The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In view of the deliberations that have been going on here with reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society as their object, I would like to shape today's lecture in a way that may help my hearers form independent judgments in these decisive days. To this end I shall be speaking somewhat more briefly and aphoristically than I usually do when discussing aspects of anthroposophy, and shall confine myself to commenting on the third phase of our anthroposophical work. This evening I will speak for the same reason on the subject of the three phases of the Anthroposophical Movement.

We often hear references being made these days to the great change that came over Western spiritual life when Copernicus substituted his new picture of the heavens for the one previously held. If one were to try to state just what the nature of this change was, it might be put as follows. In earlier times man thought of the earth realm as the object of his study and the chief concern of learning, with little or no attention being paid to the heavenly bodies circling overhead.

In recent times the heavenly bodies have come to assume a great deal more importance than they used to be accorded. Indeed, the earth came to be thought of as a mere grain of dust in the universe, and man felt himself to be living on a tiny speck of an earth quite insignificant by contrast with the rest of the cosmos and its countless thousand worlds. But if you will permit me to give just a sketch of this matter for the sake of characterizing the third phase of our Anthroposophical Movement, it must be pointed out that by reducing the earth to a mere grain of dust on the one hand, man also lost the possibility on the other of arriving at valid judgments about the rest of the universe other than those based on such physical and more recent chemical concepts as may apply. Research that goes beyond this and devotes itself to a study of soul and spiritual aspects of the universe is ignored. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the whole stance of modern learning. Man loses the possibility of seeing what he calls his soul and spirit as in any way connected with what rays down to us from the starry world. You can judge from certain passages in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, how intent anthroposophy is on creating a renewed understanding of the fact that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. Anthroposophy aims at re-creating the possibility of knowing the cosmos as spirit.

In this quest anthroposophy encounters a serious obstacle on its path, an obstacle that I am going to describe without reservation.

People come forward, quite rightly proclaiming anthroposophy with great enthusiasm. But they emphasize that what they are proclaiming is a doctrine based not on their own experience but on that of a spiritual investigator. This makes for instant conflict with the way of thinking prevailing in present day civilization, which condemns anyone who advances views based on authority. Such condemnation would disappear if people only realized that the findings of spiritual research recognized by anthroposophy can be arrived at with the use of various methods suited to various ways of investigation, but that once they are obtained, these results can readily be grasped by any truly unprejudiced mentality. But findings acceptable to all truly unprejudiced mentalities can be made and still not lead to fruitful results unless those presenting anthroposophical material do so with attitudes required for anthroposophical presentations that are not always prevailing.

Let me be explicit. Let me refer to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, published about thirty years ago, and recall my description in its pages of a special kind of thinking that is different from that generally recognized as thinking today. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature, or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at the hand of nature, thoughts that, indeed, he has only recently developed the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh century, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of it—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did the Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader as he read to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relation to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing at the moment of awakening that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color-filled, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily motions to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, The Riddle of Man, where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thoughts. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit have on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking.) One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as a result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person; it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life-element of its thinking, and the thinking left to it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there, seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, though in that book I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works because matters like these have to be gradually developed, one finds that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into formerly passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we will. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily matter comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes a part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belong to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side given its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them, for it belongs to a different world than that that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see, but the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our will leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a grain-of-dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we re-discover elements in the universe that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its suffusion with will, and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the universe and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my more recent lectures have concerned themselves with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read, speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!

Now I want to try to improve the present state of things by speaking briefly about the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. A start was made with the presentation of anthroposophy about two decades ago. I say two decades, but it was definitely already there in seed form in such writings as my Philosophy of Freedom and works on Goethe's world conception. But the presentation of anthroposophy as such began two decades ago. You will see from what I am about to say that it did begin to be presented as anthroposophy at that time.

When, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, I gave my first Berlin lectures (those printed under the title, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age), I was invited by the Theosophical Society to participate in its work. I myself did not seek out the Theosophical Society. People who belonged to it thought that what I was saying in my lectures, purely in pursuit of my own path of knowledge, was something they too would like to hear. I saw that the theosophists wanted to listen to what was being presented, and my attitude about it was that I would always address any audience interested in hearing me. Though my previous comments on the Theosophical Society had not always been exactly friendly and continued in the same vein afterwards, I saw no reason to refuse its invitation to lay before it material that had been given me for presentation by the spiritual world. That I presented it as anthroposophy is clear from the fact that at the very moment when the German section of the Theosophical Society was being founded, I was independently holding a lecture cycle [From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. History of Human Evolution Based on the World Conception of the Orient up to the Present, or Anthroposophy, 1902–3. No manuscript of these lectures is available.] not only about anthroposophy but with the name anthroposophy included in the title. The founding of the German section of the Theosophical Society and my lecture cycle on anthroposophy took place simultaneously. The aim, right from the beginning, was to present pure anthroposophy.

That was the start of the first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement. It was first exemplified in those members of the German section who were ready to absorb anthroposophy, and further groups of theosophists joined them.

During this first phase, the Anthroposophical Society led an embryonic existence within the Theosophical Society. It grew, as I say, within the Theosophical Society, but developed nevertheless as the Anthroposophical Society. In this first phase it had a special mission, that of counterposing the spirituality of Western civilization, centered in the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Theosophical Society's course, which was based on a traditional acceptance of ancient Oriental wisdom.

This first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement lasted until 1908 or 1909. Anyone who goes back over the history of the Movement can easily see for himself how definitely all the findings made on the score of prenatal existence, reincarnation and the like—findings made on the basis of direct experience in the present, not of ancient traditions handed down through the ages—were oriented around that evolutionary development in man's life on earth that centered in the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse. The Gospels were worked through, along with a great deal else. By the time it became possible for the Anthroposophical Movement to make the transition over into artistic forms of revelation, as was done with the presentation of my mystery plays, the content of anthroposophy had been worked out and related to its central core, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time when the Theosophical Society was sidetracked into a strange development. Since it had no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it committed the absurdity, among others, of proclaiming to the world that a certain young man of the present was the reincarnated Christ. Certainly no serious person could have tolerated any such nonsense; it appeared ridiculous in Western eyes. But anthroposophy had been developed as part of Western civilization, with the result that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared in a wholly new light in anthroposophical teaching. This led to the differences with the Theosophical Society that culminated in the virtual expulsion of all the anthroposophists. They didn't mind that because it didn't change anthroposophy in any way. I myself had never presented anything but anthroposophy to those interested in hearing about it, and that includes the period during which anthroposophy was outwardly contained by the Theosophical Society.

Then the second phase of the Anthroposophical Movement began. This phase was built on a foundation that already included the most important teachings about destiny, repeated earth-lives, and the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual illumination fully keyed to present day civilization. It included interpretations of the Gospels that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present.

The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917, was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels. You need only consider such examples as my lecture cycles of that period, one held in Christiania in 1910 on the European folk souls, the other at Prague in 1911 on the subject of occult physiology, and you will see that anthroposophy's second phase was devoted to working out its relationship to the sciences and practical concerns of the day. The cycles mentioned are just two examples; the overall aim was to find the way to relate to modern science and practice.

During this second phase of the Society's life, everything centered around the goal of finding a number of people whose inner attitude was such that they were able to listen to what anthroposophy was saying. More and more such people were found. All that was necessary was for people to come together in a state of soul genuinely open to anthroposophy. That laid the foundation for an anthroposophical community of sorts. The task became one of simply meeting the interest of these people who, in the course of modern man's inner evolution, had reached the point where they could bring some understanding to anthroposophy. They had to be given what they needed for their soul development. It was just a matter of presenting anthroposophy, and it was not a matter of any great concern whether the people who found their way to anthroposophy during the Society's first two phases foregathered in sect-like little groups or came to public lectures and the like. What was important was to base absolutely everything on a foundation of honestly researched knowledge, and then to go ahead and present it. It was quite possible to do this satisfactorily in the kind of Anthroposophical Society that had been developing.

Another aspect of the second phase was the further development of the artistic element. About halfway through it, the plan to build the Goetheanum took shape. A trend that began with the Mystery Plays was thus carried into the realms of architecture, sculpture and painting. Then eurythmy, the elements of which I have often characterized in my introductory talks at performances, was brought into the picture. All this came into existence from sources to which access is gained on the path sketched in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sketched in sufficient detail, however, to be understood and followed by anyone really desirous of taking that path.

This second phase of the Society's life was made especially difficult by the outbreak of the frightful war that then overran Europe and modern civilization. It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period, when mistrust and hatred were flooding the entire civilized world. The fact that the Goetheanum was located in a neutral country in a time when borders were closed often made it hard to reach. But the reasons for believing in the sincerity of anthroposophical efforts were more firmly founded on fact, even during the war, than any reasons for mistrusting it afterwards. It can truly be said that the war period brought no real disruption of the work; it continued on. As I have already mentioned, a large number of individuals from many different European countries confronting one another in hate and enmity on the battlefields worked together in a peaceful and anthroposophical spirit on the Goetheanum, which we have now lost in the terrible disaster of the fire.

Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number of individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through. The Threefold Movement, later called the Union for Free Spiritual Life, the Union for Higher Education, and so on, had to be undertaken with the clear intention of putting one's whole being irrevocably behind them. It was no longer possible, in the third phase, to rest content with the simple presentation of anthroposophy and merely to foregather with people whose inner search had led them to it. Instead, a number of individuals wanted to undertake this or that project, and they did so. This created all kinds of groupings in addition to the original purely anthroposophical community.

One of them was the scientific movement. It was built on the foundation of relationships of anthroposophy to science that had been established during the second phase. Scientists made their appearance in our midst. They had the task of giving modern science what anthroposophy had to offer. But there should have been a continuation of what I had begun in the way of building relationships to contemporary science. Perhaps I may remind you of lectures I gave during the second phase of the Movement. I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics into anthroposophy. I did the same thing in the case of other aspects of learning. This attitude, this way of relating, should have continued to prevail. If that had happened, the result would have been a different development of scientific activity than the one we have been witnessing during this third phase. Most importantly, we would have been saved from what I described at the earlier meeting as fruitless argumentation and polemics. Then we would presently be faced with a positive task, and could say that anthroposophy does indeed have a contribution to make to science, that it can help science go forward along a certain path, and in what specific way that can be accomplished. The outcome would have been a different attitude toward science than that evidenced in a recent issue of Die Drei, indeed in several issues that I looked over in connection with the cycle of lectures on science given by me last Christmastide in Dornach. I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in such unfruitful polemics. I say this not for the sake of criticizing but to point out what the task of the scientists in the Society is.

Something of the same kind ought to be happening in other respects as well. Let us take a case in point; I called attention to it on the occasion of my last lecture here.

In the third phase of the Movement, we saw the Union for Higher Education come into being. It had an excellent program. But somebody should have stayed with it and put all of himself behind it, made himself fully responsible for it. My only responsibility was for anthroposophy itself. So when someone else starts an independent enterprise founded on anthroposophy, that project becomes his responsibility. In the case I am discussing, nobody stayed with that responsibility, though I had called attention to the necessity of doing so at the time the program was being drawn up. I said that programs of this kind should be started only if an iron determination exists to carry them through; otherwise, they ought never to be launched. In this case it was the group guiding the Society that failed to stay behind it.

What was the outcome? The outcome was that a number of young people from the student movement, motivated by an intense longing for true anthroposophy but unable to find what they were looking for in the Society, sought out the living source of anthroposophy. They said expressly that they wanted to know the artistic aspects of anthroposophy as well as the others. They approached Frau Dr. Steiner with the intention of being helped by recitation and declamation to experience what I might call the anthroposophical swing of things.

Another development was taking place alongside this one, my dear friends. In the third phase of the Movement, the spiritual worlds were being described in the way I described them at the beginning of my lecture today when I gave a short sketch of a certain matter from the standpoint of purely spiritual contemplation, from a level where it is possible to show how one develops a different consciousness and thereby gains access to the spiritual world. The first and second phases were concerned with relating the Movement to the Mystery of Golgotha, to science, to the practical conduct of life. The third phase added the direct portrayal of spiritual realms. Anyone who has kept up with the efforts that were made during these three phases in Dornach and here too, for example, anyone with a real feeling for the advance represented by the third phase over the first and second phases, anyone aware to what extent it has been possible in recent years to spread anthroposophy beyond the boundaries of Central Europe, will notice that we are concerned with bringing into being a really new third phase in direct continuation and further development of the first two phases. Had we not entered the third phase, it would not really have been possible to develop the Waldorf School pedagogy, which is based on taking man's eternal as well as temporal nature into account.

Now please compare the discussions of yesterday and the week before with what I have just been saying in the interests of frank speaking and without the least intention of criticizing anyone, and ask yourselves what changes these three phases of our work have effected in the Society. Would not these same discussions, identical as to content, have been just as conceivable sixteen or eighteen years ago as they are today, when we have two decades of anthroposophical work behind us? Does it not seem as though we were back at the founding of the Society?

I repeat that I have no desire to criticize anybody. But the Anthroposophical Society can amount to something only if it is made the nurturing ground of everything that anthroposophy is working to achieve, and only if our scientists, to take an example, always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics.

Teachers have a similar task, and, to a special degree, people engaged in practical life. For their functions are of the kind that draws the heaviest fire against anthroposophy, which, despite its special potential for practicality, is most viciously attacked as being impractical.

So the Society is presently faced with the necessity of being more than a mere onlooker at really anthroposophical work going on elsewhere, more than just the founder of other enterprises that it fails to provide with truly anthroposophical zeal and enthusiasm. It needs to focus consciously on anthroposophical work. This is a completely positive statement of its mission, which needs only be worked out in detail. If this positive task is not undertaken, the Anthroposophical Society can only do anthroposophy more and more harm in the world's regard. How many enemies has the Threefold Movement not created for the Anthroposophical Movement with its failure to understand how to relate itself to anthroposophy! Instead, it made compromise after compromise, until people in certain quarters began to despise anthroposophy. We have seen similar things happen elsewhere. As I said in my first lecture here, we must realize that anthroposophy is the parent of this movement. That fact should be recognized. If it had been, a right relationship to the Movement for Religious Renewal, which I helped launch, would have resulted. Instead, everything in that area has also gone amiss. I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that takes us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

Please do not take offense at my speaking to you as I have today, my dear friends. I had to do it. As I said in Dornach on January 6th last, the Anthroposophical Society is good; it is capable of listening receptively to even the sharpest parts of my characterization. But the guiding elements in the Society must become aware that if the Society is to earn its name in future, they must make themselves responsible for keeping it the conscious carrier of the work. The conflicts that have broken out will end at the moment when the need for such a consciousness is clearly and adequately recognized in a spirit of goodwill. But there has to be goodwill for that need to be brought out into the open and any fruitless criticism dropped. Furthermore, there is no use giving oneself up to comfortable illusions, making compromises in adjustments between one movement and another, only to end up again in the same old jog-trot. It is time to be absolutely serious about anthroposophical work, and all the single movements must work together to achieve this goal. We cannot rest content to have a separate Waldorf School movement, a separate Movement for Religious Renewal, a separate Movement for Free Spiritual Life. Each will flourish only if all feel that they belong to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I am sure that everyone truly concerned for the Movement is saying the same thing in his heart. That is the reason I allowed myself to express it as sharply as I did today. Most of you were already aware of the need for a clear statement that could lead to the establishment of the consciousness I have described as so essential.

The Movement has now gone through three phases, during the last of which anthroposophy has been neglected in favor of various offspring movements. It must be re-discovered as the living spiritual movement demanded by modern civilized life and, most especially, by modern hearts. Please take my words as meant to serve that purpose. If they have sounded sharp, please consider them the more sincerely offered. They were intended not as an invitation to any further caustic deliberations but as a challenge to join in a Movement guided by a true heart for anthroposophy.

A members' lecture and a class lesson of the general pedagogical section of the Free University were held during the pedagogical event in Bern. And during the anthroposophical course at the Goetheanum during Easter week, the members of the first class were also brought together for two such class lessons. Following this course, the medical section organized two lecture series, one for younger doctors and medical students and the other for practicing doctors. We will report further on the progress of these events, which are still ongoing. However, we can already express our deep satisfaction at how strongly the participants feel the need to enrich their professional training with a spiritual view of the human being as a whole and their art of healing with a spiritual healing will that is permeated by a true understanding of the human being.

In a eurythmy performance for the members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wanted to show how the impulses that were present at the Christmas Conference at the Goetheanum can develop with a certain inevitability. The new impulse that entered anthroposophical work at this conference must also assert itself by not only bringing what has arisen in the moment to life in our events, but also by allowing what has been worked on earlier to develop further in subsequent events. The verses with which the spiritual foundation stone was laid in the hearts of the members of the Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference were presented again at this Easter Conference in a eurythmic art performance. In connection with them, Albert Steffen's spirit-filled, soul-warm poems were eurythmized, which cast a consecratory mood over this conference. Further events, taking into account the Austrian mood, entwined themselves around this content of the eurythmy performance. We had such an Austrian celebration, into which our Christmas conference, which is so meaningful for society, resonated fully.

Despite the difficulties that arise for many members due to the current situation, our Easter conference was well attended. The somewhat uncomfortable way in which the audience has to participate in the events in our inadequate rooms may well trigger the wish that fate will soon grant us the opportunity to have a Goetheanum again at the site of the one that has been taken from us.

(continued in the next issue).

I would have to read a book to you if I wanted to share with you all the extraordinarily kind words and the words of intimate connection with what has been lost here as a result of the terrible catastrophe. I will therefore only share the names of those who have signed such words of sympathy and commitment to the cause. Some of them show how deeply the hearts of many people have been touched by what may be communicated to the world from here. Some of them are also signs of truly heartfelt desires and energetic resolutions to regain what we have lost. The widespread sympathy for our work and for our loss will certainly be a source of strength for many of you, and for this reason alone I am allowed to make this announcement here. For our cause should not be merely a theoretical one; our cause should be one of labor, of philanthropy, of devoted service to humanity, and therefore, what should be said from here should also include the communication of what is being done or intended to be done. I will only take the liberty of mentioning those names that do not belong to personalities who are here, because what the hearts of those who are here have to share has been expressed more silently, but no less deeply and clearly, in these days, in these days of truly pain-stricken togetherness. So you will allow me not to mention the dear friends of the cause who have expressed their sympathy in writing. They know them, of course. (The names were read out.)

We may assume that what has been attempted here is deeply rooted in many hearts, and I would like to fill this evening's lecture by interrupting the reflections of these days, as it were episodically, and remember that it was a course that brought a large number of friends from outside to join the friends who otherwise try to work on the anthroposophical matter here at the Goetheanum. And in particular, I would like to turn first in my thoughts to the young and younger friends who have come here for this course and who, to the greatest satisfaction of all those who are serious about anthroposophy, have recently found their way into this movement in such a beautiful, deep and heartfelt way.

We must be absolutely clear about the significance of young souls, souls that are striving to acquire all that can be acquired by a young person today in the way of science, art and so on, finding each other to work within the anthroposophical movement. These younger friends who have come here for this course are among those who came here recently, saw the Goetheanum, saw it again and probably thought that they would leave it in a different state than they did on their return journey. And if I turn first to these younger friends in my thoughts, it is because everyone who cares about the anthroposophical movement must feel that everything that concerns any group or individual within the movement is their direct concern. The younger friends are, for the most part, those who want to find their way to anthroposophical work from what is called spiritual life today. And in particular, I would like to speak first to those who belong to academic life and have felt the urge from within it – but hardly generated by it – to join with other people within the anthroposophical movement for further striving.

Above all, it is the holy earnestness of the striving for the fulfillment of the human soul with spiritual life that has driven these young people. Within anthroposophy, however, there is talk of a spiritual life that cannot be acquired in direct contemplation in the easy way that is particularly loved today. And it is made no secret of the fact – not even in the literature, from which anyone in the broadest circle can see for themselves what they will find within anthroposophical work – that the paths to anthroposophy are difficult. But difficult only for the reason that they are connected with the deepest, but also with the most powerful, of human dignity, and because they are also connected, on the other hand, with what is most urgently needed in our age, our epoch, what may be said that the discerning person, who knows how to properly appreciate the phenomena of decline in our time, must recognize the necessity of such progress as is at least attempted by the anthroposophical movement.

Now it must not be forgotten that the anthroposophical cause can be of value to the modern man in many ways. He can benefit from it if he really tries with all his heart to gain a direct insight into the spiritual worlds, and thus convince himself that everything imparted from the spiritual worlds is absolutely based on truth. But I must emphasize again and again that, however necessary it is for individuals or perhaps an unlimited number of people to take this serious and difficult path in the present, on the other hand, anyone with unbiased, healthy human understanding can gain insight into the truth of anthroposophy that is completely based on real inner reasons.

This must be emphasized again and again, so that the objection, which is quite invalid, does not seemingly gain validity: that actually only the one who clairvoyantly looks into the spiritual world can somehow gain a relationship to what is proclaimed as truth in the anthroposophical movement. Today's general intellectual life, civilization and culture, they indeed bring forward so many prejudices that it is difficult for the human being to come to full awareness in the healthy human mind, to convince himself of the truth of the anthroposophical cause without clairvoyance.

But it is precisely in this area that the Anthroposophical Society should lead the way and focus its work, so that the prejudices of contemporary civilization are increasingly overcome. If the Anthroposophical Society does its duty in this direction, then one can hope that those inner powers of knowledge will arise even without clairvoyance in those who, for whatever reason, cannot strive for the exact clairvoyance that must be spoken of here; that they can still come to a fully-fledged conviction of the validity of anthroposophical knowledge.

But there is another very special path that younger academics can now find for themselves to anthroposophy. Consider what academic study should and could actually provide today as a solid starting point for coming to one's own view – and I say this expressly: for coming to one's own view – of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, if science and knowledge and inner life within our school system were present in the way that the possibility for this is actually available today.

But consider how little younger people today are inwardly connected with what they are supposed to strive for as their science, as their knowledge, within the present civilization. Consider how it cannot be otherwise today, more or less, than that the individual sciences approach younger people as something external. They approach with a system that is not at all suited to letting the often extraordinarily significant, so-called empirical knowledge speak for itself in its full value. Yes, today within every science that is cultivated, there are harrowing truths, sometimes harrowing truths in details, in specialties. And there are, in particular, such truths that, if properly presented to young people, would act as a kind of mental microscope or telescope, so that, if properly used by the soul, they would unlock tremendous secrets of existence.

But precisely those things that would be tremendously revealing if they were properly cultivated, that would carry hearts and minds away if they came from the depths of humanity and personality within academic life to the youth, precisely those things must be said today in many cases are often brought to young people within a spun-out, indifferent system, often with indifference, so that the relationship of young people to what our empirical science has produced in the most diverse fields of information remains a thoroughly external one. And one would like to say: Many, indeed most, of our young academics today go through their studies without any inner interest, letting the subject pass by, so to speak, more or less as a panorama, in order to be able to take the necessary repetitions for the exams and find a permanent position.

It may sound paradoxical to say that the hearts of academic youth should also be involved in everything that is presented to them. I say that sounds like a paradox, although it could be so! For the possibility exists, because for those who have a subjective disposition for it, sometimes even the most dry of books or lectures can be enough to be deeply moved, if not by the power of the writer or lecturer, then perhaps by their own power, and this can happen even to the heart. But I must say: sometimes it goes quite deeply to the soul when one notices, perhaps even in the best of the young friends who come to the anthroposophical movement, that through no fault of their own, but through their destiny within today's civilization ization life, not only have they received nothing for their hearts from the current field of knowledge, but – perhaps some will not forgive me for saying this, but most of the young academics here will probably understand – but also nothing for their minds.

Today, as a result of the development of natural science, which I have tried to characterize during this natural science course, we have arrived at a point in the development of civilization where it is possible that, without any Anthroposophy, through the mere practice of the life of science and knowledge by fully human beings, young people would have to experience what I would call a kind of deep mental oppression from ordinary natural science. Yes, contemporary science is such that precisely those who study it diligently and earnestly and take its things seriously feel something like a mental oppression, can feel something of what comes over the human soul when it wrestles with the problem of knowledge. For anyone who looks around a little from this or that point of view, which is available within natural science today, will be confronted with great world problems, world problems that are often, however, I would say, clothed in small formulations of facts. And these formulations of facts urge one to seek something in one's own soul, which, precisely because these scientific truths are present, must be solved as a riddle. Otherwise one cannot live, otherwise one feels oppressed.

Oh, if this oppression were the fruit of our scientific studies! Then not only the longing for the spiritual world would arise from this oppression, which takes hold of the whole person, but also the gift to look into the spiritual world. Even if one takes knowledge that cannot satisfy the human being, it is precisely through the unsatisfactory, when properly approached to the soul and heart, that the highest striving can be kindled.

This is what is sometimes felt as so terrible, so devastating, within the field of knowledge in the present day, that no claim is made to allow people to feel how the things that are present in the present can affect the whole person that he is prevented in his young life from even approaching what is most human in nature, if he does not, precisely out of a particularly predisposed yearning, free himself from that which only afflicts him with the obstacles that are placed in his way.

And if we look away from the natural sciences to the humanities, we see that during the natural science era they have reached a state in which, if a young person could devote themselves to them with a guide that would treat these humanities from a fully human point of view, they would at least give them what I would call a spiritual sense of breathlessness. All the abstract ideas, the results of documentary research and all the other things that are contained in the humanities today, if they were to be brought to young people with at least a human interest, could pursue the goal of awaken in him the urge to ascend into the fresh air that is to be brought into the field of today's spiritual contemplation through anthroposophical world view.

Anyone who has followed the spirit of my lectures on the scientific development of modern times will certainly not be able to say that I have criticized this natural science of the present unnecessarily. On the contrary, through my lectures I have proved its necessity, have tried to prove that natural science and, finally, also spiritual science of the present time can be nothing but foundations, for they served and must serve as the foundations of civilization, which must be laid once and for all so that further building can be done on them.

But man cannot help it, he is human, full of humanity in body, mind and soul. And since today's young people have to live in an age in which they are inevitably confronted with something that does not include the human being at all, the noblest and most powerful human striving could nevertheless be aroused if only that which is necessary but not humanly satisfying were to be offered to them today in the highest sense of the word, out of full humanity. If that were to happen, our young people would need nothing more than to hear about the achievements of today's physical and spiritual sciences at the academies themselves, and from this they would receive not only the innermost urge but also the ability to absorb spiritual science in a fully human way. And from what would then live in young people, it would become clear all by itself that the anthroposophical form of science would also become the one necessary for us to advance in human civilization.

I believe that our younger friends, if they reflect on the words I have spoken, which may sound somewhat paradoxical, will find that they go some way to characterizing the main suffering they had to endure during their academic years. And I can assume that for the majority, this suffering is the reason why they came to us. But for many, this suffering belongs to the past, a past that can no longer be caught up with. For what one should actually have in a certain period of youth, one can no longer have in the same form later. But nevertheless, I believe that one thing can serve as a substitute. What can replace what one can no longer have is the realization of the task that younger people in particular have among us, to cultivate anthroposophical life in the present.

Set yourselves this task: to do for the anthroposophical movement what you already know from your own conviction, that it needs you to do, or what you can become convinced of over time in your innermost being, in your very individual innermost being, that it is necessary for the further civilization of mankind, then you will be able to carry something in your heart for longer than this earthly life lasts: Then you will be able to carry the consciousness of having done your duty to humanity and the world in an age of greatest human difficulties. And that will be a rich reward for what you may rightly lose.

If you have a true sense of the situation of young people in our age, you will also look in the right way at the fact that academic youth has found its way into our circles, and then, if I may express myself express myself, the talent will gradually emerge on the part of those within the Anthroposophical Society who, let us say, do not belong to it as young people, to develop a relationship with this youth in this or that respect.

But I believe there is a word that can come from our present mourning, that I can also speak to the oldest members of the Anthroposophical Society, and that is this: That the human being who today truly understands himself as a human being can indeed experience this within the Anthroposophical Society, which in turn must be taken seriously if civilization of humanity is to continue, if the forces of decline are not to gain the upper hand over the forces of ascent. It has almost come to this within general culture and civilization of the present day that it almost sounds comical when someone says: When a person is in his spiritual-soul life between falling asleep and waking up, he should have ensured that his spiritual-soul life can behave in the right way during this time. But within the anthroposophical movement, you learn that this spiritual-soul, as it lives between falling asleep and waking up, is the germ that we carry into the eternity of the future. What we leave behind in bed when we sleep, what is visible to us when we perform our daily work from morning to evening, we do not carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual, into the supersensible world. But we do carry out that which is subtlest in the spiritual, that which exists outside of the physical and etheric bodies, when a person is between falling asleep and waking up. We will now disregard the significance of the life of sleep for a person here on earth. However, through anthroposophical spiritual science, it can become clear to a person that the subtle, substantial, which, imperceptible to the ordinary consciousness, between falling asleep and waking, is precisely what he will carry with him when he has passed through the gate of death, when he has to fulfill his task in other worlds than this earthly world.

But the tasks he has to perform there, he will be able to perform them according to how he has cultivated this spiritual-soul life. Oh my dear friends, in that spiritual world, which is around us just as the physical world, those human soul beings also live a present existence, who are not in a physical body right now, but perhaps have to wait for decades, centuries, for their next embodiment on earth. These souls are there, as we physical people are on earth. And in what happens here among us physical people, what we later call historical life, not only do earthly people play a part, but so do those forces that reach out from people who are currently between death and a new birth. These forces are there. Just as we reach out our hands, so these beings reach their spirit hands into the immediate present. And it is a desolate historiography when only the documents that deal with earthly matters are recorded, while the true history that unfolds on earth is influenced by the spiritual forces from the spiritual world that are active in those who are between death and a new birth. We also work with people who are not embodied on earth.

And just as we commit a sin against humanity if we do not educate young people in the right way, so we commit a sin against humanity, a sin against the noblest work that is to be done from the invisible worlds by not embodied human beings, we commit a sin against the evolution of humanity if we do not cultivate our own spiritual nature so that it passes through the portal of death in such a way that it can develop there more consciously and more consciously. For if the soul and spiritual aspects are not cultivated on earth, it happens that this consciousness, which in a certain way immediately and then more and more between death and a new birth begins to shine, remains clouded in all those souls who do not cultivate a spiritual life here. When a person becomes aware of his full humanity, then the spiritual belongs to it.

Those who truly understand the impulses of the anthroposophical movement should realize that what has been acquired through anthroposophical spiritual science is a world-life treasure, a world-life power; that it is a sin in the higher sense to neglect to cultivate that which must be there in order to further develop the earth, in order to further develop mankind on earth, because its absence must lead to the downfall of the earthly. And in many ways, it depends on feeling the deep seriousness of connecting with a spiritual, comprehensive human cause, in addition to what one may more or less accept in theory from spiritual science.

And this is not something that applies only to a particular category of people, it is something that certainly applies to young and old alike. But this also seems to me to be the one thing in which young and old can come together, so that a spirit may prevail within what is the Anthroposophical Society.

May the younger people bring their best, may the older people understand this best, may understanding on one side find understanding on the other, then only will we move forward. Let us, from the sad days we have gone through, from the painful suffering we have been imbued with, let us take resolutions into our hearts that are not mere wishes, not mere vows, but that sit so deep in our souls that they can become deeds. Even in a small circle, if we want to make up for the great loss, we will need deeds.

Youthful deeds, if they are in the right direction, are deeds that can be used around the world. And the most beautiful thing that one can want as an older person is to be able to work together with those people who can still perform youthful deeds. If one knows this in the right way, oh my dear friends, then youth will indeed come to meet you with understanding. And only then will we ourselves be able to do what is necessary to compensate for our great loss, when the young, who can offer us what was once necessary for the future, can see – and most certainly then to their own satisfaction – beautiful examples of what older people can do to compensate for this loss. Let us endeavor to see the good and powerful in each other, so that strength may be added to strength. Only in this way shall we make progress.

Yesterday I undertook to give you a sort of report on the events that took place in Stuttgart. I went on to say that I would like to convey something of the substance of the lectures I delivered there. So I will do that today, and tomorrow try to add further comment supplementing yesterday's report.

The first lecture on Tuesday was conceived as a response to a quite definite need that had developed and made itself clearly felt during the discussions of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; they have been described to you at least from the standpoint of the mood that prevailed there. The need I refer to was for a survey of the essentials of community building. Community building by human beings working in anthroposophy has recently played an important role in the Society. Young people in particular—but other, older ones as well—entered the Society with a keen longing to meet others in it with whom they could have a type of experience that life does not afford the single individual in today's social order. To say this is to call attention to a thoroughly understandable longing felt by many people of our time.

As a result of the dawning of the age of consciousness, old social ties have lost their purely human content and their purely human strength. People always used to grow into some particular community. They did not become hermits; they grew into some quite specific community or other. They grew into the community of a family, a profession, a certain rank. Recently they have been growing into the communities we call social classes, and so on.

These various communities have always carried certain responsibilities for the individual that he could not have carried for himself.

One of the strongest bonds felt by men of modern times has been that of class. The old social groupings: those of rank, of nationality, even of race—have given way to a sense of belonging to a certain class. This has recently developed to a point where the members of a given class—the so-called higher classes or aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat—make common cause. Thus communities based on class have transcended national and even racial and other such loyalties, and a good many of the elements witnessed in modern international social life can be ascribed to these class communities.

But the age of the consciousness soul, which began early in the fifteenth century and has come increasingly to the fore, has recently been making itself felt in human souls with growing urgency and vehemence. This has made human beings feel that they can no longer find in class communities any elements that could carry them into something beyond merely individual existence. On the one hand, modern man has a strong sense of individuality and cannot tolerate any interference with his life of individual thought and feeling. He wants to be recognized as a personality. That goes back to certain primal causes. If I may again resort to the terminology I used yesterday, I would say that since the end of Kali Yuga—or, in other words, since this century began—something has been stirring in contemporary souls, no matter how unconsciously, that could be expressed in the words, “I want to be a distinct individual.” Of course, not everybody could formulate it thus. It shows itself in many kinds of discontent and psychic instability. But underlying them is the desire to be a distinct personality.

The truth is, however, that no one can get along on earth without other human beings. Historic ties and bonds like those that unite the proletariat in a sense of class belonging, for example, do not supply anything that on the one hand can satisfy the urge to be a distinct individual and on the other unite individuals with their fellowmen. Modern man wants the purely human element in himself to relate him to the purely human element in others. He does indeed want social ties, but he wants them to have an individual character like that experienced in personal friendships.

An endless amount of what goes on between human beings in contemporary life can be traced to a craving for such human communities. It was quite evident a while ago when a group of younger people came to me wanting to bring about a renewal of Christianity. It was their belief that such a renewal could be achieved only by making the Christ impulse very much alive in the sense that anthroposophy has demonstrated. This longing felt by younger theologians, some of whom were just completing their training and were therefore about to assume pastoral duties, others of whom were still studying, was the element that gave birth to the latest offshoot of our Society, the Movement for Religious Renewal.

Now quite a variety of things had to be done for this Movement for Religious Renewal. It was of first concern to bring the Christ impulse to life in a way suited to the present. To do this meant taking very seriously indeed the fact I have so often stressed: that the Christ not only spoke to human souls at the beginning of the Christian era but has carried out the promise that he made when he said, “I will be with you always, unto the very end of the earth.” This means that he can always be heard whenever a soul desires it, that a continuing Christ revelation is taking place. There had to be an ongoing evolution from the written Gospels to immediately living revelation of the Christ impulse. This was one aspect of the task of religious renewal.

The other was one that I had to characterize at once by saying that religious renewal must bring communities into being, that it must build religious communities. Once a community has equipped an individual with knowledge, he can do something with it by himself. But that direct experience of the spiritual world, which is not based on thought but rather on feeling and is religious by nature, this experience of the spiritual world as divine can only be found by forming communities. So a healthy building of community must, I said, go hand in hand with the healthy development of religious life.

The personalities who undertook the launching of this Movement for Religious Renewal were, at the outset, all Protestant theologians. Their attention could be called to the fact that it was just the Protestant denominations that had recently been tending to lay increasing emphasis on sermons, to the neglect of ritual. But preaching has an atomizing effect on communities. The sermon, which is intended to convey knowledge of the spiritual world, challenges the individual soul to form its own opinions. This fact is reflected in the particularly pronounced modern antagonism to the credo, the confession of beliefs, in an age when everyone wants to confess only to his own. This has led to an atomization, a blowing apart of the congregation, with a resultant focusing of the religious element on the individual.

This would gradually bring about the dissolution of the soul elements of the social order if there were not to be a renewed possibility of building true community. But true community building can only be the product of a cultus derived from fresh revelations of the spiritual world. So the cultus now in use in the Movement for Religious Renewal was introduced. It takes mankind's historical evolution fully into account, and thus represents in many of its single details as well as in its overall aspects a carrying forward of the historical element. But its every aspect also bears the imprint of fresh revelations, which the spiritual world can only now begin to make to man's higher consciousness.

The cultus unites those who come together at its celebration. It creates community, and Dr. Rittelmeyer said quite rightly, in the course of the Stuttgart deliberations, that in the community building power of the cultus the Movement for Religious Renewal presents a great danger—perhaps a very grave one—to the Anthroposophical Society. What was he pointing to when he said this? He was calling attention to the fact that many a person approaches the Society with the longing to find a link with others in a free community experience. Such communal life with the religious coloration that the cultus gives it can be attained, and people with such a longing for community life can satisfy it in the Movement for Religious Renewal. If the Society is not to be endangered, it must therefore also make a point of nurturing a community building element.

Now this called attention to a fact of the greatest importance in this most recent phase of the Society's development. It pointed out that anthroposophists must acquire an understanding of community building. An answer must be found to the question whether the community building that is being achieved in the Movement for Religious Renewal is the only kind there is at present, or whether there are other possibilities of attaining the same goal in the Anthroposophical Society.

This question can obviously only be answered by studying the nature of community building.

But that impulse to build community, which modern man feels and the cultus can satisfy, is not the only one that moves him, strong though it is; there is still another. Every human being of the present feels both kinds of longings, and it is most desirable that each and every one should have his need met by providing community building elements not only in the Movement for Religious Renewal but in the Anthroposophical Society as well.

When one is discussing something, one naturally has to clothe it in idea form. But what I am about to present in that form really lives at the feeling level in people of our time. Ideas are a device for making things clear. But what I want to talk about now is something that modern man experiences purely as feeling.

The first kind of community building that we encounter the moment we set out on earthly life is one that we take quite for granted and seldom think about or weigh in feeling. That is the community built by language. We learn to speak our mother-tongue as little children, and this mother-tongue provides us with an especially strong community building element because it comes into the child's experience and is absorbed by him at a time when his etheric body is still wholly integrated with the rest of his organism and as yet quite undifferentiated. This means that the mother-tongue grows completely at one with his entire being. But it is also an element that groups of human beings share in common. People feel united by a common language, and if you remember something I have often mentioned, the fact that a spiritual being is embodied in a language, that the genius of language is not the abstraction learned men consider it but a real spiritual being, you will sense how a community based on a shared language rests on the fact that its members feel the presence of a real genius of speech. They feel sheltered beneath the wings of a real spiritual being. That is the case wherever community is built.

All community building eventuates in a higher being descending from the world of the spirit to reign over and unite people who have come together in a common cause.

But there is another, individual element eminently capable of creating community that can make its appearance when a group foregathers. A common tongue unites people because what one is saying can live in those who are listening to him; they thus share a common content. But now let us imagine that a number of individuals who spent their childhood and early schooldays together find an occasion of the sort that could and indeed often does present itself to meet again some thirty years later. This little group of forty- or fifty-year-olds, every one of whom spent his childhood in the same school and the same region, begins to talk of common experiences as children and young people. Something special comes alive in them that makes for quite a different kind of community than that created by a common tongue. When members of a group speaking the same language come, in the course of meeting and talking, to feel that they understand one another, their sense of belonging together is relatively superficial compared with what one feels when one's soul-depths are stirred by entertaining common memories. Every word has a special coloring, a special flavor, because it takes one back to a shared youth and childhood. What unites people in such moments of communal experience reaches deeper levels of their soul life. One feels related in deeper layers of one's being to those with whom one comes together on this basis.

What is this basis of relationship? It consists of memories—memories of communal experiences of earlier days. One feels oneself transported to a vanished world where one once lived in company with these others with whom one is thus re-united.

This is to describe an earthly situation that aptly illustrates the nature of the cultus. For what is intended with the cultus? Whether its medium be words or actions, it projects into the physical world, in an entirely different sense than our natural surroundings do, an image of the super-sensible, the spiritual world. Every plant, every process in external nature is, of course, also an image of something spiritual, but not in the direct sense that a rightly presented verbal or ceremonial facet of the cultus is. The words and actions of the cultus convey the super-sensible world in all its immediacy. The cultus is based on speaking words in the physical world in a way that makes the super-sensible world immediately present in them, on performing actions in a way that conveys forces of the super-sensible world. A cultus ritual is one in which something happens that is not limited to what the eyes see when they look physically at ritualistic acts; the fact is rather that forces of a spiritual, super-sensible nature permeate ordinary physical forces. A super-sensible event takes place in the physical act that pictures it.

Man is thus directly united with the spiritual world by means of the physically perceptible words and actions of the cultus. Rightly presented, its words and actions bring to our experience on the physical plane a world that corresponds to the pre-earthly one from which we human beings have descended. In just the same sense in which forty- or fifty-year-olds who have met again feel themselves transported back into the world they shared in childhood does a person who joins others at the celebration of a genuine cultus feel himself transported back into a world he shared with them before they descended to the earth. He is not aware of this; it remains a subconscious experience, but it penetrates his feeling life all the more deeply for that very reason. The cultus is designed with this intent. It is designed with a view to giving man a real experience of something that is a memory, an image of his pre-earthly life, of his existence before he descended to the earth. The members of congregations based on a cultus feel especially keenly what, for purposes of illustration, I have just described as taking place when a group comes together in later life and exchanges memories of childhood: They feel transported into a world where they lived together in the super-sensible. This accounts for the binding ties created by a cultus-based community, and it has always been the reason why it did so. Where it is a matter of a religious life that does not have an atomizing effect because of its stress on preaching but instead emphasizes the cultus, the cultus will lead to the forming of a true community or congregation. No religious life can be maintained without the community building element. Thus a community based in this sense on common memories of the super-sensible is a community of sacraments as well.

But no form of sacrament- or cultus-based community that remains standing where it is today can meet the needs of modern human beings. To be sure, it may be acceptable to many people. But cultus-based congregations would not achieve their full potential or—more important still—reach their real goal if they were to remain nothing more than communities united by common memories of super-sensible experience. This has created an increasing need for introducing sermons into the cultus. The trouble is that the atomizing tendency of sermons as these are presently conceived by the Protestant denominations has become very marked, because the real needs arising from the consciousness soul development of this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch have not been taken into account. The concept of preaching in the older confessions is still based on the needs of the Fourth Post-Atlantean period. In these older churches, sermons conform to the world view that prevailed during the period of intellectual soul development. They are no longer suited to the modern consciousness. That is why the Protestant churches have gone over to a form of presentation that makes its appeal more to human opinion, to conscious human understanding.

There is every good reason for doing this, of course. On the other hand, no really right way of doing it has yet been found. A sermon contained within the cultus is a misfit; it leads away from the cultus in a cognitive direction. But this problem has not been well recognized in the form preaching has taken in the course of man's ongoing evolution. You will see this immediately when I remind you of a certain fact. You will see how little there is left when we omit sermons of more recent times that do not take a Biblical text. In most cases, Sunday sermons as well as those delivered on special occasions take some quotation from the Bible for their text because fresh, living revelation such as is also available in the present is rejected. Historical tradition remains the only source resorted to. In other words, a more individual form of sermon is being sought, but the key to it has not been found. Thus sermons eventuate in mere opinion, personal opinion, with atomizing effect.

Now if the recently established Movement for Religious Renewal, built as it is in all essentials on an anthroposophical foundation, reckons with fresh, ongoing revelation, with a living spiritual experience of the super-sensible world, then it will be just the sermon factor that will bring it to recognize its need for something further. This something is the same thing that makes fresh, ongoing, living knowledge of the spiritual world possible, namely, anthroposophical spiritual science. I might express it by saying that sermons will always be the windows through which the Movement for Religious Renewal will have to receive what an ongoing, living Anthroposophical Society must give it. But as I said when I spoke of the Movement for Religious Renewal at the last lecture I gave over there in the still intact Goetheanum, if the Movement for Religious Renewal is to grow, the Anthroposophical Society will have to stand by it in the liveliest possible way, with all the living life of anthroposophy flowing to it from a number of human beings as the channel. The Movement for Religious Renewal would soon go dry if it were not to have at least some people standing by it in whom anthroposophical cognition is a really living element.

But as I said, many individuals are presently entering the Society, seeking anthroposophy not just in the abstract but in the community belonging that satisfies a yearning of the age of consciousness. It might be suggested that the Society too should adopt a cultus. It could do this, of course, but that would take it outside its proper sphere. I will therefore now go on to discuss the specifically anthroposophical way of building community.

Modern life definitely has other community building elements to offer besides that based on common memories of pre-natal experience of the super-sensible world. The element I have in mind is one that is needed by the present in a form especially adapted to the age of consciousness.

In this connection I must point out something that goes entirely unnoticed by most human beings of our time.

There has, to be sure, always been talk of idealism. But when idealism is mentioned nowadays, such talk amounts to little more than hollow phrases, even in the mouths of the well-meaning. For ours is a time when intellectual elements and forces have come especially strongly to the fore throughout the entire civilized world, with the result that there is no understanding for what a whole human being is. The longing for that understanding is indeed there, particularly in the case of modern youth. But the very indefiniteness of the form in which youth conceives it shows that something lives in human souls today that has not declared itself at all distinctly; it is still undifferentiated, and it will not become the less naive for being differentiated.

Now please note the following. Imagine yourselves back in times when religious streams were rising and inundating humankind. You will find that in those bygone periods of human evolution this and that proclamation from the spiritual world was being greeted by many people with enormous enthusiasm. Indeed, it would have been completely impossible for the confessions extant today to find the strength to carry people if, at the time of these proclamations, souls had not felt a much greater affinity for revelations from the spiritual world than is felt today. Observing people nowadays, one simply cannot imagine them being carried away by anything in the nature of a proclamation of religious truths such as used to take place in earlier ages. Of course, sects do form, but there is a philistine quality about them in great contrast to the fiery response of human souls to earlier proclamations. One no longer finds the same inner warmth of soul toward things of the spirit. It suffered a rapid diminution in the last third of the nineteenth century. Granted, discontent still drives people to listen to this or that, and to join one or another church. But the positive warmth that used to live in human souls and was solely responsible for enabling individuals to put their whole selves at the service of the spirit has been replaced by a certain cool or even cold attitude. This coolness is manifest in human souls today when they speak of ideals and idealism. For nowadays the matter of chief concern is something that still has a long way to go to its fulfillment, that still has a long waiting period before it, but that as expectation is already very much alive in many human souls today. I can characterize it for you in the following way.

Let us take two states of consciousness familiar to everybody, and imagine a dreaming person and someone in a state of ordinary waking consciousness.

What is the situation of the dreamer? It is the same as that of a sleeping person. For though we may speak of dreamless sleep, the fact is that sleepers are always dreaming, though their dreams may be so faint as to go unnoticed.

What, I repeat, is the dreamer's situation? He is living in his own dream-picture world. As he lives in it he frequently finds it a good deal more vivid and gripping—this much can certainly be said—than his everyday waking experience. But he is experiencing it in complete isolation. It is his purely personal experience. Two people may be sleeping in one and the same room, yet be experiencing two wholly different worlds in their dream consciousness. They cannot share each other's experience. Each has his own, and the most they can do is tell one another about it afterwards.

When a person wakes and exchanges his dream consciousness for that of everyday, he has the same sense perception of his surroundings that those about him have. They begin to share a communal scene. A person wakes to a shared world when he leaves dreams behind and enters a day-waking state of consciousness. What wakes him out of the one consciousness into the other? It is light and sound and the natural environment that rouse him to the ordinary day-waking state, and other people are in the same category for him. One wakes up from dreams by the natural aspects of one's fellowmen, by what they are saying, by the way they clothe their thoughts and feelings in the language they use. One is awakened by the way other people naturally behave. Everything in one's natural environment wakes one to normal day consciousness. In all previous ages people woke up from the dream state to day-waking consciousness. And these same surroundings provided a person with the gate through which, if he was so minded, he entered spiritual realms.

Then a new element made its appearance in human life with the awakening and development of the consciousness soul. This calls for a second kind of awakening, one for which the human race will feel a growing need: an awakening at hand of the souls and spirits of other human beings. In ordinary waking life one awakens only in meeting another's natural aspects. But a person who has become an independent, distinct individual in the age of consciousness wants to wake up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of his fellowman. He wants to awaken to his soul and spirit, to approach him in a way that startles his own soul awake in the same sense that light and sound and other such environmental elements startle one out of dreaming.

This has been felt as an absolutely basic need since the beginning of the twentieth century, and it will grow increasingly urgent. It is a need that will be apparent throughout the twentieth century, despite the time's chaotic, tumultuous nature, which will affect every phase of life and civilization. Human beings will feel this need—the need to be brought to wake up more fully in the encounter with the other person than one can wake up in regard to the merely natural surroundings. Dream life wakes up into wakeful day consciousness in the encounter with the natural environment. Wakeful day consciousness wakes up to a higher consciousness in the encounter with the soul and spirit of our fellowman. Man must become more to his fellowman than he used to be: he must become his awakener. People must come closer to one another than they used to do, each becoming an awakener of everyone he meets. Modern human beings entering life today have stored up far too much karma not to feel a destined connection with every individual they encounter. In earlier ages, souls were younger and had not formed so many karmic ties. Now it has become necessary to be awakened not just by nature but by the human beings with whom we are karmically connected and whom we want to seek.

So, in addition to the need to recall one's super-sensible home, which the cultus meets, we have the further need to be awakened to the soul-spiritual element by other human beings, and the feeling impulse that can bring this about is that of the newer idealism. When the ideal ceases to be a mere abstraction and becomes livingly reunited with man's soul and spirit, it can be expressed in the words, “I want to wake up in the encounter with my fellowman.”

This is the feeling that, vague though it is, is developing in youth today, “I want to be awakened by my fellowman,” and this is the particular form in which community can be nurtured in the Anthroposophical Society. It is the most natural development imaginable for when people come together for a communal experience of what anthroposophy can reveal of the super-sensible, the experience is quite a different one from any that the individual could have alone. The fact that one wakes up in the encounter with the soul of the other during the time spent in his company creates an atmosphere that, while it may not lead one into the super-sensible world in exactly the way described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, furthers one's understanding of the ideas that anthroposophical spiritual science brings us from super-sensible realms.

There is a different understanding of things among people who share a common idealistic life based on mutual communication of an anthroposophical content, whether by reading aloud or in some other way. Through experiencing the super-sensible together, one human soul is awakened most intensively in the encounter with another human soul. It wakes the soul to higher insight, and this frame of mind creates a situation that causes a real communal being to descend in a group of people gathered for the purpose of mutually communicating and experiencing anthroposophical ideas. Just as the genius of a language lives in that language and spreads its wings over those who speak it, so do those who experience anthroposophical ideas together in the right, idealistic frame of mind live in the shelter of the wings of a higher being.

Now what takes place as a result?

If this line (Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard) represents the demarcation between the super-sensible and the sense world, we have, here above it, the processes and beings of the higher world experienced in the cultus; they are projected by the words and ritualistic acts of the cultus into the physical world here below the line. In the case of an anthroposophical group, experience on the physical plane is lifted by the strength of its genuine, spiritualized idealism into the spiritual world. The cultus brings the super-sensible down into the physical world with its words and actions. The anthroposophical group raises the thoughts and feelings of the assembled individuals into the super-sensible, and when an anthroposophical content is experienced in the right frame of mind by a group of human beings whose souls wake up in the encounter with each other, the soul is lifted in reality into a spirit community. It is only a question of this awareness really being present. Where it exists and groups of this kind make their appearance in the Anthroposophical Society, there we have in this reversed cultus, as I shall call it, in this polar opposite of the cultus, a most potent community building element. If I were to speak pictorially, I would put it thus: the community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to the place where the cultus is being celebrated, so that they may be present in the congregation, whereas the anthroposophical community seeks to lift human souls into super-sensible realms so that they may enter the company of angels. In both cases that is what creates community.

But if anthroposophy is to serve man as a real means of entering the spiritual world, it may not be mere theory and abstraction. We must do more than just talk about spiritual beings; we must look for the opportunities nearest at hand to enter their company. The work of an anthroposophical group does not consist in a number of people merely discussing anthroposophical ideas. Its members should feel so linked with one another that human soul wakes up in the encounter with human soul and all are lifted into the spiritual world, into the company of spiritual beings, though it need not be a question of beholding them. We do not have to see them to have this experience. This is the strength-giving element that can emerge from groups that have come into being within the Society through the right practice of community building. Some of the fine things that really do exist in the Society must become more common; that is what new members have been missing. They have looked for them, but have not found them. What they have encountered has instead been some such statement as, “If you want to be a real anthroposophist you must believe in reincarnation and the etheric body,” and so on.

I have often pointed out that there are two ways of reading a book like my Theosophy. One is to read, “Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., and lives repeated earth lives and has a karma, etc.” A reader of this kind is taking in concepts. They are, of course, rather different concepts than one finds elsewhere, but the mental process that is going on is in many respects identical with what takes place when one studies a cookbook. My point was exactly that the process is the important thing, not the absorption of ideas. It makes no difference whether you are reading, “Put butter into a frying pan, add flour, stir; add the beaten eggs, etc.,” or, “There is physical matter, etheric forces, astral forces, and they interpenetrate each other.” It is all one from the standpoint of the soul process involved whether butter, eggs and flour are being mixed at a stove or the human entelechy is conceived as a mixture of physical, etheric and astral bodies. But one can also read Theosophy in such a manner as to realize that it contains concepts that stand in the same relation to the world of ordinary physical concepts as the latter does to the dream world. They belong to a world to which one has to awaken out of the ordinary physical realm in just the way one wakes out of one's dream world into the physical. It is the attitude one has in reading that gives things the right coloring. That attitude can, of course, be brought to life in present-day human beings in a variety of ways. They are all described and there to choose from in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But modern man also needs to go through the transitional phase—one not to be confused with actually beholding higher worlds—of waking up in the encounter with the soul-spiritual aspect of his fellowman to the point of living into the spiritual world just as he awakes from dreams into the physical world through the stimulus of light and sound, etc.

We must rise to an understanding of this matter. We have to come to understand what anthroposophy ought to be within the Anthroposophical Society. It should be a path to the spirit. When it becomes that, community building will be the outcome.

But anthroposophy must really be applied to life. That is the essential thing, my dear friends. How essential it is can be illustrated by an example close at hand. After we had had many smaller meetings with a varying number of people there in Stuttgart and had debated what should be done to consolidate the Society, I came together with the young people. I am not referring to the meeting I reported on yesterday, which was held later; this was a prior meeting, but also one held at night. These particular young people were all students. Well, first there was some talk about the best way to arrange things so that the Society would function properly, and so on. But after awhile the conversation shifted to anthroposophy itself. We got right into its very essence because these young men and women felt the need to enquire into the form studies ought to take in future, how the problem of doctoral dissertations should be handled, and other such questions. It was not possible to answer them superficially; we had to plunge right into anthroposophy. In other words, we began with philistine considerations and immediately got into questions of anthroposophy and its application, such as, “How does one go about writing a doctoral dissertation as an anthroposophist? How does one pursue a subject like chemistry?” Anthroposophy proved itself life-oriented, for deliberations such as these led over into it quite of themselves.

The point is that anthroposophy should never remain abstract learning. Matters can, of course, be so arranged that people are summoned to a meeting called for the purpose of deciding how the Society should be set up, with a conversation about anthroposophy as a further item on the agenda. This would be a superficial approach. I am not suggesting it, but rather a much more inward one that would lead over quite of itself from a consideration of everyday problems to the insight that anthroposophy should be called upon to help solve them. One sees the quickening effect it has on life in just such a case as the one cited, where people were discussing the re-shaping of the Society only to end up, quite as a matter of organic necessity, in a discussion of how the anthroposophist and the scientific philistine must conceive the development of the embryo from their respective standpoints. We must make a practice of this rather than of a system of double-entry bookkeeping that sets down such philistine entries on one page as “Anthroposophical Society,” “Union for a Free Spiritual Life,” and so on. Real life should be going on without a lot of theory and abstractions and a dragging in of supposedly anthroposophical sayings such as “In anthroposophy man must find his way to man,” and so on. Abstractions of this kind must not be allowed to play a role. Instead, a concrete anthroposophical approach should lead straight to the core of every matter of concern. When that happens, one seldom hears the phrase, “That is anthroposophical, or un-anthroposophical.” Indeed, in such cases the word “anthroposophy” is seldom spoken. We need to guard against fanatical talk.

My dear friends, this is not a superficial matter, as you will see. At the last Congress in Vienna I had to give twelve lectures on a wide range of subjects, and I set myself the task of never once mentioning the word “anthroposophy.” And I succeeded! You will not discover the word “anthroposophy” or “anthroposophical” in a single one of the twelve lectures given last June in Vienna. The experiment was a success. Surely one can make a person's acquaintance without having any special interest in whether his name is Mueller and what his title is. One just takes him as he is. If we take anthroposophy livingly, just as it is, without paying much attention to what its name is, this will be a good course for us to adopt.

We will speak further about these things tomorrow, and I will then give you something more in the way of a report.

My dear Friends! Circumstances have worked out in such a way that numerous friends found it possible to come to today's class and shall probably also be present for further sessions, friends who were not present at previous sessions of the class, and it is not possible, therefore, simply to proceed in the way that was indicated when we met the last time. Also, the repetition of the class lessons need prove to be no hardship for those members of this esoteric school who have participated in earlier sessions, for the content of this esoteric school is of such a nature that it should again and again be brought before the soul. This is on point for those for whom today's session is a repetition, as the repetition, just because it is a repetition, also signifies a continuation.

For all those, however, who are here today for the first time, it signifies something else. It signifies an acquaintance with the beginning of the esoteric path.

It is true that even those who are far advanced along the esoteric path find special fruitfulness for their further striving in returning again and again to the beginnings. Returning in this way to the beginning is at the same time always an entering upon a new and further step. This is the way we wish to look upon these lessons which are now to be given. So, for the sake of those members who are here today for the first time, the nature and significance of this school shall be set forth once again in an introductory manner.

When the impulse for the Christmas Conference manifested itself here in this hall through the spiritual laying of the Foundation Stone of the Anthroposophical Society on Christmas Day, it was then indeed the fact, as I said yesterday, that an esoteric impulse was from then on to flow through the entire Anthroposophical Society, an esoteric impulse which could indeed already be observed in everything that has been undertaken since Christmas in the Anthroposophical Society. The kernel of this esoteric activity of the Anthroposophical Society must henceforth be the esoteric school, specifically the esoteric school which, arising out of the whole character of Anthroposophy, now has to replace what was previously attempted as the so-called Independent College of Spiritual Science, which one cannot claim to have been successful.

This failure took place at a time when I did not yet personally have the responsibility for the conduct of the Anthroposophical Society and also did not have the task of permitting those who wished to try something to go ahead and try it. This kind of thing should not occur again in the future. It was in accordance with the nature of what formed itself out of the Christmas impulse, an impulse with which I was united, that the Free School of Spiritual Science, with its various sections, should constitute the esoteric kernel of all that was once again intended to become effective as esoteric activity within the Anthroposophical Society.

An esoteric school, however, is not founded in the earthly realm. An esoteric school is only truly present when it is the earthly reflection of what is founded in the supersensible worlds. It has frequently been discussed in Anthroposophical meetings of that in the rulership within the hierarchy of archangels, who have wielded authority over human spiritual life in sequence, it was the Archangel Michael who took on this guidance of spiritual life in the last third of the nineteenth century. It has also been pointed out that Michael's guidance has a very special importance in spiritual life, within the spiritual development of human life on earth.

It is certainly so in human evolution that life in this evolution is guided by seven successive archangels, by seven archangels who together constitute the substance of the rulership of the planetary system to which sun, earth and moon also belong. The impulse radiating out from each of these archangels extends over a period of three to four hundred years. Taking our start from the archangel under whose impulse the spiritual life of mankind stands at the present time, taking our start from Michael, we presently have the archangel who has the spiritual force of the sun within him in everything which he does, in everything that he nurtures.

He was preceded three to four hundred years back, reckoning back three to four hundred years from the last third of the nineteenth century, Michael’s rulership was preceded by the rulership of the archangel Gabriel, who predominantly bears Moon forces in his impulses.

Preceding still further back, we come to those centuries where there was a kind of revolt, especially among those who were the main carriers of civilization, a revolt during medieval times against spiritual activity and spiritual beings. This was due to the rulership of Samael, who bears Mars forces in his impulses.

Going even further back, we come to that epoch in which a medically oriented alchemy flowed deeply into spiritual life under the rulership of the Archangel Raphael, who bears Mercury forces in his impulses.

Retracing our steps still further, we come ever nearer to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, although not quite reaching it, and we find the rulership of Zachariel,¹ who bears Jupiter forces in his impulses, and then the rulership of Anael,² who bears Venus forces in his impulses, at a time quite close to the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we come to the time in which the radiance of the Mystery of Golgotha confronted a profound spiritual darkness pervasive on the earth under the rulership of Oriphiel,³ who bears Saturn forces in his impulses.

Then we return again to the former rulership of Michael, in which a concurrence of world-wide, cosmopolitan impulses took place in Alexandrianism, in Aristotelianism, which up to that time had been brought to mankind through the Greek mysteries and spiritual ways and beings of the Greeks. By means of Alexander this was carried over into Asia and North Africa, so that the life of spirit that had arisen in a small territory streamed out over the whole of the civilized world at that time. For it is precisely this which characterizes a Michael Age, that what has flowered at an earlier time in a single locality radiates out in cosmopolitan fashion over the other parts of humanity.

So, one always returns, when one has completed a cycle of all the various archangels, to the same archangel. We could go yet further back through another sequence of Gabriel, Samael, Raphael, Zachariel, Anael, and Oriphiel, and we would arrive once more at a Michael age. And we will find that after the Michael age which now streams down upon us, there will again follow an era of Oriphiel.

And so, my dear friends, we should be aware that Michael impulses live in characteristic fashion in all that is to take place at the present time as spiritual activity and spiritual substance. But this is a more important Michael epoch than were the preceding ones. I merely wish to draw your attention to this fact.

What is essential in this regard is that when at Christmas the Anthroposophical Society was placed in the service of esoteric spiritual life, this esoteric school, the esoteric kernel of the Society, could only come into existence if it were founded by that spiritual power to whom is entrusted the responsibility for the guidance of the present epoch of mankind's history. We live in this esoteric school as in an esoteric school founded by Michael, the spirit of our time. We live in an esoteric school that has been rightly founded, for this school is the Michael school of the present time.

So, my dear friends, you only conceive what is spoken in this school properly if you are conscious that what is spoken here is entirely what the Michael stream itself wishes to bring to mankind. Michael-Words are all the words spoken in this school. Michael-Will is everything which is willed in this school. Michael-Pupils are you all, when you take your places rightly within this school. Only when this consciousness lives within you is it possible for you to take part in the right way in this school, to participate in this school with the right mood and attitude of heart and mind, to know and feel that you are not merely members of what steps forth in the world as an earth institution, but what steps forth as a heavenly institution.

Furthermore, it is understood that each person who becomes a member of this school is beholden, is pledged⁴ to nurture the school. It is a unique aspect of the Christmas Foundation impulse of the Anthroposophical Society that a character of complete openness has impressed itself on this Society. As a result, nothing further is required of one who becomes a member of the Anthroposophical Society than that he receives from the Society what flows within the spiritual movement of anthroposophy. One undertakes no further obligations when one becomes an adherent of anthroposophy. The obligation to be a decent human being is, of course, understood.

It is another matter when one seeks to enter this school. In this case, in regard to all that emerges out of the whole spiritual spirit, out of the occult spirit of this school a member of this school will take on a nurturing-pledge⁵ to be a worthy representative of Anthroposophical enterprises before the entire world, with all of one’s thinking, feeling, and willing. One can be a member of this school in no other way.

The decision whether or not one is a worthy member of this school rests solely in the hands of the leadership of the school. The leadership of the school must take seriously, however, the specific duties which it takes on. The leadership of this school is accountable only to the spiritual powers, to the Michael power itself, for the various things that it does. The leadership, however, must take seriously the point that whoever belongs to the school must be a worthy representative of the concerns of Anthroposophy before the world. This entails that the leadership of the school must insist that membership be taken up seriously in the utmost sense. The leadership must therefore make clear to whomever cannot meet this seriousness, that that person’s membership cannot continue.

That this will be taken seriously, my dear friends, you may see from the fact that in the short time this school has existed, in twenty cases already, it has been necessary to exclude members for a period of time. Strict rules of this kind will have to be maintained. One may not play around with genuine esoteric matters, for they must be handled with utmost earnestness. In this manner straightforwardly through this school earnestness can stream into the movement of Anthroposophy, which is absolutely necessary for it to flourish in true spirituality.

These are the introductory words which I had to convey to you.

If you, I am speaking now to those who are present here for the first time, if you receive the words which are spoken as genuine messages from the spiritual world, as genuine Michael words, then you will take your places here in the only way that is right for you to do so.

Let us first bring before our souls those words which sound forth to man when he looks out with unprejudiced perception upon all that surrounds him in the world, in the world above, in the world around him, and in the world below. We may look out to the silent world of the minerals, to the sprouting, springing realm of the plant kingdom, to the mobile realm of the animals, to the pensive realm of the human being on earth, we might turn our glance out to the mountains, to the seas, to the rivers, to the bubbling springs, we might gaze up to the moving clouds, to thunder and lightning, we might gaze up to the shining sun, to the glimmering moon, to the twinkling stars. From all around, when a person opens his heart, when he is able to hear with soulful ears, there sounds forth confronting him the admonition, which also rests within the words which I have now to utter:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

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

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

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

And when we allow the sense and spirit of these words to work upon us, we feel the longing to seek those wellsprings from which our actual human nature flows. To understand these words completely means to seek out in earnest longing the path which leads to those waters from which flows the beingness of the human soul, to seek the origin of human life.

This will come to you, my dear brothers and sisters, in accordance with the disposition of your karma. But the first step will be a contemplative understanding of the esoteric path. This esoteric path will be portrayed in Michael words here in this school. The path will be portrayed in such a way that each human being can walk it, that no one is obliged to follow it, but rather that it can initially be understood, for this understanding is itself the first step. Therefore, there will flow forth in mantric words what Michael has to say to humanity at the present time. These mantric words are at the same time words for meditation.

Once again, the effect of these words in meditation will depend on the karma of each individual soul. The first thing is to acquire an understanding that just from the spoken mantric words a longing for human self-awareness springs forth, directing the mind to the wellsprings of human existence-awareness. O Man, know yourself! Yes, this longing must grow inwardly. We must seek for the wellspring that lives in the human soul, which is our intrinsically human existence.

We must first look out upon the world as given around us. We must look out and into all that is present for us in small things and into what is grandiose. We observe the silent stone, the earthworm, we observe whatever grows and creeps and lives around us in the realms of nature. We gaze out to the mighty twinkling, glistening stars. We hear the rolling thunder. If a person becomes an ascetic, he does not have the perspective to fathom the riddles of the intrinsic nature of a human being, nor when one despises what lives as a worm in the earth, what twinkles in the vault of the heavens, nor when one despises outward sense appearance and seeks for an abstract, vague, inwardly chaotic path, but rather, only when one develops a direct deep feeling for all that creeps, lives, and endures in the tiniest worm, when one develops a feeling for the majesty of what shines down upon us from the stars, when one can feel beauty, truth, purity, sublimity, extraordinary greatness, and majesty in all that enters through our senses and becomes perception. When one can stand upright as an observant human being and can hear from plants, stones, animals, stars, clouds, seas, springs, and mountains, when one can hear and grasp majesty and greatness and truth and beauty and radiance from everything surrounding him, then a person says to himself with full depth and intensity, “Certainly great, powerful, majestic, and magnificent is all that crawls, as do the worm on the earth, that sparkles and shines above, as the stars do in the heavens, but your being, O Man, is not among them.” You are not in all that of which your senses initially bear witness.

Then one turns one's questioning, riddle-laden glance toward the far distances. From this point forward the esoteric path will be described in imaginations. One turns one's glance toward the far distances. Something in the nature of a path comes into view, a path that leads to a black, night-bedecked wall, which reveals itself as the beginning of profound darkness. We stand there, surrounded by the majesty of sense existence, marveling at the majesty and splendor and radiance of sense existence. Not finding there our own being, our gaze is directed toward the boundary of sensory appearance. But there looms black, night-bedecked darkness. In our heart, however, something says to us, “Not here, where sunlight gleams back to us from all that grows and moves and lives, but rather over there, where night-bedecked darkness confronts us, there are the wellsprings of intrinsic human existence. From there must come the answer to the question, “O Man (O Mensch), know yourself!”

So we go cautiously to confront the black darkness and become aware of the first being whom we come up against, who stands there where the black night-bedecked darkness begins. Like a previously unnoticed cloud formation, it draws itself together, becomes humanoid, not weighed down with gravity, yet with human likeness. With earnest, deeply earnest gaze it meets our questioning glance. This is the Guardian of the Threshold. Between the sun-filled, light-reflecting surroundings of man and that night-bedecked darkness, there is an abyss, a deep, yawning abyss. At the abyss the Guardian of the Threshold confronts us. We designate him just so for a reason, as follows.

Of course, every night in sleep the human being’s “I” and astral body is certainly in that world which now appears to imaginative cognition as black, night-bedecked darkness. One is unaware, as one’s soul senses are not yet opened, one is unaware of living and moving in the midst of spiritual beings and spiritual conditions from falling asleep until awakening. If one were to experience awareness without further preparation what may be experienced there, one would be utterly crushed. The Guardian of the Threshold protects us, which is why he is called the Guardian of the Threshold. He protects us from crossing the abyss unprepared. We must obey his admonitions if we wish to follow the esoteric path. He wraps the human being in darkness every night. He guards the threshold, so that the human being, falling asleep, shall not pass over unprepared into the spiritual, occult world.

There he stands, when we have sufficiently taken this to heart, when we have immersed our soul in it. There he stands, directing his admonition to us, that everything in our physical surrounding is beautiful, but that our own being is not to be found in all this beauty, that we must seek beyond the yawning abyss of existence in the region of night-bedecked, black darkness, that we must wait until it grows dark here in the sunlit, light-gleaming realm of sense-perceptible brightness, until it becomes bright for us there, where for the present there is only black darkness.

It is this that the Guardian, with earnest words, puts before our souls. We are still standing a certain distance before him. We gaze out and take in his admonishing word, which resounds from the distance.

Where on grounds of earth, color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures, strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light:

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness;
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are and were and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit;
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

This is the first admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, that first admonition which says to us that beautiful and great and sublime as our sense-world surroundings are, this world gleaming with light illuminated by the sun is for the being of man just a sort of darkness, that we must search there where the darkness is, that this darkness becomes light for us, so that the nature of a human being may be confronted and illuminated for us out of this darkness, so that out of this darkness the human riddle may be resolved. Then the Guardian of the Threshold continues.

And from darknesses clarifies itself
(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),
The bringer of spirit-premonitions to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.
And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word:
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.

[The mantra was written on the blackboard; heading and last line was underlined.]

Where on grounds of earth, color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures, strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light:

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness;
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are and were and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit;
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,
And from darknesses clarifies itself

The continuation of this sentence follows after a few lines, but first we have a clause in parentheses:⁶

(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),

This concludes the parenthesis. Now we continue the sentence. “And from darknesses clarifies itself.,

The bringer of spirit-premonitions,

(the Guardian of the Threshold himself)

to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.
And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,

Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word:
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.

Then it is the Guardian himself, who after having conveyed this first admonition, sense light as darkness, darkness as light, now directs our attention to those feelings and senses that can now begin to rise with primeval power out of our soul. He, the Guardian, gives expression to them, as he allows his glance to grow yet more earnest, more earnest yet, as he stretches his arm and his hand toward us in admonishment, in warning, and utters these further words:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,

We feel ourselves drawn into making a few steps toward the Guardian; we approach nearer to the yawning abyss of existence.

From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:
There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
Through world forming powers,
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

It is different whether initially the word sounds forth to us from sensory beings, if we understand correctly, “O Man, know yourself,” or whether it now sounds forth at the fearful abyss of being out of the mouth of the Guardian of the Threshold himself. One and the same word, yet two different ways of being taken hold of by it! All of these words are mantric, are there to be meditated, are the sort of words that stimulate capacities in the soul to draw nearer to the spiritual world, if they are able to inflame the soul. [The mantra was written on the blackboard. The heading and the last line were underlined.]

The Guardian at the Abyss

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:
There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
Through world forming powers,
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

While the Guardian speaks these words, we have approached the yawning abyss of being. It goes deep down. There is no hope that we can cross over the abyss with the feet given to us on earth. We need to be freed from the weight of earthly, we need the wings of the spirit to cross over the abyss. Just there however, just as he has beckoned us to the edge of the abyss of being, the Guardian makes us aware that at this time of our inner self, before it has been refined and purified, of how it actually is in the present, of how we are entirely given over to hate toward the spiritual world, to mockery of the spiritual world, to lack of courage and to fear of the spiritual world. Just there the Guardian makes us aware of this self of ours that wills there, that feels there, that thinks there in its threefold configuration as willing, feeling and thinking, of how this self of ours is actually constituted today, is formed by the age in which we live. This we must first come to recognize before we can become aware of our god-implanted true self in true, genuine self-awareness.

As the three beasts, one after another, are drawn out of the abyss, they appear to us as seen by the eternal godlike healing powers, the will of a person, the feeling of a person, the thinking of a person. As one after the other, willing, feeling, and thinking in their true form emerge out of the abyss, the Guardian speaks in clarification. We stand fast at the abyss. The Guardian speaks. The beasts rise. The Guardian:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold⁷ the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin;
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monstrous foe in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
In your fire of knowing it must be tamed.

Behold the third beast, with split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this spectral form in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

I will write these mantric verses on the blackboard next time.

Having learned this from the mouth of the Guardian one returns in memory to the beginning. There stands once more before the soul what all beings say, that are in our surroundings, if we understand them rightly, what all beings said to man in the most distant past, what all beings say to man in the present day, what all beings will say to the human being of the future:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

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

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

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

These are the words of the Michael School. When they come to be spoken, the spirit of Michael waves and weaves through the room in which they come to be spoken. And his sign is the very sign, that in his presence may confirm his presence. [The Michael sign was drawn on the blackboard.]

Then Michael leads us into the true Rosicrucian School that would reveal the secrets of man's own true being in the past, in the present, and in the future through the Father God, the Son God and the Spirit God. And then, impressing the seal on the words “rosae et crucis” the words may be spoken

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

accompanied by the signs of Michael's seal, which are, for the first words, “Ex Deo Nascimur” [The lower seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], for the second words, “In Christo Morimur” [The middle seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], and for the third words, “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus” [The upper seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], whereby, as we speak the words “Ex Deo Nascimur,” confirming them through the seal and signs of Michael, we feel, “I honor the Father” [Overlying the drawn lower seal gesture was written the words:]

I honor the Father

As we speak “In Christo Morimur” we feel with this sign, “I love the Son.” [Overlying the drawn middle seal gesture is written the words:]

I love the Son

As we speak “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus” we feel with this sign, “I unite with the Spirit.” [Overlying the upper seal gesture is written the words:]

I unite with the Spirit.

That is the meaning of the signs. Michael's presence becomes confirmed by his seal and signs. [The Michael sign was made. Then the gestures of the three seal signs were made, and at the same time the words were spoken:]

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

Only those who are authorized members of this School may possess the mantric words which have come to be written on the blackboard, that is, those who have received the blue membership card. No one else may possess these words. Of course, anyone prevented from attending one or other of the Lessons may also receive them, as well as those who live too far away to attend. So long as they are members of the school, they may receive them from others who are also in this school.

In each case, however, permission must be sought before the mantras are passed on. Not the one who wants to receive the mantras but the one who wants to pass them on must ask either Frau Dr. Wegman or myself for permission. This is not merely an administrative matter. Every time a mantra is passed on permission must first be sought either from Frau Dr. Wegman or from me. The mantras may not be sent through the post, but only handed on personally.

• 1. Whom Steiner also referred to as Uriel
• 2. Also known elsewhere as Haniel
• 3. Also known elsewhere as Cassiel
• 4. Pflichten: Pfleger is cognate with pledgers, those who are pledged to care for others, to guardian, to nurse, and more than just to nourish, but to nurture. Pfleger are care-givers or nurturers. Pflichten as a verb is to care for, to nurture.
• 5. Verpflichtung
• 6. Zwischensatz
• 7. schau is a combination of behold and show (with which it is cognate) and is active and willful.

The lectures, addresses and contributions to discussions given by Rudolf Steiner at the Christmas Conference for the Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society in 1923/24 were first published by Marie Steiner twenty-one years later. She undertook the revision of the text and wrote the introductory and concluding words. The original form of Marie Steiner's presentation has been maintained in the present new edition within the framework of the Complete Works. Any changes made in the text after comparison with the existing records have been documented in the Notes. A Supplement has been added containing facsimile reproductions of documents in Rudolf Steiner's handwriting as well as of texts and diagrams made on the blackboard during the Conference.

The Conference was for members of the Anthroposophical Society only. This fact determined the tone of Rudolf Steiner's contributions, especially the lectures. ‘I was permitted to speak in internal circles in a manner which would have had to be different had I spoken publicly from the start.’ (The Course of my Life)

The records taken down in shorthand were originally not intended for publication, and Rudolf Steiner was unable to check them himself. Though for the greatest part they may be assumed to be verbatim, nevertheless, as with all his published lectures, account must be taken of his own proviso in this matter: ‘There will be nothing for it but to accept that there may be mistakes in the records I have been unable to check myself. A judgment on the content of these private publications will in any event only be acceptable when it is based on that knowledge which is a prerequisite for such judgment. In the case of most of these publications this is at least the knowledge of man and the universe as given by Anthroposophy, and also what may be found under the heading “anthroposophical history” in the wisdom that has been received from the spiritual world.’ (The Course of my Life)

You will have seen from the previous lectures, how the souls who out of the depths of their subconscious life feel impelled towards the Anthroposophical Movement, bear this impulse within them through their special relationship to the forces of Michael. We have accordingly considered the working of these Michael-forces throughout the centuries, in order to see what influence the impulses of Michael can have upon the lives of those who stand in any kind of connection with them.

Now the Michael impulses—and this is of great importance for the karma of every single anthroposophist—the Michael impulses are of a kind to enter deeply and intensely into the whole being of man. We know from previous descriptions that the rulership of Michael, if so we may call it, beginning for earthly life at the end of the eighteen-seventies, was preceded by the rulership of Gabriel; and I have described how the rulership of Gabriel is connected with forces that go through the line of physical inheritance—forces related to physical reproduction.

The forces of Michael are the very opposite of this. The rulership of Gabriel is characterised by the fact that his impulses enter strongly into the physical bodily nature of man. Michael, on the other hand, works intensely into the spiritual being of man. You can tell this from the very fact that he is the administrator of the Cosmic Intelligence. But Michael's impulses are strong and powerful. Taking their start from the spiritual, they work through and through the human being. They work into the spiritual, thence into the soul-nature, and thence again into the bodily nature of man. Now in the karmic connections of life, these super-earthly forces are constantly at work. Beings of the higher Hierarchies are working with man and upon him. It is thus that the karma of a man takes shape. And so it is with the Michael-forces. Working as they do upon the whole human being, they work also very strongly into his karma. Gabriel-forces work only very little—I do not say not at all—but very little into the essential karma of a human being. Michael-forces on the other hand work very strongly into his karma.

If, therefore, certain human beings—and this in the last resort applies to you all, my dear friends—if certain human beings are especially connected with the stream of Michael, their individual karmas can only be understood when thought of in connection with the stream of Michael.

Now Michael is a Spirit who stands in a special relationship to the Sun and to all Sun-impulses. This being the case, we shall realise what a profound significance his impulses must have for those who are especially exposed to them. In effect, his forces will work right into the physical organisation. For Michael-men therefore (if we may use this term), we must connect the physical phenomena of health and illness with karma in an even higher degree than for Gabriel- or Raphael-men, or the like. Things in the universe are very complicated; and although Raphael is the Spirit most intimately connected with the art of Healing, nevertheless it is Michael who brings the karma of men nearest of all to health and to disease.

There is another fact in this connection. The Michael-forces not only work in a cosmopolitan sense, but they also work in such a way as to tear a man out of the narrower earthly connections of his life and carry him up on to a spiritual height, where he feels the earthly connections less strongly than others do. At any rate his karma predestines him for this. This again has a profound influence upon the karma of every single man who belongs to the stream of Michael.

You see, in the last third of the 19th century it did really happen that human beings—I will not say of nervous temperament—but human beings intense in soul and spirit, were able to feel the penetration of the Michael-forces into the world. In those who were essentially men of Michael, this penetration of the Michael-forces into the world came to expression in this way: they felt many things, which other men would have passed by more or less indifferently, entering deeply and incisively into their lives.

Above all their karma was such that they had a strong feeling—though they did not understand it clearly—a strong feeling of the battle I described the day before yesterday, the battle between Michael and Ahriman. In the present age, Ahriman can only have a strong influence upon men when their consciousness is diverted in one way or another. The most radical phenomenon is that of a fainting fit, or a diminution of consciousness lasting for a considerable time. In times like this, when a man is overcome by faintness or diminution of consciousness, the Ahriman forces can most effectively approach him. At such times they work their way into him, he is exposed to them. But it was above all in the last third of the 19th century—and especially in the time when the end of the Kali Yuga was approaching, in the very last years of the 19th century,—it was a shattering experience to see behind the scenes of this external, physical world which is spread out before man's senses.

For directly adjoining this outer world there is a world revealing very, very much of those historic processes in which the higher super-sensible Beings enter and play a part.

In the last third of the 19th century, and especially in the last decade, only a thin veil concealed that which we recognise as the dominion of Michael, the great battle of Michael and all the facts connected with him. Since then, Michael himself has been taking part in the battle even in the outer world, and we need a far stronger power to behold what is present supersensibly than was needed before the end of the Kali Yuga, when, as I said, the next adjoining world, where Michael was battling as yet behind the scenes, was severed from our own by a thin veil only.

But Michael insists, as I have told you, that his dominion shall prevail and penetrate at any cost. Michael is a Spirit filled with strength, and he can only make use of thoroughly brave men, men full of inner courage.

Now in the whole nexus that I have described, in the super-sensible School of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and in the great super-sensible Cult of the beginning of the 19th century, among all the spirits who partake in these things, great numbers of Luciferic figures are all the time playing their part. The Luciferic figures are necessary, necessary in the whole connection of these things. Michael needs the Luciferic spirits, he needs their co-operation to overcome the polar antithesis of Ahriman. Thus the men of Michael are placed into the very midst of the battle—or, if we may not call it so—the surging waves of interplay, of Luciferic impulses and Ahrimanic.

Just at the end of the 19th century these things showed themselves with great clarity and definition. In those years it was by no means rarely that one caught a glimpse, through the veil, as I have called it. Then one saw how intensely Michael was having to battle against Ahriman, and how easy it was for the consciousness of men to be diverted by all manner of Luciferic influences.

You may say: Disturbances of consciousness, attacks of faintness and the like, are nothing out of the ordinary. Outwardly considered they are not, of course; but they can become most significant through that which happens as a consequence,—through that which ensues when the diversion or diminution of consciousness takes place. I will give you an example.

It was once a question of someone being made more intimately acquainted with a certain historic personality. He was to study an historic personality who had lived in the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. I want you to understand me precisely. All the preparations had been made for this man (it was at the end of the eighteen-nineties) to become historically acquainted with a personality who had lived at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. Indeed, with all the conditions that had gone before, it seemed scarcely possible for anything else to happen, than that he would become familiar with that historic personality in the perfectly ordinary, and if I may call it so, pedantic way of scholarship. But look what happened. Through the refined workings of karma he became incapable of using his consciousness just at the very time when he was to have had this experience. He fell into a kind of sleep from which he could not awaken, and was thus prevented.

Of course in ordinary life one pays little heed to such a thing. Yet it is through happenings like these that we look directly from the earthly into the spiritual world. And if you want an explanation of this fact, then we must say: This man, who was to have become historically acquainted with a certain personality of the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, would undoubtedly have received a very strong impression if he had had this experience. He did not have it; he missed it, he was prevented. But in that very time, the impression which he would have received was transformed. He received it in another form; it was transformed into a peculiar impressionability for the Michael element. He actually received, though unconsciously, a real power of understanding for the Michael element.

I give this somewhat strange example in order to show you by what paths the Michael element was approaching human beings at that time. We could give many examples of this kind. Indeed, human beings today would be quite different if such things had not occurred to many individuals. Such things may happen in hundreds of different ways. In the case I have just related, my dear friends, the man actually fell into a kind of sleep. In other cases it happened thus:—Some event that would have led a man away from Michael was prevented by a friend or someone else coming and taking him away to a different place, and his consciousness was veiled around in a most natural and matter-of-fact way. He was prevented from partaking in what was karmically set before him to begin with. It was just in those years that the strongest interferences took place with the ordinary smooth course of karma.

And as a rule in such cases it became evident how deeply these Michael influences work. In many instances one saw that such human beings had been affected not only in soul but even down into the body when their karma had received a jerk of this kind, because Michael needed to enter through the portals of a human consciousness into the earthly world of sense.

It is interesting in the highest degree to see how in the eighteen-nineties men were led into events which were none other than the paths of Michael from the spiritual into the physical world. For you must remember, the entry of Michael into the physical world was taking place in the last third of the 19th century. But it had been prepared for, in the spiritual world, for a long time before—already since the beginning of the eighteen-forties. If I may put it so, Michael and his hosts were drawing ever nearer and nearer, and it became more and more evident that those human beings would now descend, who in their earthly destiny were connected with the task of Michael,—the task of receiving the Intelligence here upon earth again after it had fallen away from the hosts of Michael in the super-sensible world.

Into the midst of all these things, as you will recognise from my presentation of the Mysteries, the Anthroposophical Movement is placed. For the Anthroposophical Movement is connected, as you will see from former lectures, with this whole stream of Michael.

Now I want you to consider in this light the karmic conditions of individual human beings who are led by an inner urge to approach the Anthroposophical Movement. They come, to begin with, from the world. They stand in many connections in the world. There have indeed been many communities in the world's history in which human beings have become united. But there was never a cohesive power of that peculiar quality which the Michael forces engender. Hence a peculiar situation is brought about for those who find their way, from other connections in the world, into the Anthroposophical Society. One can find one's way into other societies too, and could always do so, but one's destiny did not need to be very deeply affected. Into the Anthroposophical Society one cannot come—not at least in a thoroughly sincere way that really moves the soul—without being deeply and fundamentally influenced in one's destiny. This becomes especially clear when we consider these things along a right line of approach.

Take a human being who is just coming into the Anthroposophical Society, and who until then had certain connections with non-anthroposophists, which he may perhaps still continue to have. The difference between the one who stands within and the one who stands or remains outside, is of far greater significance than in the case of any other communities. There are two kinds of relationships.

Through the fulfilment of all the things I have described, we are living, once and for all, in a time of great, immense decisions. Thus the standing side-by-side today of anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists is fraught with great decisions. Either it is a question of the dissolving of old karma for the one who is in the Anthroposophical Society, or it is a question of the weaving of new karma for the one who is outside it. And these are great differences.

Let us assume an anthroposophist stands very near in life to a non-anthroposophist. It may be to begin with that the anthroposophist has old karmic connections to settle with the non-anthroposophist. On the other hand it may be that the non-anthroposophist has to enter into karmic connections with the anthroposophist, for the future. At any rate these are the only two cases I have hitherto been able to observe, though of course they are of many different kinds. There are no intermediates, there are no others beside these two. From this you will see that this is really a time of great decisions, for, if we may describe it so, either non-anthroposophists are being influenced in such a way that they come to the Michael community, or else the influences work in such a way that those who do not belong to the Michael community will be avoided by it. This indeed is the time of great decisions—the great crisis to which the sacred books of all time have referred—for in reality the present age is meant. Such indeed is the peculiar nature of the Michael impulses: they are fraught with great decisions, and they become decisive especially in this our age.

Human beings who in the present incarnation receive the Michael impulses through Anthroposophy, are thereby preparing their whole being in such a way that these Michael impulses enter even into the forces that are otherwise determined merely by the connections of race and nation.

Think how much this means:—Here is a man who stands within some national group. We can see at once, he is a Russian, he is a Frenchman, he is an Englishman, he is a German. We recognise it by his appearance, and we locate him by thinking, as we see him, where can this man belong? We think it a matter of some importance if we can recognise: he is a Turk, he is a Russian, or the like. Now with those who today receive Anthroposophy with inner force of soul, with deep impulse and strength of heart—who receive it, therefore, as the deepest force of their life—such distinctions will have no more meaning when next they return to earth. People will say: Where does he come from? He is not of any nation, he is not of any race, he is as though he had grown away from all races and nations.

When the last Michael dominion took place, in the age of Alexander, the point was to spread Grecian culture in a cosmopolitan way, carrying it out in all directions. The campaigns of Alexander were an immense achievement in the equalising of men on earth, I mean in the spreading among them of a common element. But the thing was not yet able to strike so deep, for at that time Michael still administered the Cosmic Intelligence. Now Intelligence is on the earth, now it strikes far deeper, it strikes down even into the earthly element of man. For the first time, the Spiritual is preparing to become a race-creating force. The time will come when one will no longer be able to say: the man looks as if he belonged to this or that country,—he is a Turk, or an Arabian, an Englishman, a Russian or a German,—but one will have to say what will amount to this: ‘In a former life on earth this man felt impelled to turn towards the Spirit in the sense of Michael.’ Thus, that which is influenced by Michael will appear as an immediate, physically creative, physically formative power.

Now this is a thing that takes root deeply, very deeply in the karma of the individual. Hence the strange destiny of those who are sincere anthroposophists, the strange destiny that they are not able to come to terms with the world: they cannot quite master it, and yet at the same time they have to approach the world and enter into it with full earnestness.

I have said that those who stand with full intensity within the Anthroposophical Movement will return at the end of the century, and others will then unite with them, for by this means the salvation of the earth and earthly civilisation from destruction must eventually be settled. This is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement, which weighs on the one hand so heavily upon one's heart, while on the other hand it moves the heart, uplifts it with enthusiasm. This mission we must understand and see.

It is most necessary for the anthroposophist to know that in this situation as an anthroposophist his karma will be harder to experience than it is for other men. From the very outset those who come into the Anthroposophical Society are predestined to a harder, more difficult experience of karma than other men. And if we try to pass this harder experience by—if we want to experience our karma in a comfortable way—it will surely take vengeance on us in one direction or another. We must be anthroposophists in our experience of karma too. To be true anthroposophists we must be able to observe our own experience of karma with constant wide-awake attention. If we do not, then our comfortable, easy-going experiencing of our karma—or rather our desire to experience it so—will find expression and take vengeance in physical illnesses, physical accidents and the like.

These finer, more intimate connections of life must indeed be seen and observed, for then we shall see many another thing besides. It is the best preparation for true and real spiritual sight, to observe these more intimate connections of life attentively. It is a wrong principle to want to evolve all manner of nebulous, abnormal, visionary states. On the other hand it is immensely right to occupy oneself with all that goes on more finely and intimately in the connections of destiny which we can recognise.

Do we not see how this becomes our karma, my dear friends: we live, or have lived, alongside of human beings who are absolutely prevented, inwardly prevented, from coming near to things anthroposophical. They are prevented, in spite of all that we—I will not say have brought to them of Anthroposophy—but that we might have brought to them if they would only take it. We see this happen, surely. Now this also is among the great decisions of present-day life. For the things that take place in this way will have great karmic significance, both for the one who comes into the Anthroposophical Movement and for the one who remains outside it. It will have extraordinary significance.

Let us imagine that these human beings meet one another again in a future incarnation. We know that what happens to us in future incarnations is already being prepared for in this present. The meeting-again with human beings to whom we are related in the way I have just described, will be such that the usual strangeness between man and man will be essentially enhanced. For Michael works right down into the physical sympathies and antipathies. Now all this is taking place already now in a preparatory way, for every single anthroposophist. It is immensely important for an anthroposophist to study just those karmic relationships which unfold between him and non-anthroposophists. For in this connection things are taking place which reach up into the next kingdom of the Hierarchies. For you must see, there is a counterpart to what I have just described, when I said that the Michael impulses appear as a race-creating force. There is a counterpart to it.

Let us take the following karmic instance. Someone is taken hold of in the very highest degree by the impulses of Anthroposophy. He is taken hold of in heart and mind, in soul and spirit. In such a case something will necessarily happen, which, expressed in words, sounds very strange indeed; and yet it is necessary. In such a case the Angel of the man must learn something. This is a thing of untold significance. The destiny of anthroposophists,—the destiny that works itself out between anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists,—casts its waves even into the worlds of the Angeloi. It leads to a parting of the Spirits, even in the world of the Angeloi. The Angel who accompanies the anthroposophist to his next incarnations learns to find his way still more deeply into the spiritual kingdoms than he could do before, while the Angel who belongs to the other man—to the one who cannot enter,—descends. It is in the destiny of the Angeloi that we first perceive how this great separation is taking place. To this, my dear friends, I would now direct your hearts. It is happening now, that the comparatively single and uniform kingdom of the Angeloi is being turned into a twofold kingdom of Angeloi, a kingdom of Angeloi with an upward tendency into the higher worlds, and with a downward tendency into lower worlds.

While the Michael community is being formed here upon earth, we can behold above it the ascending and the descending Angeloi. Looking more deeply into the world today, one can perpetually observe these streams, which are such as to stir the heart to its foundations.

Now I have told you that those who come into the anthroposophical life fall into two main groups. There are the ones who still carry into it a knowledge from the old heathen times, and have had little experience of that Christian development which took its course during the Kali Yuga. They have gone on evolving out of the old Pagan sources, and they now grow into the Christianity which is to be a cosmic Christianity once more. They are souls with a Pagan predestination, who in reality are only now growing into Christianity. The others are souls who are a little weary of Paganism, though they do not confess this to themselves. From the outset they grow into the Anthroposophical Movement on account of its Christian character, but they do not enter so deeply into the anthroposophical Cosmology, the anthroposophical Anthropology, and so forth. They enter, rather, into the more abstractly religious side. These two groups are clearly to be distinguished.

Now for the group of a more Pagan predestination it is particularly necessary to take hold of the sustaining forces of Anthroposophy with full intensity of inner life. For this group, it is most necessary to avoid all side-tracks and other considerations, and steer straight forward in the direction of the anthroposophical sustaining forces.

We can only grasp these things when we receive them in our hearts; but they must enter into the hearts of anthroposophists. For only then will a real living-together within the Anthroposophical Society be possible, on a true anthroposophical foundation. When the more Pagan kind of souls, if I may call them so, bring forth their forces, which are in many cases already there in this incarnation deep within their souls, though they will often only come forth with difficulty,—when as I say they do bring forth the forces that are there in them, then there will spread over the whole Anthroposophical Society an atmosphere of steady and courageous progress in the good sense of Michael.

If this is to be so, we must have the courage to look straight into the intense conflict that is taking place, as between the things that Michael must undertake to achieve his great task, and the things that Ahriman is perpetually placing in his way.

Ahriman has already taken hold of certain tendencies in civilisation and placed them in his service. Consider this one fact:—Only since the 15th century has it become most thoroughly possible for man to take hold of the Intelligence. For since that time the Spiritual Soul is present in man, and the Spiritual Soul is man's very own; therefore it can make the Intelligence its very own. Moreover it is only since that time that those things have come to men, which have made them so exceedingly keen—if I may say so—on their own personal Intelligence.

Make this little calculation; it embraces huge dimensions, though the greatness of it be only in a spatial sense. Try to make this little calculation, my dear friends. Add up in thought all that is being thought today within a single day by all the writers in newspapers over the whole earth, so that newspapers may be produced. Try to imagine the tremendous sum-total of Intelligence that is being chewed out from their pens, put on to paper, printed, and so on. See what an enormous amount of personal Intelligence is flooding through the world. And now go back a few centuries, go back into the 13th century, and see whether such a thing is there at all. It is simply not there, there can be no question of its being there.

But I will give you another task. Imagine in your thought (today is Sunday, it is a good opportunity) just imagine how many meetings are being held on political questions from West to East,—we need not go beyond Europe for the moment. Here again, how much personal Intelligence is flooding through the atmosphere of the earth! And now imagine yourself in the 13th century. They managed without the newspapers and without the meetings. None of these things existed. Compare the 13th century with the present time. We may put it thus:—When you transplant yourself into the 13th century you can look out over the world, your vision is clear and unobstructed. There are no editorial offices, no political meetings, none of these. You look through, clear and free. But today, as you look over the world, everywhere the waves of personal Intelligence are surging forth. They are there everywhere. You simply cannot penetrate. It is a spiritual air that you could cut with a knife, as in some meeting-rooms where everyone is smoking his pipe or his cigar like a chimney-pot, and you say ‘it is an air that you could cut with a knife.’ So is the spiritual atmosphere today.

Such differences must be considered, if we would judge at all truly of the succession of historic epochs. When you read historians like Ranke you see nothing of these things, yet these are the real facts of history.

And all this that has come about since the 13th century, what is it? It is spiritual nourishment for the Ahrimanic Powers. Here in this region, they are first able to make their attacks. Hence the possibilities for Ahriman to take a hand in civilisation have become ever greater and greater. Needless to say, Spirits like Ahriman are not there to incarnate in physical bodies on the earth. Nevertheless, they can work on the earth, not indeed by incarnating but by incorporating themselves for certain spaces of time; when in one man or another there happens what I mentioned before: a diminution or diversion of consciousness. At such moments the human being provides a vehicle, and Ahriman is able—not indeed to incarnate,—but to incorporate himself and to work out of that human being, with that human being's faculties.

It will be my further task to tell you of this kind of working of the Ahrimanic Powers. I shall have to show, for example, how Ahriman has appeared in the course of modern time even as an author. This will show you what things must be observed today by those who would fain observe realities.

You will have seen from the previous lectures, how the souls who out of the depths of their subconscious life feel impelled towards the Anthroposophical Movement, bear this impulse within them through their special relationship to the forces of Michael. We have accordingly considered the working of these Michael-forces throughout the centuries, in order to see what influence the impulses of Michael can have upon the lives of those who stand in any kind of connection with them.

Now the Michael impulses—and this is of great importance for the karma of every single anthroposophist—the Michael impulses are of a kind to enter deeply and intensely into the whole being of man. We know from previous descriptions that the rulership of Michael, if so we may call it, beginning for earthly life at the end of the eighteen-seventies, was preceded by the rulership of Gabriel; and I have described how the rulership of Gabriel is connected with forces that go through the line of physical inheritance—forces related to physical reproduction.

The forces of Michael are the very opposite of this. The rulership of Gabriel is characterised by the fact that his impulses enter strongly into the physical bodily nature of man. Michael, on the other hand, works intensely into the spiritual being of man. You can tell this from the very fact that he is the administrator of the Cosmic Intelligence. But Michael's impulses are strong and powerful. Taking their start from the spiritual, they work through and through the human being. They work into the spiritual, thence into the soul-nature, and thence again into the bodily nature of man. Now in the karmic connections of life, these super-earthly forces are constantly at work. Beings of the higher Hierarchies are working with man and upon him. It is thus that the karma of a man takes shape. And so it is with the Michael-forces. Working as they do upon the whole human being, they work also very strongly into his karma. Gabriel-forces work only very little—I do not say not at all—but very little into the essential karma of a human being. Michael-forces on the other hand work very strongly into his karma.

If, therefore, certain human beings—and this in the last resort applies to you all, my dear friends—if certain human beings are especially connected with the stream of Michael, their individual karmas can only be understood when thought of in connection with the stream of Michael.

Now Michael is a Spirit who stands in a special relationship to the Sun and to all Sun-impulses. This being the case, we shall realise what a profound significance his impulses must have for those who are especially exposed to them. In effect, his forces will work right into the physical organisation. For Michael-men therefore (if we may use this term), we must connect the physical phenomena of health and illness with karma in an even higher degree than for Gabriel- or Raphael-men, or the like. Things in the universe are very complicated; and although Raphael is the Spirit most intimately connected with the art of Healing, nevertheless it is Michael who brings the karma of men nearest of all to health and to disease.

There is another fact in this connection. The Michael-forces not only work in a cosmopolitan sense, but they also work in such a way as to tear a man out of the narrower earthly connections of his life and carry him up on to a spiritual height, where he feels the earthly connections less strongly than others do. At any rate his karma predestines him for this. This again has a profound influence upon the karma of every single man who belongs to the stream of Michael.

You see, in the last third of the 19th century it did really happen that human beings—I will not say of nervous temperament—but human beings intense in soul and spirit, were able to feel the penetration of the Michael-forces into the world. In those who were essentially men of Michael, this penetration of the Michael-forces into the world came to expression in this way: they felt many things, which other men would have passed by more or less indifferently, entering deeply and incisively into their lives.

Above all their karma was such that they had a strong feeling—though they did not understand it clearly—a strong feeling of the battle I described the day before yesterday, the battle between Michael and Ahriman. In the present age, Ahriman can only have a strong influence upon men when their consciousness is diverted in one way or another. The most radical phenomenon is that of a fainting fit, or a diminution of consciousness lasting for a considerable time. In times like this, when a man is overcome by faintness or diminution of consciousness, the Ahriman forces can most effectively approach him. At such times they work their way into him, he is exposed to them. But it was above all in the last third of the 19th century—and especially in the time when the end of the Kali Yuga was approaching, in the very last years of the 19th century,—it was a shattering experience to see behind the scenes of this external, physical world which is spread out before man's senses.

For directly adjoining this outer world there is a world revealing very, very much of those historic processes in which the higher super-sensible Beings enter and play a part.

In the last third of the 19th century, and especially in the last decade, only a thin veil concealed that which we recognise as the dominion of Michael, the great battle of Michael and all the facts connected with him. Since then, Michael himself has been taking part in the battle even in the outer world, and we need a far stronger power to behold what is present supersensibly than was needed before the end of the Kali Yuga, when, as I said, the next adjoining world, where Michael was battling as yet behind the scenes, was severed from our own by a thin veil only.

But Michael insists, as I have told you, that his dominion shall prevail and penetrate at any cost. Michael is a Spirit filled with strength, and he can only make use of thoroughly brave men, men full of inner courage.

Now in the whole nexus that I have described, in the super-sensible School of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and in the great super-sensible Cult of the beginning of the 19th century, among all the spirits who partake in these things, great numbers of Luciferic figures are all the time playing their part. The Luciferic figures are necessary, necessary in the whole connection of these things. Michael needs the Luciferic spirits, he needs their co-operation to overcome the polar antithesis of Ahriman. Thus the men of Michael are placed into the very midst of the battle—or, if we may not call it so—the surging waves of interplay, of Luciferic impulses and Ahrimanic.

Just at the end of the 19th century these things showed themselves with great clarity and definition. In those years it was by no means rarely that one caught a glimpse, through the veil, as I have called it. Then one saw how intensely Michael was having to battle against Ahriman, and how easy it was for the consciousness of men to be diverted by all manner of Luciferic influences.

You may say: Disturbances of consciousness, attacks of faintness and the like, are nothing out of the ordinary. Outwardly considered they are not, of course; but they can become most significant through that which happens as a consequence,—through that which ensues when the diversion or diminution of consciousness takes place. I will give you an example.

It was once a question of someone being made more intimately acquainted with a certain historic personality. He was to study an historic personality who had lived in the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. I want you to understand me precisely. All the preparations had been made for this man (it was at the end of the eighteen-nineties) to become historically acquainted with a personality who had lived at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. Indeed, with all the conditions that had gone before, it seemed scarcely possible for anything else to happen, than that he would become familiar with that historic personality in the perfectly ordinary, and if I may call it so, pedantic way of scholarship. But look what happened. Through the refined workings of karma he became incapable of using his consciousness just at the very time when he was to have had this experience. He fell into a kind of sleep from which he could not awaken, and was thus prevented.

Of course in ordinary life one pays little heed to such a thing. Yet it is through happenings like these that we look directly from the earthly into the spiritual world. And if you want an explanation of this fact, then we must say: This man, who was to have become historically acquainted with a certain personality of the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, would undoubtedly have received a very strong impression if he had had this experience. He did not have it; he missed it, he was prevented. But in that very time, the impression which he would have received was transformed. He received it in another form; it was transformed into a peculiar impressionability for the Michael element. He actually received, though unconsciously, a real power of understanding for the Michael element.

I give this somewhat strange example in order to show you by what paths the Michael element was approaching human beings at that time. We could give many examples of this kind. Indeed, human beings to-day would be quite different if such things had not occurred to many individuals. Such things may happen in hundreds of different ways. In the case I have just related, my dear friends, the man actually fell into a kind of sleep. In other cases it happened thus:—Some event that would have led a man away from Michael was prevented by a friend or someone else coming and taking him away to a different place, and his consciousness was veiled around in a most natural and matter-of-fact way. He was prevented from partaking in what was karmically set before him to begin with. It was just in those years that the strongest interferences took place with the ordinary smooth course of karma.

And as a rule in such cases it became evident how deeply these Michael influences work. In many instances one saw that such human beings had been affected not only in soul but even down into the body when their karma had received a jerk of this kind, because Michael needed to enter through the portals of a human consciousness into the earthly world of sense.

It is interesting in the highest degree to see how in the eighteen-nineties men were led into events which were none other than the paths of Michael from the spiritual into the physical world. For you must remember, the entry of Michael into the physical world was taking place in the last third of the 19th century. But it had been prepared for, in the spiritual world, for a long time before—already since the beginning of the eighteen-forties. If I may put it so, Michael and his hosts were drawing ever nearer and nearer, and it became more and more evident that those human beings would now descend, who in their earthly destiny were connected with the task of Michael,—the task of receiving the Intelligence here upon earth again after it had fallen away from the hosts of Michael in the super-sensible world.

Into the midst of all these things, as you will recognise from my presentation of the Mysteries, the Anthroposophical Movement is placed. For the Anthroposophical Movement is connected, as you will see from former lectures, with this whole stream of Michael.

Now I want you to consider in this light the karmic conditions of individual human beings who are led by an inner urge to approach the Anthroposophical Movement. They come, to begin with, from the world. They stand in many connections in the world. There have indeed been many communities in the world's history in which human beings have become united. But there was never a cohesive power of that peculiar quality which the Michael forces engender. Hence a peculiar situation is brought about for those who find their way, from other connections in the world, into the Anthroposophical Society. One can find one's way into other societies too, and could always do so, but one's destiny did not need to be very deeply affected. Into the Anthroposophical Society one cannot come—not at least in a thoroughly sincere way that really moves the soul—without being deeply and fundamentally influenced in one's destiny. This becomes especially clear when we consider these things along a right line of approach.

Take a human being who is just coming into the Anthroposophical Society, and who until then had certain connections with non-anthroposophists, which he may perhaps still continue to have. The difference between the one who stands within and the one who stands or remains outside, is of far greater significance than in the case of any other communities. There are two kinds of relationships.

Through the fulfilment of all the things I have described, we are living, once and for all, in a time of great, immense decisions. Thus the standing side-by-side to-day of anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists is fraught with great decisions. Either it is a question of the dissolving of old karma for the one who is in the Anthroposophical Society, or it is a question of the weaving of new karma for the one who is outside it. And these are great differences.

Let us assume an anthroposophist stands very near in life to a non-anthroposophist. It may be to begin with that the anthroposophist has old karmic connections to settle with the non-anthroposophist. On the other hand it may be that the non-anthroposophist has to enter into karmic connections with the anthroposophist, for the future. At any rate these are the only two cases I have hitherto been able to observe, though of course they are of many different kinds. There are no intermediates, there are no others beside these two. From this you will see that this is really a time of great decisions, for, if we may describe it so, either non-anthroposophists are being influenced in such a way that they come to the Michael community, or else the influences work in such a way that those who do not belong to the Michael community will be avoided by it. This indeed is the time of great decisions—the great crisis to which the sacred books of all time have referred—for in reality the present age is meant. Such indeed is the peculiar nature of the Michael impulses: they are fraught with great decisions, and they become decisive especially in this our age.

Human beings who in the present incarnation receive the Michael impulses through Anthroposophy, are thereby preparing their whole being in such a way that these Michael impulses enter even into the forces that are otherwise determined merely by the connections of race and nation.

Think how much this means:—Here is a man who stands within some national group. We can see at once, he is a Russian, he is a Frenchman, he is an Englishman, he is a German. We recognise it by his appearance, and we locate him by thinking, as we see him, where can this man belong? We think it a matter of some importance if we can recognise: he is a Turk, he is a Russian, or the like. Now with those who to-day receive Anthroposophy with inner force of soul, with deep impulse and strength of heart—who receive it, therefore, as the deepest force of their life—such distinctions will have no more meaning when next they return to earth. People will say: Where does he come from? He is not of any nation, he is not of any race, he is as though he had grown away from all races and nations.

When the last Michael dominion took place, in the age of Alexander, the point was to spread Grecian culture in a cosmopolitan way, carrying it out in all directions. The campaigns of Alexander were an immense achievement in the equalising of men on earth, I mean in the spreading among them of a common element. But the thing was not yet able to strike so deep, for at that time Michael still administered the Cosmic Intelligence. Now Intelligence is on the earth, now it strikes far deeper, it strikes down even into the earthly element of man. For the first time, the Spiritual is preparing to become a race-creating force. The time will come when one will no longer be able to say: the man looks as if he belonged to this or that country,—he is a Turk, or an Arabian, an Englishman, a Russian or a German,—but one will have to say what will amount to this: ‘In a former life on earth this man felt impelled to turn towards the Spirit in the sense of Michael.’ Thus, that which is influenced by Michael will appear as an immediate, physically creative, physically formative power.

Now this is a thing that takes root deeply, very deeply in the karma of the individual. Hence the strange destiny of those who are sincere anthroposophists, the strange destiny that they are not able to come to terms with the world; they cannot quite master it, and yet at the same time they have to approach the world and enter into it with full earnestness.

I have said that those who stand with full intensity within the Anthroposophical Movement will return at the end of the century, and others will then unite with them, for by this means the salvation of the earth and earthly civilisation from destruction must eventually be settled. This is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement, which weighs on the one hand so heavily upon one's heart, while on the other hand it moves the heart, uplifts it with enthusiasm. This mission we must understand and see.

It is most necessary for the anthroposophist to know that in this situation as an anthroposophist his karma will be harder to experience than it is for other men. From the very outset those who come into the Anthroposophical Society are predestined to a harder, more difficult experience of karma than other men. And if we try to pass this harder experience by—if we want to experience our karma in a comfortable way—it will surely take vengeance on us in one direction or another. We must be anthroposophists in our experience of karma too. To be true anthroposophists we must be able to observe our own experience of karma with constant wide-awake attention. If we do not, then our comfortable, easy-going experiencing of our karma—or rather our desire to experience it so—will find expression and take vengeance in physical illnesses, physical accidents and the like.

These finer, more intimate connections of life must indeed be seen and observed, for then we shall see many another thing besides. It is the best preparation for true and real spiritual sight, to observe these more intimate connections of life attentively. It is a wrong principle to want to evolve all manner of nebulous, abnormal, visionary states. On the other hand it is immensely right to occupy oneself with all that goes on more finely and intimately in the connections of destiny which we can recognise.

Do we not see how this becomes our karma, my dear friends: we live, or have lived, alongside of human beings who are absolutely prevented, inwardly prevented, from coming near to things anthroposophical. They are prevented, in spite of all that we—I will not say have brought to them of Anthroposophy—but that we might have brought to them if they would only take it. We see this happen, surely. Now this also is among the great decisions of present-day life. For the things that take place in this way will have great karmic significance, both for the one who comes into the Anthroposophical Movement and for the one who remains outside it. It will have extraordinary significance.

Let us imagine that these human beings meet one another again in a future incarnation. We know that what happens to us in future incarnations is already being prepared for in this present. The meeting-again with human beings to whom we are related in the way I have just described, will be such that the usual strangeness between man and man will be essentially enhanced. For Michael works right down into the physical sympathies and antipathies. Now all this is taking place already now in a preparatory way, for every single anthroposophist. It is immensely important for an anthroposophist to study just those karmic relationships which unfold between him and non-anthroposophists. For in this connection things are taking place which reach up into the next kingdom of the Hierarchies. For you must see, there is a counterpart to what I have just described, when I said that the Michael impulses appear as a race-creating force. There is a counterpart to it

Let us take the following karmic instance. Someone is taken hold of in the very highest degree by the impulses of Anthroposophy. He is taken hold of in heart and mind, in soul and spirit. In such a case something will necessarily happen, which, expressed in words, sounds very strange indeed; and yet it is necessary. In such a case the Angel of the man must learn something. This is a thing of untold significance. The destiny of anthroposophists,—the destiny that works itself out between anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists,—casts its waves even into the worlds of the Angeloi. It leads to a parting of the Spirits, even in the world of the Angeloi. The Angel who accompanies the anthroposophist to his next incarnations learns to find his way still more deeply into the spiritual kingdoms than he could do before, while the Angel who belongs to the other man—to the one who cannot enter,—descends. It is in the destiny of the Angeloi that we first perceive how this great separation is taking place. To this, my dear friends, I would now direct your hearts. It is happening now, that the comparatively single and uniform kingdom of the Angeloi is being turned into a twofold kingdom of Angeloi, a kingdom of Angeloi with an upward tendency into the higher worlds, and with a downward tendency into lower worlds.

While the Michael community is being formed here upon earth, we can behold above it the ascending and the descending Angeloi. Looking more deeply into the world to-day, one can perpetually observe these streams, which are such as to stir the heart to its foundations.

Now I have told you that those who come into the anthroposophical life fall into two main groups. There are the ones who still carry into it a knowledge from the old heathen times, and have had little experience of that Christian development which took its course during the Kali Yuga. They have gone on evolving out of the old Pagan sources, and they now grow into the Christianity which is to be a cosmic Christianity once more. They are souls with a Pagan predestination, who in reality are only now growing into Christianity. The others are souls who are a little weary of Paganism, though they do not confess this to themselves. From the outset they grow into the Anthroposophical Movement on account of its Christian character, but they do not enter so deeply into the anthroposophical Cosmology, the anthroposophical Anthropology, and so forth. They enter, rather, into the more abstractly religious side. These two groups are clearly to be distinguished.

Now for the group of a more Pagan predestination it is particularly necessary to take hold of the sustaining forces of Anthroposophy with full intensity of inner life. For this group, it is most necessary to avoid all side-tracks and other considerations, and steer straight forward in the direction of the anthroposophical sustaining forces.

We can only grasp these things when we receive them in our hearts; but they must enter into the hearts of anthroposophists. For only then will a real living-together within the Anthroposophical Society be possible, on a true anthroposophical foundation. When the more Pagan kind of souls, if I may call them so, bring forth their forces, which are in many cases already there in this incarnation deep within their souls, though they will often only come forth with difficulty,—when as I say they do bring forth the forces that are there in them, then there will spread over the whole Anthroposophical Society an atmosphere of steady and courageous progress in the good sense of Michael.

If this is to be so, we must have the courage to look straight into the intense conflict that is taking place, as between the things that Michael must undertake to achieve his great task, and the things that Ahriman is perpetually placing in his way.

Ahriman has already taken hold of certain tendencies in civilisation and placed them in his service. Consider this one fact:—Only since the 15th century has it become most thoroughly possible for man to take hold of the Intelligence. For since that time the Spiritual Soul is present in man, and the Spiritual Soul is man's very own; therefore it can make the Intelligence its very own. Moreover it is only since that time that those things have come to men, which have made them so exceedingly keen—if I may say so—on their own personal Intelligence.

Make this little calculation; it embraces huge dimensions, though the greatness of it be only in a spatial sense. Try to make this little calculation, my dear friends. Add up in thought all that is being thought to-day within a single day by all the writers in newspapers over the whole earth, so that newspapers may be produced. Try to imagine the tremendous sum-total of Intelligence that is being chewed out from their pens, put on to paper, printed, and so on. See what an enormous amount of personal Intelligence is flooding through the world. And now go back a few centuries, go back into the 13th century, and see whether such a thing is there at all. It is simply not there, there can be no question of its being there.

But I will give you another task. Imagine in your thought (to-day is Sunday, it is a good opportunity) just imagine how many meetings are being held on political questions from West to East,—we need not go beyond Europe for the moment. Here again, how much personal Intelligence is flooding through the atmosphere of the earth! And now imagine yourself in the 13th century. They managed without the newspapers and without the meetings. None of these things existed. Compare the 13th century with the present time. We may put it thus:—When you transplant yourself into the 13th century you can look out over the world, your vision is clear and unobstructed. There are no editorial offices, no political meetings, none of these. You look through, clear and free. But to-day, as you look over the world, everywhere the waves of personal Intelligence are surging forth. They are there everywhere. You simply cannot penetrate. It is a spiritual air that you could cut with a knife, as in some meeting-rooms where everyone is smoking his pipe or his cigar like a chimney-pot, and you say ‘it is an air that you could cut with a knife.’ So is the spiritual atmosphere to-day.

Such differences must be considered, if we would judge at all truly of the succession of historic epochs. When you read historians like Ranke you see nothing of these things, yet these are the real facts of history.

And all this that has come about since the 13th century, what is it? It is spiritual nourishment for the Ahrimanic Powers. Here in this region, they are first able to make their attacks. Hence the possibilities for Ahriman to take a hand in civilisation have become ever greater and greater. Needless to say. Spirits like Ahriman are not there to incarnate in physical bodies on the earth. Nevertheless, they can work on the earth, not indeed by incarnating but by incorporating themselves for certain spaces of time; when in one man or another there happens what I mentioned before: a diminution or diversion of consciousness. At such moments the human being provides a vehicle, and Ahriman is able,—not indeed to incarnate,—but to incorporate himself and to work out of that human being, with that human being's faculties.

It will be my further task to tell you of this kind of working of the Ahrimanic Powers. I shall have to show, for example, how Ahriman has appeared in the course of modern time even as an author. This will show you what things must be observed to-day by those who would fain observe realities.

[ 1 ] Through the Leading Thoughts which have been sent out from the Goetheanum during the past weeks to the members of the Anthroposophical Society, the soul has been directed to the Beings of the spiritual kingdoms with whom man is connected from above, just as, from below, he is connected with the kingdoms of Nature.

[ 2 ] True self-knowledge may become the guide through which man finds his way into these spiritual kingdoms. And when such self-knowledge is striven after in the right way, then the understanding will be awakened for what Anthroposophy is able to make known through its insight into the life of the spiritual world. But self-knowledge must be practised in the true sense, not as a mere rigid gazing into one's inner being.

[ 3 ] By means of such a true self-knowledge one arrives in the first place at what lives in memory. In thought-pictures, the shadow of what was a direct and living experience in the past is called up into consciousness. Anyone seeing a shadow will, out of an inner impulse of thought, be guided to the object which threw the shadow. He who bears a memory within him cannot in this direct way turn the eye of his soul to the experience which lives on in the memory. But when he truly reflects on his own nature he will be obliged to say to himself: that he himself, in his soul-being, is what his experiences have made of him—those experiences which throw their shadows into the memory. The memory-shadows appear in the consciousness; in the soul there shines what in the memory is shadow. Dead shadow lives in the memory; living being lives in the soul in which the memory is active.

[ 4 ] It is only necessary that this relationship of the memory to the actual soul-life should be made clear; and in this striving for clearness in self-knowledge a man will then perceive that he is on the path to the spiritual world.

[ 5 ] Through memory, man is looking at the spiritual in his own soul. But in the ordinary consciousness he does not arrive at a real grasp of what he thus looks upon. He looks in the direction on something; but his look meets with no reality. Anthroposophy, out of Imaginative Knowledge, shows the way to this reality. Through it we are referred from the shadow to that which gleams and shines. Anthroposophy does this, in that it speaks of the etheric body of man. It shows how the physical body is active in the thought-shadow pictures; but how in the gleaming and shining the etheric body lives.

[ 6 ] With the physical body man is in the sense-world; with the etheric body he is in the etheric world. In the sense-world he has his environment; in the etheric world also. And Anthroposophy speaks of this latter environment as the first of the hidden worlds in which man is living. It is the kingdom of the Third Hierarchy.

[ 7 ] Let us now approach speech in the same way that we have considered memory. It issues from within man just as does the memory. It connects him with a certain state of being, as memory unites him with his own experiences. In words, too, there is an element of shadow. This is deeper than the shadow of the thoughts of memory. When man inwardly casts the shadow of his experiences as his memories, his own hidden self is active in the whole process. He is there when the light casts the shadow.

[ 8 ] In speech there is also a process of shadow-casting. The words are the shadows. What is it in this case that shines? Something stronger shines, because words are stronger shadows than are the thoughts of memory. The element in the human self which in the course of an earthly life can produce memories, cannot create words. Man must learn these in connection with other human beings. Something which lies deeper in him than that which casts the shadow of memory must take part in this process. In this case Anthroposophy speaks from Inspired Knowledge of the astral body, as in the case of memory it speaks of the etheric body. The astral body is added to the physical and etheric bodies as a third part of the human being.

[ 9 ] This third part, too, has a cosmic environment about it. This is made up of the Second Hierarchy. In human language we have a phantom of this Second Hierarchy. As to his astral body, man lives within the province of this Hierarchy.

[ 10 ] We may go still further. In speech a portion of man's being is engaged. When he speaks he brings his inner being into motion. That which surrounds this inner being remains at rest. The movement of speech wrings itself loose from the human being while he remains at rest, but the whole man comes into motion when he brings into activity all that belongs to his limbs. In such movement man is no less full of expression than in memory and speech. Memory expresses his experiences. The nature of language consists in its being the expression of something. In the same way the man whose whole being is in motion expresses something.

[ 11 ] Anthroposophy points out that this ‘something’ is another part of the human being. From Intuitive Knowledge it speaks of the ‘real Self’ or ‘I.’ This too, it finds, has a cosmic environment, namely the First Hierarchy.

[ 12 ] When man approaches the thoughts in his memory he meets with the first supersensible element—his own etheric being. Anthroposophy points out to him the cosmic environment corresponding to it. When man considers himself as one who makes use of language he finds his astral being. This is no longer comprehended in that which only acts inwardly, like memory. It is seen by Inspiration as that which in the act of speaking shapes a physical process out of the Spiritual. Speech is a physical process. At its foundation lies an activity which proceeds from the sphere of the Second Hierarchy.

[ 13 ] When the whole man is in motion there is a more intense physical action than in speech. Not merely a part of man is moulded, the whole man is given shape; and in the physical being which lives and moves in form, the First Hierarchy is active.

[ 14 ] In this way, then, true self-knowledge can be cultivated. But in doing this man does not grasp his own Self alone. Step by step he comprehends the parts of his body: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Self. And by comprehending these he also reaches up, step by step, to higher worlds which like the three kingdoms of Nature, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, belong, as the three spiritual kingdoms, to the whole Universe in which his being is unfolding.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 15 ] 69. The Third Hierarchy reveals itself as pure soul and spirit. It lives and moves in all that man experiences in the soul, in his inner life. Neither in the etheric nor in the physical could any processes arise if this Hierarchy alone were active. Soul-life alone could exist.

[ 16 ] 70. The Second Hierarchy reveals itself as soul and spirit that works in the etheric. All that is etheric is a manifestation of the Second Hierarchy. This Hierarchy, however, does not reveal itself directly in the physical; its power extends only to etheric processes. Only etheric and soul-life could exist if the Third and the Second Hierarchy alone were active.

[ 17 ] 71. The First and strongest Hierarchy reveals itself as the spiritually active principle within the physical. It makes the physical world into a Cosmos. The Third and the Second Hierarchy are the Beings who minister to it in this activity.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 18 ] 72. As soon as we approach the higher members of man's being—the etheric, the astral body and the Ego-organisation—we are obliged to seek for man's relation to the beings of the spiritual kingdoms. It is only the physical body's organisation which we can illumine by reference to the three physical kingdoms of Nature.

[ 19 ] 73. In the etheric body the Intelligence of the Cosmos becomes embodied in the human being. That this can happen, requires the activity of cosmic Beings, who, in their combined working, shape the etheric body of man, even as the physical forces shape the physical.

[ 20 ] 74. In the astral body the spiritual world implants the moral impulses into the human being. That these can show forth their life in man's Organisation, depends on the activity of Beings who are able not only to think the Spiritual, but to shape it in its reality.

[ 21 ] 75. In the Ego-organisation man experiences himself, even in the physical body, as a Spirit. That this can happen, requires the activity of Beings who themselves, as spiritual Beings, live in the physical world.

During the year 1924, before his illness in September, Rudolf Steiner gave over eighty lectures, published with the title Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, to Members of the Anthroposophical Society in the following places: Dornach, Berne, Zurich, Stuttgart, Prague, Paris, Breslau, Arnhem, Torquay and London. English translations of these lectures are contained in the following volumes of the series:

Vols. I to IV. Lectures given in Dornach (49).
Vol. V. Lectures given in Prague (4) and Paris (3).
Vol. VI. Lectures given in Berne (2) Zurich (1), Stuttgart (3) Arnhem (3).

The present volume (VII) contains the nine lectures given in Breslau.

The six lectures that were given in Torquay and London will eventually be republished. They have previously been published as: Cosmic Christianity and the Impulse of Michael. Karma in the life of individuals and in the evolution of the world (1953).

Readers familiar with the contents of earlier volumes will find certain repetitions in the present collection. Such repetitions were inevitable because Dr. Steiner was speaking to different audiences on each occasion. All these lectures were given to members of the Anthroposophical Society only and were intended to be material for study by those already familiar with the fundamental principles and terminology of Anthroposophy. The following extract from the lecture of 22nd June, 1924 (see Vol. II) calls attention to the need for exactitude when passing on such contents:

“The study of problems connected with karma is by no means easy and the discussion of anything that has to do with the subject entails—or ought at any rate to entail—a sense of deep responsibility. Such study is in truth a matter of penetrating into the most profound mysteries of existence, for within the sphere of karma and the course it takes lie those processes which are the basis of the other phenomena of world-existence, even of the phenomena of nature. ... These difficult and weighty matters entail grave consideration of every word and every sentence spoken here, in order that the limits within which the statements are made shall be absolutely clear. ...”