The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to introduce this eurythmy presentation with a few words, as I usually do. Perhaps this is permissible because this eurythmic art is concerned with the establishment of something truly new, which cannot be compared with all kinds of neighboring arts, dance or other movement arts, but which seeks to draw in a serious way from the most original, most elementary artistic sources and also to make use of a special artistic language of forms. However, it may perhaps be stated that it is precisely through this eurythmic attempt that many things, I would say, can be attempted on a trial basis, which lies in the will of contemporary artistic natures. It is well known that contemporary artists seek new paths in the most diverse ways, since there is a certain justified conviction that the traditional artistic language of form has died to a certain extent and can no longer produce anything new, and that new paths must be sought. Of course, some of the things being sought are grotesque, in the form of expressionism, futurism, impressionism and so on. But however much of this one rejects, and however much of it one approves of with extraordinary justification, the fact of this striving as such indicates that a sincere artistic mind is searching for new paths.

Now it must be said that all these attempts actually have in common the fact that the means - be it in the field of painting, the colors and forms that can be applied, or in the field of sculpture – everything that is tried suffers from the same deficiency, which can be characterized simply by saying that the correct way to use artistic means has not yet been found in a satisfactory way. In our culture, we have come to a point where a certain abstract, conceptual, ideal element is considered to be particularly decisive. But all that is conceptual, ideal is actually the death of every true artistic endeavor. Every artistic endeavor must, as Goethe said, proceed from sensuous-supersensuous contemplation. But sensuous-supersensuous contemplation can only be attained when that which makes the sensuous impression also works spiritually-supersensuously, without having to be translated into concepts first. Now, of course, poetry and music as such also strive for this; but especially in the field of poetry, the fact that in our time language is also permeated and interspersed with the abstract element is particularly true, and that one feels a certain longing to come to more original sources of artistic work than those that can be achieved with language today. And this is what we are attempting to do with our eurythmic art, at least in a limited way. This eurythmic art, which we will be presenting to you today, is a weak attempt. All attempts are still weak because the eurythmic art is at the beginning of its development. This eurythmic art will show you the movements of the individual human being, especially of the arms and hands, but also of the other limbs of the human organism. These are movements that are already present in the human organism itself, but then also movements of groups, positions of groups, and so on.

All this could initially be seen as arbitrary gestures. But anyone who has studied eurythmy will recognize that these are never arbitrary gestures, never something that could be mistaken for pantomime, facial expressions or random movements. Just as little can that which is conceived as movement in eurythmy be conceived as a random gesture, just as language itself cannot be conceived as a random sound or as a random combination of sounds. The point is that every time you try to use mere pantomime or facial expressions as a means of expression, you also need the subjective-personal aspect of the human being.

Now consider how the subjective-personal contains that which cannot make a real artistic impression, because the subjective-personal is precisely an arbitrary element. Language has only freed itself from the subjective-personal because we are forced to accept language as something given. Even if you have this or that experience that you want to express through poetry, you have to put yourself in a lawful linguistic context; you have to pour into the lawful linguistic context what you have as a poetic experience.

But our language has already become conventional. Our language has become very much the expression, the predestined expression for the prosaic, for the literal. But that is not the actual artistic element in poetry either. The actual artistic element is that which lives in the extra-intellectual and wells up directly from the extra-intellectual spiritual of the whole human being, from a certain element of will. In order to arrive at this eurythmy, an attempt was made to explore, through sensory-supersensory observation, the movement tendencies of the human speech organs, tongue, lips and larynx themselves, which movement tendencies then underlie the undulating movements in the tones, but are transformed. And these movement tendencies were now transferred to the movement of the whole human being in a completely lawful way, so that in a certain sense one can say: when you see the movements performed by people on stage, it is not the tremulous movements that underlie the tones, but movement tendencies, the directions of movement that are then assessed in the speech organs of the human being, that are applied to the whole human being. The whole human being and groups of people come to you as a kind of living larynx. Eurythmy is language made visible. But this means that by translating the lawful element that is present in the human organism into movement, one is able to overcome the personal and yet is an experience of the soul, to be drawn out of the whole human being, so that one has the human being before one as a sensual object, but at the same time every movement is imbued with soul; thus a supersensible element is present in every movement.

This eurythmy does indeed have a sensual and supersensible element, so that one can say: In a limited sphere, this eurhythmy fulfills a long artistic yearning. One need only recall how those who are more delicate and artistically sensitive have always felt the yearning to express that which is an inner experience in such a way that it is not poured into the conventionality of language. There is a beautiful verse by Tieck, which says that with regard to human feelings of love, one cannot actually express human feelings of love with the abstract elements of thought. The romantic Tieck expresses this very beautifully. He says very beautifully:

Sweet love thinks in sounds,
For thoughts are too distant,
Only in tones may she, Beautify everything she wills.

It is a verse that truly expresses the deepest human yearning, but which must naturally arouse the disgust of every philistine logician, every pedant. And Ludwig Uhland, who – and I do not underestimate him at all – was a great poet, but despite being a great poet was an even greater pedant, corrected Tieck by making the following verse:

Liebtet ihr nicht, stolze Schönen,
Selbst die Logik zu verhöhnen,
I would dare to prove
That it is nonsense to say:
“Sweet love thinks in sounds."

The pedant cannot imagine that something lives in the thinking element and is too original, too elementary, to be expressed in abstract language. This consideration – not of the poet Uhland, but of the pedant Uhland – was then taken further by a logician, of course a good one, who proved quite logically that it would be nonsense to think that something is thought in sounds.

Now, when it comes to making the demand to bring human experiences to revelation through such an art of movement as eurythmy, one must be prepared for the fact that, of course, pedantry and logic that walks on crooked paths will have all kinds of objections. On the other hand, however, it must be asserted that there are experiences of the soul that need something more original today than what can be given in literal language.

Today, eurythmy has simply responded to the longing for forms of expression that are so strictly and internally connected to the human being as the expression of the organized larynx and its neighboring organs. But while ordinary language has become more of an expression of thought, the point is that eurythmy becomes an expression of the will. Therefore, the recitation accompaniment must also return to the reality of the art of recitation.

Today, we live in an unartistic age, and so people feel that a recitation is particularly beautiful when the speakers draw from the content, as they say, and particularly internalize the content of the matter to be recited. But that means nothing other than bringing out the prose content. Then it is much more artistic in the sense that romantics some time ago found it particularly pleasing to even listen when they were presented with poems whose language they did not understand. They listened to the rhythm, to the musical element, to that which formed an image. That is the characteristic of an artistic age.

So too must recitation today – there is no other way to accompany eurythmy with recitation – return to rhythm, to meter, to what is musically and visually plastic at its core, to that which that is then needed, I would say as a ladder to hang the actual artistic element on, namely the literal content of a poem, which does not actually constitute the poem as a work of art, but constitutes its prose content. On the other hand, many elementary human elements can be traced back to eurythmy.

And finally, it is the case that if the feeling of the audience is intense enough, then - regardless of the language in which the recitation is performed - an international feeling is felt in eurythmy, a universal human language. This is also something that can occur with this eurythmy, a universal human language. Because what is actually spiritual in a poem, which does not lie in the literal content, which cannot be reduced to what lies in a national language, the truly artistic, that is something that, when it is particularly grasped in its inner mobility, can be felt as something completely international, I would even say precisely in mute language. And I believe that when the moment comes when people realize that what is actually artistic in a poem is not what its content resounds with, but rather what eurythmy can bring forth – apart from the literal content. Once we have realized this, we may yet see the importance of eurythmy for our whole development in a different light from the one we are looking at now.

Apart from the fact that there are many other sides to this eurythmy - including a hygienic side, it has a healing effect on the human body and it is particularly as children's eurythmy, of which we can only show you a small sample today , will acquire a certain significance in the pedagogical-didactic view, in that the purely physiological gymnastics, which starts from pure physicality, makes the human being strong in a certain way, but does not actually reach into his or her will initiative. On the other hand, soul-inspired gymnastics – and this is also what eurythmy is, in addition to being an art form – soul-inspired gymnastics, which we introduced as a compulsory subject for the youngest children at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, alongside ordinary gymnastics, will, at the right age, develop the right disposition for initiative of the will, for an inner soul activity. And this is certainly necessary for today's humanity, which tends to fall asleep so easily when the most important human matters are discussed.

In view of the fact that eurythmy has such lofty goals, we must always ask for forbearance with regard to what can be offered today, because we are still at the very beginning of the development of the eurythmic art. The honored audience who were here months ago may see how we are endeavoring to advance the matter, especially in the elementary artistic design, the form, in the emotional forms of movement. But much remains to be done. For example, I am trying, and will try harder in the near future, to somehow bring the course of dramatic art, the actual artistic aspect of drama, to eurythmic revelation, which is very difficult. But this eurythmic art will advance if contemporaries can show some interest in it. Of course, for what can be offered today, the forbearance of contemporaries must still be sought. Nevertheless, there is the conviction that something can be created with this eurythmy as a very young art, probably by others than us in later times, which will be able to present itself as a fully valid art alongside older sister arts.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, The art of eurythmy, of which we would like to give you a small sample here today, attempts to penetrate to the very sources of human artistic creation in a certain way, unlike certain other arts that can easily be confused with it - dance or other mimic arts. It seeks to achieve this through very special artistic means. And because it is necessary to say a few words about this so that the essence of this artistic direction can be grasped, I will send these words ahead – not to explain the performance itself, which would of course be an inartistic undertaking. For art must speak for itself in the immediate impression it makes.

What you will see on the stage resembles a kind of gesture performed by the whole human being. But it is not, and one would judge eurythmy quite wrongly if one thought that the movements that come about either through the individual human being or through human groups are mere gestures that are supposed to express what is to be presented either on the one hand musically or on the other hand poetically or recitatively. Eurythmy wants to be a real visible language, it wants to reveal in plastic movement exactly the same as the human larynx and its neighboring organs can reveal through sound.

If one wants to understand the essence of eurythmy, one must look at its sources. It is the observation, both sensory and supersensible, of the movement tendencies expressed by the human larynx and all that is connected with the speech organs when speech sounds are uttered. This does not refer to the movements that pass into the outer air as direct tremulous movements, as vibrations, but to the movements that underlie these tremulous movements as movement tendencies. Movements that, organically, want to do more than they actually do. But the sensory-supersensory gaze – to use this Goethean expression – can observe these movements and then transfer them to the whole person according to the principle of metamorphosis. Just as Goethe, when he named the whole plant in its complexity a leaf multiplied in its individual subdivisions, actually saw only a leaf that had become more complicated, so what you see on the stage as a whole human being, like a larynx on the stage is, in fact, a transformation of what is naturally ignored when we simply listen to human speech, but which can be observed through sensory-supersensory observation as movements, as an inner eurhythmy of the speech organs. This is transferred to the whole human being. The individual movements that a person performs or that groups of people perform are therefore to be judged in exactly the same way as human speech itself according to the inner laws.

Now, if you look at what is being presented superficially, you would think that you were dealing with pantomime or facial expressions. On the other hand, it can be said that when we speak, we sometimes feel compelled to support our speech with gestures. When do we do that? We only do that when we feel that we are subjectively pursuing something that is more or less fully expressed in speech. But what is present in actual eurythmy is just as objective as what is expressed in language; all gesturing is excluded from it, all mere pantomime and mime is excluded from it. This can now be considered in the same way as it is considered for ordinary language.

On the one hand, we can say that eurythmy is so much an inner, visible language with its own laws that when two people or two groups of people perform the same poem in completely different places, the individual differences are no greater than when two pianists play the same sonata. That is one way of looking at it. But you could also say: you can distinguish between two pianists playing the same piece based on their individual nuances – and the same will be true for individual eurythmists or groups of eurythmists. In this way, what is subjectively incorporated into the gesture will be connected in a nuanced way with what is an objective law.

So in this visible language of eurythmy, we have something before us, not in the individual gesture, not the expression of something that lives literally in the soul, but we have in the individual eurythmic movement in which the whole human being feels as he feels in a single sound or word or word context, as he feels in spoken language. And what is effective is not that it expresses something in the soul as an individual element, but that one movement is linked to the next, creating a sequence of movements, just as a sequence of sounds is created in speech. Exactly the same way as it is in music, where we also have an inner, lawful movement in the succession of tones, in eurythmy such an inner movement comes to light, so to speak, as inner plastic music.

This enables us to extract from a poem – and in addition to the musical aspect, there will also be poems that are recited to accompany the eurythmy – the eurythmy merely expresses in silent, moving language what is expressed in the recitation in spoken language. We have the opportunity to express what concerns the whole human being, what is not expressed in the conventional or in mere thought expression - the inartistic in poetry. We have the opportunity to express the whole feeling and will, the whole personality of the human being as if in a large, moving larynx.

To do this, however, it is necessary, and this must be mentioned again and again, that one must return to the actual artistic element of poetry. Our time is essentially unartistic, and it is therefore very common today to perceive what is literally the content as the essential thing about the poetic art. In contrast to this, it must be said again and again that Schiller, for example, had an indeterminate melody alive in his soul, and from this indeterminate melody anything could become, whether it was “The Diver” or “The Fight with the Dragon” or anything else - that only emerged later. The essential thing for Schiller was not the literal content, [gap in the text] not the prose that is in the poem, but the important thing was the rhythm, the beat, the musicality, the plasticity, the imagery.

Today, people love an art of recitation that actually no longer has much to do with artistry, but sometimes with human sentimentality, with human goodwill to express this or that inwardly – although it always remains a phrase or sentimentality. But what real recitation is, can still be found in older times. Goethe rehearsed his Iphigenia with his actors with a baton, not so much going into the content as into the way the iambic went. This literal recitation could not be juxtaposed with eurythmy as an accompanying art, but one must also go into the eurythmic aspect of speaking itself. And so here one must recite as the good old artists of yore recited.

All this shows that with this eurythmy something is being striven for that wants to establish itself as a new element in our whole spiritual movement, a piece of Goetheanism. Goethe characterized so beautifully what eurythmy can achieve, even if only in a very limited area. Goethe spoke of how man, when he sees himself at the summit of nature, in turn feels himself to be a whole nature and takes in harmony, measure and meaning, and finally rises to the production of a work of art.

This production of the work of art comes to life, I would say, most fully when the human being, in the realm in which he sees eurythmy, makes himself an artistic tool for what he has to represent. Then this microcosm, this small world, as the human being presents it, as he brings it before us, is really not conceived of as a collection of arbitrary elements for the expression of the subjective, which comes to expression in the gesture, in the facial expression. Rather, what is inherent in him from his entire integration into the world, that is to be said with regard to the artistic aspect of eurythmy. And first and foremost, eurythmy should be something artistic.

But alongside this – and you will see a small sample of this in the children's eurythmy that we will present to you in the second part, along with some humor – there is also the didactic-pedagogical significance of this eurythmic art. It is certainly something significant when one introduces children to this eurythmy, because one can understand this eurythmy in a pedagogical-didactic sense as a kind of soul gymnastics. There will come times when people will think more objectively about these things than we do.

In more recent times, gymnastics have been seen as a particular benefit for young people, and rightly so. However, this is not to be criticized. An important authority told me some time ago that he does not consider gymnastics to be an educational tool, but rather a barbarism. I do not wish to go that far. But it is clearly appropriate in our time and demanded by life that this soul-based gymnastics of eurythmy is of educational and didactic significance for children. The strength of the soul, willpower, is what can be developed through this soulful gymnastics, while ordinary gymnastics - only because it looks at the human being from the point of view of physiology, only for the body that performs certain movements - can provide some help for skill.

For example, this spiritualized gymnastics, eurythmy, is being introduced at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt. This provides an essential didactic and pedagogical element. And in many other respects, it will be seen that this eurythmy can perhaps give the people of the present age what cannot come from any other source. What people thought of before this war broke out! They thought of staging the Olympic Games. It is just as if, at a certain age, people were given not what is good for them, but something that is good for a completely different age. Today, everything is seen only in the abstract and intellectually, in terms of current affairs, and not in terms of effect. The Olympic Games were a natural thing for what people needed in that age. Today we need something quite different from the Olympic Games. Today we need something that also places the human being in the whole world context in a soul-spiritual way. And so the Olympic Games and all the ideas that aim at something similar are nothing more than a certain dilettantism in relation to human cultural development.

What is attempted in eurythmy is, however, only a modest beginning, and I must keep pointing this out. But it is what is truly called for by the immediate present, by the demands of our time. And so it may be said that, on the one hand, the esteemed audience must be asked to regard what we are now able to present as really only an attempt at a beginning – all of it requires a great deal of refinement. Although those viewers who have been there before will see how we are currently striving to make progress from month to month in the development of the forms, the three-dimensionally moving forms of groups – we are also our own harshest critics and know exactly what perfection we still need.

It should also be noted that in the art of recitation, which has the particular artistic task of emphasizing the poetic, we do not achieve this by particularly emphasizing the prose content and , but that every effort must be made to apply a suitably artistic form of recitation to eurythmy, which is certainly still in its early days today, and that this will not be universally understood today. What is available as a beginning in the artistic field can, especially if our contemporaries are interested, perhaps be perfected by ourselves, but probably by others. And then something will develop out of this eurythmic art that will be able to stand as a fully-fledged sister art alongside the older fully-fledged sister arts of eurythmy.

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words to introduce this eurythmy performance, as I usually do. Not to explain the matter, may I be allowed to speak to you about these words; rather, because what we are doing here is based on an artistic form that is still unfamiliar and also comes from artistic sources that are still unfamiliar. What you will see on the stage are movements of the individual human being through his limbs, and also movements of groups of people, spatial forms and the like. At first glance, all this could be seen as a kind of gestural art, as a kind of mimic or pantomime art, and could be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts, movement-like arts and the like. However, this is not what is meant here at all. What can be seen here as eurythmy would be misunderstood if lumped together with pantomime or gesticulation. This is a presentation of a visible language that is performed by the whole human being, as audible speech is otherwise performed by the larynx and other speech organs, that is, by a very specific, localized part of the human organism.

Just as everything else that comes from this place is called Goetheanism by us, so too can we, in a sense, describe this eurythmic art as a part of Goetheanism. I can best describe the underlying principles by saying a few words about them. It may sound somewhat abstract, but that is not what I mean at all. What Goethe meant in theory in his theory of metamorphosis is meant entirely artistically. This theory of metamorphosis will one day play a much greater role than it has already played, when it is realized that the organism, the human being, can actually be wonderfully explained by the theory of metamorphosis, be it in plants, animals or humans.

This theory of metamorphosis can be initially illustrated using the object with which Goethe himself first presented it: the plant. For Goethe sees in the individual plant leaf only a simpler version of the whole plant. So each individual leaf is the idea of a whole plant, and the whole plant in turn is only a more complicated leaf. But in this way, everything alive can be understood in the Goethean sense. A single organ or a group of organs always represents the whole in a certain way – according to its disposition. And the whole is basically only – only more complicatedly formed – some organ or a group of organs.

What Goethe applies to form can also be applied to the activity of the organism and then elevated to the artistic. So we can say: What a person develops as a certain inner tendency of movement when he speaks – in every sound, in every turn of phrase, in everything that becomes audible through speech – is based on an inner tendency of movement. This is precisely why the whole human being reveals himself in language.

What takes place in a particular group of organs when a person communicates through speech or, in particular, when he or she expresses it artistically in poetry or song, what is communicated through a single group of organs, can be seen just as as the individual leaf is taken by Goethe as the whole plant, so that which is revealed in a single organ group, once one has learned to observe it through sensory and supersensory vision and has applied this observation over the course of years, can be extended to the whole human being: And so a visible language comes into being that can be used, on the one hand, as a different form of expression for that which also resounds in music. In music, we have, on the one hand, what is to be revealed out of the nature of the soul in the beginning; in poetry, we have the other side. And since we are dealing here with movements in a visible language, in which the whole human being or groups of people become visible larynxes on the stage, what wants to reveal itself musically on the one hand and poetically in recitation or declamation on the other can be revealed through this eurythmic art. It is not about mimicry or pantomime.

One can see that this is still unusual today, because I am repeatedly confronted with an accusation that is often raised at eurythmy performances: that the movements might be quite nice, but that our eurythmy artists are missing something, namely a certain expression on their faces. People then miss that.

But in doing so, they show that they have not yet grasped what eurythmy is about. If the artists were to convey what can be expressed in facial expressions, pantomime, in the physiognomy, then this would appear as an appendage to the eurythmic art, in the same way as grimaces can appear when speaking. That is what is usually not understood: that it is a visible language. Once you grasp that, you also know that if what is expressed in the face, head and so on is to be developed, then it will also be used, but it must lie within the meaning of the eurythmic line of movement itself. In this sense, eurythmy is something, let us say, like the musical art itself, where it is not the individual note that matters, the individual movement, but the lawful sequence of movements in the melody and so on. That is what our eurythmy is based on. Everything is a real language. And just as a momentary gesture cannot be anything other than an aid to speech – for instance, for the speech of sounds, when particular passions or particular emotions are to be expressed through this speech of sounds – in this sense, something of ordinary gestures or ordinary facial expressions cannot accompany that which is eurythmy. But the eurythmic element is present in every single movement, even in the smallest, and is something that is based on sensual and supersensory observation and that is extracted from the whole human organization as an independent element, just as the physiognomy of the larynx and the other speech organs is otherwise brought about from the whole of the human being in the production of speech sounds.

Therefore, what asserts itself as a eurythmic movement cannot be compared to any other naturalistic movement. Above all, it would be a dilettantish misunderstanding of eurythmy to believe that what comes about through distortions or through the facial expressions that are already formed, that this is somehow something like language; but something cannot be there because it does not belong to the thing.

On the one hand, you will see how that which is to be revealed spiritually in song and music is expressed through the visible, musical-linguistic expressive movement that lies in eurythmy. And on the other hand, you will hear poems recited in an artistic way, through recitation and declamation, which on the other hand will be performed in front of you in the movements of individuals or whole groups of people. This shows how the art of declamation and recitation is not really understood in its true artistic element today. Today, people think that recitation should be done in such a way that the prose content of the poetry is expressed. Somehow – with particular intensity, as one might think – this or that element of the prose content is emphasized, while something else is dropped or the like.

In this way, one would never be able to accompany eurythmy declamatory or recitative, but because in eurythmy the main thing is inner movement, what forms are, what is truly artistic, must also be emphasized in the poems that are recited to the accompaniment of eurythmy. Great poets like Goethe have always placed the greatest value on this form and design of language. It must be emphasized again and again how Goethe himself rehearsed “Iphigenia” - that is, iambs - with a baton in order to place the main emphasis on the melodious flow of speech, on rhythm and on the beat, and not on the prose content. And with Schiller it was always the case that before he developed any kind of poetry, he had a kind of melodious element in his soul. And this musical, melodious element dominated him; at first it was completely wordless, the words only came later.

So what is musical or plastic in language, which is not the prose content, is what comes to the fore through eurythmy. This is why, when eurythmy is accompanied by declamation and recitation, it must also come into its own in this art. And so the unartistic element, which is even admired in much of our declaiming and reciting today because our time is somewhat unartistic, will in turn lead us back to an artistic element. I just wanted to mention this in relation to the artistic element of our eurythmy.

Today, however, you will also see performances by children, in addition to the artistic eurythmy performances. And I would like to point out another element here. There is also a third element, the therapeutic and hygienic element. It does not belong here to discuss that, but the second. I would like to point out: In the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt and directed by me, we have something like an animated gymnastics, [we have] introduced eurythmy as a compulsory teaching subject into the classroom. And we can truly say – the lessons have been going on for a little longer than a year now – that it is really as one might expect: this subject is perceived by the children as something that they feel and experience quite emotionally as emerging from human nature. So that the children feel: the body wants to move in the way that is performed in eurythmy.

You don't have to go as far as – as I have repeatedly stated – a very famous contemporary physiologist, who was present here recently. And when I spoke to him about it, he told me from his physiological point of view that gymnastics is not an appropriate subject for teaching at all, but is something barbaric. As I said, I do not want to go that far, it is not necessary, but I do want to admit, contrary to this physiologist: gymnastics is of great value for physical education, and we certainly do not want to ban it from the classroom. But we place at its side a spiritualized gymnastics that truly not only trains the body but also trains the will and soul. It will be seen that the next generation will already have a great need for what eurythmy can give - this applies less to adults, but more to children. It must be emphasized that in the civilised languages, where much has become conventional, this conventionality, which often leads to phrase-mongering and then to lies, takes hold of the soul so easily. If we introduce eurythmy into the school, it is a language that comes from the whole human being. In this language, the child cannot learn to lie. That is why it is so extremely important that eurythmy is also used as a form of soul training in schools, alongside the usual physical education. As a teaching subject, it is then also a school of truthfulness, of breaking the habit of using empty phrases, of merely outward convention and the like.

Dear audience, although these intentions are all connected with eurythmy, I have to emphasize again and again before each performance that we have to ask for a great deal of forbearance, and that is because it is all only just beginning. We are our own harshest critics, and those who have been here often, especially months ago, will have noticed that we have recently put a lot of effort into the musical aspects, especially in the design of the forms on which the poems are based, and that progress can certainly be seen. But we are just at the beginning. If, on the one hand, we are to some extent our own harshest critics, we know from the sources, from the formal language of this art, about its developmental possibilities. And we know that when this eurythmy is fully developed - perhaps we will be able to develop it further, but in any case it has potential for development that requires a long period of training - and when it is developed, perhaps by others, it will in any case, according to its potential, one day be a fully fledged art alongside its older sister arts.

Program of the performance in Dornach, February 6, 1921

From the “Chymischen Hochzeit” by Valentin Andreae with music by Max Schuurman
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (44.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (45.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (46.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Little bird“ by Edward Grieg
“Question - Answer” with a musical prelude by Max Schuurman
“Where does evil come from?“ from: The test of the soul by R. Steiner
“Elf music I” by Jan Stuten
“Elfe“ Joseph von Eichendorff
“Elfenmusik II”
“Abendgefühle“ by Friedrich Hebbel
“Elfenmusik III”
“Mein Kind“ by Heinrich Heine
“Urtrieb VII” by Fercher von Steinwand
“Urtrieb VIII” by Fercher von Steinwand
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Corf Clock”; “Palmström's Clock”; “The Water Donkey”; “The Mouse Trap” Address on Eurythmy, Dornach, February 6, 1921

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words about our eurythmy performance. Artistic work must speak for itself, and it is not explained. The performance will speak for itself. But here in our eurythmy we are dealing with the attempt to achieve something from unusual artistic sources and with unusual art forms. And therefore a few words may be said about these art sources and this particular artistic language of forms.

You will see the moving human being as a human being, the movements of the individual limbs of the individual human being; you will see forms being performed by individuals and groups of people in space. All this is to be understood as a language that is to function in movement as a visible language. This visible language is constructed according to exactly the same principle as the spoken language.

Perhaps I may draw attention to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, which even today has not been sufficiently appreciated in terms of the insights it can provide for man for an understanding of nature and life. For everything that emanates from the Goetheanum is, after all, based on what Goethe had already presented in The Elements, in both his view of nature and his view of art. Now, Goethe is of the opinion that every single organ or group of organs in a living being can be understood by looking at it as a more primitively formed individual, but still representing the whole in the idea: a single plant leaf is, in idea, a whole plant, only more primitively, simply formed. The whole plant is in turn only a precious [more complicated?] simpler leaf. Goethe tried to explain this on the basis of the forms of the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and also the human kingdom.

But it can also be said, by further expanding the mode of explanation, let us say, of the activity of the organism. And then one can raise it to the artistic level, and one gets, in a certain way, what we call the eurythmic art. One can, to use this Goethean expression, namely, state through sensual-supersensible observation, as a preliminary stage, which movement tendencies are inherent in the larynx and the other speech organs when one prepares to speak or when one speaks. These are not exactly the movements that are transmitted to the air for hearing, but rather they are the tendencies of movement. Only through sensory-supersensory observation can one study this for the individual sound, for word formation, for sentence formation. Then one can transfer it. Just as what the individual leaf offers for observation relates organically to the whole plant and extends to it, so, according to the Goethean principle, what takes place in the larynx and its neighboring organs can be extended to the whole human being, so that this visible eurythmic language arises. So, in a sense, you see the moving larynx in front of you in the individual person and in groups of people.

It is usually misunderstood that one is dealing with a real, visible language. It has often been said by people who have seen such a eurythmy performance that what should be emphasized is not emphasized, namely a certain physiognomic expression in the face, a play of expression and the like. Well, to a certain extent that may be correct; but it is not correct in the extent to which it is demanded. For it is not a matter of some kind of mimic performance or pantomime, nor is it a matter of ordinary dance and the like, but rather of a language that has been specially developed through study. And just as one cannot accompany ordinary spoken language with gestures, so one cannot accompany the visible language of eurythmy with any old gestures or with a facial expression borrowed from the moment. Rather, what is presented here as eurythmy cannot be reduced to anything mimic or pantomime, but the lawfulness only comes to expression when one contemplates the organic, or I might say, melodic succession of the movement.

My dear audience, it is also the case with spoken language that we are dealing with sounds that do not mean something clearly and directly. For then one would not be able to form something artistic out of spoken language in the poetic arts. Therefore, what is pantomimed or mimicked or the like is never really artistic. Rather, just as the artistic element in poetry is based on the fact that phonetic language leaves something behind when one takes its mere meaning, so eurythmy is based on the fact that it is by no means the case that a hand movement or the like means what a hand movement presents when one uses hand movements or the like to help with something that is spoken. Rather, through the inner laws of the human organism, something is brought forth from this organism that expresses the inner soul life through this movement in exactly the same way as the inner soul life is expressed in spoken language.

And so we can shape eurythmy artistically, which is by no means a random gesture, but something that wells up out of the human organism with such regularity when the organism experiences something, just as speech wells out of it. Just as speech is something that comes out of the human organism, so the art of the eurythmic gesture is one that, although the gestures are unequivocally connected with the sound and so on , but which are not thought up at all, and cannot be invented as such for any poem or piece of music, but which so regularly reflect what lies in a poem or piece of music, just as spoken language itself does.

You will then find, on the one hand accompanied by music and on the other by corresponding poetry, what is presented in eurythmy itself, on the stage in the visible language of eurythmy. Precisely that which is expressed in a different form in music or in poetry is revealed in a special way through eurythmy, so that it can be seen. And what is suppressed is more that which is the life of thought, the inner life in speaking, and more consideration is given to the will element that is rooted in the whole human being, which emerges from deep foundations of the human soul. This is precisely what comes out of the movement. Just as speech sounds are, so too are the gestures of eurythmy, which are not thought up at all, nor can they be invented as such for a poem or a piece of music, but which regularly reflect what lies in a poem or a piece of music, just as speech sounds themselves do.

You can also see how language works in eurythmy when recitation or declamation accompanies the eurythmic, as you are experiencing here, [by seeing] how one cannot recite as is often the case today in an unartistic age, where the main emphasis is placed on the prose content of the poem, but which is by no means the main emphasis. Rather, in every truly artistic piece of writing, it is the rhythm, the beat, the melody that is the main thing. One could say – somewhat presumptuously – that there is only as much art in a piece of writing, even if it could have a completely different literal content, as there is in the beat, rhythm, and melodious weaving. This is not felt today, when it is thought that this or that must be emphasized from the prose content and other things should be left out. This is actually an unartistic recitation. Artistic recitation begins only where the musical form, the sound, is grasped. And so one would not be able to accompany eurythmy with recitation in the sense of today's unartistic recitation.

On the whole, it can be said that what is presented in the visible language of eurythmy actually happens in a much less conventional sense. This is because in our civilized life, the linguistic element has acquired a conventional or even a mental coating. However, these two are a thoroughly inartistic element, especially in the civilized languages.

Then I would like to say a few words about the fact that, in addition to the artistic element, this eurythmy also has a thoroughly hygienic-therapeutic side. These are also movements that can be drawn from the organism itself and that also have a healing effect for the child. This hygienic-therapeutic direction is not developed in the same way as in art, but it is developed in a different way.

And above all, there is a third side, the pedagogical-didactic. We have introduced eurythmy as an objective [compulsory?] subject in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Although we have only been able to observe these effects for five quarters of a year or a year and a half, it is already quite clear that the children empathize with and immerse themselves in this eurythmy with great naturalness. For the children sense this soul-inspired movement – which is eurythmy, as well as being an art form – as something that arises directly from the organism. They find their way into it, and what develops is what one might call an initiative of the soul life. This cannot develop at all through ordinary gymnastics.

It must be said – although I am not sure whether many people today would still find it almost offensive if one thought about gymnastics so objectively, but I would not want to go as far as it happened to me a few weeks ago, when a very famous physiologist of the present day, who had seen one of our who had seen one of our eurythmy performances and with whom I later spoke about gymnastics and told him that gymnastics was more for the body and eurythmy more for the whole person because it encompasses body, soul and spirit, said: gymnastics is not an art at all, but a barbarism. As I said, I did not make this statement up. I only mention it because we still face so much hostility towards our eurythmy. But perhaps people will soon think more objectively about these things. They will recognize what such inspired gymnastics is in the classroom and will also recognize that, especially with children (this is less relevant for adults), eurythmy works as a means to wean them of the conventional, the trite, and the untruthful. It is truly a training in truthfulness. When the child is to express this with his whole body, this visible language of eurythmy, he cannot become untruthful, cannot become formulaic, cannot incline towards lies. It is a school of truthfulness for seven-, twelve- or fourteen-year-olds when they undergo these eurythmy lessons at school.

These are the different sides of eurythmy. Today, as I always do at these events, I would like to emphasize: we are definitely only at the beginning with our eurythmy; it may only represent the attempt at a beginning. We ourselves are the strictest critics with regard to what is still missing; but we are also convinced that if you see these performances more often, as I hope you will, you will also be able to see that what was present in the germ has already grown. You may remember how we have been working precisely to create silent forms or to further develop the forms in general, especially in the last few months. If we continue to work in this direction, we will see that there is something in this eurythmy that can be developed in an incredible way, so that we may believe that for this eurythmy, even if it is no longer developed by us but by others, the moment will come when it will be recognized as a fully fledged art alongside the other sister arts. So that is what I wanted to say in a few words in advance of our eurythmic presentation.

The first part of the performance took place in the domed room of the Goetheanum, the second part in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop.

1. Part (Goetheanumbau)

“Göttermahl” by C. F. Meyer with music by Leopold van der Pals
“L'Art et le Peuple“ by Victor Hugo
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (16) by Rudolf Steiner
“Meisenglück” by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (17) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (18) by Rudolf Steiner
“La Priere du Mort“ by J. M. Heredia
“Prologue in Heaven” from “Faust I” by J. W. v. Goethe

II. Part (carpentry)

“The New Year” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Röve“ by Victor Hugo
“Open Table” by J. W. v. Goethe
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Prayer”; “The Lion”; “The E. P. V.”
“Valet“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Critic” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Among Magicians” by Christian Morgenstern

Dear Guests!

Allow me to begin with a few words, as I usually do before these eurythmy performances. This is not to defend or explain the artistic aspect, which would be, of course, something inartistic, and everything that aspires to be art must speak for itself, through its own impression. But what we are dealing with here in the art of eurythmy draws on artistic sources that have been unfamiliar until now and makes use of an equally unfamiliar artistic formal language. And a few words about these two, about the sources and about the formal language, may well be said so that what we are trying to develop here as eurythmy - which, however, is still more or less in the early stages of its development today - is not confused with something it does not want to be: dance or pantomime, facial expressions or the like.

What underlies this presentation, which occurs through the agency of the moving human being or groups of moving human beings, is a truly visible language, and specifically a language that, as such, emerges from the human organization just as regularly and fundamentally as spoken language or song. For it is possible to observe, through sensory-supersensory vision, the movements of the larynx and other speech organs of the human being when speaking or singing. These are not the movements that are performed last and then become air movements through which sound and tone are conveyed, but rather the movement tendencies that are held back at the moment of origin because it is not the movement that is to become visible, but the sound that is to arise. remain latent in the human organism when speaking or singing. The following can be said: in the human organism, there is, on the one hand, an element of imagination and, on the other, an element of will that seeks expression through speaking and also through singing. That which is imaginative struggles to free itself from the human cerebral organization. What is volitional in our speaking and singing comes from the whole nature of the human being, from the full human being.

Now everything that is mental, that is, conceptual, is unartistic. Man experiences the conceptual only through his soul when it is, as it were, intellectually assimilated inwardly. Thus something unartistic intrudes into the soul experience when the soul is confronted with the conceptual and has to wrestle with the unartistic element of the thought. This is always the case with the art of poetry. The poet always tries to go back as far as possible from the conceptual element to the volitional element that comes from the whole human being. This volitional element, which comes from the whole human being, is, as it were, what lies in the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs and what is, as it were, dulled by the conceptual element. The poet attempts to bring into his poetry the artistic element that underlies language in a deeper way by means of an inner eurhythmy of speech, by shaping speech, by means of the musical and phonetic, by means of formally shaped speech, by means of the rhythmic, by means of the musical, thematic element that he lays at the basis of speech and for which the literal content is only a ladder by which the artistic element can ascend. underlying artistic element in language into his poetry. What lives in the speech organs as, I would say, the hidden, full personality of the human being, can now be brought to revelation through the eurythmically visible language.

We proceed here from the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, which is the view that what is revealed in a single organ system of an organism is the same - only in a simpler way - as what is revealed through the whole organism. The individual plant leaf is, so to speak, in idea, a whole plant, only more simply formed for external sensory perception; and the whole plant is only a more complicated leaf. One can study the nature of the individual leaf in the whole plant. Thus, when this morphology, as conceived by Goethe, is artistically developed, what can be seen in the artistic in the supersensible can be transferred to the organs of movement of the whole human being, to arms and hands - which come into consideration because they are the most expressive parts of the whole human being - or to movements and postures of groups of people. In a truly visible way, one can express the same thing that the poet seeks to achieve by bringing the will element into the language. Then it must be emphasized again and again: the literal content is not the essential thing – that is only the prosaic. The essential thing is the musical-thematic, which underlies language, or the imaginative-pictorial, which underlies language, the pictorial. Especially in a pictorial language, what otherwise, I would like to say, only lies hidden in man, can be presented to the outward eye in a truly artistic sense. Therefore, anyone who has a real feeling for this expansion of artistic possibilities will be able to enjoy eurythmy and not fight it.

But it should be emphasized that poetry can be accompanied with this visible language as well as with music and singing. And what is actually poetic, the artistic, can be brought to the fore in a special way. When a poem is recited or declaimed and then performed in eurythmy, as you will see on stage here, we must go back to the actual artistic element of reciting and declaiming, because we live in an unartistic age in which the art of recitation and declamation has also become unartistic And this artistic element does not lie in what impotence seeks today, in the emphasis of the purely prosaic. If one prefers this emphasis on the purely prosaic, one will criticize what is being attempted here, as has indeed happened so often in recent times. However, in the case of the last campaign against the eurythmic art, this criticism has come not from any artistic background but from a rabble-rousing party background.

What is being sought here is a real return to the art of declamation and recitation, which cannot be based on emphasizing the prosodic structure, but must be based on the artistic, musical, thematic, rhythmic, and metrical shaping of the language treated by the poet, or on the imaginative and pictorial elements that underlie poetry which a poet like Goethe has based on, to the purely prosaic, in order to express the actual [poetic] of the poem. One can say that the actual essence of poetry never lies in the words and in what is to be conveyed in the words, but in the treatment of the thoughts, in the way the words or thoughts are formed. This can be particularly emphasized by the artistic presentation of eurythmy, but it must also come to the fore in declamation or recitation.

Today, in addition to the other performances, we will present the “Prologue in Heaven”, which precedes the dramatic presentation of Goethe's “Faust”, in eurythmy. It may be said on such an occasion that the eurythmic presentation proves particularly useful for the dramatic as well, if this drama - as is the case with Goethe's “Faust” in many places, for example in this “Prologue in Heaven” - distinguishes itself from the naturally outwardly obvious, when it rises to that which can only be given in the soul's view . When the spiritual experience is elevated to the supersensible, the naturalistic and intellectualistic aspects of the art of the stage are no longer sufficient; the presentation demands a different form.

For in the same measure in which these elements appear on the stage – the naturalistic and the intellectualistic do indeed belong together – in the same measure it becomes impossible to depict the supersensible. This is particularly evident in scenes such as the 'Prologue in Heaven' or other scenes in Goethe's 'Faust' that play in the supersensible, where there is this peculiar artistic stylization, this lifting of the content, the prosaic content, out of the naturalistic into an element where one can no longer be naturalistic because it has to be seen spiritually. That is what makes it possible to do justice to scenes that make these demands: to go out into the supersensible, so that it can also be grasped by the supersensible of the human soul. Therefore, I may believe that such poetry as “Faust” can only come into its own in eurythmic performance on the stage.

I have already said something about the artistic aspect of eurythmy. There are two other sides to this eurythmy: a therapeutic-hygienic one – there is also a form of eurythmy therapy that is now being developed, at least in its initial stages. Because eurythmic movement is an entirely channelled expression of the inner laws of the human organism, the mobility that it engenders in the human being, for example the movement of breathing, can also be used for therapeutic and hygienic purposes through the eurythmic element. I can only hint at this here.

A third element is the pedagogical-didactic one. We have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject in the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is headed by me. Children from the first year of primary school up to the highest year groups find that, because not only the physical body is set in motion as in ordinary gymnastics, but because every movement of the body is imbued with soul and spiritualized, as this soul-spiritual gymnastics - for that is what eurythmy is in a pedagogical-didactic sense - really puts the whole person in such an inner soul state that he feels in his element as a full human being. The child feels this, and that is why eurythmy is such a significant educational tool in so many different ways. I would just like to mention one thing: it is also an important [means of educating the will initiative], which can never be achieved through ordinary gymnastics, but which is so necessary for our generation and probably also for the following generations in the near future.

With regard to the artistic aspect, it may also be said that eurythmy is something that uses the human being as a tool. And if Goethe says on the one hand: “When nature begins to reveal its secrets to someone, they feel a deep longing for its most worthy interpreter, art,” on the other hand, we can say: “When the secrets of the highest naturalness, the secrets of human nature itself, are revealed to someone, they long to raise everything that lies in the human being as possibilities for movement and formation through his or her own organization into the realm of art.

On the other hand, when Goethe says: When man has reached the summit of nature, he perceives himself as complete nature, takes in harmony, order, measure and meaning, and finally rises to the production of the work of art, so one may say: This production of the work of art reaches a peak, so to speak, when man does not use external tools, but his own organism as a tool. This human organism is a small world, containing the laws of the universe in a concentrated form. If it seeks harmony, moderation and meaning in its sphere, in order to rise to the sphere of consciousness, something good must follow.

Even if one needs to ask the esteemed audience for indulgence, and I do so today, because eurythmy is only just beginning, one still knows what developmental possibilities lie in it and that one day - if not through us, but probably through others - it can be led to stages of development through which it can establish itself as a worthy supreme art alongside the older, fully entitled sister arts by making use of man himself as an artistic tool, by making use of what man can extract from his own organization, from this world in miniature.

[After discussing the first three agenda items (annual report, annual accounts and discharge of the management, resolution on the appropriation of the annual result) and a break, agenda item 4: supplementary elections to the board of directors is to be discussed.

Rudolf Steiner: Certain events have occurred in the last few days that make it necessary for you to have a precise insight into the circumstances before debating agenda item 4. You will best get a picture of the situation if I read two documents to you that will provide you with background information for dealing with this topic.

Rudolf Steiner first reads out Director Arnold Ich's letter of resignation. A copy of this letter is attached to these minutes and belongs to them.

Rudolf Steiner: I would just like to comment that the meeting mentioned here was brought about by the fact that Mr. Storrer and Mr. Day came to see me in Berlin on Monday, March 13, and at that time presented the result of discussions they had had with the management of ' Futurum” and expressed the view that they had to think of the intellectual leadership of ‘Futurum’ in a completely different way than it had been before, and that measures should be taken to do justice to the idea of ‘Futurum’ in accordance with the original program. I would like to make it explicitly clear that what Mr. Storrer and Mr. Day presented was the result of discussions that had taken place at the Futurum management and about which I had been informed. Storrer and Day implied that they had held meetings with other personalities and wanted to hear my opinion about them. I said: “Of course, everyone is free to hold such meetings; but no decisive action can be taken regarding the affairs of Futurum before I am present in Dornach.”

When I came to Dornach and was informed that meetings had taken place in which the directors Ith and Oesch, i.e. the entire management, had also participated, I naturally had no objection to attending these meetings - not as president of the board of directors, but as a private individual - in order to know what had been presented. Immediately after Mr. Storrer had raised the point about the management of 'Futurum', Director Ith declared that he wished to leave the meeting. I pointed out that I was also a guest and was not in charge of this meeting. That is the first point about the resignation of the first director.

Rudolf Steiner reads out Director Dr. Oesch's letter of resignation, a copy of which is attached to the protocol and which is to be regarded as part of this protocol.

Rudolf Steiner: As you can see from this, the board of directors is initially without management. I should perhaps add that the following members of the board, as it has always met, were present at its meetings: Etienne, Gimmi, Hirter and I. Three board members resigned from the board due to illness and other reasons. So there were only five board members left, one of whom does not usually come, so the board has shrunk considerably.

It goes without saying that the circumstances just presented to you have an extremely profound impact on all of Futurum's affairs. As for myself, I would like to make the following comment: the various foundations, be it the Waldorf School, the “Kommende Tag”, the “Futurum” and many others, had taken up an extraordinary amount of my time and energy, and it was quite natural that during this time the much livelier activity for the anthroposophical movement as such had to take a back seat. But now circumstances make it necessary for anthroposophical activity itself to be expanded to a greater extent. If one takes the view that if one bears nominal responsibility, one must also bear it in fact, that is, one must know that one is responsible for every individual matter, then it is basically not possible, in addition to a very demanding anthroposophical movement, to also devote oneself to the economic foundations as intensively as is absolutely necessary according to my own views.

The resignation of the two previous directors has created an entirely new situation for me. Since you are mostly anthroposophical members, you will see it as a necessity that the anthroposophical movement be continued to a much greater extent than has been possible in recent times.

If things go so far as to cause the resignation of the entire management, you can understand that it is no longer possible for me to conduct the business in the responsible manner that I believe it should be conducted. Therefore, I cannot do other than tell you that if the possibility arises from within this assembly that “Futurum” can continue without the old management, whose resignation seems irreversible, I would resign. As you will understand, I have no intention of somehow getting involved with a new management. That would necessitate my having to give up every other activity in the next few weeks. Among other things, it would mean that I would have to give up the already planned trips to the Netherlands and England. So if the anthroposophical movement is not to be harmed, something must be done; I can only tell you what that something is as a definite decision when the debate on the circumstances described continues. But this decision will be: if the possibility arises from the shareholders' circle that “Futurum” can be continued in the sense of its program, I will resign from my post as chairman of the board of directors because of the work I have to do for the anthroposophical movement.

I open the discussion on item 4.

[Willy Stokar and Willy Storrer, as representatives of a group of shareholders, are highly critical of the work of “Futurum” to date, saying that the spiritual goals of forming an association in the sense of the threefold social order have not been achieved at all. They therefore believe that Rudolf Steiner should be discharged of his duties as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Willy Stokar proposes a new board of directors, which should consist of

Ernst Gimmi (so far),

Consul Krebs (so far),

Willy Stokar,

Edgar Dürler,

Karl Day,

Willy Storrer, who are all willing to take on the responsibility.

In the assembly, this is perceived as an outrage.

Rudolf Steiner: One would have to examine the criticism that has been expressed about “Futurum” to see if it is valid. On the other hand, the meeting will have to be clear about how it takes a stand on the question as such.

[Further comments on this matter. Mistakes are admitted, but the meeting is warned against hasty decisions.

Rudolf Steiner: In order to avoid getting into unfruitful digressions in the discussion, please take into account that the first discussions, which created the basis for what followed, took place in the “Futurum” Directorate itself. This is very important. After all, you have an attempt at forming an opinion about “Futurum”. I explained to you how difficult, indeed how impossible it would be for me to continue as chairman under the changed circumstances. Now the question is whether I should say that I would resign as chairman if the meeting were to find a way of continuing the Futurum, and from this point of view I ask you to consider the matter. We should remain objective and consider the possibility of how the “Futurum” can be continued. It is not possible for me to work with a rump board of directors.

There is also something else. I would never have agreed to become president of the board of directors of Futurum AG here in Switzerland if Mr. Hirter had not agreed to become vice president at the request of Mr. Molt and Dr. Boos. As you can see, my presidency essentially depended on having someone like Mr. Hirter at my side, who is so successful and well respected in Swiss business circles. But now Mr. Hirter is also resigning from the board of directors. Mr. Etienne also informed me today that he is forced to resign. Mr. Gimmi has explained to you that he asks you to make a genuine attempt to work constructively with the individuals who have criticized the management of “Futurum”. Mr. Gimmi himself has resigned from the previous board of directors in favor of the new proposal. So I would be a chairman of the board without a board of directors and without a management. I must ask you to provide advice here, either to make positive counter-proposals for the election of board members and for the election of directors or to enter into a factual discussion to see if you can accept the proposals made by one side. Ultimately, whether or not the gentlemen can do this, they will have to show. At least they have shown the goodwill to become members of the board. And I also ask you to show this goodwill if necessary. If you cannot propose other members of the board and get them approved, then you are obliged to respond to the gentlemen's proposals in some way.

The discussion is becoming disorderly.

Rudolf Steiner: We must continue the discussion in an orderly fashion.

[Further contributions. Johann Hirter expressly declares that he is no longer available. Question about the separation of the spiritual activities.

Rudolf Steiner: For the clinic and laboratories and for everything that is grouped around the journal 'Das Goetheanum', and for everything that is grouped around the school, it would be a matter of ensuring that I can continue to do for them in the future what I have done for them so far, just as I have done it so far. After the exclusion of the above-mentioned enterprises, to which I will gladly stand as I have stood so far, the purely economic enterprises remain: These are the knitwear factory, the office A.G., the cold glue factory, the cardboard factory Gelterkinden, the umbrella handle and stick factory Bönigen and the trading department. There is a new fact for this. If I am to tell you exactly the point at which this became an issue for me, it is that, albeit indirectly, I was approached about negotiations that took place within the management. It is impossible for me to have someone come to me and, as it were, stand between me and the management. That is possible under the one condition that he is right. This is clear, isn't it? Otherwise such a meeting could not have taken place at all within the Futurum management. The moment the management stopped going along with me, that was that for me. You must look at things impartially. Now the case is on hand - I have read to you: “In order to create the basis for a development of ‘Futurum AG’ in line with the founding tendencies, decisions will be unavoidable that make a reorganization of the personnel necessary. I would like to contribute my share to this,” and so on (from Dr. Oesch's resignation letter). Dr. Oesch has therefore formally resigned. You have heard that he has already been designated by those prominent figures who have declared their willingness to continue the matter. This group has a director, while I am left without management and a board of directors. You have a group of prominent figures, including Mr. Gimmi and Mr. Krebs from the old board of directors and Dr. Oesch from the old management. This group can start by laying the names of leading personalities on the table of the house, quite apart from the fact that they themselves will be leading personalities. They will not expect me to continue without a board of directors and management.

[Further comments. Someone would rather make their money available for spiritual values.

Rudolf Steiner: It is of course out of the question for the shareholders to start a run on the funds invested with “Futurum”. It is not easy to get money today because the money market is completely inflexible.

[Several proposals for election to the board of directors. Since some of the proposed candidates refuse, only the candidates already proposed by Willy Stokar remain for election.

The vote confirms the removal of the previous directors, including the Rudolf Steiners, with the exception of Gimmi and Krebs, and the election of the new board of directors. After the vote, the remaining agenda items are dealt with. The meeting ends at 7:30 pm.

Today I wish to bring before you certain broader aspects concerning the development of karma, for we shall presently enter more and more into those matters which can only be illustrated—shall we say—by particular assumptions.

To gain a true insight into the progress of karma we must be able to imagine how man gathers his whole organisation together when he descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. You will understand that in the language of today there are no suitable forms of expression for these events which are practically unknown to our present civilisation. Therefore the terms we employ cannot but be inexact. When we descend out of the spiritual into the physical world, for a new life on earth, we have our physical body prepared for us, to begin with, by the stream of inheritance. This physical body is none the less connected in a certain sense, as we shall see, with the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth. Today, however, it will suffice us to bear in mind that the physical body is given to us from the earthly side, whereas those members which we may describe as the higher members of the human being—the ether-body, astral body and Ego—come down out of the spiritual world.

Take first the ether-body. Man draws it together from the whole universal ether, before he unites himself with the physical body which is given to him by heredity. The union of the soul-spiritual man as Ego, astral body, and ether-body, with the physical human embryo, can only take place inasmuch as the ether-body of the mother-organism gradually withdraws itself from the physical embryo.

Man therefore unites himself with the physical germ after having drawn together his ether-body from the universal ether. The more precise description of these events will occupy us at a later stage. For the moment we are mainly interested in the general question, whence come the several members which the human being has in earthly life between birth and death? The physical organism comes, as we have seen, from the stream of inheritance, and the ether-organism from the universal ether from which it is first drawn together. As to the astral organism, we may truly say that the human being remains in all respects unconscious of it, or only subconsciously aware of it, during his earthly life. This astral body contains all the results of his life between death and a new birth. For between death and a new birth—according to what he has become through his preceding lives on earth, man enters into manifold relations with other human souls who are in the life between death and a new birth, and also with the spiritual Beings of a higher cosmic order who do not descend to earth in a human body, but have their being in the spiritual world.

All that a man brings over from his former lives on earth—precisely according to how he was and what he did—meets with the sympathy or antipathy of the beings whom he learns to know during his passage through the world between death and a new birth.

Not only is it of great significance for karma, what sympathies and antipathies he meets among the higher Beings according to the things he did in his preceding earthly life. Not only so; it is also of deep significance that he now comes into relation to those human souls to whom he was related on the earth, and there takes place a wonderful “reflection” as between his being and the being of the souls to whom on earth he was related. Let us assume he had a good relation to a soul whom he now meets again between death and a new birth. All that the good relationship implies, was living in him during his former life, or lives on earth; and this good relationship will now be mirrored in the other soul when he encounters him between death and a new birth.

Yes, it is really so. As he goes through the life between death and a new birth, man sees himself reflected everywhere in the souls with whom he is now living, because in effect he was living with them on the earth. If he did good to another human being, something is mirrored to him from the other's soul. If he did evil, something is mirrored likewise ... And he now has the feeling—if I may use the word “feeling” with the reservations I made at the beginning—he has the feeling: “This human soul, you helped. All you experienced in helping him, all that you felt for this soul, the feelings that led you on to act thus helpfully towards him, your own inner experiences during the deed that helped him, are coming back to you now from his soul.” Yes, they are actually mirrored to you from the other's soul.

Or again, you did harm to a human soul. That which was living in you while you did him harm, is mirrored back. And so you have your former earthly lives (and notably your last life) before you as though in a far and wide-spread reflector, mirrored by the souls with whom you were together.

Especially with respect to your life of action, you have the impression that it is receding from you. Between death and a new birth you lose the Ego-feeling—the sense of “I” which was yours when in the body on earth. Indeed, you have lost it long ago. But you now get the feeling of “I” from this far-spread reflection. You come to life in the mirroring of your deeds, in the souls with whom you were during your earthly life.

On earth, your “I,” your Ego, was in the body—as it were, a point. Between death and a new birth, it is mirrored to you from the surrounding circumference. This life is an intimate being-together with the other human souls—according to the relations you have entered into with them.

And this is a reality in the spiritual world. When we go through a room hung with many mirrors, we see ourselves reflected in each one. But—in ordinary human parlance—we know that the reflections are “not there.” They do not remain when we go away; we are reflected no longer. But that which is reflected here in human souls remains; stays in existence. And there comes a time in the last third of the life between death and a new birth when we form our astral body out of these mirrored pictures. We draw all this into our astral body. In deed and truth, when we descend from the spiritual world into the physical, we carry in our astral body what we have re-absorbed into ourselves, according to the way our actions of the former life on earth were mirrored in other souls between death and a new birth. This gives us the impulses which impel us towards or away from the human souls with whom we are born again in the physical body.

In this way the impulse to karma in a new earthly life is formed between death and a new birth—though I shall have to describe it more in detail in the near future; for we must take the Ego also into account.

Now we can trace how an impulse from one life works on into other lives. Take, for example, the impulse of love. We can do our deeds, in relation to other men, out of the impulse which we call love. It makes a great difference whether we do them out of a mere sense of duty, convention, respectability and so on, or whether we do them out of a greater or lesser degree of love.

Assume that in one earthly life a man is able to perform actions sustained by love, warmed through and through by love. It remains as a real force in his soul. What he takes with him as an outcome of his deeds, what is now mirrored in the other souls, comes back to him as a reflected image. And as he forms from this his astral body, with which he descends on to the earth, the love of the former earthly life, the love which he poured out and which was now returned to him from other souls, is changed to joy and gladness.

Such is the metamorphosis—if so we may describe it. A man does something for his fellow-men, something sustained by love. Love pouring out from him accompanies the actions which help his fellow-men. In the passage through life between death and a new birth, this outpouring love of the one life on earth is transmuted, metamorphosed, into joy that streams in towards him.

If you experience joy through a human being in one earthly life, you may be sure it is the outcome of the love you unfolded towards him in a former life. This joy flows back again into your soul during your life on earth. You know the inner warmth which comes with joy, you know what joy can mean to one in life—especially that joy which comes from other human beings. It warms life and sustains it—as it were, gives it wings. It is the karmic result of love that has been expended.

But in our joy we again experience a relation to the human being who gives us joy. Thus, in our former life on earth, we had something within us that made the love flow out from us. In our succeeding life, already we have the outcome of it, the warmth of joy, which we experience inwardly once more. And this again flows out from us. A man who can experience joy in life, is again something for his fellow-men—something that warms them. He who has cause to go through life without joy is different to his fellow-men from one to whom it is granted to go through life with joyfulness.

Then, in the life between death and a new birth once more, what we thus experienced in joy between birth and death is reflected again in the many souls with whom we were on earth and with whom we are again in yonder life. And the manifold reflected image which thus comes back to us from the souls of those we knew on earth, works back again once more. We carry it into our astral body when we come down again into the next life on earth—that is the third in succession. Once more it is instilled, imprinted into our astral body. What is it in its outcome now? Now it becomes the underlying basis, the impulse for a quick and ready understanding of man and the world. It becomes the basis for that attunement of the soul which bears us along inasmuch as we have understanding of the world. If we find interest and take delight in the conduct of other men, if we understand their conduct and find it interesting in a given earthly life, it is a sure indication of the joy in our last incarnation and of the love in our incarnation before that. Men who go through the world with a free mind and an open sense, letting the world flow into them, so that they understand it well—they have attained through love and joy this relation to the world.

What we do in our deeds out of love is altogether different from what we do out of a dry and rigid sense of duty. You will remember that I have always emphasised in my books: it is the deeds that spring from love which we must recognise as truly ethical; they are the truly moral deeds. How often have I indicated the great contrast in this regard, as between Kant and Schiller. Kant, both in life and in knowledge, “kantified” everything (“Kante,” in German, means a hard edge or angle.—Note by translator.) In science, through Kant, all became hard and angular; and so it is in human action. “Duty, thou great and sublime name, thou who containest nothing of comfort or ease ... ”—this passage I quoted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to the pretended anger (not the sincere, but the pretended, hypocritical anger) of many opponents, while over against it I set what I must establish as my view: “Love, thou who speakest with warmth to the soul ...”

Over against the dry and rigid Kantian concept of duty Schiller himself found the words: “Gern dien' ich dem Freunde, doch tue ich es leider mit Neigung, drum wurmt es mich oft, dass ich nicht tugenhaft bin.” (Gladly I serve my friends, yet alas, I do it with pleasure, wherefore it oftentimes gnaws me, I am not virtuous.) For in the Kantian ethic, that is not virtuous which we do out of real inclination, but only that which we do out of the rigid concept of duty.

Well, there are human beings who, to begin with, do not attain to love. Because they cannot tell their fellow-man the truth out of love (for if you love a man, you will tell him the truth, and not lies), because they cannot love, they tell the truth out of a sense of duty. Because they cannot love, out of a sense of duty they refrain from thrashing their fellow-man or from boxing his ears or otherwise offending him, the moment he does a thing they do not like. There is indeed a difference between acting out of a rigid sense of duty—necessary as it is in social life, necessary for many things—there is all the difference between this and the deeds of love.

Now the deeds that are done out of a rigid concept of duty, or by convention or propriety, do not call forth joy in the next life on earth. They too undergo that mirroring in other souls of which I spoke before; and, having done so, in the next life on earth they call forth what we may thus describe: “You feel that people are more or less indifferent to you.” How many a person carries this through life. He is a matter of indifference to others, and he suffers from it. Rightly he suffers from it, for men are there for one another; man is dependent on not being a matter of indifference to his fellows. What he thus suffers is simply the outcome of a lack of love in a former life on earth, when he behaved as a decent man because of rigid duty hanging over him like a sword of Damocles. I will not say a sword of steel; that would be disquieting, no doubt, for most dutiful people; so let us say, a wooden sword of Damocles.

Now then, we are in the second earthly life.

That which proceeds as joy from love, in the third life becomes as we have seen, a free and open heart, bringing the world near to us, giving us open-minded insight into all things beautiful and good and true. While as to that which comes to us as the indifference of other men—what we experience in this way in one earthly life, will make us in the next life (that is, in the third) a person who does not know what to do with himself. Such a person, already in school, has no particular use for the things the teachers are doing with him. Then, when he grows a little older, he does not know what to become—mechanic or Privy Councilor, or whatever it may be. He does not know what to do with his life; he drifts through life without direction. In observation of the outer world, he is not exactly dull. Music, for instance—he understands it well enough, but it gives him no pleasure. After all, it is a matter of indifference whether the music is more or less good, or bad. He feels the beauty of a painting or other work of art; but there is always something in his soul that vexes: “What is the good of it anyhow? What's it all for?” Such are the things that emerge in the third earthly life in karmic sequence.

Now let us assume, on the other hand, that a man does positive harm to another, out of hatred or antipathy. We can imagine every conceivable degree. A man may harm his fellows out of a positively criminal sense of hatred. Or—to omit the intermediate stages—he may merely be a critic. To be a critic, you must always hate a little—unless you are one who praises; and such critics are few nowadays. It is uninteresting to show recognition of other people's work; it only becomes interesting when you can be witty at their expense.

Now there are all manner of intermediate stages. But it is a matter here of all those human deeds which proceed from a cold antipathy—antipathy of which people are often not at all clearly aware—or, at the other extreme, from positive hatred. All that is thus brought about by men against their fellows, or against sub-human creatures—all this finds vent in conditions of soul which in their turn are mirrored in the life between death and a new birth. Then, in the next earthly life, out of the hatred is born what comes to us from the outer world as pain, distress, unhappiness caused from outside—in a word, the opposite of joy.

You will reply: we experience so much of suffering and pain; is it all really due to hatred—greater or lesser hatred—in our preceding life? “I cannot possibly imagine,” man will be prone to say, “that I was such a bad lot, that I must experience so much sorrow because I hated so much.” Well, if you want to think open-mindedly of these things, you must be aware how great is the illusion which lulls you to sleep (and to which you therefore readily give yourself up) at this point. You suggest-away from your conscious mind the antipathies you are feeling against others. People go through the world with far more hatred than they think—far more antipathy, at least. It is a fact of life: hatred gives satisfaction to the soul, and for this reason, as a rule, it is not at first experienced in consciousness. It is eclipsed by the satisfaction it gives. But when it returns as pain and suffering that comes to us from outside, it is no longer so; we notice the suffering quickly enough.

Well, my dear friends, to picture, if I may, in homely and familiar fashion, the possibilities there are in this respect, think of an afternoon-tea, a real, genuine, gossiping party where half-a-dozen (half-a-dozen is quite enough) aunts or uncles—yes, uncles, too—are sitting together expatiating on their fellows. Think of it. How many antipathies are given vent to, what volumes of antipathy are poured out over other men and women, say in the course of an hour and a half—sometimes it lasts longer. In pouring out the antipathy they do not notice it; but when it comes back in the next earthly life, they notice it soon enough. And it does come back, inexorably.

Thus, in effect, a portion (not all, for we shall still learn to know other karmic connections) of what we experience as suffering that comes to us from outside in one earthly life, may very well be due to our own feelings of antipathy in former lives on earth.

But with all this, we must never forget that karma—whatsoever karmic stream it may be—must always begin somewhere. If these are a succession of earthly lives:

a b c (d) e f g h

and this one, (d), is the present life, it does not follow that all pain which comes to us from without, is due to our former life on earth. It may also be an original sorrow, the karma of which will work itself out only in the next life on earth. Therefore I say, a part—even a considerable part—of the suffering that comes to us from outside is a result of the hatred we conceived in former lives.

And now, as we go on again into the third life, the outcome of the suffering which came to us (though only of that suffering which came, as it were, out of our own stored-up hatred), the outcome of the pain which was thus spent in our soul is a kind of mental dullness—dullness as compared with quick, open-minded insight into the world.

There may be a man who meets the world with a phlegmatic indifference. He does not confront the things of the world, or other men with an open heart. The fact is, very often, that he acquired this obtuseness of spirit by his sufferings in a former life on earth, the cause of which lay in his own karma. For the suffering which subsequently finds expression in this way, in dullness of soul, is sure to have been the result of feelings of hatred, at least in the last earthly life but one. You can be absolutely sure of it: stupidity in any one life is always the outcome of hatred in this or that preceding life. Yet, my dear friends, the true concept of karma must not only be based on this; it is not only to enable us to understand life. No, we must also conceive it as an impulse in life. We must be conscious that there is not only an a b c d, but an e f g h. That is to say, there are the coming earthly lives and what we develop as the content of our soul in this life will have its outcome and effect in the next life. If anyone wants to be extra stupid in his next earthly life but one, he need only hate very much in this life. But the converse is also true: if he wants to have free and open insight in the next earthly life but one, he need only love extra much in this life.

The insight into and knowledge of karma only gains real value when it flows into our will for the future, plays its part in our will for the future. And the moment has now come in human evolution when the unconscious cannot go on working as it did when our souls were passing through their former lives on earth. Men are becoming increasingly free and conscious. Since the first third of the 15th century we are in the age when men are becoming ever more free and conscious. And so for those men who are men of the present time, a next earthly life will already contain a dim feeling of preceding lives on earth. A man of today, if it occurs to him that he is not very bright, does not ascribe it to himself, but to his native limitations; following the current theories of materialism, he will generally ascribe it to his physical nature. Not so the men who return as the reincarnation of those of today. They will already possess at least a dim, disquieting feeling: if they are not very bright, somewhere or other there must have been something connected with feelings of antipathy or hatred.

And, if we now speak of a Waldorf School educational method, naturally for the present we must take account of the prevailing earthly civilisation. We cannot yet educate frankly towards a consciousness of life in terms of reincarnation, so to speak. For the people of today have not yet a feeling—not even a dim feeling—of their repeated earthly lives. Nevertheless, the beginnings that have been made with the Waldorf School method will go on developing, if they are truly received. They will develop in the coming centuries, in this direction. This principle will be consciously applied in moral education. If a child has little talent, if a child is dull, It is somehow due to former lives in which he developed much hatred. With the help of spiritual science, you will try to find against whom the hatred may have been directed. For the men and women who were hated then, against whom the deeds inspired by hatred were done, must be there again somewhere or other in the child's environment. Education in coming centuries will have to be placed far more definitely into life. When you see what is coming to expression in such a child, in the metamorphosis of unintelligence in this life, you will then have to recognise from what quarters it is mirrored or rather was mirrored in the life between death and new birth. Then you will do something as educator so that this child will develop an especial love towards those for whom he felt specific hatred in former lives on earth. You will soon see the beneficial result of a love thus specifically roused and directed. The child's intelligence, nay, the whole life of his soul, will brighten.

It is not the general theories about karma which will help us in education, but this concrete way of looking into life, to see where the karmic connections lie. You will soon notice it; after all, the fact that destiny has brought these children together in one class is not a mere matter of indifference. People will get beyond the hideous carelessness that prevails in these things nowadays, when the “human material”—for so they often call it—which is thrown together in a class, is actually conceived as though it were bundled together by mere chance; not as though destiny had brought these human beings together. People will get beyond this appalling indifference. Then they will gain a new outlook as educators; they will be able to perceive the wonderful karmic threads that are woven between the one child and the other, as a result of their former lives.

Then they will bring consciously into the children's development that which can create a balance. For karma is, in a certain sense, inexorable. Out of an iron necessity we may write down the unquestioned sequence:

Love—Joy—an open heart.
Antipathy or Hatred—Suffering—Stupidity.

These are necessary connections. Nevertheless, we also stand face to face with a necessity when we see a river run its course; yet rivers have been regulated, their, course has been known to be altered.

So likewise it is possible, as it were, to regulate the karmic stream, to work into it, to affect its course. Yes, it is possible.

If therefore in childhood you notice there is a tendency to dullness and stupidity and you perceive the connections, if now you guide the child to develop love in its heart, if you discover (which would be possible already today for people with a delicate observation of life), if you discover which are the other children to whom the child is karmically related, and you now bring the child to love them especially, to do deeds of love towards these other children—then you will give, to the antipathy that was, a counter-weight in the love: and in a next earthly life the dullness will have been improved.

There are educators, trained, as it were, by their own instinct who often do these things instinctively. Instinctively they will bring dull-witted children to the point where they develop love, thus educating them by degrees into more intelligent and perceptive beings.

It is only when we come to these things that our insight into the karmic connections becomes of real service to life.

Before we go on to pursue the detailed questions of karma, one other general question will naturally come before our souls. What sort of person is it—generally speaking—whom you may confront so as to know that you are karmically related to one another? I must reply with a word which is sometimes used in a rather off-hand way nowadays: such a person is a “contemporary”; he is with us simultaneously on the earth.

Bearing this in mind, you will say to yourself: If you are with certain human beings in a life on earth, then you were with them in a former life (generally speaking, at least; there may of course, be displacements). And you were with them again in a life before it.

Now what of those who live fifty years later than you? They again were with other human beings in their former lives on earth. As a general rule, according to this line of thought, the human beings of the B series—shall I call it—will not come together with human beings of the A series.

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It is an oppressive thought, but it is true. I shall afterwards speak of other doubts and questions, such as arise, for instance, when people say—as they so often do—“Humanity goes on increasing and increasing on the earth,” and other things of that kind. Today, however, I want to put this thought before you; perhaps it is an oppressive thought, but it is none the less true. It is a fact that the continued life of mankind on earth takes place in rhythms. One shift of human beings—if I may put it so—goes on, as a general rule, from one life to the next; so does another shift, and they are in a certain sense separated from one another. They do not find their way together in the earthly life, but only in the long intervening life between death and a new birth. There, indeed, they find their way together, but not in the earthly life. We come down again and again with a limited circle of people. Precisely from the point of view of reincarnation, to be contemporaries is a thing of inner importance, inner significance.

Why is it so? I can assure you, on the basis of spiritual science, this question, which may well occupy one intellectually to begin with, has caused me the greatest imaginable pain. For it is necessary to bring out the truth, the inner nature of the fact. Thus you may ask: Why was I not a contemporary of Goethe's? Not having been a contemporary of Goethe's in this life, generally speaking—according to these truths—you can more or less conclude that you have never lived with him on earth. Goethe belongs to another shift.

What lies behind this? You must reverse the question; but to do so, you must have a real feeling, a perception of what the life of men together really is. You must be able to ask yourself a question on which I shall have very much to say in the near future: What is it really to be another man's contemporary? What is it, on the other hand, only to be able to know of him from history, as far as earthly life is concerned? What is it like?

We must indeed have a free mind, a sensitive heart, to answer these intimate questions: What is it like—with all the accompanying inner experiences of the soul—when a contemporary man is speaking to you, or doing any actions that come near you? What is it like? And having gained the necessary perception of this, you must then be able to compare it with what it would be like if you encountered a person who is not your contemporary, and probably has never been so in any life on earth, whom you may none the less revere—more, perhaps, than any of your contemporaries. What would it be like if you met him as a contemporary? In a word—forgive the personal note—what would it be like if I were a contemporary of Goethe? If you are not an insensitive, indifferent kind of person ... Needless to say, if you are insensitive and have no feeling for what a contemporary can be, you are scarcely in a position to answer such a question. What would it be like if I, walking down the Schillergasse, let us say, towards the Frauenplan in Weimar, had suddenly encountered “the fat Privy Councilor,” say in the year 1826 or 1827? One knows quite well, one could not have borne it. You can stand your contemporary; you cannot bear a man who, in the nature of the case, cannot be your contemporary. In a sense, he acts like a poison on your inner life. You can only bear him inasmuch as he is not your contemporary, but your predecessor or successor.

Of course, if you have no feeling for such things, they remain in the unconscious; but you can well imagine a man who has an intimate feeling for spiritual things ... if he knew that as he went down the Schillergasse towards the Frauenplan in Weimar, he would encounter the “fat Privy Councilor”—Goethe, with the double chin—he would feel himself inwardly impossible. A man who has no feeling for such things—he no doubt would just have taken off his hat!

These things are not to be explained out of the earthly life. The reasons why we cannot be contemporary with a man are in fact, not contained within the earthly life. To see them, we must penetrate into the spiritual facts. Therefore, for earthly life, such things appear paradoxical. Nevertheless, they are as I have said.

I can assure you, with genuine love I wrote the introduction to Jean Paul's works, published in the Cotta'sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Yet, if I had ever had to sit side by side with Jean Paul at Bayreuth, it would have given me a stomach-ache, without doubt! That does not hinder one's having the highest reverence. And it is so for every human being—only with most people it remains in the sub-conscious, in the astral or in the ether-body; it does not affect the physical. The experience of the soul which affects the physical body must also become conscious.

You must be well aware of this, my dear friends. If you want to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, you cannot escape hearing of things which will seem grotesque and paradoxical. The spiritual world is different from the physical. Of course, it is easy enough for anyone to turn to ridicule the statement that if I had been a contemporary of Jean Paul's, it would have given me a stomach-ache to have to sit beside him. That is quite true—it goes without saying for the everyday, banal, Philistine world of earthly life. But the laws of the banal and Philistine world do not determine the spiritual facts. You must accustom yourselves to think in other forms of thought, if you wish to understand the spiritual world; you must be prepared to experience many surprising things. When the everyday consciousness reads about Goethe, it may naturally feel impelled to say: “How I should like to have known him personally, to have shaken him by the hand!” and so on. It is a piece of thoughtlessness; for there are laws according to which we are predestined for a given epoch of the earth. In this epoch we can live. It is just as in our physical body we are predestined for a certain pressure of air; we cannot rise above the earth to a height where the pressure no longer suits us. Nor can a man who is destined for the 20th century live in the time of Goethe.

These were the things I wanted to bring forward about karma, to begin with.

When you consider what has been said here during the past two days you will see that what belongs to the essence of imperialism is that in an imperialistic community something that was felt to be part of a mission—not necessarily justified, but understandable—later continued on as an automatism, so to speak. In the history of human development things are retained—simply due to indolence—which were once justified or explicable, but no longer are.

If a community is obliged to defend itself for a period of time, then it is surely justified to create certain professions for that purpose: police and military professions. But when the danger against which defense was necessary no longer exists, the professions continue to exist. The people involved must remain. They want to continue to exercise their professions and therefore we have something which is no longer justified by the circumstances. Something develops which, although perhaps originating due to the necessity for defense, takes on an aggressive character. It is so with all empires, except the original imperialism of the first human societies, of which I spoke yesterday, in which the people's mentality considered the ruler to be a god and thus justified in expanding his domain as far as possible. This justification was no longer there in all the subsequent empires. Let us now consider once again from definite viewpoints what is apparent in the historical evolution of mankind. We find that in the oldest times the will of the individual who was seen as divine was the indisputable power factor. In public life there was in reality nothing to discuss in such empires; but this impossibility of discussion was grounded in the fact that a god in human form walked the earth as the ruler. That was, if I may say so, a secure foundation for public affairs.

Gradually all that which was based on divine will and was thus secure passed over to the second stage. In that stage the things which can be observed in physical life, be they persons, be they the persons' insignias, be they the deeds of the governing or ruling persons, it was all symbols, signs. Whereas during the first phase of imperialism here in the physical world the spirit was considered directly present, during the second stage everything physical was thought of as a reflection, as an image, as a symbol for what is not actually present in the physical world, but only illustrated by the persons and deeds in the physical world.

Such times, when the second stage appeared, was when it first occurred to people that a possibility for discussion of public affairs was possible. What we today call rights can hardly be considered as existing during the first stage. And the only political institution worth mentioning was the phenomenon of divine power exercised by physical people. In social affairs the only thing that mattered was the concrete will of a physical person. To try to judge whether this will was justified or not makes no sense. It was just there. It had to be obeyed. To discuss whether the god in human form should or should not do this or that made no sense. In fact it was not done during those times when the conditions I have described really existed. But if one only saw an image of the spiritual world in physical institutions, if one spoke of what Saint Augustine called the “City of God”—that is, the state which exists here on earth, but which is really an image of heavenly facts and personalities, then one can hold the opinion that what the person does who is a divine image is right, is a true image: someone else could object and say that it is not a true image. That's when the possibility of discussion originated. The person of today, because he is accustomed to criticize everything, to discuss everything, thinks that to criticize and discuss was always present in human history. That is not true. Discussing and criticizing are attributes of the second stage, which I have described for you. Thus began the possibility to judge on one's own, that is, to add a predicate to a subject. In the oldest forms of human expression this personal judging was not at all present in respect to public affairs. During the second stage what we call today parliament for example was in preparation; for a parliament only makes sense when it is possible to discuss public affairs. Therefore, even the most primitive form of public discourse was a characteristic of the second stage. Today we live in the third stage, insofar as the characteristic form of the western countries more or less spreads over the world. This is the stage of platitudes. This stage of platitudes, as I characterized it to you yesterday, is the one in which the inner substance has also disappeared from discussion and therefore everyone can be right, or at least think that they are right, when it can't be proved that they are wrong, because basically within the world of platitudes everything can be affirmed. Nevertheless, previous stages are always retained within the next stages. Therefore the inner impulse to imperialism exists. People observe things very superficially. When the previous German Kaiser wrote in a book that was opened out to write in: “The king's will is sublime law”—what did it mean? It meant that he expressed himself in the age of platitudes in a manner that only had meaning for the first stage. In the first stage it was really the case that the ruler's will was highest law. The concept of rights, which includes the right of free speech, and involves lawyers and courts, is essentially a characteristic of the second stage, and can only be grasped in its reality from the viewpoint of the second stage. Whoever has followed how much discussion has taken place about the origin and character of rights will have noticed that there is something shimmering in the rights concept as such, because it is applicable to the symbolic stage, where the spiritual shimmers through the material, shines, so that when only the external signs, the legal aspects and words appear, one can argue and discuss what are rights and the legal system in public discourse.

In the age of the platitudes, however, understanding of what is necessary for rights in society is completely lost: that the spiritual kingdom shines through into the physical kingdom. And then one arrives at such definitions as I described yesterday using the example of Woodrow Wilson. I will now read to you a definition of the law that Woodrow Wilson gave so you can see how this definition consists of nothing but platitudes. He said: “The law is the will of the state in respect to those citizens who are bound by it.” So the state unfolds a will! One can well imagine that someone who is embedded so strongly in abstract idealism, not to mention materialism—for they are practically the same—can claim that the state is supposed to have a will. He would have to have lost all sense of reality to even conceive of such a thing let alone write it down. But it is in the book I spoke to you about yesterday—the codex of platitudes: The State, Elements of Historical and Practical Politics.

There are other interesting things in it. Only in parenthesis I would like to draw your attention to what Wilson says in this book about the German Empire after he describes how the efforts to found it were finally successful in 1870/71. He describes this with the following sentences: “The final incentive for achievement of complete national unity was brought about by the German-French war of 1870/71. Prussia's brilliant success in this struggle, fought in the interest of German patriotism against French impertinence, caused the cool restraint of the central states towards their powerful neighbor in the northern end; they united with the rest of Germany and the German Empire was founded in the royal palace at Versailles on January 18, 1871.” The same man wrote that who a short time later in Versailles united with those whose impertinence had once been the motivation for the founding of the German Empire. Much of present day public opinion derives from the fact that people are so terribly superficial and pay no attention to the facts. If you decide to decide according to objective information, then things look quite different from what is propounded in public and accepted by thousands upon thousands of people. It wouldn't have hurt one bit if when Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in glory, praised from all sides, these remarks had been held up to him. That is what must be striven for, to take the facts into account, which means also the truth.

So the second stage is when discussion arises, which is what makes the civil rights concept possible. The third stage is when economic life is the essential reality. And yesterday we showed how this [present] age of platitudes is absolutely necessary in the course of historical evolution in order that the platitude, which is empty, can open people's eyes to the fact that the only reality is economic life and how it is therefore so necessary to propagate spirituality, the new spirituality in the world.

People have quite a skimpy idea about this new spiritual life. And it is therefore understandable that it is burdened with the most ridiculous misunderstandings. For this new spirituality must penetrate into the depths of human life. And although those secret societies, about which I spoke yesterday, only traditionally preserve the old forms, the slogan “brothers,” meaning not to let social class or an individual's religion play a part in the lodges, in a certain sense does prepare for it in the right way.

We say today—I beg you to pay special attention to this, let's take something quite banal, quite common: “The tree is green.” This is a manner of speaking which is common to the second stage of human development. Perhaps you will understand me better if you imagine that we try to paint this opinion—that “the tree is green.” You cannot paint it! There will be some white surface and green will be added, but nothing about the tree has been painted. And when something of the tree is painted which isn't green all you do is disturb the effect even more. If you try to paint “The tree is green,” you are painting something dead. The way we combine subject and predicate in our speech is only useful for our view of the dead, of the non-living in the world. As we still have no idea of how everything in the world is alive, and how to express ourselves about what is alive, we form such judgments as “The tree is green,” which presupposes that a relationship exists between something and the color green, whereas the color green is itself the creative element, the force which acts and lives. The transformation of human thinking and feeling will have to take place within the innermost life of the soul. This will take a long time to accomplish, but when it does it will affect social conditions and how people relate to each other.

Today we are only at the beginning of all this. But it is necessary to know which paths lead to the light. I have said that it is meaningful when people get together and each one's subjective beliefs play no role. And consider it from this viewpoint—really think about it—the way in which anthroposophy is described. It is not described through definitions or ordinary judgments. We try to create images, to present things from the most varied sides, and it is senseless to try and nail down something meant in a spiritual-scientific sense with a mere yes or no opinion. People today always want to do that, but it isn't possible. It happens ever more frequently—because we are growing out of the second stage and into the third—that someone asks: What is good for me in order to counter this or that difficulty in life? Advice is given. Aha! The person concerned says, so in this or that situation in life one must do this or that. They generalize. But it has only a limited meaning, for judgments given from the spiritual world always have only an individual meaning, are only applicable to one case. This way of generalizing, which we have become accustomed to in the second stage, must not continue into the third stage. People today are very much inclined to carry things over from the past into the future. One can become disinclined towards the things which are pernicious for the soul by seeing clearly what is happening.

Yesterday I indicated to you that in many respects the Catholic Church harks back to the first stage. It contains something like a sham or a shadow of the first stage of human evolution, which sometimes solidifies into a kind of spiritual imperialism, as for example in the 11th century when the Monks of Cluny really ruled over Europe more than is thought. From their ranks the powerful, imperialistic Pope Gregory VII emerged. Therefore Roman Catholic dogma enables the priest to feel greater than Christ, because he can force him to be present at the altar. This clearly shows that the institution of the Catholic Church is a relic, a shadow-image of what existed in the very first imperialism.

You know that a great enmity existed between the Catholic Church and the secret societies which used Freemasonry in the west—a certain form of Freemasonry at least—as their instrument. It would go too far in this lecture to describe in detail how this enmity has gradually increased over time. But one thing can be said, how in these secret societies the opinion is very strong that the Catholic Church is a relic of the first stage of imperialism. The Holy Roman Empire used this framework to have Charlemagne and the Otto's crowned by the pope, thereby using the imperialism of the soul as the means of mundane anointment. They took what still remained from older times and poured it into the new. Thus the imperialism of the second stage was poured into the framework of the first imperialism.

Now we have arrived at the third stage, which shows itself to be economic imperialism, especially in the west. This economic imperialism is connected to a background culture of secret societies, which are sated with empty symbols. But while it has become clear that the social constitution of the Church is a shadow-image of what once existed and no longer has meaning, it is still not understood that in the second stage the statesmen of the west still suffer under a great illusion. Woodrow Wilson would no longer speak of the will of the Church, but he speaks of the will of the State as being self-evident. But the state only had the importance attributed to it during the second stage of human development. Whereas during the oldest, the first stage the Church was all-powerful, in the second stage the state contains everything that was attributed to the Church in the first stage. Thus the economic imperialism of Great Britain and even a certain idea of freedom has been poured into the state. And those who were educated in Great Britain see in the state something that can well have a will of its own.

But we must perceive that this concept of the state must take the same road the concept of the Church has traveled. It must be realized: If we retain this concept of the state for the entire social organism, a mere rights institution, and force everything else into this rights institution, we are propagating a shadow just as the Church has propagated a shadow—recognized as such by the secret societies. There is little awareness of this though. Think of all the public affairs that people are enthusiastic about which are pressed into the concept of the political state. There are nationalists, chauvinists and so forth; everything we call nation, national , chauvinism, it's all incorporated into the framework of the state. Nationalism is added and the concept of the “nation-state” is construed. Or we may have a certain opinion about, say socialism, even radical socialism: the framework of the state is used. Instead of nationalism, socialism is incorporated. But then we have no concept; it can only be a shadow-image, as the constitution of the Church has become. In some Protestant circles the idea has arisen that the Church is only the visible institution, that the essence of religion must take root in people's hearts. But this degree of human development has not yet arrived in respect to the political state, otherwise we wouldn't be trying to squeeze all kinds of nationalisms into the political boundaries which exist as the result of the war [First World War—trans.] All this neglects to take one thing into consideration—the fact that what occurs in the historical development of humanity is life and not mechanism. And a characteristic of life is that it comes and goes. The imperialistic approach is different however. According to this approach one does not think about the future. This is part of the present-day approach to public affairs, that people have no living thoughts, only dead ones. They think: Today we instituted something, it is good, therefore it must remain forever. The feminist movement thinks like this, as do the socialists and the nationalists. We have founded something, it begins with us, everything waited for us until we became clever enough. And now we have discovered the cleverest that exists and it will continue to exist forever. It's as though I have brought up a child until he is eighteen years old and I say: I have brought him up correctly, and he will stay as he is. But he will get older, and he will also die, as does everything in the course of human evolution. Now I come to what I mention before about what must accompany the principle of indifference to one's religious beliefs and fraternity. What must accompany them is the awareness that life on earth includes death and that we are aware that the institutions we create must of necessity also cease to exist, because the death principle already resides in them and they therefore have no wish to exist forever, do not consider being permanent. Of course under the influence of the thinking characteristic of the second stage this is not possible . But if the feeling of shame of which I spoke yesterday arises, when we realize that we are living in the kingdom of platitudes under which only economic imperialism glimmers—then will we call for the spirit, invisible but real. We will call for a knowledge of the spirit, one which speaks of an invisible kingdom, a kingdom which is not of this world in which the Christ-impulse can actually gain a foothold.

This can only happen when the social order is tripartite, threefold: The economy is auto- administered, the political state is no longer the absolute, all-inclusive entity, but is exclusively concerned with rights alone, and spiritual/cultural life is truly free, meaning that here in reality a free spiritual sector can be organized. The spiritual life of humanity can only be free if it is dependent only upon itself and when all the institutions responsible for cultivating the spirit, that is, cultural life, are dependent only upon themselves.

What do we have then, when we have this tripartite organism, this social organism? We have an economy in which the living physical earth is predominant. In this sector the economic forces of the economy itself are active. I doubt anyone will think that if the economy is organized as described in my book Towards Social Renewal—Basic Issues of the Social Question some kind of super-sensible forces will be present. When we eat, when we prepare our food, when we make our clothing, it is all reality. Esthetics may be symbolically present, but the actual clothing is the reality.

When we look at the second sector of the future social organism [the rights sector], we don't have a symbolism like the second stage, where the political state constituted the totality, but we have what is valid for one person being equally valid for the other. And the third sector will be neither symbol nor platitude, but a spiritual/cultural reality. The spirit will possess the possibility of really living within humanity. The inner social order can only be built through a transition to inner truthfulness. In the age of platitudes this will be especially difficult though. For during the age of platitudes people acquire a certain ingenious cleverness, which is, however, nothing more than a play on words of the old concepts. Just consider for a moment a characteristic example. Suddenly from the imperialism of platitudes comes the idea that it would be good if the queen of England also has the title “Empress of India.” One can invent the most beautiful reasons for this, but if it didn't happen, nothing would have changed. The Emperor of Austria, who now belongs to the deposed royalty, before he was chased out carried around along with his other titles a most unusual one: Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galizia, Lodomeria, Illyia and so on. Among all these titles was also “King of Jerusalem!” The Austrian Emperor also carried, until he was no longer emperor, the title “King of Jerusalem.” It came from the crusades. It would be impossible to give a better example of meaninglessness than this. And such meaninglessness plays a much greater role than you imagine. It is a question of whether we can arise to a recognition of the present-day platitudes. It is made difficult because those who live in platitudes are the verbal representatives of the old concepts that stagger around in their brains imitating thoughts. But one can only achieve real thinking again when the inner soul-life is filled with substance and that can only come from knowledge of the spiritual world, of spiritual life. Only by being relieved by the spirit can one become a complete person, after having been constipated with platitudes. What I described yesterday as a feeling of shame will result in the call for the spirit. And the propagation of the spirit will only be possible if the spiritual/cultural sector is allowed to develop independently. Otherwise we will always have to take advantage of loopholes, as was the case with the Waldorf School because the Württemberg Province education law had such a loophole which made it possible to establish a Waldorf school only according to spiritual laws, according to spiritual principles, something which in practically no other place on earth would be possible. But one can only organize the things concerning the spiritual life from the spirit itself if the other two sectors do not interfere, if everything is taken directly from the spiritual sector itself.

At present the tendency is the reverse. But this tendency does not reckon with the fact that with every new generation a new spiritual/cultural life appears on earth. It's immaterial whether a dictatorship or a republic is established, if it is not understood that everything which appears is subject to life and must be continuously transformed, must pass through death and be formed anew, pass through metamorphoses, then all that will be accomplished is that every new generation will be revolutionary. Because only what is considered good for the present will be established. A fundamental concept for the western areas which are so mired in platitudes must be to see the social organism as something living. And one sees it as living only when it is considered in its threefold nature. It is just those whose favorable economic position allows them to spread an [economic] imperialism over practically the whole world who have the terrible responsibility of recognizing that the cultivation of a true spiritual life must be poured into this imperialism. It is ironic that an economic empire which spread over the whole world was founded on the British Isles and then when they were seeking mystical spirituality turned to those whom they had economically conquered and exploited. [India—Tr.] The obligation exists to allow one's own spiritual substance to flow into the social organism. That is the awareness which our British friends should take with them, that now, in this worldwide important historic moment, in all the world's economic institutions where English is spoken, the responsibility exists to introduce true spirituality into the exterior economic empire. It's an either/or situation: Either efforts remain exclusively oriented towards the economy—in which case the fall of earthly civilization is the inevitable result—or spirit will be poured into this economic empire, in which case what was intended for earthly evolution will be achieved. I would like to say: Every morning we should bear this in mind very seriously and all activities should be organized according to this impulse. The bell tolls with extreme urgency at present—with terrible urgency. In a certain sense we have reached the climax of platitudes. In an age when all content has been squeezed out of platitudes, content which came to humanity previously but which no longer has any meaning, we must absorb real substantial content into our psychological and social life. We must be clear about the fact that this either/or must be decided by each individual for him or her self and that each must participate in this decision with his most inner force of soul. Otherwise he does not participate in the affairs of humanity.

But the attraction for illusion is especially strong in the age of platitudes. We wish so to sweep away the seriousness of life. We avoid looking at the truth inherent in our evolution. How could people let themselves be deceived by Wilsonian ideas if they really had the intense desire for truthful clarity? It must come. The desire for truth must grow in humanity. Above all, the desire for the liberation of spiritual/cultural life must grow along with the knowledge that nobody has the right to call himself a Christian who has not grasped the saying: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

This means that the kingdom of Christ must become an invisible kingdom, a truly invisible empire, an empire of which one speaks as of invisible things. Only when spiritual science gains in importance will people speak of this empire. Not some church, not some state, not some economic empire can create this empire. Only the will of the individual who lives in a liberated spiritual/cultural life can create this empire.

It is difficult to believe that in the lands in which people are downtrodden much can be done to free spiritual life. Therefore it must be done in those lands where the people are not downtrodden politically, economically and, obviously, not spiritually downtrodden. Above all it must be realized that we have not arrived at the day when we say: Until now things have gone downhill, they will go uphill again! No, if people do not act for this objective out of the spirit, things will not go uphill again, but will continue downhill. Humanity does not live today from what it has produced—for to produce again a spiritual impulse is necessary—humanity lives today from reserves, from old reserves, and they are being used up. And it is childish and naïve to think that a low point is reached some day and things will get better then, even with our hands in our laps. That's not how it is. And I would like to see that the words spoken here kindle a fire in the hearts of those who belong to the anthroposophical movement. I would hope that the specter which perhaps haunts those who find their way to this anthroposophical movement be overcome by the spirit meant here. It is certainly true that someone who finds his way to such a movement often seeks something for himself, for his soul. Of course he can have that, but only in order to stand with his soul in the service of the whole. He should advance, certainly, for himself, but only so mankind can advance through him. I cannot say that often enough. It should be added to those things I said should be thought about every morning. If we had really taken the inner impulse of this movement seriously, we would have been much farther along. But perhaps what is done in our circles does not help advance towards the future, but is often a hindrance. We should ask ourselves why this is so. It is very important. And above all we should not think that the sharpest powers of opposition are not active from all sides against what strives for the well-being of humanity. I have already indicated to you what is being done in the world in opposition to our movement, what hostility is activated against us. I feel myself obliged to make these things known to you, so that you should never say to yourself: We have already refuted this or that. We have refuted nothing, because these opponents are not interested in the truth. They prefer to ignore as much as possible the facts and simply aim slanderous accusations from all corners.

I would like to read part of a letter to you which arrived recently from Oslo. “One of our anthroposophical friends works in a so-called people's college in Oslo together with a certain Schirmer. This Mr. Schirmer is in a certain sense quite a proficient teacher, but is also a fanatical racist and a sworn anti-Semite. At a people's meeting where three of us gave lectures about the Threefold Society, he talked against us, or rather against Dr. Steiner's Towards Social Renewal, although without much success. The guy has a certain influence in teachers' circles and he works in his own way in the sense of the social triformation in the school insofar as he is for freedom, but on the other hand he works against the social triformation and Dr. Steiner for the simple reason that he suspects that Dr. Steiner is a Jew. That is perhaps not so bad. We must expect and overcome more serious opposition. But now he has received confirmation of his suspicion. He turned to an ‘authority,’ namely the editor of the political anthropological monthly, Berlin-Steglitz. This purely anti-Semitic magazine wrote to him that Dr. Steiner is a Jew through and through. He is associated with the Zionists. And the editor added that they, the anti-Semites, have had their eye on you [Dr Steiner] for a long time. Mr. Schirmer also says that a persecution of the Jews is beginning now in Germany, and that all the Jews on the anti-Semites' blacklist should be simply shot down or, as they say, rendered harmless.” and so on.

You see, this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism as such, that's only on the face of it. They choose slogans in these situations, with which they try to accomplish as much as possible with people who listen to slogans. But such things clearly indicate what most people don't want to see, what they want to ignore more and more. It is today much more serious that you think, and we should not ignore the seriousness of the times, but should realize that we are only at the beginning of these things which are opposed to everything that is intended to advance human progress. And that we should never, without neglecting our responsibilities, divert our attention from what is a radical evil within humanity, what manifests as a radical evil within humanity. The worst that can happen today is paying attention to mere slogans and platitudes, and believing that outdated concepts somehow have roots in human reality today—if we do not initiate a new reality from the sources of the spirit itself.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to tell you today, first of all to all of you, but especially to those whose visit has pleased us greatly—especially to our English friends, so that when they return to their own country, where it will be so important, they will have something on which to base their activities. You will have seen that I have not spoken in favor or against anyone, nor have I flattered anyone. I only speak here in order to say the truth. I have known theosophists who when they speak to members of a foreign nation begin to talk about what an honor it is to be able to spread the teachings about the spiritual life in a nation which has accumulated so much glory. Such things cannot be said to you here. But I believe that you have come here to hear the truth and I think that I have best served you by really trying to tell the unvarnished truth. You will have learned during your trip that telling the truth nowadays is not a comfortable thing, for the truth calls forth opposition now more than ever. Do not be afraid of opposition, for they are one and the same: to have enemies and to tell the truth. And we will understand each other best when our mutual understanding is based on the desire to hear the unvarnished truth. Before I leave for Germany, this is what I wanted to say to you today, and especially to our English friends.

During the last few days, I have tried to show how Western civilization originated and that a significant and mighty turning point can be noted in mankind's overall evolution in the fourth Christian century. It was also necessary to point out how Greece gradually developed in the direction of this twilight, so to speak; how, based on quite different impulses, the civilization of central and western European culture came about, and how a comprehension of Christianity developed under these influences. To begin with, let us try and refer to the facts under consideration once more from a certain different viewpoint.

Christianity originated in the western Orient from the Mystery of Golgotha. Insofar as its specific nature was concerned, Oriental culture certainly was already in decline. The ancient, primordial wisdom existed in its last phases in what developed in Asia Minor and Greece as Gnosticism. The Gnosis, after all, was a form of wisdom that combined, in the most manifold ways, what presented itself to the human being as phenomena of the cosmos and nature. This not withstanding, in comparison to the directly perceived, instinctive insight into the spiritual world that was the foundation of Oriental development, Gnosticism already had a more, shall we say, intellectual, rational character. The spiritual life that permeated all human perception in the ancient Orient was no longer present. It was actually from the last vestiges of the ancient wisdom that people sought to fit together the philosophical and humanistic view that was then employed as a body of wisdom for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha. The substance inherent in the Mystery of Golgotha was clothed in the wisdom retained from the Orient in Greece.

Now let us consider this wisdom from the point of view of spiritual science. If we view human beings as they devoted themselves once upon a time to this wisdom, we find that the main thing in the ancient Orient was that people saw the world with what was active in their astral body, with what they could experience in their soul through their astral body—even though their sentient soul and rational or intellectual soul had already developed. It was the astral body that worked into these soul members and enabled people to actually turn their glance away from the earthly phenomena and to still perceive quite clearly what enters in the spiritual, super-sensible sphere from the cosmos. As yet, human beings did not have a view of the world based on the ego. Their self expressed itself only dimly. For the human being the ego was as yet not an actual question. Human beings dwelled in the astral element, and in it they still lived in a certain harmony with the world phenomena surrounding them. In a sense, the really puzzling world for them was the one they beheld with their eyes, the one that ran its course around them. For them, the comprehensible world was the super-sensible world of the gods, the world in which the spiritual beings had their existence. Human beings looked across to these spiritual beings, to their actions, their destinies. It was indeed the essential characteristic of the view of the ancient Orient that people's attention was directed towards these spiritual worlds. People wished to comprehend the sensory world on the basis of these spiritual worlds.

Today, finding ourselves within our civilization, we take the opposite view. To us, the physical-sensory world is given. Proceeding from it, in one way or another, we try to comprehend the spiritual world—if we attempt that at all, if we do not reject doing so, if we do not remain stuck in pure materialism. The material world is seen as given by us. The ancient Orientals saw the spiritual world as given. On the premise of the physical world, we try to discover something with which to comprehend the wondrousness of the phenomena, the purpose of the structure of the organisms, and so on; based on this physical, sensory world, we try to prove to ourselves the existence of the supersensory world. The ancient Orientals tried to comprehend the physical, sensory environment on the basis of the superphysical, supersensory world given to them. Out of it, they wished to receive light—indeed, they did receive it, and without it, the physical, sensory world was to them only darkness and trepidation. Thus, they also experienced what they sensed to be their innermost being as still completely illuminated by the astral body, as having emerged from the spiritual worlds. People then did not say, I have grown out of earthly life. Rather, they said, I have grown and descended out of divine-spiritual worlds; and the best I bear within me is the recollection of these divine spiritual worlds. Even Plato, the philosopher, speaks of the fact that the human being has insights, memories, of his prenatal life, the life he led prior to descending into the physical material world. The human being certainly viewed his ego as a ray emerging from the light of the super-sensible world. For him, the material world, not the supersensory world, was puzzling.

This world view then had its offshoots in Greece. The Greeks already experienced themselves within the body, but in it they discovered nothing that could have explained this body to them. They still possessed the traditions of the ancient Orient. They viewed themselves in a certain sense as a being that had descended from the spiritual worlds but that in some ways had already lost the awareness of these spiritual worlds. It was actually the final phase of the Oriental life of wisdom that appeared in Greece, and it was on the basis of this world view that the Mystery of Golgotha was to be understood. After all, this Mystery presented the human being with the profound, tremendous problem of life, with the question how the super-sensible, cosmic being from other worlds, the Christ, could have found His way into a human corporeality. The permeation of Jesus by the Christ was the great problem. We see it light up everywhere in the Gnostic endeavors. People had no such insight of their own concerning a link between the super-sensible aspect of their own nature and the sensory-physical element of their being, and because they had no perception of the connection between the soul-spiritual and the corporeal-physical in reference to themselves, the Mystery of Golgotha became an unsolvable problem for the thinking influenced by the Greek world view. It was, however, a problem with which Greek culture struggled and to which it devoted its finest resources of wisdom. History records much too little of the spiritual struggles that took place then.

I have called attention to the fact that the body of Gnostic literature was eradicated. If it were still available, we would be able to discern this tragic struggle for a comprehension of the living union of the super-sensible Christ with the sense-perceptible Jesus; we would observe the development of this extraordinarily profound problem. This struggle was extinguished, however, an end was put to it by the prosaic, abstract attitude originating from Romanism which is only capable of carrying inner devotion into its abstractions by means of whipping up emotions. The Gnosis was covered up and dogmatism and Church Council decisions were put in its place. The profound views of the Orient that contained no juristic element were saturated with a form assumed by Christianity in the more Western world, the Western world of that age, the Roman world.

Christianity emerged from this Romanism imbued, as it were, with the legal element; everywhere, legal concepts moved in as the Roman political concepts spread out over Christianity. Christianity assumed the form of the Roman body politic, and from what was once the world capital, Rome, we see the emergence of the Christian capital city of Rome. We see how this Christian Rome adopts from ancient Rome the special views on how human beings must be governed, how one's rule must be extended over men. We observe how a kind of ecclesiastical imperialism gains ground because Christianity is poured into the Roman form of government. What had been molded in spiritual forms of conception was transformed into a juristic and human polity. For the first time, Christianity and external political science were forged together and Christianity spread out in that form. Such mighty forces and impulses dwell in Christianity that they could, of course, be effective and survive despite the fact that they were poured into the mold of the Roman political system. And as the Roman political system took hold of the Western world, side by side with it, the humble narrations, the factual reports concerning what had taken place in Palestine, continued on.

In this Western world, however, people had been prepared in a quite special way for Christianity. This preparation consisted in the fact that the human being was aware of himself based on his physical nature; he sensed his ego by means of his physical being. Here, the difference became evident between the way Christianity had passed, as it were, through the Greek world, which then declined, and the form of Christianity that then turned into the actually political Christianity, the governmental, Roman Christianity. Then, more from the northern regions, another form of Christianity emerged that was poured into the northern people, called Barbarians by the Greeks and Romans. It streamed into those northern people who due to their nature and in concentrating their own being, so to speak, sensed their ego. Out of the totality of man in the physical-sensory realm, out of the human physical and sensory ego incarnation, they arrived at self-comprehension. Now they also tried to grasp what reached them as a simple story about the events in Palestine. Thus, in this Barbarian world, the humble tale of the events in Palestine encountered the ego-feeling, I would like to say, the blood-ego-feeling, particularly in the central and northern European realm. These two aspects came together. On the premise of this ego comprehension of man, people tried to grasp the simple report of the events in Palestine. They did not wish to comprehend its deeper content. They did not try to permeate it with wisdom. They only tried to draw it into the physical-sensory, human sphere.

In the Heliand,¹ we can observe how these tales concerning the events in Palestine appear drawn completely down to the human level, into the world of European people, the ego-world. We see how everything is brought down to the human level; unlike the way it was in Greece, people later had no ability to penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha with wisdom. The urge developed to picture even the activity of Christ Jesus as humble human activity without looking up into the super-sensible, and increasingly to imbue these tales with the merely human element. Furthermore, into this were fitted the Church Council resolutions spreading out dogmatically from the Roman-Christian Empire. Like two worlds that were alien to one another, these two merged—the Christianity that in a sense had Europeanized the report from Palestine and the Christianity representing the Greek spirit in juristic, Romanized, abstract form. This is what then lived on through the centuries.

Only a few individuals could place themselves into this stream in the manner I described yesterday, when I spoke of the sages who developed the conception of the Grail. They pointed out that the impulse of Christianity had indeed once been couched in Oriental wisdom, but that the bearer of this Oriental view, the sacred vessel of the Grail, could be brought to Europe only by means of divine spirits who hovered above the earth, holding on to it. Only then, so they said, a hidden castle was built for it, the Castle of the Grail on Mont Salvat. To this was added that a human being could only approach the miracles of the Holy Grail through inaccessible regions. Then these sages did not say that the surrounding impassable region a person has to penetrate in order to reach the miracles of the Grail is sixty miles wide. They put it in a much more esoteric way when they described this path to the Holy Grail. They said, Oh, these people of Europe cannot reach the Holy Grail, for the path they must take in order to arrive at the Holy Grail takes as long as the path from birth to death. Only when human beings arrive at the portal of death, having tread the path, impassable for Europeans, the path that extends from birth to death, only then will they arrive at the Castle of the Grail on Mont Salvat.

This was basically the esoteric secret that was conveyed to the pupil. Because the time had not yet come when human beings would be able to discern with a clear consciousness how the spiritual world might once more be discovered, the pupils were told that they could enter into the sacred Castle of the Grail only by way of occasional glimpses of light. In particular, they were given strict injunctions that they had to ask, that the time had come in human development when the human being who does not ask—who does not develop his inner being and does not seek the impulse of truth on his own but remains passive—cannot arrive at an experience of his own self. For man must discover his ego by means of his physical organization. This I, which discovers itself through the physical organization, must in turn raise itself up by its own power in order to behold itself where, even in the early Greek culture, this self was still beheld, in super-sensible worlds. The I must first lift itself up in order to recognize itself as something super-sensible.

In the ancient Orient, people saw what occurred in the astral body; the consequences of former earth lives were beheld in it. This is why one spoke of karma. In Greece, this conception was already obscured. The cosmic events were observed only with dim astral vision. This is why people spoke vaguely of destiny, of fate. This view of destiny is only a diminished, weaker form of the fully concrete conception held by the ancient Orient concerning man's passage through repeated earth lives, the consequences of which make themselves known to experience within the astral body, though only instinctively. Thus, the ancient Orientals could speak of karma developing in the recurring incarnations on earth, the consequences of which were simply present in astral experience.

Now the development moved westward to the ego experience. This experience of the ego was initially tied to the physical body. It was egotistically self-enclosed. The first ego experience dwelled in dullness, even when it contained a strong impulse towards the super-sensible worlds. Parsifal, who undertook his pilgrimage to the Holy Grail, is described as a dim-witted man. It must be clearly understood that when the Mithras worship spread across the West from the Orient, it was rejected by the West; it was not comprehended. For he who sat on the bull, who was to become the victor over the base forces, experienced himself, after all, as emerging from these lower forces. If Western man beheld Mithras riding on the bull, he did not comprehend this being, for this being could not be the one the ego felt and experienced out of its own physical organization. An understanding for this riding Mithras faded away and disappeared.

It can be said that all this had to come to pass, for the ego had to experience its impulse in the physical organization. It had to connect itself firmly with the physical organization, but it must not allow itself to become set in this firm experience within the physical organization.

It was a profound reaction to the Orient's treasures of wisdom, when the West increasingly aimed for what developed out of the purely physical element. This reaction was a necessity. Any number of views did come together in Europe to make this reaction a very strong one. But it was not proper for it to extend into this spiritual striving for more than a few centuries. A new spirituality has indeed emerged since then in the first third of the fifteenth century, but it was an abstract spirituality, a sublimated, filtered spirituality.

Human beings took hold of physical astronomy and physical medicine, and, to begin with, they had to have this stimulus based on the ego impulse sensing itself in the physical element. But it must not continue to become firmly set in European civilization if this European culture wishes to avoid its decline. Truly, more than enough forces of decline are present, vestiges which should only be vestiges and which should be recognized as such.

Just remember how the most up-to-date theology—I have often emphasized this—has lost the faculty for comprehending Christ; increasingly it has arrived at the point of turning Christ Jesus completely into an earth being, a human being. It has put the “humble man from Nazareth”² in the place of Christ Jesus. Proceeding from Romanism, out of a materialistically oriented principle of authority, the living spirituality, by means of which the human being can really become familiar with the Mystery of Golgotha, was lost more and more. And observe how in modern times a science is developing that tries to comprehend everything external but that does not wish to penetrate to the human being. As a result of this science, see how impulses arise in society that try only to bring about a human, physical order but that do not want to penetrate the human, physical structures with any divine-spiritual, supersensory, spiritual principle.

During all this it is as if in human souls, in a few human souls, there remained an individual glimpse of light. When a ray of the astral element still dwelling within them combined with the ego, these individuals received such glimpses of light. It is part of the most impressive phenomena of modern Europe when we observe how, out of the East, there resounds a mighty admonition in the religious philosophy of Soloviev,³ a religious philosophy steeped, so to speak, in Eastern sultriness. But something resounds from there to the effect that a super-sensible, spiritual element must permeate the earthly social order. In a sense, we see how Soloviev dreams of a kind of Christ-state. He is capable of that because within him are the last vestiges of a subjective astral experience illuminating the ego.

Compare these dreams of a Christ-permeated state with what has been established in the East accompanied by the negation of all spiritual elements, something that harbors only forces of decline—what an overwhelming, colossal contrast! The world should pay attention to such a colossal contrast. If people had already today sufficient objectivity to observe these things, they would be able to see, on the one hand, the one who raises the demand of the Christ-permeated state, the Christ-permeated social structure, Soloviev. They would view him as somebody still stimulated by the Oriental element and casting, so to speak, a final spark into this Europe growing torpid, in order to revive it again from this viewpoint. On the other hand, Czar Nicholas or his predecessors could well be placed together with Czar Lenin; the fact that they give vent to different ideas in the historical development of mankind does not constitute a fundamental difference between them. What matters are the forces living in them and shaping the world, and the same forces dwell in Lenin that dwell in the Russian Czar; there really is no fundamental difference. It is naturally difficult to find one's way within this melee of forces that extend into European civilization from earlier times. Initially, it is indeed a melee of forces and a firm direction must be sought. Such a firm direction can be found in no other way than by lifting the ego up to a spiritual comprehension of the world. Through a spiritual comprehension of the world, the Christian impulse must be reborn. What has been striven for in regard to the external world since the first third of the fifteenth century must be striven for in reference to the totality of the human being; the whole human being has to be understood based on the knowledge of the world.

The comprehension of the world must be viewed in harmony with the understanding of humanity. We must understand the earth evolution in phases, in metamorphoses. We have to look at earlier embodiments of our earth, but we must not consider a primordial nebula devoid of human beings. We have to look at Saturn, sun, and moon as already permeated with the activity of human beings; we must observe how the present structure of the human being originated from the earlier metamorphoses of the planet earth and how the human form in an early phase was likewise active there. We must recognize the human being in the world, and out of this knowledge of man in the world an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha can well up once again. Human beings must learn to understand why an impassable region surrounds the Castle of the Grail, why the path between birth and death is difficult terrain. When they understand why it is difficult, when they grasp that the ego experiences itself based on the physical organization, when they sense how impossible a merely physical astronomy, a merely physical medicine are, then they themselves will clear the paths. Then people will bring something into this hitherto difficult terrain between birth and death that comes into being through their own soul efforts.

Out of the substance of the soul and spirit, human beings have to fashion the tools with which to break the ground on the field, the soul-field, leading to the Castle of the Grail, to the Mystery of Bread and Blood, to the fulfillment of the words, “Do this in remembrance of me” [Luke 22:19]. For this remembrance has been forgotten; people are no longer aware of what dwells in the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” For this is truly done in remembrance of the mighty moment of Golgotha if the symbol of the bread, that is what develops out of the earth through the synthesis of cosmic forces is understood. It is done rightly if we understand once again how to comprehend the world through a spiritualized cosmology and astronomy, and if we learn to comprehend the human being based on what his extract is, namely, the element where the spiritual directly intervenes in him—if we grasp the Mystery of the Blood. Through work on the inner being of human souls the path must be discovered that leads to the Holy Grail. This is a task of cognition, this is a social task. It is also a task that, to the greatest extent possible, is hated in the present

For due to being placed within the ego education of Western civilization, human beings develop above all a longing to remain passive inwardly in the soul, not to allow earthly existence to give to them what could bring progress to their souls. The active taking hold of the soul forces, the inward experiencing, and this does not necessarily mean occult development but merely the experience of soul nature in general; yet this is something European humanity does not like. Instead, it wishes to continue what was natural for the epoch directly preceding it, namely, the ego development, which does, however, lead to the most blatant egotism, to the blindest raging of instincts, when it is extended beyond its own age. This ego feeling, extending beyond the time properly assigned to it, first of all has penetrated the sentiments of national chauvinism. It appears in national chauvinism; from these feelings arise the spirits who wish to keep the path to the Holy Grail in an impassable condition. But it is our obligation to do everything that can be done in order to call human souls to activity in the area of knowledge as well as in the social sphere. Yet, all those forces filled with hatred against such activity of the soul emerge in opposition to such a call. After all, haven't people been conditioned long enough so that they concluded, We must consider heretical all our own soul efforts to free ourselves from guilt; we must properly cultivate the awareness of sin and guilt, for we must not progress by means of our own efforts, but must be redeemed in passivity through Christ?

We fail to understand Christ if we do not recognize Him as the cosmic power that completely unites with us when through questions and inner activity we work our way through to Him. Everywhere today, from the denominations, from theology and those who were always connected to theology, from the military and science—from all this we see arise those powers today that try to obstruct the path of inner activity.

For a long time, I have had to call attention to the fact that this is the case, and I have had to say again and again: the arising opposing powers will become more and more vehement. Indeed, to this day this has certainly come true. It is definitely not possible to say that the opposition has already reached its greatest strength. Not by a long shot has it attained its culmination. This opposition has a strong, organizing power in concentrating together all the elements that, while they are in reality destined to decline, can obstruct in their very decline for the time being everything working with the forces of upward striving progress. The forces fostering the activity of souls are weak today in comparison to the opposing elements. Those forces that, based on the comprehension of the spiritual world, try to turn the progressive forces into forces of their own soul are weak. The world has taken on an ahrimanic character. For it was inevitable that the ego, having comprehended itself in the physical element, is taken hold of by ahrimanic forces if it remains in the physical element and does not lift itself up at the right time to a spiritual understanding of itself as a spiritual being. Indeed, we see this process of usurpation by the ahrimanic powers; we observe it in the fact that, little as the sleepy souls would be willing to admit this, an actual tendency towards evil is making itself felt everywhere today.

An inclination towards evil is clearly noticeable, for example, in the manner opponents fight against anthroposophical spiritual science and everything related to it. From the most questionable sources come the means with which individuals battle today against spiritual science, even individuals who enjoy a prestigious standing in the world in scientific or theological circles. The truth is not what people are concerned with. It is only a matter of what slander suits these individuals best and what they like better. It is truly a matter of humanity being strongly possessed by the forces of evil, by a love for evil. Those who are unable today to reckon with this tendency for evil, with this ever increasing love for evil in the battle against anthroposophy, will not be able to develop a feeling, an awareness of the kind of opposing forces and powers that will yet arise in the future. For years, reference has been made to this ever-increasing development. If nothing more can be attained than a clear feeling of it, then this clear feeling, which is, after all, also a force, must at least be maintained. We have to look into the world and be aware of the way it surrounds us. With a sober mind we must realize what is really facing us in the filthy slander that is now emerging from among our opponents and that is the more impressive the more tarnished its source.

It is really necessary to become acquainted with this particular tendency, with this love of evil, that will become more and more prevalent. It is truly necessary not to wallow groggily in excuses that the opponents are convinced of what they say. Do you really believe that in individuals such as the one who has emerged as the newest opponent against anthroposophical spiritual science even the possibility for an inner force of conviction is present? Not even the possibility of conviction is present in him. He acts out of quite different deeper motives. It is indeed a clever move to seek particularly in this direction, to seek for the manner of viewing things that is based on fooling the opponent. Who is the better commander? He who can best fool the enemy! But when this principle is transferred to the means of battling against truth, then such a battle is a battle of the lie, of the personified lie against truth. We must realize that this battle of the personified lie against truth is capable of anything, that it will definitely attempt to take away from us what we have tried and are still trying to attain in the way of outward supports in order to find bearers of truth in this civilization. It is not exaggerated to say that there exists the most profound and thoroughgoing wish to deprive us of the Waldorf School and this building.⁴ And if we pay no attention to this; if we do not even develop in us a feeling concerning the ways and means of this opposition, then we remain sleeping souls. Then we do not take hold with inner alertness of what is trying to pour forth out of anthroposophical spiritual science.

Basically, we should not be surprised now that the opponents could turn out the way they did for that could have been known long ago. The overwhelming impression for us today certainly is that there are too few individuals who can be active representatives of our spiritual movement. It is generally still easier to be effective among human beings by means of force, control, and injustice than by means of freedom. The truth that is to be proclaimed through anthroposophical spiritual science is permitted to count only on human freedom. It must find people who ask questions. One certainly cannot say, Why doesn't this truth possess in itself the strength to compel human souls by virtue of divine-spiritual power? It does not wish to do that; it cannot do that. The reason is that it will always consider inner freedom, the freedom of the human being in general, to be something absolutely inviolable. If the human being is to come to anthroposophy out of his own judgment, he must become one who asks questions; out of the innermost freedom of judgment he must convince himself. The word of spiritual truth will be spoken to him; convincing himself of it is something he must do on his own. If he wishes to cooperate and be active in society, he must do so out of the innermost impulse of his heart. Those who belong in the truest sense of the word to anthroposophical spiritual science must become people who ask questions.

What do we encounter on the side of the opposition? Do not believe that only those who band together who are in some way one-sided in any one creed. No, in a Catholic church in Stuttgart, a sermon tells its listeners, Go to the lecture by Herr von Gleich.⁵ There you can invigorate your Catholic souls and can vanquish the opponents of your Catholic souls! And these Catholic souls go there; the Catholic, General von Gleich, gives a lecture and concludes with a song by Martin Luther! A fine union of one side and the other—the opponents organize as one! It certainly matters not if they agree in any way in their faith, their convictions.

For us, what matters is the strength to stand firmly on the ground of what we recognize as right. Yes, nothing will be left undone to undermine this ground; of this you can be sure. I had to bring this up one more time, particularly in connection with the considerations concerning the course taken by European civilization; for it is necessary that at least the intention develops to place oneself firmly on the ground we must recognize as the right one. It is also necessary that among ourselves we do not give ourselves up to the popular illusions concerning the various oppositions. Their aim is to undermine the ground we stand on. It is up to us to work as much as is humanly possible, and then, if the ground under us should become undermined and we do slide down into the chasm, our efforts will nevertheless have been such that they will find their spiritual path through the world. For what appears now are the last convulsions of a dying world. But even if it is in its last throes of death, this world can still strike out like a raving maniac, and one can lose one's life due to this frantic lashing out. This is why we must at least recognize what kind of impulses give rise to this mad lashing out. Nothing can be achieved by what is timid; we must appeal to what is bold. Let us try to measure up to such an appeal!

I had to include this so that you would sense that we face an important, significant, and decisive moment, and that we have to consider how we are to find the strength to persevere.

• 1 . Heiland, (meaning “Heiland” or “Savior”), ancient Saxon poetical Gospel work from around A.D. 830.
• 2 . Reference to the overall tendency of descriptions of Jesus at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
• 3 . Vladimir Soloviev, 1853–1900, Russian philosopher and poet.
• 4 . Reference to the first Waldorf School, established in Stuttgart in 1919, and the first Goetheanum.
• 5 . Gleich completed his lecture of April 6, 1921, in Stuttgart with a quote from a song by Martin Luther. On the day before, a Jesuit, Sorel, had recommended that people attend this lecture.

You will have been able to see how certain abnormalities in the life of the soul which we can recognise as symptoms of the oncoming of illness, show themselves in children in a rather undefined form, developing only later in a more definite manner. I was able to show you, for instance, how what later on becomes hysteria manifests in early childhood in a manner that is peculiar to that period, the abnormality remaining as yet quite undefined. In order however to be able to come to correct conclusions in regard to abnormalities that belong to childhood, we must also bear in mind the whole connection that exists between the pre-natal life (which may be said to carry into the physical life on earth the impulse of karma) and the gradual development of the child through the first two epochs—even perhaps also through the third.

Today we shall still continue to speak, by way of preparation, of general principles; then we shall be able afterwards to add what further needs to be said, with practical examples in front of us. For tomorrow morning Frau Dr. Wegman will put at our disposal a boy whom we have had here under treatment for some considerable time, and in whom we shall be able to demonstrate a condition that is strikingly typical.

And now in order to make clear to you something that you will need to know before seeing this boy, I should like to draw for you here a sketch of the human organism, in its totality.

That there be no confusion, I will always draw the ego organisation red, then the astral organisation purple, the etheric organisation yellow, and lastly, the physical organisation white. And now let us be quite clear and exact in our thinking, and do our best to grasp the matter as accurately as possible. For the human organisation is not of such a nature that we can say: There is the ego organisation, there the astral organisation, there the etheric organisation, and so on. We must rather think of it in the following way. Picture to yourselves a being (see circles above, in the middle) organised in such a way that there is first of all, on the outside, the ego organisation (red); then, further inwards, the astral organisation (purple), then the etheric (yellow), and then the physical (white). You will have thus a being who shows his ego organisation outside, while he drives the astral organisation farther in, the etheric still farther in and the physical organisation farthest in of all.

And now, beside it, we will draw a different arrangement, where we have the ego organisation right inside (red), the astral organisation, as it were, raying outwards (purple); then, farther out, the etheric organisation (yellow), and still farther out, the physical organisation (white). We have now before us two beings that are the direct polar opposite of one another. Look at them carefully. As you see, the second being (on the left) will present, on the outside, a strong physical organisation, into which plays also the etheric organisation, whilst the astral and ego organisations tend to disappear within. But now, these conditions being given, a change can come about. The configuration of the being I have sketched here (on the left) may be modified in the following way (see Figure 1, left below). Here the physical organisation (white) may be fully developed above, while below it is unfinished, left open. Then we can have the etheric organisation (yellow), somewhat stronger here below than the physical, yet still unfinished. And we can have here the astral organisation (purple) coming down more in a sweeping curve; and, finally, the ego organisation (red) descending like a kind of thread. What we sketched before diagrammatically in the form of a sphere can quite well manifest also in this way.

To make the matter still clearer, I will draw this last figure here once again (see upper part of Figure 1, right)—the ego organisation (red), the astral organisation (purple), and ether organisation (yellow) and the physical organisation (white). And now we will add on to it below, the other being (figure in the middle, above) and we will do it in the following way. To begin with, for the ego organisation, which is outside, instead of describing a circle, as I did before, I will let the circle break and bend, so that we have this kind of form (red, on the lower part of Figure 1, on the right). As a matter of fact, this is what is continually happening with the sphere and the circle, wherever they occur in Nature—indeed, in the whole universe. Owing to the plasticity that is everywhere present, the sphere and the circle are perpetually undergoing modification in their form, being moulded and turned in various ways. Going inwards, I shall have to show next the astral organisation (purple); farther in, the ether organisation (yellow); and finally—pushed right inside, as it were—the physical organisation (white).

So now you have our second being changed into the head of man, and our first changed into the metabolism-and-limbs system. And in fact, this is how things really are in man. In the head organisation the ego hides itself right inside, the astral body is also comparatively hidden, while outside, showing form and shape, are the physical body and the ether body, giving form also to man's countenance. In the metabolism-and-limbs system, on the other hand, the ego is on the outside, vibrating all over the organism in its sensibility to warmth and to touch. Proceeding inwards from the ego, we have then the astral body vibrating in an inward direction; farther in, it all becomes etheric; and finally, inside the bones, it becomes physical.

We go therefore outwards from ego to physical body in the head organisation; the arrangement there is centrifugal. In the metabolism-and-limbs system, it is centripetal; we go here inwards from ego to physical. And the arrangement in the rhythmic system, in between the two, is in perpetual flow and interchange, so that one simply cannot say whether it is going from without inwards or from within outwards. For the rhythmic system is, in fact, half head system and half metabolism-and-limbs system. When we breathe in, it is more metabolism-and-limbs system; when we breathe out, it is more head system. The relationship between systole and diastole is expressed in the fact that the head system is to the limb system as outbreathing is to inbreathing. We carry therefore in us, you see, two directly opposite beings—mediated by the middle part of our organism, the rhythmic organism. What follows from this? A result, that is of no little importance.

Suppose we receive something through the medium of our head—as we do, for instance, when we listen to what another person is saying. Having been received by our head, it goes first into the ego, and into the astral body. But an interplay is always taking place in man's organism, and the moment something is caught and held fast, by means of an impression received in the one ego organisation (here in the head), it immediately vibrates right through into the other ego organisation (below). And then the same thing happens the moment something strikes home into the astral organisation; that too vibrates right through into the other astral organisation. If it were not so, we would have no memory. We owe our memory to the fact that all the impressions we receive from the external world have their reflections, their mirror-pictures, in the metabolism-and-limbs organisation. If I receive an impression from without, it disappears from the head organisation—which, as we have seen, is centripetally arranged, from physical on the outside to ego within. For the ego must maintain itself, it must hold its own. It cannot carry one single impression for hours on end; if it did, it would have to identify itself with the impression. No, it is down below that the impressions are preserved; and they have to make their way up again, for us to “remember” them.

But now, it may quite well happen that the whole of the lower system, which is, as we have seen, in direct polar contrast to the upper system, is constitutionally weak. In that case, when impressions occur, the impressions do not stamp themselves deeply enough into the lower system. The ego, let us say, receives an impression. If everything were normal, the stamp of the impression would be passed on to the lower system and only in the event of memory be fetched up again. If however the system down below, and in particular, the ego organisation—which covers there the whole periphery—is too weak, so that the impressions do not stamp themselves strongly enough, then the impressions that fail to sink down into the ego organisation of the lower system, keep streaming back again into the head.

We have with us a child who is constituted just in this way. One day we showed him, for the first time, a watch. It interested him. But his limb organisation is weak; consequently, the impression does not sink down, but rays back again. I sit down by this child, and begin to talk to him. All the time he is perpetually saying: “Lovely watch!” Hardly have I said a few more words than he says again: “A lovely watch!” The impression keeps coming back. In the education of children we must pay attention to such tendencies, of which there may sometimes be only very faint indications, but which are nevertheless quite important. For if we do not succeed in strengthening the too weak metabolism-and-limbs organisation, then this “streaming back” of impressions will go on happening with greater and greater intensity, and in later life the patient will suffer from the type of paranoia that is associated with fixed ideas. He will suffer from firmly fixed ideas. He will know that these ideas have no business to take up their abode, as it were, in his soul in this persistent way, but he will not be able to dismiss them. Why can he not dismiss them? Because while, up there above, there is the conscious soul-life, the unconscious, down below, is out of control; it keeps pushing certain ideas back into consciousness, which then become fixed ideas.

We said that the boy has a metabolism-and-limbs system that is too weakly developed. What does this mean? When metabolism and limbs are too weakly developed, the albumen substance in the human organism is prevented from containing the right amount of sulphur. We then have a metabolism-and-limbs system which produces albumen that is poor in sulphur. This can quite well happen; the proportion in which the constituents are combined in the albumen is, in such a case, different from what is usual. And, in consequence, we have in the patient what I have just been describing—fixed ideas, beginning to announce themselves in the organism in the years of childhood.

But now the opposite condition may also arise. The system of metabolism and limbs may be so constituted that it is too strongly attracted to sulphur. The albumen will then be too rich in sulphur. It will have in it carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and—in proportion—too much sulphur. In a metabolism-and-limbs system of this kind—for the system is influenced in its manifestations by the particular combination of the substances within it—there will not be, as before, the urge to push everything back; but, on the contrary, in consequence of the albumen being too rich in sulphur, the impressions will be absorbed too powerfully, they will nest themselves in too strongly.

Note that this is a different condition from the one I described in an earlier lecture, where there is a congestion at the surface of an organ. That condition gives rise, as we saw, to fits. It is not congestion that we have now, but a kind of absorption of the impressions: the impressions are, as it were, sucked in—and consequently disappear. We bring it about that the child has impressions, but to no purpose; impressions of a particular nature simply disappear into the oversulphurous albumen. And only if we can succeed in getting these impressions back, in drawing them out again from the sulphurous albumen—only then shall we be able to establish a certain balance in the whole organism of spirit, soul and body. For the disappearance of the impressions in the sulphurousness of the metabolism-and-limbs system induces a highly unsatisfactory condition of soul; it has a disturbing, exciting effect. The whole organism is a little agitated, a slight tremor runs through it.

As you know, I have often said that Psycho-Analysis is dilettantism “squared”, because the Psycho-Analyst has no real knowledge of soul or spirit or body—nor of ether body; he does not know what it is that is taking place, all he can do is to describe. And since this is all he can do, he is quite content simply to say: “The things have disappeared down below; we must fetch them up again.” The strange thing is, you see, that materialism is quite unable to probe thoroughly into the qualities even of matter! Otherwise it would be known that the disappearance of the impressions is due to the fact that the albumen-substance in the will organism contains too much sulphur. Only by following the path of Spiritual Science can the nature and character of physical substance be discovered.

It would be good if those who have to educate abnormal children would learn to have an eye for whether a child is rich or poor in sulphur. We shall, I hope, be able to speak together of many different forms of soul abnormalities, but you ought really to come to the point where certain symptoms indicate of themselves the main direction in which you have to look for the cause of the trouble. Suppose I have a child to educate, in whom I observe that impressions make difficulties for him. This may, of course, be due to conditions described in the previous lectures. But if I am right in attributing it to the condition we have been describing today, then how am I to proceed?

To begin with, I look at the child. (The first thing is, of course, to know the child, to make oneself thoroughly acquainted with him; that is the first essential.) I look at him, and notice one of the most superficial of symptoms, namely, the colour of his hair. If the child has black hair, I shall not take the trouble to investigate whether he be rich in sulphur, for a child who has black hair certainly cannot be rich in sulphur, though it is possible he may be poor in sulphur. If, therefore, abnormal symptoms are present, I shall have to look for their cause in some other sphere. Even if recurring ideas show themselves, I shall nevertheless, in the case of a child with black hair, have to look for the cause elsewhere than in richness of sulphur. If however I have to do with a fair-haired or red-haired child, I shall look for signs of overmuch sulphur in the albumen. Fair hair is the result of overmuch sulphur, black hair comes from the iron in the human organism. It is indeed the case that so-called abnormalities of soul and spirit can be followed right into the physical substance of the organism.

Now, let us take a little volcano of this kind, a sulphurous child, who sucks down impressions into the region of the will, where they stiffen and cannot get out. We shall very quickly be able to detect this in the child. He will be subject to states of depression and melancholy. The hidden impressions that he carries inside him are a torment to him. We must raise them to the surface, and we must go about it, not with psycho-analysis as it is understood today, but with a true and right psycho-analysis. We must observe the child and find out what kind of thing it is that is inclined to disappear in him. In the case of a child who confronts us on the one hand with inner excitement and on the other hand outwardly with a certain apathy, we shall have to watch carefully until we can ascertain quite exactly what things he remembers easily and what things he lets disappear within him. Things that do not come back to him, we should bring before him repeatedly, again and again, and as far as possible in rhythmic sequence. A great deal can be done in this direction, and often in a far simpler way than people imagine. Healing and education—and the two are, as you know, nearly related—do not depend so much on concocting all kinds of mixtures—be they physical or psychical!—but on knowing exactly what can really help.

What is important, then, is to be able to know in any particular case what particular substance is required; we must really succeed in following the path that brings us to that knowledge.

In my experience in the Waldorf School I have often come across children who seem, in a way, quite apathetic, but at the same time show signs also of being inwardly in a state of excitement. We had, for instance, in Herr K's Class, a particularly odd little person. He was at once excited and apathetic. He has by now improved considerably. When he was in the third class—he is now in the fifth—his apathy showed itself in the fact that it was not easy to teach him anything; he never took anything in, he learned only very slowly and with difficulty. But scarcely had Herr K. turned away from him and begun to bend over another child in front, than up would jump this little spark and hit him smack on the back! The boy was, you see, at one and the same time—inwardly, in his will, like quicksilver and intellectually an apathetic child.

There are, in fact, quite a number of children who have this kind of disposition, in greater or less degree; and it is important to note that in such children the capacity for absorption of external impressions is as a rule limited to impressions of a particular kind or type. If we have the right inspiration—and it will come, once we have the right disposition of mind and soul—we shall find for the child a certain sentence, for example, and bring it before him, suggest it to him. This can work wonders. It is only a question of guiding the whole activity and exertions of the child, of turning them in a certain direction. But this the teacher must achieve; and he can easily do so, provided he does not try to be too clever, but rather to live in such a way that the world, as it were, lies open to his view; he should not ponder overmuch about the world, but “behold” it, as it shows itself to him.

Think how boring it is—and what I am about to say is something you need to take seriously if you want to educate abnormal children—only think how tedious it is to have to go through life with no more than a handful of concepts! The soul-life of many people today is terribly barren and tedious, just because they are forced to get along with a very few concepts. With so small a range of concepts mankind slides all too easily into decadence. How hard it is for a poet today to find rhymes; all the rhymes have been used before! It is the same in the other arts; on every hand we have echoes and reminders of the past, or there is nothing new left to be done. Look at Richard Strauss, who is now so famous—and at the same time so severely criticised. He has made all kinds of innovations in orchestral music, merely in order to avoid repeating eternally the same old things.

But now think, on the other hand, what an interesting time you could have if you set out to study, let us say, every possible form of nose! Each person has a different nose; and if you were to learn to be observant and to have a quick perception for all the various forms of nose, you would soon begin to have variety in your mental content, and it would then be possible also for your concepts to become inwardly alive, you would be continually moving from one to another. I have taken the nose merely as an example, of course. Through developing an intelligent feeling for form as such, for all the variety of form that lies open to our perception, we shall actually be cultivating a disposition of soul that will enable us to receive inspiration when the occasion requires.

As you live your way into this beholding of the world—not a thinking about, but a real beholding of the world—you will find that, if you have a child who is inwardly sulphurous, alert and active, but outwardly apathetic, then, through your being able to behold him, something will suggest itself to you in connection with him and his special constitution, that provides you with the right idea. You will perhaps feel: I must say to him every morning: “The sun is shining on the hill”—or it can be some other sentence; it can be quite a simple, everyday sentence. What matters is that it comes to him rhythmically. When something of this kind is brought to the child rhythmically, approaching him as it were from outside, then all the sulphurous element in him is unburdened, it becomes freer. So, with these children—who should indeed be protected in the tender years of childhood, lest later on they become the pet victims of Psycho-Analysts—with these children we shall achieve a great deal if we reckon especially with their rhythmic nature, and let some such sentence be imparted to them so that it comes to them from outside again and again, rhythmically.

It is, in fact, very good to make a regular practice of this with all children. It works beneficially. In the Waldorf School we have arranged that school begins with a verse which, as it were, saturates the life of thought, day after day, in rhythmic sequence. And where you have a case of overabsorption in the organism, this practice will definitely help to bring relief.

We shall be doing the right thing for abnormal children, if we bring them together in groups every morning. If we have only a small number of children, we can of course, at any rate to begin with, take them all together. Something quite wonderful can come out of this. Let the children repeat a verse that is in the nature of a prayer, even though there may be some among them who cannot say a word; you will find this repeating in chorus has a wonderful balancing influence. And particularly in the case of a child in whom impressions tend to disappear, will it be important to induce certain impressions by means of such rhythmical repetition. You can change the impressions, say every three or four weeks, but you must continue bringing them to the child again and again. This will have the result of relieving the internal condition; it can indeed happen that the albumen gradually ceases to have an excess of sulphur-content. How is one to explain this? The trouble is, as we have seen, that the internal parts of the child are not giving back the impressions; that is to say, the movement from below upwards is too weak, it is even negative. If now we bring in a strong impulse from above, we rouse the movement from below (that is weak) to a stronger activity.

Suppose, however, we have the opposite state of affairs. Suppose we have children who already begin to show a tendency to fixed ideas. The raying back of impressions is in these children too strong; there is too little sulphur in the plasma. Here we shall have to do the contrary of what we did before. When we observe that the same sentence, the same impression is perpetually coming again and again to the child, it will be helpful if we ourselves fabricate for him a new impression (one which our instinct tells us may be right for this child) and then bring it to him in a gentle whisper, murmuring it softly in his ear.

The treatment could, for example, take the following form. The teacher says: “Look, there's red!” The child: “It's a lovely watch!” Teacher: “But you must look at the red.” Child: “A lovely watch!” And now we try repeating, each time a little more softly, a new impression which has the effect of paralysing the first. We say very softly: “Forget the watch!—Forget the watch!—Forget the watch!” Whispering to the child in this way, you will find that you gradually whisper away the fixed idea; as you whisper more and more softly, the fixed idea begins to yield, it too grows fainter and fainter. The remarkable thing is that when the idea is spoken—when the child hears it spoken—it is more weakly thought; it gradually quietens down, and at length the child gets the better of it. So we have this method too that we can use; and, as a matter of fact, very good results can be achieved with a treatment of this simple nature.

If only such things were known! Think how it is in an ordinary school. You have a class, and in this class are children who already have a tendency, though perhaps only slight, to fixed ideas. They are not transferred to special classes for backward children, they continue in their own class. And now perhaps there is a teacher who has a voice like thunder, who shouts loud enough to make the walls fall down. Later on, these children will turn into crazy men and women, suffering from fixed ideas. It would never have happened, had the teacher only known that he should at times speak more quietly, that he ought really to whisper certain things softly to the children. So very much depends on the manner in which we meet the children and deal with them!

Then, of course, in cases of this kind, the psychical treatment can be combined quite simply with ordinary therapy. If we have a child in whom impressions tend to disappear, it will be good to set out with the definite resolve to combat in this child the strong tendency he has to develop sulphur in the albumen. We can make good headway in this direction by seeing to it that the child has the right kind of nourishment. If, for instance, we were to give him a great deal of fruit, or food that is prepared from fruit, we should be nurturing and fostering his sulphurous nature. If, on the other hand, we give him a diet that is derived from roots, and contains substances that are rich, not in sugar, but in salt, then we shall be able to heal such a child. Naturally, this does not mean we are to sprinkle his food copiously with salt, but we should give him foods in which salt is contained—as it were, in already digested form. You will find that you can discover methods of this kind by learning to pay attention to things that are actually going on all the time in the world around you. (Here Dr. Steiner related a fact that he had himself observed, namely, that the population of a certain district instinctively preferred a particular diet, which worked counter to an illness that was prevalent in that district.) And so, in the case of these children, instead of leaving them to become subjects later on for the Psycho-Analyst, it would be far better if we were to give them in early childhood a diet that suits their need—a diet, that is, consisting of rather salty food.

Take now the opposite case—children who fail to absorb impressions, children in whom the impressions stream back. These children are poor in sulphur, and the best treatment for them is to give them as much fruit as possible; they will soon acquire a taste for it and enjoy eating it. If their condition has become decidedly pathological, we should try also to bring fragrance and aroma into their food; they should have fruits that smell sweetly. For aroma contains a strong sulphurous element. And for a very serious case, we shall have to administer sulphur direct. This can show you once again how from a spiritual study of the conditions, we are led straight on to the therapy that is required. But it must be spiritual study; it will never do to rest content with the mere description of phenomena; that will get us no further than symptomatology. What we have to do is to try to penetrate, in the way I have shown you, right into the inner structure and texture of the organism.

We have been considering irregularities which can occur in the human being when the lower part of him is not in right accordance with the upper part, so that the impressions which the head organisation receives above, fail to find the right resonance in the metabolism-and-limbs organisation. But now the condition is also possible where throughout the human being as a whole, ego organisation, astral organisation and etheric-physical organisation do not fit well together, do not harmonize. The physical organisation, let us say for example, is too dense. The child will then be absolutely incapable of sinking his astral body into this densified physical organisation. He will receive an impression in the astral body, and the astral body can stimulate the corresponding astrality of the metabolic system, but the stimulation is not passed on to the ether body, least of all to the physical. We can recognise this condition in a child by noticing how he reacts if we say to him: “Take a few steps forward.” He will not be able to do it. He does not rightly understand what he has to do. That is, he understands quite well the words we say, but he does not convey their meaning to his legs; it is as though the legs did not want to receive it. If we find this—that the child is in difficulties when we tell him to do something which involves the use of his legs, that he hesitates to bring his legs into movement at all—then that is for us a first sign that his physical body has become too hardened and is unwilling to receive thoughts; the child, in fact, shows indications of being feeble-minded. Since in such conditions the body bears too heavily on the soul, we shall find that moods of depression and melancholy also occur.

On the other hand, if a child's legs never wait for a command, but are perpetually wanting to run about, then we have in that child a tendency to a condition of mania. The tendency need only show itself very slightly, to begin with, but it is in the legs that we shall notice it first of all. It is accordingly most important that we should always include in our field of observation what a child does with his legs—and also with his fingers. A child who likes best to let his hands and legs—for you can notice the same thing in the hands—hang about anyhow, flop on to things, has the predisposition to be feeble-minded. A child who is perpetually moving his fingers, catching hold of everything, kicking out in all directions with his feet, is predisposed to become maniacal, and possibly violent.

But now these symptoms that are so marked in the limbs can be observed in all activities. In activities that are more connected with the spiritual and mental, they show themselves in a slighter form, and yet here too they are quite characteristic. In many children, for instance, you may be able to notice something like the following. A child acquires a knack of doing something with his hands. Let us say, he learns to draw a face in profile. And now, he simply cannot stop himself; whenever he sees anyone, he immediately wants to draw his profile. It becomes quite mechanical. This is a very bad sign in a child. Nothing will persuade him out of it. If he is just about to draw a profile, I can talk to him as much as ever I like, I can even offer him a sweet—he goes on just the same, the profile must be drawn! This is connected with the maniacal quality that develops when intellect runs to excess. The reverse of this—namely, the urge to do nothing, even when all the conditions are there ready, the urge not to let the thought go over into work and action—is connected with the feeble-mindedness that may be imminent.

All this goes to show that by learning to bring the limbs into proper control, we can do much to counteract on the one hand feeble-mindedness, and on the other hand the tendency to mania. And here the way is marked out for us at once to Curative Eurythmy.¹ In the case of a feebleminded child, what you have to do is to bring mobility into his metabolism-and-limbs system; this will stimulate also his whole spiritual nature. Let such a child do the movements for R, L, S, I (ee), and you will see what a good effect it will have. If, on the other hand, you have a child with a tendency to mania, then, knowing how it is with his metabolism-and limbs system, you will let him do the movements for M, N, B, P, A (as in Father), U (as in Ruth), and again you will see what an influence this will have on his maniacal tendency. We must always remember how intimate the connection still is in the young child between physical-etheric on the one hand, and soul-and-spirit on the other. If we bear this continually in mind, we shall find our way to the right methods of treatment.

• 1. For the relation of Curative Eurythmy to Eurythmy as Art see end of Lecture 12.