The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I should like during these few days to say something rather especially for the friends who have come here to attend the Easter Course,¹ and who have not heard much of what has connections. Those who were present at the lectures before Easter may find some repetitions but the circumstances make this inevitable.

I have been laying particular emphasis on the fact that study of the historical development of the life of mankind must lead on to study of the human being himself. All our endeavours aim in the direction of placing man at the centre of our study of the world. Two ends are attained thereby. Firstly, it is only in this way that the world can be studied as it truly is. For all that man sees spread around him in nature is only a part—gives as it were one picture of the world only: and to limit study of the world to this realm of nature is like studying a plant without looking beyond root, green leaf and stem, and ignoring flower and fruit. This kind of study can never reveal the whole plant. Imagine a creature that is always born at a particular time of the year, lives out its life during a period when the plant grows as far as the green leaves and no further, dies before the plant is in blossom and appears again only when roots and green leaves are there.—Such a creature would never have knowledge of the whole plant; it would regard the plant as something that has roots and leaves only.

The materialistic mind of to-day has got itself into a similar position as regards its approach to the world. It considers only the broad foundations of life, not what blossoms forth from the totality of earthly evolution and earthly existence—namely, man himself. The real way of approach must be to study nature in her full extent, but in such a way as all the time to realise that she must needs create man out of herself. We shall then see man as the microcosm he truly is, as the concentration of all that is to be found outspread in the far spaces of the cosmos.

As soon, however, as we study history from this point of view, we are no longer able to regard the human being as a resultant of the forces of history, as a single, self-contained being. We must take account of the fact that he passes through different earthly lives: one such life occurs at an earlier time and another at a later. This very fact places man at the centre of our studies, but now in his whole being, as an individuality. This is the one end that is attained when we look in this way at nature and at history.

The other is this.—The very fact of placing man at the centre of study, makes for humility. Lack of humility is due to nothing else than lack of knowledge. A penetrating, comprehensive knowledge of man in his connection with the events of the world and of history will certainly not lead to excessive self-esteem; far rather it will lead the human being to look at himself objectively. It is precisely when a man does not know himself that there rise up in him those feelings which have their source in the unknown regions of his being. Instinctive, emotional impulses make themselves felt. And it is these instinctive, emotional impulses, rooted as they are in the subconscious, that make for arrogance and pride. On the other hand, when consciousness penetrates farther and farther into those regions where man comes to know himself and to recognise how in the sequence of historical events he belongs to the whole wide universe—then, simply by virtue of an inner law, humility will unfold in him. The recognition of his place in universal existence invariably calls forth humility, never arrogance. All genuine study pursued in Anthroposophy has its ethical side, carries with it an ethical impulse.

Unlike modern materialism, Anthroposophy will not lead to a conception of life in which ethics and morality are a mere adjunct; ethics and morality emerge, as if inwardly impelled, from all genuine anthroposophical study.

I want now to show you by concrete examples, how the fruits of earlier epochs of history are carried over into later epochs through human beings themselves. A certain very striking example now to be given, is associated with Switzerland.

Our gaze falls upon a man who lived about a hundred years before the founding of Christianity.—I am relating to you what can be discovered through spiritual scientific investigation.—At this period in history we find a personality who is a kind of slave overseer in southern Europe.

We must not associate with a slave overseer of those times the feelings that the word immediately calls up in us now. Slavery was the general custom in days of antiquity, and at the time of which I am speaking it was essentially mild in form; the overseers were usually educated men. Indeed the teachers of important personages might well be slaves, who were often versed in the literary and scientific culture of the time. So you see, we must acquire sounder ideas about slavery—needless to say, without defending it in the least degree—when we are considering this aspect of the life of antiquity.

We find, then, a personality whose calling it is to be in charge of a number of slaves and to apportion their tasks. He is an extraordinarily lovable man, gentle and kind-hearted and when he is able to have his own way he does everything to make life easier for the slaves. In authority over him, however, is a rough, somewhat brutal personality. This man is, as we should say nowadays, his superior officer. And this superior officer is responsible for many things that arouse resentment and animosity in the slaves. When the personality of whom I am speaking—the slave overseer—passes through the gate of death, he is surrounded in the time between death and a new birth by all the souls who were thus united with him on earth, the souls of the slaves who had been in his charge. But as an individuality he is very strongly connected with the one who was his superior officer. The fact that he, as the slave overseer, was obliged to obey this superior officer—for in accordance with the prevailing customs of the time he always did obey him, though often very unwillingly—this fact established a strong karmic tie between them. But a deep karmic tie was also established by the relationship that had existed in the physical world between the overseer and the slaves, for in many respects he had been their teacher as well.

We must thus picture a further life unfolding between death and rebirth among all these individualities of whom I have spoken.

Afterwards, somewhere about the 9th century A.D., the individuality of the slave overseer is born again, in Central Europe, but now as a woman, and moreover, because of the prevailing karmic connection, as the wife of the former superior officer who reincarnated as a man. The two of them live together in a marital relationship that makes karmic compensation for the tie that had been established away back in the first century before the founding of Christianity, when they had lived as subordinate and superior officers respectively. The superior officer is now, in the 9th century A.D., in a commune in Central Europe where the inhabitants live on very intimate terms with one another; he holds some kind of official position in the commune, but he is everyone's servant and comes in for plenty of knocks and abuse.

Investigating the whole matter further, we find that the members of this rather extensive commune are the slaves who once had their tasks allotted to them in the way I told you. The superior officer has now become as it were the servant of them all, and has to experience the karmic fulfilment of many things which, through the instrumentality of the overseer, his brutality inflicted upon these people.

The wife of this man (she is the reincarnated overseer), suffers with a kind of silent resignation under all the impressions made by the ever-discontented superior officer in his new incarnation, and one can follow in detail how karmic destiny is here being fulfilled.

But we see, too, that this karma is by no means completely adjusted. A part only is adjusted, namely the karmic relationship between the slave overseer and his superior officer. This has been lived out and is essentially finished in the medieval incarnation in the 9th century; for the wife has paid off what her soul had experienced owing to the brutality of the man who had once been the superior officer and is now her husband.

This woman, the reincarnation of the former slave overseer, is born again, and what happens now is that the greater number of the souls who had once been slaves and had then come together again in the large commune—souls in whose destiny this individuality had twice played a part—came again as the children whose education this same individuality in his new incarnation has deeply at heart. For in this incarnation he comes as Pestalozzi. And we see how Pestalozzi's infinite humanitarianism, his enthusiasm for education in the 18th century, is the karmic fulfilment in relation to human beings with whom he had already twice been connected—the karmic fulfilment of the experiences and the sufferings of earlier incarnations.

What comes to view in single personalities can be clear and objectively intelligible to us only when we are able to see the present earthly life against the background of earlier earthly lives.

Traits that go back not merely to the previous incarnation, but often to the one before that, and even earlier, sometimes show themselves in a man. We see how what has been planted, as it were, in the single incarnations, works its way through with a certain inner, spiritual necessity, inasmuch as the human being lives not only through earthly lives but also through lives between death and a new birth.

In this connection, the study of a life of which I spoke to those of you who were in Dornach before Easter, is particularly striking and interesting—the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer presents a very special enigma to those who study the inner aspect of his life and at the same time greatly admire him as a poet. There is such wonderful harmony of form and style in his poems that we cannot help saying: what lives in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer always hovers a little above the earthly—in respect of the style and also in respect of the whole way of thinking and feeling. And if we steep ourselves in his writings we shall perceive how he is immersed in an element of spirit-and-soul that is always on the point of breaking away from the physical body. Study the nobler poems, also the prose-poems, of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and you will say to yourselves: There is evidence of a perpetual urge to get right away from connection with the physical body. As you know, in his incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, it was his lot to fall into pathological states, when the soul-and-spirit separated from the physical body to a high degree, so much so that insanity ensued, or at any rate conditions resembling insanity. And the strange thing is that his most beautiful works were produced during periods when the soul-and-spirit had loosened from the physical body.

Now when we try to investigate the karmic connections running through the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, we are driven into a kind of confusion. We cannot immediately find our bearings. We are led, first, to the 6th century A.D., and then again we are thrown back into the 19th, into the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation. The very circumstances we are observing, mislead us. I want you to realise the extraordinary difficulty of a genuine search for knowledge in this domain. If you are satisfied with phantasy, then it is naturally easy, for you can make things fit in as you like. For one who is not satisfied with phantasy but carries his investigation to the point where he can rely upon the faculties of his own soul not to play him false—for him it is no easy matter, especially when he is investigating these things in connection with an individuality as complex as that of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. In investigating karmic connections through a number of earthly lives it is no great help to look at the particularly outstanding characteristics. What strikes you most forcibly in a man, what you see at once when you meet him or learn of him in history—these characteristics are, for the most part, the outcome of his earthly environment. A man as he confronts us is a product of his earthly environment to a far greater extent than is generally believed. He takes in through education what is present in his earthly environment. It is the more intangible, more intimate traits of a man which taken quite concretely, lead back through the life between death and a new birth into former earthly lives.

In these investigations it may be more important to observe a man's gestures or some habitual mannerism than to consider what he has achieved perhaps as a figure of renown. The mannerisms of a person, or the way he will invariably answer you—not so much what he answers but how he answers—whether, for example, his first tendency is always to be negative and only when he has no other alternative, to agree, or whether again in quite a good-humoured way he is rather boastful ... these are the kind of traits that are important and if we pay special attention to them they become the centre of our observations and disclose a great deal. One observes, for instance, how a man stretches out his hand to take hold of things; one makes an objective picture of it and then works upon it in the manner of an artist; and at length one finds that it is no longer the mere gesture that one is contemplating, but around the gesture the figure of another human being takes shape.

The following may happen.—There are men who have a habit, let us say, of making a certain movement of the arms. I have known men who simply could not begin to do anything without first folding their arms. If one visualises such a gesture quite objectively, but with inner, artistic feeling, so that it stands before one as a plastic, pliable form, then one's attention is directed away from the man who is actually making the gesture. But the gesture does not remain as it is; it grows into another figure which is an indication, at least, of something in the previous incarnation or in the one before that. It may well be that the gesture is now used in connection with something that was not present at all in the previous incarnation—let us say it is a gesture used in picking up a book, or some similar action. Nevertheless, it is for gestures and habits of this kind that we must have an eye if we are to keep on the right track.

Now in the case of an individuality like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the point of significance is that while he is creating his poems there is always a tendency to a loosening of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body. There we have a starting-point but at the same time a point where we may easily go astray.

We are led, as I told you, to the 6th century A.D. We have the feeling: that is where he belongs. And moreover we find a personality who lived in Italy, who experienced a very varied destiny in that incarnation in Italy, who indeed lived a kind of double existence. On the one side he was devoted with the greatest enthusiasm to an art that has almost disappeared in this later age, but was then in its prime; it is only in the remaining examples of mosaics that we are still able to glimpse this highly developed art. And the individuality to whom we are first impelled, lived in this milieu of art in Italy at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th century A.D.—That is what presents itself, to begin with.

But now this whole picture is obscured, and again we are thrown back to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The darkness that obscures vision of the man of the 6th century now overshadows the picture of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the 19th; and we are compelled to look very closely into what Conrad Ferdinand Meyer does in the 19th century.

Our attention is then drawn to the fact that his tale Der Heilige (The Saint), deals with Thomas à Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England. We feel that here is something of peculiar importance. And we also have the feeling that the impression received from the earlier incarnation has driven us up against this particular deed of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. But now again we are driven back into the 6th century, and can find there no explanation of this. And so we are thrown to and fro between the two incarnations, the problematic one in the 6th century and the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation—until it dawns upon us that the story of Thomas à Becket as told in history, came up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mind owing to a certain similarity with an experience he had himself undergone in the 6th century, when he went to England from Italy as a member of a Catholic mission sent by Pope Gregory. There we have the second aspect of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in his previous incarnation. On the one side he was an enthusiastic devotee of the art that subsequently took the form of mosaic.—Hence his talent for form, in all its aspects. On the other side, however, he was an impassioned advocate of Catholicism, and for this reason accompanied the mission. The members of this mission founded Canterbury, where the bishopric was then established.

The individuality who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was murdered by an Anglo-Saxon courtier, in circumstances that are extraordinarily interesting. There was something of legal subtlety and craftiness, albeit still in the rough, about the events connected at that time with the murder.

You know very well, my dear friends, how even in ordinary life the sound of something remains with you. You may once have heard a name without paying any particular attention to it ... but later on a whole association of ideas is called up in your mind when this name is mentioned. In a similar way, through the peculiar circumstances of this man's connection with what later became the archbishopric of Canterbury—the town of Canterbury, as I said, was founded by the mission of which he was a member—these experiences lived on, lived on, actually, in the sound of the name Canterbury. In the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation the sound of this name—Canterbury—came to life again, and by association of ideas his attention was called to Thomas à Becket, (the Lord Chancellor of Canterbury under Henry Plantagenet) who was treacherously murdered. At first, Thomas à Becket was a favourite of Henry II, but was afterwards murdered, virtually through the instigation of the King, because he would not agree to certain measures.

These two destinies, alike in some respects and unlike in others, brought it about that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer transposed, as it were, into quite different figures taken from history, what he had himself experienced in an earlier incarnation in the 6th century—experienced in his own body, far from what was at that time his native land. Just think how interesting this is! Once we have grasped it, we are no longer driven hither and thither between the two incarnations. And then, because again in the 19th century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer has a kind of double nature, we see how his soul-and-spirit easily separates from the physical. Because he has this double nature, the place of his own, actual experiences is taken by another experience in some respects similar to it ... just as pictures often change in the play of human imagination. In a man's ordinary imagination during an earthly life, the picture changes in such a way that imagination weaves in freedom; in the course of many earthly lives it may be that some historical event which is connected with the person in question as a picture only, takes the place of the actual event.

Now this individuality whose experience in an earlier life worked on through two lives between death and rebirth and then came to expression in the story Thomas à Becket, the Saint,—this individuality had had another intermediate earthly life as a woman at the time of the Thirty Years' War. We have only to envisage the chaos prevailing all over Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War and it will not be difficult to understand the feelings and emotions of an impressionable, sensitive woman living in the midst of the chaos as the wife of a pedantic, narrow-minded man. Wearying of life in the country that was afterwards Germany, he emigrated to Graubünden in Switzerland, where he left the care of house and home to his wife, while he spent his time sullenly loafing about. His wife, however, had opportunity to observe many, many things. The wider historical perspective, no less than the curious local conditions at Graubünden, worked upon her; the experiences she underwent, experiences that were always coloured by her life with the bourgeois, commonplace husband, again sank down into the foundations of the individuality, and lived on through the life between death and a new birth. And the experiences of the wife at the time of the Thirty Years' War are imaginatively transformed in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's tale, Jürg Jenatsch.

Thus in the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer we have something that has gathered together out of the details of former incarnations. As a man of letters, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer seems to be an individuality complete in itself, for he is an artist with very definite and fixed characteristics. But in point of fact it is this that actually causes confusion, because one's attention is immediately directed away from these very definite characteristics to the elusive, double nature of the man.

Those who have eyes only for Conrad Ferdinand Meyer the poet, the famous author of all these works, will never come to know anything of his earlier lives. We have to look through the poet to the man; and then, in the background of the picture, there appear the figures of the earlier incarnations.

Paradoxical as it will seem to the modern mind, the only way in which human life can be understood in its deeper aspect is to centre our study of the course of world-events around observation of man himself in history. And man cannot be taken as belonging to one age of time only, as living in one earthly life only. In considering man, we must realise how the individuality passes from one earthly life to another, and how in the interval between death and a new birth he works upon and transforms that which has taken its course more in the subconscious realm of earthly life but for all that is connected with the actual shaping of the destiny. For the shaping of destiny takes place, not in the clear consciousness of the intellect, but in what weaves in the subconscious.

Let me now give you another example of how things work over in history through human individualities themselves.

In the first century A.D., about a hundred years after the founding of Christianity, we have an exceedingly significant Roman writer in the person of Tacitus. In all his work, and very particularly in his ‘Germania’, Tacitus proves himself a master of a concise, clear-cut style; he arrays the facts of history and geographical details in wonderfully rounded sentences with a genuinely epigrammatic ring. We may also remember how he, a man of wide culture, who knew everything considered worth knowing at that time—a hundred years after the founding of Christianity—makes no more than a passing allusion to Christ, mentioning Him as someone whom the Jews crucified but saying that this was of no great importance. Yet in point of fact, Tacitus is one of the greatest Romans.

Tacitus had a friend, the personality known in history as Pliny the Younger, himself the author of a number of letters and an ardent admirer of Tacitus.

To begin with, let us consider Pliny the Younger. He passes through the gate of death, through the life between death and a new birth, and is born again in the 11th century as a Countess of Tuscany in Italy, who is married to a Prince of Central Europe. The Prince has been robbed of his lands by Henry the Black of the Frankish-Salic dynasty and wants to secure for himself an estate in Italy. This Countess Beatrix owns the Castle of Canossa where, later on, Henry IV, the successor of Henry III the Black, was forced to make his famous penance to Pope Gregory.

Now this Countess Beatrix is an extraordinarily alert and active personality, taking keen interest in all the conditions and circumstances of the time. Indeed she cannot help being interested, for Henry III who had driven her husband, Gottfried, out of Alsace into Italy before his marriage to her, continued his persecution. Henry is a man of ruthless energy, who overthrows the Princes and Chieftains in his neighbourhood one after the other, does whatever he has a mind to do, and is not content when he has persecuted someone once, but does it a second time, when the victim has established himself somewhere else.—As I said, he was a man of ruthless vigour, a ‘great’ man in the medieval style of greatness. And when Gottfried had established himself in Tuscany, Henry was not content with having driven him out but proceeded to take the Countess back with him to Germany.

All these happenings gave the Countess an opportunity of forming a penetrating view of conditions in Italy, as well as of those in Germany. In her we have a person who is strongly representative of the time in which she lives, a woman of keen observation, vitality and energy, combined with largeness of heart and breadth of vision.

When, later on, Henry IV was forced to go on his journey of penance to Canossa, Beatrix's daughter Mathilde had become the owner of the Castle. Mathilde was on excellent terms with her mother whose qualities she had inherited, and was, in fact, the more gifted of the two. They were splendid women who because of all that had happened under Henry III and Henry IV, took a profound interest in the history of the times.

Investigation of these personalities leads to this remarkable result: the Countess Beatrix is the reincarnated Pliny the Younger, and her daughter Mathilde is the reincarnated Tacitus. Thus Tacitus, a writer of history in olden times, is now an observer of history on a wide scale—(when a woman has greatness in her she is often wonderfully gifted as an observer)—and not only an observer but a direct participant in historical events. For Mathilde is actually the owner of Canossa, the scene of issues that were immensely decisive in the Middle Ages. We find the former Tacitus now as an observer of history.

A deep intimacy develops between these two—mother and daughter—and their former work in the field of authorship enables them to grasp historical events with great perspicacity; subconsciously and instinctively they become closely linked with the world-process, as it takes its course in nature as well as in history.

And now, still later on, the following takes place.—Pliny the Younger, who in the Middle Ages was the Countess Beatrix, is born again in the 19th century, in a milieu of romanticism. He absorbs this romanticism—one cannot exactly say with enthusiasm, but with aesthetic pleasure. He has on the one hand this love for the romantic, and on the other—due to his family connections—a rather academic style; he finds his way into an academic style of writing. It is not, however, in line with his character. He is always wanting to get out of it, always wanting to discard this style.

This personality (the reincarnated Pliny the Younger and the Countess Beatrix) happens on one occasion brought about by destiny, to be visiting a friend, and takes up a book lying on the table, an English book. He is fascinated by its style and at once feels: The style I have had up till now and that I owe to my family relationships, does not really belong to me. This is my style, this is the style I need. It is wonderful; I must acquire it at all costs.

As a writer he becomes an imitator of this style—I mean, of course, an artistic imitator in the best sense, not a pedantic one—an imitator of this style in the artistic, aesthetic sense of the word. And do you know, the book he opened at that moment, reading it right through as quickly as he possibly could and then afterwards reading everything he could find of the author's writings—this book was Emerson's Representative Men. And the person in question adopted its style, immediately translated two essays from it, conceived a deep veneration for the author, and was never content until he was able to meet him in real life.

This man, who really only now found himself, who for the first time found the style that belonged to him in his admiration for the other—this reincarnation of Pliny the Younger and of the Countess Beatrix, is none other than Herman Grimm. And in Emerson we have to do with the reincarnated Tacitus, the reincarnated Countess Mathilde.

When we observe Herman Grimm's admiration for Emerson, when we remember the way in which Herman Grimm encounters Emerson, we can find again the relationship of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. In every sentence that Herman Grimm writes after this time, we can see the old relationship between Pliny the Younger and Tacitus emerging. And we see the admiration that Pliny the Younger had for Tacitus, nay more, the complete accord and understanding between them, coming out again in the admiration with which Herman Grimm looks up to Emerson.

And now for the first time we shall grasp wherein the essential greatness of Emerson's style consists, we shall perceive that what Tacitus displayed in his own way, Emerson again displays in his own special way. How does Emerson work? Those who visited Emerson discovered his way of working. There he was in a room; around him were several chairs, several tables. Books lay open everywhere and Emerson walked about among them. He would often read a sentence, imbibe it thoroughly and from it form his own magnificent, free-moving, epigrammatic sentences. That was how he worked. There you have an exact picture of Tacitus in life! Tacitus travels, takes hold of life everywhere; Emerson observes life in books. It all lives again!

And then there is this unconquerable desire in Herman Grimm to meet Emerson. Destiny leads him to Representative Men and he sees at once: this is how I must write, this is my true style. As I said, he had already acquired an academic style of writing from his uncle Jacob Grimm and his father Wilhelm Grimm, and he then abandons it. He is impelled by destiny to adopt a completely different style.

In Herman Grimm's writings we see how wide were his historical interests. He has an inner relationship of soul with Germany, combined with a deep interest in Italy. All this comes out in his writings.

These are things that go to show how the affairs of destiny work themselves out. And how is one led to perceive such things? One must first have an impression and then everything crystallizes around it. Thus we had first to envisage the picture of Herman Grimm opening Emerson's Representative Men. Now Herman Grimm used to read in a peculiar manner. He read a passage and then immediately drew back from what he had read: it was a gesture as though he were swallowing what he had read, sentence by sentence. And it was this inner gesture of swallowing sentence by sentence that made it possible to trace Herman Grimm to his earlier incarnation. In the case of Emerson it was the walking to and fro in front of the open books, as well as the rather stiff, half-Roman carriage of the man, as Herman Grimm saw him when they first met in Italy—it was these impressions that led one back from Emerson to Tacitus. Plasticity of vision is needed to follow up things of this kind.

My dear friends, I have given you here another example which should indicate how our study of history needs to be deepened. This deepening must really be evident among us as one of the fruits of the new impulse that should take effect in the Anthroposophical Society through the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must in future go bravely and boldly forward to the study of far-reaching spiritual connections; we must have courage to reach a vantage-point for observation of these great spiritual connections. For this we shall need, above all, deep earnestness. Our life in Anthroposophy must be filled with earnestness.

And this earnestness will grow in the Anthroposophical Society if those who really want to do something in the Society give more and more thought to the contents of the News Sheet that is sent out every week into all circles of Anthroposophists as a supplement to the weekly periodical, Das Goetheanum. A picture is given there of how one may shape the life in the Groups in the sense and meaning of the Christmas Meeting, of what should be done in the members' meetings, how the teaching should be given and studied. The News Sheet is also intended to give a picture of what is happening among us. Its title is: ‘What is going on in the Anthroposophical Society’, and its aim is to bring into the whole Society a unity of thought, to spread a common atmosphere of thought over the thousands of Anthroposophists everywhere. When we live in such an atmosphere, when we understand what it means for all our thinking to be stimulated and directed by the ‘Leading Thoughts’, and when we understand how the Goetheanum will thus be placed in the centre as a concrete reality through the initiative of the esoteric Vorstand—I have emphasised again and again that we now have to do with a Vorstand which conceives its task to be the inauguration of an esoteric impulse—when we understand this truly, then that which has now to flow through the Anthroposophical Movement will be carried forward in the right way. For Anthroposophical Movement and Anthroposophical Society must become one. The Anthroposophical Society must make the whole cause of Anthroposophy its own.

And it is true to say that if once this ‘thinking in common’ is an active reality, then it can also become the bearer of comprehensive, far-reaching spiritual knowledge. A power will come to life in the Anthroposophical Society that really ought to be in it, for the recent developments of civilisation need to be given a tremendous turn if they are not to lead to a complete decline.

What is said concerning successive earthly lives of this or that individual may at first seem paradoxical, but if you look more closely, if you look into the progress made by the human beings of whom we have spoken in this connection, you will see that what is said is founded on reality; you will see that we are able to look into the weaving life of gods and men when with the eye of spirit we try in this way to apprehend the spiritual forces.

This, my dear friends, is what I would lay upon your hearts and souls. If you take with you this feeling, then this Easter Meeting will be like a revitalising of the Christmas Meeting; for if the Christmas Meeting is to work as it should, then all that has developed out of it must be the means of revitalising it, of bringing it to new life just as if it were present with us.

May many things grow out of the Christmas Meeting, in constant renewal! May many things grow out of it through the activity of courageous souls, souls who are fearless representatives of Anthroposophy. If our meetings result in strengthening courage in the souls of Anthroposophists, then there will grow what is needed in the Society as the body for the Anthroposophical soul: a courageous presentation to the world of the revelations of the Spirit vouchsafed in the age of Light that has now dawned after the end of Kali-Yuga; for these revelations are necessary for the further evolution of man. If we live in the consciousness of this we shall be inspired to work courageously. May this courage be strengthened by every meeting we hold. It can be so if we are able to take in all earnestness things that seem paradoxical and foolish to those who set the tone of thought in our day. But after all, it has often happened that the dominant tone of thought in one period was soon afterwards replaced by the very thing that was formerly suppressed. May a recognition of the true nature of history, and of how it is bound up with the onward flow of the lives of men, give courage for anthroposophical activity—the courage that is essential for the further progress of human civilisation.

• 1. Easter as a Chapter in the Mystery-Wisdom of Man. (on-line as: The Easter Festival in Relation to the Mysteries) Dornach, 19th–22nd April, 1924.

The following lecture is included in Bn/GA 275. It is lecture 8 of 8 in the series entitled, Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom. It is also known as, Working with Sculptural Architecture—2.

To the impulses necessary for the transformation of the present age belongs an ever wider and more comprehensive understanding of the processes of the human soul in those regions which open to Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive observation. For what first makes our world into a whole, raising us above Maya and leading us into true reality, lies within those spheres which open to this observation. It must be emphasized again and again that what we are striving towards as a new spiritual knowledge cannot consist in any warming-up of the results of an earlier clairvoyance. It is true that many people aspire to such a warming-up of an earlier clairvoyance, but the time for this clairvoyance is past, and only atavistic echoes of it can appear in certain individuals. However, the stages of human existence that we must surmount do not disclose themselves through a revival of old clairvoyance, and thus we will endeavor to consider once again that which must lie at the basis of the new clairvoyance. We have often spoken of the principle of this, and today we shall try to do this again, but from another side.

Let us start once more from something we all know, from the fact that, during daytime waking consciousness, man lives with his ego and astral body in his physical and etheric body. During the last few days I have emphasized that this waking state of man, from waking until falling asleep, is not a fully-awake condition, because there is still something asleep in man. What we experience as our will is really only partially awake. Our thoughts are awake from waking until falling asleep, but the will is something which we exercise quite dreamily. On this account much of the pondering on the freedom of the will, and on freedom in general, is in vain, because people have not noticed that what they know of the will in waking daily life is really only a dream or a tale of will impulses. When they will, and represent something to themselves concerning it, they are of course awake. But how the will arises and passes over into action, of this man can only dream in daily waking life.

If you lift a piece of chalk and then think about this action, then you have of course an idea of it in your mind. But without clairvoyance, how the ego and astral body flow into the hand—how the will spreads out there—you can know nothing more of this in ordinary day consciousness than you know of a dream while you are dreaming. Man only dreams of real willing during ordinary waking life, and in most things we do not even dream, we sleep. You can clearly conceive of how you put a morsel of food on a fork; you can also conceive to a certain extent of how you bite this morsel; but how you swallow the morsel, this you do not even dream. For the most part you are quite unconscious of it, just as you are unconscious of your thoughts when you are asleep. A great part of the activity of will while man is awake is similarly performed in a half-sleeping condition.

For instance, if we were not asleep as regards our powers of desire and the feeling impulses connected with them, we would develop an extraordinary activity. We would follow the actions we perform right into the body; everything we fulfilled as will impulse we would follow inwardly—into our blood, and into all the blood vessels. This means that if you could follow the lifting of a piece of chalk with reference to the will impulse, you would be able to follow what takes place in your hand, right into all the blood vessels. You would see from within the activity of the blood and the feelings attached to it, for example, the gravity of the particles of chalk, and things of that nature, and would thereby become aware that you were following your nerve-paths and the etheric fluidity found therein. You would inwardly experience yourself, along with the activity of blood and nerves. This would be an inner enjoyment of your own blood and nerve activity. But during our life on earth this inner enjoyment of our own blood and nerve activity must be withheld from us, otherwise we would go through life in such a way that in everything we did we would experience this inner self enjoyment. But man, as he has become, may not have this enjoyment, and the secret of why he may not we again find expressed in a part of the Bible towards which we should always feel the greatest reverence.

After those things had taken place which are expressed in the Paradise-Myth, man was permitted to eat of the Tree of Knowledge but not of the Tree of Life. Eating of the Tree of Life would mean this inner gratification, and this must not happen to man. I cannot develop this motif further here today because it would us lead too far, but through your own meditation on the motif here touched upon you will be able to make further discoveries for yourselves. However, starting from this point, there is something else you can keep in mind which can be of essential importance for you: we are unable to eat of the Tree of Life, i.e., enjoy within our inner being our own blood and nerve activity—we cannot do this—yet something happens, especially when observing the world through our senses and our intellect, which is closely connected with such an inner enjoyment. In the perception of any object in the outer world, and in pondering over any object in the outer world, we follow the senses, that is, when we follow the eyes, nose, ears and taste nerves, we follow the path of the blood vessels. And when we think, we follow the path of the nerves. But we cannot perceive what else might have been perceived along the path of the blood and the nerves. What we might have perceived in the blood is reflected through the senses; it is as it were thrown back, and from this, sense impressions arise. And that which is conducted along the path of the nerves is also reflected and brought to where the nerve paths reach their end, and is then reflected as our thoughts.

Just suppose for once that a man appeared who was in a position not merely to follow along the path of his blood under the influence of the outer world, and then to receive reflection of what his blood does; not merely to follow his nerves, and receive reflected back what his nerves do, but to experience inwardly what is denied us in regard to the blood and sense nerves, to experience inwardly what leads to the eye, to experience inwardly the blood as it tends towards the nerves and the eyes. This he would enjoy inwardly, at least in regard to those parts of the blood and nerves. It was in this way that those forms arose that belong to the old clairvoyance. For what is reflected back for us are but images, finely filtrated images, as it were, of what is contained in the blood and nerves. Cosmic mysteries are contained in our blood and nerves, but such cosmic mysteries as are already exhausted, because we have developed beyond them. We only learn to know ourselves when we learn to know the Imaginations which are revealed to us when we experience ourselves within the blood extending to the senses; and we only learn to know those Inspirations destined to up-build us when we live within the nerves extending to our senses.

A whole inner world is thus built up. This inner world can consist of a sum of Imaginations, whereas in perceiving the outer physical world in a way fitted to our earth evolution we perceive reflections and reflected images of what takes place in blood and nerves. We are unable, when deeply sunk in the inner enjoyment of ourselves, to get beyond the senses, but only reach the point where the blood streams enter the senses. Man then experiences the Imaginative world so that he seems as it were to swim in the blood as a fish in water. But this Imaginative world is in truth no outer world, but a world which lives in our blood. When a man lives in the nerves which extend to the senses, he experiences an Inspired world, a world of sphere-tones, and a world of inward pictures. This is also cosmic, but it is nothing new, it is merely something which has completed its task in that it has streamed into our nerve and blood system.

The clairvoyance which thus arises, and which does not lead man beyond himself, but leads him rather deeper into himself, is a self-enjoyment, truly a real self-enjoyment. This is why in a certain sense it produces a higher bliss in people when they become clairvoyant in this way, that is, when they experience a new world. This way of becoming clairvoyant is on the whole a falling back to an earlier stage of evolution. For what I have just described, the life within ones own sense organs and blood, did not exist at that time in the form it does now, although the nervous system was already foreshadowed.

This kind of perception was the normal kind of perception on the Old Moon, and in what existed at that time in the tendencies toward the formation of nerves, a man was inwardly aware of himself. Blood was not yet developed within him, it was more something which came to him from outside like a warm breath, as the sun's rays come to us. Therefore what now on earth is a conscious perception of the inner blood system was on the Moon the normal perception of the outer world.

If therefore the nerve is here the boundary between the human inner and outer world, then what is now nerve was already foreshadowed on the Moon. While following the nerves a man was able to perceive what revealed itself to him as an inner, Imaginative world, which was a part of himself. He perceived how he himself is included in the cosmos. He also was aware Imaginatively of what came to him as a breath from outside… not from within. This perception has now fallen from him, what was outside him on the old Moon has become inward, as the circulation of the blood in earthly evolution. The old perception is therefore a going-back to the Old Moon evolution.

It is well to know of such things, because again and again things arise that are of this kind of clairvoyance. What appears clairvoyantly in this way has no need of being developed by those difficult paths of meditation and concentration described in How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. This clairvoyance, which arises through learning to live inwardly in ones nerves and blood—to feel satisfaction in oneself—is in general but a finer development of the organic life, a refinement of what a man experiences when he eats and drinks. When all is said such clairvoyance is not the task set before man today, but is rather something that arises as a hothouse plant through our bringing to a more refined existence that self-enjoyment afforded us by eating, drinking and similar things. Just as an inner after-effect arises in an epicure when he has drunk Rhinewine or Mosel, which of course rises only to an Imagination of taste but does not work formatively, so in many people a refined inner enjoyment arises, and this is their clairvoyance.

A great deal of clairvoyance is nothing else but a refined, rarified, hothouse-like after-enjoyment of life. Attention must frequently be drawn to these things in our day. For I may tell you that the last time the secrets concerning these things were still known, when people still spoke of them in literature, was really the first half of the 19th century. Then came the second half of the 19th century, with its so highly-rated discoveries—highly-rated from their point of view—when all understanding for these things and for the finer connections of existence was lost. It may be added parenthetically that people have not yet lost the enjoyment experienced under the influence of the coarser, let us say more selfish enjoyment; they can still live with the after-pleasure of eating and drinking, in fact these have even been developed to a certain high degree in this materialistic age.

But in such things, man lives in a cyclic, rhythmic movement. And the materialistic age, because it has extinguished what was formerly a general feeling—the passing of self-enjoyment into the senses, nerves, and blood-circulation—can therefore give itself up ever more thoroughly to the impressions of eating and drinking. We can easily observe the complete “volt face” and transformation which has taken place in this connection within a relatively short time. We have but to look at a hotel menu card from the 70's, and compare it with one of today, and we see what strides life has made in refined enjoyment, in the self-gratification of our own bodies. But such things also progress in cycles, for everything can only be reached to a certain degree, and just as a pendulum can only rise to a certain point and must then return, so mere physical enjoyment must recede when it has reached a certain point. It will then come to pass that when the keenest epicures, those who have the greatest longing for enjoyment, stand before the most daintily prepared repast, they will not yearn for it, but will say: “Ah! I cannot. All that is finished for me.” This also will come in time, for it is a necessity of evolution. Everything passes in cycles.

The other side of life is that which man experiences during sleep. His life of thought is asleep, and naturally, entirely different connections make their appearance. I have already said that in the first half of the 19th century people still had insight into these things. The clairvoyance which arises through following ones own blood and nerve paths was still called, in accord with certain memories, the Pythic clairvoyance, because it was in fact related to what lay at the root of the pythic clairvoyance of antiquity.

Other connections are present during the life of sleep. Man with his ego and astral body is then outside the physical and etheric body. Ideas from ordinary life are then suppressed and weakened, but man lives continually from falling asleep till waking in a state of longing for his physical body. Sleeping consists essentially in this, that man, from the moment he begins to sleep, develops longings for his physical body. These longings increase until a climax is reached when he is forced back more and more towards his physical body. The longing for ones physical body becomes ever greater and greater in the state of sleep. And because longing fills the ego and astral body like a cloud, the life of thought is dimmed. Perceptions become dim because desire for the physical body pervades the ego and astral body like a cloud. Just as we cannot see the trees in a wood if mist spreads over everything, neither can we ask variance of our inward life of perception if the mist of our desire spreads over it.

But it may happen that this life of desire becomes so strong during sleep that man not merely develops this desire when outside his physical and etheric body, but he becomes greedy to such an extent that he partially seizes on this inner part of his physical and etheric body so that he reaches with his desire to the furthest limits of his blood and nerve paths, he sinks through as it were from outside into the extremities of the senses of circulation, and into the ultimate ends of the nerve paths.

In ancient times, when the Gods still helped man with such experiences, they were entirely regular and good. The ancient Hebrew Prophets, for example, who did such great things for their people, performed what they did and received their prophetic gifts because they applied such infinite love to the blood and nerve structure of their people, and even in the sleeping state they did not entirely absent themselves from what lived physically in this people. These ancient Hebrew prophets were seized by such longing, filled with such love, that they remained united even in sleep with the blood of the people to whom they belonged. It was because of this that they received their prophetic gifts.

This is the physiological origin of these gifts, and most beautiful and splendid results came from what has just been told you. The prophets of different peoples were of such significance to these peoples just because, while outside the physical body, they still lived with this physical body in the way described.

As explained, a certain consciousness of this still existed up to the first half of the 19th century in the life of mankind. As the first clairvoyance described here was called Pythic clairvoyance, so the clairvoyance of which I have just spoken, in which a man dives down into the blood and nerve paths of the physical body with what otherwise lives outside the physical and etheric body during sleep, was called Prophetic clairvoyance.

If you pursue the literature of the first half of the 19th Century—even if it cannot be described with the exactitude and precision of modern spiritual science—you still find descriptions of pythic and prophetic clairvoyance. The distinction between them is not recognized today, because people can no longer understand what they read of pythic and prophetic clairvoyance.

Neither kind of clairvoyance is that which is really capable of advancing mankind at the present time. These are the kinds of clairvoyance that were valid for ancient times. The modern clairvoyance, which must develop more and more towards the future, can come neither by enjoying what penetrates our body from within during waking conditions, nor by diving down into this body from outside in a state of sleep, but from love—not for ourselves, but for that portion of mankind to which our body belongs. The earlier forms are stages of development which have been outgrown.

Modern clairvoyance must develop as a third kind of clairvoyance that does not involve desire for laying hold of the physical body from without, nor as enjoyment of the physical body from within.

That which lives within and is capable of penetrating our body, enjoying it inwardly, and that which can seize the body from without, must be detached from the body if modern clairvoyance is to arise. Neither must enter into any further connection with the body other than in the [normal] incarnation between birth and death, so that blood and nerves can be enjoyed neither from within nor from without; but each must remain connected with the body in pure renunciation of such self-enjoyment and such self-love. A connection with the body must nevertheless remain, for otherwise, death would take place. Man must remain united with the body which belongs to him during his physical incarnation on earth, remain united with it through those members which in a sense stand far, or at least relatively far, from the activity of blood and nerve. A release from blood and nerve activity must be attained.

When man no longer finds inward enjoyment along the paths which lead to his senses, or penetrates his own being from outside as far as to the senses, but when he can enter into such union with himself both from within and from without so as to really lay hold in a living way of that which in physical existence is the symbol of death, and can unite himself with that which gives the expectancy of physical death, the condition we are considering is then reached. For considered physiologically, we really die because we are capable of developing a bony system—a skeleton. When we are capable of comprehending our bones, which through a wonderful intuition people recognize as the symbol of death—the bony skeleton—and which is so far removed from the blood and nervous systems, we then attain to something which is higher than pythic and prophetic clairvoyance, we come to what we can call the Clairvoyance of Spiritual Science.

In this spiritual scientific clairvoyance, we no longer grasp only a part of human nature, we grasp the whole man. And fundamentally, it is all one whether we grasp it from within or from without, because this kind of clairvoyance can no longer be an “enjoyment,” it is no longer a refined pleasure, but a going forth into the divinely spiritual forces of the All. It is a becoming-one with the cosmos, an experience no longer of man and of what is secreted in man, but an experience that is a living within the deeds of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, a real raising of oneself above self-enjoyment and self-love. Just as our thoughts are members of our souls, so man must become, as it were, a thought, a member of the higher Hierarchies. To allow oneself to be thought, pictured, perceived by the higher hierarchies, this is the principle of the clairvoyance of spiritual science. It is being taken up, not taking up.

I hope that what I am now saying may very definitely become the subject of your further meditations, for precisely those things that I have explained today are capable of stimulating very much in all of you, and this can serve toward an ever deeper and more comprehensive penetration to the real impulses of our spiritual scientific stream. How much earnestness is necessary for this penetration into our spiritual scientific stream has been spoken of often in these past days. Something might be realized of what is—I do not say willed, but what must be willed—within this spiritual stream, if as many as possible would resolve to ponder in a living way this threefold form of knowledge of higher worlds, so that clearer and ever clearer ideas might arise concerning what we all desire at bottom, and which is so easily confused with what is far easier and more comfortable to acquire.

We have in fact worked from cycle to cycle of lectures for no other purpose than to bring together, ever more and more, ideas and concepts. It is necessary to study these ideas and concepts, and in this way we prepare in ourselves those impulses of soul which lead to real spiritual scientific clairvoyance. Often because one has sipped a little here or there of what is imparted within our spiritual scientific stream, and thereby given some part of our human nature to pythic or prophetic clairvoyance—because of this one may perhaps become proud and haughty. When this is the case opinions arise as are often heard when one or another says: I need not study every detail, I do not require what is said in this cycle. What I hear I already know, and so on. The principle of living in a few Imaginations which might be called blood and nerve Imaginations, still exists in many. Many think they possess something quite special if they have a few blood and nerve Imaginations. But this is not what leads us to selfless labor for human evolution; such a tarrying in blood and nerve imaginations leads only to a heightening of self-enjoyment, to a refined egoism. In this event, it may be that a more refined egoism is cultivated through the pursuit of spiritual science than exists even in the outside world.

Naturally, in referring to such things, one never speaks of these matters to those who are present, and never of the members of the anthroposophical society who are present. Yet it may be mentioned that societies exist in which people are to be found who, according to the principles of these societies, bring themselves to co-operate, not with true selflessness, but to undertake preferably that which kindles the blood or nerve Imaginations. They then think they can be excused from anything else. They attain to such an atavistic clairvoyance—or perhaps they do not attain to it, but merely to the feelings which are held to be an accompaniment of the phenomenon of such Imaginative clairvoyance. These feelings are not a conquest of egoism, but only a higher blossoming of it. One finds within such societies—the anthroposophical society being excepted from politeness—that although their duty is to develop love and esteem, harmony and compassion, at the profoundest depths of their souls one finds disharmony, quarrelsomeness, mutual calumniation, etc, growing more and more from member to member. I venture to express myself thus, because, as I have said, I always exclude the members of the anthroposophical. society.

We then see how, that where an especially strong light should arise, deep shadows are also cast. It is not so much as if I wished to place blame on such things, or believed they could be rooted out at once, between today and tomorrow. That is impossible because they arise naturally. However, each one can at least work on himself. And it is not good if the consciousness is not at least directed to such matters.

One can thoroughly understand that just because a certain stress must be worked out within such societies, the shadow-sides also make themselves felt, and that what flourishes outside in life often flourishes all the more vigorously within such societies. Nevertheless a certain bitter feeling is evoked when this appears in societies that should naturally (otherwise the society would have no meaning) develop a certain brotherliness and unity, and when, with this closer contact, certain qualities that exist but fleetingly outside are developed with all the greater intensity. Since the Anthroposophical Society—being present—is excepted, it is all the more possible for us to think over these things objectively, as non-participators, so that we can learn to know them more intimately. And if we find such things anywhere in the world, we do not regard them as anything other than what they are. We believe—if anyone thinks he understands anthroposophy with especial depth, yet reveals certain qualities which not only show themselves in him as they do in the world, but more intensely—that these things are not incomprehensible, but realize that they are comprehensible, yet as matters we must fight. We can frequently only fight them when we have really understood them.

This is also something which shows us how life is connected with the spiritual scientific view, and can only reach its goal when it is understood as acceptance of life, as an art of life; when it is carried into all life. How beautiful it would be if each single relationship of life, let us now say of the Anthroposophical Society, showed itself to be in such mutual harmony as is attempted in the forms of our building, where the separate forms pass over into each other, and all are in harmony one with another; if it could be in life as it is in the building, if the whole life of our society could be as we would have it through the beautiful co-operation of those who are active on the building; so that this labor which is already something harmonious and noble, might be a copy of that which finds expression in the building itself.

Thus the inner meaning of the life-principle of our building, and the inner meaning of the co-operation of the souls should ... no, would rather not say that. Thus the inner meaning of the co-operation in the forms of our building should find a path outwards into each separate relationship of the life of our Society—should in its inward construction stand before us as an ideal. I should like to assure you that I did not make a slip when I omitted a sentence just now. I left it out with full intention, and many a time that also is said which one did not say.

Summing up, what I have put before you during the last few days is a theme varying in the most diverse manner, and what I would fain lay on your hearts especially is this: that you not only place the thoughts and ideas of spiritual science, the results of spiritual investigation, before your intellect, before your reason, but that you receive that which lives in spiritual science into your hearts. For the salvation of the future progress of mankind really depends upon this. I say this without presumption, and anyone who attempts to study but a little the impulses of our evolution and the signs of our time can recognize this for himself.

With this the series of lectures, what I have permitted myself to give you at this turning point of the year is concluded.

Dear anthroposophical friends in Germany!

On New Year's Eve 1922/23, a tremendous fire lit up the world as a harrowing symbol of a world-historical moment. The Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, burned down to its foundations that night. An unknown person had insidiously placed the igniting spark in the sanctuary of thousands of human hearts.

This event could evoke the memory of another crime recorded in human history. On February 6, 356 BC, Herostratus hurled a torch into the sanctuary of Diana of Ephesus. He wanted to achieve immortality for himself through this act. Treasures of ancient wisdom sank into oblivion; the name Herostratus was engraved on the memory of posterity.

If the burning of Ephesus is a symbol in world history that ancient and holy wisdom had to perish so that the human personality could unfold, then the burning of the Goetheanum, which wanted to be a place of love that now wants to come to the peoples of the earth in a new form, can be a sign of how this coming of love in our time is opposed by criminal forces.

In the spirit of love, while the world war raged and the flames of ethnic hatred were raging all around, anthroposophists from 17 nationalities built the Goetheanum under the leadership of their teacher. The work of ten years of dedicated work and sacrificial love was destroyed by a senseless crime in a few fateful hours.

Immediately after the disaster, donations were also made in Germany for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum to the collection point that had been set up in Stuttgart at the time as the “Dr. Rudolf Steiner Disposition Account”. In the meantime, our friends abroad have taken steps to secure the financial means for the reconstruction. The necessary guarantees were provided by the International Assembly of Delegates in Dornach, which met from July 20 to 22 this year. Once again, people from all over the world will work together to rebuild the Goetheanum. We German Anthroposophists initially found ourselves unable to provide financial assistance. Not because we are poor; anyone who loves something as we love this building – which does not belong to us Anthroposophists, but is intended to serve all of humanity – has something to give, no matter how poor they are. But we had to be clear about the fact that money and monetary value must not cross our national border. That, dear friends, was our great sorrow: to experience that the sacrifice we wanted to make for our beloved cause was to be made impossible by fate.

But the moral power that lives in anthroposophy has shown us the way in which our sacrifice can still be effective. All the material gifts we were able to contribute out of love and a spirit of sacrifice to the construction of the first Goetheanum were destroyed by the crime of New Year's Eve. The new Goetheanum will largely have to be built from the insurance money, which will not be offered by generous friends. And we German anthroposophists had to see ourselves excluded from the material sacrifices that our friends made for the reconstruction. But the spirit of sacrifice was aroused among our friends. Therefore, we decided that all donations from Germany for the Goetheanum should be combined into a “German Goetheanum Fund”. This fund is to be used within German borders for purposes that are in line with the Goetheanum's endeavors. For example, it is planned to use this fund to support German intellectual workers within the borders of our country in their spiritual scientific work and research in the spirit of the School of Spiritual Science. Dr. Rudolf Steiner himself will have the exclusive and sole right of disposal over the funds of this foundation.

In this way, we could hope that our sacrifice, which could not be used for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum itself in material form, would nevertheless have an effect beyond the borders of our country through its inherent moral power. What we were denied by fate in the material realm should be compensated for by the spirit in which we wanted to make our sacrifice.

We presented our intention to our foreign friends at the international delegates' meeting in Dornach. Our friends have honored the spirit of our Goetheanum offering in the most beautiful way. Their delegates declared that they were determined to add to what they were already willing to do for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum, however much the amount collected in Germany for the German Goetheanum Fund and remaining there would account for. And they would do this from funds that would never have flowed into Germany. This makes it possible for our gift to remain within Germany and for its equivalent value to be used for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum.

Each of us wants to make a sacrifice for the Goetheanum. A sacrifice that he is able to make only for this purpose, out of a clear insight into the world-historical necessity of this building. This sacrifice should have an inherent moral power, as a counterweight to the tragic facts that will affect the emerging Goetheanum.

This sacrifice should be a one-time sacrifice, so that such undertakings in our own country, such as the Waldorf School, for example, should not be deprived of the regular support that is so indispensable for these undertakings at this time.

It is with this in mind that we are turning to our German anthroposophical friends today with a request for donations to the German Goetheanum Fund. This fund will serve the reconstruction of the Goetheanum without depriving our people of anything. Just as during the world war the nations that were at war with each other worked together in Dornach to rebuild the Goetheanum, so now, while Germany is economically collapsing, anthroposophists from other nations are economically supporting us in the reconstruction process.

This fact proves that, beyond the hatred of nations, anthroposophy is able to pave the way to humanity. Because this is so, we are allowed to build again. Let us build, friends, the strength of morality, the strength of love, into this building, so that the strong building may have a strong society behind it!

May the behavior of anthroposophical friends in countries outside of Germany towards German anthroposophists set an example for nations! Then the new building in Dornach could mark the beginning of an era of understanding between peoples. In this sense, may the rebuilding of the Goetheanum be embraced by the whole world!

Stuttgart, August 1923.

The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany:

Jürgen von Grone, Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Emil Leinhas, Johanna Mücke, Dr. Otto Palmer, Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, Dr. Carl Unger, Wolfgang Wachsmuth, Louis Werbeck.

The committee of the Free Anthroposophical Society in Germany:

Moritz Bartsch, Dr. Hans Büchenbacher, Jürgen von Grone, Dr. Ernst Lehrs, Ren& Maikowski, Wilhelm Rath, Dr. Maria Röschl, J. G. W. Schröder.

The German members of the Executive Council of the Association of the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science: Graf Otto Lerchenfeld, Gräfin Pauline Kalckreuth, Dr. Felix Peipers.

All donations are to be made out to the Treuhandgesellschaft des Goetheanum in Stuttgart, in favor of the “Verfügungskonto Dr. Rudolf Steiner” and sent to Bankhaus Hans Stammer & Co., Stuttgart, Rotestr. 4.

Dr. Steiner answers questions from the officials of the Societies on the various Paragraphs of the Statutes.

To a question on Paragraph 11 regarding the admission of individual members who do not wish to join a particular group he answers as follows:

This Paragraph would only come into consideration if it proves entirely impossible to bring these efforts to a satisfactory conclusion. Only then should individuals or groups apply for membership direct to Dornach. Efforts must first be made to join the relevant national Society and only if this fails for some reason would we admit an individual or a group here in Dornach.

Herr Hohlenburg asks what is meant by: ‘Only for those for whom it is quite impossible to find entry to a group.’

Dr. Steiner: The Statutes are phrased in such a way as to include everything in as few words as possible. Perhaps it is necessary to clarify the sentence ‘Only those for whom it is quite impossible to find entry to a group should apply directly to Dornach for membership’ by adding that this refers not only to the group not agreeing to admit the individual but also to the individual finding it inwardly impossible to join the group. Thus for instance a person who is convinced that he cannot thrive in a particular group can, if all efforts fail, become a member in Dornach. Here in Dornach we for our part shall of course endeavour to convince the individual to join a group. When I was writing down this sentence I was thinking not only of external obstacles coming from the group but also of obstacles arising out of an individual's convictions.

Herr Hohlenburg: Are all those who are already members to have their membership confirmed?

Dr. Steiner: This will be desirable if only for the reason that we are having proper membership cards printed to replace the old, not very beautiful membership cards, and every member will enjoy seeing a membership card which is somewhat larger and which commands a certain degree of respect. Therefore it would be good to send a circular to the individual groups letting them know that all the old membership cards can be exchanged for new ones.

Mademoiselle Sauerwein asks: If a number of members in a particular country want to form themselves into a group and elect a new officer who is not an officer of the national group, would they be allowed to do this or not?

Dr. Steiner: Of course nobody can be denied this right. All that can be done is to make efforts to prevent it, but nobody can be denied the right to form groups which would, of course, not be the national group but simply a private group. It would not be possible for it to be the national group because, of course, the national group already exists, does it not? But this cannot be included in the Statutes. The Statutes must contain the principles. But it can be included in By-Laws which we shall still have to elaborate.

Herr Donner wants to ask whether a group which does not want to be affiliated with the national Society in its own country can instead be affiliated with the Society of another country.

Dr. Steiner: In principle this would not be impossible. To exclude this on principle would be too great an infringement of the freedom of the individual members. We cannot exclude this possibility, but we would have to make efforts not to let such a situation arise in which a group in one country joins the Society of another country; if such a group were not to join the national Society, then it would join directly in Dornach. This could come about as a matter of usage. It cannot be excluded on principle. For instance it would not be possible to prevent a group coming into being in France and registering with the German Society. We would not be able to prevent this.

Madame Muntz: Should we make efforts to bring it about that individuals who do not live in Belgium and yet do belong to our group apply for membership in their own countries, or not?

Dr. Steiner: In cases where they have done this from sympathy, this is all right. Cases where those in question have sympathies in a particular direction might as well be allowed to remain. But for the future it would be preferable for this not to happen. We need not take up a pedantic position; there is no need for this, but we do need something that can give us a certain degree of support.

Dr. Unger: There are quite a number of people in South America who are members of the German Society and who have expressed their wish to remain so. Arrangements are, however, being made for a Society to be formed among the different groups. I have been asked to bring to this meeting the need expressed there that a South American Society should be planned. For the moment they wish to remain attached to Germany, and the method of transferring these groups will gradually come about.

Dr. Steiner: The configuration of the Society being what it is, it is of course the case that from the administrative point of view everything will have to be taken into consideration not in a bureaucratic way but in a way that is necessitated by human factors. Take Paragraph 14 of the Statutes: ‘The organ of the Society is Das Goetheanum, which for this purpose is provided with a Supplement containing the official communications of the Society. This enlarged edition of Das Goetheanum will be supplied to members of the Anthroposophical Society only.’ Would you not agree that this implies that if the South American groups belong to Germany they would be supplied with Das Goetheanum not by us here but that it would be sent to them from Germany? Similar situations are still likely to arise. Here we are of the opinion that things should not remain confined to paper. The things that are written in the Members' Supplement are things which every member wants to know as quickly as possible. So I think it would be a good thing for groups which exist outside their national groups to join directly in Dornach so that anthroposophical life can flourish as much as possible without having to make all kinds of detours.

Dr Wachsmuth informs the meeting that the South American Society had written a letter just before Christmas, having heard about the new decisions. He reads a statement from them.

Herr Leinhas: I have had a similar letter. It arrived only a few days ago, and I have been asked for the moment to represent the national Society, which is to have its seat in Rio.

Dr. Zeymans Van Emmichoven:In point 5 mention is made of the three Classes of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach: ‘Members of the Society will be admitted to the School on their own application.’ I should like to ask whether the national Societies have anything to do with this or whether this is a purely personal matter for each member.

Dr. Steiner: What is contained in point 5 will be a matter for the Goetheanum in Dornach as far as the overall leadership is concerned. Everything that belongs to the configuration of this School of Spiritual Science will have to be taken in hand by the leadership at the Goetheanum in Dornach. Among the things that will have to be dealt with will of course be the matter of making contact not only with officers but also with members who are doing certain work in one place or another. Members of the First, Second and Third Class of the Goetheanum will be everywhere, having been nominated by the Goetheanum. How they are chosen will depend entirely on the individual case, for it will be essentially an esoteric matter, but an esoteric matter which is handled in a modern way. Once things have got going it will become apparent that there will be members in the different national Societies who belong to one of the Classes of the Goetheanum. For these the Goetheanum will nominate their own leadership in the different countries, so that matters are territorially delimited and do not expand boundlessly. This matter, then, will be handled essentially by the leadership at the Goetheanum; I shall describe it in more detail as our Conference progresses. Point 7 also refers to this matter: ‘The organizing of the School of Spiritual Science is, to begin with, the responsibility of Rudolf Steiner, who will appoint his collaborators and his possible successor.’

To begin with, I intend to set up, in addition to the three Classes, Sections which will be in charge of the different fields of research. For example there will be a Section for General Anthroposophy, another for what used to be called in France Belles-Lettres, a Section for Natural Science, for Education, for Art, for the various realms of art. Each Section will have a Section Leader and together these will constitute the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science. The members of the different Classes will be scattered all over the place; they will be members, for their pupilship is their own private affair. This is an independent institution which the national Societies will undertake to protect and guard as a matter of course.

Fräulein Henström: In Sweden, as far as I know, more than a third of the members have not joined a branch. In small villages this is natural, but there are a good many in Stockholm who do not wish to belong to the groups. They believe that they can work more freely if they stand by themselves and study the lectures alone. There are a good many of us who understand how important it is to stand firmly together and that it is therefore necessary for members to get to know one another personally. I think it is quite impossible if members refuse to conform to the groups and I wondered whether some encouragement could not be given from Dornach to bring about an improvement in this direction.

Dr. Steiner: We shall make every effort towards encouraging members in the different countries to join the main groups, which in most countries will mean the national Society. But we do not want to exert any pressure by means of some statute or other. We do not want to exert any pressure from Dornach in any direction, but we shall make every effort to help people understand, so that for instance in Sweden any members who live in an isolated situation, even if they want to remain isolated as far as their way of living is concerned, can nevertheless join the Stockholm Society or the national Society.

Fräulein Henström: I too would not want any compulsion to be brought to bear.

Dr. Steiner: We shall certainly endeavour to bring about an understanding of this matter.

Mr Monges enquires about the point of view and the manner in which the General Secretaries in the different countries are selected and whether this shall be a democratic procedure or what else?

Dr. Steiner: This is a further matter which I would not wish to lay down in any way by means of statutes for the various groups all over the world. I can well imagine, for example, that there are national Societies who will most certainly want to employ democratic procedures. I can also imagine that there will be others who will want to be thoroughly aristocratic in their approach, agreeing with the wishes of a particular individual upon whom they confer the task of nominating the other officers and so on. Thus I rather assume that the, shall I say, somewhat aristocratic method I have adopted with regard to appointing the Vorstand may well be imitated. In some quarters, however, this method may be regarded as highly undesirable, and in those quarters the democratic method could be used. An election is naturally all the easier the smaller the group in question, whereas I consider elections in a gathering as large as ours today to be totally meaningless. It is impossible to nominate and elect anybody in a situation where there is to start with so little mutual recognition. So in this gathering such a procedure would not be possible. But I can well imagine that a democratic institution of some kind might come into being in one place or another. In a general way, however, I do not find this question to be of paramount importance as a matter of principle. If on the one hand the selection is made by means of an election that is thoughtless, then the Societies will not flourish. They will come to nought if someone is simply nominated so that the election may be settled in a hurry, as is the case with political elections. Nothing can come of this in our circles.

The matter will be different, though, if consideration is given to those who have already earned some merit, or done certain work, or if their way of working has been observed. In such cases a majority is likely to come about quite naturally. But if the antecedents are all set for some kind of election, I do not believe that amongst us, since our main concern is for the work, some kind of democracy could prevent this work. In other words, in practice there will be little difference between democracy and aristocracy. We might try this out over the next few days. We could ask whether the Vorstand I have suggested would be elected or not. This would give us a democratic basis, for I do consider their election to be a necessary condition, otherwise I myself would also have to withdraw! Freedom must reign, of course. But, dear friends, I too must have freedom. I cannot allow anything to be imposed on me. Anyone who is expected to carry out a function must have freedom above all else. Is this not so? Thus I rather assume that what I have just said will be born out everywhere, for the most part. Whether democracy or aristocracy is the method, the Society will not look much different.

Mr. Monges: We in America are very political.

Dr. Steiner: If Dornach is permitted to have its say to a certain extent, then everything will work out satisfactorily.

Fräulein Schwarz: It was said some time ago that members of the old Theosophical Society cannot become anthroposophists, that is they cannot belong to the Anthroposophical Society. Will this continue to be the case or not?

Dr. Steiner: Who said that? I certainly never said such a thing! Never. The decision as to whether a person shall be admitted or not has to be taken individually in each case. I have always expressly stated that it matters not a jot whether someone belongs to a carpenters' club, or an insurance company, or a scientific research society, or the Theosophical Society. The only thing that matters is the human being. I have never said that the stamp of membership of any other society presents an obstacle for joining the Anthroposophical Society. Of course there might be individual cases in which membership of the Theosophical Society could present an obstacle. It is naturally questionable whether Mrs Besant³⁹ or Mr Leadbeater,⁴⁰ should they apply for membership of the Anthroposophical Society, would be admitted or not. So the question might arise in individual cases. But as a matter of principle it can have no validity whatsoever; otherwise we would come down to principles which would not be in keeping with a society that is to be formed in the modern style.

The Duke of Cesaro brings up a question regarding the number of votes allotted to members. There was once some unpleasantness in a national section of the old Theosophical Society, for example; and the solution had been to break up the whole group in order to gain more votes. Such things ought no longer to be possible.

Dr. Steiner: As you say, Your Grace, it is desirable that such things should not happen. But on the other hand there are certain difficulties involved in fixing the number of members at the lower end. There you come up against the question: How many members should there be in a group? So far we have had quite a definite view on this. But problems might now arise in this connection: Should we perhaps put everything pertaining to matters of modern usage into Paragraph 3, so that everything esoteric is contained in Paragraph 3, or should we name the number of members a group ought to contain? In the latter case the minimum number would be seven, because only seven can yield a true majority. In the case of three and five there can of course be a seeming majority. But those who understand the nature of the human being know that with a majority of two to one arrived at amongst three members, or of three to two arrived at when there are five members, the one who makes the seeming majority does not count properly. Not until you can have four to three can you arrive at a possible majority, which results if on the one side you have three and on the other side one third more. This then makes a true majority possible. So the minimum number would be seven members. I would not object to including this number here, but I did consider that these Statutes are more likely to be respected in the eyes of the world if we refrain from including things like the number seven. I therefore think, Your Grace, that your suggestion would be better included in the By-Laws, which would mean that in practice this is how the matter would be handled. This is probably the solution for us in this case.

Professor Dr.Maurer: I want to ask whether it might not be possible to curtail the other Paragraph as well, as regards the Classes. Perhaps it would be preferable not to launch this aspect on the public. I rather fear that all kinds of historical and other parallels might once again be dredged up and possibly used against us.

Dr. Steiner: Take Paragraph 5 as it is formulated here and ask yourself whether it could not be applied to any university just as it stands. As it stands it is applicable to any university and cannot possibly cause any offence. Everything else will be a matter of how we handle it.

Professor Dr.Maurer: Yes, I agree it is applicable, but there are other points which are open to attack. Taken in its usual sense it could remind people of something which did exist historically.

Dr. Steiner: Historically it was never the custom to speak of ‘Classes’, only of ‘Degrees’.

Professor Dr.Maurer: Nevertheless people will immediately jump to the wrong conclusion and I merely wanted to prevent the incidence of such mistaken and warped conclusions.

Dr. Steiner: It would be the greatest possible mistake to include anything in our Statutes arising from any conclusion. We cannot avoid having misunderstandings attached to what we do. But anyone interpreting Paragraph 5 wrongly must really want to do so. We cannot prevent this. Paragraph 5 is phrased in such a way that absolutely nobody can say anything other than that in this School of Spiritual Science in Dornach there are three Classes, just as if in Freiburg there were a university with four medical classes, a four-year course. The description in Paragraph 5 accords exactly with the pattern of universities in the outside world, so there is not the smallest opportunity for objection that could be seized with any even seeming justification. The same applies to the way the affairs of the School are conducted. You know that at a university it is the leadership who decide whether a student is ready to move on to the next year or not.

Professor Dr.Maurer: This has not always been the case. In the faculties of philosophy it was never a matter of moving up to the next class; this did not happen at Strasbourg under Professor Windelband⁴¹ or anywhere else for that matter. You simply presented yourself and were accepted. Naturally what you gained from the lectures depended on your abilities. Nowadays I agree that in the interest of the students a certain amount of grading has been introduced. I only wanted to draw attention to this matter because our opponents will immediately point it out.

Dr. Steiner: It is certainly not the case that a medical student who has just arrived at the university will be allowed to attend the special classes on anatomical medicine. There are proper classes for this, are there not. I do not believe that he would be allowed to attend immediately.

Professor Dr.Maurer: No, of course not.

Dr. Steiner: In the case of the philosophical faculty there are good reasons which have come about historically. A justification can certainly always be found for these things. Originally there was no such thing as a philosophical faculty at the universities. The three faculties were those of theology, medicine, and jurisprudence. These three faculties were always graded into classes. The philosophical department was at the basis of all three. First you attended the faculty of philosophy. This is where you started, whether you wanted to study theology, jurisprudence or medicine. Then you moved up from this faculty of philosophy into the different faculties. From then on you moved up in classes. I do not believe that it is any different in other countries. So if you take our Constitution to be the general anthroposophical and philosophical faculty, then advancing on from there you have the three Classes. The set-up is absolutely identical with that of a university. I have taken the utmost care to ensure that it shall be absolutely indisputable. In universities, though, the faculty of philosophy gradually developed into a faculty in its own right. More and more lectures were given till the whole situation degenerated into anarchy and chaos. No one entering the faculty of philosophy has any idea what lectures he ought to attend, indeed he can go to lectures he cannot understand at all. This is a chaotic situation that has arisen at the universities.

What we have written down here corresponds exactly to what was customary at universities, in Vienna for instance, up to the year 1848. This is entirely indisputable. And I believe that this is the case to this day in Paris; and also in Italy there are universities which still conduct matters in this way. At German universities there are certain things which have developed chaotically. But what we have written down here is absolutely indisputable. If we were to do these things without including them in our Statutes—and do them we must, otherwise Paragraph 8 about the lecture cycles would also have to be modified—we would immediately find ourselves in another situation which would not serve our purposes at all. This Paragraph must stand as it is and so must Paragraph 8. Of course we can consider requests for changes regarding details, but a complete suppression of the School with its three Classes would not be acceptable.

Professor Dr. Maurer: I quite see that it will be necessary to move up Class by Class. I was merely concerned that it might give our opponents something on which they could seize.

Dr. Steiner: The only change that could be considered would be to say: ‘The Anthroposophical Society sees the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach as the centre for its activity. The School will be composed of three classes after the manner of other universities.’ If you wish to include this we can certainly do so.

Baroness de Renzis: Should the report on our work in Italy and the direction it is taking be given now, or are we to discuss the Statutes only?

Dr. Steiner: I would request you to speak tomorrow about the work in Italy.

Baroness de Renzis wishes to ask a question about the direction the work is taking in general.

Dr. Steiner: I would ask you to give your report tomorrow.

Baroness de Renzis: Ought we to announce the anthroposophical character of any undertaking or initiative arising out of our Movement from the start, thus provoking the danger of having it rejected, or should we endeavour to disseminate an anthroposophical understanding within public opinion without throwing down the challenge of it being judged and rejected? It is necessary to decide this so that we know what is to determine the attitude of our groups in the future.

Dr. Steiner: It is of course not the word ‘Anthroposophy’ itself that matters but there are other things that do matter. Take the following example. Medicine is a case in point. It is today not possible to take medicine beyond the point it has now reached, which is not far enough, without starting to speak of the etheric body of the human being, and also of the astral body and the ego-organization, for it is here that the real causes of illness lie. So it is necessary simply to place before the world the substance of what Anthroposophy contains. We have gained some extremely instructive experience in this matter. Frau Dr Wegman has run courses with me in London, Vienna and The Hague.⁴² One of these took place at Dr Zeylmans' Dutch institute. I have given lectures to doctors in which I spoke quite directly of anthroposophical matters. At appropriate moments I have spoken about the astral body, the etheric body and so on. In doing this it is barely relevant what terminology is used. In some instances one feels it is more appropriate to name the etheric body and in others it is better to use different words in describing it. For example when you want to speak of the etheric body you can say: The effects on the physical substances which come not from the centre of the earth but from the periphery of the universe. Only those who have not fully come to grips with their subject matter are tied to a specific terminology, is this not so? We have found that when we speak in this way people can make something of what we say. They know that this is something new making its appearance in the world. If you avoid speaking clearly, all people can say is: Well, here is another opinion about the effect of this or that medicament on the human organism; it has been held before and was then replaced by another; now here is yet another opinion. They cannot distinguish whether a clinical report or a clinical dissertation comes from some external source or from us. But if we want to bring what can really lead us to the centre of the illness, then we cannot avoid speaking about the etheric body and so on, even if we use different terminology. Then people know what is what. We go furthest when we act in this way. It is not in the first instance a matter of the actual name of Anthroposophy; what matters is nowhere to shy away from whatever is necessary to explain something properly. If you try to dress Anthroposophy up in ‘this is what the parson says too’, then people have no idea what you are getting at. I myself once proved this point. I gave a course of twelve lectures in Vienna⁴³ ranging over every aspect of Anthroposophy including its practical applications. If you read this cycle today you will not find a single mention of the word Anthroposophy. It is perfectly possible for there to be occasions when it is inappropriate to use the word Anthroposophy. This is for sure. For me what matters is the actual subject itself, the spirit of the subject. You have no idea how many well-meaning people have come to me saying: People dread the expression ‘etheric body’; could we not say ‘the functional element in the human organism’? But this is a meaningless expression. To speak of the etheric body you have to distinguish between the physical body in which all the forces are related to gravity, the mechanical pull of gravity, and the etheric body in which all the forces can be related to the periphery, to all that is ever in weaving movement. This is the difference. The ‘functional element in the human organism’ refers to the function and not to this fundamental contrast. So these well-meant suggestions that come, often from outsiders, cannot be taken into account.

Baroness de Renzis: Is it sufficient to speak of the ‘essence’ of things?

Dr. Steiner: It is not necessary to throw the actual word ‘Anthroposophy’ at people, but if asked whether you are an anthroposophist it would be quite a good thing if you did not say: No!

We shall continue this meeting tomorrow. We must try to make sure that we have enough breathing space during this Conference.

• 39. Annie Besant, 1847–1933. From 1907, following the death of the Founder-President H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society.
• 40. Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1847–1934. Influential colleague of Annie Besant. Inspired the founding of the order ‘Star of the East’.
• 41. Wilhelm Windelband, 1848–1915. Philosopher, 1882–1903 professor in Strasbourg.
• 42. See lectures in London on 2 and 3 September, Vienna on 2 October and The Hague on 15 and 16 November 1923 in Rudolf Steiner Spiritual Science and the Art of Healing, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1950. GA 319.
• 43. See Rudolf Steiner The Tension between East and West, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1963. GA 83.

My address this evening represents a break in our current series; its subject is quite different from yesterday's.¹ This morning I received a letter, and I feel compelled, even obligated, to bring it to the attention of each individual member of the Anthroposophical Society. I will explain my reasons after I read you the letter.

Letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch to Rudolf Steiner

19 August 1915, Dornach

Dear Dr. Steiner:

Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors that serve evil purposes. On the good side, I am grateful for the esoteric knowledge and teachings you have imparted to us, for the mystery dramas you have given us, for the introduction of eurythmy, and for the art of the Johannesbau. In these contexts, I continue to recognize you as an envoy of the great white lodge and am filled with profound gratitude to you and to anything you do that is devoted to the good.

However, I perceive the way you cultivate relationships between yourself and other members of our spiritual movement as serving evil purposes, and I see this behavior as gravely endangering our movement. The relationships you create between yourself and other members turn the others into merely parts of yourself rather than independent spiritual entities alongside you. You only appear to act as a human being among equals. In actuality, you scorn any truly human connection and presume to intervene in the lives of others in a way that belongs only to the gods and not to any modern human being.

In this way, you create an anti-Christian relationship between yourself and the other members of our spiritual movement. These people have readied themselves to meet great spiritual teachings in our time, but you are making them poorer than the poorest materialists out there, who in spite of their distorted Christianity that has turned into its exact opposite are still able to develop a strong I. If it goes on like this, however, your followers will eventually fall prey to black magic as a result of the constant weakening of their I through how you behave toward them.

There have already been instances of highly respected members substituting a reliance on your word for reliance on the truth; they cut off any criticism of any part of your work, objecting that your critics would be placing themselves above you. They feel that putting oneself above you is such an act of wanton temerity as to be out of the question, and that with their objection the issue is resolved once and for all. The members are not to blame for erroneous ideas like this—you are. In your concern to promulgate ever more of your teachings, you have neglected to cultivate the attitude among your pupils that as Christians, individuals must put themselves not only below any other person, but also above any other; not only are the least of our fellow human beings of irreplaceable value to us in their most profound depths of being, but also the least of us carry responsibility for the most advanced and must oppose their errors. Your own teachings have strengthened me in this conviction. In real life, however, you apply a number of means that work counter to this Christian ideal of human community.

I will now discuss two of these means in detail so that the thrust of my contentions becomes clearer.

It is a fact that you have developed the habit of making promises and not keeping them. No one will maintain that you do not have a sufficiently clear view of the future, or that you are too weak to carry out your original intentions, either of which would constitute a certain justification for failing to keep promises. No, this is a case of deliberately causing disappointment. Since the promises were unsolicited and made at your own initiative, it is also a case of deliberate intervention into someone else's life in order do something that is by rights reserved for destiny. A disappointment that comes to us through karma has a direct and beneficial effect on our development. In contrast, a disappointment deliberately arranged for us by another person is at the very least a heavy blow, and if our confidence in the person delivering the blow is not shaken, it also constitutes a weakening of our I. The difference is the same as the difference between meeting an accidental death in a burning building and death by burning at the stake, premeditated by others.

Because of their trust in you, recipients of such a promise who are waiting for it to be kept get into a state of tension and uncertainty; meanwhile you are able to calmly survey their gradually increasing disappointment. Once the people in question have realized that the promise is not going to be kept, they will not take your word seriously in the future and thus will distance themselves from you, at least to some extent. However, since on the whole they continue to put their trust in you, they will lose all standards for the sanctity of giving one's word, and may perhaps begin to act as you do. As a result, they are dependent on you in a humanly unworthy fashion and will try to affect others in the same way you do.

Alternatively, people may respond in one of the three following ways: First, because of the confidence they have in you, they may assume that there must be a deep occult meaning behind the way you act. They will conclude that there can be profound occult reasons that permit or even obligate someone to make promises without intending to keep them. Occasionally we even meet people whose emotions are so confused that they admire that kind of behavior and take it as a sign of something superhuman. It is evident, however, that nothing in this world can authorize a modern human being to make promises without intending to keep them. Causing disappointment is something reserved for the gods who direct our karma.

This sort of conceptual confusion is all the more dangerous for a student of esotericism because modern spiritual science appeals to our healthy capacity for discernment, which is undermined by things like this. In a most unfortunate fashion, your word displaces the truth; the thought “I must not place myself above him” displaces the realization that you have done something evil. The human dignity of these people crumbles away bit by bit, and they turn into spiritually dependent tools in your hands.

The second possibility for those whose trust has been betrayed is that in order to be able to maintain their confidence in you, the people in question never let themselves become fully conscious of the fact that you never had any intention of keeping the promises you made to them. As a way out, they take your not keeping promises as a new revelation of a being they do not experience as really human and cannot hold responsible as they would a human being. This point of view is in fact already represented within the Society and is leading to your becoming ever more shadowlike as a human being.

The third and final possibility is that some people will choose the radical way out, forgetting the fact that a promise of some kind was ever made. This, too, robs people of a bit of their I. As a result, your coworkers in our spiritual movement will be shadows whose I is weakened, rather than independent individuals. You yourself, however, are the one to blame for all this.

A second example of the evil nature of your behavior is your refusal to accept any criticism of people working in our movement. On occasion, you have implied that any such criticism stems from negative emotions. This is a false assumption. I am not talking about malicious or destructive criticism. Many of our members, out of their sincere sense of responsibility, are capable of constructive criticism, and that is what I am talking about. The only possible reason for avoiding such criticism would be knowing that people in positions of responsibility are unfit for their jobs. In our modern age, people are meant to come together out of their own free will and freely create the kind of hierarchy and order necessary for us to accomplish what we have to do, and a certain amount of constructive mutual criticism is our only guarantee of success. In fact, the only way a true, natural, and appropriate hierarchical order can come about nowadays is if this kind of criticism is allowed to work.

If people who have been criticized do not choose to take action on justified accusations—and in fact they are morally obliged to actively seek criticism—they must give up their positions in the hierarchy so that the truth can triumph. Their superiors should not protect people like that by acting as if everything were going fine. This is what our modern age requires. However, if at any level in the hierarchical order mistakes are not criticized but tolerated and allowed to persist, we are only creating a false hierarchy that is based, not on real human capabilities and relationships, but on fiction—a fiction that is maintained only through further wrongdoing. Once again, the result is a lack of humanity and Christianity in our relationships in general, and once again you are to blame. In the organization of our Society as it has gradually developed under your guidance, the strengths of the members are usurped to the advantage of yourself and perhaps of certain other people prominent in this false hierarchy. Meanwhile, the Society's affairs are being mismanaged.

Personal oversensitivity on the part of those being criticized is something that needs to be eliminated; you might give a lecture about this sometime. As a general rule, especially if it comes at the right moment, criticism can take a stimulating and gratifying form and be free of any personal bitterness, so that its thorns are removed and the recipient can be glad to receive help in resolving the issue. The nervousness and animosity so prevalent among the critics spring in part from the justified feeling that even the most objective criticism will not be heeded, but will be looked at askance and disregarded. A truly superior person has no reason to fear criticism; true superiority can stand the test of even the most pointed criticism. In the event that people attempt to offer criticism out of a sense of responsibility but are not really able to grasp the facts of the case, those people can usually be made to see their misunderstanding sooner or later without any undue waste of time.

At the moment, I am not talking about a case like this one, where the criticism has already developed into a well-founded rejection of an entire self-contained system confronting me. In this case, no amount of postponement would make any difference. If in a specific instance, however, a person I myself recognize as superior—not simply someone who, for some unknown reason, is my superior in a false hierarchy—points out that I do not yet fully understand the case in question, I will gladly defer my criticism until the case can be considered closed. Under your influence, however, the principle at work in our spiritual movement is that any such criticism should be withheld indefinitely—until the facts of the case have been forgotten. And this principle applies not only to certain specific cases, but to all such instances. This is not only wrong and harmful to everyone, it also undermines our discernment, on which so much depends.

Once again, I have to point out the inherent contradiction between spiritual science's appeal to people's healthy power of judgment and the fact that in most instances in our movement, this power of judgment must be subordinated to incomprehensible reasons for measures being taken. You must admit, however, that at this point in time, two thousand years after Christ, people possess certain standards that all individuals can apply and must also allow to be applied to themselves, if they are not to be utterly lost. There are certainly a sufficient number of closed cases that really are subject to our judgment. The mere fact that a person feels compelled to think about a particular case usually suggests that he or she is capable of achieving some clarity in the matter, though not necessarily without help.

As things stand at the moment, our members are constantly expending a considerable portion of their spiritual energy on the useless task of seeking out hidden wisdom-filled motives for the evil behavior of yourself and your highest colleagues, while you stand by, calmly observing this waste of effort. Or, in order not to lose faith in you, these people have to decide to repress these truth-seeking forces in themselves and thus fall prey to partial stupefaction. What happens with these forces then? What a horrible thought to pursue! In any case, you represent a great focal point of forces of which individuals are merely the instruments, to be used as you choose for incomprehensible ends. There is no question in our movement of real interaction taking place between complete human beings, interaction in which each one is allowed to contribute his or her best. You are not a friend to all the members; your whole attitude rejects lively friendly relationships. In truth, for many people, you are the greatest enemy they have ever encountered.

All these things I have described are not only objectively evil, they also directly contradict the teachings you promulgate. It is from you that I learned the reasons that lead me to reject the way you act. As time goes on, you give an ever stronger impression of acting on your connection to the Christ impulse only in your lectures; outside the lectures, you embrace impulses that are quite the opposite. In parts, it already seems to me as if your teaching has been somewhat influenced by what you practice in real life—not the content of your teachings, but their formal structure. In their structure, certain sentences make promises that are then not kept and can only serve the purpose of subjecting the reader to fruitless thought and work. (See “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges.”)² If people try to explain this by saying that you, like any other human being, may have changed your mind over the course of time, you reject this as irksome criticism (Preface to Riddles of Philosophy, last paragraph).³ Both these passages, by the way, clearly show a change in style verging on the incomprehensible.

The kind of interpersonal attitude you create not only contradicts your teachings; your behavior also contradicts what you yourself demand of spiritual teachers in the modern age. Such teachers should appeal only to people's consciousness. Their self-chosen obligation toward their students is to never exercise any magical influence on the students' subconscious that the latter have not consented to or cannot control. You, however, are doing this incessantly through the behavior I described and through other occult means. For you, every handshake, every friendly conversation becomes a means of cultivating these false relationships. The bliss that fills the members after meeting with you is not the bliss of the communion of saints, but a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic one. You, not the members themselves, are to blame for this. You even try to use these handshakes and friendly conversations to pull members back into the fold against their will once they have recognized the falsity of the relationships you try to create. I have perceived with certainty that you exercise undue influence on your followers in this way.

In the modern age, when any uncontrollable influence on the subconscious of others must be avoided, it is not enough to simply give lectures or introduce new spirituality. In addition, the life you lead together with the other members of our movement must be governed by Christian impulses; your relationships with your followers must become like those of Benedictus, so beautifully portrayed in your fourth mystery drama. In fact, now that we have received so much in the way of teachings, developing such relationships is the much more urgent obligation.

When I ask myself how it can possibly be that you whose task it was to proclaim these teachings can act in ways directly counter to them, I can conceive of two possible answers. On the one hand, I can guess at the reasons why the great white lodge might have had to choose a person who is not yet completely Christianized for this task, and in your capacity as teacher I still accept you as the envoy of the lodge. On the other hand, it seems to me that your most profound motivation is by no means actively evil, although what I have had to say might be erroneously interpreted to imply that. No, it is simply a too one-sided interest in renewing these teachings in a way appropriate to our times, and above all a fear of real life. By avoiding and obstructing real life and by creating substitutes for it, however, you allow an evil force to develop. In this, I see the greatest danger to our spiritual movement and to yourself.

Fully Christian occultists can never rest content with simply passing on teachings; they must also enter into a life partnership with their students. True relationships from person to person in the Christian sense require each one of us to be an open book to all others to the extent their individual strength permits. All people should give themselves completely to their fellows to whatever extent the latter can receive them. This should be the basis of any modern hierarchy. Those higher up in the hierarchy must turn to those beneath them with whatever they have to give. What you practice, however, is anti-Christian and just the opposite. Whenever possible you arrange things so that intentions are kept in the dark and events are treated as if they had not happened. It is not enough to confess that like anyone else, you too can have a weak moment. Whenever we meet any other person (a person who in the Christian sense is just as necessary as ourselves), we do so as people who are imperfect in some way and still need to learn. This fact must not only be admitted, it must be constantly confirmed in our actions as human beings. It is truly necessary to seek out this interaction with our fellows, no matter how much an occultist of the old school may dread it. It is not enough to simply protest against blind admiration; we must also seek out objective criticism.

In communities of this sort, spiritual teachers must renounce all the help available to them in pre-Christian times for making students receptive to their teachings. Above all, they must renounce the unapproachable authority of the teacher filled with divine wisdom, who taught students in whom the I had not yet been born. They must also do without the complete isolation of teachers and pupils from all human relationships. The problem I am pointing out here did not exist for pre-Christian initiators. The individual I had not yet been born, and the divine being working through the teachers had the authority to intervene in the destiny of the students in ways otherwise reserved for karma. But as Christians, we must see modern initiates first and foremost as human beings, and our confidence in them depends on them not exercising any superhuman influence on our destiny.

For someone who is directing all his energies toward the renewal of occult teachings for our times, the temptation is great to reject the difficult tasks of Christian community and to artificially make his teaching easier by any of the means appropriate in earlier times. However, these things have become evil in our times, and it would be better nowadays for the teacher to remain invisible except when promulgating the doctrine than it would be for him to relate to his students as you are doing. Maintaining and strengthening the I of each student is much more important than passing on the teachings—after all, the teachings are directed to the individual I. Any restriction of the ego's rights must also result in the teachings taking root within the individual in the wrong way. Any dulling of individual discernment represents a grave danger to those striving for the spirit.

I will admit that in one sense, this kind of right living is infinitely more difficult for you than for others. Christian occultists must take up a challenge that other people will face only in times to come; that is, to both live and be a seer. They are in constant danger of falsely confusing these different planes and the laws that govern them. But they cannot escape this danger by refusing the challenge; for without being able to orient themselves according to the Christ impulse, they would still get these two planes mixed up in unjustified ways. When this happens in a meeting with a pupil, the pupil will be the first to experience the disastrous results, although they will soon revert to the teacher.

The community of the Grail is perhaps the only place where this challenge has been met satisfactorily to any extent. You yourself admit that you are not totally satisfied with what you have been able to tell us about the Grail, and you have clearly described your own difficulties in researching the Grail mysteries, although you call the new initiates “initiates of the Grail.” Perhaps the Grail will grant us salvation in this difficult hour.

Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time, as you were well aware. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being. I will refrain from explaining this statement in greater detail at this point because that would lead us too far afield.

It is still possible for me to greet you from a distance with all due respect as the bearer of great teachings, as I attempted to do on that evening. But I cannot submit to exchanging handshakes and friendly conversations with you as if nothing had happened, and especially not since I have clearly seen that these very handshakes and conversations are one of your chief means of exercising impermissible influences on your pupils and since I cannot share the opinion of a certain respected member that these things exist for the purpose of testing one's own strength in the face of outside influences.

To inform you of the need to avoid further personal contact is the purpose of this letter inasmuch as it concerns the two of us personally.

With regard to yourself, my purpose in writing to you about this very serious matter is to see accomplished the little I can do as your fellow human being, namely, to confront you with the fact that a person on the physical plane and using physical means has been able to point out to you the evil in your actions. You would be condemned to a shadowy existence if no one would turn to you like this. I hope that the fact that at least a few people nowadays are capable of recognizing your errors as such, remembering them and taking a stand against them, will be of help to you in the now necessary process of restructuring life in our spiritual movement. There are a few other members whom I can expect to understand the matters under discussion here, and I shall inform them of the contents of this letter.

It is imperative, however, that you begin to thoroughly transform the relationship between yourself and other members of the movement, as I have indicated. The objective purpose of my writing to you is to express this in the hopes that our movement will continue to work in accordance with the intentions of evolution. What would be the consequence if you were to reject this challenge? At least in certain instances, you have already forfeited an activity that must have been assigned to you by the masters of the white lodge—the personal instruction of individuals. For as I have already said, a profound mistrust in your treatment of individual human destinies is all too justified. I can also not imagine how an esoteric lesson could take place under the prevailing circumstances.

If you restricted yourself to disseminating ever more aspects of the teachings but let everything else continue as before, and if not enough members were able to work their way through to the necessary insights, the Society would degenerate into an exoteric association at best. There are already certain signs of this happening, alongside the tendencies to evil and to stupefaction. Either that or, if your followers become aware of their responsibility, they will have to bring about a complete separation between the teacher and what is taught, leaving you to discharge the duties of your holy office as a guilty and tormented Amfortas among hungry and sorrowful disciples.

I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell. But I have decided to send the letter anyway because the moment demands it.

When I wonder about the emotions with which you will receive this letter, the question of whether you will find your way to people with whom you can go through this experience and begin the necessary transformations weighs on me especially heavily. This is an area where, in this Christian age, the occultist as such is bound to fail and must be simply a human among humans, just as Christ Jesus had to experience things on Earth that he could not experience as a God. May you turn to this Spirit for help!

Heinrich Goesch
Gertrud Goesch

I have read you this letter, my friends, because it concerns each and every one of you just as much as it concerns me, and because it seems obvious to me that you must each decide for yourself to what extent you believe its claims correspond to actual practice within our Society. Otherwise people might think that I am afraid of this charge of contributing to the “stupefaction” of our members, and that I do not see you as sufficiently independent to leave it up to each one of you to judge the situation individually as you see fit.

However, you must realize that a letter like this cannot be seen in isolation; it is a symptom of what is going on in our Society. That is why I will take no part in discussing either this letter or anything that will need to be done as a result of it. It is clear that it must be left up to the members to decide what needs to be done and how to go about it, at least to begin with. In particular, I will refrain from saying anything about the passage claiming that promises have not been kept. If assessing this matter is left to individual discretion, each one of you will know how things stand, since each one of you must know what you have been promised and whether the promises were kept. However, I would expect and request the Society as such, or those members living in the neighborhood of the building in Dornach, to take a decided stand on this issue in the very near future.

I myself will not get involved in discussions on the matter at all. There are only a few things I want to tell you, and I ask you to take my remarks as what I have to say in connection with what I have just read, especially because it is obvious from other symptoms, not just from this letter, that many things I have said to members in lectures here in the course of the last few weeks and months have had no effect at all.

First of all, there is one thing I would like to emphasize. My friends, I cannot allow anyone to dictate how I conduct myself with members of the Society. It is up to me, and me alone, to decide how I find it necessary to relate to them. This is not to be taken as any kind of guideline for you; I am simply speaking for myself. I will not allow anyone to prescribe in any way how I should interact with members, inasmuch as this interaction has to do with the sins of omission I am supposed to have committed against them.

There is a very deep and weighty reason why this has to be the way it is. Not only this letter, but also many other things that have come up in the Society intermittently down through the years and with increasing frequency lately, show that many people simply do not make an effort to understand the kind of responsibility carried by someone communicating esoteric truths. It seems that many of our members don't want to try to understand what it sometimes takes to speak even a single sentence of that sort. With all the spiritual preparation it takes to give a lecture, it is simply not possible to sit with different little groups of members until two in the morning every night chatting about all kinds of useless and superfluous stuff. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated, nor are many other things that people seem to require of me and that then get counted as sins of omission. I need my time, and I need it in a totally different way than what people seem to want to understand. If I weren't using it the way I am, you would be hearing the same kind of stupid esoteric views from me that you can hear so much of in the rest of the world. So much for the sins of omission.

I also do not understand how the statement that my dealings with individual members and with groups of members are not Christian enough fits together with the complaint that I am exerting an undue influence over you by means of black magic whenever I take the liberty of shaking hands with one of you or involving you in conversation. I am certainly open to changing this practice if the Society will make its views on the subject known, because it is up to you, of course, whether you want to shake hands or get involved in a friendly conversation with me.

If this opinion becomes prevalent, it should be expressed, and then handshakes can, of course, be avoided in the future. For reasons I expressed earlier, I will not go into this any further, but there is still one thing I must mention because it is so very typical.

There is a passage in this letter that reads as follows: “Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being.” Let me just mention that on the Friday before Sunday the 25th, a member of our Society approached me with an inquiry from Mrs. Goesch with regard to her child, who had fallen down and gotten hurt somehow. I responded by saying that if she wished, I could take a look at what was wrong with the child. Shortly thereafter that person returned, bringing Mrs. Goesch and the child to me. On the following Sunday, here in the Schreinerei, I intervened in the inner being of Mrs. Goesch by shaking her hand and asking her how the child was doing.

My encounter with Mr. Goesch on the stairs leading up to the eurythmy room on Thursday, August 5, consisted of my responding to Mr. Goesch, who had asked me whether it was all right for the child (whom I had just seen standing down by the door) to take part in eurythmy exercises again, by saying that of course that was entirely up to the parents, since what the parents wanted was the only thing to consider in whether or not the child should come to eurythmy again. At that point, I also made the mistake of extending my hand to Mr. Goesch. These are the two instances in which I intervened in someone else's inner being by means of black magic.

Let me still comment on one more passage from the end of this letter: “I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe my insights—which I achieved through the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell.” I believe you all know who the so-called keeper of the seal is, and all I have to say about this is that the person in question has written a number of letters to both me and my wife in the past few months, including one Mrs. Steiner received only today.⁴ I will not discuss the matter of the “keeper of the seal” any further today; I just want to point out that her letters started coming around Christmas, mysteriously enough.

It may well be that I shall have to say something about this at some point, but I really do not want to do it today. I want you to come to a conclusion without being influenced by me. It is certainly almost impossible to be aware of the mysterious connection between this letter and the “keeper of the seal” and say nothing further about it, but today may not be the right time for that.

However, I do still want to mention that some years ago in fall I announced that due to certain embarrassing symptoms that had appeared within our Society, it seemed necessary to found a society of a more restricted sort.⁵ To begin with, I attempted to invest a number of long-term members close to me with certain offices, on the assumption that these people would become independently active in accordance with their new titles. At that time, I said that if anything came of it, the membership would hear about it by Epiphany. No one heard a thing, which means that the Society for Theosophical Art and Style does not exist. That is a perfectly justified assumption, since no one has heard anything to the contrary, and it is equally safe to assume that an announcement would have been made if my intentions had in fact been realized. The way my plans were received, however, made it impossible for this society to come about. It was simply an experiment.

My friends, I have often said that the Anthroposophical Society has to make sense as a society if it is to make sense at all. After all, other arrangements could be made for lecturing on esoteric teachings. I have also often pointed out that if certain signs and symptoms continue to appear in the Society, finding another form for it will become inevitable because the present form and present arrangements are not serving the purpose. I was trying to avoid certain things prevalent in the Theosophical Society when I founded the Anthroposophical Society, of which I do not want to be a member, since that is crucial to what I have to do for this spiritual movement.

Our Society also often comes under attack from outside, and of course these attacks are also directed at the Society's teacher and lecturer. This should lead our active members to take up the obligation to defend our cause, if they take the idea of our Society as seriously as they should. However, libelous pamphlets of the most despicable sort, containing the most unbelievable calumnies, have been appearing, and I leave it up to each one of you to judge whether everyone who could do something about them has taken the idea of the Society as seriously as would be necessary if the Society is to withstand these attacks from outside.

My friends, it is neither feasible nor possible for those who have an interest in the survival of the Anthroposophical Society to always first come to me to discuss what they ought to do in defense of me and our cause. That has to come to an end. If it does not, it would mean that it is actually true that people here are assigned their positions by me. I have to respect the independence of the members, even if that means, as it unfortunately does in many cases, that I have to deny them something. The fact of the matter is that the way things have been going, I could truly have done much more if I had not had to get involved in a lot of things that actually did not warrant my involvement. At least where the well-being of our Society is concerned, it is an absurdity to want to clear everything with me first. If what I want to do is to be accomplished on behalf of the Society, then please allow me the time to do it. The Society is wrongly conceived of if people are always turning to one individual; it must include taking personal initiative in what needs to be done on behalf of the Society.

For this reason, my friends, today's incident must be seen as an important and even crucial one. That is why I read you this letter, which is basically only an isolated symptom of something flaring up here, there, and everywhere. I will wait patiently to see what you, as members of the Society, will do about it. Meanwhile, I will continue to fulfill my obligations; the program will continue tomorrow as planned. But it goes without saying that how everything goes on after that will depend on the position the Society takes on what it has heard today. This is not something to be taken as an isolated case; it touches on many fundamental issues I have been pointing to for months in many discussions.⁶

When Rudolf Steiner had finished, a discussion took place; no stenographic record was kept. Some people must have spoken up in defense of the point of view expressed in Goesch's letter, because as one participant recollects, Rudolf Steiner left the room together with Marie Steiner, saying “I cannot have anything more to do with a society like this!”⁷ The great majority of those present must have been ashamed of this state of affairs, and on that same evening they composed this expression of confidence:

Dornach
August 21, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner:

As members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wish to express our righteous indignation and our feeling of shame that someone of mendacious and immoral outlook, as evident in Mr. Heinrich Goesch's letter, has dared to address you in a fashion dictated by the most despicable delusions of grandeur.

We must painfully reproach ourselves for not having understood how to prevent what has happened and for having proved unable thus far to create a circle of people in which the thoughts and feelings expressed in this letter could not have arisen.

We ask your forgiveness as our loved and respected teacher. We also ask that you not retract your confidence in us, or rather, that you trust in us again, because we are firmly resolved to better realize the ideal of the Anthroposophical Society and to be more aware of our responsibility in future.

It is a matter of course that, given the point of view they represent, we no longer wish to consider Miss Alice Sprengel, Mr. Heinrich Goesch, and Mrs. Gertrud Goesch as having a place in our midst.

We ask you, dear Dr. Steiner, to take our signatures as an assurance of our unconditional and constant trust and our sincerest gratitude.

signed by Michael Bauer and over 300 others⁸

This vote of confidence was a spontaneous and purely human expression of the signers' relationship to Rudolf Steiner. The facts of the case are addressed in Rudolf Steiner's own contributions. The professional comments of one Dr. Amann (Basel, September 14, 1915) shed some light on the difficulties the members faced in judging the situation:

Among the members, the prevailing opinion is still that Mr. Goesch is not mentally ill, he is only under a bad influence.

When someone has a fever or is drowsy, that is easy enough for anyone to diagnose. On the other hand, mental illness is extremely difficult for even an expert professional to diagnose except in extreme cases.

From people's comments, it is clear that they cannot understand that Mr. Goesch is mentally ill and that they have misconceptions about this type of illness. They believe the mentally ill are necessarily idiots who cannot write intelligently.

Idiots are feeble-minded; the sluggishness of their brain does not allow them to think at all. Unless some organic illness causes feeble-mindedness as a secondary condition, they are born retarded. Exactly the opposite is true of someone who is mentally ill; here, we are dealing with a melancholy frame of mind and clouded logic. This condition, in turn, must be distinguished from insanity—insane people are dangerous!

People who are mentally ill forfeit none of the quality of their intellect. Their intellectual capacity actually increases, because they are inexhaustible when it comes to intellectual work; in fact, they are intellectually active all day and all night. Their illness lies in the fact that they become obsessed and hypnotized with their own fixed trains of thought and are not susceptible to any criticism from outside. These people suffer in secret under the thoughts that plague them until they have carried them to term and can present them to the public. The urge to be visibly productive and important is constantly present in them.

Rudolf Steiner continued in the same vein on the following evening, August 22, 1915, discussing the case further.

• 1. Lecture of August 20, 1915, Dornach, entitled “Episodische Betrachtungen fiber Raum, Zeit, Bewegung” (“Some Observations on Space, Time, and Movement”), in Der Wert des Denkens far eine den Menschen befriedigende Weltanschauung. Das Verhältnis der Geisteswissenschaft zur Naturwissenschaft (“Thinking's Value for a Humanly Satisfying World View: The Relationship of Spiritual Science to Natural Science”), GA 164, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This lecture has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges” (“Thoughts during the Time of War”), essay of July 5, 1915, in Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage: Schriften und Aufsätze 1915–1921 (“On the Threefolding of the Social Organism and on the Current Situation: Essays and Articles 1915–1921”), GA 24, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1982). [Not available in English—Translator.]
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 4. See p. 115 in this volume.
• 5. Address in Berlin, December 15, 1911, in Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919 (“On the History and Contents of the First Class of the Esoteric School, 1904–1919”), GA 264, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This volume has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 6. Rudolf Steiner may well have been referring to his description of different types of clairvoyance, and especially the difference between “head clairvoyance” and “gut clairvoyance.” Cf. the lecture series Wege der Geistigen Erkenntniss und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (“Paths to Spiritual Knowledge and Renewal of Art Philosophy”), GA 161, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1980), and Kunst- und Lebensfragen im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft (“Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science”), GA 162, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1985). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator]
• 7. Hilde Boos-Hamburger in Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland (“News about the Anthroposophical Work in Germany”), Vol 17, no. 1, Easter 1963.
• 8. Michael Bauer, 1871–1929, leader of the Albrecht Diirer Branch in Nurnberg. He was a member of the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society from 1913 until his retirement for health reasons in 1921.

with leading German members and Rudolf Steiner

Minutes by Karl Schubert

Teacher Rudolf Meyer, Berlin, asks whether it would be right to hold the planned international conference in Berlin. He asks Dr. Steiner for guidelines.

Dr. Steiner: Is it necessary that we allow a change to occur through the catastrophe, other than that we are even more zealous than we were? I think this misfortune is something that happened independently of us, so we don't need to think about how we should do things differently than we have done so far. The only question that arises is: how will the building be rebuilt? I cannot imagine that the working method outside should be different.

Rudolf Meyer asks whether the congress should be postponed.

Dr. Steiner: The question is whether there is a possibility of achieving something on an international scale. It is questionable whether the international aspect can have any great significance in Berlin. I believe that a congress in Berlin will not be international. Do you have reasons for this other than financial ones? Not many people will come to Berlin from the western and southern countries; it is also not certain whether many people will come from Austria. Therefore, I ask: Do you have a particular interest in the Berlin congress having a truly international character?

Rudolf Meyer answers that Goethe represented a supranational soul and spiritual life.

Dr. Steiner: You won't achieve this by fostering a better understanding of Goethe in Berlin. You'd be better off going somewhere else. Not Berlin. If you talk about it in Berlin, it's likely to have the opposite of the desired effect. Goethe is not a reason to hold an international congress in Berlin. Would the English be receptive if they were invited to Berlin? If you say in Berlin that Goethe is a great man, people will not tolerate it. But if you could say it in Paris! Formally, you can make the congress international, but it would be good not to count on it working. Whether it is a congress or something else is not the point. Such a gathering, if it grasps its task correctly, could be extraordinarily important for Germany, because the Germans have every reason to educate themselves a little. In the 'name' one can allow the internationality to appear; it will hardly be possible to translate this into reality.

Dr. Unger says a few things that are not noted.

Rudolf Meyer: The building in Dornach is going ahead. The German friends will economize in order to make the [mystery] plays possible!

Dr. Steiner: I do not think it is desirable for our German friends to save, because it does not help. No matter how much they save, it means little in Dornach, while it may mean something in Berlin. If the Germans save 30,000,000 marks, that is 17,000 francs.

Dr. Unger: Perhaps we could hold a conference elsewhere.

Dr. Steiner: We lack the strength in the western countries. In Germany we have the personalities, but the conditions are terrible. We hardly have the strength for the western countries that would enable us to hold a conference. The building up of Dornach is much more concrete. The Anthroposophical Society in the western countries needs to be built up before one can think of doing anything. Whether it is financially possible or not, I do not know. A guarantee fund through a collection is a questionable matter. If it does not remain a guarantee fund, it is just a questionable matter. Is it the case that not enough people will come to Berlin in Germany?

Dr. Kolisko: It is hardly possible financially.

Dr. Steiner: If that is the case, then it is difficult to hold a comprehensive conference. Emil Leinhas: Perhaps a conference as a School of Spiritual Science event?

The following spoke: Mrs. Eljakim and Dr. Stein (not noted).

Dr. Steiner: What we might face here is an attempt to actually establish what anthroposophy is in the world. This would consist of the three courses, warmth, optics and astronomy, being further elaborated and this work being made available. Things have developed to such an extent that these courses have been locked away, so that now people are approaching me from all sides and want me to give them permission to read these courses. It would do the necessary work on them. That was intended from the beginning. Things that are defective show themselves in symptoms. For example, a paper by Theberath was announced at a public conference. Theberath did not appear. These things are not acceptable, otherwise the verdict is: What do they want to do with science!

Dr. Stein: You shouldn't have a congress; you have to work first!

Dr. Steiner: But we are working! We have counted how many scientists we have. Surely something very nice can be worked out from that. I have only counted those who are in some position with us. Those who have the opportunity to work experimentally with us have been counted.

Dr. Kolisko: The congress is impossible for financial reasons.

Dr. von Heydebrand: It is difficult to speak publicly in Prussia about 'international' matters.

Rudolf Meyer: It is not in the spirit of our friends in Berlin to hold a congress without Dr. Steiner.

Albert Steffen: There is concern about the lack of security and the possibility of riots. I have been asked to take this into consideration.

Dr. Steiner: This is only a temporary situation. But for me the first question is this: if I give lectures in Germany now, there is such a commotion that the lectures would stop being attended altogether for ever. Naturally, various things have been considered; I myself can do nothing but take aim at the noise. But that is something that will not suffice; above all, because all possible currents are mixed up. One must believe that under the present circumstances, the opposition to anthroposophy will increase immeasurably if things continue like this. There could be no clearer sign of the growth of the opposition than the burning of this building. The opposition grows with each passing week.

The inner consolidation and positivization of the Society would be necessary. It is not enough to criticize the mischief that is happening outside. If one continues to do so, the opposition will only grow. All those ventures that aim to show our opponents their own face only make the opposition more fierce. The opposition has grown because we have made many enemies in response to mere criticism. As long as we do not succeed in consolidating society, these conditions will not change.

Dr. Hahn speaks (not noted).

Dr. Steiner: I have given specific examples of this. They show that it is necessary to intensify the reception of positive anthroposophical work within our society. Things are happening in our society that, if they happened elsewhere, would actually establish something far-reaching: with us, they are allowed to pass by. But if things are treated the way this positive work has been treated, then there is no understanding within our society for what I call the inner consolidation of our society. What has been achieved in society must be recognized by society. Otherwise, it is no wonder that conditions develop as they have developed. We are going around the bush. We have to call a spade a spade!

In principle, a congress in Stockholm, Copenhagen or Kr istiania (Oslo) would be a good thing for anthroposophy, from a purely theoretical point of view. But the question is whether this is financially desirable at the moment, given the current circumstances, when we need to take care of the structure.

However, Dr. von Heydebrand has raised an important question. This question has led me to say that we cannot approach the matter from the rear. It was different when the Anthroposophical Society had a different position. Now we have to take the defense against our opponents seriously; we have to understand that. This understanding is not there. And then one might hear talk about whether something new is needed. One can always talk about what is needed. But one does not think of taking this as an important question, that Theberath announces a lecture and then does not appear. I also mentioned the treatment of Mrs. Kolisko's work. It is not possible to let things go, not to take care of things! This is how we put the movement on a dead track. By dealing with the atomic question, for example, we are putting the matter on a dead track.

The opposition does not slumber. The only way to deal with it is through the positive achievements of society. The fact that scientists have emerged in recent years means that society must begin with what wants to continue outwardly. But if we go about it in such a way that we do not accommodate our own work, we will never consolidate society. It is necessary to create conditions in society itself that make it possible for achievements to support each other. The situation with the Koliskoschen brochure is ruining society.

Edited by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden P.T. General Secretary of the Theosophical Society in Germany.

The fact that this memorandum forces me to write the following saddens me. For I would prefer to respond to the fierce attacks that its “publisher” (sic) has printed against me only with the compassion that I have for their author. There are indeed attacks – and this “memorandum” is truly proof of this – that are so absurd, that lack all documentation, that the matter itself, not just the temperament and attitude of the attacked party, can push all other feelings aside, except that of compassion. In the matter at hand, however, I am not defending my person, but a cause. And this imposes on me the obligation to suppress my personal feelings. It would truly not do them justice to let Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden speak against Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden in the way I will have to do. I would have liked to leave the following statements by this man in my archives, where a large number of them have been for several years. One only refers to such things when the attacker forces one to do so, as Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden forces me to do in this case. Forced by him, I must bring the following to the notice.

On page 7 of this memorandum – the first one to be considered for the text – Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes: “Meanwhile, a new association, ‘the Anthroposophical Society’, has emerged from the members of this earlier German Section. This was a completely natural development of the circumstances, since in the last seven years the attitude and aspirations in the section had become so completely different from the essence and program of the Theosophical Movement. This community followed different spiritual leaders than those in whose spirit the Theosophical Society was founded decades ago and is still led. The meaning and purpose of the Theosophical Society are now fundamentally in question here. However, in Germany, no one is better able to judge this and provide information than the editor of this

On pages 73 and 74 of his ‘Denkschrift’ Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden has printed the programmatic sentences of an “Undogmatic Association” that he had to found with a task that the final sentences of this program express in the following way: “Its only purpose is to ensure that the original meaning of the Theosophical Society is also expressed again in Germany within the organization as it was created by the founders of the Society.” According to the draft of the program that I have, this “Undogmatic Association” was founded in August 1912 by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden and Mr. J.H. Cordes.

The whole situation forces one to assume that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden was of the opinion in August 1912 that the German Section of the Theosophical Society, founded in October 1902, had gradually developed into a body that did not express the “original meaning of the Theosophical Society,” about which no one was better able to provide “information” than he was.

On page 8 of the “Denkschrift” published by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, we read: “The following factual material on the prehistory and the course of the present separation of the Anthroposophical Society is given here.” Here, however, the “factual material” given in the “memorandum” must be contrasted with another. It should then be left to the reader to form an opinion about this “memorandum”. He could truly, if he only reads this memorandum, form the opinion that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had to watch how the “German Section of the Theosophical Society”, founded in 1902, thoroughly misunderstood the meaning and purpose of this society, even turning it into its opposite, so that he, who is able to “judge and provide information” about this “meaning and purpose”, felt compelled to take care of this “meaning and purpose” in August 1912 by founding an “Undogmatic Association”; yes, that he even felt compelled to found a better German Section in February 1913, under the presidency of Annie Besant. purpose» by founding an «Undogmatic Association»; yes, that he even felt compelled to join President Annie Besant in February 1913 to found a better German Section, after she had excluded the German Section founded in 1902 from the Theosophical Society because of its conduct, which allegedly went against the purpose of the Theosophical Society. Anyone who formed this opinion could then ask: Why did the German section, founded in 1902, not properly integrate into the Theosophical Society and then continue to act in accordance with the “purpose and meaning” of that society? It would have been enough to ask Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden about this “meaning and purpose”, since, according to the quoted statement that he had printed in the “memorandum” that he “published”, he knew it exactly. A reader who might come across this question must undoubtedly be interested to know whether the General Secretary of the German Section had not heard anything from Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden about the “meaning and purpose” of the Society in 1902, since he had, after all, Hübbe-Schleiden, so thoroughly mismanaged this section that the man who is best qualified to judge the “meaning and purpose” of this in Germany feels compelled to return the matter, which has gone so badly astray, to the right track.

Now, I will not object if Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden boasts that he can provide better information than anyone else about the “meaning and purpose” of the Theosophical Society, that he worked with Olcott and Blavatsky and that he “introduced the entire Theosophical movement to Germany” thirty years ago. Well – one should at least believe it – if Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden is currently having this printed, then he would have to admit that anyone who, because they were led to do so by the circumstances at the time, became the General Secretary when the German section of this society was founded, would not have acted disloyally towards Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden in 1902 if they had turned to Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden for such “information”. This “someone” could have been me, for example. Suppose I had asked Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, who claimed in 1913 that no one was as capable as he was of providing information about these matters, for this information on various occasions in 1902. At any rate, I received such “information” from him on repeated occasions at the time. I will not talk about verbal information now. I will only cite those that are contained in letters that are still available.

On August 15, 1902, a passage in a letter from Dr. Hübbe-Schleidens (who “was almost the only one able to provide information about these matters”) read: “Only now do you feel the awkwardness and even hopelessness of the prospects for the use of our old Theosophical Society within the entire Theosophical movement in Germany. Almost all the human material that we have acquired as members so far is not only useless, but an almost insurmountable obstacle. The spirit of Theosophy, as understood by H.P.B. and Annie Besant, is also (here follows the name of a man who was in the camp of the opponents of the Theosophical Society founded by Olcott and Blavatsky) and his people so completely and adequately represented that we are quite superfluous as “Theosophists” alongside them. Olcott's nature and attitude is essentially that of... and... (here are two names for men who were fierce opponents of Dr. Hübbe-Schleidens); and that is why I have always voted not to found a section of our Theosophical Society alongside the Leipzig movement, but to let the old Theosophical Society here in Germany peter out, since its achievements are spiritually and organizationally incapable.

But since no one except... (here is the name of a long-time friend, Dr. Hübbe-Schleidens) and the Munich group so far shares my view, I passively let them do as they please. I myself will hardly ever publicly represent the spiritual movement I serve under the name Theosophy and Theosophical Society. For me, quite different names will arise out of the matter itself. Nevertheless, I am glad to try to serve the Theosophical Movement as it has developed, and in a general way the little pamphlet “Serve the Eternal!” does that. In the Leipzig Society there will be hundreds who will read it and like it. In our Society it will be simply thrown into the corner by... (again the names of the two opponents Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden) and their followers will simply be thrown into the corner. But new interested parties will rather turn to this school of thought if it is not tainted by the bad smell of lies and deception, dishonesty and superficiality, lack of judgment and lack of education...

On August 18, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden again writes the following “information”: “I fully agree with you that our Theosophical movement has to go far beyond H.P.B. and Annie Besant. Whether this will still be possible here in Germany under the catchwords Theosophy and Theosophical Society, I doubt very much...

On August 21, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden gave this “information”: “I can only repeat to you that I consider this section formation to be completely irrelevant. It may provide you personally with a foundation; (here Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden adds the marginal note: “Only from this point of view do I approve the founding of the Section”), but factually and intellectually it is only an obstacle for you. A movement of members, which we can use for spiritual life, is to be made first. Such members must first be found. Whether this will still be possible at all under the slogans Theosophy and Theos. Society? I do not think it is possible. But try it!...

On September 26, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote the following “information” – which “nobody could provide as well” as he could: “First of all, you (the letter writer meant me, Rudolf Steiner) must be given a free hand and the opportunity to bring together a few communities without the hopelessly compromised buzzwords, with which one might be able to found a section later.”

On September 26, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden provided the following information: “Moreover, it is my often-expressed opinion that Theosophy, as Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater understand it, is fully and adequately represented by the Hartmannians.... But that is not all, and in any case, these aspects are not even the most important. What I consider most important is the fact that the Theosophical movement, as it is currently practiced, has absolutely no right to exist in modern and future intellectual culture. Not only is there a lack of scientific justification, but what is called Theosophy today is even hostile to any scientific justification. This is the only point of view in which our... (the names of the two opponents Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden and associates with... (the names of opponents of the Theosophical Society, to which Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden belonged) and their followers. Any amount of energy that you throw into a movement that calls itself 'Theosophy or 'Theosophical Society is a shameful waste of your (actually I am meant, Rudolf Steiner) living spiritual power. You are thereby committing a sin against the Holy Spirit, because your inner consciousness tells you that what today calls itself 'Theosophy' and 'Theosophical Society' is culturally contrary and hostile. It is the opposite of the spirit that you express in your 'Christianity' (especially p. 1.)...

On September 30, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden provided the following “information” (which even “nobody” could not have provided better): “Furthermore, it seems to me from your letter that you actually have the desire or are willing to bind the Section, as it will now be formed, to your legs as a block...”

Now, I do not want to talk here about the reasons that led me to believe that the founding of the German Section was both right and necessary at the time. Perhaps I can do so on another occasion. (This can also be found in my previously given descriptions.) I will only add to the above “information” provided by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, who was better qualified to provide it than anyone else, that before the constituent general assembly of the German Section in October 1902, I gave a lecture at the Berlin Giordano Bruno League in which I explained why I believe a Theosophical movement is necessary in our time, what I found insufficient in what is called such a movement, and how I envision this movement. Whether I have ever deviated from what I then characterized as a program to this day, I believe I can expose myself to the strictest judgment of those who understand.

What did the man (Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden) write, who, as the “Denkschrift” claims, hardly needed to know, about the message I gave him about this lecture? On October 15, 1902, he wrote: “Your letter of the day before yesterday gave me great pleasure in many ways. Most of all, I am refreshed by your optimistic enthusiasm; if the success of such gatherings had no other purpose than to maintain this enthusiasm and the resulting blossoming of fresh energy, that would be enough. But the success will have a broader impact... Whether or that such successes can uplift our society and bring it better members, I doubt and I also consider quite irrelevant. I remain very decided in my advice - especially at the beginning or even in your program of the Theosophical Society to talk, and I also advise “Theosophy in a very explicit way always only in the sense of Eckhart, James. Böhme and Fichte to use.”

And regarding whether I was the appropriate person to carry out the planned work, the man who was better qualified than anyone provided the information (in the same letter dated October 15, 1902): “But you are the instrument now. (I, Rudolf Steiner, am really meant). Your person is the center. Everything must revolve around your person. It is you who now serve publicly, as H.P.B. served, as Annie Besant serves. But just as H.P.B. did not become what she was and achieved through society, so you should first gain an unshakable position in the spiritual life of our German culture. Until then, you cannot do anything for society, and society will only paralyze your progress and your wings. But you know: I wish you all blessings! ...

Thus the man who, more than anyone, did not need to know, provided information about the value of the Theosophical Society before the Section was founded. But perhaps someone might object that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden only wanted this to be understood in relation to what was then called “Theosophy” and “Theosophical Society” in Germany. Now, although this objection is already refuted by the content of the above “information”, some unambiguous “information” from Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden about the entire Theosophical Society will be given here.

On April 17, 1903, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden gives the following “information”: “There is nothing more alien and disharmonious to the mystical disposition of the German mind than the Anglo-American advertising with which our movement is conducted in the world...”

On September 26, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had already given me the “information” in a letter about his involvement in the Theosophical Society as a whole up to that time: “For me, I conclude this old period by addressing the three articles ”Unification as a Warning to the Old (English-speaking and thinking) Theosophical Society. Gesellschaft richte. Da der Verhetzungs-Geist unter diesen ebenso groß ist wie bei ... und ... (folgen wieder die Namen der beiden deutschen Gegner Dr. Hübbe-Schleidens), so ist dieser Mahnruf ganz vergeblich. Aber er muss ergehen! Die Leute sollen nicht sagen, sie seien nicht zur rechten Zeit gewarnt worden.

On page 63 of the “Denkschrift” Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes: “When Dr. Steiner was General Secretary. Dr. Steiner has proceeded thoroughly in his complaints. He has also reached very far back. How Dr. Steiner can answer to his conscience (according to the protocol on page 5) for saying that I “caused him difficulties at the beginning of the founding of the section” is incomprehensible to me. Does Dr. Steiner really believe that he could have become General Secretary without my help? Does he no longer remember that Mr. Rich. Bresch suggested the founding of the section and was to become General Secretary, that there were also two other candidates in succession, and that when this proved impossible, it was I who proposed Dr. Steiner for the post? Was he not still an opponent of the Theosophical Society in January 1902? Even in this, his pre-Theosophical period, Dr. Steiner was repeatedly my guest in Döhren near Hannover. I knew that he had a very low opinion of the Theosophical Society at the time; persuasion is not my thing.

I still remember quite well that these sentences turn things around, as they happened at the time; but this time I want to refrain from memories of oral conversations and limit myself to what can be proven in writing.

Perhaps it will be understandable to some people that in February 1913 I was able to say that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden “had already experienced difficulties at the beginning of the founding of the Section,” if they consider the above-mentioned “information.” I also leave it to others to judge whether the “very low opinion” that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had of the Theosophical Society at the time - according to the above “information” - could easily be surpassed by someone. But let me quote a few more reflections on the way Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden viewed the founding of the Section at the time, so that everyone can judge how right I was to speak of such 'difficulties'.

On September 26, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “We cannot establish a section now. I will not travel to Berlin to found a section in which somehow the spirit of... can have its say. (The names of Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's two German opponents are again given.) Hopefully Mrs. A.B. (Annie Besant is meant) does not...»

On September 30, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: «Well, that the section can be founded if we want it at all costs, that is almost self-evident. So then I resign with my opinion and, as always, I am of course happy to help. But I will not take responsibility for anything. I believe I have done my duty by advising against it.

In a letter dated September 26, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleidens adds the following opinion: “I consider it... foolishness – no, a lie – to found a German Section. With four people, as... you cannot establish a section alone, but even less so when we are confronted by a whole mass of unjudicious and hateful brawlers. Any community, whatever it may call itself, in which elements like... come into play, even if only incidentally, will always be the opposite of what I consider Theosophy.

Well, perhaps some people do find that these sentences express some of what is meant by the “difficulties that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden caused even before the constituent assembly of the German Section”. On October 20, 1902, the Section was formally founded; and the quoted sentences by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden reflect the events of September 1902.

Now, as for my opposition to Theosophy at that time! “In January 1902,” the “Denkschrift” writes, Dr. Steiner was “an opponent of the Theosophical Society”. There is one person who was very close to the circle, and Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's words in the memorandum are well-founded: “The Count and Countess of Brockdorff deserve credit for regularly hosting evenings where all spiritually-inclined groups could express themselves.” (Denkschrift p. 9. I fully subscribe to this). This personality wrote me the following on February 1, 1902, from Colombo – that is, at the time when the “Denkschrift” places my opposition: “I have just read a very appreciative article by Bertram Keightley in the January 15 issue of the Theosophical Review about your new book 'Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life', etc. It is on pages 45f.... I am so pleased that the English (meaning the English Theosophists of the time) are emphasizing your book appreciatively, and especially that they are doing it in this way, they who otherwise always say, “Germany is not yet ripe” or “what good can come from Germany”. In my opinion, you have really shown the English that you are not only ready, but that you, or let's rather say, the German mystics, and you with your understanding of them, are far ahead of the English (meaning the English theosophists of the time). I myself was present at the birth of your book. At first you spoke to us as a teacher speaks to his pupils, and I felt far more sympathy and understanding in what you said than in the erudition in Adyar. The hours we spent with you in the library were of more profit to me than the artful, learned Mrs. Besants, whose skill and knowledge I admired in amazement, but my heart has only found its rightful place with you; and true knowledge, intuition, has its seat in the heart and only from there does it affect the brain. All the others want to affect heart and mind from the brain...

There are many more members of the Theosophical Society here, and indeed learned members, but I believe that the Society as such has outlived itself; the best comes from people who are not members on paper, but who, without a diploma from Adyar or London, are far closer to the truth...

Now I must also ask the reader to compare the “information” provided by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden before the section justification with the sentence that he $. 64 of the “Denkschrift”: “But did I not also work intensively for Dr. Steiner before the section was founded? Was not my ‘Diene dem Ewigen’ written in complete harmony with him?”

But I would like to add the following to this: Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden is the author of the book “Diene dem Ewigen”. I do not know what the sentence is supposed to mean: “Was not my ‘Diene dem Ewigen’ written entirely in harmony with him,” if this sentence in the “Denkschrift” follows on from the other: “But did I not also work intensively for Dr. Steiner before the Section was founded?” Let the reader judge who worked for whom at that time, since it was not I, but Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden who published the writing 'Diene dem Ewigen' (Serve the Eternal).

On August 14, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes to me: 'Today I am returning to the correction sent to you. Since I would like to make every sentence in the writing (Serve the Eternal!) easy for you to understand in terms of form and content, I am giving you here the changes to the appendix of the last paragraph of the introduction, in which I finally quote Julius Sturm as an example (because verses are better than prose at this point). I am writing this new version on the attached sheet. If you have already sent me the beginning of the correction when you receive this letter, I would ask you to send me your objections to this addition on a postcard, for example, in case you do not agree with it or with any of the details.

In the same letter, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes: “We have agreed that you will send your galley proofs to me here, not directly to the printers.”

On August 18, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes to me with reference to “Diene dem Ewigen” (Serve the Eternal): “I fully agree with everything you wrote to me on the 15th and 16th. I gratefully accept your corrections of my text and have included them almost word for word; I consider them to be very valuable.

Now all this could have remained dormant in my archive if the “Denkschrift” had not forced me to bring the matter to light. For it shows what happened at that time. Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote a paper; I read the corrections and made “improvements” - so he says - which he finds “very valuable” - so he says. Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden calls this, he says, he worked “intensively for Dr. Steiner”.

Now someone might still think that the “information” that no one could provide as well as Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden only related to external matters of the Society; but he would have had reservations about my direction regarding the “meaning and purpose” of the inner life of the Theosophical movement even then.

Again, he may provide information about this himself.

On August 18, 1902, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “We should anxiously avoid the appearance of being associated with phenomenal spiritualism. In fact, this is the case with Besant and Leadbeater, as well as with HPB and the whole TS. However, I am particularly unsympathetic to occultism and even more so to spiritualism. We should cut the ties that bind us.” (Of course, this refers to what Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden understood by occultism at the time.)

If anyone might think that I was critical of Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden because of my position on Haeckel, then he too may be heard on the matter. In the same letter of August 18, 1902, he wrote to me: “And now, above all, my warmest thanks for the dedication of your Haeckel writing! (What is meant is my writing ‘Haeckel and his opponents’)... it is very dear to me to own the writing. It must be cited at the end of note 8 of our (sic. meant is “Serve the Eternal) writing behind Prof. Dr. Raph. v. Koebers like-minded writing ‘Faeckel no materialist’. I myself have always had the greatest sympathy and admiration for Haeckel. After 100 years, no one will remember Virchow, and the same will be true of Haeckel after 1000 years, and even more so of Darwin (unless German intellectual culture were to perish completely, which is not unlikely).” This comment comes from Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden himself.

And on September 26, 1902 (24 days before the formal founding of the German Section), Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “With this - meaning my ‘Christianity as Mystical Fact’ - you - meaning me, Rudolf Steiner - have created a program with which you can pave the way for a broad, very broad future. In this direction, very broad and clear perspectives have since been opened up for me as well. ... Your 'Christianity' is the beginning of a new epoch for us. My 'Serve the Eternal' is nothing but a superfluous and almost worthless conclusion to an old period that we have overcome. It is completely unusable because it contains the keywords 'Theosophy' and 'Theosophical Society'. No serious, truly educated person today can take anything seriously that is associated with what is called in Germany today and will be called in the future."

On page 11 of the “memorandum” published by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, we read: “Dr. Steiner's followers usually object to the statements made in this ‘memorandum’: ‘But Dr. Steiner says the opposite!’ But that is precisely the point. It is not necessary here to recall the well-known after-effects of mental suggestion and to point out its authoritative power. Nor is it the question here to discuss in more detail whether only one human will is at work. No amount of factual material will help anyone who believes in human infallibility. But everyone can judge for themselves what the facts really are by honestly and thoroughly examining the information from both sides. Audiatur et altera pars!” Now, in the case of Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, it truly seems that the “other part” can be heard on its own, for one could believe that even without Dr. Steiner saying “the opposite”, any unbiased reader could form an unbiased judgment without the “known after-effects of psychic suggestion”.

Once again, I have to add a few comments here. The German Section was founded in 1902 for reasons that would take us too far afield to discuss today, despite the “information” provided by the man who “introduced the entire Theosophical movement to Germany”. However, I, who was asked to take over the General Secretariat, had to take this introduction as a given fact at the time. For it was and is my opinion that in similar cases one must always reckon with such presuppositions. Among these presuppositions was the fact that a number of persons who were then closely connected with the Theosophical movement looked upon Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden as the man he is characterized as being again on pages 7 and 8 of his “Denkschrift.” I behaved towards him in accordance with this assumption. Yes, at first I completely suppressed my own opinion of him and allowed a feeling to speak within me that one might have towards the initiator of the Theosophical movement in Germany. Even today, people who could know about it are still able to tell of how I spoke out on his behalf and to quote me as saying so. And even if there are those who might reproach me for having overestimated Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, I will not go into that further. What I can assert, however, is that I never based my actions and measures within the Theosophical movement on Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's judgment. This can be seen from the fact that I allowed myself to be made General Secretary of the section to be founded, despite Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's “information”.

But how he judged the reasons for my relationship to the Theosophical movement may be seen from his own words. On April 17, 1903, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “I only differ from you in opinion with regard to the intention and purpose of the Theosophical movement. You and all the other present-day representatives want to derive spiritual advantage and benefit from this movement for themselves and as many other individuals as possible. I consider this to be very good and very justified, but only as a secondary benefit. I consider the main task of our movement to be making our worldview a factor in the intellectual life of our European culture, so that in 3000 years, when we are involved again, we can succeed in replacing today's “Christian” worldview with ours. In place of Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's letter, in which this saying of his appears, I wrote a few words (in pencil) at the time. Today, reading these words of mine, I can see from them again how far Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden was then from understanding what I had in mind. I wrote in the margin: “This is precisely the fundamentally false premise that causes all misunderstandings. Not benefit and not advantage, but necessary fulfillment of a clearly recognized karma!!! For me, the difference was clear when I saw that my insinuations to that effect in Berlin fell on no fertile soil and were understood only by... (followed by the name of a person close to me). First of all, we should also serve those readers who, without 'the well-known after-effects of psychic suggestion', want to form an independent opinion on the question of whether Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's opinion of Dr. Steiner's leadership of the German Section of the Theosophical Society changed very soon after this man, who is in a better position than almost anyone else to judge, saw how the General Secretary perceives the movement. It could be, one might say, that the rehashing of old letters says nothing in the face of Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's thoroughly changed opinion, based on his experience with Dr. Steiner. And if one reads on page 65 of the Hübbe-Schleiden's “memoir” the following words, it could indeed seem that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had soon changed his opinion about Steiner, after he had realized the impossible attitude of the latter. These words are found on page 65 of the “Denkschrift” and read: “I resigned (namely from the board of the German Section, Dr. H.-Schl. means) because I no longer wanted to be responsible for the school of thought represented in the Section.” Someone might now believe that this “school of thought” represented in the Section refers to a deviation from the meaning and purpose of the Society, for which Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had to stand up for again through the “memorandum” he “published”, because page 12 of this “memorandum” reads: “The statutes created for the section in 1902 were fully in line with the constitution of the entire society. In the early years, the section also worked entirely in line with the program of the society.”

Now on January 1, 1906, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “On this New Year's Day, I cannot refrain from expressing to you with all my heart... our most sincere wishes for the greatest possible success of our movement during this year. This is naturally combined with the warmest wishes for you personally and for your success in leading this our movement. You know, of course, that in my opinion the success for our school of thought, which we all desire as much as you do, can only be found in a slightly different approach than the one I have been pursuing for 22 years in this endeavor, and which you have been trying for three years now.” Let others judge the way I proceed; let Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's description of his approach be compared with the statements in the “Denkschrift” without prejudice.

On February 28, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote in a letter to me: “In the interest of our Theosophical movement, everything must, of course, be done in agreement with you.” This sentence refers to a specific project, but it seems to me that it applies all the more, since there would have been nothing wrong with this particular project being handled without any “agreement” with me.

On July 4, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “Mrs. Besant has appointed me as the representative of the Order of the Star in the East for Germany, without first asking me (side note from Dr. H.-Schls: ‘When I applied for membership, it was of course understood that I was willing to help’). After considering the enormous difficulties of all kinds that this entails for me, I have accepted responsibility for this task. ... The reason why I had applied for membership of the order is that the attitude and organization expressed in its prospectus correspond exactly to my entire preliminary development... since my association with the Theosophical Society in 1884. The minimal organization avoids all the drawbacks that have always been a hindrance to me in this society; and it essentially corresponds to the establishment of my 'Theosophical Association' 1892-94 in Berlin. ... As soon as I read the first mention of the order in Vollrath's 'Theosophy', it seemed to me an imminent danger that this movement, which exists alongside the Theosophical Society, could be turned by other parties against the Theosophical Society that you so masterfully lead in Germany, against you and against the Rosicrucians. You would probably feel neither affected nor impaired by this, any more than you would by the Hartmann Society or the Tingley Society. But it seemed and seems certain to me that if I had refused the office conferred upon me, Dr. Franz Hartmann would have been put in my place. Then the witch hunt in Germany would come to a boil again; and – whatever you may think about it – this seems very undesirable to me, and I would not want to bear the responsibility for it by avoiding taking on this very difficult, embarrassing office. The 'brotherhood' of the Theosophical Society in Germany already has too bad a reputation for personal squabbling.” At a later point in this letter, it says: “This acceptance of all forms of religion, with full equality for each cultural form or race for which it was given, is the fundamental purpose of the Theosophical Society. This is what particularly appealed to me when I joined the Society 27 years ago, and it is something I find congenial. In this, there can be no difference between you and Mrs. Besant. You have often spoken of this breadth of mind, and you would not otherwise lead the Theosophical Society."

It will surely not be an invocation of the “well-known after-effect of psychic suggestion” if the date of this passage by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden is referred to again. It is July 4, 1911. Compare this with what Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden said in his lecture “The Message of Peace,” delivered in Hanover on June 19, 1912 (the lecture was published in print). In it he says: “It is not tolerant, it is un-Theosophical, to think: 'The other person may believe what he wants; I will not get involved with him in discussing the differences of opinion. He may accept my views if he wants to know the truth; but he must accept my views on trust. All his counter-arguments have no value for me; I regard them a priori as errors. I am not concerned with research; I follow only a ready-made revelation and only my present understanding of this revelation.” If someone were to say that these sentences do not apply to Dr. Steiner at all, then the thought must be considered whether a reader of the “Message of Peace” will not apply them to him, who reads on page 11 of this “Message of Peace”: “These are all appropriate, tried and tested measures; and they actually fulfill the purpose in our 'German Section', as well as in every church or sect, to protect their wisdom...” “The result is also that in Germany there are hardly any branch societies of our section left in which other widely held views can be presented that are not exactly these peculiar 'spiritual treasures'. All this, of course, contradicts the first compelling principle of the theosophical movement and the general statutes of our society."

Thus spoke Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden on June 19, 1912, not even a year after he had written to me (on July 4, 1911): “It seemed to me an impending danger... that this movement, existing alongside the Theosophical Society, could be turned by other hands against the Theosophical movement so masterfully directed by you in Germany, against you and against Rosicrucianism. And after he paid me the compliment on the same day (July 4, 1911): “You have often expressed this breadth of mind, and otherwise you would not lead the Theosophical Society,” he says - not quite a year later - the above sentences of his “Message of Peace.” —

In connection with all this, it must be discussed what Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, in a spirit of love and brotherhood, had printed on $. 72 of the “memorandum” he “published”. There we read: “Dr. Steiner continued his fierce accusations in the following sentences (protocol $. 7 and 8): Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden circulated a document as propaganda for an “Undogmatic Association”. This document is full of accusations that are plucked out of thin air. We had here not only a member of the “Star in the East” before us, but a man who fought us at every turn, who wanted nothing more than to fight us.” And further: “Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had sent around his messages attacking the German Section in the most vehement way via the ‘Undogmatic Association’”. I actually said all that. Now - does Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden dare to have the following words printed in his “Denkschrift” (memoir), following on from this? ($. 72.): “For this purpose, the prospectus of this association itself is printed here in full. Nothing else has ever been published about the association. The reader can see for himself that not a single word more is said in it than any association working in the spirit of the Theosophical Society must recognize, not a single word more.” And then Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had “the brochure” printed, which contains not a word of all that I said according to the protocol. Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden dares nothing less than to claim that I simply lied with my assertion. Because I would have done that if what Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden had printed were true. Now I want to give the reader the opportunity to “convince himself” of who has told the truth. In November 1912, a printed “appeal” signed by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden and John. H. Cordes was “sent around” about the “Undogmatic Federation”. (This is the title it explicitly bears: Undogmatic Federation.) It also bore the stamp: “Recording Secretary. Theosophical Society. Adyar. Madras.” The following sentences, among others, appear in this writing: “The Society expects from them (namely, its members) that they shall be perfectly able to justify their beliefs rationally (reasonably) and without having recourse to authoritative protection. It is the German Section alone which makes an exception... The Council of the Section corresponds therefore with the concilium of Cardinals and the Church Council of State; the lodge-president finds a parallel in the bishop or ordained priest who celebrates the confirmation; and the course of preparation is the equivalent for the instructions preceding confirmation. — This divergence of the General Section from the fundamental objects of the Society has been silently borne so far by the Presidential Leitung»... (The above should read German Section instead of General Section). In English this would read: “The Society expects of them (its members) that they will prove capable of judging their faith rationally and will claim no authoritative protection for it. In the German Section alone, an exception is made... The board of the section therefore corresponds to a council of cardinals and a church council of the state; the president of a lodge finds his parallel in a bishop or an ordained priest who solemnly performs the confirmation; and a preparatory course finds its equivalent in the instruction that precedes the confirmation. This deviation of the German section from the basic laws of the Society has so far been tacitly tolerated by the presidential leadership."

According to the method admitted or followed by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden in his ‘Denkschrift’ – on the title page it says ‘published’ – it is still necessary to say the following. If Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, in view of the fact that is being recorded here, were to say that in his opinion everything contained in the pamphlet he sent around was correct, then it must be replied that this is not the point with regard to what has been said here, but rather that it is literally true that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden sent around such a pamphlet, and that he dares to say in his “Denkschrift”: “The prospectus of this association itself is printed in full here. Nothing else has ever been published about the association.” — I would like to point out that I have expressed myself exactly and precisely, right down to the word “sent around”. I have presented a verifiably true fact; and Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden accuses me – in brotherly love – of nothing less than lying. I leave this case, without the “well-known after-effects of psychological suggestion”, to the readers' judgment.

I will, as I have done so far, despite Dr. Hübbe-Schleidens' outrageous challenge, limit myself to citing only those of his omissions that have nothing to do with any matter in which he might say that he has confided in his letters to me in the belief that letters are not used in publications. I will avoid mentioning anything that refers to the truly personal and the like, and only cite what contains Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's judgments about the meaning and purpose of society, about the spirit of the theosophical worldview and the like.

On page 32 of the “Message of Peace”, which the “Memorandum” on page 5 refers to as its continuation, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden says: “Many of us, in whose spiritual sphere to date this vision of the future - meaning the return of a world teacher - has shone like a ray of sunshine of hopeful joy, of beauty and bliss, we feel as if we have been awakened from a heavy nightmare. The old colors, which were previously the symbols of religious life, deep black and blood red, are no longer relevant to us. What elevates us to the divine are bright golden sunshine and sky blue, the color of infinity, plus the silver-white of starlight.” I do not wish to claim that with these words the Rosicrucians were meant to be the symbolum of those who were interested in what I had presented. In any case, however, this symbolum is: “the red roses on a black cross background”. On June 19, 1912, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden stated that these colors were “done away with” for him and his people. On August 9, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is no essential contradiction between the aims of Rosicrucianism and those of the Theosophical Society. The latter has no objection to Rosicrucianism becoming the religion of the sixth cultural epoch. At least as far as I am concerned, my desire and will do not stand in the way of this.” I would like to explicitly note here that I always objected to hearing my research referred to as Rosicrucianism, especially in the speeches I gave in Stuttgart at the opening of the new lodge there. But I cannot expect Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden to understand what I have to say; so I must accept that he seems to regard my intentions as “only” Rosicrucian.

Regarding the scope of Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's judgments, and thus also for the value of his “memorandum”, the following may also be significant to the reader. On July 4, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “Indeed, Mrs. Besant has a somewhat different position towards the Mystery of Golgotha than you do. This is due to the fact that in her younger years... everything connected with the Christian Church thoroughly disgusted her. But even if it may be a shortcoming on Mrs. Besant's part that she could not make the Rosicrucianism her own, she still recognizes the Christ spirit, the Logos as the great teacher (Mahaguru)... On August 9, 1911, the same Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes to me: “Mrs. Besant is indeed familiar with the Rosicrucian conception of the ‘Spirit of Christ as having been manifested in Jesus’ body. But she decisively rejects this conception; she does not recognize it.”

On July 4, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes to me: “In any case, Mrs. Besant does not understand the task of the coming adept as what the ‘Mystery of Golgotha’ is according to the Rosicrucian view. The adept should not merely lend his body to the embodiment of the “great teacher,” as Jesus did, but should work as an adept himself, full of the spirit of Mahaguru, just as every other adept does, only not secretly but openly.

In his “memoir,” Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes: “We even have your main goal - he means the Rosicrucian one - in common with you, the goal that should unite us just as actively as it actually separates us; I mean complete devotion to the Christ-Spirit, the Christ, who through Jesus once at Golgotha presented to humanity the only greatest symbol of self-sacrifice."

On August 9, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote to me: “Mrs. Besant uses the word ‹Christ› only in the sense of an Indian theology. She understands it to mean precisely the Bodhisattva of Maitreya Buddha. According to Mrs. Besant, the Christ who worked through Jesus' body was nothing other than this Bodhisattva. According to Rosicrucian terminology, one could probably say 'archangel' or even 'fire spirit' for this in German.

On page 68 of the “memorandum” “edited” by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, we read: “Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden is said to have demanded (according to the protocol on page 6, column 2, above) that Dr. Steiner avoid the word ‘Christ’ because Mrs. Besant uses this word for Bodhisattva. In addition, sentences from July 4, 1911 to Dr. Steiner are inserted into the protocol. - This letter contains nothing about a suggestion regarding the use of Dr. Steiner's brand new concept of Christ. But at the end of a letter dated August 9, 1911, I did warn against causing misunderstandings by applying the designation to new concepts that have been in use for a long time.

What is the point of the sentence in the memorandum: “This letter contains nothing about a proposal for the use of the Christ concept that Dr. Steiner has recently formulated.” Read the protocol and you will find that I only quote the words from the letter of July 4, 1911 that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden wrote in this letter: “That a 14- to 15-year-old boy can survive such a test as the Krishnamurti is now going through, is incomprehensible to me. She parades him before the world as the coming Adept. Since the cultured world does not associate this with anything at all, Besant tells her ecclesiastical listeners in abbreviated form: “The coming Christ as the type of the divine adept.” But anyone who has read the thirty past lives of Krishnamurti, which she and Leadbeater published in Theosophist, knows that she does not mean Jesus with that. Since the memorandum says, “This letter contains nothing about a proposal for the use of the term ‘Christ’”, the reader might think that I had ever claimed that this letter contained anything about it. I did not claim that. But I did say (according to the protocol on page 6): “One day, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden appeared... He also explained the following: since there was a contradiction between what Mrs. Besant teaches and what Dr. Steiner teaches, I should in future arrange my teaching in such a way that my listeners could not construct contradictions. It was even said that I should avoid the word 'Christ', because it could only lead to misunderstandings. The reason given was that Mrs. Besant needed this word for Bodhisattva because in Europe the word Bodhisattva would not be understood. Of course, these words have their basis in the letter that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden addressed to me on August 9, 1911. The “Denkschrift” “edited” by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden pretends to be quite innocent by saying: “However, at the end of a letter dated August 9, 1911, I did warn against causing misunderstandings by applying the designation for old, traditional concepts to new ones.” And in order to lend some emphasis to this “innocent” sentence in front of his readers, the author of the “Denkschrift” writes on page 70: “The letters in question will be presented to anyone who comes to me after the announcement for inspection...” Now I want to spare the readers of these “messages” the trip to Göttingen and write the passage here that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden so “innocently” characterizes as a warning “at the end”. Incidentally, I note that the words that, in my opinion, are most important, are not at the “end” of the letter, but on the first and second pages of the eight-page letter. They read: “... In doing so, you then warn against the error of another spiritual circle that now hopes for the return of Christ in the physical body of an earthly man... It is not known to me what exactly you are referring to with your warning. But your students all understand it as if it were directed against the views and intentions of Mrs. Besant and now also against the Sternbund founded by her. But since this warning of yours does not apply to Mrs. Besant and the Star Federation at all, I would like to suggest to you either to dispense with this remark or to phrase it in such a way that your students will no longer be able to understand it as directed against the Star Federation.” And in §7 of the same letter, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden writes: “The danger of misunderstanding is avoided, by the way, if only for the Rosicrucian conception of Christ another word would be retained. The choice is great. The whole of the rest of the cultural world can at most rise to the (third) unclear concept that theology connects with the word ”Christ. This does not even come close to that of the Bodhisattva or the Archangel.” Are these sentences - assuming that one wants to find any meaning in them at all - to be understood differently, as that for the so-called Rosicrucian concept of Christ, ‘another word should be retained’? It is even pointed out that ‘there is a wide selection’ here. In the same letter, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, however, also precedes this with a piece of instruction. He says: “Not so much through the different concepts as through the designation of the different concepts with the same word ‘becoming Christ’ endless confusion is conjured up. For the different concepts, this same expression is quite unnecessary for anyone who understands, since the three different concepts of the point at issue could be sufficiently described with many other words. For example, it is quite sufficient if we - Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden means the members of the Star Federation - speak only of the Bodhisattva or the Archangel of Maitreya Buddha.” In all other respects, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden may be fully conceded that he set himself the example of avoiding misunderstanding with regard to the name of the Christ. For he writes in the same letter: “But misunderstandings through the use of the same word for different concepts can and should be avoided. Since here alone the Greek word “Christ” is disputed, I will henceforth endeavor never to pronounce this ambiguous word of discord again...” How well Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden has succeeded in keeping this promise can be seen in the ‘Message of Peace’ and in the ‘Memorandum’ he ‘published’.

Now, in view of the fact that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden makes a certain - albeit absurd - comment in his “Message of Peace”, readers of these “messages” might also be interested in the fact that there is another rather curious omission in the letter dated August 9, 1911. With reference to those personalities who are interested in the spiritual scientific research I have presented, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden makes the following comment on page 41 of the “Message of Peace”: “The Catholic Church also felt that its rights had been violated when Luther came on the scene and demanded the right to independent thought, open research into the truth and freedom of thought, and only wanted to protect and defend itself against ignorance and encroachment. But the church felt that its autocratic rule over consciences and minds was being severely compromised.” On August 9, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden - as already mentioned - that it was not contrary to his wishes and will if Rosicrucianism became the religion of the next 6th cultural epoch; and he then continues in his letter of August 9, 1911: “Admittedly, it is not easy to imagine the possibility of such circumstances. But two possibilities would be conceivable. One would be that the Christian churches would be destroyed by their own disintegration and state opposition, as in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. But that is not likely; Macanlay was right in predicting that the Catholic Church, at least, would be resilient. Therefore, the other possibility could more likely come true, namely that some cardinals would later become Rosicrucians, and that one of them would then become Pope. Since he would then be an “initiate himself and have knowledge of higher worlds, the requirement of the desirable theocracy would be approximately realized for the followers of such a church. - Such an arrangement of circumstances seems to me to correspond entirely to the ideal that the Theosophical Society and the Star Federation have formed. What they want is something that goes even further; but it is very compatible with it."

In the same letter of August 9, 1911, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden also writes something to me that is suitable to be compared with the omissions of the ‘Denkschrift’. It is the following: “Incidentally, if the disciple in whom the Maitreya Buddha is to reveal himself in the future has progressed so far, and if the white brotherhood and the occult hierarchy then see that he can still learn something from the Rosicrucians, they will certainly send him to you (I am really meant, Rudolf Steiner) to be trained. After all, Jesus is said to have learned something from the Essenes as well.

The above explanations had to be provided so that the readers of the Mitteilungen can form an unbiased opinion about the value of the “memoir” published by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden based on the factual material. There are many things that could be added to help assess this value. For example, on pages 47-50, this “memorandum” deals with why Mr. Hubo should not have allowed himself to be used to write all sorts of confidential messages about the German Section to Adyar, and why Mr. Hubo indignantly rejected such an imposition. Perhaps it is understandable that a discussion with Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden about such a matter is quite impossible when it is considered that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden — to whom Dr. Vollrath was assigned as representative of the Star of the East — made the following demand on July 4, 1911: He (Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden) writes: “Would you perhaps have the opportunity and kindness to be able to point out someone to me in Leipzig whom I can approach with the request to check Dr. Vollrath in our interest in a friendly manner and to keep me informed about him, so that I can then, if necessary, inhibit him in good time. I certainly can't mention this to our dear Mrs. Wolfram, who is very dear to me. She has already had too much trouble with Vollrath. But perhaps you can name another personality to me who is willing to make the sacrifice."

On pages 61 and 62 of the “Denkschrift” the following passage can be found: “Dr. Steiner particularly ‘complains’ that Mrs. Besant has expressed the suspicion that he was educated by Jesuits and is therefore dogmatically one-sided. Dr. Steiner and his followers (protocol pages 11 and 13) reject this with great indignation. Why this indignation?” Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden cannot find a reason for this rejection. It does not occur to him that one can reject something because it is not true.

Mrs. Besant has stated in an excellent place, not only as a supposition, but with absolute certainty: Dr. Steiner was educated by Jesuits. This assertion is an objective untruth. And when there is talk of “indignation”, it refers to the fact that the President can make such an untrue assertion at the General Assembly of the entire Theosophical Society. Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden does not feel this at all. In his memorandum he really does write the words: “Why this indignation, actually? Probably only because of the mental confusion of the Jesuit order with the accusation of Jesuitism.” It is therefore possible – really possible – that a representative of the Society, which wants to place “truth” higher than any confession, allows these words to be printed! In view of the fact that it is an objective untruth that Steiner was educated by Jesuits – in view of this fact, it is possible that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden has printed in his “memorandum”: “And would Dr. Steiner be willing to take an oath in court that none of his teachers ever belonged to the Jesuit order?” This is actually written on page 62 of the memoir, which also refers on page 11 to the well-known “after-effects of mental suggestion”.

After this sample of the way in which the “factual material” praised on p. 3 is presented in this memorandum, I ask the reader to put aside all “known after-effects of psychological suggestions” and to answer the question for himself whether the “facts” I have presented here are sufficient to form an opinion about the value of the “memorandum” published by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden “published” “memorandum”? - I had the duty to present “facts” first, which are less accessible to others. What the memorandum presents about the last events regarding the former German section of the “Theosophical Society” may be discussed by others. I know that I have done everything in full agreement with the leadership of this section. The leadership knows everything that is necessary to form an opinion regarding the external facts.

Elsewhere in this communication, the “suppressions and omissions” on pages 55 ff. are addressed from the other side. Now Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, who had got to know this part of the Adyar brotherhood in the Berlin branch of the Anthroposophical Society, wrote how he, without the “known after-effects of psychic suggestion”, had nevertheless acted “brotherly” in this case by making the Memorial Book the depository for this little piece of Adyar. In response to this communication, he wrote to me on June 21, 1913: “I am sincerely sorry to have unintentionally exacerbated what was said on this side. Therefore, I ask you to forgive this mistake immediately.” - Now

however, the “well-known after-effects of mental suggestion” aside, should we get sentimental? The man has made a “mistake”, he asks for “pardon”. But let us hear the further words of the man who asks for “pardon” for his “mistake”. Indeed, he has to admit that the claim of the omission is objectively untrue - and then, following the above-mentioned request for forgiveness, he continues: “Objectively, of course, only the intentionality that I suspected in the keeping of the minutes is thereby invalidated, not the reproach itself, which is at issue here and which, moreover, is of less importance than what is further stated and the other aspects in my 'Denkschrift'. So, it is possible that someone accuses another: “you did this on purpose”. It turns out that it is not true that he did this; the accuser replies: “you did not do on purpose what you did not do”.

I must confess that I really do not want to use sentimental phrases here. But I must still say that I thought long and hard about whether I should write the above. For I have compassion for the man who is the subject of this discussion. And if it were about him, I would not have written anything. But what this man has said in print, and which is contrary to the matter I have to deal with, urgently requires the above information. When things are said, as Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden said them in his “Denkschrift”, then these things, after they have been said, are no longer connected with the one who said them. They then have an independent existence. The above is written to characterize these things. I feel sorry for Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden. But however I looked at the matter, no matter how much I was overwhelmed by the feeling: to say what I have said, I am obliged.

I SHALL TAKE the liberty of adding a few remarks to what I said yesterday, after which I shall invite contributions from those who have asked to speak.

You will remember that I endeavoured to solve the problem of the outside of the Goetheanum as well as was possible at the time by treating it as a building problem. A number of aspects were, though, made more difficult than they need have been by the speed at which the building was expected to be constructed. Nevertheless I believe that the shaping of the facade, of the portals, of the windows and window surrounds did portray outwardly the inner content of the Goetheanum, which was essentially a circular building.

Now, as I attempted to describe it to you yesterday, the impression is to be of a building that is partly circular and partly rectangular, having no longer a ground-plan that is circular. And it will be necessary to find for the forms a modern style that is appropriate for concrete as a building material.

Such things are always exceedingly difficult. It is of course easier to work in an abstract way out of the forms, and then choose the material, than it is to accept the material as the necessary given factor and then search for the forms out of this material, forms which are also partly determined by the circumstances which I described to you yesterday. Now, since we do not have time to go into more detail, I want to show you one essential feature, the underlying theme of the portals and of the windows, so that you can see how I want to let the inner formative force that was latent in the old forms assert itself once more also in the new forms of the intractable material, concrete.

I want the walls, coming down from the roof which is shaped in flat surfaces, to give the eye a definite impression of load. I want to bring it about that this downward pressure is caught and held, also for the eye, by the portal as well as the window surrounds. I also want to bring it about that inwardly the spiritual impression is of a portal that draws you in, or a window that takes in the light in order to usher it into the space within. But at the same time I want to bring it about that in a certain way this form reveals how the Goetheanum is to be a kind of shelter for the one who seeks the spirit within it. This will also have to be expressed by the portal. So let me describe what is to be revealed. [See [See Facsimile 5, Page XIX.]

For instance, on the west front the roof will rise up like this. So I want the next thing appearing after the roof to be a kind of small form growing out of this roofing. Let me make it easier for you to see by using different colours to draw what will, of course, be all the same colour.

So this will jut out (lemon-yellow); it will be immediately above the head of someone who is standing before the portal, about to enter. Below that will be a portion, something that could be seen as a portion of a pentagon, but only a portion (reddish). The remainder of the pentagon would be above. And the whole of this is carried by a form which recedes (blue). So what you remember as rounded forms in the earlier Goetheanum [Note 78] will here appear as something angular. You must imagine that this comes forward like a kind of roof (lemon-yellow), this goes back inwards (blue), and this becomes visible in the background (whitish). And the whole of this is to be supported by a pillar shape to the left and to the right in such a way that this pillar or column receives this protective form which appears above the head of the one who enters; it receives this protective form in another form (orange-yellow) like this, but at the same time it carries the roof part with an appropriate form which grows out of it.

This form will be used for both the side and main portals and for the windows. And in the use of this form we shall be able to achieve a really integrated external impression. It will show on the one hand how the load pressing down from above is carried and on the other hand how the pillars rise up in order to support that which comes out from the inside, revealing itself and needing to be received.

The essential thing about an angular building is the harmony between the forces of support and load. If we are to carry this out in an organic building, every part must reveal the indwelling character of the totality. The pillars in the old building reached from bottom to top. Now they will be metamorphosed so that on the lower level, the ground floor, they will develop like roots—architecturally conceived, of course. Out of these the actual pillars will grow on the upper level, becoming bearers of the whole. They will then bring the forms of the roof to completion from within outwards. The roof will not be terminated horizontally but rather in the way the cupola was terminated. The pillars and columns will be metamorphosed into supporting elements while at the same time expressing what in the old Goetheanum was to have been expressed in the roundness of the building.

We shall have to endeavour to calculate how basic the forms will have to be, merely hinted at perhaps, in order to keep the whole building, given this shape, within 3 to 3½ million Francs. Once we have made this decision—and I do not believe that any other is possible—then we shall I hope, and if the willingness of our friends to make sacrifices does not let us down, soon be in a position to begin construction and the building will then appear as a new Goetheanum in the place where the old one stood and in a much more basic and simple form.

I would now like to call on Herr van Leer, who has asked to speak on this matter.

Herr van Leer wants to found a World Goetheanum Association, resembling a World School Association, for the running of the Goetheanum.

DR STEINER: Yes, my dear friends, I cannot see any objection to the creation of a body of people who are members of a Goetheanum Association or something similar even if they are not members of the Anthroposophical Society. The question will be, though, as to what the members of such an organization can be called upon to do. It will be very difficult to win members merely by saying that they should pay money for the Goetheanum or for any other of our ventures. But perhaps in future Anthroposophy as such, as represented now here in Dornach, will become more and more known in the world. Perhaps people who are not in the first instance courageous enough to become anthroposophists will see that fruitful work can be done out of Anthroposophy and with Anthroposophy. Then it might be possible to say to people: Look, this is a spiritual movement; maybe you are not interested now; but help it to mature, do something so that the people involved can get going and show what they can do. It is quite likely, if we carry out into the world what has been discussed here during this Conference, that an Association such as that envisaged by our dear friend van Leer might indeed become a possibility.

Do not forget that a good deal of what is now included in the Statutes is of necessity bound up with the complete openness of the Society. You will see that much will change in practice. And once there is an understanding everywhere of what is connected with this openness of the Society, then it could very well be that a form such as that suggested just now by van Leer will be found. This openness will have to be taken very, very seriously by us. And on the other hand we here at the Goetheanum, this Vorstand, will have to take very seriously the fact that in future there can be no more working under cover. It will no longer be possible to say: If we approach people about a threefold social order or about Anthroposophy, they don't want to know about this, but they are interested in the things themselves. This is something that has done us the most damage of all over the last few years, or indeed over a longer period too, because it has brought us inwardly into a sphere of untruthfulness. The work going out from Dornach in future in all realms of life will be uprightly and honestly declared in full openness as being for Anthroposophy. Then people will know for what they are giving their money. And if we work from this angle then I do believe that a form such as you have suggested will become possible. It will never be possible if people have to ask what they are supposed to give money for.

This is what I believed I ought to say. If this is done, then the prospects are quite good. Would anybody else like to speak on the question of the rebuilding?

Miss X believes that eurythmy can show the public a great deal of what Anthroposophy is about. She asks for pictures, pictures of eurythmy and the picture of Frau Dr Steiner for publication in South America.

Mr Monges hopes to arouse interest in America. ‘Americans have to see before they will give.’

DR STEINER: Does anyone else wish to speak?

Herr Donner speaks about the financial situation.

DR STEINER: Does anyone else wish to speak?

Mademoiselle Sauerwein asks whether the 12 Schillings are for the Society or the Goetheanum.

DR STEINER: In order to clarify the question Mademoiselle Sauerwein has brought to our agenda, I should report to you on the meeting in committee the other day of the General Secretaries of many different countries with the Vorstand and with representatives of the Swiss groups. I must tell you what conclusions were reached. It was a matter of completing the only point of the Statutes which could not be finalized before they were printed. We have adopted the Statutes, but one small point remained open because I said that it would be better to discuss it in a smaller circle first; and that was the matter of the annual contribution to be made by the groups for each member.

I brought the following points of view to that smaller circle. You see, an anthroposophist—let me say this, though of course it will be easily questioned—an anthroposophist does not entertain illusions but must think realistically, for the future too. To think realistically is to say that one will need this much money for a particular project, that is, to make a preliminary annual budget which is likely to be sufficient. For the founding of the Anthroposophical Society there is no sense financially in talking a great deal about what each individual thinks should be paid annually for each member. The only sensible thing to do is to say how much we need and then to calculate how much this is likely to come to when it is divided by the number of paying members. I have concerned myself very fundamentally with this question ever since I decided—with the agreement of the members of the Vorstand whom I considered to be the right ones—to take the Presidency of the Anthroposophical Society into my own hands. All I can do is to tell you the conclusion given to me as a result of my considerations: If we really want to run the Society which you yourselves have decided shall exist, the only thing we can do is ourselves lay down the amount which we need from every group for each member. All we can do is enter at this point in the Statutes the membership contribution to be made by every group for each of its members: 12 Schillings annually. That is only 1 Schilling monthly. You can work out what a minute amount that is per day! But we cannot manage without these 12 Schillings annually for each member. We could, of course, have started off the other way round, though I don't know whether this would have been more dignified. We could first have said: We need 12 Schillings from every member and then we shall found the Anthroposophical Society. Perhaps that would have been more practical. However that may be, the Society will only be realistically founded when we have these 12 Schillings annually.

Now, my dear friends, there are sure to be many groups who will say that they cannot raise this amount. There are groups whose membership fees would not even cover this, and they all want to keep at least half of the membership fee for themselves! So in the cases where this is so it will be a matter of negotiating with them how much they can reduce their contribution. And the missing amount will have to be raised in another way. We still need this missing amount. But this minimum sum which we need will have to be the standard, and then groups can go below it, which is bound to happen, as we well know from experience, down even to the vanishing point. The vanishing point is often reached. But I hope that there will also be instances of the opposite, right up to the level of Carnegie, though of course never quite reaching the infinite! Anyway, this is the suggestion that I wanted to make in a smaller circle. And this smaller circle did not by any means agree immediately. But I do believe that most have meanwhile come to see that there is no other way. Countries also do it like this. You cannot set up a budget and then ask every single citizen: How much can you pay? This is not how it is done. We admittedly have no means of enforcing collection, and of course we want no such thing, for there must be freedom amongst us, including that of saying how much we need. So if you like, please do say what you think, or at least vote on whether you agree in general, in principle, to the payment of 12 Schillings per member, always remembering that everyone can negotiate how much below this it is necessary to go. I had to say this if this matter was to be discussed. (Applause)

Mademoiselle Sauerwein says that these 12 Schillings will be contributed by France because they are needed and she would like to know the date by which payment is required.

DR STEINER: The date will be a matter of administration. In the very near future—since time is too short to do so at the Conference—we shall issue By-Laws to the various groups and in these we shall say when the contributions can be paid. They do not all have to come in at the same time. The method will gradually emerge, and agreements can be made with the different groups as to when it suits them to pay. Certainly we shall not shirk. Does anyone want to speak to this question of the membership contribution?

Mr Pyle suggests that agreement be expressed immediately on the point that the 12 Schillings per year would be raised somehow, since they were absolutely necessary.

DR STEINER: It has been suggested that we vote straight away on this question of the membership contribution. Does anyone want to speak about this suggestion, which is actually a matter for the By-Laws? Only on the suggestion, not on the question. If that is not the case, then I now call for a vote on this suggestion. Will those friends who are in favour of the standard membership contribution being set at 12 Schillings with the given proviso please raise their hands. (They do.) Will those member-friends not in favour now also please raise their hands. There seems to be cordial agreement on this point.

I intended to bring up this point at the end of today's agenda, but it has now been settled. So after this interruption we can continue with the agenda if anyone still wants to speak about the rebuilding of the Goetheanum or about Herr van Leer's suggestion.

Mrs Merry wishes to speak.

DR STEINER: Would anyone else like to speak on this?

Herr Koschützki touches on the question of finance. He considers that work at research institutes is the most suitable for obtaining money for the Goetheanum from non-anthroposophists.

DR STEINER: So long as these things are in future always shown to be intimately bound up with Anthroposophy. It would be wrong to give the impression of merely wanting to do some research through ordinary science. In future we want to put things before the world simply as they emerge from the central core of Anthroposophy. Of course there is a good deal which does have to be presented in public in a way that is not possible through pictures, since pictures at best bring something super-sensible into the realm of the sense-perceptible. But we are supposed to present the super-sensible to the world. This is of course difficult, more difficult than presenting something sense-perceptible, but we must succeed. And we shall succeed. But please have the courage to present the super-sensible and not something that appears as though through a mask. This has brought us enough harm.

Does anyone else wish to speak?

Herr Leinhas speaks about the building of the Goetheanum and about the organization. He believes that friends can be won on the basis of pointing out what is said in the Statutes.

DR STEINER: Does anyone else wish to speak?

Dr Kruger speaks of personal impressions and of his feelings for what has been experienced here as a primeval founding.

DR STEINER: Now, dear friends, let me throw the discussion open for any subject people might still want to mention.

Herr Geuter says that the journal Anthroposophie and the articles of Herr Steffen and Dr Steiner are particularly valuable for disseminating Anthroposophy.

DR STEINER: Does anyone else wish to speak about anything?

Dr Zeylmans speaks from the medical point of view. There is surely no realm more in need of renewal than that of medicine. About thirty-five doctors were present at the founding of the small clinic in The Hague and by the end they were very enthusiastic about the lectures. It can certainly be said that we do not want anything different but we do want more. The lectures heard up to now have been marvellous, but what is needed is not only a bridge such as this but also an entirely new kingdom in one's heart in order as a doctor to become a healer in the sense of earlier times. He therefore especially welcomes the founding of the Medical Section.

DR STEINER: You will allow me, my dear friends, to add a few words after my lecture this evening about such questions as, for instance, the shaping of the medical work and how we think about it. I shall do so then because I want to ask any friends who would still like to say something in brief about one thing or another to do so now. The farewell words I myself want to say and also what I want to say about questions such as that brought up so kindly by Dr Zeylmans just now I shall say in connection with my lecture this evening. So would anyone who still has a short contribution to make please do so.

Herr Wullschleger, a teacher, speaks about the question of a school in Switzerland, considers a school in Basel to be absolutely necessary and requests support of every kind.

DR STEINER: Now we have come to the end of our agenda. Or rather we should say that time has brought us to the end of our agenda. It will be satisfying this afternoon, on the very day on which we saw for the first time from the grounds just outside here the ruins still in flames, on this very anniversary of that terrible day we shall meet here at 4.30 for a social gathering. The thought of meeting for such a gathering on this very day can be particularly dear to us when for one or another it may be possible to speak together in the most intense and best and intimate way such as will seem suitable for this very day of mourning and remembrance and such as our heart must long for. So at 4.30 we shall assemble here for our social gathering. At 8.30 my final lecture will take place. The practising doctors are requested to meet me again tomorrow morning at 8.30 down in the Glass House. I shall make any further announcements this evening.

Anything which one or another of you might still have wished to say will now remain unsaid. But just as last time it was possible for one or two things intended for more than a personal conversation to be said to everyone during the Social Gathering, so this time, too, it will be possible to speak to the members during the Social Gathering if anyone wishes to do so.

Now will those friends from Germany who wish to travel tomorrow at 10.45 please raise their hands so that Dr Wachsmuth can see how many there are wishing to travel tomorrow morning. Now will those wishing to take the evening train please raise their hands. It will not be easy to arrange for anyone to stay any longer. Only those who have had their passes extended properly can remain. It is not possible to endanger future meetings here by allowing the authorities to notice that fifty or more people are leaving later than intended. If only a few depart, it will not be possible to arrange for extra lodgings. Also would you please hand in any unused meal tickets at House Friedwart. In addition would you please hand in the blankets you have used at House Friedwart because we shall need them for future meetings. Then would those friends who have not yet collected their passes from House Friedwart please do so, because we have no use for them. We would of course gladly travel away on behalf of every one of you if we only could. Finally, for those friends still here, there will be a eurythmy performance at 7 o'clock tomorrow evening. The programme will include a repeat of ‘Olaf Asteson’.