The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we look back at what we discussed yesterday and the day before, a more intimate relationship between human beings and the surrounding cosmos must reveal itself to us. And we have been able to relate the physical body of the human being to the whole cosmos according to the organization of the head, the rhythmic organization, the metabolic organization; we have also been able to relate the human being in terms of soul and spirit to the whole cosmos. What appears to you there as the relationship of the human being to the cosmos, as the human being's complete integration into the world, had to be viewed differently in ancient times than it must be viewed now and than it will have to be viewed more and more as humanity strides towards the future. We have often mentioned how in ancient times an instinctive, primeval wisdom was spread over humanity; a wisdom that man did not work out inwardly, but that he, one might say, felt rising within him as if half in a dream. It was given to him, and he actually had nothing to do but open his soul's receptive organs and accept what came to him from the cosmos as a gift from the gods.

Since the human being is a threefold creature, this instinctive, primeval wisdom must also have presented the human being's entire relationship as a threefold one. By turning his attention more to that to which he belonged before his birth and which shone into the time between birth and death as a spiritual essence, which is essentially that which appears in the expanse of the cosmos, man spoke that what presented itself to him was beauty; the cosmos in beauty, and man, in terms of his brain organization, in terms of his organization of thinking, in terms of his being awake, born out of this world of beauty. Prehistoric man sensed that it was benevolent spiritual beings that revealed themselves around him; for prehistoric man did not see natural phenomena as dryly and soberly as we see them today when we merely indulge in ordinary consciousness. Prehistoric man saw spirituality and soulfulness revealing themselves everywhere. That revealed itself to him. And this cosmos, which was the revelation of the spiritual and soul and which revealed itself to his instinctive consciousness as in mighty dream images, that is what prehistoric man called the cosmos in beauty.

Then man felt, so to speak, standing on his planet. He felt connected to his planet. From it came his food, on it he had his location. He felt, as it were, his power, which permeated him physically, which revealed itself in the soul as will, which strengthened him out of the state of sleep. He felt this power, in turn, as the gift of benevolent divine spiritual beings and called it strength. The planet in strength permeates me - that is roughly how prehistoric man felt what he could not, however, express in sharply modulated words.

Thus he felt, as it were, standing in the midst of what was taking shape in his mind, taking form in his perceptions, and revealing itself in his awakening consciousness. And he felt himself standing on the planet in relation to the power that lived in his limbs, a power that he sensed as coming to him from the planet. He said to himself: “The same thing that works as a force in the stone when it falls to the ground, making a hole when the stone falls, lives in my legs when I walk. That connects me to the earth planet through my legs as my strength. That also lives in my arms when I work, that permeates my muscle strength. And he felt as if he were standing between beauty and strength, and felt that it was his task to bring about a balance in rhythm between the above, the beauty, and the below, the strength, in wisdom. And again he felt supported by the fact that he had to bring about this balance between beauty and strength, from the spiritual beings who were the bearers of wisdom, who illuminated him with wisdom.

Thus man felt what the cosmos gave him as beauty, wisdom and strength. Beauty, wisdom and strength were the things that made primitive man feel connected to the whole universe, that made him feel strengthened by them. In a sense, he felt the external world that surrounded him, the internal world that he sensed within himself, and the balance between the two, as beauty, wisdom and strength.

In the various secret societies, what remained were the keywords wisdom, beauty, strength, whereby it sometimes becomes quite clear how only the words remained, how the deeper understanding is missing. For a time has come for humanity when this feeling and this knowledge, even if it is instinctive knowledge, has been pushed more into the darkness by our connections with the cosmos. Man lived, as it were, in subordinate perceptions and subordinate feelings. He drove the impulses of his will out of subordinate elements of his own being. He forgot what he once sensed in beauty, wisdom and strength, for he was to become a free being. A central power had to emerge, as it were, from his inner chaos, to which was not revealed what revealed itself full of light and strength to the primeval man. But the newer humanity will not progress if it does not resurrect from within what once revealed itself from the cosmos as beauty, wisdom and strength. From the outside, the cosmos will not reveal itself again in beauty to humanity, as long as it is humanity on earth. These times are the times of the instinctive primal wisdom. These times are past times. These times are not those in which the free human being has developed, but rather those in which the human being could only develop who was driven, as it were, in bondage, in instincts. These times will not return, but out of his own inner being, man must resurrect what has come to him from outside in the way of wisdom, beauty and strength.

What has been absorbed, I would say, sucked in as power of beauty from the universe, man has, so to speak, taken in during old, very old earthly lives. In the middle earth-lives that followed, which we have gone through in the Egyptian, in the Greek, in the modern time, in these earth-lives, it was absorbed, but it did not come before human consciousness. Now mankind is ripe to bring it out of consciousness, and it will be brought out. What has been absorbed as the power of beauty will arise again from the inner being of man, and spiritual science is the instruction for this, how it is to arise from the human inner being. It will arise from out of the inner being through imagination. And all that is now consciously imparted through imagination in spiritual science is nothing other than the resurrected life of beauty, as it existed within the original wisdom. And all that man has experienced within himself in feeling the power of his planet, in which, however, was contained all the power of the cosmos, only that it was centered in the planet or is centered in the planet, all that must rise again, in that man grasps it from within through the realization of intuition. Beauty, drawn from the universe, becomes imagination for the future of humanity from the present on. Strength becomes intuition, grasped through one's own free human power, and wisdom becomes inspiration.

Thus man has left an age in which beauty, wisdom and strength were bestowed upon him from the outside. I would like to say that these buzzwords of wisdom, beauty and strength have been merely parroted in certain secret societies, in freemason orders and so on, without further cultivation of inner understanding. If one would understand the matter inwardly, one would know that these are ancient traditions that must revive as imagination, as inspiration, as intuition. It is therefore a rather inferior wisdom when all kinds of members of this or that order come and find a similarity between what occurs in spiritual science and what they have as their tradition, which they mostly do not understand. In spiritual science, the connection is lifted out of the spirit-knowledge itself.

Thus, people have left an ancient age in which the secrets of the universe were revealed to them in beauty, wisdom and strength. Humanity must now approach an age in which the secrets of the universe will be revealed to them through the imagination, inspiration and intuition of those who want to or are meant to come to these powers of knowledge and who can reach them in some way. Today, everyone can understand what is brought forth from inspiration, intuition and imagination, if only they want to.

But now the old age was exposed to a certain danger. And this danger, I would say, arose most strongly in the then civilized world, in Egypt, the Near East, India and so on, towards the end of the 2nd millennium BC. The danger was this: that people did not receive in the right way what revealed itself, as if by itself, out of the universe, I would say by grace, to the human being who only had to receive it in his cognitive instinct. One could succumb to this danger in the following way.

You have to imagine what it means that not only what appears to today's sober consciousness as nature and as natural laws is revealed in the nature surrounding man, but that grandiose beauty, that is, beautiful appearance in mighty, pictorial revelations of spiritual beings, which looked out from every source, from every cloud, from everything. It was particularly during this time, towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Christian era, not as in even older times, when of course all this was also there; but it was, I would say, more naturally there. In those days, man had to partake of this grace by doing something himself. He did not have to do it in the way that we, now in full consciousness, seek higher spiritual development, but he could — and it was even a rather doubtful ability — develop a desire for this spiritual that revealed itself in nature; he could fire up his forces of need, his driving forces; then, as it were, the spiritual revealed itself to him out of nature. And in this kindling of the driving forces, of the forces of need, lay a strong satanic gift.

Most of you know, of course, how natural it was for man in the old Atlantean time to see the appearance of elemental beings. But this appearance still resonates for the clairvoyance of the post-Atlantean time. But it gradually faded away, and then man knew how to conjure it up in a certain way from natural phenomena through his powers of perception. That was the Luciferic danger that arose. Man could, so to speak, shake himself up, fire himself, in order to unite spiritual beings with himself. But this kind of arousal was something Luciferic in him. Therefore, the world of culture and civilization at that time was strongly contaminated by Lucifer at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. We have pointed out this Luciferic contamination from other points of view on other occasions; I have traced it back to its other causes; but now let us look at it from the point of view adopted in these three lectures.

This former Luciferic infestation of the world is now facing another, an Ahrimanic one. And this Ahrimanic infestation is currently on the march with a tremendously strong force. It is quite dreadful how the civilized man of the present day sleeps in the face of what is actually developing. Just consider how mechanical and machine power has developed in recent times. I have spoken of this before from other points of view. It is not so very long ago that people had to do everything with their own muscular strength, whereas today they can leave certain things to machines, which they only have to operate. The forces that man brings out of the earth by mining the coal underlie what takes place in the machines. The coal provides the power that then works in our machines.

When man now brings it about that a machine works alongside him, it is the case that he, so to speak, hands over to the machine what he used to have to do himself. The machine does it. The machine stands beside him and does the work that he used to have to do himself. One measures what the machine produces in horsepower, and if one wants to measure on a large scale, one measures what is produced within a certain territory in the horsepower that a horse can muster in a year when it does its daily work. Now take the following: in 1870 – we can calculate this from coal production – within Germany – I am deliberately choosing the war year – a total of six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years were worked by machines. That is, in addition to what people have worked, the machines have worked six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years. This is therefore a force that has been worked out of the machines themselves. In 1912, 79 million horsepower-years were worked by machine power in Germany alone!

Since Germany has a population of almost 79 million, this means that a horse works all year long next to every human being. And consider the increase from 6.7 million horsepower-years to 79 million horsepower-years within a few decades!

And now consider these conditions in relation to the outbreak of the terrible catastrophe of war. In the same year of 1912, France, Russia, and Belgium together could muster 35 million horsepower-years; Great Britain 98 million horsepower-years. Essentially, the war in 1870 was fought by people, because there was not much in the way of mechanical forces that could be mobilized. In Germany, there were only 6.7 million horsepower years available. In the few decades that followed, things changed. You know, in this war, it was essentially the machines that worked against each other. What confronted each other at the fronts came from the machines, so that actually the horsepower years of the mechanisms were led to the front.

Now the fact of the matter was that it took Great Britain a long time to mobilize its 98 million horsepower-years. But then, in terms of the mechanical power of these empires, 133 million horsepower-years stood against 79 million horsepower-years from Germany; about 92 million horsepower-years could be mustered if Austria were added. Now, this was initially offset by the fact that, as I said, Great Britain could not convert its horsepower years so quickly from land cultivation to the front. In this terrible war catastrophe, it was not the wisdom of the generals that was at issue – they did give certain directions, but the main thing that was at issue was the mechanical forces that collided at the fronts, and these did not depend on the generals, but on the inventions that man had previously made based on his natural science.

And what, then, had to happen as a matter of fate and destiny, as it were? Let us assume that the horsepower years of the United States of America, amounting to 139 million horsepower years, were still being sent to the front.

You see, the human race had produced so much machine power in just a few decades that the fate of the world was predetermined, quite apart from the genius of the generals. Nothing could be done about this fate of the world, about this necessity, where the results of the mechanical forces on the fronts simply collided.

So what exactly are we dealing with here? Man has constructed the mechanisms based on his thinking. By constructing them, he had placed his intellect, his scientific understanding, into the mechanisms. In a sense, reason had run away from his head and become the Horsepower Years in his environment. They now worked, having run away, themselves. The frantic speed with which this creation of a world, which is inhumanly-extra-human, has occurred in recent decades through humans, is not easily imagined by the sleeping civilized man of the present.

The person I referred to at the end of the 2nd millennium BC had the luciferic contamination around him; the spiritual beings for whom he developed his needs appeared to him from nature. When that is a natural object, the spiritual being appears in it (it is drawn). Now man lets his spirit flow into matter, into mechanisms. It becomes so in there that, for example, in Germany every person has created a horse alongside him out of the human mind, which now works alongside him, which was not a horse but machine power. This is separate from man, as these elemental beings were once separate from man, only in a different sense. They were so separate that man had to turn his Luciferic power to them. Now he turns his Ahrimanic power to them. Now he mechanizes them, materializes them. We live in the age of Ahrimanic contamination. Men do not even notice that they are actually withdrawing from the world, and that they are incorporating their intellect into the world and creating a world alongside them that is becoming independent. And the great, I might say, diabolical experiment has been carried out since 1914; that the one Ahrimanic entity against the other Ahrimanic entity has basically turned out to be the decisive factor. We have been dealing with an ahrimanic struggle over almost the whole earth. Man has accepted the ahrimanic character by creating a new ahrimanic world in the mechanism that surrounds him. And it is a new ahrimanic world. If you look at the figures: From 6.7 million to 79 million horsepower-years in just a few decades, the increase in non-human mechanical power – the ratio is the same in the other countries – how quickly Ahriman has grown in recent decades!

Should we not ask ourselves whether man should lose completely what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man should be led more and more towards the illusion that he is doing things, while in truth the Ahrimanic forces, which can be calculated in horsepower years, are working against each other? Those who have an overview of the world are only interested in Foch and Ludendorff and Haig from a moral point of view. From the point of view of full reality, they are interested in those forces that come from the coal and that clash on the fronts, that are led from the mechanical workshops to the fronts, depending on the inventive powers of previous years, and that turn into a simple mathematical calculation what must happen.

Thus, the Ahrimanization of the world is a simple mathematical calculation to know what must happen. And what is man's place in all this? He can stand by as the stupid one whose machines ultimately run towards when he finds somewhat more complicated combinations of forces.

This Ahrimanization is the modern counterpart to the Luciferization of the world of which I spoke earlier. That is what we must look at. For is this not perhaps the most eloquent illustration of the necessity for man to create from within? We will not stop this Ahrimanization, nor should we stop it, otherwise we would stand before every new mechanization like the Nuremberg Medical Council in 1839 or like the Berlin postmaster before the construction of the railroad, who said: People want to run a railroad from Berlin to Potsdam — I run post coaches out there twice a week, and there is no one inside! — One cannot stop mechanization, because culture must go in this direction. Culture demands the Ahrimanization. But it must be placed alongside what is now working from within the human being, what draws wisdom, beauty, power, and thus strength from within the human being, in the imagination, in the intuition, in the inspiration. For the worlds that will arise will be man's worlds, they will be those that stand before us in spirit and in soul, while without the forces of Ahriman are at work. And these powers that arise from imagination, from inspiration, from intuition, will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm the human being around him, out of the frantic pace of Ahrimanization. What comes from the spiritual world, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, is stronger than all the horsepower years that can still spring from the mechanization of the world. But the mechanizing forces would overwhelm man if he did not find the counterweight for them in what he can find from the revelations of the spiritual world, which he must strive for.

It is not some invention, some abstract ideal, some slogan that appears with spiritual science and strives for the realization of imagination, inspiration and intuition, but it is something that can be clearly seen in its necessity from the course of human development. And it must be pointed out that man would be overwhelmed by the non-human, which he himself has created in a world Ahrimanized in calculable horse power. When man received from without that which gave him wisdom, beauty and strength, he had not yet the Ahrimanized world around him, he could receive it in grace or through grace, and on earth he had at most what he acquired through the power of fire or through the simplest mechanical tools, which did not add much to his own strength. And only since about the second half of the nineteenth century have we a new world, I might say, a mighty new geological layer covering the earth. To all the layers, diluvium, alluvium, is added the Ahrimanic layer of mechanized forces, which forms like a crust over the earth. So what overwhelms man rises up from the depths if man does not place himself in the outer world with that world that comes to him from the spirit, that is, from imagination, intuition and inspiration.

Truly strong impulses arise out of the knowledge of the course of the world, which point to the necessity of spiritual-scientific culture and civilization. These are necessities that can already be grasped today. For is it not terrible that alongside man, this, let us say, super-geological layer is emerging with such furious haste like a new earth crust, and that many people today still think as they have been taught, as for example in Germany only 6.7 million horsepower years were produced by mechanization? Do people think about what actually drives the course of the world? Do we have a clear picture of what is really happening? We do not, otherwise we would truly recognize from the knowledge of what is happening the necessity to find a new way of imbuing people with what past ages called beauty, wisdom, strength, and what we must call imagination, inspiration, intuition after the path that the human personality must take to attain it.

We are therefore looking into a world that is riddled with Ahriman. I have said before that I do not want to use the word “transition period” carelessly, because basically every period is a transition period; but a time in which something as special as Ahrimanism has developed so rapidly as it has since the last third of the 19th century is not always there. And the Biedermeier period, which immediately preceded it for a large part of Central Europe, truly cannot be compared with what has actually happened in reality in the last few decades. One must feel the full gravity of these modern events. And one must feel the following.

When you look at an event such as the war that took place in Central Europe in 1870/71, you can reflect on it and keep thinking about it. But just look at how people still try to visualize the events of the last few years in the same way! They still think the way they did when there were only 6.7 million horsepower years in Germany! They do not understand that you have to think differently when 79 million horsepower years are working outside of humans! This requires a completely different way of thinking. Without turning to spiritual science, the riddles that arise from these events will not be solved at all. If man mechanizes the world around him through external science, then he must all the more develop an inner science from within himself, which in turn is wisdom. This will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm him.

[ 1 ] When the work of Michael at the present time is approached through spiritual experience, it becomes possible, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, to obtain light on the cosmic nature of Freedom.

[ 2 ] This does not refer to my Philosophy of Freedom (or ‘Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,’) which is based on the purely human faculties of cognition, where these are operative in the field of the spirit. In order to follow the thought of this book, it is not yet necessary to join company with the beings of other worlds. But it may be said that the Philosophy of Freedom prepares the way for the understanding of the freedom which, in spiritual connection with Michael, can then be experienced. [ 3 ] And this is as follows.

[ 4 ] If freedom is to be a living reality in human action, then that which is accomplished in the light of it must be completely independent of man's physical and etheric organisation. There can be no freedom except through the ‘I,’ and the astral body must be able to vibrate in harmony with the free activity of the ‘I,’ so that it may be able to transmit it to the physical and etheric bodies. But this is only one side of the matter. The other side becomes clear in connection with the mission of Michael. For it is also true that what man experiences in freedom must not in any way affect his physical or etheric body. Were this to happen, he would have to lose entirely what he had gained during his evolution under the influence of Divine-Spiritual Being, and Divine-Spiritual Manifestation.

[ 5 ] What man experiences through this his environment which is but the accomplished Work of the Divine and Spiritual, must take effect on his spiritual nature (i.e. his Ego) only. His physical and etheric Organisation must only be affected by that which flows on, in the stream of evolution, not in his outer environment, but within his own being, and which had its origin in the Being and Manifestation of the Divine-Spiritual. But this must not work together with that in the human being which lives in the element of freedom.

[ 6 ] All this is only made possible because Michael carries over from the far past of evolution something that brings man into connection with that Divine-Spiritual reality which in the present day no longer penetrates the physical and etheric Organisation. Through this the foundation is being laid, within the mission of Michael, for a human intercourse with the spiritual world which does not interfere at all with the working of Nature.

[ 7 ] It is inspiring to see how the human being is raised by Michael into the spiritual sphere, whereas the unconscious and subconscious elements which develop beneath the sphere of freedom are uniting ever more strongly with the world of matter.

[ 8 ] Man's position with respect to the world will in the future become more and more incomprehensible to him if he is not prepared to recognise, in addition to his relations to the beings and processes of Nature, such relations as this to the Michael Mission. Our relations to Nature are recognised by looking at them from without; our relations to the spiritual world proceed from something like an inner conversation with Beings to whom we have opened up the way by adopting a spiritual view of the world.

[ 9 ] In order, therefore, for man to realise the impulse of freedom, he must be able to hold at a distance certain influences of Nature which affect his being from the Cosmos. This ‘holding at a distance’ is taking place in the sub-consciousness, when in the consciousness there are the forces which represent the life of the Ego in freedom. For the inward perception of man himself there is the consciousness of his activity in freedom, but for the spiritual Beings connected with man from other spheres of the Universe it is different. The Being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, who leads human existence from one earthly life to another, sees at once how the matter stands regarding human action in freedom; he sees how man thrusts away from himself cosmic forces which want to form and mould him further—which want to give to his Ego-organisation the necessary physical supports, as they did before the age of Michael.

[ 10 ] Michael, who is a member of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, receives his impressions with the aid of the Beings of the Angeloi-hierarchy. He devotes himself, in the manner here described, to the task of bringing to man from the spiritual part of the Cosmos forces which can replace those from the realm of Nature which have been suppressed.

[ 11 ] He accomplishes this by bringing his activity into the most perfect accord with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] The forces which man requires for the compensation of suppressed impulses of Nature when he acts through freedom, are contained in the activity of Christ within earthly evolution. But man must then really bring his soul into that inner life in union with Christ, of which we have already spoken in these articles on the Michael Mission.

[ 13 ] When a man faces the physical Sun and receives from it warmth and light he knows that he is living in a reality. [ 14 ] In the same way he must live in the presence of Christ, the spiritual Sun, who has joined His life to that of the Earth, and receive actively from Him into his soul that which in the spiritual world corresponds to warmth and light.

[ 15 ] He will feel himself permeated by ‘spiritual warmth’ when he experiences the ‘Christ in me.’ Feeling himself thus permeated he will say to himself: ‘This warmth liberates my human being from bonds of the Cosmos in which it may not remain. For me to gain my freedom the Divine-Spiritual Being of primeval times had to lead me into regions where it could not remain with me, where, however, it gave me Christ, that His forces might bestow upon me as a free human being what the Divine-Spiritual primeval Being once gave me by way of Nature, which was then also the Spirit-way. This warmth leads me back again to the divine sources, whence I came.’

[ 16 ] And in this feeling there will grow together in man, in inner warmth of soul, the experience in and with Christ and the experience of real and true humanity. ‘Christ gives me my humanity’—that will be the fundamental feeling which will well up in the soul and pervade it. When this feeling is once there, another comes: man feels raised by Christ beyond mere earthly existence, he feels one with the starry firmament around the Earth and with all that can be recognised in this firmament as Spiritual and Divine.

[ 17 ] It is the same with the spiritual Light. Man can feel himself fully in his true human nature by becoming aware of himself as a free individual. A certain darkening is however connected with this. The Divine-Spiritual of primeval times no longer shines. The primeval Light appears again in the Light brought by Christ to the human ego. In the life in union with Christ this blissful thought may shine like a sun through the whole soul: ‘The glorious primal Divine Light is here again; it shines, although its light comes not from Nature.’ And man unites himself, while in the present, with the spiritual, cosmic forces of Light belonging to that past when he was not yet a free individual. And in this Light he can find the paths which lead him aright as a human being, when in his soul he unites himself, with understanding, with the Michael Mission.

[ 18 ] Then in the Spirit-warmth man will feel the impulse which so carries him over into his cosmic future, that in this future he will be able to remain true to the original gifts of Divine Spiritual Beings, albeit he has evolved in their worlds to free individuality. And in the Spirit-light he will feel the power which leads him with open eyes and ever higher and wider consciousness to the world in which as a free human being he will find himself again with the Gods of his origin.

[ 19 ] If man wishes to continue in the original existence and keep the primal naive Divine Goodness which held sway in him, and shrinks from the full use of freedom—it leads him, in this present world in which everything tends to develop his freedom, to Lucifer, who wishes the present world to be denied.

[ 20 ] If man devotes himself to present existence and wishes the natural world alone to hold sway (the natural world which is accessible to the present intellect and which is neutral with respect to Goodness), if he wishes to experience the use of freedom in the intellect alone, then in this present world where evolution needs to be continued in deeper regions of the soul, while freedom rules in the upper regions—he will after all be led to Ahriman, who wishes to see the present world transformed into a Cosmos of pure intellectuality.

[ 21 ] Certainty of soul and spirit flourishes in those regions where man feels that in the direction of the outer world his gaze rests spiritually on Michael, and in the direction towards the inner being of the soul on Christ. It is that certainty through which he will be able to traverse the cosmic path upon which he will, without losing his origin, in the future find his true perfection.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 22 ] 118. That action alone can be free in which no process of Nature, either within man or without him, plays an active part.

[ 23 ] 119. But there is also the other pole, the opposite aspect of this truth. Whenever the individuality of man works freely, a Nature-process is suppressed in him. In an unfree action this process of Nature would indeed be present, giving to the human being his cosmically predestined character.

[ 24 ] 120. To the man who with his own life and being really partakes in the present and future stages of World-evolution, this character is not vouchsafed by way of Nature. But it comes to him by way of the Spirit when he unites himself with Michael, whereby he also finds the way to Christ.

[ 1 ] When one inwardly pursues the course of spiritual life down to Michael's workings at the present day, it becomes possible to obtain a light from spiritual science upon Freedom in its cosmic character.

[ 2 ] This does not apply to my ‘Philosophy of Freedom,’ which is something that proceeds from the purely human powers of cognition themselves, if once they can enter upon the field of the spirit. To arrive at the knowledge there arrived at, requires, so far, no intercourse with beings of other worlds. But the ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ makes—one may say—a good preparation for that other knowledge about freedom which may afterwards be learnt in spiritual intercourse with Michael. [ 3 ] And this is as follows.

[ 4 ] If freedom is really to have life in human actions, that which is performed in freedom's light must be in no way dependent upon the human physical and etheric organization. A ‘free’ performance can proceed from the I alone, and the astral body must also be able to vibrate along with the free action of the I, so as to transmit it to the physical and ether-bodies. This however is only one side of the matter. The other side is the one that becomes clear in connection with Michael's mission. Namely, whatever a man realizes in freedom in his inward life, must again have no sort of action upon his etheric nor physical body. Were it to do so, the man would inevitably be brought completely out of line with all that he has come to be during the different stages of his evolution under the influence of divine-spiritual Being and divine-spiritual Revelation.

[ 5 ] What Man brings to realization in his inward life from all that is the wrought work only of divine spirit round about him, must exert no influence of any but his spiritual part—his I. The only thing that may influence his physical and etheric organism, is what comes through the evolutionary stream, not in his surroundings, but in his own being itself, as the continuation of what had its first beginnings in the being and revelation of divine spirit. But this element in the human being must on no account become involved in its workings with what lives in the element of freedom.

[ 6 ] What alone makes this possible, is that Michael carries over from a very remote past in evolution, something which gives Man a link with that divine-spiritual reality which no longer intervenes, in the present day, in the physical and etheric structures. So that by this means, there grows up in the Michael Mission the basis for an intercourse between Man and the spiritual world, which does not interfere in the workings of Nature.

[ 7 ] It is elevating to watch how, through Michael, Man's being becomes lifted ever higher into the spiritual sphere; whilst what is going on below, unconscious and subconscious, beneath the sphere of freedom, becomes ever more deeply wedded to the world of matter.

[ 8 ] Man will find his relation to world-being growing ever more incomprehensible as time goes on, unless he will consent to recognize his relation, not merely with natural beings and natural processes, but also with things of another kind, such as the Michael Mission. One's relations to the natural world are something that one learns to know as viewed from outside. Relations with the spiritual world proceed from something like an inner conversation with a reality of being, to which one has opened access by one's readiness to view the world in a spiritual aspect.

[ 9 ] For Man, therefore, to carry the impulses of freedom into actual life, he must be in a position to hold aloof from his own being certain affectations of nature that act upon his being from out of the Cosmos, and to keep them from affecting it. This ‘holding aloof’ goes on then in the subconscious, whilst in the consciousness those other forces are at work, which represent the life of the I in freedom.

For the man's inward perception, there is this consciousness of creative freedom. For the spiritual beings connected with Man from other world-spheres it is different. The being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, whose work it is to conduct the man's identity from one earth-life to another, becomes at once visibly aware that man is repelling cosmic forces which are seeking to continue his development—forces which are seeking to give the necessary physical support to his I-system, as they did previous to the age of Michael.

[ 10 ] Michael, as a being from the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, receives his impressions by aid of the beings from the Angeloi-Hierarchy. He devotes himself to the task of conveying to Man from the spiritual part of the Cosmos, in the manner described, forces which can replace the suppressed forces of his natural existence.

[ 11 ] This he accomplishes by bringing all he does into most perfect unison with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 12 ] The workings of the Christ in earthly evolution contain the forces which Man needs when he works in freedom, in order to make good the suppressed impulses of Nature. Only, Man must then actually bring his soul into that inner intercourse of life with the Christ, already spoken of in these descriptions of the Michael Mission.

[ 13 ] Man is conscious of being in the midst of a reality, when he stands in the face of the physical Sun, and it gives him warmth and light.

[ 14 ] Even so he must live before the face of the Spiritual Sun, the Christ, who has united His life with the life of Earth; and from this Spiritual Sun he must receive, alive within his soul, what in the spiritual world corresponds to warmth and light.

[ 15 ] He will feel himself filled through and through with ‘spiritual warmth,’ when he realizes the life of the ‘Christ within him.’ And feeling how this warmth flows through him, he will say: This warmth dissolves my human being from bonds with the Cosmos which must not hold it. The divine-spiritual Being of yore led me to regions where it needs must leave me, in order that I might achieve my freedom. But in these regions it has given to me the Christ, that from His forces I may receive as a free man, what the divine-spiritual Being of yore once gave to me by way of Nature—which, in those days, was also the way of the Spirit. To the divine source whence I came, this warmth leads me back once more.

[ 16 ] And as this feeling rises in him, Man's sense of his life in and with the Christ will become one in inner soul-warmth with his sense of real, true manhood. ‘Christ gives me my human being,’—this will be a dominant feeling, breathing, 0pulsing through all the soul. And if this feeling be once there, there will come too that other feeling, where Man feels himself by Christ lifted up above the life of earth, and feels himself one with the stars that environ the earth and with all that may be read in this starry environment of the spiritual and divine.

[ 17 ] So too will it be with the spiritual light. Man can have the full feeling of himself in his own being as a man, when he wakens to the consciousness of himself as a man, when he wakens to the consciousness of himself as a free individual. Nevertheless this is accompanied with a certain darkness. The Divine and spiritual of ancient days no longer shines. In the light which Christ brings to the I of Man, the ancient, primal light is there once more. In such a life in community with Christ, the thought may arise, shedding bliss and brightness like the sun through the whole soul: The divine light of old is there, in all its pristine glory; it shines, though not with the light of Nature. And Man unites himself in the present with the spiritual cosmic Light-Powers of the past, that shone in the times before he was a free individual. In this light he can find the paths which will lead him aright as human being, if he understandingly unites himself in soul with the Michael Mission.

[ 18 ] In the spirit's warmth Man will feel the impulse that can carry him on in such a way into his cosmic future, that he can there remain true to the gifts given him by the divine spirit-beings at his origin—notwithstanding that he has since developed in their worlds to a free individuality. And in the spirit's light he will find the power which will lead him, with open eyes and ever higher and broader consciousness, to that world where he shall find himself again as free Man in the company of the Gods of his first origin.

[ 19 ] To want to remain in the first, original state of existence—to want to keep the original naïve simplicity of divine goodness, of the time when the gods ruled in Man, and to shrink from making use of his freedom,—this leads Man in the present-day world, where everything is disposed for the evolution of his freedom, only in the end to Lucifer, whose aim it is to see the present world repudiated.

[ 20 ] To give himself over to the present state of existence; to admit through all the worlds nothing save the rule of that natural law, accessible to the present-day intellect, to which goodness is a neutral matter; to want to enjoy the use of freedom in the intellect alone; this, in the present-day world—where, while freedom reigns in the upper regions, evolution must be carried further in the deeper regions of the soul—only leads Man in the end to Ahriman, whose aim it is to see the present world transformed entirely into a Cosmos of Intellectual Being.

[ 21 ] In regions such as this, where Man is able to feel that when he turns his eyes upon the outer world they fall spiritually upon Michael, and when he turns them to the inner world of the soul they fall spiritually upon Christ, here he will gather such security of soul and spirit, as shall enable him to travel along that cosmic road, on which without the loss of his first origin he shall find the true and right consummation of his future.

Leading Thoughts

[ 22 ] A free action can only be one in which no process of Nature, in or outside of Man, plays a part.

[ 23 ] The polaric counter-proposition in this: In all free action of human individuality, a process of Nature in man is suppressed, which in an unfree action would be there and would give the man's being the formation cosmically predestined for it.

[ 24 ] This formation of his being, which a man fails to receive by the natural road if in his life and being he follows the course of cosmic evolution through its present and future stages, comes to him by a spiritual road through the union with Michael, whereby he also finds the way to Christ.

[ 1 ] At the time when the Spiritual Soul was entering the evolution of mankind on Earth, it was difficult for the Beings of the spiritual world next to this earthly existence to approach mankind. The form assumed by earthly events at that time proves that very peculiar conditions were necessary in order to enable the Spirit to find its way into the physical life of mankind. But it shows another thing as well, and in a way that is often most illuminating. It shows how, at a point when the Powers of the past are still at work and those of the future already beginning their activity, one spiritual influence tries to find its way into the earthly life of mankind in vigorous opposition to another.

[ 2 ] Between 1339 and 1453 a chaotic, devastating war begins between France and England. It lasts for more than a hundred years. In the chaos of this war, which was due to a certain spiritual current unfavourable to the evolution of mankind, events which would otherwise have brought the Spiritual Soul into humanity more quickly were definitely hindered. Chaucer, who died in 1400, laid the foundations of English literature. We need only remember the great spiritual consequences which took their start in Europe from the founding of this literature, and we shall see the importance of the fact that such an event was not able to work itself out freely, but fell into the midst of the confusions of a prolonged war. Moreover, already in 1215 that way of political thought which can receive its true stamp and character through the Spiritual Soul had begun in England. The further evolution of this fact, too, fell into all the hindrances of war.

[ 3 ] This was a time when the spiritual forces, seeking to evolve man according to the potentialities laid in him from the very beginning by yet loftier Divine-Spiritual Powers, encountered their strong adversaries. These adversaries wish to divert man into channels other than those appointed for him from the beginning. If they were to succeed, man would not be able to apply the forces of his origin to his further evolution. His cosmic childhood would remain unfruitful for him. It would become a dying, withering part within his being. The consequence would be that man could then fall a prey to the Luciferic or Ahrimanic Powers and lose his own true and proper development. If the adversaries of mankind had succeeded in their efforts—if they had not only put hindrances in the way, but achieved complete success—the entry of the Spiritual Soul could have been prevented.

[ 4 ] An event which reveals the inpouring of the Spiritual into the earthly events in a most clear and radiant way is the appearance and subsequent history of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans (1412–1431). The impulses for what she does lie in the deep, subconscious foundations of her soul. She follows dim inspirations from the spiritual world. On the Earth there is confusion and disorder, through which the age of the Spiritual Soul is to be hindered. Michael has to prepare from the spiritual world his later mission; this he is able to do where his impulses are received into human souls. Such a soul lives in the Maid of Orleans. And Michael also worked through many other souls, although this was possible only in a minor degree and is less apparent in outer historical life. In events such as the war between England and France he met with opposition from his Ahrimanic adversary.

[ 5 ] In our last number we spoke of the Luciferic adversary Michael found at the same time. And indeed, this adversary is particularly apparent in the course of events following upon the appearance of the Maid of Orleans. From these events it may be seen that mankind no longer knew how to deal with an intervention of the spiritual world in the destiny of humanity, which could be understood and also received by men into the will as long as Imaginative understanding existed. The earlier attitude towards such intervention became impossible when the Intellectual Soul ceased to act; the attitude corresponding to the Spiritual Soul had not at that time been discovered; nor has it yet been achieved.

[ 6 ] Thus it came about that Europe was moulded from the spiritual world without men understanding what was happening, and without that which they were able to do having any appreciable influence on this process.

[ 7 ] The significance of this event, the determining causes of which lay in the spiritual world, will be perceived if one tries to imagine what would have happened in the fifteenth century had there been no Maid of Orleans. There are some who wish to explain this phenomenon materialistically. It is impossible to come to an understanding with such people because they arbitrarily interpret in the materialistic sense something that is obviously spiritual.

[ 8 ] In certain directions of spiritual striving, too, it may now be clearly seen that humanity can no longer find the way to the Divine-Spiritual without difficulty, even though men search with resolution. There are difficulties which did not exist in the age when insight could still be gained with the aid of Imaginations. In order to judge correctly what is here meant, all that is necessary is to see in a clear light those individuals who come forward as philosophical thinkers. A philosopher cannot be judged by his effect on his age alone, nor by observing how many people have accepted his ideas. He is rather the expression, the manifestation in person for his age. The philosopher presents in his ideas that which the greater part of humanity bears within it as its frame of mind, unconscious feelings and impulses of life. Like a thermometer which registers the degree of the surrounding warmth, he registers the mental condition of his age. The philosophers are no more the causes of the psychology of their age than the thermometer is the cause of the surrounding temperature.

[ 9 ] Consider, from this point of view, the philosopher René Descartes, who worked when the age of the Spiritual Soul had already commenced. (He lived from 1596 to 1650.) The slender support for his connection with the spirit-world (the world of true being) is the experience ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In the centre of self-consciousness, in the ‘I,’ he tries to feel reality; and indeed, only so much as the Spiritual Soul can tell him.

[ 10 ] And he endeavours intellectually to understand the rest of the Spiritual by inquiring what guarantee the certainty of his own self-consciousness gives for the certainty of anything else. Regarding the truths handed on to him historically he always inquires: Are they as clear as the ‘I think, therefore I am’? And if he can answer this in the affirmative he accepts them.

[ 11 ] In this kind of human thought is not the Spirit eliminated from all observation that is directed towards the things in the world? The manifestation of the Spirit has withdrawn to the pin-point support in self-consciousness; all else, as it shows itself directly, is void of any revelation of the Spirit. Only indirectly, by the intellect in the Spiritual Soul, can the light of this spirit-revelation be thrown on that which lies outside self-consciousness. [ 12 ] The man of this age allows the content of his Spiritual Soul, which is as yet almost empty, to stream towards the spiritual world with intense longing. A tiny ray goes thither.

[ 13 ] The beings in the Spirit-world immediately bordering upon the Earth-world, and the human souls on Earth, come to one another with difficulty. Michael's supersensible preparation for his later Mission is also experienced by the human soul only under the greatest hindrances.

[ 14 ] In order to grasp the essential nature of the frame of mind expressed in Descartes, compare this philosopher with St. Augustine, who, in the outer formulation of it, sets up for the experience of the spiritual world the same support as Descartes. But in St. Augustine it takes place out of the full force of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. St. Augustine (354 - 430) is justly found to be related to Descartes, but his intellect is still the remnant of what is cosmic, whereas that of Descartes is the intellect that is already entering the individual human soul. In the progress of spiritual striving from St. Augustine to Descartes it may be seen how the cosmic character of the power of thought is lost and how it then reappears in the human soul. But it can also be seen at the same time with what difficulty Michael and the human soul come together so that Michael may lead in man what he once led in the Cosmos.

[ 15 ] The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are at work to prevent this union. The Luciferic forces want man to unfold only that which was proper to him during his cosmic childhood; the Ahrimanic forces, which are opposed to the Luciferic and yet co-operate with them, would like to develop only those forces which were gained in later ages of the world, and so let the cosmic childhood of man wither away.

[ 16 ] Under increased resistances such as these, the human souls in Europe digested the spiritual impulses contained in old world-conceptions which had streamed from the East to the West through the Crusades. The Michael-forces lived very strongly in these conceptions. The Cosmic Intelligence, the rulership of which was the ancient spiritual heritage of Michael, was dominant in these old world-conceptions.

[ 17 ] How could they be received, seeing that there was a chasm between the forces of the spirit-world and the human souls? These forces came to the Spiritual Soul which was only just beginning to evolve. On one side they met with the hindrance given in the Spiritual Soul itself which was still but little developed. And on the other they no longer found a consciousness supported by Imagination. The human soul could not with full insight unite them with itself. They were accepted either quite superficially or superstitiously.

[ 18 ] We have to pay attention to this frame of mind if we wish to understand the movements of thought connected on the one hand with the names of Wycliffe, Huss and others, and on the other with the name of ‘Rosicrucianism.’

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing Second Study of the Michael Forces in the earliest Unfolding of the Spiritual Soul)

[ 19 ] 127. At the beginning of the Age of Consciousness, man evolved the intellectual forces of his soul only to a small extent as yet. Hence there arose a gap between what the soul of man in unconscious depths was longing for, and what the forces from the region of Michael's abode could give him.

[ 20 ] 128. Owing to this gap, there was a greater possibility for the Luciferic powers to hold man back in the forces of cosmic childhood, thus bringing about his further evolution, not on the paths of the Divine-Spiritual Powers with whom he was united from the beginning, but on the paths of Lucifer.

[ 21 ] 129. Moreover there was a greater possibility for the powers of Ahriman to wrest man away from the forces of his cosmic childhood, thus dragging him down, for his further evolution, into their own domain.

[ 22 ] 130. Neither of these dangers was realised, for the forces of Michael were after all at work. But the spiritual evolution of mankind had to take place under the resulting hindrances, and it was thus that it became what it has, in fact, hitherto become.

Anthroposophical understanding of the spirit must not be a merely theoretical view of the world, but a leaven, an actual power in life. Only when we manage to investigate this view of the world so fundamentally that it really comes alive in us does it properly fulfill its mission. For by linking our souls with this anthroposophical conception of the spirit we have become custodians, as it were, of very definite and significant processes in the evolution of humanity.

Whatever their view of the world, men are generally convinced that thoughts and ideas have no status in it except as the contents of their own souls. Those who hold such views believe that thoughts and mental pictures are “ideals” which will be embodied in the world only to the extent that man succeeds in ratifying them by his physical deeds.

The anthroposophical attitude posits the conviction that our thoughts and ideas must find other ways of taking effect besides the way through our deeds in the physical world. Recognition of this essential principle implies that the anthroposophist must play his part in watching out for the signs of the times. A very great deal is happening all the time in the evolution of the world; and it is incumbent upon men, particularly the men of our own time, to acquire real understanding of what is going on in the evolutionary process in which they themselves are placed.

In the case of an individual human being, everybody knows that account must be taken of his stage of development, not only of the outer facts and occurrences around him. Think of it quite crudely for a moment. Outer, physical happenings are going on around human beings of five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, seventy years of age. But nobody in his senses will expect the same reaction to these happenings from the five-year-olds, the ten-year-olds, the twenty-year-olds, the fifty-year-olds, the seventy-year-olds! How human beings may be expected to react to their environment can be determined only by taking account of their stage of development. Everybody will admit this in the case of the individual.

But just as there are definite stages in the evolution of the individual human being, just as the nature of his powers and faculties differs in childhood, middle life and old age, so too are the powers and faculties possessed by humanity in general constantly changing in the course of evolution. Not to take account of the fact that the character of humanity is different in the 20th century from what it was in the 15th century, let alone before and at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, is to sleep through the process of world-evolution. One of the greatest defects, one of the principal sources of aberration and confusion in our time, is its failure to pay heed to this, as well as the prevalent notion that it is possible to speak of man or of humanity in terms of abstract generalisations, that there is no need to regard humanity as being involved in a continuous process of evolution.

How can a more exact insight into these things be acquired? As you know, mention has often been made of an important phase in the evolution of humanity. The Greco-Latin epoch of civilisation, lasting from the 8th century B.C. to approximately the 15th century, was the period of the development of the Intellectual Soul, or Mind-Soul; the development of the Consciousness-Soul (the Spiritual Soul) has been in progress since the 15th century. This is a factor in the evolution of humanity which essentially concerns our own times. The paramount force in human evolution from the 15th century until the beginning of the fourth millennium, is the spiritual Soul.

But in true Spiritual Science we must never stop at generalisations and abstractions; everywhere and at all times it must be our endeavour to grasp concrete facts. Abstractions are, at the highest, useful to curiosity in the most ordinary sense of the term. If Spiritual Science is to become the very leaven and essential force of life, earnestness must outweigh curiosity and we must not stop at abstractions such as those of which I have just spoken. It is both true and important that because we are living in the epoch of the Spiritual Soul we must take account of its development; but we must not stop there.

To arrive at a clear conception of these things, we must above all consider in greater detail the nature of man himself. In the sense of Spiritual Science, the members of man's being, beginning from above downwards, are: Ego, astral body, etheric body—which latterly I have also called the body of formative forces—and physical body. The Ego is the only one of these members in which we live and function as beings of spirit-and-soul. The Ego has been implanted in us by the Earth-evolution and the spirits of Form who direct it. Fundamentally speaking, everything that enters into our consciousness enters it through our Ego. And unless the Ego, as it unfolds itself, can remain connected—connected through the bodies—with the outer world, we have as little consciousness as we have during sleep. It is the Ego that connects us with our environment; the astral body is the legacy of the Moon-evolution, the etheric body of the Sun-evolution, the physical body, in its first rudiments, of the Saturn-evolution.

But if you study the description of these bodies given in the book, An Outline of Occult Science, you will realise by what a complicated process this fourfold constitution of man came into being. It is not evident from the facts presented in that book that Spirits belonging to all the Hierarchies participated in the formation of the three sheaths of man's being? Is it not evident that our threefold sheath composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body, is extremely complicated? It is not simply that these sheaths owe their origin to the co-operation of the Hierarchies; the Hierarchies are still constantly working within them. And those who believe that man is merely the apparatus of bones, blood, flesh and so forth, of which natural science, physiology, biology and anatomy speak, have no understanding of his nature.

If we genuinely study these sheaths of man, we realise that spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies are working together with wisdom and set purpose in everything that takes place, without our being conscious of it, in our bodily sheaths. From the brief outline I have given in Occult Science about the co-operation that took place between particular Beings of the Hierarchies in order that man should come into existence, you will have realised how intricate the details must be. Nevertheless if man is to be understood, these things too must be studied more and more concretely.

In this domain it is extremely difficult even to formulate a concrete question, because of the tremendous complexity of all such questions. Suppose for a moment that someone were to ask: What is the Hierarchy, let us say, of the Seraphim or of the Dynamis (Mights) doing in man's etheric body in the year 1918 of the present cycle of evolution? For we can certainly ask this question, just as we can ask whether it is raining or not raining in Lugano at the present time. Neither question can be answered by mere reflection or theorising, but only by ascertaining the facts. Just as we should have to find out, by means perhaps of a telegram, whether or not it is raining at Lugano, so it is necessary to investigate the facts themselves, in order to get the answer to a question such as: What is the task of the Spirits of Wisdom or of the Thrones in the etheric body of man during the present cycle of evolution? Only, this latter kind of question is indescribably complex and we can never do more than make an approach to the domains where such questions arise. Good care is taken that man shall not soar too far aloft and become arrogant and supercilious in his endeavours to attain knowledge of such things.

Roughly speaking, it is the prospects nearest to us—those that directly concern us—of which we can get a clear view. But such a view we must get, if we are not to remain asleep at our stations in the evolution of humanity.

I will therefore speak about a question that is less vague and indefinite than the question as to what the Dynamis or the Thrones are doing in our etheric body. I will speak of another question that is of immediate concern to men at the present time. It is the question: What are the Angels—the spiritual Beings nearest to men—doing in the human astral body in the present cycle of evolution?

The astral body is the member nearest to the Ego; obviously, therefore, the answer to this question will vitally concern us. The Angels are the Hierarchy immediately above the Human Hierarchy itself. So the question is not unduly arrogant and we shall see how it can be answered. What are the Angels doing in man's astral body in this present epoch which began in the 15th century and will last until the beginning of the fourth millennium?

What is there to be said in the general sense when it comes to answering a question such as this? It can only be said that spiritual investigation, when earnestly pursued, is not a matter of juggling with ideas or words, but works its way into the actual sphere where the spiritual world becomes perceptible ... but this question can, in reality, be fruitfully answered only in the age of the Spiritual Soul itself.

You may think that if this question had been asked in other epochs, an answer would probably have been forthcoming. But neither in the epoch of atavistic clairvoyance nor in that of Greco-Latin civilisation could this question have been answered, because the pictures arising in man's soul from atavistic clairvoyance obscured his observation of the deeds of the Angels in his astral body. Nothing could be seen of this, precisely because he had in him the pictures given by the atavistic clairvoyance. And in the Greco-Latin period, thought was not as strong as it is today. Thought has been strengthened as the direct consequence of natural science. Hence it is in the epoch of the Spiritual Soul that such questions can be the subject of conscious study. The fruitfulness of Spiritual Science for life must be shown by the fact that we do not just browse on theories but know how to say things of incisive significance for life.

What are the Angels doing in our astral body? Conviction of what they are doing can come to us only when we have achieved a certain degree of clairvoyance and are able to perceive what is actually going on in our astral body. A certain degree at least of Imaginative Knowledge must therefore have been attained if this question is to be answered.

It is then revealed that these Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels—particularly through their concerted work, although in a certain sense each single Angel also has his task in connection with every individual human being—these Beings form pictures in man's astral body. Under the guidance of the Spirits of Form (Exusiai) the Angels form pictures. Unless we reach the level of Imaginative Cognition we do not know that pictures are all the time being formed in our astral body. They arise and pass away, but without them there would be for mankind no evolution into the future in accordance with the intentions of the Spirits of Form. The Spirits of Form are obliged, to begin with, to unfold in pictures what they desire to achieve with us during Earth-evolution and beyond. And then, later on, the pictures become reality in a humanity transformed.

Through the Angels, the Spirits of Form are already now shaping these pictures in our astral body. The Angels form pictures in man's astral body and these pictures are accessible to thinking that has become clairvoyant. If we are able to scrutinise these pictures, it becomes evident that they are woven in accordance with quite definite impulses and principles. Forces for the future evolution of mankind are contained in them. If we watch the Angels carrying out this work of theirs—strange as it sounds, one has to express it in this way—it is clear that they have a very definite plan for the future configuration of social life on earth; their aim is to engender in the astral bodies of men such pictures as will bring about definite conditions in the social life of the future.

People may shy away from the notion that Angels want to call forth in them ideals for the future, but it is so all the same. And indeed in forming these pictures the Angels work on a definite principle, namely, that in the future no human being is to find peace in the enjoyment of happiness if others beside him are unhappy. An impulse of Brotherhood in the absolute sense, unification of the human race in Brotherhood rightly understood—this is to be the governing principle of the social conditions in physical existence.

That is the one principle in accordance with which the Angels form the pictures in man's astral body.

But there is a second impulse in the work of the Angels. The Angels have certain objectives in view, not only in connection with the outer social life but also with man's life of soul. Through the pictures they inculcate into the astral body their aim is that in future time every human being shall see in each and all of his fellow-men a hidden divinity.

Quite clearly, then, according to the intention underlying the work of the Angels, things are to be very different in future. Neither in theory nor in practice shall we look only at man's physical qualities, regarding him as a more highly developed animal, but we must confront every human being with the full realisation that in him something is revealing itself from the divine foundations of the world, revealing itself through flesh and blood. To conceive man as a picture revealed from the spiritual world, to conceive this with all the earnestness, all the strength and all the insight at our command—this is the impulse laid by the Angels into the pictures.

Once this is fulfilled, there will be a very definite consequence. The basis of all free religious feeling that will unfold in humanity in the future will be the acknowledgment, not merely in theory but in actual practice, that every human being is made in the likeness of the Godhead. When that time comes there will be no need for any religious coercion; for then every meeting between one man and another will of itself be in the nature of a religious rite, a sacrament, and nobody will need a special Church with institutions on the physical plane to sustain the religious life. If the Church understands itself truly, its one aim must be to render itself unnecessary on the physical plane, as the whole of life becomes the expression of the super-sensible.

The bestowal on man of complete freedom in the religious life—this underlies the impulses, at least, of the work of the Angels.

And there is a third objective: To make it possible for men to reach the Spirit through thinking, to cross the abyss and through thinking to experience the reality of the Spirit.

Spiritual Science for the spirit, freedom of religious life for the soul, brotherhood for the bodily life—this resounds like cosmic music through the work wrought by the Angels in the astral bodies of men.

All that is necessary is to raise our consciousness to a different level and we shall feel ourselves transported to this wonderful site of the work done by the Angels in the human astral body.

We are living in the age of the Spiritual Soul, and in this age the Angels work in the astral bodies of men as I have described. Man must gradually come to understand this in his wideawake consciousness. It is part of the process of human evolution itself. How can such a statement be made? Where are we to look for this work of the Angels?

It is still to be discovered in man while he is sleeping, in the conditions prevailing between the moments of falling asleep and waking—also in somnolent waking states. I have often said that although men are awake, they actually sleep through the most important concerns in life. And I can give you the not very heartening assurance that anyone who goes through life with alert consciousness to-day finds numbers and numbers of human beings who are really asleep. They let events happen without taking the slightest interest in them, without troubling about them or associating themselves with these happenings in any way. Great world-events often pass men by just as something that is taking place in the city passes a sleeper by ... although people are apparently awake. At such times, while men, in spite of being awake, are sleeping through some momentous event, it can be seen how in their astral bodies—quite independently of what they want or do not want to know—this important work of the Angels continues.

Such things proceed in a way which must necessarily seem highly enigmatic and paradoxical. A man may be considered entirely unworthy of having any connections at all with the spiritual world. But the truth about such a man may well be that in this incarnation he is just a terrible dormouse who sleeps through everything that goes on around him. Yet one of the choir of the Angels is working in his astral body at the future of mankind. Observation of his astral body shows that it is being made use of, in spite of these conditions.

What really matters, however, is that men shall become conscious of these things. The Spiritual Soul must rise to the level where it is able to recognise what can be discovered only in this way.

After all this, you will understand me when I point out that this epoch of the Spiritual Soul is heading towards the definite event, and that—just because it is the Spiritual Soul that is involved—it will depend upon men themselves how this event takes effect in the evolution of humanity. It may come a century earlier or a century later, but it is bound to form part of the evolutionary process. It can be characterised by saying: Purely through the Spiritual Soul, purely through their conscious thinking, men must reach the point of actually perceiving what the Angels are doing to prepare the future of humanity. The teachings of Spiritual Science in this domain must become practical wisdom in the life of humanity—practical, because men can be convinced that it belongs to their own wisdom to recognise the aims of the Angels, as I have described them.

But the progress of the human race towards freedom has already gone so far that it depends upon man himself whether he will sleep through this event or face it with fully wideawake consciousness. What would this entail? To face this event with wideawake consciousness would entail the study of Spiritual Science, which is possible to-day. Indeed nothing else is really necessary. The practice of meditations of various kinds and attention to the guidance given in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, will be an additional help. But the essential step has already been taken when Spiritual Science is studied and really consciously understood. Spiritual Science can be studied to-day without developing clairvoyance faculties. Everyone can do so, who does not bar his own way with his prejudices. And if people study Spiritual Science more and more thoroughly, if they assimilate its concepts and ideas, their consciousness will become so alert that instead of sleeping through certain events, they will be fully aware of them.

These events can be characterised in greater detail, for to know what the Angel is doing is only the preparatory stage. The essential point is that at a definite time—depending, as I have said, upon the attitude men themselves adopt it will be earlier or later or at worst not at all—a threefold truth will be revealed to mankind by the Angels.

Firstly, it will be shown how his own genuine interest will enable man to understand the deeper side of human nature. A time will come—and it must not pass unnoticed—when out of the spiritual world men will receive through their Angel an impulse that will kindle a far deeper interest in every individual human being than we are inclined to have to-day. This enhanced interest in our fellow-men will not unfold in the subjective, leisurely way that people would prefer, but by a sudden impetus a certain secret will be inspired into man from the spiritual side, namely, what the other man really is. By this I mean something quite concrete—not any kind of theoretical consideration. Men will learn something whereby their interest in every individual can be kindled. That is the one point—and that is what will particularly affect the social life.

Secondly: From the spiritual world the Angel will reveal to man that, in addition to everything else, the Christ Impulse postulates complete freedom in matters of religious life, that the only true Christianity is the Christianity which makes possible absolute freedom in the religious life.

And thirdly: Unquestionable insight into the spiritual nature of the world.

As I have said, this event ought to take place in such a way that the Spiritual Soul in man participates in it. This is impending in the evolution of humanity, for the Angel is working to this end through the pictures woven in man's astral body.

But let it be emphasised that this impending event confronts the will of man. Many things that should lead to conscious awareness of this event may be and indeed are being left undone.

But as you know, there are other beings working in world-evolution, beings who are interested in deflecting man from his proper course: these are the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic beings. What I have just said belongs to the divinely-willed evolution of mankind. If man were to follow the dictates of his own proper nature, he could not very well fail to perceive what the Angel is unfolding in his astral body; but the aim of the Luciferic beings is to tear men away from insight into the work of the Angels. And they set about doing this by curbing man's free will. They try to cloud his understanding of the exercise of his free will. True, they desire to make him good—far from the aspect of which I am now speaking, Lucifer desires that there shall be goodness, spirituality, in man—but automatic goodness, automatic spirituality—without free will. Lucifer desires that man shall be led automatically, in accordance with perfectly good principles, to clairvoyance—but he wants to deprive him of his free will, to remove from him the possibility of evil-doing. Lucifer wants to make man into a being who, it is true, acts out of the spirit, but acts as a reflection, as an automaton, without free will.

This is connected with certain specific secrets of evolution. As you know, the Luciferic beings have remained stationary at other stages of evolution and they introduce an element that is foreign to the normal evolutionary process. They are deeply interested in so seizing hold of man that he does not unfold free will, because they themselves have not acquired free will. Free will can be acquired only on the Earth but the Luciferic beings want to have nothing to do with the Earth; they want only Saturn-, Sun-, Moon-evolution, and to remain at those stages. In a sense they hate the free will of man. Their manner of acting is highly spiritual, but it is automatic—that is a point of great significance—and they want to lift man to their own spiritual heights, to make him an automaton—a spiritual, but an automatically spiritual, being. Thereby on the one side the danger would arise that prematurely, before his Spiritual Soul is in full function, man would become a being whose actions are those of a spiritual puppet and he would sleep through the impending revelation.

But the Ahrimanic beings too are working to obscure this revelation. They are not at pains to make man particularly spiritual, but rather to kill out in him the consciousness of his own spirituality. They endeavour to instill into him the conviction that he is nothing but a completely developed animal. Ahriman is in truth the teacher par excellence of materialistic Darwinism. He is also the great teacher of all those technical and practical pursuits in Earth-evolution where there is refusal to acknowledge the validity of anything except the external life of the senses, where the only desire is for a widespread technology, so that with somewhat greater refinement, men shall satisfy their hunger, thirst and other needs in the same way as the animal. To kill, to darken in man the consciousness that he is an image of the Godhead—this is what the Ahrimanic beings are endeavouring by subtle scientific means of every kind to achieve in our age of the Spiritual Soul.

In earlier epochs it would have been of no avail to the Ahrimanic beings to obscure the truth from men by theories in this way. And why? Even during the Greco-Latin age, but still more so in the earlier epoch when man still had the pictures of atavistic clairvoyance, how he thought was entirely a matter of indifference: he had his pictures and these pictures were windows through which he looked into the spiritual world. Whatever Ahriman might have insinuated to man concerning his relation to the animals would have had no effect at all upon his way of life. Thought has for the first time become really powerful—one could also say, powerful in its ineptitude—in our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, since the 15th century. Only since then has thinking been competent to bring the Spiritual Soul into the realm of the spirit, but at the same time also to hinder it from entering the spiritual world. Only now are we experiencing the age when a theory or a science, by the path of consciousness, robs man of his divinity, of his knowledge of the Divine. Only in the age of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul is this possible. Hence the Ahrimanic spirits endeavour to spread teachings which obscure man's divine origin.

From this mention of the streams which run counter to the normal, god-willed evolution of man it can be gathered how he must conduct his life, lest the impending revelation finds him in a state of sleep. A great danger may arise and men must be alert to it. If they are not, instead of the event that should play a momentous part in shaping the future evolution of the Earth, a great danger to this evolution will supervene.

Now certain spiritual beings achieve their development through men who evolve together with them. The Angels who unfold their pictures in the human astral body are not doing this as a game but in order to achieve something. But because this aim must be achieved in earthly humanity itself, the whole matter would become a game if, having reached the stage of the Spiritual Soul, men deliberately ignore it. It would become a game! The Angels would be playing a game in the evolution of man's astral body! Only when this activity is realised in humanity itself is it not a game but serious business.

From this you can realise that the work of the Angels is, and under all circumstances must remain, serious. Just imagine what conditions would be behind the scenes of existence if through their somnolence men were able to turn the work of the Angels into a game!

And what if this should happen after all? What if humanity on earth should persist in sleeping through the momentous spiritual revelation of the future? If this were to happen in respect of the freedom of the religious life, for example, if men were to sleep through the repetition of the Mystery of Golgotha on the etheric plane, the reappearance of the etheric Christ, or other matters as well, then the Angels would have to try different means of achieving what the pictures they weave in the astral body of man are intended to achieve. If men do not allow this to be achieved in the astral body while they are awake, the Angels would, in this case, endeavour to fulfill their aims through their sleeping bodies. Therefore what the Angels could not achieve, because in their waking life men slept through it, would be achieved with the help of the physical and etheric bodies of men during actual sleep. It is there that the Angels would seek forces required for the fulfillment of what could not be achieved through men in their wideawake consciousness when the souls were within the etheric and physical bodies in the waking state. It would be achieved by means of the etheric and physical bodies in the sleeping state, when human beings who ought to be awake to what is going on were outside these bodies with their Ego and astral body.

Here lies the great danger for the age of the Spiritual Soul. This is what might still happen if, before the beginning of the third millennium, men were to refuse to turn to the spiritual life. The third millennium begins with the year 2000, so it is only a short time ahead of us. It might still happen that the aim of the Angels in their work would have to be achieved by means of the sleeping bodies of men—instead of through men wideawake. The Angels might still be compelled to withdraw their whole work from the astral body and to submerge it in the etheric body in order to bring it to fulfillment. But then, in his real being, man would have no part in it. It would have to be performed in the etheric body while man himself was not there, just because if he were there in the waking state, he would obstruct it.

I have now given you a general picture of these things. But what would be the outcome if the Angels were obliged to perform this work without man himself participating, to carry it out in his etheric and physical bodies during sleep?

The outcome in the evolution of humanity would unquestionably be threefold. Firstly, something would be engendered in the sleeping human bodies—while the Ego and astral body were not within them—and man would meet with it on waking in the morning ... but then it would become instinct instead of conscious spiritual activity and therefore baleful. It is so indeed: certain instinctive knowledge that will arise in human nature, instinctive knowledge connected with the mystery of birth and conception, with sexual life as a whole, threatens to become baleful if the danger of which I have spoken takes effect. Certain Angels would then themselves undergo a change—a change of which I cannot speak, because this is a subject belonging to the higher secrets of Initiation-Science which may not yet be disclosed. But this much can certainly be said: The effect in the evolution of humanity would be that certain instincts connected with the sexual life would arise in a pernicious form instead of wholesomely, in clear waking consciousness. These instincts would not be mere aberrations but would pass over into and configure the social life, would above all prevent men—through what would then enter their blood as the effect of the sexual life—from unfolding brotherhood in any form whatever on the earth, and would rather induce them to rebel against it. This would be a matter of instinct.

So the crucial point lies ahead when either the path to the right can be taken—but that demands wakefulness—or the path to the left, which permits of sleep. But in that case instincts come on the scene—instincts of a fearful kind.

And what do you suppose the scientific experts will say when such instincts come into evidence? They will say that it is a natural and inevitable development in the evolution of humanity. Light cannot be shed on such matters by natural science, for whether men become angels or devils would be equally capable of explanation by scientific reasoning. Science will say the same in both cases: the later is the outcome of the earlier ... so grand and wise is the interpretation of nature in terms of causality! Natural science will be totally blind to the event of which I have told you, for if men become half devils through their sexual instincts, science will as a matter of course regard this as a natural necessity. Scientifically, then, the matter is simply not capable of explanation, for whatever happens, everything can be explained by science. The fact is that such things can be understood only by spiritual, super-sensible cognition. That is the one aspect.

The second aspect is that from this work which involves changes affecting the Angels themselves, still another result accrues for humanity: instinctive knowledge of certain medicaments—but knowledge of a baleful kind!

Everything connected with medicine will make a great advance in the materialistic sense. Men will acquire instinctive insights into the medicinal properties of certain substances and certain treatments—and thereby do terrible harm. But the harm will be called useful. A sick man will be called healthy, for it will be perceived that the particular treatment applied leads to something pleasing. People will actually like things that make the human being—in a certain direction—unhealthy.

Knowledge of the medicinal effects of certain processes and treatments will be enhanced, but this will lead into very baleful channels. For man will come to know through certain instincts, what kind of illnesses can be induced by particular substances and treatments. And it will then be possible for him either to bring about or not to bring about illnesses, entirely as suits his egotistical purposes.

The third result will be this. Man will get to know of definite forces which, simply by means of quite easy manipulations—by bringing into accord certain vibrations—will enable him to unleash tremendous mechanical forces in the world. Instinctively he will come to realise in this way the possibility of exercising a certain spiritual guidance and control of the mechanistic principle—and the whole of technical science will sail into desolate waters. But human egoism will find these desolate waters of tremendous use and benefit.

This, my friends, is a fragment of concrete knowledge of the evolution of existence, a fragment of a conception of life which can be truly assessed only by those who realise that an unspiritual view of life can never grow clear about these things. If a form of medicine injurious to humanity were ever to take root, if a terrible aberration of the sexual instincts were to arise, if there were baleful doings in the sphere of the purely mechanistic forces of the world, in the application of the forces of nature by means of spiritual powers, an unspiritual conception of life would see through none of these things, would not perceive how they deviate from the true path ... The sleeper, as long as sleep lasts, does not see the approach of a thief who is about to rob him; he is unaware of it and at most he finds out later on, when he wakes, what has been done to him. But it would be a bad awakening for humanity! Man would pride himself upon the growth of his instinctive knowledge of certain processes and substances and would experience such satisfaction in obeying certain aberrations of the sexual impulses that he would regard them as evidence of a particularly high development of superhumanity, of freedom from convention, of broad-mindedness! In a certain respect, ugliness would be beauty and beauty, ugliness. Nothing of this would be perceived because it would all be regarded as natural necessity. But it would denote an aberration from the path which, in the nature of humanity itself, is prescribed for man's essential being.

If a feeling has been acquired of how Spiritual Science penetrates into and affects our whole attitude of mind, I believe that there can also arise the earnestness required for receiving such truths as have been presented today. From this earnestness there can stem what ought indeed to stem from all Spiritual Science: the acknowledgment of definite obligations, of definite responsibilities in life. Whatever our position may be, whatever we have to do in the world, the essential thing is to foster the thought that our conduct must be permeated and illumined by our anthroposophical consciousness. Then we contribute something towards the true progress of humanity.

If a man ever believes that true Spiritual Science, earnestly and worthily pursued, may divert him from practical and necessary activity in life, he is entirely misguided. True Spiritual Science begets vigilance—an awakening in regard to matters such as those I have presented today. It may be asked: Is waking life, then, really harmful to sleep? If we choose to draw this parallel—namely that insight into the spiritual world is itself a greater awakening from ordinary waking life, just as the ordinary waking is an awakening from sleep, then in order to follow the comparison, we can indeed ask the question: Can waking life ever be harmful to sleep?

Yes—if waking life is not what it ought to be! If a man spends his waking life as it ought to be spent, his sleep will also be healthy, and if in his waking life he is drowsy or lazy, happy-go-lucky or indolent, then his sleep too will be unhealthy. And it is the same in regard to the waking life we acquire as the result of our study of Spiritual Science. If Spiritual Science enables us to establish a true relation to the spiritual world, our interest in the familiar facts of physical life will be guided into the right channels—just as a healthy waking life brings order and direction into sleep.

Anyone who looks at life, particularly in our own age, must himself be asleep if he does not notice a number of things. How men have preened themselves on their conduct of life, particularly during the last few decades! Things have finally come to the point where the leading positions everywhere are held by those who are most contemptuous of the ideal, of the spiritual. People managed to go on declaiming about their conduct of this life as long as mankind had not actually been dragged into the abyss. Now a few—mostly out of instinct—are actually beginning to croak that a new age must come, with all kinds of new ideals. But it is all so much croaking. And if things have to come about instinctively, without conscious penetration into Spiritual Science on the part of men, they would lead to the decline of what ought to be experienced in the waking state rather than to any wholesome transition in evolution.

One who today makes impassioned speeches to men in the words they have so long been accustomed to hear can still usually count on some applause. But men will have to get used to listening to different words, different ways of putting things, if social cosmos is again to arise out of chaos.

If, in some epoch, the men who ought to be vigilant fail in this respect and do not discern what really ought to happen then nothing real does happen. Instead, the ghost of the preceding epoch walks-as the ghosts of the past are walking in many religious communities today, and as the ghost of ancient Rome still haunts the sphere of jurisprudence. In the age of the Spiritual Soul, Spiritual Science must make men free in just this way, must lead them to perception of a spiritual fact: What the Angel is doing in our astral body. To speak abstractly about Angels and so on, can at most be the beginning; progress requires that we speak concretely—which means that in reference to our own epoch we find the answer to the question nearest to us. This question concerns us most nearly, for the simple reason that in our astral body the Angel is weaving pictures that are to determine our future form, and this determination is to be brought about through the Spiritual Soul.

If we had not the Spiritual Soul, there would be no need to exert ourselves, for then other Spirits, other Hierarchies, would certainly step in to bring to fulfillment what the Angel is weaving. But because our task is to unfold the Spiritual Soul, no other Spirits step in to carry the work of the Angels into effect.

Other Angels, of course, were at work in the Egyptian epoch. But other Spirits soon made their entry and the work of the Angel was obscured from men through their own atavistic clairvoyance. Their clairvoyance wove a veil, a dark veil over the pictures. But now man must unveil them. Therefore it behooves him not to sleep through what is being inculcated into his conscious life in the epoch that will end before the third millennium does. Let us draw from anthroposophical Spiritual Science not only teachings, but resolutions as well! They will give us strength to be vigilant and alert. We can season ourselves to be watchful human beings by paying heed to many things. We can make a beginning in this direction now; we can discover that in reality no single day passes without a miracle happening in our life. This last sentence can be turned, and we can also say: If on some day we find no miracle in our life, then we have merely overlooked it. Try one evening to survey your life and you will find in it some event of slight or great or middling importance of which you will be able to say: It came into my life and took effect in a truly remarkable way. You can realise this provided only that you think comprehensively enough, provided only that you have in your mind's eye a sufficiently comprehensive picture of the circumstances and connections of life. But in the ordinary course this does not happen, because as a rule we do not ask ourselves: What was it that was prevented from happening by this or that occurrence?

We do not usually trouble about the things that have been prevented but which, if they had happened, would have fundamentally changed our life. Behind these things which in some way or other have been kept out of our lives there is very, very much that educates us into becoming vigilant human beings. What manner of things might have happened to me today? If we ask ourselves this question every evening and then think of particular occurrences which could have had this or that result, observations will couple themselves with such questions and introduce the element of vigilance into the exercise of self-discipline. This is something that can be a beginning, and of itself leads on and on, until finally we do not explore only into what it meant in our life when, for example, we wanted to go out, say, at half-past ten one morning and at the last moment somebody turned up and stopped us ... we are annoyed at being stopped, but we do not enquire what might have happened if we had actually gone out as we had planned. What is it that has been changed?

I have already spoken here in greater detail about such matters. From observation of the negative in our life—which can, however, bear witness to the wisdom guiding it—to observation of the Angel weaving and working in our astral body there is a direct path, a direct and unerring path that can be trodden.

It has often been emphasized that the present can best be understood in the light of the past and its happenings, and we shall most easily discover and understand the characteristics of our spiritual ideals for the future by looking back into times of remote antiquity. Today, therefore, we will consider developments that took place after the destruction of ancient Atlantis and, in connection with those developments, man's experience during the life after death.

The conditions experienced by the soul between death and a new birth have not always been the same. They, too, have changed in the course of evolution. During the great cultural epochs—the ancient Indian, the epoch of the Holy Rishis; the ancient Persian, epoch of the Zarathustrian culture; the Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin and our present epoch—man has connected himself ever more closely with the physical plane, which he grew to love more and more intensely. In every such epoch the human soul descended deeper into the material world. The greater the understanding acquired by man for this world, the stranger the spiritual world became for him after death. This was the case most strongly in the Greco-Latin epoch. The Greeks loved the physical world because in their glorious art, in that splendid adornment of physical existence, their whole soul could live joyfully. The physical world was dear to the Roman because in his discovery of the ego, the “I,” the feeling of his own personality could develop to the full. The concepts of Roman citizenship and Roman rights are hallmarks of this cultural epoch. The Roman felt at home in this physical, material world. The concept of rights has existed only since that epoch, so it is quite correct to say that jurisprudence began in the Roman Empire; it is the sign of reverence for the single personality. Death was the great unknown and evoked fear. The utterance of Achilles: “Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of Shades,” aptly indicates the conception prevailing in that epoch of the soul's experience during the life after death in the spiritual world. The more fully these souls had given expression in the realm of earth to all their faculties, the more did the capacity to find their bearings in the spiritual world after death depart from them. The soul felt isolated in the spheres it had now entered. Even in spiritland (Devachan) the soul felt that everything around it was dark, empty and cold. The soul was no longer capable of experiencing the spirituality of yonder world. Even the great leaders of mankind, the initiates, could not change this condition, yet they are the teachers of men not only here on earth but also in yonder worlds. When they told the dead anything about the world this side of the threshold, these souls felt still greater pain at having been obliged to leave the physical world that had become so dear to them. The teachers could bring with them nothing that would help or be of value to the dead, all of whom longed for reincarnation. A human being felt as though he were shut away from his brothers, abandoned even in the realm of the spirit. Had these conditions remained, love and brotherliness would also have gradually disappeared from the earth. For this sojourn in the realm of spirit would have meant that these souls would bring egoism with them into the physical world and into a life wholly centered in the individual self.

In the ancient. Indian epoch man still regarded the earthly world as maya, but things changed in the course of evolution. Zarathustra already proclaimed that the spiritual can also be found by man in the physical world. He revealed the path by which the people were ultimately to realize that the sun with its light is only the external body of a sublime spiritual being whom he called Ahura Mazdao, the Great Aura, in contrast to the little human aura. His aim was to proclaim that this being, as yet far off, would one day come down to the earth in order to unite with its very substance and to work further in the evolution of humanity. For the people of Zarathustra this heralded the same being who in later history lived on the earth as Christ. To his pupils Zarathustra proclaimed, “If you learn to understand that the spiritual is present in everything physical and material, that the physical is permeated by the great Sun Aura, by Ahura Mazdao, then Ahriman will no longer lead you astray.”

At other times Zarathustra said, “So great, so mighty is He who has revealed Himself to me in the sun that I sacrifice everything to him. Gladly I offer to Him the life of my body, the etheric existence of my senses, the expression of my deeds, the astral body.”

This was the pledge once made by the great Zarathustra. He announced to his pupils that the great Sun Spirit would reveal Himself directly in the earth itself, in the realities of earthly existence. Thus did Zarathustra inaugurate the teaching that the material is only the physiognomy, the expression of the spiritual.

Then came the time when the being who had been heralded by Zarathustra revealed himself to Moses in the burning thornbush and on Sinai. Moses taught that this Sun Being is also the Ego Being, the highest principle that can be membered into man. But it is not only into man that a particle of the Sun Spirit has descended; it has also descended into everything in external nature, into the elements, everywhere. The same divinity who, in the name of the “I am the I am,” the principle once revealed to Zarathustra as Ahura Mazdao, as the innermost core, the primordial ground of all existence, was proclaimed by Moses to a whole people as the supreme being whose name was inexpressible and might be uttered only in the innermost sanctuary by the officiating priest. The Godhead who dwells in man, who does not reveal Himself only in the elements, in the flaming fire, is He who is here proclaimed.

Thus we can regard Zarathustra as the herald of Jehovah, of the same being who at the beginning of our time-reckoning dwelt for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the same God who had been proclaimed by Moses and Zarathustra.

Christ says, “How shall ye believe me if ye have not believed )Moses and the prophets?” Herewith Christ confirms that the Old Testament had proclaimed in advance, only under different names, the same God whom He, Christ also proclaims. All events in the world need a certain time to take effect. On Sinai, in the burning thornbush, this Sun Being, descending from the heights of the spiritual world, had reached the point where He could announce Himself to man through the elements. He now came nearer and nearer to the earth, into the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism in the Jordan, and when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth and the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, this was not only the expression of a great cosmic event but also of the greatest of all earthly events: the Christ passed into the earth's aura as the Spirit of the earth. A new impetus had been given and could be perceived by clairvoyance, for at that moment the earth's aura changed, revealing particular colors. New colors were revealed and new powers were incorporated in the earth's aura. At the moment when the blood that is the physical expression of the ego flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer on Golgotha, at that moment the ego of Christ united with the earth. But the moment had also come when conditions in the spiritual world could begin to change for souls after death. This was the meaning of Christ's descent into Hell.

A clairvoyant, living before the event of Golgotha, would not have seen in the earth's aura what could be seen there later on, when Christ Jesus had passed through the death on Golgotha. Let us now think of the event of Damascus. Saul who, as an initiate of the Jewish Mysteries, knew full well that the “Great Aura,” Ahura Mazdao, would one day unite with the earth, rebelled against the belief that this being could have died on the shameful cross. Although he had participated in the events in Palestine, he did not believe that this great spirit had dwelt on the earth in Jesus of Nazareth. It was when he became clairvoyant near the gates of Damascus that in the earth's aura he beheld the Christ spirit, the living Christ, who could not previously have been seen there. He then said to himself, “Yes, it was predicted that the earth's aura would change, and that has now come to pass.” Then Saul became Paul. Paul spoke of himself as one who had been born prematurely, one who had become clairvoyant through grace; his was a premature birth because maturity had not yet been fully reached; he had not descended so deeply into matter and was less firmly connected with the physical body. Those who follow the course of Christianity know that the personality in it of supreme importance is Paul. He achieved more than anyone else for its propagation.

It was an occult fact, an occult event, by which Paul was converted, and it can justly be said that through that clairvoyant experience humanity was led to Christ. At that time a change took place in the earth's aura, and since then it has been changed. The words of St. John's Gospel were thus fulfilled: “He who eats my bread treads upon me with his feet.” Since then Christ has been the Spirit of the earth, the planetary Spirit. The earth is the body of Christ; His habitation is within the earth. This profound utterance in St. John's Gospel is not to be understood in an adverse sense or as a pointer to Judas who betrayed Christ. Rather, the reference is to the Christ-Jehovah Divinity and His relation to the earth.

When the occult investigator compares the effect of the art of the Greeks and post-Christian art upon the world man enters after death, he still finds that when a clairvoyant contemplates with physical eyes a Greek temple with its Doric pillars—for example, the ruins at Paestum-he may well be entranced by the harmonious forms that follow the spiritual lines of direction and thereby make this temple an actual dwelling place of the god. Just as a soul feels drawn to the body that is fitting for it, so does the god descend into these forms that harmonize so perfectly with his nature and being. But when a seer turns his eyes to the spiritual counterpart of his temple, he finds nothing in the spiritual world. The temple seems to have been obliterated from that world and a space left empty there: nothing of the temple is to be seen. If, on the other hand, a seer is contemplating works of art of the post-Christian era or, for example, contemplating the Gospel of St. John or the passages in the Old and New Testaments that have to do with Christ-Jehovah or Raphael's Madonnas—if the seer contemplates these creations first with physical eyes and then with clairvoyant sight, they are by no means invisible in the spiritual world but radiate there in even greater splendor. This is especially true of the Gospel of St. John. It is in the spiritual world that the greatness of that creation is first realized. It is in the spiritual world that whatever is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha first becomes radiant and clear in the fullest sense.

Simultaneously with the historical event on the physical plane, a spiritual happening, which was also a symbolic happening, took place when the blood flowed from the Redeemer's wounds. When Christ was no longer living in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, at the moment when He died on Golgotha, He appeared in the spiritual world to the souls living between death and rebirth, and the darkness abated. The spiritual world was suddenly filled with light. Just as the objects in a dark room suddenly become visible when a ray of light shines into the room and you see the objects that were always there although you could not previously detect them, thus did light pour into the world of the dead. The souls there were again able to perceive what was around them, to feel united in the realm of spirit with their brothers and could now bring into the physical world the qualities of love and brotherliness. Thus a new light came into this world of the dead, for the Mystery of Golgotha has significance not only for the world in which it took place physically but for all the worlds with which man is connected in the course of his evolution. If the spiritual world had remained as the dead experienced it during the Greco-Latin epoch, if the human soul had remained in the icy coldness and loneliness then prevailing, brotherliness and love would have gradually vanished from the world. Man would have brought with him from Devachan the longing for seclusion. For the light that then streamed into the earthly world and also into the world of the dead was meant to establish the kingdom of brotherliness and love on the earth. That is the mission of the Christ impulse.

We will now consider from still another side the Mystery of Golgotha and the secret of the blood flowing from the wounds of the Redeemer.

We know that man on the earth has received an inheritance from Old Moon. The three lower bodies, physical body, etheric body and astral body had been prepared for him and it was on the earth that the ego was first added—the ego as the expression of human freedom and independence. In ancient times it was important to establish the homogeneity of mankind. At the beginning, conditions were such that the relations of one human being to another were saved only by being given a physical foundation. The blood is the expression of the ego. Blood kinship and the ties of blood were the ruling principles. The physical blood was the medium operating from man to man. This was how things were in times of antiquity. But through Christ Jesus love became a non-material bond. The activity of the human group ego declined. In earlier times the human being belonged to a communal tribal ego and he felt safe and secure within it, within the bosom of Father Abraham. This kinship was much more important to him than his personal identity. His higher self continued to exist in the ties of blood kinship. In the Old Testament we hear of Noah and other tribal fathers that they lived for hundreds of years. We are there led back to times when the human being not only had a memory of what he himself had experienced but also to a time when this memory extended far back into the generations. He did not say “I” of himself but he lived in his “I” right back to remote ancestors. His life did not begin with his birth; it was not then that he began to say “I” of himself but he said “I” of everything his ancestors had experienced.

It was against love based on blood that the luciferic beings at all times directed their sharpest attacks. Their aim was to make each single human being dependent upon himself alone, to instill consciousness of self into man even between death and a new birth. But divine beings, bearers of love, strove to bring individuals together through bonds other than those based on ties of blood, which take no account of freedom. The Christ principle unites with the full expression of the “I” the power flowing from the spirit of love and lets it hold sway from individual to individual. Hence there is a saying, Christ is the true Lucifer (Christus verus Luciferus) or Light-bringer, and finally the opponent of the fallen Lucifer. The love based on blood was transformed by Christ into spiritual love, into the brotherly love streaming from soul to soul. Christ's utterance, “He who forsakes not father and mother cannot be my disciple,” is to be understood in the sense that love based on blood must be transformed into the brotherly love that embraces all human beings with equal strength. Spiritual science takes nothing away from any of these biblical utterances but when it is rightly understood can only enrich them with a deeper understanding of Christian grace. The power of spiritual love was brought to the souls of men for the first time by Christ when He appeared on the earth; and with the blood that flowed on Golgotha from the wounds of the Redeemer the superfluous blood of humanity was as it were sacrificed. Through this act the teaching was confirmed that individual must confront individual as human brothers. In the world today there is still little understanding of Christ. Mankind has first to learn to realize the greatness of this most. mighty cosmic event. A few individuals have always had a divining of the whole significance of the Christ Being and His appearance on the earth. How have they thought of that event? Think of the human beings and peoples who preserved for some considerable time the connection with the spiritual world. The ancient Indian set little store by his connection with the physical world. He was intent upon the acquisition of super-sensible truths and lofty spiritual life in the spiritual world but had no desire to love physical existence. Let me tell you about an Eastern saga, which indicates in a splendid way how the Christ principle was tentatively grasped there.

In the course of time, so runs this saga, there appeared the power that guides our earth. An oriental legend, which reports it, was narrated in the temples of Northern Tibet to the pupil of the wisdom of the Buddha, and has been preserved ever since. This Eastern legend narrates that Kashyapa, the worthiest pupil of the Buddha, lived at a time when, even in the East, little understanding of wisdom was to be found. When he felt his end approaching he withdrew into a cave where he lived for long ages; his corpse was to be preserved there to await the appearance of the Maitreya Buddha in order then to ascend to heaven.

The gist of this legend follows. If there had been no special event, that is to say, if Christ had not appeared on the earth, neither the East nor the West would have been able to find the path into the spiritual world. The body of Kashyapa is pre-served until the Maitreya Buddha releases the corpse from the earth. This means that in the future man will again have powers whereby what is earthly can be spiritualized. The sublime being who conducts Kashyapa's body into the spiritual world will have descended more deeply than any being has ever done. Christ Himself releases the body of Kashyapa. In the period following this event the body is no longer there. What does this mean? It means that the body was immediately transported into the spiritual world. The body of Kashyapa can be liberated in the element of fire. Where is this fire? When seen by Paul before Damascus it was spiritualized. Thus the appearance of Christ on the earth is the great turning point when man can ascend again from the physical into the spiritual world.

Now think of the Buddha's teaching. Through observing old age, illness, death, and so forth, the great truth concerning suffering dawned in him. He now taught of the cessation of suffering, of release from suffering through the elimination of the desire for birth, for physical incarnation.

Now think of humanity six hundred years later. What do you find? Humanity reveres a corpse. Men gaze at Christ on the cross, Christ who dies and through His death brought life. Life has vanquished death.

One: To be born is suffering? No, for Christ entered into our earth and henceforward for me, a Christian, to be born is no longer suffering.

Two: Illness is suffering? But the great medicine will exist, that is, the power of the soul that has been kindled by the Christ impulse. In uniting himself with the Christ impulse, man spiritualizes his life.

Three: Old age is suffering? But whereas man's body becomes frail and infirm, in his real self he grows ever stronger and more powerful.

Four: Death is suffering? But through Christ the corpse has become the symbol of the fact that death, physical death, has been vanquished by life, by the spirit; death has been finally overcome by life.

Five: To be separated from the being one loves is suffering? But the man who has understood Christ is never separated from the one he loves, for Christ has brought light to the world stretching between death and a new birth; so a man remains united with the object of his love.

Six: Not to receive that for which one craves is suffering? He who lives with Christ will no longer crave for what does not come to him, or is not given to him.

Seven: To be united with what one does not love is suffering? But the man who has recognized Christ kindles in himself that universal love that envelops every being, every object according to its value.

Eight: To be separated from what one loves is no longer suffering, for in Christ there is no more separation.

Thus for the illness of suffering, which Buddha proclaimed and recognized, the remedy has been given through Christ.

This turning of humanity to Christ and to the dead body on the cross is the greatest transformation that has ever come to pass in evolution.

The individuality that embodied itself in the body of John the Baptist, which had previously been the Zarathustra ego, had, because it was such a high individuality, no less ability to suffer and feel pain. On the contrary.

This must be emphasized because many people believe that the one who incarnated at the baptism of John was a higher individuality and therefore suffers less. But that is not the case. Which individuality embodied itself? The Zarathustra individuality left the three bodies, then another individuality moved in. Only slowly and gradually can one bring oneself to understand the one who lived on earth for these three years. [This being had never been on earth before.] Zarathustra had once proclaimed that behind the physical sunlight stands Ahura-Mazdao, the spiritual light. We do not have to imagine something abstract, but a real spiritual being, an individuality that has never incarnated itself earlier or later. A complete idea is obtained when one ascends to even higher levels than we have tried to suggest. [Because: to understand it, man must first begin to understand himself.]

Man must say to himself: Gradually I have become what I am today from an imperfect being. But gradually I will become more and more perfect. There is something in me as a seed that will come out later. [Step by step he has developed into the sentient, willing and thinking being that he is now. But we also find hidden within us potential, seeds that have not yet sprouted and that point to a continued development in the ages to come. The more man develops in this way, the richer his knowledge of the world becomes, the deeper his understanding of the mystery of life.]

Thus man can compare his being with that of the great world. What does he seek from incarnation to incarnation? I will find more and more knowledge and feelings about the world in my soul. He who says he can find this in his soul and it is not outside, should just say he would drink water from a glass in which there is nothing. Whatever thoughts and feelings a person ultimately allows to arise in his soul must be contained in it. Everything we will still find in the future must underlie the world. Spiritual content is in the world. What a person can ultimately find in himself was contained in the world in the very beginning.

What does a person find outside?

1. The world of minerals, which obeys the so-called lifeless laws of nature.
2. He finds plants and says that he has the same within him. 3. He also has the same as is in the animals.

But he has something that the others do not have, and he must develop it ever higher. The animal can rise to the sound, which is an expression of inner pain, but not to what configures our sound so that it is a manifestation of our thoughts. This is how man can feel like the crown of earthly creation. And what produces this sound, he can call his “I”. In man is the thought-imbued, thought-interwoven word, which radiates as if from the ego. This word has therefore always been regarded. When man can see into a distant future, so that ever higher things can interweave his word,

[If we look back to the most ancient times, we find the I spread throughout the world, and if we go back even further, we find the world-word as an expression of the world-I, we find that the world-word has sprung from the world-I.

Just as the human body is the physical expression of the I living in it, so the universe is the physical expression of the world word. Ahura-Mazdao is what Zarathustra called the world word that is behind the world light. In Greek, this world word was called the Logos, so that Zarathustra pointed beyond the light to the world word. And John the Baptist was called to recognize when this world word should manifest itself. He was to say when it would be embodied: Until now, the world word has only been poured out into the whole extent of the universe; now it has first seized a soul.

Thus we see that in the thirtieth year of life, the Zarathustra ego leaves the body and enters what underlies our cosmos as its spiritual content.

The one whom the Christ has appointed as his messenger has said: [gap in the transcript.] In the beginning, the word of the world was not in man, only spread throughout the world, but it was /gap in the transcript.] In the very beginning, however, the Logos was not with a human being, but with God. And little by little the Logos poured itself out into humanity, very gradually. First of all, by the Logos becoming life - in what originally was the physical human body. Then came the time of the influences of Lucifer. If they had not come, the human being would have been permeated by the Logos in relation to the etheric body as well; only a part was permeated. The astral body in the astral light would have become radiant in man if the luciferic influences had not come; so it was darkened. The light did not shine so that man could perceive it as shining light. It shone in the darkness. It fully shone at the moment of John the Baptist's baptism: And the Logos was flesh and dwelt among men. The Logos had entered a human body and taken upon Himself everything that human beings have made of themselves by descending ever deeper into matter. Thus He had taken upon Himself all pain. Through this, one can gradually come to understand what happened at the baptism of John.

But that was not all he was to experience, what one experiences from incarnation to incarnation, but what one feels in the human body through initiation. This was not written by the evangelist John, because he had to describe the Christ as he was recognized; the others had to describe him as he lived in the astral body: Matthew and Luke.

Matthew describes the Solomon-like Jesus up to the twelfth year. Even if the Zarathustra-ego was later in the other, the Nathan-like Jesus, it had nevertheless developed in the first, awakening all the feelings in it; therefore, what it had experienced in this body remained with it. Matthew described in particular the Christ Jesus as a human being. Luke was the one who had to describe the astral body in particular. The seers Matthew and Luke described the human being Jesus, Matthew from the outside, Luke from the inside.

The seers Mark and John had other things to write. Mark had to direct his gaze to the Logos as He permeates all things, to the Logos on the periphery, as He shines forth in Jesus of Nazareth; therefore, he describes what happened after the baptism.

John wanted to describe how this Logos has become the inner essence when I have shone forth.

The human side is described by the seers Matthew and Luke. The human being with an outer appearance, permeated by the Christ presence: Mark; the inner Logos: John. How He comes from the outside and becomes the inner being: Mark; how He becomes flesh and pours out on the outside: John.

Now it should be described how the man who carried the Christ in himself experienced not only the human side, the temporal side, but the initiate, the eternal side - Mark.

The others describe, as true seers, what must be overcome. John describes what the I means when it has been overcome - the highest perfection. In the times before Christ Jesus lived, there were two ways of experiencing initiation: the more Egyptian and [the more Persian - Mithras]. Egyptian: developing towards the inner soul, turned away from the outer world, towards the inner self. All that surges up and down in the astral body is Maya, and only when we descend into deeper reasons do we come to the spiritual.

Let us imagine a soul that has been initiated in Egypt. It had to find everything that had mixed into this soul from incarnation to incarnation, and that was bad. Today we call this the tempter or the little guardian of the threshold. It is the expression of the Luciferic entity in the soul: arrogance, lies. The human being had to free himself from this.

Man can only free himself from that which he faces eye to eye. He must see all sources of pride and vanity in himself if he wants to be free of them; he must experience all possibilities of illusion, all possibilities of lies. At this stage, the temptation arises easily in him to believe that he has already found the spiritual reality, that he already knows something, possesses something. Here he encounters the little Dweller of the Threshold. This is what the person to be initiated had to do in the Egyptian mysteries: encounter all that the luciferic entities had made of the soul. In the Greek mysteries it was called Diabolos.

In the Persian initiation, which aimed to lead the person out, the person did not have to descend into themselves, but come out of themselves, fall into ecstasy. There was another power to be seen: the one that prevents him from finding the spirit in the outer world, the one that makes him believe that the veil of the senses is the only reality. To believe that the physical is a reality is just as foolish as seeing the mirror image as the truth.

But the luciferic forces have seduced man into regarding the opaque veil of Maya as the truth. Zarathustra knew how to tell of that second kind of force that prevents man from attaining to the spirit: Ahriman, who was able to oppose himself after the luciferic forces had woven the veil. When man enters into ecstasy, he brings with him the error that the external world is not a veil. This is what the second guardian of the threshold protects him from: belief in materiality appears before his eyes like a mirage. The great guardian is the one who asks to distinguish this brought illusion from the true spiritual world.

Two stations are to be distinguished: either the human being must have the strength to resist, to hurry past, or he remains with the Guardian of the Threshold, does not advance further. Therefore, there is the possibility to remain with vanity and lies, with Diabolos. While the outer tempter, who presents the illusions, is called Satan. We meet Satan as tempter when we follow the way outwards; we meet Diabolos when we follow the way inwards. The great Guardian of the Threshold leads us out over the temptations of Satan.

In Christ Jesus both initiations should be united, therefore he had to overcome both tempters.

The tempter who projects the illusions – Satan – is described by the seer Mark; and the writers of the human side of Christ Jesus had to describe how, through descending into the soul, the other tempter arose. Read the scenes of temptation in Matthew and Luke and you will see that they differ greatly from Mark's, and with good reason: Satan in the case of external initiation, Diabolos in the case of internal initiation. It is no coincidence that they are described in this way, but it is well founded. Consequently, the scene of temptation is also described differently.

“Turn these stones to bread,” says Luke and Matthew; and the tempter, the Diabolos, speaks to vanity: “All this I will give you, that you may rule over it.” - The egoistic person who merely wants to build a world for himself within and does not believe that one must penetrate the world that is spread all around us is portrayed here.

And Markus – the initiate who goes outwards – what does he experience? In the outer world there are two kingdoms of nature, the mineral and the vegetable, which have not permeated each other with an astral body. Only in the astral body and I lies the possibility of vanity and error, the possibility of falling. We can carry this into the outer world; so in which forms will our errors take shape? In animal forms, not in plant forms. The possibility of error about the outer world is expressed in animal forms, which we must overcome. Only by seeing the angelic form of the great Guardian of the Threshold beside him does man overcome the animal forms that he might otherwise mistake for truths of the spiritual world. This is why Mark expresses it so beautifully: “He was led into the wilderness, and he was with the animals and the angels served, that is, they led him upward.

Where two gospels describe different things, we can prove that they have reason to say different things. So the way inwards is via the temptations and the little guardian of the threshold, which destroys self-delusion. The way of Mark is outwards.

Thus the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke do not describe what the ordinary person has to go through on earth, but rather the initiates of every kind.

But how the Christ becomes an overcomer, who is able to live with the life of the whole world, had to be described by the writer of the Gospel of John. The ideal of the future is exemplified by Christ Jesus. Such an individuality does not live selfishly within, but in every being. Therefore, it can evoke in every being the strength to live in the same way. I am the light and the life. He can therefore pour this light and life over into another individuality. In the resurrection of Lazarus we have the description of that power, whose life can flow over into the other individuality. His death will appear as life, because I am the life.

Because he wanted to describe this powerful individuality, the writer of the Gospel of John does not first describe the temptations, but the overcomer. And he has become an overcomer at the price that the Christ Jesus had made himself the Lamb of God, who wants to be nothing but the expression of God, nothing but what can provide an opportunity for the working of the will of the world.

In this way, John the Baptist is also convinced by the impression of how truly the One standing before him is the Lamb - ready for the task.

The theosophist can recognize the truths more and more independently of the Gospels, and they shine out to him from the Gospels. Therefore, we see that those who wrote the Gospels were seers. This is the result when we first find the truths independently.

To-day I should like to speak about a very important myth, also Greek, one which, like all myths, can be interpreted at many different levels. We will endeavour to uncover its real kernel. But before going on I should like to preface what I have to say by a few more theoretic observations.

In the last number of Lucifer-Gnosis¹ I stressed that the last three culture-periods of Atlantis saw the beginning of a particular influence on the human race which still endures even to-day. It has to do with the fact that men then became mature enough to work in what we call our intellect. Before that time man was more a being of memory. Up to the fourth Atlantean culture-period man's memory was especially developed. The faculty of intellectual combination, the calculating faculty, in short, all that makes up our present-day culture, began in the fifth Atlantean period with the Ur-Semites. And it was this that made the Ur-Semites capable of originating the whole of the fifth, the Aryan, root-race. The Aryan root-race had as its primary task the development of the intelligence which is active on the physical plane. When such a new phase of human evolution occurs, it becomes possible for new Beings, Beings who up to that time had led hidden lives, to gain an influence on evolution. And in fact, since the fifth culture-epoch of Atlantis, a particular host of Beings have participated in human evolution, the activity of whom had not hitherto been noticeable. You must think of these Beings as very highly evolved, far more highly evolved than man at the stage he then was. But in a certain way they had lagged in their development behind the Beings who in the middle of the Lemurian time had intervened in the affairs of the human race. It was a fresh setback which took place at that time. The Beings of whom I am now speaking belonged in their whole nature to what we call the Moon evolution. They went through their development on the Old Moon, but they were not so far advanced as the Beings who were able to intervene in the middle of the Lemurian time. They had remained behind the normal development on the Moon. They had advanced to the point of recognising that the faculties which man had now attained were analogous to their own, to the point of recognising that they could obtain control over those human faculties. Up to this time men had not been Beings of intelligence, now they acquired the intellect. And these new Beings made use of this human intellect for their own further development. Thus it came about that a phase of human evolution now set in which we call the phase of cold, objective science. Prior to this time there was no such thing, and one day there will again be no such thing. All wisdom hitherto attained in human evolution has been fundamentally associated with love. Cold, calculating science is under the influence of these backward Beings. Thus the influence of these Beings, who are still active, will come to an end only when our whole intellectual activity, everything which we are capable of knowing, is again permeated with love. When intelligence and love are once more united in the higher wisdom, the influence of those Beings, who are not visible on the physical plane, will disappear. To make clear their influence, in the first place to the pupils of the Mysteries, and then to mankind, was the task of the Greek Mysteries

About the eighth century B.C., a very important epoch sets in as regards these Beings. If you think of the culture-epochs of our fifth root-race—of the ancient Veda culture, then of the ancient Persian culture, of the Chaldean-Egyptian culture, if you think even of the time of the Druid culture, you will find that an objective, dispassionate science of knowledge did not exist. It first emerged at the dawn of the fourth culture-epoch, which one can place in about the eighth century B.C. With it there dawned an objective knowledge, completely detached from all the rest of the contents of the human mind. A Chaldean priest who cultivated astronomy still sought to fathom the purposes of the rulership of the world; and this can also be said of the Egyptian and Druid priests; they sought to acquire insight into the purposes of the world-ruler. A purely intellectual knowledge first dawned in Greece. This intellectual knowledge had been prepared step by step, and emerged, bound up with the rest of human activity, under the influence of the Beings I have mentioned; it was fully released in the fourth culture-epoch of the fifth root-race. Those who were initiated in the Mysteries of that time, confronted by the external wisdom, looked upon the ancient wisdom, which had formerly been at the disposal of mankind, as something lost, something which men must seek to regain.

Now there was a particular way of describing the point of time in which this dispassionate, dry wisdom separated itself from the all-embracing primeval wisdom. In the eighth century B.C., the passage of the sun through the sign of the Ram, which then took place, was experienced as the repetition of an earlier passage through the same sign thousands of years previously. It is well known that the sun moves forward through the whole of the zodiac, through the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, through Cancer, the Lion, the Virgin and so on, so that it has already passed through the Ram many times. The last time it had passed through the Ram, man was in possession of a knowledge united with love, and thereby of the primeval wisdom. This primeval wisdom had now been lost, and had given place to a culture of external wisdom. The priests of the Greek. Mysteries expressed this whole process in its occult significance through the profound symbol of the Argonaut saga, in which the ram is the symbol of the union of love and knowledge.

Let us first call to mind the whole of the myth. We are told that Phrixos and Helle had to suffer many things at the hand of their bad stepmother. Therefore their dead mother appeared to Phrixos and advised him to run away and to take his sister with him. She gave him a large ram with a golden fleece, upon the back of which they were to cross the sea. Helle fell off and was drowned in the Hellespont, but Phrixos reached Colchis with the ram. There he is said to have sacrificed it and to have given its fleece to King Petus, who hung it on an oak in front of a cavern. Later, the Greek hero Jason, together with the most important of the Greek initiates of the time, Orpheus, Theseus, Hercules and others, set to work to recover the fleece from the alien people of Colchis. Through winning the hand of the king's youngest daughter, Medea, he was enabled to bring it back to Greece. First he had to overcome two fire-breathing bulls. Then he had to sow a dragon's teeth. From the dragon's teeth grew armed men, who began to fight. With Medea's help he was able to bring this conflict to a successful conclusion. It was she too who enabled him to capture the fleece and to set out, together with it and her, on the homeward journey to Greece. In order to deceive her father Medea had taken her brother with her, had slain him and had thrown his dismembered body into the sea. While the lamenting father was collecting his son's limbs she was able to continue her flight with Jason into Greece.

In the eighth and ninth centuries B.C., the pupils of the Greek Mysteries were taught the occult meaning of this saga. They were taught that the Beings who made use of the dry, dispassionate human intelligence had now attained a special importance. The longing awoke in them for the ancient culture which had obtained when the sun had passed through the sign of the Ram on the occasion before the last. That the twins Phrixos and Helle were carried by the ram to Colchis means simply that an earlier race—the Persian-Iranian, with its twofold nature (it stood under the sign of the gods Ormuzd and Ahriman)—had regained the union of knowledge and love. This race had borne the fleece to hidden realms. Still earlier, in Atlantis, this fleece, this wisdom, had been the common possession of human culture; then it had been carried into distant Mystery-schools. It had to be brought back again. Thus the Argonaut saga is an expression of the founding of the Greek Mystery-schools.

Thus we are told that a primeval wisdom existed among the people of Atlantis. It was then the common possession of humanity. It had been lost and was now only to be found in the caves and crypts of the pupils of the Mysteries. But the Greeks established the Mysteries anew; by bringing the primeval wisdom back again to Greece, Theseus, Orpheus, Hercules and others became the founders of this Greek Mystery-wisdom.

A dispassionate, cold intelligence, which is objective, is introduced by Thales, Anaximenes, Socrates and other philosophers. The Mystery-wisdom is united with love. It is a wisdom which cannot be attained without purification of the passions, the forces of Kama.² The other kind of knowledge can be obtained without purification of Kama.

Thus the very important Argonaut saga puts before us the transition from the third to the fourth culture-epoch of our present root-race. Human culture, which formerly was one stream, now separates into two—into mystery-wisdom and external knowledge. The one stream was hidden—it was the recovery of the golden fleece but it was nevertheless effective. It had an influence on Greek art and culture. Only on external knowledge was it henceforth to have no influence. This is the saga of the voyage of the Argonauts.

The Odyssey too is concerned with the transition from one race to another. The Odyssey has been given the most varied explanations To-day I only want to indicate the bare framework of the saga. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I tried to make use of its second stage of interpretation; to-day we will look at the third.

Odysseus, who took part in the siege of Troy, by his cunning and his cleverness, helped the Greeks to conquer Troy. He made lone voyages, voyages in which he went astray—voyages on the water, be it noted. He came to the land of the Cyclops and overcame their one-eyed leader; then he went further, to Circe, who, we are told, turned his companions into swine. Then he descended into the underworld, and made the acquaintance of the dead heroes of Troy. Then he came under the influence of the sirens, who lead men astray by their magic songs. We are further told that most of his companions succumbed to the temptation, but that Odysseus caused himself to be bound to his ship, and thus saved himself; we are told how he then came to a place between Scylla and Charybdis where his ships were in danger of being wrecked. To save himself he had to pass through a whirlpool. Then he comes to the island of Calypso, sojourns there seven years and is enabled to leave by the intervention of Zeus, who orders Calypso to let him go, and at last he reaches his home country.

He is led by the goddess Pallas Athene into his house and to his wife, who has had to withstand many dangers because of the suitors who beset her. So she unravels by night the weaving she accomplishes by day, because she has promised her hand to one of her suitors when the work is finished.

Now let us go through this outline of the Odyssey as it is known to us from Greek occult wisdom. The schools of initiation, in which was actually enacted what I have just recounted, led the pupils on to the astral and the mental planes³ in such a way as to enable them to survey a stretch of human evolution, to survey the period from the middle of Lemuria to the time when in Greece, in the school of initiation which had been founded by Jason together with Orpheus, Theseus, Hercules and others, man was again able to find the primeval wisdom. Thus the pupil was led on to the astral and the mental planes and was shown the events which humanity had to pass through between the middle of Lemuria and the point of time when the Trojan war took place. The Argonaut saga is a picture of the primeval wisdom. It shows us that it existed at that time side by side with external knowledge.

What was it that was shown to the pupils of the Mysteries in the Odyssey? Odysseus himself is its expression. Let us turn back for a moment to the middle of the Lemurian time. Man was then in a state of transition from the hermaphroditic to the condition of sexuality, in a state of transition from the condition of being able to see without an external physical sense-organ to that of seeing with the physical eye. Up to the middle of Lemuria every man had one eye, which was then replaced by two external physical eyes. It was into this phase of evolution that the pupil of the early Greek Mysteries was transplanted. He had to experience the transition from the first half of Lemuria into the second half of Lemuria, into the time after the middle of Lemuria up to the emergence of the second eye. The Cyclopes were the men of the early Lemurian time. Odysseus came to know these men upon the astral plane. After this time, human astral bodies were plunged into matter which was becoming denser, more solid. We then come—so were the initiates instructed—to the first periods of Atlantis. The Atlantean acquires more and more the capacity to make use of the forces of life, to apply these forces for his own ends. They were fully developed astral forces which the Atlantean possessed, and it was only on the astral plane that a Greek could be transported into them. This was the time, so often spoken of in occult writings, when the Atlantean races lapsed into the wildest arts of black magic. This epoch was brought before the pupils of the Greek Mysteries in these shifting scenes. This was the age when. human passions became so distorted under the influence of the forces of black magic that their astral bodies resembled those of the lowest animals. This was the picture which the Turanians presented when they lapsed into these wild magic arts. The astral body was so changed under the influence of these black arts that it could only be expressed symbolically as the changing of the comrades of Odysseus into swine. This was the moment of human evolution which the Greek initiates of that time experienced. Then Odysseus descended into the underworld. In the world of Greek mythology this always signified an initiation. Whenever it is said of a hero that he descended into the underworld, the narrator wants to express the fact that the hero concerned has been initiated, made acquainted with things that lie beyond death. Odysseus was an initiate and the Odyssey itself is the description of his initiation.

Now we go on to a point when, after the Atlantean flood, men became acquainted with the first operations of those Beings of whom I have spoken, acquainted with the effects of external culture, science and art, with forces which influenced intellectual life after the flood. The first periods of purely external physical culture were brought before the initiates as the temptations of purely worldly arts, worldly culture. These are the siren songs of the young fifth root-race. It was of these siren songs of the young fifth root-race that so much is said in occult writings. For on the one hand we have the great wisdom teaching of Manu⁴ who, in the sub-race which was the originator of the fifth root-race, draws men's attention to the fact that their intellect has to lift itself up to the divine. This found its expression in the Vedas, and in what the Persian Zarathustra left to his co-religionists. But then we have the pure culture of the intelligence, which diverts men from what was developing in them under the influence of Manu. In all occult writings you find described the events which then took place. Manu chose a small band and went with them into the Desert of Gobi or Sebamo. There it was only a handful that remained true to him, whilst the others were unfaithful and dispersed in all directions. This important event was shown to the candidates for initiation—that is to say, they were shown how the Manu had chosen some of the Ur-Semites, but that of those chosen only a small number followed him, whereas the others ran into destruction through following the siren-song of external culture.

Then a still more important moment of human evolution was represented by the passage between Scylla and Charybdis. What is it which now really begins in mankind? The essential Kama—Manas culture now first begins. It had gradually been prepared up to this point; it is only now that it really begins. Our fifth root-race possesses preeminently this Kama-Manas culture. Kama is in the astral, and even to-day is still active in the astral body. But Manas is what is active in the physical brain. The man of the fifth root-race thinks with the physical brain. It is only in a future phase of evolution that Kama, the astral body, will be so advanced that it will be able to think. To-day Manas has taken hold of the physical brain. We have to pass between the hindrances on either side—Scylla-Manas and Charybdis-Kama. The passage of Odysseus is a picture of this. There is on the one hand the astral whirlpool of the instincts, appetites and passions into which man can fall; on the other hand there is the physical intellect chained to the rock. The rock occurs also in the Prometheus saga, where we meet the rock again. The human intellect is exposed to all the dangers of the physical, of the rock. Man sails between the physical intelligence and the whirlpool of the astral life. If he has accomplished that successfully, if he has recognized the dangers of the passage, and has nevertheless kept his footing, then he comes to Calypso, to the hidden wisdom. Then he can take a look into the future of humanity, then he can undergo the testing time, which lasts seven years. That is why Odysseus remains with the nymph Calypso seven years. Every man who seeks initiation goes through a seven-year testing period, and this is represented by the sojourn with Calypso. Only then can he reach the point to which the soul aspires. Read Homer's Odyssey! He means that man is in search of his own soul. He who really wishes to understand the Odyssey cannot accept the view of a modern investigator who asserts that Polyphemus and the Cyclopes only mean that Etna had erupted and that the scene of the conflagration seemed to Odysseus like the eye of a giant.

At last Odysseus returns home as a beggar, without any external property. This means that the man who had recognized the unimportance of the external world and of worldly goods, seeks his soul's home not in Maya, but behind Maya, thus in a mystical sense he returns home as a beggar. That he is truly wise is shown by his being led into his house by Pallas Athene. In all esotericism the soul is represented as feminine, it is always the feminine nature that is chosen as the symbol for the striving of the individual soul. Goethe calls it the ‘Eternal Feminine’. In Medea in the Argonaut saga, in Penelope, we have to understand the real soul, to which Odysseus seeks the way again. The Virgin Mary too, in the Christian religion, is the striving human soul, only there the significance is infinitely deeper. Strictly speaking, Penelope is the human soul in the fifth root-race. The fifth root-race has to cultivate human intelligence. Human intelligence is utterly unfruitful when it is only turned upon itself. When it has something that one can call a content, then the intelligence can be applied to it. Intelligence is a network which is spun around things we have from some other place. When external experience teaches you something, you can weave around it with your intelligence. When the higher occult wisdom teaches you something, you can also weave around it. Men say that occult wisdom contradicts reason. Nothing contradicts reason! When something new dawns on their horizon men have always said that it is contrary to reason. But the intellect is only there for purposes of combining. Out of itself it can win nothing. This barrenness of the intellect, which is nevertheless the real soul of the fifth root-race, is expressed in the perpetual weaving and unraveling of Penelope's cloth. Odysseus is led by wisdom. The initiate must find the way to the soul of the fifth root-race, but he will only unite himself with this soul in the right way if he is guided by Pallas Athene. Pallas Athene too is a feminine deity, another soul-force, wisdom, the real guide. But man has to reach intelligence through many by-paths, in so far as they are paths of development—for there were many by-paths in the Lemurian epoch. And in this journey Pallas Athene must be his guide. This was brought before the pupils of the Mysteries in Greece and this is what Homer wanted to express in his profound saga.

What is described in the Odyssey is initiation as it was carried out in Greece at that time—an initiation which was a repetition on the astral and mental planes of experiences from Lemurian times right down to the time of the Mysteries themselves. Odysseus is the clever man, the cunning man, and Troy was overthrown through his ability. The clever, intellectual man is the man of the fifth root-race. But to be able to find his way rightly in the fifth root-race, he must again on his devious path seek his home country, his Penelope. The man who is merely cunning and clever would never find the right way. He must first come out of himself, broaden his view, by looking back on the long journey of the human race. Odysseus is the representative of the cunning Kama-Manas man, who has to wander through many byways, in order to be led back again to the soul of the fifth root-race.

• 1. The article here mentioned, which first appeared in the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis was later published and forms chapter 1 of Atlantis and Lemuria.
• 2. Forces of Kama. The forces of the astral body.
• 3. Astral plane and Mental plane. These are the “soul-world” and “spirit-land” in Rudolf Steiner's Theosophy.
• 4. Manu. Described in An Outline of Occult Science as “the Christ-initiate” or “the leader of the Christ-oracle”.

We will soon depict the scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, which precedes the final scene, which, as you know, has already been depicted. The scene begins with the holy anchorites:

Woods, they sway in,
rocks, they weigh on them,

Goethe calls it “Faust's Ascension” and the scene that now follows is usually called the “Entombment”. But we will begin where, in the broader sense, this entombment of Faust is depicted.

When one comes to the various parts of Goethe's “Faust”, one must repeatedly and repeatedly fall into a certain astonishment at the infinite depth that lies in the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, in particular, deep in that one is dealing with an objectivity in the representation of the spiritual world that can be justified by spiritual science. And it is remarkable that Goethe presented the spiritual world with such objectivity at a time when spiritual science as such did not yet exist. I do not need to dwell at length on the question that was once put to me when I gave a lecture many years ago on Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, and a theosophical authority of the old school asked me whether I thought that Goethe knew everything that was said from the spiritual science to justify the deeper secret of the poem of the green snake and the beautiful lily. I could only reply whether the person in question believed that the plant also knows exactly what the botanist makes about it in order to be able to grow in the right way according to the botanical laws. When one hears such a question, one is usually aware of how clever the questioner feels. But if one thinks such a question through to its conclusion, then one realizes how endlessly foolish people often are, who think of themselves as being so clever. So we need not concern ourselves further with the question of whether Goethe, for instance, also studied spiritual science somewhere in the way we can study it today, even if objections can very easily be made from a point of view that considers this question. We want to go straight to the matter itself.

We are presented with three types of figures in addition to those familiar to us from the rest of the Faust legend. We are presented with three types of figures that have to do with the period of time that elapses between the death of Faust and the ascent of his soul into the spiritual regions. The first type of figures presented to us are the lemurs; the second type of figures presented to us are the thick devils with short, straight horns, and the third are the scrawny devils with long, crooked horns; both types of devils are “of the old devil's grist and grain”.

Now we can ask: What spiritual instinct, what deeper wisdom, would lead us to present these three figures in the Entombment and before the Ascension of Faust? This “Entombment” is introduced in such a way that Faust has grown old in his evolution, and, as Goethe himself stated, has become a hundred years old. So, at the beginning of this scene, we are dealing with the old, hundred-year-old Faust, who is still chained to Mephistopheles, but in such a way that Faust can now believe that Mephistopheles has become his servant. Faust has made the decision to wrest a piece of land from the sea, to cultivate this piece of land, and thereby create the basis for an area that will be beneficial to humanity, where this humanity, part of humanity, can develop in peace and freedom. This land is, so to speak, because it was wrested from the sea by Faust's labor, Faust's creation. It is to be made complete by draining a swamp that is there through a ditch, so that the air will also be purified, so that the health of the people who are to develop in peace and freedom will not be endangered by the polluting vapors of the swamp. Faust now believes that Mephisto has become his overseer in this beneficial work and commands the host that is to perform the last work. Faust has already gone blind, as was shown in the previous scene. So he does not see what Mephistopheles is doing on the external physical plane, and it is understandable that he later confuses the words “digging” and “grave”. While Faust is of the opinion that a ditch should be dug to drain the swamp water into the sea in order to purify the air, Mephistopheles has the grave of Faust dug by his lemurs. As a centenarian, Faust thus still experiences the deception, becomes entangled in the web of lies of Mephistopheles, who has the grave dug and, through the similarity of names, deceives Faust into imagining that a ditch is being dug.

There are already many secrets in it. I do not want to get involved in these things today, perhaps it can be discussed another time. But I would prefer us to make ourselves clear about the nature of these three beings. Right at the beginning of the scene, which takes place in the forecourt of the palace that Faust has built for himself, Mephistopheles appears, as already mentioned, as the overseer of the workers, whom Faust believes he has assembled, while Mephistopheles calls his lemurs. Mephistopheles characterizes the lemurs not in a particular scenic remark, but in the scene itself:

Come, come! Enter, enter!
You shivering lemurs,
Made of ligaments, tendons and bones
Half-natures patched together!

So they are described to us as creatures that are held together only by the ligaments that hold the limbs of the human body together, anatomical tendons and bones. So what is not even present in the human organism in the form of muscles holds these figures together, they are patched together out of it. They are not full-natured, not whole-natured, they are half-natured, since they only have what is not blood, not muscle, not nerve, but what tendons, ligaments and bones are. They are patched together out of it. Furthermore, they are characterized by the fact that they later express themselves in chorus. And what they express indicates two things to us. First, how they actually come to do a job there under the supervision of Mephistopheles; but at the same time, this also tells us something about their nature. The lemurs express themselves in such a way that one hears in their quivering tones:

We will help you immediately,
And, as we have half heard,
There is even a wide land,
We shall get it.

So the lemurs are also deceived at first: they have half heard that they are to be given a wide country. They are to dig the grave according to Mephistopheles' plan. But they have half heard and not fully heard that they are to receive a wide country. To this end, they bring sharpened stakes to work with.

Sharpened stakes, they are there,
The long chain for measuring;
Why we were called upon,
we have forgotten.

It sounds in their half-nature, which is patched together from tendons, ligaments and bones, there is still something that sounds and rattles from a call. But what the content of the call is, what they are actually supposed to do there, they have forgotten. They are truly characterized by this. One can say that they are there, but they do not know why they are there. They know half of it, why they are there, they have heard something, but they do not know what they have heard. They have heard a call, but they have forgotten it again. So there they are in front of us, these lemurs, and Mephistopheles immediately reprimands them. He says: “This has nothing to do with the wide land you wanted; only act according to your own dimensions, according to such dimensions as are appropriate for one who consists only of legs and tendons:

The longest one lies down lengthwise.

So the one lemur has to lie down lengthwise, and now he instructs them how to dig the grave.

In the next chorus of lemurs, we are told that there is still something in them of a half-remembered memory that they were once something like human beings, that they come from something like human beings:

How young I was and live and love,
Methought it was quite sweet;
Where there was cheerful sound and merry mirth,
There moved my feet.

— That is behind them, and only half conscious.

Now the treacherous age has struck me
With his crutch;
I stumbled over the door of the grave,

Why was it open just then!

So they half-remember that they come from dead people. Mephisto first tried to come to terms with them, he needs them first.

Now I ask you to remember that I have indeed said many times that we do not carry our physical bodies with us without further ado, and that we only discard them like an empty shell. It is not only our shell, I often said, it is our tool. It contains the forces through which we are connected to the mineral earth. Now I ask you to consider the following: we are, with our physical body, formed on Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, with what we now have between birth and death. Let us imagine all that has been implanted in us by Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, I would say, summed up and suggested by everything I am drawing here, and let us imagine that which is incorporated into the earth in that we receive an ego as a tool in the earth, that this ego is incorporated as a physical tool. Let us imagine that within.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

During the time on earth, our physical body again receives what was demanded of it on Saturn, what was formed during the time of the sun and moon. But because the I works in it, what the human being has not through Saturn, Sun and Moon, but only through the development of the Earth, is incorporated. This is the external physical expression of the I. From this, the I emerges in death. What remains of Saturn, Sun and Moon has no place in earthly life; it has nothing to do with the forces of earthly development. The physical forces of the evolution of the earth would never have produced our muscles; they had to be produced by the physical forces of the evolution of the moon. But during the evolution of the earth, the impulses of the ego did indeed produce the bones, and the bones only during the Atlantean evolution, through the salt deposits in the Atlantic Ocean, the ligaments, the tendons. All this is integrated only through the forces of the earth. In this way we carry the earth within us, in our bones, tendons and ligaments. The spirit of the earth lives in them. The same forces live in them that are present in all the mineral, natural or technical domains of the earth. In the composition of our bones, tendons and ligaments, everything that can arise from the mineral-physical natural and technical effects of the earth lives. When we now go through the gate of death, we leave behind our Saturn, Sun and Moon parts. These are destroyed by the fact that they cannot exist in the earth. Bones, tendons and ligaments must destroy the forces of the earth itself, regardless of whether the person is buried or cremated; this makes no difference, the special forces of the earth must destroy them.

Thus, because Faust has died, that which is subject to the special forces of the earth is handed over to the earth, to that earth to which all dead people are also handed over, insofar as they are made of bones, tendons and ligaments. A deep spiritual insight into nature is expressed in this formulation that Goethe gave to this scene, an infinitely deep knowledge of nature! For one should not believe that one has exhausted what remains of us when one says: Well, the physical body falls away from us, and our soul — as we have always described it — continues into the spiritual worlds. — No, there are secret spiritual forces in the whole physical body that remain on the earth. The earth can only retain that which it has produced itself, but it retains only the forces from bones, tendons and ligaments. Bury the human being and let him decay, burn him - in the earthly body itself, despite decay or burning, what remains for all future is always present in the forces in bones, tendons and ligaments! We hand over our skeleton, so to speak, to the earth, and it remains there until the earth itself has reached the goal of its evolution. Our skeleton is taken up by the skeletons of all those who have died before us, and enters into the community of those who have died before us. It would be a superficial view to say: “Everything is transitory here.” Only the form is transitory. The forces that prevail in them are contained in the earth's activity. And if you take the physical forces at work on earth today, if you look straight into the earth, the forces in it that have come about because people have been buried in the earth, or because they have somehow been destroyed, their bodies have somehow been destroyed. The forces that formed the human being are now in the earth, working in the interior of the earth, they are there, they are preserved.

So we can say: Mephisto is initially faced with the task of dealing with the path of the physical body, with the path, with the paths that the physical body wants to take. - That's where he needs the lemurs, I would say, who are not ghostly, but under ghostly beings, phantom beings that are always united with the earthly body as the remains of dead people. He needs them.

Do you know what would happen if what has been ours since Atlantean times were to disappear in our bones, tendons and ligaments? Even today the earth would be close to it, and it would soon be more likely that all people would be born with so-called “English limbs,” with weak and powerless limbs. People would be born rickety, because the earth only has a certain amount of the strength that lies in our bone movements and tendon development. And what we give back in death always goes into later human bodies in a mysterious way. Otherwise, people would be born rickety. And if one is born rickety, it is a sign that one has not entered into a right relationship in one's total karma with those forces that the earth gives again and again and again, and receives back again and again from the bones, tendons and ligaments of humanity.

Thus an infinitely deep, spiritual thought of nature is expressed in the fact that Mephisto has summoned these underworldly spectres, these pure phantom beings, in whose ranks Faust's phantom also enters. We must, of course, grasp the scene quite spiritually. The interpreters of Faust always believed that there were bone men walking around. But they are only the forces that lie in the bones, tendons and ligaments, the supersensible forces. The scene is to be grasped entirely spiritually, only through spiritual vision, in the manner of spiritual vision. These lemurs have what is in man in that he has an I. But the I is outside. But the I is outside. So all the qualities that only came in through the I are gone, are only half present, only echoes. Therefore they are there and also not there. We human beings are only there when we send our I into our bones, tendons and ligaments. They no longer have that. We only understand what we have heard when we send our ego through our bones, tendons and ligaments. They only have the echo; they hear and do not know what they hear; they have heard a call and have only half heard it, have forgotten it because the memory lies in the system that is put together by bones, tendons and ligaments. So, because Mephistopheles first has to deal with the paths that Faust's physical body takes, he, who is a spirit but wants to assert his rights on earth, naturally comes into the necessity of having to deal with the lemurs, as they are meant here, because from them he could snatch the spiritual part of Faust's physical body. After all, the physical body is also based on a spiritual one. He could grasp this spiritual.

Now, to understand the whole, let us recall something we can find in the chapter of the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds?' where the Dweller of the Threshold is mentioned. There you will find that when a person undergoes higher spiritual development, the individual powers that are otherwise united in him in ordinary human knowledge, diverge. I characterized them there according to their abilities. Will, feeling and thinking go their separate ways, each becoming something in itself. Mephisto, who remained behind on the lunar evolution with his own nature, was still familiar with the lunar evolution. That is how you have to understand him. He, Mephisto, is familiar with the lunar development in his practical view of life. But even in the atavistic view of the moon, the limbs of the human being were still separate and not yet united by the ego. So if Mephisto, in his way, wants to grasp the spiritual essence of Faust, he must actually grasp it in its threefold nature. He must grasp it as the spiritual essence of the physical body; there he must deal with the lemurs. Then he must want to grasp it as the second link in the etheric body, which separates soon after death. He is familiar with that, so he must want to grasp it. And then he must want to grasp it in what passes over into the spiritual world and has detached itself from the etheric body. What has been united through the ego does not yet correspond to his realm; he is not yet at home there, Mephisto; the separateness still exists. So he must instinctively attach importance to achieving what the spiritual is of the physical body; there he must let the lemurs work. Now, because he only knows the soul in separation, he wants to catch for himself - he does not know what - the etheric body, which leaves the human being through the lower limbs. So he puts the Dickteufel there to catch the etheric body for him. Then - he does not know how it should be. Perhaps he can grasp Faust's spiritual essence at the third link, at that which wants to ascend into the spiritual world? That is where he places the Dürrteufel. And so he wants to grasp Faust's spiritual essence. But he must, I would say, with devilish instinct, bring together the threefoldness that can convey to him the physical body directly in its spirituality – etheric body, soul-spiritual –.

Etheric body - you see, physics cannot quite cope with the ether that is present because the ether has a strange property that distinguishes it from ordinary materiality. It is not heavy, it has no weight. The usual gravity of the earth cannot hold the ether. Mephisto wants to hold it. He wants to hold it through spiritual beings. Because the ether has already become spiritual, it should also be held by spiritual beings. To do this, he needs the thick devils, who, as spiritual beings, have a certain heaviness. They must therefore be thick-bellied creatures with huge, thick bodies – small, of course, because if they were towering, they would reach too far into the upper regions. They must be designed to be small and stout, their spiritual nature must be earthly, their spiritual nature must be such that it can sustain on earth that which seeks to fly spiritually.

They must therefore be small and stout, and everything in them that is the physiognomic expression of humanity must be clumsy. They must have enormous strength in their somewhat stocky bodies. Therefore, the limbs that are more spiritualized are small; in reality they would have to have small hands, stumps, arm stumps. It is difficult to portray, can only be portrayed if the actors make every effort to move only the lower part of the arms; of course, this must be practiced and learned. But the nose, too, is difficult. It is developed, the nose that has become a horn in the devils, it is difficult; so it is, together with the forehead, the heavy organ that does not connect man with the air, but that works and is formed by its own weight.

Mephisto needs such creatures to be able to hold back the etheric body, which we know takes a different path because it is not weighed down by the earth, in the rest of the earth. He must therefore hire them so that when the etheric body appears from the lower regions of Faust's body, they can grasp it. Therefore he hires them:

Fresh meat! Double your step,
You gentlemen from the straight, crooked horn,
From the old devil's grist and grain
You bring the hellish maw at the same time.
Hell has many a maw! many!
According to rank and dignity, she devours;
But in this last game, too, one will

Canines gape; from the gorge's vault
The fire stream wells up in rage,
And in the boiling smoke of the background
I see the flame city in eternal glow!

This is, of course, the same flame city that appears in Dante!

The red surf... and so on.

Here they come, the fat devils with short, straight horns! He now describes them:

Now, bloated villains with fire cheeks!

So they are in the state in which the lunar creatures still breathed fire. They are “pot-bellied villains with fire-cheeks” who “are really fat from the brimstone of hell”.

Block-like, short, never moving necks!

So everything is immobile; mobility is already semi-spiritual. They are all clumsy and awkward, all so that they force the spirit into heaviness, because they are supposed to hold the light ether. And there he posts them:

Here below lurks, whether it glistens like phosphorus:

- whether the etheric body comes out, which they are supposed to catch —

That is the little soul, Psyche with the wings,

- he sees it as the soul! —

You pluck it out, and there is a nasty worm;

So he wants the etheric body in the form of a dragon, doesn't he.

With my stamp I will seal her,
Then away with her in a fiery whirlwind!

He says very aptly now, by placing the devil's advocate there:

Pay attention to the lower regions,
you windbags, that is your duty;
Whether she likes to live there,

You can't really know.

How should he know, since he has the three members of the soul; he does not really know what to start with!

She likes to be at home in the navel,

That is the region where the etheric body must leave the person first.

Take care, for she will wipe you out there.

So there we have the fat devils with short, straight horns who want to try to shape the spiritual so that it develops earthly heaviness.

Mephisto wants to conquer the third part through the Dürrteufel. They must be very thin guys, again difficult to represent! Very thin, and all spiritual, so nose and forehead together to a horn united, which overcomes the matter as possible, in devilish way overcomes, so crooked and long, because they should achieve it, to become quite spiritual, to overcome the earth heaviness completely. Therefore, they are “Firlefanze”, as spinning tops, move quickly like spinning tops. They must now be employed to catch that which goes into the spiritual world - the third. So they are supposed to chase after the forces that develop precisely out of heaviness, so to speak. That which they are not supposed to get into the heaviness of the earth, they are supposed to develop, like a spinning top, counter to the heaviness, through their long, flexible limbs, which should actually grow out of them. That is how they should develop. That is how Mephisto sets them up:

You winged giants of Firlefanze!
Reach into the air, try without rest;
Arms straight,

— straight means long in this case, that they become thin and long.

The arms are stretched, the claws are sharply pointed,

– so long claws instead of fingers come out –

so that you can catch the fluttering, the fleeting.

– the soul that goes to the spiritual worlds –

She must feel ill at ease in the old house,
And the genius

- in contrast to the etheric body: the genius, which is always soul-spiritual -

And the genius, it wants to get out right at the top.

There you can see how, according to the way man is constituted, the function of the lemurs on the physical body, the thick devil on the etheric body, the dry devil for the spiritual-soul is sharply, clearly outlined!

Now the heavenly host is approaching, the heavenly host, that is, the beings who belong to the spiritual worlds. And the matter is presented in such a way that none of those who can serve Mephisto – the lemures, the thick- and scrawny devils – achieve anything. The heavenly host is coming:

Follow the messengers,
heavenly relatives,
slow flight;
forgiving dust,
animating dust;
to all natures
friendly traces
work in floating
its dwelling train.

These are beings that have not experienced the earthly either, but do not claim to have an effect on the earthly sphere, but only on the spiritual and mental aspects of the human being. Mephistopheles is out of place, he has remained a ghost, a moon ghost, and has an effect on the earth. They have remained in their own sphere. They must therefore appear to him as beings who have not even become human, but are still pre-human, immature, less than children.

I hear discordant notes, nasty strumming,
From above it comes with unwelcome day;
It is the mischievous, girlish banging,
As sanctimonious taste may love it.

And so on. Of course, Mephisto is well aware of the close kinship between him and the angels as spiritual beings. They have both remained spiritual beings. That is why he calls them devils in his own way, but devils in disguise.

They are devils, but in disguise.

Now the battle begins between the host of angels and the demons and goblins down there who are striving for Faust's soul. Mephisto is standing there and must take part in this battle. He instructs his devils because he senses something. What does he actually sense? Yes, he knows the trinity as a soul quality. But that is not capable of grasping the I-unity. He does not believe that in Faust the I-unity is so strong that it holds the trinity together. That is his great error. While he is actually always talking about the trinity of the soul, the unity of the soul is asserted at this moment from the spiritual world, holding everything together. If this unity, this unity of the ego, were not there, the lemures would be able to draw the soul of the physical body to themselves, without it having remained connected to the whole world, to the whole cosmos. The Dürrteufel would be able to grasp the soul, the genius. But because they are held together by the ego in the human being between birth and death, each one goes its way: the body to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric region, that which is soul to the spiritual region, but they remain destined for each other. There remains a connection. And as soon as the connection, which is brought about by the character of the ego, is there, the devil can do nothing. But he is positioning himself quite correctly.

Why do you cower and flinch? Is this the custom of hell?

— the thick-skinned and scrawny devils sense that a different element is coming.

So stand firm and let them scatter.

They scatter roses, namely, as a symbol of spiritual love coming from above.

To his place, every Gauch!
They think, with such flowerbedecking
They can snow in the hot devils;
That melts and shrivels at your breath.

Now they begin, because he commands them:

Now blow, Püstriche! —

Now they blow away the love torment that surrounds them. This is a hot glow for them, which they cannot endure. Now they blow, but they blow too hard because they cannot find the right measure. They have not been taught about what is formed through the evolution of the earth.

— Enough, enough!....

That you never know the right measure!

He also only knows them insofar as he observes them on earth; he does not know them from his own nature, the right measures. But because he was with Faust for so long and saw what Faust needed, he recognizes the measures of men again for a while.

— Enough, enough!
Before your breath the whole flight pales. —
Not so violently! Shut your mouths and nostrils!
Truly, you have blown too strongly.
That you never know the right measure!
That not only shrinks, it browns, dries, burns!
It is already floating along with poisonous clear flames;
Brace yourselves against it, press close together! The strength goes out! All courage is gone! The devils scent the flattery of strangers.

To him, love is only flattery, he turns everything into something purely selfish. And so we see how, through this struggle that unfolds here, how in the imagination – for the whole thing takes place in the imagination of Mephisto, who for a while transports himself back to his old time on the moon – how, for the imagination of Mephisto, the possibility presents itself that he could have the soul in its trinity, while it was actually snatched from him by the unity.

The interesting thing is that in this scene in particular we also find an awareness of the inner spiritual evolution of humanity. Think of what I have often said, that only a certain narrow-mindedness can believe that as far back as people go, they have always looked the same; so spiritually, one imagines the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, all more or less the same as present-day people, while great developments have been undergone. People who only think about the last few centuries know nothing about what human beings have gone through in the course of the centuries in evolution. But spiritual beings notice this because they look at things spiritually. And so it is so wonderful that we can see from Mephisto's words here to Faust precisely what he, Mephisto, who is of course an old fellow, has gone through the whole evolution of the earth — you know how he says at one point that he once found “crystallized human race”! — yes, Mephisto sees how it has changed:

The body lies, and the spirit seeks to flee;
I quickly show it the blood-written title.

So, what does he actually want? Faust has died. He wants the soul, of which he only recognizes the trinity. We remember that Faust made a contract with Mephisto, even written in blood, a contract. What does Mephisto actually want, MephistoAhriman? What does he want? He wants to invoke his contract. If he shows the contract at the moment when the soul comes out, he believes that the soul cannot escape him. Well, I would rather not speak further on this point in view of some contemptuous words that have been spoken in this troubled time. Since our friends are already being accused of not thinking clearly about contracts, I do not want to develop a contract theory now that could be exploited in turn. Perhaps it could even be said, if I do not take the side of Mephisto in this scene, but rather the side of Faust: Faust would be a real Pan-Germanist in terms of his view of contracts! I do not want to talk further about the plight one could get into, because either one would have to take sides for Mephisto-Ahriman, or one would expose oneself to danger because Faust does not go into the blood-written title, to chalk this up to us as a pan-Germanistic view. So we prefer to remain silent about all the deeper wisdom that would have to be developed if one were to talk about Faust and Mephisto's contract. Let's leave it!

But evolution with its inner meaning comes to us in the words of Mephisto, who points out that times change and with them the impulses that are in the development of humanity. In the past, when the old times were there, he still understood quite well how to catch souls – today we call it superstition, but we know that they were somewhat clairvoyant times. Then the souls were still easily accessible in their trinity; then he could still catch the souls if the matter was well prepared – and after all, he prepared them quite well in Faust. But now, as the fifth post-Atlantic period approaches and the unity of the soul is being established through the ego, he has not yet undergone his full training.

But unfortunately we now have so many means
to withdraw souls from the devil
we come up against the old ways,
we are not recommended

The little people never sense the devil,
even when he has them by the collar.

There he is, but he is not recommended. And so he gets the helpers he needs, who he believes can help him get what he wants: the soul in its trinity. But the fact that it no longer exists in its trinity, in its original form, allows it to slip through his fingers.

It is a curious thing with this Mephisto-Ahriman. The beings that belong to the spiritual world come down into his spheres, and - yes, he actually falls in love with these beings. Goethe quite rightly describes a love scene between Mephisto and the angels. The devil has understanding. And a love affair between Mephisto and the angels is truly an absurd love affair, that is what Mephisto also calls it, it is truly an absurd love affair. But how is it that this absurd love affair can still affect him? That feelings of love arise in him at all? If he had not lived at Faust's side for so long and wanted to beguile Faust by stimulating such feelings in Faust in a particularly enticing way, they would not have crossed over to him. And so here again you have a deep wisdom, a wonderful wisdom. The devil actually has no erotic or other love in the earthly sense. He doesn't have it. Love affair is of course absurd for him, because we know that the earth is the cosmos of love. He is from the cosmos of wisdom. But he is out of place, he wanders around on earth and always wants to incorporate the earth into his realm. This means that he repeatedly finds himself in a position to incorporate into himself qualities that are developed on earth and that no longer fit his nature. In order to gain a soul, he must prepare this soul for the devil, that is, make it suitable for the qualities that Lucifer implanted at the beginning. But in doing so, he himself becomes infected by these qualities and once again makes himself incapable of keeping this soul. You see here in the big picture what happens on a small scale. Imagine that man is also capable of arousing passions, but if he develops them to a certain point, they destroy his organism at the same time. So you can only do it to a certain point. The devil must, as it were, vampirically absorb human qualities into himself so that he can arouse the passions in Faust. But in doing so, he destroys his own true devilish nature. This is how the absurd affair with the angels comes about, and he becomes inattentive and does not even realize that the angels are snatching his soul away. This darkening of consciousness, this transition of consciousness into the subconscious, had to occur in him.

Since we will have the performance today, I cannot say more. I think that enough has been said for the time being to convey a little of the understanding of the trinity inherent in this scene. I think we see, especially when we devote ourselves to such a contemplation, how infinitely deep that is of which Goethe says that he has secretly incorporated it into the second part of 'Faust'.

Those people who were able to evoke in themselves the idea that spiritual wisdom is at work through the evolution of humanity, that it has only receded somewhat in our time, that this spiritual wisdom often only a shadow in all kinds of legitimate or illegitimate occult societies, such people, as isolated individuals, always knew what profound wisdom is contained in Goethe's “Faust,” real wisdom, concrete world wisdom. That is why they have expressed themselves in this sense. And one such man dedicated a short poem to the memory of Goethe at the Feast of St. John in 1880, a poem in which he wanted to express how much he felt at one with him in spiritual wisdom, a man who, due to the erudition of the materialistic age, actually had very little of Goethe in him, very little of substance. And since spiritual science had not yet been born when this man wrote, he only had a vague feeling that this spiritual science lives in Goethe like an instinct. The Faust commentary that he wrote as a result, Oswald Marbach, did not become significant. But in the poem that he dedicated to the great mason's wisdom festival, the Manenfest, to the manes of Goethe — as one used to say in the past when speaking of the immortal part of man, the Manen, the same spirit lives that lives in the Manas – it shows that, as it were half-consciously only in lonely souls, there was always the connection with the great that lived in Goethe's poetry. And so he, who felt connected with the Manes of Goethe, with the individuality of Goethe, says at the Feast of St. John, the masonic feast in 1880:

To you, brother, father, exalted master!
To you, to whom we now, for over a century,
As a sign of our most loyal love in the alliance of free spirits,
We extend our tightly entwined hands; —
To you, the greatest of spirits and the freest of the free!
To whom we aspire to be like; —
We consecrate ourselves to you! We consecrate our sons to you,
That our building may one day be crowned with perfection!

You have striven as we have; but your striving
For self-knowledge, which leads to wisdom,
Was always inspired by the most vital life,
By strength of the creator, which proceeds to action,
To works that lift themselves up to the light,
Around which the splendor of beauty spreads eternally:
You wrestled with God like Israel,
Until you, as victor, conquered yourself!

What mysteriously unites us with you
Will not be revealed to the uninitiated by a single word;
But let it be proclaimed loudly before all the people
Through the purest love, tireless deeds,
Through clear light that ignites spirit in spirit,
Through eternal life's evergreen seeds. —
Onward, O Master! Wherever You have gone,
We follow You with the most ardent longing.

May there come a time again when such words may and can be truth!

When we last spoke to each other during my previous visit, we considered some spiritual facts that relate to the life of the human soul after the human being has passed through the gate of death. Today, we will first look at some facts related to this event in the spiritual world that may shed further light on this event, facts that, however, are just as likely to shed light on the event of death as they are to shed light on what happens in the life between the birth and death of a person, what happens in the physical life in which we are immersed. I must again and again emphasize that spiritual science must attempt not to stop at an external schematic conception of the human being, but to penetrate ever deeper and deeper into the various members of the human being.

Let us now turn our attention to what we have often called the human etheric body. In yesterday's public lecture, I already pointed out that this etheric body should not be imagined merely as a rarefied physical body — that would be a materialistic view — but that it should be imagined as it appears through an inner experience. And here we come to the fact that what we call thinking or imagining in the narrower sense, as man lives here on the physical plane, actually takes place in the etheric body. But in order for thoughts to be formed through this thinking, through this imagining, the physical body is necessary, because the physical body must receive its impressions if thoughts are to be retained here in physical life in the form of memories.

The process is as follows: when we think, the thinking naturally starts from the I, passes through the astral body, but then it takes place mainly in the movements of the etheric body. Whatever we think, whatever we imagine, takes place in the movements of the etheric body. These movements of the etheric body are literally impressed upon the physical body. This is a rough way of putting it, because it involves much more subtle processes than a rough imprinting, but it is a rough way of putting it. And because these movements of the etheric body are imprinted in the physical body, thoughts take place for our consciousness, and that is how thoughts are also retained in memory. It is more or less like this: when we have a thought and later recall it from memory, our etheric body is set in motion by the act of wanting to remember, and it adapts its movements to those of the physical body. By entering into the impressions that this etheric body made in the physical body during the corresponding thought, the thought comes to the consciousness again. Thus memory is linked to the fact that the movements of the etheric body can imprint themselves on the physical body. Of course, memory is connected to the ether body, but the ether body must have some kind of recorder of its movements so that memory can come about in physical life. And so we live our lives between birth and death, have our experiences and remember our experiences, that is, our thought life runs within us. When we are awake, we always have more or less of this thought life going on within us.

As a human being in the physical body, we have the feeling that what takes place in our thinking, in our imaginative life, is inner experience, something that takes place within ourselves, that is our property. And for our physical life this is initially correct, because what takes place inwardly as a thought experience is not visible to others. So it is our property. But in relation to the spiritual world, what takes place in our thought life is not our property at all.

Yes, our thought life has a completely different significance than we often assume when we refer to it as our property. And let us inquire a little about this world significance of our thought life. In order for me to make myself quite clearly understood, I must start from a comparison: We physical people work here in the physical world. Let us assume that our work consists of making machines. It could also consist of something else, but let us assume that it consists of making machines. To make the machines that are then used in the service of human life, we need wood or iron or whatever the machines are made of. We need the appropriate materials for this, and we have to work these materials. The materials must be there in nature. We as physical human beings cannot create iron, create wood, these materials must be there. We take these materials, shape them, work them and assemble them into our machines. In this way we humans perform a certain activity. We bring about, as it were, the existence of a realm of machines, but we create this realm of machines on the basis of the materials we take from the earth.

Now imagine that we are not dealing with people who make machines out of earthly materials, out of iron or wood, but with the beings of the next higher hierarchy, the beings to whom we give the names: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. One might ask: What do these beings actually have to do? Do they also have something to do that could perhaps be compared to the activity just mentioned, which leads to the creation of a realm of machines? Yes, these angeloi, archangeloi and archai also have their activity. This activity takes place only in the spiritual world. And just as we humans must take our iron and our wood from the subordinate realms, that is, first from the mineral and then from the vegetable kingdom, in order to construct our machines, so the angels, archangels and archai also need materials to build, let us say, what they are to build, although the expression is of course very crude. And what are their materials? For much of what the angels, archangels and archai have to accomplish in the spiritual world, the materials are precisely the thoughts that people consider their own. And it is true: while we go through the world and harbor our thoughts, look at our thought life from within, as it were, and consider it our own, work on our thoughts without knowing it, the angels, archangels and archai are at work. We are aware of only the very least that lives in our thoughts, for thoughts signify much more than what comes to our consciousness, much more than what lives in our souls. While we think and remember our thoughts, the beings of the higher hierarchy, the next hierarchy, work from the outside in, so to speak, in accordance with the way they can use our thoughts. So you should imagine that only one side of the thought life of every human being takes place in their consciousness. While they are thinking, the beings of the hierarchies mentioned are constantly surrounding them and working with the help of their thoughts. These are their materials. And what they work with in this way is part of what is needed so that Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan can one day emerge from the earth. This is part of what brings about progress in the evolution of the universe. And our whole life until death is spent working on thoughts, insofar as they are, as it were, embraced by our being, from the outside in by the beings of the higher hierarchy.

And when we pass through the gate of death, then, as we have already indicated in my previous presence, some time after we have passed through the gate of death, our etheric body is taken from us and woven into the general world ether. Not only what we see last, when we look at one side of our web of thoughts, is woven into the universal ether, but also what the beings mentioned have worked for. While they are, as it were, working on our individual thought-weave during our lifetime, they then piece together the individual thought-weaves of one person, then another, then a third, in whatever way they can use them, so that something new may come into being in the progressive development of the world. What they can acquire by putting together the individual etheric bodies of the people they have worked with during the time of their physical life must be woven into the general world ether.

From this you can see how serious our inner life actually is. It is quite serious. Depending on how we think, we are found useful for the general process of world development. Someone who has spent their whole life thinking only foolish things, or only endeavoring to think things that are images of the physical world, will not provide very good building materials for what is to be woven out of his ether body into the general world ether. The inner life, the inner life of thought, is a serious matter. It seems to be our own during the time between birth and death. In the way it has been described, it actually belongs to the whole world. And just as we humans could not make machines without wood and iron, so the higher beings could not continue to work on the evolution of the world if they could not find their building materials in the thoughts we can give them during our physical lives. We are the soil from which they take their wood, their iron and so on, that is, our thought fabric. They carry out their exalted work with these materials, guided by their wisdom, which transcends human existence; but the materials must provide them with what lies within us.

What we are able to give to these beings, the angels, archangels, archai, is there for us to contemplate during the time between our death and a new birth. We know, of course, that we will be taken just a few days after we have passed through the gate of death. But as we continue to live between death and a new birth, our soul's gaze is constantly fixed on what we were able to give to the general web of the ether of the world. And just as we ourselves now have to participate in the creation of that which then connects with physical matter to give us a new incarnation, so the sight of what we have thus given to the great world has an effect on our work. In short, whether we have something to look forward to, from which we can draw new impulses for a next incarnation in this thought fabric interwoven with the world ether, or whether we cannot, much will depend on this with regard to the way we will be able to prepare for our new incarnation.

So our thoughts are bound to our physicality before we pass through the gate of death. Then they are taken from us in a sense and woven into the general world ether in what the beings mentioned have made of them, so that they now have an existence outside of us rather than within us. Therefore, in spiritual science, this process can be described as “the inner becomes an outer” in order to always remember it, to always have it in mind, so to speak, for meditation. For just as we see mountains, rivers, clouds and stars with our physical eyes here, so after death we see what our thoughts have woven as the outside, which is taken from us and woven into the general world ether. It is now the outside world, uplifting or saddening us, strengthening or weakening us. The inner world has become an outer world.

Then we know that there is a more distant, very long time in which we have to relive, in a certain way, what we have gone through in our earthly life, but differently than we went through it in earthly life. We relive, as we know, with threefold speed the past life between death and birth in reverse order, so what we have experienced in the last year, first, then that of the year before last and so on. So we live the life after death in imaginations, but differently than we have lived it here in the physical body. After our ether body has been separated from us, we live life again, but in such a way that we do not now experience what we have experienced in our feelings, in our will impulses during our physical existence. If we take the extreme case of having hurt or offended someone during our physical existence, we have felt something by offending them. But they have also felt something. What we felt is what drove us out of our feelings to insult him, and then also what we felt, perhaps even a certain satisfaction with the act. In short, you can imagine what a person feels, in the good or bad sense, when he does something on the physical plane. But the other person, the one at whom we were aimed, feels something different. The one who is offended feels something different than the one who offends. After death, in this regression, which is to be characterized now, we feel the effects that we have caused in other people, but also in other beings, with our actions, with our will impulses, and even with our thoughts. So we do not feel what we already felt while we were in the physical body, but what we have done in other souls, in other beings. What was external, what remained external during our physical life, now becomes internal. Just as the separation of the etheric body turns the inner into the outer, so this reliving turns the outer into the inner. Our soul is filled with the effects of our physical existence. This now becomes our inner life: the external becomes an internal. Thus the internal becomes an external and the external becomes an internal. In this way the human being is, as it were, turned around after passing through the gate of death.

Imagine how you previously had to imagine the angeloi, archangeloi and archai in a certain relationship to the human world of thought, and now imagine the spirits of the higher hierarchies: the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, the spirits of wisdom, even the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, which you should imagine as being in a kind of relationship to what I have now characterized, how the human being acquires a new inner being that is now welded together from the outer being. With their spiritual eye, if I may use the image, the Form Spirits, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Will, look down on that remarkable, meaningful spectacle that takes place after the human being, between birth and death, has , through his impulses of will, inwardly experiences this or that between birth and death; what he now experiences after he has passed through the gate of death, where he gathers up the effects, as it were, in order to make them into a new inner being, that inner being which can then live itself further out in karma during the building of the later incarnation. From their spiritual heights, the aforementioned spirits observe how everything that spreads out into the world as our effects becomes inner. And what they observe in this way is now material for them to incorporate something else into the lower spirits of the ongoing world development, in order to provide help above all so that karma can be effected, so that what is pushed from the outside inwards provides the foundation for a slow process that unites between 'death and a new birth that tissue that then descends to the physical hereditary substance in order to connect as a spiritual being with what the person inherits from father and mother. Much is necessary for that to come about, which descends from the spiritual heights and must connect with the hereditary substance that comes from the ancestors. After the human being has passed through the gate of death, discarded his etheric body, and undergone the return journey through the world of the soul, as mentioned earlier, the work that must be done between death and a new birth begins, so that the new birth, the new incarnation, can come about.

What kind of work is done? It is actually infinitely difficult to characterize the way we are worked on in the spiritual cosmos. If I were to characterize it, I could perhaps do so in the following way through a schematic sketch. Let us assume that a person passes through the gate of death. His ether body is then discarded. That which he himself still has control over remains in the vicinity of the earth for a relatively long time. I have characterized such things to you over time. But that which the angels, archangels, and archai have woven extends so far out into the general ether world that it unfolds in a wide sphere whose center is the earth. Thus, like a spiritual atmosphere, the world ether surrounds the earth. And what we have spun out of our thoughts is woven into this world ether. Do not be anxious about where there could be space for all these weavings: the spiritual permeates itself, and all these weavings are within this sphere.

In its further course, man now sees this fabric not from within but from without. And his further life is a kind of enlargement, a merging into the universe. And during the whole time that life takes place between death and a new birth, the human being always sees from the outside in, sees: That is you - like an even more powerful, more expansive sphere. On this sphere, you imagine something like a mighty map. It is, of course, all figurative and roughly expressed, but it does reflect the facts. There, on this map, on this globe, work is being done by drawing everything in, by incorporating it spiritually: First, what has been worked out by the person himself in his etheric body, which the person can look at, but then also what has now become human inside in the way I have described. All this is incorporated by the spirits of form, spirits of movement, spirits of wisdom and willpower working on the person between death and new birth. And when the time has come for the new incarnation to take place, this web is ready. Then there is a mighty sphere. Again, there is no need to worry that there would be no space for all these spheres; they can all be inside one another. It is, of course, a picture for a spiritual thing. Then this sphere begins to become smaller and smaller, and it turns, just as you turn a glove inside out, so that the inside becomes the outside and the outside becomes the inside. That which is, as it were, on the outside, all goes inside, turns completely and becomes so small that it can unite with the human germ as it develops in the mother's body. That is also a picture.

Of course, these things can also be presented in a different way. This has already been done here. But today we want to imagine the matter in such a way that, in proportion to what a person has given to the beings of the higher hierarchies during his life between birth and death, these spirits of the higher hierarchies work both on the world and on the establishment of the spiritual foundations for the new incarnation of the human being. I think that is a tremendous thought when it settles in our soul in an emotional way, when we become aware of what our life actually means for the entire universe when we are in it. And it is necessary that, from this moment on, more and more people imbibe this awareness of being connected to the spiritual world throughout their lives.

The very clever people of today, who are opponents of spiritual science, will say: Human life goes on even if one does not spread such knowledge among people, but knowledge of a much simpler kind. For these would only be things that are there for thinking, with which one could weigh down one's thinking; but one does not need to burden life with such thoughts. — That is what the very clever people say. And they might even add: People in the past did not have such unnecessary wisdom and were able to make progress. The people who say this have no idea how stupid what they say is, because such an assertion is made on the assumption that it is really true that people were always as ignorant of the spiritual secrets of existence as they are now. But it is not so long ago that people were not so ignorant. This can be shown even by outward appearances everywhere.

I will give you one such outward appearance. I have never had the opportunity to visit a picture gallery here to see if there are similar pieces here in Stuttgart. But recently we visited a picture gallery in Hamburg, and the following emerged. You see, when today's painters are supposed to paint what we know as a great, powerful picture, but a picture of a truth, such as we know, the Fall of Man at the beginning of the Old Testament, when painters are supposed to paint this Fall of Man based on what they consider to be right today, well, they paint a tree, with Eve on one side and Adam on the other. Depending on whether they are expressionists, impressionists or some other “ists,” they paint these human figures more or less vividly, I mean, on the tree, they paint a snake. That's naturalistic, isn't it, that's realistic. But if you look more closely, for those who can really think, it's not realistic at all. Because I would like to know the woman, even if she were an Eve, who would let herself be tempted by such an ordinary snake with a real naked snake's head to do what Eve let herself be tempted to do. I mean, that's not possible. An Eve will not let herself be tempted by such a snake. We know, of course, that it is a matter of seduction by Lucifer. But can Lucifer be represented by an ordinary snake? At most, this can only be the image. But we know of Lucifer that he actually received his existence by remaining behind on the lunar level. There were no such snakes there as have formed during the time on earth. So it is quite unnatural to paint a pure snake with a huge snake's head. How should Lucifer actually be painted if one wanted to paint him realistically in the sense of our spiritual science? One would have to paint him in such a way that one expresses how Lucifer was for one who still expresses the imaginative during the moon period, as I have described in the Akasha Chronicle. That is to say, if one goes into it in more detail, one will find that what has now become physical in man as the head on Earth, with the thick, sometimes very thick, bony skull, was still thin in those days. It could be seen imaginatively. But what is attached to it – you can see it in the skeleton, how the human being actually consists of the two parts, the brain and the spine – that is attached to it only like a very thin strip. The rest is actually earthly work. And what is actually the skull of the human being has come from the moon, and the spinal cord has come across as an appendage. Everything else was added through what we have developed as earthly existence. So what would Lucifer have to look like for an imaginative insight? He would have had a human skull, and attached to it something like a snake's body, developed as a movable part at that time, the backbone. That is how he would have looked. If you wanted to paint realistically, you would have to paint the tree, and on the tree the human head with the snake body hanging from it, hinting at the backbone. Then you would paint truthfully. But then you would have to know something about the mystery of existence, about the spiritual worlds with which man is connected.

In the Hamburg Museum of Pictures, you will find a painting from the 13th or 14th century by the so-called Master Bertram. The Fall of Man is painted exactly as I have described it to you. It is not a mere snake that is depicted, but everything about the tree is painted as I have just described it to you. What does that mean? It means that at most it has only been a few centuries since people no longer know how they are connected to the spiritual world and that there is a spiritual world in the sense described. So people have become so foolish that they believe that the way people now look at the world with their mere physical senses and with the mere mind that is bound to the brain is the way they have always looked at it; they would only have been a little more childish and would have come up with all sorts of myths. This is how university science thinks today. But it is all nonsense, because it is only a few centuries since mankind lost its living connection with the spiritual world. And in the face of the great tasks of knowledge, materialistic science of the present day is nothing but a walking stupor in relation to the spiritual world. And this stupor is what walks around as the authoritative among men today, what is marveled at as great progress. It had to come sometime. We know why it had to come: so that people are protected by their mere physical development and can become free. And that must be seen through. And even from such external documents as I have quoted to you, people could see, if they had just a little, forgive me, sense in their heads, how short a time it is since spiritual insight has been lost to man. But it does not occur to people today to really look at these things in thought. They prefer to choose external means of power because it is convenient, because they do not need to learn anything special, but only need to stand at some laboratory table and let certain methods be drummed into them; and then they declare by external fiat that everything that speaks of the spiritual world is error and nonsense and fantasy. This is what is to be given to people at the present time instead of a real inclination towards the spiritual world.

But, my dear friends, at present it is still the case that everything that involves inventiveness remains as a legacy from those ancient times when people looked into the spiritual world. If that were to disappear, then people would no longer make any inventions. And if spiritual science did not rekindle human thinking, it would not last fifty years. Within that time everything that works in mere materialism, a way of talking about external matter, and no one would come up with anything that could enrich art or ideology or somehow enrich the outer life. Therefore it is the strictest demand of the time, not a mere preference for any spiritual reverie, that a consciousness of the connection of humanity with the spiritual world should take hold, that people should be able to look up again. And they can do so, now that the old atavistic clairvoyance has passed away, by going through spiritual science.

And in this sense it is indeed necessary that people learn how a study of spiritual science can not only enrich their knowledge of the spiritual world, but also lead to correct thinking about life as a whole. Time and again, one experiences how people in the present time are actually quite reluctant to engage in that somewhat complicated inner life of the soul, which must be developed if one is to approach the spiritual world. Just imagine: a real average professor of today – of course there may be exceptions, no one is to be offended, and all the more must it be praised if one should be there in this circle – a real average professor of today, he will not want to listen to these things at all, it is much too boring for him. If you talk about spiritual things today, you have to use general, vague phrases that mean as little as possible, but that also mean as little as possible for real life.

When I recently gave the same lecture in Leipzig that I gave here the day before yesterday about a faded tone in German intellectual life, two gentlemen approached me after the lecture, two gentlemen of the clever type of the people mentioned, of course, and one said that he was actually surprised that I had spoken in this way, because he would have expected that when talking from a theosophical point of view, one would be more in line with his way of thinking; he is a pacifist and, as a pacifist, must view the current war in particular.

Pacifism is the view that has been cultivated for some time under the auspices of various people, including Bertha von Suttner, but also that being in St. Petersburg that is considered Caesar and Pope at the same time. Many years ago, in lectures in Berlin, I already said that it is characteristic of the peace efforts that, since we have them, the largest and bloodiest wars in world history have been waged. But this movement is precisely one of those that thrive on spreading vague phrases that insinuate themselves into the human emotional life because all they have to do is spread love and kindness. I took the liberty of saying to the gentleman: You see, we are now living in the most terrible war the world has ever seen. We have seen more ammunition used in one day, in June or July 1915, than in the entire Franco-Prussian War! We have already reached the point that as much ammunition has been fired in this war as in all the wars that have been fought with this ammunition in the world, in the development of humanity, to date. I said: Is it not clear then that what has now taken place over centuries as culture has led itself ad absurdum, that it has shown what it leads to? - Now he objected: I see this war as an illness, and that must be cured; after all, it is only an illness, it can occur.

A sentence like this is especially illuminating because it is so self-evident and because it is quite naturally correct from any point of view. But what matters is not whether things are right, but whether they are more or less superficial. The sentence is right, of course: it is a disease. But I said to him: If you would look at the disease more deeply, why does it occur in people? Because something is not right beforehand! The disease is only the reaction against something that was not right before. So if you would just think a little further from your point of view, you would come to the conclusion that this is a disease, but it occurred because things were not right before. Because something was wrong, the illness occurred, that is true. But people mix up all kinds of correct things because they are trivial and self-evident and because they cannot actually get at deeper things. That is the serious thing to realize in the present time.

If you take a fact such as the one I mentioned the day before yesterday about Karl Christian Planck, whose intellectual capacity is clearly shown by the fact that in 1880 he foresaw exactly what is happening today, you will realize from the way he has been esteemed and recognized that this culture, which has developed there, is quite suited to make the rule of the power of the incapable, which suppresses all truthful striving, precisely to world power. One should not indulge in any ambiguity about that. That is what one must understand in the deepest sense.

I will tell you a little story. A man once heard that Goethe had written a “Faust,” and he said he wanted to get to know what this Goethean “Faust” actually contains. So the man he asked found that he had to find the most convenient, easiest method for the other man to learn what this “Faust” actually contains, and he thought deeply: How can I actually teach this person, who has no sense of the simplest idea of Goethe's “Faust,” what it contains? Then a light dawned on him. He realized: a new edition of “Faust” is being printed in a certain printing press right now, so I'll take the guy who wants to know what's in “Faust” there. And so he told him: Just watch, in three weeks' time 'Faust' will be printed here. In all the hundreds of type cases there are the most diverse letters, and now just pay attention, you will see how the typesetter takes out this and that letter and puts the individual letters together to form words. You will see exactly how page after page is put together, and how finally the “Faust” comes together from the individual letters. So the other one sat there for weeks and saw how the whole “Faust” came together through the hands of people through the letters!

Yes, you see, I can also tell it in a slightly different way. The more recent times came up. People wanted to know what actually exists in the spiritual and soul life, and they had a need to understand how perceptions, thoughts, volitional impulses and feelings are woven into the human soul and what they mean for the world as a whole. They asked — the people. Now, the newer science, this merely naturalistic science, came along and said: Well, we will do that! We will see to it that we examine the individual brain pathways, nerve fibres, ganglia and all that, as far as it can be done now, and see how they are interwoven. And there we have the soul life. You get exactly the same from Goethe's 'Faust' when you get to know it in this way as the person who sat at the printing press for three weeks does! Take all the products that are being manufactured today by the so-called psychophysiologists. In terms of spiritual knowledge of the world, you have the same knowledge as you would have of the entire “Faust” if you had watched how “Faust” is manufactured from the typesetter. It is only necessary to realize this, and then the soul will be overwhelmed by the harrowing feeling that is necessary to advance in the process of human development.

You are formidable opponents, the people of naturalism will now say, denigrating our science, the true science, which proceeds strictly according to nature! But it does not occur to us to denigrate it. We are only placing it in the right context, in the right context of life. If Faust is to come into being, then of course the research work must be done for the Faust edition; but it must be recognized in its proper cosmic position.

All that I can hint at here, in the sense in which I meant it yesterday, belongs to the serious and momentous tasks that await Central Europe in the future. All this points to these serious tasks. And to remember these things in our present serious time is an urgent necessity. For it is absolutely necessary that a deeper sense of real truth should permeate the world than can prevail under the influence of the materialistic or naturalistic or strictly scientific world view. One does not need to be opposed to people learning to typeset so that Faust editions can be made. One need not be opposed to people studying the brain and nervous system. All this should be studied, which is really very important to study today. But one must be decidedly opposed to the arrogant arrogance that exists today in materialistic science, that the sense of how seriously and worthily the spiritualization of culture must be achieved, especially from Central Europe, because Western Europe has died out in relation to these things. I am not saying this just to say something paradoxical, something strong, but because of the necessity that works for the expression of such things in our time. There will come a time when one will have to look truthfully at various things; but today there is not much sense for such truthful looking. I could give you thousands and thousands of examples of the inner dishonesty of the current scientific and literary establishment. Let me give you at least one that I would have liked to have mentioned in yesterday's public lecture, but time is always too short, and unfortunately the lectures have to be kept so very short.

For example, in many of Ernst Faeckel's books – you know that I have a high regard for Ernst Haeckel in the areas where he is worthy of respect – you can repeatedly find references to Karl Ernst von Baer, the excellent naturalist whom he calls his teacher. Today, people naturally pick up Haeckel's books, study them, and regard them as a kind of new Bible or at least as a kind of writing by new church fathers. For the difference is not that today people believe in their own judgment, whereas in the time of the church fathers they simply relied on the church fathers; rather, the difference is quite a different one. In the days of Tertullian and Gregory of Nazianzus, these were the Church Fathers, and people swore by them. Today, those who found monistic societies or associations for a eugenic worldview or similar fine things swear by the holy Darwin, the holy Haeckel or the holy Helmholtz. It is the same thing, only in a slightly different area! It is not called sacred, but that does not make any difference. So people read Haeckel and when he cites Karl Ernst von Baer, they have the opinion: Well, you can see that this great naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer was in complete agreement with Haeckel in his rejection of any spiritual world. I would like to advise many a person today, after he has had a little sniff of Haeckel's and Darwin's books, to do many other things before he sets about founding a branch for a monist association: for example, if Haeckel cites Ernst von Baer, to take Karl Ernst von Baer in hand himself and read him. I will read just one passage from Karl Ernst von Baer, where he discusses the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds. Baer says: “The earth is only the seedbed on which the spiritual inheritance of man proliferates, and the history of nature is only the history of the progressive victories of the spiritual over matter. That is the fundamental idea of Creation, to please it, no, to achieve it, it makes individuals and generations disappear and elevates the present on the scaffolding of an immeasurable past.

So what does this bear say? The terrestrial body, the earth is the seedbed, and into it are sunk the spiritual germs, so that they envelop themselves. — This bear spoke the pure truth at the beginning of the 19th century! Ernst Haeckel picks out the sentences from Baer that suit him. Those who do nothing but at most found monistic associations to promote world wisdom know nothing of all this other than what Haeckel says about Baer, and continue to live in the lie without even the slightest inclination to convince themselves of the underlying fact. Our literature today is permeated with such webs of lies everywhere. And everywhere, especially in our popular scientific literature, the striving for the greatest possible vagueness and playfulness, one could even say, of intellectual endeavors and the greatest possible reluctance to express oneself, comes to expression in these things, to look into them and judge them with clear, confident human judgment.

To give you some specific examples, in the West there are various high-ranking Masonic orders among the French, the British and the Italians, some with thirty-three degrees, but there are also some with over ninety degrees. In the course of the last few centuries, much has been fished out in the murky depths of such orders. And if we examine with sober, healthy judgment the influence of all kinds of unhealthy, foolish, but well-thought-out personal and political intentions, if we study the influences and currents of Freemasonry that exist in Western Europe on the part Italy played in this war, then we will get an inkling of the many ambiguities and obfuscation in our so-called culture! What has taken place, especially in such Masonic orders since the outbreak of the war, will one day become a curious chapter. The German Freemasons will come off relatively best in this, because of them one thing can be said: that they were the fool in the whole game. They did not notice anything, that is, insofar as they lived in brotherhood with the others. And that is something that can still be said in their favor. But one should not believe that what is asserted from such sides is without influence on what lives and works around us in so-called culture, and what can only work and live as long as other people do not want their judgment clarified and strengthened by insight into the spiritual world.

In my book Thoughts During the Time of War, I have drawn attention, as far as one can in public literature in order to be understood – and indeed it has been little understood – to certain currents that are everywhere in the East and in the West. These currents, let us say for example the Eastern Slavophile current, to which I have referred in the aforementioned booklet, are rooted much deeper. At the end of the eighteenth century, and especially at the end of the nineteenth century, but also decades earlier, the western Masonic orders in particular had a greater influence on Russian intellectual life, transplanting, infecting, and instilling what was to emerge there. And in many respects Slavophilism and Pan-Slavism are truly the seeds that sprouted from what many had planted from these very Masonic orders. Under the mask, under the cloak of ceremony, people were initially befuddled, so to speak, and all kinds of nonsense was paraded before them so that they might then be inclined to favor certain plans. And what things have taken place in Eastern Europe from this Western side, mankind will then, when other events have taken the place of the warlike ones, be able to see for itself!

If these places where we are together in our branches are the only places where one can speak today, then it must at least be discussed here.

Today I wanted to take up the great, the sublime in the connection of the human being with entire hierarchies, which can arise in our soul when we consider that what we carry within us in our thoughts and feelings is already within our physical shell between birth and death, but then also between death and a new birth in a web, a world work on which entire hierarchies work in the context of the world. What matters is not that we know the individual so much, but that we can imbue ourselves with such a world feeling, and that you, my dear friends, leave such a contemplation with a feeling for what the human being actually is within the world, and what he should know about this connection with the world. That all this flows together in your souls, in your hearts, into a sense of the world, and that in this way something of the power that can be kindled in you can be kindled by what is to be incorporated into our culture, insofar as each of us is able to do so in the place we are placed in the world. Official scholars have not worked on these things today; they will not do so. Therefore, people's eyes must also be opened to the position that official scholars deserve in the world: that they, insofar as they do laboratory work, can be compared to typesetters, or some, who do not do laboratory work, merely to people who describe the typesetting. Today, these are mostly the philosophers who preach at the universities.

That this is so should be known in individual souls. For this is not a criticism of the times, it is a characterization. Only by knowing how things stand in the different ages have the forces been found to further development, only by this.

I wanted to impress this on you, especially in these difficult times, when it is not always possible to say that we will see each other again: a realization that, when we feel it in the right way, can become a sacred inner duty of the human soul towards the world connection. Deaths and more deaths surround us today in the event, which on the one hand is the fruit of the preceding development in the sense indicated, but which must be a signpost for many things that have to happen so that humanity does not advance in the way the designers of the set box want, but advances in a way that corresponds to the necessity of world development.

Of course, yesterday I quoted everything materialism, everything by Lamettrie, that he said – of course, that is also true – Erasmus would only have needed a small cog in his nervous system to change, then perhaps he would not have become Erasmus but a fool. I said that there is no need to refute that. But we, who are perhaps a little prepared, must indeed know a little more about it.

We take everything we have considered today, let it become feeling and sensation in us, and then we say to ourselves how true it is that the numerous sacrificial deaths that are currently being made really do relate to earthly existence in such a way that the etheric bodies, which are taken from people at an early age, remain connected to earthly existence for a long, long time remain connected with earthly existence, and that now there must be people who can become aware of what lives in these unconsumed etheric bodies, which still contain everything that these people could still have used in their earthly life if they had lived for decades, that is in the spiritual-etheric of the earth. But there must be people in the time to come who are conscious of this, so that the fruits of what these ethereal bodies contain may fall to the culture of the earth and not to Ahriman. Let us then, in view of the fact that we have to prepare ourselves in our souls for what is happening, imbue ourselves with the words that have often been spoken here:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
The fruit of the spirit will grow —
Guiding souls, spirit-conscious
Their minds into the spiritual realm.