The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is one of the aims of our spiritual-scientific endeavour to form concrete ideas of how we, as human beings upon earth, live with the spiritual worlds, even as we are connected through the physical body—its experiences and perceptions—with the physical world.

At the present stage of our studies we may well take our start from what is already known to us—what has already come before our souls during these years. Here, for instance, is the world of our sense-perceptions, the world to which we direct our will-impulses for which the physical body mediates—that is to say, our actions. Immediately behind it, as you know, there is the elemental world. That is the next world behind this one. It is not a question of the name; we might have named it differently. To gain clear and living ideas of these super-sensible worlds we must at least enter into some of their peculiarities. We must try to recognize what they are for us as human beings. For in truth our whole life between birth and death—and also our subsequent life which takes its course between death and a new birth—depends on our co-existence with the various worlds that are spread out around us. We call the ‘elemental world’ that world which can only be perceived by what we know as ‘imaginations.’ Hence we may also call it the ‘imaginative world.’ In ordinary human life, under ordinary conditions, man cannot lift into consciousness his imaginative perceptions—his perceptions of the elemental world. Not that the imaginations are not there, or that in any given moment of our sleeping or waking life we are not in relation to the elemental world, receiving imaginations from it. On the contrary, imaginations are perpetually ebbing and flowing in us. Though we are unaware of it, we constantly receive impressions from the elemental world. Just as when we open our eyes or lend our ears to the outer world we have sensations of colour and light, perceptions of sound, so do we receive continual impressions from the elemental world, giving rise to imaginations—in this case, in our etheric body. Imaginations differ from ordinary thought in this respect. In ordinary, every-day human thoughts, only the head is concerned as an instrument of conscious assimilation and experience. In our imaginations, on the other hand, we partake with almost the whole of our organism—albeit, it is our etheric organism. In our etheric organism they are constantly taking place—we may refer to them as unconscious imaginations, since it is only for an occultly trained cognition that they rise into consciousness. Moreover, though they do not enter our consciousness directly in every-day life, they are by no means without significance for us. No, for our life as a whole they are far more important than our sense-perceptions, for we are united far more intensely and intimately with our imaginations than with our sense-perceptions.

From the mineral kingdom, as physical human beings, we receive few imaginations. We receive more through all that we develop by living with the plant-world and with the animal. But the greater part, by far, of what lives as imaginations in our etheric body is due to our relations to our fellow human beings, and all that these relations entail for our life as a whole. In fact, our whole relation to our fellow human beings—our whole attitude towards them—is fundamentally based on imaginations. Imaginations always result from the way we meet another human being, and though, as I said, to ordinary consciousness they do not appear as imaginations, nevertheless they make themselves felt in the sympathies and antipathies which play such an overwhelming part in our life. To a greater or lesser degree, we develop sympathies and antipathies with all that approaches us as human beings in this world. We have our vague undefined feelings, slight inclinations or disinclinations. Sometimes our sympathies grow into friendship and love—love which can be so enhanced that we think we can no longer live without this or that human being. All this is due to the imaginations which are perpetually called forth, in our etheric body, by our life with our fellow human beings. In fact we always carry with us in life something that cannot quite be called memory—for it is far more real than memory. We bear within us—shall we say—these enhanced memories or imaginations which we have received from all the impressions of the human beings with who we have ever been, and which we go on receiving all the time. We bear them within us, and they constitute a goodly portion of what we call our inner life. I mean not the inner life that lives in clear, well-defined memories, but that inner life which makes itself felt in our prevailing mood and feeling and outlook—our outlook on the world itself, or on our own life in the world. We would go past the world around us coldly and we would live with our contemporary world indifferently if we did not unfold this imaginative life by living together with other beings—and notably with other human beings.

It is, as we might say, our soul's interest in the surrounding world which makes itself felt in this way. It belongs especially to the elemental world, and notably to our own etheric body. It is, above all, inherent in the forces of our etheric body, and it makes itself felt in this way. Sometimes we feel ourselves immediately ‘caught’ and interested. Such interest as is often woven from the very first moment between one human being and another is due to definite relationships which arise between the one—the one etheric human being—and the other, bringing about the play of imaginations hither and thither. We live with these imaginations and with our resulting sympathies, of whose effect and intensity we are often largely unaware, or aware only in the vaguest way. Indeed, when our everyday life is not wide-awake but runs along more or less obtusely, we often fail to observe them at all.

We belong with all this to the elemental world, for it is out of the elemental world that we have our own etheric body. Our etheric body is our instrument of communication with the elemental world. With it, however, we do not only spin out relationships to those other etheric bodies which belong to physical beings. We are also related with our etheric body to spiritual beings of an elemental character. The ‘beings of an elemental character’ are precisely those who are able to call forth in us imaginations—conscious or unconscious. We are perpetually related to a multitude of elemental beings. It is in this that one human being differs from another. They have their several relationships—one person to a given set of elemental beings, another to another set of elemental beings. Moreover, the relations of the one human being to certain elemental beings may sometimes coincide with the relations of the other to the same beings. One thing, however, must be observed in this connection. While we are always, in a manner of speaking, akin to a large number of elemental beings, we have relations of special intensity to one elemental being, who is in essence the counterpart of our own etheric body. Our own etheric body is intimately related to one particular etheric being. Just as our etheric body—what we call our etheric body from birth until death—develops its own relations to the physical world inasmuch as it is inserted in a physical body, so does this etheric entity, which is as it were the counterpart or counter-pole of our own etheric body, enable us to have relations to the whole of the elemental world—the whole of the surrounding, cosmic-elemental world.

We gaze upon an elemental world to which we ourselves belong by virtue of our etheric body, and with which we stand in manifold relations—specific relationships to such and such elemental beings. In the elemental world we make acquaintance with beings who are truly no less real than human beings or animals in the physical—beings, however, who never come to incarnation, but only to ‘etherization,’ so to speak, for their densest corporeality is ethereal. Just as we go about among physical people in this world, so do we constantly go about among such elemental beings, while other elemental beings—more remote from ourselves—are related in their turn to other people. A certain number, however, are more nearly related to ourselves, and one among them—related to us most nearly of all—acts as our organ of communication with the entire cosmic-elemental world. Now in the time immediately following our passage through the Gate of Death, when for a few days we still bear our etheric body with us, we ourselves become precisely such a being as these elemental beings are. In a manner of speaking, we ourselves become an elemental being. We have often described this process of the passage through the Gate of Death, but the more exactly we study it, the clearer the imaginations it provides. For the impressions we receive immediately after the passage of a human being through the Gate of Death always consist in imaginations—make themselves felt as imaginations.

Observing the process more exactly, we find that there is a certain mutual interplay, immediately after death, between our own etheric body and its etheric counterpart. The fact that our etheric body is taken from us a few days after death is mainly due to its being attracted—drawn in, as it were—by this etheric counterpart. Henceforth it becomes one with the etheric counterpart. A few days after death we do in fact lay aside our etheric body, we hand it over, so to speak; but it is to our own etheric counterpart that we hand it over. Our etheric body is taken from us by our own cosmic prototype or image and, as a result, special relations now emerge between what is thus taken from us and the other elemental beings with whom we have been related in any way during our life. We might describe it thus: a kind of mutual relation now arises between what our own etheric body has become—united as it now is with its counterpart or counter-image—and the other elemental beings who accompanied us from birth till death. It might be compared to the relation of a sun to its associated planetary system. Our etheric body with its cosmic counterpart is like a kind of sun, surrounded—as a kind of planetary system—by the other elemental beings. This mutual interplay gives rise to the forces which instill into the elemental world—in the right manner and in slow evolution—what our etheric body is able to take into that world. That which we commonly refer to in abstract terms—‘the dissolution of the etheric body’—is essentially a play of forces, engendered by this sun-planetary system which we have left behind. Gradually, what we acquired and assimilated to our etheric body in the course of life becomes a part of the spiritual world. It weaves itself into the forces of the spiritual world. We must be very clear on this. Every thought, every idea, every feeling we develop—however hidden it remains—is of significance for the spiritual world. For when the coherence is broken by our passage through the Gate of Death, all our thoughts and feelings pass with our etheric body into the spiritual world and become part and parcel of it. We do not live for nothing. Even as we receive them into the thoughts we make our own, into the feelings we experience, so are the fruits of our life embodied in the cosmos. This is a truth we must receive into our whole mood and outlook; otherwise we do not rightly conduct ourselves in the spiritual-scientific movement. You are not a spiritual scientist merely by knowing about certain things. You are so only if you feel yourself, by virtue of this knowledge, within the spiritual world; if you know yourself quite definitely as a member in the spiritual world. Then you will say to yourself: the thought you are now harbouring is of significance for the entire universe, for at your death it will be handed over to the universe in such or such a form.

Now after a human being's death we may have to do, in one form or another, with what is thus handed over to the universe. Many of the ways in which the dead are present to those whom they have left behind are due to the fact that the etheric human being—which has, of course, been laid aside by the real individuality—sends back his imaginations to the living. And if the living person is sensitive enough, or if he is in some abnormal state or has normally prepared himself by proper spiritual training, the influences of what is thus given over to the spiritual world by the dead—the influences, that is to say, of imaginative natures—can emerge in him in a conscious form.

But there still remains a connection after death between the true human individuality and this etheric entity which has separated from him. There is a mutual interplay between them. We can observe it most clearly when by spiritual training we come into actual intercourse with this or that dead individual. A certain kind of intercourse can then take place, as follows: to begin with, the dead human being conveys to his etheric body what he himself wishes to transmit to us who are still in the physical world. For only by his transmitting it to his etheric body—as it were, making inscriptions in his etheric body—only by this means can we, who are here in the physical, have perceptions of the dead in terms of what we call ‘imaginations.’ The moment we have imaginations of him, the etheric body of the dead—if you will pardon my use of the trivial and all too realistic term—is acting as a ‘switch’ or ‘commutator.’ Do not imagine that our relations to the dead need be any the less deeply felt because such an instrument is needed. A person who meets us in the outer world also conveys his form to us by the picture which he calls forth in us through our own eyes. So it is with this transmission through the etheric body. We perceive what the dead wishes to convey to us by ‘getting’ it, so to speak, via his etheric body. This body is outside him, but he is so intimately related to it that he can inscribe in it what lives within himself, and thus enable us to read it in imaginations. There is, however, this condition. If a person who is spiritually trained wishes to come into connection with a dead human being through the etheric body in this way, he must have entered into some relation to the dead—either in his last life between birth and death, or out of former incarnations. Moreover, these relationships must have affected his soul—the soul of the one who is still living here—deeply enough for the imaginations to make an impression on him. For this can only be if in his heart and mind he had a definite and living interest in the dead person. Interests of heart and feeling must always be the mediator between the living and the dead, if any intercourse at all is to take place—conscious or unconscious. (Of the latter we shall speak presently.) Some interest of heart and feeling must be there, so that we really carry something of the dead within us. In a certain respect at any rate the dead person must have constituted a portion of our own soul's experience. Only one who is spiritually trained can make himself a certain substitute. For instance—(it may seem external at first sight, but spiritual training turns it into something far more inward)—one can give oneself up to the impression of the handwriting, or of something else in which the individuality of the dead is living. However, one can only do so if one has acquired a certain practice in making contact with an individuality through the fact that he lives in the writing. Or again, one may establish this possibility by entering with sympathy into the feelings of the physical survivors, partaking in their grief and in all the emotional interest they have in the dead person. By entering with sympathy into these real and living feelings, which flow from the dead into the dear ones whom he has left on Earth—or which remain in their inner life—a person of spiritual training can prepare his soul to read in the aforesaid imaginations.

But we must also realize the following. Though to perceive the imaginations which play over from the etheric body depends on spiritual training or other special conditions, yet at the same time what passes unperceived by people is there none the less. And we may truly say, those who are living in the physical world are not only woven around by the elemental forces, as imaginations, which proceed from other human beings living with them in the physical body. Whether we know it or not, our etheric body is constantly played-through by all the imaginations which we absorb from those who stood in any kind of relation to us and who passed before us through the Gate of Death. As in our physical life, in the physical body, we are related to the air around us, so are we related to the whole of the elemental world—including all that is there of the dead.

We shall never learn to know our human life unless we gain knowledge of these relationships, albeit they are so intimate and fine that they remain unnoticed by most people. After all, who can deny that we do not always remain the same between birth and death. Let us look back upon our lives. However consistent we may think the course of life has been, we will soon notice that we have often gone hither and thither in life, or that this or that has occurred. Even if this does not immediately change the direction of our lives, which it can of course do, it nonetheless has the effect of enriching our lives in one way or another—in a happy direction or in a painful one. It brings us into different conditions—just as when you go into another district your general feeling of health may be changed by the different composition of the air.

These moods of soul, into which we enter in our life's course, are due to the influences of the elemental world, and in no small measure to the influences that come from the dead who were formerly related to us. Many a human being in earthly life meets with a friend or with some person with whom he becomes connected in one way or another—to whom, perhaps, he finds himself obliged to do this or that by way of kindness or of criticism or rebuke. The fact that they were brought together required the influence of certain forces. He who recognizes the occult connections in the world knows that when two human beings are brought together to this end or that, sometimes one and sometimes several of those who have gone before them through the Gate of Death are instrumental. Our life does not become any the less free thereby. We do not lose our freedom because we starve if we do not eat. No one who is not deliberately foolish will say: how can a person be free, seeing that he is obliged to eat? It would be just as invalid to say that we become unfree because our soul constantly receives influences from the elemental world as here described. Indeed, just as we are connected with warmth and cold, with all the things that become our food and with the air around us, so are we connected with that which comes to us from those who have died before us. We are equally connected with the rest of the elemental world, but above all with that which comes to us from them, and we can truly say: man's working for his fellow human beings does not cease with his passage through the Gate of Death. Through his etheric body, with which he himself remains connected, he sends his imaginations into those with whom he was connected in his life. Indeed, the world to which we are here referring is far more real than that we commonly call real—even if, in our every-day life, for very good reasons, it remains unperceived. So much, for today, about the elemental world.

A further realm which is ever present in our environment, and to which we ourselves belong no less than to the elemental world, is the soul world—for so we may call it. (It is not the name that matters.) With the elemental world we are always connected in our waking life, and in sleep, too, indirectly, when with our ego and astral body we are outside the physical and the etheric; when our body that lies there in the bed, and our etheric body, are still connected with the elemental world. But with the higher world to which I now refer, we are connected most directly—only that this too cannot rise into our consciousness in ordinary life. We are connected with it in sleep when we have our astral body freely around us, and also in waking life—albeit then the connection, mediated as it is by forces which the physical body has drawn into itself, is no longer so direct.

Now in this world-of-soul (let us call it the soul world for the present; medieval philosophers referred to it as the heavenly world or the celestial) in this world, once more, we find beings who are just as real as we are during our life between birth and death, nay, more so. They are, however, beings who do not need to come to embodiment in a physical, or even in an etheric, body. They live—as in their lowest corporeality—in that which we are wont to call the astral body. Constantly, during our life and after our death, we are connected intimately with a large number of these purely astral beings. Here, too, human beings differ from one another inasmuch as they are related to different astral beings—albeit, here again, two people may have their relationships to one or more astral beings in common, while at the same time each of them has his several relations to other astral beings.

It is to this world, in which these astral beings are, that we ourselves belong from the time when, after passing through the Gate of Death, we have laid aside our etheric body. We with our own individuality are then among the beings of the soul world. We are such beings at that time, and beings of the soul world are our immediate environment. True, we are also related to the content of the elemental world, inasmuch as we can kindle in it that which calls forth imaginations as aforesaid. We have, however, the elemental world in a certain sense outside us—or, as one might also say, beneath us. It is a portion of which we rather make use for purposes of communication with the remainder of the world, while we ourselves belong directly to what I have now called the world-of-soul. It is with the beings of the soul world that we have our intercourse, including other human beings who have also passed through the Gate of Death and, after a few days, laid aside their etheric bodies.

Now just as we constantly get influences from the elemental world, although we do not notice it, so too we constantly receive influences—straight into our astral body—out of this world-of-soul which I am now describing. It is only the immediate, straightforward influences which we thus receive that can appear as inspirations. (Of the indirect influences via the etheric body we have already spoken.) You will understand the character of such an influence from the soul world if I describe once more in a few words how it appears to one who is spiritually trained—one who is able to receive conscious inspirations out of the spiritual world. It appears to him as follows. He can only bring these inspirations to his consciousness if he is able, so to speak, to take into himself some portion of the being who wants to inspire him—some portion of the qualities, of the inherent tendency in life, of such a being.

One who is spiritually trained to develop conscious relations with a dead person, not only via the etheric body but in this direct way through inspiration, must bear in his soul even more than mere interest or sympathy is able to call forth. For a short while, at least, he must be so able to transform himself as to receive into his own being something of the habits, the character, the very human nature of the one with whom he wishes to communicate. He must be able to enter into him till he can truly say to himself, ‘I am taking on his habits to such an extent that I could do what he could, and in his way; that I could feel as he could, and will as he could, also.’ It is the ‘could’ that matters—the possibility. We must, therefore, be able to live together with the dead even more intimately. For a person of spiritual training there are many ways of coming thus near to the dead, provided the dead person himself allows it. We should, however, realize that the beings who belong to what we are now calling the world-of-soul are quite differently related to the world than we are in our physical body. Hence there are certain conditions, quite definite conditions, of intercourse with such beings—and, among others, with the dead, so long as they are living still as astral beings in their astral bodies. We may draw attention especially to certain points.

You see, all that we develop for our life in the physical body—our many and varied relationships to other people (I mean precisely those relationships which arise through earthly life)—all this acquires quite another kind of interest for the dead. Here on the earth we develop sympathies and antipathies. Let us be fully clear on this. Such sympathies and antipathies as we develop while we are living in the physical body are subject to the influences of this our present form of life, which we owe to the physical body and to its conditions. They are subject to the influences of our own vanity and of our egoism. Let us not fail to realize how many relationships we develop to this or that human being as a result of vanity or egoism—or other things that depend on our physical and earthly life in this world. We love other people or we hate them. Verily, as a rule, we take little notice of the true grounds of our loving and our hating—our sympathies and antipathies. Nay, often enough we flee from taking conscious notice of our sympathies and antipathies, for the simple reason that, if we did so, highly unpleasant truths would as a rule emerge. If, for instance, we followed up the real facts which find expression in our not loving this or that human being, we should often have to ascribe to ourselves so much of prejudice or vanity or other qualities that we are afraid to do so. Therefore we do not bring to full clarity in consciousness why it is that we hate this person or that. And with love, too, the case is often similar. Interests, sympathies and antipathies evolve in this way, which only have significance for our everyday life. Yet it is out of all this that we act. We arrange our life according to these interests and sympathies and antipathies.

Now it would be quite wrong to imagine that the dead can possibly have the same interest as we earthly people have in all the ephemeral sympathies and antipathies which thus arise under the influence of our physical and earthly life. That would be utterly wrong. Truly, the dead are obliged to look at these things from quite another point of view. Moreover, we may ask ourselves, are we not largely influenced in our estimate of our fellow human beings by these subjective feelings—by all that lies inherent in our subjective interest, our vanity and egoism and the like? Let us not think for a moment that a dead person can have any interest in such relationships between ourselves and other human beings, or in our actions which proceed out of such interests. But we must also not imagine that the dead person does not see what is living in our souls. For it is really living there, and the dead one sees it well enough. He shares in it, too, but he sees something else as well. One who is dead has quite another way of judging people. He sees them quite differently. As to the way in which the dead person sees the human beings who are here on earth, there is one thing of outstanding importance. Let us not imagine that the dead has not a keen and living interest in the world of human beings. He has, indeed, for the world of human beings belongs to the whole cosmos. Our own life belongs to the cosmos. And just as we, even in the physical world, interest ourselves in the subordinate kingdoms, so do the dead interest themselves intensely in the human world, and send their active impulses into the human world. For the dead work through the living into this world. We have only just given an example of the way in which they go on working soon after their passage through the Gate of Death.

But the dead sees one thing above all, and that most clearly. Suppose, for example, that he sees a human being here following impulses of hatred—hating this person or that, and with a merely personal intensity or purpose. This the dead sees. At the same time, however, according to the whole manner of his vision and all that he is then able to know, he will observe quite clearly, in such a case, the part which Ahriman is playing. He sees how Ahriman impels the person to hatred. The dead actually sees Ahriman working upon the human being. On the other hand, if a person on earth is vain, he sees Lucifer working at him. That is the essential point. It is in connection with the world of Ahriman and Lucifer that the dead human being sees the human beings who are here on earth. Consequently, what generally colours our judgement of people is quite eliminated for the dead. We see this or that human being, whom in one sense or another we must condemn. Whatever we find blameworthy in him, we put it down to him. The dead does not put it down directly to the human being. He sees how the person is misled by Lucifer or Ahriman. This brings about a toning-down, so to speak, of the sharply differentiated feelings which in our physical and earthly life we generally have towards this or that human being. To a far greater extent, a kind of universal human love arises in the dead. This does not mean that he cannot criticize—that is to say, cannot rightly see what is evil in evil. He sees it well enough, but he is able to refer it to its origin—to its real inner connections.

What I have here described is not without its results, for it means that an occultly-trained person cannot consciously come near to one who is dead unless he truly frees himself from feelings of personal sympathy or antipathy to individuals. He must not allow himself to be dependent, in his soul, on personal feelings of sympathy or antipathy. You need only imagine it for a moment. Suppose that an occultly-trained, clairvoyant person were about to approach a dead human being—whoever he might be—so that the inspirations which the dead was sending in towards him might find their way into his consciousness. Suppose, moreover, that the one here living were pursuing another human being with a quite special hatred—hatred having its origin only in personal relationships. Then, of a truth, as fire is avoided by our hand, so would the dead avoid such a person who was capable of hatred for personal reasons. He cannot approach him, for hatred works on the dead like fire. To come into conscious relation with the dead we must be able to make ourselves like them—independent, in a sense, of personal sympathies and antipathies.

Hence you will understand what I now have to say. Bear in mind this whole relation of the dead to the living, in so far as it rests on Inspirations. Remember that the inspirations are always there, even if they pass unnoticed. They are perpetually living in the human astral body, so that the human being upon earth has his relations to the dead in this direct way, too. Now, after all that we have said, you will well understand that these relationships depend on our whole mood and spirit here in our life on earth. If our attitude to other people is hostile, if we are without interest or sympathy for our contemporaries above all, if we have not an unprejudiced interest in our fellow human beings—then are the dead unable to approach us in the way they long to do. They cannot properly transplant themselves into our souls, or, if they must do so, in one way or another it is made difficult for them and they can only do it with great suffering and pain. All in all, the living-together of the dead with the living is complicated.

Thus man goes on working beyond the time when he passes through the Gate of Death, even directly, inasmuch as after death he inspires those who are living on the physical plane. And this is absolutely true. Notably as to their inner habits and qualities—the way they think and feel and develop inclinations—those who are living at any given time on earth are largely dependent on those who died and passed from the earth before them, who were related to them during their life, or to whom they themselves established a relation even after death—which may sometimes happen, though it is not so easy.

A certain portion of the world-ordering and of the whole progress of mankind is altogether dependent on this working of the dead into the life of earthly human beings, inspiring them. Nay, more, in their instinctive life people are not without an inkling that it is so and that it must be so. We can observe it if we consider ways of life, formerly very wide-spread, which are now dying out because humanity in the course of evolution goes ever onward to new forms of life. In bygone times when, generally speaking, they divined far more of the reality of spiritual worlds, people were more deeply aware of what is necessary for life as a whole. They knew that the living need the dead—need to receive into their habits and customs the impulses from the dead. What, then, did they do? You need only think of former times, when in wide circles it was customary for a father to take care that his son should inherit and carry on his business, so that the son went on working on the same lines. Then when the father was long dead, inasmuch as the son remained in the same channels of life, a bond of communication was created through the physical world itself. The son's activity and life-work being akin to his father's, the father was able to work on in him. Many things in life were based on this principle. And if whole classes of society attached great value to the inheritance of this or that property within the class or within its several families, it was due to their divining this necessity. Into the life-habits of those who live later, the life-habits of those who lived earlier must enter, but only when these life-habits are so far ripened that they come from them after they have passed through the Gate of Death—for it is only then that they become mature.

These things are ceasing, as you know—for such is the progress of the human race. We can already see a time approaching when these inheritances, these conservative conditions, will no longer play a part. The physical bonds will no longer be there in the same way. But all the more, to compensate for this, people must receive such detailed spiritual-scientific knowledge as will lift the whole matter into their consciousness. For then they will be able consciously to connect their life with the life-habits of former times—with which we have to reckon in order that life may go forward with continuity. Since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period we are living in a transition time. During this time a more or less chaotic state has intervened. But the conditions will arise again when in a far more conscious way—by recognition of the spiritual-scientific truths—people will connect their life and work with that which has gone before them. Unconsciously, merely instinctively, they used to do so—of that there can be no doubt. But even that which is still instinctive to this day must be transmuted into consciousness. Instinctively, for instance, people still teach in this way—only we do not observe it. One who studies history on spiritual lines will soon observe it, if only he pays attention to the facts and not to the dreadful abstractions which prevail nowadays in the so-called humanistic branches of scholarship. If we look at the facts we can well observe it: what is taught in a given epoch bears a certain character only because people attach themselves unconsciously, instinctively, to what the dead are pouring down into the present. If once you learn to study in a real way the educational ideas which are propounded in any given age by the leading spirits in education—I mean not the charlatans but the true educationists—you will soon see how these ideas have their origins in the habitual natures of those who have recently died.

This is a far more intimate living-together; for that which plays into the human being's astral body enters far more into his inner life than that which plays into his etheric body. The communion which the dead themselves, as individualities, can have with people on earth, is far more intimate than that which the etheric bodies have—or, for that matter, any other elemental beings. Hence you will see how the succeeding epoch in the life of humanity is always conditioned by the preceding one. The preceding time always goes on living in the time that follows. For in reality, strange though it may sound, it is only after our death that we become truly ripe to influence other people—I mean to influence them directly, working right into their inner being. To impress our own habits on any man who is ‘of age’ (I mean now, spiritually speaking, not in the legal sense) is the very thing we should not do. Yet it is right and according to the conditions of the progressive evolution of mankind for us to do so after we ourselves have passed through the Gate of Death. Beside all the things that are contained in the progress of karma and in the general laws of incarnation, these things take place. If you ask for the occult reasons why, let us say, the people of this year are doing this or that, then—not for all things but certainly for many—you will find that they are doing it because certain impulses are flowing down to them from those who died twenty or thirty years ago, or even longer. These are the hidden connections—the real concrete connections—between the physical and the spiritual world. It is not only for ourselves that something ripens and matures in what we carry with us through the Gate of Death. It is not only for ourselves, but for the world at large. And it is only from a given moment that it becomes truly ripe to work upon others. Then, however, it does become ever riper and riper.

I beg you here to observe that I am not speaking of externals, but of inner, spiritual workings. A person may remember the habits of his dead father or grandfather and repeat them out of memory on the physical plane. That is not what I mean; that is a different matter. I really mean the inspired influences—imperceptible, therefore, to ordinary consciousness—the influences which make themselves felt in our habits in our most intimate character. Much in our life depends on our finding ourselves obliged, here or there, to free ourselves from the influences—even the well-meant influences—coming to us from the dead. Indeed, we gain much of our inner freedom by having to free ourselves in this way, in one direction or another. Inner conflicts of soul, which a person often does not know, will grow intelligible to him when he views them in this light or that, taking his light from spiritual knowledge of this kind. To use a trite expression, we may say: the past is rumbling on—the souls of the past go rumbling on—in our own inner life.

These things are facts—truths into which we look by spiritual vision. But alas, especially in the life of today, men have a peculiar relation to these truths. It was not always so. Anyone who can study history in a spiritual way will know this. Today people are afraid of these truths—they are afraid of facing them. They have a nameless fear—not indeed conscious, but unconscious. Unconsciously they are afraid of recognizing the mysterious connections between soul and soul, not only in this world, but between here and the other world. It is this unconscious fear which holds back the people in the outer world. This is a part of that which holds them back, instinctively, from spiritual science. They are afraid of knowing the reality. They are all unaware of how they are disturbing—by their unwillingness to know reality—disturbing and confusing the whole course of world-evolution, and with it, needless to say, the life that will have to be lived through between death and a new birth, when these conditions must be seen.

Still more mature—for everything that evolves, becomes ever riper and more mature—still more mature becomes that which lives in us when it no longer has to stop short at Inspiration but can become Intuition (in the true sense in which I used the word in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. Now Intuition can only be a being that has none other than a Spirit-body (to use this paradoxical expression). To work intuitively upon other beings—and, among others, upon those who are still incarnated here in the physical life—a human being must first have laid aside his astral body; that is to say, he must first belong entirely to the spiritual world. That will be decades after his death, as we know. Then he can also work down on other people through intuition—no longer merely through Inspiration as I described it just now. Not until then does he as ego—now in the spiritual world—work in a purely spiritual way into other egos. Formerly he worked by Inspiration into the astral body—or, via his etheric body, into the etheric body of man. But one who has been dead for decades past can also work directly as an ego—albeit at the same time he can still work through the other vehicles, as described above. It is at this stage that the human individuality grows ripe to enter no longer merely into the habits of people but even into their views and ideas of life. To modern feeling, full of prejudice as it is, this may be an unpleasant truth—very unpleasant, I doubt not. None the less it is true. Our views and ideas, originating as they do in our ego, are under constant influences from those long dead. In our views and conceptions of life, those who are long dead are living. By this very means, the continuity of evolution is preserved—out of the spiritual world. It is a necessity, for otherwise the thread of people's ideas would constantly be broken.

Forgive me if I insert a personal matter at this point. I do so, if I may say so, for thoroughly objective reasons. For such a truth as this can only be made intelligible by concrete examples.

No one ought really to bring forward, as views or ideas, his own personal opinions—however sincerely gained. Therefore, no one who stands with full sincerity on the true ground of occultism—no one who is experienced in the conditions of spiritual science—will impose his own opinions on the world. On the contrary, he will do all he can to avoid imposing his own opinions directly. For the opinions, the outlook he acquires under the influence of his own personal tendency of feeling, should not begin to work until thirty or forty years after his death. Then it will work in this way: it will come into the souls of people along the same paths as the impulses of the Time-Spirits or Archai. Only then has it become so mature that its working is in harmony with the objective course of things. Hence it is necessary for everyone who stands on the true ground of occultism to avoid making personal proselytes—setting out to gain followers for his own personal views. That is the general custom nowadays. No sooner has anyone got an opinion of his own, he cannot hasten enough to make propaganda for it. That is what a real and practising spiritual scientist cannot possibly desire to do. Now I may bring in the personal matter to which I referred just now. It is no chance, but something essential to my life, that I began by writing—communicating to the world—not my own views, but Goethe's world-conception. That was the first thing I wrote. I wrote entirely in the spirit and in the sense of Goethe's world-conception, thus taking my start not from any living person. For even if that living person were oneself, it could not possibly justify one in teaching spiritual science in the comprehensive way I try to do. It was a necessary link in the chain, when I thus placed my work into the objective course of world-evolution. Therefore I did not write my theory of knowledge, but Goethe's—A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception—and in this way I continued.

Thus you will see how the development of man goes on. What he attained on earth ripens not only for the sake of his own life as he advances on the paths of karma. It ripens also for the world. So we continue to work for the world. After a certain time we become ripe to send imaginations; then—after a further time—inspirations into the habits of human beings. And only after a longer time has elapsed do we grow ready and mature enough to send intuitions into the most intimate part of man's life—into the views and conceptions of people.

Let us not imagine that our views and conceptions of life grow out of nothing—or that they arise anew in every age. They grow from the soil in which our own soul is rooted, which soil is in truth identical with the sphere of activity of human beings who died long ago.

By knowledge of such facts, I do believe human life must receive that enrichment which it needs, according to the character and sense of our age and of the immediate future. Many an old custom has grown rotten to the core. The new must be developed, as I have often said; but man cannot enter the new life without those impulses which grow in him through spiritual science. It is the feelings that matter—the feelings towards the world in its entirety, and all the other beings of the world, which we acquire through spiritual science. Our mood of life grows different through spiritual science. The super-sensible, in which we always are, becomes alive for us through spiritual science. We are and always have been living in it; but human beings will be called to know it, more and more consciously, the farther they evolve through the fifth, sixth and seventh post-Atlantean epochs and for the rest of earthly time.

These things I wanted to communicate to you today. They are indeed essential to the enrichment, the quickening of man's whole feeling for the world, and to the deepening of all his life. These things I wanted to kindle in your hearts, now that we have been able to be together once more after a lapse of time. May we be able to be together often again to speak of similar matters, so that our souls may partake in achieving that evolution of mankind which is the aim and endeavour of spiritual science.

By devoting oneself to spiritual life, it is necessary to become aware of why we, as human beings in today's world, by grasping our task as human beings in today's world, have the longing and the urge to cultivate spiritual life. This is because, since the last period of the last century, people can relate to the higher worlds in a completely different way than was the case in earlier centuries. This is something that is basically far too little taken into account: that the development of humanity from epoch to epoch always produces new impulses.

Whereas it was relatively difficult in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries to gain an understanding of the spiritual world and spiritual life from within the human soul, it will become more and more a natural need of the human soul in the coming times to seek spiritual understanding. For since the last third of the 19th century, the gates to the spiritual world have, in a sense, opened so that spiritual knowledge flows from the spiritual world for everyone who wants to receive it. In this sense, we are in a completely new epoch of human development. Those who today are drawn to anthroposophy and the anthroposophical movement as if by instinct feel what is written in the signs of the times. Fifty years ago, it would have been completely impossible to gather together to discuss the spiritual secrets of existence, because the waves of spiritual understanding had not yet begun to flow down to humanity. And we must understand that what we strive for and want must become more and more general. To do that, we must also look at the symptoms that characterize the overall development of humanity today. Today, only a few people are interested in spiritual life and have the urge to gain knowledge of the spiritual world. The masses still vigorously reject any spiritual knowledge. Now we must know how to delve into all that has led to such a state of affairs in our human development. Among the ideas that best show what has emerged as a symptom of the present era, perhaps the idea of freedom is the most important, for it is the idea that can best illustrate the evolution of the last few centuries.

It is only natural that a person out in the world today who is not seeking spiritual knowledge but who wants to be informed about the laws of the world and the human soul life, takes refuge in official science, which in turn is dominated by natural science. How do people come to know about the world? They turn to people who have learned to gain a scientific understanding of the world and who may have then also laid down in popular scientific writings how one should think about the human soul, about nature and freedom and so on. How would someone like that come to a different idea than by asking such people?

Now, in the nineteenth century, official science, in its desire to become a world view, underwent a very strange but symptomatic development. But people do not notice such very strange symptoms at all. If you ask a great scientist whether there is such a thing as an idea of freedom, he will answer: It does not exist in the sense in which the old worldviews understood this idea, because today we know that when a person, for example, consumes a certain substance, that substance immediately affects his brain, and then he can no longer properly control his brain. You see that man is dependent on his brain, so how can he be free? Or they say: In rational psychology, we show that a person who is afflicted with a mental illness and cannot speak or remember speech sounds shows abnormalities in his brain. How can you talk about freedom when man is dependent on his brain? This is what ordinary psychiatry says. For ordinary, trivial thinking, all these reasons carry a great deal of weight. Such things sound very plausible and gradually take hold in people's thinking. Unless a spiritual worldview sets minds straight again, people will fall prey to a worldview that completely denies the idea of freedom.

In this respect, science has come a long way. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, people were always looking for purpose in nature. They wondered: why does the bull have horns, why do apples grow on apple trees? — A wise world guidance, they said, has done that. It gave the bull horns to be able to push with, and it has apples grow so that man can eat them and so on. Enlightened minds of the 18th and 19th centuries have scoffed at these utilitarian reasons. They have said, ironically: Why did the world's existence cause this or that tree to grow? — Because man wants to drink wine and needs cork stoppers for his wine bottles!

Such objections to the careless way in which nature was thought of as man are entirely justified. With a person, you can always ask: what purpose does he pursue with what he does? — Now, nature had been humanized or anthropomorphized, an anthropomorphic worldview had been created that asked about goals in nature just as one can ask about a person's goal. It was perfectly legitimate for the nineteenth century to oppose this anthropomorphism, which saw nothing in nature itself, but only introduced human beings into nature. The spirits of the nineteenth century wanted to look at nature directly, to ask it themselves. They did not want to fantasize human purposes into nature. This striving was entirely justified, because the old way of looking at things transferred human soul life into nature. And it is justified to say that one wants to look at nature as it is, apart from man. It was said: We want to throw out of nature everything that belongs to man. This then led in the 19th century to an image of nature in which there was no longer anything of man in it. This gave rise to a materialistic natural science. Human concepts were pushed out of nature. In a sense, it was a correct reaction against the old doctrine of utility or teleology.

Thus a materialistic natural science arose on the premise that nothing of man can be found in this natural science. At the time, this was a perfectly justified demand. But in the second half of the 19th century, it became clear that we must also consider the human being as a natural product, we must also consider the human being as nature. This second demand, to consider the human being according to the material conditions of nature, changed everything, because the human being had been thrown out of nature. It was quite clear that man could no longer be found in this science of nature, which had been so arranged. This developed in the course of the 19th century. It was then that everything belonging to the human soul was distilled out of natural science, which can be compared to saying: I have a bottle, there is water in it. But I want an empty bottle, so I pour the water out of the bottle. And then one is surprised that there is no more water in the bottle. With the bottle, everyone immediately notices that the bottle is then empty. With science, people did not realize the folly of wanting to understand man from nature emptied of man. I am convinced that a materialistic assembly would only laugh at these simple considerations, because they are not aware of this capital mistake. Among these misconceptions, the idea of freedom, immortality and the like suffered the most. For anyone who looks at the matter as it has just been described finds it quite natural that no information about these concepts can be obtained from science.

Now it is a matter of the fact that it is indeed necessary, especially for a spiritual world view, to come to the realization that although man in his corporeality belongs to external nature and its laws, he carries something within him as a soul that can only be found by spiritual means. In other words: If we want to recognize the human being in his very own essence, then we must not look at that in man which is his outer shell between birth and death, but we must look at that which, going from incarnation to incarnation, is his actual, true essence. And it will be the task of anthroposophy to direct people's attention to those processes of the inner life that prove that there is such an eternal core of being within the human being, independent of the outer physical body.

If we first consider the human being in such a way that we admit that the actual human essence not only lives between birth and death, but is also that which places the human being in the physical world and which remains after death, then one will recognize the necessity of guiding human knowledge and cognition up to the regions where the human being, through its knowledge, participates in that higher world to which it belongs through its soul-spiritual nature. But in the moment when man enters with his knowledge into the higher worlds, he comes together with spiritual beings of the higher worlds just as he does here in the physical world with the beings of the three natural kingdoms.

Now, the most unjustified view is that which Pascal, the famous Christian researcher, once expressed and in which Maeterlinck, for example, today quite rightly agrees with him, saying that Pascal wanted that once and for all. - Pascal says: We actually have nothing from earthly existence but that it hides eternity, infinity, from us. It must be said that this belief is very widespread. Wherever one goes, one finds a justified longing for the spiritual, the eternal, which is expressed in such a way that one says: after all, earthly existence is quite unsatisfying. Only in the contemplation of the eternal can man really find satisfaction. But when one really penetrates into the eternal worlds, then something else is added to Pascal's saying. When one penetrates into eternity, one experiences that it by no means conceals earthly existence, but rather shows that everything there is designed to lead back to earthly existence.

The most peculiar objections are sometimes raised against the doctrine of re-embodiment. A lady, to whom I explained the necessity of re-embodiment with all its reasons, said to me: I do not want to come back to earth, I do not like life enough. — I tried to make her understand that her feelings had nothing to do with the matter. She listened to me and then left. From the nearest railway station she sent me a postcard on which was written: I don't want to be born again! One can laugh at such an attitude. One finds it often. One does not consider that the attitude is not important, not important what one says here on earth within this life. One just does not know that it can be quite insignificant whether one wants to return or not. They do not realize that in the time between death and the new birth they carry all the forces in their soul that long for re-embodiment, that want to return. These forces are indeed present. There everything is geared to the fact that the forces one develops there can only be satisfied when one enters earthly life again. One senses that the soul has remained imperfect, that it has not developed certain qualities in its last life on earth. Here on earth it may be unimportant whether one is perfect or imperfect, but not in the life between death and a new birth. There are irresistible forces to transform imperfection into perfection. One realizes that in many cases this can only be achieved through suffering and pain, and one knows that in order to achieve perfection, one must undergo the sufferings and joys of an earthly life. And so one enters a new incarnation with all one's might.

I have mentioned this because from such a matter one can see very clearly that our world view must become all-encompassing, that one must not draw conclusions from life between birth and death, as it presents itself to our desires and interests, about the desires and interests that one has between death and a new birth. Man only learns to think in a thorough, energetic way when he trains himself in this way to be all-round through the spiritual world view, when he learns to recognize that every thing must be considered from different sides. Even the practice of life forces man to do so in ordinary life. If one says: fire is beneficial – he is right. But if one says: Fire is very harmful, because it burns towns and villages, then that is also true. The absolute statement: Fire is good, or: Fire is evil, does not apply. With regard to fire, practical life already teaches us to recognize these two sides. But if the same is demanded for beings of the higher worlds, for example, Lucifer and Ahriman, then one does not readily accept it, but one asks: Is Lucifer a good or an evil being? Is Ahriman a good or an evil being? People want to have definitions that give them an answer to such questions, and they consider an answer to be highly unsatisfactory that says: Lucifer and Ahriman can be both good and evil. This is not demanded of fire. Here, practical life helps us to transform an incorrect judgment into a correct one.

Among the many things that are now circulating in Germany, for example, to attack us, is the fact that it was recently said: He — that is, Dr. Steiner — presents things in his public lectures as they present themselves to his view, but he avoids giving specific concepts or judgments. My dear friends, in a Greek school of philosophy, they once wanted to have a very definite concept of what a human being is. After much discussion, they agreed to say that to define the concept of a human being, a human being is a being that walks on two legs and has no feathers. The next day someone brought a plucked cockerel and said: So this is a human being, because it has two legs and no feathers. According to the definition, this must therefore be a human being! — It just so happens that when you look more closely, 'certain concepts' can be very unrealistic. Therefore, the spiritual world view will accustom people to characterizing things in a comprehensive way. Natural science has also produced a good deal of one-sided thinking, and even those who, with their spirit, would like to rise above natural scientific thinking often show - with all good will - a certain admirable naivety. In this field, one must really develop the will bit by bit to achieve full clarity.

Just as I tried to show yesterday how people who may be regarded as thorough natural scientists and whose names should not be vilified are unable to judge in the field of spiritual scientific research, so one should not, without being unjust, be immediately amazed by an idea that may be put forward with good intentions but is not sound. There is, for example, the natural scientist William Crookes. He has achieved many significant things for scientific research, but at the same time he was someone who wholeheartedly committed himself to research into immortality. He wanted to gain certainty about immortality using the usual scientific methods, and he achieved wonderful results in his mediumistic research. Now he once expressed an idea in such a way that one can also appropriate this idea, go along with it to a certain point. When someone claims that we see colors depends on the nature of our eyes, that we hear sounds, we owe to our ears, and if we had other sensory organs, the world around us would be quite different – that is quite right. When William Crookes says, “Why do you then deny the existence of a supersensible world, which is not there for you only because you have such organs that are not suited to perceive it?” — so that is also correct. He expresses this fully justified idea more precisely by assuming that he says: We perceive colors, we hear sounds, but we only see effects of electricity and magnetism. They are forces of nature, the essence of which man does not know, even if he applies them in practical life. This is found everywhere, that it is said to be natural forces, the essence of which man has not fathomed. — Admitted! In reality, it means nothing more than: Man has his eyes for colors, his ears for sounds, and so on; in the case of magnetism, man sees that the magnet attracts the iron, but he does not see magnetism itself, that which magnetism actually is. With electricity, he perceives light and heat effects, but not electricity itself. Now William Crookes says: What would the world be like for beings that could perceive electricity and magnetism directly with special sensory organs, but not light, colors, sounds, and so on? If we could not perceive light, a crystal would be opaque to us, as would glass, and there would be no point in putting windows in. They would only prevent us from having contact with the outside world. If, on the other hand, we had organs for electric current, we would see a telegraph wire as a line of light running through the dark space; we would perceive flowing, luminous electricity there. If we had an organ for magnetism, we would perceive magnets in such a way that magnetic forces would radiate in all directions, and so on. William Crookes now says: It is not unlikely that there are such beings whose organs are attuned to vibrations that our organs leave untouched. Such beings live in a completely different world from us. And he then considers what this world would look like. In this world, glass and crystal are dark bodies; metals, because they conduct electricity, are somewhat lighter, interspersed with dark parts. A telegraph wire would be a long, narrow hole in a body of impenetrable solidity. A working dynamo would resemble a conflagration, and a magnet would even fulfill the dream of medieval mystics of an eternal lamp that never goes out.

William Crookes has dealt with this beautifully, and in this way one can already give an idea of how nonsensical it is to claim that this sensual-physical world is the only one, that there is no other world than just ours, and that there cannot be beings other than human beings. All true! But there is something else that can be said about this idea – and this is where the other side of the matter begins, which concerns the true spiritual researcher. Let us suppose that we ask the question: What would it be like if, instead of eyes, man really had these organs to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, if this idea, which a person naively puts forward, were realized in us humans, what would it be like? Then we human beings would find our way around in the realm of electricity and magnetism just as directly as we now find our way around in the realm of light and sound. But that would have a consequence. If man had an organ for the direct perception of electricity and magnetism, then, at the same time as this organ, which would then be an organ of knowledge for him, he would have the power and the authority to kill or make sick every other human being. This ability would be conferred directly by such an organ.

This is what spiritual science has to say about William Crookes' idea, because spiritual science knows that the human being is permeated by such forces, which have a kinship here on earth with magnetic and electrical forces. Now the question takes on a completely different meaning; now the touch of naivety in the simple posing of such an idea becomes really apparent. While a person who has no higher vision posits the idea of looking into the electrical and magnetic forces, for the spiritual researcher what has just been said follows immediately from it. When we realize this, we first come to realize that we must not remain on the surface if we really want to delve into and understand the wisdom that underlies the order of the world. For this insight of the spiritual researcher shows us that it is very good for man that he does not have the electrical and magnetic organs, that he cannot harm his fellow human beings with them. In this way, his lower instincts and desires cannot be satisfied in such a way as to be fatal for him and the world. Man has a world around him that allows him, through a slow and gradual education, to conquer these lower forces and then ascend to the higher forces.

That is the whole purpose of evolution on earth: that man, passing through many earth-lives, in manifold undulating movements, gradually heads towards perfection, but in such a way that he learns to put his lower powers, instincts and longings at the service of higher ideas and motives. He would not be able to do this if, at the time when he was only developing morality in the course of his evolution on earth, he had been given organs that allowed him to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, because then the temptation would have been too strong to kill people he did not like for whatever reason, and to leave only those people on earth who were right for him.

Thus we see that only the spiritual world view actually gives us the opportunity to look at existence from all sides and to penetrate deeper into it. When a person really becomes a spiritual researcher, as could only be briefly characterized in yesterday's public lecture, he really enters the spiritual world and then becomes aware that the higher hierarchies are around him there, as the three kingdoms of nature are around him here. There we learn to recognize certain entities, which we call the luciferic and ahrimanic beings. What then are the luciferic beings? They are those that belong to beings who, during their previous incarnation on earth, in the old lunar age, remained behind in their development, thus did not enter into the full hardening of earthly existence, into which the human being has entered, but remained at a stage that lies before the materialization of the human being. As a result, they and their powers have remained more spiritual than the human being is. In their development they could only reach a stage that is more spiritual than the stage in which man undergoes his earthly embodiments. By permeating human nature with their powers, they have caused human nature to contain more spirituality than it should actually have. If these Luciferic forces had not been present, man would have had in his astral body, in the lower unconscious forces as compared with the conscious ego forces, a personal spiritualization in the form of the Luciferic forces, but not such forces as he now has. Through the Luciferic influence man's lower nature has become more spiritual than it would otherwise have been. Man would have received everything he should have received on earth from the progressive powers, but he would not be as spiritual as he is today. He would have escaped the Luciferic impact.

But man would also lack something else. Without this influence, man could not have had freedom, because if this influence of Lucifer had not come, he would have carried out all his actions in such a way that, when he had to do this or that, he could only have looked to the motives that would have come to him from the spiritual world in the form of ideas. Whatever man would accomplish on earth, he would accomplish in such a way that he would see the idea underlying it like a picture showing him what had to happen, without him having to form this idea. It would be like an inspiration from the higher worlds, and this would affect him in such a way that he could not possibly resist it. He would naturally follow the will of the gods.

But now the Luciferic influence was there. Through it, man has come into the position of not simply allowing the motives for an act to flow to him, but he must first prepare these motives himself through his own work from the depths of his soul. He must educate himself to moral ideas, and man would not be able to educate himself to moral ideas if the Luciferic influence had not come. For through this a more spiritual element has entered into our astral nature. Thus it is not only the idea of morality that works in our consciousness of self — for the idea of morality would work in such a way that it would not occur to any human being to do evil, since the idea of good for an action would be directly presented to his spiritual eye by divine spiritual beings — but the instincts and passions also work with it. This idea would not be able to arise in the consciousness of the ego at all if its astral nature, individually shaped by the influence of Lucifer, did not confront it. This influence of Lucifer has brought about that in our nature, out of the unconscious and towards consciousness, purification must take place, that we must work our way up to conscious moral ideas and motives in the struggle with ourselves, and then follow these ideas of our own accord. Thus it is Lucifer who enables us to follow moral ideas after we have first worked them out for ourselves.

Now we can say: So there is a power that arises from within us when we work towards moral ideas. Where is this power in man, if man is not moral by nature but must educate himself to be so; where is the power that works in the soul from out of the unconscious to present moral ideas to man? Where is it in us that we can bring it out of ourselves? If man becomes a spiritual researcher, if he is able to look into the spiritual world, then he also discovers where the power that generates moral ideas is to be found. It is constantly at work in the unconscious forces; it is in man, but in the ordinary world it is used for something quite different. When we act in the ordinary world before we have set ourselves moral goals, we act under the influence of our urges, desires and instincts. But we can only act when we put our body into action. Here we are constantly working with unconscious forces, for unless one has studied spiritual science, who knows what forces are at work when one bends an arm, puts one foot in front of the other, and so on? Without spiritual science, one does not know what forces are at work in man. No one knows how his movements, how everything that works so that he can be an active person in the physical world, how that comes about and what force is at work. This is only noticed by the spiritual researcher when he comes to so-called imaginative knowledge. First, one makes images that work by drawing stronger forces from the soul than are otherwise used in ordinary life. Where does this power come from that unleashes the images of imaginative experience in the soul? It comes from the place where the forces that make us active human beings in the world are at work, that make us move our hands and feet. Because this is the case, you can only access your imagination if you are able to remain still, if you can bring the movements of your body to a standstill, if you can control it. Then you notice how this power, which otherwise moves the muscles, flows up into the soul and mind and forms the imaginative images. So you are actually rearranging the forces. So down there in the depths of the body is something of our very own nature, of which we feel nothing in ordinary life. By switching off the physical, the spirit, which otherwise comes to expression in our actions, penetrates up into the soul and fills it with what it would otherwise have to use for the physical. The spiritual researcher knows that he must withdraw from the body what the body would otherwise consume. For imaginative knowledge, therefore, the bodily must be eliminated. In ordinary life, we do think, we do form ego-conscious images, but the just-discussed power flows down into our organs in our organism in waking consciousness, becomes effective there and is not used at all, as a rule, to become spiritually visible in the soul.

If we are not spiritual researchers, we have no control over this power; we have to leave it down there in the subconscious, but it does something, this power. It works on our moral ideas. When it flows up consciously, one educates oneself by means of this power to imaginative knowledge; if it is not consciously used for that, it serves man in his actions in the world. But man is not always in action, in activity; then this power, which sits below, is unconsciously released, and it then also works on the realization of moral ideas. So the same power that moves the limbs, that spiritually permeates the body so that man can grasp, walk, and so on, that power sometimes releases itself in the human 'body and produces moral ideals. If you can admire a moral thinker somewhere, who alone develops lofty ideals, you see in these ideals the release of the same forces that play in his hand movements and so on. So, to develop moral ideals, man must, so to speak, first come to rest.

But one can also develop moral ideals and then not follow them, because the forces we use to develop moral ideas, we also use to move and they can be used for one and for the other. Developing moral ideals does not yet mean being moral. Only following them means acting morally. The moral ideals then emerge like memories. As long as you still have to educate yourself to them, you have to use the same strength to generate them that you will need later to follow them. We carry them as memories within us as our moral norms. Therefore, man must be educated in morality so that these memories arise within him as his moral norms and he can follow them.

Who is it then that works in us to conjure up these moral ideals from our nature? That is Lucifer. He urges us to produce our moral ideas, our free morality, out of ourselves. Man owes it to Lucifer that he must produce his moral freedom out of himself. There is no freedom in nature. Freedom is only found by carrying out and realizing that which permeates the human being spiritually and soulfully. By penetrating the lower desires of the human being, Lucifer not only became the seducer of the human being, but at the same time the creator of human freedom. Through Lucifer's impulse, man was made free.

So when we study the innermost nature of our physical body in the way that science studies nature, and follow the laws of logic, we come to this origin of human freedom. If someone were to say today: I don't believe in magnetism, I only see an iron and that cannot possibly attract another iron, that's fantasy —, then this refutes life practice. But in the realm of soul and spirit, people do behave in such a way as to deny the forces that are present. Luciferic forces are inherent in freedom. Without these luciferic forces, we could not be free beings; we could never develop ethical impulses from the depths of our souls and act upon them. We will only understand freedom when we understand that the physical-sensual nature of man is permeated by a spiritual-soul nature, which is already expressed in the hand movement, but which can be released consciously in the imaginations of the spiritual researcher, unconsciously in the presentation of moral motives. When we look within, we also get to know the good side of Lucifer, and one can no longer say: Lucifer is an evil being – for he is also the bringer of human freedom.

Now, however, man also transforms other forces in his soul into bodily functions, for example, when speaking, when the speech organ is set in motion by the brain. In this case, we are not in action with the whole body, but by setting the organization of the physical body in motion from the spiritual-soul, we perform an inner activity. When we speak, spiritual-soul forces intervene in the so-called Broca's organ, which is located in the third cerebral convolution, and then in the larynx. If we withdraw this power, which acts on the Broca's organ, from speaking, as it were, if we become aware of it without using it to speak, then we have grasped it in its spiritual-soul aspect. Let us suppose, for example, that you meditate in such a way that you place yourself in the forces of your soul, which would otherwise be expressed in speech, without speaking, you remain silent. When one thus arrests the soul-life in its inner being, before it intervenes in the bodily, one has grasped a power in oneself that leads to so-called inspiration, to spiritual hearing. The occult saying about so-called “silent knowledge” is based on this. What is meant is a kind of silence in which one inwardly applies the forces that would otherwise flow into the larynx. These forces penetrate into the soul and make it inwardly active. In this way one enters into the world of inspiration.

This world of inspiration is basically a world that is separate from the world of mere imagination when the spiritual researcher enters it. It is a world through which other beings of the spiritual worlds express themselves to us. In our present cycle of time, it is the case that, as if by a law of nature, such forces are unconsciously coming more and more to expression in man as well, which otherwise only live out in the organs of the physical body and their inner activities.

When the power that a person would otherwise use to speak is released in him as if by natural necessity, this power enables him to perceive a spiritual reality, which corresponds to inspiration. This is different from perceiving images in imaginative knowledge with the eye of a true seer. This power, which is active in our moral ideas, enables us to recognize the good side of the Luciferic beings. When we can perceive with this power, which is otherwise used to speak, then we enter into the sphere for which, without all religious prejudice, the Gospel of John gives us the right understanding by saying: “In the beginning was the Word.” This “Word” is heard when one can so subdue one's own word, one's own corporeality, that the power which otherwise speaks through the larynx can be held back before the larynx, and thus be set free.

So what was the obstacle that prevented people from perceiving the word of the world from the very beginning? It was that they had to learn to speak! But in the process of further development, language will indeed become something very strange. Language has changed a great deal in the course of human development. If we go back to the original stages of language, people were still directly connected with language. Even today, in the country, we find that man lives and moves much more in it, is more closely knit to it. He still feels, when uttering a word, that there lies in it something like an image of what he sees around him. The further human evolution advances, the more abstract the word becomes; it becomes only a sign of what it is meant to express. Language becomes more and more inorganic,

increasingly arabesque-like, ever more alien to the human being. Why is this so? In this alienation of language from the inner meaning of words, those forces that were formerly used to develop language are laid bare. This in turn is connected with the fact that spiritual perception of the Christ-being will soon come, precisely because man's power to form speech is being released. In ancient times speech was closely connected with the human organism, now it is beginning to emancipate itself from it. Thus the power to form speech is being released and will be used for the perception of the World Word, the spiritual Christ.

Thus we have considered two sides of human nature; how man, on the one hand, uses the luciferic power in the free creation of moral ideals, and how, on the other hand, through the release of the speech-forming power – through something, therefore, that he shares with all mankind, since these powers are released within all mankind – he attains the power to perceive the Christ spiritually. We can penetrate to the Christ impulse because we are members of the whole human race. To the same extent that language becomes more and more abstract and the power of speech emancipates itself from the organism in human nature, man prepares himself to truly perceive the spiritual Christ. This is the other side of human evolution. While man has inwardly become freer through the influence of Lucifer, in that the latter gave him the possibility of forming his moral ideas, he will, as through an external force, acquire for himself the ability to connect with the Christ. The Christ will approach man in such a way that He will pour out His nature as the epitome of moral ideas over the whole evolution of mankind. When the Christ-being thus becomes known to all mankind, the Christ-entity will have in itself something of the nature of moral motives. And here we touch on something that shows how anthroposophy can rise to a level where the highest sense of truth can unite with the noblest moral motives. In my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom', which was completed twenty years ago, I tried to show that real freedom is present in the human soul when a person follows the moral motives that he has raised to consciousness. What is the nature of these moral motives? They do not force; we follow them without compulsion. No motive is moral that forces. Motives that we follow out of compulsion are brought to us from the outside world. Moral motives can be recognized by the fact that we cannot follow them either. We must let their value penetrate us in a free way. Man only professes the ethical-moral motives in a truly moral way when he goes to them, when they do not impose themselves on him. That is the characteristic of moral motives. The Christ, when humanity recognizes Him in spirit, will have this in common with ethical motives: that one can also deny Him, that He forces no one to acknowledge Him. The old gods still worked on other powers of the human soul. They still touched man where he had not yet raised himself to consciousness. But the Christ will consciously appear to man in his spirituality to the extent that man has freed himself in consciousness and will have risen to him. He will be there for all who want to recognize him, without forcing anyone to acknowledge him. He will appear before humanity in such a way that people can follow Him freely. Just as a moral motive does not force a person, but leaves him free to follow this motive or not, so it will also be with the Christ-Being: a person must be fully aware of the value of this Christ-Being if he wants to follow it. In the future, the recognition of the Christ-being will be at the same time a free deed of the soul for every single human being. This will be the infinitely significant fact that we may struggle to a truth that does not force us to recognize it, but that we only recognize when we see its full value.

Thus, the idea that anthroposophy gives us of Christianity — which will only come into its true form — will indeed bring a truth to people that is, in the most eminent sense, a free truth at the same time. The following, given in pictorial form, can be added to this, which can then be further understood through meditation. The same word has been used twice in the development of humanity: Once at the temptation in Paradise, when Lucifer said to man: “You will be like the gods; your eyes shall be opened.” This is the pictorial expression for the Luciferic impulse. With it, Lucifer poured spirituality into the lower nature of man and in return gave man the possibility of attaining inner freedom through moral motives. And a second time it was said, now by the Christ: Are you not gods? The same Word! From this it is evident that it is not only the content of a word that is important, but the essence that a word expresses, the way in which a word is spoken. There we see the necessary connection between the act of Lucifer and the act of the Christ, also expressed in a figurative way, as the religious documents tend to do.

Lucifer is the bringer of personal freedom for the individual human being; Christ is the bearer of freedom for the whole human race, for all humanity on earth. That is the significance of anthroposophy: it teaches us that the recognition of the Christ-being will take place in such a way that it is up to the individual to recognize the Christ or not, just as it is up to the individual not to be moral.

The Christ should be a free truth for the human soul. All other truths, which belong to all mankind, constrain us. But there are still truths in the bosom of the world that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, the recognition of which must be free acts of the human being and which ennoble and refine this human being by being recognized by the human being of his or her own free will. Thus does free truth, free concrete truth, reach so deeply into the developing nature of man on earth. It shows us how truth, won in freedom, belongs to the fundamental laws of human evolution.

It has been shown to us how freedom could only come into human development through the influence of Lucifer, and that man first had to rise to the truth with the help of this Luciferic impulse. In this way, humanity was still compelled to the truth; one could only recognize the truth through compulsion. But man can see this as an ideal for the future, that he can develop in such a way towards freedom and recognize truths in a free way, as set out here. Much could be said about anthroposophy, but it would be difficult to find anything more intimately connected with our need for freedom than the above statement about free truth. It must speak in the most profound and noble way to what lies at the core of our human destiny.

We can only truly grasp what it means to be human on earth when we realize what stands before us as a conscious ideal: the ideal of freedom and truth, of truth that will create an outer body for itself in freedom.

It was necessary to speak to you about such ideas of freedom at the very moment when we have won our own liberation as an Anthroposophical Society from fetters that had become impossible for us, in order to use these ideas to give a feeling-based indication of the way one should think in a society that makes such ideals the goal of its togetherness.

Now I would like to say to you in the warmest way – as all friends who have come together with our Swedish friends here from out of town will feel with me – how deeply satisfying it is, and even more deeply satisfying at the end of our event, that here in this country, what has been presented here has met with such a deep, fundamental understanding, that such a fundamental understanding has developed here for what we want with the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. And truly, not to fight against anything, but to serve in the right way our freely conceived anthroposophical ideal, may this be chosen as a farewell word. May the society that you have founded among yourselves contribute much more work and achievement to what we were able to discuss today in our lecture on the freedom of the soul in the light of spiritual scientific knowledge. May that which is already there, waiting and hoping, flow down from the spiritual worlds through this work, and may it surely come true for us humans when our work is done, which will be so tremendously significant for the development of humanity's spiritual striving. May this be the work of this branch in particular! With these words, I would like to have said my farewell to you.

When you undergo a spiritual development, you get to know the spiritual life. But there it is always, this spiritual life. For the ordinary human mind, it is much too fine and unfamiliar compared to the external world, and man cannot go beyond the familiar.

This spiritual world is the area where man lives between death and the new birth. With those souls with whom one had no connection at all here in life, no relationships can be established from here after death. The moral and intellectual life continues over there. In ordinary life, one cannot achieve such a strong ability to get in touch with that area.

Here, in the physical world, we hear what someone else says. If the disembodied soul wants to connect with another person here, it is the other way around. The disembodied soul tells us what we ask it. What comes from us, the dead person tells us, what comes from the “dead resounds in us. It is very easy to say this, but it is so difficult to fulfill, because it is usually overlooked that the messages come from us, which we think we are receiving from there. The moments of falling asleep and waking up are the most favorable for the usual communication between this world and the spiritual one. The spiritually developed person can, of course, also use other [moments].

If you want to come together with a [deceased] soul at the moment of falling asleep, then it is good to summarize what you feel for the dead person in a question to the dead person, just as you would have done when he was still alive, as far as possible in the same way as you were accustomed to during his lifetime. This can have an effect in dreams. It can lead to illusions; it is not the dead person who speaks, but what we have thought, felt and wished during the day in relation to the dead person. This comes back to us from the dead person in a dream. It is right at the moment of waking up, when something comes from the dead person into one's own soul and this comes up again during the day. During sleep, what we have thought of the dead during the day comes up; during the waking hours, what has come to us from the dead during falling asleep and waking up.

Spiritual science does nothing other than grasp with the mind's eye what is in the spiritual world. Much more plays out of the spiritual world – including the one in which the dead are – into our world than we know.

For a long time, not enough attention has been paid to what changes in the different periods. What we have experienced during life between death and a new birth lives in us. What we bring with us from the spiritual world is woven into the inherited physical body - into the blood, the nervous system, the muscles and so on. The soul that moves in with the birth is wise. We are actually tremendously wise; enchanted, we carry this wisdom within us. And we have to release what pulses as a wise being in our blood, nerve, muscle and respiratory systems. What soul mood is most suitable for this? The one that has been lost to people in recent centuries: faith in life. This is connected to a casualness in relation to religious life.

We now only really believe in our youth and young adulthood into our twenties; only up to that point can we get something out of the development of the body – up to around the age of twenty-seven. In ancient Greece, it was still possible up to the age of thirty, and so on.

But we have to replace the physical and bodily, which no longer has anything to offer, with the spiritual and soul. We must learn to believe in the whole of life. Even if I want to be able to experience something different at forty than at thirty, I have to imbue myself with the spirit that makes us capable of always experiencing something new. Not like today, of course, when twenty-year-olds are already saying, “From my point of view.” How can you have a point of view at twenty? A person must give himself impulses. Today it is the case that a person stops at the age of 27; he does not live further. That would be a person who, in terms of character, is rooted in our time, a self-made man, not a grammar school student, who already takes up traditions, not only

not only what comes from the time. Coming from a poor background, gifted with an active intellect, elected to parliament at the age of twenty-seven, and thus committed for life: that is Lloyd George, a true representative of our time.

We must rediscover our faith in the meaning of life. The different parts of the human body have different speeds, so to speak. What is in the head and what is in the trunk has different rates of development. The main organization develops relatively quickly and is completed by the twenties. The heart organism – let us call it that – develops throughout life. Our educational and social lives actually only serve the development of our minds. Our head would be ready to die at the age of 27. But there is also a spiritual side to this. If people only cared about developing their minds, humanity would soon become decrepit, physically too. It must become a principle of education that memories of youth appear like a paradise. The head that is ready to die at the age of 27 must always be able to draw new strength from what radiates from youth. Those who study spiritual science know that there are things they cannot know in their 30s or 40s, because only in their 50s can this or that enter into them. If we acquire a sense of the whole of life, then we will not be thrown back by the leap from the physical to the spiritual life, but will develop more quickly.

The leap from the physical to the spiritual life does not bring us back, but develops us faster. People today can demystify much more of the “wise” than was possible in an earlier time.

Only by starting from the point of view that Goethe can now tell us something completely different than in 1832, only by finding the strength to live with the Goethe of 1882, have I been able to achieve what is called Goethe research, which I have done.

One must set age higher, in the social higher than twenty-seven, where people are elected to parliament.

The dead should be allowed to speak. For example, Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”, what is said there about social issues, should be allowed to affect the soul of people who are socially active. We can always give something to the world after we die – let the dead be fruitful for the living. This is to be taken together with what was said at the beginning about the relationship to the dead.

Dessoir: “Philosophy of Freedom”, one of Dr. Steiner's “first works”; [in the second edition] a first work in the theosophical field - all the more wrong.

It is necessary to develop a sense for the concrete, a sense of truth; to feel pain at what is not true. Full participation, pictorial participation, has declined sharply today; that wants to get into the souls later than in the 28th year.

A speaker once said, after raising many questions: “Now I have presented you with a forest of question marks.” You just have to imagine that. You have to be careful not to slip up in your speech.

How a person expresses himself in his thoughts - the “how” of thoughts - from the way a person thinks, you can see how he stands in life. A Herman Grimm has won and fought for what he says. A Woodrow Wilson seems to be possessed by his point of view, by demons. Today it is not so much the content of what one says that matters, but the “how”, whether it is identical with the personality or whether the personality is possessed. Today it will matter less and less what the content of theories is, but rather how they are presented.

We must gain a sense of the whole of life and make it fruitful for the whole of life, including life after death, and how the hereafter is referred to here. Today, despite the catastrophic events taking place outside, life is being overslept a great deal. Many people today have not yet realized that since August 1914 we have had to think differently.

In the spring of 1914, Dr. Steiner said that there was a cancer in social life and so on. This cancer soon broke out. You have to rethink and learn to feel.

When physics and so forth speak of negative and positive and so forth today, that is quite correct, but what we say about Lucifer and Ahriman is just as correct. But there must be balance between the two poles. The Luciferic lives in the spiritual world as well as here, it lives in the selfish drives. This has long been taken into account in the social structure: medals, titles and so on. In our social structure, far too much has been attributed to the one-sided Luciferic. Now the Ahrimanic is rising. The public is at the mercy of what is printed. Now it is the case that people want to take the social structure into their own hands, so to speak, in an Ahrimanic way. Through aptitude tests, they want to find out whether a child has intellectual potential. Nothing but Ahrimanic forces are revealed by these tests, nothing of the soul itself. It would be terrible from a social point of view if the aptitude tests were to continue. The child is a mystery. Belief in the meaning of life could also have a positive effect on pedagogy, not what is achieved through aptitude tests and so on.

I wanted to make sure that what has happened in these four years would not be forgotten.

Before I continue to share some more of the Fifth Gospel with you, please allow me to make a few remarks about the announcement of this Fifth Gospel. The significance of what is to be brought to our time through occultism and spiritual science is by no means fully understood in the broader context of the present day, because there is still far too little inclination in wider circles to deal with those cultural elements of our time, namely the spiritual cultural elements and those that signify an ascent and are, so to speak, the beginning of a renewal of our spiritual life, and which yet can take no other form than that which leads to an acquaintance, however much it may still be frowned upon today, with the facts of concrete occult research.

Above all, I would ask you to bear in mind, in connection with the above, that such communications from concrete occult research must still be treated with a certain reverence today. Our time is not at all inclined to accept such things readily, and only by living with them, by feeling with them from the life impulses that we absorb in our anthroposophical togetherness, do our souls become suited to see these things in the right light. But if they are transferred to the unprepared, then what had to be handed over through the pressure of the public about the two Jesus boys shows how wild even the most well-meaning became. I will completely disregard the numerous foolish attacks that are directed against such things. How wildly and passionately such things have been received! Today it is inconceivable that knowledge can be gained from the spiritual world that is not abstract but is of such a concrete character as the research results communicated the day before yesterday. This is connected with the fact that our contemporary world-view literature has been seized by a superficiality of thinking and imagining.

Not to be unnecessarily critical, I mention one or the other of our branches in particular, but to draw our friends' attention to how miserable the situation is with pure logic of thought in our time. In our time, there is no discernment. More than one might think, especially since people are always complaining about the emancipation from all authority, people accept everything willingly and with pleasure on authority, especially in circles that often consider themselves the most educated today. One experiences such things again and again, which must be mentioned, even if only by taking up time that would otherwise be better used. I experienced something like this in Berlin at a lecture I gave in a worldview about Giordano Bruno, and where I had to mention - it was a long time ago - how little our time is suited to really getting into the thought structure of great personalities like Giordano Bruno. At the time, I drew attention to the aberration of thought, which is connected with an aberration of feeling, in a then famous book, in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity”.

In my public lecture yesterday, I pointed out that when I mention something in order to refute it, I do not mean to imply that the capacity or scientific nature of this personality is to be judged disparagingly. I just want to show how something significant can have a devastating effect through its suggestive power. So it was that in those days one of the most famous theologians of the present time recognized this writing, 'The Essence of Christianity', as something very significant. I will not go into details. For example, this writing defends the view of the resurrection of Christ Jesus, which goes something like this: Whatever may have happened in Palestine at the time, we can no longer know today, so there is no need to reconstruct the concept of resurrection; but the belief in the resurrection originated from this fact in Palestine. This belief is held, regardless of what may have happened that could have led to this belief.

The chairman of this Weltanschauungsbund told me after the lecture that he had read Harnack's “Essence of Christianity” carefully, but that he had not found this passage in the book. That would be a Catholic view. The Catholics say: It does not matter whether it is the Holy Robe in Trier or not, but it is the faith that it is the Robe that counts. He objected to it, but explained that it was not in the book. The next day I wrote him the page where it is of course stated. The learned gentleman simply skims over it. Everything that works as an authority by suggestion is so devastating today that people do not notice it, but those who truly call themselves anthroposophists must notice such things, because it is the most devastating thing in today's spiritual culture.

The name Eucken is known as the restorer of idealism. He has been awarded a famous prize. He should not be envied for that. He wrote a book entitled: “Can We Still Be Christians?” On one page, it says: “We, as educated people of the present, can no longer accept such things, that people speak of demons as they did in the time when Christ walked the earth. No educated person of the present can believe in demons.”

When a “educated” person of the present reads this, he feels very flattered. The man who paid him this compliment is his colleague. Does this educated person realize that a few pages further on in the same book, there is another sentence, “The contact between the divine and the human generates demonic powers”? That is so nicely accepted. If you quote this as nonsense, you hear the answer: He does not mean that in the sense of the demonic. When one hears this answer, one must be particularly saddened, because from this answer it becomes completely clear that today people use words in an unscrupulous way, without thinking about giving them the meaning that they should have. That is the terrible thing.

Therefore, it is only to be expected that such a distressing phenomenon has come to light as the book, which, despite being three thick volumes, is already experiencing a second edition, the book “Kritik der Sprache” by Fritz Mauthner, who, by writing a large philosophical dictionary, has become the man for many. Such phenomena must be discussed today, even if it is not pleasant. The “Critique of Language” is supposed to be the last significant critique of all philosophical worldviews. The book is quite significant in the sense of its external cleverness in the present. It is not disputed that it is an important book, full of witty aperçus. The whole of humanity's past worldviews are being lectured to. In his denunciation of a school of thought, with which I cannot sympathize either, the critic uses the following image in all seriousness: He who speaks of this school of thought is like a clown who climbs a free-standing ladder and then, having reached the top, wants to pull it up to himself. He will tumble down. — But I beg you: How do you do that if you have set up a ladder vertically and climbed up it and then pull it up to you and then tumble down? How do you carry out such a thought without being thoughtless? Most people do not notice this hollow thought because today there is little practice in logic. Otherwise one would notice that today in every second book on every twentieth page such unthoughts are found. This must also be mentioned because it is characteristic of how people think today, how thinking is suggestively influenced. I have given this example not without significance, because for those who can think, the whole book is written with the same logic, but one does not notice it. Many will not even notice the impossibility of this thought, but rather, as intellectual life is now, such a literary phenomenon will be trumpeted as something tremendously significant and many will believe that this is the case, study it, and from the sum of those who can think in such a way, the opponents of spiritual science are recruited.

I find it brutal that I am compelled to say this, but it must be said, because you should not be unaware of what is happening today. Even if not many will read the book, but what comes from it finds its way into many books and lectures and figures as logic. That is why it is so infinitely difficult, in view of the immature thinking of our time, not only to come up with spiritual-scientific thoughts, but also with the positive results of Akasha research, of which I spoke last time. This compelled me to utter the words that have just been used, that our friends should really feel the need to thoroughly and deeply penetrate each other's views – especially when it comes to dealing with things where ordinary thinking can no longer suffice – with the realization of the necessity of a strictly trained thinking. Otherwise it will, of course, take a long time before we can get through to the thinking fog of our time, which behaves so critically, with positive occult research. Of course, this can only be taken up by someone who has first prepared his soul through the results of spiritual science, which can be more deeply imprinted in thought. Only to such people can one speak of things that cannot be reached by mere thought, but which must be related as they result from Akasha research. Not incoherent, although they are only narrations, what I gave as the Fifth Gospel, they are related with what spiritual research has to give in strict thought structure, even if it does not appear so immediately.

The rejection of these concrete research results stems from nothing other than the fact that modern thinking is too dull to really penetrate the results of spiritual research. One should recognize that it is natural that a person who can form such thoughts as they have been mentioned is not at all able to really penetrate spiritual science. This is the guideline we should follow in the face of the many philosophical and ideological works that are currently being published. When dealing with such matters, we must be imbued with the idea that such things must reach at least a few souls in the present time, so that they may gradually find their way into the spiritual life of the present age.

I have often referred to the Mystery of Golgotha, to those moments of it which must be comprehensible to the most rigorous thinking if it is to engage in the contemplation of the historical evolution of humanity. We do not really have a contemplation of the historical evolution of humanity. Today we have no history, no insightful penetration into what has happened. Once we have that, then it will be recognized how, in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, human development was indeed a descending one, and how through Golgotha an impulse occurred that gave humanity that rejuvenation that influenced the aging cultural forces. Contemplation of the specific events that took place in Palestine does not in fact detract from this general idea, but on the contrary elevates it by recognizing the specific events that took place.

The day before yesterday, I got to the point where Jesus of Nazareth, after the conversation he had with his foster mother and where the ego of Zarathustra had detached itself from the three bodies, which were then in a strange combination without a human earth ego, met the two Essenes. I have endeavored to describe this scene; I have described it up to the point where Jesus, after speaking to them, stood before them as if dissolving, and they beheld him like a mirage, from which the words resounded: “Your striving is in vain because your hearts are empty, because you have filled yourselves with the spirit that deceptively hides pride in the guise of humility.” When they had heard this, these two Essenes, their eyes were clouded for a while. They saw him again only after he had gone some distance. I could ascertain from the Akashic Records that the two Essenes were deeply affected by what they had experienced, and became silent from that day on and told the other Essenes nothing.

As Jesus walked a little further, he encountered a person who appeared to be in the deepest sorrow, oppression and distress. With bowed head and a physically oppressed body, the man approached Jesus. Then he heard the Being, which I characterized the day before yesterday as Jesus at that time, speak words to him that sounded as if they came from the deepest source of that Being. This oppressed man heard Jesus say: Why has your soul led you on this path? I knew you once, thousands and thousands of years ago, you were different then. — This man felt impelled to say certain things to this being, for as earthmen we cannot describe a being such as this, which consisted only of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, with the after-effect of the Zarathustra ego in these three bodies. We can only call it an entity. The despairing man felt impelled to say to this entity: 'In my life I have attained high positions and whenever I rose to a new position I felt very much at home in my element and often the feeling came over me: “What an extraordinary person you are, that your fellow human beings hold you in such high regard, that you have been able to achieve so much on earth. What a rare person you are! I was happy about everything. But then it happened quickly that I lost that happiness. One night it happened. And just when I had fallen asleep, a dream came over me that I brought into the dream the feeling that I was ashamed of myself for dreaming something like that. I dreamt that a being stood before me and asked me: Who has made you so great, brought you to such high honors? I was ashamed that such a question could be addressed to me in a dream, because it was so clear to me that I was a rare person and that I had naturally come to these honors through my great virtues. And when the being had spoken to me in this way, I was seized in my dream by an ever-increasing sense of shame before myself, in my dream – so said this despairing man. Then I fled, but no sooner had I escaped than the apparition stood before me again in a changed form and said: I have exalted you, brought you to honor. Then I recognized him as the tempter of whom the Scriptures tell that he was already the tempter in paradise. Then I woke up and since that moment I have had no peace. I left my dignity, my home, everything, and since then I have been wandering around the world without doing anything. And now, as a beggar, I come before you, a wandering man. And at that moment, when the man had spoken – so it says in the Akasha Chronicle – the apparition was before him again, introducing itself as Jesus of Nazareth, who at that moment again disappeared before his eyes. Then the apparition dissolved, and the man was left to his fate.

Jesus continued on his way. He then met a leper and, when the man approached him, had to say the words: “Why has your soul led you this way? I saw you differently thousands and thousands of years ago, many thousands of years ago. Yes, you were different then. The leper said: “Men everywhere have rejected me because of my leprosy. Therefore I had to wander around in the world and no one took me in. I was glad when they threw out scraps at my door or at my window, which gave me meager nourishment. But I could not sit still anywhere; I had to wander from place to place. Once, in the night, I came to a forest. There, as if from afar, a tree, shaped like a flame, glowed towards me. The light attracted me. As I drew nearer and nearer, a figure in the shape of a skeleton emerged from the glowing tree and spoke to me the terrible words: “I am you! I am consuming you. Then I was overcome by the most terrible fear; and since it permeated me so that I felt on me, as the leprosy scabs clashed and crackled together, the being felt what was happening to me and said: Why are you so afraid of me? You have lived many a life before, when you loved the pleasures of life, when many things created desires in your life, which brought you the joys of everyday life, when you revelled in the pleasures of everyday life; then you loved me, you loved me, you loved me deeply. You did not always know it, but you loved me, and because you loved me so, your soul was attracted to my nature. I became you and now may feed on you. - And my fear became even greater. Then the skeleton transformed into a beautiful archangel; I looked at him. Yes, he said, you loved me once. - Then I sank into a deep sleep and in the morning I found myself lying at the tree, awakening, and wandered further in the world, and now I find you. Since this apparition came to me, the leprosy has become ever worse. As he spoke, the skeleton of the dead man stood there again and covered Jesus, who disappeared and had to continue on his way through the urge that ruled in him. The man also had to go on.

After these three encounters – with the two Essenes, with the despairing man and with the leper – which Jesus of Nazareth had in the form of which I told you last time, he continued on his way and came to John at the Jordan. What is known from the other gospels took place: the Christ-being descended from cosmic heights, took possession of the three bodies of Jesus, in which the Christ-being was to remain for three years.

The next thing I have to tell is the story of the temptation. Here the Akasha Chronicle presents the matter in more detail than the other gospels. I must just mention in advance that I shall relate it as it presented itself to me, but that it may very easily be — because it is difficult to investigate such matters and one must be careful — that later on a correction might be necessary to modify the three stages of the temptation that I shall relate. Because the sequence can sometimes be easily mixed up when observing the Akashic Records, and I am not completely sure of the order. I will only tell the story to the extent that I know it exactly.

After Jesus Christ – for now the Christ was in Jesus – had withdrawn into solitude, the first being to approach him was Lucifer, as Jesus immediately sensed, for two important perceptions first played out in his soul. He remembered how Lucifer and Ahriman had fled from the Essene Gate to join the other human beings when he had stepped through the Essene Gate after a conversation with the Essenes. He had to think of that. The second sensation that passed through his soul reminded him of the desperate man he had met on the way to the Jordan, whom this figure hid and forced him, Jesus, to go on. He now knew how to recognize such things in occult perception: it was Lucifer whom I saw fleeing with Ahriman before the Essene gate; Lucifer stood between me and the despairing man; it is he who now stands before me again.

This story can give us an idea of how occult perceptions are made when they relate to the past. They are truly not something that can be received with the same cold objectivity as other things that are told. These things express deep secrets of the world, enter into all the powers of our soul life and touch not only our imagination and ordinary understanding. That is why it is so difficult to put the words at such a distance from the corresponding occult perceptions, from these researches, that one does not need to remain silent, but can still express the shattering result of the research in words of ordinary language. Only when it is necessary to communicate such things are they communicated.

So Lucifer stood before Christ Jesus. What took place can be expressed with the words of the other gospels – they are descriptions of spiritual processes: “If you acknowledge me, I will give you the kingdoms of this world.

Thus spoke Lucifer to Christ Jesus, in whom, to be sure, the divine essence of the Christ was now present, who could understand Lucifer, but in order to understand, had to make use of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, as it had developed through the Zarathustra ego, which had permeated the astral body of Jesus, so that he could use it as a tool. Therefore, he did not hear the words as a god, so to speak, but only as a human being inspired by God: “Do you recognize me, then my angels will guard your every step.

We must now resort to what I once said in a lecture series, which has now also been published in print: that even in the old solar age, Lucifer was a being who, at that time, was equal to the Christ Being, so that So the Christ-being, who had now descended into a human body, had to feel the high cosmic rank that Lucifer had and had to feel him as an equal despite everything that had happened to him until he became the tempter. So that it can already be understood how Lucifer could address the demand to him: Recognize me. — When Lucifer speaks something like this, really says it in such a way that it pours into the human soul through occult channels, then all the forces of pride and arrogance that live in the human soul swell up powerfully. Therefore there is no other means – when the strongest temptation to succumb to feelings of arrogance and hidden pride arises – than to resist it with the most concentrated soul power.

“If you acknowledge me, I will give you all the realms that you now see around me.” These are vast realms of great splendor, these are whole worlds that Lucifer can spread out in such moments. These realms have only this one peculiarity: one can only feel desire for them out of the justified or unjustified arrogance of the soul. And one escapes only in the same way as Christ Jesus escaped in the past: by realizing this. For in that moment one feels nothing but the arrogance and pride that is in the human soul; all other feelings are paralyzed. But Christ Jesus escaped this temptation and pushed Lucifer away.

Then came the second attack. Now there were two of them. Once again, Christ Jesus had the feelings that allowed him to recognize who they were. The sensations arose again, as they had arisen in him at the two fugitives before the gates of the Essenes, and on the way to the Jordan at the appearance in conversation with the desperate and the skeleton image that had turned into the archangel. He knew that he now had the two tempters before him. The challenge, which the other gospels also correctly reproduce, was to him: “Throw yourself down, nothing will happen to you!”

In such temptations, courage that overcomes all fears speaks in a grandiose way in man, which can also make man willful. Christ Jesus was also able to beat back these two tempters.

Then came a third attack. It proceeded from Ahriman alone. He now stood alone before Christ Jesus. And there came the temptation, which can be expressed in turn with the words of the other Gospels: “Make these stones become bread with my power.”

What was to be said in answer to this question of Ahriman – this is what distinguishes the further course of events in the Fifth Gospel from the way it is related in the other Gospels – could not be answered by Christ Jesus. This question remained partly unanswered, remaining as the last unsolved remnant of the temptation. From this arose an impulse that remained effective for the further experience of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he could not fully answer the last question of Ahriman during the temptation in solitude established the connection between Christ Jesus and the earthly events that are connected with Ahriman.

If you remember how Ahriman is the lord of death, how he spreads materiality before the soul through the kind of deception he creates, so that the soul accepts the material in the deception, if you remember what was said this summer about the deeds of Ahriman in the evolution of the earth, you will find it understandable that the deeds of Ahriman are embedded in the evolution of the earth. And so it happened that a connection was created by the unanswered rest of this question between the earthly walk of Christ Jesus and the whole evolution of the earth. As it were, connected with the evolution of the earth, in so far as Ahriman is interwoven with it, was Christ Jesus through this unanswered question.

Sometimes one has to describe things in trivial terms; but they are not meant to be trivial. Ahriman makes everything appear in the material world and is preserved in it. But the fact that he handles things in this way means that an event such as Christ Jesus turning stones into bread was not possible. Ahrimanic activity prevented it. It is the same phenomenon that makes it necessary for certain stages of earthly development, in so far as they are connected with Ahriman, to be overcome only in the course of time and with the complete penetration of earthly evolution by the Christ.

What is said in the Cosmic Lord's Prayer: “Self-debts incurred by others, experienced in daily bread,” is expressed in the Ahrimanic powers, of which it is said in this Lord's Prayer: “In which heaven's will does not prevail,” but Ahriman's will, so this must be treated within the earthly lawfulness and cannot be treated merely spiritually. These things are connected with this daily bread. In the outer social world this expresses itself in the fact that we actually need material things in the form of money, of mammon, the crudest image of the Ahrimanic fetter, which then prevents stones in the social life from becoming bread, and makes it necessary for man on earth to remain connected with the Ahrimanic, with the material.

You must develop this thought further yourselves: how the injunction 'Turn stones into bread' is connected with the function of money in the social order. But the fact that the Ahrimanic power remained connected with the earthly change of Christ Jesus in this way enabled Ahriman to later flow into the soul of Judas, and to lead indirectly through Judas to the events related in the other Gospels, which then, indirectly through Judas, made Christ Jesus recognizable to his persecutors. Ahriman in Judas actually brought about Christ's death, and the fact that he was able to do so stems from the question at the temptation that was not fully answered.

But now, in order to understand the whole of Christ Jesus' earthly life, one thing must be taken into account. The Christ-being had entered the three bodies, but not in the same way that the Christ-ego is connected to these three bodies as a human ego is connected to them. At the beginning of the three years of earthly life, the Christ-entity was only loosely connected with the three bodies of Jesus, and then it was drawn more and more into the three bodies. The development in the three years consisted in this, that slowly and gradually this Christ-entity, which at first only permeated the Jesus-entity like an aura, was more and more pressed into the three bodies. This Christ-entity was only pressed into the three bodies as tightly as a human ego shortly before His death on the cross. But this pressing in was a continuous sensation of pain throughout the three years. The process of this complete humanization, which lasted three years and led to the Mystery of Golgotha, was this being pressed into the three bodies. It was the pain of God that had to be felt on earth so that what was necessary could happen to introduce the Christ impulse into earthly evolution. What I said about Jesus' pain and suffering in His youth must be added to this.

When one speaks of divine pain, it could easily be that one is poorly understood today. Maeterlinck, for example, who says many a beautiful thing in his book “On Death,” which is sure to become famous, and who, after all, strove to explain things of the spiritual life with the means he had, could say that a disembodied soul cannot have pain, that only the mortal body can feel pain. That is the height of nonsense, for a body feels no pain, any more than a stone does. Pain is felt by the astral body with the I inside the physical body; besides, there are also mental pains and therefore pain does not stop after death. They can only no longer be caused by disturbances in the physical body, but for the soul they need not stop as a result.

What took place when the three bodies of Jesus were forced through with the Christ-Being, that was for the Christ-Being the highest pain. It will gradually become necessary for humanity to understand that in order to continue the evolution of the Earth from Golgotha, this Christ-Essence had to enter the aura of the Earth through pain, and humanity will have to feel its destiny connected with this Christ-pain. The connection of humanity with the Christ-pain will have to become more and more concrete. Only then will one understand how this pain continued to work in the earth aura in rejuvenating forces for the development of the earth since the mystery of Golgotha.

To understand this mystery of Golgotha better and better will be the task of progressive spiritual development. Some things that play a major role in present-day culture will indeed have to be overcome. We are currently facing a crisis in our understanding of Christianity, a real crisis. Of course, I am not talking about what can be said about Christianity by this or that popular theology. I would just like to draw attention to elementary events of incomprehension in the present. At one of those meetings in 1910, where the historical Christ was discussed, a much-talked-about theologian spoke to emphasize that the words of Christ Jesus' teaching were only summarized teachings that had existed before: “I will be grateful to you if I can be shown just one sentence among the sayings of Jesus Christ that was not already there in some form or other.” If a liberal theological investigator can prove today what that person claimed, he is a great man for our contemporaries, because how convincing it must be if one can really prove that all of Christ's sayings were said earlier by others, that they were therefore nothing new. To the one who sees things through, such a saying appears in a different light. Imagine that Goethe had made a poem, not yet written it down, only spoken it, and a child who was listening had shouted: These are all words that I have already heard. The theologian who hears nothing but what he already knows and does not realize what is important, because that stands above the sayings that were there before, as a Goethean poem stands above the individual words that the child has already heard. If one does not know what to consider the main thing, and believes that one is doing real theology today by adhering to words in this way, adhering to what is true, that the sayings have already “been there,” it is implied that we are in a deep crisis with regard to the understanding of Christianity, from which one can already understand that a real understanding of Christ can only come into the world when today's theology, which has the public office of watching over the understanding of Christ, first dies. That is what matters: that one learns to sense the full magnitude of the facts that took place around Golgotha.

The Akasha Chronicle shows us yet more significant things: Since the Christ-Being was not immediately closely connected with the bodies of Jesus, but only loosely and externally, the following could occur in the early days: At times the Christ-entity was externally connected with the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, was in such connection among the disciples and nearest followers, spoke with them. But that was not always necessary. The outer covers could be in any place and the Christ-entity could go away from them; it could then appear as a spiritual entity far away here or there. Many appearances of Christ are such that only the Christ-being appears to the disciples, the followers and also to others. Later, he often walked around the country with the disciples, teaching, speaking, healing. While he was walking with ten or fifteen or even more followers, and the Christ-being pressed more and more into his bodies, another phenomenon emerged. It was repeatedly shown that one or other of the disciples suddenly felt inspired. Then his face changed so that you could see from the outside how he took on a completely different physiognomy. And when something like that happened and he spoke the most glorious words of Christ, the actual outward appearance of Christ Jesus changed so that he looked like the simplest person in the group.

This was repeated over and over again. This is how it appears in the Akashic Records. As a result, the persecutors never knew who in the wandering group was the one they were actually looking for, so they faced the danger of seizing someone who was not the right one. Then the right one would have escaped. That is why the betrayal of Judas was necessary. As it is usually told, it is not very ingeniously told. For if you think about the situation, you ask yourself: Why was Judas' kiss necessary? It was only necessary for the reason I just hinted at.

Much that is mysterious is connected with the Christ's earthly human walk, but what makes the most harrowing impression shows when one turns one's gaze to his death. Here it must be said, and I say it without fear, because it is a fact for occult knowledge, that at the most important points in historical-spiritual events, the moral and physical world orders, which otherwise flow separately, touch each other again. When this was most strongly the case in the evolution of the earth, the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

When Christ was nailed to the cross, a widespread eclipse occurred. It was not yet possible to determine from the Akasha Chronicle where it had come from, whether it was of earthly or cosmic origin. But it was there, and what such an eclipse means can be observed occultly during a solar eclipse. I do not want to say that it was a solar eclipse at that time; it could also have been a significant cloud eclipse. But it is different when the sun is eclipsed in the sky during the day than when it is simply night. But the effect of such a general eclipse can already be seen in the case of a solar eclipse caused by the moon, for example. During such an event, great occult changes take place in all living beings, humans, animals and plants; the entire structure, for example, between the physical body and the etheric body of plants changes, the whole world looks quite different and with it the earth aura. The last time it happened, it made a particularly moving impression on me when I was able to observe it during a solar eclipse during a short lecture cycle in Stockholm. It is a fact that great changes are taking place in that part of the Earth's aura where the eclipse is at its greatest. And it was through such a part of the Earth's aura that the Christ Impulse flowed into the evolution of the Earth at the time of the death of Christ Jesus on the cross. That is the wonderful, sacred event of the eclipse around the cross on Golgotha.

The other thing is what I already hinted at in Karlsruhe and what is also in the printed cycle of Karlsruhe, which is also shown in the Fifth Gospel, how the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth was, as it were, was absorbed by the physical earth, for when the body was laid in the tomb, an earthquake-like shaking of the earth did indeed take place, combined with a storm, so that a fissure in the earth opened up and received the body. The storm whirled in such a way that the peculiar winding and position of the cloths actually resulted, as described in the Gospel of John. The cleft caused by the earthquake closed up, and so the body could not be found, of course. Only the answer from occult regions could be given to those seeking: “He whom you seek is no longer here.” A similar event occurred later, when many in Europe set out as crusaders to seek the memory of Christ at Golgotha. They too received the answer, albeit not audibly, “He whom you seek is no longer here.”

For the Christ Impulse spiritually permeates the souls of men, and as a fact it also works in those who do not understand it. One should not speak only of the great teacher. What happened works as a fact and gave the great impulses for the further development of humanity. The task of true occult research in this field will be to learn to understand better and better how to seek the Christ differently, so that one would not have to be given the answer: “He whom you seek is no longer here.” But if one wants to seek Him in an ever more spiritual way, one will be able to find the true answer that corresponds to reality.

This is what I wanted to tell you today, and I believe that these communications are of great importance for the description of the mystery of Golgotha in contrast to the abstractions of theologians. The way these facts appear in the Akasha Chronicle shows that something very important happened at that time.

The occultist is convinced of the following: Once the minds of humanity have risen somewhat above all that now dominates souls with so much pride of knowledge and illogicality, as I had to characterize it at the beginning, once the minds of right thinking have become interwoven, then - despite what some might believe: What has thinking to do with receiving such communications and trying to recognize them? — then the mind will prepare itself to truly understand even those things that seemingly have nothing to do with thinking, because it is precisely through true thinking that the soul is imbued with the genuine sense of truth, which does not perceive what is given in these two lectures as ridiculous, but strives to accept it as carefully conducted research from the Akasha Chronicle.

The spiritual and psychic experiences of the characters appearing in this ‘Soul's Probation’ are a continuation of the experiences given in the scenes of ‘The Portal of Initiation,’ and the events related occur several years later.

Benedictus, Theodosius, Romanus, Hierophants of the Temple of the Sun.

Professor Capesius.

Philia, Astrid, Luna, The spiritual beings who facilitate the connection between the Soul and the Cosmos. They are not allegorical, but are realities for the spirit Seer.

The Other Philia, The spiritual being who enters the connection between the Soul and the Cosmos.

The Voice of Conscience, not allegorical, but a reality, for the spirit Seer.

Maria

Thomasius.

Doctor Strader.

Felix Balde.

Felicia, his wife.

The ‘Double’ of Johannes Thomasius.

Lucifer

Ahriman

The events of the Sixth to the Ninth Scenes contain the spiritual vision, of Capesius into his former life. Maria and Johannes share the experiences at the same time; but Strader's former incarnation is only seen by Capesius, Maria, and Johannes.

These scenes back into the fourteenth century are conceived as results of imaginative cognition, and in the physical world are only recognizable by their effect. The way in which these lives are repeated (from occurrences of the fourteenth century into the present day) should not be generalised. This kind of repetition can only happen at a turning point of time.

THE VISION OF CAPESIUS INTO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

The Spirit of Benedictus.

The Grand Master, chief of a branch of mystic brother-hood.

First Preceptor, of the mystic brotherhood. (A former incarnation of Professor Capesius.)

Second Preceptor, of the mystic brotherhood.

First Master of the Ceremonies, of the mystic brotherhood.

Second Master of the Ceremonies, of the mystic brotherhood.

Simon, the Jew (a former incarnation of Dr. Studer). Thomas (a former incarnation of Johannes Thomasius).

A Monk (a former incarnation of Maria).

Joseph Keane (a former incarnation of Felix Baide). His Wife (a former incarnation of Felicia Balde)

Bertha, their daughter (a former incarnation of the Other Maria).

Cecilia, their foster-daughter (a former incarnation of Theodora).

Six Country Men, and

Six Country Women.

NOTE ON THE COSTUMES WORN (see also notes to the “Portal of Initiation”). The knights are in chain armour and dark blue lobes of their order, with a white Maltese cross on their mantle and on their tunic. The mantle of the Grand Master is crimson; is tunic is white with a red cross. Their blue caps and the Grand Master's red cap are flat and triangular. The apparition Benedictus in Scene 7, is in pink peach blossom colour. He spears in the background about nine feet above the stage and mains rigid with his arms extended in cross fashion the whole ire of his appearance in this scene.

(The German transcript has been slightly abbreviated)

The information revealed by the “Fifth Gospel” sheds new light upon the great steps taken, as it were in the whole Cosmos, in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritual Science conceives the Mystery of Golgotha to be a kind of interim culmination of other happenings with which it is connected in the streams of world-realities.

We have heard that the Jesus boys were born in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. One of them was the “Solomon Jesus Child” who bore within him the Ego of Zarathustra. The age of the two boys was approximately the same and when they were twelve years old, the Zarathustra-Ego passed over into the body of the other Jesus boy who had descended from the “Nathan line” of the House of David. Then—from the source of the Fifth Gospel—it was possible to give details of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. His three bodily sheaths were those of the Nathan Jesus Child and the Zarathustra-Ego was present these three sheaths until Jesus of Nazareth reached his thirtieth year. You have also heard of the conversation with the mother which then took place and how, as he poured his very Self—his Ego—into the words, the Zarathustra-Ego departed from the bodily sheaths. Then, at the Baptism by John in the Jordan, the Christ Being descended into the threefold bodily sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth.

This conception of the Being Christ Jesus gives us an infinitely deeper and grander impression than is possible to those who draw only upon the sources of hitherto existing knowledge and the information contained in the Gospels.

Thee Event which, together with the “Crucifixion” and the “Resurrection” we call the Mystery of Golgotha, followed three other Events as a kind of culmination.

One of these other Events had taken place in very ancient Lemurian times; the second in the early period of the Atlantean epoch, and the third towards its end. These first three Events, however, transpired in the spiritual worlds, not on the physical plane. We have therefore to turn our eyes to four Events, of which the last only—the Mystery of Golgotha itself—took place on the physical plane. The three others were Events in the spiritual world, as it were in preparation for the fourth.

I have told you that the altogether unique character of the Being we know as the Nathan Jesus was revealed in that immediately after his birth he spoke certain words—albeit in a language unintelligible to everyone except his mother, who in her heart and feeling was able to discern what the words implied. It must be realised that the Nathan Jesus boy was not an ordinary human being; unlike the Solomon Jesus boy who bore within him the Zarathustra-Ego and, as other human beings, had passed through many earthly lives, the Nathan Jesus boy had no earthly incarnations behind him for the whole of his previous existence had been spent in the spiritual worlds.

I have spoken of this in earlier lectures by saying that when, from the Lemurian epoch onwards, human souls were coming down to earthly incarnations, something was as it were kept back in the spiritual worlds and incarnated for the first time in the Nathan Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth therefore was not the bearer of a human Ego in the ordinary sense, for the “human Ego” passes on from one earthly incarnation to another, whereas the previous existence of this Being had been spent in the spiritual worlds. And only the Initiates in the ancient Mysteries who were able to see into the spiritual worlds knew that this Being—who would eventually be born as the Nathan Jesus and become the bearer of the Christ—had been connected with certain previous Events in the spiritual worlds. In order to understand the nature of these Events we must remind ourselves of the following.

Most of you will remember that in lectures on Anthroposophy given here some years ago, I spoke of the human senses. I emphasised then that in reality man possesses twelve senses—the five usually enumerated forming only a part of these twelve. We will not enter into this in greater detail to-day but speak of something else, namely, that the senses of man, the senses in the physical body, would have suffered a fate portending ill for human nature had not the first Christ Event taken place in the spiritual worlds during the epoch of ancient Lemuria in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Lemurian epoch the foundations of the senses were actually present in man's bodily structure. But we know, too, that in this same epoch the Luciferic powers began to operate in human evolution and influenced the whole organism of man. If in the Lemurian epoch nothing else had happened than the descent of man to earthly incarnations and the onset of the Luciferic influence, the senses would not have developed into the organs they are to-day. They would have been hypersensitive, over-sensitive. We should have gone about the world with ‘untempered’ senses. The colour red, for instance would have affected the eye so strongly as to cause actual suffering; other impressions too would have caused pain to the senses. For example: the eye would have felt as if it were being drawn away, sucked away by the colour blue. And it would have been the same in all the other senses. The human being would have been obliged to go about the world with senses over-susceptible to pain or to immoderate, and therefore unhealthy, sensations of pleasure. Sensory activity would have been stronger and more intense than is healthy; the senses would have been affected by every single impression coming from the world outside. This would have been the outcome of the Luciferic influence, and it was averted from humanity not by anything that transpired in the physical world but by the first of the three Events which took place in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Lemurian epoch, the same Christ Being Who later on, at the Baptism in the Jordan, came down into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, united at that time with a being still living in the spiritual world—the being subsequently born as “Nathan Jesus boy.”

If we say of the Event in Palestine that the Christ Being then united with a body, of this first Event we must say that in the spiritual world, during the Lemurian epoch, He “ensouled” (verseelte sich) a Being who in a later epoch came down to the Earth as the Nathan Jesus boy.

Thus there was present in the spiritual worlds a Being of soul-and-spirit Who through this union with the soul of the later Jesus of Nazareth and through all the consequences of this Deed, averted the calamity that would have befallen the human senses. It was as though this Being radiated His light from the spiritual worlds upon humanity in order that the senses might be saved from the suffering attendant upon over-sensitiveness. The first Event in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha was for the well-being and salvation of the senses. The fact that we can go about the world with senses functioning as they now do, is due to this first Christ Event.

A second Event took place towards the beginning of the Atlantean epoch. The same being—the later Jesus of Nazareth—was again “ensouled” by the Christ Being, with the result that another evil was averted from human nature. Although the first Christ Event had brought salvation to the senses, the Luciferic and, later on, the Ahrimanic influences had so affected the seven life-organs of man that if the second Event had not taken place, human life in the world could not have been as it now is; man would have vacillated between wild, inordinate desire (in certain limits this is what we not call ‘sympathy’) and utter disgust for what he imbibes through his life-organs, for his means of nourishment. In the lectures on “anthroposophy” I also spoke of these seven life-organs. In the physical body they are vesicular organs, but what underlies them is actually a certain formation of the etheric body. Moreover for everything that found its way to his organs of breathing, too, man would either have felt inordinate desire or deepest loathing. Therefore the seven life-organs too would have become over-active as a result of the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman. The second Christ Event took place—again in the supersensible worlds. And this Event brought ‘moderation’ into the life-organs, enabled them to function with a certain restraint. Just as our senses would never have been able to face the world “in wisdom” if the first Christ Event had not taken place in the Lemurian epoch, so our life-organs could never have functioned with temperance and moderation if the second Christ Event had not transpired at the beginning of the Atlantean epoch.

But man was faced by yet another evil. This third evil threatened the astral body, in connection with thinking, feeling and willing and their due fields of activity. A certain harmony is maintained to-day in man's thinking, feeling and willing, and when this harmony is upset, the healthy life of the soul is disturbed. When thinking, feeling and willing do not interact in the right way, a man falls into conditions of extreme hypochondria, melancholy or actual insanity. As a result of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence, therefore, men's thinking, feeling and willing would have lapsed into utter disorder if, towards the end of the Atlantean epoch, the third Christ Event had not taken place. Once again the Christ Being united with the “Nathan-Jesus soul” in the supersensible worlds, bringing order and harmony into the soul-powers of thinking, feeling and willing.

These three Events all worked upon man from the spiritual worlds; they were not Events of the physical plane. But memories of the third Event in particular, have been well preserved in myths and legends; and as in many other cases, spiritual knowledge leads us to a much deeper understanding of the wisdom they contain.

We are all familiar with imagery often used for the portrayal of supersensible beings; the Archangel Michael, or St. George overcoming the Dragon, vanquishing death. This is a pictorial presentation of the third Christ Event: St. George or the Archangel Michael is inspired by the Christ Being; and the ‘Conquest of the Dragon’ indicates the overcoming of those elements in the desire-nature of man which would bring confusion and disorder into thinking, feeling and willing.

There is deep meaning in these pictures; they have not been created for the intellect but for the feeling, in order that what eludes intellectual understanding may be presented to the human soul in the form of visible symbols.

In earlier lectures we have heard how in its world of Gods and Spirit-Beings, Greek culture preserved the shadow-images of the Divine Spiritual Beings who in the Atlantean epoch had been present, in all their reality, in the sphere immediately above the world of men. The Greeks had preserved definite consciousness of the third Christ Event, the Event that is portrayed elsewhere as St. George or the Archangel Michael overthrowing the Dragon.—In their Apollo the Greeks portrayed the Christ Being permeating the soul of the later Jesus boy. And we may say with truth that in ancient Greece, St. George and the Dragon are real beings, cosmic beings. The Greeks had their Castalian fountain on Parnassos; vapours arose from a gorge in the earth and these vapours, winding around the mountain like snakes, were a picture of those wild tumultuous passions of men which cast thinking, feeling and willing into confusion and disorder. At the place—it was the abode of Python—where these curling, snake-like vapours issued from the gorge, the Greeks erected the sanctuary of the Pythian Oracle. Sitting there on her tripod above the gorge, she was transported by the rising vapours into a state of visionary consciousness and her utterances were conceived to by the words of Apollo himself. Those who sought advice addressed themselves to the Pythian Oracle and received it from Apollo through her mouth.

In Greece, therefore, Apollo was a real and living Being. We know now that he was the Being who was ensouled by the Christ and later on became the Nathan Jesus boy. This being was known to the Greeks as “Apollo.” He eliminates the effects of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences from what rises out of the earth into the soul of the Pythian Oracle. And because the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences no longer creep into her soul with the vapours which had been purified by Apollo, the forces issuing from her no longer bring thinking, feeling and willing into confusion but into order and harmony on the Earth.

And so we perceive in the figure of Apollo the idea that the God whom we in later time call Christ sent His influence into the thinking, feeling and willing of men.—He was the God Who sacrificed Himself at that time by uniting with the soul of the later Nathan Jesus, in order that harmony and order might prevail in the thinking, feeling and willing of the human soul, instead of the confusion wrought by the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman.

In the supersensible worlds, therefore, three Christ Events take place in preparation for the Event of Golgotha.

What was actually achieved by this Event? What is it that would have fallen into chaos and disorder if the Event of Golgotha had not taken place?

In the Fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, humanity was ready for the development of the ‘I’. The first peoples who were ready for this were those who inhabited the lands stretching from Western Asia across Southern Europe and into Middle Europe. The encounter between the Roman peoples and the Germanic peoples in Middle and Southern Europe was to give a strong impetus to this development of Ego-consciousness. The ‘I’, the Ego, was to develop in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—but something would have gone wrong with this development had not the Mystery of Golgotha taken place in that same epoch. Just as the senses would have been impaired in the Lemurian epoch if the first Christ Event had not taken place; just as irregularity would have crept into the development of the seven life-organs if the second Christ Event had not taken place at the beginning of the Atlantean epoch; just as thinking, feeling and willing in man's life of soul would have been cast into disorder if the third Christ Event had not taken place towards the end of the Atlantean epoch... so, too it would have been with the development of the ‘I’, if the fourth Christ Event—the Mystery of Golgotha—had not taken place in the Greco-Latin epoch. For as we know, in this fourth post-Atlantean epoch men had reached the stage of Egohood, of ‘I’-consciousness.

For human beings not belonging to this particular phase of evolution, a different kind of revelation was given. The characteristic difference between the Buddha revelation and the Christ revelation is that the Buddha revelation was given to human beings not destined to unfold consciousness of the ‘I’ which passes through the series of incarnations. Without understanding what this implies, it is not possible to have a true conception of Buddhism. I have often spoken of a simile employed in a later phase of Buddhism, to the effect that the true Buddhist likens what passes over from one incarnation to another to the fruit of the mango which, when it is laid into the earth, produces a new tree upon which new fruit grows; the new mango fruit has in common with the old only ‘name’ and ‘form.’ The ‘form’ alone remains, the individual entity disappears and nothing that has real being passes on. Buddhism teaches nothing about the transmission of the Ego—for the reason that the Eastern peoples had not yet reached full consciousness of the ‘I’. And to this very day we find that when adherents of purely oriental teachings endeavour to understand Western thought and philosophy, they come to a standstill at the point where Egohood becomes an essential and basic factor. The Ego was destined to come to birth in the peoples of the West.

The time for the birth of the Ego was the Fourth post-Atlantean epoch, but if nothing had intervened, irregularity would have set in. This is indicated by something that made its first appearance in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, namely Greek Philosophy. Greek philosophy is a significant sign of the birth of the Ego, but side by side with Greek philosophy we find the Sibylline soothsayers. Unlike the Pythia under the influence of Apollo, the Sibyls were women whose life of soul lacked order and harmony, who allowed the revelations they received to work chaotically in their thinking, feeling and willing. Great and sublime truths were often contained in these Sibylline revelations which began to play a part from about the eighth century B.C. and continued right on into the Middle Ages.—But the wisdom was confused and chaotic, fraught with all kinds of extravagance. Sibylline ‘wisdom’ is a striking example of he fact that the birth of Ego-consciousness (just as would have happened to the twelve senses in the Lemurian epoch, the seven life-organs in the earthly Atlantean epoch and the three soul-faculties at the end of the Atlantean epoch had it not been for the first three Christ Events. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, disorder would have crept into the development of Ego-consciousness if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place.

The Mystery of Golgotha comes down as it were by stages, from those lofty heights of Spirit where the Christ Event had taken place in the Lemurian epoch, to the physical plane itself—as our earthly Mystery of Golgotha.

Here again we have an indication of the supreme significance of this unique Event in Earth-evolution, prepared for as it had been by great and momentous happenings in the spiritual worlds. The connection with the sublime Sun Being we know as the Christ is revealed, too, in the Greek Apollo, for Apollo is the ‘Sun God.’

I have spoken in bare outline only of matters which help me to realise the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. All these things could be expounded in detail and would reveal the untold Cosmic significance of this Event.

We have been considering the Mystery of Golgotha from the aspect of the Cosmos; but it is possible, too, to make a different approach.

A human being passes into the spiritual world through the Gate of Death or through initiation, but we will think now only of one who enters the spiritual world through death. He lays aside his physical body and this outermost sheath is given over to the earthly elements through burial or through cremation. Suppose that after death a man looks back from the spiritual world upon what is happening to his physical body as it passes over through decay or through cremation into the physical elements of the Earth.—What he beholds in the processes here taking place can be called a ‘happening of Nature’, like any other, in which no moral concepts, for example, are involved—for we do not apply moral concepts when clouds form, when lightening strikes from one cloud to another, and so forth. Man looks at his physical body in process of dissolution, just as he looks at these phenomena of Nature. But for a few days, as we know, his connection with the ether-body remains and then the second separation, the separation of the ether-body from the astral body and Ego takes place.

As man looks back upon the discarded ether-body, the processes in which it is involved are not of the same character as those operating in the discarded physical body. After death we can by no means look at what the ether-body is and what is becoming of it, as if it were a ‘phenomenon of Nature’. The ether-body reveals its own individual character, coloured by the feelings and sentiments we have harboured during life. The whole gamut of our feelings—good or bad—is revealed to us by the ether-body. The temper and tenor of our soul is stamped into the ether-body and becomes visible to us after death. Then by a complicated process it dissolves into the universe of ether, is absorbed into the other world.

Looking back in this way upon what becomes of our ether-body, we have before us an image of what we ourselves were in earthly life. And this image tells us: ‘If your feelings were good, if you were truly devoted to the spiritual worlds, then you have given over to the universe of Ether something that is good and beneficial; if your feelings were unrighteous, if you turned a deaf ear to information concerning the spiritual worlds, then you have given over to the Cosmos of Ether something that is injurious and harmful.

In the spiritual world it is part of the destiny of our soul, that is to say of our astral body and Ego, to behold ourselves in the fate of the ether-body—which cannot be changed once the separation from the physical body has taken place. It is a moment of paramount significance after death when we realise that just as in the world of sense we saw clouds and mountains, so now, after death, we see, as a kind of background, all that we ourselves laid into our ether-body through our feelings and tenor of soul. The picture expands as the ether-body dissolves, becomes as it were a “firmament” against which everything else stands out in relief. After death, therefore, man sees what is happening to his ether-body.

Something else is revealed as well, namely, two different kinks of properties, or forces, in the now dissolving ether-body: one of these properties gives rise to an impression that must always weigh heavily upon the soul after death. The best way to understand what this means is to think of the destiny confronting the physical Earth.

The destiny of the physical Earth is recognised to-day even by the physicists, who rightly speak of the “Wärmetod” (equilibration of heat and cold) to which the physical Earth will succumb. The relation of heat to the other physical forces is such that as scientific calculations already show, a time will come when all temperature will be reduced to a dead level. No life or existence in the physical kingdom of Earth will then be possible; the whole physical Earth will perish.

Materialists are bound to assume—for otherwise they would be inconsistent—that this equilibration of temperature, the Wärmetod, also entails the end of everything know to them as culture, the end of all human thinking, reflection, aspiration, endeavour, in short the disappearance of all human existence.

Those who understand the conditions as revealed by Spiritual Science know what this means, namely, that the physical Earth will fall away from the Spiritual like a corpse, just as the physical corpse falls away from that part of a man's being which passes onwards through the Gate of Death. At death, the corpse is discarded and as a being of soul-and-spirit, man lives through an intermediate period between death and a new birth, passing over from one state of existence to another. In the same way the spiritual part of the Earth will pass over to the ‘Jupiter existence’ when physical existence comes to an end. This ‘Jupiter existence’ will be a further embodiment of everything that is connected spiritually with the Earth.

And so when we are able after death to look back at the ether-body, we realise that in very truth one part of the ether-body has to do with everything in the realm of Earth that will ultimately perish. Certain forces in our ether-body have to do with the process by which the Earth is led onwards to its end. But the ether-body contains other forces too, quite different forces. We can picture the relation of these forces to the physical Earth by thinking of the seed of the plant surrounded by substance out of which the next plant arises. Similarly, we perceive in the ether-body, forces which have only to be active as long as the Earth exists, until the Earth comes to an end with the Wärmetod. But there are other forces too, ‘young’, fertile forces, and these are connected with everything that makes the Earth capable of germination in the Cosmos, of passing over to its next embodiment. This ‘fertile’ part of the ether-body can only be perceived—and here we come to another significant secret disclosed by Spiritual Science—when the human being has established a certain relationship with the Christ, the Christ Impulse. For this part of the ether-body is permeated with the Christ Forces which since the Mystery of Golgotha have poured into the sphere of the Earth. It is these Christ Forces in the ether-body which enable the ‘fertile seed’ in the human soul, too, to pass over to the Jupiter embodiment of the Earth. Our connection with the Christ Impulse therefore, enables us to perceive the fertile seed, the seed of the future within our ether-body. And this brings the certain knowledge that the power of the Mystery of Golgotha has flowed, in very truth, into the Earth-sphere and that this power was responsible for quickening the spiritual forces of the Earth with which we ourselves, as human beings, are inwoven. When a human being who has attained Ego-consciousness in the real sense—as is the case in the West to-day—gazes upon his ether-body after death, he must not find this ether-body devoid of the forces flowing from the Christ Impulse. For it means a life of unblessedness after death if the vista of the ether-body reveals that ether-body is not permeated by the Christ Impulse.

I have said many, many times that Christ has come to the Earth as a Real Being and that even those who in their surface-consciousness to-day resist the Christ Impulse... they too will gradually find their way to it, although perhaps one or two incarnations later than the peoples of the West. Man's blessedness after death depends upon the realisation that the Christ Impulse is present in the ether-body; whereas he is doomed to tribulation if he can perceive in the ether-body only that which must inevitably perish with the Earth. A man belonging to Western civilisation, born as he is with the clear Ego-consciousness to which the Oriental peoples have not yet attained, is doomed to a state of unblessedness if, after death, he must look back upon an ether-body lacking the‘substance’ of the Christ Impulse and containing only those forces by which Earth-evolution is finally led to its end. When a man cannot perceive the young, fertile forces of the Christ Impulse in his ether-body, it is rather like having to live after death under the constant impression of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption.

These young, fertile forces of the Christ Impulse... what are they?

Of one aspect I have spoken many times, namely, of the part played by the blood in the physical body of Christ Jesus. The blood is, of course, one of the physical components of the body, and in the case of an ordinary human being it dissolves away at death in the physical Elements. This did not happen to that part of the blood in the body of Christ Jesus which flowed from the wounds on Golgotha. This blood was ‘etherised’, was actually taken up into the etheric forces of the Earth. The blood that flowed from the wounds on Golgotha became Ether-Substance. And perceiving this Ether-Substance gleaming and glistening in the ether-body after death, man knows it to be the young, fertile life by which he is borne onwards into the future.

These quickening, freshening life-forces pour into the human ether-body from yet another source. Contemplation of the Fifth Gospel reveals—it is a deep and solemn impression—that after the body of Christ Jesus had been laid in the Grave, a certain happening led, in actual fact, to the scene described with such marvellous exactitude in the Gospel of St. John: the clothes lay scattered around the empty Grave. The Fifth Gospel reveals that it was indeed so. An undulating earthquake had produced a rift in the earth and into this rift the body of Christ Jesus fell. The rift then closed again and, as described in St. John's Gospel, the clothes in which the body had been shrouded were hurled about the empty sepulchre by the tempest. When these things are revealed to one from the Fifth Gospel, it is a deeply moving experience to find them confirmed in the Gospel of St. John.

And so something else too flowed into the human ether-body. What had been received into the rift in the earth poured through the blood now agleam in the Ether, making this gleaming blood visible in the human ether-body. As I said before, the ether-body expands after death and man sees it as a ‘firmament’ against which everything else stands out in relief. And the feeling arises: The body of Christ Jesus, empty of blood, spreads through the expanding ether-body like a basic substance. The body which had fallen into the chasm passed into the Earth, and the etherised blood now reveals itself in the tableau of the human ether-body, filling the tableau with life. And from this revelation arises the certainty: Mankind does not perish, but lives on as the spiritual essence of Earth-existence when the Earth falls away, just as the corpse falls away from the indwelling spiritual being on man. True, the ‘I’ and astral body guarantee freedom and immortality for man; but he would live on only for himself, he would pass over to Jupiter only to find himself in an alien world if the forces poured by the Christ Impulse into the Earth-sphere were not carried over to Jupiter.

If individual human beings were not rooted within an Earth-sphere that has been pervaded by the Christ Impulse, they would pass over to Jupiter in ‘poverty of soul’, with faculties hardly richer than those belonging to the Lemurian epoch. And this ‘poverty of soul’ which would give the conviction that earthly life is doomed to perish would betoken a state of unblessedness for man between death and rebirth; whereas realisation of what the Christ Impulse has wrought for the spiritual part of the Earth brings blessedness to the soul in the life between death and rebirth.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, every experience by which the human soul is quickened and enriched comes from what was poured into the spiritual aura of the Earth by the Christ Impulse.

It is a matter of deep satisfaction to me, as I think you know, to be with you again for a while, for this is the place where we are able to create a visible sign of our intentions and of the will to come closer and closer to a true knowledge of the spirit in our studies and in our work in spiritual science.

The quest for knowledge is intimately bound up with the most inward aspect of the human being, and every now and then we must therefore enquire into the essential nature of our will and intent. In the light of the present situation, woeful as it is, it seems the answer to this question must be a negative one. For more than three years we have seen something spread across the world that I need not discuss in detail, at least to begin with, for we are all aware of it and feel it deeply. The events now taking place are the opposite of our own intentions, which have come to expression in this very building.¹

Again and again we must try to see clearly which stream of spiritual development we wish to see taken up by humanity, and today we have to say it is the opposite of the stream which has led to the terrible tragedy of these last years. This is something we may call to mind again and again when we give deep and full consideration to the events now raging all over the world. We may say to ourselves that it appears as if time were drawn out and had become elastic, as if the things we remember from before this madness took hold of the world happened not just years but centuries ago.

There will, of course, be many today—as there always have been—who may be said to sleep through the events of the day, people who are not fully awake to what is going on today. But when those who are awake look back on what went through their minds four or five years ago and left an impression, they will feel more or the less the way one does when one lets the mind dwell on an old book or a work of art that was created hundreds of years ago. Events which meant something to us before this madness came on the world now seem to have happened an infinitely long time ago.

Anyone who was awake—through the science of the spirit—was, of course, able to appreciate what was coming even before these events developed. Many of our friends will remember the almost routine answer I gave to questions asked over and over again after my public lectures from the beginning of this century. The question, you may remember, was: “According to the statistics, the world population is increasing; how does this relate to the idea of repeated earth lives? The increase in population is rapid. How can one reconcile this with the spiritual scientific finding that these are always the same souls?” My answer always had to be: It does look as if the statisticians are right and the world population is increasing; but we have to take a longer view and consider much longer time-spans if we are to do justice to the question. And I would always go on to say that a time may well come, sooner than we may expect, when people discover to their horror that the population can also decrease.

I t is not always possible to give plain and simple answers in anthroposophy. People have not yet reached the point where they are able to take truths in the right way and some things can only be hinted at. Read through the lectures given in Vienna not long before this catastrophe came on our world and you will find the passage where I spoke of the social cancer that is gnawing away at the evolution of humanity.² This and other things were said in order to indicate what was going to happen in human evolution and to challenge people to reflect. For we need to reflect on these things if we are really and truly to wake up. We need to be awake and alive for the sake of humanity. If anthroposophy is to fulfil its purpose, its prime task must be to rouse people and make them really wake up. Merely knowing what is going on in the physical world, and knowing the laws that human minds are able to perceive as operative in this world, is no more than being asleep in a higher sense. Humanity is only fully awake when people are able to develop notions and ideas of the world of the spirit. This is all around us, just as air and water, the stars, the sun and the moon are all around us. When we are physically asleep we are wholly given up to the internal processes that go on in the body during the night and have no idea of anything in the physical world around us. We are asleep in exactly the same way when we are wholly given up to the physical environment, and to the world and the laws of the intellect, and have no idea of the world of the spirit that is all around us.

Humanity has made great play of its intellectual progress and scientific achievements in the last few centuries and has been particularly insistent on this at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Yet, strangely enough, the unconscious and instinctive life was never more to the fore than it is at this time. Up to the present time this instinctive and unconscious element has increasingly taken hold of the human race. Failure to see the spiritual reality and take account of the element of the spirit is ultimately the cause of this terrible world war. Nor can it be said that through these years—years which have turned into centuries for anyone who is awake in them, as I have said—humanity has learned an adequate lesson from the terrible events around us. Sadly, it has to be said that the opposite is the case.

What is the characteristic element to be found day by day, hour by hour, when we take note of what people think, or rather pretend to think and pretend to want? It is that, fundamentally speaking, no one in the world knows what they want, and no one realizes that people's perfectly justifiable aims, whichever form they may take in the minds of individual nations, would be achieved so much better if they did away with these terrible wars in which so much blood is shed. People do not realize that these terrible events with their bloodshed are really not necessary as a means of helping them to achieve their aims.

These events have a mysterious background, but if you consider some of the things said in our anthroposophical lectures over the years, even if they have only been touched on lightly, you will find perfectly clear statements, also with reference to the most significant of recent events. Consider also what has been said in these very rooms, especially in the last few years, on the character of the Russian people and the difference between the Russians and the peoples of Western and Central Europe.³ You will find that you need the things which have been said here to gain understanding of an event that appears to have come in with such vehemence. It has burst forth as though it were a karmic vengeance, the inner meaning of which is quite clear, though the word ‘vengeance’ must be taken as a technical term and not at all in a moral sense.

Not only the Russian people, but those of Europe and the whole world, will have to reflect for a long time to come on the events in Eastern Europe, events much more mysterious than we are inclined to think. Something has come to the surface which has been preparing for centuries. The new element wanting to take shape is something completely different from what is actually taking shape. Later generations will be able to use the events which will be taking shape in Eastern Europe over the next decades to demonstrate the difference between maya and reality. For you see, the generations of today are taking what is happening now for the real thing, when this is in fact still waiting in the wings, and they are wrong in taking it for real, for something quite different wants to make its appearance.

The people in the West are ill-equipped to understand what wants to come to the surface. Why are they so ill-equipped? Strange as it may seem to people today—not to you but to the ordinary, average individual; being anthroposophists, you are not ordinary, average people of today—the present age is more than any other age demanding the one thing people least want to have: understanding based on the science of the spirit. Strange as it may sound to the ordinary, average people of today—order will not be created from the chaos of the present time until a sufficiently large number of people are prepared to recognize the truths of that science. Such will be the karma of world history.

If people insist that this war is just like the wars of the past and that we'll be making peace just as peace has been made before—let them talk. They are the people who love maya and do not distinguish between truth and deception. Let them make what may seem like ‘peace’—order will only arise from the chaos that fills the world today when insight based on the science of the spirit dawns in human minds. You may feel in your hearts that it will be a long time before such order comes; you may think it will be a long time before people are prepared to let the dawn of such a science arise, and you will be right. You have to accept that it will be a long time before order arises from the chaos. For it will not come until human hearts understand the realm of the spirit. Order can only come when it is understood how this chaos has arisen.

Chaos has arisen because the reality is considered in an unspiritual way and the world of the spirit cannot be ignored with impunity. You may think it is enough to live with thoughts and ideas that are wholly derived from the physical world. It is what people generally think today, though this does not make it true. The most completely and utterly wrong idea humanity has ever had is—to put it simply—that the spirits will put up with being ignored. You may consider it egotistical and selfish on their part, but the terminology is different in their world. Egotism or not, the spirits take their revenge if they are ignored here on earth. This is a law, an iron necessity. One way to characterize the present time is to say that the present human chaos is the revenge of the spirits who have been ignored for too long.

I have often said, both here and elsewhere: A mysterious connection exists between human consciousness and the destructive powers of decline and fall in the universe. Each can, or indeed must, take the place of the other in the following way.

Let us assume there was a time, say during the last twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century, when people put the same effort into their quest for the things of the spirit as they have put into achieving material knowledge and material actions during those twenty or thirty years. What would have happened if they had endeavoured to recognize the world of the spirit and used this to give a character, a foundation, to the physical world, rather than follow mere instinct and chase after more and more knowledge of a kind that has seen its ultimate triumph in the creation of instruments of murder and found its be-all and end-all in people enriching themselves with nothing but material goods? What would have happened if people had sought to gain spiritual knowledge and spiritual impulses for their activities in the social sphere? It would have meant that the powers of destruction were paid off! If people had been more awake and not asleep in the last decades of the nineteenth century there would have been greater awareness and therefore no need for destruction in the first decades of the twentieth century. Spiritual awareness simply has to be greater than purely sensual and material awareness. If this had been the case during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the powers of destruction would not have had to intervene in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This is brought to realization most insistently, and perhaps most cruelly, to the perceptive mind when you meet many of the dead who have entered the world of the spirit either during the last decades of the nineteenth or the first decades of the twentieth century. Many of them have been caught up in the hustle and bustle and search for material values here on earth and never had the opportunity to let spiritual impulses arouse awareness. Many have gone through the gate of death without even a notion of the thoughts and ideas that point to spiritual impulses. If they had had the opportunity to take in spiritual thoughts and ideas before they went through the gate of death they could have taken these with them. It would have been something they needed after death, but they were not in a position to have it.

Anyone who knows the history of ideas of the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century also knows that people actually no longer knew how to use the term ‘spirit’. It has been used to describe all kinds of things, but not the true spirit. Those souls therefore had no opportunity of knowing the spirit whilst here on earth and they have to take the consequences. Having gone through the gate of death and entered the world of the spirit, they are thirsting for—well, what are they thirsting for, these souls who lived in materialism here? They are thirsting for destructive powers in the physical world! Those are the dues and they must be paid.

There is no easy way of dealing with these things. If we want to know the realities in this sphere, we must acquire a feeling for what the ancient Egyptians called ‘iron necessity’. Terrible as it may be, it was necessary that destruction should spread, for those who had gone through the gate of death were longing for the destructive powers in which they are able to live, seeing they did not receive what was due to them and had been deprived of spiritual impulses while on earth.

Order cannot arise from the chaos until people are ready to give room to such grave truths in their souls and also let these truths enter into the ideas that apply in the world of politics today. And if these truths sound pessimistic to you and make you think that humanity is still a long way from achieving all that is demanded, as I have indicated, you are indeed right. But let this justifiable pessimism become a challenge to be awake and to try, whatever your place in life may be, to awaken souls so that the science of the spirit can send out its impulses. It cannot yet be done to any great extent, but we must have the real, honest desire to make people consciously aware in such a way that they are able to understand this concrete fact: Longings have arisen in the dead in recent times, and those longings are being met with events which are truly horrifying for those of us who are alive here on the physical plane.

Just think how easy it is for some people to present their friends with an image of the region into which human beings enter when they have gone through the gate of death. Consider the unctuous sermons preached in the churches—with politicians now actually following the example of these sermonizers—and the facile notions people have of the world of the spirit, and you simply cannot help realizing how far removed from reality is the facile vanity of many of today's leading figures. Compare the speeches of such leading figures—their lives show that they do anything but lead and that they are guided by all kinds of forces of which they are completely unconscious and which are not the right forces—compare this with what is really needed at the present time, and you will realize the immense gravity of the present situation.

Right next to our physical world lies another, non-physical or spiritual world, and this has never before influenced our world as intensely as it is doing at the present time. People are not aware of this, however; they do not even notice when things get heart-stoppingly fearsome and terrible. Intensely illuminating words are heard in the world today; they should set vast numbers of people thinking. But people never notice, or at least they do not show it if they do.

Some of you will remember that on a number of occasions in the last three years⁴ I have said that when the history of this ‘world war’ will be written in the future—unfortunately present-day critics have not done so, though it could be done fairly easily—it will be impossible to use the method which has produced the legend, the fairy-tale, or call it what you will, which currently goes by the name of ‘history’. This was produced by ‘scholars’—as the world calls them—sitting in libraries for months, years and decades and studying diplomatic records in order to write their histories. Inevitably a time will come when most of these histories will have to be pulped. In fact, no one will be able to write the history of these last years by such a method unless they are literally off their heads.

The causes of the chaos will not be apparent to the people who have been writing histories until now, but only to people who have a real feeling for what it means when a miserable individual of our time has to face a court and is forced to sum up the condition he was in at the time by flinging down before the world the lamentable statement: ‘First one thing happened, then another, and that was the moment when I went out of my mind!’ It was Suchomlinov who spoke these pitiful words.⁵

Many people had gone out of their minds at that time, not only Suchomlinov. What kind of moments are these in world events when the only way of describing them is by confessing that one has gone out of one's mind? They are moments when Ahriman and his cohorts gain access to the human race and to human thoughts. For as long as people watch over their conscious minds and their consciousness is not in any way clouded or inactive, neither Ahriman nor Lucifer have access to it. But when it is not fully active and one needs to use the phrase ‘I have gone out of my mind’, that is the moment when Ahriman and his cohorts enter the stage. The things that happen then will not appear in diplomatic records—little of what it says in those records in recent decades makes real sense, by the way. Leaving this aside, the things that have happened in our time and have led to chaos are not merely human actions, but above all the actions of ahrimanic spirits seeking to gain access by reducing human awareness. Some of you know very well that soon after the present catastrophe broke on the world I pointed out that when we speak of the origins of this catastrophe in time to come, we must not do so on the basis of written records; instead we shall have to point to real facts through which ahrimanic spirits gained access to the stage of human events.

These things must be taken in all seriousness; they have to be seen as concrete realities and not merely as abstract formulations. People who do not know anything about it may well laugh when one says that Ahriman gained access to human evolution. They may well laugh at people who say this, but the day will come when world history laughs them to scorn for having laughed at others today.

We certainly cannot say that the judgments, ideas and notions to be found on the surface in recent years show any degree of maturity. People even failed to understand when eighteen months ago it was pointed out somewhere that something might soon happen of which due note should be taken; it should not be taken lightly. Concrete examples given as an indication of what was likely to happen were never taken in the right way; people were not sufficiently awake in their minds to do so. Now the event has come. And people fail to realize that something is taking root deeply in a certain soil. People are taking it as something which—well, because a certain number of statements take up so many lines, people accept they have a number of statements made in that particular number of lines. They are not at all interested in looking for the roots of such statements, but simply take things at their face value.

I think you know what I mean. You know I am referring to the Papal Note¹ as something I had seen coming for eighteen months. I have looked around a great deal to see if I might not find someone who has expressed their views on this Note, or asked the kind of question that should have come to mind.

Let us remember that the idea of the state as we know it today has been dawning since the sixteenth century. In some parts of the world peculiar people known as ‘historians’ are speaking of states as something which have existed for I do not know how long. But they know little about real history. The present-day idea of a state is no more than four or five hundred years old and something entirely different existed in earlier times. It is important to know this and be really clear about it. The priestly element, which is to be found in Rome, is indeed older than our modern states. It had its justification in its own day, when it brought about many things in the world. I have tried to find out if people are asking themselves the question: What does it really mean that the modern structures which have developed over four or five centuries cannot find a way of achieving order out of their own resources, and look back to the old priestly element as something to be discussed in the way people generally discuss things today?

It would interest me to know if anyone faced with the question as to whether it is a good idea to skate on ice when it is only one millimetre thick would actually answer in the affirmative. Relative to what we are really dealing with, the concepts on which people base their opinions when a priestly element brings impulses into modern life today are like a one- millimetre layer of ice covering the water. The things people write and say today are like someone skating on ice that is not more than one millimetre in thickness. No one is trying to understand what is happening, no one is prepared to see that what matters is not to take a document and look at the statements it contains, but to know that a statement can mean something totally different, depending on the source from which it comes.

Everywhere today we are faced with the need to warn people in all seriousness to look to the origins, to see how things are related, to look for realities and not to the way things look on the surface. Surely it cannot be that difficult for anyone to admit: I see the way things are, but I do not yet understand them and therefore I will not say anything to interfere. Considering the incredibly superficial level of education, it is not at all surprising when people are able to understand and have an opinion on everything. People find it really difficult to admit that they cannot judge an issue and need to get a basis for their judgement before they give an opinion. In fact, it hardly ever comes to their minds that one has to have a basis on which to form an opinion.

Infinitely much depends on real insight into the driving forces, especially for the immediate future. It has to be realized that the chaos will certainly not be reduced if—speaking hypothetically—the churches were to succeed in establishing even the initial stages of apparent order. The worst error we can fall into would be to say: It does not matter where peace comes from, even if it is from the Pope. The point is, it may actually cause no harm at all to have peace initiated by the Pope; the question is how those who are involved see the issue.

Again and again we need to be really clear in our minds that the present time is literally challenging us every hour, indeed every minute, to wake up. Anthroposophy as a science of the spirit can only be understood by those who are able to grasp that humanity is being asked to make a clear decision. Either the spirit is understood or the chaos continues. A papered-over chaos would be no better than the carnage we have today. If we are unable to come up with anything better than materialism and again materialism, even a heightened materialism, in the next few years, and if it were to happen that the events of the last three years, to which humanity has failed to wake up and take notice, were to lead to a new rush for material goods—many people are longing for this as something that comes with peace—then souls would once again go through the gate of death and thirst for destruction here on earth. There would be no end to the destruction.

All it needs is to get an idea, a feeling, an inner impulse for the need to turn to the things of the spirit! Then we shall progress, depending on the extent to which this is achieved. Anyone who wants to gain a little understanding of the present position, and looks at our time in the light of the serious truths we have been considering, must develop a reasonable degree of feeling for all the terrible, hopelessly commonplace and superficial things that are now being written and said in this world.

Imagine a band of children smashing up all the pots and plates, glasses and everything in the house. The adults who see this happening are considering how to stop it, for the children keep running to the larder and all over the house to find more things to smash. Finally the adults have an idea as to how they can stop it. A number of people who are watching, people who actually consider themselves to be the teachers of these children, find a solution: They take care that everything breakable is collected and smashed to pieces—and that, they think, should put an end to it all! I do not know how many people would not consider those teachers to be fools. This is the kind of situation where people would see the truth. Yet there are people who consider themselves to be wise and who say to the whole world: Carnage must continue until peace comes; everything has to be broken, so there will be nothing left to smash in the world. This is considered wisdom. Go on murdering people for as long as you can and you will stop the murder. This is wisdom!

For anyone who has even a spark of logic it is no longer wisdom when the teacher says to a band of children: To make sure nothing else gets smashed up, I will quickly get people to collect all other breakable objects and smash them; I reckon nothing else will get smashed after that. Why do people call this foolishness and the other thing political foresight? Because people's thinking stops at the very point where it should be most intense, which is where their thoughts relate to great questions of destiny.

We shall continue with this tomorrow, and consider some serious spiritual truths.

• 1. The ‘visible sign’ was the First Goetheanum, built from 1913 onwards and destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/23. See H. Biesantz, A. Klingborg, et al., The Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner's Architectural Impulse. Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth. Trans. by A. Meuss. Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol 1993 (GA 153). The passage referred to is in the lecture given on 14 April 1914.
• 3. Lectures given by Rudolf Steiner on 7, 14 and 15 October 1916, also on 24 September 1916, published in Inner Impulses of Human Evolution (GA 171), trans. revised by G. Church, F. Kozlik and S.C. Easton, Antroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1984.
• 4. For example, in The Karma of Materialism. Trans. by R. Everett. Anthroposophie Press, Hudson, NY, and Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1985.
• 5. Vladimir Alexandrovitch Suchomlinov, 1848–1926, Minister for War at the time when the First World War broke out. Together with Janushkievitch, Chief of General Staff, and Sasonov, Foreign Minister, Suchomlinov played a key role in the fateful mobilization of the Russian army on 29 July 1914, ignoring a direct order from the Tsar to countermand the mobilization at the last minute. After the deposition of the Tsar, Suchomlinov was questioned in court. According to the paper Novoie Vremia, the words he said in court were: ‘On that day I almost went out of my mind.’ Quoted from Suchomlinov, die russische Mobilmachung im Lichte amtlicher Urkunden und der Entlillungen des Prozesses, Berne 1917.
• 1. On 1 August 1917 Pope Benedict XV issued a Peace Note to the governments of the belligerent nations.

Yesterday we saw how the mood of soul, towards which in this age of the Consciousness Soul we have to aim, was in a certain sense prepared historically. Let us keep clearly before us the relevant situation in the external world. We may say: The year 333 after Christ represents a kind of equilibrium (see diagram), distinctly perceptible in the course of historical events, but figuring very little in external history, for the simple reason that affairs revolve round it, and the actual pivot—this holds good even in mechanical motion—does not belong to the system that is moving. Take a pair of scales. You see the movement of the scales and of the beam, but the pivot itself is an ideal point—something we cannot really see. Yet it is obviously the most important part of the balance and must essentially have proper support.

It is particularly necessary for us to grasp what happened in this important year 333, as little noticed by the external world as is the pivot in a pair of scales. The year 333 is indeed the mid-point of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the midpoint of that significant epoch which ran its course from the founding of Rome, 747 years before the Mystery of Golgotha, until approximately 1413, when the Graeco-Latin epoch came to an end and was followed by the epoch which will last until the middle of the fourth millennium—the epoch of the Consciousness Soul. When we consider outward events, this midpoint of 333 is as little apparent as the mid-point of a balance. But we could indicate something else, 333 years later—the year 666. Of this year we can say that what later developed as the scientific method of thinking was already then evident in the activities of the Academy of Jundí Sábúr, which were later blunted by Mohammedanism. We tried yesterday to follow up how a certain mood of spirit, or mood of soul, spread among the people of Southern Europe—that typically scientific mood which still pervades modern natural science and has extended very widely into modern ways of thought. This was 333 years from the time when people still only looked back to the old days, as Julian the Apostate did. Up to 666 is 333 years; if we then go back and take the other side of the scales, 333 years earlier, we come to the preparations for the Mystery of Golgotha through the birth of Christ Jesus.

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Fundamentally, we have been considering these events in such a way as to ask: What would have happened if the Mystery of Golgotha had never taken place? For the whole founding of the Academy of Jundí Sábúr and all that it brought about, was independent of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Schools of Philosophy in Athens had already come into contact with Christianity, but Justinian had closed them in 529. A purely Greek wisdom passed through Syria to Jundí Sábúr, in the new Persian kingdom. And everything else bound up with this, in so far as it was not blunted and was actually intended by Jundí Sábúr, was thought out without reference to Christianity, without reference to the Mystery of Golgotha. In reality, nothing has happened since the very beginning of our era without the working of the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha; but of course many things have been aimed at.

In fact we may say that even the impulses which were active in non-Christian souls during the fourth century, at the time of the turning-point, can be seen in their essentials only if we ask: What would have become of the evolution of mankind in the West if the Mystery of Golgotha had never taken place? This can indeed be studied, even historically—for example, in the case of Augustine, who offered both sides for later people to contemplate. At first he is quite independent of Christianity, seeking to find in Manichaeism an answer to the problems that weighed on him, and only afterwards is drawn to Christianity.

But we can go further back and then a significant question arises. Suppose we were to look at human evolution during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and ask: How was it in all the regions untouched by the occurrence in Palestine of the Mystery of Golgotha? (Strictly speaking, outside the narrow circle of Christ's activity, this would apply to all the regions of the earth.) How did people look on things, especially in Rome, when the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha spread later on, and became particularly effective?

This question is of quite special importance just now; it is truly no mere theoretical question: How were things in Rome when the Mystery of Golgotha took place in Palestine? For presently we shall see how similar—but in another sphere—our immediate present is to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. We should never forget something that is easily forgotten when we look back to that time: we must repeatedly feel our way back in imagination to the culture of the old Roman Empire, where people were ignorant of the fact that over in Palestine a solitary human personality had arisen with a few followers, a personality who went through a certain life, suffered death by crucifixion, and with whom was linked the knowledge, the important knowledge, that men in the future will have concerning birth and death. We must increasingly accustom ourselves to the idea that although this event, which to-day sheds its rays as a fully risen sun into the history of man, was enacted at the beginning of our era, it developed at that time in such a way that throughout the world there was little recognition, either inwardly or externally, of this Palestinian Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the question must be asked: How was it looked upon, especially in Rome?

Now we shall understand each other better if we take our start from the desire that was present later, in 666, among those who were particularly influential in bringing the Academy of Jundí Sábúr to the fore. As I said yesterday, the desire was to give men through revelation, received on an Ahrimanic path, that which can only later be acquired by the Consciousness Soul through the efforts of men themselves. The year 666 was still in the age of the Intellectual or Mind Soul, when men could not by their own efforts think in such a way as to be conscious of everything. So the desire was to give them prematurely something that was intended to come thousands of years later. The whole thing, however, was completely reversed at the very beginning of our era, during the age when the Mystery of Golgotha itself was enacted. Three hundred and thirty-three years after 333, the wish was to give men something belonging to the future, something destined for them only in the future. Three hundred and thirty-three years before 333, just at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, there was a wish to force men back to a condition which in the normal way had entered human evolution thousands of years earlier.

It is very difficult, my dear friends, to speak of these things, for the very reason that history, which itself has a history, has developed in such a way that in these matters people have actually been driven into error by history. Happenings in the southern districts of Europe—happenings with important consequences—have been covered up; people have not been allowed to know about them. In the history books we have a picture, for instance, of the personality of Augustus, the first Roman Emperor.¹ But in what sense he was an important, an incisively effective personality—of this no understanding is called forth, intentionally from a certain side, but for the most part unintentionally. For the Emperor Augustus was the centre-point of quite conscious Roman endeavours to bring about a world-wide form of civilisation that would cast a veil over all that the Intellectual or Mind Soul had brought to mankind—over everything that men had been able to achieve in the way of culture by their own efforts since 747 B.C. Above all, people were to be limited to what they had acquired for themselves prior to the age of the Intellectual or Mind Soul—that is, in the age particularly of the Sentient Soul, in Egypto-Chaldean times.

Thus whereas in 666 the sages of the Jundí Sábúr Academy wanted to bring to an earlier time something that was meant to come later, in the days of the Emperor Augustus there was to be an extinguishing of that which men could acquire in their own epoch. Instead, they were to have, in its ancient glory and significance, that which had been proper to the people of earlier times, the time of ancient Persia, and of the Egypto-Chaldean culture. And when, through all the undergrowth heaped up as history, we look back at the reality, we must ask: Among certain Romans there was a deliberate wish to preserve something from the past, and this project was defeated by the Christian impulse—what exactly did the Romans want to preserve?

It was above all of a twofold nature. First, there was the wish to preserve a feeling for the meaning of the old cults, those cults which thousands of years before had been customary among the Egyptians, in Asia Minor, and deeper into the heart of Asia. The aim was to render inoperative the capacity for intelligent understanding and to allow only the Sentient Soul to come to fruition. This was to be done by presenting all the significant, sublime, powerful rituals which had proved effective in earlier times, before people had acquired intelligence and when the cults of the Gods had arisen out of the Sentient Soul, so that men should not be left without Gods. There were great rituals then, full of significance, designed to take the place of reflection—rituals which, according to old, atavistic customs, were to arouse the soul in a half hypnotic condition to a living experience of the Gods and of blissfulness through the Divine, It was this experience that some people in Rome wished to infuse with new life.

We can get to know the specific character of this by observing the finer points of distinction between the Roman and the Greek outlooks—although Greek culture was then approaching its outward decline. This feeling, which the Emperor Augustus in particular, with his powerful initiation-impulse turned towards the past, wished to introduce into Rome—all this was unknown over in Greece. The Greeks had no wish to bring back the past; they preferred to keep their eyes on what they could understand and could feel at one with. And if the Christian impulse had not come at a quite early date, and if it had not worked very quickly against the intentions of Augustus and his followers, the old rituals would have been revived in Rome with a much greater display of brilliance than they actually were.

Let us, therefore, to begin with, hold fast to this: it was the intention of Augustus and his supporters that there should go out from Rome—just as later a prophetic wisdom was intended to go out from the Academy of Jundí Sábúr—a powerful ritual which was to spread a haze over the whole world so that the possibility of acquiring the Intellectual Soul, as well as the later Consciousness Soul, would be ruled out. Had the Academy of Jundí Sábúr straightway given man the Consciousness Soul in order to cut off what was to come later—to cut off Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man—Augustus and his supporters in Rome would not have wanted the Consciousness Soul ever to be acquired. They would have wished—333 years before the turning-point—to blot out all possibility of the Intellectual or Mind Soul, and to place before mankind powerful rituals, intended to lead the soul to a consciousness of God. This was one side, meant to be introduced in accordance with the wishes of the initiate Augustus.

But the Intellectual or Mind Soul has always two aspects. One of its aspects tends towards the Sentient Soul. You know that we have the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual or Mind Soul and the Consciousness Soul. The first to be developed was the Sentient Soul; its evolution came to an end in 747 B.C. The Intellectual or Mind Soul evolved from 747 to about A.D. 1413. These are approximate dates. Then follows the age of the Consciousness Soul. Now the Intellectual or Mind Soul inclines on one side towards the Sentient Soul, when it wishes to permeate itself with the past, as we have seen. This tendency is what Augustus wanted to infuse with fresh life. What then is brought about by this forcing back of the Intellectual or Mind Soul to the standpoint of the Sentient Soul—what becomes of the part that inclines towards the future, towards the Consciousness Soul? What becomes of the more intelligent inclination? We have to ask this question, and in the age of Augustus it had to be raised as a great cultural question. What happens if the Intellectual or Mind Soul is now allowed to develop further; what becomes of the human soul that wishes to strive towards the Consciousness Soul? A striving backwards towards the Sentient Soul through a renewal of old rituals is satisfying to men, more than is permissible for their normal development—but what is provided to meet a striving towards the Consciousness Soul? In this connection a certain word is always avoided, in order that a particular fact of human evolution since that time may not be seen in its true light: we need only mention this word and we shall understand what is involved. For this other side of the soul, rhetoric is provided—rhetoric which gives mere husks in place of permeating the soul with substance, with inner content; mere husks which, where living concepts should hold sway, are concerned with the forms of words and the construction of sentences.

Yes, indeed, my dear friends, under the influence of Augustus something developed in Rome very different from anything experienced earlier in Greece. However similar the Roman attire was to the Greek, a Roman in the folds of his toga no longer felt as a Greek had felt; the toga was looked on as a garment meant to be decorative. A certain glamour reflected from the exaltation of the old rituals is there in the fall of the folds of the Roman toga, quite in contrast to the Greek garment. And a strong distinction would be felt—if only people had a feeling for such distinctions—between Demosthenes, who stuttered, but still expressed the Greek nature, though not in rhetoric, and the Roman rhetoricians, among whom there was no stutterer, but men who well understood how to formulate the order of words and the structure of sentences.

From this Augustan age came the wish to give mankind, on the one hand, the incomprehensible old cults; there was indeed an endeavour to keep people from understanding them, even from asking what anything in the ritual meant This attitude is still prevalent in all sorts of realms even to-day. There are Freemasons who say the most curious things. For instance, one says to them: “You have an extensive symbolism in which very much is concealed, but modern Freemasons do not bother about the real meaning of the symbols.” One may say this to people who answer: “That is just what I find so beautiful about Freemasonry to-day; everyone can think what he likes about the symbols.” A person of this kind mostly thinks what his simplicity allows him to think, and this is far, very far, from the profound significance of the symbols—a significance that leads us deeply into the hearts and souls of men.

This is what it was intended to bring about in Rome at that time—a cult with no questions asked as to what it all meant, no attempt to approach the ritual with intelligence and will. The other pole, necessarily connected with this, is rhetoric devoid of content—rhetoric which does not take effect only in speeches, but which as rhetoric went into the laws of Justinian, and afterwards flooded the Western world as so-called Roman law. This Roman law bears the same relation to what should be active in souls approaching the development of the Consciousness Soul as rhetoric does to a soul-warming substance of speech. The frigidity inherent in Roman law has been the cause throughout the world of Roman law being related to warmth of soul in the same way that rhetoric is related to what is spoken out of the warmth and light of the soul—even if spoken with a stuttering tongue.

My dear friends, the fact that nothing willed by Augustus in this connection came fully to fruition was a result of the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha flowing in from the East. Yet just as the aftermath of the Academy of Jundí Sábúr has been preserved in our present-day science, so has the after-effect of what Augustus aimed at been preserved. It could no more come to fruition in the form he intended than could the Academy of Jundí Sábúr achieve its purpose. It was simply the supersensible that was banished from the impulse of the Academy of Jundí Sábúr, and this is still evident in the scientific attitude of our own time. But the supersensible was driven out also from what Augustus aimed at—at least the grander supersensible element through which he wished to bring about a real renewal of the old religious feeling of the Sentient Soul. The supersensible was driven out, and of the rest—which in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was founded chiefly in Rome—there remained only Catholicism, the Catholic Church; for the Catholic Church is the continuation, the true continuation, of the Augustan age. The fact that the Catholic Church has taken the form it has is the result of its not being founded upon the Mystery of Palestine, not upon the Mystery of Golgotha. Only a breath of this has passed over it. The most active element that runs through the Catholic Church is at best its ritual. And into this ritual there are woven only some threads derived from the Mystery of Golgotha; in its forms and ceremonies it has come over from the age of the Sentient Soul.

At the centre of this ritual there is something truly great, truly holy, because it brings the holiness that from primeval times has been woven into mankind (everything has its great and powerful aspects and needs only not to be developed one-sidedly), but we can relate ourselves rightly to this central point, the sacrifice of the Mass, which is an image of the highest Mysteries of all time, only if new life is brought into what is dead and was intended for the age of the Sentient Soul. The new life must come from all that Spiritual Science has to say in our modern lime concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. All that is found again, in the normal course of human evolution, by the researches of Spiritual Science—all this can be carried into the designs of Augustus, in so far as these have been preserved by Catholicism. In the same way, that which Spiritual Science can bring from the spiritual world must be carried into what has remained—physically blunted—of the aims of the Jundí Sábúr Academy. Spirit must be drawn into science.

Spirit must be drawn down into all that is enacted in the sacraments, to which men must turn again.

The weighty, momentous content of what I have just said will be taken in only by those who feel—and anyone who has studied Spiritual Science for more than a short time can fed it—how like our age is, in terms of what lives for the most part unconsciously in our souls, to the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching mankind. I have often mentioned, and you will find it brought out in the first of my Mystery Plays, The Portal of Initiation, that as at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha men stood facing the turning-point of the fourth post-Atlantean age, the year 333, so we to-day are facing a turning-point. The time is rather shorter because the movements of the higher Spirits change in velocity; we cannot reckon that to-day we have 333 years again before the turning-point. It changes somewhat in the course of time, this speed with which the various separate Spirits of the higher Hierarchies move on. Thus to-day, in the first third of the twentieth century, we are facing the approach of an important event for mankind. And all the convulsions, all the catastrophes, are nothing else than the earth-shaking occurrences which precede a great spiritual event of the twentieth century. It is not an event now in the physical world, but an event that will come to men as a kind of enlightenment, reaching them before the first third of the twentieth century has run out. If the phrase is not misunderstood, one can call it the reappearance of Christ Jesus.² But Christ Jesus will not appear in external life, as at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, but will work in man and be felt supersensibly. He is present in the etheric body. Those who are prepared can constantly experience Him in visions, constantly receive His counsel; in a certain sense they can enter into a direct personal relation with Him. All this that lies before us is comparable with what the Romans felt prior to the Augustan age, as the physically real Mystery of Golgotha that was approaching.

But, my dear friends, for things such as these one must have the true feeling. In face of various external phenomena that have come about, and have finally led to this terrible world-catastrophe, we must feel how the urge towards religious ritual exists once again in men. It has been long in coming. Just reflect, just consider—but with real attention, I beg you—how for more than a century sensitive spirits have repeatedly felt this urge to move away from the prosaic, rational intellectualism of the Protestant religion towards ritual. See how just those spirits among the Romantic writers who were able to feel something of the whole significance of ritual for the soul, strove after Catholicism. Because they were still incapable of gaining illumination from Spiritual Science as to what was seeking to enter the world sacramentally, they looked to Catholicism. Such spirits as Novalis—and just because of the specially deep spirituality that arose in him at a comparatively youthful age, he is a particularly characteristic personality—such spirits as he are not satisfied with prosaic Protestantism and strive after the forms of Catholicism, but they are healthy enough by nature to be shielded from stepping over into Catholicism. Such spirits give expression to what our age must express if it is to be healthy—the endeavour to feel once more in the world something sacramental, something corresponding to ritual. But they have no use for anything that wants to drag in merely an old cult, as is so often done to-day, when seeds appear which are no longer capable of growth, where spiritual invalids appear—among whom I would certainly place my old one-time friend, Hermann Bahr. Where these invalids of the soul are concerned, we see how even to-day they incline towards a misunderstood Catholicism, as with Herman Bahr, Scheler, Börres von Münchhausen. With all these people—they are very numerous and I know many of them—in the weakness of their soul-life they strive after Catholicism. One knows very well this attitude of soul; it springs from these people being unable to make the effort towards a life of soul that is inwardly active, a genuine, courageous activity in their soul-life, because in their soul-life they have become invalids and so they turn to what is offered them as a finished article. This permeates all Scheler's books of myths, which are very gifted, and all the quite mythical writings of Hermann Bahr's later period, and so on and so forth. It is all invalidism of the soul in a certain sense. It is the comfortable attitude that refuses to call forth out of the soul's depths what the times demand, in order to rediscover in the age of the Consciousness Soul, the way towards a true natural science, and to see in the whole of nature herself something sacramental—to see all nature as an expression of the divine-spiritual World-Order.

In the age of the Consciousness Soul, man must very soon develop the possibility of having not merely the abstract, dry natural science which petrifies the whole of him—a science which is to-day extolled as the salvation of the world—but a science that can deepen itself to a reverent perception of all the sacred symbols spread out over the world by the Godhead, in all the deeds giving joy to man, but also in everything by which the Godhead puts man to the test. If man is able once more to do his laboratory experiments sacramentally, on a higher level, and to make the operating table an altar, instead of a carpenter's workshop and a shambles, then the time will have come which is demanded for and souls to-day by divine evolution. Hence it is not surprising that at such a time as this much can be misunderstood, misunderstood above all through the aftermath of the Jundí Sábúr Academy, and is therefore taken up into natural science without any wish for a connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. Because of this, natural science becomes a purely Ahrimanic science, corresponding to all the Ahrimanic needs of mankind, corresponding to the state of mind which wants to organise the world according to externals alone. It may be said that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha has always to be sought anew; we must take in earnest the words: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”—even to the time when all the cycles of the earth have been accomplished. These words have to be taken seriously. If we wish to remain connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, we must keep our souls fresh, so that we can take up the new impulses which flow out repeatedly from the spiritual world—not always in cycles but because of the wish to approach mankind from time to time.

It is true that over against this we have a natural science without any desire to know of such influences; a science which wants simply to install its scientists in laboratories or in hospitals where the work is a matter of routine. There, as we know, research is carried on which works like invisible radiations and no-one concerns himself about what is thereby let loose in the world. Things are tried out, aspirin or phenacetin, and given to patients. When such things are administered one after another, all that has to be done is to record what is perceived physically—there is no need to call upon any activity of the soul. This is the state of mind which in essentials has come from the impulse of the Academy of Jundí Sábúr. For if men had been permeated by those impulses in the past, they could have taken their ease to-day, with no need to do anything more. They would have been endowed through grace with everything they would otherwise have to work for in developing the Consciousness Soul. Translated into physical terms, this attitude is present in external science.

The other attitude comes from what has been poured out into the world by Rome. It lives on in the most varied impulses, derived, not from Palestine, not from the Mystery of Golgotha, but from Rome, and it has developed in two directions—the burning of incense for the carrying out of a ritual which makes no demand on intelligence but only on the Sentient Soul; and, secondly, rhetoric, which is concerned only with the forming of sentences, or with giving human actions a character such that there is rhetoric even in the resulting laws that are made. Both these two attitudes have lived on. There can be no help for either unless it is clearly seen how in the future there should not be a science devoid of spirit; without fighting against science, we shall have to recognise its limits. There is no need to fight against it, for if it is studied in a positive way it offers magnificent and powerful gifts, and no-one has the right to say anything against science who is not well acquainted with its fruits. Anyone who is not acquainted with science, and yet harshly criticises it, is wrong; only someone who believes in it, is thoroughly acquainted with it, has gone into it deeply and made its methods his own—only such a person has acquired the right to judge it, to specify its limits and point out how science itself will have to advance towards a spiritual comprehension of the world.

Hostile opinion has found among other things in my writings that I have spoken with appreciation of Haeckel and modern science. My dear friends, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, out of which I speak, I should never dare to utter a word of criticism about science had I not previously made it every acknowledgement. For from the ground of the positive life of spirit we have the right of negative criticism only if we are able to show that within its acceptable limits we fully appreciate what we are fighting against. I believe I have fully earned the right to make known a spiritual development of mankind, a spiritual evolution, in doing which I have given out what the senses do not teach, because I have shown also what significance Darwinism and Haeckelism have for scientific life.

On the ground of Spiritual Science it must be asked that the words one speaks should be taken rather differently from the way in which they are generally taken. Hence I should not like anything I may say about Catholicism, or any other present-day movements, in the way I have been speaking to-day, to be understood from the standpoint of the ordinary philistine, or confused with criticism put forward about Catholicism or similar movements by one or other society with liberal views. Nothing is meant beyond what has been stated here; nothing is meant that cannot be fully justified from the standpoint of spiritual-scientific research. Research in natural science needs to be deepened so that it gradually leads into spiritual life. What has been preserved from ancient times, what has fallen into disuse—to some extent rightly—in the course of human life, is now appearing anew for reasons I have mentioned—man's need for the sacramental and his need for expressive forms. To see in forms the signature of the Divine in the world, but to understand these forms; not to speak in terms of dogma about Lucifer, Ahriman and Christ, but to have this trinity before us in artistic forms—this is what we need.

Out of this thought will arise the creation that is to be the centre-point of our Building, the wood-carving of Christ-Lucifer-Ahriman; out of this thought, the creation in an expressive unity of forms demanded by human evolution; but in such a way that while looking at the forms we penetrate to the spirit. The creation of such forms had to be the very foundation of our Building. No-one has the right to take this Building in a trivial sense; it must be understood in accordance with the essential aims arising from the great demands of our age, and with the needs of an age which once again, and now in a new way, has to approach the Mystery of Golgotha.

As we are given the necessary point of time in this age for finding the Christ anew, for finding the Christ on a higher level, so opposition to the Christ must also occur. These opposing forces were there in the past. We know that Christianity prevented the aims of the Academy of Jundí Sábúr from coming to fruition. We know that Augustus in Rome was aiming at something quite unconnected with the Christ Impulse. The persecution of the Christians by Nero, by Diocletian, even the rejection of Christianity by Apollonius of Tyana—all this came about because some people in Rome did their utmost to resist Christianity. It was meant to be quite rooted out—but it did not allow itself to be rooted out. So it is that Romanism, by taking from Christianity as much as suited it, became the Catholic Church, which developed also in this spirit; for directly there comes to mankind a new revelation, leading to further knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Catholic Church turns not towards it but away from it.

Only think—we must constantly look this fact in the face—when Copernicus, who was himself Canon of a cathedral, and therefore a true Catholic, advanced his theory, the Catholic Church condemned it as heretical. Up to the year 1827 orthodox Catholics were forbidden to accept the Copernican theory; since that time they have been allowed to believe in it. It has also become possible for a university professor of Catholic philosophy to say: Certainly the Catholic Church proscribed the Copernican theory and treated Galileo in the way it did. But it is no longer appropriate to think in that way (so said Professor Müllner, a Catholic philosopher, in his inaugural address as Rector of Vienna University); to-day it is appropriate to say that through these very discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo concerning the secrets of the external universe, the miracle of Divine Omnipotence has become all the more clearly a miracle of Divine Omnipotence. That, it is true, was spoken in a Christian way, but if it were judged critically by former standards, it would certainly not be regarded as spoken in a Roman Catholic way. Thus it has taken a good deal of time for the Catholic Church to be compelled by external pressure to recognise that knowledge of the cosmos does no harm to Christianity but helps it forward. How long it will take the Catholic Church to recognise the results of Spiritual Science—well, we will wait and see; we must certainly resign ourselves to the probability of no such outcome during our present incarnations. That is one side of the matter, my dear friends.

Confusions and misunderstandings, however, can very easily arise. They can arise from the subconscious urge in souls to experience the sacramental. The whole of mankind to-day is striving for a higher level of sacramental experience. Naturally, the Catholic Church makes use of this for its own advantage. And to-day, when men, alas, are so deeply asleep, one must earnestly wish that they would at least be awake to the most important things that are happening, even if as individuals they can do little to change them in many cases. There is no need to say: How can I alone change anything?

Often we must let time tell; in many cases we can work only when conditions are right. We need not apply the same prescription to everything; but we do need to be clear in our consciousness, to know how to observe, so that when something is asked of a man in his own sphere he really knows what he has to do. Above all, we must realise that most people nowadays who believe they do a great deal of thinking, in fact go to sleep whenever they can; they sleep when they might be won over—though this is difficult—to real knowledge of the impulses at work in human evolution. But others are awake! And these powers make use of every opportunity, every channel, in order to prevent human life from developing so as to meet the demands of the Consciousness Soul, and to make it develop only in accordance with their own aims. If people would only wake up to what is being willed in this direction, if they would only recognise things that often lie close at hand and are judged from quite another point of view, this would be of tremendous significance for the solution of those questions which arise out of the chaos of the present day and in the near future will have to be solved. Hence a recognition of such a fact as we have been speaking about yesterday and to-day is of very great importance. We should not judge the world to-day in accordance with abstract principles, for then we only fall into a deeper doze; we should make it our aim to judge with actual knowledge. For what must happen in these coming years can be brought about only by those who draw their principles, the impulses for what they do and will, from a spiritual knowledge of world-evolution. From this point of view—I must add—we dare not allow the healthy, genuine, welcome and refreshing trend that leads human souls towards sacramentalism—we dare not allow this to be used for the revival of ancient cults. For this would be using it not to gain knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, but to preserve a symbolism without spirit, the very thing that was inaugurated in the Augustan age and is now promoted in certain quarters for their own advantage. This is one aspect of what can be done to expose men's souls to misunderstandings—misunderstandings about sacramentalism, misunderstandings about ritual, misunderstandings about rhetoric, about living in concepts, in mere words. The formalization has indeed not sprung from the endeavours of Demosthenes in Greece, who put pebbles on his tongue because he stuttered, but wished to share with his countrymen the warm, loving content of his soul. It derives from rhetoric, and people who are not fully awake to the impulses at work in the evolution of mankind absorb it with enthusiasm.

The other side is made up of those who swear by the crudest science, who refuse to accept the spiritual, who value science only as technology, rejecting all that can be discovered concerning the spiritual content of the world through the great and powerful phenomena of nature. I once said, and this was truly not said rhetorically, but out of the deeper knowledge of the soul: Until our physics, our mechanics, the whole of our external science, come to be permeated by the Christ Impulse, science will not have reached its goal. Not only history should speak of the Mystery of Golgotha: men should also realise that since the Mystery of Golgotha natural phenomena have to be observed in such a way that Christ is known to be on the earth, whereas He was not on the earth before. A truly Christian science will not seek for atoms, not for atoms and their laws, nor for the conservation of matter and of energy; it will seek for the revelation of Christ in all the phenomena of nature, and these will thereby reveal to men their sacramental character.

From a contemplation of nature in this light there will spring a feeling for moral, social, political and religious principles in human life which will really answer to the demands of human living. If we absorb the divine element in nature, if we draw upon the power of Christ in our knowledge of nature, then we shall carry into the rules of conduct that we set up for mankind, and into all that we want to exemplify, whether in caring for the poor or in any other realm of social service—we shall carry Christology into all our works. If we are unable to look upon nature around us as permeated by Christ, if we are unable to discover the activity of Christ in all that lives in human deeds even when they are halting deeds, neither shall we be able in our social, moral or political life to meet the real demands of our time. In that case we should be left on the one hand with our crude science, which simply refuses to know anything about the supersensible, or with mere rhetoric, which is a legacy of Romanism, the ghost of Romanism. And if, when we speak of sacramentalism and ritual, which are both misunderstood, we must refer to Rome, in fact to present-day Rome, to the Rome that has become great especially through the shrewdness of Pope Leo XIII, then we have also to find the name which goes with the empty phrase-making of rhetoric—the kind of phrase-making which anyone really permeated by anthroposophical understanding of spiritual life must recognise.

We have often referred to this rhetoric. I must now go into actualities. I generally do this when enough time has been spent on other aspects of a subject. Where do we find the rhetoric that confronts a no longer healthy ritual, just as the Roman pulpit rhetoric of the Jesuits does? Where do we find the rhetoric that confronts modern science, which is craving for spirituality, the rhetoric that threatens our contemporaries because in a sleeping condition they are absorbing something which for external reasons is perhaps necessary for them? But should the people who recognise these things remain inwardly aloof, entirely aloof, from what is spreading through the world as mere rhetoric? This is Wilsonism! Woodrow Wilson is the name which has to be imprinted on this life in rhetoric, on the stringing together of words without substance. Call it a League of Nations, call it what you will, it is all a wallowing in mere rhetoric. This is something that mankind should not sleep through. People should feel impelled in one way or another to wake up to what is here emphasised—that Wilson ism is essentially opposed to the true progress of mankind; and this must be recognised in the very nature of its rhetoric; an idol with feet of clay.

These things, my dear friends, cannot be expressed through a few bourgeois, philistine ideas. That which threatens our time from the direction indicated, and has to be looked at soberly when present events are considered, must also be recognised in all its significance. We must not allow the world to be Wilsonised because everyone is asleep. Let there be followers of Wilson in America, in Europe, or anywhere else, but there must also be people who know that a deep connection exists between Jesuitism on the one hand and Wilsonism on the other. There must be people who realise this. Certainly they will have to grow beyond the philistinism of to-day; they must not form their opinions according to what the day brings, or even the years; they must be able to take account of what the centuries conceal, and yet reveal to us, if really and truly, with the innermost active force of the soul, we are able to look up to the hill where stood the Cross of Golgotha, the symbol for everything that as a revelation of the primeval Mysteries has poured into human life. But it will remain always youthful, always bringing fresh revelations to mankind.

• 1. See Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, lecture 5.
• 2. See True Nature of the Second Coming. Two lectures given at Carlsbad and Stuttgart in January and March, 1910.

After the fourth lecture of the Easter Course for physicians and
medical students, Dornach, April 21–25, 1924.

(Rudolf Steiner said the following in response to a question about
the grasping of the fluid man by imaginative perception.)

Now, of course, you will only be able to manage here if you proceed from a comprehensive view, and not from details. One would have to investigate such questions by proceeding from more comprehensive things and especially by meditating on some of the things which I already said. If we take the connections in nature in a comprehensive way—I will only speak of things which will gradually lead to imaginative thinking—we have the drop form. One generally thinks that a drop is held together from within, but it is also possible to think that it is formed from outside or from all sides. Then one has the circumference of the universe in the surface of a drop.

Of course, in these things one should realize that the imaginative idea must be true, and that the present-day ideas which one brings with one from one's general education diverge as far as is possible from the truth.

People have this idea today that there is an infinite space which has stars scattered in it. Now, to proceed from such an idea means that one is imagining things and is brutally ignoring everything but what one has made up in thought. Just take a report which was in the paper a little while ago, and which should be taken more seriously than one thinks; they were trying to show that the cosmos is not empty after a certain distance from the earth, but that it is solid and filled with crystallized nitrogen. Things are so confused today that such a view is possible. Of course, it is untrue, but in any case, these things show one how superficial the assumptions which have been derived from observation till now are. For today someone can just decide to imagine that we live here in an empty space with a slightly condensed earth at the center with solidified nitrogen all around, and that this simulates the starry heavens for us. Of course it is nonsense but it is true that if one reads the literature today one can pick up all kinds of ideas about the way the cosmos is constituted. This report on crystallized nitrogen might just as well have been an April fool's joke, and yet many people probably believe it. One is hardly anymore foolish if one believes this report than if one believes what is generally assumed today. The thinking which is accepted today is brutally materialistic for in reality the universe acts like a hollow sphere and as if forces from the periphery were going into it everywhere. One is really dealing with formations which can only be modified and differentiated in accordance with the stars, so that it is true that we have a copy of the configuration of the stars which we see outside in us. Thus we arrive at an imagination through the idea which our head shows us.

Speaking about heads, take a look at the way a bird is constructed. One is looking at a bird's structure or skeleton in the wrong way if one simply compares it with a whole mammal or human being. You can really only compare a bird's structure with a human head, and one has to imagine that one has a modified bird formation in the human head, and that the bird has the rest of its body attached in various ways as short appendages. Birds' legs are always stunted.

Now imagine that our drop is drawn out into a cylinder. If you expand the drop into a cylinder and you imagine that the part of the head which is differentiated by the cosmos remains, except that it becomes modified in many ways, because you draw the drop out into a cylinder, you then get the human torso. In order to imagine man's torso, one has to think that the skullcap is rudimentary. The third stage is to indent the cylinder here, and then you get the limb man. What I drew here is what you would initially get at the arms. You have to imagine that you expand this to get the arms, and that the second expansion is made through the creation of a second copy from within which comes from the moon. But let us omit the arms to make it easier. So you pass over from a sphere to an expansion and then to indentations. If you get used to making images through expansion and indentations in this way you are beginning to get what you need in order to really accustom your soul to work in the imaginative sphere. For basically all organized life consists of expansion and infolding and just think how wonderful that really is.

So let us say that I imagine a sphere, and then an elongated sphere; this is an expansion in an upwards direction which is brought about by the periphery. If you think that the earth and its forces here are a counterimage of the periphery then you have the earth under the human being as that which indents him. The cosmos expands up above and the earth indents down below. Thus an image is brought from the cosmos and man is indented by the earth. You can now ask what would happen if the earth were not beneath you and the starry heavens weren't over you, and you can answer this in an imaginative way And so if you want to form imaginations you should get used to looking at the universe as a whole when you pass over from solids to fluids, and you should not just try to sort of re-educate yourselves. You should gradually think: solid, sharp contours, whereas the fluidic element is always battling solids and is trying to insert them into the flow and the stream of the entire universe. And you will then get to the point of seeing this expansion and indentation everywhere, and you will thereupon look for counterimages.

Embryologists proceed in such a way that one never really knows why things develop the way that they do. One proceeds from an egg cell and passes over into a clump of cells, and one sees how the thing suddenly folds in and becomes a gastrula. One should realize that what is really happening here is that the cosmos has the possibility of working upon the surface and that the earth can work upon the infolding process.

Take an epidermis cell near the surface. They exist everywhere. Such a cell is here near the surface. The terrestrial principle which brings about the infolding continues to work in the human being. And so these terrestrial principles continue to work everywhere. Thereby there is always a tendency to direct fluidic things in people, so that things always move along in this way and so that an indentation is pushed along; indentation—push from behind, indentation—push from behind, this goes in various directions. Now imagine that this occurs as if some kind of fluid would move forward and become rigid. Look at an organ from this point of view. You can see rigidified, solidified and infolded things everywhere in it, and on the other hand, you can see its outward bulges. Thereby you arrive at the organ's form and at a view of how forces work from various sides, and you see that all these organs are part of a unity. However, you should realize that you must proceed from a quite particular point, namely, from the plastic element. Now, you have already pointed out that one should grasp forms through modeling. But actually try to get a feeling for what happens by taking some soft, plastic material or clay with one hand and pushing it forward with the other hand. Try to observe what is happening at the same time. You get the feeling that the idea of empty space is pure nonsense. Space has different kinds of forces in it everywhere and in this way you gradually learn to understand plastic things.

Now, of course, if you want to understand man in a plastic way you must be able to go to extremes. Thus I can think of a sphere here. I imagine that the sphere becomes expanded on one side and infolded on the other. But now imagine that you go further and that you push it in so far here that you go beyond the expansion; then you get two formations. But now imagine that the formations do not just become acted upon from one side. Imagine that you make an expansion, infolding, expansion, infolding, and then another infolding from below and an expansion on the top, and if you do this three times you get a model of the forms of the two lungs. Thus you can gradually see how the whole human being is connected with such forces within, and then you can go on to the following.

This is a very important idea, and its pathological, therapeutic significance will become completely clear when the book which Dr. Wegman and I are publishing appears (Fundamentals of Therapy). There one will be able to see the connection which exists between a fully developed organ and its function. Let us take the organ's function. This is something which is kept in connection with fluids and which is fluctuating continuously—the same thing which closed the organ off produces the activity. So that you can ask: What is the movement of juices in the stomach? It is something fluid which is basically the same thing as the stomach which has become solid. If you imagine that the movement of juices has become rigidified, you have the stomach. If this were not the case, no organ could be healed. You can only work upon a fluctuating organ and not upon a solid organ.

Silica acts in the same way that the human kidney does. If I give the silica which is in equisetum to a patient I build up the phantom of a kidney in his renal region. The phantom then replaces the astral activity at this place. This presses out old kidney substances and permits some new kidney substances to form from what is in flux, just as it forms there in any case after seven to eight years. However, one accelerates the process by producing this phantom. One should realize that an organ and the activity which forms it are always present together, and that this activity always rigidifies into the organ. This is where you encounter the fluidic human being.

But then you run into something else. You have to be able to press on to the idea that if I look at the solid human being I arrive at the pictures which one sees in anatomical books. But what we see there is only ten percent of the human being. As long as I look at these firm contours in the solid man a liver is a liver, a lung is a lung and a stomach is a stomach. But if I pass over to the fluidic man I will find that this stream of juices is particularly concentrated in the liver, let us say, and that it is constructing a liver out of fluids. However, every organ always wants to become the whole human being. This tendency is present in every organ in the fluid man. So that one should realize that if one cuts a liver out it remains a liver. But if I would take out the fluids with which the liver is created they would have the tendency to become a whole human being. You have to put this into an imagination: on the one side the tendency to take on contours, and on the other side the tendency to permeate everything.

If one is serious about these things they are really as follows. The meditation formulas are the beginning, and through them you will eventually be able to tell yourselves what I am telling you here. The beginning lies everywhere in the formulas, and they are the way to get into imagination oneself. Anyone who begins to meditate has an enormous inner desire in the beginning, but after a certain point when things begin to get serious something in him revolts, because the thing gets enormously complicated.

If one does not approach meditation in an extraordinarily serious way what happens to one is like what happens to someone who looks for Lucifer but sees a picture of Ahriman instead. Then the meditation works in such a way that one gets the opposite of what one is striving for. Or someone looks for Ahriman and sees a picture of Lucifer. That is the trouble. One usually becomes impatient and doesn't stick with it. It is not a question of time but of an intense application of patience, and then five minutes on a meditation can sometimes be a very long time. But it doesn't make any difference whether one loses one's patience in five months or in five minutes. You must have patience and then you will see that you can begin to understand things, and that you can pass over from the solid man to the fluid man.

If you then go on to the aeriform man you will need a musical principle. Here you have to understand the breathing process, and if you really meditate you will become attentive to your breath. The astral, aeriform man appears. You will begin to realize that most people go through life without any real self-knowledge. One learns to feel with one's breath. One of the things which happens first if one is in the habit of thinking in a mathematical or qualitative way is that one may suddenly ask oneself: Are you three halves? One feels as if one were three halves. Why is that? It is because one's breathing is beginning to make one feel that one has a threefold lung on one side and a twofold lung on the other. In this way one can ascend to the astral, aeriform element, by experiencing the proportions of one's inner structures through air.

A way to study the ego organization is to listen exactly to one's own speech. You can also get at the ego organization in a meditative way which ascends to a real understanding, if you take the skeleton of a dog or other mammal and concentrate very hard on its rear and front parts. One part is a modification of the other part. Then you have to pass over to cosmic aspects and think that the rear form was created by moon forces and the front one by sun forces and you should imagine how the sun looks at the moon, and then you have the animal's hindquarters on the moon side and its forequarters on the sun side. Then imagine that a modification of the sun and moon occurs so that man can stand upright and you will get a transformation. Thereby, the whole thing gets shifted up one level, and you can begin to grasp the ego organization. But you have to proceed in the following way: the spatial element must disappear into the plastic element, the plastic element into the musical element and the musical element into what has meaning.

If you proceed in this way, you are moving towards comprehensive things, and this is really the healthier way, because you can get completely confused the other way. You really have to start with these principles and not with the details.

We can obtain maybe the best survey of what ought to enter into our souls and hearts as a result of our efforts in spiritual science if we turn our attention for a moment to the greater part of what I have dealt with in my book Occult Science, an Outline. Leaving aside the introductory chapters, which are necessary as a preparation for the subject, we can begin with those chapters that introduce us to the being of man, his relation to birth and death, and his life in the spiritual worlds. After this comes a description of the great cosmic relationships, of course only in rough outlines; we are led through the transformations of our earth before it became the earth, through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions leading up to our present Earth evolution. Then follows a sketch in the form of brief hints giving us a glimpse of the future Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions. Finally, instead of a more detailed description of the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions we have an account of what must be undergone by the individual who wishes to set in motion within his being those inner soul experiences which must eventually lead him to initiation. These processes have been described in greater detail up to a certain stage in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved?.

It will become apparent that for us spiritual science falls into two parts. In one part we describe cosmic relationships; we describe how what we have before us today as the earth and its beings and as the rest of the cosmos has been coming into existence out of the very, very distant past, and we describe the prospect of how it will develop further. If you review the many observations that we have made, you will see that a large part of them are in a way under the influence of what we take into ourselves concerning the development and coming into being of the cosmos.

The other part of spiritual science is concerned for us with what the soul must do in order to enter the spiritual worlds or, in other words, to reach initiation. It is these inner experiences, conquests, battles, redemptions, and achievements of the soul with which we are always concerned in this second sphere of observation. Our observations always belong essentially to one or other of these two spheres.

Starting now with the first sphere of observations, we see that by describing the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions up to the present Earth evolution, we are placing something in the world which is entirely contrary to both the religious and the scientific world concepts of today; indeed the modern world for the most part considers these descriptions to be absurd. It is quite natural that to our modern minds a description of a world order appropriate, for instance, to the conditions of the Saturn evolution must appear too fantastic; the description of a cosmic order of this kind must appear to our present way of looking at things as absolute nonsense, as something that cannot exist, as the outcome of fantastic speculation. And this is just as true of the other parts of our portrayal.

Now bear in mind a remark that I have made here several times: The human being does not only sleep at night, when his conscious thoughts and ideas are dulled, but a part of his being is also asleep during the day. At night it is more the life of concepts that is asleep; but during the day, in a part of our being, the life of the will is more asleep. The will sleeps in the depths of our bodily being, or at least a large part of the will sleeps thus. This sphere of our will is much more comprehensive than the part which we develop consciously; the latter is only a small part. We may say with complete assurance that in his ordinary daily consciousness, either at work or enjoying leisure, the human being is really for the most part a sleepwalker. A vast number of things take place within him unconsciously; and even a great part of what seems to be done consciously is, in reality, done half or more than half unconsciously.

If we observe the human being exactly in what he does half or more than half unconsciously, then we may see with our spiritual eyes that during sleep he is not nearly so unbelieving as when awake. When awake his modern view of the world prompts him to say: The description of the Saturn evolution in a book like Occult Science is pure and absolute nonsense! Of course he must say this. But as a complete human being he does not speak like this; for he carries within himself something through which he—if I may say so—knows unconsciously that there was once upon a time a Saturn existence. He does something which proves that he in a certain way unconsciously remembers this Saturn existence: he becomes an architect. Architecture would never have come into being if man did not now carry within himself the laws which were imprinted on his physical body during the ancient Saturn period. Yesterday we discussed how these laws in the physical body can be projected into the space outside, where they become the laws of architecture. Man mysteriously projects into the laws of architecture all that he took into his being during the ancient Saturn period. Obviously he has to use such means as are at his disposal today; accordingly the present aspect of architecture is quite different from what we know of ‘Saturn architecture’. But the essential and living elements in our architectural activities stem from what was implanted in us during the ancient Saturn evolution.

Let us enter still deeper into the matter which we thus place before our souls. What does the human being do when he becomes totally absorbed in the creativity of architecture, either as the architect or as the observer or admirer? He lives within the Saturn laws of his physical body; if he immerses himself entirely into the laws of architecture, he forgets all about the life of his etheric body, his astral body and his ego: he becomes once more a Saturn man. All the impressions produced by architecture, its austerity, its chaste proportions, its silence which is yet so eloquent, result from the fact that, abandoning the higher members of his being, he immerses himself in what was given to him by the spirits of the higher hierarchies, the Thrones and Archai, who were active at the beginning of the Saturn period. It was mainly these two groups of higher spirits who were active then, assisted by the other beings belonging to the higher hierarchies.

So when he creates or enjoys architecture (where it is a case of real art of course), the human being really lifts himself not only out of the present Earth existence but also out of the more distant past and places himself once more into the period of Saturn existence.

Let us now pass on to sculpture. Yesterday we saw that the laws of sculpture are the laws of the etheric body which have been pressed down one step into the physical body. Just as that which lives in the physical body, when compelled into the space outside, becomes architecture, so sculpture appears when what lives in the etheric body is made to descend into the physical body. In enjoying sculpture we abandon the astral body, the ego, and all the higher members of our being, living as though we had only the physical body, and in the physical body an expression of the etheric body; in such a condition we are once more participants of the ancient Sun condition. All that the ancient Sun evolution planted in us reappears when we enjoy or create works of sculpture. On the one hand these works appear so congenial to us because they give us back our own very distant past which is still creative within us, our Sun period; and on the other hand they are so smooth and cold in their marble because what rays out to us from them is like light coming to us from the far distances of the cosmos.

Now let us pass on to painting. We know that painting comes about when the inner impulses of the astral body are pressed down into the etheric body; in painting we abandon the ego and live as though we were only in the astral, but were pressing it down into the etheric body. We experience ourselves in all that the ancient Moon evolution has implanted in us, this being our inner astral nature as human being. Painting is, as it were, the outward projection of this inner astral nature of ours. Just as we experience in our astral nature sorrow or joy, things that affect or impress us, whatever fate brings us, so do we experience what the painter conjures upon the canvas for us, which is a reflection of our own inner astral being.

If you try to enter a little into what is described in Occult Science as the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, you will discover that an architectural mood underlies the description of the Saturn evolution, a sculptural mood underlies the description of the Sun evolution, and a pictorial mood underlies the description of the Moon evolution; an attempt was made to express these moods by choosing suitable words. The presentation of occult events definitely requires more than the current literary equipment of today. It would be an entire misconception of the style of an occult description to believe that it could be achieved by the dreadful literary devices of our time.

We now come to the Earth evolution. Here we are in the immediate present, in the reality appointed for us; what we experience here we do not immediately feel the need to place before ourselves in the form of art. But the need the human being feels of projecting his inner life outward in the form of art is not exhausted by, as it were, recreating his cosmic past in architecture, sculpture, and painting out of the memory implanted in him.

Our need for art progresses further and we can find the spiritual foundation for this if we turn again to the book Occult Science. After the descriptions of the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth evolutions and after the brief outline of the future Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions, we come to the description of the processes of initiation, which are essentially at first inner human processes. These initiation processes are, in the form in which we encounter them today, the beginning of important changes for the life of human beings on earth and for the whole of future humanity.

Is it not so that our deeper experience of the life of humanity on earth is expressed in the words: Alas, in so far as man is consciously aware during life on earth he appears to be but an orphan in the cosmos, a child abandoned by the cosmos, or even a traveller who has lost his way in the cosmos!

For his everyday waking consciousness man does not know the origin of what lives in him as a result of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions; nor does he know what will become of him in the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions. Knowing neither his origin nor his future he wanders about at the edge of the abyss that bounds our earthly valley. Sometimes his consciousness may give him a feeling of assurance or he may feel secure as to his future; nevertheless, neither the past nor the future can be determined objectively and competently by man on earth. But something capable of giving him clear guidance in his life will appear before his soul. This will come about when man makes himself acquainted with the guidelines given him in the laws of initiation. Initiation, in ancient times, took the form of a kind of inheritance left to men by the gods, which manifested itself as atavistic clairvoyance; but in the course of our progress towards the future it must take hold of man more and more firmly and actually shape his inner soul life.

The path to initiation has two sides. The one side leads man to discover the secrets, the riddles of life so that he can enter into the spiritual experience of existence. The other side may be called the more subjective side of initiation that takes place more within the soul itself. It is, at the same time, the side from which men shrink the most, because it presents in fact something which does not fit in with the comfortable indolence of experience to which the soul so easily yields or wants to yield. An extremely wide and detailed range of inner experiences awaits the one who is to be gradually led by his inner experience to initiation. Conquest and liberation, hindrance and redemption alternate in manifold ways with inner experience on the way to initiation. One goes through everything the soul experiences when it suddenly feels it has become an entire stranger to itself; as though it had been cast into an abyss where it cannot help feeling that it is eternally lost and can never recover anything which it may have acquired during any lifetime. It may feel an unlimited dismay and grief at the loss of the existence already won. Then the soul may feel itself forced into complete fragmentation, as though it must disintegrate into an endless multiplicity and dissolve into all the beings out of which the cosmos is composed. Further the soul may feel itself wandering through the beings of the cosmos, becoming akin to one of them, then leaving it again and becoming akin to another, in the way I have described it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World, in the part dealing with experiences that are always attended by painful privations, painful loneliness as they are passed through one by one. Then comes the experience of the most radical transformation of all, when the soul must decide to undergo what can be expressed with the words: Now you must lose yourself for a while, you must thrust yourself away from yourself; but you must have faith that while you are losing yourself, while you are thrusting yourself away from yourself, beings reposing in the wide expanses of the divine hierarchies will protect you, will cause you to find yourself again after you have lost yourself. This is the passage through births and deaths. This is to be undergone among the inner experiences which lead to initiation.

At last comes the awful passage through all the forces which are not necessary for life on earth, but which are necessary for the life of the extra-terrestrial cosmos and which become the forces of evil when they are brought without justification into the life of the earth by Lucifer or Ahriman. It is the dreadful passage through the forces of evil, together with all the disruptive, devouring, engulfing forces they represent throughout the cosmos. And finally man passes through a stage when he ought to feel himself to be only an instrument, a tool through which the spiritual beings speak; he becomes symbolically what his larynx is as a single organ, he becomes the larynx of the divine spiritual beings, he feels himself to be resting in the all-powerful divine world. And then at last a condition will be reached in the future in which this feeling emerges into sharing the experience of the divine will, working in the cosmos itself.

Only single stages have been described here. But the grades of experience through which the soul passes are infinite. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? and, more descriptively, in The Threshold of the Spiritual World, you will find set forth as far as is necessary for the present time, how the soul is able to adjust itself to all these states and how, at each stage, it advances one step further into the spiritual world. All that the soul passes through on the path to initiation is consciously undergone and consciously experienced.

This is why this path of knowledge is so beset with pain and yet so full of liberation. But long, long before the human being enters consciously into all that I have described to you as the stages of the path to initiation, he is able to express these experiences in his own way in pictures, and this is done through music! In the last analysis genuine music is essentially a process of life taking its course in tones, which is an external picture of what the soul experiences consciously in initiation.

If he remains in the everyday sphere, the human being cannot at once accomplish what we described yesterday as the submerging of the ego in the astral body. To submerge the ego in the astral body in the right way is to enter into the divine world, and this is the passage through initiation. A picture of this is given to us in the processes we perceive in musical compositions. When he surrenders himself to musical creativity, either as the composer or the listener, the human being abandons his ego, he pushes it back; but at the same time he surrenders it to those divine spiritual powers who are to work upon his astral body when he has ascended to existence on Jupiter.

Please observe how we are entering upon a consideration of the creative art of music which links us with the future of mankind. It is almost, one feels, lacking in modesty to say that musical creativity is called upon to perfect itself more and more in the world, to become continually more profound, and that the musical creativity that has entered into our world so far is still more or less at the experimental stage, even though so much greatness and so much genius has already been involved. So far we have made attempts at what will be infinitely more meaningful in the musical creativity of the future. And this musical art of the future will be most significantly stimulated when human beings begin to engage in learning to know the inner nature of the path of initiation.

When one day what can be described concerning the path of initiation will no longer be experienced by human beings as it is today, but will be experienced in such a way that the description of what the soul must feel will cause human beings to go through bliss and bitter disappointment; when the knowledge that can be gained by reading about the path of initiation has become a complete inner experience: only then will it be possible for human souls to be so deeply moved through their participation in the destinies of all those beings who take part in the events of the cosmos outside the human realm, that they will feel within themselves the shocks, privations and liberation that will impel the soul to express in tonal relationships what is experienced through the description of the path of initiation.

In time to come there will be individuals who will feel what is described as the path of initiation; they will feel that things which are put before us in such an apparently abstract way can be intensely experienced, much more intensely than is the case with our outward physical experience. Then a moment will come when those who are able to experience the truth of what is described as the path of initiation will say to themselves: Now I feel that what I am experiencing does not connect me with the realm of nature that surrounds me on the earth but with all that lives and weaves in the cosmos; not only can I experience all this, but I am able to sing it, to set it to music!

In what can thus be described we have an indication of what spiritual science is to become for human beings. Spiritual science must be a living stimulus for the human soul; it should be more than mere theory, mere understanding, mere knowledge. Spiritual science must live in the soul, taking hold of all its powers, transforming the human being into another being. Or vice versa, the human being must transform himself into another being when he becomes devoted to spiritual science.

In ancient times, even in the case of the Greeks who were Sun men, an atavistic clairsentience led men to abandon their astral and their ego beings completely and only to express the laws of the physical human form created during the Saturn and Sun evolutions. Thus Greek statues were made, those works of sculpture that really stand before our physical eyes as the mankind of the Sun evolution must stand before our spiritual eyes, when we understand that the human being of that period consisted only of the physical human body which contained within it the living etheric forces but not as yet the astral.

Indeed, a work of Greek art such as the Venus of Milo stands before us as the personification of absolute chastity, since unchastity is only possible in the astral body, in all that permeates the astral body as passion and desire. Unchastity is not yet possible in the etheric body. It was a heritage from the gods bestowed upon men which caused them to create such works of art. The human being has lost this ability to feel himself within the etheric and physical bodies alone, without the ego or the astral body.

When he awakes and submerges his ego and his astral body into his etheric and physical bodies, he feels and experiences only what is present in his ego. Even the processes in the astral body are in the subconscious realm, and he has no inner knowledge at all of what takes place in the etheric and physical bodies. The ancient Greeks were still dimly aware of all this. But today, when we seek to bring spiritual knowledge to life once more within ourselves and cause it to embrace not only our abstract and theoretical thoughts but also the whole of our soul life, we gradually penetrate the different members of our being and learn to know what permeates our astral and etheric bodies in rhythmical and harmonious cycles. Then we become able to follow with the soul the etheric forces which pulsate through the body and through space, calling forth forms out of the etheric.

An attempt of this kind was made in the creation of the columns and architraves in our Goetheanum building; it was a diving down into the spheres made accessible to us by spiritual science which have been forgotten by mankind. In this we must indeed take deeply seriously what spiritual science can mean to us. You can glean from all that has so far been said about spiritual science that when we enter consciously into the spiritual world (and one must enter the spiritual world consciously), in other words when with understanding we give form to what lives in the etheric world and in the human etheric body and wish to enjoy what we have thus formed, then we must inevitably make the acquaintance of those beings which are called the luciferic and ahrimanic spirits.

Now consider how much of what we create today has an ahrimanic character. You will remember¹ what I have said with regard to our modern technical environment; and of course we cannot do otherwise than use modern technical methods in our work. If we wished to do without them we would produce the equivalent of hothouse plants. So it afforded me a certain satisfaction that we were able to use concrete, one of the most modern building materials, for part of our building here. For progress consists not in shutting oneself off, as in a hothouse, from the life around one, but in using what is offered by it. By grasping the spiritual nature of the world through spiritual science, we try to use modern materials in such way that what we know through spiritual science finds a living expression in them.

Of course this is only possible up to a certain point, and you will understand why this is so when you perceive all the implications of what has been said about the technical environment. For it is not possible to separate technical methods from ahrimanic forces, for instance, if we wish to create something in architecture or sculpture for ourselves. Thus it was a difficult task to take what of necessity had an ahrimanic nature in our building and, as it were, banish it from the building as something rendered harmless. It really was a difficult task, for we know that the ahrimanic element is inseparable from modern technology. For a while it seemed that Ahriman would easily gain the upper hand. Then we should have been compelled to incorporate into our main building all the technical equipment necessary for running it. As a result, Ahriman would have been permanently installed within the building. We had to think of a way of excluding the ahrimanic forces from the building, and the only possibility was to take the boiler house out and make it a separate unit. This has been done, as you can see for yourselves, and with great success.

It has been possible to create, in the most modern building material, forms that truly express the following: Here, near the building, but outside it, stands the part that must not be included in it, though it must be present outside; and the material out of which it has been formed represents an architectural structure that is truly in keeping with spiritual-scientific knowledge.

It was of immense importance that this should be achieved, particularly as the most modern building materials were employed. For if you look more deeply into what I have written about spiritual science, taking in this case the last chapter of The Portal of Initiation, you will find expressed there the fact that Lucifer and Ahriman are at their most harmful when they are not seen, when they remain invisible. Let us suppose that somebody is tormented by ahrimanic forces; what would be the best remedy? The best remedy would be for him to have some kind of picture made of Ahriman which he could place in his room. The best remedy against an astral being which torments one, is to place it before oneself in a physical form. It is incorrect to suppose that if we have Ahriman before us we will be persecuted by him; the contrary is true. Things must be made visible. But we must not let the matter get on our nerves; we must not develop a condition in which, if we happen to pass by the picture of Ahriman and look at it unconsciously, we then carry the image within ourselves. For this image will then be invisible inside us, thus making us nervous or excited.

You will also see, if you study our ahrimanic chimney along with the whole boiler house, how it is indeed possible to make an architectural structure of what belongs, one might say, to the most blatant elements of ahrimanic civilisation in our time. Certain defects of this civilisation will not vanish until mankind resolves to give architectural form to the things that concern the ahrimanic elements of our civilisation. Apart from all else, apart from our having a building for our own purposes, it is simply important that the first step should be taken in relating our present culture to art and in relating spiritual science to our present culture. Our boiler house is a first small step in this direction, and will lead, it is hoped, to the solution of other problems later. One enormous problem, for instance, would be to find a suitable form for the modern railway station; for the horrors and abominations which perform that function today are a contradiction of all decent human requirements. In its entire form our boiler house is not only suited to its specific purpose but also corresponds to the whole relationship of Ahriman to our building; in the same way the form of a railway station must correspond to what happens through it, with it, and in it within the framework of our modern civilisation.

Such things as these should indicate the way in which spiritual science can provide inspiration for artistic creativity and for many other fields. And we may rest assured, if we enter into the true sense and spirit of what is to develop for us out of spiritual science, that one day, when human beings immerse themselves in the nature of the Saturn condition, then the deeper laws of architecture will reveal themselves; and if people immerse themselves in the nature of the Sun condition, the the deeper laws of sculpture will reveal themselves; and if they immerse themselves in the nature of the Moon condition, then the deeper relationships between form and colour and the nature of chiaroscuro will become apparent, creating inspiration for the art of painting.

And from the description of the path of initiation will spring inspirations and intuitions for the creation of music and yet further for the creation of poetry. Then the time will come when poetic creativity in the true sense of the word will reappear in the world. For poetic creativity has to a certain extent died away. The ‘divine dreams’ incorporated in the work of the true poets were the last vestiges of the ancient heritage from the gods. But a time must come when, out of an understanding of the mysteries of initiation, poets will speak in dramatic or epic or lyric poetry about those intimate processes which take place in the soul when the human being is not alone with himself, but lives together with the gods of the higher hierarchies. In the not too distant future people will be saying: Stop bothering me with your perpetual jingles about men's experiences in the physical world; your daily routine of love and hate and enjoyment is your own affair. It is about what they experience together with the gods when they have found their way outside earthly experience, that men will sing in their music and in their dramas, epics, and lyrical poems. For we know that all men's experiences with the extra-terrestrial world must be brought into these arts through true creativity that is not involved in everyday life.

We have now seen what impulses of transformation lie in the knowledge brought to us by spiritual science, even in the field of artistic appreciation. And we have now seen how, if we enter into spiritual-scientific knowledge, we can dimly perceive the forces which must reign over the spiritual culture of future humanity. Indeed, we may believe that without achieving a profound inner transformation nobody can really make contact with spiritual science; and we may believe that spiritual science is something which can grasp man in a deeply inward way, leading beyond the narrow connections of physical life alone. If we bear in mind this ideal of spiritual science, if we bear in mind that spiritual science can lead out into a sphere that is different from ordinary experience, then it is always an event of immense significance to see somebody within the spiritual-scientific movement, really igniting within himself the spark that leads him out of and beyond the narrow limits of ordinary personal experience. In a way, the only joyful experience which is so far made possible for us through the spiritual-scientific movement is, that as a result of this movement, individuals can appear among us who really find their way out of their personal sphere into those spheres where the personal element ceases to exist.

In our everyday life we must, of course, cultivate the personal element; but in so far as we are together as students of spiritual science, all personal willing and feeling is changed into something impersonal if we take hold of spiritual science in the right way. And every victory over personal feelings and over the weight of personal feelings and over the weight of personal matters in life is of immense significance and value. But on the other hand it is one of the bitterest disappointments if something that is striven for in spiritual science with a will that is purely spiritual, becomes entangled again in the merely personal will and purpose of human beings, and if personal matters begin to play a role within a society whose object it is to unite us in striving for spiritual-scientific knowledge.

I shall not elaborate on these concluding remarks or go into more detail because I believe that there are a good many among you who will perhaps understand much of what is meant by them, who will understand that they were intended as an indication of a number of things that are satisfactory and a number that are disappointing. Today, having tried for a while to walk together along a path of spiritual science, it is good to think about these things for a moment; for there are various reasons why we should reflect and ask ourselves to what extent our own soul is participating in the sincere and honest effort to achieve the spiritual purposes which are nourished by the current of spiritual science. What a superb perspective unfolds before us when we say: Life, science, religion, and also art can receive impulses of transformation from spiritual science when it is truly understood. In the case of the pictorial and plastic arts the impulses come from what we learn in spiritual spheres about the past; and in the case of the arts involving music and speech the impulses come from that which we are striving for inwardly, in order to be able to approach the future. This perspective is so immense and so powerful that we cannot bring enough realisation to bear on it, in order to make it more intensely clear to ourselves. And the more we succeed in making clear to ourselves the inner mood resulting from this vision, the better we shall be as true members of that great organism known to us as spiritual science, an organism which is small today, but which has within it great possibilities. With this today I not only want to appeal to your reason and your understanding, but I also want to sow it as a seed in your souls and in your hearts.

• 1. see lecture ‘Technology and Art’, p. 5 et seq. of this volume.