The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Theosophical Society, founded by H.P. Blavatsky,¹ had the task of adding an occult element to the awakening European interest in oriental spirituality which had been greatly stimulated in the mid-19th century by Schopenhauer and other major thinkers. ‘The Secret Doctrine’² by H.P. Blavatsky was the sensational work which caused the rapid expansion of the Theosophical Society in the English-speaking world. It made no effort to take account of Christianity. An attempt by Rosicrucian occultists to place Christianity at the centre of the new movement, in which the author's mediumistic faculties were to have been used, had been deflected earlier. And yet it was required that Western and Eastern wisdom should be brought into harmony. The ancient wisdom was to live on in the future development of mankind, whose salvation was guaranteed by the Mystery of Golgotha. Similar to the way that Christianity in the past, still young and vigorous in belief, had assimilated science through the wave of Arabism, turning observation of nature into the science of nature, present mankind, fallen prey to materialism and parched, had to be revitalised by being permeated with the knowledge of ancient wisdom. This took place by way of a knowledge of Buddhist philosophy with the result that the teaching of karma and reincarnation found entry to many souls and penetrated their understanding. The scientific works of Max Muller,³ Deussen⁴ and other significant philosophers opened up to Europeans a world of overwhelming spirituality and vivid imaginations. The key to the understanding of these worlds, however, still had to be given to intellectual science.

The work done by Blavatsky and her pupils in this respect was insufficient. Suitable personalities to act as mediators in this task still remained to be found. Through the particular constitution of her physical organism H.P. Blavatsky had been an instrument which was particularly open to the influences of the spiritual world. Her strong will made her suitable to carry out difficult tasks in the service of mankind; but her thinking was disjointed and her character often degenerated into emotionalism, and when her emotions broke loose catastrophe ensued and sometimes even the direction of her striving was reversed. It would not be wrong to say: as an instrument open to spiritual influence, occult forces fought for her possession.

In order to turn knowledge of the occult worlds into a science of the spirit which might in time be learnt by people through serious study, a person had to devote himself to this transformation who had his character and temperament completely under control, who also had a grasp of the knowledge of his time and command of the individual fields of knowledge to an extent which enabled him to reply to the most fierce criticism. An iron and yet flexible physical organism were required in order to withstand the onslaught against him.

Such a person was Rudolf Steiner.⁵ His youth was spent in what might be called convivial seclusion and constant study. Hardly grown up, he supported himself by giving lessons and then as an educator. On this foundation his lecturing and writing activity developed while he was still a young man. Since recognition of the spirit was quite natural to him, he quite consciously set himself the task of raising all the objections which the critical materialist brings to bear on revelations of the spirit and to spare himself nothing which might be the smallest deviation from this line. This he called ‘crawling into the skin of the dragon.’ He felt this difficult task to be his duty. Otherwise he would have considered himself as lacking the right to fight to the end the difficult battle for mankind, of wresting victory from abstract intellectualism. Only then would he be able to present the deed of the Buddha and the deed of the Christ as a harmonious unity; only then, when he himself had gained victory over the inner adversary and his hidden ways, would he be able to point the path of salvation through Christ's deed. Thus armed, he made his appearance as representative of the ancient mystery teachings as they had been revealed to him in the light of Christ's deed.

The Theosophical Society was alarmed. It saw the deep effect of Steiner's teachings on souls in search of Christ. It did not want to expose its members to this, did not want to expose them to the danger of taking in Steiner's teachings, thus abandoning the orientalising stream. His topics for the Congress of the Federation of European Sections, arranged to take place in Genoa,⁶ contained as their subject: Buddhist wisdom and Western esotericism. They opposed this subject with an Indian boy, the incarnation in the flesh of Christ Jesus according to their teaching. No common ground for scientific debate as it should have taken place at the Congress in Genoa could be found to cover such a gaping divergence; and now that Rudolf Steiner's significance had been recognised such a debate was deemed much too dangerous an undertaking. It was better to avoid such hot issues altogether. The congress was cancelled at the last minute for reasons which never became clear.

And Steiner, who had already set out for Italy,—as had many others—was able to speak only to group meetings, to small circles. There was not time to arrange for stenographers to be present. But not everything was lost, due to the devotion of a number of members who were taking notes, whose hand, however, naturally weakened towards the end in the fire of the enthusiastically spoken word. The Locarno lecture and those held in Neuchatel in particular give us cause to remember our dear Agnes Friedlander, who died of pneumonia in 1942 in a concentration camp. She was among those whose soul was particularly deeply affected by the transforming impulse alive in the mystery of Christ.

The lectures themselves have only been preserved as fragments. No satisfactory transcripts exist. It seems like a counter-attack by adversary forces that no experienced stenographer was present. They exist—apart from the shortened Cassel lectures—partly as fragments and partly as notes which have been pieced together. Nevertheless, the essential framework has been preserved and the effort was made to place them into context. This effort is not always successful as far as the stylistic form is concerned, but the spirit is challenged all the more to sharpen its powers of thought and stimulated to embark on their study.

Besides emphasising the particular character of Spiritual Science after the event of Christ, the aim of the lectures held in 1911 and 1912⁷ was to bring out the significance of karma as the course of destiny and to enable us to penetrate into its intimate nature. Even if the overall course of those reflections has been preserved only as a series of remembered images—the notes were frequently too brief to convey the logical progression and the irregular collection of notes and headings tend to be little more than indications—the direction of the spiritual impulses given by Dr. Steiner has been preserved and perhaps justifies this attempted collection: they can deepen the soul by meditative work and continue to be active within us.

Marie Steiner

• 1. The Theosophical Society, founded by H.P. Blavatsky: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, nee von Hahn (Ekaterinoslav, Southern Russia, 1831 – 1891 London), founded the Theosophical Society together with Col. H.S. Olcott in New York in 1875, its headquarters moving in 1879 to India (Adyar, near Madras).
• 2. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. Volume 1, Cosmogenesis; Volume II, Anthropogenesis; London, 1888. A third volume was published from manuscripts by Annie Besant in London in 1897.
• 3. Max Muller: 1823 – 1900; one of the most important orientalists of the nineteenth century.
• 4. Paul Deussen: 1845 – 1919; philosopher and scholar of Indian culture.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner. His youth was spent: see Rudolf Steiner, ‘An Autobiography’, Rudolf Steiner Publications; New York, 1977.
• 6. Congress ... in Genoa: see Rudolf Steiner ‘The Anthroposophical Movement, its History and Life Conditions in Relation to the Anthroposophical Society’. Eight lectures in Dornach, 10th – 17th June 1923; London, 1933.
• 7. aim of the lectures held in 1911 and 1912 was to bring out the significance of karma: see the Berlin and Stuttgart lectures ‘Reincarnation and Karma: their Significance in Modern Culture’; London, 1960.

In the last lecture we retraced the past of man more particularly from the point of view of his form and his body. We will now consider the past as regards his states of consciousness.

The following questions often arise before the mind: Is man the only being upon Earth who possesses self consciousness? Or again: What is the relation between the consciousness of man and that of the animals, plants and metals? Have these lower kingdoms of life any consciousness at all?

Imagine that a tiny insect crawling on the body of a man could see only his finger. It could have no conception whatever of the organism as a whole, nor of the soul. We ourselves are in exactly the same position as regards the Earth and other beings indwelling it. A materialist has no conception of the soul of the Earth and, as a natural result, he is not aware of the existence of his own soul. Similarly, if a tiny insect is unaware of the soul of man, this is because it has no soul with which to perceive.

The Earth-soul is much more sublime than the soul of man and man knows nothing of it. In reality, all beings have consciousness but man's consciousness is quite different, inasmuch as in our age it is perfectly attuned to the physical world.

As well as the waking state (corresponding to the physical world), man passes through other conditions of consciousness. During dreamless sleep, his consciousness lives in the devachanic world. The consciousness of the plant is always devachanic. If a plant ‘suffers,’ the suffering brings about a change in devachanic consciousness. The animal has astral consciousness, corresponding to the dream-life of man.

These three states of consciousness are very different. In the physical world we evolve ideas simply by means of the sense organs and the outer realities with which these organs put us into touch. In the astral world, we perceive the surrounding milieu only in the form of pictures, feeling at the same time as if we were part of them.

Why does man, who is conscious in the physical world, feel himself separate from all that is not himself? It is because he receives all his impressions from a milieu which he perceives very distinctly outside his body. In the astral world, on the contrary, we do not perceive by means of the senses but by the sympathy which makes us penetrate to the heart of everything we encounter. Astral consciousness is not confined within a relatively limited field; in a certain sense it is liquid, fluidic. In the devachanic world, consciousness is as diffused as a gas might be. There is no resemblance whatever with physical consciousness, into which nothing penetrates except by way of the senses.

What was the object of this shutting-off of consciousness which followed the stage of imaginative consciousness? If such a shutting-off had not taken place, man could never have said ‘I’ of himself. The divine germ could not have penetrated into his being in the course of evolution if it had not been for the crystallisation of his physical body. Where, then, was this divine Spirit before the solidification of the Earth and of consciousness? Genesis tells us: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The divine Spirit, the spark of the Ego, was still in the astral world.

In higher Devachan, beyond the fourth degree, referred to in occultism as Arupa (without body), where Akasha (negative substance) has its rise—there is the home of the consciousness of the minerals. We must try to reach a deep and true understanding of the mineral kingdom and discover our moral link with it. The Rosicrucians in the Middle Ages taught their disciples to revere the chastity of the mineral,—“Imagine,” they said, “that while retaining his faculties of thinking and feeling, a man becomes as pure and free from desire as the mineral,—He then possesses an infallible power—a spiritual power.”—If we can say that the spirits of the several minerals are living in Devachan, we can say equally correctly that the spirit of the minerals is like a man who might live only with devachanic consciousness.

In other beings, then, the existence of consciousness must not be denied. Man has traversed all these degrees of consciousness on the descending curve of evolution. Originally he resembled the minerals, in this sense, that his Ego lived in a higher world and guided him from above. But the aim of evolution is to free man from being subject to beings endowed with a consciousness higher than his own and to bear him to a point where he himself is fully conscious in higher worlds.

All these levels of consciousness are contained within man today:

1. The consciousness of the mineral-corresponding to deep sleep.
2. The consciousness of the plant-ordinary sleep.
3. Animal consciousness-dream-life.
4. Physical, objective consciousness-the normal waking state. The two former states are atavistic survivals.
5. A consciousness which repeats the third stage but retains the acquired quality of objectivity. Images have definite colours and are realised as being quite distinct from the perceiver. The subjective sense of attraction or repulsion vanishes. In this new imaginative consciousness, the faculty of reason that has been acquired in the physical world retains its own powers.
6. Sleep itself—not the dream—here becomes a conscious state. We do not only behold images but we enter into the living essence of beings and hear their inner tones. In the physical world we give names to things but the names are merely outer appellations. Only man can express his own being from within by saying ‘I’—the ineffable name of conscious individuality. By this word we distinguish our own personality from the rest of the universe. But when we become conscious of the world of sound, each being, each thing communicates its own true name; in clairaudience we hear the sound which expresses its innermost being and rings forth as a tone in the universe that is distinct from all others.
7. One stage further and deep sleep becomes a conscious state. Description is impossible, for this condition passes beyond the limits of comparison. All that can be said is that it exists.

Such are the seven states of consciousness through which man passes, and he will pass through others too. There is always one central state, with three beneath and three above. The three higher states reproduce, in a higher sense, the three lower. A traveler is always at the centre of the horizon. Each state of consciousness develops through seven states of life, and each state of life through seven states of form. Thus seven states of form always constitute one state of life; seven states of life compose one whole period of planetary evolution, for example that of our Earth.

The seven states of life culminate in the formation of seven kingdoms, of which four are actually visible: the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. In each state of consciousness, therefore, man passes through 7 x 7 states of form this brings us to 7 x 7 x 7 metamorphoses (343).

If we could envisage in one single tableau the 343 states of form, we should have a picture of the third Logos.

If we could envisage the 49 states of life, we should have a picture of the second Logos.

If we could envisage the 7 states of consciousness, we should have a conception of the first Logos.

Evolution consists in the mutual interaction of all these seven forms. In order to pass from one form to the other, a new spirit is necessary (the action of the Holy Spirit). In order to pass from one state of life to another, a new power is necessary (the action of the Son). In order to pass from one state of consciousness to another, a new consciousness is necessary (the action of the Father).

Christ Jesus brought a new state of life and was in very truth the Word made Flesh. With the coming of the Christ, a new force entered into the world, preparing a new Earth in a new relationship with the heavens.

Those who do not connect with the spiritual world are like a sleepwalker who, without consciousness, performs all sorts of things in his sleep by means of higher (subconscious) powers. There are two friends, one of whom always feels fresh and strong, vigorous for work in the morning, while the other is usually tired and listless. One day the strong man says to the weak man: “It is no wonder that you feel miserable in the morning, because you always go out at night and work at your desk for several hours.” And sure enough, when they checked, they found the task that the weak man had to solve worked out on the desk.

In his subconscious, the person was guided by higher powers to do what he felt too weak to do in his waking life. The religious beliefs did something similar for humanity. Without being aware of it, she was led by leading powers into the spiritual worlds and to spiritual insights. Of course, the result was not achieved that was the case in much earlier times, that the most mundane was, as it were, spiritually consecrated. No stone was hewn without a certain rhythm, blow upon blow, and this rhythm was felt as an echo of the music of the spheres of the higher worlds.

Today there are only meagre remnants of this, for example when grain is threshed in rhythm in the countryside. It all depends on one's perception. Take children, for example, who look forward to Christmas. They have been told that at night the Christmas angel or Santa Claus secretly comes and places the presents on the floor. Then the child, driven by a materialistic sting, wakes up and sees the parents, who are people living on the physical plane, laying the things down. His faith in higher spiritual beings is destroyed. But one can also look at it from the parents' point of view. They can feel that they are mediators through whom higher powers can flow to the children through the gifts and benefits.

Nowadays, the world is simply de-divinized, and it is difficult to speak of divine guidance and government of the world. Think of those who built and sailed the Titanic. ¹

But the higher powers were always active on the physical plane as well, in order to let spiritual forces flow into human life, especially in the mysteries. One could go back to Atlantis in this regard, but let us talk about the post-Atlantean mysteries. Pupils were drawn to them so that they could be gradually introduced to the secrets of the universe and the development of humanity. The students were so worked on that fear and terror befell them. Some of them became free, courageous and strong as a result, and in this incarnation attained union with the supersensible world; but the others, who were overwhelmed and proved to be too weak, felt: You are still too weak to ascend into the supersensible worlds, but you will still benefit when you pass through the gate of death from this attempt to reach the higher worlds. Later, great initiates such as Ormus and Mark, the writer of the Gospel of Mark, conveyed the fruits of the Christ impulse in the Mysteries of Humanity; then the Culdean monks, who incorporated spiritual wisdom into the Gothic cathedrals. ² And time and again there were occult brotherhoods that, under various pseudonyms, guided people in the physical world to the higher worlds. One example is the Arthurian Brotherhood, to which Parzival belonged and which later operated under the name of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. The Round Table of King Arthur represented the youthful natural forces, which then, in the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, were transformed into conscious spiritual forces. Here we have the union of the old occult wisdom with the new Christian wisdom. For the legend tells that a stone fell out of Lucifer's crown when he fell from heaven, and that this stone was worked into the Grail Cup, the sacred and noble chalice in which the blood of Christ was caught at Golgotha. ³

The mature human being, like Parzival, came to the decisive question through the guidance of higher powers, which opened the gate to initiation for him.

Today there is great resistance to such occult brotherhoods, especially from devout Christian circles, who seek to ascend to the higher worlds with the help of the Christ impulse. They resist them as if they were Satan incarnate, because they say one loses the Christ through them. Herein lies not merely ill will or a principled dislike of the occult, but the dimly sensed, thoroughly correct realization that only he finds the Christ in the higher worlds who brings him up there as a memory from the physical plane. For only here can the Christ be grasped, and it is quite right that those who enter the higher worlds without a knowledge and realization of the Christ, and are unstable, may lose their way.

In our occult brotherhood, as in all, there is a hierarchy instead of democracy, because not a referendum can decide what truth is, but only those who have been given the only correct knowledge by spiritual powers can decide on this. A deification of work and life, wisdom and the warmth of love is attained, and each person recognizes in the other, as a brother striving for the same goal, the divine essence.

In the three lower degrees, all the knowledge that can be gained from the world of higher beings and forces is symbolically experienced. In the six higher degrees, one then becomes more intimately acquainted with the occult forces themselves.

Promise Formula

Two handwritten templates by Rudolf Steiner from notebook archive number 611

I

I try to understand how I can find development in the service of my self in Misraim and approach the holy secret that demands reverent silence. I want to try to open up the cultivation of this development to my fellow human beings by caring for the symbolic sanctuary and to understand the inner nature of human wisdom by preserving the sense of the degrees of truth.

I will try to preserve my self from all influences that diminish its fully conscious freedom and rob it of its inner light and self-determination through hypnosis, suggestion, etc. at any stage of life.

A soul can only find a goal and destiny in the realm of duration, direction and growth in the realm of time: those who attempt such.

I perceive that such is proclaimed as a doctrine by those whom I hear called the knowing ones, who are said to have the key to hidden secrets.

II

I ---- born in ----- residing in ---- do hereby vow and promise to faithfully keep and follow the rules of the genuine and true Misraim service; to keep the holy secret strictly, to take care of and advocate for the preservation of the sanctuary to the best of my ability, and to unreservedly recognize the Grand Master as the highest decision-making authority in all Misraim matters. I also vow and promise that I will not allow myself to be put into a state of bondage through hypnosis, suggestion, etc., so that everything that will ever affect me in life will find me in a state of wakefulness, so that the secrets of the great service can never be betrayed to outsiders through me.

Should I ever break this solemn vow of mine, may my soul wander restlessly without purpose or destination in space, may it be without direction in immeasurable time.

This I vow by the wise masters of the East, who may turn their eye to my deeds.

• 1. The English express steamer “Titanic” was on its maiden voyage shortly before this address on April 15, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic with about 1500 people. People were so convinced of the absolute safety of the ship that they ignored the iceberg warnings. Cf. Walter Lord, “The Sinking of the Titanic”, New York 1955.
• 2. Culdean = old Irish ascetics, in spiritual communities since the 8th century, who are said to have had great influence on Freemasonry, architecture and customs. See Joseph Schauberg, op. cit., vol. I, p. 503.
• 3. Regarding the connection between high-degree Freemasonry and the legend of the Holy Grail, see the lecture given in Berlin on January 2, 1906.

What we want to attain through esoteric exercises is to concentrate completely on one thought and afterwards to let an empty space arise in us and to wait for what flows to us as a result of our meditation What we attain thereby depends on the intensity of the perseverance that we have applied to this. One might think that one gets ahead faster by changing exercises, but the most profound esoterics have always said that they got the furthest by doing the same exercise with patience and perseverance for years.

One might get a spiritual exercise from someone and then not see him again on this earth. But if this exercise is done correctly and the pupil's karma is favorable, it can last him a whole lifetime and bear fruits for him until he finally finds his teacher in the spiritual world.

When an esoteric applies forces to his inner development, he'll notice that certain bad qualities had become more manifest. One of these is criticism, but an esoteric should realize how this desire to knock other people down arises. We heighten and intensify our egoity through the exercises, and criticizing is a desire to assert oneself, a wanting to be something special, a need to separate oneself. An esoteric loses interest in many outer things that he paid a lot of attention to previously. This goes so far that some esoterics have the feeling they can't see as well as before.

Most of them also complain that their memory isn't as good. But as we pointed out in previous classes this not paying attention to one's environment is a mistake. It can happen that someone doesn't do his exercises intensively enough to fill the inner emptiness with spiritual content, which he now no longer wants to fill with his previous interests. This gives him an urgent feeling, a driving restlessness, a need to fill his inner emptiness from outside. Then he's easily tempted to criticize outer things. In a way, this criticizing is understandable and justified, for after a man first closed himself off from the outer world and now steps out of himself again, he would like to assert himself against the world. But there's an egotism in this that should be suppressed together with the criticizing. When we attain this the forces that we would have wasted otherwise will turn inwards and fructify our soul life. The need to separate himself is something that's quite justified for an esoteric, for he can only make progress in solitude. The feeling of loneliness is unbearable for most ordinary mortals, but an esoteric should learn to tolerate solitude. This promotes his esoteric life a great deal. A man who longs for company dissipates his forces through this longing. It's as if this longing sprayed out from him in all directions He should gather thee forces and turn them inwards instead. That way he'll gain a great deal.

An esoteric must bring two qualities into equilibrium like pendulum swings, first the tolerance of solitude, that is, the strengthening of egoity, and secondly complete devotion to the duty that approaches us from outside, to the point of self-sacrifice or the forgetting of oneself. When we've gotten to the point where our heart longs for solitude in the midst of our surroundings, where the latter makes us suffer and we nevertheless give it our full, devoted love—then we've attained the unification of apparently contradictory qualities.

A third thing we should practice is to be silent about our esoteric experiences. An undeveloped man almost explodes if he has to keep a secret, and he feels very relieved if he can get things off his chest. But an esoteric should consider that this force that threatens to blow one up must be a very strong one if one prefers to store it up inwardly. That's why it says, “Learn to be silent and you'll get the power”—that is, the power to rule things within one. For instance, an occult investigator can perceive how much stronger a man gets when he has to suppress the telling of a secret for some reason. Say that a man has something on his soul that he would like to tell a friend. Intending to rush over to him, he meets another acquaintance at the door, but he doesn't want to tell this one about it. Later it's too late to go to his friend, so he has to suppress his urge to communicate. An occultist will see that the soul in such a person has developed a force that wouldn't have arisen if the man had fulfilled his wish to make his communication. The saying: “The mouth speaks out of the heart's abundance” shouldn't apply to an esoteric.

It might sometimes be good and appropriate for a nonesoteric to tell all, but not for an esoteric. By communicating his innermost feelings and thoughts, he sprays out forces that would have been very necessary for his soul. Every time we're able to keep thoughts and feelings to ourselves, especially ones that are connected with our esoteric experiences and difficulties, we acquire a soul force that we can't lose. One should speak about universally human things and about things that can be useful to people, but not about one's own affairs that are nobody else's business. Where does this need to communicate come from anyway? We seldom feel the need to go to other men because we love them selflessly, but usually because they have qualities that give us something. We should also drop the wish to be coddled. We should be grateful to people if they treat us badly, because then we can exercise our tolerating forces. We should try to love these people anyway, and we'll then notice that this is the right thing to do. An esoteric should also stop complaining. What does he complain about? Mostly about the thoughts that storm in on him from all sides when he begins his meditation. But he should be thankful for this and look upon it as progress that he notices how real the thought world is and that it can assert itself like this. He should just oppose it because he'll get stronger thereby We should figure out how these thoughts do it, look upon them as models of how we can concentrate ourselves and tell ourselves: We should immerse ourselves in meditation with the same intensity—then we'll attract spiritual forces that support us. It would be a very comfortable meditation if angels or other spiritual beings would come beforehand to sweep away the undesired thoughts.

Once an esoteric has overcome all of these qualities and has learned to speak the right amount, he'll arrive at what mystics called the portal of death, because he finds himself in the same condition as a man who has turned all of his interests away from the outer world as he gets ready to die. He has turned inwards or toward divine spiritual things. That's what's meant in the second part of our Rosicrucian verse: In Christo morimur; we die in Christ when we transform ourselves completely and turn toward the spiritual world again. Ex Deo nascimur: We're born from God and must incarnate in the physical. Then it's our task to develop so that we can say; In Christo morimur. We turn away from all physical things and raise ourselves to the spiritual that was always called the Holy Spirit, and in this we are reborn: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. The verse that masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feeling gave us:

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.

We know that everyone who's on a path of esoteric development must gradually transform his whole thinking, make it different than it is in ordinary sense life, so that he can find his way into the spiritual world. We must learn to rethink, as it were, and our whole life of feeling and perception must also become different than it had been until now. What really is our thinking in ordinary life? We're used to saying that thinking takes place in the physical body, but that's not the case. The etheric body is the real causer of our thoughts. Our physical body only has something to do with it to the extent that it's a mirror for our thoughts that reflects the picture so that we can thereby become aware of it. We can clarify this through an example. When a man looks into a mirror he has his mirror image before him, the mirror gives him the outer impression of his physical shape that is, a shadow of his outer personality. Likewise the thoughts that have their living seat in the etheric body are the reflected shadow pictures of our physical brain when we think them. What do the concentration exercises that are given us bring about? They help us to gradually loosen ourselves from the thought shadows as we concentrate and contract ourselves in our etheric body so that we can press forward to the real origin of our ideas that have their life in the etheric body. It should become ever clearer to us not only that our thoughts are shadows but that all of our percepts are really nothing, and that in reality only the spiritual world exists. A naive man says that what he perceives exists. But what is existence (Sein) really? Philosophers have tried to get behind this entity in various ways. “Sein” is really derived from sehen(seeing); it's really the past participle of “sehen.” No one can see existence in the physical world, because it rests in the spiritual world; but one only sees the spirit when one doesn't see matter. Matter is really nothing, it's enveloped by spirit which is the real thing. The following example can elucidate this. When one has a bottle of seltzer water before one can't really see the water—one sees the glittering bubbles of carbon dioxide that rise like shiny pearls. And what are these sparkling, shiny pearls? They're just empty gas bubbles filled with a substance that's much thinner than water, that's “nothing” in comparison with water. So what one sees here is nothing, whereas one doesn't see the real water in which they're resting.

Thus we must become aware that all space around us is filled with spiritual realities, beings and facts, and that there's nothing there where we perceive the world's things, nothing but a hole. When we stretch out an arm we push it through the spiritual world, but we don't feel it; we only feel resistance when our hand runs into nothing or matter. We don't really see objects in space—we only see the contours of the spiritual world that these objects bound.

We grow into the spiritual world when we've gotten to the point where we've let all the shadowiness of our thoughts and of our outer surroundings fall away. But to be able to rightly place ourselves into the new world we must transform our whole thinking through esoteric development so that we can understand and judge the things and facts of the spiritual world correctly. Because it's an entirely new world for us, but a world that's more real than the one we've known so far. We enter a world that has real things and beings in it, and we connect ourselves with it, we grow into this world. As the beings and things of this world move into us we lose our head thoughts—it's as if we had stuck our head into an anthill. Then we become aware of the elemental world. As our soul life gets stronger through thought concentration and our inner self gets increasingly separate from the physical body, the things of that world appear before our soul's eye in ever clearer Imaginations and visions. We'll see that all the thoughts we've had about good, benevolent and noble things have become transformed into Imaginations that continue to live and to give their value to the universe, and that all bad, evil and low, egotistical thoughts remain behind as waste products. This becomes something that's unproductive by itself but which becomes food for what's supposed to develop from the germ of the good. Just as the mineral soil furnishes food stuffs for plants here on the physical plane, so everything that's thought badly becomes the soil for germinating thoughts of good, true and beautiful things in the elemental world. That's the reason why an occultist can think out bad and wrong things so quickly and imagine them in thought. But he doesn't let it get further. He knows that he's only allowed to get to the point where it remains thought—he doesn't let it pass over into deed, into reality. He only lets it prepare the soil from which the germ of the good can grow.

That's what happened in the world order also, that's the way the earth's mineral kingdom arose. The Elohim thought erroneous things on old Moon—that was all right there—and the mineral kingdom on earth arose from this. Jahve-Elohim was able to create man from this dust and give him his physical sheath. But Lucifer who is now about where the Elohim were on old Moon still wants to go on doing the same thing. He can only use men for this, he can only think errors within men.

We want to develop ourselves into an organ of the spiritual world, just as we've developed our physical eyes into organs for sunlight. The germ for it lay in us, and we also have a germ for that spiritual development in us that we can only unfold through strict self-training. Various means are indicated in How Does One Attain Knowledge Of Higher Worlds? to really free ourselves from the physical body through concentration and so on, so that through this splitting of one's nature one can cross the threshold of the spiritual world and behold spiritual reality. The following verses express the position one has to take with respect to the physical world and to this new spiritual world. They can be meditated in any way by people who've already received a verse to meditate on; one who doesn't have such can meditate the first verse in the morning, the second in the evening and the third verse should only be meditated occasionally to check the extent to which one has attained what was striven for in the first two strophes.

To things I turn myself
I turn myself with ray senses;—
Sense existence, you deceive me!—
What flees existence as nothing:
For you it's existence and reality;
May what must seem like nothing to you
Be disclosed to my inner life.—

(I must attain this: it's the taking of a position towards the new, outer world.)

Spirit light warm me
Let me feel myself volitionally in you.
Well thought, truly known things
How does shining I experience you
May weaving of error, badly thought things
Show itself to shining soul
That I may be weaving in myself.

(That's a questioning and experiencing in the new existence within.)

Shining I and luminous soul (- oneself -)
Floats over real developing being
What was thought, what was known
Now becomes dense spirit existence
And what seems like existence to the senses
Lives in the ocean of divine reality
Like aery existential bubbles.

(In anticipation of truth. It's a guessing, a feeling of the new self.)

When elaborated each of these strophes contains the same thing that's successively compressed in our rosicrucian verse in the ten words: Ex Deo nascimur, In Christo morimur, Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus

The reversing of Egyptian remembrance into material forms by way of Arabism. The harmonizing of Egyptian remembrance. The Christian impulse of power in Rosicrucianism.

In the previous lectures wide reaches, both of human evolution and also of world evolution, were brought before our souls. We saw how mysterious connections in the evolution of the world are reflected in the civilizations of the different nations belonging to the post-Atlantean period. We saw how the first epoch of earthly development is reflected in the civilization of ancient India; the second, during which the separation of the sun from the earth took place, is reflected in the Persian civilization; and we have endeavoured, as far as time permitted, to sketch the various events of the Lemurian epoch—the third in the course of the earth's development—in which man received the foundations of his ego, which is reflected in the civilization of Egypt. It was pointed out that the initiation wisdom of ancient Egypt was a kind of remembrance of this, which was the first period of earthly evolution in which man participated. Then, coming to the fourth age, that in which the true union between body and spirit is so beautifully presented in the art of Greece, we showed it to be a reflection of what man experienced with the ancient gods, the beings we have described as Angels. Nothing remained that could be reflected in our age—the fifth—the age now running its course. Secret connections do, however, exist between the different periods of post Atlantean civilization; these we have already touched on in the first of these lectures.

You may recall how it was stated that the confinement of the people of the present day to their own immediate surroundings, that is, to the materialistic belief that reality is only to be found between life and death, can be traced to the circumstance of the Egyptians having bestowed so much care on the preservation of the bodies of the dead. They tried at that time to preserve the physical form of man, and this has not been without an effect on souls after death. When the bodily form is thus preserved the soul after death is still connected in a certain way with the form it bore during life. Thought-forms are called up in the soul, these cling to the sensible form, and when the person incarnates again and again and the soul enters into new bodies these thought-forms endure.

All that the human soul experienced when it looked down from spiritual heights upon its corpse is firmly rooted within it, hence it has not been able to unlearn this, nor to turn away from the vision which bound it to the flesh. The result has been that countless souls who were incorporated in ancient Egypt are born again with the fruits of this vision, and can only believe in the reality of the physical body. This was firmly implanted in souls at that time. Things that take place in one age of culture are by no means unconnected with the ages that follow.

Suppose that we represent here the seven consecutive cultural periods of post-Atlantean civilization by a line. The fourth age, which is exactly in the middle, occupies an exceptional position.

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We have only to consider this age exoterically to see that in it the most wonderful physical things have been produced, things by which man has conquered the physical world in a unique and harmonious way. Looking back to the Egyptian pyramids we observe a type of geometric form which demonstrates certain things symbolically. The close union of spirit—the formative human spirit—and the physical form had not yet been completed. We see this with special clearness in the Sphinx, the origin of which is to be traced to a remembrance of the Atlantean etheric human form. In its physical form the Sphinx gives us no direct conviction of this union, although it is a great human conception; in it we see the thought embodied that man is still animal-like below and only attains to what is human in the etheric head.

What confronts us on the physical plane is ennobled in the fourth age in the forms of Greek plastic art; and the moral life, the destiny of man, we find depicted in the Greek tragedies. In them we see the inner life of the spirit played out upon the physical plane in a very wonderful way; we see the meaning of earthly evolution in so far as the gods are connected with it.

So long as the earth was a part of the sun, high Sun-Spirits were united with the human race. By the end of the Atlantean epoch these exalted Beings had gradually faded, step by step, along with the sun, from the consciousness of man. Human consciousness was no longer capable of reaching up after death to the high realms where vision of the Sun-Spirits was possible. Assuming that we are at the standpoint of these Beings (which we can be in spirit), we can picture them saying: We were once united with humanity but had to withdraw from them for a time. The divine world had to disappear from human consciousness so as to re-appear in a newer, higher form through the Christ-Impulse.

A man who belonged to Grecian civilization was incapable as yet of understanding what was to come to earth through the Christ; but an Initiate, one who, as we have seen, knew the Christ aforetime, could say: That spiritual form which was preserved in men's minds as Osiris had to disappear for a time from the sight of man, the horizon of the Gods had to be darkened, but within us dwells the sure consciousness that the glory of God will appear again on earth. This certainty was the result of the cosmic consciousness which men possessed and the consciousness of the withdrawal of the glory of God and of its return is reflected in Greek tragedy.

We see man here represented as the image of the Gods, we see how he lives, strives, and has a tragic end. At the same time the tragedy holds within it the idea that man will yet conquer through his spiritual power. The drama was intended as a presentation of living and dying humanity, and at the same time it reflected man's whole relationship to the universe. In every realm of Greek culture we see this union between things of the spirit and things of the senses. It was a unique age in post-Atlantean civilization.

It is remarkable how certain phenomena of the third age are connected as by underground channels with our own, the fifth age. Certain things which were sown as seed during the Egyptian age are re-appearing in our own; others which were sown as seed during the Persian age will appear in the sixth; and things belonging to the first epoch will return in the seventh. Everything has a deep and law-filled connection, the past pointing always to the future. This connection will best be realized if we explain it by referring to the two extremes, those things connecting the first and the seventh age. Let us turn back to the first age and consider, not what history tells us, but what really existed in ancient pre-Vedic times.

Everything that appeared later had been first prepared for; this was especially the case with the division of mankind into castes. Europeans may feel strong objections to the caste system, but it was justified in the civilization of that time, and is profoundly connected with human karma. The souls coming over from Atlantis were really of very different values, and in some respects it was suitable for these souls, of whom some were at a more advanced stage than others, to be divided in accordance with the karma they had previously stored up for themselves. In that far off age humanity was not left to itself as it is now, but was really led and guided in its development in a much higher way than is generally supposed. At that time highly advanced individuals, whom we call the Rishis, understood the value of souls, and the difference there is between the various categories of souls. At the bottom of the division into castes lies a well-founded cosmic law. Though to a later age this may seem harsh, in that far-off time, when the guidance of humanity was spiritual, the caste principle was entirely suited to human nature.

It is true that in the normal evolution of man those who lived over into a new age with a particular karma came also into a particular caste, and it is also true that a man could only rise above any special caste if he underwent a process of initiation. Only when he attained a stage where he was able to strip off that which was the cause of his karma, only when he lived in Yoga, could the difference in caste, under certain circumstances, be overcome. Let us keep in mind the Anthroposophical principle which lays down that we must put aside all criticism of the facts of evolution and strive only to understand them. However had the impression this division into castes makes on us at the present time, there was every justification for it, and it has to be taken in connection with a far-reaching and just arrangement regarding the human race.

When a person speaks of races today he speaks of something that is no longer quite correct; even in Theosophical handbooks great mistakes are made on this subject. In them it is said that our evolution runs its course in Rounds, that in each Round there are Globes, and in each Globe, Races which develop one after the other—so that we have races in each epoch of the earth's evolution.

But this is not the case. Even in regard to present humanity there is no justification for speaking of a mere development of races. In the true sense of the word we can only speak of race development during the Atlantean epoch. People were so different in external physiognomy throughout the seven periods that one might speak rather of different forms than races. While it is true that the races have arisen through this, it is [in]correct to speak of races in the far back Lemurian epoch; and in our own epoch the idea of race will gradually disappear along with all the differences that are a relic of earlier times. We still speak of races, but all that remains of these today are relics of differences that existed in Atlantean times, and the idea of race has now lost its original meaning. What new idea is to arise in place of the present idea of race?

Humanity will be differentiated in the future even more than in the past; it will be divided into categories, but not in an arbitrary way; from their own spiritual inner capacities men will come to know that they must work together for the whole body corporate.

There will be categories and classes however fiercely class-war may rage today, among those who do not develop egoism but accept the spiritual life and evolve toward what is good a time will come when men will organize themselves voluntarily. They will say: One must do this, the other must do that. Division of work even to the smallest detail will take place; work will be so organized that a holder of this or that position will not find it necessary to impose his authority on others. All authority will be voluntarily recognized, so that in a small portion of humanity we shall again have divisions in the seventh age, which will recall the principle of castes, but in such a way that no one will feel forced into any caste, but each will say: I must undertake a part of the work of humanity, and leave another part to another—both will be equally recognized.

Humanity will be divided according to differences in intellect and morals; on this basis a spiritualized caste system will again appear. Led, as it were, through a secret channel, the seventh age will repeat that which arose prophetically in the first. The third, the Egyptian age, is connected in the same way with our own. Little as it may appear to a superficial view, all that was laid down during the Egyptian age re-appears in the present one. Most of the people living on the earth today were incarnated formerly in Egyptian bodies and experienced an Egyptian environment; having lived through other intermediate incarnations, they are now again on earth, and, in accordance with the laws we have indicated, they unconsciously remember what they experienced in Egypt.

All this is re-appearing now in a mysterious way, and if you are willing to recognize such secret connection of the great laws of the universe working from one civilization to another, you must make yourselves acquainted with the truth, not with all those legendary and fantastic ideas which are given out concerning the facts of human evolution.

People think too superficially about the spiritual progress of humanity. For example, someone remarks about Copernicus that a man with such ideas as his was possible, because in the age in which he lived a change in thought had arisen regarding the solar system. Anyone holding such an opinion has never studied, even exoterically, how Copernicus arrived at his ideas concerning the relationship of the heavenly bodies. One who has done this, and who more especially has followed the grand ideas of Kepler, knows differently, and he will be strengthened even more in these ideas by what occultism has to say about it.

Let us consider this so that we may see the matter clearly, and try to enter into the soul of Copernicus. This soul had lived in the age of ancient Egypt, and had then occupied an important position in the cult of Osiris; it knew that Osiris was held to be the same as the high Sun-Being.

The sun, in a spiritual sense, was at the centre of Egyptian thought and feeling; I do not mean the outwardly visible sun; it was regarded only as the bodily expression of the spiritual sun. Just as the eye is the expression for the power of sight, so to the Egyptian the Sun was the eye of Osiris, the embodiment of the Spirit of the Sun. All this had been experienced at one time by the soul of Copernicus, and it was the unconscious memory of it that impelled him to renew, in a form possible to a materialistic age, this ancient idea of Osiris, which at that time had been entirely spiritual. When humanity had sunk more deeply within the physical plane, this idea confronts us again in its materialistic form, as the Copernican theory.

The Egyptians possessed the spiritual conception and it was the world-karma of Copernicus to retain a memory of such conceptions, and this conjured forth that “combination of bearings” that led to his theory of the solar system. The case was similar with Kepler, who, in his three laws, presented the movement of the planets round the sun in a much more comprehensive way; however abstract they may appear to us, they were the result of a most profound conception. A striking fact in connection with this highly gifted being is contained in a passage written by himself and which fills us with awe when we read it. Kepler writes: “I have thought deeply upon the Solar System. It has revealed to me its secrets; I will carry over the sacred ceremonial vessels of the Egyptians into the modern world.”

Thoughts implanted in the souls of the ancient Egyptians meet us again, and our modern truths are the re-born myths of Egypt. Were it desired, we could follow this up in many details; we could follow it up to the very beginnings of humanity. Let us think once more of the Sphinx, that wondrous, enigmatic form which later became the Sphinx of Oedipus, who put its well-known riddle to man. We have learnt already that the Sphinx is built up from that human form which on the physical plane still resembled that of animals, although the etheric part had already assumed human form. In the Egyptian age man could only see the Sphinx in an etheric form after he had passed through certain stages of initiation. Then it appeared to him. But the important thing is that when a man had true clairvoyant perception it did not appear to him merely as a lump of wood does, but certain feelings were necessarily associated with the vision.

Under certain circumstances a callous person may pass by a highly important work of art and remain unmoved by it; clairvoyant consciousness is not like this; when really developed the fitting emotion is already aroused. The Greek legend of the Sphinx expresses the right feeling, experienced by the clairvoyant during the ancient Egyptian period and also in the Grecian Mysteries, when he had progressed so far that the Sphinx appeared to him. What was it that then appeared before his eyes? He beheld something incomplete something that was in course of development. The form he saw was in a certain way related to that of animals, and in the etheric head we saw what was to work within the physical form in order to shape it more like man. What man was to become, what his task was in evolution, this was the question that rose vividly before him when he saw the Sphinx—a question full of longing, of expectation, and of future development.

The Greeks say that all investigation and philosophy have originated from longing; this is also a saying of clairvoyants. A form appears to man which he can only perceive with his astral consciousness; it worries him, it propounds a riddle, the riddle of man's future. Further, this etheric form, which was present in the Atlantean epoch and lived on as a memory into the Egyptian age, is embodied more and more in man, and re-appears on the other side in the nature of man. It reappears in all the religious doubts, in the impotence of our age of civilization when faced with the question: What is man? In all unanswered questions, in all statements that revolve round “Ignorabimus,” we have to see the Sphinx. In ages that were still spiritual man could rise to heights where the Sphinx was actually before him—today it dwells within him in countless unanswered questions.

It is therefore very difficult for man at the present time to arrive at conviction with regard to the spiritual world. The Sphinx, which formerly was outside him, is now in his inner being, for a Being has appeared in the central epoch of post-Atlantean evolution Who has cast the Sphinx into the abyss—into the individual inner being of every man.

When the Greco-Latin age, with its after-effects, had continued into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we come to the fifth post-Atlantean age. Up to the present new doubts have arisen more and more in place of the old certainty. We meet with such things more and more, and if desired we could discover many more instances of Egyptian ideas, transformed into their materialistic counterpart in the new evolution. We might ask what has really happened in the present age, for this is no ordinary passing over of ideas; things are not met with directly, but they are as if modified. Everything is presented in a more materialistic form; even man's connection with animal nature re-appears, but changed into a materialistic conception. The fact that man knew in earlier times that he could not shape his body otherwise than in the semblance of animals, and that on this account in his Egyptian remembrances he pictured even his gods in animal forms, confronts us today in the generally held materialistic opinion that man has descended from animals. Darwinism is nothing but an heirloom of ancient Egypt in a materialistic form.

From this we see that the path of evolution has by no means been a straightforward one, but that something like a division has taken place, one branch becoming more materialistic and one more spiritual. That which had formerly progressed in one line now split into two lines of development, namely, science and belief.

Going back into earlier times, to the Egyptian, Persian, and ancient Indian civilizations, one does not find a science apart from faith. What was known regarding the spiritual origin of the world passed in a direct line to knowledge of particular things; men were able to rise from knowledge of the material world to the most exalted heights; there was no contradiction between knowledge and faith. An ancient Indian sage or a Chaldean priest would not have understood this difference; even the Egyptians knew no difference between what was simply a matter of belief or a fact of knowledge. This difference became apparent when man had sunk more deeply into matter, and had gained more material culture; but in order to gain this another organization was necessary.

Let us suppose that this descent of man into matter had not taken place; what would have happened? We considered a like descent in the last lecture, but it was of a different nature; this is a new descent in another realm, by which something like an independent science entered alongside the comprehension of what was spiritual. This occurred first in Greece. Up till then opposition between science and religion did not exist; and would have had no meaning to a priest of Egypt. Take, for instance, what Pythagoras learnt from the Egyptians, the teaching regarding numbers. This was not merely abstract mathematics to him; it gave him the musical secrets of the world in the harmony of numbers. Mathematics, which is only something abstract to the man of the present day, was to him a sacred wisdom with a religious foundation.

Man had, however, to sink more and more within the material, physical plane, and it can be seen how the spiritual wisdom of Egypt reappears—but transformed into a materialistic, mythical conception of the universe. In the future, the theories of today will be held to have had only temporal value, just as ancient theories have only a temporal value to the man of today. Perhaps men will then be so sensible that they will not fall into the mistake of some of our contemporaries who say: “Until the nineteenth century man was absolutely stupid as regards science; it was only then he became sensible all that was taught previously about anatomy was nonsense, only the last century has produced what is true.” In the future men will be wiser, and will not give tit for tat; they will not reject our myths of anatomy, philosophy, and Darwinism so disdainfully as present-day man rejects ancient truths. For it is the case that things which today are regarded as firmly established are but transitory forms of truth.

The Copernican system is but a transitory form, it has been brought about through the plunge into materialism, and will be replaced by something different. The forms of truth continually change. In order that all connection with what is spiritual should not be lost, an even stronger spiritual impulse had to enter human evolution. This was described yesterday as the Christ-Impulse. For a time mankind had to be left to itself, as it were, as regards scientific progress, and the religious side had to develop separately; it had to be saved from the progressive onslaught of science.

Thus we see how science, which devoted itself to material things, was separated for a while from things spiritual, which now followed a special course and the two movements—belief in what was spiritual, and the knowledge of external things—proceeded side by side. We even see in one particular period of development in the Middle Ages, a period immediately preceding our own, that science and belief consciously oppose each other, but still seek union.

Consider the Scholastics. They said: Faith was given to man by Christ, this we may not deny; it was a direct gift; and all the science which has been produced since the division took place, can only serve to prove this gift. We see in scholasticism the tendency to employ all science to prove revealed truth. At its prime it said: Men can gaze upwards to the blessedness of faith and to a certain degree human science can enter into it, but to do this men must devote themselves to it.

In the course of time all relationship between science and belief was, however, lost, and there was no longer any hope that they could advance side by side. The extremity of this divergence is found in the philosophy of Kant, where science and belief are completely sundered. In it, on the one hand, the categorical imperative is put forward with its practical postulates of reason; on the other hand, purely theoretical reason which has lost all connection with spiritual truths and declares that from the standpoint of science these cannot be found.

Another powerful impulse was, however, already making itself felt, which also represented a memory of ancient Egyptian thought. Minds appeared that were seeking a union between science and belief, minds that were endeavouring, through entering profoundly into science, to recognize the things of God with such certainty and clarity that they would be accessible to scientific thought. Goethe is typical of such a thinker and of such a point of view. To him religion, art, and science were one; he felt the works of Greek art to be connected with religion, as he felt the great thoughts of Divinity to be reflected in the countless plant formations he investigated.

Taking the whole of modern culture, we have to see in it a memory of Egyptian culture; Egyptian thought is reflected in it from its beginning.

The division in modern culture between science and belief did not arise without long preparation,—and if we are to understand how this came about we must glance briefly at the way post-Atlantean culture was prepared for during the Atlantean epoch.

We have seen how a handful of people who dwelt in the neighbourhood of Ireland had progressed the furthest; they had acquired those qualities which had to appear gradually in the succeeding epochs of civilization. The rudiments of the ego had been developing as we know since the Lemurian epoch, but each stage of selfhood in this small group of people, by whom the stream of culture was carried from West to East, consisted in a tendency to logical thought and the power of judgment. Up to this time these did not exist; if a thought arose it was already substantiated. The beginning of thought that was capable of judgment was implanted in these people, and they bore the rudiments of this with them from West to East in their colonizing migrations, one of which went southwards towards India. Here the first foundations of constructive thinking were laid. Later, this constructive thinking passed into the Persian civilization. In the third cultural period, that of Chaldea, it grew stronger and with the Greeks it developed so far that they have left behind them the glorious monument of Aristotelian philosophy.

Constructive thought continued to develop more and more, but always returned to a central point, where it received reinforcement. We must picture it as follows: When civilization came from the West into Asia one group, that having the smallest amount of purely logical thinking capacity, went toward India; the second group, which traveled towards Persia, had a little more; and the group that went towards Egypt had still more. From within this group were separated off the people of the Old Testament, who had exactly that combination of faculties which had to be developed in order that another forward step might be taken in this purely logical form of human cognition.

With this is associated the other thing we have been considering, namely, the descent to the physical plane. The further we descend the more does thought become merely logical, and the more it tends to a merely external faculty of judgment. Pure logical thought, mere human logic, that which proceeds from one idea to another, requires the human brain as its instrument; the cultivated brain makes logical thought possible. Hence external thinking, even when it has reached an astonishing height, can never of itself comprehend reincarnation, because it is in the first place only applicable to the things of the external sense world that surrounds us.

Logic may indeed be applied to all worlds, but can only be applied directly to the physical world; hence when it appears as human logic it is bound unconditionally to its instrument, the physical brain. Abstract thought could never have entered the world without a further descent into the world of the senses. This development of logical thought is bound up with the loss of ancient clairvoyant vision, and was bought at the cost of this loss. The task of man is to re-conquer clairvoyant vision, adding logical thought to it. In time to come he will obtain imagination as well, but logical thinking will be retained.

The human head had in the first place to be created similar to the etheric head before man could have a brain. It was then first possible for man to descend to the physical plane. In order that all spirituality should not be lost a point of time had to be chosen for the saving of this, when the last impulse to purely mechanical thought had not yet been given. If the Christ had appeared a few centuries later He would have come, as it were, too late, for humanity would have descended too far, would have been too much entangled in thought, and would not have been able to understand Christ. Christ had to come before this last impulse had been received, when the spiritually religious tendency could still be saved as a tendency leading to belief. Then came the last impulse, which plunged human thought to the lowest point, where it was banished and completely chained to physical life. This arose through the Arabs and Mohammedans. Moslem thought is a peculiar episode in Arabian life and thought, which in its passage over to Europe gave the final impulse to logical thinking—to that which is incapable of rising to what is spiritual.

To begin with, man was so led by what may be called Providence or a spiritual guidance that spiritual life was saved in Christendom; later, Arabism approached Europe from the south and provided the field for external culture. It is only capable of comprehending what is external. Do we not see this in the Arabesque, which is incapable of rising to what is living, but has to remain formal? We can also see in the Mosque how the spirit is, as it were, sucked out.

Humanity had first to be led down into matter, then in a roundabout way by means of Arabism, and the invasion of the Arab, we are shown how modern science first arose in the sharp contact of Arabism with Europeanism which had already accepted Christianity. The ancient Egyptian memories had come to life again; but what made them materialistic? What made them into thought-forms of the dead? We can show this clearly. If the path of progress had been smooth the memory of what had taken place previously would have re-appeared in our age. That which is spiritual has been saved as a whole, but one wing of European culture has been gripped by materialism. We also see how the remembrance of those who recalled the ancient Egyptian age was so changed by its passage through Arabism that it reappeared in a materialistic form. The fact that Copernicus comprehended the modern way of regarding the solar system was the outcome of his Egyptian memory. The reason why he presented it in a materialistic form, making of it a dead mechanical rotation, is because the Arabian mentality, encountering this memory from the other side, forced it into materialism.

From all that has been said you can see how secret channels connect the third and the fifth age. This can be seen even in the principle of initiation, and as modern life is to receive a principle of initiation in Rosicrucianism let us ask what this is.

In modern science we have to see a union between Egyptian remembrances and Arabism, which tends towards that which is dead. On the other side we see another union consummated, that between what Egyptian initiates imparted to their pupils and things spiritual. We see a union between wisdom and that which had been rescued as the truths of belief. This wondrous harmony between the Egyptian remembrance in wisdom and the Christian impulse of power is found in Rosicrucian spiritual teaching. So the ancient seed laid down in the Egyptian period re-appears, not merely as a repetition, but differentiated and upon a higher level.

These are thoughts which should not only instruct with regard to the universe, earth, and man, but they should enter as well into our feeling and our impulses of will and give us wings; for they show us the path we have to travel. They point the path to that which is spiritual, and also show how we may carry over into the future what, in a good sense, we have gained here on the purely material plane.

We have seen how paths separate and again unite; the time will come when not the remembrances only of Egypt will unite with spiritual truths to produce a Rosicrucian science, but science and Rosicrucianism will also unite. Rosicrucianism is both a religion and at the same time a science that is firmly bound to what is material. When we turn to the Babylonian period we find this is shown in myth of the third period of civilization; here we are told of the God Maradu, who meets with the evil principle, the serpent of the Old Testament, and splits his head in two, so that in a certain sense the earlier adversary is divided into two parts. This was in fact what actually happened; a partition of that which arose in the primeval, watery earth-substance, as symbolized by the serpent. In the upper part we have to see the truths upheld by faith, in the lower the purely material acceptance of the world. These two must be united—science and that which is spiritual—and they will be united in the future. This will come to pass when, through Rosicrucian wisdom, spirituality is intensified, and itself becomes a science, when it once more coincides with the investigations made by science. Then a mighty harmonious unity will again arise; the various currents of civilization will unite and flow together through the channels of humanity. Do we not see in recent times how this unity is being striven for?

When we consider the ancient Egyptian mysteries we see that religion, science, and art were then one. The course of the world evolution is shown in the descent of the Gods into matter; this is presented to us in a grand dramatic symbolism. Anyone who can appreciate this symbolism has science before him, for he sees there vividly portrayed the descent of man and his entrance into the world. He is also confronted with something else, namely, art, for the picture presented to him is an artistic reflection of science. But he does not see only these two, science and art, in the mysteries of ancient Egypt; they are for him at the same time religion, for what is presented to him pictorially is filled with religious feeling.

These three were later divided; religion, science, and art went separate ways, but already in our age men feel that they must again come together.

What else was the great effort of Richard Wagner than a spiritual striving, a mighty longing towards a cultural impulse? The Egyptians saw visible pictures because the external eye had need of them. In our age what they saw will be repeated; once more the separate streams of culture will unite, a whole will be constructed, this time preferably in a work of art whose elements will be the sequence of sound. On every side we find connections between what appertained to Egypt and modern times; everywhere this reflection can be seen. As time goes on our souls will realize more and more that each age is not merely a repetition but an ascent; that a progressive development is taking place in humanity. Then the most intimate strivings of humanity—the striving for initiation—must find fulfillment.

The principle of initiation suited to the first age cannot be the principle of initiation for the changed humanity of today. It is of no value to us to be told that the Egyptians had already found primeval wisdom and truth in ancient times; that these are contained in the old Oriental religions and philosophies, and that everything that has appeared since exists only to enable us to experience the same over again if we are to rise to the highest initiation. No! This is useless talk. Each age has need of its own particular force within the depths of the human soul.

When it is asserted in certain Theosophical quarters that there is a western initiation for our stage of civilization, but that it is a late product, that true initiation comes only from the East, we must answer that this cannot be determined without knowing something further. The matter must be gone into more deeply than is usually done. There may be some who say that in Buddha the highest summit was reached, that Christ has brought nothing new since Buddha; but only in that which meets us positively can we recognize what really is the question here. If we ask those who stand on the ground of Western initiation whether they deny anything in Eastern initiation, whether they make any different statements regarding Buddha than those in the East, they answer, “No.” They value all; they agree with all; but they understand progressive development. They can be distinguished from those who deny the Western principle of initiation by the fact that they know how to accept what Orientalism has to give, and in addition they know the advanced forms which the course of time has made necessary. They deny nothing in the realm of Eastern initiation.

Take a description of Buddha by one who accepts the standpoint of Western esotericism. This will not differ from that of a follower of Eastern esotericism; but the man with the Western standpoint holds that in Christ there is something which goes beyond Buddha. The Eastern standpoint does not allow this. If it is said that Buddha is greater than Christ that does not decide anything, for this depends on something positive. Here the Western standpoint is the same as the Eastern. The West does not deny what the East says, but it asserts something further.

The life of Buddha is not rightly understood when we read that Buddha perished through the enjoyment of too much pork; this must not be taken literally. It is rightly objected from the standpoint of Christian esotericism that people who understand something trivial from this understand nothing about it at all; this is only an image, and shows the position in which Buddha stood to his contemporaries. He had imparted too many of' the sacred Brahmanical secrets to the outer world. He was ruined through having given out that which was hidden, as is everyone else who imparts what is hidden.

This is what is expressed in this peculiar symbol. Allow me to emphasize strongly that we disagree in no way with Oriental conceptions, but people must understand the esotericism of such things. If it is said that this is of little importance: it is not the case. They might as well think it of little importance when we are told that the writer of the Apocalypse wrote it amid thunder and lightning, and if anyone found occasion to mock at the Apocalypse because of this we should reply: “What a pity he does not know what it means when we are told that the Apocalypse was imparted to the earth 'mid lightning and thunder!”

We must keep in mind the fact that no negation has passed the lips of Western esotericists, and that much that was puzzling at the beginning of the Anthroposophical movement has been explained by them. The followers of Western esotericism never find in it anything out of harmony with the mighty truths given to the world by H. P. Blavatsky. When we are told, for example, that we have to distinguish in the Buddha the Dhyani-Buddha, the Adi-Buddha, and the human Buddha, this is first fully explained by the Western esotericist. For we know that what is regarded as the Dhyani-Buddha is nothing but the etheric body of the historic Buddha that had been taken possession of by a God; that this etheric body had been laid hold of by the being whom we call Wotan. This was already contained in Eastern esotericism, but was only first understood in the right way through Western esotericism.

The Anthroposophical movement should be especially careful that the feeling which rises in our souls from such thoughts as these should stimulate in us the desire for further development, that we should not stand still for a moment. The value of our movement does not consist in the ancient dogmas it contains (if these are but fifteen years old), but in comprehending its true purpose, which is the opening up of fresh springs of spiritual knowledge. It will then become a living movement and will help to bring about that future which, if only very briefly, has been presented to your mental sight today, by drawing upon what we are able to observe of the past.

We are not concerned with the imparting of theoretic truths, but that our feeling, our perception, and our actions may be full of power.

We have considered the evolution of Universe, Earth, and Man; we desire so to grasp what we have gathered from these studies that we may be ready at any time to enter upon development.

What we call “future” must always be rooted in the past; knowledge has no value if not changed into motive power for the future. The purpose for the future must be in accordance with the knowledge of the past, but this knowledge is of little value unless changed into propelling force for the future.

What we have heard has presented to us a picture of' such mighty motive powers that not only our will and our enthusiasm have been stimulated, but our feelings of joy and of security in life have also been deeply moved. When we note the interplay of so many currents we are constrained to say: Many are the seeds within the womb of Time. Through an ever deepening knowledge man must learn how better to foster all these seeds. Knowledge in order to work, in order to gain certainty in life, must be the feeling that pervades all Anthroposophical study.

In conclusion I would like to point out that the so-called theories of Spiritual Science only attain final truth when they are changed into something living—into impulses of feeling and of certainty as regards life; so that our studies may not merely be theoretical, but may play a real part in evolution.

On the meaning and spiritual origin of the cult of knowledge

It is quite impossible to make real progress in penetrating into higher worlds without going through the stage of imaginative knowledge.¹

The motif of the temple in Goethe and in Rudolf Steiner is to be a vessel for supersensible worship, which Goethe has performed by the three kings and which Rudolf Steiner has performed at the three altars.²

One important reason for working with cultic symbolism at all lies in the original knowledge that events in the higher world immediately adjacent to the physical world - the astral or imaginative world - express themselves in symbolic images that correspond to astral facts just as what is seen in the physical world corresponds to physical facts. In this sense, symbolic-cultic work can be seen as a practical tool for becoming familiar with the astral world. Rudolf Steiner once emphasized that the higher worlds cannot be penetrated in any other way than through symbolic representations. Literally it says: “In the various occult currents of the present time, the opinion prevails that there are other ways of ascending into the higher worlds than by using imaginative and symbolic images. And for people of the present time, ascending to the astral world with the help of symbolic signs or other occult means of education is associated with a certain fear, even aversion. If one raises the question: Are such states of fear justified? - one can say: Yes and No. - In a certain respect they are justified, in another respect they are completely out of place, because no one can really come up into the higher worlds without passing through the astral world.” (Cologne, December 29, 1907).

Regarding the statement about the spiritual origin of the cult of knowledge in the letter of August 15, 1906 (p. 68): “This ritual cannot be any different than the reflection of what is the fact of the higher planes,” there is an important addition in lectures from 1924, in which this fact of the higher planes is described as follows: “At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, hovering very close by, of course, I mean in terms of quality, to the physical-sensuous world, there is a supersensible event which presents supersensible acts of worship, powerful developments of images of spiritual life...” These illuminated Goethe's spirit in miniature images and were shaped by him into his ” Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (Dornach, September 16, 1924). One of the central motifs of this fairy-tale is the temple with the three kings, the representatives of wisdom, beauty, power or strength; also characterized by Rudolf Steiner as representatives of initiation: the golden king for the imagination, the silver king for the cognitive faculty of objective feeling, the brazen king for the cognitive faculty of the will (Berlin, October 24, 1908). The three altars with their servants are in line with this, both in the cult of knowledge and in the temple scenes of the mystery dramas. And if the letter of August 15, 1906, goes on to say that the ritual recognized by occultism for 2300 years ³ was prepared by the masters of the “Rosicrucians” according to European standards, the connection with supersensible cult appears in the following words: “The Rosicrucians said: Shape the world so that it contains wisdom, beauty and strength, then wisdom, beauty and strength are reflected in us. If you have devoted your time to this, you yourself will emerge from this earth with the reflection of wisdom, beauty and strength. Wisdom is the reflection of the manas; beauty, devotion, kindness is the reflection of the budhi; strength is the reflection of the atma. ... Man advances on earth, not by idle contemplation, but by assimilating wisdom, beauty and strength from the earth.

Goethe's riddle-tale, as it has often been called, was written at the end of the 18th century (1795). A century later, in 1899, as the so-called Kali Yuga, the spiritually dark age, came to an end and a spiritually bright age was to begin again, Rudolf Steiner grasped the far-reaching decision to bring the esoteric that lived in him to public display, in the sense of the decisive word for the whole event in Goethe's fairy tale, “It is time!” And true to the esoteric law of maintaining continuity, he took up the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, the images of which had been his meditation for twenty years. On August 28, 1899, the 150th anniversary of Goethe's birth, he published the essay “Goethe's Secret Revelation” and a year later, in the fall of 1900, he continued the interpretation of the Goethean apocalypse begun in it in a lecture given to the Berlin Theosophists and now became “completely esoteric”. ⁴ Twenty years later, on the eve of the first event in the first Goetheanum building, the so-called first college course, he referred to this lecture as the “primordial cell” of the anthroposophical movement, looking back on its development (Dornach, September 25, 1920).

This probably meant not only that the anthroposophical movement had its external beginning with this lecture, but also, unspoken, that at that time the realization of the central demand of the Goethe fairy tale had begun: to bring the mysteries - the temple - out of the hidden into the full light of day, that is, into the public sphere. For it was in this deeper sense that anthroposophical spiritual science was developed as the herald of the spiritually bright age that had dawned for humanity. And that is why, in the last year of his lecturing activities, Rudolf Steiner said the following, which is so important in connection with the description of the supersensible cult: “What is anthroposophy in terms of its reality? Yes, my dear friends, when you see through all the wonderful, majestic imaginations that existed as supersensible worship in the first half of the 19th century [and also at the end of the 18th century], and translate that into human concepts, then you have Anthroposophy” (Dornach, July 8, 1924).

Thus, a straight line leads from the perception of the cult in the supersensible world - which is undoubtedly connected with the ancient ritual prepared by the masters of the Rosicrucians for European conditions - through the Goethe fairy tale to the translation of these images of spiritual life into the scientific concepts of anthroposophy and to the design of the cult of knowledge.

In this sense, Rudolf Steiner brought the cult of knowledge, with its three altars, which Marie Steiner describes as the signs and seals of his work, “out of the depths of the temple in which they have stood since the beginning of mystery religions” and handed it over to “mankind” ($. 486).

Why the cult of knowledge was cultivated in fraternal union

It is not the one and the other and the third, but something completely new that arises through union.⁵

To answer the question of why cult symbolism is used in fraternal associations, certain spiritual facts must be taken into account. One is the nature of such associations, which Rudolf Steiner characterized in his lecture on brotherhood and the struggle for existence, given in Berlin on November 23, 1905, one day before he entered the Memphis-Misraim Freemasonry:

"Unity means the possibility of a higher being expressing itself through the united members. This is a general principle in all life.” Five people who are together, thinking and feeling in harmony with each other, are more than 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1; they are not merely the sum of the five, just as our body is not the sum of the five senses, but the living together, the living into each other means something very similar to the living into each other of the cells of the human body. A new, higher being is in the midst of the five, even in the midst of two or three. “Where two or three are united in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” It is not the one and the other and the third, but something completely new that arises from the union. But this can only come about if the individual lives in the other, if the individual draws his strength not only from himself but also from the others. But this can only happen if he lives in the other selflessly. Thus human associations are the mysterious places into which higher spiritual beings descend in order to work through individual people, as the soul works through the members of the body.

In our materialistic age, this is not easily believed, but in the spiritual scientific world view, it is not merely something figurative, but highly real. Therefore, the spiritual scientist is not just talking about abstract things when he speaks of the folk spirit or the folk soul or the family spirit or the spirit of another community. You cannot see this spirit at work in an association, but it is there, and it is there through the brotherly love of the personalities working in this association. Just as the body has a soul, so a guild, a brotherhood, also has a soul, and I repeat once again, it is not just a figure of speech, but is to be taken as a full reality.

The magicians are the people who work together in the brotherhood because they attract higher beings into their circle. There is no longer any need to invoke the machinations of spiritualism when working together in a community with brotherly love. Higher beings are manifesting themselves there. When we give ourselves up in the brotherhood, this giving up, this merging into the whole, is a strengthening, a fortification of our organs. When we then act or speak as a member of such a community, it is not the individual soul that acts or speaks in us, but the spirit of the community. This is the secret of the progress of future humanity, to work out of communities. Just as one epoch replaces another and each has its own task, so it is also with the medieval epoch in relation to our own, with our epoch in relation to the future. The medieval brotherhoods were active in the practical side of life, in the foundation of the useful arts. They only showed a materialistic life after they had preserved their fruits, their basis of consciousness, namely brotherhood, but had more or less disappeared after the abstract principle of the state, the abstract, spiritual life had taken the place of real empathy. It is incumbent upon the future to found brotherhoods again, and to do so out of the spiritual, out of the highest ideals of the soul. Human life has so far produced the most diverse associations; it has given rise to a terrible struggle for existence, which today has almost reached its peak. The spiritual-scientific world view aims to develop the highest goods of humanity in the sense of the brotherhood principle, and so you see that the spiritual-scientific world movement is replacing the struggle for existence with the brotherhood principle in all fields. We must learn to live a life of community. We must not believe that one or the other is capable of carrying out this or that.

Everyone would like to know how to combine the struggle for existence and brotherly love. That is quite simple. We must learn to replace struggle with positive work, to replace war with the ideal. Today, however, people understand too little what this means. We do not know what fight we are talking about, because we only talk about fights in life in general. There is the social fight, the fight for peace, the fight for the emancipation of women, the fight for land and so on, everywhere we look we see fight.

The spiritual scientific worldview now strives to replace this struggle with positive work. Those who have embraced this worldview know that fighting in any area of life does not lead to real results. Seek to introduce into life that which proves to be right in your experience and knowledge, to assert it without fighting your opponent. It can, of course, only be an ideal, but there must be such an ideal to be introduced into life today as a spiritual-scientific principle. People who attach themselves to other people and use their strength for the benefit of all are the foundation on which a fruitful development into the future can be built. The Theosophical [or Anthroposophical] Society aims to be exemplary in this respect. It is therefore not a propaganda society like others, but a brotherhood. In it, one works through the work of each individual member. One must only understand this correctly. The one who works best is not the one who wants to enforce his opinion, but the one who sees what he sees in his fellow brothers; who searches the thoughts and feelings of his fellow human beings and makes himself their servant. He works best within this circle, which can implement in practical life, not sparing one's own opinion. If we try to understand in this way, that our best powers arise from union and that union is not to be held merely as an abstract principle, but above all to be practiced in a theosophical way in every action, in every moment of life, then we will make progress. We must only not be impatient in this progress."

Another spiritual fact on which communal work on cult symbols is based is that the powers of thought developed through genuine cult symbols, when thought through long periods of time, increase to such an extent that they become external reality in later times. In this way progress is effected. For everything happens from within, not from without: “What is thought and feeling in one period is outer form in the following period. And the individualities that guide the evolution of humanity must implant the thought forms that are to become outer physical reality many millennia in advance. There you have the function of thought forms, which are stimulated by such symbolic images as Noah's Ark, the Temple of Solomon, and the four apocalyptic creatures man, lion, bull, eagle. ... Images that guide people when they surrender to them... to take part in the world that directly borders on theirs,” as it says in the lecture Cologne, December 28, 1907, in which the transformation of the human body is described as a prime example of how the ideas of Noah's Ark and Solomon's Temple are brought about.

These spiritual scientific insights also provide a concrete background for the following statement about Freemasonry: “If you ask me what Freemasonry actually consists of, I have to tell you in abstract terms: Freemasonry consists in its members thinking ahead, for several centuries, of the events that should advance the world, “which, however, has already been realized to a large extent today (Berlin, January 2, 1906).

If the whole of progress is served by symbolic-cultic fraternal cooperation, then the progress of the individual is also served. The fact that Rudolf Steiner points out that real consciousness of immortality is bound to practical fraternity, for the decisive law for the real consciousness of immortality is: Only that which a person does not do for himself alone in order to attain it contributes to the development of the consciousness of immortality, to a spiritual survival filled with full consciousness (Berlin, December 23, 1904).

As is well known, realizing ideals requires a great deal of patience. Rudolf Steiner spoke about this in an instructive and consoling way in a lesson in the following way:

Instruction lesson, Berlin, October 28, 1911

Perhaps there are some among you who feel oppressed because they cannot yet apply what they have learned here in their lives to their outer work, so that they can only keep taking in spiritual teachings and now have to ask themselves: Am I perhaps a spiritual hedonist? The wise masters of the East give us this answer: When spiritual teachings are assimilated, something happens that also lasts for all eternity. The spiritual development of humanity could not be furthered by the “spirits of the past” - whether people who lived in the distant past or gods who preceded us in their earthly development - if there were no souls into which they could pour these teachings. It is like the seed of a plant: as long as it is still inside the flower or ovary, it has no value; only when it enters the earth can it flourish. Of much more importance for the development of the earth are the people who allow works of art such as the Sistine Madonna, Faust and so on to have an effect on them than the artists themselves. If Raphael had only painted the [Sistine] Madonna and no one else had ever seen it, it would have been significant only for him, but not for eternity. Only by allowing people to be affected by works of art or other intellectual products is something created that will outlast the earth and be taken into the Jupiter state. The creator is not the most important thing; by far the most important are the viewers, readers and so on. If someone who creates a work of art or writes a book receives the inspiration for it from the spiritual world, then, until the moment of conception, it also has an eternal meaning for him. But as soon as he sets to work with pen or brush, he works only for the temporal, it has meaning only for him. Everything that is produced for the world is temporal. Only that which is inspired in human souls remains. The greatest weight is therefore not where one would expect it to be according to ordinary intellectual judgment. That the evangelists wrote the Gospels was significant for them, but it would mean nothing for eternity if there had not been innumerable hearts on which these Gospels had an effect. It is infinitely better to read a good book from an earlier time and let it have an effect on you than to write a bad book yourself. Those who believe they have to achieve something in the world should wait until their karma calls them to this or that work. And those who, for example, have had a spiritual vision and wonder whether they should share it with the world can apply the following criterion: If sharing it gives them joy, then they should certainly refrain from doing so. Only that which causes pain when communicated has value. Humorists who enjoy their ideas do not produce anything that has meaning for humanity; only those who have painfully relived the folly of men and have risen to their humor from it give something lasting in history. Nothing but “devotion to the spiritual world” can make a work fruitful in the world.

People may have accumulated treasures and feel the need to use them again for the benefit of humanity, but without occult insight it is impossible to know whether one or the other philanthropic institution will serve the good or the misfortune of people after a short time. No matter how many Samaritan deeds are performed and how many people are made happy, it could be, and without the devotion to the spiritual world just mentioned, it is even very likely, that great harm will be done, for instance to the children of those people, that is, to the next generation.

Here, in our lodge, because people are present with their thoughts, more is being done for the good of the world than all philanthropic work. Physical values are destroyed by using them for oneself; spiritual values, on the other hand, are created by absorbing them. Thus, the creator himself is not the most important thing at all. If one were to go back to the Akasha Chronicle to the age of Raphael, Michelangelo and so on, and pay attention only to them, one would not get the right picture. Likewise, if one were to only pay attention to what was in the souls of the great leaders of the mysteries when researching the Atlantean period in the Akasha Chronicle – which, by the way, is very difficult – one only sees the right thing when one pays attention to what was awakened in the hearts and souls of their disciples.

Anyone capable of writing a mediocre book is then also capable of understanding a good book from the past and will derive infinitely more benefit from it than from writing a mediocre book.

So it is not unauthorized enjoyment when the members endeavor to absorb what is offered here. Without this acceptance by the members, nothing could be done for the further spiritual development of people. Then people would have to fall completely prey to materialism; future generations would be sick in body and soul. The children born among us would not find the thoughts they need for their proper development in the spiritual atmosphere if there were no circles in which spiritual knowledge is received, even if it is not carried out. Materialism sins so much that one cannot do enough in this direction, that exaggeration is not possible at all. Even if ten or a hundred times more were studied than is really the case, it would still not be too much to make up for what is sinned against the world through materialism.

Regarding the name of the working group

It was a “cult of knowledge”.

For inner reasons, the working group had no actual name for Rudolf Steiner (see page 237). It was therefore sometimes abbreviated to “FM” (Freemasonry), sometimes to “ME” (mystica aeterna), and later, at Rudolf Steiner's express request, to “MD” (Misraim Service) (see page 94). For the present publication, the term “cult of knowledge” was chosen because it best expresses the essence of Steiner's intentions. It was in 1923 when he answered a question from priests of the “Christian Community” about the relationship between their cult and the earlier esoteric cult:

"The earlier cult was purely demonstrative. It was a cult of knowledge with degrees. The first degree brought the knowledge of the earthly man, showed man from the Lemurian time to the present, in the imagination. The second degree represented the relationship to the spiritual world, the third the secrets of the gate of death and so on. This cult was a non-temporal, interdenominational and interreligious one; only a certain degree had a Christian character. The use of this cult had to be discontinued because the demonstration character could no longer be made clear to the outside world.6

Even before Rudolf Steiner referred to the cult as a “cult of knowledge” in this question-and-answer session, he had pointed out the importance of knowledge for the cultic in his Dornach lecture of December 30, 1922, with the words: “For everything that is cultic must ultimately dissolve if the backbone of knowledge is lacking.”

Admission Procedure

Those approaching the institution were told in the clearest possible terms that they were not joining a religious order, but that as participants in ceremonial acts they would experience a kind of sensitization, a demonstration of spiritual knowledge. If some of the forms in which members were accepted into traditional orders or promoted to higher degrees were retained, this too had nothing to do with the purpose of such an order, but only to illustrate spiritual ascent in soul experiences through sensual images. ⁷

An example of how admission was sought can be found in a letter from the leader of the Munich group, Sophie Stinde, which Steiner passed on to Rudolf Steiner on February 24, 1908: “Countess H. would like to become a member of the FM. but wanted to ask you in Stuttgart beforehand whether she could join at her next visit or whether you thought it better if she waited. Since she did not get around to asking you in Stuttgart, I suggested that I should ask you. Since we probably have recordings, we could include her, if you don't think it's too soon for Grf.H. Miss L. was with us recently and repeated that she and Dr. W. would like to be included in March. Miss Kr. and Mr. R. also repeated the request. (...) We had thought of the work plan as follows: On the 17th in the evening, Lodge. On the 18th in the morning ES. - In the evening public lecture Man and Woman. On the 19th in the morning FM-admission. We would certainly have placed the admission before the instruction, since we know that you prefer it that way, but since there is a public lecture on the 19th in the evening, we must refrain from it this time, since the admission will be a very extensive one after all."

Depending on how many candidates were admitted, the admissions often lasted for hours; individual admissions were only undertaken in exceptional cases. Before the actual admission, there was a preparatory session in which the candidates were informed about the tasks and duties. Only two records of Rudolf Steiner's remarks in such preparatory sessions are available (p. 143f.). In exceptional cases, such preliminary meetings were also formally organized, as can be seen from a letter from Rudolf Steiner to Sophie Stinde dated June 10, 1908, which states: “St's are to be admitted to the FM this time. It will not do to have a short preliminary celebration on Monday for the FM. The most urgent wish of the St. is to be admitted precisely on his 50th birthday. Of course, the admission cannot take place until Tuesday – the day after his birthday – but one could briefly – perhaps without a lodge ceremony – hold a preliminary celebration of the admission on Monday, which would be specially arranged.

On the degrees

A truth is either known or not known. ... Therefore, the democratic principle is impossible in matters of knowledge.⁸

Regarding the right to work in degrees, one of the lectures given during the period of preparation of the circle states: “Truth is not something about which one can have opinions. One either knows a truth or one does not know it.... Just as little as one can discuss whether the sum of the angles of a triangle is such and such or has so many degrees, just as little can one discuss higher truths. Therefore, the democratic principle is impossible in matters of knowledge (Berlin, December 16, 1904).

In this sense, the working group of the Knowledge Cult was structured in degrees. One participant described it as follows: “It was an institution in which there were different degrees to which the participants were promoted, depending on the readiness of their souls for the content of these degrees, as determined by their karma. Promotion to a higher degree took place partly in forms that were also practiced in occult societies, for example in Freemasonry - but not in imitation of such orders, but because they resulted from spiritual research. ... It is easy to see that the esoteric impulses flowed ever more abundantly as the degrees rose, and that in the almost ten years of the events – right up to the outbreak of war – the experiences of these hours meant something tremendously profound for the development of the soul life of many participants.” ⁹

There were nine degrees in all, divided into three and six, forming two sections or classes, which, together with the so-called “ES”, formed the three sections or classes of the Esoteric School, as it existed from 1904 to 1914. In the first three degrees, the emphasis was on ritual acts; in the following six degrees, which, according to tradition, only a few belonged to, teaching was said to have been the main focus. The extent to which nine degrees correspond to the number of degrees that can be taught in a true secret training course today was once explained as follows:

”...Now it is very important to know that every occult fraternity is built upon the foundation of three degrees. In the first degree, when the symbolism is used in the right way (and by 'right' I naturally mean as I have just indicated for our fifth post-Atlantean period), the souls come to the point where they have a precise inner experience of the fact that there is knowledge independent of ordinary physical-sensory knowledge. And in the first degree they must have a certain sum of such knowledge independent of the physical. Everyone in the first degree today within the fifth post-Atlantic period should know approximately what is in my “Occult Science”. Everyone who has reached the second degree should know - that is, know inwardly in a living way - what is contained in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. And anyone who has reached the third degree and receives the meaningful symbols, signs, grip and word of the third degree already, knows what it means to live outside of one's physical body. That would be the rule, that would be what is to be attained.

But then there are people who arrive at the so-called high degrees, at higher degrees. Now, this is certainly an area where an enormous amount of vanity comes into play, because there is fraternization in which one can reach ninety or more than ninety degrees. Now just imagine what it means to bear such a high degree! The so-called Scottish High Degree system has thirty-three degrees, simply due to an error arising from grotesque ignorance. This system is built on the three degrees that run in the way I have described. So there you have the three degrees, which, as you can see, have their profound significance. But after these three degrees, there are another thirty. Now you can imagine what a high being you are if you are able to experience yourself outside of your body in the third degree, what a high being you are if you go through another thirty degrees after that. But it is based on a grotesque error of knowledge. In the occult sciences, degrees are read differently than in the decimal system: they are read in such a way that one does not calculate according to the decimal system, but according to the system of numbers that are currently being considered. So when you write: 33rd degree, in reality, according to the system of numbers that are being considered, it means: 3 times 3 = 9. ... Just because people can't read, they read 33 instead of 9.

Well, but let's disregard these vanities. There are still six degrees that build on these three degrees, and these are counted as legitimate degrees. And when they are gone through, they already give very significant results. But basically, they cannot be fully experienced in the present. It is absolutely impossible. They cannot be fully experienced because humanity in the fifth post-Atlantic period is not yet so far advanced that all that can be experienced can actually be experienced. For not enough has emerged from the spiritual worlds – I will not say in the way of knowledge, but in the way of the exercise of knowledge. This will come out only later.” (Berlin, April 4, 1916)

On the symbolism of the institution

In fact, Freemasonry originally emerged from the mystery schools through a betrayal. This is why many of the symbols found in Freemasonry can also be found here.¹⁰

The interior design of the lodge or temple has been handed down in detail only for the first two degrees, but it is likely that it was also largely the same for the third degree, at least: walls draped in black, which were transformed into glowing red in the final act, at the Rose Cross conclusion. ¹¹ On the east wall, in a blue square of cloth, there was a radiant sun with a triangle in the middle. On the ceiling was a lamp with a second-degree letter “G” made of gilded cardboard or sheet metal.¹² The floor was covered by a carpet in a black and white checkerboard pattern. At the edges of the large carpet were three altars: in the east the altar of wisdom (master), in the south the altar of beauty (2nd overseer), in the west the altar of strength (1st overseer). ¹³ Each officiant carried a herald's staff, presumably as in the Mystery Dramas. A large candelabrum stood beside each altar. A plumb line made of gilded sheet metal was affixed to the front of each altar. Furthermore, each altar had a candle, matches, scissors for cutting candles, a candle snuffer, a hammer and a trowel. A chalice belonged to the altar of the East, the so-called “Holy of Holies”; a censer with a bowl and an angle to the altar of the South; two compasses, a yardstick and a skull to the altar of the West.

At the altar of the East stood a cross with a wreath of thorns, which in the final act, at the Rose-Cross conclusion, was exchanged for a wreath of red roses. Close by stood a somewhat smaller altar with the 13th chapter of the Gospel of John open at the Bible, on which lay a gilded sheet metal triangle and a ladle that fit into each other. In the beginning, one had to swear at this altar not to reveal the secrets of the Temple. This was in keeping with an ancient tradition in occult contexts.¹⁴

Although this was also linked to the old, it was later abandoned, as reported by participants. For Rudolf Steiner, people in the modern age should be increasingly called upon to take personal moral responsibility in their esoteric lives. In the north, outside the large carpet, stood the two round columns Jakin and Boaz, also called the Pillars of Hercules. The left one (Jakin) was brick red; on top lay a hewn cube-shaped stone (blue). The right one (Boaz) was dark blue; on top of it lay an unhewn stone (red). Between the two columns lay the symbolic table, which Elisabeth Vreede's sketch shows as a “small carpet”, as it is also used in general Masonic lodges (so-called Tapis, Tableau). The participants had their seats on the north and south sides of the lodge room.

In the third degree, a fourth altar appeared in the north, as well as a coffin, just as in certain temple scenes in the mystery dramas.

The sketches for the first and second degree settings, as well as the detailed sketches and explanations, were done by the Dutchwoman Elisabeth Vreede.

Clothing

There is no authentic information about clothing. It is known that the apron (mason's apron, lambskin) was worn, and that Rudolf Steiner wore an alb (the long white priest's robe), over which a red cloak was thrown when the color of the room changed from black to red.

For the symbolic meaning of such clothing, see the remarks in the workers' lecture of June 4, 1924, reproduced on page 272 under “Zeichen, Griff und Wort”.

Regarding the rituals

Everything that was presented in terms of the content of “actions” ... was without historical reference to any tradition. In the possession of the formal diploma, only that was cultivated which resulted from the visualization of anthroposophical knowledge.¹⁵

All the extant ritual texts are summarized in the second part of this volume. It is known that there were also one or two smaller ritual acts: for example, the so-called baptism of fire in the fourth degree. Before a burning sulfur flame, the person in question was given the name that is appropriate for him in the spiritual world; ¹⁶ There are also isolated reports of marriages. But there are no texts for these small ceremonies. Presumably there were none for them, or no ritual text was necessary.

The rituals can no longer be reconstructed in their full entirety, insofar as they were determined not only by the wording but also, and just as essentially, by the actions, the implements, the clothing and so on. But there is not enough authentic information available about these.

At the beginning of 1913, after some members left the Erkenntniskultischer Arbeitskreis in connection with the separation from the Theosophical Society and the founding of the independent Anthroposophical Society, and apparently betrayed some of it, Rudolf Steiner announced that it had become necessary to change the rituals as a result. In the notes from the instruction session for all degrees in Berlin on February 8, 1913, it says: “Because of this betrayal, it has become necessary to change our ritual and to transform it so that - while the meaning remains essentially the same - the rituals will nevertheless be different from before, so that they will not resonate with those of the others.” Another participant noted the statement as follows: “We were talking about those who have fallen away. In order for their thoughts not to resonate with our work here, it is necessary to change the ritual.” There is no original document for this announced change. However, one participant has passed on the extent to which the words spoken at the three altars have undergone a certain change (see page 170).

Ritual events only take place in places where appropriate rooms are available, such as in the anthroposophical centers in Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart, among others, but also in other countries. ¹⁷

On the explanations of the cult of knowledge and the symbolism of the furnishings

Theosophy is the inner truth of these ceremonies; it says what these ceremonies show, it has the spirit of these signs and images.¹⁸

The instruction or teaching sessions in which the rituals and the symbolism of the furnishings were explained and general spiritual scientific research results were presented, took place between the ritual beginning and the ritual end of a meeting. But there were also instruction sessions without ritual; mostly for one degree, sometimes for several, sometimes for all degrees together.

Since it was not allowed to take notes during such lessons, it should be noted that all the records handed down were made afterwards from memory and are therefore fragmentary or only in note form, and in terms of style, and possibly also content, do not always do justice to Rudolf Steiner.

In the present documentation, only those notes were included that directly refer to the cult of knowledge, the symbolism of the furnishings, as well as the temple legend and the golden legend. Since this information is widely scattered, it was extracted and assigned to the respective terms for a better overview. In some cases, where no explanations from instruction hours are available, illustrations from general lectures given later were included.¹⁹ On the other hand, notes from general spiritual scientific presentations were not included, since these can be found, for the most part, in better reproduction in the part of the lecture work that is already available in the complete edition, because they are based on stenographic notes.

Regarding the Temple Legend and the Golden Legend as they appeared in the rituals.

The nature of Hiram is in all of us; we must bring it to resurrection in us.²⁰

Legends as pictorial representations of esoteric truths play an important role in all secret teachings, since such images summarize a vast number of ideas and not only affect the intellect but also the feelings of the human being. In this sense, the two legends were of great importance because their images reflect the exemplary advancement of the Hiram individuality on the occult path.

The Temple Legend - of which it was once said that he who takes it up takes up something “that forms his thinking in a certain lawful way, and lawful thinking is what matters” ²¹ - appeared in two forms. The part symbolically interpreting the evolution of humanity was taught as meditation material when entering the first degree; the conclusion of the legend, referring to Hiram's death and resurrection, formed part of the initiation ritual into the third degree. The legend was repeatedly treated in instruction hours. The records handed down are summarized in the section 'Explanations of the Temple Legend'. The information contained therein about the re-embodiments of Hiram Abiff requires supplementation, since it forms only part of what may be called Rudolf Steiner's Hiram research in the field of reincarnation. This supplement is attached to the section 'Explanations of the Temple Legend'.

The Golden Legend – referred to in one of the traditional explanations as the “second” Master Legend – was symbolized by the two round columns, Jakin and Boaz. The text of this legend and the explanations that have been handed down can be found in the section “Explanations of the symbolism of the furnishings”.

• 1. From “The Stages of Higher Knowledge,” GA 12.
• 2. E.A. Karl Stockmeyer, a member of the working group on the cult of knowledge, in his essay “On the Unity of Temple and Cult in the Context of the Goetheanum Building Idea,” contained in “Bilder okkulter Siegel und Säulen. Der Münchner Kongreß Pfingsten 1907,” GA 284.
• 3. According to a note by Günther Schubert, Rudolf Steiner said that the whole thing goes back to Melchizedek.
• 4. "My Life” (Chapter 30), GA 28. Marie Steiner noted in a notebook (archive number 21): 'When Rudolf Steiner first came among people with the intention of lifting the veils of esotericism, he took Goethe's fairy tale as his starting point and spoke about the altars of wisdom, beauty and strength. He placed them in the temples of his mystery dramas and spoke to us again and in greater depth about their significance. And again he placed them in our esoteric school and had us approach the various aspects of thinking, feeling and willing, which are an expression of these altars, again and again.”
• 5. From a lecture in Berlin, November 23, 1905.
• 7. “My Life”, see page 95f.
• 8. Berlin, December 16, 1904.
• 9. Adolf Arenson in “Circular letter to the members of the Anthroposophical Society”, October 1926.
• 10. Instruction Lesson Berlin December 16, 1911, see p. 93.
• 11. Rudolf Steiner also indicated the transformation from black to red for the “Easter Night” from Goethe's “Faust”, which he and Marie Steiner staged.
• 12. It is known that the “G” had various meanings, such as “gnosis” or “geometry”.
• 13. At the altar of the east, Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers always officiated together, while the other altars had alternating officiants.
• 14. See page 245.
• 15. “My Life Course”, see page 95f. of the present volume.
• 16. A baptismal ceremony with water took place in the first degree, see page 208 ff. of the present volume.
• 17. From documents in the archive of the Rudolf Steiner estate administration, it can be seen that there must have been translations of Rudolf Steiner's ritual texts (at least in part) into English and French.
• 18. From notes by Marie Steiner from the lecture in Bremen, April 9, 1906.
• 19. Evidence of symbolism in cultural history can be found in Joseph Schauberg, op. cit.
• 20. See the section 'Notes on the Temple Legend'.
• 21. Berlin, May 15, 1905.

My dear friends!

I would like to combine the two lectures today and tomorrow into one unit, so that today we look up at certain ideas and facts of the spiritual world, which we then want to summarize tomorrow in a certain world view that is particularly important for the present time.

Perhaps it will already be understandable to some today that we are currently living in a time that, for all those who, in one form or another, are participating in and living through this time, means a time that demands the development of the soul in a way approaches the soul in such a way that this way cannot easily be compared with anything we know from before, whether it be through our own human experience or through anything else we have been able to take in. One could say many things. One could express through many symptoms and images what this very special thing about soul development consists of.

Let's start with an image. You know – either you have heard it or read about it in lectures or in cycles of lectures – that over the years in which we have spoken to each other in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I have often referred to the name Herman Grimm, to Herman Grimm as a spirit who, in the most eminent sense, has grown directly out of the development of German culture and has placed himself in this development of German culture and spirit. I can say, my dear friends, that when I spoke of Herman Grimm in the years up to 1914, it always seemed to me as if he were standing beside me spiritually, as if one could have had the thought: What does such a personality say, which - albeit in a completely different form than spiritual science makes possible - has participated intensively in German spiritual life? The feeling that such minds as Herman Grimm's — he died in 1901, at the age of 70 — such a feeling that such minds are standing beside you and quietly asking the question: What do I myself have to say about what is being brought forth from the spiritual life of humanity, be it in one form or another, and thus also in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? This feeling, we have not had it since 1914. That is significant. Today, my dear friends, there is no possibility, from the outside, to ask oneself: How would a personality like Herman Grimm behave in the context of our times and in relation to anything that is taking place in the development of the spirit in the sense of this time? Of course, Herman Grimm would be almost 90 years old if he were still alive, but if he were still alive today, one must imagine that, from the thoughts that such a personality could have, from the way he way of experiencing the present life of humanity, it would hardly be possible for such a personality, to gain a judgment, a position to that, which has gone on in these three years since 1914 over the development of humanity.

Now we can certainly ask ourselves the question differently from our point of view, we can ask ourselves the question like this: How does such a soul, after passing through the gate of death and having lived through almost twenty years in the spiritual world, look down on us and on what is happening here on earth? We come to the conclusion that it does not look down so uncomprehendingly as it actually should have done, considering how alien everything is to what such a personality has felt on earth.

It is not without reason, my dear friends, that I draw your attention to such a thought. We have thus hinted at a thought that, to a certain extent, cannot be completely real to us, cannot be completely real, a thought that asks: How understandingly or unintelligently would a personality like Herman Grimm face the present, the external present? We know very well that this thought has no reality, namely because the soul, when it passes through the gate of death, continues to develop in a completely different way – and that is the reality – in a completely different way than it would have developed if it had remained in the body for years. But to pose the question of how such a personality would face the external present today, to virtually present us with this unreal thought, the unreality of which we can be well aware of, is good material for meditation. Above all, such thoughts have great significance for our spiritual life, and it can be said that they will gain ever greater importance for our spiritual life. More and more, people will have to become accustomed to thinking that takes into account factors such as putting oneself in the place of such a thought: this is how it would have been if such a personality had remained on earth.

It will become more and more necessary for our thinking to become more agile through such thoughts than it unfortunately is in this day and age. For what is around us, my dear friends, what humanity is experiencing with such terror, what makes our feelings so different, is largely connected with the development of thoughts – or one could also say with the lack of development of thoughts in recent times. If I am to correctly supplement the thoughts expressed earlier, I would like to say that since 1914, when I think of Herman Grimm and his school of thought and world view, I feel something as I used to feel when I looked back centuries to a personality who was centuries before us, to a personality who had long since become historical. But, my dear friends, it will only gradually dawn on humanity that these years are now in reality a much longer time than they are in terms of the external, physical course. We have actually - it can be said that it is not an exaggeration - we have actually lived through centuries in these three years. But, my dear friends, we must not be afraid to add something else to the concept that we have acquired over the decades within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, to the “we have lived through centuries”; we must not be afraid to add: in many, many respects, these times have not only been lived through, but in a certain higher sense they have also been slept through. What do we mean when we say that they have been slept through in a higher sense? These years contain so many possibilities for life and experience that for many souls these possibilities for life and experience pass by in much the same way as the events that take place around a person when he is asleep. They are there when he sleeps, but he does not perceive them.

I would like to speak to you today about some of the conditions of awakening in our time, of being awakened in our time, my dear friends, in these preliminary discussions. It will be necessary for humanity to see many things in a different light than it has been seen before. And so let us point out a basic fact, an important, important basic fact, which can bring our thinking in the direction, in the current, that we need to understand what is already preparing for many in this time. Let us look, my dear friends, at what is being said, thought, and expressed in words from various places around the world. From the outset, one must of course believe that when this or that is expressed in thoughts or in words, these words, these thoughts mean what – yes, I would like to say, what is found in the dictionary as the meaning of these thoughts, these words; one must believe this to be the case from the outset. But in many respects in our time this is not the case. And one should know that in our time it is not the case in many respects.

In our time, many things happen, and many highly significant things happen, that I would characterize as follows: Let us assume that two people come into a difference with each other, and we listen to the one person who is in difference with the other. He tells us: I came into difference with this person, I quarreled with him. We ask him why he has come into difference, why he is in conflict with the person in question. He answers us, “Yes, because this person has a bad character, because he has done this or that.” Of course, sometimes if you look into the facts, you may find something justified. If you are completely honest in looking into the facts today, you will very often not find something justified. The man says that the other man did this or that, or was such and such, and that is why he came into conflict with him. But why does he say that? Not because the other man is like that, but perhaps he says it for the same reason, because he needs to be reassured about the real reason why he came into conflict with him. What could this real reason be? This true reason can simply be that the soul life, the life of experience of this person who is telling us this, has developed in such a way that at a certain point in time it must discharge itself with a certain amount of hatred. Let us hold on to this, my dear friends, that this can simply be a primal fact of the soul of some human individualities. They grow up, they develop, and the soul develops in such a way that at a certain point in time it simply needs a certain amount of hatred. Just as a certain constitution, an abnormal constitution of the organism needs a fever, so a soul needs a discharge of a certain amount of hatred before itself, for the sake of what it has developed within itself. Because this certain amount of hatred is present in the soul, this soul mysteriously seeks someone on whom to discharge this hatred. But you can't say to yourself, without being frightened in a certain sense: I attack the person concerned because I have to discharge a certain amount of hatred. You have a sedative, a kind of anesthetic for the soul. This calming, this numbing of the soul occurs when one describes the other. The description may be true, the description may be false; but what it expresses is in any case not the real reason, but lies in the soul itself in the accumulated amount of hatred that must be discharged.

With this example, I wanted to show that anyone who is truly able to observe the world and makes an effort to do so can see today, wherever they look, how common it is to confuse cause and effect in our judgment of people. It is easy, my dear friends, to agree that in ordinary science, cause and effect are confused at every turn; but this confusion only occurs because in general human life there is a tendency to confuse cause and effect in the way described. Mankind, and I mean all of mankind, must learn to observe life and to live wisely. Without this observation of life, without this wisdom of life, my dear friends, which human beings must strive for, the complicated life that will come upon this earth cannot be lived through by mankind. For only through such striving will one come to feel with the necessary weight that which one needs to live. And in saying this, my dear friends, I may perhaps point out a certain fact that has occurred over the years of our anthroposophical endeavors within our previous considerations.

You can think back many years, a whole series of years, and you will remember that even in public lectures the question was quite often asked: How do repeated earthly lives relate to the increasing population of the earth? After all, the population of the earth is constantly increasing. If the same individuals keep reincarnating, how does this fact fit in with the increasing population of the earth? You will recall that I have given various reasons for understanding the apparent increase in the earth's population despite repeated lives on earth. But you may also remember that whenever this question came up, I always added a sentence to the other reasons I had given. I always added the sentence: “We shall wait, and perhaps the time will soon come when people will realize in a terrible way that the population of the earth will also be reduced in an extremely significant way by horrific events.” Of course, many will be able to remember these sentences. Many things could be remembered, but today I would like to remind you in particular that you will find in the cycle held in Vienna before the war, which dealt with life between death and new birth, how I tried to describe the general possibilities of the disease of social life across the globe. At the time, I even used the expression – it can be read in the cycle – that something like a social carcinoma is going through the world. The expression can be found printed in the cycle.

Such things, my dear friends, have been said to point out that much is going on around us that is as elusive to the ordinary consciousness as the tables and chairs of our bedroom are to us when we are asleep. And many, many passages in the lectures that have been given, they were given with the intention of touching souls, of touching hearts, to point out the utter seriousness of the forces that go through time in one direction or another. Because it does not help us, my dear friends, if we only try to gain, I would say in accessible concepts, some general ideas about the spiritual worlds. What we need, especially if these ideas that we gain are to be fruitfully integrated into our time, what we need is to acquire such concepts, such ideas from the experience of the spiritual world, that can intervene in reality in every area of life. But our present time is altogether poor, tremendously poor, in such concepts that can intervene in reality. And it is a concomitant of materialism, my dear friends, that the concepts that develop in the materialistic age have no power to intervene in reality in a directing, ordering, comprehending way. Man must learn to place himself in the world in a realistic way. This is only possible if spiritual science opens up an understanding for something without which understanding one knows nothing at all: for the relationship of man to the world.

If we are to take up the important things we have to say in this regard and bring them before our soul in the right way and with the utmost seriousness, we must start with three concepts that every religious mind today will inevitably see as the three most important concepts. We must start with the concept of the Father-God, with the concept of the Christ, and with the concept of the Spirit or Holy Spirit. Let us first consider today what spiritual science can say about the relationship of the human being to that which can be expressed by the three concepts of the Father God, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Today, we are indeed confronted with a world in which materialistic development has led to there being people who do not accept all these three ideas, the three concepts, I will not say, but do not experience them in their full seriousness, in their full depth. They will not be able to doubt, my dear friends, that many people today go through life without dealing with all their soul forces with these three concepts of Father-God, Christ, Holy Spirit.

What then does spiritual science have to say, based on what it can experience, about the just-mentioned lack in human souls, about this inability to deal with these three concepts? If you enter into the full meaning of our spiritual science, you will always be able to understand the following, because in what follows I would like to express a basic phenomenon for the soul's life in words that, I believe, express this basic phenomenon succinctly and precisely. I think that spiritual science can say from its point of view: the denial or misunderstanding of the Father-God is an illness; the denial or misunderstanding of the Christ is a misfortune of fate. Note the words carefully; I am using them in such a way that the matter is expressed very precisely. The denial or misjudgment of the Father-God is an illness; the denial or misjudgment of the Christ is an accident of fate for the soul; and the denial or misjudgment of the spirit is a blindness of the soul. I believe that anyone who combines the right approach with these three characteristics has much of what is needed to understand materialism in our time. I also believe that anyone who understands these three characteristics in the right sense has the key to understanding much, much more in our time.

Let us consider the first characteristic: the denial or misunderstanding of the Father-God is an illness. As an anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientist, I have to say this because, if the totality of the human being is organized in a healthy way according to the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of this being and the person does not physically, mentally or spiritually oppose themselves to allow their whole being to work healthily, then there is no possibility of not recognizing that which can be called the Father God. Every human being with a healthy organization, my dear friends, who does not allow prejudices to stand in his way – prejudices that have such an effect that everything organic no longer works properly – every human being, if he looks at the world in a healthy way and really applies his healthy spiritual power to this healthy view, comes to think of nature and the life of history as imbued with a Father-God. And the strange thing that offends today's materialists – the denial or misjudgment of the Father God – is not possible at all, except that something is not right in the human organization. So one can say: atheism is, under all circumstances, a real symptom of illness for spiritual science; something must be wrong in the human organization when atheism is present.

If people want to develop a relationship to human evolution, if they want to make sense of earthly development, then they have to be able to look at a certain point in time in this earthly development, when the mystery of Golgotha had to take place. But you can't say – just as you can say: that an atheist is actually more or less physically ill, one cannot say that anyone who does not find the Christ is ill. For finding the Christ is really something that is connected with a power to which the name 'grace' is fully applicable. The Christ must be found in such a way that He approaches the human being as an entity, so that the person can find His way to Him. Not to recognize God as such, to be an atheist, means — also in the physical sense — to be ill. But one can be healthy without finding the Christ. Therefore, not finding the Christ is not an illness like not finding God, but not finding the Christ is an misfortune of the soul. It is something that affects us, the failure to find Christ, that plunges the soul into misfortune. You can see this from the deeper meaning of the many discussions that have been held in our field for years: the soul needs the connection with Christ in order to find its way in the overall development of humanity. It was only until the Mystery of Golgotha that it was possible for the human soul to develop its entire life without coming into contact with the Christ. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ must permeate the human soul with His power, the Christ must connect with the human soul so that this human soul can find its way through the entire development of humanity. You can really find this within the development of spiritual life itself.

Just think of what a beautiful flowering of human spiritual life Greek culture was. People today have no real idea of what life was like for the ancient Greeks. And really, sometimes the only way to express one's admiration for Greek culture is to be negative. Spiritual science will first allow us to become positive again with regard to our admiration of Greek culture. Today, people take it for granted that they can read Sophocles or even Aeschylus, or perhaps even recite or act them. And so one is often asked: Is it possible to do anything with Aeschylus in terms of acting or reciting? It is possible if one has the right sense of Greek culture. If you have Aeschylus or even Sophocles as they exist today in modern languages as Aeschylus or Sophocles, then that is a shadow of the matter. Only the full, dense, reality-imbued concepts will be able to lie in the words again, when there will be [true] translations of Aeschylus or Sophocles or when the Greek words are to be understood. We must not forget that those whom we call intellectuals today, in the cultural life to which they go back in reality, only go back to Roman times. Our high school students may learn Greek, but they only learn Latin-Roman ideas. We have Roman law, Roman ideas in other areas of life as well. But Greece is actually a fairy-tale land. But it is deeply, deeply rooted in this Greekness, my dear friends, that we have been handed down the significant word of the Greek hero: Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows. Why? The soul concept of Aristotle answers that. No one has dealt so thoroughly with Aristotle's soul concept as the recently deceased excellent psychologist Franz Brentano. It can be said that spiritual research can agree with what Brentano discovered by philosophical means with regard to the soul and immortality concept of Aristotle, the Greek sage, for the reason that it is the Greek concept, but elevated to philosophy.

Aristotle was not initiated. The initiated Greeks knew something else about the immortality of the soul. But Aristotle was not initiated. He could only rise to that conception of the soul to which an uninitiated wise thinker of the Greeks could rise in the centuries before the entrance of the mystery of Golgotha. What is this conception of the soul and immortality? The ancient Greeks knew, they knew from an experience that people today no longer have, that everything they accomplish in the body as human beings is imbued with soul. The ancient Greeks did not speculate about whether their soul somehow lives, but they knew that when I move my hand, my soul moves with it. The ancient Greeks knew that the soul lives in everything they did, physically and mentally. But he had the idea that soul and body belong together internally. For him, it was a whole: soul and body. That is why Aristotle says: If they cut off one of your arms, then you are no longer a complete human being. If they cut off two of your arms, then you are even less so; if they take away your whole body, as death does, then you are no longer a complete human being. Aristotle speaks of human immortality, but he says, when man has gone through the gate of death, he is no longer a complete human being – he says this as a Greek – because he lacks the possibility of coming into contact with the environment in any way, which is only possible through the body. A person who has passed through the gateway of death is, for Aristotle, a maimed person. Although Aristotle still clings to the idea of immortality, within this immortality the soul lives in such a way that one is an incomplete human being. And that it can actually do nothing but continue this existence, I would say spiritually vegetatively, to reproduce, without coming into any contact with the environment. That is the concept of Aristotle, which could arise before the Mystery of Golgotha, when man was left to his own devices. And now think about what the concept of immortality would look like today if this had been propagated. Something new had to occur in human development to give the human soul the strength to come to the concept of immortality again: that is the Mystery of Golgotha. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the power of Christ has permeated the evolution of the earth. But it must happen to people in a merciful way that the power of their soul coincides with the power of Christ. Otherwise, misfortune would befall them, and they would know nothing of the soul that has passed through the gate of death except that it is only an incomplete, mutilated human being.

These are only preliminary remarks, my dear friends, who want to explain the word, want to explain the characteristic: misjudgment or denial of the Christ is a misfortune of fate for the soul. You can be healthy, but you must be unhappy in soul if you do not find the Christ. People must be brought to make clear distinctions regarding the most important concepts if life is to go on and what the future will demand of people is to be achieved. But it is precisely such ideas that some people, especially those who are otherwise close to us, shy away from.

You see, for someone who is a humanities scholar, there is a theologian – such as Adolf Harnack, for example – in terms of the inner structure of thought, the Father God, but there is no actual Christ. Harnack does, of course, introduce the concept of Christ, but it is not organically connected with what he thinks. And what Harnack says about Christ are basically only the attributes of God the Father. The most important attributes Harnack presents about Christ and His nature are only attributes of God the Father. It will be a fundamental requirement of our time that humanity finds the way to the real Christ, that the confusion between Christ and God the Father ceases. Otherwise, some might believe that they have the Christ, when in fact they only have God the Father. We only need to remember that some Christian mystics of the Middle Ages claimed that they had found the Christ by delving into their souls. There is no reason for them to say that they have found the Christ – they have only found the Father God. One can find the Father God in this way, but not the Christ. Take the term that I initially developed as a characteristic. When our soul appears healthy for the organism, when it properly comprehends itself in the whole person, then it says “Ex Deo nascimur” – “I am born of God”. This saying “Ex Deo nascimur” should be nothing more than an expression of the complete health of human nature. So just living your life in the right way, living a completely healthy life, allows this life to culminate in the recognition of the Father God: “Ex Deo nascimur”.

The good fortune of being able to connect one's own soul with the power of Christ brings the gracious possibility to know oneself beyond death, not as a mutilated human being, but on the contrary, not only as a whole human being, but as a human being illuminated in the illuminated spiritual world. Therefore, “In Christo morimur” – “In Christ we die”.

But in order not to recognize the spirit, blindness of the soul is necessary; this is now more than ever characteristic of materialism. For if the soul really sees all that is around her, if she does not pass by in sleep but sees what is around her in an awakened state, she is therefore not blind but sees awakened, then she sees the spirit at work in all things. Therefore, it must be said that to fail to recognize or to deny the Spirit is blindness of the soul. I particularly want you to grasp this distinction: Not being able to see the mysterious working of the Spirit in world events when the soul is blind comes from not being able to see the Spirit. Being unhealthy in oneself, so that the soul does not fully experience itself, causes atheism, the non-recognition of the Father-God. The recognition of the Father-God therefore comes from the healthy inner being, the recognition of the spirit comes from the alert observation of the world facts and world events around us. The materialist is only a sleeper to the world facts and world events around us.

If what has just been said is plausible – and it is well-founded in spiritual science – then perhaps the question will arise: Yes, but why has there been no real possibility for so long in humanity to develop complete clarity precisely about these three ideas? Why is that so? Yes, you see, that has to do with what I would like to call the historical “misdeity” — “misdeity”. Three is the number: mis-deity, just “misdeity”. I had to coin a new word, and you will soon hear that it is quite good to coin a new word for this idea. In the future, we will have to coin many new words. People will coin many new words in general, because the old words are no longer sufficient for what we need to understand now. And for what we have to say to each other now, we take the word “abuse”, where three is taken from the number three.

You see, my dear friends, in the presentation that I have given in my “Theosophy”, I have pointed out from the most diverse sides in a clearly noticeable way that in order to understand the entire essence of man, it is necessary to consider the human and also the worldly trinity of body, soul and spirit - body, soul and spirit. If we go back to those times when there was only an atavistic, dream-like consciousness, but within this atavistic, dream-like consciousness there was an ancient view of reality, we find everywhere, especially in the wisdom of the mysteries, the threefold division of the world and man into body, soul and spirit. For neither the world nor man can be understood otherwise if one does not grasp the meaning of the threefoldness of body, soul and spirit.

Now something strange has occurred. The Council of Constantinople took place in 869; with it, the spirit was actually abolished. Until then, there was widespread awareness that one must distinguish between body, soul and spirit. Among the things established by the Council of Constantinople, the most important is that one should not assume a difference between soul and spirit, but in the soul one should only think of a thinking and a spiritual part. And from that time on, throughout the entire world-developmental currents of the Middle Ages, it became necessary that one no longer distinguished the human being into body, soul and spirit, but only into body and soul, whereby soul and spirit were conflated with each other. It was heretical to speak of the so-called “trichotomy” since the Council of Constantinople in 869, after which it was only permissible to distinguish the human body and the human soul as a thinking and spiritual being, but not the threefold nature, the trichotomy into body, soul and spirit. This is tremendously significant. Those who are familiar with medieval philosophy know how some medieval philosophers struggle with the fact that they still had the feeling from ancient times that the human being consists of three parts. But the misappropriation had occurred since the Council of Constantinople, and anyone who wanted to claim or philosophically teach the trichotomy of body-soul-spirit would have been declared a heretic.

We are experiencing the highly remarkable fact today that the gentlemen who pursue unconditional science, exactly according to the Council of Constantinople, divide man into body and soul, and have no idea at all about the division into soul and spirit, except at most as something that is only a verbal skirmish. Look at Wundt and other enlightened minds of the present day; they all have the division into body and soul. That is why these gentlemen are also “presuppositionless”, because they have only the Council of Constantinople as a presupposition. They just don't know that they have this presupposition, which is why they call this philosophy “presuppositionless science”.

In certain directions, order and, above all, strength and world understanding are not created if one does not penetrate the secret of “dreiung” again, if one does not overcome the “missdreiung” that has been going on for centuries through the world view, through the view of humanity in general. The deep significance of the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit must be recognized again. But then, in precisely this most important and essential area, one will find the possibility of speaking concretely, imbued with reality, and expressing the truth, whereas in this area, the present time speaks not in terms of reality but in abstract terms; it believes that it is not speaking abstractly but is presenting the greatest real ideals of humanity.

It was at the end of the nineteenth century, as you know, that three ideals of humanity resounded through Europe and as far as Asia: fraternity, freedom, equality. And you know that within the European discussion - which today is no longer a discussion, but is being written in blood - that within this discussion the three words keep coming up that are supposed to say: But let us ask the question that must be asked in relation to these three words, let us ask it from a spiritual scientific point of view: if we simply talk in general terms that man or humanity must strive for fraternity, freedom and equality, we are dealing with an abstraction, three abstractions that are still under the complete influence of “misdeity”. Why? Man is in reality a trinity: body, soul and spirit, and as body, soul and spirit man lives with other people, who are also body, soul and spirit, here on earth together. This gives rise to a relationship between those forces within people that experience each other here in the physical world, and that comes from the fact that a person is incarnated in a body, a relationship that arises from the fact that we interact with each other in our bodies.

If we are to formulate an ideal for the future, a social ideal based on the truth that man is incarnated in a body, then it must be the ideal of brotherhood. From what man is for man, because man is bodily, from that must grow brotherhood, my dear friends; that is a social ideal for the future. But there is no point in speaking of the ideal of freedom from the same point of view. That would be to speak in the abstract. Speaking of the ideal of freedom only makes sense if one knows that only the spiritual relationship between people can be free. Just as people can only develop a social relationship according to the ideal of brotherhood if they are incarnated in the body, so too can this striving for the ideal of freedom only be realized if one understands how one soul can live from another. People become free as souls, people can become free as souls just as they can be fraternal if they are incarnated in bodies. Equality is an ideal that only makes sense if it refers to man as spirit. For the way we are placed in the world means that we are specialized in having one body and one soul. In terms of our spirituality, we are equal. Therefore, when we have discarded the body and with it the specialization of the characteristics, the saying that aptly characterizes the event comes to mind: In death, all men are equal, because they all become spirits.

The three ideals are meaningless when they are mixed up in “misuse”; they only become meaningful when these three ideals will sound through humanity in such a way that one can recognize them.

Man is body, soul and spirit; he must become brotherly according to the body, free according to the soul, equal according to the spirit. You see, these three abstract, unreal words will only make sense when spiritual science can find this meaning for them.

But why were these words spoken at the end of the 18th century? You see, you say words – I gave you the example on a small scale earlier – you say words, you believe you have come to a difference [with someone]; in truth it was hatred that has been unleashed. I have shown you that. And now we have the application of this small example to the great world-historical event. And so these words were also spoken in historical time, not to express what one thought one could find in these words, but to compensate, as it were, for something else. In a sense unconsciously, the three words came historically from the human mouth as if in a play, out of ecstasy. Out of full reflection, the words should have been: Fraternity from the body, freedom from the soul, equality from the spirit. One speaks the words half consciously, not fully consciously, for only spiritual science will speak them fully consciously. One speaks the words half consciously, like a person in ecstasy, a visionary speaks the words. But of course no one will understand this who swears by the supposed weight of these three words today. What will he say? He will say: Are you saying that these words were spoken in ecstasy? They are something that is most imbued with self-confident human reason. That is the belief that is poured out over the whole fact. Because why? Because in the depths of the soul of the times, when these words were spoken, Ahriman was lurking; and Ahriman is the one from whom these words really emerged. That is why they rashly croak.

And Ahriman needed to unburden his soul. Just as a soul usually unloads hatred, so Ahriman sought to unload himself. And just as a soul that is discharging would say that so-and-so did this or that to me, Ahriman had above all to bring out of his soul a certain impulse towards the material. And this was expressed not by letting people say — imagine what would have been the fate of people if they had had to say: We must not oppose materialism, we must now forget that there is a soul and a spirit, we must ascribe everything to the material; not to the body fraternity, not to the soul liberty, not to the spirit equality, but we must ascribe everything to material man; we must finally wipe the slate clean with this trichotomy.

That did not work. Therefore, the three things had to be conjured up as an ideal. And because Ahriman was at work in these, they came out under ecstasy. When a person does something like this, he numbs himself, he is in ecstasy. When Ahriman raves in him, then he can believe that he is saying the wisest thing, that he has complete control over himself and is saying something quite natural, while in fact he is saying nothing else that is perfectly apt for outer development, but which in truth is the life of an Ahrimanic power in the human soul.

We will take up these matters again tomorrow, for they are truly important if we want to understand the present time. And tomorrow I will have many more important things to say, especially with regard to the present time.

But now, following these discussions, allow me to say something that I would rather not say, but must say. We have fulfilled our task today. But it is necessary because I am obliged to observe certain measures for the near future within the Anthroposophical Society, and I need to give some motivation for them.

You see, my dear friends, spiritual science is something that must — I have motivated you from a wide variety of perspectives, quite objectively — that must become part of human development. It is not something that has an end in itself, like the program points of other societies, which one can be passionate about, but something that must become established because humanity itself, if it understands itself correctly, demands spiritual science. Only a few people still know this objectivity over time to observe what really presents itself as a yearning in human souls. But from certain laws, which are already understandable through spiritual science itself, my dear friends, what I have indicated in the most diverse ways is being realized more and more. And those who have heard me speak often know that I have often pointed out that the forces that would like to extinguish the light of spiritual science are indeed already at work. These dear friends who have heard me speak often know this for certain. For those who observe things, they have not come as a surprise, but they must still be treated in the right way.

Is it not the case that spiritual science is something that has to become established? In a sense, the Anthroposophical Society should be an instrument for spiritual science. It is an instrument that is difficult to handle, that must be readily admitted. But my dear friends, we must also truly face the fact that the Anthroposophical Society must be taken extremely seriously. Otherwise it would be better to have very small groups of friends in different cities trying to organize public lectures, and spiritual science would be able to fulfill its current mission for humanity in this way. But if there is an Anthroposophical Society, then it must be something real. Now, from certain backgrounds, it is extremely difficult for this Anthroposophical Society to fulfill its ideals, but on the other hand, it must not be ignored that one must look at what is necessary in this Anthroposophical Society in order to advance it as a society - I am not talking about spiritual science now, but about the society.

You see, above all it is necessary to acquire a clear and healthy judgment within the Society, also for what exists in society, and about the way society works outwardly, and to shape one's feelings and one's judgment of the world in the sense of this judgment. I am not saying that I demand this of society, but society cannot be what it wants to be if it does not strive for it. I have nothing to demand of society, I emphasize that, but it cannot be what it should be and wants to be if it does not strive for this healthy judgment of the world and life, if this striving does not really take root in society.

Look, let me start from a specific point: there are things that, as they happen, are only possible within our Anthroposophical Society, that would not actually be possible outside. Take the most blatant case of Heindel-Vollrath. What I mean is this: a Mr. Grasshoff applied for admission to the Anthroposophical Society a few years ago. That is, he was one of those people who are dragged into it by other members, sometimes in a rather unjustified way. But he had an urgent desire to become a member of our society. He became one, attended all the lectures, perhaps even spent some time in Hamburg, took part in public and branch lectures, but he also borrowed all kinds of individual lectures from all kinds of members and diligently copied everything down. So that when he said one day that he wanted to go back to America, he not only had all the public lectures in his head, but also pretty much everything that had been presented in our cycles and branch lectures.

Now you may say: Why was the person accepted at all? Yes, my dear friends, you cannot anticipate the future in such a case. You cannot – I must ask for forgiveness for using a harsh word – you cannot reject someone and say: I am rejecting you because later on you will be a bastard! You cannot give prophecies as a reason for rejection. This is a dilemma that occurs in such a society, and it makes it necessary for every member of the society to develop correct judgment.

So Mr. Grasshoff went back to America one day, took all his things with him and said that he wanted to spread our spiritual science in America. The dependency was so great that he himself said, before he took leave and made the solemn promise, that the way he would represent spiritual science would be a thoroughly honest one. The matter went so far that he said at the time: How should one actually translate “Rosicrucian worldview” into English? Back then, it was very difficult to translate “Weltanschauung” into English, and we still discussed the “Rosicrucian World Conception”. Except for this word, it is from me, which is a word that had not been used before: “Rosicrucian World Conception”. So he packed this word into his suitcase and left.

What did he do? He sat down in America and wrote down in his own way what he had found in the lectures and in the printed books, changing it in his own way. But there is nothing in his books that he did not get here. But in the preface he wrote the following: He had learned many things in my lectures that he wanted to share in America, but it was not enough, and after he had listened to the lectures here - here with me, with us - he received a call from a wise master down there in Transylvania, in the Transylvanian Alps, who introduced him to the deeper secrets of the matter. Therefore, he would not only give what he had from me, but also what he had received from that wise master there in the Transylvanian Alps. But if you check what this wise master told him, it is what he copied here from the cycles, lectures and branch lectures. It is all worked into it. The book was published in America.

Well, that could still be tolerated, right? But it didn't stop there. This book was translated into German and published years ago in German translation as “Rosenkreuzerische Unterrichtsbriefe” under the aegis of Mr. Hugo Vollrath years ago, and on the bookplates and in the preface, you can read that some building blocks of this Rosicrucian worldview did indeed come to light here in Germany, but they were impure; they first had to be purified by the bright Californian sun. That is where Grasshoff, who later called himself Heindel, later lived. So not only was it possible in America, but the things were retranslated into German. That is possible. This is a scandal, my dear friends, and deserves to be made known. I have even mentioned it in public lectures. It has not become known. But if the Anthroposophical Society wants to fulfill its task, it is important that our cause be presented to the world in the right way; that it is not just said by me, but that one also gains the right attitude towards these things. Of course, it is wonderful and desirable to hear lectures and read cycles about spiritual things, but for that we do not need an Anthroposophical Society. The Anthroposophical Society must work and develop a field of activity.

Of course, where such things can develop, things move forward. What have we experienced recently? Recently we have seen that a man who for a long time truly appeared to be the most honest of the so-called followers of anthroposophy, was a member of the Anthroposophical Society who called himself true, he was so true that he even wrote a book that was published by the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, and then he wrote a small booklet “Who was Christ?” In this booklet, he used some material that is also from the Cycles. Now, that might still be acceptable, but Dr. Steiner did not think it was quite right to introduce it. I did not take a stand on the matter, but Dr. Steiner did not think it was right – and she is the one who runs the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House – that if you take things from the cycles and then say: some hints have been given, but I must first explain them clearly. For these and other reasons, the booklet “Who Was Christ?” had to be rejected. Post hoc ergo propter hoc - after a thing, therefore because of a thing. This is often a disputed dictum, but I believe it is often a very correct dictum. What became of this man who had lived among us as a loyal anthroposophist and who had sought to find his own place for his work? This man became the most vehement and swollen opponent because his little book was not accepted by the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag. That is the only reason. All the foolish talk he has developed about alleged contradictions in “Psychische Studien” is just added. And one does not do justice to the matter if one believes that one has to go into this talk, but one has to know, in order to see the whole enormity, that a person who has last sought to publish his writing in the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag posophical publishing house, and thus had every intention, had his writing been accepted, to remain an anthroposophist as he had been before, that he would become a person producing defamatory writings if his writing were rejected. One has to - forgive me - found the Anthroposophical Society in order to experience such things, because otherwise this cannot actually happen with such intensity.

Now don't misunderstand me! Opposing writings must also appear, I will have no objection to that. Please do not take my words as if spiritual science should be afraid of opposing writings. They may appear, but they should be objective. But there is nothing objective here. This will become immediately apparent when we see what ground the whole matter is taking. Everywhere it is actually only seemingly a matter of all kinds of refutations, I might say, of contradictions that are pointed out; in truth, it is a matter of spreading gossip and scandal, most of which is even invented, but sometimes presented with great sophistication. So this is not said because of factual opposition, but because the aim is not to engage in a factual fight – that is far too uncomfortable – but because the aim is – by virtually driving the anthroposophical movement into scandal, into defamation, into slander, into inventing facts that have absolutely no connection with reality - to make this Anthroposophical Society impossible.

But so much can happen in the realm of this Anthroposophical Society! A man from a town in central Germany once wrote to Dr. Steiner: He is now at a particular point in his soul life, he does not know what to do next. He would like some advice, should he become involved in a business or should he seek his new soul path in some other way. Since he had been informed that it could not be our task to give advice on marrying into a family, he turned up one day. He made himself noticed by reciting Schiller's “Cassandra” with furious emphasis, although he had no idea of any art of recitation, and unleashing it on the unsuspecting members of the Anthroposophical Society. In this way he made himself felt in the Society; to individual members he made himself felt by, as I was credibly told, energetically exercising the will to marry the young girls of the Society.

Now, of course, such things happen in the course of the flow of anthroposophical life, but sometimes they take on even more forms. One day the good man was seized by the urge to be a genius, a painter genius. He was seized not by the urge to become a genius, but to be a genius, not by the urge to become a painter. If anyone expected him to become a painter, he took it as an insult.

He couldn't paint, couldn't do anything, but he wanted to be a painter. He moved to Munich, and we tried in every way – didn't we, to a certain extent anyone can become a painter – to get him teachers. He has been supported, but we just couldn't make him a genius. And this whole matter developed into what is now called the “Bamler case”, which is supposed to characterize the entire disgrace of the anthroposophical movement with invented stuff about exercises causing bruises on the skin and similar things. These articles are accepted with open arms, and not only that, by busy editors, by editors who are sometimes of such a nature that they make any old remark, and someone writes to them – I am only telling facts, a correct judgment can only be based on facts and I am accustomed to telling only facts —, someone wrote to the editor: Well, haven't you read the essay in your own magazine, which should have told you that this [illegible] is completely unjustified [illegible]? The editor replied to the person concerned: “Yes, do you think that I have time to read all the essays that are printed by me?”

Well, it is not about that when someone enters into a factual discussion, but rather that one wants to avoid it. For spiritual science has no need to fear factual discussions. One wants to collect all that is simply invented today from such things. For the things that are invented are indeed enough to make one want to climb up the walls – and are partly invented in the most obscene way.

I do not want to tell you obscenities today, which are already being printed, but I do want to give you a small sample of what is possible in this day and age; I will give you a sample that is sweet but no less ridiculous. I could come up with very thick chunks that would taste quite different, through which, in order to drive them into a scandal, anthroposophy is to be made impossible. I would like to give just a small sample. There is a nice / gap in the transcript] essay that contains things that are all made up. What matters is that they are made up. And what is not important is that attention is drawn to the fact that the personality who wrote this did so in a mentally ill state; that is not important, but that the things are objectively untrue. It says: Dr. Steiner often explained the Lazarus miracle to his students, the transformation of the human being through the Lazarus miracle. Dr. Steiner sent chocolate to a certain person who had to be taken to a sanatorium “to thicken the blood.” This chocolate had been chosen to bring about a transformation in the person in the sense of the Lazarus miracle.

There you have an example – as I said, I have chosen one that is still the most appetizing, but that does not make it any less likely for you to invent. But there are editors who write: “Even a healthy person could be put in an asylum because of such craziness.” - So you can imagine: someone thinks that Dr. Steiner wrote about the Lazarus miracle; Dr. Steiner wants to perform the Lazarus miracle by sending chocolate biscuits - now imagine during the war - to a sick woman in the sanatorium to send chocolate biscuits to thicken the blood so that the Lazarus miracle will take place. This will be printed today, and an editor can be found who says: “Through such follies, even a healthy person could end up in an insane asylum.”

Yes, it is ridiculous, but the very campaign that is starting today is characterized by the fact that on the one hand it is ridiculously ridiculous and on the other hand it is downright spiteful. For it has become possible for articles to appear in the “Psychische Studien” with comments by the editor that ridicule the anthroposophical movement and drive it into scandal. It has become possible for such an article to appear that one would have to experience first hand to believe that such things could appear. For against the prevailing attitude, everything that has been written in the scandal press so far does not come up. For to proceed in such a way would have been avoided until now – I will say, if not towards a man, then at least towards a woman, but that has also become possible.

And it has become possible that just people who cannot be rejected when they enter society – because the one who wrote this was, of course, a member of the Anthroposophical Society – because one cannot anticipate the future, one cannot reject them; it is possible for these things to happen. It is possible, my dear friends, that now, in the most incredible way, what really did not happen to my pleasure and at the request of the members, that the most incredible gossip and slander about the personal relationship between me and Dr. Steiner and the members – that all of this is being dragged into gossip and slander and – not to speak with my own words, but with the words of a friend who was at the Nuremberg lectures and heard the matter – into meanness. Not only did the Imperial Privy Councillor and Professor Max Seiling explain quite tastefully, despite the fact that he had come repeatedly over the years and did not even request brief private discussions, and now declares: the cycles would have a better style if they were corrected by me, instead of having private discussions with the members. Nevertheless, the imperial court councilor Professor Max Seiling knows very well how the cycles were wrested from me, because it was not my wish that they be published, but it was done out of two necessities: it was desired by the members, although I said there was no time to review them; on the other hand, the mischief that was done with the rewritten lectures. The rewriting went so far that one day we came across a lecture that had been rewritten. This transcript actually stated that I had said in a cycle that prostitution had been set up by the great initiates. This is just a sample of the things that were present in the private transcripts that were passed from hand to hand.

It was necessary that at least once the matter was taken in hand, that at least the follies that were passed from hand to hand in society in the form of private notes should cease. Nevertheless, the imperial court councilor Seiling had the nerve to say: if the private conversations had not taken place, then these lectures - while he was calculating and indicating prices - could have been corrected. All this is possible, other things are possible that I do not want to mention for the time being. All these things are possible, but it is precisely the private conversations that lead to things being invented, purely invented, and that are now beginning to be used because people do not want to fight objectively, that are now to be used to proceed in the most unobjective way against what the anthroposophical movement is.

What has been said over the years, and how have I emphasized: Those who know me know how opposed to everything sectarian what I have in mind is. And where is there more of a tendency towards it than in our society! I need only mention one external manifestation. We once wanted to travel to a course in Helsingfors. We arrived at the Stettin train station and found, walking on the other platform, a whole company of female members - I don't want to say anything against the female members, it could also be male members - so we saw a whole bunch of ladies with purple bishop's caps in incredible costumes heading for the Helsingfors train. When the ladies got off in Helsingfors: One should have seen the fright that the poor Helsingfors Anthroposophists got. They no longer had any sense of the aesthetics of these bishop's caps and so on, but only the sense of accommodating the ladies in such a way that at least the rest of the Helsingfors population would not notice that they belonged to the Helsingfors Anthroposophists.

But this is only an outward sign of the urge for sectarianism. Again and again, people on the outside have to hear: This is a society built on authority. They do everything that Dr. Steiner wants. I don't think there is a society where it is like ours, where if something is to happen according to my opinion, it certainly won't happen. I do not consider myself the master of the Society, so I cannot demand that what I want should happen; but I can demand one thing: that I should not be asked. But on a small scale it has been shown time and again: some lady or man, it can also be a gentleman, feels the need to justify to her husband or a friend why she is traveling on a cycle. What does she say? “Doctor Steiner said so.” — What do I care whether she goes to the cycle or not? — ‘Do you have anything against it?’ she asks me. — I can't have anything against it, that would be an infringement of human freedom, which I respect and value. But then one says: ‘Doctor Steiner said I should travel to the cycle.’

Well, these are the kinds of insinuations that make it necessary, after years of talking about these things, to take measures once, not to take them, but because they are necessary, even if they are as difficult for me as they are for some people, but to emphasize the seriousness that is necessary in these measures.

Firstly, I now have to stop having private conversations with members for the time being. I can no longer have private conversations with members. I can only say that I am as sorry as anyone can be, but you will have to turn to those who made this necessary. It was not I who made it necessary.

The second thing is – but I ask that the one not be told without the other, the one is not right without the other – the second thing is: I explain to everyone who has ever had a private conversation with me that they can tell everything that has been said in these private conversations or has otherwise occurred, that they can tell everything completely, as far as they themselves want. I urge no one not to tell anything, insofar as he himself wants, that has ever occurred in such conversations. Nothing need shun the light of day if it is truthfully communicated.

So first, the private conversations must stop; second, I authorize everyone, insofar as he himself wants, to tell everything that has ever been spoken or occurred in any private conversation. It remains to be seen whether, under the seriousness of these measures, one or the other may yet be achieved. For my part, I am completely convinced that those of our dear members who are seriously and with dignity seeking that which must now be sought through spiritual science within humanity not only understand these two measures, but also approve of them and find them necessary. For those who seriously want to advance esoterically – just give me a little time, and even without the private conversations I will find ways and means to ensure that no one is held back in their esoteric development; a fully valid substitute will be found, it just has to be created first.

I have only given you a small part of the characteristics of the campaign as it is now being launched, but something must be done, because it is not acceptable to be caught between personal spite and ridicule. After all, it could be said in Munich: One of the most serious attacks is yet to come, that of Goesch.

Yes, my dear friends, that can be said, even though Goesch's attack is typical of the stupid and ridiculous on the one hand, because he engages in magical effects of handshakes and the like, and on the other hand, just in mere spite.

Perhaps if we just have a little awareness / gap in the transcript] some things can be improved. I know that those who take the Anthroposophical Society and spiritual science seriously will understand me.

In connection with the Congress held by the “Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society” in Budapest in the year 1909, Dr. Steiner gave a Lecture-Course entitled: “Theosophy and Occultism of the Rosicrucians.” The Mystery of Golgotha is there indicated as the great turning-point between the old, now already fading Mystery-wisdom and the wisdom in its new form of revelation wherein account is taken of the faculty of thought possessed by a maturer humanity and of the advance of culture and civilisation. Theosophia, the Divine Wisdom, could not, as in earlier times, flow as inner illumination into the hardened constitution of man. Intellect, the more recent faculty of the soul, was directed to the world of sense and its phenomena. Theosophy was rejected by the scholars with a shrug of the shoulders and the very word brought a supercilious smile from the monists. Dr. Steiner, however, was trying to restore to this word its whole weight and spiritual significance and to show how the roots of all later knowledge lie in Theosophy, how it unites East and West, how in it all the creeds are integral parts of one great harmony.

This had also been the fundamental conception of the Founder of the Theosophical Society but she understood nothing of the essence of Christianity and disputed its unique significance. Her tendency to place too much reliance upon spiritualistic communications drew her into the net of an oriental stream only too ready to use this instrument for its own ends—to begin with under the cloak of Neo-Buddhism then represented in the person of Charles Leadbeater, a former priest of the Anglican Church. Annie Besant, a pupil of Charles Bradlaugh, a free-thinker and the most brilliant orator of the day in the field of political and social reform, had also been so deeply influenced by spiritualistic communications that on the advice of William Stead she went to Madame Blavatsky towards the end of the latter's life and became her ardent follower. Stead's spiritualistic circle was influential and the Theosophical Society, with its much purer spiritual foundations, had here a dangerous rival.

Dr. Steiner brought light to bear upon all these developments, upon their aims and aberrations, and raised Theosophy to heights far transcending the narrow sphere of the Theosophical Society. Alarmed by this, the Indian inspirers behind the Adyar Society, with their nationalistic aims, took their own measures.—The imminence of a return of Christ was announced and the assertion made that he would incarnate in an Indian boy. A newly founded Order, the “Star in the East,” using the widespread organisation of the Theosophical Society, was expected to achieve the aim that had met with failure in Palestine.

Not very long after the Budapest Congress, these developments began to be felt in the sphere of Dr. Steiner's lecturing activities. Disquieted by the beginnings of the propaganda for the Star in the East, Groups begged Dr. Steiner to speak about these matters. This caused alarm to the organisers of the Genoa Congress, who thought that the scientific as well as the esoteric discussions with Dr. Steiner would be too dangerous a ground, and for extremely threadbare reasons the Congress was cancelled at the last moment. Many of those taking part were already on their way—we too. A number of Groups in Switzerland took advantage of this opportunity to ask Dr. Steiner for lectures. They wanted to understand the meaning and significance of the Michael Impulse which denotes the turning-point in the historic evolution of the Mystery-wisdom. The Intelligence ruled over in the spiritual world by the hierarchy of Michael had now come down to humanity. It was for men to receive this Intelligence consciously into their impulses of will and thenceforward to play their part in shaping a future wherein the human “I” will achieve union with the Divine “I.” For this goal of the future men must be prepared, a transformation wrought in their souls; they must “change their hearts and minds.” To bring this about was the task of Rudolf Steiner. The moment had arrived for treading the path which liberates the Spirit from the grip of the material powers. The first healthy step to be taken along this path by the pupil of spiritual knowledge, is study.

As the theme chosen for Genoa had been “From Buddha to Christ,” it was natural that the lectures now given in Switzerland should shed the light of Spiritual Science not only upon the earlier connections between the Buddha and Christ Jesus but also upon the lasting connections indicated by the Essene wisdom contained in the Gospels. This is the theme which gives these studies their special character—which could only be brought out by outlining the historical development of the Mystery-wisdom. The ancient revelations of the Mysteries had shed light into many forms of culture, but were now spent; symptoms of decay and increasing sterility of thought were everywhere in evidence. Then, from heights of Spirit, the Michael Impulse came down to the Earth—in order gradually to stir and flame through the hearts of men. The intellect was pervaded by spiritual fire, the lower human “I” lifted nearer to the ideal of times to come: union with the Divine “I.” To awaken understanding of these goals, to establish them firmly on the ground of their spiritual origins and to place them in living pictures before the souls of men—such was the task of Rudolf Steiner.

This brought the inevitable counterblow from the opposing powers; into this they knew they must drive their wedge. The development of the human being in freedom, this gift bestowed by Michael, must be checked and the hearts and minds of men incited to resistance. In his Four Mystery Plays, Rudolf Steiner has given us living pictures of this: the human being between Lucifer and Ahriman—now succumbing to their promptings, now overcoming them, but nevertheless bearing them in the soul like a poison that may at any time begin to work. We too shall continue to bear this picture and its substance in our souls.

The full content of the lectures, however, has not been preserved, for we possess no good transcriptions. The fact that no really reliable and expert stenographist was available at the time seems like a counterblow from the opposing powers. Besides the abbreviated reports of the Cassel lectures, we have in some cases only fragments, in others, scattered notes strung together. But the essential threads have been preserved and an attempt at compilation has been made. The attempt does not always succeed from the point of view of convincing style, but the impetus for effort in thought and study will be all the stronger.

The activities of the Star in the East led, finally, to the exclusion of the German section from the Theosophical Society; this, however, had been preceded by the forming of a Union which included people in other countries who opposed this piece of Adyar sectarianism and led to the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. For a time, care was necessary to prevent confusion as between the two Societies and so for the Movement associated with him, Rudolf Steiner chose the name Anthroposophy—the Divine Wisdom finding its fulfilment in man. Theosophy and Anthroposophy are one, provided the soul has cast away its dress. And Rudolf Steiner showed us how this can be done.

The new Indian Messiah soon cast off the shackles of the renown that had been forced upon him and retired to private life in California. Annie Besant was obliged to renounce her cherished dream and died at a very great age. It is rumoured that the question of the dissolution of the Adyar Society was considered but that this proved impossible owing to the extensive material possessions. Jinarajadasa, my good friend from the days of the founding of the Italian Section, succeeded Annie Besant as President. The branch of the Theosophical Society which had seceded at the time of the Judge conflict and to which Madame Blavatsky's niece belonged, had found in Mrs. Catharine Tingley a leader of energy and initiative, but she too had died.

The old conditions have now faded away. Those grotesque edifices of phantasy can no longer be associated with the Anthroposophical, formerly Theosophical, Movement, for they have crumbled to pieces. We can allow the word Theosophy again to come to its own, as did Rudolf Steiner when he was trying to restore to this word its primary and true significance.

Besides laying emphasis on the essential character of Spiritual Science in the post-Christian era, the aim of the lectures given in 1911 and 1912 was to explain karma as the flow of destiny and to point to its intimate workings. The lines of development running through the lectures have survived only as pictures of memory; the transcriptions often failed to catch the threads of the logical sequence and the notes or headings jotted down and collected here and there are really no more than indications. But the direction of the spiritual impulses given by Dr. Steiner has been preserved, and justifies, maybe, the attempt at compilation. Through meditative study these impulses will be able to work in us and deepen our souls.