The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Contemplation: Michael's sorrow over the evolution of mankind, before the time of his earthly regency.

[ 1 ] With the further progress of the Age of Consciousness, the possibility more and more ceases of direct connection between Michael and the generality of human kind. Into Man's being enters in triumph the new, humanized power of Intellectuality and out of it vanish those imaginative conceptions of the mind, which shew Man the living forms of the Cosmic Intelligence. For Michael, any possibility of approaching Man does not begin until the last third of the nineteenth century. Before then, approach can only be attempted by such roads as were those of the genuine Rosicrucians.

[ 2 ] Man looks with his fresh opening intellect at Nature; and what he sees is a physical world, an ether-world, in which he himself is not. Through the great ideas of Copernicus and Galileo he gains a picture of the external, non-human world; but he loses the picture of himself. He looks at himself, and he has no possibility of arriving at any insight as to what he is.

[ 3 ] In the depths of his being is awakened that which is ordained to be the bearer of his human intelligence. With this, his I combines. Man bears accordingly within him now a threefold being. First, in his spirit-soul, he bears within him, manifested in physical-etheric form, that being which at the very first—in the Saturn and Sun times, and repeatedly ever since—has given him a place in the realm of divine spirit. This is where Man's being and Michael's being can join company. Secondly, Man bears within him his later physical and etheric being—namely that which became his during the Moon and Earth times. All this is the work and workings of divine spirit; but divine spirit no longer lives in it with present being. [ 4 ] It first becomes present again in living being when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha. In that which works spiritually in Man's physical and etheric body, may be found the Christ. Thirdly, Man has in him that part of his spirit and soul which during the Moon and Earth times has acquired a new form of being. In this part, Michael has remained active; whereas in the part turned to the Moon and Earth, he has grown ever more inactive. In the former, it is he who has preserved to Man Man's divine images.

[ 5 ] This Michael could do until the dawn of the Age of Consciousness. And then the entire spirit-and-soul element in Man sank, so to speak, down into the physical and etheric, in order to fetch forth the Spiritual Soul.

[ 6 ] Luminously there arose in Man's consciousness all that his physical body and his ether-body could tell him about the physical and etheric in Nature. There sank from before his vision what astral body and I could tell him about himself.

[ 7 ] A time arises, when amongst mankind there begins to stir a feeling that their insight no longer brings them to themselves. There begins a search after the Knowledge of the Human Being. Men fail to satisfy their seeking by anything which the Present can supply. They go back in history to earlier times. ‘Humanism’ makes its appearance in the evolution of the human mind. Humanism becomes men's ideal object, not because they possess the human being but because they have lost him. So long as they still possessed him, their soul which animated the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam and others would have worn a very different colour from anything that their Humanism could give it.

[ 8 ] In Faust, later on, as re-discovered by Goethe, is the figure of a man who has utterly lost the human being. [ 9 ] Ever intenser becomes this search after Man. For men have only two alternatives: either completely to blunt themselves to the awakening inner sense of their own being; or else to pursue this longing search for Man, so that this search becomes an inherent element of their soul.

[ 10 ] Until the nineteenth century, in the spiritual life of Europe the best men in every field are engaged in the pursuit of every variety of idea—historic, scientific, philosophic, mystic—all representing the endeavour in the intellectualized aspect of the World to discover Man.

[ 11 ] Renaissance, spiritual New Birth, Humanism—all are rushing, storming indeed, after spirituality in a direction where spirituality is not to be found. In the direction where it is to be sought, impotence, illusion, bemazement. And everywhere, through it all, the Michael Forces breaking through, in art, in learning, into the life of man, only not as yet into the young, rising forces of the Spiritual Soul. A tottering of all spiritual life; Michael, with all his forces reaching back in cosmic evolution, in order to find strength to keep in balance the Dragon under his feet. Under these powerful exertions of Michael there arise the great works of the Renaissance. Yet these are still a revival, by Michael's power, of the old life of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul—not yet a working of the new soul-forces.

[ 12 ] One can see Michael, full of anxiety as to whether, after all, he will be in a position to keep the Dragon permanently in check, when he perceives how men are engaged in the one field only, trying to obtain from the picture they have just obtained of Nature a similar picture of Man. Michael sees the way in which men are observing nature and trying, out of what they call Natural Law, to construct an image of Man. He sees how they depict it in their minds: This peculiarity in some animal becomes perfects; that combination of organic functions becomes more nicely adjusted; and so, there ‘arises’ Man. But before the spirit-eye of Michael, what arise is not Man at all. What they think of as growing ever more perfected and more nicely adjusted, is just a thought thing; no one can see it actually growing into fact because the actual facts are otherwise.

[ 13 ] And thus men live with such thoughts of Man in unsubstantial pictures, in illusions that have no being. They pursue an image of Man; they think they possess it; but in truth there is nothing within their range of sight. ‘The power of the Spirit-Sun shines upon their souls; Christ is at work; but as yet they cannot heed Him. The power of the spiritual Soul is strong in their bodies, but into their souls it still will not enter.’ So may one hear the Inspiration which Michael utters in his dire anxiety. May not this force of Illusion in men give the Dragon so much power after all, that it will be an impossibility for him—for Michael himself—to maintain the balance?

[ 14 ] Other individuals again endeavour with more inwardly artistic power to find the union between Nature and Man. Grandly ring the words of Goethe, when describing in a noble book the work of Winkelmann: “When the powers of Man's nature are at work in whole and healthful unison; when he feels himself in the World as in one grand, fair, worshipful and worthy whole; when the well-being of harmonious attunement fills him with a pure and free delight—then would the Universe, were it conscious of itself, shout with joy at the attainment of its goal, and marvellingly acclaim the crown of its own life and being.” The same impulse which inspired the mind of Lessing with flame of fire, which ensouled the world-wide vision of Herder, rings through these words of Goethe. And the whole of Goethe's own creative work is like a universal demonstration on all sides of this saying of his. Schiller in his “letters on Aesthetics' has drawn the picture of an Ideal Man—one (as it rings in the words of Goethe) who bears the whole Universe within himself, and realizes it actually in social co-operation with other men. But where is this Picture of a Man drawn from? It shines like the morning sun over the Spring earth. But it has entered into men's feelings from contemplation of ancient Greek Man. Men cherished the picture with all the strong inner impulse of Michael; but they could find no form to give to this impulse, except by turning their soul's gaze back towards a bygone age. Goethe went, as we know, through the severest conflicts with the Spiritual Soul when he tried inwardly to realize Man. He thought that for the first time he really had a glimpse of him, when on his Italian tour he had his first sight into Greek life and being. He hastened away from the Spiritual Soul, striving forward in Spinoza, to what, in the end, was but the dying embers of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; only that Goethe succeeds in bringing an endless amount of this latter into the Spiritual Soul, in his all-embracing view of Nature.

[ 15 ] Gravely Michael watches these endeavours too to find Man. He sees something, it is true, that is to his own mind, entering here into the evolution of the human spirit. It is that same Man, who once beheld the life-forms of Intelligent Being, in the times when Michael ruled from the Cosmos without. Yet eventually, if it be not grasped by the spiritualized power of the Spiritual Soul, this too must end by falling from Michael's range of action into the dominion of Lucifer. That Lucifer might gain the ascendancy in the rocking of the cosmic balance—this is the other dire anxiety in Michael's life.

[ 16 ] The preparation for Michael's mission at the end of the nineteenth century roll on in cosmic tragedy. Beneath upon earth, there often reigns the profoundest satisfaction over Man's picture of Nature and its effective working; whilst in the region where Michael is at work there is nothing but tragedy over the obstacles which prevent the true picture of Man from finding its way into life.

[ 17 ] There was a time when in the beams of the sun, in the flush of morning skies, in the sparkling of the stars, there lived the keen, clear spirit-love of Michael. The dominant note this love had now taken, was one of sorrow, aroused on gazing on mankind.

[ 18 ] Michael's position in the Cosmos became one of tragic difficulty, but one that was also urging towards a solution, just at the period preceding his mission upon earth. Men could maintain their power of intellect only in the domain of the body, and there only in the domain of the senses. They accordingly admitted nothing into their range of mental vision, except what their senses told them. Nature became a field of sense-revelation—a revelation quite materially conceived. In Nature and all her forms, men no longer saw the work of divine spirit, but something which has come into existence without spirit, and of which they nevertheless assert that the spiritual life which Man leads is born of it. Of the spirit-world, on the other hand, men would only accept so much as was still told of in the historic records. Any real seeing of the creative spirit in the past was as severely taboo'd, as was the seeing of the spirit in the present.

[ 19 ] All that now remained living in men's souls came from that region of the external present world into which Michael does not enter. Man was glad to be standing upon ‘secure’ ground. He fancied the ground secure because he abstained from looking for any Thoughts in Nature, in which he would at once have suspected the unreliability of a spontaneous fancy. But Michael was not glad. He was obliged to remain on the far side, aloof from men, and carry on the war in his own region against Lucifer and Ahriman. Hence came the great and tragic difficulty; for Lucifer can approach Man all the more easily, the more Michael—who is also the preserver of his past—is obliged to keep away from him. And so a stormy contest was being waged on Man's behalf, in the spiritual world next to earth, by Michael against Lucifer and Ahriman: whilst Man himself on earthly territory was busying his soul in opposition to the healing forces of his own evolution.

[ 20 ] All this applies of course to the spiritual life of Europe and America. For Asia it would be necessary to speak differently.

Leading Thoughts

[ 21 ] In the very first period of the spiritual Soul's evolution Man began to feel that the picture of Mankind, of his own Human Being, which had hitherto come of itself, imaginatively, was now lost to him. Powerless to find it as yet in his Spiritual Soul, he seeks for it along the paths of Natural Science of History. He would like to revive once more within him the old picture of Humanity.

[ 22 ] By this road, men do not come to the real fullness of the human being; they come only to empty illusions. But they do not see this; they look on these as things that give mankind substantiation and support.

[ 23 ] And so Michael, in the time preceding his earthly regency, can only look with anxiety and sorrow upon mankind's evolution. For men condemn spiritual contemplation in any direction, and thereby cut themselves off from everything that makes a bond with Michael.

These lectures are so arranged that separate themes will be introduced, and then I shall bring in considerations which will lead towards the themes and throw light upon them. One theme, accordingly, resides in what was said about the difficulty of understanding the Being of Christ Jesus. Then we came to the significance of the prophecies of the Sibyls as illustrating one side of human soul life during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Finally, at the close of yesterday's lecture, I introduced the theme of Paul and the olive tree.

I will return to these leading themes, but we must approach them as it were in circles, with our themes inscribed at the centre. What is really meant by the themes will then gradually emerge. Today I would like to say something about the Christ Being as such. We shall then see how in Paul the Christ Being is reflected in a certain definite way.

From earlier lectures we know that the Christ Being can be understood if we follow the evolution of our system back to the Old Sun existence.¹ And on various occasions, in lectures already published, attention has been drawn to the fact that in the Christ Being we have to do with a high spiritual Being—that is the term we will use for the present—for whose own evolution the Old Sun period was especially important. I will not go further into that just now. We will simply look up to the Christ Being as a high spiritual Being. But for understanding human evolution something else is necessary, and we have seen how necessary it is, for in relation to a certain fact the concepts and ideas which in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch aspired to understand the Being of Christ were powerless to do so.

Again and again, especially during the early centuries among the Gnostics, among the Apostolic Fathers and among the persons who contributed in one way or another to the founding of Christianity, this question came up—How was the nature of Christ related to the nature of Jesus? Now we already know that we have to distinguish two Jesus-boys.² Of one of these we need not speak further here, for he can be readily understood from previous anthroposophical explanations. I mean the Jesus in whom lived the Ego of Zarathustra. Here we have a human being who in the second post-Atlantean epoch had already reached a high degree of evolution; who at that time founded the Zarathustrian spiritual stream and then had subsequent lives; who later reincarnated in the Solomon Jesus-child and in him, up to his twelfth year, underwent the development appropriate for so lofty an Ego in that period. We know also that the Zarathustra Ego passed over into the body of the other Jesus-child, on whose nature the Luke Gospel throws some gleams of light.

We must now consider a little this Nathan Jesus child. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that in this child we have not to do with a human being, like other human beings, in the strict sense of the term. We cannot say of this Being that he had previously been incarnated on Earth in this or that individual. We have always emphasised that of the soul-element which has come forth from spiritual worlds in order to live in single individuals on Earth, something as it were remained behind; and that what had thus remained behind appeared in the Nathan Jesus-child. Hence of this child we cannot say that in him there lived an ordinary human ego which had developed in a certain way through earlier incarnations. We have to recognise (this follows from what is said in my book, Occult Science—an Outline) that he had not previously walked the Earth as man. The only question is: Did this Being, whom we will now call simply Jesus of Nazareth, have any previous connection with Earth-evolution?³ We must remember that the Beings and Powers connected with human evolution are not confined to those who incarnate on the Earth itself; there are also spiritual Beings and Powers who belong to the higher Hierarchies. If therefore we say that something of the substance which divided itself among single human souls remained behind, and was then in a certain sense born in the Nathan Jesus-child, we are not saying that this .Being had no previous relation with Earth evolution. We are saying only that he was not related to the evolution of the Earth and of humanity in such a way as to have walked the Earth as man. We must look for him not in the history of the physical Earth, but in pre-earthly spiritual realms. And then, for the kind of observation I have often spoken about—clairvoyant observation—the following is revealed.

Let us recall what is described in Occult Science—how from the Lemurian Age onwards souls gradually came down from the other planets (with the exception of one principal human pair who had stayed on earth) and were incarnated in human bodies throughout Atlantean times. We must accordingly think of Earth-evolution as being such that the souls withdrew from the Earth's cosmic surroundings and at various points of time took up again their evolution on Earth. We know that before the Lemurian Age they had gone away to other planets. But we know also that the evolution of the Earth had been exposed to the attacks of Lucifer, and later to those of Ahriman. Thus the souls of men had to enter into bodies wherein they were exposed in the course of human evolution to the attacks of both these spiritual Beings. If nothing further had come about—if, that is, the human souls had come down from planetary existence into evolution on Earth, there to encounter the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences—then something else would have happened to them as they went through subsequent incarnations; something I did not intimate in Occult Science, for at the present day one cannot say everything in public.

First of all, when the human beings came down from the planets into physical bodies, the development of their senses would have been exposed to a certain danger. We must not think it was a quite simple matter for these human souls to come down from their planetary abodes and assume bodies on Earth, and that after that everything went on normally. Because the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles held sway in these bodies, they were not so organised as to enable human beings to pursue the course of evolution which in fact they did pursue. If these souls had simply gone on using the forces which governed the sense-organs of these bodies, they would have had to use their senses in a peculiar way—a way not really human.

For example, the eye would have been so impressed and affected by a colour that it would have felt itself permeated with intense feeling. At the sight of one colour it would have positively glowed with pleasure; for another colour it would have felt intense, painful antipathy. And so, because of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, the souls descending from the planets would have found no bodies equipped with senses of the right kind. They would have been tormented by sympathy and antipathy; on seeing one colour or another they would have been seized with bliss or repulsed with acute pain, all through their lives. That was how evolution was going; cosmic forces, especially those from the Sun, would have worked on the Earth in such a way as to give the senses this character. Any contemplation of the world, in a spirit of quiet wisdom, would have been ruled out. So a change had to be brought about in the forces which flowed from the cosmic environment into the Earth and had built up the senses of man. In the spiritual world something had to happen so that these forces would not turn the senses into mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, for they would then have been under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman. Hence the following took place.

The Being of whom we have said that he had not chosen the path down from the planets to the Earth, but had remained behind, the Being who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who had dwelt from primal ages in the spiritual worlds—this Being resolved (if we may use this expression, for of course all these expressions are taken from human speech and cannot fully convey what one wants to say) while still in the world of the higher Hierarchies to go through a development which would enable him to be permeated for a time by the Christ Being. Thus we have to do not with a man but with a superhuman Being who (if we may speak in this way) lived in the spiritual world and as it were heard the distress of the human sense system crying out to the spiritual world for help, and in response to this cry made himself fitted to be permeated by the Christ.

So it was that in the spiritual worlds the Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child was permeated by the Christ Being, and then brought about a change in the cosmic forces which were streaming in to build up the human senses. These senses were changed in such a way that instead of being mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, they became organs that human beings could use, and so could look with wisdom at all the nuances of sense-perception. Very differently would the cosmic forces have flowed into mankind if this event, far back in the Lemurian Age, had not taken place in the spiritual worlds. This Being who appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child was then still living (if I may use the phrase) in the Sun-sphere, and because he listened to the human cry of distress, he experienced something which made it possible for him to be permeated by the very Spirit of the Sun, so that the activity of the Sun was modified in such a way that the human sense organs, which derive essentially from solar activity, did not become organs of mere sympathy and antipathy.

Here we touch upon a significant cosmic secret, and one which will enable us to understand much that happened later on. A certain order and harmony, imbued with wisdom, could now flow into the realm of the human senses, and evolution could go on normally for a while. The worst activity of Lucifer and Ahriman had been turned away from the human senses by a deed in the higher worlds.

Later on came a time, in the Atlantean Age, when it once more became apparent that the human bodily constitution could not be a suitable instrument for the further course of evolution. The human vital organs, and their underlying forces in the etheric body, which for a time had developed in a suitably useful way, had fallen into disorder. For the cosmic forces which had worked on them from the surroundings of the Earth, and whose task it was to bring order into these organs—the organs of breathing, blood circulation and so on—these forces would have developed under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in such a way that the vital organs would have ceased to be usable by human beings on Earth. They would have acquired a quite peculiar character. The forces which provide for these vital organs do not flow in directly from the Sun, but from the seven planets, as they used to be called. The planetary forces worked from the cosmos into man. And it was necessary that these forces, also, should be modified. If they had remained under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman, the vital organs would have become merely organs of greed or organs of loathing. For example, a man would not have been able to restrain himself from hurling himself greedily upon a given dish, while a terrible loathing would have driven him from another. These are things which unveil themselves as world secrets, as cosmic secrets, when we try to penetrate into them clairvoyantly.

So again something had to happen in the spiritual worlds in order that this destructive activity should not enter into human life. And this same Being, who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who (as we have explained) dwelt in earlier times on the Sun and was there permeated by the Christ Being, the sublime Sun-Spirit—this Being went from planet to planet, touched in his innermost nature by the fact that human evolution could go no further, as things were. And this experience affected him so strongly, while he was assuming a form of body on the different planets, that at a certain time during the Atlantean evolution the Spirit of Christ permeated him again. And through what was now brought about by the permeation of this Being by the Christ Spirit, it became possible for moderation to be implanted in the vital organs of man. In the same way that wisdom had been given to the sense-organs, so moderation was now bestowed on the vital organs. Thus it came about that when a man breathed in a particular place, he was not impelled to suck in the air greedily, or to recoil with loathing from the air in another place. That was the deed accomplished in the spiritual worlds through a further permeation of the Nathan Jesus-child by the Christ Being, the high Sun-Spirit.

Then in the further course of human evolution a third thing happened. A third confusion would have arisen if the souls had been obliged to continue using the bodies then available for them on Earth. We can put it in the following way.

At this time the physical nature of man was in order. Through the two Christ deeds in the super-sensible world, the human sense organs were in a condition serviceable for man on Earth, and so were the vital organs. But it was not so with the soul-organs, thinking, feeling and willing. If nothing further had happened, these soul-organs would have become disordered. I mean that willing would have been continually disturbed by thinking, feeling would have interfered with willing, and so on. Men would have been condemned as it were to a perpetually chaotic use of these soul-organs. They would have been maddened by an excess of will, or confused by repressed feeling, or there would have been people plagued with fleeting ideas through a hypertrophy of thinking, and so forth. This was the third great danger to which humanity was exposed on Earth.

Now these three soul-powers, thinking, feeling and willing, are coordinated from the surroundings of the Earth, for the Earth itself is essentially the scene of action for the Ego. The working together of thinking, feeling and willing has to be kept in order; not, however, from all the planets, but only from Sun, Moon and Earth, so that through the inter-working of Sun, Moon and Earth, if this is harmonious, man is made fit for the harmonious cooperation of his three soul-powers.

Help for these soul-forces had to be provided from the spiritual world. And now the soul of that Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child assumed a cosmic form such that his life was in a sense neither on the Moon nor on the Sun, but as though it encircled the Earth and felt a dependence on the influences of Sun, Moon and Earth at the same time. The Earth influences came to him from below; the Sun and Moon influences from above. Clairvoyant observation really sees this Being, in the spring time of his evolution—if I may use that phrase—in the same sphere as that in which the Moon goes round the Earth. Hence I cannot say exactly that the Moon influence came to him from above, but rather that it came to him from the place where he was, this pre-earthly Jesus-Being. Again there rose to him a cry of distress, a cry that told of what human thinking, feeling and willing were on the way to becoming; and he sought to experience completely in his own inner being this tragedy of human evolution. Thereby he called to himself the high Sun-spirit, who now for the third time descended upon him, permeating him. So in the cosmic height, beyond the Earth, there was a third permeation of this Nathan Jesus-child by the high Sun Spirit whom we call the Christ.

Now I would wish to depict for you this third ensouling rather differently from the way in which I described the other two. That which took place through these successive stages of spiritual evolution—or heavenly evolution, I would say—was reflected in the various world outlooks of the post-Atlantean peoples. For it had effects which worked on into later times; the Sun's activity continued to be influenced by the fact that in ancient Lemurian times the Being who afterwards became the Nathan Jesus-child had been permeated by the Christ Being. And the essential thing about the initiation of Zarathustra was that he perceived the activity of the Sun impregnated with this influence. In this way his teaching arose; his initiation had revealed to him—had projected into his soul—what had happened in primeval times.

The third post-Atlantean epoch, which we call the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, came about partly through the reflection in human souls, as a continuing human experience, of the activities that had originated from the permeation by the Sun-Spirit of the Nathan Jesus-Being while that Being was journeying round the planets. From this arose that science of planetary activities which comes before us in Chaldean astrology; people today have a very meagre conception of what it really was. Among the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples of the epoch there developed also that star worship which is indeed known exoterically; it arose because the moderating of planetary influence was still making itself felt at that later time.

Later still, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we can see in Hellenism a reflection of planetary spirits who had as it were come into existence because the Being who had been permeated by the Christ journeyed from planet to planet and on each planet became one or other of these spirits. On Jupiter he became the one whom the Greeks later called Zeus; on Mars, the one later called Ares; on Mercury, the one later called Hermes. In the Greek planetary gods there was this later reflection of what Christ Jesus in the super-sensible worlds had made of the planetary beings who were imbued with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles. When a Greek looked up to his heaven of the gods, he came into touch with the adumbrations, the reflections, of the activity of Christ Jesus on the individual planets, together with much else that I have described.

To this was added as a third event the reflection or adumbration of that which the Jesus-Being, in the later post-Atlantean times, had experienced as a celestial Being in relation to Sun, Moon and Earth. If we are to characterise this we can say: The Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. We say of Christ that he embodied himself in Jesus of Nazareth, but we are speaking now of an event that took place in spiritual worlds: the Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. And the effect was that human thinking, feeling and willing took an orderly course. This was an important event, coming early in the evolution of humanity: the development of the human soul-powers was brought into good order. The two earlier Christ events had brought order rather into the bodily constitution of man on Earth: what then had had to happen in the celestial worlds for this third event to come about?

It will be easier to recognise this third event if we look for the reflection of it in Greek mythology. For just as the planetary spirits projected themselves into the figures of Zeus, Ares, Hermes, Venus or Aphrodite, Kronos and so on, so was this third cosmic event reflected not only in Greek mythology but in the mythologies of the most diverse peoples. We can understand how it was reflected if we allow ourselves to compare the reflected images with their sources; if, that is, we compare what happened in Greece with what first happened in the Cosmos.

What was it that happened up there in the Cosmos? The need was to drive out something which would have raged chaotically in human souls; this had to be overcome. The angelic Being who was permeated with the Christ had to accomplish the deed of vanquishing and driving out from the human soul that which had to be driven out if thinking, feeling and willing were to be harmonised. And so there arises the picture—let us bring it vividly before our souls—of an angelic Being, dwelling still in the spiritual worlds, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child: he appears to us ensouled by the Christ and thereby rendered capable of special deeds—able to drive out from thinking, feeling and willing the element which would have raged within them as a dragon and brought them into chaos.

A reminiscence of this is preserved in all the pictures of St. George vanquishing the Dragon which are found in the records of human culture. St. George and the Dragon reflect that celestial event when the Christ ensouled the Jesus-Being and enabled him to drive the Dragon out of the soul-nature of man. This was a significant deed, made possible only with the help of Christ in the Being of Jesus, at that time an angelic Being. For this angelic Being had actually to connect himself with the Dragon-nature; to take on as it were the form of the Dragon in order to hold off the Dragon from the soul of man. He had to work from within the Dragon, so that the Dragon was ennobled and brought out of chaos into a kind of harmony. The training, the taming of the Dragon—that is the further task of this Being. And so it came about that the Dragon indeed remained active, but because there was poured into him the influence and power of the Being I have described, he became the bearer of many revelations which proved their worth to human civilisations throughout the course of post-Atlantean evolution. Instead of the chaos of the Dragon manifesting in maddened or bewildered men, the primal wisdom of the post-Atlantean time came forth. Christ Jesus used the Dragon's blood, as it were, so that with His help it could transfuse human blood and thereby make human beings the vehicles of divine wisdom. A significant reflection of this is apparent—even quite exoterically—in Greek mythology from the ninth century B.C. onwards.

It is remarkable how for the Greek mind one particular divine figure emerged from the others. The Greeks, we know, reverenced a variety of gods. These gods were the reflections or projections of the Beings who originated from the journey round the planets of the Being, permeated by the Christ, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child. The Greeks saw them in such a way that when they looked out into cosmic spaces, when they looked up through the light-aether, they rightly ascribed to the planet Jupiter—in an inward spiritual, not an external, sense—the origin of the Being they spoke of as Zeus. So they spoke of Pallas Athene, of Artemis, of the various planetary gods who were the reflections of what we have spoken about. But from these pictures of the various figures of the gods there emerged one figure—the figure of Apollo. The figure of Apollo emerged in a distinctive way: what did these Greeks see in him?

We come to know Apollo if we look at Parnassus and the Castalian spring. To the west of it there was a cleft in the earth, and over this the Greeks built a temple—why? Vapours used to rise up out of the cleft, and when the air-currents were right the vapours crept up the Mountainside like the coils of a snake, like a dragon. And the Greeks imagined Apollo as shooting his arrows at the dragon, as it rose from the cleft in the form of turbulent vapours. Here, in the Greek Apollo, we see an earthly reflection of St. George, shooting his arrows at the dragon. And when Apollo had overcome the dragon, the Python, a temple was built, and instead of the dragon we see how the vapours entered into the soul of the Pythia, and how the Greeks imagined that Apollo lived in these swirling dragon-vapours and prophesied to them through the oracle, through the lips of the Pythia. And the Greeks, that self-conscious people, rose through the stages for which their souls had been prepared; they accepted what Apollo had to say to them through the Pythia, who was imbued with the dragon-vapours. It meant that Apollo lived in the dragon's blood and filled men with wisdom from the Castalian spring. And the place became a meeting-place for the most sacred plays and festivals.

Why was Apollo able to do this—who was he? It was only from spring to autumn that he caused wisdom to flow up from the dragon's blood. Towards autumn he went away to his ancient home in the north, in the Hyperborean land. Farewell festivals were held at the time of his departure, and his return was welcomed in the spring. A deep wisdom resides in this idea of Apollo going north. The physical sun withdraws towards the south; in a spiritual sense it is always the opposite. The story shows that Apollo has to do with the sun. Apollo is the angelic Being of whom we have spoken; he was a reflection, projected into the Greek mind, of the angelic Being who had in fact worked at the end of the Atlantean time and who had been permeated by the Christ. This reflection was the Apollo who spoke wisdom to the Greeks through the mouth of the Pythia. And what was the content for the Greeks of this Apollo wisdom? We might say it was everything that led them, on the most important occasions, to take this or that decision. Again and again people went to Apollo at difficult moments in their lives, with their souls well prepared, and received prophetic guidance from the Pythia, who was stimulated by the vapours in which Apollo lived. And Asklepios, the Healer, is for the Greeks the son of Apollo, the healing god. The weakened form of the Angel in whom Christ once dwelt is a healer on Earth, or for the Earth. For Apollo was never physically embodied, but he worked through the Earth-elements.

And the god of the Muses, above all the god of song and the art of music, is Apollo. Why is this? Because through the power of song and string-music he brings thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. We have only to keep firmly in mind that in Apollo there was a projection of what had happened at the end of the Atlantean time. Something had then worked from spiritual heights into the human soul, and a weak echo of it could be heard in the musical art cultivated by the Greeks under the protection of Apollo. They knew it as an earthly reflection of the ancient art which the Angel-Being, permeated by the Christ, had cultivated in the heavenly heights in order to bring thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. They did not say so openly; only in the Mysteries was the meaning of it understood.

In the Apollonian Mysteries it was said: A high Divine Being once sank Himself into a Being of the Hierarchy of Angels and thereby brought harmony into thinking, feeling and willing. The art of music was a reflection of that happening, especially the Apollonian art which flowed from the sound of strings. The music which demands less of the elements than wind instruments do; which depends in the main only on the skill of human hands; in short, the music that sounds from the strings of Apollo—to this music the Greeks ascribed the musical effects which bring harmony into the soul. And persons who have no inclination for Apollo's music, or do not value it highly enough, were said by the Greeks to carry a bodily mark of their obtuseness in this respect; a sign that they had stayed behind, atavistically, at an earlier stage.

It is remarkable that when a certain man—King Midas—was born with exceptionally long ears, the Greeks said he had come into the world with ass's ears because in his life before birth he had not rightly devoted himself to the influence of the Being whom the Christ had enfilled. Therefore, said the Greeks, he had asses ears, and that was why he preferred wind instruments to string instruments. And when once a child was born who so to speak had no skin—he is known in mythology as the Flayed Marsyas—the Greeks said it was because before his birth he had not paid heed to all that flowed from the angelic Being. For that is how it looks to occult observation: Marsyas was not flayed in his lifetime, but before his birth, and it was then that his misdeed occurred.

Many towns founded by the Greeks as colonies were named Apollonia, because the sites for them had been chosen after consulting the Pythia. The Greeks cherished their freedom and so were not politically united, but they had an ideal unity through the god Apollo, for whom a kind of confederation was founded later on.

We see how the Greeks revered in the god they called, Apollo the Being of whom we have spoken; and we might say that in the Being who truly corresponded to Apollo at the end of the Atlantean time, the Christ was ensouled. Who then was Apollo—not the reflection revered by the Greeks, but Apollo himself? A celestial Being who from the higher worlds poured out healing forces for the soul, paralysing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. These forces brought about in the human body a harmonious co-operation of brain, breath and lungs with the larynx and the heart, and it was this that came to expression in song. For the right co-operation of brain and breathing with the speech organ and the heart is the bodily expression of harmony in thinking, feeling and willing. The Healer, the celestial Healer, is Apollo. We have seen this Being pass through three stages of evolution, and then the Healer, whom Apollo reflected, was born on Earth and men called him Jesus, which in our language means “He who heals through God”. He is the Nathan Jesus-child, the one who heals through God, Jehoschua-Jesus.

Now, at this fourth stage, this Being made himself ripe to be enfilled with the Christ Being, with the ‘I’. This came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. For if this Mystery had not been enacted—if the Being whom we have followed through cosmic ages had not given embodiment to the Christ—then in the course of later time human souls would not have found bodies in which the Ego-force could come to necessary expression on Earth. The Ego had been brought to its highest stage in Zarathustra. The souls who had taken part in the evolution of the Ego would never have found earthly bodies suitable for its further development if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come to pass.

We have now seen the four stages of harmonisation: the harmonising of sense perception, of the life-organs, of thinking, feeling and willing, and the harmonisation in the Ego, this last through the Mystery of Golgotha. You have the connections between the Being who was born as the Nathan Jesus-child and the Christ Being, and the way in which this was prepared. It is now possible, through that which it is permissible to reveal in true Anthroposophy, to understand this kind of growing together, belonging together, of the Christ Being and the human nature of Jesus. This is possible for us. And a healthy development of spiritual life in the future will depend on this—on it becoming possible for more and more people to grasp that which could not be grasped by the thoughts and ideas of the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled.

• 1. See Occult Science—an Outline, Chapter IV. Chapter IV. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)
• 2. See, among others, the following references in lecture courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Luke, notably lectures 4 to 7; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lecture 6; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind; Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of St. Matthew's Gospel.
• 3. See lecture given by Dr. Steiner at Pforzheim (7–3, 1914): Pre-Earthly Deeds of Christ.

after eurythmy-dramatic presentations of the “Dedication” and the “Prologue in Heaven”

In the last few weeks, we have spoken of the three great, highest ideals of humanity and have described these three ideals as they have been described for a long time: the ideal of wisdom, the ideal of beauty and the ideal of kindness.

Now, in more recent times, these three highest ideals of humanity have always been associated with the three human soul powers that we know and have considered in the most diverse ways. The ideal of wisdom has been associated with thinking or imagining, the ideal of beauty with feeling, and the ideal of kindness with willing.

Wisdom can only be acquired by man through clear perceptions, through clear thinking. That which is the object of art, the beautiful, cannot be grasped in this way. Feeling is the soul power that is primarily concerned with beauty, as psychologists have long since discovered. And that which is realized as good in the world is connected with the will. It seems that what the psychologists and soul experts have said about the relationship between the three great ideals of humanity and the various soul powers is quite plausible. In a sense, we can add a kind of supplement: that Kant wrote three critiques, one of which, the “Critique of Pure Reason”, is supposed to serve wisdom because it seeks to criticize the power of imagination. Kant called another critique the “Critique of Judgment,” and it is divided into two parts: the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” Basically, when Kant speaks of judgment here, he means what is contained in the knowledge of feeling, through which one affirms that something is beautiful or ugly, useful or harmful. So we could say – as a subsection, precisely in this Kantian sense, and others have retained the terminology – that the power of judgment, whereby we are thinking not only of the imaginative judgment, but also of the fact that the judgment comes from the heart, is related to the perception of beauty. And a third of Kant's criticisms is the “critique of practical reason,” which refers to the will, to the pursuit of the good.

Now, we can find what I have just said in all psychologists, except for one psychologist who emerged in the second half of the 19th century and found that this whole division of the human soul does not work, does not correspond to the unbiased observation of the human soul. And the assignment of humanity's great ideals to the various powers of the soul – imagination, feeling and will – is just as wrong. Imagination is assigned wisdom as its highest ideal, feeling is assigned beauty, and will is assigned goodness. The psychologist I am referring to, Franz Brentano, thought that he would have to overturn the whole doctrine that I have now outlined and, one might say, fundamentally change the way the human soul is structured. He assigns imagination to beauty, let us assume. You see, while everyone else assigns feeling, or rather judgment, aesthetic judgment, or judgment in general, to beauty, Brentano assigns imagination to beauty. Brentano assigns judgment to wisdom, insofar as it is something that man acquires; he does not say imagination, but judgment. And curiously enough, he even blunts the will by not focusing on the development of the will, on the impulse of the will, but on what underlies the impulse of the will: sympathy and antipathy. — There is much to be said for looking at things this way. Language itself sometimes leads us to associate the volitional impulse with sympathy and antipathy. For example, when we say: to have repugnance for something! We do not want anything, but we have an antipathy for something. And so Brentano, as it were, blunts the will to sympathy and antipathy and assigns to the will this sympathy and antipathy to say yes or no to something. He does not go as far as the volitional impulse, but only to what underlies the will: saying yes or no to something, affirming or denying a thing.

Through imagining, Brentano argues, one never arrives at a true, that is, a wisdom-filled, view, but only at a view. He says that one imagines, for example, a winged horse. There is nothing wrong with imagining a winged horse. But it is not — we must bear in mind that Brentano is living in the age of materialism — it is not full of wisdom to imagine a winged horse, because a winged horse has no reality. Something must be added when we form an idea. But that is, the recognition or non-recognition of the idea by the power of judgment must be added, and only then does wisdom come out.

We may ask ourselves, what is it, so to speak, that underlies such a complete reversal of the powers of the soul? What has led Brentano to distribute the soul powers quite differently from the other psychologists, namely, into beauty, goodness, and wisdom? If we inquire into the reason why Brentano has arrived at this different grouping of the soul life, we can get no answer except by taking into account Brentano's own personal development. The other psychologists of modern times are people who have mostly emerged from the more recent development of world views. It is a peculiarity of modern philosophers, of all philosophers, that they know Greek philosophy relatively well - in their own way, of course - and then philosophy basically begins with Kant. And the modern philosophers do not know much of what lies between Greek philosophy and Kant. Kant himself knew little more about the period between Greek philosophy and himself than what he had read in Aume and Berkeley; he knew nothing of the development of medieval philosophy. Kant was completely ignorant of what is called the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. And those who, in their complacency, exaggerate everything in their own way, find just that much cause, because Kant knew nothing of scholasticism, to regard scholasticism as a bundle of pedantic follies and not to study it further. The fact that Kant knew nothing of scholasticism does not prevent him from also knowing nothing of Greek philosophy. Others knew more than he did in this area. Brentano, on the other hand, was a profound expert on scholasticism, a profound expert on medieval philosophy and, in addition, a profound expert on Aristotle. As for those who see the world of philosophy as beginning with Kant, they are not scholars, not genuine scholars of Aristotle, for Aristotle, the great Greek, was most grievously mistreated in the developmental history of the newer intellectual life. Brentano was a profound scholar of Aristotle and scholasticism, but not in the merely historical sense, not in the sense of someone who knew what Aristotle wrote and what the scholastics wrote, for with regard to such knowledge one can . make one's own thoughts when going through the history of philosophy! Brentano was a man who had become familiar with the philosophy of Aristotle and with scholastic philosophy, with the solitary thinking that went on for centuries in the cells of monasteries, with the thinking that worked with a thorough technique of the conceptual world, with that thorough technique of the conceptual world that has been completely lost to more recent thinking. Those who therefore heard psychology in the seventies and eighties from Brentano, basically heard a completely different tone of human thinking than has been or is heard from other philosophers of modern times. Something really did live in Brentano as an undertone of what spoke from the soul of the scholastics. And that is significant because he made this different classification out of this different thinking. So that we can say: there is the peculiar fact that all the newer thinkers, for whom scholasticism was and is merely a web of concepts, present the human soul and its relationship to wisdom, beauty and goodness in this way:

Wisdom: Imagining
Beauty: Feeling
Goodness: Wanting.

In Brentano, all the feelings and inner impulses that were in a scholastic heart lived, as far as something like that is possible in the present. He had to think in this way, had to structure the human soul differently in its powers and relate it to the great ideals of humanity. Where does that come from?

If you had been able to ask the angels on the stage – and in particular the three archangels – how they organize the soul and how they relate it to the great ideals, they would have answered you, albeit in a much more perfect way than Brentano could, with an answer similar to the one Brentano gave. Raphael, Gabriel and Michael would not understand this classification, but they would easily find their way into it, only to transform it more completely into the classification that Brentano gave. We are touching here on a significant fact in the spiritual development of mankind. However far we may be today from the thinking of the scholastic Middle Ages, there was something underlying this way of thinking that can be presented in the following way. The scholastic did not try to stop when speaking of the highest things, with what is happening directly on the physical plane, but the scholastic first tried to prepare his soul so that the spiritual entities of the higher world could speak out of it. In many respects this will be a stammering of the human soul, because it is self-evident that the human soul will only ever be able to imperfectly express the language of the higher spirits that are superior to man. But that is how the scholastics wanted to speak to a certain extent about the spiritual affairs of man, as a soul must speak that surrenders to what supersensible spirits have to say.

We are getting used to forming our agreement or disagreement with what makes an idea a valid one, a wise one, according to the external physical world, here on the physical plane, since the time of materialism is the actual time of humanity. We say that a winged horse is not a valid concept because we have never seen a winged horse. Materialism regards a concept as a wise concept if it agrees with what the external world dictates.

Brentano, so to speak, provided the last abstract imitation of the language of angels. Angels would say: That which is in accordance with the context of the messages of the beings that are beyond the threshold of the spiritual worlds is full of wisdom. It is not enough to form a concept; rather, this concept must be in harmony with what the spiritual beings reveal beyond the threshold. So mere imagining cannot serve wisdom beyond the threshold. What then can it serve? It can serve appearance, in which beauty lives. If one applies imagination to reality without further ado, then one does not arrive at the right imagination. But one may apply it to the appearance in which beauty lives and works. Brentano was quite right when he related imagination to beauty. For the angels, when they want to imagine, will always ask themselves: What kind of images may we form? Never ugly ones, but always beautiful images. But these images, which they form and which they form according to the ideal of beauty, will not correspond to reality if they do not correspond to the revelations of other entities that they encounter in the spiritual world. Imagining is really only to be assigned to beauty. Angels have the ideal of imagining in such a way that their entire world of imagination is permeated and illuminated by the ideal of beauty. And you need only read the chapter of my Theosophy that deals with the soul world, and there study the two forces in the form in which they are found beyond the threshold to the spiritual world, the two forces of sympathy and antipathy, and you will find that the relationship between sympathy and antipathy underlies the impulses of will. So that coincides again to a certain extent. But it must be related to the life of the soul, as this life, from the subconscious, still arises from the soul world in today's human soul. There you see how a modern philosopher, because he has, so to speak, atavistically preserved the scholasticism of the Middle Ages in his heart, tries to speak in the terminology of angels, albeit in the imperfect language of modern materialism. It is an extraordinarily interesting fact. Otherwise, one cannot understand how Brentano opposed the whole of modern psychology in such a way that he distinguished the powers of the soul quite differently from other psychologists and assigned them to the highest ideals of humanity in a different way.

But take what is said in this way in all its consequences. Note all the consequences. When we cross the threshold to the spiritual world, then we live in a world of beings, I said, insofar as we speak of the real. So we cannot form abstract concepts in the same sense as we do here in the physical world when we speak of the real. We have to have entities. So when we speak of the real, we have to say: It cannot be that wisdom, beauty and goodness have the same meaning in the spiritual world over there as they do here in the physical world. There they would be abstract concepts again, as we can apply them here in the physical world. There must be entities over there. — So, as soon as we speak in terms of wisdom itself, that is, seek a reality, entities must exist over there, not just what is designated in abstracto by wisdom, beauty, goodness. When one speaks of beauty in the spiritual world, one cannot say: Beauty is there as maya, as appearance in the spiritual world. Just as beauty and wisdom are imprinted in the physical world, for example, when we depict wisdom-filled beauty in drama or in other works of art, or when we depict goodness in beauty in drama or in other works of art, and how all this is interrelated, so wisdom, beauty and goodness are at work in the realm of beauty beyond the threshold. But we must not speak of them as concepts; we must not apply what is over there as we apply it here. So let us assume that someone wants to speak from over there, and he wants to speak from over there with the power of the soul, which corresponds to our imagination, so he should not say: wisdom, beauty, strength, because these are abstract ideas, he would have to cite entities. Wisdom would have to appear as an entity on the other side.

In the language of the ancient mysteries, what I am now explaining was well known, and therefore terms were introduced that could express this, that did not point to mere abstract ideas, but to entities. On the other side, beyond the threshold, there must be a Being, which here is Wisdom, a Being. If you reflect a little, you will easily find that a Being, which we call God-vision, the God-visionary, could be such a Being, corresponding to Wisdom on the other side: God-vision.

A being that corresponds to beauty, our abstract idea of beauty for the physical plane, would have to reveal itself. Beauty reveals itself, it is the appearance, the appearing, that which appears. At the moment one crosses the threshold, that which is much more alive than here on the physical plane emerges. When the beautiful is spoken of, the essentially beautiful, something so mute or merely living in human, physical hearing or speech abstractions, it is not spoken of as it is here on the physical plane. It is all revelation, living revelation. And if you combine what I am saying now with what I said earlier, you will understand that the ancient mysteries coined a word for what corresponds to it on the other side, beyond the threshold of Beauty, which can be described as the proclamation of God. God's Word, God-proclaimer, for example. You could also say the Word of God.

Likewise, there must be a being for the volition: the God-willing. Not the abstract, as we have it in our soul as volition, but a being must be on the other side of the threshold for the will. God-willer - if we may form the word. Why should we only form words that are already in use, since we are entering realms for which words have not been coined at all! God's volition, as it were. If we take God as a collective name for the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, then God has within Himself not only a volition, as we have in our souls, but a volitioner: this is essential. What in us are only the three soul powers: imagination, feeling, volition, are in God's being: the God-breather, the God-proclaimer, the God-willing. And if one takes the old Hebrew expressions, they correspond completely to the words that I have tried to coin here. Of course, you will not find the translation of these words in any Hebrew dictionary, but if you immerse yourself in what was meant, you would actually translate the old Hebrew words with these words today, and in such a way that Gottschauer means exactly the same in our language as Michael; Gottverkünder means exactly the same as Gabriel; Gottwoller means exactly the same as Raphael. While we work in the physical world through our three soul powers, the beings of the higher hierarchies work through their own entities. Just as we work through imagination, feeling and will, so a God works through Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. And that means the same for a God: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael – which for our soul means: I work through thinking, feeling and willing. This translation: I work through thinking, feeling and willing - into: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, is simply the translation from the language of men into the language that should be spoken - if one speaks the real language that prevails there - beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. If you open yourself to some of the descriptions in the Bible, you will be able to feel everywhere – if you feel appropriately and not in a way that corresponds to today's interpretation of the Bible, which is a misinterpretation in many respects – you will be able to feel how this really must be intended for Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Wisdom: power of judgment – Godshower; Michael
Revelation of Essence

Beauty: imagination – God-announcer: Gabriel
Power of Judgment

Goodness: sympathy, affirmation / antipathy, negation –
God-willing: Raphael

Now, bearing this in mind, think back to the way Gabriel, Michael and Raphael speak in Goethe's “Prologue to Heaven”. One can only say that one is deeply shaken by the instinctive certainty with which this “Prologue in Heaven” suggests how the willing essence of the Godhead, through Raphael, the seeing essence of the Godhead, through Michael, and the beautifully revealing essence of the Godhead, the revealing, proclaiming essence of the Godhead, through Gabriel, is manifested. The volition of the Godhead lies in the harmony of the spheres, in that which expresses itself in the great movements of the heavenly bodies and in that which happens while the heavenly bodies move:

The sun sounds in the ancient manner
In the singing contest of the spheres,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
The sight of it gives strength to the angels,

— one could also say: goodness, the strength of the super-moral life beyond the threshold. Therefore, some also refer to the three soul powers of wisdom, beauty, goodness as wisdom, beauty, strength.

When none can fathom them;

— you will bite your teeth out if you try to hold on to the Faust commentators on this line: “If no one can fathom it.” Most say: Oh yes, Goethe just meant, even though, or although, or although no one can fathom it. But that is not how a truly great poet speaks – I have often mentioned this to Goethe – that is not how a great poet speaks. Fathoming belongs to wisdom as it lives within the human physical world. Beyond the threshold, everything is a becoming acquainted with spiritual beings, whom one approaches as one approaches people here, who must also keep an inner being, who cannot be completely fathomed. This fathoming in the sense in which it occurs here on earth does not exist for the angels at all. They have the spiritual reality before them; they do not fathom; they look, because something of the power of Michael's vision has also been given to each one. Each has something of the other power, just as each soul power has something of the other, for example, imagining has something of wanting, because if we could not want when imagining, we would only dream and so on. So Raphael also has something of Michael and Gabriel in himself, of course.

The incomprehensibly high works

Are glorious as on the first day.

Try to feel these two lines with all the sensations that you can have from spiritual science!

The incomprehensibly high works

— which are described there

Are glorious as on the first day.

What does that mean? They are not glorious as on that day, glorious as on the first day. Just as they appeared glorious to the angels at that time, that is, expressing themselves, revealing themselves, they are still - luciferic. Because what has remained behind is, after all, luciferic. One must really apply the perceptions that one acquires through spiritual science. The stars shine as luciferically as on the first day. They have not progressed; they retain their original character – again a reason why the angels do not fathom them, but behold them. For angels, the luciferic is visible. It does not make the angels bad. I have often described the luciferic as a necessity in the evolution of the world. Here it is presented to you as something that the angels behold: Lucifer – not as he reigns for people – but as he gloriously maintains the indescribably high works as they were on the first day. And we are led to it in exalted language, so that we are shown how the Luciferic lives out in the universe, and the angels may look at it as on the first day. There it is justified. It should not descend into the physical world to man in the ordinary way, but live above in the world that is beyond the threshold. And the world that is pervaded and thundered through by the will of the world is first proclaimed on earth. Up there it should remain unfathomable, it should not be fathomed. Here on earth, with the powers that are given to man, it is there so that what is unfathomable for angels

be fathomed through human wisdom. But Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, the Word of God, can only hint at this as he sees it from outside the earth. Do you remember the profound Bible verse: “Before the mystery of the Incarnation they veiled their faces.” In this profound Bible verse lies the whole of the unfathomable for the angels of the worlds that are accessible to man through the wisdom that is developed on earth. And here angelic language is spoken in the 'Prologue to Heaven', which is why Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, characterizes from the outside that which reveals itself on earth as wisdom.

And fast and incomprehensibly fast
The earth's splendor revolves;
Paradise's brightness changes
With deep, shudder-filled night;

This is how it appears from the outside: the world in which we live here, which we try to unravel, and which affects us in the sphere of our senses. Out there it is the wonderful change of day and night.

The sea foams in broad rivers

Human weal and woe depend on it; out there it reveals itself only as that which, in its foaming, composes the spherical earth.

At the deep bottom of the rocks,
And rock and sea are torn away
In an eternally fast spherical course.

In which our whole earthly destiny, bound to our sensory life, is bound. The God-announcer draws it from outside the earth.

And how is the meaning of the earth revealed? By looking not only at that which is valid for the human sense realm, but also at that which sends its effect out into the universe. Gabriel describes the earth as it appears from the outside, but he describes what is significant for man in the sense realm. Michael, the God-shower, describes that which radiates out into the universe and also has its significance for the earth's surroundings, for the entire celestial sphere. Therefore, he begins with the surroundings, not below, where the sea flows, where the rivers flow, but with

the surroundings. He looks at the surroundings.

And storms roar in competition,

A deep word!

From sea to land, from land to sea,
And furiously form a chain
Of the deepest impact all around.

Just imagine, seen from the outside, let's say, the trade winds that blow out there in regular currents. Our limited natural science describes all this, what goes on in these atmospheric phenomena, but it is limited, this natural science. When one examines the regularities in atmospheric phenomena, one comes across a deep connection between these regular atmospheric phenomena and the phases of the moon, the phenomena of the moon, but not because the moon causes what happens in the atmosphere, but because, in the same measure, in parallel, the old lunar laws still govern the moon today, and the atmospheric phenomena also still remain from the old lunar laws. Not that the moon rules the atmospheric phenomena and the tides, but both are ruled by causes that go back much further, ruled in parallel. What happens in the atmosphere is therefore not only significant for that which affects people in the sphere of the senses, but it also has significance for that which happens out there in the universe. We look up at the lightning, we hear the thunder. But the Gods also see the lightning and hear the thunder from the other side. And for them it means something quite different - of which we can speak another time - than for us human beings here, who do not understand lightning and thunder. But the God-shower Michael understands from the earth precisely that which is lived out on the other side in lightning and thunder, which has been described here by me — remember the first lecture I gave here this summer — as the subterranean of the human soul, as the thunderstorms of the human soul, which I have described to you in terms of the character of Weininger, who died young. What corresponds to these thunderstorms in the human soul, in the atmosphere, has an effect. And just as the soul storms in us are harmonized and mitigated when we pour our higher soul forces over them, so for the world outside, what is stormy and thundering here in our atmosphere and is irregular in meteorology becomes regular and harmonious in the universe. Just as we, as we develop, do not remain in the storms, but progress to the harmony of the soul life. Down there, lightning and thunder

But your messengers,

- the angels -

Lord,
we honor the gentle walking of your day.

Everything falls into place, gently and harmoniously, as seen from the sphere of the angels outside.

The sight gives the angels strength,

- that is, it strengthens their volition

Since no one can fathom you,

– it is not a matter of fathoming, but of beholding!

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day.

That means: they are Luciferian, they are there for angels, they should only not have the same effect on people. Lucifer is the unjustified in the world of man, insofar as he transfers his justified sphere outside into the world of man for the spiritual world and applies the same laws there that he should only apply outside in the spiritual world.

And do you remember how I dealt with it in other lectures, based on Goethe's “Faust”, the ambiguity that still remained in Goethe when he wrote “Faust”. I told you at the time that Goethe did not yet properly distinguish between Lucifer and Ahriman. Mephistopheles is actually Ahriman, who has only been left behind in a different way than Lucifer. But this distinction is only given by the newer spiritual science. Goethe constantly confuses Lucifer and Ahriman, throws them together, so that his Mephistopheles is really a confused figure in this respect, has Luciferic and Ahrimanic traits. If Goethe had already had spiritual science, this terrible confusion with regard to the character of Mephistopheles would certainly not occur. I have already said at the time: I ask not to be accused of not sufficiently venerating Goethe or of criticizing him in a mean, philistine way because of what I say. By telling the truth, one's veneration of some genius is truly no less than if one merely praises it. I believe that no one can accuse me of having a low opinion of Goethe after what I have written and said about him. But I must always emphasize that his Mephistopheles is a confused spiritual character when I speak from the impulse of spiritual science. If Goethe had known exactly the right thing to say after the verse:

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day

first appeared Lucifer, the one who works through the appearance of the world of the spheres, through the beauty of the world of the spheres. Lucifer would stand there. And because Lucifer has as his companion Ahriman, Mephistopheles – which is the same as Ahriman – Mephistopheles would then step in, or Lucifer would step down and Mephistopheles would step up. That is what Goethe would have done if he had had spiritual science in its present form. We would have seen a red Lucifer first, and only then the gray-black Ahriman, the gray-black Mephistopheles. But Goethe did not get that far. Therefore, he only lets Mephistopheles appear, who in his own way also combines the retarded qualities that should work in the spiritual world and not work in a human way into human life. Goethe felt that, felt it correctly. That is why not everything about this Mephistopheles is quite right, although it is right. The feeling here seems much more certain than Goethe's intuition has already worked. Much of what Faust encounters as temptation really comes from Mephistopheles, but other things cannot properly be attributed to Mephistopheles. That Faust should be tempted by base passions cannot really come from Ahriman, it can only come from Lucifer. And when Ahriman-Mephistopheles says this, Goethe remembers, subconsciously, that it is not quite right. Mephistopheles should actually have Lucifer at his side. That is why Mephistopheles says: “Dust shall he eat,” that is, he shall live in lower passions, “like my aunt, the famous snake.” That is Lucifer. Then he reminds us of his aunt, the good Aunt Lucifer!' There you have the reminiscence of Lucifer, who is actually supposed to be there.

You see, there are tremendously deep secrets of the world in this “Prologue in Heaven”, by which I do not mean to say that Goethe wanted to present them as we feel them today in spiritual science. But instinctive wisdom is often much deeper than the apparent one. And in ancient times there was only instinctive wisdom, and that was truly a higher wisdom than that which is produced today by limited natural science.

Thus Mephistopheles-Ahriman entered the physical world, where he should not be. There is also a poor fit between what he has to say and the physical world and the intentions of the Deity in the physical world. He wants to rule in the world, but he finds everything “very bad”. He must be different from the others, from the genuine sons of the gods, for he is to be here in the physical world, where works are to be fathomed. Since Mephistopheles enters the physical world at all, the saying that he should not fathom the world does not apply to him; he must fathom it. He is only a half-nature on earth; as a spiritual being he does not really belong. He would have to fathom it, but cannot fathom it. That is why he finds everything “very bad”. We will talk about the extent to which he is here for creation tomorrow in connection with other teachings of spiritual science. Today we just want to say this.

So this Ahriman-Mephistopheles is different here in the physical world from the true sons of the gods. He really must be used for something else here. He must work on what is real in the physical world, unlike the true sons of the gods. They do not need to have the earthly real in their imaginations. They must delight in the “vividly rich beauty”, the beauty in their imaginations. There is a discrepancy between the angels, the true sons of the gods, and Ahriman, the Mephistopheles. For them, the angels cannot do it like Mephistopheles, they delight in the lively, rich beauty.

That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
embraces you with the sweet barriers of love.

This is about as profound as the prologue gets. Remember what we said about the cosmos of wisdom and the cosmos of love? And remember the words: They veiled their faces from the mystery of the Incarnation. — Love does not live the same way for the Sons of God of Wisdom as it does for humans: they are beings within wisdom; there are limits for the true Sons of God. And by living in the great Maja, in the glory of the Luciferic world, they weave the “permanent thoughts” that are in turn beings, not abstract ideas, that are forces, not mere thoughts.

It is truly remarkable how this “Prologue in Heaven” was written in 1797, one might say, not in the language of men, but in the language of the gods, and how humanity will take a long time to fathom all the depths of this prologue. I think it is possible to get a sense of the feelings that lived in Goethe when, spurred on by Schiller, he set about continuing Faust in 1797, which he had started years ago. It began there: “Have now, alas, studied philosophy, law” and so on. Then the three parts are missing: “Dedication”, “Prelude to the Theater”, “Prologue in Heaven”. Then the whole Easter walk was missing. Some scenes were then written during the Italian journey in 1787, and under Schiller's encouragement, Goethe went back to it. He may well have thought back to the time when he had not taken Faust so deeply, when he had only taken it, albeit very deeply, as one who strives out of the world of physical reality, over the threshold, into the spiritual world, to the earth spirit and so on. But he could not take it then, he, the twenty-year-old Goethe, as he took it now at the end of the century, in 1797, when he himself felt that he really did not understand in an abstract way much of what he had to express in the “Prologue in Heaven”. For there the language of angels prevails. Those who heard the first songs of Faust would have had to develop with Goethe in the way that Goethe himself developed if they had wanted to understand what had become of the whole rich world of Faust in Goethe's soul by 1797. Something different had become of it. What he had created as a young man appeared to him in a higher sphere. He must have had some sense of the view from the spiritual sphere beyond the threshold down to the earthly world in which Faust also walked, who says: “Have now, alas, philosophy, jurisprudence...” and so on. “... studied with hot endeavor.” Goethe could say that he and his companions enjoyed something different back then than what has now become his. And he might have sensed something of how little he would be understood. For Goethe sensed already, from the end of the 1790s, that something must come like a spiritual science if what he instinctively sensed and felt as world-wisdom and world-beauty and world-strength was to be fully understood.

They will not hear the following songs,
The souls to whom I sang the first;
The friendly throng has been scattered,
Alas! the first echo has faded.

Echo from the souls to whom he read the first scenes of “Faust,” which he wrote when he was twenty years old: the first echo. But understanding at that time – for even that time is now already gone in the time of materialism – understanding, however, for crossing the threshold with a character like Faust, understanding for appealing to the earth spirit, which “weaves and lives in the tides of life, in the storm of deeds”. But a stopping at this understanding, an inability to ascend to what Goethe had to struggle to achieve. Therefore - now that the language of angels prevails and the whole is viewed from a different point of view - no longer the old resonance. Faded away, alas! - that old resonance! Scattered the souls for whom he sang the first songs. That suffering that everyone goes through who really wants to look at the spiritual world, Goethe knew it and knew that he was alone with this suffering in his time.

My suffering is heard by the unknown multitude.

This is not much different today, when one could be frightened by the applause that people give to “Faust”. For what do people today still hear of the deep wisdom that prevails in “Faust”, much more than external appearances!?

But Goethe might say, if he now felt that he had to lift up his song, the song of his suffering, into the realm of the spirit: What used to be reality to me floats far into the distance, and what used to disappear becomes reality — the silent, earnest spiritual kingdom, which one approaches with that awe that one feels when one has a presentiment of the completely different form that the world takes on the other side of the threshold and on this side of the threshold. This 'dedication' also arose from Goethe's deep sense of the possibilities of the future. If spiritual science could also deepen human hearts in such cases, so that they are really able to take what must be taken deeply, then spiritual science would fulfill one of its tasks. For the saying that I quoted here only recently is true, deeply true: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day conceived,” that is, than the day that shows us only the physical, sensual world. The world is deep as it is revealed to us by that night which, compared to physical day, is indeed night and darkness, but into which we carry that light which we kindle in our own soul as a lamp and which we then have to illuminate ourselves. The world is deep and must be fathomed by a light that we first kindle through our spiritual striving so that it may shine in the spiritual world. Then it will shine as the light does in the eternal becoming, which works and lives and in which the beings of the higher world have to dwell, so that it may be revealed to them what they need to fortify with lasting thoughts that which floats in fluctuating appearance.

From this point we will then continue our meditation tomorrow.

I would just like to ask our friends from Basel not to bring any children with them tomorrow. We have to make this exception because the presence of the personality from hell presented to you today makes this scene unsuitable for children's fantasies and dreams. So, as an exception, we ask that anyone under fifteen or sixteen years of age not be brought tomorrow.

Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform.

There are a number of things I want to recall in this extra session today, themes spoken of in different lectures which we shall bring together and consider from a particular point of view today. The rays of light which arise will then be directed at subjects we have previously considered from one angle or another. There is a particular prejudice, a feeling people have, which stops them from accepting spiritual science in the present age. People have so little idea of how small a proportion of whatever a human being accomplishes at any hour, any moment, basically is within his ordinary awareness of being a human individual in the physical world. Just consider how little we would be able to function as human beings if we were fully conscious of everything we needed in order to live as human beings. It is often stressed, and quite rightly so, that modern man knows very little—taking first of all the purely physical functions in life—how his brain, liver, heart and so on really work in order to accomplish what man has to accomplish to enable him to live on this earth as a physical entity. All the things man has to accomplish merely to let his external physical life progress—all those things he simply has to accomplish. But consider how little man is able to follow this with his conscious mind. Just consider some quite minor thing happening in everyday life and you'll immediately see that man as an entity in this world, an entity on earth, is one thing, and what may be called ‘conscious man’ is something quite different. In relation to what man is within his whole compass, this conscious man is small, very small indeed. It should therefore not come as a surprise that man feels a natural urge to extend this small conscious man more and more into the region that opens up when we consider man as part of the cosmos. We shall do this today by returning to aspects considered in earlier lectures and considering them in a different context.

Our conscious existence as a human being starts, in a way, with sensory perception, with everything our senses perceive of the world outside us. Sensory perception—the fact that impressions are made on our senses, with those impressions arising on the basis of certain processes, is something quite different from our being aware of this. Imagine you are sleeping with your eyes open, not closed. Hares are capable of this. Unless it were pitch dark the environment would constantly leave impressions on the eye, only you would not be aware of those impressions. Our ears are of course always open, and every sound, all the things we are constantly aware of during the day when we are awake, are of course also processed in the ear when we are asleep. Our sense organs may always be engaged in the whole process of earth life; yet any significance they may hold for us depends on our following this process in the sense organs in conscious awareness' Only the things we take into conscious awareness are actually ours in this life on earth.

Do these sensory perceptions as we call them, the ability of our eyes, ears and so on to perceive, have significance only for us as human beings living on earth, or do they also hold a wider, cosmic significance?

To answer this question we need to use clairvoyant insight to fain an opinion as to what it is that we actually see of the stars in the universe. I think we may say that people taking the point of view of materialistic physics would say: ‘Well, when we see a planet, the light of the sun has fallen on it and been reflected, and that is how we see the planet.’ That is, in fact, the way objects on earth are seen. Physicists therefore concluded, on the basis of mere analogy, that planets are seen in the same way. There is no reason at all why something applicable on earth—the conclusion that light falls on objects and these objects become visible through that light being reflected—should also apply to heavenly bodies. There is absolutely no reason to say that this conclusion also applies to the universe. As to the fixed stars, well, the physicists say these give off their own light. I remember how, as quite a young fellow, I asked a former schoolmate from our village school: ‘What are they teaching you about light?’ Even in those days I had listened with a certain youthful scepticism to what was said of the 'real' origin of light, of all the tiny dancing particles of ether and of light-waves. The other boy, who had had his further education at a seminary, had heard nothing of this as yet. He told me: ‘Whenever the question came up as to the nature of light we were simply told: “Light is what makes bodies luminous”.’ Well, you see that really is saying something quite brilliant about light, to say that light is what makes bodies luminous. Yet modern materialistic physicists are not really saying much more than that when they say that we see heavenly bodies because they radiate light. It is very much the same in principle.

I did mention on another occasion that materialistic physicists might get quite a surprise if they were able to travel to the sun to look and see what the sun really is like. I said that because in fact there is nothing at all there in the place where the sun is. What we would find would be a composite of purely spiritual entities and energies. There is nothing material there at all.

If we use clairvoyant awareness to investigate the stars and inquire into the reason for their luminosity we find that what is actually there, what we call their luminosity, really consists in the ability to perceive, an ability which is rather crude in man and more highly developed in other entities. If some entity were to look down on the earth from Venus or Mars and find the earth luminous, it would have to say to itself: ‘This earth is luminous not because it reflects the rays of the sun, but because there are men on earth who perceive with their eyes.’ The process of visual perception holds significance not only for our own conscious awareness but radiates out into the whole of outer space. The light of this particular heavenly body consists in what men do in order to see. We do not merely see in order to become aware of the results of visual perception, we also see in order that because of this process the earth becomes radiant to outer space. And it is a fact that every one of our sense organs has the function not only to be what it is for us but also has a function within the universe. Through sensory perception man is an entity within the cosmos. He is not merely the entity his conscious mind presents to him as a human being on earth, he is also a cosmic entity.

Considering the inner configuration of the soul at a deeper level, we come to our thinking activity. We are even more inclined to consider our thoughts our own. Not only are ‘thoughts free from toll’, as the saying goes, indicating that thoughts really hold significance only for the individual person, but it is widely thought that people merely go through an inner process when they think and that this thinking activity more or less holds only personal significance for them. The truth is very different. Thinking activity is, in fact, a process occurring in the ether body. And people know extremely little of what really goes on when they are thinking. Extremely little of what goes on when he is thinking enters into man's conscious awareness. As he thinks, he is aware of part of what he is thinking. Yet infinitely more thinking activity is associated with this even when we think in the daytime. What is more, we continue to think during the night, when we are asleep. It is not true that we stop thinking when we go to sleep and start again on waking. Thinking activity is continuous. There are many different dream processes, processes in our dream-life, and part of all this is that man's ego and astral body enter into his ether body and physical body on waking. He comes in with these two principles and finds himself in the surging billows of something very active and alive. Giving just a little consideration to this he will realize that these are weaving thoughts and that he is becoming immersed in an ocean consisting entirely of weaving thoughts. People often say to themselves on waking: ‘If only I could remember what I was thinking just now. Those were very sensible ideas, something that could help me enormously if only I could remember!’ And they are not mistaken. There really is something like a billowing ocean down there. It is the billowing, weaving, etheric world, and this is not simply a more subtle form of matter, the way English theosophists like to present it,⁸⁴ but the world of weaving thoughts, something genuinely spiritual. We become immersed in a world of weaving thoughts.

As human beings we are really much more sensible and intelligent than we are just as conscious human beings. This is something that has to be admitted. It would indeed be most regrettable if we were no more sensible at the unconscious level than we are at the conscious level. For we could do nothing else in that case but repeat ourselves at the same level of intelligence life after life. In fact, we already have within us during our present life the potential for our next life; this will be the fruit. If we were always able to catch hold of this element we become immersed in, we would catch hold of much of what we will be in our next life. So there is billowing, weaving life down there. It is the germ of our next incarnation and this is what we take into ourselves. Hence the prophetic nature of our dream life.

Thinking is an immensely complicated process and man only takes a small proportion of what it involves into his consciousness. A thought involves something which is a process in time. Our sensory perceptions made in conscious awareness also make us part of the cosmos. The activity of seeing causes the earth to grow luminous and this makes us part of cosmic space. The processes involved in thinking activity make us part of cosmic time; all that happened before we were born and all that is going to happen after death plays its part in this. Through our thinking, then, we take part in the whole cosmic process of time, through our sensory perception in the whole cosmic process of space. Only the earth-based process of sensory perception is for ourselves.

Let us move on to feeling. We are even less aware of feeling activity than we are of sensory perception and of thinking activity. Feeling is a very profound process. You see, to discover the true significance of thinking, to find the real truth—that thinking has cosmic significance—it is necessary to progress to imaginative perception, as described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.⁸⁵ Stripping our thinking of the abstract nature we consciously associate with it, and entering into that ocean of weaving thoughts, we encounter the necessity to have not only the abstract thoughts in there that we have as citizens of the earth but to conceive images in it. For everything is created from images. Images are the true or origins of things; images are behind everything around us; and it is into these images we enter when we immerse ourselves in the ocean of weaving thoughts. Those are the images Plato spoke of; they are the images all who have spoken of spiritual primary causes had in mind, the images Goethe had in mind with his archetypal plant. These images are to be found in imaginative thinking. This imaginative thinking is a reality and we become immersed in it when we enter the billowing world of thoughts that move with the stream of time.

We only enter into the depths of feeling when we attain to what is called Inspiration. This is a higher form of perception compared to Imagination. Everything that lies at the root of feeling in us really is a surging sea of Inspirations. Just as the image reflected in the mirror is merely an image of the object which exists in the world outside, so our feelings are merely reflections mirrored in our own organism of Inspirations that come to us from the universe. They are a mirror image which relates to the flowing movement in the universe the way a dead mirror image relates to the living creature it is reflecting. Each of those images reflects the attributes of entities belonging to higher hierarchies who express themselves in the world through Inspiration. If we do not stop at feeling activity but progress to clairaudient perception we perceive the world as the united activity of a great multitude of entities within hierarchies. The world is this entity arising out of the united actions of entities from the hierarchies. The deeds of the higher hierarchies are happening in the world. And we are involved. We are in the mirror. And the deeds of the higher hierarchies are reflected in our mirror. We then perceive what has been reflected—through conscious awareness. As human beings active in feeling, we live in the womb of the attributes of the hierarchies, perceiving those attributes because we have consciousness.

When it comes to being conscious of his feelings, man is even smaller compared to what he really is in his ability to feel than he is compared to his sensory perceptions and his thinking activity. As feeling human beings we are also part of the hierarchies, are also working in the sphere where the hierarchies are at work. We are active in creating the fabric. We perform deeds that are not for ourselves alone, deeds through which we share in the great work of building the world. Through our feelings we are the servants of the higher entities that are the world builders. We may think, as we stand before the Sistine Madonna for example, that this merely meets certain emotional needs in us. The fact however is that when a human being stands before the Sistine Madonna and responds to the painting emotionally this is an entirely real process. If there were no emotional element, no element of feeling, the entities which one day are to share in the work of building Venus as a heavenly body would lack the powers they need to do this work. Our feelings are needed for the world the gods are building, the way bricks are needed in building a house. Again we have only partial knowledge of our feelings. We know the joy we experience as we stand before the Sistine Madonna, yet what is happening there is one element within the universal whole, irrespective of whether we have conscious awareness of this or not.

As to our will activity, this, too, is but a mirror, though in this case the essential nature of individual members of the hierarchies is reflected. We are also an entity within the hierarchies but at a different level. Our reality lies in our will. We give substance to the world by somehow or other letting our will live in reality. Again it holds true that, in so far as we follow our will activity in conscious awareness, this has significance only for us as human beings. But apart from this, our will activity is a reality which is the material the gods used to build the world.

So you see how our sensory perceptions, our thinking, feeling and will activity, have cosmic significance; how they are an integral part of the whole of cosmic life. It really seems that modern man should have a fair degree of understanding and should, with some good will, be able to accept these things. Occasionally we come across evidence of someone being aware that there is a small human being—the conscious human being—and a big human being who is the cosmic reality. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of this in his Zarathustra, for he had some idea of it. The same holds true for many other people, except that they do not make the effort to follow the paths that will show how we progress from being a small human being to being the greater one. It is really necessary, however, that a fair number of people come to realize that the times have passed when it was possible to manage without such insight.

In the past, something still remained of the old clairvoyance that enabled people to see into the spiritual world. In those days they really were able to see the way man does today when he is outside his .physical and ether bodies with his astral body and ego and out there in the cosmos. Man would never have achieved complete freedom as an individual and dependence would have been his lot if the old clairvoyance had persisted. It was necessary for man to take possession, as it were, of his physical ego. The form of thinking he would develop if he perceived the surging ocean of thinking, feeling and will activity that exists below consciousness would be a heavenly form of thinking but not independent thinking. How does man achieve independent thinking?

Well, imagine it is night-time and you are lying asleep in your bed. It is the physical body and the ether body which are lying in your bed. As you wake up the ego and the astral body enter from outside. Thinking activity continues in the ether body. And now the ego and the astral body enter, first of all taking hold of the ether body. This does not take long, however, for at that very moment the thought may flash up: ‘What have I been thinking? Those were sensible thoughts.’ However, the human being has a strong desire to take hold of the physical body as well, and the moment he does so everything vanishes. Now the human being is wholly within the sphere of earth life. It is because man immediately takes hold of his physical body that he is unable to gain awareness of the subtle swell of etheric thinking. To have the awareness 'It is I who am thinking' man simply has to take hold of his physical body and make it his instrument; otherwise he would not feel 'It is I who am thinking' but ‘It is the angel guarding me who is thinking’. The conscious thought ‘I am thinking’ is possible only if the physical body is taken hold of. Man therefore must be able to use his physical body. In the time that lies ahead he will have to make use of what the earth is giving him and take hold of his physical body more and more. His justifiable egoism will grow and grow. This will have to be counteracted by taking hold of the insights provided through spiritual science. We are now at the beginning of this era. People might say:

No need to concern ourselves with this. What do we care as to the intentions of the gods? We have no desire to enquire into the will of the gods. We'll accept whatever they offer us in the course of life on this earth; they give us the physical body to be an ever more powerful instrument for physical thinking. But to feel concerned that we should start to gain something else that is more than just power—that is too much of an effort. And we do not really have to. The gods could take another course.

That, too, is what people say, only they say it by inventing philosophies and so forth.

It has to be clearly understood that in the world it really makes no difference if we decide to put a limit on what is to happen, a limit to suit our reluctance to be personally involved. It is quite impossible for the measure meted out to man to be reduced. If man is intended to develop certain powers within a particular era and only develops part of them, the rest will nevertheless emerge. It is not true to say that they do not emerge. When you heat up an engine the excess heat supplied does not disappear; it radiates from the engine. In the same way nothing that exists in human life can disappear. It is not true, therefore, that mystical powers—so much despised by modern man—do not exist. Man is able to deny them, yet they continue to exist as part of this world. You can deny them, you can be a great materialist in your conscious mind, but you cannot be a materialist with the whole of your being. What happens is that those powers will, unknown to man, develop in such a way that he will offer to Lucifer and Ahriman what he would otherwise have offered to the legitimate gods. Everything you suppress in your conscious mind, everything you will not allow to unfold, you offer to Ahriman and Lucifer.

No culture in the present age, dear friends, can have been more intensely materialistic down to the last fibre of the soul than the Italian culture. Present-day Italian culture, the culture of the Italian nation, has developed through the influence of the folk soul on the sentient soul. It is the current mission of English culture to develop materialism. Materialism will be on the surface there, but it will be the way it ought to be. The earth does need a certain materialism and this is developing there. It is the mission of the British to bring materialism into earth evolution. With them it cannot take root in the soul as deeply as it does with the Italians. An Italian feels everything deeply and in him materialism takes root at the very deepest level. This is why present-day Italian culture goes into positive frenzies of nationalistic materialism and does so with all its soul, when in fact materialism cannot be accepted with the whole of one's soul. We may be its protagonists in the world but we cannot really develop an enthusiasm for it—unless we are part of the Italian folk soul. It is true that the present age is the most materialistic ever. It is equally true that among the people living in the south of Europe the most materialistic attitudes of all arise from the sentient soul. Fichte said: `Anyone who believes in freedom within the life of the spirit is really one of us.’⁸⁶ His conception of nationalism was one entirely determined by the spirit. There is nothing of this in the Italian concept of nationalism. In their case it is entirely a matter of blood substance—their nationalism is entirely naturalistic. One man's idea of what constitutes a nation is quite different from that of another. An utterly nationalistic materialism is alive among the Italian people. This, of course, only relates to the present day.

You must realize that when the soul is so determinedly aiming for naturalistic materialism in what a nation is intending, the sense for the mystical cannot be lost on account of this. It persists. It is merely thrust out from consciousness and comes to rest elsewhere. It is not thrust out from man's true and innermost being. It now serves the powers we refer to by the technical terms of Lucifer and Ahriman. Those human faculties are then not directed along the path of the progressive deities but into the path,. of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers.

One would assume that something will have to emerge in those nations when powers of a mystical nature are thrust out into public life. Can we find something of this kind in the South, a stream of mystical will that has been thrust out?

It was in May 1347, on Whitsunday, that Cola di Rienzi⁸⁷ walked up to the Capitol in Rome at the head of a great procession. He was wearing ancient Roman armour, which was in accord with the sentiments of that time, and had four standards. The Capitol is the place from which speeches concerning Rome civilization were traditionally addressed to the Romans. Rienzi proclaimed that he had come to speak in the name of Jesus Christ, as a man compelled to speak to the Romans in the name of freedom for the whole world. Rhetoric was very much the order of the day at the time. It did have a certain significance then—in 1347—but no reality. The whole was something like a puff of smoke. But that is not really my point. I want to draw your attention to the fact that this happened on a Whitsunday—on 20 May 1347. It was then that the man representing this whole stream called himself an ambassador of Christ. Later, when he had further elaborated his message, he also called himself a man inspired by the Holy Spirit.

It was also a Whitsunday that war was declared against Austria. Immediately before that a man who did not call himself an ambassador of Christ but nevertheless let it appear in what he said that he was filled with the Holy Spirit, had walked at the head of a large procession and made speeches in Rome. There certainly was no vestige in the soul of this man of the mysticism out of which Rienzi had formerly spoken. Yet—and here we get an element of mysticism that has been thrust out—the words were again spoken on a Whitsunday. Yet they were spoken in the service of those other powers. The Christ impulse had been thrust out from consciousness. And that it was very much the Ahrimanic element—an element we must of course expect in the present age—is evident from just a few words that were said at the time. A 20th century orator could not, of course, arrive in Roman armour and with four standards and so he came in a car. That is the kind of sacrifice one has to make in this materialistic age. But somehow he had to bring to expression—perhaps unconsciously—that an element of mystical power thrust out by man had been ceded to another power and was now on the move in the outside world, having been turned into its opposite. This man who calls himself d'Annuncio—in reality he is called something else⁸⁹—spoke in such a way that people might have believed all the great flaming speeches of Rienzi were coming to life again—it is easy to do this in Italian—deliberately making every sentence reminiscent of him. After his oration, which to the Central European mind consists of nothing but empty words, he picked up a ceremonial sword and he kissed this sword to indicate that the power of his oratory should pass into this sword. The sword was the property of the editor of a magazine one commonly sees around when one goes to Italy. The editor of a magazine had presented the sword to the Mayor of Rome as a sacred relic on this occasion. The sword belonged to the editor of the cosmic paper Asino. In time to come a world judging these things on a different basis from that prevailing today will realize that many of the things happening at the present time have to be judged from the point of view I have presented—that much of what is present in man by way of mystical powers is thrust out, handed over to the world process, but does not get lost. It becomes the spoil of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. Rarely is the irony inherent in world history as obvious to the eye as in the case I have just presented.

Let us use all we have been able to absorb out of the work we have been doing these last years and try to understand clearly that there is a certain measure of spiritual power that is given to human nature. Mystical spirituality has to be thrust out of human consciousness in order that mankind can grow free in taking hold of the physical body. Yet on the other hand this mystical spirituality must be made part of our conscious life, otherwise Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers will take hold of what has been thrust out from conscious awareness. Again and again I want to remind you, dear friends, that having made such efforts for many years to absorb this into our conscious mind, we also have the feeling arise in us that something will have to emerge from the bloodshed of the present time that will lead mankind towards spirituality, towards recognition of the spirit. This means, as I have often said, that there will have to be souls who have grown able, through spiritual science, to look up into the spiritual world where all the ether bodies that have come from young people are present. These have reached the spiritual world and will continue to be present because on that plane, too, powers are not lost. We must look up towards them. They will unite with the powers shining down for us from the spiritual world and what the dead have to say will form the impulses of the future—if souls are present who understand their language. It it in this spirit that once again we say these simple words:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 84. Rudolf Steiner was probably referring above all to the works of Charles Webster Leadbeater (1847 –1934).
• 85. Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Kenntnisse der höheren Welten? (GA 10); in English as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? (tr. not mentioned) Rudolf Steiner Press. London 1976.
• 86. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: Reden an die deutsche Nation: Nr. 7 (Addresses to the German Nation No. 7) (Berlin 1808).
• 87. di Rienzi, Nicholas (or Cola) (c. 1313–1354), Tribune of the People at Rome. See Robert Davidssohn: ‘Vom Mittelalter zu unscren Tagcn’ in Süddeutsche Monatshefte 12: 121. 1915.
• 89. At a later date Rudolf Steiner changed the line ‘Dich. tönend von Lob and Macht’ to ‘Dich, tönend von Licht und Macht’ (‘Thee ringing with praise and power’ to ‘Thee ringing with light and power’). See Wahrspruchworte—Richtspruchworte. Dornach 1951 ( proposed GA 41).

Notes from a lecture

Our life must, so to speak, represent what we can become through anthroposophy. This requires a clear view of life and a healthy judgment about it. In our time, life is more complicated than it was in the previous age. Even in periods of time that lie just behind us today, it was much less complicated. This was due to the simple circumstances. At that time, the soul and the qualities associated with it were more widespread in humanity than they are today. But many other things have also changed significantly. And we all live in this changed life and must try to penetrate the sphere of life in which we live as it is necessary. It is precisely part of contemporary life that we achieve harmony of soul and inner unity of mind despite the fragmentation of modern life.

This cannot be fully explained in a lecture; we can only highlight a few points. Today we find materialism everywhere, including a materialism that permeates all of practical life, brought about by machine operation. The latter has made the conditions of business life, of life in general, much more complicated, has given rise to the hustle and bustle in which humanity must live and not come to its senses. People often do not even realize how their entire labor, their entire thinking and pondering from morning till evening is devoted to material needs. It is only natural that in the age in which we are surrounded by machines, people begin to think materialistically about all matters. Truly, the spread of materialistic and monistic worldviews would be impossible in any other age.

We anthroposophists stand in a new worldview. The spiritual movement is entering the world. Consider the difficulties we face, consider how small spiritual science has remained despite its magnificent potential. Let us compare what prevails in the world as religious denominations, which are to be seen as remnants from times gone by. We find many religious aspirations. We should certainly take a look at them. We find a very intellectual approach to religion. There are preachers, Christian ones, who no longer believe in a human Christ, no longer believe in immortality. People are happy when a Jatho movement and the like appears and is presented as rationally as possible. All old authorities can no longer prevail against the blind faith in what science has proven. These phenomena are all related to moral concepts. Anyone who works in a business will confirm how little truth there is in today's interactions between salespeople and customers. Many a person who stands in between suffers as a result. Do the cobweb-thin concepts of such rational preachers have any moral force in them? Even the public opinion of which we are so proud today did not exist in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as it does now through the newspaper system. Great philosophers have long since said: Public opinion is private error. Who could possibly make an Ostwald and the like believe that spiritual entities have anything to do with him? But by denying them, he is summoning very specific spiritual entities. Behind every Ostwald there is an army of very specific spirits. The spirit lives in all matter. There is a spirit that has every interest in denying its spirit, and that is Ahriman. When man directs all his attention to the material laws, he does not banish the spirits, but conjures them up; they creep into the minds of the materialists. Mephistopheles sends Faust to the realm of the Mothers and says: There you will find the Nothing. — Faust answers him: “In your Nothing I hope to find the All.” — But humanity today does not answer like Faust, for materialistic people are obsessed by Ahriman.

In the religious-rationalistic direction, on the other hand, another spirit is at work, namely Lucifer. Through abstract, cobweb-thin concepts, he detaches people from the real spiritual. Ideas are now supposed to live in history, which is just as clever as expecting a painter who is only painted to paint pictures. This amalgamation with matter had been in preparation for a long time, and today it has reached a preliminary climax. Heraclitus diluted Theosophy into philosophy through the influence of Lucifer. This is expressed figuratively in the saying that he offered his book as a sacrifice to Diana of Ephesus.

Now let us look at public opinion. It arises from the law that Lucifer and Ahriman had to intervene in the world view. In the past, instead of public opinion, there were people whose spiritual life extended to the spiritual mysteries. For better or for worse, these personalities had an influence on world life. This can be understood by studying the history of Florence between the years 1100 and 1500, for example. Today, this influence corresponds to those people who strive to achieve a connection with the spiritual. However, the luciferic beings who have remained behind on the moon and determine public opinion have not progressed to this point. As a result, public opinion is about a thousand years behind. The very lowest among them, the recruits, so to speak, of the luciferic army, work on public opinion. Beings are formed in them that will later appear as powerful entities. They sit behind the editorial desk, they stand behind the popular speaker and so on. These are just beginning luciferic spirits, actually still little ones.

To know about life, that is part of practical spiritual science. Man forms his image of the world with his mind. What now arises from this knowledge of the mind and senses? There is an old word for it. Not even the appointed representatives can grasp it. The serpent says: You will be like God, knowing good and evil. All intellectual and sensory knowledge is Luciferic, is its actual hallmark. The insistence on external experience, which does not recognize anything other than atoms, is a fantasy. Behind Maya are not atoms, but spiritual realities. All the phenomena that are described are not realities; the realities are the spiritual beings. The monads do not exist if we do not grasp them in reality as the higher hierarchies. There are many hierarchies, among the highest are also the deities of the Trinity. Philosophy speaks only of one unity. But the spirits are many, and unity exists only in the souls of the spirits. Those who have become accustomed to thinking in such a way that they know themselves to be in the community of spirits have the moral laws. Ahriman lets human beings sink into the swamp of matter; Lucifer draws them away from the truth, preventing them from realizing that they are lost in an illusory world. Maya has a right to exist if it is understood as an expression of the reality behind it.

The day before yesterday I spoke to you about the fact that we, as members of the human race, live in a sphere which we may designate as the fourth sphere of evolution. We know that the Earth evolution has gradually developed out of the Saturn evolution; the Saturn evolution was followed by the Sun evolution, this in turn by the Moon evolution, out of which, finally came the Earth evolution. If we keep in mind these four sequential formations of the earth planet to which, of course, mankind as such belongs, we must only consider man in so far as he is a head-being. In doing so we must realize that the designation “the head of man” is the symbolic expression of everything that belongs to human sense perception, to human intelligence, of all that in turn flows over into social life through human sense perception, as an intelligent being, must be included in this symbolic expression. Thus, if I say: “man as a head-being,” this is spoken symbolically and refers to everything I have just mentioned.

We speak lightly of the fact that we, as physical human beings, live in the surrounding atmosphere. We must realize that this atmosphere belongs to us. For, is it not true that the air which is now within us was a short time ago outside us? We are not thinkable as human beings outside this atmosphere. But we have become accustomed to believe that men of earlier periods spoke about subjects like the air in the way modern mankind speaks about them. This, however, was not the case. We find it queer if we say that just as we walk in the air so we walk in a sphere which contains the conditions for our existence as sense-beings, intelligent beings, in short, that we possess all that can be symbolically expressed, as has been stated, by virtue of our existence as head-beings. Now, I have told you that this is only one of the spheres in which we exist, for we live in various spheres. Let us now progress in our considerations to a sphere of practical import for mankind and focus our attention upon the fourth sphere in which we now live by virtue of three evolutionary states having preceded our Earth. Let this be characterized by this circular plane (Dr. Steiner makes a drawing on the blackboard) in which we live as in our fourth sphere of evolution. Besides this, we live in yet another sphere of evolution through the fact that this other evolutionary sphere belongs to the spiritual beings that are our creators, just as this fourth sphere belongs to us. If we disregard the human being for a moment and consider those beings which we always have called, in the order of the hierarchies standing above us, the Spirits of Form, the Creative Form Beings, then we shall have to say that we, as human beings, shall only reach the sphere which we ascribe to our Divine Creator Beings when the Earth has passed through three further stages of evolution, which you will find designated in my Occult Science [Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, an Outline, Anthroposophic Press, New York] as Jupiter stage, Venus stage and Vulcan stage, and shall have reached the eighth stage. Thus these Creative Spirits are at the stage which we human beings shall have reached after the Vulcan evolution. This is their sphere which belongs to them just as the fourth sphere belongs to us. But we must think of these spheres as being inserted into one another, as interpenetrating one another. Thus, is I designate the sphere of which I have just spoken as the eighth sphere, we do not live only in the fourth but also in this eighth sphere through the fact that our Divine Creators live in this sphere together with us.

If we now hold this eighth sphere in view, we find living there not only our Divine Creator Spirits, but also the Ahrimanic beings. Thus by living in the surroundings of the eighth sphere we live together with the Ahrimanic beings. In the fourth sphere, the Luciferic beings live together with us. This is the situation concerning the distribution of these spiritual beings. We are able to go into details regarding these things only if we know how we ourselves are related to the corresponding surroundings of this sphere.

Thus, it is revealed to the perception of initiation science that we are perceiving and intelligent beings by virtue of our living in the fourth sphere of our evolution. But we must never forget that the Luciferic power influenced this intelligence in which we must always include sense perceptions. This Luciferic power is intimately connected with the special kind of intelligence which the human being today considers his very own and which he prefers to employ. Yet, man was endowed with this intelligence only through the fact that the higher being of whom I have spoken to you as the Michael-being has cast the Luciferic beings down into the sphere of men, into the fourth sphere of men. Through this the impulse of intelligence arose in human beings.

You can feel what this impulse of intelligence signifies in mankind if you direct your attention to the impersonal element of present-day human intelligence. You know that we human beings have many personal interests, and we are individualized in regard to them. But his individualization comes to a halt before intelligence. As far as intelligence and logic are concerned, all human beings possess the same; we count upon this common possession. We would not have this common possession if the Luciferic influence, mediated by Michael, had not been exerted upon mankind.

We comprehend one another in this simple fashion only by virtue of our having this common intelligence which originates in the Luciferic spirituality. This Luciferic spirituality arose through Michael's having permeated and influenced human beings with the being of Lucifer. These Luciferic influences developed further in human historic evolution. Alongside of them, much else has been developed in the human being. But today this Luciferic spirituality which we call our intelligence is still considered by many people the most distinguished faculty of man.

You must, in order to come to greater clarity in this matter, direct your soul gaze upon something else which may bring human beings together over the whole earth once it has spread. This is the Christ impulse. But the Christ impulse is something different from the intelligence impulse. The intelligence impulse is of coercive nature. You cannot make the intelligence of mankind your personal affair. You cannot suddenly resolve to decide in a personal way what has to be decided by intelligence without appearing insane within social life relationships. Yet, on the other hand, you cannot gain any relation to the Christ impulse other than a personal one. Nobody can interfere with another person's way of relating himself to the Christ. This is an entirely personal matter. But through the fact that the Christ has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha and has united Himself with the Earth evolution the situation has become such that, regardless of how many human beings, independently from one another, make the Christ impulse their personal affair: the Christ impulse, through its very nature, will become the same for everyone. That means, human beings are brought together through something which every one of them makes his own affair, not coercively as in the case of intelligence, but through the fact that precisely through the Christ impulse itself the relationship of every human being to the Christ forms itself in such a way—if it forms itself rightly—that it is the same in every human being. This, you see, is the difference between the intelligence impulse and the Christ impulse. The Christ impulse may be the same for all mankind and yet is a personal matter for every individual human being. Intelligence is not a personal affair.

Now, what was the situation into which the Christ impulse entered? We can answer this from indications which I have already given. We know that the evolution of the head is retrogressive. In regard to his head the human being finds himself in a process of dying. We may thus point to the following cosmic fact: Michael has pushed the Luciferic hosts down into the realm of mankind; they took up their abode in the human head, but in the human head in its state of gradual dying.

These Luciferic beings began to fight against this dying of the human head. And here we touch a well-known secret of human nature, a secret known in the most varied forms, but which is almost completely concealed from modern man. In regard to this divine evolution, man carries in his head a continual death process; but paralleling this continual process of dying is a kindling of life on the part of Lucifer. It is Lucifer's constant endeavor to make our head as living as is the rest of our organism. Seen from the organic aspect, Lucifer would turn mankind away from its divine direction, were he to succeed in making the human head as living as is the rest of the organism.

This is precisely what the divine direction of human evolution has to turn against. Man must remain united with Earth evolution so that he may continue on through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolution. If Lucifer were to reach his goal, man would not continue on his destined path; on the contrary, he would be made part of a cosmos which is intelligent through and through.

Physiologically speaking, it is Lucifer's constant endeavor to send the life forces out of the rest of our organism into our head. Psychically speaking, Lucifer is constantly endeavoring to give to the content of our intelligence which merely comprises thoughts and images the character of substance. What I have stated above from the physical point of view I now state from the point of view of the soul when I say that Lucifer has the constant tendency to give a real substantial content to that which we form as an image in our spirit—anything of an artistic form, for instance; that is, he has the tendency to permeate our thought contents with ordinary earthly reality. If he were to succeed he would bring it about that we as human beings would forsake reality and fly over into a thought reality which would be reality and not mere thoughts. This tendency of letting our fantasies become realities is connected with our human nature, and the greatest efforts imaginable are made to turn our human fantasies into realities.

Now, everything that exists in mankind as causes of internal diseases is connected with this Luciferic tendency. To see through the work of Lucifer in regard to the driving of the vital forces into the dying forces of the human head means, in truth, to be able to diagnose all internal diseases. Scientific-medical development must strive to build its knowledge upon this Luciferic element. To give this impulse belongs to the tendencies of the Michael influence entering our human evolution.

The Ahrimanic influence is the reverse of the Luciferic tendency. It makes itself felt from the eighth sphere out of which the rest of our organism, exclusive of the head, is fashioned; this organism is full of vitality through its very nature. Into these forces of vitality the Ahrimanic powers endeavor to send the forces of death which properly, in the divine process of evolution, belong to the head. Thus, out of the eighth sphere the forces of death come to us through Ahriman as intermediary. This, again, is spoken of from the physical aspect.

Speaking from the soul aspect, I would have to say: everything that sends its influence into us out of the eighth sphere acts upon the human will, not upon intelligence. Wish, desire underlie human willing; all willing contains a certain amount of desire. It is Ahriman's constant endeavor to insert the personal element into the desire-nature which underlies the willing; and through the fact that the personal element is concealed in our desire-nature, our human soul-will activity bears the imprint of our gradual approaching the moment of death. Instead of permitting ourselves to be permeated by divine ideals and letting them enter our desires and thus our will, the personal element is introduced into our wishing, into our willing.

Thus we are actually in a state of equilibrium between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic element. The Luciferic-Ahrimanic element delivers us to illness and death in the physical; in the soul sphere it develops deception in so far as we consider something a reality which merely belongs to the world of thought, of fantasy. In regard to the spiritual sphere, the desire of egotism penetrates into our human nature on this path.

Thus we see this duality—Lucifer-Ahriman—connected with human nature, and I have shown you by Milton's Paradise Lost, by Klopstock's Messiah, and by Goethe's Faust how modern civilized mankind deceives itself, can deceive itself, in regard to this duality. Now we have to keep in mind that mankind in its development has passed beyond the middle point of Earth evolution. Mankind's evolution was, in the first place, an ascending one; then it reached its climax and is now on the descending path. For certain reasons which we need not discuss today there was a state of balance in the Greco-Latin period up to the fifteenth century. Since that time, however, earth humanity's evolution is on the descending path. Physical Earth evolution has entered the descending path at a much earlier period; already at the time which preceded our last ice age; that is, prior to the Atlantean catastrophe, Earth evolution began to descend in a physical respect. This is a fact which anthroposophists need not announce to the world; for it is already known to geology, as I have frequently mentioned, that as we walk over the earth in numerous regions we walk already over the earth crust in the state of decline. You need only read the descriptions of Earth evolution in good geology books of our day and you will find that physical science has come to the conclusion that the earth is on the descending stage of its evolution. But we human beings, too, are on the descending stage of evolution. We must not expect that any upward trend will arise in our bodily development. We must take hold of the upward trend by looking upon that which leads the human being beyond the Earth evolution to its subsequent evolutionary forms. We must learn to look upon the human being of the future. This means to think in the sense of Michael, to have Michaelic thoughts.

I will characterize more precisely what it means to think in the sense of Michael, to think Michaelically. You see, my dear friends, if you confront your fellow-man today, you actually confront him with a completely materialistic consciousness. You say to yourselves, even though you do not say it aloud nor even in thought, but you say to yourselves in the more intimate recesses of your consciousness: This is a man of flesh and blood; this is a man of earth substances. You say the same in the case of the animal, the same in the case of the plant. But what you thus say to yourselves when confronting man, animal and plant, you are justified in saying only in regard to the mineral nature. Let us deal at once with the most extreme case, with man. Let us consider man in regard to his external form. That which constitutes his external shape you do not really see, you do not confront it at all with your physical capacity of observation, for it is filled with more than ninety percent of fluid, of water. That which fills the form as mineral substance is what you see with your physical eyes. That which man unites with himself of this outer mineral world is what you see; the human being who does the uniting you do not see. You speak correctly only if you say to yourself: What confronts me here are the particles of matter which the human spirit shape stores up in itself; this makes the invisible being which stands here before me visible. You all as you are sitting here are invisible to physical senses. A certain number of shapes are sitting here; they have, through a certain inner power of attraction collected particles of matter. These particles of matter are what we see; we merely see the mineral. The real human beings that are sitting here are invisible, are super-sensible. To say this to oneself with full consciousness at every moment of waking life constitutes the Michaelic mode of thinking; to cease conceiving of the human being as a conglomerate of mineral particles which he but arranges in a certain way, as is also assumed of animals and plants and from which only the minerals are excepted, and to become conscious of the fact that we walk among invisible human beings—this means to think Michaelically.

We speak of Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings, we speak of the beings of the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so forth. These are invisible beings. We learn to know them by their effects. We have discussed many of these effects, even during the last few days. We learn to know these beings by their deeds. Well, is the matter different with the human being? We learn to know the human being—who is invisible—here in the physical world through the fact that he arranges mineral particles in a human-like shape. But this is only an activity of the human being, an effect of his nature. The fact that we have to become clear about the effects of Ahriman and Lucifer, of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so forth, in another way means simply that we have to learn to know them in a different manner. But in regard to the super-sensible character of these beings there is no difference between them and human beings if we employ reason in our thinking about the being of man.

To comprehend that we are not different in our essential being from the super-sensible beings means to think in the spirit of Michael. Mankind was able to get along without this insight as long as it still received something from the mineral world. But since the mineral world is in a declining evolution, the human being must gradually acquire a spiritual conception of himself and the world. Since the seventies of the nineteenth century he is able, in growing measure, to find the inner strength to develop the consciousness that man is not a well-ordered conglomeration of particles of matter but that he is a super-sensible being, and that these particles of matter are only a gesture of the external mineral world, indicating: here is a human being. Only because of the Ahrimanic influences which I have characterized in a recent lecture [Lecture of November 15, 1919, Dornach] does the human being fend off this inner consciousness, does he try to avoid it. One thing is connected with another in human life. And just as we labor under the delusion that man is a sensuous and not a super-sensible being, so do we labor under other delusions. We speak of evolution and imagine that one thing proceeds from the other in a continuous progressive development. You know that it was not possible to follow such a thought in depicting evolution artistically in our Building. [See Rudolf Steiner, Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum, with 104 photographs of the first Goetheanum.] When I developed the forms for the capitals, I had to show the first, second, and third capital in an ascending evolution, the fourth stood in the middle, the fifth began the declining evolution, the sixth was still simpler, the seventh the most simple. I had to add to the ascending evolution the declining evolution.

Our head is in this declining evolution, whereas the rest of our organism is still in the ascending evolution. If we believe that evolution signifies a continuous ascent we forsake true reality. We then hold the view of Haeckel who, under the influence of a certain delusion, maintained that there are, first, simple beings, as evolution progresses, more and more complicated beings, more and more perfect beings, and so on and on, ad infinitum. This is nonsense. Every evolution that progresses also turns back and retrogresses. Every ascent is followed by a descent; every ascent bears in itself the germ for the descent. It belongs among the most insidious deceptions of modern mankind that it is unaware of the connection between evolution and devolution, between progressive development and retrogressive development. For from every ascending evolution there must result the disposition for retrogressive evolution. At the moment when progressive evolution begins to become retrogressive, the physical passes over into the spiritual evolution. For as soon as the physical begins to become retrogressive, there is room for spiritual development. In our head there is room for spiritual development because physical development is on the retrogressive path. Only when we are in the position to see these things in the right light, that is, only when we see the connection of our intelligence with the Luciferic development shall we really understand the being of man and thereby the world. For then we shall evaluate these things correctly and shall know that our intelligence needs a new impulse if it is to lead man to his goal. Through the Christ principle Lucifer must be prevented from making the human being desert his predestined divine course.

I said before: One thing is connected with the other. Human beings are today under the influence of the same delusion which attributed to the divine powers certain Luciferic qualities. The same delusion creates today the inclination in human beings to see an ideal in the one-sided representation, of the beautiful, for instance. To be sure, it is possible to represent the beautiful as such. But we must be conscious of the fact that were we as human beings merely to surrender ourselves to the beautiful, we would cultivate those forces in us which lead into Luciferic channels. Just as there is no one-sided progressive evolution in the real world, but evolution is followed by devolution, so likewise there exists no one-sided beauty in the real world. The merely beautiful used by Lucifer in order to fascinate and blind human beings would set human beings free of Earth evolution; it would sever their connection with it. Just as there is an interplay of evolution and devolution, so we have in reality to do with an interplay of beauty and ugliness; in truth, there is a hard battle between beauty and ugliness. And if we wish really to take hold of art we must never forget that the ultimate in art in the world is the interplay of the beautiful and the ugly, the presentation of the battle of the beautiful with the ugly. For only by looking upon the state of equilibrium between the beautiful and the ugly do we stand within reality; then we do not exist within a one-sided Luciferic or Ahrimanic reality not belonging to us, into which, however, Lucifer and Ahriman strive to place us. It is very necessary that such ideas as I have just put forward enter human cultural evolution. You know that I have often spoken to you with great enthusiasm about Greek culture, yet in ancient Greece it was still possible to devote oneself one-sidedly to the cultivation of beauty, for mankind at that time had not yet been taken hold of by the decline of Earth evolution, at least not the Greeks. Since that time, however, man must not any longer indulge in the cultivation of the merely beautiful. This would be a flight from reality. He must, boldly and courageously, confront the real battle between beauty and ugliness. He must be able to feel, and experience the dissonances in their battle with the consonances of the world.

This will bring strength into mankind's evolution, and from this strength will spring the possibility of attaining that inner condition of consciousness which lifts us above the delusion that the human being consists in his true essence of heaped-up matter, of mineral particles of substance which he has drawn together into himself. Even from the physical aspect it can be said today that man does not bear in his being the signature of mineral nature, of external physical nature. The outer mineral is heavy. But that which gives us, for instance, the possibility of developing the soul element—I do not refer here to intelligence—that which makes us capable of developing soul qualities is not bound to gravity but to its opposite, to what is called the levity of fluids. I have on other occasions described to you how our brain swims in the cerebral fluid. If this were not so, the blood corpuscles contained in it would be crushed. You know from your lessons in physics that Archimedes, sitting in his bath, discovered that he became lighter, and he was so pleased about this that he called out his famous “Eureka!” In regard to our soul, we do not live by being pulled downward, but by being pulled upward. Not by our brain being heavy, but by our brain being lighter through its swimming in the cerebral fluid do we live physically. We live by means of what draws us away from the earth. This may be stated today even from the physical aspect.

However, what I wanted to point out to you in the present lectures was and is that, confronting modern life, we need a condition of soul which really, at every moment of day-waking life, is conscious of the super-sensible in the immediate surroundings, and which does not surrender to the delusion that the human being is real because he can be seen, and the spirits are not real because they cannot be seen. For the truth is that we do not see the human beings either. This is precisely the delusion that we believe we see the human beings. We do not differ at all from the beings of the higher hierarchies. To learn to grasp the similarity between the beings of the higher hierarchies and ourselves, and even the animals and plants, is the task put to modern mankind.

We say that through the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ impulse has entered Earth evolution, has entered mankind's evolution, to begin with, and is henceforth united with it. People say: We do not see it. Indeed, they will not see it as long as they deceive themselves about man himself, as long as they consider man to be something quite different from what he really is. The moment this is no longer a theory but a vividly felt reality of the soul which enables us to see in man a super-sensible being, we cultivate within us the faculty of perceiving the Christ impulse in our midst, everywhere, and of being able to say with full conviction: do not seek for Him in external manifestation; He is among you everywhere. But mankind would have to develop the belief, modestly and humbly, that it takes a great effort to cultivate the consciousness which, right from the outset, sees in man a super-sensible being. For if we do this only in theory it is of no avail. Only if we really do not believe that what confronts us physically is the real human being, only if we feel this to be an absurdity, have we acquired the state of soul I am referring to.

My dear friends, if you were to go to our building lot outside and collect all kinds of scrap that is lying about there and through clever handling of it were able to hold it in front of you in such a way that a person who met you could not see you but only the scraps of wood or brick—you would not maintain that these scraps of brick and wood are the human being. But the matter is in no way different in regard to the mineral substances with which you confront your fellow-men, arranged in a certain way. Yet you say: these mineral substances—since your physical eyes see them—are the human being! In truth they are only the gesture which points to the real human being.

If we look back into pre-Christian times we shall find that God's Messenger came down to earth, visibly, as it were, revealing and making himself understood to the human being. The greatest Messenger of God Who came down to the earth, the Christ, was at the same time the One Who was able to reveal Himself in the greatest earth event as the last one of those who could reveal themselves without the human beings' assistance. Now we live in the age of the Michael Revelation. It exists like the other revelations. But it does not force itself upon the human being because man has entered his evolution of freedom. We must go out to meet the revelation of Michael, we must prepare ourselves so that he sends into us the strongest forces and we become conscious of the super-sensible in the immediate surroundings of the earth. Do not fail to recognize what this Michael revelation would signify for men of the present and the future if men were to approach it in freedom. Do not fail to recognize that men of today strive for a solution of the social question out of the remnants of ancient states of consciousness.

All the problems that could be solved out of the ancient states of human consciousness have been solved. The earth is on the descending stage of its evolution. The demands which arise today cannot be solved with the thinking of the past. They can only be solved by a mankind with a new soul constitution. It is our task so to direct our activity that it may assist the rise of this new soul constitution in mankind. The fact that human beings cannot free themselves from the concepts which have been fostered for millennia oppresses our souls like a terrible nightmare. We see today how the results of these age-old concepts which are divested of all content and are nothing more than mere word hulls run their course almost automatically. Everywhere there is talk about human ideals. But these ideals have not real content, they are merely sounding words, for mankind needs a new soul constitution. Once upon a time the call resounded to mankind which, translated into our language, says: “Change your thinking, for the time is at hand!” At that time, however, human beings were still able to change their thinking out of their old soul constitution. Now this possibility has ceased; if what at that time was begun will have to be fulfilled today, it must be fulfilled out of a new soul constitution. Michael transmitted to human beings the Yahve-tradition, the Yahve-influence. Since the end of the seventies of last century he is engaged—if we but go to meet him—in transmitting the comprehension of the Christ-Impulse in the true sense of the word. But we must go to meet him. And we do come to meet him if we fulfill two conditions.

In regard to our own soul constitution we can say to ourselves: We have to overcome a certain error. I do not wish to burden you unduly with narrow abstractions and philosophical world conceptions, but I have to draw your attention to such a symptom of modern human evolution as the philosopher Cartesius (Descartes) who lived at the dawn of the modern age. He still knew something of the spiritual which plays through the dying nervous system of man. But he made at the same time the statement: “I think, therefore I am.” That is the opposite of the truth. When we think we are not; for in thinking we have merely the image of reality. Thinking would be of no consequence for us if we would exist within reality with our thinking, if thinking were not merely an image. We must become conscious of the mirror-character of our world of mental images, of our world of thoughts. The moment we become conscious of this mirror character we shall appeal to a different source of reality within us. Of this, Michael wills to speak to us. That means, we must try to recognize our thought world in the mirror-character; then we shall work against the Luciferic evolution. For the latter is greatly interested in pouring substance into our thinking, in trying to delude us with the erroneous belief that thinking is permeated by substance. Thinking contains no substance, but merely image. We shall take substance out of other and deeper levels of our consciousness. That is the one condition. We only need to be conscious that our thoughts make us weak, then we shall appeal to the strength of Michael; for he is to be the spirit who points us to that which is stronger in us than thought, whereas we have learned through modern civilization chiefly to look upon thought, and by doing so have become weak human beings because we have considered thought itself to be something real. We may imagine that we are turning ever so far away from mere abstract intelligence, but this is an illusion; for as modern human beings we are in the bondage of intelligence and do not send out of the deeper levels of our being into thoughts themselves that which ought to be in them.

The second condition is that we introduce into our wishes, and thus into our will, that which results from a reality which we must recognize as super-sensible. The fact that the Mystery of Golgotha in its super-sensible character has not been taken absolutely seriously has had dire consequences. I have often mentioned it here. I have, for instance, drawn your attention to the views of the liberal theologian, Adolf Harnack. There are many such liberal theologians who openly confess: through historical documents there cannot be found any proof of the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. Indeed, my dear friends, it is impossible to prove historically the existence of the Christ Jesus in the same way it is possible to prove the existence of Caesar or that of Napoleon. Why? Because in the Mystery of Golgotha an event was to be placed before mankind to which it should have only super-sensible access. It was not to have access to it through the senses. In order that mankind might learn, precisely through the Mystery of Golgotha, to raise itself to the super-sensible, there was not to be any external, sensible, historical proof.

We have thus indicated two things toward which we must strive. First, to recognize the super-sensible in the immediate sense world, that is, in the world of man, animal, and plant: this is the Michael path. And its continuation is to find in the world which we ourselves recognize as super-sensible, the Christ impulse.

In describing this to you, I am describing to you at the same time the deepest impulses of the social question. For the abstract League of Nations will not solve the international problem. Such abstractions do not bring the people together all over the earth. But the spirits who lead the human beings into the super-sensible, and of whom we have spoken during these days, will bring people together.

Externally, mankind approaches today serious battles. In regard to these serious battles which are only at their beginning—I have often mentioned it here—and which will lead the old impulses of Earth evolution ad absurdum, there are no political, economical, or spiritual remedies to be taken from the pharmacy of past historical evolution. For from these past times come the elements of fermentation which first, have brought Europe to the brink of the abyss, which will array Asia and America against each other, and which are preparing a battle over the whole earth. This leading ad absurdum of human evolution can be counteracted alone by that which leads men on the path toward the spiritual: the Michael path which finds its continuation in the Christ Path.

You will have been able to see from yesterday's lecture that there is a connection between the physical body of man and what we call the world of the senses. We saw how the human physical body is of the same substance as we find in the sense world outside us—the substance that we spoke of yesterday, and that we recognised to be of the nature of will. In the sense world outside us and in the human physical body as well, we have active ruling will. To this extent it is, therefore, true to say that the physical body of man is a part of the external world of the senses. You will remember that we went on to speak of how behind the world of the senses lies a world of coming into being and passing away, and in this latter world we found wisdom; we found that its true form may be described as active ruling wisdom. And what we call the etheric body of man is really composed of the substance of wisdom. Now the etheric and physical bodies of man have something more inserted into them, they contain within them an astral body and an ego; for as we know, man as a whole, as we encounter him on earth, is a conjunction of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego.

At this point I shall have to direct your thought to a matter which may perhaps be a little difficult, but which, when we have once grasped it, will help us very greatly in our understanding of the world and especially of the nature of man himself. You will be ready to accept the assumption that physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego must at some time have been brought together and formed into a whole. Now it is a fact that if one who has developed clairvoyance tries to observe how the four members of man's nature are joined together, then he has the impression—we shall see later why it is important to consider this impression—he has the impression that they are united in an irregular manner. In the human being of the present day we find them combined in such a way as to force us to conclude that at one time or other a disorder and an irregularity has come in. That is a remarkable fact and demands our attention—that an investigation of the four members of man's being leads to the conclusion that they are not placed one into the other as they originally belonged together, but that a disarrangement has at some time come about. This is the impression they make upon one.

Now here we have once more an opportunity of seeing what infinite depths are contained in the primal truths of religion if they are but rightly understood. For what we have expressed as a disarrangement is marvelously described in the Bible in the words that are spoken to man by Lucifer, when he is trying to tempt man. He says: “Your eyes shall be opened and you shall distinguish between good and evil.” In these words lies a very deep truth. We are not to understand that the eyes only are to be opened. The eyes are here representative of all the senses. If we understand Lucifer's words aright we may render them as follows: “All your senses shall work in a different way from the way they would work if you were going to follow the Gods and not me”—i.e. Lucifer. Owing to the influence of Lucifer the senses have a different form of activity from what they would otherwise have. It is extraordinarily difficult for a man of the present day to picture to himself how the senses work, and I shall have here to say something that will strike you as absurd, in my endeavour to make clear for you how the senses would work if no disorder had come into the conjunction of the four members of man's nature through Lucifer. It must sound absurd, because it is almost impossible to believe that some other form of activity in the senses was the original right one, rather than the activity we experience in them. If you are asked the question: What are the eyes of man really for? then what is more natural and obvious than to answer: Why, of course, for seeing. And from that aspect there is certainly some justification for calling a man a fool who says the eyes are not for seeing. In reality, however, if we go back to the beginnings of Earth evolution we find that the eyes of man did not originally belong to the faculty of seeing: that they do so now is due to the temptation of Lucifer. It is like this. The power of vision that man has was not intended to press through the eye and go out beyond to reach so-called “things”; what should have happened if all had gone forward in accordance with the original purposes of the Gods was that in every act of seeing man should become directly conscious of his eye—that is, he should not see the external object, but feel and experience his own eye. He should become aware of the activity that is going on in the eye itself. As it is to-day he is not aware of this but only of what happens by means of the activity in the eye, he is aware of the external object with which he is confronted. He ought really to be involved in his seeing at a much earlier stage, and not only when the seeing has reached the object; in the eye he ought to be already conscious of himself. The activity of the eye—this is what he ought to feel.

In the case of the eye such an experience is scarcely possible to-day unless one has undergone special occult development. With the hand it is possible. A man can at least distinguish whether he is catching hold of an object with his hand or whether his hand is merely moving freely in an aimless way. In the latter case he is conscious only of the actual activity of the hand itself. But if to-day a person directs his power of vision to the eye he sees nothing. This is how it stands with present-day man. It was not, however, so intended from the beginning. The intention was that when the human being considered his eye or his ear or any of his sense organs, he would perceive the ruling will of which we have spoken, he would really swim in the ruling will and recognise the fact from the peculiar manner in which it affected his eye, etc. His experience with the eye would thus have been similar in every respect to his experience with the hand. When you take hold of an object you discover that it is hard or soft, according to whether it yields to your touch. But you are all the time really aware of what you yourself are doing with your hand. This is how it would be also with the eye. But that could only be if the etheric body were rightly fitted into the physical body. Only then should we be able directly to perceive our eye and feel its connection with the ruling will. The etheric body is, however, not rightly fitted into the physical body. That is the remarkable fact we have to recognise. But this is only one example of the disarrangement that exists in the human being. There is no single member of man's nature that is rightly fitted into the other members, everything is in disorder. If it had not been for the Luciferic influence at the beginning of Earth evolution all the members of man's being would have been placed within one another quite differently. That is the point I want to make clear to-day; I want to show you the particular and significant results that have followed on the disorder brought about by Lucifer's influence in the connections between the four members of man's being.

It will be helpful at this point if I begin to write down the facts in tabular form on the blackboard. See table.

We will take first the relation that exists between the physical body and the etheric body which is inserted into it. If, as was originally intended by the Gods who guided human evolution, the etheric body had been poured into the physical body in a perfectly regular manner, then the human being would experience all around him—I can assure you it is hard to find words for it when there is no such experience!—something like a perpetual flowing and trickling of ruling will. Everywhere he would perceive differentiated will, for he would detect a certain difference in the workings of the will according as he was conscious of directing his eye or his ear or some other organ on the world around him. All these organs in their variety would only afford him the possibility of experiencing will in as many new ways, but it would always be will, flowing will. That is what would have happened if the etheric body had been fitted into the physical body in the way that was intended by the Gods. It is, however, not the case. What has happened is that the etheric body is not completely within the physical body, it has, as it were, left a piece of the physical body for itself, it does not penetrate the whole of it; with the result that the physical body has from a certain aspect a surplus of its own activity which it should by right not have. Thus there are places in the physical body of man which are not filled with the etheric body as they should have been in accordance with the original intention of the Divine Spiritual Beings who guide Earth evolution. And these places where the physical is not properly penetrated by the etheric body are where the sense organs have come to development. It is owing to this fact that the sense organs have attained their present form. Hence it is that in the case of every sense organ we find the very remarkable phenomenon of a purely physical activity from which the prevailing life activity is completely excluded.

For consider how you have, for example, in the eye something you can compare with the purely physical workings of a camera obscura, of a photographer's apparatus. It is just as if a piece had been left out in the general penetration of the etheric body. And that is what has actually happened. It is the same with the peculiar inner ear where there is a kind of keyboard in the labyrinth of the ear. The etheric body has been, as it were, pushed back and you have activities that are purely physical in character and are not penetrated with the etheric body. This is the origin of what we call sense impressions. The experience of colour is due to the fact that the etheric body does not penetrate the organ of vision in the proper way, and that consequently purely physical activities are carried on there. And it is the same with all the senses, there is a preponderance of physical body over etheric body. We can, therefore, set this down as our first result. In the relationship between physical and etheric body we have to do with a condition which we may call a preponderance of physical over etheric body. Were this preponderance of the physical body not present then we should not have around us, as we have to-day, the whole expanse of the world of the senses, but man's connection with the world around him would be that he would perceive it all as flowing, surging, ruling will. Were it not for this preponderance of the physical over the etheric body, man would not feel himself to be passive, but active, as he does when he stretches out his hand. We are here stating a fact of extraordinarily deep interest that is actually manifest to higher and occult observation—the fact that the whole world of the senses depends on this, that the etheric body has been, so to say, held up from entering into the sense organs, and that where these are situated there the purely physical world has found place in man.

And now we come secondly to the relation between etheric body and astral body. Again there is not a right and proper penetration the one of the other, but a preponderance shows itself of the etheric body over the astral body in the nature of man. A very slight degree of clairvoyance will quickly lead to an investigation of this preponderance of etheric body over astral body. It does not take much to perceive it. If there were no such preponderance then among other things man would never be able to shed tears. If you observe some one weeping, excreting from the glands of the eye that singular salty fluid, then if you have a slight degree of clairvoyance you will notice at once that there is in this case a too great activity of the etheric body in relation to the activity of the astral body. What he experiences astrally the human being is unable to impress fully into the life of the etheric body; the etheric body has a preponderance over the astral body and this comes to expression in the fact that the etheric body works back on to the physical and presses out the tears from it. And it is the same with all processes of glandular excretion in the human being. They all depend on a preponderance of etheric body over astral. The disturbance of balance, when its effect is continued on into the physical body, comes to expression in the various glandular excretions. Otherwise no excretion would take place when the glands were active; but the activity of the astral body, if it were to coincide with the etheric body, would be used up in the inner movement and activity of the glands. The glands would not expel anything, they would fulfil their whole function in themselves. No expulsion of matter would take place. Thus you see how tremendous to an occult observation appear the consequences of the Luciferic temptation. If Lucifer had not entered into the world order nobody would ever, for example, be able to perspire, but instead of the activity that takes place in perspiration, there would be in the corresponding organs an activity and movement that exhausted themselves inside the organs; nothing at all would be expelled from the glands. So that we may put down as our second point a preponderance of etheric body over astral body. If the peculiar nature and appearance of our sense world is to be traced to the first preponderance, the preponderance of physical over etheric body, then this second preponderance, that of etheric over astral body, must be regarded as the cause of what we may call our impressions and sensations. For man's whole general feeling of his bodily condition comes from this preponderance of etheric body over astral body. It is the subjective expression of this preponderance.

But now, if we would continue the train of thought, we must not proceed diagrammatically. If you were to proceed diagrammatically it would, of course, be perfectly easy, you would simply have to say: He has demonstrated to us a preponderance of physical body over etheric body, and then a preponderance of etheric body over astral body, and now we come to a preponderance of astral body over ego. This is how you would proceed to complete the scheme on purely intellectual foundations. You would, however, get no true result; the train of thought cannot be continued in that way at all. As a matter of fact, whenever you receive a communication of an occult fact and set out to draw conclusions with your intellect in a schematic way, you will always find that reality gives quite a different result. It is no use trying to carry on the train of thought in an intellectual way; sometimes it will be correct for a while, but then it will fail. And here the fact is that we have to take as our third disarrangement an inverted preponderance, namely, a preponderance of astral body over etheric body. Thus it is once more the relationship of these same two bodies that concerns us, and this time occult observation discovers a preponderance of the astral over the etheric body. And this preponderance is the one that in the eyes of man is the most important of the three. For when you consider the human being from a perfectly material point of view you can really imagine him to be as he is pictured in many materialistic books, namely, as nothing else than a great big apparatus of digestion, a sort of machine that eats and digests and builds up its body out of the substances it has received in eating and has elaborated in all kinds of ways. As a matter of fact you find the human being described in this way in books that are written from a materialistic outlook; the picture they give is little more than of a great digestive apparatus, that takes in food, works it up and distributes it to the muscles, bones, sinews, etc. If you look away from all that man is through the fact that he perceives the world of the senses and through the fact that in the whole feeling he has of his body he experiences various glandular processes of excretion—if you look away from all this and consider the human being merely from the point of view of the receiving of nourishment, investigating what happens with the substances from the time they are received through the mouth until the time they are absorbed into the blood stream, then you have before you a material process which is the ultimate physical expression of the preponderance of the astral over the etheric body. You will remember that whenever we consider the world from a spiritual point of view we always have to see behind every phenomenon of the senses a spiritual reality. What the senses can perceive is no more than the external appearance. And so behind all these coarser processes of the receiving and the elaboration of nourishment we have to look for spiritual forces, and these spiritual forces are to be found in the preponderance of the astral over the etheric body. This preponderance is expressed in the normal physical organic life-processes.

It is indeed a strange conclusion to which we have come, and I beg you to regard it closely. You must be clear that the very thing that materialism often sees as the whole human being, the very thing that for most people is the principal concern and care of life—to receive nourishment and to bear it to the various organs of the body—has only come into existence through the fact that the Luciferic influence has given rise to a preponderance of the astral over the etheric body in man. In other words, if it had not been for Lucifer, if Lucifer had not at the beginning of the evolution of man shifted in this way the relationship between the astral and etheric bodies, then the human being would not eat and digest and work over the substances as he does to-day. What, from a materialistic standpoint, is the principal thing about a human being is thus all due to a Luciferic action, for it is nothing else than the result of a displacement between astral and etheric body. The astral body has through Lucifer come in for an extra share of activity and has thereby achieved a preponderance over the etheric body. It is Lucifer's doing and it has had the result of making man a receiver of coarse material nourishment. For man was not destined to receive material nourishment, he was intended to have a kind of existence that did not require it. This fact brings to expression in a marvellous way how through the temptation of Lucifer there has come about what we may call the “expulsion from Paradise.” For to be in Paradise means nothing else than to be a spiritual being and to have no need of physical nourishment. That which appears to the vast majority of people who are materialistically inclined as the greatest pleasure in life—when we see it for what it is, is their expulsion from Paradise. Human beings have not only been punished by being obliged to receive and digest food, but they have been doubly punished. For the very event which as related in the symbols of the Bible was seen to inflict the greatest loss and sorrow to man, the very event which by the expulsion from Paradise makes it necessary for man to take physical food, has become for the majority of human beings one of the keenest enjoyments of life! Such a change has man undergone that to be outside Paradise has become his greatest pleasure. It is indeed a strange fact in human life that we here have to face, but it must be learned and known.

Finally we come to a fourth disarrangement. And the fourth concerns the relationship between the ego and the astral body. Here the Luciferic displacement has brought about a preponderance of the ego over the activity of the astral body. You see what it is that is missing; we have no preponderance of astral body over ego. Such a thing does not exist. One must not just make a diagram, one must always proceed according to observation. As we have seen, in the astral body and etheric body we have first one relation and then its reverse, whereas here we only have the preponderance of ego over astral body. This means that the ego or I has not that relation with the astral body which it was originally intended to have before the entrance of the Luciferic influence; it is more egoistic than it ought to be. This has happened through the Luciferic influence. What then exactly took place to bring about this fourth preponderance? In order to understand this we need first to have a clear idea of what would have been the right and proper relation between I and astral body.

The only way to come to know the right and true relation is to re-establish it. In the human being as he stands to-day in the world, subject as he is to the Luciferic influence, the relation between I and astral body is not in order; the I has the preponderance. Man is more I-ish than he should be. (You must forgive the strange expression; it is literally true.) Now we have in these lectures been pursuing a consideration which leads us to see what the I of man ought really to be like. A right and proper relationship will come about when man undertakes a wise and energetic and patient self-discipline and acquires the qualities we have described under the names of wonder, reverence, feeling in harmony, surrender. The ego will then stand in such a relation to the astral body that an unprejudiced observer will have the impression that the relation is now a true one, that the ego has now cancelled and undone what came in through the Luciferic influence. Only by developing these four qualities of the soul in the very highest degree can the original relationship be righted again. And how does the ego stand then to the astral body? The relationship is a very remarkable one. You can form an idea of it if you will follow attentively some of the chapters in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. As man is to-day, he is perpetually intimately interwoven with his thinking, feeling and willing. It is not easy to discover a condition in external consciousness where man is merely in his ego and not interwoven with thinking, feeling and willing. Make the experiment of trying to grasp the pure thought of the I. Our friends make valiant attempts to grasp the pure thought of the I when Dr. Unger makes the demand upon them again and again to think this thought of the I apart from all thinking, feeling and willing. They are left breathless in their efforts! (See “Principles of Spiritual Science,” by Carl Unger.)

You see how difficult it is to come to the I of man even in thought, to say nothing of actually separating it in reality from thinking, feeling and willing. In the ordinary way man's soul is traversed all the time with thoughts and feelings and impulses of will, as well as with desires. His ego is never for a moment separated from thinking, feeling and willing. But this separation is what we attain by means of the four conditions of soul as I described them. We become able to stand outside thinking, feeling and willing, and to look upon these as something outside ourselves. Our own thoughts must then be as indifferent to us as are the objects around us. We no longer say: I think—for our thinking has for us the appearance of a process that goes on of itself and is no concern of ours. And it must be the same with feeling and willing. If one reflects a little one is bound to admit that although it may be possible to have this before one as an ideal some day capable of fulfilment, yet man is, as a matter of fact, so mixed up with his thinking, feeling and willing that it is an exceedingly difficult matter for him to extricate himself. He would find it most difficult to go through the world saying to himself: Here am I going through the world, and with me all the time is a companion who hangs on to me because I have grown together with him, who is like a kind of double. All my thinking, feeling and willing go on alongside of me. I am not that which thinks and feels and wills, I am what I am in my I, and I walk by the side of what I carry around with me like three sacks, one filled with my thinking, one with my feeling and one with my willing. But until we have come to a practical realisation of this “three sacks” theory we shall not be able to form any correct idea of how the ego would now stand in relation to thinking, feeling and willing if all were as originally intended by the divine beings before the Luciferic influence interposed. Man was destined to be an onlooker of himself, it was not intended that he should live inside himself. For what was really the nature of the original temptation? Let us put it as tritely as possible:—

Lucifer approached the human I or ego, which man ought to have preserved in all its purity beside the astral body that had been given to him on the Moon, and said something like this: “Look here, Man! It is tedious to go wandering about always with this one single centre-point of ‘I am’ and merely to be able to look on at the rest; it would be much more amusing to dive down into thy astral body. I will give thee the power to do this, and then thou wilt not any longer be standing there on one side with thine ego and looking on at thy double, but thou wilt be immersed in thy double. And then needst not fear that thou wilt be overwhelmed and drowned, I will provide for that, I will give thee some of my own power.” Thereupon the ego of man did dive down into the astral body and was saved from drowning by being inoculated with Luciferic power. And the Luciferic power that man then received was the preponderance of the I over the astral body, it was the excessive egoism, which is a Luciferic quality in man. And what is this quality actually? How does it manifest in life? It shows itself to begin with in the fact that we are involved and entangled first in our thoughts, and then also in our feelings and our impulses of will. In the first place with our thoughts. If it had not been for Lucifer man would never have hit upon the ridiculous idea that he has an intelligence inside him and that he himself cherishes thoughts within him. He would have known that the thoughts are outside him and that he has to look on at his thinking. Man would always have considered and contemplated, and waited till the thought was given to him, waited until the purpose and meaning of the thinking was revealed. You will find this set forth, for example, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Man would never have had the idea that he has to connect together all kinds of thoughts and form a judgment or opinion within himself. This forming of judgments within ourselves, independent of revelation, is a Luciferic nature in us. And the whole intelligence of man, in so far as he regards it as his property, is a mistake. It is nothing but the temptation of Lucifer that makes man imagine he should have intelligence. And now you will understand how this intelligence, having come about through a shifting of this kind, can by no means be taken as the criterion for all human comprehension of reality.

I pointed out in my lectures in Carlsruhe (From Jesus to Christ) that for a man who builds upon his intelligence it seems quite reasonable to say: “If I am to understand the Resurrection as part of the Mystery of Golgotha I must simply discard my intelligence altogether. For everything it says contradicts the Resurrection.” So says the man of the nineteenth century, so says even the theologian of the nineteenth century in so far as he is a theologian of the liberal school. But how should he ever expect that the Mystery of Golgotha—a deed that is not entangled with the Luciferic influence, a deed that lies altogether outside Lucifer's domain and came into the world for the very purpose of vanquishing Lucifer—how could he expect that he could ever grasp such a deed with an intelligence that he owes to Lucifer? Nothing can be more obvious than that these things can never be grasped with a man's own intelligence. For his intelligence is Lucifer's gift to him and is not adapted to understanding things that have nothing to do with the working of Lucifer. You see what deep connections lie behind these things. Were the Mystery of Golgotha comprehensible with human intelligence, then, my dear friends, there would have been no need for it to take place. The Mystery of Golgotha would have been quite unnecessary. For the very purpose of it is to balance out the disorder which arose through the Luciferic influence. The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted in order to cure man of that singular arrogance and pride which manifests in a desire to comprehend everything by means of the intellect. This is the very place where we can perceive how limited is the intellect as such. I have frequently protested against the idea that human knowledge is limited, but the intellect as such is certainly limited.

• 1. Preponderance of physical body over etheric body.
• (a) The sense world.
• 2. Preponderance of etheric body over astral body.
• (b) The whole feeling of the body.
• 3. Preponderance of astral body over etheric body.
• Normal organic bodily processes.
• 4. Preponderance of I over astral body.
• N.B.—At (b) Lucifer and Ahriman meet.

Let us now study this table and discover where was the starting point of the shifting or displacement that occurred in man's nature. It is obvious that the first disarrangement to come about was what we have called the preponderance of the I over the astral body. All the Luciferic influence over man began with this—that Luciferic power was given to the I and the I got impurely mixed up with thinking, feeling and willing, and then maintained the Luciferic preponderance over the astral body. The astral body in consequence was able to gain an ascendancy on its part over the etheric body. And thus the whole balance in man was upset. It is just as though by the Luciferic influence a blow had been dealt at the astral body, and the astral body had passed it on and so gained an ascendancy over the etheric. But it can go no further that way. The etheric body does not hand on the blow. It is like hitting a rubber ball. You can push into the ball for a certain distance but then it comes back again. So we can speak of a preponderance of astral over etheric body, and then the story is reversed. For now it is the etheric body that rebounds and asserts a predominance over the astral, giving us a reverse predominance of what we had before. And then follows the predominance of physical body over the etheric body. These latter two strike in the opposite direction. Why do they strike back? It comes about because while here Lucifer is striking in, Ahriman, in the physical and etheric body, is striking back from the other side. Here in the middle, where you have on the one hand the ascendancy of etheric body over astral body and physical body over etheric body, and on the other hand the ascendancy of astral body over etheric body and I over astral body—here in the middle you have Lucifer and Ahriman in collision. Here they come up against one another. Thus, there is in man a centre point where Lucifer and Ahriman meet in their own true nature. And man can either swing in the direction of Lucifer and bore his astral body deeper than is right into his etheric body, or he can take hold of the impetus in the power of Ahriman and strike the etheric body too deep into the astral body. Such are the dynamic effects with which we have to deal.

Our next step will be to realise that everywhere in man's nature we actually have to do with the working of forces. Except for one instance, namely in the case of a preponderance of astral over etheric body, where we have to consider the taking of food and the elaboration of substances in digestion—nowhere but in this one instance have we come across a working of matter. This leads us to feel a necessity to investigate from an occult point of view the nature of what we call substance or matter; and with this question we will begin our considerations tomorrow.

The lecture yesterday will have shown you that if we are to acquire insight into the nature and evolution of man, we must be constantly mindful of the power and influence of Lucifer, of Christ, and of Ahriman.

These influences were, of course, already at work in earlier stages of cosmic evolution, but in spheres where it was unnecessary for man to have clear consciousness of their effects. On the other hand, the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence. The unveiling of many more of the secrets of human life would be desirable at the present time if only there were greater willingness to face things frankly and objectively. For without the knowledge of certain facts of the kind indicated yesterday, it will not be possible for humanity to make progress either in the inner life or in the sphere of social life. Think only of something that is connected with the social problems we have recently been studying. It has been our aim to demonstrate the necessity for separating the spiritual life, and also the political life or life of rights, from the economic life. Our greatest concern is to create conditions throughout the world, or at least—for we cannot do more at present—to convince men of the necessity for conditions which would provide the foundation for a free spiritual life no longer dependent upon the other spheres of social life or as deeply entangled as it is to-day in the economic life on the one side and in the political life of the State on the other. Civilised mankind must either establish the independence of the spiritual life or face collapse—with the inevitable result of an Asiatic influence taking effect in the future.

Those who still do not recognise the gravity of the present situation in the world are also, in a certain respect, helping to prepare for Ahriman's incarnation. Many things in external life to-day bear witness to this. The Ahrimanic incarnation will be greatly furthered if men fail to establish a free and independent spiritual life and allow it to remain entangled in the economic or political life. For the Ahrimanic power has everything to gain by the spiritual life being even more closely intermingled with these other spheres. To the Ahrimanic power a free spiritual life would denote a kind of darkness, and men's interest in it, a burning, raging fire. The establishment of this free spiritual life is essential in order that the right attitude, the right relationship, may be adopted to Ahriman's incarnation in the future.

But there is still a strong tendency to-day to conceal the facts of which we spoke yesterday. The vast majority of people cast a veil over these things; they refuse to see them as they really are and allow themselves to be deceived by words which have no connection with reality. And very often, endeavours to shirk reality are described as “honest” and “well-meaning”.

Take, for example, the recently published letter of Romain Rolland, in which he says that men should not allow themselves to be deluded by erstwhile proclamations of the victorious powers concerning justice and the upholding of political rights. The treatment which Russia is receiving from the Entente has led him to speak in these terms. He says: No matter whether it be on the part of monarchies or republics—what has been said about rights and justice is so much phrase-mongering; the issue at bottom is one of power, and of power alone.

Now even this apparent approach to reality still betrays willingness to be deluded, for Romain Rolland is just as deluded as ever; the delusion is not one whit less. It could only be so if such men were to discard phrases and recognise that all these things for which they aspire are meaningless as long as they fail to realise that if the old unified State as such—whether a democracy, a republic or a monarchy—does not become threefold, this is simply a way of helping Ahriman's incarnation. Hence all these things, including this recent letter addressed to the world by Romain Rolland, amount to nothing more than rhetorical harangues. People do not grasp the reality, for reality can be grasped only when the necessity for spiritual knowledge and deep penetration into the nature of things is thoroughly understood.

You are all familiar with the much quoted verse: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.” Do men really take these lines in earnest? They utter them, but so often as mere phrases! No particular emphasis is laid on the tense: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.” “ Word” here must obviously have the meaning it bore in ancient Greece. It is not “word” as understood to-day—word as mere sound—but it is the inner, spiritual reality. In either case, however, it is the imperfect tense that is employed. The implication therefore is: “In the beginning the Word was; but it is no longer.” Otherwise the sentence would run: “Now is the Word; and the Word is not with God; it was with God, and a God was the Word but is so no longer.” This, moreover, is what stands in the Gospel of St. John; otherwise what would be the meaning of the words immediately following: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” This indicates a further evolution of the Word. “Word” also means anything that man can acquire in the way of intellectual wisdom through his efforts and through his intelligence. But it must be quite clear to us that what “word” denotes here is not really the goal for which man must strive at the present time or in the immediate future. To express what is now the goal, we should have to say: “Let man seek for the Spirit that reveals itself in the Word; for the Spirit is with God, and the Spirit is a God.” Mankind must press on from the word to the spirit, to perception and knowledge of the spirit.

When I remind you of these first verses of the Gospel of St. John, you will realise what little inclination there is to-day to take such things in earnest and to surmount the arbitrary interpretations so often accepted in matters of the greatest moment. Human intelligence itself must be quickened and illumined by what is revealed in spiritual vision.—Not that actual seership is essential; what matters is that the fruits of spiritual vision shall be understood. I have repeatedly emphasised that to-day it is not the seer alone who can apprehend the truth of clairvoyant experience; this apprehension is within the power of everyone at the present time, because the spiritual capacities of men are sufficiently mature if they will but resolve to exercise them and are not too indolent to do so. But if the level befitting humanity is to be achieved, such things as were mentioned in the lecture yesterday must be taken in deep earnestness ! I used a trivial example to show you how easy it is to be deluded by figures and numbers. Is there not a great deal of superstition where numbers are concerned? What can in some way be counted is accepted in science. Natural science loves to weigh, to compute, and social science loves statistics—again a matter of computation and reckoning. It will be difficult indeed for men to bring themselves to admit that all knowledge of the external world acquired through measure and number is so much delusion.

To measure—what does it mean, in reality? It means to compare something with a given dimension, be it length or volume. I can measure a line if I compare it with a line twice, three times, four times, etc. smaller:

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In such measurements, no matter whether of lengths or surfaces or weights, the qualitative element is entirely lacking. The number 3 always remains the same, whether one is counting sheep, human beings or politicians ! It is not a matter of the qualitative, but only of the quantum, the quantitative. The essential principle of volume and number is that the qualitative is left out of account. But for that very reason, all knowledge derived from the principles of volume and measure is illusion; and the fact which must be taken in all seriousness is that the moment we enter the world that can be weighed and measured, the world of space and time, we enter a world of illusion, a world that is nothing but a Fata Morgana as long as we take it to be reality. It is the ideal of present-day thinking to experience in connection with all the things of the external world of space and time, their spatial and temporal significance; whereas, in truth, what things signify in space and time is their external aspect only, and we must transcend space and time, penetrating to much deeper levels, if we are to reach the innermost truth, the innermost being of things. And so a future must come when men will be able to say: “Yes, with my intelligence I can apprehend the external world in the way that is the ideal of natural science. But the vista thus presented to me is wholly Ahrimanic.”—This does not mean that natural science is to be ignored or put aside; it is a matter of realising that this natural science leads only to the Ahrimanic illusion. Why, then, must man have natural science, in spite of the fact that it leads only to illusion? It is because in his earth-existence he is already on the descending curve of evolution. Of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, it may be said that in respect of knowledge, man was relatively speaking at the zenith. But now, in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, he is on the path of decline, he is a being growing physically weaker, and to perceive the world in the way the Greek perceived it would be too much for his strength.

That is something we are not told in history! Just imagine what modern historians would have to say about it—those worthy historians who describe Greece as if they were describing some region of their own time because they do not know that the Greeks looked out into nature with different eyes, listened with different ears from those of modern men. These historians do not tell us that modern human beings would suffer from constant headache or migraine if they were to see and hear in the outer world all that the Greeks saw and heard. The Greeks lived with infinitely greater intensity in the world of the senses. Our own apprehension of this world has already weakened. To be able to bear it, a Fata Morgana has to be and is presented to us. And not only what we perceive with the senses but on account of our scientific conceptions we “dream” about the external world—that, most emphatically of all, is a Fata Morgana. The greatest dreamers where the external world is concerned are precisely those who pride themselves on being realistic in their thinking. Darwin and John Stuart Mill are fundamentally dreamers. The dreamers are the very men who claim to be thorough-going realists.

But neither must we give ourselves up entirely to our own inner life and impulses. From the way things have developed in the movement represented by the “Theosophical Society”, many of you will have realised that cultivation of the inner life alone, as attempted by numbers of people to-day, does not lead to the goal befitting man in the present age. For the all too prevalent tendency is to make no free resolve of his own to transcend ordinary life and attain higher vision but rather to bring into prominence that in him which is not free. All kinds of hallucinatory tendencies, all kinds of faculties fraught with illusion come into play.

It should be realised that just as external science becomes Ahrimanic, the higher development of a man's inner nature becomes Luciferic if he gives himself up to mystical experiences. The Luciferic tendency wakens and becomes especially powerful in everyone who, without the self-training described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sets about any mystical deepening of the impulses already inherent in his nature. The Luciferic tendency shows itself in everyone who begins to brood over experiences of his inner life, and it is extremely powerful in present-day humanity. It takes effect in egoism of which most people are entirely unaware. One comes across so many to-day who are quite satisfied when they can say of something they have done, that they have no cause for self-reproach, that they did it to the best of their knowledge and according to their conscience. That is an entirely Luciferic attitude. For in what we do in life the point is not whether or not we have cause to reproach ourselves; what really matters is that we shall take things objectively, with complete detachment, and in accordance with the course of objective facts. And the majority of people to-day make no effort to achieve this objective understanding or to acquire knowledge of what is necessary for world-evolution.

Therefore spiritual science must emphasise the following:—That Ahriman is actually preparing for his incarnation; where we can recognise how he is preparing for it; and with what attitude it must be confronted.—In such questions the point is not to say: We do this or that in order that we may have no cause for self-reproach—but to learn to recognise the objective facts. We must come to know what is at work in the world, and act accordingly—for the world's sake.

It all amounts to this, that modern man only speaks truly of himself when he says that he hovers perpetually between two extremes: between the Ahrimanic on the one side, where he is presented with an outer delusion, a Fata Morgana, and, on the other, the Luciferic element within him which induces the tendency to illusions, hallucinations and the like. The Ahrimanic tendencies in man to-day live themselves out in science, the Luciferic tendencies, in religion, while in art he swings between the one extreme and the other. In recent times the tendencies of some artists have been more Luciferic—they are the expressionists; the tendencies of the others have been more Ahrimanic—they are the impressionists. And then, vacillating between all this, there are the people who want to be neither the one nor the other, who do not rightly assess either the Luciferic or the Ahrimanic but want to avoid both.—“Ahriman—no!—that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the Ahrimanic; that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the Luciferic!” They want to be virtuous, avoiding both the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic.

But the truth of the matter is that Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance and it is we who must hold the beam in equipoise.

And how can we train ourselves to do this?—By permeating what takes Ahrimanic form within us with a strongly Luciferic element. What is it that arises in modern man in an Ahrimanic form? It is his knowledge of the outer world. There is nothing more Ahrimanic than this knowledge of the material world, for it is sheer illusion. Nevertheless if the Fata Morgana that arises out of chemistry, out of physics, out of astronomy and the like can fill us with fiery enthusiasm and interest, then through our interest—which is itself Luciferic—we can wrest from Ahriman what is his own.

That, however, is just what human beings have no desire to do; they find it irksome. And many people who flee from external, materialistic knowledge are misconceiving their task and preparing the best possible incarnation for Ahriman in earth-existence. Again, what wells up in man's inmost being to-day is very strongly Luciferic. How can we train ourselves rightly in this direction?—By diving into it with our Ahrimanic nature, that is to say, by trying to avoid all illusions about our own inner life and impulses and observing ourselves just as we observe the outer world. Modern man must realise how urgent it is to educate himself in this way. Anyone who has an observant eye in these matters will often come across circumstances of which the following is an example.

A man tells him how indignant he is with countless human beings. He describes minutely how this or that in a, in b, in c, and so on, angers him. He has not an inkling that he is simply talking about his own characteristics. This peculiarity in human beings was never so widespread as it is to-day. And those who believe they are free of it, are the greatest culprits. The essential is that man should approach his own inner nature with Ahrimanic cold-bloodedness and dispassion. His inner nature is still fiery enough even when cooled down in this way! There is no need to fear that it will be over-cooled.

If the right stand is to be taken to Ahriman's future incarnation, men must become more objective where their own impulses are concerned, and far, far more subjective where the external world is concerned—not by introducing pictures of phantasy but by bringing interest, alert attention and devotion to the things of immediate life.

When men find one thing or another in outer life tedious, possibly because of the education they have received or because of other circumstances, the path which Ahriman wants to take for the benefit of his incarnation is greatly smoothed. Tedium is so widespread nowadays! I have known numbers of people who find it irksome to acquaint themselves for example with banking procedure, or the Stock Exchange, or single or double entry in book-keeping. But that is never the right attitude. It simply means that the point has not been discovered where a thing burns with interest. Once this point is reached, even a dry cash-book can become just as interesting as Schiller's Maid of Orleans, or Shakespeare's Hamlet, or anything else—even Raphael's Sistine Madonna. It is only a question of finding the point at which every single thing in life becomes interesting.

What I have just said may make you think that all these matters are very paradoxical. But in reality they are not. It is man who is paradoxical in his relationship to truth. What he must realise—and this is a dire necessity to-day—is that he, not the world, is at fault. Nothing does more to prepare the path for Ahriman's incarnation than to find this or that tedious, to consider oneself superior to one thing or another and refuse to enter into it. Again it is the same question of finding the point where everything is of interest. It is never a matter of a subjective rejection or acceptance of things, but of an objective recognition of the extent to which things are either Luciferic or Ahrimanic, with the result that the scales are over-weighted on the one side or the other.

To be interested in something does not mean that one considers it justifiable. It means simply that one develops an inner energy to get to grips with it and steer it into the right channel.

As some of you may know—it is a long time ago now—a number of friends bought themselves books on mathematics. A kind of “sporting spirit” had crept into them! They bought the works of Lübsen¹ but it was not long before most of the volumes found their way to library shelves and the mathematical knowledge was not much in evidence! This, of course, is not meant as a hint to tackle the matter again—I am making no such suggestion. But to come to grips with something in which, to begin with, one is not interested at all, in order that a new understanding of world-existence may arise—that is of untold significance. For such things as I want to bring home to you in these lectures—how Lucifer and Ahriman intervene in the evolution of mankind side by side with the Christ Impulse—these things must be taken in all earnestness and their consequences rightly assessed.

Had there been no Luciferic wisdom, no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could have been acquired through the Gnosis in the early centuries of Christendom. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha diminished with the fading of the Luciferic wisdom. And where is there any evidence to-day of such understanding ? The fact that understanding cannot be found through external, Ahrimanic science is perceived by those who to some extent recognise its characteristics. Take, for example, a man like Cardinal Newman—a very significant figure in the sphere of religion during the second half of the nineteenth century. At his investiture as Cardinal in Rome, he declared that he could see no salvation for the religious development of mankind other than a new revelation!² But there it remained. He himself showed no special inclination to receive anything of the new spiritual life that can now stream into humanity out of the spiritual worlds. What he said remained in the sphere of abstraction.

In very truth humanity needs a new revelation. Of this there is evidence on all sides. There have been discussions recently about the deterioration in morals and in the general attitude to morality during the last four or five years. The conclusion reached is that denominational religious instruction must be introduced more intensively into the schools. But it cannot be emphasised often enough that this instruction was already being given and the times are supposed to have come under its influence. If the old denominational instruction is again to be introduced we shall simply be beginning the whole process over again. In a short time we shall be back where we were in 1914. It is in the highest degree important to realise that in the subconsciousness of human beings there are longings quite different in character from what comes to expression on the surface.

When we founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart earlier this year, we were obliged to arrange for the religious instruction to be divided among the various clergy. A particular hour is devoted to religious instruction, which is given by a Catholic priest for the Catholic children and by an Evangelical pastor for the Evangelicals. I shall not speak of the difficulties that came from the side of the priests—that is a chapter by itself. What I do want to say, however, is that an immediate desire was expressed for religious teaching apart from any denomination. At first I thought that the attendance would be insignificant in comparison with the numbers attending the denominational instruction. But in spite of the fact that soon there will not be a single pulpit in Stuttgart from which invectives are not poured on Anthroposophy, a large number of children—five times as many as we expected—have asked for a kind of anthroposophical instruction in religion, and the class has had to be divided into two. Subjectively this may not be altogether welcome, for it may prove to be a rod for our own backs. But of that I do not want to speak. I want only to show that there is a longing for progress in human beings but that they are asleep and do not perceive that forces are keeping these longings in subjection. And moreover the courage to bring these longings to the surface is very largely lacking.

Just think what the effect could be of knowledge such as that of the future incarnation of Ahriman, who is preparing for it by means I have been describing both yesterday and to-day. It is essential to inform ourselves objectively about these things in order that we may take the right stand towards what is going on around us in the way of preparation for the Ahriman-incarnation. Only if you apply deep and mature reflection to what has been said in these lectures about the Ahrimanic currents, will you be able to apprehend the gravity of the present situation.

• 1. Heinrich Borchert Lübsen (1801–64).
• 2. See his speech in Rome, May 12th, 1879, when he had been raised to the rank of Cardinal. “... Hitherto the civil power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that ‘Christianity was the law of the land’. Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten.” (The Life of John Henry Newman, by Wilfrid Ward. Vol. 2, p. 460.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

There are two aspects of this beautiful saying of the great Mystic Angelus Silesius. The one is the declaration that the true Christmas must be celebrated in man's inmost heart, that any outward celebration of Christmas must quicken the impulse whereby in the Holy Night of winter, the very deepest forces of the soul are drawn forth from the darkness prevailing within as the darkness of winter prevails without. These deep forces of the soul are aware of their union with the Being Who pervades all earthly evolution, giving it meaning and purpose. Within us we find some thing with which Christ is united if with conscious devotion to the Spiritual Powers working in the world we penetrate deeply enough into our life of soul.

And the other aspect of the words of Angelus Silesius is that the human being in earthly evolution to-day can become conscious of the fact that true manhood, assurance of true manhood, depends upon the soul feeling inwardly united with the essence and substantiality of Christ Jesus.

In the course of years our studies have brought it home to us that as earthly evolution proceeds, consciousness of Christ deepens, that human beings passing from incarnation to incarnation attain greater and greater understanding of the real nature of Christ. And we have tried to intensify this knowledge by drawing upon a source which enables us to celebrate the Holy Night of Christmas, the Festival of the Birth of Jesus, in a deeper and more worthy way.

What this implies will become clear from the lecture to-day.

A famous modern historian was once asked by a man interested in world events, why no mention is made in his writings of happenings which are the outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha, nor of the influences of Christ Jesus in the course of human history. The historian was asked why his books speak of the influences exercised upon history by popes, monarchs, military campaigns, governments, even by happenings in nature, but have no single word to say about the forces that have poured into mankind from the Mystery of Golgotha and since then have been at work in all human life and human affairs. After a long pause and deep deliberation, the historian answered: The method I have adopted for the exposition of history must remain as it is; for the Christ-forces that stream through happenings in the world belong to a primordial realm into which the human mind is incapable of gazing. The effects and influences of the Mystery of Golgotha—yes, certainly they can be discerned; but to describe the intrinsic, essential nature of these deeds of Christ is not possible in the writing of history.

This is only one of the many examples that could be given in proof of the fact that the most distinguished and enlightened minds of modern times cannot claim to celebrate the Christmas Festival in an inner sense. For in the soul of this historian, Christ Jesus as a living Figure, a living Being, had not become such intense reality that he could feel His presence in all human evolution from year to year, from week to week, even from hour to hour. It is possible for a really learned scholar to-day to survey the whole course of history without perceiving that since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Power of Christ has been working everywhere. There are many causes to account for the fact that the Festival of the Holy Night, the Festival of the Christmas Mystery, is not yet celebrated in the souls of the vast majority of human beings.

A certain illumination is given by one who has spoken of these things out of a deep and true feeling for the Christian Mystery. This was Goethe, who so beautifully recounts the life and travels of Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm Meister comes to a stately building and is conducted around it by its owner. He is shown the gallery which contains a series of paintings of the most important historical occurrences among various peoples of antiquity—notably among the early Hebrews—from the time of Paradise, the Fall, and on through the later epochs. History is portrayed in impressive scenes, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem ... but there is no single picture of a scene from the life of Christ Jesus, although the series continues beyond the Crucifixion as far as the destruction of Jerusalem. Wilhelm Meister asks: Why does nothing in this picture-gallery portray the life of the divine Man who has brought such blessing into the evolution of humanity?—These are his words:¹ "In your historical series I find a chasm. The Temple of Jerusalem is destroyed and the people dispersed, yet you have not introduced the divine Man who taught there shortly before; to whom, shortly before, they would give no ear." The answer made to Wilhelm Meister is: "To have done this, as you require it, would have been an error. The life of that divine Man whom you allude to, stands in no connection with the general history of the world in his time. It was a private life; his teaching was a teaching for individuals. What has publicly befallen vast masses of people and the minor parts which compose them, belongs to the general history of the world, to the general religion of the world, the religion we have named the First. What inwardly befalls individuals, belongs to the Second religion, the Philosophical: such a religion was it that Christ taught and practised, so long as He went about on earth."

These are deeply moving words. Every human being on the earth is related individually to the Christ. Folk-history, as it may be called, is woven by the affairs of the several peoples, for it is concerned with human affairs in general, within the orbit of general human destiny. But what Christ Jesus has brought into the world penetrates deeply and inwardly into the experiences of every human heart, every human soul—belonging to no matter what part of earthly evolution—in so far as it feels itself truly Man. We must realise that this ‘feeling of oneself as man’ arose for the first time from what came into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now to continue. The owner of the palace leads Wilhelm Meister to another gallery that has been kept closed, where the events of the New Testament are portrayed. Wilhelm Meister is therefore not permitted to see the events of the New Testament in a place where external happenings and actions in the world are presented, but only in an esoteric sanctuary, for the sight of which the soul must have been prepared, have withdrawn from things pertaining to the worldly history of the peoples. The basis of the soul's activity must now be esoteric and individual: then it may cross the Threshold leading to the pictures of scenes from the New Testament. Here again the pictures go no farther than the Last Supper. Wilhelm Meister asks: "As you have set up the life of the divine Man for a pattern and example, have you likewise selected his sufferings, his death?" The answer he receives is full of significance; it is an answer which indicates what reverent awe accompanies the experience of the mystery fulfilled on the earth by the Being dwelling in the body whose birth is celebrated in the Holy Night of winter. Wilhelm Meister has been conducted as it were to the first level of esoteric truth, where he witnesses the delineation of scenes as far as the Last Supper; but then comes the most esoteric portion of all, referred to with deep and holy awe: "We draw a veil over these sufferings, because we reverence them so highly. We hold it a damnable audacity to exhibit that torturing Cross and the Holy One who suffers on it, exposing them to the light of the sun." (Travels of Wilhelm Meister. Part II.)

This is an example of the feeling for esotericism to be found in the 18th century. The feeling was sound and true, for we ourselves shall readily agree that pictorial representations of Christ's sufferings, unless they are from the hand of a supreme artist, drag down the Mystery of Golgotha to the human level. And we can understand that one who in the 18th century had a deep, deep feeling for the Mystery of Golgotha was averse from looking at the many distorted portrayals of this sacred Mystery, preferring to draw a veil over these things, because he felt that only the inmost forces of the soul can be united, supersensibly, with what is connected with and follows the Last Supper.

But what is it that underlies these esoteric feelings and experiences? The hearts of men were yearning for a vista, a conception of the Christ Mystery greater than any that was possible at that time. With all humility, with a humility deeper than that with which we approach any other matter presented by spiritual science, it may truly be said that for long ages the best human souls have been yearning, pining for the knowledge of Christ that can be imparted by occult science. And to-day we may be assured that when the time is ripe, the souls of men will behold as reality, what hitherto could only be known in a different form.

The consciousness that such knowledge will one day be within the reach of the human heart, and the longing for it, has been one of life's great riddles to the best souls. Men have been reaching out for an understanding of Christ that will enable them to grasp the import of the mighty Deed accomplished on Golgotha which can be revealed to the eye of soul when the veil is lifted. In the lecture yesterday I explained why a knowledge of Christ once enriched by the old clairvoyance was bound to recede, how it was received in the earliest periods of Christendom but then gradually waned and faded away. I will read, again to-day, an ancient Gnostic hymn from which it is clear that in the old, clairvoyant form of knowledge the consciousness was alive that the Christ Who came into the world through the Child born at Christmastime, is a Cosmic Being, increasing in majesty and greatness, the higher the soul's vision soars into the realms of spirit—for through these realms He descended. It was inevitable that in later times, when the springs of this knowledge had run dry, a veil should be drawn over the great Event, because men were no longer able to explain that in the secret represented by the Child, the highest wisdom is enshrined. In this Child was born a Being Who traversed the heavenly worlds before His appearance on earth.—

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
(this ‘being’ is the human soul)
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed, it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?

In converse with the Father God, Jesus is speaking of the descent through the cosmic spheres, of how his eyes turn to the human soul to whom he would fain bring salvation, wandering in chaos but yet longing for Christ.—

Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending, I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons ...

The spiritual worlds are ranged one above the other in the heavenly spheres and the higher we ascend the more do we find that the older worlds are still living realities, the most ancient being present to this day in the highest spheres of all. What was once connected with the Saturn evolution is to be found in the very highest spiritual spheres, and these successive spheres, related to the flow of time, are called ‘Aeons.’

Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

Mankind has very largely lost consciousness of the Christ as a Cosmic Being. This loss was inevitable, for the old clairvoyance had to disappear and an intervening period—an Aeon devoid of spirit—to come, in order that eventually a new form of clairvoyant vision may arise. But this new vision must again be directed to the spiritual worlds, must not characterise in forms such as are presented to men's outward sight, the Being Who in the Holy Night entered into the evolution of humanity. This new vision must reveal how the Christ Being descended from heavenly sphere to heavenly sphere and thence to the earth, giving the earth meaning and purpose.

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?
Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

What, in reality, is the earth that surrounds us, when we perceive its essential being? If the corpse of one whose soul already dwells in spiritual worlds lies before you, will you ever say: This is a man? Will you ever say: This is still, in the full sense of the word, a man? The higher members of human nature are no longer in the corpse from which the soul has departed. But since the middle of the Atlantean epoch the earth has been gradually becoming a corpse devoid of soul. The earth around us, despite its manifold beauties, has been approaching the state of a corpse since the middle of Atlantean times and is becoming more and more corpselike. Standing before the huge rocks, one can say no truer thing than that here is the skeleton which the earth has been in process of becoming ever since that time! In the rock-strewn earth we perceive the dying part of the earth-organism, which was a living organism only until the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Geology itself realises that when we walk over the earth or guide the plough through the soil, we are walking over the corpse of the earth, guiding the plough through the corpse of the earth. Geologists have acknowledged this and external science itself, when it begins really to think, cannot do otherwise. And so, inasmuch as we are surrounded by the earth, we confront death; we are spectators of the gradual dying of our earthly globe.

And now let us imagine that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, that the Cosmic Being Whom we call Christ had not entered through the two Jesus boys into earth-evolution.² Earth-evolution would then be no more, would already by to-day have been overcome by death. But through the two Jesus boys the Christ did enter earthly evolution and then, living in the one for three years, consummated the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby a new seed of life was imparted to the earth. Therefore when the time is fulfilled, the earth will not remain a corpse in cosmic space—the soul having become the prey of Ahriman and Lucifer! No—that is what would have happened had Christ not come into the earth as a living, fertile seed. Because He has come, the earth will not fall into dust, the soul will not be in the sole possession of Lucifer and Ahriman, for the Christ Seed has infused new life into earth-evolution! Just as the earth once separated from the sun and has become a child of the sun, so will earth-evolution, imbued with a new impulse, be fraught with the meaning and purpose imparted by Christ.

Thus spiritual science turns our eyes with awe and reverence to the Mystery of Golgotha and because it points to realms beyond the range of material vision, we feel that it is for us to lift the veil ... since we are resolved to see behind this veil not only what comes before the eyes of an age destined to grow into materialism. Therefore it is again beginning to be possible for those in whom the impulses of spiritual science have come to life, to look up to the Christ as a Cosmic Being. Again and again let it be repeated that the infinite devotion we can feel towards the Child born in the Holy Night of Christmas is not thereby diminished. Rather is this devotion deepened when we can feel the reality of Christ as did Christian Morgenstern when there sprang from his soul a poem which seems like a resurrection of ancient and holy Gnostic thoughts pervaded alike by the Christ-Love and cosmic wisdom. And so a new Christmas is celebrated when in the dark night of materialism, voices ring out that are not the voices of the Gnostics of olden times but are quickened and enriched by dedication to the Living Being of the Cosmic Christ.

Licht ist Liebe ... Sonnen-Weben
Liebes-Strahlung einer Welt
schöpferischer Wesenheiten—

die durch unerhörtte Zeiten
uns an ihrem Herzen hält,
und die uns zuletzt gegeben

ihren höchsten Geist in eines
Menschen Hülle wahrend dreier
Jahre: da Er kam in seines

Vaters Erbteil—nun der Erde
innerlichstes Himmelsfeuer:
dass auch sie einst Sonne werde.

(Light is Love ... the rays of sunshine are the weaving radiance of a world of loving Creator-Spirits. Who, after hiding us in their heart through endless ages, at the last surrendered to us their sublimest One. Wrapped for three years in the body of a Man, He came then into possession of His Father's estate—and is now the innermost heavenly flame of Earth herself, that she too may one day be a Sun).

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

May there be celebrated in our souls an inner festival of the Holy Night; may our souls be filled with the realisation that a new knowledge of Christ must be born in our time. This new knowledge of Christ links the inmost core of man's being with primal innocence, links the state of childhood, not, as yet, that of mature life, with the very heights of cosmic being. When, in the Holy Night of winter our minds turn to the Christ Child, there is enacted before our souls the greatest of all festivals of consecration, the festival that rings through all the Aeons—and we know that the deepest realities of man's being and nature are indissolubly connected with all cosmic evolution.

Those whose hearts are kindled by spiritual science feel and know that victory over all death can be achieved when the soul is united with the Christ Being. I spoke of this to-day at the funeral of one taken from us so tragically by the war. Realisation of how the heights of cosmic being are connected with the inmost nature of man was impossible as long as the human mind was unable to conceive that the very quintessence of history lies in the Mystery of Bethlehem. But this insight will dawn in those who understand the secret of the two Jesus boys. In the one boy there was present the power of the wisest of all men in pre-Christian times, namely Zarathustra. This boy represents the flower of the previous stages of human evolution; the aura of the other boy was illumined by the forces of the great Buddha. The body of the one boy springs from the noblest blood of the ancient Hebrew peoples; the soul of the Jesus boy described in the Gospel of St. Luke leads back to the earth's beginning.³ The soul of this Jesus boy was kept back, when, in the age of Lemuria, man came to the earth; this soul was guarded by the Mysteries until it was sent into the body of the Jesus whose birth is described in the Gospel of St. Luke. It is said that immediately after birth, this Child uttered words intelligible only to the Mother, in a language unlike any other language, and which the Child himself forgot directly earthly consciousness awoke in him. A mystery was voiced immediately after birth ... And indeed, much of what we have to reveal concerning the Christ Mystery is an exposition of what was uttered by the Jesus boy of the Gospel of St. Luke directly after his birth.

And so spiritual science enables us to understand the Christ Impulse in the deeper aspect of human evolution—in the evolution of pre-Christian times too—for the differences disappear and the voice of the Initiates can still be heard. When once the magnitude of what poured into the evolution of humanity at the Mystery of Golgotha is grasped it will be possible for these forces to be brought to even greater fruition. But men must know Who the Christ was before they can speak truly of Him—in history, for example. If within our movement there are individuals—in greater and greater numbers—who resolve to kindle the light that can be kindled in those inner depths which since the Mystery of Golgotha have been within men's reach then the Christ Light will shine out in every single soul. This Christ Light becomes the Christmas Tree that will illumine all evolution in ages of time to come. The soul will behold an earth again made living, will find Christ everywhere within this new earth.

Those who have allied themselves with spiritual science can receive its tidings of Christ with such depth of feeling that the Christmas Festival will one day be celebrated in every individual soul. It is the Festival which represents the birth of that knowledge of Christ which comes from Christ Himself and is therefore a birth of Christ within us, True, indeed are the words: "Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally." But to this beautiful string of Angelus Silesius we can add: We are secure eternally if we seek the experience belonging to the Holy Night of winter, if we seek to bring Christ to birth in the depths of our souls!

• 1. The translation of the quotations from Wilhelm Meister is that of Thomas Carlyle.
• 2. See: The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind; also the Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Luke and the Gospel of St. Matthew by Rudolf Steiner.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Gospel of St. Luke.