The Rudolf Steiner Archive

All the eurythmy performances from October 2 to 17, 1920, took place as part of the First College Course at the Goetheanum. As stated in the program, this course consisted of numerous lectures, primarily on the “scientific conscience of the present” through “demonstrations of positive spiritual scientific knowledge” in many fields. The aim was to show how the “reconciliation of science, art and religion” could be possible. The performances took place in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop - with the exception of the opening ceremony on September 26, 1920, which was the first event at the Goetheanum itself.

Program for the performance in Dornach, October 2 and 3, 1920.

The “Fairytale of the Spring Miracle” was performed only on October 2, 1920.

“The Fairy Tale of the Spring Miracle” by R. Steiner from The Testing of the Soul, with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Treasure Digger“ by J. W. v. Goethe
EVOE (Eurythmy without Words) with music by Max Schuurman
“To the Cicada” by J. W. v. Goethe
A saying from the Calendar of the Soul (26th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Children's Song“ by Max Schuurman
A saying from the Calendar of the Soul (27th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Little Dance” by J. S. Bach
“Hymn to Nature” by J. W. v. Goethe
Satirical Prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Explanation of an Antique Gem“ by J. W. v. Goethe
From the ‘West-östlichen Divan’ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Korfs Uhr” by Christian Morgenstern
“Palmströms Uhr” by Christian Morgenstern
“Den Originalen“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Séance” by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words in advance of our attempts at a eurythmic presentation. This is not done for the sake of explaining the presentation. That would be an inartistic beginning, because everything artistic must work through itself and must make its impression in immediacy. But since the aim here is to inaugurate an artistic movement that comes from special artistic sources that have not actually been tapped into until today and, on the other hand, draws on a special artistic formal language, some of these two, of the sources, of the special formal language, may be sent ahead of the experiment.

What you will see on the stage, ladies and gentlemen, will be an artistic performance using a non-verbal language that speaks through movement. The human body, through its limbs, is in relation to the individual or groups of people, in movements that express a non-verbal language. It is not a facial expression or a gesticulation that becomes the individual expression of the soul; nor is the individual emotional state expressed through an arbitrary gesture or facial expression. Rather, what you will see in the movements of the individual human being or groups of people is something that has been drawn from the human organization itself, and specifically through a process that I would call — borrowing a Goethean expression — a sensory-supersensory seeing.

When we communicate with one another or express our soul life, we use the speech sound language. This speech sound language has as its tools the larynx and the other speech organs. What initially demands our attention is the sound that is produced by the larynx and its neighboring organs. But one can also discern through sensory-supersensory observation the movement tendencies that are present in the larynx and its neighboring organs when a sound is formed. And one has to distinguish between what is conceived as a tendency to move and the actual movements, the vibrational movements that the air carries out and which, by being carried out, mediate between the speaker and the listener. It is not these movements that are initially thought, but the tendencies towards these movements, which are not even noticed in ordinary speech. These tendencies of movement, which, as I said, can be studied through sensory-supersensory observation, can be transferred to the human being as a whole; I would say: they can be transferred according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphosis teaching. This Goethean theory of metamorphosis is something that is still far from being recognized in its deep essence, but which, once it is recognized in its depth, will shine deeply into the laws of life, of the origin of life, of becoming alive, and so on. To put it in the simplest terms, Goethe says: the whole plant is basically nothing more than a complicated leaf. And every single leaf is a whole plant, only simply and primitively executed. According to the idea, the individual leaf is a whole plant, and according to the external physical, sensory reality, a concrete manifestation of the individual leaf is the whole plant.

If we study what Goethe applied to the formation of living things – he also extended it to the formation of animals – if we really study it through sensory and supersensory observation in the human being itself and then transfer it into artistic sensation, if we translate what we have heard in the dormant form of Goethe into then one can transfer that which a single organ – corresponding to the leaf of Goethe's Metamorphosis – that which a single organ or a group of organs – the larynx and its neighboring organs – expresses, one can transfer it to movements of the limbs of the whole human being or to movements of groups of people. And in this way one can create a soundless language that is just as inwardly lawful as the sounding language.

It is this language that eurythmy makes use of. This language presents the whole human being or groups of people as a kind of ensouled larynx or other speech organs. And just as one can feel the meaning of what is spoken through language without thinking about it in detail, one can also become aware of what speaks from this soundless language in an immediate aesthetic sense. And just as sounding language can be processed and artistically shaped, so too can this moving language be artistically shaped. And in this way one acquires a very special ability in artistic expression. For one may say: the more civilized our speech becomes, the less artistic it actually becomes. And a time that will feel more artistic than ours will see how a civilized language is actually less and less suitable as a means of expression for poetic representation. For on the one hand, language is developing in such a way that it becomes an expression of thought. But where the thought emerges, there, in essence, the direct artistic feeling ceases. All that lives in our expressions, in our revelations as a direct thought, is actually inartistic. The artistic must work in direct impression, must take hold only of the senses at the very foundation.

In ordinary speech, thought and everything that comes from the whole human being as a volitional impulse flow together. It is as if thought and volitional impulses are in harmony, and this is what is revealed in speech.

By now moving down into the whole human body, by letting it move that which is otherwise expressed in sounding language, we can achieve that the actual revelation, the linguistic, is moved down after the will element. In a sense, thought is excluded. The human being's soul-spiritual comes to direct perception through movement. By stripping away what is attached to language as a means of expressing thoughts and makes it unstructured (?), or what is attached to it, since educated language is becoming more and more conventional, one goes back to a primal element of the artistic precisely in the form of eurythmic expression.

Of course, what is first eurythmized is not yet artistic. But it is possible, through the qualities that I have just emphasized, to express the artistic in a very special way through eurythmy - including the poetic and the musical. And so, in parallel with what you will see on stage through soundless speech, you will hear the recitation or you will hear music. Basically, what is expressed in recitation is just another form, another manifestation of the same thing that is expressed in our eurythmy; so that we have the recitation accompanying the eurythmy, and on the other hand we have music. In the same way that music is a lawful progression of tones and it is in the lawful connections between tones that the true artistry lies, so it is in the succession of movements in eurythmy.

One can see that in a sense eurhythmy goes back to the original elements of artistry when one realizes that eurhythmy cannot be recited in the unformed way of today's recitation. Here, too, one must go back to the eurhythmic in poetry. For basically only that which lives beyond the content of prose, that which lives beyond the literal, is truly artistic. Again and again we must point out that basically the art of poetry is only an art to the extent that what is presented is related to music on the one hand or pictorial sculpture on the other. Schiller, before he developed any kind of poetry – at least in the case of his most important poetry, one can say – had an indeterminate melody living in his soul. And he could just as easily have added the prose content, the content in general, of either poem to this melody.

Here we have the musical element that comes to expression in poetry and that we can bring out through eurythmy. On the other hand, with a poet like Goethe we always have the pictorial element, which is also pictorially represented in language. This is what is actually artistic. The recitation that goes hand in hand with eurythmy must go back to this artistic element, to that which has little to do with the content but everything to do with the artistic presentation. Therefore, we must overcome what is currently considered to be the most meaningful aspect of recitation: One wants, so to speak, to find means of expression for the content. One is not aware that in doing so one actually goes beyond the artistic, that one actually turns the poem into a piece of prose. Whereas it is precisely in the movement of the sound, in the movement of the thought, that which constitutes the actual artistic element of poetry. And so we can hope that through eurythmy our largely unartistic age can be led back to something artistic.

That is one thing. That is the artistic aspect of our eurythmic endeavors. The other is a hygienic-therapeutic side. I will not speak of this here. And the third is a didactic-pedagogical element. You will see our children's eurythmy again, and you will see how easily children find their way into eurythmic performances. One can say that this eurythmy is a soul-filled form of gymnastics for the child. Certainly, future times will think more objectively about this than we do today. I certainly do not want to go as far as a well-known modern physiologist recently went, who said to me here in this hall after a eurythmy performance that gymnastics is actually not an educational tool but a barbarism. As I said, I do not want to go that far, but I do want to at least point out that ordinary gymnastics, however much it has been emphasized in a materialistic age, is only about the physical development of the body according to physiological laws.

Of course, gymnastics has its good sides and is very useful; but for the child, when it has to put soul into every movement, when no movement is performed other than that the child connects meaning and soul with it, something very special comes into education, into teaching, through soulful gymnastics, through children's eurythmy. It brings in what I believe our time, our sleepy time, particularly needs: soul initiative, will initiative. We will see that when eurythmy is taken up on a broader scale in education - as we have done at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, where eurythmy is a compulsory subject - it can help to instill in people precisely what they need so urgently if a more active age than ours is to arise for the next generation: initiative of the soul.

I only wanted to say a few words about what our eurythmy actually aspires to be. We have been striving for some time to make this eurythmy more and more perfect. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize that for the time being we are only dealing with a beginning, perhaps even with an attempt at a beginning. We ourselves are the strictest critics of what we can find in this direction today. But those who have been there often and have seen how we strive, especially in the formation of the eurythmic, to achieve that we give the style and artistic execution of the poem, that we learn more and more to overcome pantomime and all mimicry and to see the essential in moving music. Those who have been here often will also notice how we endeavor to distinguish the humorous and the comical from the serious, how we endeavor to enter into the inner rhythm of thought, which you will see in the first piece here, into the artistic shaping of the thought. In the poetic arts today, people cannot even distinguish the rhythm of the thought from the content of the thought. Anyone who notices all this will say to themselves, if they come here often, how we try to progress with our eurythmy.

Nevertheless, I ask for your forbearance, because we know we are at the beginning. But we also carry within us the conviction that if we continue with this eurythmic art in the same spirit in which we have begun, it will become ever more perfect. And it will - probably no longer through us, but through others - one day become something that can stand as a fully-fledged art form alongside the other, older, legitimate art forms.

Program of the performance in Dornach, October 30 and 31, 1920.

Mercury prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Devachan scene: 7th picture from the Portal of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner
“In the Sistine Chapel” by C. F. Meyer NZ 2420
Prelude ‘Fateful Question’ with music by Leopold van der Pals
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (29th) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (30th) by Rudolf Steiner
Opening of the elves
“Erlkönig“ by]. W. v. Goethe
Opening of the planetary dance with music by Max Schuurman
“World Soul” by J. W. v. Goethe
Children's poem (children's group)
“The Walk” by Martin Opitz with music by Max Schuurman (children's group)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘The Problem’ by Christian Morgenstern; ‘Muhme Kunkel’ series: ‘Muhme Kunkel’; ‘The Parrot’; ‘Lore’; ‘Lorus’; ‘Word Art’
“The Pied Piper” by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me to say a few words before these eurythmy performances, as I usually do, not to explain the presentation. Art must work through itself, through the immediate impression, through what you are able to see by participating. But this eurythmy, which we cultivate here, wants to draw from artistic sources that have been used less so far. It seeks to express itself in an artistic formal language that has also been used very little. And so I would like to say a few words about the nature of this eurythmic art.

What you will see on the stage is people or groups of people in motion. The movements that are performed are essentially not gestures, they are not a mimic representation, nor are they a completely dance-like , but is in fact a visible language, and a true language at that, a language that is not derived from the interpretation of words or the like, but that is based on a careful study of the essence of the sound language itself.

In the case of sound, we are also dealing with movements that the larynx and the other speech organs want to carry out, but which do not emerge as such, but are, as it were, stopped in their development, so that they then transform into the air movement through which the sound is conveyed. Through sensory-supersensory observation – that is a Goethean expression – one can actually form an idea of how the larynx and the other speech organs want to move, what this inner movement is like as it is developing, and how it is transformed into sound. And then, as it were, through the movement of a single organism or a group of organs of the human organism, one can bring about a visible language through the whole person, so that the whole person moves, namely his arms move in such a way as the speech organs want to move in the sound language, but stop in the will, so that sound comes out.

Now one can say that by making the whole human being the larynx, so to speak, or making groups of people the larynx, to a certain extent speech organs are transformed, that one able to tap into truly artistic sources and an artistic formal language, including for that which is otherwise expressed musically or, in particular, that which is otherwise expressed poetically. This happens in the following way.

The poet must express himself through language. In more advanced civilizations, language becomes more and more conventional on the one hand, but on the other hand, language also increasingly becomes the expression of abstract thought. Neither conventional nor abstract thinking can have any kind of artistic effect. Therefore, if I want to express myself in a somewhat trivial way, it can be said that poetry becomes increasingly difficult in civilized languages unless other elements of expression are used to help.

We can already imagine something under what I call a visible language here, when I refer you, I would like to say, to the other pole, to the abstract, inartistic pole of language development, the other pole in relation to eurythmy, which we will talk about in a moment. To a certain extent, writing, which we then fix on our paper, is also seen as a metamorphosis of speech. It is, in a sense, a kind of visible language. But writing develops in the other direction. We can trace writing back to where it was in its original stages. We see how the thought, the idea that a person formed of an external object, is still placed into the written character or characters, how the mental element becomes a kind of mute language in writing, a kind of visible language.

But then what was initially present as pictographic writing or hieroglyphic writing develops into completely conventional writing. That is one pole. I would like to say that the thought life of language enters into writing. Language becomes mute in writing. The thought element enters into writing. Writing is thus also a kind of visible language.

The further a civilization advances, the less one can tell from its writing how it wells up out of the living language. In the original writings, one would still notice this human-individual-personal element in the writing. You would still feel a kind of silent, visible language in the writing when you look at the original manuscripts. But then, little by little, as humanity develops, the element that lives in language passes completely into the conceptual and the conventional, that is, into the inartistic. And the more man wants to capture the conceptual in writing, the more inartistic writing becomes. Isn't it true that the highest potency of the inartistic is stenography, which is already terrible in itself because of its contrast to everything artistic.

Now one can come to the other pole, where one does not consider the mental element of language, but rather the will element. When a person speaks, the mental element, which is borrowed from the things of the external world, and the will element, the part that the person has in the external world and what wells up from within, flow together in his speech sound element. What flows into writing is completely rejected – it is completely rejected. When one studies the sound language in order to make eurythmy out of it, one introduces, as it were, that which is externalized in writing, thrown out, so that one then has the written word in front of one and nothing more of the human being is in it, it is completely separated from the human being: In a sense, this is incorporated into eurythmy. Through movement, the human being is made to express in his totality, in his wholeness, that which is the will element in speech.

But this means that while in writing, which is also a mute language, the linguistic element detaches itself from the human being, it becomes more and more intimately connected when one moves on to eurythmy, which in turn lives entirely within the human being where the human being does not fixate in a separate sign what is expressed in language, but where the human being makes himself the tool, the artistic tool, of what lives in language, for example in poetry. So one can say: language is structured towards two poles. On the one hand, there is the non-artistic element of writing, which is completely rejected when one studies language inwardly through sensory-supersensory vision in such a way that one then metamorphoses it into eurythmy. In this way, the human being takes everything into his own being, everything that lives in his will, in his mind, lives through poetry and is revived in the movements of eurythmy.

Therefore, for example, on the one hand, what can appear in eurythmy as an artistic movement can be set to music. But basically eurythmy is the best expression of the inner artistic quality of poetry. The inner artistic quality of poetry is not the prose content of the poem, but rather that which lives in rhythm, in beat, in short: in the musical, which is therefore that on which the words move as if only on waves. Or it is the pictorial. Both the pictorial aspect of language and the musical aspect of language are particularly emphasized in eurythmy. Because the human will expresses itself through the human instrumentality, we can say: when we see the human being in motion — but who acts as if he were the soul-content expressing itself in speech — we have before us something that we can see directly, that we do not need to understand first.

Of course, people are not yet accustomed to eurythmy. That is why they say that much of it is incomprehensible to them. But the more accustomed we become, the more we will find that every eurythmic movement, every sequence of movements, is an immediate expression of what is simultaneously evoked in the recitation of the poem. And then one will see this whole human being as an instrument for the soul. One will see it, and at the same time one will have the soul. For naturally the human being puts his soul into eurythmic movement, that soul which the poet can only imperfectly express in language because the unartistic element of thought enters into it.

So what the human being experiences in civilization, I would like to say, in terms of “prosaicization”, if I may choose the expression, where he becomes more and more prosaic and prosaic the more he writes, [is balanced]. Sometimes people no longer have a real inner experience of what is being said; they come to no longer hear the language but actually to transfer it directly into writing, whereby from the outset the human being flows entirely into prose. Poetry will return to human feeling, to human emotion, when we come to eurythmy, by taking language into the inner being of the human being, into his movements.

Therefore, recitation as it is done today in our unartistic time, in our paper age, cannot be done as eurythmy is recited. For eurythmy, it must be recited in such a way that one hears rhythm, beat, and musicality, that one senses the image that lives in the poet, and that the words, so to speak, only provide an opportunity to bring to revelation the deeper, more artistic aspect of the poetry. In eurythmy, the words as such do not live, the heard words do not live. But in this way the inartistic element of the thought also disappears, and in eurythmy only that part of the poetry that is truly artistic comes to life.

In recent times we have often tried to shape through forms that which otherwise lives in the feeling of language. You will see, especially in the case of the things we are performing today, how, on the one hand, in the case of the serious poems, the form expresses the how of the creation, and how, in the case of the humorous and comic poems, we also express the style of the poem through the different style of the forms. That is one side of it.

Eurythmy has many other sides, including a hygienic and therapeutic side, which I will not discuss here. It also has a pedagogical and didactic side, which has already proved to be a blessing in the one year that we had eurythmy as a compulsory subject at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. There we could see how children benefit from this soul-filled exercise, which is quite different from mere gymnastics that only trains the body, where they do not merely perform movements that are first studied from a physiological point of view to see whether they are beneficial for the body, but where the child puts its soul into every movement it performs.

This is something that adults who engage in eurythmy can no longer feel, that no longer has any great significance for them, but that is evident in children, because in eurythmy the human being has a revelation of his soul nature, and this connects him with his humanity in a very significant way. If eurythmy is used as a teaching tool, it will also have a teaching effect on the sense of truth. The more abstract languages become, the less truthful they are. The element of set phrases is particularly developed in more advanced languages because the language becomes detached from the human being.

In eurythmy, everything that becomes detached in language is taken back into the human being. When we make ourselves an instrument and completely immerse ourselves in what we feel, we cannot be untrue. And when children are allowed to do eurythmy, they develop a sense of truthfulness and an instinctive feeling for all that is meaningful. These are the educational and didactic results that will be found when these things are thought about objectively.

I must always ask for forbearance when it comes to demonstrations, because eurythmy has only been cultivated for a few years. It is in its infancy, it is an experiment. But anyone who engages with the sources and with the artistic language of forms can know that there is an unlimited potential for development in it. We will discover more and more possibilities for presenting the art of eurythmy.

For some time now, I have been concerned with the question of how to express the dramatic. We can now only express the epic and the lyrical, and the actual drama, when it expresses the supersensible, you will find portrayed today, drama that expresses the supersensible, in a piece of one of my “mystery dramas”. The supersensible can also be adequately portrayed in eurythmy in a drama. But the ordinary dramatic, which, so to speak, takes place in the world of the senses, is something I have set myself as a problem, for which we will also find the eurythmic forms.

As you can see, everything is still in flux. Therefore, as I said, I still have to ask for forbearance. We are our own harshest critics and we know very well that eurythmy is still in its infancy. However, we also know that if it continues to develop, the eurythmic art will grow from its beginnings into a complete art that can stand alongside the other, older, fully-fledged arts, so that it will be recognized as equal to them.

Dear attendees,

I am taking the liberty of saying a few words in advance, not to explain our eurythmy performance – for artistic things must speak through their own impression, through direct perception, and to want to explain them would be unartistic – but for the reason that I would like to say a few words in advance because what we are trying to do here at the Goetheanum with eurythmy is to research and create from artistic sources that have been little considered by art so far, and because this eurythmy wants to express itself through a particular artistic formal language that has also been little used so far.

It is very easy to mistake what we see here on the stage, with people and groups of people moving, for something borrowed from neighboring arts. But eurythmy is not meant to be what dance art is, what pantomime is, what mimic performance is, and so on. Rather, eurythmy wants to develop as an art, building on a special visible language. And this visible language, which is revealed through the moving human being, is not something arbitrarily conceived. The individual gestures, the individual movements that you see are also not at all arbitrarily conceived, but have come about in such a lawful way as human speech, the speech of sounds, comes about in a lawful way.

What is expressed as sound language is based on movements of the larynx and the other speech organs. These movements, however, take place in a special way, in such a way that basically these speech organs only attempt the movement; the movement is arrested and converted into air movement. And it is through the vibrations of the air that the sounds and tones of the speech sounds are conveyed.

But that which is actually only present in the speech organs during ordinary speech, which is held back in order to become external air movement, can, if I may use Goethe's expression, be truly recognized through sensory-supersensory observation. It is possible to recognize, if one is able to turn one's attention to these movement tendencies of the larynx and the other speech organs through sensuous-supersensuous observation, it is possible to recognize from which speech predispositions of these individual organ groups the speech sounds actually arise. And then, based on Goethe's artistic attitude and view of art, one can build a mute language, construct a visible language, by having the whole human being or groups of people perform the movements that are actually present in the speech organs and are transformed into sound language.

In this way the whole human being – or groups of people – become the bearers of a silent language. Admittedly, at first one has the impression that this silent language cannot be readily and obviously understood. But, dear assembled, we must be clear about the fact that we do not immediately understand ordinary spoken language either, in any form; we have to learn it.

Now, one does not need to learn the eurythmic language in this way, but there are many preconceptions - if I may use the word in analogy to prejudices - against it, when one sees the individual moving in his limbs, and at first one has to overcome the unfamiliar a little. But then, once you have overcome this unfamiliarity a little, you will feel that the inner life of the soul can be revealed just as much through the movements and sequences of movements that are performed here as it is through the language of sound. And that what is expressed through the language of sound can be translated, I would like to say, my dear audience, into the visible, for this we have a very ordinary fact in our writing.

The writing that emerged from pictographic writing or from sign writing can no longer be understood today in such a way that one sees great similarities between it and language. But this is only the case with writing that has already been developed in more advanced civilizations, writing that has already completely transitioned into abstract signs. The original writings bear the character of how they emerged from a reproduction of speech.

But this development of writing, I would say, is at the opposite pole to eurythmy. When language develops into writing, it is allowed to penetrate into the conventional. In relation to writing, we are very dependent on the people, on the community of people, within which we stand. And we have to adapt to this human community, to the community of the people - you let it flow out completely in writing. There is nothing personal or at least very little personal in it. Man does not reveal himself in his soul life through writing, or at least only to a small extent. The writing is separated, carried out into the prosaic, and actually visualized. What is writing for if not a mute language? Writing is a mute language for that which lies in our language as thought-life. Thus writing becomes something inartistic. And something horribly inartistic becomes the trained writing that wants to adapt completely to the thought: the stenography, of course, which is somewhat outrageously inartistic, which strives to drive what is spoken into the inartfulness of language.

Thinking, then, is what kills all art. Art lives in the elements of feeling, will, and mind.

Eurythmy, on the other hand, develops speech in the opposite direction. It allows speech to radiate back out from the human being, to be taken back by the human being. Instead of speech being transformed into written characters, it is taken back by the human being. This means that the human being's will element, their personal element, is activated through the movements that are expressed in eurythmy. And in that we see the human being, or groups of people, as it were, as a moving larynx, in that this silent language of eurythmy reveals itself, we have something before us through which the human being's soul life can directly reveal itself in silent language through the instrument of the human organism.

And so, on the one hand, we can regard what appears before us in a musical form – what is accompanied on one side, what is presented on stage – as another expression of eurythmy, but what is still to be presented through eurythmy is that which emerges from language into the artistic realm. It can therefore be accompanied, and will be accompanied, by recitation or declamation. These bring out precisely how the artistic element of poetry comes into play as the conceptual element is stripped away in the eurythmic movement.

But you cannot, as is believed today, recite or declaim, you cannot accompany eurythmy with this purely prosaic, inartistic recitation, which, precisely because we live in an inartistic time, is not seen as inartistic at all. You could not accompany eurythmy with it. This is just one sign of the lack of artistry in our time, that there is no longer any inclination for the formal element to immediately come into its own at the moment when a poem is to be recited or declaimed.

In artistic declamation, the prose content of the poem does not have to be effective, which, after all, is only intended to serve as a point of reference, so to speak, through which rhythm, meter, the musicality and the imagery of the poem develop. That is why poetry today basically has a hard time rising from language to become real art. In civilized languages, in particular, on the one hand, the abstract expression of thought becomes predominant. This is inartistic. Or, on the other hand, they become the expression of conventional communication between people – again inartistic. Language is only artistic when it is the direct expression of the soul, the inwardly moved expression of the soul's feelings. Real poets, like Schiller, for example, have first of all had an indefinite melody in their soul for each of their poems. And in Schiller's case, the prose content of the poems only followed on from this melody.

And on the other hand, on the prose side, today the emphasis is somehow created and so on. And so, from the outset, something that is popular with many people today in the art of recitation is something that has nothing to do with real recitation. Real recitation art must look at the rhythm, the beat, the musicality, or the poetic content of the poetry, not at the prosaic.

Real eurythmy shows that when in a poem that which is to be felt in terms of content or what is to be felt musically [gap in the text]. If, on the other hand, it is to be eurythmized that which, in a just civilized language, is basically unartistic in poetry, that is, mere prose content - however beautiful or witty the prose content may be - if that is to be eurythmized, it becomes extremely difficult. That is why such poems, as you will see in what you are about to see in my presentation of the spiritual realm to which the human being can rise with his feelings and thoughts, in what is written from the outset in a simple language or in a more complicated language only when one forms new word connections for what is thought eurythmically from the outset, is viewed eurythmically - it more or less eurythmizes itself. Whereas the eurythmic form is extremely difficult to find for what is carried out of a civilized language, as is usually the case with our art poets, where it depends on the witty content.

That is precisely the peculiar thing, that through the eurythmic art, poetry as the expression of the human soul can be taken back into the human being. Therefore, the artistic pole is developed in eurythmy in contrast to the spiritual, which, on the one hand, develops language into a mute language, and is brought to the human being in such a way that everything personal, everything conceptual, everything volitional is carried into movement. Therefore, in our time, which is so unartistic in many respects, one will be able to experience a genuine artistic feeling, a genuine feeling for the artistic, through eurythmy. On the one hand, this could be said about the artistic that is attempted with our eurythmy.

But eurythmy also has other sides. Just as it brings forth the mute language of eurythmy from the artistic, it has also brought forth a natural side of the human being, the therapeutic and hygienic side. I will not go into this today, as it would take us too far afield. But I would like to mention very briefly that this eurythmy also has a significant pedagogical-didactic side. We have therefore introduced it as a compulsory subject in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, and already in the first year it has become clear how this moving, soulful gymnastics - this is how it initially affects the child - has an extraordinarily beneficial influence alongside ordinary gymnastics. By performing the movements, the child finds that the body moves as if by itself. It perceives this as something quite different from the gymnastics that is taught to the child. I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous physiologist of the present day, who told me some time ago that gymnastics is not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism. Once we think more impartially and objectively than we do today, we will realize what a difference it makes to the child whether the movements used in gymnastics are devised purely on the basis of physiological observation or whether a soul-filled, spiritualized form of gymnastics is used, as eurythmy is for the child, where it feels soulfully and spiritually in the movements it performs, where it knows itself to be completely within, not, I would say, forcibly, through bodily movements that have been thought up, as it were, and which it must follow.

That is what I would have to say about eurythmy if it is introduced as a subject in schools. And it must be introduced because it will develop the will initiative in children in particular, because it will bring initiative into the human soul and because it will bring out another element, which can no longer emerge so strongly when adults learn eurythmy, but which will emerge to the greatest extent in children: that our language, especially when it is a civilized language, tends more and more to fantasy. We speak because we want to speak. And language becomes - as can be seen by anyone who can really study the soul in this respect - language gradually becomes more and more untrue, the more civilized it becomes.

By taking language back into the movements of his own body, the human being must be present for everything that the soul wants to express. When introduced at the right time, this has an effect on the child such that the sense of truth, the sense of the opposite of all phraseology, will emerge in the child at the same time. In the future, people will think much more freely about these things. These things are only just beginning.

For this reason, I always have to ask the esteemed audience for their forbearance when we present a eurythmy experiment here. We are our own harshest critics and know very well what we are only just able to do with our eurythmy art today. But we also know that what is just beginning to emerge today can be developed further and further by ourselves or, more likely, by others. Then the time will surely come when developed eurythmy, which uses the noblest tool, the microcosm itself, and which uses the human being as a tool and thus comes so close to Goethe's word so close: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn sees himself as a summit of nature, takes harmony, measure and meaning together and rises to the production of the work of art.

Man rises to the production of the work of art, not when he [gap in the text], but when he makes himself the tool of artistic revelation. For this reason, although we are only at the beginning of the eurythmic art today, I would like to emphasize that all of this is already possible in the development of the eurythmic art. Therefore, if you look at things impartially, you have to be convinced that eurythmy can continue to develop and will be able to stand alongside its older sister arts as a fully-fledged, youngest art in the future.

Program for the performance in Dornach, December 5, 1920

The Fairy Tale of the Miracle of the Springs from The Testing of the Soul by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (33rd) by Rudolf Steiner
“To the Young Mineralogist” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (34th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Mächtiges Überraschen“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Wiegenlied” folk song (children's group)
“Those evening bells“ by Thomas Moore
Saying from the soul calendar (34.) by Rudolf Steiner
Folk song (children's group)
“Mailied” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Vöglein“ folk song (children's group)
“Hubâ” [?]
“Ein Rätsel - ein Männlein steht im Walde” (children's group)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘Korfs Geruchssinn’; ‘Geruchsorgel’; ‘Der Aromat’

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words to introduce the eurythmy presentation that we will be treating you to. I do not do this in order to explain the content of the performance as such, because it goes without saying that everything artistic must speak for itself; explaining an artistic performance would itself be something inartistic. Rather, I do it because what we are doing here as a eurythmic art draws in a certain way on new artistic sources and a new artistic, at least a hitherto unfamiliar artistic, formal language. And I would like to say a few words about this.

You will see, first of all, the individual on the stage moving the limbs of this physical organization in a certain way. You will also see groups of people performing coordinated, lawful movements. These artistic achievements in movement will be accompanied, on the one hand, by music and, on the other, by recitation. It is exactly what we have here as eurythmy, conceived as a real visible language. Therefore, what is called eurythmy here should not be confused with anything mimic, pantomime or even dance-like.

Our eurythmy has nothing to do with any of this. Rather, it is about creating a real visible language that comes about through movements of one's own human body. If I may use Goethe's expression, this language is studied through sensual and supersensory observation of what takes place in the human larynx and the other speech organs in terms of their structure and movement tendencies, while the human being develops speech or song. And precisely for this reason, what is represented through eurythmy approaches the musical on the one hand, and thus comes close to the purely musical, the instrumental, while on the other hand it approaches the thinking, which is expressed through poetry.

But, as I said, it is not a matter of some random gesture, of something mimed, so that a single gesture might be sought for the stirring of the soul, for the feeling. Rather, it is a matter of seeking out that what the larynx and its neighboring organs want to do when a person forms this or that sound, when they form this or that sequence of sounds, when they bring language into those laws through which it can form the basis for the poetic arts and so on. So that one does not see the essence of eurythmy in the individual gestures – it is not about gestures at all – but in the sequence of gestures, just as one has to look for the essence in the sequence of notes in music and in the sequence of sounds in speech, which is what matters.

In this way the whole human being becomes, as it were, a visible speech organ. The whole human being becomes a larynx and presents speech or song and music on the stage. And the laws of this language are derived from the same foundations as human speech. The only difference is that in the latter case, it is only the larynx and the other speech organs that make the initial movement. Then the movement is held in while this movement tendency comes into contact with the external air. What is set in motion in the larynx is transformed into an outward movement of the air, and speech is created. What is present in the larynx or in the other speech organs before speech is formed is transferred to the whole person and expressed through the whole person.

It is based on both Goethe's view of nature and art, namely Goethe's artistic attitude. Goethe founded the theory of metamorphosis, that magnificent view of the inner lawfulness and essence of living things, which is still far from being appreciated and which will most certainly continue to play a major role in the future, scientifically. If we take just one aspect of Goethe's view of nature, not to present it as a theory but for a different purpose, which will be shown in a moment, if we take just one aspect, we have to say that in the individual plant leaf Goethe sees the whole plant in its potential; in the whole plant he sees a complex leaf. So that to him, life is a combination of details that are equal to the whole in idea, but which in turn are formed according to the same principle into a unity on a large scale. What Goethe has as an insight into form in his theory of metamorphosis should meet you artistically in eurythmy.

When a person formulates speech, one aspect of their organization, the speech organs, is activated. In a sense, the entire human organization is active, localized in the human speech organs, just as Goethe saw the whole plant localized in the plant leaf from the outset, so to speak. But what can be observed through sensory-supersensory vision in the larynx can be transferred to the whole human being in the same way that one can think of the organizing force of the [whole] plant being transferred to the [single] leaf. In this way one has a real, visible language, governed by natural laws, which can then be given artistic form. Of course, as a visible language it is not artistic at first; it must be given artistic form, and then it can be used to express the same things that the poet or the composer express through their artistic forms.

If we judge what eurythmy is meant to be by its gestural expression, then we will not be able to judge it at all. We will only be able to judge it if we see the laws of movement in eurythmy in the same way that we see the melodious element in the lawful progression of tones. In this, my dear audience, the human being is taken as an instrument for artistic expression, and in this way, too, we come close to the highest sense of Goethe's artistic spirit. Goethe spoke beautifully about the relationship between the human being and the rest of the world. He said: When the human being is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn feels himself to be all of nature, taking in order, harmony, measure and meaning and rising to the creation of the work of art.

The best way for a person to create a work of art is to see themselves as an instrument that combines order, harmony, measure and meaning. This is precisely what eurythmy does, not by using an external musical instrument but by using the human being themselves, the human organization, as a tool. But, my dear audience, one comes very close to the artistic through this eurythmy, closer than through many other artistic means and formal languages. For let us take the poetic language: Especially in the civilized languages, since language is on the one hand thoroughly permeated by a moving (?) Element that actually serves only human communication. What is originally a direct poetic, artistic element in language thus passes into prose. Likewise, the linguistic element in a civilized language passes into prose through the inclusion of the thought element. Thought as such is the inartistic element, and the more form something contains, the less it contains of artistic effects.

In our languages, it is therefore difficult to produce something truly artistic without resorting to new means of expression. After all, poetry is basically only as artistic as its musicality - rhythm, meter, and so on - and its pictorial-plasticity. The literal is not the essence of poetry. That is why I must always point out that true poets, who as poets are also artistic through and through – such as Schiller, for example – did not initially place the main emphasis on the literal content of a poem , but rather he had a certain indeterminate melody in his soul, and it was from this indeterminate melody that he first shaped that to which he, so to speak, gives the literal content. And Goethe placed so little value on the literal in poetry, even in drama, and much more on the rhythmic, the metrical, the musical and pictorial, that he himself studied his Iphigenia with his actors, conducting it with a baton like a piece of music.

You can see how eurythmy, by observing it, leads back that which becomes prosaic in thought, that which, in thought, leads away from art in poetry, how that which is prosaic in thought is led back into the will element, in which the whole human being becomes a means of expression. But because everything conventional and everything conceptual is gone from the language, because the language works as a visible means of expression through the whole human being, through this, especially in poetry, it is reduced to the actual artistic basis of it.

This can be seen from the fact that, for example, when recitation is done in parallel with the eurythmic presentation, it cannot be recited in the same way as an unartistic time like the present imagines recitation. One recites according to the literal content, that is, according to the prose. Today recitation is basically only done according to the prose. The literal content is taken as the basis and then articulated and so on. But the artistic basis of poetry must also be incorporated into the recitation and declamation as rhythm and meter. Today it is not loved. Eurythmy can only be accompanied by this artistic element of recitation and declamation. In this way, eurythmy can have a healing effect on the art of recitation and declamation. Therefore, recitation must be done somewhat differently than is popular today. This is something I wanted to note about the artistic element of eurythmy.

Now eurythmy also has other meanings for the whole culture of the present. First of all, it has an element - which I do not want to discuss here because it requires too much detail - a hygienic-therapeutic element, which is also a social element, so that eurythmy can also be used in therapy and hygiene. But the third element, and this I wish to emphasize here, is the didactic-pedagogical element. We have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is now under my direction. We have seen that in the one year since the school has had eurythmy, it has been able to achieve something very significant for children by including it.

What is eurythmy for the child? The child derives great joy from practising eurythmy simply because it can move in forms that are taken directly from the laws of its own physical organization. It feels at home in its element, so to speak, and feels that it can do what the body wants to do. We did not introduce eurythmy to replace gymnastics, but as a supplement to it. For the child, eurythmy is like soul-filled gymnastics. Gymnastics is - I do not want to go so far as I was recently told, even after I had spoken such words before a eurythmy performance, a famous contemporary physiologist who was here. He told me that from his physiological point of view, he saw no educational value at all in gymnastics, only barbarism. But I just want to say that gymnastics trains the physical side of the human being. This soul-filled gymnastics, eurythmy, trains the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. And so children benefit from it greatly, especially in terms of what is most urgently needed at the present time: we must have more inner willpower, more soul initiative, in the next generation than we have at the present time. And eurythmy, when introduced to the child at the right age and in the right pedagogical and didactic way, has an effect on the development of the soul and the will.

Furthermore, when children from the age of seven, eight, nine, when they have not yet reached sexual maturity – later this is no longer an issue, but at this time it is very much an issue – when children perform this, they have to devote themselves entirely to the expression with their whole organization, then it has an effect in the sense of truthfulness. And in our time – when language itself becomes a temptation to use empty phrases due to the conventionalization of our words and thus a temptation to untruthfulness – it must have a beneficial effect pedagogically when we eurythmy has something that draws us directly to truthfulness, because you cannot learn a lie or learn a phrase if you have to work with the whole human being as a tool for language.

And much more could be said. I just wanted to point in the direction of how eurythmy can become significant as a pedagogical-didactic tool. But all this, ladies and gentlemen, is in its infancy. Those who have been here often will see how we have tried to progress in the last few months. We have now also found forms for what was there before, which emphasized the means of expression, so that we can either introduce the poetry or let it fade away in forms that are intended to work without musical or declamatory accompaniment. This way, we can show how this art of movement is a real visible language that can also speak for itself. In general, we have made progress in terms of shaping the successive formations in recent times.

We will try to continue to make progress. But nevertheless, it must always be taken into account in such a performance that the audience is asked to be forgiving. We ourselves are our own harshest critics and know that we have not yet come very far. But we also know that this eurythmic art carries something within it that can be further developed, perhaps to some extent still by us, but probably by others. And then what is now present in the germ can be further developed. And all those who see through the nature of the eurythmic art are convinced that eurythmy will be able to position itself as a worthy younger art alongside its worthy older sister arts.

This performance took place in the Goetheanum building – including the last, cheerful part. This was the first complete eurythmy performance there; previously, only individual eurythmic performances had been shown there as part of larger celebrations. From the next performance on April 24, 1921, the first parts of the performance took place in the Goetheanum building, but during the break for the last, cheerful part, the audience moved to the carpentry workshop.

“Charming Region (Ariel Scene)” from “Faust II” by]. W. v. Goethe
“Proemion“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (2.) by Rudolf Steiner
“With a Painted Ribbon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (3rd) by Rudolf Steiner Music (with the curtain closed)
Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Among Times”; “Twelve-Eleven”; “The Guineafowl”
Two presentations by the children's

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

I do not wish to use these introductory words to explain the presentation, for artistic matters must speak for themselves. But the art of eurythmy, as we practise it here, and of which we would like to give you a presentation today, draws on special artistic sources and expresses itself in a special artistic language of forms that is less familiar to the present day. What is being striven for here should not be confused with any kind of pantomime or facial expression or even dance-like performances. It may appear to you to be a representation of the moving human being, of the human being moving in his limbs, especially his arms and hands, and also the movements between groups of people in space and so on – an art of movement. But the movements are not meant to convey an immediate facial expression or other expression taken from the moment from something in the spiritual or psychological, but rather they are meant to convey something that is based in reality on a, I would like to say, visible language.

This visible language came about through the observation of human speech. The inner formation of movement that occurs when a person sings was also observed. It does not fully emerge, but it is present in the larynx and other speech organs, in everything that can be observed in speaking and singing in humans. And that which can be overheard through sensual and supersensual observation and research in the human organism in relation to one of its organ systems when speaking [for example], is then transferred and transformed into mere movement in the whole person. So that one has before one, so to speak, in a certain sense a kind of visible larynx, visible speech. Just as the soul-spiritual expresses itself through speech, so it can also do so through this visible speech. Of course, we have to bear in mind that what is initially the eurythmic language is just a form of expression, that it has to be transformed into something artistic, just as, depending on the treatment of language, on the shaping of language, on the forming of language, it depends on whether something that is pronounced succinctly becomes a real work of art, something artistic. So the artistic element must first be drawn out of what underlies this eurythmic language.

But now we can see that the artistic element can indeed be expanded if we try to translate the human form itself into movement; and we arrive at the sources of movements that are naturally and elementarily present in the human organism. One can see, as it were, how the human form moves out of its own forms into certain forms of movement. And one can perceive these forms of movement as a natural revelation of the human being, just as one perceives it as a natural revelation of the human being when he expresses what lies in the soul through the language of sounds or tones. On the other hand, however, one can also see how the artistic element in eurythmy lies not in the individual movement, but in the lawful sequence of movements, in the way one movement emerges from another, in the way the individual movement makes each of the others visible. individual movement. And so, as it were, what is essential and artistic in poems must be substantiated by the prose content of language, so it must also be the case with this eurythmy.

And it must be said in advance that what is expressed, in terms of its impression, in terms of its aesthetic impression, can be completely independent of the interpretation of the individual movement. In the artistic shaping of this visible language, there is a definite transformation into such movements that are immediately comprehensible for the sensory impression. In ordinary spoken language, the following actually work together as a human speech sound: the mental element, which, as it were, flows through the sound, and it works into the sound, which is particularly evident in artistic, poetic language; it works into the sound and into the sequence of sounds, into the inner sound formation, the feeling and the will element. And one can say: the more the intellectual element lives in the poetry, the less artistic the poetry becomes. The more formative-volitional element there is in the poetry, but which is expressed in the evenness of the form, the more artistic it is.

Now, when the whole human being is expressed through this eurythmically visible language, one appeals to the whole human being, to the full human being. In this way, the abstract element of the mere thought is overcome and what is revealed is more that is the will-feeling element. One also sees how in the eurythmic embodiment of a poem, those things come to light that express the actual formal artistic element in the poem. That which is first secreted into language by the real poet, but that is seen to be expressed in a eurythmic form.

Therefore, even if you have accompaniment, as is to be done here, you cannot recite in the way that is popular and considered good today, since one particularly emphasizes, so to speak, the prose side of poetry in recitation or declamation. This leads to a prosaic effect, and an unartistic age like the present will have much to object to in the way recitation and declamation are done in the way that is being challenged by eurythmy – that is, to bring out the rhythmic, the melodious, the sense of meter in the treatment of speech – and to bring this out in recitation as well, so that the recitation in the recitation eurythmic element contained in every true poem. So on the one hand you can see here how what can be recited and declaimed comes to light in this visible language. On the other hand, the musical element will accompany what then becomes visible language. Just as one can sing with the larynx and the other vocal organs, one can also sing visibly. This is what can be visibly presented as a singing revelation through the art of eurythmy.

It is important that this eurythmic art can also be used to present dramatic material, such as we are about to show you today. This dramatic element is initially revealed in such a way that eurythmy is particularly suited to depicting those parts and dramas where certain poets rise from the representation of the external physical-sensual into the supersensible, where the inner life of the human being is also depicted in an external visualization. And you will see in the one [representation] of a Goethe scene that is being presented today how that which, so to speak, plays into the sensual world from the supersensible, how it is brought out through the eurythmic element. Of course, today we still have the necessity that everything that is, so to speak, a realistic representation of human beings, that is, the actual realistic drama, must also be given in the ordinary theatrical form. But there is hope, and I give myself up to this hope in the expectation that, after we have already succeeded in eurythmically presenting the non-sensuous, we will also succeed in progressing to a dramatic stage style, again starting from the element of movement, for realistic scenes as well. However, further work needs to be done on this. Today we are not yet able to shape the eurythmic-dramatic in a eurythmic way. What it [gap in the shorthand]

made possible was to find a way, through eurythmy, to create a kind of [a] representation that truly corresponds to the subject. In the scene from my Mystery Dramas that is to be presented today, you will see the supersensible human element, that which works in people in such a way that it cannot be portrayed in such realism. This is where we are dealing with what a person from a soul-spiritual world does in actions, what lives in him from a soul-spiritual world. Then one must use eurythmy to reveal this soul and spiritual reality. That which is already working eurythmically, such as a scene from my “Mysteries Dramas”, can most easily be presented in a theatrical form, although what is realism in the presentation must also be taken into account. What is in people and what is the main thing that we form today.

In a scene like this, you will see in the eurythmic presentation, how it is from my “mystery dramas”, that it is indeed possible to present in full individual form that which, as it were, sees through the world of the senses as something supersensible, and that in this way one can enter into a certain working and essential nature of [nature], whereas today one does not really can see anything of the kind. Today, one only wants to have an abstract creation of natural events in natural laws. So we must say to ourselves: if nature does not want to give up her secrets to mere, abstract thought, if nature herself is a great artist whose secrets can only be surmised, if, when we shape, we must indeed resort to what we call knowledge of nature, then we must resort to what poets present dramatically. And it was from such a feeling that Goethe spoke the words: “To whom nature begins to reveal her open secret, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter: art.”

That is essentially what needs to be said about eurythmy as such, as art. You will see that even [introductions can be given before, without] accompanying words, which thus create the mood, can be formed eurythmically. [Incomprehensible sentence, see notes] Endings can be given where the mood is [represented] in a purely [eurythmic night act].

Another side of this eurythmy is – which I will only mention here – therapy and hygiene. Since the movements involved here are taken from the full human being and his creative powers, they can also be developed in such a way that they actually become a kind of eurythmy therapy, because they are healing movements. They are taken from the organization of the whole human being, which is fully formed. This is something I only want to mention.

I would like to point out a third element in this eurythmic endeavor. This is the pedagogical-didactic element: at the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run, eurythmy has been introduced as a kind of soulful gymnastics, as a kind of compulsory teaching subject, and one can clearly see how the children find it, the self-evident fact that the full human being is not only based on the external physical nature, this point of view but on body, soul and spirit [is based] on this expression as a full human being. I would say that even the child feels this as something quite natural. It grows into those healing forces that are particularly also healing forces during growth, namely in the transition from the human, resting form to the moving human form, which [demands] nature of the human form. The child demands such movements and such movement exercises in such a way that it has an inner, implicit idea of them. [Sentence difficult to read, see notes.] Initiatives of the will are thus trained in the right way through what the child can live out in these eurythmic movements, in this soul-filled gymnastics.

What needs to be said about artistic eurythmy to characterize it can be summed up by recalling what Goethe said about the artistic human being and their relationship to the world: “When man is placed at the summit [of nature, he perceives himself as a whole of nature again], takes measure of nature, harmony, meaning and sense together and finally rises to the production of the work of art work].” - There is now another: When man uses external instruments, he has to express what he experiences artistically within himself differently than when he has the tool in his own organism, the tool that is, firstly, an imprint of the whole world, really a kind of microcosm [gap in the shorthand, see notes], but that, on the other hand, is also something that man lives entirely within himself, so that in what he expresses he expresses his own innate tool, so that man, not only when he is placed at the summit of nature to produce a work of art, but that he tries to let the artistic experience within him be revealed through himself. In this respect, those who have a true artistic feeling can see the eurythmy experiment and the artistic endeavor. The artistic goal is certainly not to depict abstractions.

On the other hand, let me repeat once again, dear audience, that the new eurythmy art is still in its infancy, and that we must therefore always ask for the indulgence of our esteemed audience. It is the case that we are our own harshest critics, but we are also convinced that we will find opportunities for development in our artistic endeavors, and that we will be able to fully develop some of these opportunities, probably through others and no longer through ourselves. Then the time will come when this art of eurythmy, even if it is the youngest, will be able to stand alongside the older sister arts as a fully justified sister art.

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.

1st part (Goetheanumbau)

“The Fairy Tale of the Spring Miracle” from “The Testing of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Dance Song“ by Friedrich Nietzsche
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (20) by Rudolf Steiner
“Joy” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (21) by Rudolf Steiner
“Elfe“ by Joseph von Eichendorf
“From old fairy tales” by Heinrich Heine
“The violet“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The metamorphosis of plants” by J. W. v. Goethe

II. Part (joinery)

“Trauermarsch” by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
From Pierrot Lunaire by Albert Giraud, translated by Ötto Erich Hartleben: “Abend” (Evening), “Gebet” (Prayer), “Harlekin” (Harlequin), “Souper” (Supper)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The somersault”; “Label question”; “Toilet arts”; “The horse”

Dear attendees!

Allow me to accompany the performance that we will attempt in eurythmic art with a few introductory words. The reason for this is not to explain the artistic aspect itself - the artistic must work through itself in the immediate view, and an explanation would itself be something unartistic - but what is being attempted here as eurythmic art is based on artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today, and it makes use of an artistic formal language that is also unfamiliar. And it is these artistic sources and this artistic formal language that I would like to say a few words about.

What you will see presented on stage, dear attendees, consists of movements that are mainly performed by individuals and groups of people. All this aspires to be a real visible language, and indeed a language that, as a visible one, can truly be connected to the sound or phonetic language, but which, on the other hand, despite being revealed through human movements, has nothing to do with mere facial expressions, with pantomime and the like.

What the human being experiences in his soul and what is expressed in the most diverse ways through his bodily organization, viewed from a certain point of view, moves entirely between two poles: between the speech or sound language, which passes into the no longer artistic, prosaic speech, and between what the human being attempts to develop out of, I would like to say, equilibrium positions and forms of his organism .

Now, man is on both paths, both towards the use of sounds and towards pantomime, absolutely on an inartistic path, or rather on a path that leads to inartistic goals.

That which man forms out of his soul experiences, whether in music or in speech, could be described, if one feels its essence, as that which man, after having developed it within himself separately from the outside world, in a sense imposes on this outside world. This imposition of the human being's own nature on the outside world is most evident in prose speech. Aesthetically sensed, one might say that the imposition of one's own human being on the outside world actually lies in this prose speech. And in doing so, man proceeds in such a way that he transforms more and more what he develops within himself as soul experiences into the expression of thought, which then either becomes the expression in words for the inner, spiritual experience or for the conventionally communicable.

In both, in the conventionally communicable, to which particularly the languages of culture must develop, and in that which is expressed in inner soul experiences, the aesthetic conscience is lost, one would like to say, and logical reflection takes its place. To the same extent that logical reflection encroaches on oral expression, to the same extent the aesthetic conscience is lost, what is actually artistic is lost. On the other hand, in the mimetic arts, man must behave in such a way that he either uses his organism in such a way that he shapes this organism; then he is dependent on the natural laws that govern the organism. Or he sets himself in motion in space, so that pantomime becomes dance-like.

In this movement, which encompasses the soul, the opposite happens to the human being. He hands himself over to nature, as it were. He hands himself over to the outside world. He integrates himself into the outside world.

So while man imposes himself in the language of sound and also in the musical language - [in eurythmy] he transforms that which he experiences within himself into air again; he hands over that which is his inner experience to outer objectivity. While this is not the case with speech, with the tonal, on the one hand, the human being integrates himself, selflessly surrendering to the laws of nature when he meaningfully sets his own organism in motion.

But just as man loses himself in the spiritual when speaking or singing, so he loses himself in the natural when he passes over into pantomime and dance. Here too the aesthetic conscience ceases. And something occurs that ultimately, when pantomime is worked out more and more to one side [to a certain perfection], makes it appear as if the person is being pulled by wires, thus being incorporated into an inhuman or extra-human system.

When he moves into dance, he comes close to ecstasy and thus to something inartistic. Eurythmy, as a visible language, is situated between these two extremes, without straying into either. It has come into being through the careful study of the movement tendencies in which human beings live, which are then taken up in the larynx and the other speech organs, as it were, in the process of their formation, in order to be translated into air movements. This is what is studied. And just as Goethe sees something in the whole plant that contains all the secrets of the green leaf in a complicated way, so what is otherwise the basis of movement tendencies for speech can be transferred to the movement of arms and hands for singing, but this will only be true if the person speaks or sings. And this can become as lawful as in language and singing, an inner lawfulness can be carried out by the outer movement of a person or a group of people. So that one does not have an arbitrary pantomime, not a coincidence of one form with another, but one has a real, coherent linguistic expression of what is going on in the human soul.

When a language that is actually visible is formed in this way, it can become the expression of what, on the one hand, a person experiences musically as that which he transmits from himself, from his own being, to the outside world, and what he experiences on the linguistic side. This can be transferred into movements through which the human being, as it were, integrates himself into the outer world, integrating himself into the pictoriality of this outer world. Therefore, those things that have arisen in poetry as truly artistic, which are also contained in the musical-tonal, but are accessible to pictoriality, come to the fore particularly through this moving plastic art, eurythmy.

In the case of poetry, if it is truly poetic, one can say that the poet is actually fighting a battle. Language tends towards prose content, that is, towards that which allows logic to shine through. Here the aesthetic conscience is suppressed. The poet, in his desire to express himself linguistically, is seized, as it were, by this aesthetic conscience, and he in turn pushes back what is effective in prose language. Through rhythm, meter, rhyme, and thematic motifs, he pushes it back into the language form, so that what has flowed into the spirit in prose language is led back into the soul.

In eurythmy, the soul is not led into appearance as it is in pantomime, where one does not so much feel that the person is expressing poetry or poetic forces, but rather the soul is kept entirely inward, only to be directly transferred into the organic movement. Therefore, the very possibilities that the poet strives for in speech formation, which express the truly artistic in poetry, can be brought out through this visible language of eurythmy, through what is thought eurythmically in speech formation from the outset. I would like to draw your attention to the way in which the “Fairytale of the Miracle of the Spring” comes about in eurythmy: in this way it is self-evident how it flows into the outer eurythmic movement sculpture.

On the one hand, we can find the eurythmic accompanied by music; for one can sing in this visible language, in this visible sound-weave of eurythmy, I would say, just as one can sing through the sound. And on the other hand, what is performed eurythmically on the stage will be accompanied by the corresponding poetic, literal, but artistically shaped expression of the soul experience.

But here it becomes clear how eurythmy, in a certain way, must return to the original source of the artistic in this field as well. In our thoroughly unartistic time, one sees in declaiming and reciting an art in the literal shaping of language — not one that the poets have struggled for — where the literal content and the prosaic is to be emphasized. That which strives for this side no longer knows anything of what Goethe, for example, wanted when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors, baton in hand, like a conductor, so that particular emphasis was placed on speech formation and speech treatment. It would not be possible to accompany eurythmy correctly in the way we want to recite or declaim today; instead, what comes to the fore is what reciting, declaiming, what speech treatment, what tone, rhyme, meter, what thematic development is. This must truly prevail in the recitation and declamation of the artistic treatment of language, in contrast to the mere prosaic content. The prosaic content is the unartistic element. The form in which it is expressed must come from the artistic source. And so, gradually, we can strive for a complete correspondence between what is recited and what appears before the spectator as eurythmic speech, which can then also be judged artistically.

This is essentially the artistic side of eurythmy. But there are other sides to it as well. I would like to mention just one: the therapeutic, hygienic and medical aspects, which are also included in the training. The movements that arise in the human being during eurythmy are truly drawn from the human organism. Therefore, it cannot reveal itself in the same way as it does artistically, but in a way that almost promotes what the human organization is in a certain way. It can therefore be applied in a healing way, so that the human organism is transformed into healing movements. This work of developing eurythmy as eurythmy therapy has already begun. I just want to mention that.

A third aspect is the pedagogical-didactic one, which has already been applied in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run, where eurythmy is taught to children from the first grade, from the youngest children to the highest grades, as a kind of mental gymnastics.

One need not, as I always say, go as far as a famous contemporary physiologist – you would be amazed if I were to mention his name, because he is perhaps mentioned as the most famous today – who told me, as I also indicated gymnastics, that it is actually only a physical means of education and later, when one has come back from one-sided prejudices, it will not be as much as it is today. I could not go that far, although, as I said, you would be amazed if you knew the name of this physiologist. But one can say that what is developed as gymnastics is based entirely on the culture of the physical, while what appears as movements in eurythmy comes from the whole human being, from body, soul and spirit, and yet body, soul and spirit are increasingly more and more harmonized.

Therefore, one can see that children perform the movements they are asked to do as something natural, with elementary strength, coming from their own bodies. And they feel that the whole human being is incorporated into these movements. Hence the inner satisfaction of this spiritual-soul gymnastics, which is not at all one-sided, for instance, in that it leaves the physical unattended to. The whole human being is engaged, for in anthroposophy the physical is not neglected. This spiritual-soul gymnastics is therefore a significant educational tool that has already proven itself as such. I should also like to add that, while one can continue to practise external physical gymnastics, one needs just as much the spiritual-soul gymnastics, which is eurythmy, because it has an effect on the will.

Due to the limited time available, we can only show you the artistic aspects that are hinted at in this eurythmy. As always before these performances, I must ask for your forbearance. For although something is being aimed at that arises artistically from the whole being of the human being, eurythmy is only just beginning to have an effect today, so the viewer's forbearance must be called upon again and again.

Nevertheless, the following may be said. If Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, they feel the greatest yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art,” then we may say: “When someone is revealed the entire inner, essential natural order of the human organism, they want to create a tool in this human organism that, like a microcosm, a small world, also contains natural secrets and can therefore also express them artistically.

When Goethe says elsewhere, for example, that “man is placed at the summit of nature, so he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself has to produce another summit. To do so, he elevates himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.” So one must probably add: When the human being takes order, measure, harmony and meaning, as they are present in his own organism, and develops them, then, if he does not yet merely use an external tool, but uses his own human organism itself with all its possibilities as a tool, then something must come out that is artistic in a higher sense.

Therefore, those who inaugurate this eurythmy may believe that, even if it is still in its infancy and therefore imperfect today – we are our own harshest critics in this regard – it will continue to develop, still partly through us, but certainly through others; so that ultimately, because it draws from the genuine artistic realm and even from the human, this eurythmy will one day be able to stand alongside its older, fully recognized sister arts as a worthy, fully recognized younger art.

In view of the deliberations that have been going on here with reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society as their object, I would like to shape today's lecture in a way that may help my hearers form independent judgments in these decisive days. To this end I shall be speaking somewhat more briefly and aphoristically than I usually do when discussing aspects of anthroposophy, and shall confine myself to commenting on the third phase of our anthroposophical work. This evening I will speak for the same reason on the subject of the three phases of the Anthroposophical Movement.

We often hear references being made these days to the great change that came over Western spiritual life when Copernicus substituted his new picture of the heavens for the one previously held. If one were to try to state just what the nature of this change was, it might be put as follows. In earlier times man thought of the earth realm as the object of his study and the chief concern of learning, with little or no attention being paid to the heavenly bodies circling overhead.

In recent times the heavenly bodies have come to assume a great deal more importance than they used to be accorded. Indeed, the earth came to be thought of as a mere grain of dust in the universe, and man felt himself to be living on a tiny speck of an earth quite insignificant by contrast with the rest of the cosmos and its countless thousand worlds. But if you will permit me to give just a sketch of this matter for the sake of characterizing the third phase of our Anthroposophical Movement, it must be pointed out that by reducing the earth to a mere grain of dust on the one hand, man also lost the possibility on the other of arriving at valid judgments about the rest of the universe other than those based on such physical and more recent chemical concepts as may apply. Research that goes beyond this and devotes itself to a study of soul and spiritual aspects of the universe is ignored. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the whole stance of modern learning. Man loses the possibility of seeing what he calls his soul and spirit as in any way connected with what rays down to us from the starry world. You can judge from certain passages in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, how intent anthroposophy is on creating a renewed understanding of the fact that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. Anthroposophy aims at re-creating the possibility of knowing the cosmos as spirit.

In this quest anthroposophy encounters a serious obstacle on its path, an obstacle that I am going to describe without reservation.

People come forward, quite rightly proclaiming anthroposophy with great enthusiasm. But they emphasize that what they are proclaiming is a doctrine based not on their own experience but on that of a spiritual investigator. This makes for instant conflict with the way of thinking prevailing in present day civilization, which condemns anyone who advances views based on authority. Such condemnation would disappear if people only realized that the findings of spiritual research recognized by anthroposophy can be arrived at with the use of various methods suited to various ways of investigation, but that once they are obtained, these results can readily be grasped by any truly unprejudiced mentality. But findings acceptable to all truly unprejudiced mentalities can be made and still not lead to fruitful results unless those presenting anthroposophical material do so with attitudes required for anthroposophical presentations that are not always prevailing.

Let me be explicit. Let me refer to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, published about thirty years ago, and recall my description in its pages of a special kind of thinking that is different from that generally recognized as thinking today. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature, or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at the hand of nature, thoughts that, indeed, he has only recently developed the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh century, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of it—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did the Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader as he read to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relation to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing at the moment of awakening that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color-filled, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily motions to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, The Riddle of Man, where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thoughts. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit have on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking.) One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as a result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person; it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life-element of its thinking, and the thinking left to it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there, seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, though in that book I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works because matters like these have to be gradually developed, one finds that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into formerly passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we will. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily matter comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes a part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belong to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side given its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them, for it belongs to a different world than that that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see, but the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our will leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a grain-of-dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we re-discover elements in the universe that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its suffusion with will, and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the universe and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my more recent lectures have concerned themselves with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read, speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!

Now I want to try to improve the present state of things by speaking briefly about the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. A start was made with the presentation of anthroposophy about two decades ago. I say two decades, but it was definitely already there in seed form in such writings as my Philosophy of Freedom and works on Goethe's world conception. But the presentation of anthroposophy as such began two decades ago. You will see from what I am about to say that it did begin to be presented as anthroposophy at that time.

When, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, I gave my first Berlin lectures (those printed under the title, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age), I was invited by the Theosophical Society to participate in its work. I myself did not seek out the Theosophical Society. People who belonged to it thought that what I was saying in my lectures, purely in pursuit of my own path of knowledge, was something they too would like to hear. I saw that the theosophists wanted to listen to what was being presented, and my attitude about it was that I would always address any audience interested in hearing me. Though my previous comments on the Theosophical Society had not always been exactly friendly and continued in the same vein afterwards, I saw no reason to refuse its invitation to lay before it material that had been given me for presentation by the spiritual world. That I presented it as anthroposophy is clear from the fact that at the very moment when the German section of the Theosophical Society was being founded, I was independently holding a lecture cycle [From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. History of Human Evolution Based on the World Conception of the Orient up to the Present, or Anthroposophy, 1902–3. No manuscript of these lectures is available.] not only about anthroposophy but with the name anthroposophy included in the title. The founding of the German section of the Theosophical Society and my lecture cycle on anthroposophy took place simultaneously. The aim, right from the beginning, was to present pure anthroposophy.

That was the start of the first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement. It was first exemplified in those members of the German section who were ready to absorb anthroposophy, and further groups of theosophists joined them.

During this first phase, the Anthroposophical Society led an embryonic existence within the Theosophical Society. It grew, as I say, within the Theosophical Society, but developed nevertheless as the Anthroposophical Society. In this first phase it had a special mission, that of counterposing the spirituality of Western civilization, centered in the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Theosophical Society's course, which was based on a traditional acceptance of ancient Oriental wisdom.

This first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement lasted until 1908 or 1909. Anyone who goes back over the history of the Movement can easily see for himself how definitely all the findings made on the score of prenatal existence, reincarnation and the like—findings made on the basis of direct experience in the present, not of ancient traditions handed down through the ages—were oriented around that evolutionary development in man's life on earth that centered in the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse. The Gospels were worked through, along with a great deal else. By the time it became possible for the Anthroposophical Movement to make the transition over into artistic forms of revelation, as was done with the presentation of my mystery plays, the content of anthroposophy had been worked out and related to its central core, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time when the Theosophical Society was sidetracked into a strange development. Since it had no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it committed the absurdity, among others, of proclaiming to the world that a certain young man of the present was the reincarnated Christ. Certainly no serious person could have tolerated any such nonsense; it appeared ridiculous in Western eyes. But anthroposophy had been developed as part of Western civilization, with the result that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared in a wholly new light in anthroposophical teaching. This led to the differences with the Theosophical Society that culminated in the virtual expulsion of all the anthroposophists. They didn't mind that because it didn't change anthroposophy in any way. I myself had never presented anything but anthroposophy to those interested in hearing about it, and that includes the period during which anthroposophy was outwardly contained by the Theosophical Society.

Then the second phase of the Anthroposophical Movement began. This phase was built on a foundation that already included the most important teachings about destiny, repeated earth-lives, and the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual illumination fully keyed to present day civilization. It included interpretations of the Gospels that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present.

The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917, was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels. You need only consider such examples as my lecture cycles of that period, one held in Christiania in 1910 on the European folk souls, the other at Prague in 1911 on the subject of occult physiology, and you will see that anthroposophy's second phase was devoted to working out its relationship to the sciences and practical concerns of the day. The cycles mentioned are just two examples; the overall aim was to find the way to relate to modern science and practice.

During this second phase of the Society's life, everything centered around the goal of finding a number of people whose inner attitude was such that they were able to listen to what anthroposophy was saying. More and more such people were found. All that was necessary was for people to come together in a state of soul genuinely open to anthroposophy. That laid the foundation for an anthroposophical community of sorts. The task became one of simply meeting the interest of these people who, in the course of modern man's inner evolution, had reached the point where they could bring some understanding to anthroposophy. They had to be given what they needed for their soul development. It was just a matter of presenting anthroposophy, and it was not a matter of any great concern whether the people who found their way to anthroposophy during the Society's first two phases foregathered in sect-like little groups or came to public lectures and the like. What was important was to base absolutely everything on a foundation of honestly researched knowledge, and then to go ahead and present it. It was quite possible to do this satisfactorily in the kind of Anthroposophical Society that had been developing.

Another aspect of the second phase was the further development of the artistic element. About halfway through it, the plan to build the Goetheanum took shape. A trend that began with the Mystery Plays was thus carried into the realms of architecture, sculpture and painting. Then eurythmy, the elements of which I have often characterized in my introductory talks at performances, was brought into the picture. All this came into existence from sources to which access is gained on the path sketched in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sketched in sufficient detail, however, to be understood and followed by anyone really desirous of taking that path.

This second phase of the Society's life was made especially difficult by the outbreak of the frightful war that then overran Europe and modern civilization. It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period, when mistrust and hatred were flooding the entire civilized world. The fact that the Goetheanum was located in a neutral country in a time when borders were closed often made it hard to reach. But the reasons for believing in the sincerity of anthroposophical efforts were more firmly founded on fact, even during the war, than any reasons for mistrusting it afterwards. It can truly be said that the war period brought no real disruption of the work; it continued on. As I have already mentioned, a large number of individuals from many different European countries confronting one another in hate and enmity on the battlefields worked together in a peaceful and anthroposophical spirit on the Goetheanum, which we have now lost in the terrible disaster of the fire.

Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number of individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through. The Threefold Movement, later called the Union for Free Spiritual Life, the Union for Higher Education, and so on, had to be undertaken with the clear intention of putting one's whole being irrevocably behind them. It was no longer possible, in the third phase, to rest content with the simple presentation of anthroposophy and merely to foregather with people whose inner search had led them to it. Instead, a number of individuals wanted to undertake this or that project, and they did so. This created all kinds of groupings in addition to the original purely anthroposophical community.

One of them was the scientific movement. It was built on the foundation of relationships of anthroposophy to science that had been established during the second phase. Scientists made their appearance in our midst. They had the task of giving modern science what anthroposophy had to offer. But there should have been a continuation of what I had begun in the way of building relationships to contemporary science. Perhaps I may remind you of lectures I gave during the second phase of the Movement. I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics into anthroposophy. I did the same thing in the case of other aspects of learning. This attitude, this way of relating, should have continued to prevail. If that had happened, the result would have been a different development of scientific activity than the one we have been witnessing during this third phase. Most importantly, we would have been saved from what I described at the earlier meeting as fruitless argumentation and polemics. Then we would presently be faced with a positive task, and could say that anthroposophy does indeed have a contribution to make to science, that it can help science go forward along a certain path, and in what specific way that can be accomplished. The outcome would have been a different attitude toward science than that evidenced in a recent issue of Die Drei, indeed in several issues that I looked over in connection with the cycle of lectures on science given by me last Christmastide in Dornach. I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in such unfruitful polemics. I say this not for the sake of criticizing but to point out what the task of the scientists in the Society is.

Something of the same kind ought to be happening in other respects as well. Let us take a case in point; I called attention to it on the occasion of my last lecture here.

In the third phase of the Movement, we saw the Union for Higher Education come into being. It had an excellent program. But somebody should have stayed with it and put all of himself behind it, made himself fully responsible for it. My only responsibility was for anthroposophy itself. So when someone else starts an independent enterprise founded on anthroposophy, that project becomes his responsibility. In the case I am discussing, nobody stayed with that responsibility, though I had called attention to the necessity of doing so at the time the program was being drawn up. I said that programs of this kind should be started only if an iron determination exists to carry them through; otherwise, they ought never to be launched. In this case it was the group guiding the Society that failed to stay behind it.

What was the outcome? The outcome was that a number of young people from the student movement, motivated by an intense longing for true anthroposophy but unable to find what they were looking for in the Society, sought out the living source of anthroposophy. They said expressly that they wanted to know the artistic aspects of anthroposophy as well as the others. They approached Frau Dr. Steiner with the intention of being helped by recitation and declamation to experience what I might call the anthroposophical swing of things.

Another development was taking place alongside this one, my dear friends. In the third phase of the Movement, the spiritual worlds were being described in the way I described them at the beginning of my lecture today when I gave a short sketch of a certain matter from the standpoint of purely spiritual contemplation, from a level where it is possible to show how one develops a different consciousness and thereby gains access to the spiritual world. The first and second phases were concerned with relating the Movement to the Mystery of Golgotha, to science, to the practical conduct of life. The third phase added the direct portrayal of spiritual realms. Anyone who has kept up with the efforts that were made during these three phases in Dornach and here too, for example, anyone with a real feeling for the advance represented by the third phase over the first and second phases, anyone aware to what extent it has been possible in recent years to spread anthroposophy beyond the boundaries of Central Europe, will notice that we are concerned with bringing into being a really new third phase in direct continuation and further development of the first two phases. Had we not entered the third phase, it would not really have been possible to develop the Waldorf School pedagogy, which is based on taking man's eternal as well as temporal nature into account.

Now please compare the discussions of yesterday and the week before with what I have just been saying in the interests of frank speaking and without the least intention of criticizing anyone, and ask yourselves what changes these three phases of our work have effected in the Society. Would not these same discussions, identical as to content, have been just as conceivable sixteen or eighteen years ago as they are today, when we have two decades of anthroposophical work behind us? Does it not seem as though we were back at the founding of the Society?

I repeat that I have no desire to criticize anybody. But the Anthroposophical Society can amount to something only if it is made the nurturing ground of everything that anthroposophy is working to achieve, and only if our scientists, to take an example, always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics.

Teachers have a similar task, and, to a special degree, people engaged in practical life. For their functions are of the kind that draws the heaviest fire against anthroposophy, which, despite its special potential for practicality, is most viciously attacked as being impractical.

So the Society is presently faced with the necessity of being more than a mere onlooker at really anthroposophical work going on elsewhere, more than just the founder of other enterprises that it fails to provide with truly anthroposophical zeal and enthusiasm. It needs to focus consciously on anthroposophical work. This is a completely positive statement of its mission, which needs only be worked out in detail. If this positive task is not undertaken, the Anthroposophical Society can only do anthroposophy more and more harm in the world's regard. How many enemies has the Threefold Movement not created for the Anthroposophical Movement with its failure to understand how to relate itself to anthroposophy! Instead, it made compromise after compromise, until people in certain quarters began to despise anthroposophy. We have seen similar things happen elsewhere. As I said in my first lecture here, we must realize that anthroposophy is the parent of this movement. That fact should be recognized. If it had been, a right relationship to the Movement for Religious Renewal, which I helped launch, would have resulted. Instead, everything in that area has also gone amiss. I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that takes us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

Please do not take offense at my speaking to you as I have today, my dear friends. I had to do it. As I said in Dornach on January 6th last, the Anthroposophical Society is good; it is capable of listening receptively to even the sharpest parts of my characterization. But the guiding elements in the Society must become aware that if the Society is to earn its name in future, they must make themselves responsible for keeping it the conscious carrier of the work. The conflicts that have broken out will end at the moment when the need for such a consciousness is clearly and adequately recognized in a spirit of goodwill. But there has to be goodwill for that need to be brought out into the open and any fruitless criticism dropped. Furthermore, there is no use giving oneself up to comfortable illusions, making compromises in adjustments between one movement and another, only to end up again in the same old jog-trot. It is time to be absolutely serious about anthroposophical work, and all the single movements must work together to achieve this goal. We cannot rest content to have a separate Waldorf School movement, a separate Movement for Religious Renewal, a separate Movement for Free Spiritual Life. Each will flourish only if all feel that they belong to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I am sure that everyone truly concerned for the Movement is saying the same thing in his heart. That is the reason I allowed myself to express it as sharply as I did today. Most of you were already aware of the need for a clear statement that could lead to the establishment of the consciousness I have described as so essential.

The Movement has now gone through three phases, during the last of which anthroposophy has been neglected in favor of various offspring movements. It must be re-discovered as the living spiritual movement demanded by modern civilized life and, most especially, by modern hearts. Please take my words as meant to serve that purpose. If they have sounded sharp, please consider them the more sincerely offered. They were intended not as an invitation to any further caustic deliberations but as a challenge to join in a Movement guided by a true heart for anthroposophy.

Report by Rudolf Steiner on the Berlin School of Spiritual Science

[My dear friends!]

Allow me to say a few words today about the course of the Berlin School of Spiritual Science and then, tomorrow, to conclude with a reflection that should be of particular interest to you as a further elaboration on this very topic.

The Berlin School of Spiritual Science had organized its program in a special way. The aim was to show the relationship between certain branches of life and science in the present day and the anthroposophical world view. Each day was to be devoted mainly to a particular branch of science or life. The week was organized so that it began on Sunday, which was to be devoted to inorganic natural science; Monday was to be devoted to organic natural science and medicine; Tuesday to philosophy; Wednesday to education; Thursday to economics; Friday to theology. Saturday should be devoted to linguistics, and then on Sunday the whole thing should come to a certain conclusion with a performance of eurythmy at the Deutsches Theater.

The program was so well thought out that each day was to begin with a short lecture by me. Only the first Sunday could not begin in this way, since I could not yet be in Berlin at that time. So on Monday I had to summarize both inorganic and organic science in my introductory words; then the day should have a unified character. After my introductory remarks, two more lectures took place in the morning; then there was a short break for refreshments, but – as had already been announced – no refreshments were available in the Singakademie rooms, and a discussion was scheduled to take place from 1 to 2 p.m. The last lecture of the morning was then to follow from 2 to 3 p.m. It was a bit of a strenuous program!

In the evening, there were lectures, some of which were held by me in the Philharmonie, and some of which were held by others in the rooms of the Berlin University. Every evening there was a lecture, and for the other lectures, except for mine, there was still some kind of discussion in the evening after these lectures. So the days were extremely full.

Now, the entire structure of the program can actually be called interesting, especially through the formulation that the individual 'daily programs had experienced. To some extent, each day had an overall title, and the formulation of these overall titles for the days is really interesting, because they reveal so much that is significant. If you go through these formulations of the daily programs, each individual day has something positive in its formulation, except for Friday, which was dedicated to theology.

This is significant, not so much in terms of an awareness of the times, but in the way the program formulators related to the development of anthroposophy on the part of those who formulated the program. One simply felt compelled to formulate the other daily programs in a positive way. And we only need to look at these formulations to find out what is significant.

Sunday, March 5: “From hostile mechanistics to true phenomenology” - so in the formulation of the program, the hope is expressed that through anthroposophy one will come to find a phenomenology as the basis of inorganic science.

The program for Monday is summarized even more positively: “Ways of anthroposophical human knowledge in biology and medicine”. And the program for Tuesday on philosophy is just as positive: “The foundation of anthroposophy from the philosophical consciousness of the present”.

The program for Wednesday was equally positive: “From modern pedagogical demands to their realization through anthroposophy” — so here, too, the idea is that there are such pedagogical

demands in the present that can be realized through anthroposophy.

Thursday, which was devoted to social science, had a very auspicious title in the overall formulation of the program, although what was presented was less auspicious. Thursday even had an extremely auspicious title that sounds very positive: “National Economic Outlooks”.

Saturday, which was devoted to linguistics, bore the title: “From dead linguistics to living linguistics”.

So you see, these title formulations are the basis for everything: the aim is to point out the path that leads from the present into the anthroposophical shaping of the spiritual path in question. One has an idea of how the individual disciplines take their starting point from the given scientific formulations of the present and run into certain other insights, which are to be given by anthroposophy — everywhere absolutely concrete ideas about possible paths. Only - as I said - Thursday has the extraordinarily promising title: “Outlook”, even “economic outlook”, which is an abstract formulation, but which, in its abstractness, points out that one does not want to go, but to leap.

If we then look at Friday in the general formulation of the daily program, it reads as follows: “The Decline of Religion in Contemporary Theology and the New Foundation through Anthroposophy”. - So here, first of all, it is formulated quite negatively: The decline of religion in contemporary theology, and the new foundation - so it is only pointed out, even in a negative way, that there is something like anthroposophy, and that through it theology and religion can experience a renewal. It is not shown in this title in such a concrete way how the path out of the present confusion can lead into the anthroposophical formation.

If you compare this with the formulation from Sunday, for example: 'From mechanistic materialism hostile to life to true phenomenology', you even have a very specific term for what is to come in the word 'phenomenology'. Likewise, in the word 'human knowledge' from Monday, you pointed to something very specific. In philosophy you pointed to the philosophical consciousness of the present, and so to something concrete; in education you pointed to the pedagogical demands of the present, and in linguistics you said, at least, that we must move from the study of dead languages to the study of living languages, and so you formulated something concrete too.

Now, it is extraordinarily significant that this entire university course, which essentially culminated both internally and externally in the Friday event, which basically – especially the feeling that arose – had a theological character, which, while otherwise extremely well attended, on Friday, the theological day, had an attendance such that it was “packed”, overcrowded —, [it is extremely significant] that this course, in the formulation of the day for the theological program, had something negative,

Of course, these formulations arose out of the circumstances of the moment, and the speakers tried in all honesty and sincerity to express these circumstances as they arose, on the one hand from an awareness of the present and on the other from an idea of what can become of this awareness of the present through anthroposophy.

If we then go through the individual days, we naturally encounter things that are mostly familiar to us. Sunday: From mechanistic materialism hostile to life to true phenomenology: The point here, then, is to point out how we should overcome all speculation about atomism, about a mechanistic view of inanimate nature, how we should come to a pure observation of what is present in phenomena, in appearances, how these appearances themselves should speak for themselves, how they themselves should provide their theory. So it is expressed in this formulation that one wants to pursue Goetheanism in natural science.

In organic natural science, it is then expressed that the entire scope of organic natural science must be based on knowledge of the human being, that it is therefore necessary not to study nature in its kingdoms in a fragmented way, as is currently the case, but that, above all, one should start out from getting to know the human being, and from there explore the other kingdoms of nature.

If we then look at philosophy, the question on Tuesday was how philosophical consciousness has reached an end of a kind. It is interesting to think of this formulation in connection with Hegelianism, for example. In his philosophy, which dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel said that all philosophy of the present is an end in itself, and that basically, in philosophy, one can only look back on how things have come about, but that further development is not possible.

Now, on this Tuesday, it should be shown how a beginning, a new beginning, can arise from the end of philosophy, if one allows this beginning in the anthroposophical sense.

In education, the aim was to show that all truly thinking people today actually make certain educational demands, but that these cannot be met by the pedagogy currently being developed. These demands, which are basically made by all thinking people, can only be met by anthroposophy.

In linguistics, it should be shown how language itself, as a living organism, should be understood in the context of the human being, and not merely from the dead records, as is the case with contemporary linguistics.

As for social science, it can only be said that Emil Leinhas, in an extraordinarily illuminating way, has said something quite significant about the monetary problem of the present day based on his sound knowledge; but, as you yourself may sometimes feel, not an awful lot of positive things can be said about the monetary problem of the present day. You will already feel this here in Switzerland, in this country with its almost supreme currency. But you will believe that not much positive can be said about the money problem when you cross the border! So it is true that not an enormous amount of positive things could be said. The next two lectures did not bring any such positive results either, and this national economic day in particular showed how, basically, the cultivation of the national economic within our anthroposophical movement is what has actually failed through and through. For we have basically not been able to bring it about, despite the fact that the necessity in this area has been emphasized time and again. We have not been able to bring it about that in economics, on the part of those who are involved in economic life itself, something truly future-proof would have been put forward; namely, something that would meet the extremely difficult demands of the present. And so, for this day, the title “Nationalökonomische Aussichten” was basically something of a dancing promise; but what the day then brought was a more or less limping follow-up to this dancing promise.

As for theology, the three titles of the lectures that followed my introductory words were just as interesting as the general formulation of the day's program. The first title of Licentiate Bock's lecture was: “The Decline of Religion into Psychologism”; the second of Licentiate Doctor Rittelmeyer was: “The Decline of Theology into Irrationalism”; and the third lecture by Doctor Geyer was: “The Decline of Theology into Historicism”. So we have been given a threefold description of the decline of theology and religion in these days.

In a sense, the situation of the time had naturally led to theologians speaking, who explained how they come to a dead end within their theology today, based on their particular experiences of thought and feeling. Basically, there was a tendency among theologians to show how they come to a dead end within the theology that is presented to them at the present time.

And if we then consider what has been presented in a positive way, what has been said this Friday can be summarized as follows: Theological consideration of religion – as Mr. Bock, the licentiate, was probably thinking – comes down to looking only at the spiritual experience that can be described as a religious experience, perhaps as an experience of God. It is found that among the various inner experiences of the soul, the human being also has the religious experience, the experience that in a certain respect points to a divine one; but that, if one is unbiased, one can say: Yes, you just have a subjective experience. You have something purely psychological. There is absolutely no guarantee that this experience corresponds to anything in the objective world. The subjective experience of God is not such in modern theology that it can lead to a real acceptance of God, let alone to a view of the essence of the divine in the world. It stifles, as it were, the religious element in the consciousness of man in the psychological fact: Yes, we need a religious life. But there is nothing that can provide the certainty that this need will somehow be satisfied. The psychological fact is there that man needs religion, but the present knows of no content of this religion. - The result of the first lecture by Licentiate Bock would be something like this.

Dr. Rittelmeyer then explained how theology had become tired of rationalism, how it had come to no longer want to formulate the essence of the divine in the world in thought, that it no longer wanted to say: this or that is the content of the divine that permeates and animates the world. Thought was to be excluded from theology. The rational, the one stemming from reason, should be eliminated, and the irrational, the one that excludes thought, should become the content of theology. So that in fact in theology one arrives at nothing but the most extreme abstractions. One no longer wants concrete thoughts, one wants the most extreme abstractions. One does not dare to say: the essence of God can be grasped by this or that thought. One dares only to say: the Being of God is the Unconditional, the Absolute. One pins down a completely indeterminate concept, the “irrational,” that which no reason can grasp.

Would it not be so, in every other area of life, it would be strange to characterize something so negatively. If someone were to ask, for example, “Who is the head of the Goetheanum?” – [And one would answer:] The board of directors is the one who is not the board of directors of any other institution. – One would not get any information about who the board of directors of the Goetheanum is. Of course, you don't get any information about it if you say: The ratio of the divine being consists in the fact that God is the irrational, that which cannot be grasped by reason. – It is all just negation.

Rittelmeyer then linked this to some of the things these contemporary irrationalists have to say. For example, how man behaves inwardly when he wants to rise to this God, who can only be grasped in an irrational way. How does he experience this rising? He experiences it in silence. This is not the silence of mystical experience, which can be very positive, but the absence of speech, the cessation of speaking to oneself inwardly in thought. It was then further explained how this silence should take place in worship. It is out of the absolute powerlessness to formulate anything at all, to take refuge in silence.

It was interesting to hear two gentlemen speak, a private lecturer and a pastor, who defended this irrationalism in turn in order to show that irrationalism is particularly prevalent in the present day. For example, one private lecturer said: Yes, that would be quite right, it would be nonsense, for example, to say that one could find God less in nature than in the spirit. Nature is no more distant from God than is the spirit. Knowledge of the spirit provides no more for God than does knowledge of nature, for God is precisely the absolute that breaks through everywhere. This was repeated very often: that God is the absolute that breaks through everywhere.

Theology... Faust would have said “unfortunately” not just once, but three times; Faust would have to be rewritten: I have now studied, alas, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine and, alas, alas, alas, also theology. So when one has to hear again and again: God is the absolute, which breaks through everywhere... one imagines it everywhere, and then it breaks through, breaks out... but it is precisely the indeterminate that breaks through everywhere! The last lecture was that of Dr. Geyer, who dealt with the decline of theology in historicism. Geyer tried to show how theology gradually came to have nothing creative of its own, but only to observe what had already been, always studying history, what had already been, in order to arrive at a content - but which naturally leads to the fact that at most one can say: In the past, people had a religious consciousness, but today they only have the opportunity to look at these different stages of religious consciousness in the past and choose something they still want to keep. Unfortunately, by making that choice, they are left with nothing of all that is served up to them from the different epochs of the past.

I myself began this day's program by noting that anthroposophy does not want to appear as a religion, that it wants to be a knowledge of supersensible worlds, and that, if theology wants to be fertilized by it, it may do so. Anthroposophy will, of course, say what can be said about the supersensible worlds, and it can wait to see what theologians can use from Anthroposophy for themselves.

For anyone who is able to see the big picture of the present situation, one deficiency has become very apparent today – but one that naturally arises from the circumstances. At least, if the topic of the day had been exhausted – as has been attempted with the other topics of the day and, with the exception of social science, has been achieved to a certain extent – a Catholic theologian should also have spoken. For all the lectures that have been given have been given solely from a Protestant perspective.

A Catholic theologian would have been in a completely different position from these three Protestant theologians. A Catholic theologian does not have a historically handed down theology, but a historically handed down and eternally valid theology, a theology that must be grasped in the present as vividly as it was grasped, let us say, in the third or second centuries of the Christian era. Of course, the councils and, in the eighteenth century, the Pope, who had become infallible, added many things. But these are individual dogmas, these are additions. But the whole essence of Catholic theology is something that, first of all, does not depend on the development of time, and that, in itself, through its own way of knowing, should have a perennial, an everlasting character.

Perhaps if a more progressive man had spoken about Catholic theology, it might have been possible to present the struggles of Catholic thinkers such as Cardinal Newman in an extraordinarily interesting way. If a less advanced Catholic theologian had spoken, he would have presented the essence of the eternal doctrine of salvation, that is, Catholic theology. Then questions of tremendous importance would have arisen. [For example] the question: What exactly is given in Catholic theology for today's man? In Catholic theology, as it appears today, there is undoubtedly nothing living for the present consciousness. But it was once something living. Its content is based entirely on the results of old spiritual knowledge, even if it is atavistic. What Catholic theology contains, say, about the fact of creation, of redemption, about the content of the Trinity, about all these things, these are real concepts, this is something that – only that it has content, which modern consciousness can no longer grasp, but instead dresses it up in abstract, incomprehensible dogmatics or does not dress it up at all, but accepts it as incomprehensible, dry dogmatics.

It was particularly the development of Catholic theology in the nineteenth century in such a way that it was no longer recognized what is contained in the dogmas. On the other hand, there is – or was, in the case of this university course in Berlin – an interesting experience.

On Friday, in my introduction, I said the following, based on my direct experience, which you already know: I said that the one who experiences what is in our natural environment and in what follows on from this natural environment comes, if he is not somehow inwardly crippled, to an awareness of the Father-God. Those who, during their lifetime, recognize the inadequacy of the Father-God and experience a kind of inner rebirth come to an experience of the Son-God, the God-Son. And then, in the same way, by progressing further, one comes to the spiritual experience.

Now a Protestant private lecturer, Lizentiat X., thought: Aha, there is the Trinity, you have to construct it. And he called it a construction, not realizing that there were experiences on which it was based... that was quite foreign to him. Well, those experiences on which the Catholic dogmas are based have become just as foreign to the modern consciousness of the nineteenth century.

These Catholic dogmas, of course, originally go back to spiritual realities. But they are no longer understood, they have become empty concepts. But in the nineteenth century, people wanted to get back to being able to revive a little externally what lives in Catholic theology. You are well aware that this urge to at least be able to understand a little of what lives in Catholic theology arose particularly under the pontificate of Leo XIII, hence the Catholic decree at that time, the Roman decree for all Catholic theologians to return to the study of Thomistic philosophy, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, because all later philosophy is no longer useful for grasping something like what lies in Catholic dogmas. All philosophy that followed Thomas Aquinas is only useful for understanding natural existence, for providing a foundation for the natural sciences, but not for understanding spiritual realities. These are indeed unknown even in the Catholic Church, but they are formulated in Catholic dogmas – they were formulated at a time when these spiritual realities were still known. For this purpose, all later post-Thomistic philosophy is no longer suitable. Therefore, when the need was felt to understand something of what lies in the Catholic dogmas, the renewal of the study of Thomistic was demanded, which is indeed the actual philosophical endeavor within Roman Catholicism today.

There are historical realities at the root of this. And if we compare what is actually necessary to gain access to spiritual things again, we can see that, of course, Thomistic theology alone is not enough to revive what is contained in the old dogmas that have become ossified in Rome. A completely different approach is needed.

Please just remember what a completely twisted view I put forward for such a contemporary literary historian before I left here, in the last lectures, where, by going beyond everything that is space and time, I was able to show you how Hamlet is a pupil of Faust, how Hamlet sat at the feet of Faust for ten years, during those ten years when Faust led his pupils by the nose straight and crooked, how Hamlet was one of those who were led by the nose straight and crooked and criss-cross at the time. Such connections, which are of course an abomination to the present-day literary historian – but then, almost nothing of significance can be said today in the intellectual field that would not be an abomination to the official representatives – is that it is almost the stigma of the real truth today that it is an abomination to the public representatives of real science... Well, if you take this for such a profane area, then you will see what is necessary to really come to that agility of mind that can provide a basis for grasping what is preserved in the dogmas. How one must go back to a completely different state of mind in order to enter into the way one lived in such dogmas is shown precisely by the development of Cardinal Newman.

In Berlin today, it is perhaps still taken for granted that such a university course only addresses Protestant points of view and disregards the Catholic point of view; but you still won't get a picture of what actually prevails there today if you are not somehow able to discuss the Catholic point of view, especially today, when we once again need to look at the whole world.

We have to get beyond just talking today. You know about parochial science and parochial politics. But there is also such a thing as a parochial worldview; it comes across very strongly when you see something like the event on Friday evening, when Dr. Theberat gave a lecture on the topic: “Atomistic and Realistic Consideration of Chemical Processes.” That is to say, Dr. Theberat, who is now employed at our research institute in Stuttgart, tried to show how atomism must be abandoned and how phenomenology must also be introduced into chemistry. Dr. Kurt Grelling then entered the debate. I do not want to talk about Dr. Kurt Grelling, who more or less follows the recipe: Yes, all sorts of things are said in anthroposophy, but all that is not yet probable to me. What is certain, however, is that 2 x 2 = 4, and one must hold to what is certain: 2 x 2 is 4, this is certain. He asserted this already last summer in the Stuttgart course and then even called in two university teachers to help him assert this, that 2 x 2 = 4, on a special evening.

Of course, one could not contradict him. I mean, I only want to hint symbolically at what he said; because 2 x 2 is really 4. I could not contradict him. I could not even contradict him when he said last Friday, again completely out of context: I had admitted in Stuttgart that 2 x 2 = 4. Of course, I cannot deny that. I don't just mean 2 x 2 is 4, but rather things that are just as valuable in the overall context, he put forward at the time... but actually I want to say something else with this. He then claimed: Yes, the question that is being put forward can be decided on the basis of phenomenology, it cannot be decided from the point of view of natural science, but only from the point of view of philosophy.

Now, I am not saying that this is just a Göttingen thing, but at least it is not thought in a cosmopolitan scientific way today, because in England, for example, one would not be able to make sense of a sentence like that. If someone says: This cannot be decided scientifically, this can only be decided philosophically - because this difference is something that is, isn't it, a parochial worldview. This formulation is only known within certain Central European circles.

In any case, when we are talking about such questions, we need a broader perspective today. And it is impossible, for example, to keep talking about the center, west and east – formulation of the Vienna Program: there is constant talk of the west and the east and the center, which I do not criticize, I think it is quite great-spirited when there is talk of the west and the east and the center – but I think you then have to broaden your concepts a bit, they then really have to span these areas. You cannot, of course, embrace the world from a limited point of view. Well, for example, something is missing in relation to the western development of religious life if one completely leaves out Catholicism. Because this western religious life has nothing in it of what one touches when one speaks only of Protestant theology. One does not even come to talk about how... let us say, for example, Puritanism in England or the High Church in England or things like that.

I am not putting all this forward as a criticism, because the things that have been put forward were, of course, excellent. But I would still like to talk in the narrower anthroposophical circle about what needs to be said in connection with all that has happened.

And then it would have become clear how current thinking is not at all able to approach what was once the source of the theological content. So that in Berlin there was no bridge between what modern Protestant theology is and what is now to come from Anthroposophy to enliven religious consciousness. There were only ever indications that this should come from anthroposophy. But how it should be developed was not actually discussed.

These are things that may give you an idea of the struggle on anthroposophical ground, which has now found its most beautiful expression in Berlin. It was clear from the participation of the most diverse circles in Berlin – the lectures were extremely well attended, even the morning lectures – and it was clear from the participation of wide circles that something is definitely alive in the anthroposophical movement, which strikes strongly and intensely at the consciousness of the present.

And sometimes we also did not hold back on our part in the sharpness of expression, which should be characteristic of what is. I remember, for example, with a certain inner joy, when on Saturday Dr. Karl Schubert, who was speaking within the framework of “Anthroposophy and Linguistics” and who also wanted to show how linguistics should play a role in the political life of thinkers and races, became spirited in the debate. He wanted to point out what linguistics is today when you look at it... and what it must become through anthroposophy. It was spirited when he then said: Yes, he had been to Berlin, studied linguistics with a wide variety of teachers, and then came to anthroposophy to enliven this linguistics... and only then did it become clear to him... and there he found what this present linguistics is: a dunghill! And then he banged on the table! Well, there was no lack of spirited expressions to characterize the present situation. So it was already strongly felt what one could feel. The opponents have not exactly... yes, spirited I can't really say, I don't want to say anything that — well, I won't say anything like that!

The evening events were such that one tried to give a picture of the anthroposophical content. It was particularly significant this time that both Dr. Stein and Dr. Schwebsch, two teachers at the Waldorf School, gave vivid pictures of the educational work in the Waldorf School itself.

I would like to say, between the lines, that one could experience many strange things. The whole course ended on Sunday, and I had to give the final evening lecture on Sunday, but the morning events ended with a eurythmy performance at the Deutsches Theater, in front of a full house, which was an extraordinarily successful event.

I hardly need to say that if you should come across any newspapers, you will read the opposite of what happened. But a gentleman, for example, who wrote an article in a Berlin paper that some consider to be pro-Anthroposophy... well, I don't want to comment on that – he then asked another paper, a large paper, if he could also write an article about this college course. They asked: pro or contra? He said, because he thought his article was pro: pro. They said: No, we only take contra.

So they don't care what anyone writes, they just buy “contra”! And of course you won't get any idea of what happened there if you get other reports from outside.

It is a pity that apart from this eurythmy performance at the German Theatre, and the short eurythmy performances on Thursday and Sunday, more eurythmy was not performed; for that might perhaps have led to the situation – along the lines of the Stuttgart Anthroposophical Congress – that the honored attendees would not have had to bear the burden of these packed days quite so heavily. Because I could well imagine that it was quite hard! You see, take any of the days, an average day, when there were no meetings for a number of people, well, the person who experienced everything heard five lectures and a discussion. That is a bit much for a person today: five lectures and a discussion in one day! There were actually two discussions on a normal day. So one had the opportunity to live in such thoughts from 9 a.m. to [3:00 p.m.] and then again from [8:00 p.m.] to about [10:30 p.m.]. Of course, it would have been much better if, in between, as was the case in Stuttgart, witty eurythmy lectures could have taken place.

Yes, I was in a city and had the opportunity to speak to a theologian. He said: We were at a theological meeting in Eisenach; they showed us something like eurythmy there! Well, it must have been something else, but that is what he thought. 'I don't know,' he said, 'what we theologians should make of it; we were all quite amazed, we didn't know how we came to see something like that. But on the whole the result is an extraordinarily significant one, and otherwise, I would say, the inner characteristics of the times presented themselves in an extraordinarily eloquent way. For example, at the theologians' conference, a gentleman asked to speak who once had to give a lecture on the whole field of anthroposophy in one evening; he came to the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag in Berlin that morning Berlin and bought, or rather was given, the books he needed to prepare for his evening lecture, in which he wanted to explain to a larger audience what anthroposophy is, because he was the one who had to give the lecture. Then the gentleman in question seems to have heard one of my philharmonic lectures in Berlin. He ranted terribly about it in a lecture he gave afterwards; among other things, he said that he had actually seen, when he looked around with the opera-goer during my lecture, that someone had even slept on individual benches. And on that theological morning, he spoke.

You couldn't really see the context of this discussion, neither with the topic of the day nor with what

what had been said, nor with anything else. I just kept hearing: “The Gospels shall greet us.” But I had no real idea how it related to the whole. Then he explained that the things had all been so significant that one must have the most ardent desire to unite the whole into one book in order to sell it. Yes, that is the essence of the present-day culture: essence.

I wanted to give you a kind of overview of what has been going on. I don't want to fail to mention that a very pleasing influence has emerged in Berlin, particularly within the German anthroposophical movement: the student influence. With a real inner devotion and with extraordinary zeal, one could see a part of the student body attached to anthroposophy. And that afternoon during the week, it was Friday, when I was with the students to discuss in their way what they wanted to know, that afternoon was a very beautiful part of this entire college course for me.

It is perhaps also worth mentioning that such an afternoon also took place in Leipzig – with a small group of university students devoted to anthroposophy. But the fact that, if one really wants it, a scientific discussion can take place between well-meaning people of current scientific practice and anthroposophy was demonstrated on that very afternoon in Leipzig, when the well-known anatomy professor Spalteholz was there and actually talked to me mainly about the relationship between current natural science and anthroposophy in front of the students. I believe that the students present learned an extraordinary amount from this conversation.

You can see from such a fact that it is actually quite unobjective reasons that official science, slandered and hereticized, is the one that is anthroposophical; while, if if someone were to be found who would deign to enter into a dispassionate discussion, such as Professor Spalteholz in Leipzig, then something very fruitful could come out of it, even if a full understanding is not reached. A complete understanding cannot yet be reached today because there is an abyss between the two sides. But at least a beginning can be made by saying in front of young people what can be said by both sides if we listen to each other. That is the essential thing, and that was the case on that Saturday, March 4, when a number of Leipzig students were with Professor Spalteholz and me to talk about anthroposophy and science. And in fact, many extremely important things were discussed.

Tomorrow we will then address a specific question. I just have to say that tomorrow evening will begin with an artistic eurythmy performance, in which new students will perform, supported by some older eurythmy performers. We will start with the eurythmy performance at [7:30] p.m., and then my lecture will follow.

Today I wish, primarily, to bring before you some of the more comprehensive aspects in the development of karma, in order to be able gradually to go more and more into matters of detail. If we wish to gain insight into the course of karma, we must be able to imagine how the human being gathers his whole organization together as he descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. You will understand, my dear friends, that in the language of today there are no suitable expressions for certain processes which are practically unknown to modern civilization, and that, therefore, the expressions employed here for what takes place under certain conditions can only be approximate.

When we descend out of the spiritual into the physical world for an earth life, we have, to begin with, prepared our physical body by means of the stream of heredity. We shall see how this physical body is, nevertheless, connected in a certain sense with what the human being experiences between death and a new birth. Today, however, it will suffice if we are clear about the fact that the physical body is given to us from the earth; on the other hand, those members which we may describe as the higher members of the human being—the ether body, astral body, and ego—come down from the spiritual world.

The human being attracts, so to speak, the ether body out of the whole universal ether before he unites himself with the physical body which is given to him by heredity. The union of the soul-spirit man—i.e. ego, astral body, and ether body—with the physical human embryo can ensue only through the gradual withdrawal of the ether body of the maternal organism from the physical human embryo.

The human being, thus, unites himself with the physical germ after having attracted his ether body out of the common universal ether. The more precise descriptions of these events will occupy us later. At present we are to interest ourselves mainly in asking: Whence come the individual members of human nature which the human being possesses during earth life between birth and death?

The physical organism comes, as we have seen, from the stream of heredity, the etheric organism out of the universal ether from which it is attracted. The astral organism—of which the human being remains, we might say, in all respects unconscious or only sub-consciously aware during his earth life—this astral body contains all the results of the life between death and a new birth. And it is a fact that between death and a new birth, according to what the human being has become through his preceding earth lives, he comes, in the most manifold way, into relationship with other human souls who are also in the life between death and a new birth, or with other spiritual beings of a higher cosmic order who do not descend to earth in a human body, but have their existence in the spiritual world.

All that a man brings over from his former lives on earth according to what he was, according to what he has done, all this is met by the sympathy or antipathy of the beings whom he learns to know while he passes through the world between death and a new birth. What sympathies and antipathies he meets among the higher beings according to what he has done in his preceding earth life is of great significance for karma during this period; but, above all, it is of deep significance that he comes into relationship with those human souls with whom he was in relationship on earth, and that a peculiar reflection takes place between his own nature and the nature of the souls with whom he had this relationship. Let us assume that someone has had a good relationship with a soul whom he now encounters again between death and a new birth. All that the good relationship implies had lived in him during former earth lives. Then this good relationship is reflected in the soul, when this soul is encountered between death and a new birth. And it is really true that the human being during this passage through the life between death and a new birth sees himself reflected everywhere in the souls with whom he is now associated because he was associated with them on earth. If he did good to a human being, something is mirrored to him from the other soul; if he did him an evil turn, something is likewise mirrored to him from the other soul. And he has the feeling—if I may use the word “feeling” with the reservation made at the beginning of these observations—he has the feeling: “You have advanced this human soul. What you have experienced through advancing him, what you then felt for this soul, that impulse in your feelings which led to your attitude toward him, your own inner experiences in performing the deed that advanced this soul, come back to you from him. They are reflected to you from this soul. In another case you have injured a soul; what has lived in you during this injury is reflected to you.”

And the human being has actually spread out before him, as though in a mighty and wide-extending reflector, his previous earth lives, but chiefly the last one, mirrored from the souls with whom he was associated. And we gain the impression, just in regard to our life of action, that all that is departing from us. We lose the ego-feeling which we had on earth in the body, or we really lost it a long time ago between death and a new birth. Now, however, the ego-feeling arises in us from this whole reflection. With the mirroring of our deeds, we come to life in all the souls with whom we were associated during our earth life.

On earth, our I, our ego, was like a point. Here between death and a new birth, it is reflected to us everywhere from the periphery. This is an intimate association with other souls, but an association in accordance with the relations into which we have entered with them.

And in the spiritual world all this is a reality. If we go through a room hung with many mirrors, we see ourselves reflected in each one. But we also know that the reflections—according to ordinary human parlance—are “not there;” when we depart they do not remain; we are no longer reflected. But that which is reflected there in human souls remains as something present. 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 images. We draw all this together to form our astral body, so that, in truth, when we descend from the spiritual world into the physical, we carry in our astral body what we have taken up again into ourselves, in accordance with the reflection to which our actions of the former earth life have given rise in other souls between death and a new birth. This gives us the impulses which impel us toward or away from the human souls with whom we are born again at the same time in the physical body.

In this way, between death and a new birth, the impulse for the karma of the new earth life is fashioned. I shall, very soon, have to describe the process more in detail by taking the ego into consideration also.

And now we can trace how an impulse from one life works on into other lives. Let us take, for example, the impulse of love. We can perform our deeds in relation to other human beings out of that impulse which we call love. There is a difference whether we perform our acts out of a mere sense of duty, of convention, of decency, or the like, or whether we perform them out of a greater or lesser degree of love.

Let us assume that during an earth life a human being is able to perform actions warmed through and through by love. This, indeed, remains as a real force in his soul. What he now takes with him as result of his deeds, what is mirrored there in the other souls, comes back to him as a reflection. And from this he forms his astral body with which he descends to the earth. There the love of the former earth life, the love which has streamed out of him and which now returns to him from other human beings, transforms itself into joy. So that, when the human being does something for his fellow-men that is sustained by love, something in connection with which love streams out of him and accompanies the deeds which advance his fellow-men, then the metamorphosis in the passage through life between death and a new birth is of such a character that what is outpouring love in one life on earth is, in the next earth life, transmuted, metamorphosed, into joy streaming toward him.

If you experience joy, my dear friends, through a human being in one earth life, you may be sure it is the outcome of the love which you have shown for him in a former life. This joy now flows back again into your soul during earth life. You know this inwardly warming feeling of joy. You know what meaning joy has in life, especially the joy which conies from human beings. It warms life, it sustains life, we may say that it gives wings to life. It is karmically the result of love bestowed.

In our joy, however, we again experience a relation to the other human being who gives us joy. So that in our former earth lives we have had something within us that made the love flow out from us; in our subsequent earth lives we already have, as a result, the inward experience of the warmth of joy. And that is again something that streams from us. A human being who is allowed to experience joy in life, is of importance to his fellow-men, has warming significance. A human being who has cause for going joylessly through life behaves differently toward his fellow-men from the one who is permitted to go through life joyfully.

But what is experienced in joy in the life between birth and death is reflected again in the souls of the most various kinds with whom we were associated on earth and who are now also in the life between death and a new birth. And this reflection, which in manifold ways then comes back to us from the souls of the human beings known to us on earth, this reflection works back in turn. We carry it again in our astral body when we descend into the next earth life—we are now dealing with the third earth life. Once more it is instilled, imprinted, in our astral body. And it now becomes in its result the underlying basis, the impulse for a quick and ready understanding of human beings and the world. It becomes the basis for that soul condition which sustains us by virtue of our having the ability to understand the world. If we find the conduct of human beings interesting and can take joy in it, if we understand their conduct and take interest in it in a given incarnation on earth, then that directs us back to the joy of our previous incarnation, to the love of our still earlier incarnation. Human beings who are able to go through the world with a free and open mind, so that the free and open mind permits the world to flow into them, so that they have an understanding for the world, these are human beings who have gained this attitude to the world through love and joy.

What we perform in our deeds out of love is altogether different from what we do out of a rigid and dry sense of duty. You know, indeed, that I have always emphasized in my books that the deeds springing from love are to be understood as the truly ethical, as the truly moral deeds. I have often been compelled to indicate the great contrast, in this regard, between Kant and Schiller. Kant, both in life and in knowledge, “kantified” [Kante in German means a hard edge or angle. (Note by translator)] everything. Through Kant, everything in knowledge became sharp and angular; and thus, also human conduct. “Duty, thou great and exalted name, thou who containest nothing of pleasure, nothing that curries favors ...” this passage I quoted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to the pretended vexation—not the sincere, but the pretended, hypocritical vexation—of many opponents, and I opposed to it what I must acknowledge to be my view: “Love, thou impulse that speaketh warmly to the soul. ...”

Over against the dry and rigid Kantian concept of duty, Schiller coined the expression: “Gladly I serve my friends; yet alas, I do it with pleasure, wherefore it oftentimes vexes me that I am not virtuous,” For, according to the Kantian ethics, that which we do out of inclination is not virtuous, but only that which we do out of the rigid concept of duty.

Now, there are human beings who, in the first place, do not attain to love. But, because they cannot tell their fellow-man the truth out of love (for if we love a human being we tell him the truth, and not lies), because they are unable to love, they tell the truth out of a sense of duty; since they cannot love, they refrain, merely out of a sense of duty, from thrashing their fellow-man, or boxing his ears, striking him, or doing something similar, when he does anything they do not like. There is, indeed, a difference between the deeds of love and acting out of a rigid sense of duty—which, to be sure, is absolutely necessary in social life, necessary for many things.

Now, the deeds that are done out of a rigid concept of duty, or out of convention or propriety, because it is “the proper thing to do,” will not call forth joy in the next earth life, but in that they pass in the same way through the reflection by the souls, as I have described it, they call forth in the next earth life something which we might describe as follows: We sense that we are an object of indifference to other human beings. Many a person carries through life the sense that he is an object of indifference to other human beings and suffers from it. And rightly he suffers from it, if he is of no concern to other human beings, for human beings are there for one another, and the human being is dependent upon not being a matter of indifference to his fellow-men. What the human being thus suffers here is simply the result of the lack of love in a former earth life where he behaved as a decent human being because of the rigid duty which hung over him like the sword of Damocles—I will not say, a sword of steel, for that would be disquieting for most dutiful people, but just like a wooden sword of Damocles.

We have now reached the second earth life. That which comes as joy from love becomes in the third life, 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 true and good. That which streams to us as indifference from other human beings, and what we experience thereby in one earth life, fashions us for the third, that is to say for the next earth life, into a human being who does not know what to do with himself. When such a person enters school, he is at a loss what to do with that which the teachers impart to him. When he grows a little older, he does not know whether to become a locksmith or Privy Councilor. He does not know what to do with himself in life. He actually drifts aimlessly through life without direction. In regard to his observation of the outer world, he is not exactly dull. Music, for instance, he understands well enough, but it gives him no pleasure. It is, after all, a matter of indifference to him whether the music is more or less good or more or less bad. To be sure, he feels the beauty of a painting or other work of art, but there is always something in his soul that irritates him: “What is the good of it, anyhow? To what purpose is all this?” These, in turn, are the things that make their appearance in karmic connection in the third earth life.

Now let us assume, however, that out of hate or an inclination to antipathy a human being does certain injuries to his fellow-men. Here we may imagine every conceivable degree. One individual with criminal feelings of hatred may harm his fellow-men. Or—I am omitting the intermediate stages—he may be a critic. To be a critic, one must always hate a little—unless one is a praising critic, and such critics are few nowadays, for it is not interesting to show recognition of other people's work; it becomes interesting only when one can make fun of things. Now, there are all manner of intermediate stages. But we have here to think of human deeds which proceed from a cold antipathy—antipathy about which we are often not at all clear—or, at the other extreme, from hatred. All that is brought about in this way by human beings against their fellow-men or even against sub-human creatures, all this vents itself in soul conditions which in turn also mirror themselves in the life between death and a new birth. And then, in the next earth life, out of the hatred is born that which streams to us from the world as sorrow, as unhappiness caused from without, as the opposite of joy.

You will reply: “But really, we experience so much sorrow; is that all due to hatred, greater or lesser hatred, in our preceding life? I cannot possibly imagine”—a man will be apt to say—“that I have been such a bad lot, so that I must experience so much sorrow, because I have hated so much.” Well, if we wish to think without prejudice on these things, we must become aware of how great is the illusion which gives us satisfaction and to which, therefore, we easily surrender if it is a question of our suggesting away from our conscious mind any feeling of antipathy against other human beings. People really go through the world with far more hatred than they think—at least, with far more antipathy. And it is a matter of fact that hatred, because it gives satisfaction to the soul, is not as a rule consciously experienced. It is eclipsed by the satisfaction it gives. But, when it returns as sorrow which streams to us from without, then we notice it, as sorrow.

But just consider for a moment, my dear friends—in order to represent in a quite trivial fashion what is present there as a possibility—think of an afternoon-tea chatter, a real, a genuine gossiping tea party where half a dozen (half a dozen is quite enough) “aunts” or “uncles”—it can be uncles, too—or “cousins,” if you will, are sitting together discussing their fellows. Just think how many antipathies are unloaded on human beings, say, in the course of an hour and a half—often it is longer. While this antipathy pours out, people do not notice it; but when it returns in the next earth life, then it will, indeed, be noticed. And it returns, inexorably.

Thus, in actual fact, a portion—not all; we shall still become acquainted with other karmic connections—a portion of what we experience in one earth life as sorrow caused from outside may very well be due to our feelings of antipathy in a former earth life.

In connection with all this we must, naturally, always realize that karma, that some sort of karmic stream, must begin at some time, somewhere. So that, if you have here, for example, a succession of earth lives:

a b c (d)

and this (d) is the present life; not all pain, naturally, that falls to our lot from without need be due to our former earth lives. It may also be an original sorrow, which will work itself out karmically only in the next earth life. I say, therefore, that a large part of that sorrow which streams to us from outside is a result of hate which was brought into being in former earth lives.

If we now proceed again to the third earth life, the result of what streams to us there as sorrow—but only the result of that sorrow which comes to us, so to speak, out of stored-up hate—the result of this sorrow which then unloads in our soul is, in the first place, a kind of mental dullness, a sort of dullness in the capacity of insight into the world. If you have a human being who confronts the world phlegmatically and with indifference, who does not confront the things of the world, or other human beings, with an open heart, the fact is, very often, that he has acquired this obtuseness of mind through the sorrow of a previous earth life, caused in his own karma. This sorrow, however, when it expresses itself in this way in obtuseness of soul must be retraced to the feelings of hatred which occurred at least in the second earth life prior to this one. We can be absolutely sure that stupidity in any one earth life is always the consequence of hatred in a certain former earth life.

Yet, my dear friends, the understanding of karma shall not rest only on the fact that we comprehend karma for the purpose of understanding life, but that we are also able to comprehend it as an impulse of life, that we are conscious that with life there is not merely an “a, b, c, d,” but also an “e, f, g, h,”

a, b, c, (d), e, f, g, h

that there are also earth lives still to come, and that what we develop as the content of our soul in a present earth life will have its effects, its results, in the next earth life. If any one wishes to be especially stupid in his second earth life after this one, he need, really, only hate a great deal in this present earth life. But, if someone wishes to have a free and open insight in the second earth life after this one, he need only love with special intensity in this earth life. And insight into karma, knowledge of karma, gains real value only through the fact that it flows into our will for the future, that it plays a role in this will for the future. And it is true in every respect that the moment is now at hand in the evolution of mankind when the unconscious can no longer continue to be effective in the same way it was effective previously, while our souls were passing through previous earth lives, for human beings are becoming constantly freer and more conscious.

Since the first third of the fifteenth century we have been in the age in which human beings are continually becoming freer and more conscious. Hence, those individuals who are human beings of the present time will have in a subsequent earth life a dim feeling of previous earth lives. And just as the modern man, if he notices that he is not very bright, does not ascribe this to himself, but to his natural lack of ability—the cause of which he usually seeks in his physical nature in accordance with the theories of modern materialism—so will the human beings who will be the re-incarnated human beings of the present time, have at least an obscure feeling which will worry them. If they are not very bright, they will feel that something must have taken place which was connected with feelings of hate and antipathy.

And, if we speak today of a Waldorf School pedagogy, we must naturally take into account the present earth civilization. We cannot yet educate in complete frankness in such a way that we consciously employ repeated earth lives in education, for modern human beings have not yet even a dim feeling for repeated earth lives. The beginnings, however, that have been made just in the Waldorf School pedagogy, if they are taken up, will continue to develop in the coming centuries with the result that the following will be included in ethical, moral education: If a child has little talent, it is due to former earth lives in which it has hated intensely, and we shall then, with the help of spiritual science, seek out whom it might have hated. For the human beings who were hated, and against whom deeds were committed out of hate, must be rediscovered somewhere in the child's environment. Gradually, in coming centuries, the education of a child will have to be related far more definitely to human life. We shall have to see, in regard to this dull child, whence that is reflected or has been reflected in the life between death and a new birth, which goes through a metamorphosis resulting in unintelligence in this earth life. We shall then be able to do something to the end that in childhood a special love is developed for those human beings for whom the child felt specific hatred in former earth lives. And we shall see that through such a specifically aroused and directed love, the child's intellect, nay, the child's whole soul state, will brighten.

It is not in general theories about karma that we shall find what can aid education, but in looking concretely into life in order to see what the karmic connections are. We shall soon notice that the fact that children are brought together in a school class by fate is, indeed, not something to be regarded with complete indifference. And when we shall have risen beyond the hideous carelessness that prevails in these things nowadays, when the “human material”—for so it is often called—which is thrown together in a school class is actually conceived as though it were thrown together by mere chance, not as though destiny had brought these human beings together,—if we shall have risen beyond this appalling indifference, we shall then gain a new outlook as educators, we shall then be able to perceive what strange karmic threads are spun from one child to the other as a result of former lives. And we shall then bring into the children's development that which can effect equalization.

In a certain respect, karma is under the domination of an inexorable necessity. Out of an inexorable necessity we are able definitely to establish the sequence:

These are unconditional connections. Although it is true that we are confronted by an absolute necessity when a river follows its course, yet we have frequently regulated rivers, have given them a different course. So in like manner is it also possible to regulate, if I may say so, the karmic stream, to affect its course. Indeed, this is possible.

Thus, if you notice that in childhood there is a tendency to idiocy, and if you then realize the necessity of guiding the child, especially of developing love in his heart, if you discover—and this should be possible even today for people with a fine observation of life,—if you discover to which other children the child is karmically related, and if you are able

to bring the child to the point of loving just these children, to perforin deeds of love for them, you will then see that you are able with love to give a counterweight to antipathy, and that you are able by means of it to correct this idiocy in the next incarnation, in the next earth life.

There are educators, trained, as it were, by their own instinct, who often do some such thing out of their instinct, who bring dull-witted children to the point where they are able to love, and thus educate them by degrees to become more intelligent human beings.

It is such things that make our insight into karmic connections of service to life.

Before we go further in considering the details of karma, yet another question will have to confront our souls. Just ask yourself: What is a human being really with whom—in general, at least—we may know ourselves to be karmically related? I must use an expression which is often used today rather ironically: such a man is a “contemporary”; he is on the earth at the same time that we are.

If you bear this in mind, you will say to yourself that, if you are associated with certain human beings in one earth life, you were associated with them in a previous earth life also (generally speaking, at least; matters may, of course, be somewhat shifted). And you were, likewise, associated with them in a still earlier life. (See Figure V)

Now, those individuals, who live fifty years later than you, were associated in turn with human beings in former earth lives. Generally speaking, the human beings of, let us say, the B series do not, in accordance with the thought we have developed here, come in contact with the human beings of the A series. This is an oppressive thought, but a true one.

I shall later speak about other debatable questions, such as arise, for instance, through the fact that people often say that humanity multiplies on the earth. Today, however, I should like to place the following thought before you; it is, perhaps, an oppressive thought, but it is none the less a true one. It is an actual fact that the continued life of men on earth takes place in rhythms. One shift of human beings—if I may put it so—proceeds, as a general rule, from one earth life to another; another shift of human beings does the same, and they are in a certain sense separated from one another; they do not come together during earth life. To be sure, in the long intervening life between death and a new birth they do come together; but for earth life it is, indeed, a fact that we descend to the earth with a limited circle of people. To be “contemporaries” has an inner meaning, an inner importance just for repeated earth lives.

Why is it so? I can assure you, this question which, in the first place, may occupy us intellectually, has caused me the greatest imaginable pain in the field of spiritual science, because it is necessary to discover the truth regarding this question, the inner nature of the facts. And thus, we may ask ourself—forgive my using an example which really concerns me only as a matter of research—we may ask ourself the question: “Why were you not a contemporary of Goethe's? By your not a contemporary of Goethe's you can, according to this truth, conclude on general principles that you have never lived with Goethe on the earth. Goethe belongs to another shift of human beings.”

What really lies behind this? Here we must reverse the question. But to do so we must have an open, liberal mind for human social relationships. We must be able to ask ourself a question—and I shall have very much to say in the near future about this question—we must be able to ask ourself the question: What is it really to be another man's contemporary? What is it, on the other hand, to be able to know of him only from history, so far as the earth life is concerned? What does this mean?

Well, my dear friends, we must have an open, liberal mind in order to answer the intimate question: “How do matters stand with regard to all the inner accompanying phenomena of the soul when a contemporary of yours speaks to you, performs actions which come near you? How do matters stand?” And, after having acquired the necessary knowledge, you must then be able to compare this with what the situation would be were you to come into contact with a personality who is not your contemporary, perhaps has never been such in any life on earth, and whom you may, nevertheless, revere to the highest degree, much more, perhaps, than any of your contemporaries—what would be the situation were you to encounter this personality as a contemporary? In a word—pardon the personal note—what would the situation be, had I been a contemporary of Goethe? If you are not an indifferent kind of person—naturally, if you are an indifferent person and have no comprehension of what a contemporary can be, you cannot very well answer such a question—then you can ask the question: “How would it be if I, walking down the Schillergasse in Weimar toward the Frauenplan, had seen the fat Privy Councilor approaching me, say in the year 1826, 1827?” Now, we know quite well, we could not have stood it. Our contemporary we can stand. If the one with whom we cannot be contemporary were, nevertheless, our contemporary, we should not be able to endure him; he would, in a certain sense, act like a poison on our soul life. We endure him as a historical character, because he is not our contemporary, but our successor or predecessor.

Of course, if we have no feeling for such things, they remain in the unconscious. We can well imagine that a certain man has a fine feeling for the spiritual and knows that, had he walked down the Schillergasse in Weimar toward the Frauenplan, and had he, as a contemporary, encountered the fat Privy Councilor Goethe with the double chin, he would then have felt himself in an inwardly impossible state. The one, however, who has no feeling for such things—well, he would, perhaps, have taken off his hat!

These things, my dear friends, do not derive from the earth life, be- cause the reasons why we cannot be the contemporary of some particular man are not to be found within earth life, because here we must penetrate with our preception into the spiritual relationships. This is why, for earth life, such things appear at times paradoxical. Nevertheless, they are facts, most certainly facts.

I can assure you that I wrote with genuine love an 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—without doubt, I should have had a stomach ache. That does not hinder us from having the highest reverence. But such an experience comes to every human being, only, with most people it remains in the subconscious, in the astral or in the ether body; it does not take hold of the physical body. For the soul experience which must seize upon the physical body must, indeed, become conscious. But the following must also be clear to you, my dear friends: If you wish to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, you cannot escape hearing things which seem grotesque and paradoxical, because the spiritual world is different from the physical.

It is, of course, easy enough for anyone to ridicule the statement that if I had been a contemporary of Jean Paul's, it would have given me a stomach ache to sit in his company. It goes without saying that for the everyday, banal, philistine world of earthly life ridicule is to be expected. But the laws of the banal, philistine world do not hold good for spiritual relationships. If we wish to understand the spiritual world we must accustom ourselves to think with other thought forms; we must be prepared to experience many quite surprising things. When, in our everyday consciousness, we read about Goethe, we may naturally feel impelled to say: “How I should like to have known him personally, to have shaken hands with him!” and so on. That is thoughtlessness, for there are laws according to which we are predestined for a certain epoch of the earth in which we can live. Just as we are preconditioned to stand a certain pressure of the air in our physical body, and therefore cannot rise above the earth beyond a certain height where the pressure is not agreeable, so is a man who is predestined for the twentieth century unable to live at the time of Goethe.

These were the things which, at the outset, I wished to bring forward about karma.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1984. It is also known as, The Michael Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha. It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume The Mission of Michael. The Revelation of the Intrinsic Secret of the Human Being.

For a true understanding of the nature of the human being we have to recognise his division into three members, each of which is, relatively speaking, self-dependent. We have within the human being the head, the organs of the breast system, and the organs of the limbs. These are of course crude expressions that are only roughly true. Under the name of limbs, for example, we have to include a good part of what is contained in the trunk. Moreover, as you will have gathered from my lectures, as well as from my book, Riddles of the Soul, there is a connection between the head of Man and his life of thought and ideation; the whole rhythmic activity in Man—roughly speaking, the breast system—is connected with the sphere of feeling; and finally the sphere of the will, which represents the essentially spiritual part of Man, goes together with the system and organisation of the limbs. Relatively speaking, these three systems of the human organism are independent one of another. Similarly, the life of ideas, the life of feeling and the life of will are each self-dependent, although at the same time they work together.

Now, as you know, we can best comprehend the difference from a spiritual point of view between these three systems when we observe them in the following way. In ordinary waking life Man is fully awake only in his head system—in all that has to do with the life of thinking and ideas. Everything connected with the life of feeling—that is, from a bodily aspect, with the rhythmic system—is a dream-life. Even in daytime the life of feeling pervades our waking life with a life of dreams. What goes on in the sphere of feeling we know indirectly through ideas, but we can never know it directly through the feelings themselves. The life of will is in still greater darkness; we have no clearer grasp of its real content than we have of the life of sleep.

A recognition of these distinctions allows us to indicate more exactly than is usually done the character and extent of the subconscious states lying below ordinary human consciousness. Subconscious ideas lie beneath the life of feeling; and still more deeply unconscious ideas lie beneath the life of will.

Now it is very important to realise that each one of the three systems contains within it thinking, feeling and willing. In the head system or the system of thought, a life of feeling and a life of will are also present; only they are much less developed than the life of ideas. Similarly, thoughts are present in the sphere of feeling, more feebly than in the sphere of the head and only coming to consciousness in a dreamlike manner.

One thing is usually quite disregarded, my dear friends, in our time of abstract science, and it is this. These subconscious members of the human being are more objective in proportion as they are less subjectively present in consciousness. What do I mean by that? I mean this. In our life of ideas, in our head life, we have processes which take place within us. On the other hand, what we experience through our rhythmic system, the processes that go on in the sphere of our feeling, are by no means our own individual property. They take place within us and yet at the same time they represent objective world-processes. This means that when you feel, you have of course an experience in yourself, but this experience is at the same time something that happens in the world and has significance there. And it is of extraordinary interest to follow up the world-processes that lie behind our life of feeling.

Suppose you experience something that affects you very deeply, Some event that moves you to joy or sorrow. Now you know that the whole of life runs its course in such a way that we can separate it into periods of about seven years in length. Roughly speaking, the first is from birth to the change of teeth, the second to the age of puberty, the third to the beginning of the twenty-first year, and so on. All these boundary lines are of course only approximate. Here then we have one division that shows itself in the course of human life.

The turning-points in the development of the human being which we arrive at by this method are clearly marked in the earlier part of life—change of teeth, and puberty—but later are more or less concealed, although they can be distinctly noted by one who knows what to look for. That which takes place in the soul and spirit of the human being about the twenty-first year of life is, for one who can observe it, just as clearly perceptible as the change at puberty is for external physiology. The division into seven-year periods holds true, in fact, for the whole course of human life.

Now let us go back to the event that makes a strong impression on our life of feeling. Suppose the event happens between the change of teeth and puberty. A very remarkable thing then takes place, which in these days of crude observation is not generally noticed. The impression made upon your feeling is there, and then gradually the vibrations of it die away in your consciousness. But something takes place in the objective world quite apart from what is in your consciousness, quite apart from any share your life of soul has in it. And this process that goes on in the objective world may be compared with the setting up of a vibratory motion. It vibrates out into the world. And the remarkable thing is that it does not go out and out endlessly into the infinite, but when it has spread itself out for a sufficient distance—when its elasticity is, so to speak, used up—it swings back and makes its appearance in the next seven-year period as an impulse that works upon your life of soul from outside. I will not say that such an event always comes back seven years later, for the lapse of time depends on the whole form and character of the individual life, but it falls into the course of the next seven-year period, although very often entirely without your notice.

Yes, my dear friends, we continually undergo experiences which strike in upon our feeling life and are the reaction of the world to an experience we had in the sphere of feeling during the previous seven-year period. An event that stirs and moves our feelings resounds again into our life of soul during the next stage of life. People do not usually remark such things, but anyone who takes a little trouble can learn to observe them, even externally.

Who of you has not at one time had the experience that someone you know well suddenly becomes dejected and out of humour? You have no idea why, but a change has come over him “out of the blue”, as we say. If you follow up the matter and have the eyes of your soul open to observe the particular way in which such a man conducts himself in life, if you can feel what is in between the words he says—or rather, what is within the words—then you will be able to go back to some earlier event that affected him deeply. And during the whole of the interval something has been going on in the world which would not have been going on if the man had not had that moving experience. The whole thing is a process which, besides being experienced by the man himself, takes place also as an absolutely objective experience outside him.

You will readily see how many opportunities there are for such things to go on outside us! They come about through our instrumentality, but they are none the less objective world-processes. These processes become involved in all that is going on among the elemental beings outside us, including such elemental beings as I described to you recently. You will remember how in another connection I brought them together with the breathing and the whole rhythmic system. Now you can see them working together with the rhythmic system indirectly through stimulation of the feelings. When we understand these things rightly, we are led to the inevitable conclusion that Man is continually creating around him as it were a great aura. And into the waves that are thus thrown up, elemental beings plunge; they mix themselves up, as it were, in the whole process and are able to influence the reaction that comes back on to Man—their power to do so, however, depending on the individual human being.

Let us picture the whole process. Something moves you deeply. You ray it out all around you. When it comes back to you, it is not unchanged; in the meantime elemental beings have concerned themselves with it, and when it works back on to you, then, together with the process outside you of which the elemental beings took hold, you receive also the influences and workings of these elemental beings. Man spreads out around him a spiritual atmosphere whereby he comes into contact with elemental beings—he and they mutually affect one another. All destiny that works itself out within the course of life is connected with these beings. For even within this life we have a kind of fulfillment of our destiny. If we have some experience today, then that experience has a significance for our later life. And this in fact is how our destiny is moulded. Elemental beings who feel attracted to us by reason of our nature, work at the shaping of our destiny. There they attain to a feeling of themselves: there they work with us and upon us.

We have here obtained an insight into the interplay between Man and his environment, and can see how spiritual forces are at work in the environment. By following this interplay, we can throw a light on many things that happen to Man in the way of destiny. An insight into these connections is nowhere within the scope of the ‘enlightened’ knowledge of our times; we can find traces of it only in traditions that have survived from earlier times, when Man lived in more elemental stages of consciousness and had more direct connection with reality. These traditions you will find sometimes very beautifully brought to expression in poems of earlier ages, where a destiny that befalls a human being is referred to the intervention of elemental beings. One of the most beautiful that has been preserved is a poem often presented to you in a Eurythmy performance. Here you can see how elemental beings from the Elf King's realm intervene in the destiny of Man. The poem runs thus:

THE ELF KING'S DAUGHTER
Sir Olaf rides from house and hall
Till late, his wedding guests to call.

There elves are dancing on the green,
Elf King's daughter amidst them is seen.

“Welcome Sir Olaf, your hand I'll take,
Come dance and join us for my sake.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may,
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
Two golden spurs I'll give to thee!

A silken sark snow white and fine—
My mother bleached it by moonshine.”

“I shall not dance nor dance I may
Tomorrow will be my wedding day!”

“Mark well, Sir Olaf, and dance with me—
A mountain of gold I'll give to thee!”

“To a mountain of gold I'll not say nay,
But I shall not dance nor dance I may.”

“If you refuse to dance with me
Illness and pest shall follow thee.”

Over his heart she struck amain,
Never he felt such bitter pain.

Pale-faced he sat on his horse so tame—
“Go back”, she cried, “to your worthy dame.”

And when at last he reached his gate
Trembling his mother stood to wait.

“My son, my son, oh tell me true
Why is your face of deathlike hue?”

“Of deathlike hue it needs must be
For Elf King's daughter did I see.”

“My son so dear, and loved so well,
What to your bride I needs must tell?”

“Tell her that to the woods I'm bound—
To exercise my horse and hound.”

At early dawn, at break of day,
Came bride and guests in their wedding array.

They feasted and drank of wine and beer—
“Where is Sir Olaf, my bridegroom dear?”

“Sir Olaf to the woods is bound
To exercise his horse and hound!”

The bride she lifted the cloth so red
There lay Sir Olaf—and he was dead.

There you have the elemental world interweaving in the destiny of Man, at the very moment when his destiny strikes in upon him with the shock of illness and of death. Please note the words exactly. In old poems these things are not presented as they would be in poems of recent times. (Herder took these verses from an old folk-poem). Of the poems produced within present day culture we may well say that about 99 per cent are superfluous. The poems that are derived from an ancient knowledge are always to be distinguished by the fact that they are true to reality. It could not possibly have been said in this poem that she struck him on the head, or on the mouth, or on the nose, but:

Over the heart she struck him amain,
He felt therefrom a grievous pain.

In this connection it has to be an organ of the rhythmic system, hence the heart.

What I want you to note is that here you have an entirely faithful reproduction in poetry of what actually goes on around Man in such an hour of destiny. It is in fact always going on around Man, but it makes itself felt particularly strongly in connection with the phenomenon of this periodic return of experiences in the sphere of feeling. For these always come back to us in a changed form. They enter into our destiny only after they have passed through whatever the elemental beings have found to do with them. Just as we live within the external physical air or among the products of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—in the very same way do we live with the subconscious parts of our nature in spiritual spheres. In particular, with our rhythmic system we live in the spiritual sphere of the elemental beings. And in that sphere is shaped as much of our destiny as can be shaped in the course of life between birth and death.

Only because in our head we are fully awake, do we rise up at all out of this interplay with the elemental beings. In respect of our head life alone we are not involved in the realm of the elemental beings. There in our head we emerge, so to speak, above the surface of the ocean of elemental existence, in which as human beings we perpetually swim. Here then you may see how experiences can come back in the form of destiny even within the ordinary course of life, when they are related to our rhythmic system.

For the limb system, too, there is an interplay with the environment, but it is very much more complicated. Here again the events swing back; but they make a wider circuit and come back only in the next life or in one of the following earth-lives. Thus we can say that what we call our destiny or Karma need not after all be so enigmatic for us, if we look on it as only a further expansion of what can be studied in the return of experiences within a single life. For the experiences do not come back unchanged; they have undergone a very great change in the meantime.

Let me now draw your attention to a particular fact. Wherever I have lectured on education, I have always given emphasis to an important landmark in the course of life that occurs at about the ninth year. It is a turning-point that should be very carefully marked in teaching. Up to that time one's teaching about nature should be entirely of the kind where the description of nature and her processes is connected—by way of fables, legends, and so forth—with the moral life. Only at the ninth year may one begin to describe nature in a simple, elementary manner. Then the child is ripe for it. In Waldorf education the whole arrangement and treatment of subjects is derived directly and entirely from actual observation of the human being, down to the smallest details. I pointed this out in the article I wrote on the educational foundations of the Waldorf School, and I alluded there to this turning-point around the ninth year.

We may characterise this turning-point by saying that the ego-consciousness receives then a new form. The child becomes capable of taking note of external nature in a more objective way. Earlier, he unites whatever he sees in nature with his own being. Now the ego-consciousness unfolds, as you know, in the first seven-year stage of life, from about 2 – 2 ½ years of age. What happens is that it comes back in the second seven-year period, at about the ninth year. This is one of the most striking ‘returns’—this return of the ego-consciousness at about the ninth year of age. It comes back in a more spiritual form, whereas in the second or third year of life it has more of a soul character. This is only one of the events which comes back in a striking manner. The same observation can be made for less significant events.

Indeed, my dear friends, it will become urgently necessary for the future of human evolution to pay attention to these intimate things in the life of Man. An insight into such things must gradually become part of general culture. The culture and education of mankind change from epoch to epoch. We today, for example, are quite unhappy if at ten years old our children cannot read or do sums. The Romans were not so at all; they were unhappy if a child of ten did not yet know the twelve tables of the law. We for our part do not put ourselves to great trouble to make our children acquainted with the terms of the law. Our children's minds would be in a sorry plight if we did! What is thought necessary for people generally to be aware of, changes from age to age; and today we stand at the starting point of a time when the very evolution of the earth and mankind requires that these more intimate connections of Man's life of soul shall be generally recognised. Man will have to come to the point of knowing himself more exactly than has been held to be necessary hitherto. Otherwise these things will work back upon the whole disposition of human life in a most unfavourable way.

Because we do not know that something which stirs us deeply has such an origin, it does not by any means follow that nothing of the kind takes place in our life of soul. The events come back; they exercise their influence upon our life of soul. We cannot account for them. We do not attempt to bring them into our consciousness. The result is that many people today suffer a great deal from conditions of soul which they simply accept, while of course having no idea that they are to be referred to earlier experiences. Whatever concerns our feelings always comes back in some form or other. You will probably remember the typical instance I have often given. If we teach a child to pray—if, that is, we teach him to develop a prayerful mood and feeling, the effect of it will swing back into his life after many years. It swings back in the interval, but then swings out again further, and only later, after a very long time, does the feeling of prayer come back and manifest in a mood of blessing. As I have often said: No-one will be able in old age to bestow blessing upon others, merely from his presence, from the imponderable elements in his nature, if in childhood he has not learned to pray. Prayer turns into the power to bless. That is how things come back in life. And it is becoming imperative that men should understand these things.

The truth is that men's failure to comprehend these things is the cause of their inability to perceive the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. What meaning can it have for people who are caught in the toils of present day education when they hear it said: ‘After Christ had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, He united Himself with the life of earthly humanity?’ People are not ready to form any idea of their reciprocal relation to the very realm of life wherein the Christ is to be found. The influence of the Christ Impulse is not very noticeable in the concept-forming activity of our heads. As soon, however, as we look down into the unconscious, as soon as we turn our gaze downwards into the sphere of feeling and into the sphere of willing, then we live, first of all, in the sphere of elemental beings; but this sphere is interwoven for us with the Christ Impulse. By way of our rhythmic system—that is, by way of our feelings—we dive down into the realm with which the Christ has united Himself. There we come to the place where the Christ is truly to be found, quite objectively, not merely through tradition or through subjective mysticism.

Moreover, we are living now in an epoch when the events that come from this place, in the way I have just explained, are coming to have great objective significance for the life of Man. For they are beginning to exercise an unconscious influence on men's decisions, upon all that men do; and this is true, even if they struggle against it. If only we are willing to enter into this matter and understand it, we shall be able to experience the influence consciously and to reckon with it; and then we shall be able to call on the spiritual worlds around us to aid us and to work with us.

An external observation will suffice to show that in this matter we are standing at a turning-point in human evolution. I need only refer you to one fact of which I have often spoken from one or another point of view. If we look at the accustomed treatment of history, we shall see that it has not yet reached an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just recall the history of the world as it is usually set before us. A description is given of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms, of the ancient Persian and Egyptian kingdoms and of Greece and Rome, and then perhaps mention is made that the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and after that follows an account of the migrations of peoples, and so on. Some historians then carry the story up to the French Revolution or to Poincare; others to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, and so forth. But in all this fable convenue you will find no mention of the continued working of the Christ Impulse. From the point of view of history as conceived today, it is just as though the Christ Impulse had been simply struck out. It is not there.

It is remarkable how, for example, an historian such as Ranke, who was a Christian and had a true appreciation of the Christ Impulse from a subjective aspect, simply cannot bring the Christ Event into his history. He does not know what to make of it. It plays no part in his conception of history. We may truly say that for Man's knowledge of the spirit, as manifested in history, Christianity is not yet there. It is our anthroposophical spiritual science which for the first time treats history in such a way as to reckon quite positively with the necessity that in the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch the event of Golgotha should break in upon the course of historical evolution. This event is placed at the very centre of our picture of the history of Man. Yes, and we go further. Not only do we receive the event of Golgotha into our picture of the history of Man, we portray cosmic evolution also, so that the Mystery of Golgotha has place within it.

If you will study my Outline of Occult Science, you will find that we do not speak there merely of eclipses of the sun or eclipses of the moon or of explosions or eruptions in the cosmos, but we speak of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. Strange to say, while the so-called historians can find no possible way of including the Christ Event in the progress of Man, the official representatives of religion are infuriated when they hear that some kind of anthroposophical spiritual science has entered the field and speaks of the Christ Event as a cosmic event. When they hear this, they treat it as a terrible outrage. Thus you can see how little readiness there is on the part of the Churches to meet the requirements of our time, for it is essential that the Christ Event should be brought into connection with the great events of the universe.

It must be said that even theologians today often speak of the Christ just as they may speak of any other divine Being. They speak of Him very much as the Hebrews of old or the Jews today speak of their Jahve. I told you a few days ago how one could take Harnack's book, The Essence of Christianity, and substitute for the name of Christ, wherever he uses it, the general name of God, and this without altering the sense, for Harnack has no glimmering of the specific nature of Christianity. His book is page for page a description of the very opposite of the essence of Christianity. It does not treat of Christianity at all; it treats of a general Jahve teaching.

It is important to point out these things, for they are deeply connected with the necessary demands of our time. It is no vague awareness of the presence of an abstract spiritual world that is needed: the evolution of human culture requires that Man should bring into it a consciousness of the actual spiritual world in which we live with all that we feel and will and do, and out of which we raise ourselves only in so far as we think. We emerge from it only with our heads, so to speak. Indeed, an entirely new kind of world-picture is justified when the endeavour is made to permeate all our feeling and willing and doing with the Christ Impulse. Our modern astronomy and our theory of evolution have been able to develop so entirely along the lines of abstract formulae solely because the Christ Impulse has not taken hold of men inwardly, but has remained a tradition. Even where it has taken hold of men subjectively, their inner experiences have not been at the same time objective world experiences—that is, experiences where we feel an interplay between ourselves and all that is happening spiritually around us.

Here and there one sees people beginning to be very keenly aware of the need for a new impulse in the evolution of humanity. But it is with the greatest difficulty that they come to the point of resolving to take hold of the life of the spirit in its actuality. When people speak of the spirit, they always have more or less a desire to keep within the abstract.

Even the consciousness of how we stand in relation to our thoughts must change in a certain way. For, as I have repeatedly pointed out, anthroposophical spiritual science is brought forward at this present time in fulfillment of a definite purpose. It is not the result of a wish to promote enthusiasm for some sort of ideal. It springs from an insight into Man's needs at the present time. And we must again at this point relate the needs of the present day to certain powers of the soul that were present in earlier ages, when Man had a closer connection with his spiritual environment. For in earlier times the conditions of Man's life of soul were quite different.

As I have often explained to you, we cannot look for any further development of Man from sources outside himself. The impulses for the progress of human evolution must in future be called forth from within; they must proceed from our connection with the spiritual world, and we must not blind ourselves to the fact that unless something is added by our own exertion to the experiences of life, these will tend increasingly to become experiences of decline. We find ourselves already in the descending evolution of the earth, and as human beings we must lift ourselves up by our own efforts if we are to transcend the earth-evolution, for we can emerge beyond it only through our connection with the spiritual world. It is our strivings in the direction of knowledge that we shall have to feel as a power within us, enabling humanity to pass over into future stages of evolution, when the Earth dies away, even as we pass on to further stages of evolution when our body dies away and we go through the gate of death.

We pass as individual human beings through the gate of death into the spiritual world; the body dies away beneath us. So will it be one day for mankind as a whole. Mankind will evolve over into the Jupiter existence. The Earth will become a corpse. We are even now in the dying stage of its evolution. The individual human being gets wrinkles and grey hairs. For the geologist who knows how to observe correctly, the Earth bears upon her today the unmistakable signs of old age; she is dying away beneath our feet. The spiritual quest we are engaged upon today is working counter to the ageing of the Earth. Awareness of this fact must permeate our consciousness.

Earlier ages spoke from a different point of view of the close relation between their Mystery knowledge and physical health and healing. This is a truth that must now begin once more to find its way into human consciousness. All striving for knowledge must give rise to the thought: I am doing something to promote the further evolution of the whole of mankind. We shall obviously never come to this consciousness as long as we do not pay attention to the actual process that goes on around us in the way I have described. For until we recognise this, we are bound to regard everything we feel and will and do as our personal affair. We shall have no idea that it is something which takes its course outside us, as well as within.

It will be necessary also for the more exact branches of human knowledge to come to meet this extension of our thought and understanding of the world. And here allow me to refer to something that may perhaps not be fully intelligible to everyone.

The more exact domains of knowledge are by no means yet at their zenith—far from it! For example, you can find today in the exact sciences the most impossible ideas. I will select just one, which may perhaps be generally intelligible. People have usually the following trivial picture: out there somewhere is the sun, and from the sun light goes out in all directions, just as from any other source of light. And you will find that wherever people follow this diffusion of light with mathematical ideas, they will say: You see, the light spreads out and out into the infinite, and then—why then it somehow or other disappears; it gradually weakens and is lost. But this is not so. Everything that spreads out or is diffused in this way reaches a boundary, and from this boundary it swings back again; it returns to its source in a changed form. The sunlight does not go out into the infinite, but swings back on itself—not indeed as light, but as something else. None the less, it does return.

So it is in reality with every form of light. And so it is with every kind of activity. All activities and influences are subject to the law of elasticity. The elasticity in them always has its boundary or limit. And yet ideas such as I have described above are current in our so-called exact sciences; you will find them presented there today. If you were physicists, I would draw your attention to how people reckon with distance traversed and time. They call the velocity, usually denoted by ‘v’, a function of distance and time, and they arrive at the following equation: v = d/t

But, my dear friends, that is absolutely false. The velocity is not a resultant; the velocity is an elementary principle or quality that something, be it material or spiritual, bears within it. And this velocity we analyse; we split it up into distance and time. We abstract the two things out of it—space and time. Space and time, however, are not real things in themselves. Velocities, varying velocities, are real.

This observation I make for the benefit of physicists. They will understand me when I say that their theoretical knowledge of time rests in very shaky foundations. These theories would indeed not hold water if we were in a position to grasp the spiritual in its actuality.

That is the very thing required of us in the present Michael Age. It means that we must take full cognisance of the environment of Man; we must come to know the various elemental and higher beings in our environment as surely as we know of the air and water around us. These are the important things for us; and they must once again become a part of general education and culture, as they were in ancient times. People are not prepared to admit this. They will not admit that in human evolution changes occur as momentous as that which occurred, for example, at the turning-point in the middle of the 15th century. And yet it is quite possible to prove it from detailed facts.

Some Swede or Norwegian has recently written a book in which he gives many quotations from the alchemists. In particular he cites a passage where all manner of things are mentioned—mercury, antimony, and so on. And now our author, whom his book shows to be an excellent modern chemist, says he can make nothing of a certain recipe which is indicated by some alchemist. He cannot do so for the simple reason that, when a present-day chemist speaks of mercury or quicksilver, he means the external metal. But in the book from which he is quoting the words mean something quite different. They do not refer to the external metal at all, but to certain processes within the human organism, and they indicate a knowledge of the inner being of Man. They carry the sense they had for the alchemist. Certainly it is quite possible to read them as if one were reading the description of a laboratory experiment, carried out with retorts and the like—but then one gets no meaning out of it! One is bound to regard it all as nonsense. It has meaning, however, as soon as we know what was meant by the words antimony, mercury, and so forth in those times. They have, it is true, a certain application to the external minerals, but they refer paramountly to inner processes of human nature, for which one had other means of approach than those we have today. The relevant writings from before the 15th century have accordingly to be read with an understanding quite different from the way in which we approach scientific writings of later date.

Such things as these give opportunity to study even externally the far-reaching change that has occurred in Man's life of soul. For a long time now, indeed for hundreds of years, mankind has set no value on these things, but today we are living in an epoch when we must begin to place very great value on them.