The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to address some fundamental anthroposophical questions about life and then move up from these fundamental questions, from the everyday to the all-encompassing, the fundamental. The most fruitful gain of our striving should be that we learn through spiritual science to judge life more and more in its truth, in its reality, to judge it in such a way that this judgment itself can lead us most efficiently and energetically into life and how it can place us in the position that we have to fill out of our karma, that we have to fill out of our greater or lesser mission in the time in which we are embodied in the earthly body.

And so I would like to start with some of life's qualities that present themselves to us every day, either in ourselves or in our surroundings. We only begin to understand the full scope and significance of these qualities when we are able to view them in the light of spiritual science. I would like to start with two vices in life and then talk about some virtues, starting with the virtues of goodwill and contentment and the vices of lying and envy.

Let us first consider these two vices, which we often encounter in life. It cannot be denied that in the broadest circles, both among the simplest people and among those who, so to speak, already belong to the leaders of life, there is a deep, deep aversion and antipathy towards what we can call envy and mendacity. To mention right away some people who were among the leaders of life, I refer to the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and to those passages in his autobiography where he says that on close self-examination he must accuse himself of many vices, but may still say that he was never really a liar. This artist therefore finds a certain satisfaction in the fact that, on the basis of his self-observation, he can exclude lying from his character traits. And Goethe once says, as a result of his self-observation, that he must accuse himself of many things, but that envy, this ugly vice, had not really eaten at his heart. Thus we see, as it were, at the summits of life, how one feels antipathy for mendacity and envy, how one is told everywhere, where one is accustomed to look at life a little deeper, even where great abilities are, as it were, inherent in the life of the soul: You must guard against these vices in particular. And who would deny that this fundamental antipathy to falsehood and envy runs through all, all layers of our humanity. You only need to remember how much it would eat away at your heart if, in a certain moment, you had to say to yourself during truly honest and correct self-observation: I am an envious person. If you had to admit this resolutely to yourself, you would certainly feel in this confession that you would have to take something into yourself, such as fighting against this envy, fighting against envy. It is a deeply rooted feeling that mendacity and envy are ugly human traits. Why do we feel that way, then? Yes, you see, people do not always realize why they have such a deep antipathy to this or that. They often do not realize what is slumbering in the more or less subconscious part of their soul life and is undoubtedly present. In the face of envy and mendacity, man feels that he is violating something that is connected with the very essence of humanity and the very essence of human value. We need only utter a word and we will feel this. Spiritual science should gradually make us aware that, in addition to the individual personalities incarnated in the flesh, there is something like a unified, universal humanity that dwells in all souls in the same way as the divine-human. And here it is precisely spiritual science that presents this to us as a great ideal and that gradually leads us to have an understanding of the universal human. And yet, in an emotional way, there is something in all human hearts that always says in a certain way: Seek a bond that holds all people together, that always entwines itself from soul to soul, and you will find it. — And the corresponding feeling is expressed in the word “compassion”. Compassion is such a general human quality that we have to say: In this compassion, it is darkly announced the bond that goes from every soul to every soul. And there one feels again in the subconscious how one is violating compassion, the recognition of what is common in all people in the most eminent sense, with falsehood and envy.

What do we actually do when we tell a lie? We do nothing else than erect a partition between us and the other person. What should connect us with him, the common knowledge of some truth that should live in our soul and in his, if things were right, we tear that apart by telling him a lie. We do not recognize, in the moment when we tell the untruth, that we should actually live in the other with the best part of ourselves.

And when we envy someone, be it for abilities or for something else in life, then we sin against compassion in the way that we do not recognize the person for what he or she should actually be for us, as something that actually belongs to us and whose advantages and gifts and strokes of luck we should actually rejoice in if we felt truly connected to him or her.

So we are sinning against the most beautiful thing in human life, against compassion, when we are envious and untruthful people. And why is this so vehemently expressed in the dissatisfaction with these two qualities? Why is that? Well, both qualities can show us how that which resides in our soul reproduces itself, progresses to the shells of our being and has a meaning for these shells.

Envy is something that, when observed occultly, is clearly expressed in a very specific nature of the astral body when it is present in a person. And an envious person, no matter how much he is able to hide this envy from the outside world, reveals the quality of envy in his astral body. Our astral body has very specific basic properties. Even if it is different in every person and shows the most diverse differences in different people, it still has certain basic properties. And when we look at it with clairvoyant vision as an aura, it has very specific color properties. These fade in a remarkable way in the case of envious people; they fade, they become weak and dull. And the astral body of an envious person becomes, as it were, poor in the strength that it should supply to the whole human organism.

In the case of untruthfulness, it is again the case that it, and also every single lie, expresses itself in the etheric body. The etheric body loses vitality and life energy when a person is untruthful. This can even be observed externally. However strange it may sound for our age, it is nevertheless true that wounds, for example, heal more slowly in people who lie a lot than in truthful people, under otherwise similar conditions. Of course, one should not draw absolute conclusions, there may also be other reasons. But all other things being equal, wounds are more difficult to heal in dishonest people than in truthful people. It is good to observe such things in life. And that is also easily explained. The etheric body of a person is the actual life principle, it is what must contain the life forces. But these are undermined by untruthfulness. So that the etheric body cannot give as much life force as is necessary for a healing if this etheric body has had its life force withdrawn through untruthfulness, if it has not always been permeated by those movements, by those facts that arise from truthfulness. We should pay attention to such things, for we shall understand life better in many respects if we do.

Now you know that we must see what is happening to people in the light of two powers that influence human life as it develops from incarnation to incarnation. We must look at human life under the influence of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. The forces of Lucifer are those that act on our astral body, that radiate their power into our astral body and tempt us in relation to it. The forces of Ahriman are those that tempt us in relation to our etheric body. Yes, it is Lucifer who, so to speak, grabs us by the scruff of the neck when we are envious people. Envy is truly a Luciferic quality, a quality that comes from Lucifer, whereas untruthfulness is a quality that comes from Ahriman. For Ahriman sends out the forces and powers that radiate into our etheric body.

Now we can say: It was absolutely necessary that Lucifer and Ahriman were delegated by the wise powers of the world so that they could influence us to become independent. In that they cause us to abuse our independence, they are in a sense enemies of the higher development of mankind. But even if they are in a sense enemies of man in his higher development, they are very friendly and make very peculiar compromises among themselves. We can speak of these compromises when we consider human qualities such as envy and lying.

Envy! The moment a person who is not completely corrupt says to himself, 'I am an envious person', he will do anything to fight that envy. You don't have to be particularly high to do anything. But sometimes things are much deeper than our power, which comes from consciousness. And sometimes people imagine that it is too easy to fight such things. So it happens that they fight such things because they perceive them as ugly, but they do not go away, they actually only change their form, they reappear in a different area. They then appear in masks, in disguises. And because one hates envy so much, one fights against it, but if the soul is not yet strong enough to fight it thoroughly, it disappears as envy but reappears in another form.

You all know that human trait that is so common and that you could call: criticism and faultfinding, paying attention to the faults of our fellow human beings. When someone has to say to themselves, “I am an envious person, I don't want my fellow human beings to have advantages,” they feel bad. They feel that they have to fight it. But when they can say, He feels that the fault-finding is justified to a certain extent, and he feels right in his element. Just imagine, if that were not the case, how many coffee parties and beer societies would have to be abandoned, where basically nothing else is done so often but to give rein to this carping and fault-finding. And then man finds himself justified before himself. He says to himself: Yes, one sees the faults, one must see them, one cannot close one's eyes. — It is only a matter of why we see the faults of our fellow human beings, whether we see the intention to improve life, or whether we follow a tendency of our soul, which is often nothing more than a masked envy. People fight envy because they hate it, but they are too weak to uproot it. So it takes on the guise of a critical nature and continues to roam the soul in this way. Then you have not fought envy, you have only forced it into a different metamorphosis. In reality, what has happened is that man has fought Lucifer, because he is above the envy of the Regent, as he is above much. But Lucifer then says to Ahriman, if I may express it thus: 'See, dear Ahriman, man hates my mode of ruling envy; he does not want to be envious. Now you take him in relation to this quality! Then Ahriman says: Yes, I will press that into the etheric body. — And it is pressed into the etheric body as a critical mind, as a critical spirit, as a misguided judgment about the world. For the ability to judge always has something to do with the movements and forces of the etheric body. Here the command of our soul passes from Lucifer to Ahriman. And so many qualities, which if they presented themselves in their original form we would hate and fight against, appear in disguise. Sometimes they present themselves in such a way that we actually find them very justified and even take some pride in being able to see what is right in life. Then we are truly caught in the tentacles of the other power, the Ahrimanic power. We must not forget that a quality is much more dangerous when it appears in disguise than when it appears in its original form. Therefore, when we see this or that in life, it is always good to ask: Is it not perhaps only a transformed other vice? — This is extremely necessary so that we learn to look at life in its truth. We can only do this if we use the guidelines that anthroposophical wisdom gives us to properly observe life.

Now we must say: What appears in life as this or that vice, whether in its true form or in disguise, we often see as a karmic effect in a single incarnation. We do not even have to wait for the transition from one incarnation to another. We see the karmic effect of a quality that occurs in any period of life in one incarnation. And those who really want to observe life and pay a little attention, will not get to know life if they always forget tomorrow what happened today, but if they consider longer periods of human life, they will find karma at work even in one embodiment, in one life. It is really necessary to pay very, very careful attention to how the sins of life basically only show up after decades. But people are a forgetful generation. Of all the races, beginning with the human race and extending to all higher worlds, people are truly the most forgetful generation. Even if we have known someone for decades, we forget what came to light ten years ago; we are very happy to let it fade from our memory. I may have already mentioned a small example here, but it can show us how we have to look at life in larger periods of time if we want to recognize it in its true form – something external that I just want to insert. It concerns the time in which I had the opportunity to observe many children in different families. When you educate children, you not only have to observe the children you are educating yourself, but also the more or less young offspring of uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, and so on. And you can take note of many things for life. Well, it was a long time ago, fashions change. When I had children of my own, it was fashionable for their teachers to give them quite a few tins of red wine with their meals during the day as a form of sustenance. It was done, and it was thought to be a good thing. If you made a note of it at the time: this child and that child were given red wine and the other was not, you can now, if you have the opportunity again, as I always try to observe what has become of these children, gather strange insights. I can say that the two- to three- to four-year-old children of yesteryear – now people of twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine years – who were given red wine as children, are fidgety, nervous people who sometimes find it extremely difficult to find their way in life. Of course, one should not just make one's observations over a period of five years. Today it is so common to try this or that, and if it shows some success in the next few months, it is quickly a widespread remedy. People are forgetful in this area too. How many remedies have gone out of fashion after five years, people have forgotten again. But, as I said, if you extend your observation over decades, then you can really feel how life works. There really is a big difference between children who were given red wine in those days and those who were not given any. But you would have to make your observations over three decades, so to speak, to see that. And that is how it is. I have included this to show that if you want to see karma at work, it is necessary not to be forgetful, but to extend your observations over longer periods of time. The same applies to what comes to light in a more psychological way.

If you look at the second half of a person's life in context with the first, you can see how a person who was untruthful or envious, or who expressed envy under the mask of criticism, will experience the karmic effect of this in the second half of their life. Dishonest people always show a certain karmic effect of dishonesty in one incarnation: a certain shyness, an impossibility, one might say, to look people straight in the eye. That will certainly come true. Just try to observe the matter. You will find it confirmed. Folk proverbs sometimes have a deep, wise core. It is not without reason that in many regions people say that one should beware of a person who cannot look another in the eye. This is because of the karmic effect of untruthfulness.

Envy, on the other hand, or envy masked as criticism, manifests itself in a later life epoch of the same incarnation in such a way that the person in question has the characteristic of not being able to stand on his or her own two feet, so that he or she has the longing to lean on others, to need advice on all sorts of things, and always wants to run to someone else for advice. Independence in life is lost through envy, criticism, and a tendency to find fault. Such a person becomes weak in spirit.

Now these qualities, with their karmic effects, confront us spiritually when we consider one incarnation. We will take a moment to consider how the karmic effects play out as we move from one incarnation to another.

But now, so as not to be one-sided, we also want to consider good qualities: goodwill and contentment. Everyone knows what a benevolent person is. A benevolent person is someone who feels satisfied when someone else succeeds or achieves something, when they notice good qualities in someone. Goodwill is present when, in a sense, one experiences what the other person experiences as one's own. This goodwill, in turn, has a very specific effect on our astral body, which is almost the opposite of the effect of envy. We see how the lights of the astral body shine when a person expresses goodwill. The astral body becomes brighter and more radiant when there are feelings of goodwill in the soul of the person. The aura becomes more luminous, more radiant and thus richer; it becomes more saturated, and it is then able to infuse into the person first something like warmth of soul and then even a sense of well-being.

And when we see a contented person before us, a person who is not inclined to be grumpy about everything from the outset, to be dissatisfied about everything, then the etheric body shows us very definite qualities. It is important that we take note of this in a certain way. For we should actually realize how much of our dissatisfaction basically really depends on ourselves. There are those who cannot do enough to ferret out everything that can make them dissatisfied. And we feel that not only happier natures, but also better natures, are capable of paying a great deal of attention to the fact that, however bad things may be, we still have reasons to be happy about this or that. There are such reasons. And if someone does not want to admit that these exist, it is their own fault. Satisfaction, especially when it is brought about by a better quality of our soul, strengthens the etheric body in terms of its life force. And again it is the case – all other conditions being equal – that wounds or other things heal more easily in a contented person who has good reason to be contented, and does not get worked up about what happens to him, than in a grumpy and discontented person who gets worked up about everything and, as I said, leaves unsatisfied, under otherwise similar circumstances. Now we can also see quite clearly in a lifetime – and this is important for us to bear in mind when educating others – that someone who is truly imbued with contentment during a certain period of their life and who strives to seek out things that can satisfy them, perhaps despite pain and suffering, that a karmic effect will occur in the same life, even if it takes decades. This is expressed in particular by the fact that such a person, who has endeavored to acquire contentment in a certain period of his life, radiates a certain beneficial balance of life to his environment. You know that this exists. There are people around whom others have to fidget, and there are those who simply by being there calm others. People who have endeavored to be content in one epoch of their lives gain, as a karmic effect for the next epoch of the same life, the possibility of having a harmonizing effect on their environment, so to speak, purely by their existence, being benefactors to their environment.

We can always observe that benevolent people who have endeavored to be benevolent reap the karmic effect of all things that depend on them and are intended by them succeeding in a later epoch of life. Sometimes it seems inexplicable to us that some people succeed in everything, that they feel up to whatever they undertake, while others do not succeed and everything they touch fails. This leads back to the karmic cause of goodwill or ill will. You can observe these things, which I am presenting to you as guidelines, in life. If you exclude the sources of error that exist, you will see that life confirms what I have said.

When we now pass from one incarnation to another, we have to say: in one incarnation, the karmic effects can actually only show themselves in the soul. The effects of envy show themselves in certain weaknesses and in a lack of independence, the effects of untruthfulness in shyness, the effects of goodwill and contentment as I have described them to you. In this incarnation we do not have the same thorough and profound influences on our bodily organization that would enable us to make more progress with the karmic effects than a psychic basis. These things only take effect in the body, in the structure and organization of the body, in the next incarnation. And while we make ourselves spiritually dependent on others in one incarnation through envy and a tendency to find fault, these have the effect of constituting the body weakly and building it up weakly into the next incarnation. A weak body is built up by someone who was formerly plagued by envy or by masked envy, by a tendency to find fault, to be critical.

But now, if we have studied spiritual science a little, we must also say that it is truly not by chance that we are brought together with this or that person in a new incarnation. We are led into the family and environment with which we have something to do. And so you will not find it very strange if I say: If someone in an incarnation was an envious person, he will be reborn with the people – be they his parents or others – whom he envied, judged or gossiped about, or blamed. He will be reunited with them. And we may be reunited with them because we are led into this environment with weak organization. This makes the matter very practical, bringing the teaching of karma close to our practical life. We can say that when a human child is born with weak organization, This is the consequence of the envious disposition of the previous incarnation, and we are the ones who were envied, and this human child has been brought together with us karmically because we are the ones who were the target of their envy and gossip. It is fruitful when we say to ourselves: If karma has any meaning at all, it is justified to look at it this way. So let's look at it that way.

Of course, the only way to make it fruitful is to ask ourselves: What should we do in the face of such a weak human being? We only need to ask ourselves: What seems morally best in ordinary life when someone persecutes us with their envy and criticism? Perhaps it is not always possible to do the best in our ordinary, everyday lives. But what seems best to us? - Now, most certainly, forgiveness seems to us to be the very best. We may say that our lives are perhaps not such that we can always forgive, but the best is undoubtedly the forgiveness, and the most effective and also the most fruitful in life is the forgiveness. We cannot always practise it in our ordinary lives, but if we can say that the best thing in life is to forgive, it turns out that the real application of the principle of forgiveness is in the right place in all circumstances. This is when we have to acknowledge what I have said as a karmic effect from past incarnations. If a weak human child is born into our environment or brought together with us, we must then say to ourselves: Since karma should not remain merely a theoretical idea, we must think that we were the envied ones, the gossiped about. Now, under all circumstances, we can practice in our deepest hearts the feeling of forgiveness and of forgiveness. We can, so to speak, envelop such a human child in an atmosphere of repeatedly stirred feelings of forgiveness. If we did that in life, if we felt united with people who are weak, and did not just grasp the idea of forgiveness in theory, but always renewed the feelings in our souls, I have something to forgive you for, I want to forgive you, and always renew this feeling, then that would be a practical introduction of the anthroposophical attitude into life. You would certainly see the effect. Just try to put it into practice and you will see that people who are born into our environment in a weak state will flourish when you forgive them in this way and renew the feeling of forgiveness, that our feeling has a healing and invigorating effect on them. And we can become healers, healers of the people with whom we have been brought together by karma. In this way, anthroposophy becomes fruitful if we do not merely regard it as a collection of ideas that interest us. It is basically quite selfish when we begin to get enthusiastic about anthroposophy because the thoughts of anthroposophy inspire us and seem true to us. For what are we satisfying then? We are satisfying our longing for a harmonious worldview. That is very beautiful. But the greater thing is when we permeate our whole life with what results from these ideas; when the ideas go into our hands, into every step and into everything we experience and do. Only then does anthroposophy become a principle of life, and until it does, it has no value.

We can also speak in a similar way with regard to the other qualities. If, for example, we have been liars in a previous incarnation and are born again, we will be brought together with those to whom we may have lied to their faces. It is not uncommon, if one is a true student of the occult, to find that a human being is born into an environment to which he cannot find the right relationship, is not understood by it and does not understand it. Sometimes we have a peculiar effect on our environment. I don't know if you have already observed that this has a much wider impact than just on people. There are certain people: if they want to raise flowers, these flowers thrive, they have a lucky hand for it. The fact that it is they who raise the flowers makes them thrive. Other people can do whatever they want: the flowers wither. That happens. There are simply much more mysterious relationships between the individual beings of existence than one usually thinks. These mysterious relationships are, of course, mainly from person to person. And if we are brought together through karma with a human child who brazenly lied to us in a previous incarnation, it is so that we, so to speak, find it difficult to relate to this child. We should pay attention to this. We should not judge this merely according to our temperament, but karmically. We should say: “This comes from the fact that we were perhaps often lied to by this human child.” Now we can in turn help this human child, strengthen and empower him.

What is the best way to forgive something that can be expressed something like this, another person tells you a lie. The best way to forgive that is to teach him a truth. With the other, by rectifying the lie, you are already doing some good, but you have not helped the person any further. You can help him further by trying to teach him a useful truth. You have to follow a kind of policy in your dealings with people, and that helps people to progress. If we are obliged to look at the matter karmically, it is particularly advantageous that we endeavor to be truthful to people with whom we are karmically brought together and who we know do not find a relationship with us because they are shy around us. Then we will see how these people in turn flourish under our openness and how this openness is of great advantage to them. Thus we see how we can gain life principles by looking at the workings of karma in a practical way.

What we have just characterized as the effect of goodwill in a single life, we can see as having the effect of harmonizing life, but initially in the soul. People in whom this has an effect from one incarnation to the next, we find that they are actually born with a happier organization, which we can call 'skillful'. Good will, contentment in one incarnation, brings about skillfulness in another incarnation. It is true that this is the case, because it can always be proven in the field of occult research. And one can very well observe oneself and experience some of the ways in which the previous incarnation works its way into the present one. We can be quite sure that it is so in the case of people whose fingers are quite unsuitable for sewing on a button that might tear, or in the case of people who, when asked to carry a glass into the cupboard, happily throw it to the floor – I am exaggerating a little now. But in more subtle nuances, there are very many people who are so organized that they cannot help but move their fingers in the wrong way, that they always make awkward mistakes. Whether one can use the instrument of one's body well or whether it presents treacherous obstacles at every turn has a profound significance for one's life. This is extraordinarily important. And when we see a clumsy child growing up, we must assume in most cases that in the previous incarnation he lacked contentment and goodwill. When we see skill emerging, so that the person, when he touches something, already literally knows how to do it, then that is most certainly the karmic effect of goodwill and contentment. |

If we look at it this way, we can say that we can actually have a wonderful effect from one incarnation to the next. It is possible for us to really work on our next incarnation. And we will change a lot for our next incarnation if we seriously resolve to observe whether we have a little bit of faultfinding and criticizing in us after all. If we try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of this, we find that we have it to a considerable extent. It is good to try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of it. Then the process of working on ourselves begins. And we may be able to avoid being born weak and pale in the next incarnation, avoid in this life becoming, so to speak, dependent human beings.

When we consider these things, we will say to ourselves: It is no longer a fantasy to combine the individual incarnations like links in a human chain and to really regard the earth as a kind of training through which we learn to use what is offered to us in the individual incarnations so that we come higher and higher, go further and further. After all, why are we incarnated, in principle? We can best understand this by asking ourselves what the two great differences are between our incarnations in the old, pre-Christian times and our present incarnations, which are taking place after the Christ Impulse has been present. There is a very, very significant difference.

This difference between our incarnations in ancient pre-Christian times and our present incarnations could best be described by saying: When you look back at the incarnations of people in the pre-Christian era, to a certain extent the souls in that pre-Christian era had all retained something of what all souls had at the beginning of their earthly incarnations. All souls had natural clairvoyance, an insight into the spiritual world. And the progress of incarnations consists precisely in the fact that this inheritance from the spiritual world, from the spiritual origin, has gradually been lost, that people have increasingly emerged onto the physical plane, and the spiritual world has increasingly faded from them. The Christ impulse means that when we find the possibility to receive the Christ in us, to connect him with our ego, we in turn begin to ascend more and more to what we were at the beginning, only richer. That we are again at the end of the incarnations in the spiritual as we were at the beginning of our incarnations, is effected by the reception of the Christ power, when we apply our next incarnations so that we absorb more and more of the Christ. These are the great differences between pre-Christian and post-Christian incarnations. We are actually still in a transitional period in this regard. We have been pushed far out of the reach of normal human perception onto the physical plane, onto mere physical perception, and today is actually a high point in terms of physical perception. For the Christ impulse is only just beginning, and in subsequent incarnations people will truly take up the Christ, will only come to love these incarnations because they give them the opportunity to experience what can only be experienced through earthly existence: the acceptance of the Christ impulse into the soul. We can observe this even in great personalities, how there is, so to speak, a tremendous difference between the incarnations before the Christ impulse on Earth and after. I would like to tell you a detail.

Some time ago I was called upon to spend a few days lecturing in our southernmost European branch – I mean in so far as we speak of Rosicrucian Theosophy – in Palermo. And when I entered Sicily from Naples by ship, I already had the very definite feeling that there was something to be learned there about occult facts that are difficult to study in the north alone. For there is a personality, an individuality that emerged, which I cannot name now, that played a certain role at the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era, which made a lot of noise in our and neighboring areas and which makes the occultist wonder: What was the previous incarnation of this personality? That was an important research question for me, and strangely enough, I hoped to find out something about this question through the occult research that was possible there, especially at this entrance to Sicily. And that was indeed the case very soon. Of course, what is being told is something intimate, but within our branches, there is no longer any need to hold back on these intimate things. Something very, very remarkable has been poured out into the whole spiritual atmosphere of Sicily – I do not say the outer, but the spiritual atmosphere. And the pursuit of this remarkable thing really led at last to its origin, to a great sage who worked in Sicily and who is also dismissed with a few words in the history of philosophy, but whom we really know very little about in an outwardly exoteric way. His name is Empedocles.

If one wants to characterize Empedocles as an occultist – and I would like to do this for you – then one must say: in some respects, Empedocles was very much ahead of his time, he was overripe for his time. In other respects, however, he could not go beyond his time. There was a deep conflict in his soul. Empedocles is truly a great, all-embracing personality. He was active in Sicily not only as a philosopher, not only as a mystery teacher, but also as a statesman, as an architect, as all kinds of things – he was a kind of organizer, this wonderful Empedocles. Empedocles lived in Sicily about four or five centuries before the Christ Impulse, and he was ahead of his time in that he had the urge to delve into the material world. In the past, people had never delved into matter as superficially as they do today. When someone spoke of water, like T'hales, for example, they meant something spiritual. Empedocles was the one who, in a certain respect, nevertheless anticipated a materialistic principle by composing all being out of the four elements, which he, however, conceived materially. And by mixing and unmixing this matter, he conceived the constitution of the world. He lost the spiritual because he — precisely as an occult personality, looking back on his incarnations — should have found the Christ impulse; he would have been called to do so. When we look back in the Akasha Chronicle today, we find the Christ impulse at a very specific point; but the one who lived before the Christ impulse could not do so. He could not absorb it as an earthly impulse, because it had not yet existed physically. Empedocles lacked that, it could not pour into his soul. He did not have the counterweight against the materialism that flared up in him. But because he was a personality with strong impulses, albeit with the impulses of an occultist, this led him to live out this disharmony. That is what turned out to be the truth. This led him to want to be one with the material of the four elements, just as one would otherwise, when seeking the truth, want to unite with this spiritual in spirit. And he plunged into the Atna. He really did throw himself into it to be one with the elements. He sought the divine in the material, identifying with the divine that appeared to him in the material image. And I would like to say: this product of Empedocles' combustion in the fiery floods of Etna is still present today in the atmosphere of Sicily as a fertilizing force, like the effect of a sacrifice. Something great and mighty is present, but it is emanating from this, one might say, false, blasé, wrongly placed in time – do not misunderstand the term 'false' – materialism. Empedocles, who, looking back, could not find the Christ, although he should have found him, throws his life away. Thus it happened that he came to life again in such a remarkable way at the beginning of the newer time and lived quite differently. It is not yet time to speak of the personality in which he was reborn. A wonderful view of what the Christ Impulse actually is in the course of evolution arises. Between the previous and the later incarnation of Empedocles stands the Christ event in the midst. And by comparing the two incarnations of Empedocles, one can see, by observing his individuality, what effect it has, whether one, as a spirit belonging to the newer observation, can look back and find the Christ impulse or not. This makes an enormous difference. Just as souls in ancient times had to go back from incarnation to incarnation to see how they had allied themselves with the divine spiritual being in earlier incarnations, so we must have the opportunity, when we go back from our own incarnation and trace the time from our birth to our previous death and again from that to our previous birth and so on, to find the Christ impulse in this way. The spiritual researcher in particular must find it. This Christ impulse lights a light for him, whereas otherwise he would be plunged into darkness at this moment and everything that existed would lie in darkness. We need the Christ impulse like a torch in the field of spiritual research, otherwise darkness comes, otherwise we cannot see clearly into the true reasons of the Akasha Chronicle of ancient times. This can be observed in a wonderful way in examples such as that of Empedocles. Then one gets a feeling for how these incarnations follow one another in our earthly existence; how, so to speak, man has moved in a descending direction up to the Christ Impulse, how he has emerged further and further onto the physical plane, and how we are in the process of gradually ascending into the spiritual realm again. The last great spirit of descent is the great Buddha, the first great impulse for ascent is that of Christ Jesus, and perhaps there is no better way to feel the tremendous difference between the Buddha principle and the principle of Christ Jesus than by contemplating something that the great Buddha once said to his most intimate disciples, looking back at his enlightenment, which is symbolically called the enlightenment under the bodhi tree. There Buddha says: When I look back on earlier incarnations, I see how I proceeded from the divine-spiritual source of the world, how I went from incarnation to incarnation, always dwelling with the spiritual essence in the outer body temple, descending into the physical world. But now, in this incarnation, I have found the possibility of no longer having to return to an incarnation. From body temple to body temple I have gone, in every incarnation the Godhead has erected the temple of my body for me. But now, as I am embodied in it for the last time, I feel how the beams of this body temple are cracking and that I no longer need to return to such a temple. For that is what he proclaimed: that the true striving must be to escape from this earthly activity, to no longer have any connection with this temple of the body, but to strive out of it to the last incarnation, in order to live on only in the spiritual. That was the last reference to man's descent, to the memory that men can have of primeval wisdom, of what stands at the beginning of the human race.

Oh, it must move us when we see the Buddha standing, saying: From temple to temple of the body I have passed; now I feel that it is for the last time. If we compare this – and disregard all metaphysical backgrounds – with an intimate saying of Christ to his intimate disciples, with the words: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again”, we see that in the Buddha was a great longing for the beams of the temple of the body to collapse, so that there would be no need to return to it; but that in Christ there was the promise: “Tear it down, and I will rebuild it in three days.” The love for the earthly world expresses itself in the fact that for the following incarnations of human beings, in which they find the possibility to build their body temple again and again, so that they can learn again and again and ascend higher; so that then, when the earth has reached its goal, the earth itself will become a corpse, so to speak, fall away from the soul of all humanity, just as our body falls away from the soul when we pass through the gate of death. But then people will have come higher and higher. By becoming Christianized, people will be able to live on to new levels of existence as humanity. What is meant by Christ's saying that he himself wants to return to the physical body, but that he will return to the principle of building the body, that he will remain in the earthly existence until the end of the earth.

That is what I tried to express in what I say through Theodora, the seer in the Mystery Drama, where you can see how the Christ will become more and more familiar to human life, although he does not return to a physical body. But he is experienced in the physical body temples of human beings. And in this saying of his, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” lies the promise: Yes, I will make it true that I can enter into the souls of men, so that more and more people can come who, in the sense of Paul, can say, “Not I, but the Christ in me!”

Thus we see how we can contemplate in a small way spiritual science as a principle of life, by gaining the possibility of seeing certain qualities of our character and soul taking effect karmically between birth and death, and of seeing them working their way into the bodily organization of the next incarnation. And so we see how spiritual science presents the loftiest ideals to us and tells us what we will become — Christ-like human beings — when the Earth will become a corpse and fall away from the soul-like in man, when man will be called upon to progress to other planetary conditions. Spiritual science can thus give us the greatest ideals and can flow into the smallest circumstances of life. In this way it becomes practical for everyday life, and it can and should become more and more so. When we become anthroposophists in the sense that all our actions, no matter how remote from what might be considered anthroposophical activity, are imbued with anthroposophical thinking and feeling, only then can we say that our beings have been imbued with anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must be regarded not as a theory but as a way of life, but as a way of life that needs to be learned. And basically we must realize that we have to encourage ourselves through the true, concrete content of anthroposophy if it is to be a way of life for us, not wanting to say: I understand this from anthroposophy and that is the right thing to do, but rather that we first have to familiarize ourselves deeply with what spiritual science has to say to us. Then it must become the strength of our lives. And it can only do so when we permeate ourselves with it. But then it will do so in the smallest and in the greatest, then the perspective for the connections of human progress and for the smallest facts of everyday life will open up for us.

Translated by Catherine E. Creeger

Today in this branch meeting we will begin with several of life’s crucial issues that touch each of us daily. After that, we will rise to higher spiritual viewpoints for a while. I would like to start with two human qualities, two human errors or failings that are experienced as negative, as decreasing a person’s worth. We will speak about what we call envy and lying.

If you look around in life, you will easily notice that as a rule, there is a very natural antipathy to these two human qualities. Also, when we look up to other people as leaders among human beings, we see that they value the absence of these two failings. Goethe, for instance, was very concerned with self-knowledge and thinking about his own mistakes, and mentioned that while he had certain faults and certain assets, what seemed most important to him was that he could not count envy among his fadings. And the famous Benvenuto Cellini said that he was glad he didn’t need to accuse himself of lying. So we see that these great personalities sensed the importance of struggling against these two human qualities. And even the simplest, most unsophisticated individuals agree with leaders of humanity in their negative assessment of these failings.

If we ask ourselves why these two qualities are so instinctively condemned, we realize that almost nothing else is less compatible with one of the most important earthly qualities; envy and lying are incompatible with what we call empathy for other people. When we envy someone, we tend not to yield to the particular virtue devoted to the deepest, inmost kernel of that person’s being, to the divine in the other person. Actually, to empathize with someone is of value only when you are also able to appreciate the other person’s essence, his or her spiritual being. However, as a basis for empathy, appreciation for others includes recognition of their assets and the ability to take pleasure in their successes and level of development. All of this precludes envy. Envy shows itself to be a quality that is very closely related to an individual’s greatest egotism.

Something similar can be said about lying. If we tell an untruth, we break the law that applies to the truth—to create a bond that includes all individuals. What is true is the truth for all human beings. More than anything else, truth allows us to practice the development of a consciousness that includes all human beings. If we tell an untruth, we commit a heinous act against the bond meant to connect one human heart with another.

This is how things look when we consider them from the viewpoint of human beings. When we consider them from the viewpoint of spiritual science, we know that the effects of our earlier incarnations are being worked out in this lifetime, and that we are subject to many different influences. There are two great influences in particular that have to be worked through again and again—specifically, what we call the luciferic and the ahrimanic influences. We will not attempt to cover these from the cosmological point of view today, but will restrict ourselves to the life of human individuals. We will imagine that we have passed through many incarnations and that the power of Lucifer was already working on our astral body when we were going through our very first incarnation. Since then, this luciferic power has always been the power that tempts our astral body. Forces are present that proceed from Lucifer and exert an influence on our astral body. Basically, Lucifer’s efforts are directed toward gaining influence over the human astral body on Earth. We can find him in everything that pulls the astral body down, in all the qualities that live in our astral body as egotistical passions, desires, urges, and wishes. Thus, it must be clear that envy is one of Lucifer’s worst effects on us. Everything living in our soul that can be counted as envy falls into his territory, and each time we have an attack of envy, Lucifer takes hold of the urges in our astral body.

Ahriman, on the other hand, influences our ether body. Everything to do with disturbances of judgment derives from him—both the unintentional disturbance of arriving at a false judgment, and the deliberate one of lying. When we succumb to lying, Ahriman is at work in our ether body.

It is interesting that we feel these influences strongly enough to experience such great antipathy when they appear, and that people will do everything to combat these two qualities of envy and lying. You will not easily find people who consciously admit that they want to be envious. To be sure, “I envy you” has crept into our language as an idiom, but what it means is not so very bad; we do not mean actual envy when we say it. In any case, as soon as we notice envy or lying in ourselves, we do everything we can to combat it, and in doing so we take up the struggle against Lucifer and Ahriman in this particular area.

Often, however, something then happens that we should notice when applying ourselves to spiritual science. We can combat individual attacks of envy and lying, but when these qualities are stuck in our soul—when we have acquired them in earlier incarnations and are now combating them—they then appear as different qualities. When we try to combat a tendency to envy stemming from earlier incarnations, this envy puts on a mask. Lucifer says, “This person has noticed feelings of envy and is fighting me; I’ll turn this person over to my brother Ahriman.” And then a different influence takes effect, one that is a consequence of combating envy. Qualities that we are struggling against appear in disguise. Often the envy that we are fighting takes the form of an urge to seek out other people’s mistakes and to make them aware of them with a great deal of reproach. We encounter many people in our life who always discover the mistakes and negative aspects of others, as if with a certain clairvoyant strength. If we search for the basis of this phenomenon, we find that envy has been transformed into a compulsion to reproach, which the people in question take to be a very desirable quality. It is a good thing, so they say, to make people aware of the presence of their bad qualities. However, there is nothing more behind this compulsion to reproach than transformed envy in disguise. We should learn to recognize whether such qualities are the original ones or whether they are transformations of something else. In the process, we must consider whether such individuals were envious as children—perhaps we drove the envy out of them, and they have now become compulsive reproachers.

Lying also often transforms itself in our lifetime and shows itself in disguise. Lying can make us feel ashamed, but it’s not easily uprooted, and very often it metamorphoses into a certain superficiality with regard to the truth. It’s important for us to know these things so we can observe what we encounter in another person in life. People like this are satisfied with answers that make us ask, “How can they possibly be satisfied with an answer Eke that?” It is easy for them to say, “Yes, yes, of course, that’s the way it is.” Very often, this is the end product of the transformation of a personal tendency toward lying. We need to test the law of karma, particularly with regard to such qualities. People don’t pay attention to them, for among all the various beings at work on different planes, human beings are the most forgetful.

For instance, if we are acquainted with a person and remain close over the years, we can observe how some things in this person change. If we are still close after thirty years, we might find noteworthy connections within that person’s life when we look back over a lifetime together, while the person in question knows nothing about it, and has forgotten it all. We really should observe such things in life, however. Important connections become evident. For example, a certain person is envious as a child. Later, the envy is no longer evident, but at a later age it appears transformed as a lack of independence in the person in question, of wanting to be dependent on others. It appears in the form of ideas of being unable to stand on one’s own two feet, of always needing other people around to advise and help. A specific moral weaknesS appears as a consequence of the transformation of envy. When someone has this moral weakness, we will always find that this is the karmic consequence of transformed envy.

When transformed, lying creates a shyness later in life. In later life, someone who tended to lie as a child doesn’t dare to look people in the eye. Out in the country, people have an instinctive elemental knowledge of this, although it doesn’t function on the level of concepts. They say that you shouldn’t trust a person who can’t look you in the eye. Shyness and reserve that stem not from modesty but from fear of meeting other people are the karmic consequences of lying during the same incarnation.

What appears in this way as a moral weakness within an incarnation has an organizing influence on the next incarnation. The soul’s weakness resulting from envy cannot significantly destroy the body during this present incarnation, when the body has already been built up. But when we die and return in a new incarnation, the effect of these forces is such that they become organic weaknesses in building up the new body. We find that people who have possessed transformed envy in a previous incarnation form a weak body. We say without prejudice that a person is weak simply because people need to know what is weak and what is strong. When a person is easily susceptible to different influences and puts up no resistance, then we know that the person s body is weak, and that this weakness is the result of envy that was transformed earlier.

Now we must realize, however, that when a child is born into a particular environment as a weak child, we should not imagine that only this inner karma is active, but also that people are brought together in their surroundings for a reason, and not by chance. This aspect of karma—our adaptation to our environment—is extremely easy to see. A flower such as an edelweiss, for example, can only thrive in the environment to which it is adapted, and a human being also thrives only in the environment to which he or she is adapted. The simplest possible logic necessarily tells us this, for we can only understand life when we take this into account. Each being conforms to its environment; nothing is by chance. Therefore, we are born into the group of people we have envied or reproached; we find ourselves with our weak body among the people we have envied for their accomplishments in a previous incarnation, or something like this. It is infinitely important to know these things, because we understand fife only when we include them in our considerations. When a child with a weak body is born into our surroundings, we should ask ourselves how we are meant to relate to this. The right way to relate to it must be the most morally meaningful way—that is, to forgive. This will lead most surely to the goal in this case, and is also the best education for such a person. It has an incredibly educational effect when we can lovingly forgive a weak child who is born into our surroundings. The person through whom forgiveness occurs in a truly forceful way will see that the child becomes stronger and stronger because of it. Loving forgiveness must even affect thinking, because that makes it possible for the child to gather the forces needed to turn old karma around and get it moving in the right direction. Through this the child will also become physically strong. A child such as this often demonstrates unpleasant qualities. The healing effect is strongest when we love the child in the depths of our heart, and we soon find out just how effective the healing is.

Something comparable applies when we look at the other quality: lying. Within a single incarnation, the person who lies becomes shy in later life. This is a soul quality. But in the next incarnation, this quality takes effect as the body’s architect. In this case, the child appears not merely weak, but unable to acquire a proper relationship to its surroundings—that is, the child is mentally handicapped. In this case, we must think that we are the people to whom this person often lied, and we must repay the bad that happened to us with the best we can offer. We must try to communicate a great deal of the truths of spiritual life to such a person, and then we see how that person begins to blossom. We must always keep in mind that this individual lied to us a lot in earlier incarnations, and do everything possible to bring about a right relationship between this child and his or her surroundings.

When we consider these things, we find that as human beings we are always called upon to help other people come to terms with their karma in the right way. People understand nothing of karma if they think others must be left to their own karma. If we were to meet individuals who had lied to us, and we were to believe these people must come to grips with their karma by themselves, this would show that we do not have a correct understanding of karma. The right idea would be to provide help wherever possible. When it is said that we should leave people to their karma, this could only apply in the esoteric realm, but never in actual life.

Let’s imagine that we would make an effort to help other people according to their individual karma. Take a person with a shy nature. We concern ourselves lovingly with that person, creating a connection between that person and ourselves. We will then see in later life that something comes back to us from this person. We must leave this to karma, however; we are not allowed to hope for it. We must regard it as our obligation to help the other person. At this point we come upon a subtle law: Everything we do to help another person bear and overcome karma not only helps that person, it also does something for us. As a rule, however, what we do for the sake of our own quick progress will not help much. The only thing that can bear fruit for an individual is what he or she does for others. We cannot send good things in our own direction. The best effects come from helping another person overcome his or her karma, since what we do for others is a gain for humanity. We can do nothing for ourselves; that must be done in turn by others. That’s why we must understand empathy for other people in the highest sense of the word. If we develop this empathy in the highest sense, then we also feel an obligation to empathize with another person with regard to envy and lying. In this way we develop a feeling of solidarity that extends to all human souls.

In fact, humanity possesses the potential for each human being to always feel a connection to humanity as a whole, and this feeling, in all its different manifestations in life, should also be present and active in the individual’s struggles against Lucifer and Ahriman. By helping people whose physical bodies have become weak through the influence of envy that has been overcome, by coming to understand how we should behave toward these people, it can become clear to us that the world is filled with the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman. How they can be overcome in the course of the Earth’s evolution also becomes clear. Anyone who traces such connections in his or her feelings necessarily comes to an ever deepening feeling for all of humanity. The possibility exists, so to speak, for each of us to feel what connects him or her to all human beings. However, this feeling has changed greatly in the course of human evolution. If we go back three or four thousand years, the feeling of what human beings have in common was very pronounced in everyone.

If we go back still further—back through the post-Atlantean cultures, back to old Atlantis, and still further back—we come to an incarnation in which we came down into a physical body for the first time. Before that, we existed in a spiritual state—or so it was still said three or four thousand years ago. At that time, wisdom-filled feelings such as this were to be found in all people. The human soul asked, “What does it mean to be a human being?” And it answered itself, “Before I came down into my body for the first time, I existed in a sea of divine-spiritual interweaving life. I was within it, and all other human souls were within it. That was our common point of origin.” This basic feeling in the souls of human beings made it possible for them to feel kinship, to feel that they had something in common with all human beings, because they felt that all human souls had a common origin. And if we recall how all the ancient mystery schools worked on people to make them good people who would be receptive to the most profound, intimate, and moving feelings, we can see that this was always done by pointing to their common origin, to the fact that all human beings proceed from a common divine source. It was easy to sound this note in their souls then, but it became more and more difficult. For example, if this note had been sounded then in the number of people now sitting here, it would have made an overwhelming impression.

But human feeling for our common origin became ever colder. This was necessary because humanity had to pass through a certain point in evolution. And if I describe that point, we will also have to look toward our human future, toward the goal of Earth’s evolution.

Just as our origin is common to all of us, just as all human souls sprang from a common source, so too all human souls will come together in a common goal. And how can we reach this goal so that we can continue to evolve once Earth has achieved its own goal and the material sphere beneath us is dissipating and falling away? How can we have a common understanding of this goal so that we proceed into our future together? The awareness of what we have in common will need to extend into the deepest sinews of our soul. This is only possible if we develop a feeling for our future, similar to the feeling people in ancient times had for their human origin, a feeling that is growing ever colder among humanity. Now, the feeling and the certainty of a common goal held by all human beings must come to life more and more in our souls. Regardless of our individual degree of development or where we stand in life, the very fact that we are human beings must make possible a soul experience that allows us to say we are all striving for a single goal. In looking toward this goal, we must also be able to realize that this is something that can concern each and every human being.

In our most profound inner depths, we must be able to find something in which we can all come together in a single point. Esoteric teaching calls this “something” the Christ. People thousands of years ago felt, sensed, and knew that our souls are all born out of a common divine source. Similarly, we will increasingly learn that just as we can be united and come together in something we think in common, something that can live in all human heads, there is also something that can live as a common element in all human hearts, something that can flow through all human hearts like the blood of life. If this pervades us more and more warmly in incarnations to come, these incarnations will then run their course in such a way that Earth, having achieved its goal, will be able to proceed to the next planetary stage—the Jupiter state—and human souls will come together as one in the common element of the Christ.

For this to be a possibility, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place. In Jesus, the Christ became human so that this common stream of warmth could flow from human heart to human heart. The feeling for our common human goal has its origin in the cross on Golgotha, which connects past and future. This is the goal of future human evolution. It is not important whether we retain the name “Christ” for what we have in common. What is important is that all human beings learn to grasp that the feeling people originally had for their common origin is being transformed into a feeling for our common earthly future.

Earth’s evolution is divided into halves—one lasting until the time of the cross on Golgotha, and the other from that time until the end of Earth. We human beings have a great deal to do to grasp the Christ and his evolution. Once these things have been grasped, we as human beings will come together in a common goal for the Jupiter evolution. All the knowledge we have as individuals culminates in finding this principle of the Christ-like.

Today we tried to recognize how karma works from one incarnation to another to shape the body. Having done so, we understand how human beings can become more and more perfect as they go through incarnation after incarnation. We are still speaking of the Christ, though without using that name, because we are turning away from the personal element. When we are confronted with a child who lies to us, we ask ourselves how we can help this child transform his or her karma. We do not ask whether being lied to hurts us. We turn to the very center of the child’s being, and in doing so we help karma move on. In this way, deep human compassion will increasingly take effect in the world.

Thus, what we call spiritual science—if we also include in it a real grasp of life’s processes related to reincarnation and karma—prepares us to truly grasp the Christ impulse in the world. How people formulate this in words is not important. Those who really understand this evolutionary law cannot help but be Christians, whether they are Hindus or Muslims or belong to some other religious tradition. What’s important is that they take this impulse into their souls, the impulse for a common goal for humanity, as in ancient times the impulse to look toward our common human origin was alive in people.

Thus, spiritual science always leads to the Christ impulse. It cannot do otherwise. It would also be possible to summarize spiritual science as it appears today by saying, “Even if those who meet spiritual science want to know nothing of Christianity, in truth they are already being led to the Christ.” In reality, that is where they are being led, even if they resist this in words.

Today we have shown our souls something that has a direct connection to life. We have seen how we should act when a child lies or is envious. It must be clear to us that the thread of karma runs through all of the incarnations of a human soul, that its karma is spun according to its destiny. Having looked back to our origin in God, we look to God again when we look ahead to our human goal.

When we look back on the culture of the ancient rishis, we see that they pointed to the human origins, to the world in which human beings existed before descending into incarnation. This teaching persisted for hundreds and thousands of years. The great Buddha taught it when he spoke of how everything that created a connection to the world of our origin has been lost to people because they cling to embodiment. He challenged people to leave the world of embodiment so that their souls could once again live in the spiritual worlds of their origin. The prophets, in announcing the coming of the Christ, also pointed to a future in which human beings would once again discover their proper earthly goal. And then there was the Christ himself, and the act of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through this Mystery of Golgotha, the individual human being can now be led toward our Earth s divine-spiritual future.

Perhaps there is nothing quite as shattering as two similar statements of the Buddha and the Christ, which present to our souls the contrast between the old times and the new. As the Buddha stands among his pupils, he draws their attention to the body and says, “I look back from incarnation to incarnation and see how I have again and again entered a human body such as the one I now wear. Again and again, the temple of this body has been built up for me by the gods. Again and again the soul attempts to enter this bodily temple in new incarnations. Now, however, I know that I no longer need to return to a bodily temple. I know its beams are broken, its pillars collapsed. Through my knowledge, I have freed my soul from this body. The wish and desire to return to such a body has been killed.” This was a great and powerful result of the old time of looking back on our human origin. The Buddha, with his pupils and successors, strove to become free of the body. How powerfully different this is from the Christ standing before his intimate pupils and saying, “Tear down the temple of My body, and I will build it up again in three days.” These are the words of the Christ, taken at face value, regardless of how we interpret them. The Christ does not long to be free of the temple of the body. He wants to build it up again.

It is not as if the Christ himself would be there again in such a physical body in future incarnations. But what he teaches his pupils and all human beings is to return into this earthly temple again and again in order to make the Christ impulse greater and more intense in each successive incarnation, so that we human beings are able to take up more and more of earthly existence. In the end, we will be able to say that we spent these incarnations working to become more like the Christ. We become more like him by taking into this bodily temple what the Christ permitted to stream forth from his own being from the cross on Golgotha. We allow this to stream from human soul to human soul, for only through this can we understand each other now. This is what all human souls will have in common in our earthly future. And then the time will come when Earth as a planet will cease to exist, will fall into dust, and human beings in a spiritualized state will proceed to their next incarnation on a different planet.

The words of the great Buddha—“I feel how the columns of my bodily temple no longer bear weight, how its beams are breaking apart”—can stand before our souls as the endpoint of our common human origin. And when we turn to what the Christ says to his disciples—“I will build up the temple of this body in three days”—this can be for us like the beginning of the time that points to our earthly goal. We can expand upon this statement, saying: “In death, this temple falls apart, but we know that the best forces we have acquired in this incarnation are used for our next incarnation. We have received these forces by devoting our souls to the knowledge of Christ. In this way, we will always make progress from incarnation to incarnation.” When we human beings build up this bodily temple for the last time, we will have arrived at an understanding of our common earthly goal for the future.

It is the Mystery of Golgotha alone that can be the common impulse for humanity as a whole, for human and Earth evolution.

Excerpts from notes taken by Nanna Thorne from a lecture by Rudolf Steiner in Kristiania (Oslo) on December 4, 1921, translated by Agnes Steineger and Karl Engqvist in a letter dated November 27, 1966 from Karl Engqvist (Järna) to Edwin Froböse (Dornach)

Dear Mr. Froböse.

Unfortunately, I am writing this to you from my bed. I suddenly became quite ill yesterday.

Thank you very much for your kind words.

I would now like to add a few things that were not included in the translation by me, because they come from Miss Nanna Thorne, at least for the most part.

The title reads: “I entered this sense world”, Oslo, May 21, 1923. Then it continues like this:

“When Dr. Steiner was in Oslo for the first time in 1921, he spoke about the mantram: ‘I entered this sense world’, and likewise the last time he was up here, in May 1923. Today a report is to be given of this last lecture. It was therefore the last thing he entrusted to the esotericists here in Norway.”

Here, Miss Steineger has translated the first sentence incorrectly. It should probably read: “[...] he spoke for the first time about the mantram [...]”. - The heading was certainly added by Nanna Thorne. - It is also written at the top, in brackets: “(Is the mantram read?)”

Before the two lectures, there are three mantras on a left-hand page in the book: “I entered this world of the senses”, “First know the earnest guardian”, “O man, know thyself”.

---

The lecture from 1921 begins like this:

Everyone should realize that they are a spirit, come from the spiritual worlds and are only down here for a short time.

Why does the human spirit have to come here to Earth, where it has to go through so much?..

An infinite desire for earthly life, to bring new life germs, fills the human spirit. That is why it descends again and again...

A person creates their karma through their thoughts...

There is also another inheritance that man must take with him into earthly life: original sin... Lucifer... Ahriman, the lord of death...

Another consequence of man's dried-up, killing thinking is the point of view of science regarding the laws of nature... Thoughts and ideas essentially revolve around machines, mechanics and the like. The life of thought has become earthbound, poor and dried up; Ahriman, the god of death, now has the power, and to such an extent that not only the human soul perishes, but the physical human organism is also damaged, it becomes paralyzed and is killed, the material dies. ...

And not only man will stiffen and go towards death, but all of nature. ...

And just as nature here on earth is heading towards death, so too is the universe... It is not enough to know about the new life-force of Xri; if it is not worked into people through the will, one will nevertheless face spiritual death.... this new life-force that is given to man by grace...

... Ex Deo Nascimur

If the esotericist is to see into the spiritual worlds, he must first meet the “guardian of the threshold”... Before he lets the esotericist in, he takes away the use of the physical senses; therefore, the esotericist must have developed occult organs in advance to replace them.

Likewise, the Dweller takes from him everything he has absorbed through the mind. ... This, that one takes the sense world for reality, also makes it impossible to get clarity about oneself, to get to know one's own nature.

Everything seen in space is dead. Once the gods created it. Now they have abandoned it, they have moved away. It is the work of the gods, but they themselves are gone; matter is dead, it is permeated by Ahriman, and here in this dead man does not find his true being. Nor can one find one's true nature as long as one allows oneself to be deceived by the spirits of the age. ... It is important to see the errors of one's own time (that is, epoch, Karl Engqvist), to rise above them and then to try to live in time, with time and for time.

In Christo morimur.

In this struggle to arrive at one's true self, these words will resound:

O man, know thyself.

It is Xri (short for Karl Enggvist), the world word, that makes these words resound through everything that life on earth has to give.

You do not find your own being just by looking into yourself, but by seeing everything that is in the cosmos, everything that is around us in space. There the image of one's own self is spread out.

It is not only in space that you get to know your higher self. Space belongs to the physical world. But behind space, time is at work through everything that lives in time. There one must also find one's self (which was awakened to conscious life in man through Xri[s] (abbreviation by Karl Enggvist) death), learn to understand how this higher self has fought its way out... through what happens in time. One must direct one's attention to the fact that time is a creative being that incessantly sends its impulses among people so that they may develop their ego here on earth, may find their ego. ...

When man recognizes his ego as that which stands behind things in space and behind what he has experienced in time, and when he sees the meaning of it all, then the ego is consciously born in him, and then he himself will one day become a creative word of the world... But the living, fully conscious spirit lives among the divine beings.

Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

The lecture is 19 pages long in Fräulein Steineger's handwriting. The one from May 21, 1923 is 21 pages long.

Since the class existed before the Christmas Conference, it follows, I think, that the institutions and agreements that existed before the Christmas Conference were not destroyed by the Christmas Conference, and thus neither was Rudolf Steiner's will to Mrs. Marie Steiner. I feel tremendously uplifted and inspired to have been able to contribute to this fact. Very warm greetings, also from my wife,

Karl Engqvist

The Vidar group tried to get Fräulein Steineger's inheritance after her death, but my friends explained to them that she had given me testamentary power of attorney to dispose of it. What luck!

Emil Grosheintz: Does anyone wish to speak about the treasurer's report and the statement of accounts?

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to ask a question. So, this devaluation, which is calculated at 23,354.65 francs, is that an approximate equivalent or does it have a completely different context? We have always indicated the Swiss franc amounts corresponding to the German mark amounts, which is now a purely illusory thing. Is there now something that corresponds to the equivalent, or is there a different context?

Mr. Lupschewitz: The loans were originally valued at 123 per 100 marks. We have reduced all our mark amounts to 100, and that is why this exchange rate adjustment has been made.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, but that is not what I mean. I mean whether the two items are equivalent to each other, whether they have a connection.

Mr. Englert: No, these 23,354.65 francs are the compensation because these loans were calculated at 123.

Mr. Lupschewitz: The conversion of this sum is already included in this amount.

Mr. Englert: The connection lies in the number 100.

Rudolf Steiner: Certainly, but I mean, if we don't have the francs 23,354.65 here in the balance account on the left side, we would have an illusory balance account because of these francs 23,354.65.

Mr. Englert: That is the balance of debit and credit.

Rudolf Steiner: The other thing I would have liked to ask is this: an account has been opened at the Munich branch, has it not? “The German marks in the account are a reserve for us for a later date under the current circumstances.” Are they not usable for the present, and can they not be redeemed at all?

Mr. Englert: Yes, but then we would have a valuta loss.

Rudolf Steiner: So legally it would be perfectly possible to transfer this account, and it is only because of the valuta loss?

Mr. Englert: Yes, up to 2,000 marks at a time. I was at a branch office in Berlin and that is where I was told.

Rudolf Steiner: I just wanted to say this so that the members are aware that this bank balance will remain in Munich for the time being, not because it is legally impossible to transfer it, but only because of the exchange rate.

Emil Grosheintz: Does anyone else wish to speak? If not, I will give the floor to the auditors.

[...]

Emil Grosheintz: Does anyone wish to speak about the chairpersons' report?

Rudolf Steiner: What I want to say, dear friends, is not to be understood as if I wanted to somehow supplement the reports of the esteemed chairperson or find them incomplete, but I just want to make a suggestion about something that has been on my mind for a long time. Anyone familiar with the research that is done on what has happened in such areas in the past and is still happening today, for example in our construction, knows how great the difficulties are for later analysts to get hold of some details and to establish the history correctly. I emphasize that, for example, even today it is not possible to state with complete certainty when Raphael moved from Florence to Rome. In the books, the dates vary between 1505 and 1508. But in such matters, one can get a little help from the future – and objectivity alone would require that.

I would like to suggest that in the reports that will be given at our general meetings and that will form the basis for the history of the building movement, the names of our loyal supporters should really be listed in detail, along with the movement of funds and other matters. Anyone who is aware of the endless labor that has gone into the great building work will actually consider it a matter of course that all the loyal contributors appear in the reports in the first place, with a description of their work and so on. Perhaps this will be of particular importance and significance under the current circumstances, quite apart from the fact that, in my opinion, objective reporting has to pay tribute to those who have done a truly invaluable and immeasurable amount of work to complete the group and our construction.

If, for example, it has been emphasized how hard we have worked on the group, I would like to stress that one thing must be kept in mind: this group could not have been created without the loyal cooperation of those who have dedicated their labor to the cause; it could not have been created at all, least of all under the present conditions. You know how often I was unable to be here on the spot, and how much work had to be done without me being able to be there in any way. The sentence, for example, that Raphael would of course be Raphael even without hands is a very beautiful paradox, but I would ask you to consider more carefully whether we would have any paintings by Raphael if Raphael had been born without hands. Likewise, I ask you to consider more carefully how much of the entire structure would be there, despite all the ideas and so on, if we did not have such a large number of loyal, dedicated employees, truly dedicated not only with their physical labor, but dedicated with their whole soul, their powers of invention and their entire artistry.

My dear friends, we have much to complain about, especially in view of the actions undertaken by some members against our society and our movement. This may also seem paradoxical, but it is not without connection to the fact that it is compensation for some things that are somewhat lacking in our movement. And that is: in our movement, we do not understand how to be grateful enough for achievements; we do not understand enough how to recognize the achievements of others. And if we want to improve the karma that brings us such strange, irresponsible, even unbelievable opposition from our own members, then a great deal can be done to improve it if we understand how to be truly grateful for such loyal service to the movement. I ask the chairpersons not to take this as a criticism of their reports, but only as a suggestion that I would like to make. I would very much like to see an appreciation of the loyal service of our members included in our reports.

Following the discussion of Mieta Weller's motion to rename the Johannesbau at the Goetheanum:

Emil Grosheintz: According to our statutes, we cannot make a decision today; we can only express our views, we can only explore whether it is desirable at all to change the name, and if so, when it could be changed. Or perhaps someone would like to suggest a different name? After all, Goethe used the name “Humanus” in his secrets. Could we not tie in with this name?

Albrecht Wilhelm Sellin: Dear friends, this is also new for us who are present here. Those out there in the branches don't know anything about it yet. But it seems to me that it would be more considerate to first spread the word in the branches about what has been discussed here, namely that we intend to call our building the “Goetheanum”. If we were to take a decision now, we would be presenting the members outside with a fait accompli. I therefore propose that we do not take a decision until next year and in the meantime work in the branches to prepare the understanding for this decision.

Rudolf Steiner: There is certainly no need to rush into a decision right away. And besides, it would be desirable for statutory matters not to play too great a role in such things, so that it is not something regulated that plays into these things, but the living life. You see, my dear friends, a decision would be extremely difficult today anyway and, under the current circumstances, would have to be very one-sided, because it seems to me that if the decision were taken today, a large number of members would not be able to vote. Under the present circumstances, only the members of neutral countries and the Entente powers could vote today; the German members would, of course, be excluded. A very one-sided decision would have to be taken, would it not? But it is not a matter of taking a decision, but rather of knowing whether you really want to accommodate the intention that I have expressed in the last few days in the public lecture, which is my subjective intention, my subjective conviction, because I never express anything other than my intention, than my conviction. If one wants to accommodate this, then it will be more a matter of making this thing popular so that it becomes established.

This corresponds more to the sphere from which this suggestion comes – if one wants to call it a suggestion, because, isn't it true that Goethe, in addition to being international, is also a German, and that is very important under the current circumstances. And, isn't it true that one might also say that one makes such a proposal not out of German chauvinism – which has to do not with attitude but with origin – but out of German spirituality. And here I must confess that when one really says something like that out of the German temperament, it is already linked to a certain quality in the German that is less well known. The true German character is an enemy of all organization, an enemy of all organization, an enemy of all regimentation, because [true] Germanness does not correspond to regimentation, to the ubiquitous drawing up of statutes and so on. I consider the existence of statutes, of statutory matters, to be a necessary evil in relation to the outside world, but as a curse on any social activity, which must be based on living together. And this is actually the German view, because to say that the German is based on regimentation, on organization and so on, is one of the most incredible defamations of the German character, which in reality is based in its depths on precisely the opposite qualities.

Therefore, I personally do not really care whether the statutes, which after all are not made for us but for the external representation of the matter, state the name “Johannes-Bau” or “ABC-Bau” or “Goethe-Bau” or any other name. I believe that what matters is how we see things and what we are able to do for ourselves and for the cause, not for the statutory, in order to make it popular in this way in the world.

Have we not unfortunately always distinguished these two things far too little, kept them far too little apart? The anthroposophical movement only gains in significance when it is based on living activity, on direct living activity. My dear friends, it makes no difference to the anthroposophical movement whether it has these or those statutes, whether it bears this or that name, but it is of the utmost greatest conceivable value for the anthroposophical movement if it has valuable members who, with full hearts and full understanding, intervene wherever they can, wherever it is in their power and karma, in the current cultural currents. Our movement is actually based on the human personality of our members. And that is what must be taken into account: that everyone carries the matter in their hearts, regardless of what name it has. There are difficulties associated with changing the name “Johannesbau” and difficulties associated with keeping it.

Unfortunately, not all of our members have a clear idea of the difficulties that will arise for the anthroposophical movement in the near future and how they will manifest in all their details. There are certainly difficulties such as those mentioned by Mademoiselle Payen. On the other hand, powerful difficulties will certainly arise if we retain the name “Johannesbau”, if only for the simple reason that in the near future - I am only drawing attention to one point among many - it may be very important to have a name that does not cause any misunderstandings in public. The name “Johannesbau” not only gives rise to the misunderstanding that it takes its name from Johannes the Baptist, Johannes the Evangelist or even Johannes Thomasius; above all, a large number of people associate the name “Johannesbau” with the Freemasonry of Johannes. And the fact that we differ from St. John Freemasonry and have nothing to do with it may, under certain circumstances, be something that has great significance for the near future, especially in the current war conditions. The things that are developing out of our present cultural porridge and cultural chaos will play a much greater role than one might think. Of course, some difficulties may arise if the misunderstanding persists that some kind of offshoot of St. John's Freemasonry has been established on this Dornach hill, which is not the case given the nature of our movement.

All these things are only intended to show that difficulties will arise whether we leave the name or change it. Much is being done to keep our cause out of misunderstanding, if such things do not recur as I had to fight against four years ago in a way that was so unpleasant and unappealing to me. At that time, articles about our, as it was called there, “temple building” came from a certain quarter and were published in the entire European press. The tendency to create misunderstanding after misunderstanding, to press the whole thing into a sectarian hustle and bustle - unconsciously, of course, with the best will in the world - this tendency, which was the basis of those articles at the time and which I had to fight hard, this tendency must not be repeated. If at that time the action against these things had found more support - of course all this should have been done in a friendly way - that would have been very good. It was very unfortunate that at that time these things about the 'Dornach Temple' and so on went around the whole world.

So, what we can do personally to put things in their proper perspective, to give everyone a clear idea, that is what we should do. But this has by no means happened everywhere in our circles, because there were really quite different tendencies in many cases. How often I had to say – which I don't really like – that someone here or there represents something with which I strongly disagree, but which he says I myself would have said. These things are related to a certain trait in the members: they want to represent something, but not take responsibility for it.

Our task should be to create clarity. Perhaps the whole thing can be brought to a favorable conclusion if we do not focus, as if hypnotized, on bringing about a change of statutes and name, but rather concentrate on creating clarity personally in all areas and, above all, on putting this fact into the proper perspective, namely that it really corresponds to the matter when we speak of the “Goetheanum”. This occurred in the most unbiased way, for example, in the report of our dear and esteemed Mr. Sellin, in which the name 'Goetheanum' appeared [as a matter of course]. And if this wish is not forgotten the day after tomorrow, but if we work in this direction, we will serve the cause much better than if we were to make a decision right now. Otherwise, we will only provoke one person saying 'Johannesbau' and another saying 'Goetheanum', while a third person will think: 'Yes, I no longer know what the name actually is, one person says one thing and another says another. It will be much more useful if we imprint the matter into life than if we organize and regulate it, which would not be in Goethe's sense at all, but if we try to bring it to life.

I think that is how it was actually meant, what has been suggested here, otherwise it would be really difficult to find the right thing today. For it is also a matter of tact as to who can vote and who cannot, because the different regions of the world naturally have very different views and feelings about these things. I imagine, for example – and I do not wish to offend anyone – that if a Goethe Society did not yet exist in the British Isles and one were founded there today, it would perhaps not find too many members. But if a Shakespeare Society were founded in Germany today – it is already there, of course – it would have no end of work filling its membership lists, because people in Central Europe today would join a Shakespeare Society in huge numbers.

Of course, there are different feelings and opinions about such things, and stirring up these wasps' nests naturally causes all sorts of difficulties. That's just the way it is. But, as I said, if a Shakespeare Society were established in Germany today, it would be very popular and would find numerous supporters. But it no longer needs to be founded, because it has been in existence for decades.

Emil Grosheintz: Does anyone else wish to say something about this matter? In any case, we have come so far today that no one should be prevented from donating a “Goetheanum” in our “Johannesbau”. If no one else wishes to speak on this matter, I would like to ask if anything else needs to be said under “Miscellaneous”. If this is not the case, I declare today's meeting closed and ask Dr. Steiner to say a few words.

Rudolf Steiner: It has been requested that I say a few words about the purpose of the group, which has been mentioned in the various reports.

Perhaps the best way to understand the thoughts that express the meaning of this group and, ultimately, the meaning of our entire structure, is to continue the train of thought that I expressed just last Monday in connection with the artistic development of Europe in the period of transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantic era. The aim has been to carry out this construction in such a way that it presents a unified whole in all its parts and components. And if one disregards the fact that this unity has been somewhat compromised by the history of the building, then one will be able to see this unity when it is finished, and also notice that this unity has been somewhat compromised by the vicissitudes that have taken place around the building. This is also something that should of course be made a little more popular by our members.

You have to remember: the building was originally supposed to be constructed in Munich. As it was conceived in Munich, the idea was that it should be built in a city, among other building complexes and the like. Of course, it was out of the question to connect such a building idea with current architectural styles and forms. Therefore, it was necessary at the time to think of the building primarily in terms of interior design, and to make it as simple as possible on the outside, inconspicuous. I often said during the Munich period, when the building was still conceived in Munich – of course such things are paradoxical, but it does not matter – that I would have liked most of all to see the building in its basic idea as interior architecture after entering through the gate, and if it appeared as a hill on the outside, covered with grass, so that you could walk over it; on the outside you would only have a hill, you would not see anything at all, and inside you would only have interior architecture. This was, of course, not feasible, if only for the reason that one cannot allow something hidden to become overgrown with grass, and because of the effects of the weather, of course. And so attempts were made to do it in a somewhat modified way, in that they wanted to place the building in the middle of the terrain and erect tall apartment buildings around it, so that actually nothing of the building would have been seen from the street, from the surrounding area, in terms of the external architecture.

As I said, this and many other related aspects were justified at the time when it was intended to erect the building in the middle of a city. When the necessity arose to transfer the building to Dornach, to erect it as a building on a hill that can be seen from afar, it was necessary to at least create some kind of exterior architecture for the interior architecture. For now the building was visible from all sides; now it was necessary to demand that the building be in harmony with the landscape in a certain sense.

Our members at that time naturally had a tendency, in the most commendable way, to stage the matter as quickly as possible. Rethinking the idea of interior design in such a way that there would now be complete unity between interior design and exterior design was not possible at that speed. Therefore, the original interior design concept remained essentially unchanged, and the exterior architecture was then designed around it. Of course, if you look at the building with an artistic eye, you can see this today, and it must be emphasized that the unified concept is compromised as a result.

However, it is always good to make it clear to people who approach this building with an artistic mind that it is intended to provide a starting point, that we do not intend for this building to represent the completion of some kind of idea. A suggestion should be given. If later times express in similar buildings what was inaugurated here in terms of architectural style – perhaps the expression is not correct – but rather in terms of building forms and building ideas, then of course some things will appear infinitely more perfect than they could ever be in the first attempt. In this respect, of course, the unity has not been fully expressed; but one can already see the intention; because it has of course been tried later, with various difficulties, to maintain the unity in some way.

If it is said that the group is in a sense a kind of crowning of the whole structure, then that is absolutely right. Only one must bear in mind that precisely in the design of this group the whole basic impulse of our movement comes into consideration, that therefore precisely in this group everything traditional, everything merely historical must take a back seat to the future-oriented, inspiring. Those who wish to give a group the name of a Christ-Group must do so out of their own personal conviction, if the matter makes an impression on them, so that they can address the central figure as Christ. Here too, it is not good to set anything in stone from the outset.

What one encounters at first is the representative of humanity, the all-spiritual, internalized humanity. Of course, some will immediately associate this internalized humanity with the Christ presence. They will be right. But to stigmatize again, to call the group the Christ group and the like, that will not be good. Leave it to each person who wants to interpret this group, who looks at it, to decide what name to give it. The works of art are always the less good ones that need names to make them clear. A work of art must speak for itself. This work of art should also – it is quite paradoxical for me to say this, of course it cannot be, but it is good for characterization if I say it – this work of art should also have an effect if the history of Christianity were not there, if one did not know it through history, only through what is placed in the room. As a work of art, it must have an effect. It must speak for itself. Any interpretation is already a mistake.

Therefore, of course, all traditional Christ physiognomies and the like had to be avoided, which have changed a lot over time - I have often spoken about this in lectures. Above all, one thing had to be taken into account for the whole group, which is closely related to the impulse of our movement. The representations of Christ have increasingly taken on a form that places Christ in the midst of the physical hustle and bustle of people. Especially in recent times, in the age of naturalism and materialism, it has been welcomed everywhere as appealing to bring Christ as close as possible to humanity. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest": People are sitting around the table, Jesus enters as a human being among humans, distinguishing himself as little as possible! After all, this is what theology strives for: the ‘simple man from Nazareth’ who has as little of the divine as possible. For the divine disturbs people of the present.

In the case of our figure, the exact opposite had to be aimed for in the representative of humanity. We are dealing with something that takes place purely in the spiritual. We are dealing with the representative of humanity's struggle with Ahriman and Lucifer, with something that is deeply rooted in human existence, and that is therefore going in the opposite direction to what is currently popular. The times we live in are characterized by a desire to reduce everything to naturalism, to the immediacy of everyday life! In keeping with the impulses of the anthroposophical movement, we had to get as far away as possible from the sympathies of the present day, we had to embody a narrative, an action, an event that completely eludes external sensory observation, and we had to do it in sculpture. It would have been impossible to try it with a material other than wood. For some truly secret and mysterious reasons, the spiritual and soul-like can best be shaped in wood, can best be expressed in wood. And what might have to be considered rules for sculpture, as it is often done today, had to be broken, had to be replaced by something else when creating this group.

Figures such as Ahriman and Lucifer, and to a certain extent the figure in the middle, must be created from within, from the self-creative spiritual-soul, disregarding any model in the usual sense of the word.

But this is the hope for art in general. Because enough models have already been created. And the fact that contemporary art repeatedly goes back to models is precisely what makes it dead. I have already explained in my considerations that the Greeks did not rely on models, but created from other sources. Creating from a model is only a transition, an intermediate state of artistic development. And so, with this group in particular, a start had to be made on creating out of living spirituality itself, overcoming everything naturalistic.

Perhaps these things contain some of the main values of this group's attempt. But this is the case with the whole building. If you consider that the whole idea of building is based on something opposite to what has been valid so far in building ideas, you will have a basis for what you as members of the anthroposophical movement should actually popularize in relation to this building.

You see, I have expressed this wish today out of a truly heartfelt desire to take into account the achievements of the individual contributors to the artistic works, because in the work, in which positions were available for the work on this building, a great deal of selflessness was really necessary, and it was most necessary for the artists. In a sense, everyone who provided their labor had to make sacrifices in relation to everything else that is demanded of them, for example, when they work as artists or otherwise in the external world.

Take just one thing: every building from the architectural point of view that has been valid until now is based on the fact that an interior space has walls and these walls close it off. This enclosure, whether in ancient times the image of a god or the god himself was enclosed in the temple, or in the Middle Ages the community was enclosed in the Gothic building, it was all based on enclosure, on the concept of the wall as an enclosure, as a covering to the inside, to cover the space. For us, of course, only when you are inside the room, the opposite is the case: for us, the walls, with everything that is sculpturally and architecturally intended for these walls, do not give a conclusion, but a self-abolition. So that when you are inside, you get the feeling through the walls of being connected to infinity, not closed off from the outside by a wall, but of being continued into infinity through the wall. The wall cancels itself out; the wall destroys itself in itself through its forms.

Once you understand this, in the forms, then you will know what the building idea actually rests on in this case. It is the opposite of how such building ideas were before. It will also be possible for other buildings. If you look at the basic forms of the house Duldeck, you will see that once it is inhabited, it will also give a feeling of merging with the world, of striving out of being locked up, out of being closed off.

Our principles are not at all in line with certain aspects of the most immediate present. The experiences of the immediate present are very much taken from the past.

Not true, you couldn't even see through the old walls with your eye, with an “eye pass” through the old walls, you just had to stop at the “border” with your eye. Such were the forms, everything that was appropriate. Well, that is common practice today, isn't it: people seal themselves off from each other. Naturally, our movement cannot agree with these things; it breaks through everything through the form itself. It does not stop the eye, but if you understand the forms that are on the building, you will see everywhere: you can imagine such a form where it is, but you can just as easily imagine it fifty miles further on, only it may be a little larger in perspective, you can imagine it in outer space. When you place it in outer space, you can suddenly get the thought: It grows and grows and actually only stops growing at the firmament, and starts there in the appropriate size. The forms do not prevent you from using them as you like to fill the macrocosm, to fill the universe. That is how the forms are conceived. And so, of course, everything is placed in these forms.

If you look closely at the glass windows, you will see that they already express this interweaving with the world. This is because the glass windows, as they stand, are not finished in themselves by their material, nor by what the artist has done to them, but the artist has created in a confederation, in the confederation with the sun! The sun must come and shine through, then the work of art is finally complete. The artist and the sun together do what actually makes an impression on us in the glass windows! There you see how the sun is invoked through every single form, how one creates together with sunlight, how one truly regards light as one's ally.

Look at the dome paintings. All these dome paintings do not have the tendency to respect the space on which they are painted, but they have independent,

macrocosmic entities. And selflessness on the part of the artists was present because something completely new was considered. These figures had to shine from within, by their own light. While one is accustomed to reproducing the striking light, which is then reflected, in the picture, here the auric self-illumination had to be envisaged, which is again something that contemporary art does not consider to be its task at all. For example, for today's painter, it is not the human being who glows aurically, but sunlight falls on him, reflects him, and he paints the reflected sunlight. The model human being is always only the opportunity to paint this reflected sunlight. We paint the glow of the human being from within, and the connection of this glow with the movements of light, with the light impulses of the cosmos.

Hence the endeavour to make the things that occur on the human being in terms of lighting effects and so on grow together with what is in the environment. The light approaches the human being and forms his hair, as was really the case during the solar age. For the hair has not grown out of the human being, but into it – I have often explained this – it is actually crystallized sunbeams that have been placed into it. All these secrets of the world are, of course, not to be expressed dogmatically or scientifically, but in a lively, artistic way, as attempts to be carried out in art. And so it is really intended in all its details in this middle group.

The difficulties that the individual artists had to take on are truly enormous. For example, on the one hand we needed to realize the principle of painting with plant-based colors. Now, one can certainly say that it would, of course, be much easier to achieve certain effects if one could paint with traditional painting materials and colors. Many things cannot be expressed in this way because the preparation of the colors is not yet as advanced as it should be. One must selflessly accept the challenge of painting worse than one could actually paint. It does not only depend on how well one paints or can paint, but on how far our means have been developed, and so on.

So these things just prove the tremendous debt of gratitude one has towards those who have worked with us, who have really put their art and skill at the service of this cause, who have necessarily had to compromise themselves for the outside world, because the outside world does not recognize such things from the outset.

What I hope for most of all from the Christ Group, though I also hope for the whole building, is that it is seen as a first attempt. It was intended to be made in different wooden forms and types of wood, but because of the war we could only make it in one type of wood. I hope that people will see this group of Christ sculptures as a first attempt to artistically depict spiritual realities and to create such things on a larger scale in all their aspects. If they can provide any kind of artistic inspiration in this direction, then they will have done the world a service, quite apart from the contribution they are intended to make to the Bauhaus.

I believe that when this group is installed in the building, some artistic prejudices will have to be abandoned, which are still perfectly understandable and comprehensible today in view of this sculpture, because after all it is not what one imagines a work of art must be. But of course in earlier times people also did not imagine what later artistic forms of creation in the course of human development would become.

With these few words, I would like to conclude today's meeting on behalf of our esteemed board. There would, of course, be much more to say about this group, but we can postpone that until a later occasion.

Only through a knowledge of the most important and essential laws of human evolution can man attain a real consciousness that supports his soul. He must learn to know the events of human evolution and make them part of his question of taking fully into account—I made this remark already a few days ago—that the evolution of mankind is itself an evolution of a living entity. Just as there is ordered growth in the single human individual, so is there ordered growth in the evolution of the whole human race. And since the present is the moment when we have to become conscious of certain things, and since the human being has participated, during his repeated earth lives, in the various configurations of humanity's evolutionary history, it is also necessary to develop an understanding for the different human soul moods in the various epochs of mankind's evolution. I have often stated that what we call history today is really a fable convenue, a fable agreed upon, for the reason that the abstract recounting of events and the searching for cause and effect in historical processes in an external sense does not take into account the transformations, the metamorphoses of human soul life itself. When, from this point of view, we make tests, we can easily show that it is a prejudice to believe that the soul mood of modern man prevailed also in the times to which the first historical documents reach back. This is not the case. Human beings, even the simplest, most primitive, of the ninth and tenth post-Christian centuries had a soul mood completely different from that of human beings after the middle of the fifteenth century. We can trace this right into the lower strata of the human race, but also into the upper levels. Try, for instance, to familiarize yourselves with Dante's curious work about “Monarchy.” If you read such a thing, not as an oddity, but with a certain cultural-historical sagacity, then you will notice that such a book of a representative of his time contains things which could not possibly have been spoken out of the soul of a modern human being.

In this book, which was intended as a serious treatise about the legal and political foundations of monarchy, Dante tries to show that the Romans were the most excellent people of the world, as far as it was known at that time, was the primeval right of the Romans. He tries to show that the conquest of the whole earth by the Romans constituted a right greater than for instance the right of independence of single, smaller peoples; for it was the will of God that the Romans should rule over the various smaller peoples, for the latter's own good. Dante offers many proofs, out of the spirit of his time, why the Romans were justified in ruling the earth. One of these proofs is the following: He says: The Romans descend from Aeneas. Aeneas married three times. First, Creusa; through this marriage he acquired the right, as progenitor of the race, to rule Asia. Secondly, he married Dido; through this marriage he acquired the right, as ancestor of the Romans, to rule Africa. Then he married Lavinia; through this he acquired the right for the Romans to rule Europe. Herman Grimm, who once discussed this matter, made the telling remark: How fortunate that at the time America and Australia were not yet discovered!

But this sort of conclusion was something quite self-evident for an enlightened spirit of the time of Dante, indeed, for the most outstanding spirit of that time. This was a juridical presentation at that time. Now I ask you to imagine that any lawyer of the present age would draw such conclusions. You cannot imagine it. And you can just as little imagine that the mode of thought which Dante employs in regard to other subjects could arise in the soul constitution of a man of the present age.

Thus a quite obvious fact shows that we have to take into consideration the transformation of the soul constitutions of human beings. To fail to understand these things was tolerable in a certain way up to our time. But it will no longer do in our time, and quite especially will it not do for mankind in the future, for the simple reason that mankind, right up to our time, or at least up to the end of the eighteenth century, had certain instincts; (since the French Revolution matters have gradually changed, but still, old remnants remained of the soul constitutions in question.) Out of these instincts mankind was able to develop a consciousness which supported the soul. But in the present state of the constantly changing organism of mankind these instincts no longer exist and man must consciously acquire the connection with the whole of humanity. This is, after all, the deeper significance of the social question in our present time. What people state in their party platforms are only superficial formulations. That which surges in the depths of human souls expresses itself in such formulas; mankind feels that it is necessary to acquire a conscious relationship of the individual to the whole of humanity, that is, to acquire a social impulse.

Now, we cannot do so without focusing our attention upon the law of evolution. Let us do this once more after having done so repeatedly in regard to other questions. Let us take the time from the fourth post-Christian century up to the sixteenth post-Christian century. We see how Christianity bears the character of which I spoke yesterday and on previous occasions. We find that great care is taken during this period to understand the secrets of Golgotha through human concepts and ideas as they had been transmitted by Greek culture. Then a changed form of evolution sets in. We know that it really set in at an earlier time, around the middle of the fifteenth century; but it became clearly discernible only in the sixteenth century. At that time the natural-scientifically orientated thinking began to take hold of the upper level of mankind and to spread further and further.

Let us focus our attention upon this natural-scientific thinking in regard to a certain quality. There are many qualities of natural-scientifically orientated thinking which might be mentioned, but today we want to emphasize one quality in particular. It is the following: If we are a really efficient, modern thinker in the present sense, we are unable to cope with the problem of the necessity of nature and human freedom. The natural-scientific thinking of the modern age pressed onward more and more toward conceiving of the human being as a member of the rest of nature, the latter being considered a stream of causes and effects determining one another. Certainly, there exist today many human beings who see clearly that freedom, the experience of freedom, is a fact of human consciousness. But this does not prevent them from being unable to cope with this problem as they steep themselves in the special configuration of natural-scientific thinking. If we think about the being of man in the way modern natural science demands we are unable to reconcile this thinking with the thinking about human freedom. Some people take it very easy in regard to human freedom, in regard to the sense of human responsibility. I knew a professor of criminal law who began his lectures on criminal law every time with the following remarks: Gentlemen, I have to lecture to you on criminal law. Let us begin by assuming the axiom that there is human freedom and responsibility. For, if there were no human freedom and responsibility, there could be no criminal law. However, criminal law exists, for I have to lecture on it to you; therefore, responsibility and freedom exist also.—this argumentation is somewhat simple, but it points to the difficulty that arises for human beings when they have to ask the question: How can the necessity of nature be reconciled with freedom? It shows, in other words, how the human being has been forced more and more through the evolution of the last few centuries to acknowledge a certain omnipotence of the necessity of nature. One does not express it in these words; nevertheless, a certain omnipotence of natural necessity is conceived of. What is this omnipotence of natural necessity?

We shall understand one another best if I remind you of something which I have mentioned frequently. Modern thinkers believe that they act—or, rather, think—without prejudice, merely as scientific researchers, when they assert that man consists of body and soul. People, all the way up to the great philosopher Wilhelm Wundt—who is great, however, merely through the graces of his publisher—people maintain: if we think without prejudice, we have to consider man as consisting of body and soul, if we ascribe any validity to the soul at all. And only timidly does the truth make its appearance, namely, that man consists of body, soul, and spirit. The philosophers who consider themselves unbiased in their belief that man consists of body and soul do not know that their concept is merely the result of a historical process which had its starting point in the eighth Œcumencial council of Constantinople when the Roman-Catholic church abolished the spirit by establishing the dogma that henceforth the orthodox Christian was to think of man as consisting of body and soul, the soul having some spiritual qualities. This was a church law; philosophers still teach it today and do not know that they are merely following a church law. They believe they carry on unprejudiced science. This is the situation today in regard to many things called “unprejudiced science.”

The matter is similar in regard to the necessity of nature. During the whole evolution between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries the concept of god took on a quite particular form. If one takes into account the more intimate aspects of the spiritual evolution of these centuries, one will become aware of the fact that a quite definite concept of God was more and more elaborated in human thinking, a concept of God which culminated in the dictum: God, the Omnipotent, the All-Mighty. Few people know that it would have had no meaning for human beings prior to the fourth post-Christian century to speak of God, the All-Mighty. My dear friends, we do not engage in catechism truths; there you will, naturally, find: God is all-mighty, all-wise, all-benevolent. All these are things which have nothing to do with realities. Prior to the fourth century, nobody would have thought of considering omnipotence as a fundamental quality of the Divine Being if he had an understanding of these matters and really lived with them. For at that time the after-effect of the Greek concepts still held sway. In thinking about the Divine Being, people would not have spoken of God, the All-Mighty, but of God, the Omniscient, the All-Wise.

God, the All-Mighty

(Previously: God the All-Wise)

fourth century sixteenth century

Wisdom was considered the fundamental attribute of the Divine Being. The concept of Omnipotence only gradually penetrated the idea of the Divine Being, from the fourth century onward. It continued to develop. The concept of personality was abandoned and the predicate was transmitted to the mere order of nature, which is conceived of more and more mechanically. And the modern concept of the necessity of nature, the omnipotence of nature, is nothing but the result of the evolution of the concept of God from the fourth to the sixteenth century. Only, the qualities of personality were abandoned and that which constituted the concept of God was taken over into the structure of thinking about nature.

Now, my dear friends, the genuine natural scientists of today would oppose such statements vigorously. Just as many philosophers believe they are thinking without prejudice about man by considering him as consisting of body and soul, whereas in truth they merely follow the eighth Œcumenical Council of Constantinople in 869,—just as these philosophers are dependent upon a historical stream, so all the Haeckeleans, Darwinists, physicists with their natural order are dependent upon the theological stream that developed in the period from St. Augustine to Calvin. These things have to be comprehended. It is the peculiar character of every evolutionary stream that it comprises evolution as well as involution or devolution. And while the concept “God the All-Mighty” developed, there existed a sub-current in the subconscious spheres of human soul life, which then became the leading upper current: the nature necessity. (See diagram, red) And since the sixteenth century there exists a new sub-current which prepares precisely in our time to become an upper current. (blue.)

It is characteristic of the Michael age that that which has been prepared in the form of a sub-current of nature-necessity must henceforth become an upper current. But if we wish to acquire a possible concept of what it is that has thus prepared itself, we must understand the inner spirit of Earth evolution.

I recently drew your attention to the fact that what takes place in the evolution of the earth and of mankind in particular moves in a descending line. Earth humanity and the evolution of the earth itself is on the path of decadence. I drew your attention to the fact that this is today a recognized geological truth, that geologists who are to be taken seriously admit that the earth crust is in a process of decay. Mankind itself, in particular, is in a process of decay through the sensuous-earthly forces. And mankind, in its evolutionary process, must receive spiritual impulses which counteract decadence. Therefore a conscious spiritual life must enter mankind. We must be clear about the fact that we have already passed beyond the pinnacle of Earth evolution. In order that it may proceed, the spiritual must be taken up more and more clearly and distinctly.

At the outset, this seems an abstract fact. But for the spiritual researcher this is not an abstract fact. You know that we can trace the evolution of the Earth through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon states right into the Earth state. This evolution may also be characterized in the following way: if we speak of present mankind, we may consider the evolution of mankind through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods as a preparation, as a pre-state. Only upon the Earth itself did man, as he received his ego, gain his true humanhood, and he will receive further elements into his true being during the subsequent evolutionary stages of the Earth.

Now you know that the so-called Archai, the present Spirits of Personality or Time Spirits, were in the Saturn state at the stage of evolution at which the human being is today, although in quite different forms, with a completely different outer aspect. I have expressed this in my books by saying: what we designate today as Archai, as Spirits of Personality, was man during the Saturn period. The Archangeloi were man during the Sun period, the Angeloi during the Moon period. During the Earth period we are man.

Our own evolution, of course, went on alongside all this, by way of preparation. If we go back to the Moon state we must say: Here the Angeloi were human beings, human beings, to be sure, with an appearance quite different from ours, for there were quite different conditions upon the ancient Moon. But alongside these Moon men, the Angeloi, we developed in a pre-state of the Earth evolution, in a very advanced state, so that we had to be taken into consideration by the Angeloi. Especially during the descending phase of the Moon evolution did we, at times, constitute a troublesome concern for the Angeloi. The same, however, is the case with us in descending Earth evolution: since the Earth evolution has entered its descending phases, other beings make themselves felt. My dear friends, it is a significant, an important result of spiritual-scientific research which is to be taken very, very seriously, that we have already entered the period of Earth evolution when certain beings make themselves felt who upon Jupiter—the next state of Earth evolution—will have advanced to the form of man, a different form of man, to be sure, but which, nevertheless, may be compared with the being of man. For we will be different beings on Jupiter. These so-to-speak Jupiter men exist already now just as we existed upon the Moon. They exist, of course not externally visible; but I explained to you recently what it means to be externally visible, and that man is also a super-sensible being. Supersensibily these beings are very decidedly present.

I emphasize once more: it is an extremely serious truth that certain beings make themselves felt which exist in the environment of mankind. They make themselves felt more and more since the middle of the fifteenth century. These beings possess chiefly the impulse of a force which is very similar to the human force of will, that force of will of which I told you yesterday that it exists in the deeper strata of the human consciousness. These invisible beings are related to that element of which ordinary consciousness thus remains unconscious today; but they already make themselves very strongly felt in the development of present-day humanity.

For the person who takes spiritual research truly seriously this is a problem of great magnitude. I was confronted with this problem especially strongly—at the time I spoke to a number of our friends about it in one or another form—I was confronted with this problem in a demanding fashion, as it were, when, in the year 1914, this war catastrophe broke in upon us. One had to ask oneself: How did an event overtake European mankind which it is impossible to gauge as to its causes in the way that is customary in regard to previous historical events? The one who knows that not more than thirty or forty people participated in Europe in the decisive events of the year 1914, and who also knows the soul condition in which most of these people were, will be confronted by this significant problem. For most of these people, as strange as it may sound today, my dear friends, most of these people had a dulled, obscured state of consciousness. During the last few years much has occurred that was caused by a dulled human consciousness. In the decisive places of the year 1914 we see everywhere that the most important decisions of the end of July and the beginning of August were reached with an obscured consciousness; and this has continued on right into our present day. This is a problem, terrifying in its nature. If we investigate it spiritual-scientifically, then we find that these obscured consciousnesses were the gateways through which precisely these will-beings were able to take possession of the consciousness of these men; they took possession of the obscured, veiled consciousness of these human beings and acted with their consciousness. And these beings who thus took possession, who are still sub-human beings, what kind of beings are they? We have to pose this question very seriously: What kind of beings are they?

Well, my dear friends, we have asked about the origin of human intelligence, about the origin of human intelligent behavior which, stating it simply, has its instrument in our head organism. And we have seen that this intelligent constitution of our soul stems from that deed of the Archangel Michael which is commonly presented in the symbol of the fall, the casting down of the Dragon. This is actually a very trivial symbol. For, if we really conceive of Michael and the Dragon, we have to visualize, first, the Michael Being, and, secondly, the Dragon who, in reality, consists of all that which enters into our so-called reason, into our intelligence. Not into a hell does Michael cast his opposing hosts, but into the human heads; there this Luciferic impulse continues to live. I have characterized human intelligence as an actual Luciferic impulse. Thus we may say: if we look back into the evolution of the Earth, we find the Michael-deed, and to this Michael-deed is joined the illumination of man by his reason.

The sub-human beings whose main character consists of an impulse which strongly coincides with human willing, with the human power of will, now appear from below, as it were, whereas the hosts of forces cast down by Michael came from above; and while these latter took possession of the human power of will; they unite themselves with it and are beings produced by the realm of Ahriman. Ahrimanic influences acted through those obscured consciousnesses. Indeed, my dear friends, as long as one does not take into consideration these forces as forces objectively existing in the world just as one takes into consideration what today is called magnetism, electricity, and so forth, one will not gain an insight into that nature which, according to Goethe's prose Hymn to Nature, comprises man. For nature, as it is conceived of in today's natural science does not contain man, but merely the human physical self.

At the beginning of Earth becoming we have to do with a downfall of Luciferic beings; today we have a rise of Ahrimanic beings. The former beings influence the Luciferic power of thought, the latter the human power of will; we have to recognize the arrival of these latter beings within the evolution of mankind. We have to realize that these beings arrive and that we have to reckon with a conception of nature which, to be sure, for the time being only includes man; for the animal kingdom will only be included later on in the Earth period. Upon the animal these beings have no influences as yet. We shall not comprehend the human race without taking these beings into consideration. And these beings, who are, as it were, pushed from behind, for behind them there stands the Ahrimanic power which endows them with their strong will power, which pours into them their directive forces,—these beings who as such are sub-human beings are controlled in their totality by higher Ahrimanic spirits and thus contain something which far surpasses their own nature and being. Therefore they show something in their appearance which, if it takes the human being captive, acts much more strongly, very much more strongly than that which the weak human being can control today, if he does not strengthen it through the spirit. What is the aim of this host? Well, my dear friends, just as the hosts which Michael has pushed down have aimed at human illumination, at human permeation with reason, so these hosts aim at a certain permeation of human willing. And what do they want? They burrow, as it were, in the deepest stratum of consciousness in which the human being is still asleep today in his waking state. Man does not notice how these beings enter his soul and also his body. Here they suck in, with their power of attraction, everything that has remained Luciferic, that has not become Christ-permeated. This they can reach: this they can take possession of.

My dear friends, our time raises these problems for us. We must no longer pass by these things. They are not convenient. For it has become convenient for human beings to think differently, that is, not to think at all about man, not to take him into consideration at all. And it is not without danger to speak about these things in complete truth at a time when many people do not at all love the sense for truth, quite apart from the fact that false sentimentality might find these things a psychic cruelty.

The result of the comprehension of these things, however, will be a thorough grasp of the necessity of the Christ impulse. One must recognize where the Christ impulse is lacking. Yesterday we showed that the Christ impulse takes hold of the middle stratum of consciousness; if man really permeates himself with the Christ, then these Ahrimanic powers cannot penetrate through this middle stratum, upward, and they cannot, with their spiritual forces, pull down the intellectual forces. Everything depends on that.

It is very necessary today that we recognize the nature of the influences which come to us from extra-human, sub-human beings which in turn are influenced by other beings. They are just as important as many influences which are only rooted in the world of man. A week ago I talked to you about the Michael influence. I have characterized this Michael influence for you. It is a very necessary one. For just as it is true that the Michael influence has brought about the Luciferic influencing of human intelligence, so true is it that now the counter-pole arises, namely, the appearance of certain Ahrimanic beings. And only through the constant activity of Michael is the human being armed against that which arises there. Even physiologically it is dangerous today to cling to mere nature necessity, to that kind of fatalism which is expressed in nature necessity. For education, through school and through life, in the concepts which are merely based upon nature necessity, upon the omnipotence of nature necessity, weakens the human head, and human beings become thereby so strongly passive in regard to their consciousness, that other forces are able to enter this consciousness, and human beings will fail to acquire the strength that is necessary for the reception into the human soul of the Christ impulse in its present form.

It is my duty, as it were, my dear friends, to speak at this time of the subject of which I have begun to speak today (I shall continue it tomorrow): of the appearance of certain Ahrimanic beings, which we have to take into account. Of this appearance numerous people upon earth are cognizant today. But they give it the wrong interpretation. They interpret it wrongly for the reason that they know nothing of the real triad of Christ-Lucifer-Ahriman, or do not wish to know anything about it, but jumble up Ahriman and Lucifer. Then discrimination is impossible; then it is impossible properly to recognize the true fundamental character of these Ahrimanic beings who now arise. Only if we clearly elaborate the Ahrimanic element and know the nature of the super-sensible influences which now arise as the counterpart, as it were, of Michael's casting down of the Dragon. It is like a lifting up, out of Ahrimanic depths, of certain beings. And these beings find special points of attack in the human being if the latter yields to unbridled instinctive impulses and does not strive for clarity in relation to them.

Now, there exists today a method I might call it an anti-method, of concealing the instinctive element, by putting down a concept and pushing another over it, so that it is impossible to form a proper judgment concerning it. Just think of the battle cry of the proletariat of the modern age. Behind this battle cry there stand very justified demands of mankind—I have often dealt with this. But these demands are not, to begin with, appealed to. In our idea of the three-fold social order they are appealed to for the first time. Something essentially different is appealed to: Proletarians of all countries, unite! What does this mean? It means: Foster your antipathy against the other classes, foster, as individuals, what resembles hate, and unite; that means, love one another, unite your feelings of hate, look for the love of one class, search among you for the love of the members of one class out of hate. Love one another out of hate, on the basis of hate.—There you have put down two concepts of opposing poles. This pushing back of instincts makes man's conceptions so nebulous, rendering him unable to know what he is dealing with in his own self. There actually exists a kind of anti-method, if I may use the paradoxical expression, in order to obscure, through present-day human thinking, the holding sway of an instinctive life which offers especially strong points of attack for the described Ahrimanic beings.

We have arrived at an important point in our studies—a sort of climax—hence we may expect to encounter various difficult passages in elucidating the Gospels. I may therefore be permitted at the beginning of these expositions, to preface the continuation of what was said yesterday with a short survey of the salient features thus far treated.

We know that the nature of mankind's development was essentially different in remote times from what it is today, and we know that the human being shows an increasingly different form as our retrospect reaches farther and farther back to earlier conditions. It has already been mentioned that from our own time, which we may call the Central European cultural epoch, we can look back successively to the Greco-Latin time, to the Egypto-Chaldean period, and then to the era in which the ancient Persian people was led by Zarathustra. Beyond that we arrive at the remote Indian civilization, so very different from ours; and that brings us to a period of cultural evolution that followed immediately upon a great and mighty catastrophe. This cataclysm, running its course in tempestuous events in the air and in the water element, led to the disappearance of that continent which mankind had inhabited before the Indian civilization—ancient Atlantis, situated between Europe-Africa, and America—and to the migration of its people, westward to America and on the other side to the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had gradually taken on their present configuration. This Atlantean age, especially in the early part, produced human beings who were very differently constituted in respect of their soul from present-day mankind; and what interests us primarily in human evolution is precisely what pertains to the soul, for we know that everything corporeal is a result of psychospiritual development.

What was the nature of the soul life in this ancient Atlantean age? We know that at that time human consciousness was very different from what it became later, and that in a certain respect man had an archaic clairvoyance, but that he was not yet capable of any pronounced self-consciousness, of ego-consciousness. This is achieved only by learning to distinguish oneself from outer objects, and people of that time were not quite able to do this.

Let us imagine for a moment what would happen in our time if we were unable to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings—let us consider the matter in a concise way. Nowadays we ask, Where are the confines of my being? And with a certain justification we answer, from our present-day standpoint, The confines of my human entity are where my skin divides me off from my surroundings. People imagine that they consist only of what their skin encloses, and that everything else is made up of outer objects which they perceive and from which they distinguish themselves. They believe this because they know that if some part is removed from within their skin they are no longer a complete human being, nor can be. From a certain standpoint it is quite correct to say that if you cut off a piece of a man's flesh he is no longer a whole human being.

On the other hand, we also know that we inhale air with every breath; and to the question, where is this air, the answer is, all around us—everywhere where our environment makes contact with us: that is the air we will have within us in the next moment. Now it is outside us, now in us. Cut off this air, remove it, and you can no longer exist. You are less whole than you would be if the hand within your skin were cut off. So the truth of the matter is that we are not bounded by our skin. The surrounding air is part of us, it enters and leaves us, and we have no right arbitrarily to fix the skin as our boundary.

If people would come to understand this—it would have to be arrived at theoretically, as perception provides no means of observing it—it would lead them to ponder on matters not forced upon their attention by the outer world itself. If a man were at all times able to see the air current passing into him, spreading, being transformed, and passing out again, it would never occur to him to say, This hand is more a part of me than the air I inhale. He would count the air as part of himself, and would suspect hallucinations if he fancied himself an independent being capable of existing without his environment.

No such delusion could exist for the Atlantean, for his observation clearly showed him a different state of affairs. He saw the objects in his environment not in sharp outline, but surrounded by colored auras. He did not see a plant as we see it, but more as we see the street lamps on a foggy autumn evening: everything was surrounded by a great colored aura. That was because there is spirit—spiritual beings—in and among all things of the outer world, which the dim clairvoyance still existing at that time enabled the Atlantean to perceive. As the fog fills the space between the lights, so there are spiritual beings everywhere in space. The Atlantean saw these spiritual beings just as you see the fog, hence they constituted for him a kind of vaporous aura investing all outer objects. These themselves were indistinct; but because he saw the spirit he also saw everything of a spiritual nature that streamed in and out of him. And for the same reason he saw himself as a component of his whole environment. He saw currents flowing into his body from all sides, currents you cannot see today. Air is merely the densest substance that enters us: there are far more tenuous ones. Man has lost the power of discerning spirit because he no longer has the old dim clairvoyance; but the man of Atlantis saw the spiritual currents streaming in and out, just as your finger, were it conscious, would see the blood coursing through it and would know that it must wither if it were torn off. Just as the finger would feel, if conscious, so the Atlantean felt himself to be a member of an organism. He felt the currents streaming in through his eyes and ears, and so forth; and he knew that if he were to force himself out of their reach he could not remain a human being. He felt as though poured out into the whole outer world.

The man of Atlantis saw the spiritual world, but he could not distinguish himself from it: he lacked anything like a strong ego sense—self-consciousness in its present meaning. The opportunity to develop this was provided by the fading from his view of all that had emphasized his dependence upon his environment. The cessation of that awareness enabled him to develop his self-consciousness, his egoity, and to do this was the task of post-Atlantean man. After the great Atlantean catastrophe people were organized in such a way that the spiritual world receded from their consciousness, and that they gradually learned to see the outer physical world of the senses ever more clearly and distinctly. But nothing that evolves in the world takes place all at once, but step by step; it proceeds slowly and gradually; and thus the old dim clairvoyance vanished slowly and by degrees. Even today, under given conditions, it is still found as an old heritage in certain people and in mediumistic natures. Something that had reached its climax in a certain era gradually becomes extinct. In the earliest period of postAtlantean times, ordinary people still retained a great deal of the gift of clairvoyance; and what these people saw in the spiritual world was continually supplemented, expanded, and animated by the initiates who were guided to the spiritual world by the methods described in an earlier lecture, and who thus became the messengers of what in former times had been seen to a certain extent by all men.

Better than any external historical research, legends and myths—especially those linked with the oracle sanctuaries—have preserved for us what is true of those old times. In the oracle temples specially selected people were thrown into abnormal states—a dream state, or mediumistic state, as one might say—by reducing them to a consciousness state duller and darker than the ordinary waking state. They were in a condition of diminished consciousness, where they were surrounded by outer objects which, however, they did not see. This was not clairvoyance as it had once existed, but an intermediate state, half dreamlike, half in the nature of clairvoyance. Now, if information was sought concerning certain particular circumstances in the world, or the right mode of procedure in some special matter, the oracles were consulted; for in them was to be found the dim clairvoyance as a heritage of the ancient faculty.

At the beginning of his evolution, then, man was endowed with wisdom: wisdom streamed into him. But this wisdom gradually dwindled away: and even the initiates in their abnormal states—of for they had to be led into the spiritual world by the withdrawal of however, those who were not only initiated in the old sense, but who had advanced with the times and were prophets of the future, realized that a new impulse was indispensable for humanity. An ancient heritage of wisdom had been bestowed upon mankind when it descended from divine-spiritual heights, but it became ever more obscured. In the beginning all men possessed it, then but the few who were thrown into special states of consciousness in the oracles, then only the initiates, and so forth.

The day must come—thus spoke the old initiates who knew the signs of the time—in which this ancient heritage will have dwindled to the point where it is no longer capable of leading and guiding humanity; and this would mean that man would fall a prey to uncertainty and doubt in the world. It would express itself in his willing, his acting, and his feeling. And with the gradual dwindling of wisdom men would become their own unwise leaders: their ego would wax increasingly strong, so that with the recession of wisdom every individual would seek truth in his own ego, would develop his own feelings and will—every man for himself—and men would become ever more isolated, more alienated from each other, and they would understand each other less and less. Since each wants his own thoughts—thoughts that no longer flow out of a unified wisdom—none can understand the other's thoughts; and human feelings, no longer guided by universal wisdom, must eventually come into mutual conflict, as must also human actions. All men would act, think, and feel in opposition to each other, and ultimately mankind would be split up altogether into an aggregation of quarrelling and fighting individuals.

And what was the outer, physical sign that appeared as the expression of this development? It was the transformation mankind experienced in the blood. In very ancient times, as we know, endogamy was customary: people married only within the blood-related tribe. But this custom yielded increasingly to exogamy: the blood of mutually alien tribes became mixed; and that explains the decrease, the dwindling, of the heritage deriving from a remote past.

Let us once more recall Goethe's words which we quoted yesterday:

“My father gave my build to me,
Toward life my sober bearing.
From mother comes my cheerful heart,
My joy in storytelling.”

We connected this assertion with the fact that what the etheric body comprises derives from the maternal element, as handed down from generation to generation, so that every man bears in his own etheric body the legacy of the maternal element, and in his physical body, that of the paternal element. Now, by reason of consanguinity the inheritance, perpetuating itself from etheric body to etheric body, was very potent, and from it derived the old faculty of clairvoyance. The offspring of endogamy inherited with the related blood the old capacity for wisdom in the etheric body. But as blood became more and more mixed—as a result of increasing intermarriage among tribes—the possibility of handing down the ancient wisdom diminished; for as we said yesterday, human blood gradually altered, and the mixing of different bloods obscured the ancient wisdom more and more.

In other words, the blood—bearer of inherited maternal attributes—became ever less fitted to transmit the old faculty of clairvoyance. It simply developed in such a way that people became ever less able to see into the spiritual world. Physically considered, therefore, human blood altered in a manner to render it increasingly incapable of bearing the old wisdom that once had guided man so surely, falling instead more and more into the opposite extreme, becoming the bearer of egotism—that is, of a quality that leads men, as egos, to individual isolation and mutual antagonism. And for the same reason it gradually lost its power of uniting men in love.

We are, of course, still involved in this process of deterioration taking place in the human blood because, in as far as it has its origin in an ancient epoch, it will follow its lingering course to the end of Earth evolution. Therefore an impulse was needed in humanity capable of counteracting this condition. Through consanguinity men would have been led into error and misery, as the old wise men tell us in legends and myths, Men could no longer rely on the legacies of an ancient wisdom: even the oracles, asked for information and advice, divulged only what led to savage conflicts and quarrels. The oracle had foretold, for example, that Laios and Jocasta would have a son who would kill his father and wed his mother. Nevertheless, in the face of this legacy of oracle wisdom, nothing could at that time prevent the blood from falling more and more a prey to error: Oedipus does kill his father and does wed his mother. He commits parricide and incest.

What the old sage meant was this: Once upon a time men possessed wisdom; but even had it been preserved, the development of the ego must inevitably have proceeded, and egotism would have grown so strong that blood would rage against blood. Blood is no longer fitted to lead men upwards when it is guided only by the ancient wisdom. And thus the clairvoyant initiate who gave us the original picture of the Oedipus legend wished to set up a warning for mankind, saying: That is what would happen to you if nothing came to supersede the old oracle wisdom.—And in the Judas legend there is preserved even more clearly an indication of what the old oracle wisdom would have led to. Judas' mother, too, was prophetically told that her son would kill his father and wed his mother, thereby conjuring up untold misery; and it all came to pass in spite of the foreknowledge. This means that the primeval, inherited wisdom is not capable of saving man from the abyss into which he must fall unless a new impulse reaches mankind.

If we now look more closely into the causes of all this we must ask, Why was it inevitable that the ancient wisdom should become unfitted to dominate humanity? The answer to this question can be found by examining nature carefully the origin of the old wisdom in its relation to mankind I have already indicated that in the old Atlantean age a connection existed between the physical body and the etheric body of man that differed greatly from the later relation. In regard to two of the principles of man's nature it can be said that the physical and etheric bodies are so related that they approximately coincide, especially in the region of the head; but this is only the case in our own time. Looking back to the Atlantean period we find the etheric head protruding far beyond its physical counterpart: the etheric body extended past the physical body, particularly in the head region. Now, in the Atlantean epoch human evolution proceeded in such a way that the outline of the physical and of the etheric body became more and more coincident, especially in the head: the etheric body kept withdrawing into the physical body, thereby naturally altering this member of the human being.

That, then, is the essential feature of this phase of human evolution: the etheric body of the human head withdraws more and more into the physical aspect of the head until the two come to coincide. Now, as long as the etheric body was outside the physical head it was subject to conditions quite different from the subsequent ones: it was in touch, on all sides, with currents, with other spiritual beings; and the substance of what thus streamed in and out provided the faculty of clairvoyance in Atlantean times. So the capacity for clairvoyance was due to the incomplete coincidence of the physical and etheric bodies in the head region, a condition admitting from all sides currents endowing the etheric head with clairvoyance. Then followed the time when the etheric body withdrew into the physical body. In a certain way—not completely—it tore itself away from these currents; it began to cut itself off from the currents which had provided the capacity for clairvoyantly penetrating the wisdom of the world. Conversely, when in the old initiations a man's etheric body was withdrawn, his etheric head became interpermeated once more with the surrounding currents, and clairvoyance set in again.

Now, had this contact between the etheric body and the outer world been severed at one stroke, in the middle of the Atlantean age, the old clairvoyance would have vanished far more rapidly than was actually the case. No remnants of it would have remained for the post-Atlantean time, nor would mankind of a later age have retained any recollection of it. As it occurred, however, man preserved a certain contact with the outer currents. And something else took place as well: this etheric body that had cut itself off from the currents of its environment retained, nevertheless, certain remnants of the former capacity for wisdom. Keep well in mind that at the end of the Atlantean epoch, after man had drawn his etheric body into himself, there remained in it a sort of fund, the residue of what had once come to it from without—a small saving, if I may use the term: as if a son had a father, the father is earning money, and the son draws upon him according to his needs. In the same way, man drew upon his environment for all the wisdom he needed, up to the time when his etheric body severed the connection. Keeping to our simile, let us now assume that the son loses his father, there remains for him but a certain portion of his father's money, and he earns nothing to add to it. In time he will come to the end of it and have nothing left. That is the position in which the human being found himself. He had torn himself loose from his father-wisdom, had added nothing to it through his own endeavor, and subsisted on it into the Christian era—indeed, even now he is still living on his inheritance, not on anything he has earned. He lives on his capital, so to speak. In the earliest part of post-Atlantean development a bit of the capital was still left, though without his having himself earned the wisdom: he lived on the interest, as it were, and occasionally requested an additional sum from the initiates. But ultimately the coin of ancient wisdom lost its currency; and when it was given to Oedipus it no longer had any value: this old wisdom did not save him from the most frightful transgression, nor did it save Judas.

That is what took place in the course of human evolution. How did it come about that man gradually exhausted his capital of wisdom? Because in the past he had given access to two kinds of spiritual beings: the Luciferic beings, and later, as a consequence of these, the Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean beings. These prevented him from adding, by his own labor, to the store of old wisdom, for they acted upon his being as follows: the Luciferic beings tended to corrupt his passions and feelings, while the Ahrimanic, the Mephistophelean beings were more concerned with outwardly distorting his view of the world. Had the Luciferic beings not intervened in Earth evolution, man would have developed no such interests in the physical world that drags him down beneath his true status; and if, as a result of the Luciferic influence, the Mephistophelian, the Ahrimanic, the Satanic beings had not taken a-hand, man would know, and would always have known, that underlying every object of the senses there is spirit, and he would look through the surface of the sense world upon the spirit. But Ahriman infused into human observation something like a dark smoke cloud that prevents penetration to the spiritual. Through Ahriman's agency man is enmeshed in lies, in maya, in illusion.—These are the two beings that prevent man from earning any increment to the store of ancient wisdom once bestowed upon humanity; and as a consequence, this heritage has dwindled away and gradually become wholly useless.

Nevertheless, in a certain other respect evolution held to its course. During the Atlantean time the human etheric body merged with the physical body; and it was man's misfortune, so to speak—his fate—to be forced to experience the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in his physical body in this physical world just at a time when he was God-forsaken, as it were. The result was that the old heritage of wisdom became useless precisely by reason of the influence of the physical body, of living in the physical body. How did this happen? Formerly man did not live in the physical body: he gathered his wisdom from his father's treasury, so to speak—from the ancient fund of wisdom. His source of supplies was outside his physical body, because he himself was outside it in respect of his etheric body; and this source finally dried up. In order to augment his fund of wisdom, man would have needed a treasury in his own body. But this he did not have; and consequently, in default of an inner source of wisdom, there remained less and less of it in his etheric body every time he abandoned his physical body at death. After every death, every reincarnation, the sum of wisdom in his etheric body was less: the etheric body became ever poorer in wisdom.

But evolution advances; and just as in the Atlantean age evolution was such that the etheric body withdrew into the physical body, so future development will proceed in such a way that man will gradually emerge again from his physical body. Whereas in a former age the etheric body kept drawing into the physical—ever deeper, up to the coming of Christ—the time then arrived in which the course of evolution changed. At the moment in which Christ appeared the etheric body began to retrace its course; and already in our present time it is no longer as closely bound to the physical body as it was when Christ was present on earth. And as a result the physical body has become even denser than before. The human being, then, is moving toward a future in which his etheric body will increasingly protrude, and in time it will extend as far as it did in the Atlantean epoch.

Here we can pursue our simile a bit further. If the son, who had formerly lived on his father's fund, spends it all and earns nothing additional, his prospects will become increasingly dismal. But if this man now has a son of his own—that would be the grandson—the latter will not be in the same position as his father. The father at least inherited something and could go on spending, but there remains nothing at all for the grandson, nor does he inherit anything: for the time being he is left with nothing whatever. And in a certain way that describes the course of human evolution. When the etheric body entered the physical, bringing along a supply of divine wisdom from the treasury of the Godhead, it still provided wisdom for its physical body. But the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits prevented all augmentation of this wisdom in the physical body—contrived that none should be added. When now the etheric body begins to emerge again it takes nothing with it from the physical body, and the consequence is that if nothing else had intervened man would be heading for a future in which his etheric body, though belonging to him, would contain no vestige of wisdom or knowledge. And with the complete desiccation of the physical body the etheric body would be destitute as well, for nothing could be drawn from the dried-up physical body. Therefore, if the physical body is not to desiccate in that future period, the etheric body must he provided with strength, with the strength of wisdom. Before emerging from the physical body the etheric body should have been endowed with the power of wisdom. Within the physical body it must have received something it can take out with it. Then, when it emerges—provided it has acquired this wisdom—it can react on the physical body, giving it life and preventing its desiccation.

The future evolution of humanity can take one of two courses, of which one is as follows: Man develops without Christ. In this case the etheric body could bring with it nothing from the physical body, because it had received nothing from it: it emerges empty. But conversely, the etheric body cannot animate the physical body, having nothing to give: it cannot prevent the attrition, the withering, of the physical body. Man would gradually forfeit all the fruits of his physical life: they could furnish nothing out of his physical body, which he would therefore have to abandon. But the very purpose for which man descended to earth was to acquire a physical body in addition to his other principles. The germ of the physical body originated in an earlier period, but without its actual formation man would never fulfill his mission on earth. But the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman have entered the picture; and if man acquires nothing in his physical body, if his etheric body withdraws again with nothing to take with it—having even used up the old store of wisdom—then the earth's mission is doomed: the mission of the earth within the universe would fail of fulfillment. Man would carry over nothing into the future but the empty etheric skull which had been abundantly filled when he originally brought it into earth evolution.

But now let us suppose something were to occur at the right moment which would enable man, as his etheric body emerges again, to provide something for it, to animate it, to penetrate it with wisdom as of old: the etheric body would continue to emerge just the same; but now, endowed with new life, new strength, it could employ these for vitalizing the physical body. It could send power and life back into it. But the etheric body itself must first possess these: it would first have to receive this strength and life; and if it succeeds in this the fruits of man's earth life are saved. The physical body will then not simply decay, but rather, this corruptible physical body will assume the configuration of the etheric body, the incorruptible; and man's resurrection, with the harvest reaped in his physical body, is assured.

An impulse had thus to come to the earth through which the exhausted treasure of ancient wisdom might be replenished, through which the etheric body might be endowed with new life, thus enabling the physical element—otherwise destined to corruption—to put on the incorruptible and to become permeated by an etheric body capable of rendering it immortal, of rescuing it from Earth evolution. And that is what Christ brought mankind—this pervasion of the etheric body with life. The transformation of the human physical body that would otherwise be doomed to death, its preservation from corruption, its ability to wear the incorruptible—all this is connected with the Christ. Life was infused into the human etheric body by the Christ impulse—new life, after the old had been spent. And looking into the future, man must tell himself: When my etheric body will ultimately have emerged from my physical body, I should have developed in such a way that it is wholly saturated by the Christ. The Christ must live in me. In the course of my earth development I must by degrees completely permeate my etheric body with the Christ.

What I have just described to you are the deeper processes that elude outer observation. They constitute the spiritual principle underlying the physical evolution of the world.

But what outer form did all this have to take? What was it that entered the physical body through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings? The tendency to decay, to dissolution—in short, the tendency to die. The germ of death had entered the physical body. Had no Christ come, this death germ would have developed its full power only at the end of Earth evolution, for then the etheric body would be for all time powerless to reanimate man; and at the completion of Earth evolution, that which had come into being as human physical body would fall into decay and the earth's mission itself would end in death. Whenever we encounter death today we can discern in our present life a portent of the universal death that would occur at the end of Earth evolution. Mankind's ancient heritage dwindles but slowly and gradually, and the possibility of being born again and again, of passing from incarnation to incarnation, is due to the life fund originally given man on his way. As regards his purely external life in the successive incarnations, the possibility for life to exist would not be fully exhausted before the end of Earth evolution; but as time goes on the gradual extinction of the race would manifest itself. This would occur piece by piece, and the physical body would continually wither. Had the Christ impulse not come, man would perish member by member as Earth evolution approached its termination.—At present the Christ-Impulse is but at the beginning of its development: only by degrees will it make its way among men; and only future epochs will reveal—and continue to reveal to the very end of Earth evolution—the full significance of Christ for humanity.

But the various human activities and interests have not all been affected alike by the Christ impulse. There are today many such that have not been touched by it at all, that must await a future time. I will give you a striking example of one whole sphere of human activity which at present has not been influenced by the Christ impulse at all. Toward the end of the pre-Christian epoch—say, in the 6th or 7th Century before our era—the primeval wisdom and power were on the wane in so far as human knowledge was concerned. In connection with other phases of life that wisdom long retained a fresh, young forcefulness; but it declined most noticeably in the matter of knowledge. From the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B. C. there remained something that may be termed the remnant of a remnant. Were you to hark back even to the Egypto-Chaldean wisdom, not to say that of ancient Persia or India, you would find this wisdom everywhere permeated by true spiritual vision, by the fruits of primeval clairvoyance; and for those endowed to a lesser degree with this faculty the reports of the clairvoyants were available. Such a thing as science other than one based on clairvoyance never existed in the Indian and Persian epochs, nor in still later times; even during the early Greek period there was no science without a basis of clairvoyant research. But then the time approached when this fading clairvoyant research was lost to human science, and for the first time we witness the rise of a human science devoid of clairvoyance—or at least, a science from which clairvoyance was gradually cast out.

Clairvoyance vanishes, as does faith in the revelations of clairvoyants; and during the 6th or 7th Century before the appearance of Christ we see established something we can call a human science, from which the fruits of spiritual research are increasingly eliminated. And this becomes ever more the case: in Parmenides and Heraclitus, in Plato and even in Aristotle—everywhere in the writings of the old naturalists and physicians—you can find ample confirmation that what is known as science was originally permeated by the results of spiritual research. But spiritual science steadily deteriorated and decreased. In connection with our psychic capacity, our feeling and willing, it still endures; but as regards our thinking it is vanishing.

Thus with respect to human thinking, to thinking in terms of science, the influence of the etheric on the physical body had already begun to wane when Christ appeared. Everything of that sort comes about gradually, step by step. Christ came and gave the impulse; but naturally not everyone accepted it at once, and particularly was it rejected in certain spheres of activity. In others it was received, but in the field of science it was positively spurned. Examine for yourselves the science that prevailed in the time of the Roman empire. Look it up in Celsus, where you can read all sorts of rubbish about Christ. This Celsus was a great scholar, but he understood nothing whatever about human thinking as affected by the Christ impulse. He reports:

“There is said to have lived at one time in Palestine a couple known as Joseph and Mary, with whom the sect of Christians originated. But what is told about them is all superstition. The truth is that the wife of this Joseph was once unfaithful to her husband with a Roman captain named Panthera; but Joseph did not know the identity of the child's father.”

That was one of the most popular accounts of the time; and if you follow our contemporary literature you will realize that certain people of the present have not advanced beyond the standard of Celsus. Certainly there are fields in which the Christ-Impulse can take root but slowly, but among those now under discussion it has to this day found no foothold at all. There is one part of man we see withering: it is in the human brain; but when it shall have been influenced by the Christ-Impulse it will revive science in a very different form. Strange as that may sound in this age of scientific fanaticism, it is nevertheless true. That part of the brain assigned to scientific thinking is moving toward a slow death. This illustrates the gradual disappearance of the ancient heritage from scientific thinking. Aristotle still possessed a relatively large store of it, but we see science gradually being drained of it; and science, by reason of the accumulation of external data, will become God-forsaken in respect of its thinking, having nothing left of the old fund. And we see further how it is possible that, no matter how powerfully we experience the Christ, we can no longer establish any contact between the Christ-Impulse and what mankind has achieved in the way of science.

We have tangible evidence of this. Suppose that a man of the 13th Century had been profoundly affected by the Christ-Impulse and had said: We have the Christ-Impulse; like a flood of mighty new revelations it streams to us from the Gospel, and we can permeate ourselves with it.—And suppose further that this man had made it his mission to create a connecting link between science and Christianity: even as early as the 13th Century he would have found nothing in the current science that could have been used for the purpose. He would have had to hark back to Aristotle. Only by collaborating with Aristotle, not with 13th-Century science, would he have been able to interpret Christianity. Science simply became increasingly incapable of making any contact with the Christ principle; hence the 13th-Century scholars had to revert to Aristotle, who still possessed something of the old legacy of wisdom and could thus provide concepts capable of correlating science and Christianity.

But as science grew richer in data and observations it became ever poorer in ideas, until finally the time came when all concepts emanating from the old wisdom disappeared from it. Even the greatest men are, of course, children of their era as far as their scientific activity is concerned. Galileo, for example, could not think from an absolute background, but only as his age thought; and his greatness consists precisely in his having established God-forsaken thinking as such—pure mechanistical thinking. An important revulsion in thought set in with Galileo: the most commonplace phenomena treated by modern physics had quite a different explanation after Galileo's day from what they had previously. Say, someone throws a stone. Today we are told that the stone retains its motion until the latter is counteracted by the influence of another force, the force of inertia. Before Galileo's time a different opinion was held: people were convinced that if the stone was to keep moving it would have to be propelled—something active must be behind it. Galileo taught people to think in an entirely new way, but in a way implying that the world is a mechanism; and the ideal striven for today is a mechanical, mechanistic explanation of the world with the complete elimination of all spirit. And the reason for this is that those portions of the human brain, of the thought apparatus, which constitute the organ of scientific thinking, are already so shrivelled as to be no longer able to infuse new life into concepts, with the result that the latter become more and more poverty-stricken.

One could easily show that science, for all the isolated facts it keeps accumulating, has not enriched the life of mankind by a single concept. Note well that observations are not concepts! Do not imagine that such things as Darwinism and the like have provided humanity with concepts. That is something that others have done—not the scientists, but men who tapped quite different sources. Goethe was such a man: he enriched man's fund of ideas from altogether different sources; and consequently the scientists consider him a dilettante.

The fact is that science has not grown richer in ideas. Far more alive, loftier, grander are those of antiquity. The Darwinian concepts are like squeezed-out lemons: Darwinism merely collected the results of observation and then linked them with poverty-stricken concepts. This trend in science points clearly to the process of gradual death. In the human brain there is a part that is withering, and this is the part that in our time functions in scientific thinking. The reason for this is that the portion of the human etheric body which should animate this shrivelling brain has as yet not grasped the Christ-Impulse. No life will flow into science until the Christ impulse enters the portion of the human brain that is intended to serve science. That is a fact based on the great cosmic laws. If science continues in this way it will become poorer and poorer in concepts, and gradually these will vanish. And increasingly numerous will be the scientists who keep lining up their data, and who will be frightened out of their wits when someone begins to think. Nowadays it is a sore trial for a professor to discover a bit of thinking in a doctor's dissertation submitted to him by some candidate.

But we now have an anthroposophy, and this anthroposophy will increasingly clarify the Christ-Impulse for mankind, thereby imbuing the etheric body with ever more life—with such a wealth of it, in fact, that the etheric body will be able to restore flexibility to that rigid portion of the brain which is responsible for the present trend of scientific thinking. That is an illustration of the manner in which the Christ-Impulse, having in time laid hold on mankind, will reanimate the dying members of the body. The future of the race would see the withering of more and more members; but the flowing in of the Christ-Impulse will increase proportionately with the dwindling of each part; and by the end of the Earth evolution all the parts that would otherwise have perished will be revivified by the Christ-Impulse, which will have saturated the whole etheric body: the human etheric body will have become one with the Christ-Impulse.

The first impetus for this gradual revitalization of mankind, for the resurrection of humanity, was given at a particular moment during a scene most beautifully described in the Gospel of St. John. Think of the Christ as coming into the world a wholly universal Being, and commencing His great work by means of an etheric body completely saturated with His spirit—for the transformation brought about in the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth enabled it to animate even the physical body. At the moment in which the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, in Whom the Christ now dwelt, became completely a life giver for the physical body, the etheric body of Christ is seen transfigured. And the writer of the John Gospel describes this moment:

Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.

The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered.

What is said is that those who stood by heard thunder; but nowhere does it say that anyone who had not been duly prepared had heard it.

Others said, An angel spake to him.

Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.

Why? That what had taken place might be understood by all who were near. And Christ clarifies the event:

Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.

In that moment Lucifer-Ahriman was cast out of the physical body of Christ. There stands the great example which in the future must be realized by all mankind: through the Christ-Impulse the obstacles placed by Lucifer-Ahriman must be cast out of the physical body; and man's earth body must be so vitalized by the Christ-Impulse that the fruits of the earth's mission may be carried over into the time that is to follow this earth epoch.

My dear friends! Once again, we will begin with the mantric verse of the world stage and the world’s beings, the mantric verse that confronts a person as it sounds forth from all sides, when one is able with true inner appreciation of heart and soul to perceive what the prime essential beings of the world, the prime producers of the world, are able to say.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear brothers and sisters, my dear friends, it is worth noting, that since various class members are making their appearance at this Class lesson today, who have not been here before, some things will be said for the sake of continuity, things which are necessary to know, if one wishes to take up and fully appreciate the subject-matter of today’s Class lesson.

We have certainly experienced, my dear brothers and sisters, how the great pictures of life appear before the soul when a person approaches, through true, genuine experience, the abyss which emerges between the world in which we live here, and the world that we come to know as the one in which we have our own true being, our actual human existence.

We are aware that when we take hold of the world around us here in the right way, that this world certainly claims our most intense interest. We look all around from the lowliest worm up to the shining, glittering stars of the heavens, looking all around throughout the realms of nature, out of which much has been taken that we ourselves carry within. And we have every reason, in what is revealed around us in streaming brilliant sunlight, to feel down to the bottom of our hearts and souls its grandeur, its world-shaking importance, and its majesty. And we should not become mislead by participating in any sort of esotericism, by any type of science of the spirit, however ascetically we happen to chance upon it, for it could be merely a false asceticism, that involves turning away from the world. We should turn neither from the lowly worm nor from the exalted starry heavens, simply because these belong to the visible world. We should not turn away from it all and fail to perceive its grandeur, its majesty, and its sublimity, and fail to perceive the significance that it has for each of us.

We should take this to heart. If we truly embrace spiritual science, we should feel fully at home in what appears around us as the world. But we should also be aware, and we can become aware, as we interact with the things and beings and events of the world in the proper intrinsic manner of heart and soul, we can and should become aware that our true, genuine, highest human self is not to be found in all these realms of nature, in spite of the world being so grand and exalted, in its sun-drenched and sun-illuminated nature, but that in the pursuit of cognition, we must seek our highest nature in a world which is separated from us by an abyss, and that the things on the other side of the abyss, in the other world, from which we really stem, are portrayed to us initially as blackest night. The abyss looms before us as a wall, a black wall.

But the first being that we meet stands right at the abyss. Ever more and more we must allow this to resound within every night when we sleep, and we may certainly find this out, that the realm we are actually in then is the one to which we belong with the innermost and most genuine part of our humanity. But we really take up residence in this realm only when fully ready. We should not enter undeveloped. The Guardian of the Threshold, the first spirit-being that we meet, has warned us about this, in regard to any serious, genuine wish to gaze into this world of our ancient origin, and to enter therein unprepared.

Then it is the Guardian of the Threshold himself who speaks the first words to us, as we tread the path over the abyss, into the realm of spirit from which we come. The Guardian of the Threshold himself admonishes that we should look back at our own self, in order that in self-awareness we should seek the foundation for understanding the world.

It is also the Guardian of the Threshold himself, however, who shows us that what is initially in our soul-nature as thinking, feeling, and willing, that this corresponds to a certain gestalt, an organization in the spiritual world, which can be portrayed in front of us, and with which we can become acquainted imaginatively. At the abyss he points this construction out to us, this gestalt of our thinking, feeling, and willing, in their initial forms appropriate for our present time and age, as the three beasts that emerge from the abyss. And all that follows then is an admonition from the side of the Guardian of the Threshold, that we should pay especially close attention to these three beasts, meaning of course, to ourselves, in order in this manner to really find, out of our primal state, the path toward world comprehension.

All this has been brought in the form of mantric verses before the souls of all who have taken part in these lessons, and all of this has led up to what was brought forth in the last lesson.

So here we stand, the situational meditation before us. We have been advised, have had it pointed out to us, that we are already standing on the other side of the abyss, although still under the warning guidance of the Guardian of the Threshold. He directs certain words to us, in order that they should lead us to an understanding of our situation when we have over-flown the abyss and have entered the realm which for us is initially quite dark.

On this side, as long as we stay within our present realm, from which we have not originated and from which we have not emerged, here we have under us the firmness of earth, which carries and supports us, and which, as we have seen, may be touched and felt by our entire body, when we stand upon the first element, upon the element of earth.

We also carry within us and may feel what one calls "water" in spiritual science. This is indicated overall by all fluidity, and we may feel the fluid element within us. Most certainly it has built us from within, has made us grow, out of its nature has guided all organs into being, merely out of its nature, out of the nature of this second element, the element of water. And entrained to this water element, that of course is also the blood element, is again an admonition of the Guardian.

Entrained to what we take up through our breath, the air element, entrained to what we take up through warmth, the fire element working effectively in us, also entrained there and directed at us are meaningful words of the Guardian of the Threshold.

And the powers of the world work in us in such a way that an answer forms in our souls, an answer concerning each admonishing question of the Guardian of the Threshold. This answer, brought into movement in us by world powers, this answer can come from Christ, and then it will be the right answer. It can come from Lucifer, but then it will be an incorrect answer. It can come from Ahriman, but then again it will be an incorrect answer.

The admonition of Christ should always be formed, in regard to each individual element, so that the Christ in us speaks, so that over there in the spiritual world we feel full of spirit, totally full of spirit, fully in harmony with the spirit-element, but so that we know, that as long as we are men of earth, that we must ever and again journey back over the abyss into earthly existence, we must not languish in how we are over there in the spiritual world, we must tear ourselves away from the nature of the spiritual world.

Christ will always speak to us in this way, warning us, that as long as we are in the spiritual world, that we should be at one with this spiritual world, but when we return again, that we should live upon the earth as proper men and women of earth, for we should be living in the spirit only in the spiritual world.

Lucifer will always spur us on, seeking to have us wish to remain in the spiritual world, to become absorbed in lust with the spiritual world, to become absorbed in the pleasures of the spiritual world.

Ahriman will always induce us into wanting to take on the task of pulling the spiritual world over into the physical world.

This sort of thing must be allowed to work on one's soul, so that by its means a person can properly regard, can feel into the whole situation regarding the spiritual world.

And so, feel that we ourselves are on the other side of the abyss, already standing within the spiritual world, but standing nonetheless in utter darkness, the Guardian of the Threshold at the abyss turning to us assertively, in warning, directing admonishing questions at us, questions that lance deeply into our souls. Sense how for each individual question a three-fold answer comes to us in the answers of Christ, of Lucifer, and of Ahriman.

The Guardian speaks: Where is the firmness of earth, that supported you?

There is no floor anywhere. We are in the spiritual world.

The Guardian asks: Where is earth’s firmness, that supported you?
Christ in us answers: I leave its solid ground, as long as the spirit carries me.
Lucifer in us answers: I feel delight, that I no longer need the support.
Ahriman answers: I will hammer it still harder by the spirit’s might.

The Guardian speaks: Where is water’s forming force, that permeated you?
Christ in us speaks: My life extinguishes it, as long as the spirit forms me.
Lucifer in us: My life expunges it, that I may be released from it.
Ahriman in us: My life affixes it, that I may carry it to spirit realms.

The Guardian: Where is air’s stimulation, that waked you?
Christ in us: My soul breathes heaven's air, as long as the spirit is about me.
Lucifer in us: My soul cares not for it in spirit blissfulness.
Ahriman in us: My soul absorbs it, that I may learn godlike to create.

The Guardian speaks: Where is fire’s cleansing, that inflamed in you the I?
Christ in us: My “I” blazes in God-Fire, so long as the spirit kindles me.
Lucifer in us: My “I” has flaming power through spirit sun-craft.
Ahriman in us: My “I” has its own fire, that flames purely through self-unfolding.

We will be probed by the admonishing questions of the Guardian, about how we have come to deport ourselves in regard to the supports of earth, in regard to the fluid forming force in us, in regard to the astral nurturing force of air in us, and in regard to the “I”-bearing force of fire in us. And in us Christ answers, if a proper humanity moves within us. In us the tempter Lucifer answers, as if we should bound over into the wonder of all forever, which we should really bring into movement within us only during the time we rightfully give ourselves over to the spirit. And in us Ahriman answers, as if we should carry over into the fields of earth, what we partake of in the land of the spirit.

Whatever is possible for the soul, we must allow the soul to work on, to work within the soul. We must expose ourselves just as fully to the voice of Christ, as to the voice of Lucifer and to the voice of Ahriman. We must inwardly move ourselves in meditation into this situation. In depths of soul we then become, directly by this means, in having appealed to our deepest inner nature, my dear brothers and sisters, directly by this means we become so broadly liberated, that in liberated spirit-experience we can have the spiritual element most truly as our own.

Today we must enter into this situation more fully. We must pointedly feel ourselves to be standing on the other side of the threshold of this abyss, the admonishing Guardian of the Threshold beside us, and within us voices dragging a human being toward the very different positions of Lucifer and Ahriman, and within us the voice of Christ showing us the proper course while Lucifer on one side and Ahriman on the other are seeking to mislead us. Then we will be in the right frame of heart and mind which makes it possible to start off into the spiritual world with feeling, with empathy, with empathic inner feeling.

We can only do this, my dear brothers and sisters, by gradually acquiring the ability to sense, to feel, to regard higher spiritual beings, just as we sense, feel, and regard the beings of the three realms of nature here in the sensory world.

When standing here in the sensory world, external to ourselves we may feel the nature of a stone, the mineral nature, and we may say to ourselves that this mineral nature also lives in us. For we have salinity in us. Mineral nature, living in us in salinity, is the principal thing that really makes it possible to be a human being upon the earth.

We may gaze out upon the plant-world and know that we have taken plant-like nature into ourselves, having it in our earthly nature within what is bordered by our skin, carrying it in our power of growth, carrying it in what forms our organs for us, and carrying it also in all that we process while asleep. We feel plant-like nature carried in us, while we gaze at plant-like nature around us.

We may gaze out upon the animals, and know that in our astral nature, in our breathing process, that we carry animal nature itself within us. As we gaze out on various animals, we say that we feel allied to, in sympathy with their animal nature, because we carry within ourselves this same animal nature, although within our human nature we reorganize it.

We feel ourselves to be human here in the sensory world under the sway of the beings of the three realms of nature. We must learn to feel in this way when remaining within the spiritual world under the sway of those beings with whom we exist in our human soul and spirit nature, just as we exist here with our physical and etheric nature among the beings of the three realms of external nature. Just as we learn to know ourselves as physical human beings under the sway of other physical human beings, just so we must learn to know ourselves as humans of soul and spirit under the sway of higher beings of soul and spirit.

We have become acquainted with what, for us as human beings, is the surrounding encompassing spiritual-soul world, composed of three hierarchies, in the same way we have learned to know what is around us here, and have become acquainted with the beings of the sensory world in the three realms of nature. With our physical-etheric nature we belong to the three realms of nature. With our soul-spiritual nature we belong to the three realms of the hierarchies. While remaining here in the physical world, it is only natural to belong to the three realms of nature, to let them flow through us and to remain amongst them. While remaining pressed into the soul-spiritual world, during our time there, our condition must be soul-spiritual, in belonging among the entities of the higher hierarchies of the spiritual world, feeling ourselves empathically, intuitively pressed in amongst them, and discerning these entities of the higher hierarchies just as we do otherwise in regard to the beings of the realms of nature.

The Guardian in turn instructs us further about this. And to these mantric words, drawn forth from the spiritual world by the alluring voice of the Guardian, to these mantric words we must turn, ever and ever again allowing them to resound within our souls in meditation. Then they will have the power, directly by the simple manner in which they have been constructed, through the recapitulation within yourself, through their own quite capable intrinsic form, these mantric words will be properly able to call into wakefulness in our souls the feeling of standing within the spiritual world among the hierarchies.

We have to envision the next mantra in this way, with the Guardian speaking. We are still standing on the other side of the Threshold of the spiritual world in darkness, having learned first to feel about within the spiritual world, before learning to gaze about. First the Guardian speaks, once again in reference to the elements of earth, water, and air. Building on fire will be the subject matter of the next Class lesson. First the Guardian speaks, in reference to the elements of earth, water, and air, and therefore to all that is fixed in us, to all that is fluid in us, primarily our blood and lymph, and in reference to all that is aeriform in us, the air taken in from outside that is encompassed in our breathing process. The Guardian speaks in reference to all this. And he calls forth what resounds in the world of the hierarchies.

After the Guardian has directed his word at us, one hierarchy after the other speaks, the third hierarchy accompanying the first mantra, at first the Angels, then the Archangels, and finally the Archai. We should feel ourselves in this situation. The Guardian of the Threshold is speaking to us. It sounds forth from the darkness, as if emerging from the background all around, and at the same time it speaks within our souls, reverberating within us.

The Guardian speaks:

What becomes of earth’s firmness, that supported you?

The Angels from the Third Hierarchy:

Sense,¹ as we sense in your thinking.

The Archangels from the Third Hierarchy:

Experience,² as we experience in your feeling.

The Archai from the Third Hierarchy:

Behold,³ as we behold in your willing.

We receive from the cosmos a momentous three-fold instruction in regard to the question of the Guardian of the Threshold. With magic power his words call forth the answer of the Angels, the Archangels, and the Archai.

Just what do the Angels profess to us? As human beings we think. Initially we believe we only experience our thoughts. But while our thoughts are flowing through our souls, the Angels are actually living within our thoughts. And as we perceive with our senses, as we confront and engage something or other, so living within our thoughts are the Angels, for that is how they perceive, how they sense. They speak and make us aware of this. And just as the Angels sense within our thinking, just so the Archangels live in and experience in our feeling, and the Archai show themselves and take part in our willing.

When some sort of thought, my dear brothers and sisters, zips through your soul, then you should feel, that in this thought a being of the hierarchy of Angels perceives something. In that you are thinking, an Angel is touching something, sensing, perceiving. While you are feeling, a being from the hierarchy of the Archangels is living into it, experiencing. While you are willing, in that you deploy your will, a being from the hierarchy of the Archai is taking hold and looking about, observing. Human thinking, human feeling, and human willing are not merely ongoing within human beings. When we think, the Angels sense. When we feel, the Archangels experience. When we employ our will, the Archai take part, looking about, observing.

[The first part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The Guardian speaks:

What becomes of earth’s firmness, that supported you?

It is answered from the hierarchy of the Angels, from the third hierarchy: [3rd Hierarchy was written in front of this section and underlined.]

3rd Hierarchy

Angels: Sense, as we sense in your thinking.

It sounds forth from the hierarchy of the Archangels:

Archangels: Experience, as we experience in your feeling.

It sounds forth from the hierarchy of the Archai:

Archai: Behold, as we behold in your willing.

That is what in the spiritual world takes the place of the element of earth. For the supporting force of earth is simply not there. The firm floor of earth is gone. Everything solid and fixed is gone. The Third Hierarchy, the Angels, Archangels, and Archai make a firm support, but not as the minerals shape up into firmness. We would not be thinking deeply, but would be bogged down on all sides in our thinking if the Angels were not working there, if they were not having their own sort of sensory perception there. If the Archangels were not living in our feeling, we would scatter ourselves about in amorphous formlessness. If the Archai were not able to gaze into our willing, we would fade away to nothing in our willing.

The Guardian speaks:

hat becomes of water’s forming force, that permeated you?

Out of the second hierarchy the Exusiai answer:

Know spirit-world-construction⁴ in human-body-construction.

The Dynamis of the second hierarchy:

Feel spirit-world-life in human-body-life.

The Kyriotetes of the second hierarchy:

Will spirit-world-process in human-body-existence.

In this manner we are brought into becoming aware, that as we stand face to face with everything around us, that we are not standing alone. We should learn to feel that in our bodily existence, in all that we carry around within the boundaries of our skin, there lives a part of universal world existence. The Second Hierarchy is in us, working in us, making us to some extent cosmic beings, beings linked to the cosmos as our limbs are linked to us.

All this should wash over us so thoroughly in awareness, through this mantric verse, so that in standing within the events of the world, everything within us, from the smallest vibration of our cellular organs, to the grand exalted beating movements of our blood, to the rhythms of our breathing system, to the rhythms alternating between night and day, so that everything, so that all this is not merely happening within us, but as a linked limb of universal world process. [The second part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The Guardian speaks:

What becomes of water’s forming force, that permeated you?

The Exusiai answer from the Second Hierarchy: [2nd Hierarchy was written in front of this section and underlined.]

2nd Hierarchy

Exusiai:

Know spirit-world-construction in human-body-construction.

The Dynamis answer from the second hierarchy:

Dynamis:

Feel spirit-world-life in human-body-life.

The Kyriotetes answer from the second hierarchy:

Kyriotetes:

Will spirit-world-process in human-body-existence.

In these mantric verses, as I have often said, all must be taken specifically as given. So the question may arise, why it is, that standing here next to “world spiritual process” is “human body existence”? We must take each exact word to heart if a mantric verse is to work properly in our souls. Externally world process has dominion, and we perceive it as happening. This world process is world-wide, all-embracing, and fills the universe. As it continues on in us, it actually is in us, although we feel it as self-contained in our existence, because our skin defines our outer borders and we feel ourselves to be fully self-contained. Within ourselves we do not feel everything moving, undulating, weaving, in the way we feel it externally. And so here “process” stands in contradistinction to “existence,” whereas earlier and quite rightly “construction” stands with “construction," and “life” with “life”.

And in regard to the element of air, its admonishing question is also raised by the Guardian of the Threshold. It is answered by the beings of the First Hierarchy, the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. They admonish us that we should become aware of just how the cosmos works in us. We must progress from mere consciousness to self-consciousness, and here it is the beings of the First Hierarchy who guide us.

The Guardian speaks:

What becomes of air’s stimulation, that waked you?

From the First Hierarchy the Thrones answer:

Grasp⁵ inner existence knowingly in your god’s-world-existence.

The Cherubim from the First Hierarchy:

Warm⁶ yourself on inner life in your god’s-world-life.

The Seraphim from the First Hierarchy:

Wake⁷ inner light in yourself in your god’s-world-light.

So now we are admonished to re-awaken self-awareness at a higher level, for by means of the magical words of the second hierarchy we have traversed out into the cosmos, we have felt our unification with the cosmos. [The third part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The Guardian speaks:

What becomes of air’s stimulation, that waked you?

From the First Hierarchy the cosmic answer sounds forth: [3rd Hierarchy was written before the section and underlined.]

3rd Hierarchy

Thrones:

Grasp inner existence knowingly in your god’s-world-existence.

Cherubim:

Warm yourself on inner life in your god’s-world-life.

Seraphim:

Wake inner light in yourself in your god’s-world-light.

Yes, my dear brothers and sisters, without having felt the effective working of this last mantra, as it sounds forth from the fiery flashing power of the Seraphim, “Wake inner light in yourself in your god’s-world-light,” without this flashing, flaming word intoned by the Seraphim flaming forth, we would not be able to catch the sense of how, out of our own soul, a force must be awakened, so that as we stand there in darkness, on the other side of the abyss, still just feeling about, gradually feeling the world approaching us, by this means, by and by, a mere glimmer begins to emanate from us, becoming more lucid, the glimmer progressively penetrating ever further in space, and broader and broader, and as the glimmer becomes more and more luminous, more and more brilliant, by means of our own force the night-bedecked darkness there in the spiritual world gradually becomes lucent. It must be so. In this manner we must try to attain the igniting power of the true self, the fiery igniting power of true humanity, for this is the light in the initially night-bedecked spiritual lands.

So, we feel ourselves to be within the threefold spiritual world of the Angels, Exusiai, Thrones, and so forth, just as we feel ourselves to be within the sensory world here in the sensory existence in the three realms of nature. So we learn to feel ourselves as human beings in our true human manner of existing in the spiritual environment, just as we feel ourselves as sensing human beings in the sensory environment. We learn it, inasmuch as we ascend due to the third hierarchy, which unfurls the spirit in us, we ascend to the particular spirit within which this hierarchy lives, inasmuch as we then ascend from this to the second hierarchy, which develops the spirit in us of producing, living, existing, and finally, insofar as we come to the first hierarchy, where we once again have a support, although a support of spirit, which most certainly is at the top and not at the bottom, wherein we have the reign of wisdom in the Cherubim, which brings us, in the service of self-awareness, to what can in turn bring warmth into our inner nature in self-perception, in inner-self-feelings, in inner-self-warming, until we come thereby to this inwardly-warmed self which becomes the illuminating element, which will clarify, illuminate what was dark for us before.

And so we stand, feeling such things at the side of the Guardian of the Threshold, feeling immersed in the admonition sounding forth, confronting us from all the beings of the world, from all the happenings of the world, so that from self-awareness we ascend to world-awareness, from world-awareness to human-awareness, and so that we remain standing extant in nature, but also extant in spirit, we ourselves held by both sides of reality, by the side of nature and by the side of spirit.

But then resounding in a new form, in a new gestalt, the words not being different, but being felt differently, strengthened through the admonition of all the hierarchies of the spiritual world, in which we stand primarily as human beings, and so then again resounds the world word:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

• 1. empfinde is find with empathy, although sense or feel are commonly used.
• 2. erlebe is live in, although experience is commonly used (erfahre is more properly experience).
• 3. schaue is a combination of behold and show (with which it is cognate) and is active and willful.
• 4. Welten is cognate with world. The entire physical-material universe is the cosmos (Kosmos in German). Cosmic rays were initially mysterious, although we now know that they come from supernova and black holes, so cosmic in English acquired the secondary meaning of powerful and mysterious. A third meaning is cosmetic jewelry and makeup. The cosmetic adornment of the world-all is the cosmos. Our entire world, however, is quite a bit more than the cosmos, as it includes inner worlds (such as the world of mathematics, the world of education, and the spiritual world). We must translate various forms of Welt as world and never as cosmos or universe.
• 5. ergreife: The prefix er- in ergreife makes it an inner grasping.
• 6. erwarme: The prefix er- in erwarme makes it an inner warming.
• 7. erwecke: The prefix er- in erwecke makes it an inner waking (inspiration, excitement, arousal), Wecken is transitive, to wake someone or something (wachen, to awaken, is intransitive and is not used here).

My dear guests!

I must ask you to excuse me for speaking in German and not in Dutch; however, I will have to show you a number of photographs to illustrate today's lecture, and they will not be in German, but international.

The anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement from Dornach has been working on this for the last twenty years or so. In the early years, however, the Anthroposophical Society was a member of the general Theosophical Society, but I never put forward anything other than what I currently represent. And when, after this anthroposophy had been tolerated for a while within the Theosophical Society, it was then found to be too heretical and was to a certain extent expelled, the Anthroposophical Society was founded as an independent society.

The anthroposophical movement definitely wants to reckon with the scientific attitude of the contemporary civilized world, it does not want to be anything sectarian or the like, but it wants to have a serious stimulating effect on the various sciences of our time, on the religious consciousness and also on the artistic and social life of the present.

By around 1909, the anthroposophical movement had grown to such an extent within Central Europe that it was impossible for it to work without its own building, and so a number of long-standing members came up with the idea of erecting their own building for anthroposophy. And when I was approached with the intention of erecting such a building, a very specific impulse immediately arose from the nature of anthroposophical work. Otherwise, if one had been forced by some spiritual movement to construct a building of one's own, one would have gone to some master builder and had him construct a Renaissance building or a Gothic building or a Greek building or something similar.

It would have been impossible for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to proceed in such an outward manner. For this is not something that merely seeks to spread a theoretical culture, but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science emerges from the source of the full human being. I have taken the liberty of explaining how it emerges from this source of full humanity in the two previous lectures here in this hall. But because this is so, because anthroposophy is not merely a one-sided theoretical science, but because it is something for the whole of human life in all its forms of activity, this anthroposophical movement also had to create its own architectural style out of its sources at the moment when it was faced with the necessity of erecting its own building. And we have succeeded in creating such a building. It is not yet finished, but it is already finished to such an extent that courses were held in it last fall and will be held again at Easter. We have succeeded in erecting such a building on the Dornach Hill near Basel in Switzerland.

I said that the style of this Goetheanum, the attempt at a new style of building, was also formed from the same sources from which spiritual science was born, naturally with all the dangers, with all the shortcomings with which such a first attempt at a new style must be associated. Anthroposophy really emerges from the sources of being, not from thoughts or mere experimental and intellectually extended investigations, from the sources of existence itself. Therefore, in all its work, it must connect itself with the creative forces that are active in nature itself, for example, because the ultimate creative forces in nature are, as I have explained in the previous lectures, themselves of a spiritual nature.

I may perhaps use a comparison. Take a nut. It has a nut kernel; this nut kernel is formed in a lawful way. But there is also the nutshell; it could not be otherwise as it is, since the nut is as it is. The same force that shapes the nut kernel also shapes the nutshell in a unique way. Just as the nut kernel is shaped by natural law, so is the nutshell.

In Dornach, anthroposophical spiritual science is taught from the podium. The results of anthroposophical spiritual science are explored. Artistic representations are offered which are an outward expression - artistic, not symbolic or straw allegorical, but artistic - of that of which spiritual science itself is the expression. Therefore, around all this, around the kernel, so to speak, the shell must also be formed, which is [formed] precisely out of the same laws.

Therefore, an architecture has been cultivated in Dornach that is [designed] from the same sense, from the same spirit as anthroposophical spiritual science itself. Sculpture is done there out of exactly the same spirit, painting out of the same spirit. When someone stands on the podium and speaks in ideas, it is just another form of expression of what the pillars speak, what the paintings on the walls speak, what the sculptures speak. Everything is, if I may put it this way, cast from a single mold.

People are so afraid that nothing artistic would be created in this way, but only something symbolic or allegorical. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in Dornach there is not a single symbol, not a single allegory, but everything is attempted to be given in artistic form. The aim is not to somehow embody the ideas that are presented through images, that would be inartistic. Rather, the one spiritual life that underlies it can be shaped artistically at one time, and at another time it can be shaped ideally, in thought, scientifically. Art in Dornach is not a didactic expression of a science, for example, but it is one representation, and science is the other representation of the same great spiritual unknown from which anthroposophical spiritual science draws everything it wants to give humanity.

The entire external design of the Dornach building had to be accordingly. Anyone who looks at this Dornach building will see a double-domed structure, with two circular cylinders standing side by side, but interlocking, and two hemispherical domes above them, which are joined together in the circular segment by a somewhat difficult mechanical construction. Since in Dornach what can be researched through spiritual science is to be brought to the world, this must be reflected in the building itself. The small domed building is a kind of stage in which mystery plays and the like are performed. Eurythmy is also performed, but many other things are planned. The podium for the speaker is located between the small and large domed rooms. The large dome room is the auditorium or audience room for almost a thousand people. This double-domed building expresses the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science has something to say to the world of the present and the future in spiritual, general human and social terms, which I took the liberty of discussing in the two previous lectures.

If you approach the building from the west [and] come towards the main portal, which is oriented to the west, you will first see the following view (Fig. 5). The bottom of the building is made of concrete; at the top is a terrace that leads around the building in a stylized curve. This wooden structure stands on this concrete foundation. The domes are covered with that wonderful Nordic slate that is found in the slate quarries that can be seen on the journey from Kristiania to Bergen, from the Vossian slate quarries. This slate fits in wonderfully with the main idea of Dornach. Concrete and wood are both processed in such a way that an architectural style emerges which can be characterized as the transformation of the existing geometric, symmetrical, mechanical, static, dynamic architectural styles into an organic architectural style. Not as if any organic form had been imitated in the architectural forms of Dornach, that is not the case, but rather I tried, in the sense of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, to become completely integrated into the natural creation of organic forms and to obtain organic forms which, by metamorphosing them, could then form a whole in the Dornach building; organic forms which are such that each individual form must be in the place where it is.

Imagine the nature of organic forms. Think of something seemingly quite insignificant in the organic form of the human organism: an earlobe. You will have to say to yourself: This earlobe, in the place where it is, could not be otherwise, as it is, if the whole organism is as it has just revealed itself. The smallest and the largest thing in an organic context has its very specific form at its place in the organism. This has been carried over into the building concept of Dornach.

I know very well how much can be objected to this organic principle of building from the point of view of the old architectural styles. But this organic building style was once coined in the Dornach building concept. It may be rejected from the old point of view, but after all, everything new was rejected from the old point of view. In any case, however, if one can make friends with the transformation of static-dynamic, geometric building forms into organic ones, then one will find that all transitions from one organic form to another - not organic [natural] forms, for nothing is naturalistically imitated - [can be experienced] with the same inner regularity as, say, the plant leaf that is at the bottom of the stem, metamorphoses when it appears further up the stem, always [is] the same form, but alternating with the greatest variety.

So in Dornach you will find certain organic forms carried into the building concept everywhere, as they are carved out of the wood here, as they appear here on the entrance pillars as capitals. Here on the side windows (Fig. 4, 12) you can see the same motif, on the windows of the side wing (Fig. 13) too, apparently no longer similar, but nevertheless the same metamorphosed, just as the motif of the green leaf reappears in the flower petal.

If you look at the building from the inside and the outside, you can get the impression: If any motif is near the gate, it is worked differently, so that you can see that the motif has less to bear against the gate, while it has to brace itself against the whole weight of the building. All of this, as it is taken into account in nature in the formation of the bones and muscle shapes, is definitely carried out in Dornach's building concept. Take a look at the bone form within the formation of the knee, it is designed in a wonderfully natural and ingenious way so that certain bones, which form the foundation bones, carry what lies on them. They are expanded and retracted in the right place. Feeling one's way into the forms of organic formation, of carrying, of weight, that was necessary in order to build Dornach.

Here (Fig. 5) you enter. Here is a room to put down your clothes, here is a staircase inside, through which you walk up. You can walk around this terrace and at the same time have a distant view over the countryside, the Swiss Jura.

The same picture, slightly shifted and closer (Fig. 6).

Here (Fig. 7) you can see the building as it presents itself to you from the southwest. Here the gallery, below the concrete building.

The building as you see it when you approach it from the north (Fig. 1), so that you have the large dome in front of you, [here] the small dome. Here the two domes are joined together.

From a point in the north, the building (Fig. 2). Here you can see a strange structure. This is the one that is most criticized. It is the building that stands near the building. I started by looking at the lighting and heating machines as if they were the kernel of a nut, and constructing a shell over it out of concrete, which is extremely difficult to work with artistically. Those who still criticize this building today don't consider what would be standing there if no effort had been made to create something artistic out of the artistically brittle concrete material: there would be a red chimney. I would like to ask people whether that would be more beautiful than what is certainly a first attempt to stylize something out of concrete, which has some shortcomings, but is nevertheless a first attempt to create something artistic in these things.

Here (Fig. 3) the building seen from the northeast. Here is a house that was already standing when we were given the building plot. A house that we very much hope we will be able to buy one day. You can imagine for what purpose we would like to acquire it; of course it disturbs the whole aspect of the building.

Here is the interlocking of the domes (Fig. 17). Here the main wing, here the main entrance (Fig. 10).

Here is the studio where the stained glass windows were made (Fig. 103). It was listed as a studio for grinding the stained glass windows.

Behind it is the boiler house again (Figs. 106, 107). In a neighboring village, Arlesheim, there is a particularly tastelessly built church. I have nothing to say against it, but it is honestly tasteless. Nevertheless, the Swiss Association for the Beautification of Swiss Buildings has managed to say that this [our] building disfigures this part of Switzerland: just take a look at the beautiful church in Arlesheim.

The ground plan (Fig. 20). Main entrance, organ room, auditorium. Here is the lectern. The stage area. Here are the two side wings with the individual rooms for the performing actors and other artists. Here you can see seven columns on both sides. Here in the curve six columns. These seven pillars are not formed out of some mystical urge in the number seven, but purely out of artistic feeling. Just as the violin has four strings, so the artistic feeling here has resulted from inner reasons that a certain artistic development and in turn an artistic conclusion can be achieved by developing just seven motifs. With these pillars, the risk was taken not to design the capital and architrave motifs as repetitions, but in a lively development. When you enter from the west portal, you come across the first two columns. However, they are symmetrical. But if you move on from the first to the second column, the capital of the second column, the base, the architrave above the second column is designed in a way that must be organic. It is designed in such a way that one had to live into the creation and creation of the forces of nature if one wanted to artistically shape the second pillar motif out of the first, the third again out of the second and so on, until a certain conclusion was reached in the seventh pillar motif.

Many visitors come to Dornach and ask: What does the individual chapter mean? You can't ask that at all about art. The essential thing is that one pillar emerges artistically and formally from the other pillar. Whereas in the static architectural style we are actually only dealing with symmetry, with repetitions of the same motif, here we are dealing with a living evolution from the first to the seventh column. I will show the columns later, then you can see this.

Section through the building (Fig. 21).

Original model, cut vertically in the middle (Fig. 22). I originally had to work out the whole building as a model, so that even the building plan, ground plan and elevation, as they were based on, were formed according to this model. This whole model is precisely the embodiment of the Dornach building concept, is conceived in the same way as spiritual science itself is conceived, is to a certain extent another expression for that for which the one expression is spiritual science itself.

Right next to the main entrance, the main portal in the west (Fig. 15). The pictures were taken at a time when construction was still in full swing.

A little further on from the main entrance (Fig. 12). Here the part containing the stairs to go up. Here is a house nearby. This house was built in a very special way. After all, we built the entire structure through the understanding of our anthroposophical friends. The fact that the Dornach hill was used to build this house is explained by the fact that a friend in Basel, near Basel, bought this building plot a long time ago to build a summer house for himself; he then gave us this plot as a gift. We were then able to build there. The friend also wanted to have his house here. And that's when I was given the task - various conditions made it necessary - to stylize a house, a family home with fifteen rooms, out of concrete material. It was a bit of a gamble. There are certainly still flaws in this house, which is formed out of the artistic nature of the brittle concrete material. But such things have to be done for the first time.

A side wing (Fig. 17). These two side wings are inserted like a crossbeam. Here the main motif is again metamorphosed. Everywhere the same and yet again something different, one could say, is contained in the building forms.

Front façade of a side wing (Fig. 14). Here again the motif that is at the main entrance, very widened, designed with rich material, here once more sparingly designed in the same metamorphosis. A certain law of symmetry is observed everywhere, but this is combined with asymmetry. This asymmetry gives the building an artistically pleasing effect and great variety.

Taken somewhat larger, the motif of the façade of one such side wing (Fig. 11).

We enter through the concrete entrance in the west, imagine (Fig. 23). Then we first come to the stairs leading up here. This would be the room where you put your clothes. Then you go to the front, here you enter the auditorium. Here I have dared to make the column shape organic.

[Then] for example this shape here (Fig. 24): There are three motifs standing perpendicular to each other. How did this form come about? Not through any kind of philosophizing, but purely out of feeling. You can say to yourself: anyone who has first entered through the main portal and then wants to come into the auditorium must be able to move in a certain way towards the thought and feeling of what he wants to hear in Dornach from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual view: Here you may enter for the security of your soul, to gain a firm foothold within yourself. Here you may enter in such a way that no illusions of life shall beguile you; that no kind of wavering shall come over you. This has been sensitively expressed here in this motif.

Then you see here a pillar supporting the staircase (Fig. 25). The staircase motif itself is designed in such a way that it is organically braced against the building, in this case against the exit. Here it is carried by a column that does not imitate organic motifs in a naturalistic way, but is just as organically shaped as the forms of living creatures in nature are shaped by the creative forces of nature. How this pillar stands up, how it supports something on one side, where the load to be carried is lighter, how it braces itself against this side, where the main load of the building lies, is expressed in the smallest things in the same way as the earlobe shape expresses the affiliation to the whole human organism. Every form in Dornach must be perceived as a necessity in its place.

Here (Fig. 26) is a motif that I have executed in the various metamorphoses. Here it is made of concrete, in the upper section of wood. It's a front piece for a radiator. As I said, in Dornach the individual forms emerge from each other in a metamorphic way, and there are no abstract forms that are merely appropriate to the underground art, but everything is realized in a strictly organic artistic way.

Here (Fig. 27) you can see the room that you enter when you climb the staircase that has just been built. This is a wooden building. Here is a pillar supporting the ceiling. Everything that immediately follows in the interior is handcrafted by a large number of our friends. It must be emphasized again and again that a large number of friends have gathered in Dornach over many years, all of whom have worked out these individual sculptural forms, which were given to them in the model, by hand. In a sense, the entire wooden structure is the handiwork of the anthroposophical friends. And that is something that could have been exemplary at the same time for the loving cooperation of a group of people.

If you now enter and look backwards in the auditorium, you can see the organ loft here. This is the model (Fig. 30). The idea is not to place the organ in a cavity, but to take the organ and shape the architecture accordingly. Additional motifs were then added during the elaboration.

Here is the interior (Fig. 29). When you enter the interior, you can see the organ porch where the singers stand. Here are the first three columns. I will explain the picture of the column formation in a moment. Above the columns are the architraves, which also show progressive motifs.

Here is the organ loft (Fig. 28).

Here is the space above the organ, sculpted out of wood (Fig. 33). Please take a look at the chapter. It is composed of simple forms. We will make the transition to the next and next capital and architrave forms. You don't have to think about how one capital emerges from another, but it is simply perceived like a leaf on the stem of a plant from which others now emerge metamorphically. Thus the next motifs here are always formed quite sensitively from the previous ones.

Here you have the simple capital motif of the first column (fig. 34).

The first column and the second column (Fig. 35). If you think of the simple motif from top to bottom, from bottom to top, you can imagine how it grows. The drops from above grow into this form, and from below the forms grow to meet them in more complicated shapes. It is the same with the architrave motifs.

Second column motif (fig. 36): already more complicated.

Second and third columns together (fig. 37): Again organically metamorphosed, the third column is obtained from the second column.

The third column on its own (Fig. 38).

Third and fourth pillars together (Fig. 39). What is still simple here has become more complicated. You make very special discoveries in the process. I simply let one motif emerge from the other according to artistic feeling. In doing so, I realized that it is only through this artistic approach that one can really understand the essence of evolution in nature. One usually imagines that the first forms in a developmental process are the simpler ones, which then become more and more complicated. This is not the case. If you work artistically, allowing one to emerge from the other, then you end up shaping the simpler into the more complicated, but when the complication has reached a certain level, things become more harmonious, but simpler again. This is how evolution works: from the simple to the complicated and then back to simplification. This discovery is surprising at first. You create something like this from the purely artistic and then find that it actually corresponds fully to the artistic creation of nature.

Consider the human eye: it is the most perfect, but not the most complicated. Certain organs of lower beings, the fan in the eye, the xiphoid process, are absorbed by the human eye. You come to that by yourself if you shape purely artistically.

Something very strange also happened to me. I said I had to form seven pillars, really not out of any mystical inclination. The seventh pillar turned out to be the end; you couldn't go any further, the motifs had been fulfilled. But later I discovered that if I took the convex shape of the seventh pillar and reshaped it a little artistically, it went straight into the concave, hollowed-out shape of the first pillar. I wasn't looking for that. It was the same with the sixth and second pillars, and also with the third and fifth pillars. I discovered that the capitals and the pedestal figures were something that emerged naturally from the work in the sense of an evolution. This is not something I was looking for. Even in nature itself, such surprising formal relationships arise. When you create artistically, you get these things that confront you from the individual forms, and you come to a deep respect for the mysterious working and weaving firstly in nature, but secondly in the world of forms itself, which you can penetrate imaginatively and artistically and by looking at it.

A column on its own has become relatively complicated (fig. 42). But you will see that by thinking of this motif in such a way that it grows from top to bottom, from bottom to top, something emerges that I did not aim for; but when people look at it, they will say: He has formed the staff of Mercury. I didn't want to form that, but it came out like that.

It spreads out, grows, thus creating this complicated motif (fig. 41), then the motifs become simpler.

Here you can see this motif (Fig. 43). Now I couldn't go any further in the complication. By thinking of it as growing and perceiving it as growing, I created this simpler motif.

The last two columns with their architraves above them (fig. 45). The column directly in front of the stage entrance (fig. 46).

In this way, you can see how the individual capitals came about, how the entire column motifs developed artistically in their evolution.

Here we are in front of a plinth (Fig. 48). I wanted to show these pedestals in turn, one after the other, how they develop apart in the same way as the capitals.

All pedestals (figs. 48-54). First becoming more complicated, then simpler again.

Here you can see from the auditorium into the stage area (Fig. 57). Here you can see the painted interior of the stage dome. Here the architrave above the columns of the auditorium. Here the auditorium closes off the stage area. Still in progress is the gap that connects the auditorium with the stage area (Fig. 56).

Another view from the auditorium, whose last columns you can see, into the stage area (Fig. 55). Here the painted stage dome. With regard to the painting of the two domes, however, I cannot give you such pictures, or rather I cannot give you pictures that speak as clearly as I can about the other. For with regard to the painting of the Dornach building, what I once described as the essence of modern painting has been very seriously striven for and followed, at least in the small dome room. Everything that is created in painting must be extracted from color.

The world of color is a world unto itself. The person who immerses himself in the world of color learns to recognize the creativity of each individual color; he learns to recognize the creativity that lies in the harmony of colors. Those who know how red affects human perception, how red speaks from within, those who know that blue has a formative, creative effect, come to shape the painterly world out of the colors

This is roughly what they tried to create when painting the small domed room in Dornach. The essential thing is always, if I may put it this way, the spot of color in a certain place. Although the figurative is born out of color, everything is originally conceived out of color. Light, dark and colors are actually the only things that are justified when you depict something painterly with the help of the surface; drawing is actually a mendacity. Take the horizon line: the blue sky above, the greenish sea below. If you paint it like this, then the horizon emerges by itself as the creature of the color encounter. And so it is with all lines in real painting. In painting, form is the work of color. This is what was attempted in Dornach.

There (Fig. 64) you first see what is under the dome, the architrave motif, directly above the group that is to be placed in the east of the building as the sculptural center of this building, so to speak. A motif from the small domed room (Fig. 66). I ask that these motifs be judged in the same way as those of the large domed room, except that six columns are intended on both sides; thus the whole shapes and designs are “ben other.

A capital motif of the small domed room (fig. 58-63).

The first thing in the painting of the small domed room when you enter it (Fig. 73). Of course, you will only get a real sense of what I can show you now when you feel this [photographic] reproduction in its defects, when you say to yourself: What is this actually? There should be color! Of course it is also color, everything is taken out of the color.

Here is a child flying towards a kind of fist figure (fig. 69). The child is red-yellow, the fist figure in blue.

Here fist (fig. 70), [here] the child (fig. 69). This fist figure roughly represents the civilization of the fifteenth, sixteenth century, in which we are actually all still immersed. However, that which takes shape from that civilization in external theoretical science is basically only a surface. The person who lives into the world view that has emerged through the newer natural sciences with his whole human being feels death strongly on the one side and budding, germinating life on the other. These two polar opposites confront us precisely from the present-day view of nature. Just take the following: The way we describe nature, we use terms that are basically taken from the dead, the mineral. Our natural scientists see an ideal in thinking of plant and animal life along the lines of the mineral, perhaps even being able to work experimentally in this direction. The idea of death is very strong (Fig. 71). On the other hand, if we delve into our self-consciousness, there is that life which is polar opposite to death, which we feel in particular when we allow the life of a child to affect us uninfluenced by knowledge. It is entirely in keeping with the feeling that a fist figure appears here, painted out of the blue.

[Here] the only word you will find in the entire structure: ICH (Fig. 72).

It is at this time, when this fist figure enters modern civilization, that we first really get to know the ego as the abstract content of self-consciousness. As you know, older languages still have the I in the verb. In this age, the ego is peeled out, set apart, when at the same time this culture appears, the political contrasts of which I have just described. This is the first motif that confronts us in the painting of the small dome.

Here Faust (fig. 70), here Death (fig. 71) as the contrast to the child. It is precisely the most modern cognitive and spiritual life that is to emerge in this motif, but out of the color, out of the yellow-reddish tone of the child, the blue tone of Faust, the brownish-blackish tone of this skeleton.

An angel-like figure above Faust (fig. 74). In a sense, everywhere below is a figure representing the more human, above it a spirit figure, the inspirer, the inspiring figure.

Here (fig. 75) is an image born out of the sensibility of Greek culture, i.e. more in the past. The fist figure was conceived out of modern culture, which we are still part of. Here is a kind of Pallas Athena figure, perceived from Greek culture, with the inspiring figure above it (Fig. 76).

Also such an inspiring, spirit-like figure (fig. 77).

Here (fig. 78) going further back an initiate of the Egyptian culture, above him the inspiring figure, so that everything worked out of the color is really intended here as figurative, which even represents the successive cultures and their evolution.

Here again two figures (fig. 79), and below them the figure that I will show you in larger size later. This is a kind of man of more recent times, a man of the present Central European culture. That which is ambivalent in this man of the present is expressed in his inspiration, which is above him. Here is a Luciferian figure. In this Luciferic figure there is to live all that which lives in that human nature, that through which man wants to go beyond himself, through which he falls into the rapturous, mystical, theosophical. The other, the Ahrimanic, through which he falls into the philistine, the intellectual-materialistic. These two opposites are in every human being today. Man seeks a balance between this duality. Everything in him that leads pathologically to fever, to pleurisy, is in this Luciferic form; everything that leads to sclerosis, to calcification, is in this Ahrimanic form.

Here (Fig. 81) you see one thing, in a sense the human being with those forces that age him, drive him towards sclerosis, drive him mentally towards intellectuality, towards materialism. Man would be like this, despite the fact that no one desires it so much, so Mephistopheleanahrimanic, if he had no heart, if he were merely a man of intellect. He is in all of us, but we also have a heart.

This (Fig. 80) is the one who represents us if we only had a heart and no mind. The Luciferic figure: rapturous, mystical, theosophical, everything that wants to go beyond the human being. Here is the human being who, with the help of these two again polar, contour-like opposing effects, really feels duality and can only bear it if the child is placed by his side. The man of the present in his ambivalent nature. Here (fig. 82) still somewhat larger, the same man who feels conflict within himself.

Here (figs. 83, 84) we come somewhat closer to the center. Here two figures, one painted more light, the other more dark. I have always taken the view that the Russian people's soul contains the man of the future. Today, only in the East is everything distorted. Today, through Lenin and Trotsky, the East is working towards the death of culture, towards the most terrible destruction. For all that which is at work in the East as forces of decline in the most terrible way can only lead to the destruction of all culture. But that is not what corresponds to the Russian national soul. And if nothing else would bring down Lenin and Trotsky, the Russian people's soul would one day bring them down. But the Russian people's soul is such that every Russian has his own shadow next to him. There is not only the ambivalent man as in Central Europe, who carries Lucifer and Ahriman within him, the enthusiastic and the materialistic, there is a man who has a second man beside him. This shadow must first be absorbed by the man of the future, but then he will also become the man of the future.

Here (Fig. 83) the inspiring angel, above it a centaur figure. When the man of the future will have attained his maturity, this figure will be that which may be put forward as the actual inspirer next to the angelic figure; today he is still centaur-like.

Here (Fig. 84) this centaur figure, the starry sky in between, so rightly sensing that evolution in the spirit which hovers between the angelic and the animal. Man stands, as it were, between the animal, which has assumed a human form in its passions and instincts, and the angelic, in which the ahrimanic is transformed into the spiritual and thereby receives its cosmic justification.

Here (fig. 85) from the other side, symmetrically situated, the angel, the centaur figure, carved out of the yellow.

Here you can see what is painted in the middle: a kind of representative of humanity (fig. 86). Anyone who sees this representative of humanity may feel as if it were an embodiment of the figure of Christ. This Christ figure in the middle is shaped as I had to place it according to my supersensible view of the Christ figure, which I believed, as this being really lived in Palestine at the beginning of our era. The traditional figure of Christ with the beard was only invented in the fifth or sixth century. Today we have to go back through spiritual scientific research to the time when Christ lived in Palestine in order to be able to discover his form through extrasensory vision. I make no claim to be believed authoritatively that this is the true figure of Christ, but I see it this way and I hold from the depths of my being that this is the figure of Christ. Below it, carved into a rock, is the figure of Ahriman. From the right arm of the

The figure of Christ emanates lightning bolts that snake around the ahrimanic figure. The Ahrimanic figure is everything that man would be if he had only reason, only intellect, only a materialistic attitude, not a heart. Above it is the figure of Lucifer, carved out of the red, all that which in man tends to rapture, to fantasy, to one-sided theosophy, to mysticism.

Here (Fig. 87) you see this figure of Lucifer, the face painted entirely out of the red, above the figure of Christ.

The Ahrimanic figure (fig. 88), the countenance - the wings are bat-like in the Ahrimanic figure - bound by the lightning bolts emanating from the hand of Christ. Of course, it all depends on how you perceive it from the color.

Here is the head of the Christ figure (fig. 90). This is what is painted into the dome at the very east end of the small dome room. Below this painting - Christ, Lucifer, Ahriman - is a nine and a half meter high wooden group (Fig. 93); again in the middle is the representative of humanity, who can be perceived as Christ. Twice above it is the Lucifer motif, twice below it the Ahriman motif. And then out of the rock an elemental being, which looks at the Christ in the midst of Lucifer and Ahriman like a natural being.

Here (fig. 91) the first model of the Christ figure in profile, as I made it in order to base the wooden group, the sculpture on it.

En face the first model; it is somewhat defective (fig. 92). A model of the Ahriman figure (Fig. 99). A Lucifer figure (Fig. 101), at the side of the wooden figure in the middle.

Another Lucifer (Fig. 98). Above it, carved out of the rock, an elemental being bending its head, as it were, and looking at Christ in union with Lucifer and Ahriman. I have dared to form a face quite asymmetrically, so that it is carved out of the composition. This is usually done in such a way that the composition is made up of the individual figures. Here in the wooden group, the individual figure is always created from the meaning and spirit of the whole composition, hence this asymmetry. It is a completely asymmetrical face, but it has to be like this at the point in the composition where it is in the group.

Here you have the heating and lighting house (Fig. 106) standing on its own, the rear front completely adapted to the machines that are inside. The whole thing is only finished when the smoke comes out of the top. Then these extensions will also be perceived as justified. Artistically, one creates from the form and cannot give an abstract explanation as to why it is this way or that. Some people think they are leaves, others think they are ears. That's not the point, it's the form that matters, which adapts on the one hand to growing out of the boiler house and on the other hand to what happens in the boiler house.

The glass house in which the glass windows have been cut (Fig. 103). These windows are located in the auditorium. They are cut out of monochrome glass panes, i.e. glass panes tinted with a single color. They have a certain history: We had first ordered glass panes from a factory near Paris in the spring of 1914, but the shipment was so delayed that it simply disappeared on the battlefield; we never saw anything of it. We had to buy the panes a second time.

The idea is that the motif is now cut out of the single-colored glass pane using special machines. The pane is then inserted and the work of art is created in the sunlight that passes through. This is connected with the whole idea of building in Dornach. In buildings everywhere else, you have to deal with walls that close off the room. In Dornach you have walls that don't evoke the idea at all: You are closed off. Everything I have now shown you is actually designed to make the walls artistically transparent. The viewer or listener has the feeling in the building that the wall is transparent, artistically transparent through its form, and that he is in contact with the whole wide universe. This is expressed artistically and physically through these glass windows, which are actually only a kind of score, as they are worked out as glass etchings. They become works of art when the sunlight shines through them. In other words, what is inside the building expands into the outer, sunlit nature. The glass cutting had to be done in this studio, which now serves as the building office.

The door to the glass house (Fig. 104). Not even philistine door handles, but completely new door handles (Fig. 105).

[Now] a small sample of the stained glass windows. All kinds of motifs cut out of the single-colored glass pane, but they only make sense to enjoy when you are standing in front of them.

Here (Fig. 112) a pair of people, the feelings of this pair of people carried out in what is around them.

Another window motif, scratched out of the glass (fig. 110). The glasses are not all of the same color, but one color is always followed by another. So that when you enter the building, you can see the different colors from the various windows. The whole room is then illuminated with a symphony of colors, which is artistically perceived as being composed of the most diverse colors. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have taken the liberty of presenting to you the architectural concept of Dornach in the eighty pictures I have shown you. I have also taken the liberty of explaining to you how this Dornach building concept aims to replace merely static, geometric, symmetrical building with organic building. This had to happen because this spiritual science, as I have represented it here in my lectures, is not merely a one-sided science, but full of life; because it wants to draw fully from the source of world and human life. Therefore, it is not merely a phrase when it is said that religion, art and science and social life should be united with one another, but that the building in its new architectural style simply had to express the same thing out of the whole essence of this spiritual science that is expressed in the spiritual science itself through thoughts or laws.

My esteemed audience, through the willingness of a large number of understanding friends to make sacrifices, we have brought the building so far that last fall we were able to have about thirty experts, people of practice, hold courses in this building, and shorter courses are to be held again at Easter. However, the building is not yet finished. We can only express the hope that we will be able to complete this building, from which a spiritual-scientific movement, which will also bring the social liberation that is necessary for the people of the present and the near future, will emanate. For this, however, it will be particularly necessary to have the international understanding that I described yesterday as the basis for a world school association that works towards the liberation of spiritual life as one member of the tripartite social organism. It will be necessary for this spiritual life to be promoted and supported by the World School Association in an international way.

With regard to the building of Dornach, I know very well what can be objected to from older points of view, from old architectural styles. But if we never dared to do anything new, the development of humanity could not progress. And the impulse to move forward has to do above all with that which wants to emanate from Dornach as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Forward in the development of humanity, according to the goals that I indicated yesterday at the end of the lecture.

We know, in that we have also formed this outer shell of anthroposophical spiritual science in the building of Dornach, the Goetheanum, what all can be criticized about this building, what all can be objected to it. We have only one justification for ourselves, which is ultimately decisive for everything new: we must dare to try this new thing. And we always remember what is true: that what is justified will work its way through against all resistance if it is justified. If it is not justified, it will be eliminated and will do little harm to humanity. In the face of all opposition, it will become clear whether the building idea of Dornach is justified as an outer shell for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We can only say: we think it is justified, and that is why we dared to do it!

The lecture yesterday will have shown you that if we are to acquire insight into the nature and evolution of humanity, 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 people to have clear consciousness of their effects. On the other hand, the very purpose of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch is that human beings should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through them 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 people 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 today in the economic life on the one side and in the political life of the state on the other. Civilized humankind 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 recognize 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 today bear witness to this. The ahrimanic incarnation will be greatly furthered if people 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 people'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 today 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, endeavors 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 people 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 the 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 people were to discard phrases and recognize that all these things for which they aspire are meaningless as long as they fail to realize 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 people 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 God.” “Word” here must obviously have the meaning it bore in ancient Greece. It is not “word” as understood today—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 human beings can acquire in the way of intellectual wisdom through their efforts and through their intelligence. But it must be quite clear to us that what “word” denotes here is not really the goal for which humanity must strive at the present time or in the immediate future. To express what is now the goal, we should have to say: “Let human beings seek for the Spirit that reveals itself in the Word; for the Spirit is with God, and the Spirit is a God.” Humankind 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 realize what little inclination there is today 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 emphasized that today 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 human beings 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 people 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:

In such measurements, no matter whether of lengths or surfaces or weights, the qualitative element is entirely lacking. The number three 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 people 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 realizing that this natural science leads only to the ahrimanic illusion. Why, then, must people have natural science, in spite of the fact that it leads only to illusion? It is because in earth existence they are already on the descending curve of evolution. Of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, it may be said that with respect to knowledge, humanity was, relatively speaking, at the zenith. But now, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, human beings are on the path of decline, they are a being growing physically weaker, and to perceive the world in the way the Greeks perceived it would be too much for their 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 people. 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 people who claim to be thoroughgoing 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 realized that cultivation of the inner life alone, as attempted by numbers of people today, does not lead to the goal befitting humanity in the present age. For the all too prevalent tendency is to make no free resolve to transcend ordinary life and attain higher vision but rather to bring into prominence that in us which is not free. All kinds of hallucinatory tendencies, all kinds of faculties fraught with illusion come into play.

It should be realized that just as external science becomes ahrimanic, the higher development of our inner nature becomes luciferic if we give ourselves 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 their nature. The luciferic tendency shows itself in everyone who begins to brood over experiences of their 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 today 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 today make no effort to achieve this objective understanding or to acquire knowledge of what is necessary for world evolution.

Therefore spiritual science must emphasize the following: That Ahriman is actually preparing for his incarnation; where we can recognize 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 recognize 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 people only speak truly of themselves when they say that they hover perpetually between two extremes: between the ahrimanic on the one side, where they are presented with an outer delusion, a fata morgana, and, on the other, the luciferic element within them which induces the tendency to illusions, hallucinations and the like. The ahrimanic tendencies in people today live themselves out in science, the luciferic tendencies, in religion, while in art they swing 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 people 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 our inmost being today 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 people must realize how urgent it is to educate themselves 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 someone 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 today. And those who believe they are free of it, are the greatest culprits. The essential is that people should approach their own inner nature with ahrimanic cold-bloodedness and dispassion. Their inner nature is still fiery enough even when cooled down in this way! There is no need to fear that it will be overcooled.

If the right stand is to be taken to Ahriman's future incarnation, people 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 fantasy but by bringing interest, alert attention, and devotion to the things of immediate life.

When people 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 bookkeeping. 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 cashbook 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 we who are paradoxical in our relationship to truth. What we must realize—and this is a dire necessity today—is that we, not the world, are 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 overweighted 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 Lubsen [Heinrich Borchert Lubsen (1801-64).] 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 humankind 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 today of such understanding? The fact that understanding cannot be found through external, ahrimanic science is perceived by those who to some extent recognize 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 humankind other than a new revelation! [See his speech in Rome, May 12, 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.)] 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 toward 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 emphasized 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 realize 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 today. It is essential to inform ourselves objectively about these things in order that we may take the right stand toward 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 ] For anyone who has imbued his whole mind, in all sincerity of feeling, with the inner conception of Michael's being, and Michael's acts, there will come also a right understanding of how Man must treat a world, which is neither one of divine Being, nor Revelation, nor Workings, but is the wrought Work of the Gods. To look at this world with knowledge, is to have before one forms, formations, which everywhere tell with a plain voice of the divine, but in which the divine being in its own self-existence is not to be found, if one be led away by no illusions. Nor must one look only at the knowledgeable aspect of the world. True, this reveals most plainly the configuration of the world which surrounds Man to-day. But of more essential importance for everyday life is the feeling, willing and working in a world which may be felt in its formation to be divine, but in which no divine life can actually be experienced. To bring real ethical life into such a world as this, requires those ethical impulses, of which I gave an indication in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom.’

[ 2 ] Amidst this world of past works, for the man of genuine feeling, Michael's being and Michael's present world of action may shed a shining light. Michael does not enter the physical world in a visible appearance. He remains with all his doings in a supersensible region, but one which is just on the borders of the physical world in the present evolutionary phase of the worlds. Thus no possibility can ever occur, that any impressions made on men by Michael's actual being, should lead their views of Nature into fantastic realms, or tempt them to build their practical social and ethical life—within a God-wrought, but not God-actuated world—on the pretense that any other impulses could be at work there, save those of which Man himself must be the ethical and spiritual agent. Whether thinking or willing, men will always have to go into spiritual regions, in order to find Michael.

[ 3 ] This will mean living, spiritually, as follows: the ways of knowledge and of life must be taken, as they are and must be taken since the fifteenth century. But men will hold fast to Michael's revelation; they will let this revelation shine as a light into the thoughts which they receive from Nature; they will carry it as warmth in their hearts, when obliged to lead their lives in accordance with the divinely wrought world of finished Works. They will not then have only in view the observation and living realization of this present world, but another state of the world too, which Michael gives them—one which is past, but which Michael, by his being and his deeds, transfers into the present.

[ 4 ] Were it otherwise—were Michael to work so that he transferred his actions into that physical world which Man, at the present day, must know and experience as such—then Man would learn from the world at the present day, not what actually is in the world, but what was. Wherever this happens, the human soul is led by this illusory reading of the world out of its own reality, that is fitted to it, into a reality of another sort—namely a Luciferic one.

[ 5 ] The way which Michael takes to bring the past as an active force into present human life, is a way that follows the right spiritual lines of cosmic progress, and has in it nothing Luciferic. It is important for the human soul to understand this, and to keep before it a clear conception of the way in which, in Michael's mission, everything Luciferic is avoided.

[ 6 ] This attitude towards the light now dawning on the history of mankind—towards the light of Michael—means also finding the right road to the Christ.

[ 7 ] Michael will give the right orientation when it is a question of the world which lies all about Man and calls on him to know and act in it. The way to Christ must be found within.

[ 8 ] It is quite comprehensible, at a time when the knowledge of Nature has assumed the form given it by the last five hundred years, that the knowledge of the supersensible world should also have become such as mankind to-day make it in their lives. It is necessary that Nature should be so learnt and so lived, that everything is emptied of its Gods. And hence, in the form he has thus given to his relations with Nature, Man fails any longer to find himself.

[ 9 ] That relation of himself to Nature, which is the fitting one for the age, gives Man, inasmuch as he is a supersensible being, nothing whatever as to his own nature and being. Nor does this attitude—if it is all that he looks to—enable him to live, ethically, in a way befitting his manhood.

[ 10 ] Hence the tendency arises, not to let this form of knowledge and of life enter into anything which has to do with Man's supersensible being, or indeed with the supersensible world at all. The latter is made into a field of knowledge, set apart from that which is attainable by human powers of cognition. As against the field of what is knowable, another—extra-scientific, or super-scientific—field is marked off for revelation by Faith.

[ 11 ] But in active contrast to all this, is the pure spiritual efficacy of the Christ. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ can be reached by the human soul. And the soul's relation to Him has no need to remain a dim and vague mysticism of feeling; it can be a perfectly concrete relation, one to be realized with all the depth and clearness of the entire man.

[ 12 ] When this is so, then there flows into the human soul, from her life together with the Christ, the knowledge which the soul needs about his own supersensible being. The revelation of faith must then be so embraced, that through it there runs unceasingly the stream of actual, living Christ-experience. The whole of life will thereby receive its christening, when in the Christ is recognized He who gives to the human soul the understanding vision of her own supersensible being.

[ 13 ] Thus may stand side by side, as realization of the inner life, Michael-Realization and Christ Realization. Through Michael, Man will find his right way to the Supersensible in respect to external Nature. The naturalistic conception will then, without suffering any falsification, be able to take its place alongside a spiritually-minded conception of the World and of Man—in so far as Man is a creature of the World.

[ 14 ] Through a right position towards the Christ, that which otherwise could only be received by Man as a traditional revelation by faith, will be learnt by actual experience in the soul's living intercourse with Christ. The inner world of the soul, the life of inner feeling and experience will then be realized as one illumined by the light of the Spirit; the outer world of Nature as a world sustained and carried by the Spirit.

[ 15 ] Were Man to seek to obtain the clue to his own supersensible being, except in the life of communion with Christ, it would lead him away from his own realm of reality and into Ahriman's. Christ bears within Himself the impulses of the human future in the manner that is cosmically justifiable. To unite herself with Him, is for the human soul to receive into her the seeds of her own future as cosmically justified. Other beings, that already present forms which cosmically will only be justifiable for Man in the future are beings that belong to the Ahrimanic sphere. The right form of union with Christ, is at the same time the right form of safeguard against Ahriman.

[ 16 ] Those people who strictly insist on the revelations of Faith being safeguarded against the intrusion of any influences from human powers of Knowledge, are actuated by the unconscious fear that if Man once enters upon this path he will fall under Ahrimanic influences. This must be understood. But it should also be understood, that it is, in reality, to the honour of Christ and to His true recognition, when to Christ and to realization of life with Him is ascribed the gracious inflow of the Spirit into the soul of Man.

[ 17 ] Thus Michael-Realization and Christ-Realization may stand in the future side by side. So will Man find his right way—the way of freedom—between Lucifer, who leads him astray into illusions of thought and life, and Ahriman, who entices him into forms of the future which gratify his pride, but can nevertheless not be his, as yet, in the present.

[ 18 ] To fall a victim to Lucifer's illusions, means, not to be willing to advance to the stage of freedom, but to stop short, as God-Man, at a too early stage in evolution. To fall a victim to Ahriman's enticements, means, not to be willing to wait until the right cosmic moment has come at a definite stage of humanity, but to want to take this stage before its time.

[ 19 ] Michael-Christ will stand in the future as the sign at the head of the way along which Man must travel in order to keep the right cosmic direction between the two Powers, of Lucifer and Ahriman, and so arrive at his World-destination.

Leading Thoughts

[ 20 ] Man journeys on his way through the Cosmos in such a manner that his gazing-backward into the bygone world may be falsified by the impulses of Lucifer, and his thinking-forward into the future may be cheated by the enticements of Ahriman.

[ 21 ] The right position towards Lucifer and his falsities will be found when Man imbues his whole mind, in respect both to knowledge and to life, with a sense of the Being and the Mission of Michael.

[ 22 ] Thereby Man safeguards himself also against Ahriman and his lures. For that spiritual path, by which Michael directs Man's mind into external Nature, leads him to a right position towards Ahriman, because he finds the right realization of life in communion with Christ.