The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] The time that I consumed in the setting forth of Goethe's natural-scientific ideas for the introduction to Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur was very protracted. I began this task in the year 1880, and I had not finished even when I entered upon the second phase of my life with the removal from Vienna to Weimar. The reason for this lay in the difficulties I have described in connection with the natural scientific and the mystical form of expression.

[ 2 ] While I was labouring to reduce to correct forms of thought Goethe's attitude to the natural sciences, I had to advance also in the formulation of that which had taken shape before my mind as spiritual experience in my perception of the world process. I was thus constantly driven from Goethe to the representation of my own world-conception and back again to him, in order the better to interpret his thoughts by means of the thoughts to which I myself had attained. I felt that the most essential thing in Goethe was his refusal to be content with any sort of theoretically easily surveyed thought-pictures as contrasted with the knowledge of the illimitable richness of reality. Goethe becomes rationalistic when he wishes to describe the manifold forms of plants and animals. He struggles for ideas which manifest themselves as active in the evolution of the earth when he wishes to grasp the geologic building of the earth or the phenomena of meteorology. But his ideas are not abstract thoughts; they are images living in the form of thoughts within the mind.

When I grasped what he has set forth in such pictures in his natural-scientific works, I had before me something which satisfied me to the bottom of my soul. I looked upon a content of ideal images of which I could not but believe that this content – if followed further – represented a true reflection within the human spirit of that which happens in nature. It was clear to me that the form of thought in the natural sciences must be raised to this of Goethe's.

[ 3 ] But at the same time, in this grasping of Goethe's knowledge of nature, there came the need for representing the content of ideal images in relation to spiritual reality itself. The ideal images are not justifiable unless they refer to a spiritual reality lying at the foundation of the things of sense. But Goethe, in his holy awe before the immeasurable richness of reality, refrains from entering upon a presentation of the spiritual world after having brought the sense-world to the form of a spiritual image in his mind.

[ 4 ] I had now to show that Goethe really experienced the life of the soul in that he pressed forward from sense-nature to spirit-nature, but that anyone else can comprehend Goethe's soul-life only by going beyond him and carrying his own knowledge on to ideal conception of the spiritual world itself. [ 5 ] When Goethe spoke of nature, he was standing within the spiritual. He feared that he would become abstract if he proceeded further beyond this vital standing-within to a living in thoughts concerning this standing-within. He desired the experience of being within the spirit; but he did not desire to think himself within the spirit.

[ 6 ] I often felt that I should be false to Goethe's way of thinking if I only gave expression to thoughts concerning his world conception. And in regard to every detail which I had to interpret concerning Goethe I had again and again to master the method of speaking about Goethe in Goethe's own way. [ 7 ] My setting forth of Goethe's ideas consisted in the struggle, lasting for years, gradually to achieve a better understanding of him with the help of his own ideas. When I look back upon this endeavour I have to say to myself that I owe to this in large measure the evolution of my spiritual experience of knowledge. This evolution proceeded far more slowly than would have been the case if the Goethe task had not been set by destiny on the pathway of my life. I should then have followed my spiritual experiences and have set these forth as they came to light. I should have broken through into the spiritual world more quickly; but I should have had no inducement to sink down by actual striving into my own inner self.

[ 8 ] Thus by means of my Goethe task I experienced the difference between a state of soul in which the spiritual world manifests itself, so to speak, as an act of grace, and one in which step by step the soul first makes its own inner self like the spirit, in order that, when the soul experiences itself as true spirit, it may then stand within the spiritual of the world. But in this standing-within man first realizes that the human spirit and the spiritual world may come into union one with the other within the human soul.

[ 9 ] During the time that I was working at my interpretation of Goethe, I had Goethe always beside me as an admonisher who called inaudibly to me: “Whoever too rashly moves forward on the spiritual way may attain to a narrowly restricted experience of the spirit, but he enters into a content of reality impoverished of all the richness of life.”

[ 10 ] In my relation to the Goethe work I could observe clearly “how Karma works in human life.” Destiny is made of two forms of fact-complexes which grow into unity in human life. The one streams from the struggle of the soul outward; the other comes from the outer world into man. My own mental impulses moved toward the perception of the spiritual; the outer spiritual life of the world brought the Goethe work to me. I had to reduce to a harmony within my consciousness the two currents which there met. I occupied the last year of the first phase of my life in justifying myself alternately in the eyes of Goethe and then in my own eyes.

[ 11 ] The task I set myself in my doctor's dissertation was an inner experience: that of bringing about an “understanding of man's consciousness with itself.” For I saw that man can understand what the genuine reality in the outer world is only when he has perceived this genuine reality within himself.

[ 12 ] This bringing together of the genuine reality of the outer world and the genuine reality of the inner life of the soul must be achieved for the knowing consciousness through tireless spiritual activity; for the willing and the acting consciousness it is always present when man in action experiences his own freedom.

[ 13 ] That freedom exists as a matter of fact for the unprejudiced consciousness and yet becomes a riddle for the understanding is due to the fundamental fact that man does not possess his own true being, his genuine self-consciousness, as something given from the beginning, but must first achieve this through an understanding of his consciousness with itself.

That which makes man of the highest worth-freedom can be won only after appropriate preparation.

[ 14 ] My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is based upon an experience which consists in the understanding of human consciousness with itself. In willing, freedom is practised; in feeling, it is experienced; in thinking, it is known. Only, in order to attain this last, one must not lose the life out of thinking.

[ 15 ] While I was working at my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, it was my constant endeavour in the statement of my thoughts to keep my inner experience fully awake within the very thoughts. This gives to thoughts the mystical character of inner perception, but makes the perception like the perception of the outer physical world. If one forces oneself through to such an inner experience, then one no longer finds any contradiction between knowledge of nature and knowledge of spirit. It becomes clear to one that the second is only a metamorphosed continuation of the first. Since this appeared thus to me, I could later place on the title-page of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity the motto: Seelische Beobachtungsresultate nach naturwissenschaftliche Methode.¹ For, when the natural-scientific methods are truly followed in the spiritual sphere, then these lead one in knowledge into this sphere.

[ 16 ] There was great significance for me at that time in my thorough-going work upon Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, which forms the conclusion of his Entertainments of the German Wanderers. These “riddle tales” have had many interpreters. I was not at all interested in the “interpretation” of the content. I wished simply to take that in its poetic, artistic form. I always had an antipathy to shattering the dominant fantasy with intellectual interpretation.

[ 17 ] I saw that these poems of Goethe's had arisen out of his spiritual intercourse with Schiller. When Schiller wrote his Briefe fur Förderung der aesthetischen Erziehung des Menschen,² his mind was passing through the philosophical phase of its evolution. The “understanding of human consciousness with itself” was a mental task which occupied him most intensely. He saw the human mind on the one side wholly absorbed in intellectual activity. He felt that the mind dominant in the purely intellectual was not dependent upon the bodily and sensible. And yet he found in this form of supersensible activity something unsatisfying. The mind is “in the spirit” when it is given over to the “logical necessity” of the reason, but in this activity it is neither free nor inwardly spiritually alive. It is given over to an abstract shadow-image of the spirit, but is not weaving and ruling in the life and existence of the spirit. On the other side, Schiller observed that, in an opposite sort of activity, the mind is wholly given over to the bodily – the sense-perceptions and the instinctive impulses. Then the influence out of the spiritual shadow-images is lost from the mind, but it is given over to natural law, which does not constitute its being. [ 18 ] Schiller came to the conclusion that man is not “true man” in either of these activities. But he can produce through himself that which is not given to him by nature or by the rational shadows of the spiritual coming to existence without his effort. He can take his reason into his sense-activities; and he can elevate the sensible into a higher realm of consciousness so that it acts like the spiritual. Thus he attains to a mood midway between the logical and the natural compulsion.

Schiller sees man in such a mood when he is living in the artistic. The aesthetic conception of the world directs its look upon the sensible, but in such a way that it perceives therein the spirit. It lives in shadows of the spirit, but in its creating or its enjoying it gives to the spirit a sensible form so that it loses the shadow existence.

[ 19 ] Years before had this endeavour of Schiller's to reach a conception of the “true man” attracted my attention; now, when Goethe's “riddle fairy-tale” became itself a riddle to me, Schiller's endeavour occurred to me again. I saw how Goethe had taken hold of Schiller's conception of the “true man.” For him no less than for his friend this was a vital question: “How does the shadowy spiritual find in the mind the sensible-corporeal, and how does the natural in physical bodies work itself upward to the spiritual?”

[ 20 ] The correspondence between the two friends and all that can be learned otherwise about their spiritual relationship indicates that Schiller's solution was too abstract, too one-sidedly philosophical for Goethe. He created the charming picture of the stream which separates two worlds; of the will-o'-the-wisps who seek the way from one world to the other; of the snake which must sacrifice itself in order to form a bridge between the two worlds; of the beautiful lily who can only be surmised as wandering in the spirit on the “far side” of the stream by those who live on “this side,” and of much more. Over against Schiller's philosophical solution he places a poetic vision in fairy-tale form. He had the feeling that, if one attacked with philosophical conceptions the riddle of the soul which Schiller perceived, such a person impoverished himself while seeking for his true being. He desired to approach the riddle in all the wealth of the soul's experience.

[ 21 ] The Goethe fairy-tale images hark back to imaginations which had often been set forth before the time of Goethe by seekers for the spiritual experience of the soul. The three kings of fairy-lore are found in some resemblance in the Chymische Hochzeit³ by Christian Rosenkreutz. Other forms are revivals of those which had appeared earlier in pictures of the way of knowledge. Only in Goethe these pictures appear in a more beautiful, noble, artistic form of fantasy, whereas they had until his time borne a less artistic character.

[ 22 ] In these fairy-tales Goethe carried this fanciful creation near to the point at which it passes over into the inner process of the soul which is a knowing experience of the real world of spirit. I felt that one could see to the utmost depths of Goethe's nature when one sank down into this poetry.

[ 23 ] Not the interpretation, but the stimulus to the experience of the soul, was the important result that came to me from my work upon the fairy-tales. This stimulus later influenced my mental life even in the shaping of the mystery dramas which I afterward wrote. As to that part of my work which related directly to Goethe, I could gain but little from these fairy-tales. For it seemed to me that Goethe in their composition had grown beyond himself in his world-conception, as if impelled by a half-conscious life of the soul. In this way there came about for me a serious difficulty. I could set forth my interpretation of Goethe for Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur only in the style in which I had commenced this; but this in itself did not suffice me at all. For I said to myself that, while Goethe was writing the “fairy-tales,” he had, as it were, looked across the boundary and had seen into the spiritual world. But nevertheless what he wrote about natural processes gave no attention to this glimpse. Therefore he could not be interpreted on the basis of this insight.

[ 24 ] But even though I obtained nothing at once for my Goethe writings from sinking down into the fairy-tale, yet I gained much mental stimulus from it. What came to me as mental content in connection with the fairy-tale became most important material for meditation. I returned to this again and again. By this activity I prepared myself beforehand for the temper of mind into which I entered later during my Weimar work.

• 1. The Results of Spiritual Observation According to the Methods of Natural Science.
• 2. Letters on the Advancement of the Aesthetic Education of man.
• 3. Chemical Marriage.

We will try to understand the physical body somewhat more exactly. At the present time we distinguish within the constitution of man four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. In studying the physical body we must now enter into greater detail. Man was already something when he came into the Old Saturn existence from a far-distant past. The physical body is the oldest and most developed member at present possessed by man. It is fourfold, which is not the case with the other bodies. On Old Saturn the groundwork was already laid as a germ. The etheric body was first added on the Old Sun. There the physical body evolved a stage further. The astral body was added on the Old Moon and the physical body underwent a still further stage of development. On the Earth the ego was now added, and the physical body went through a fourth stage. So we may say that the physical body is, as it were, in the fourth grade, while the etheric body is in the third, the astral body in the second and the ego in the first.

This is why it is only the physical body as such that has self-awareness, not the other three bodies. In the moment when man closes his physical sense organs in sleep, awareness of self ceases: when he opens them to what is outside, self-awareness returns. Man gains consciousness of self because his organs enable him to observe his surroundings. Only the physical body is so far advanced that it is able to open its organs to what is outside. If the etheric and astral bodies were able with their organs to observe their surroundings, man would attain self-awareness in them also. But for this, organs are necessary. The physical body has self-awareness only through its organs. These organs of the physical body are the senses.

Let us consider the senses in their successive stages. There are in fact twelve senses.³⁴ Of these, five are already physical and two others will become physical during the further development of the Earth.

The five senses which we already have are smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing. In time man will develop two other senses into proper physical senses. These two are located in the pituitary gland (hypophysis) and the pineal gland (epiphysis). These will develop the two future senses in the physical body which will then have seven senses. To understand the successive stages of the senses we must make it clear that in so far as man is a being conscious of self, he is on a descending curve. So though the body is on an ascending curve, the senses are on a descending curve.³⁵

Of the higher principles in man, Atma developed on Old Saturn, Buddhi on Old Sun and Manas on Old Moon. There was a time when the Monad assembled itself bit by bit, and then in the Lemurian Age entered into its self-constructed house. Now the Monad has descended to the fourth stage, Atma, Buddhi, Manas, Kama-Manas. This descending curve is expressed in the development of the senses. Actually, in the beginning, on Old Saturn, only one sense was present, the sense of smell. The senses that developed later had to descend from higher to ever lower regions.

In Nature we differentiate the solid, the fluid, the gaseous, the warmth ether, light ether, chemical ether and the life ether. These are the seven stages of matter. In his descent man experienced these stages from above downwards. At the beginning of evolution the first human life-germ could only manifest itself in the Life Ether. What corresponds to this stage as sense, is the sense of smell. Then man possessed the first sense, that of smell, of which only an after effect is present today. The solid has its life, as we saw a few days ago on the Maha-para-nirvana plane, the fluid on the Para-nirvana plane, the gaseous on the Nirvana plane, the Warmth Ether on the Buddhi plane, the Light Ether on the Mental plane, the Chemical Ether on the astral plane, the Life Ether on the physical plane. We can therefore also speak of the atomistic ether.

An object can only be smelt when it impinges on the organ of smell, comes into contact with it. The organ of smell must unite itself with the material. To smell means to perceive with a sense that enters into a relationship with the material itself.

As second stage we have the Chemical Ether. Here the sense of taste develops. This depends on dissolving what is to be tasted. We have to do, not with matter itself, but with what is made out of it. This is a chemical, physical process through which matter is changed into something different. The tongue can do this: it can first dissolve and then taste.

The third stage is to be found in the Light Ether. There sight develops. Now we do not perceive what is broken down by chemical, physical processes, but we perceive a picture of the object which is brought about by the external light.

The fourth is the Warmth Ether. In this, the sense of touch is developed. Here one no longer perceives a picture. Warmth is a passing condition of the body, a condition experienced only in the moment. We are speaking here of the sense of touch as the perception of warmth and cold; it is in fact a ‘Warmth sense’.

Fifthly we have what is of the nature of air. This corresponds to the sense of hearing. Here we no longer perceive a condition of the body in question, but what the body says to us. Now we enter into the inner nature of the body. At the sound of a bell it is not the bell itself that interests us, not the outer form, the matter, but what it has to disclose of its inner nature. Hearing is a uniting with what reveals itself as the spiritual in matter. At this stage the life of the senses goes over from the passive to the active. The passively received sound becomes in man active in speech. Through speech man gives utterance to his soul being.

As the sixth stage we have the fluid element. The sense organ corresponding to the fluid is the pituitary gland. This is situated in the brain in an elongated cylindrical form.

As seventh stage we have the solid. The appropriate sense organ is the pineal gland.

As now, when man speaks he influences the air, so later he will gain an influence over what is fluid.³⁶ The ‘I think’, and thought in general, will express itself in the air and indeed in forms, for example as crystals. At the next stage feeling will also be involved with thinking. Development will work backwards. The warmth of the heart will then express itself in oscillations, and flow outwards together with thought. And the last stage will be achieved by man when he will create actual beings which remain; when through the word he will externalise what he wills. The expression of feeling is merely a transition. When man becomes creative through the will, then the beings which he brings forth will have actual existence.

In times to come man will bring forth into his surroundings what he feels. This will be imparted to the fluid element. The entire fluid element of the planet which will follow next (the future Jupiter) will be an expression of what people feel. Today man sends out words; they are inscribed into the Akasha. There they remain, even though the airwaves vanish. Out of these words the Future Jupiter will later be formed. When therefore today man uses evil, blasphemous language, then on Jupiter terrible formations will be brought about. This is why one should be so very careful of what one says, and why it is so immensely important that man should be master of his speech. In the future man will also send out his feelings; the conditions of the fluids on Jupiter will be a result of feelings on the Earth. What man speaks today will give Jupiter its form; what he feels will engender its inner warmth; what he wills determines the separate beings inhabiting Jupiter. The Future Jupiter will be constructed out of the basic powers of the human soul.

Just as today we can trace the rock formation of the Earth back to earlier conditions, so will the rock formation of the Future Jupiter be the result of our words. The ocean of Jupiter, the warmth of Jupiter, will arise out of the feelings of present-day humanity. The beings of Jupiter will arise out of human will. Thus the inhabitants of a previous planet create the basic conditions for its successor. And beings who today still [Gap in text ...] hover over the earth, as was once the case with the Monads, will enter into incarnation on the Future Jupiter. There will then exist a kind of Jupiter-Lemurian race. Beings will be there which we have created as the Pitris did. Just as we inhabited the grotesque forms of the Old Moon, so these beings will inhabit the forms which we develop by means of our pineal gland.

We are building the house for future Monads. A similar procedure took place when the development of the human being led over from the Old Moon to the Earth. This makes absolutely clear how everything external is actually created from within outwards.

It is difficult to distinguish the pure physical body from what has been formed through human error. A hunchback owes his deformity to the astral, to Karma. The external form, the physiognomy and so on, are dependent on Karma. Modifications of the physical body are therefore dependent on the higher bodies. When one eliminates everything that depends on Karma we find that the physical body is in fact wisely ordered. All forms of illness are errors which find their expression in the physical body. All illnesses have been wrong-doing in the past, all wrong-doing will be illness in the future. When human beings become truly worthy, the bodies of the beings they create will be equally imbued with wisdom.

All wisdom, feeling and will, in the next evolution, will actually be present as form and being. The physical body is called a temple in all ancient religions because its structure is so filled with wisdom. It is not correct to speak of the physical body as the lower nature, for what is lower in man does in fact lie in the higher bodies which today are still in infancy.

Here we can consider an important karmic connection. We live in a materialistic age and this is the result of a preceding age. This materialistic age has accomplished much, not only outwardly but also inwardly. We may think for instance of the decrease in mortality through hygienic measures. This is actually a step forward, brought about by hygienic means. Such external progress is always a karmic result of progress which earlier has been made inwardly. These steps forward in the physical are the result of inner steps forward in the Middle Ages. Today therefore it would be quite wrong to look back on the ‘dark’ Middle Ages. Our most significant materialists have been educated idealistically; for instance, Haeckel, Büchner, Moleschott. This is why their systems are thought out so admirably; but this they owe to their idealistic education. Present day materialism is actually the outer expression of the preceding idealistic period.

Now too we must work in preparation for the future. Just as the karmic result of the earlier idealistic period made its appearance in materialism, so again a new beginning must be made in regard to Idealism and spiritual impulses. It was in accordance with this law that the leading personalities acted when they called the Theosophical Movement into life.

The 14th century was the time of the creation of towns. Within a few hundred years independent towns had developed in all civilised European countries. The burgher is the founder of materialism in practical life. This comes to expression in the Lohengrin myth.³⁷ Lohengrin, the emissary of the Grail Lodge, was the wise leader who took hold in the Middle Ages and prepared the way for the establishment of towns. The swan was his symbol; the initiate of the Third Grade is the Swan. Consciousness is always represented as something feminine. Elsa of Brabant represents the consciousness of the materialistic civic sense. The spiritual life had, however, to be saved; this happened through the fact that Christian Rosenkreuz³⁸ founded the Rosicrucian Order. Spiritual life remained in the Mystery Schools. Today materialism has been driven to uttermost extremes. This is why in our time something new must break in. At that time the same movement took hold which today through Theosophy makes popular the elementary teachings of spiritual life in order to create once again a new inner impulse that will later be able to reveal itself outwardly. The inner always comes later to outer expression. An illness is the karmic result of earlier wrongdoing, for instance, lying. When something of this kind becomes outer reality, it manifests as illness. Epidemics can be traced far back to the misdeeds of a people. They are something imperfect which from being inward has been exteriorised. The sixth sense is the Kundalini light radiating warmth;³⁹ the seventh is the synthesizing sense.

• 34. See The Wisdom of man of the Soul and of the Spirit. The Twelve Senses and the Seven Life Processes (Golden Blade 1975).
• 35. Theosophy teaches that all development proceeds in cycles, first on a descending curve from spiritual to material and then back on an ascending curve from material to spiritual. In a lecture to the same audience in Berlin 17.10.1904 Rudolf Steiner says ‘Theosophical writings have described certain evolutionary developments as ascending and descending ... during the descent development is slowed down while during the ascent it becomes ever faster. This accelerated development does not apply to the whole physical plane but only to individual beings.’ In a lecture in Berlin 27.1.1908 there is a further clarification: ‘... so that when we are at a particular moment of our development we can always say: Yes, there are certain forces there that draw into man and pass out of him, forces that descend and forces that rise. For every such force there is always a moment when it changes from a descending to an ascending force. All forces that become ascending forces have been at first descending. They descend down to man, so to speak, and in man they achieve the strength to rise’.
  In this sense ‘when the body is on the ascending curve the senses are on the descending curve’ should be understood as meaning that the physical body in general is on the rising curve because it has passed the deepest point of its material densification, while the senses are on the descending curve since there are two senses which still have to develop as physical senses.
• 36. For further clarification of this passage see lecture 12.6.1907 Occult Seals and Pillars (typescript).
• 37. The Lohengrin figure first appears in Eschenbach's ‘Parzifal’ as a knight of the Grail and son of Parzifal. The saga was further developed in a poem in middle high German dating from the end of the 13th century. A simpler form is Conrad von Würzburg's Schwanenritter. See also Rudolf Steiner's lecture 29.3.1906 on Parzifal and Lohengrin (Typescript).
• 38. See: The Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz lecture 1912-13.
• 39. see lecture 18.10.1904 in History of the Middle Ages (Typescript)

One of the less well known poems written by Goethe is called The Secrets.¹⁵³ It has remained a fragment. Goethe speaks of a pilgrim, Brother Mark, whose peregrinations remind us of the destiny of Parsifal. Having travelled a long way he comes to an isolated house, a monastic kind of building. There he finds a federation, a gathering of twelve persons. He ultimately gets to know the nature, the character of the twelve and of a thirteenth who is their leader. Each of the twelve has something to do that is extraordinarily important. It is to give a kind of description of the life of the thirteenth. This thirteenth individual has worked his way through chaos and obstacles of all kinds. Goethe says of him:

Man needs to overcome and free himself
of the great power binding all creation,

meaning someone who develops the higher human being in himself.

This thirteenth individual, called Humanus, has grown completely beyond himself. The greatness, the influence of this wise individual, as we feel and intuit him to be, is even greater because, as we are immediately told, he is dying and before entering the higher worlds of the spirit has the ultimate, most beautiful and greatest gift to give to the twelve. And the ‘pure fool’ is to win through and take the place of the thirteenth. There is some kind of Good Friday magic about this fragment. And the whole should indeed have been presented in the Good Friday setting. Goethe himself explained the poem more or less by saying that there are many confessions in the world but we must see the same kernel of truth in all of them.¹⁵⁴ He suggested this in the poem by putting one of the twelve world religions before us that represents the common kernel of truth in the twelve. And the thirteenth is the representative of this original truth itself. The poem really outlines the theosophical view of the world. Using a poetic image, Goethe wanted to show how a synthesis of all religions can be brought about in peace. When Brother Mark comes to the monastery gate, a cross with roses wound around it shines out. Goethe knew the deep significance of this symbol, and also hinted at it in his verses:

Yet something new comes to his inner mind
When he beholds the image with his eyes:
The cross stands there, with roses closely wound.
Who put together roses and the cross?

These are words of truly esoteric meaning.

The question we are going to consider today is ‘How do we gain knowledge of the higher worlds in the Rosicrucian way?’ We are going to discuss some aspects of the Rosicrucian method. It is one of the ways of gaining insight into and access to the higher worlds. The term ‘Rosicrucian’ may sound strange and peculiar to some of you. One has heard of the Rosicrucians as a secret brotherhood which first appeared under that name in about the 14th century. Anything one finds in encyclopaedias and the current literature about them is of no account. A number of highly influential people have represented a quite specific spiritual stream as Rosicrucians. It is only too easy to flail into the most serious error when seeking to discover the greatest truths, as may be seen from many publications on the Rosicrucians. They were one of the closest secret brotherhoods and had to go through severe trials and tests. Anyone wishing to become a member of the order had to go through many things. The aspirant had to go through specific occult training to gain self-knowledge. Ignorance may, however, make the sublime appear in caricature. And that is also how Rosicrucianism was completely misunderstood and distorted to become caricature. What has been written about Rosicrucianism is utter charlatanism. Someone who is able to judge it rightly will see the kernel of truth in it. But it has always been difficult to find out about Rosicrucianism, as you can see from the fact that Helmont,¹⁵⁵ Leibniz¹⁵⁶ and others were unable to do so. Rosicrucian initiation is said go back to a book written in the early 17th century which says, among other things, that the Rosicrucians were involved in alchemy and also other things such as higher education. That's what is says in the Fama Fraternitatis.¹⁵⁷

Even there you'll find nothing about genuine Rosicrucianism, for the secrets of the Rosicrucians were passed on by the oral tradition. Things that are outwardly given the name ‘Rosicrucian’ are hardly suitable for getting at the essence of the Rosicrucians. Today we'll consider the methods used by the genuine Rosicrucians, in so far as this is possible on a public occasion. The theosophical movement initially started in the Oriental way. The truth can be found anywhere if one knows how to look for it and is sufficiently mature. People had a different way of thinking things at the time when the ancient Indians received the teaching of the holy Rishis, a different way of feeling and using their will, of seeing and perceiving. The things they did in those days can no longer be done today. The methods used in the past can no longer be used today. Nothing in the world is absolute; humanity is in a continuous process of evolution. People now have a very different, more subtle structure to their brains, and even the way the blood is formed is different. Because of this, all truth must be transformed today, and initiation methods must be such that they are suitable for present-day Europeans. These are the reasons why there had to be Rosicrucianism, a completely different way of initiation. The Rosicrucian stream is in the care of great teachers who have always stayed in the background.

Rosicrucian initiation is in seven stages. These provide a standard method that makes it possible for Europeans to go through the trials they have to go through. The stages do not necessarily have to be consecutive, for the teacher would choose what was best for the individual nature of the pupil. The seven stages are study, imagination, inspired insight or reading the occult script, preparing the philosopher's stone, correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, entering into the macrocosm in a living way, and the 7th or highest stage which is godliness.

Study meant developing concepts and ideas that made a person able to form a sound, comprehensive idea of essential relationships. For the Rosicrucians, study involved everything we have in theosophy today, having taken away the Oriental garb. Theosophy today offers Rosicrucian wisdom. We have also spoken about the elementary Rosicrucian teaching in public lectures.¹⁵⁸ The main point is to gain a sum of concepts relating to the world that form a complete whole, in a strictly established, firm set of ideas. A system of thinking is created that is entirely sensible. A Rosicrucian had to be a sober, thinking individual. These teachings are truths accessible to the simplest hearts as well as intellectual minds. What is the aim of such study? It leads to insight into higher worlds—the astral world and then the spiritual or devachanic world—that are invisibly all around us.

Man has the same number of abilities to perceive as there are worlds around him. To begin with, these abilities are of course undeveloped. For someone born blind, gaining sight is like a new birth. In the same way, the appearance of yet another world is always like a new birth for the human being. The astral world—we call it that for specific reasons—is around us, and so is the spiritual or devachanic world. It would be arrogance for someone who does not know the higher worlds to insist that they do no exist. The astral world and the devachanic world both differ tremendously from the physical world we are able to see around us. We gain completely new impressions in the astral and again in the devachanic world. Yet although our perceptions in these worlds differ greatly from those we have in the physical world, the logic is always the same. Thinking is the same in all three worlds; it only changes in worlds that lie beyond. Having learned to think in one of these three worlds, the laws of this are the same also in the higher ones. The problem is, however, that in the physical world human errors are corrected from experience. In those other worlds there is no such easy correction, and we therefore need a solid standard of objectivity. You will be completely unsupported if you enter those worlds without this objectivity. This is why a guru was needed for initiation in earlier times. The guru had to be the ultimate authority in the soul of an individual who was being initiated into Indian yoga wisdom. In Rosicrucian training, the guru-pupil relationship is replaced by the support gained from trained thinking. The pupil must be his own guide. Because of this, study is an important part of training. Fundamental truths of theosophy have been written in Truth and Knowledge and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for both the simplest hearts and people who aim higher. Reading those books it is necessary to be completely given up to inner work, letting one thought evolve from another.

The 2nd stage of the Rosicrucian path was imagination. A comprehensive method meant that one was then able to take the first step into the higher worlds. Experiencing imagination we perceive the deeper meaning of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’.¹⁵⁹

Looking at a plant we can experience in its form and essential nature how true it is that the spirit of the earth, as it were, reveals itself in it when it is sad and when it is cheerful. It is a great truth that man is part of the earth just as a finger is part of the human body. Man is only part of the whole but he has the illusion of living a separate life. The finger is protected from such illusion because it cannot walk about on the human body. If you feel yourself to be an integral part of the earth, you have a feeling not only for the poetry but for the truth of Goethe's words of the earth spirit.¹⁶⁰ When human beings enter into the things which the earth spirit produces on its surface, many a plant will be the earth spirit's tears for them, and many a plant its smile.

Something else was brought to the pupil's awareness by all possible means. He would be told: ‘Look at the calyx with its organs of fertilization, chastely held up to the sun. The sun ray kisses the inner calyx. The plant innocently holds out its organs of fertilization to cosmic space. Think of this transformed and taken to a higher level. Consider the animal first, and the human being, and see how the human being veils the principle which the plant holds out to the sun. And then say to yourself: “One day man must reach a higher level where anything base will have gone from his organs. At this higher level he will offer to the sun the principle which today is the calyx of the plant. All drives and instincts will then have been purified, the human individuality will have overcome its natural desires.”’ In Rosicrucian wisdom this transformation was called the grail, the sacred chalice.

When a person has lived for some time with such ideas, he will be ready to move on to even higher experiences. The physical eye only sees the seed of the plant. When the soul has been prepared, it will be able to penetrate to the image that arises for it from the seed grain. A flame form will arise from the seed for that soul. The individual thus learns to see the spiritual aspect that is behind things; he comes to know that everything physical has been born from a world of the spirit.

The 3rd stage is called reading the occult script in Rosicrucian training. The cosmic powers active in the world are revealed in certain currents and in colour and sound combinations. This occult script is written into the structure of the world. An example is the spiral we see as two intertwined vortices in the Orion nebula far out in the cosmos. At the microcosmic level, the incorporation of the human seed takes a corresponding form. The image of a double spiral is the sign of cancer in the zodiac. In occult script, it shows the transition from one stage of evolution to another. The sun's spring equinox was in fact in the sign of cancer when a new period of human evolution started in ancient India after the end of Atlantis.

Another sign in occult script is the triangle. This, too, is written into the macrocosm. At the microcosmic level the figure of the equilateral triangle with its centre marked is the symbol of balance restored between the three powers of soul. Harmonization of thinking, feeling and will gives rise to the higher power of love.

This 3rd stage, where conscious awareness of inspiration was gained, was followed by the development of rhythm in life and in breathing. In the language of the Rosicrucians this is called preparing the philosopher's stone. Later on it will be a stage in the evolution of humanity as a whole. Today people need oxygen to breathe. They exhale carbon dioxide, which is a poison. It is the other way round with plants, for they breathe in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. In the distant future man will consciously use the carbon which today is taken in with the food to build his physical body and no longer exhale it. The human body will then consist of an entirely different substance than it does today. It will be a soft, transparent form of carbon. Man's body will then have become the philosopher's stone. The symbol for this is the crystal clear diamond, which is also carbon.

The whole process was prepared for by bringing rhythm into our breathing and altogether into all vital processes. These are regulated from outside in plants and animals. But this no longer happens for modern man. He must create the rhythm for himself which nature gives to all its life forms. Strict adherence to such a rhythm was an important part of Rosicrucian training.

At the 5th stage of Rosicrucian training the pupil would have living experience of the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. Paracelsus said: ‘Everything that exists around us in space is related to us.’ The individual letters are in the world,¹⁶¹ and man is the word. Man has everything that exists out there in the world in him on a small scale, in its essence. To know yourself so that you might know the world, that was the task set for this stage.

At the next, the 6th stage, the pupil had to enter into the macrocosm in a living way. Here the human being had to leave himself behind, abandoning all that was his own. He then truly came to know the macrocosm.

The highest stage that could be reached by a Rosicrucian was that of godliness. Here the initiate grew to unite with the whole universe, he knew the summit of human evolution which humanity is to reach in the far distant future. The Rosicrucian pupils would make every endeavour to prepare for this evolution.

A lower, passive nature lives in man and also an active element. If he develops in the way I have described he will overcome his lower nature and be reborn through the spirit. This aspect of human evolution has been put into words by Goethe:

So long as you don't have it,
this word: ‘Die and become!’
you're but a miserable guest
here on this earth.

The symbol for ‘to die’ is the cross, the symbol for a new birth are the roses. The human physical body is the cross. Everything connected with powers of growth is the passive element in us. This means above all the milk. In the blood, on the other hand, the human being develops an active element as he seeks to attain to higher things. That is the secret of the white and the red rose. Our higher nature seeks to find the balance between the white and the red rose. In Goethe's poem The Secrets the thirteenth is the image of someone who has reached this exalted level. We may therefore take the words spoken by this thirteenth as a guide for all Rosicrucian endeavour:

All power pushes forward far and wide
To live and work both here and there;
the stream that is the world, however, hems us in,
builds obstacles all round and carries us away.
Caught in this inner storm and outer strife
the mind does hear a word that's hard to understand:
Man needs to overcome and free himself
of the great power binding all creation.

• 153. Steiner R. The Mysteries. A Christmas and Easter Poem by Goethe (in GA 98). Title should read The Secrets. Translator not known. London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1946.
• 154. Die Geheimnisse. Fragment von Goethe. Published (in German) in Morgenblatt für die gebildeten Stände 27 April 1816.
• 155. Helmont, Johann Baptist van (1577–1644), Flemish physician and chemist. His son Franciscus Mercurius Helmont, developed his natural philosophy and theosophical teachings further.
• 156. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716), German philosopher and mathematician. The source on which Rudolf Steiner based his statement has noi yet been established. See Arnold, Paul, Esoterik im Werke Shakespeares, Berlin n.d.: ‘Leibniz felt moved write that everything said about the Brothers of Rosenkreutz was pure invention on the part of some people with rich imaginations.’ It is known, however, that Leibniz was a member of a Rosicrucian group when he obtained his doctorate at Altdorf University in 1667. Baron Johann Christian von Boyneburg, former president of the Elector of Mainz's privy council, was also a member. It was at the suggestion of Boyneburg that Leibniz was called to serve the Elector of Mainz as a diplomat and legal adviser.
• 157. Anonymous work entitled Fama Fraternitatis oder Entdeckimg der Bruderschaft des Hochldblichen Ordens der R. C., Kassel 1614.
• 158. E.g. lecture of 14 March 1907, printed in German in GA 55: Die Erkenntnis des Übersinnlichen in unserer Zeit.
• 159. Faust 2, final chorus. Tr. Philip Wayne. London: Penguin 1959
• 160. Given in the next lecture.
• 161. ‘For of this will I bear witness for nature: wanting to study it you must tread your books underfoot. Written works are studied by studying its letters, but nature is studied land by land, a land as often as a page. Thus is the codex of nature, and one must turn its leaves.’ Source as in note 151, but vol. 11, Die vierte Defension, Seite 145 f. München 1924.

My address this evening represents a break in our current series; its subject is quite different from yesterday's.¹ This morning I received a letter, and I feel compelled, even obligated, to bring it to the attention of each individual member of the Anthroposophical Society. I will explain my reasons after I read you the letter.

Letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch to Rudolf Steiner

19 August 1915, Dornach

Dear Dr. Steiner:

Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors that serve evil purposes. On the good side, I am grateful for the esoteric knowledge and teachings you have imparted to us, for the mystery dramas you have given us, for the introduction of eurythmy, and for the art of the Johannesbau. In these contexts, I continue to recognize you as an envoy of the great white lodge and am filled with profound gratitude to you and to anything you do that is devoted to the good.

However, I perceive the way you cultivate relationships between yourself and other members of our spiritual movement as serving evil purposes, and I see this behavior as gravely endangering our movement. The relationships you create between yourself and other members turn the others into merely parts of yourself rather than independent spiritual entities alongside you. You only appear to act as a human being among equals. In actuality, you scorn any truly human connection and presume to intervene in the lives of others in a way that belongs only to the gods and not to any modern human being.

In this way, you create an anti-Christian relationship between yourself and the other members of our spiritual movement. These people have readied themselves to meet great spiritual teachings in our time, but you are making them poorer than the poorest materialists out there, who in spite of their distorted Christianity that has turned into its exact opposite are still able to develop a strong I. If it goes on like this, however, your followers will eventually fall prey to black magic as a result of the constant weakening of their I through how you behave toward them.

There have already been instances of highly respected members substituting a reliance on your word for reliance on the truth; they cut off any criticism of any part of your work, objecting that your critics would be placing themselves above you. They feel that putting oneself above you is such an act of wanton temerity as to be out of the question, and that with their objection the issue is resolved once and for all. The members are not to blame for erroneous ideas like this—you are. In your concern to promulgate ever more of your teachings, you have neglected to cultivate the attitude among your pupils that as Christians, individuals must put themselves not only below any other person, but also above any other; not only are the least of our fellow human beings of irreplaceable value to us in their most profound depths of being, but also the least of us carry responsibility for the most advanced and must oppose their errors. Your own teachings have strengthened me in this conviction. In real life, however, you apply a number of means that work counter to this Christian ideal of human community.

I will now discuss two of these means in detail so that the thrust of my contentions becomes clearer.

It is a fact that you have developed the habit of making promises and not keeping them. No one will maintain that you do not have a sufficiently clear view of the future, or that you are too weak to carry out your original intentions, either of which would constitute a certain justification for failing to keep promises. No, this is a case of deliberately causing disappointment. Since the promises were unsolicited and made at your own initiative, it is also a case of deliberate intervention into someone else's life in order do something that is by rights reserved for destiny. A disappointment that comes to us through karma has a direct and beneficial effect on our development. In contrast, a disappointment deliberately arranged for us by another person is at the very least a heavy blow, and if our confidence in the person delivering the blow is not shaken, it also constitutes a weakening of our I. The difference is the same as the difference between meeting an accidental death in a burning building and death by burning at the stake, premeditated by others.

Because of their trust in you, recipients of such a promise who are waiting for it to be kept get into a state of tension and uncertainty; meanwhile you are able to calmly survey their gradually increasing disappointment. Once the people in question have realized that the promise is not going to be kept, they will not take your word seriously in the future and thus will distance themselves from you, at least to some extent. However, since on the whole they continue to put their trust in you, they will lose all standards for the sanctity of giving one's word, and may perhaps begin to act as you do. As a result, they are dependent on you in a humanly unworthy fashion and will try to affect others in the same way you do.

Alternatively, people may respond in one of the three following ways: First, because of the confidence they have in you, they may assume that there must be a deep occult meaning behind the way you act. They will conclude that there can be profound occult reasons that permit or even obligate someone to make promises without intending to keep them. Occasionally we even meet people whose emotions are so confused that they admire that kind of behavior and take it as a sign of something superhuman. It is evident, however, that nothing in this world can authorize a modern human being to make promises without intending to keep them. Causing disappointment is something reserved for the gods who direct our karma.

This sort of conceptual confusion is all the more dangerous for a student of esotericism because modern spiritual science appeals to our healthy capacity for discernment, which is undermined by things like this. In a most unfortunate fashion, your word displaces the truth; the thought “I must not place myself above him” displaces the realization that you have done something evil. The human dignity of these people crumbles away bit by bit, and they turn into spiritually dependent tools in your hands.

The second possibility for those whose trust has been betrayed is that in order to be able to maintain their confidence in you, the people in question never let themselves become fully conscious of the fact that you never had any intention of keeping the promises you made to them. As a way out, they take your not keeping promises as a new revelation of a being they do not experience as really human and cannot hold responsible as they would a human being. This point of view is in fact already represented within the Society and is leading to your becoming ever more shadowlike as a human being.

The third and final possibility is that some people will choose the radical way out, forgetting the fact that a promise of some kind was ever made. This, too, robs people of a bit of their I. As a result, your coworkers in our spiritual movement will be shadows whose I is weakened, rather than independent individuals. You yourself, however, are the one to blame for all this.

A second example of the evil nature of your behavior is your refusal to accept any criticism of people working in our movement. On occasion, you have implied that any such criticism stems from negative emotions. This is a false assumption. I am not talking about malicious or destructive criticism. Many of our members, out of their sincere sense of responsibility, are capable of constructive criticism, and that is what I am talking about. The only possible reason for avoiding such criticism would be knowing that people in positions of responsibility are unfit for their jobs. In our modern age, people are meant to come together out of their own free will and freely create the kind of hierarchy and order necessary for us to accomplish what we have to do, and a certain amount of constructive mutual criticism is our only guarantee of success. In fact, the only way a true, natural, and appropriate hierarchical order can come about nowadays is if this kind of criticism is allowed to work.

If people who have been criticized do not choose to take action on justified accusations—and in fact they are morally obliged to actively seek criticism—they must give up their positions in the hierarchy so that the truth can triumph. Their superiors should not protect people like that by acting as if everything were going fine. This is what our modern age requires. However, if at any level in the hierarchical order mistakes are not criticized but tolerated and allowed to persist, we are only creating a false hierarchy that is based, not on real human capabilities and relationships, but on fiction—a fiction that is maintained only through further wrongdoing. Once again, the result is a lack of humanity and Christianity in our relationships in general, and once again you are to blame. In the organization of our Society as it has gradually developed under your guidance, the strengths of the members are usurped to the advantage of yourself and perhaps of certain other people prominent in this false hierarchy. Meanwhile, the Society's affairs are being mismanaged.

Personal oversensitivity on the part of those being criticized is something that needs to be eliminated; you might give a lecture about this sometime. As a general rule, especially if it comes at the right moment, criticism can take a stimulating and gratifying form and be free of any personal bitterness, so that its thorns are removed and the recipient can be glad to receive help in resolving the issue. The nervousness and animosity so prevalent among the critics spring in part from the justified feeling that even the most objective criticism will not be heeded, but will be looked at askance and disregarded. A truly superior person has no reason to fear criticism; true superiority can stand the test of even the most pointed criticism. In the event that people attempt to offer criticism out of a sense of responsibility but are not really able to grasp the facts of the case, those people can usually be made to see their misunderstanding sooner or later without any undue waste of time.

At the moment, I am not talking about a case like this one, where the criticism has already developed into a well-founded rejection of an entire self-contained system confronting me. In this case, no amount of postponement would make any difference. If in a specific instance, however, a person I myself recognize as superior—not simply someone who, for some unknown reason, is my superior in a false hierarchy—points out that I do not yet fully understand the case in question, I will gladly defer my criticism until the case can be considered closed. Under your influence, however, the principle at work in our spiritual movement is that any such criticism should be withheld indefinitely—until the facts of the case have been forgotten. And this principle applies not only to certain specific cases, but to all such instances. This is not only wrong and harmful to everyone, it also undermines our discernment, on which so much depends.

Once again, I have to point out the inherent contradiction between spiritual science's appeal to people's healthy power of judgment and the fact that in most instances in our movement, this power of judgment must be subordinated to incomprehensible reasons for measures being taken. You must admit, however, that at this point in time, two thousand years after Christ, people possess certain standards that all individuals can apply and must also allow to be applied to themselves, if they are not to be utterly lost. There are certainly a sufficient number of closed cases that really are subject to our judgment. The mere fact that a person feels compelled to think about a particular case usually suggests that he or she is capable of achieving some clarity in the matter, though not necessarily without help.

As things stand at the moment, our members are constantly expending a considerable portion of their spiritual energy on the useless task of seeking out hidden wisdom-filled motives for the evil behavior of yourself and your highest colleagues, while you stand by, calmly observing this waste of effort. Or, in order not to lose faith in you, these people have to decide to repress these truth-seeking forces in themselves and thus fall prey to partial stupefaction. What happens with these forces then? What a horrible thought to pursue! In any case, you represent a great focal point of forces of which individuals are merely the instruments, to be used as you choose for incomprehensible ends. There is no question in our movement of real interaction taking place between complete human beings, interaction in which each one is allowed to contribute his or her best. You are not a friend to all the members; your whole attitude rejects lively friendly relationships. In truth, for many people, you are the greatest enemy they have ever encountered.

All these things I have described are not only objectively evil, they also directly contradict the teachings you promulgate. It is from you that I learned the reasons that lead me to reject the way you act. As time goes on, you give an ever stronger impression of acting on your connection to the Christ impulse only in your lectures; outside the lectures, you embrace impulses that are quite the opposite. In parts, it already seems to me as if your teaching has been somewhat influenced by what you practice in real life—not the content of your teachings, but their formal structure. In their structure, certain sentences make promises that are then not kept and can only serve the purpose of subjecting the reader to fruitless thought and work. (See “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges.”)² If people try to explain this by saying that you, like any other human being, may have changed your mind over the course of time, you reject this as irksome criticism (Preface to Riddles of Philosophy, last paragraph).³ Both these passages, by the way, clearly show a change in style verging on the incomprehensible.

The kind of interpersonal attitude you create not only contradicts your teachings; your behavior also contradicts what you yourself demand of spiritual teachers in the modern age. Such teachers should appeal only to people's consciousness. Their self-chosen obligation toward their students is to never exercise any magical influence on the students' subconscious that the latter have not consented to or cannot control. You, however, are doing this incessantly through the behavior I described and through other occult means. For you, every handshake, every friendly conversation becomes a means of cultivating these false relationships. The bliss that fills the members after meeting with you is not the bliss of the communion of saints, but a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic one. You, not the members themselves, are to blame for this. You even try to use these handshakes and friendly conversations to pull members back into the fold against their will once they have recognized the falsity of the relationships you try to create. I have perceived with certainty that you exercise undue influence on your followers in this way.

In the modern age, when any uncontrollable influence on the subconscious of others must be avoided, it is not enough to simply give lectures or introduce new spirituality. In addition, the life you lead together with the other members of our movement must be governed by Christian impulses; your relationships with your followers must become like those of Benedictus, so beautifully portrayed in your fourth mystery drama. In fact, now that we have received so much in the way of teachings, developing such relationships is the much more urgent obligation.

When I ask myself how it can possibly be that you whose task it was to proclaim these teachings can act in ways directly counter to them, I can conceive of two possible answers. On the one hand, I can guess at the reasons why the great white lodge might have had to choose a person who is not yet completely Christianized for this task, and in your capacity as teacher I still accept you as the envoy of the lodge. On the other hand, it seems to me that your most profound motivation is by no means actively evil, although what I have had to say might be erroneously interpreted to imply that. No, it is simply a too one-sided interest in renewing these teachings in a way appropriate to our times, and above all a fear of real life. By avoiding and obstructing real life and by creating substitutes for it, however, you allow an evil force to develop. In this, I see the greatest danger to our spiritual movement and to yourself.

Fully Christian occultists can never rest content with simply passing on teachings; they must also enter into a life partnership with their students. True relationships from person to person in the Christian sense require each one of us to be an open book to all others to the extent their individual strength permits. All people should give themselves completely to their fellows to whatever extent the latter can receive them. This should be the basis of any modern hierarchy. Those higher up in the hierarchy must turn to those beneath them with whatever they have to give. What you practice, however, is anti-Christian and just the opposite. Whenever possible you arrange things so that intentions are kept in the dark and events are treated as if they had not happened. It is not enough to confess that like anyone else, you too can have a weak moment. Whenever we meet any other person (a person who in the Christian sense is just as necessary as ourselves), we do so as people who are imperfect in some way and still need to learn. This fact must not only be admitted, it must be constantly confirmed in our actions as human beings. It is truly necessary to seek out this interaction with our fellows, no matter how much an occultist of the old school may dread it. It is not enough to simply protest against blind admiration; we must also seek out objective criticism.

In communities of this sort, spiritual teachers must renounce all the help available to them in pre-Christian times for making students receptive to their teachings. Above all, they must renounce the unapproachable authority of the teacher filled with divine wisdom, who taught students in whom the I had not yet been born. They must also do without the complete isolation of teachers and pupils from all human relationships. The problem I am pointing out here did not exist for pre-Christian initiators. The individual I had not yet been born, and the divine being working through the teachers had the authority to intervene in the destiny of the students in ways otherwise reserved for karma. But as Christians, we must see modern initiates first and foremost as human beings, and our confidence in them depends on them not exercising any superhuman influence on our destiny.

For someone who is directing all his energies toward the renewal of occult teachings for our times, the temptation is great to reject the difficult tasks of Christian community and to artificially make his teaching easier by any of the means appropriate in earlier times. However, these things have become evil in our times, and it would be better nowadays for the teacher to remain invisible except when promulgating the doctrine than it would be for him to relate to his students as you are doing. Maintaining and strengthening the I of each student is much more important than passing on the teachings—after all, the teachings are directed to the individual I. Any restriction of the ego's rights must also result in the teachings taking root within the individual in the wrong way. Any dulling of individual discernment represents a grave danger to those striving for the spirit.

I will admit that in one sense, this kind of right living is infinitely more difficult for you than for others. Christian occultists must take up a challenge that other people will face only in times to come; that is, to both live and be a seer. They are in constant danger of falsely confusing these different planes and the laws that govern them. But they cannot escape this danger by refusing the challenge; for without being able to orient themselves according to the Christ impulse, they would still get these two planes mixed up in unjustified ways. When this happens in a meeting with a pupil, the pupil will be the first to experience the disastrous results, although they will soon revert to the teacher.

The community of the Grail is perhaps the only place where this challenge has been met satisfactorily to any extent. You yourself admit that you are not totally satisfied with what you have been able to tell us about the Grail, and you have clearly described your own difficulties in researching the Grail mysteries, although you call the new initiates “initiates of the Grail.” Perhaps the Grail will grant us salvation in this difficult hour.

Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time, as you were well aware. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being. I will refrain from explaining this statement in greater detail at this point because that would lead us too far afield.

It is still possible for me to greet you from a distance with all due respect as the bearer of great teachings, as I attempted to do on that evening. But I cannot submit to exchanging handshakes and friendly conversations with you as if nothing had happened, and especially not since I have clearly seen that these very handshakes and conversations are one of your chief means of exercising impermissible influences on your pupils and since I cannot share the opinion of a certain respected member that these things exist for the purpose of testing one's own strength in the face of outside influences.

To inform you of the need to avoid further personal contact is the purpose of this letter inasmuch as it concerns the two of us personally.

With regard to yourself, my purpose in writing to you about this very serious matter is to see accomplished the little I can do as your fellow human being, namely, to confront you with the fact that a person on the physical plane and using physical means has been able to point out to you the evil in your actions. You would be condemned to a shadowy existence if no one would turn to you like this. I hope that the fact that at least a few people nowadays are capable of recognizing your errors as such, remembering them and taking a stand against them, will be of help to you in the now necessary process of restructuring life in our spiritual movement. There are a few other members whom I can expect to understand the matters under discussion here, and I shall inform them of the contents of this letter.

It is imperative, however, that you begin to thoroughly transform the relationship between yourself and other members of the movement, as I have indicated. The objective purpose of my writing to you is to express this in the hopes that our movement will continue to work in accordance with the intentions of evolution. What would be the consequence if you were to reject this challenge? At least in certain instances, you have already forfeited an activity that must have been assigned to you by the masters of the white lodge—the personal instruction of individuals. For as I have already said, a profound mistrust in your treatment of individual human destinies is all too justified. I can also not imagine how an esoteric lesson could take place under the prevailing circumstances.

If you restricted yourself to disseminating ever more aspects of the teachings but let everything else continue as before, and if not enough members were able to work their way through to the necessary insights, the Society would degenerate into an exoteric association at best. There are already certain signs of this happening, alongside the tendencies to evil and to stupefaction. Either that or, if your followers become aware of their responsibility, they will have to bring about a complete separation between the teacher and what is taught, leaving you to discharge the duties of your holy office as a guilty and tormented Amfortas among hungry and sorrowful disciples.

I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell. But I have decided to send the letter anyway because the moment demands it.

When I wonder about the emotions with which you will receive this letter, the question of whether you will find your way to people with whom you can go through this experience and begin the necessary transformations weighs on me especially heavily. This is an area where, in this Christian age, the occultist as such is bound to fail and must be simply a human among humans, just as Christ Jesus had to experience things on Earth that he could not experience as a God. May you turn to this Spirit for help!

Heinrich Goesch
Gertrud Goesch

I have read you this letter, my friends, because it concerns each and every one of you just as much as it concerns me, and because it seems obvious to me that you must each decide for yourself to what extent you believe its claims correspond to actual practice within our Society. Otherwise people might think that I am afraid of this charge of contributing to the “stupefaction” of our members, and that I do not see you as sufficiently independent to leave it up to each one of you to judge the situation individually as you see fit.

However, you must realize that a letter like this cannot be seen in isolation; it is a symptom of what is going on in our Society. That is why I will take no part in discussing either this letter or anything that will need to be done as a result of it. It is clear that it must be left up to the members to decide what needs to be done and how to go about it, at least to begin with. In particular, I will refrain from saying anything about the passage claiming that promises have not been kept. If assessing this matter is left to individual discretion, each one of you will know how things stand, since each one of you must know what you have been promised and whether the promises were kept. However, I would expect and request the Society as such, or those members living in the neighborhood of the building in Dornach, to take a decided stand on this issue in the very near future.

I myself will not get involved in discussions on the matter at all. There are only a few things I want to tell you, and I ask you to take my remarks as what I have to say in connection with what I have just read, especially because it is obvious from other symptoms, not just from this letter, that many things I have said to members in lectures here in the course of the last few weeks and months have had no effect at all.

First of all, there is one thing I would like to emphasize. My friends, I cannot allow anyone to dictate how I conduct myself with members of the Society. It is up to me, and me alone, to decide how I find it necessary to relate to them. This is not to be taken as any kind of guideline for you; I am simply speaking for myself. I will not allow anyone to prescribe in any way how I should interact with members, inasmuch as this interaction has to do with the sins of omission I am supposed to have committed against them.

There is a very deep and weighty reason why this has to be the way it is. Not only this letter, but also many other things that have come up in the Society intermittently down through the years and with increasing frequency lately, show that many people simply do not make an effort to understand the kind of responsibility carried by someone communicating esoteric truths. It seems that many of our members don't want to try to understand what it sometimes takes to speak even a single sentence of that sort. With all the spiritual preparation it takes to give a lecture, it is simply not possible to sit with different little groups of members until two in the morning every night chatting about all kinds of useless and superfluous stuff. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated, nor are many other things that people seem to require of me and that then get counted as sins of omission. I need my time, and I need it in a totally different way than what people seem to want to understand. If I weren't using it the way I am, you would be hearing the same kind of stupid esoteric views from me that you can hear so much of in the rest of the world. So much for the sins of omission.

I also do not understand how the statement that my dealings with individual members and with groups of members are not Christian enough fits together with the complaint that I am exerting an undue influence over you by means of black magic whenever I take the liberty of shaking hands with one of you or involving you in conversation. I am certainly open to changing this practice if the Society will make its views on the subject known, because it is up to you, of course, whether you want to shake hands or get involved in a friendly conversation with me.

If this opinion becomes prevalent, it should be expressed, and then handshakes can, of course, be avoided in the future. For reasons I expressed earlier, I will not go into this any further, but there is still one thing I must mention because it is so very typical.

There is a passage in this letter that reads as follows: “Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being.” Let me just mention that on the Friday before Sunday the 25th, a member of our Society approached me with an inquiry from Mrs. Goesch with regard to her child, who had fallen down and gotten hurt somehow. I responded by saying that if she wished, I could take a look at what was wrong with the child. Shortly thereafter that person returned, bringing Mrs. Goesch and the child to me. On the following Sunday, here in the Schreinerei, I intervened in the inner being of Mrs. Goesch by shaking her hand and asking her how the child was doing.

My encounter with Mr. Goesch on the stairs leading up to the eurythmy room on Thursday, August 5, consisted of my responding to Mr. Goesch, who had asked me whether it was all right for the child (whom I had just seen standing down by the door) to take part in eurythmy exercises again, by saying that of course that was entirely up to the parents, since what the parents wanted was the only thing to consider in whether or not the child should come to eurythmy again. At that point, I also made the mistake of extending my hand to Mr. Goesch. These are the two instances in which I intervened in someone else's inner being by means of black magic.

Let me still comment on one more passage from the end of this letter: “I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe my insights—which I achieved through the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell.” I believe you all know who the so-called keeper of the seal is, and all I have to say about this is that the person in question has written a number of letters to both me and my wife in the past few months, including one Mrs. Steiner received only today.⁴ I will not discuss the matter of the “keeper of the seal” any further today; I just want to point out that her letters started coming around Christmas, mysteriously enough.

It may well be that I shall have to say something about this at some point, but I really do not want to do it today. I want you to come to a conclusion without being influenced by me. It is certainly almost impossible to be aware of the mysterious connection between this letter and the “keeper of the seal” and say nothing further about it, but today may not be the right time for that.

However, I do still want to mention that some years ago in fall I announced that due to certain embarrassing symptoms that had appeared within our Society, it seemed necessary to found a society of a more restricted sort.⁵ To begin with, I attempted to invest a number of long-term members close to me with certain offices, on the assumption that these people would become independently active in accordance with their new titles. At that time, I said that if anything came of it, the membership would hear about it by Epiphany. No one heard a thing, which means that the Society for Theosophical Art and Style does not exist. That is a perfectly justified assumption, since no one has heard anything to the contrary, and it is equally safe to assume that an announcement would have been made if my intentions had in fact been realized. The way my plans were received, however, made it impossible for this society to come about. It was simply an experiment.

My friends, I have often said that the Anthroposophical Society has to make sense as a society if it is to make sense at all. After all, other arrangements could be made for lecturing on esoteric teachings. I have also often pointed out that if certain signs and symptoms continue to appear in the Society, finding another form for it will become inevitable because the present form and present arrangements are not serving the purpose. I was trying to avoid certain things prevalent in the Theosophical Society when I founded the Anthroposophical Society, of which I do not want to be a member, since that is crucial to what I have to do for this spiritual movement.

Our Society also often comes under attack from outside, and of course these attacks are also directed at the Society's teacher and lecturer. This should lead our active members to take up the obligation to defend our cause, if they take the idea of our Society as seriously as they should. However, libelous pamphlets of the most despicable sort, containing the most unbelievable calumnies, have been appearing, and I leave it up to each one of you to judge whether everyone who could do something about them has taken the idea of the Society as seriously as would be necessary if the Society is to withstand these attacks from outside.

My friends, it is neither feasible nor possible for those who have an interest in the survival of the Anthroposophical Society to always first come to me to discuss what they ought to do in defense of me and our cause. That has to come to an end. If it does not, it would mean that it is actually true that people here are assigned their positions by me. I have to respect the independence of the members, even if that means, as it unfortunately does in many cases, that I have to deny them something. The fact of the matter is that the way things have been going, I could truly have done much more if I had not had to get involved in a lot of things that actually did not warrant my involvement. At least where the well-being of our Society is concerned, it is an absurdity to want to clear everything with me first. If what I want to do is to be accomplished on behalf of the Society, then please allow me the time to do it. The Society is wrongly conceived of if people are always turning to one individual; it must include taking personal initiative in what needs to be done on behalf of the Society.

For this reason, my friends, today's incident must be seen as an important and even crucial one. That is why I read you this letter, which is basically only an isolated symptom of something flaring up here, there, and everywhere. I will wait patiently to see what you, as members of the Society, will do about it. Meanwhile, I will continue to fulfill my obligations; the program will continue tomorrow as planned. But it goes without saying that how everything goes on after that will depend on the position the Society takes on what it has heard today. This is not something to be taken as an isolated case; it touches on many fundamental issues I have been pointing to for months in many discussions.⁶

When Rudolf Steiner had finished, a discussion took place; no stenographic record was kept. Some people must have spoken up in defense of the point of view expressed in Goesch's letter, because as one participant recollects, Rudolf Steiner left the room together with Marie Steiner, saying “I cannot have anything more to do with a society like this!” ⁷ The great majority of those present must have been ashamed of this state of affairs, and on that same evening they composed this expression of confidence:

Dornach
August 21, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner:

As members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wish to express our righteous indignation and our feeling of shame that someone of mendacious and immoral outlook, as evident in Mr. Heinrich Goesch's letter, has dared to address you in a fashion dictated by the most despicable delusions of grandeur.

We must painfully reproach ourselves for not having understood how to prevent what has happened and for having proved unable thus far to create a circle of people in which the thoughts and feelings expressed in this letter could not have arisen.

We ask your forgiveness as our loved and respected teacher. We also ask that you not retract your confidence in us, or rather, that you trust in us again, because we are firmly resolved to better realize the ideal of the Anthroposophical Society and to be more aware of our responsibility in future.

It is a matter of course that, given the point of view they represent, we no longer wish to consider Miss Alice Sprengel, Mr. Heinrich Goesch, and Mrs. Gertrud Goesch as having a place in our midst.

We ask you, dear Dr. Steiner, to take our signatures as an assurance of our unconditional and constant trust and our sincerest gratitude.

signed by Michael Bauer and over 300 others ⁸

This vote of confidence was a spontaneous and purely human expression of the signers' relationship to Rudolf Steiner. The facts of the case are addressed in Rudolf Steiner's own contributions. The professional comments of one Dr. Amann (Basel, September 14, 1915) shed some light on the difficulties the members faced in judging the situation:

Among the members, the prevailing opinion is still that Mr. Goesch is not mentally ill, he is only under a bad influence.

When someone has a fever or is drowsy, that is easy enough for anyone to diagnose. On the other hand, mental illness is extremely difficult for even an expert professional to diagnose except in extreme cases.

From people's comments, it is clear that they cannot understand that Mr. Goesch is mentally ill and that they have misconceptions about this type of illness. They believe the mentally ill are necessarily idiots who cannot write intelligently.

Idiots are feeble-minded; the sluggishness of their brain does not allow them to think at all. Unless some organic illness causes feeble-mindedness as a secondary condition, they are born retarded. Exactly the opposite is true of someone who is mentally ill; here, we are dealing with a melancholy frame of mind and clouded logic. This condition, in turn, must be distinguished from insanity—insane people are dangerous!

People who are mentally ill forfeit none of the quality of their intellect. Their intellectual capacity actually increases, because they are inexhaustible when it comes to intellectual work; in fact, they are intellectually active all day and all night. Their illness lies in the fact that they become obsessed and hypnotized with their own fixed trains of thought and are not susceptible to any criticism from outside. These people suffer in secret under the thoughts that plague them until they have carried them to term and can present them to the public. The urge to be visibly productive and important is constantly present in them.

Rudolf Steiner continued in the same vein on the following evening, August 22, 1915, discussing the case further.

• 1. Lecture of August 20, 1915, Dornach, entitled “Episodische Betrachtungen fiber Raum, Zeit, Bewegung” (“Some Observations on Space, Time, and Movement”), in Der Wert des Denkens far eine den Menschen befriedigende Weltanschauung. Das Verhältnis der Geisteswissenschaft zur Naturwissenschaft (“Thinking's Value for a Humanly Satisfying World View: The Relationship of Spiritual Science to Natural Science”), GA 164, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This lecture has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges” (“Thoughts during the Time of War”), essay of July 5, 1915, in Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage: Schriften und Aufsätze 1915–1921 (“On the Threefolding of the Social Organism and on the Current Situation: Essays and Articles 1915–1921”), GA 24, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1982). [Not available in English—Translator.]
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 4. See p. 115 in this volume.
• 5. Address in Berlin, December 15, 1911, in Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919 (“On the History and Contents of the First Class of the Esoteric School, 1904–1919”), GA 264, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This volume has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 6. Rudolf Steiner may well have been referring to his description of different types of clairvoyance, and especially the difference between “head clairvoyance” and “gut clairvoyance.” Cf. the lecture series Wege der Geistigen Erkenntniss und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (“Paths to Spiritual Knowledge and Renewal of Art Philosophy”), GA 161, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1980), and Kunst- und Lebensfragen im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft (“Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science”), GA 162, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1985). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator]
• 7. Hilde Boos-Hamburger in Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland (“News about the Anthroposophical Work in Germany”), Vol 17, no. 1, Easter 1963.
• 8. Michael Bauer, 1871–1929, leader of the Albrecht Diirer Branch in Nurnberg. He was a member of the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society from 1913 until his retirement for health reasons in 1921.

Notes by Camilla Wandrey

The reason why there is no ceremony at the meetings of our occult brotherhood in the days from December 24 to January 6, the day of the Epiphany of Christ, no ceremony takes place at the meetings of our occult brotherhood is because those whom we call the “wise masters of the East” withdraw to the sanctuary during this time to gather their strength, which they then give to both all of humanity and our occult brotherhood with renewed vigor. When we surround ourselves with all the symbols that we encounter in our occult temple, we must always remember that we are not dealing with imaginative things, but with something very real: we should feel within the walls of our temple that with these symbols surrounding us, the forces of the wise masters of the East are flowing to us. When we look up to those who have guided us, the whole of human development from the very beginning of the world, through the development of Saturn, Sun, Moon, to the development of the Earth, to our present time, we turn in prayer, seeking help for our present development to those whom we call “Brothers of the Past”. And so we pray:

Brothers of the Past...

As we look up to those who are currently guiding us spiritually, we pray:

Brothers of the Present...

And those who will be the guides of humanity in the future, we address as:

Brothers of the Future...

As we say our prayers, we look at the three lights that are lit before us. From the altar of the East, in the light that is lit there, wisdom shines for us; from the altar of the South, strength; and from the altar of the West, beauty. In all the mysteries, it was known that what we see in these lights is the basis of all human progress. But the one who spoke these three words as Master knew that they do not have their true meaning in the physical plane, that what we ignite in our souls here at our meetings is only a reflection that is brought to us from the spiritual world.

The wisdom that radiates back to us from the altar of the East in the kindled flame as a mirror image, we find in its true essence on the astral plane. It can only be found on the astral plane. In us human beings it is reflected as the truth of thinking.

If a person really makes an effort to penetrate to the wisdom of the world in their thinking – not in a pantheistic sense, but in such a way that they perceive the workings of the world spirit, which has created the smallest and the greatest in our physical world with wisdom, which reigns in a green flower petal and in all the great and majestic things surrounding us. Only in this highest sense may we speak of “wisdom.” What is called “wisdom” in science is not such; wiser is the one who looks out into the world and sees in every plant a wisdom-filled imprint of the creating God. This can be done by the most naive mind.

If we now bear in mind that we are always surrounded by this spirit of the world, then we also know that we stand before it as we truly are, not as we want to appear before the world, through dishonesty and untruthfulness. In the higher worlds, there is nothing that could hide our vices from us. There we stand completely abandoned by all that we would like to surround ourselves with here as deception. Lies, deception, dishonesty have no access to this world. There are no words for them there, since these qualities do not exist there. And if a person is really so bad that he brings no good qualities from his incarnation into the higher worlds, he would not even enter the lower Devachan, but would have to re-embody himself as soon as possible. Therefore, before he can ascend, man must discard his vices in Kamaloka, because only good is received in the higher worlds; there is no evil there. What man has worked out as good and true is received there; he takes up his bad qualities, desires, passions and faults again as his karma, which he must work off. The second flame is an image of the true beauty that dwells in the lower Devachan plan and radiates into people as true piety. The truly pious soul power looks up into the sky and looks at the stars as an expression of the divine spiritual beings weaving behind them, and the deepest piety penetrates through such a soul. And at sunset, it feels: Yes, now the sun is sinking, darkness is setting in – but in this darkness another sun can rise, shining brighter and more radiantly than the physical sun. The soul can rise, the midnight sun. So we must learn to think, to feel in every moment, that what radiates down from the spiritual world is felt here as true piety, and lives there in Devachan as beauty. But this is something different from what is called “beauty” on earth. This “true beauty” of the devachanic world is hidden from us as if by a veil. We do not see it until we have prepared ourselves through true devotion, through true purity, through absolute truth here on earth, to see it in its splendor up there in devachan. Everything we believe we see as “beauty” before we are worthy to enter this sphere of beauty, what we may see as angelic figures, as sublime images – that is all deception. This transforms into ugliness when we conquer deception. We only come to true beauty through true devotion.

It may happen that a person, through special circumstances between death and birth, has truly seen this beauty – even if he himself was not pure. Through this, he has received such strong powers that in a new incarnation he is able to weave a garment for himself that surrounds him with radiant beauty. But that is not the truth, that is a lie. He appears before the eyes of the world in this radiant beauty, but those who can see behind it know that it is the work of the devil. There are many such people now - outwardly beautiful people - but inwardly they are all the uglier, more evil, worse.

It could also be that a person who was quite developed in a previous incarnation then came into contact with black magic due to certain circumstances. Such a person is now very much exposed to all kinds of errors. He may believe that he sees wonderful angelic figures – from his memories of his earlier stage of development he weaves a magnificent garment of beauty for them – but in reality they are devilish entities.

The third flame, the flame of strength, has its shadow on earth as active virtue, as morality in the exercise of the will. This flame is at home in the higher Devachan. Only the person who develops these qualities can hope to penetrate into this higher Devachan. — The higher worlds reject everything that does not belong in them. All egoism, vanity, ambition, timidity, fearfulness cannot enter. Man must learn to see that these qualities are great stupidities.

A truly pious person always feels surrounded by the World Spirit, he feels secure in it – how can he be afraid? How can he harbor vanity or ambition in his soul?

Nevertheless, there is a great danger, especially for those who have already progressed, received certain occult truths and are allowed to pass them on. It is very easy for a feeling of personal veneration, even worship, to arise among his listeners. He must completely free himself of this, so that the qualities that had already been cast off do not reappear. He must keep as the deepest secret within himself what flows to him from the higher worlds. If he is completely free of the longing for adoration and so on, then recognition will flow down to him from the higher worlds as strength.

In all the mystery centers, the student would recite these words as his creed:

Wisdom, Beauty, Strength.

Notes B by Lonise Clason

First and Second Degree

The three flames that shine on the altars signify: wisdom, beauty, strength.

In all occult associations, the deep significance of these three principles has been known and it has been known that all progress is based on them.

1. When man on the physical plane endeavors to penetrate to the truth of thinking, he will notice that it flows to him as wisdom from the astral plane. The wisdom that is at home on the astral plane casts its shadow on the physical plane as the truth of thought. Therefore, we should be careful not to speak of wisdom in any other sense than in this highest sense, to apply it, for example, to material knowledge. On the other hand, a very simple, naive person can be “wise” who sees in a green flower petal the beneficent work of the deity.

2. The second flame symbolizes beauty: it is at home in the lower Devachan and finds its shadow image on the physical plane in true piety. But this is different from what is understood by beauty on earth. Those who want to get to know this beauty must be pure and true. Those who lie will not be allowed here, because lying would appear here as ugliness.

Now it could be that a person who was quite developed in a previous existence has now, due to some circumstances, come to black magic. Such a person is exposed to error: he can believe he sees wonderful angelic forms, from his memories he weaves a magnificent garment of beauty for them - but in truth they are hideous, devilish entities.

3. The third flame, strength, has its shadow image on earth in active virtue. It is at home in the higher Devachan plan. There is no virtue there, for the simple reason that there is no vice, no evil, because that is not allowed there. That is why a person must first go through Kamaloka after his death, cleanse himself of his desires and passions before he can enter Devachan; because only the good that he has worked for in life is accepted here. If he then progresses to a new existence, his desires and passions will reunite with him so that he can work them off as karma in a new existence. Now there is the possibility that someone is completely bad, that he brings nothing good from an existence. Such a person does not enter Devachan at all, but soon passes from the astral plane to a new existence.

How does a person attain the virtue that allows him to enter the Devachan plan? If he conquers his egotism above all, that is, his ambition, vanity, timidity, fearfulness. The truly pious person is always surrounded by the World Spirit and can never be timid. He will also soon realize that vanity and ambition are great foolishness on the higher planes.

Nevertheless, there is a certain difficulty for those who have already progressed a little, who receive certain occult truths and are allowed to share them with their fellow human beings. It is easy for the feeling of personal veneration and worship to arise among these listeners, and this can lead him to awaken these qualities, which he thought he had discarded, despite his higher level. He must completely free himself from this, and keep more and more of the revelations as his deepest secret. Then recognition from the higher worlds will descend upon him in the form of strength.

The three flames that shine on our altars signify: wisdom, beauty, strength.

All occult associations recognize them as the basis for all progress.

Firstly: When man on the physical plane strives to penetrate to the truth of thought, he will notice that it flows to him as wisdom from the astral plane. The wisdom that is at home in the astral plane casts its shadow into the physical world as the truth of thought. Therefore, we should be careful not to speak of wisdom in any other than this highest sense, not to apply it to material knowledge, for example. On the other hand, a naive person can be wise who sees the beneficent work of the deity in a green flower petal.

The second flame symbolizes beauty. This is at home in the lower devachan plan and finds its shadow image on the physical plane in true piety. But this is different from what is called beauty on earth. Those who want to see this beauty must be pure and true. (A liar would not be admitted here, because lying would appear here as ugliness.) Now it is possible that a person who was [relatively] developed in a previous existence might now, due to some circumstances, have come to black magic. Such a person is now very much exposed to error; he can believe that he sees wonderful angelic figures; from his memories he weaves a magnificent garment for them; but in truth they are hideous, devilish entities.

The third flame: Strength has its earthly reflection in active virtue. It is at home in the higher devachan plan. There is no vice there, simply because there is no evil there; that is not allowed there. That is why a person must first pass through Kamaloka after his death before he can enter devachan. For only the good that he has worked for in life is accepted here. When he then moves on to a new existence, his desires will reunite with him so that he can work off his karma in a new existence. Now there is the possibility that someone is completely bad, that he brings nothing good with him from an existence. Such a person does not enter Devachan at all, but passes from the astral plane to a new existence.

How does a person acquire this active virtue? Above all, he must conquer his egoism, that is, his ambition, vanity, timidity, fearfulness. A truly pious person always feels surrounded by the World Spirit and cannot be timid. He will also soon realize that vanity and ambition are great foolishness on the higher planes.

Nevertheless, there is a certain difficulty for those who have already progressed, received certain occult truths and are allowed to pass them on to their fellow human beings. It is very easy for the feeling of personal veneration, even worship, to arise among his listeners. He must completely free himself from this, always lock away in his innermost being as the deepest secret what flows to him from higher worlds. Then the recognition from the spiritual worlds will not fail to materialize, but will trickle down to him in the form of strength.

Many of us who constantly absorb spiritual truths without being able to pass them on have wondered whether this is not a spiritual enjoyment that draws his strength from other things instead of making it useful for his fellow human beings. This is not the case: those who can absorb so much spiritual truth within themselves do a great deal for all of humanity when they allow these realities to take effect on them with true devotion. There is an occult law: everything material is destroyed by enjoyment, everything spiritual is only born with enjoyment.

Just as the plant, when it has reached the fruit, must entrust its seed to the earth again in order to continue to live - so people must be there to receive the spiritual truths. And those who receive revelations from the higher worlds should examine themselves very carefully to see if they are allowed to pass on the truths they have received, and always regard it as karma and pay attention to whether karma calls them to do so. If you still enjoy sharing spiritual truths, then it is better to refrain from doing so. But if it is associated with pain, if your heart's blood is attached to it, then you may confidently do so; it will bring blessings. Even the books of external science are only of value if they are born out of suffering and pain. Those who have not gone through misery and suffering should not write books. They would do better to read a good book in the quiet of their room than to write a bad one. The spiritual truths gained are of more use than all the materialistic books of our time put together. Raphael's Madonna would have no lasting value if there were no people to contemplate her. It is only through being contemplated by the world around it that a work of art acquires eternal value. It is not the work of art itself that is immortal, but the lasting feelings and sensations of those who enjoy it.

The artist has fulfilled his main task and exhausted his enjoyment before he begins to create, that is, to depict externally. Then he was in contact with the spiritual world, and for the true artist it is a sacrifice to shape his ideas into a solid form - his heart's blood is attached to them. Therefore, if you want to learn something about Raphael and Michelangelo in the Akashic Records, it is wrong to go to them yourself. You have to observe the people who lived in his time, who were influenced by him. It is much more necessary for humanity if we absorb spiritual truths with true devotion than if, for example, we make a donation that often only brings about an apparent happiness. Because if you look closely, you will see how often unhappiness arises from it in the next generation. These material things pass away, while spiritual truths remain permanently. There is a hundredfold more to be enjoyed spiritually now that we live in such a materialized atmosphere of thought, but it is far from being balanced.

Record D by Alice Kinkel

We may always have the attitude:

The All-Spirit is with me and He knows what is going on with me.

Wisdom, beauty, strength

are actually only present in the spiritual world; down here, only their reflection is present.

Anyone who utters the words: wisdom, beauty, strength, should be mindful that they are expressing a creed:

The reflection of wisdom down here is truth, that of beauty down here is piety, that of strength down here is virtue.

Wise Master – who is that? “In everything, in every leaf, the deity comes to meet me.”

Lucifer has almost complete control over the blood and thus over the human being; however, he cannot reach the nerves, muscles or bones.

Certain questions will increasingly obtrude themselves upon those who really think, even though in these times of overwhelming materialism these thinkers would prefer to keep them more or leas at a distance. There are many such questions, and today I should like, out of all of them, to pick a few that arise from man, in spite of resisting it, becoming aware of the spiritual world. To such questions belong those, for instance, raised in the course of everyday life; certain men die young, others in old age, others again in middle life. Concerning the fact that on the one hand young children die and on the other hand people grow to old age and then die—concerning this fact questions arise in man to which by the means today called scientific the answer can never be found. Everyone has to own this after inner reflection. Yet in human life these are burning questions; and surely anyone can feel that infinitely much in life must receive enlightenment when we can really get down to these questions: why do some human beings die early, some as children, some as adolescents, some in the middle of the normal period of life? Why do other die old? What significance has this in the whole cosmos?

Men still had ideas, concepts, with which to answer these questions up to that point of time described in these lectures, the time at the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, up to approximately the middle of the eighth pre-Christian century. Men had concepts that came down out of ancient wisdom. In those olden times before the eighth pre-Christian century, ideas were in fact circulating everywhere in the cultural life of the earth giving men, in conformity with the mind of those times, the solution to such questions as are here mentioned. What today we call science cannot connect the right meaning with these questions and has no idea that there is something in them for which men should be seeking a possible answer. All this arises because since the point of time indicated, all conceptions related to spiritual and therefore to immortal man have actually been lost. Only these conceptions remain that are connected with man's transitory nature, man between his birth and his death. I have drawn attention to how in all the old world-conceptions they spoke of the Sun as being threefold; the same sun that is perceived out there by the physical senses as a shining sphere in cosmic space. But behind this sun the wise men of old saw the soul-sun, according to the Greeks Helios, and behind this soul-Sun again, the spiritual-Sun, still identified by Plato, for example, with the Good. Modern men do not see any real sense in speaking of Helios, the soul-Sun, or for that matter of the spiritual-Sun, the Good. But as the physical sun shines upon us here between birth and death, there shines into our ego, if I may say so, during the time we pass between death and a new birth, the spiritual sun identified by Plato with the Good. And during this time between death and a new birth, to speak of a shining sphere in the way it is spoken of in our modern materialistic world-conception has no meaning. Between death and a new birth there is only meaning when we speak of the spiritual-Sun Plato still referred to as the Good. A concept of this kind is just what should show us something. It should lead us to reflect how the matter really stands with regard to the physical representation we form of the world. It is not taken seriously in its full sense, at any rate not so seriously that our outlook on life is actually permeated by it, that in all our physical representations of the world, in what is spread out perceptibly before us, we have to see a kind of illusion, Maya.

It is indeed fundamentally this kind of representation of the Sun that anyone accepts when taking as his authority modern physics, astrophysics, whatever you like to call it. If he were able to travel to the place where the physicist places the sun, on approaching it he would—now let us turn from the conditions of human life and assume that absolute conditions of life could prevail—he would become aware of overpowering heat, this is how he would picture it. And when he had arrived inside the space that the physicist considers to be filled by the sun, he would find in this space red hot gas or something of the kind. This is what the physicist considers to be filled by the sun, he would find in this space red hot gas or something of the kind. This is what the physicist actually pictures—a ball of glowing gas or something like it. But it is not so, my dear friends, that is definitely maya, complete illusion. This representation cannot hold water in face of true physical perception that is possible, let alone what can actually be perceived spiritually. Were it possible to get near the sun, to reach where the sun is, we should find yes, indeed, an getting near, we should find something that would have the same effect as going through floods of light. But when we came right inside, where the physicist supposes the sun to be, we should find first what we could only call empty space. Where the physical sun is supposed to be there is nothing at all, absolutely nothing. I will draw it diagrammatically (blue centre in yellow circle, diagram not available) but in reality nothing is there; there is nothing, there is empty space. But it is a strange kind of empty space: When I say there is nothing there I am not speaking quite accurately—there is less than nothing there. It is not only empty space for there is less than nothing there. And that is something that is an extraordinarily difficult idea for the modern western man to picture. Even today men of the east take this as a matter of course; for them there is absolutely nothing strange or difficult to understand when they are told that less than nothing is there. The man of the west thinks to himself—especially when he is a hard and fast follower of Kant, and there are far more followers of Kant today than those who are consciously so—he thinks to himself that if there is nothing in space then it is just empty space! However this is not the case, there can also be exhausted space. And if indeed you were to look right through this corona of the sun, you would feel the empty space into which you would then enter most uncomfortable—that is to say it would tear you asunder. By that it would show its nature, that it is more—or it is less, however we can best express it, than empty space. You need only seek the help of the simplest mathematical concept and when I say empty space is less than just emptiness you will no longer find my meaning so puzzling. Now let us assume you possess some kind of property. It can also happen that you have given away what you possess and have nothing. But we can have less than nothing, we can have debts. Then we do actually have less than nothing. If we pass from fullness of space to its ever diminishing fullness, we can come to empty space; and we can still go an beyond mere emptiness just as we can go beyond having nothing to having debts. It is a great weakness of the modern world outlook that it does not know this particular kind of—if I may so express it—negative materiality, that it only knows emptiness or fullness and not what is less than emptiness. For because knowledge today, the world outlook today is ignorant of what is less than emptiness, this world outlook is more or less held in the bonds of materialism, strictly confined by materialism—I should like to say, under the ban of materialism. For in man also there is a place that is emptier than empty, not in the whole of him but where there are layers of what is emptier than empty. As a whole, man, physical man, is a being who materially fills a certain space; but there is a certain member of man's nature, of the three I have referred to, that actually has something in it like the sun, emptier than empty. That is—yet, my dear friends, you'll have to put up with it—it is the head. And it is just because man is so organised that his head can become empty and in certain parts more than empty, that this head has the power to make room for the spiritual. Now just picture the matter as it actually is.

Naturally we have to picture things diagrammatically, but use your imagination and picture that everything materially filling your head I am going to draw in the following way. This is the diagram of your head (see red in diagram 5). but now, if I want to draw it properly, I shall have to leave empty places in this head, these naturally are not very big; but there inside are empty places. And into these empty places can enter what I have recently been calling the young spirit. In these spaces the young spirit with its rays, as it were, is drawn (see yellow in diagram 5).

Now, my dear friends, the materialists say that the brain is the instrument of the soul-life, of the thinking. The reverse is the truth. The holes in the brain, what indeed is more than holes, or one could just say as well less than holes, what therefore is emptier than empty, that is the instrument of the soul-life. And here where the soul-life is not, into which the soul-life is continually pushing, where the space in our skull is filled with brain substance here nothing is thought, here is no soul-experience.

We do not need our physical brain for our life of soul; we need it only to lay hold of our soul-life, physically to lay hold of it. And if the soul-life were not actually alive in the holes of the brain, pushing up everywhere, it would vanish, it would never reach our consciousness. But it lives in the holes of our brain that are emptier than empty.

Thus we have gradually to correct our concepts. When we stand in front of a mirror we do not perceive ourselves but only our reflected image. We could forget ourselves ... We see ourselves in the mirror. In the same way man does not experience himself by putting together with his brain what is lying in the holes in that brain. He experiences the way in which his soul-life is everywhere reflected by pushing up against the brain substance. It is reflected everywhere, and man experiences it; what he experiences is actually its reflected image. All that has slipped into the holes, however, because it is then permeated by consciousness in the contrary sense is what makes man conscious when without the resistance of the brain he goes through the gate of death. Now I should like to draw another diagram. Take the following: forgive me if I am rather drastic in portraying the brain and how the holes are left (blue in diagram 6). Here is the brain substance and here the brain leaves its holes and into these holes goes the life of the soul. (yellow)

This soul-life, however, continues, just outside the holes. There come to what naturally is only seen near man but projects indefinitely—man's aura. Now let us think away the brain and imagine we are looking at the soul-life of an ordinary man between birth and death. We should then have to say that seen in this way the condition of the real man between birth and death is such that actually his face is turned to his body thus (see lilac). It is true I shall have to draw this diagram differently. He turns his soul-life to the corporeal. And when we look at the brain the soul-life stretches out like a feeler that creeps into the holes of the brain. What there I made yellow here I make lilac, because that is more appropriate for the view into the living man. Thus, that would be what runs into the brain of the living man.

If after this I want to draw, let us say, physical man, I could best indicate that by perhaps here drawing in for you the boundary set to the faculty of memory. You would go outside there and there you would have the outer boundary, the boundary of cognition, of which I have also spoken to you. For that you will just have to remember diagram 5 and diagram 3 drawn yesterday).

But now this is the reality—when man is looked at spiritually from without, his soul-life stretches into him thus... so I will draw the single elongation only where the brain is concerned (diagram 7). But this soul-life in itself is also differentiated. So to follow up this soul-life further I should have to draw... another region here (red under the lilac), here another region blue); thus all this would belong to what constitutes man's aura. Then another region (green). You see how this part I am now drawing lies beyond the boundary of man's cognition. Then the region (yellow)—in reality all this belongs to man—and this region (orange.)

When man is asleep this moves more or less out of the body, as it was drawn yesterday (diagram 2), but when man is awake it is more or lass within the body. So that actually, perceived with the soul, the aura is in the immediate vicinity of the body. And if the physical man is described this is done by saying that this physical man consists of lungs, heart, liver, gall and so on; This is done in physical anatomy, this is done in physiology. But you can do the same when describing the man of soul and spirit who in this way actually stretches out into the holes in man, in what is more than empty in man. You can describe this in the same way—only then you must mention of what this soul-and spirit man consists. just as in physical man the organs are differentiated, here the different currents must be separated. It can be said: in here where it is red, physical man would stand thus in profile, the face turned in this direction, for example, the eyes here (diagram 7), and here would be the region of burning desire (red). That would be part of the man of soul-and-spirit who has taken his substance from the region known in my book Theosophy as the region of burning desire. Thus something taken from burning desire and introduced into man gives this part of him.

If I am describing this in detail what I have here colored lilac I should have to call soul-life. As you know, a certain part of the soul-sphere, of the soul-land, has been given the name soul-life. This substance of it would have this violet color,this lilac, and forms in man a part of his soul-spiritual being.

And if we continue in this way the orange here would have to be called active soul-force. So that you have to remember that your soul-life is what during your life between birth and death enters you with most intensity by way of your senses. And behind, checking itself, not so well able to enter, held up by the soul-life, there is the active soul-force.

Still further behind there is what is called soul-light (yellow in diagram 8). To a certain extent attached to this soul-light, pressing itself through, there would be what is taken from the region of liking and disliking which I should have to give to the green area. Wishes, we should ascribe to the sphere of what is approximately blue. And now pushing up here, the real blue, that is approaching blue red, this would be the region of mobile susceptibility. These are auric currents that I here call burning desire, mobile susceptibility, and wishes. As you know, these auric currents, these auric streams, constitute the world of soul, they also constitute the man of soul and spirit who may be said to be built out
of the ingredients of this soul world.

Then when death comes the physical body falls away, and man withdraws what has projected into the holes in the body. He takes it away and by so doing (we can now think away physical man) he comes into a certain relation with the soul-world and then with the spirit-land as you will find it described in Theosophy. He has this relationship by having in him its ingredients, but during physical life these are bound up with the physical body and then they become free. Becoming free, however, as a whole it is gradually changed. During physical life—if I leave out the differentiations and draw the soul-life thus—the feelers (lilac in diagram 8) reach out into our holes; after death these feelers are drawn back. By their being drawn back, however, the soul-life itself becomes hollowed out and the life of the spirit coming from the other side rises into the life of soul (yellow).

In the same degree as man ceases to dive into the physical, the soul-spiritual lights up and, from the other side, penetrates his aura with light. And just as man is able to acquires a consciousness through the reflection caused by the continual pushing of the soul-spiritual against the physical body, he now acquires a consciousness by drawing himself back against the light. This light is that of the Sun, the original light that is the Good. Thus, whereas during his physical life as man of soul and spirit he pushes against what is related to the Sun, namely, against the more than empty holes in the brain, after death when he withdraws himself he pushes against the other Sun, the Good-Sun, the original sun.

You see, my dear friends, how the possibility of receiving concepts of life between death and a new birth is bound up with the basic ideas of primeval mysteries. For we are placed into this whole cosmic life in true way I have been picturing during these last few days. It is true, however, that we have to go more deeply into the framework of actual human evolution throughout earthly time to come to correct concepts of these matters. I think you will agree it might be possible that someone through a special stroke of luck—if one might so call it—were able to see clairvoyantly, the whole of what I have been describing. This stroke of luck, however, could only bring him to the point of seeing ever changing images. It is something like this—a man through some kind of miracle—but nowadays it would not happen through a miracle—or let us say through clairvoyant vision, super-sensible vision, a man might see something of the nature of what I have been trying to picture, namely man's life of soul and spirit. You will find it obvious that this should look rather different from what a short time ago I was describing as the normal aura, if you understand what I was describing only a few days ago as the aura revealed when the whole man is seen, that is, physical man with his encircling aura. But now I have taken out the man of soul und spirit, so that this man of soul and spirit has been abstracted from the physical man.

From this you recognise that in one case the colors have to be arranged in one way, in another case in another way; you recognise also that for super-sensible consciousness things look very different. Try simply to see man's aura—as it is while man is in the physical body—then look at this aura. Turn your attention that is, from the man of soul and spirit, and try to see the man why stretches out his organs into physical man. But when you see the man during the time between death and a new birth, then you also see how the whole changes. Above all, the region that is red here (Diagram 7) goes away, goes here, and the yellow goes below, the whole gradually gets into disorder. These things can be perceived but the percept has something confusing about it. Therefore it will not be easily possible for modern man to bring meaning and significance into this confusion if he does not turn to other expedients.

Now we have shown that man's head points to the past whereas the extremities man points to the future. This is entirely a polaric contrast, both the head and the extremities of man (remember what was said yesterday) are actually one and the same, only the head is a very old formation, it is overformed. That is why it has the holes; so far the extremities man has not these holes; on the surface he is still full of matter. To have these holes is a sign of over development. Development in a backward sense can be seen in the head and much hangs on that. Much depends too on man being able to understand that extremities man is a recent metamorphosis—the head an old metamorphosis. And because extremities man is a recent metamorphosis he has not so far developed the capacity to think in physical life but his consciousness remains unconscious; he does not open up to the man of soul and spirit such holes as are in the brain.

You see it is infinitely important for spiritual culture, and will in future become more and more so, for us to perceive that these two things that outwardly, physically, are as totally different from one another as the head man and extremities man, are according to soul and spirit, one and the same, and only differ because they are at different stages of development in time. Many mysteries lie in this particular fact that two equal physical things at different stages of their development in time, can be really one and the same that, though outwardly physically different, this is only due to the conditions of their change, of their metamorphosis.

Goethe with his theory of metamorphosis began in an elementary way to form concepts by which all this can be understood. Whereas otherwise since ancient times there has been a deadlock in the formation of concepts, with Goethe the faculty of forming concepts once more arose. And these concepts are those of living metamorphoses. Goethe, it is true, always began with the most simple. He said: when we look at a plant we have its green leaf; but the green leaf changes into the flower petal, into the colorsome petal of the flower. Both are the same, only one is the metamorphosis of the other. And as the green leaf of the plant and the red petal of the rose are different metamorphoses, the same thing at a different stage, man's head and his extremities organism too are simply metamorphoses of one another. When we take Goethe's thought on the metamorphosis of the plant we have something primitive, simple; but this thought can blossom into something of the greatest and can serve to describe man's passing from one incarnation to the next. We see the plant with its green leaf and its blossom, and say: this blossom, this red blossom of the rose is the metamorphosis of the green leaf of the plant. We see a man standing before us and say: that head you are carrying is the metamorphosis of arms, hands, legs, feet of your previous incarnation, and what you now have as arms, hands, legs and feet will be changed into your head of the next incarnation.

Now, however, will come an objection that evidently sits heavily on your souls. You will say: good gracious but I leave my legs and feet behind, my arms and hands too; I do not take them into my next incarnation ... how then should my head be made out of them? It is true, this objection can be made. But once again you are coming here up against Maya. It is not true that you actually leave behind your legs, feet, hands, arms. It is indeed untrue. You say that because you still cling to Maya, the great illusion.

What indeed with the ordinary consciousness you refer to as your arms, hands, legs and feet, are not your arms, hands, legs and feet at all, but what as blood and other juices fills out the real arms, hands, feet and legs. This again is a difficult idea but it is true. Suppose that here you have arms, hands, feet and legs, but that what is here is spiritual, spiritual forces. Now please to think that your arms, hands, legs and feet are forces—super-sensible forces. Had you these alone you would not see them with your eyes; they are filled out, these forces, with juices, with the blood, and you see what as mineral substance, fluid or partly solid—the smallest part solid—fills out what is invisible (hatching in diagram 9). What you leave in the grave or what is burnt is only what might be called the mineral enclosure. Your arms and hands, legs and feet are not visible, they are forces and you take them with you, you take the forms with you. You say: I have hands and feet. Anyone who sees into the spiritual world does not say: I have hands and feet, he says; there are spirits of form, Elohim, they think cosmic thoughts, and their thoughts are my arms and hands, my legs and feet; and their thoughts are filled out with blood and other fluids. But neither are blood and the other fluids what they appear physically; these again are the ideas of spirits of wisdom, and what the physicist calls matter is only outer semblance. The physicist ought to say when he comes to matter: here I come to the thoughts of the spirits of wisdom, the Kyriotetes. And where you see arms, hands, feet, legs, you cannot touch them but should say: here the spirits of form are building into these shapes their cosmic thoughts.

In short, my dear friends, strange as it sounds, there are no such things as your bodies, but where your body is in space there intermingled with one another live the cosmic thoughts of the higher hierarchies. And were you able to see correctly and not in accordance with Maya, you would say: into here there project the cosmic thoughts of the Exusiai, the spirits of form, the Elohim. These cosmic thoughts make themselves visible to me by being filled out with the cosmic thoughts of the spirits of wisdom. That gives us arms and hands, legs and feet. Nothing, absolutely nothing, as it appears in Maya is there before the spiritual vision, out there stand the cosmic thoughts. And these cosmic thoughts crowd together, are condensed, pushed into one another; for this reason they appear to us as these shadow figures of ours that go around, which we believe to have reality. Thus, as far as the physical man is concerned, he does not exist at all.

With certain justification we can say that in the hour of death the spirits of form separate their cosmic thoughts from those of the spirits of wisdom. The spirits of form take their thoughts up into the air, the spirits of wisdom sink their material thoughts into the earth. This brings it about that in the corpse an aftershadow of the thoughts of the spirits of wisdom still exists when the spirits of form have taken back their thoughts into the air. That is physical death—that is its reality.

In short, when we begin to think about the reality we come to the dissolution of what is commonly called the physical world. For this physical world derives its existence from the spirits of the higher hierarchies pushing in their intermingled thoughts, and I beg you to imagine that finely distributed quantities of water are introduced in some way which form a thick mist. That is why your body appears as a kind of shadow-form, because the thoughts of the spirits of form penetrate those of the spirits of wisdom, the formative thoughts enter the thoughts of substance. In face of this conception the whole world dissolve into the spiritual. We must, however, have the possibility of imagining the world to be really spiritual, of knowing that it is only apparent that my arms and hands, my feet and legs are given over to the earth. That is what it seems; in reality the metamorphosis of my arms and legs, hands and feet begins there and comes to completion in the life between death and a new birth, when my arms and legs, hands and feet become the head of my next incarnation.

I have been here telling you many things that perhaps at least in their form may have struck you as something strange. But what is all this ultimately of which we have been speaking but an ascending from man as he appears, to man as he really is, ascending from what lives externally in Maya to the successive ranks of the hierarchies.

It is only when we do this, my dear friends, that we are able to speak in a form that is ripe today of how man is permitted to know a so-called higher self. When we simply rant about a higher self, when we simply say: I feel a higher self within me . . . then this higher self is a mere empty abstraction with no content; for the ordinary self is in the hands of Maya, is itself Maya. The higher self has only one meaning when we speak of it in connection with the world of the higher hierarchies. To talk of the higher self without paying heed to the world that consists of the spirits of form and the angels, archangels and so on, to speak of the higher self without reference to this world, means that we are speaking of empty abstractions, and at the same time signifies that we are not talking of what lives in man between death and a new birth. For as here we live with animals, plants and minerals, between death and a new birth we live with the kingdoms of the higher hierarchies of whom we have so often spoken. Only when we gradually come nearer to these ideas and concepts (in a week, perhaps, we shall be speaking of them) shall we approach what can answer the question: why do many human beings die as mere children, many in old age, others in middle age?

Now, my dear friends, what I have just given you in outline are concrete concepts of what is real in the world. Truly they are not abstract concepts I have been describing, they are concrete concepts of world reality. These concrete concepts were given, for a more atavistic perception, it is true, in the ancient mysteries. Since the eighth pre-Christian century they have been lost to human perception, but through a deepening of our comprehension of the Christ-Being they must be found again. And this can only be realised on the path of spiritual science.

Let us make ourselves from a certain point of view another kind of picture of human evolution. We will here keep before us exceedingly important concepts. Now it can be said that when we go back in the evolution of man we discover—and I have often described this—that in ancient days men had more of the group-soul, and that the individual souls were membered into what was group-soul. You can read about this in various cycles:¹ we can then diagrammatically represent human evolution and say: in olden days there were group-souls and each of these split up (it would appear thus to soul perception but different for the perception of the spirit). But each of these souls clothed itself with a body that here in this figure I indicate with red strokes. (Diagram 10).

Up to the time of the Pythagorean school this drawing, or something like it, was always made and it was said: look at your body, so far as that is concerned men are separated, each having his own body (that is why the red strokes are isolated). Where the souls are concerned however, mankind is a unity, since we go back—it is true a long way back—to the group-soul. There we have a unity. If you think away the red, the while will form a unified figure (see diagram.)

There is sense in speaking of this figure only if we have first spoken of the spiritual as has been done here today; for then we know everything that is working together in these souls, how the higher hierarchies are working together on these souls. There is no sense in speaking of this figure if our gaze is not fixed on the hierarchies. It was thus that they spoke up to the time of the Pythagorean School; and it was from the Pythagorean School that Apollonius learned what I spoke about yesterday and about which I shall be talking further in these next weeks. But then after the eighth pre-Christian century, when the Pythagorean Schools were in their decadence, the possibility of thus speaking was lost. And gradually the concepts that are concrete, that have reality by being related to the higher hierarchies—these concepts have become confused and hazy to people. Thus there has come to them in the place of Angels, Archangels, Archai, Spirits of Form, Spirits of Movement, Spirits of Wisdom, Thrones, instead of all this concrete weaving of the spirit, they arrived at a concept that now played a certain part in the perception of the Greeks—the concept of the pneuma. Everything became hazily confused: Pneuma, universal spirit, this indistinct concept still so loved today by the Pantheists ... spirit, spirit, spirit ... I have often spoken of how the Pantheists place spirit everywhere; that goes back to Greek life. Again this figure is portrayed ... but you can now see how what was once concrete, the fullness of the Godhead, now became an abstract concept—Pneuma. The white is Pneuma, the red physical matter (see diagram 10) if we are considering the evolution of man. The Greeks, however, at least still preserved some perception of this Pneuma, for they always saw something of the aura. Thus, for them, what you can picture in these white branches was always of an auric nature, something really perceptible. There is the great significance of the transition from that constituted Greece to all that was Roman—that the Greeks still in their perception experienced Pneuma as something actual and spiritual, but that the Romans did so no longer. Everything now becomes quite abstract with the Romans, completely abstract; concepts and nothing more. The Romans are the people of abstract concepts.

My dear friends, in our days you find in science the same diagram! You can come upon it today in materialistic books on science. You will find the same diagram, exactly the same, as you would have found in the old Mysteries, in the Pythagorean Schools, where everything was still related to the hierarchies. You have it with the Greeks where everything is related to the Pneuma; again today you find it drawn, and we shall see what it has now become. Today the scientist says as he makes this same drawing on the blackboard for his students: in the propagation of the human race the substance of the parents' germ cells passes over to the children; but part of this substance remains so that it can again pass over to the children and and again there remains some of this to pass over anew to the children. And another part of the germ cell substance develops so that it can form the cells of the physical body. You have exactly the same diagram, only the modern scientist sees in the white (see diagram) the continuity of the substance of the germ cell. He says; if we go back to our old human ancestors and take this germ cell substance of both male and female, and then go to present day man and take his, it is still the same stream, the substance is continuous. There always remains in this germ substance something eternal—so the scientist imagines—and only half of the germ plasma goes over into the new body. The scientist has still the same figure but no longer has the pneuma; the white is now for him the material germ substance—nothing is left of soul and spirit, it is just material substance. You can read this today in scientific books, and it is taken as a great and significant discovery. That is the materialising of a higher spiritual perception that has passed through the process of abstraction; in the midst stands the abstract concept. And it is really amusing that a modern scientist has written a book (for those whose thinking is sound, it is amusing) in which he says right out: what the Greeks still represented as Pneuma is today the continuity of the germ substance. Yes, it is foolish, but today it counts for great wisdom.

From this you can, however, see one thing, it is not the drawing that does it! And you will therefore understand why to a certain extent I have always been against drawing diagrams so long as we were still trying to run our Anthroposophy within the Theosophical Society. One had only to enter any theosophical branch and the walls as a rule would be plastered with all manner of diagrams; there were drawings of every possible thing with words attached; there ware whole genealogical trees and every possible kind of sketch. However, my dear friends, these drawings are not important. What matters is that we should really be able to have living conceptions; for the same drawing can represent the soul-spiritual in the flowing of hierarchies, the purely material in the continuous germ-plasm. These things are seen very hazily by modern man. Therefore it is so important to be clear that the Greeks still knew something of the real self in man, of the real spiritual and that it was the Romans who made the transition to the abstract concept. You can see all this in what is external. When the Greek talked about his Gods, he did so in a way that made it quite evident that he was still picturing concrete figures behind these Gods. For the Romans the Gods, in reality, ware only names, only expressions, abstractions and they became abstractions more and more. For Greek a certain idea was ever present that in the man before him the hierarchies were living, that in each man the hierarchies were living a different life. Thus the hierarchies were living differently in every man. The Greek knew the reality of man, and when he said, that is Alcibiades, that is Socrates, or that is Plato, he still had the concept that there in Alcibiades, Socrates or Plato ware rising up, within each in a different way, the cosmic thoughts of the hierarchies. And because the cosmic thoughts arose differently these figures appeared different.

All this was entirely lacking in the Roman. For this reason he formed for himself a system of concepts that reached its climax when from the time of Augustus on and actually from an earlier date, the Roman Caesar was held to be God. The Godhead gradually became an abstraction and the Roman Caesar was himself a God because the concept of God had become completely abstract. This applies to the rest of their concepts; and it was particularly the case with the concepts that lived deeply in the Roman nature as concepts of rights, moral concepts. Thus, in place of all that in olden days was a living reality, there arose a number of abstractions. And all these abstractions lasted on as a heritage throughout the middle ages and descended to modern times, remaining as heritage down to the nineteenth century—abstract concepts carried into every sphere.

In the nineteenth century there came something startling. Man himself was entirely lost sight of among all these abstract concepts! The Greeks still had a presentiment of the real man who descends here after being formed and fashioned out of the cosmos; in the time of the Roman empire all knowledge of him was lost. The nineteenth century was needed to rediscover him through all the connections I have been showing you and will go on showing you even more exactly. The discovery of man took place now from the opposite pole. Greece wanted to see man as descending from the hierarchies, divine man; in place of this the Romans set up a series of abstract concepts; the nineteenth century—the eighteenth century too but particularly the nineteenth—was needed to rediscover man from the other side, from his animal side. And he could not be grasped with abstract concepts; this was the great shock. This was the great shock and the deep cleft that arose; what is this actually that stands there on two legs and fidgets with its hands, and eats and drinks all manner of things; what is it? The Greeks still knew, then a change took place when concepts became abstract. Now it comes as something startling to men of the nineteenth century; it stands there and there are no concepts with which to grasp it. It is taken for simply a higher form of animal. On the one hand, in science it produces Darwinism, on the other hand, in the spiritual it brings about socialism which would place man into society as a mere animal. Here is man standing transfixed before himself—what is this thing? And he is powerless to answer the question.

That is the situation today; that is the situation that will produce not only concepts that are right or wrong according as men will them, but is called upon to create facts either catastrophic or beneficial. And the situation is—the shock men have when seeing themselves. We must find the elements once more for te understanding of spiritual man. These elements will not be found unless we turn to the theory of metamorphosis. There lies the essential point. Goethe's concepts of metamorphosis are alone able to grasp the ever changing phenomena which offer themselves to the perception of the reality.

Now one might say that spiritual evolution has always moved in this direction. Even at the time when the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in the seventeenth century was being published in so wonderful a way—other writings too—the endeavour was already there to provide for the arising of a social structure for man compatible with his true nature. (In Das Reich I have referred to this in a series of articles concerning The Chemical Wedding). In this way the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz by the so-called Valentin Andreae arose. On the other hand, however, there also arose the book he called Reformation des Ganzer Menschengeschlectes (Reformation of the whole Human Race), where he gives a great political survey of how social conditions ought to be. Then, it was the thirty years war that swept the thing away! Today, there is the possibility that the ordering of the world either sweep things away once more ... or carry them right into human evolution. With this we are touching an the great fundamental questions of the day, with which men should be occupying themselves instead of with all the secondary matters that engross them. If only men concerned themselves about basic questions they would find means and ways of bringing fruitful concepts into modern reality—then we could get away from abstract concepts.

It is not very easy to distinguish reality from illusion. For that, we must have the will to go right into life with all seriousness and all good will, and not be bound down by programmes and prejudices. I could tell many tales about this but now I will refer to one fact only. In the beginning of the nineties of the last century a number of people foregathered in various towns of Europe and brought about something of an American nature, namely, the Movement for Ethical Culture. At that time it was the intellectuals who were connected with founding these societies for Ethical Culture. These people produced very beautiful things, and if today you read the articles written at that time by the promoters of Societies for Ethical Culture ... if you have a taste for butter, you will probably even today be enchanted by all the beautiful, wonderfully beautiful ideals, in which these people indulged. And indeed it was no pleasant task to go against this reveling in butter: However, I wrote an article at the time in one of the first numbers of Die Zunkunft (The Future), against all this oiliness in “ethical culture,” and denounced it in awful words. Naturally it was a shameful deed—how should it not have been when these people had set out to make the whole world ethical, moral—how should it not have been disgraceful to turn upon anything so good: At that time I was living in Weimar but on paying a visit to Berlin I had a conversation with Herman Grimm who said:

“What is the matter with ‘ethical culture'? Go and see the people themselves. You will find that here in Berlin those who hold meetings about ethics are really thoroughly nice kind people—one could not have any objection to them. They can even be congenial and very pleasant.” This was not to be denied and at the moment Herman Grimm had just as much right on his side as I had. Outwardly and momentarily, one of us was as right as the other, one could be proved right just as well as the other. And I am not for maintaining that from the point of view of pure logic my grounds for opposing these ethical philosophers were any more sound than those brought forward by them—I wouldn't be sure. But, my dear friends, from all this highfalutin idealism the present catastrophe has arisen! And only those people were right, and have been justified by events, who said at the time; with all your talking and luxuriating in buttery ideals, by means of which you would bring universal peace and universal morals to man, you have produced nothing but what I then called social carcinoma that had to end in this catastrophic present. Time has shown who was working with concrete concepts, who with merely those that are abstract. When they are simply abstract in character, there is no distinguishing who is right and who is wrong. The only thing that decides is whether a concept finds its right setting in the course of actual events. A professor teaching science in a university can naturally prove everything he says to be right in a most beautiful and logical way. And all this goes into the holes in the head (and this today I naturally may be allowed to say with the very best intention). But you see it is not a question of bringing forward apparently good logical grounds; for when these thoughts sink into a head such as Lenin's they become Bolshevism. What matters is what a thought is in reality, not what can be thought about it or felt about it in an abstract way, but what force goes to the forming of it in its reality. And if we test the world-conception that is chiefly talked of today—for the others, specified yesterday, were more in picture form—when one brings socialism to the test, it is not a question today of sitting oneself down to cram (as we say for ‘study') Karl Marx, or Lassalle, or Bernstein, to study their books, to study these authors. No! It is a question of having a feeling, a living experience for what will become of human progress if a number of men—the sort of men who stand at a machine—have these thoughts. That is what matters, and not to have thoughts about the social structure in the near future that are learnt in the customary course of modern diplomatic schooling, Now is the time when it is important to weigh thoughts so as to be able to answer the question: what are the times wanting for the coming decades? Today the time has already come when it is not allowed to sit in comfort in the various magisterial seats and to go on cherishing what is old. The time has come when men must bear the shock of seeing themselves, and when the thought must rise up in those responsible anywhere for anything: How is this question to be solved out of the spiritual life?

• 1. For example: Universe, Earth and Man, and Egyptian Myths and Mysteries.

Today it is my task to speak about a topic that has millions of enthusiastic followers in the world, on one side, that has found the most violent adversaries, on the other side, not only adversaries who combat this field of the so-called spiritism the sharpest, but also those who ridicule it who lump together it with the darkest superstition or what they call dark superstition; adversaries who want to ignore it only with empty words of joke and scorn.

It may be not easy to speak just in our present about such a topic where as a rule with the “pros and cons” the most violent passions are aroused straight away. I would like to ask those listeners among you who may be enthusiastic followers of spiritism not to roundly condemn me immediately, if to you any of my explanations seems to correspond not completely to your views, because we representatives of theosophy, nevertheless, are combined with the spiritists in one matter in any case: we have the intention to investigate the higher spiritual worlds, those worlds which are beyond the everyday sense-perception. We are in agreement on that. However, on the other side, I would like to ask the scientists also to realise that that movement in whose name I myself speak has not chosen the slogan only like a signboard, as a phrase, but in the most serious sense of the word: no human opinion is higher than truth.—I would also like to ask the scientist to keep in mind that he may take into consideration that the views of science were subjected to change in the course of times, and that is why the scientific views of today cannot be regarded as being fixed.

Let me now outline the development of the spiritistic movement without taking sides, because no human opinion is higher than truth.

I would like to emphasise above all that the founders of the theosophical movement, Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky, and the great organiser, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, went out from the spiritistic movement. They were experts of the spiritistic movement and turned to the theosophical movement only, after they had vigorously searched for truth before within the spiritistic movement, but had not found it.

Theosophy does not want to combat spiritism, but to search for truth where it is to be found.

I would like to emphasise something else that will surprise some of you, however, that will not at all surprise others who are in the know. Allow me to express it: you can never hear the last word about spiritism and similar matters from people like me who are forced to speak about that. You know that there is in any science a rule which is simply justified by the scientific methods, and the rule is that one shows the results of science before a bigger audience in popular way. If one wants to do more intimate acquaintance with these results, if one wants to get to know the more intimate truth, then a longer way is necessary: a way using the different methods in any detail. As a rule the researchers are not able to report in popular talks what takes place inside of the laboratories, of the observatories. That applies to the physical science. On the other side, in the great spiritual movements of the world somebody who is reasonable and allowed to express the words with regard to the spiritual views has to withhold the last word because the last words are still of quite different kind. They are of such a kind that they can hardly be discussed publicly. That is why you can never hear the very last word of this matter from an occultist—unless you are able and want to go his ways most intimately. But to those who are in the know of the matter something becomes clear from the way how a matter is said, what is said not only between the lines, but perhaps also between the words.

After this introduction I would like to move on the topic which certainly has a tremendous cultural-historical significance even for somebody who wants to make it ridiculous. I would like to speak about the matter in a sense which really throws light from this point of view: what does spiritism search for today? Does it search for something new, or is it something ancient that it searches? Are the ways on which it looks absolutely novel, or has humankind gone on them since centuries or even since millennia?—If anybody puts these questions to himself, he reaches his goal concerning the history of spiritism the fastest. What the spiritists search for is at first the knowledge of those worlds which are beyond our sensory world, and secondly the significance of these worlds for the goal, for the determination of our human race.

If we ask ourselves: were these problems not the tasks of humankind, since it strives on our earth and wants anything?—Then we must say to ourselves: yes. And because they are certainly the highest tasks, it would already appear as something absurd from the beginning if in the world history something absolutely new had appeared with regard to these questions. It seems if we look around in the old and new spiritistic movements, as if we deal with something absolutely new. The strongest adversaries refer to the fact that it has brought something absolutely new into the world, and other adversaries say that the human beings had never needed to combat this movement like nowadays. There a change must have happened in humankind with regard to the way to look at the case. This is illuminated to us like lightning if we get clear in our mind that humankind has behaved in three different ways to the questions which we call spiritistic today.

There we have one way which we can find in the whole antiquity, a way which changes only in the Christian times. Then we have the second way to position ourselves to these questions, the whole Middle Ages through, till the 17th century. Only in the 17th century spiritism basically starts taking on a certain form that one can rightly call spiritism today.

The questions that the spiritist wants to answer today were the object of the so-called mysteries the whole antiquity through. I try only to characterise with few lines what one has to understand by mysteries. It was not the custom in antiquity to announce wisdom publicly. One had another view of wisdom and truth. One believed the whole antiquity through that it is necessary to train super-sensible organs to the knowledge of the super-sensible truth at first. One realised the fact that in every human being spiritual forces slumber which are not developed with the average human being, that spiritual forces slumber in the human nature which one can wake and develop by means of long exercises, through steps of development, which the disciples of the mysteries describe as very difficult. If the neophyte had developed such forces in him and had become a researcher of truth, one was of the opinion that he is to the average human being in such a way as a sighted is to a blind-born. This was also the goal within the holy mysteries. One aimed to achieve something similar in the spiritual field as today the doctor aims to achieve with the blind-born if he operates him that he becomes sighted. One was clear about the fact that—like with a blind-born who is operated the colours of the light and the forms of the things appear—a new world appears to somebody whose internal senses are woken, a world which the everyday reason cannot perceive. Thus the follower of the mysteries tried to develop a human being of lower level to one of higher level, to an initiate. Only the initiate should be able to recognise something of the super-sensible truth by immediate beholding, by spiritual intuition. The big mass of human beings could get the truth by means of pictures. The myths of antiquity, the legends about gods and world origin, which simply appear today—indeed, in certain sense rightly—as childish views of humankind, they are nothing but disguises of the super-sensible truth. The initiate informed people in pictures of that which he could behold within the temple mysteries. The whole Eastern mythology, the Greek and Roman mythologies, the Germanic mythology and the mythologies of the savage peoples are nothing but metaphorical, symbolic representations of the super-sensible truth. Of course, only somebody can completely understand this who occupies himself not in such a way as anthropology and ethnology do it but also with their spirit. He sees that a myth like the Hercules legend shows a deep inner truth; he sees that the conquest of the Golden Fleece by Jason shows a deep and true knowledge.

Then another way came with our calendar. I can indicate only roughly what I have to say. A certain basis of higher, spiritual truth was determined and made the object of the confessions, in particular of the Christian. And now this basis of spiritual truth was removed from any human research, from the immediate human striving. Those who studied the history of the Council of Nicaea know what I mean, and also those who understand the words of St. Augustine who says there: I would not believe in the truth of the divine revelation unless the authority of the church forces me.—Faith that determines a certain basis of the truth replaces the old mystery truth which retains it in pictures. Then follows the epoch when the big mass is no longer informed about the truth of the super-sensible world in pictures, but simply by authority. This is the second way how the big mass and those who had to lead them behaved to the highest truth. The mysteries provided it to the big mass on account of experience; it was provided by faith and fixed by authority in the Middle Ages.

But beside those who had the task to retain the big mass by faith and authority were also those in the 12th and 13th centuries—they existed at all times, but they did not appear publicly—who wanted to develop by immediate own beholding to the highest truth. These searched for it on the same ways on which it had been searched for within the mysteries. That is why we find in mediaeval times beside those who are only priests, also the mystics, theosophists and occultists, those who talk in an almost incomprehensible language hard to be understood by modern materialists and rationalists. We find people who had reached the secrets on the ways which avoid the senses. In an even more incomprehensible language those people spoke who had the guidance of the spirit as mystery priests. So we hear from one that he had the ability to send his thoughts miles away; another boasted that he could transform the whole sea into gold if it was permitted. Another says that he could construct a vehicle with which he would be able to move through the air.

There were times when people did not know how to do with such sayings, because they had no notion of how they were to be understood. Moreover, prejudices flourished against such a kind of investigation since the oldest times. That becomes clear to us at once where these prejudices came from. When in the first centuries of our calendar the Christian culture spread over the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, it appeared that the cult actions and the ceremonies of Christianity and also most of Christian dogmas agreed with ancient pagan traditions, and were not so different—even if in a watered way—from that which had took place in the old pagan Mithras temples. There said those who had the task to defend the reputation of the church: bad spirits gave the pagans these views; they aped within the pagan world what God revealed to the Christian church.—However, it is an odd imitation which leads the way of the original! The whole Christianity was aped in the pagan mysteries—if we apply the word of the accusers, what the church has later found! It is comprehensible that every other way than that of the authoritative Christian faith, as Augustine characterised it, was wrong and in the course of time it was regarded as such which was not given by good powers; since the church had to provide the good powers.

Thus these traditions continued through the whole Middle Ages. Those who wanted to come on their own ways, independently to the highest super-sensible truth were regarded as magicians, as allies of the bad or of the bad spirits. The mark stone is the Faust legend. Faust is the representative of those who want to get by own knowledge to the secrets. Hence, the bad powers must have captivated him. One should only do research in the writings handed down from earlier times, only the trust in authority should lead to the super-sensible powers. In spite of that, initiated minds realised—even if they were defamed as magicians and were prosecuted—that the time must come again when one has to progress to truth on own, human ways.

Thus we see occult brotherhoods originating in Europe from the middle of the Middle Ages on which led their members on the same ways as the old mysteries had done this to the development of higher intuitive forces. So that within such occult brotherhoods the way to the highest truth was taken like in the mysteries—I mention only that of the Rosicrucians, the deepest and most significant one, founded by Christian Rosenkreutz. This way can be investigated strictly historically till the 18th century. I cannot explain in detail how this happened; I can only give one example, the great representative of the occult science of the 16th and 17th centuries, Robert Fludd. He shows for those who have insight into these fields in all his writings that he knows the ways how to get to truth that he knows how to develop such forces that are of quite different kind than the forces in us which see any body of light before themselves. He shows that there are mysterious ways to get to the highest truth. He also speaks of the Rosicrucian Society in such a way that the relationship is clear to any initiate.

I would like to present three questions only to you to show you how these questions were discussed in veiled form at that time. He says of them that everybody who has arrived at the lowest level must be able to answer them with understanding. These questions and also their answers may appear quite futile to the rationalists and materialists. The first question which anybody must answer who wants to rise in worthy way to higher spiritual spheres is: where do you live?—The answer is: I live in the temple of wisdom, on the mountain of reason.—Understanding this sentence really, experiencing it internally means already to have opened certain inner senses.

The second sentence was: where truth comes from to you?—The answer is: it comes to me from the creative , and now there comes a word which cannot be translated at all into German: from the highest ..., mighty all-embracing spirit who has spoken through Solomon and wants to inform me about alchemy, magic and the kabala ...—This was the second question.

The third question is: what do you want to build?—The answer is: I want to build a temple like the tabernacle, like Solomon's temple, like the body of Christ and ... like something else that one does not pronounce.

You see—I cannot go into these questions further—that one veiled the super-sensible truth in a mysterious darkness for all non-initiates in such brotherhoods, and that the non-initiate should make himself worthy at first and had to get to a moral and intellectual summit. Somebody who had not stood the trials who did not have the force in himself to find the experiences inside was not judged as worthy, was not admitted to the initiation. One considered it as dangerous to know this truth. One knew that knowledge is connected with a tremendous power, with a power as the average human being does not suspect at all. Only somebody is able to possess this truth and power without any danger for humankind who has got to that moral and intellectual height. Otherwise one said: without having reached this height he behaves with this truth and power like a child that is sent with matches into a powder magazine.

Now one was of the opinion in these times that only somebody who is in the possession of the highest super-sensible truth can explain the phenomena as they are told everywhere and since millennia in a popular way—phenomena which the modern spiritism shows again. The matters were nothing new but something ancient that spiritism recognises today. In ancient times one spoke about the fact that the human being can have such an effect on the human beings as it is not the case, otherwise: certain human beings cause that knocking sounds are to be heard in their surroundings that objects move, contrary to the laws of gravitation, with or without touch that objects fly through the air without applying any physical force et cetera. Since the oldest times one knew that there are human beings who can be transported into certain states, today we call these states trance states, in which they speak about things about which they can never speak in the waking consciousness that they also tell about other worlds not belonging to our sense-perceptible world. One knew that there are human beings who communicate by signs about that which they see in such super-sensible worlds. One also knew that there are human beings who are able to see events which are far away from them and also to report about that; human beings who could foresee and forecast future events with the help of their prophetic gift. All that—we do not verify it today—is an ancient tradition. Those who believe to be able to accept it as truth consider it as something natural. Such not physical, not sense-perceptible phenomena were regarded as true through the whole Middle Ages. Indeed, they were considered by the church of the Middle Ages in such a way, as if they were caused by means of bad skills, but this should not touch us. In any case, the way to the super-sensible world was not searched for on the way of these phenomena in the time of the 17th and 18th centuries. Nobody claimed till those times that a dancing table, an anyhow appearing ghost which is seen with eyes or in any way in trance could reveal anything of a super-sensible world. Even if anybody told that he saw a blaze in Hanover from here, one believed it; but nobody saw anything in it that could seriously give information about the super-sensible world. Reasonable people considered it as a matter of course that one could not look for the super-sensible world that way. Those who wanted to get to super-sensible perception searched for it by developing inner forces in the occult brotherhoods.

Then another time came in the development of the West, in which one started looking for truth scientifically. There came the Copernican world view and the researches of physiology; technology, the discoveries of the blood circulation, of the ovum et cetera. One attained insights into nature with the senses. Somebody who does not approach the Middle Ages with prejudices but wants to get to know the world view of the Middle Ages in its true form, convinces himself soon that this medieval thinking did not imagine heaven and hell as localities in space, but that they were something spiritual to it. In mediaeval times no reasonable human being thought to advocate that world view which one attributes to the medieval scholars today. Copernicanism is nothing new in this sense. It is new in another sense; in the sense that since the 16th century sense-perception became decisive for truth; what one can see what one can perceive with the senses. The world view of the Middle Ages was not wrong as one often shows it today, but it was only a view which was not got with bodily eyes. The bodily sensualisation was a symbol of something spiritual. Also Dante did not imagine his hell and his heaven in the earthly sense; they were to be understood spiritually.

One broke with this point of view. The real psychologist of the human development finds out this. The sensuous was raised, and now sensuality conquered the world gradually. However, the human being got used to it without noticing it. Only the searching psychologist rushing behind the development is able to make a picture of it. The human being gets used to such changes. With his feeling, with his senses he looks at everything, and accepts the sensuous only as true. Without knowing it, people considered as a principle of the human nature to accept only what they can see in any way of what they can convince themselves by sensory inspection. People did not think much of such circles that spoke of an initiation and led to super-sensible truth on occult ways; everything had to be sensually shown.

What about the super-sensible view of the world? How could one find the super-sensible in the world in which one wanted to seek for truth only in the sensory effects? There were rare, so-called abnormal phenomena which were not explicable by means of natural forces known till then; phenomena that the physicist, the naturalist could not explain, and which one simply denied because one wanted to accept the sensually explicable only. There were these phenomena which were handed down through millennia to which the human being sought refuge now: now one went to them. Simultaneously with the urge to keep only to the sense-perceptible appearance the urge for the super-sensible resorted to such phenomena. One wanted to know what scientific criticism could not explain; one wanted to know how it is. When one started searching for evidences of another world in these matters, the birth of modern spiritism took place. We can give the hour of birth and the place where it happened. It was in 1716; there a book was published by a member of the Royal Society, a description of the western islands of Scotland. Everything was collected in it that was to be found out about the “second sight.” This is that which one cannot perceive with the usual eyes, but what one could find out only by super-sensible research. Here you have the precursor of everything that was later done by the so-called scientific side to the investigation of the spiritistic phenomena.

Now we also stand already at the gate of the whole spiritistic movement of the newer time. That person from whom the whole spiritistic movement started is one of the strangest of the world: Swedenborg. He influenced the whole 18th century. Even Kant argued with him. A person who could bring to life the modern spiritistic movement had to be disposed like Swedenborg. He was born in 1688 and died in 1772. In the first half of his life he was a naturalist who stood at the head of the natural sciences of his time. He encompassed them. Nobody has a right to attack Swedenborg as an illiterate man. We know that he was not only a perfect expert of his time, but he also anticipated a lot of scientific truths that one discovered on the universities only later. So he stood in the first half of his life not only completely on the scientific point of view which wanted to investigate everything by the appearance to the senses and by mathematical calculations, but he also was far ahead of his time in this regard. Then he completely turned to that which one calls visionariness. What Swedenborg experienced—you may call him a seer or visionary—was a particular class of phenomena. Somebody who is only somewhat initiated in these fields knows that Swedenborg could only experience this class of phenomena.

I only give a few examples. Swedenborg saw a conflagration in Stockholm from a place which was removed sixty miles from Stockholm. He informed the guests, with who he was in a soirée, about this event, and after some time one heard that the fire had happened in such a way as Swedenborg had told it. Another example: a high-ranking person asked for a secret which a brother had not completely told before his death because he died before. The person turned to Swedenborg with the strange demand whether he could not discover him and ask what he wanted to say. Swedenborg ridded himself of the order in such a way that the person in question could have no doubt that Swedenborg had penetrated into this secret.

Still the third example to show how Swedenborg moved within the super-sensible world. A scholar and friend visited Swedenborg. The servant said to him: you have to wait for some time, please. The scholar sat down and heard a discussion in the next room. However, he heard always only Swedenborg speaking; he did not hear answering. The case became even more noticeable to him when he heard the discussion taking place in wonderful classical Latin, and particularly when he heard him intimately talking about states of the emperor Augustus. Then Swedenborg went to the door, bowed before somebody and spoke with him but the friend could not see the visitor at all. Then Swedenborg came back and said to the friend: excuse that I let you wait. I had lofty visit—Virgil visited me.

People may think about such matters as they want. However, one thing is certain: Swedenborg believed in them, regarded them as reality. I said: only a person like Swedenborg could get to such a kind of research. Just the fact that he was expert naturalist of his time led him to this view of the super-sensible nature. He was a man who got used to accepting nothing but the sensuous, the sense-perceptible in the time of the dawning natural sciences. Everybody knows it who knows him; the reasons become clear in the talk which I hold next time here about the topic “Hypnotism and Somnambulism”—and that is why he also depended on it as such a man who sees the spiritual in the world. As well as he insisted to recognise only as right what he could calculate and perceive with senses, the super-sensible was brought by him into the shape which it had to have for him; the super-sensible world was pulled down to a deeper sphere under the influence of the ways of thinking of natural sciences. Because it approaches us in such way like the views of the sensory world, I cited the reasons. We hear next time how such a thing comes about. However, the preconditions are given by the own spiritual development of the human beings who got used to the sense-perceptible.

I do not want to speak now about the significance and core of truth of Swedenborg’s visions, but about the fact that somebody sees—as soon as he enters this field which forms the basis of Swedenborg's views—his dispositions in this area, what he has developed in himself. A proof of it may be a simple example.

When the wave of spiritism spread in the second half of the 19th century, one also made experiments in Bavaria. It became apparent there that with the experiments at which also scholars were present and took place at different places quite different spiritual manifestations happened. In such an event one asked whether the human soul is received via heredity from the parents, so that also the soul is hereditary, or whether it is made new with every human being. In this spiritistic séance it was answered: the souls are made new. Almost at the same time the same question was put in another séance. The answer was: the soul is not created, but is passed on from the parents to the children.—One thought that at one séance followers of the so-called creation theory were, and at the other séance some scholars were present who were followers of the other theory. In the sense of the thoughts which lived in them the answers were given. Whichever facts may be there, whichever reasons of these facts may be there, it became clear that the human being receives as a manifestation what corresponds to his view. It is irrelevant whether it faces him only as an intellectual manifestation or as a vision; what the human being sees is founded in his own dispositions.

This search for sensuous-extrasensory proofs became just a child of the natural sciences of the materialistic time. The principle was actually drawn up that one had to seek for the extrasensory world as one had to seek for the sensuous one. Just as somebody convinces himself in the laboratory of the reality of forces of magnetism or light, one wanted to convince oneself of the super-sensible world by the appearance to the senses. People had forgotten how to behold the spiritual in purely spiritual way. They had forgotten how to develop the belief in super-sensible forces and how to learn to recognise what is neither sensuous nor analogous to the sensuous, but what can be seized only by spiritual intuition. They had got to be used to get everything on the sensory way, and that is why they also wanted to get these matters on the sensory way. Research moved on this way. Thus we see Swedenborg’s direction going on. What appears offers nothing new to us; spiritism offers nothing new! We take an overview of this later and understand it then also better.

All the phenomena which spiritism knows were explained that way. There we see the South German Oetinger who elaborated the theory that there is a super-sensible substance which can be seen as a physical phenomenon. Only, he says, the super-sensible matter does not have the raw qualities of the physical matter, not the impenetrable resistance and the row mixture. Here we have the substance from which the materialisations are taken.

Another researcher of this field is Johann Heinrich Jung called Stilling who published a detailed report on spirits and apparitions of spirits and described all these matters. He tried there to understand everything in such a way that he did justice to these phenomena as a religious Christian. Because he had tendencies to be a religious Christian, the whole world seemed to him to manifest nothing but the truth of the Christian teaching. Because at the same time natural sciences made claims, we see a mixture of the purely Christian standpoint with the standpoint of natural sciences in his representation. Esotericism explains the phenomena by the intrusion of a spiritual world into our world.

You see all these phenomena registered in the works of those who wrote about spiritism, demonology, magic et cetera in which you can also find something that goes beyond spiritism, like with Ennemoser, for instance. We see even carefully registered how a person can enable himself to perceive the thoughts of others who are in distant rooms. You find such instructions with Ennemoser, also with others. Already in the 19th century you find with a certain Meyer who wrote a book about the Hades from spiritistic standpoint as a manifestation of spiritistic manipulations and stood up for the so-called reincarnation theory. You find a theory there to which theosophy has led us again, and which shows us that the old fairy tales are expressions of the higher truth prepared for the people. Meyer got this view on account of sensuous demonstrations.

We find all the spiritistic phenomena with Justinus Kerner. They are significant because of the moral weight of the author. There we find, for example, that near the seeress of Prevorst things—spoons et cetera—are repelled by her; it is also told that this seeress communicated with beings of other worlds. Justinus Kerner registered all the communications which he got from her. She informed him that she saw beings of other worlds which went through her, indeed, but which she could perceive and that she could even behold such beings which came in along with other people. Some people may say about these matters: Kerner fantasised and was fooled a lot by his seeress. However, I would like to say one thing: you know David Friedrich Strauss who was friendly with Justinus Kerner. He knew how it stood with the seeress of Prevorst. You also know that that which he performed goes in a direction which runs against the spiritistic current. He says that the facts of which the seeress of Prevorst reports are true as facts—about that cannot be discussed with those who know something about it, he considered the matters as being beyond any doubt.

Even if a bigger number of human beings existed who were still interested somewhat in such things, the interest decreased, nevertheless, more and more. This could be led back to the influence of science. It refused to look at such phenomena as true manifestations in the time of the forties when the law of energy conservation was discovered forming the basis of our physics when the cell theory was drawn up when Darwinism prepared. What came up in this time could not be favourable to the pneumatologists. Hence, they were strictly rejected. That is why one forgot everything that these had to say.

Then an event took place which meant a victory for spiritism. The event did not happen in Europe, but in the country where materialism celebrated the biggest triumphs in that time where one had made oneself used to consider only as true what hands can seize. This happened in America, in the country where the materialistic way of thinking intimated by me had strongly developed. It went out from the phenomena which belong in the broadest sense to those which one has to call abnormal but sensual. The well-known knocking sounds, the phenomena of moving tables and the knocking through them, the audibility of certain voices which sounded through the air accompanied by intelligent manifestations for which no sensuous reason existed—they pointed to the super-sensible so clearly in America, in the country where one attaches much value to the outer appearance. Like by storm the view gained recognition that there is a super-sensible world that beings which do not belong to our world manifest themselves in our sensory world. Like a storm this went through the world.

A man, Andrew Jackson Davis, who concerned himself with these phenomena, was called upon for explaining these matters. He was, in similar way as Swedenborg, a seer; he only did not have the deepness of Swedenborg. He was an unlearned American grown up as a farmer boy and Swedenborg was a learnt Swede. He wrote a book in 1848 (?): The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse. This work arose from the most modern needs which had originated within the modern battle in which one wanted to accept the sensuous only in which everybody wanted to put his personal egoism forward, in which everybody wanted to grab so much to himself, wanted to become as happy as he only was able to. In this world one was no longer able to have sense for a faith which leads beyond the sensuous world, according to the ways of thinking which were tied to the material only. One wanted to see and one wanted to have such a faith which satisfies the needs and desires of modern humankind. Above all Davis says plainly that modern people cannot believe that a quantity of human beings is blessed, another quantity condemned. It was this what the modern could not stand; there an idea of development had to intervene. Davis was informed of a truth which shows an exact image of the sensuous world. It may be characterised by an example. When his first wife had died, he had the idea to marry a second wife. However, he had doubt, but a super-sensible manifestation caused that he gave himself the permission. In this manifestation his first wife said to him that she had married in the sun-land again; that is why he felt to have the right also to marry a second time. In the beginning of the first part of his book he informs us that he was educated as a farmer boy like a Christian, but he realised soon that the Christian faith can deliver no conviction, because the modern human being must understand the what, the why and the where to of the way.

I was sent out—he tells—to the field by my parents. There came a snake. I attacked it with the hayfork. But the tooth broke off. I took the tooth and prayed. I was convinced that the prayer must help. But ... [gap in the transcript]. How can I believe in a God who allows that I experience such a thing? He said to himself. He became an unbeliever. By the spiritistic séances in which he took part he got the ability of trance and became one of the most fertile spiritistic writers. He emphasises that the appearance of that world is approximately the same as that of the sensory world. It would be an unbelief that a good father does not care for his children, because the father makes long journeys for this purpose et cetera.

You see that the earthly world is transferred to the other world. Therefore, this way of thinking spread like a wildfire all over the world. In short time one could count millions of followers of spiritism. Already in 1850 one could find thousands of media in Boston, and one could also pay 400,000 $ in short time to construct a spiritistic temple. You will not deny that that has a great cultural-historical significance. However, with regard to the modern way of thinking this movement had only prospects of success if science took hold of it, that means if science believed in it.

If I held a lecture about theosophy, I could speak in detail of the fact that still quite different powers stand behind the staging of the spiritistic phenomena. Behind the scenery deep occult powers are at work. But this cannot be my task today. I tell another time who is, actually, the true director of these phenomena. But this is certain: if this occult director wanted to presuppose that these phenomena convinced the materialistically minded humankind of the existence of a super-sensible world thoroughly if it should believe in it in the long run, the scientific circles had to be conquered. These scientific circles were not so hard to conquer. Just among the most reasonable, among those who could think thoroughly and logically were many who turned to the spiritistic movement. These were in America Lincoln, Edison, in England Gladstone, the naturalist Wallace, the mathematician Morgan. Also in Germany was a big number of excellent scholars, they were experts in their fields, and were convinced of the spiritistic phenomena by media, like Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, the founder of psychophysics. Friedrich Zöllner also belongs to them about whom only those who understand nothing of the matter can say that he became mad when he did the famous experiments with Slade. Then, however, also a personality who is yet underestimated: this is the Baron Hellenbach, deceased in 1887. He presented his experiences in spiritistic fields in his numerous books in such a brilliant way. For example, in his book about biological magnetism and in the book about the magic of figures, so that these books are true treasure troves to study which way this movement has taken—in particular in more inspired heads—in the second half of the 19th century.

A European impulse came to the American movement and this went out from a man who stood in the European culture, from a disciple of Pestalozzi, and it originated at a time which is already significant because of its other discoveries. This spirit is Allan Kardec who wrote his Spirits’ Book in 1858, in the same year in which many other works appeared epoch-making for the western education in different fields. We only have to call some of the works to indicate the significance of the mental life in this time. One is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; the other is a basic work about the psycho-physical field by Fechner. The third one is a work of Bunsen which familiarises us with spectral analysis and which gives the possibility to discover something of the material composition of the stars for the first time. The fourth one was the work of Karl Marx: The Capital. The fifth one was a work of Kardec, a spiritistic work, but of quite different kind as the American works. He represented the idea of reincarnation, the re-embodiment of the human soul. This French spiritism had as numerous supporters as the American one in short time. It spread over France, Spain and especially also over Austria. It was completely in accord with the ancient teachings of wisdom of theosophy. Also spirits like Hellenbach, an Austrian politician, could accept it. He represented the scientific form of spiritism Kardec had founded. Hellenbach played a prominent role in important political matters of Austria in the sixties and seventies of the last century and proved to be a clear and keen thinker at every step. Spiritism got a scientific form in Germany that way. Also such spirits founded the scientific spiritism in Germany who did not want to speak like Hellenbach or Gladstone, Wallace, Crookes who assumed angelic spirits of the old Christendom but who wanted only to speak about the reincarnation of the human being and the intrusion of beings unknown to us whose forms Hellenbach leaves open. But also those who generally do not want to know anything about a yonder world were no longer able to not accept the facts as such. Even people like Eduard von Hartmann who wanted to know nothing about the theories of the spiritists, however, said that the facts could not be denied. They let themselves not be swayed during the period of the exposures. The most famous one was that of the medium Bastian by the Crown Prince Rudolf and the archduke Johann of Austria. The media, which had convinced our scientific circles, were exposed with the medium Bastian. Everybody who simply has some insight in this field knows that Hellenbach is right when he says: nobody will claim that there are no wigs. Should one also believe that there is no real hair because one has discovered wigs?—To somebody who works in occult fields the sentence applies that one can prove to many a bank that it is a corrupt bank; yes, but did not this bank do also honest banking business once? The assessment of the spiritistic truth hides behind such comparisons.

We have seen that the scientific and materialistic ways of thinking since the 18th century—we can call 1716 the natal year of spiritism—have completely adapted themselves to the modern thinking, also to the materialistic views. A new form was sought for to be able to approach the higher, super-sensible truth, and everybody who faced these facts tried to understand them in his way. The Christian faith found a confirmation of its ancient church faith; also some orthodox have accepted it to find favourable proofs of their case. Others also found confirmation from the standpoints of the material thinking which assesses everything only according to the material relations.

Also those who were thorough scientific researchers like Zöllner, Weber, Fechner and also several famous mathematicians like Simony et cetera tried to get closer to the case, while they moved from the three-dimensional on the four-dimensional. The philosophical individualists who could not believe that in the spiritual world also an individualistic development exists like in the physical one were led by means of thorough investigation to understand that the human way, this sensory way to be—to see with bodily eyes to hear with bodily ears—is only one way of many possible ways. The representatives of a super-sensible spiritism like Hellenbach found their ideas confirmed on account of the spiritistic facts. If you imagine a person who knew to deal with the peculiarities of every single medium who knew how to adapt himself to the most difficult circumstances, so that it was a relief to meet him, Hellenbach was such a man. Also those who spoke only about a psychic force of which one does not and needs not think a lot also these followers of a psychic force, like Eduard von Hartmann or also spirits like du Prel of whom I will speak next time, they all explained the facts in their ways. There were many theories, from the popular interpretations for the people who looked after the manifesting spirits, after writing media, after communications by knocking sounds et cetera, from these religious seekers in old way up to the most enlightened spirits: everybody explained these phenomena in his way. This was in the time when this lack of clarity prevailed in every field, in the time when the phenomena could no longer be denied—but the minds of the human beings proved to be absolutely incapable to do justice to the super-sensible world.

In this time the ground was prepared to a renewal of the mystic way, to a renewal of that way which was taken in former times in the occult science and in the mysteries, but in such way that it is accessible to everybody who wants to go it. The Theosophical Society was founded by Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky to open an understanding of the ways. The theosophical movement revived the investigation of wisdom as it was nurtured in the mysteries and by the Rosicrucians in mediaeval times. It wants to spread what one has searched for in recent time on other ways. It is based on the old movements, however, also on the newest researches.

Somebody who gets a better understanding of the theosophical movement will find that the way of theosophy or spiritual science which leads to the super-sensible truth is on one side really spiritual, on the other side, that it answers the questions: where does the human being come from, where does he go to, what is his vocation?

We know that one had to speak in certain way to the human beings of antiquity, in more different way to those of the Middle Ages, and again in another way to the modern human beings. The facts of theosophy are ancient. But you convince yourselves if you seek on the way of theosophy or spiritual science that it satisfies any demand of modern scientific nature if it is understood in its very own figure. He would be a bad theosophist who wanted to give up any of the scientific truths for theosophy. Knowledge on the bright, clear way of true scientific nature—yes, but no knowledge which limits itself to sensory things which limits itself to that which takes place in the human being between birth and death, but also knowledge of that which is beyond birth and death. Spiritual science cannot do this without having the authorisation of it—just within a materialistic age. It is aware that all the spiritual movements must converge at a great goal at last which the spiritists will find in spiritual science in the end. However, it searches the spiritual on other, more comprehensive ways; it knows that the spiritual is not found in the sensory world and also not by arrangements of sensory nature only, maybe by means of a beholding which is analogous to the sensory looking. It knows that there is a world of which one receives an insight only if one goes through a kind of spiritual operation which is similar to the operation of a blind-born that is made sighted. It knows that it is not right if the modern human being says: show me the super-sensible like something sensory.—It knows that the answer is: human being, rise up to the higher spheres of the spiritual world, while you yourself become more and more spiritual, so that the connection with the spiritual world is in such a way as the connection is with the sensuous world by means of your sensory eyes and ears.

Theosophy or spiritual science has that viewpoint which a believer of the Middle Ages, a deep mystic, Master Eckhart, expressed, while he characterised that the really spiritual cannot be searched for in the same way as the sensuous. In the 13th, 14th centuries, he expressed meaningfully that one cannot receive the spiritual by sensuous performances, by anything that is analogous to the sensuous. Therefore, he says the great truth leading to the super-sensible: people want to look at God with the eyes, as if they looked at a cow and loved it. They want to look at God as if He stood there and here. It is not that way. God and I are one in recognition.

We do not want to behold a higher world by means of events like knocking sounds or other sensuous arrangements. It is called a super-sensible world, indeed, but it is similar to the sensuous world round us.—Eckhart characterises such apparently super-sensible events saying: such people want to behold God as they look at a cow. However, we want to behold the spiritual developing our spiritual eyes like nature developed our bodily eyes to let us see the physical. Nature has dismissed us with outer senses to make the sensuous perceptible to us. The way, however, to develop further in the sensuous to the spiritual to be able to behold the spiritual with spiritual eyes—we ourselves have to go this spiritual way in free development, also in the sense of modern development.

Notes:

In the title of the talk, the term spiritism is used instead of the more common term spiritualism. Allan Kardec used it for the first time in his book The Spirits’ Book. Since then it is used outside the English speaking world to distinguish spiritism and spiritualism (Spiritualismus). The latter term is applied to the opposite of (philosophical, religious) materialism.

St. Augustine (354–430): Evangelio non crederem, nisi me ecclesia commoveret auctoritas (Contr. Epist. Manich., 5)

Christian Rosenkreutz (1378–1484), cf. CW 130

Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910) The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse: Being an Explanation of Modern Mysteries (1853). Davis dictated his first and most significant book in trance in 1845: The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind.

Robert Fludd (1574–1637), English philosopher and physician, Rosicrucian
Apologia Compendaria, Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce … (1616)
Microcosmi Historia (1619)
Clavis Philosophiae et Alchymiae Fluddanae (1633)

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in his Divine Comedy

It was in 1716: M. Martin Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, London 1703
Martin Martin (?–1719), Scottish writer

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish scientist and philosopher

Stockholm: the place from which Swedenborg saw the conflagration was Goteborg, 400 km away from Stockholm.

Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 -1782), Swabian theologian and theosopher

Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817), German pietistic-mystic author

Joseph Ennemoser (1787–1854), physician and mesmerist

Johann Friedrich von Meyer (1772–1849), Protestant theologian, politician
Hades, a Contribution to the Theory of Spirits (1810) (link to German page as the article in the English wikipedia is insufficient)

Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), German physician, poet, author
History of Two Somnambulists (1824), The Seeress of Prevorst. Revelations of the Human Inner Life and about the Penetrations of the Spirit World into ours (1828), Leaves from Prevorst (1831–1839), The Somnambulistic Tables (1853)

Seeress of Prevorst: Friederike Hauffe (1801–1829), somnambulist, born in a little village, named Prevorst

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), German theologian and writer of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846)

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), 16th President of the United States

Thomas Edison (1847–1931), American inventor and businessman

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), British politician, Prime Minister

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), British naturalist

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), British mathematician and logician

Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878), German physician, founder of experimental psychology

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), German philosopher and experimental psychologist, the founder of psychophysics

Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834–1882),German astrophysicist. He explains that the spiritistic phenomena are caused in a four-dimensional space and appear as shadows in the three-dimensional space: Transcendental Physics (1878)

Henry Slade (1835–1905), fraudulent medium

Baron Lazar von Hellenbach (1827–1887), Austrian politician, philosophical and socio-political writer, famous spiritist. On the Magic of Figures (Vienna, 1882).

Allan Kardec (pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, 1804–1869), French spiritist, systematiser of spiritism

Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (1858–1889)

Archduke Johann Nepomuk Salvator of Austria (1852–1890?) Einblicke in den Spiritismus (Insights into Spiritism) (1885)

Oskar Simony (1852–1915), Austrian mathematician and physicist: On Spiritistic Manifestations from the Scientific Standpoint (1884), cf. R. Steiner mentions him in CW 169 Toward Imagination (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), lecture 6

Master Eckhart (~1260–1327), German Dominican monk and mystic, c f. R. Steiner CW 7 Mystics after Modernism

The aim of these lectures is to give a survey of what we are accustomed to call theosophy. Theosophy must become a new impulse of culture in an encompassing way. For a long time humanity has been yearning for it, and from many aspects it is called upon to give an answer to the burning questions now advanced by men. At the present time, however, theosophy is to a great extent something which people not only wish to oppose, but something which they look upon as questionable, even as mad, like the dreams of certain fantastic brains.

Of course, if they were to ask these dreamers what THEY seek through theosophy and what they expect from it, their answer will be a rather wide one. Those who have recognised the vital essence of theosophy, which modern people take to be mere dreams, look upon theosophy as something which in a few decades will have an immense significance for human thought and feeling, and for man' s will and actions.

There is nothing into which theosophy cannot shed its light as an impulse, nothing into which it is not called upon to shine.

It is a well known fact that at the present time there are many problems, hygienic, social or pedagogical problems, or women's suffrage, and even greater is the number of answers supplied to these questions. But if we investigate all these questions and answers in an objective way, we come to the conclusion that modern civilisation puts the questions rightly—for they are determined by the conditions of our time—but that our modern epoch is not able to supply the answers to these questions without further ado. One who shuts his eyes and ears to the problems of our time, will continually encounter obstacles along his path. A time will come when men will realise that they must face many other problems too: these problems arise out of the inner, and outer strife of humanity, out of all the pains and sufferings and out of the shattered hopes in every field. But only theosophy is able to supply an answer.

Ever greater grows the number of people who despondently bow their heads, who fulfil their duty, but do not know the reason for their work and whose nervous state of mind often culminates in despair, and even affects their physical health, ending in neurasthenic conditions.

Let us only allude to these things, for the fundamental idea which should rise up before us is that theosophy is not something which takes hold of the minds of a few lazy people, who have nothing better to do, but theosophy must penetrate into practical life.

During the thirty years of its existence, the Theosophical Society of course had to pass through many things and many an illness of childhood, which made people question its significance! But it will extricate itself from these illnesses and show what it is capable of. Spiritual science must become an all-encompassing concern, a universal task, because it must supply the answer to questions which are, after all, the fundamental questions of all existence, and it must point out the way in which modern men should grasp these questions and why religions and sciences exist at all. Whatever we do, and if art, science and practical activities are to exist at all, we must go back to certain fundamental questions, and these must in some way or other be solved. All religions were attempts to give an answer to such questions, an answer which was always in keeping with the intellectual and cultural stage of different peoples.

Theosophy does not wish to be a religion, it has nothing to do with sects and it does not agitate.

Religion, as you know, is as old as human endeavor. If we gain an insight into the different religions of different nations, we come to the conclusion that all these religions endeavoured to supply an answer to the questions: What is, in the first place, man's essential being? Secondly, what is his task and goal? and thirdly, what reaches beyond physical existence?

In regard to these questions, a strange epoch lies behind modern humanity, one which called into life many a doubt in religion. Let us ask: How many people are there to-day who need religion, but who are not able to have it? Some of us can look back into times when religion was still a truly experienced life, when it still counted far more, indeed in a much higher measure, than is the case to-day with single religiously disposed natures. These natures still possess something of that warm feeling which existed throughout thousands of years. The longing, the need for what we call the spiritual world, or the longing for religion, still exists to-day; indeed, among the most truth-loving natures this longing has even grown. Such a person may say to himself: When I was a child, I still had true faith. But then things changed: I become acquainted with so-called science and with its facts, and since science speaks in quite a different way, for instance, concerning the origin of the world, I seriously began to doubt that which I once believed in my childhood. And there followed a deeply sad mood in life; the soul felt as if it were torn and devastated, and when it looked out into the world, no light was shed upon the inner contrasts. This explains the torn state of mind swaying between religious longing and satisfaction of the soul, and it also explains the tragedy of modern man, But the strife of such souls is perhaps better than the other condition: namely, to ask nothing at all, to lose the habit of asking questions, to become superficial and just allow oneself to be driven along by ordinary life.

Is it the fault of religion that things have come to such a pass? No! It is plainly evident that this is not so, for every religion, even the ancient myths and legends, have means and ways to lead the heart once more towards the spiritual world to reanimate the soul, if the soul is willing.

Who would have thought that such mighty impulses from the ancient myths, which had apparently died out thousands of years ago, leading an almost hidden, unknown existence, could rise to new life, as is the case in Richard Wagner's dramas?

It is not necessary to found a new religion; the time for this has past. What is needed now, is a new attitude towards religion, a new understanding of religion! What has changed, is the human spirit, the human soul, the human heart!

If we immerse ourselves in the development of human souls, we shall find in the course of these lectures, that human souls have already lived many times upon the physical plane, and that they gradually developed, until they reached the present stage, At first, this may sound strange, yet during past lives our souls have frequently heard the deep truths which will be explained in to-day's lecture.

The teaching of reincarnation will, for instance, be advanced; but your souls have listened, as they are listening to me now, to the Druids who lived and taught particularly in this region. These druidic teachers of ancient times already taught the truth of reincarnation to a smaller circle; they cultivated this primordial wisdom concerning the riddles of life. They went out to those whose souls thirsted for a deeper knowledge. But if these teachers of ancient times had spoken as I am speaking to you now, your souls could not then have understood them, for at that time the human spirit had not yet reached the present stage of development. Logical thought did not as yet exist in the human spirit. Man possessed instead the possibility of grasping truths in the form of images. These teachers therefore spoke in the form of images, and these images are known to us to-day in the form of legends and myths. If in the past our souls had not heard these teachings, we could not understand the spiritual truths to-day, when they are taught to us in a new form.

The soul thus makes enormous progresses through thousands of years; it continually takes on a new shape and therefore truth must be presented in a constantly new form; it must ever again be proclaimed anew. Let me give you a second example.

Let us go back into, the evolution of humanity as far as the ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans and Babylonians. When these peoples were the bearers of culture they did not look upon the sun and the stars as mere physical bodies. To-day, when a materialistic astronomer contemplates the heavenly bodies, he only sees in them physical bodies, and nothing besides. Even the earth is to him a physical body in the world's spaces, and man crawls about upon it, like the gnat upon our hand.

But it was otherwise among the ancient Egyptian astronomers. When the ancient Egyptian astrologer looked upon a star, he did not think of a purely physical body, for the star meant to him something quite different than it does to modern men. When he pronounced, for instance, the name of Mercury, he uttered it with veneration. It never passed through his mind to address the physical heavenly body, just as you would not dream of addressing a body made of cardboard. Everything which the eye perceived was at that time the expression of something spiritual. For the ancient astronomer, the physical star Mercury was therefore the expression of the Spirit of Mercury. You must not grasp this intellectually, but with your feeling, for otherwise you cannot understand what lived in the soul of such an astronomer. Everything in the world was to him the expression of something spiritual. He said: Everything is Spirit, and I, as a spirit, am a part of this Spirit.

You should bear in mind this feeling of the sages of ancient times; we should endeavour to understand them, and grasp what they knew concerning the processes which took place in the spiritual spaces. Those who immerse themselves in this feeling, know how immensely superior is this conception to our modern materialistic one! It is necessary to understand the sages of olden times; we should find out what they knew concerning that which took place in the spiritual spaces of the universe, for then we begin to notice the tremendous difference between their conception and our modern one, and the enormous significance of those ancient teachings of wisdom! This may seem ridiculous to the materialistic sense of our time, which is only acquainted with the purely physical conception of astronomy—yet it is so.

How did it come about that man has now lost the understanding for the spiritual life which lies at the foundation of all physical existence? Why had this to occur?

Let us turn our gaze to our immediate surroundings. Were you able to compare man's present environment with that which once surrounded him at every step, you would find that at that time man only possessed the most necessary means of subsistence; but he had, on the other hand, more comprehension for spiritual things. This comprehension for the spiritual world had to withdraw in order to give man the possibility to acquire his present dominion over the earth. Every technical and industrial progress of the present time could only be achieved through a world-conception which had become materialistic, through the fact that the spirit, the super-sensible world, withdrew. At the cost of spiritual contemplation man gained, in the course of the last centuries, his rule over the physical world. It is a primordial, eternal law of humanity that capacities acquired in one sphere, can only be gained by the withdrawal of others upon another sphere. For instance, man could never have called into life the possibilities of travel and communication had other capacities not withdrawn. The sense for spiritual things had to withdraw, in order that everything which now surrounds us might arise. All that once filled the human soul had to withdraw, to render possible the conquest of the physical world.

Thus we see that around the 16th century men lost the vision of the spiritual world, and we see how the materialistic conception took hold of humanity. Those who believe that they themselves do not live in the very midst of such materialism are greatly mistaken.

It is not the task of spiritual science to deny or renounce things; it does not intend to criticise the bad world of to-day; but it wishes to indicate the necessity of man's descent into matter. The great horizon of spiritual life had to withdraw from humanity while this descent took place, and this explains why man lost the old way of comprehending spiritual things. The truths exist in their old, earlier forms. Spiritual science can show how those truths can be rendered accessible to modern men. This is its chief aim. Consequently theosophy is merely the instrument whereby the deepest truths can be rendered accessible to the modern human spirit, in order that they may be grasped in their full depth.

To-day it is once more necessary to draw attention to the Spirit. We should not content ourselves with pointing out the “magnificent progress” of modern times! Spiritual truth is always accessible to us, and we must comprehend it in different ways.

If we turn back to ancient India and Egypt, and to ancient Greece at the time when Christianity arose, we always come across the same ancient truths, in different forms. There were always leaders of humanity who took care that the truths which had paled with the decay of civilisations should, at given times, be communicated anew. All the great founders of religion can be found among such leaders.

Before the dawn of our modern epoch, before the time of Copernicus and the 16th century, care was taken also in Europe to establish the foundation for a new way of proclaiming spiritual truths. Around the 16th century, lived certain people who were able to interpret the signs of the times. As early as 1459, a higher spiritual individuality, known in the external world as Christian Rosenkreutz, founded, with quite a small number of men, an occult school for the cultivation of wisdom, of ancient wisdom, but in a form suited to modern men. This is the wisdom of the Rosicrucians, cultivated for the first time around 1459. As stated, this wisdom is nothing new; it is the ancient primeval wisdom, but in a form suited to modern men.

What is the connection between this Rosicrucian wisdom and Christianity? There is no difference between the genuine Christian teachings and those of the Rosicrucians. If we grasp Christianity in its essence, we obtain the theosophy of the Rosicrucians. It is not necessary to found a new religion, but Christianity should be grasped in the way in which the early Christians grasped it. Only a few people still know something concerning the mysteries of the early Christian development. Even official theology has not the slightest idea of this. We come across St.Paul, as a man who had a deep knowledge of the Christian mysteries, who taught those mighty truths which were to guide humanity throughout thousands of years. At Athens, St. Paul had founded a school, whose leader was Dionysios thc Areopagite. Dionysios was a genuine disciple of St. Paul.

The teachings of Dionysios have always remained alive, and they have always been taught, particularly to those who had to bring Christ's living Word out into thc world. Had men stopped at Dionysios' standpoint, no new form would have been required. But the new era dawned, and with it arose the necessary of proclaiming these truths in such a way that no science could raise any objection against them. This is the aim of the Rosicrucian theosophy. Rosicrucian theosophy is therefore that form of religion which is suited to our time.

Only those who understand Christianity in the right way, can have an idea of its living content.

If we were in the position to hear from every side that which Rosicrucian theosophy had to say in connection with true Christianity, we would discover that scientific facts do not contradict these descriptions. The chief thing to bear in mind is that there should be no contradiction between religion and scientific facts, and that these scientific facts should harmonise with religion.

What does the Rosicrucian theosophy wish to give us? The knowledge of higher worlds, that is to say, of the worlds to which man will belong, when his physical body shall have decayed. It gives him the knowledge of life, the knowledge of the true nature of death and of human development. In this way, it can give him new strength in regard to religious truths and religious life.

No one should say: I stand firmly upon the foundation of the ancient teachings, and these suffice for me ... What do I care for those who doubt!—No opinion can be more selfish or un-Christian that this! It is still possible to-day for a certain number of men to live upon the foundation of old religions, but in a not too distant future this will no longer be possible. Those who have an insight into that which great social upheavals throw up to the surface, cannot judge in this way. They will realise that it is not possible to quarrel over the fact that theosophy must be proclaimed.

Thinking men know that spiritual science exists in order to supply an answer to the most burning questions, and that it is actually able to reply to all these questions. After all, one can prove or disprove anything, but this is not the essential point: It is impossible to quarrel over a REMEDY; the essential point is the success which we achieve with it. It is exactly the same with spiritual science. Humanity needs spirituality as a remedy, and it can only recover from its illnesses if this remedy streams into it. It is an evolutionary factor of our civilisation, and a giver of life.

Our modern way of living does not suffice, for it is directed exclusively towards physical-bodily things. The aim of theosophy is the health and recovery of Soul and Spirit. Spiritual science is nothing arbitrary; our present time and its problems call for it. All that it tells us, constitutes the teaching of those men who were able to make investigations in this sphere.

Spiritual science leads us into higher worlds, into which no physical eye can look, and which contain the causes of the effects to be found in the physical world. It will bring us knowledge of the external part of human nature, of every individuals essential being, the knowledge of the spiritual worlds and their hierarchies.

As we learn to know these, we also learn to know man's mission and significance. What we should endeavour to grasp is the true essence of human nature. We shall learn to know worlds which exist, but which cannot be perceived through our ordinary physical senses. Some might say: What you are telling us is very fine, but we cannot really know anything about it.—Fichte has already supplied an answer to this objection. Imagine that you were to enter a world of blind-born men, as the only one endowed with sight, and that you were to describe colours to these blind men ... These men will say: You are telling us nonsense; colours do not exist. But if the blind could be operated on, so as to give them the power of sight, they would be able to experience this world of colours and of light.

The same argument applies to the above objection. Those who raise it, adopt the same standpoint of the blind. No one should therefore say: Such things do not exist ... For no man has the right to speak of “limits of knowledge”, as did Du Bois-Reymond. As many worlds exist, as there are organs able to perceive them, and this is an infinite number of worlds! We are unable to perceive them to-day, because we still lack the organs of perception. The world is not only spatially infinite, but also intensively infinite: These is a world for every organ of sense. These worlds are still inaccessible to us yet they exist,—they exist, where we ourselves exist. The only thing needed is that our eyes should be opened, for these worlds are in our very midst.

The words of Christ: “Do not seek the Kingdom of God, for the Kingdom of God is in your midst”, should be taken literally. Also spiritual science speaks in this sense of the spiritual worlds. There have always been initiates who knew how to enter these kingdoms of heaven. Every religion speaks of these kingdoms. Spiritual science is but the means of disclosing anew this fundamental truth contained in every religion: Whatever we see and perceive round about us, is but the result and the effect of what takes place in the spiritual worlds. Whatever manifests itself upon the earth, is but the development of that which works and lives in the spiritual worlds.

Official Christianity has long ago lost the capacity of understanding the depths of religious documents. Spiritual science therefore had to take over the task of supplying the key to the forgotten treasures of knowledge, thus offering humanity, which is standing at the parting of thc roads, the remedy which it needs. Yet spiritual science does not know fanaticism; it simply relates and clearly sets forth man's being; it indicates his destiny after death, and how his soul develops outside the physical body. It describes that which takes place in the higher worlds; it speaks of the evolutionary stages of the earth and of the other planets, and it throws light upon the life-path trodden by man so far, and upon his future path. It points to that which man must still pass through, in order that he may reach his goal.

We shall try to grasp man's being and the nature of the worlds from which he comes. This is the sphere of knowledge to which spiritual science leads us.

Now we might object that all this only exists for the so-called clairvoyant seer, who is able to look into the spiritual worlds. Of what use is it to us, for these worlds are not accessible to us!

To this objection we can reply: There are, to be sure, certain methods of training which are only suited to the spiritual investigator, which make the above objection seem justified. But the path of Rosicrucian training is a different one. The clairvoyant eye and the ear of an initiate are of course needed if we wish to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, but our ordinary logic suffices to understand them. All that the spiritual investigator describes to us, is accessible to our logical reason; our sound common sense suffices for the comprehension of such things. Those who cannot grasp them, simply lack logical power. For the discovery of spiritual mysteries the clairvoyant eye of the spiritual investigator is of course needed, but our ordinary logic suffices in order to understand the things described in Rosicrucianism.

Those who cannot understand these things, should not ascribe their lack of understanding to the Rosicrucian training. Their failure does not depend upon the fact that they are not clairvoyant, but because their understanding is not sound and their thought is not consistent. Many people have no idea of logic. There is a modern musician, for instance, who even said that it is a mistake to think over things ... Even our scientists do not think beyond a certain limit. But if we use our understanding in the right way, we are able to grasp spiritual truths and spiritual wisdom, and they can become alive within us. If you keep on asking: Of what use are these things to us? I can give you the following reply:—Nothing can be given to us which is of greater importance than the knowledge of spiritual science! This alone transforms us into real human beings and gives us, even at the present time, a contented heart and a soul that has reached harmony.

With more words we do not proceed far in this field, for the striving after knowledge is an earnest matter and we must immerse ourselves in the necessities and problems of life. We must endeavour to pass on courageously from one sphere of spiritual life to the other, for this will give us an insight into the whole evolution of the universe and of man. The overwhelming greatness of these events will not only take hold of our hearts, but awaken new capacities within us; which render us more capable to face the tasks of everyday life. Direct forces stream out of spiritual science, and these become a treasure which cannot be lost and which transforms us into creative man beings.

You will understand the physical world, only if you learn to know the spiritual world. Spiritual science is not meant for cranks, but for the most practical of the practical!

Every form of life is spiritual. Even as ice is condensed water, so matter is condensed spirit. Mineral, plant, animal, or man—each is a condensed form of the spirit.

In this sense, the Rosicrucian theosophy will lead us to understand the spiritual foundations of the world. It does not change us into brooding egotists, but into lovers of life, for it does not despise ordinary life, nor estrange us from our earthly tasks, but it unites us with them. It stimulates us to diligent activity, for it knows that every action, as well as every Being, is an expression of the Spirit.

Text from Rudolf Steiner's original manuscript ¹
Notebook archive number 612

All metal objects of value, determined by the conditions of the external world, are taken from the person to be initiated: jewelry, money, etc. This removes him from the context of the physical world and its laws. He must feel detached from the value that his own soul does not give him.

Then the person to be initiated is led to the gate, accompanied by the person acting as his guide. Before reaching the gate, a bandage is tied before his eyes. Upon the knock of the initiating personality (..-² ) the following conversation ensues between the initiating personality and the personality received in the inner room:

Question: Who knocks ardently at our door?

Answer: A free man (a free woman) who wants to be admitted to the mystical temple of wisdom, beauty and strength, to sacrifice and serve the spirit in communion with the older brothers of humanity.

Question: What is his (her) name?

Answer: Name.

Question: Who vouches for him (for her)?

Answer: The names of two guarantors.

Question: Are all conditions fulfilled?

Answer: They are fulfilled.

The recipient: He (she) enters.

The initiate is led by the introducer in spirals into the “room of self-knowledge”. Here he is addressed by an older initiate in the following way:

So, we are at the right place. I come from the universe of Canis Major. I met this soul on the way that leads from the north. She has discarded her body. She has arrived at the gate of death. $o listen, soul, now to the spirit, which wants to and can lead you to your full human dignity. Since you are no longer afflicted with senses and a mind that draws its strength from a body, your gaze no longer encounters the things and occurrences in your surroundings through which the spirit, which I have had to fight since the beginning of the earth, robs you of your freedom and only wants to make you a serving member of its own being. In your environment, nothing lives of its creation, which you always had to encounter in the sense body when you turned your gaze outwards. So my opponent instilled his essence into your soul; you were not yourself; you were filled with his essence within. Now you can draw everything you experience from within yourself; now you can be master, sole master in the world, which creates itself from within you. Only now will you know yourself completely, will you live in your human dignity. So feel yourself. Be yourself. When you fully understand yourself, you cannot help but find your home in the world to which I have led you. So, self-aware, you penetrate from my opponent's creation into your own world, here where everything is silent around you.

There is complete silence for a while. Silent calm reigns... This is interrupted after some time by heavy knocks (.. -).

The mystic who has just spoken continues:

My opponent, whom I have been fighting since the beginning of the earth, is approaching. He wants to oust me from this place. It is he who wants to make your soul a limb of his being. If you follow him, you will lose your human dignity. You will become a slave to his being. But for now I must give way to him. Do not fall for him, soul!

The mystic who performs the service at the altar of the East now begins to speak:

I have recognized in you, O soul, that the temptations of the spirit that has been fighting me since the beginning of the earth have given you a tendency towards his words. He was able to make you feel that it was good for your human dignity to follow him. I, the Spirit of the East, am now standing here before you. My opponent has now had to give way for me. Around me stand the judges of the terrible court of the dead. I ask them: What should be done with the soul, at the bottom of which I see an inclination towards the spirit that has been fighting me since the beginning of the earth?

The surrounding mystics answer:

You have to bring this soul to hell.

The servant-mystic of the East:

You bring this soul to hell.

Then the one to be received is led again in a spiral circle into a room that represents hell. One hears the clanking of chains and the locking of a door when the one to be received arrives in the room.

The mystic from the East now speaks:

You soul, you are in the place where the longing of your soul can be fulfilled. You are in your own world. Henceforth you will never again come across a creation with your gaze that does not originate from your own soul. You will live entirely in your own world and will be able to be the sole master in it. But know that you will live in your isolated world for all eternity. But you will never be able to find anything, not even anything of all that has become dear and precious to you in the world into which I have led you. For all eternity you will not learn anything about beings that you have grown fond of, that you would have liked to help. They will never be able to learn anything from you. In all future time you will know nothing but only yourself. And so also recognize the silence, the loneliness, which will surround you endlessly from the outside. And know that the further you will only live in yourself, the more dreadful your life will be. You will look into an empty future eternity, in which you will be able to enjoy nothing but only your own being! This life with a view into eternity will become more terrible the more you live towards it. Your inclination towards my opponent has condemned you to this; the judges of my terrible court of the dead have only put into words what your soul has condemned itself to. But I may, by virtue of the grace that also radiates from the East, now show you once more what you have gone through on earth. Perhaps your soul will develop a different inclination when you, armed with insight into everything that my opponent promised you and what I have to impose on you here, see once again what you have become. Therefore I will guide you through your earthly past and show your soul what my messengers from the east have granted you during your earthly course so that you could become what you are now. I have sent them, these wise messengers of mine; now they may once more bring to your ears what they have accomplished in you during your earthly course.

Again the chains are heard to clink violently, and the lock (of hell) opens with a loud noise.

A mystic appointed for this purpose calls out the words:

The journey backwards through life is now to begin. While the person being initiated is led back through the spiral paths, the mystic who has already spoken the last words says the following:

1. Man walks through his whole life in darkness; only the knowledge of the spirit can snatch him from darkness.

2. If the soul is driven to the spirit only by curiosity or a thirst for knowledge, it will not find the spirit. For only those beings find the spirit who recognize that they do not belong to themselves, but to the world, and who therefore feel the duty within themselves to make themselves as perfect as possible as a member of the world as a whole. Duty of knowing the spirit: you shall feel it.

3. If you do not want to penetrate so deeply into human souls that all earthly differences disappear before your gaze, and you see all people as they present themselves without differences, one like the other, you cannot come to knowledge; for this is attained only by the one who sees all people as equal, without the differences that the world, steeped in darkness, has imprinted on them.

4. If the soul is not inclined to hold up her weaknesses and errors in clear observation, she will not find the way to spiritual knowledge; for every unrecognized error is an obstacle that stands in the way of knowledge.

After the candidate has heard these four sentences during his spiral walk, a staircase is placed in his path, which he has to climb. Having reached the top step, he is made to fall down on the other side. During this ascent and fall, the following words are spoken by the appointed mystic:

You also sought to find the light for your soul on your previous path; but you climbed the heights of the path of life in darkness. This ascent makes you visually aware of your ascent in darkness. You can only reach the heights of life by following the light received from the spirit; without it you must fall, as you are falling now.

After this, the person to be initiated is led to the two pillars that are located at the entrance to the room that symbolizes the ancient Atlantic land. The person to be initiated is placed in front of these pillars; and the appointed mystic speaks the following:

You have traveled backwards through the incarnations you have lived through since the great Atlantic catastrophe with the gaze of your soul. Now you have arrived at the epoch of this catastrophe. You stand at the Pillars of Hercules, which once led from the east to the northwest into the old Atlantic land. Consider that you have gone through further previous incarnations in this Atlantean land. You lived through these under completely different conditions than the later ones in the post-Atlantean time. The Atlantean land was shaped in such a way that the ground was filled with dense water fog vapors. Within the constant water fog, you lived in a completely different human form than later in the post-Atlantean time. In this time, the air had become free from the constant water vapor. Accordingly, the whole perception and experience of man had changed. The post-Atlantic time is the air test of humanity; the process of incarnations of the Atlantic time is the water test of humanity. During the test of the air, the messengers of the good spirit from the East have allowed the simple but deeply meaningful principles you have heard to flow into all the life of your soul. These principles are the impulses that lead all souls to good, which the wise men of the East always saw before them as if written in gold in the spiritual writing of the world; through them they wanted to lead your soul to salvation. But my opponent, who fights against me, has mixed his impulses into everything that was permeated by these impulses, and these impulses have always implanted corruption instead of salvation. If you could now turn your gaze towards the east and the reality would appear to you in the spirit, you would see my eagle in the bright heights, which wanted to bring you the wisdom of the east. But beneath him you would see my opponent's vulture, which has so influenced your thinking that wisdom must become a consuming power for you, and destroy you by wasting your strength to the extent that you sought to attain wisdom by earthly thinking.

If you could turn the gaze of your soul towards the south, you would see in the heights of light my angel, who was to bring your feeling the revelation of beauty; but my opponent points you to the owl below, which must add to the revelation of spiritual beauty the forces that, when your soul dwells outside the body at night while you sleep, implant in it the urge which rebels against beauty and wants to lead your feelings away from the revelation of the spiritual. If you could turn the soul's gaze to the west, you would see in the light heights my lion, as the messenger who could have endowed your soul with the power that comes from the spirit and that would make you spiritually strong; but below my lion you would see my opponent's black raven, which implants in your soul the urge to always cover up spiritual power with physical strength.

Thus, by going through the post-Atlantic incarnations, your soul could never have received unmixed, unmixed, what the wise messengers of the progressing world spirits wanted to give you. They received it mixed with the disastrous gifts of my opponent, who has been fighting me since the beginning of the earth.

After this, the mystic who has led the person to be received into the “space of self-knowledge” enters again. He speaks the following:

You have entered the time of the Atlantic catastrophe, in which you are wandering backwards with your soul's gaze. This is the time when the spirit, which I have had to fight since the beginning of the earth, cannot completely silence me. So now I can also tell your soul what you have received from me in your post-Atlantic incarnations. Without me you would never have attained the knowledge that your mind acquired by freely observing the creatures and events on earth. For He, who directs the cosmic order I am fighting against, wanted to instill His wisdom alone into your mind; He wanted to live in your thinking, feeling and willing. Only He Himself wanted to live in you; you were to represent only Him in your life. Your speech was to resound with His glory alone. I have so permeated your speech with My Being that you can express your impulses of thinking, feeling and willing in speaking. I have caused my brother, who, like me, has been fighting that other spirit since the beginning of the earth, to enable you to preserve in writing on earth what could only live under the other spirit's sole guidance in the words he had permeated, and what would have to perish with the word. So judge what has made you what you are in the course of the post-Atlantic incarnations. Judge what you would be today without speech, which can express not only the supersensible but also, through me, the sensible, without writing. I am the Bringer of Earthly Culture; without me you would be the image of a divine spirit; but not a freer, self-representing earthman.

After this has been spoken, the other mystic who spoke before this last one appears again. This one now says the following:

I will now lead your soul through the Pillars of Hercules into the ancient Atlantic land. There you will see in soul pictures what you have experienced in your Atlantean incarnations, but which you have completely forgotten, while you have become accustomed to looking at earthly conditions in the way that was made possible for you by my opponent's influence. It was only in the post-Atlantean and final Atlantean periods that his influence became noticeably greater. Before that, mine prevailed in your soul. You were closer to my nature in the water-mist life than later. Thus you will be able to gauge from what entered your life at that time what he is to you; and what the spirit I serve can be to you. - For your perception at that time, wisdom spoke from all things and processes of the three realms of nature immersed in the water mist. At present, your soul only recognizes articulate, meaningful language from the mouths of humans. The source, the waves of water, the leaves of the forest trees swirling in the wind do not speak meaningful language. But they did in the ancient Atlantean times. And your soul was able to commune with all the beings of nature. It was still close to the “wisdom of the world” at the time of the test of humanity's ability to live in harmony with the water. And when the soul went within, when it withdrew its attention from what all things expressed, then, too, when man withdrew into solitude, where things did not speak, the soul heard a fundamental or intermediate tone that resounded through everything. When the soul heard this sound, then with the sound all the warmth of the world's existence streamed into it, and the light of the world-creative powers streamed into it. The soul was filled with the all-pervading wisdom. It said, intuitively sensing what was there: “The great spirit speaks.” The soul became devout and reverent when it felt the “great spirit” flowing within it. Thus spoke the great spirit......; and as in an echo, the soul spoke with the great spirit in adoration and worship;......; so was the dialogue of the soul with the great spirit in the old Atlantean times:...... ..... ..... Your soul has forgotten this dialogue; I have reminded her of it.

But now, through your journey through life on earth, you are gradually arriving at the place where the spirit was very close, which the other has been fighting since the beginning of time. I have placed this temple room in this place, which can only be reached through the depths of the soul. When the bandage is removed from your eyes, you will be surrounded by images that show your soul what surrounded you at the moment you stepped out of the spiritual world into an earthly incarnation for the first time. You will be able to “choose” again. When your soul chose for the first time, it incorporated into its developmental impulses those of my adversary. Thus the secrets of spiritual existence had to be veiled from it.

The person to be initiated is now led into the actual temple room, which is made completely dark at this moment. The Mystos, who serves the altar of the East, now speaks the words of consecration, which are intended to make the soul aware of the direction of its journey through space and time.

These words are followed by those which the soul should feel within itself in order to know how to feel correctly towards the essence of the first degree:

I vow and promise that I will keep myself in the spirit of the first occult degree without duplicity, weakness, or ambiguity, and that I will also keep myself in this spirit with respect to outsiders of this degree. Should I not conduct myself in the spirit of what I promise myself, then what I myself must then allow through full awareness will be fulfilled in my soul................³

The mystic serving the altar of the East continues:

You soul, bear in mind that you have left behind, at the gates of this room, everything that receives its value from the external world, in which my opponent also works with me. Here you can achieve nothing through all this; only your soul can work here, which makes use of nothing of all this for its work. What can serve you for work here is expressed in the symbolic garment that is now being put on you by my helpers.

The symbolic garment of the first degree is put on the person to be initiated.

In the completely dark room, a light is now lit. The mystos standing at the side of the one serving at the altar of the East receives this light in his hand and stands close in front of the person to be initiated. Behind him stands another designated mystos.

The mystos in the East speaks:

What is the soul seeking in this room?

The surrounding mystics answer in chorus:

The light of the spirit.

The mystic in the east says:

The light of the spirit will appear to this soul when it will penetrate through the right attitude into everything that speaks to it here.

In this moment, the mystic standing behind the person to be received removes the bandage from the eyes of the person to be received; the light only remains for moments; then it goes out of the mystic carrying it.

The person being initiated is in the completely dark room.

This is immediately followed by the opening ceremony associated with the lighting of the lights in the east, south and west. - - - ³

After this, the symbolic signs and words are explained and communicated, which the person to be initiated should become aware of in the sense of processes in the etheric body of man, so that he can feel himself to be a member of the first degree through their communication.

Then the person to be initiated is led before the altar of the East by two designated mystics. The mystic serving the East mimes the... sign; two mystics of the higher degrees join him; they cross their sword-like symbols above the forehead of the person to be initiated: the mystic of the East speaks:

In the name of the wise masters of the East and by the power with which I serve them, I inscribe you in the book of the first degree of those who strive for the light of eternal mysticism.

The candidate is led by the appointed mysts to the place assigned to him.

The ceremony is now interrupted and an instruction ceremony is inserted. During this, a teaching mystic imparts to the person to be initiated:

1. the legend, which interprets the evolution of humanity in symbolic terms.⁴

2. A sign of the occult writing.⁵

After this instruction, the ceremony is resumed to end with the same three symbolic conclusions that conclude all the ceremonies of the first degree.

• 1. The various dots in the text correspond to the original manuscript.
• 2. ..- = short-short-long.
• 3. See the explanation on page 245.
• 3. On page 153.
• 4. The Temple Legend
  According to Rudolf Steiner's lecture in Berlin on November 4, 1904, the legend goes back to Christian Rosenkreutz, the founder of Rosicrucianism in the 14th/15th century. However, he did not explain how the original Rosicrucian legend became the basis for the entire Freemasonry, but he did remark in his lecture Berlin, November 11, 1904, that Freemasonry had joined forces with the Rosicrucians. This probably also explains the term “Rosicrucian-Masons” in certain ritual texts by Rudolf Steiner.
  In Masonic literature, the origin of the Temple Legend is generally placed in the early 18th century because it first appeared in literature at that time. Although it is assumed that it must have been part of the ideas of Freemasonry at an earlier time, this has not been proven by documentation. There is no unequivocal version of the wording. In the various traditions, there are always variants.
  It first became known outside of Freemasonry in the 19th century, once through the literary adaptation by Gérard de Nerval (pseudonym for Gérard Labrunie, Paris 1828–1858), which appeared in mid-19th century in Paris and was translated into German by Manfred Krüger (“Die Geschichte der Königin aus dem Morgenland und von Soliman, dem Fürsten der Genien”, Stuttgart 1967), and by Charles William Heckethorn in his work “Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries”, London 1875, first German translation “Geheime Gesellschaften, Geheimbünde und Geheimlehren”, Leipzig 1900. The version contained in this work was used by Rudolf Steiner in the lectures of the volume “The Legend of the Temple and the Golden Legend” (GA 93).
  In 1923, in connection with the esoteric lessons for the “Wachsmuth-Lerchenfeld Group”, Rudolf Steiner suggested to the two participating writers Kurt Piper and Albert Steffen that they artistically interpret the legend. Before Rudolf Steiner's death (March 1925), Albert Steffen's drama “Hieram and Solomon” was created, in which he also incorporated parts of the Golden Legend. It was first published in 1925 in the weekly journal “Das Goetheanum”. In 1935, Marie Steiner's production of the play premiered on the stage of the Goetheanum; in 1937, it was performed at the World's Fair in Paris as a guest performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Kurt Piper created a cycle of poems based on the legend, “Kain und Abel-Seth. Mysterienlegende in 10 Tafeln am Grabe Rudolf Steiners”, published in the monthly journal “Die Drei” 6. Jg. 1926/27, 1. Heft.
• 5. A note from Marie Steiner reads: “Now it is my responsibility to communicate the sign, grip and word of the first degree. - The sign, grip and word are not only identifying marks; they not only have a deep symbolic meaning, but also a magical effect and magical value. An old masonic saying rightly says: To him who knows the sign, grip and word, the temple is built; but he who does not recognize them remains eternally blind in life.

My dear brothers and sisters! It is not possible, again today, to repeat the introductory words, despite the fact that a number of new members of this esoteric school are present who were not here before. For this reason, I must require that when the newly admitted members of the school receive the mantras from other members, in accordance with the instructions which I shall refer to at the conclusion of today’s session, they must feel themselves duty bound to have explained to them, by those who impart the verses, the conditions for membership in this school. It will now be necessary to continue where we left off the last time.

To begin with let us once again allow those words to come before our soul which sound forth to any open-minded human soul from all beings of the world and from all living processes of the world. What lies in the following words sounds forth to the human being from everything around him; all things have spoken thus to man in the past, all things speak thus to him in the present, all things will speak thus to him in the future.

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?

We saw how someone who takes this in comes to feel the longing arising out of the word which speaks to him from all things and from all processes in the world, the longing to take leave of the majestic, shining world of the senses and to enter into that world which exists beyond the yawning abyss, the world which at first looms up before the human soul as black, night-bedecked darkness. For the solution, the true solution of the riddle of man the hope arises that everything in external life that is bathed in radiant, gleaming light may grow dark so that the light which is in the world where our true self is to be found may shine forth from the world of being that at first appears to be black, night-bedecked darkness.

And as we approached in thought and feeling along the path, we saw the figure of the Guardian of the Threshold brightly forming up, clarifying its existence in our awareness as if from a spiritual cloud. We heard him speak, for everything that is spoken here sounds forth out of spiritual worlds, sounds forth at the behest of Michael, the leader of the spiritual stream of mankind at the present time, for this school is the true Michael School. And the Guardian spoke about human self-awareness. But then he uttered words which at first have a crushing effect upon the soul.

The Guardian called us to himself, to stand close by him. He gazes toward us, beholding us with earnest countenance. He shows us how our willing, our feeling, our thinking appear, at least as imaginations of what is envisioned by the gods. There it is not yet human, this willing, this feeling, this thinking; there it is still animalistic. There acquaintanceship with oneself is still bewildering, shattering. But we must penetrate out of their misconception by means of that aspect of ourselves that is conjured up, which in our time, in our world era has been placed in us, for by means of this we can press onward to true self-awareness.

This misconception, familiarity with that aspect of ourselves that we carry about within us in the spirit of our era, is shown to us by the Guardian as he allows the first beast to rise out of the yawning abyss of existence, the beast that depicts willing. His hand then sweeps again instructively over the abyss of existence, showing the second beast rising up, the beast that depicts feeling. And then once again the hand sweeps instructively over the yawning abyss of existence, allowing the third beast to rise up, the beast that depicts thinking.

They rise up one after the other. The first beast, initially the true spirit-gestalt of our willing, is produced by fear of knowing, fear that can only be overcome through courage, courage concerning spiritual awareness. Just so the second beast appears, born out of hatred of knowing, lurking in the underground reaches of the soul in all human beings, only to be overcome by dignified enthusiasm for knowing, by truly soul-filled fire for knowing. Living in souls today is lukewarm indolence toward inner awareness, indeed, hatred in relation to inner acquaintanceship, because of mental laxity and laziness. Then also comes the third beast in his ghostly character, produced by doubts about the spiritual world, doubts which gnaw today at the roots of human souls, doubts that can only be weakened and made to yield when inner knowing wakes the strength in itself to attain those things which exist outside in the spiritual world. The Guardian speaks about this at the yawning abyss of being once we have drawn near to him:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
Your fire of knowing must tame it.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

[The mantra, including the underlinings, was now written on the blackboard:]

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
Your fire of knowing must tame it.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

When the Guardian has shown us this staggering picture, confronting us presently in answer to the challenge, “O Man, know yourself,” once the Guardian has shown us this picture, he approaches us to give us a clarification, which now can begin to set us straight, a clarification of the third beast, that is interwoven in our thinking, of the second beast interwoven in our feeling, and of the first beast interwoven in our willing. And he gives us a sort of lesson in what he initially says to us. He points out to us how we should feel our way correctly into our human earth-thinking.

My dear brothers and sisters, even exoterically one feels that this thinking, suitable in relationship to things and processes of the world, is somewhat abstract, somewhat shadowy, somewhat unreal. What actually is this thinking?

As a picture we must place in our mind’s eye what this thinking really is. We place there a corpse, a corpse which has only a short time ago been left by the soul and spirit of a human being. We examine this corpse. It can never arise in the world as it is now. It can be nothing for itself, but can only be left over from a living person. It must have been due to the person, who must himself have configured it. Death lies there; life has withdrawn; the corpse lies in the coffin. Let us keep firm hold of this image.

Our soul-spiritual life, which is our own true human essence, was alive before it descended from the divine spiritual world through conception and birth into a physical earthly human body. When it was in the spiritual world it was no shadowy, abstract thinking, but soul-spirit-being, living, moving, fashioning, working, weaving, continuing. There it was alive. Then it descended into a human body. But it died while descending. The human body is its coffin. And the thinking that we have between birth and death is the corpse of that living thinking that we had before we descended into earthly existence.

My dear brothers and sisters, we rightly experience thinking’s esoteric essence only when we experience it in this way, and only then can we struggle upward, gradually, gradually overcoming the ghostly gestalt of the third beast. Only then can we rise ever nearer and nearer to the pure angelic gestalt of true thinking, the dead after-image of which whiles away, weaves, works, and dwells¹ in our physical, earthly body.

As long as we regard thinking as somewhat alive, we are not being truthful. Only when we look at our body as the coffin of dead thinking, only when we feel this thoroughly, only then are we truthful. So the Guardian of the Threshold speaks to us in his words, which we will hear and can use as mantric verse. He speaks them to us in special intimacy.

And when we pass by our thinking to view our feeling, then we must see and feel how the sort of customary feeling, which we believe to be living within us between birth and death, is only half-living, how this feeling works continually to consume us, how it somehow continually kills us, how it pointedly drags us away from spirit. Thinking is dead, but in us our half-alive feeling is basically only picture-formation. Only when we feel this contrast in our feeling, that this earth-feeling is a weak, half-living reflection of the might of the sun, which as universal world love the cosmic feeling streams through the whole cosmos, then we feel the contrast of feeling correctly. In this manner the Guardian of the Threshold speaks to us confidentially, intimately.

And not until we feel a similar contrast in willing, that it undoubtedly lives in us, but that that it is continuously being tampered with and bogged down by hostile opposing spiritual powers, who intend that its force should not be in service to overarching godliness, but rather to physicality below, not until we actually feel these opposing powers, that in our willing continuously would like to divert us from our proper godly task and ensnarl us entirely and solely in awareness of our earth existence, only then can we really feel these opposing powers trying to take possession of our willing, trying to have the future of the earth in their power. If they were to succeed, if we are not steadfastly on guard that our willing remains hallowed to godliness, not to Ahrimanic earth-powers, then on earth the gods themselves would be disputed, the gods who actually tended earth-existence from the very beginning.

The Guardian says this to us in clarification of the three beasts:

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit-fields.

The second beast’s mocking face
Is the bad contrary-force
Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

The first beast’s boney mind,
Is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

[The mantra was now written on the blackboard and a few words were underlined]

The Guardian speaks:
The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type

(it is merely an image)

Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit-fields.

The second beast’s mocking face
Is the bad contrary-force

(the first is image, the second force)

Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

The first beast’s bony mind,
Is the bad creative-might

(the progression: image or type, force, might)

Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

Ever more the Guardian at the gaping abyss of being leads us nearer to true self-knowledge, which can only dawn for us when light arises yonder in the black, night-bedecked darkness. In this regard he shows us in different ways, what he first showed us in the formation of the beasts, and then in the formation of the corresponding mantric verses, and now again delineates, in order that we may come ever closer and closer to self-awareness, so that we may gain wings with which to cross the abyss of being, for we are not able to cross over with human feet, with heavy human feet, which means with external illusions, with maya-reality.

So the Guardian makes us aware, after he has given us these mantric verses intimately, he makes us aware of how we should proceed in using empathy in delving into our thinking, how we should feel our thinking and not just see it as objectively existing, for there we no longer weave the fabric of our thoughts as illusion, as we do in the sort of thinking that we engage in as men and women of earth, but rather as something else than appearance. Self-aware existence means our true actual existence, that does not actually live in thinking, but conceals itself in thinking, so says the Guardian. One can do nothing except to plunge into the appearance of thinking, ever further, then as one plunges deep into and disperses oneself with the soul beneath the appearance of thinking, one arrives into immeasurable world-ether.

There, where our aware-self feels itself just minimally hovering in appearance, there we should honor the guiding beings of the higher hierarchies that guide us. There we feel that we need these guiding beings of the higher hierarchies.

Then the Guardian admonishes, that we should turn from thinking to feeling, experiencing, finding with empathy feeling streaming within us. Thinking is still entirely appearance. In feeling, however, we stand at least halfway close to our existence. In feeling we come deeper into our intrinsic existence than we do in thinking, although we are not yet fully within. We are halfway into our proper being when we are feeling, for feeling has some ambiguity, not total ambiguity, for it mingles semblance and substance. The aware-self that we seek, here in the proper sense genuine aware-self, simply leans toward semblance. Now we should plunge into the semblance of existence, into an existence that only seems to be, into a semblance that is energized halfway toward existence. There we will grasp world forces that now are not merely semblance, but rather halfway existing as world soul forces. There we should consider well in this moving web of our intrinsic weaving, moving being in the weaving moving world ether, there we should consider well the life powers intrinsic to the soul, that we cannot consider in thinking, for thinking is semblance only.

Then we should plunge into willing, which we feel as existence, existence concealed within us. We are unable to inwardly grasp it. But the will is effective as thrusting and crafting existence. The will climbs from all apparent being and equips our autonomous existence, our true autonomous existence, meant here as autonomous existence in the best sense. We should turn our life to this. It is filled with world-spirit-might. Our intrinsic existence should inwardly grasp and plunge into world-creator-might, the world-maker-might that inwardly fills all regions of space, all times, all spirit-realms in willing.

At the very edge of the abyss the Guardian speaks:

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance you experience,
Self-awareness hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

I will write these mantric verses on the board next time and clarify their various characteristics.

Now, however, let us turn once more to what spoke to man in the past, to what speaks now in the present, and to what will speak in the future, exhorting him to undertake the holiest task on his life's path, the task of seeking self-knowledge:

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?

The next esoteric Lesson of this First Class will take place on Thursday at 8 o'clock.

I must now add that the verses, which are given as mantric verses for meditation by the Guardian of the Threshold at the behest of Michael, are only for those who are members of this school. Those who are unable to receive them personally can obtain them from someone else who is a member of this school. Permission must, however, be requested in every single instance either from Frau Dr. Wegman or from me. This is not merely a bureaucratic regulation, but rather it points to the fact that everything in our Anthroposophical Movement from now on expresses a reality. The procedure for passing on the texts begins with the request for permission as a real matter of fact, not as a mere administrative reason. The mantras may not be sent through the mail. Only the one who has to give the mantras to someone else may ask permission from Frau Dr. Wegman or from me. It is not the one who is to receive them who asks, but the one who is to give them. You speak with someone who might give them to you and that person then requests permission.

If anyone has taken notes during this lesson of anything other than the mantras, I would ask that they be kept not longer than a week, after which they should be burned, in order that the content of the school, which only has meaning if the Michael stream flows through the school, shall not go beyond the circle of its members and thereby become ineffective. This is not because of any obscure wish to make things secret, but so that the content of the school may not become ineffective. This is a fundamental occult law that must be observed. And we live in an earnest occult school, in the true School of Michael, and we give what flows here through this school in the sign of Michael.

[The Michael Sign was drawn on the blackboard.]

We give it in the Rosicrucian sense with the Rosicrucian symbol.

Ex Deo Nascimur

[The sign of the lower seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.]

In Christo Morimur

[The sign of the middle seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.]

Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

[The sign of the upper seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.]

And we think as we make this seal and sign of Christian Rosenkreutz:

I honor the Father

[This was written beside the sign of the lower seal gesture.]

I love the Son

[This was written beside the sign of the middle seal gesture.]

I unite with the Spirit

[This was written beside the sign of the upper seal gesture.]

Per signum Michaeli:

[The sign of Michael was made.]

[The three seal gestures were made and the words were spoken.]

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

The Guardian speaks at the edge of the abyss:
Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin;
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
In your fire of knowing it must be tamed.

Behold the third beast, with split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this spectral form in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Salvation seeking, would hallow itself.

The Guardian speaks:

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earthly life
Living in spirit in spirit-fields.

The second beast’s mocking face
Is the bad contrary-force
Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

The first beast’s bony mind,
Is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus
I honor the Father
I love the Son
I unite with the Spirit

• 1. west und webt und wirkt und wellt.