The Rudolf Steiner Archive

on the occasion of the first anthroposophical university course

The two lectures by Arnold Ith on October 4 and 5, 1920, on “Banking and pricing in their current and future significance for the economy” serve as the basis for the evening. The discussion will be opened:

Rudolf Toepel starts from two passages in the “Key Points”. He comments on the problem of ascertaining needs and, linked to this, on the question of pricing.

Roman Boos: I must refute Dr. Toepel's view; the two passages from the “key points” are taken out of context. Dr. Toepel's presentation lacks an anthroposophical basis. This is not the way to move forward. The state cannot prescribe administrative measures for the economy; we will not advance in economic life if we cannot embrace other ways of thinking. People who live in such an economic system rebel against it, because statistics are used to determine people's needs.

And there is another danger to be considered. Perhaps new needs could arise the day after tomorrow that are not yet known today. As Dr. Steiner always emphasized, it is important that we do not interfere with needs as such. The state should not interfere, nor should statistics in the question of needs as such, otherwise we are still in the old way of thinking. It is precisely this old way of thinking that seems to me to be partly alive in Director Ich's remarks.

I would therefore like to refer once more explicitly to Dr. Steiner's basic idea of the economic primordium: the price set should enable the person who has produced a particular economic product to be able to produce the same again afterwards. Price policy as such is something that the state should not simply interfere with, otherwise it will destroy economic life altogether.

Werner Zimmermann speaks as a representative of the free money and free land theory of Silvio Gesell.

Roman Boos interrupts the speaker: What is important is not the goal, but the beginning. And there it is about creating associations; we must create associations.

Arnold Ith: There are several points on which I would like to have greater clarity and which need to be discussed in more detail. Firstly, what role does trade play in the threefold social organism? Secondly, how does capital arise in the threefold social organism? Thirdly, can factories and real estate also be sold? Is private capital even possible after the introduction of threefolding? Fourthly: Is there still money in the threefolded social organism? Money is then only an order for goods. And now to what the previous speakers said. What Mr. Zimmermann said about the free money theory cannot be understood or followed at all. Some objections must also be raised regarding the comments of Dr. Toepel; the same applies to Dr. Boos and his presentation of the economic primal cell. And in this context, returning to Dr. Boos' objection to my remarks, I would like to ask: to what extent should this relate to the remarks I have made here, and to what extent should something appear to be incorrect in them? That as a specific question.

Roman Boos: I would like to ask a counter-question: what role do you think the state should play in setting prices?

Arnold Ith: I only wanted to show with this breakdown of the price how some of the price goes to the laborers and the other part is distributed among the producers. In this respect, the state will have a say in prices by determining what the individual needs for his or her livelihood.

Interjection: Senseless.

Roman Boos: I actually just picked up on this point and felt compelled to object. I have always been of the opinion that in the tripartite social organism the state has something to determine only with regard to the type of work and the time, but does not have any kind of price to determine or needs to assess; the state should only create the facts from the outside, with which economic life has to reckon as with given facts.

Arnold Ith: It is not a matter of the state fixing the nominal price level, but of a proportionate, real distribution, a percentage allocation. Perhaps I may ask Dr. Steiner about this question.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear ladies and gentlemen! I would very much like to speak about some of the individual matters that have been touched on here. However, it is hardly possible to speak about them briefly, and it is especially difficult to do so when a number of people have already clashed with each other. This usually complicates even those things that are otherwise simple. I would therefore just like to make a few brief comments that answer some of the questions or at least attempt to point in the right direction.

I would like to point out that in economic life it really matters to think economically. But thinking economically means having ideas about production and consumption that have certain effects in one direction or the other in the course of their development; and we are part of this economic process with our physical well-being and woe. Favorite opinions are of no use here. Anyone who thinks, for example, that something can be achieved simply by reducing [or expanding] the money supply, depending on whether prices are rising or falling, shows that he has little real understanding of the economic process. Nothing is achieved by such a fixing of the value of money, by a reduction, as it were, of the money supply or by a very specific expansion or the like. Because the moment money can no longer be used for speculation, speculation shifts to commodities. You see, only now are we getting close to reality with our ideas. We have to be able to look at reality. And there is absolutely no need to change the money supply. , but it can very easily be brought about by all sorts of machinations that the prices of a particular type of product fall or rise, while other products need not give any cause for such a fall or rise. In any case, the whole idea of indexing money – apart from the fact that as long as there is a gold standard in any of the countries involved, there can be no question of it – the whole idea is a purely utopian one. I will only hint at this, it would have to be discussed in detail, but the whole of Gesell's idea is nothing but an idea born out of a complete ignorance of economic life as such. If you really want to intervene in economic life in a way that yields results, then you have to intervene not in money but in consumption and production in a living way. What is needed is the formation of associations that have the opportunity to exert a real effect on the economic process. Of course, if associations form here and there, they may be right in principle, but they will not be able to exert a favorable influence; they can only exert a favorable influence when the associative principle can really take effect through the threefold social order. But people keep asking: How do associations form?

Dear attendees, as long as people are still arguing about whether, on the one hand, producers should join together to form associations and, on the other hand, consumers should form cooperatives, and as long as they are stipulating something to each other, the idea of association will not be remotely realized. Of course, the idea of an association is not about some kind of commission getting together to form associations and the like, but about these associations emerging from economic life itself. I would like to give two examples that I have given before.

Some time before the war, there was a member of ours who was a kind of baker; he baked bread, so he produced bread, with all that that entails, of course. Now, it occurred to them to make something that could initially be a kind of model example. We had the Anthroposophical Society, Anthroposophists also eat bread, they were already united, and nothing was easier than to put the bread producer together with the Anthroposophists. This gave him consumers, and an association was ready. Of course, when such a thing stands alone, it can have all kinds of shortcomings. In this case, it had shortcomings because the producer also had quirks and eccentricities, and this put the whole thing on an uneven footing. But that is not what ultimately matters. An association arises by itself out of an organic connection between consumers and producers, whereby, of course, the producer usually has to take the initiative – and then this association will prove itself all by itself.

And then I often give the example of a different kind of work, that created by the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House in Berlin. It consists in this publishing house not working like other publishing houses. How do the other publishing houses work? They work by concluding contracts for books with as many authors as possible, good and bad. Right, then they set about printing these books. But when books are printed, paper has to be available, typesetters have to be employed, and so on. Now try to imagine how many books are printed each year, let's say just in Germany, that are not sold, for which there are no consumers at all. Just do the math, just add up how much poetry is printed in Germany and how much poetry is bought, and you will get an idea of how much human labor has to be expended to produce paper that is wasted, how many typesetters work for the corresponding books and so on – all work that is done for nothing. That is what matters: we have to enter economic life by thinking economically, that is, by thinking in such a way that we avoid unnecessary work, wasted labor. In the case of the association between the Anthroposophical Society and the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, this is not possible because the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press does not print a single book that is not sold. There are consumers. Why? Because work is done so that consumers are there? On the contrary, the publishing house does not have the necessary means to produce enough for the consumers. But at least no work is wasted. We do not have paper produced in which wasted work is involved; we do not have typesetters employed who work for nothing, and so on.

And exactly the same thing that you have seen in these two examples can be done in all possible fields. That is what it is about, that the association is thought about correctly. If it is thought about correctly, then above all unnecessary labor is avoided. And that is what matters. The aim is to create the right relationship between production and consumption in all possible areas through real measures. Then this original cell of economic life comes about, then a price comes about that will be appropriate for the whole of life, so that the person who produces something, any product, let's say a pair of boots, gets as much for it as he needs for his needs, until he has manufactured an equally good pair of boots again. It is not a matter of somehow stipulating the price, of drawing up statistics and the like, but rather of working in such a way that consumption is commensurate with production. And that can only happen if consumption determines production. If examples are given, this can be seen quite clearly. What matters is not to talk in circles about wants and needs and the like, but to be grounded in needs. What matters is to be related to [consumption] on the one hand and on the other hand to be able to intervene in production in such a way that it leads directly to the satisfaction of needs. What is important is not creating so-and-so many numbers and moving them from one place to another, but having active people in the association who can see how they have to mediate between consumption and production.

We have caused such terrible damage to our economic life precisely because we have dumped everything on the value measure of money. But money has only the value that it has, depending on the nature of the economic process. Of course you cannot start with the most abstract thing of all, with money, and introduce any kind of reforms. You don't even need to discuss whether money should be an order for goods or something else. I would like to know what the money I have in my wallet is other than an order for goods. And if I didn't have it in my wallet, the payment for a job I did could also be written in a book somewhere; you could always look it up for my sake; but instead of just being written in there, it could also be written out to me. All these things must be thought of not as secondary and partial, but as primary, and it must be clear to oneself that money by itself becomes a kind of walking bookkeeping in economic life when one thinks economically — not theoretically, but economically — that is, when one is able to dynamically relate economic conditions to one another.

Interjection: Very rich!

That's it. But this practical thinking, which should be thrown into the cultural development of the present day by the “core issues”, this practical thinking, is terribly far removed from today's people. They immediately fall back into theorizing, they immediately have everything possible to schematize and theorize, while it is important to approach people in such a way that they are fully involved in life, that is, in economic life - then the right conditions will be able to develop in this economic life. Of course, we were not allowed to found other associations because we were not allowed to found any other associations than those with the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House. But please consider in an hour of quiet reflection, my dear attendees, what this means as an effect for the whole economic life, if there is anything that prevents unnecessary work from being done - that affects the whole economic life. The typesetters, whom we have spared by not keeping them unnecessarily busy, have done other work in the meantime, and the people who worked in paper production have done other work in the meantime. So we are involved in the whole economic process. You can't think so briefly that you only think of one company, but you have to be clear about the effect it has on the whole economy. That is what matters.

I just wanted to point out that we have to try to think in truly economic terms. And if questions are raised about how it will work with the economic associations, it is the case that everyone would find sufficient reason in their own position to form such economic associations if they wanted to, based on the matter at hand. Of course, you can't say to me or to Dr. Boos or to others: How should I form associations? – and then assume that an empire should be created for the purpose of forming associations.

What is important is not that, but that we finally try to think and reflect objectively – that is what is important. Of course, the old way of thinking sometimes still strikes you in the neck a little; and even though Mr. Ith undoubtedly understood the issues extremely well and presented them quite well in essence, we still had to hear, for example, that he had included wages among his accounting costs. Of course, there is no question of wages when drawing up balance sheets in line with the threefold order – there can be no question of wages, nor of any kind of valuation of raw materials; after all, it is merely a matter of somehow accounting for the difference between what are work products and what are raw materials, and the like. So it is not true that sometimes the old way of thinking comes through; but that does not matter if one only has the will to think one's way into positive economic life, then the right thing comes out.

It is also self-evident that such enterprises as Futurum or the Coming Day cannot be built in all respects according to the “core principles” in the same way; one is, after all, in the middle of a different economic life, which makes its waves everywhere. But in that such enterprises are established, in which, on the one hand, the one-sided banking principle is overcome, on the other hand, the one-sided commercial or industrial principle – that is, on the one hand, the principle of lending money from the bank, on the other hand, the principle of the bank lending – that is, the divergence of the bank and the industrial, commercial enterprise – these are combined into one, and in doing so, the path to the associative principle is taken. For the time being, it is only a path. The real associative principle would be achieved if you could implement it in reality as I have shown in the two examples. Of course it would be necessary for the producers alone, that is, people who understand how to create a particular article, to take the initiative to do so; that is, the initiative cannot of course come from the consumers if an association is to be formed. But on the other hand, whoever takes the initiative to establish an association will essentially depend on the needs of consumers to shape the association; after all, they can only address certain needs that no one has to regulate. If, for example, there are luxury needs and so on for my sake, they will take care of themselves.

Recently I was asked: It was said of me that one should take needs into account; but now there are strange needs; for example, one person has a need for particularly high riding boots, riding boots and so on; [how to behave towards them].- Yes, my dear audience, all this takes into account only a very small part in his thinking. What is needed is to really think our way into economic life; and when you think your way into it, you move away from these details, because a healthy economic life also regulates needs to a certain extent. We can wait and see what these needs will be when a healthy economic life comes about under the associative principle, when, above all, unnecessary employment, unnecessary work that goes nowhere, is prevented. That is what it is all about.

Of course, these few hints do not yet say anything very substantial; but I want to point out at least that one can only understand the “key points” correctly if one understands them in a practical sense, if one thinks about how to bring about such an association in concrete terms, in life, that is built on combining consumption and production in the most organic way possible. If we know how such an economic structure, which is economically based on the principle of association, has an economizing effect on the whole of economic life, then we can actually create economic foundations where some no longer have to do so much unnecessary work and where others can no longer satisfy so many needs. In the world, it is already the case – this could be explained in great detail and even presented as a kind of axiom – that in the life of the world, it is already the case that certain things, if one does not take away the possibility of following their own laws, regulate themselves in a very strange way.

Dear attendees, if tomorrow someone were to come up with a way of seriously influencing the birth of a boy or girl in embryonic development, then, I am firmly convinced, the most terrible chaos would result. The ratio between the number of girls and boys that are born would create a terrible, catastrophic situation; crises and catastrophes would occur in a truly horrific manner. Only by keeping this, so to speak, from people's rational judgment, only in this way does the strangely wonderful relationship arise – which is, of course, approximate, like everything in nature – that every woman can find her man and every man his woman. And if a man remains unmarried, then a woman must also remain unmarried for him. Of course, where human will comes into play, disastrous results occur; but if we have a social life, we must look with a certain interest at that which works to a certain extent through its own laws. And you can be quite sure that when associations with real understanding are able to shape economic entities in which consumption and production take place in such a way that only the necessary work is done in the most rational way, then, as far as possible, people's needs will also be able to be satisfied, because one thing leads to the other. Real thinking makes this clear.

I would also like to point out that when discussing such questions, one must think in real terms above all and get rid of abstractions. In the scientific field, it is also bad when people think up all kinds of theories. If, for example, someone in the scientific field were to develop a theory as Gesell does in the economic field, then facts would soon become too much for him; he would only have to belittle the value of theories a little. In the economic sphere, the aim is to intervene in real life and to think practically. Practical thinking is precisely what spiritual science demands. Spiritual science thinks practically in the spiritual realm; it teaches people to think practically. This does not result in complicated theories. It educates people, and it will also educate them to think practically in economic life. And this practical thinking is the task.

IN 1913 on the hill in Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, construction had begun on the building then known as the Johannesbau and later to be called the Goetheanum, the central headquarters of the anthroposophical movement. Members of the Anthroposophical Society from all parts of the world had been called upon to work on the building, and they were joined by a growing number of others who moved to Dornach, either permanently or temporarily, on their own initiative. Thus a unique center of anthroposophical activity developed in Dornach, a center that was, understandably enough, burdened with the shortcomings and problems unavoidable in such a group.

In the summer of 1914, these difficulties escalated when World War I broke out, since people from many different nations, including those at war, had to work together and get along with each other. Isolation from the rest of the world and, last but not least, both local and more widespread opposition to the building and the people it attracted, further complicated the situation. In spite of all obstacles, however, the building continued to grow under the artistic leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who was well-loved as a teacher and felt by all to be a bulwark of constancy. But in the summer of 1915 all this changed as a result of incidents that threatened to test the Dornach group, and thus the Anthroposophical Society as a whole, to the breaking point.

Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas of 1914 had provoked not only general gossip, but also some bizarre mystical behavior on the part of a member named Alice Sprengel. [ Note 1 ] Heinrich Goesch (see below) and his wife Gertrud seized upon her strange ideas and made use of them in personal attacks on Rudolf Steiner. Since this was done publicly in the context of the Society, Rudolf Steiner asked that the Society itself resolve the case. This resulted in weeks of debate, at the end of which all three were expelled from the Society. Rudolf and Marie Steiner did not take part either in the debates or in the decision to rescind their membership.

The documents that follow reconstruct the events of the case in the sequence in which they occurred.

Alice Sprengel (b. 1871 in Scotland, d. 1949 in Bern, Switzerland) had joined the Theosophical Society in Munich in the summer of 1902, at a time when Rudolf Steiner had not yet become General Secretary for Germany. She joined the German Section a few years later. In a notice issued by the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society in the fall of 1915 informing members about the case, Miss Sprengel is described as having undergone unusual suffering in her childhood. At the time of her entry into the Society, she still impressed people as being very dejected. In addition, she was unemployed at that time and outwardly in very unfortunate circumstances. For that reason, efforts were made to help her.

Marie Steiner, then Marie von Sivers, sponsored her involvement in the Munich drama festival in 1907 and arranged for her to be financially supported by members in Munich. In order to help her find a means of supporting herself in line with her artistic abilities, Rudolf Steiner advised her on making symbolic jewelry and the like for members of the Society. It was also made possible for her to make the move to Dornach in 1914. She, however, interpreted this generous assistance to mean that she had a significant mission to fulfill within the Society. Having been given the role of Theodora in Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas fed her delusions with regard to her mission, as did the fact that toward the end of the year 1911, in conjunction with the project to construct a building to house the mystery dramas, Rudolf Steiner had made an attempt to found a “Society for Theosophical Art and Style” in which she had been nominated as “keeper of the seal” because of her work as an artist. She imagined having lived through important incarnations and even believed herself to be the inspirer of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual teachings. In addition, having been asked to play Theodora gave rise to the delusion that she had received a symbolic promise of marriage from Rudolf Steiner, and she then suffered a breakdown as a result of Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas 1914. Her letters to Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner, reproduced below, clearly reveal that she was deeply upset.

Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner
(undated; received December 25, 1914. Cf. p. 159.)

“Seven years now have passed,” [ Note 2 ] Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, “I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.”

You saw the struggles and doubts this experience occasioned in me; you knew that in the end my conviction was unshakable—yes, so it is. And you waited for my soul to open and for me to speak about this. Yet I remained silent, because my heart was broken. Long before I learned of theosophy, but also much more recently, I had had many experiences that made me say, “I willingly accept whatever suffering life brings me, no matter how hard it may be. After all, I have been shown by the spirit that it cannot be different.” But this is something that seems to go beyond the original plan of destiny; I lack the strength to bear it, and so it kills something in me, destroys forces I should once have possessed. These experiences were mostly instances of people deliberately abusing my confidence, and all in the name of love. But I had the feeling that this was not only my own fault; it seemed as if the will of destiny was inflicting more on me than I could bear.

I had some vague idea of why that might be so. Once, some years ago, I heard a voice within me saying, “There are beings in the spiritual world whose work requires that human beings sustain hope, but they have no interest in seeing these hopes fulfilled—on the contrary.” At that point I was not fully aware of what we were later to hear about the mystery of premature death, of goals not achieved, and so forth.

Then, however, I bore within me a wish and a hope that seemed like a proclamation from the spiritual world. This wish and this hope had made it possible for me to bear the unbearable; they worked in me with such tremendous force that they carried me along with them. My soul was in such a condition, however, that it could neither relinquish them nor tolerate their fulfillment, or, to put it better, it could not live up to what their fulfillment would have demanded of it. Thus I could not come to clarity on what the above-mentioned experience meant for me as an earthly human being. Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.

I can no longer remain silent; it speaks in me and forces me to speak. Years ago I begged you for advice, asked for enlightenment, and your words gave me hope and comfort. I am grateful for that, but today I would no longer be able to bear it. Why did you say to me recently that I looked well, that I should persevere? Did you think I was already aware of the step you are taking now, and that I had already “gotten over it”? I was as far from that as ever.

In conclusion, I ask that you let Miss von Sivers read this letter.

Alice Sprengel

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Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner

Arlesheim
February 3, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner,

This will probably be my last letter to you; I will never turn to you again, neither in speaking nor in writing. I only want to tell you that I see no way out for myself; I am at my wits' end. As the weeks gone by have showed me, it is inconceivable that time will alleviate or wipe out anything that has happened; it will only bring to light what is hidden. Until now I have more or less managed to conceal how I feel, but I will not be able to do so indefinitely. I feel a melancholy settling in on me; being together with others and feeling their attentiveness is a torment to me, but I also cannot tolerate being alone for any length of time. I feel that everything that was to develop in me and flow into our movement through me has been buried alive.

My life stretches ahead of me, but it is devoid of any breath of air that makes life possible. And yet, in the darkest hour of my existence, I feel condemned to live—but my soul will be dead. Desolation and numbness will alternate with bouts of pain. I cannot imagine how the tragedy will end. It is likely, though, that I will show some signs of sorrow in weeks to come, and it may well be that I will say and do things that will surprise me as much as anyone else. I do not have the feeling that my words will arouse any echo in you. I feel as if I were talking to a picture. Since that time early on in those seven years when I stood bodily in front of you and you appeared to me as the embodiment of the figure that had been revealed to my inner vision, you have become unreal to me. Then, your voice sounded as sweet and comforting as my own hopes. You restored my soul with mysterious hints and promises that were so often contradicted in the course of events. And when my soul wanted to unfold under that radiant gaze of yours in which I could read that you knew what had happened to me, something looked at me out of your eyes, crying “This is a temptation.”

The most terrible thing was to have what stood before me in visible human form become unreal to me. And yet, I had the feeling that there was something real behind all this. I do not know what power makes your essential being a reality for me. You know that I have struggled for my faith and will continue to do so as long as there is a glimmer of life in me. You also know how I have pleaded with that Being whose light and teachings you must bring to those who suffer the terrible fate of being human, pleaded that whatever guilt may flow on my account may not disturb you in your mission, and I have the feeling that I have been heard. Nevertheless, the shadow of what has happened to me will fall across your path, just as it will darken my future earthly lives. That shadow will also fall across the continued existence of our movement and upon the destiny of our building. If the mystery dramas are ever performed again, you will have to have another Theodora, and since I will never be able to come to terms with what has happened, the very doors of the temple are closed to me in future. I wonder if, under these circumstances, there will ever again… I do not need to finish the sentence.

I sense that, on an occult level, this is a terrible state of affairs. Is there no way out?

Only a miracle can help in this case.

I am well aware that deliverance is possible, and if it were not to come, it would be terrible, and not only for me.

Let me tell you a story by way of conclusion, the story of the “sœur gardienne.” [ Note 3 ]

During the preparations for the plays during the summer of 1913, I noticed that you were not satisfied with me, and when it was all over I felt like a sick person who knows the doctor has given up on her. That feeling never left me from then on, and I could tell you of many instances, especially in recent months, when I felt a deathly chill come over me although your words actually sounded encouraging. The feeling grew stronger whenever I encountered anyone who knew what lay ahead. Why do I feel as if someone had slapped me in the face? Don't they all look as if they were part of a plot? That's what came to mind on many occasions, but I was relatively cheerful then and put it out of my mind. But all this is just a digression.

Two summers ago, shortly before the rehearsals began, I read La Sœur Gardienne. I had always assumed that Miss von Sivers would play the title role. On reading it, however, I began to doubt that the role would suit her; in fact, it seemed to me that she would not even want to play that part. And then I noticed how the figure came alive within me—it spoke, it moved in me. It was my role. If only I were allowed to play it! I saw what it would mean to me, and it was too beautiful to be true. Then invisible eyes looked at me, and I heard, “They will not give you that part, so resign yourself.” In my experience, that voice had always been correct. In view of the existing situation, I said to myself, “Dr. Steiner knows as well as I do that I had this experience; he must have good reasons for arranging things this way in spite of it—and as far as Miss von Sivers is concerned, I must have been mistaken—the whole thing must simply be another one of the incomprehensible disappointments that run like a red thread through my life.”

My soul collapsed; I behaved as calmly as I could, but that did not seem to be good enough. Your behavior as well as Miss von Sivers' was totally incomprehensible to me. They were looking everywhere for someone, anyone, to take the title role, and no one seemed to think of me; anyone else seemed more desirable. And yet people were making comments about how strange it was that I had nothing to do in that play. I held back, because at one point I was really afraid I would have to play a different role. Performances have been more or less the only occasions in my life where I could breathe freely, so to speak, where I could give of myself. But that was only true when I played parts that lived in me, like Theodora and Persephone. But when a role didn't sit well with me, it increased the pressure I was living under for quite some time. That is why I was not as unconcerned about these things as others might be; for me it was a matter of life and death. In the midst of all this tension something befell me that I had already experienced countless times before in many different situations and against which I have always been defenseless. My soul crumples as soon as it happens. Once again, “it” looked at me and said, “This is a lesson for you!” (or sometimes it said “a test” or “an ordeal”).

I felt the effects in my soul of countless experiences, repeated daily, hourly, going back to my earliest childhood. I do not know why my surroundings have always been tempted to participate wrongfully in my inner life. Only here and only very recently have I been able to ward this off, but it has forced me into complete isolation. What my foster parents, teachers, playmates, friends, and even strangers used to do to see what kind of a face I would make or to guess at how I would react! And much more than that. As I said, these experiences were so frequent that I could not deal with them; they suffocated me. Mostly I took it all calmly, thinking they didn't know any better. Now, however, in the situation I described, these semi-conscious memories played a trick on me—and I was overcome by anger. And then this summer, a year later, I had to relive the whole thing. And it occurred to me that I should have told you about what went before it.

As I said, those words “This is a lesson for you” always made me stiffen and freeze. When I look back on my life, it seems as if a devilish wisdom had foreseen all the possibilities life would bring to me in these last few years, and as if this intelligence had done its utmost to make me unfit for them. I could watch it at work, and yet was powerless to do anything. Much could be said about why that happened. But nothing in my own soul or in any single soul could ever help me over this abyss. Only the spark leaping from soul to soul, the spark that is so weak now, so very weak, can make the miracle happen now…

February 5

I have just read over what I wrote, and now I wonder, is it really all right for everything to happen as I described? That is how it would have to happen if everything stays as it is now. But don't we all three feel how destiny stands between us? Can it really be that there is one among us who does not know what has to happen next? That will bring many things to light; the course of events to come depends on what had been one person's secret. This is truly a test, but not only for me. What was hidden shall be revealed.

I still have one thing to say to you, my teacher and guide: even though the tempter looks out of your eyes, there have been times when I experienced with a shudder that what was revealed to me also meant something to you, something that has not been given its due. However, this must happen and will happen—you know that well, and so does

The Keeper of the Seal

* * *

Excerpt from a letter from Alice Sprengel to Marie Steiner
(undated; received on August 21, 1915. Cf. p. 139 and p. 160.)

I know that people who have “occult experiences” are a calamity as far as the people in positions of responsibility in our movement are concerned, and understandably so, but still, that is what our movement is there for—to come to grips with things like that.

The relationship between you and Dr. Steiner is not the point right now; no, it is the relationship between you and myself. However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in its actual course of events, you understand, but in its nature and severity. That is to say, for years I had seen something developing between my teacher and me, something to which we can indeed apply what we have heard in the last few days, though not for the first time. It has a will of its own and laws of its own and cannot be exorcised with any clever magic word. As I said, I had sufficient self-knowledge to know what had to come if nothing happened to prevent it.

Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography. I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it. The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not “intend” anything of the sort; nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing. I do not understand…

* * *

The next letter, written by an Englishwoman who was living at the Goetheanum at the time, characterizes Alice Sprengel from a different point of view:

Letter from Mary Peet to Alice Sprengel [ Note 4 ]

Arlesheim,
October 1915

Dear Miss Sprengel,

I cannot let the time pass without writing to tell you how greatly shocked I am at your disgraceful behavior to Doctor Steiner—and also to Mrs. Steiner.

I have truly always thought of you as a rather delicate and hysterical looking [sic] person, but I little imagined to what depths your evidently hysterical nature could lead you.

Your illusive hope of becoming a prominent person in our society not having been realized has been too much of a disappointment for your nature. This kind of thing happens every day, in that disappointed young women fall into all sorts of hysterical conditions, which give rise to all sorts of fantastical dreams. In this case the most holy things have been mixed with false illusions arising from much vanity, self-pride, and the desire for greatness!

To one who pictures herself to be the reincarnation of David, and of the Virgin Mary, very little can be said, for if one starts with such suppositions, one necessarily places oneself almost beyond the pale of reason and logic.

A dog will not bite the hand that has fed it for years—you have not shown the fidelity of a dog in that you have turned all your hatred and spite against the one who has given you all that has brought life into your existence, both spiritually and physically, for you have been beholden to him and his friends for your subsistence.

And now, because you are thoroughly disappointed, you have tried and are trying your best to injure him with every subtle untruth and insinuation, engendered by those thoughts which have entered your imaginative brain.

Doctor Steiner is beloved, revered, and respected; his life is an example to all. He has been able through his power of logic and clear and right thinking to feed us with the bread of Wisdom and Life, and has truly been a Light-bringer to us all.

I implore you to listen to reason before it is too late! Try to examine yourself for one hour and perceive the cause of all the fearful self-deception from which you are suffering. Beware of the awful figure of HATE, called up by your jealousy and consequent disappointment!

You cannot undo the past, but you can try to redeem the lost opportunities you have had by refraining from showing more and more clearly the picture that many can see—to which you are apparently quite blind up till now—namely, that of jealous woman suffering from ingratitude, disappointment, and hysterical illusions!

O Man! Know Thyself!

Truly,

[signed Mary Peet]

* * *

Heinrich Goesch (b. 1880 in Rostock, d. 1930 in Konstanz) was a man of many talents and interests who was already a Ph.D. and LL.D. at age twenty. His name also appeared once in December 1900 on the list of those present at a meeting of the Berlin literary society Die Kommenden. Financial support from parents and relatives enabled him to lead a life that allowed him to pursue numerous interests. Except for the last years of his life, when he lectured on art at the Dresden Academy of Arts and Crafts, he had never actually practiced a profession, presumably for reasons of health. According to a report by the psychiatrist Friedrich Husemann, Goesch had suffered from a very early age from epilepsy or seizure substitutes (absences). An expert witness reports having experienced one of Goesch's heaviest seizures. [ Note 5 ]

Goesch had come into contact with psychoanalysis in 1908 or 1909 while living with his wife (a cousin of Kathe Kollwitz) and his brother Paul, a painter, in Niederpoyritz near Dresden, where they were engaged in studying architecture, aesthetics, and philosophy. Paul Fechter, a journalist who was a friend of the Goeschs at that time, reports the following in his memoirs: [ Note 6 ]

Such was the world that greeted the dawning of psychoanalysis. One day Heinrich Goesch made the acquaintance of one of its earliest adepts, the son of a professor in Graz, who had made the teachings of Sigmund Freud, which at that time had not yet been widely popularized, the basis of his whole life. Goesch took him along to Niederpoyritz, where in endless nightly sessions the young doctor initiated the two brothers into the secrets of the new doctrine. As a result, Heinrich and Paul Goesch, consistent and logical in all their intellectual pursuits, were not content with the theory, but set about putting it into practice. They not only listened to what their guest had to offer, they tried it out on themselves and anything else they could get their hands on. They analyzed themselves and others and staged complex-resolutions by night until Niederpoyritz rebelled and their reputation rivaled that of young Schlegel in Jena.

All that would have made no difference; rumors get started and then fade away again. The effect on Paul Goesch, however, was disastrous—his thin-skinned psyche cracked under these experiments. Analysis, it seems, had eliminated certain inhibitions he needed in order to maintain a secure hold on life. Shortly after the doctor's visit, he entered a mental hospital for the first time…

The “doctor” whose name Fechter does not reveal was Otto Gross, private lecturer in psychopathology at the University of Graz and one of Freud's first pupils. Unlike Freud, who used psychoanalysis simply as a method of medical treatment, Gross, by applying it in social and political contexts as well, tried to make it the underlying basis of everyday life. His efforts eventually brought him into conflict with all existing social structures. As a drug addict, he became a patient of C. G. Jung at the Burghoelzli in Zurich and in that capacity played a certain role in the professional disagreements between Jung and Freud. Later, at the instigation of his father, Hans Gross (professor of criminology at Graz), he was declared legally incompetent and spent most of the rest of his life in mental hospitals. [ Note 7 ]

In his obituary of Heinrich Goesch, Fechter has this to say about Goesch's relationship to psychoanalysis:

When Otto Gross first introduced him to the as yet relatively unknown psychoanalytic method of Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Goesch recognized it immediately as a means of extending his personal experience into unfathomed depths. He took up this new subject passionately, not as a theoretical, conceptual, or abstract object of study and experience, but plunging with his whole being and all the strength he possessed into this stream that opened up before him and led into new depths. He did not study psychoanalysis, he experienced it through and through, making himself the object of his own analysis, descending into the shocks and ecstasies of the darkness that opened up in front of him with a total disregard for how it might affect his everyday existence. At once, he began to pull the theory out of the realm of science and into his immediate personal experience. It was a very dangerous experiment… [ Note 8 ]

Goesch became acquainted with Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy around 1910. Shortly thereafter, he became a member of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, led at that point by Rudolf Steiner as General Secretary. He had been recommended by the physician Max Asch, who wrote to Rudolf Steiner on April 27, 1910. [ Note 9 ]

For the last two weeks or so, I have been involved in a lively and personal exchange of ideas with a Mr. Heinrich Goesch, Ph.D., who seems to me predestined for occult training. He is one of the most highly gifted people I have ever met, and about one year ago had unusual inner experiences that occurred as part of a state of ecstasy lasting about a week, which leads me to assume that his case would be of particular interest to you, too. He has recently immersed himself in the study of your works Theosophy, An Outline Of Occult Science, etc.), and the unbelievable quickness with which he grasps these things leads me to suspect that he has undergone some form of occult schooling in an earlier incarnation—apparently a specifically Christian one, given the nature of his ecstatic experiences. Mr. Goesch will attend your lecture tomorrow evening; if you wish, I will introduce him to you. He wants to become a member of the Theosophical Society immediately.

The lecture in question took place on April 28, 1910, in the Berlin House of Architects. Its title was “Error and Mental Disorder.” [ Note 10 ] On April 30, 1910, Asch wrote to Rudolf Steiner again:

Heinrich Goesch, Ph.D., about whom I wrote to you, would be very grateful if you would find an opportunity to speak with him soon. He would like to attend your lectures in Hamburg, since they are related to an area he has researched with particular interest in the last few years. Therefore, he would like to become a member of the Theosophical Society as soon as possible. Mr. Goesch lives in Charlottenburg…

A short time after Heinrich Goesch and his wife Gertrud became members, the construction of a building to serve as its central headquarters became a focal point of the Society's activity. Goesch was very interested in architecture and in 1912 made some suggestions about the design of the building. This interest, it seems, was also what led him to come in the spring of 1914 to Dornach, where work on the Johannesbau (first Goetheanum) had begun in fall of 1913.

These facts from the biography of Goesch, who, as Paul Fechter puts it, displayed “a personal and unique combination of logic and mysticism,” make it somewhat understandable why he would jump into the Sprengel case with typical passionate energy. According to the psychiatrist Friedrich Husemann, epileptics characteristically combine egocentricity with a disproportionate sensitivity to personal affront and a tendency to complain. On the basis of these changes in their affective life, it is easy for them to develop delusions, and a certain affinity must have developed between Goesch's delusions and those of Alice Sprengel. Goesch formulated his thoughts in a long and elaborate letter (dated August 19, 1915) to Rudolf Steiner, who read it to the Dornach circle on August 21, 1915, in place of his usual Saturday evening lecture.

Dr. Unger: With regard to the Boldt motion, we have to work through to understand why we entered into this at the general assembly. It is not about us making the Boldt case a big case. Mr. Boldt has hurled accusations and insults in his brochure and forced a matter on us that we do not like. But if it is to have a general significance, then we must pay attention to what is typical about such a phenomenon.

First of all, it is quite impossible to force members to buy a brochure so that they are informed about its contents at the general assembly. The only correct thing, in accordance with the rules of procedure, is for someone who wants to orientate a meeting to provide the relevant material and not to demand 50 pfennigs from each person in order to be able to orientate themselves. In addition, if you have read the brochure, in which there is nothing at all that we can use, you are supposed to buy the book as well. These are things that are impossible for us. That is why we did not need to meet here. But it is typical and significant of the case. It is important for us to learn something from it and to become aware that it is necessary within our society to emancipate ourselves from certain prejudices and suggestions that the whole of life and thought in our time wants to impose on us. In this regard, we must pay attention to some of the things in the brochure. For the accusations, which need not be taken personally at all, relate, among other things, to the fact that something has been rejected here that deals with an important problem of our time, which supposedly deals with a problem in the manner of “spiritual science” and claims to be a scientifically significant matter, as can be seen from the “blurb” read out yesterday. Such an accusation is unjustified from the outset; for no one can demand that any intellectual products should be read, but one can only wait and see what each individual wants to do of his own free will. Then it is claimed that all those who have rejected the matter are supposed to have done so out of ignorance. It was therefore very commendable that some samples from the book were given yesterday, so that anyone who has not read it because they did not want to can now say from their own experience: there is nothing in the book that could have any value for us. What matters is that we educate ourselves to be able to judge what has value and what has no value. And since this is precisely the kind of problem that should be placed at the center of our attention, that should be imposed on us as a problem even though it is not one at all, it is important to work through the question of this alleged problem.

We want to come together here to cultivate knowledge, to gain insight into the workings of spiritual beings. This means that we do not take the starting points from external appearances and symptoms, from what is imposed by sensory experience or what could be gained from the habituation of scientific observation, but that we recognize that all true knowledge can only be found in spiritual reality. It is important that we learn to hold fast to this, that we learn to recognize how much of what passes itself off today as “scientific” is reality and what is not. And that is why it is important that this is not just a “Boldt case,” but a case that gives us the opportunity to shed light on the workings of scientific claims and prejudices in our time. An example will be given that, in terms of its content, already points to the problems that are to be brought home to us here. If we want to look at any vital questions from the spiritual-scientific point of view - that is, from the point of view that we seek to gain on the basis of what is communicated to us from higher knowledge - then it must be the first condition for us to know something know something about it, to know something from the spiritual sources; otherwise we are not in the channel of a spiritual movement, the spiritual movement in question here, but only deal with what is prepared as “scientific phenomenology”. So an example is to be given that, as it were, introduces us to our subject.

When we are led to the basic principles of how man has been born out of the spiritual worlds and has developed under the guidance of spiritual beings, we are then shown that this is not a theory, but a reality of the spiritual worlds, which in the past has also worked in a pictorial way into the pictorial consciousness of mankind, and the expression of these images has been preserved in myths and legends. When we occupy ourselves with myths and legends, we have something that touches our inner hearts, and what would otherwise be presented to us in dry, sober thoughts is presented to us in pictorial thoughts. The legends of the gods are higher realities for us, and in this respect they are a force that reaches deep into our hearts, with which we can approach the problems of existence. They contain something that can work as an element of progress for our movement. We can gain knowledge within our movement from research in the spiritual world about a certain area of existence, namely about the origin of myths and legends and about their significance for the past and present of humanity. If we now ask the circles that behave scientifically about this, we do find a reliable collection of myths and legends as fact. It is not characterized by the fact that one says: it is superficial or not. For such a collection is something that is still most to be praised for in this day and age, namely the diligence in collecting facts. What is then added to such a collection is usually very little. But among the things that are added, we find something typical: a tendency to look at everything from the point of view of a preconceived favorite subject. In this, so-called “sexual literature” is particularly distinguished by the fact that nothing is sacred to it; and in this sexual literature we find volumes of descriptions that trace myths and legends back to the lowest sexual elements - not only to what belongs to natural or animal life, but all excesses, perversions and decadent phenomena are placed in the most arbitrary way at the beginning of the cultural history of mankind and thus the legends and myths are explained. If we wanted to pay attention to it at all, then we would have to give up our entire spiritual-scientific point of view from the outset. The moment we open our ears to what not only wants to reach us from such circles, but also wants to behave in an “occult” manner, we pronounce our own death sentence!

And this is the significant lesson that arises from this: that we must beware of anything that, in whatever way, with great ingenuity, perhaps even wit, presses itself upon us and seeks so easily to associate itself with the name “occultism”; that, on the contrary, we learn to recognize it, see through it and reject it out of our innermost knowledge and understanding. It is not necessary to point out the dangers that beset us in this regard; even the name Leadbeater can be avoided. But one thing must be emphasized: that we also find something in the newer Adyar literature that must be rejected by us in the strongest possible terms: Mrs. Besant refers to her earlier work, to her collaboration with Bradlaugh, to the possibility of limiting the population in the sense of Malthusianism, and so on. What was spread at that time from England, out of the general materialistic spirit of the age, was superseded by Mrs. Besant when Mrs. Blavatsky approached with her spiritual aspirations. Today it is rearing its head again, “illuminated by the glory of occultism.” We see in what presents itself as “occultism” the face of materialism, and we must pay attention to this and draw attention to it. It is certainly true that the influence of materialism on our movement is very strong, so that we must be on our guard, must sharpen our judgment, must learn to stand firmly on spiritual ground, and must learn to seek and find the starting-point for our world-related thinking more and more in the spiritual worlds and beings. In this sense, my request is that, in dealing with this matter, we should look less at the personality of the unfortunate Mr. Boldt than at the typical contemporary phenomena that it expresses, which we must take into account if we want to continue our movement in the right direction.

Mr. von Rainer: Dearly beloved! It may be necessary, after all, to shed light on this “Boldt case,” which has already been examined in some respects because it is symptomatic, from a perspective that plays a major role in our spiritual movement in our time. And if I am obliged to say some things in such a way that it appears as if I wanted to give good teachings, it may be necessary to preface this with a personal comment: that I am fully convinced that all people are children of their time, and that in can only speak with such conviction about something if you feel clearly within yourself how much you are a child of your time and how much opportunity you have to observe how being a “child of your time” creates an enormous obstacle for all ideal endeavors.

From the letters of Mr. Boldt, which he writes to the two representatives and chairmen of the Munich Lodge, the word has been read that he “has been insulted in his theosophical honor.” Even in today's world, the word “honor” actually has only a passive side and no longer an active one. One's honor is continually offended, but today one does not ask oneself whether one might offend the honor of other people. And if we ask ourselves why such a fact plays a significant role in our movement, we must remember the cycle of lectures given by Dr. Steiner in Norrköping on “Theosophical Morality”, where he pointed out that the moral qualities of the Orient, of India, for example, were different from those of Europe. While the Indian was characterized by devotion and worship, courage, standing up for one's convictions with clenched fists, so to speak, was always what distinguished the Westerner. The spiritual impulse of the theosophical movement has now been brought to the West with thoroughly Indian concepts, including the Indian concept of worship, of devotion – certainly justifiably – towards everything that exists in the world. But in doing so, it has been completely overlooked that in the West one is faced with a different audience than in India. In India, the caste system excludes the democratic spirit of the West from the outset; and it is already expressed in political institutions that veneration and devotion must then be modified somewhat differently in a certain way depending on what one is facing. But the West has been a pioneer for humanity in precisely this respect, in that the development of freedom has found a certain support through the democratic spirit of the time. But the whole nature of intellectual life in our time is such that it does not understand when it is stopped. Therefore, one did not understand how to stop in the democratic spirit of the time, in this spirit, which I would like to characterize for you through the saying of a poet, because precisely this poet, the Austrian poet Grillparzer, can be considered quite distant from all political endeavors...

Here Mr. von Rainer quoted a passage from the drama “A Brother Quarrel in the House of Habsburg,” which was put into the mouth of Emperor Rudolf II, and which ended with the following lines:

I say to you: not Scythians and Khazars,
Who once extinguished the splendor of the ancient world,
Are threatening our time, but foreign peoples:
The barbarian struggles loose from his own bosom,
Who, once without reins, everything great,
Art, science, state, church
falls from the heights that protect it,
to the surface of its own vulgarity,
until everything is the same, yes, because everything is low.

And following on from this, Mr. von Rainer pointed out that there is also a certain danger looming in our circles, from which we must protect ourselves. He then continued:

It is not always the case in the world that when someone comes along with certain pretensions and also displays on the other hand all the qualities that should lead to his condemnation as a human being, that these should also make him unworthy of human compassion. We must show a personality like Mr. Boldt's the greatest compassion, indeed the greatest love, but we must not be deceived by it. We must remember that love does not consist in overlooking or even excusing the dangers inherent in a fellow human being. If we examine the dangerousness of what is written in this brochure, objectively, regardless of what kind of person Mr. Boldt is, we must say: What is written here has emerged from the school of Vollrath, Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden and so on. But it is also written entirely in the spirit of our time, about which we heard again yesterday from Dr. Steiner, that it really leaves much to be desired in terms of truthfulness. And I must also cite evidence of the way in which people and things are judged today, without even informing themselves about what the personalities in question actually want with their appearance.

An essay by Dr. Wilhelm Oehl entitled “Modern Theosophy” has been published in the magazine “Der Aar”, a monthly publication for the entire Catholic intellectual life of the present day. It states:

In stark contrast to the reserved Hübbe-Schleiden and even more so to Hartmann, who emphasized ethics, the magician Rudolf Steiner is at the center of a large group of followers who hold his person and his supernatural secret forces in absolute devotion. (“Der Aar,” July 1913 issue, p. 519).

At the beginning, the author writes in a footnote:

As sources, I used the writings of Blavatsky, Besant, Hartmann, Hübbe-Schleiden, Collin, Brahmacharin-Bodhabhikshu and Hermann Rudolph, as well as many essays in the journals “Theosophische Kultur”, “Sphinx”, “Lotosbl , Prana and The Theosophical Path; valuable material is contained in the two brochures by Hans Freimark, Moderne Theosophen und ihre Theosophie and Die okkultistische Bewegung, both published in Leipzig in 1912 by Wilhelm Heims (Leipzig). Finally, attention is drawn to the excellent essay by P. Zimmermann in the 'Stimmen aus Maria Laach': 'Die neue Theosophie' (1910, pp. 387ff.). The various conversation encyclopedias and church encyclopedias offer almost nothing or very little about Theosophy. - Several years of contact with the Theosophists, occultists and astrologers of Vienna, Berlin and Zurich gave me the most desirable opportunity to thoroughly get to know the thinking of these circles.

These were the sources that he said he had used; and yet he has the nerve to write what I read about Dr. Steiner's personality, even though it is clear from his own statements that he is not familiar with any of Dr. Steiner's books! And while he cites the titles of books and publishers for other authors, he only says in the rest of the essay that Dr. Steiner published the magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis”; he says nothing about any of his other books. Perhaps it could be objected that this is a journal that serves a certain tendency; but it is precisely in these circles that people pride themselves on being “modern” and on wanting to draw modern aspirations into the church.

So I saw a poster for a lecture: “Modern Theosophy in the Spirit of Christianity”. Where pretensions arise that “modern theosophy also wants to represent a surrogate for Christianity”, one speaks of a person as a “fantastic magician” and does not even know what books he has written!

These are terrible times in which the reader is deprived of any basis for judging something correctly; because one must be able to read between the lines of such articles and see that, for example, Hans Freimark and Father Otto Zimmermann are opponents of Dr. Steiner. These are the kinds of signs that should make us extremely vigilant about our time and ourselves. It is a tremendous slogan to write on a brochure: “A free word to free Theosophists”. You can quite calmly write this as a powerful motto at the top of your brochure, and then later say: If Dr. Steiner had said something good about my book, I have no doubt that it would have been considered thoroughly Theosophical and would have been read and distributed in the widest circles.

What about “freedom” here? If you speak well of a book that someone writes and publishes, you can be sure that you will be called a “free person”; if you say nothing or cannot say anything commendatory, then you have violated freedom! It is entirely possible that someone comes along with the pretension of redeeming the gagged Frei and then says quite calmly: If the person in question, whom I naturally do not recognize as an authority, had asserted his authority for me, I would not have objected; then the whole brochure would not have been written, and everything else would have been avoided. On page 23, Mr. Boldt writes:

I had to come to the conclusion [at that time] that Dr. Steiner's negative attitude had not remained without influence on these events.

the “events” that his book was not recommended!

As a result, he only encouraged the prudishness and herd prejudices in theosophical circles. I am certain that if he had devoted even a single good word to my work, which has been appreciated by many Theosophists, no one would have dared to find the book un-Theosophical and to object to the sale of the book or to the announcement of the prospectus within the lodges.

Thus, the representative of freedom and opponent of authority would have had no objection to the “herd-like human prejudices” if they had proved useful in the dissemination of this book.

So it is that someone can say, “I am offended in my theosophical honor,” but does nothing for the honor of the other people, the 75 percent, as he says, that he counts among the “partisaners”; because he insults them with the brochure. If we are guided by the perhaps “outdated” but nevertheless existing concepts of honor that prevail in the West, namely to have strong convictions for the moral foundations of Western man, then it is no longer possible to accept what is offered to us. We seem to be like game that anyone can shoot, just because we have a conviction – and not only can anyone from outside shoot at it, whom one cannot blame for it for certain reasons, but everyone within the movement shoots at it! However profound this movement is, among ourselves the individual is actually treated very superficially. In these circles anyone who dares to write anything that condemns 75 percent of the people in a movement dedicated to a high ideal, lock, stock and barrel. One has only to recall the unheard-of nature of such an act! It is always said that it is the belief in authority that we have towards Dr. Steiner. No - our own honor, our theosophical honor is at stake here, because we cannot allow ourselves to be disparaged in this way by a person who knows nothing about the view of life that we want to realize and who wants to exploit for his own purposes what we want to create in the world with this view of life.

Where are the 25 percent he refers to? They should show themselves, these 25 percent, and if there are more of them, they should show themselves too, because we are tired of being attacked in this way. We are Westerners in the sense that we say: We don't have to do theosophical work if there is no one for whom it is suitable. But we would like to hear it! So someone writes this and goes around in the Society! He speaks of “masks and gestures.” But there are many people going around who are saying the same thing! In this regard, we must cultivate a certain honor and say: We will give a fitting answer to anyone who speaks like that, even if it is in the most trivial private conversation, because otherwise a poison will enter the movement and spread! We can only make progress if we are clear about the active part of the theosophical honor. It is not acceptable that just anyone who has barely sniffed into the theosophical movement can appear and say, “All this is blind faith in authority”; or that someone can express such a thoroughly dishonest view that he says, “I am completely permeated with love and admiration for the personality of Dr. Steiner , but this personality of Dr. Steiner adheres entirely to Nietzsche, who says, 'One must not come to people with the truth', and then in a certain way acts as if Dr. Steiner had the same personality in Nietzsche, from whom he gets everything he needs to lead this movement.

In the face of such a thing, it is also necessary to state very precisely what can shed light on the matter. In the first chapter of Dr. Steiner's book “Friedrich Nietzsche – A Fighter Against His Time” it says:

The words that he (Nietzsche) has spoken about his relationship to Schopenhauer, I would like to say about mine to Nietzsche: “I belong to those readers of Nietzsche who, after reading the first page of him, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word he has ever said. My trust in him was immediate... I understood him as if he had written for the sole purpose of expressing himself clearly, but also immodestly and foolishly.” You can speak in this way and be far from professing yourself a ‘believer’ in Nietzsche's world view.

This is stated at the beginning of the book and should be borne in mind when quoting from it. Mr. Boldt is not justified in quoting Dr. Steiner as saying: 'Dr. Steiner himself admitted that Nietzsche is an authority on this point ($. 16).

In his discussion of this topic, Dr. Steiner himself characterized the unconditional striving for truth and truthfulness, as advocated by Fichte, as “superficial,” whereas Nietzsche's view is said to be “rooted deeply in the essence of human nature.

Such a juxtaposition cannot help but create the impression that Dr. Steiner is of the opinion that the pursuit of truth and truthfulness must be characterized as “superficial.” What is meant, of course, is that, as it also appears in the book “Friedrich Nietzsche - A Fighter Against His Time,” Nietzsche himself raised the question: Must one strive for truth? Why does one want truth and not rather untruth? These are philosophical, intellectual processes about which one can say: It takes tremendous courage to express such things; but they cannot be taken as a basis for the practice of a way of life, especially not in a circle like ours, where we know where we want the foundations of the truth. We only need people who remain true to this truth. After all, truth no longer needs to be invented.

One need not say of a book like Mr. Boldt's that the author also has good aspirations. He should develop them wherever he wants, but not within the Anthroposophical Society, which has its store of truth. If one really always works positively, one already comes to such concepts to advance the movement.

This is not a matter of Theosophical honor revolting against what someone else does; rather, Theosophical honor should be flexible enough to allow us to do something that someone else does not. That is one side of it. But there is also a second side. For it would be easy to object to such statements: Are we not really doing everything that is humanly possible, so to speak? Are we not truly completely honest for this movement?

With regard to this movement, we must truly also think that we are children of our time. We are children of our time for the Movement itself, and it is not at all certain that those who write in this way are not also completely children of their time. But the misfortune is when we always “soar on clouds” in a certain respect, when we want something, and believe that we must always achieve something great, and think that there are no “little things”. You have to start with the little things! At the beginning of our movement, there were many who said, “How can I be useful to the movement?” before they really knew what it was about. But the more the movement needs strength, the more those same people show themselves to be truly willing to work where they are placed by karma. It is not enough to work for a worldview if you are with the “idea” of the matter. In terms of the practice of a worldview, one can be there for an idea and yet be a crass materialist. In this respect, it is perhaps good to take a historical look at our society, at what has happened since the time of the Constituent Assembly.

The lunch break begins around two o'clock; the continuation of the business negotiations is scheduled for four o'clock.

My dear sisters and brothers,

Since the Christmas Conference an esoteric breath flows through the whole Anthroposophical Society. And those members of the Anthroposophical Society who have taken part in the general members' lectures will have noted how this esoteric breath flows through all the work within the anthroposophical movement now, and should do so in the future.

This was a necessity which, above all, flows from the spiritual world, from where the revelations come which should live in the anthroposophical movement.

Therefore, the necessity arose to create a certain nucleus for anthroposophical esoteric life, to create real esoteric life, and therewith the necessity arose to build a bridge to the spiritual world itself.

In a certain sense the spiritual world had to manifest the will for the creation of such a School. For an esoteric school cannot be created by human arbitrariness, nor from that human arbitrariness called “human ideals”; rather must this esoteric school be the body for something which flows out of spiritual life, so that everything that occurs in such a school presents the outer expression of an activity which in reality occurs in the spiritual world itself. Therefore, this esoteric school could not have been created without first asking the will of Michael, which since the last third of the nineteenth century has been guiding human affairs - something which I have often mentioned here in members' lectures.

In the course of time this will of Michael again and again cyclically intervenes in human affairs from the spiritual world. And when we look back in the evolution of time, we find that this same Michael-Will - which we can also call the Michael Reign - was active in the spiritual affairs of humanity, in the great questions of civilization before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the time of Alexander in Greece through the Chthonian and Celestial mysteries, and which was to spread to Asia and Africa. Where the Michael-Will reigns, there is always cosmopolitanism. What differentiates people on earth is overcome during the Michael age.

The most important influence, related to Aristotle and to Alexander, which was under the impulse of Michael, was followed by that of Oriphiel, and after Oriphiel came the Anael impulse, the Zachariel impulse, then the Raphael impulse, then the Samael impulse, then the Gabriel impulse, which extended into the 19^th century. And since the seventies of the nineteenth century we are again under the sign of Michael's reign. It is in its beginnings. But Michael's impulses must flow into all legitimate esoteric activities in a conscious manner - what can be clear to you, my sisters and brothers, through the general lectures for members.

And everything connected with the Christmas Conference leads to what is constituted as the basis of the anthroposophical movement's formation of this Esoteric School inspired and guided by Michael. It therefore rightfully exists in our times as a spiritual institution. All those who want to be rightful members of this School must accept this in their lives with the deepest sincerity. They must feel that they don't merely belong to an earthly community, but to a supersensible community, whose guide and leader is Michael himself. Therefore, everything communicated here is not to be understood as my words, insofar as they are the content of the lessons, but rather as what Michael communicates in an esoteric manner to those who feel they belong with him in this age. Therefore, what these lessons contain will be Michael's message for our age.

And it is because of this that the anthroposophical movement will receive its true spiritual strength. For this it is necessary that what membership in this School means be taken with the utmost earnestness. It is really necessary, my dear sisters and brothers, truly and deeply necessary, that it be indicated in the utmost earnest manner the sacred earnestness with which the School must be taken.

And here within the School it must be repeatedly said: in anthroposophical circles there is much too little earnestness for what really flows through the anthroposophical movement, and at least the esoteric members of the Esoteric School must be in the forefront of what humanity can gradually develop as the necessary earnestness. Therefore, it is necessary that the leadership of the School retain for itself the right to allow only those to enter as rightful, worthy members of the School who, in every aspect of their lives, want to be worthy representatives of anthroposophy; and the decision about whether this is the case or not must lie with the School's leadership.

Do not consider this, my sisters and brothers, as a limitation of freedom. The School's leadership must also have its freedom and be able to recognize who belongs to the School and who does not, just as each one is free to decide whether to belong to the School or not. So, a free, ideal-spiritual contract, so to speak, between each member of the School and the leadership must be agreed upon. In no other way could esoteric development be called healthy, especially not one which is worthy of the fact that this Esoteric School exists under the direct force of the Michael impulse itself.

Conscientious care of the mantric verses so that they do not fall into unauthorized hands is the first requisite; but also, to really be a worthy representative of the anthroposophical cause.

I only need to mention a few things to show how little the anthroposophical movement is still grasped with complete earnestness. It has happened that members of the School have reserved their seats by placing on them the blue membership certificates, which gives them the right to participate in the School. [1] It has happened in the Anthroposophical Society that whole piles of the News Sheets, only intended for members, have been found on the trolley cars that run from Dornach to Basel. And I could add many other examples to this list. And amazing things happen as a result of this lack of earnestness. Even with things that in everyday life are taken seriously, at the moment when those within the anthroposophical movement are expected to do so, they do not take them seriously.

These are things which must be considered in connection with the firm structure that this School must have. Therefore, these things must be said, because if they are not observed, one cannot worthily receive what is given here in the School as revelations from the spiritual world. At the end of each lesson, your attention is expressly drawn to the fact that the being of Michael is present while the revelations from the spiritual world are given, and are confirmed by Michael's sign and seal.

All these things must live in the members' hearts. And worthiness, profound worthiness must reign in all that is bound even in thought to the School. For only in this way what today is to be carried through the world as an esoteric stream can live. And that includes the duties incumbent on each individual.

The mantric verses written here on the blackboard can only be possessed, in the strictest sense of the word, by those who have the right to be present. And if a member of the School is unable to attend a lesson during which mantric verses are given, another member, who has the verses, may give them to him; but it must be for each individual case, that is, for each person to whom the verses are to be given, that permission must be requested, either from Dr. Wegman or from me. Once permission is granted in respect to a person, it remains valid. But permission must again be requested for each other individual. This is not an administrative rule, it is an occult rule that must be strictly adhered to. For every act of the School must be connected to the School's leadership: and that begins with having to request permission from the School's leadership for acts having to do with the School. Not the one who is to receive the mantras may ask, but only the one who is to give them, using the modality that I have just described. If someone takes notes on what is said here, except for the mantras, he is obliged to keep them for only one week, and then to burn them.

All these things are not arbitrary rules, but they relate to the occult fact that esoteric matters are only effective if they are embraced by the School members' attitude. The mantras lose their effectiveness if they fall into the wrong hands. And it is a rule so firmly inscribed in the cosmic order, that the following once happened and a whole group of mantras, which had been in effect within the anthroposophical movement, have been rendered ineffective.

I was able to give mantric verses to a number of people; I also gave them to a certain person, who had a friend. The friend was somewhat clairvoyant. And it happened that while the two friends were sleeping in the same room, the clairvoyant friend, when the other one merely repeated the mantra in thought, surreptitiously copied it and then did mischief with it by giving it to others as coming from himself. It was necessary to look into the matter, which revealed why the mantra became ineffective for all those who possessed it.

Therefore, my dear sisters and brothers, you must not take these things lightly, for esoteric rules are strict; and when someone has made such an error, he should not excuse himself by claiming that he was unable to avoid it. Of course, if someone runs through a mantra in his mind, and someone else copies it clairvoyantly, he certainly can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, the rules are applied with an iron necessity. [2]

I mention this so that you can see how little arbitrariness is involved, and how these things are being read from the spiritual world and that the practices of the spiritual world apply. Nothing is arbitrary in what occurs in a rightly existing esoteric school. And the earnestness from this esoteric school should stream out to the whole anthroposophical movement. For only then will this School be what it should be for the anthroposophical movement. But when something is done which only springs from personal motives and then it is pretended that it is because of devotion to the anthroposophical movement- well, I don't mean to say that it should not happen, because obviously, people today must be personal - but then it is also necessary that truth lives in what is personal, that for instance if someone comes here to Dornach for personal pleasure he should admit it and not pretend otherwise. There's nothing wrong with coming to Dornach for personal pleasure, in fact it is good. But one should admit it and not sidestep it by declaring pure dedication to spiritual life.

I mention this; I could just as well mention another example, which is more real, for it is really the case that when most of our friends come to Dornach, a will to sacrifice is involved, and that only in the least of cases is untruthfulness involved. But I've chosen this example because it is the least applicable and thus the least harmful. If I had mentioned other examples, what I would like to have as a calm prevailing mood in the hearts and souls of all who are sitting here now could not exist in the necessary degree.

After that introduction, I would like to start with the verse that is the beginning and end of Michael's proclamation to all unbiased human beings, and which contains what all entities in the world are saying, if one listens to them with the soul. For from all that lives in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, what sparkles down from the stars, what acts into our souls from the domains of the hierarchies, from all that crawls under and on the earth as worm-life, from what speaks in rocks and springs and fields and thunder and clouds and lightning; all these spoke to unbiased human beings in the past, speak at the present and will speak in the future:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

The previous lesson ended, my dear sisters and brothers, with the Guardian of the Threshold giving the last admonitions before one passes over the yawning abyss of being; the Guardian of the Threshold spoke the weighty, moving words:

Come in,
The gate has opened;
You will become
A true human being.

Our souls and hearts have been exposed to the important, weighty, meaningful words spoken by the Guardian of the Threshold on behalf of Michael. And everything he said was to prepare us for the attitude we must have when we come over after the gate has been opened - over the yawning abyss of being, where one does not come walking with earthly feet, where one flies with the spiritual wings that grow when the soul is imbued with a spiritual attitude, with spiritual love, with spiritual feeling.

And now, now, my dear sisters and brothers, will be described what the human being experiences when he stands on the other side of the yawning abyss of being. The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to him: turn around and look back! Until now you have been looking at what appeared to you as black, night-cloaked gloom, about which you had to say that it will become inner light and will illumine your own Self. With the last admonitions—the Guardian of the Threshold says—I let it become lighter, at first most gently. You feel now the first light around you. But turn around, look back!

And now, when he who has crossed over the yawning abyss of being and turns around and looks back, he sees himself as an earthly human being, what he is during his physical incarnation, over there in the part of his being that he has left behind and which now lies in the earthly sphere. He observes his own human self there. He has embodied himself in spiritual being with his spirit-soul. The earthly environment is over there now. He stands there in the region, in which we first were with all our humanity, where we saw what crawls beneath and flies above, where we saw the sparkling stars, the warmth-giving sun, where we saw what lives in the wind and weather, and where, knowing that despite all its majesty, how the sun blazes and illumines, despite all the beauty and greatness accessible to the senses, we said to ourselves: our own humanity is not here; we must seek it on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, in what seems at first, to the senses, to be black, night-cloaked gloom.

The Guardian of the Threshold has shown, by the three beasts, what we actually are. Now will be described how in the gloom that is beginning to be light, we should begin to look back on what we as humans are in the sensory world, together with what was our only world in sensory earthly existence.

And now the Guardian of the Threshold points directly back there to the earthly man, which we ourselves also are during earthly existence, and to which we must continually return, into which we must always penetrate when we leave the spiritual world and return to our earthly duty. For we may not become dreamers and go into raptures, we must return completely to earth life. Therefore the Guardian of the Threshold directs us to look at the person who stands over there, who we ourselves are, in a way that at first draws our attention to what this person is. [An outline of a human being is drawn on the blackboard.]

He knows that he perceives the outer world through the senses, which are mostly situated in the head, and that he perceives his thinking through the impulse of the head.

But the Guardian of the Threshold now says: Look into this head. It is like looking into a dark cell, for you do not see the creative light within it. The truth is that what you had as thinking over there in the sensory world is mere seeming, mere images, not much more than mirror-images.

The Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us to be very aware of this, but also to be aware that what is only appearance in earthly thinking is the corpse - as we have heard in previous lessons - of a living thinking in which we were immersed in the soul-spiritual world before we descended to this earthly life. There thinking lived! Now thinking rests as dead thinking, as seeming thinking in the coffin of our bodies. And all the thinking we use in the sensory world is dead thinking. It was alive before we descended.

And what has this thinking accomplished? It has created everything that is within the head, within this dark cell - as it appears to the senses - that is light-creating essence. The brain, which rests within as thinking's support, has been created by living thinking. [The interior of the head, yellow, is drawn on the blackboard.] It is living thinking that creates the support for our earthly semblance of thinking.

Observe the brain's convolutions, observe what you carry within the dark cell that enables you to think, my sisters and brothers, observe the semblance of thinking in the dark cell, then you will find in what is felt above as thinking [drawing: red arrows] from out of which streams the force of will into thinking, so that each thought is streamed through with will. How the will streams into thinking can be sensed.

And now we look back from the other side of the threshold at how that other person, who we ourselves are, has waves of will streaming out of his body into the head, which create the will, and finally, when we follow them back to the turning points of time which lead to our previous incarnations, how they create the waves of thought from worlds past into our present incarnation and form our heads, all of which makes the semblance of thinking in this incarnation possible.

Therefore, we must be strong, the Guardian of the Threshold tells us, and imagine dead thinking being cast out into the cosmic nothingness, for it is only seeming. And the willing that then arises we should consider as what comes over from previous incarnations and interweaves and works, making us thinkers. Within [drawing: yellow] are the creating cosmic thoughts. These creating cosmic thoughts enable us to have human thoughts.

Therefore, the first words the Guardian of the Threshold speaks after he has let us cross the threshold, and after he has announced that the gate has opened, that we can become true human beings, the first words he speaks are:

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

The first words we hear on the other side, as we look back at the figure, which we ourselves are:

[The first mantra is written on the blackboard, together with a heading. Blackboard writing is always in italics.]

The Guardian is heard in the brightening darkness:

I

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

And then the Guardian of the Threshold adds - and one must strain to hear him: Now imagine that you are observing that figure on the other side who you yourself are; you turn around again and look into the darkness and try with all your inner imaginative force of remembrance - as one does when retaining a physical after-image in the eye. Try with all your strength to draw before you something like a gray outline of what you saw over there, but avoid drawing anything except the outline of the figure. [It is drawn.]

Then, if one succeeds in seeing this gray outline of a figure, behind it appears an image of the moon [a sickle moon, yellow, is drawn], the gray figure before it.

If one is able to keep inner calm, one sees the moon in the distance. The gray figure outline is also there, but it is active in us. And if we practice this over and over, we feel we have arrived at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, not the physical human figure, but at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, if we can feel what karma brings to us from previous earthly incarnations. [yellow arrow at the right of the sickle moon.]

Therefore, you should meditate on this picture that I have drawn here, the sickle moon with this arrow; let the mantra unfold, with this picture as the marker for the gradual familiarization with what forcefully comes over from previous earthly existences.

And secondly, the Guardian of the Threshold points with a stronger gesture to what feeling is to the person over there, who we ourselves are, and he admonishes that we are to see this feeling as a dim dream. In fact, we see feeling - which makes the person over there more real than thinking, for thinking is illusion, whereas feeling is half reality - we see the person's feeling enfold in numerous dream-pictures during the day. We learn by observing it that feeling, for the spirit and in the spirit, is dreaming.

But what kind of dreaming is feeling? In this feeling, not only the individual dreams, but within it the whole surrounding world dreams. Our thinking is our own. That's why it's illusion. The world lives in our feeling. The world's existence is within it.

Now we must achieve, to the extent possible, tranquility of heart, the Guardian warns, so that we can extinguish what lives and interweaves as feeling in the dream-pictures, just as dreams are extinguished in deep sleep. Then we can reach the truth of feeling, and we can see human feeling interwoven with the cosmic life that is present in spirit in all our surroundings. And then the real spiritual human being appears to us, who in his body lives at first in his half-existence. The human being appears to us from out of sleeping feeling. We feel ourselves to be on the other side of the threshold, on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, for feeling has fallen asleep and the cosmic creative powers, which live in feeling, have appeared around us.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

[This second part is written on the blackboard.]

II

See in

(Before it was “behind”, here it is “in”; all the words in a mantric verse are important.)

feeling's weaving in the soul,

(Before it was “thinking”, here “feeling”; there “sensory light”, here “weaving in the soul”; “weaving” is much more real than merely semblance of light.)

[In the first part “thinking” and “sensory light”, and in the second part “feeling's” are underlined.

How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;

(There it was “Willing arises from the body's depths;”, here “Life streams in from cosmic distance;”)

[In the third line of the first part “Willing” is underlined, and in the second part “Life”.]

Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;

It is enhanced: Here [in the first part] it involved letting flow through the soul's force; here [in the second part] one must waft away human feeling. [the word “waft” is underlined.]

And cosmic life spiritualizes

—here [in the first part] it was the willing that is still in the human being; here it is cosmic

As the human being's power.

—the enhancement relative to cosmic thought's creation.—

[In the first part “cosmic thought's creation” and in the second part “human being's power” are underlined.]

The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us that we should look back once again at the gray figure that stands over there, which we are ourselves in earthly life, but this time after having turned away, in our minds we turn it around in a circle. We will find, when we rotate the figure, that the sun appears behind it and rotates with it. [It is drawn - left, red]. And we will realize that at the moment we are brought into physical existence from the spiritual world, our etheric body has been compressed from the cosmic ether. Therefore, just as the first verse belongs to this [the drawing of the gray figure and the first verse are numbered “I”], this second verse belongs to this. [The drawing of the red rotating form and the second verse are numbered “II”.]

Then the Guardian of the Threshold refers us to our will, which is active in our limbs. And he strongly draws our attention to the fact that whatever relates to the will is in a sleeping state, even when we are awake. He explains how as the thought works downward - I explained it last time, so may say it now -, how as the thought carries warmth downward into our limbs' movement so that it becomes will: this becomes clear in spiritual cognition and spiritual seeing. Normal consciousness hides this when we are sleeping, as it hides life in general during sleep. Now we should observe the will in the limbs as though sunken in deep sleep. The will is asleep. The limbs are asleep. We should see this as a firm mental image. Then, when it is firm, we realize how thinking, the source of willing in earthly man, sinks down into the limbs. Then it becomes light in him. The will becomes bright. It wakes up. When we first see it in its sleeping state, we find that it wakes up when thinking sinks downward and light from below streams upward, which is the force of gravity. Feel the force of gravity in your legs and arms when you let them relax: that is what streams upward, and which meets with the downward streaming thinking. We observe human will transformed into its reality and thinking appearing as what ignites the will in man in an enchanting, magical way. That is the truly magical effect of thinking on the will. It is magic. Now we become aware of it. The Guardian of the Threshold says:

See above the bodily effects of will,
—in the aura—
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

[This third verse, with underlining, is written on the blackboard.]

III

See above the bodily effects of will,

Now we imagine that the Guardian of the Threshold again points to the person over there, who we are ourselves, telling us to look and retain the picture, but not to turn around, but to let this picture sink below the surface of the earth beneath where the figure is standing. We look over there. There stands the one who we ourselves are. We make the picture and develop the strong force to look below, as though a lake were there and we were looking at this image as now being within the earth, but not as a mirror-image, but as an upright figure. [Draws.]

We imagine this picture: the earth [A white arc is drawn.] belonging to the third verse [This drawing and the third verse are given the number III.] We imagine: how the earth's gravitational forces rise, how the gravitational forces illuminate the limbs, feet and arms [white arrows]. In later observation, we acquire an idea of how gods and humans cooperate between death and a new birth to arrange karma.

That is what the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us about when he speaks to us for the first time after we have crossed over the yawning abyss of being.

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

See above the bodily effects of will,
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

The circle always closes. We are looking again at the starting point, listening to all the beings and all the processes of the world:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

By this affirmation, Michael is present in this, his rightfully existing School. His presence is confirmed by his sign, which should loom over everything given in this School:

[Michael Sign - in red]

It is confirmed by his seal, that he has impressed on the esoteric striving of the Rosicrucian School, and which lives on symbolically in the threefold verse:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

And as Michael impresses his seal, the first sentence is spoken with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the lower seal gesture, yellow]

The second sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the middle seal gesture, yellow]

The third sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the upper seal gesture]

The first gesture means:[3]

I esteem the Father

It lives mutely as we say: “Ex deo nascimur”.

[lower seal gesture]

The second gesture means:

I love the Son

It lives mutely as we say: “In Christo morimur”.

[middle seal gesture]

The third gesture means:

I unite with the Spirit

It lives mutely in the Sign, which is Michael's Seal, as we speak: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”.

[upper seal gesture]

Thus, today's Michael affirmation is confirmed by means of his Sign and Seals:

[Michael's Sign]

[spoken with the seal gestures:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Translator's notes:

[1] It is a fairly common practice in Germany and Switzerland for people who come early to a function to place a paper, notebook, or hat on a chair to reserve their places.

[2] It seems to me, although the editors of the German original say nothing about it, that Rudolf Steiner was being ironic here, that a School member gave the mantra to his unauthorized friend, who then passed it on to others, and that the member then used the “clairvoyant” story as an excuse.

[3] The Michael Sign and Seals: From the stenographic notes of the seven recapitulation lessons, it is not possible to determine when Rudolf Steiner only wrote the words on the blackboard or when he spoke the words and wrote them, or only spoke them.

---

This was the last Lesson for the Esoteric School. Rudolf Steiner was unable to continue because of illness. He died on March 30, 1925.

It is our task today to speak about two soul contents, one of which is a wonderful and inner ideal called Brotherhood¹ or Mutual Help, the other, which we meet especially in daily life, is the survival of the fittest—Mutual Help and the Fight for Survival. Those of you who concern themselves even a little with our Spiritual Scientific Movement know that our first aim is to form the core of a mutual help which is founded on an all embracing love for people, without regard for race, sex, creed, or profession. Thus the Anthroposophical Society² itself puts this principle of an all-embracing mutual help as the spearhead of its movement, as the most important of its ideals. With this it has shown that it is one of those cultural streams, which above all are necessary today, in which this extensive ethical striving for mutual help is seen closely connected with what altogether is the aim of man's evolution.

Those of us who are consciously striving in Spiritual Science are convinced that the deepest recognition of the Spiritual World, if it is truly and totally taking hold of a person, must lead to mutual help, that the most noble fruit of deep inner knowing is just this mutual help. This Spiritual Scientific World View seems to go against what people have found recently. In certain circles it is repeatedly pointed out how progress is brought about by competition and strife, that our strength develops through working against resistance, that our will and intellectual initiatives are strengthened because our power is put against an opponent. The worldview of Friedrich Nietzsche, which arose out of a spiritual basis, states among other things advocating contention, the following; “I love the critic. I love the strongly critical more than the gentle critic.” This we can find in various forms especially with Nietzsche. It can be found again in established economic views that in the fight of all against all in free enterprise there is a strong force for progress. How often has it been said that we progress best if we push ourselves forward for our own good. The word “individualism” has become a slogan in the area of the outer material life; however, it is really in the field of the inner spiritual life that it has true validity.

If people develop as much as they can in the economic field they will be most useful for their fellows because if they become economically powerful they benefit everyone. This is the creed of many national economists and sociologists. From a different side we hear repeated in different ways that we shall not just fit into a mold, that we must develop all our powers, that without limit we must live ourselves out, that we shall unfold what lies within, and thus we can be most useful to our fellows. There are many among us who cannot do enough to support this principle. The Spiritual Scientific Worldview does not ignore the necessity of the Fight for Survival, particularly in our time, but we are also clear that while this Fight for Survival makes such a strong impression, the deepest significance of the principle of mutual help must be brought to people's general awareness.

Is it really true what many believe, that people grow strong by working against a resistance? Is it really above all else their aggressive activities, which make them big and strong?

I showed you in the lecture, which I was able to give about the idea of peace, the following; the principle of the Fight for Survival is emphasized in our life nowadays because science has made it into a universal natural world principle. Especially in the west it is believed since some time that those beings in the world are best adapted who are able to fight their enemies, to subdue them and to succeed in the Fight for Survival.

Huxley the natural scientist says, if we look at life in nature it looks like a gladiator's “free for all,” the strongest is the victor, and the weaker ones must perish. If one would believe the natural scientists one would have to assume that all beings that are now living in the world would be able to overcome their predecessors. There is even a school of sociology, which has attempted to make out of this principle of the Fight for Survival a teaching of the evolution of mankind. In a book called “From Darwin to Nietzsche” by Alexander Tille he tried to show that the happiness of mankind in the future depends on recklessly inscribing this “Fight for Survival” onto the flag of the evolution, that one has to take care that the weaker ones perish, and that the strong and powerful multiply. In the Fight for Survival the weak ones have to perish, so he says we need a social order which subdues the weak ones because they are a burden, injurious.

Now I must ask you; who is stronger? The one who has an ideal spiritual power but a weak body or the one who has less spiritual power but a robust body? As you can see one cannot generalize. It is difficult to decide who should survive in the Fight for Survival. If one were to be practical, one would have to solve this question first. Now let us ask ourselves what human life really shows us; has the principle of mutual help or the Fight for Survival brought about greater changes, or have both contributed to the evolution of mankind?

With a few words I want to indicate once more what I have said in my lecture about the idea of peace. Even natural science of today does not really teach anymore what was taught a decade ago. I told you about the basic lecture of the Russian researcher Kefler (1880) in which he showed that the kind of animals are best adapted and progressive that help each other in mutual relationships, and not those who excel in aggressive behavior. I do not want to say with this that in the world of the animals there is no fighting and war, they are certainly there, that is not the question. It is rather: What enhances evolution more, war or mutual help? Also the following question was raised; do those kinds survive in which the individuals constantly fight with each other or those where they help each other? It was shown in this research that it is not the fighting but the mutual help, which was the real stimulus to progress. I mentioned the book by Kropotkin called “Mutual Help in Animal and Man.” Among the ideas, which today are being put forward with regard to these questions, we find a number of relevant concepts.

What has mutual help in man's evolution achieved? We only have to look at our own ancestors in this region where we now are. One could easily imagine that hunting and fighting were the main forces for forming out the character of these human beings, but if you look deeper into history you will find that this is not true. Just those among the Germanic tribes flourished best who developed the principle of mutual help to a high level. We specially find this principle of mutual help influencing more than anything the way material possessions were ordered in the time before and after the tribal migrations. To a large extent there was a common ownership of the land. The Communities of Villages where the people lived had common land ownership with the exception of a few things belonging directly to the household, the tools, and maybe a garden, all else was common possession. From time to time all the land was redistributed and newly divided among the people. It could be seen that those tribes became powerful which were able to bring the application of mutual help to an extraordinarily high level in relation to material goods.

If we proceed a few hundred years further we find that this principle appears again in a most fruitful manner. Mutual help, as it lived in the old communities of villages, in the old ways of life in which people found their freedom in brotherly, sisterly common life, shows particularly in the following example: If someone died all their personal possessions were burned because nobody wanted to own what had belonged to them during life. After one broke with this principle through various circumstances, single individuals managed to gain large tracts of land and the people within these fiefdoms were forced into servitude. Through this the principle of mutual help appeared in a different form. Those who felt suppressed by the Feudal Lord wanted to free themselves from this oppression and we see in the Middle Ages a powerful movement for freedom sweeping through all of Europe. This movement stood under the sign of a universal mutual help out of which a common culture blossomed, the so-called culture of the cities, the middle of the Middle Ages. Those human beings who could not stand the bonded servitude on the fiefdoms, escaped from the Feudal Lords to seek freedom in the growing cities. People came from Scotland, France, Russia, from all sides and brought about the free cities. Through this the principle of mutual help developed, and in the way it worked it greatly enhanced the development of the culture. Those who had common professions and trades began to form sort of trade unions which were later called Guilds, Brother/Sisterhoods which one joined through a vow or conscious commitment. These guilds were more than just unions of craftsmen or traders. They developed out of practical life to a high moral level. Mutual support, mutual help was cultivated to a high degree in those organizations.

Many things, which no one attends to much today, were guided by the principle of mutual support. For instance, the members of such a Guild helped out if somebody fell ill. Day by day two members were called to be at the bedside of the sick one. He or she got food. Even beyond his or her death this brotherliness and sisterliness continued. After somebody died it was considered an honor by other members of the Guild to provide in the proper manner for the burial of the deceased one and it was part of this honor to care for the well being of the widow/widower and her or his children. You can see out of what I have said what understanding of morality in common life was created. This morality was developed on the basis of a moral awareness of which modern people can hardly get a true picture. Don't believe that I want to criticize modern circumstances; they are necessary in the same way as it was necessary that the circumstances in the Middle Ages developed in their way. We must understand that there were different phases of development leading to the present.

In those free cities during the Middle Ages one spoke about a just price and a just trade. What was meant by that? I can tell you on hand of a concrete example. If out of the surrounding holdings produce was brought into the city, it was rigidly forbidden that those goods be sold in the first days in any different manner than in the accustomed small units, not wholesale. Nobody was allowed to buy large amounts and nobody could become a wholesaler. It never would have occurred to them that price would be regulated by supply and demand; rather one was able to regulate both. The trade groups in the cities or the guilds established, according to what was necessary to produce the goods, the price for these goods. Nobody was allowed to go above or below a set price. If we look even in the work relationships we see how a thorough understanding of people's needs was available. If we look at the wages of that time, in consideration of the most different circumstances we have to say, “The way a worker was paid can in no way be compared to the earning of wages nowadays.” These circumstances are often most wrongly interpreted by scientists.

Those Brother/Sisterhoods were evolved according to practical points of view. Because of that they continued in a practical manner, they appeared in the cities because it was only natural that those who had the same trade in a city would come together in mutual help, so the guilds grew from city to city.

People were, at that time, not united under police rulings but under practical points of view. Anyone who takes the trouble to study the circumstances, which were commonly visible in the cities of Europe, will soon find out that we deal here with a certain faith in the deepening of this mutual help principle. It shows specially if we look at the fruit which developed. You can now look at the highest peak of this development at the extensive products of art, at the cathedrals and churches, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They could not have come about without such a deepening of the mutual help principle. From a cultural/historical point of view, we can comprehend Dante's Divine Comedy, an immense work, only if we understand the establishment of the mutual help principle at that time. If you look further at what developed in these cities under the influence of this principle, you will find, for instance, the art of printing, engraving, papermaking, watch making, and all the later inventions, prepared under the free principle of mutual help. What we are used to call the burger or freeman of the city developed out of the establishment of this principle help in the Middle Ages. Much, which came about because of scientific and artistic deepening, would not have been possible without this development. If one wanted to build a cathedral, let's say the cathedral of Cologne, or any other, we see that at first a building guild was formed in which cooperation came about agreed upon by the members. One can, if one has an intuitive eye for it, see this principle of mutual help even in the architecture. You can see it in each of the cities of the Middle Age and you find it everywhere whether you go to the North of Scotland, to Venice or to the Russian or Polish cities.

We have to emphasize that this principle of mutual help developed under the influence of a materialistic culture. In everything that appeared as the highest fruits of this culture we see, the material, the physical. It was a necessary development and for this to happen rightly the mutual help principle was necessary at that time. Out of an abstraction this mutual help principle came about and because of this intellectual thinking our life is split. Today one doesn't know anymore, one doesn't understand how the Fight for Survival and the mutual help principle can function together in a relationship. On one hand spiritual life has become more and more abstract; morality and justice, ideas about the state, and different social relationships, are understood through more and more abstract principles, and the Fight for Survival is more and more separated from everything that people regard as ideal.

At that time, in the middle of the Middle Ages, there was a harmony between what people felt as their ideals and what they really did and if it was ever shown that one can be an idealist and a pragmatist at the same time it was during the Middle Ages. Even the relation of the Roman Law to life was a harmonious one, but if you look at it today you will find how our practice of law, our jurisprudence, is floating above the moral life. Many say, “We know what is good and right, but it is not practical.” It comes about that thoughts concerning the highest principle are separated from life. Only in the sixteenth century we see spiritual life developing under the principle of the intellect. In the Middle Ages a member of a guild, sitting with a jury of twelve to judge some offense which another member of the guild had committed, was a brother or sister of the one who had to be tried, life bound with life. Everyone understood the other's work and everyone tried to understand how he or she could have left the “straight and narrow.” One, so to speak, looked into one's brother or sister and one wanted to look into him or her.

Nowadays our jurisprudence is such that the judge and the prosecutor are only interested in the books of law; both see only a case in front of them to which they must apply the law. Just imagine how this separates morality from the practice of law. This condition progressed even more in the last century. In the Middle Ages expert knowledge and trust developed under the principle of mutual help and became the means of real progress. Today “expert knowledge and trust” are more and more ignored. The judgment of the expert is today almost completely bypassed in favor of the abstract interpretation of the law. The majority opinion is what counts today, not expertise. The rule of the opinion of the majority had to come, but as little as one can vote in mathematics to obtain a true result—three times three is always nine—so it is in the realm of jurisprudence. However, it is impossible to work according to the principle of the expert without the principle of mutual help, and brotherly and sisterly love.

The Fight for Survival has its place in life because humanity is composed of individual beings. Because all must go their separate ways in life, they are dependent on this Fight for Survival. In a certain relationship the saying of Ruckert is relevant. “As the rose beautifies herself, she beautifies the garden.” If we don't attempt to develop all our faculties we will have little success in helping our brothers and sisters. However, to develop our faculties requires a certain egoism, because initiative is connected to egoism. Those who understand how to be not only followers, who understand that they are not just subject to their environment, who are able to go down into their inner selves where the sources are, the fountains of their powers, they will develop to powerful and able people, and they will have the possibility to serve others much more than those who are constantly given to all possible influences in their surroundings. It is possible that this attitude, so necessary for people, could lead to a one-sidedness. It will only bear its proper fruits if it is paired with the principle of brotherly and sisterly love.

I have taken the free city guilds of the Middle Ages as an example in order to show you that the practical life became strong under the principle of mutual personal individual help. Where did they get their strength?—because they lived with their fellows in a spirit of mutual help. It is right to make oneself as strong as possible, but the question is can we really become strong without love? He who really develops to a true soul recognition must answer this question with a decisive, “No!”

We see throughout nature models for the cooperation of singular beings within a totality. Take the human body; it consists of millions and trillions of self-sufficient, living beings, or cells. If you take a part of this human body and look at it under the microscope you will find that it is composed of independent beings. How do they function together? How does selflessness come about in forming the totality? None of our cells takes its separation in an egoistic manner.

The wonderful tool of thought, the brain, also consists of millions of fine cells, but each one acts in its place in a harmonious way. What causes the cooperation of these small cells?—that a higher being expresses itself through those tiny living beings. It is the human soul that causes this effect, but this soul could never act here on earth if these millions of small beings would not have given up their selfhood to serve a large common being which we call the soul. The soul sees with the cells of the eye, thinks with the cells of the brain, lives in the cells of the blood; here we see what community signifies. Union—community—means that a higher being presses itself through the unified members. It is a universal principle of life; five people, who are together, who think and feel harmoniously together in common, are more than one plus one plus one plus one plus one. They are the sum of five as little as our body is the sum of our five senses. The living together, the in-each-other-living of human beings, means something similar as the living in each other of the cells of the human body. A new higher being is among these five—even among two or three; “Where two or three are gathered together in my name there I am among them.” It is not the one or the other or the third, but something entirely new that comes into appearance through the unification, but it only comes about if the individual lives in the other one—if the single one obtains his powers not only from himself but also out of the others. It can only happen if each of us lives selflessly in the others.

Thus human communities are mystery places where higher spiritual beings descend to act through the individual human beings just as the soul expresses itself in the members of the body. In our materialistic age one does not easily believe this, but in the Spiritual Scientific World View, it is not only an image but in the highest sense, reality. Because of this spiritual scientists are not speaking of abstract things if they talk about folk-spirit or folk-soul or family-spirit or about the spirit of some community. One cannot see the spirits who live in communities but they are there. They are there because of the sisterly, brotherly love of the personalities working in these communities. As the body has a soul, so a guild or community also has a soul, and I repeat, it is not spoken allegorically but must be taken as a full reality.

Those who work together in mutual help are magicians because they pull in higher beings. One does not call upon the machinations of spiritism if one works together in a community in sisterly, brotherly love. Higher beings manifest themselves there. If we give up ourselves to mutual help, through this giving up to the community a powerful strengthening of our organs takes place. If we then speak or act as a member of such a community there speaks or acts in us not the singular soul only but the spirit of the community. This is the secret of progress for the future of mankind: To work out of communities. In the same way as an epoch is followed by the next one and each one has its particular task so also the Middle Ages relate to our time and ours to the future one. The work of the Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods of Middle Ages laid the foundations for the practical arts. A materialistic way of life followed only after their fruits had appeared. The basis of their consciousness was the sisterliness and brotherliness that was more or less gone after the abstract social-state principle and the abstract spiritual life took the place of the real in-each-other feelings.

It is the task of the future to found again Brother/Sisterhoods out of the spirit, out of the highest ideals of the soul. Life has so far brought about the most manifold unions; it has also brought about a terrible Fight for Survival, which nowadays reaches its peak. The Spiritual Scientific World View wants to lead towards the highest treasures of mankind in the sense of the mutual help principle, and you will see that the Spiritual Scientific World Movement will extend this mutual help principle everywhere to replace the Fight for Survival. We must learn to lead community life. We shall not believe that the one or the other is able to accomplish anything by him or herself.

Everyone would of course like to know how one combines the Fight for Survival with sisterly and brotherly love—that's simple: We have to learn to replace the fighting with positive work, to replace fighting and war by the search for ideals. One understands nowadays little of what that implies. One does not know what fight one talks about because one speaks in today's life about nothing else but fighting. We have the class struggles, the fight for peace, the fight for women's rights, the fight for land and so on everywhere, regardless in what direction we look, we see fighting.

The Spiritual Scientific World View strives to put in place of this fight, positive work. Those who have lived into this worldview know that fighting has never achieved any real results in any area of life. Try to introduce into life what in your experience and recognition is shown to be the right thing and make it effective without fighting against your opponent. It can of course only be an ideal but such an ideal must be present, introduced into life as Spiritual Scientific basic statement. Human beings who unite with other human beings and who use their powers for the benefit of all are those who will produce the basis for a proper evolution into the future. The Anthroposophical Society wants to be a forerunner of this and, because of this, it is not a society based on propaganda but a sisterly and brotherly society. In this society we are effective through the work of every member. One has only to understand it rightly—we have the most effect if we do not want to push our own opinion but if we work out of what we see in the eyes of our sisters and brothers, if we search in the thoughts and feelings of our fellows, and make ourselves their servant. We work best in such a circle if we are able in practical life to disregard our own opinion. If we understand that our best forces spring out of community and that community is not just understood as an abstract principle but primary at every turn of the road, at every moment of life in a Anthroposophical manner. Only then we will be able to proceed, however, we must not be impatient with this.

What does Spiritual Science show us? She shows us a higher reality, and it is this consciousness of a higher reality, which brings us ahead in putting into effect the mutual help principle.

Today, some people call Anthroposophists, impractical idealists, but before long one will see that they will be the most practical ones, because they are able to deal with the forces of life. Nobody will doubt that one would injure a person if one throws a stone at their head, but that it is much worse to send towards a man a feeling of hate, that this hurts the soul of a man much more than a stone hurts the body, this does not enter the mind. It entirely depends in what attitude we confront a fellow man, and our power to work fruitfully into the future also depends exactly on that. If we try to live community in this way we foster the principle of mutual help practically. To be tolerant means in the sense of Spiritual Science something quite different from what one understands usually about it. It means also to respect the freedom of thought in others. To push others away from their place is an insult, but if one does the same thing in thought nobody would say this is an injustice. We talk a lot about “regard for the other's opinion,” but are not really willing to apply this principle ourselves.

The “Word” today has almost no meaning, one hears it and one has heard nothing. One has to learn to listen with one's soul, to get hold of the most intimate things with our soul. What later manifests itself in physical life is always present in the spirit first. So we must suppress our opinion and really listen completely to the other, not only listen to the word but even to the feeling. Even then, if in us a feeling will stir that it is wrong what the other one says, it is much more powerful to be able to listen as long as the other one talks than to jump into their speech. This listening creates a completely different understanding—you feel as if the soul of the other starts to warm you through, to shine through you, if you confront “her” in this manner with absolute tolerance.

We shall not only grant the freedom of person but complete freedom. We shall even treasure the freedom of the other's opinion. This stands only as an example for many things. If one cuts off someone's speech one does something similar to kicking the other from the point of view of the spiritual world. If one brings oneself as far as to understand that it is much more destructive to cut somebody off than to give them a kick, only then one comes as far as to understand mutual help or community right into one's soul. Then it becomes a reality. The greatness of the spiritual scientific movement is that it brings to us a new conviction of spiritual forces which stream from man to man, the higher mutual help principle. You can imagine for yourself how far man is away from such a spiritual mutual help principle. Everyone can attempt as time permits to send thoughts of love and friendship to their loved ones. We usually think such a thing insignificant. If you recognize that a thought has a power in the same way as an electrical wave, which goes from one apparatus to a receiver, then you will also understand better the mutual help principle. Then slowly a common consciousness becomes available, it becomes practical.

From this we can see how the Spiritual Scientific Worldview understands the Fight for Survival, and mutual help at work. We know exactly that many who find themselves on this or that place in life would just go under if they wouldn't howl with the wolves, if they wouldn't pursue this Fight for Survival as ruthlessly as the others. For the one who thinks materialistically there is almost no escape from this Fight for Survival. We should, of course, do our duty on the place where karma puts us, but we do the right thing if we are clear that we could achieve much more if we would forego to look for quick success. Maybe you stand in pain in regard to the one you hurt in the Fight for Survival but, overcome yourself, develop a loving attitude and let your thoughts stream from soul to soul. If you are a materialist you might think you didn't achieve anything, but after what I have told you, you should recognize that this must later on have its effect. Because nothing is lost that happens in the spirit.

In this way we are able with fearful soul, with pain in our hearts, to take up the Fight for Survival and transform it through our working together. In this way, to work in this Fight for Survival means, in a practical sense to change it. We are not able to do it from today to tomorrow, that's beyond all doubt. But if we work in this way upon our own soul in love, we become more useful to ourselves, and then to a greater extent to mankind. If we are stuck in self-centered isolation, our talents are uprooted like a plant pulled out of the ground. As little as an eye is still an eye if it is torn out of one's head so little is a human soul a human soul if it is separated from community. You will see that we educate our talents best if we live in sisterly and brotherly community, that we live most intensely if we are rooted in the totality. Of course we have to wait till that which forms roots in the totality ripens to fruit in quiet inwardness.

We may not lose ourselves into the outside world nor into ourselves, because it is true in the highest spiritual sense what the poet said that one has to be quiet in oneself if one's faculties are to appear, but those faculties are rooted in the world. We are only able to strengthen them and to improve ourselves if we live in community, because it is true in the sense of genuine mutual help that working in a sisterly and brotherly way makes us strongest in the Fight for Survival and we will find most of our powers in the stillness of our hearts if we develop our total personality, our total individuality in community with our human sisters and brothers. It is true that a talent is formed in quietude. It is also true that, in the stream of the world, character is formed and with it the whole of one's being and the totality of humanity.

• 1. Although “brotherhood” is a reasonable translation of the German, it is not totally satisfactory. There is no suitable gender-neutral form, “sisterhood” doesn't even appear in the standard Microsoft spelling dictionary and using it requires the combination “brother/sisterhood” or “brotherhood/sisterhood” neither of which reads easily. I have therefore elected to translate, “bruderschaft” as “mutual help,” which works well throughout this lecture.
• 2. This lecture was actually given under the auspices of the Theosophical Society. We have changed this to the Anthroposophical Society since Rudolf Steiner's work continued in that organization unchanged in content and intent.

Previous studies in the Anthroposophical Society here in Prague will have made it clear to you that the evolution of mankind is governed by the spirit—or perhaps it is better to say, by spiritual Beings—and that human souls, themselves filled with spirit, carry over their achievements from one epoch to another, including, of course, whatever burden of guilt they have accumulated in a particular epoch. All these things enable us to gaze deeply into the life of the Cosmos both from the physical aspect and from the aspect of soul and spirit, and only in this way is it possible for us to understand our real nature and being. For without yielding to pride we must acknowledge that in our own human nature we are united with the spiritual fount of the Cosmos and that we can understand our own being and constitution only through a spiritual understanding of the Cosmos.

Now since the Christmas Foundation Meeting it is not only a matter of conducting the affairs of Anthroposophy within the Anthroposophical Society; the conduct of these affairs must in itself be Anthroposophy. And this must also come to expression in the re casting of Anthroposophical work. In these lectures, therefore, I have not been afraid to lead our study from exoteric into more esoteric domains, and in this respect I want to add something to-day to what has already been said—something that provides concrete evidence of how the human soul passes over from one epoch into another. The general principle applies equally to individuals, and through an understanding of the karma of personalities known to us all, light can be shed upon our own karma. To-day, therefore, we will continue our study of karma in more concrete detail.

In the course of these lectures I have mentioned the name of an individual who is a remarkable example of how a certain visionary quality can reveal itself in one who is preeminently a man of will. I have mentioned the name of Garibaldi, the hero of the cause of freedom in Italy, and I have also spoken of certain of his outstanding characteristics. Everything about him gives expression to will, to impulses of will. What a tremendous power of will was in evidence when as a young man during the twenties and early thirties of the 19th century he set out again and again, quite voluntarily, on perilous voyages through the Adriatic, and after having been taken prisoner several times was always able, through his strength and courage, to escape. What a tremendous power of will was at work when, having seen that for the time being there was no field for his activity in Europe, he went over to South America where he became one of the most intrepid fighters in the cause of freedom there. I have spoken, too, of how in the circumstances of his betrothal and marriage he disregarded the usual customs and determined his own life as he saw fit. Then, on his return to Europe, he became the one to whom, in reality, modern Italy owes everything.

When the question was put to me one day: “What could have been the karmic connections of this personality?” two aspects came into consideration. For the finding of karmic connections is by no means a simple but a very complicated task. I have said already that one must often start from details which although clearly in evidence seem to be of minor importance and be led by them to the principles according to which the facts of the one earthly life are carried over into the later life.

The case of Garibaldi is strange in that although at heart and in sentiment he was a republican, through and through a republican, he laid the whole force of his will into the task of consolidating the Italian monarchy under Victor Emanuel. Simply by studying the biography of Garibaldi one can perceive a fundamental contradiction between this inner trend of feeling and his actual deeds. One perceives, too, that he felt a bond with men like Mazzini and Cavour, with whose ideas and convictions he was manifestly at variance and whose trend of thought differed so radically from his own. Then there is the striking fact that Garibaldi was born, in the year 1807, quite near to the birthplaces of the other three: the later King Victor Emanuel, Cavour the statesman, and Mazzini the philosopher. Their birthplaces were really in close proximity. And then one is led to investigate the connection between the karma of such personalities.

The other aspect—a very far reaching one—is the following. In studying Spiritual Science we must always have in our minds that in olden times there were Initiates, seers, men of vision in the widest sense. And the question may be asked: Since these wise men of times gone by must reincarnate, where are they working now, in the modern age? Where are they, these great personalities who worked as Initiates in the past?—They have indeed come again but it must be remembered that when a human being is born in a particular epoch he is obliged to use the body provided by that epoch. The bodies of olden days were more pliant, more flexible, yielding more readily to the spirit; and in earthly existence man must use the body to transform into earthly shape and earthly activity what was imbued into him before he came down to the Earth. Faced with conditions that are so full of riddles, we must remember—and no criticism is here implied—that for centuries now the effect of the whole of education upon the human organism has been such that what was once alive in an Initiate simply cannot come to expression. Much has to remain concealed in the deep substrata of existence. And for this reason, many Initiates of bygone days appear again as personalities who with the concepts and notions prevailing to-day cannot be recognised as former Initiates because they are obliged to use the body which their epoch provides.

Garibaldi is just such an example. If we go far back into the past, we find deep and profound Mysteries, great Initiates, in ancient Ireland. But the Irish Mysteries survived right on into the Christian era. Even to-day there is still much living spirituality in Ireland—not of an abstract, conceptual kind, but alive, spiritually potent. Chaotic as conditions in that country appear to-day, there is in Ireland much real spiritual life. But it is only the very last vestige of what once existed. In Hibernia, in Ireland, there were deep and penetrating Mysteries whose influences still made their way across to Europe in the early centuries of the spread of Christianity. And there one finds an Initiate whose path in the 8th to 9th centuries after the founding of Christianity led him from Ireland to the region corresponding approximately to modern Alsace. Under the stormy conditions then prevailing, this Initiate achieved much for the cause of true Christianity, for which, if the truth be told, Boniface accomplished very little. To this Initiate came three pupils from different quarters of the world—three pupils who entrusted themselves to him. These three pupils came to him—one from far away, another from nearer at hand. But in the Irish Mysteries there was an inviolable decree that an Initiate to whom pupils had entrusted themselves must not abandon them in the later incarnation but must accomplish in earthly life something that will hold them to him, something that establishes a bond between him and these pupils. The Initiate of whom I am speaking was born again as Joseph Garibaldi, with that visionary quality of will which in olden times had been able to express itself in a quite different form from that possible in a body belonging to the 19th century. Garibaldi received only a very inferior education, quite unlike the education that was typical of the 19th century. The three others I have named were the pupils who in the past had come to him from different parts of the world. But the impulse working from the one incarnation over into the other was far deeper and more potent than external principles of action. In comparison with the link stretching across the incarnations between man and man, it is a triviality to contend: I am a Republican, you are a Monarchist. In these things one must realise how greatly earthly Maya, the great illusion, the semblance of being, deviates from the spiritual reality which is in truth the motive power behind the phenomena of existence. And so in spite of the radical difference in sentiment and conviction, Garibaldi could not abandon, for example, Victor Emanuel. Sentiment and conviction in connection with earthly matters and not with human beings belong to the epoch, not to the individuality who passes from one earthly life to another.

I want to give another example, one with which I came into close personal contact. I had a geometry teacher¹ who was of enormous help to me. My autobiography will have indicated to you that geometry is one of the subjects to which I owe most because of the impulses it quickened in me. This geometry teacher himself played a very valuable part in my life. The fact that he was an excellent constructor might well have led to my great affection for him because I myself loved geometrical construction and because he expressed everything with genuine independence of mind and also with all the exclusiveness belonging to geometrical thinking. His mind was focused so exclusively upon geometry that in the real sense of the word he was no mathematician; he was a geometrician and nothing else. In this sphere he was brilliant but it could not be said that he was deeply versed in mathematics. He lived at a time when all descriptive geometry—his special subject—underwent changes. Characteristically, however, he kept to the old forms. But something else about him provided a far more revealing clue for occult investigation: he had what is called a club foot. Now the strange thing is that the force—not, of course, the physical substance—the force which a man has in his feet in one incarnation, the character of his tread, how his feet lead him into wrong-doing or well doing—this force is metamorphosed. Whatever is connected with the feet may live itself out in a subsequent incarnation in the head organisation; whereas what we now bear in our head may come to expression, in the later incarnation, in the organisation of the legs. Metamorphosis takes a peculiar form here. One who is conversant with these things can discern from the style and manner of a man's gait, how he treads with his toes and heels, what quality of thinking characterised him in an earlier incarnation. And one who observes the qualities of a man's thinking—whether his thoughts are quick, fleeting, cursory, or deliberate and cautious—will be able to picture how he actually walked in a previous incarnation.

In the earlier incarnation, a man whose thoughts are fleeting and cursory walked with short, rapid steps, as though tapping over the ground, whereas the gait of a man who thinks cautiously and with deliberation was firm and steady in the earlier life. It is just these apparently minor characteristics that lead further when one is looking for the deeper, spiritual connections and not those of an external, abstract kind. And so when time and time again I called up the picture of this greatly loved teacher, I was guided to his earlier incarnation. With this picture another associated itself—also of a man with a club foot: Lord Byron.² The two men were there before me in this inner picture. And the karma of my teacher, as well as the peculiarity of which I have told you, led me to the discovery that in the 10th or 11th century, both these souls had lived in their earlier incarnations far over in the East of Europe where they came one day under the influence of a legend, a prophecy. This legend was to the effect that the Palladium, which in a certain magical way helped to sustain the power of Rome, had been brought to that city from ancient Troy, and hidden. When the Emperor Constantine conceived the wish to carry Roman culture to Constantinople he caused the Palladium to be transported with the greatest pomp and pageantry to Constantinople and hidden under a pillar, the details of which gave expression to his overweening pride. For he ordered an ancient statue of Apollo to be set at the top of this pillar, but altered in such a way as to be a portrait of himself. He caused wood to be brought from the Cross on which Christ had been crucified and shaped into a kind of crown which was then placed on the head of this statue. It was the occasion for indulging in veritable orgies of pride!

The legend went on to prophesy that the Palladium would be transferred from Constantinople to the North and that the power embodied in it would be vested eventually in a Slavonic Empire. This prophecy came to the knowledge of the two men of whom I have been speaking and they resolved to go to Constantinople and to carry off the Palladium to Russia. They did not succeed. But in one of them especially—in Byron—the urge remained, and was then transformed in the later life into the impulse to espouse the cause of freedom in Greece. This impulse led Byron, in the 19th century, to the very region, broadly speaking, where he had searched for the Palladium in an earlier incarnation.

It is a question, you see, of finding the threads which lead back into earlier ages. On another occasion my attention fell on a personality who lived about the 9th century in the north east of France as France is to-day, and who during the first part of his life was the owner of extensive landed estates. He was, for those times, a wealthy man, and being of a warlike nature he engaged in many rather quixotic military adventures not on a large but on a small scale. When he had reached a certain age, this personality gathered around him people who then accompanied him on a campaign which ended in disaster and brought bitter disillusionment in its train. Without having achieved anything at all, he was obliged to return home. But meanwhile—as was a common practice in those days—another had taken possession of his house, land and people during his absence. On his arrival he found that his own estates were in other hands strange as the story is, it actually happened so and he was obliged thereafter to serve in his own manor as a kind of helot or serf. Many a meeting took place there with people of the neighbourhood, usually by night, and in a rather uncultured, rough and ready way, ideas were elaborated for seizing power—although beyond the fact that such ideas were worked out, nothing could possibly come of them. These ideas for rebelling against the overlords—almost as in the days of Rome—were the subject of much heated and fervid dialectic. Our interest may well be roused by this personality who had been ousted from estates, possessions and authority but who with an inflexible will stirred up the whole district, particularly against the one who had usurped the property. The personality of whom I am speaking was born again in the 19th century, when inwardly, in mind and soul, he became the kind of character one would expect from the circumstances of the earlier incarnation: he became Karl Marx³ the socialist leader. Just think what a light is shed upon world history when one can study it in this way, when one can actually follow the souls passing from one epoch into the other, observing how what these souls bear within them is carried over from epoch to epoch. History and the evolution of mankind are seen in this way in their real and concrete setting.

In Dornach recently I was able to call attention to another connection of karma, one which caused me repeatedly during the War, and especially at the end of the War, to warn people against allowing themselves to be blinded by a certain outstanding figure of modern times. In the Helsingfors⁴ lectures of 1913 I had already spoken of the very limited abilities of the person in question. This was because the connection between Muawiyah,⁵ a follower of Mohammed in the 7th century, and Woodrow Wilson, was clear to me. All the fatalism which characterised the personality of Muawiyah, came out in the otherwise inexplicable fatalism of Woodrow Wilson—in his case, fatalism of will. And if anyone wants to find corroboration, to discover the origin of the well known Fourteen Points, he has only to turn to the Koran. Such are the connections. These things must be kept absolutely free from sympathy or antipathy; it is not a question of criticism but only of the purest objectivity. But this very objectivity leads from one point in history at which a soul has appeared, to another such point. When humanity outsteps in some degree the still surviving heritage of materialism, people will be willing to listen to such things and observe for themselves. And then they will feel quite differently about their place in modern civilisation because they will be able to see it not in a dead but in a living setting. That is the important point. The whole process of historical development will be imbued with life. And if man is to get beyond the blind alley in which he is now standing in his civilisation, he needs the living spirit and not the dead spirit of abstract concepts and ideas.

In their study of history, people will probably be very reluctant to approach the spiritual in the way indicated in my public lecture here a few days ago, but nevertheless they will ultimately be obliged to do so. For ordinary historical study which has only documentary evidence to go upon is full of insoluble enigmas. Things of which the origins cannot be explained are forever cropping up. Why is it so? It is because the origins are not understood, they have been completely obscured. When such things are investigated, a great deal in history becomes living reality. But it also becomes apparent that men themselves have done a great deal to garble and falsify history in important respects.

It will certainly seem strange and perplexing when in connection with a relatively near past, the spiritual investigator is forced to assert that a wonderful work of art has been wiped out of existence by the hostility of a certain stream of spiritual life. In the early centuries of Christendom there was extant in the more southerly regions of European civilisation a literary work of art setting forth the nature of advancing culture immediately after Christianity had taken root in the evolution of humanity in Europe. This work of art—it was an epic drama, a dramatic epos—narrated how since the recent revelation of Christianity man cannot draw near to the true Being of Christ unless he undergoes a definite preparation similar to that given in the Mysteries.

In order to understand the real import of this, the following must be clear to us. To His intimate disciples Christ had made it abundantly clear that He, as a Sun Being, a Cosmic Being, had come down into the one born in the East as Jesus, in the thirtieth year of his life. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a Moon religion. What was the nature of the Jahve, the Jehovah religion, and of the Being Jahve himself? In looking upwards to Jahve, men were gazing, in reality, at the human ‘I,' the ‘I' that is directly dependent upon the physical human configuration that is born with us. But what is born with us, what has taken shape and developed inasmuch as in the mother's body we were moulded into a vessel for the human ‘I' this is dependent upon the Moon forces. Jahve is a Moon God. And in lifting their eyes to Jahve, men said to themselves: Jahve is the Regent of the Moon Beings, from whom proceed those forces which bear man into his physical existence on Earth.—But if Moon forces alone were at work, man would never be able to transcend what is laid into him in the life that belongs to the Earth. This he can no longer do of himself, but in earlier times it was different. If we go back into prehistoric ages we find something very remarkable, something that to the modern mind sounds extremely strange. We find that in the thirtieth year of life, human beings experienced a complete transformation of soul. This was the case in the great majority of people belonging to a certain class. Strange as it sounds to modern ears, it was really the case in an age of which the Vedas are mere echoes. There were men in ancient India to whom the following might happen.—When another man whom they had seen a few years previously came up to them, he might find that although they saw him, they did not recognise who he was; they had forgotten everything that had happened to them during the previous thirty-years, they had forgotten it all—even their own identity. And there was an actual institution—we should call it, as we call every such institution to-day, an official department or board of authorities—to which such a person must apply in order to be informed who he was and where he had been born. Only when, in the Mysteries, these people had been given the necessary training were they able to remember their lives up to the age of thirty. They were men who at a later time, were called the ‘twice born,' who owed the first period of their existence to the Moon forces, the second to the forces of the Sun.

The metamorphosis which in ancient times came about in so radical a way in the course of earthly life, the ‘being born a second time,' was ascribed to the Sun—and rightly so, for the Sun forces have to do with what a human being is able, by dint of his own free will, to make of himself. But as the evolution of humanity progressed, this gradually ceased to be part of the process of development; man no longer brought down into the physical realm any consciousness of having gazed into the cosmic worlds. Julian the Apostate wished to revive the knowledge of these things and had to pay for the attempt with his death. But through the power enshrined in His words, Christ wished to bring to men through morality, through a deepening of the moral and religious life, what nature does not bring. It was Christ Who taught: “When you learn to feel as I feel, when instead of turning your eyes to the Sun you behold what is alive in me—who was the very last to receive the Sun Word in the thirtieth year—then you will find the way to the essence of the Sun once again!” The teachers in the Mysteries during the early period of Christianity knew with certainty that the development of the intellect, of intellectuality, was then beginning; intellectuality does indeed bring man freedom but deprives him of the ancient clairvoyance which leads him into the cosmic spirituality. Therefore these wise men of the old Christian Mysteries instituted teaching which was then set forth in that epic drama of which I spoke. It was the narration of the experiences of a pupil in the Christian Mysteries, who by the sacrifice of intellect at a certain point in his youth was to be led to true Christianity when the realisation had dawned in him that Christ is a Sun Being Who came to dwell in Jesus of Nazareth from his thirtieth year onwards.

This epic was a moving and impressive narration of how a human being seeking the inmost truth of Christianity makes the sacrifice of intellect in early years—that is to say, he vows to the higher Spiritual Powers that intellectuality shall not be his mainstay but that he will so deepen his inner life that he may come to know Christianity not as mere history or tradition but in its cosmic reality and setting, seeing in Christ the Bearer of the spirituality of the Sun. A scene of dramatic grandeur and impressive content was presented by this transformation in a human being by the sacrifice of intellectuality. A human being who, to begin with, received Christianity merely according to the letter of the Gospels—as was customary later on—became one who learned to behold the cosmic realities and Christ's living connection with the Cosmos. The awakening of clairvoyant vision of Christianity as cosmic reality—such was the content of that ancient epic drama. The Catholic Church took care to ensure that every trace of this epic should be exterminated. Nothing has remained—the Catholic Church has had power enough for that. It is only by accident that a transcript has been preserved of which, too, nothing would be known, had it not been from the hand of a personage living at the Court of Charles the Bald—from the hand of Scotus Erigena.

Those who realise the import of these things will not think it so strange when spiritual investigation urges one to speak of this epic story of a man who by vowing to sacrifice intellectuality was transformed in such a way that the heavens were opened to him. But in the form of tradition many a fragment from that ancient epic has survived, in substance largely unchanged, but no longer understood—above all its great setting and its imagery were no longer understood. The content of this work of poetic art became the subject of numerous paintings. These paintings too were exterminated and only traditions survived. Fragments of these traditions were known in a circle to which Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante, belonged. From this teacher Dante heard something of the traditions—not of course in precision of detail, but in aftermath—and in his Divine Comedy echoes from that old epic still live on. But the work existed, as truly and as surely as the Divine Comedy itself exists.

Recorded history, you see, does not tally with the realities and a great deal of what was exterminated by enemies will have to be discovered again through spiritual investigation. For it was all to the interests of a certain side to root out every indication that Christ comes from the Cosmos. The birth of Christ which actually took place in Jesus' thirtieth year has been confounded with the physical birth. What then became a Christian doctrine could never have been established had the epic drama of which I have spoken not been exterminated. The time will come when spiritual investigation will have to play a part if human civilisation is to make real progress.

You know the devastating effect of illnesses of the kind which befell someone I once knew well. He held a post of considerable authority but one day he left his home and family, went to the railway station and took a ticket for a far distant place, having suddenly forgotten everything about his life hitherto—his intellect was in order but his memory was completely clouded. When he arrived at his first destination he took another ticket, travelling in this way through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Galicia, and finally, when his memory came back to him, he found himself in an asylum for the homeless in Berlin.

It is in truth the ruin of the whole Ego when a man forgets what he has lived through and experienced. It would also mean the ruin of the Ego of civilisation, the Ego of European humanity, were men to forget completely the things that were part of their historical experience, those things which have been rooted out. Spiritual Science alone can bring back the power of remembrance.

But even to men who, comparatively speaking, are kindly disposed, Spiritual Science still seems strange and foreign. One cannot read without a certain irony what a man, who is in other respects so promising, says about me as the founder of Anthroposophy. In The Great Secret, Maurice Maeterlinck⁶ seems unable to deny that the introductions to my books contain much that is reasonable. He is struck by this. But then he finds things which leave him in a state of bewilderment and of which he can make absolutely nothing.—We might vary slightly one of Lichtenberg's remarks, by saying: “When books and an individual come into collision and there is a hollow sound, this need not be the fault of the books!” But just think of it—Maurice Maeterlinck is certainly a high light in our modern culture and yet he writes the following—I quote almost word for word: ‘In the introductions to his books, in the first chapters, Steiner invariably shows himself possessed of a thoughtful, logical and cultured mind, and then, in the later chapters he seems to have gone crazy' (See note, p109). What are we to deduce from this? First chapter—thoughtful, logical, cultured; last chapter—crazy. Then another book comes out. ‘Again, to begin with, thoughtful, logical, cultured; and finally—crazy!' And so it goes on. As I have written quite a number of books I must be pretty expert at this sort of thing! According to Maurice Maeterlinck a kind of juggling must go on in my books But the idea that this happens voluntarily ... such a case has yet to be found in the lunatic asylums!

The books of writers who think one crazy are really more bewildering still The very irony with which one is bound to accept many things to-day shows how difficult it still is for men of the present age to understand genuine spiritual investigation Nevertheless such investigation will have to come. And in order that we shall not have been found wanting in the strength to bring about this deepening of the spiritual life, the Christmas Foundation Meeting was held as a beacon for the further development of the Anthroposophical Society in the direction I have indicated. The Christmas Foundation Meeting was intended, first and foremost, to inaugurate in the Anthroposophical Movement an epoch when concrete facts of the spiritual life are fearlessly set forth—as has been the case to-day and in the preceding lectures. For if the spirit needed by mankind is to find entrance, a stronger impetus is required than that which has prevailed hitherto.

It has been for me a source of real gladness that in the lectures here, given either to the public or to a smaller circle, the opportunity has been afforded me to lead a little further into the depths of spiritual life. And with this inner gladness let me express my heartfelt thanks for the cordial words addressed to me by Professor Hauffen at the beginning of this evening's session. I thank you for your welcome and for the way in which your souls have responded during my presence here. And you may rest assured that Professor Hauffen's words will remain with me as a wellspring of the thoughts which I shall constantly send you and which will be with you alike when you achieve your aims and when you are working here. Even when we are separated from one another in space we are, as Anthroposophists, together in our hearts, and this should be known and remembered. For many years I have been privileged to speak in Prague of different aspects of the spiritual life and it has always been a source of satisfaction to me. Particularly is it so on this occasion, because the demands made upon your hearts and souls have been relatively new, because this time you have had to receive with an even greater open mindedness what I had to say to you in discharging a spiritual commission. When I say ‘spiritual commission,' let us take these words to imply that in the spirit we remain together. The aim before us will be achieved if friends work together with all their hearts, if, above all, they remain united in Anthroposophical thinking, feeling and willing.

Together with my thanks, please take this as a cordial farewell—betokening no separation but rather the establishment of a spiritual communion. This feeling of communion should flow through every word that is spoken among us. Everything that is said among us should serve to unite us more and more closely. In this sense let me assure you with all my heart that my thoughts will be with you, seeking to find among you one of those places where true Anthroposophical will and the Anthroposophical stream of spiritual life are able to work. And so we will go our ways, but in the body only, remaining spiritually and in our hearts together.

• 1. Gregory VII, Pope from 1053 to 1085.
• 2. Lord Byron, 1788–1824.
• 3. Karl Marx, 1818–1883.
• 4. Helsingfors lecture course: 'The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad-Gita.' 9 lectures, May/June, 1913.
• 5. Muawiyah, Caliph in Syria from 661 to 680. Founded the dynasty of the Omayyads.
• 6. Maurice Maeterlinck on Rudolf Steiner. See Le Grand Secret, p. 253 (Bibliothèque Charpentier, Paris, 1921). The words referred to are as follows: ‘Steiner ... nous décrit les transformations successives des entités qui deviendront des hommes, et il le fait avec tant d'assurance qu'on se demande, après l'avoir suivi avec intérêt à travers des préliminaires qui dénotent un esprit très pondéré, très logique et très vaste, s'il devient subitement fou ou si l'on a affaire à un mystificateur ou à un véritable voyant. ...’

Address by Rudolf Steiner after the cycle “What significance does the occult development of the human being have for his sheaths and his self?” (GA 145)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture cycle, this lecture cycle itself was a solemn, serious event for me in a certain way; a solemn, serious event because we have, so to speak, the first lecture cycle within the circle of our Theosophical friends after - let's call it today from the one aspect from which we can also look at it - after our liberation from that which, in a certain way, fettered us after all, fetters that we, if we really want to progress with the demands of the spiritual development of humanity, should have found increasingly unbearable and unbearable.

I think it was quite palpable at some points in this lecture cycle that certain inhibiting spiritual forces have now been cast off, and that many things – I don't know if it was felt much – that many things could be brought before the ears of our revered friends in a less inhibited way from the secrets of higher existence, more than was the case in earlier times, when we still carried around the sorrow - which in some respects was a sorrow for us - that thought forms were introduced into our society that came from sources that gave these thought forms, even if they had only spread to people through books, a certain inhibiting influence.

Because when we are dealing with spiritual matters, we are dealing with real forces. We are dealing with a liberation, with the fact that thoughts that used to inhibit us are now – I don't want to say how – withdrawing from our ranks, really withdrawing; thoughts that previously – I don't want to say how – worked within our work. Perhaps in the not too distant future the world will be able to see for itself what these thought forms and various elemental forces are that used to mingle with our ranks from some quarters, but in more recent times have poured into our work only in the form of a distortion veiled in the well-known objective untruths.

We will increasingly feel that what has happened is a liberation; but many things will have to be understood, my dear friends. We have noticed in particular in Germany that a certain movement with pretensions has emerged, the truthful description of which would be nothing short of an outrage; because the way, for example, our opponents in Germany have , which led to the necessary defense, showed everywhere, in every point, the opposite of what must be striven for by a real occult movement, showed everywhere a desire for tyranny poured into objective untruths. A true occultist can only come to want to have nothing to do with those whom he knows cannot belong to him; that is, not to want them in his ranks. That is the only principle that can prevail in an occult movement: positive work and the right not to want to take care of others who work on a different ground. That was the only thing that was claimed within our ranks. And the one who examines will be able to find this ancient, sacred criterion of real understanding of the occult realized precisely in our ranks.

Mocking real occultism was the demand that, for example, the German section had to accept anyone who, in their own opinion, but not in the opinion of this section, had to belong to it. What our opponents demanded of us in the past, and why they hurled every kind of untruth at us, was the same as the demand that people should not walk on their legs but on their heads; only in our time things are not pursued to their ultimate consequences.

It has come to the point that in the last “Mitteilungen” it had to be said that one of the representatives of the “Besant system” in Germany went so far as to say that he did not understand how that strange boy could have gone through the kind of development he was supposed to have gone through. Because, says the gentleman, Annie Besant parades with him as the coming Christ; the expression 'parades' was used; but anyone who has read the so-and-so many incarnations of that strange boy will already know that Annie Besant does not mean the Christ of the Gospels by this; she only says - says that gentleman - to European humanity that he who she does not consider the Christ is the Christ. Well, I believe that if it is possible for someone to write such things, it is proof enough for a cause that should not be further characterized.

So it can mean a relief, which is what happened. You may also have felt this way about this cycle, which was in a sense a solemn and serious one for me because it was the first in our new work, in our new creative endeavor; and indeed there could be nothing else but a feeling of gratitude for this work, which has offered us the opportunity to accept with a certain equanimity all that has come our way in such a repulsive and intrusive and often so brazen manner.

So let this series of lectures, my dear friends, who have taken part in it, be felt in your hearts as a kind of inauguration of a new period of our work. That is how I greeted you at the beginning of this cycle; and I think that in a way we were in agreement; and if we, my dear friends, have not seen some people sitting here who might have been here if events had not taken the turn they did, then another thing, if we feel it right, may lift us above all that: This lecture cycle has shown us, right before our eyes and close to our hearts, that the personality who is so

has become so dear to us and will remain so dear: our dear, highly esteemed Edouard Schuré, who has done so much for modern esotericism in the West in the form of an immensely valuable literature. That this personality has graced us with his presence at this lecture cycle of the Anthroposophical Society is a gift that we cannot value highly enough.

I just wanted to give color and nuance to the words of greeting that I am addressing to you at the end of this lecture cycle, to the effect that we feel united in our souls, in our hearts, in the old theosophical sense that we mean, even where we and that we will feel, feel like a spatial, a physical togetherness, as with such a cycle, as the starting point of a belonging together of souls, of hearts for the spiritually lasting, for that which may work on the spiritual development of humanity.

During this course of lectures we have brought before our souls two remarkable documents of humanity, although necessarily described very briefly on account of the limited number of lectures; and we have seen what impulses had to flow into the evolution of mankind in order that these two significant documents, the sublime Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul, might come into existence. What it is important for us to grasp is the essential difference between the whole spirit of the Gita and that of the Epistles of St. Paul. As we have already said:—in the Gita we have the teachings that Krishna was able to give to his pupil Arjuna. Such teachings can only be given and should only be given to one person individually, for they are in reality exactly what they appear in the Gita; teachings of an intimate nature. On the other hand, it may be said that they are now within the reach of anyone, because they appear in the Gita. This naturally was not the case at the time the Gita was composed. They did not then reach all ears; they were then only communicated by word of mouth. In those old days teachers were careful to ascertain the maturity of the pupil to whom they were about to communicate such teachings; they always made sure of his being ready for them. In our time this is no longer possible as regards all the teachings and instructions which have in some way come openly to light. We are living in an age in which the spiritual life is in a certain sense public. Not that there is no longer any occult science in our day, but it cannot be considered occult simply because it is not printed or spread abroad. There is plenty of occult science even in our day. The scientific teaching of Fichte, for instance, although everyone can procure it in printed form, is really a secret teaching; and finally Hegel's philosophy is also a secret doctrine, for it is very little known and has indeed many reasons in it for remaining a secret teaching; and this is the case with many things in our day. The scientific teaching of Fichte and the philosophy of Hegel have a very simple method of remaining secret doctrine, in that they are written in such a way that most people do not understand them, and fall asleep if they read the first pages. In that way the subject itself remains a secret doctrine, and this is the case in our own age with a great deal which many people think they know. They do not know it; thus these things remain secret doctrine; and, in reality, such things as are to be found in the Gita also remain secret doctrine, although they may be made known in the widest circles by means of printing. For while one person who takes up the Gita today sees in it great and mighty revelations about the evolution of man's own inner being, another will only see in it an interesting poem; to him all the perceptions and feelings expressed in the Gita are mere trivialities. For let no one think that he has really made what is in the Gita his own, although he may be able to express in the words of the Gita itself what is contained in it, but which may itself be far removed from his comprehension. Thus the greatness of the subject itself is in many respects a protection against its becoming common. What is certain is that the teachings which are poetically worked out in the Gita are such that each one must follow, must experience them for himself, if, through them, he wishes to rise in his soul, and finally to experience the meeting with the Lord of Yoga, with Krishna. It is therefore an individual matter; something which the great Teacher addresses to one individual alone. It is a different thing when we consider the contents of the Epistles of St. Paul from this point of view. There we see that all is for the community, all is matter appealing to the many. For if we fix our attention upon, the innermost core of the essence of the Krishna-teaching we must say: What one experiences through this teaching, one experiences for oneself alone, in the strictest seclusion of one's own soul, and one can only have the meeting with Krishna as a lonely soul-wanderer, after one has found the way back to the original revelations and experiences of mankind. That which Krishna can give must be given to each individual.

This is not the ease with the revelation given to the world through the Christ-Impulse. From the beginning the Christ-Impulse was intended for all humanity, and the Mystery of Golgotha was not consummated as an act for the individual soul alone; but we must think of the whole of mankind from the very beginning to the very end of the earth's evolution, and realise that what happened at Golgotha was for all men. It is to the greatest possible extent a matter for the community in general. Therefore the style of the Epistles of St. Paul, apart from all that has already been characterised, must be quite different from the style of the sublime Gita. Let us once more picture clearly the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna. He gives his pupil unequivocal directions as Lord of Yoga as to how he can rise in his soul in order to attain the vision of Krishna. Let us compare with this a specially pregnant passage in the Pauline Epistles, in which a community turn to St. Paul and ask him whether this or that was true, whether this could be considered as giving the right views about what he had taught. In the instructions which St. Paul gives, we find a passage which may certainly be compared in greatness, even in artistic style with what we find in the sublime Gita; but at the same time we find quite a different tone, we find everything spoken from quite a different soul-feeling; It is where St. Paul writes to the Corinthians of how the different human gifts to be found in a group of people must work in cooperation. To Arjuna, Krishna says “Thou must be so and so, thou must do this or that, then wilt thou rise stage by stage in thy soul-life.” To his Corinthians St. Paul says: “One of you has this gift, another that, a third another; and if these work harmoniously together, as do the members of the human body, the result is spiritually a whole which can spiritually be permeated with the Christ.” Thus through the subject itself St. Paul addresses himself to men who work together, that is to say, to a multitude; and he uses an important opportunity to do this-namely, when the gift of the so-called speaking with tongues comes under consideration.

What is this speaking with tongues that we find spoken of in St. Paul's Epistles? It is neither more nor less than a survival of old spiritual gifts, which, in a renewed way, but with full human consciousness, confront-us again at the present time. For when, among our initiation-methods, we speak of Inspiration, it is understood that a man who attains to inspiration in our age does so with a clear consciousness; just as he brings a clear consciousness to bear upon his powers of understanding and his sense-realisations. But in olden times this was different, then such a man spoke as an instrument of high spiritual beings who made use of his organs to express higher things through his speech. He might sometimes say things which he himself could not understand at all. Thus revelations from the spiritual worlds were given, which were not necessarily understood by him who was used as an instrument, and just that was the case in Corinth. The situation had there arisen of a number of persons having this gift of tongues. They were then able to make this or that prediction from the spiritual worlds. Now when a man possesses such gifts everything he is able to reveal by their means is under all circumstances a revelation from the spiritual world, yet it may, nevertheless, be the case that one man may say this and another that, for spiritual sources are manifold, One may be inspired from one source and another from another, and thus it may happen that the revelations do not correspond. Complete harmony can only be found when these worlds are entered in full consciousness. Therefore St. Paul gives the following admonition: “Some there are who can speak with tongues, others who can interpret the words spoken. They should work together as do the right and left hands, and we should not only listen to those who speak with tongues, but also to those who have not that gift, but who can expound and understand what someone is able to bring down from the spiritual sphere.” Here again St. Paul was urging the question of a community which might be founded through the united working of men. In connection with this very speaking with tongues St. Paul gave that address which, as I have said, is in certain respects so wonderful that in its might it may well compare, though in a different way-with the revelations of the Gita. He says (1 Cor. xii. verses 3-31): “As regards the spiritually gifted brethren, I will not leave you without instructions. You know that in the time of your heathendom, it was to dumb idols that you were blindly led by desire. Wherefore I make clear to you: that just as little as one speaking in the Spirit of God says: Accursed be Jesus; so little can a man call Him Lord but through the Holy Spirit. Now there are diversities of gracious gifts, but there is one Spirit. There are diversities in the guidance of mankind, but there is one Lord. There are differences in the force which individual men possess; but there is one God Who works in all these forces. But to every man is given the manifestation of the Spirit, as much as he can profit by it. So to one is given the word of prophecy, to another the word of knowledge; others are spirits who live in faith; again others have the gift of healing, others the gift of prophecy, others have the gift of seeing into men's characters, others that of speaking different tongues, and to others again is given the interpretation of tongues; but in all these worketh one and the same Spirit, apportioning to each one what is due to him. For as the body is one and hath many members, yet all the members together form one body, so also is it with Christ. For through the Spirit we are all baptised into one body, whether Jew or Greek, bond or free, and have all been imbued with one spirit; so also the body is not made of one but of many members. If the foot were to say: Because I am not the hand therefore I do not belong to the body, it would none the less belong to it. And if the ear were to say: Because I am not the eye I do not belong to the body, none the less does it belong to the body. If the whole body were only an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were a sense of hearing, where would be the power of smell? But now hath God set each one of the members in the body where it seemed good to Him. If there were only one member, where would the body be? But now there are truly many members, but there is only one body. The eye may not say to the hand: I do not require thee! nor the head to the feet—I have no need of you; rather those which appear to be the feeble members of the body are necessary, and those which we consider mean prove themselves to be specially important. God has put the body together and has recognised the importance of the unimportant members that there should be no division in the body, but that all the members should work harmoniously together and should care for one another. And if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, and it one member prosper, all the members rejoice with it. “But ye,” said St. Paul to his Corinthians, “are the Body of Christ, and are severally the members thereof. And some God hath set in the community as apostles, others as prophets, a third part as teachers, a fourth as miraculous healers, a fifth for other activities in helping, a sixth for the administration of the community, and a seventh He set aside to speak with tongues. Shall all men be prophets, shall all men be apostles, shall all be teachers, all healers, shall all speak with tongues, or shall all interpret? Therefore it is right for all the gifts to work together, but the more numerous they are the better.”

Then Paul speaks of the force that can prevail in the individual but also in the community, and that holds all the separate members together as the strength of the body holds the separate members of the body together. Krishna says nothing more beautiful to one man than St. Paul spoke to humanity in its different members. Then he speaks of the Christ-Power, which holds the different members together just as the body holds its different members together; and the force that can live in one individual as the life-force in every one of his limbs, and yet lives also in a whole community; that is described by St. Paul in powerful words: “Nevertheless I will show you,” says he, “the way that is higher than all else. If I could speak with tongues of men or of angels and have not love, my speech is but as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal, and if I could prophesy and reveal all secrets and communicate all the knowledge in the world, and if I had all the faith that could remove mountains themselves and had not love, it would all be nothing. And if I distributed every spiritual gift, yea, if I gave my body itself to be burnt, but were lacking in love, it would all be in vain. Love endureth ever. Love is kind. Love knoweth not envy. Love knoweth not boasting, knoweth not pride. Love injureth not what is decorous, seeketh not her own advantage, doth not let herself be provoked, beareth no one any malice, doth not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth only in truth. Love envelopeth all, streameth through all beliefs, hopeth all things, practiseth toleration everywhere. Love, if it existeth, can never be lost. Prophesies vanish when they are fulfilled, what is spoken with tongues ceases when it can no longer speak to human hearts; what is known ceases when the subject of knowledge is exhausted, for we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child; when I became, a man the world of childhood was past. Now we only see dark outlines in a mirror, but then we shall see the spirit face to face; now is my knowledge in part, but then I shall know completely, even as I myself am known. Now abideth Faith, the certainty of Hope, and Love; but Love is the greatest of these, hence Love is above all. For if you could have all spiritual gifts, whoever himself understands prophecy must also strive after love; for whoever speaks with tongues speaks not among men, he speaks among Gods. No one understands him, because in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.” We see how St. Paul understands the nature of speaking with tongues. His meaning is: The speaker with tongues is transported into the spiritual worlds; he speaks among Gods. Whoever prophesies speaks to men to build up, to warn, to comfort; he who speaks with tongues, to a certain extent satisfies himself; he who prophesies builds up the community. If you all attain to speaking with tongues, it is yet more important that you should prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than he who speaks with tongues, for he who speaks with tongues must first understand his own speaking, in order that the community should do so. Supposing that I came to' you as a speaker with tongues, of what use should I be to you if I did not tell you what my speaking signifies as prophecy, teaching and revelation! My speaking would be like a flute or a zither, of which one could not clearly distinguish the sounds. How could one distinguish the playing of either the zither or of the flute if they did not give forth distinct sounds? And if the trumpet gave forth an indistinct sound, who would arm himself to battle? So it is with you; if you cannot connect a distinct language with the tongue-speaking, it is all merely spoken into the air.

All this shows us that the different spiritual gifts must be divided amongst the community, and that the members as individuals, must work together. With this we come to the point at which the revelation of Paul, through the moment in human evolution in which it appears, must differ absolutely from that of Krishna. The Krishna-revelation is directed to one individual, but in reality applies to every man if he is ripe to tread the upward path prescribed to him by the Lord of Yoga; we are more and more reminded of the primeval ages of mankind, to which we always, according to Krishna-teaching, return in spirit. At that time men were less individualised, one could assume that for each man the same teaching and directions would be suitable. St. Paul confronted mankind when individuals were becoming differentiated, when they really had to become differentiated, each one with his special capacity, his own special gift. One could then no longer reckon on being able to pour the same thing into each different soul; one had then to point to that which is invisible and rules over all. This, which lives in no man as a separate individual, although it may be within each one, is the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse, again, is something like a new group-soul of humanity, but one that must be consciously sought for by men. To make this clearer, let us picture to ourselves how, for instance, a number of Krishna students are to be distinguished in the spiritual worlds, from a number of those who have been moved in the deepest part of their being by the Christ-Impulse. The Krishna pupils have every one of them been stirred by one and the same impulse, which has been given them by the Lord of Yoga. In spiritual life each one of these is like the other. The same instructions have been given to them all. But those who have been moved by the Christ-Impulse, are each, when disembodied and in the spiritual world, possessed of their own particular individuality, their own distinct spiritual forces. Therefore even in the spiritual world, one man may go in one direction and one in another; and the Leader of both, the One Who pours Himself into the soul of each one, no matter how individualised he may be, is the Christ, Who is in the soul of each one and at the same time soars above them all. So we still have a differentiated community even when the souls are discarnate, while the souls of the Krishna pupils, when they have received instructions from the Lord of Yoga, are as one unit. The object of human evolution, however, is that souls should become more and more differentiated.

Therefore it was necessary that Krishna should speak in a different way. He really speaks to his pupils just as he does in the Gita. But St. Paul must speak differently. He really speaks to each individual, and it is a question of individual development whether, according to the degree of his maturity, a man remains at a certain stage of his incarnation at a standstill in exoteric life, or whether he is able to enter the esoteric life and raise himself into esoteric Christianity. We can go further and further in the Christian life and attain the utmost esoteric heights; but we must start from something different from what we start from in the Krishna-teaching. In the Krishna-teaching you start from the point you have reached as man, and raise the soul individually, as a separate being; in Christianity, before you attempt to go further along the path you must have gained a connection with the Christ-Impulse-feeling in the first place that this transcends all else. The spiritual path to Krishna can only be trodden by one who receives instructions from Krishna; the spiritual path to Christ can be trodden by anyone, for Christ brought the mystery for all men who feel drawn towards it. That, however, is something external, accomplished on the physical plane; the first step is, therefore taken on the physical plane. That is the essential thing. Truly one need not, if one looks into the world-historical importance of the Christ-Impulse, begin by belonging to this or that Christian denomination; on the contrary one can, just in our time, even start from an anti-Christian standpoint, or from one of indifference towards Christ. Yet if one goes deeply into the spiritual life of our own age, examining the contradictions and follies of materialism, perhaps one may genuinely be led to Christ, even though to begin with one may not have belonged to any particular creed. Therefore when it is said outside our circle that we are starting from a peculiar Christian denomination, this must be regarded as a special calumny; for it is not a matter of starting from any denomination, but that in response to the demands of the spiritual life itself, everyone, be he Mahommedan or Buddhist, Jew or Hindu, or Christian, shall be able to understand the Christ-Impulse in its whole significance for the evolution of mankind. This desire we can see deeply penetrating the whole view and presentation of St. Paul, and in this respect he is absolutely the one who sets the tone for the first proclamation of the Christ-Impulse to the world.

As we have described how Sankhya philosophy concerns itself with the changing forms, with that which appertains to Prakriti, we may also say that St. Paul, in all that underlies his profound Epistles, deals with Purusha, that which pertains to the soul. What the soul is to become, the destiny of the soul, how throughout the whole evolution of mankind it evolves in manifold ways, concerning all this St. Paul gives us quite definite and profound conclusions. There is a fundamental difference between what Eastern thought was still able to give us, and what we find at once with such wonderful clearness in St. Paul. We pointed out yesterday that, according to Krishna, everything depended on man's finding his way out of the changing forms. But Prakriti remains outside, as something foreign to the soul. All the striving in this Eastern method of development and even in the Eastern initiation, tends to free one from material existence' from that which is spread outside in nature; for that, according to the Veda-philosophy, is merely maya. Everything external is maya, and to be free from maya is Yoga. We have pointed out how in the Gita it is expected of man that he shall become free from all he does and accomplishes, from what he wills and thinks, from what he likes and enjoys, and in his soul shall triumph over everything external. The work that man accomplishes should equally fall away from him, and thus resting within himself, he shall find satisfaction. Thus, he who wishes to develop according to the Krishna teaching, aspires to become something like a Paramahamsa, that is to say, a high Initiate who leaves all material existence, behind him, who triumphs over all he has himself accomplished by his actions in this world of sense; and lives a purely spiritual existence, having so overcome what belongs to the senses that he no longer thirsts for reincarnation, that he has nothing more to do with what filled his life and at which he worked in this sense-world. Thus it is the issuing forth from this maya, the triumphing over it which meets us everywhere in the Gita, With St. Paul it is not so.

If he had met with these Eastern teachings, something in the depth of his soul would have caused the following words to come forth: “Yes, thou wishest to rise above all that surrounds thee outside, from that also which thou formerly accomplished there! Dost thou wish to leave all that behind thee? Is not then all that the work of God, is not everything above which thou wishest to lift thyself created by the Divine Spirit? In despising that, art thou not despising the work of God? Does not the revelation of God's Spirit dwell everywhere within it? Didst thou not at first seek to represent God in thine own work, in love and faith and devotion, and now desirest thou to triumph over what is the work of God?”

It would be well, my dear friends, if we were to inscribe these words of St. Paul-which though unspoken were felt in the depths of his soul-deeply into our own souls; for they express an important part of what we know as Western revelation. In the Pauline sense, we too speak of the maya which surrounds us. We certainly say: We are surrounded by maya: but we also say: Is there not spiritual revelation in this maya, is it not all divine spiritual work? Is it not blasphemy to fail to understand that there is divine spiritual work in all things? Now arises the other question: Why is that maya there -? Why do we see maya around us? The West does not stop at the question as to whether all is maya: it inquires as to the wherefore of maya. Then follows an answer that leads us into the centre of the soul—into Purusha: Because the soul once came under the power of Lucifer it sees everything through the veil of maya and spreads the veil of maya over everything. Is it the fault of objectivity that we see maya? No. To us as souls objectivity would appear in all its truth, if we had not come under the power of Lucifer. It only appears to us as maya because we are not capable of seeing down into the foundations of what is spread out there. That comes from the soul's having come under the power of Lucifer; it is not the fault of the Gods, it is the fault of our own soul. Thou, O soul, hast made the world a maya to thyself, because thou hast fallen into the power of Lucifer. From the highest spiritual grasp of this formula, down to the words of Goethe: “The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives,” is one straight line. The Philistines and zealots may fight against Goethe and his Christianity as much as they like; he might nevertheless say that he is one of the most Christian of men, for in the depths of his being he thought as a Christian, even in that very formula: “The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives.” It is the soul's own fault that what it sees appears as maya and not as truth. So that which in Orientalism appears simply as an act of Gods themselves, is diverted into the depths of the human soul, where the great struggle with Lucifer takes place.

Thus Orientalism, if we consider it aright, is in a certain sense materialism, in that it does not recognise the spirituality of maya, and wishes to rise above matter. That which pulses through the Epistles of St. Paul is a doctrine of the soul, although only existing in germ and therefore capable of being so mistaken and misunderstood as in our Tamas-time, but it will in the future be visibly spread out over the whole earth. This, concerning the peculiar nature of maya, will have to be understood; for only then can one understand the full depth of that which is the object of the progress of human evolution. Then only does one understand what St. Paul means when he speaks of the first Adam, who succumbed to Lucifer in his soul, and who was therefore more and more entangled in matter-which means nothing else than this: ensnared in a false experiencing of matter. As God's creation external matter is good: what takes place there is good. But what the soul experiences in the course of human evolution became more and more evil, because in the beginning the soul fell into the power of Lucifer. Therefore St. Paul called Christ the Second Adam, for He came into the world untempted by Lucifer, and therefore He can be a guide and friend to men's souls, who can lead them away from Lucifer, that is, into the right relationship to Him. St. Paul could not tell mankind at that time all that he as an Initiate knew; but if we allow his Epistles to work on us we shall see that there is more in their depths than they express externally. That is because St. Paul spoke to a community, and had to reckon with the understanding of that community. That is why in certain of his Epistles there seem to be absolute contradictions. But one who can plunge down into the depths, finds everywhere the impulse of the Christ-Being. Let us here remember, my dear friends, how we ourselves have represented the coming into existence of the Mystery of Golgotha. As time went on we recognised that there were two different stories of the youth, of Christ Jesus, in the Gospel of St. Matthew and that of St. Luke, because in reality there are two Jesus-boys in question. We have seen that externally—after the flesh, according to St. Paul, which means through physical descent—both Jesus-boys descended from the stock of David; that one came from the line of Nathan and the other from that of Solomon; that thus there were two Jesus-boys born at about the same time. In the one Jesus-child, that of St. Matthew's Gospel, we find Zarathustra reincarnated: and we have emphatically stated that in the other Jesus-child, the one described by St. Luke, there was no such human ego as is usually to be found, and certainly not as the one existing in the other Jesus-child, in whom lived such a highly evolved ego as that of Zarathustra. In the Luke-Jesus there actually lives that part of man that has not entered into human evolution on the earth. *[See also The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind, the Gospel of St. Luke, the Gospel of St. Matthew.]

It is rather difficult to form a right conception of this but we must just try to think how, so to speak, the soul that was incarnated in Adam, he who may be described as Adam in the sense of my Occult Science succumbed to Lucifer's temptation, symbolically described in the Bible as the Fall of Man in Paradise. We must picture this. Then we must picture further, that side by side with that human soul-nature which incarnated in Adam's body, there was a human part, a human being, that remained behind and did not then incarnate, that did not enter a physical body, but remained “pure soul.” You need only now picture how, before a physical man arose in the evolution of humanity, there was one soul, which then divided itself into two parts. The one part, the one descendant of the common soul, incarnated in Adam and thus entered into the line of incarnations, succumbed to Lucifer, and so on. As to the other soul, the sister-soul, as it were, the wise rulers of the world saw beforehand that it would not be good that this too should be embodied; it was kept back in the soul world; it did not therefore take part in the incarnations of humanity, but was kept back. With this soul none but the Initiates of the Mysteries had intercourse. During the evolution preceding the Mystery of Golgotha this soul did not, therefore, take into itself the experience of an ego, for this can only be obtained by incarnating in a human body. None the less, it had all the Wisdom that could have been attained through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, it possessed all the love of which a human soul is capable. This soul remained blameless, as it were, of all the guilt that a man can acquire in the course of his incarnations in human evolution. It could not be met with as a human being externally; but it could be perceived by the old clairvoyants, and was recognised by them: they encountered it, so to say, in the mysteries. Thus, here we have a soul, one might say, that was within, but yet above, the evolution of mankind, that could at first only be perceived in the spirit; a pre-man, a true super-man.

It was this soul which, instead of an ego, was incarnated in the Jesus-child of St. Luke's Gospel. You will remember the lectures at Bale; this fact was already given out there. We have therefore to do with a soul that is only ego-like, one that naturally acts as an ego when it permeates the body of Jesus: but which in all it displays is yet quite different from an ordinary ego. I have already mentioned the fact that the boy of St. Luke's Gospel spoke a language understood by his mother as soon as he came into the world, and other facts of similar nature were to he observed in him. Then we know that the Matthew-Jesus, in whom lived the Zarathustra ego, grew up until his twelfth year, and the Luke-child also grew up, possessing no particular human knowledge or science, but bearing the divine wisdom and the divine power of sacrifice within him. Thus the Luke-Jesus grew up not being particularly gifted for what can be learnt externally. We know further that the body of the Matthew-Jesus was forsaken by the Zarathustra ego, and that in the twelfth year of the Luke-Jesus his body was taken possession of by that same Zarathustra-ego. That is the moment referred to when it is related of the twelve-year-old Jesus of Luke's Gospel, that when his parents lost him he stood teaching before the wise men of the Temple. We know further that this Luke-Jesus bore the Zarathustra ego within him up to his thirtieth year; that the Zarathustra ego then left the body of the Luke-Jesus, and all its sheaths were taken possession of by Christ, a superhuman Being of the higher Hierarchies, Who only could live in a human body at all inasmuch as a body was offered Him which had first been permeated up to its twelfth year with the pre-human Wisdom-forces, and the pre-human divine Love-forces, and was then permeated through and through by all that the Zarathustra ego had acquired through many incarnations by means of initiation. In no other way, perhaps, could one so well obtain the right respect, the right reverence, in short, the right feeling altogether for the Christ-Being, as by trying to understand what sort of a body was needed for this Christ-Ego to be able to enter humanity at all. Many people consider that in this presentation, given out of the holy mysteries of the newer age about the Christ-Being, He is thus made to appear less intimate and human than the Christ-Jesus so many have honoured in the way in which He is generally represented-familiar, near to man, incarnate in an ordinary human body in which nothing like a Zarathustra ego lived. It is brought as a reproach against our teaching that Christ-Jesus is here represented as composed of forces drawn from all regions of the cosmos. Such reproaches proceed only from the indolence of human perception and human feeling which is unwilling to raise itself to the true heights of perception and feeling. The greatest of all must be so grasped by us that our souls have to make the supremest possible efforts to attain the inner intensity of perception and feeling necessary to bring the Greatest, the Highest, at all near to our soul. Our first feelings will thus be raised higher still, if we do but consider them in this light. We know one other thing besides. We know how we have to understand the words of the Gospel: “Divine forces are being revealed in the Heights, and peace will spread among men of goodwill.” We know that this message of peace and love resounded when the Luke-Jesus appeared, because Buddha intermingled with the astral body of the Luke-Jesus; Buddha, who had already lived in a being who went through his last incarnation as Gautama Buddha and had risen to complete spirituality. So that in the astral body of the Luke-Jesus, Buddha revealed himself, as he had progressed up to the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha on earth.

Thus we have the Being of Christ Jesus presented before us in a way only now possible to mankind from the basis of occult science. St. Paul, although an Initiate, was compelled to speak in concepts more easily understood at that time; he could not then have assumed a humanity able to understand such concepts as we have brought before your hearts today. His inspiration, however, was derived from his initiation, which came about as an act of grace. Because he did not attain this through regular schooling in the old mysteries, but by grace on the road to Damascus when the risen Christ appeared to him, therefore I call this initiation one brought about by grace. But he experienced this Damascus Vision in such a way that by means of it he knew that He Who arose in the Mystery of Golgotha lives in the sphere of this earth and has been attached to it since that Event. He recognised the risen Christ. From that time on he proclaimed Him. Why was he able to see Him in the particular way he did? At this point we must enter somewhat into the nature of such a vision, such a manifestation as that of Damascus: for it was a vision, a manifestation of a quite peculiar kind. Only those people who never wish to learn anything of occult facts consider all visions as being of one kind. They will not distinguish such an occurrence as the vision of St. Paul from many other visions such as appeared to the saints later. What really was the reason that St. Paul could recognise Christ as he did when He appeared to him on the way to Damascus? Why did the certain conviction come to him that this was the risen Christ? This question leads us back to another one: What was necessary in order that the whole Christ-Being should be able completely to enter into Jesus of Nazareth, at the baptism by John in the Jordan? Now, we have just said what was necessary to prepare the body into which the Christ-Being could descend. But what was necessary in order that the Arisen One could appear in such a densified soul-form as he appeared in to St. Paul? What, then, so to speak, was that halo of light in which Christ appeared to St. Paul before Damascus? What was it? Whence was it taken?

If we wish to answer these questions, my dear friends, we must add a few finishing touches to what I have already said. I have told you that there was, as it were, a sister-soul to the Adam-soul, to that soul which entered into the sequence of human generations. This sister-soul remained in the soul world. It was this sister-soul that was incarnated in the Luke-Jesus. But it was not then incarnated for the first time in a human body in the strictest sense of the words, it had already been once incarnated prophetically. This soul had already been made use of formerly as a messenger of the holy mysteries; it was, so to say, cherished and cultivated in the mysteries, and was sent whenever anything specially important to man was taking place; but it could only appear as a vision in the etheric body, and could only be perceived, strictly speaking, as long as the old clairvoyance remained. In earlier ages that still existed. Therefore this old sister-soul of Adam had no need at that time to descend as far as the physical body in order to be seen. So it actually appeared on earth repeatedly in human evolution: sent forth by the impulses of the mysteries, at all times when important things were to take place in the evolution of the earth; but it did not require to incarnate, in ancient times, because clairvoyance was there. The first time it needed to incarnate was when the old clairvoyance was to be overcome through the transition of human evolution from the third to the fourth Post-Atlantean age, of which we spoke yesterday. Then, by way of compensation, it took on an incarnation, in order to be able to express itself at the time when clairvoyance no longer existed. The only time this sister-soul of Adam was compelled to appear and to become physically visible, it was incorporated, so to speak, in Krishna; and then it was incorporated again in the Luke-Jesus. So now we can understand how it was that Krishna spoke in such a superhuman manner, why he is the best teacher for the human ego, why he represents, so to speak, a victory over the ego, why he appears so psychically sublime. It is because he appears as human being at that sublime moment which we brought before our souls in the lecture before last, as Man not yet descended into human incarnations. He then appears again to be embodied in the Luke-Jesus. Hence that perfection that came about when the most significant world-conceptions of Asia, the ego of Zarathustra and the spirit of Krishna, were united in the twelve-year-old Jesus described by St. Luke. He who spoke to the learned men in the Temple was therefore not only Zarathustra speaking as an ego, but one who spoke from those sources from which Krishna at one time drew Yoga; he spoke of Yoga raised a stage higher; he united himself with the Krishna force, with Krishna himself, in order to continue to grow until his thirtieth year. Then only have we that complete, perfected body which could be taken possession of by the Christ. Thus do the spiritual currents of humanity flow together. So that in what happened at the Mystery of Golgotha, we really have a co-operation of the most important leaders of mankind, a synthesis of spirit-life. When St. Paul had his vision before Damascus, He Who appeared to him then was the Christ. The halo of light in which Christ was enveloped was Krishna. And because Christ has taken Krishna for His own soul-covering through which He then works on further, therefore in the light which shone there, in Christ Himself, there is all that was once upon a time contained in the sublime Gita. We find much of that old Krishna-teaching, although scattered about, in the New Testament revelations. This old Krishna-teaching has on that account become a personal matter to the whole of mankind, because Christ is not as such a human ego belonging to mankind, but to the Higher Hierarchies. Thus Christ belongs also to those times when man was not yet separated from that which now surrounds him as material existence, and which is veiled to him in maya through his own Luciferic temptation. If we glance back over the whole of evolution, we shall find that in those olden times there was not yet that strict division between the spiritual and the material; material was then still spiritual, and the spiritual—if we may say so—still manifested itself externally. Thus because, in the Christ-Impulse, something entered into mankind which completely prevented such a strict separation as we find in Sankhya philosophy between Purusha and Prakriti, Christ becomes the Leader of men out of themselves and towards the divine creation. Must we then say that we must unconditionally give up maya now that we recognise that it seems to be given us through our own fault? No, for that would be blaspheming the spirit in the world; that would be assigning to matter properties which we ourselves have imposed upon it with the veil of maya. Let us rather hope that when we have overcome in ourselves that which caused matter to become maya, we may again be reconciled with the world.

For do we not hear resounding out of the world around us that it is a creation of the Elohim, and that on the last day of creation they considered: and behold, all was very good? That would be the karma to be fulfilled if there were nothing but Krishna-teaching (for there is nothing in the world that does not fulfil its karma). If in all eternity there had been only the teaching of Krishna, then the material existence which surrounds us, the manifestation of God of which the Elohim at the starting-point of evolution said: “Behold all was very good,” would encounter the judgment of men: “It is not good, I must abandon it!” The judgment of man would be placed above the judgment of God. We must learn to understand the words which stand as a mystery at the outset of evolution; we must not set the judgment of man above the judgment of God. If all and everything that could cling to us in the way of guilt were to fall away from us, and yet that one fault remained, that we slandered the work of the Elohim; the earth-Karma would have to be fulfilled; in the future everything would have to fall upon us and karma would have to fulfil itself thus. In order that this should not happen, Christ appeared in the world, so to reconcile us with the world that we may learn to overcome Lucifer's tempting forces, and learn to penetrate the veil; that—we may see the divine revelation in its true form; that we may find the Christ as the Reconciler, Who will lead us to the true form of the divine revelation, so that through Him we may learn to understand the primeval words: “And behold, it is very good.” In order that we may learn to ascribe to ourselves that which we may never again dare to ascribe to the world, we need Christ; for if all our other sins could be taken away from us: yet this sin could only be removed by Him. This, transformed into a moral feeling, is a newer side of the Christ-Impulse. It shows us at the same time why the necessity arose for the Christ-Impulse as the higher soul to envelope itself in the Krishna-Impulse.

An exposition such as I have given you in this course, my dear friends, should not be taken as mere theory, merely as a number of thoughts and ideas to be absorbed; it should be taken as a sort of New Year's gift, a gift which should influence our New Year, and from now on it should work as that which we can perceive through the understanding of the Christ-Impulse, in so far as this helps us to understand the words of the Elohim, which resound down to us from the starting point, from the very primeval beginning of the creation of our earth. And look upon the intention of the course at the same time as the starting point of our Anthroposophical spiritual stream. This must be Anthroposophical because by means of it will be more and more recognised how man can in himself attain to self-knowledge—. He cannot yet attain to complete self-knowledge, not yet can Anthropos attain to knowledge of Anthropos, man to the knowledge of man, so long as this man can consider what he has to carry out in his own soul as an affair to be played out between him and external nature. That the world should appear to us to be immersed in matter is a thing the Gods have prepared for us, it is an affair of our own souls, a question of higher self-knowledge; it is something that man must himself recognise in his own manhood, it is a question of Anthroposophy, by means of which we can come to the perception of what theosophy may become to mankind. It should be a feeling of the greatest modesty which impels a man to belong to the Anthroposophical movement; a modesty which says: If I want to spring over that which is an affair of the human soul and to take at once the highest step into the divine, humility may very easily vanish from me, and pride step in, in its place; vanity may easily install itself May the Anthroposophical Society also be a starting point in this higher moral sphere; above all, may it avoid all that has so easily crept into the theosophical movement, in the way of pride, vanity, ambition, and want of earnestness in receiving that which is the highest Wisdom. May the Anthroposophical Society avoid all this because from its very starting point, it has already considered that the settlement with maya is an affair for the human soul itself.

One should feel that the Anthroposophical Society ought to be the result of the profoundest human modesty. For out of this modesty should well up deep earnestness as regards the sacred truths into which it will penetrate if we betake ourselves into this sphere of the super-sensible, of the spiritual. Let us therefore understand the adoption of the name “Anthroposophical Society” in true modesty, in true humility, saying to ourselves Let all that remains of that pride and lack of modesty, vanity, ambition and untruthfulness, that played a part under the name of Theosophy, be eradicated, if now, under the sign and device of modesty, we begin humbly to look up to the, Gods and divine wisdom, and on the other hand dutifully to study man and human wisdom, if we reverently approach Spiritual Science, and dutifully devote ourselves to Anthroposophy. This Anthroposophy will lead to the divine and to the Gods. If by its help we learn in the highest sense to look humbly and truthfully into our own selves and see how we must struggle against all maya and error through self-training and the severest self-discipline, then, as written on a bronze tablet may there stand above us the word: Anthroposophy! Let that be an exhortation to us, that above all we should seek through it to acquire self-knowledge, modesty, and in this way endeavour to erect a building founded upon truth, for truth can only blossom if self-knowledge lays hold of the human soul in deep earnestness. What is the origin of all vanity, of all untruth? The want of self-knowledge. From what alone can truth spring, from what can true reverence for divine worlds and divine wisdom alone come? From true self-knowledge, self-training, self-discipline. Therefore may that which shall stream and pulsate through the Anthroposophical movement serve that purpose. For these reasons this particular course of lectures has been given at the starting point of the Anthroposophical movement, and it should prove that there is no question of narrowness, but that precisely through our movement we can extend our horizon over those distances which comprise Eastern thought also. But let us take this humbly in self-educative anthroposophical fashion, by creating the will within us to discipline and train ourselves. If Anthroposophy, my dear friends, be taken up among you in this way, it will then lead to a beneficial end and will attain a goal that can extend to each individual and every human society for their welfare. So let these words be spoken which shall be the last of this course of lectures, but something of which perhaps many in the coming days will take away with them in their souls, so that it may bear fruit within our Anthroposophical movement, within which you, my dear friends, have, so to speak, met together for the first time. May we ever so meet together in the sign of Anthroposophy, that we have the right to call upon words with which we shall now conclude, words of humility and of self-knowledge, which we should now at this moment place as an ideal before our souls.

It is indeed the case that much of the legitimacy, the secrets of the world's existence, has been obscured in the consciousness of humanity by the misunderstandings that I discussed yesterday and the day before yesterday in relation to the conception of the polar opposites of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Above all, it is only through this that modern materialism has become possible, which fills humanity with the awareness that there are contradictions all around us that are being investigated by today's conventional science and from which the universe will gradually be able to be understood. A simple consideration can teach that in this way an understanding of the universe can never be possible. For just think back to some things that I explained here a few weeks ago and put them in the right perspective for yourself. Remember how those people who are considered to be natural scientists today actually only refer to the human being insofar as the human being is a corpse after his death. That which of the remaining natural laws, of the remaining natural processes, permeates the human being after he has become a corpse, can initially be explained according to the usual natural laws. But what lives in man between birth and death already resists these natural laws. And if we were to judge not according to prejudice but according to reality, we would have to say: Between birth and death, and actually from the time of his first embryonic development, man fights against that which is governed by natural laws as we understand them in our science today.

Take the surrounding nature and everything that physics, chemistry, physiology, biology and so on say about this nature today, visualize all that is said about nature and then think of man as he lives between birth and death, then you will say to yourself: This whole life is a struggle against the realm that is ruled by these natural laws. It is only because the human organization, as it were, wants to know nothing about these natural laws, fights them, that man is human between birth and death.

From this, however, you can already see that if human becoming is to be placed in the universe, in the cosmos, it is necessary to assume different laws, a different kind of becoming for the universe. Thus, with our present laws of nature, we present a world in which man, and even plants and animals, are not included. But today we want to consider only the human being in relation to the rest of nature. Man is not included in the nature that today's science dominates. Indeed, with every breath, man rebels against this nature, of which this science speaks.

Nevertheless, we can speak of the Cosmos, of the Universe, because man also comes forth from the bosom of this Cosmos, just as he stands before us as a physical human being. But then we must think of this cosmos as being of a different nature from what we have in mind when we speak in terms of today's science. We will be able to form a concept of what is actually meant by the above if we bring to mind the following fact, established by spiritual science.

Let us consider the moment when a person dies, whether young or old. The corpse remains behind. We can compare this process, and it is more than a comparison, with the sloughing of a snake or the shedding of the shell of a young bird. The corpse is shed, and what is shed is taken up by the laws of nature, which we have in mind with today's science, just as, for example, the snake skin is taken up by the outer laws of nature when it is shed and no longer follows the snake's laws of growth. That which becomes a corpse is taken up by the laws of the earth. But between birth and death, one has the human form, the human shape. This dissolves, it ceases to exist. In a sense, the corpse still has this shape, but it only has it in imitation, so to speak. It still imitates this shape. The shape of the corpse is no longer the same as the one we have during our life between birth and death. For it is characteristic of this shape that the person feels it, that the person can move with it; this shape has a certain sum of strength that unfolds when the person moves. All that is gone when only the corpse is still present. That which actually gives the corpse its shape has gone from the corpse, but that already disappears when the person has just died. The person does not take that with them. They take their etheric body with them for some time – we will ignore that for the time being – but in any case, they do not take with them what their physical form, their physical shape is. In a sense, he loses this physical form. To put it more precisely, if one were to follow the movements and activities of a person after he has left his body and passed through the gate of death, one would find different movements and impulses than those of the physical form.

So what is actually there in the physical form ceases to be visible to the outer eye when the person has passed through the gate of death. The corpse has only had this form, and it still retains it. It loses it little by little, it is no longer its own. Just as if you – if I may use a rough comparison – have a pot shape and put it over the dough of the cake: the cake then also has the shape, but it is not part of the pot shape, and you cannot say that the cake you then have has this shape from its own material; no, it has received it from the pot that was put over it. And just as the cake retains the shape of the pan when you remove the pan, so the corpse retains the shape of the human being when that shape is removed. But this form itself, which is actually the form with which we walk around, ceases when the human being passes through the gate of death. However, the fact that we have this form, that this form can develop out of the laws of the world, just as a crystal develops out of the laws of the world, is inherent in the laws of the world. So we may ask ourselves: What becomes of this form? And here spiritual scientific research gives us the answer: That which is spirit continues to nourish and sustain itself from the Hierarchy, which we call the Archai, the Primordial Foundations. So we can say: Something passes from the human form into the realm of the Archai.

It is indeed the case that the physical form we receive at birth and discard at death comes from the realm of the archai, the primal depths, the primal forces, that we actually have our physical form because we are enveloped by a spirit from the realm of the archai. We are immersed in a spirit that came from the realm of the archai, which in turn withdraws what it has lent us during our life.

You see, it is something else that makes you realize how you actually belong to the whole cosmos. It is already the case that, so to speak, the archai extend their feeler horns. If that is one of the archai, it extends its structure: this forms the human form, and only then is the human being inside. You can only imagine your existence within the cosmos correctly if you imagine yourself, so to speak, clothed in an outgrowth of the archai. If you now imagine that man, like me, has also dealt with this in these days - in the Lemurian period, as a being such as the earth man is, only emerging and only gradually taking on this form, then you get in what can be provided as a description, as I have given it in “Occult Science in Outline” of the transformation of the human form — just recall how I described it in the account of the Atlantean world — you get the description of what the archai actually do. You get a description of how the archai work from their realm down into the earthly realm, how they metamorphose the human form. This metamorphosis of the human form from the Lemurian period to the time when the human form will disappear from the earth is something that is constituted and shaped from the realm of the archai. And as the archai work on the human being in this way, they simultaneously bring forth that which is truly the spirit of the age. For this spirit of the age is intimately connected with the shaping of human beings, in that, as it were, their skin is given a certain form. The spirit of the age essentially resides in the very outermost sphere of human perception. And if one understands the working of these archai, then one also understands how not only human forms change, but also how the spirits of the age change in the course of earthly existence.

Now you know that in the order of the hierarchies behind the archai lie the spirits of form, the exusiai (see list on page 236). If you look up from the earthly existence of what constitutes the human being to its form, to what is inherent in the entire planet from its beginning to its end, then you will see something more comprehensive in terms of external cosmic law than that which already contains the human form. For, do we not have, when we describe the evolution of the earth, first an echo of the old Saturn time, we call this the polaric epoch; we have an echo of the old sun time, the hyperborean epoch, an echo of the old moon time, the lemurian epoch. Then comes the actual Earth time, the first Earth time, the Atlantean epoch, and now we live in the post-Atlantean epoch. Man has only just developed in his form. The Earth must have more comprehensive laws than those that express themselves in the part of the Earth's development in which man in his present form, or rather in the metamorphoses of his present form, is possible. We must look back to the first beginning of the Earth, when man had not yet attained his form, when he was still present as a spiritual-ethereal being, and we must look forward to that which will also yet happen on Earth, when, after a series of millennia, human beings will have disappeared from the Earth as physical beings. Then the physical earth will continue to exist for a time, yes, it will even be inhabited by people, but no longer in visible human forms, but as etheric beings.

If we take this whole shaping of the earth, including the human being, but going beyond the human being: if we embrace the laws, of which our present natural laws are really only the very smallest part, with the spiritual view, then we have in them that which belongs to the realm of the Exusiai. From the realm of the Exusiai the earthly has been formed in the same way as the human being has been formed from the realm of the elemental forces, the human being together with all that must be in the earth so that the human being can come into being at all. So that we can say: the earthly form passes, when it once dissolves, into the realm of the Exusiai.

If we now consider the second link in the human being, the human etheric body, it is also the case that we may not address it as our complete property at all, but just as the physical form actually belongs to the realm of the Archai and we are clothed in an outgrowth of the realm of the archai, so we are clothed in relation to our etheric body in an outgrowth of the realm of the archangels, the archangeloi. So that we can say: When we go through the gate of death, we still retain this etheric body for a short time. We know that it then dissolves, but its dissolution does not mean that it disappears into nothingness, but rather that it returns to the realm of the archangeloi. They, in turn, lay claim to it; they lower, as it were, a part of their being to the earthly human realm and thereby constitute the human etheric body for the duration of its life. We can therefore say: something passes from the human etheric body into the realm of the archangeloi.

And with regard to the astral body, it is certainly the case that there is a similar relationship to the realm of the Angeloi, the angels, as there is to the realm of the Archai with regard to the physical form and to the realm of the Archangeloi with regard to the etheric body. We do not have our astral body entirely of our own either. It is an evagination of the angelic beings. So that we can say: From the human astral body, something passes over into the realm of the Angeloi at death. We also have our astral body like a garment of our being from the realm of the Angeloi. So you see how, by having a physical human form, an etheric body, and an astral body, we are actually embedded in the realms of the next higher hierarchies. And by participating in the laws of the earth, by walking around on earth as human beings, by developing a will, by developing actions on earth, in short, by participating in the laws of the earth, we also participate in the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form, the elohim.

But here a significant moment occurs. When you look at your physical form in the state in which you are asleep: when your body is in bed, it has its form; you will find this form again in the morning. This form is certainly not dissolved at all, and so one cannot say that the physical body is a corpse, that it is merely a cast like a pot, but the form is really there. So that the archai, by participating in this form, are constantly connected with what is present on earth as a physical being. Likewise, the archangeloi are connected with the human etheric body. But the situation is different with regard to the human astral body. This human astral body is by no means connected with the physical human form from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up; this astral body is, so to speak, in a completely different environment from falling asleep to waking up than from waking up to falling asleep. And the point is that while the archaic principle is inevitably connected with the physical form from birth to death, and the archangelic principle with the etheric being, it is the case with the angelic principle, with the angel principle, that it must, so to speak, accompany the human being from one state to another and back again. This principle of the angeloi, this essentiality of the angeloi, must, as it were, accompany the path into the state of sleep and back again.

You see, a new element arises when we speak of the angelos. And in fact, it depends on the person themselves – on their attitude, on their inclination of their entire emotional world to the spiritual world – whether the angel accompanies them when they leave their physical body and etheric body to enter the state of sleep. It goes with children, but with a person who has reached a certain maturity, it actually depends on the person's disposition, on whether the person has an inner affinity with the angel in his soul. And if this affinity is not present, if the person believes only in the material, if the person harbors only thoughts of the material, the angel does not go with him.

Because if you imagine the fully developed human being (see illustration on page 234), the earth as the result of the exusiai (outer red), the human physical body as the result of the archai (inner red), the human etheric body as the result of the archangeloi (yellow), the human astral body as a result of the work of the angeloi (blue), if you can imagine all this, you can say: as long as the human being is awake, the angel is in the bosom of the archangels, the archai, the exusiai, in short, the higher spiritual beings. When a person leaves their physical body and etheric body, and if they leave with a materialistic attitude, then the angel would indeed deny its own realm, its affiliation with the archangels, the archai, the exusiai, if it were to go with them. You see, here we enter a realm in which human thinking is decisive for an important event, for an important fact within human life, for the fact of whether or not a person is present during the angel's visit in his sleep.

Today, we cannot say: Well, if angels exist, we do not need to believe in them when we are awake, because when we are asleep, they will take care of us. No, they do not go with us when they are denied during the day! This is something that leads very deeply into the secrets of human existence and at the same time shows you how a person's disposition is just as much a part of the whole cosmic order of things as, let us say, a person's blood circulation is a part of what external natural science overlooks or actually does not overlook.

Man himself, with his ego and the prospect of becoming an independent being, is then included in the whole. But man only acquired this sense of self in the course of his earthly existence. And he came to it slowly. And if we go back to ancient times, when there was the so-called instinctive clairvoyance of mankind, then people did not yet have this sense of self at all. When these ancient inhabitants of the earth had their special insights, these instinctive insights, then these were actually not their own insights, because this I was not yet awakened at all. It surrendered to what the angel thought, to what the archangel felt, to what the arche wanted. It lived in the bosom of these entities. Today we look back on the wonderful ancient wisdom. But it is not human wisdom at all, basically, but a wisdom that came to Earth through the Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, who clothed human beings and entered human souls through this ancient wisdom, which much higher beings actually possessed and appropriated before the Earth became Earth. And man must acquire his own wisdom with the help of his angel, to whom he should be connected in mind. We are now approaching this time. And now, in this period that has now begun, when man has awakened the ego more and more, man was, if he did not pull himself together through his own resolve, so to speak abandoned by what the angel, the archangel, thought in him.

But because man was abandoned by these angels, he only then really came into contact with earthly existence. And this coming into contact with earthly existence is what, on the one hand, makes man free, but it is also that which causes the necessity for man to now strive up out of his strength to that which makes the higher hierarchies possible, to live with man in his consciousness. We must strive to receive thoughts again that enable the angels to live with us. These are thoughts that we can only receive through the imagination of spiritual science. And when we again orient our whole feeling towards the world through receiving such thoughts, then we can again reach up into the realm of the archangeloi. Now, when a person wakes up and returns to their physical body, they are in danger of not even realizing that they have an etheric body and that the substance of the archangeloi rules in this etheric body. They must first learn this again. And they must learn that the primal forces, the archai, rule in their physical form. He must learn to understand the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.

For man came out of the realm of the higher hierarchies by advancing to his ego, by experiencing this ego. He became an independent being. But as a result, he entered into another realm, the realm of Ahriman. The I goes, and now especially in an awakened state, into the realm of Ahriman.

The earthly form enters the realm of the Exusiai
Something passes from the human form into the realm of the Archai
Something passes from the human etheric body into the realm of the Archangeloi
Something passes from the human astral body into the realm of the Angeloi
The I goes into the realm of Ahriman (Maja of Ahriman).

The danger of falling into the realm of Ahriman was most acute around 333 BC, before the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the time when people began to rely on mere intellect and mere logic. Then the Mystery of Golgotha occurred and soon took root in humanity. And from the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, the time began when man must consciously strive into the realm of the higher hierarchies.

Admittedly, because of the onset of intellectualism in the 15th century, he has not yet risen again from the realm of Ahriman. But by living in the intellect, and not in reality, he actually lives in the image, he lives in maya. And that is his good fortune. He does not live in the real realm of Ahriman, but in the maya of Ahriman, in mere appearance, in the sense in which I have explained this in recent days. Through this he can in turn turn back. But he can only do so out of freedom. Because it is Maya, we live in images; the whole intellectualistic culture is only an image. Since that time, since 333 BC, it has been placed in the freedom of man to strive upwards. The Catholic Church tried hard to prevent this; it must finally be overcome in this direction. Man must strive upwards to the spiritual worlds.

333 BC
333 AD
= 666

If you add these two numbers together, you get 666. That is the “number of the beast”, where man was most exposed to really sinking into the realm of the animals. But of course he remains exposed to it, even after the year 333, when he, after the Maya of Ahriman has occurred, does not strive upwards. So it is a matter of the fact that by sailing into the realm of Ahriman as far as its Maja, we have thereby become free beings. No providence, no world wisdom could withhold from us sailing into the realm of Ahriman, otherwise it would have left us unfree.

But consider, it is one thing for man to acquire a spiritual attitude and thereby keep his astral body connected to the Angelos when he is asleep, but quite another for man to acquire no spiritual attitude, in which case the Angelos does not accompany the sleeping person, for then man brings with him from sleep that which is the inspiration of Ahriman. And it is indeed the case that in the present epoch man's whole materialistic way of thinking, his whole being filled with materialistic thoughts, is emerging with ever greater rapidity from the sleeping state of man. Man can protect himself against the fact that he again and again brings with him from his sleep that which condemns him to materialism, that is, to being connected with the earth, to becoming matter, to mortality in his soul; he can only prevent it by permeating himself with the attitude that fills him when he absorbs spiritual-scientific concepts. The state of sleep is therefore in itself something that slowly brings about materialism. But Ahriman also makes other efforts to distance man from his angel, and these conditions are becoming more and more frequent. In 1914 they were particularly bad, where people were numbed by Ahrimanic forces, where their consciousness, their straight consciousness, was taken from them, so that they came into states where the angel was not present and where therefore the Ahrimanic influences became great. That was why I told so many people in 1914: one should not believe that, for example, the correct view of the origin of the war in 1914 could ever be seen from external documents. In the past, something could be discovered from the documents in the archives. What happened this time happened more spiritually, from the spiritual world, and a large part of those people who were involved at the time did not do so with their full consciousness, but were led over by Ahrimanic forces into a paralysis of consciousness, where the realm of the Angeloi did not participate. If we want to understand our time, we must look at the influence of the spiritual world in this time. This is absolutely necessary.

But there are many other ways in which we are striving today, which come from Ahrimanic sources, to detach people, so to speak, from their connection with the realm of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exusiai and so on, to draw people to the Ahrimanic, to draw the whole of culture to the Ahrimanic. Just think how often one hears today – I have said this over and over again, mentioned it for many years – when someone has once again told a lie, a whopper of a lie: But he believed what he said, he said it to the best of his knowledge and belief. — Yes, that changes just as little about the objective fact as it changes something when you stick your finger in the flame to the best of your knowledge and belief; no providence will help you that you do not burn your finger when you stick it in to the best of your knowledge and belief. In the cosmic context, invoking one's best knowledge and conscience is of little help either – and it would be sad if it were otherwise. Man does not have the freedom to tell untruths out of best knowledge and conscience, but man has the obligation to take care that what he says is true. He must stand in such a relationship to the world that what he entertains as thoughts is born out of the world, and does not live in him alone, cut off from the world. If what one says to the best of one's knowledge and belief is not true, one can only realize it when one says it, in isolation from the world. For if anyone writes: There is a group in the world that has Luciferic characteristics above and Ahrimanic traits below. And when others claim, as they repeatedly do, that he has said it to the best of his knowledge and belief, this means that through such an attitude Ahriman is declared to be the ruler of the world. For the one who makes such an assertion has the obligation to convince himself whether or not what he says is true! And it is an Ahrimanic influence when even jurisprudence has been taken over by it today, when one does not strictly prosecute someone who has been accused of telling a lie, and says that he did it in good faith, in this or that good faith. This good faith is something that is precisely the Ahrimanic seduction and temptation in the worst sense. There is basically no word more tempting and seductive than this one of good faith. Because this good faith is the lazy person's friend for the most indolent of humanity, who does not feel the obligation, when asserting something, to first convince themselves whether it is true or not, whether something corresponds to the facts or not.

And anyone who seriously wants to fight against the spread of Ahriman, to fight in a concrete way, must fight against this: Something has been said in good faith - must be fought against in the first place; for by invoking good faith, man cuts himself off from the objective world context. That which lives in us in such a way that we consider ourselves authorized to assert it must also agree with the world context; it must not merely correspond to us; for whatever else is in the external world is abandoned by angels, is at the mercy of Ahriman. And all that is asserted as untruth in good faith is something that most powerfully drives people into the Ahrimanic, that draws them into the Ahrimanic with a strong rope. And the appeal to good faith in the case of untruths is today the best means of delivering world civilization into the hands of the Ahrimanic entity.

You see, if you look into what actually constitutes the world, then you have to understand something like this. But you don't just have to fantasize in generalities like the mere nebulous mysticism of angels, archangels, archai and so on, and stick to theories. You have to go to the world where it is concrete. For it is indeed the case that people lose the support of the world of the angels by lying down on the lazy bed of good faith for that which they have not tested and which they nevertheless assert.

These things show how what flows out as an attitude is connected with real life, with directly real life, and how it permeates us with spiritual scientific truths and insights. And these spiritual scientific truths and insights must send their power down into the details of life.

It is precisely this that makes many people so angry about what spiritual science is: that spiritual science is not just another theory like the other worldviews, but that it is something living, that it demands of people, above all, to overcome such laziness - laziness in both senses of the word - as this, which lies in asserting good faith when representing untruth. People do not like this, and excuses are rife everywhere: so-and-so claimed something in good faith. As a result, our science, especially historical science, is thoroughly corrupted. For you can easily imagine that such people, who go before the world with mere assertions of the caliber I have told you about, do not deserve any credence, even if they claim anything else, if they for example, somehow represent external science; then one must first check whether he has copied it from someone else who still belonged to the better generation, where one still felt inwardly obliged to what one wrote. And when you see how people today officially imitate these Frohnmeyers, then you will see how great the trust in official science and its representatives can be! But it is most important that these things are looked into. And one would very much wish for a following for spiritual science that would be truly imbued with the fact that today a serious commitment is needed to insights that will bring about a strong change in the world. Because today it does not work with small things.

This is what one would like to see: that Anthroposophy could acquire an enthusiastic following that would be passionate about realizing it. Over in the building, I mentioned that today, from the side where the lies can be counted by the dozens, a new, sensational, that is, scandalous, brochure is being announced. These people are at work. Why? Because out of their bad feelings of the soul they can feel strongly enthusiastic. They can lie enthusiastically. We must get used to being able to advocate the truth with equal enthusiasm, otherwise we will not be able to advance with civilization, my dear friends!

Anyone who looks around the world today must be clear about the fact that the path back to the hierarchies must be seriously sought, out of the Ahrimanic embrace. But this means that we have to look at the details. Time and again, when some nefarious opponent comes along and throws this or that into the world, even our own followers still come and say: We still have to examine whether this or that was done out of this or that weakness. In the Anthroposophical Society, unfortunately, there is always a yearning to accuse those who speak the truth much more than to accuse opponents who would like to trample all truth into the mud from the depths of their souls. As long as it is still the custom in the Anthroposophical Society itself to repeatedly have compassion for the lie, we will not move forward.

It must be said again and again from time to time that we must recognize the lie as a lie; for it is into the lie that Ahriman slips, and it is mostly the lie that, when it has been told, refers to good faith, to the best of one's knowledge and belief. I have given you enough examples where this good faith, this best knowledge and conscience, is invoked. But examine the facts and see this Ahrimanic influence of so-called good faith, which even plays a constant role in our jurisprudence, so that one can say that humanity has been seized by Ahriman even in jurisprudence. These are the things that must be seriously considered. If the Anthroposophical Society is to be what it wants to be, then it must be imbued with a fervent sense of truth, because today that is identical with a fervent sense of humanity's progress. Everything else is only filled with the will that leads into the forces of decline and drives ever further into them.

What I am saying today is not just another of those truisms, but something that individual people need to know, because the signs of the times demand it.

First Question:

It is certainly possible to believe that spreading a main lesson subject over a longer period of time could have drawbacks. Neither can one deny that it is difficult to engage the attention of children on the same subject for a longer time. Other opinions, representing official contemporary educational theory, also seem to speak against such an extension of a subject into block periods. Nevertheless, it was decided to introduce this method in the Waldorf school. The point is that the results of recent psychological experiments (the main reason for disapproval of our methods) do not represent the true nature of the human being. These methods do not penetrate the deeper layers of the human being.

Why are psychological experiments done at all? I do not object to them, inasmuch as they are justified within the proper sphere. Within certain limits, I am quite willing to recognize their justification. Nevertheless the question remains: Why perform experiments on the human psyche today?

We experiment with the human soul because, during the course of human evolution, we have reached a point where we are no longer able to build a bridge, spontaneously and naturally, from one soul to another. We no longer have a natural feeling for the various needs of children, of how or when they feel fatigued and so on. This is why we try to acquire externally the kind of knowledge that human beings once possessed in full presence of mind, one soul linked to the other. We ask, How do children feel fatigued after being occupied with one or another subject for a certain length of time? We compile statistics and so on. As I said, in a way we have invented these procedures just to discover in a roundabout way what we can no longer recognize directly in a human being.

But for those who wish to establish a close rapport between the soul of a teacher and that of a child, there is something far more important than asking whether we claim too much of our students’ powers of concentration by teaching the same subject for a longer period of time. If I understand the question correctly, it implies that, if we were to introduce more variety into the lesson by changing the subject more frequently, we would gain something of value. Well, something would be gained, all right; one cannot deny that. But these things affect students’ whole lives, and they should not be calculated mathematically. One ought to be able to decide intuitively. Do we gain something valuable when seen against the whole life development of an individual? Or is something lost in the long run?

It is an entirely different matter whether we teach the same subject for two hours (as in a main lesson) or teach one subject for an hour and then another for the second hour—or even change subjects after shorter periods of time. Although students will tire to a certain extent (for which teachers must make allowances), it is better for their overall development to proceed in this concentrated way than to artificially limit the lesson time just to fill the students’ souls with new and different material in another lesson.

What we consider most important in the Waldorf school is that teachers use their available lesson time in the most economical way—that they apply soul economy in relation to their students’ potential. If we build lessons along major lines of content that students can follow without becoming tired, or at least without feeling overcome by tiredness, and if we can work against any oncoming tiredness by introducing variations of the main theme, we can accomplish more than if we followed other methods for the sake of advantages they may bring.

In theory it is always possible to argue for or against such things, but it is not a question of preference. The only thing that matters is finding what is best for the overall development of children, as seen from a long-term viewpoint.

There is one further point to be considered. It is quite correct to say that children will tire if made to listen to the same subject too long. But nowadays there is so little insight into what is healthy or unhealthy for children that people see fatigue as negative and something to be corrected. In itself, becoming tired is just as healthy as feeling refreshed. Life has its rhythms. It is not a question of holding the students’ attention for half an hour and then giving them a five-minute break to recover from the strain (which would not balance their fatigue in any case) before cramming something else into their heads. It is an illusion to think that this would solve the problem. In fact, one has not tackled it at all, but simply poured something different into their souls instead of allowing the consequences of the organic causes of fatigue to fade. In other words, we have to probe into the deeper layers of the human soul to realize that it has great value for the overall development of children when they concentrate for a longer period on the same subject.

As I said, one can easily reach the opinion that more frequent changes of subjects offer an advantage, but one must also realize that a perfect solution will never be found in life as it is. The real issue is, relatively speaking, finding the best solution to a problem. Then one finds that short lessons of different subjects do not offer the possibility of giving children content which will unite deeply enough with their spiritual, soul, and physical organizations.

Perhaps I should add this; if a school, based on the principles I have been describing, were ever condemned to put up with boring teachers, we would be forced to cut the length of the lesson time. I have to admit that, if teachers were to give boring and monotonous lessons, it would be better to reduce the length of each lesson. But if teachers are able to stimulate their students’ interest, a longer main lesson is definitely better. For me, it is essential not to become fixed or fanatical in any way but always consider the circumstances. Certainly, if we expect interesting lessons at school, we must not engage boring teachers on the staff.

Second Question:

There may be good reasons for seeing eurythmy as a derivation of another art form rather than as a new form of art. But whenever one deals with an artistic medium or with the artistic side of life, it is not the what that matters, but the how. To me, there is no real meaning in the statement that sculpture, music, speech, rhythm, and so on are merely a means of expression, whereas the underlying ideas are the real substance. There seems to be little point in making such abstract distinctions in life. Naturally, if one is interested in finding unifying ideas in the abstract, one can also find different media through which they are expressed. But in real life, these media do represent something new and different. For example, according to Goethe’s theory of plant metamorphosis, a colored flower petal is, in the abstract, essentially the same as a green plant leaf. Goethe sees a metamorphosed green leaf in a flower petal. And yet, from a practical point of view, a petal is altogether different from a leaf.

Whether eurythmy is a new form of expression or a new version of another art form is not the point at all. What matters is that, during the course of human evolution, speech and singing (though singing is less noticeable) have increasingly become a means of expressing what comes through the human head. Again, this is putting it rather radically, but from a certain point of view it represents the facts. Today, human language and speech no longer express the whole human being. Speech has become thought directed. In modern cultures, it has become closely connected with thinking, and through this development, speech reveals what springs from egoism.

Eurythmy, however, goes back again to human will, so it engages the whole human being. Through eurythmy, human beings are shown within the entire macrocosm. For example, during certain primeval times, gesture and mime always accompanied speech, especially during artistic activities, so that word and gesture formed a single expression and became inseparable. But today, word and gesture have drifted far apart. So one senses the need to engage the whole human being again by including more of the volition and, thus, reconnecting humankind to the macrocosm.

There seems to be way too much theorizing these days, whereas it is so important to consider the practical aspects of life—especially now. Those who observe life from this point of view, without preconceived ideas, know that for every “yes” there is a “no” and that anything can be proved both right and wrong. Yet the real value does not lie in proving something right or wrong or in finding definitions and making distinctions; it is a matter of discovering ways to new impulses and new life in the world. You may have your own thoughts about all this, but spiritual scientific insight reveals the development of humankind, and today it is leaning toward overcoming the intellectuality of mere definitions, being drawn instead toward the human soul realm and creative activity.

And so, it does not really matter whether we see eurythmy as a version of another art form or as a new art. A little anecdote may illustrate this. When I studied at Vienna University, some of the professors there had been given a much coveted title of distinction; they were called “Privy Councillors” (Hofrat). In Germany I found that such professors received the title of “Confidential Councillors” (Geheimrat). In certain quarters, the distinction between these two titles seemed important. But to me, it was the person behind the title that mattered, not the title itself. This seems similar to the situation in which people engage in philosophical arguments (forgive me, for I really don’t wish to offend anyone) to determine the difference between an art form that has been transferred to a different medium or, for want of a better word, one referred to as a new dimension in the world of art.

Third Question:

I am not quite clear what this question means, but it seems to express a somewhat evangelical attitude. At best, discipline, as I have already said, can become a natural byproduct of ordinary classroom life. I have also told you how, during the last two years of the Waldorf school, discipline has improved remarkably, and I have given examples to substantiate this. With regard to this “sense of sin,” it seems that one’s moral attitude led to a belief in awakening this feeling in children for their own benefit. But let’s please look at this point without any religious bias. An awakening of an awareness of sin would pour something into the soul of children that would remain there in the form of a kind of insecurity throughout life. Putting this in psychoanalytical terminology, one could say that such a method could create a kind of vacuum, an inner emptiness, within the souls of children, which, in later life, could degenerate into a weakness rather than a more active and energetic response to life in general. If I have understood the question rightly, this is all I can say in answer to it.

Fourth Question:

In my opinion this question has already been answered by what I said during the first part of my lecture this morning. In general, we cannot say that at this particular age boys have to go through yet another crisis, apart from the one described this morning. There would be too many different grades of development if we were to speak of an emerging turbulence that affects all boys at this age. Perhaps some people are under delusions about this. If the inner change I spoke of this morning is not guided correctly by the teachers and educators, children (and not just boys) can become very turbulent. They become restless and inwardly uncooperative, so that it becomes very difficult to cope with them.

Events at this age can vary a great deal according to the temperament of the adolescent, a factor that needs to be taken into account. If this were done, one would not make generalizations of the sort that appears here in the first sentence. It would be more accurate to say that, unless children are guided in their development—unless teachers know how to handle this noticeable change around the ninth and tenth years—they become uncooperative, unstable, and so on. Only then does the situation arise that was mentioned in the question. It is essential for teachers and educators to fully consider this turning point in the children’s development.

Fifth Question:

What has been written here is perfectly correct and I believe that one needs to simply say “yes.” Of course, we need a certain amount of tact when talking about the human being with students between ten and twelve. If teachers are aware of how much they can tell students about the nature of the human being, then I certainly agree that we have to enter the individual life of the person concerned.

Sixth Question:

With regard to this question I would like to say that we must count on the possibility of a continually increasing interest in new methods for understanding the secrets of human nature, because spiritual research into the human being is more penetrating than the efforts of natural science. Of course, the possibilities of this study will not be available in every field, but where they do exist, they should be used. It is beneficial not only for teachers and educators, but also for, say, doctors, to learn to observe the human being beyond what outer appearances tell us. I think that, without causing any misunderstandings, we can safely say that only prejudice stands in the way of such methods, and that their development is to be desired. It really is true that much more could be achieved in this way if old, intellectual preconceptions did not bar the way to higher knowledge. My book How to Know Higher Worlds describes just the initial stages of such paths.

Seventh Question:

In the Waldorf school, mathematics definitely belongs to the main lesson subjects, and as such it plays its role according to the students’ various ages and stages. In no way is this subject relegated to classes outside the main lesson. This question is based on a misunderstanding.

Rudolf Steiner:

Because of the impending departure of various conference members, there is a wish that the practical application of Waldorf principles be discussed first. Thus, it is surely appropriate for me to speak of the Waldorf school. Nevertheless, I want to broaden this subject, because I believe we need a great deal of strength and genuine enthusiasm in the face of present world conditions before our educational goals can be put into practice. It seems to me that, until we recognize the need to move toward the educational impulses described here, it will be impossible to achieve any sort of breakthrough in education. I am convinced that if you are willing to observe the recent development of humankind with an open mind, you must realize that we are living in the middle of a cultural decline and that any objection to such an assessment is based on illusions. Of course it’s very unpleasant and seems pessimistic, though in fact it is meant to be optimistic to speak as I do now. But there are many indications of a declining culture in evidence today, and the situation is really very clear. And the whole question of education arises properly in hearts and souls only when this is fully recognized. In view of this, I see the establishment of the Waldorf school as only the first example of a practical application of the education we have been talking about.

How did the Waldorf school come about? It owes its existence—this much can surely be said—to the realization of educational principles based on true knowledge of the human being. But what made it happen? The Waldorf school is an indirect result of the total collapse of society all over Central Europe in 1919. This general collapse embraced every area of society—the economic, sociopolitical, and spiritual life of all people. Perhaps we could also call it a collapse of economic and political life and a complete bankruptcy of spiritual life. In 1919 the stark realities of the situation made the entire public very much aware of this. Roughly halfway through 1919, there was a general and complete awareness of it.

Today there is much talk, even in Central Europe, about how humankind will recover, how it will eventually pull itself out of the trough again, and so on. But such talk is a figment of an all too comfortable way of thinking, and in reality such thoughts are only empty phrases. The fact is that this decline will certainly accelerate. Today, the situation in Central Europe is not unlike those who have known better days, when they bought plenty of good clothes. They still have those clothes and wear them down to their last threads. The fact that they cannot buy new clothes is certainly clear. And, although they realize they cannot replenish their stock, they nevertheless live under the illusion that all is well and that they will be adequately provided for. Similarly, the world at large fails to realize that it is no longer possible to obtain “new clothes” from its cultural past.

During the first half of 1919, the people of Germany were ready for a serious reassessment of the general situation. At that time, however, a Waldorf school had not yet begun, but it was the time when I gave lectures on social and educational issues, which addressed what I have been describing during this conference (though only in rough outline). Some people saw sense in what was said, and this led to founding the Waldorf school.

I emphasize this point, because the prerequisite for a renewal of education is an inner readiness and openness to assess the real situation, which will itself clearly indicate what needs to be done. At the founding of the Waldorf school, I remarked how good it is that this school will serve as a model, but this in itself it is not enough. As the only school of its kind, it cannot solve today’s educational problems. At least a dozen Waldorf schools must be started during the next three months if we are to take the first steps toward a solution in education. However, since this has not happened, we can hardly see our achievement in Stuttgart as success. We have only a model, and even this does not yet represent what we wish to see. For example, apart from our eurythmy room, which we finally managed to obtain, we badly need a gymnasium. We still do not have one, and thus anyone who visits the Waldorf school must not see its current state as the realization of our goals. Beyond all the other problems, the school has always been short of money. Financially it stands on extremely weak and shaky legs.

You see, hiding one’s head in the sand goes nowhere in such serious matters. Therefore, I must ask you to permit me to speak freely and frankly. Often, when I speak of these things, as well as my views on money, I am told, “In England we would have to go about this in a very different way; otherwise, we would merely put people off.” Now, in my opinion, two things must be done. First, the principles of this education—based as they are on a true picture of the human being—should be made widely known, and the underlying ideas need to be thoroughly taken in and understood. Everything possible should be done in this direction.

If we were to leave it at that, however, there would be little progress. Unless we make up our minds to overcome certain objections, we will never move forward at all. For instance, people say, “In England, people must see practical results.” This is precisely what the civilized world has been saying for the past five or six hundred years. Only what people see with their own eyes has been considered truly valuable, and this drags us down. And if we insist on this stance, we will never pull ourselves out of this chaos.

We are not talking about small, insignificant matters. It is absolutely necessary that we grasp our courage and give a new impulse. Well-meaning people often think that I cannot appreciate what they are saying when they state, “In England, we would have to do things very differently.” I understand this only too well, but this does not get to the root of the issue at all. If the catastrophic conditions of 1919 had not hit the people of Central Europe so hard—though this ill fortune was really a stroke of good luck in terms of beginning the Waldorf school—if that terrible situation had not opened people’s eyes, there would be no Waldorf school in Central Europe, even today. In Central Europe, and especially in Germany, there is every need for a new impulse, because there is an innate lack of any ability to organize and so little sense of structured social organization. When people outside Central Europe speak so highly of German organization, it does not reflect the facts. There is no assertive talent for organization in Germany. Above all, there is no articulated social organization; rather, real culture is carried by individuals, not by the general public. Look, for example, at German universities. They do not represent the real character of the German people at all. They are very abstract structures, and do not at all express what is truly German. The real German spirit lives only in individuals. Of course, this is only a hint, but it shows what would probably happen if we appealed to the national mood in Germany; one meets a void and a lack of understanding for what we have been speaking of here. In other words, the Waldorf school owes its existence to an “unlucky stroke of luck.”

Now, with regard to the second point, the most important thing, besides the need to build further on what was spoken of here, is that something like a Waldorf school should be established also in countries where the populations have not been jolted into action by abysmal, cataclysmic conditions, such as Germany experienced in 1919. If, for instance, some sort of Waldorf school could be opened in England, this would mark a significant step forward. Naturally, such a school would have to be adapted to the conditions and culture of that country.

I realized that the Waldorf educational movement was not going to spread its wings, because the original Waldorf school was, in fact, still the only one. So I tried to initiate a worldwide Waldorf school movement. I did this because, during the preceding years, there had been a tremendous expansion of the anthroposophic movement, at least in Central Europe. Today this movement is a fact to be reckoned with in Central Europe. As a spiritual movement, it has made its mark. But there is no organization to direct and guide this movement. It needs to said, and generally understood, that the Anthroposophical Society is not in a position to carry the anthroposophic movement. The Anthroposophical Society is riddled with a tendency toward sectarianism, and consequently it is not capable of carrying the anthroposophic movement as it has developed and exists today.

All the same, I had wanted to make a final appeal to the stronger elements within the Anthroposophical Society, because I was hoping that some individuals might respond by making a final effort to bring about a Waldorf movement. Well, this did not happen. The world school movement is dead and buried, because it is not enough simply to talk about such things; it must be accomplished in a down-to-earth and practical way. To implement such a plan, a larger body of people is needed.

The Waldorf school in Stuttgart is one of the results of the German revolution. It is not itself a revolutionary school, but the revolution was its matrix, so to speak. It would mean a big step forward if something like a Waldorf school were started in another country also (say, in England) because the general world situation was clearly recognized. Perhaps later, when time has been given to the discussion, a little more could be said about this.

Millicent MacKenzie (Professor at University College, Cardiff: At this point, I would like to add that, among the members of this conference, there are several people from England who recognize the needs of humankind and would be in a position to work in this direction. They are in a position to exert considerable influence in an effort to realize this educational impulse. As a first step, they would like to invite Dr. Steiner to come to England some time later this year, and they are eager to create the right attitude and context for such a visit, during which they hope a number of prominent individuals and educators would also be present to welcome Dr. Steiner.

Rudolf Steiner: I wish to add that such a step must be taken only in a practical sense, and that it would be harmful if we talk too much about it. Those of you who are in a position to take a step forward in this direction would have to prepare the ground, so that when the right time has come, the appropriate action may be taken.

I am sure that Mrs. MacKenzie and her friends will agree if there are conference members from other countries who might have ideas on this subject and wish to come forward to add their suggestions.

Mrs. K. Haag: Today we have heard a great deal about England. We are pleased about this and have found it useful. But there are various other matters that we, who come from our little Holland, have on our heart. In fact, we have come with a very guilty conscience because the idea of a World school movement was just discussed for the first time in Holland. Somehow we did not do what we might have done about it, partly because of misunderstandings and partly because of a lack of strength. But we have not been quite as inactive as people might think, and I can assure you that we are more than ready to make good on our failure, as far as possible. Despite our shortcoming, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner whether the plan he outlined for England could also be implemented in Holland. And since Dr. Steiner has promised to visit us in April, I would like to ask him if he might be willing to discuss this with a larger group of people who have a particular interest in education.

Rudolf Steiner: There is already a plan for Holland, which, as far as I know, is being worked out. From the fifth to the twelfth of April this year, an academic course will be held there that are similar to courses given elsewhere. It has the task, first and foremost, of introducing anthroposophy in depth.

After the need to work for anthroposophy in Holland was repeatedly pointed out, and after the lectures and performances there during February and the beginning of March last year, it has been somewhat discouraging to see a notable decline, not in an understanding of spiritual science, but certainly in terms of the inner life of the Anthroposophical Society in Holland. Therefore it seems to me very necessary, especially in Holland, that the anthroposophic movement make a new and vigorous beginning. From which angle this should be approached will depend on the prevailing conditions, but an educational movement could certainly be the prime mover.

Another question has been handed to me, which has a direct bearing on this point.

Question: According to Dutch law, it is possible to set up a free school if the government is satisfied that the intentions behind it are serious and genuine. If we in Holland were unable to raise enough money to begin a Waldorf school, would it be right for us to accept state subsidies, as long as we were allowed to arrange our curriculum and our lessons according to Waldorf principles?

Rudolf Steiner: There is one part of the question I do not understand, and another fills me with doubts. What I cannot understand is that it should be that difficult to collect enough money for a free school in Holland. Forgive me if I am naive, but I do not understand this. I believe that, if the enthusiasm is there, it should at least be possible to begin. After all, it doesn’t take so much money to start a school.

The other point, which seems dubious to me, is that it would be possible to run a school with the aid of state subsidies. For I seriously doubt that the government, if it pays out money for a school, would forego the right to inspect it. Therefore I cannot believe that a free school could be established with state subsidies, which imply supervision by inspectors of the educational authorities. It was yet another stroke of good luck for the Waldorf school in Stuttgart that it was begun just before the new Republican National Assembly passed a law forbidding the opening of independent schools. Isn’t it true to say that, as liberalization increases, we increasingly lose our freedom? Consequently, in Germany we are living in a time of progress, whereas it is quite unlikely that we could begin a Waldorf school in Stuttgart today. It was established just in time.

Now the eyes of the world are on the Waldorf school. It will be allowed to exist until the groups that were instrumental in instituting the so-called elementary schools have become so powerful that, out of mistaken fanaticism, they will do away with the first four classes of the Waldorf school. I hope this can be prevented, but in any case we are facing menacing times. This is why I continue to emphasize the importance of putting into action, as quickly as possible, all that needs to be done. A wave is spreading all over the world, and it is moving quickly toward state dictatorship. It is a fact that Western civilization is exposing itself to the danger of one day being inundated by an Asiatic sort of culture, one that will have a spirituality all its own. People are closing their eyes to this, but it will happen nevertheless.

To return to our point: I think it only delays the issue to think it is necessary to claim state help before starting a school. Somehow this does not look promising to me at all. But perhaps others have different views on this subject. I ask everyone present to voice an opinion freely.

Question: He states that, at the present time, it is impossible to establish a school in Holland without interference by the state, which would demand, for instance, that a certain set curriculum be formulated and so on.

Rudolf Steiner: If things had been any different, I would not have decided at the time to form a world school movement, because, as an idea, it borders on the theoretical. But because the situation stands as you have described it, I thought that such a movement would have practical uses. The matter is like this: Take the example of the little school we used to have here in Dornach. For the reason already mentioned several times, we managed to have only a very small school because of our continual “overabundant lack of funds.” Children around the age of ten came together in this school. Now, in the local canton of Solothurn, there is a strict law in education that is really not much different from similar laws all over Switzerland. This law is so fixed that, when the local education authorities found out that we were teaching children under the age of fourteen, they declared it completely unacceptable; it was simply unheard of. Whatever we might have done to arrive at some agreement, we would never have received permission to apply Waldorf methods in teaching children under fourteen.

Hindrances of this kind will, of course, be placed in our way all over the continent. I dare not say how this would work in England at the moment. But if turns out to be possible to begin a totally free school there, it would really mean a marvelous step forward. But because we meet resistance almost everywhere when we try to put Waldorf education into practice, I thought that a worldwide movement for the renewal of education might have some practical value. I had hoped that it might make an impression on people interested in education, thus creating possibilities for establishing new Waldorf schools. I consider it extremely important to bring about a movement counter to modern currents, which culminated in Russian Bolshevism. These currents find their fulfillment in absolute state dictatorship in education. We see it looming everywhere, but people won’t realize that Lunatscharski is merely the final result of what lies dormant all over Europe. As long as it does not interfere with people’s private lives, the existence of such thinking is conveniently ignored. Well, in my opinion, we should react by generating a movement against Lunatscharski’s principle that the state should become a giant machine, and that each citizen should be a cog in the machine. The goal of this countermovement should be to educate each person. It is this that is needed. In this sense, one can make most painful experiences even in the anthroposophic movement.

Today it would also be possible to give birth to a real medical movement on the basis of the anthroposophic movement. All the antecedents are there. But it would require a movement capable of placing this impulse before the eyes of the world. Yet everywhere we find a tendency to call those who are able to represent a truly human medicine “quacks,” thus putting them outside the law. As an example, and entirely unconnected with the anthroposophic medical movement, I would like to tell you what happened in the case of a minister in the German government who rigorously upheld a strict law against the freedom of the healing profession, a law that still operates today. However, when members of his own family fell ill, he surreptitiously called for the help of unqualified healers, showing that, for his own family, he did not believe in official medical science, but only in what the law condemned as “quackery.”

This is symptomatic of the root causes of sectarianism. A movement can free itself of such causes when it stands up to the world, while remaining fully within the laws of the land, so that there can be no confusion in terms of the legal aspects. And this is what I had in mind with regard to a world school movement. I wanted to create the right setting for introducing laws that allow schools based entirely on the need for educational renewal. Schools will never be established correctly by majority decisions, which is also why such schools cannot be run by the state.

That’s all I have to say about the planned world school movement, an idea that, in itself, does not appeal to me at all. I do not sympathize with it, because it would have led to an international association, a “world club,” and to the creation of a platform for the purpose of making propaganda. My way is to work directly where the needs of the times present themselves. All propaganda and agitation is alien to me. I abhor these things. But if our hands are tied and if there is no possibility to establish free schools, we must first create the right climate for ideas that might eventually lead to free education. Compromises may well be justified in various instances, but we live in a time when each compromise is likely to pull us still further into difficulties.

Question: How can we best work in the realm of politics?

Rudolf Steiner: I think that we should digress too much from our main theme if we were to look at these deep and significant questions from a political perspective. Unless today’s politics experience a regeneration—at least in those countries known to me on the physical plane—they hold little promise. It is my opinion that it is exactly in this area that such definite symptoms of decadence are most obvious, and one would expect society to recognize the need for renewal—the threefold social order. Such a movement would then run parallel to the anthroposophic movement.

Where has the old social order placed us? I will indicate this only very briefly and, thus, possibly cause misunderstandings. Where did the old social order, which did not recognize its own threefold nature, land us? It has led to a situation in which the destinies of whole populations are determined by political parties whose ideological backgrounds consist of nothing but phrases. No one today can maintain that the phrases used by the various political parties contain anything of real substance.

A few days ago I spoke of Bismarck, who in later life became a rigid monarchist, although in his younger years he had been something of a bashful, closet republican. This is how he described himself. This same Bismarck expressed opinions similar to those expressed by Robespierre. People can make all sorts of statements. What matters in the end is what comes to light when the real ideology of a party is revealed.

For some years, I taught at the Berlin Center for the Education of the Working Classes, a purely social-democratic institution. I took every opportunity to spread the truth wherever people were willing to listen, no matter what the political persuasion or program of the organizers of those institutions. And so, among people who were, politically, rigid Marxists, I taught a purely anthroposophic approach to life, both in courses on natural science and on history. Even when giving speech exercises to the workers, I was able to express my deepest inner convictions. The number of students grew larger and larger, and soon the social-democratic party leaders began to take notice. It led to a decisive meeting, attended not only by party leaders but also by all my adult students, who were unanimous in their wish to continue their courses. But three to four party leaders stolidly declared that this kind of teaching had no place in their establishment, because it was undermining the character of the social-democratic party. I replied that surely the party wanted to build for a future and that, since humankind was moving inevitably toward greater freedom, any future school or educational institution would have to respect human freedom. Then a typical party member rose and said, “We don’t know anything about freedom in education, but we do know a reasonable form of compulsion.” This was the decisive turning point that finally led to closing my courses.

It may seem rather silly and egotistic to say this, but I am convinced that, had this quickly growing movement among my students at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century been allowed to live and expand unhindered, conditions in Central Europe would have been different during the 1920s.

So you can see that I do not have much trust in working with political parties. And you will have the least success in bringing freedom into education when dealing with socialist parties. They, above all, will strive in most incredible ways for the abolition of freedom in education. As for the Christian parties, they are bound to clamor for independent schools, simply because of the constitution of the present German government. But if they were placed at the helm, they would immediately claim this freedom in education only to suit themselves. It is a simple fact that we will be unable to make progress in public life unless we first create the necessary foundations for a threefold social order, in which the democratic element prevails exclusively in the middle sphere of rights. This in itself would guarantee the possibility of freedom in education. We will never achieve it through electioneering.

Question: If children of the present generation were educated according to the principles of anthroposophic knowledge, would this in itself be enough to stem the tide of decadence and decay, or would it be necessary to send them out into the world with the stated intent of changing society to bring about a new social organism?

Rudolf Steiner: The ideas I tried to express in Towards Social Renewal are not fully understood. The reasons for writing this book are decades old. Humanity has reached a stage when, although someone might show up with the most promising ideas for improving society and people’s social attitudes, one could not implement them simply because there is a lack of practical possibilities for such purposes. The first step would be to create the right conditions for the possibility of implementing such ideas and insights into social life.

Consequently, I do not believe it is helpful to ask, If a generation were educated in the way we have described, would the desired social conditions automatically follow? Or, Would a change of the social order one way or another still be necessary? I would say, we must understand that the best we can do in practical life is to help as many people as possible of one generation to make progress through education based on knowledge of the human being. This in itself would obviate the second question, because the thoughts and ideas needed to change society would be exactly those developed by that generation. Since their human conditions would be different from those of the general public today, they would have very different possibilities for implementing their aims.

The point is, if we want to be practical, we have to think in practical terms rather than theories. To think practically means to do what is possible, not attempt to realize an ideal. Our most promising aim would be to educate as many as possible of one generation, working from knowledge of the human being, and then trust that, in their adult lives, they would be able to bring about a desirable society. The second question can be answered only through the actions of those who, through their education, have been prepared for the task you outlined. It cannot be answered theoretically.

Question: How can one make use of what we have heard in this course of lectures to educate profoundly mentally retarded children?

Rudolf Steiner: In answer to this question I should like to give you a real and practical example. When I was twenty-three or twenty-four, I was called to work as a tutor in a family of four boys. Three of the boys presented no educational difficulties, but one, who was eleven at that time, had a particular history. At the age of seven, a private tutor had tried in vain to teach him according to the accepted methods of an elementary school. Bear in mind that this happened in Austria, where anyone was free to teach children, because the only thing that mattered was that they could pass an examination at the end of each year, and students were allowed to take these exams at any state school. No one cared whether they had been taught by angels or by devils, as long as they passed their exam, which was seen as proof of a good education.

Among those four boys, one had four to nearly five years of private tutoring behind him. He was around eleven years old when his latest drawing book was presented to me, which he had brought home from his most recent annual exam. In all other subjects he had remained either completely silent or had talked complete nonsense, but he had not put anything down on paper. His drawing book was the only document he had handed in during his exam, and all it contained was a big hole in the first page. All he had done was scribble something and then immediately erase it, until only a big hole was left as evidence of his efforts and the only tangible result of his exam. In other respects, it proved impossible—sometimes for several weeks—to get him to say even a single word to anyone. For awhile, he also refused to eat at table. Instead, he went into the kitchen, where he ate from the garbage can. He would rather eat garbage than proper food.

I am describing these symptoms in detail so you can see that we are dealing with a child who certainly belonged to the category of “seriously developmentally disabled.” I was told that not much could be done, since everything has been tried already. Even the family doctor (who incidentally was a leading medical practitioner in Vienna and a greatly respected authority) had given up on the boy, and the whole family was very discouraged. One simply did not know how to approach that boy.

I asked that this child’s education, as well as that of his three brothers, be left entirely in my hands, and that I be given complete freedom in dealing with the boy. The whole family refused to grant me such freedom, except for the boy’s mother. From their unconscious depths, mothers sometimes have the right feeling for these things, and the boy was given into my care. Above all else, when preparing my lessons I followed the principle of approaching such a child—generally called “feebleminded”—entirely in terms of physical development. This means that I had to base everything on the same principles I have elaborated to you for healthy children. What matters in such a case is that one gains the possibility of looking into the inner being of such a child. He was noticeably hydrocephalic, so it was very difficult to treat this boy. And so my first principle was that education means healing and must be accomplished on a medical basis.

After two and a half years, the boy had progressed enough to work at the curriculum of a grammar school, for I had succeeded in teaching him with the strictest economy. Sometimes I limited his academic work to only a quarter or, at most, a half hour each day. In order to concentrate the right material into such a short time, I sometimes needed as much as four hours of preparation for a lesson of half an hour. To me, it was most important not to place him under any strain whatsoever. I did exactly as I thought right, since I had reserved the right to do so. We spent much time on music lessons, which seemed to help the boy. From week to week, the musical activity was increased, and I could observe his physical condition gradually changing. Admittedly, I forbid any interference from anyone. The rest of the family, with the exception of the boy’s mother, registered objections when, time and again, they noticed that the boy looked pale. I insisted on my rights and told them that it was now up to me whether I made him look pale, and even more pale. I told them that he would look ruddy again when the time came.

My guiding line was to base the entire education of this child on insight into his physical condition and to arrange all soul and spiritual measures accordingly. I believe that the details will always vary in each case. One has to know the human being thoroughly and intimately, and therefore I must repeatedly point out that everything depends on a real knowledge of the human being. When I asked myself, What is the boy’s real age and how do I have to treat him? I realized that he had remained a young child of two years and three months, and that I would have to treat him as such, despite the fact that he had completed his eleventh year, according to his birth certificate. I had to teach him according to his mental age. Always keeping an eye on the boy’s health and applying strictest soul economy, I initially based my teaching entirely on the principle of imitation, which meant that everything had to be systematically built on his forces of imitation. I then went on to what, today, I called “further structuring” of lessons. Within two and a half years, the boy had progressed enough that he was able to study grammar school curriculum. I continued to help when he was a student in grammar school. Eventually, he was weaned of any extra help. In fact, he was able to go through the last two classes of his school entirely on his own. Afterward, he became a medical doctor with a practice for many years. He died around the age of forty from an infection he had contracted in Poland during the World War.

This is just one example, and I could cite many others. It shows that, especially in the case of developmentally disabled children, we need to apply the same principles I elaborated here for healthy children. In the Waldorf school there are quite a number of slightly and profoundly “mentally-retarded children” (to use the phrase of the question). Naturally, more serious cases would disturb their classmates, so we have opened a special remedial class for such children of various ages, whose members are drawn from all our classes. This group is under the guidance of Dr. Schubert.

Whenever we have to decide whether to send a child into this remedial class, I have the joy (if I may say it this way) of having to fight with the child’s class teacher. Our class teachers never want to let a class member go. All of them fight to keep such children, doing their best to support them within the class, and often successfully. Although our classes are certainly not small, by giving individual attention, it is possible to keep such children in the class. The more serious cases, however, must be placed in our remedial group, where it is absolutely essential to give them individual treatment. Dr. Schubert, who is freed from having to follow any set curriculum, allows himself be guided entirely by the individual needs of each child. Consequently, he may be doing things with his children that are completely different from what is usually done in a classroom. The main thing is to find specific treatments that will benefit each child.

For instance, there may be some very dull-witted children in such a group, and once we develop the necessary sense for these things, we realize that their faculty of making mental pictures is so slow that they lose the images while making them. They lose mental images because they never fully make them. This is only one type of mental handicap. We can help these children by calling out unexpected commands, if they are capable of grasping their meaning. We have also children who are unable to follow such instructions, so one has to think of something else. For instance, one may suddenly call out, “Quickly hold your left earlobe between your right thumb and second finger. Quickly grip your right arm with your left hand!” In this way, if we let them orient themselves first through their own body geography and then through objects of the world outside, we may be able to make real progress with them. Another method might get them to quickly recognize what one has drawn on the blackboard (Steiner drew an ear on the board). It is not easy at all to get such a child to respond by saying “ear.” But what matters is this flash of recognition. One has to invent the most varied things to wake up such children. It is this awakening and becoming active that can lead to progress, though, of course, not in the case of those who display uncontrollable tempers. They have to be dealt with differently. But these examples may at least indicate the direction in which one has to move. What matters is the individual treatment, and this must spring from a real knowledge of the human being.