The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In a second period, Man passes from the domain of the Archai into that of the Archangels. With these, however, he is not bound up in such a bodily-spiritual manner as he was with the Archai. With the Archangel Hierarchy his connection is a more spiritual one. It is nevertheless so intimate that one still could not speak at this period of Man's being in any way detached from the spiritual world.

From the Archangel Hierarchy Man receives for his ether-body what, in this body, corresponds to the Form in the physical body, which he owes to the Archai. Even as the physical body is adapted by its form to the Earth, to be the vehicle on Earth for Man's Self-consciousness, so is the ether-body adapted to the conditions of extra-earthly, cosmic forces. In the physical body lives the Earth; in the ether-body lives the Star-world. All that Man bears within him of inner forces, so that, while being upon Earth, he yet frees himself from the Earth in posture, movement and gesture—all this he owes to the creation of the Archangels in his ether-body. As the Earth-forces live, by means of its formation, in the physical body, so in the ether-body there live those forces, which from all sides, from the circumference of the cosmos, stream in towards the Earth. The Earth-forces that live in the physically apparent formation of the body are such as make the form a comparatively fixed and final one. The outlines of the man remain—with some subordinate changes—fixed for this entire earth-life; his aptitudes for movement harden into set habits, and so on. With the ether-body, all is in continual motion, reflecting the changes in the constellations of the Stars during human earth-life. Even with such changes in the heavens as day-and-night, the ether-body adapts its form accordingly; but also in accordance with the particular changes which take place between its own birth and death.

[ 2 ] The adaptation of the ether-body in this manner to the heavenly forces is in no contradiction to what has been spoken of elsewhere as the gradual detachment of the starry heavens from the divine Spirit-Powers. It is true that in very olden times there dwelt in the stars the living will of Gods, the living intelligence of Gods, whereas in later times all this passed over into the ‘Calculable.’ The gods no longer act directly upon Man through what has now become their finished work. Man however gradually comes through his ether-body into a relation of his own with the stars; just as through his physical body he comes into a relation of his own with the gravity of earth.

[ 3 ] What Man collects and fits into himself when he comes down out of the spirit-world to be born upon earth—his ether-body, which gathers into itself the cosmic forces from beyond the earth, was created by the Archangel Hierarchy during this second period.

[ 4 ] A very important thing which Man acquires through this hierarchy, is that he belongs to a group of people upon earth. Men are differentiated over the face of the earth. When one looks back into this second period, one does not find the differentiation of to-day, into races and nations, but a somewhat other and more spiritual one, arising from the fact that upon various parts of the earth the star-influences fall in various constellations. In the relative distribution of land and water, in climate, in vegetation, etc., the starry heavens are living and acting upon earth.

In so far as Man has to adopt himself to these relations—which are heavenly relations upon earth—the necessary adaptations belong to his ether-body, and the formation thus given to it is the creation of the choir of Archangeloi.

[ 5 ] This however is the very time—during the second period—when the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers come into Man's life, and in a special way. It is necessary for them to come into it, although at first sight it appears as though Man would thereby be driven down, below the level of his manhood.

[ 6 ] For Man to develop the consciousness of Self in earth-life, he must become much more thoroughly detached from the divine spiritual world which gave him his origin, than can be done by that world of itself. It takes place during the time when the Archangels are at work upon him, because his link with the spiritual world is then no longer such a strong one as it was during the time when the Archai were at work. Lucifer and Ahriman are more of a match for the purely spiritual forces which proceed from the Archangels than for the sturdier forces of the Archai.

[ 7 ] The Luciferic Powers give the ether-form, in all its tendencies, a much stronger inclination towards the star-world than it would have if only those divine spirit-Powers were at work, who were connected with Man from his origin. And by the Ahrimanic Powers the form and configuration of the physical body becomes more deeply entangled with the weight of earth than would be the case if these Powers were unable to exert an influence.

[ 8 ] Hereby the seed is laid in Man of future full Self-consciousness and free will. For though the Ahrimanic Powers detest free will, yet their effect upon Man, by tearing him away from this proper world of divine spirit, is to implant the first seed of free will in him.

[ 9 ] The immediate result, however, is that in this second period all that has been accomplished in Man by the various hierarchies—from the Seraphim to the Archangeloi—is pressed more deeply into the physical and ether-bodies, than could have been done without the influence of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers. But for their influence, the action of the hierarchies would remain more in the astral body and the I.

[ 10 ] Thus the grouping of Mankind which arises on earth is not that more spiritual one for which the Archangels are striving.

[ 11 ] Impressed into the physical body, the spiritual forces are turned into their opposite. Instead of the more spiritual one, comes the differentiation into races and nations.

[ 12 ] Were it not for the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, men would see themselves and one-another upon earth differentiated from the heavens above. The various groups would live, one with another, in the relation of beings who share in love a spiritual treasure, freely giving and freely taking, each from each. In races and nations is seen the down-drag of earth, manifested in Man's body. In that other spiritual grouping there would have been seen a reflected image of the divine spiritual world.

[ 13 ] Yet along with all this the first dispositions had to be laid in human evolution for the future, full consciousness of Self. This again meant that—mitigated, it is true, but still with a certain distinctness of form—those original, primeval differentiations of mankind were retained, which had existed when in ancient days Man passed over from the Hierarchy of the Exusiai to that of the Archai.

[ 14 ] Man went through this stage of his evolution as through a cosmic school, alive to it all in a state between feeling and seeing. He had not as yet evolved any conscious knowledge that this was all an essential preparation for his own future Self-consciousness; but the ‘feeling vision,’ at that period, of the forces engaged in his evolution was nevertheless important for the engrafting of Self-consciousness in the astral body and the I.

[ 15 ] In respect to Man's Thinking, what happened at that time was that the Luciferic Powers gave him a bent which inclined him still to remain immersed in the old forms of spiritual life, and not to adapt himself to its new forms. For Lucifer's endeavour is always to preserve for Man the earlier forms of life.

[ 16 ] And so it came about in the development of Man's Thinking. Little by little, in his life between death and new birth Man evolved and elaborated the faculty which in primeval times had endowed his inner life with Thoughts. In those primeval times, this faculty had been able to behold the Spiritual in things, though it was very like the way man now takes hold of the world in mere sense-perception. For in those days the Physical wore the Spiritual on its surface. To-day, however, this Thinking faculty conserved from the earlier age can only act like sense-perception. The faculty to rise in the act of thought to the spirit gradually declined and died away. And this became fully manifest when in the age of the Spiritual Soul the spiritual world became veiled for Man in complete obscurity. So then it came about that in the nineteenth century the best of the natural scientists, who could not become mere materialists, said to themselves: ‘Nothing remains for us, but to explore that world alone which admits of being explored by the senses and in terms of measure, number and weight. We have however no right to deny the existence of a spiritual world behind this sensible one.’ They were thus indicating that there may be a world of light, unknown to Man, where he is staring into darkness only.

[ 17 ] As Man's Thought was put out of time and place by Lucifer, so by Ahriman his Will. This latter became endowed with a tendency to a kind of freedom to which it should only have attained later. Freedom of this sort is no real freedom, but only the illusion of it. Mankind lived for a long while in this illusion of freedom. It gave men no possibility of evolving the true spiritual idea of freedom in their minds. They wavered to-and-fro between the various opinions, that Man is free or that he is caught in the meshes of hard and fast necessity. And when with the dawning Age of Consciousness the real freedom came, men failed to understand it, because their understanding had been too long engaged with the illusion of freedom.

[ 18 ] Everything which had implanted itself in Man's inner being during the evolution of his lives between death and new birth in this second stage, was carried on by him as a cosmic memory into the third stage, in which he is still living in this present time. In this stage he holds a relation to the Hierarchy of Angeloi, similar to that which he held in the second to the Archangeloi. Only, the relation to the Angeloi is one which enables him to attain to complete, self-dependent individuality. For the Angeloi—not now the whole choir, but one Angelos for one man—confine themselves to effecting a right connection between his lives between death and new birth and his earth-lives.

[ 19 ] A fact here worthy of notice is that in the second stage of Man's evolution during the lives between death and new birth, the whole hierarchy of Archangeloi are at work for each single man. Later on, the guidance of the various nations and tribes devolves upon this hierarchy; and here, for one nation there is one Archangel, as Spirit of the Nation. In the races of men, the Primeval Powers (the Archai) remain active. Here again, for one race, there is one being at work out of the hierarchy of the Archai, as Spirit of that Race.

[ 20 ] Thus the man of the present age retains within him, during the life also between death and new birth, a cosmic memory of what he has learnt from this life in its previous stages. And even where, in the physical world, spiritual guidance manifests itself in such a form as in races and nationalities, there too this cosmic memory is plainly present.

Leading Thoughts

[ 21 ] In a second period of evolution in the lives between death and new birth, Man passes into the domain of the Archangeloi. During his period the seed of later Self-consciousness is planted in the human soul, the predisposition for it having already been created in the first period, in the shaping of the human Form.

[ 22 ] Man, during the second period, is driven by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences deeper into the physical world than would have happened without their influence.

[ 23 ] In the third period, Man comes into the domain of the Angeloi, whose influence however is only exerted in the astral body and the I. This period is the present. What took place in the first two periods lives on in human evolution, and explains the fact that in the age of the Spiritual Soul—during the nineteenth century—Man is left staring into the spiritual world as into total darkness.

When I have had occasion in recent years to speak on any of the great yearly festivals, Christmas, Easter or Whitsuntide, I have felt bound to say that we have no right, especially under the conditions that obtain today, to commemorate these occasions in the old accustomed manner; we have no right to forget the widespread suffering, the widespread sorrow of the times, and to recall only the greatest Event which took place in earthly evolution. It is our duty, standing as we do on the ground of our Spiritual conception of the World, so fully to realize all that which indicates decline in human civilization today, that this realization permeates our thoughts even round the Christmas tree. It is clearly our duty so to receive the birth of Christ Jesus into our hearts, into our souls, that we do not close our eyes to the fearful deterioration that has overtaken the so-called culture of mankind.

At this very time it is for us to bring forward the question: “Has not the thought of Christmas also suffered the fate of being seized by the forces of general deterioration?” When Christmas is spoken of today are we still conscious of that of which man ought to be conscious when he raises his thoughts and feelings to the contemplation of the festival of Christ? Are men in general conscious of the true meaning of what entered human evolution at the Mystery of Golgotha?

We light up our Christmas trees, we repeat the customary words and phrases associated with the Christmas festival, but all too often we avoid opening our eyes fully, we avoid awakening our consciousness fully to the need of saying to ourselves: “Here, too, there is decline. Where art Thou, O Christ-Power, Thou who canst actively bring about a new ascent?” For it must have been very clear to you in the lectures which for many years have been given in our circles, that only by the power of Christ will it be possible to permeate declining civilization with that impulse which can give it a new uplift.

In these days we must often think of men, in the middle of the nineteenth century, or towards the last third of it, who, from a certain materialistic mentality, spoke quite differently from the way many men speak today. They spoke more honestly than most men do today. I should like to recall to you one personality, a truly materialistic mind—David Friedrich Strauss. You know that his book, The Old Faith and the New, is a kind of Bible of materialism.

Among the questions Strauss asks in this book is the following: “Can we still be Christians?” He answers this question, and the unusual thing about his answer is that it comes from a mind fundamentally materialistic, but at the same time honest.

David Friedrich Strauss constructed a world-edifice of thoughts, of ideas, formed entirely according to materialistic, physical laws. He placed man within it in a world-order in which human nature contained none but physical laws. From these convictions, Strauss answered the question “can we still be Christians?” with an emphatic “No”. For men who held the views on natural science which Strauss held in accordance with the consciousness of his times, could not be Christians.

Thus a fatal, but entirely honest opinion is expressed in this “No” of David Friedrich Strauss, and the feeling often occurs to us today: Would that the official advocates of this or that religious faith were as honest as was David Friedrich Strauss. Could they but see that though they use the name of Christ they are really active opponents of Christianity.

My dear friends, we dare not surrender ourselves in these days to a love of ease, nor close our eyes to the essentially important happenings of the present time. It may not seem to you to be associated with Christmas, though it does indeed seem so to me, when I refer to an experience which came to me through a kind of spiritual investigation of an actual fact of the present day.

You all know those persons who to a great extent are responsible, especially in Central Europe, for the dreadful conditions into which we have drifted, so far as any human being can be called responsible for these things. What did these men do when misfortune broke over Europe? They wrote books! We had books written by all kinds of people.

Now, the following experiment can be made with the help of Spiritual Science. The question can be asked, but strictly in accordance with Spiritual Science: “What forms of thought speak to us from the greater part of these self-vindicating books?” I have tried from every side to answer this question conscientiously. I have asked myself: “Of what kind are the thought-forms of these men on whom so much of the fate of Central Europe depends?” If we do not proceed in the abstract, but enter into things in the concrete, we compare one thing with another. In this way a comparison came to me when I asked myself the question: “About what period in the normal course of evolution in Europe were such thought-forms cultivated as those which we find in the leading personalities during the world war?” After conscientious scrutiny of the facts it was made plain to me that men thought in this manner about the time of the Roman, Julius Caesar. There is no difference between the soul- and thought-life of Julius Caesar at the time, let us say, of his Gallic wars, and the way in which such modern personalities form their thoughts. This means that these men have remained in a life of thought entirely unaffected by Christianity, for Caesar lived before the Mystery of Golgotha had broken into evolution. Even if the name of Christ Jesus is sometimes on their lips, the soul-life of these men has developed in such a way that it has nothing to do with concrete Christianity.

As the result of our many-sided studies we know that if anything develops in its own period, it is fundamentally good for humanity, but that it is otherwise when this thing remains stationary and comes to the front later. When this happens, when for instance that which was suited to the time of the Caesars continues to play a part in the twentieth century, that which was suitable to Caesar's day is transformed into something Luciferic. For that which ought to have worked properly in another period becomes, if it remains stationary, Luciferic. It is indeed essentially Luciferic.

We may now ask: “How is it that people whose fate has placed them in a leading position, have in their lives remained behind in this way?” If this question is to be answered we must turn our attention to those who claim to fill their spiritual life with the Christ-impulse, but who really work in an anti-Christian direction. Let us turn our attention to many official representatives of religious creeds, men who pretend to speak according to the Gospels, but who are opposed to everything that really tells of the living Christ in our day. The most anti-Christian persons are frequently found today among the clergy, among the preachers of the so-called Christian creeds.

If among other writings people would investigate a book—regarded by many as setting the fashion—a book entitled Das Wesen des Christentums (The Nature of Christianity), by Adolf Harnack, they would find an answer to this question. If the name of Christ were struck out of this book and replaced by the name of a God generally little known, a God who permeates and controls human life just as he permeates and controls Nature; if the name of Christ were struck out and replaced by the name of Jahve of the Old Testament, this book would be nearer the truth than it is, and would then have some meaning.

The fact is that Adolf Harnack knows nothing of the real Being of Christ, that he has not the vaguest idea of the real Being of Christ, that he worships a universal, indefinite God and then labels this universal, indefinite God with the name of Christ. And who is Adolf Harnack? Adolf Harnack has become the fashionable theologian of the circles which have provided the ground for the spiritual tendencies of those persons of whom I have been speaking. It is because no true revelation regarding the Christ comes any longer from the representatives of the creeds, that we no longer find in the events of the present day, among the men bound up with these events, any understanding for the true revelation of the Christ.

It hardly means anything to thousands, to millions of people at the present day, when they speak of the festival of Christmas; for they know nothing of the Being of Christ in the sense that is so necessary for our time. We must look into these things if in a deeper sense we will to understand the original causes of the downfall in contemporary events, and in the life of mankind within these events.

I have frequently spoken to you here of that important event which came to pass in the last third of the nineteenth century, the event through which a special relationship was established between the Archangelic Power, that Being whom we call the Archangel Michael, and the destiny of mankind. I have reminded you that since November, 1879, Michael has become the Regent, as it were, of all those who seek to bring to men the beneficial forces necessary to their healthy progress.

My dear friends, in our day we know that when such a matter is indicated, the indication refers to two different things: first, to the objective fact, and second, to the way this objective fact is connected with what men are willing to receive into their consciousness, into their Will. The objective fact is simply this, that in November, 1879, beyond the sphere of the Sense World, in the Supersensible World, that event took place which may be described as follows: Michael has gained for himself the power, when men come to meet him with all the living content of their souls, so to permeate them with his power, that they are able to transform their old materialistic intellectual power—which by that time had become strong in humanity—into spiritual intellectual power, into spiritual power of understanding. That is objective fact; it has taken place. We may say concerning it that since November, 1879, Michael has entered into another relationship with man than that in which he formerly stood. But it is required of men that they shall become the servants of Michael.

What I mean by this will become quite clear to you through the following explanation. You are aware that before the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished upon earth, the Jews of the Old Testament looked up to their Jahve (or Jehovah). Those who, among the Jewish priests, looked up in full consciousness to Jahve, were well aware that they could not reach him directly with human perception. The very name, Jahve, was held to be unspeakable, and if it had to be uttered, a sign only was made, a sign which resembles certain combinations of signs which we attempt in the art of Eurhythmy. The Jewish priesthood, however, was well aware that men could approach Jahve through Michael. They called Michael the countenance of Jahve. Just as we learn to know a man when we look into his face, just as we draw conclusions about the gentleness of his soul from the gentleness of his countenance, and about his character from the way he looks at us, so the priesthood of the Old Testament, through the atavistic clairvoyance which flowed into their souls in dreams, desired to gain from the countenance of Jahve, from Michael's connection with Jahve, that which it was not yet possible for mankind to gain.

The position of this priesthood towards Michael and Jahve was the right one. Their position towards Michael was right because they knew that if a man of that time turned to Michael, he could find through Michael the Jahve-power, which it was proper for the humanity of that time to seek.

Other Soul-Regents of humanity have appeared since then in the place of Michael; but in November, 1879, Michael once more took the lead, and can become active in the soul-life of those who seek the paths to him. These paths today are the paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge. We may speak of “the paths of Michael”, just as well as of the “paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge”.

But just at the time when Michael entered in this way into relationship with the souls of men, in order again to become their inspirer for three centuries, at this very time the demonic opposing force, having previously prepared itself, set up the very strongest opposition to him, so that a cry went through the world during our so-called war-years, in reality years of terror, a cry which has become the great World-misunderstanding which now fills the hearts and souls of men.

Let us consider what would have become of the Jewish people of the Old Testament, if instead of approaching Jahve through Michael they had sought to approach Him directly. They would have become an intolerant people, a national self-seeking people concerned with the aggrandizement of their own nation, a nation thinking only of itself. For Jahve is the God who is connected with all natural things, and in the external historical development of mankind, He manifests His Being through the connection of generations, as it expresses itself in the essential qualities of the people. It was only because the ancient Jewish people desired at that time to approach Jahve through Michael, that they saved themselves from becoming nationally so egoistic that Christ Jesus would not have been able to come forth from among them. Because they had permeated themselves with the Michael power, as this power was in their time, the Jewish people were not so strongly impregnated with forces given over to national egoism, as would have been the case had they turned directly to Jahve.

Today Michael is again the Regent of the World, but it is in a new way that mankind must become related to him. For now Michael is not the countenance of Jahve, but the countenance of Christ Jesus. Today we must approach the Christ-impulse through Michael. In many respects humanity has not yet struggled through to this. Humanity has retained atavistically the old qualities of perception by which Michael could be approached when he was still the intermediary to Jahve; and so today humanity has a false relationship to Michael. This false relationship to Michael is apparent in a very characteristic phenomenon.

During the years of the war we heard continually the universal lie: “Freedom for individual nations, even for the smallest nations.” This is an essentially false idea, because today, in the Michael period, the all-important matter is not groups of men, but human individuals, separate men. This lie is nothing else than the endeavour to permeate each individual nation not with the new force of Michael, but with the force of the old, the pre-Christian time, with the Michael-force of the Old Testament. However paradoxical it may sound, there is a tendency among so-called civilized nations at the present day to transform what was justifiable among the Jewish people of the Old Testament, into something Luciferic, and to make of this the most powerful impulse in every single nation.

People wish today to build up the republics of Poland, of France, of America, etc., upon methods of thought suited to Old Testament times. They strive to follow Michael as it was right to follow him before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men found through him the Folk-God Jahve. Today it is Christ Jesus whom we must strive to find through Michael, Christ Jesus the Divine Leader of the whole human race. This means that we must seek for feelings and ideas which have nothing to do with human distinctions of any kind on the Earth. Such feelings and ideas cannot be found on the surface. They must be sought where the spirit and soul-part of man pulsate i.e., along the path of Spiritual Science. The matter lies thus, that we must resolve to seek the real Christ upon the path of Spiritual Science i.e., upon the Michael-path. Only through this striving after spiritual truth is the real Christ to be sought and found; otherwise it would be better to extinguish the lights of Christmas, to destroy all Christmas trees, and to acknowledge at least with truth, that we want nothing that will recall what Christ Jesus has brought into human evolution.

Pre-Christian ways of thinking speak to us from the memoirs of our contemporaries i.e., ways of thinking which in our time are anti-Christian. When men, who are held to be representative, make pronouncements such as Wilson has done in the Fourteen Points, from such pronouncements there resounds nothing but pure Old Testament mentality, a mentality which in our time has become Luciferic.

Whence comes this, my dear friends? What really lies before us? When we travel back through the periods of human evolution prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, we find, early in the course of Oriental civilization, within that civilization out of which the Chinese civilization of today has developed, a human personality who was the external incorporation of Lucifer. Lucifer really did walk the earth at that time, in a human body. He it was who brought that human light which we find at the foundation of the ancient pre-Christian wisdom, with the exception of Judaism. In the art, the philosophy, and the statesmanship of Greece, much was still active which had proceeded from this Luciferic incarnation thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must endeavour clearly to understand, that that which today we call human understanding is always, so long as we have not spiritualized it, a gift of that Lucifer. We must not hold merely, in a matter-of-fact, bourgeois way, the one-sided idea that anything Luciferic is dreadful, and we must get rid of it. The more we seek to get rid of Lucifer, the more we are dominated by him, for it was necessary during thousands of years of human evolution to enter into the inheritance of the incarnated Lucifer. Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. And a time will come in the future when, just as Lucifer was incorporated in the East in an earthly personality, to prepare for Christianity among the heathen, so in the West there will take place an earthly incarnation of Ahriman himself. This time is approaching. Ahriman will appear, objectively, on the earth. Just as truly as Lucifer has walked the Earth, and as Christ has walked the Earth, objectively, in human form, so will Ahriman walk the Earth, bringing with him an extraordinary increase of power to the earthly human understanding. We men have not the task of hindering in any way this incarnation of Ahriman, but it is our task so to prepare humanity beforehand, that Ahriman may be estimated in the right way. For Ahriman will have tasks, he will have to do this and that, and men must value rightly and make a right use of that which, through Ahriman, comes into the world. Men will only be able to do this if they are able to adjust themselves now in the right way to that which Ahriman is already sending to the Earth from the Worlds beyond in order that he may control the Economic life upon Earth without being noticed. This must not be. Ahriman must not control the Economic life on the Earth without his being noticed. We must thoroughly learn to know his particular qualities. We must be able to oppose him with full consciousness.

During the time I am lecturing here at Stuttgart I shall point out much that we must carefully note in human evolution up to the time of the Ahriman incarnation, so that when this comes to pass we may know how rightly to assess it. Today I shall only call your attention to one thing more. In this respect many of the modern interpretations of the Gospels are just as bad as the worst materialistic conceptions. When the representatives of so-called religious societies accept the Gospels today simply as they are written, and when every new revelation is rejected, such devotion to the Gospels, such a way of furthering Christianity, is really the best way to prepare for Ahriman's appearance on earth. A great many of the exponents of the so-called creeds of today are working intensively for Ahriman; they leave unnoticed the truth: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the Earth-age,” when they declare heretical all that proceeds from the immediate vision of the Christ today. They leave this truth unnoticed because it is more comfortable to take the Gospels in a literal way only, that is, to hold to what they deem to be the literal interpretation of the Gospels.

Mankind must be protected by wisdom from regarding the Gospels in this way, for the four Gospels, as regards external physical understanding, do contradict one another. He who does not press forward today to a spiritual interpretation of the Gospels, spreads abroad an untruthful interpretation of these Gospels, for he deceives men as regards the external contradictions which are to be found in the four Gospels. He who deceives man regarding the things that concern him most vitally, best furthers the progress of Ahriman.

It is most important for man at the present time to place Christ in the centre between Ahriman and Lucifer. The Christ power must permeate us. But as men we must always seek the balance between the mystic enthusiasm which tends to lift us above ourselves, and the materialistic understanding which by its bourgeois heaviness drags us down to earth. At every moment we must seek the balance between the Luciferic impulses which lift us up, and the Ahrimanic which drag us down. In the effort to gain this balance we find the Christ. When we strive to gain this balance, then alone can we find the Christ.

By a strange coincidence, a remarkable thing happened in human evolution at the time when materialism entered into it. I shall mention (concerning it) only two documents: Milton's “Paradise Lost” and Klopstock's “Messiah”. In these poems the Spiritual Powers are described as if a Paradise had been lost, and man had been driven out of it. The work of both poets is based upon the idea of Duality in the Universe, upon the opposition of good and evil, of the Divine and the Diabolical. It is the great error of modern times that World-Evolution should be represented as a Duality, whereas it should be represented as a Trinity. One set of forces are the upward-striving Luciferic forces which approach man in mysticism, in sentimentalism, in fantasy—in what in fantasy is degenerate, fantastic; these forces dwell in man's blood. The second are the Ahrimanic forces which dwell in all that is dry, heavy, (speaking physiologically) in the bony system. The Christ stands in the middle between these two. His is the third group of forces. Lucifer's is the first, Ahriman's the second, and in the centre, between the two, is the Christ-force.

What then has happened in more recent days? Something has taken place to which men should look up with true spiritual-intellectual fervour, for unless they understand what it is that has happened they cannot enter in the right way into the Christmas festival. We read today Milton and Klopstock, we read their descriptions of the Supersensible World. What do we find? Everywhere we find Luciferic qualities ascribed to Beings who are called Divine. Writers such as Milton and Klopstock describe the fight between Luciferic qualities which appear to them Divine, and Ahrimanic qualities. And a great part of that which modern humanity describes as Godlike, is simply Luciferic. They do not recognize it for what it is; just as little as they recognize that which is Ahrimanic for what it is.

The same thing appears in Goethe's Faust, where we find Mephistopheles contrasted with “the Lord”. Goethe, too, was unable to distinguish between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. Consequently his Mephistopheles is a kind of mixture of the two. I have already pointed this out in my little book Goethe's Standard of the Soul (Geistesart).

True followers of Goethe do not merely quote literally from his works, as do so many academic persons and the like. If we faithfully travel the path that Goethe has taken, so that we are able to recognize the things wherein he must have changed, especially if we follow his Conception of the World beyond the year 1832, we are able to speak of a Goethe of the year 1919, now soon to be 1920.

The way must be found calmly to admit that in the materialistic centuries, much that is Luciferic is hidden behind what is called Divine. There is much by which men seek to spread religion at the present day that reaches humanity only as words born on the wings of Lucifer.

Only when men are once more able to recognize this Dualism—the Luciferic that would lead them above themselves, and the Ahrimanic that would lead them down below themselves—and turn from these to what is truly Christ-like, only then will they again celebrate in the right way the Christmas event, that event by which we should recall how that which gives its own particular meaning, its true meaning to the Earth, entered into human evolution.

Today we cannot help thinking sometimes of Leonardo da Vinci, of Leonardo, who once as you know, painted in Milan his great picture, the “Last Supper”—Christ with His Disciples around Him. Leonardo was a long time painting this picture—twenty years. He wanted to put a great deal into it, and could never finish it, because he was always making a fresh attempt to paint the figure of Judas in the right way. Now under the State organization of Milan, the abbot of the monastery for which the picture was being painted was his immediate employer. When later a new abbot came, a sharp resolute man, not so patient as his predecessor, he went to Leonardo and told him sternly that the picture must be finished forthwith. Leonardo replied that he could now finish the picture, for since the new abbot had come he had a model for Judas. In a short time he had painted the face of Judas as we see it in the picture.

Just as at the beginning of the new age the face of Judas appeared to Leonardo on the ground of a positive faith, so we in our day have frequent occasion to write on our hearts and souls the fact that He whose birth we commemorate at this holy season, is betrayed most of all by many of those who declare that it is in accordance with their creed that they prepare this festival. We know that the Christmas Festival itself is one of those that has been adopted in the course of Christian evolution, that it was not till the third or fourth century that people began in these December days, to commemorate the birth of Christ. The event of Golgotha had already taken place some centuries before, when those whose thoughts were centred upon that Event, adopted something so incisively new, at that time, as the institution of the Festival of Christmas. Much, much later it was still possible for new things to be implanted in Christianity. Many of those who called themselves true Christians, fought at the time against these innovations. Today there are very many such people at work, who will not advance in the way their own creed advanced when it accepted in the third and fourth centuries the institution of Christmas; people who hold rigidly to that of which they say, “it stands written”, people who turn away from every living revelation.

Terrible as is the state of sleep of people at the present day—of people who with their non-moral thoughts soil, too often, things which are seeking to enter the Spiritual life—the most terrible of all is the case of those who betray the true spirit of Christian evolution from out of the very faith itself.

It is in this earnest mood that I wished to present the lights of the Christmas tree to you today; next time I hope to speak of them in another connection.

In the course of our spiritual reflections, which often lead us to very special heights of existence, it is perhaps sometimes good to take a look at everyday life from our spiritual-scientific point of view, at the life that constantly surrounds us. For if one brings some good will and the right perspective, then it is precisely by applying spiritual science to everyday life that one can gain the most important insights into the truth and the conclusiveness of what is sought in this very field.

Among the most significant teachings that we encounter in the field of spiritual science is undoubtedly that of the cause of a later life on earth being determined by the one that preceded it, what we call karma. Now, in most cases when karma is mentioned, the 'theosophist' certainly thinks of the causes that lie in the lives of previous lives. Then people who are still far removed from spiritual scientific endeavors can easily raise the objection: How can such things be proven? Of course we know how impossible, how childish such an objection is. If a person takes the trouble to penetrate more deeply into what is given through spiritual science, he will notice how well-founded everything is that can be said about karma. But it is also good to point out the experiences and observations that are already accessible to people who are still far from clairvoyance or other theosophical methods of observation. Karma, if we understand it correctly, does not only work from one life to another, but already in one life that we go through between birth and death. Of course, what people usually observe in life is actually such a short period of a person's life that not much can come from the working over of earlier causes into later effects. If we look at five or six years, not much comes of it. But if we also consider longer periods between birth and death, as far as this is always possible, then we can see a great deal of the manifestation of karma. This can also be seen in very external things.

I do not want to present this as something particularly theosophical, but only to show that even for the most ordinary things, larger periods of time are necessary to arrive at a connection between cause and effect. For those who take an interest in observing life, I may point out that I have had many opportunities to observe children. It has been a long time since I taught children. But when you have taught four boys in a family over many years, you not only have the opportunity to observe these four children, but also the children of acquaintances and so on. There are always many opportunities to observe what these or those children do, or what can be done with them. Now, in those days, there was a very particular medical practice, which, thank God, is now rapidly declining: it was considered necessary to give little tots a glass of red wine if they were to grow strong, not just with one meal but with several. This was considered to be something quite excellent. I was able to observe many children who were raised with red wine and other children whose parents had refused to follow suit. Today, these children, who were two and a half to four years old at the time, are people who are over thirty or approaching forty years old. The little ones who were forced to drink red wine to keep them going back then can be seen to have become very fidgety and nervous people. They differ very clearly from those who did not drink red wine as children, if one is willing to observe. Almost a quarter of a century can be considered in order to be able to observe this.

Thus, it is particularly important to consider longer periods of time for the moral, ethical qualities of a person in relation to karmic effects. Today I would like to point out several qualities that can be observed, how they affect the soul, the mind, and how the effects of karma are already actively manifesting themselves in one lifetime. I would like to list some good and some bad qualities: envy, enviousness, untruthfulness, then goodwill and what we find so often in younger people, amazement, wonder, and similar things. First, let us take the bad qualities, envy and untruthfulness. Let us assume that we can observe envy and enviousness in childhood. We know from spiritual scientific observations that in the limbs of a person's being, which he is usually not aware of, special powers are at work in the astral body and etheric body: in the astral body the luciferic powers, in the etheric body the ahrimanic powers, which are opponents of human development. Everything that has to do with the astral body, such as envy, comes from the temptations of Lucifer. Everything that has to do with the etheric body, such as untruthfulness, comes from the temptations of Ahriman. In an envious child, the astral body has been seized by Lucifer to a certain extent; this is where the Luciferic beings have their points of attack. Something very significant applies to envy and lies: from the most primitive people to the most developed leaders of humanity, envy and mendacity are considered to be very reprehensible qualities. As soon as a person realizes that he is envious or mendacious, a sense of the reprehensibility of these qualities arises in his soul. One wants to get rid of them with all one's might. Envy and lying, in particular, are instinctively recognized as reprehensible. Goethe says that he must admit to many faults, but that he does not find envy in the depths of his soul. Benvenuto Cellini says the same about lying. If someone realizes, “I am an envious person,” then he instinctively works to get rid of this trait. But it can be very deeply rooted, so deeply that he can indeed strive to overcome envy, but he is not strong enough, morally not strong enough. Then something very peculiar happens. Envy is a Luciferic quality. When a person realizes that he has a tendency to envy and works to overcome it, Lucifer says to himself: There is a danger that this person will escape me. Lucifer and Ahriman are equally hostile to man, but they are good friends among themselves. Then Lucifer calls on Ahriman for help, and he transforms envy into another quality. Envy undergoes a metamorphosis that manifests itself in the human soul in such a way that a person who previously did not want this in another person now becomes a busybody, looking for everything possible in his fellow human beings in order to find fault. This craving to find fault is nothing more than envy in disguise. If this is the case, then Ahriman has you in his claws. This envy in disguise is very widespread. If it did not exist in the form of carping and the craving to say all kinds of nasty things about people, many a morning and evening gathering and many a coffee party would have no subject matter at all.

Strangely enough, the same thing happens in terms of karma whether you let envy arise originally or in a transformed form as carping. If you follow a person who was envious in his youth or a carper into later life, you will see that people who were consumed by envy in their youth develop insecurity in old age. They cannot gain a firm hold on life, cannot come into a right relationship with other people, cannot advise themselves, and are glad if they can say, “Such and such advised me.” This is a karmic result of envy or of transformed envy in this very life.

Dishonesty is an attribute of the etheric body and has its source in Ahriman. If, at a certain age, a person habitually displays dishonesty, or if he lies a great deal as a result of bad education, then in later life he will always show a certain shyness, an inability to look people in the eye. Certain proverbial rules in the moral sphere are very apt here. When one says, “This person cannot look me in the eye,” then there is an effect of dishonesty. Shyness and a lack of independence arise as soul qualities in the same life. If one wants to observe life in the same way that the physicist observes the external course of the world, then one can observe such things. This makes life clear.

What follows from such a quality remains in the one life as a soul; it remains as a soul. Let us assume that we follow one life spiritually into the next. What appeared as a karmic effect in one life will gain greater power in the next life. Thus we can prove that the lack of independence, which initially appears as a mental effect of envy in one life, and the shyness as an effect of untruthfulness, that these become organizing in the building of the body in the next life. There they reach into the physical.

Someone who has developed a lot of envy in a previous life will be reborn as a person who already has what makes him or her helpless in the external organization of the body. Those who have been untruthful will reappear in such a way that they have no right relationship to their environment. They cannot be loved by the people around them, they feel repelled by them, love is difficult to come by. Spiritual science is to be understood as a way of life. What has now been said becomes an immediate way of life.

Let us suppose that a child like this is born in our neighborhood. If we notice that this child cannot enter into a relationship with us, that it shyly withdraws, or that this child is weak and pale, a theosophist will say to himself: the pallor, the disposition to all kinds of illnesses must be traced back to an envious disposition in the previous incarnation, the shyness to a tendency to tell lies. It is no coincidence that this child was born into our circle, for an individuality can only be placed where it belongs. It will not be long before people will accept the law of karma as a matter of course. People are born into the circumstances in which they belong. Weakness and helplessness are the result of former envy, and we meet this child because it envied us. And with its shy nature it comes to us because it is we who were so often lied to by this being in a previous incarnation. How should we behave in such a case? There is no need to think about this for long. We should behave in the most moral and ethical way, as we would in our ordinary lives.

A person who envies us or criticizes us in everything is best treated when we show them goodwill and love. This is the best behavior. Of course, this cannot be done everywhere in our unnatural, materialistic time. But it is the best behavior towards a child who is born into life with these particular dispositions. We do not just tell ourselves: the child envied us and lied to us in a past incarnation, but we make the firm decision to show this child a great deal of goodwill. Let us immerse ourselves in a warm feeling. Try to observe this and you will find that a child like that can redden in the cheek and become strong and robust. It is only necessary to repeat such behavior over and over again. It is the same with mendacity. The best way to convert a person who lies to us every moment is to do everything we can to give him as much of a sense of what love of truth is. If we behave in this way towards a shy child, we will find that we do everything to counteract the escalation of the conflict.

Thus we see that we can serve life to an enormous extent. This is an example of how spiritual science can become a life practice. We should never forget that we can have the evidence for karma in our hands all the time. But we should also not forget, especially when we have to educate such people, that it is up to us to prove that spiritual science has become part of our flesh and blood.

We can also look at other qualities in the light of spiritual science, for example, wonder and amazement. The ancient Greek philosophers, guided by a fine instinct, said: Philosophy takes its starting point from wonder and amazement. What is this sense of wonder, this amazement? There is a certain relationship to the phenomena that confront us that leads us to be amazed, to be in awe. Then sometimes, instead of amazement, there comes something else into it, into which amazement and awe no longer mix. This is namely the case when we begin to understand the facts in question. We would now like to raise the question: what about this sense of wonder, this amazement? We encounter a phenomenon, it compels us to marvel. It cannot be a relationship to the intellect, to intelligence, because these seek understanding, do not express themselves in amazement. It is a much more direct relationship. Understanding has to deal with the individual parts; amazement arises directly in the face of the whole thing. This is because in understanding the I relates to the thing, but in marveling the astral body faces the thing. It does not have full consciousness, but a kind of subconscious. When the astral body has a relationship to the thing and this relationship is not yet elevated to the I, then wonder arises. The fact that a person can be amazed at something makes it possible to enter into a connection with the object that lies below the threshold of consciousness. This is very important in many cases, this subconscious connection, just as it is important for philosophy according to the view of the ancient Greeks that there is amazement first.

It is good for people to spread their astral body over a subject before they apply their intelligence to it. This creates an emotional and mental basis into which understanding is then immersed. This is quite different from approaching the subject abstractly with the mind. It has the effect of broadening the basis of our understanding. A richer understanding is the result. That is why it is so important for the educator to first develop a sense of holy awe in the face of the child, in the face of the individual emerging from the darkness; when we keep an open mind about what we cannot grasp with our intellect: the infinity of an individuality. We artificially place ourselves in a state of wonder in the face of this individuality. It will come, for there are abundant opportunities for wonder and amazement in the presence of each individuality. These feelings are not tainted by our narrow intellect; they are sometimes much more certain, richer, and more correct than what is recognized by the narrow intellect. The foundations for knowledge applicable to practical life are to be gained through amazement, through the life of the soul. Something very important depends on this: the trust that one person has in another. How often does it happen in life that a person has trust or even mistrust in another — because the negative applies just as much as the positive — before they have encountered the person in terms of concepts and everyday understanding? Sometimes trust and mistrust arise quite suddenly. How many people there are who often break out in a kind of lament: If only I had trusted my first impression! I spoiled the true impression that I had sensed before. — Such people are sometimes very right. Our social relationship, our relationship to life, should grow out of our emotional life. There are people who do not have much of an inclination to feel this vagueness, this sense of foreboding, in people. There are people who can gaze in wonder at the starry sky for hours without understanding much astronomy, and there are others who remain fixed on the starry sky until they get hold of books in which they can dissect it all. These are the people who cannot have this basic disposition. Such people, like sticks, often pass people by until they have had enough time to dissect people.

This is also evident in the behavior of spiritual science. One can actually speak to the intellect only in the very earliest youth. Later it is impossible for the reason that Goethe indicates: one could not convince people of the untruthfulness of their claim, because their view was based on the fact that they thought the untruthful was true. If someone feels that there is something in spiritual science that fulfills all their longings, they will always find logical evidence that can be found everywhere. Basically, things are extremely clear; they just have to be seen in the light of a spiritual worldview. Suppose a person in youth experiences a kind of sacred awe in the presence of an older person, one that they may not even be able to say why it arises. When we notice such a broad-minded disposition in a person, we find that such people remain young for a long time, indeed, remain young at all, that a young heart beats in them even when their hair has long since turned grey. They retain a certain agility in life. In particular, they retain the ability throughout their lives to quickly find their way into situations, to be adept in all circumstances. Those who open themselves up to life in this way in their youth will find that life opens up more and more for them in later epochs. They are increasingly able to see into things, more easily achieve the ability to feel the spiritual behind things, and become more and more spiritual. It is different for a person who has particularly developed the intellectual side in their youth. Such people tend towards premature old age. This is not the fault of the individual, but the karma of the community. The person who is a rational being separates himself more and more from the world, it becomes more and more incomprehensible to him. Hence the criticism of many people about everything that is in their environment. In my youth, they say, everything was beautiful, now everything is spoiled. This grumpiness, this dissatisfaction with everything, this withdrawal, this living only in childhood memories, is something that is connected to the intellectuality of the soul in youth. Therefore, we cannot do enough to build education on the broad basis of the mind, especially on imagery.

In our time, humanity in general is sailing in the opposite direction. Children are not told the stork tale, for example. Only one image is used, and it is truer than what people today want to teach children, namely that a child comes only from its father and mother. The stork image — or any other — indicates that there is something in the child that comes down from the heights of the clouds. The child sees into regions that are beyond triviality and builds up what is to grow into the truth of later life. To consider the stork picture to be untrue is just a lack of imagination, an inability to find a suitable image for the process that cannot be described to children as reincarnation, to clothe this process in an appropriate image. But, it is objected, children do not believe in it today. That is because the people who tell children such things do not believe in them themselves. As soon as we ourselves do not believe in what the image expresses, children cannot believe in it either. But if we ourselves have a picture of the real and true that is behind it, if we have enough imagination to translate the truth into a picture, then children will believe it too. And it is really beautiful to tell the child: A part comes from the father and a part from the mother, but a third is carried down from the heights of heaven by other beings, who carry it in their wings, bringing it to the father and mother. When we say this, the image is very appropriate and we are speaking the truth. A child to whom we teach rich, pictorial ideas is helped in relation to the conditions of the astral life, and we give him the blessing of a youthfulness that extends well into old age. This pictorial element in the educational activity, which above all also underlies play, is so infinitely important. Here too it can be seen in one life how karma works.

Thus spiritual science, when it intervenes in culture, will show its truth in the way in which life thrives and blossoms, while materialism shows its untruth by making life desolate and prematurely old.

Whoever turns to the Gospel of St. Luke will, to begin with, only be able to feel dimly something of what it contains; but an inkling will then dawn on him that whole worlds, vast spiritual worlds, are revealed by this Gospel. After what was said in the last lecture, this will be obvious to us, for as we heard, spiritual research shows how the Buddhistic world-conception, with everything it was able to give to mankind, flowed into the Gospel of St. Luke. It may truly be said that Buddhism radiates from this Gospel, but in a special form, comprehensible to the simplest and most unsophisticated mind.

As could be gathered from the last lecture and will become particularly clear to-day, to understand Buddhism as presented to the world in the teachings of the great Buddha demands the application of lofty conceptions and an ascent to the pure, ethereal heights of the Spirit; a very great deal of preparation is required to grasp the essence of Buddhism. Its spiritual substance is contained in the Gospel of St. Luke in a form that can influence everyone who recognizes concepts and ideas that are essential for humanity. This will be readily understood when we get to the root of the mystery underlying the Gospel of St. Luke. Not only are the spiritual attainments of Buddhism presented to us through this Gospel; they come before us in an even nobler form, as though raised to a level higher than when they were a gift to humanity in India some six hundred years before our era.

In the lecture yesterday we spoke of Buddhism as the purest teaching of compassion and love; from the place in the world where Buddha worked a gospel of love and compassion streamed into the whole spiritual evolution of the Earth. The gospel of love and compassion lives in the true Buddhist when his own heart feels the suffering confronting him in the outer world from all living creatures. There we encounter Buddhistic love and compassion in the fullest sense of the words; but from the Gospel of St. Luke there streams to us something that is more than this all-embracing love and compassion. It might be described as the translation of love and compassion into deed. Compassion in the highest sense of the word is the ideal of the Buddhist; the aim of one who lives according to the message of the Gospel of St. Luke is to unfold love that acts. The true Buddhist can himself share in the sufferings of the sick; from the Gospel of St. Luke comes the call to take active steps to do whatever is possible to bring about healing. Buddhism helps us to understand everything that stirs the human soul; the Gospel of St. Luke calls upon us to abstain from passing judgment, to do more than is done to us, to give more than we receive! Although in this Gospel there is the purest, most genuine Buddhism, love translated into deed must be regarded as a progression, a sublimation, of Buddhism.

This aspect of Christianity—Buddhism raised to a higher level—could be truly described only by one possessed of the heart and disposition of the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke. It was eminently possible for him to portray Christ Jesus as the Healer of body and soul because having himself worked as a physician he was able to write in the way that appealed so deeply to the hearts of men. That he recorded what he had to say about Christ Jesus from the standpoint of a physician will become more and more apparent as we penetrate into the depths of the Gospel.

But something else strikes us when we consider what an impression this Gospel can make upon even the most childlike natures. The lofty teachings of Buddhism, to understand which mature intelligence is required, appear to us in the Gospel of St. Luke as though rejuvenated, as though born anew from a fountain of youth. Buddhism is a fruit on the tree of humanity, and when we find it again in this Gospel it seems to be like a rejuvenation of what it had previously been. It is only possible to understand this rejuvenation by paying close attention to the great Buddha's teachings themselves and discerning with spiritual eyes the powers working in Buddha's soul.

In the first place it must be remembered that the Buddha had been a Bodhisattva, that is to say, a very lofty Being able to gaze deeply into the mysteries of existence. As a Bodhisattva, the Buddha had participated in the evolution of humanity throughout the ages. When in the epoch following Atlantis the first post-Atlantean civilization was established and promoted, Buddha was already present as Bodhisattva and, acting as an intermediary, conveyed to man from the spiritual worlds the teachings indicated in the lecture yesterday. He had been present in Atlantean and even in Lemurian times. And because he had reached such a high stage of development, he was also able, during the twenty-nine years of his final existence as Bodhisattva, from his birth to the moment when he became Buddha, to recollect stage by stage all the communities in which he had lived before incarnating for the last time in India. He could look back upon his participation in the labours of humanity, upon his existence in the divine-spiritual worlds in order that he might bring down from there what it was his mission to impart to mankind. It was indicated yesterday that even an Individuality of this lofty rank must live through again, briefly at any rate, what he has already learnt. Thus Buddha describes how while still a Bodhisattva he gradually rose to higher stages of consciousness, how his spiritual vision became ever more perfect and his enlightenment complete.

We are told how he described to his disciples the path his soul had traversed and how he was able by degrees to recollect his experiences in the past. He spoke to them somewhat as follows. ‘There was a time, O ye monks, when an all-pervading light appeared to me from the spiritual world, but as yet I could distinguish nothing in it—neither forms, nor pictures: my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then I began to see not only the light, but single pictures, single forms, within the light; but I could not distinguish what these forms and pictures denoted: my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then I began to realize that spiritual beings were expressing themselves in these forms and pictures; but again I could not distinguish to what kingdoms of the spiritual world these beings belonged: my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then I learnt to know to which of the various kingdoms of the spiritual world these several beings belonged; but I could not yet distinguish through what actions they had acquired their place in the spiritual realms, nor what was their condition of soul: for my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then came the time when I could discern through what actions these spiritual beings had acquired their place in the spiritual realms, and what was their condition of soul; but I could not yet distinguish with which particular spiritual beings I myself had lived in former times, nor how I was related to them: for my enlightenment was not yet pure enough. Then came the time when I was able to know that I was together with certain beings in particular epochs and was related to them in this way or in that: I knew what my previous lives had been. Now my enlightenment was pure!’

In this way Buddha indicated to his disciples how he had gradually worked his way to knowledge which, although he had already attained it in an earlier epoch, had nevertheless to be freshly acquired in accordance with the conditions prevailing in each successive incarnation. In Buddha's case this knowledge had necessarily to be in a form in keeping with his complete descent into a physical human body. If we enter into these things with the right feeling we shall get an inkling of the greatness and significance of the Individuality who incarnated at that time in the King's son of the family of Sakya. Buddha knew that the world he himself could again experience and behold would be inaccessible to men's ordinary faculty of vision in the immediate present and future. Only ‘Initiates’—and Buddha himself was an Initiate—could gaze into the spiritual world; for normal humanity this was no longer possible. Inherited remains of the old clairvoyance had become increasingly rare. But Buddha had not come to speak to men only of what Initiates had to say; his primary mission was to convey to them knowledge of the forces that must flow out of the human soul itself. Hence he could not speak only of the fruits of his own enlightenment, but he said to himself: ‘I must speak to men of what they can attain through the higher development of their own inner nature and of the faculties belonging to this epoch.

In the course of Earth evolution men will gradually come to recognize the content of Buddha's teaching as something that their own reason, their own soul, tells them. But long, long ages will have to pass before all men are mature enough to produce out of their own souls what Buddha was the first to bring to expression in the form of pure knowledge. For to develop certain faculties in later ages is not the same as to bring them forth for the first time from the depths of the human soul. Let us take another example. To-day, even the young are able to assimiliate the principles of logic and unfold logical thinking. Logical thinking is now one of the general faculties possessed by man and developed from his own inner nature. But it was in Aristotle, the great Greek thinker, that this faculty first arose from a human soul. There is a difference between bringing forth something for the first time from the soul and bringing it forth after it has already been developing for a period in humanity.

Buddha's message to men was among the very greatest of teachings and will remain so for long, long ages. Hence the soul of a Bodhisattva, the soul of one enlightened to such a supreme degree, was needed in order that this teaching should for the first time become a living power in a human being. Only the highest degree of enlightenment could enable the soul to give birth to what was to become a universal endowment of mankind—namely, the lofty doctrine of compassion and love. Buddha's message had to be presented in words familiar to the humanity of that time, especially to the people of his homeland. Reference has already been made to the fact that at the time of Buddha the Sankhya and Yoga philosophies were being taught in India. From them were derived the terminologies and concepts in use at the time. Anyone who brought a new message had necessarily to use current parlance, and Buddha too clothed what was living within him in concepts familiar to his contemporaries. True, he re-cast these concepts into completely new forms but he was obliged to use them. The principle of all evolution must be that the future is based on the past. And so Buddha clothed his sublime wisdom in expressions customary in the Indian teachings of that time.

We must now try to picture what Buddha experienced during the seven-day period of his ‘Enlightenment’ under the Bodhi-tree. This teaching was to become the deepest, most intimate concern of mankind. Let us therefore try to conceive, even if with thoughts only approximately adequate, what profound experiences were undergone by Buddha under the Bodhi-tree and then came to expression in his soul.

He might have said that there were times in the ancient past when many human beings were dimly clairvoyant and that in an even more distant past this was the case with everyone. What does it mean—to be ‘dimly clairvoyant’, or ‘clairvoyant’? To be clairvoyant means to be able to use the organs of the etheric body. When a man is able to use the organs of his astral body only, he can, it is true, inwardly feel and experience profound mysteries, but there can be no actual vision. Clairvoyance cannot arise until what is experienced in the astral body makes its ‘impress’ in the etheric body. Even the old, dim clairvoyance originated from the fact that in the etheric body, which had not yet passed completely into the physical body, there were organs which it was still possible for ancient humanity to use. What, therefore, was it that men lost in the course of time? They lost the capacity to use the organs of the etheric body! They were obliged to make use of the external organs of the physical body only, experiencing in the astral body, in the form of thoughts, feelings and mental pictures, what the physical body transmitted. All this passed through the soul of the great Buddha as the expression of what he experienced. He said to himself: ‘Men have lost the capacity to use the organs of their etheric bodies. They experience in their astral bodies what they learn from the outer world through the instrumentality of their physical bodies.’

Buddha now concerned himself with this significant question: ‘When the eye perceives the colour red, when the ear hears a sound, a tone, when the sense of taste has received some impression, under normal conditions these impressions become concepts and ideas, are inwardly experienced in the astral body. If they were experienced in this way alone, they could not, in normal circumstances, be accompanied by pain and suffering. Were man simply to abandon himself to the impressions of the outer world as the latter with its light, colours, sounds, and so forth, affects his senses, he would pass through the world without experiencing pain and suffering from the impressions made upon him. Only under certain conditions can pain and suffering be experienced by man.’

Hence the great Buddha sought to discover the conditions under which man experiences pain, suffering, cares and afflictions. When and why do the impressions of the outer world become fraught with suffering? Then he said to himself: Looking back into ancient times, it is revealed that in men's earlier incarnations on the Earth certain beings worked into their astral bodies from two sides. In the course of incarnations through the epochs of Lemuria and Atlantis, the Luciferic beings penetrated into human nature, and their influences took actual effect in the human astral body. Then, from the Atlantean epoch onwards, man was also worked upon by beings under the leadership of Ahriman. Thus in the course of his earlier incarnations, man was subjected to the influences of both the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. Had these beings not worked upon him, he could have acquired neither freedom nor the capacity to distinguish between good and evil, nor free will. From a higher point of view, therefore, it is fortunate that these influences were exercised upon him, although it is true that in a certain respect they led him from divine-spiritual heights more deeply into material existence than he would otherwise have descended.

The great Buddha could therefore say that man bears within himself influences due to the invasion of Lucifer on the one side and Ahriman on the other. These influences have remained with him from earlier incarnations. When, with his old clairvoyance, man was still able to gaze into the spiritual world, he perceived the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman and could clearly distinguish them. He could say: This particular influence comes from Lucifer, this other from Ahriman. And inasmuch as with his vision of the astral world he perceived the harmful influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, he could reckon with and protect himself from them. He knew too, how he had come into contact with these Beings. There was a time—so said Buddha—when men knew whence came the influences they had borne within themselves from incarnation to incarnation since bygone ages. But with the loss of the old clairvoyance this knowledge was also lost; man is now ignorant of the influences that have worked upon his soul through the series of incarnations. The earlier clairvoyant knowledge has been replaced by ignorance. Darkness now envelops man; he cannot perceive whence come these influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, but they are there within him! He has within him something of which he knows nothing. It would be folly to deny the reality and effectiveness of something that exists, even though people are ignorant of it. The influences that have penetrated into man from incarnation to incarnation are working in him. They are there and they work through his whole life—only he is unaware of them!

What effect have these influences in man? Although he cannot actually recognize them for what they are, he feels them; there is a power within him that is the expression of what has continued from incarnation to incarnation and has entered into his present form of existence. These forces, the nature of which man cannot recognize, are represented by his desire for external life, for experience in the world, by his thirst and craving for life. Thus the ancient Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences work within man as the thirst, the craving for existence. This ‘thirst for existence’ continues from incarnation to incarnation. This, in effect, is what the great Buddha said. But to his intimate pupils he gave more detailed explanations.

How he presented what he thus felt can be understood only if there has been a certain preparation through Anthroposophy. We know that when a man dies his astral body and his Ego leave the physical and etheric bodies. Then he has before him, for a certain time, the great memory-tableau of his last life in the form of a vast picture. The main part of his etheric body is then cast off as a second corpse and something like an extract or essence of this etheric body remains; he bears this extract with him through the periods of Kamaloka and Devachan and brings it back again into his next incarnation. While he is in Kamaloka there is inscribed into this life-extract everything he has experienced through his deeds, everything that has been incurred in the way of human Karma and for which he has to make compensation. All this unites with the extract of the etheric body which passes on from one incarnation to another and man brings it with him when he again comes into existence through birth. The term in Oriental literature for what we call ‘etheric body’ is ‘Linga Sharira’. Thus it is an extract of Linga Sharira that man takes with him from incarnation to incarnation.

Buddha was able to say: At birth, the human being brings with him, in his Linga Sharira, everything it contains from his former incarnations; it is inscribed there everything of which man, in the present epoch, knows nothing and over which spreads the darkness of ignorance, although it asserts itself as the ‘thirst for existence’, the ‘craving for life’. In what is called the ‘craving for life’, Buddha saw everything that comes from previous incarnations and drives man to long avidly for enjoyment in the world, so that he does not merely move though the world of colours, tones and other impressions, but yearns for this world. This force exists in man from previous incarnations. Buddha's pupils called it ‘Samskara’. Buddha spoke to his intimate pupils to the following effect.—What is characteristic of man is his ignorance, his ‘non-perception’ of something very significant that is in him. Because of this ignorance, this non-perception, everything that confronts man from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings and to which he might otherwise adopt an effective attitude, is transformed into the ‘thirst for existence’, into slumbering forces which rumble darkly within him from previous incarnations. Man's present thinking has developed from ‘Samskara’ and this is why, in the present cycle of human evolution, nobody is able, without further effort, to think objectively.

Mark well the fine distinction made clear by Buddha to his pupils: the distinction between objective thinking which has nothing but the ‘object’ in view, and thinking influenced by the forces arising from the Linga Sharira. Consider how you acquire your ‘opinions’ about things; ask yourselves how much you acquire from these things because they please you and how much because you observe them objectively. Everything acquired as an apparent truth, not as the result of objective thinking, but because old inclinations have been brought from previous incarnations—all this, according to Buddha, forms an ‘inner organ of thought’. This organ of thought comprises the sum-total of what a man thinks because certain experiences in former incarnations remain in his Linga Sharira as a residue. Buddha saw in the inner being of man a kind of inner organ of thought formed from Samskara, and he said: ‘It is this thought-substance that forms in man what is called his ‘present individuality’—in Buddhism, ‘Name and Form’, or ‘Kamarupa’. ‘Ahamkara’ is the term used in another philosophy.

Buddha spoke to his pupils somewhat as follows. In primeval times, when men were still clairvoyant and beheld the world lying behind physical existence, they all, in a certain sense, saw the same, for the objective world is the same for everyone. But when the darkness of ignorance spread over the world, each man brought with him individual capacities which distinguished him from his fellows. This made him into a being best described as having a particular form of soul. Each human being had a name which distinguished him from another—each had an ‘Ahamkara’. What is thus created in man's inner nature under the influence of what he has brought with him from former incarnations and accounts for his ‘Name and Form’, his individuality—this builds in him, from within outwards, Manas and the five sense-organs, the so-called ‘six organs’.

Note well that Buddha did not say: ‘The eye is merely formed from within outwards’; but he said: ‘Something that was in Linga Sharira and has been brought over from previous stages of existence is membered into the eye.’ Hence the eye does not see with pure, unclouded vision; it would look into the world of outer existence quite differently if it were not inwardly permeated with the residue of earlier stages of existence. Hence the ear does not hear with full clarity but everything is dimmed by this residue. The result is that there is mingled into all things the desire to see this or that, to hear this or that, to taste or perceive in one way or another. Into everything man encounters in the present cycle of existence there is insinuated what has remained from earlier incarnations as ‘desire’. If this element of desire were absent—so said Buddha—man would look out into the world as a divine being; he would let the world work upon him and no longer desire anything more than is granted to him, nor wish his knowledge to exceed what was bestowed upon him by the divine Powers; he would make no distinction between himself and the outer world, but would feel himself membered into it. He feels himself separated from the rest of the world only because he craves for more and different enjoyment than the world voluntarily offers him. This leads to the consciousness that he is different from the world. If he were satisfied with what is in the world, he would not distinguish himself from it; he would feel his own existence continuing in the outer world. He would never experience what is called ‘contact’ with the outer world, for, not being separate from it, he could not come into ‘contact’ with it. The forming of the ‘six organs’ was responsible for the gradual establishment of ‘contact with the outer world’; contact gave rise to feeling and feeling to the urge to cling to the outer world. But it is because man tries to cling to the outer world that pain, suffering, cares and afflictions arise.

This is what Buddha taught his pupils regarding the ‘inner man’ as the cause of pain, suffering, cares and afflictions. It was a delicately woven, sublime theory—but a theory that sprang directly from life, for an ‘Enlightened One’ had experienced it as a profound truth concerning the humanity of his time. Having guided humanity as Bodhisattva for thousands and thousands of years in accordance with the principles of love and compassion, there dawned in him when he became Buddha, knowledge of the true nature and the causes of suffering. He was able to know why man suffers, and explained this to his intimate disciples. And when his development was so advanced that he could experience the very essence and meaning of human existence in the present cycle of evolution, he summarized it all in the famous sermon at Benares with which he inaugurated his work as Buddha. There he presented in a popular form what he had previously communicated to his disciples in a more intimate way.

He spoke somewhat as follows.—Whoever knows the causes of human existence, realizes that life, as it is, must be fraught with suffering. The first teaching I have to give you concerns suffering in the world. The second teaching concerns the causes of suffering. Wherein do these causes lie? They lie in the fact that the thirst for existence insinuates itself into man from what has remained in him from previous incarnations. Thirst for existence is the cause of suffering. The third teaching concerns the question: How is suffering eliminated from the world? By eliminating its cause; by extinguishing the thirst for existence proceeding from ignorance! Men have lost their former clairvoyant knowledge, have become ignorant, and it is this ignorance that conceals the spiritual world from them. Ignorance is to blame for the thirst for existence and this in turn is the cause of suffering and pain, cares and afflictions. Thirst for existence must disappear from the world if suffering is to disappear. The old knowledge has passed away from the world; men can no longer use the organs of the etheric body. But a new knowledge is now possible, the knowledge acquired when man immerses himself completely in what his astral body, thanks to its deepest forces, can give him, and with the help of what his outer sense-organs enable him to observe in the external physical world. What is thus kindled in the deepest forces of the astral body and is developed with the co-operation of the physical body—although not actually derived from it—this alone can help man to begin with, and give him knowledge; for this knowledge is at first bestowed upon him as a gift. It was to this effect that Buddha spoke in his great inaugural sermon.

He knew that he must transmit to humanity the kind of knowledge that is attainable through the highest development of the forces of the astral body. Hence he had to teach that through deep and penetrating understanding of the forces of the astral body, man acquires knowledge that is both appropriate and possible for him but is at the same time untouched by influences from earlier incarnations. Buddha wished to impart to men a kind of knowledge that has nothing to do with what slumbers in the darkness of ignorance within the human soul as Samskara. Such knowledge is acquired by waking to life all the forces contained in the astral body in one incarnation. ‘The cause of suffering in the world’—so said Buddha—‘is that something of which man knows nothing has remained behind from earlier incarnations. This legacy from earlier incarnations is the cause of man's ignorance concerning the world; it is the cause of his suffering and pain. But when he becomes conscious of the nature of the forces in his astral body, he can, if he so will, acquire a knowledge that has remained independent of all influences from earlier times—a knowledge that is his very own!’

This was the knowledge that the great Buddha wished to impart to men, and he did so in the form of what is known as the ‘Eightfold Path’. There he indicates the capacities and qualities which man must develop in order to attain, in the present cycle of human evolution, knowledge that is uninfluenced by the ever-recurring births. Thus by the power he had himself acquired, Buddha raised his soul to the heights attainable by means of the strongest forces of the astral body, and in the ‘Eightfold Path’ he showed humanity the way to a kind of knowledge uninfluenced by Samskara. He described the path as follows.—

Man attains this kind of knowledge about the world when he acquires a right view of things, a view that has nothing to do with sympathy or antipathy or preference of any sort. He must strive as best he can to acquire the right view of each thing, purely according to what presents itself to him outwardly. That is the first principle: the right view of things. Secondly, man must become independent of what has remained from earlier incarnations; he must also endeavour to judge in accordance with his right view of a thing and not be swayed by any other influences. Thus right judgment is the second principle. The third is that he must strive to give true expression to what he desires to communicate to the world, having first acquired the right view and right judgment of it; not only his words but every manifestation of his being must express his own right view—that and that alone. This is right speech. The fourth principle is that man must strive to act, not according to his sympathies and antipathies, not according to the dark forces of Samskara within him, but in such a way that he lets his right view, right judgment and right speech become deed. This is right action. The fifth principle, enabling a man to liberate himself from what is within him, is that he should acquire the right vocation and station in the world. We may best understand what Buddha meant by this, if we remember how many people are dissatisfied with the tasks devolving upon them, believing that some other position would be more advantageous. But a man should be able to derive from the situation into which he is born or into which fate has placed him, the best that is possible, i.e. to acquire the right ‘occupation’ or ‘vocation’. Whoever finds no satisfaction in the situation in which he is placed, will not be able to derive from it the power to unfold right activity in the world. This is what Buddha called right vocation. The sixth principle is that a man should make increasing efforts to ensure that what he acquires through right views, right judgment and so forth, shall become habit in him. He is born into the world with certain habits. A child gives evidence of this or that inclination or habit. But man's endeavours should be directed, not towards retaining the habits, proceeding from Samskara but towards acquiring those that gradually become his own as the result of right views, right judgment, right speech, and so on. These are the right habits. The seventh principle is that a man should bring order into his life through not invariably forgetting yesterday when he has to act to-day. He would never accomplish anything if he had to learn his skills anew each time. He must strive to develop recollectedness, mindfulness, regarding everything in his life. He must always turn to account what he has already learnt, he must link the present with the past. Thus along the Eightfold Path man must acquire right mindfulness in the sense of Buddha's teaching. The eighth quality is acquired when, without partiality for one view or another and without being influenced by any element remaining in him from former incarnations, he surrenders himself with pure devotion to the things of the world, immerses himself in them and lets them alone speak to him. This is right contemplation.

This is the Eightfold Path, of which Buddha said to his disciples that if followed it would gradually lead to the extinction of the thirst for existence with its attendant suffering, and impart to the soul something that brings liberation from elements enslaving it from past lives.

We have now been able to grasp something of the spirit and origin of Buddhism. We know too what significance lies in the fact that the Bodhisattva of old became Buddha. The Bodhisattva had always allowed everything connected with his mission to flow into humanity. In very ancient times, before Buddha came into the world, men were not able to apply even their inner forces in such a way that they themselves could have developed the attributes of the Eightfold Path. Influences flowing from the spiritual world were necessary to make this possible, and it was the Bodhisattva of old who enabled these influences to stream down upon mankind. It was therefore an event of unique significance when this Bodhisattva became Buddha and now gave forth in the form of teaching what in earlier times he had caused to flow down upon men from above. He had now brought into the world a physical body able to unfold out of itself, forces that formerly could flow down from higher realms only. The first body of this kind was brought into the world by Gautama Buddha. Everything he had formerly caused to flow down from above became reality in the physical world at that time. It is a happening of great and far-reaching importance for the whole of Earth evolution when forces that have streamed down upon humanity from epoch to epoch are present one day in the bodily nature of a human being on Earth. A power that can pass over into all men is then engendered.

In the body of Gautama Buddha lie the causes enabling men in all ages to develop in their own being the powers of the Eightfold Path. Buddha's existence ensured for men the possibility of right thinking! And whatever comes to pass in the future in this respect, until the principles of the Eightfold Path become reality in the whole of mankind, will all be thanks to that existence. What Buddha bore within himself he surrendered to men for their spiritual nourishment.

Generally speaking, no science to-day perceives these significant facts in the evolution of humanity, but they are often presented in simple fairy-tales and legends. I have emphasized more than once that fairy-tales and legends are often wiser and more truly ‘scientific’ than our objective science itself. In its depths the human soul has always sensed a certain truth connected with the nature of a Being such as a Bodhisattva: that, to begin with, something streams down from above, then becomes by degrees a possession of the soul and thereafter rays back again into the cosmos from the soul itself. Men who were able to feel the significance of this either dimly or clearly said to themselves: like the rays of the sun from the heavens, so did the Bodhisattva once ray down upon the Earth the forces of the doctrine of compassion and love, the forces developed through the principles of the Eightfold Path. But then the Bodhisattva descended into a human body and surrendered to men the power that was once his own possession. This power now lives in humanity and streams back into the cosmos as the rays of the sun are reflected back in the moon's light. This was felt to be of special significance in regions where it was customary to express such a truth in the form of a fairy-tale or legend. Thus the following remarkable legend was narrated in the regions where the Bodhisattva appeared.

Once upon a time the Buddha lived as a hare. It was an age when other creatures of many different species were looking for food, but it had all been consumed. The plant food which the hare itself could eat was not suitable for carnivorous creatures. The hare, who was in reality the Buddha, saw a Brahman passing by and resolved to sacrifice himself in order to provide food. At that moment the God appeared and saw the noble deed. A chasm opened and swallowed the hare. Then the God took a tincture and drew the picture of the hare on the moon. And since that time the picture of Buddha as the hare is to be seen on the face of the moon. In the West we do not speak of the ‘hare in the moon’ but of the ‘man in the moon’.

A Kalmuck fairy-tale expresses this still more cogently. In the moon lives a hare; it came there because once upon a time the Buddha sacrificed himself and the Earth-Spirit drew the picture of the hare on the moon. This expresses the great truth of the Bodhisattva becoming Buddha and sacrificing the substance of his very being to mankind for nourishment, so that his forces now ray out into the world from the hearts of men.

Of a Being such as the Bodhisattva who became Buddha, we said—and this is the teaching of all who know: When a Being passes through this stage he has had his last incarnation on the Earth, for his whole nature is contained within a human body. Such a Being never again incarnates in this sense. Hence when the Buddha became aware of the significance of his present existence, he could say: ‘This is my last incarnation; I shall not again incarnate on the Earth!’—It would however be erroneous to think that such a Being then withdraws altogether from Earth-existence. True, he does not enter directly into a physical body but he assumes another body—of an astral or etheric nature—and so continues to send his influences into the world. The way in which such a Being who has passed through the last incarnation belonging to his own destiny continues to work in the world, may be understood by thinking of the following facts.

An ordinary human being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, can be permeated by such a Being. It is possible for a Being of this rank, who no longer descends into a physical body but still has an astral body, to be membered into the astral body of another human being. This man may well become a personality of importance, for the forces of a Being who has already passed through his last incarnation on the Earth are now working in him. Thus an astral Being unites with the astral nature of some individual on the Earth. Such a union may take place in a most complicated way. When the Buddha appeared to the shepherds in the picture of the ‘heavenly host’, he was not in a physical body but in an astral body. He had assumed a body in which he could still send his influences to the Earth. Thus in the case of a Being who has become a Buddha, we distinguish three bodies:

1. The body he has before he attains Buddhahood, when he is still working from above as a Bodhisattva; it is a body that does not contain in itself all the powers at his command; he still lives in spiritual heights and is linked with his earlier mission as was the Bodhisattva before his mission became the Buddha's mission. As long as such a Being is living in a body of this nature, his body is called a ‘Dharmakaya’;

2. The body which such a Being builds as his own and through which he brings to expression, in the physical body, everything he has within him. This body is called the ‘body of perfection’, ‘Sambhogakaya’.

3. The body which such a Being assumes, after he has passed through the stage of perfection and can work from above in the way described. This body is called a Nirmanakaya’.¹

We can therefore say that the ‘Nirmanakaya’ of Buddha appeared to the shepherds in the picture of the angelic host. Buddha appeared in the radiance of his Nirmanakaya and revealed himself in this way to the shepherds. But he was to find further ways of working into the events in Palestine at this crucial point of time.

To understand this we must briefly recall what is known to us from other lectures about the nature of man. Spiritual science speaks of several ‘births’. At what is called ‘physical birth’ the human being strips off, as it were, the maternal physical sheath; at the seventh year he strips off the etheric sheath which envelops him until the change of teeth just as the maternal physical sheath enveloped him until physical birth. At puberty—about the fourteenth or fifteenth year in the modern epoch—the human being strips off the astral sheath that is around him until then. It is not until the seventh year that the human etheric body is born outwardly as a free body; the astral body is born at puberty, when the outer astral sheath is cast off.

Let us now consider what it is that is discarded at puberty. In Palestine and the neighbouring regions this point of time occurs normally at about the twelfth year—rather earlier than in lands farther to the West. In the ordinary way this protective astral sheath is cast off and given over to the outer astral world. In the case of the child who descended from the priestly line of the House of David, however, something different happened. At the age of twelve the astral sheath was cast off but did not dissolve in the universal astral world. Just as it was, as the protective astral sheath of the young boy, with all the vitalising forces that had streamed into it between the change of teeth and puberty, it now united with the Nirmanakaya of Buddha. The spiritual body that had once appeared to the shepherds as the radiant angelic host united with the astral sheath released from the twelve-year-old Jesus, united with all the forces through which the freshness of youth is maintained during the period between the second dentition and puberty. The Nirmanakaya which shone upon the Nathan Jesus-child from birth onwards united with the astral sheath detached from this child at puberty; it became one with this sheath and was thereby rejuvenated. Through this rejuvenation, what Buddha had formerly given to the world could be manifest again in the Jesus-child. Hence the boy was able to speak with all the simplicity of childhood about the lofty teachings of compassion and love to which we have referred to-day. When Jesus was found in the temple he was speaking in a way that astonished those around him, because he was enveloped by the Nirmanakaya of Buddha, refreshed as from a fountain of youth by the boy's astral sheath.

These are facts which can become known to the spiritual investigator and which the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke has indicated in the remarkable scene when a sudden change came over the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple. We must grasp what it was that had happened and then we shall understand why the boy no longer spoke as he had formerly been wont to speak. It so happened that at this very time, King Kanisha of Tibet summoned a Synod in India and proclaimed ancient Buddhism to be the orthodox religion. But in the meantime Buddha himself had advanced! He had absorbed the forces of the protective astral sheath of the Jesus-child and was thereby able to speak in a new way to the hearts and souls of men.

The Gospel of St. Luke contains Buddhism in a new form, as though springing from a fountain of youth; hence it expresses the religion of compassion and love in a form comprehensible to the simplest souls. We can read what the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke has woven into the text of his Gospel, but still more is contained in its depths. Only part of what appertains to the scene of Jesus in the temple could be described to-day and even greater depths of this mystery have still to be explained. Light will then be shed upon the earlier as well as upon the later years of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

• 1. Also referred to in Buddhist literature as ‘the Body of Transformation’.

If you will think back to the dramatic scenes we have had before us these last few days, you will find that they lead into what we will consider in this lecture cycle. First of all, I would like to call to mind Scenes Nine, Ten and Thirteen of The Souls' Awakening. These are scenes whose effect one could call simple and straightforward. After the happenings in the Spirit Realm (Scenes Five and Six) and the Egyptian initiation (Scenes Seven and Eight), some people might have expected a much more forceful sequel coming before their eyes of soul, more tragic, perhaps, or more emphatic in speech, not just a subsiding into inner quietness. However, anything formed differently in Scenes Nine, Ten, and Thirteen would appear untruthful to the occult eye.

We see on stage various developments of soul. It should be said immediately that we have also given theoretical descriptions of the development into higher worlds, and these contain points of reference for every person on his or her path towards the spiritual world. Nevertheless, soul development is necessarily different for each one, according to his own special nature, character, temperament and circumstances. We can therefore gain a deeper understanding of an esoteric soul development only when we observe its diversity: how differently it takes place in Maria, how differently in Johannes Thomasius, how differently in the other characters of the drama.

Scene Nine is first of all directed to that psychological moment when the consciousness breaks into Maria's soul of the experiences that had penetrated to her very core but not altogether consciously during the devachanic¹ time before birth and in the ancient Egyptian initiation. In what was presented to us as “Spirit Realm,” we are concerned with soul experiences between death at the end of a medieval incarnation and birth into our present time. The events of all four Mystery Dramas, with the exception of the episode in The Souls' Probation that represents the spiritual review of his previous life by Capesius, take place at the present time, a time linked to the spiritual past spent in Devachan, between the death of the various characters after their incarnation in the Middle Ages (this being the content of the episode mentioned) and their present life.

The experiences of the devachanic period differ according to the preparation our souls have made on earth. It must be understood that it is a significant experience when a soul can go through what is called the Cosmic Midnight with consciousness. Souls that are not prepared for it will sleep through that part of the time called the Saturn period of Devachan (one can designate the successive periods a soul undergoes between death and a new birth as connected with the various planets: Sun, Mars, Mercury periods, and so on). Many souls sleep through the whole Cosmic Midnight. Souls that have been prepared are awake in this period of their spiritual life, but there is no guarantee that souls so prepared will also bring a clear memory of this experience into their life on earth when they come back into physical existence.

Maria and Johannes were well prepared for the experience of the Cosmic Midnight during their time in the spirit between death and new birth. Nevertheless a kind of soul darkness prevailed at the beginning of their earth lives, continuing over long periods of time and shrouding the experience of the Cosmic Midnight; then at a later stage of their present life, this rose to the surface. It reappeared only when a certain inner calmness and resolution of soul was reached. Significant and profound are the experiences of the Cosmic Midnight when the soul is awake to them. The earthly memory of all this must come as a calm inner experience, a luminous inner experience, for the effect of such a perception of the Cosmic Midnight is this: what formerly was only subjective, working inwardly as soul force, now appears as a living being or beings before the soul. As shown in Scene Nine of The Souls' Awakening it presents itself before Maria in the forms of Astrid and Luna as real beings. To Johannes Thomasius the Other Philia becomes a living being of the spiritual world, and to Capesius, Philia, in Scene Thirteen. These characters had to learn to feel perceptively that what before this were only abstract forces within themselves now could appear to them in a spiritually tangible form.

What comes to souls spiritually tangible as genuine self-knowledge has to appear in complete soul quietness, the result of meditation: this is essential if such happenings are to be experienced in the true sense of the word for genuine strengthening of the soul. If a person wanted to experience the Cosmic Midnight as retrospective memory or to experience what is shown as the Egyptian initiation not in the clear light of meditation but as intense tragedy, he would not be able to experience them at all. For the spiritual happening that is taking place in the soul would place itself like a dark veil before it, so that any impressions recede from observation. A soul that has experienced the Cosmic Midnight and in its deepest core received a momentous impression of the kind shown in Scenes Seven and Eight of The Souls' Awakening can remember the past happening only when the soul in completely lucid calmness can perceive thoughts approaching, thoughts about earlier experiences in the spiritual life or in the former earth life. This is what is expressed in the words at the beginning of Scene Nine:

A star of soul ... there ... at the spirit shore ...
it draws near ... nears in spirit brightness ...
my Self it brings... and nearing,
its light gains strength ... gains calmness too.
You star within the circuit of my spirit ... what,
approaching, shines on my beholding soul?²

Only when the soul is in this calm mood, so that the experience does not whirl in upon it with tragic vehemence, can one feel the arising memory of the Cosmic Midnight and the experiences of the previous incarnation as occultly true. When it is experienced and lived through, the Cosmic Midnight has a profound significance for a person's emotional life. There one lives through what can only be expressed as follows: In the Cosmic Midnight things are experienced that he hidden deep, deep down under the surface, not only of the sense world but also under the surface of the various worlds to which a dawning clairvoyance can lead. The sense world recedes, and also there recedes from clairvoyant vision in some of those who have already been able to discern various layers below the sense world, what we may call (and we will speak of it at length later on)—the Necessities in cosmic events. The Necessities are rooted in the foundations of things, where also the deepest part of the human soul rests. This, however, evades the physical gaze and also the dawning clairvoyant gaze, revealing itself to the latter only when something is experienced like the Saturn period scenes. One may therefore say that to such a clairvoyant gaze, which indeed must first appear between death and a new birth, it is as if lightning flashes were crossing the soul's whole field of vision, lightning whose terrifying brilliance was illumining the Cosmic Necessities, which at the same time were themselves so blindingly bright that the cognitive gaze dies away in the radiant light. Then from this expiring glance of cognition there come forth picture forms that enweave themselves into the cosmic web like the forms from which grow the destinies of the cosmic beings. One discovers in the foundations of the Necessities the fundamental causes of human destinies and those of other beings, but only when one gazes with glances of cognition that die away in the knowing, destroyed by the lightning flashes; they then remodel themselves as if into forms that have died but that live on as the impulses of destiny in life.

All that a true self-knowledge can discover in itself—not the self-knowledge so bandied about in Theosophical ranks but the highly serious self-knowledge that comes to pass in the course of esoteric life³—all that a soul can perceive within itself, with all the imperfections it has to ascribe to itself, all this is heard at the cosmic midnight as if enwoven into rolling cosmic thunder, rumbling in the underground of existence.

All these experiences may take place with great anguish and solemn resolve between death and a new birth as an awakening at the Cosmic Midnight. If the soul is mature enough to allow the consciousness of this to enter the physical sense world, it must happen in the quiet clarity of the meditative mood hinted at by Maria at the beginning of Scene Nine. What, however, the soul has perceived within its spiritual life must have preceded this, as if something of itself, something belonging intimately to itself but not always dwelling in what one can call the Self, had approached from world distances. The mood in which something in the spirit world approaches one like a part of oneself, yet as though coming from far away: this was attempted in the words Maria speaks in the Spirit Realm (Scene Six):

The flames are nearing—nearing with my thinking
from distant cosmic soul-shores of my being.—
A heated battle nears—and my own thinking
must battle with the thoughts of Lucifer;
within another soul my thinking fights.—
Hot light is wafted—out of fierce dark coldness.—
It flashes lightnings, this hot light of soul—
the light of soul—in cosmic fields of ice—

The memory of the experience that can be expressed in such words as this can be rendered again in the words of Maria mentioned above at the beginning of Scene Nine (“A star of soul ...”). What, however, the soul has to feel in order to have such a memory of the Cosmic Midnight must also lie in one's earth life, for here the human soul goes through events which bring to it the moods of inner anguish, inner resolve, inner dread, that one can only express in such words given to Maria to speak at the end of Scene Four. Indeed, one has to have felt that the individual self tears itself away from what one generally calls the inner life; that the power of thinking, with which one feels so confidently connected in life, tears itself out of the inner being and seems to go off towards the far, far limits of one's field of vision; and one must have found alive in oneself as soul presence what is expressed in such words—though naturally these will seem complete nonsense, overflowing with contradictions, to the sort of comprehension limited to the external senses and tied to the brain. One must first have experienced the feeling of one's own self moving away, of one' s thinking moving away, if one is to live through again in complete calm the memory of the Cosmic Midnight. The memory during earth life must be preceded by the experience of the Cosmic Midnight in the spiritual life, if what is in Scene Nine should take place.

To make this possible, however, there must again have been the soul mood expressed at the end of Scene Four. The flames do in truth take flight; they do not come earlier into earthly consciousness; they do not approach the calm of meditation, before they have first fled away, until this soul mood has become a truth:

The flames are fleeing ... fleeing with my thinking;
----------------------------------------------------------
And there at distant cosmic shores of soul
a furious battle ... my own thinking fights ...
at flowing nothingness—cold spirit light ...
my thinking wavers, reels ... cold light ...
it strikes out of my thinking flaming waves of darkness ...
what now emerges from the fierce, dark heat?
in red flames storms my Self ... into the light ...
into cold light ... of cosmic fields of ice.

These things are linked together; their being connected in this way strengthens the inner soul faculties. What at first was only an abstract soul force now steps before the soul in a spiritual body, so that in one sense it is a special entity, on the other hand it belongs to one's self, as Astrid and Luna appear to Maria. These beings, who are real and at the same time perceived as soul forces, appear in such a way that they can stand on stage with the Guardian of the Threshold and with Benedictus as they do in Scene Nine. The most important thing is to sense the mood of this scene so that in a quite different, individual manner, when the inner soul force corresponding to the Other Philia takes on bodily form, an awakening takes place, that is, the memory of the Cosmic Midnight and of the ancient Egyptian time in Johannes Thomasius. To such a finely attuned soul as Johannes Thomasius the words of the Other Philia: “Enchanted weaving of your own being...” have a special meaning, as well as what is connected with them during the rest of the Mystery Drama. Because of this, the Spirit of Johannes' Youth, Benedictus and Lucifer appear as they do at the end of Scene Ten. It is important to bring before the mind's eye in just this scene how Lucifer approaches Johannes Thomasius and the same words are spoken that were heard at the end of Scene Three in The Guardian of the Threshold. In these words one discovers how the battle Lucifer wages moves through all the worlds and through every human life, and one also discovers the mood that resounds out of the words of Benedictus in answer to Lucifer. Try to feel what lies in these words which sound from Lucifer both in The Guardian of the Threshold at the end of Scene Three and in The Souls' Awakening at the end of Scene Ten:

Lucifer: I mean to fight.
Benedictus: And fighting serve the gods.

Let us note very carefully something else at this point, that although the same words are spoken in these two places, they can be spoken so that in each place they mean something quite different. What they mean at the end of Scene Ten of The Souls' Awakening is determined by the fact that the preceding words of Maria are transformed from words spoken in The Guardian of the Threshold, while in Maria's soul there lives what she had spoken:

Maria, as you have desired to see her,
does not exist in worlds of radiant truth.
My holy, solemn vow rays forth new strength
to hold for you what you have gained.

She says now:

You'll find me in bright fields of light ...

She no longer says:

And you will find me in cold fields of ice ...

but

You'll find me in bright fields of light
where glowing beauty brings forth powers of life.
Seek me in grounds of worlds where souls
must struggle to achieve their feeling for the gods
through love, which in the All beholds the Self.

The words are turned around from what they are in Scene Two of The Souls' Awakening. It is through this that the dialogue between Lucifer and Benedictus at the end of Scene Ten: “I mean to fight”—“And fighting serve the gods,” becomes entirely different from what it was at the end of Scene Three in The Guardian of the Threshold. In understanding this, light is shed on something of an ahrimanic thrust, one can say, that prevails in all intellectual thinking, in the whole intellectual culture of today.

It is one of the most difficult things for people with this superficial faculty of intellect in our modern culture to realize that the same words in a different context mean something different. Modern civilization is such that people think that the words they use—in so far as they have been coined on the physical plane—must always mean the same thing. Here we have precisely the place where Ahriman has people most firmly by the throat, and where he hinders them from understanding that words only become living in their deepest sense when one looks at them in the connection in which they are uttered. Nothing that reaches out beyond the physical plane can be understood if one does not keep this occult fact in mind. It is especially important today that an occult fact of this kind should work upon our hearts and souls as a counterbalance to the external intellectual life that has taken firm hold of every human being.

Among the many things that have to be considered in these Mystery Dramas, notice how indeed in The Souls' Awakening the remarkable figure of Ahriman steals in quietly at first,⁴ how it seems to insinuate itself among the other characters and how it continually gains in significance towards the end of the drama. I shall endeavor to bring out for you a special piece of writing about Lucifer and Ahriman, and other things as well, entitled The Threshold of the Spiritual World;⁵ it will be on hand during this lecture course, for these seem to me the subjects particularly necessary to illumine for our friends at this time. It is not easy to get a clear understanding of such figures as Ahriman and Lucifer. Perhaps it may be useful for some of you to observe how precisely in The Souls' Awakening he who is not quite in a fog about the ahrimanic element in the world may be able to think of things which someone else through unconscious ahrimanic impulses may be thinking, too, but in a different frame of mind. There will be many among you, dear friends, who can enter into all the circumstances which stream into such words as those expressed by Ahriman while he is insinuating himself among the various persons:

Do not permit him to confuse you quite.
He guards the threshold faithfully indeed,
although he shows himself in borrowed clothes
which you have patched together in your mind
from odds and ends that look like melodrama.
You as an artist could, of course, avoid
producing him in such a wretched style,
though later you will surely do it better.
But even his distorted image serves.
It does not need too much of emphasis
to show you what his present stature is.
You should take notes of how the Guardian speaks:
too mournful is his tone, too much of pathos.—
Forbid him this, and he will show to you
from whom today he borrows to excess.⁶

I can imagine that many people—from some aesthetic point of view or other—will shake their heads at the way these Mystery Dramas are put before us. My dear friends, these objections as well as others raised against anthroposophy can be set aside by those who put themselves in the mood of Ahriman. The hypercritical people of our time who denounce anthroposophy certainly belong to those described by the poet: “The devil's never noticed by some folk, even when he has them by the neck!” We can judge these opponents of anthroposophy a bit by what Ahriman is saying here while he prowls around. He meets us in his more serious form when the death of Strader gradually plays into the events presented in the drama; it comes about then that the forces flowing out of this death must be sought by soul vision in the effect they have on everything else that happens in The Souls' Awakening.

It must be said again and again that this awakening takes place in different ways. For Maria it happens that, through special circumstances, the soul forces that find their bodily-spiritual expression in Luna and Astrid appear before her soul. For Johannes Thomasius it takes place when he experiences in himself the enchanted weaving of his inner being, on the Other Philia's appearance in a spiritually palpable form, if one may use such an absurd expression. For Capesius it happens through Philia in a still different way. In many other forms this awakening can gradually dawn upon souls, for instance, as we see it dawn upon Strader in Scene Eleven. Here we do not meet what we have just described as the spiritually tangible forms of Luna, Philia, Astrid and the Other Philia; we have the still imaginative pictures that radiate spiritual experiences into the physical consciousness. This stage of the awakening of the soul that takes place in Strader can be represented only by such an imaginative perception as the image of the ship in Scene Eleven.

In yet another form can the awakening of the soul gradually prepare itself. You will find this, carefully planned, after Ahriman has been shown in his deeper significance in Scene Twelve: it is hinted at in Scene Thirteen in the conversation between Hilary and Romanus. Let your mind's eye rest on what has been happening in Hilary's soul between the events in The Guardian of the Threshold and those of The Souls' Awakening, expressed in these words of Hilary:

My friend, I thank you for these occult words.
I've heard them often; for the first time now
I feel the secret meaning they contain.
The cosmic ways are hard to penetrate.
And I, dear friend, am called upon to wait
until the spirit shows me the direction
which is in keeping with my spirit sight.

What are the words Romanus had spoken?⁷ They are words that Hilary has heard again and again from the place where Romanus stands in the Temple, words that Romanus has so often spoken at this place, yet until this experience, they had passed before the inner vision of Hilary without the deeper understanding one can call understanding of life. It is also a bit of soul awakening for someone to wrestle his way to an understanding of what he has taken in as thought-forms, grasping them pretty well and even lecturing about them but still without having a living, vital understanding. He may have absorbed everything of anthroposophy contained in books, lectures and cycles, may have even imparted it to others, perhaps to their great benefit, and yet discover this: to understand as now Hilary understands the words of Romanus is only possible after a certain experience for which he must calmly wait. This is a definite stage of the awakening of the soul.

O if only a good number of our friends could put themselves into this mood of waiting! If only they could adopt this frame of mind, of awaiting the approach of something whose description in advance both as theories and explanations has apparently been clear enough and yet misunderstood—then something would take place in their souls that is expressed by Strader's words in Scene Three of The Souls' Awakening. Strader stands there between Felix Balde and Capesius, stands there in a remarkable way—he stands there so that literally he hears every word they say and could repeat it, and yet he cannot understand it. He knows what it is, can even consider it to be wisdom, but now he notices that there is something that can be expressed in the words:

Capesius and Felix, both ... to me ...
conceal dark meaning in transparent words ...

Our supremely clever people today will perhaps concede that by chance this or that person can hide meaning—clear meaning—in obscure words. However, it will not easily be granted by these clever people that an obscure meaning can be hidden in clear words. Nevertheless for human nature to concede that in clear words an obscure meaning may be hidden is of the two the higher acknowledgment. Many sciences are clear, as are many philosophies, but something important would happen for the further evolution of mankind if philosophers would finally confess that—although in all philosophical systems they had certainly produced stuff that was clear and ever clearer, so that anyone could say, “These things are clear!”—yet there may be in clear words an obscure meaning. Something important would take place if the many people who think themselves supremely clever, reckoning what they know to be wisdom (and to some degree rightly so), if they could only place themselves before the world as Strader places himself between Felix Balde and Capesius and learn to say:

I often understood—what you are saying;—
I took it then for wisdom;—but no word
of what you say has meaning for me now.
Capesius and Felix, both—to me—
conceal dark meaning in transparent words.

Just imagine some modern philosopher or one from the past, who has brought together in his own way a plausible clear system of philosophy, and who will take a stand by the side of his philosophy (which is of course in its own way the result of all human thought), saying, “I've usually found this comprehensible. Everything I've written I've taken for wisdom—and yet not a single word in all these phrases can I understand. Even in those I wrote myself, much of it is incomprehensible: these pronouncements seem to hide a dark meaning in clear words.”

Well, one cannot easily imagine such a confession coming from one of our recent or slightly older philosophers, nor from one of the highly clever men of our materialistic, or as it's called in more grandiose style, our monistic age either. And yet it would be a blessing for our present life if people could assume the attitude towards the thoughts and other cultural achievements that Strader assumed towards Felix Balde and Capesius. If only such people might become more and more numerous, and if only anthroposophy could in very truth contribute something directly to this self-knowledge!

• 1. Devachan, devachanic (Sanscrit, deva-divine being) The spirit world. In An Outline of Occult Science Steiner describes it as “The manifestation of the Spirit World in its fullness.”
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Souls' Awakening, contained in Four Mystery Dramas, (Vancouver, Steiner Book Centre, 1978).
• 3. Theosophical Society: The German section of the Theosophical Society, headed by Rudolf Steiner until 1912, diverged from the beginning from the rest of the Theosophical Society which was headed by Annie Besant. In 1912, the German section broke away and the Anthroposophical Society was founded.
• 4. The Souls' Awakening, Scene 3.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner, A Road to Self-Knowledge and The Threshold Of The Spiritual World (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1975).
• 6. The Souls' Awakening, Scene 13.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner, The Probation of the Soul, contained in Four Mystery Dramas.

In connection with some spiritual-scientific considerations, I have often said that it concerns within our spiritual-scientific movement and its efforts of taking up those concepts and ideas not only in theory which one can learn by spiritual science, but that the spiritual-scientific results have to penetrate the innermost movements, the innermost impulses of our soul life. Indeed, we have to start from the results of the spiritual-scientific knowledge, and we can gain such knowledge if we just study it if we occupy ourselves with it. But spiritual science is not to be taken up like another science, so that one knows only afterwards that one has heard this or that, that this or that is true concerning one or another matter in the world. Spiritual science has to work on our souls so that the souls become different in this or that field of feeling that they become different taking up what can flow out of spiritual science. The concepts, ideas and mental pictures which we take up by means of spiritual science have to rouse our souls in the core, have to unite with our feelings, so that we learn through spiritual science to look at the world not only differently, but also to feel differently than without it. The spiritual scientist, actually, has to familiarise himself with certain circumstances quite differently than this is possible without spiritual science. If he is able to do this, he has basically only arrived at what has to flow to us from spiritual science.

We live in a grievous time today, in which to us one of the most important questions of spiritual science, the question of death, appears in so countless cases before our eyes, before our souls, before our hearts, closer to one, closest to the other. The spiritual scientist has also to be able to prove spiritual science in his feelings in this grievous time. He should be able to have a different attitude to the events of time than the others, even if these events touch him so near. Indeed, the one needs consolation, the other needs encouragement; but both should find this also in spiritual science. If this can be the case, we have only correctly understood the intentions of spiritual science.

We have thereby to experience a certain shock in our souls through the ideas of spiritual science already that we learn to feel quite differently about some matters than we can feel without spiritual science about anything in the world. If you summarise all that which has already been said about the mystery of death within our spiritual science, you can understand what I would also like to explain today not only repeating, but something adding to former considerations. We must learn to think about death not only differently, but we must learn to feel about death differently. Since, indeed, the mystery of death is connected with the deepest world mysteries. We should be quite clear to ourselves that we take off all that through which we get perception and knowledge in the physical world, through which we experience something of the external world when we go through the gate of death. We get impressions about the world in the physical world by means of our senses. We take off these senses when we enter the spiritual world. Then we do not have the senses any more. This must already be a proof to us that we must try if we think about the supersensible world to think differently than we have learnt to think by means of our senses.

Indeed, we have a clue of sorts, while also in the everyday life, which we spend between birth and death, something analogous, something similar of the experiences in the spiritual world projects. These are the dream experiences projecting into the everyday life. The dream experience does not come into being to us through our senses; our senses have really nothing to do with the dream experience. Nevertheless, it is in the pictures that sometimes remind of the sensory life. We have in these dream pictures, even if a weak reflection, just a reflection of that type, as the spiritual existence faces us as an Imaginative world between death and a new birth. We have Imaginative perception, however, after death; the experience appears in pictures. Only if you see, for example, a red colour in the sensory world and must have the thought: what is behind this red colour?—Then you will say to yourselves: there is something that fulfils the space, something material is behind it.—The red colour also appears to you in the spiritual world, but there is nothing material behind it, nothing that would exercise a material impression in the usual sense. Behind the red is a psycho-spiritual being; behind the red is the same which you feel as your world in your soul. One would like to say: from the sense-impression of the colour we descend externally in the physical down to the material world, from the Imaginations we ascend to spiritual regions of the spiritual world.

Now we must be aware—this has been emphasised strongly in the new edition of my Theosophy—that also these Imaginations do not appear to us like the sensory impressions of the physical world. They are there indeed, these Imaginations, but they appear as experiences: the red, the blue colours are there experiences. One can rightly call these Imaginations red or blue, but they are something different than the sensory impressions of the physical world. They are more intimate; we unite more intimately with them. Without the red colour of the rose you are yourself; within the red colour of the spiritual world you feel to be therein, you are united with the red colour. While you perceive a red colour in the spiritual world, a will, a very effective will of a spiritual being develops. This will shines, and that which it shines is red. But you feel to be in the will, and you call this experience red, of course. I would like to say that a physical colour is like the frozen spiritual experience. Thus we must get the possibility in many fields to think something different, to give our ideas other values and meanings if we really want to rise to an understanding of the spiritual world.

Then we have to realise that above in the spiritual world the Imaginations do not have the same relationship to the spiritual beings—whose expression, for example, the colours are—as a colour has to a sensory being. The rose is red; this is a quality of the rose. But if a spirit comes to the nearness and we must have the consciousness according to that which I have now said: the spirit shines red, and then the red does not mean a quality of the spirit like the red of the rose is a quality. This red colour is more something like a revelation of the inside of the spiritual being; it is more a character which the spiritual being puts in the spiritual world. You have only to behold through the Imaginations. The activity which you develop there is to be compared in the physical world only with its ahrimanic image, namely with reading. We look at the red colour of the rose and know: it is a quality of the rose. We do not only look at the red colour in the spiritual world, but we interpret it, but not fantasising—I must warn about it always again. However, our soul itself already finds that something is given like a sound, a letter, like something that should be deciphered, should be read, so that it recognises the meaning.

The spiritual being means something if he manifests himself as a C sharp or G sharp or as red or blue or green colours. The spiritual being means something with it; one starts speaking with him, one starts reading his writing. The external culture is based on it that such matters which have their deep wisdom in the spiritual world are transplanted then also to the external world. We speak rightly of an occult reading, because somebody who attains the clairvoyant consciousness, who enters the spiritual world, who is able to see out over the Imaginations and reads in them, looks through them at the bottom of the souls living in the spiritual world, not only through colours, but also through other impressions, such impressions which remind of sensory impressions, and those which are added in the spiritual worlds.

This activity which is a purely psycho-spiritual activity is subordinate, as it were, to the government of the really progressive spiritual beings. Here in the physical world, Ahriman creates a reflection just of that which I have characterised now. The external reading of characters in the physical world is an ahrimanic reflection of this occult reading. Since reading in the physical world by signs which were developed artificially is an ahrimanic activity. Not without good reason, the invention of the art of printing was felt as an ahrimanic art, as a “black art,” as one called it. You are just not allowed to believe that you could escape the claws of Lucifer and Ahriman using any performances. Lucifer and Ahriman must be in the external culture. It is only that you find the balance, the way if life turns perpetually to the luciferic or the ahrimanic side. If anybody did not want to be touched at all by Ahriman, never would he have to learn reading. But this is why it concerns not that we flee Ahriman and Lucifer, but that we get the right relationship to them, that we position ourselves correctly to them, although they are as forces round us. If we know that we follow what we have described so often as the Christ Impulse which lives in us, and if we get the spiritual sensations which impose the intention to follow Christ to us at every moment of our life, then we are also able to read. Then we can get to know—and we already shall do it if it is right according to our karma—that Ahriman also established reading, and we see this ahrimanic art in the right light. If we do not experience this, we declaim something about the ahrimanic culture, about the progress and the splendour of the ahrimanic culture, for example, about reading.

But all these matters also impose duties, and this is why it concerns that such duties are also kept. Just in our present time, a lot can be stated to defend or accuse this or that. Really, we have what we can call a flood of war literature. Every day produces not only brochures, but also books et cetera. There you can often read: this country has so and so many illiterates, in this country so and so many people can read and write, and the like. Adopting this easily would not be according to what somebody who is well-versed in spiritual science has to say out of his responsibility. If I wanted to indicate, for example, that which I have to state with regard to our time, all the especially bad of a nation and say that in this nation are so and so many people who cannot read and write, I would not correctly speak spiritual-scientifically. There only matters must be stated for which one can take responsibility to the occult duties.

You see—I wanted to give only an example—that spiritual science must go over into life and imposes duties in this deeper sense. If the spiritual scientist says such things which the others also say, you are always able to notice that they are said in a different context, and it depends on this. Hence, something appears rather strange to somebody who does not know spiritual science, if it is said in spiritual science, because he is accustomed to have other ideas and must say to himself sometimes: this spiritual science calls the black white, and the white black.—This is necessary sometimes, because if one ascends to the spiritual world with the usual ideas and concepts which one learns in the physical world, some ideas and concepts must be changed thoroughly.

From this point of view let us take one of the most important, most enigmatic concepts which we have to acquire out of the impressions of the physical world, the concept of death. In the physical world, the human being sees death always only from one side, from the side that he sees developing the human life up to the point where the human being dies. That is where the physical body is separated at first from the higher members of the human nature and is dissolved then within the physical world. One can really say what the human being sees as death within the physical world: looking at death from one side. However, looking at death from the other side means to look at it in an opposite light, to see it as something totally different.

When we enter the physical life by birth, we experience something at first in such a way that the peak of our physical consciousness is not yet reached. You know that we do not remember the first years of our experience with the usual physical consciousness. Nobody can remember his birth with the usual physical consciousness. At least no one will appear in the world who states that he can remember with his usual consciousness how he was born. We can say: this is a characteristic of the physical consciousness that the birth of the human being must be forgotten. It is forgotten; also the first years are forgotten. If we look back at our life between birth and death, we remember up to a certain point. Then memory ends. The point where it stops is not our physical birth, but an experience precedes. Nobody can know from experience that he is born. He can only conclude it. We conclude that we are born—and only from that—that after us human beings are born whose birth we perceive. If the naturalist states that he only admits what can be seen, nobody could claim his birth after this principle if he wants to be logical, because it is impossible to perceive his own birth without being clairvoyant; one can only conclude it.

Now exactly the opposite takes place with regard to death. The whole life through between death and new birth the moment of death which he experienced stands before the soul eye of the dead as the liveliest, as the brightest impression. However, do not believe that you are allowed to possibly conclude from it that this would be a painful impression. Then you would believe that the dead looks back at what you see in the physical world of death, of decay, of decline. He sees death, however, from the other side; he sees something in death what one must call the most beautiful also in the spiritual world. Since the human being can experience nothing more beautiful than the sight of death in the spiritual world first of all. Seeing this victory of the spirit over the material, this lighting up of the spiritual light of the soul from the deep darkness of the material is the greatest, the most significant that can be beheld on the other side of life which the human being goes through between death and a new birth.

If the human being takes off the etheric body between death and new birth and has fully developed his consciousness what happens not very long time after death, then he has not the same relationship to himself as here in the physical world. If the human being sleeps here in the physical world, he is unaware, and if he is awake, he realises that he knows now: I have a self, an ego in myself. After death in the spiritual world, this is something different—there is his self-consciousness on a higher level,—then it is not just the same. I will immediately speak about that. But there is also something like a self-contemplation. Exactly the same way as one must call to mind the self in the morning while waking up it is in the spiritual world. But this self-contemplation is a looking back at the moment of death. Always it is in such a way, as if we say to ourselves to perceive our ego between death and a new birth: you have really died, so you are a self, you are an ego.

This is the most important thing: one looks back at the victory of the spirit over the body, one looks back at the moment of death which is the most beautiful of the spiritual world that can be experienced. In this looking back one notices his self in the spiritual world. This is always, one cannot say like waking up—one would stamp the concepts one-sidedly,—it is the self-contemplation to look back at his death. That is why it is so important that the human being has the possibility to look really back at the moment of death with full postmortal consciousness—with a consciousness which enters after death. So he dreams not only in any way what he beholds there but can completely understand what he beholds; this is extremely important. We can already prepare ourselves during life while we try to practice self-knowledge. In particular, this is necessary for humankind from now on to practice self-knowledge. Basically all spiritual science is there to give that self-knowledge to the human being which is necessary to him. For spiritual science is an introduction to the enlarged self of the human being, that self by which one belongs to the whole world. I said that the consciousness after death is something different than here in the physical world. If I might to plot the consciousness after death diagrammatically to you, I could do it in the following way.

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(sehendes Auge = seeing eye, sinnlicher Körper = material object, geistige Wesenheit = spiritual being)

Imagine we would have an eye here, and here we would have an object. How do we attain the consciousness that there is an object outside us? Because the object makes an impression on our eye. The object makes an impression on our eye, and we learn to know something about the object. The object is outside in the world, it makes an impression on our senses, and we take up the mental picture, which we can form of the object, in ourselves, in our souls. The object is outside us. Then it has delivered the mental picture which we form then. It is different now in the spiritual world. Because I cannot draw it graphically differently, I would want what I always call soul eye to draw as a soul eye, although it is wrong strictly considered. Now this soul eye which the human being has after death has the disposition that after death the human being sees, for example, an angel or another human soul who is also in the spiritual world not as he sees a flower in the physical world, but this soul eye has the disposition—we disregard a human soul at first, we look only at a being of the higher hierarchy—that it does not have as an eye the consciousness if here an angel, an archangel is: I see this angelic being outside myself,—but: I am seen by the angelic being, he sees me.—It is just the opposite of the physical world. We familiarise in the spiritual world so that we get the consciousness of the beings of the higher hierarchies that we are known by them that they think us. We feel embedded in them, we feel that we are conceived by the angels, archangels, spirits of personality like the realms of minerals, plants, and animals feel to be conceived by us.

Only concerning human souls we have the feeling that they see us as we also have the feeling that our view goes into them. We see them and the human souls see us. As to all the other beings of the higher hierarchies, we have the feeling that we are perceived by them, are thought, imagined by them; and while we are perceived by them, are thought, are imagined by them, we are in the spiritual world. Now imagine that we walk around as souls in the spiritual world, like we walk around in the physical world. We then have the feeling everywhere to get a relationship to the beings of the higher hierarchies, like we have the feeling here in the physical world to get a relationship to the mineral, plant, and animal realms. Only we need the meditation repeatedly that we have a self. Then we look at our death and say to us: this is you.—This is a continual consciousness, continual contents of our conscioussnes.

What I have said today is to be added to the various ideas which you can take up from talks and books. It is spoken more emotionally than that which is spoken, for example, in the book Theosophy more from an external point of view. But only while you look at such a matter emotionally, you can feel as if you are in the sensations which one must have towards these matters and generally towards the spiritual world.

Hence, self-knowledge is that which supports us which makes us strong for the life between death and a new birth. That could face me recently again with particular liveliness when I had the task to speak several times at the cremation, after some of our friends had deceased. There it was necessary to speak about something that is connected intimately with the character, with the self of that who had gone through the gate of death. Why did this Inspirative or Intuitive come into being to speak something to the dead that is connected with their beings? This appears in the life of the persons concerned after death. It comes to their assistance what invigorates the forces of their self-knowledge. While speaking about these qualities, which they feel in themselves, immediately after death when their consciousness had not yet awoken, one let flow, as it were, something of the strength towards them that they need to gradually develop the ability to look at the moment of death. Their whole being seems to be concentrated there, as it has developed between birth and death. One helps the dead if one lets flow something towards them just after death that reminds them of their qualities, of their experiences et cetera. One thereby fosters the strength of self-knowledge. If anybody has the possibility as clairvoyant to familiarise himself with the soul of such a dead person, then he feels the desire in his soul to hear something just in this time about the kind, as he was, about this and that which he has gone through or which his main qualities are. You can understand that here on earth the life of a human being does not resemble the life of the other, but that all human beings have lives which are different from each other. It is the same with those who have gone through the gate of death. Not one soul-life resembles the other between death and new birth. I would like to say: every soul-life which one can observe there is a new revelation, and one can always emphasise individual particular qualities only. I would like to speak about such matters today and then also in Cologne the day after tomorrow. I would like to speak of a concrete case as an example.

In Dornach before some time, we saw a member leaving the physical plane who was rather old-aged (Lina Grosheintz-Rohrer). A member who had spent her life, in any case, in industrious work, caring work, but during the last years, since longer time already, she was connected in the deepest soul with our spiritual-scientific world view and had completely developed it in her heart, in her soul. So that one may say: this personality had come so far that in the last times of her physical existence she was completely one in her feeling with our world view. Now you know that the human being if he/she goes through the gate of death takes off his physical body first, carries the etheric body in himself still for a while and then takes off the etheric body, too. There comes a time when the human being must only gain the consciousness gradually which he has to possess between death and a new birth. Immediately after death, the human being is in his etheric body. There he experiences, we know this, a complete review of his life as a big life tableau. In this time, particularly the powerful impulses also appear in his soul, I would like to say, all at once, so that something that is important just in this regard can appear after death that is completely different than during life.

During life the human being is often tied up by the restrictions which his physical body places on him. Immediately after death, the human being has overcome what burdens, presses, solidifies him, and also the physical that weakens the clearness of some soul impulses. One has not yet lost the etheric body and, hence, the memory of life. It is an Imaginative world which contains the pictures of the past life, and also contains the especially strong impulses. If now a soul has taken up the impulses of spiritual science during life so intensely, if this soul has brought these impulses up to the innermost feeling in herself, she can develop these impressions after death also in another way, because she has the elastic, malleable etheric body at her disposal, then she is no longer tied up to that which the physical body allows.

One could see this with that personality in particular about which I have just spoken who shortly after death let flow out of her soul what had lived from the spiritual-scientific impulses in her, after I had just succeeded in transporting myself completely into this soul. Of course, it would not have stamped this in such words during her physical life. Because the etheric body was still there, she could dress it in physical words. It was not yet out of her elastic etheric body, when she developed what she had taken up from spiritual science, so that it became the expression of her soul. Then I had the necessity at the cremation of the concerning personality a few days later that I had to speak these words, which sounded from her being, which belonged to her, not to me:

Into cosmic distances I will carry
My feeling heart, so that it grows warm
In the fire of the holy forces' working;

Into cosmic thoughts I will weave
My own thinking, so that it grows clear
In the light of eternal life-becoming;

Into depths of soul I will sink
Devoted contemplation, so that it grows strong
For the true goals of human activity;

In the peace of God I strive thus
Amidst life's battles and cares
To prepare myself for the higher Self;

Aspiring to work in joy-filled peace,
Sensing cosmic being in my own being,
I seek to fulfill my human duty;

May I live in anticipation,
Oriented toward my soul's star
Which gives me my place in spirit realms.

I would like to say that these are the words expressing the sensation after death what the soul has become through spiritual science. Then came the time which everybody has to go through after death more or less which one improperly calls the time of sleeping. Because if you have taken off the etheric body, you are actually in the spiritual world, only the fullness of the spiritual world is dazzling you. You cannot have an overview of everything, you have only to adapt your strength which you have brought into the spiritual world; you have to belittle yourself. You see too much after death; the consciousness is there, you have to reduce it to the level of the forces which you have acquired. Then you can orientate yourself and live really in the spiritual world. It is spoken not quite properly if anybody says that one becomes conscious after some time, but one has to say that somebody has too much consciousness and has to reduce it to the levels which he can endure. This means waking up. That is why the soul of which I have just spoken to you reached this condition—when the etheric body is taken off—that she was unable to endure the spirit light. But she had a lot of strength in herself. You notice that in the words which I have read, and that this strength had been completely filled bit by bit with that which spiritual science can make of the human feeling and willing. That is why this being, this soul got a consciousness which was tolerable to her some time after death. Of course, one would have to describe a lot of the time which begins then for a soul when one wanted to describe everything that such a soul experiences there. One only describes parts always; and while we are within our movement, it belongs, of course, to the most significant matters you can observe in the souls what connects these souls with our movement. You can learn what generally human souls connects with the whole world after death; but you can observe best of all in such souls what is the life of the soul after death, particularly when it has approached you like this soul of whom I speak now. Therefore I could observe just with this soul how she got the orientating consciousness while taking part in our meetings, really taking part in our meetings. And she completely took part in a Dornach Easter festival of this year, in that Easter festival when I tried to explain the particular depth of the Easter thought to our dear friends there in Dornach. This soul was present there. She took part as she had taken part once with intimate warmth; she took part now as a soul. She wanted to express herself like somebody has the need in the physical body to express himself afterwards about that which he has taken up. She wanted to express herself, and the peculiar is that she stamped such words, because thereby the possibility exists to communicate, that she formed such words describing her present life and its experience of this Easter lecture. The soul added something like a supplement of that which had come from her at that time after death. This supplement which came out of the consciousness is the following:

I will steer in human souls
Spirit feeling, so that willingly
It wakes in hearts the word of sacrifice;

I will think with human spirits
Soul warmth, so that powerfully
It can feel the Risen One;

I had taken care just in those Easter talks and in some other talks, which I held at that time, to draw attention—as I did it repeatedly—to the significance of spiritual science not only here for the life on earth, but for the whole world. Somebody who goes through the gate of death can also experience and get to know what is done here in spiritual science. That is why I advise so many people if they have dear dead to read out to them or to tell about the spiritual-scientific teachings, because what is stamped in spiritual-scientific words has not only significance for the souls living in physical bodies, but it has full significance also for the souls who are disembodied. It is to them like spiritual air of life, like spiritual water of life, or one could also say, they perceive light by us here below. This light is for us symbolic at first, one would like to say, because we hear words and take up them as thoughts in our souls; the dead see it, however, really as a spiritual light.

Now it is very significant that just this soul who has often heard this wanted to say really: I have understood this, and it is real that way.—Since her words in this regard are:

The earthly flame of spiritual knowledge
Brightly illuminates death's appearance;

This is the fact for the soul. She wants to say: what you speak there below shines like a flame.—She expressed this, while she said “earthly flame:” it “brightly illuminates death's appearance ...” Why does she say “death's appearance?” If you meditate, you find out it. She said it, because she had always heard that we call the world maya: on earth she is in the appearance of the senses; now she is also in an appearance by which she only has to behold the being:

The earthly flame of spiritual knowledge

Brightly illuminates death's appearance;—

And something that she also confirms now:

The Self becomes cosmic eye and ear.

She means cosmic ear. She means that now the whole self becomes a powerful sense-organ, becomes the perception organ for the whole universe. It is a nice way by which the dead shows how she becomes conscious that that becomes true which spiritual science says. For this soul it is typical that she wants to express herself straight away after death and wants to say: yes, now I am so far that that which I have learnt on earth appears to me as the right thing.

These words were to me of a certain importance, because they came after some time, maybe a few weeks later, from the spiritual world from that soul of which I have spoken, after shortly before, a few weeks before, another event satisfying me took place.

Friends of our movement lost a rather young son in the current war who had volunteered for the army. The young man fell. He had half approached spiritual science; one would like to say, in his last earth time which he went through. He was only seventeen, eighteen years old. Now he had gone, he had fallen. After some time I could behold the soul of this young man really approaching his parents. With many souls who have now gone through the gate of death during the war this is the case that they become conscious rather rapidly. It was thus—I could really hear it,—as if he said to them: now I would like to make it comprehensible to you that that which I have often heard of spiritual science, of spiritual light and spiritual beings in your home can become clear to me that it is true that it helps me what I heard there.

I do not mention this, because it is something special, but because it just shows how the relationship is between the earthly life and the spiritual life. Nevertheless, I want to mention something strange besides. At that time after a lecture which I held in one of our branches—I had written down the words which had come through to me, I went to the parents of the young man and told this to them and also gave the night in which the young man approached his parents and spoke as it were to their souls. There said the father: this is quite strange, I dream very seldom. However, I dreamt this night, this same night of my son that he appeared to me and that he wanted to say something to me; however, I have not understood it.

It touches those people strangely even today who are outside our spiritual movement if these matters are explained to them. Hence, we keep them among us. But it must be important to us to deal specifically also with these matters, because our knowledge is composed of these single stones of the experiences of the spiritual world. We only get a concrete picture if we do not want to limit ourselves only to hear nice theories of the spiritual world but if we can enliven spiritual science in our souls, so that we endure that which one speaks of the spiritual world really, like reasonable human beings just speak of that which they experience in the sensory world. Spiritual science thereby becomes life in the right sense in us, and it should become life in us, that we gain a life by it—not only a teaching, a knowledge. It should bridge the abyss which results from materialism which extends outside spiritual science and must become bigger and bigger. It bridges this abyss between the physical-sensory realm, which we go through between birth and death, and the spiritual realm in which we live between death and a new birth, so that we gradually learn to become citizens also of the spiritual world. What matters is that we learn to feel: somebody who has gone through the gate of death has only taken on another condition of life and has an attitude towards our feeling after death like somebody who just had to move because of the events of life to a distant country in which we can follow him only later. So we have to endure nothing but a time of separation. But this must be felt vividly by means of spiritual science. If you risk forming an idea about single concrete facts, you will already see that these facts also correspond to it and support each other for somebody who does not look into the spiritual world. That is why the confidence, which one has, before one beholds in the spiritual world, is actually no blind confidence, no trust in authority, but a confidence which is supported by the feeling which is deeper than critical knowledge, by the original feeling of truth indigenous to the human soul.

We live in a time in which the external destiny-burdened events make it clear that the human life has to be deepened. It would be much better if the human beings looked at these military events as a warning to deepen the souls more than the predominating majority of the human beings do. They discuss instead who has the war guilt, who does this or that. I said, while I discussed the most important matters before you: concerning some matters we must learn by spiritual science to change our ideas, our concepts. We can count the concept of war to these concepts—today this may be still added to our consideration about such a significant object like death.

One will be right, also from the spiritual-scientific point of view, to consider the war as an illness of development. Indeed, it is an illness, but you remember only once that you also do not do justice to an illness if you condemn it. What matters in illness is often that which has preceded the illness in the human body: the disorder, the disharmony has preceded. Then the illness comes into being which often is there to work just against the disorder in the body. Even if the human being goes through an illness before death, it is this way. He carries disharmonies in himself which make it impossible for him to enter the spiritual world. Perhaps, the spiritual world would be obscured to him too long, or other obstacles would be there, because disharmonies are in him which cannot just be brought into the spiritual world. This is why an illness infects him before death. It frees his soul from disharmony so far that he can enter the spiritual world.

If it is an illness which leads to recovery, then this illness is there to compensate that which has preceded the illness which was caused by the karma of previous lives, maybe of thousands of years. One would not do well to say at all: the child has the measles; had it not got these measles.—One cannot know what would have come about the child if it had not got the measles. Because that came out which sat deeply always in the child and looked for its compensation.

It is also good to consider the war, and to see the evil not so much in that which must be experienced now in blood and iron but also to look at that which happened since long, long times in the cultural currents. The human beings must learn to look deeper at the connections. After this war, a time will come when the human beings start thinking about this war. There they will get on how many hollow words were talked if one said: this one has the guilt, that one has the guilt.—Something will just happen, even if it takes place only long after the war. Then the people will say something different than today. There will be people who say: if one studies history the way as one studied it up to now, indeed, one finds in these acts of the diplomats this, in those acts of diplomats that; here and there or this and that was written.

But if one proceeds that way as history treated all that up to now, and wants “to objectively judge” everything, as one says, then one never finds out why this war came into being. Then one will discover that it is necessary to look at the deeper reasons beyond the external causes which then spiritual science has to explain. Unfortunately, I can make only remarks about these matters. One will find that at various places just at the outbreak of this war this or that happened where not the consciousness played the most significant role, but something unconscious, something under the threshold of the external events was a contributory factor; so that those matters are not exhausted at all which the historian is accustomed to consider as something decisive for the causality. Just with this example one learns: history, as we are accustomed to it up to now, explains nothing at all to us. It is an admonition to go into deeper reasons.

As I had to admonish our souls at the end of almost each talk which I held in the last time, I would like to do it also again today.

A certain responsibility arises for you simply from the fact that you have approached the spiritual-scientific world view. You must become able to have the thoughts by the spiritual-scientific world view at least that those superficial judgments which are delivered everywhere today, because materialism controls the world, should also not become judgments of ours who we are supporters of spiritual science. What plays a role in the world today is a superficial hatred from nation to nation. I have often spoken about that in our branch talks. It must not penetrate us to the same degree, but we also must not become unfair. For we can learn from the old Theosophical Society to become rather unfair. They have impressed on their supporters with regard to the religions: all religions are equal.

This is approximately the same, as if one liked to impress on the human beings: on the table are pepper, salt, sugar, paprika; now, they all can be used as spices, one should not prefer anything. So, here I have a cup of coffee, I put some pepper into it, because everything is the same. The identical logic is in it if one speaks of the fact that the same core of truth forms the basis of all religions. This logic saves one from studying the great miraculous world development in its details, because one gets by with the sentence: a core of truth forms the basis of everything. But we have freed ourselves from the most superficial judgments since long. Thus that cannot prevent us from recognising rightly to go into any national characteristic with affectionate understanding, where we have to stand with our hearts out of knowledge. It is not possible that all friends agree in this regard. That does not matter, but that our souls try to get over the point of view of the external world and to deal with the characteristics of the different folk-souls.—Then we will already see that the belief in our spiritual-scientific world view imposes a certain responsibility to us in many respects, the responsibility to deal with the matters as thoroughly as possible and to pay more attention on them on the basis of spiritual science.

One experiences painful things sometimes. Not any human being does remember the big admonition of our destiny-burdened events, so that he feels obliged to turn his heart really deeper, more thoroughly to the events instead of judging superficially in the way of the external materialism we just want to overcome. In this regard, one would like to wish and long for that the human beings who are within our movement form a host, as it were, which deals thoroughly with the deeply moving questions of today. Thoroughness is necessary concerning a lot of matters. You do not imagine at all what is possible in our time.

Oh, I could tell a lot about that which can make the heart bloody to somebody who pursues the time really with the goodness of his heart. Today a lot of views and thoughts are spread, sometimes with the best intention, from an unhealthy, ahrimanic world view. But looking at the flood of war literature we have just to deeper meditate about the tasks of the cultural development. I attempt this now in my talks showing the real position of the single human beings. Because it is often a matter of defending thoroughness against superficiality. You could experience something very strange, for example, during the last weeks. Because of comprehensible reasons I would not like to mention the title of a book which has appeared abroad, even in German, and some people state that a German would have written it. Expressly I would like to stress that you can bring yourselves to understand any point of view. Perhaps, you can understand the most anti-German standpoint if the one or the other shows it. You may try to understand it, you need not share it, but perhaps you are able to understand it.

But the concerning book has characteristics to which it does not depend on the fact that it takes a thoroughly anti-German standpoint, that it reviles Germanness and the German nature on every line. One may understand that it is written viciously. But nobody is allowed to come and say: if a German speaks about the book that way, we can understand this, because he talks disparagingly about Germanness.—However, it depends on something different. The book is written, so that somebody who has a little feeling for internal professionalism and internal thoroughness, who is educated a little, must find: it is the most terrible simulation of the cheapest literature.—Completely apart from its standpoint, its literary level is so low that somebody who finds something in the book shows that he accepts the most trivial literature as something that one can take seriously, a book cobbled together with ignorance, I would like to say, with the most obvious ignorance.

So the standpoint does not matter; but you see from the way, as it is written like anybody who learnt thinking would not write, that one deals with a quite inferior sort of book. Nevertheless, I also had to hear judgments that this book whose title I do not mention because of particular reasons is taken seriously. If such matters appear, it is just to us not to shrink from forming a judgment on the basis of certain versatility. If anybody agrees to certain sentences which are expressed in that book as regards content, he does not need to take such a book seriously, already because the book is a terrible concoction, and because one does not take a terrible concoction seriously, because one cannot wish that even the truth is expressed terribly in the worst affect and in an uneducated way. I wanted to characterise such an example, because I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it depends on various things if the spiritual scientist tries to form a judgment about the world.

If it were possible to take a book for good, even if it is stylistically a horror book, then somebody would admit that he has not enough enlivened the spiritual-scientific feeling in his heart, in his soul. Not to express anything differently but to draw attention to the fact that spiritual science has to penetrate our feeling and thinking vividly in the most profound sense, concrete examples are also given in this field. It is very necessary that such concrete impulses are searched for in our souls. I have to admit what satisfied me particularly up to now, travelling through Germany, that I could not notice terrifying cheering after great victories. One noticed that pain about the enormous losses was in every soul at the same time. I believe that it is that way. Futile joy of victory must not be there. Since these destiny-burdened days demand not only enormous sacrifices, but they open up enormous wounds, also spiritual wounds if one considers the behaviour of many human beings. That is why it is very necessary that we remember now and again, just if we look at important matters in the field of spiritual science which responsibility is imposed on our souls and that we must long for times in which the effects of the young, unused etheric bodies and the souls can really meet who still are below in the bodies of the human beings and can send their sensations and abilities up to them.

A time will come after this war when the unused etheric bodies of those work who went through the gate of death and developed forces out of the sacrifices they made and which they could send down now for the spiritualisation of humankind. But below there must be souls who are able to receive this, who look up in lively confidence at that which went up in the spiritual world from the early deceased to shine down the forces of the spiritualisation of humankind.

There I would want that it appears to our eyes in the sense of the words which I would like to speak at the end of this consideration again:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

Notes

The earthly flame of spiritual knowledge
Brightly illuminates death's appearance;
The Self becomes cosmic eye and ear.

The translation of these verses in Our Dead contains some mistakes; perhaps, they occurred because Steiner used a script consisting of normal Latin but also of old German letters (Sütterlin script):

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Es leuchtet hell dem Todesscheine
Des Geisteswissens (not: Geisteswillens) Erdenflamme;
Das Selbst wird Welten (not: Wellen)-Aug und Ohr.

a book which has appeared abroad: Richard Grelling J'accuse. By a German. Third edition, Lausanne, 1915

after a eurythmy-dramatic presentation

Today we have preceded the Easter scene in 'Faust' with the scene in which the Earth Spirit appears to Faust. Eight days ago, we were able to tie in many thoughts from 'Faust' that can be meaningful to those who want to approach the laws of the world, the life of the world, in a spiritual scientific way. It is not just to give you explanations of Goethe's 'Faust' that I am taking up Goethe's poetic creation last time on Easter Sunday and this time here. The reason is because the human soul can truly perceive something of the artistic images that confront us in “Faust” that must be called the development of this soul into the spiritual worlds, which one can call becoming familiar with the spiritual worlds. To the extent that we can, so to speak, immerse ourselves in “Faust” from a spiritual scientific point of view, we may indeed tie one or the other reflection to this poetic creation. In essence, Goethe's 'Faust' is the expression of the striving into the spiritual world in Goethe, and thus the expression of how, at an important turning point in modern history, a mind as deep as Goethe's tried to enter the world that we seek through our spiritual deepening.

Last time, we were able to convince ourselves that Goethe lived in a time in which it was really not yet possible to find the way into the spiritual worlds in a clear, I would say unambiguous, way. We were able to convince ourselves that such truths as those of the significance of Lucifer and Ahriman still hovered before Goethe's soul as an unclear realization, one might say, like an unclear sense of the spiritual world, and we were able to convince ourselves that in the figure of Mephistopheles the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman have been conflated, so that Goethe has before him an unclear figure in Mephistopheles, to whom he cannot get close in an unambiguous spiritual-scientific relationship. And so we can see precisely in this striving of Goethe's, as it is expressed in 'Faust', with what seriousness and with what inner conscientiousness, one might say, with what responsibility before our own soul we should pursue what spiritual-scientific deepening is intended to open up. When a spirit so profound encounters such difficulties in the way of what many, many people today are seeking, there is truly an opportunity to learn a great deal from Goethe's own quest and striving. One would wish that everyone who has delved a little into the results of our spiritual science would again approach this document, Goethe's “Faust”, which is a document from the dawn, not yet from the time after the sunrise of spiritual-scientific endeavors. Last time I said that Goethe needed the maturity of his life to emerge from the state of his soul in his youth. Goethe's soul cannot be satisfied with just seeing in the world what the sensory eyes see and what the mind, bound to the brain, perceives. And what lived and raged in his soul for the deeper spiritual foundations of life, he shaped it in the striving Faust, who is not a likeness of Goethe, but who does present certain aspects of Goethe's striving and Goethe's life in a truly artistic way. And so we have here, in the scene with the Earth Spirit, one of the oldest parts of Goethe's Faust that he wrote down.

Last time I spoke about Goethe's “Faust” in such a way that if I were misunderstood as I often am, one could go and say that I had called “Faust” a defective work of art and would even have said some harsh words about it. And someone who is particularly inventive might say that I have undergone a change in my view of Goethe, for I was of course once an admirer of Goethe and have now proved myself to be someone who criticizes Goethe. Now, I should not need to mention that I venerate Goethe no less than I ever did, that he appears to me as the most magnificent spirit of modern times. But what is venerating devotion to a personality should never lead us to a blind sense of authority, but should always keep us clear-sighted for that which we have recognized as truth.

The various parts of Faust can be said to have been pieced together, not to mention glued, and it can be said that at the time when Goethe wrote the oldest parts of Faust in the 1770s, 18th century, was really incapable of writing the later parts, that he really had to mature first in order to come from his longing for the spiritual world to what one might call his understanding of Christianity. It was only through the maturity of life that Goethe was able to continue Faust, who is searching for the spirit world, in such a way that Faust comes to be preserved in life through the Austrian memory, and that Faust even comes to take the Gospel into his own hands and to begin translating the Gospel of John. When one hears some people today saying that they need no spiritual knowledge to fathom the depths of Christianity, that this spiritual science is unnecessary stuff, because Christianity can be sufficiently understood by what every pastor proclaims from the pulpit, that mere belief must prevail, especially in this Christianity, and one compares such soul mood with what must be said about Goethe, who, as one of the deepest took decades to mature to his understanding of Christianity, then one can get an idea of the tremendous arrogance, the tremendous conceit, that is in people who, conceited and haughty, always speak of the simplicity of their minds, and who dismiss what they do not need — the content of spiritual science, what they do not need according to their view.

In the scene with the Earth Spirit, we see something of what occupied Goethe in his youth, in his thirties, and also in the last twenties of his life. We can see from this earth spirit scene and from what preceded it, the so-called first Faust monologue, how Goethe immersed himself in so-called occult-mystical literature and how he tried to find the spiritual world through meditation and meditative devotion, through what this literature gave him. We see him in the scene that has been presented to us today, in the midst of his search through meditation, which arises from the allusions that he, as it is said here, can gain from an occult-mystical book, from an old mystical book by Nostradamus, as he strives through his meditation, which arises from a mystical book, to rise up into the spiritual worlds.

Let us try to imagine the worlds to which Faust, and thus also Goethe, actually wants to go. When the soul of man has really managed to strengthen its inner power so that the spiritual-soul core of man's being is released from the instrument of the physical body, when the soul, so to speak, with its powers that are not perceptible to it in ordinary everyday life, has slipped from the physical body, what becomes – not the physical body itself in its spatial boundaries, but the physical life, with which the human being is always spiritually connected because a ray or stream goes to this physical life – what becomes for the human soul this physical experience? In the time between death and a new birth, a ray or stream of spiritual life goes back to what we have experienced on earth, as you can see from the illustrations of earlier lectures. So there is always something like a spiritual reaching out, or even more than a spiritual reaching out, back to what is physical experience. What then does this physical experience become for the human soul, which has been freed from the use of the instrument of the physical body? I would like to say: the whole physical experience becomes a soul organ for the person who has emerged from this physical experience. The physical experience becomes, as it were, an eye or an ear; the whole human being becomes a sense organ, a spiritual sense organ, an organ, one might say, of the whole earth, which looks out into space. In order for our eye to see physical objects, we have to be outside of our eye. The eye has to be embedded like a kind of independent organ in the eye socket, which is even closed off by bony walls, so that the eye is a relatively independent organ. In a similar way, the ear is also closed. Again, the whole physical apparatus of the brain is enclosed in the head cavity and closed off from the rest of the human body. The physical experience of the human being must become so closed off that it becomes a kind of sensory organ, a kind of eye or ear through which the human being, who is outside of what his physical experience is, looks out into the vastness of space.

What is experienced there can also be described as follows: one can say that one is now in the world that is presented in the book 'Theosophy' as the soul world. This is the world that one first enters when one has the experience of being outside the body with the soul that has become independent and having one's own physical experience outside of it. In the Vienna Cycle of April 1914, I described how, in the life between death and a new birth, the human being has a spiritual-soul sense organ through his last life on earth to perceive the rest of the world, that is, he perceives the rest of the world through this life on earth. In this world we find our deceased for quite some time after their death, until they advance to another world, which can only be reached by a later state of development of the soul, even for the human initiate. In this world, into which we enter, many things must strike the observer. Only details about this world can be said. From the various lectures, one must gather what characterizes this supersensible world. Above all, what the soul immediately notices is that, having become free from the body and entering into a new world, the soul now sees the stars going out, feels the stars going out. The soul settles into an elementary world, so that it now weaves with the sea of air, itself surges with the warmth surging in the world, radiates out with the light, and since the soul radiates out with the light, it cannot see external objects through the light. That is why the sun and stars fade, and the moon extinguishes its light before the soul. It is not an external looking at, in which one then is, it is a co-experiencing of the elemental world. And at the same time it is a co-experiencing of that which one calls the power of historical happenings, of historical becoming. In this world one can see in process what history really does in human life.

In its further meditative development, the soul can then struggle up to a higher experience. Then, not only its own experience becomes a spiritual-soul sense organ, but the whole earth becomes a sense organ. To put it quite paradoxically, but you will understand me, the human soul must advance to such an experience, of which one can say: The human being is now something in which the whole globe is inserted, as otherwise the eye or ear is inserted into our body, and as we otherwise see with our eyes, hear with our ears, so we perceive the cosmic space with the whole earth and its experiences. There we become aware that what physicists say about the sun and the stars is mere materialistic dreaming. The stars have indeed already gone out, the sun, the moonlight has gone out in the previous world. But now we become aware that where we suspected the sun there is a community of spirits, that everywhere we suspected a star there is a spiritual world. And we become aware, by remembering our life on earth, that the materialistic reverie of which the physicists speak is a fantastic one, because when stars or suns appear to us, it is because somewhere in the spiritual world there is the seat of a spiritual community, just as the earth is the seat of a community of people. But just as little as one would perceive the physical bodies of a distant star, only the human souls, so little can it be said that something up there among the stars could interest us that is not of a spiritual-soul nature. But what we see, we must imagine as the vapors of the earth's atmosphere, which collide with what is coming in, and the physical eye can see nothing of what the star really is, but only the vapor that the earth itself throws out into space. All that we see as the starry sky is nothing but the material, albeit ethereal, material of the earth itself woven together, it is a curtain that the earth draws across what is behind it. But when the soul comes to live itself out in this world, then it perceives that out there are not these fantastic stars, these materialistic-fantastic stars that physicists speak of, but living beings, living communities of beings, floating up and down, weaving back and forth in the outer space of the universe, passing the gifts from top to bottom, and in turn the gifts are passed from bottom to top. If you translate the words into the spiritual:

How everything is woven into the whole,
One thing within the other lives and works!
How heavenly powers ascend and descend
And pass the golden buckets!

— Powers, but now in the sense in which we speak of primal forces -,

With wings that smell of blessing
From heaven through the earth they penetrate,
Harmoniously through all the universe they resound!

But if we imagine all this in spiritual and mental terms, then we have roughly the world in which the soul lives out itself.

Now, what did Faust have of all that has been described here at the time when he is presented to us? He has opened an old book, written by someone who has recorded an ancient observation in signs: this was given by the sign of the macrocosm. But Faust is naturally not in a position to project his soul into worlds where the entities in space develop their great happenings. Faust is not able to reach that level. He only sees the sign that someone who has reached that level has written down, the sign of the macrocosm. But a dream, a presentiment is evoked that this sign means something. So imagine yourself in your soul, that you had never heard of spiritual science, that you had the sign in front of you, but that you had an inkling that someone had once seen something similar that you would also like to see, then you are in Faust's soul. At first you can dream yourself into it, so that your imagination brings to life something through these outer signs, which are essentially the signs of the zodiac, the signs of the elements, the signs of the planets. You can even begin to break out with overflowing feeling into the words:

What a spectacle!

But this strikes back at you, for now you become aware that you have nothing but the sign in the book, nothing but a fantasy...

But alas! only a spectacle!

Even just a spectacle as an inner fantasy! And you are thrown back. The sign has brought you to nothing, on the contrary, it has thrown you back, has brought you the feeling: there is the world of the spirit, before which you stand, but nowhere can you find an entrance.

Where can I grasp you, infinite nature?
Your breasts, where? You, the sources of all life,
On which heaven and earth depend,
Where the withered chest presses –

Nothing but feeling inside the elements, in the light and in the air, as I said, in the subordinate world. And now even more clearly expressed. Faust has pushed his way up into the spiritual world, fallen back into the world that I described earlier as the next supersensible world. This with the air and light life, that expresses itself very well in the words:

You spring up, you water, and must I languish in vain?

He has fallen back completely, back from the spiritual world into the elemental world. But he is not yet able to recognize this either. It helps him that he opens the book and sees the sign of the earth spirit. That is the sign that someone has written who has had this lower world, the elemental world, as his own world. Now he feels at home in it. He has a presentiment of being at home in it.

How differently this sign affects me!

— because he feels something in it, because he has turned away from the appearance of meaning and feels something of the world's inner workings. Now he is actually always speaking of this world:

Already I feel my powers increased,

— that which one experiences when one lives in warmth and light -,

I glow like new wine.

Imagine feeling warmth in your soul when you live and weave in the world as a heat wave!

I feel brave enough to venture out into the world.

It really is like moving in the elements. I told you that life on earth becomes a sense organ, and just as you feel your eyes and ears within you, you now feel your sense organs in the earth.

To bear the earth's sorrow and its joy,
To battle with the storms around me,

when you are a wave in the air.

Clouds gather overhead,
The moon hides its light.

No wonder! I have just described to you how this happens, how stars like the moon go out. The light goes out because it goes with the light itself.

It steams! – Red rays
Twitch around my head

This is now internal perception.

A shuddering blast
From the vaulted roof descends
And seizes me!
I feel it, thou art hovering around me, implored spirit.
Reveal thyself!
Ha! how my heart is torn!
To new feelings
All my senses are awakened!

Do you not notice how life is expressed in the elements here?

I feel my heart completely given to you!
You must, you must! Even if it costs me my life!

And now, out of his meditation, he speaks the spell that is added to the sign of the earth spirit, a meditative, suggestive spell that really does lead him to the sight of the spirit, who is the leader of the spirits in whose realm we enter when we enter the elemental world. But immediately we realize that Faust is not actually ready for this world, and above all cannot feel ready for this world. What will become of him, then, of Faust? He will come to self-knowledge, in the sense that this is the highest knowledge of the world, in that we all experience what can be experienced when we swim and weave and roll and dwell in the elemental world. But Faust cannot recognize what individualizes itself in it.

This spiritual conversation between Faust and the Earth Spirit is so very characteristic of the state of maturity of Goethe at the time when he wrote the scene, as he describes his tremendous striving into the spiritual world.

Spirit: Who calls me?

Faust is already turning away. Of course, it doesn't sound like what we usually hear with our ears, that it sounds to us from afar, but rather so that we live in the sounds. It sounds different from what can be heard on earth, very different. Just as one does not see what one sees through the light, but rather shines with it. It looks different. Faust wanted to become a superhuman. That is, he wanted to enter the spiritual world, but he is seized by horror at this spiritual world. Through this encounter with the earth spirit, it becomes clear to Faust that one must become a different person than one was before as a human being if one wants to enter the spiritual world, that one cannot enter this spiritual world with one's ordinary powers, feelings and passions. Faust must have felt this deeply, how he was first thrown back, falling from the higher spiritual world into the elemental world, and how he is now thrown back in the elemental world in his knowledge, because he has remained only the ego he used to be, because he did not develop into this elementary world, to which the suggestive meditation brought him, which he carried out through the saying attributed to the earth spirit. He was able to see for a moment what kind of beings are within. But the spirit says to him:

Where are you, Faust, whose voice resounded for me,
Who with all his powers penetrated me?

That this voice resounded from the subconscious, I have already pointed out, that this was the Faust whom the outer Faust himself does not even really know.

Is it you, surrounded by my breath,
Trembling in all depths of life...

This “you” now refers to the ordinary Faust, while the striving Faust was the higher human being Faust.

A timid, cringing worm?

But now Faust's defiance awakens. He wants to plunge into the world for which he is not ready:

Shall I yield to you, flame formation?
It is I, I am Faust, I am your equal.

Now he can still hear how the spirits of the elemental world, into which he has transferred himself, live with human history, with what takes place on earth through the races and cultures, and how they live with it. And the secret of the elemental world is expressed by the earth spirit; it never speaks of being, but of becoming, of happening.

Spirit: In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I labor at the whirling loom of time
And weave the living robe of divinity.

Not in space, but in time: read the lectures given in The Hague!

Faust can grasp that this is the spirit that walks through history:

You who wander the wide world,
Busy spirit, how close I feel to you!

You who wander the wide world! You who are the spirit that belongs to the spirits of the age, how close I feel to you! — So he says in his presumptuousness. The spirit now tells him what Faust himself later calls the word of thunder, which strikes his soul like a word of thunder and in turn strikes him back into the ordinary world in which he is because he is not yet mature. He should seek self-knowledge and in the self expanded to the world, the spiritual world. He cannot yet find it, so the word of thunder must sound to him from this earth spirit:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend,
Not me!

What spirit is it then that Faust comprehends? What spirit does Faust comprehend? He, the image of the deity, who cannot comprehend the earth spirit? How can he then advance in self-knowledge? What kind of human spirit can Faust comprehend? Enter the other Faust, wearing a dressing gown and nightcap: this is the spirit you comprehend! You do comprehend Wagner! You have not progressed any further, for the other part of you lives only in defiance, as a passion! In self-knowledge he comes a little further. That is precisely what is so remarkable about Goethe's Faust, that is the beautiful artistic form of Goethe's Faust, that what is brought onto the stage in real form is always, at bottom, a piece of self-knowledge. Just as Mephistopheles is a piece of self-knowledge, so is Wagner also a piece of Faust's self-knowledge. Wagner is Faust himself. And it would not be wrong to stage “Faust” in such a way that the character of Wagner, dressed in a dressing gown and nightcap, to whom Faust turns away, would be a likeness of Faust himself. Then people would immediately understand why it is precisely this Wagner who comes in. What Wagner says is basically what Faust already understands; he only recites the rest. He just lets it out. He believes he is elevating himself to the highest truths, which he can recite in a phrase-like manner, but which he does not experience inwardly. And now a piece of self-knowledge takes place. Wagner speaks the truth. Basically, Faust has not spoken his innermost experiences, he has recited.

Forgive me! I hear you declaim.

That is one truth: he only declaimed. And it is a piece of self-reflection to realize that you do not approach the spirit of the world in this way, but at most read a Greek tragedy. So many people, when they approach spiritual science, want to declaim about the highest truths, even if it is often a self-declamation about the highest truths. Basically, they want nothing more than to benefit from this spiritual science, to profit from it, to delude themselves with a hazy mist. With regard to today, it can be said that this is often the case in some circles. Some people are very interesting when they talk about their visions. In earlier times, we heard this from the priests; now the actors have learned it even better, so that the priests can learn something from the actors. If Faust were to go only as far as his understanding, he would have to say the words that Wagner speaks, his mirror image. But he goes beyond the limits of his passion, and goes beyond with the Luciferic, not with the genuine, full, human core of the soul, but with the Luciferic core. It is the Lucifer in Faust who now answers what Faust is, but what stands before us as Wagner:

Yes, when the pastor is an actor;
How that may come about in time.

This contempt, this arrogance comes from the Luciferian in Faust, because if Faust were not seized by Lucifer, he would speak as Wagner does when he expresses only what he can honestly admit as the subject of his understanding. The other thing is a dark foreboding in him of something he wants to get to. But this soliloquy – really, it is only a conversation with himself – does get him a little further. You get so much further in life when you encounter yourself in another. You don't like to admit to yourself that you have these or those qualities. But when they confront you in another, you are more willing to study them. In this way, we acquire self-knowledge when a quality presents itself in the form of another, as in Faust by Wagner. Faust has not yet reached the point where he would say to himself, now that Wagner is gone: Yes, that is actually me. — If he had already fully penetrated to himself with his understanding, he would say: I am only a Wagner, the Wagner is only here in my head!

How all hope does not fade from the mind,
That clings forever to stale evidence,
With greedy hand digs for treasures,
And is glad when it finds earthworms!

For up to now he has done nothing else, except seek the spirits in the manner described. It is self-knowledge that confronts Faust in Wagner. Who sent Wagner into him? The Earth Spirit sent him in, the Earth Spirit:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend,
Not me!

And now Faust shall see what spirits he resembles. He does not resemble the Earth Spirit, who is the ruler of the Earth, but he shall see one of the forms within him: there is your Wagner! This Wagner is in you!

But now there is not only Wagner in Faust, but the Luciferic element is opposed to Wagner, that is, opposed to itself. There is another element in him.

If you look at “Faust” in its earlier form, as it was at the beginning, it is the case that Goethe did not finish the following after the earth spirit scene at the time. It continues like this: conversation with Wagner, then with the student, Mephisto... Mephisto enters, of whom Goethe does not quite know whether he is Lucifer or Ahriman. If he had studied spiritual science, Lucifer would appear now. But he has the other one, who is sent to him by the earth spirit. The earth spirit sends him Wagner, sends him Mephisto, we would say Lucifer. Faust is to get to know little by little what is in him. Mephisto is sent by the earth spirit: There you have another one of the spirits that you understand. Try to understand the Lucifer that is in you, and not immediately look at the spirit of the earth!

How unclear Goethe was about the matter can be seen from the fact that a small piece, which was later left out, is in the original writing, in four lines. In 1775 there were four lines after the scene where Mephisto has brought Faust so far that he has led him to Gretchen, and that Faust now wants to force himself on Gretchen. There are four lines that were no longer in the fragment as early as 1790. After Faust, who is actually Lucifer – Goethe just mixes them up – has asked Mephisto to take care of the jewelry for Gretchen, Mephisto says in the old manuscript, after Faust has left:

He acts as if he were a prince's son.
If Lucifer had a dozen princes,
They would surely conjure up something for him;
In the end, he would get a commission.

There it is, Mephisto himself calls himself Lucifer. As I said, the four lines were later omitted. So what was Goethe actually trying to do in his earlier days, when he wanted, one might say, to express himself in his “Faust”? Well, he wanted to show how man should come to self-knowledge. But, one might say, there is an inkling of it in this first scene, which Goethe wrote in his youth, and which you can now read with clarity, where it is described in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. You foresaw in Faust how the human being, who gradually realizes how different entities are within him, divides himself up, how he divides himself up into Wagner and Lucifer-Mephisto. He gets to know himself bit by bit in his individual parts, he gets to know himself as Wagner, he gets to know himself as Lucifer-Mephisto. But as I said, Goethe first had to mature in order to really see the great significance of the Christ impulse for humanity, as far as that was possible in his time. Therefore, we see how Goethe, in his later years, sought to supplement what he had written earlier about Faust's striving until man encounters himself in his various images, including the image of Lucifer, by having Faust come into contact with what has been incorporated into earthly development through Christ. One could say that the cultic symbols of Christ approach Faust. And so we see in Faust the document that shows us how Goethe himself brought occultism to Christianity, to the Christ impulse, and how we are indeed continuing today to work on the path that Goethe took with regard to its first steps. In Goethe's time one could only get a glimpse. Today, the time has come when it is possible for man, through spiritual science, to truly enter into the realm of spiritual life, into which all of Goethe's striving was directed. Today, Faust must be understood differently than Goethe himself understood him. Yes, the world is progressing, and if we do not fully recognize that the world is progressing, then we are not serious enough about the world. But such experiences, that one splits, that one encounters oneself in one's true form, in a Luciferian form, such experiences do bring one forward, but always only a little way. We must part with the belief that we can see the whole spiritual world if we have only made small advances, such as we can make through meditation. One always advances only a little.

There are two natures in Faust: the Wagner nature and that which now strives forward. When Goethe wanted to point this out in his later years, he did it very beautifully. Goethe felt the need, when Faust had already approached Christianity, to show what the Wagner nature in Faust is. Therefore, he lets Wagner and Faust take the Easter Walk together. It is now the case that, as is naturally dramatic, two people are presented to us, showing what is going on in Faust's soul. The higher man in Faust strives forward, but the Faust-Wagner holds Faust back. A spark of comprehension of the spiritual world has been kindled in Faust, so that he now sees not only the sensual poodle, and there really is something like a soul force in Faust that expresses itself in the conversation with Wagner:

Faust: Do you see the black dog roaming through the seed and stubble?

Now the nature of Wagner awakens in Faust.

Wagner: I saw him long ago, he seemed unimportant to me.
Higher Nature: Look at him closely! What do you think the animal is?
Wagner Nature: A poodle, who in his own way is trying to follow his master.

These are objections that Faust himself actually raises. And now it continues. Faust begins to see the supersensible behind the sensual; he already senses it. So, it is a hunch, brought on by the experiences he has had. A spark of the spiritual world has entered into him. And it is beautiful, one wants to say, how infinitely artistically sincere and honest Goethe is, one just has to understand him. When Faust now feels the Luciferic in himself – as you know, the Luciferic is connected with obstinacy, with inner egoism – he, Faust, now also carries this Luciferic into his being gripped by the Christ impulse. It is a Luciferian trait that the Gospel of John, in that he wants to translate it, does not seem perfect to him at all. For the understanding, the Goethe commentators are a bit curious, who really go along with the poet, because they always go along with the poet, even where he distributes the things he wants to say among his characters. Faust does not yet understand the text of the Gospel at all, otherwise he would stop at “In the beginning was the word”. He falters because he does not yet understand it. The professors present it as if Faust understood it better, but he does not yet understand it. What appears to him now is the power, the deed – so he brings rationalism and intellectualism into the gospel. This now evokes the opposite phenomenon. Whereas he was once pushed down into the sensual world, he is now drawn up into the spiritual world. By fully asserting his limitations, by setting 'sense and power and action', he is pushed up into the spiritual world, because there is already a spark of spiritual power in Faust. Then the spirits come and again as the messenger of the earth spirit... Mephisto, this unclear figure between Lucifer and Ahriman. So you see, one must understand Goethe's struggle to penetrate Faust's spiritual world, and one can learn an infinite amount from it, especially for our present time.

What I particularly wanted to do in the last lecture on Easter Sunday and in this lecture was to show you how it is more difficult for a spirit that wants to delve deeper to penetrate to the Christ impulse than for a spirit that remains in its infinite pride and conceit and does not want what spiritual science can offer it. On the other hand, I also wanted to use Faust to illustrate how powerful the impact of the Christ Impulse has been on the world. There will come a time when we will learn to understand the inner nature of the Christ impulse ever better and better, precisely through what spiritual science has to give. It stands there in the world – I would like to say, as an illustration of the development of humanity on earth, brought about by world history, of what the Christ impulse is – the fact stands that centuries after the Christ impulse entered into the development of humanity on earth, something occurs in this development of humanity that is also not properly understood. But at the moment when one begins to understand it correctly, one is led precisely through this understanding to a deeper feeling for the Christ event. You know, of course, that six hundred years after the Christ impulse entered into the evolution of mankind, a prophet arose in a certain community who initially rejected what had entered into the evolution of mankind through the Christ impulse: Mohammed. Today we must no longer profess the superstition of the 19th century, which, out of rationalism, seeks to explain in a belittling way what must be explained out of spiritual insight. And it must appear ridiculous to anyone who really wants to penetrate into spiritual science when a particularly learned and clever man says of Mohammed: Yes, he claims that the angel who whispered in his ear what he wrote in the Koran approached him in the form of doves! But Mohammed - so the rationalist scholar says - was a mere juggler. He put some grains, which doves like to eat, into his ear, so the doves flew up and took the grains, but flew away again when they had had them! Yes, there have been such explanations, within and outside of Christianity, in the very clever 19th century.

There will come a time when such explanations will really only be laughed at, even though they are fully capable of satisfying materialism. We have to take Muhammad more deeply; we have to be clear that what lived in his soul was really such intercourse with the spiritual world as Goethe sought for his Faust. But what did Muhammad feel? What did he find? Today I can only hint at it, another time I will explain it more precisely. What did Mohammed find? Well, you know, Mohammed first strove for a world for which he had an expression, it is only one word: God. The world becomes a monism, a monistic expression of God. This world has nothing of the essence of Christianity, of course. But Mohammed does look into the spiritual world; he enters the elementary world of which I have spoken today. He promises his believers that they will enter, when they have gone through the gate of death, into this spiritual world. But he can only tell them about the spiritual world that he has come to know. What kind of spiritual world is this? This spiritual world, of which Mohammed tells his believers, is the Luciferian world, which he regards as paradise, the world that is to be aspired to. And when one passes from the abstract to the real, and adds, by way of interpretation, the meaning of Islam's striving in the spiritual world, one recognizes what spiritual science also proclaims. But this spiritual world is the world in which Lucifer rules; reinterpreted, the Luciferian world becomes a paradise, the world that people are just beginning to strive for.

I believe that it must make a deep impression on our souls if we can delve into the essence of historical development in such a way, through a very important phenomenon. It must give us pause when we learn in the progression of religious life how a great prophet emerged with the error that the Luciferic world is paradise. I do not want you to take this in just as abstract truths, I believe it can shake the soul if you let it affect you. But what does the Muslim do to enter his spiritual world? Perhaps we could later have a note handed in at the door from each of our dear friends here who has read the entire Koran. It would be interesting to count the slips of paper of those who have read it. But it is not easy to read the Koran completely, with its endless repetitions, which Westerners find so endlessly boring to read. But among Muslims, there are people who claim to have read it from beginning to end seventy thousand times in their lives. That means: to have brought a word that was given to the soul in such a way that this word has become alive in the soul! Even if we cannot learn anything in terms of content from such a religious community with regard to Christianity, we can still learn that within that community of people, even spiritual error is treated quite differently than what we are called to recognize as spiritual truths. At most, a European might read Faust, then, when he has forgotten it, read it again, and when he has forgotten it again, read it once more. But those who have read Faust a hundred times will also be sought after. It is also understandable within the context of Western education to date. How could anyone read everything that is printed in the West seventy thousand times? It is quite understandable. But we should still acquire something, that it is one thing to simply inform oneself about a content that is meaningful for the soul's life, and something else to live with it, again and again, so that one becomes completely one with it, completely one. It is something that one must first gain an understanding of, something that one cannot even understand according to the thinking habits of our national community. But we should reflect on such things. Not just to tell you something, but to stimulate your reflection, words are spoken as they are in this reflection. To increase our sense of responsibility towards ourselves and towards the world, with regard to what spiritual science can and should be for us.

We live in difficult times in many respects. The very difficult external events that surround us at present are only the outward sign of our very difficult times. It is not good to look at these very difficult times as if they were an illness, as we often call an illness an illness, because an illness is often a healing process, the true illness has preceded the physically apparent illness. So also what is now going through the world as mourning events has been preceded by something pathological, and we are to see into much deeper things than humanity is inclined to see into. Oh, a great pain can be deposited on the soul of the one who looks at the present time with the tasks it has, and with the little understanding that so many people have for these tasks. When one sees how people judge, think, feel and perceive the world today, and how these thoughts, feelings and perceptions lead to external events, and how people learn so little from these external events, then an infinitely meaningful pain is deposited on the soul. It is this feeling of pain that must now often come over the soul. If one can really look back over the past months of trial, to mention only the most recent, and turn one's gaze to what people have learned through these months of trial, to what judgment confronts one in relation to what confronted one eight months ago: it is the same kind of judgment, the same kind of feeling. What made people believe they were right eight months ago, they still think so, they even want the sad events to have occurred in order to prove them right in what they believed was right eight months ago.

I cannot express how infinite the pain is that one feels at the small way in which human souls have changed in recent months according to the assumptions that had to be made for this change, so that our time really would be a time of trial, a time of learning. But of those who stand within spiritual science, one would wish that they absorb much of what can be learned when such considerations as these are undertaken in connection with Faust. Again and again one would like to point out to souls the deep seriousness and the sacred striving for truth that must be connected with our spiritual-scientific view. And in such a movement there must be retribution for everything that does not arise out of deep sincerity and a deep sense of truth. We must really try to overcome everything that can make one say to the one who utters it: Forgive me, I hear you declaiming!

Is it not strange, when we see the stage traditions according to Wagner often on the stage today, and when scholars, when rationalists and intellectuals deride what Wagner is, instead of them knocking on their hearts and seeing themselves in the Wagner. This Wagner sits on the chairs everywhere, in the laboratories, and our scientific literature, our philosophical literature, would contain a deep truth if the majority of the authors chose the pseudonym “Wagner”. For they are written by Wagner, these philosophies of the present.

I am quite sure that many a person who lives in the ranks of spiritual science also has sufficient reason to beat their breasts, to examine themselves in self-knowledge, to see how much of their soul is mere self-promotion and how much arises from absolute honesty, from an absolute sense of truth! With this admonition to your hearts, to the deepest powers of your soul, I close this reflection.

Tonight we will talk about sin, original sin, illness, and so on. Let us first look backwards into the past and then allow the future to pass by our spiritual eyes. We have before our modern era the time of Rome and Athens, which was preceded by the Egyptian-Chaldaic period; actual historical records are lacking for the time before then. However, for these older prehistorical epochs there are two sources that can give information; ancient religious teachings for those who know how to decipher them and retrospective images that can be perceived by clairvoyant consciousness. It is the latter we wish to discuss.

Everything on earth is subject to the laws of evolution, and that is especially true for the life of the human soul. The life of the soul in ancient times was different from what it is today. In prehistoric times, thousands of years in the past, the scope of the souls of human beings in Europe, Asia, and Africa was much wider and more comprehensive than that of human beings of our time. To be sure, they did not have the kind of mind that enables us to read or to do arithmetic, but they did possess a primitive clairvoyance and a tremendous memory of which ours cannot have the slightest notion. We shall see later why that was so.

To give you an idea of how these prehistoric people perceived the world, let me tell you, for example, that they saw everything surrounded by an aura when they awakened to their day-consciousness. A flower, for instance, appeared to them surrounded by a circle of light similar to that we see around the light of street lamps in the evening fog. And during sleep these human beings were able to perceive the soul- spiritual beings in their full reality. Human beings learned gradually to see the contours of objects more clearly, but simultaneously and in direct proportion to their ability to do so, the conscious interaction with the spiritual world and the beings in it decreased; it ceased altogether when the ego became individualized in every single being.

The earth, too, had quite a different configuration in those early ages. Human beings lived in other regions and on other continents, and our own ancestors lived on a continent that is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean. The traditional name for this continent is Atlantis, and its disappearance as well as the legend of the universal flood is related in the myths of all peoples. The Atlantean culture was magnificent, and mankind lost many important insights with its destruction, insights that now can be retrieved only with great difficulty. Just as we in our times know how to harness the forces hidden in fossil plants—coal—for trade and industry, so the ancient Atlanteans knew how to utilize the driving forces in grain as energy, for example for the purpose of propelling their air vehicles that moved just a little bit above the ground in air that was much denser than is ours.

Let us now look at the physical organism of the Atlantean individual. It had the peculiar characteristic that the etheric body was not completely identical with the physical body and that the head of the etheric body projected beyond the head of the physical body. This peculiarity is connected with the clairvoyant capabilities of the Atlanteans, also with their extraordinary memory and with their magical powers. The ether-head had a special and central point of perception.

When the ether-head in the course of evolution retracted more and more into the physical head, the profile was changed. Now we have at that point an organ, the development of which will restore the power of clairvoyance in humanity: the pineal gland. And thus, the clairvoyant power of the Atlanteans, as well as their tremendous memory and their magical powers, disappeared gradually; and in its place we developed our present ability to think and to do mathematics.

Going still farther back, we find other catastrophes. The volcanos that we have today are the last remnants of an epoch when whole parts of the earth were destroyed by fire. The continent that perished in those times is designated by the name “Lemuria” and was the area that is now largely taken up by the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The inhabitants of that continent had bodies that were quite different from human bodies in our age and by our standards would appear grotesque. The relationship of the physical to the astral body was different in those early human beings. The crown of the head was open, and rays of light penetrated this opening, so that the head was surrounded by a resplendent aura, and this gave one the appearance of having a lantern on top. The last remnant of this Lemurian head structure can be seen today when we look at the head of a newborn baby and discover the small opening on top that remains open for about a year or a little longer. The bodies of the Lemurians had gigantic dimensions and were made out of a fine, almost gelatine-like substance.

Human beings in the Lemurian age were not at all independent and could do only the things they were inspired to do by the spiritual forces within whom they were, in a manner of speaking, imbedded. Receiving everything from these forces, they acted as if driven by a soul-instinct. At this time the powerful effect of spiritual beings who had not descended into a physical incarnation made itself felt. These beings, who were not well-disposed to humanity, had such an effect on humanity that it attained the independence it had lacked heretofore. According to divine providence, mankind was certainly meant to attain this independence some day, but only through the influence of these beings did that independence come about so early. Together with the other forces, these beings slipped into the astral bodies of human beings, who had not yet entered into a close relationship with their own essence, and bestowed on them a kind of will power that would enable them to do evil since it was only astral and not guided by reason. The influence of these forces, called Luciferic forces, as we can see, may be good or bad because, on the one hand, they led mankind astray and, on the other, gave it freedom.

Today's consciousness originated in clairvoyant consciousness, which we find increasingly more developed as we go back in human evolution. The Lemurians were able to perceive things only with their soul. They were, for example, unable to perceive the form, the color, or the external qualities of a flower. It revealed itself to them as a shining astral configuration that they perceived with a kind of inner organ. According to the divine plan, human beings were not supposed to perceive the world with external sense organs before the middle of the Atlantean period, but the Luciferic forces made this happen earlier, at a time when human instincts had not yet matured. That represents the “Fall” of mankind. Religious documents tell us that the snake opened man's eyes, but without the interference of Lucifer the human body would not have become as firm as it now is and the Atlantean humanity would have been able to see the spiritual side of all things. Instead, man fell into sin, illusion, and error, and to make things worse, toward the middle of the Atlantean period he was also subjected to the influence of Ahrimanic forces. The Luciferic forces had worked on the astral body, but the Ahrimanic forces worked on the etheric body, especially on the ether-head. By that, many human beings fell into the error of mistaking the physical world for the world of truth. The name “Ahrimanic” comes from Ahriman, the name the Persians gave to this erroneous principle. Zoroaster told his people about Ahriman, warned them about him, and exhorted them to become one with Ahura Mazdao—Ormuzd. Ahriman is identical with Mephistopheles and has nothing to do with Lucifer. Mephistopheles comes from the Hebrew word me-phis-to-pel, which means the liar, the cheater. Satan in the Bible is Ahriman too, not Lucifer.

Ancient Atlantis was gradually destroyed in the course of centuries by floods, and the inhabitants left over from the catastrophe retreated to regions that had been spared, such as Asia, Africa, and America. The first region in which Atlantean culture continued to develop was the area that later came to be called India. There the people kept a clear memory of the earlier clairvoyance and of the perception of the spiritual world. It was therefore not difficult for their teachers—the Rishis—to direct their attention to the spiritual side of the world, and initiation was easy to achieve. Clairvoyance was never completely lost; there always existed some clairvoyant people up to the time of Christ. We can recognize a remnant of this primitive form of clairvoyance in mythology, in which the central concern was with beings who had actually been alive, such as Zeus, Apollo, and so forth. Although the Ahrimanic influence began in the Atlantean epoch, as we have said, it unfolded its full strength only later in human evolution. The ancient Indians were sufficiently protected against Ahriman; for them the physical world was never anything else but maya, illusion. Only in the most ancient Persian period of Zarathustra did people begin to place value on the physical world and thereby come into the power of Ahriman. This clarifies for us Zarathustra's admonition of which we spoke earlier.

As the evolution of humanity reached the Greek period, human beings were confronted by another force that began to drive them back up to the spiritual world from which, as it were, they had been expelled since the Lemurian age. This new force was the Christ-Principle, which entered Jesus of Nazareth and permeated His three bodies—the physical, the etheric, and the astral. When the human soul is completely imbued with the Christ-Principle, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers will be defeated, and through this principle the course of evolution will be reversed. Christ would not have been able to influence humanity had His coming not been announced to it a long time before He actually appeared. Inwardly, however, humanity has always been led by Christ; we can deduce this from the magnificent images by which His coming was prophesied. Who else could have inspired such mighty imaginations?

Immediately after the mystery of Golgotha when Christ's blood ran from five wounds and His spirit permeated the lowest realms, the incarnation of Christ brought about a remarkable change in the physical, etheric, and astral bodies of humanity. Christ's etheric and astral bodies multiplied like a grain of seed, and the spiritual world was filled with these copies. For example, human beings living in the period from the fifth or sixth through the tenth centuries who had developed sufficiently received at their birth such an imprint of the Christ-Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. St. Augustine is the individual in whom such partaking in the etheric body of Christ is most clearly evident, and the great significance of his life must be attributed to this fact. On the other hand, Christ's astral body was incorporated into human beings from about the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, and this explains the appearance of human beings who were endowed with extraordinary humility and virtue, such as St. Francis of Assisi and the great Dominicans who reflected the wonderful astral qualities of Christ. These individuals were imbued with such a clear image of the great truths they practiced throughout their lives. By contrast, St. Augustine was never free of doubt and always experienced the conflict between theory and practice. Of the great Dominicans, St. Thomas Aquinas³⁰ is especially noteworthy because in him the influence of the astral body of Christ was manifest to a high degree, as we shall see later. Beginning with the sixteenth century, copies of the Christ-Ego begin to weave themselves into the egos of a few individualities, one of them being Christian Rosenkreutz,³¹ the first Rosicrucian. This phenomenon led to the feasibility of a more intimate relationship with Christ, as is revealed by esoteric teaching.

The power of Christ will make human beings more perfect, spiritualize them, and lead them back into the spiritual world. Mankind developed its reason at the expense of clairvoyance; the power of Christ will enable human beings to learn on this earth and to ascend again with what they will have acquired on earth. Human beings descended from the Father, and the power of Christ will lead them back to the Father.

• 30. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the Italian theologian and philosopher whose philosophy was declared the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. He is generally regarded to have been the most prominent mind of scholasticism.
• 31. Christian Rosenkreutz is generally regarded by most scholars as the pseudonym for the German writer Johan Valentin Andrea (1586–1654). In his works Fama fraternitatis (1614) and in Confessio rosae crucis (1615), he traced the development of the Rosicrucian Society to Arab and Oriental origins.

Today and tomorrow evening, we will have much to talk about, in reference to Goethe, that may interest the student of spiritual science with regard to the inner workings of the human soul, its development and its relation to the world. Since our task in these two lectures will be to consider the above questions only in the light of Goethe, it seems to me expedient to speak now, independently of Goethe, as we are accustomed to doing, from the sources of spiritual science, about the inner life of the human soul, its development, and its relationship to the world. It will be necessary for me to assume that you are somewhat familiar with the basic elements of the human soul life.

When we consider the human soul in its development, we must objectively distinguish between the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. When we speak of the sentient soul, we do not just mean that part of our soul that is able to connect with the outside world through perception, through sensory impressions, but we also mean the seat of everything we can call instincts, desires, passions, and also the seat of everything that are impulses of will in the human soul. It is most useful, if we want to form an idea of what the sentient soul actually is within our mental life, to imagine how everything volitional, everything that gives us impulses from within , is seeking a relationship with the outside world, is the essential part of the sentient soul, and how it is attached to the sentient soul that it is the most important mediator of receiving external impressions of perception. That is why it is called the sentient soul. When a person receives a sound or a color impression, the sentient soul is in control. Even when passions arise, in the case of affects, anger, fear, anxiety, it is essentially the sentient soul that rules.

What we call the intellectual or mind soul first works its way out of the sentient soul and is, in certain respects, somewhat more serene than the sentient soul. The abilities to clothe in ideas what is felt in the sentient soul, to clarify what is experienced as instincts, as affects, into a more human form of soul life, are already present in the mind soul. When, for example, affects that otherwise only aim at self-preservation are clarified into goodwill, or even loving behavior towards the environment, we are already dealing with the soul of understanding or mind. In the soul of understanding, the I reveals itself to us as the actual center of our soul life.

In the further development of the I, where we feel ourselves to be truly inwardly human beings, asserting ourselves in the center, we form our perceptions and thoughts into great ideas with which we comprehend nature, or into ideas of duty or moral ideas. We speak of the consciousness soul in everything with which we relate to ourselves in this way. There are no dividing walls between the individual soul members, but it is necessary to distinguish between these three members because each relates to the outside world in a different way.

If you take the consciousness soul first, for us humans this is the highest soul element for the time being, but at the same time it is the soul element that has, to a certain extent, separated itself the most from the whole rest of the world. It is the most independent soul element.

When a person delves into the consciousness soul, he can be most lonely in his soul life, shutting himself off from the outer world. It is the soul element that, by its very nature, has erected the most barriers to the environment, so that it is most strongly predisposed to fall into error and error. It is most detached from the universe. But this part of the soul can only fall into error to a limited extent. This is the most important thing in what we call the consciousness soul. It expresses itself above all as logical thinking, as the dissection of concepts, and also proceeds as computational thinking, as everything that man has in a certain respect as an ability of his own, and which is not found in animals.

The powers of the sentient and rational soul play up into the consciousness soul. The drives, desires and passions, the volitional impulses of the sentient soul, the feelings and intellectual judgments of the rational soul penetrate into it. But in the consciousness soul, all this is processed by logical thinking. That is why it is excellent in the consciousness soul that we form our opinions. And because the consciousness soul is the most isolated, people are so very separate from each other in terms of opinions. When we speak of what we have in common because it is formed within our community, our family circle, because it is common practice in our environment, we speak of such things that are located in the intellectual or emotional soul. But even the things that are only located in the consciousness soul migrate into the intellectual soul, for example, an opinion we have formed can become a habitual opinion. Or an ability can be transformed into skill, into habit. Then they have descended into the mind soul.

The consciousness soul is also the most isolated because through the consciousness soul, the human being directly extends the horns of feeling into the environment. When we consider what we want to do, we live in the mind soul. When we look at what is around us, we extend the horns of feeling of the consciousness soul directly through the senses and come back to what makes us the most isolated being. Because of what our senses offer us, we become the most isolated beings. Thus man isolates himself precisely because, through the consciousness soul, he must relate to the outside world in a very local and temporary way. But opinions cling most intensely to the consciousness soul. An opinion asserts itself first and becomes firmly established in the consciousness soul. Therefore, in terms of opinions, man is an isolated being. In terms of habits, people understand each other better. Man is most independent, but also most isolated, in the consciousness soul, therefore we cannot really find access to what is in the consciousness soul of another person. We do not even know whether everyone sees the color red or blue in the same way as we do.

But leaving that aside, let us now just assume the content of the consciousness soul, which consists of opinions. If we take something that may seem extremely logical, something that we can imagine we base these opinions on in the most logical way possible, these logical reasons cannot be applied to our fellow human beings. Logical arguments do not initially have an effect on external life, and it is even normal for them not to have an effect. Therefore, it is easy to convert people to our opinions at a young age, in childhood. Later on, this is less and less the case. This is because the child not only confronts us with his consciousness soul, but also with his mind soul and his sentient soul. He confronts us with his entire personality. And the way we convince them depends more on all the other soul aspects than on the consciousness soul. The will and feelings are involved. If people's direction of will and feelings differ, then the most diverse points of view can be justified in the most logical way. Nevertheless, in the present cycle of human development, people are only truly independent with regard to the consciousness soul, and less so with regard to the other soul aspects. Consider how opinions are formed: the human being is completely free to form this or that conceptual context as his opinion. He is less free when the content of the intellectual soul comes into play. Here the human being does not feel at all free, otherwise his feelings and perceptions could not play many tricks on him. We can be completely in agreement with ourselves in our opinions that this or that should actually displease us, but the mind speaks differently, allowing us to take pleasure in the matter after all. The fact that the mind can be in discord with opinions can show us that man is not as free in terms of feeling as he is in terms of opinions. The strongest unfreedom the human being feels is in regard to everything concerning the will and so on, everything that is in the sentient soul. The discord is sometimes very great between the most glorious intentions, between the opinion that this or that is not good, and the urge, the affect towards it. A drastic example is the following: A teacher who has an angry child realizes in the soul of understanding that the anger must be expelled. Since he does not succeed in doing so in a good way, he throws the inkwell at the child's head, and he himself becomes angry. There we have the most beautiful discord.

What is it in the life of the soul that happens, that this discord can come about? It is the case that we are actually only isolated and independent in relation to the consciousness soul in our present state of development, but that between the consciousness soul, at the boundary to the mind or feeling soul, there is an influence on the soul, an influence of higher superhuman beings. And again, at the boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul, we have such an influence of external forces of superhuman entities, likewise between the sentient soul and the sentient body.

I am now describing the state that presents itself in our time, in our century. It is different for other times. Man can also easily be convinced that other forces come into play where the will comes into play. When we think, we are with ourselves. We can sit down in a corner and be with ourselves in thought. When a person has to exercise a volitional impulse, he has to move his hands and feet, he has to produce a physical action, an act. If you move from one thought to another, your consciousness remains present. Today, people have no idea of the transition that takes place when, for example, they grasp the thought: I want to grab the watch – and then carry out this thought. Here we have a completely different context than in the transition from one thought to another, where the whole sequence can be followed by the consciousness. This is an example of how other forces intervene to help us. At the boundary between the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, entities intervene that we call angels or angeloi. They are the ones who condense what would otherwise only be conscious in opinions and concepts, and condense them into what can be called sensations and feelings. The term 'sensation' fluctuates somewhat. What is felt and sensed internally is already a condensation of thought. There are forces behind us that help us.

Let us now turn to the other boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul. Here we have even higher beings that intervene. They are the ones who stir our will, who strengthen our thoughts into willpower: they are the archangels or archangeloi. But when we enter into relationship with our environment on our own initiative, then it is the spirits of personality; there we already feel the resistance of the world when we intervene in its structure. Thus, in the intermediate realms between the individual soul forces, there are guiding spiritual entities that permeate us and have the task of transforming into deeds and forces what, left to himself, a person can only experience within himself as thoughts.

Now, when we enter into these subconscious regions of the soul's life, there is indeed the possibility that the struggles that take place and must take place within the spiritual world will also enter the arena of our consciousness. Where the angelic beings intervene, the luciferic beings, who are the opponents of the angels, are also close behind. If only the angels were to intervene, our minds would reach out to what is beautiful, only to what corresponds to our human dignity. The luciferic beings lead us to what we ourselves do not agree with in calm reflection, but which carries us away. Where the archangels intervene, the Ahrimanic beings can also intervene, leading us to transform our judgment into error and our search for truth into falsehood. As human beings, we are given free will to think logically. But the moment we develop feelings and impulses of will, other beings, including those that counteract the emerging beings, intervene. This is the point that everyone who is in any way familiar with occult research should basically educate themselves about.

Where man stands in normal life today, it is already so arranged that the forces of the luciferic and ahrimanic entities, which counteract the angels and archangels, are nevertheless directed towards the good in all their effects. We need not seek to be wiser than the Ruling Power of the World and ask: Why do human beings need the entities of Lucifer and Ahriman? Man could not be so free if he were not given a counterpoise in these two powers to balance the angels and archangels. Man must have the opportunity to tell a lie so that he can arrive at the truth independently. As an independent being, he must gain truth for himself, and so Ahriman must be there. Man must resist Ahriman and take the path to truth. In this way man has become an independent being, in whom the sense for truth is inherent. The highest rulers of the world have already arranged matters so that the opponents, Lucifer and Ahriman, do not have too much to deal with. They are there to drive people to a strong degree of impure urges, desires and also incorrect judgments for the sake of their freedom and development of consciousness, but these can be balanced out in the course of karma and cannot disrupt the earthly mission. It is one of the most beautiful and profound insights that man gradually comes to through occult studies and esotericism, that he realizes: that everything that is untrue and bad can ultimately be transformed into good.

The question that everyone must ask is: apart from this circumstance, is there any reason why man must go through all incarnations and only reach perfection through every error? Yes, there is a reason. It would be going too far to show that man has become such through his previous lives on earth that he can only mature gradually. Now he is only independent with regard to the consciousness soul. But a time will come when, despite all his tendency to err, man will have a firm direction in his actions and work. If people did not yet have this, they would be in constant dispute and quarrel. As humanity is now, it is ripe to acquire the freedom for the consciousness soul, but people are not yet ripe to become free in relation to the mind soul and sentient soul. Progress arises from the fact that development can never take place in a completely straight line. We can see in all cultures how some souls are ahead of the pack, taking the lead, anticipating what other souls will only be able to acquire in later times. Today, human souls are only mature enough to become free in relation to the consciousness soul. But spiritual wisdom gradually leads to the mind and sentient soul also being freed and isolated, so that people no longer have to look to tradition and habit to find the good, but that the impulse for good flows from their own soul. This is also a necessary interpretation of Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me.” When the Christ lives in people, they will also be allowed to be free in relation to the intellectual and sentient soul. People have already achieved a certain dispassion when it comes to the most trivial logical matters and mathematical calculations. Here passion has already been banished so far from the human heart that people can find the truth for themselves. But for that which is within the mind and sentient soul, people are still very much in tune, even considering the tuning as the essential, because there Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play a role everywhere.

You will understand that with such a movement, which is built on the foundation of spiritual wisdom and where the deeper powers of the human soul are to be awakened for the purpose of isolation, not only curiosity about the spiritual worlds may be connected – that may not actually be the impulse for spiritual research – but also a sense of responsibility. Through this movement, every ability of human beings to shape the future is brought into our time. A germ of the future is being called forth that is not yet ripe in the general public. We must bear this in mind and be clear about how we have to be careful to ensure that, even if the soul may be beautiful and sympathetic within the spiritual movement, we must still be vigilant in the face of impending dangers and must awaken the feeling of responsibility. If the soul approaches spiritual things immaturely, there is still danger. Not everyone notices this danger. Those who are a little more deeply involved in the movement know and must know – if they do not want to break down under the unbearable – how they must always be on guard to say only what has passed through their soul not once or ten times, but a hundred times! It is difficult to find words that are adequate with regard to spiritual matters. A definite opinion must form in the whole circle of Anthroposophists: the opinion that they demand of those who represent the movement that they take the truth in this sense seriously. One must not believe that as a speaker every evening one can simply stand there without letting these truths pass through one's soul again and again, so that they are properly shaped down to the last word. The difficulty that lies in being able to open one's mouth only for spiritual truths is one thing. The other is that those who are in such a movement must, in a certain way, even make sure that this feeling is present in the representatives of the movement. But even those who are not yet deeply involved have to be careful that certain things do not happen to their soul, and people should ask themselves again and again: Am I mature enough to represent a spiritual movement? Do I have to place myself in the movement in such a way that the things of the spiritual world have an even stronger effect on me? No one should be discouraged, but everyone should awaken the feeling in themselves: Even if I have done what is good and right through the compulsion of tradition and education, there is a limit beyond which not only the angels, archangels and spirits of the personality stand when the right is represented, but where Lucifer and Ahriman also stand. Time and again, we see people who were truthful begin to tell lies when they are confronted with spiritual truths, because they have not sufficiently said to themselves: Above all, you must prepare yourself, you must let the spiritual truths take effect on you, you must not let yourself speak! — One must be aware of such responsibility. But it would be cowardly to say: Then I do not want to place myself in the spiritual movement. It is not by evading the duty to observe caution that one behaves correctly, but by observing this duty correctly. Much of what has been said at all times characterizes the progressive spiritual movement.

There are the great lights that are supposed to help people move forward. But where there are strong lights, there are often very strong shadows as well. Hence the not always unjustified accusations against those who are supposed to bring down the truths of the spiritual world to the physical plane. In every such movement, those who wanted nothing more than to let spiritual truths flow down into the physical world were joined by those who did not want to exercise self-criticism, who did not want to tame pride and vanity. They became like those we see so abundantly within spiritual movements, and to whom one must say: Unfortunately, the outside world cannot always distinguish between such bearers and those who are the true bearers. The opposite also sometimes happens. Our spiritual science movement should call on people to judge freely and sweep away everything that merely relies on external authority. As long as society still feels that it depends on the mouth through which it speaks, our ideal has not yet been achieved. We should only listen to what this mouth speaks because the things make sense to us when we listen to it with a sense of truth and unbiased logic. Our movement is highly suited to nurturing and developing people's free judgment; but there is a strong tendency, which can be called 'laziness' with regard to faith, that runs through our time. The laziness of faith creates great obstacles for the spiritual science movement. Believing something because someone has said it delays free judgment, the free human soul life, and independence in relation to the mind soul. It is so convenient not to have to think and just accept some truth because someone has said it; it is much more convenient to believe the person than to examine what the person is saying.

I have often said: It is only possible to make suggestions within the spiritual movement. But take everything we can find in history, for example, about Zarathustra: none of it will be refuted by what is said here about Zarathustra, if you really take everything. It can be examined, and the more rigorously it is examined, the more pleasing it is to those who want to represent the spiritual movement in an objective way. The will to examine is what they want. But it is infinitely more convenient to believe, to simply refer to what this or that clairvoyant said. This is a danger for the real or so-called clairvoyant if he is not yet really established. There is already a temptation to say what people believe. It is easy for him to slide into that, into which it is generally easy to slide when it concerns the ascent into the supersensible world. One ascends into a world in which it really cannot be controlled as easily as in the physical world. If you want to check with the mind, the angels and archangels intervene at the border areas, so it takes quite a lot to check it out. When it comes to faith, it often depends only on the impression one has of the person. How easily people can be influenced in terms of faith can be seen from mass suggestion.

Mass suggestion is something about which the most wonderful discoveries can only be made in the future. In earlier times it was quite different because the consciousness soul was not yet free. Today man is in the liberation of the consciousness soul, but is still completely in the bondage of the mind soul. How is suggestion made? Not only by what is pleasant or unpleasant about a personality; but also, for example, by the fact that someone has taken up an office, has five children to care for and now feels compelled to remain in office. Today, people often prefer to listen to everything that is obtained from the supersensible world in a charlatan-like manner rather than to what is based on solid research. For the former has two characteristics. First of all, it is tremendously trivial. For example, what writing mediums write down is usually such that one could just as easily think of the subject oneself, only it is made credible to man by the way it is taught to him. Man then believes that something is playing into it from the spiritual world. It is precisely their triviality that makes these things pleasant for people. Or they have the other property of being so incomprehensible that no one can understand anything about them. The things that are particularly incomprehensible are then often considered particularly mystical. At the borderline between the supernatural and the sensual, the charlatanry can be combined with what is based on serious research. It must be emphasized that only he is doing his duty who is alert to his own soul, who is especially careful about everything that can dull the instincts, so that we believe we are promoting the affairs of humanity when we are only promoting our own, or that the untruth, the lie, the temptation of Ahriman, is inadvertently mixed into what we say.

Only those who are constantly vigilant with regard to all this, only those who always say to themselves: 'If you join a spiritual movement, there is a great danger that you will become vain and proud' – only they can make progress. That goes without saying. Therefore, you cannot reproach a person for that, only if the person in question does nothing at all to suppress these traits. There is a tremendous temptation not to be completely truthful when you are dealing with people who believe you. You can make up all kinds of stories if they believe on authority. Then it is easy. You must not reproach anyone for the fact that when approaching the spiritual world, the tendency to lie arises in him, but that should not excuse him from himself, rather he should make every effort to expel it from his soul. That is the meaning of: know thyself. You have to seek the lonely hours when you can come to say to yourself: there is a danger looming again, so be on your guard. If you do not have these lonely hours, if you are uncomfortable with not being able to confess something good to yourself, if they are not the starting point for fighting your faults with all your might, then you are on the slippery slope, then you will roll down instead of climbing up.

These are the things we have to face if we want to recognize our position in occult research, the research that is the highest gift of grace flowing into the physical world from the spiritual worlds, for which we should have the greatest sense of responsibility.

The duty to enter the spiritual world with a part of humanity, because only in this way is progress possible, and at the same time the feeling of responsibility should awaken in us, the feeling: it is a duty, once I have learned the matter, to participate in it. It is often said that the representatives of spiritual science do not pay enough attention to moral considerations. They are often made, as they are today, so that in the progress of our spiritual movement, through which we are to be led to the spiritual sources, we may also hear of the impulses that come from those spiritual sources.

The purpose of the following synopses is to facilitate reference to the particular themes and subjects dealt with in the different lectures.

Lecture One

“Homelessness”—stage in spiritual development. The reality of Beings who cannot be apprehended through sense perception, e.g. Folk Souls or the Spirits of Nations. These invisible Beings work through visible beings. The Spirit of the Swiss people. The anthroposophical view of man: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. In future time man will transmute these three members into Spirit Self (Manas), Life Spirit (Buddhi) and Spirit Man (Atma). The ego works through the three bodily members and develops in them the threefold soul: Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul (Mind-Soul) and the Spiritual Soul (Consciousness-Soul). The task of certain epochs or nations is to develop one of these soul-members. The three former cosmic stages of man: Old Saturn (creation of rudiment of physical body), Old Sun (etheric body), Old Moon (astral body). The higher Beings—Angels, Archangels, Archai. Archai are guiding Spirits of civilization epochs, also called Time Spirits: they influence national character and temperament. Angels mediate between the Archangels and the single human being. In future man will be able to direct his body from outside. In order to know what a nation is we must understand the missions of these Beings.

Lecture Two

Climate, nature of the soil, plant-cover, etc. are the physical expression of a spiritual reality. A geographical region has not only a physical, but also a psychic and spiritual topography or aura. This aura is the sphere of activity of the Folk Spirit. Every people or nation has its particular etheric aura which is dependent upon the etheric emanations of the soil and the people domiciled in the particular area. This aura changes with the migrations of peoples.

Archangels cannot intervene where physical laws are operative. The Archangel sometimes withdraws: then the nation perishes. The etheric aura works into the etheric body of an individual and creates national temperament. It affects only the sanguine, choleric and phlegmatic temperaments, but not the melancholic.

The sequence of the Hierarchies above man. Beings who can remain behind as a deed of sacrifice are called abnormal Beings. Abnormal Archangels responsible for the language of nations. Normal Archangels, abnormal Time Spirit and abnormal Archangel working in concert are responsible for the Old Indian temperament, sacred (holy) Sanscrit language and spiritual philosophy of ancient India. Spirits of Form create the present physical body of man which becomes the vehicle for the conscious ego. Backward Beings responsible for the present form of the brain. Normal Archai work in the thought life, give impulse to creative thought of the age, e.g. Galileo.

Emphasis upon Christ's relationship with the Beings of normal evolution. Before the coming of Christ men worshipped the Jehovah Being.

Lecture Three

Characterization of the inner life and consciousness of the Archangels, e.g. Folk Spirits. Archangels have three modifications of their etheric body which correspond to the three members of the human soul. Archangels do not share in the Sentient Soul and lower part of the Intellectual Soul, but in the realm of pure thought and moral feeling, i.e. in the Spiritual Soul and higher part of the Intellectual Soul. Influences of art and religion. The Archangel perceives rise and fall of peoples; incarnates in the springtime of a people and withdraws in its decline. Relation of Archai (Time Spirits,) Archangels (Folk Spirits) and Angels (guardians of the destiny of the individual). Sometimes normal Time Spirit intervenes in the field of the Archangel; a part of the nation is suddenly detached and forms a new nation, e.g. the Dutch detached from the Teutonic people, the Portuguese from the Spanish.

Interplay of abnormal Spirits of Movement with normal Spirits of Form creates the races of mankind. Difference between the concept of nation and that of race. Differentiation of mankind into races is the work of the abnormal Spirits of Form (or Movement). Racial differentiations enter more deeply into the physical.

Lecture Four

Important to understand how nations and folk communities arise out of races. Earth passed through three states or conditions before the present Earth condition. Ego-consciousness made possible by the Spirits of Form or Exusiai. The seven-year periods of man's development. Spirits of Form only interested in ego-development, i.e. man at age of twenty to twenty-one. Reason for man's dependence on Earth during the third of the seven-year periods.

Races began to be formed in early Atlantis. Racial types determined by locality of birth and transmitted by heredity. Diverse regions of Earth diversely receptive to cosmic influences. Importance of migrations. Centres of cosmic influence (diagram). Africa (here work forces which influence childhood), Asia (forces which influence adolescence), Europe (forces which influence maturity), North America (forces of decline). Today race is less predominant.

The civilization-epochs of post-Atlantis: India, Persia, Egypt-Chaldea, Greece, Rome and Europe of today. Westward movement brings decline of creative powers—an aging process. The geographical areas narrowed from continents to islands and peninsulas. Need for rejuvenation from forces of the East, but man must find his spiritual resources within himself. Rosicrucianism implies evolution of all mankind. Evolution of races by evolution of nations. Plato's ancestry and race. Nation occupies an intermediate position between race and the individual.

Lecture Five

The lecture first enumerates the spiritual Hierarchies. Their working is manifested in the material surface of the Earth, e.g. the rocks of Norway. This is (outer) Maya. Two kinds of spiritual forces meet here—the forces of the Spirits of Will raying outward from within the Earth and the forces of the Spirits of Movement streaming in from the Universe. Formerly the Earth was in a semi-fluid state. The Alps and eminences of the Bohemian plateau resemble dammed up waves which have solidified. Spirits of Form brought the fluctuating forms to rest. The elements in which these Beings work: the Thrones in the Water-element, the Cherubim in the Air-element and the Seraphim in Fire. The Beings of the second Hierarchy work in the three Ethers; the third Hierarchy (Angels, Archangels and Archai) in the intermediate realm.

Each of the planetary epochs of the Earth has its special mission. Man owes his physical body and life of Will to Old Saturn, his etheric body and life of Feeling to Old Sun, astral body and life of Thought to Old Moon. The mission of the Earth epoch is to bring about the harmony of the three from within. The element of Love is added. Spirits of Form, creators of the Ego, are called Spirits of Love. The contributions of the different Spirits to Earth evolution. The need for man to raise his consciousness to higher planes.

The attendant Nature-spirits of the normal Beings of the highest Hierarchy: Undines, Sylphs and Salamanders.

Lecture Six

For a full understanding of cosmic evolution it is necessary to correlate the contents of the different lectures. The creation of races described in detail. The different races are the product of the co-operation between the seven Elohim and the abnormal Spirits of Movement. The abnormal Spirits are centred in the five planets and create the five root races: Mercury, the Negro race; Venus, the Malayan race; Mars, the Mongolian race; Jupiter, the Caucasian race; Saturn, the Red Indians. This took place in Atlantis.

The planetary forces also work in man's organic system. Mars works in the blood. The abnormal Spirits of Movement in conjunction with the Elohim on the Sun and Jahve on the Moon create the Semitic race. Where they work in opposition to the Sun and Moon forces the Mongolian race is the outcome.

Venus and Jupiter work in the nervous system via the breathing and senses, producing respectively the Malayan racial type and the Caucasian or European racial type. The Greeks under the Jupiter influence; their idealization of the external world. Mercury and Saturn work in the glandular system. Mercury is connected with the growth forces of the body, hence Mercury creates the Negro racial type. Saturn ossifies the glandular system and creates the Red Indian; hence his bony features. Dialogue between a Red Indian chieftain and a European colonist.

Red Indians preserved a clairvoyant memory of Atlantis before the separation of the races.

Lecture Seven

In post-Atlantean times the Archangels advance to the rank of Time Spirits or Archai. They are concerned with the events of late Atlantis and the transition to post-Atlantis. Distribution of races took place in early Atlantis; in late Atlantis a second migration took place. Nuclei of future peoples left behind in Asia, Africa, Europe. Archangels became their guiding Spirits. Culture-epochs named after those peoples whose Archangels became the leading Time Spirits. Time Spirit of the first post-Atlantean epoch was the ancient Indian Archangel. In the second epoch the Persian Archangel became the Time Spirit who inspired the original Zarathustra. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch the Archangel of the Egyptian people became the ruling Time Spirit. In the third epoch an Archangel acted on behalf of Jehovah who had chosen the Semitic people as his own.

The two currents—pluralism and monism. Semitic race represent monotheism in religion and monism in philosophy, cf. Rabbinism. Other peoples represented polytheism and pluralism, cf. trinity of ancient India. Both aspects are necessary.

Two acts of renunciation on the part of Beings of the Hierarchies. The Greek Archangel remained as Time Spirit and becomes guiding Spirit of exoteric Christianity. Celtic Archangel remained as Archangel working among peoples of Western Europe, Southern Germany, Hungary and the Alpine countries. He was leader of esoteric Christianity. Mysteries of the Holy Grail, Rosicrucianism. Leading Time Spirit of fifth epoch chosen from among Archangels of the Germanic peoples. In Europe many Folk Souls acting independently: need to individualize peoples, hence late appearance of Time Spirit of Europe. Time Spirit of present epoch subject to impulses of ancient Egypt—hence materialism.

In remote past there existed, before the Celtic Archangel had established a new centre in the Castle of the Grail, above the Earth a spiritual centre in the region of Detmold and Paderborn. According to legend ‘Asgard’ once situated here. From this centre the different Archangels of Europe were sent on their different missions. In later years its spiritual mission taken over by the Castle of the Grail. No other mythology gives a clearer picture of evolution than Northern mythology. Germanic mythology in its pictures is close to anthroposophical conception of future evolution.

Lecture Eight

The characteristics of Teutonic mythology; contrast with Greek mythology. Superficiality of analogies of comparative religion. Relation between mythology and successive civilization-epochs. In India high spiritual level allied to dim ego-consciousness, cf. Vedas. Peoples of old India closely associated with Spirits of movement and Spirits of wisdom. Unable to apprehend Christ Impulse. Western peoples, especially the Teutonic, awakened to the ego at elementary level of psychic development. Need to overcome old clairvoyance. Effect of migrations. Persians looked to Spirits of Form, Chaldeans to Archai or Time Spirits, Greeks and Romans to Archangels and Angels, normal and abnormal. Teutonic peoples experienced transition from old vision to new, perceived Divine Beings working directly upon their souls.

The two races of gods in Teutonic mythology; the Vanir and the Aesir. Odin: resigned his evolution to give the gift of speech. His Initiation and the magic draught at the fountain of Mimir. Hönir gives power of thought; Lödur: blood and pigmentation. Vili and Ve, abnormal Archangels. Thor, son of Odin. Remained behind as an Angel; transmits to the ‘I’ spiritual powers of the Archangel. Speech lives in our breathing; ego incarnates in the blood: this is the hammer of Thor. In macrocosm, winds and clouds related to breathing; in microcosm, thunder and lightning to pulse-beat. Nordic man recognized Odin and Thor in powers of nature. Niflheim and the twelve cranial nerves Muspelheim and the forces issuing from the human heart.

From Ginnungagap, the primeval abyss, a new Earth emerges after the three Earth incarnations of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Imaginative pictures of Teutonic mythology replaced by concepts in Anthroposophy.

Lecture Nine

Cognition of ego different from other forms of cognition. When the ego knows itself subject and object of cognition are the same. Importance of objective ego to Western peoples. Relation between ego and spiritual Beings—Lucifer and Ahriman. Old Testament knows only Lucifer, the serpent. Gospel writer (cf. St. Matthew) spoke of Satan, i.e. Ahriman. Old Indians looked up to the Devas; eschewed Asuras, beings of darkness. Persians fear Luciferic powers within man.

Loki and his three offspring: the Midgard Snake, Fenris Wolf and Hel.

Loki is Lucifer. Consequences of Lucifer influence: selfishness in astral body (the Midgard Snake), falsehood in the etheric body (the Fenris Wolf), in physical body sickness and death (Hel).

Death of Baldur at hands of blind Hodur, an Ahrimanic figure. Extinction of old clairvoyance. Man now subject to Ahriman. Among Teutonic peoples clairvoyant experience did not perish completely, but unable to accept Christianity. Initiates taught them that attachment to physical plane and loss of vision only an intermediate time. Perception of spiritual world would return, but spiritual world would be changed. Lucifer would be overcome. This is the vision of Ragnarok. Connection between innate talents of Teutonic peoples and the vision of the future.

Lecture Ten

Subject of this lecture is the history of the European Folk Souls. Spiritual life of Europe a unity. Mission of Europe before and after Christ, to educate and develop the ego. Every single nation has its special contribution to make to this task. For development of the ego a mingling of races and nations necessary. Tacitus describes Germanic tribes as still immersed in Group-Soul. Celtic Folk Spirit helped to awaken ego out of group-soul life. The Druid priests and the Mysteries. Man had to become more self-sufficient; hence Mysteries gradually withdrew. The successive stages of post-Atlantean civilizations. Relation of culture-epochs to members of man's being summarized. Indians saw with forces of etheric body; in Persians, organ of perception was the astral body; in Egyptians and Chaldeans the Sentient Soul; in Greeks and Romans the Intellectual Soul. In the fifth epoch the forces of the ego are directed to the physical plane. Romans were founders of civil law and jurisprudence; Italy and Southern Spain subject to Sentient Soul, France to Intellectual Soul, Great Britain to Spiritual (or Consciousness) Soul. In Britain union of ego and Spiritual Soul led to foundation of constitutional rights and Parliamentary Government. Outward orientation. Task of South Germanic peoples to prepare Spiritual Soul more inwardly. Hegel and Fichte: sublimation of clairvoyant insight of old Germanic peoples.

Polarity of India and China. Chinese civilization a static continuation of Atlantean wisdom. The Great Wall of China. Oceanus. The Gulf Stream encircling the old Atlantean continent. In the sixth culture-epoch Spirit Self will irradiate the Spiritual Soul. This civilization is being prepared by Slavonic peoples. Future potentialities of Russian soul in Solovieff. Solovieff perceives dual nature of Christ. His conception of a Christian Social State contrasted with Divine State of St. Augustine. To Russian people is given the seed of the sixth culture-epoch, but had to be nurtured by the Christian Time Spirit (who had been the Time Spirit of ancient Greece).

Lecture Eleven

Pictures or symbols of Teutonic mythology contain occult truths. Reference to Occult Science—an Outline which describes the descent of human souls from the planetary spheres in late Lemurian and Atlantean times and their incarnation in human bodies. This event perceived clairvoyantly by those on Earth. The memory of this event survived amongst Southern Germanic peoples and was described by Tacitus in his Germania. Worship of Goddess Nerthus. Evolution on physical plane inspired by earlier stages of clairvoyance. Freyr, continuer of old clairvoyance. Riesenheim. Marriage of Freyr and Gerda. Symbols of Freyr's horse Bluthof and his magic ship. End of Kali Yuga in 1899 and the second coming of Christ. This will not be a physical manifestation, but will be etherically perceived—at first by a select few, then by increasing numbers of people. Need for objectivity: occult teaching accepts neither dogmas nor authorities. All teachings to be verified. Dangers of new materialism which looks for Christ's return in a physical body. False Messiahs, e.g. Sabbatai Zevi in the seventeenth century.

Ragnarok again. Picture of relics of old clairvoyance in Fenris Wolf. Forces of old Gods no longer avail. Danger of survival of old clairvoyance in future. Old clairvoyance must be transformed. The Christ in etheric form will drive out old, dark clairvoyant powers, i.e. Vidar will overcome the Fenris Wolf. Future mission of Teutonic Archangel. Importance of Slavonic peoples for spiritual development of all mankind. All nations to contribute to united progress of mankind. Christ Impulse overcomes separation: Christianity leads to ideal of the brotherhood of man.