The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When we consider how Karma works,¹ we always have to bear in mind that the human Ego, which is the essential being, the inmost being, of man, has as it were three instruments through which it is able to live and express itself in the world. These are the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Man really carries the physical, etheric and astral bodies with him through the world, but he himself is not in any one of these bodies. In the truest sense he is the Ego; and it is the Ego which both suffers and creates Karma.

Now the point is to gain an understanding of the relationship between man as the Ego-being and these three instrumental forms—if I may call them so—the physical, etheric and astral bodies. This will give us the foundation for an understanding of the essence of Karma. We shall gain a fruitful point of view for the study of the physical, the etheric and the astral in man in relation to Karma, if we consider the following.

The physical as we behold it in the mineral kingdom, the etheric as we find it working in the plant kingdom, and the astral as we find it working in the animal kingdom—all these are to be found in the environment of man here on Earth. In the Cosmos surrounding the Earth we have that Universe into which, if I may so describe it, the Earth extends on all sides. Man can feel a certain relationship between what takes place on the Earth and what takes place in the cosmic environment. But when we come to Spiritual Science we have to ask: Is this relationship really so commonplace as the present-day scientific conception of the world imagines? This modern scientific conception of the world examines the physical qualities of everything on the Earth, living and lifeless. It also investigates the stars, the sun, the moon, etc.; and it discovers—indeed it is particularly proud of the discovery—that these heavenly bodies are fundamentally of the same nature as the Earth.

Such a conception can only result from a form of knowledge which at no point comes to a real grasp of man himself—a knowledge which takes hold only of what is external to man. The moment, however, we really take hold of Man as he stands within the Universe, we become able to discover the relationships between the several instrumental members of man's nature, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body and the corresponding entities, the corresponding realities of Being, in the Cosmos.

In regard to the etheric body of man, we find spread out in the Cosmos the universal Ether. The etheric body of man has a definite human shape, definite forms of movement within it, and so on. These, it is true, are different in the cosmic Ether. Nevertheless the cosmic Ether is fundamentally of like nature with what we find in the human etheric body. In the same way we can speak of a similarity between what is found in the human astral body and a certain astral principle that works through all things and all beings out in the far-spread Universe.

Here we come to something of extraordinary importance, something which in its true nature is quite foreign to the human being of to-day. Let us take our start from this. (A drawing is made on the blackboard). We have, first, the Earth; and on the Earth we have Man, with his etheric body. Then in the Earth's environment we have the cosmic Ether—the cosmic Ether which is of the same nature as the etheric in man. In man we also have the astral body. In the cosmic environment too there is Astrality. Where are we to find this cosmic Astrality? Where is it? It is indeed to be found, but we must first discover—what it is in the Cosmos that betrays the presence of cosmic Astrality; what it is that reveals it. Somewhere or other is the Astrality. Is this Astrality in the Cosmos quite invisible and imperceptible, or is it, after all, in some way perceptible to us?

In itself, of course, the Ether too is imperceptible for our physical senses. If I may put it so, when you are looking at a small fragment of Ether, you see nothing with your physical senses, you simply see through it. The Ether is like an empty nothingness to you. But when you regard the etheric environment as a totality, you behold the blue sky, of which we also say that it is not really there but that you are gazing into empty space. Now the reason why you see the blue of the sky is that you are actually perceiving the end of the Ether. Thus you behold the Ether as the blue of the heavens. The perception of the blue sky is really and truly a perception of the Ether. We may therefore say: In that we perceive the blue of the sky we are perceiving the universal Ether that surrounds us.

At first contact, we see through the Ether. It allows us to do so; and yet, it makes itself perceptible in the blue heavens. Hence the existence for human perception of the blue of the sky is expressed in that we say: The Ether itself, though imperceptible, yet rises to the level of perceptibility by reason of the great majesty with which it stands there in the Universe, revealing its presence, making itself known in the blue of the vast expanse.

Physical science theorises materialistically about the blue of the sky; and for physical science it is indeed very difficult to reach any intelligent conclusion on this point, for the simple reason that it is bound to admit that where we see the blue of the sky there is nothing physical. Nevertheless men spin out the most elaborate theories to explain how the rays of light are reflected and refracted in a peculiar way so as to call forth this blue of the sky. In reality, it is here that the super-sensible world begins already to hold sway. In the Cosmos the Supersensible does indeed become visible to us. We have only to discover where and how it becomes visible. The Ether becomes perceptible to us through the blue of the sky.

But now, somewhere there is also present the astral element of the Cosmos. In the blue sky the Ether peers through, as it were, into the realms of sense. Where then does the Astrality in the Cosmos peer through into the realms of perceptibility? The answer, my dear friends, is this.

Every star that we see glittering in the heavens is in reality a gate of entry for the Astral. Wherever the stars are twinkling and glittering in towards us, there glitters and shines the Astral. Look at the starry heavens in their manifold variety; in one part the stars are gathered into heaps and clusters, or in another they are scattered far apart. In all this wonderful configuration of radiant light, the invisible and super-sensible astral body of the Cosmos makes itself visible to us.

For this reason we must not consider the world of stars unspiritually. To look up to the world of stars and speak of worlds of burning gases is just as though—forgive the apparent absurdity of the comparison, but it is precisely true—it is just as though someone who loves you were gently stroking you, holding the fingers a little apart, and you were then to say that it feels like so many little ribbons being drawn across your cheek. It is no more untrue that little ribbons are laid across your cheek when someone strokes you, than that there exist up there in the heavens those material entities of which modern physics tells. It is the astral body of the Universe which is perpetually wielding its influences—like the gently stroking fingers—on the etheric organism of the Cosmos. The etheric Cosmos is organised for very long duration; it is for this reason that a star has its quality of fixity, representing a perpetual influence on the cosmic Ether by the astral Universe. It lasts far longer than the stroking of your cheek. But in the Cosmos things do last longer, for there we are dealing with gigantic measures. Thus in the starry heavens that we perceive, we actually behold an expression of the soul-life of the cosmic astral world.

In this way, an immense, unfathomable life, yet, at the same time, a soul-life, a real and actual life of the soul, is brought into the Cosmos. Think how dead the Cosmos appears to us when we look into the far spaces and see nothing but burning gaseous bodies. Think how living it all becomes when we know that the stars are an expression of the love with which the astral Cosmos works upon the etheric Cosmos—for this is to express it with perfect truth. Think then of those mysterious processes when certain stars suddenly light up at certain times,—processes which have only been explained to us by means of physical hypotheses that do not lead to any real understanding. Stars that were not there before, light up for a time, and disappear again. Thus in the Cosmos too there is a “stroking” of shorter duration. For it is true indeed that in epochs when divine Beings desire to work in an especial way from the astral world into the etheric, we behold new stars light up and fade away again.

We ourselves in our own astral body have feelings of delight and comfort in the most varied ways. In like manner in the Cosmos, through the cosmic astral body, we have the varied configuration of the starry heavens. No wonder that an ancient science, instinctively clairvoyant, describes this third member of our human organism as the “astral” or “starry” body, seeing that it is of like nature with that which reveals itself to us in the stars.

It is only the Ego that we do not find revealed in the cosmic environment. Why is this? We shall find the reason if we consider how this human Ego manifests here on the Earth, in a world that is in reality threefold,—physical, etheric and astral. The Ego of man, as it appears within the Universe, is ever and again a repetition of former lives on Earth; and again and again it finds itself in the life between death and a new birth. But when we observe the Ego in its life between death and a new birth, we perceive that the Etheric which we have here in the cosmic environment of the Earth has no significance for the human Ego. The etheric body is laid aside soon after death. It is only the astral world, that shines in towards us through the stars that has significance for the Ego in the life between death and a new birth. And in that world which glistens in towards us through the stars, in that world there live the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies with whom man forms his Karma between death and a new birth.

Indeed, when we follow this Ego in its successive evolutions through lives between birth and death and between death and a new birth, we cannot remain within the world of Space at all. For two successive earthly lives cannot be within the same space. They cannot be within that Universe which is dependent on spatial co-existence. Here therefore we go right out of Space and enter into Time. This is actually so. We go out of Space and come into the pure flow of Time when we contemplate the Ego in its successive lives on Earth.

Now consider this, my dear friends. In Space, Time is still present, of course, but within this world of Space we have no means of experiencing Time in itself. We always have to experience Time through Space and spatial processes. For example, if you wish to experience Time, you look at the clock, or, if you will, at the course of the sun. What do you see? You see the various positions of the hands of the clock or of the sun. You see something that is spatial. Through the fact that the positions of the hand or of the sun are changed, through the fact that spatial things are present to you as changing, you gain some idea of Time. But of Time itself there is really nothing in this spatial perception. There are only varied spatial configurations, varied positions of the hands of the clock, varied positions of the sun. You only experience Time itself when you come into the sphere of the soul's experience. There you do really experience Time, but there you also go out of Space. There, Time is a reality, but within the earthly world of Space, Time is no reality. What, then, must happen to us, if we would go out of the Space in which we live between birth and death and enter into the spacelessness in which we live between death and a new birth? What must we do? The answer is this: We must die!

We must take these words in their exact and deep meaning. On Earth we experience Time only through Space—through points in Space, through the positions of spatial things. On Earth we do not experience Time in its reality at all. Once you grasp this, you will say: “Really to enter into Time we must go out of Space, we must put away all things spatial.” You can also express it in other words, for it is really nothing else than—to die. It means, in very deed and truth: to die.

Let us now turn our eyes to this cosmic world that encircles the Earth—this cosmic world to which we are akin both through our etheric body, and also through our astral body—and let us look at the spiritual in this cosmic world. There have indeed been nations and human societies who have had regard only to the spiritual that is to be found within our earthly world of Space. Such peoples were unable to have any thoughts about repeated lives on Earth. Thoughts about repeated lives on Earth were possessed only by those human beings and groups that were able to conceive Time in its pure essence, Time in its spaceless character. But if we consider this earthly world together with its cosmic environment, or, to put it briefly, all that we speak of as the Cosmos, the Universe; and if we behold the spiritual manifest in it, we are then apprehending something of which it can be said that it had to be present in order that we might enter into our existence as earthly human beings; it had to be there.

Unfathomable depths are really contained in this simple conception,—that all that to which I have just referred, had to exist in order that we as earthly human beings might enter this earthly life. Infinite depths are revealed when we really grasp the spiritual aspect of all that is thus put before us. If we conceive this Spiritual in its completeness as a self-contained whole, if we consider it in its own purity and essence, then we have a conception of what was called “God” by those peoples who limited their outlook to the world of space alone.

These peoples—at any rate in their Wisdom-teachings—had come to feel: The Cosmos is woven through and through by a Divine element that is at work in it, and we can distinguish from this Divine element in the Cosmos that which is present, on the Earth in our immediate environment, as the physical world. We can also distinguish that which, in this cosmic, divine-spiritual world reveals itself as the Etheric, namely that which gazes down upon us in the blue of the sky. We can distinguish as the Astral in this divine world, that which gazes down upon us in the configuration of the starry heavens.

If we enter as fully as possible into the situation as we stand here, within the Universe, as human beings on this Earth, we shall say to ourselves: “We as human beings have a physical body: where, then, is the Physical in the Universe?” Here I am returning to something which I have already pointed out. The physical science of to-day expects to find everything which is on the Earth existing also in the Universe. But the physical organisation itself is not to be found in the Universe at all. Man has in the first place his physical organisation: then in addition he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe on the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. In the Universe there is the Etheric and the Astral. There is also a third element within the Universe which we have yet to speak about in this present lecture, for the Cosmos too is threefold. But the threefoldness of the Cosmos, apart from the Earth, is different from the threefoldness of the Cosmos in which we include the Earth.

Let these feelings enter into our earthly consciousness, the perceiving of the Physical in our immediate earthly dwelling-place; the feeling of the Etheric, which is both on the Earth and in the Universe; the beholding of the Astral, glistening down to the Earth from the stars, and most intensely of all from the Sun-star. Then, when we consider all these things and place before our souls the majesty of this world-conception, we can well understand how in ancient times, when with the old instinctive clairvoyance men did not think so abstractly, but were still able to feel the majesty of a great conception, they were led to realise: “A thought so majestic as this cannot be conceived perpetually in all its fullness. We must take hold of it at one special time, allowing it to work on the soul in its full, unfathomable glory. It will then work on in the inner depths of our human being, without being spoilt and corrupted by our surface consciousness.”—If we consider by what means the old instinctive clairvoyance gave expression to such a feeling, then out of all that combined to give truth to this thought in mankind in olden time, there remains to us to-day the institution of the Christmas Festival.

On Christmas Night, man, as he stands here upon the Earth with his physical, his etheric and his astral bodies, feels himself to be related to the threefold Cosmos, which appears to him in its Etheric nature, shining so majestically, and with the magic wonder of the night in the blue of the heavens; while face to face with him is the Astral of the Universe, in the stars that glitter in towards the Earth. As he realises how the holiness of this cosmic environment is related to that which is on the Earth itself, he feels that he himself with his own Ego has been transplanted from the Cosmos into this world of Space. And now he may gaze upon the Christmas Mystery—the new-born Child, the Representative of Humanity on Earth, who, inasmuch as he is entering into childhood, is born into this world of Space. In the fullness and majesty of this Christmas thought, as he gazes on the Child that is born on Christmas Night, he exclaims: “Ex Deo Nascimur—I am born out of the Divine, the Divine that weaves and surges through the world of Space.”

When a man has felt this, when he has permeated himself through and through with it, then he may also recall what Anthroposophy has revealed to us about the meaning of the Earth. The Child on whom we are gazing is the outer sheath of That which is now born into Space. But whence is He born, that He might be brought to birth in the world of Space? According to what we have explained to-day, it can only be from Time. From out of Time the Child is born.

If we then follow out the life of this Child and His permeation by the Spirit of the Christ-Being, we come to realise that this Being, this Christ-Being, comes from the Sun. Then we shall look up to the Sun, and say to ourselves: “As I look up to the Sun, I must behold in the sunshine that Time, which in the world of Space is hidden. Within the Sun is Time, and from out of the Time that weaves and works within the Sun, Christ came forth, came out into Space, on to the Earth.”

What have we then in Christ on Earth? In Christ on Earth we have That, which coming from beyond Space, from outside of Space, unites with the Earth.

I want you to realise how our conception of the Universe changes, in comparison with the ordinary present-day conception, when we really enter into all that has come before our souls this evening. There in the Universe we have the Sun, with all that there appears to us to be immediately connected with it—all that is contained in the blue of the heavens, in the world of the stars. At another point in the Universe we have the Earth with humanity. When we look up from the Earth to the Sun, we are at the same time looking into the flow of Time.

Now from this there follows something of great significance. Man only looks up to the Sun in the right way (even if it be but in his mind) when, as he gazes upwards, he forgets Space and considers Time alone. For in truth, the Sun does not only radiate light, it radiates Space itself, and when we are looking into the Sun we are looking out of Space into the world of Time. The Sun is the unique star that it is because when we gaze into the Sun we are looking out of Space. And from that world, outside of Space, Christ came to men. At the time when Christianity was founded by Christ on Earth, man had been all too long restricted to the mere Ex Deo Nascimur, he had become altogether bound up in it, he had become a Space-being pure and simple. The reason why it is so hard for us to understand the traditions of primeval epochs, when we go back to them with the consciousness of present-day civilisation, is that they always had in mind [Space], and not the world of [Time]. They regarded the world of [Time] only as an appendage of the world of [Space].²

Christ came to bring the element of Time again to men, and when the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, unite themselves with Christ, then man receives once more the stream of Time that flows from Eternity to Eternity. What else can we human beings do when we die, i.e. when we go out of the world of Space, than hold fast to Him who gives Time back to us again? At the Mystery of Golgotha man had become to so great an extent a being of Space that Time was lost to him. Christ brought Time back again to men.

If, then, in going forth from the world of Space, men would not die in their souls as well as in their bodies, they must die in Christ, We can still be human beings of Space, and say: Ex Deo Nascimur, and we can look to the Child who comes forth from Time into Space, that he may unite Christ with humanity. But since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot conceive of death, the bound of our earthly life, without this thought: “We must die in Christ.” Otherwise we shall pay for our loss of Time with the loss of Christ Himself, and, banished from Him, remain held spell-bound. We must fill ourselves with the Mystery of Golgotha. In addition to the Ex Deo Nascimur, we must find the In Christo Morimur. We must bring forth the Easter thought in addition to the Christmas thought. Thus the Ex Deo Nascimur lets the Christmas thought appear before our souls, and in the In Christo Morimur the Easter thought.

We can now say: On the Earth man has his three bodies, the physical, the etheric and the astral. The Etheric and Astral are also out there in the Cosmos, but the Physical is only to be found on the Earth. Out in the Cosmos there is no Physical. Thus we must say: On the Earth—physical, etheric, astral. In the Cosmos—no physical, but only the etheric and the astral.

Yet the Cosmos too is threefold, for what the Cosmos lacks at the lowest level, it adds above. In the Cosmos the Etheric is the lowest: on the Earth the Physical is the lowest. On Earth the Astral is the highest; in the Cosmos the highest is that of which man has to-day only the beginnings—that out of which his Spirit-Self will one day be woven. We may therefore say: In the Cosmos there is, as the third, the highest element, the Spirit-Selfhood.

Now we see the stars as expressions of something real. I compared their action to a gentle stroking. The Spirit-Selfhood that is behind them is indeed the Being that lovingly strokes,—only in this case it is not a single Being but the whole world of the Hierarchies. I gaze upon a man and see his form; I look at his eyes and see them shining towards me; I hear his voice; it is the utterance of the human being. In the same way I gaze up into the far Spaces of the world, I look upon the stars. They are the utterance of the Hierarchies,—the living utterance of the Hierarchies, kindling astral feeling. I gaze into the blue depths of the firmament and, perceive in it the outward revelation of the etheric body which is the lowest member of the whole world of the Hierarchies.

Now we may draw near to a still further realisation. We look out into the far Cosmos which goes out beyond earthly reality, even as the Earth with its physical substance and forces goes down beneath cosmic reality. As in the Physical the Earth has a sub-cosmic element, so in Spirit-Selfhood the Cosmos has a super-earthly element.

Physical science speaks of a movement of the Sun; and it can do so, for within the spatial picture of the Cosmos which surrounds us, we perceive by certain phenomena that the Sun is in movement. But that is only an image of the true Sun-movement—an image cast into Space. If we are speaking of the real Sun it is nonsense to say that the Sun moves in Space; for Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself. And the movement of the Sun is only a spatial movement within this created Space. Outside of Space it is a movement in Time. What seems apparent to us—namely, that the Sun is speeding on towards the constellation of Hercules—is only a spatial image of the Time-evolution of the Sun-Being.

To His intimate disciples Christ spoke these words: “Behold the life of the Earth; it is related to the life of the Cosmos. When you look out on the Earth and the surrounding Cosmos, it is the Father whose life permeates this Universe.³ The Father-God is the God of Space. But I make known to you that I have come to you from the Sun, from Time—Time that receives man only when he dies. I have brought you myself from out of Time.⁴ If you receive me, you receive Time, and you will not be held spell-bound in Space. But you find the transition from the one trinity—Physical, Etheric and Astral—to the other trinity, which leads from the Etheric and Astral to Spirit-Selfhood. Spirit-Selfhood is not to be found in the earthly world, just as the Earthly-Physical is not to be found in the Cosmos. But I bring you the message of it, for I am from the Sun.”

The Sun has indeed a threefold aspect. If one lives within the Sun and looks down from the Sun to the Earth, one beholds the Physical, Etheric and Astral. One may also gaze on that which is within the Sun itself. Then one still sees the Physical so long as one remembers the Earth or gazes down towards the Earth. But if one looks away from the Earth one beholds on the other side the Spirit-Selfhood. Thus one swings backwards and forwards between the Physical and the nature of the Spirit-Self. Only the Etheric and Astral in between are permanent. As you look out into the great Universe, the Earthly vanishes away, and you have the Etheric, the Astral and the Spirit-Selfhood. This is what you behold when you come into the Sun-Time between death and a new birth.

Let us now imagine first of all the inner mood of a man's soul to be such that he shuts himself up entirely within this Earth-existence. He can still feel the Divine, for out of the Divine he is born: Ex Deo Nascimur. Then let us imagine him no longer shutting himself up within the mere world of Space, but receiving the Christ who came from the world of Time into the world of Space, who brought Time itself into the earthly Space. If a man does this, then in Death he will overcome Death. Ex Deo Nascimur. In Christo Morimur. But Christ Himself brings the message that when Space is overcome and one has learned to recognise the Sun as the creator of Space, when one feels oneself transplanted through Christ into the Sun, into the living Sun, then the earthly Physical vanishes and only the Etheric and the Astral are there. Now the Etheric comes to life, not as the blue of the sky, but as the lilac-red gleaming radiance of the Cosmos, and forth from the reddish light the stars no longer twinkle down upon us but gently touch us with their loving effluence.

If a man really enters into all this, he can have the experience of himself, standing here upon the Earth, the Physical put aside, but the Etheric still with him, streaming through and out of him in the lilac-reddish light. No longer now are the stars glimmering points of light; they are radiations of love like the caressing hand of a human being. As we feel all this—the divine within ourselves, the divine cosmic fire flaming forth from within us as the very being of man; ourselves within the Etheric world and experiencing the living expression of the Spirit in the Astral cosmic radiance, there bursts forth within us the inner awakening of the creative radiance of Spirit, which is man's high calling in the Universe.

When those to whom Christ revealed these things had let the revelation sink deep into their being, then the moment came when they experienced the working of this mighty concept, in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. At first they felt the falling away, the discarding of the earthly-Physical as death. But then the feeling came; This is not death, but in place of the physical of the Earth, there now dawns upon us the Spirit-Selfhood of the Universe. “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.”

Thus may we regard the threefold nature of the one half of the year. We have the Christmas thought—Ex Deo Nascimur; the Easter thought—In Christo Morimur; and the Whitsun thought—Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

There remains the other half of the year. If we understand that too, there dawns on us the other aspect of our human life. If we understand the relationship of the physical to the soul of man and to the superphysical—which contains the true freedom of which man is to become a partaker on the Earth,—then in the interconnection of the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun festivals we understand the human freedom on Earth. As we understand man from out of these three thoughts, the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought, and as we let this kindle in us the desire to understand the remaining portions of the year, there arises the other half of human life which I indicated when I said: “Gaze upon this human destiny; the Hierarchies appear behind it—the working and weaving of the Hierarchies.” It is wonderful to look truly into the destiny of a human being, for behind it stands the whole world of the Hierarchies.

It is indeed the language of the stars which sounds towards us from the thoughts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide; from the Christmas thought, inasmuch as the Earth is a star within the Universe; from the Easter thought inasmuch as the most radiant of stars, the Sun, gives us his gifts of grace; and from the Whitsun thought inasmuch as that which lies hidden beyond the stars lights into the soul, and lights forth again from the soul in the fiery tongues of Pentecost.

Enter into all this, my dear friends! I have told you of the Father, the Bearer of the Christmas thought, who sends the Son that through him the Easter thought may be fulfilled; I have told you further how the Son brings the message of the Spirit, so that in the thought of Whitsun man's life on Earth may be completed in its threefold being. Meditate this through, ponder it well; then for all the descriptive foundations I have already given you for an understanding of Karma, you will gain a right foundation of inner feeling.

Try to let the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun thoughts, in the way I have expressed them to you to-day, work deeply and truly into your human feeling, and when we meet again after the journey which I must undertake this Whitsun-tide for the Course on Agriculture—when we come together again, bring this feeling with you, my dear friends. For this feeling should live on in you as the warm and fiery thought of Pentecost. Then we shall be able to go further in our study of Karma; your power of understanding will be fertilised by what the Whitsun thought contains.

Just as once upon a time at the first Whitsun Festival something shone forth from each one of the disciples, so the thought of Pentecost should now become alive again for our anthroposophical understanding. Something must light up and shine forth from our souls. Therefore it is as a Whitsun feeling, to prepare you for the further continuation of our thoughts on Karma, which are related to the other half of the year, that I have given you what I have said to-day about the inner connections of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide.

• 1. From February until September, 1924, with intervals of visits to other towns and countries, Rudolf Steiner was giving at Dornach the great series of 49 lectures on Karma, subsequently produced in four volumes now available in English translation. The present lecture was given very shortly before the Whitsun Festival and deals with its specific significance for the problem of human destiny with which the Karma lectures deal.
  
  Lecturing as he was to Anthroposophists, Dr. Steiner begins at once with the fundamental fact of the three ‘bodies’ at work in the human organism. A full exposition of this is to be found in the book Theosophy, chapter I.
• 2. The bracketed words were transposed in the translation. Error brought to our attention by to Lucas Dreier
• 3. Cp. Paul: “God that made the world and all things therein, being Lord of heaven and earth, giveth to all life and breath and all things, and is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” Acts XVII, 24–28.
• 4. “Time,” as here used, is what we usually designate as “Eternity”, i.e. a continuous, unbroken time-experience. What we usually call “Time” is our spatialised concept of real Time, separate successional events, measured by spatial changes.

In this course of lectures I hope to be able to give you a survey of some important truths of Spiritual Science from one particular aspect. It is perhaps only towards the end of the course that you will be able to see how the threads all hang together. In the two lectures just given I dwelt a good deal upon the Mystery of Eleusis and upon Greek mythology, and I shall still often have occasion to refer to the performances we have seen. But I also have another purpose, which you will recognise at the end of the course. I want this evening to bring home to you from another direction how Spiritual Science in our day is aspiring towards that mighty archetypal wisdom of which we have caught a glimpse, how it throws light upon those great figures and images and upon the tidings of the Mysteries which have come down to us from ancient Greece. If we are to grasp the whole mission of Spiritual Science today we shall have to recognise that many concepts and ideas which obtain today have to be changed. Contemporary humanity is often very short-sighted, it scarcely gives a thought to anything beyond the immediate future. To evoke a feeling that we must change our very manner of thinking if we are to enter deeply into the mission of Spiritual Science—that is why I draw attention to the completely different view of the world and of life, and of the relation of man to the spiritual world, held by the Greeks. For in all this the Greek attitude of heart and soul was very different from that of modern man.

Let me begin today by mentioning just one thing. There is a concept, an idea, very familiar to you all, an idea which not only finds common expression in the vocabulary of all languages, but which has also tended to take on a certain scientific connotation. It is the word NATURE. When the word ‘nature’ is used in any context it at once arouses in modern man a whole number of ideas. We think of nature as the opposite of soul or spirit. Now what the man of today means by ‘nature’ simply did not exist for Greek thought. You have to eliminate altogether what you mean today by the term ‘nature’ if you wish to enter into the thought of ancient Greece. The contrast between nature and spirit which we today experience was unknown to the Greeks. When the Greek directed his eye to the processes which took place in wood and meadow, in sun and moon, in the world of the stars, he did not yet experience a natural existence devoid of spirit, but everything which happened in the world was as much the deed of spiritual Beings as for us a movement of our hand is an expression of our own soul-activity. When we move our hand from left to right, we know that a mental activity lies behind this movement, and we do not talk of an opposition between the mere movement of the hand and our will, but we know that the movement of the hand and our will, as an impulse of movement, constitute a unity. We still feel the unity when we make a gesture which our mind directs. But when we direct our gaze upon the course of sun and moon, when we become aware of the currents of air in the wind, then we no longer see in these things, as the Greeks did, the outer gestures, the moving hand so to say, of divine-spiritual Beings, but we see something outside us which we study according to abstract laws, mathematical-mechanical laws. Such a nature—a nature which is calculated according to purely external mathematical-mechanical laws, a nature which is not simply the physiognomy of divine-spiritual activity—was unknown to the Greeks. We shall hear how the concept ‘nature’ as understood by modern man gradually came to birth.

Thus in those ancient times Spirit and Nature were in full harmony with one another. Consequently what we today call a wonder, a miracle, did not bear its present interpretation. Putting aside all finer shades of difference, today we should call it a miracle if we were to perceive an event in the outer world which could not be explained by natural laws already known or of the same kind as those already known, but which presupposed a direct intervention of the spirit. If a man were to perceive directly a spiritual event which he could not understand and could not explain according to the strict laws of mathematics and mechanics, he would say it was miraculous. The ancient Greek could not use the term ‘miraculous’ in this sense, for to him it was obvious that everything which takes place in Nature is effected by Spirit; he did not discriminate between the daily happenings in the ordering of Nature and rarer events. The one kind occurred only rarely, the other kind was habitual, but for him spiritual creation, divine-spiritual activity, entered into every natural event. You see how these concepts have changed. For the intervention of the spirit in events on the physical plane to be regarded as miraculous is essentially a feature of our own time. It is peculiar to our modern way of looking at things to draw a sharp line between what we believe to be governed by natural law and what we have to recognise as a direct intervention of spiritual worlds.

I have spoken to you of the harmonising of two streams of culture which I may call the Demeter-Persephone stream and the Agamemnon-Iphigenia stream. It is the mission of Spiritual Science to unite these two streams. We cannot emphasise too strongly how necessary it is for humanity to learn to feel again that the spiritual is active in everyday events as well as in rarer occurrences. But this requires a clear recognition that there are two currents in human experience. Men must be quite clear that there are things which form part of a system of nature, things which follow the laws accepted today by the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the biologist, while on the other hand there are also other occurrences which can be accepted as facts, just as the facts which follow the physicalmathematical-chemical laws, but which cannot be explained unless one recognises the reality of a spiritual movement and life behind the physical plane.

The whole conflict caused in the human soul by this opposition between Nature and Spirit, and at the same time the longing to resolve it, is discharged in my Rosicrucian Drama The Portal of Initiation in the soul of Strader. There we see how such an event as Theodora's vision, an event outside the ordinary processes of nature, affects someone who is accustomed only to accept as valid phenomena which can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry ... Strader's character and his inner experiences illustrate how such an event acts upon the heart as an ordeal of the soul. This scene epitomises the sense of conflict which finds expression in countless modern souls. People like Strader are very numerous today. To such people it is a necessity to inquire into the characteristics of the regular, normal course of natural events, events which can be explained by physical, chemical or biological laws; on the other hand it is also necessary that such souls should be brought to recognise other events, events which also take place on the physical plane, but which are classed as miracles by the purely materialistic mind, and hence brushed aside as impossibilities and not recognised for what they are.

Thus we can say that today there is a longing to reconcile the opposition between nature and spirit, an opposition which did not yet exist in ancient Greece. And the fact that attempts are made, that societies are established, to examine the activity and nature of laws in the physical world other than purely chemical, physiological, biological laws, is proof that the longing to resolve this opposition is very widely felt. It is part of the mission of our own Spiritual Science to resolve this opposition between spirit and nature. We must set to work out of new sources of spiritual-scientific insight; we must fit ourselves to see again in what is all around us more than meets the eye of the physicist or the chemist or the anatomist or the physiologist. To do this we must start with man himself, who so emphatically demands not only that the chemical and physical laws active in his physical body should be studied, but also that the connection between physical, psychic and spiritual, which for anyone who will look attentively can become visible in an unobtrusive way even to physical eyes, should be investigated.

The man of today no longer experiences what I have so far only been able to put before you as the working of the Demeter or the Persephone forces in the human organism. He no longer experiences the important fact that what is diffused over the whole universe without is also in us. The Greek did experience this. Even if he could not express it in modern terms, he experienced a truth, for example, of which modern theology will only slowly become convinced again—a truth which I will try to bring home to you in the following way. Today you look upwards to the rainbow. So long as it cannot be explained it is as much a wonder of Nature, a wonder of the world, a miracle, as anything else. Amid all that is familiar in everyday life there stands before our eyes the marvellous bow with its seven colours ... we will ignore all the explanations of the physicist, for the physics of the future will have quite different things to say about the rainbow too. We say to ourselves: ‘Our gaze falls upon the rainbow which emerges as if out of the bosom of the surrounding universe; in looking at it we look into the macrocosm, into the great world; the macrocosm gives birth to the rainbow.’ Now let us turn our gaze inwards; within ourselves we can observe that out of a vague, unthinking brooding, there emerge specific thoughts relating to something or other—in other words, thought flashes up within our souls. It is an everyday experience, we have only to see it in the right light. Let us take these two things, the macrocosm which gives birth to the rainbow out of the bosom of the universe, and the other thing, that in ourselves thought is born out of the rest of our soul-life. Those are the two facts of which the wise men of ancient Greece already knew something and which men will come to know again through Spiritual Science. The same forces which cause thoughts to light up in our microcosm call forth the outward rainbow from the bosom of the universe. Just as the Demeter forces from without enter into man and become active within, so outside us in the cosmos those forces are active which form the rainbow out of the ingredients of Nature; there they work spread out in space; within, in the microcosmic world of man, they cause thought to flash up out of the indefinite. Of course ordinary physics has not yet come anywhere near such truths, nevertheless, that is the truth.

Everything that is outside in space is also within us. Today man does not yet recognise the complete harmony which exists between the mysterious forces at work in himself, and the forces active outside in the macrocosm; indeed he probably regards that as a fantastic daydream. The ancient Greek could not say what I say today about these things, because he could not penetrate the matter with intellect, but it lived in his subconscious, he saw it, or felt it clairvoyantly. If today we wish to express in up-to-date phraseology what the Greek felt, we must say that he felt working within him the forces which caused thought to flash up, and felt that they were the same forces which organised the rainbow without. That is what he experienced. And he said to himself: ‘If there are psychic forces within me which cause thought to flash up, what is it that is without? What is the spiritual force in the widths of space, above and below, right and left, before and behind? What is it outspread there in space which causes the rainbow to flash up, causes the sunrise and the sunset, causes the glimmer and the glory of the clouds, just as within me the forces of the soul bring forth thought?’ For the ancient Greek it was a spiritual Being who gave birth out of the universal ether to all these phenomena—to the roseate tints of sunrise and sunset, to the rainbow, to the glimmer and the glory of the clouds, to thunder and lightning. And out of this feeling, which, as I said before, had not become intellectual knowledge, but was elemental feeling, there arose the intuitive perception, ‘That is Zeus!’ One does not get any idea, still less any sense of what the Greek soul experienced as Zeus, if one does not approach this experience and this feeling by way of the spiritual-scientific outlook. Zeus was a Being with a clearly defined form, but one could not get an idea of him without the feeling that the forces which cause thought to light up in us are also at work in what flashes up externally, such as the rainbow and so on. But today in anthroposophical circles, when we look into the human being and try to learn something of the forces which call forth in us thoughts, ideas—the forces which call forth all that flashes up in our consciousness—we say that all this constitutes what we call the astral body. In this way, having the microcosmic substance, the astral body, we can give an answer in terms of Spiritual Science to the question we have just put in a more pictorial way, and we can say that as a microcosm we have in us the astral body ... we can then ask ourselves what corresponds without in the widths of space to the astral body—what fills all space right and left, behind and before, above and below? Just as the astral body extends throughout our microcosm, so is the universal ether, so are the wide expanses of space, permeated with the macrocosmic counterpart of our astral body, and we can also say that what the ancient Greek pictured to himself as Zeus is the macrocosmic counterpart of our astral body. In us we have the astral body, it causes the phenomena of consciousness to light up; without extends the astrality from which, as from the cosmic womb, is born the rainbow, the sunrise, the sunset, thunder and lightning, clouds and snow. The man of today can find no word to cover what the Greek thought of as Zeus, and which is the cosmic counterpart of our astral body.

To continue: Besides what lights up in us momentarily or for a short time as thought, as idea, as feeling, we have our enduring life of soul, with its emotions and passions, with its fluctuating life of feeling, something which is abiding and subject to habit and memory. It is by their permanent soul-life that we recognise individuals. Here we see a man of wild passions, impetuously laying hold of everything in his path; here another who has no interest in the world. That is something quite different from the momentary thought, that is what constitutes the permanent configuration of our inner life, the basis of our happiness, of our destiny. The man of fiery temperament, of strong passions, sympathies and antipathies, may in certain circumstances commit some action which causes him happiness or unhappiness. The forces in us which represent the more enduring qualities, the qualities which turn into memory and habit, must be distinguished from the forces of the astral body—the former are rooted in our ether bodies. You know that from other lectures.

Now if we were to put the matter as a Greek would do, we should ask once more whether there is anything outside in the cosmos which has the same forces as we bear in our habits our passions, our enduring emotive attitudes. And once more the Greek felt the answer, was conscious of the answer without undergoing any intellectual process. He felt that in the ebb and flow of the ocean, in the storms and hurricanes which rage over the earth, the same forces are active as are active in us when lasting emotions, when passion and habit pulsate through our memory. When we are speaking microcosmically they are the forces in us which we cover by the term ‘ether body’, and which bring about our lasting emotions. Macrocosmically speaking they are forces more closely bound up with the earth than the forces of Zeus in the widths of space, they are the forces which determine wind and weather, storm and calm, untroubled and raging seas. In all these phenomena, in storm and tempest, in tumultuous or untroubled seas, in hurricane or doldrums, the modern man sees merely ‘nature’, and present-day meteorology is a purely physical science. For the Greeks there was as yet no such thing as a purely physical science comparable to what we have today in meteorology. To talk of meteorology in such terms he would have thought as senseless as it would be for us to investigate the physical forces which move our muscles when we laugh, if we did not know that in these movements of our muscles psychic forces are involved. To the Greeks all these things were gestures without and around us, gestures of the same spiritual activity that is revealed in us, in the microcosm, as lasting emotion, passion, memory. The ancient Greek was still conscious of a figure who could be reached by clairvoyance, he was still conscious of the ruler, the centre of all these forces in the macrocosm, and spoke of him as Poseidon.

Today we will go on to speak of the physical body, the densest part of the human being. Microcosmically speaking we have to look upon the physical body as composed of all those characteristics of the human being which have not been mentioned as belonging to the other two bodies. Everything in the nature of transitory thought and idea, thought which arises in us and then disappears, belongs to the astral body; every habitual, lasting attitude of mind, everything which is not merely thought in the sense that it leads its own isolated thought-existence in the soul, belongs to the ether body. And for everything which is not merely a sentiment, an attitude of mind, but which passes over into the sphere of will, for everything which results in an impulse to do something, man needs in this life between birth and death the physical body. The physical body is what serves to raise the mere thought or the mere sentiment to an impulse of will, it is the prime mover behind the deed in the physical world. The will-impulses, the soul-forces which lie behind the will, find their expression in the whole outward aspect of the physical body. The physical body is the expression of will-impulses as the astral body is the expression of mere thoughts, and the ether body of enduring sentiments and habits. In order that will can act through man here in the physical world he must have the physical body. In the higher worlds, activity of will is something quite different from what it is in the physical world. Thus, as microcosms, we have in us above all those forces of soul which bring about our will-impulses, impulses which are needed to make good the claim that the ego is the central governing power of the human soul. For without his will man would never attain to an ego-consciousness. Now when the Greek asked himself what it was, outspread in the macrocosm, that corresponded to the forces in us which call forth the will-impulse—the whole world of will—what did he answer? He gave it the name of Pluto. Pluto, as the central ruling power outspread in macrocosmic space, but closely associated with the solid mass of the planet, was for the Greeks the macrocosmic counterpart of the impulses of will which forced the life of Persephone into the depths of the soul.

Anyone who has clairvoyant consciousness, who can see into the real spiritual world, has a self-knowledge which can properly distinguish this threefold nature of his being into astral, etheric and physical bodies. The ancient Greek was really not in a position to examine the microcosm with the precision we apply to it today. Actually it was not until the beginning of our fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch that man's attention was turned to the microcosm. The ancient Greek was far more conscious of the Pluto, Poseidon and Zeus forces outside him and took it for granted that those forces worked into him.

He lived far more in the macrocosm than in the microcosm. Therein lies the difference between ancient and modern times, that the Greek felt mainly the macrocosm and consequently peopled the world with the gods who were for him its central ruling powers; whereas the modern man thinks more about the microcosm, about man himself, the centre of our own world, and thus seeks more within his own being for the distinguishing features of this threefold world.

We begin to see how it was that, just at the beginning of our fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, there arose in all sorts of ways in western esotericism an awareness of the inner activity of the soul-forces, so that physical, etheric and astral bodies were distinguished. Now that occult investigation in this direction is being pursued with greater intensity, many things to which particular individuals in modern times have borne testimony can be confirmed today. For instance, it has been possible recently to confirm experiences which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the ‘clear-tasting’ of one's own being. Just as one can speak of clairvoyance, or clairaudience, so one may speak of clairsipience. This clairsipience can apply to the threefold human being, and I can describe to you the difference between external sensations of taste and the various sensations of taste which a man can have in connection with his own threefold being.

Try to imagine vividly the taste you have when you eat a very tart fruit such as the sloe, which contracts the palate; imagine this wry sensation enhanced so that you are completely permeated by the sensation of bitterness, of astringency, of downright pain; try to imagine yourself from top to bottom, right down to the finger-tips and in every limb, permeated by this astringent taste, then you have the self-knowledge which the occultist calls the self-knowledge of the physical body through the occult sense of taste, the spiritual sense of taste. When self-knowledge works in such a way that man feels himself completely permeated by this astringent taste, the occultist knows that he is experiencing knowledge of his own physical body through the occult sense of taste, for he knows that the astral body and the etheric body are bound to taste quite different, if I may so express it. As astral and etheric man, one has a different taste from what one has as physical man. These things are not said out of the blue, but out of concrete knowledge; they are known to occultists in the same way as the laws of the outside world are familiar to physicists and chemists.

Now take—not exactly the taste you get from sugar or from a sweet—but the delicate etheric sensation of taste, which most men do not experience, but which nevertheless can be experienced in physical life when, for example, you enter into an atmosphere which you enjoy very much—let us say into an avenue of trees or into a wood, where you feel, ‘Ah, how delicious it is here, I should like to be one with the scent of the trees!’ Imagine this kind of experience, which can really grow into a kind of taste, a taste which you can have when you can forget yourself in your own inwardness, when you can feel yourself so united with your surroundings that you would like to taste yourself into those surroundings ... imagine the experience transferred into the spiritual, then you have the clairsipience which the occultist knows when he seeks the self-knowledge which is possible in respect of the human ether body. It comes if one says, ‘I am now eliminating my physical body, I am shutting off everything connected with the will-impulses, I am suppressing the flashing-up of thought, and surrendering myself entirely to my permanent habits, to my sympathies and antipathies.’ When the occultist acquires the taste of this, when as a practising occultist he feels himself in this etheric body of his, then there comes to him a spiritualised form of taste rather like what I have just described as regards the physical world. Thus there is a clear distinction between self-knowledge in respect of the physical and of the etheric bodies.

The astral body can also be recognised by the occultist who has developed these higher faculties. But in this case one can no longer properly speak of a sense of taste. In the case of the astral body the sense of taste is lacking, just as it is in the case of certain physical substances. Knowledge of one's own astral body has to be described in quite different terms. But it is also possible for the practising occultist to eliminate his physical body, to eliminate his ether body, and to relate his self-knowledge solely to his astral body—that is to say, to pay attention only to what his astral body is. The normal man does not do that. The normal man experiences the interworking of physical, etheric and astral. He never has the astral body alone, he cannot experience it because he is incapable of shutting out the physical and etheric bodies. When this does happen to the practising occultist, he certainly gets at first a very unpleasant sensation ... it can only be compared with the sensation which overcomes us in the physical world when there is not enough air, when we have a feeling of breathlessness. When the etheric and physical bodies are suppressed, and self-knowledge is concentrated upon the astral body, there comes a feeling of oppression rather like breathlessness. Hence knowledge of a man's own astral body is first and formost accompanied by fear and anxiety, more so than in the other cases, because it consists basically in being filled through and through with a sense of oppression. It is impossible to perceive the astral body in isolation without becoming filled with dread. That in ordinary life we are not aware of this fear, which is there all the time, arises from the fact that the normal man, when aware of himself, feels a mixture, a harmonious or inharmonious working together of physical, etheric and astral, and not the isolated, separate members of the human being.

Now that you have heard what are the main experiences of the soul in self-knowledge as regards the physical body, which represents the Pluto forces in us, as regards the ether body, which represents the Poseidon forces, and as regards the astral body, which represents the Zeus forces, you may want to know how these forces work together; what is the relationship between the three kinds of force? Well, how do we express relationship between things and events in the physical world? It is very simple. If anyone were to give you a dish containing peas and beans and perhaps lentils all jumbled up together, that would be a mixture. If the quantities of each were not equal, you would have to separate peas, beans and lentils from one another to get the ratio between their quantities. You could say, for example, that their quantities were in the ratio of 1:3:5; in short, when you are dealing with a mixture of things, you have to find out the proportions of the component parts of the mixture. In the same way we can ask what is the ratio of the strength of the forces of the physical body to those of the etheric body, to those of the astral body? How can we express the relative magnitudes of physical, etheric and astral bodies? Is there a numerical formula, or any other formula, which can express their relative strengths? The question of this relationship will enable us to acquire a profound insight, first into the wonders of the world, and then into the ordeals of the soul and into the revelations of the spirit. We will begin to speak about it today; we shall be led further and further into the subject.

The proportions can be expressed. There is something which shows quite exactly the quantities and the strengths of our inner forces in physical, etheric and astral bodies respectively, and the corresponding relationships between them. Let me make a diagram of it for you. For these relationships can only be expressed by means of a geometrical figure. If we ponder deeply this figure we find that it contains—like an occult sign on which we can meditate—all the proportions of size and strength of the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies respectively. You see that what I am drawing is a pentagram.

If we look at this pentagram, to begin with, taken at its face value, it is a symbol for the etheric body. But I have already said that the ether body also contains the central forces of both astral and physical bodies; it is from the ether body that all the forces, the ageing and the youth-giving forces emanate. Because the ether body is the centre for all these forces it is possible to show, in this diagram, in this sign and seal of the ether body, what in the human body is the ratio between the strength of the forces of the physical body, the strength of the forces of the etheric body, and the strength of the forces of the astral body respectively.

One arrives at the precise magnitude of these relationships in this way; within the pentagram there is an upside-down pentagon. I will fill it in completely with chalk. That gives us to start with one of the component parts of the pentagram. You get another part of the pentagram if you look at the triangles based on the sides of the pentagon. These I am shading with horizontal lines. Thus the pentagram has been reduced to a central pentagon with its point downwards (blocked out in chalk) and five triangles which I have shaded by means of horizontal lines. If you compare the size of the pentagon with the size of the sum of the five triangles, you can say, ‘as the size of this pentagon is to the size of the sum of the five triangles, so are the forces of the physical body in man to the forces of his etheric body.’ Note well that just as one can say in the case of a mixture of peas, beans and lentils that the quantity of lentils is to the quantity of beans let us say—as three to five, so we can say, ‘the ratio of the strength of the forces in the physical body is to the strength of the forces in the etheric body as the area of the pentagon in the pentagram is to the sum of the areas of the triangles which I have shaded horizontally.’ Now I will draw a pentagon with the point upwards, by circumscribing the pentagram. In this case you must not take only the triangles which complete the figure, but the whole pentagon, including the area of the pentagram—that is to say, including all that I have shaded vertically. Now consider this vertically shaded pentagon around the pentagram.

As is the area of this small downward-pointing pentagon to the area of this vertically shaded upward-pointing pentagon, so is the strength of the forces of the physical body in man to the strength of the forces of his astral body. In short, in this figure you find expressed the reciprocal relationships of the forces of physical, etheric and astral forces in man. It does not all come into human consciousness. The upward-pointing pentagon comprises all the astral forces in man, including those of which he is not yet aware, and which will be perfected as the ego transforms the astral body more and more into Spirit-Self or Manas.

Now you may wonder how these three sheaths are related to the ego. You see, normally developed man today knows very little of the real ego, which I have called the baby, and which is the least developed of the human members. But all the forces of the ego are already in man. If you want to consider the total forces of the ego in relation to the forces of physical, etheric and astral bodies, you need only describe a circle around the whole figure. I don't want to make the diagram too confusing, but if I were to shade the whole area of the circle, the ratio of the size of its area to the size of the area of the upward-pointed pentagon, to the sum of the areas of the horizontally-shaded triangles, to the small downward-pointed pentagon which I have filled in with chalk ... would give the ratio of the forces of the entire ego (represented by the area of the circle) to the forces of the astral body (represented by the area of the large pentagon), to the forces of the ether body (represented by the sum of the horizontally shaded triangles around the small pentagon), to the forces of the physical body (represented by the area of the pentagon filled in with chalk). If you give yourself in meditation to this occult sign and acquire a certain feeling for the proportional relationships of these four different areas, you get an impression of the mutual ratios of physical, etheric, astral and ego. Thus, you must think with the same attentiveness of the large circle and try to grasp it in meditation. Next you must place before you the upward- pointing pentagon, and because it is somewhat smaller than the circle—to the extent of these segments of the circle here—it makes a weaker impression upon you than the circle. And to the extent to which the impression of the pentagon is weaker than the impression of the circle, so are the forces of the astral body weaker than the forces of the ego. And if as a third exercise you place before you the five horizontally shaded triangles (without the middle pentagon) you have a still weaker impression if you are thinking with the same degree of attentiveness. And to the extent to which this impression is weaker than the impression made by the two previous figures, so are the forces of the etheric body weaker than the forces of the astral body or the forces of the ego. And if you place before you the small pentagon, assuming the same degree of attentiveness, you get the weakest impression. If you can acquire a feeling of the relative strengths of these four impressions and can retain them, as we hold together in our thought the notes of a melody—if you can think these four impressions together in proportion to their strengths, then you have the measure of harmony which exists between the forces of ego, astral, ether and physical bodies respectively.

What I have shown you is an occult sign; one can meditate on such signs; I have described more or less how it is done. By thinking of the relative sizes of these areas with an equal attentiveness, one gains an impression of their difference in strength. Then one receives a corresponding impression of the relative strengths of the forces of the four members of the human being. These things are symbols of the true occult script, emanating from the nature of things. To meditate on this script means to read the signs of the great world-wonders, which guide us into the great world-secrets. Thereby we gradually acquire a complete understanding of what is at work in the cosmos as wonders of the world, an understanding of the fact that the spirit pours itself into matter in accordance with definite ratios. I have at the same time evoked in you something of what was really the most elementary exercise of the old Pythagorean schools. A man begins by meditating on the occult signs, makes them real to himself, and then finds that he has seen the truth of the world with its wonders; then he begins to perceive with his spiritual hearing the harmonies and the melodies of the forces of the world. Tomorrow we will go further into this. My main object today has been to place before your souls this occult sign, which will lead us a step further into the nature of man.

Yesterday I attempted to show the methods employed by Eastern spirituality for approaching the spiritual world and pointed out how anybody who wished to pursue this path into the super-sensible more or less dispensed with the bridge linking him with his fellow men. He chose a path different from that which establishes communication within society by means of language, thought, and perception of the ego. And I showed how it was initially attempted not to understand through the word what one's fellow man wished to say, what one wants to understand from him, but to live within the words. This process of living within the word was enhanced by forming the words into certain aphorisms. One lived in these and repeated them, so that the forces accrued in the soul by this process were strengthened further by repetition. And I showed how something was achieved in the condition of the soul that might be called a state of Inspiration, in the sense in which I have used the word, except that the sages of the ancient East were, of course, members of their race: their ego-consciousness was much less developed than in later epochs of human evolution. They thus entered into the spiritual world in a more instinctive manner, and because the whole thing was instinctive and thus resulted, in a sense, from a healthy drive within human nature, in the earliest times it could not lead to the pathological afflictions of which we have also spoken. In later times steps were taken by the so-called Mysteries to guard against the rise of such afflictions as I have described to you. I said that those Westerners who desire to gain knowledge of the spiritual world must approach this in another way. Humanity has progressed in the interim. Different soul faculties have evolved, so that one cannot simply renew the ancient Eastern path of spiritual development. Within the realm of spiritual life one cannot long to return in a reactionary manner to prehistoric or earlier historical periods of human evolution. For Western civilization, the path leading into the spiritual worlds is that of Imagination. This faculty of Imagination, however, must be integrated organically into the life of the soul as a whole. This can come about in the most varied ways, just as the Eastern path of development was not unequivocally predetermined but could take numerous different courses. Today I would like to describe the path into the spiritual world that conforms to the needs of Western civilization and is particularly suited to anyone immersed in the scientific life of the West.

In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have described an entirely safe path leading to the super-sensible, but I describe it in such a way that it applies for everybody, above all for those who have not devoted their lives to science. Today I shall describe a path into the super-sensible that is much more for the scientist. All my experience has taught me that for such a scientist a kind of precondition for this cognitional striving is to take up what is presented in my book, Philosophy of Freedom. I will explain what I mean by this. This book, Philosophy of Freedom, was not written with the same intent as most books written today. Nowadays books are written simply in order to inform the reader of the book's subject matter, so that the reader learns the book's contents in accordance with his education, his scientific training, or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not my primary Intention in writing Philosophy of Freedom, and thus it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire Information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader directly engage his thinking activity on every page.

In a sense, the book is only a kind of musical score that one must read with inner thought activity in order to progress, as the result of one's own efforts, from one thought to the next. The book constantly presupposes the mental collaboration of the reader. Moreover, the book presupposes that which the soul becomes in the process of such mental exertion. Anyone who has really worked through this book with his own inner thinking activity and cannot confess that he has come to know himself in a part of his inner life in which he had not known himself previously has not read Philosophy of Freedom properly. One should feel that one is being lifted out of one's usual thinking [Vorstellen] into a thinking independent of the senses [ein sinnlichkeitsfreies Denken], in which one is fully immersed, so that one feels free of the conditions of physical existence. Whoever cannot confess this to himself has actually misunderstood the book. One should be able to say to oneself: now I know, as a result of the inner thought activity I myself have expended, what pure thinking actually is.

The strange thing is that most Western philosophers totally deny the reality of the very thing that my Philosophy of Freedom seeks to awaken as something real in the soul of the reader. Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who maintain this have never really studied mathematics or gone into the difference between analytical and empirical mechanics. Specialization, however, has already grown to such an extent that nowadays philosophy is often pursued by people totally lacking any knowledge of mathematical thinking. The pursuit of philosophy is actually impossible without a grasp of at least the spirit of mathematical thinking. We have seen what Goethe's attitude was toward this spirit of mathematical thinking, even though he made no claim himself to any special training in mathematics. Many thus would deny the existence of the very faculty I would like those who study The Philosophy of Freedom to acquire.

And now let us imagine a reader who simply sets about working through The Philosophy of Freedom within the context of his ordinary consciousness in the way I have described: he will, of course, not be able to claim that he has been transported into a super-sensible world. For I intentionally wrote The Philosophy of Freedom in the way that I did so that it would present itself to the world initially as a purely philosophical work. Just think what a disservice would have been accorded anthroposophically oriented spiritual science if I had begun immediately with spiritual scientific writings! These writings would, of course, have been disregarded by all trained philosophers as the worst kind of dilettantism, as the efforts of an amateur. To begin with I had to write purely philosophically. I had to present the world with something thought out philosophically in the strict sense, though it transcended the normal bounds of philosophy. At some point, however, the transition had to be made from a merely philosophical and scientific kind of writing to a spiritual scientific writing. This occurred at a time when I was invited to write a special chapter about Goethe's scientific writings for a German biography of Goethe. This was at the end of the last century, in the 1890s. And so I was to write the chapter on Goethe's scientific writings: I had, in fact, finished it and sent it to the publisher when there appeared another work of mine, called Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. The book was a bridge between pure philosophy and an anthroposophical orientation. When this work came out, my manuscript was returned to me by the publisher, who had enclosed nothing but my fee so that I would not make a fuss, for thereby the legal obligations had been met. Among the learned pedants, there was obviously no interest in anything—not even a single chapter devoted to the development of Goethe's attitude toward natural science written by one who had authored this book on mysticism.

I will now assume that The Philosophy of Freedom has been worked through already with one's ordinary consciousness in the way described. Now we are in the right frame of mind for our souls to undertake in a healthy way what I described yesterday, if only very briefly, as the path leading into Imagination. It is possible to pursue this path in a way consonant with Western life if we attempt to surrender ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we allow them to work upon us without thinking about them but still perceiving them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are constantly perceiving, but actually in the very process of doing so we are continually saturating our percepts with concepts; in scientific thinking we interweave percepts and concepts entirely systematically, building up systems of concepts and so on. By having acquired the capacity for the kind of thinking that gradually emerges from The Philosophy of Freedom, one can become capable of such acute inner activity that one can exclude and suppress conceptual thinking from the process of perception and surrender oneself to bare percepts. But there is something else we can do in order to strengthen the forces of the soul and absorb percepts unelaborated by concepts. One can, moreover, refrain from formulating the judgments that arise when these percepts are joined to concepts and create instead symbolic images, or images of another sort, alongside the images seen by the eye, heard by the ear, and rendered by the senses of warmth, touch, and so on. If we thus bring our activity of perception into a state of flux, infusing it with life and movement, not as we do when forming concepts but by elaborating perception symbolically or artistically, we will develop much sooner the power of allowing the percepts to permeate us as such. An excellent preparation for this kind of cognition is to school oneself rigorously in what I have characterized as phenomenalism, as elaboration of phenomena. If one has really striven not to allow inertia to carry one through the veil of sense perception upon reaching the boundary of the material world, in order to look for all kinds of metaphysical explanations in terms of atoms and molecules, but has instead used concepts to set the phenomena in order and follow them through to the archetypal phenomena, one has already undergone a training that enables one to isolate the phenomena from everything conceptual. And if one still symbolizes the phenomena, turns them into images, one acquires a potent soul forte enabling one to absorb the external world free from concepts.

Obviously we cannot expect to achieve this quickly. Spiritual research demands of us far more than research in a laboratory or observatory. It demands above all an intense effort of the individual will. If one has practiced such an inner representation of symbolic images for a certain length of time and striven in addition to dwell contemplatively upon images that one keeps present in the soul in a way analogous to the mental representation of phenomena, images that otherwise only pass away when we race from sensation to sensation, from experience to experience; if one has accustomed oneself to dwell contemplatively for longer and longer periods of time upon an image that one has fully understood, that one has formed oneself or taken at somebody else's suggestion so that it cannot be a reminiscence, and if one repeats this process again and again, one strengthens one's inner soul forces and finally realizes that one experiences something of which one previously had no inkling. The only way to obtain even an approximate idea of such an experience, which takes place only in one's inner being—one must be very careful not to misunderstand this—is to recall particularly lively dream-images. One must keep in mind, however, that dream-images are always reminiscences that can never be related directly to anything external and are thus a sort of reaction coming toward one out of one's own inner self. If one experiences to the full the images formed in the way described above, this is something entirely real, and one begins to understand that one is encountering within oneself the spiritual element that actuates the processes of growth, that is the power of growth. One realizes that one has entered into apart of one's human constitution, something within one; something that unites itself with one; something that is active within but that one previously had experienced only unconsciously. Experienced unconsciously in what way?

I have told you that from birth until the change of teeth a soul-spiritual entity is at work structuring the human being and that this then emancipates itself to an extent. Later, between the change of teeth and puberty, another such soul-spiritual entity, which dips down in a way into the physical body, awakens the erotic drives and much else as well. All this occurs unconsciously. If, however, we use fully consciously such measures of soul as I have described to observe this permeation of the physical organism by the soul-spiritual, one sees how such processes work within man and how man is actually given over to the external world continually, from birth onward. Nowadays this giving-over of oneself to the external world is held to be nothing but abstract perception or abstract cognition. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of color, sound, and warmth and by all kinds of sense impressions, By elaborating these with our concepts we create yet further impressions that have an effect on us. By experiencing all this consciously we come to see that in the unconscious experience of color- and sound-impressions that we have from childhood onward there is something spiritual that suffuses our organization. And when, for example, we take up the sense of love between the change of teeth and puberty, this is not something originating in the physical body but rather something that the cosmos gives us through the colors, sounds, and streaming warmth that reach us. Warmth is something other than warmth; light something other than light in the physical sense; sound is something other than physical sound. Through our sense impressions we are conscious only of what I would term external sound and external color. And when we surrender ourselves to nature, we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms, and so on of which modern physics and physiology dream; rather, it is spiritual forces that are at work, forces that fashion us between birth and death into what we are as human beings. Once we tread the path of knowledge I have described, we become aware that it is the external world that forms us. We become best able to observe consciously what lives and embodies itself within us when we acquire above all a clear sense that spirit is at work in the external world. lt is of all things phenomenology that enables us to perceive how spirit works within the external world. It is through phenomenology, and not abstract metaphysics, that we attain knowledge of the spirit by consciously observing, by raising to consciousness, what otherwise we would do unconsciously, by observing how, through the sense world, spiritual forces enter our being and work formatively upon it.

Yesterday I pointed out to you that the Eastern sage in a way disregards the significance of Speech, thought, and the perception of the ego. He experiences these things differently and cultivates a different attitude of soul toward these things, because language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego initially tend to lead us away from the spiritual world into social contact with other human beings. In everyday physical existence we purchase our social life at the price of listening right through language, looking through thoughts, and feeling our way right through the perception of the ego. The Eastern sage took upon himself not to listen right through the word but to live within it. He took upon himself not to look right through the thought but to live within the thought, and so forth. We in the West have as our task more to contemplate man himself in following the path into super-sensible worlds.

At this point it must be remembered that man bears a certain kind of sensory organization within as well. I have already described the three inner senses through which he becomes aware of his inner being, just as he perceives what goes on outside him. We have a sense of balance by means of which we sense the spatial orientation appropriate to us as human beings and are thereby able to work inside it with our will. We have a sense of movement by means of which we know that we are moving even in the dark: we know this from an inner sensing and not merely because we perceive our changing relationship to other objects we pass. We have an actual inner sense of movement. And we have a sense of life, by means of which we can perceive our general state of well-being, the constant changes in the inner condition of our life forces. These three inner senses work together with the will during man's first seven years. We are guided by our sense of balance, and a being who initially cannot move at all and later can only crawl is transformed into one who can stand upright and walk. This ability to walk upright is effected by the sense of balance, which places us into the world. The sense of movement and the sense of life likewise contribute toward the development of our full humanity. Anybody who is capable of applying the standards of objective observation employed in the scientist's laboratory to the development of man's physical body and his soul-spirit will soon discover how the forces that worked formatively upon man principally during the fast seven years emancipate themselves and begin to assume a different aspect from the time of the change of teeth onward. By this time a person is less intensively connected to that within than he was as a child. A child is closely bound up inwardly with human equilibrium, movement, and life. Something else, however, is evolving simultaneously during this emancipation of balance, movement, and life. There takes place a certain adjustment of the three other senses: the senses of smell, taste, and touch. It is extremely interesting to observe in detail the way in which a child gradually finds his way into life, orienting himself by means of the senses of taste, smell, and touch. Of course, this can be seen most obviously in early life, but anybody trained to do so can see it clearly enough later on as well. In a certain way, the child pushes out of himself balance, movement, and life but at the same time draws more into himself the qualities of the sense of smell, the sense of taste, and the sense of touch. In the course of an extended phase of development the one is, so to speak, exhaled and the other inhaled, so that the forces of balance, movement, and life, which press from within outward, and the qualitative orientations of smell, taste, and touch, which press from without inward, meet within our organism. This is effected by the interpenetration of the two sense-triads. As a result of this interpenetration, there arises within man a firm sense of self; in this way man First experiences himself as a true ego. Now we are cut off from the spirituality of the external world by speech and by our faculties of perceiving thoughts and perceiving the egos of others—and rightly so, for if it were otherwise we could never in this physical life become social beings—in just the same way, inasmuch as the qualities of smell, taste, and touch encounter balance, movement, and life, we are inwardly cut off from the triad life, movement, and balance, which would otherwise reveal itself to us directly. The experiences of the senses of smell, taste, and touch place themselves, as it were, in front of what we would otherwise experience through our sense of balance, our sense of movement, and our sense of life. And the result of this development toward Imagination of which I have spoken consists in this: the Oriental comes to a halt at language in order to live within it; he halts at the thought in order to live there; he halts at the perception of the ego in order to live within it. By these means he makes his way outward into the spiritual world. The Oriental comes to a halt within these; we, by striving for Imagination, by a kind of absorption of external percepts devoid of concepts, engage in an activity that is in a way the opposite of that in which the Oriental engages with regard to language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego. The Oriental comes to a halt at these and enters into them. In striving for Imagination, however, one wends one's way through the sensations of smell, taste, and touch, penetrating into the inner realm so that, by one's remaining undisturbed by sensations of smell, taste, and touch, the experiences stemming from balance, movement, and life come forth to meet one.

It is a great moment when one has penetrated through what I have described as the sense-triad of taste, smell, and touch, and one confronts the naked essence of movement, balance, and life.

With such a preparation behind us, it is interesting to study what Western mysticism often sets forth. Most certainly, I am very far from decrying the elements of poetry, beauty, and imaginative expression in the writings of many mystics. I most certainly admire what, for instance, St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and others have to tell us, and indeed Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler. But all that arises in this way reveals itself to the true spiritual scientist as something that arises when one traverses the inward-leading path yet does not penetrate beyond the region of smell, taste, and touch. Read what has been written by individuals who have described with particular clarity what they have experienced in this way. They speak of a tasting of that within, of a tasting regarding what exists as soul-spirit in man's inner being; they also speak of a smelling and, in a certain sense, of a touching. And anybody who knows how to read Mechthild of Magdeburg, for instance, or St. Theresa, in the right way will see that they follow this inward path but never penetrate right through taste, smell, and touch. They use beautiful poetic imagery for their descriptions, but they are speaking only of how one can touch, savor, and sniff oneself inwardly.

For it is far less agreeable to see the true nature of reality with senses that are developed truly spiritually than to read the accounts given by voluptuous mysticism—the only term for it—which in the final analysis only gratifies a refined, inward-looking egotism of soul. As I say, much as this mysticism is to be admired—and I do admire it—the true spiritual scientist must realize that it stops halfway: what is manifest in the splendid poetic imagery of Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Theresa, and the others is really only what is smelt, tasted, and touched before breaking through into the actual inner realm. Truth is occasionally unpleasant, and at times perhaps even cruel, but modern humanity has no business becoming rickety in soul by following a nebulous, imperfect mysticism. What is required today is to penetrate into man's true inner nature with strength of spirit, with the same strength we have achieved in a much more disciplined way for the external world by pursuing natural science. And it is not in vain that we have achieved this. Natural science must not be undervalued! Indeed, we must seek to acquire the disciplined and methodical side of natural science. And it is precisely when one has assimilated this scientific method that one appreciates the achievements of a nebulous mysticism at their true worth, but one also knows that this nebulous mysticism is not what spiritual science must foster. On the contrary, the task of spiritual science is to seek clear comprehension of man's own inner being, whereby a clear, spiritual understanding of the external world is made possible in turn.

I know that if I did not speak in the way that truth demands I could enjoy the support of every nebulous, blathering mystic who takes up mysticism in order to satisfy his voluptuous soul. That cannot be our concern here, however; rather, we must seek forces that can be used for life, spiritual forces that are capable of informing our scientific and social life.

When one has penetrated as far as that which lives in the sense of balance, the sense of life, and the sense of movement, one has reached something that one experiences initially as the true inner being of man because of its transparency. The very nature of the thing shows us that we cannot penetrate any deeper. But then again one has more than enough at this initial stage, for what we discover is not the stuff of nebulous, mystical dreams. What one finds is a true organology, and above all one finds within oneself the essence of that which is within equilibrium, of that which is in movement, of that which is suffused with life. One finds this within oneself.

Then, after experiencing this, something entirely extraordinary has occurred. Then, at the appropriate moment, one begins to notice something. An essential prerequisite is, as I have said, to have thought through The Philosophy of Freedom beforehand. This is then left, so to speak, to one side, while pursuing the inner path of contemplation, of meditation. One has advanced as far as balance, movement, and life. One lives within this life, this movement, this balance. Entirely parallel with our pursuit of the way of contemplation and meditation but without any other activity on our part, our thinking regarding The Philosophy of Freedom has undergone a transformation. What can be experienced in such a philosophy of freedom in pure thinking has, as a result of our having worked inwardly on our souls in another sphere, become something utterly different. lt has become fuller, richer in content. While on the one hand we have penetrated into our inner being and have deepened our power of Imagination, on the other hand we have raised what resulted from our mental work on The Philosophy of Freedom up out of ordinary consciousness. Thoughts that formerly had floated more or less abstractly within pure thinking have been transformed into substantial forces that are alive in our consciousness: what once was pure thought is now Inspiration. We have developed Imagination, and pure thinking has become Inspiration. Following this path further, we become able to keep apart what we have gained following two paths that must be sharply differentiated: on the one hand, what we have obtained as Inspiration from pure thinking—the life that at a lower level is thinking, and then becomes a thinking raised to Inspiration—and on the other hand what we experience as conditions of equilibrium, movement, and life. Now we can bring these modes of experience together. We can unite the inner with the outer. The fusion of Imagination and Inspiration brings us in turn to Intuition. What have we accomplished now? Well, I would like to answer this question by approaching it from another side. First of all I must draw attention to the steps taken by the Oriental who wishes to rise further after having schooled himself by means of the mantras, after having lived within the language, within the word. He now learns not only to live in the rhythms of language but also in a certain way to experience breathing consciously, in a certain way to experience breathing artificially by altering it in the most varied ways. For him this is the next highest step—but again not something that can be taken over directly by the West. What does the Eastern student of yoga attain by surrendering himself to conscious, regulated, varied breathing? Oh, he experiences something quite extraordinary when he inhales. When inhaling he experiences a quality of air that is not found when we experience air as a purely physical substance but only when we unite ourselves with the air and thus comprehend it spiritually. As he breathes in, a genuine student of yoga experiences something that works formatively upon his whole being, that works spiritually; something that does not expend itself in the life between birth and death, but, entering into us through the spirituality of the outer air, engenders in us something that passes with us through the portal of death. To experience the breathing process consciously means taking part in something that persists when we have laid aside the physical body. For to experience the breathing process consciously is to experience the reaction of our inner being to inhalation. In experiencing this we experience something that preceded birth in our existence as soul-spirit—or let us say preceded our conception—something that had already cooperated in shaping us as embryos and then continued to work within our organism in childhood. To grasp the breathing process consciously means to comprehend ourselves beyond birth and death. The advance from an experience of the aphorism and the word to an experience of the breathing process represented a further penetration into an inspired comprehension of the eternal in man. We Westerners must experience much the same thing—but in a different sphere.

What, in fact, is the process of perception? It is nothing but a modified process of inhalation. As we breathe in, the air presses upon our diaphragm and upon the whole of our being. Cerebral fluid is forced up through the spinal column into the brain. In this way a connection is established between breathing and cerebral activity. And the part of the breathing that can be discerned as active within the brain works upon our sense activity as perception. Perception is thus a kind of branch of inhalation. In exhalation, on the other hand, cerebral fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of cerebral fluid is bound up with the activity of the will and also of exhalation. Anybody who really studies The Philosophy of Freedom, however, will discover that when we achieve pure thinking, thinking and willing coincide. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. Thus pure thinking turns out to be related to what the Oriental experienced in the process of exhalation. Pure thinking is related to exhalation just as perception is related to inhalation. We have to go through the same process as the yogi but in a way that is, so to speak, pushed back more into the inner life. Yoga depends upon a regulation of the breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What can Western man do? He can raise into clear soul experiences perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which are otherwise united only abstractly, formally, and passively, so that inwardly, in his soul-spirit, he has the same experience as he has physically in breathing in and out. Inhalation and exhalation are physical experiences: when they are harmonized, one consciously experiences the eternal. In everyday life we experience thinking and perception. By bringing mobility into the life of the soul, one experiences the pendulum, the rhythm, the continual interpenetrating vibration of perception and thinking. A higher reality evolves for the Oriental in the process of inhalation and exhalation; the Westerner achieves a kind of breathing of the soul-spirit in place of the physical breathing of the yogi. He achieves this by developing within himself the living process of modified inhalation in perception and modified exhalation in pure thinking, by weaving together concept, thinking, and perceiving. And gradually, by means of this rhythmic pulse, by means of this rhythmic breathing process in perception and thinking, he struggles to rise up to spiritual reality in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. And when I indicated in my book The Philosophy of Freedom, at first only philosophically, that reality arises out of the interpenetration of perception and thinking, I intended, because the book was meant as a schooling for the soul, to show what Western man can do in order to enter the spiritual world itself. The Oriental says: systole, diastole; inhalation, exhalation. In place of these the Westerner must put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of a breathing of the soul-spirit within the cognitional process through perception and thinking.

All this had to be contrasted with what can be experienced as a kind of dead end in Western spiritual evolution. Let me explain what I mean. In 1841 Michelet, the Berlin philosopher, published posthumously Hegel's works on natural philosophy. Hegel had worked at the end of the eighteenth century, together with Schelling, at laying the foundations of a system of natural philosophy. Schelling, as a young firebrand, had constructed his natural philosophy in a remarkable way out of what he called “intellectual Intuition” [intellektuale Anschauung]. He reached a point, however, where he could make no further progress. He immersed himself in the mystics at a certain point. His work, Bruno, or Concerning the Divine and Natural Principle in Things, and his fine treatise on human freedom and the origin of evil testify so wonderfully to this immersion. But for all this he could make no progress and began to hold back from expressing himself at all. He kept promising to follow up with a philosophy that would reveal the true nature of those hidden forces at which his earlier natural philosophy had only hinted. When Michelet published Hegel's natural philosophy in 1841, Schelling's long-expected and oft-promised “philosophy of revelation” had still not been vouchsafed to the public. He was summoned to Berlin. What he h ad to offer, however, was not the actual spirit that was to permeate the natural philosophy he had founded. He had striven for an intellectual intuition. He ground to a halt at this point, because he was unable to use Imagination to enter the sphere of which I spoke to you today. And so he was stuck there. Hegel, who had a more rational intellect, had taken over Schelling's thoughts and carried them further by applying pure thinking to the observation of nature. That was the origin of Hegel's natural philosophy. And so one had Schelling's unfulfilled promise to bring forth nature out of the spirit, and then one had Hegel's natural philosophy, which was discarded by science in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was misunderstood, to be sure, but it was bound to remain so, because it was impossible to gain any kind of connection to the ideas contained in Hegel's natural philosophy with regard to phenomenology, the true observation of nature. It is a kind of wonderful incident: Schelling traveling from Munich to Berlin, where great things are expected of him, and it turns out that he has nothing to say. It was a disappointment for all who believed that through Hegel's natural philosophy revelations about nature would emerge from pure thinking. Thus it was in a way demonstrated historically, in that Schelling had attained the level of intellectual intuition but not that of genuine Imagination and in that Hegel showed as well that if pure thinking does not lead on to Imagination or to Inspiration—that is, to the level of nature's secrets ... it was shown that the evolution of the West had thereby run up against a dead end. There was as yet nothing to counter what had come over from the Orient and engendered skepticism; one could counter with nothing that was suffused with the spirit. And anyone who had immersed himself lovingly in Schelling and Hegel and has thus been able to see, with love in his heart, the limitations of Western philosophy, had to strive for anthroposophy. He had to strive to bring about an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for the West, so that we will possess something that works creatively in the spirit, just as the East had worked in the spirit through systole and diastole in their interaction. We in the West can allow perception and thinking to resound through one another in the soul-spirit [das geistig-seelische Ineinanderklingenlassen], through which we can rise to something more than a merely abstract science. It opens the way to a living science, which is the only kind of science that enables us to dwell within the element of truth. After all the failures of the Kantian, Schellingian, and Hegelian philosophies, we need a philosophy that, by revealing the way of the spirit, can show the real relationship between truth and science, a spiritualized science, in which truth can really live to the great benefit of future human evolution.

Good morning, gentlemen! Has anyone come up with anything today?

Mr. Pea: I would like to ask how it is that people today look at the starry sky the way they do, and yet the ancient Babylonians looked at it quite differently?

Dr. Steiner: Well, the question belongs there, to say something at all about the whole turnaround that has occurred in the way the world is viewed. You have this astronomy course here with Dr. Vreede, and you will see how difficult it actually is today to get through the computational and mathematical considerations.

You see, if you want to understand these things, you have to imagine, above all, that the ancients were indeed much, one might say, more spiritual than the present people. For a relatively long time, people were aware of those effects in nature that are actually quite unknown today. I would like to draw your attention to a few things in this regard. For one cannot understand what the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians wanted with their star science if one does not understand certain things that are actually quite unknown today.

For example, Rousseau still recounts the following: In Egypt, that is, in a warmer region, of which we have also heard such remarkable things in the last lesson, he had managed, by looking at them in a certain way, for example at toads that came towards him, by staring into their eyes, to make the toads stand still and unable to move at all. The toads were paralyzed. He always succeeded in doing this in warmer regions, in Egypt, for example. There he was able to paralyze the toads and later also kill them. But he wanted to do the same in Lyon. There a toad came towards him. He looked at it, stared at it, and lo and behold, he was paralyzed! He could no longer move his eye, was paralyzed, as if he were dead. It was only when people came and got a doctor, and he was given viper venom, snake venom, which just pulled him out of the cramp, that he came out of it. Then the story had turned. So you see, you just have to go from Egypt to Lyon for such effects, emanating from nature beings, to simply reverse themselves.

We can therefore say that there are indeed effects that are very closely related to human will, because it is an expression of human will. There are such effects. And these forces are also there. Because what was there a century ago is still there today, will always be there as long as the earth exists. But people today no longer want to know about such things and no longer care about them.

But, you see, gentlemen, this is still connected with a few other things. We have to take into account the place where they are made if we want to understand how certain things are. So in a sense we have to consult geography. But not the kind of geography that is valid today, because it does not talk about the difference between the effects of toads, starting from humans or towards humans, but it only talks about very external things.

Now I will tell you another example along these lines. You see, in the 17th century there was a scholar, van Helmont. This scholar still had much of what had been known earlier. For actually the things of earlier knowledge were only completely lost in the 19th century. In the 17th century they were still quite present, and in the 18th century they began to decline. But it was only in the 19th century that people became quite clever in their own opinion!

Van Helmont reflected on how one could know more than one can have through the ordinary human mind. Today, people do not think about how one could know more than one can know through the ordinary mind, because they believe that the human mind can know everything. But van Helmont, who was a doctor, did not think much of this human mind. He wanted spiritual knowledge.

But to gain spiritual knowledge in a spiritual way, as we try to do today in anthroposophy, was not yet possible at that time. Mankind had not progressed that far. So van Helmont used even older methods. He did the following, which I certainly do not recommend anyone imitate. It can't be done. And it wouldn't be as effective today as it was back then. But van Helmont did it.

You see, he took a certain plant that is a poisonous medicinal plant. It is prescribed for certain diseases. He took that. Of course, being a doctor, he knew that he could not eat this plant because it would kill him. But he licked the tip of the root, the lower part of the root. And now he describes the state he entered into in the following way. He says he felt as if his head had been switched off completely, as if he had become headless. He had become completely headless from it. Of course, his head had not fallen off, but he no longer felt it. So he could no longer know anything through his head. But now his abdominal area began to function like a head. And lo and behold, he received great revelations in the form of images, what we today in anthroposophy call imagination, in the form of images from the spiritual world. And that gave him a great jolt in life, a terrible jolt; because now he knew: you can not only say something about the spiritual world through the intellect, but you can also really see the spiritual world. He did not think through the nervous system, which is in the metabolic-limb system of man, but he looked at it and really saw the spiritual world. He thus received imaginations of the spiritual world.

This lasted two hours. After these two hours, he had a slight dizzy spell. Then he recovered. Now you can imagine that this, of course, gave his life a significant jolt; because from that moment on, he knew that one can see the spiritual world. But he knew something else as well. He knew that the head with its thinking is an obstacle to seeing the spiritual world.

Of course, we do not do it by licking a plant root like van Helmont – some people believe that, but it is nonsense – but through spiritual exercises, the thinking of the head itself is eliminated. The head is there only to grasp what is seen with the rest of the human organism. Thus the same process is evoked in a spiritual way that van Helmont evoked in an ancient way.

Now I am not telling you everything that would be necessary to refer you once more to spiritual training; that can be done on another occasion. But today, in answer to Mr. Erbsmehl's question, I am telling you that the two things I have told you are connected with the influence of the stars. And since the influence of the stars is denied altogether today, people no longer look at these things.

Van Helmont, on the other hand, had experienced this great shock in his life, and because he liked it, he wanted to repeat the experience more often, and he nibbled at the tip of the plant root again and again. But he did not achieve the same result.

Yes, but what does it mean that he did not achieve the same result? You see, it means that van Helmont did something later on that was no longer quite in accordance with the earlier thing. Van Helmont himself has no explanation for this. Of course I cannot tell you when van Helmont first nibbled on the tip of the plant root, because he does not give the date. But from what can otherwise be known from spiritual science, the following can be said.

You see, the first time van Helmont nibbled on the tip of the root, there was definitely a full moon. And he didn't pay attention to that. Later he didn't do it during a full moon anymore, and then he didn't succeed in the same way anymore. Something remained with him from the first time; he was always able to see something in the spiritual world. But he never managed to have such a jolt again as the first time.

Now, in the 17th century, he no longer knew that this was dependent on the moon and believed that it came from the plant root alone. But in older times, such things were known quite precisely. And therefore, in older times, this view was also very much alive everywhere, that the stars have a certain influence on the life of humans, animals and plants.

If one were to examine how such things happen, one would have to say: We do not eat poisonous plants, but we do eat plants, and we also eat the roots of plants. And while poisonous plants can only be used for healing, the other plants, which are not poisonous, are used as food. You see, gentlemen, the thing is this: When you eat a plant root, it is just as the poisonous plant root is under the influence of the moon. The moon has an influence on the growth of plant roots. Therefore, certain plant roots are very necessary for a certain human constitution. You know, for example, that there is also a population of the intestines, that is, the digestive organs, worms that are very troublesome. Now, for people who are prone to worms, beetroot is a good food. When the beetroot enters the intestines, the worms become angry, are paralyzed and then leave with the intestinal waste. So you can see that the root also has an influence on the life of these lower animals, the worms. The beetroot root does not poison us, but it poisons the worms. And again, you will find that the greatest effectiveness in expelling the worms comes from those plant roots that we eat during the full moon. Such things must be taken into account.

Now, you see, you can say: If you study the plant root, it turns out that the plants give us something that has a very strong effect on the metabolic limb system. You could even provide great help to people who have certain illnesses by giving them a root diet, by eating roots and by doing it in such a way that you give them at the time of the full moon and let them rest at the time of the new moon.

Now, you see, everything that can be observed in plants also has a meaning for humans, namely for human reproduction, for human growth. Children who have an addiction to staying small could also be nursed back to health with root food so that they would grow more easily; you just have to do it at the appropriate time in youth, between birth and the age of seven. The forces of the moon have a great influence on everything in the plant world and everything in the animal and human world that has to do with reproduction and growth. So you have to study the moon not only by pointing a telescope at it, but by studying what it causes on Earth. And with the Babylonians and Assyrians, those who were the scholars there, who were then called initiates, knew exactly: this plant is so under the influence of the moon, another so, and so on. They did not speak of the moon as a mere sphere, frozen up there in space, but they saw the effects of the moon everywhere. And these moon effects are mainly seen on the surface of the earth. They do not go deeper into the earth. They go just far enough to stimulate the roots of plants. They are not stuck in the earth at all.

You can find proof, for example, that the moon's forces do not go into the earth at all if you ask swimmers who swim in moonlight. They soon go out again because they always have the feeling that they are sinking. The water is pitch black. It does not go into the water, it does not go deeper at all, it does not connect with the earth, the moonlight. And so you see that the matter is such that the animals and plants are under the influence of the moonlight, which does not even come from the earth, but only from the very outermost surface to the roots of the plants. Now, this gives you a first insight into the starry sky.

Let us now turn to the example I gave you of Rousseau, who could paralyze, even kill, toads in the hot zone, but who himself became paralyzed in the temperate zone, in Lyon. What is the reason for this?

Yes, gentlemen, you just have to consider: when the Earth, which is a sphere, is almost a sphere, when it is illuminated by the sun, the sun's rays fall almost vertically in the hot zone. There they have a completely different effect than in the temperate zone, where they fall obliquely on the earth, at a completely different angle. And just as growth and reproduction in plants and in humans are influenced by the moon, so what its inner animal powers are, what is transmitted to the gaze, is influenced by the sun. These animalistic, bestial forces, which are indeed deeds, depend on the sun. So the sun, with its forces, causes humans in Egypt to be easily fascinated, paralyzed, even killed by toads, while in temperate zones they must yield to the influence of the toads themselves. So that depends on the sun again.

And then you will know that sometimes thinking itself, the whole inner life, is more difficult, sometimes easier. This again depends on Saturn, depending on where it is.

And so we have stellar effects for everything that occurs in human, animal, and plant life. Only the minerals are earthly effects. Therefore, with a science that is limited only to the earthly, one cannot possibly come to really understand the human being in any way. And one cannot know what the stars do if one does not look at the deeds of the stars.

Just imagine – today it's not so bad, but in the past it could still happen – that someone was a great statesman because of me. One could have asked those who lived with him in the house, who cooked for him, the cook, for example, who was not at all interested in statecraft, what the man does. She might have said: He has breakfast, lunch, and dinner; otherwise he does nothing at all, and during the rest of the time he goes out. Otherwise he does nothing. She would simply not have known what else he does.

Today's scholars only talk about the stars in terms of what they can calculate; they only know that. The others, the earlier people, were interested in what else the stars do. And that is why they had such a star science. They knew that the moon has a relationship to the plant in man, the sun to the animal in man, and Saturn has a relationship to the completely human in man. And so they went further.

Now they said to themselves: So the sun has a relationship to the animal in man. When the sun shines completely vertically, then man in the hot zone can have a strong effect on animals.

Now, you see, in Europe, for example, there is a strong effect of man on horses; but it will never be as intimately connected with the horse as it is with the Arabs, in the hot zone, because this relationship between man and animal cannot take place there. It depends on the vertical incidence of the sun's rays, on the effects of the sun.

Please continue, gentlemen. In Babylonia and Assyria, people knew that certain effects and forces emanated from the sun. But now people have observed the sun (it is being drawn). They said to themselves, there is the constellation of Leo, a group of stars out in the sky, and there is the constellation, let's say, of Scorpius. Now there is a certain time of the year when the sun is in the constellation of Leo, that is, it covers the lion, and you can see the lion behind the sun. At another time, the sun covers the constellation of Scorpius, or Sagittarius, or some other group of stars.

Now the Babylonians and Assyrians knew that these effects, which emanate from people onto animals, are strongest when the sun is in front of Leo; they become weaker when the sun moves on and is in Virgo or Scorpius. So they not only knew that there is a relationship between the planets and what people do, but they also knew that there is a relationship between the position of the sun and whether it covers Leo or covers Scorpio, because that is when these things change.

What do we do today? Today we simply calculate: the sun is in the zodiac in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Pisces and so on; we calculate how long it will be in that constellation, when it will be in it and so on. We know that on March 21, the sun is in the constellation of Pisces, but that's all we know. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, for example, still knew that when Saturn is in a certain constellation, called the Pleiades, the human head is at its freest. They knew all this. They could easily judge this because they lived in a hotter area than we do and developed a certain science from which they understood the whole human being from the heavens.

If we can say that this science was such that it was applied to people – well, this science has gradually been forgotten. But in those days, the planetary system was understood, and the fixed starry sky was also understood. It was known that depending on whether a planet is here or there, it means this or that for human life. It was known that when the sun is in Leo, the sun exerts the strongest influence on the human heart.

The thing is this: people have now tried to see how it is with minerals. They have said to themselves: the stars affect plants, animals and humans; they do not affect minerals. Only the earth affects minerals. But the minerals in the earth did not just come into being today; they came into being much earlier and were also plants in ancient times. All minerals were plants. You know from the bituminous coal that it was a plant. But just like the bituminous coal, all other minerals were once plants. The moon had an influence on them, and in even earlier times, the sun also had an influence, and in still earlier times, Saturn also had an influence. And now they wanted to know which mineral, in much earlier times, when it was still a plant, had an influence from the sun. So they examined the effect of the mineral on humans and found out, for example, that when the sun is in front of Leo and has a strong influence on the heart, the same effect on the heart is produced as when gold is administered to humans. From this they concluded that the sun once had a great influence on gold. Or when Saturn is in the Pleiades constellation, then the strongest influence is on the human head. It becomes free. And then they tried to find out which mineral, when it was still an animal – because before they were plants, the minerals were animals – could have had the strongest influence from Saturn. Then they found that it was lead. And in this way one finds out that lead also has the effect of making the human head freer. Therefore, someone who gets a dull head and for whom this is caused by the fact that he carries out certain digestive processes, which should no longer take place in the head, through illness with the head, must be given lead.

And so we get a metal for each planet. And that is why the Babylonians and Assyrians wrote the sun with this sign:®. But they also wrote gold with this sign. They knew that the stars no longer have any influence on the minerals now that the earth is there, but they once had it. They wrote the sun and gold like this:®. We write the sun and the gold with the letters that are in our alphabet; but the ancients always made this sign:®. They also did not write “lead”, but they made this sign:, and that means both Saturn and lead. It would not have occurred to anyone in ancient times to write Saturn or lead with ordinary letters. If he wanted to write that, he wrote this sign Ahin. If he wanted to write “silver,” he wrote this sign: C. That means both the moon and silver. So that the Earth, insofar as it is metallic, was also related to the stars.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, you don't really know very much about man and his relationship to the universe if you can't go into such things.

Now, on to the next point. These things were generally known in ancient times. The fact of the matter is that when Christianity first spread, such knowledge was also spread throughout the more southern regions of Europe. For example, there is a book about nature from the first Christian centuries that contains much of this. Today, we need to know it again, otherwise we cannot find the confusing information there, because it is quite confusing; but it contains much of such ancient wisdom. But then came the time when Christianity limited itself only to the intellect, and gave up everything else for the dogma. That was the time when everything of such an ancient science was eradicated in Europe. Between the 5th and 11th or 12th centuries, work was actually done to eradicate this ancient science in Europe. And to a high degree, they succeeded. You see, it was like this: the people who practiced this ancient science in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Spain, that is, in southern regions, these people were at the same time already quite spiritually and physically depraved people. The history of Rome at that time is actually a terrible one; they were morally completely corrupt people. They still had the old science, but they could no longer maintain themselves as human beings, figures such as the autocrats Nero or Commodus.

The following story can be told about Commodus, for example, the Roman Caesar. This Commodus, like all Roman emperors, was an initiate. But what does “initiate” mean in this case? It is the same as if someone today bears some title by name. Every Roman emperor was considered an initiate from the outset because he was an emperor. This does, however, show that in those days science was held in very high esteem. Except for Augustus, the Roman emperors did not have this science. But they too were initiated into the mysteries; they were even able to initiate others themselves. Now there was a certain degree where the person being initiated had to be struck on the head. This is a symbolic act. The emperor Commodus gave this blow in such a way that the person concerned collapsed dead. You couldn't punish it because it was the emperor Commodus. Just as they were as “initiates”, they were as human beings.

Further north, there were still people who, although they later developed into the Central European culture, were still quite uncivilized at that time. But the Germanic peoples later conquered Italy, Greece and Spain. Only those who worked with pure logic, with pure thinking, were preserved there. That was to be only dogma. The other should not be understood. Thinking was limited only to the most external things. And so it has come about that what was old knowledge has been eradicated everywhere by schools and monasteries. And one can see how, in fact, only by devious means, I would say, through contraband, some of this Babylonian science has come to Europe. But as a rule it did not travel far. In Babylonia, such science was cultivated for a relatively long time.

But even into the Middle Ages there was a Greek empire in Constantinople. Yes, you see, gentlemen, they were strange figures! Just as the Polish Jews sometimes come to us with their caftans and their old scrolls, which are also not very well regarded sometimes, but are profoundly knowledgeable in Judaism, such figures also arrived in Constantinople again and again at a time when everything was being eradicated. They arrived with large, mighty parchment scrolls on which they had written many things. Now, you see, these parchment scrolls were taken from these strange figures in Constantinople and opened there. And so everything that came from Babylonia and Assyria was stored in Constantinople. And no one took care of it. And in Europe, everything was eradicated. It was only in the 12th and 13th centuries and later in the Middle Ages, with the decline of the empire, that these parchments were freed again, and many people stole them. They then traveled around Europe. All that was not yet deciphered by the learned but by the unlearned came from these parchment scroll.

And so a little knowledge was spread again in the Middle Ages. Such a little knowledge then had a stimulating effect on others again, otherwise there would not have been a van Helmont, Paracelsus and so on, if these people had not brought the parchment scrolls they had stolen to Europe and sold them there for a lot of money. As a result, a lot of things came to Europe again. And many secret societies still exist today because of all the knowledge that came to Europe. There are all kinds of orders, freemasons, odd fellows and so on; they would have no knowledge at all if it had not been brought to Europe from Constantinople in the parchment scrolls that were sold for a lot of money back then.

But this knowledge was not appreciated. If you were a learned canon like Copernicus, you did not go to the people who had such parchment scrolls. You were not allowed to do that. You would have lost all respect. Yes, but as a result, the old science also lost all respect. And a man like Copernicus first established the kind of science that we still have today, really still have today.

But then something very strange happened, gentlemen. The most beautiful thing about it is that Copernicus now founded a certain astronomical science, and it was already so that he no longer knew everything that had been known about it in the past, just as we no longer know it today. But the following period did not even understand what Copernicus said. Two sentences of Copernicus were understood; the third was no longer understood. Because if one understands the two sentences of Copernicus, then one believes that the sun is in the center, around the sun Venus, Mercury, Earth and so on revolve. That is taught today in all schools. But if you understand the whole of Copernicus, it is not at all like that. Copernicus himself still draws attention to the fact that the sun is stationary (it is drawn), with Mercury behind it, Venus behind it, the earth here and so on. In reality, all this revolves with the sun through space in such a spiral. You can read that from Copernicus if you want. So there is the strange fact that even Copernicus trampled on the old science, but that the more recent ones have not even understood Copernicus. Now people are beginning to understand Copernicus, that is, to see that he said three sentences, not just two; the third sentence was too difficult for people to understand. And so, little by little, astronomy has become what it is today: a mere calculation.

And now you can imagine: what remained of the old science was not achieved in the way we want to achieve something today. We have to achieve something today with the full clarity of mind. The ancients proceeded more instinctively. And so it is no longer understandable what the ancients meant by knowledge.

A few years ago there was a very interesting example of this. A Swedish scholar came across an old alchemical book that contained all sorts of information about lead and silver. It said that if you add lead to silver, this will happen, and if you add gold, that will happen, and so on. What did the scholar do? He said: Since we have written these things down, let's try to reproduce them! And he imitated them in his laboratory, took lead as it is available today, silver as it is available today, treated them in the fire as described there – nothing came of it!

Nothing could come of it, because what he read there were such signs. Now he believed that this sign © means gold; so I take gold and process it chemically. This sign r. means lead; so I take lead and process it chemically.

But the terrible thing was that the man with whom the Swedish scholar read this, the alchemist, did not mean the metals in this case, but the planets, and meant that if you mixing solar forces with Saturn forces and moon forces – what is described here actually refers to the human embryo – when solar and lunar forces act on the child in the womb, then this and that happens.

Now it happened to this Swedish scholar that he wanted to do in the retort with the outer metals what the old alchemist refers to as germination in the human womb. Of course that could not be right, because he should have seen the development in the human womb; then he could have figured it out. You see, so little is understood today of what was actually meant in this ancient science.

All of this will now show you how this question, which Mr. Erbsmehl asked, is actually to be answered. It is actually to be answered in such a way that one becomes aware: It is all well and good and right with modern science. Today, one can calculate exactly the position of a star; one can calculate the distance between it and another star, and one can also see through the spectroscope what color the light rays have, and from that one can deduce the material composition of the stars. But how the stars affect the earth is something that must first be researched again! And this must not be researched in the way that many people do today, by simply taking old books. Of course, it would be easy if one could simply take old books and find out what people no longer know today. But that is no longer of any use with Paracelsus, because people no longer understand him even when they read him with today's eyes. Rather, it is a matter of learning anew how to research what influence the stars have on people. And that can only be done with spiritual science, with anthroposophical spiritual science.

Then you come back to researching not only where the moon is, but how the moon is connected to the whole person. You realize that the child experiences the influence of the moon for ten lunar months, so ten times four weeks in the womb, and experiences the influence of the moon in such a way that during this time the full moon is experienced eight, nine, ten times. Now, the child swims in amniotic fluid and is therefore a completely different being before it is born, protected from the forces of the earth. That is the important thing, that it is protected from the forces of the earth, and since it also has the influence of the other stars, it has the influence of the moon.

You see, it should be the case that today at our universities and at our schools, and even at the elementary schools in a certain way, as far as that can be, things would be studied quite differently, that above all the human being would be studied, the human heart, the human head, and in connection with that the stars would be studied. And at the universities, there should first be a description of how the human germ develops from the very small human seed through the first, second, third, fourth, fifth week and so on. This description exists, but the other description, of what the moon does during the same period, does not exist. Therefore, one can only have a science of the physical development of man if, on the one hand, one describes what happens in the mother's womb and, on the other hand, one describes the actions of the moon.

And again, one can only truly understand how, for example, teeth change around the seventh year if one not only describes - as is done today - how the milk tooth is, the other grows in after it, and the milk tooth is pushed out, but if one again has a sun science; because this depends on the forces of the sun.

And likewise, when a person becomes sexually mature, today one describes the purely physical processes. But these depend on Saturn; one needs a Saturn science. So one cannot proceed as one does today, describing each thing separately. Because then, of course, it turns out as it did in a hospital in a large European city. A man came to the university hospital with a spleen disease, as he believed. He asked: “Which department should I go to with a spleen disease?” He was told that he should go to any department. Unfortunately, he mentioned in passing that he also had a liver disease. He was told: “You can't have anything from us, you have to go to a completely different hospital, that's for people with liver disease, and the ones we have here are only for people with spleen disease.” He was now “between two bundles of hay”, like the well-known donkey, between two bundles of hay that were the same size and looked exactly the same. It is a famous logical image of the freedom of will! They said: What does a donkey do when he is between two bundles of hay that are the same size and smell the same? If he wants to choose the left one, then he thinks: the right one tastes just as good; if he wants to choose the right one, he thinks: the left one is just as good. And then he goes back and forth and dies of hunger between these two haystacks! So it was with the two diseases, he did not know where to go, and actually could die between his decision inside whether he belonged to the department for liver diseases or to the department for spleen diseases!

I only mention this to show that today everyone only knows a very small part of the world. But you can't know anything like that today! Because if you want to know something about the moon today, you have to go to the observatory and ask the people there. But they don't know anything about the origin of man. So you have to ask a gynecologist, an obstetrician, a female professor. But he doesn't know anything about the stars. But the two things belong together.

This is the source of the misery of today's knowledge: that everyone knows a piece of the world, but no one the whole. That is why it is, and it is based on it, that science today, when it is presented in popular lectures, is so terribly boring. Of course, gentlemen, the subject must be boring if you only tell people what is just a small part of the subject.

Imagine you want to know what a chair looks like that is not here, and someone describes the wood to you; but you want to know how it is designed. Then you will be bored if the person only describes the wood of the chair to you. So today it is boring to learn, as it is called today, anthropology, the science of the physical human being, because what is important is not described. And if it is described, it has no relation to the matter at hand.

So star science will only come into its own when it is combined with human science. And that is what it is about; that is the way I can answer this question for you today in a way that is appropriate to the subject. It is really the case that one must understand such important things as those I have told you about Rousseau and van Helmont - which are there, and which cannot be understood from the earth at all. People have become materialistic even in terms of words. For example, what was it called when someone could paralyze animals with his gaze? It was called magnetism. Yes, but later on the word magnetism was only applied to iron, to the magnet. And when people talk about it in science today, they only talk about leaving it with iron and not abusing magnetism. Only quacks still talk about magnetizing a person; but they can no longer imagine what it means. To see through such talk, a spiritual science is needed.

Next time at nine o'clock on Wednesday.

Mankind is ever in need of truths which cannot, in every age, be wholly understood. The assimilation of truths is not only of significance for our knowledge; Truths in themselves contain life-force; and by permeating ourselves with truth, we permeate our soul being with a Cosmic element, just as we must permeate our physical being with air taken from outside in order to live. Deep truths are indeed expressed in great religious revelations, but in such a form that their real inner meaning is often only understood much later.

The New Testament has been written; the New Testament is there as a revelation for humanity—but the whole of the earth's evolution will have to run its course before this New Testament will be fully understood. In the future, man will require much knowledge of the external world, and of the spiritual world also; and if taken in the right sense everything will make for an understanding of the New Testament. The understanding comes about gradually, but the New Testament is written in a simple form so that it can be absorbed, although it can only later and gradually be understood. The assimilation of the truths that are to be found in the New Testament is not without significance, even if we cannot as yet understand the truths in their inner depths. Later on, the truth becomes cognitional force, but it is already life-force; it is imbibed, in a more or less childlike form. And if these very questions which we began to consider yesterday are to be understood in the sense in which they are imparted in the New Testament, we need knowledge of greater depth, with insight into the spiritual world and its mysteries.

To continue the last lecture, we must again examine some occult mysteries, for they will be able to guide us to a further understanding of the riddle of guilt and sin, and from this point of view throw light on the relation of Christ to the human soul.

In the course of our anthroposophical work we have often been faced with a point of view which may be clothed in the form of a question, ‘Why did Christ die in a human body?’ In reality this question expresses the riddle of the Mystery of Golgotha: ‘Why did Christ die, why did the Godhead die, in a human body?’

God died because for the sake of the evolution of the universe it was necessary for Him to be able to enter humanity; it was necessary that a God of the upper worlds should be able to become the leader of the earth-evolution. Christ had to become akin to death. Akin to death! One could wish that this expression might be deeply understood by the soul of man. As a rule a man only meets with death when he himself sees another die, or in different phenomena akin to death, which are to be found in the world, or in the certainty that he must himself pass through the portal of death when the present incarnation is over. But this is really only the external aspect of death. Death is present in quite a different form in the world in which we live. Let us start from an ordinary everyday phenomenon. We breathe the air in and we breathe it out again: but thereby the air undergoes a change. When this air is exhaled it is dead air; as exhaled air, it cannot be inhaled again, for exhaled air is harmful. I only indicate this in order that you may understand the meaning of the occult saying: ‘When the air enters into man, it dies.’ That which is living in the air dies when it enters into man. Death enters the air with every breath taken by man. That, however, is only one phenomenon. The ray of light which penetrates our eye must likewise die, and we should have nothing from the rays of light if our eye did not set itself up against the ray of light as our lungs do in the case of the air; the light that enters into our eye dies in our eye; and as a result of the death of the light in our eye it comes about that we can see. That which is living in the light dies when it penetrates our eye. The ray of light is killed in the eye. We slay it in order that our eye may be able to perceive. We are filled with that which must die within us in order that we may have our earth-consciousness. Corporeally we kill the air; we kill also the ray of light which penetrates us, we kill it in many ways.

When we call Spiritual Science to our aid, we differentiate earth substance, and the substance of water, air and heat; we then enter into the world of light-ether; we speak also of the warmth-ether. As far up as the light-ether, we kill that which penetrates us; we slay it unceasingly in order that we may have our earth-consciousness. But there is something that is not killed by our earth-existence. We know that above the light-ether there is the so-called ‘chemical-ether,’ and then there comes the ‘life-ether.’ Those are the two kinds of ether which we cannot kill. But, because of this, these two kinds of ether have no special participation in us. If we were able to kill the chemical-ether, the waves of the harmony of the spheres would sound perpetually into our physical body, and we should destroy these waves with our physical life. And if we could also kill the life-ether, we should destroy and continuously kill within ourselves the cosmic life that streams to the earth. In earthly sound a substitute is given to us, but it must not be compared with what we should hear if the chemical-ether were audible to us as physical human beings. For physical sound is a product of the air and is not the spiritual sound; it is only a substitute for the spiritual sound.

When the Luciferic temptation came, the progressive gods were obliged to place man in a sphere, where, from the light-ether downwards death lives in his physical body. But at that time the progressive gods said—and the words are there in the Bible—‘Man has taken unto himself the faculty of differentiation between Good and Evil, but Life he is not to have. Of the Tree of Life he is not to eat.’ In Occultism an addition may be made to this; to the sentence ‘Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat’ might be added the words ‘and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear.’ Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear! These spheres were closed to man. Only through a certain process in the old Mysteries were the tones of the Sphere-Music and the Cosmic Life, pulsating through the universe, revealed to those who were to be initiated when it was given them, outside the body, to see the Christ in advance. Hence it is that the old philosophers speak of the Music of the Spheres.

In drawing attention to this, we indicate at the same time those regions from which the Christ came to us at the time of the baptism by John in Jordan. Whence did Christ come? He came from those spheres which had been closed to man, which man had to forget at the beginning of the Earth-evolution, as a result of the Luciferic temptation—from the region of the Music of the Spheres—from the region of Cosmic Life. At the baptism by John in Jordan, Christ entered into a human body, and that which permeated this human body was the spiritual essence of the Harmony of the Spheres, the spiritual essence of the cosmic Life—elements that still belonged to the human soul during its earth-evolution, but from which the soul of man had to be separated as a result of the Luciferic temptation. In this sense also man is related to Spirit. As a being of soul he really belongs to the region of the Music of the Spheres, and to the region of the Word—of the living cosmic Ether. But he was cast out from these regions. They were to be restored to him again in order that he might again be gradually permeated by that from which he had been cast out. Therefore it is that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, the words of St. John's Gospel touch us so deeply: In the primal beginning, when man was not yet subject to temptation, was the Logos. Man belonged to the Logos ... the Logos was with God, and man was with the Logos, with God. And through the baptism by John in Jordan the Logos entered into human evolution—He became Man.

Here we have the all-important connection. Let us leave this truth as it stands there, and approach the question from another side. Life as a whole shows itself to us only from the external side. If it did not show itself merely from the external side, man would know how he absorbs the corpse of the light into his eye when he sees.

What was it that the Christ had to undertake in order that the fulfillment of St. Paul's saying: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me,’ might be made possible? It had to be possible that Christ should permeate the nature of man; but the nature of man is filled with what is slain through human nature in earth-existence, from the light-ether that dies in the human eye downwards. The nature of man is filled with death; but what lives in the highest kinds of ether was withdrawn in order that human nature might not be filled with their death. But in order that Christ might dwell in us He had to become akin to death, akin to all that is spread out in the world, beginning from the light down into the depths of materiality. Christ had to be able to pass into that which we bear within us as the corpse of the light, of the heat, of the air, etc. It was only because He was able to become akin to death that He could become akin to man. And we must feel within our soul that the God had to die so that He might be able to enfill us, who had acquired death as a result of the Luciferic temptation, so that we might be able to say: ‘Christ in us.’

Many other things are hidden for man behind sense-existence. He turns his gaze upon the plant-world; he sees how the light of the sun conjures forth the plants from out of the soil. Science teaches us that light is necessary for the growth of plants, but that is only half of the truth. He who looks at the plants with clairvoyant sight sees living spiritual elements rising out of them. The light dips down into the plants and rises again out of them as a living spiritual element; the light comes down into the plants in order to be transformed in them and to be born again as a living spiritual element. In the animals it is the chemical-ether that enters, and this chemical-ether is not perceptible to man: if man could be aware of it, it would sound spiritually. The animals transform this ether into water-spirits. The plants transform light into air-spirits; animals transform the spirit active in the chemical-ether into water-spirits. But man transforms what dwells in the cosmic ether-in the life-ether—that which enables him to live at all and which he has been prevented from killing within himself—that he transforms into earth-spirits.

In a course of lectures in Carlsruhe ‘From Jesus to Christ,’ I once spoke of the human ‘phantom.’ This is not the time for drawing the connecting threads between what is to be said here and what was said then about the human ‘phantom,’ but such connecting threads do exist and you will perhaps find them for yourselves. To-day let me present the thing from another side.

There is perpetually brought forth in man something that is also spiritual—the life in him. It is forever passing out into the world. Man projects an aura around him, an aura of rays whereby he enriches the earthly spiritual element of the earth. In the earthly spiritual element of the earth, however, there are contained, all the qualities, moral or otherwise that man has acquired and that he bears within himself. This is absolutely true. Clairvoyant sight perceives how man sends out his moral, intellectual and aesthetic aura into the world and how this aura continues to live as earth-spirit in the spirituality of the earth. As a comet draws its tail through the cosmos, so does man draw through the whole of earthly life the spiritual aura which he projects. This spiritual aura is held together phantom-like, during a man's life, but at the same time it rays out into the world his moral and intellectual wealth of soul. Life is very complicated, and this also is a phenomenon of life.

When, in our occult studies, we go back to the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that men of those periods simply radiated this phantomlike entity which contained their moral qualities, into the external world, into the external spiritual aura of the earth. But humanity developed in the course of the earth's existence, and just at the epoch when the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass a certain stage had been reached in the evolution of this phantom-like entity. We may say that in earlier times the phantomlike entity, rayed out by man, was much more evanescent; by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had become denser, had more form; and as a fundamental characteristic of this phantom-like entity, man had mingled the connection with death, which he was developing in himself, by killing the ray of light that enters into his eye, and so on, as I have explained. These earthly spiritual entities which radiate from man himself are like a stillborn child, because man imparts his death to them. If Christ had not come upon Earth, human beings would, during the sojourn of their souls in earthly bodies, continuously have exuded entities with the impress of death upon them. And with this impress of death there would have been bound up the moral qualities of men, of which we spoke yesterday—objective guilt and objective sin,—they would have been within it.

Let us suppose that Christ had not come. What would have happened in the evolution of the earth? From the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha would otherwise have taken place, men would have spiritually created dense forms to which they would have imparted death. And these dense forms would have had to pass over to ‘Jupiter’ with the earth. Man would have imparted death to the earth. A dead earth would have given birth to a dead Jupiter.

It could not have been otherwise, because, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, man would have lacked the possibility of permeating what rayed out from him, with the Music of the Spheres, and the Cosmic Life. Christ brought these with the Mystery of Golgotha. And when there is a fulfillment of the words: ‘Not I, but Christ in me,’ when we bring about a relationship to Christ within ourselves, that which rays out from us, and which would otherwise be dead, is made living. Because we bear death within us the living Christ had to permeate us, in order that He might give life to the spiritual earth-essence that we leave behind us. Christ, the Living Logos, permeates and gives life to the objective guilt and sin which detaches itself from us and which we do not carry further in Karma, and because He gives it life, a living earth will evolve into a living Jupiter. That is the result of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The soul can, if it reflects, receive Christ in the following way. The soul can realize that there was once a time when man was within the bosom of the divine Logos. But man had to succumb to the temptation of Lucifer. He took death into himself. Into him there passed the germ by which he would have brought to birth a dead earth as a dead Jupiter. That remained behind, which, before the temptation, the human soul had been destined to receive for its earth-existence: with Christ, this entered again into man's earth-existence.

When man takes Christ into himself so as to feel permeated with Christ, he is able to say to himself: ‘That which the gods had allotted to me, before the Luciferic temptation, but which, owing to the temptation by Lucifer, had to remain behind in the Cosmos, enters into my soul with Christ. The soul may become perfect again through taking Christ into itself. Then only am I fully soul; then only am I again what, according to divine decree, I was intended to be from the very beginning of the earth.’ ‘Am I really a soul without Christ?’ man asks himself: and he feels that it is through Christ that he first becomes the soul that the guiding divine Beings intended him to be. That is the wonderful feeling of ‘home’ which souls can have with Christ; for out of the primal cosmic home of the soul did Christ descend, in order to give back to the soul of man that which had to be lost upon the earth as a result of the temptation of Lucifer. Christ leads the soul up again to its primordial home, the home allotted to it by the Gods. That is the bliss and the blessing of the human soul in the experience of Christ. It was this that gave such bliss to certain Christian mystics in the Middle Ages. They may have written many things which in themselves seem to be tinged with too strong a sense element, but it was nevertheless fundamentally spiritual. Such Christian mystics as those who joined Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, felt that the human soul was as a bride who had lost her bridegroom at the primal beginning of the earth; and when Christ entered into their souls, filling them with life, and soul, and spirit, Christ was to them as the bridegroom who united himself with the soul, and whom she had once lost in her original home, whom she had forsaken in order, through Lucifer, to follow the path of freedom, the path of differentiation between good and evil.

When the soul of man really lives into Christ, feeling that Christ is the living Being, Who from the death on Golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of the earth, and may flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly vivified through the Christ. The soul feels a transition from death to life.

As up to the most remote future we must live out our earthly existence in human bodies, we cannot hear directly the Music of the Spheres, nor have direct experience of the cosmic life. But we can experience that which flows out from Christ, and in this way, have, by proxy, as it were, that which otherwise comes to us from the Music of the Spheres and the cosmic life. Pythagoras of old spoke of the Music of the Spheres. Why?

Pythagoras was an initiate of the ancient Mysteries. He had gone through the experience wherein the soul passed out of the body. When the soul was out of the body he was able to be withdrawn into the spiritual worlds; there he saw Christ Who was later to come to the earth. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, man cannot speak of the Music of the Spheres as did Pythagoras; but even if his soul does not live outside the body he can speak in another way of the Music of the Spheres. As an initiate he might even to-day speak like Pythagoras; but the ordinary inhabitant of earth can speak of the Music of the Spheres and of the cosmic life only when he experiences in his soul: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me,’ for That is What has lived in the Sphere-Music, and in the cosmic life. But we too must pass through the experience in ourselves; we must receive the Christ into our souls. Let us suppose that a man were to fight against this that he did not wish to receive Christ into his soul. At the end of the earth when the earth spirits, that have arisen in the course Of the life of mankind, have formed themselves into a nebulous spirit-form that has emanated from the earth, such a man would bear with him all those phantom-like entities which had come forth from him in earlier incarnations. There would be a dead earth, and this would pass over, dead, to Jupiter. At the end of the earth-period a man might have carried out and completely absolved his Karma; he might have shouldered the whole of it in order to work out the adjustment of all the imperfections committed by him; he might have become perfect in his soul being, in his Ego, but sin and guilt would remain objectively in what was left behind. That is a truth, for we do not live only for ourselves; we do not live in order that we may become egoistically more perfect; we live for the world, and at the end of the world, the remains of our earth-incarnations will stand there like a mighty tableau if we have not taken into us the living Christ. When we connect what was said in the last lecture with what is being said to-day (and it is really the same, only taken from two sides) we understand how Christ takes upon Himself the guilt and sin of the earth-humanity, in so far as these are objective guilt and sin. And if we have inwardly realized this, ‘Not I, but Christ in me,’ then He takes over what comes forth from us, and these ‘remains’ of ours stand there vivified by Christ, irradiated by Christ and permeated by His life. Our incarnations stand there, that is to say, the remains of these incarnations, and taken as a whole, what do they yield?

Because Christ unites them all—Christ Who belongs to all mankind in the present and in the future—all the remains of the single incarnations coalesce. Let us take one incarnation: certain relics or remains are left, as we have described. Further incarnations have other remains, and so on, up to the end of the earth period. If these relics are permeated with Christ, they coalesce—compress what is rarified and you will get density—spirit also becomes dense, our collective earth-incarnations are united into a spiritual body. That belongs to us, we need it, because we evolve onwards to Jupiter, and it is the starting point of our embodiment on Jupiter. At the end of the earth period we shall stand there with our soul, we shall stand there before our earth-relics, which have been gathered together by Christ, and we shall have to unite ourselves with them in order to pass over with them to Jupiter.

We shall rise again in the body, in the earth-body, that has condensed out of the separate incarnations. From a heart profoundly moved I say: ‘In the body we shall rise again!’

In these days, young people of sixteen, and even less, are beginning to press their own confession of faith, and to talk of having happily grown beyond such nonsense as ‘The Resurrection of the Body.’ But those who seek to deepen their occult knowledge of the Mysteries of the Universe strive gradually to rise to an understanding of what has been said to men, because—as I explained at the beginning of this lecture—it had first of all to be said, in order that men might grasp it as life-truth and then understand it later. The resurrection of the body is a reality, but our soul must feel that it will arise face to face with the earth-relics that have been collected, brought together by Christ, face to face with the spiritual body that is permeated with Christ. This is what our soul must learn to understand. For supposing that (because of our not having received into ourselves the living Christ), we could not approach this earth-body with its sin and guilt and unite with it. If we rejected the Christ, the relics of our various incarnations would be scattered at the end of the earth-period; they would have remained, but they would not have been gathered together by the Christ who spiritualizes the whole of humanity. We should stand as a soul at the end of the earth period, and we should be bound to the earth, to that in the earth which remains dead in our relics. Certainly our souls would, in spirit, be free in an egoistic sense, but we could not approach our bodily relics. Such souls are the booty of Lucifer, for he strives to cross the true earth-goal, he tries to prevent souls from reaching their earth-goal, to hold them back in the spiritual world. And Lucifer will send over what has remained of scattered earth-relics, to the Jupiter evolution as a dead content of Jupiter, which will not separate as Moon from Jupiter, but will be in Jupiter, and will be continually emitting these earth-relics. And these earth-relics will have to be called into life on Jupiter by the souls above, of their own kind.

And now you will remember what I told you some years ago—that the human race on Jupiter will divide itself into those souls who have attained their earth-goal, who will have attained the goal of Jupiter, and into those souls who will form a middle kingdom between the human kingdom and the animal kingdom on Jupiter. These latter will be Luciferic souls, Luciferic—merely spiritual. They will have their body below, and this body will be a direct expression of their whole inner being, but they will be able to direct it only from outside. Two races, the good and the bad, will differentiate themselves from one another on Jupiter.

A Venus existence will follow that of Jupiter; and again there will be an adjustment as a result of the further evolution of the Christ event, but it is on Jupiter that man will realize what it means to wish to be perfect only in his own Ego, and not to make the whole earth his own affair. Through the whole course of the Jupiter cycle man will have to experience that, for all that he has not permeated with Christ, during his earthly existence, will then pass before his spiritual sight.

Let us reflect from this point of view upon the words of Christ which sent His disciples out into the world to proclaim His Name, and in His Name to forgive sins. Why to forgive sins in His Name? Because the forgiveness of sins is connected with His Name. Sins can only be blotted out and transformed into living life if Christ can be united with our earth-relics, if during our earth-existence He is within us in the sense of the Pauline saying: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me.’

And wherever any religious confession, in its outer ceremonial associates itself with this saying of Christ in order to bring home to souls the meaning and significance of Christ, we must seek this deeper meaning in it. When in any form of religious confession, one of His servants speaks of the forgiveness of sins, by Christ's command, as it were, it means that he who with his words about the forgiveness of sins, forms a connection with the forgiveness of sins through Christ, says to the soul in need of comfort: ‘I have seen that thou hast developed a living relationship to Christ. Thou dost unite with objective sin and guilt, and with what as objective sin and guilt is to enter into thine Earth-relics, all that Christ is to thee. Because I have recognized that thou hast permeated thyself with the Christ—therefore I dare to say to thee: “Thy sins are forgiven thee.”‘

Such words always mean that he, who in any religious confession whatsoever, speaks of the forgiveness of sins, is convinced that the person in question has formed a connection with Christ, that he wants to bear Christ in his heart and in his soul. Because of this he is permitted to give comfort when the other comes to him conscious of his guilt. ‘Christ will forgive thee, and I dare to say unto thee that in His Name thy sins are forgiven thee.’ Christ is the only forgiver of sins because He is the bearer of sins. He is the Being Who gives life to human earth-relics, and a wonderful link with Him is created when those who want to serve Him can give comfort in the words: ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee’—to those who show that in their inner being they feel a union with Christ. For it is a fresh strengthening of the relationship to Christ when the soul realizes ‘I have taken such a view of my guilt and of my sins, that it might be said to me that Christ takes them upon Himself, works through them with His Being.’ If the expression ‘forgiveness of sins’ is to be an expression of a truth it must contain as an undertone that the sinner is reminded of his bond with Christ even if he does not form it anew. There must be so inward a bond between the soul and Christ that the soul cannot be reminded of it often enough. And because Christ is bound up with the objective sin and guilt of the human soul, the soul can best remind itself in daily life of its relation to Christ by reminding itself at the moment of the forgiveness of sins, of the existence of the cosmic Christ in the earth's being. Those who join Anthroposophy in the real spirit, and not merely in an external sense, can most assuredly become their own father-confessors. Through Spiritual Science they can learn to know Christ so intimately and feel themselves so closely connected with Him—that they can be directly conscious of His spiritual presence. And, when they have solemnly vowed themselves to Him as the Cosmic Principle, they can in spirit direct their confession to Him, and in their silent meditation ask from Him the forgiveness of sins. But so long as men have not yet permeated themselves with Spiritual Science in this deep spiritual sense, intelligent reference must be made to that which, as an external sign, is known in the various religions of the world as the ‘Forgiveness of Sins.’ Men will become spiritually freer and freer, and in this greater spiritual freedom their communion with Christ will become more and more a thing of direct experience.

And there must be tolerance I A man who thinks that, through the deep understanding which his innermost soul has of Christ—the Spirit of Golgotha—he can hold direct intercourse with the Christ, must look with understanding upon those who need the positive declarations of a confession of faith, and who need a minister of Christ to give them comfort with the words ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee.’ On the other side there should be tolerance on the part of those who see that there are men who can manage for themselves. This may be all an ideal in the Earth existence, but the anthroposophist, at all events, may look out to such an ideal.

I have spoken to you of spiritual secrets which reveal themselves, and which make it possible for men—even those, who have imbibed much spiritual teaching—to look still more deeply into the nature of our being. I have spoken to you of the overcoming of human egoism, and of those things which we must understand before we can have a right understanding of Karma. I have spoken to you of man in so far as he is not only an ‘I’ being, but belong to the whole earth-existence, and is called to help forward the attainment of the divine aim of the earth. Christ did not come into the world and pass through the Mystery of Golgotha in order that He might be something to each one of us in our egoism. It would be terrible if Christ were to be so understood in a sense that the expression of Paul. ‘Not I, but Christ in me’ should only encourage a higher egoism. Christ died for the whole of humanity, for the humanity of the earth. Christ became the central Spirit of the earth Who has to save, for the sake of the earth, the spiritual-earthly elements that flow from man.

Those who read theological works to-day can bear out what I now say. Certain theologians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries peremptorily disposed of the popular belief of the Middle Ages, that Christ came upon earth in order to snatch the earth from the devil, to snatch the earth from Lucifer. Within modern theology there is an ‘enlightened’ materialism which will not recognize itself as such, on the contrary it imagines itself to be very enlightened; it says: ‘In the dark Middle Ages people said that Christ appeared in the world because He had to snatch the earth away from the devil.’ But the true explanation leads us back to this simple, popular belief of the people. For everything on the earth which is not set free by Christ belongs to Lucifer. All that is human in us—all that is more than what is contained in our Ego, will be ennobled; it will be made fruitful for the whole of humanity when it is permeated with Christ.

And now at the end of what we have been considering during the last few days, I do not want to omit to say these words to each single one of the souls who have gathered together here: Hope and confidence in the future of the work in which we are engaged, can dwell in our hearts, because we have endeavored, from the very beginning, to fill what we had to say with the will of Christ. And in this hope and confidence it may be said that our teaching is itself what Christ wishes to say to us, in fulfillment of His words: ‘I am with you always even to the end of the earth-ages.’ We have wished to be mindful only of what comes from Him; and that which He has breathed into us, according to His promise, we want to take into ourselves as Spiritual Science. Not because we feel our Spiritual Science to be filled with an element of Christian dogmatism, do we consider it truly Christian, but because having Christ within us, it is really a revelation of the Christ. I am therefore also convinced that what takes root as true Spiritual Science in those souls which want to receive our Christ-filled Spiritual Science will be fruitful for the whole of humanity.

Clairvoyant investigation shows that much of what is good in a spiritual sense in our Movement proceeds from those who have taken our ‘Christian’ Spiritual Science into themselves, and who, after having passed through the gate of death, send down to us the fruits of this Christian Spiritual Science. The Christian Spiritual Science, which they have taken into themselves, and which they are now sending down to us from the spiritual worlds is already living in us. For they do not keep it merely for the sake of perfecting their own Karma. They can let it stream into those who want to receive it. Comfort and hope arise for our Spiritual Science when we know that our so-called ‘dead’ are working with us.

In the second lecture we spoke about these things in a certain connection. But to-day, when we have come to the close of this course, I should like to add a personal word.

Whilst I have been speaking to this Norrköping Branch of our Society I could not help being conscious of the spirit of one who was so closely connected with us here. It is really true to say that the spirit of Frau Danielsen like a ‘good angel’ looks on all that this Branch wants to undertake. Hers also was a ‘Christian spirit’ in the sense described, and the souls who knew her will never feel themselves separated from her. May that spirit hover as guardian-spirit over this Branch! Willingly will it do so if the souls that work in this Branch receive it. With these words, which I speak from the depths of my heart, I close these lectures, and I hope that we shall continue to work together on the spiritual path which we have entered.

The phase of evolution beginning in our own time has a very special character. The same may, of course, be said of each epoch but in every case it is a matter of defining the particular characteristics. The present phase of evolution may be characterized in a general way by saying that all the experiences confronting humankind in the physical world during the earth's further existence will represent a decline, a retrogression. The time when human progress was made possible through the constant refinement of the physical forces is already over. In the future, too, humankind will progress, but only through spiritual development, through development on a higher level than that of the processes of the physical plane. People who rely entirely on the processes of the physical plane will find in them no source of satisfaction. An indication given in spiritual science a long time ago, in the lecture course on the Apocalypse,¹ namely that we are heading for the “War of All against All,” must from now onward be grasped in all its significance and gravity; its implications must not remain in the realm of theory but also come to expression in the actions, the whole behavior of human beings.

The fact that—to use a colloquialism—people in the future are not going to get much fun out of developments on the physical plane will bring home to them that further evolution must proceed from spiritual forces.

This can be understood only by surveying a lengthy period of evolution and applying what is discovered to experiences that will become more and more general in the future. The trend of forces that will manifest in the well-nigh rhythmical onset of war and destruction—processes of which the present catastrophe is but the beginning—will become only too evident. It is childish to believe that anything connected with this war can bring about a permanent era of peace for humanity on the physical plane. That will not be so. What must come about on the earth is spiritual development. Its direction and purport will be clear to us if, after surveying a comparatively lengthy epoch preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, we bear in mind something of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and then try to envisage the impulse of that event working in the future evolution of humankind.

We have studied the Mystery of Golgotha from many different points of view and will do so again today by characterizing, very briefly, the civilization which preceded it—let us say as far back as the third millennium B.C.—and then continued for a time as pagan culture in the period of Christian development itself. Within this pagan culture, the utterly different Hebraic-Jewish culture took root, having Christianity as its offspring.

The nature of pagan culture can best be understood if we realize that it was the outcome of knowledge, vision and action born of forces much wider in range than those belonging to present earthly existence. It was actually through Hebraic culture that the moral element was first inculcated into humanity. In paganism the moral element did not occupy a place separate and apart; this pagan culture was such that people felt themselves members of the whole cosmos.

This is something we must particularly bear in mind. Human beings living on earth within the old pagan world felt themselves membered into the whole cosmos. They felt how the forces at work in the movements of the stars extend into their own action, or, better said, into the forces taking effect in their actions. What later passed for astrology, and does so still, is but a reflection—and a very misleading one at that—of the ancient wisdom gleaned from contemplation of the stars in their courses and then used as the basis for precepts governing human action.

These ancient civilizations can be understood only if light is thrown by spiritual science upon human evolution in its outer aspect some four or five thousand years before Christ.

We are apt to speak in rather a matter-of-fact way of the second or the first post-Atlantean epochs, but we err if we picture human existence on the earth in the fifth, sixth, or seventh millennia B.C. as having been similar to our present existence. It is quite correct that people living on the earth in those ancient times had a kind of instinctive soul life, in a certain respect more akin to the soul life of animals than to that of present-day human beings. But it is a very one-sided conception of human life to say that in those ancient times people were more like animals. In tenor of soul, the human being then moving about the earth was, it is true, more like the animal; but those human-animal bodies were used by beings of soul and spirit who felt themselves members of the super-sensible worlds, above all of the cosmic worlds. And provided we go back far enough, say to the fifth pre-Christian millennium, it may be said that people made use of animal bodies as instruments rather than feeling themselves within those bodies. To characterize these people accurately, one would have to say that when they were awake, they moved about with an instinctive life of soul like that of animals, but into this instinctive life of soul there shone something like dreams from their sleeping state, waking dreams. And in these waking dreams they perceived how they had descended, to use animal bodies merely as instruments. This inner, fundamental tenor of the human soul then came to expression as a religious rite, in the Mithras cult with its main symbol of the God Mithras riding on a bull, above him the starry heavens to which he belongs, and below him the earth to which the bull belongs. This symbol was not, strictly speaking, a symbol to these people of old; it was a vision of reality. People's whole tenor of soul made them say to themselves: When I am outside my body at night I belong to the forces of the cosmos, of the starry heavens; when I wake in the morning I make use of animal instincts in an animal body.

Then human evolution passed, figuratively speaking, into a period of twilight. A certain dimness, a certain lethargy, spread over the life of humanity; the cosmic dreams receded and instinct gained the upper hand.

The attitude of soul formerly prevailing in human beings was preserved through the Mysteries, mainly through the Asiatic Mysteries. But in the fourth millennium B.C. and until the beginning of the third, humanity in general—when uninfluenced by the Mystery wisdom—lived an existence pervaded by a more or less dim, twilight consciousness. In Asia and the then-known world, it may be said that during the fourth and at the beginning of the third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, people's life of soul was dim and instinctive. But the Mysteries were there, into which, through the powerful rites and ceremonies, the spiritual worlds were able to penetrate. And it was from these centers that human beings received illumination.

At the beginning of the third millennium a momentous event took place. The root cause of this dim, more instinctive life may be characterized by saying that as beings of spirit and soul, people were still unable at that time to make use of the human organs of intellect. These organs were already within them, they had taken shape in their physical constitution, but the being of spirit and soul could not make use of them. Thus human beings could not acquire knowledge through their own thinking, through their own powers of intellectual discernment. They were dependent upon what was imparted to them from the Mysteries. And then, about the beginning of the third millennium, a momentous event took place in the east of Asia.

A child of a distinguished Asiatic family of the time was allowed to grow up in the precincts of the Mystery ceremonies. Circumstances were such that this child was actually permitted to take part in the ceremonies, undoubtedly because the priests conducting the rites in the Mysteries felt it as an inspiration that such a child must be allowed to participate. And when the being incarnate in that child had reached the age of about forty—approximately that age—something very remarkable came to light. It became evident—and there is no doubt at all that the priests of the Mysteries had foreseen the event prophetically—it became evident that this man who had been allowed to grow up in the precincts of one of the Mystery centers in East Asia, began suddenly, at the age of about forty, to grasp through the faculty of human intellect itself what had formerly come into the Mysteries through revelation, and only through revelation. He was as it were the first to make use of the organs of human intellect, but still in association with the Mysteries.

Translating into terms of our present language how the priests of the Mysteries spoke of this matter, we must say: In this man, Lucifer himself was incarnated—no more and no less than that! It is a significant, momentous fact that in the third millennium before Christ an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh actually took place in the east of Asia. And from this incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh—for this being became a teacher—there went forth what is described as the pre-Christian, pagan culture which still survived in the gnosis of the earliest Christian centuries.

It would be wrong to pass derogatory judgment on this Lucifer culture. For all the beauty produced by Greek civilization, even the insight that is still alive in ancient Greek philosophy and in the tragedies of Aeschylus would have been impossible without this Lucifer incarnation.

The influence of the Lucifer incarnation was still powerful in the south of Europe, in the north of Africa, and in Asia Minor during the first centuries of Christendom. And when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, it was essentially the luciferic wisdom through which it could be understood. The gnosis, which set about the task of grasping the import of the Mystery of Golgotha, was impregnated through and through with luciferic wisdom. It must therefore be emphasized, firstly, that at the beginning of the third millennium B.C. there was a Chinese incarnation of Lucifer; at the beginning of our own era the incarnation of Christ took place. And to begin with, the significance of the incarnation of Christ was grasped because the power of the old Lucifer incarnation still survived. This power did not actually fade from the human faculty of comprehension until the fourth century A.D.; and even then, it had its aftermath, its ramifications.

To these two incarnations, the Lucifer incarnation in ancient times and the incarnation of the Christ which gives the earth its meaning, a third incarnation will be added in a future not so very far distant. And the events of the present time are already moving in such a way as to prepare for it.

Of the incarnation of Lucifer at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., we must say: through Lucifer, human beings have acquired the faculty of using the organs of their intellect, of their power of intellectual discernment. It was Lucifer himself, in a human body, who was the first to grasp through the power of intellect what formerly could be imparted to humanity only through revelation, namely, the content of the Mysteries.

What is now in preparation and will quite definitely come to pass on earth in a none-too-distant future is an actual incarnation of Ahriman.

As you know, since the middle of the fifteenth century we have been living in an era in which it behooves humankind to come more and more into possession of the full power of consciousness. It is of the very greatest importance that people should approach the coming incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness of this event. The incarnation of Lucifer could be recognized only by the prophetic insight of the priests of the Mysteries. People were also very unconscious of what the incarnation of Christ and the event of Golgotha really signified. But they must live on toward the incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness amid the shattering events which will occur on the physical plane. Amid the perpetual stresses of war and other tribulations of the immediate future, the human mind will become very inventive in the domain of physical life. And through this very growth of inventiveness in physical life—which cannot be averted in any way or by any means—the bodily existence of a human individuality in whom Ahriman can incarnate will become possible and inevitable.

From the spiritual world this Ahrimanic power is preparing for incarnation on the earth, endeavoring in every conceivable way to make such preparation that the incarnation of Ahriman in human form may be able to mislead and corrupt humankind on earth to the uttermost. A task of humankind during the next phase of civilization will be to live toward the incarnation of Ahriman with such alert consciousness that this incarnation can actually serve to promote a higher, spiritual development, inasmuch as through Ahriman himself humanity will become aware of what can, or shall we say, can not be achieved by physical life alone. But people must go forward with full consciousness toward this incarnation of Ahriman and become more and more alert in every domain, in order to recognize with greater and greater clarity those trends in life which are leading toward this Ahrimanic incarnation. People must learn from spiritual science to find the key to life and so be able to recognize and learn to control the currents leading toward the incarnation of Ahriman. It must be realized that Ahriman will live among people on the earth, but that in confronting him people will themselves determine what they may learn from him, what they may receive from him. This, however, they will not be able to do unless, from now onward, they take control of certain spiritual and also unspiritual currents which otherwise are used by Ahriman for the purpose of leaving humankind as deeply unconscious as possible of his coming; then, one day, he will be able to appear on earth and overwhelm people tempting and luring them to repudiate earth evolution, thus preventing it from reaching its goal. To understand the whole process of which I have been speaking, it is essential to recognize the character of certain currents and influences—spiritual or the reverse.

Do you not see the continually growing number of people at the present time who do not want any science of the spirit, any knowledge of the spiritual? Do you not see how numerous are the people to whom the old forces of religion no longer give any inner stimulus? Whether they go to church or not is a matter of complete indifference to large numbers of human beings nowadays. The old religious impulses mean nothing to them. But neither will they bring themselves to give a thought to what can stream into our civilization as new spiritual life. They resist it, reject it, regard it as folly, as something inconvenient; they will not allow themselves to have anything to do with it. But, you see, human beings as we live on earth are veritably a unity. Our spiritual nature cannot be separated from our physical nature; both work together as a unity between birth and death. And even if human beings do not receive the spiritual through their faculties of soul, the spiritual takes effect, nevertheless. Since the last third of the nineteenth century the spiritual has been streaming around us; it is streaming into earthly evolution. The spiritual is there in very truth—only people are not willing to receive it.

But even if they do not accept the spiritual, it is there! And what becomes of it? Paradoxical as it may seem—for much that is true seems paradoxical to the modern mind—in those people who refuse the spiritual and like eating and drinking best of all things in life, the spiritual streams, unconsciously to them, into the processes of eating and digestion. This is the secret of that march into materialism which began about the year 1840, or rather was then in active preparation. Those who do not receive the spiritual through their souls receive it today nonetheless: in eating and drinking they eat and drink the spirit. They are “eaters” of the soul and spirit. And in this way the spirit that is streaming into earth evolution passes over into the luciferic element, is conveyed to Lucifer. Thereby the luciferic power, which can then be of help to the ahrimanic power for its later incarnation, is constantly strengthened. This must come to the knowledge of those who admit the fact that in the future people will either receive spiritual knowledge consciously or consume the spirit unconsciously, thereby delivering it into the hands of the luciferic powers.

This stream of spirit-and-soul-consumption is particularly encouraged by Ahriman because in this way he can lull humankind into greater and greater drowsiness, so that then, through his incarnation, he will be able to come among people and fall upon them unawares because they do not confront him consciously.

But Ahriman can also make direct preparation for his incarnation, and he does so. Certainly, people of our day also have a spiritual life, but it is purely intellectual, unconnected with the spiritual world. This purely intellectual life is becoming more and more widespread; at first it took effect mainly in the sciences, but now it is leading to mischiefs of every kind in social life as well. What is the essential character of this intellectual life?

This intellectual life has very little to do with the true interests of human beings! I ask you: how many teachers do you not see today, passing in and out of higher and lower educational institutions without bringing any inner enthusiasm to their science but pursuing it merely as a means of livelihood? In such cases the interest of the soul is not directly linked with the actual pursuit. The same thing happens even at school. Think how much is learned at the various stages of life without any real enthusiasm or interest, how external the intellectual life is becoming for many people who devote themselves to it! And how many there are today who are forced to produce a mass of intellectual material which is then preserved in libraries and, as spiritual life, is not truly alive!

Everything that is developing as intellectual life without being suffused by warmth of soul, without being quickened by enthusiasm, directly furthers the incarnation of Ahriman in a way that is after his own heart. It lulls people to sleep in the way I have described, so that its results are advantageous to Ahriman.

There are numerous other currents in the spiritual or unspiritual life which Ahriman can turn to his advantage. You have lately heard—and you are still hearing it—that national states, national empires must be founded. A great deal is said about “freedom of the individual peoples.” But the time for founding empires based on relationships of blood and race is past and over in the evolution of mankind. [Quote 1] If an appeal is made today to national, racial, and similar relationships, to relationships arising out of the intellect and not out of the spirit, then disharmony among humankind will be intensified. And it is this disharmony among humankind which the ahrimanic power can put to special use. Chauvinism, perverted patriotism in every form—this is the material from which Ahriman will build just what he needs.

But there are other things as well. Everywhere today we see parties being formed for one object or another. People nowadays have no discernment, nor do they desire to have it where party opinions and party programs are concerned. With intellectual ingenuity, proof can be furnished in support of the most radically opposing theories. Very clever arguments can be used to prove the soundness of Leninism—but the same applies to directly contrary principles and also to what lies between the two extremes. An excellent case can be made out for every party program: but the one who establishes the validity of the opposite program is equally right. The intellectualism prevailing among people today is not capable of demonstrating the inner potentialities and values of anything. It can furnish proofs; but what is intellectually proved should not be regarded as of real value or efficacy in life. People oppose one another in parties because the soundness of every party opinion—at any rate the main party opinions—can be proved with equal justification. Our intellect remains at the surface layer of understanding and does not penetrate to the deeper layer where the truth actually lies. This, too, must be fundamentally and thoroughly understood.

People today prefer to let their intellect remain on the surface and not to penetrate with deeper forces to those levels where the essential nature of things is disclosed. It is only necessary to look around a little, for even where it takes its most external form, life often reveals the pitfalls of current predilections. People love numbers and figures in science, but they also love figures in the social sphere as well. Social science consists almost entirely of statistics. And from statistics, that is to say from figures, the weightiest conclusions are reached. Well, with figures too, anything can be proved and anything believed; for figures are not a means whereby the essential reality of things can be proved—they are simply a means of deception! Whenever one fails to look beyond figures to the qualitative, they can be utterly deceptive.

The following is an obvious example. There is, or at least there used to be, a great deal of argument about the nationality of the Macedonians. In the political life of the Balkan peninsula, much depended upon the statistics compiled there. The figures are of just as much value as those contained in other statistics. Whether statistics are compiled of wheat and rye production, or of the numbers of Greek, Serbian, or Bulgarian nationals in Macedonia—in regard to what can be proved by these means it is all the same. From the figures quoted for the Greeks, for the Bulgarians, for the Serbians, very plausible conclusions can be drawn. But one can also have an eye for the qualitative element, and then one often finds it recorded that the father was Greek, one son was Bulgarian, another was Serbian. What is at the back of it you can puzzle out for yourselves! These statistics are taken as authoritative, whereas in this case they were compiled solely in support of party aims. It stands to reason that if the father is really a Greek, the two sons are also Greeks. But the procedure adopted there is just an example of many other things that are done with figures. Ahriman can achieve a great deal through figures and numbers used in this way as evidence of proof.

A further means of which Ahriman can avail himself is again one that will seem paradoxical. As you know, we have been concerned in our movement to study the Gospels in the light of spiritual science. But these deeper interpretations of the Gospels, which are becoming more and more necessary in our time, are rejected on all sides, just as spiritual science as a whole is rejected.

The people who often profess humility in these matters—and they are insistent about it—are actually the most arrogant of all. More and more generally it is being said that people should steep themselves in the very simplicity of the Gospels and not attempt to understand the Mystery of Golgotha by entering into the complexities of spiritual science. Those who feign unpretentiousness in their study of the Gospels are the most arrogant of all, for they despise the honest search for knowledge demanded in spiritual science. So arrogant are they that they believe the highest revelations of the spiritual world can be garnered without effort, simply by browsing on the simplicity of the Gospels. What claims to be “humble” or “simple” today is often supreme arrogance. In sects, in religious confessions—it is there that the most arrogant people are to be found:

It must be remembered that the Gospels came into existence at a time when the luciferic wisdom still survived. In the first centuries of Christendom, people's understanding of the Gospels was quite different from what it came to be in later times. Today, people who cannot deepen their minds through spiritual science merely pretend to understand the Gospels. In reality they have no idea even of the original meaning of the words; for the translations that have been made into the different languages are not faithful reproductions of the Gospels; often they are scarcely even reminiscent of the original meaning of the words in which the Gospels were composed.

Real understanding of the intervention of the Christ being in earthly evolution is possible today only through spiritual science. Those who want to study, or actually do study the Gospels “without pretension”—as the saying goes—cannot come to any inner realization of the Christ being as he truly is, but only to an illusory picture, or, at very most, a vision or hallucination of the Christ being. No real connection with the Christ impulse can be achieved today merely through reading the Gospels—but only a hallucinatory picture of the Christ. Hence the prevalence of the theological view that the Christ was not present in the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was simply an historical figure like Socrates or Plato or others, although possibly more exalted. The “simple man of Nazareth” is an ideal even to the theologians. And very few of them indeed can make anything of an event like Paul's vision at the gate of Damascus, because without the deepened knowledge yielded by spiritual science the Gospels can give rise only to a hallucination of the Christ, not to vision of the real Christ. And so Paul's vision at Damascus is also regarded as a hallucination.

Deeper understanding of the Gospels in the light of spiritual science is essential today, for the apathy that takes hold of people who are content to live merely within the arms of the denominations will be used to the utmost by Ahriman in order to achieve his goal—which is that his incarnation shall catch people unawares. And those who believe they are being most truly Christian by rejecting any development of the conception of the Christ mystery, are, in their arrogance, the ones who do most to promote Ahriman's aims. The denominations and sects are positively spheres of encouragement, breeding-grounds for Ahriman. It is futile to gloss these things over with illusions. Just as the materialistic attitude, rejecting the spiritual altogether and contending that the human being is a product of what people eat and drink, furthers Ahriman's aims, so are these aims furthered by the stubborn rejection of everything spiritual and adherence to the literal, “simple” conception of the Gospels.

You see, a barrier which prevents the single Gospels from unduly circumscribing the human mind has been erected through the fact that the event of Golgotha is described in the Gospels from four—seemingly contradictory—sides. Only a little reflection will show that this is a protection from too literal a conception. In sects, however, where one Gospel only is taken as the basis of the teaching—and such sects are quite numerous—pitfalls, stupefaction, and hallucination are generated. In their day, the Gospels were given as a necessary counterweight to the luciferic gnosis; but if no attempt is made to develop understanding of their content, the aims of Ahriman are furthered, not the progress of humankind. In the absolute sense, nothing is good in itself, but is always good or bad according to the use to which it is put. The best can be the worst if wrongly used. Sublime though they are, the Gospels can also have the opposite effect if people are too lazy to search for a deeper understanding based on spiritual science.

Hence there is a great deal in the spiritual and unspiritual currents of the present time of which people should be acutely aware, and determine their attitude of soul accordingly. Upon the ability and willingness to penetrate to the roots of such matters will depend the effect which the incarnation of Ahriman can have upon human beings, whether this incarnation will lead them to prevent the earth from reaching its goal, or bring home to them the very limited significance of intellectual, unspiritual life. If people rightly take in hand the currents leading toward Ahriman, then simply through his incarnation in earthly life they will recognize the ahrimanic influence on the one side, and on the other its polar opposite—the luciferic influence. And then the very contrast between the ahrimanic and the luciferic will enable them to perceive the third reality. Human beings must consciously wrestle through to an understanding of this trinity of the Christian impulse, the ahrimanic and the luciferic influences; for without this consciousness they will not be able to go forward into the future with the prospect of achieving the goal of earth existence.

Spiritual science must be taken in deep earnestness, for only so can it be rightly understood. It is not the outcome of any sectarian whim but something that has proceeded from the fundamental needs of human evolution. Those who recognize these needs cannot choose between whether they will or will not endeavor to foster spiritual science. On the contrary they will say to themselves: The whole physical and spiritual life of human beings must be illumined and pervaded by the conceptions of spiritual science!

Just as once in the East there was a Lucifer incarnation, and then, at the midpoint, as it were, of world evolution, the incarnation of Christ, so in the West there will be an incarnation of Ahriman.

This ahrimanic incarnation cannot be averted; it is inevitable, for humanity must confront Ahriman face to face. He will be the individuality by whom it will be made clear what indescribable cleverness can be developed if they call to their help all that earthly forces can do to enhance cleverness and ingenuity. In the catastrophes that will befall humanity in the near future, people will become extremely inventive; many things discovered in the forces and substances of the universe will be used to provide human nourishment. But these very discoveries will at the same time make it apparent that matter is connected with the organs of intellect, not with the organs of the spirit but of the intellect. People will learn what to eat and drink in order to become really clever. Eating and drinking cannot make them spiritual, but clever and astute, yes. Humanity has no knowledge of these things as yet; but not only will they be striven for, they will be the inevitable outcome of catastrophes looming in the near future. And certain secret societies—where preparations are already in train—will apply these things in such a way that the necessary conditions can be established for an actual incarnation of Ahriman on the earth. This incarnation cannot be averted, for people must realize during the time of the earth's existence just how much can proceed from purely material processes! We must learn to bring under our control those spiritual or unspiritual currents which are leading to Ahriman.

Once it is realized that conflicting party programs can be proved equally correct, our attitude of soul will be that we do not set out to prove things, but rather to experience them. For to experience a thing is a very different matter from attempting to prove it intellectually.

Equally we shall be convinced that deeper and deeper penetration of the Gospels is necessary through spiritual science. The literal, word-for-word acceptance of the Gospels that is still so prevalent today promotes ahrimanic culture. Even on external grounds it is obvious that a strictly literal acceptance of the Gospels is unjustified. For as you know, what is good and right for one time is not right for every other time. What is right for one epoch becomes luciferic or ahrimanic when practiced in a later one. The mere reading of the Gospel texts has had its day. What is essential now is to acquire a spiritual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in the light of the truths enshrined in the Gospels. Many people, of course, find these things disquieting; but those whose interest is attracted by anthroposophy must learn to realize that the levels of culture, gradually piling one above the other, have created chaos, and that light must penetrate again into this chaos.

It is interesting nowadays to listen to someone whose views have become very extreme, or to read about some burning question of the day, and then to listen to sermons on the same subject given by a priest of some denomination who is still steeped in the form of thought current in bygone times. There you face two worlds which you cannot possibly confuse unless you avoid all attempts to get at the root of these things. Listen to a modern socialist speaking about social questions and then, immediately afterward, to a Catholic preacher speaking about the same questions. It is very interesting to find two levels of culture existing side by side but using the words in an entirely different sense. The same word has quite a different meaning in each case.

These things should be seen in the light that will dawn if they are taken in the earnest spirit we have been trying to convey. People belonging to definite religions do also come, in the end, to long in their way for spiritual deepening. It is by no means without significance that a man as eminently spiritual as Cardinal Newman, ardent Catholic though he was, should say at his investiture in Rome that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation.

In effect, what Cardinal Newman said was that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation! But he had not the courage to take a new spiritual revelation seriously. And so it is with many others. You can read countless treatises today about what is needed in social life. Another book has recently appeared: Socialism, by Robert Wilbrandt, the son of the poet. In it the social question is discussed on the foundation of accurate and detailed knowledge. And finally it is stated that without the spirit nothing is achieved, that the very course of events shows that the spirit is necessary. Yes, but what does such a man really achieve? He gets as far as to utter the word “spirit,” to pronounce the abstract word “spirit;” but he refuses to accept, indeed he rejects, anything that endeavors to make the spirit really take effect.

For that, it is essential above all to realize that wallowing in abstractions, however loud the cry for the spirit, is not yet spiritual, not yet spirit! Vague, abstract chattering about the spirit must never be confused with the active search for the content of the spiritual world pursued in anthroposophical science.

Nowadays there is much talk about the spirit. But you who accept spiritual science should not be deluded by such chattering; you should perceive the difference between it and the descriptions of the spiritual world attempted in anthroposophy, where the spiritual world is described as objectively as the physical world. You should probe into these differences, reminding yourselves repeatedly that abstract talk of the spirit is a deviation from sincere striving for the spirit and that by their very talk, people are actually removing themselves from the spirit. Purely intellectual allusion to the spirit leads nowhere. What, then, is “intelligence?” What is the content of our human intelligence? I can best explain this in the following way. Imagine—and this will be better understood by the many ladies present!—imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror and looking into it. The picture presented to you by the mirror is you, but it has no reality at all. It is nothing but a reflection. All the intelligence within your soul, all the intellectual content, is only a mirror image; it has no reality. And just as your reflected image is called into existence through the mirror, so what mirrors itself as intelligence is called into existence through the physical apparatus of your body, through the brain. You are intelligent only because your body is there. And as little as you can touch yourself by stretching your hand toward your reflected image, as little can you lay hold of the spirit if you turn only to the intellectual—for the spirit is not there! What is grasped through the intellect, ingenious as it may be, never contains the spirit itself, but only a picture of the spirit. You cannot truly experience the spirit if you get no further than mere intelligence. The reason why intelligence is so seductive is that it yields a picture, a reflected picture of the spirit—but not the spirit itself. It seems unnecessary to go to the inconvenience of penetrating to the spirit, because it is there—or so, at least, one imagines. In reality it is only a reflected picture—but for all that, it is not difficult to talk about the spirit.

To distinguish the mere picture from the reality—that is the task of the tenor of soul which does not merely theorize about spiritual science but has actual perception of the spirit.

That is what I wanted to say to you today in order to intensify the earnestness which should pervade our whole attitude to the spiritual life as conceived by anthroposophy. For the evolution of humanity in the future will depend upon how truly this attitude is adopted by people of the present day. If what I have characterized in this lecture continues to be offered the reception that is still offered to it today by the vast majority of people on the earth, then Ahriman will be an evil guest when he comes. But if people are able to rouse themselves to take into their consciousness what we have been studying, if they are able so to guide it that humanity can freely confront the ahrimanic influence, then, when Ahriman appears, human beings will acquire, precisely through him, the power to realize that although the earth must enter inevitably into its decline, humankind is lifted above earthly existence through this very fact. When human beings have reached a certain age in physical life, the body begins to decline, but if they are sensible they make no complaint, knowing that together with the soul they are approaching a life that does not run parallel with this physical decline. There lives in humankind something that is not bound up with the already prevailing decline of the physical earth but becomes more and more spiritual just because of this physical decline.

Let us learn to say frankly: Yes, the earth is in its decline, and human life, too, with respect to its physical manifestation; but just because it is so, let us muster the strength to draw into our civilization that element which, springing from humankind itself, will live on while the earth is in decline, as the immortal fruit of earth evolution.

• 1. Twelve lectures given at Nürnberg, 1908.

The phase of evolution beginning in our own time has a very special character. The same may, of course, be said of each epoch but in every case it is a matter of defining the particular characteristics. The present phase of evolution may be characterised in a general way by saying that all the experiences confronting mankind in the physical world during the earth's further existence will represent a decline, a retrogression. The time when human progress was made possible through the constant refinement of the physical forces, is already over. In the future, too, mankind will progress, but only through spiritual development, through development on a higher level than that of the processes of the physical plane. Men who rely entirely on the processes of the physical plane will find in them no source of satisfaction. An indication given in spiritual science a long time ago, in the Lecture-Course on the Apocalypse,¹ namely that we are heading for the “War of All against All”, must from now onwards be grasped in all its significance and gravity; its implications must not remain in the realm of theory but also come to expression in the actions, the whole behaviour of men.

The fact that—to use a colloquialism—people in the future are not going to get much fun out of developments on the physical plane, will bring home to them that further evolution must proceed from spiritual forces.

This can be understood only by surveying a lengthy period of evolution and applying what is discovered to experiences that will become more and more general in the future. The trend of forces that will manifest in the well nigh rhythmical onset of war and destruction—processes of which the present catastrophe is but the beginning—will become only too evident. It is childish to believe that anything connected with this war can bring about a permanent era of peace for humanity on the physical plane. That will not be so. What must come about on the earth is spiritual development. Its direction and purport will be clear to us if, after surveying a comparatively lengthy epoch preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, we bear in mind something of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and then try to envisage the impulse of that Event working in the future evolution of mankind.

We have studied the Mystery of Golgotha from many different points of view and will do so again to-day by characterising, very briefly, the civilisation which preceded it—let us say as far back as the third millennium B.C.—and then continued for a time as Pagan culture in the period of Christian development itself.

Within this Pagan culture, the utterly different Hebraic-Jewish culture took root, having Christianity as its offspring.

The nature of Pagan culture can best be understood if we realise that it was the outcome of knowledge, vision and action born of forces much wider in range than those belonging to present earthly existence. It was actually through Hebraic culture that the moral element was first inculcated into humanity. In Paganism the moral element did not occupy a place separate and apart; this Pagan culture was such that man felt himself a member of the whole cosmos.

This is something we must particularly bear in mind.—The human being living on earth within the old Pagan world felt himself membered into the whole cosmos. He felt how the forces at work in the movements of the stars extend into his own actions, or, better said, into the forces taking effect in his actions. What later passed for astrology, and does so still, is but a reflection—and a very misleading one at that—of the ancient wisdom gleaned from contemplation of the stars in their courses and then used as the basis for precepts governing human action.

These ancient civilisations can be understood only if light is thrown by spiritual science upon human evolution in its outer aspect some four or five thousand years before Christ.

We are apt to speak in rather a matter-of-fact way of the second or the first Post-Atlantean epochs, but we err if we picture man's existence on the earth in the fifth, sixth or seventh millennia B.C. as having been similar to our present existence. It is quite correct that men living on the earth in those ancient times had a kind of instinctive soul-life, in a certain respect more akin to the soul-life of animals than to that of present-day man. But it is a very one-sided conception of human life to say that in those ancient times men were more like animals. In tenor of soul, the human being then moving about the earth was, it is true, more like the animal; but those human-animal bodies were used by beings of soul-and-spirit who felt themselves members of the super-sensible worlds, above all of the cosmic worlds. And provided we go back far enough, say to the fifth pre-Christian millennium, it may be said that men made use of animal bodies as instruments rather than feeling themselves within those bodies. To characterise these men accurately, one would have to say that when they were awake, they moved about with an instinctive life of soul like that of animals, but into this instinctive life of soul there shone something like dreams from their sleeping state, waking dreams. And in these waking dreams they perceived how they had descended, to use animal bodies merely as instruments. This inner, fundamental tenor of the human soul then came to expression as a religious rite, in the Mithras cult with its main symbol of the God Mithras riding on a bull, above him the starry heavens to which he belongs, and below him the earth to which the bull belongs. This symbol was not, strictly speaking, a symbol to these men of old; it was a vision of reality. Man's whole tenor of soul made him say to himself: When I am outside my body at night I belong to the forces of the cosmos, of the starry heavens; when I wake in the morning, I make use of animal instincts in an animal body.

Then human evolution passed, figuratively speaking, into a period of twilight. A certain dimness, a certain lethargy, spread over the life of humanity; the cosmic dreams receded and instinct gained the upper hand.

The attitude of soul formerly prevailing in men was preserved through the Mysteries, mainly through the Asiatic Mysteries. But in the fourth millennium B.C. and until the beginning of the third, humanity in general—when uninfluenced by the Mystery wisdom—lived an existence pervaded by a more or less dim, twilight consciousness. In Asia and the then known world, it may be said that during the fourth and at the beginning of the third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, man's life of soul was dim and instinctive. But the Mysteries were there, into which, through the powerful rites and ceremonies, the spiritual worlds were able to penetrate. And it was from these centres that men received illumination.

At the beginning of the third millennium a momentous event took place.—The root-cause of this dim, more instinctive life may be characterised by saying that as a being of spirit-and-soul, man was still unable at that time to make use of the human organs of intellect. These organs were already within him, they had taken shape in his physical constitution, but the being of spirit-and-soul could not make use of them. Thus men could not acquire knowledge through their own thinking, through their own powers of intellectual discernment. They were dependent upon what was imparted to them from the Mysteries. And then, about the beginning of the third millennium, a momentous event took place in the east of Asia.

A child of a distinguished Asiatic family of the time was allowed to grow up in the precincts of the Mystery-ceremonies. Circumstances were such that this child was actually permitted to take part in the ceremonies, undoubtedly because the priests conducting the rites in the Mysteries felt it as an inspiration that such a child must be allowed to participate. And when the being incarnate in that child had reached the age of about 40—approximately that age—something very remarkable came to light. It became evident and there is no doubt at all that the priests of the Mysteries had foreseen the event prophetically—it became evident that this man who had been allowed to grow up in the precincts of one of the Mystery-centres in East Asia, began suddenly, at the age of about 4o, to grasp through the faculty of human intellect itself what had formerly come into the Mysteries through revelation, and only through revelation. He was as it were the first to make use of the organs of human intellect, but still in association with the Mysteries.

Translating into terms of our present language how the priests of the Mysteries spoke of this matter, we must say: In this man, Lucifer himself was incarnated—no more and no less than that!—It is a significant, momentous fact that in the third millennium before Christ an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh actually took place in the east of Asia. And from this incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh—for this Being became a Teacher—there went forth what is described as the pre-Christian, Pagan culture which still survived in the Gnosis of the earliest Christian centuries.

It would be wrong to pass derogatory judgment on this Lucifer-culture. For all the beauty produced by Greek civilisation, even the insight that is still alive in ancient Greek philosophy and in the tragedies of Aeschylus would have been impossible without this Lucifer-incarnation.

The influence of the Lucifer-incarnation was still powerful in the south of Europe, in the north of Africa and in Asia Minor during the first centuries of Christendom. And when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, it was essentially the Luciferic wisdom through which it could be understood. The Gnosis, which set about the task of grasping the import of the Mystery of Golgotha, was impregnated through and through with Luciferic wisdom. It must therefore be emphasised, firstly, that at the beginning of the third Millennium B.C. there was a Chinese incarnation of Lucifer; at the beginning of our own era the incarnation of Christ took place. And to begin with, the significance of the incarnation of Christ was grasped because the power of the old Lucifer-incarnation still survived. This power did not actually fade from man's faculty of comprehension until the fourth century A.D.; and even then, it had its aftermath, its ramifications.

To these two incarnations, the Lucifer-incarnation in ancient times and the incarnation of the Christ which gives the earth its meaning, a third incarnation will be added in a future not so very far distant. And the events of the present time are already moving in such a way as to prepare for it.

Of the incarnation of Lucifer at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., we must say: through Lucifer, man has acquired the faculty of using the organs of his intellect, of his power of intellectual discernment. It was Lucifer himself, in a human body, who was the first to grasp through the power of intellect, what formerly could be imparted to man only through revelation, namely, the content of the Mysteries.

What is now in preparation and will quite definitely come to pass on earth in a none too distant future, is an actual incarnation of Ahriman.

As you know, since the middle of the fifteenth century we have been living in an era in which it behoves mankind to come more and more into possession of the full power of consciousness. It is of the very greatest importance that men should approach the coming incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness of this event. The incarnation of Lucifer could be recognised only by the prophetic insight of the priests of the Mysteries. Men were also very unconscious of what the incarnation of Christ and the Event of Golgotha really signified. But they must live on towards the incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness amid the shattering events which will occur on the physical plane. Amid the perpetual stresses of war and other tribulations of the immediate future, the human mind will become very inventive in the domain of physical life. And through this very growth of inventiveness in physical life—which cannot be averted in any way or by any means—the bodily existence of a human individuality in whom Ahriman can incarnate, will become possible and inevitable.

From the spiritual world this Ahrimanic power is preparing for incarnation on the earth, is endeavouring in every conceivable way to make such preparation that the incarnation of Ahriman in human form may be able to mislead and corrupt mankind on earth to the uttermost. A task of mankind during the next phase of civilisation will be to live towards the incarnation of Ahriman with such alert consciousness that this incarnation can actually serve to promote a higher, spiritual development, inasmuch as through Ahriman himself man will become aware of what can, or shall we say, can not be achieved by physical life alone. But men must go forward with full consciousness towards this incarnation of Ahriman and become more and more alert in every domain, in order to recognise with greater and greater clarity those trends in life which are leading towards this Ahrimanic incarnation. Men must learn from spiritual science to find the key to life and so be able to recognise and learn to control the currents leading towards the incarnation of Ahriman. It must be realised that Ahriman will live among men on the earth, but that in confronting him men will themselves determine what they may learn from him, what they may receive from him. This, however, they will not be able to do unless, from now onwards, they take control of certain spiritual and also unspiritual currents which otherwise are used by Ahriman for the purpose of leaving mankind as deeply unconscious as possible of his coming; then, one day, he will be able to appear on earth and overwhelm men, tempting and luring them to repudiate earth-evolution, thus preventing it from reaching its goal. To understand the whole process of which I have been speaking, it is essential to recognise the character of certain currents and influences—spiritual or the reverse.

Do you not see the continually growing number of people at the present time who do not want any science of the spirit, any knowledge of the spiritual? Do you not see how numerous are the people to whom the old forces of religion no longer give any inner stimulus?—Whether they go to church or not is a matter of complete indifference to large numbers of human beings nowadays. The old religious impulses mean nothing to them. But neither will they bring themselves to give a thought to what can stream into our civilisation as new spiritual life. They resist it, reject it, regard it as folly, as something inconvenient; they will not allow themselves to have anything to do with it. But, you see, man as he lives on earth is veritably a unity. His spiritual nature cannot be separated from his physical nature; both work together as a unity between birth and death. And even if man does not receive the spiritual through his faculties of soul, the spiritual takes effect, nevertheless. Since the last third of the nineteenth century the spiritual has been streaming around us; it is streaming into earthly evolution. The spiritual is there in very truth—only men are not willing to receive it.

But even if they do not accept the spiritual, it is there! And what becomes of it? Paradoxical as it may seem—for much that is true seems paradoxical to the modern mind—in those people who refuse the spiritual and like eating and drinking best of all things in life, the spiritual streams, unconsciously to them, into the processes of eating and digestion. This is the secret of that march into materialism which began about the year 184o, or rather was then in active preparation. Those who do not receive the spiritual through their souls, receive it to-day none the less: in eating and drinking they eat and drink the spirit. They are “eaters” of the soul-and-spirit. And in this way the spirit that is streaming into earth-evolution passes over into the Luciferic element, is conveyed to Lucifer. Thereby the Luciferic power which can then be of help to the Ahrimanic power for its later incarnation, is constantly strengthened. This must come to the knowledge of those who admit the fact that in the future men will either receive spiritual knowledge consciously or consume the spirit unconsciously, thereby delivering it into the hands of the Luciferic powers.

This stream of spirit-and-soul-consumption is particularly encouraged by Ahriman because in this way he can lull mankind into greater and greater drowsiness, so that then, through his incarnation, he will be able to come among men and fall upon them unawares because they do not confront him consciously.

But Ahriman can also make direct preparation for his incarnation, and he does so. Certainly, men of our day also have a spiritual life, but it is purely intellectual, unconnected with the spiritual world. This purely intellectual life is becoming more and more widespread; at first it took effect mainly in the sciences, but now it is leading to mischiefs of every kind in social life as well. What is the essential character of this intellectual life?

This intellectual life has very little to do with the true interests of men! I ask you: how many teachers do you not see to-day, passing in and out of higher and lower educational institutions without bringing any inner enthusiasm to their science but pursuing it merely as a means of livelihood—In such cases the interest of the soul is not directly linked with the actual pursuit. The same thing happens even at school. Think how much is learnt at the various stages of life without any real enthusiasm or interest, how external the intellectual life is becoming for many people who devote themselves to it! And how many there are to-day who are forced to produce a mass of intellectual material which is then preserved in libraries and, as spiritual life, is not truly alive!

Everything that is developing as intellectual life without being suffused by warmth of soul, without being quickened by enthusiasm, directly furthers the incarnation of Ahriman in a way that is after his own heart. It lulls men to sleep in the way I have described, so that its results are advantageous to Ahriman.

There are numerous other currents in the spiritual or unspiritual life which Ahriman can turn to his advantage. You have lately heard—and you are still hearing it—that national states, national empires must be founded. A great deal is said about “freedom of the individual peoples”. But the time for founding empires based on relationships of blood and race is past and over in the evolution of mankind. If an appeal is made to-day to national, racial and similar relationships, to relationships arising out of the intellect and not out of the spirit, then disharmony among mankind will be intensified. And it is this disharmony among mankind which the Ahrimanic power can put to special use. Chauvinism, perverted patriotism in every form—this is the material from which Ahriman will build just what he needs.

But there are other things as well. Everywhere to-day we see parties being formed for one object or another. People nowadays have no discernment, nor do they desire to have it where party opinions and party programmes are concerned. With intellectual ingenuity, proof can be furnished in support of the most radically opposing theories. Very clever arguments can be used to prove the soundness of Leninism—but the same applies to directly contrary principles and also to what lies between the two extremes. An excellent case can be made out for every party programme: but the one who establishes the validity of the opposite programme is equally right. The intellectualism prevailing among men to-day is not capable of demonstrating the inner potentialities and values of anything. It can furnish proofs; but what is intellectually proved should not be regarded as of real value or efficacy in life. Men oppose one another in parties because the soundness of every party opinion—at any rate the main party opinions—can be proved with equal justification. Our intellect remains at the surface-layer of understanding and does not penetrate to the deeper layer where the truth actually lies. This, too, must be fundamentally and thoroughly understood.

People to-day prefer to let their intellect remain on the surface and not to penetrate with deeper forces to those levels where the essential nature of things is disclosed. It is only necessary to look around a little, for even where it takes its most external form, life often reveals the pitfalls of current predilections. People love numbers and figures in science, but they also love figures in the social sphere as well. Social science consists almost entirely of statistics. And from statistics, that is to say from figures, the weightiest conclusions are reached. Well, with figures too, anything can be proved and anything believed; for figures are not a means whereby the essential reality of things can be proved—they are simply a means of deception! Whenever one fails to look beyond figures to the qualitative, they can be utterly deceptive.

The following is an obvious example.—There is, or at least there used to be, a great deal of argument about the nationality of the Macedonians. In the political life of the Balkan peninsula, much depended upon the statistics compiled there. The figures are of just as much value as those contained in other statistics. Whether statistics are compiled of wheat and rye production, or of the numbers of Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian nationals in Macedonia—in regard to what can be proved by these means it is all the same. From the figures quoted for the Greeks, for the Bulgarians, for the Serbians, very plausible conclusions can be drawn. But one can also have an eye for the qualitative element, and then one often finds it recorded that the father was Greek, one son was Bulgarian, another was Serbian.—What is at the back of it you can puzzle out for yourselves!—These statistics are taken as authoritative, whereas in this case they were compiled solely in support of party aims. It stands to reason that if the father is really a Greek, the two sons are also Greeks. But the procedure adopted there is just an example of many other things that are done with figures. Ahriman can achieve a great deal through figures and numbers used in this way as evidence of proof.

A further means of which Ahriman can avail himself is again one that will seem paradoxical. As you know, we have been concerned in our movement to study the Gospels in the light of spiritual science. But these deeper interpretations of the Gospels which are becoming more and more necessary in our time, are rejected on all sides, just as spiritual science as a whole is rejected.

The people who often profess humility in these matters—and they are insistent about it—are actually the most arrogant of all. More and more generally it is being said that people should steep themselves in the very simplicity of the Gospels and not attempt to understand the Mystery of Golgotha by entering into the complexities of spiritual science. Those who feign unpretentiousness in their study of the Gospels are the most arrogant of all, for they despise the honest search for knowledge demanded in spiritual science. So arrogant are they that they believe the highest revelations of the spiritual world can be garnered without effort, simply by browsing on the simplicity of the Gospels. What claims to be “humble” or “simple” to-day is often supreme arrogance. In sects, in religious confessions—it is there that the most arrogant of men are to be found.

It must be remembered that the Gospels came into existence at a time when the Luciferic wisdom still survived. In the first centuries of Christendom, men's understanding of the Gospels was quite different from what it came to be in later times. To-day, people who cannot deepen their minds through spiritual science merely pretend to understand the Gospels. In reality they have no idea even of the original meaning of the words; for the translations that have been made into the different languages are not faithful reproductions of the Gospels; often they are scarcely even reminiscent of the original meaning of the words in which the Gospels were composed.

Real understanding of the intervention of the Christ Being in earthly evolution is possible to-day only through spiritual science. Those who want to study, or actually do study the Gospels “without pretention”—as the saying goes—cannot come to any inner realisation of the Christ Being as He truly is, but only to an illusory picture, or, at very most, a vision or hallucination of the Christ Being. No real connection with the Christ Impulse can be achieved to-day merely through reading the Gospels—but only an hallucinatory picture of the Christ. Hence the prevalence of the theological view that the Christ was not present in the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was simply an historical figure like Socrates or Plato or others, although possibly more exalted. The “simple man of Nazareth” is an ideal even to the theologians. And very few of them indeed can make anything of an event like Paul's vision at the gate of Damascus, because without the deepened knowledge yielded by spiritual science the Gospels can give rise only to an hallucination of the Christ, not to vision of the Real Christ. And so Paul's vision at Damascus is also regarded as an hallucination.

Deeper understanding of the Gospels in the light of spiritual science is essential to-day, for the apathy that takes hold of people who are content to live merely within the arms of the denominations will be used to the utmost by Ahriman in order to achieve his goal—which is that his incarnation shall catch men unawares. And those who believe they are being most truly Christian by rejecting any development of the conception of the Christ Mystery, are, in their arrogance, the ones who do most to promote Ahriman's aims. The denominations and sects are positively spheres of encouragement, breeding-grounds for Ahriman. It is futile to gloss these things over with illusions. Just as the materialistic attitude, rejecting the spiritual altogether and contending that man is a product of what he eats and drinks, furthers Ahriman's aims, so are these aims furthered by the stubborn rejection of everything spiritual and adherence to the literal, “simple” conception of the Gospels.

You see, a barrier which prevents the single Gospels from unduly circumscribing the human mind, has been erected through the fact that the Event of Golgotha is described in the Gospels from four—seemingly contradictory—sides. Only a little reflection will show that this is a protection from too literal a conception. In sects, however, where one Gospel only is taken as the basis of the teaching—and such sects are quite numerous—pitfalls, stupefaction and hallucination are generated. In their day, the Gospels were given as a necessary counterweight to the Luciferic Gnosis; but if no attempt is made to develop understanding of their content, the aims of Ahriman are furthered, not the progress of mankind. In the absolute sense, nothing is good in itself, but is always good or bad according to the use to which it is put. The best can be the worst if wrongly used. Sublime though they are, the Gospels can also have the opposite effect if men are too lazy to search for a deeper understanding based on spiritual science.

Hence there is a great deal in the spiritual and unspiritual currents of the present time of which men should be acutely aware, and determine their attitude of soul accordingly. Upon the ability and willingness to penetrate to the roots of such matters will depend the effect which the incarnation of Ahriman can have upon men, whether this incarnation will lead them to prevent the earth from reaching its goal, or bring home to them the very limited significance of intellectual, unspiritual life. If men rightly take in hand the currents leading towards Ahriman, then simply through his incarnation in earthly life they will recognise the Ahrimanic influence on the one side, and on the other its polar opposite—the Luciferic influence. And then the very contrast between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic will enable them to perceive the third reality. Men must consciously wrestle through to an understanding of this trinity of the Christian impulse, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic influences; for without this consciousness they will not be able to go forward into the future with the prospect of achieving the goal of earth-existence.

Spiritual science must be taken in deep earnestness, for only so can it be rightly understood. It is not the outcome of any sectarian whim but something that has proceeded from the fundamental needs of human evolution. Those who recognise these needs cannot choose between whether they will or will not endeavour to foster spiritual science. On the contrary they will say to themselves: The whole physical and spiritual life of men must be illumined and pervaded by the conceptions of spiritual science!

Just as once in the East there was a Lucifer-incarnation, and then, at the mid-point, as it were, of world-evolution, the incarnation of Christ, so in the West there will be an incarnation of Ahriman.

This Ahrimanic incarnation cannot be averted; it is inevitable, for men must confront Ahriman face to face. He will be the individuality by whom it will be made clear to men what indescribable cleverness can be developed if they call to their help all that earthly forces can do to enhance cleverness and ingenuity. In the catastrophes that will befall humanity in the near future, men will become extremely inventive; many things discovered in the forces and substances of the universe will be used to provide nourishment for man. But these very discoveries will at the same time make it apparent that matter is connected with the organs of intellect, not with the organs of the spirit but of the intellect. People will learn what to eat and drink in order to become really clever. Eating and drinking cannot make them spiritual, but clever and astute, yes. Men have no knowledge of these things as yet; but not only will they be striven for, they will be the inevitable outcome of catastrophes looming in the near future. And certain secret societies—where preparations are already in train—will apply these things in such a way that the necessary conditions can be established for an actual incarnation of Ahriman on the earth. This incarnation cannot be averted, for men must realise during the time of the earth's existence just how much can proceed from purely material processes! He must learn to bring under his control those spiritual or unspiritual currents which are leading to Ahriman.

Once it is realised that conflicting party programmes can be proved equally correct, our attitude of soul will be that we do not set out to prove things, but rather to experience them. For to experience a thing is a very different matter from attempting to prove it intellectually.

Equally we shall be convinced that deeper and deeper penetration of the Gospels is necessary through spiritual science. The literal, word-for-word acceptance of the Gospels that is still so prevalent to-day, promotes Ahrimanic culture. Even on external grounds it is obvious that a strictly literal acceptance of the Gospels is unjustified. For as you know, what is good and right for one time is not right for every other time. What is right for one epoch becomes Luciferic or Ahrimanic when practised in a later one. The mere reading of the Gospel texts has had its day. What is essential now is to acquire a spiritual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in the light of the truths enshrined in the Gospels. Many people, of course, find these things disquieting; but those whose interest is attracted by Anthroposophy must learn to realise that the levels of culture, gradually piling one above the other, have created chaos, and that light must penetrate again into this chaos.

It is interesting nowadays to listen to someone whose views have become very extreme, or to read about some burning question of the day, and then to listen to sermons on the same subject given by a priest of some denomination who is still steeped in the form of thought current in bye gone times. There you face two worlds which you cannot possibly confuse unless you avoid all attempts to get at the root of these things. Listen to a modern socialist speaking about social questions and then, immediately afterwards, to a Catholic preacher speaking about the same questions. It is very interesting to find two levels of culture existing side by side but using the words in an entirely different sense. The same word has quite a different meaning in each case.

These things should be seen in the light that will dawn if they are taken in the earnest spirit we have been trying to convey. People belonging to definite religions do also come, in the end, to long in their own way for spiritual deepening. It is by no means without significance that a man as eminently spiritual as Cardinal Newman, ardent Catholic though he was, should say at his investiture as Cardinal in Rome that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation.

In effect, what Cardinal Newman said was that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation! But he had not the courage to take a new spiritual revelation seriously. And so it is with many others. You can read countless treatises to-day about what is needed in social life.—Another book has recently appeared: Socialism, by Robert Wilbrandt, the son of the poet. In it the social question is discussed on the foundation of accurate and detailed knowledge. And finally it is stated that without the spirit nothing is achieved? That the very course of events shows that the spirit is necessary. Yes, but what does such a man really achieve? He gets as far as to utter the word “spirit”, to pronounce the abstract word “spirit”; but he refuses to accept, indeed he rejects, anything that endeavours to make the spirit really take effect.

For that it is essential above all to realise that wallowing in abstractions, however loud the cry for the spirit, is not yet spiritual, not yet spirit! Vague, abstract chattering about the spirit must never be confused with the active search for the content of the spiritual world pursued in anthroposophical science.

Nowadays there is much talk about the spirit. But you who accept spiritual science should not be deluded by such chattering; you should perceive the difference between it and the descriptions of the spiritual world attempted in Anthroposophy, where the spiritual world is described as objectively as the physical world. You should probe into these differences, reminding yourselves repeatedly that abstract talk of the spirit is a deviation from sincere striving for the spirit and that, by their very talk, people are actually removing themselves from the spirit. Purely intellectual allusion to the spirit leads nowhere.—What, then, is “intelligence”? What is the content of our human intelligence? I can best explain this in the following way.—Imagine—and this will be better understood by the many ladies present!—imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror and looking into it. The picture presented to you by the mirror is you, but it has no reality at all. It is nothing but a reflection. All the intelligence within your soul, all the intellectual content, is only a mirror-image; it has no reality. And just as your reflected image is called into existence through the mirror, so what mirrors itself as intelligence is called into existence through the physical apparatus of your body, through the brain. Man is intelligent only because his body is there. And as little as you can touch yourself by stretching your hand towards your reflected image, as little can you lay hold of the spirit if you turn only to the intellectual—for the spirit is not there! What is grasped through the intellect, ingenious as it may be, never contains the spirit itself, but only a picture of the spirit. You cannot truly experience the spirit if you get no further than mere intelligence. The reason why intelligence is so seductive is that it yields a picture, a reflected picture of the spirit—but not the spirit itself. It seems unnecessary to go to the inconvenience of penetrating to the spirit, because it is there—or so, at least, one imagines. In reality it is only a reflected picture—but for all that, it is not difficult to talk about the spirit.

To distinguish the mere picture from the reality—that is the task of the tenor of soul which does not merely theorise about spiritual science but has actual perception of the spirit.

That is what I wanted to say to you to-day in order to intensify the earnestness which should pervade our whole attitude to the spiritual life as conceived by Anthroposophy. For the evolution of humanity in the future will depend upon how truly this attitude is adopted by men of the present day. If what I have characterised in this lecture continues to be offered the reception that is still offered to it to-day by the vast majority of people on the earth, then Ahriman will be an evil guest when he comes. But if men are able to rouse themselves to take into their consciousness what we have been studying, if they are able so to guide it that humanity can freely confront the Ahrimanic influence, then, when Ahriman appears, men will acquire, precisely through him, the power to realise that although the earth must enter inevitably into its decline, mankind is lifted above earthly existence through this very fact. When a man has reached a certain age in physical life, his body begins to decline, but if he is sensible he makes no complaint, knowing that together with his soul he is approaching a life that does not run parallel with this physical decline. There lives in mankind something that is not bound up with the already prevailing decline of the physical earth but becomes more and more spiritual just because of this physical decline.

Let us learn to say frankly: Yes, the earth is in its decline, and human life, too, in respect of its physical manifestation; but just because it is so, let us muster the strength to draw into our civilisation that element which, springing from mankind itself, will live on while the earth is in decline, as the immortal fruit of earth-evolution.

• 1. Twelve lectures given at Nuremberg, 1908.

Those of you who heard the last lectures given here will have understood from what was said in them that it is an absolute necessity of our time that the Science of Initiation, the real science of the spiritual life, should permeate the whole evolution of our present civilized society. I have already said much concerning the obstacles which hinder the permeation of our civilization, both present and in the future, by the science of the spiritual worlds. First, above all things, there is that feeling which I have often characterized as fear of spiritual knowledge. At the present time one has only to say such a thing openly for it to be received on all sides as a kind of insult. According to the views of most people, how can it be conceivable that in this age in which such splendid progress has been made, men should be afraid of any kind of knowledge? People today undoubtedly believe that with their powers of cognition they are in a position to comprehend everything, practically everything. The fear, however, of which I am speaking and of which I have so often spoken, does not lie within the consciousness of mankind. In his consciousness man persuades himself that he is courageous enough to face any kind of knowledge. But deep down in that part of the soul of which men know nothing, and of which indeed they wish today to know nothing, there lies this unconscious fear. And because men have this unconscious fear, all kinds of reasons rise up from the depths of their soul which they call logical, and they give out these reasons as logical objections to Spiritual Science. These are not logical objections. They are only the outcome of that fear of the science of the spirit, a fear which rules unconsciously in human souls. As a matter of fact, in the hidden depths of his soul-life everyone knows far more than he thinks, but he does not want this knowledge, which is rooted in the depths of his soul-life, to come to the surface, because in the presence of it he is afraid. Above all things man surmises one thing about the super-sensible worlds; he surmises that in all that he calls his thinking, in all that he designates as his world of thought, there is something contained of a super-sensible world. At the present time, even persons of a materialist turn of mind cannot altogether drive away the dim feeling that in the life of thought there is something contained which somehow indicates a super-sensible world. And at the same time man surmises something else about this thought-world. He divines that this world of thought relates itself to an actual reality, just as the image seen in a looking glass relates itself to the reality reflected by the looking glass. Just as the image in the looking glass is no reality, so man has to admit that his own world of thought is no reality. In that moment where man has the courage, the fearlessness, to admit that the world of thought is not a reality, in that moment he is also seized with yearning for a knowledge of the spiritual world. For after all, one would like to know what it is that is really there, but of which one only sees the reflection.

What I have just said has an important polaric counterpart. When through the Science of Initiation we cross the threshold of the super-sensible world, over into the spiritual world, then everything which man experiences here as sensible reality is transformed to a mere picture, to an appearance. We mount up into the super-sensible world and just as, let us say, here on earth the super-sensible world is a mirror-picture, existing only as a mirror-picture, so in the super-sensible world the earthly world exists only as a mirror-picture. He, therefore, who speaks from the Science of Initiation, speaks quite naturally of the realities of the sense world as of “pictures”. Now, human beings feel this; they feel that that on which they can stand so comfortably, that which they can breathe in so comfortably, which they can see so comfortably without having to do anything else than, at most, open their eyes when they get up in the morning and rub them—all this becomes a mere picture. They feel this and they begin to feel insecure, much as a man might who, taken for a walk, is led to the edge of an abyss and is then seized by the dizziness of fear. On the one side therefore, the human being feels that his thinking in the sense-world is a mere sum-total of pictures. On the other side he feels—and he feels it even if he deceives himself through that unconscious fear—that that which is told him of the super-sensible world makes this physical world a mere picture. As I have said, this is felt by men, and therefore they struggle against that which comes from the Science of Initiation. They rebel because they think that the secure foundation of existence falls away from them when their soul-life is, as it were, transformed to a mere picture.

Of course, it is not everybody in our present age who, quite unprepared, can go through that which has to be gone through by one who actually directly enters the world of Initiation. For anyone who enters the world of Initiation must not only know in it what every human being today should strive to know, but he has to live in it as well. He has to live in it, just as a man lives with his body in the physical sense world. That means he has to go through, as it were, by proxy what is only to be gone through in the physical sense-world at the moment of death. He has to gain the power to live in a world for which the physical, sensible part of him is not adapted. If we cut our finger we feel a certain pain, a discomfort. Why do we feel discomfort when we cut our finger? For the simple reason that the knife cuts the skin and muscle and nerve, but does not cut the super-sensible etheric body. If we have an uninjured finger, our super-sensible etheric body is adapted to it. If we cut the finger (and we cannot cut the etheric body) the super-sensible uncut etheric body is not adapted to it. That is the reason why the astral body then feels pain. The pain comes from non-adaptability to the sensible corporality. But when man crosses the threshold and enters the super-sensible world, then in his whole body he is no longer adapted to the sensible body. He gradually feels something similar to what he felt locally when he cut his finger. And this, my dear friends, this has to be thought of as enhanced to an unlimited degree.

Naturally, then, one cannot imagine what would come over human beings of the present-day, who often are so brave in their consciousness, and so sorry for themselves in their souls, if they suddenly received the power to live in the super-sensible world, if they had to experience everything which comes from non-adaptability to the super-sensible world.

But not only are human beings today so far advanced that with their healthy human understanding they can comprehend everything related by those who know the life in the super-sensible, but this knowledge of the super-sensible, this receptivity towards the science of the super-sensible, is an absolute, an unconditional, necessity for the healthy human understanding of the present age. Only this knowledge of the super-sensible can throw light upon all that is so chaotic, so destructive, in our modern surroundings. We are living in a world in which things are making their appearance, in which things are working themselves out, of which we must say: “They cannot go on like this, they must undergo transformation.” But human beings today have absolutely no insight into that which lives around them. To see through that which lives around man today is only possible through the Science of Initiation, is only possible when all the life of our present age can be compared with all the phenomena of life which have marked the evolution of mankind in the course of centuries, of millennia.

There has come a time when it must be said publicly that if any fruitful impulse is to be brought into life, into life with its modern destructive phenomena, it can be no other than the principle of the Three-fold Division of the Social Organism. By this means the eyes of men's souls will be directed to the three basic streams of our present life of civilization.

These three basic streams, as most of you today are fully aware, are the stream of the Spiritual Life (in the full meaning of the word spiritual), and that of the Political Life of Rights, and that of the external Life of Economy and Industry.

When these three basic streams of life are placed before the soul of man, when the name for each of these streams is uttered, in each case a great sum-total of the phenomena of Life is really included.

Let us now pass briefly before our spiritual vision these three streams in their sequence. We have today a Spiritual Life. In one way or another each individual has a part in this spiritual life: One, perhaps because his way of life is conditioned by economic circumstances or civic status, goes only to an elementary school; another perhaps is taken further on in our educational institutions. And that which is learnt in this way by human beings lives on at work amongst us in our social life. By this means we are linked to our fellow man.

Today the time has come when the question has to be put searchingly: “Where has this whole spiritual life come from, and what was it in the course of its descent, in the course of its evolution, which gave to it the character which it bears today?” If we go back to the real origin of this spiritual life, we must pass through certain stages on the way. That which characterizes the life of our schools, elementary and higher—I am leaving out the intermediate stages for the present—all goes back to a far-distant past. People usually do not know how far it goes back, e.g., in the case of the elementary school, that that goes back to the time of ancient Greece. Fundamentally our spiritual life today is nourished by impulses which existed in ancient Greece in a somewhat different form, and which have only been changed since then. But these impulses did not originate even in ancient Greece. They originated far away in the East. Thousands of years ago at their source in the East they had certainly another form than they had in ancient Greece. In the East these impulses belonged to the Wisdom of the Mysteries. If we leave aside our legal-political life, which is entangled chaotically as in a knot with the spiritual life, and also leave aside the life of industry, of economics; if we separate, abstract from these our spiritual life, then we can go back, mounting the path to certain Mysteries of the East, the origin of which lies undoubtedly thousands of years ago. That, however, which for us today in educational institutions is a dry barren abstraction, devoid of life, was then something altogether living. And if we transport ourselves in spirit back to those Mysteries of the East to which I am now referring, we meet as the leaders of these Mysteries men who may be designated as a kind of union of priest, of king, and at the same time, strange as it may sound to people today, of industrialists, economists. For in those Mysteries—I shall call them the “Mysteries of Light or of the Spirit”- an all-embracing knowledge of life was pursued, a knowledge which, in the first place, aimed at directing the study of the nature of man by means of the facts of the world of the Heavens, and the world of the Stars. But this knowledge was also a wisdom which aimed at regulating the rights of man's communal life in accordance with the knowledge thus acquired. Thus from these Mystery centres instruction was given for the tending of the cattle, for ploughing the fields, for laying the water courses, and so on. This Science of Initiation of hoary antiquity had an impelling power for social life; it was something which gave scope to the whole man. It was in a position not merely to say lovely things about the good and the true, but also by the Spirit itself it could rule practical life, could organize it and give it form.

Now the path which these Mystery leaders took and, which so far as was possible to them, showed to the people who belonged to such a Mystery, was a path leading from above downwards. First, these Mystery leaders strove for a revelation of the spiritual world, then grasping the spirit in the concrete in accordance with the basic principles of atavistic clairvoyance, they worked down to the political life, to the political shaping of the social organism, then down to economy and industry. That was Wisdom, with impelling force for life itself. By what road did this wisdom with its impelling life-force actually come among mankind?

If we go back to the ages before the Mysteries to which I am now referring became authoritative, we find in the regions of civilized humanity people with a primeval atavistic clairvoyance, human beings who, if they spoke of the needs of life, could invoke the impressions of their heart, of their soul, of their inner vision. These people were spread over the regions now called India, Persia, Armenia, North Africa, South Europe, etc. One thing, however, we do not find in the souls of these human beings. It is that which today we consider our proudest soul-treasure—Intellect, Reason. The inhabitants of the civilized world of that time did not yet need reason. What our reason does today, was done by those human beings out of the promptings of their souls, and these promptings were guided and directed by the leaders whom these men had. Later there came into these regions another human race, quite a different race from the earlier population. In the Sagas and Myths, and indeed also in history, we are told that from the highlands of Asia certain people came down in very ancient times who brought a form of civilization to the south and south-west. Spiritual Science is required to establish what kind of men these were who came down upon those earlier human beings, who simply from their own inner promptings received the guiding powers for daily life. Through investigation by Spiritual Science we find that those who brought in a new population-element combined two qualities, one of which the earlier people did not possess. The original inhabitants had atavistic clairvoyance without reason, without intelligence. Those who came down amongst them also had something of the clairvoyant power, but at the same time in their souls they had received the first germ of intelligence, of reason. They brought, therefore, into the civilization of that time, a clairvoyance impregnated with reason. These were the first Aryans, of whom history tells us, and out of the mutual opposition of the ancient early people living by atavistic powers of the soul, and those who impregnated the ancient soul-powers with reason, out of that opposition there arose the first distinction into Caste, external, physical and empirical, which still works on in Asia, and of which Tagore, for instance, speaks.

The most prominent members of the race, who possessed at the same time ancient soul-vision and the intellect which was dawning in humanity, were the leaders of those Mysteries of which I have just spoken, the Mysteries of Oriental Light. From these proceeded the Mysteries of Greece. Thus we may say: From the Mysteries of the East there went forth later the stream of the Spirit, that living wisdom with its living practical impulse of which I have just spoken. In the course of time it came over to Greece. Its influence is still to be traced in the most ancient Greek civilization. But in the progress of Greek civilization the influence became weakened, the leaders lost their ancient soul-vision, and reason more and more freed itself from the old clairvoyance. Thereby the leadership of this civilization lost its meaning, because this once only had meaning as long as the leaders were endowed with spiritual soul-vision as well as intelligence. History tells us that that which had a meaning in ancient times is preserved into a much later epoch. Thus we find humanity in the later Greek civilization still grouped in a way which had a meaning for that ancient time, when the leaders of the Mysteries were actually messengers of the Gods. That which once was wisdom with an impulse for life, was transformed into Greek logic and dialectic, into the wisdom of the Greeks, wisdom which is already strained thin compared with its old Oriental origin. In the old Oriental times every one knew why there were people who obeyed when the leaders gave them directions in economics. In Greece we find the division into masters and slaves. The division of mankind was still there, but the meaning had been gradually lost. And that which for the Greeks still had much meaning, for at least they knew that it came from the ancient Mysteries, was still more weakened as it passed into our modern life of education. In our modern life of education, everything has become devoid of living connection. We pursue today an abstract science. We find no longer a connection between this abstract science and external life. The stream from Greece has gone into our Colleges, into our elementary and secondary schools, into the whole popular cultural life of modern humanity. One curious thing may be observed today. We meet among the men with whom we are surrounded some whom we call “noblemen”, “aristocrats”. We try in vain to find the reason why one person is an aristocrat and another is not, for mankind has long stripped off that which distinguishes the aristocrat from the non-aristocrat. The aristocrat was the leader in the old Oriental Mysteries of Light. He could be the aristocrat, because from him came everything which had a real living impulse in political and economic affairs. The wisdom has become watered thin, the divisions into which it made groups of people have become an external abstraction without meaning for those whose lives are cast in it. From that stream proceeded what we call Feudalism. In external social life this Feudalism lives on, tolerated by some, perhaps vexatious to others, meaningless. No one thinks any more about the meaning, because it is not to be found in life today, but in our modern age of chaos the feudal origin of our abstract science and knowledge shows itself pretty clearly. And when our modern Spiritual life became entirely the spiritual life of the journalistic world, a term was invented which really is a verbal atrocity. Through this term men sought to bring about a transformation of our life, but it was merely the expression of an utterly rickety spiritual life—they invented the term, “spiritual aristocracy”. If anyone tried to explain exactly what is meant by this term he could only say: “It is that which now squeezed dry to the uttermost had once upon a time in the Mysteries of the East, an impelling force which worked down into the furthest limits of practical life.” The term in those days had a meaning, but today it has lost all meaning. And if anyone wishes to describe our Spiritual life, he has to think of a desperately tangled coil of wool where all the threads are twisted together. There are three threads in particular which are entangled. One of them I have just described to you. Our essential task is to unravel the tangle.

Let us now turn the eyes of our soul to the second stream. This second stream had another origin, which also lies far back in the evolution of mankind; it, too, was essentially united with the Mysteries, and in particular with the Mysteries of Egypt. I called the first stream “the Mysteries of the East” or “the Mysteries of Light”. I shall call this second stream “the Mysteries of Man”. These Mysteries were directed above all to obtaining at the Egyptian source, that Wisdom which gives the power to organize human communal life, to establish a relation between one human being and another. This stream from the Mysteries spread through the South of Europe, and then, just as the first stream went through the life of Greece, this second stream found its way to the people of Rome, a people lacking in imagination. I might call it “the stream of Rights”. It took its path through Rome. All that which, bit by bit, in the course of human evolution has been inoculated as Jurisprudence, as legal distinctions in Equity, is the attenuated remnant of knowledge of these Mysteries of Man.

The second thread in our tangle of civilization has come to us in this way, but very much changed, transformed after having passed through the unimaginative mind of Rome. We shall not understand modern life, until we know that men even today are still unproductive both in the life of Spirit and in the life of Rights; until we know that both of these have been received by us from outside—the first after it had traveled the long way from the Mysteries of the East through the Mysteries of Greece, the second, the long way from the Mysteries of Egypt through Rome. Present-day humanity has been sterile with regard to both the life of Spirit and the life of Rights. We could bring forward many cases to prove this assertion, but it will suffice if I point out paths taken by Christianity.

When Christianity sought to enter the world, where had Christ Jesus to appear so that what He had to give to the world could find a foothold? He had to appear in the East. It was in that which lived in the East that He had to place what He had to give to humanity. The Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. What mankind knows about it is in process of evolving. What people first had to say about the Mystery of Golgotha was clothed in that which was still left to them from the Mysteries of the East. They surrounded the Mystery of Golgotha with the Science and Wisdom of the Mysteries of the East, and with that Wisdom they tried to understand it. In the early Greek Fathers of the Church we find there is still something of this Christianity.

To point to another manifestation of the same kind, when the civilization of the West had spiritually become utterly sterile, and a spiritual restorative was sought for, through one of its representatives, what happened? In England and America a few people came together and borrowed the Wisdom from the conquered and enslaved people of India. That is to say, they went once more to the East to seek there the spiritual stream, to seek in the East what remained of that ancient spiritual stream. From this arose Theosophy of the English-American dye, which sought to draw water from this source, but in the form it has assumed at the present day. It is the sterility of modern Spiritual life which strikes one most forcibly, especially in Western lands.

The second stream, then, is that which is concerned with Politics and Rights, and which passed through Rome. In it we find the origin of our life of Politics and Rights. This stream which has flowed into, and is still active in our life of Rights, only came by the side-channel of the Roman world. Hence, in our civilization, that which passed into our Spiritual life also has been received by way of the Roman political-legal system. This accounts for so many anomalies. Even Christianity, which spread in the West on Roman lines, took on a form conditioned by this fact. What did the religious element become on its passage through the Roman world? It became that great System of Law which we call the Roman Catholic religion. There, God with his attendant gods, is essentially a Being who rules according to the Roman conception of justice, only He is in the super-sensible world. Here we find established the ideas of debt, of default, which are really only legal ideas, ideas which never existed in the Mysteries of the East or in the Greek philosophy of life. In this Christianity the juristic concepts of Rome are established. It is a religious stream saturated with legalities. Everything which finds expression in life can assume a form of beauty, but we must confess that even that juristic-political scene in which the God of the World becomes the Judge of the World, and winds up the whole evolution of the earth by a legal Act, even that magnificent painting of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, is only a glorious expression of Christianity saturated by legalism. It is just this Christianity saturated by legalism, which finds its culmination in the “Last Judgment”.

We must unwind the tangle of our spiritual, political, and industrial life so that we may see what is really contained inside it. For we live in a chaotic civilization. Three streams are working in it; we must separate them from one another.

The third stream which has come into our chaotic civilization, originated more in the North. Much has filtered into it also, but in another way. This stream has been preserved till today, especially in the social organization of England and America. I shall speak of this stream as “the Mysteries of the Earth”, the Mysteries of the North or of the Earth. Now this stream which developed first as primitive spirituality out of the Mysteries of the Earth, took a different course from that of the essentially Spiritual life of the East. I have said that in the East the path led from above downwards, first revealing itself as the Mysteries of the Heavens and of the Light, then passing down into Politics and Economics. Here, in the North things rose out of Economics, out of the life of Industry. The origin has, of course, vanished from ordinary modern life. We notice it at most in ancient customs which still survive here and there; such customs as are described in accounts of ancient Nordic civilization, of which the English civilization is a branch, e.g., processions through the villages at a certain season of the year, with the bull, which has to fertilize the herd of cows, crowned with wreaths. That is to say, from below upwards there arose a longing after the Spiritual life. The path leads from below upwards. Everything, even that which existed as primitive spirituality, was taken from the industrial-economic life. All the festivals originally were connected with the life of Economy, of Industry, all expressed something of the meaning of the life of Economy. Just as in the Oriental civilization the path led from above downwards, so here, in the North, the path had to lead from below upwards. Mankind had to be raised from below, out of Economics, through the life of Rights, into the Mysteries of the Spirit. Mankind has not as yet advanced very far on this path from below upwards.

If we investigate the Legal life, the life of law and justice, as it has developed in the regions of Western Europe, we find it completely orientated to Rome. If we investigate the Spiritual life, we do not find it so plainly orientated to the East as that Indian Theosophy is of which I have just spoken. But we do find that that which has survived as innate Spiritual life which was not taken from the East, nor saturated with legalities from Rome, we do often find this original Spiritual life struggling to release itself from the Economic life, and with hard labour working itself free.

Let us take a characteristic example. Such philosophers, such students of natural science as Newton, Darwin, Hume, Mill, Spencer, can only be understood if we see how they developed out of the Economic life, how they endeavoured to take an upward path. Mill, for example, as a national economist, can only be understood if we understand the economic conditions surrounding him. We can only understand the English philosophers if we clearly grasp the economic basis of their environment. That basis is something inseparable from the third stream, the stream of “the Mysteries of the Earth”, the stream which works its way from below upwards. This, the third stream, is as yet quite unrefined.

Here then, in the tangle of our so-called civilization, we have the three threads chaotically at work. Always in a certain sense there has been a revolt against this tangle, in the West at least. In America, where the Economic life is derived from the Mysteries of the North, we find theories built up scientifically, but devoid of Spirit, alien to Spirit. America obtained her Legal-Political life by way of Rome. Spiritual concerns were borrowed from the East. In Central Europe, too, there was a good deal of revolt, and various endeavours were made to grasp these things in their primitive clarity; in the Spiritual life with most penetration in what I must call Goetheanism. Goethe, who sought to get rid of a Law-code in the sphere of natural science, Goethe is characteristic of this revolt against the purely Oriental life of Spirit. For the legal element has entered into natural science too. We speak of “Laws of Nature”. The Oriental would never have spoken of the Laws of Nature, but of the Rule of Cosmic Will. The term “Natural Law” was derived from the side-stream of Jurisprudence. It crept into nature knowledge as through a window and became “natural law”. Goethe wanted to grasp the pure phenomenon, the pure fact, the primal phenomenon. Until we purge our Natural Science from its dependence on Jurisprudence, we can never reach a purified cultural life. For this reason Spiritual Science everywhere lays hold on facts, and indicates so-called “laws” as secondary phenomena only.

We find also a certain revolt against the Roman system of Rights, a revolt which is still in the minds of many persons inclined to socialism. For instance, a Prussian minister, Wilhelm van Humbold, in his fine treatise on “The Limits of State Action”, shows stirring within him something of this impulse to free the Cultural life and the life of Economics from the mere life of the State. In that little book there lives the impulse to strip off the political from the other directing forces. Thus in German philosophy, too, there lives this revolt against that which is merely “old”. But only through a healthy insight into that which the Science of Initiation can give concerning the origin of our present cultural life, can man gain a sure foot-hold; only through such insight can healing, can health, come into the evolution of human civilization.

In the East of Europe especially, there has always been a feeling for the necessity of a right co-operation of the three elements in our present life of culture. Of these three streams the one most characteristic in expression is that which came from the North to the West. In the West everything is overpowered by the Economic-industrial life. Of the legal element there is much in Central Europe, whilst much of that which arose from the Mysteries of the East, the Mysteries of Light, is to be found in Eastern Europe and Asia. There, where the caste system still prevails, we find something of the meaning of that old Feudalism which came forth from the Spirit. The life permeated with legalities has bred the modern Bourgeoisie. The Bourgeoisie is the outcome of the stream of Rights. These things have to be seen with perfect clarity now; and the impulse towards this clear recognition lies already in the unconscious part of man, but it is only Spiritual Science which can bring this longing, this impulse, to real clarity.

In the nineteenth century, again and again, we can see how men strove amid all the confusion of very indefinite impulses, to reach ideals for the future. Men wanted especially to put an end to the abstract relations which prevail today between man and man. The life of the Spirit has been watered down so that it lives in us as an abstraction; and the life of Economics is grasping and struggling to find the way upward from below.

In Eastern Europe, where things of such disturbing, devastating significance are now working themselves out, it was shown for the first time in the much-confused nineteenth century how men attempted to prepare for the revolt against this chaos of civilization. The Russian revolutionaries of the second and last third of the nineteenth century, attempted in particular to fertilize the remnant still left in the East of an early stage of Spiritual life, with that element in Central Europe which had already revolted against tradition. We find among such Russians in their correspondence with each other, how they point out that already in Central Europe, the intellect, the pure abstract life of reason has endeavoured to permeate itself with a certain spirituality. Again and again there appears some such sentence as the following: “In German philosophy the attempt has been made once more to raise the intellect, which has lost its ancient soul-vision, to a certain spirituality.” In Eastern Europe they wanted to make themselves intimately acquainted with this attempt in Central Europe, and this intimate knowledge reflects itself in the way these Russian revolutionaries write to one another. They greatly esteemed the philosopher Ivan Petrovitch. They spoke much of his philosophy, how he had raised himself to pure thought, attempting to bring Spirit again into the dialectic play of thought of Western Culture. They tried to draw conclusions from his philosophy. The better to mark their own feeling of relationship to him, they called him not “Hegel”, but “Ivan Petrovitch”. In their endeavours we see foreshadowed that which later on had to work so destructively.

In our age, clear thinking must spread over the whole earth. Everything must be done to help forward the victory of clear thinking. But we must be quite conscious of all that is against us when we make the attempt to reach this clear thinking, and that, amongst many other things, we have against us man's love of ease. We must wean ourselves from the habit of regard for the comfort of men. For mankind needs the Spirit, and the triumph of the Spirit is not brought about by the comfortable paths so often trodden today. Today men fight against the coming in of Initiation with the most significant weapons.

I was recently informed of something which is significant in historic culture. You will correct me if I make a mistake, for I was not there myself. At a meeting where a Protestant clergyman was in the chair, one of our friends made some quotations from the Bible. The truth of these did not please the chairman, who then used the expression, “Here Christ is wrong!” Have I repeated that correctly? (Assent.) Today when one can no longer justify one's own view, it is man who is infallible, and the Christ who is wrong! We have come as far as this.

All these things bear witness to the true character of that which is stirring as Spiritual life in mankind today. Where Spiritual life has reached the most utter abstraction, it can no longer keep within the sphere of truth. But we must become aware of what really exists.

The periodical, The Threefold Social Organism, recently published a notice of a gathering held here at Stuttgart, where from the Roman Catholic side, but in harmony with the Protestant, opposition was made to the teaching given as Spiritual Science. And the leading cleric is reported to have said that no discussion was necessary because people can inform themselves concerning the doctrines of Dr. Steiner from the writings of his opponents, but the writings of Dr. Steiner himself may not be read because the Pope has forbidden it. In fact, this is the latest decree from the Holy Congregation, and it applies especially to Catholics—the decree that it is forbidden to Catholics to read Anthroposophical writings. Roman Catholics, therefore, are officially bound to seek information upon what I teach from the writings of my opponents, but they are not allowed to read what I write myself. Anyone on the other side who knows the whole constitution of the Roman Catholic Church, how the individual is so dovetailed into it that he is only a representative of the whole organization, must in all earnestness, out of the depths of his soul, bring forward the question regarding the moral aspect of such a procedure. Is such a procedure to be reconciled in any way with human morality? Is it not profoundly immoral? Such questions must be put bravely today, without any leniency. We are living in a serious time, and may not go on sleeping in the easy comfort-loving, lazy way. We must express ourselves unreservedly about these things. If we show the immorality of modern untruth in the right light, it will bring about a healing.

Recently an article by a doctor in Sociology was brought to me. It began somewhat as follows: “What a distance there is between the clear thoughts of Waxweiler and the obscure thoughts of Dr. Steiner! But then, this Dr. Steiner was the intimate of William II, and it has been suggested that he helped William II with important advice, especially in recent years. So one can even call this man the Rasputin of William II.” His next sentence runs: “We will not make ourselves the transmitters of such a rumour.” And there are today many people with this mentality, people forsaken by every spirit of truthfulness, and whatever they say is beyond the sphere of truth.

We see two things here. First, the moral degradation of a man who makes himself the bearer of this rumour, and then his fine logic when he says, “Because I spread this rumour among my readers, I do not make myself a spreader of this rumour.” Countless people think in this way. What they say has no reality in it. I cannot say, “I say something because I do not say it.” This is what Monsieur Ferriere says, the man who wrote the article from which I have just read. We cannot enter into relationship with such morally degenerate individuals. I can only maintain, and I hope that it will be brought before this writer's notice, that I have had the following relationships with William II. Once about 1897, I was sitting in a theatre in Berlin, in the middle of the front row, above, and William II sat in the Royal Box, and I saw him, as far away as from here to the end of this room. The second time was when he walked behind the coffin of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, and that was quite far away. The third time was in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, where, with his following, with the Marshal's baton in his hand, he rode through the streets, all the people shouting “Hurrah!” after him. These are all the relationships with William II, I have ever had. I have never had any others nor sought them. Thus assertions arise today, and much of what you read on paper in printer's ink is of no more value than that dirty rumour which is used to make Anthroposophy a heresy in Latin countries. Today such things have to be traced to their origin. It is not enough to take them as mere parlance. People must accustom themselves to go to the origin of what is affirmed.

A sense for the true origin of facts in the external world will only develop in mankind out of a deepening in real Spiritual Science.

I shall now continue, in a certain direction, the more elementary considerations recently begun. In the first lecture of this series I drew your attention to the heart's real, inner need of finding, or at least seeking, the paths of the soul to the spiritual world. I spoke of this need meeting man from two directions: from the side of Nature, and from the side of inner experience.

Today we will again place these two aspects of human life before us in a quite elementary way. We shall then see that impulses from the subconscious are really active in all man's striving for knowledge in response to the needs of life, in his artistic aims and religious aspirations.

You can quite easily study the opposition, to which I here refer, in yourselves at any moment.

Take one quite simple fact. You are looking, let us say, at some part of your body—your hand, for example. In so far as the act of cognition itself is concerned you look at your hand exactly as at a crystal, or plant, or any other natural object. But when you look at this part of your body and go through life with this perception, you encounter that seriously disturbing fact which intrudes on all human experience and of which I spoke. You find that what you see will one day be a corpse; external Nature, on receiving it, has not the power to do anything else than destroy it. The moment man has become a corpse within the physical world and has been handed over to the elements in any form, there is no longer any possibility that the human form, which has been impressed on all the substances visible in his body, will be able to maintain itself.

All the forces of Nature which you can make the subject of any scientific study are only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Every unprejudiced study that is not guided by theory but controlled by life itself, leads us to say: We look at Nature around us in so far it is intelligible. (We will not speak, for the present, of what external cognition cannot grasp.) As civilised people of today we feel we have advanced very far indeed, for we have discovered so many laws of Nature. This talk of progress is, indeed, perfectly justified. Nevertheless, it is a fact that all these laws of Nature are, by their mode of operation, only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Human insight is unable, at first, to discover anything in the external world except laws of Nature which destroy man.

Let us now look at our inner life. We experience what we call our psychical life, i.e. our thinking, which can confront us fairly clearly, our feeling, which is less clearly experienced, and our willing, which is quite hidden from us. For, with ordinary consciousness, no one can claim insight into the way an intention—to pick up an object, let us say—works down into this very complicated organism of muscle and nerve in order to move, at length, arms and legs. What it is that here works down into the organism, between the formation of the thought and the perception of the lifted object, is hidden in complete darkness. But an indefinite impulse takes place in us, saying: I will this. So we ascribe will to ourselves and, on surveying our inner life, speak of thinking, feeling and willing.

But there is another side, and this introduces us again—in a certain sense—to what is deeply disturbing. We see that all this soul life of man is submerged whenever he sleeps and arises anew when he wakes. If we want to use a comparison we may well say: The soul life is like a flame which I kindle and extinguish again. But we see more. We see this soul life destroyed when certain organs are destroyed. Moreover, it is dependent on bodily development; being dreamlike in a little child and becoming gradually clearer and clearer, more and more awake. This increase in clarity and awareness goes hand in hand with the development of the body; and when we grow old our soul life becomes weaker again. The life of the soul thus keeps step with the growth and decay of the body. We see it light up and die away.

But, however sure we may be that our soul, though dependent in its manifestations on the physical organism, has its own life, its own existence, this is not all we can say about it. It contains an element man must value above all else in life, for his whole manhood—his human dignity—depends on this. I refer to the moral element.

We cannot deduce moral laws from Nature however far we may explore it. They have to be experienced entirely within the soul; there, too, we must be able to obey them. The conflict and settlement must therefore take place entirely within the soul. And we must regard it as a kind of ideal for the moral life to be able, as human beings, to obey moral principles which are not forced upon us. Yet man cannot become an ‘abstract being’ only obeying laws. The moral life does not begin until emotions, impulses, instincts, passions, outbursts of temperament, etc., are subordinated to the settlement, reached entirely within the soul, between moral laws grasped in a purely spiritual way and the soul itself.

The moment we become truly conscious of our human dignity and feel we cannot be like beings driven by necessity, we rise to a world quite different from the world of Nature.

Now the disturbing element that, as long as there has been human evolution at all, has led men to strive beyond the life immediately visible, really springs from these two laws—however many subconscious and unconscious factors may be involved: We see, on the one hand, man's bodily being, but it belongs to Nature that can only destroy it; and, on the other hand, we are inwardly aware of ourselves as soul beings who light up and fade away, yet are bound up with what is most valuable in us—the moral element.

It can only be ascribed to a fundamental insincerity of our civilisation that people deceive themselves so terribly, turning a blind eye to this direct opposition between outer perception and inner experience. If we understand ourselves, if we refuse to be confined and constricted by the shackles which our education, with a definite aim in view, imposes upon us, if we free ourselves a little from these constraints we say at once: Man! you bear within you your soul life—your thinking, feeling and willing. All this is connected with the moral world which you must value above all else—perhaps with the religious source of all existence on which this moral world itself depends. But where is this inner life of moral adjustments when you sleep?

Of course, one can spin philosophic fantasies or fantastic philosophies about these things. One may then say: Man has a secure basis in his ego (i.e. in his ordinary ego-consciousness). The ego begins to think in St. Augustine, continues through Descartes, and attains a somewhat coquettish expression in Bergsonism today. But every sleep refutes this. For, from the moment we fall asleep to the moment of waking, a certain time elapses; and when, in the waking state, we look back on this interval of time, we do not find the ego qua experience. It was extinguished. And yet it is connected with what is most valuable in our lives—the moral element!

Thus we must say: Our body, whose existence we are rudely forced to admit, is certainly not a product of Nature, which has only the power to destroy and disintegrate it. On the other hand, our own soul life eludes us when we sleep, and is dependent on every rising and falling tide of our bodily life. As soon as we free ourselves a little from the constraints imposed on civilised man by his education today, we see at once that every religious or artistic aspiration—in fact, any higher striving—no matter how many subconscious and unconscious elements be involved, depends, throughout all human evolution, on these antitheses.

Of course, millions and millions of people do not realise this clearly. But is it necessary that what becomes a riddle of life for a man be clearly recognised as such? If people had to live by what they are clear about they would soon die. It is really the contributions to the general mood from unclear, subconscious depths that compose the main stream of our life. We should not say that he alone feels the riddles of life who can formulate them in an intellectually clear way and lay them before us: first riddle, second riddle, etc. Indeed, such people are the shallowest.

Someone may come who has this or that to talk over with us. Perhaps it is some quite ordinary matter. He speaks with a definite aim in view, but is not quite happy about it. He wants something, and yet does not want it; he cannot come to a decision. He is not quite happy about his own thoughts. To what is this due? It comes from the feeling of uncertainty, in the subconscious depths of his being, about the real basis of man's true being and worth. He feels life's riddles because of the polar antithesis I have described.

Thus we can find support neither in the corporeal, nor in the spiritual as we experience it. For the spiritual always reveals itself as something that lights up and dies down, and the body is recognised as coming from Nature which can, however, only destroy it.

So man stands between two riddles. He looks outwards and perceives his physical body, but this is a perpetual riddle to him. He is aware of his psycho-spiritual life, but this, too, is a perpetual riddle. But the greatest riddle is this: If I really experience a moral impulse and have to set my legs in motion to do something towards its realisation, it means—of course—I must move my body. Let us say the impulse is one of goodwill. At first this is really experienced entirely within the soul, i.e. purely psychically. How, now, does this impulse of goodwill shoot down into the body? How does a moral impulse come to move bones by muscles? Ordinary consciousness cannot comprehend this. One may regard such a discussion as theoretical, and say: We leave that to philosophers; they will think about it. Our civilisation usually leaves this question to its thinkers, and then despises—or, at least, values but little—what they say. Well; this satisfies the head only, not the heart. The human heart feels a nervous unrest and finds no joy in life, no firm foundation, no security. With the form man's thinking has taken since the first third of the fifteenth century magnificent results in the domain of external science have been achieved, but nothing has or can be contributed towards a solution of these two riddles—that of man's physical body and that of his psychical life. It is just from a clear insight into these things that Anthroposophy comes forward, saying: True; man's thinking, in the form it has so far actually taken, is powerless in the face of Reality. However much we think, we cannot in the very least influence an external process of nature by our thinking.

Moreover, we cannot, by mere thinking, influence our own ‘will-organism’. To feel deeply the powerlessness of this thinking is to receive the impulse to transcend it.

But one cannot transcend it by spinning fantasies. There is no starting point but thought; you cannot begin to think about the world except by thinking. Our thinking, however, is not fitted for this. So we are unavoidably led by life itself to find—from this starting point in thought—a way by which our thinking may penetrate more deeply into existence—into Reality. This way is only to be found in what is described as meditation—for example, in my book: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

Today we will only describe this path in bare outline, for we intend to give the skeleton of a whole anthroposophical structure. We will begin again where we began twenty years ago.

Meditation, we may say, consists in experiencing thinking in another way than usual. Today one allows oneself to be stimulated from without; one surrenders to external reality. And in seeing, hearing, grasping, etc., one notices that the reception of external impressions is continued—to a certain extent—in thoughts. One's attitude is passive—one surrenders to the world and the thoughts come. We never get further in this way. We must begin to experience thinking. One does this by taking a thought that is easily comprehended, letting it stay in one's consciousness, and concentrating one's whole consciousness upon it.

Now it does not matter at all what the thought may signify for the external world. The point is simply that we concentrate our consciousness on this one thought, ignoring every other experience. I say it must be a comprehensible thought—a simple thought, that can be ‘seen’ from all sides [überschaubar]. A very, very learned man once asked me how one meditates. I gave him an exceedingly simple thought. I told him it did not matter whether the thought referred to any external reality. I told him to think: Wisdom is in the light. He was to apply the whole force of his soul again and again to the thought: Wisdom is in the light. Whether this be true or false is not the point. It matters just as little whether an object that I set in motion, again and again, by exerting my arm, be of far-reaching importance or a game; I strengthen the muscles of my arm thereby. So, too, we strengthen our thinking when we exert ourselves, again and again, to per-form the above activity, irrespective of what the thought may signify. If we strenuously endeavour, again and again, to make it present in our consciousness and concentrate our whole soul life upon it, we strengthen our soul life just as we strengthen the muscular force of our arm if we apply it again and again to the same action. But we must choose a thought that is easily surveyed; otherwise we are exposed to all possible tricks of our own organisation. People do not believe how strong is the suggestive power of unconscious echoes of past experiences and the like. The moment we entertain a more complicated thought demonic powers approach from all sides, suggesting this or that to our consciousness. One can only be sure that one is living in one's meditation in the full awareness of normal, conscious life, if one really takes a completely surveyable thought that can contain nothing but what one is actually thinking.

If we contrive to meditate in this way, all manner of people may say we are succumbing to auto-suggestion or the like, but they will be talking nonsense. It all turns on our success in holding a ‘transparent’ thought—not one that works in us through sub-conscious impulses in some way or other. By such concentration one strengthens and intensifies his soul life—in so far as this is a life in thought. Of course, it will depend on a man's capacities, as I have often said; in the case of one man it will take a long time, in the case of another it will happen quickly. But, after a certain time, the result will be that he no longer experiences his thinking as in ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness our thoughts stand there powerless; they are ‘just thoughts’. But through such concentration one really comes to experience thoughts as inner being [Sein], just as one experiences the tension of a muscle—the act of reaching out to grasp an object. Thinking becomes a reality in us; we experience, on developing ourselves further and further, a second man within us of whom we knew nothing before.

The moment now arrives when you say to yourself: True, I am this human being who, to begin with, can look at himself externally as one looks at the things of nature; I feel inwardly, but very dimly, the tensions of my muscles, but I do not really know how my thoughts shoot down into them. But after strengthening your thinking in the way described, you feel your strengthened thinking flowing, streaming, pulsating within you; you feel the second man. This is, to begin with, an abstract characterisation. The main thing is that the moment you feel this second man within you, supra-terrestrial things begin to concern you in the way only terrestrial things did before. In this moment, when you feel your thought take on inner life—when you feel its flow as you feel the flow of your breath when you pay heed to it—you become aware of something new in your whole being. Formerly you felt for example: I am standing on my legs. The ground is below and supports me. If it were not there, if the earth did not offer me this support, I would sink into bottomless space. I am standing on something. After you have intensified your thinking and come to feel the second man within, your earthly environment begins to interest you less than before. This only holds, however, for the moments in which you give special attention to the second man. One does not become a dreamer if one advances to these stages of knowledge in a sincere and fully conscious way. One can quite easily return, with all one's wonted skill, to the world of ordinary life. One does not become a visionary and say: Oh! I have learnt to know the spiritual world; the earthly is unreal and of less value. From now on I shall only concern myself with the spiritual world. On a true, spiritual path one does not become like that, but learns to value external life more than ever when one returns to it. Apart from this, the moments in which one transcends external life in the way described and fixes attention on the second man one has discovered cannot be maintained for long. To fix one's attention in this way and with inner sincerity demands great effort, and this can only be sustained for a certain time which is usually not very long.

Now, in turning our attention to the second man, we find at the same time, that we begin to value the spatial environment of the earth as much as what is on the earth itself. We know that the crust of the earth supports us, and the various kingdoms of Nature provide the substances we must eat if our body is to receive through food the repeated stimulus it needs. We know that we are connected with terrestrial Nature in this way. We must go into the garden to pick cabbages, cook and eat them; and we know that we need what is out there in the garden and that it is connected with our ‘first’ or physical man. In just the same way we learn to know what the rays of the sun, the light of the moon and the twinkling of the stars around the earth are to us. Gradually we attain one possible way of thinking of the spatial environment of the earth in relation to our ‘second man’, as we formerly thought of our first (physical) body in relation to its physical environment.

And now we say to ourselves: What you bear within you as muscles, bones, lung, liver, etc., is connected with the cabbage, the pheasant, etc., out there in the world. But the ‘second man’ of whom you have become conscious through strengthening your thinking, is connected with the sun and the moon and all the twinkling stars—with the spatial environment of the earth. We become more familiar with this environment than we usually are with our terrestrial environment—unless we happen to be food-specialists. We really gain a second world which, to begin with, is spatial.

We learn to esteem ourselves inhabitants of the world of stars as we formerly considered ourselves inhabitants of the earth. Hitherto we did not realise that we dwell in the world of stars; for a science which does not go as far to strengthen man's thinking cannot make him conscious of his connection, through a second man, with the spatial environment of the earth—a connection similar to that between his physical body and the physical earth. Such a science does not know this. It engages in calculations; but even the calculations of Astrophysics, etc., only reveal things which do not really concern man at all, or—at most—only satisfy his curiosity. After all, what does it mean to a man, or his inner life, to know how the spiral nebular in Canes venatici may be thought of as having originated, or as still evolving? Moreover, it is not even true! Such things do not really concern us. Man's attitude towards the world of stars is like that of some disembodied spirit towards the earth—if such a spirit be thought of as coming from some region or other to visit the earth, requiring neither ground to stand on, nor nourishment, etc. But, in actual fact, from a mere citizen of the earth man becomes a citizen of the universe when he strengthens his thinking in the above way.

We now become conscious of something quite definite, which can be described in the following way. We say to ourselves: It is good that there are cabbages, corn, etc., out there; they build up our physical body (if I may use this somewhat incorrect expression in accordance with the general, but very superficial, view). I am able to discover a certain connection between my physical body and what is there outside in the various kingdoms of Nature. But with strengthened thinking I begin to discover a similar connection between the ‘second man’ who lives in me and what surrounds me in supra-terrestrial space. At length one comes to say: If I go out at night and only use my ordinary eyes, I see nothing; by day the sunlight from beyond the earth makes all objects visible. To begin with, I know nothing. If I restrict myself to the earth alone, I know: there is a cabbage, there a quartz crystal. I see both by the light of the sun, but on earth I am only interested in the difference between them.

But now I begin to know that I myself, as the second man, am made of that which makes cabbage and crystal visible. It is a most significant leap in consciousness that one takes here—a complete metamorphosis. From this point one says to oneself: If you stand on the earth you see what is physical and connected with your physical man. If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the second man you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your ‘second existence’ to the cosmic ether through whose activities earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body. You see, merely to systematise and think of man as composed of various members gives no real knowledge. We only attain real insight into these things by regarding the complete metamorphosis of consciousness that results from really discovering such a second man within.

I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel, in a sense, the flowing force in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a touching that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

The moment now arrives when one is obliged to descend another step, if I may put it so. Through such ‘imaginative’ thinking as I have described we come, at first, to feel this inward touching of the second man within us; we come, too, to see this in connection with the far spaces of the universal ether. By this term you are to understand nothing but what I have just spoken of; do not read into it a meaning from some other quarter. Now, however, we must return again to ordinary consciousness if we are to get further.

You see, if we are thinking of man's physical body in the way described, we readily ask how it is really related to its environment. It is doubtless related to our physical, terrestrial environment; but how?

If we take a corpse, which is, indeed, a faithful representation of physical man—even of the living physical man—we see, in sharp contours, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lung, bones, muscles and nerve strands. These can be drawn; they have sharp contours and resemble in this everything that occurs in solid forms. Yet there is a curious thing about this sharply outlined part of the human organism. Strictly speaking, there is nothing more deceptive than our handbooks of anatomy or physiology, for they lead people to think: there is a liver, there a heart, etc. They see all this in sharp contours and imagine this sharpness to be essential. The human organism is looked upon as a conglomeration of solid things. But it is not so at all. Ten per cent., at most, is solid; the other ninety per cent. is fluid or even gaseous. At least ninety per cent. of man, while he lives, is a column of water.

Thus we can say: In his physical body man belongs, it is true, to the solid earth—to what the ancient thinkers in particular called the ‘earth’. Then we come to what is fluid in man; and even in external science one will never gain a reasonable idea of man until one learns to distinguish the solid man from the fluid man this inner surging and weaving element which really resembles a small ocean.

But what is terrestrial can only really affect man through the solid part of him. For even in external Nature you can see, where the fluid element begins, an inner formative force working with very great uniformity. Take the whole fluid element of our earth—its water; it is a great drop. Wherever water is free to take its own form, it takes that of a drop. The fluid element tends everywhere to be drop-like.

What is earthly—or solid, as we say today—occurs in definite, individual forms, which we can recognise. What is fluid, however, tends always to take on spherical form.

Why is this? Well, if you study a drop, be it small or as large as the earth itself, you find it is an image of the whole universe. Of course, this is wrong according to the ordinary conceptions of today; nevertheless it appears so, to begin with, and we shall soon see that this appearance is justified. The universe really appears to us as a hollow sphere into which we look.

Every drop, whether small or large, appears as a reflection of the universe itself. Whether you take a drop of rain, or the waters of the earth as a whole, the surface gives you a picture of the universe. Thus, as soon as you come to what is fluid, you cannot explain it by earthly forces. If you study closely the enormous efforts that have been made to explain the spherical form of the oceans by terrestrial forces, you will realise how vain such efforts are. The spherical form of the oceans cannot be explained by terrestrial gravitational attraction and the like, but by pressure from without. Here, even in external Nature, we find we must look beyond the terrestrial. And, in doing this, we come to grasp how it is with man himself.

As long as you restrict yourself to the solid part of man, you need not look beyond the terrestrial in understanding his form. The moment you come to his fluid part, you require the second man discovered by strengthened thinking. He works in what is fluid.

We are now back again at what is terrestrial. We find in man a solid constituent; this we can explain with our ordinary thoughts. But we cannot understand the form of his fluid components unless we think of the second man as active within him—the second man whom we contact within ourselves in our strengthened thinking as the human etheric body.

Thus we can say: The physical man works in what is solid, the etheric man in what is fluid. Of course, the etheric man still remains an independent entity, but he works through the fluid medium.

We must now proceed further. Imagine we have actually got so far as to experience inwardly this strengthened thinking and, therefore, the etheric—the second—man. This means, that we are developing great inner force. Now, as you know, one can—with a little effort—not only let oneself be stimulated to think, but can even refrain from all thinking. One can stop thinking; and our physical organisation does this for us when we are tired and fall asleep. But it becomes more difficult to extinguish again, of our own accord, the strengthened thinking which results from meditation and which we have acquired by great effort. It is comparatively easy to extinguish an ordinary, powerless thought; to put away—or ‘suggest away’—the strengthened thinking one has developed demands a stronger force, for one cleaves in a more inward way to what one has thus acquired. If we succeed, however, something special occurs.

You see, our ordinary thinking is stimulated by our environment, or memories of our environment. When you follow a train of thought the world is still there; when you fall asleep the world is still there. But it is out of this very world of visible things that you have raised yourself in your strengthened thinking. You have contacted the supra-terrestrial spatial environment, and now study your relationship to the stars as you formerly studied the relation between the natural objects around you. You have now brought yourself into relation with all this, but can suppress it again. In suppressing it, however, the external world, too, is no longer there—for you have just directed all your interest to this strengthened consciousness. The outer world is not there; and you come to what one can call ‘empty consciousness’. Ordinary consciousness only knows emptiness in sleep, and then in the form of unconsciousness.

What one now attains is just this: one remains fully awake, receiving no outer sense impressions, yet not sleeping—merely ‘waking’. Yet one does not remain merely awake. For now, on exposing one's empty consciousness to the indefinite on all sides, the spiritual world proper enters. One says: the spiritual world approaches me. Whereas previously one only looked out into the supra-terrestrial physical environment—which is really an etheric environment—and saw what is spatial, something new, the actual spiritual world, now approaches through this cosmic space from all sides as from indefinite distances. At first the spiritual approaches you from the outermost part of the cosmos when you traverse the path I have described.

A third thing is now added to the former metamorphosis of consciousness. One now says: I bear with me my physical body (inner circle), my etheric body (blue) which I apprehended in my strengthened thinking, and something more that comes from the undefined—from beyond space. I ask you to notice that I am talking of the world of appearance; we shall see in the course of the next few days how far one is justified in speaking of the etheric as coming from the spatial world, and of what lies beyond us (red) coming from the Undefined. We are no longer conscious of this third component as coming from the spatial world. It streams to us through the cosmic ether and permeates us as a ‘third man’. We have now a right to speak, from our own experience, of a first or physical man, a second or etheric man, and a third or ‘astral man’. (You realise, of course, that you must not be put off by words.) We bear within us an astral or third man, who comes from the spiritual, not merely from the etheric. We can speak of the astral body or astral man.

Now we can go further. I will only indicate this in conclusion so that I can elaborate it tomorrow. We now say to ourselves: I breathe in, use my breath for my inner organisation and breathe out. But is it really true that what people think of as a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen enters and leaves us in breathing?

Well, according to the views of present day civilisation, what enters and leaves is composed of oxygen and nitrogen and some other things. But one who attains ‘empty consciousness’ and then experiences this onrush—as I might call it—of the spiritual through the ether, experiences in the breath he draws something not formed out of the ether alone, but out of the spiritual beyond it. He gradually learns to know the spiritual that plays into man in respiration. He learns to say to himself: You have a physical body; this works into what is solid—that is its medium. You have your etheric body; this works into what is fluid. But, in being a man—not merely a solid man or fluid man, but a man who bears his ‘air man’ within him—your third or astral man can work into what is airy or gaseous. It is through this material substance on the earth that your astral man operates.

Man's fluid organisation with its regular but ever changing life will never be grasped by ordinary thinking. It can only be grasped by strengthened thinking. With ordinary thinking we can only apprehend the definite contours of the physical man. And, since our anatomy and physiology merely take account of the body, they only describe ten per cent of man. But the ‘fluid man’ is in constant movement and never presents a fixed contour. At one moment it is like this, at another, like that—now long, now short. What is in constant movement cannot be grasped with the closed concepts suitable for calculations; you require concepts mobile in themselves—‘pictures’. The etheric man within the fluid man is apprehended in pictures.

The third or astral man who works in the ‘airy’ man, is apprehended not merely in pictures but in yet another way. If you advance further and further in meditation—I am here describing the Western process—you notice, after reaching a certain stage in your exercises, that your breath has become something palpably musical. You experience it as inner music; you feel as if inner music were weaving and surging through you. The third man—who is physically the airy man, spiritually the astral man—is experienced as an inner musical element. In this way you take hold of your breathing.

The oriental meditator did this directly by concentrating on his breathing, making it irregular in order to experience how it lives and weaves in man. He strove to take hold of this third man directly.

Thus we discover the nature of the third man, and are now at the stage when we can say: By deepening and strengthening our insight we learn, at first, to distinguish in man:

the physical body which lives in solid forms on the earth and is also connected with the terrestrial kingdoms,

the fluid man in whom an ever mobile, etheric element lives and which can only be apprehended in images (Bilder)—in moving, plastic images,

the astral man who has his physical copy or image (Abbild) in all that constitutes the stream of inspired air.

This stream enters and takes hold of our inner organisation, expands, works, is transformed and streams out again. That is a wonderful process of becoming. We cannot draw it; we might do so symbolically, at most, but not as it really is. You could no more draw this process than you could draw the tones of a violin. You might do this symbolically; nevertheless you must direct your musical sense to hearing inwardly—i.e. you must attend with your inner, musical ear and not merely listen to the external tones. In this inward way you must hear the weaving of your breath—must hear the human astral body. This is the third man. We apprehend him when we attain to ‘empty consciousness’ and allow this to be filled with ‘inspirations’ from without.

Now language is really cleverer than men, for it comes to us from primeval worlds. There is a deep reason why breathing was once called inspiration. In general, the words of our language say much more than we, in our abstract consciousness, feel them to contain.

These are the considerations that can lead us to the three members of man—the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies—which find expression in the solid, fluid and airy ‘men’ and have their physical counterparts in the forms of the solid man, in the changing shapes of the fluid man and in that which permeates man as an inner music, experienced through feeling. The nervous system is indeed the most beautiful representation of this inner music. It is built from out of the astral body—from out of this inner music; and for this reason it has, at a definite part, the wonderful configuration of the spinal cord with its attached nerve-strands. All this together is a wonderful, musical structure that is continually working upwards into man's head.

A primeval wisdom that was still alive in Ancient Greece, felt the presence of this wonderful instrument in man. For the air assimilated through breathing ascends through the whole spinal cord. The air we breathe in ‘enters’ the cerebro-spinal canal and pulsates upwards towards the brain. This music is actually per-formed, but it remains unconscious; only the upper rebound is in consciousness. This is the lyre of Apollo, the inner musical instrument that the instinctive, primeval wisdom still recognised in man. I have referred to these things before, but it is my present intention to give a resume of what has been developed within our society in the course of twenty-one years.

Tomorrow I shall go further and consider the fourth member of man, the ego organisation proper. I shall then show the connection between these various members of man and his life on earth and beyond it—i.e. his so-called eternal life.

Translated by Steiner Online Library