The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Saying from the soul calendar (22nd) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (23rd) by Rudolf Steiner
“The Element of Life“ by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the soul calendar (24th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Little Dance” by J. $. Bach (children's group with eurythmists)
Saying from the soul calendar (25.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Sommerbild“ by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the soul calendar (26.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Scherzo” by Hendrika Hollenbach
Cosmic prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“V. Urtrieb“ by Fercher von Steinwand
“VI. Urtrieb” by Fercher von Steinwand
“Soldatenliedchen“ (children's group)
From the ‘Vormittags-Skizzenbuch’ by Christian Morgenstern
“Ein Rätsel” by Rudolf Steiner
“Schwalben” by Christian Morgenstern
“Two Roots“ by Christian Morgenstern
Satirical prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Northward” and “West-East” by Christian Morgenstern
Prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
The “Magpie” series by Christian Morgenstern

Dear attendees,

As on previous occasions before these eurythmy exercises, I would like to take the liberty of saying a few words in advance today. This is not done with the intention of somehow explaining artistic performances, that would be inartistic - art must speak for itself - but it is done because what is presented here as the eurythmic art is based on certain sources for artistic creation that have not been used in the same way before, and also on a certain formal language that has not been used in art in this way either. The basis of this eurythmy is a kind of visible language, but not a sign language or anything mimetic - anything gestural or mimetic must be avoided here.

Rather, you will see [this language] expressed through the individual human being moving in his limbs – or through the movement of the human being in space or also through the movement of the mutual positions of groups. So you will see movements that are visible linguistic expression in the same way that expression is ordinary language in an audible way. So eurythmy is based on emotional life expressed in a visible language.

What the artist then seeks to shape is, of course, something that is first built on this special language. This special language has not come about in some arbitrary way, through the fixation of this or that movement for the individual sound, for the individual word or for some sentence or some rhythm, or from some other context. Rather, the basis for the eurythmic art has come about through careful study, but on the basis of what Goethe calls sensuous-suprasensuous vision.

Our speech organs – the larynx and the other speech organs – are in constant motion. Everyone knows that they are in motion when we speak, because the sound is simply conveyed through the air by the air being vibrated by the movement of the speech organs. But it is not this movement that is important here, but rather the tendency to move, which in turn underlies this vibratory movement. And this tendency of movement, which can be studied for every sound, for every inflection, and also for that which underlies the expression of speech in the soul, has all been studied and is transmitted from a single organ or a group of organs, such as the larynx and its neighboring organs, to the movements of the whole person.

This is done entirely out of Goethe's world view. Goethe sees the whole plant only as a complicated expression of a single organ, the leaf. This is an expression of Goethe's important theory of metamorphosis, which has not been sufficiently appreciated scientifically by a long way. Just as Goethe's morphology of form thus sees the whole plant as a complicated, developed leaf, so we try, as it were, to place the whole human being on the stage like a modified, moving larynx. And then, in the artistic realm, what has been begun is further transformed. The artistic aspect only really begins when what has been gained through the study of the secrets of human speech is shaped.

Of course, from today's point of view, it is very easy to say: Yes, what movements are performed, that cannot be understood. My dear audience, a new-born child does not understand language either. Language must first be listened to. And for eurythmy this is not as easy as it is for speech. When a person simply abandons themselves to the form of movement on which the art of eurythmy is based, they have an instinctive, intuitive knowledge of it. Every human being has the potential to understand human language; but it must be clear, for example, that poetry first emerges from ordinary spoken language by formally transforming and developing this spoken language in terms of rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and so on. So what can be learned eurythmically as a basic formal language must first be artistically developed. Those of the honored audience who have been here often will notice how we have progressed in recent months in terms of the artistic development of eurythmy. You may have seen how much at that time still recalled facial expressions, ordinary gestures, but how we worked our way out of that, so that little by little there is actually nothing left in what is done in eurythmy but what the poet makes out of the linguistic content. And the further we get at shaping what the poet first makes out of the linguistic content, the more the eurythmic art will develop. The artistic element in eurythmy is to the movement of speech, to visible speech, as poetic language is to language.

The task now is to present a self-contained work of art through the inner laws of eurythmy, just as one creates a musical work of art through the succession of tones or the poetic art through the artistic design of the vocabulary of language. They will become a completely independent art because that is still necessary today, until eurythmy has achieved a certain emancipation, being a completely independent art. However, this may take a very long time, perhaps decades. Today you will still see musical elements presented in parallel, where some soul element is revealed through the sound, through the musical art – and at the same time the same soul element through the eurythmic art – or mainly poetic elements. And here it must be taken into account that when the eurythmic is accompanied by recitation, the recitation itself is forced to return to the earlier, more artistic forms of recitation, which have been more or less lost in our thoroughly unartistic times.

Today, something special can be seen in such recitation, which essentially goes back to the prose of the poem's content and actually takes back what the poet has made from the material of the poem. That is why the poet creates something out of language in rhyme, rhythm, beat and so on. When reciting, this does not have to be taken back by reciting according to the content of prose, according to the pure logic that underlies it. This is considered a sincere, soulful recitation. However, it has become an unartistic recitation. We are therefore trying to shape the art of recitation in a eurythmic way again, namely to give what is already eurythmic in poetic language in recitation as well, to bring out the rhythmic, the pictorial, imaginative, the rhyme and so on. It is precisely in such things that eurythmy, in the wake of which such views must arise, can in turn have a fruitful effect on other artistic endeavors. And that will be of very special importance in our time.

It is already the case, as I have said, that eurythmy is in the early stages of its development. We ourselves are most aware of the mistakes we still make today; but it will perfect itself. Today it must be said that this eurythmic art has, firstly, the artistic on the one hand; on the other hand, however, it has an essentially pedagogical-didactic and hygienic element in it. And in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, we have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject.

One day, when people think about these things more objectively than they do today, they will see that when children are taught eurythmics, they actually add something to ordinary gymnastics that can be called soulful gymnastics, because every movement also comes from the soul. In this way, what is merely physiological gymnastics - that is, something derived only from the physical laws of the human body - is enriched by movements that come from the soul. This has a very strong influence on the whole development of the growing human being. While ordinary gymnastics actually only trains the body, eurythmy - you will also see some examples of children's eurythmy today - has an effect on the child and its development that awakens and appropriately fosters willpower, the soul's initiative. And this is of the greatest possible importance for our time, for the present and the near future, since our age has brought about catastrophic events precisely because people lack awakened souls.

So then, eurythmy has various sides to it: an artistic side, a pedagogical-didactic side. But all this is actually only just beginning today. Hopefully it will be further developed, probably by others, no longer by us. For the one who can really see through the world form language of eurythmy knows what still needs to be done. Then it will be seen that it can stand alongside its older sister arts as a fully justified art. In this sense of a beginning, perhaps also of an attempt at a beginning, I ask you to take up such ideas from the eurythmic art as we want to present to you again today.

Dear attendees,

First of all, I would like to apologize for the fact that neither these introductory words nor the accompanying poems are spoken in Dutch. Since we are using German, you will have to make do with receiving these words and the accompanying poems in German.

If I, dear attendees, say a few words of introduction to our presentation, a performance of eurythmic art, it is not to explain the art of eurythmy itself, which you will see afterwards. To explain art would itself be an inartistic endeavor. And eurythmy is meant to be art first and foremost. I am sending these words ahead for the sole reason that our eurythmic art makes use of particular artistic means of expression that we have not been accustomed to before, and because it also draws from artistic sources that we have not been accustomed to either. It is very easy to confuse what is meant here with pantomime or mime or even with some kind of dance.

So, my dear attendees, we are not dealing with the forms of movement that are then translated into the air to convey the spoken word, but rather with the movement tendencies in the larynx and the other human speech organs that do not come to real manifestation. These have been carefully studied. Then, according to the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, according to which the whole plant is in the form of a leaf and in this sense everything alive can be understood and represented, then that which otherwise only comes to revelation in one group of human organs - and there in a different way, through spoken language - is transferred to the whole human being, to groups of people.

So you will really hear a visible language coming from the stage. Through this visible language, both the musical and the poetic can be expressed. On the one hand, you will therefore see the eurythmic performances accompanied by the musical: one can sing in this silent, visible language to the musical. One can also present the poetic in eurythmy. Every single sound, every sequence of sounds, the formation of words and sentences: just as they have their corresponding manifestation in the language of sound, they also have this manifestation in this visible language, which will now appear before you. The only difference is that everything that is initially eurythmic speech is realized in artistic forms corresponding to the poetry or music.

Therefore, what you will encounter as accompanying recitation and declamation will have to take on a different character from that which is particularly loved in a somewhat inartistic age in terms of declamation and recitation. The great poets always have, before the literal content of a poem, an artistic form, something melodious, something musical or something imaginative and real, which is at first only a moving rhythm, a moving beat, something like a melodious theme, and so on, to which the literal prose content is then added. This word-for-word recitation and declamation, which we love today, could not accompany eurythmy. Here the recitation and declamation must itself become eurythmy, that is to say: not by particularly emphasizing the prose content of the poem and the like, but by shaping the sound forms and sound laws. Those who no longer experience an inner aesthetic joy in language and its configuration – quite apart from the content of the thoughts – will hardly do justice to the recitation and declamation that eurythmy must accompany.

In this way, eurythmy is truly visible language or visible song. Anything pantomime-like, anything mimetic, anything dance-like is excluded. This is a common misunderstanding. And there is another misunderstanding that is also common. People demand a certain physiognomic expression because they think that eurythmy has something to do with facial expressions or the like, and they miss it here. We deliberately do not give it in the usual form, but only in the form that every movement of the face and head must correspond to the eurythmic. Just as one cannot accompany the sound movements with the face, which would be perceived as grimacing if exaggerated, one cannot accompany the eurythmic speech with what people demand as the “moved countenance” out of misunderstanding.

You will see how – just as in music in a melodious theme – the artistic element is expressed in the lawful sequence of movements when eurythmizing. We are trying more and more to transform the ordinary eurythmic into artistic eurythmic through complicated forms, which in turn have inner simplicity and harmony. You will notice this particularly in some group movements. In the second part, the humorous part, you will see how the eurythmic style, the eurythmic form, can also do justice to this difference in style - the serious on the one hand, the picturesque on the other - in the outer, visible form.

That is the artistic aspect of eurythmy. I would just like to mention in conclusion that this eurythmy also contains other elements, first of all what I only want to hint at, the hygienic-therapeutic aspect. Since the movements involved here are drawn from the whole human being, from the physical-organic foundation as well as from the soul-spiritual, they have an eminently healing effect. If they are developed in a certain way, the result is a hygienic-therapeutic eurythmy from which much can be expected for the future.

And there is a third element that we can study initially in its effect in our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was born and established as an independent school out of anthroposophical spiritual science by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and which I run. We have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject for children entering primary school until the years when they leave it again. For the children, it is not just an art, but a form of gymnastics that is imbued with soul and spirit. And we have seen how the children take these eurythmic movements, which are born entirely out of the human organization, for granted. Unlike gymnastics, which is born out of physiology, eurythmy is born out of soul and spirit. The children have an intimate joy and feel that their whole being is absorbed in this eurythmizing.

It can also be said that this eurythmy has a particular effect on the development of the will initiative, which we so urgently need in our time. And a third point may be suggested. It is not as applicable to adults who do eurythmy, but for children it is considered to be a particularly important educational tool. When we speak in ordinary language, we can conform to convention and lapse into empty phrases. A phrase is, after all, the less harmful, sometimes also very harmful, sister of the lie. But when we engage our whole being and use it as a means of expression, then we cannot lie, least of all teach lying, through a form of expression such as eurythmy. Therefore, eurythmy in schools proves to be a means of education for truthfulness. And to look for new means of education seems to me to be a particularly important task of the present.

That about the three elements of eurythmy. We are our own harshest critics, and we know that what we can present today is only the beginning, perhaps even an attempt at a beginning. We do not misjudge this, but we also know that Goethe's words are absolutely correct: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To do this, he rises by permeating himself with all perfection, invoking order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. When man rises to the production of a work of art in such a way that he does not use external tools, but his own organization, this human organism, which is a small world, a microcosm, containing all the secrets of the world, then, by using his own organism as a tool, man must indeed be able to represent the artistic that is hidden in the world at a particular level.

However, we are still a long way from reaching this level. Therefore, we must always apologize to the honored audience, who are already showing interest in this incipient eurythmic art. We know that we are dealing with a beginning, but we also know — because we know the conditions of origin, the special sources of this eurythmic art, because we have great respect for the most comprehensive tool, the human being — we know that if this beginning of a eurythmic art is perfected, something will certainly arise that will be able to join the older, fully-fledged sister arts as a fully-fledged, younger art. With this in mind, we ask for leniency in your judgment, because we do not want to present more than a beginning with our attempt at a eurythmic art today.

Meeting you today with New Year Greetings, I should like to express the wish that each one of you may realize in the depth of his soul how great and insistent are the demands of the present moment as regards the evolution of mankind, and that, as a result of this realization, each one in his own place may co-operate as far as he can, in bringing to fulfilment that of which mankind stands in such need. At this time of year, expressing as it does symbolically the meeting of past and future, I should like, by way of introduction to our New Year contemplation, which rightly is also a contemplation of the whole course of time, to recall some passages from essays which I wrote more than thirty years ago and which are shortly to be published. Although connected with personal experiences, these essays have a definite significance if we want to look into the whole spiritual condition of the present day. My purpose in writing them was, as you will notice, to rouse the conscience of the German people, to give expression to that which could be perceived even then, as fundamentally lacking in the spiritual life of the German nation. I will read to you some passages from one of these essays entitled “The Spiritual Mark of the Present Day”. These passages refer to what was taking place more than thirty years ago, to a past which was then the present. I wrote in the very midst of the spiritual life prevailing at that time, amid symptoms which showed themselves most markedly in the life of thought of the German nation. I wrote: “It is with a shrug of the shoulders that our generation recalls the period when a philosophic current ran through the whole spiritual life of the German people. The mighty impulse of the times, seizing men's minds at the end of last century (i.e., the eighteenth century) and the beginning of this one, and boldly facing the highest imaginable tasks, is now looked upon as a regrettable aberration. If anyone dares to raise an objection when the conversation turns upon Fichte's fantasies, or Hegel's insubstantial play of thoughts and words, he is regarded by his listeners as a mere amateur, who has as slight an idea of the spirit of modern scientific investigation, as he has of the thoroughness and seriousness of philosophic methods. Kant and Schopenhauer at best are tolerated by our contemporaries. It is apparently possible to trace back to Kant the somewhat scanty philosophic crumbs used by modern science as foundational; and Schopenhauer, besides his strictly scientific works, also wrote a few things in a light style, on subjects accessible to people with a limited spiritual horizon. An open mind for that striving towards the loftiest heights of the world of thought, an understanding for that soaring of the spirit which in the realms of science went parallel with our classic period of culture—this is lacking now. The serious side of this phenomenon only appears when we take into consideration that a persistent turning away from that spiritual goal implies for the German people the loss of their own Self, a breaking away from the Spirit of the Nation. For that striving sprang from a deep need in the German nature. It does not enter our mind to wish to deny the manifold mistakes and one-sided fallacies which Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken, and others, committed in their bold inroads into the kingdom of idealism. But the impulse which in all its grandeur inspired them should not be misunderstood. It is the impulse most fitting for a nation of thinkers. The German nation is not characterized by that living sense for immediate reality, or the outward aspect of Nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their wonderful and imperishable works of art. Among the Germans there is instead, an unceasing urge of the spirit toward the cause of things, toward the apparently hidden, deeper origins of the Nature which surrounds us. Just as the Greek spirit found expression in its wonderful world of plastic forms, so the German, more concentrated within himself, less open to Nature but on that account more with his own heart, cherishing intercourse with his own inner world, sought his conquests in the world of pure thought. The way, therefore, in which Fichte and his successors looked upon the world and life was truly German. This is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received; this is why, for a time, they held the whole life of the nation enthralled. This is why we must not break with their spiritual leading. Our solution of the difficulty should be to overcome mistakes, while continuing the natural course of development on the lines laid down at that time. Not what these spirits found or thought to find, is of lasting value, but how they faced the problems.”

At the time when this essay was written the German nation had to be shown these truths, which were threatening to disappear from their field of vision. We were living then in another age than the present, an age in which, had we willed it, it might still have been possible for certain circles to unite with the spirit, then at the beginning of its decline, and thus to prepare the way for an all-pervading and lasting development of the human impulse. Indeed, at that time it ought to have been possible to find such people, amongst those who called themselves leaders of the nation, amongst those who prepared the younger generation for later life. There were no experiments, then, of the kind now coming to the fore in Russia. At that time (in Germany) those who educated the young, still had the chance of turning back to the aims and intentions of the old spiritual life, causing it to rise again in the new form. But no one was willing to listen in the least to any voice urging that a real, spiritual striving should rise to life again amongst men. Every opinion that had taken firm hold amongst the lower or higher ranks of the nation's teachers during the preceding thirty years, was an attack directed against the aims and intentions of a spiritual world-conception.

I should recall that when I wrote this essay, I had already published my views on Goethe's World Conception, on Goethe's scientific ideas. I had pointed out two great dangers in the domain of thought, in the field of active scientific investigation. I coined at that time two expressions defining the two great foes of human spiritual progress. On the one hand I spoke of the “Dogma of Revelation”, and on the other hand of the “Dogma of mere Experience”. I wished to show that the one-sided cultivation of the dogma of revelation, as it had developed in the religious confessions, was just as pernicious as the continual hammering upon the so-called dogmas of experience, i.e., continually insisting only upon all that the external sense-world, the world of material facts, offers to scientists and sociologists. In the course of time the task arose of rendering these thoughts more concrete, of pointing out the real forces behind this or that phenomenon.

What, then, lies behind in everything brought to our notice when the dogma of revelation is mentioned? Today, in an all-embracing sense, all that lies behind what we term Luciferic influences in the course of mankind's evolution. And behind the dogma of experience, lies everything that we term, again in an all-embracing sense, the Ahrimanic influences in human evolution. In the present age, he who wishes to lead men only under the influence of the dogma of revelation, leads them in the Luciferic direction; he who wishes instead to lead men, as scientists would do, only according to the dogma of external sense-experience, leads them in the Ahrimanic direction. Is it not a fitting New Year's contemplation in these serious times of ours, to review the last thirty or forty years, and to point out how necessary it still is today to repeat the call of that time, to raise it anew, but far more strongly? The outward course of events during these last thirty or forty years has shown clearly the justification of that call; for he who without prejudice looks at what has happened, must say to himself: “There would not be today's misery and want, had that call become a reality in the hearts of the people of Central Europe at that time.” At that time it sounded in vain. Today the Holy Roman Congregation meets it with the Decree of the 18th July, 1919, and the chief clergy announce from their pulpits that Anthroposophy is not to be read in my books because the Pope forbids it. Information concerning it can be obtained from the writings of my opponents. This pronouncement takes place simultaneously with negotiations for the establishment of a Roman Catholic Nuntiate in Berlin under the auspices of a Berlin Government with socialistic leanings! Here, again, is something that shows the spiritual mark of the age. Would that today one could really appeal to the innermost heart-forces of those who are still capable of feeling something of the spiritual impulses in human evolution, so that they may wake up, so that they may see how things really stand. The all-important thing today is that man should be able to find himself. But to find our own Self requires confidence in our own strength of soul. Little is attained amongst men today, by appealing to this confidence in their own strength of soul. People want, on the one hand, the support of something which constrains them from within to think and to will what is right, or, on the other hand, the support of something which constrains them from without to think and to will what is right. In some way we always find these two extremes in men; they never wish to pull themselves together, to strive with active forces towards the balance between these two extremes.

Let us reconsider this spiritual mark of the present day, about to become the social and material mark. Let us reconsider it to some extent. We hear the old Marxist call rising in the East of Europe: “A social order must be established among men, where everyone can live according to his individual capacities and needs; a social order must be evolved where the individual capacities of each man can be taken into full consideration and where the justifiable needs of every single person can be satisfied.” Taken in the abstract, no objection whatever can be raised against this saying. But on the other hand, we hear a personality like Lenin saying: “Among people of today such a social order cannot be founded; it is only possible to establish a transitory social order; it is only possible to establish something which is injustice”—of course in the widest sense of the word. Injustice is indeed present to an absurd extent in everything that Lenin and his followers establish. For Lenin and his followers believe that only by passing through a transitory social order, can a new human race be produced, a race not yet in existence; only when the race is there, will it be possible to introduce the social order where everyone will be able to employ his capacities, where everyone will be able to live according to his needs. This, then, is what they are aiming at: the formation of a race of men not yet in existence, in order to realize an ideal which, as I have said, can be justified in the abstract.

Ought not enough people, when they hear of such a thing as this, be able to find themselves, and to grasp the whole seriousness of the present world-situation? Is it not time for this drowsiness to cease, when something of this kind appears before us pointing most significantly to the mark of the present day—this drowsiness which causes us to close our eyes a little, so that we do not grasp the whole significance of such a matter? Nothing will help us to reach a concrete insight into these things, except to abandon the paths of abstraction in the Spiritual life. And for this we must first really acquire the feeling that where there is only a flow of words and phrases about spirit and soul, there the talk is mere abstraction. We must be able to feel when spirit and soul are spoken of as reality. For example, speaking of human capacities: These arise as manifestations from out of man's inner being as the individual grows up. Through some of its leaders, mankind feels itself induced to develop accordingly these capacities and forces, which come to light in the growing human being. But in this domain our feelings are to be trusted only if we definitely perceive in the manifestation of these forces and capacities, a manifestation of the Divine; if we can say to ourselves: Man has come into this World of sense-realities out of a spirit-soul World of Being, and that which externalizes as human forces and capacities, and which we develop in ourselves and in others, comes from a spiritual world and is now placed in a physical human body. Now, consider the spiritual meaning of that which has been explained in this place for decades; it will show you that with the incorporation of human capacities and forces in the physical human body, Luciferic beings were given the possibility of approaching these human capacities and forces. No work whatsoever can be done in the sphere of human capacities and forces, be it in the form of self-activity or in the teaching of others, or in the furtherance of general culture, without coming into contact with the Luciferic forces. In that region which man has to go through before he enters physical existence through birth or conception, the Luciferic Power cannot directly approach the human capacities and forces. Embodiment in a physical human frame, is the means by which the Luciferic Powers are able to reach human capacities and forces. It is only if, without prejudice we look this fact in the face, that we assume a right attitude in life towards everything that surges up from human nature as individual capacities and forces. If we close our eyes to what is Luciferic, if we deny that it exists, then we succumb to it. Then the soul falls into that mood which desires above all to deliver itself up to some coercion from within, so that through all kinds of mystic or religious forces it can unburden itself of the necessity of calling upon its own free Self, or of seeking for the Divine in the world, within the development of its own free Self. Men do not want to think for themselves, they want some indefinite force from within to manifest itself, according to which they can argue logically. They do not want to experience truth; they only want to experience that inner force compelling them from within, manifesting itself in proof which does not appeal to experience, but appeals instead to a Spiritual Power which over-rules man, which compels him to think in this or in that way about Nature or about mankind himself. Men deliver themselves over to the Luciferic Powers, by calling up within themselves this inner compulsion, this inner power.

The means which can be used so that man shall appeal to this inner compulsion, so that he shall not rise to the free, upright position in the spiritual world, is to force him to think that there are no such three members of human nature as Body, Soul and Spirit; to forbid him, as actually happened in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, to think that man consists of Body, Soul and Spirit, and bid him to put away all thoughts concerning the Spirit. These are inner connections which may not be overlooked any longer. We must face them today clearly and without prejudice. In the year 869 A.D., it was decided to forbid the belief in the Spirit in man. It was in that year that the downward slope towards Lucifer began in European civilization. And today we have the full result. Long enough has mankind yielded to the inclination not to experience truth, but to allow the compulsion of argument, of impersonal argument, to work upon him. As a result, mankind has fallen into the other extreme. There has been no real comprehension of human capacities and forces, no one wanted to own that, as I have just explained, Luciferic forces live in human capacities and forces, when these are embodied in a physical human frame. That false point of view—the ruling one in humanity today, concerning individual capacities and forces in human nature—has been the outcome.

Human needs, needs arising first out of his purely physical nature, constitute the other pole of man. In his Letters on aesthetics, Schiller has characterized these needs very finely, contrasting them with man's abstract logical power. He calls them the basic needs (“Notdurft”), whereas he characterizes logical compulsion as the other power, a power straying into spiritual regions. During that great period of German evolution, a personality such as Schiller, was on the point of grasping rightly the polaric contrasts in man. The time was not yet ripe for saying more than what Schiller, Goethe, and others like-minded had said. The necessity of building further upon this beginning has been laid upon our present age. If we continue to build, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science will arise. He who is only acquainted with the one-sided power of proof in the spiritual sphere, only learns to know in life the one-sided power of natural instincts in human needs. It is easy to imagine that when man with his capacities and powers enters the physical sense-world through conception or birth, and Lucifer hovers over him and from that which man himself ought to possess takes something on one side, the head-side of the man's being, there remains in man an inferior kind of power for the exercise of his independence in the sphere of his needs. Through that which Lucifer on the one hand takes for his own, Ahriman on the other hand attains the possibility of making his own that which works in the needs of human nature. The dogma of mere external sense-experience has paved the way for the complete Ahrimanization of mankind's sense-life of instinct during the last third of the nineteenth century. Modern man stands before a terrible fact today because he does not recognize that salvation lies in the state of balance between the two extremes, between capacities on the one side, and needs on the other side. The materialistic spirit in man makes him look on the body alone as that which produces capacities i.e., man looks merely on the Luciferic primal force of capacities. The capacities become Luciferic owing to their entrance into a human body. If man believes that capacities spring from the body, then man believes in Lucifer, and if man believes that needs spring from the human body, then man believes only in the Ahrimanic side of such needs.

And what experiment is being made in the East of Europe today under the guidance of the West? (This guidance is not only evident through the fact that Lenin and Trotsky are the spiritual disciples of the West, but also through the fact that Lenin was dispatched into Russia in a sealed railway carriage by Dr. Helphand, the German official who accompanied him. So that what is termed Bolshevism, is an article transported into Russia by a German Administration and the German military command.) What are they trying to attain in the civilization of Eastern Europe? An attempt is being made to do away with everything human, with everything embodied in a human body as human, and to harness together Lucifer and Ahriman, with the civilization they represent. Were this to be realized in the East, then the Manufacturing Company of Lucifer and Ahriman would create a world excluding everything beneficial to the individual human being, and man himself would be dovetailed into this Luciferic-Ahrimanic civilization as part of a machine in the complete working of the machine. But the parts of a machine are lifeless and allow themselves to be fitted in, whereas human nature is inwardly alive, permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. It cannot fit into a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic organization, but will perish in it. Only an understanding of Spiritual Science can grasp what is really taking place today in this materialistic world which has but the haziest notions of spirit. It is only the insight of Spiritual Science and its living earnestness which can explain what the fact implies that, during the last thirty to forty years, the essential nature of the German people would not turn back to that German spirituality pointed out in my essay, but that in this German world of culture, we have at last come to this, that men of authority have felt it to be the right thing to send to Russia (in a sealed railway carriage), through a man who stood in their service, the inaugurators of Lucifer and Ahriman. In our days, it will not do simply to look around and then go to sleep peacefully, in the presence of what is actually taking place in the depths of the spirit of the present time. We ought to feel that we must say: “We have forsaken and trodden under foot that which in the age of Schiller and of Goethe was created within the Spiritual life of Germany. And we have the task of beginning where they left off and of building on further.” No better New Year's thought can enter our souls than the resolution to make this our starting point.

I told you the following some years ago: In the sixties and seventies of last century an educationist, Heinrich Deinhardt, lived in Vienna, the place where my essays were put together. This man's spirit led him from the standpoint of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics to take an active part in pedagogics, a science that was then under full sail, following the materialistic lead of his day. In some fine letters, printed at the time, explanatory of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics, Deinhardt wrote that man should be educated to recognize the compelling necessity of logic, and of the basic needs (“Notdurft”), which only live in instinct. Deinhardt was one of those who raised the warning cry: “We must prevent by means of education what is bound to happen otherwise.” He could not yet speak with the concepts of Spiritual Science, but he did point out in his own words the inevitable coming of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic culture if the Science of Education, the Art of Education were not determined by this balance. Heinrich Deinhardt had the misfortune to be knocked down in the street and to break his leg. Quite a simple operation might have put it right again, but the doctors found he was so undernourished that the injured parts would not heal. So this man, who could look so deeply into the events of his day, died owing to a slight accident. Yes, in Central Europe, men whose will was directed to bring forth something out of the spiritual, were left to starve! This example could be multiplied many times. Those who write like the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, whom I mentioned yesterday, will probably not die of hunger. Those will not die of hunger who wrote the following: “In No. 6 of the weekly paper, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Orgaeismus (The Threefold Social Organism) it is boasted that the ‘new impulse’ (a pet phrase of the Anthroposophists and of the Dreigliederung people) rests upon the fullness of Steiner's spiritual knowledge. The head of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart founded the ‘Free Waldorf School’ for the children of employees and managers, a school founded on the impulses of all the thoughts that had come from Dr. Steiner's Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In that school ‘Anthroposophy is to be the artistic method of education’.” Those who mock and tread into the dust what is being willed out of the spirit will surely not die of hunger, even in these hard days.

But it is indeed necessary to receive into our souls New Year impulses that prevent us from passing by sleepily and heedlessly, what is actually going on, impulses that make us accept sternly the stern intention of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In our own ranks, too, I see many who would like to doze over things that reveal themselves out of full compassion, out of compassion for that which is happening in our times and which, left to itself, must lead to downfall! There are persons lacking courage who join the Anthroposophical Society and then say: “Yes, Spiritual Science is something I like, but I do not want to have anything to do with social activity; it has no place in it.” Such members might take an example from our adversaries. The Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, follows everything we do. He concludes the article mentioned above, with the sentence, “The weekly paper, The Threefold Social Organism—e.g., No. 8, of course holds the opinion that the ‘Church is conspiring’ against the historical task of the self-determination of the individual.” In other articles, too, the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, shows how seriously he takes all we do.

It would be well if those who are in our Society would also take things seriously, in the right way. The spies who are on the outlook for any weak spot which they can expose in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and in all that proceeds from it, are not few in number. I think you know that I am not so foolish as to tell you what follows, out of mere vanity, and so I venture to refer to it. On the side of our adversaries the wish naturally arises to find a point of attack here or there. It is well, therefore, to read the following passage in Dr. Rittelmeyer's essay: ‘Steiner, War and Revolution’: “I happened to have a talk recently with a young Swedish scientist in economics, who had had the strict schooling of the economists of Cassel. He told me that he had read Steiner's book very carefully, from end to end, with the expectation of unmasking him as an amateur; but he had been unable to find any mistake.” In our circles we ought to consider such matters more seriously. The foundation on which we ought to build is the knowledge: Here something is willed, something that has nothing to do with the rambling talk of Theosophy, current elsewhere. Here we build upon the same strict insight into things as is demanded from any other accepted science. Were this really felt, then we should understand why the event took place which Father Zimmermann terms a defection. You know that it was no defection, but that we were thrown out because it was impossible to bring any earnestness into that society of mystic wishy-washy talk, no real earnestness was wanted there. They only wished to go on chattering in the same way they had chattered for years, particularly in connection with subjects about which all possible things can be said with no knowledge of the spiritual world. What our age most sorely needs is the greatest earnestness in the sphere of Spiritual life.

Today, New Year's day, with my visit drawing to an end, I wished to speak to you again of this deep earnestness. My most heartfelt desire is that into our ranks may come the New Year wish—it is a wish each one can shape for himself—that through the souls and hearts of our friends, eyes may in some degree be opened to that which is needed so sorely, to that which, out of the Spirit alone, is able to help humanity. No salvation is to be found in any external organization. Something new must be stamped upon human evolution. These facts must become known, and to feel that these facts must become known is indeed the most worthy New Year's thought that could rise in your hearts. This year, 1920, will hold in store many an important decision, if enough people can be found who are able to recognize the needs of mankind, as I have pointed them out today. 1920 will bring misery and suffering if such men cannot be found, if those only take the lead who wish to work on in the old way.

You must remind yourselves that as well as living through his life here between birth and death, man passes again and again through the life between death and a new birth. Just as here on earth we have experiences through the instrumentality of our body, we also have experiences between death and a new birth, and these experiences are by no means without significance for what we do during our earthly existence in the physical body. But neither are they without significance for what happens on earth as a whole. For only part—and indeed the rather lesser part—of what happens on the earth originates from those who are living in the physical body. The dead are perpetually working into our physical world. The forces of which man is unwilling to speak to-day in the age of materialism are nevertheless at work in the physical world. Our physical environment is fashioned and permeated not only by the forces emanating from the spiritual world, from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, but forces proceeding from the dead also penetrate into what surrounds and overtakes us here. So that a full and complete survey of man's life is possible only if we look beyond what can be told us by knowledge obtained through the senses and through history, here on earth.

The existence of such forces is in the end the one and only thing that can explain man in his whole being and the whole course of human evolution on the earth. A time will come in the physical evolution of the earth—it will be after the year 5,700—when, if he fulfils his rightful evolution, man will no longer tread the earth by incarnating in bodies derived from physical parents. In that epoch, women will be barren; children will no longer be born in the manner of to-day, if evolution on the earth takes its normal course.

There must be no misunderstanding about such a fact as this. Something else, for example, might come about. The Ahrimanic Powers, which under the influence of the impulses working in men to-day are becoming extremely strong, might succeed in preventing earth-evolution in a certain respect. It would then become possible for men—by no means for their good—to be held in the same form of physical life beyond this time in the sixth or seventh millennium. They would become much more like animals, while continuing to be held in the grip of physical incarnation. One of the endeavours of the Ahrimanic Powers is to keep humanity fettered too long to the earth in order to divert it from its normal evolution.

However, if men really take hold of the best possibilities for their evolution, then in the sixth millennium they will enter for a further 2,500 years into a connection with the earthly world of such a kind that they will, it is true, still have a relationship with the earth, but a relationship no longer coming to expression in the birth of physical children. In order to make the picture graphic, I will put it like this: In clouds, in rain, in lightning and thunder, man will be astir as a being of spirit-and-soul in the affairs of the earth. He will pulsate, as it were, through the manifestations of nature; and in a still later epoch his relationship to the earthly will become even more spiritual.

To speak of any such matters to-day is possible only when men have some conception of what happens between death and a new birth. Although there is not complete conformity between the way in which, between death and a new birth to-day, man is related to earthly conditions and the way in which he will be related to them when he no longer incarnates physically, there is nevertheless a similarity. If we understand how to imbue earth-evolution with its true meaning and purpose, we shall enter permanently into the same kind of relationship with earthly affairs that we now have only between death and a new birth. Only our life between death and a new birth in the present age is, shall I say, rather more essentially spiritual than it will be when this relationship is permanent.

Without the science of Initiation, understanding of these things lies leagues away. Most people to-day still persist in believing that the essential way to acquire knowledge of the science of Initiation is to amass all kinds of spiritual experiences, but not by the path that is proper for us in the physical body. Even the experiences gained by spiritualistic methods are apt to be valued more highly to-day than those which can be understood by the healthy human reason. Everything that is discovered by an Initiate, and can be communicated, is intelligible by the normal, rightly applied, human reason if only the necessary efforts are made. It is a primary task for the Initiate, also, to translate what he is able to proclaim out of the spiritual world into a language intelligible to human reason. Much more depends upon such translation being correct than upon the fact of having experiences in the spiritual world.

Naturally, if one has no such experiences, there is nothing to communicate. But crude experiences which arise without healthy reason being applied to their interpretation are really worthless, and have not the right significance for human life. Even if people were able to have many super-sensible experiences, but disdained to apply healthy reason to them, these experiences would be of no use whatever to humanity in the future. On the contrary, they would do serious harm, for a super-sensible experience is of use only when it is translated into the language that human reason can understand. The real evil of our time is not that men have no super-sensible experiences; they could have plenty if they so wished. Such experiences are accessible, but healthy reason is not applied in order to reach them. What is lacking to-day is the application of this healthy human reason.

It is of course unpleasant to have to say this to a generation that prides itself particularly on the exercise of this very reason. But at the present time it is not super-sensible experience that is in the worst plight; it is healthy logic, really sound thinking, and above all, too, the force of truthfulness that are worst off. The moment untruthfulness asserts itself, the super-sensible experiences fade away without being understood. People are never willing to believe this, but it is a fact.

The first requirement for understanding the super-sensible world is the most scrupulous veracity in regard to the experiences of the senses. Those who are not strictly accurate about these experiences can have no true understanding of the super-sensible world. However much may be heard about the super-sensible world, it remains so much empty verbiage if the strictest conscientiousness is not present in formulating what happens here in the physical world.

Anyone who observes how humanity is handling palpable truth today will have a sorrowful picture! For most people are not in the least concerned to formulate something they have experienced in such a way that the experience is presented faithfully; their concern is to formulate things as they want them to be, in the way that suits themselves. They know nothing about the impulses that are at work to beguile them in one direction or another away from a faithful presentation of the physical experience.

Leaving aside trifling matters, we need only observe the impulses which arise from ordinary human connections in life and prompt men to ‘varnish’ the truth in one respect or another. Further, we need only realise that the majority of people to-day are not speaking the truth at all about certain things, because of national interests or the like. Anyone who has national interests of some kind at heart can neither think nor say anything that is true in the sense in which truth must be conceived to-day. Hence the truth is virtually never uttered about the events of the last four or five years, because people everywhere speak out of one or other national interest.

What must be realised is that when a man desires to approach the super-sensible world, infinitely much depends upon such things. In times when procedures such as I characterised at the end of the lecture yesterday are possible—can you believe that many avenues to the truth lie open?¹ They certainly do not. For those who wallow in such swamps of untruthfulness as were disclosed yester-day, spread fog which completely shuts off what should be grasped as super-sensible truth by the healthy human reason. There is equal unwillingness to perceive that straightforward, candid relations between man and man must prevail if super-sensible truths are to penetrate in the right way into the social life. One cannot ‘varnish’ truth on the one hand and, on the other, wish to understand matters of a super-sensible nature.

When they are put into words, these things seem almost matters of course, but actually they are so little matters of course that everybody to-day ought constantly to repeat them to himself. Only so can there gradually be achieved what is necessary in this domain. As I said here recently, the essential principle of social community is that it must be founded upon confidence, in the sense indicated. This must be taken in all earnestness. In very many respects this confidence will also be necessary in the future with regard to paths of knowledge. The attitude adopted towards those who are in a position to say something about the science of Initiation should be to examine their utterances with the healthy reason only, not with sympathy, antipathy or the like, nor in the mirror of personal feeling. It must at all times be realised that the Anthroposophical Society should become in the real sense a bearer of super-sensible truths into the world. Thereby it could achieve something extraordinarily necessary and significant for the evolution of mankind.

But it must be remembered that to have experiences in sensible spheres is obviously a matter to be taken in earnest. I told you some time ago how a friend of our Movement, shortly before he died from the effects of war-wounds, wrote lines in which, in the very face of death, he speaks of the air becoming hard, granite-like.

I said at the time that this is an absolutely true experience.² Think only of the most elementary experiences connected with crossing the Threshold of the spiritual world and you will be able to gauge the importances of these things. In our life by day—or also by night, for then there is electric light—the sun, the light of the sun, illumines the objects around us; the sunlight makes them visible. In a similar way the other senses become aware of surrounding objects. If I limit myself at the moment to the example of the sunlight, directly the Threshold is crossed man must become one with the light in his inmost being. The light cannot enable him to see objects because he has to pass into the very light itself. Objects can be seen with the help of the light only as long as the light is outside. When man is himself moving together with the light, the objects illumined by it can no longer be seen. But when, in his being of soul, he is moving in the light itself, then for the first time he becomes aware that thinking is, in reality, one with the light weaving in the world.

Thinking that is bound up with the body is proper to physical life only. Directly we leave this body, our thinking loses definition; it weaves into the light, lives in the light, is one with the light. But the moment our thinking is received into the light, it is no longer possible to have an ego as easily as man has one between birth and death, without doing anything towards it. His body is organised in such a way that his being reflects itself through the body, and he calls this mirror-image his ego. It is a faithful mirror-image of the real ego, but it is a mirror-image, a picture only, a picture-thought, a thought-picture. And the moment the Threshold is crossed, it streams out into the light.

If another anchorage were not now available, man would have no ego at all. For this ego, this ‘I’, that he has between birth and death, is furnished for him by his body. He loses it the moment he leaves the body, and then he can be conscious of an ego only by becoming one with what may be called the forces of the planet especially the variations of the planet's force of gravity. He must become so entirely one with the planet, with the earth, that he feels himself to be a part of the earth, as the finger feels itself to be a member of the human organism. Then, in union with the earth, it is possible for him again to have an ego. And he perceives that just as here in earthly life he makes use of thinking in the physical body, after earthly life he can make use of the light.

From the standpoint of Initiation, therefore, one would have to say: Man is united with the earth's force of gravity and through radiating light concerns himself with the things of the world. Applied to the experience beyond the Threshold, this would express the same fact as when one says here on earth: Man lives in his body and thinks about the things of the world. Of the life between birth and death we say: Man lives in the body and concerns himself with things through thinking.

As soon as he leaves the body, we must say: He is united with the earth's force of gravity or with its variations, with electricity or magnetism, and through radiating light, inasmuch as he is now living in the light, concerns himself with the things of the world.

When things that have been illumined in this way—instead of being merely thought about, as is generally the case—are put into words, they are entirely comprehensible to the healthy human reason. And even the Initiate, if he has not developed his reason in the right way, gains nothing whatever from his super-sensible experiences. When someone to-day—please take what I am now saying as a really serious matter—has learnt to think in a way perfectly adapted to meeting the demands of school examinations, when he acquires habits of thought that enable him to pass academic tests with flying colours—then his reasoning faculty will be so vitiated that even if millions of experiences of the super-sensible world were handed to him on a platter, he would see them as little as you could physically see the objects in a dark room; for that which makes men fit to cope with the demands of this materialistic age darkens the space in which the super-sensible worlds come towards them.

Men have become accustomed to think in the one and only way that is possible when thinking is based on the bodily functions. This kind of thinking is ingrained in them from their youth onwards. But healthy human reason does not unfold on bodily foundations; it unfolds in free spiritual activity. And even in our Elementary Schools to-day children are educated away from free spiritual activity. The very methods of teaching hinder the development of free spiritual activity. Dare one incur the responsibility of concealing from the world these vital truths of the age? People may not realise why it was thought necessary to set into active operation an institution such as the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. But through this Waldorf School some at least of the children of men will be given a real chance to discard the bigotry of the times and to learn how to move in the element of thinking that is truly free. As long as such things are not regarded in this serious light, we shall make no progress.

Now I would like to call your attention to another tendency which is still far too common. Because people are tired of the old in its ordinary form, they like to get hold of something new; but for all that they want the new to be somehow veiled, whenever possible, in all the old, habitual conceptions. I have known many people—and it is well to be under no delusion about these things—who have realised that anthroposophical Spiritual Science is endeavouring to promulgate something true and right about Christianity, about the Mystery of Golgotha. But among them were some for whom this was right only because it exposed them to less disapproval in Church circles; hence they found Anthroposophy more opportune than some other form of spiritual science holding a different view of Christianity. In anthroposophical Spiritual Science the one and only question is that of truth; but with some people it has not always been a question only of truth, but often only of opportunism. Naturally it is unpleasant nowadays to have to witness the attitude to truth adopted by the representatives of the religious confessions and ultimately by their congregations who are also influenced by it. This is a trend of the times that must be kept clearly in view.

If it is desired to approach the super-sensible world in the right way, we must have interest in all things—but never mere curiosity. People are so ready to confound curiosity with interest. They must learn not only to think differently but to feel differently about all things. If anthroposophical Spiritual Science were ever to be given a mantle suitable for the atmosphere of coffee-parties or what corresponds to them nowadays, this would by no means conduce to the fulfilment of its task—for this task is of grave moment.

The reason for the hostility that is asserting itself at the present time in such ugly forms is simply this: People realise that here it is not a matter of a sect, or of a happier “family circle” such as many desire, but that something is truly striving to activate the impulses needed by the times. But what interest have the majority of people to-day in these impulses? If only they can bask in happiness or have something in the nature of a new religion! This egoism of soul, which impels very many people to anthroposophical Spiritual Science, must be overcome. Interest in the great affairs of humanity is necessary for any true understanding of Anthroposophy.

These great concerns of the life of humanity are clearly to be discerned in the most seemingly trivial facts of life. But in one respect our whole life of perception and feeling must change if we want so to orientate healthy human reason that it functions in the right stream of Spiritual Science. Let me repeat: The whole of our life of soul must change in one particular respect if our healthy human reason is to function within the stream of spiritual life that is to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy. What is the orientation given us here on earth by the culture that is smothered in materialism? Our orientation is such that we feel ourselves as bodily men—with bones, muscles, nerves. And our body acts as a mirror, reflecting the image of our ego to us—schematically, like this:

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Your true being is somewhere in spiritual regions. Here, in the physical world, is your body. It becomes a mirror, reflecting back to you the image of the ego. The ego itself is here (= = =), but the image of the ego is reflected back to you by the body. You know of this ego-image when you look at the body with that centre of your being of which most people at present know nothing, but in which they nevertheless live. So the ego, together with the thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, is mirrored by the body. Behind this ego-image is the body, and man calls these mirrored images his soul; behind the soul he perceives the body and uses it as his support.

But this picture: There, down below, is the body; there the ego emerges ... this picture must be entirely changed. It is a picture perceived in complete passivity, and is indeed perceived only because the body is behind it. We must learn to perceive quite differently. We must learn to perceive: You are there in your spiritual world, a world in which there are no plants, minerals and animals, but Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and the other Beings of the Hierarchies; in them you live. And because these Beings permeate us through and through, we ray forth the ego:

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We ray forth this ego from the spiritual world. We must learn to feel this ego, to feel that we have within us the ego behind which stand the Hierarchies, just as the body, composed of elements of the three kingdoms of nature, is behind the ego that is an image only. We must pass out of the passive experience into activity in the fullest sense. We must learn to feel that our real ego is brought into being out of the spiritual world. And then we also learn to feel that the mirror-image of our ego is brought into being for us out of the body that belongs to physical existence.

This is a reversal of the usual feeling, and to this reversal we must habituate ourselves. That is the important thing—not the amassing of facts and data. They will be there in abundance once this reversal of feeling has been experienced. Then, when thinking is active in the real sense, those thoughts are born which can fertilise social thinking. When the ego is allowed to remain a mirror-image, thinking can take account only of those social matters which are (as I said yesterday) merely the outcome of changes in phraseology. Only when man is active in his ego can his thoughts be truly free.

In past centuries, not so very long ago, this freedom in thinking was still present in men, although springing, it is true, from atavistic qualities of soul. Instinctively, they regarded it as an ideal to achieve this freedom in their thinking, whereas we have to achieve it in the future by conscious effort. There is an outer illustration of this. Just look at the diplomas conferring the Doctor's degree at universities in Middle Europe. As a rule, people are made not only Doctors, but Doctors and Masters of the Seven Liberal Arts—Arithmetic, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and so on. This no longer means anything, for the Seven Liberal Arts are nowhere included in the curriculum of modern universities. It is a relic, a heritage from an earlier period when through university life men strove to liberate their thinking, to develop a life of soul able to rise to truly free thinking.

At the universities to-day the degrees of Master of the Liberal Arts and Doctor of Philosophy are still conferred. But this is no more than a relic, for nobody understands what the Liberal Arts really are. They are justly named ‘Arts’ because they were pursued in a sphere lying above that of sensory experience, just as the artist's imagination unfolds freely and independently of material existence. The degrees inscribed in university diplomas once represented a reality, just as many other things still surviving in the formula current at universities were once realities. The title, Magister Artium Liberalium, is a very characteristic example.

This living grasp of the self (Sicherfassen) must again be achieved. But it goes against the grain, because people to-day prefer to move about on crutches instead of using their legs. Their ideal is to have what they are to think conveyed to them by the outer, material facts. It is unpleasant for them to realise that thinking in the true sense must be experienced in free spiritual activity, because it means tearing themselves away from the convenient things of life, from all props, all crutches in the life of soul. Whenever things are said from the standpoint of a kind of thinking that has nothing whatever to do with the sense-world, but in complete freedom creates out of intuitions, people do not understand it. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was not understood because it can be grasped only by one who is intent upon unfolding really free thoughts, one who is truly and in a new sense a ‘Master of the Liberal Arts’.

These are the things that must be understood today with the right feeling and with the earnestness that is their due. Especially to the English friends who are here for a short time only, I want to say this: The Building we have erected on this hill must be regarded as an outer beacon for the signs of the times. This Building stands here in order that through it the world may be told: If you go on thinking in the old way, as for four centuries you have become accustomed to think in your sciences, you will condemn humanity to destruction. With the help of crutches you may seek in the easy way to establish principles of social life, but in so doing you will only be preserving what already has death within it.

For the life of soul to-day it is essential to unfold thinking that is as free as are those forms out of which, in architecture, sculpture or painting, the attempt has been made to create this Building. Its purpose is that at one spot on the earth these things shall be said not through words alone, but also through forms. Men should feel that here, through these forms, something different from what can be heard elsewhere in the world to-day is intended to be said, and also that what is said is urgently necessary for the further progress of mankind in respect of knowledge and social principles, in respect of all the sciences and of all branches of social life.

• 1. Steiner was quoting scurrilous statements based on deliberate falsification published in newspapers in Germany about the alleged political aims, methods and activities of the Threefold Commonwealth Movement at the time it was founded. He also referred to articles in a Roman Catholic periodical, and to a book by a Professor of Psychology containing false information about Anthroposophy.
• 2. See lecture given at Dornach, 15th November, 1919: “An impression of this nature must be understood. ... For in wrestling to acquire the wisdom needed for the future, one of the most frequent experiences is this: the surrounding world presses in upon one, as if the air had suddenly hardened to granite. The reason for these things can be known, for it need only be remembered that it is the striving of the Ahrimanic Powers to cause the earth to become completely rigidified.”

The task underlying our present studies is, in the widest sense, to try to understand the Universe through the relations existing between it and Man. I am far from wishing to convey the idea to those who have had certain glimpses into the Universe during the foregoing lectures that the truth of these matters can be found in any quick and easy way such as one hears of in ordinary Astronomy when it tells of the celestial motions. I would, however, like the friends who have come to the General Meeting not merely to hear something that comes right in the middle of a consecutive series, but in these few lectures held during the General Meeting, also to have a self-contained picture. I will therefore continue our studies of yesterday, giving indications of how the conception of the nature of Man leads to the conception of the Universe, its being and its movements. Of course, this subject is so vast that it is impossible to exhaust it for the friends who are now present. It will be continued later. For the benefit of those here for the first time to-night, I should like to put before them at any rate a few of the salient features of the subject embodied in previous lectures.

From other lectures you all know of the relation existing in human life between waking and sleeping. You know that in the abstract the relation is something like this: In the waking condition, the physical, etheric and astral bodies, together with the Ego-being, are in a certain inner connection; whereas during sleep, we have on the one side, the physical and etheric bodies united, and on the other—separated from them at any rate in comparison with the waking state—we have the astral body and the Ego. This, as you know, is merely an abstract assertion, for I have often emphasised that as regards all that belongs to the limb-nature—which is continued into the inner organisation, and is also the real bearer of metabolism—all this part of man, connected as it is at the same time with the human will, is really in a perpetual state of sleep. We must be absolutely clear that this state of sleep continues in regard to our inner organism, when we ourselves are awake. We can therefore say that the ‘Limb-man’ as carrier of the ‘Will-man’, is in a permanent state of sleep. The Circulation or ‘Rhythmic-man’, which may be described as in the middle between the Head-organisation and the Limb-man (the latter extending into the interior of man) persists in a continuous dream state. This is at the same time the outer instrument for our world of feeling. The world of feeling is rooted wholly within man's rhythmic organisation and while the metabolic man, together with its outward extension—the limbs—is the vehicle of the will, the rhythmic man is the vehicle of the life of feeling, and is related to our consciousness in the same way as our dream state to our waking life. Between waking and falling asleep, we are only really awake in our life of ideation and thought.

In this way we have set before us the fact that man, in his life between birth and death, is in an intermittent waking state in respect to his life of thought, in a dream state regarding his emotions and feelings, of which the rhythmic man is the vehicle; and he is in a state of continuous sleep as regards his limbs and metabolic system. We must realise at this point that really to comprehend human nature, it is necessary to fix our attention upon the fact of the extension of the limb-nature into the interior of man. All the processes that are ultimately connected with the abdominal region, everything connected with assimilation, digestion, as also with the secretion of milk in females, and so forth, all these processes are a continuation of the limb nature, directed inwards. So that in speaking of the will-nature or metabolic-nature, we do not mean only the outer limbs, but the continuation inwards too of this limb activity. In respect to all this, intimately connected as it is with the will-nature, man is continuously asleep.

This complicates the abstract idea we gain in the first place of the departure of the Ego and astral body; and it also necessitates a corresponding comprehension of another important fact.

When the materialistic physiologist of today speaks of the will, saying for instance, that it manifests in the movement of the limbs, he has in mind that some kind of telephonic signal is sent from the central organ, the brain, proceeds through the so-called motor-nerves, and thus moves the right leg, for instance. This however is quite unproven—in fact, a quite erroneous hypothesis! For spiritual observation shows the following: If a man's right leg is raised or moved by the will, a direct influence of the Ego-being of man takes place, acting upon that limb, so that it is really raised by the Ego-being itself; only, the process takes place in a state like that of sleep. Consciousness knows nothing of it. The nerve merely informs us that we have a limb, it tells us of the presence of such a limb. This nerve as such has no part in the activity of the Ego upon that limb. A direct correspondence exists between the limb and the will, which latter is associated in man with the Ego-being, and in the animal with the astral body. All that Physiology has to say in respect, for instance, of the speed of transmission of the so-called will, needs to be revised; it should be impressed upon us that here we have to do rather with the velocity of transmission in respect of the perception of that particular limb. Naturally anyone initiated into modern physiology can challenge this assertion in a dozen ways. I am well acquainted with these objections. But we have to try to rise a really logical thought process in this matter, and we shall find that what I say here corresponds with actual facts of observation, while what is said in physiological textbooks does not.

Sometimes indeed these things are so obvious as to be evident to all. Thus at a meeting of scientists in Italy—I think it was in the 80's of the last century—a most interesting discussion took place concerning the contradictions which came to light between the usual theory of the motor-nerves and the movement of a limb. As however the tendency to take notice of the spiritual aspect of things is absent in the physiology of today, even during a discussion such as this little was arrived at, except that contradictions existed in the hypothetical explanation of a certain fact. It would be extremely interesting if our learned friends, and there are such among us, were to investigate and test the physiological and biological literature of the last 40 years. They would make extremely interesting discoveries, were they to take up these subjects. They would find facts everywhere, which merely need handling in the proper way to confirm the findings of Spiritual Science. It would form one of the most interesting problems of the Institutes of Scientific Research which ought now to be erected, to proceed in the following way: International literature on the subject should first be carefully studied. We must take the international literature, for in English, and particularly in American literature, most interesting facts are substantiated, although these investigators do not know what to make of them. If you look into the discovered facts and substantiate them, there is but one step more needed in the sequence of investigation—given the right kind of vision in response to which the thing will, as it were, come out and show itself—and magnificent results would be arrived at today. Once we have advanced sufficiently to possess such an Institute, furnished with adequate apparatus and the necessary material, the facts will be found all around us, waiting as it were. Today people fail to notice the universal urge towards an Institute such as I have in mind, for the series of tests and experiments commenced are always discontinued just at the most critical moments, simply because people are ignorant of the ultimate direction of such experiments. Really important foundations would be laid by such an Institute, foundations for practical work. People do not dream at the present time of the technique that would result if these things were actually done, first as experiments and then building up from them further. It is only the possibility of putting it into practical effect that is lacking.

This is only by the way. To return to our subject, we have to do with a portion of man which sleeps even while he is awake. I now wish to bring to your notice a fact which has played an important part in all the older conceptions of the Universe. I refer to the assertion that the starting-point of the lower limbs is under the rulership of the Moon, while the region of the larynx, which we may consider as the meeting-point of the higher limbs, is associated with Mars. The man of today who is deeply involved in the modern conception of the Macrocosm, cannot of course make anything of such assertions; and the nonsense which hazy mystics and theosophists of today say or write about these things should not be awarded any special value, for these facts lie far deeper than, for instance, the repeated statements of materialistic theosophy that we have first coarse physical matter, and then other rather ‘finer’, then the astral still ‘finer’ and so forth. Those and similar things that pass for theosophy are in reality no spiritual teaching at all, but a spiritual untruth, for they are nothing more than a perpetuation of materialism.

Statements, however, that have come down to us as remnants of the ancient wisdom, have power to lead us to a state of real veneration and deep humility before that ancient knowledge of man, as soon as we begin to understand its meaning. These indications of an ancient wisdom persisted, not only till far into the Middle Ages, but even into the eighteenth century (where they may be found in the literature of the period), and perhaps into the nineteenth century, though here they have become merely copies, so to speak, and are no longer the direct result of an original primeval consciousness. And when these things are found introduced into quite modern literature, then they are still more certain to be copies. Up to the earlier part of the eighteenth century, however, we can still find traces of a certain consciousness of these things, and here again an association was thought of as between the nature of the Moon and this region of the human organism.

What I have just said—that man in relation to his will-metabolic nature is in a constant state of sleep—is most forcibly expressed in the lower limbs. In other words, through the metamorphosis which the arms and hands have undergone, man wrests from unconsciousness that which is really the sleep-nature of the limb-man. If to some degree we sharpen our sensitiveness for these things, we shall perceive what a really remarkable difference exists between the movement of a leg and the movement of an arm. The movements of the arms are free, and in a sense follow the feelings. The movement of the legs is not as free—I mean in respect to the laws by which we produce their movements. This, of course, is something which is not always noticed, nor sufficiently appreciated, as exemplified by the fact that the greater portion of the public attending our performances of Eurythmy are merely passive observers, and fail to notice that the leg movements are less articulated and the movements of the arms and hands more so. The reason for this is that, to understand the movements of the arms, a certain co-operation of the soul on the part of the observer is necessary. In our cinema age, people do not want to give this co-operation. While watching the movements of a dance where only the legs are in movement, and the arms at most are subject to arbitrary movements, there is little need either to think or feel in union with the dancer. This is by the way.

As we have seen, the most intensely unconscious process is in connection with the movements of the lower limbs. There, man is in a sense, fast asleep. How the will works into the legs or into the abdominal region, is entirely missed by man, owing to this state of sleep. In respect to this process, man's own nature sends back to him what is a reflection only of the process. Of course we follow the movement of our legs, but this observation does not make us conscious of the processes taking place in the nervous system as the will acts upon it; only the reflection of this becomes manifest to us. The nature of our lower man turns one side away, as it were, and only the other side is turned towards us. It is exactly the same with the Moon. She revolves round the Earth, and is altogether a most courteous lady, who never turns her back upon us, but shows us always the same side. She does not show us first one side, and then the other, while proceeding along her journey round the Earth. Nobody has ever seen her back. On account of this we never receive anything from the Moon which may be termed her own, but always a reflected light. In this fact we have an absolute inner parallel between the Moon-nature and the whole inner being of man. As we look up to the Moon, we understand her only as regards her outer formal side, but we should try to feel her inner relationship with the lower physical organisation of man. The deeper we go into these matters, the more we find this to hold good. It was the simple, instinctive observations of the Ancients which enabled them to realise these inner relations between human nature and the celestial bodies ...

Now let us take the other fact—that the arms, in their connection with the upper portion of the middle or rhythmic man, come awake in a sense in man; the movements of the arms can be taken as equivalent at least to the dream-state. We feel that the activity of the arms is related in a much nearer sense to human consciousness than is the activity of the lower limbs. Hence we find that a man who has elementary feelings, generally accompanies his speech, which is in close relation to the middle man, with a gesture of the arms, by way of emphasis or as a help in explaining his meaning. Speech is closely related to the upper part of the rhythmic-man. I do not suppose there are many speakers who use movements of the legs as a help for speech, or many audiences who would consider such movements attractive!

So if we feel in the right way this necessity or tendency in man's nature, we can also feel the real relationship between the hands and arms, which belong to the upper portion of the limb-man, and the middle-man or rhythmic-man, who has as his spiritual counterpart, the feeling nature. Quite naturally we try to support our speech, which is often in danger of becoming too abstract, by gestures of our arms and hands. We endeavour to project our emotional nature into our speech.

Today, in many circles—I will not name them—it is considered a sign of intellectual clarity to abstain as much as possible from using gesture in speech. We may however, look at the matter from another standpoint and say: If a person acquires the habit of putting his hands in his trouser pockets while speaking, it may not only mark him as a man of linguistic ability, but also perhaps as being somewhat blasé. That is another aspect of the matter. I am not speaking in favour of either of these points of view, but you will see how the nature of the arms clearly indicates their connection not only with the metabolic limb man, but also with the middle, the rhythmic or circulation man. This was understood and felt by the Ancients when they connected the combination of speech and arm-movement with the sphere of Mars. This planet is not so intimately connected with the Earth as is the Moon, nor is that which underlies the foundation of speech and the arm-organisation so intimately connected with the earthly man as is that which underlies the abdominal and leg-organisation. In a certain sense we can say: what in its activity corresponds to the lower limbs, works very strongly upon the unconscious man. What corresponds to the arms and hands, however, works very powerfully upon the semiconscious man. It is indeed a fact that no one with wholly unskilled hands, no one wholly unable to perform any dexterous movements with the fingers, can be a very subtle thinker. He would in a sense seek a coarse thought-mesh rather than fine links of thought. If he has coarse, clumsy hands, he is much more qualified for materialism than one whose hand movements are more adroit. This has nothing to do with having an abstract conception of the Universe, but with the true inclination to a spiritual view of the Universe, which always demands to be comprehended in finely-meshed thoughts.

All these matters are taken fully into consideration in a comprehensive educational science. You would probably be very pleased if you came to our Waldorf School and visited the classroom where, from ten o'clock, instruction is given in handicrafts. You would see the boys as well as the girls industriously absorbed in knitting or crochet. These things are the outcome of the whole spirit of the Waldorf School, for it is not a question of writing sundry abstract programmes, but of taking in earnest that for the whole training of human knowledge, one should as a teacher know the great difference it makes to the thinking whether I understand how to move my fingers dexterously, whether I am able in ordinary circumstances to cross the middle finger over the first, like a caduceus, or not. The movements of our fingers are to a great extent the teachers of the elasticity of our thinking. These things must be followed with understanding and discernment. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in crossing the middle finger over the first with elasticity, making a serpent and the caduceus, but it is not so easy to do the same with the second and third toes. In this we see what great distinctions there are in the whole organisation of man. It is very important to bear this in mind, for the construction of the foot is intimately connected with our whole human earthly nature. By the organisation of our hands we raise ourselves above the earthly nature. We raise ourselves to the super-earthly. This was felt by the ancient wisdom, for it said that the lower man belonged to the Moon, but that the part of man which raised itself above the earthly nature belonged to Mars. Primeval Wisdom felt the organisation in the whole Universe in the same way as we feel the organisation there is in man. Materialism, however, has brought it about that we do not understand man any more. Again and again I must emphasise that the tragedy of materialism is that it turns its attention to matter, and all the time understands nothing at all of matter but simply loses connection with material existence. For this reason materialism can only cause social harm; for the socialistic materialists, the Marxists, are, as regards reality, just talkers. This they have learnt from the middle classes which have indulged in materialistic chatter for centuries; but they have not applied it to the social institution, and have remained satisfied with half-truths. A spiritual philosophy of life will once more reveal the nature of man, not in the abstract, but as possessing a concrete soul and spirit, which can work into each individual member of the human organisation.

One cannot advance in these things without constantly turning to the other side of life; for this development which our organisation manifests is two-fold, in so far as the upper man is a metamorphosis of the lower man from the last Earth-life. There is a point of time between death and rebirth when a complete reversal takes place, when the inner is turned to the outer, when what is presented as the connection between the organisation of the liver and that of the spleen is changed in the whole structure of its forces into, what becomes our hearing organisation when we are reborn. The whole of the lower man appears transformed. We have today in our lower man a certain relationship between the spleen and the liver. They slide into one another as it were. What is now the spleen slips right through the liver, and comes out, in a certain respect, on the other side, appearing again in the hearing organisation. So too with the other organs. People say that proofs should be found for repeated Earth-lives. Well, the methods by which such proofs can be found have first to be created. Anyone who is able to observe the human head in the right way, possessing a sense for such observation, comes to a way of understanding the transformation of the lower man into the human head; but he cannot understand it without filling in the intermediate stages of the experiences between death and rebirth.

In this connection very remarkable things are experienced. It may perhaps astonish some of you when I say that an artist who has become well acquainted with our conception of the Universe, said: “All that Anthroposophy says is very beautiful, but there is no proof. De Rochas, for instance, has given proofs, for he has shown how in certain conditions of hypnosis, reminiscences of former earth-lives may arise.” It seemed to he very remarkable that an artist of all people should have said such a thing. I might have assured him that it is as though I were to say to him: “My dear friend, your pictures tell me nothing; show me first the original of them, then I will believe that they are good”, or something of the kind. That of course, would be nonsense. As soon as he leaves his own domain, however, he has no power to understand how out of what he has before him, out of the true form of the human head, one can arrive at what is expressed in this human head. The picture must speak through itself, not through the mere likeness to the original. The human head speaks for itself. It corresponds to reality. It is the transformed lower man and points us back to the former Earth-life. One must however first provide what will make it possible to understand the reality aright.

The physical is thus seen to be a direct expression of the Spiritual. It is possible to understand the physical man as an expression of the Spiritual which is experienced between death and re-birth. The physical world explains itself and brings the spiritual world into this explanation. But we must first know this, saying to ourselves: The phenomena of nature are only a half, as long as we have them as mere sense-phenomena. We must first know this. Then we can find the bridge and understand the event that gave Earth its true meaning—the event of Golgotha: then we can understand how a purely spiritual event can at the same time enter right into physical life. If a man is not prepared to see the relation of the physical to the spiritual aright, he will never be able to grasp the fact that the Event of Golgotha is both a spiritual Event and an Event of the physical plane. When in the eighth General Ecumenical Council, in the year 869, the Spirit was eliminated, it was made impossible to understand the Event of Golgotha. The interesting point is that while the Western Churches started from Christianity, they took great care that the essence of Christianity should not be understood. For the nature and essence of Christianity must be grasped by the Spirit. The Western creeds set themselves against the Spirit, and one of the principal reasons why Anthroposophy is prohibited from the Roman Catholic side is that in Anthroposophy we have to relinquish the erroneous statement that ‘man consists of soul and body’ and return to the truth that ‘man consists of body, soul and Spirit’. The prohibition indicates the interest taken on that side to prevent man from coming to the knowledge of the Spirit, and so arriving at the true significance of the Event of Golgotha. Thus the whole knowledge which, as we see, throws so much light on the understanding of Man, has been entirely lost.

How then is an educational science to be constructed for the humanity of today, when the vision of the true nature of Man has been lost? To be an educationalist means to solve those sublime riddles which the child propounds to us, as it gradually brings forth that which has been laid into it between death and re-birth. The creeds however, reckon only with the post-mortem life—in order to humour human egotism; they have not reckoned that human life on Earth should be regarded as a continuation of the heavenly life. To demand of man that he should prove himself worthy of the claim made on him before he entered earthly life through birth, requires a certain selflessness of view, whereas the creeds have chiefly reckoned with egotism up to the present. Here, in Anthroposophy, whatever is of the nature of creed or faith gains, as it were, a moral colouring. Here purely theoretical knowledge is made to flow out into the higher ethical view and conception of the Universe. This should be understood by the friends of Anthroposophy. They should understand that in a sense, a moral inclination to spirituality is the preliminary condition for a knowledge of spiritual beings. In our present difficult time, it is specially necessary that attention should be paid to this moral side of the nature of the conception of the Universe. If we glance at what is taking place in the external world, we must say that empty talk, which is the sister of falsehood, is what has resulted from materialism, even for the ethical experience of humanity. This would become stronger and stronger if humanity were not helped by knowledge which leads to the Spirit, and which must be united with a raising of man's inner moral sense. We ought to acquire a realisation of how a spiritual-scientific conception of the world stands to the tasks and the whole dignity of Man and we should take this feeling as a starting point of our knowledge. This is only too necessary to mankind today, and one would like to find new phrases, new forms of expression in which to describe this aspect of the task of Spiritual Science!

Dear friends,

We must now go on from the knowledge we have gained in one direction, of individuals who, although not exactly having intuition, do develop a perception of the spiritual world and who show certain aspects of behavior that to a physician may seem to be pathological but are in fact something quite different, something more. For as you have seen, the pathological condition remains with them in statu nascendi and there is continuous healing coming from the spirit. This is the case with such personalities as St. Teresa and Mechthild of Magdeburg,⁵ as well as with male visionaries.

When we study these individuals, we find that as a first stage the ego organization separates from the rest of the human organism. It then draws the astral body closely to it, in a certain sense away from the physical-etheric organism. This is in the waking state. What is the consequence of this? You can easily see that this puts the individual into a kind of dream condition. From a spiritual-scientific point of view the ego, by drawing the astral body to itself, is not allowing it to enter the physical and etheric bodies completely, and this brings about a kind of dream condition. But because of the special karmic density, both ego and astral body are strong, and they bring into the dream condition receptivity for the perception of the spiritual world. Dream is transformed into a state in which the individual is really able to see into the spiritual world and to feel the presence of spiritual beings.

Now let us look at the extreme opposite condition. Here the ego is weak, and the astral body draws it down too strongly into the rest of the organism—again in the waking state. Then there is not illumination, as with visionaries like St. Teresa, but the opposite: a darkening, a clouding, a lowering of consciousness—in the waking state—to a dream condition.

One cannot learn to know this second type of person in the way I have indicated for the first type. Individuals who feel the presence of spiritual beings, who come to such final stages as St. Teresa or Mechthild of Magdeburg, are much more numerous than one would think. One learns to know them if one has some particular opportunity or if one has cultivated the corresponding faculties. One learns to know them best by letting them tell about their conditions. They talk more interestingly than our ordinary contemporaries. Their narratives are much more interesting; above all, they speak of things one does not encounter in everyday life. So they are already interesting in the first stage.

The opposite individuals, those whose astral body is drawing the ego down, are also interesting if one lets them talk about themselves. To understand the first type of person requires the soul depth of the priest. To understand this second type of person—who often is even more interesting than the usual visionaries, who do not develop very far—really requires the sensitivity of a physician who comprehends the world with a good intelligence and a fair amount of intuition. For it is a matter of understanding what they do not tell one: what they do tell one is of little value. It is a matter of grasping what they say or do in such a way that one can think of it in relation to the human organism. Such persons, if one asks them a question, show a certain amount of stupidity, also unwillingness to answer a question. They begin to talk about something quite foreign to what one is asking. But if one catches hold of what they say about themselves—and some of them talk endlessly—one sometimes has the feeling that they possess an inner source of speech that gives them a special association of ideas such as the ordinary person does not have. They'll tell you if you let them ramble on—you mustn't ask questions, you must just snap up what they tell as it were by chance—For example a man might say: “Sure, ten years ago I was in a farmer's house and the wife gave me some coffee. The cup had red roses painted on it. She couldn't give me the coffee right away because she'd forgotten the sugar was in the kitchen and she had to go and get it. And she forgot the milk. She had to get the milk from down in the cellar. And then she poured almost half a cup of milk into the coffee. And she said, ‘My coffee is very good.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I think so too, farmer lady.’” And so he goes on and on. He tells incidents from far in his past, and goes into the most unbelievable details. You think, “If I only had a memory as good as his!”—forgetting that if you did have as good a memory you would be just like him! Now of course I'm telling it this way to portray a type, and to show a typical outcome. You must then think of the corresponding lighter variations that you meet in life, which the physician especially meets. I'm picturing an extreme case so that you can see the chief characteristics.

So when the astral body draws the ego organization in, there comes about a kind of power for reproducing details of memory as though automatically. It is always ready to repeat them; it is indifferent to logical connections and just tells things one after another. As a result one can't help wondering why the person hits upon one thing at one moment and another thing at the next. His tale can go on like this, for instance: “The farmer lady went to get the milk and while she was gone I looked in the corner of the room and there was a Madonna picture and it was the same one I'd seen thirty years earlier in another place but there I didn't have coffee but a very good soup.” It can happen that he comes entirely away from the first part of his narrative, but it can also happen that he returns to it again. One sees that this is not a logical memory but a space-and-time memory, extraordinarily exact, with a compulsive desire to tell everything. It is a memory in which, when one studies it more closely, one sees something very remarkable—one sees its deeper foundation. One notices that the person enjoys the sound of certain words he had associated with certain events while he was experiencing the events themselves, and now he takes pleasure in sounding these words again. He is in fact going back to speech that was kept in his memory while thoughts were pushed out—not completely, but almost so.

One also notices changes in the sphere of the will. To these one must pay attention, for now the beginning of real pathological conditions can be found. One will encounter the following—again, one must pay attention, for nothing much can be acclomplished if, for instance, one approaches such people to do this or that in order to observe them. For they become amazingly stubborn, they don't want to cooperate, won't answer questions, won't do anything. But if one can obtain an earlier case history and put those things together with what can be learned from the person's neighbors or a similar source, then one discovers, for instance, that such a person feels a terrific impulse at a definite time of the year to go wandering off somewhere. Often it is to the same region each year. And this inner impulse of will works so strongly that if one tries at such a moment to counteract it, just to discover what state the person is in, one can, for instance, notice the following.

Take a gourmand (there are gourmands even among such people as these!). Catch up with him while he is wandering and sit him down to a wonderful meal or two—to what gives him his greatest joy in life. You'll find that he will only stay put the first day, possibly a second day if he is still a good distance from the place he is heading for. He becomes restless, for he would love another fine meal, and he knows that the next place he'll reach has frightful food. He knows that, for his memory is unusually well developed. He becomes anxious. He wants to go on, for he cannot adapt his will to sudden external suggestions. Just as on the one hand he cannot adapt himself to immediate sense impressions but brings out every possible gem from his speech coffers, so on the other hand he cannot adapt himself to the necessity of surrendering his will-limb system to life's external circumstances. He wants just to follow his own will-impulses, which drive him from within in a very definite manner. One sees that he has almost completely lost the faculty of the ego organization that unites a human being with the outer world. His senses are dulled; his will-impulses prevent him from having a normal relation to the world, and he wants only to follow these will-impulses. This is the consequence of the ego being drawn down into the astral body.

So you see, such people could be helped very much if our medical understanding and the loving devotion of the theologians would work together—not, however, by some instant therapy, but in the following way. With these people one can observe a very definite situation. First we have to consider their life between the change of teeth and puberty. In that period, from a superficial point of view usually nothing abnormal is to be noticed. Everyone loves to see how clever these children are, how frightfully clever, what clever answers they can give, “just like an adult!” But one should be alert to this clever answering between the seventh and the fourteenth year. The children who are so excessively clever at this age are receiving something in this period before puberty that they should only have for their development after puberty. That is how the condition that I have just been describing comes about. The astral body should only be drawing the ego down after puberty, so that then the ego can completely unfold by the beginning of the twenties. With these children the astral body has already drawn the ego down after the change of teeth or in the ninth, tenth, eleventh year. We observe the abnormal cleverness and are delighted by it. By the time the late teens come, the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth years, the ego is stuck too deeply in the astral body. Then the condition is present that I have described, along with the symptoms that I indicated. So now if a child worries us in those early years by premature cleverness, it is a matter of giving certain kinds of treatment. First of all, there will be situations where physician and priest will have to confer with the teacher, so that the teacher will realize what should be done for that early life period. When we have finished this general characterization, we will make several detailed suggestions of what can actually be done. But first I'd like to carry this further, to indicate certain clear connections between the various themes we've been discussing.

Now the following can happen: the etheric body on its part can draw the astral body and ego in too strongly, so that they snap to an excessive degree into the physical and etheric bodies—again in the waking state. Then we have the situation that, seen from within, there is too much astrality in the organs; it cannot unite properly with them. This condition is the pathological mirror-picture of a visionary state such as, for instance, that of St. Teresa, such as her “first stage” as I described it, when she felt the presence of spiritual beings. We had there the bringing of waking-sleep into clear consciousness. And now in such persons as I am describing we have the opposite: dreams are carried over into waking life, with the accompanying symptoms I have mentioned. For it really happens in waking life: dreams do not appear, but an active “dream” life that discloses itself in the kind of speech I described, and in that extreme turning inward of the will impulses. That is the pathological mirror-picture of ordinary dreaming. Activity is there instead of the passivity that is the normal condition of dreaming.

Then we have the second stage, the drawing down of the ego and astral organization by the etheric body. The individual snaps too strongly with the ego, astral body, and etheric body into the physical organism, and the physical organism is not able to receive them into its single organs. Every possible organ has excess astrality that could not unite properly with the organ. Now we have the pathological mirror-picture of what we learned was the second stage for the individuals in whom sense impressions were in a certain sense stimulated from within. The direction was from within out to the senses. Now in this mirror-picture the direction is the opposite: it goes inward to the organs, it takes hold of the physical organism. And conditions appear that always appear when a physical or etheric organ is flooded by the astral body and ego organization and they cannot unite so that it could be called a proper saturation of the physical body by the etheric and astral bodies. Something is left over in the physical organs from the higher members of the organism. What in the other type of individuals poured into visions similar to a sense perception, with colors like a sense perception, visions that revealed the spiritual world, is in this case pouring itself inward, wanting to seize a physical organ. In the former situation there was a reaching out more externally, to the spiritual world beyond the sense world. In this case there is a reaching inward to a physical organ, manifesting in so-called “seizures,” all the different forms of real epilepsy or epileptoid symptoms (“temporal lobe seizures”). It can be explained as the snapping down of the ego and astral organization too strongly into the physical organism, which then succeeds in drawing the etheric body to itself. We see how the first condition advances to this second condition.

Hereby we see something in modern life that could be prevented if a real pastoral medicine would come about. People do not realize that the first condition is pathological; they simply find it interesting. And they only become aware of the second condition when seizures or other epileptic symptoms appear. The memory is now no longer expanding into detail, and the inner will-impulses are no longer increasing: now, since the astral and ego organizations are being pulled inward, and therefore the astral organization is failing to relate properly to certain organs, we find the memory is extinguished. Instead of the memory clinging to details as in the previous condition (details with no logical relation, that were just a running stream of unassociated pictures), now we find the memory disrupted, collapsed, a memory with gaps in it. This can become so extreme that the person lives in a kind of double consciousness. For instance, the memory clings to the upper organs—for the whole human being participates in memory—it takes hold of the upper organs, deserting the lower organs. Then this is reversed: the upper organs lose the memory activity and the lower organs receive it again. There is a rhythmic alteration. Such things can happen. And so these people have two streams of consciousness flowing parallel to each other. In one stream they remember everything that occurs when they are in the one condition; in the other stream they remember all the other things. And they never know in one condition of consciousness any of the content of the other condition of consciousness. Thus the memory deteriorates to a pathological level.

There we have the pathological mirror-picture of what we found in the second stage of the saint. Let us use that term, for modern medicine has no word for such a thing. Saints have a world around them that is visionary but that has a spiritual content. They reach into the spiritual world and receive inner impressions of it. People with pathological conditions—because their karma has given them a weak personality—are drawn down into the physical body. Instead of receiving visions of spiritual things they have epileptic conditions, empty gaps in consciousness, a lack of coherence in daily waking life, and so forth.

But now there can be still a third stage. This is the stage at which for karmic reasons the physical body has become even weaker, along with all the other members, so that earlier karmic forces no longer operate sufficiently in the physical body. With such a person it now comes about, not that ego, astral, and etheric body are pulled in by the physical body, but that something quite different happens. I shall have to describe it in the following way.

Think how it is with those who are extremely sensitive in the other direction, in the direction of the senses, that is, in the direction of the ego organization. How painfully sensitive they can be to all that flows in through the senses, to strong colors, lively sounds. Now precisely the opposite is the case with those whose physical body is weak from karmic causes. Such people are not hypersensitive from within outward, but are insensitive to their physical body and yield to an excessive degree to everything from the other side, the side of the will, that is, from the outer physical world. They succumb to heaviness, warmth, cold. All of this affects them not as it normally affects organic beings, but as it affects inorganic things. This then stifles the expression of the astral body and ego. They are hemmed in by the world and because of a weak physical body they cannot confront it with the necessary intensity; they are like a piece of the outer world although they are still inside their physical body. This is clearly the exact opposite of what we described as the third stage for the saint. The saint goes through pain that is then transformed into bliss, and then further to an experience of the spiritual world in its pure spirituality. This is called “rest in God” or “rest in the Spirit.”

But people who develop in the way I am now describing do not come to “rest in God” or “rest in the Spirit.” They come, although they are not conscious of it, to rest in the hidden occult forces of the physical world, forces against which they, as human beings, should actually be maintaining their independence. They develop the pathological mirror-picture of the third stage of the saint: the condition called idiocy, in which the human personality is lost, in which a person rests in outer nature, that is, in the hidden forces of nature. They can no longer manifest as a human being. They live only in the natural processes that go on within them, in what is a continuation of external natural processes, vegetable processes—eating food, digesting food, moving about in whatever way digestion and the food substances give an impulse to move. It is a complete waking sleep given over to the bodily functions, which are not under the control of the weak physical body but are active as processes in the outer world are active. Naturally, since these processes are working in a human being they do give human-like impulses. But these people are isolated from the normal human world because they are pushed into the physical world to too great a degree. Here we have to do with everything that is a pathological mirror-picture of the “rest in God.” We can call it “rest in Nature.” It has to do with the various paranoid states, with what in everyday life is called idiocy, while the previous conditions would be called mental retardation.

So we have seen the progression in the case of the saint from feeling the presence of spiritual beings to a third stage, being present in the spiritual world. And we have seen the opposite pathological states: first, psychopathological impairment as the first stage. We can be particularly aware of this stage when we encounter an abnormal wanderlust, as I described, connected with a memory that lacks logic. We see this progress to states of insanity, of which the early stage will still allow a person to pursue certain activities in external life. Then we see this progress to the third stage—which could also have been present in early childhood in statu nascendi.

The second stage can be due to the fact that no one has been able to recognize and counteract certain conditions in the first life period, between birth and change of teeth. Occasionally young children show, not exactly an excessive cleverness, but rather an unusual desire to learn things—something that should only appear after the change of teeth. This characteristic is normal between change of teeth and puberty. When it appears in the first life period, however, we should be concerned and we should find the means—physical, soul, and spiritual means—to cure what is already pathological. It is of utmost importance to investigate how certain capacities can be prevented from shining down into the first seven years of life that should really only emerge during the second seven years.

The third stage can reveal itself in two ways. In most cases a person brings it along as his or her karma—as you have seen from my descriptions. Already at birth, the person is in an abnormal condition because of some unusual stress in putting together the etheric body before entering the physical body. An etheric body was formed that does not want to penetrate the physical body completely, does not want to enter heart and stomach in the proper way but wants to flood them: in other words, an etheric body that carries the astral body and ego organization too strongly into the various organs. Already at birth or very soon after, we see facial or bodily deformities that can give us deep concern. This is called congenital mental retardation—but there is no such thing! There is only karmic mental retardation, related to the child's entire destiny. We will also speak about this more fully, so that you will see how an incarnation spent in such mental dullness can, under certain conditions, even have a beneficial place in a human being's karma, although it may mean misery in that one incarnation. There is need, after all, to regard things not merely from the point of view of finite life, but sub specie aeterni from the point of view of the immortal life of a human being. Then we would have a compassionate charity (caritas) and a wise one as well.

On the other hand, the second stage I have described can progress to the third stage in the following way. If in the first life period, between birth and change of teeth, not only the second life period shines in but also the third—the period between puberty and the twenties, when our organization should work into our organism—then we see a child in their fourth or fifth year with capacities that often delight the people. They say, “This child talks or acts like a twenty-year-old!” But this is what is happening: the ego organization is developing too early and is overpowering the physical body and making it weak. Idiocy will then appear in the latter part of the person's life. In this case it is not brought on by karma but has been acquired in this very life, and can only be balanced out karmically in later lives. If we observe life intelligently and have a good pastoral medicine to support us, we will be able to prevent it simply by providing the proper education for such a person's early childhood.

Whoever is vocationally drawn to observe such things should do so not only as individual symptoms—where, naturally, they should be studied with special love—but should also cultivate an understanding for them as a general phenomenon. Such a person should also develop an understanding for how these things are brought about.

We have seen how much of the pedagogy of former decades that a healthy pedagogy, such as the Waldorf school pedagogy wants to be, must definitely oppose. Yet these things have become extraordinarily precious to people. Sometimes our Waldorf school education must address certain things with tremendous severity, for instance, the Froebel kindergarten work, which is taken not from life but out of the intellect. Before the change of teeth it occupies children with activities that are not an imitation of life but are invented out of people's heads. This is putting into the child's first years of life something that should not be there until the next period, between change of teeth and puberty. This brings on the first stage of a pathological condition, a mild state of illness that often is not yet regarded as pathological. Also it were better, perhaps, not to label it pathological, otherwise so much else would have to be labeled pathological, which must in any case be recognized as “cultural phenomena.” These things cannot merely be criticized, they must be understood, so that one relates to them in the right way.

What we should see in front of us is wrong education in early childhood. The second life period has been carried into the first. This is the underlying cause creating a person's automatic speech and stirring the will from within outwards without adjusting in any degree to the surrounding world. Think of a situation such as I described as the first pathological stage: a slight tendency, caused by bad education, education going the wrong way. Then what happens? Wanderlust. This impulse is not entirely pathological, but it is characterized by the desire at a certain age to follow none but one's own ideas, not to bother about the world, to get free and away from one's surroundings, to wander at will! It is connected with other contemporary phenomena that also have their origin in a pathological education, or at least an education with a pathological tinge. You can observe this right now. Look at some of these youth groups. Their very existence belongs to the lifestyle of the last decades of the Kali Yuga.⁶ There is an affinity between this slightly pathological condition and the kind of life that the Kali Yuga brought about. These things all belong together. But they must be examined from these two aspects. If you look, you will easily see tinges of what I have been describing. They reveal themselves clearly in wanderlust, but that is an extreme symptom. Listen once in a while to their conversations! One despairs at their indifference to what one says to them. They repeat details eternally, details they describe as their “experience”; they come back again and again to the same thing.

Please don't misunderstand me! I'm certainly not pointing to any of these things in a trivial sense. My intention is to show you that such phenomena can only be really understood if one grasps clearly the connection I've been pointing to during these few days: that there is always a step into spiritual life and its extreme opposite—a step into the physical body. A further step into the spiritual world for the saint; a further step into the body, into seizures, for instance, for the psychopath. And so on. That is the relationship. If you consider how in the external world, in electricity and magnetism, one pole is always dependent upon the other, you will realize that in life too there can be such a relation between two poles of human development.

This, of course, cannot be seized upon clumsily, as happens today so often with the materialistic worldview. This fact, that there are polar opposites here and that there is a connection between the two poles, must be approached with delicacy. Then one will begin to see what can develop in the one and the other direction. One will finally learn in this way to see into the nature of the human being.

We will continue tomorrow.

• 5 . Mechthild von Magdeburg (1210–1286?). Cistercian nun. Her chief work was The Flowing Light of the Godhead.
• 6 . Kali Yuga, “the Dark Age,” reckoned from 3101 B.C. to A.D. 1899 in Steiner's esoteric chronology.

Since today must be our last session, we will be concerned with filling out and expanding upon what has been said; so you must consider this rather like a final clearance at a rummage sale, where what has been left is finally brought out.

First, I would like most of all to say one must keep in mind that the speaker is in an essentially different position than he who gives something he has written to a reader. The speaker must be very aware that he does not have a reader before him, but rather a listener. The listener is not in a position to go back and re-read a sentence he has not understood. The reader, of course, can do this, and this must be kept in mind. This situation can be met by presenting through repetition what is considered important, even indispensable, for a grasp of the whole. Naturally, care must be taken that such repetitions are varied, that the most important things are put forth in varied formulations while, at the same time, this variety of re-phrasings does not bore the listener who has a gift for comprehension. The speaker will have to see to it that the different ways he phrases one and the same thing have, as it were, a sort of artistic character.

The artistic aspect of speaking is, in general, something that must be kept clearly in mind, the more the subject matter is concerned with logic, life-experience, and other powers of understanding. The more the speaker is appealing to the understanding through strenuous thinking, the more he must proceed artistically—through repetition, composition, and many other things which will be mentioned today. You must remember that the artistic has its own means of facilitating understanding. Take, for example, repetition, which can work in such a way that it forms a sort of facilitation for the listener. Differently phrased repetitions give the listener occasion to give up rigidly holding himself to one or another phrase and to hear what lies between them. In this way his comprehension is freed, giving him the feeling of release, and that aids understanding to an extraordinary degree.

However, not only should different means of artistically structuring the speech be applied, but also different ways of executing it. For example, take the speaker who, in seeking the right word for something, brings in a question in such a way that he actually speaks the question amidst the usual flow of statements. What does it mean to address one's listeners with a question? Questions which are listened to actually work mainly on the listener's inhalation. The listener lives during his listening in a breathing-in, breathing-out, breathing-in, breathing-out. That is not only important for speaking, it is also most important for listening. If the lecturer brings up a question the listener's exhalation can, as it were, remain unused. Listening is diverted into inhalation on hearing a question. This is not contradicted by a situation when the listener may be breathing out on hearing a question. Listening takes place not only directly but indirectly, so that a sentence which falls during an exhalation—if it is a question—is really only rightly perceived, rightly taken in, during the subsequent inhalation. In short, inhalation is essentially connected with hearing a content in question form. However, because of the fact that inhalation is engaged by a question being thrown out, the whole process of listening is internalized. What is said goes somewhat more deeply into the soul than if one listens merely to an assertion.

When a person hears a straight assertion his actual tendency is to engage neither his inhalation nor his exhalation. The assertion may sink in a little, but it doesn't actually even engage the sense organs much.

Lengthy assertions concerning logical matters are, on the whole, unfortunate within the spoken lecture. Whoever would lecture as if he were merely giving a reasoned argument has gotten hold of a great instrument—to put his listeners to sleep; for such a logical development has the disadvantage that it removes the understanding from the organ of hearing. One doesn't listen properly to logic. Furthermore, it doesn't really form the breath; it doesn't set it going in varied waves. The breath remains essentially in its most neutral state when a logical assertion is listened to, thus one goes to sleep with it. This is a wholly organic process. Logical assertions are perforce impersonal—but that takes its toll.

Thus, one who wants to develop into a speaker must take care whenever possible not to speak in logical formulae but in figures of speech, while remaining logical. To these figures of speech belongs the question. Also belonging to figures of speech is the ploy of occasionally saying the opposite of what one really wants to say. This has to be said in such a way that the listener knows he is to understand the opposite. Thus, let us say, the speaker says straight out, and even in an assertive tone: Kully is stupid. Under certain circumstances that could prove to be not a very good turn of phrase. But it could be a good formulation if someone said: I don't believe there is anyone sitting here who presumes that Kully is clever! There you have spoken a phrase that is opposite of the truth. But, naturally, you have added something so that you could formulate the opposite to the assertive statement. Thus, by proceeding in this way, and with inner feeling, the speech will be able to stand on its own two feet.

I have just said that the speech will be able to stand on its own feet. This is an image. Philistines can say that a speech has no feet. But a speech does have feet!As an example one need only recall that Goethe, in advanced age, when he had to speak while fatigued, liked to walk around the room. Speech is basically the expression of the whole man—thus it has feet! And to surprise the listener with something about which he is unfamiliar and which, if he is to grasp it, he must go counter to what he is familiar with—that is extremely important in a lecture.

Also belonging to the feeling-logic of the speech is the fact that one does not talk continually in the same tone of voice. To go on in the same tone, you know, puts the listener to sleep. Each heightening of the tone is actually a gentle nightmare; thus the listener is somewhat shaken by it. Every relative sinking of tone is really a gentle fainting, so that it is necessary for the listener to fight against it. Through modulating the tone of speech one gives occasion for the listener to participate, and that is extraordinarily important for the speaker.

But it is also especially important now and then to appeal somewhat to the ear of the listener. If he is too immersed in himself while listening, at times he won't follow certain passages. He begins to reflect within himself. It is a great misfortune for the lecturer when his listeners begin to ponder within themselves. They miss something that is being said, and when—after a time—they again begin to hear, they just can't keep up. Thus at times you must take the listener by the ear, and you do that by applying unusual syntax and sequences of phrasing. The question, of course, gives a different placing of subject and predicate than one is used to, but you ought to have on hand a variety of other ways of changing the word order. You should speak some sentences in such a way that what you have at the beginning is a verb or some other part of speech which is not usually there. Where something unusual happens, the listener again pays attention, and what is most noteworthy is that he not only pays attention to the sentence concerned but also to the one that follows. And if you have to do with listeners who are unusually docile, you will find that they will even listen to the second sentence if you interlace your word-order a bit. As a lecturer, you must pay attention to this inner lawfulness. You will learn these things best if, in your listening, you will direct your attention to how really good speakers use such things. Such techniques are what lead essentially to the pictorial quality of a speech.

In connection with the formal aspect of speaking, you could learn a great deal from the Jesuits. They are very well trained. First, they use the components of a speech well. They work not only on intensification and relaxation but, above all, on the image. I must continually refer to a striking Jesuit speech I once heard in Vienna, where I had been led by someone to the Jesuit church and where one of the most famous Jesuit Fathers was preaching. He preached on the Easter Confessional, and I will share the essential part of his sermon with you. He said: "Dear Christians! There are apostates from God who assert that the Easter Confessional was instituted by the Pope, by the Roman Pope; that it does not derive from God but rather from the Roman Pope. Dear Christians! Whoever would believe that can learn something from what I am going to say: Imagine in front of you, dear Christians, there stands a cannon. Beside the cannon there stands a cannonier. The cannonier has a match in his hand ready to light the fuse. The cannon is loaded. Behind the cannonier is the commanding officer. When the officer commands, 'Fire,' the cannonier lights the fuse. The cannon goes off. Would any of you now say that this cannonier, who obeyed the command of his superior, invented the powder? None of you, dear Christians, would say that! Look now, such a cannonier was the Roman Pope, who waited for the command from above before ordering the Easter Confessional. Thus, no one will say the Pope invented the Easter Confessional; as little as the cannonier invented the gunpowder. He only carries out the commandments from above." All the listeners were crushed, convinced!

Obviously, the man knew the situation and the state of mind of the people. But that is something that is an indispensable precondition for a good speech and has already been characterized in this study. He said something which, as an image, fell completely outside the train of thought, and yet the listeners completed the course of the argument without feeling that the man spoke subjectively. I have also called to your attention the dictum by Bismarck about politicians steering by the wind, an image he took from those with whom he was debating, but which nevertheless frees one from the strictness of the chain of thought under discussion.

These sorts of things, if they are rightly felt, are those artistic means which completely replace what a lecture does not need, namely, sheer logic. Logic is for thought, not for speaking; I mean for the form of speech, not the way of expression. Naturally, the illogical may not be in it. But a speech cannot be put together as one combines a train of thought. You will find that something may be most acute and appropriate in a debate and yet really have no lasting effect. What does have a lasting effect in a speech is an image which grabs, that is, which stands at some distance from the meaning, so that the speaker who uses the image has become free from slavish dependence on the pure thought-sense.

Such things lead to the recognition of how far a speech can be enhanced through humor. A deeply serious speech can be elevated by a humor which, so to say, has barbs. It is just as I have said: if you wish to forcibly pour will into the listeners, they get angry. The right way to apply the will is for the speech itself to develop images which are, so to speak, inner realities. The speech itself should be the reality. You can perhaps grasp what I want to say if I tell you of two debates. The second is not a pure debate, but it still can be instructive for the use of images in a speech which wishes to characterize something.

Notice that those orations that are intended to be witty often acquire a completely subjective coloring. The German Parliament had for some time, in one of its members by the name of Meyer, just such a witty debater. For example, at one time the famous—or infamous—“Lex Heinze” was advocated in this particular Parliament. I believe that the man who gave the speech for the defense was the minister; and he always spoke, as the defender and as one belonging to the Conservative Party, of “das Lex Heinze.” He always said “das Lex Heinze.” Now, no doubt, such a thing can pass. But it was in the nature of the Liberal Party, of which the joker, Representative Meyer, was a member, that it took just such matters seriously. So later on in the debate Meyer asked leave to speak and said somewhat as follows: “The Lord Minister has defended die Lex Heinze¹ and has constantly said ‘das Lex Heinze.’ I didn't know what he was really talking about. I have gone all around asking what ‘das Lex’ is. No one has been able to enlighten me. I took the dictionary and looked—and found nothing. I was about to come here and ask the Minister, when it suddenly struck me to consult a Latin Grammar. There I found it, there stood the statement: 'What one cannot decline must be considered a neuter!”

To be sure, for an immediate laugh it is very good, this coarse wit. But it still has no barbs, it doesn't ignite deeply, because with such a ploy there is aroused subtly and unconsciously in the listener a pity for the afflicted one. This kind of wit is too subjective, it comes more out of a love of sarcasm than out of the thing itself.

Over against this I have always found the following to be a striking image: He who was later to become Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was, as Crown Prince, a very witty man. His father, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, had a minister who was very special to him, whose name was von Klewiz.² Now the Crown Prince could not bear von Klewiz. Once, at a court ball, the Crown Prince spoke to Klewiz and said: Your Excellency, I would like to put to you a riddle today:

The first is the fruit from the field
The second is something which,
when one hears it, one gets a light shock;
And the whole is a public calamity!

Von Klewiz turned red from ear to ear, bowed, and handed in his resignation after the ball. The King called him and said: What happened to you? I can't spare you, my dear Klewiz!—Yes, but, Your Royal Highness, the Crown Prince said something to me yesterday which made it impossible for me to remain in office.—But that is not possible! The dear Crown Prince would not say such a thing, that I can't believe!—Yes, but it is so, Your Majesty.—What has the Crown Prince said?—He said to me: The first is a fruit from the field; the second is something which, if one hears it, one gets something like a light shock; the whole is a public calamity! There is no doubt, Royal Highness, that the Crown Prince meant me.—Indeed, remarkable thing, dear Klewiz. But we will have the Crown Prince come and we will hear how the matter stands.

The Crown Prince was called.—Dear One, yesterday evening you are supposed to have said something very offensive to my indispensible minister, His Excellency, von Klewiz.—The Crown Prince said: Your Majesty, I am unable to remember. If it had been something serious I would surely be able to remember it.—It does seem to have been something serious, though.—Oh! Yes, yes, I remember. I said to His Excellency that I wished to put a riddle to him: The first syllable is a fruit of the field, the second syllable indicates something which, if one perceives it, one gets something like a slight shock; the whole is a public calamity. I don't think that it is a matter of my having offended His Excellency so much as that His Excellency could not solve the riddle. I recall that His Excellency simply could not solve the riddle!—The King said: Indeed, what is the riddle's solution?—Here, then: The first syllable is a fruit of the field: hay (Heu); the second syllable, where one gets a light shock, is “fear” (Schreck); the whole is: grasshopper (Heu-schreck), that is, a public calamity (or nuisance), Your Majesty.

Now why do I say that? I say it on the grounds that no one who tells such a thing, no one who moulds his phrases or figures of speech in such a form, has need of following the matter through to its end; for no person expects in telling it that he has to explain the tableau further, but rather expects each to draw for himself the pictorial idea. And it is good in a speech to occasionally work it so that something is left over for the listener. There is nothing left over when one ridicules someone; the gap is perfectly filled up.

It is a matter of heightening the vividness so that the listener can really get the feeling that he can act on something, can take it further. Naturally, it is necessary that one leaves the needed pauses in his speech. These pauses must be there.

Now along this line we could say an extraordinary amount about the form, about the structure, of a speech. For usually it is believed that men listen with their ears alone; but the fact that some, when they especially want to grasp something, open their mouths while listening, already speaks against this. They would not do this if they listened with their ears alone. We listen with our speech organs much more than is usually thought. We always, as it were, snap up the speech of the speaker with our speech organ; and the etheric body always speaks along with, even makes eurythmy along with, the listening—and, in fact, the movements correspond exactly to eurythmy movements. Only people don't usually know them unless they have studied eurythmy.

It is true that everything we hear from inanimate bodies is heard more from outside with the ear, but the speech of men is really heard in such a way that one heeds what beats on the ear from within. That is a fact which very few people know. Very few know what a great difference exists between hearing, say, the sound of church bells or a symphony, and listening to human speech. With human speech, it is really the innermost part of the speaking that is heard. The rest is much more merely an accompanying phenomenon than is the case with the hearing of something inanimate. Thus, I have said all that I did about one's own listening so that the speaker will actually formulate his speech as he would criticize it if he were listening to it. I mean that the formulation comes from the same power, out of the same impulse, as does the criticism if one is doing the listening.

It is of some importance that the persons who make it their task to do something directly for the threefolding of the social organism—or something similar to this—take care that what they have to say to an audience is done, in a certain way, artistically. For basically, one speaks today—I have already indicated this—to rather deaf ears, if one speaks before the usual public about the threefolding of the social organism. And, I would like to say, that in a sense one will have to be fully immersed in the topic, especially with feeling and sensitivity, if one wants to have any success at all. That is not to suggest that it is necessary to study the secrets of success—that is certainly not necessary—and to adapt oneself in trivial ways to what the listener wants to hear. That is certainly not what should be striven for. What one must strive for is a genuine knowledge of the events of the time. And, you see, such a firm grounding in the events of the time, an arousal of the really deeper interest for the events of the time, can only be evoked today by Anthroposophy. For these and other reasons, whoever wants to speak effectively about threefolding must be at least inwardly permeated with the conviction that for the world to understand threefold, it is also necessary to bring Anthroposophy to the world.

Admittedly, since the very first efforts toward the realization of the threefold social order, there have been, on the one hand, those who are apparently interested in the threefold social order but not in Anthroposophy; while on the other hand, those interested in Anthroposophy but caring little for the threefold social order. In the long run, however, such a separation is not feasible if anything of consequence is to be brought about.

This is especially true in Switzerland, some of the reasons for which having already been mentioned. The speaker must have a strong underlying conviction that a threefold social order cannot exist without Anthroposophy as its foundation. Of course, one can make use of the fact that some persons want to accept threefolding and reject Anthroposophy; but one should absolutely know—and he who knows will be able to find the right words, for he will know that without the knowledge of at least the fundamentals of Anthroposophy there can be no threefold organization.

For what are we attempting to organize in a threefold way? Imagine a country where the govern ment has complete control of the schools on the one hand and the economy on the other, so that the area of human rights falls between the two. In such a country it would be very unlikely that a threefold organization could be achieved. If the school system were made independent of the government, the election of a school monarch or school minister would probably shortly follow, transforming within the shortest time the independent cultural life into a form of government!

Such matters cannot be manipulated by formulas; they must be rooted in the whole of human life. First we must actually have an independent cultural life and participate in it before we can assign it its own sphere of activity within society. Only when that life is carried on in the spirit of Anthroposophy—as exemplified by the Waldorf school in Stuttgart—can one speak of the beginnings of an independent cultural sector. The Waldorf school has no head, no lesson plans, nor anything else of the kind; but life is there, and life dictates what is to be done.

I am entirely convinced that on this topic of the ideal independent school system any number of persons, be it three, seven, 12, 13 or 15, could get together and think up the most beautiful thoughts to formulate a program: firstly, secondly, thirdly—many points. These programs could be such that nothing more beautiful could be imagined. The people who figured out these programs need not be of superior intelligence. They could, for example, be average politicians, not even that, they could be barroom politicians. They could discover 30, 40 points, fulfilling all the highest ideals for the most perfect schools, but they wouldn't be able to do anything with it! It is superfluous to set up programs and statutes no one can work with. One can work with a group of teachers only on the basis of what one has at hand—not on the basis of statutes—doing the best one can in the most living way.

An independent cultural life must be a real life of the spirit. Today, when people speak of the spiritual life, they mean ideas; they speak only of ideas.

Consequently, since Anthroposophy exists for the purpose of calling forth in people the feeling for a genuine life of the spirit, it is indispensable when the demand arises for a threefold social organism. Accordingly, the two should go together: furtherance of Anthroposophy and furtherance of the threefold social order.

But people, especially today, are tired in mind and soul. They actually want to avoid coming to original thoughts and feelings, interested only in maintaining traditions. They want to be sheltered. They don't want to turn to Anthroposophy, because they don't want to stir their souls into activity; instead, they flock in great numbers—especially the intellectuals—to the Roman Catholic Church, where no effort is required of them. The work is on the part of the bishop or priest, who guides the soul through death. Just think how deep-rooted it is in today's humanity: parents have a son whom they love; therefore they want his life to be secure. Let him work for the government: then he is bound to be well looked after; then he doesn't have to face the battle of life by himself. He will work as long as he can, then go on to pensioned retirement—secure even beyond his working days. How grateful we should be to the government for taking such good care of our children!

Neither are people so fond of an independently striving soul. The soul is to be taken care of until death by the church, just as work is provided by the government. And just as the power of the government provides the physical man with a pension, so the church is expected to provide the soul with a pension when a man dies, is expected to provide for it after death—that is something that lies deeply in present-day man, in everyone today. Just to be polite I will add that this is true for the daughters as well as the sons, for they would rather be married to those who are thus “secure,” who are provided for in this way. Such seems to be the obsession of humanity: not to build upon oneself, but to have some mystical power somewhere upon which to build. The government, as it exists today, is an example of such a mystical power. Or is there not much obscurity in the government? I suspect much more obscurity than in even the worst mystic.

We must have a sense for these things as we commit ourselves to the tasks to which these lectures are addressed. This course was primarily confined to the formalities of the art of lecturing, but the important thing is the enthusiasm that lives in your hearts, the devotion to the necessity of that effectiveness which can emanate from the Goetheanum in Dornach. And to the degree that this inner conviction grows in you, it will become a convincing power not only for you but for others as well. For what do we need today? Not a mere doctrine; however good it could be, it could just get moldy in libraries, it could be formulated—here or there—by a "preacher in the desert," unless we see to it that the impulse for a threefold social order finds entrance, with minimal delay, to as many minds as possible. Then practical application of that impulse will follow by itself.

But we need to broaden the range of our efforts. A weekly publication such as the Goetheanum will have to be distributed as widely as possible in Switzerland. That is only one of many requirements, in view of the fact that the basic essentials of Anthroposophy must be acquired ever anew; but a weekly of this type will have to find its place on the world scene and work in widespread areas for the introduction and application of the threefold social order. The experience of the way in which the Goetheanum publication thus works will be essential to anyone attempting to assist in the realization of such an order in the social organism.

What we need above all is energy, courage, insight, and interest in world events on a broader scale! Let us not isolate ourselves from the world, not get entangled in narrow interests, but be interested in everything that goes on all over the world. That will give wings to our words and make us true coworkers in the field we have chosen.

In this light were these lectures given; and when you go out to continue your work, you can be assured that the thoughts of the lecturer will accompany you. May such cooperation strengthen the impulse that should inspire our work, if that work, especially in Switzerland, is to be carried on in the right way.

And so I wish you luck, sending you out not into darkness but into where light and open air can enter into the development of humanity—from which you will doubly benefit, as you yourselves are the ones who are to bring this light and openness into the world.

• 1. The proper form was apparently “die,” implying feminine gender. “Das” implies neuter gender.
• 2. The two syllables of the name are identical in sound with Klee (clover) and Witz (joke).

Today, as in the past, I would like to say a few introductory words before this performance of eurythmy. I do this not in order to explain what will be presented since, of course, what is artistic will need to have its effect through direct experience, and it would be inartistic to give some theoretical explanation before such a performance. Nevertheless I might say that the art of eurythmy is an attempt to reach down into a source of art that exists in human beings. That wellspring seeks expression in artistic forms that are particularly well-suited for revealing the needs of all art, namely, to bring what is artistic into the realm of the sense and super-sense-perceptible.

Goethe coined the expression “sensible and supersensible viewing” 1out of the depths of his world perspective and his feeling for art. The form of the art of eurythmy is completely based upon this sense and supersensible perception.

On the stage you will see all kinds of movements performed by individuals and groups. At first you might have the impression that the eurythmy presentation should be accompanied by poetic or musical performance and that the eurythmy is simply another expression of that. You might have the impression that eurythmy is simply gestures invented to mimic what is presented through the poetry or music. That is not the case. Eurythmy is based upon movements exercised by the organs of speech themselves and which have been revealed through a careful sensory and supersensible study of human speech.

In normal speech, the movements of the lips and gums and so forth directly affect the air. They are transformed into subtle vibrations that form the basis of what we hear. It is, of course, not these vibrations that are important here in eurythmy; rather what is important lies at the basis of an entire system of such vibrations.

This has been studied and was transferred from the organs of speech to the entire human being according to the Goethean principle of metamorphosis, according to which, for instance, the entire plant is only a leaf that is more complicated in form.

What you will see on the stage are not simply random movements. Instead they are movements that strictly follow certain laws. They follow the same laws and occur in the same order as do the movements of the organs of speech when giving tone while speaking or sounds while singing. Within these forms resides an inner necessity of the same sort as is created by music in forming a series of tones. What we are concerned with here is, in fact, a kind of visible speech that closely follows certain rules.

Modern culture will need to find its way into this visible speech, as modern culture contains something quite inartistic within it. Things that were quite common during the Romantic period are much less so today—for example, people intently listened to poems when they did not actually understand the words; they listened more to the rhythm and the inner form of the sounds. We will see this in the recitations that accompany the eurythmy presentations in much the same way as does music, that there is nothing other that we could emphasize in this element of artistic eurythmy than the actual artistic element of the poetry itself. It is not the word-for-word content of the poem that is important; rather, it is the formal form that the artist has created which is important. Thus you will see that we attempt to present forms and spatial forms created by groups. They are not simply mimicking the content of the poetry; rather something follows from the character of the poem that the poet developed into the words. Even when the presentation is concerned with something surreal, something affected, such as we will attempt to present in the second part of the presentation today, you will see that it is concerned not with some imitative presentation of the content, but rather with forming connections of such a nature that the individual movements have little effect; the effect is formed through the harmonious forms acting together.

In general, we can say that through eurythmy we return to the sources of art because eurythmy is an art that should not affect us solely through our thoughts. When our concern is with science in our modern materialistic sense, it is only thoughts that affect us, and for that reason, we can penetrate only into the sense-perceptible content of the world. In the art of eurythmy, our concern is more that the sense and supersensible character should be expressed than the fact that the entire human being or groups of human beings are the means of expressing it.

We can thus say that the human being, the ensouled human being, the human being permeated by spirit, places soul and spirit into each movement, namely, that soul and spirit that we can hear through the truths sounding from the poetry. All this shows how the sense-perceptible, which we can see through the limbs of the human being, at the same time carries the spirit on its wings. It is, therefore, genuinely sensory and super-sensibly perceptible. Eurythmy thus expresses what Goethe demanded of all art when he said, “Those to whom nature begins to reveal its secret will have a deep desire for nature’s highest level of expression, namely, art.”3 For Goethe, art is in a certain sense a way of experiencing nature through feeling. How would it be possible to better correspond to nature than to bring to expression those capacities that enable human beings to move based upon their will, so that a kind of visible speech is therefore expressed? Thinking, which in general ignores art, is thus shut out. It is only will that is expressed in the movements. The personality of human beings is transferred to these movements in an impersonal way, so something that is highly artistic and represents something sense- and super-sense-perceptible is expressed through these presentations.

Eurythmy also has a significant educational effect in that it is at the same time a kind of ensouled gymnastics. If you think about these things objectively, then you will see that what has long been treasured as gymnastics and something which we certainly do not wish to eliminate is something that experiences a particular kind of growth when we place alongside it this ensouled form of gymnastics as we have done for the children at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. You will see some of this children’s eurythmy during the second part of our presentation today.

Normal gymnastics strengthens the body, of course, and for that reason we certainly do not want to go without it. However, ensouled gymnastics, which has an effect not simply upon the physical body but the spirit and soul as well, is particularly effective in developing the will. Future generations, who will have an increasingly difficult life, will need stronger will energies.

Eurythmy also has an important hygienic side. The movements of eurythmy are those movements through which individuals can best place themselves into the rhythm and harmony of the world. All unhealthy things are essentially based upon people separating themselves from that rhythm. We are certainly not doing anything reactionary, and I would ask therefore that you do not consider me to be rejecting the aspects of modern culture. There are many things today that are necessary, things we need, things we cannot eliminate. We must also admit there are many reasons modern human beings would want to separate themselves from the rhythm and harmony of the world. Each time we sit in a railway car or an automobile, and when we do many other such things at the same time, we undertake actions that separate us from universal rhythms. This separation sneaks slowly into human health and undermines it in a way that is not even noticed. These things can be seen only by those who have an intimate understanding of the relationship of human beings with the universe. However, the universe seeks today to give something that will return human beings to health.

Where do people today seek health? I know that with the following I am saying something contrary to what is commonly held today, but in the future people will think more objectively of this. Prior to this terrible world catastrophe that crashed in upon us, there was an attempt to achieve health through such things as the Olympic Games. That is a terrible thought that lies entirely outside of any genuine understanding. The Olympic Games were appropriate for the Greek body. When undertaking such things, people do not at all realize that each cultural period has its particular requirements.

That is something, however, that we attempt to do through the art of eurythmy. We do not attempt to provide humanity with something based upon some abstract theory or something from the past. Instead we try to do what is necessary for modern civilization, something that we can find within human nature and which is appropriate for the structure of modern humanity.

Such things certainly cannot be proven anatomically or physiologically, because we cannot dissect the ancient Greeks. Those who can look into cultural development through spiritual science recognize that modern human beings in their physical form and especially in their soul and spiritual structure require something else. Eurythmy is a beginning toward finding those requirements placed before us by our cultural period itself. Eurythmy attempts to correspond to our culture.

As you know, what we will present here today is at its very beginnings, and therefore remains simply an attempt. We are nevertheless convinced that because we are serious about working based upon the requirements of our cultural period, others will further develop what we can present here today, so that a mature art form will arise that is worthy of being placed alongside its older sisters.

Part I (Goetheanum)
“Graceful Region (Ariel Scene)” from ‘Faust II’ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Nile Delta“ by Wladimir Solowjow (Russian) ‘World Soul Spirits’ by Rudolf Steiner
“Laurore sallume” by Victor Hugo
“Spring“ by Rudolf Steiner
“Proemion” by]. W.v. Goethe
From the “Chymischen Hochzeit” by Valentin Andreae with music by Max Schuurman

Part II (Joiner's workshop)
Elegiac prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Heiß mich nicht reden“ (Mignon II) by J. W. v. Goethe
“Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (Mignon III) by J. W. v. Goethe
“Erlkönig“ by J. W. v. Goethe with ‘Elven prelude’
Prelude ‘Look around you’
“The little bouquet” by J. W. v. Goethe
Cheerful prelude
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Prayer: The Deer”; “The Lion”; “The Priestess”; “From the Suburbs”

Dear attendees!

We will be giving you a eurythmy performance here today, and I will take the liberty of saying a few words in advance about the nature of our eurythmic art. This art is based above all on a real, visible language. You will see gestures, movements, performed by individuals, groups of people and so on here on stage. What is presented here is not intended to be some kind of mimic or pantomime performance, or even something dance-like, as we understand these things today. Rather, it is about exploring, through sensual and supersensory observation – if I may use this Goethean expression – which movement tendencies underlie our speech organs when phonetic language is produced or when singing is produced . In this case, however, it is more a matter of movement tendencies that, I would say, are still disappearing as they arise and then transform into that which, as a movement of the air, underlies the tone, the sound.

These movements, which only half arise, but which as such lie quite clearly, I would say in the will of the human being, in the unconscious will of the human being, are carefully studied and are now transferred according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphic view of the whole human being, namely to that part of the human being that can most directly reveal the soul's inner being: to the human arms and hands, which are then supported, admittedly, by movements of the rest of the human organism.

When I say, according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphic view, it means that, as Goethe saw in the individual leaf of the idea a whole plant and in turn in the whole plant a more intricately designed leaf, so in the processes that take place in an organ system, one can see something like an expression of the whole human being. This is indeed the case when a person makes use of the activities of his speech organs. What we otherwise feel as the content of our full humanity is expressed, so to speak, through this one organ system. And so, like Goethe, we can look at the whole plant as a more complicated leaf, and in a sense we can make the whole human being an organ of expression for his soul and spirit. And then something like a visible language emerges, which is the basis of our eurythmy.

It is therefore important to bear in mind that the movements that are performed are not random gestures that would be added at random to one or other expression of the soul, but that everything that is done in terms of the smallest and small movements here is subject to strict inner laws, just as the formation of language itself is.

Anyone who has an appreciation of the eurythmic quality of the way language is treated by the true poet, something of what one might call the pictorial, painterly or musical representation of language, will also have to approve of an extension of the artistic formal language into this eurythmic quality, for artistic reasons, I think. For anyone who is interested in art at all is also interested in expanding artistic means.

What the poet actually wants is based on something that, I would say, is one layer deeper than what we reveal through language in ordinary prosaic expression. When we reveal ourselves in ordinary prosaic expression through the literal, then basically it is the thought that is embodied in our language. And it is quite certain that all thought kills what is actually artistic.

The actual artistry of poetry makes use only of thought, of the literal content. But what is truly artistic about poetry is the special formation of language, the relationship between one sound and another, between high and low tones, and so on and so forth. It is that which presupposes that the human being not only has an understanding of the meaningful that is expressed through his language, but also has an understanding of the phonetic, of the sound itself.

For what appears here as eurythmy is not the same gesture that we use to accompany our speech today. The gestures we use to accompany our speech do, to a large extent, come from the unconscious, but they are connected to the meaning of what we are saying. And the details of the eurythmic movements performed here are essentially connected to the sounds and tones themselves.

So we can say that when we see one or other of these movements performed, it is the reaction of the human soul, not to the meaning expressed by some sequence of sounds, but to the sequence of sounds themselves, which produces sympathetic, antipathetic, joyful, sorrowful impressions and so on, albeit in a finely nuanced way. Nuances of the soul and its inner movement, which are brought about by the sound itself, are to come to light through eurythmy. Therefore, precisely that which is actually volitional, that is, emotional, in the artistic can come to light through this eurythmy, that is, that which has already stripped away the thought, the inartistic. And those who can immerse themselves in this way of looking at eurythmy will probably find that the very thing the poet struggles with in order to express it in language can be expressed particularly well in the visible language of eurythmy. These are a few words that point to the essence of eurythmy in an artistic sense.

This eurythmy has another side, a hygienic-therapeutic side. The gestures and movements that are made here initially appear to us as something like a visible pronunciation of what is recited here in the poetry, or are intended to be a visible song, a musical element. This eurhythmics is therefore presented as musical and recitative, accompanied.

But at the same time, these movements are such that they follow from the inner laws of the organism itself. Anyone with an appreciation of the human form will know that the outer limbs, as you know, extend into the most intimate structures of all the organs. When the human form is at rest, it is in a constant state of transition into movement. We cannot, my dear attendees, look at a head, for example, which is intended to be at rest [gap in shorthand], or at each finger, which is intended to grasp, in its resting form [gap in shorthand], or at how it looks in motion, how it must appear at rest.

In this way, however, it is possible to extract, as it were, the forms of movement from what man is as an organized being, which are thoroughly healthy forms of movement of the human being. And in this way it is possible to extract certain forms of movement from healthy people, but also from sick people (this is only hinted at), which can also be applied to the medical field (this is only hinted at).

The third [area of eurythmy is] didactic and pedagogical. We introduced [eurythmy as a subject] in the Waldorf School, founded by [Emil Molt], from the very beginning. It represents a kind of soulful gymnastics. And it must be said that one day we will think about these things more impartially and without prejudice than is already possible for people today. One day we will see that our present-day gymnastics are actually only taken from the laws of the human body, so that children derive great joy and devotion from this soulful gymnastics from the very beginning. They feel that they are entering into a life of movement that has been drawn from the nature of the human being itself. It can be said that it is quite possible to perceive in children that the soul forces can also be cultivated in this way through eurythmy, namely the initiative of the will, which is not really expressed through ordinary gymnastics. I would say that a certain efficiency and a certain courage come from ordinary gymnastics. But it is the inner initiative that comes from the soul, and this is what can be cultivated in children through eurythmy.

And so this eurythmy has three sides. But what is artistic for us here is [illegible word]. And this artistic element is indeed only just beginning today. I must therefore ask again and again to be lenient with what [gap in shorthand]. We ourselves are the strictest critics of what we have dared to begin with this eurythmy. But one must consider that eurythmy uses that [illegible word] as its means of expression, its tool, which summarizes all the secrets of the world, which is a real microcosm: it uses the human organization itself.

Goethe says that man arrives at art by taking order, harmony, measure and meaning from the whole of the rest of the world and expressing them in his production. When man borrows order, harmony, measure and meaning from the world through mystical vision and expresses them through his own intention, thus making himself, as it were, a work of art, then the artistic must come to expression in the best way. Therefore, one may also believe that, despite the fact that eurythmy is only just beginning today, it will have developmental possibilities in itself, so that one day, when it has been further developed, it will be able to present itself in a fully valid way as a younger art alongside the older, fully valid arts.

We will, honored attendees, have the first part of our presentation here in this room today. Then there will be an intermission after the performance of The Chemical Wedding. And for the following part, that is, for what comes after the intermission, I ask the honored audience to please go to the rehearsal hall.

‘A translation has to be made out of the spirit of the language of the country just as if the respective book were written in this language’ (R. Steiner, Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Lecture 14, 5.1.22, GA303 [RSP/AP 1986]).

With this sentence, Steiner encapsulates the translator's ideal. It is echoed by Gerald Vann: ‘Translation must always of course be a rendering not of word for word but of idea for idea; to be content to transliterate is merely illiterate’ (G. Vann, ‘Translator's Note to Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe [Collins, London 1965]). I do not think any translator believes a fixed ‘fundamentalist’ view concerning Steiner's terms is a tenable position. Words with Teutonic roots are not automatically holy or accurate, whoever the author might be. Nor does anybody claim pommes de terre has anything to do with apples! We have all heard of ‘anthrospeak’, that habit of jargonizing which we try to avoid in serious discourse. We all know that language is a living reality, and we try to be sensitive to its development.

These remarks arise from a perception that general awareness of our use of language is not as precise as it might be, that several factors are involved, and that a translator of a text on music inherits a difficult and controversial situation from which, nevertheless, I am convinced much good can result. Questions of terminology began to be aired at last in the Newsletter of the Association of Eurythmists in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, Aberdeen, Winter 1993. Potential critics may care to know that the aims expressed in Anna Meuss' article ‘Translating Rudolf Steiner's lectures’ (in Anthroposophy Today No. 20, RSP Autumn 1993) match my own. Most translators working in English owe much to her example. With the question of spelling and what to italicize, I have followed The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1991). The few alternative American musical terms are included in brackets.

The course of lectures on music eurythmy translated here was held in February, 1924, for an audience of eurythmists and musicians. It represents the greatest of Steiner's contributions to music, and should interest all artists. Other lecture courses were planned, including one for musicians, but Steiner's death in 1925 prevented this. Nevertheless a rich fund of insights was offered with which artists can begin working: the lectures published under the title Das Wesen des Musikalischen GA283, most of which are published in The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone (AP 1983), also Art as seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom GA275 (AP 1984), and The Arts and their Mission GA276 (AP 1964). Lea van der Pals, a leading eurythmist in Dornach, has achieved a creative synthesis of what Steiner gave on the subject in her book, The Human Being as Music (The Robinswood Press, Stourbridge 1992).

Eurythmie als Sichtbarer Gesang GA278, was first published in English as Eurythmy as Visible Song in 1932. In the second edition (1977) this title was changed to Eurythmy as Visible Music, presumably on the grounds that eurythmy is not practised with singers (for reasons Steiner gives in Lecture 7 below). However, the original designation sichtbarer Gesang is unusual in German, too. The literal translation ‘visible singing’ is what Steiner had in mind, more active than either ‘visible music’ or ‘visible song’. (Steiner sometimes said sichtbares Singen, ‘visible singing’ [14.2.20 in GA277 and Tb642, and in the essay ‘Das Goetheanum ...’ IV, 1924 in GA36 and Tb635, p. 142]; and in Lecture 6, in connection with instrumental music, he said Gesangseurythmie—‘a singing eurythmy’.) Gesang is translated as ‘singing’ because it points to three central issues:

(1) the human being as creative source of music;

(2) the origin of all instrumental music in singing, intrinsically and historically;

(3) the possibility of expressing this human essence in artistic movement.

Steiner sums it up: ‘Eurythmy is a singing through movement; it is singing. It is not dancing; it is not mime’ (Lecture 7; see GA277, p. 337 too). Ralph Kux explains: The eurythmic artist ... perceives instrumental music through the ear and straight away transforms it into an inwardly heard singing, and fashions this singing into visible movement. Consequently we can speak of a “visible singing” and not of a “visible music” ’ (R. Kux, Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner, Mellinger Verlag [Stuttgart 1976], p. 52; translation A. S.).

It also seems reasonable that a conscientious translator should be consistent in following the use of one of the main branches of the English language. Clarity of meaning is thereby encouraged. As this translation aims, in the first place, for accuracy in English as it is used in Britain, we should clarify three words. The German Ton means ‘sound’, more specifically ‘musical sound’, and ‘note’. In the USA the term ‘tone’ might cover some, but not all, of the uses: both English and American musicians sing and play ‘notes’. To British musicians, the word ‘tone’ denotes a major second; it also refers to the quality of sound. Interestingly, Shakespeare's Titania begs, ‘I pray you gentle mortal, sing again / Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note’; Don Pedro advises: ‘do it in notes’. Steiner, too, sometimes uses Note and Noten in his lectures. Eurythmy employs sound as its raw material: Laut—speech sound, Ton—musical sound. For Lauteurythmie we rightly say ‘speech eurythmy’, and for Toneurythmie, logically ‘music eurythmy’. This term suggests itself as one which avoids misunderstanding and consequently one which could be internationally acceptable. But it may genuinely not be desirable to have an ‘internationally acceptable’ term.

Incidentally, Steiner uses the expressions musikalische Eurythmie (‘musical eurythmy’) and musikalisches Eurythmisieren (literally ‘musical eurythmizing’) in Lecture 5; musikalische Eurythmisierende (‘the person engaged in music eurythmy’) in Lecture 6, and Musikgebärde (‘gestures of music [eurythmy]’) in Lecture 1. Owen Barfield, in his article ‘The Art of Eurythmy’, in The Golden Blade (London 1954), speaks of ‘speech eurythmy’, ‘musical eurythmy’, and simply ‘eurythmy’.

The Romance languages use the words ‘music’ and ‘musical’: eurythmie musicale (French), euritmia musicale (Italian), eurythmia da musica (Portuguese), eurythmia de la musica (Spanish). Hebrew possesses only one word for both musical and speech sound (tzlil), and so uses ‘music’ too: oritmia im-musica. Eastern Europe uses the word ‘musical’, for example: muzikalaija evritmija (Russian), musikalna evritmia (Bulgarian). The Japanese, too, use their equivalent word for ‘music’. Since this translation uses English as it is spoken in Britain, Ton is translated as ‘sound’, ‘musical sound’ and ‘note’ according to the context. Here, as in general, I have been guided by the Oxford Dictionary of Music (1985) and The New Oxford Companion to Music (1983), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), and Collins Encyclopaedia of Music (1976). Those who feel they are closer to the Teutonic tradition, and who prefer the earlier terms ‘tone’ and ‘tone-eurythmy’ that have been hallowed by use, will realize that these terms sound like jargon, at least in Britain. It should also be said that the modern meaning of the word ‘tone’ for acoustics and electronics, for example, as implied in ‘a musical note, without its harmonics’ (from the first sentence of the entry ‘Tone’ in The International Cyclopaedia of Music and Musicians, ed. Oscar Thompson [Dodd, Mead and Co, New York and Toronto / Dent, London; 10th edition 1975], p. 2293), is the opposite of what Steiner means by Ton. However, I have been asked to retain the term ‘tone eurythmy’ in the lectures.

Eurythmists, Steiner explains, have to ‘raise’ their bodies ‘through work’, so that their bodies (their instruments) can appear as if moving in the etheric realm. Translators, similarly, have to ‘raise’ their thinking. In fact, anyone who manages to do this can ‘approach [the archangel] Michael’ (lecture 13.1.24 in GA233a). ‘Christology,’ Steiner says elsewhere (Lecture 1.8.15), ‘has nothing to do with any division of man and mankind.’ But he does emphasize that realization comes only from within. The ‘raising’ mentioned above is also attempted by all those who have contributed their labour of love to the present work. No translation, of course, can claim to be ‘perfect’. Even were this translation good, it could still be better. Any comments in this direction that would assist preparation for the day when a fourth edition is needed, will be appreciated. Endnote numbers in square brackets refer to the section ‘Notes to the Lectures’ in the companion volume to the present lectures. This companion volume also contains eight Appendices on specific subjects.

Eurythmists will be for ever grateful to Marie Steiner for her incalculable contribution to eurythmy. Her main concern, however, was the speech work. Her synopsis of the present lectures which appeared in the first edition (Eurythmy as Visible Song) even contains an occasional misleading statement. Her original titles for these lectures have been slightly revised here. This third edition of Eurythmy as Visible Singing is planned to appear during the bicentenary of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters (1794) and the centenary of Steiner's own The Philosophy of Freedom (1894). Both books are recommended by Steiner for eurythmy students. What worthier companions could be imagined for the present lecture course, which is an attempt to blaze a trail between naturalism and abstraction in art, in order to get beyond materialism? May this edition, planned to appear in 1994 (seventy years after the lectures were held), encourage a further step in bringing about that which Goethe called ‘Nature's worthiest exponent, Art’.