The Rudolf Steiner Archive

For those of you who are able to be here today I wish to give a kind of interlude in the studies we have been pursuing for some time. What I shall say today will serve to illustrate and explain many questions that may emerge out of the subjects we have treated until now. At the same time it will help to throw light on the mood of soul of the civilisation of the present time.

For years past, we have had to draw attention to a certain point of time in that evolution of civilisation which is concentrated mainly in Europe. The time I mean lies in the 14th or 15th century or around the middle of the Middle Ages. It is the moment in the evolution of humanity when intellectualism began—when people began mainly to pay attention to the intellect, the life of thought, making the intellect the judge of what shall be thought and done among them.

Since the age of the intellect is with us today, we can certainly gain a good idea of what intellectualism is. We need but experience the present time to gain a notion of what came to the surface of civilisation in the 14th and 15th centuries. But as to the mood of soul which preceded this, we are no longer able to feel it in a living way. People who study history nowadays generally project what they are accustomed to see in the present time back into the historic past, and they have little idea how altogether different people were in mind and spirit before the present epoch. Even when they let the old documents speak for themselves, they largely read into them the way of thought and outlook of the present.

To spiritual-scientific study many things will appear differently. Let us turn our gaze for example to those historic personalities who were influenced on the one hand by Arabism, the civilisation of Asia—influenced by what lived and found expression in the Mohammedan religion, while on the other hand they were influenced by Aristotelianism. Let us consider these personalities, who found their way in the course of time through Africa to Spain, and deeply influenced the thinkers of Europe down to Spinoza and even beyond him. We gain no real conception of them if we imagine their mood of soul as though they had been like people of the present time with the only difference that they were ignorant of so and so many things subsequently discovered. (Roughly speaking, this is how they are generally thought of today). The whole way of thought and outlook, even of the people who lived in the above described stream of civilisation as late as the 12th century A.D., was altogether different from that of today.

Today, when man reflects upon himself, he feels himself as the possessor of thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will which lead to action. Above all, man ascribes to himself the ‘I think,’ the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’

But in the personalities of whom I am now speaking, the ‘I think’ was by no means yet accompanied by the same feeling with which we today would say ‘I think.’ This could only be said of the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’ In effect, those human beings ascribed to their own person only their feeling and their willing. Out of an ancient background of culture they rather lived in the sensation ‘It thinks in me’ than that they thought ‘I think.’ Doubtless they thought ‘I feel,’ ‘I will,’ but they did not think ‘I think’ in the same measure. On the other hand they said to themselves—and what I shall now describe was an absolutely real conception to them: The thoughts live in the Sublunary Sphere. The thoughts are everywhere within this sphere, which is determined when we imagine the earth at a certain point, and the moon at another, followed by Mercury, Venus, etc. They not only conceived the Earth as a dense and rigid cosmic mass, but as a second thing belonging to it they conceived the Lunar Sphere, reaching up to the moon. And as we say, ‘In the air in which we breathe is oxygen,’ so did these people say (it is only forgotten now that it ever was so):—‘In the ether which reaches up to the Moon, there are the thoughts.’ And as we say ‘We breathe in the oxygen of the air,’ so did these people say—not ‘We breathe in the thoughts’—but ‘We perceive the thoughts, receive them into ourselves.’ They were conscious of the fact that they received the thoughts.

Today, no doubt, a person can also familiarise himself with such an idea as a theoretical concept. He may even understand it with the help of Anthroposophy, but as soon as it becomes a question of practical life he forgets it. For then at once he has the rather strange idea that the thoughts spring forth within himself—which is just as though he were to think that the oxygen he receives in breathing were not received by him but sprang forth from within him.

For the personalities of whom I am now speaking, it was a profound feeling and an immediate experience: ‘I have not my own thoughts as my own possession. I cannot really say, I think. Thoughts exist, and I receive them unto myself.’

We know that the oxygen of the air circulates through our organism in a comparatively short time. We count these cycles by the pulse-beat. This happens quickly. The people of whom I am now speaking did indeed imagine the receiving of thoughts as a kind of breathing, but it was a very slow breathing. It consisted in this: At the beginning of his earthly life, man becomes capable of receiving the thoughts. As we hold the breath within us for a certain time—between our in-breathing and out-breathing—so did those people conceive a certain fact, as follows: They imagined that they held the thoughts within them, yet only in the sense in which we hold the oxygen which belongs to the outer air. They imagined that they held the thoughts during the time of their earthly life, and breathed them out again—out into the cosmic spaces—when they passed through the gate of death.

Thus it was a question of in-breathing—the beginning of life; holding the breath—the duration of earthly life; out-breathing—the sending forth of the thoughts into the universe.

People who had this kind of inner experience felt themselves in a common atmosphere of thought with all others who had the same experience. It was a common atmosphere of thought reaching beyond the earth, not only a few miles, but as I said, up to the orbit of the moon.

This idea was wrestling for the civilisation of Europe at that time. It was trying to spread itself ever more and more, impelled especially by those Aristotelians who came from Asia into Europe along the path I have just indicated. Let us suppose for a moment that it had really succeeded. What would then have come about?

In that case, my dear friends, that which was destined after all to find expression in the course of earthly evolution could never have come to expression in the fullest sense: I mean the Consciousness Soul. The human beings of whom I am now speaking stood in the last stage of evolution of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. In the 14th and 15th century, the Consciousness Soul was to arise, which, if it found extreme expression, would lead all civilisation into intellectualism.

The population of Europe in its totality, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, was by no means in a position merely to submit to the outpouring of a conception such as was held by the people whom I have now described. For if they had done so, the evolution of the Consciousness Soul would not have come about. Though it was determined in the councils of the Gods that the Consciousness Soul should evolve, nevertheless it could not evolve out of the mere independent activity of all European humanity. A special impulse had to be given towards the development of the Consciousness Soul itself.

And so, beginning in the time which I have now described, we witness the rise of two spiritual streams. One was represented by the quasi-Arabian philosophers who, working from Western Europe, influenced European civilisation very strongly—far more so than is commonly supposed. The other was the stream which fought against the former one with the utmost intensity and severity, representing it to Europe as the most heretical of all.

For a long time after, this conflict was felt with great intensity. You may still feel this if you consider the pictures in which Dominican Monks, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, are represented in triumph—that is to say, in the triumph of an altogether different conception which emphasised above all things the individual and personal being of man, and worked to the end that man might acquire his thoughts as his own property. In these pictures we see the Dominicans portrayed, treading the representatives of Arabism under foot. The Arabians are there under their feet—they are being trodden underfoot.

The two streams were felt in this keen contrast for a long time after. An energy of feeling such as is contained in these pictures no longer exists in the humanity of today, which is rather apathetic. We need such energy of feeling very badly, not only for the things for which they battled, but for other things as well.

Let us consider for a moment what they imagined. The in-breathing of thoughts as the cosmic ether from the Sublunary Sphere—that is the beginning of life. The holding of the breath—that is the earthly life itself. The out-breathing—that is the going forth of the thoughts once more, but with an individually human colouring, into the cosmic ether, into the impulses of the sphere beneath the Moon, of the Sublunary Sphere.

What then is this out-breathing? It is the very same, my dear friends, of which we speak when we say: In the three days after death the etheric body of man expands. Man looks back upon his etheric body slowly increasing in magnitude. He sees how his thoughts spread out into the cosmos. It is the very same, only it was then conceived, if I may say so, from a more subjective standpoint. It was indeed quite true, how these people felt and experienced it. They felt the cycle of life more deeply than it is felt today.

Nevertheless, if their idea had become dominant in Europe, only a feeble feeling of the I would have evolved in the people of European civilisation. The Consciousness Soul would not have been able to emerge; the I would not have grasped itself in the ‘I think.’ The idea of immortality would have become vaguer and vaguer. People would increasingly have fixed their attention on that which lives and weaves in the far reaches of the Sublunary Sphere as a remnant of the human being who has lived here on this earth.

They would have felt the spirituality of the earth as its extended atmosphere. They would have felt themselves belonging to the earth, but not as individuals distinct from the earth. Through their feeling of “It thinks in me,” the people whom I described above felt themselves intimately connected with the earth. They did not feel themselves as individualities in the same degree as the people of the rest of Europe were beginning to feel themselves, however indistinctly.

We must, however, also bear in mind the following. Only the spiritual stream of which I have just spoken was aware of the fact that when a person dies the thoughts he received during his earthly life are living and weaving in the cosmic ether that surrounds the earth. This idea was violently attacked by those other personalities who arose chiefly within the Dominican Order. They declared that man is an individuality, and that we must concentrate above all on his individuality which passes through the gate of death, not on what is dissolved in the universal cosmic ether. This was emphasised, albeit not exclusively,—emphasised representatively, I would say,—by the Dominicans. They stood up vigorously for the idea of the individuality of man, as against the other stream which I characterised before. But precisely as a result of this a certain condition came about. For let us now consider these representatives of individualism.

After all, it was the individually coloured thoughts which passed into the universal ether. And those who fought against the former stream—just because they were still vividly aware that this was being said, that this idea existed,—were troubled and disquieted by what was really there.

This anxiety, notably among the greatest thinkers,—this anxiety as a result of the forces expanding and dissolving and passing on the human thoughts to the cosmic ether,—did not really come to an end until the 16th or 17th century.

We must somehow be able to transplant ourselves into the inner life of soul of these people, especially those who belonged to the Dominican Order. Only then do we gain an idea of how much they were disquieted by what was really left as an heritage from the dead,—which they, with their conception, no longer could nor dared believe in.

We must transplant ourselves into the hearts and minds of these people. No great man of the 13th or 14th century could have thought so dryly, so abstractly or in such cold and icy concepts as the people of today. When the people of today are defending ideas or theories, it seems as though it were a recognised condition for so doing that one's heart should first be torn out of one's body. At that time it was not so. At that time there was deep feeling, there was heart in all that men upheld as their ideas. But in a case such as I am now citing, this heart also involved an intense inner conflict.

That philosophy, which proceeded from the Dominican Order, evolved under the most appalling inner conflicts. I mean that philosophy which afterwards had such a strong influence on life—for life at that time was still far more dependent on the authority of individual men. There was no such popular education at that time. All culture and education—all that the people knew—eventually merged into the possession of a few. And as a consequence, these few reached up far more to a real philosophic life and striving. And in all that then flowed out into civilisation, these inner conflicts which they lived through were contained.

Today one reads the works of the Scholastics and is conscious only of the driest thoughts. But it is the readers of today who are dry. Those who wrote these works were by no means dry in heart or mind. They were filled with inner fire in relation to their thoughts. Moreover, this inner fire was due to the striving to hold at bay the objective influence of thoughts.

When a person of today thinks on philosophic questions or questions of worldview, nothing is there, so to speak, to worry him. A man of today can think the greatest nonsense—he thinks it in perfect calm and peace of mind. Humanity has already evolved for so long within the Consciousness Soul that no such disquieting occurs, as would occur, for instance, if individuals among us felt how the thoughts of men appear when they flow out after death into the ethereal environment of the earth. Today such things as could still be experienced in the 13th or 14th century are quite unknown. Then it would happen that a younger priest would come to an older priest, telling of the inner tortures which he was undergoing in remaining true to his religious faith, and expressing it in this wise: ‘I am pursued by the ghosts of the dead.’

Speaking of the ghosts of the dead, they meant precisely what I have just described. That was a time when people could still grow deeply into what they learned. In such a community—a Dominican community for instance,—they learned that man is individual and has his own individual immortality. They learned that it is a false and heretical idea to conceive, with respect to thought, a kind of universal soul comprising all the earth. They learned to attack this heresy with all their might. And yet, in certain moments when they took deep counsel with themselves, they would feel the objective and influential presence of the thoughts which were left behind as relics by the dead. Then they would say to themselves, ‘Is it quite right for me to be doing what I am doing? Here is something intangible working into my soul. I cannot rise against it—I am held fast by it.’

The intellects of that time, many of them at any rate, were still so constituted that they were generally aware of the speaking of the dead, at least for some days after death. And when one had ceased to speak another would begin. With respect to such things too, they felt themselves immersed in the all-pervading spiritual—or at the very least, ethereal—essence of the universe.

Coming into our own time, this living feeling with the Universal All has ceased. In return for it we have achieved conscious life in the Consciousness Soul, while all the spiritual reality that surrounds us (surrounds us as a reality, no less so than tables or chairs, trees or rivers) works only upon the depths of our subconscious. The inwardness of life, the spiritual inwardness, has passed away. It must first be acquired again by spiritual-scientific knowledge livingly received.

We must think livingly upon the knowledge of spiritual science, and we shall do so if we dwell upon such facts of life as lie by no means very far behind us. Imagine a Scholastic thinker or writer of the 13th century. He writes down his thoughts. Nowadays it is easy work to think, for people have grown accustomed to think intellectually. At that time it was only at the beginning, and was still difficult. Man was still conscious of a tremendous inner effort. He was conscious of fatigue in thinking even as in hewing wood, if I may use the trivial comparison. Today the thinking of many people has become quite automatic. Today we are scarcely overcome by the longing to follow up every one of our thoughts with our own human personality! We hear a person of today letting one thought arise out of another like an automaton. We cannot follow, we do not know why, for there is no inner necessity in it. And yet so long as a man is living in the body he should follow up his thoughts with his own personality. Afterwards they will soon take a different course; they will spread out and expand when he is dead.

So a person could be sitting there at that time, defending with every weapon of sharp incisive thought the doctrine of individual man in order to save the doctrine of individual immortality. He could be arguing with polemics against Averroes, or others of that stream of thought which I described at the beginning of this lecture. But there was another possibility. For especially in the case of an outstanding person like Averroes, that which proceeded from him, dissolving after his death like a kind of ghost in the Sublunary Sphere, might well be gathered up again by the Moon itself at the end of that Sphere, and remain behind. Having enlarged and expanded, it might even be reduced again, shape and form be given to it, till it was consolidated once again into an essence built, if I may say so, in the ether. That could well happen. Then the man would be sitting there, trying to lay the foundations of individualism, carrying on his polemic against Averroes; and Averroes would appear before him as a threatening figure, disturbing his mind.

The most important of the Scholastic writings which arose in the 13th century were directed against Averroes, who was long dead. They made polemics against the man long dead, against the doctrine which he had left behind. Then he arose to prove to them that his thoughts had become condensed, consolidated once again and thus were living on.

There were indeed these inner conflicts before the beginning of the new age of consciousness. And they were such that we today should see once more their full intensity and depth and inwardness. Words after all are words. The people of later times can but receive what lies behind the words with such ideas as they possess. But within the words there were often rich contents of inner life. They pointed to a life of soul such as I have now described.

These, then, are the two streams, and they have remained active, basically speaking, to this day. The one—albeit now only working from the spiritual world, yet all the stronger there,—would like to convince man that a universal life of thoughts surrounds the earth, and that in thoughts man breathes in soul and spirit. The other stream desires above all to point out that man should make himself independent of such universality. The former stream is more like a vague intangible presence in the spiritual environment of the earth, perceptible today to many people (for there are still such people) when in certain nights they lie on their beds and listen to the void, and out of the void all manner of doubts are born in them as to what they are asserting today so definitely and so surely in their own individuality.

Meanwhile in others, who always sleep soundly because they are so well satisfied with themselves, we have the unswerving emphasis on the individual principle.

This battle is smouldering still at the very foundations of European culture. It is here to this day; and in the things that are taking place outwardly on the surface of our life, we have scarcely anything other than the beating of the surface-waves from what is still present in the depths of souls—a relic of the deeper and intenser inner life of earlier times.

Many souls of that time are here again in present earthly life. In a certain way they have conquered what then disquieted them so much in their surface consciousness—disquieted them at least in certain moments of their surface consciousness.

But in the depths it smoulders all the more in many minds and hearts today. Spiritual science, once again, is here to draw attention also to such historic facts as these.

But we must not forget the following. In the same measure in which people become unconscious during earthly life of what is there none the less, namely the thoughts in the ether in the immediate environment of the earth—in the same measure, therefore, in which they acquire the ‘I think’ as their own possession—their human soul is narrowed down. Man passes through the gate of death with a contracted soul.

The narrowed soul has carried untrue, imperfect, inconsistent earthly thoughts into the cosmic ether, and these work back again upon the minds of men. Thence there arise such social movements as we see today. We must understand these too as to their inner origin. Then we shall recognise that there is no other cure, no other healing for these social ideas, destructive as they often are, than the spreading of the truth about the spiritual life and being.

Call to mind the lectures we have given here, especially the historic ones taking into account the concept of reincarnation and leading to so many definite examples. These lectures will have shown you how things work beneath the surface of external history. You will have seen how what lived in one historic age is carried over into a later one by people returning into earthly life. But everything spiritual plays its part between death and a new birth in moulding what is carried by man from one earth-life into another.

Today it would be good if many souls would attain for themselves that objectivity to which we can address ourselves, awakening an inner understanding, when we describe the people who lived in the twilight of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul age.

Some of the people who lived at that time are here again today. Deep in their souls they underwent the evening twilight of an age, and through the constant attacks they suffered from the ghosts of which I have now spoken, they have absorbed deep doubts about the validity of intellectualism.

This doubt can well be understood. For around the 13th century there were many people—men of knowledge who stood in the midst of learning, almost entirely theological as it then was—people for whom it was a deep question of conscience: What will happen now ?

Such souls had often carried with them into that time mighty contents from their former incarnations. They gave it an intellectual colouring; but they felt this all as a declining stream. While at the rising stream—pressing forward as it was to individuality—they felt the pangs of conscience. Until at length those philosophers arose who stood under an influence which has really killed all meaning. To speak radically: those who stood under the influence of Descartes! For many, even among those who had their place in the Scholasticism of an earlier time, had already fallen into the Cartesian way of thought. I do not say that they became philosophers. These things underwent many changes. When people begin to think along these lines the strangest nonsense becomes self-evident. To Descartes, as you know, is due the saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Countless clever thinkers have accepted this as true: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Yet the result is this: From morning until evening I think, therefore I am. Then I fall asleep. I do not think, therefore I am not. I wake up again, I think, therefore I am. I fall asleep, and as I now do not think, I am not. This then is the consequence: A person not only falls asleep, but ceases to be when he falls asleep. There is no less fitting proof of the existence of the spirit of man than the theorem: ‘I think.’ Yet this began to be the most widely accepted statement in the age of evolution of consciousness (the age of the Consciousness Soul). When we point to such things today it is like a sacrilege, but we cannot help ourselves!

But over against all this I will now tell you of a kind of conversation. Though it is not historically recorded, by spiritual research it can be discovered among the real things that happened. It was a conversation that took place between an older and a younger Dominican, somewhat as follows:

The younger man said, ‘Thinking takes hold of men. Thought, the shadow of reality, takes hold of them. In ancient times thought was always the last revelation of the living Spirit from above. But now thought is the very thing that has forgotten that living Spirit. Now it is experienced as a mere shadow. Verily, when a man sees a shadow, he knows the shadow points to some reality. The realities are there indeed. Thinking itself is not to be attacked, but only the fact that we have lost the living Spirit from our thinking.’

The older man replied, ‘In thinking, through the very fact that man is turning his attention with loving interest to outer Nature, (while he accepts Revelation as Revelation and does not seek to approach it with his thinking),—in thinking, to compensate for the former heavenly reality, an earthly reality must be found once more.’

‘What will happen?’ said the younger man. ‘Will European humanity be strong enough to find this earthly reality of thought, or will it only be weak enough to lose the heavenly reality?’

This dialogue truly contains all that still holds good with regard to European civilisation. For after the intermediate time, with the darkening of the living quality of thought, humanity must now attain to living thinking once more. Otherwise humanity will remain weak and the reality of thought will lose its own reality. Therefore it is most necessary, since the our Christmas Conference impulse, that we in the Anthroposophical Movement speak without reserve in forms of living thought. For otherwise it will come about more and more that even the things we know from this source or from that—for instance that man has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body—will only be grasped with the forms of dead thinking.

These things must not be grasped with the forms of dead thinking. For then they become distorted, misrepresented truth, and not the truth itself.

That is what I wanted to say today. We must attain a living, sympathetic interest, a longing to go beyond ordinary history and to attain that history which must and can be read in the living Spirit, the history which shall more and more be cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement. Today, my dear friends, I wished to place before your souls the concrete outline of our programme in this direction.

Much has been said today in aphorism. The inner connection will dawn upon you if you attempt not so much to follow up with the intellect, but to feel with your whole being what has been said today. You must attempt to feel it knowingly, to know it feelingly, in order that not only what is said but what is heard within our circles may be sustained more and more by real spirituality.

We need education to spiritual hearing, spiritual listening. Only then shall we develop true spirituality among us. I wanted to awaken this feeling in you today; not so much to give a systematic lecture, but to speak to your hearts, albeit calling to witness, as I did, many a concrete spiritual fact.

Let us once again call to mind the real significance. of the fact that the knowledge and truths expressed in the Mysteries of Hibernia had been, in a manner of speaking, dimmed; that means that they could not develop any further activity in their journey towards central Europe and the East; and in the place of a spiritual approach even in matters of religion, physical perception, or at least a tradition based on this appeared.

Let us again call to mind that Image which appeared at the end of our last consideration. We pointed to the Being of Christ in the Mysteries of Hibernia. We indicated also that epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place. There, in Hibernia, were the Initiates with their pupils; and there, without any means for the physical perception of the Mystery of Golgotha, without any possibility of information concerning this Mystery coming across to them, we find that at the same time in Ireland the Initiates established a universal ceremony, because they were quite clear from their insight that the Mystery of Golgotha was taking place simultaneously in an external way.

Now for these Initiates and their pupils in the Mysteries of Hibernia, they had of necessity to experience a physical reality, a sensible event, but only in a spiritual way. It was not necessary, for their way of thinking, and the manner of knowledge then customary in Hibernia to have more than the Spiritual in the physical world.

It must be clearly understood, however, that in Hibernia the Spiritual was paramount. In all kinds of secret streams of spiritual life that which had originated in Hibernia was brought over to central Europe, through the British Isles, through Brittany, through what is now Holland and Belgium, and even through the Alsace of today. Even though not present in the general civilization, yet, in the first centuries of Christian development, we find here and there in all the regions mentioned single individualities able to understand what had come over from the Mysteries of Hibernia, but, as we have said, this was not to be found in the general civilization of Europe. One must approach these things with an inner longing for knowledge, in order to find in the first Christian centuries those fairly numerous personalities. In the later centuries, from the 8th and 9th to the 15th and 16th centuries such personalities became rarer and rarer; personalities able to gather around them a small number of pupils through whom, in the silent places far removed from the world and its civilization, that which had been initiated in western Europe, in Hibernia, could be carried further.

In general, there spread over Europe that for which spiritual perception is not required, that which could be linked on to the mere historical tradition, which simply related the physical events which had taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. From this stream there proceeded that element which gradually developed more and more, which reckoned only with that which transpired in physical life. Less and less did humanity in general divine what a colossal contradiction lies in the fact that the mystery of Golgotha, which is really only comprehensible by means of the deepest spiritual life, is now based simply on an external figure, perceptible physically; this became for a time the necessary course of development of civilization in Europe.

Fundamentally, all this had been gradually prepared over a long time, but it could only come about because a very great deal of the old Mystery-knowledge, even such as still existed in Greece, had been forgotten.

These Mysteries of Greece were divided into two classes; one of these busied itself with guiding man's mind towards the spiritual world, towards the actual guidance and direction of the world in spirit, while the other investigated the mysteries of nature and that which rules in nature, especially the forces and beings connected with the powers of the earth. A great number of candidates were initiated into both kinds of mysteries. Of these it was said that they had knowledge and had been initiated into the Mysteries of the Father, the Mysteries of Zeus, and also that they had been admitted into the Mysteries of the Mother, the Mysteries of Demeter. When we look back into those times we find a far-reaching spiritual perception, though still somewhat abstract, into the highest regions, and side by side with this, a conception of nature which was capable of descending into the depths. Above all, we find in Greece that which is of special significance—the union of both Mysteries.

Concerning this union of both Mysteries we see that which today is but little noticed; the fact that man carries certain external substances of nature in his being while certain other substances of nature he does not carry in his being; this was observed and studied in the very deepest sense, in the Chthonic Mysteries in Ancient Greece. You know that man has iron in his being, as part of his organization. He also carries other metals within him, calcium, sodium, magnesium, and so on; but there are other metals which he does not carry within him. If we were to try and find these metals within by means of ordinary scientific methods, if one analysed the substances in man, then by means of this external investigation, we should find no lead, no copper, no quicksilver, no tin, no silver and no gold within him.

That was the great riddle which occupied those undergoing initiation into the Greek Mysteries, and the apex of this riddle was reached in the question: How does it come about that man carries iron in himself, that he carries sodium magnesium, and other substances which we can also find in outer nature, but does not, for instance carry lead or tin in his being? They were deeply convinced that man is a small world, a microcosm; yet it would appear that man did not carry in his being these other metals, lead, tin, quicksilver, silver, gold and so on.

We may truly say that the older candidates for initiation in Greece were of the opinion that this was only apparently the case; for they were deeply permeated by the knowledge that man is a real microcosm; that means that everything which is to be found in the cosmos he also carries in his own being.

Let us look for a moment into the mind of a man about to be initiated in Greece. He would be instructed somewhat as follows: (and here of course I must compose into a few sentences that which extended over long periods in the course of this instruction) he was instructed by being told the following: Observe how the earth today conceals iron everywhere in itself; iron is also in man. Once upon a time, when the earth had not yet become earth, when it existed in a previous planetary condition, the earth which was then Old Moon, or perhaps even Old Sun also concealed in itself lead, tin and so on: and all the beings which had shared in the previous construction of the earth also had a part in these metals and their forces, just as man today shares in the forces of iron. But with those transformations which the ancient shape of the earth underwent iron alone remained in such a degree of strength and density that man could permeate his being with it. The other metals which we have just named are also contained in the earth, but they are no longer of such a consistency that man can directly permeate himself with them; they are to be found in an infinitely rarefied condition in the whole cosmic space which surrounds man.

If I examine a small piece of lead I see before me the well-known grayish-white metal, which has a definite density. One can grasp it. But this same lead which appears in the lead-ores of the earth exists in an infinitely fine ramification in the whole cosmic space surrounding man, and there it has its significance. It has this significance there, that it radiates its forces everywhere, even where there is apparently no lead and man comes into contact with these forces of the lead, not through his physical body, but through his etheric body; because outside the lead-ores of the earth lead exists in such a rarefied fine condition that it can work only on the etheric body of man. On man's etheric body the lead works in this condition of infinite ramification extended over the whole of cosmic space.

The pupil of those ancient Greek Chthonic Mysteries learnt that, just as is the case today with the earth, which is infinitely rich in iron, and I a planet concerning which the inhabitant of another planet could say: “That planet is rich in iron,” (the only other planet rich in iron being Mars); just as the earth is rich in iron, so Saturn is rich in lead. What iron is for the earth, lead is for Saturn; and one has to assume—this the student of the Chthonic Mysteries in Greece learned—that once upon a time, when the separation of Saturn from the common planetary body of the earth took place as described in my Outline of Occult Science—when Saturn separated from this cosmic body, this fine division with reference to lead took place. One can say that Saturn took the lead out with him, as it were and held it through his own planetary life-force, through his own planetary warmth in such a condition that he can permeate the whole planetary system to which our earth belongs with this infinitely finely distributed lead.

You must therefore imagine the earth, and in the distances Saturn filling the whole planetary system with its finely distributed lead, and this fine lead substance works on man. You can still find traces that this was taught to those about to be initiated in ancient Greece, and that they learnt to understand how this lead worked. They knew that our sense organs, especially the organ of the eye would take the whole of man's being into its own sphere, and not allow man to come to self-reliance. Man would only be able to see, he would not be able to think about what he had seen. He would be unable to detach himself from what he saw and say: “I see.” He would be over-powered by sight, as it were, unless this effect of lead existed in the Cosmos. It is this activity of lead which makes it possible for man to be independent in himself, which places him as an ego as regards receptivity to the outer world, which lives in him. These lead-forces first enter the etheric body of man, and from the etheric body they also impregnate the physical body, in a certain sense. Thereby man receives the capacity of memory; the power of memory.

It was always a great moment when a pupil, such as the Greek pupil of the Chthonic Mysteries, after having learnt all this, was led on to what then followed. He was shown with all possible ceremonial the substance of lead, and then his mind was directed towards Saturn. The relationship of Saturn with earthly lead was brought before his soul, and then he was told: “The lead which thou seest is concealed in the earth, for in its present state the earth is not in a condition to give the lead a form in which it can work in man; but Saturn with its very different condition of warmth, with its inner life-forces scatters lead in planetary space. Thereby thou art an independent being, possessing the power of memory. Just think, thou art a human being only through the fact that today thou dost know still what thou knewest ten or twenty years ago. Just think how the human part of thee would suffer if thou didst not carry within thee what thou didst experience ten or twenty years ago. Thy ego-forces would be shattered unless this power of memory were present in full measure. This is due to what streams to thee from that distant Saturn. It is the force which has come to rest in lead in the earth, and which can now no longer work upon man in its quiescent state. Thus it is the Saturn lead-forces which enable thee to consolidate thy thoughts, so that they can arise later out of the depths of the soul, and thou canst thus live a continuous life in the external world, and not merely in a transient way. Thou owest it to the Saturn lead-forces that thou dost not merely look around thee today and then forget the objects thou beholdest, but canst retain the memory of them in thy soul. Thou canst retain in thy soul what thou didst experience twenty years ago, and canst cause this to live again; thou canst so form thy inner life as to reproduce what thou didst experience in thy surroundings at any particular time of thy life.”

It was a powerful impression that the pupil received, when with the greatest ceremony this knowledge was brought before him seriously and without sentimentality. He then learnt to understand: If it were only these lead-forces which were active in giving man the power of his ego, the power of memory, he would be completely separated from the Cosmos. If the Saturn-forces alone existed in man he would indeed be able to retain in his memory what he saw with his physical eyes, and preserve this throughout his earthly life; but he would be divorced from the Cosmos. He would become, as it were, a hermit in his earth-life in spite of being inspired by Saturn with the power of memory. The pupil then learnt that against the Saturn forces another force had to be set up, the force of the moon. Let us suppose that these two forces confront one another in such a way that the force of Saturn and the force of the moon, approaching from opposite sides, but flowing into each other, descend to the earth and to man on the earth. Now Saturn takes from man what he receives from the moon, and what man receives from Saturn is taken by the moon. So, just as the earth has in iron a force which man can transmute within himself, a force which Saturn has in lead, that same force is possessed by the moon in silver.

Now even the silver, as it exists in the earth, has already attained a condition in which it cannot enter directly into man; but the whole sphere which includes the moon is actually permeated by finely divided silver, and the moon, especially when its light comes from the constellation of Leo, works in such a way that man, through these silver-forces of the moon receives the opposing activity of the lead-forces of Saturn; he is therefore not divorced or cut off from the Cosmos, in spite of the fact that he is beneficently inspired with the forces of memory by the Cosmos. It was a moment of special ceremony when the Greek pupil was led to see this opposition of Saturn and the moon., In the sanctity of the night it was made clear to the pupil: “Look up to Saturn surrounded by his rings; to him thou owest the fact that thou art an independent being. Now look towards the other side, to the silver-radiating moon. To her thou owest the fact that thou art able to bear the Saturn forces without being cut off from the rest of the Cosmos.”

In this way, based directly upon the union of man with the cosmos, that teaching was given in Greece which later on we find as a caricature in what is called astrology. At that time it was a true wisdom, for then man saw in a star not merely the speck or point of light above him; he saw in the star the spiritual living being, and the human being of the earth was seen in union with this spiritual living being. Men then had a natural science which reached up into the heavens, and extended right out into cosmic spaces. When the pupil had received such insight, and such illumination had entered deeply into his soul, he was lead into the real Mysteries of Eleusis. You have heard what took place in these Mysteries, in my description of other Mysteries; for instance, the Mysteries of Hibernia. The pupil was led before two statues. One of these statues represented to him a fatherly divinity, that fatherly divinity which was surrounded by the signs of the planets and the sun, represented to him shining Saturn, but so radiant that the pupil was reminded of the fact: That is the radiance of lead from the cosmos—just as the moon reminded him of the silver radiance. And this same thing happened with each single planet. Thus, in that statue which represented the father principle there appeared all those mysteries which ray down to earth from the planetary environment, all that which was related to the single metals of the earth, which, however, had now become unusable within the earth as regards man's inner being.

Then the pupil was told the following: Here stands the Father of the world before Thee. The Father of the world carries the lead in Saturn, in Jupiter he bears tin, in Mars the iron, which is so closely related with the earth-being but in quite another condition, in the sun, the radiating gold, in Venus, the radiating streaming copper, in Mercury the radiating quicksilver, and in the moon the radiating silver. Thou dost only bear within thee that part of the metals which thou wast able to assimilate from the planetary conditions which the earth had once upon a time gone through. In its present condition thou canst only assimilate the iron. As an earthly human being thou art not complete. In that which the Father, standing before thee shows thee in the metals which cannot today exist within thee in thy earthly existence, but which thou must take up from the cosmos, in that thou hast another part of thy being; when thou dost look upon thyself as a human being who has gone through the planetary transformations of the earth, then art thou really a complete human being. Here on the earth thou art only a part human being; the other part the Father carries round his head and in his arms before thee. It is only that which stands before thee, combined with that which he bears which makes thee man. Thou standest on the earth, but that earth was not always as it is today. If the earth had been always as it is today thou couldst not dwell upon it as a human being. For the earth carries today in itself, even in a lifeless condition, the lead of Saturn, the tin of Jupiter, the iron of Mars (though in that other state) the gold of the sun, the silver of the moon, the copper of Venus, and the quicksilver of Mercury. It carries these things within it. But these metals which the earth carries in its body today are no more than a memory of their former existence, of the way in which, once upon a time silver lived during the Moon-existence of the earth, in which gold lived during the Sun-existence, only a reminder of the way in which lead lived during the Saturn-existence of the earth. That which thou hast today in the dense metallic ores of lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, quicksilver, silver, with the exception of the iron which thou really knowest, and which is not the iron within the earth, for that belongs to the Mars nature, that which thou now seest in these dense compact metals—these metals poured themselves out on to the earth in a quite different condition. These metals as thou knowest them today on the earth are the corpses of the erstwhile metal-beings. The corpse has remained of that metal-being which during the Saturn time and later in a different stage, during the Moon time of the earth played a part in their ancient form. Tin played a part in a combination with gold during the Sun time of the earth in a very different condition. And if thou dost see these things in the Spirit, then will this statue become for thee in all that it brings before thee the true Father statue.

And in the Spirit, as in a real vision the statue of the true Mysteries of Eleusis became living and handed to the female statue which stood beside it that which the metals at that time were. In the vision seen by the pupil, the female statue received that which was the metals in their former shape, and surrounded it with what the earth in becoming earth could give out of its own being.

The pupil saw this wonderful process, this wonderful happening. There radiated forth out of the hand of the Father-statue the metallic mass, as the pupil now saw in a symbolic way; and that which the earth then was, with its chalk and stone-formation encountered that which streamed in and surrounded this in-streaming metal-element with earthly substance.

The way in which the hand stretching out in love from the Mother-statue received the metal-forces which were offered by the Father-statue made a great and mighty impression on the pupil, for he then saw how the Cosmos worked together with the earth in the course of aeons of time, and he learnt to feel in the right way what the earth was offering.

Look around at the metallic nature in the earth today. It is crystallized and surrounded with a kind of crust which comes from the earth. The metal-nature streamed in from the cosmos, and that which comes from the earth received lovingly that which streamed in from the cosmos. You see this everywhere if you go to metal-mines and take an interest in them. That which received the metal was called the Mother. The most important of these earthly substances which, as it were, came forward to meet the heavenly metal-element in order to take it up were called “the Mothers.”

That is only one aspect of “The Mothers” to whom Faust descends. He descends at the same time into those pre-earthly periods of the earth, in order to see there how the Mother-earth takes into herself what is given by the Father-element in the cosmos.

Through all this there was stirred up in the pupil of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in his inner being, a feeling of being one with the Cosmos. It was an inner recognition in his heart of that which is in reality the nature-processes of the earth.

If the man of today observes these processes, these products of nature, he finds everything dead, there is nothing but a corpse; and if we occupy ourselves with physics or chemistry, are we doing with nature really anything else in our science than what the anatomist does when he dissects the corpse in the anatomical theatre when he has only the dead aspect of that which was intended for life? Thus in our science and physics we cut into living nature.

To the Greek pupil was given a different natural science, a natural science of the living, which showed him our present lead as the corpse of lead. He had to go back to the times when lead lived, and in that way the mysterious relation of man with the cosmos, the mysterious connection of man with all that existed around him on the earth was made clear.

When the pupil had undergone all these things, when the Father-statue and the Mother-statue had sunk deeply into his soul, bringing before his soul the two opposing forces of the Cosmos and of the earth, he was led in Ancient Greece into the very holiest of all. There he had before him the picture of a female figure suckling at her breast a Child, and he was finally led to the understanding of the Word: “That is the God Jacchos [originally translated as Jakos], Who is to come in the future.”

In this way the Greek disciple learned to understand the Mystery of Christ in a pre-Christian period; again it was in a spiritual way that the Christ was placed before those to be initiated into the Mysteries of Eleusis. In that time, however, he had to learn of the Christ only as a future Appearance, as One Who was still a Child, a cosmic Child, Who must first grow up in the Cosmos. Those about to be initiated, who were taught to look towards the end, towards the goal of earth-evolution were called Tellists.

Now there came a very important turning-point, which is expressed very dearly and even historically in the transition from Plato to Aristotle. It is remarkable that, in the evolution of this Greek civilisation, as the fourth century began, this first transition towards the abstract appeared. This fact is exemplified in the following scene which took place between Plato and Aristotle, at a time when Plato was very old, and really at the end of his earthly career. I must of course clothe in words what naturally occurred in a much more complicated way. Plato said to Aristotle somewhat as follows: “Many things I have told you and my other pupils may not have seemed correct to you, but what I have told you is really an extract of the most ancient holy Mystery-Wisdom. Human beings will, however, in the course of their evolution acquire such a form and such an inner Organisation, which will gradually lead them to something certainly higher than we now possess but this will at the same time make it impossible for them to accept natural science in the way it is presented to the Greeks.” Plato made this clear to Aristotle. “Therefore, I will withdraw myself for a time” said Plato, “and will leave you to yourself. In the world of thought, for which you are so especially endowed, and which will become the thought-world of humanity for many centuries, try to build up in thoughts what you have learnt here in my school.” So Plato and Aristotle separated, and Plato therewith fulfilled, as commanded, a high spiritual mission through Aristotle.

I am obliged to describe this scene in this way; but if you look in the history books, you will also find this scene described, and I will now tell you how it is there described: “Aristotle was always a headstrong pupil of Plato; so that Plato once said that though Aristotle was a gifted pupil yet he was like a horse that was trained by someone and then kicked its trainer with its hoof. That which took place between Aristotle and Plato led as time went on to Plato becoming annoyed and withdrawing from Aristotle. He returned no more into the Academy to teach therein.” That is the account given in the history books.

This narrative is in the history books; the other which I have just related is the truth and bears within it an impulse toward something very significant. For there were two kinds of writings of Aristotle. The one contained a remarkable natural science, the natural science of Eleusis, which came by way of Plato to Aristotle. The other contained the thoughts, the abstract thoughts which were also given to Aristotle by Plato from out of the Eleusinian Mysteries for the accomplishment of his mission.

That which Aristotle actually had to give also followed a two-fold path. We have his so-called logical writings, those logical writings which drew forth the most weighty thoughts from the ancient Eleusinian Mystery wisdom. These writings containing, less of natural science, Aristotle gave to his pupil Theophrastus, and through him and in other ways they came through Greece and Rome and formed the content of the wisdom taught throughout the Middle Ages to those leading minds in civilisation—the teachers of philosophy in Central Europe.

That which came about in the way I described in the last lecture, because the Mystery-wisdom of Hibernia had to be rejected, and men had simply to link on to what was tradition, tradition recording the events which took place at the beginning of our own era, this united with that which was separated from the wisdom of Plato by Aristotle, the wisdom of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The natural science which still carried within it the spirit of the Chthonic Mysteries and which had flowed into the Eleusinian Mysteries was a natural science which extended to the heavens, and soared out to the wide spaces of the cosmos to seek explanation of the earth from thence. For this natural science the time was past in Greece. As much as could be saved of this natural science was saved by Alexander becoming the pupil of Aristotle, who then undertook his journeys into Asia, and did everything possible to introduce this Aristotelian natural science to the East to extend it eastward. That then passed over into the Jewish and Arabian schools. From thence it came across from Africa to Spain, and there in a filtered form it influenced certain human beings in Central Europe. Theophrastus had given his version of the teachings of Aristotle to the theological teachers of the Middle Ages. Alexander the Great had carried his—the other version of Aristotle—over into Asia. That Eleusinian wisdom which came, but in infinite dilution, through Africa into Spain, shone out here and there in the Middle Ages, and notwithstanding the general standard of culture, was cultivated in certain monasteries and lived on under the surface. For instance, we meet with it in mystical form as brought down to posterity in Basilius Valentinus. On the surface there prevailed that culture of which I spoke to you in the last lecture. In this culture that which it was still possible to teach at the time of Aristotle was not to be found—that Christ must really be recognized and known.

The third picture, the female form who carries at her breast the Child, the Jacchos-Child, must also be understood; but that which should bring the understanding of this third figure was still to come in the evolution of humanity. That must come through certain relationships which I have explained to you. This was made clear to Alexander the Great by Aristotle, not in writing, but through circumstances such as I have just described.

So we see how in the bosom of time there lies the demand to understand in its original reality what has been so beautifully put before the world by the Christian painters; the Mother with the Child at her breast; but which was not fully understood either in the Madonna of Raphael, or in the eastern icons. It still awaits understanding.

Something of what is necessary to acquire such understanding will be discussed in the lectures to be given here; and in the next lecture I will describe the way along which many deeply occult secrets traveled from Arabia towards Europe. This will help to place before your souls a certain historical phenomenon, and in the lectures which are to form the basis of the historical evolution of humanity, and which will be given to the delegates at Christmas I will endeavour to put before you at the proper place the significance of the journeys of Alexander the Great in connection with the teachings of Aristotle.

In the evening hours of our Christmas Gathering,¹ I should like to give you a kind of survey of human evolution on the earth, that may help us to become more intimately conscious of the nature and being of present-day man. For at this time in man's history, when we can see already in preparation events of extraordinary importance for the whole civilisation of humanity, every thinking man must be inclined to ask: ‘How has the present configuration, the present make-up of the human soul arisen? How has it come about through the long course of evolution?’ For it cannot be denied that the present only becomes comprehensible as we try to understand its origin in the past.

The present age is however one that is peculiarly prejudiced in its thought about the evolution of man and of mankind. It is commonly believed that, as regards his life of soul and spirit, man has always been essentially the same as he is to-day throughout the whole of the time that we call history. True, in respect of knowledge, it is imagined that in ancient times human beings were childlike, that they believed in all kinds of fancies, and that man has only really become clever in the scientific sense in modern times; but if we look away from the actual sphere of knowledge, it is generally held that the soul-constitution which man has to-day was also possessed by the ancient Greek and by the ancient Oriental. Even though it be admitted that modifications may have occurred in detail, yet on the whole it is supposed that throughout the historical period everything in the life of the soul has been as it is to-day. Then we go on to assume a prehistoric life of man, and say that nothing is really known of this. Going still further back, we picture man in a kind of animal form. Thus, in the first place, as we trace back in historical time, we see a soul-life undergoing comparatively little change. Then the picture disappears in a kind of cloud, and before that again we see man in his animal imperfection as a kind of higher ape-being. Such is approximately the usual conception of to-day.

Now all this rests on an extraordinary prejudice, for in forming such a conception, we do not take the trouble to observe the important differences that exist in the soul-constitution of a man of the present-time, as compared even with that of a relatively not very far distant past,—say, of the 11th, 10th, or 9th century A.D. The difference goes deeper when we compare the constitution of soul in the human being of to-day and in a contemporary of the Mystery of Golgotha, or in a Greek; while if we go over to the ancient Oriental world of which the Greek civilisation was, in a sense, a kind of colony, we find there a disposition of soul utterly different from that of the man of to-day. I should like to show you from real instances how man lived in the East, let us say, ten thousand, or fifteen thousand years ago, and how different he was in nature from the Greek, and how still more different from what we ourselves are.

Let us first call to mind our own soul-life. I will take an example from it. We have a certain experience; and of this experience, in which we take part through our senses, or through our personality in some other way, we form an idea, a concept, and we retain this idea in our thought. After a certain time the idea may arise again out of our thought into our conscious soul-life, as memory. You have perhaps to-day a memory-experience that leads you back to experiences in perception of some ten years ago. Now try and understand exactly what that really means. Ten years ago you experienced something. Ten years ago you may have visited a gathering of men and women. You formed an idea of each one of these persons, of their appearance and so on. You experienced what they said to you, and what you did in common with them. All that, in the form of pictures, may arise before you to-day. It is an inner soul-picture that is present within you, connected with the event which occurred ten years ago. Now not only according to Science, but according to a general feeling,—which is, of course, experienced by man to-day in an extremely weak form, but which nevertheless is experienced,—according to this general feeling man localises such a memory-concept which brings back a past experience, in his head. He says:—‘What lives as the memory of an experience is present in my head.’

Now let us jump a long way back in human evolution, and consider the early population of the Orient, of which the Chinese and Indians as we know them in history were only the late descendants: that is, let us go back really thousands of years. Then, if we contemplate a human being of that ancient epoch, we find that he did not live in such a way as to say: ‘I have in my head the memory of something I have experienced, something I have undergone, in external life.’ He had no such inner feeling or experience; it simply did not exist for him. His head was not filled with thoughts and ideas. The present-day man thinks in his superficial way that as we to-day have ideas, thoughts, and concepts, so human beings always possessed these, as far back as history records; but that is not the case. If with spiritual insight we go back far enough, we meet with human beings who did not have ideas, concepts, thoughts at all in their head, who did not experience any such abstract content of the head, but, strange as it may seem, experienced the whole head; they perceived and felt their whole head. These men did not give themselves up to abstractions as we do. To experience ideas in the head was something quite foreign to them, but they knew how to experience their own head. And as you, when you have a memory-picture, refer the memory-picture to an experience, as a relationship exists between your memory-picture and the experience, similarly these men related the experience of their head to the Earth, to the whole Earth. They said:—‘There exists in the Cosmos the Earth. And there exists in the Cosmos I myself, and as a part of me, my head; and the head which I carry on my shoulders is the cosmic memory of the Earth. The Earth existed earlier; my head later. That I have a head is due to the memory, the cosmic memory of earthly existence. The earthly existence is always there. But the whole configuration, the whole shape of the human head, is in relation to the whole Earth.’ Thus an ancient Eastern felt in his own head the being of the Earth-planet itself. He said: ‘Out of the whole great cosmic existence the Gods have created, have generated the Earth with its kingdoms of Nature, the Earth

with its rivers and mountains. I carry on my shoulders my head; and this head of mine is a true picture of the Earth. This head, with the blood flowing in it, is a true picture of the Earth with the land and water coursing over it. The configuration of mountains on the Earth repeats itself in my head in the configurations of my brain; I carry on my shoulders my own image of the Earth-planet.’ Exactly as our modern man refers his memory-picture to his experience, so did the man of old refer his entire head to the Earth-planet. A considerable difference in inner perception!

Further, when we consider the periphery of the Earth, and fit it, as it were, into our vision of things, we feel this air surrounding the Earth as air permeated by the Sun's warmth and light; and in a certain sense, we can say: ‘The Sun lives in the atmosphere of the Earth.’ The Earth opens herself to the Cosmic universe; the activities that come forth from herself she yields up to the encircling atmosphere, and opens herself to receive the activities of the Sun. Now each human being, in those ancient times, experienced the region of the Earth on which he lived as of peculiar importance. An ancient Eastern would feel some portion of the surface of the Earth as his own; beneath him the earth, and above him the encircling atmosphere turned towards the Sun. The rest of the Earth that lay to left and right, in front and behind—all the rest of the Earth merged into a general whole.

Thus if an ancient Oriental lived, for example, on Indian soil, he experienced the Indian soil as especially important for him; but everything else on the Earth, East, West, South of him, disappeared into the whole. He did not concern himself much with the way in which the Earth in these other parts was bounded by the rest of Cosmic space; while on the other hand not only was the soil on which he lived something important, but the extension of the Earth into Cosmic space in this region became a matter of great moment to him. The way in which he was able to breathe on this particular soil was felt by him as an inner experience of special importance.

To-day we are not in the habit of asking, how does one breathe in this or that place? We are of course still subject to favourable or unfavourable conditions for breathing, but we are no longer so conscious of the fact. For an ancient Oriental this was different. The way in which he was able to breathe was for him a very deep experience, and so were many other things too that depend on the character of the Earth's relation and contact with cosmic space. All that goes to make up the Earth, the whole Earth, was felt by the human being of those early times as that which lived in his head.

Now the head is enclosed by the hard firm bones of the skull, it is shut in above, on two sides and behind. But it has certain exits; it has a free opening downwards towards the chest. And it was of special importance for the man of olden time to feel how the head opens with relative freedom in the direction of the chest. (See Drawing). And as he had to feel the inner configuration of the head as an image of the Earth, so he had to bring the environment of the Earth, all that is above and around the Earth, into connection with the opening downwards, the turning towards the heart. In this he saw an image of how the Earth opens to the Cosmos. It was a mighty experience for a man of those ancient times when he said: ‘In my head I feel the whole Earth. But this Earth opens to my chest which carries within it my heart. And that which takes place between head, chest and heart is an image of what is borne out from my life into the Cosmos, borne out to the surrounding atmosphere that is open to the Sun.’

A great experience it was for him, and one of deep meaning, when he was able to say: ‘Here in my head lives the Earth. When I go deeper, there the Earth is turning towards the Sun; my heart is the image of the Sun.’ In this way did the man of olden times attain what corresponds to our life of feeling.

We have the abstract life of feeling still. But who of us knows anything directly of his heart? Through anatomy and physiology, we think we know something, but it is about as much as we know of some papier-mâché model of the heart that we may have before us. On the other hand, what we have as a feeling-experience of the world, that the man of olden times did not have. In place of it he had the experience of his heart. Just as we relate our feeling to the world in which we live, just as we feel whether we love a man or meet him with antipathy, whether we like this or that flower, whether we incline towards this or that, just as we relate our feelings to the world—but to a world torn out, as it were, in airy abstraction, from the solid, firm Cosmos—in the same way did the ancient Oriental relate his heart to the Cosmos, that is, to that which goes away from the Earth in the direction of the Sun.

Again, we say to-day: I will walk. We know that our will lives in our limbs. The ancient man of the East had an essentially different experience. What we call ‘will’ was quite unknown to him. We judge quite wrongly when we believe that what we call thinking, feeling and willing were present among the ancient Eastern races. It was not at all the case. They had head experiences, which were Earth experiences. They had chest or heart experiences, which were experiences of the environment of the Earth as far out as the Sun. The Sun corresponds to the heart experience. Then they had a further experience, a feeling of expanding and stretching out into their limbs. They became conscious and aware of their own humanity in the movement of their legs and feet, or of their arms and hands. They themselves were within the movements. And in this expansion of the inner being into the limbs, they felt a direct picture of their connection with the starry worlds. (See Drawing). ‘In my head I have a picture of the Earth. Where my head opens freely downwards into the chest and reaches down to my heart, I have a picture of what lives in the Earth's environment. In what I experience as the forces of my arms and hands, of my feet and legs, I have something which represents the relation the Earth bears to the stars that live far out there in cosmic space.’

When therefore man wanted to express the experience he had as ‘willing’ human being—to use the language of to-day,—he did not say: I walk. We can see that from the very words that he used. Nor did he say: I sit down. If we investigate the ancient languages in respect of their finer content, we find everywhere that for the action which we describe by saying: I walk, the ancient Oriental would have said: Mars impels me, Mars is active in me. Going forward was felt as a Mars impulse in the legs.

Grasping hold of something, feeling and touching with the hands, was expressed by saying: Venus works in me. Pointing out something to another person was expressed by saying: Mercury works in me. Even when a rude person called some one's attention by giving him a push or a kick, the action would be described by saying: Mercury was working in that person. Sitting down was a Jupiter activity, and lying down, whether for rest or from sheer laziness, was expressed by saying: I give myself over to the impulses of Saturn. Thus man felt in his limbs the wide spaces of the Cosmos out beyond. He knew that when he went away from the Earth out into cosmic space, he came into the Earth's environment and then into the starry spheres. If he went downwards from his head, he passed through the very same experience, only this time within his own being. In his head he was in the Earth, in his chest and heart he was in the environment of the Earth, in his limbs he was in the starry Cosmos beyond.

From a certain point of view such an experience is perfectly possible for man. Alas for us, poor men of to-day, who can experience only abstract thoughts! What are these in reality, for the most part? We are very proud of them, but we quite forget what is far beyond the cleverest of them,—our head; our head is much more rich in content than the very cleverest of our abstract thoughts. Anatomy and physiology know little of the marvel and mystery of the convolutions of the brain, but one single convolution of the brain is more majestic and more powerful than the abstract knowledge of the greatest genius. There was once a time on the Earth when man was not merely conscious as we are of thoughts lying around, so to speak, but was conscious of his own head; he felt the head as the image of the Earth, and he felt this or that part of the head—let us say, the optic thalamus or the corpora quadrigemina—as the image of a certain, physical mountainous configuration of the Earth. He did not then merely relate his heart to the Sun in accordance with some abstract theory, he felt: ‘My head stands in the same relation to my chest, to my heart, as the Earth does to the Sun.’ That was the time when man had grown together, in his whole life, with the Cosmic Universe; he had become one with the Cosmos. And this found expression in his whole life.

Through the fact that we to-day put our puny thinking in the place of our head, through this very fact we are able to have a conceptual memory, we are able to remember things in thought. We form pictures in thought of what we have experienced as abstract memories in our head. That could not be done by a man of olden times who did not have thoughts, but still had his head. He could not form memory pictures. And so, in those regions of the Ancient East where people were still conscious of their head, but had as yet no thoughts and hence no memories, we find developed to a remarkable degree something of which people are again beginning to feel the need to-day. For a long time such a thing has not been necessary, and if to-day the need for it is returning it is due to what I can only call slovenliness of soul.

If in that time of which I have spoken one were to enter the region inhabited by people who were still conscious of their head, chest, heart and limbs, one would see on every hand small pegs placed in the earth and marked with some sign. Or here and there a sign made upon a wall. Such memorials were to be found scattered over all inhabited regions. Wherever anything happened, a man would set up some kind of memorial, and when he came back to the place, he lived through the event over again in the memorial he had made. Man had grown together with the earth, he had become one with it with his head. To-day he merely makes a note of some event in his head. As I have pointed out already, we are beginning once more to find it necessary to make notes not only in our head but also in a note-book; this is due as I said, to slovenliness of soul, but we shall nevertheless require to do it more and more. At that time however there was no such thing as making notes even in one's head, because thoughts and ideas were simply nonexistent. Instead, the land was dotted over with signs. And from this habit, so naturally acquired by men in olden times, has arisen the whole custom of making monuments and memorials.

Everything that has happened in the historical evolution of mankind has its origin and cause in the inner being of man. If we were but honest, we should have to admit that we modern men have not the faintest knowledge of the deeper basis of this custom of erecting memorials. We set them up from habit. They are however the relics of the ancient monuments and signs put up by man in a time when he had no memory such as we have to-day but was taught, in any place where he had some experience, there to set up a memorial, so that when he came that way again he might re-experience the event in his head; for the head can call up again everything that has connection with the earth. ‘We give over to the earth what our head has experienced’—was a principle of olden times.

And so we have to point to a very early time in the ancient East, the epoch of localised memory, when everything of the nature of memory was connected with the setting up of signs and memorials on the earth. Memory was not within, but without. Everywhere were memorial tablets and memorial stones. It was localised memory, a remembering connected with place.

Even to-day it is still of no small value for a man's spiritual evolution that he should sometimes make use of his capacity for this kind of memory, for a memory that is not within him but is unfolded in connection with the outer world. It is good sometimes to say: I will not remember this or that, but I will set here or there a sign, or token; or, I will let my soul unfold an experience about certain things, only in connection with signs or tokens. I will, for instance, hang a picture of the Madonna in a corner of my room, and when the picture is before me, I will experience in my soul all that I can experience by turning with my whole soul to the Madonna. For there is a subtle relation to a thing belonging so intimately to the home as does the picture of the Madonna that we meet with in the homes of the people, when we go a little way eastwards in Europe; we have not even to go as far as Russia, we find them everywhere in Central Europe. All experience of this nature is in reality a relic of the epoch of localised memory. The memory is outside, it attaches to the place.

A second stage is reached when man passes from localised to rhythmic memory. Thus we have first, localised memory; and secondly, rhythmic memory.

We have now come to the time when, not from any conscious, subtle finesse, but right out of his own inner being, man had developed the need of living in rhythm. He felt a need so to reproduce, within himself, what he heard that a rhythm was formed. If his experience of a cow, for instance, suggested ‘moo,’ he did not simply call her ‘moo,’ but ‘moo-moo,’—perhaps, in very ancient times, ‘moo-moo-moo.’ That is to say, the perception was as it were piled up in repetition, so as to produce rhythm. You can follow the same process in the formation of many words to-day; and you can observe how little children still feel the need of these repetitions. We have here again a heritage come down from the time when rhythmic memory prevailed, the time when man had no memory at all of what he had merely experienced, but only of what he experienced in rhythmic form,—in repetitions, in rhythmic repetition. There had to be at any rate some similarity between a sequence of words. ‘Might and main,’ ‘stock and stone’—such setting of experience in rhythmic sequence is a last relic of an extreme longing to bring everything into rhythm; for in this second epoch, that followed the epoch of localised memory, what was not set into rhythm was not retained. It is from this rhythmic memory that the whole ancient art of verse developed—indeed all metrical poetry.

Only in the third stage does that develop which we still know to-day,—temporal memory, when we no longer have a point in space to which memory attaches, nor are any longer dependent on rhythm, but when that which is inserted into the course of time can be evoked again later. This quite abstract memory of ours is the third stage in the evolution of memory.

Let us now call to mind the point of time in human evolution when rhythmic memory passes over into temporal memory, when that memory first made its appearance which we with our lamentable abstractness of thought take entirely as a matter of course; the memory whereby we evoke some-thing in picture-form, no longer needing to make use of semi-conscious or unconscious rhythmic repetitions in order to call it up again.

The epoch of the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory is the time when the ancient East was sending colonies to Greece,—the beginning of the colonies planted from Asia in Europe. When the Greeks relate stories of the heroes who came over from Asia and Egypt to settle on Grecian soil, they are in reality relating how the great heroes went forth from the land of rhythmic memory to seek a climate where rhythmic memory could pass over into temporal memory, into a remembering in time.

We are thus able to define quite exactly the time in history when this transition took place,—namely, the time of the rise of Greece. For that which may be called the Motherland of Greece was the home of a people with strongly developed rhythmic memory. There rhythm lived. The ancient East is indeed only rightly understood when we see it as the land of rhythm. And if we place Paradise only so far back as the Bible places it, if we lay the scene of Paradise in Asia, then we have to see it as a land where purest rhythms resounded through the Cosmos and awoke again in man as rhythmic memory,—a land where man lived not only as experiencing rhythm in a Cosmos, but as himself a creator of rhythm.

Listen to the Bhagavad-Gita and you will catch the after-echo of that mighty rhythm that once lived in the experience of man. You will hear its echo also in the Vedas, and you will even hear it in the poetry and literature—to use a modern word—of Western Asia. In all these live the echoes of that rhythm which once filled the whole of Asia with majestic content and, bearing within it the mysteries of the environment of the Earth, made these resound again in the human breast, in the beat of the human heart. Then we come to a still more ancient time, when rhythmic memory leads back into localised memory, when man did not even have rhythmic memories but was taught, in the place where he had had an experience, there to erect a memorial. When he was away from the place, he needed no memorial; but when he came thither again he had to recall the experience. Yet it was not he who recalled it to himself; the memorial, the very Earth, recalled it to him. As the head is the image of the Earth, so for the man of localised memory the memorial in the Earth evoked its own image in the head. Man lived completely with the Earth; in his connection with the Earth he had his memory.

The Gospels contain a passage that recalls this kind of memory, where we are told that Christ wrote something in the Earth.

The period we have thus defined as the transition from localised memory to rhythmic memory is the time when ancient Atlantis was declining and the first Post-Atlantean peoples were wandering eastward in the direction of Asia. For we have first the wanderings from ancient Atlantis—the continent that to-day forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean—right across Europe into Asia, and later the wanderings back again from Asia into Europe. The migration of the Atlantean peoples to Asia marks the transition from localised memory to rhythmic memory, which latter finds its completion in the spiritual life of Asia. The colonisation of Greece marks the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory—the memory that we still carry within us to-day.

1. Localised Memory.
2. Rhythmic Memory.
3. Temporal Memory.

And within this evolution of memory lies the whole development of civilisation between the Atlantean catastrophe and the rise of Greece,—all that resounds to us from ancient Asia, coming to us in the form of legend and saga rather than as history. We shall arrive at no understanding of the evolution of humanity on the Earth by looking principally to the external phenomena, by investigating the external documents; rather do we need to fix our attention on the evolution of what is within man; we must consider how such a thing as the faculty of memory has developed, passing in its development from without into the inner being of man.

You know how much the power of memory means for the man of to-day. You will have heard of persons who through some condition of illness suddenly find that a portion of their past life, which they ought to remember quite easily, has been completely wiped out. A terrible experience of this kind befell a friend of mine before his death. One day he left his home, bought a ticket at the railway station for a certain place, alighted there and bought another ticket. He did all this, having lost for the time the memory of his life up to the moment of buying the ticket. He carried everything out quite sensibly. His reason was sound. But his memory was blotted out. And he found himself, when his memory came back, in a Casual Ward in Berlin. It was afterwards proved that in the interval he had wandered over half Europe, without being able to connect the experience with the earlier experiences of his life. Memory did not re-awaken in him till he had found his way—he himself did not know how—into a Casual Ward in Berlin.

This is only one of countless cases which we meet with in life and which show us how the soul-life of the man of to-day is not intact unless the threads of memory are able to reach back unbroken to a certain period after birth.

With the men of olden time who had developed a localised memory, this was not the case. They knew nothing of these threads of memory. They, on the other hand, would have been unhappy in their soul-life, they would have felt as we feel when something robs us of our self, if they had not been surrounded by memorials which recalled to them what they had experienced; and not alone by memorials which they themselves had set up, but memorials too erected by their forefathers, or by their brothers and sisters, similar in configuration to their own and bringing them into contact with their own kinsmen. Whereas we are conscious of something inward as the condition for keeping our Self intact, for these men of bygone times the condition was to be sought outside themselves—in the world without.

We have to let the whole picture of this change in man's soul pass before our eyes in order to realise its significance in the history of man's evolution. It is by observing such things as these that light begins to be thrown upon history. To-day I wanted to show, by a special example, how man's mind and soul have evolved in respect of one faculty—the faculty of memory. We shall go on to see in the course of the succeeding lectures how the events of history begin to reveal themselves in their true shape when we can thus illumine them with light derived from knowledge of the human soul.

• 1. Die Weihnachtstagung zur Begründung der Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft. Jahresausklang und Jahreswende 1923/24 by Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works, Dornach 1962.

Also known as: Archangels and the Living Source of Speech Lecture 2 of 13 from the lecture series: The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that exist between the several languages, but rather with those metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.

If we consider the relationship man has to-day to language, we find that the words he speaks are nearly all of them signs for things that are round about him. As you will know, we have in the course of our studies alluded to a more intimate relationship between word and object. In our day however there is hardly any feeling left for this; words are very little more than mere outward signs for the objects indicated. Who is there who still feels, when the word Blitz (lightning) is uttered, something of the same experience he has when lightning actually flashes through space? To-day we are inclined to look on the word merely as a combination of sounds that is a sign for the phenomenon of the flash of lightning. It was not always so. If we go no farther back than to the earlier part of the Greek civilisation, we find that man's relation to language was not then one of thought, where the word is for him a sign and a symbol. The man of olden time entered with heart and soul into the sounds of his words and into the whole way the sounds were formed and arranged. And in the case of the languages of Northern Europe we do not even need to go back so far before we come to a time when the word Pflug (plough) gave man the same inner experience as did the activity of ploughing. This has been lost, and the word has become no more than a sign. But it is scarcely more than 1500 years or so since words were still felt in this way in the Northern parts of Europe. The feeling a man had when he was ploughing was similar to the feeling he had when he heard the word which in those days designated the plough. When anyone was listening to or speaking a word, it was not so much his thinking that partook in the experience as his feeling.

If now we go back into more remote ages, we find something different again; the will takes an intense and active part in the forming of words. But in order to study the times when man's relationship to external Nature was pre-eminently one of will, we must take our thoughts right back to Atlantis. For we have to reckon with long epochs of time when we are considering the evolution of language.

Within language lives the Genius of language. Language is not dependent for its evolution on the decision of man. In language lives the Genius of language. And the Genius of Language belongs to the hierarchy of the Archangels. When man speaks—when, that is, an atmosphere is prepared around the Earth within which can live man's utterances articulated into speech, then that atmosphere of speech and language is the element of the Archangels. Hence are the Archangels the Spirits of the different peoples—the Folk Spirits as we call them. You will know of this from the lectures I gave on the Mission of the Folk-Souls.

The evolution of language on Earth has thus a deep and intimate connection with the evolution of the Archangels. We can go so far as to say that in the evolution of speech and language we are beholding the evolution of the Archangels themselves. For even when we are studying something that has to do with the Earth, it is by no means impossible in the course of that very study to come to a knowledge of the evolution of higher spiritual Beings. We need only learn how to relate particular facts and phenomena to particular higher spiritual Beings, and we can arrive at a clear perception of how the continuous evolution of the Archangels is expressed and revealed in the changes that are to be observed in man's faculty of speech.

Now in those far-off times when an element of will came to expression in man's speech—that is, in the later part of the Atlantean evolution—it was not the same Beings of the Hierarchy who lived in his language as in more recent times. The whole relationship moreover was different. In those remote times man was not yet so interested in the feelings aroused in him at the sight, for example, of the blossoming of flowers or by changes in weather. These feelings interested him, it is true, in another connection, but not in respect of the faculty whereby the word welled up from the depths of his soul. Whether danger threatened him from this or that fact in Nature, summoning him to defend himself, or whether something else had a kindly and favourable influence and he would fain bring it into the orbit of his life, or again whether another object of perception were good or bad for his health,—in effect, how his will was aroused to activity, what he was induced to do under the influence of some fact or other,—this was the aspect of experience that interested him, and he formed his words accordingly. So that in those older times we find words that express how man reacts, what he finds himself impelled to do under the influence of the world around him. The most ancient language of all consisted almost entirely of expressions of will. How do we account for this? It was due to the fact that the Archangels came to language by way of Intuition. Read the descriptions I have given in my books of the nature of Intuition, and you will have a picture of the activity exercised by the Archangels in the later part of the Atlantean evolution, when they bestowed upon man the language of will.

Later, these Archangels moved forward in their own evolution. In my little book, “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,” I spoke about the evolution of the Leaders and Guides of humanity who live in the spiritual world. To-day we will extend this into a realm to which on that occasion we gave little attention,—the realm of speech and language. The advance made by the Archangels in their relation to language may be described in the following way. In the older faculty of Intuition they were standing within the world of still higher Hierarchies, giving themselves up in devotion to these worlds, so that together with speech they received something of the very being of higher Hierarchies than themselves. So long as it all depended upon Intuition, the Archangels surrendered themselves to the next higher Hierarchy,—Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. They were within the worlds of this higher Hierarchy, and it was the experience of standing intuitively within this higher Hierarchy that enabled them to put the speech-forming power into human life on Earth.

In the next epoch the Archangels make, as it were, a step forward and then their speech-forming power flows no longer out of Intuition but out of Inspiration. They are not now completely surrendered to the next higher Hierarchy. (What they did still receive through their devotion to this Hierarchy underwent a change; it ceased to be something they could then communicate to man as speech or language). Now they hearken to the Inspirations of the First Hierarchy,—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim,—and from out of this Inspiration they pour down to Earth the speech-forming power.

If we go back to the earliest times of Post-Atlantean evolution, or even only as far as ancient Egypt and Chaldea, we find in every land that the source from which the Archangels drew, in order to communicate speech to man, is Inspiration. Language itself is metamorphosed. Words become an expression before all else of sympathy and antipathy, of every shade of human feeling. Instead of a language of will, as in former times, we have now a language of feeling. We have come to a stage where this feeling, which is called forth in man by an external process or being is the very same as is experienced when the sounds issuing forth from the depths of his being are uttered by the speech organs and articulated into the word.

We have reached a significant phase in the evolution of mankind. The Hierarchy of the Archangels is at first the receiver of Intuitions; and the language of will, brought down as it were out of these Intuitions, is created by these Beings. The Archangels move on further and become the receivers of Inspiration. And what they receive through the inspiration of Beings of the First Hierarchy, gives rise to the language of feeling.

It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to take pains to understand what we learn; but as we go back over the evolution of mankind, we can only understand history as far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand, for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day,—although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas. Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf. The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say, there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with them. Their dramatis personae simply do not exist in the tragedies themselves.

Hermann Grimm showed a true and sure instinct, when he said that we come into an entirely different world when we come to Greece—to say nothing of the Orient. It is really no more than a ridiculous mockery for modern man to imagine he can understand anything of the true Orient out of Deussen's translations. The first thing necessary is to be able to comprehend the change that has come about since then in the very being of man's soul.

And now when we come to consider our particular sphere, the sphere of speech or language, then we find that the language of feeling still prevailed in Greece among the philosophers up to the time of Plato. The first philosophical pedant is Aristotle, the great and universal spirit.¹ It will surprise you that I give him these two appellations, one after the other, but we do not understand Aristotle unless we see in him the first philosophical pedant and at the same time the universal spirit. He is great in a certain aspect but he is in another aspect the first pedant philosopher, for he made out of words categories of thought. It would never have occurred to the Greek of an older time to take words and force them, as it were, to yield categories of thought; he still felt the words as something that is inspired into man, still felt the presence of higher Spirits in speech and language.

Well on into the Greek epoch and—for the man in the street, as we say—as late as the Mystery of Golgotha, we can still detect in the speech-forming power of man the element of Inspiration, as it lives in the soul of the Archangel. True, the ordinary person lags behind the philosopher in certain respects; but in spiritual matters he is often less behind, and in the matter of the speech-forming faculty, he retains the Inspirations longer. Dates can of course be no more than approximate. In one region of the earth Inspiration lasts a longer, in another a shorter, time. In one region, men still feel how the word pulsates in them as the blood pulsates in the body; they feel it in the power of the breath. In the power of the breath as it enfills and surges through the body, they feel the presence of the Archangel, who is himself subject to Inspiration.

Then we come into a time when it is no longer so that the Archangel is yielding to Inspiration when he communicates to man the power of speech, but to Imagination. And language becomes the language of thought. Man begins to speak more out of thoughts; language approaches the abstract. And behind this lies a fact of great significance.

The Archangels, who belong to the Third Hierarchy, received Intuitions from the Second Hierarchy, and Inspirations from Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the First Hierarchy. Whence do they receive Imagination? There is no Hierarchy beyond the First! The Imaginations cannot at any rate come to them from any one of the Hierarchies named in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. For he tells of no Hierarchy beyond the first. Certain Archangel Beings were therefore obliged to turn to the past for Imaginations, to find in the past the pictures of the speech-forming power,—for that is what the Imaginations are. What came from an earlier time had to be carried on into the future. There was no longer any immediate and present flow of the speech-forming power. And inasmuch as speech now took its source from an earlier stage, into it crept an Ahrimanic element. This is a fact of incalculable significance. And what the Archangels felt above them came to expression in the world of man in a deadening of speech and language. Language became polished and at the same time paralysed, it no longer retained the livingness it had in earlier days.

Try to understand the significance of this change. Something enters into the life of man that in reality requires a higher hierarchy than the First. If we have a right understanding for this event in human development in all its tremendous significance, we shall come to see that a time had arrived when the Gods had to grow out beyond what is contained in the First Hierarchy. There is one thing that up to that time had not yet been achieved by the Gods, and was already present here on Earth in picture. What the Gods had not yet achieved is the passage through Death. You have often heard me speak of this. The Gods who stand above man in the various Hierarchies knew only of changes from one form of life into another. The actual event of death in life had not, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, been an experience of the Gods. Death came as a result of Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it came, that is, through the agency of Divine Beings who had either remained behind in evolution or pressed forward too quickly. Death had no place in the life-experience of the higher Hierarchies. It enters into their experience in the moment when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha—passes, that is, through Death, uniting Himself so deeply with the destiny of Earth Man as to have this also in common with him,—that He passes through Death. The event of Golgotha is accordingly more than an event of the life of Earth, it is an event of the life of the Gods. The actual event that took place in that moment on Earth, and the knowledge of the Event that finds its way into the hearts and minds of men—all this is an image of the infinitely more lofty and sublime and far-reaching Event that took place in the worlds of the Gods themselves. Christ's passing through death on Golgotha is an event whereby the First Hierarchy reached up into a still higher realm. Therefore have I always had to speak to you of the Trinity as standing above the First Hierarchy. In reality It only came there in the course of evolution. Everywhere there is evolution.

And so, if we are speaking of the Hierarchies as described in Dionysius the Areopagite, we have to say that the Archangels lose the possibility of forming Imaginations from above. Consequently Man loses the possibility of continuing to build and fashion his language in a living manner. In the world of the Gods an event takes place of which the Mystery of Golgotha is an earthly reflection. Therefore the Event of Golgotha contains among its many implications also this,—that as men gradually receive into themselves more and more of the Christ Impulse, they receive again through the Christ Impulse the living spring and fountain of language.

We have to-day the various languages that run their course like diverging streams. And if we look at these various languages in a free and unbiassed way, we cannot fail to observe how they carry in them—and more especially, the farther we go Westward—an element of death, how they tend to become mere empty husks. In Asia things have not yet gone so far, but as we go West we find increasingly how the languages show signs of dying.

There is only one way whereby the speech-creating power can be quickened into life,—and that is through men coming to realise the Christ Impulse as a living Impulse. Then the Christ Impulse can become a power in man that can create speech. And among all the facts to be noted if we want to form a true picture of the significance of the Christ Impulse in the whole evolution of mankind, this must also have place, that at the time when man went forward into freedom, he came right out of the Divine and spiritual stream in which he had been steeped hitherto. Had speech remained as it was in the time of ancient Greece, man would not have been able to evolve to freedom. That speech serves the purpose merely of a sign,—this absurdity (for so I must call it) had to come about when the Archangels lost the possibility of forming Imaginations from the present and had to resort to the past. During the time since the Christ first made Himself known to men, during all this time while He has let the Mystery of His Being and His activity be there on record in the Gospels, the knowledge of Christ has not come in its fullness, the knowledge men have had of Him has not been sufficiently spiritual, it has often been merely traditional. But when the word of the Gospel is quickened to life by an understanding of the Christ, an understanding that derives from the Christ Himself as He still works on in the world, continuing to have influence always upon man, then—and only then—will proceed from the Christ Impulse, from the living Christ Impulse, the speech-forming power.

Let us now set down on the blackboard what I have been indicating. Here up above, the Gods grow more and more exalted. Down below an evolution goes on among men. On the one hand they receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom.

And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom. And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ, Who has found His home in the hearts of men on Earth; He enters with His Impulse right into the Imaginations of the Archangels, and these become alive, become quick with immediate present life.

We shall in the future have an altogether different kind of language-forming power. A quite new kind will begin to work. I have spoken of this from other points of view in earlier lectures.

We can describe the evolution that goes on above in the Heavens at the same time as mankind evolves on the Earth below. And we can also describe its copy or reflection on Earth,—the progress from the language of will to the language of feeling and thence to the language of thought or symbol. And we can know that amidst it all Archangels are ascending—or shall we rather say descending—from Intuition to Inspiration and to Imagination. We behold first the evolution of the Archangels and all that takes place in connection therewith among the higher Hierarchies, and when we turn from that to man in his evolution, it is on the evolution of language and of the word that we have to fix our attention. We will consider one particular stream in the whole history of mankind, into which a divine stream was interwoven. It goes back to the origin of all things, the far beginning of all things. “In the Beginning was the Word” where was the word in those distant ages, when mankind had a language of the will? The Word was with God, it had to be sought there by means of Intuition. “The Word was with God ”.

The Archangels had to transpose themselves by means of Intuition into the Being of the Second Hierarchy. The Being that flowed over into Them was the Word. “And a God was the Word”.

In the Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.

We see how intimate is the connection of that stream in evolution which finds its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha with the Logos, the Word. And it is all bound up with the great cosmic event of man's “becoming” and the passage of Christ through death. When those great sentences were uttered: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word ”—in those days the Word was felt as moving and weaving in the soul of man. With the Advent of the Mystery of Golgotha came a time when Christ was present in a human body—men beheld Him through the Word. The Word had entered into physical man. “ And the Word became flesh ”.

Deep truths, deep facts of evolution, lie hidden in the ancient writings, but earnest and persistent work is needed to find them again. We must first be able to observe in the spiritual world. Above all, we must approach these ancient writings with reverence, knowing that we shall only be able to deepen our understanding of their content by learning to investigate these sublime matters for ourselves. And as we are able to enter into their deeper meaning we enter also into spiritual life itself.

Well indeed would it be for us in this age, had we a Michael civilisation, a culture and a civilisation fired by what I recently called the Michael thought! This Michael thought should be alive, above all, in the autumn time. The festival of autumn should be filled with it. The leaves have withered and are falling from the branches of the trees, the plants are fading away, life is being mineralised. All the fresh young sprouting life that we saw in the earlier part of the year is receiving death into itself, death and decay, and is fast undergoing mineralisation. Now must the Michael power well up from man's inner being; now must man recognise how, just where the physical and material grows weak and faint and tends to die away,—just there the spiritual enters in! The Autumn Festival of Michaelmas at the end of September should become a festival filled with life and impulse. It has to express how man, while he stands right within the decaying processes of Nature, grows correspondingly active in his soul. When the Michael Festival shall have this character, then all human activity will be fructified from it. And how sore is the need to-day for such fructification! Let me give you an instance.

A short while ago, we heard a great deal about a resolve some people had made to study language. Nothing came of it, nothing at all. All manner of facts about language were collected, but the whole effort was completely lacking in spirituality. It was really so. There you had a group of young people, straight from school. At school of course, they had not yet woken up, but now—they are going to “study language”! They begin to plan it all and think how it will be when they have gone on studying for some time; a dazzling picture floats before their eyes of the fruit of all their labours. Actually all the preliminary steps are there; they could quite well have gone on to a recognition of the great miracle that unfolds before us when we look away from the present-day language of thought, through the language of feeling, to the language of will, and behold there the wonderful working and weaving of the Divine Archangels, behold too how their working and weaving stirs even yet in the language corpses of to-day. Were the life of the First Beginnings to flow again in language, what a sublime greatness were there revealed!

You must understand that the Michael thought is not a thing to be taken easily. You cannot simply say: Let us inaugurate a Michael Festival; it will be wonderful, and we shall then be in the very forefront of progress. The Michael thought has relation to the strongest and deepest impulses of the human will. It must reckon with these innermost impulses, and a Michael Festival cannot be other than a festival which gives a tremendous urge to human life, much as in those olden times, when man had the power to create festivals, the institution of the Christmas Festival or of the Easter Festival gave a new urge and impetus to the whole life of man on Earth.

• 1. Pedant’ seems to be, in this connection, the nearest rendering for ‘Philinter.’ (Note by Translator).

As I propose to follow up the theme of our lecture yesterday,¹ I would remind you of the three figures whose outstanding importance has lasted from the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries right on into our own times, namely, Giordano Bruno, Lord Bacon of Verulam and Jacob Boehme. We feel how they wrestled within themselves to understand man, to know something of the being of man, but yet were unable to attain their goal. In the time in which they lived, ancient knowledge of the being of man had been lost and the genuine strivings of the most eminent minds of the day were unable to lead to a new knowledge.

It was said that out of the strange and incoherent utterances of Jacob Boehme there resounds a kind of longing to know the universe in man and man in the universe. Out of the sum-total of his knowledge of the universe and of the being of man something glimmers which, to deeper insight, seems to point to man in pre-earthly existence, to man before he descends to earthly life. And yet we find in Jacob Boehme’s works no clear definition or description of man as a pre-earthly being.

I expressed this more or less as follows. I said that Jacob Boehme describes in halting words the being of pre-earthly man but the man he places before us would have had to die as a being of soul-and-spirit in the spiritual world before he could have come down to the earth. Jacob Boehme describes a rudiment only of pre-earthly man. And so he is incapable of understanding the reality of the universe in man and man in the universe.

If we then consider Giordano Bruno—semi-poet and semi-scientist—we find in him a knowledge of the universe which he expresses in pictures of great majesty. He too tries to fit man into his place within this majestic picture of the universe and he too is trying to recognise the universe in man and man in the universe. But he does not actually reach this knowledge. Giordano Bruno’s imagery is full of beauty and grandeur. On the one side it soars into infinitudes and on the other into depths of the human soul, but it all remains indefinite, even nebulous. Everything that Giordano Bruno says reveals a striving to describe the man of the present in the universe of space and the nature of the spatial universe itself.

And so while Jacob Boehme harks back ineffectually to pre-earthly man, Giordano Bruno gives us a blurred picture of man as he lives on earth in connection with space and with the cosmos too. The picture is not sufficiently clear to indicate real insight into that relation of man to the cosmos which would open up a vista of pre-earthly and post-earthly man.

If we then turn to Lord Bacon of Verulam, we find that he, in reality, no longer has any traditional ideas of the being of man. Of the old insight into human nature which had survived from ancient clairvoyant perception and from the Mysteries, there is no trace in him whatever.

Bacon, however, looks out into the world that is perceptible to the senses and assigns to human intelligence the task of combining the phenomena and objects of this world of sense-existence, of discovering the laws by which they are governed. He thus transfers the perception of the human soul into that world in which the soul is immersed during sleep, but there he only arrives at pictures of nature other than human nature. These pictures, if they are regarded as Bacon regarded them merely from the logical and abstract point of view, merely place the external aspect of human nature before us. If they are inwardly experienced, however, they gradually become vision of man’s existence after death, for a true clairvoyant perception of man’s being after death is to be obtained through this very medium of a real knowledge of nature. Thus Bacon too, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of those who strive to recognise man in the universe and the universe in man.

But even his powers were inadequate for he did not intensify the pictures into a new experience. Indeed he could not do so, because the old reality was no longer living in the experiences of the soul. Bacon stands as it were at the threshold of the knowledge of life after death but does not actually attain to this knowledge.

We can therefore say: Jacob Boehme still shows signs of possessing a knowledge of pre-earthly man—a knowledge drawn from ancient tradition, but inadequate. Giordano Bruno embarks upon a description of the universe which might have led him to a knowledge of earthly man as he stands there with his life of soul on the one side and his cosmic background on the other. But Giordano Bruno fails to give an adequate description either of the cosmos or of the life of soul which, as presented by him, shrinks into an animated ‘monad.’

Bacon indicates the lines along which natural science must evolve, how it must seek with the powers of free human cognition for the spark of the Spiritual within the merely material. He points to this free activity of human knowledge, but it has no content. Had it been imbued with content Bacon would have been pointing to post-earthly man. But this he cannot do. His knowledge too remains inadequate.

All the living knowledge which in earlier epochs of human evolution it had been possible to create from the inner being, had by that time been lost. Man remained empty when he looked into his inner being with the object of finding knowledge of the universe. He had really ‘lost’ himself, together with his inner life of knowledge, and what remained to him was the vista of the outer world, of outer nature, of that which is not man. Jacob Boehme had gleaned from the Folk-Wisdom something like the following: In the human being there are three principles—salt, mercury, sulphur, as he calls them. These words have, however, an entirely different significance in his language from the significance attaching to them in modern chemistry. Indeed if we try to connect the conceptions of modern chemistry with Jacob Boehme’s magnificent, albeit stammering utterances, his words are entirely devoid of meaning. They were used, of course, by Boehme with a different meaning.

What did these expressions—salt, mercury, sulphur—still mean in the Folk-Wisdom from which Jacob Boehme derived his ideas? When Boehme spoke of the working of the salt, the mercury or the sulphur in man, he was speaking of something absolutely real and concrete. When man to-day speaks of himself, of his soul-nature, he gives voice to abstract ideas which have no real content. Jacob Boehme gathered together, as it were, the last vestiges of knowledge filled with concrete reality. Outer nature lay there perceptible to the senses, comprehensible to human reason. In this outer nature man learnt to see the existence of processes and phenomena and then in the succeeding centuries proceeded to build up an idea of the make-up of man from what he had been able to observe in nature. That is to say, understanding of the being of man was based on what was perceived to be outside man and in seeking thus to understand human nature by way of these external media, a conception of man's body too was built up without any knowledge as to whether this conception was in accordance with his true being or not.

By synthesising the processes which are to be observed in the outer, sense-perceptible world and applying them to the inner processes which take place within the limits of man’s skin, a kind of human spectre is evolved, never the real being of man. In this human spectre the faculties of thinking, feeling and willing also come into consideration, but they remain abstractions, shadowy thought-pictures filled with so-called inner experiences which are, in reality, mere reflections of processes in outer nature. At the time of Bacon there was no longer the slightest inkling of the way in which the being of spirit-and-soul penetrates into the bodily nature, and traditions which had been handed on from the old clairvoyant knowledge were not understood.

Now what has Spiritual Science to say to this? When in the first place we study the bodily nature of man, we have to do with processes connected with the senses, with nutrition, and also with those in which nutrition and sense-perception coincide. When man eats, he absorbs nutriment; he takes into himself the external substances of nature but at the same time he tastes them, so that a sense-perception is intermingled with a process which is continued from nature outside, on into man himself.

Think for a moment of the process of nutrition being accompanied by the perception of taste. We find that while the sense of taste is stimulated and the process of nutrition is set in operation, the outer substances are dissolved in the fluids and juices within the human organism. The outer substances which the plants absorb from lifeless nature are all, to begin with, given form. That which exists on earth without form, in lifeless nature, is really cloven asunder. Crystals are at the basis of all substances. And those substances which we do not find in crystallised form, but formless, in dust and the like, are really crystallisations which have been shattered. Out of crystallised, lifeless nature the plant draws its substances and builds them up into that form which is peculiar to its own nature. From this again the animal derives its nourishment. So that we may say: Out there in nature, everything has its form, its configuration. When man takes in these forms, he dissolves them. This is one form of the process which goes on in man’s organism. The forms, as they exist in outer nature, are dissolved. They are transmuted into the organic fluids.

But when the substances have been absorbed and transmuted into fluid, forms which were first dissolved begin to build up again. When we eat salt, it is first dissolved by means of the fluids in the organism, but we then give it form again. When we eat substances drawn from plants, they are dissolved and then inwardly reformed, not, this time, in the bodily fluids, but in the etheric body.

And now think of what happened in ancient times, when, for example, a man ate salt. It was dissolved and re-formed in his etheric body but he was able to perceive the whole process inwardly. He had an inner thought-experience of the formative process undergone by the salt. When he ate salt, the salt was dissolved and the salt-cube was there in his etheric body. From this he knew: salt has the shape of a cube. And so, as man experienced his being inwardly, he also experienced nature within himself. The cosmic thoughts became his thoughts. What he experienced as imaginations, as dreamlike imaginations, were forms which revealed themselves in his etheric body. They were cosmic forms, cosmic configurations.

But the age dawned when this faculty to experience in the etheric body these processes of dissolution and reconstruction was lost to man. He was obliged more and more to turn to external nature. It was no longer an inner experience to him that salt is cubic in form. He was obliged to investigate outer nature to find out the true configuration of salt.

In this way man’s attention was diverted entirely to the outer world. The radical change to this condition wherein men no longer experienced cosmic thoughts through inner perception of the etheric body, had been taking place since the beginning of the fifteenth century and had reached a certain climax at the time of Giordano Bruno, Jacob Boehme and Bacon of Verulam.

Jacob Boehme, however, had still been able to gather up those crumbs of Folk-Wisdom which told him: Man dissolves everything he assimilates from the outer world of matter. It is a process like salt being dissolved in water. Man bears this water within himself, in his vital fluids. All substances, in so far as they are foodstuffs, are salt. This salt dissolves. In the salts, the cosmic thoughts are expressed on earth. And man again gives form to these cosmic thoughts in his etheric body. This is the ‘salt-process.’

Jacob Boehme expressed in halting language that which in olden times was an inner experience. But if Anthroposophy did not shed light upon what Jacob Boehme says, we should never be able to interpret his stammering utterances. We should read into them all kinds of dark, mystical meanings. Jacob Boehme connected the thinking—the process by which the world presents itself to man in pictures—with the salt-process, that is to say, with the dissolving and re-forming process undergone by substance within the organism of man. Such was his ‘salt-process.’

It is often pathetic, although at the same time it shows up the conceit of some people, to see how they read Jacob Boehme and whenever they come across the word ‘salt,’ pretend to understand it, whereas in reality they understand nothing at all. They come along with their heads in the air saying that they have studied Jacob Boehme and find in him a profound wisdom. But there is no trace of this wisdom in the interpretations they bring forward. Were it not an evidence of conceit it would be quite pathetic to hear such people talk about matters of which Boehme himself had only a glimmering understanding from the Folk-Wisdom which he then voiced in halting words.

These things indicate the existence of an altogether different wisdom and science in olden times, a wisdom which was experienced through inner perception of the processes taking their course in the etheric body—processes which revealed themselves to man as the ever-recurring cosmic thoughts. The world constructed from the thoughts which are embodied in the crystal-formations of the earth, to which man gives form in his etheric body and consciously experiences - such was the ancient knowledge which disappeared in the course of time.

If we were able to transfer ourselves into one of the old Mystery-sanctuaries and listen spiritually to the description which an Initiate would give of the universe, it would have been something like the following: All through the universe the cosmic thoughts are weaving; the Logos is working. The crystal-formations of the earth are the embodiments of the single parts of the cosmic Word. Now the sense of taste is only one of the many senses. The processes of hearing and of sight can be dealt with in a similar way though in their case the working of the salts in etheric form must be thought of in a more outward sense. Man receives through his senses that which is embodied in the salts and re-forms it in his etheric body, experiences it within himself. Cosmic thoughts repeat themselves in the thoughts of men. The universe is recognised in man and man in the universe. With concrete and unerring intuition the Initiates of olden times were able to describe this out of their visionary, dream-like knowledge of the universe and of man.

During the course of the Middle Ages this wisdom was gradually superseded by a merely logical form of knowledge which, though of great significance, became, nevertheless, entirely academic and on the other side had trickled away into Folk-Wisdom. What was once sublime wisdom, relating both to the cosmos and to man had degenerated into sayings used by simple folk who by that time understood little of their meaning but who still felt that some great value was contained in them. It was among such people that Jacob Boehme lived. He absorbed this Folk-Wisdom and by his own genius revived it within him. He was more articulate than those among whom he lived but even he could do no more than express it in halting language.

In Giordano Bruno there was a feeling that man must learn to understand the universe, must get to know his own nature, but his faculties did not enable him to say anything so definite as: ‘Out there are the cosmic thoughts, a universal Word which enshrines itself in the crystal; man takes into himself these cosmic thoughts when, knowingly and deliberately, he dissolves the salts and gives them new form in his etheric body.’ It is so, indeed: from the concrete thoughts of the world of myriad forms, from the innermost thoughts of man, there arises an etheric world as rich in its varied forms as the world outside us.

Just think of it: This wealth of thought in regard to the cosmos and to man shrinks, in Giordano Bruno, into generalisations about the cosmos. It hovers into infinitudes but is nevertheless abstract. And that which lives in man as the world re-formed, shrinks into a picture of the animate monad—in reality, nothing but an extended point.

What I have described to you was real knowledge among the sages of old; it was their science. But in addition to the fact that these ancient sages of the Mysteries were able, by their own dream-veiled vision, to evolve this knowledge, they were able to have actual intercourse with the spiritual Beings of the cosmos. Just as here on earth a man enters into conscious relationship with other human beings, so did these ancient sages enter into relation with spiritual Beings. And from these spiritual Beings they learned something else, namely that what man has formed in his etheric body—by virtue of which he is inwardly another cosmos, a microcosm, an etheric rebirth of the macrocosm—what he thus possesses as an inner cosmos, he can in the element of air, by the process of breathing, again gradually obliterate.

And so in those ancient times man knew that within him the universe is reborn in varied forms; he experienced an inner world. Out of his inner vital fluids the whole universe arose as an etheric structure. That was ancient clairvoyance. Man experienced a real process, an actual happening. And in modern man the process is there just the same, only he cannot inwardly experience it.

Now those spiritual Beings with whom the ancient sages could have real intercourse did not enlighten them only in regard to the vital fluids from which this micro-cosmic universe was born but also in regard to the life-giving air, to the air which man takes in with his breath and which then spreads through his whole organism. This air which spreads itself over the whole of the microcosm, renders the shapes therein indistinct. The wonderful etheric universe in miniature begins, directly the breath contacts it, to become indefinite, That which formerly consisted of a myriad forms, is unified, because the ‘astral’ man lives in the airy element, just as the etheric man lives in the fluids. The astral being of man lives in this airy element and by the breaking up of the etheric thoughts, by the metamorphosis of etheric thoughts into a force, the will is born from the working of the ‘astral man’ in the ‘air man.’ And together with the will there arise the forces of growth which are connected with the will.

This knowledge again expressed a great deal more than is suggested nowadays by the abstract word ‘will.’ It is a concrete process. The astral lays hold of the airy element and spreads over that which is etheric and fluidic. And thereby a real process is set up which appears in outer nature at a different stage, when something is burnt. This process was conceived by the ancients as the sulphur-process. And from the sulphur-process there unfolded that which was then experienced in the soul as will.

In olden times men did not use the abstract word think to express something that arose in the mind as a picture. When a real knower spoke about ‘thinking’ he spoke of the salt-process just described. Nor did he speak in an abstract way of the ‘will’ but of the astral forces laying hold of the airy element in man, of the sulphur-process from which the will is born. Willing was a process of concrete reality and it was said that the adjustment between the two—for they are opposite processes—was brought about by the mercury-process, by that which is fluid and yet has form, which swings to and fro from the etheric nature to the astral nature, from the fluidic to the aeriform. The abstract ideas which were gradually evolved by Scholasticism and have since been adopted by modern science, did not exist for the thinkers of olden times. If they had been confronted with our concepts of thinking, feeling and willing they would have felt rather like frogs in a vessel from which all the air has been pumped. This is how our abstract concepts would have appeared to the thinkers of old. They would, have said: It is not possible for the soul to live or breathe with concepts like this. For the thinkers of old never spoke of a purely abstract will-process, of a purely abstract thought-process, but of a salt-process, of a sulphur-process, and they meant thereby, something that on the one hand is of the nature of soul-and-spirit and on the other of a material-etheric nature. To them, this was a unity and they perceived how the soul works everywhere in the bodily organism.

The writings of the Middle Ages which date back to the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries still showed traces of this ancient faculty of perception and of a knowledge that was at the same time inner experience. This kind of knowledge had faded away at the time of Giordano Bruno, Jacob Boehme and Bacon of Verulam. Ideas had become abstract; man was obliged to look, not into his own being but out into nature. I have told you that our concepts to-day would have made the wise men of old feel like frogs exhausted by lack of air. We, however, find it possible to exist with such ideas. The majority of people when they speak of thinking, feeling and willing, consider them at most mirror-pictures of external nature which appear in man. But precisely in our age it is possible to attain to what in olden times was not possible. Man lost the spontaneous, inner activity which gives birth to knowledge. In the interval which has elapsed since the fifteenth century, man has lost the capacity to discover anything when he merely looks into his inner being. He therefore looks out into nature and evolves his abstract concepts. None the less it is possible so to intensify these concepts that they can again be filled with content because they can be experienced. We are, of course, only at the very beginning of this phase of development, and anthroposophical Spiritual Science tries to be such a beginning.

All the processes I have described above—the salt process, the sulphur-process—are nowhere to be found in this form in external nature; they are processes which can only be known by man as taking place in his image being. In outer nature there transpires something which is related to these processes as the processes in a corpse are related to those in a living man. The salt- and sulphur-processes spoken of by modern chemistry are those which the old Folk-Wisdom living in Jacob Boehm conceived as taking place within a corpse. Such processes are dead, whereas they were once filled with inner life. And as he observed them in their living state, man saw a new world—a world which is not the world surrounding him on earth.

The ancients, then, were able with the help of their inwardly experienced knowledge, to see that which is not of the earth, which belongs to a different world. The moment we really understand these salt-and sulphur-processes we see the pre-earthly life of man. For earthly life differs from the pre-earthly life precisely in this: the sulphur- and salt-processes are dead in the external world of sense; in pre-earthly existence they are living. What we perceive with our senses between birth and death, is dead. The real salt- and sulphur-processes are living when we experience them as they are in pre-earthly existence. In other words, understanding of these processes of which Jacob Boehme speaks in halting words, is a vision of pre-earthly existence. That Jacob Boehme does not speak of pre-earthly existence is due to the fact that he did not really understand it and could only express it in faltering words.

This faculty of man to look back into pre-earthly existence has been lost—lost together with that union with the spiritual Beings who help us to see in the sulphur-process the reality of post-earthly existence. The whole attitude of the human soul has entirely changed. And Giordano Bruno, Jacob Boehme and Lord Bacon of Verulam lived precisely at the time of this change.

In the last lecture I drew your attention to the fact that of the way man felt himself placed in the universe in earlier times not the faintest notion remains to-day. Consequently no great importance is attached to information which dates back beyond comparatively recent times.

Here in Dornach we have given many performances of the play of the Three Kings. This story of the visit of the Three Kings to the Child Jesus is also given in the old German song of the “Heliand.” You are aware that it dates back to a comparatively early period of the Middle Ages and that it originated in Central Europe. There is something remarkable here. It is obvious that something else is connected with this visit of the Three Kings from the East. These Kings relate that they have come from regions where conditions were very different from what they now find (i.e., at the beginning of our era). They tell us that they are the descendants of ancestors who were possessed of a wisdom incomparably greater than any contemporary wisdom. They speak of an ancestor far back in time—an ancestor who was able to hold converse with his God. And when he came to die, this ancestor assembled all his family and told them of what his God had revealed to him, namely, that in the course of time a World-King would appear whose coming would be heralded by a star.

When search is made for an indication of this ancestor, we find—and even literature points to this—that he is Balaam, mentioned in the fourth book of Moses in the Old Testament. These three Holy Kings from the East, therefore, are referring to Balaam, the son of Beor, of whom it is related in the fourth Book of Moses that he held converse with his God and that he regulated his whole earthly life in accordance with that converse.

In short, when we examine the facts, they tell us that at the time when this old German poem originated, a consciousness still existed of ages when men had intercourse with the Gods. A very real conception of this still remained, with men. Again here, we have an indication of something which the contemplation of history revealed to these people and which proves to us that we have passed from those olden times when men felt themselves placed in a living universe, into a Philistine age. For our civilisation is really a Philistine civilisation. Even those who believe that they have grown out of it are by no means so opposed to Philistinism that they would find it possible to accept such traditions as that of Balaam being the ancestor of the Three Kings. Such people have by no means grown beyond Philistinism. The most that could be said of them is that they are ‘Bohemians!’

These things indicate what a mighty change has taken place in the attitude of the human soul. Centuries ago it was known that with their dreamy clairvoyant faculties men were able to observe the actual working of such processes as the sulphur-process and the salt-process. And because of this they were able to see into the pre-earthly state of existence.

Certain people who did not desire the upward progress, but rather the retrogression of humanity, but who were nevertheless initiated in a certain sense, saw in advance that human beings would lose this capacity; that a time would come when nothing would be known any longer about pre-existence. And so they laid it down as a dogma that there is no pre-existent life, that man’s soul is created together with his physical body. The fact of pre-existence was shrouded in the darkness of dogma. That was the first step downwards of what had once been knowledge of man’s place in the universe. It was a step downwards into ignorance for it is not possible to understand man if one part of his existence is obliterated, especially so important a part as his pre-existent life.

Now Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno and Lord Bacon of Verulam lived at a time when this insight into pre-existent life had faded away. And moreover the age had not yet dawned when the inner experiencing of knowledge was to give place to a spiritual perception of external nature, whereby man, who can no longer find himself in his inner being, finds himself again in nature outside. For a long time there had been Initiates who wished to lead mankind on the downward path. Such Initiates did not desire that the new faculty of insight—which was exactly the reverse of the old clairvoyance—should make headway. And they tried by means of dogma to replace the new form of knowledge by mere faith and belief in the life after death. And so, in Giordano Bruno's time, dogmatic decrees had wiped out the possibility of knowledge of pre-existent life and of life after death. Giordano Bruno stood there wrestling—wrestling more forcibly than Jacob Boehme and much more forcibly than Lord Bacon. Giordano Bruno stood there among the men of his time, unable to transmute the Dominican wisdom that lived in him into a true conception of the universe. And he expressed in poetic language the somewhat indefinite views which he was able to evolve.

But the knowledge which Giordano Bruno possessed in so nebulous a form must give birth to a definite and precise understanding of man in the universe and the universe in man, not by means of a recrudescence of inner clairvoyance but by means of new clairvoyant faculties acquired by free spiritual activity.

With these words I have indicated what must take place in the evolution of mankind. And in our day humanity is faced with the fact that the will to attain this higher knowledge is violently opposed and hated by numbers of people. This too is apparent in events of which history tells. And when we understand these events we also understand why it is that bitter opposition arises to anthroposophical conceptions of the world.

• 1. Published in Anthroposophy, Christmas, 1930.

My dear Friends! Formerly there were a number of different esoteric circles in the Anthroposophical Society. Within those circles the material of the general lectures, drawn as it is from the spiritual life of the world, was brought to the members in a manner that enabled spiritual striving, esoteric life to arise in them. As indicated yesterday in the meeting for members, since the Christmas Conference a basic esoteric impulse will flow through the entire Anthroposophical Society in the future. And so, in essence the esoteric in a deeper form will be nurtured further. And as you will find published in the next Goetheanum members newsletter, in order that what is discussed more exoterically can be developed more esoterically, for this reason the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum exists.

The School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum therefore will be an esoteric school in the best sense of the word, so that in the organization of its classes, in the whole way it is structured, it will increasingly strive to become what a modern Mystery Center ought to be. Hopefully circumstances will make this possible very soon.

The First Class, the only one established so far, is a beginning, which will develop as further classes are set up. Designating them classes was chosen for public use because people's state of soul is today no longer properly receptive to the kind of designation that used to be customary in earlier times. What matters, of course, is the content and not what it is called. That is why it is necessary for those who are accepted as members of the school to be properly aware of what it means to be a member.

The School of Spiritual Science has been through a period of trial and error. Before I myself became the leader of the Anthroposophical Society there were various initiatives to create at the Goetheanum a kind of free university that would endeavor to emulate ordinary universities in certain ways. It has to be said now that these initiatives failed and that indeed they could not have succeeded, but it was necessary for the attempts to have been made. Enough is enough, however, and from now on there will be no more such endeavors. The real purpose of the Goetheanum is that every individual shall be able to find there whatever it is his own soul intensely seeks in its spiritual striving and cannot find elsewhere. Someone whose soul is striving in a general way and not in connection with any specific subject must … be able to find there an entirely satisfactory outcome for his endeavors. Those, equally, who are involved in a particular art or science must be able to find esoteric guidance in the various Sections so that they can deepen their spiritual insights. That is why a number of Sections have been established, some of which have already begun their activities. In Dornach especially a beginning has been made with the General Anthroposophical Section, the Section that is there for any individual who is seeking to deepen the life of his or her soul.

It is important for our Anthroposophical Society to be able to encompass the larger circle of general membership. Anyone seeking Anthroposophy in any way must be able to become a member, especially now that we have recognized the Society to be an open and public one. No obligations are attached to becoming a member except those that arise as a matter of course out of Anthroposophy itself. For members of the school, however, because it must be an esoteric school in the real and true sense, certain obligations do arise. The esoteric undercurrent in the General Anthroposophical Society flows from the fact that the executive leadership¹ is an esoteric institution, as I explained yesterday. As a result of this, everything that flows from the Executive Council will carry an esoteric undercurrent through the Society.

But so far as the school is concerned, every member must be conscious of being a true representative of Anthroposophy before the world. It must be clear to every member of the school that he or she has to be a true representative of Anthroposophy before the world. This means more than is generally understood and must be taken fully and deeply seriously. For example, it is not right to say that the school deprives certain people of their freedom by not accepting them as members. The leadership of the school must be allowed to be as free as anyone else. It, too, must be granted freedom of action and thus be permitted to determine which individuals it can recognize as members. The freedom must be mutual. There is no point in making critical remarks about the curtailment of freedom if one has not been accepted as a member of the school.

Furthermore, if a member of the school embarks on undertakings with which the leadership of the school cannot agree, so that it cannot regard that member as a true representative of the anthroposophical movement, it must be permissible for the leadership to cancel that person's membership. All this goes to show how very seriously membership of the school will have to be taken...

These exoteric measures will give the school a character that will enable truly esoteric substance to flow through it. Those who become members of it will have to regard Anthroposophy itself as crucial to their lives in the strictest sense.

Today we have gathered for a single Lesson of the First Class since it is assumed that those of you who are present will be able to make it possible to come at least occasionally to the Lessons that will take place regularly at the Goetheanum, where the content of the school is to be continuously elaborated. The aim increasingly will be to develop what has already started in the Medical Section, where Frau Dr. Wegman has begun to send out circular letters informing members who live too far away about what is flowing through the school. Today's Lesson will stand on its own, since I assume that most of you will be able to come to the Goetheanum, but I did want there to be something also for those who find it impossible to get to Dornach.

My dear friends, my brothers and sisters, ever since esoteric striving became a part of human evolution there has existed within this esoteric striving a call, a challenge, a summons.² This call, which became more exoteric during Grecian times, can be heard properly by a human being when he becomes still in his heart and soul, and then allows the influence of the stars above to work on him, the stars that resting there in the world-all, that take on forms there in their grouping-together, and through the peacefulness of their forms bring the words of heaven into a sort of script, that the person gradually will decipher. When he gives himself up in quietness of soul and in stillness of heart to the impressions of the fixed stars, when he similarly gives himself up to the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the other not resting but wandering stars, when he so deepens himself in the movements of the circumference, where certainly what wields authority in the stars, which are only markers for spiritual authorities, for reigning powers of earth-existence, when he allows all this to work on his mind and heart, all that happens in the wandering movement of the planets, and when a person deepens himself in what lives around him entering his own organism as earth, water, air, and fire, when the person really deepens himself in the world-all and gazes upon the spirit in the world-all, and when he infuses himself with all that can whisper to him, the resting-star spirits, the wandering-star spirits, the elementary spirits, in this way he deepens himself in the call, the challenge, the summons which through eons has gone out to people striving esoterically.

Let’s bring this to our souls today, as it resounds there from the heights, from the circling, from immediate surrounding area:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?
Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

So it sounds forth from the threefold world-all. O Man, know yourself! Above all it sounds when the person comes to that situation in his conscious existence which is called the threshold to the spiritual world. At this threshold to the spiritual world a person notices how everything that surrounds him in the external, sense-perceptible world has greatness, beauty, and majesty, as well as much that is hideous, how he cannot live as an earthly person if he does not have a sense for all that color upon color lives in nature, for all that radiance on radiance unfurls in star-existence, for what arises and maintains itself living in all that surrounds him on earth. When he immerses himself in all this, and he ought to want to immerse himself in it, he begins to notice that however beautiful and great and majestic all this may be, the root, the source of his own existence is not in any of it. He must take note that he must look elsewhere for the connection with the source and root of his own existence. For this purpose, the threshold is there.

On this side there is color upon color, effect on effect, force on force, life on life. this is the world merely of a person’s externality, not the world of his roots, the source of his existence. Over here initially is the light bright world, but over there, when a person looks across, there is darkness. But the person gets a feeling over there, where darkness still reigns, that actually there is true light there, there I must cross over into this true light. And this true light can only be attained when the person is prepared to attain it, when the person takes on the specific attitude and disposition in his soul, that thereby prepares himself to receive properly what as light streams out of the darkness and specifically what first gives him an image of himself.

Then the person becomes aware that a spiritual being is standing at this threshold, a being known to a person as the Guardian of the Threshold, which he has to approach. One must feel and sense everything that the Guardian wants us to feel and sense, for without having come up to and passed by this Guardian, it is not possible to attain any genuine inner knowing. And all actual inner knowing that appears to have been attained without a sense of the Guardian of the Threshold is not genuine inner knowing. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, take into your hearts something that can give you a preliminary sense of this earnest figure who stands there between not knowing and knowing:

First come to know the earnest Guardian,
Who stands before the gates of spirit-land,
Denying entry to your sensory force
And to your intellect’s might,
For in weaving of sense
And in forming of thought
Out of space’s absence of being,
Out of time’s illusory powers,
The truth of your own self
You must first forcefully master.

More than anything else it is important to be able to say to oneself to the greatest extent, “I am not yet a human being. I must become a human being through what I shall develop and unfold within myself.” Clothed in pictures initially, is what in a person initially must remain hidden from himself. For as a person descends into the earthly world, he is tucked into all the forces of heredity. The forces of heredity hold what draws us downward. There is willing, taken over almost completely by the forces of heredity, enmeshed in the physical forces of heredity, when a person follows his trials and tribulations. There is feeling, that will drive a person into every misgiving and all kinds of indolence, into all sorts of doubts about the spiritual world. And there is thinking, that specifically is dead, is the corpse of real true thinking, that was our own before we descended from pre-earthly existence into earthly life. These three appear to a person in the form of three beasts that rise up out of the abyss, standing behind the Guardian of the Threshold in front of the light-bearing darkness. Three beasts rise up, making the person aware of what he certainly is, if he fails to activate the spiritual in himself.

We see them there formed up. One as a bony shell, a bony ghost, is certainly an elementary embodiment, an incarnation of insubstantial, dead thinking, that lives however in the elemental realm. We learn to know that thinking is dead in us. Before birth it was alive, and it will be alive after death. The person’s physical body is a sort of grave, in which thinking is entombed as a mummy. The person takes this thinking, that for him as a physical person is his own, as a reality. It was indeed real before it became a corpse. … But there, the person was in pre-earthly existence. The more a person is aware that thinking in true reality is a bony ghost, the more he acquaints himself with the earthly human being.

The more a person learns to know that feeling, that becomes milder and more harmonious through spirituality, in which the person carries it up, the more he becomes aware that feeling dependent on the forces of heredity is a hate-filled beast with split mouth, sarcastic appearance, the more a person learns to know that willing is like a terrible consuming beast, then the more he will be called inwardly to say, “I am not yet a human being; I must become one by attending to the spiritual powers. I must seek to bring my thinking to life, to internalize my feelings, to spiritualize my willing.

At the same time, that truly gives great difficulties, for as we stand in physical life thinking, feeling, and willing weave themselves into the whole of our humanity. They flow into one another. In a diagram we could depict them like this: [left side of diagram] Thinking would be here [blue], not entirely separate but partly mingled with feeling [green], which in turn is partly mingled, not entirely separate from willing [red]. And thereby can a person maintain himself in physical life, by interweaving thinking, feeling, and willing with one another in his being. When the person comes over into the spiritual world, thinking, feeling, and willing split apart, and it is as though the person separates into three beings. And he pointedly has separated thinking, feeling, and willing from one another. [see right side of drawing]

The person becomes one with the world, overflowing into the world. While at one with his body, feeling unified in physical-earthly existence, because he is in a finite organic individual body, he gets the impression that he is a unity within his ego, his “I”. But through the earnest impulse that goes out from the Guardian of the Threshold, the person feels himself as a trinity. In going out into the world he feels himself in a certain manner divided up, divided up so that between thinking and feeling a space open up in between, not outwardly sensed but qualitatively there. A person observes, or rather feels, when he is at one with the world, that between the thinking-being and the feeling-being there is a sort of gap, a space.

In a remarkable way we have thus come to realize that knowing, in the true sense of the word, is to live out into the world. Just as here on earth we are one with our heart or our stomach, just so are we one with sun and moon once we have stepped across the threshold. They are our organs. We become one with the sun and the moon, and the person as he is here on earth becomes the external world. What is now inside becomes foreign, as now stones, plants, and animals are foreign. Here on earth, you do not say, “I am a mountain, I am a river.” You say, “There is a mountain, there is a river.” And when you have crossed the threshold, you don't say, “I have a heart and lungs within me.” In the same way that you speak about mountains and rivers here you speak about heart and lungs once you have crossed the threshold. You point to them as they stand outside you, but you feel the sun and moon to be part of your inner being. You feel the sun to be part of your inner being between thinking and feeling, and you feel the moon to be part of your inner being between feeling and willing. [see right side of diagram]

This is a fact of life, that in a certain manner a person can rise to, even if he is not yet clairvoyant, but rather inwardly deepens sound human understanding, and actualizes standing at the threshold alongside the earnest Guardian. It is a meditation, and is extraordinarily effective, this feeling that somehow can place the person outside himself into world existence-awareness, not in a generalized, blurred way but quite concretely, as if poured out into the cosmos, bearing the sun and moon within himself.

But over the sun there is thinking, over the moon we have feeling, and under the moon we have willing. Another way of saying this is: Over beyond the sun thinking spreads out into the starry heavens, into the zodiac [drawing on the blackboard] of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and so on. Feeling overlies the circling orbits of the sun and the planets. Willing overlies the earth, for willing is totally bound to the earth, to the gravity of the earth, to the elements earth, water, air, and fire, over which we have the moon. This is how one can put oneself out into the world.

A person’s way of comprehending the world today, when he speaks of many elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so forth, would have been regarded by a person still under the influence of the Mysteries as the corpse of the world. Even a Greek in ancient times would have said to a modern person, “Not only do you pick the human organism to pieces by dissecting it in the clinical laboratory, you also dismember the world as a whole with your science because you conduct science only from the earthly point of view.

Then see, my dear brothers and sisters, that still in the ancient Egyptian Mysteries it was still clearly known that one cannot learn anything of natural science by simply observing what is outside in nature. It was rather done only by one taking each thing, this was unequivocally made clear to each person in the First Degree of Initiation in the Mysteries, only by the person taking each thing inside himself, so to speak remembering each thing, just as it had appeared in pre-earthly existence-awareness. The science of nature is truly what simultaneously incorporates the earthly and the pre-earthly.

And in the Second Degree one was told that in the earthly world one can of course learn geometry, the science of measuring, and arithmetic. For these human soul-activities are drawn from the physical. They present the super-sensible in the physical. This was not unveiled in the First Degree for it was considered dangerous. In the First Degree it was considered appropriate to describe the spiritual world to the pupil. Therefore, the science of nature was taught in the First degree, but in such a way that the pupil was reminded of the living thinking that existed within him before he came down into earthly life.

In the Third Degree the person learned, solely by approaching the portal of death, that he may not thirst after blood, that he could find human existence outside physical existence, as in the physical body with blood. Naturally when you open modern books, you will find this interpreted that one may not thirst after killing or stabbing another person, not that a person may not thirst after blood. But truly there is no need to reach the teachings of the Third Degree of Initiation in order to understand this.

Then comes a further degree in which the adept will be given the name Christ-Bearer.³ For the spirit of Christ was known by man in all the mysteries of the ages. There he was brought out first in what at that time was called chemistry. The spiritual nature of stuff is grasped when a person has gone through the portal of death. And chemistry instruction from the earthly point of view, before the pupil absorbed what he is outside his physical body, and also our present method of teaching chemistry, would have been regarded as the work of the devil in ancient Egypt. To the ancient Egyptian all chemists, all modern chemists, would have been sons of the devil, for it was known that things in nature were linked together with spirit. And it was well and completely known, even in those olden times, where instinctive clairvoyance pulsed through initiation science, that a person undoubtably is linked to the supersensible world.

For those who belong to the School of Spiritual Science and the Anthroposophical Society, the way they learn ought to resemble the way people learned from an initiate in the ancient Mysteries. If initiated in this way, as well as for those who learn from an initiate, a gathering like the one we are now having is given its wholly spiritual, esoteric character. People must partake of this spiritual atmosphere with all their consciousness. To this end it is yet necessary that direct participation in the fullest sense of the word ever and again include bringing meditative content in various forms before the members of the school.

One such set phrase should now be given to us, one of those formulas through which we can gradually prepare ourselves to press forward across the threshold, whether with our ordinary healthy common sense or with initiation awareness.

What should be trotted forth to the person, what he himself should place inwardly with mantric rhythm before the soul, out of the speech of the spirit translated into speech that is useful on earth, can be given in the following words. [The first two lines were written on the blackboard.]

O Man, touch inwardly in your body’s whole existence,
How earth forces for you in existence-awareness are pillars.

We feel an object with our fingers and call this touching. Imagine, my brothers and sisters, that you were to touch with your whole body instead of only with hand and arm. But you are not touching anything specific in your surroundings, you are touching with the whole of yourself, you are touching the earth with your whole body in such a way that the sole of your foot is the surface with which you touch and you are feeling-out and touching the way you are being supported by the forces of the earth by using the whole of yourself as the organ of touch. Unconsciously this is what we are doing all the time as we walk about or stand still, but we don't notice it. But when a person calls, summons these things in human life into consciousness, when you actually delve into your earthly experience, as it actually lets you experience it, when you touch and taste it somewhat, then you have the first feeling that must be meditated. [Writing continued.]

O Man, live inwardly in your touching’s whole sphere,
How water ways for you in existence-awareness are sculptors.

Now imagine, as you continue on in this mantric formulation, how what was at first an organ of touching and tasting is now something that is felt. This is a further step inwards. Previously you merely used your body as an organ of touching, now you experience it, live into it as an organ of touching. Just as when a person first touched and then felt, as a person forms a fist out of his hand he gets an inner feeling, touched and then felt, as you curl your hand into a fist, you have an inner feeling. Similarly, you feel and experience the touching and become aware, as you experience this touching, how something begins to move within you, something that the fluids and liquids within you constantly do as sculptors as they circulate. There the sculpting forces of a human being are inwardly experienced, the sculpting forces sent out by the etheric body.

Such things are attained while the meditation is carried out in the corresponding manner. In the first line we have touch within. Here feeling, touching, is an activity. [touch within was underlined.] In the third line touching has become a noun. [Touching's was underlined.] This repetition of that feeling, now metamorphosed, is what gives the mantra its mantric character.

Now a person steps up further, not merely to grasping the touching experience by living into it, but rather to inner grasping of life itself, to inner grasping in water of the etheric itself working. A person goes yet another degree inwardly and feels inwardly, as he touched inwardly earlier, he feels inwardly now life itself within him. A person envisions it, realizes it in this way. [Writing continued.]

O Man, feel inwardly in your living’s whole weave,

Again, we have the experience as an activity [In the third line live was underlined.], and now life is a noun. [In the fifth line living’s was underlined.] We have ascended with constantly changing activity from the physical body, which is at work entirely in the earthly realm. Here [in the first line] the objective is touching. In the next line [the third] it is experiencing activity, and here it is inwardly feeling the activity. [The word feel in the fifth line was underlined] It is placed in the fullness of life like a noun.

How air powers

—in breathing—

for you in existence-awareness are nurturers.

We have ascended as far as the air and shall now rise even further to where we enter into our fire nature, our warmth nature. [Writing continued.]

O Man, think inwardly in your feeling’s whole stream,

Again, we have the verb feeling becoming a noun. [In the seventh line feeling's was underlined.]

How fire-mights⁴ for you in existence-awareness are helpers.

All of this can now be summarized in the single sentence we come to next.

O Man, look within yourself into the elemental realm.

The elements are earth, water, air, and fire.

Let us now ascend further from all that surrounds us in the elemental world and proceed to the powerful activity that comes towards us from the circling round about, from the sun, the moon and the circling planets. In later Lessons we shall look in more detail at the way we participate in the movements of the circling planets and the connection this has with the being of man. Today the mantric formulation is more general. We are to ascend in meditation from an experience of the elemental world to an experience of the circling with these words: [writing continues]

O Man, just so let rule in the depths of your soul

The wandering stars' world-guiding might.

And this is summarized in the words:

O Man, bring yourself into being, into motion⁵ through world’s circling.

Bring yourself into being means to fashion yourself, to make yourself into a being.

Then we ascend to what we can feel especially in the existence of our head when we turn our attention to the fixed stars, those stars that depict the shapes, for example, of the zodiac and that regulate the existence of the world. Here we feel how all that quietly lives and weaves in our head is an after-effect of what we see up there among the fixed stars heralding heaven. We can ascend to this if we continue our mantra as follows: [writing continued]

O Man, inwardly hold in the work of your spirit

The resting stars’ heaven-heralding words.

In summary:

O Man, fashion yourself through heaven's guardians.⁶

Fashion yourself through heaven's guardians, through those beings you discern through the words and the script of the fixed stars to be the ones who heed, herd, and help guard the world.

My dear brothers and sisters, such things are there in order that they may work on in the soul, work on in such a way that the inner structure of such mantras comes to be felt as inner harmony, and that such mantras, as they are repeated over and over again in the soul, so that the soul in this finally strives and weaves and continues and thereby finds the way across to the serious Guardian in the proper manner. Finding him improperly and being swept back into the physical world, a person can easily be disconcerted in the physical world, by confusing what applies to the spiritual world with what applies to the physical world. [At this point the shorthand report has a long sentence which cannot be deciphered.]

We will let work on our souls that which makes us appreciate how true, genuine, honest awareness is gained at the threshold to the spiritual world where we, as we approach this threshold, become aware of such earnestness. We will let work on us what has already been spoken here today.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?
Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Then, however, comes the inner courage that arises and persists in the words:

O Man, touch inwardly in your body’s whole existence,
How earth forces for you in existence-awareness are pillars.
O Man, live inwardly in your touching’s whole sphere,
How water ways for you in existence-awareness are sculptors.
O Man, feel inwardly in your living’s whole weave,
How air powers for you in existence-awareness are nurturers.
O Man, think inwardly in your feeling’s whole stream,
How fire-mights for you in existence-awareness are helpers.
O Man, look within yourself into the elemental realm.

O Man, just so let rule in the depths of your soul
The wandering stars' world-guiding might.
O Man, bring yourself into being, into motion, through world’s circling.

O Man, hold inwardly in the work of your spirit
The resting stars’ heaven-heralding words.
O Man, fashion yourself through heavens’ guardians.

• 1. Vorstand
• 2. Aufforderung
• 3. Christophoros in Greek
• 4. Feuermächte
• 5. erwese dich
• 6. Hüter

[ 1 ] In future there will be found in these columns something in the nature of anthroposophical ‘Leading Thoughts’ or principles. These may be taken to contain advice on the direction which members can give to the lectures and discussions in the several Groups. It is but a stimulus and suggestion which the Goetheanum would like to give to the whole Society. The independence of individual leading members in their work is in no way to be interfered with. We shall develop healthily if the Society gives free play to what leading members have to offer in all the different Groups. This will enrich and make manifold the life of the Society.

[ 2 ] But it should also be possible for a unity of consciousness to arise in the whole Society—which will happen if the initiative and ideas that emerge at different places become known everywhere. Thus in these columns we shall sum up in short paragraphs the descriptions and lines of thought given by me in my lectures to the Society at the Goetheanum. I imagine that those who lecture or conduct the discussions in the Groups will be able to take what is here given as guiding lines, with which they may freely connect what they have to say. This will contribute to the unity and organic wholeness of the work of the Society without there being any question of constraint.

[ 3 ] The plan will become fruitful for the whole Society if it meets with a true response—if the leading members will inform the Executive at the Goetheanum too of the content and nature of their own lectures and suggestions. Then only shall we grow, from a chaos of separate Groups, into a Society with a real spiritual content.

[ 4 ] The Leading Thoughts here given are meant to open up subjects for study and discussion. Points of contact with them will be found in countless places in the anthroposophical books and lecture-courses, so that the subjects thus opened up can be enlarged upon and the discussions in the Groups centred around them.

[ 5 ] When new ideas emerge among leading members in the several Groups, these too can be brought into connection with the suggestions we shall send out from the Goetheanum. We would thus provide an open framework for all the spiritual activity in the Society.

[ 6 ] Spiritual activity can of course only thrive by free unfoldment on the part of the active individuals—and we must never sin against this truth. But there is no need to do so when one group or member within the Society acts in proper harmony with the other. If such co-operation were impossible, the attachment of individuals or groups to the Society would always remain a purely external thing—where it should in fact be felt as an inner reality.

[ 7 ] It cannot be allowed that the existence of the Anthroposophical Society is merely made use of by this or that individual as an opportunity to say what he personally wishes to say with this or that intention. The Society must rather be the place where true Anthroposophy is cultivated. Anything that is not Anthroposophy can, after all, be pursued outside it. The Society is not there for extraneous objects.

[ 8 ] It has not helped us that in the last few years individual members have brought into the Society their own personal wishes simply because they thought that as it increased it would become a suitable sphere of action for them. It may be said, Why was this not met and counteracted with the proper firmness? If that had been done, we should now be hearing it said on all sides, ‘Oh, if only the initiative that arose in this or that quarter had been followed up at the time, how much farther we should be today!’ Well, many things were followed up, which ended in sad disaster and only resulted in throwing us back.

[ 9 ] But now it is enough. The demonstrations which individual experimenters in the Society wished to provide are done with. Such things need not be repeated endlessly. In the Executive at the Goetheanum we have a body which intends to cultivate Anthroposophy itself; and the Society should be an association of human beings who have the same object and are ready to enter into a living understanding with the Executive in the pursuit of it.

[ 10 ] We must not think that our ideal in the Society can be attained from one day to the next. Time will be needed, and patience too. If we imagined that what lay in the intentions of the Christmas meeting could be brought into existence in a few weeks' time, this again would be harmful.

Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts given out as suggestions from the Goetheanum

[ 11 ] 1. Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe. It arises in man as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling; and it can be justified only inasmuch as it can satisfy this inner need. He alone can acknowledge Anthroposophy, who finds in it what he himself in his own inner life feels impelled to seek. Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst.

[ 12 ] 2. Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way. Yet it only does so because everyday life, and the science founded on sense-perception and intellectual activity, lead to a barrier along life's way—a limit where the life of the soul in man would die if it could go no farther. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to compel man to stop short at it. For at the very frontier where the knowledge derived from sense perception ceases, there is opened through the human soul itself the further outlook into the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] 3. There are those who believe that with the limits of knowledge derived from sense perception the limits of all insight are given. Yet if they would carefully observe how they become conscious of these limits, they would find in the very consciousness of the limits the faculties to transcend them. The fish swims up to the limits of the water; it must return because it lacks the physical organs to live outside this element. Man reaches the limits of knowledge attainable by sense perception; but he can recognise that on the way to this point powers of soul have arisen in him—powers whereby the soul can live in an element that goes beyond the horizon of the senses.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 14 ] 4. For certainty of feeling and for a strong unfolding of his will, man needs a knowledge of the spiritual world. However widely he may feel the greatness, beauty and wisdom of the natural world, this world gives him no answer to the question of his own being. His own being holds together the materials and forces of the natural world in the living and sensitive form of man until the moment when he passes through the gate of death. Then Nature receives this human form, and Nature cannot hold it together; she can but dissolve and disperse it. Great, beautiful, wisdom-filled Nature does indeed answer the question, How is the human form dissolved and destroyed? but not the other question, How is it maintained and held together? No theoretical objection can dispel this question from the feeling soul of man, unless indeed he prefers to lull himself to sleep. The presence of this question must incessantly maintain alive, in every human soul that is really awake, the longing for spiritual paths of World-knowledge.

[ 15 ] 5. For peace in his inner life, man needs Self-knowledge in the Spirit. He finds himself in his Thinking, Feeling and Willing. He sees how Thinking, Feeling and Willing are dependent on the natural man. In all their developments, they must follow the health and sickness, the strengthening and weakening of the body. Every sleep blots them out. Thus the experience of everyday life shows the spiritual consciousness of man in the greatest imaginable dependence on his bodily existence. Man suddenly becomes aware that in this realm of ordinary experience Self-knowledge may be utterly lost—the search for it a vain quest. Then first the anxious question arises: Can there be a Self-knowledge transcending the ordinary experiences of life? Can we have any certainty at all, as to a true Self of man? Anthroposophy would fain answer this question on a firm basis of spiritual experience. In so doing it takes its stand, not on any opinion or belief, but on a conscious experience in the Spirit—an experience in its own nature no less certain than the conscious experience in the body.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 16 ] 6. When we look out on lifeless Nature, we find a world full of inner relationships of law and order. We seek for these relationships and find in them the content of the ‘Laws of Nature.’ We find, moreover, that by virtue of these Laws lifeless Nature forms a connected whole with the entire Earth. We may now pass from this earthly connection which rules in all lifeless things, to contemplate the living world of plants. We see how the Universe beyond the Earth sends in from distances of space the forces which draw the Living forth out of the womb of the Lifeless. In all living things we are made aware of an element of being, which, freeing itself from the mere earthly connection, makes manifest the forces that work down on to the Earth from realms of cosmic space. As in the eye we become aware of the luminous object which confronts it, so in the tiniest plant we are made aware of the nature of the Light from beyond the Earth. Through this ascent in contemplation, we can perceive the difference of the earthly and physical which holds sway in the lifeless world, from the extra-earthly and ethereal which abounds in all living things.

[ 17 ] 7. We find man with his transcendent being of soul and spirit placed into this world of the earthly and the extra earthly. Inasmuch as he is placed into the earthly connection which contains all lifeless things, he bears with him his physical body. Inasmuch as he unfolds within him the forces which the living world draws into this earthly sphere from cosmic space, he has an etheric or life-body. The trend of science in modern times has taken no account of this essential contrast of the earthly and the ethereal. For this very reason, science has given birth to the most impossible conceptions of the ether. For fear of losing their way in fanciful and nebulous ideas, scientists have refrained from dwelling on the real contrast. But unless we do so, we can attain no true insight into the Universe and Man.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 18 ] 8. We may consider the nature of man in so far as it results from his physical and his etheric body. We shall find that all the phenomena of man's life which proceed from this side of his nature remain in the unconscious, nor do they ever lead to consciousness. Consciousness is not lighted up but darkened when the activity of the physical and the etheric body is enhanced. Conditions of faintness and the like can be recognised as the result of such enhancement. Following up this line of thought, we recognise that something is at work in man—and in the animal—which is not of the same nature as the physical and the etheric. It takes effect, not when the forces of the physical and the etheric are active in their own way, but when they cease to be thus active. In this way we arrive at the conception of the astral body.

[ 19 ] 9. The reality of this astral body is discovered when we rise in meditation from the Thinking that is stimulated by the outer senses to an inner act of Vision. To this end, the Thinking that is stimulated from without must be taken hold of inwardly, and experienced as such, intensely in the soul, apart from its relation to the outer world. Through the strength of soul thus engendered, we become aware that there are inner organs of perception, which see a spiritual reality working in the animal and man at the very point where the physical and the etheric body are held in check in order that consciousness may arise.

[ 20 ] 10. Consciousness, therefore, does not arise by a further enhancement of activities which proceed from the physical and etheric bodies. On the contrary, these two bodies, with their activities, must be reduced to zero—nay even below zero—to ‘make room’ for the working of consciousness. They do not generate consciousness, they only furnish the ground on which the Spirit must stand in order to bring forth consciousness within the earthly life. As man on Earth needs the ground on which to stand, so does the Spiritual, within the earthly realm, need a material foundation on which it may unfold itself. And as a planet in the cosmic spaces does not require any ground beneath it in order to assert its place, so too the Spirit, when it looks—not through the senses into material—but through its own power into spiritual things, needs no material foundation to call its conscious activity to life.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 21 ] 11. The Self-consciousness which is summed up in the ‘I’ or ‘Ego’ emerges out of the sea of consciousness. Consciousness arises when the forces of the physical and etheric bodies disintegrate these bodies, and thus make way for the Spiritual to enter into man. For through this disintegration is provided the ground on which the life of consciousness can develop. If, however, the organism is not to be destroyed, the disintegration must be followed by a reconstruction. Thus, when for an experience in consciousness a process of disintegration has taken place, that which has been demolished will be built up again exactly. The experience of Self-consciousness lies in the perception of this upbuilding process. The same process can be observed with inner vision. We then feel how the Conscious is led over into the Self-conscious by man's creating out of himself an after-image of the merely Conscious. The latter has its image in the emptiness, as it were, produced within the organism by the disintegration. It has passed into Self-consciousness when the emptiness has been filled up again from within. The Being, capable of this ‘fulfilment,’ is experienced as ‘I.’

[ 22 ] 12. The reality of the ‘I’ is found when the inner vision whereby the astral body is known and taken hold of, is carried a stage further. The Thinking which has become alive in meditation must now be permeated by the Will. To begin with we simply gave ourselves up to this new Thinking, without active Will. We thereby enabled spiritual realities to enter into this thinking life, even as in outer sense perception colour enters the eye or sound the ear. What we have thus called to life in our consciousness by a more passive devotion, must now be reproduced by ourselves, by an act of Will. When we do so, there enters into this act of Will the perception of our own ‘I’ or Ego.

[ 23 ] 13. On the path of meditation we discover, beside the form in which the ‘I’ occurs in ordinary consciousness, three further forms: (1) In the consciousness which takes hold of the etheric body, the ‘I’ appears in picture-form; yet the picture is at the same time active Being, and as such it gives man form and figure, growth, and the plastic forces that create his body. (2) In the consciousness which takes hold of the astral body, the ‘I’ is manifested as a member of a spiritual world whence it receives its forces. (3) In the consciousness just indicated, as the last to be achieved, the ‘I’ reveals itself as a self-contained spiritual Being—relatively independent of the surrounding spiritual world.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 24 ] 14. The second form of the ‘I’—first of the three forms that were indicated in the last section—appears as a ‘picture’ of the I. When we become aware of this picture-character, a light is also thrown on the quality of thought in which the ‘I’ appears before the ordinary consciousness. With all manner of reflections, men have sought within this consciousness for the ‘true I.’ Yet an earnest insight into the experiences of the ordinary consciousness will suffice to show that the ‘true I’ cannot be found therein. Only a shadow-in-thought is able to appear there—a shadowy reflection, even less than a picture. The truth of this seizes us all the more when we progress to the ‘I’ as a picture, which lives in the etheric body. Only now are we rightly kindled to search for the ‘I’, for the true being of man.

[ 25 ] 15. Insight into the form in which the ‘I’ lives in the astral body leads to a right feeling of the relation of man to the spiritual world. For ordinary consciousness this form of the ‘I’ is buried in the dark depths of the unconscious, where man enters into connection with the spiritual being of the Universe through Inspiration. Ordinary consciousness experiences only a faint echo-in-feeling of this Inspiration from the wide expanse of the spiritual world, which holds sway in depths of the soul.

[ 26 ] 16. It is the third form of the ‘I’ which gives us insight into the independent Being of man within a spiritual world. It makes us feel how, with his earthly-sensible nature, man stands before himself as a mere manifestation of what he really is. Here lies the starting-point of true Self-knowledge. For the Self which fashions man in his true nature is revealed to him in Knowledge only when he progresses from the thought of the ‘I’ to its picture, from the picture to the creative forces of the picture, and from the creative forces to the spiritual Beings who sustain them.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 27 ] 17. Man is a being who unfolds his life in the midst, between two regions of the world. With his bodily development he is a member of a ‘lower world’; with his soul-nature he himself constitutes a ‘middle world’; and with his faculties of Spirit he is ever striving towards an ‘upper world.’ He owes his bodily development to all that Nature has given him; he bears the being of his soul within him as his own portion; and he discovers in himself the forces of the Spirit, as the gifts that lead him out beyond himself to participate in a Divine World.

[ 28 ] 18. The Spirit is creative in these three regions of the World. Nature is not void of Spirit. We lose even Nature from our knowledge if we do not become aware of the Spirit within her. Nevertheless, in Nature's existence we find the Spirit as it were asleep. Yet just as sleep has its task in human life—as the ‘I’ must be asleep at one time in order to be the more awake at another—so must the World-Spirit be asleep where Nature is, in order to be the more awake elsewhere.

[ 29 ] 19. In relation to the World, the soul of man is like a dreamer if it does not pay heed to the Spirit at work within it. The Spirit awakens the dreams of the soul from their ceaseless weaving in the inner life, to active participation in the World where man's true Being has its origin. As the dreamer shuts himself off from the surrounding physical world and entwines himself into himself, so would the soul lose connection with the Spirit of the World in whom it has its source, if it turned a deaf ear to the awakening calls of the Spirit within it.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 30 ] 20. For a right development of the life of the human soul, it is essential for man to become fully conscious of working actively from out of spiritual sources in his being. Many adherents of the modern scientific world-conception are victims of a strong prejudice in this respect. They say that a universal causality is dominant in all phenomena of the world; and that if man believes that he himself, out of his own resources, can be the cause of anything, it is a mere illusion on his part. Modern Natural Science wishes to follow observation and experience faithfully in all things, but in its prejudice about the hidden causality of man's inner sources of action it sins against its own principle. For the free and active working, straight from the inner resources of the human being, is a perfectly elementary experience of self-observation. It cannot be argued away; rather must we harmonise it with our insight into the universal causation of things within the order of Nature.

[ 31 ] 21. Non-recognition of this impulse out of the Spirit working in the inner life of man, is the greatest hindrance to the attainment of an insight into the spiritual world. For to consider our own being as a mere part of the order of Nature is in reality to divert the soul's attention from our own being. Nor can we penetrate into the spiritual world unless we first take hold of the Spirit where it is immediately given to us, namely in clear and open-minded self-observation.

[ 32 ] 22. Self-observation is the first beginning in the observation of the Spirit. It can indeed be the right beginning, for if it is true, man cannot possibly stop short at it, but is bound to progress to the further spiritual content of the World. As the human body pines away when bereft of physical nourishment, so will the man who rightly observes himself feel that his Self is becoming stunted if he does not see working into it the forces from a creative spiritual World outside him.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 33 ] 23. Passing through the gate of death, man goes out into the spiritual world, in that he feels falling away from him all the impressions and contents of soul which he received during earthly life through the bodily senses and the brain. His consciousness then has before it in an all-embracing picture-tableau the whole content of life which, during his earthly wanderings, entered as pictureless thoughts into his memory, or which—remaining unnoticed by the earthly consciousness—nevertheless made a subconscious impression on his soul. After a very few days these pictures grow faint and fade away. When they have altogether vanished, he knows that he has laid aside his etheric body too; for in the etheric body he can recognise the bearer of these pictures.

[ 34 ] 24. Having laid aside the etheric body, man has the astral body and the Ego as the members of his being still remaining to him. The astral body, so long as it is with him, brings to his consciousness all that during earthly life was the unconscious content of the soul when at rest in sleep. This content includes the judgements instilled into the astral body by Spirit-beings of a higher World during the periods of sleep—judgements which remain concealed from earthly consciousness. Man now lives through his earthly life a second time, yet so, that the content of his soul is now the judgement of his thought and action from the standpoint of the Spirit-world. He lives it through in backward order: first the last night, then the last but one, and so on.

[ 35 ] 25. This judgement of his life, which man experiences in the astral body after passing through the gate of death, lasts as long as the sum-total of the times he spent during his earthly life in sleep.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 36 ] 26. Only when the astral body has been laid aside—when the judgement of his life is over—man enters the spiritual world. There he stands in like relation to Beings of purely spiritual character as on Earth to the beings and processes of the Nature-kingdoms. In spiritual experience, everything that was his outer world on Earth now becomes his inner world. He no longer merely perceives it, but experiences it in its spiritual being which was hid from him on Earth, as his own world.

[ 37 ] 27. In the Spirit-realm, man as he is on Earth becomes an outer world. We gaze upon him, even as on Earth we gaze upon the stars and clouds, the mountains and rivers. Nor is this ‘outer world’ any less rich in content than the glory of the Cosmos as it appears to us in earthly life.

[ 38 ] 28. The forces begotten by the human Spirit in the Spirit-realm work on in the fashioning of earthly Man, even as the deeds we accomplish in the Physical work on as a content of the soul in the life after death.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 39 ] 29. In the evolved Imaginative Knowledge there works what lives as soul and spirit in the inner life of man, fashioning the physical body in its life, and unfolding man's existence in the physical world on this bodily foundation. Over against the physical body, whose substances are renewed again and again in the process of metabolism, we here come to the inner nature of man, unfolding itself continuously from birth (or conception) until death. Over against the physical Space-body, we come to a Time-body.

[ 40 ] 30. In the Inspired Knowledge there lives, in picture-form, what man experiences in a spiritual environment in the time between death and a new birth. What Man is in his own Being and in relation to cosmic worlds—without the physical and etheric bodies by means of which he undergoes his earthly life—is here made visible.

[ 41 ] 31. In the Intuitive Knowledge there comes to consciousness the working-over of former earthly lives into the present. In the further course of evolution these former lives have been divested of their erstwhile connections with the physical world. They have become the purely spiritual kernel of man's being, and, as such, are working in his present life. In this way, they too are an object of Knowledge—of that Knowledge which results with the further unfolding of the Imaginative and Inspired.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 42 ] 32. In the head of man, the physical Organisation is a copy, an impress of the spiritual individuality. The physical and the etheric part of the head stand out as complete and self-contained pictures of the Spiritual; beside them, in independent soul-spiritual existence, there stand the astral and the Ego-part. Thus in the head of man we have to do with a development, side by side, of the physical and etheric, relatively independent on the one hand, and of the astral and Ego-organisation on the other.

[ 43 ] 33. In the limbs and metabolic part of man the four members of the human being are intimately bound up with one another. The Ego-organisation and astral body are not there beside the physical and etheric part. They are within them, vitalising them, working in their growth, their faculty of movement and so forth. Through this very fact, the limbs and metabolic part of man is like a germinating seed, striving for ever to unfold; striving continually to become a ‘head,’ and—during the earthly life of man—no less continually prevented.

[ 44 ] 34. The rhythmic Organisation stands in the midst. Here the Ego-organisation and astral body alternately unite with the physical and etheric part, and loose themselves again. The breathing and the circulation of the blood are the physical impress of this alternate union and loosening. The inbreathing process portrays the union; the out-breathing the loosening. The processes in the arterial blood represent the union; those in the venous blood the loosening.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 45 ] 35. We understand the physical nature of man only if we regard it as a picture of the soul and spirit. Taken by itself, the physical corporality of man is unintelligible. But it is a picture of the soul and spirit in different ways in its several members. The head is the most perfect and complete symbolic picture of the soul and spirit. All that pertains to the system of the metabolism and the limbs is like a picture that has not yet assumed its finished forms, but is still being worked upon. Lastly, in all that belongs to the rhythmic Organisation of man, the relation of the soul and spirit to the body is intermediate between these opposites.

[ 46 ] 36. If we contemplate the human head from this spiritual point of view, we shall find in it a help to the understanding of spiritual Imaginations. For in the forms of the head, Imaginative forms are as it were coagulated to the point of physical density.

[ 47 ] 37. Similarly, if we contemplate the rhythmic part of man's Organisation it will help us to understand Inspirations. The physical appearance of the rhythms of life bears even in the sense-perceptible picture the character of Inspiration. Lastly, in the system of the metabolism and the limbs—if we observe it in full action, in the exercise of its necessary or possible functions—we have a picture, supersensible yet sensible, of pure supersensible Intuitions.

The Michael period into which the world has entered ever since the last third of the 19th century, and into which human beings will have to enter with increasing consciousness, is very different from former periods of Michael. For in the earthly evolution of mankind different ones among the seven great Archangel Spirits enter from time to time into the life of man. Thus, after given periods of time a certain guidance of the world—such as the guidance of Gabriel or Uriel, Raphael or Michael,—is repeated. Our own period is, however, essentially different from the preceding period of Michael. This is due to the fact that man stands in quite another relation to the spiritual world since the first third of the 15th century than he ever did before. This new relation to the spiritual world also determines a peculiar relation to the Spirit guiding the destinies of mankind, whom we may call by the ancient name of Michael.

Recently I have been speaking to you again of the Rosicrucian movement. Rosicrucianism, I remarked, has indeed led to charlatanry in many quarters. Most of the so-called “Rosicrucianism” that has been transmitted to mankind is charlatanry. Nevertheless, as I have explained on former occasions, there did exist an individuality whom we may describe by the name of Christian Rosenkreutz. This individuality is, in a sense, the type and standard: he reveals the way in which an enlightened spirit—a man of spiritual knowledge—could enter into relation with the spiritual world at the dawn of the new phase of humanity.

To Christian Rosenkreutz it was vouchsafed to ask many questions, deeply significant riddles of existence, and in quite a new way when compared to the earlier experiences of mankind. You see, my dear friends, while Rosicrucianism was arising, directing the mind of man with “Faustian” striving—as it was afterwards described—towards the spiritual world, an abstract naturalistic Science was arising on the other hand. The bearers of this modern stream of spiritual life—men like Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus or Kepler, worthy as they are of fullest recognition—were quite differently situated from the Rosicrucians, who wanted to foster, not a merely formal or abstract, but a true knowledge of things. The Rosicrucians perceived in their own human life and being how utterly the time had changed, and with it the whole relation of the Gods to mankind.

We may describe it as follows. Quite distinctly until the 4th century A.D., and in a rudimentary way even until the 12th and 13th century, man was able to draw forth from himself real knowledge about the spiritual world. In doing the exercises which belonged to the old Mysteries, he could draw forth from himself the secrets of existence. For the humanity of olden times it really was so: the Initiates drew forth what they had to say to mankind, from the depths of their souls to the surface of their thought—their world of ideas. They had the consciousness that they were drawing forth their knowledge from the inner being of the human soul. The exercises they underwent were intended, as you know, to stir the human heart to its depths,—so to inform the human heart and mind with experiences which man does not undergo in the ordinary round of life. There-by the secrets of the world of the Gods were, so to speak, drawn forth from the depths, from the inner being of man.

Man, however, cannot see the secrets he draws out of himself while in the very act of doing so. True, in the old instinctive clairvoyance man did behold the secrets of the world; he saw them in Imagination; he heard and perceived them in Inspiration; he united himself with them in Intuition. These things, however, are impossible so long as man merely stands there alone,—just as little as it is possible for me to draw a triangle without a board. The triangle I draw on the board portrays to me what I bear in a purely spiritual way within me. The triangle as a whole,—all the laws of the triangle are in me; but I draw the triangle on the board, thereby bringing home to myself what is really there within me. So it is when we make external diagrams. But when it is a question of deriving real knowledge out of the being of man, after the manner of the ancient Mysteries, this knowledge too must, in a certain sense, be written somewhere. Every such knowledge, in effect, to be seen in the spirit, must be inscribed in that which has been called from time immemorial “the astral light,”—i.e., in the fine substantiality of the Akasha. Everything must be written there, and man must be able to develop this faculty of writing in the astral light.

This faculty has depended on many and varied things in the course of human evolution. Not to speak, for the moment, of pristine ages, I will leave on one side the first Post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient Indian. At that time it was somewhat different. Let me begin with the ancient Persian epoch, as described in my Outline of Occult Science. There was an instinctive clairvoyance, knowledge of the divine-spiritual world. This knowledge could be written in the astral light so that man himself could behold it, inasmuch as the earth, the solid earth, afforded resistance. The writing itself is done, needless to say, with the spiritual organs, but these organs also require a basis of resistance. The things that are thus seen in the spirit are not inscribed, of course, on the earth itself; they are written in the astral light. But the earth acts as a ground of resistance. In the old Persian epoch the seers could feel the resistance of the earth; and hence the perceptions they drew forth from their inner being grew into actual visions.

In the next, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, all the knowledge that the Initiates drew forth from their souls was able to be written in the astral light by virtue of the fluid element. You must conceive it rightly. The Initiate of the old Persian epoch looked to the solid earth. Wherever there were plants or stones, the astral light reflected back to him his inner vision. The Initiate of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch looked into the sea, into the river, or into the falling rain, the rising mist. When he looked into the river or the sea, he saw the lasting secrets. Those secrets, on the other hand, which relate to the transient—to the creation of the Gods in transient things—he beheld in the downpouring rain or the ascending mist. You must familiarise yourself with the idea. The ancients had not the prosaic, matter-of-fact way of seeing the mist and rain which is ours to-day. Rain and mist said very much to them—revealed to them the secrets of the Gods.

Then in the Graeco-Latin period, the visions were there like a Fata Morgana in the air. The Greek saw his Zeus, his gods, in the astral light; but he had the feeling that the astral light only reflected the gods to him under the proper conditions. Hence he assigned his gods to special places,—places where the air could offer the proper resistance to the inscriptions in the astral light. And so it remained until the 4th century A.D. Even among the first Fathers of the Christian Church, and notably the old Greek Fathers, there were many (as you may even prove from their writings) who saw this Fata Morgana of their own spiritual visions through the resistance of the air in the astral light. Thus they had clear knowledge of the fact that out of Man the Logos, the Divine Word, revealed Himself through Nature. But in the course of time this knowledge faded and grew feeble. Echoes of it still continued in a few specially gifted persons, even until the 12th or 13th century. But when the age of abstract knowledge came—when men were only dependent on the logical sequence of ideas and the results of sense-observation—then neither earth nor water nor air afforded resistance to the astral light, but only the element of the warmth-ether. It is unknown, of course, to those who are completely wrapped up in their abstract thoughts that these abstract thoughts are also written in the astral light. They are written there indeed; but in this process the element of the warmth-ether is the sole resistance.

The following is now the case. Remember once more that in the ancient Persian epoch men had the solid earth as a resistance so as to behold their entries in the astral light. What is thus contained in the astral light—all that, for which the solid earth is the resistance—rays on and out, but only as far as the sphere of the Moon. Farther it cannot go. Thence it rays back again. Thus it remains, so to speak, with the Earth. We behold the secrets reflected by virtue of the earth; they remain because of the pressure of the lunar sphere.

Now let us consider the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. The water on the Earth reflects. What is thus reflected goes as far as the Saturn-sphere, which presses once again. Thereby the possibility is given for man to remain with his visions on the Earth. And if we go on into the Graeco-Latin period—even into the 12th or 13th century—we find the visions inscribed in the astral light by virtue of the air. This time it goes to the very end of the cosmic sphere and thence returns. It is the most fleeting of all; yet still it is such that man remains united with his visions. The Initiates of all these epochs could say to themselves every time: Such spiritual vision as we have had—through earth or water or air—it is there. But when the most modern time arrived, only the element of the warmth-ether was left to offer resistance. And the element of the warmth-ether carries all that is written in it out into the cosmic realms, right out of space into the spiritual worlds. It is no longer there.

It is so indeed. Take the most pedantic of modern professors with his ideas. (He must at least have ideas. You would first have to make sure of it in the individual case; modern professors seldom have ideas!) But if he has ideas, then they are entered through the warmth-ether in the astral light. Now the warmth-ether is transient and fleeting; all things become merged and fused in it at once, and go out into cosmic distances.

Such a man as Christian Rosenkreutz knew that the Initiates of olden times had lived with their visions. They had confirmed what they beheld through knowing that it was there, reflected somewhere in the heavens—be it in the moon-sphere or in the planetary sphere, or at the end of the Universe—it was reflected. But now, nothing at all was reflected. For the immediate, wide-awake vision of man, nothing at all was reflected. Now men could find ideas about Nature; the Copernican cosmology could arise, all manner of ideas could be formed, but they were scattered in the warmth-ether, out into cosmic space.

So then it came about that Christian Rosenkreutz, by inspiration of a higher Spirit, found a way to perceive the reflected radiation after all, in spite of the fact that it was only a reflection by the warmth-ether. It was brought about as follows. Other conditions of consciousness—dim, subconscious and sleep-like—were called into play; conditions in which man is even normally outside his body. Then it became perceptible that that which is discovered with modern abstract ideas is after all inscribed, although not in space, but in the spiritual world. This, therefore, was the peculiar outcome for the Rosicrucian Movement: the Rosicrucians, as it were in a transition stage, made themselves acquainted with all that could be discovered about Nature in this epoch. They received it into themselves and assimilated it as only man can assimilate it. They enhanced into true Wisdom what for the others was only Science. Holding it in their souls, they tried to pass over into sleep in highest purity and after intimate meditations. Then the divine spiritual worlds—no longer the spatial end of the universe, but the divine spiritual worlds—brought back to them in a spiritually real language what had been conceived at first in abstract ideas.

In Rosicrucian schools not only was the Copernican cosmology taught, but in special states of consciousness its ideas came back in the form I explained here during the last few days. It was the Rosicrucians, above all, who realised that that which man receives in modern knowledge must first be carried forth, so to speak, and offered to the Gods, that the Gods may translate it into their language and give it back again to men.

The possibility has remained until this present. It is so indeed, my dear friends. If you are touched by the Rosicrucian principle as here intended, study the system of Haeckel, with all its materialism; study it, and at the same time permeate yourselves with the methods of cognition indicated in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, Take what you learn in Haeckel's Anthropogenesis: on the Ancestors of Man. In that form it may very likely repel you. Learn it nevertheless; learn all that can be learned about it by outer Natural Science, and carry it towards the Gods; then you will get what is related about evolution in my Occult Science.

Such is the connection between the feeble, shadowy knowledge which man can acquire here with his physical body, and that which the Gods can give him, if with the proper spirit he duly prepares himself by the learning of this knowledge. But man must first bring towards them what he can learn here on the Earth, for in truth the times have changed.

Moreover, another thing has happened. Let a man strive as he will to-day; he can no longer draw anything forth from himself as the old Initiates did. The soul no longer gives anything forth in the way it did for the old Initiates. It all becomes impure—filled with instincts, as is evident in the case of spiritualist mediums, and in other morbid or pathological conditions. All that arises merely from within, becomes impure. The time of such creation from within is past; it was past already in the 12th or 13th century. What happened can be expressed approximately as follows: The Initiates of the old Persian epoch wrote very much in the astral light with the help of the resistance of the earth. When the first Initiate of the old Persian epoch appeared, the whole of the astral light, destined for man, was like an unwritten slate. I shall speak later of the old Indian epoch. To-day I shall only go back to the ancient Persian epoch. All Nature: all the elements—solid, liquid, airy and warmth-like—were an unwritten slate.

Now the Initiates of the old Persian epoch wrote on this slate as much as could be written by virtue of the resistance of the earth. There, to begin with, the secrets destined to come to man from the Gods were written in the astral light. To a certain degree the tablet was inscribed; yet judged by another standard it was empty. So the Initiates of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch were able to continue the writing in their way; for they gained their visions by the resistance of the water. Another part of the tablet was inscribed.

Then came the Greek Initiates; they inscribed the third portion of the tablet. Now the tablet of Nature is fully inscribed; it was quite fully inscribed by the 13th or 14th century. Then human beings began to write in the warmth-ether; that, however, scatters and dissolves away in the vast expanse. For a time—until the 19th century—men wrote in the warmth-ether; they had no inkling that their experiences also stood written in the astral light. But now, my dear friends, the time has come when men must see that not out of themselves, in the old sense, can they find the secrets of the world, but only by so preparing themselves in heart and mind that they can read what is written on the tablet which is now full of writing. This we must prepare to do to-day. We must make ourselves ripe for this—no longer to draw forth from ourselves like the old Initiates, but to be able to read in the astral light all that is written there. If we do so, precisely what we gain from the warmth-ether will work as an inspiration. The Gods come to meet us, and bring to us in its reality what we have acquired by our own efforts here on Earth. And what we thus receive from the warmth-ether reacts in turn on all that stands written on the tablet by virtue of the air and water and earth.

Thus the Natural Science of to-day is actually the true basis for spiritual seership. Learn first by Natural Science to know the properties of air, water and earth. Attain the corresponding inner faculties. Then, as you gaze into the airy, into the watery, into the earthy element, the astral light will stream forth. It does not stream forth like a vague mist or cloud; but so that we can read in it the secrets of world-existence and of human life.

What, then, do we read? We—the humanity of to-day—read what we ourselves have written in it. For what does it mean to say that the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians wrote in the astral light? It was we ourselves who wrote it in our former lives on Earth.

You see, my dear friends: just as our inner memory of the common things that we experience in earthly life preserves them for us, so too the astral light preserves for us what we have written in it. It is the astral light which spreads around us, as a fully written tablet with respect to the secrets which we ourselves have inscribed. There we must read, if we wish to find the secrets once more. It is a kind of evolution-memory which must arise in mankind. A consciousness must gradually arise that there is such an evolution-memory, and that in relation to former epochs of culture the humanity of to-day must read in the astral light, just as we, at a later age, read in our own youth through ordinary memory. This must come into the consciousness of men. In this sense I have held the lectures this Christmas-time, so that you could see that the point is to draw forth from the astral light the secrets that we need to-day. The old initiation was directed mainly to the subjective life; the new initiation concentrates on the objective,—that is the great difference. For all that was subjective is written in the outer world. All that the Gods have secreted into man, . . . what they secreted in his sentient body, came out into the old Persian epoch; what they secreted in his sentient soul, came out in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch; what they secreted in his intellectual or mind-soul came out during the Grecian epoch. The spiritual soul which we are now to evolve is independent, brings forth nothing more out of itself; it stands over against what is already there. As human beings we must find our humanity again in the astral light.

That is the peculiarity of the Rosicrucian movement: in a time of transition it had to content itself with entering into certain dream-like conditions, and, as it were, dreaming the higher truth of that which Science discovers here—in a dry, matter-of-fact way—out of the Nature around us.

And this is the peculiarity since the beginning of the Michael epoch, since the end of the 1870's, the last third of the 19th century:—The same thing that was attained in the way above-described in the time of the old Rosicrucians, can now be attained in a conscious way. To-day, therefore, we can say: We no longer need that other condition which was half-conscious. What we need is a state of enhanced consciousness. Then, with the knowledge of Nature which we acquire, we can press into the higher world; and the Nature-knowledge we have acquired emerges and comes towards us from that higher world. We read again what has been written in the astral light; and as we do so, it emerges and comes to meet us in spiritual reality. We carry up into a spiritual world the knowledge of Nature here attained, or again, the creations of naturalistic art, or the religious sentiments working naturalistically in the soul. (Even religion has become naturalistic nowadays). And as we carry all this upward—if we develop the necessary faculties—we do indeed encounter Michael.

So we may say: the old Rosicrucian movement is characterised by the fact that its most illumined spirits had an intense longing to meet Michael; but they could only do so as in dream. Since the end of the last third of the nineteenth century, men can meet Michael in the spirit, in a fully conscious way.

Michael, however, is a peculiar being: Michael is a being who reveals nothing if we do not bring him something from our diligent spiritual work on Earth. Michael is a silent Spirit—silent and taciturn. The other ruling Archangels are talkative Spirits—in a spiritual sense, of course; but Michael is taciturn. He is a Spirit who speaks very little. At most he will give sparing indications, for what we learn from Michael is not really the word, but—if I may so express it—the look, the power, the direction of his gaze.

This is because Michael concerns himself most of all with that which men create out of the Spirit. He lives with the consequences of all that men have created. The other Spirits live more with the causes; Michael lives with the consequences. The other Spirits kindle in man the impulses for that which he shall do. Michael will be the true spiritual hero of Freedom; he lets men do, and he then takes what becomes of human deeds, receives it and carries it on and out into the cosmos, to continue in the cosmos what men themselves cannot yet do with it.

Other beings of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi give us the feeling that from them come the impulses to do this or that. In a greater or lesser degree, the impulses come from them. Michael is the Spirit from whom no impulses come, to begin with; for his characteristic period of rulership is that which is now coming, when things are to arise out of human freedom. But when man does things out of spiritual activity or inner freedom, consciously or unconsciously kindled by the reading of the astral light, then Michael carries the human earthly deed out into the cosmos; so that it becomes cosmic deed. Michael cares for the results; the other Spirits care more for the causes.

However, Michael is not only a silent, taciturn Spirit. Michael meets man with a very clear gesture of repulsion for many things in which the human being of to-day still lives on Earth. For example, all knowledge that arises in the life of men or animals or plants, tending to lay stress on the inherited characteristics—on all that is inherited in physical nature—is such that we feel Michael constantly repelling it, driving it away with deprecation. He means to show that such knowledge cannot help man at all for the Spiritual World. Only what man discovers in the human and animal and plant kingdoms independently of the purely hereditary nature, can be carried up before Michael. Then we receive, not the eloquent gesture of deprecation, but the look of approval which tells us that it is a thought righteously conceived in face of the cosmic guidance. For this is what we learn increasingly to strive for: as it were to meditate, so as to strike through to the astral light, to see the secrets of existence, and then to come before Michael and receive his approving look which tells us: That is just, that is right before the cosmic guidance.

So it is with Michael. He also sternly rejects all separating elements, such as the human languages. So long as we only clothe our knowledge in these languages, and do not carry it right up into the thoughts, we cannot come near Michael. Therefore, to-day in the spiritual world there is much significant battle. For on the one hand the Michael impulse has entered the evolution of humanity. The Michael impulse is there. But on the other hand, in the evolution of humanity there is much that will not receive this impulse of Michael but wants to reject it. Among the things that would fain reject the impulse of Michael to-day are the feelings of nationality. They flared up in the nineteenth century and became strong in the twentieth—stronger and stronger. By the principle of nationality many things have been ordered, or rather, disordered in the most recent times. For they have in fact been disordered.

All this is in terrible opposition to the Michael principle; all this contains Ahrimanic forces which strive against the in-pouring and throbbing of the Michael-force into the earthly life of man. So then we see this battle of the up-ward-attacking Ahrimanic spirits who would like to carry upward what comes through the inherited impulses of nationality—which Michael sternly rejects and repels.

Truly to-day there is the most vivid spiritual conflict in this direction. For this is the state of affairs over a great portion of mankind. Thoughts are not there at all; men only think in words, and to think in words is no way to Michael. We only come to Michael when we get through the words to real inner experiences of the spirit—when we do not hang on the words, but arrive at real inner experiences of the spirit.

This is the very essence, the secret of modern Initiation: to get beyond the words to a living experience of the spiritual. It is nothing contrary to a feeling for the beauty of language. Precisely when we no longer think in language, we begin to feel it; we begin to have it streaming in us and out from us as an element of feeling. That, however, is a thing to which the man of to-day must first aspire. Perhaps, to begin with, he cannot attain it in his actual speech, but through his writing. For in respect of writing, too, it must be said: To-day men do not have the writing but the writing has them. What does it mean, ‘the writing has them’? It means that in our wrist, in our hand, we have a certain train of writing. We write mechanically, out of the hand. This is a thing that fetters man. He only becomes unfettered when he writes as he paints or draws—when every letter beside the next becomes a thing that is painted or drawn ... Then there is no longer what is ordinarily called ‘a handwriting.’ Man draws the form of the letter. His relation to the letter is objective; he sees it before him—that is the essential thing.

For this reason, strange as it may sound, in certain Rosicrucian schools learning-to-write was prohibited until the fourteenth or fifteenth year of age; so that the form, the mechanism which comes to expression in writing, did not enter the human organism. Man only approached the form of the letter when his spiritual vision was developed. Then it was so arranged that simultaneously with his learning of the conventional letters, needed for human intercourse, he had to learn others—specifically Rosicrucian letters—which are regarded nowadays as a secret script. They were not intended as such; the idea was that for an A one should learn at the same time another sign: O. For then one did not hold fast to the one sign but got free of it. Then one felt the real A as something higher than the mere sign of A or O. Otherwise, the mere letter A would be identified with that which comes forth from the human being, soaring and hovering as the living sound of A.

With Rosicrucianism many things found their way into the people. For it was one of their fundamental principles: from the small circles in which they were united, the Rosicrucians went out into the world, as I have already told you, generally working as doctors. But at the same time, while they were doctors, they spread knowledge of many things in the wide circles into which they came. Moreover, with such knowledge, certain moods and feelings were spread. We find them everywhere, wherever the Rosicrucian stream has left its traces. Sometimes they even assume grotesque forms. For instance, out of such moods and feelings of soul, men came to regard the whole of this modern relationship to writing—and, a fortiori, to printing—a black art. For in truth, nothing hinders one more from reading in the astral light than ordinary writing. This artificial fixing hinders one very much from reading in the astral light. One must always first overcome this writing when one wants to read in the astral light.

At this point two things come together, one of which I mentioned a short while ago. In the production of spiritual knowledge man must always be present with full inner activity. I confessed that I have many note-books in which I write or put down the results I come to. I generally do not look at them again. Only, by calling into activity not only the head but the whole man, these perceptions which do indeed take hold of the entire man come forth. He who does so, gradually accustoms himself not to care so much for what he sees physically, what is already fixed; but to remain in the activity, in order not to spoil his faculty of seeing in the astral light. It is good to practise this reticence. As far as possible, when fixing things in ordinary writing, one should adhere not to the writing as such, but draw in the letters after one's pleasure (for then it is really as though you were painting, it is an art). Or again, one does not reflect upon what one writes down. Thereby one acquires the faculty not to spoil the impressions in the astral light.

If we are obliged to relate ourselves to writing in the modern way, we mar our spiritual progress. For this reason, in our Waldorf School educational method, great care is taken that the human being does not go so far in writing as in the ordinary educational methods of to-day. Care is taken to enable him to remain within the spiritual, for that is necessary.

Thus the world must come to receive the principle of Initiation as such, once more, among the principles of civilisation. Only in this way will it come about: man, here on the Earth, will gather in his soul something with which he can go before Michael, so as to meet with Michael's approving gaze, which says: “That is just before the Universe.” Then the will is strengthened and made firm, and the human being is incorporated in the spiritual progress of the Universe. Hence man himself becomes a co-operator in that which is about to be instilled into the evolution of mankind on Earth by Michael—beginning now in this present epoch of Michael.

Many, many things must be taken into account if man wishes rightly to cross that abyss of which I spoke yesterday, where in truth a Guardian is standing. We shall show in the next lectures how this abyss was opened out in the 1840's, and how, under the influence of such knowledge as I have set forth once more to-day, man, looking back to this abyss, can relate himself to this same Guardian.

I should still like to add something to what we have been studying, and afterwards to consider the more general theme to which certain of your questions relate.

I want to speak now of something that it is well to consider only after we have listened to what has been given here in the last few days. It is not well to give the general truths first but only to pass on to them when certain things have already been learned. Only so can general truths receive their proper coloring.

We will now picture to ourselves that each of the four members of man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego has its own special structure. The structure of physical body and etheric body is one of space and time. The structure of astral body and ego is purely spiritual. A purely spiritual structure is not governed by space and time. It is possible, nonetheless, to make a picture of the spiritual structure so that we can have a conception of it. This can be done in imaginative consciousness. Hold it firmly in your minds, my dear friends, that on the one side we have to do with a physical etheric structure which in the sleeping human being is separated from the structure of spirit and soul, and, on the other side, with the structure of spirit and soul.

In the sleeping human being we have a physical etheric structure which has sent out the ego and astral body, and again we have the structure of spirit and soul that is separated from physical body and etheric body. These two structures are very different from each other. The physical-etheric structure is differentiated into the single organs, as an organism that has, so to speak, driven out the single organs from the center of life. The astral body and ego structure have, however, been driven inwards from outside—it is as though space and time had been left free by this process. The essential thing is that the physical-etheric structure and the structure of spirit and soul are fundamentally different from one another. In the human being as he stands in the physical world in waking consciousness, the spirit and soul (astral body and ego) are inserted into the physical-etheric organization—to use a form of expression that is not absolutely accurate but enables us to visualize the state of things. To a certain degree they permeate each other. So that every physical organ that is warmed through and irradiated by the etheric body is also filled with life, inasmuch as the cosmos works through the etheric body, and in every physical organ ego organization and astral organization are working, when the human being is in waking consciousness.

And now think of the following: Suppose that astral organization and ego organization impress their own structure upon some organ or system of organs. In other words, something that ought to maintain its physical and etheric structure receives a spiritual structure, becomes an image of the astral and ego organization. This, speaking quite generally, is the cause of physical illnesses. Speaking generally, the cause of physical illnesses is that the body of the human being is becoming too spiritual, in some parts or as a whole. Hence, as was well-known in olden times, real and devoted study of the sick human being throws tremendous light upon knowledge of man as a being of spirit.

In ancient times quite a different idea prevailed of man's nature. Therefore I do not say the following in any sense for the purpose of suggesting that this conception should be re-adopted or made the basis for modern methods. In olden times, when conceptions of the human being were more robust, a man who held heretical views was burned, if such a fate was deemed necessary for the salvation of his soul. These heretics were burned for the salvation of their souls—so at least it was alleged. They were burned in order that they might be freed from what, after their death, would cause them the most terrible sufferings. This procedure was, in earlier times, the outcome of a form of vision; later on, of course, it assumed a really brutal form. Views about the human being were more robust and so it might happen that a certain preparation of melissa (balm mint) would be given to someone who might be regarded as healthy. When he took melissa that had been prepared in a certain way, his consciousness would become slightly dreamy. He became more dreamy than he was before taking the melissa preparation. In this condition, faint imaginations entered into his consciousness. If, for instance, a man was treated in a certain way with henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) he became very susceptible to inspirations. Such investigations revealed that if the solar plexus was stimulated by means of henbane, it was permeated with spirit; in such a case, astral body and ego organization take firm hold of the solar plexus. Or it was noticed that the whole blood supply of the cerebrum became stronger—to a slight extent, but the effect was very significant—by the administration of melissa juice, because the ego organization takes a firm hold by way of the cerebrum. And so the whole human being was tested for the purpose of finding out how he could become spiritual and of perceiving how the single organs could become more spiritual.

It is a preconceived notion to imagine that we think with the head. This is simply not true. We think with legs and with arms and the head beholds what is going on in the arms and legs and receives it into the pictures of thought. I said at Christmas that man would never have learned the law of angles if he had never walked. He would never have learned the mechanical laws of equilibrium if he had had no experience of them through his own center of gravity which lies in his subconsciousness. When we come to the astral body which unfolds these things in the subconsciousness, the human being appears to us to be extraordinarily wise, even if he is often a fool in the physical world, because the geometry that comes to expression in walking, for instance, is all known—if I may put it so—in the subconsciousness, and then perceived by the brain.

Now when the organization of spirit and soul takes too strong a hold of the physical-etheric organization, physical illness ensues. In former times, therefore, the spirit in the physical organs was investigated because everything that can be spoken of as a gift from above is spiritual, of the nature of spirit and soul. But a distinction has to be made here. What the human being received, in a purely spiritual way, as a gift from above, was called a gift and retained this name. But now take a substance like belladonna for example.

Whereas in ordinary plants the physical and etheric principles are at work, there are others where the cosmic astrality works very strongly from outside, where the spiritual element—either the astral or what corresponds in the cosmos to the ego organization—works upon plants or animals. Poisons are then produced instead of the gifts bestowed by the spirit. But the poisons are a true correlate of the spiritual because, in plants and animals, they are the element of cosmic astrality which transcends the plant nature proper. By administering henbane we lead over the astral contained in the warmth mantle of the earth (which marks the boundary of the atmosphere) into the solar plexus and thereby into the diaphragm of the human being. Melissa, which is not a poison in the real sense, produces a gentle working of the spiritual which shows itself only in a form of slight stupor. In melissa, the poisoning process is in statu nascendi. This leads to the principle: physical illness arises when the physical organism or its parts are becoming too strongly spiritual.

But a different condition may set in. It may happen that when a human being is in waking consciousness, the soul-spiritual structure of his astral body or ego organization is transferred with too much strength into some physical organ. But instead of impressing itself upon the physical organism the physical organism forces physical structure upon the structure of spirit and soul, so that when he is asleep the human being becomes, in his astral body and ego, an image of his physical and etheric body. He takes the physical structure into his astral body and ego.

Here we have the difference in the two forms of irregularities which may appear. Even to observation they differ quite essentially. When a human being is ill, the sick organ is, strange to say, spiritualized. It becomes clearer. As though from outside, from its surface inwards, it is laid hold of by spirituality. Long before any definite traces are noticeable in the color of the skin and the like, a sick man appears transparent—shall I say—to occult sight and the spirit and soul is pressing into the transparency.

We notice the opposite condition, where the organization of spirit and soul is taking on the structure of the physical and etheric, when a man in his life of soul and spirit is really asleep. Then he becomes a ghost, a fleeting, wavering ghost of his physical body. He remains like his physical body. He truly becomes a specter of his physical body, and all the crude experiments that are made by spiritualists in connection with manifestations, as they are called, are due to the fact that the spirit and soul in the medium is weakened. That is indeed obvious. In some hidden way, this is what happens. In a dark room the weakened astral body and ego can take on the forms of the organs to the point of visibility. The manifestations are real, but illicit.

Now all so-called mental diseases are due to the spirit and soul—astral body and ego organization—assuming the physical and etheric structure. All so-called mental illnesses are due to this. We may therefore say: Physical illnesses are due to the physical organism or its parts becoming spiritual. Mental illnesses are due to the astral body or ego organization, or one of their parts, taking form in the physical or etheric sense. This universal truth is a very good guiding principle.

These things have a bearing, too, upon questions put by individuals about the connection between medicine and pedagogy, for in the child's organism we have before us every grade between these two extremes. The astral and ego organization in one child will tend to make the physical and etheric body spiritual. In another child the tendency of the astral and ego organization will be to allow the physical and etheric to give them form. Between these two extremes there are all kinds of intermediate stages. This fundamental principle also comes to expression in the temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have a vehement tendency (not as in insanity but of a kind that is controllable) to assume forms belonging to the physical and etheric body, we have the melancholic temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have the tendency to impress their structure on the physical and etheric body, we have to do with the choleric temperament. The phlegmatic and sanguine temperaments lie in between. In the phlegmatic temperament the astral body and ego organization have a tendency, but only in a certain sense, to assume the structure of the physical and especially of the etheric body In the sanguine temperament, the vital principle in the etheric body is strongly influenced by the astral body. So this principle also comes to expression in the temperaments.

What, in radical cases, is the guiding principle for the physician, namely, knowledge of how the spirit and soul and physical-etheric are interlinked in the waking consciousness of a human being, is also a guiding principle for educators, although they have to deal with latent conditions. Pedagogy and medicine are mutual continuations, the one of the other.

Now what you have to do, my dear friends, is to strive with might and main to attain imagination in your conception of man's being. I should therefore like, in this connection, to give you a few fundamental indications.

The form of the human being in the embryonic state is familiar to you as a picture—or at any rate can become so. We know today what the embryo looks like in its earliest stages and the form it takes later on, and from this you can make a connected picture of the human being in the embryonic state. You can also form a connected picture of the human being during childhood. You must try to make both the first and second pictures as intense as possible, as though your thinking were actually touching them, so that it seems as if the embryo were tangible to your thinking and you were inwardly following its forms. Then, in your thoughts, expand the embryo to the size of the child in an equally intense mental picture which you can look at and observe. Then, inwardly metamorphosing the mental picture of the embryo, let it pass into the picture of the child. If you really carry this out, you will be aware of certain difficulties. You will feel: If I enlarge the head of the embryo to the size of a child's head, it becomes very big. I must compress it. I must also inwardly crystallize, as it were, all that in the embryo is still watery and fluid, being part of the fluid man so that it becomes the embryonic brain. Then you will have to stretch and give shape to the limbs in the embryonic state. Inwardly you will have to carry out an act of plastic activity by letting the unplastic limbs of the embryo pass over to become the limbs of the child. It is an extraordinarily interesting inner occupation to let the embryo pass over into childhood in inner contemplation.

Then, going further, you can make the same experiment with the child and the grown-up person. Here there will be greater difficulty. The differences between embryo and child are very considerable and you will have to be extremely active inwardly if you are to succeed. But when you compare childhood with the prime of life, the differences will not be so great. The difficulty will be to fit the one into the other. But if you succeed in this, the imagination of the human etheric body will actually come to birth within you, and comparatively soon.

Shove man's earliest time
[- the embryonic life -]
On into childhood,
And carry childhood on
Into the days of youth.
There will appear to you, condensed, Human ether being
Behind the body's structure.
[- physical body in its structure -]

Schiebe die Frühzeit
[ - Embryonalzeit -]
In des Kindes Alter,
Und des Kindes Alter In die Jugend Zeit.
Dir erscheint verdichtet Menschenäthersein
Hinter Körperwesen.
[ -physischer Leib in seiner Struktur-]

Here you have a guiding principle which you can use just as well as the others I have given during these lectures. But you must fully realize that the acquisition of imaginative consciousness demands effort. It is not to be attained by mere beckoning but only by strenuous work.

Now you can go still further. You can try to picture an old, sclerotic man—old men are, to a certain extent, sclerotic—feeling that you are touching him and in this act of spiritual touching you get the impression that he is really hollow. The impression you get when you touch an old, sclerotic man spiritually is not as if he were more solid, harder, but, on the contrary, as if he were sucking at you. In this spiritual touching the feeling is as if, in the physical world, you were to run a moistened finger along the foam of a breaking wave or along the surface of clay. This, as you know, gives the impression of suction. So it is, spiritually, with a sclerotic old man. You must develop this experience of touch in your visual picture of the old man. This applies not only to the visual act but to any one of the twelve senses, also to the sense of life (Lebenssinn). So you have a picture of age, with its density, which seems to exercise suction. And now just as in the first instance you let the picture of the embryonic period pass on into the picture of childhood and then into that of the prime of life, maturity—now let the picture of old age pass backwards. Picture the mature human being and let your touch experience of the aged man pass back into the picture of man in the prime of life, who does not seem to suck but stands in the world full of vigor. When you let the picture of the embryonic structure pass over into the structure of childhood, you carried out a spatial metamorphosis—what happens now is that with old age you have the impression of a being who has been hollowed out, who sucks all the time, and this hollow being seems to be filled with force and energy when you let the picture pass back into the age of maturity. Whereas the first picture of abounding strength is connected with an experience of being very slightly paralyzed, when the picture of the old man is let pass backwards, vigor seems again to come into his bones and into the whole structure of his solid organism. More care must be taken when this inner process is being carried out. And then the picture of the prime of life must be carried back to that of youth. This is an easier thing to do. We picture a man who already has one or two wrinkles and then let him be merged into the picture of a young, chubby-faced person. When we succeed in doing this, we get the impression of the etheric body being animated, beginning to ring and sound. This gives us an impression of the astral nature of the human being. And so you have a guiding principle for the ascent to inspiration.

Shove old age's density
Back into the prime of life,
And the prime of life
Back into the life of youth.
There will ring forth in cosmic tones The working of man's soul
[—astral body—]
Out of the Ether life.

Schiebe die Altersdichte In die Menschenreifezeit,
Und das reife Alter
In das Jugendleben.
Dir ertönt in Weltenklängen Menschenseelenwirken
[ - der Astralleib also -]
Aus dem Ätherleben.

You will realize from what I have told you that guiding lines for meditation are not given out as a commandment but are based upon things that can be understood. When a human being is guided to meditation in the proper way, conditions are not as they once were in the ancient East, when both the upbringing of children and the development of old age rested upon quite different foundations. When somebody is given meditations today, they are of such a form that he realizes and understands what he is doing with himself. In the East the child was under the guidance of his Dada. This meant that the child was taught and brought up according to the Dada's mode of life. The child learned no more than he was able to learn by watching the Dada. When a grown-up man wished to make progress, he had his Guru. And the Guru taught in no other way than: thus it is and thus it shall be done. The difference in our Western civilization is that an appeal is always made to the free spiritual activity of the human being, so that he is fully aware of what he is doing. He also has insight into how inspiration arises.

If with the powers of healthy human intelligence we have grasped how physical illness and spiritual illness work—and the things I have told you today can be understood by healthy human intelligence—if we go on to realize what we should achieve in meditation, we have reached, with the powers of healthy human intelligence, the boundary of what can be attained. Healthy human intelligence can acquire everything that proceeds from Anthroposophy. When things begin that are not to be understood by healthy human intelligence, then it is right for this intelligence to work only so far as that boundary, and no farther. It is like standing by an lake—a boundary is there, too. We look towards it from the shore. Truly, the healthy human intelligence leads right up to this boundary. No criticism ought to be leveled at you for spreading an obscure, mystical view of the world, for it should be one that is attainable by all healthy human intelligence. When I once said the same thing in Berlin, an article that was written about the lecture, said: Healthy human intelligence can comprehend nothing whatever about the spiritual world and a form of intelligence which does grasp something about the spiritual world is ill; it is not healthy. This was what was held up against me.

I want still to say something else. Your medical studies oblige you to look very intimately into the whole nature and being of man and as young men and women you are in a special position. In all seriousness we must take the fact that the Kali Yuga has passed, that we have entered a new Age of Light although for the reason that the old continues through inertia, humanity is still living in the darkness. From the spiritual universe, light is shining in; as human beings, we are entering an Age of Light; only we must make ourselves fit to realize the intentions of this Age of Light. Young people are especially predestined for this and if with the necessary earnestness they unfold a definite consciousness of why they have been born precisely at the beginning of the Age of Light, it will be possible for them to adjust themselves to what is really demanded in the sense of the true evolution of humanity. And what is demanded now is that we shall look into the human being if we want to explain the world, just as formerly men looked at nature in order to see how the human being is built up out of the forces and processes of nature. Man and his being will have to be understood and the single nature processes as specializations, one-sided processes of what is going on within the human being. When this point is reached a certain inward quality in all the activities of human feeling and the human mind will arise—a quality that has been sought for, although in a rather tumultuous fashion.

Think only of how youth began to deify nature when the Youth Movement of the Age of Light began. It was all abstract, however vitally the impulse may have been felt. The true path of spiritual development for the young man or woman today must lead to the unfolding of intimate feelings for his connection, as a human being, with the world—there must be intimate, tender feelings and what the young absorb spiritually must no longer be a science for the intellect. In that he remains cold—it has always been so. Science must take a form in which every stage that is reached means that one becomes a different human being in feeling and in mind, and acquainted with something that has been forgotten. We also learned to know nature before we came down into the physical world. But then, nature had a different appearance. When a young human being today is led to a coarse, robust, external way of looking at things, the deathblow is struck at what he experienced in pre-earthly existence. If we could succeed in feeling that an old acquaintance of pre-earthly life had entered into our external, material way of looking at things, then feeling would flow into knowledge and understanding. And like a bloodstream, a spiritual bloodstream, this must go through the whole of scientific life, above all through the whole education and teaching of the human being. It is this intimacy with reality that must be acquired in science. Truly the modern age was lacking in understanding in this respect.

Comparatively early in my life I tried to show how the human being, when he confronts the outer world of sense, really has only the half reality, and how he only reaches the whole reality when he unites what arises within him with the outer, material reality. And to begin with, because the times were quite different then—things have always to be prepared—I had to present it in terms of a theory of knowledge. When you read my little book Truth and Science (Mercury Press, 1993), try to let the spiritual rise up into the mind and heart, the spiritual that wells forth from within. Thereby the first step is taken towards this “making inward” of science, especially towards a heart-filled receptivity to world reality. The physician has particular opportunities for this intimate experiencing of reality and therefore the physician, just because he is a physician, can be the person who can make the abstractness prevalent in the other Youth Movement composed of those who are not destined to be physicians, more concrete, more full of heart. A young person today who has some real knowledge of medicine has the advantage when he comes together with someone else who knows nothing but jurisprudence and is, consequently, to be pitied. Medicine can be deepened as we are deepening it here, but with law this is quite impossible. Even up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, something of the spirit still remained in medicine; in jurisprudence spirituality ceased far away in the Middle Ages, when men no longer even dreamed of the spirit and had nothing but recorded statutes. The physician who from the very beginning comes to grips with the most concrete facts of life can have an extraordinarily good effect upon the rest of the youth.

It would be good if you, as physicians, would interest yourselves, too, when opportunity arises, in the educational work that is being done in the Anthroposophical movement. There would be nothing to prevent this if you are in real earnest. The information contained in the Waldorf School Seminary courses cannot be given to everyone, but when somebody shows genuine interest there is nothing against your getting these courses if you really study them from the medical point of view, remembering the close relationship that existed in ancient times between healing and education.

In these days we have quite got away from the conception of man as a being who comes into earthly life burdened with sin, because the modern mind simply does not know what sin really is. What is it that took form as the notion of sin? It is what I have spoken of here as the law of heredity—this is the inherited sin. Individual sin, too, is something that the human being has to overcome in the second half of his life. He has to overcome the sinful model, which comes from heredity. We can also say the sick model, according to ancient conceptions. If the human being were to retain, as his body, what works in his model up to the change of teeth, he would carry it within him his whole life long and at nine years of age he would be a man—how shall I put it?—the whole of his skin would be covered with a kind of moist eczema and if the condition continued he would get little cavities all over his body, would look like a leper, and if he lived on at all the flesh would fall away from his bones. Man is born as a sick being into the world and to educate him, that is to say, to understand and guide what is working according to the model, is the same thing as a mild healing process. Within the Youth Movement and when speaking of education, you should consider yourselves as healers. You can indicate the remedies—which in the first place, of course, remain a spiritual matter—but can certainly be applied physically when a child's condition becomes pathological. In pedagogy, too, there is an art of healing, only it is on another level, another plane. On the other hand, when a patient gives no help at all by working with any guiding principle we may give him for his own subjective consciousness, for the understanding of his illness, for pessimism or optimism in his conception of life—when we simply cannot work educationally—it is exceedingly difficult to help him medically. If the patient—I do not say that he must have blind faith in the remedy for that would be an exaggeration—but if the patient, simply through the individuality of the physician, is brought to a point where he feels the physician's will-to-heal, the reflex action in him is that he will be filled with the will to become healthy. This interplay of the will-to-heal and the will to be healthy plays a tremendous part in the therapeutic process. We can therefore say that there is a reflection of education in healing, and in education a reflection of healing.

Very much depends today upon human beings in the world coming together in the right consciousness. If, therefore, medical youth comes together with the other youth in the right consciousness, the result will certainly be that the medical youth can work very fruitfully on the others. But what is so necessary is to sharpen the consciousness in both directions.

These are the things that I would fain have laid into your souls and hearts, now that you have come here again. I hope they have helped to strengthen still more the bonds between your souls and the Goetheanum and that even in such a concrete domain as that of medicine, the Goetheanum will find human beings who carry out into the world those things that can be found here. You will think rightly about this if you will also feel yourselves as part of the Goetheanum and will often turn your thoughts to what the Goetheanum desires for the world and the growth of civilization. And so the ties of heart that you can form with the Goetheanum may be a very great help to you in the tasks before you. This is what I have had in mind in giving these more intimate addresses and I believe that we shall be able to achieve much if, after what must be the last lecture now, you will carry this feeling out into the world. Thereby we shall also remain together and the Goetheanum will feel itself a center with a definite task. Then the Goetheanum will be a real Goetheanum and you, true Goetheanists. And at the same time, out yonder in the world you will be the supporting pillars which the Goetheanum needs. If things go on in this way, everything will be well.

HERR ERBSMEHL remarked that in modern bee-keeping the bee-master is primarily concerned with making a profit: it is the material side that has to be considered. In the “Bienenzeitung” (No. 10) it says:—“Honey is for the most part a luxury, and those who can afford to buy it can well pay a good price for it.” An instance is then given of how a certain Balmesberger who was travelling in Spain, found a number of very healthy children in a bee-keeper's house, and how in answer to the question where he sold his honey, he replied: “Here are my customers.” Here in Middle Europe we want to get as much profit as possible from our honey. An employer of many workmen must see that he gets as much as possible out of them, and the same also applies to the bees.

In the eleventh number, the further question is asked as to whether there was any truth in the matter when people thought that moonlight had an influence on the production of honey or nectar in the flowers.

HERR MÜLLER replied:

1. That Herr Erbsmehl can gather from the Journal that the bee-keeper in question was only working on a small scale, and did not sell his honey. Erbsmehl is evidently not aware what bee-keeping is in our days, and all the things connected with it so that one is obliged to keep accounts. If one does not reckon on making a profit out of it, as with other matters, one might just as well give it up.

Honey would never be available in the necessary quantities if one did not have recourse to artificial methods. One gets perhaps 4–8 pounds of honey and may need rather more than this to keep the stock in good condition. Then a bad year comes and one has not enough to last till April or May. One must help the stock that has sufficient vitality by artificial feeding—with sugar, camomile tea, thyme and a small seasoning of salt.

Then the hours which the bee-keeper spends in working are noted down quite exactly in a modern apiary—how much time the bee-keeper has given to it and so on. Let us say five and a half hours;—(the hour is reckoned at the rate of one franc or one franc, fifty)—thus a pound of honey costs seven francs. Then one must reckon with wear and tear; the combs get used up, and one must replace them. The whole enterprise should surely make a profit. But if the bee-keeper remains at the old standpoint, he does not get along. Herr Erbsmehl may be able to do so, but if I have a large stock, then I must reckon up and say to myself—I have already made a loss if I sell my honey at six francs. The American bee-keepers take exactly this view.

2. I myself, cannot understand that within the next eighty to a hundred years the whole stock of bees will die out. I really cannot understand what Dr. Steiner means by saying that within eighty to a hundred years bee-keeping will be endangered.

3. As to the second point—i.e., what announcing the death of the bee-master to the bees has to do with the bee-master, I have already stated that the greater part of the stock dies after the death of the person in charge. How it came about, I am quite unable to understand.

4. With regard to impure honey in hotels I would like to say that first-class hotels frequently buy American honey. When bees are fed oil this honey, they die—and yet it is produced by bees.

5. As to stinging, sweat is the very worst thing; when you hear shrill buzzing sounds, it is advisable to stand still.

6. As to the question how far can a bee sting affect a man, I know of a case which I should like to mention. A strong man was stung by a bee. He cried out: “Hold me, I have been stung!” He was extremely sensitive to it. He was a man with slight heart trouble. Perhaps Dr. Steiner will tell us to what extent a bee-sting may be really dangerous.

For instance, it is said that three hornet stings will kill a horse. A little while ago I found a hornets' nest in my bee-house. I was taking away the brood. The hornets were such cowards they did not sting me in the dark; perhaps they might have done so out of doors.

DR. STEINER:

Let us go back to the recognition by the bees of their bee-master. I should like to add a few remarks that we may discuss these matters in a reasonable way.

You have formed an opinion that is naturally completely justified if you consider the thing intellectually. But now I should like to tell you this: imagine you have a friend, you came to know him, let us say, in the year 1915. This friend stays here in Europe and you go to America, returning in the year 1925. Your friend, let us suppose, is in Arlesheim. You come to Arlesheim, meet your friend and recognise him. But what has happened meanwhile? I have already described to you how the matter, the substance of the human body is completely changed after seven or eight years. There is then nothing at all left of it; so that your friend when you see hint again after ten years' interval, has nothing of the old, actually nothing, of the substance you saw in him ten years ago. Yet you recognised him! When you look at a man externally, he certainly looks like a coherent mass, but if you were to see him through a big enough magnifying glass, you would then see the blood flowing through his head. Very well, this blood when you see it with the naked eye, or with a small magnifying glass—this blood looks like blood. But if you imagine a gigantic magnifying glass then what flows there as blood no longer has the same appearance; then it seems to consist of little “dots” which are like minute animals. But these little dots do not remain at rest, they vibrate continually. And when you watch this going on it has the strangest likeness to a mass of bees. When sufficiently magnified in his substances, man appears exactly like a mass of bees.

If we thoroughly examine the whole matter it must seem just as incomprehensible that one man should be able to recognise another after ten years (for not a single one of these small vibrating dots is any longer there). His eyes are quite different dots, quite different minute creatures are there, and yet one man recognises another again

So you see, it is entirely unnecessary that it should be due to these minute creatures and plants of which we consist, that we are able to recognise one another, for it is the whole man, who again recognises us. The colony is not only just so and so many thousands of bees, the whole host of bees is a whole and complete unitary being that recognises a man or does not recognise him. If you had a diminishing glass instead of a magnifying glass you would be able to gather all these bees together; you could then visualise them as united in the same way as a human muscle. It is just this fact that one has to bear in mind with bees—that one is not dealing with single individual bees but must consider them as a whole, as belonging together as one whole.

With the intellect alone this cannot be grasped; one must be able to visualise it as a whole. It is for this reason that the bee colony is so profoundly instructive; it completely refutes all our usual ideas. Our ideas really always tell us that things ought to be different But the most marvellous things happen in the hive; not at all such as we think out with our reason.

That it should have a certain effect upon the bees when, for instance, through the death of the bee-master another has to take his place, is undeniable. Experience has shown it to be a fact. Those who have had to do with many apiaries, and not only with one, know this quite well.

I can tell you that bee-keeping in a variety of ways interested me extremely when I was a boy, though the economic side, the financial problem of bee-keeping did not interest me so much then as later, or today—because honey even in those days was very dear and my parents could not afford to buy any. We got all our honey from our neighbours as a gift, for Christmas or at other times, indeed we had so much given us that we had honey all the year round. Honey was given away in those days.

You see the economic problem was not of great interest to me because, as a boy I ate a terrible lot of honey, as much indeed as I wanted of the honey that was given us.

How could this be? Nowadays, under the same circumstances one could not get so much honey as a gift, but in those days the bee-keepers in the neighbourhood of my parents' home were mostly farmers, and honey was just a part of the general farm produce. This is quite a different matter, gentlemen, from starting bee-keeping as some of you do while living on the wages you earn. On a farm, bee-keeping goes on without one's paying much attention to it. The time it takes up is not considered, is not taken into account. On the farm this was always so, it was time that remained over. Time was saved somewhere or other, or a bit of work was put off till another time and so on. At all events the honey was looked after between-whiles, and one had the idea that honey is something so precious that one cannot really pay for it at all.

In a certain sense this is quite right, but at the present time conditions are such that all price levels are quite false. It is fundamentally impossible to discuss prices today, for the whole question ought to be discussed on a much wider basis, on the basis of economics. Nothing much results if one discusses the price of separate food substances, and honey is a food substance, not merely a luxury or a pleasure. In a healthy social order a healthy price for honey would naturally be found; this is undoubted.

But because we do not live under healthy social conditions at the present day, all our problems are placed in an unhealthy position. When you visit big farms today and hear what the farm-bailiff has to say (as a rule it is not a peasant, but a bailiff) when he tells you how much milk he gets from his cows, it is horrible! He gets so many gallons of milk a day that anyone knowing the nature of the cow realises it is quite unnatural to get so much milk from a cow. But they manage to get it! Quite certainly gentlemen, they manage to get it! Some of them in my opinion, get up to twice as large a quantity as the cow should really give. In this way the farm can obviously become exceedingly profitable. One cannot even say that it is as yet very noticeable, but the milk has not got the same force as milk produced under normal conditions; one cannot immediately prove the great harm that is being done.

Perhaps I might tell you the following. We have made experiments with a remedy for foot-and-mouth disease in cattle; we have made many such experiments during the last few years. They were carried out on large farms as well as on smaller ones where the milk production was not pushed so far as on the big farms. Much could be learnt in this way because one had to test how the remedy worked in foot-and-mouth disease.

The matter however, was not carried to a conclusion, for the officials in charge did not agree, and today so many concessions and so on, are necessary. But the remedy succeeded well, and with a slight alteration, it has also had very good results in distemper in dogs, under the name of “Distempo.”

When one makes these experiments one discovers the following:—

One finds that calves bred from cows that have been brought to an excessive production of milk, are considerably weaker. You see it in the way the remedy affects them. The working or nonworking of the remedy, so to speak, can be tremendously increased in such cases. The calf grows up if it does not die of the disease, but the calf bred from a cow that has been over-stimulated to this over-production of milk, a calf of such breeding is weaker than calves bred from cows that have never been so forced. This change can be observed through the first, second, third or fourth generations, but is then so slight that observation is not easy. This breeding for milk-production is still of short standing, but I know very well that if it continues, if a cow is forced to yield six gallons of milk a day, if you continue thus maltreating it, all breeding of cows will after a time go absolutely to ruin. There is nothing to be done.

Well, in artificial bee-keeping things are, naturally not fundamentally so bad, because the bee is a creature that can always help itself again, that is indeed, incredibly able to help itself because the bee lives so much nearer to Nature than the cow that is being bred in this fashion. It is not even quite so bad if cows so maltreated for milk-production are nevertheless at times taken out to pasture. But on the big dairy farms this is no longer done. These farms have nothing but stall-feeding; the cow is completely torn away from natural conditions.

You cannot afford to do this in bee-keeping. Thanks to its nature the bee remains united with external Nature; it helps itself again. And you see, gentlemen, this self-help in the bee-hive is something extremely wonderful.

We now come to what Herr Müller said about the bumblebees and hornets he sometimes finds in his bee-hives, which did not sting him, whereas it can be sometimes rather a disaster to meet a hornet.

I would like here to tell you something else. I do not know whether those of you who are bee-keepers have already experienced this; it may happen that you have an empty hive, and I once saw a strange thing in an empty hive, something like a lump. At first one could not make out what it was. The bees appeared, apparently for no good reason at all, to have made a lump out of all their usual products, out of all sorts of things. A lump just like a big stone and surrounded by all manner of resin and pitch, glue-like substances, wax and so on; such things as the bees also collect. I was curious to know what this was and I took the lump to pieces, and behold, there was a dead mouse inside

You see, the mouse had got into the hive and died there, and now imagine what a terrible thing the smell of a dead mouse would have been for the bees. In this emergency the whole colony had the instinct to surround the dead mouse with a shell. When one took this shell to pieces it smelt horribly, but the smell had remained quite shut up within the shell.

You see, gentlemen, within the hive was not only the instinct to build cells, to feed the brood, but, in an emergency, the instinct for something unusual, for what has to be done when a dead mouse is in the hive! Since the bees were not sufficient in number to carry the mouse away, they helped themselves; they made a shell all round it.

I have heard from others that snails or slugs which had crept inside hives were also thus encrusted. In the hive not only ordinary instincts are living, but true healing instincts; these are exceedingly active in the hive.

Well—if there is a hornets nest in the hive the bees do not enclose it with a hard shell, but continually surround the nest with excretions of their poison, so that the hornets lose all energy, all power to attack. Just as the mouse, the dead mouse in there can no longer send its smell in all directions, so the hornet, though not so firmly imprisoned, is continually exposed to the exhalations with which the bees surround it, and thereby gets so weakened that they can do nothing. The hornet loses all its strength, and can no longer use its sting to defend itself when you come near it.

It is really so, that one only does justice to the bees when one goes beyond mere intellect and actually follows up the facts with a certain inner vision. It is quite wonderful, this picture. One must therefore say, the bee-colony is a totality. It must be seen as a totality. But in a totality the harm does not appear all in a moment.

You see, if one knows men well, one can say for instance, the following:—A man—there are such men—is fairly fresh and strong at the age of 65 or 66; another man is not so fresh because he suffers inwardly from too much lime in his arteries, etc. To observe this, and to bring it into connection with what had occurred in his childhood, is extremely interesting.

For example, one can give a child milk that comes from cows who get too much fodder from a lime-stone soil. Even in the milk with which the child is nourished, the child gets some elements of this limey soil. This may not perhaps be at once evident. A doctor of the kind we have today, may come along and show you a child fed on milk derived from a limey soil, and another child fed with its mother's milk and he says, “It makes no difference at all,” and so on. But the child fed on its mother's milk is still fresh at the age of 65 or 66, and the child fed on the cow's milk has too much lime in the blood-vessels at the same age. This is so because man is a whole, and what works in one period of time still continues to be active at a much later period. A thing can be entirely healthy at one moment, and yet it works on later.

This is what I mean when I say that from the conditions. of bee-keeping today, you cannot draw conclusions as to what artificial methods of bee-keeping signify, or do not signify. One must think how will it be 50, 60 or 100 years hence! It is quite comprehensible that someone should say today—I do not understand how this will be quite different in 50, 60 or 100 years time—this is quite comprehensible.

It once happened to me on a farm, that all in good nature, I was nearly killed when I began to say that one ought not to get so much milk, for the breeding of cows would suffer even sooner, and would be ruined within a quarter of a century. One cannot as yet say very much against these artificial methods in bee-keeping today, because we are now living under conditions in which nothing can be done in the social domain.

But it must be recognised that there is a great difference in whether one allows Nature to take a free course, or whether one brings artificial methods into the matter. I do not want to protest against what Herr Müller has said. It is quite correct. Today one cannot as yet confirm these things; one must wait for this. We will discuss it together in a 100 years time, Herr Müller, and see what your opinion is then! It is a question that cannot be decided at the moment.

(HERR ERBSMHEL once more points out that modern bee-keeping is entirely a matter of making it profitable).

DR. STEINER:

The more you find that a man does his bee-keeping as a hobby, the more you will find him in agreement with the Spaniard whom you quoted just now. This farmer did not do much reckoning up as to profit; this is not generally the case today, but 50 or 60 years ago the farmer did not do much reckoning as to what he could make out of his bees; it was hardly taken into account. He either gave the honey away, or if he sold it, he put the money into the children's money boxes—or something similar. Today, the whole conditions are quite different. One cannot imagine that a man paid by the hour, or in any sense dependent on time for his payment, would not feel himself obliged to take profit-making into account. He is simply driven to it by circumstances. Today there are bee-keepers who as working men, must stay away from their work now and again, must take leave of absence if they want to carry on their bee-keeping in the right way—this is so is it not? (Certainly.) Then, quite naturally, they count up what they did not get—from other work.

Just think for a moment; bee-keeping is so ancient that no one can say today from any external evidence what bee-keeping really was when the bee was still undomesticated. For the most part people know only our bees, I mean the European honey-bees, and they know only domestic bee-keeping. Natural History books write mostly about the bee which is universally spread in Europe, as “the common. hive-bee.” Thus one only knows about domestic bee-keeping. This is well worth our attention, gentlemen, that one knows only domestic bee-keeping; one is not aware what it was all like when only Nature herself was at work. Bee-keeping is very ancient. And when things are so old as this prices must be fixed on quite a different basis from that on which we mostly work today. For this reason we really have to say that here also we must trust that little by little men will come to realise that better social conditions must be brought about. I believe there will then be less talk as to whether things are profitable or not. These competitive ideas, even if they do not imply competition among those engaged in the production of similar goods, have at any rate to do with those who produce different goods.

I will now answer any other questions connected with what has already been said.

QUESTION:

There are people who cannot digest honey at all. They immediately get stomach trouble. Is there any way of preventing these bad effects of eating honey?

DR. STEINER:

People who cannot take honey are, as a rule, those who in early life have had some tendency to sclerosis, to a hardening of the whole body, so that the whole digestive process is too slow. That is why they cannot digest honey which tends to accelerate the metabolic process. Because these persons digest too slowly, the honey wants to make It quicker, and so they quarrel with their own digestion, with the result that they have pains in the stomach.

Everybody ought really to be able to enjoy a little honey—that is, not only to “enjoy” it, but to have the inner capacity to do so. When one finds people unable to digest honey, one has first to look for the actual cause. You must not think there is a general remedy, an universal remedy, but one can make use of one remedy or another, dependent on the causes which have resulted in this hardened body. For example, the cause might be as follows: let us say, a man cannot take honey; he gets indigestion. One asks oneself: “Does this man get indigestion because, as we say, he has a tendency to a sclerosis of the head, as it is called, to a calcifying of the veins and arteries, the blood-vessels of the head?” It can happen, in this case, that at a certain age he is unable to digest honey. To cure such a man we must take a preparation of phosphorus, and if one can cure him he will then be able to take honey. Or it may also happen that one finds the trouble in the lungs. One must then not take phosphorus, but a preparation of sulphur. Thus the answer to the question is that one cannot say in general that a man has indigestion when he eats honey, how can we cure it? But one must say: If a man at a certain age is not able to eat honey, it is an illness. A healthy man can eat honey. If he cannot digest it he is ill, and one must find out what is wrong with him and cure it. Not to be able to digest honey is, however, less important than not to be able to take sugar, as, for instance, when a man has “diabetes mellitus,” or sugar-sickness. This, of course, is worse, then he is really ill, much more so than when he cannot digest honey. But even in this case he is somewhat ill and one must cure the illness.

QUESTION:

Like most other insects, in the dark, bees will fly towards candle or lamp-light. I have been frequently assured by experienced bee-keepers that bees are much less attracted by electric light. When one goes to them with a pocket electric torch they keep quite quiet, as though they did not notice the light at all. Only after some little time do they get restless Lamp or candle-light affects them much more quickly, and in greater numbers. Is there any explanation for this behaviour? Herr Müller says he has observed the same thing.

DR. STEINER:

You will probably have seen, gentlemen, in the old Goetheanum, that the cupolas were painted inside with different colours, colours made from pure vegetable substances. But this making of colours from various plant-substances finally proved that they would have completely faded away if the Sun had shone into the cupola. If one had exposed these colours for some little time, they might have lasted perhaps for some months, perhaps a few years, but exposed to direct sunlight they would have faded so much one would have seen nothing more of the paintings once there.

But exposed to the electric light, they remained. We therefore, used these colours in a way that a painter working in sunlight could not have done at all. In the sunlight they would have faded completely away, whereas in electric light they were permanent.

So you see, sunlight which has chemical properties (and you said bees were aware of this) has effects quite different to those of electric light. Electric light works on all substances in a much more hardening way, it does not dissolve them. That is why the bees feel something like a very slight cramp which they do not feel with sunlight, though of course, they recover again.

QUESTION:

With regard to the influences of the Signs of the Zodiac on honey production, the peasants lay great stress on sowing seed when the moon is in the sign of the Twins, and so on. The question is whether this idea as to the Signs of the Zodiac is founded on external data, or if there is more than this in it?

DR STEINER:

You see, gentlemen, today these things are never dealt with scientifically. But one can treat them scientifically. On the whole colony of bees, as such, there is as I told you, an influence. The bee, and above all the Queen is, in a certain sense, a Sun creature, and thus all that the Sun experiences in that it passes through the Zodiac, has the greater influence. But the bees naturally, depend on the plants, and here indeed, the sowing, the scattering of the seed, can he very much affected by the passage of the moon through a zodiacal sign; this concerns the preparatory substances the bees are able to find in the plants.

These things are by no means fanciful, but as a rule they are represented quite superficially; they should be much more deeply studied.

We have now come to the end of our time. What has to be said further we will discuss next Saturday at 9 o'clock. I think many of you have questions at heart. Bee-keeping is so beautiful and of such great value that one cannot ask enough about it. Ask questions of one another, of Herr Müller, and of me. I believe we shall find a balancing of our contradictory opinions. We need not get our stings ready like the bees but can peacefully discuss them all. But questions must be asked honestly and without reserve.