The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Just at this time my outward life was altogether happy. I was frequently with my old friends. Few as were the opportunities I had to speak of the things I am here discussing, yet the spiritual and mental ties that bound me to these friends were none the less strong. How often must I think over again the conversations, sometimes unending, which occurred at that time in a well-known coffee house on Michaelerplatz in Vienna. I had cause to think of these especially during that period following the World War when old Austria went to pieces. For the causes of this crumbling to pieces were at that time already present everywhere. But no one was willing to recognize this. Everyone had thoughts that would be the means of a cure, always according to his own special national or cultural leanings. And if ideals which manifest themselves at times of the ebbing tide are stimulating, yet they are ideals born out of the decadence itself, out of the desire to prevent this-themselves being no less tragic. Such tragic ideals worked in the hearts of the best Viennese and Austrians.

[ 2 ] I frequently caused misunderstandings with these idealists when I expressed a conviction which had been borne in upon me through my absorption in the period of Goethe. I said that a culmination in Occidental cultural evolution had been reached during that period. This had not been continued. The period of the natural sciences, with its effects upon the lives of men and of peoples, denoted a decadence. For any further advance there was needed an entirely new attack from the side of the spirit. There could be no further progress into the spiritual by those roads which had previously been laid out, except after a previous turning back.

Goethe is a climax, but therefore not a point of departure; on the contrary, an end. He develops the results of an evolution which goes as far as himself and finds in him its most complete embodiment, but which cannot be further advanced without first resorting to far more primal springs of spiritual experience than exist in this evolution. In this mood I wrote the last part of my Goethe exposition.

[ 3 ] It was in this mood that I first became acquainted with Nietzsche's writings. Jenseits von Gut und Böse¹ was the first of his books that I read. I was fascinated by his way of viewing things and yet at the same time repelled. I found it hard to get a right attitude toward Nietzsche. I loved his style; I loved his keenness; but I did not love at all the way in which Nietzsche spoke of the most profound problems without immersing himself in these with fully conscious thought in spiritual experience. Only I then observed that he said many things with which I stood in the closest intimacy in my spiritual experience. And thus I felt myself close to his struggle and felt that I must find an expression for this proximity. Nietzsche seemed to me one of the most tragic figures of that time. And this tragedy, I believed, must be the effect of the spiritual attitude characterizing the natural-scientific age upon human souls of more than ordinary depth. I passed my last years in Vienna with such feelings as these.

[ 4 ] Before the close of the first phase of my life, I had the opportunity of visiting also Budapest and Siebenbürgen (Transylvania). The friend I have previously mentioned whose family belonged to Transylvania, who had remained bound to me with rare loyalty through all these years, had introduced me to a good many of the people from his district who were in Vienna. Thus it happened that, in addition to my other extensive social relationships, I had also this with persons from Transylvania. Among them were Herr and Frau Breitenstein, who became friends of mine at that time and who have remained such in the most heartfelt fashion. For a long time they have taken a leading part in the Anthroposophical Society in Vienna. This human relationship with “Siebenbürgers” led me to make a journey to Budapest. The capital of Hungary, in character so entirely unlike Vienna, made a deep impression upon me. One went there from Vienna through a region brilliant in the beauty of its scenery, its highly temperamental humanity, and the intensity of its musical interest. When one looked from the windows of the train, one had the impression that nature herself had become poetic in a special way, and that human beings, paying little heed to the poetic nature so familiar to them, plunged down within themselves in an often profoundly inward music of the heart. And, when one reached Budapest, there came to expression a world which may be viewed with the greatest interest from the point of view of the relationships to other European peoples, but which can from this point of view never be wholly understood. A dark undertone over which gleams a light playing amid colours. This character seemed to me as if it were forced together into visible unity when I stood before the Franz Drak [Ferenc Deák – e.Ed] monument. In this head of the maker of that Hungary which existed from the year 1867 to 1918 there lived a strong, proud will which laid hold with all its might, which forced itself through without cunning but with elemental mercilessness. I felt how true subjectively for every Hungarian was the proverb I had often heard: “Outside of Hungary there is no life; and, if there is a life, it is by no means such as this.”

[ 5 ] As a child I had seen on the western borders of Hungary how Germans were made to feel this strong, proud will; now I learned in the midst of Hungary how this will brings the Magyar people into an isolation from humanity which clothes them, as they rather naïvely think, in a certain glamour obvious to themselves which values much the showing of itself to the hidden eyes of nature but not to the open eyes of men.

[ 6 ] Half a year after this visit, my Transylvanian friends arranged for me to deliver a lecture at Hermannstadt. It was Christmas time. I traveled over the wide plains in the midst of which lies Arad. The melancholy poetry of Lenau sounded in my heart as I looked out over these plains where all is one expanse to which the eye can find no limit. I had to spend the night in a little border village between Hungary and Transylvania.

I sat in a little guest-room half the night. Besides myself there was only a group of card-players sitting round a table. In this group there were all the nationalities to be found at that time in Hungary and Transylvania. The men were playing with a vehemence which constantly broke loose at half-hour intervals, so that it took the form of soul-clouds which rose above the table, struggled together like demons, and wreathed the men about completely as if in the folds of serpents. What differences in vehement existence were there manifested by these different national types!

[ 7 ] I reached Hermannstadt on Christmas Day. Here I was introduced into “Siebenburger Saxondom.” This existed there in the midst of a Rumanian and Magyar environment. A noble folk which, in the midst of a decline that it could not perceive, desired to prove its gallantry. A Germanism which, like a memory of the transfer of its life centuries ago to the East, wished to show its loyalty to its origins, but which in this temper of soul showed a trait of alienation from the world manifesting itself as an elevated universal joy in life. I passed happy days among the German ministers of the Evangelical Church, among the teachers of the German schools, and among other German Siebenburgers. My heart warmed to these people who, in the concern for their folk life and in their duty to this, evolved a culture of the heart which spoke first of all likewise to the heart. [ 8 ] This vital warmth filled my soul as I sat in a sleigh, wrapped close in heavy furs, and travelled with these old and new friends through icy-cold and crackling snow to the Carpathians (the Transylvanian Alps). A dark, forested mountain country when one moves toward it from the distance; a wild, precipitous, often frightful mountain landscape when one is close at hand.

[ 9 ] The centre in all which I then experienced was my friend of many years. He was always thinking out something new whereby I might learn thoroughly Siebenburger Saxondom. He was still dividing his time between Vienna and Hermannstadt. At that time he owned a weekly paper at Hermannstadt founded for the purpose of fostering Siebenburger Saxondom. An undertaking it was which arose entirely out of idealism, utterly devoid of practical experience, but at which almost all representatives of Saxondom laboured together. After a few weeks it came to grief.

[ 10 ] Such experiences as this journey were brought me by destiny; and through them I was enabled to educate my perception for the outer world, a thing which had not been easy for me, whereas in the element of the spiritual I lived as in something self-evident.

[ 11 ] It was with sad memories that I made the journey back to Vienna. There fell into my hands just then a book of whose “spiritual richness” men of all sorts were speaking: Rembrandt als Erzieher.² In conversations about this book, which were then going on wherever one went, one could hear about the coming of an entirely new spirit. I was forced to become aware, by reason of this very phenomenon, of the great loneliness in which I stood with my temper of mind amid the spiritual life of that period.

[ 12 ] In regard to a book which was prized in the highest degree by all the world my own feeling was as if someone had sat for several months at a table in one of the better hotels and listened to what the “outstanding” personalities in the genealogical tables said by way of “brilliant” remarks, and had then written these down in the form of aphorisms. After this continuous “preliminary work” he could have thrown his slips of paper with these remarks into a vessel, shaken them thoroughly together, and then taken them out again After drawing out the slips, he could have made a series of these and so produced a book. Of course, this criticism is exaggerated. But my inner vital mood forced me into such revulsion from that which the “spirit of the times” then praised as a work of the highest merit. I considered Rembrandt as Teacher a book which dealt wholly with the surface of thoughts that have to do with the realm of the spiritual, and which did not harmonize in a single sentence with the real depths of the human soul. It grieved me to know that my contemporaries considered such a book as coming from a profound personality, whereas I was forced to believe that such dealers in the small change of thought moving in the shallows of the spirit would drive all that is deeply human out of man's soul.

[ 13 ] When I was fourteen years old I had to begin tutoring; for fifteen years, up to the beginning of the second phase of my life, that spent at Weimar, my destiny kept me engaged in this work. The unfolding of the minds of many persons, both in childhood and in youth, was in this way bound up with my own evolution. Through this means I was able to observe how different were the ways in which the two sexes grow into life. For, along with the giving of instruction to boys and young men, it fell to my lot to teach also a number of young girls. Indeed, for a long time the mother of the boy whose instruction I had taken over because of his pathological condition was a pupil of mine in geometry; and at another time I taught this lady and her sister aesthetics.

[ 14 ] In the family of these children I found for a number of years a sort of home, from which I went out to other families as tutor or instructor. Through the intimate friendship between the mother of the children and myself, it came about that I shared fully in the joys and sorrows of this family. In this woman I perceived a uniquely beautiful human soul. She was wholly devoted to the development of her four boys according to their destiny. In her one could study mother love in its larger manifestation. To co-operate with her in problems of education formed a beautiful content of life. For the musical part of the artistic she possessed both talent and enthusiasm. At times she took charge of the musical practice of her boys, as long as they were still young. She discussed intelligently with me the most varied life problems, sharing in everything with the deepest interest. She gave the greatest attention to my scientific and other tasks. There was a time when I had the greatest need to discuss with her everything which intimately concerned me. When I spoke of my spiritual experiences, she listened in a peculiar way. To her intelligence the thing was entirely congenial, but it maintained a certain marked reserve; yet her mind absorbed everything. At the same time she maintained in reference to man's being a certain naturalistic view. She believed the moral temper to be entirely bound up with the health or sickness of the bodily constitution. I mean to say that she thought instinctively about man in a medical fashion, whereby her thinking tended to be somewhat naturalistic. To discuss things in this way with her was in the highest degree stimulating. Besides, her attitude toward all outer life was that of a woman who attended with the strongest sense of duty to everything which fell to her lot, but who looked upon most inner things as not belonging to her sphere. She looked upon her fate in many aspects as something burdensome. But still she made no claims upon life; she accepted this as it took form so far as it did not concern her sons. In relation to these she felt every experience with the deepest emotion of her soul.

[ 15 ] All this I shared vitally – the soul-life of a woman, her beautiful devotion to her sons, the life of the family within a wide circle of kinsmen and acquaintances. But for this reason things did not move without difficulty. The family was Jewish. In their views they were quite free from any sectarian or racial narrowness, but the head of the family, to whom I was deeply attached, felt a certain sensitiveness to any expression by a Gentile in regard to the Jews. The flame of anti-Semitism which had sprung up at that time had caused this feeling.

[ 16 ] Now, I took a keen interest in the struggle which the Germans in Austria were then carrying on in behalf of their national existence. I was also led to occupy myself with the historical and the social position of the Jews. Especially earnest did this activity of mine become after the appearance of Hamerling's Homunculus. This eminent German poet was considered by a great part of the journalists as an anti-Semite on account of this work; indeed, he was claimed by the German national anti-Semites as one of their own. This disturbed me very little; but I wrote a paper on the Homunculus in which, as I thought, I expressed myself quite objectively in regard to the Jews. The man in whose home I lived, and who was my friend, took this to be a special form of anti-Semitism. Not in the least did his friendly feeling for me suffer on that account, but he was affected with a profound distress. When he had read the paper, he faced me, his heart torn by innermost sorrow, and said to me: “What you wrote in this in regard to the Jews cannot be explained in a friendly sense; but this is not what hurts me, but the fact that you could have had the experiences in regard to us which induced you to write thus only through your close relationship with us and our friends.” He was mistaken: for I had formed my opinions altogether from a spiritual and historic survey; nothing personal had entered into my judgment. He could not see the thing in this way. His reply to my explanations was: “No, the man who teaches my children is, after this paper, no ‘friend of the Jews.’” He could not be induced to change. Not for a moment did he think that my relation ship to the family ought to be altered. This he looked upon as something necessary. Still less could I make this matter the occasion for a change; for I looked upon the teaching of his sons as a task which destiny had brought to me. But neither of us could do otherwise than think that a tragic thread had been woven into this relationship. [ 17 ] To all this was added the fact that many of my friends had taken on from their national struggle a tinge of anti-Semitism in their view of the Jews. They did not view sympathetically my holding a post in a Jewish family; and the head of this family saw in my friendly mingling with such persons only a confirmation of the impression which he had received from my paper.

[ 18 ] To the family circle in which I so intimately shared belonged the composer of Das Goldene Kreuz, Ignatius Brüll. A sensitive person he was, of whom I was extraordinarily fond. Ignatius Brüll was something of an alien to the world, buried in himself. His interests were not exclusively musical; they were directed toward many aspects of the spiritual life. These interests he could enter into only as a “darling of destiny” against the background of a family circle which never permitted him to be disturbed by attention to everyday affairs but permitted his creative work to grow out of a certain prosperity. And thus he did not grow in life but only in music. To what degree his musical creations were or were not meritorious is not the question just here. But it was stimulating in the most beautiful sense to meet the man in the street and see him awaken out of his world of tones when one addressed him. Generally he did not have his waistcoat buttons in the right button-holes. His eye spoke in a mild thoughtfulness; his walk was not fast but very expressive. One could talk with him about many things; for these he had a sensitive understanding; but one saw how the content of the conversation slipped, as it were, for him into the sphere of music.

[ 19 ] In the family in which I thus lived I became acquainted also with the distinguished physician, Dr. Breuer, who was associated with Dr. Freud at the birth of psycho-analysis. Only in the beginning, however, did he share in this sort of view, and he was not in agreement with Freud in its later development. Dr. Breuer was to me a very attractive personality. I admired the way in which he was related to his medical profession. Besides, he was a man of many interests in other fields. He spoke of Shakespeare in such a way as to stimulate one very strongly. It was interesting also to hear him in his purely medical way of thinking speak of Ibsen or even of Tolstoi's Kreuzer Sonata. When he spoke with the friend I have here described, the mother of the children whom I had to teach, I was often present and deeply interested. Psycho-analysis was not yet born; but the problems which looked toward this goal were already there. The phenomena of hypnotism had given a special colouring to medical thought. My friend had been a friend of Dr. Breuer from her youth. There I faced a fact which gave me much food for thought. This woman thought in a certain direction more medically than the distinguished physician. They were once discussing a morphine addict. Dr. Breuer was treating him. The woman once said to me: “Think what Breuer has done! He has taken the promise of the morphine addict on his word of honour that he will take no more morphine. He expected to attain something by this, and he was deluded, since the patient did not keep his promise. He even said: ‘How can I treat a man who does not keep his promise?’ Would one have believed,” she said, “that so distinguished a physician could be so naïve? How can one try to cure ‘by a promise’ something so deeply rooted ‘in a man's nature’?” The woman may not, however, have been entirely right; the opinion of the physician regarding the therapy of suggestion may have entered then into his attempt at a cure; but no one can deny that my friend's statement indicated the extraordinary energy with which she spoke in a noteworthy fashion out of the spirit which lived in the Viennese school of medicine up to the time when this new school blossomed forth.

[ 20 ] This woman was in her own way a significant person; and she is a significant phenomenon in my life. She has long been dead; among the things which made it hard for me to leave Vienna was this also, that I had to part from her.

[ 21 ] When I reflect in retrospect upon the content of the first phase of my life, while I seek to characterize it as if from without, the feeling forces itself upon me that destiny so led me that I was not fettered by any external “calling” during my first thirty years. I entered the Goethe and Schiller Institute in Weimar also, not to take a life position, but as a free collaborator in the edition of Goethe which would be published by the Institute under a commission from the Grand-duchess Sophie. In the report which the Director of the Institute published in the twelfth volume of the Goethe Year Book occurs this statement: “The permanent workers have associated with themselves since 1890 Rudolf Steiner from Vienna. To him has been assigned the general field of ‘morphology’ (with the exception of the osteological part): five or probably six volumes of the ‘second division,’ to which important material is added from the manuscript, remains.”

• 1. Beyond Good and Evil.
• 2. Rembrandt as Teacher.

A spiritual movement can be injured very much by one-sidedness; and when we devote ourselves to such a subject as the occult standpoints of the Stuttgart building¹ we must clearly understand that when some single truth is specially emphasised, a strong light falls upon this truth, and one may then easily fail to recognise what should also be observed — the other side of the matter. In order to arrive at an all-round view one should always bear this in mind. For example, to all that was said yesterday² something else must be added. Certainly, a still greater perfection is attained when we are able purely in thought to erect around us such a temple, when we are able to imagine ourselves surrounded in thought by such a home. To this end our thoughts must be so strong that they act like a physical home. This may be achieved by a great power of concentration when, alone by ourselves, we follow rules such as are given in my books, The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Results.³

But now, in order that we may have the right ideas about the necessity of such a building, we must say that when we devote ourselves to our studies in our lodge work, we require not only that we as individuals shall produce the conditions for our concentration, but also that we shall be disturbed as little as possible by what is around us. As the human being consists not only of the physical organism but also of supersensible principles, and these are active and set up relations with our environment, it is necessary when we exert our physical thought, for us to support the efforts of our will for our etheric and astral bodies. This we can do by providing for our subconsciousness — that is, for our etheric and astral bodies — conditions which may best be set up when we are in occult surroundings.

For this reason such a building is a great benefit and becomes a necessity to us.

We must bear in mind that in a certain way the great truths are at the same time difficulties to a person, something which he must first learn to bear, something which at first may be shocking, which may upset him, because it agrees so little with his everyday life. Therefore, in order to come to the higher truths in as favourable a way as possible it is necessary to provide a building such as this so that the spiritual knowledge which awaits us may indeed come into us — and in our age the Masters of Wisdom and of Harmony of Feeling are able to give us a great deal.

Since the end of the 19th century many doors have opened to the spiritual world, and many streams of spiritual life may be led into us. It may be said that just in the immediate future, towards which humanity is now going, the conditions are becoming more and more favourable for the influx of important spiritual knowledge which can enable us to progress quickly in every respect; but in order to clear away the hindrances which come through people — after they have just slipped out of materialism — not yet being sufficiently mature to receive the great truths, we must develop within ourselves a frame of mind which brings less danger of disturbance. This can be accomplished by means of suitable surroundings; and everywhere where from our standpoint just at this time care should be taken to see all is in order, there everything will really be observed which the occult point of view demands. It is natural that the needs and wishes of one who comes into Anthroposophy should go very far to one side or another, and because on the other hand there cannot be the necessary insight, it is difficult to be obliged to deny things which the other considers right. Very often it is not perceived that the denial is for the other’s welfare, and it is especially the case that some can only await the answer to one question or another with very great difficulty.

Because all knowledge is exoteric, one has grown so accustomed to expect that fundamentally everything that a person may ask can always be answered; but to this belongs two things at least. One is that the person who wants the answer should be in the position to understand it, that is to say, that through his whole anthroposophical or theosophical development he had progressed far enough to understand the answer. Abstract reasons prompt him to put the question much earlier than it is possible for him to understand the answer which is given from occult worlds. The other is that the one asked knows the answer. In regard to certain spiritual knowledge we are just at the stage when a question may be very premature, not only for individuals but for our whole age, although the answer will doubtless be given to us in the right form in the course of time. For this reason I said in the course of lectures at Karlsruhe⁴ that an essential thing in occultism is: to be able to wait. Particularly one who perhaps has undergone a certain development must be able to do this, and most of all one who has reached a certain height of occult development. When a person considers it extremely important to answer a question at a certain time, the intellect, which is always ready to answer, may very easily conjure up an answer, even from the feeling of a trained occultist. This answer is not only false or insufficient, but it takes away for a long time the possibility of a coming to the right answer at all, hence it is necessary to be able to wait until one is favoured with an answer from the spiritual world.

This applies not only to the highest questions, but also to more elementary ones. Even to the trained occultist there is a great temptation to produce the answer out of himself, but then he will be liable to fall into error. These two pictures [in our building here in Stuttgart] are an example. Our friend Stockmeyer has said for a long time that he wishes to finish them. The answer concerning the idea was promised him as soon as it was possible. That went on for a long time. To the despair of the architect the pictures were only finished very late indeed. Where did the fault lie? It was because the answer which was necessary as a kind of occult sketch for these pictures could only be given very late. One had to wait until the intuition came. These ideas might very easily be thought out, but then they would be worthless. What is so necessary is that one should not only go the straight way, as it were, but one should also have the resignation not to excogitate something; only to exercise the intellect upon occult truths when they are there, but not in order to find them. For this purpose the intellect must be absolutely laid aside. When occult truths are there they must then be taken up and established by the intellect, it must give them a logical character. One must make a practice of this if one wishes to progress; just as when one uses details which may perhaps be elementary in order to fit them into a whole. Then what will happen if in Munich we wish to build a great hall and at the right time we have not the idea which is to be embodied? We are Anthroposophists and know that karma works not only in individual beings, but in all connections, and when we have this faith we know that when a thing is necessary it can let us wait, but it will come, and indeed at the right time. We cannot judge when the right time is, for this we need confidence in the future; if it does not come, then it is not the right thing for us. This is not fatalism, for such a faith does not prevent us from making every effort, but it directs these efforts into the right lines. We make no false attempts with our intellect, but prepare ourselves for the moment when we shall be favoured. Instead of worrying oneself in front of a sheet of paper it is better to sink into prayerful meditation and ask of karma that this moment of intuition may come.

With this is also connected what might be called the right view of the Rosicrucian principle. If one who is acquainted with the Rosicrucian Temple⁵ in a pedantic, external manner were to come into this building, and if he were to remember the rules taught him from old traditions, he would say: “You have done it all wrong, that is not Rosicrucian.” We should have to reply: That which you demand we do not wish, and could not wish it, for Rosicrucianism does not mean to carry on certain truths throughout the centuries, but it means to develop the sense for what each age can give to man from the spiritual world. That which in the l4th century might perhaps be wrong is right in our age, and in our age it must be done in this way, for our relation to the spiritual powers around us requires exactly this form. This building, therefore, is not constructed after an old pattern, but it is built in accordance with the requirements of our age.

For what is the demand made of us by the spiritual powers? I give hardly a single lecture without using the word ‘theosophical’, as this is linguistically possible, although it is not grammatically correct. Perhaps many would find our address, “My dear theosophical friends,” blameworthy.⁶ This word is purposely used because the heart of our mission may be characterised by this word. Theosophy, or Anthroposophy is something which has always existed in the world and has been cultivated in all ages in the way in which humanity had to cultivate it according to its requirements — at one time in wider circles and at another in smaller ones, according to the peculiarities of the several ages. It is something which — after all the preceding developments have taken place — may now be given in such a form that, within certain limits, it can enter into each human I, into every feeling and every stage of intellectual maturity.

Today there need be no one who, if he has the goodwill, may not receive Theosophy or Anthroposophy. For this reason it is on the one hand something external and on the other a special task of our age. From this standpoint we must consider ourselves as the vehicles of the world-movement which must be described as the theosophical or anthroposophical movement.

That within this movement, according to the capacities of the individuals, the most varied shades may be found, should be self-evident, and this has been the case in our movement in every age. When Theosophy becomes conviction it provides the ground upon which the most varied knowledge may blossom forth, but they have to be obtained on the paths of actual truth. Among those who understand the heart of occultism it is always the case that they cannot disturb one another; it is impossible for persons to disturb one another who are engaged in occult practice and through proceeding from different starting-points arrive at other formulations. That is a strict law. The occultist may not fight when he sees that other occultists have correct starting-points and are striving rightly, even if he finds their formulation clumsy. The fact that various occultists formulate what they have to say in different ways may depend upon the various starting-points, and according to how they consider it necessary to bring this or that from the higher worlds.

It is different when it becomes evident that other movements are not on the same level, when they simply set to work with more elementary conditions and then assert that this is the final truth. Not to recognise a higher standpoint is wrong. If someone were to say that Christ — whose nature we have tried for years in our spiritual movement to render more and more plain — can incarnate more than once upon the earth in a fleshly body — upon what would this assertion rest? From what you have heard and will still hear you will clearly understand that there is a Being Who works in such a way that He could sojourn but once in a physical body for three years, and cannot come again and again in a physical body. This is a truth which has always been emphasised by Rosicrucianism; and it was also clearly shown in the Mysteries. One who does not know this may arrive at an incorrect formulation from a knowledge which does not extend so far into these regions; incorrect because it uses the name Christ.

On the other hand it is possible to say: Why does the other speak differently? He speaks differently because he is not thinking at all of what we have here called Christ. He designates someone else as Christ, of whom perhaps might be said what he says, but it is not the one who is spoken of in this movement, because it is the unconditional necessity of our age — as the requirements of the Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feeling — that we should speak of this high Being whom we call Christ. And when we read the Gospels we may recognise and identify Him with the One who for 2,000 years has been thus described. This is an historical right, not an absolute one, of course! Although the knowledge of Him has been very imperfect for 2,000 years, He has been thus described, and we do the same for historical reasons. On this account this name ought not to be used for other beings. This is something which has always been emphasised and which today can really be quite easily understood by anyone.

It is, however, interesting to notice how difficult for some to understand this matter clearly, but those who from the very beginning have no particular inclination to enter into more detailed explanations will have felt it uncomfortable that we do not by any means make the matter concerning Christ so easy. This one could see again in Karlsruhe (when the preceding course of lectures on the subject of ‘Jesus to Christ’ was given). What was said there was only possible because of everything else which had preceded it. Thus at the present time it is not yet very easy to arrive at the Christ principle, but it is a necessity which is laid upon us by the leaders of the spiritual movement.

It is very remarkable that there has been a certain difficulty in introducing the special investigations of Rosicrucianism into the theosophical movement, and even the position of this movement is very misunderstood here; exactly in how far does this movement merit the name of a Rosicrucian movement? But I shall never say: “My Rosicrucian friends!” You may gather from this that it was never correct to consider what belongs to Rosicrucianism as something exclusive. If someone outside our movement were to say that we were Rosicrucians, that would not only be a misunderstanding, but it would be a somewhat defamatory designation for our movement. This always reminds me of a man in the market place who once said that so and so was a phlegmatic, and a woman said, “Oh, is that what he was? But I know he is a butcher!” It is somewhat similar when in order to distinguish us someone calls us Rosicrucians. This has no meaning. Rosicrucianism has flowed into our movement, it is assimilated and to a certain extent practised. How difficult it is to let this current flow in you may see in the remarkable fate of the personality to whom all we in this movement look up with great respect: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. If you follow her development from Isis Unveiled to The Secret Doctrine you will see that a great amount of Rosicrucian knowledge has streamed into Isis Unveiled. For reasons which cannot now be discovered she then swerved to one side in The Secret Doctrine, which did not further develop what could have been carried further, but on the contrary took a side path. But how strongly these Rosicrucian principles acted we may see in the third volume of The Secret Doctrine. There one finds the greatest truths next to really impossible things. One who is able to discriminate may connect this with what is being revealed today.

Thus it has come about that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky has very clearly said that it must never be thought that Christ Who is to come again will reappear in a fleshly body, but that the coming Christ must only be understood as an event which a person experiences through a connection with the spiritual world. We take the same ground that she did in this respect, when in a clearer way than was possible to her, we work out what she commenced. When she turns with such severity against the idea that Christ could incarnate again in the flesh it is not easy when the reproach is made against our movement that her most important knowledge, which sometimes is not well formulated, is violated. There is continuity, and there is no need to make this breach with the original starting-point, by coming into conflict with what concerns the coming of Christ. Although we always set what is true in place of what is false, in many things we may go back to the original statements of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. And we may know that in the form in which she now lives she wished that the continuity should be developed, which should not be an adhesion to the formulas but a working in the spirit which existed at that time. It was not a spirit of standing still, and least of all a spirit of retrogression! We work in the best way when we bring out that which was still closed to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The doors have opened in quite a different way, especially since 1899.

Without taking into account anything that has gone before, we try to penetrate into the meaning and importance of the Christ Principle. This leads us naturally to join on to the occult investigations which have been made with special care in Rosicrucian circles since the l3th century.

But those who have heard my various courses and lectures will know that we are not now teaching the Rosicrucianism of the 13th century. We are Rosicrucians of the 20th century! It is our task to join on to the principles which Rosicrucianism possessed, to utilise them in theosophical progress. We cannot do otherwise than recognise that what has thus been found is something higher in every way than anything else in the world with respect to the Christ Principle. We must, however, admit that on account of the energy with which this principle has been worked out the teachings regarding Karma and Reincarnation passed into the background. Therefore we are dealing not with the spirit of an historical epoch, nor with the spirit of Rosicrucianism, but with the Spirit of Truth. It is quite indifferent to us where one faith or another appears, we have to deal with the Spirit of Truth, and on this account all division into categories and forms must always give rise to misunderstandings in our movement; we desire only to serve the Truth, as was described with respect to our small festival. We wish to represent not what this or that age has said, but what comes directly from the spiritual world. That which can be recognised by the human intellect is our concern; in accordance with this we shall lead our movement further, and with respect to all other creeds we may call ourselves theosophists, according to the motto of our movement: No religion is higher than Truth. In this respect we take the most theosophic ground.

For this reason we surround ourselves not with a building modelled according to Rosicrucian pattern but with one that is planned for a particular object. For example, the size of the space is the external condition for this. Perhaps we should have been quite unable to add one thing or another if the space had been larger or smaller. No scheme is of any value, but we have to wait for what comes to us as a gift from spiritual worlds. In other words, our whole effort is to understand something that sounds so simple: To open our hearts to the spiritual world which is always around us, to understand words such as those which Christ said: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” If someone were to examine the work we have done in past years he will not be able to say that we present Christianity in a way it was thought in the early centuries. We desire to acquire the spirit which wishes to come close to Christ as He is today; and only when we have recognised that this Christ is a living One we shall illuminate what took place in former times.

In the same way we consider Buddha as a living One, who follows his principle that Buddha does not return any more in the flesh. If someone were to affirm this, we should have to reply that he understands nothing about Buddhism, for one who has risen from Bodhisattva to Buddha does not return. For Buddha lives, and he works in our movement and illuminates what he accomplished 2,500 years ago by what he does today.

Just as only he may speak of Buddha who knows him, so also only he who knows Christ may speak about Him. Therefore if someone says that a very important being will come in a fleshly body, that may be correct, but he has nothing to do with Christ. The fact is that if a person enters deeply into the nature of Christ he comes to understand that the other is making a mistake; it can never be the reverse. This brings difficulties, but it must be borne in mind — especially by one who has occasion to practise theosophical principles in the true sense — that one should exercise tolerance even towards error. But to exercise tolerance means, not to acknowledge error but to deal with it with love, otherwise it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit. We must exercise tolerance precisely because in regard to Christ we represent the Rosicrucian principle.

We can wait until opposition comes, exactly concerning Christ. If you understand this word, the principle of the most real search for truth and on the other hand real tolerance, you will be able to answer for yourselves the question: In what sense are we Theosophists and in what sense are we Rosicrucians?

• 1. The Branch-House in Stuttgart; the first building specially erected and designed for anthroposophical work; opened by Rudolf Steiner in October, 1911.
• 2. Special Building for Anthroposophy at Stuttgart from an Occult Point of View, Stuttgart, 15 October 1911
• 3. The Way of Initiation is an early version of the first half of the book entitled Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. The book Initiation and Its Results corresponds to the second half of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
• 4. Course of lectures From Jesus to Christ, GA 131
• 5. See description of the Temple of the Holy Grail in The Younger Titurel by Albrecht von Scharfenberg, about 1270 AD.
• 6. This lecture was given prior to the exclusion of the German Section from the Theosophical Society. Since then Dr. Steiner’s movement has continued as the Anthroposophical Society.

After the points of business, Rudolf Steiner took the floor:

On the whole, it can be said that many of the outcomes of our goals actually constitute a single phenomenon within a larger framework of facts. Please allow me to make a few comments on this, and especially on the experience we have gathered since founding the Waldorf School.

As you know, we founded the Waldorf School as one part of the effects that were intended to proceed from a spiritual movement that is over two decades old. The Waldorf School would be inconceivable without this spiritual movement. In its particulars, the plan to found the school came from our dear friend Emil Molt at a time when there was a certain interest in great humanitarian questions because it was a time of such great need. Counting on this interest, we began to work in many different directions to try to influence aspects of public life from anthroposophical points of view. We may well say that since that time we have been able to acquire very extensive experience along certain lines.

To begin with, we encountered a certain interest that promised to encompass broader circles. In 1919 humanity had a great interest in working in one or the other direction to enable forces of ascent to replace the forces of decline that were so evident. And today we still see a universal interest in educational issues, not only in Central Europe but all over the world. It is a remarkable fact that this year’s Shakespeare festival in Stratford actually took place under the auspices of educational issues. You know that I myself had to give lectures at this festival, and that the event stood fully under the sign of educational issues. In fact, a committee on new ideals in education organized this event. This summer we will have another opportunity to have a conference, this time at Oxford, where nine out of twelve lectures will deal with educational issues in a narrower sense.¹ This shows that at any rate an interest in educational issues is still present today.

This interest is to be found everywhere. In the widest possible circles today, we definitely find that educational issues are thought to be the most important issues of all. We find numerous people who believe, and rightly so, that any talk of social issues does not rest on firm ground if it does not take educational issues as its starting point. We have come to realize that the chaos that humanity has fallen into and will continue to fall into has essentially been brought about by our failure to place the right value on the spiritual issues of humankind’s evolution.

However, this interest is “thought interest,” if I may put it like that. The way in which this interest manifests clearly shows that we are dealing with some kind of thought interest. People organize conferences on education just as they organize other conferences today. They get together and talk about educational issues, and it cannot be denied that extraordinarily clever things are talked about at these gatherings. People nowadays talk with extraordinary cleverness. A large portion of humanity today is smart, and it is also the case that the majority of these very smart people like to hear themselves talk. This creates the best circumstances imaginable for holding conferences to discuss how to find ways out of these chaotic conditions.

If it depended only on conferences of this sort, we would be well on the way. Ladies and gentlemen, this is something we should consider very carefully. I have often stated that I am convinced that if twelve people or some other number of people would get together to undertake to establish an agenda for educating children in the best way, something extremely clever would come out of it. I say this in complete seriousness. When it comes to establishing an agenda for assembling the best pedagogical principles for dealing with children, the literature available today is excellent. What people are saying today in these conferences is literature. However, it all depends on accomplishing the work that is to be done on the basis of real life. People who establish agendas are never dealing with real life. In real life you deal with a certain number of students and a certain number of teachers; you deal with people. These people will do what needs doing; they will do whatever they can do.

However, in order to actually accomplish what is theoretically possible, we depend on having our hands free to do our work on a humanitarian basis. This brings us to the fact that nowadays the presence of a “thought interest” in great existential issues is much less important than the presence of the will to actually bring about the conditions that make a system of education such as this one possible. The remarkable thing about this is that while there is the broadest possible interest in the thought or the feeling that such and such ought to be, this is not accompanied by any real will interest. That no real will interest accompanies it is the reason why I call what it is our conferences deal with, “literature.” Literature is what it actually is; it is not something that will be transformed into action.

One of the most important facts about the background of the Waldorf School is that we were in a position to make the anthroposophical movement a relatively large movement. The anthroposophical movement has become a large one. This is evident from the fact that difficult anthroposophical books go through many editions.”² Interest springs up everywhere. This is a “thought interest,” or even goes beyond thought interest to the extent that the people who come together in the anthroposophical movement also have a feeling interest in it, an interest of the heart. In all of our modern movements people are coming together with a mere “thought interest” that is transformed into a talking interest in those who are somewhat active. The anthroposophical movement gathers together those people who have an intense human need, a soul need, to make headway with regard to the essence of the human being. This is what things look like when we consider an interest in knowledge, a feeling interest, more theoretically. There are very many people today who realize that there is something here that can satisfy their spiritual interests. That is how it stands today, and I hope that its growth is guaranteed in spite of the scandalous opposition to it.

But what we are lacking are people who are not merely interested in the anthroposophical movement becoming as large as possible and bringing forth as much spiritual content as possible, but who are also interested in making this anthroposophical movement happen, in being co-workers in its coming about. There are extraordinarily few of them. We have many people who listen, many who want something for themselves, but we have extraordinarily few people who are co-workers in the fullest sense of the word.

You know, when our conference in Vienna was being organized, which was not a conference in the same sense as other conferences—the point of our conferences is for people to get together to receive something they can take home, while in other conferences everyone wants to get rid of what they bring from home—in any case, when this conference was being organized, there had to be workers there to get ready for it and bring it about, and there had to be speakers there. There are always a small number of friends who nearly have to run their legs off, work their fingers to the bone writing letters, and empty out their wallets. There are only a small number of them, the Waldorf teachers and a small number of others, and they are thoroughly overworked almost every month of the year because of their involvement. Actually, they are always terribly overworked.

But at the end of a conference such as this, even if it is as successful as the one in Vienna, we experience once again that although all the conditions are in place for our Waldorf system of education to expand, or something of that sort, the way these conditions come about means that the small number of active people get in over their heads. Again and again we have to be on the lookout for new coworkers. Perhaps not all of you will agree with me, but I would like to state my experience quite openly. As things stand today, I believe there would be a possibility of gaining plenty of members. I got the impression in Vienna that it would be possible to attract enough people who would become coworkers in the best sense of the word.

But—and here our general concern coincides with our concern for the Waldorf School—at this point we bump up against the fact that it is not possible to expand our circle of coworkers for the simple reason that we have no money. People everywhere have the means of supporting their coworkers, but this is only possible for us to a very inadequate extent. The main question is always how to offer people the means to exist when we disconnect them from their previous means. That is the fact of the matter. Today, if we want to move forward, we need a large number of coworkers. Those we have are simply not enough. Thus, what needs to be taken care of can be done only by exhausting the strength of the forces we have, and what can be done in this way is at most a tenth of what could be accomplished under conditions at present if we could count on a full complement of coworkers. After the Vienna conference in particular, we could watch the experience I have just described welling up.

Naturally this is not a question of an ordinary appeal to the wallets of those who are already members. That is not the issue. The issue, to put it very strongly for once, is that in recent times whenever we have appealed to the will, the matter in question failed.

In the end, the Waldorf School movement is connected to the threefold movement. The Waldorf School movement is conceivable only within a free spiritual life. The “thought interest” we met with at first has not led to a will interest. When the attempt was made to accomplish the deed of founding the World School Association as our only means of expanding beyond Central Europe, this attempt failed.³ It was to have encompassed the entire civilized world. The attempt to rouse whatever belief people had that the educational system must change, which was what was being attempted in the World School Association, was a miserable fiasco. There is such a terrible feeling of being rebuffed when you appeal to the will. I do not say that I am appealing for money in this case. We are lacking in money, but we are lacking in will to a much greater extent. The interest that exists does not go very deep, otherwise it would extend to the right areas.

We were able to found the Waldorf School. Herr Stockmeyer⁴ read the ruling,⁵ the gist of which was that as of Easter of 1925 we will lose our first grade, and eventually the four lowest classes. We would hardly have been able to open the school at all anywhere else. In founding the Waldorf School, we took advantage of the right moment in which it was possible to do such a thing.

Whenever the educational system is at the mercy of universal schematization, we can point to strongly working forces of decline. We encounter them everywhere. We can point them out wherever what is laid down in the regulations for primary schools is taken to the last stage. In Lunatsharsky’s school system in Soviet Russia, it has been carried through to its conclusion. People there are thinking the way we will think here when this is carried through to its conclusion and the full consequences have been felt. The current misery in Eastern Europe is what comes of it when this way of thinking about non-independent schools finds its way into practice.

I am trying to speak today in a way that awakens enthusiasm, so that people feel the spiritual blood trickling in their souls and a large number of people who realize this will commit themselves, so that public opinion is aroused. Actually, I must say that at any point in the last twenty years when I tried to speak a language that appealed to people’s hearts not only in a theoretical sense, but to the heart as an organ of will, what I felt, first in the Anthroposophical Society and later in other groups, always made me wonder, “Dont people have ears?” It seemed that people could not hear things that were supposed to move from words to action. The experience of the fiasco of the World School Association was enough to drive one to despair.

How do we think when we hear something such as this ruling that was read aloud? We think that perhaps ways and means will be found to push through the lower classes for a few years, after all. Even in more intimate circles, not much more comes of it than thinking, “Well, maybe the possibility will be there for a few more years.” The point, however, is for all of us to stand behind it now. Education must evolve independently, as has been emphasized ever since 1919. There is no other way for this to become a reality than through general acceptance of what is offered by the members of our various associations, who are in full agreement that something like this should exist, and through them being joined by more and more people who will become active members. The will has to develop first!

I would like to tell you how my calculation goes: If numbers speak, we can say that we have no money. Having said that, we then collect money and fill the gap by the skin of our teeth.

However, we will also not get very far by this means. We will get further only by the means I intended in speaking of the World School Association. We must have an active faith that what is being done will really become a factor in public opinion. In order to maintain the Waldorf School and establish additional schools, we need a growing public conviction that continuing in the sense of the old school system will lead only to forces of decline within humanity. This conviction is what we need. We will move forward only when instead of merely establishing schools here and there for the sake of practicing some kind of educational quackery, we can make the breakthrough to deciding to take our educational principles to the public in a way that will make them a matter of inner conviction for parents and non-parents alike.

Please excuse me, but in a certain respect I really cannot avoid saying that I know many people will recognize the truth in what I have just said, but you only really acknowledge the truth of something by doing something about it! By doing something about it! This is why, above all, we must make sure that we do not found schools simply to an extent that lies within our existing means, which come from our branches and from wallets that are already empty. We must try to work for ideas and ideals so that an ever growing number of people is imbued with them.

In this respect our actual experience is just the opposite. The current issue of the newspaper for threefolding has just announced that in future it will be a magazine for anthroposophy. Why? Because the promising beginnings in understanding threefolding have petered out. Because, fundamentally, we must go back to the style we had prior to the threefolding movement. In spite of the fact that a lot has been said about threefolding, this is another case of being driven to despair when you talk with people. We need something to come of this; we need it to enter public opinion. That is what we need above all else if we want to make progress with the Waldorf School.

I must admit that I have been saying this for a long time. But just about anything else strikes a chord more readily than what I have said today. I would like to say that if I see what lives in people’s will as mere faith—well, no one believes that mere faith, the mere faith that humanity can only be helped by having an independent system of education, will accomplish anything. But it would lead people who are still able to do so to support us financially, so that we would not continually be left empty-handed in comparison to other movements.

The anthroposophical movement is the basis of the Waldorf School movement. Even if it is set back by scandalous things such as are happening now,⁶ it has within it the necessary prerequisites for life. A lot of associations are founded that have adequate monetary means but no inherent prerequisites for life. Associations are constantly being founded, and people have money for them, and yet they fail. If all the money that people spend today on unnecessary associations could be directed into our channels, then the reports would look different. Herr Leinhas⁷ would have to report that our reserve fund is so large that we will have to try to invest it fruitfully.

I do not believe at all that the main thing for us today is our lack of money. What we are lacking is the will to assert ourselves in real life, to insist that the portion of spiritual life that we acknowledge as true be given its due in the world. What use would it be if I had claimed that our effectiveness in the past year was satisfactory in some way? But here, in a members’ meeting, it is necessary to speak from this point of view. I am fully convinced that our Waldorf School can get as good as it can, but if we do not find the possibility of imbuing public opinion with our educational impulses, then all of our fancy arithmetic will not help us at all.

The will to convince everyone must be present in an everincreasing number of people. In addition, the conviction must become widespread that for the salvation of humanity, it is necessary for something such as is present in embryonic form in the Waldorf School to keep on growing.

That is what I wanted to have said to that percentage of hearts in which the impulse of will is present. We can get very far if we only think about what it depends on: It depends on us using our will to really get public opinion to where it ought to be. That is what I needed to say.

From the discussion

I must add that a great number of parents have expressed the request that something be done by the Waldorf School to manage the relationship of the faculty to the parent body—what can the parents themselves do for the children? I would like to say that we will very soon be giving careful thought to how we can work in this direction. At parents’ evenings, I myself will try to offer something along the lines indicated by these many signatures.⁷

We will try to do everything possible along these lines in the very near future.

Expanding our circle of coworkers can be achieved only if the circumstances of which I spoke become a reality. Something must first be done to shape public opinion so that more extensive work can be undertaken. Then it will be possible to do many things. But as long as what is growing on our grounds remains the secret of the members, we will not be able to move on.

A question is asked, among others, regarding the official ruling mentioned in the speech.

Dr. Steiner: It would not help us to file a complaint with the authorities. As many people as possible must be won over to the idea that such a school should exist. The authorities are doing the right thing if that is the law. It is a question of opinjons gaining a foothold, becoming an effective force. There is something much deeper at stake. We must decide to interpret things ambitiously, to realize that what we think to be right must become the opinion of the public. The point is to get this idea into as many heads as possible. That must be accomplished so that as many people as possible change their view.

Dr. Steiner (in response to a suggestion). That does not come into question at all. Influencing public opinion is the only possible means of bringing the other methods up for discussion. To win over public opinion is the only practical way for us to go. We have not done so because there are far too few of us who believe in such a thing. I imagined that the World School Association would be promulgated in a certain way. If the monthly contribution could be one franc per member, we would be able to achieve what would have to be achieved by such an association. It would only be a question of individuals working in such a way that enthusiasm is present in their will.

Without doing that, we will get no further; we will simply manage to use up our last reserves. Even if we still find a lot of well-meaning members, it would be impractical to carry out. Even if something like that were to become a reality, we would only use up our last reserves. Our experience has shown most recently that it is necessary to attract the circles that are interested in what we are doing but are being kept away by the fact that the majority of the current membership feels the urge to keep the membership small.

May I still say that although we have established a certain level of contribution for membership, it is very good not to exclude anyone who is simply not in a position to pay the whole amount. Alongside the paragraph in the bylaws, let us remember among ourselves that people can also pay less.

• 1. This international congress on “Spiritual Values in Education and Social Life” at which Rudolf Steiner was invited to speak took place under the patronage of the English Minister of Education and others active in public life in England. From August 16-25, 1922, Steiner spoke on “The Basic Forces of Soul and Spirit in the Art of Education” [Die geistig-seelischen Grundkréfte der Erziehungskunst], 12 lectures, Oxford, 1922, GA 305, 1978], see The Spiritual Ground of Education, Garber Publications, Blauvelt, NY, nd.
• 2. For example, if paperback editions are included, in 1980 7heosophywas in its 30th German edition (164,000), Occult Science in its 29th edition (108,000), How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds in its 21st edition (150,000), The Philosophy of Freedomy/Spiritual Activity in its 14th edition (156,000) and Riddles of Philosophy in its eighth edition (31,000).
• 3. See note p. 119.
• 4. A teacher at the Independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart.
• 5. See note p. 95.
• 6. The opposition to Rudolf Steiner and the Goetheanum.
• 7. Chief accountant of the Independent Waldorf School Association.
• 7. The thrust of this request can be gathered from Rudolf Steiner’s presentation on “Issues of School and Home” at the parents’ evening on June 22, 1923. See pp. 190-202 of this volume.

In my former series of lectures I have been speaking about occult schools and secret societies, and I think it right today to bring this whole course of lectures to a close before we pass on to a different subject next time. A week from now I shall speak about the meaning of the days connected in the Church Calendar with the Christmas Festival—most especially about Epiphany, which follows on the less important New Year Festival.¹ The lecture today, therefore, will be more in the nature of a conclusion.

The question might be asked: What is the deeper meaning of such secret societies, and what is their whole purpose in world evolution? To such a question, my answer would be that they have a real connection with the way in which beings in this world evolve and make progress. If you wish to develop yourself, you know that different kinds of exercises are necessary towards this end and that they are available. You have heard of Hatha Yoga, Rajah Yoga and other exercises of different kinds by means of which societies and brotherhoods connected with occult science have initiated their members.

Somebody might say: All this, surely, could be attained without these secret societies. But I can tell you—and in the course of the lecture you will realise it—that the world cannot do without such societies. To put it bluntly, it is quite unjustifiable to speak in public in the style of the Manifesto of the Freemasons which I read to you a fortnight ago.²

One cannot attain to what is usually known as immortality unless one is to some extent familiar with the occult sciences. The fruits of occult science do, of course, find their way out into the world along many different channels. A great deal of occult knowledge exists in the various religions, and all those who participate deeply and sincerely in the life of a religious community have some share in this knowledge and are preparing themselves for the attainment of immortality in the real sense. But it is still something different, to subsist on the knowledge of this immortality and the feeling of belonging in the spiritual world in concrete experience and with full awareness.

All of you have lived many times; but not all of you are conscious that you have lived through these many lives. However, you will gradually attain this consciousness, and without it, man's life is lived through with incomplete consciousness. It has never been the aim of occult science to inculcate into man a dim feeling of survival, but to impart a clear, fully conscious knowledge of onflowing life in the spiritual world. And there is a certain great law which governs the progressive development of consciousness in all future stages of life. Namely, it is what man works at to help others attain such consciousness which contributes the most to its development. It is an apparently paradoxical proposition: Everything a being works at without aiming at developing its own consciousness, helps to maintain that being's consciousness.

Take as an example the building of a house. An architect builds a house; he does not build this house for himself, but undertakes the task of building it for reasons which have nothing at all to do with him himself. You know well that this is very seldom the case. There are many people who, to all appearances, are not working for themselves; and yet, in reality, they are.

A lawyer, for example, is to all intents and purposes working for his clients. Part of his work may well be selfless, but the real question is one of earning his living. Whatever men do in business merely for the sake of their own livelihood, to the extent that their business only serves that end, just so much is lost in the way of spiritual gain. On the other hand, everything that is introduced into the work for an objective end, everything that is connected with the interests of another, helps to conserve our consciousness for future evolution. So that is quite clear.

Now, think of the Freemasons. In the original arrangement, they gave this injunction to their members: Build such buildings as make no contribution at all to, or have nothing to do with, your own subsistence. All that has survived of the good old Freemasonry, are certain charitable institutions. And although the lodges have lost their living roots in the ancient wisdom and occult knowledge once in their possession, these charitable institutions are evidence of a humanitarianism which, while it is empty [of real substance] still persists and is cultivated as a tradition. Selfless activity is something that belongs to Freemasonry. Freemasonry did originally urge its members to work in the service of humanity, to build into the objective world.

We are living now in the epoch of evolution that may be called the mineral epoch; and our task is to permeate this mineral world through and through with our own spirit. Grasp exactly what this means. You are building a house. You fetch the stones from some quarry. You hew them into the shapes needed for the house, and so on. What are you joining this raw material, obtained from the mineral kingdom, with? You are joining raw material with human spirit. When you make a machine, you have introduced your spirit into that machine. The actual machine does, of course, perish and become dust; it will be broken up. Not a trace of it will survive. But what it has done does not vanish without a trace, but passes into the very atoms. Every atom bears a trace of your spirit and will carry this trace with it. It is not a matter of indifference whether or not an atom has at some time been in a machine. The atom itself has undergone change as a result of having once been in a machine, and this change that you have wrought in the atom will never again be lost to it. Moreover, through your having changed the atom, through your having united your spirit with the mineral world, a permanent stamp has been made upon the general consciousness [of mankind]. Just so much will be taken from us into the other world.

It is a fact that all occult science consists of knowing how a man can act selflessly in order to attain the greatest enhancement of his own consciousness. Consider how certain men who have known this very clearly, have been so selfless that they took steps to prevent their names from going down to posterity. An example of this is the Theologia Deutsch.³ Nobody knows who wrote it. Outwardly, there is only ‘The man from Frankfurt’. He therefore took care that his name could not even be guessed. He worked in such a way that he merely added something to the objective world without asking for honour or for the preservation of his name. By way of comparison, let it be mentioned that the Masters, as a rule, are not personages known to history;⁴ they sometimes incarnate [embody] themselves, when it is necessary, in historical personalities, but this is in a certain respect a sacrifice. The level of their consciousness is no longer compatible with any work for themselves—and preservation of a name does after all involve work for oneself.

It is difficult to understand this rule. However, you will now grasp that the Freemasons aim in this, as far as possible, to do their work in the world in such a way that it is concealed in the cathedrals, in social institutions and organisations, in charitable foundations. For selfless deeds are the real foundations of immortality: this is the reflex of selfless deeds in the outer world. They need not be of great account. If someone gives a coin to someone in a selfless way, then that is an action that is to be understood in that way; but only to the extent that it was selfless does it come into immortality. And very few [deeds] are selfless. A good deed may be very egotistical when, for instance, it creates a feeling of comfort. Good deeds spring extremely often from selfish motives. If a poor man living among us has no roast meat at Christmas, and I feel the need to give him some in order that I may feel justified in [eating] my own roast meat, that, after all, is egoistic.

In the Middle Ages no one could say who had built many of the cathedrals or painted many of the pictures. It is only in our epoch that people have begun to attach such value to an individual human name. In earlier epochs, more spiritual than our own, the individual name had less importance. Spirituality in those days was directed at reality; whereas our epoch adheres to the delusion that what is merely transient should be preserved.

I have said this only in order to indicate to you the principle on which these secret societies depended. It mattered to them to efface themselves altogether as personalities, and to allow what they did to live only in its effects. And this brings us to the heart of the secrets. The fact that some particular thing is kept secret is of less importance than keeping one's own share in the work secret. Everyone who keeps his own part secret thereby secures immortality for himself. The rule is therefore clear and unambiguous: As much as you yourself put into the world, that much consciousness the world will give you back. That is connected with the greatest universal laws.

You all have a soul and you all have a spirit. This soul and spirit are called upon to reach one day the highest stages of perfection. But you were already there before your first physical incarnation. You were first physically incarnated in the preceding races after the time of the Hyperborean and Polarian epochs.⁵ Before that you were purely beings of soul. But as beings of soul you were a part of the world soul, and as spirit you were part of the general world spirit. The world soul and the world spirit were spread around you as Nature is spread around you today. Just as the mineral world, the plant world and the animal world are around you today, so were the worlds of soul and spirit spread around you then. And what was once outside you is now your soul; you have made inward what to begin with was outside. What today is your inward part was once spread about outside. This has now become your soul. The spirit, too, was once spread around you. And what is now spread around you will become your inner life. You will take into yourself what is now the mineral kingdom, and it will become your inner part. The plant kingdom will become your inner part. What surrounds you in Nature will become your inner being.

You will understand now how this is connected with the first example given: you build a church for others, not for yourself. You can take into [yourself] a world full of majesty, beauty and splendour if you make the world majestic, beautiful and splendid. To do something for the higher self is not selfish because it is not done only for the self. This higher self will be united with all other higher selves, so that it is [done] for all at the same time.

It is this that the Freemasons knew. The Freemason knew, when he helped [by] building with the spiritualisation of the mineral world, that this would one day become the content of his soul—and to build means nothing else than to spiritualise the mineral world. That is the significant thing: God once gave us the Nature that surrounds us, as mineral, plant and animal nature. We take these in [to ourselves]. It is not due to us that it is there; all we can do is to appropriate it for ourselves. But what we ourselves create in the world—that is what will, through ourselves, constitute our future being.

The mineral world, as such, we perceive; what we make out of it we will, in the future, be. What we make of the plant world, of the animal world and of the world of men, that too we will be, in the future. If you found a charitable institution or have contributed something to it, what you have contributed, you will be. If a man does nothing which he can draw back in this way into his soul from outside, he will remain empty. It must be possible for man to spiritualise as much as he can of the three kingdoms of nature—four, for mankind also belongs thereto. To bring spirit into the whole external world—that has been the task of the secret societies of every age.

You understand that that must be so. Take a child who is just learning to read and write. To begin with, all the equipment is around him. Today, the child begins to learn to read. Nothing is in him yet, but the teacher, the primers and so forth are there. So it continues until what was outside the child has been instilled into him. And the child acquires the capacity to read. And so it is with Nature, too. In times to come we shall have within us what is now spread around us. We are souls, we spring from the world soul, and we drew it in, when it was spread around us. The spirit was likewise drawn in, and Nature, too, will be drawn in by us, in order to stay within us as an active ability.

That is the great thought at the basis of these secret societies, that all progress is the result of involution and evolution. Involution is the drawing in, evolution is the giving out. All situations in the universe alternate between these two processes. When you see, hear, smell or taste Nature, you breathe it in. What you see does not pass away without leaving a trace on you. The eye itself perishes, the object perishes, but [the fact] that you have seen something remains. You will understand now that at certain times it can be necessary that an understanding of these things be available. We are going forward to an age when, as I recently indicated, understanding will reach right into the atom. It will be realised—by the popular mind too that the atom is nothing else than congealed electricity. Thought itself is composed of the same substance.

Before the end of our present cultural epoch one will in fact have come so far that people will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. When one is able to grasp the materiality between the thought and the atom, then one will soon be able to understand the penetration of the atom. And then nothing will be inaccessible to certain methods of working. A man standing here, let us say, will be able, by pressing a button concealed in his pocket, to [explode] some object at a great distance, let us say in Hamburg, just as wireless telegraphy is possible, by setting up a wave movement and causing it to take a particular form at some other place. This will be within man's power when the occult truth, that thought and atom consist of the same substance, is applied to practical life.

It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances if mankind has not by then reached selflessness. Only through the attainment of selflessness will it be possible to preserve mankind from the brink of destruction. The downfall of post-Atlantean culture will be caused by the lack of morality. The Lemurian race was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; ours will be destroyed by the War of All against All, [by?] evil, through the struggle of men with one another. Humanity will destroy itself in mutual strife. And the despairing thing—more desperately tragic than other catastrophes—will be that the blame will lie with human beings themselves.

A tiny handful of men will save themselves and pass over into the sixth epoch. This tiny handful will have developed complete selflessness. The others will make use of every [imaginable] skill and subtlety in the penetration and conquest of the physical forces of Nature, but without attaining the essential degree of selflessness . They will start the War of All against All, and that will be the cause of the destruction of our civilisation.

In the seventh post-Atlantean cultural epoch, to be precise, this War of All against All will break out, in the most terrible way. Great and mighty forces will ensue from discoveries that will turn the entire globe into a kind of self-functioning electrical apparatus. The tiny handful will be protected in a way that cannot be discussed.

Now you will be able to picture more clearly than was possible when I spoke of these things last time, why the Good [and Proper] Form must be sought and in what sense Freemasonry became aware that it must build a building [dedicated to] selfless [ends]. It is easier to survive and pass over into the future, to the tiny handful of new humanity, with the good old forms, than in chaos.

It is easy to jeer at empty forms, but they have however a deep significance. They are adapted to the structure of our [period of] evolution. After all, they are connected with necessary stages in human nature and the development of the human soul. Just think of it: we are living in the fifth period of the fifth great post-Atlantean epoch;⁶ we have still to live through two more periods of this great epoch. Then the seven periods of the sixth great epoch will follow and then the seven periods of the seventh great epoch. This makes sixteen stages of evolution in the future. Humanity has still to pass through these sixteen stages. A man who can experience something of the conditions [of existence] that are possible there, is to a certain degree initiated. There is a certain correspondence between the degrees of initiation and the secrets of the epochs still to come.

In the ‘form-state’ of our planet there are seven great epochs and each of these epochs has seven sub-periods (cultural epochs)—forty-nine conditions, therefore, in all. In the next ‘form-state’ of our planet there are again forty-nine conditions. Thus there are definite stages for the investigation of the secrets of future phases of evolution. The higher degrees of Freemasonry had no other aim or purpose, originally, than to be an expression of each one of the future stages of the evolution of humanity. Thus in Freemasonry we actually have something which has been very good, namely, that a man who had attained a certain degree knew how he must work his way into the future, so that he could be a kind of pioneer. He knew, too, that one who had reached a higher degree could accomplish more. This arrangement according to degrees can very well be made, for it corresponds with the facts.

If, therefore, it were again possible to pour a new content, together with a new knowledge, into these forms, much good would accrue. Freemasonry would then be imbued with real spirit once again. But content and form belong to the Whole. The state of affairs today is, as I have said: the degrees are there, but nobody has really worked through them. In spite of this, however, they are not there for nothing. They will be brought to life again in the future.

The fifth cultural epoch is a purely intellectual one, an epoch of egoism. We are now at the high point of egoism. The intellect is egoistical in the highest degree, and it is the hallmark of our time. And so we must make our way upwards through intellect to spirituality, which was once there ...[Gap]

The secret of secrets is this, therefore: the human being must learn how to keep silence about the paths along which his ego unfolds, and to regard his deeds, not his ego, as the criterion. The real heart of the secret lies in his deeds and the overcoming of the ego through action. The ego must remain concealed within the deed. Elimination of the interests of the ego from the on-streaming flow of karma—this belongs to the first degree. Whatever karma the ego incurs is thereby wiped out from karma. Nation, race, sex, position, religion—all these work upon human egoism. Only when mankind has overcome all these things will it be freed from egoism.

You can identify, in the astral body, a particular colour for every nation, every race, every epoch. You will always find a base-colour there, that the person has as a member of one of these classifications or categories. This [specific colour] must be eliminated. The Theosophical Society works to level out the colours of the astral bodies of its adherents. They must be of like colour, like in respect of the base-colour. This base colour gives rise to a certain substance ... [Gap] ... [called kundalini, which holds together, within the human being, the forces which lead eventually to the spirit.]⁷

Bringing this levelling-out about will actually entail bloody war, and through such things as economic strife among nations, wars of exploitation, financial and industrial enterprises, conquests, etc., and through the adoption of certain measures, it will be more and more possible to set masses of people in motion and simply to compel them. The individual will acquire more and more power over certain masses of people. For the drift of this development is not that we will become democratic, but that we will become brutally oligarchic, in that the individual will gain more and more power. If the ennobling of morals is not achieved, then the most brutal forces will lead. This will happen, just as catastrophe by water happened to the Atlanteans.

• 1 . The German text, as handed down, reads: an Weihnachten, vor allen Dingen an das minder bedeutende Fest Neujahr anschliessen, das Fest der Epiphanie,’ which could be rendered as follows: ‘... about Christmas, most especially about the less important New Year's Festival the Festival of Epiphany.’ One must assume that the shorthand copy of Seiler intended the following: ‘... das minder bedeutende Fest Neujahr anschliessende Fest der Epiphanie's, which would give the rendering as in the text of the lecture above. The said lecture was held on 30th December 1904 and its subject was the “Three Kings” Festival.’
• 2 . In the lecture given on 9th December 1904 (lecture 8 in this volume). Regarding the style of speaking appropriate to lecturing in public, see The Course of My Life,Chapter 32.
• 3 . Written about 1380. First published by Luther (fragmentary edition) Wittenberg, 1516. Complete edition 1518. First German translation by Johannes Arndt, 1597. Translation into modern German by Franz Pfeiffer, Giitersloh, 1875.
• 4 . See note 21 to the lecture given on 23rd May 1904. (Lecture 1 in this volume).
• 5 . The word nach (‘after’) is missing from the German edition, but to leave it out would be to negate the sense given in lecture I of this series: ‘Whitsuntide,’ given on the 23rd o May 1904, which reads: ‘It is a wrong conception when theosophists believe that reincarnations had no beginning and will have no ending. Reincarnation started in the Lemurian Age and will cease again at the beginning of the sixth Root Race or Age.‘ (See diagram opposite). The German would then read: ‘In physischer Inkarnation waren Sie in den vorhergehenden Rassen erst zur Zeit nach der hyperboraischen und polarischen Rasse vorhanden.’
• 6 . See diagram at the bottom of the page.
• 7 . called Kundalini, which holds together, within the human being, the forces which lead eventually to the spirit.] The latter part of this sentence (within square brackets) was a correction made for the earlier edition of this lecture, published on 23rd November 1947, in the members' newsletter of the German Anthroposophical Society, No. 47.

With Rudolf Steiner the educationalist, the scientist, the philosopher, even the sculptor and the architect of the Goetheanum, we already enjoy the degree of familiarity that translations of his books and lectures afford. We enjoy it too where, as a result of his observations and discoveries, new beginnings have been made in a host of other fields. But Rudolf Steiner’s literary work remains for the most part unfamiliar. Of course, there are grave and ominous difficulties: here more than anywhere else the barriers of language and tradition are tightly defended, hard to traverse. Yet we should not too readily turn away and admit defeat in the face of these literary problems. We might remember, after all, that the scientist-philosopher to whom the young scholar in Vienna and Weimar devoted so much sympathy and scrupulous attention, the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who wrote the Farbenlehre and The Metamorphosis of Plants, was better known to the world as one of the darlings of literature, the Poet of Faust and a great novelist and dramatist into the bargain. It is true that for Steiner the many-sidedness of the poet and artist was to be the new ideal for the philosopher too, but art, or man’s faculty of “aesthetic judgment”, was never to lose its central position or its claim to be – as the Romantics of England and Germany had argued with alternate reason and intuition – the highest and most perfect form of knowledge, because the most human. The apprehension of beauty, as Steiner once put it, “comprises truth, that is, selflessness; but it is at the same time an assertion of self-supremacy in the soul-life, giving us back to ourselves as a spontaneous gift.” [See The Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit (New York 1971), p.114.] In our own day Owen Barfield has taken up the Romantic argument anew, with renewed passion and a new sense of precision, in Poetic Diction and certain of his essays elsewhere. In all Rudolf Steiner’s later, anthroposophical work, moreover, we seem to see everything tending to assume an artistic, poetic form.

He had, of course, his period of quite straightforwardly literary activity, dating back to the last decades of the nineteenth century. He was for some years the editor of the Magazin für Literatur, a well-established literary review founded in the year of Goethe’s death, and contributed to it pieces of his own criticism on literature and drama. [These are collected as Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur (Dornach 1971).] He mingled in Vienna with many literary and some rather Bohemian figures, both prominent and obscure, and later recalled how deeply this cultural atmosphere had influenced The Philosophy of Freedom. [In From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (London 1976), pp. 132ff.]

He also edited and furnished with introductions several of the German “classics”. The occasion for his own venture into drama, however, was to come somewhat later and far from the conventional stage. This was in 1910, when his The Portal of Initiation was produced in Munich for the Annual Congress of the Theosophical Society, which Steiner was even then on the point of leaving. His work in this sphere was to be continued in the more congenial framework of the newly founded Anthroposophical Society. The Portal of Initiation was followed by a further three poetic Mystery Dramas.

It was around that time, too, that he first began to include in his lectures more detailed discussions of the working of language and “speech-formation”—the concrete substance (vowels, consonants, diphthongs, etc.) by means of which language evokes its astonishing range of sensual, emotive and poetic effects. It was in a lecture of 1911, in fact, that he first expounded one of his fundamental conclusions about the basic constituents of language. By that time his researches had reached a stage which enabled him to look back to a period of pre-history, near the very beginnings of language, when, as he says, there existed a kind of primitive human language, a manner of speech which was the same all over the earth, because “speech” in those days came much more out of the depths of the soul than it does now.

At that remote period, he continues, people felt all outward impressions in such a way that if the soul wished to express anything outward by a sound, it was constrained to use a consonant. What existed in space pressed for imitation in a consonant. The blowing of the wind, the murmur of the waves, the shelter given by a house were felt and imitated by man in consonants. On the other hand, the sorrow or joy which was felt inwardly, or was observed as feeling in another being, was imitated in a vowel. From this we can see that the soul became one, in speech, with outer events or beings. [The Spiritual Guidance of Man, Lecture II]

He adds the following example of this kind of intimate relationship between experience and the particular sounds of speech:

A man drew near a hut, which was arched in the ancient fashion and gave shelter and protection to a family. He noticed this, and expressed the protective arch by a consonant; and by a vowel he expressed the fact, which he was able to feel, that within the hut embodied souls were comfortable. Thence arose the thought shelter; “there is a shelter for me – shelter for human bodies.” The thought was then poured forth in consonants and vowels, which could not be otherwise than they were, because they were a direct impression of experience and had but one meaning. This was the same all over the earth. It is no dream that there was once an original human root-language. And, in a certain sense, the initiates of all nations are still able to feel that language. Indeed there are in all languages certain similar sounds which are the remains of that universal language. [The Spiritual Guidance of Man (New York 1970), pp.35-36. Compare the earlier (1904) discussion of this stage of language in Cosmic Memory (New York 1971), p.50. Cf. Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell Nos. 236, 241.]

This was a discovery from which a great deal could be made, in opening up the way to a wide-ranging investigation both into the nature of language in general and, especially as regards that immediate and necessary link “in the depths of the soul” between certain specific sounds and types of experience, into the foundations of poetry and poetic speech-formation.

As so often in Rudolf Steiner’s career, however, he put himself at the disposal of those around him, and developed his ideas as circumstances seemed to demand, rather than as he himself might have found it easiest to elaborate them. In any event, the lecture-courses embodying his contributions to the subject in depth do not come until virtually the last years of his life – commencing around 1919. Some of these lectures, together with a sprinkling of aphorisms and notes, have been usefully gathered together and published in English as Creative Speech: The Nature of Speech-Formation, translated by Winifred Budgett, Nancy Hummel and Maisie Jones (London 1978). Others, notably concerned with broader and less technical issues in poetry and artistic speech, are presented in this volume. In our notes we have made some effort to indicate the points at which the two books may shed light upon each other or provide the inquisitive reader with further details on a particular topic.

Both earlier and later, one of Rudolf Steiner’s main inducements to develop his work in this direction was undoubtedly the interest, the practical help, the enthusiasm and the talents of Marie von Sivers (later Marie Steiner). Whilst still in Russia, as a promising young actress in St. Petersburg, Marie von Sivers had studied under Maria Strauch-Spettini, one of the prominent figures on the stage of the German Imperial Theatre. There were later hopes that she might have returned there to help make a stand for the traditions of French classicism against the all-engulfing trend towards naturalism. For in the meantime she had spent two years in Paris studying under the direction of Madame Favart, the first lady of the Comédie Francaise, then at the end of her theatrical career, and had been attending at the Conservatoire the classes of several other notable actors of the time. But she decided against returning permanently to St. Petersburg, and her connection with the Theosophical Society soon opened out quite different avenues for her future work. In his autobiography, The Course of My Life, Rudolf Steiner describes their collaboration in those early days, and the importance it assumed for the germinating Anthroposophical Movement:

In the Theosophical Society artistic interests were hardly cultivated at all. This was understandable in a certain sense – but had to change if a proper attitude toward the spirit was to flourish. The members of such a society tend to focus all their interests in the reality of the spiritual life; man in the sense-world seems to them merely a transitory being, severed from the spirit. And art appears to concern only that severed existence, as if it were divorced from the looked-for reality of the spirit.

In view of this, artists did not feel at home in the Theosophical Society. To Marie von Sivers and me it seemed important for an artistic life to be engendered in the Society. Knowledge of the spirit, when it becomes an inner experience, takes hold of the whole man. All the powers of the soul are roused. And the light of this inner spiritual experience will shine into man’s creative imagination.

But there may be difficulties. The artist, when his imagination is illumined by the spiritual world, may feel a certain uneasiness. He finds it preferable to remain unconscious of the spiritual that rules within the soul. And so long as it is a question of his imagination being prompted by that intellectualizing which has dominated spiritual life since the opening of the consciousness-soul era, this feeling is quite justified. Such a stimulation by human intellect does have a deadening effect on art.

When a spiritual content is perceived directly, however, and lights up in the imagination, the opposite result is brought about. This leads to a resurrection of all those creative powers which have ever brought art into being in the life of humanity. Marie von Sivers was genuinely accomplished in the art of speech-formation, and had a real feeling for drama. Thus there was represented within the Movement an art-form on which the fruitfulness of spiritual perception for the arts could be tested.

The evolution of the consciousness-soul exposes the “Word” to danger from two directions. On the one hand it is made the vehicle of social understanding, and on the other it serves to communicate logical, intellectual knowledge. In both spheres the “Word” loses all value of its own. It has to be adapted to the “sense” of what it expresses. That the tone, the sound and the formation of the sound possess a reality of their own has to be forgotten. The beauty and luminous quality of the vowels, the unique character of the various consonants, are lost in speech. The vowel is drained of soul, the consonant of spirit. Speech deserts utterly the sphere of its origin – the spiritual sphere. It becomes the slave of intellectual knowledge and of a social life that shuns the spirit. It is divorced entirely from the domain of art.

True spiritual perception is also instinctively an “experience of the Word”. Through it one learns to enter into the soul-quality that resonates in the vowel, and the spiritual power of depiction that resides in the consonant. One gradually begins to comprehend the mystery of speech and its evolution: how divine-spiritual beings could once speak to man’s soul through the Word, whereas now it is merely a means of communicating in the physical world.

To lead the word back to its own sphere requires the enthusiasm kindled by such a spiritual insight. Marie von Sivers had this enthusiasm. Through her personality there entered the Anthroposophical Movement the possibility of cultivating the art of speech and speech-formation. Thus to the activity of imparting spiritual knowledge was added cultivation of the art of recitation and declamation, and this played an ever-increasing part in the events that were organized within the Anthroposophical Movement.

Marie von Sivers’ recitations on these occasions formed the point of departure for the impact of art on the Anthroposophical Movement. From them, beginning as supplements to lectures, the drama productions later staged in Munichside by side with anthroposophical lecture-cycles were directly descended.

Since, along with spiritual knowledge, we could also unfold artistic work, we entered more and more upon an experience of the spirit appropriate for our time. For art did indeed grow out of man’s primaeval, dream-image experience of the spirit. And when this experience receded in the course of man’s development, it was left alone to find its way; therefore art must find its way back to the experience of the spirit, when this is once more becoming, in a new form, a part of man’s cultural evolution. [The Course of My Life, Chapter XXXIV]

The present volume is a fragment of the work that resulted from their collaboration. It consists for the greater part of lectures held in several places by Rudolf Steiner, and these are punctuated by regular recitals of poetry, illustrating the points that the speaker has just made. The poems were recited or declaimed by Marie Steiner – generally introduced with impeccable courtesy as “Frau Dr. Steiner” – and constitute an integral part of the lecture’s meaning. Indeed the lecturer often relies entirely on the effect of her reciting to make some literary characteristic or contrast immediately obvious. And this, of course, makes for certain difficulties in point. A case in point is the basic distinction, adumbrated in the opening lectures and running all through the book, between recitation and declamation. Rudolf Steiner naturally makes no attempt to define for us what the differences between them are. A definition, after all, is not what is finally wanted. And it becomes totally superfluous when we can hear the difference through a concrete demonstration of things being recited and declaimed. Even the most precise definition would pale in comparison.

The situation with the printed poem (at least for those who cannot call upon the resources of some trained speech-formationist) is a little more difficult. Yet for all its force and vividness, even the oral demonstration would have resolved itself only gradually in our minds into a clear grasp of the distinctions involved, enabling us to discern the essentials of both modes of speech. All the more must the serious reader be content to work his way slowly and patiently forward before he can attain to a clear experience, and, excellent introduction though these lectures may be, he will certainly find himself in need, if he is to progress beyond a certain point, of contact with the living tradition of anthroposophical speech-formation. In England this is represented above all by the London School of Speech Formation, headed by Maisie Jones. Those who wish to learn for themselves the detailed methods of the art of speech which has developed on the basis of Rudolf Steiner’s investigations will there find qualified instructors, with practical experience of its complexities.

For those who simply want to approach literature and poetry with a more awakened sense of its spiritual depth, however, these lectures remain a valuable and relatively accessible source of illumination. But either way, practical or appreciative, the student must be wary of the intellectual short-cut and the neat definition as a substitute for experience. He must gradually progress along a path of knowledge, and so ultimately develop a sensitivity for the multifarious and elusive ways in which poetry, all-mysteriously, contrives to operate. It is one of the central arguments of this book that such a process is also one of increasingly definite self-knowledge – not only in the vague, Johnsonian sense of general human psychology, but even as regards one’s own deeper spiritual resources, at a level where these are continuous with the forces of organic life itself.

Perhaps we may be permitted to say a little on the subject of one of the difficulties that is likely to arise from a first perusal of the lectures that follow – a difficulty connected with the polarity between recitation and declamation. Rudolf Steiner characterises them in the opening lecture-cycle in terms of the contrast between the plastic arts and music. Recitation and metrical, regular poetry are brought into connection with music; energetic declamation is connected with a kind of powerful visual experience. In the later lecture on “Speech-Formation and Poetic Form”, however, he apparently contradicts himself by presenting recitation as a visual, plastic art, as opposed to declamation which is musical and melodic. We would suggest that, as always with Steiner’s observations, the key to understanding is to descend from the level of abstractions, and take a concrete look at which aspects of the arts are involved in these contrasts. We do not, of course, propose to discuss the question in detail. But it may prove helpful to the reader to be reminded that both music and the plastic arts are themselves very varied things, and that each at their extremes may invite comparison with the other. Within music, for example, the classical style stands at the opposite pole to the baroque. Mozart’s music is eminently metrical and regular: yet, precisely because it reaches us in a series of perfectly defined and clearly differentiated structures of sound, it can easily be compared to an exactly delineated picture, where the artist has sharply rendered every detail. With Bach, on the other hand, we are engaged by the driving-force of the music, its tremendous energy and unflagging will: and yet there is even here a certain kind of painting with which it can very appropriately be compared – as in baroque art, where we have a visual experience that, rather than lingering over every detail of form, catches us up in a single powerful movement or effect of light. When Steiner contrasts recitation and declamation as opposite poles in the art of speech, therefore, we must remember to ask which features of music and the plastic arts he is appealing to in order to explain the contrast, and realize that he might elsewhere appeal to very different ones.

Edwin Froböse, in his “Nachwort” to the German original of this work, has adduced an extract from the papers left by Marie Steiner, possibly drafted in the ’30s, where she describes the high seriousness of their undertaking, as it was carried on by her continuing work at the Goetheanum:

The endeavour of the Section for Speech and Music at the Goetheanum is to approach more nearly the riddle of language and the foundation of a spiritual knowledge of man and the universe, as uniquely expressed in the anthroposophical Spiritual Science of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, and to grasp the nature of sound-formation in connection with man and the cosmos. Through abstract understanding we have lost the secret of the creating word. This creating power of the word can be reawakened and experienced, however, through a conscious activity of thought – a thinking that is not simply a mirror of the external, but wells up vitally from deeper strata of the soul. In association with music, colour, and the new art of eurythmy (a speech made visible through the medium of the body), it is possible to instil new life into the works of our great poets, and also into works for the stage. This, at a time when interest in and understanding for the idealistic struggles of our ‘classic’ authors is on the wane, is one of the tasks that the Goetheanum has set for itself. [Die Kunst der Rezitation und Deklamation, p.246.]

This passage may also remind us, among other things, of the remarkably wide implications of what the Germans so conveniently and all-embracingly term a Geisteswissenschaft, which comes rather sadly truncated into English either as cultural or spiritual science. In these lectures poetry and the other arts are all viewed from the perspective of such a science, as the several manifestations of the human Spirit. And conversely, the rediscovery of the spiritual is seen as something with consequences across the whole range of human culture.

But how are we to coax this book into English? Poetry is traditionally defined as what gets lost in translation between two languages, and a work such as this might in the end look like nothing so much as a sort of stranded whale when once removed from the native element of German poetry to which it makes minute and constant reference. Certainly we could see little point in offering the reader the dubious assistance of the German poems in translation. But we were convinced that the principles of Steiner’s poetics could be applied, with the appropriate adjustments, to English – or any other – poetry. The only valid way of translating the book, we therefore decided, was to furnish it with a repertoire of suitable examples from the vast wealth of English verse or, in one case, poetic prose. In this way we hoped to present Steiner’s work on poetry to English readers with some semblance of its having been genuinely domiciled in English literature. How far we have succeeded it is for our readers, and particularly those pioneers who have already taken up anthroposophical speech-formation in English, to judge.

As for the examples themselves, they are no more than suggestions on our part. They lay no great claim to finality, nor indeed any authority save that we took some pains in the choosing of them, and tried conscientiously to find extracts which exemplified as precisely as possible the points made in the lecture to which they belong. Predictably, we were not always as successful as we might have wished. In some areas, German and English literature simply do move in incompatible directions: poets here in England, for instance, do not feel the apparently perennial attraction that alliterative verse has for the German poet. But at the same time the poem we eventually included (by W. R. Rodgers), besides confessing to the gulf which lies between the two languages, is indirectly valuable in pointing to something essential in the differences that divide them. It shows that alliteration in English is essentially distinctive and in important ways unlike its German counterpart, whilst sharing certain fundamental qualities with it.

We have enclosed all our editorial intrusions within square brackets, adding the briefest of explanations as to our intention in each case. It was obviously necessary, too, to preserve the original German poems employed as examples and recited when the lectures were given. Furthermore, we have on some occasions availed ourselves of a poetic licence to be frankly inconsistent, and supplied an English translation where the interest of the poem’s content seemed to merit it, or, as in the brilliant example of the two versions of Iphigeneia used in the first lecture, where nothing exactly comparable could be adduced from English. Conversely, where the German poem was a translation, and as such no nearer to the original than an English version, we have of course simply substituted the latter for the German piece. (However, the observant reader will in one case here find us guilty of double inconsistency.) In general we have tried to make the selection as interesting as we could. We have had the advantage, in cases where Steiner used the same example on more than one occasion, of being able to offer more than a single analogy from our own literature. This, too, has broadened the range of our anthology.

We have followed the lead of the German choice of examples in selecting works from the mainstream of literature. Some of our instances are in fact old favourites; some of them not so old; and some of them, perhaps, not such favourites. But they are all drawn from the central, deep channel along which the history of English literature has been directed more or less from the days of Chaucer and Langland to the present day. Only one large omission may provoke the raising of an eyebrow or two: we therefore take this opportunity of pledging our boundless admiration for William Shakespeare, even though we have chosen to represent him by a mere fourteen lines. Here, with the poet who more than any other is in himself an entire world, a microcosm within the literary macrocosm of our language, we suffered from a sheer embarras de richesse. Any choice seemed like a concession to the arbitrary or a personal whim. It seemed best, therefore, to exclude him (with entire good will) from our little republic of poetry, only erecting within it the monument of a lone sonnet to commemorate his kingly greatness.

A further disparity which may strike the reader stems from another of the differences between German and English literary history. Steiner drew a good many of his examples from the so-called “classic” period, the age of Goethe and Schiller, one of the high points in the development of German literature and poetry. But England’s equivalent of the classic period falls earlier, with the blossoming of poetry and drama in the Renaissance. Our Goethe is, so to speak, Shakespeare. In order to do justice to the splendours of our literature we have accordingly delved back a little further into the past for the bulk of our examples, and by way of compensation broadened their range to show some of the almost infinite variety of forms which have sprung up since. We soon ran into certain difficulties, however, over the language of our poems. The German “classics” are written in what is virtually modern speech; many of the highlights of English literature, contrastingly, are in a slightly archaic language. Even though the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s day was not too far removed from what it is now, there are nuances – and these are reflected in the spelling. This confronted us with the problem of whether or not to modernize our texts. Easy intelligibility argues for modern spelling and punctuation. But in poetry, as Steiner continually emphasizes, the sound and articulation of the words is all-important. Indeed, in the last of the lectures in this volume he says explicitly that “the spiritual does not speak in human words. The spiritual world goes only as far as the syllable, not as far as the word.” The preservation of the syllables of each word as nearly as possible in the way the poet envisaged them therefore seemed the only justifiable policy. Now the relation between spelling and the spoken sound, particularly in an eccentrically written language like English, and particularly in times when spelling was much less hidebound by orthodoxy than it is nowadays, is a subtle and complex one. But in those flexible circumstances a poet’s spelling obviously will form a valuable guide to the particular sound he wanted. In the superbly musical case of Miltonit is now known that the poet developed a highly refined notation for the pronunciation of his works. And we may take a more simple and blatant case: if a poet transcribed the sound he envisaged as thorough, this is plainly unlikely to be exactly what we get if we insist upon writing through. Often the difference is no more than a shade or nuance – but these are the special province of the speech-formationist, who must be thankful for any of the poet’s hints on the formation of sound that underlies his poem.

In the case of pre-Elizabethan texts we have supplied a few (hopefully judicious) critical signs, notably where a final -ed is to be sounded in defiance of later usage. It is assumed that the later conventions of pronouncing this syllable, extending to the Romantic period but abandoned in the modern, are generally understood. In our couple of mediaeval texts we have marked the final -e where it is to be pronounced for the benefit of the rhythm. It should be said very short, just suggested rather than as a full vowel. Otherwise, alterations have been confined to editing out the old orthography and adding a few helpful capitals.

The English language is at a later stage of development than is German, and has lost many of those qualities which make for a ready, spontaneous poetic effect in speech. The English poet has very much to mould a language of his own to achieve what he needs to express. And in the same way there are difficulties for the reciter who must wrestle with what Blake called the “stubborn structure” of this language. But we are far from wishing to conclude from these gloomy observations that there are limits to the future potentialities of an English speech-formation. We may therefore be forgiven for taking this opportunity to quote the vision of our “English Blake” of what speech may ultimately become. It is taken from the last, apocalyptic pages of Jerusalem:

And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect,
Creating Space, Creating Time, according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination throughout all the Three Regions immense
Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age; & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent, varying
According to the subject of discourse; & every Word & Every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous fibres: such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary; & they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man, reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing, according to fitness & order.

We turn finally to the more immediate difficulties of rendering this book into English. That certain of these are notorious does not make them easier to resolve. Particularly with regard to philosophical or semi-philosophical terms, where the original distinguishes between inner processes with a Germanic nicety, we have retained its precision at slight expense to natural English usage. “Representation” appears uniformly for Vorstellung – occasionally “mental representation”; vorstellen as “form a representation” or “represent”. For Steiner’s argument it is important to realize that what is being contrasted in one context with “concept-formation”, for instance, is the same activity of “representation” referred to less technically elsewhere in the book; consistency was thus essential. In addition we have resorted to “psychic” to fill the lack of an English adjective from “soul” for man’s subjective and emotional nature; and we have sometimes been slightly devious in getting round the problem of ordinary “imagination” (Phantasie) and Steiner’s technical use of Imagination for the more highly developed spiritual faculty.

Our translation is based on the second, enlarged and improved edition of Die Kunst der Rezitation und Deklamation (Dornach 1967), edited by Edwin Froböse. This omits the introductory lecture included in the first edition, but adds the lecture here called “Poetry and the Art of Speech”. The German book also contains a seminar by Marie Steiner and a series of short discussions of individual poets: several of them are not known at all in England, and it seemed best to leave them out of an English version altogether.

Every translation is in some sense a collaborative effort. But we have more than the common number of acknowledgements for help and suggestions to record. Work on this volume began some years ago, having been originally undertaken by Maud Surrey for the benefit of her pupils, but she was regrettably unable to complete it before her death. We inherited from her a draft of the earlier lectures, whose renderings we have not infrequently adopted, even though we have subjected it to a thorough revision, mainly in the interests of a uniform style. We were aided in the first stages of this process and for all too brief a time by Olga Holbek, who made some fine contributions and has continued to take a beneficent interest in the work's progress. We were also encouraged from the very beginning by the warm support of Maisie Jones, of the London School, herself a leading figure in the struggle to develop a speech-formation for the English language. We also have good reason to thank Valerie Jacobs and Winifred Budgett for their help at various points, and their continued good will towards our project. In moments of difficulty or desperation in the face of the German text we have benefited incalculably from the knowledge and friendly exhortations of Edwin Froböse, who also made several excellent proposals for the preface and has been in general, as they say, a mine of information. For the manifold imperfections which remain we hold ourselves solely responsible.

Cambridge, E. J. W.

In the lecture yesterday which dealt with Spengler's Decline of the West, I tried to bring home to you the significance of anthroposophical Spiritual Science by emphasising the difference between merely abstract concepts and that which also arises in the soul in the form of ideas and concepts but is, nevertheless, reality. Let us realise once for all that with his materialistic frame of mind, and his tendency to reject spiritual conceptions and occupy himself only with ideas concerning the natural world, man is making himself more and more akin to the material, is descending so deeply into the material world that he is no longer speaking falsely when he declares that it is the material substance of his body which thinks, that his brain actually does the thinking. Man is becoming a kind of automaton in the universe, and as the result of his denial of the soul and Spirit he is losing the soul and Spirit. I said before that this thought is by no means popular; people will not accept it because they cherish the belief that the soul-and-spirit will be saved to man for all eternity without any action being necessary an his part. By no means is it so. A man may give himself up to material life to such an extent that he severs himself from the soul-and-spirit altogether, sinks into the realm of the Ahrimanic Powers and passes with them into a cosmic stream which does not belong to our world. But thereby he loses his own Ego, for the Ego does not belong to the world of Ahriman and can only find its true path of development when a human being pursues the normal course of progressive evolution; that is to say, when he unites with the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha and when he realises that in the pr sent age he must find a link with all that spiritual research can contribute to the civilised life of mankind. Since the middle of the fifteenth century man has been living through the phase of evolution in which, as he looks out into his environment, he sees nothing but the material world. And as he looks into his own being he intellectualizes the inner experiences of his life of soul; these become abstract and shadowy. This has been the tendency since the middle of the fifteenth century.

The thoughts and concepts with which we build up our picture of the world to-day, drawn as they are from the dicta of orthodox science, have no connection with existence as it actually is. Neither can they lead to the heart of reality. It is merely a convention to imagine that man's life of soul is fundamentally involved in the forming of abstract thought. These abstract thoughts are quite remote from reality; they are nothing but a series of pictures. We may say, therefore, that externally man perceives the material world and inwardly a world of pictures having no essential connection with existence. This has been the lot of mankind since the middle of the fifteenth century and we shall presently see what effect it has upon a conception of the universe to see, externally, nothing but the material world and, inwardly, to have experiences that have become a mere series of pictures. We may ask: Why is it that since the middle of the fifteenth century man's life of soul has gradually come to the point of having no more reality than a picture? The reason is that only in this way is it possible for man to attain his real freedom.

In order to understand this let us consider the world as it lies before us to-day and our own place in the world. To begin with we will think of the world, leaving aside the human being altogether. Looking at clouds, mountains, rivers, at the minerals, plants and animals, we ask: What is there, in reality, in the whole wide world, when we leave the human being out of the picture? In other words, we think of all that surrounds us in the mineral and plant kingdoms, and to a certain extent also, in the animal kingdom, but apart altogether from man. In reality, of course, this is quite impossible, but we will assume hypothetically a Nature divested of the human being. In this Nature that is divested of the human being, there are no Gods. That is what we must bring home to ourselves. In this Nature that is divested of the human being there are no Gods, any more than an oyster is there within an empty oyster-shell or a snail in an empty snail-shell. This whole world which we assume hypothetically, a world without the human being, is something which the Gods have separated off from themselves in the course of evolution, just as the oyster sheds its shell. But the Gods—the spiritual Beings—are no longer within it. The world that surrounds us, is a world of the Past. When we look at Nature we are looking at something which represents the spiritual Past, we are looking at a residue of the Spiritual. And that is why religious consciousness in the real sense can never arise from contemplation of the external world alone. Let us not imagine for a moment that any element of the life of the divine-spiritual Beings who work creatively in mankind, is contained in this external world. Elementary beings, spiritual beings of a lower order, are there, of course; but the creative spiritual Beings who should live in our religious consciousness belong to this external world only inasmuch as represents their shell, being a residue of spiritual evolution in the Past.

Certain outstanding personalities have felt the truth of these things. In the spiritual life of the nineteenth century the man who felt most deeply of all that the Nature surrounding man is a residue of divine-spiritual evolution was Philip Mainländer whose philosophy of self-destruction was born from the gravity of this knowledge and who finally put an end to his own life. It is often the destiny of human beings to steep themselves in one-sided truths of this kind and the inevitable consequence is that this destiny itself becomes one-sided and difficult to bear. Philip Mainländer, the unfortunate German Philosopher, is an outstanding example of this.

Having realised what has been put forward hypothetically in connection with external Nature, you may ask: Where then, are the Gods; where are the creative spiritual Beings? If I were to make a drawing, I should have to draw the Gods within the human being. The truly creative Gods have their habitat in the realm that is bounded by the human skin, within the organs—if I may use this expression. The being of man is now the bearer of the Divine-Spiritual. The Divine-Spiritual, the truly creative principles is within the human being. Try to picture to ourselves external Nature as it is to-day, and then a future lying thousands of years ahead—in this future there will be no clouds, no minerals, no plants, even no animals. There will be nothing left of all that now lives in external Nature outside the bounds of the human skin. What will continue its evolution is the soul and Spirit permeating the inner organisation of man. This will constitute the future. The Nature by which man is now surrounded will pass away, and the Human-Divine principle now within his being will become his outer environment.

Insight into the truth that the Divine-Spiritual—the only truly creative principle in our time—lives inside the bounds of the human skin, must be taken in deepest seriousness, for it lays upon man a responsibility in regard to the whole universe. It enables him to understand the words of Christ: “Heaven and Earth”—the world of external Nature—“will pass away but my words will not pass away.” And when in the individual human being the saying of St. Paul, “Not I but Christ in me,” is fulfilled, then the words of Christ will live in the individual human being. “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” or My words in the individual human being, namely all that lies inside the human skin and is received into Christ, this will not pass away.

All this is an indication of the fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century, through his abstract, intellectual concepts, man has been making his inner being empty and void. And to what end has he been making himself empty? It is in order to receive the Christ Impulse, the Divine Spiritual, into his inner being. I said that as we look into the external world, we see only the material. It is the divine Past. (In this residue of a divine Past there are, of course, the Elemental Spirits who have remained at lower stages of evolution.) As we look into our inner being, we see, to begin with, nothing but abstract concepts which can only become concrete and real when we receive the impulse of the Spirit into our being through Spiritual Science and unite the impulse of the Spirit with our inner life. Man has the choice—a choice which has become a matter of greater and greater seriousness since the middle of the fifteenth century—either to remain at a standstill with his abstract intellectual concepts or to receive into himself the living substance of Spiritual Science. Abstract intellectuality enables him to evolve a brilliant science of Nature, for intellectual concepts are dead and by their means he can unfold an admirable understanding of dead Nature. But all this mummifies him, makes him akin to matter, and leads him ultimately into the clutches of the Ahrimanic world. To further the Progress of earthly existence and the whole evolution of the earth, he must receive the Spiritual into his being, and in our time the Spiritual does not draw near to man by way of atavistic instinct. It must be reached by his own efforts. The assimilation of Spiritual Science is not, therefore, the assimilation of a theory but the development of something absolutely real, an impulse that will fill the otherwise empty recesses of the soul with spiritual substance.

In the mass to-day, men prefer to have this emptiness inwardly and the Past outwardly manifest before them. They will only admit the validity of thought when it has been proved by experiment and they resist the quickening impulses of spiritual life. The danger confronting the world to-day is not so much the spread of false theories but the loss of the very Mission of the Earth.

Only those who have really thought through and perceived the task of the human race will realise how much depends upon the assimilation of Spiritual Science. These souls will never lose sight of the importance of knowledge of the being of man, but in modern natural science and in the ancient religious tradition this knowledge simply does not exist. What is the trend of ancient religious tradition? It directs the minds of men to unworldly abstractions and is silent an the subject of the Gods indwelling the being of man, indwelling his very organism. This thought would he condemned by religious tradition as out-and out heresy. If any attempt were made to bring home to the traditional religions in Europe and America to-day the truth of the ancient saying that “the Body of man is the Temple of the Gods,” they would indignantly refuse to countenance such heresy.

And an the other hand we have a materialistic natural science which precisely because it is materialistic has no real understanding of matter. What does science really know about the functioning of the human brain, of the human heart? I have often told you, and I have also said in public, that one of the views held by modern science is that the human heart is a kind of pump which drives the blood through the body. This dictum of academic science is universally accepted but it is simply a piece of nonsense—pure nonsense. We shall never understand the essential nature of the heart we imagine that it pumps the blood in every direction and then lets it flow back again. The circulating blood itself is the living force. The driving force in the human organisation is contained in the blood, in the circulating blood, and the heart is the outward expression of this; the movement reveals itself in the heart. To say in accordance with modern science that the heart drives the blood into the Body, is rather like saying: “At ten minutes to nine one hand of the clock pointed to nine, and the other a little past ten, and these hands, in conjunction with the mechanism of the clock, drove me to the speaker's desk and left a great many still outside (because in the Anthroposophical Society people have a habit of unpunctuality). In reality, it is not so at all. Obviously the clock is simply an expression of what is happening—it is the expression and nothing more. The heart is not the pumping machine by means of which the blood is driven through the body; the heart is inserted into and is the expression of this whole system of movement.

Natural Science, as it is to-day, never leads into the inner being of man. All that science does is to make the inner into the outer by the dissection of dead bodies. But dissection of the dead body merely takes the inner and transfers it to the outer world. I mention this in order to bring home to you that in the spiritual life of to-day there is no inclination whatever to penetrate into the inner being and inner nature of man, and it devolves upon Spiritual Science to bring that real knowledge of man's being which scares the great majority of our contemporaries. Why are they scared? It is because religious traditions through the centuries have utterly hood-winked mankind so far as striving for real knowledge is concerned. Just think of the way in which the traditional creeds mystify human beings with apocryphal utterances culminating in a warning that it is not meant for man to know the Supersensible, that he may only have faith in it and feel its existence darkly. This is all done with the object of playing upon man's pride and self-conceit and also upon his inherent laziness. He must be led to believe that it is not necessary for him to think about the Divine, that his conception of the Divine must be a matter of instinct and dim feeling. But ideas that arise from this region of man's being are merely emanations from the organs—emanations which become illusions, and these illusions are distorted into all kinds of nebulous ideas by theologians and others who know quite well how much they can count an man's inherent love of ease.

The instinct for knowledge which alone can promote the earthly evolution of man and also lead him to the path of spiritual development, has been stifled and suppressed for many long centuries. People to-day are frightened at the very thought of developing knowledgE of realities or of experiencing the spiritual world. But to the extent to which they are frightened—to that extent do they sever themselves from the Spirit and soul and make themselves akin to the material.

It is so indeed; people are scared when the gravity of these things dawns upon them, because everything to-day is regarded from the external point of view. And here, in parenthesis, let me repeat certain remarks made a short time ago. In Stuttgart we have the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School was founded out of the very spirit of anthroposophical Spiritual Science; that is to say, fundamental principles of education and of teaching were laid before those who were specially Chosen to work in the School. Everything is a question of the Spirit in this art of education. Yet we are finding to-day, a sensation, that people visit the school and actually think that in a couple of hours or so they can inform themselves about the essentials of education there given. But it is of course only through Spiritual Science that one can gain insight into the spirit of the Waldorf School; it cannot be done by short brief visits which only disturb the teaching.

To assimilate anthroposophical Spiritual Science, however, is much more difficult and much less sensational than visiting the School as an outsider. As I have often said, the education at the Waldorf School takes account of the existence of the spiritual world, and, above all, of the pre-earthly existence of the human being. What is there to be said about this pre-earthly existence? We may take the year of our birth and say that this is the time when we descended to physical life on the Earth. Children born later have been living in the spiritual world while we were already on the Earth. These children have just descended to the physical world, whereas we ourselves have been living through our earthly existence for a considerable length of time. And they bring with them something of what they were experiencing in the spiritual world while we were already living in the physical world.

One can realise this quite clearly among children who are taught according to the principles of Waldorf School education. To give this kind of education is to prepare for the application in everyday life of thoughts and ideas which are the natural outcome of Spiritual Science. But it is precisely here that people are kept back by traditional religions, for the last thing these religions want is the development of inner activity in human beings. Inner activity leads to a real knowledge of the being of man and brings home the truth that the dwelling place of the Gods is inside the bounds of the human skin.

Suppose we see a planet in the sky. There is nothing of the Divine-Spiritual in anything upon that planet except in Spiritual Beings whose nature in some way resembles the nature of man. From these Beings the Divine pours its radiance upon us. Why, then, should this radiance be any the less because it shines from the bodies of men? You will begin to feel at home with this thought if you dissociate it from earthly life and relate it to conditions as they are upon another planet. Living an the Earth as you do, you will find that there is something oppressive, something rather coercive in the thought that you and your fellow men are bearers of the Divine-Spiritual. But if you turn the gaze of your soul to one of the other planets it will be much easier for you to grasp the fact that the Beings who there constitute the highest kingdom of Nature are the point from which the Divine Spiritual shines down upon you.

In a certain respect the thought we have been considering to-day amplifies the thought which occupied our minds in the last lecture, namely that something is unfolding in the inner being of man upon which the future evolution of the Earth essentially depends, but also that it lies within the powers of the human will to hinder the Earth's evolution, to receive the stream of Ahrimanic forces only. And to-day we added the other thought, namely, that Nature around is transient and external, for it already represents nothing more than a residue of Divine Spiritual creation. The process of Divine-Spiritual creation which dominates the present and will dominate the future, lies inside the bounds of the human skin. Strange as it may seem, it is therefore quite true to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears hear will all pass away with the Earth. Only that which is contained in the regions enclosed by the human skin lives over to the Jupiter stage of evolution, bearing existence as it is an the Earth into future conditions of planetary evolution.

When it is once realised that a knowledge of the nature of man is a burning necessity, the urge to understand the connection of the human being with the universe will again make itself felt. You know that man really lives between two extremes, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic as we are accustomed to call them. We can also understand the nature of these two extremes from a more elementary point of view. Philosophers have declared again and again that Being in itself eludes the grasp of thought. This is quite true, for whence comes the sense of being, the feeling of existence which there is in man? The human being exists before he enters earthly existence through conception and birth; he exists in super-sensible worlds. From super-sensible worlds he descends into his earthly, material existence. Here he experiences something quite new, something he did not experience in the super-sensible worlds. He is encompassed by it as soon as he has descended to earthly existence. It is the attractive force of the Earth, gravity, ‘to have weight,’ as we say, but only by way of illustration. As you know, the expression ‘to have weight’ is drawn from the most palpable phenomenon of all. The fatigue of which we become aware is similar to ‘having weight,’ and what we feel in our limbs when they move is also akin to this. But because the fact of ‘having weight’ is merely the representative phenomenon, we can say: The human being places himself within gravity. And in a hidden way man always enters, a little more into this element of gravity when he approaches a thing of Earth and calls it real.

It is exactly the reverse when the human being is passing through his life between death and rebirth. Just as here on the Earth he is allied with gravity, in the life between death and rebirth he is allied with light, for ‘light’ too is used in a representative sense. Because we receive most of our higher sense-perceptions through the eye, we speak of the light. But what lives as light in the sense-perception of the eye is the same element that sounds in the sense-perception of the ear and reveals itself in different tones, just as the light reveals itself in different colours. And it is the same with the other senses. fundamentally speaking, the element we speak of in a representative sense as the light, just as we speak of gravity in a representative sense, is the ‘tincture’ of all the senses. We are received into the extreme pole of gravity when we descend to the Earth. We are received into the extreme pole of light when we are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. are, in reality, always in the middle condition between light and gravity; and every sense-perception, as we experience it here on Earth, is half light and half gravity. When, as the result of some pathological condition, or in dream, we experience without the element of our own gravity, we are experiencing only the Spiritual, as for instance in a dream or in delirium. Psychologically, delirium is a state in which the human being has experience, but his own gravity is no factor in them. This state of balance between gravity and light into which we are placed, is something that is intimately connected with the riddle of the world, inasmuch as it is bound up with many of the experiences we have as beings of soul and Spirit in the world.

It will surely be obvious to you from what has been said that neither the traditional creeds nor the fantasies of natural science succeed in finding their way from merely abstract concepts into the light nor from sense perception down into gravity. People have become blind and deaf to these things. Man is bound to the Earth by gravity. He experiences gravity as the element which draws him to the Earth. Think of a crystal. A crystal gives itself its form. Within the crystal there is the same force which the human being feels drawing him downwards—the force which gives the whole Earth form. And now think of the oceans and seas. Here the Earth can give form, or rather the element of gravity gives the form. This very same force also gives the crystal its form but in this case it works from within. According to science, nobody knows what is behind matter or within matter. This is said to be a world-riddle. But inasmuch as we experience our own gravity, we experience what is behind the surface of matter; for in relation to the whole Earth we are placed within the same forces which are active in small bodies (as, for instance, the crystal) and by which the various parts are held together. We must reach the point of being able to recognise the small in the great, the great in the small and not to lose ourselves in speculation as to what presumably lies behind matter.

Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual which transcends matter must be kindled by those forces in man's inner being which enable him to understand ideas such as that of the Temple represented in ancient tradition by the human being himself.

I have said many times that the sayings of ancient atavistic wisdom contain much that is worthy of deep veneration. In the present age it is our task once again to raise these truths from the depths of our being and to make them the guiding principles of life and action.

My dear friends,

Again we shall let the verse flow through our souls which can bring to mind how everything that is, was in the past and will be in the future, calls out to us to seek self-knowledge, for it is the foundation of all real, true cosmic knowledge.

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,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

My dear sisters and brothers, we have let mantric verses pass into our souls which, through their force, contain the path into spirit-land, first passing the Guardian of the Threshold into what is at first a dark, gloomy, night-engulfed spiritual world, where light is felt, which then becomes light for our spiritual perception. We have seen in this spiritual world how the human being participates – usually unconsciously, though he can be conscious of it – in the dialogs of the higher hierarchies – as though the Cosmic Word itself were acting together with the higher hierarchies. And finally we have been able to move on to the cosmic realm where the choruses of the different hierarchies resound together. Let us now bring that to mind once more – how we had already continued from hearing what the beings of the second hierarchy were saying to where the beings of the first hierarchy speak. And now we are able to hear them speaking in harmony as a chorus.

The Guardian brings it to our attention; we know this from previous lessons:

See the ether-rainbow arc's
Light teeming round,
Let the light-creating force
Pass through your eyes,
Your I penetrate the circle,
Observe from the other side's vantage point
Color flooding the cosmic bowl.

After the Guardian reveals to us this spiritual secret of the rainbow, from the chorus or the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai we hear resound:

Sense our thoughts
Breathing the colors of life
Into the light-flooded bowl;
We carry the mirage of the senses
To spirit's domain of being
And turn, by the world inspired,
To serve the higher spirits.

The spirits of the third hierarchy explain how they wish to serve the spirits of the second hierarchy for the benefit of humanity: we hear again the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes in chorus from their realm:

What you have received
From dead illusion made live:
We waken it to existence;
We give it to the rays,
Who manifest with love
The nothingness of matter
In the spirit's being.

And once we have heard how the beings of the second hierarchy, creating the world, approach our I; then the choir of the first hierarchy resounds – the Thrones, Seraphim and Cherubim:

In the willing of your worlds
Feel our world working:
Spirit glows in matter
When, thinking, we create.
Spirit creates in matter
When we live in willing:
World is the I-willing Spirit-Word.

Now we stand within the Spirit-Word, the Spirit-Word that underlies the creation of the world. We feel ourselves surrounded by this Spirit-Word. We feel the world penetrated by this Spirit-Word. We feel ourselves woven within this Spirit-Word. We feel it penetrating into our humanity. Finally we feel this cosmic Spirit-Word streaming into our hearts; we feel our whole humanity immersed in the waves of this Spirit-Word. We feel ourselves spiritually immersed in the spiritual world interwoven with the Word.

The Guardian is there in the distance. We had passed him by. He is now far in the distance. We now hear him as he softly speaks a last word of warning to our spirit-ear from afar. The Guardian speaks:

Who speaks in the Spirit-Word
With the voice
Which blazes in the cosmic fire?

From the realm of the first hierarchy comes the answer:

The flame of the stars speaks,
Seraphic Fire-Forces flame;
They flame also in my heart.
In the primal being's fount of love
The human heart finds
Creative spirit-flaming-speech:
It is I.

My dear sisters and brothers, if we wish to enter the esoteric realm, we should first feel that the ancient holy “'eyeh 'asher 'eyeh!” – “I am I”, “I am” is a holy word which resounds from that other worldly reality. What our fleeting thoughts understand as “I am” is only a reflection of it.

We must be aware that the true “I am” does not come from us in the earthly realm, that if we wish to say “I am” worthily, we must first enter the realm of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Only there does “I am” sound true. Here in the earthly realm it is illusion.

In order to experience the true “I am” within us, we must hear the Cosmic-Word. So we must listen to the Guardian of the Threshold's question: who speaks in the Cosmic-Word? Seraphim, who wend their way through the cosmic waves with spiritual flames of lightning, where we now stand. The Word is flame, a flaming voice. And in experiencing ourselves in this blazing cosmic fire, which speaks the fire language in the flaming fire, we experience the true “I am”.

This is contained in the Guardian of the Threshold's question posed from the distance – we have passed him long ago – and the answer comes from the realm of the first hierarchy:

Who speaks in the Spirit-Word
With the voice
Which blazes in the cosmic fire?

The flame of the stars speaks,
Seraphic fire-forces flaming;
They flame also in my heart.
In the primal being's fount of love
The human heart finds
Creative spirit-speech aflame:
It is I.

[The first part of the mantra is written on the blackboard:]

The Guardian speaks from afar (The human-I knows itself to be in the realm of Spirit-Word borne by the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones):

Who speaks in the Spirit-Word
With the voice
Which blazes in the cosmic fire?

Again the answer comes to us from the realm of the first hierarchy:

The flame of the stars speaks,
Seraphic fire-forces flaming;
They flame also in my heart.
In the primal being's fount of love
The human heart finds
Creative spirit-speech aflame:
It is I.

When human words resound, then human thinking speaks through human words. When the spirit's cosmic-word resounds, then cosmic thinking speaks through the spirit's cosmic-word. This lies in the Guardian's second question, which he now poses from afar.

The Guardian speaks from afar. The human-I knows itself to be in the realm of the Spirit-Word borne by the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones:

What thinks in the Spirit-Word
With thoughts
Which are formed from cosmic souls?

They are the thoughts that come from all the cosmic souls, which belong to the beings of the various hierarchies. They form and shape everything in the kingdoms of the world. Therefore, the Guardian asks who thinks the formative forces:

What thinks in the Spirit-Word
With thoughts
Which are formed from cosmic souls?

Again from the realm of the first hierarchy the answer comes to us:

The glow of the stars thinks.

First it was the flames that speak the words; the star-flames speak the words. The glow that come from the flames thinks.

The glow of the stars thinks,
The formative forces of the Cherubim glow;
They also glow in my head.

This is what the human being who stands within it all says.

In the primal beings' source of light
The human head finds
Thinking soul-forming at work:
It is I.

This is the second dialog – as though the beings of the first hierarchy were giving us cosmic permission to experience the “I am”:

What thinks in the Spirit-Word
With thoughts
Which are formed from cosmic souls?

The glow of the stars thinks,
The formative forces of the Cherubim glow;
They also glow in my head.
In the primal beings' source of light
The human head finds
Thinking soul-forming at work:
It is I.

[The second part of the mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian speaks from afar:
What thinks in the Spirit-Word
With thoughts
Which are formed from cosmic souls?

From the realm of the first hierarchy:

The glow of the stars thinks,
The formative forces of the Cherubim glow;
They also glow in my head.
In the primal beings' source of light
The human head finds
Thinking soul-forming at work:
It is I.

The cosmic Spirit-Word must speak. Thoughts stream from it. But the thoughts are creative; the thoughts are permeated with forces; the thoughts stream; and cosmic beings and cosmic events, everything which is evolves from them. In it, in the thought bearing Cosmic-Word live the word-created cosmic thoughts. It is not mere thinking, it is not mere speaking, it is force, forces streaming in the Words. Forces inscribe the thoughts into the cosmic beings, into the cosmic events.

Thereby the third question which the Guardian of the Threshold asks from afar is indicated:

What impels in the Spirit-Word
With forces
Which live in the cosmic body?

The whole world, which resounds from the Cosmic-Word, which gleams from the cosmic-thoughts, is what thinks and speaks in humans, what bears the body, the thought pervaded cosmic body. The Thrones bear it, or rather the Thrones bear the thought illumined cosmic Spirit-Word that is within it.

Therefore, the answer to the Guardian's question comes from the first hierarchy:

The cosmic body of the stars impels,
The Thrones' bearing powers “body”.

We must form a picture which is otherwise unusual. But just as one “enlightens” from light, and can form the verb “to live” from life, so also can one form the word “to body” from the force used to bear the body. [The verb “leiben” – “to body” – does not exist in German or English. Here Rudolf Steiner invents the word, so to speak. There is a subtle difference between the two German words which mean “body”: Leib and Körper. In the theological sense Leib indicates a kind of soul function which the biological concept of Körper lacks. Because there is only one word in English for body, I feel justified in using “embody”, where Steiner said “to body” or “bodies” which are so awkward in English, as they are in German. But embody does follow his line of thought deriving “enlighten” from “light”, for example. If someone wishes to stick closely to the literal translation, he/she may substitute “to body” or “bodies” where “embody” or “embodies” appears.] For body is not dead, it is not something finished. Body is something which is active at every moment, mobile, alert, something that “bodies” [“leibt”].

The Thrones' bearing powers embody.
They also embody in my limbs.
In the primal being's source of life
Human limbs find
Forceful Cosmic-bearer-powers.
It is I.

Cosmic-Word, cosmic-thinking, cosmic-body; the speaking, thinking cosmic-body is what the Guardian's third question refers to:

What impels in the Spirit-Word
With forces
Which live in the cosmic body?

The cosmic body of the stars impels,
The Thrones' bearing powers embody;
They also embody in my limbs.
In the primal being's source of life
Human limbs find
Forceful cosmic-bearer-powers.
It is I.

[The third part of the mantra is written on the blackboard.]

The Guardian speaks from afar:

– The human-I knows itself to be in the realm of the Spirit-Word borne by the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones –

What impels in the Spirit-Word
With forces,
Which live in the cosmic body?

From the realm of the first hierarchy:

The cosmic body of the stars impels,
The Thrones' bearing powers embody;
They also embody in my limbs.
In the primal being's source of life
Human limbs find
Forceful Cosmic-bearer-powers.
It is I.

In a certain sense, my sisters and brothers, it is a kind of conclusion to the path that began in the realm of illusion, of maya, which led us to the Guardian of the Threshold, which led us to self-knowledge, and through self-knowledge over to the spiritual realm, and allowed us to hear the choirs of the hierarchies. In a certain sense it is a conclusion when we now stand at the place where we may experience in ourselves the true “I am”, “'eyeh 'asher 'eyeh”.

In this dialog we can experience, when the threefold “It is I” streams from the heart, where it may stream from the heart; when it streams from the heart in such a way that it is the echo of what resounds in these hearts from the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones:

Who speaks in the Spirit-Word
With the voice
Which blazes in the cosmic fire?

The flame of the stars speaks,
Seraphic fire-forces flaming;
They flame also in my heart.
In the primal being's fount of love
The human heart finds
Creative spirit-speech aflame:
It is I.

What thinks in the Spirit-Word
With thoughts
Which are formed from cosmic souls?

The glow of the stars thinks,
The formative forces of the Cherubim glow;
They also glow in my head.
In the primal beings' source of light
The human head finds
Thinking soul-forming at work:

It is I.

What impels in the Spirit-Word
With forces
Which live in the cosmic body?

The cosmic body of the stars impels,
The Thrones' bearing powers embody;
They also embody in my limbs.
In the primal being's source of life
Human limbs find
Forceful Cosmic-bearer-powers.
It is I.

Here, my dear sisters and brothers, in a certain sense we have completed the first section of this First Class of the School.

We have heard the communications which we have received from the spiritual worlds – for this School is one which has been constituted by the spiritual worlds themselves; we have let the images and inspirations which can come from the spiritual worlds pass through us. They point out to our souls the path to understanding the true Human I in the surroundings of the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.

My dear sisters and brothers! It was, as you have heard in the general anthroposophical lectures, Michael's super-sensible School in which such inner heartfelt teachings first resounded. They were the powerful pictures of the imaginative ritual at the beginning of the nineteenth century, where the souls who were selected to be close to Michael were taught the School's revelations of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries, and which was led by Michael and his companions in the way described here. And now we are here in this anthroposophical School founded by Michael. We feel ourselves to be in it. They are the words of Michael which were to characterize the path which leads into the spiritual world and the human I: The words of Michael. These words of Michael of the super-sensible Michael-School constituted the first section.

When in September we find ourselves again in these Class Lessons, it will be Michael's will to describe the imaginative ritual revelations of the beginning of the nineteenth century. [2] [Due to the great increase in new Class members, the announced second section could not begin in September of 1924. Instead, repetition lessons – with additional content – were held. These will be the contents of Volume III. Due to Rudolf Steiner's premature death in March of 1925, the Esoteric School lessons were left incomplete.] That will be the second section. What has been presented to us in mantric words, will stand before our souls as pictures, which will be – to the extent possible – the pictures of the super-sensible imaginative ritual brought down at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The third stage of this School will consist of what will lead us directly to the interpretations of the mantric words that were given in the super-sensible Michael School of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries.

*

We should feel how we ourselves go through all this in the spiritual world. We should always keep looking back to the physical-sensory world of the earth and humbly absorb everything that takes place in the physical-sensory world of the earth.

Therefore, in conclusion let resound on our souls again what – if we are capable of absorbing it and appreciating it – what resounds from every stone, from every plant, from every moving cloud, from every bubbling spring, from every rustling wind, from the forests and the mountains, everywhere from the things and events that resound from the earthly sphere, if we are appreciative of it.

We were in the realm of the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. Even the Guardian of the Threshold only called from afar. We go back again with humility, past the Guardian, out to the realm of sensory appearances. And again we let these words resound in us:

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,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

*

My dear sisters and brothers, it is unfortunately the case that the measures, which have been repeated sufficiently within this Esoteric School, have been observed in a strange way by many who have become members by requesting membership and attained it; and just yesterday I had to criticize some rather unedifying matters. It is hard to believe, but it is really the case that members have left their blue membership certificates here on the chairs to reserve their places. It has also happened that three members have left notebooks – one folder and two notebooks – have been simply left lying around. The folder with the typewritten verses was found out on the street. From one of the notebooks could be copied what I told you yesterday. Another notebook was left lying in the Glasshaus. Therefore, it was necessary to expel three members of this School directly before this Class Lesson began.

With these, there have been nineteen expulsions from the School. One could have expected that earnestness would mean more to those who have already heard here what this School means. One of them loses the verses on the street, another leaves themhere, the third leaves them lying in the Glasshaus: so it was necessary to expel three quite prominent members of the School. And I can assure you, my dear sisters and brothers, that the strict observance of rules I informed you of at the beginning and often repeated, must be strictly observed. Such a School with the esoteric earnestness can only be maintained if its members really observe what is demanded in the name of the spiritual powers which direct it.

With true occult matters it is really so. And what has been often occurring in the Anthroposophical Society can no longer continue. That which is filled with earnestness by its own character, must also be treated with earnestness.

We have placed the Apocalypticer's concluding perspective before our souls. If we understand it correctly we see that this last perspective is described in a way which is in complete agreement with everything one can say about evolution from the viewpoint of the most exact spiritual science. We saw that the building of cultural phenomena and of the human body changed from a below upwards mode to an above downwards mode, and that this is reflected in the Apocalypse. At the end of the last lecture I pointed out that if one honestly tries to understand the Apocalypse one must become acquainted with the things which can be said about world evolution from the viewpoint of spiritual research.

However, we see that a meaning is incorporated in certain places in the Apocalypse which one will find one can only grasp if one goes into the knowledge of the human being which is found in Anthroposophy. This is definitely the case when one has to do with a revelation which is based on experiences of the spiritual world. Of course one has to be able to see that the images which are presented in the Apocalypse are revelations from the spiritual world. Here one will disregard the question as to whether the Apocalypticer would really have been able to present all of the details which we rediscover in his work in an intellectualistic way, that is, whether he understood them to that extent. For that is not important at all. The only important thing is whether he is a real seer. He looks into the things in the spiritual world, but it's not he who makes them true, they are true through their own content, and they have this content and reveal it through themselves and not through him. So that even outer, rationalistic experts could come and could prove: The one who gave us the Apocalypse had this or that amount of education, and one cannot really expect him to have had these wide perspectives of things through his own soul. I don't want to discuss whether the writer of the Apocalypse had them here; I: just want to point out that this is not important. We must place the Apocalypticer's pictures which are revelations of the spiritual world before; our soul and we must let their content work upon us.

Now we have the magnificent concluding picture of the new Jerusalem before us, which has the experiential backgrounds of which I spoke. We will do well to go backwards from this picture a little bit. Here we have the important passage where another magnificent picture appears before our soul, namely, that magnificent picture where the Apocalypticer sees what he calls heaven open, and where a power approaches him on a white horse of whom he speaks in such a way that we become aware: he doesn't just have the trichotomy or the threefoldedness of the Godhead in his intellectuality—he has it in his whole I human being. He speaks in such a way that he is really still aware with his whole soul that one has the three forms of the one God before one, and that if one places oneself outside of the physical world one can alternately speak of the one or the other of them, because they intermingle.

Of course, when they're put into the physical World one gets a picture of three persons, so that one has to distinguish between the Father God who underlies all facts of nature, including the ones which work into human nature, the Son God who has to do with everything which leads to freedom in the soul's experience and the Spirit God who lives in a spiritual, cosmic order which is far away from nature and foreign to nature. This is how sharply contoured the three persons of the Godhead appear here upon the physical plane.

Now when man crosses the threshold to the spiritual world, he gets into the condition which I described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? where he splits up into three beings, so that thinking, feeling and willing become somewhat independent. However, if we go to higher worlds from the physical plane we see the triune Godhead approaching us ever more as a unity. And so of course, the Apocalypse must be read in this light. One shouldn't distinguish between the Father God, the Son God and the Spirit God as directly as one would do this in the physical world.

Thus the one who approaches us on a white horse in that magnificent Imagination is none other than the unified God. And in the form in which he is' the Son of God, we have to see Him more in the free soul development of human beings on earth. But now something very strange occurs, which is what makes the picture that comes before the concluding one seem very magnificent. It is quite natural and a matter of course that John sees heaven open—I will call the one who wrote the Apocalypse John—for the new thing which is descending from the spiritual world. The whole culture must be arranged in such a way that it comes down from the spiritual world to the physical world. Now if we place this before our soul correctly, then of course the condition which must precede this is that John looks into the spiritual world. But this means: heaven is opened for him. However, he wants to indicate a future situation which will exist for human beings. He's actually saying nothing less than the following.

Before that state of affairs will arise on earth where the spiritual ingredients for the building up of the new Jerusalem will sink down from the spiritual world and will be received by men—just as men previously raised material ingredients from the earth upwards—before this state will come, before men become aware that they must build from above downwards—as I said recently, he considers this state to be a real one—before this will come, the state of affairs where man is mainly engaged with his will will be replaced by another one where he is only concerned with knowledge and where he has to look into the spiritual world: heaven is opened. The one who underlies the beings of the world in a radiating and creative and sanctifying way appears. And now the significant reason which makes the picture so magnificent: He has a name written on him which is known to no one besides himself. That is very significant. When one comes to the place in the Apocalypse where this is written, one sees another clear sign that one is dealing with one of the greatest spiritual revelations. The name which is given to the ego varies considerably in various languages, but I have pointed to the spiritually trivial fact that the name for the ego can never be spoken by someone in such a way that it can be given to someone else. I cannot say I to someone else; this distinguishes the name of the self from all other names. They are given to objects, to either inner or outer objects. But when I say “I” in any language I can only say it to myself; I can only say it to another person if I have slipped into him—which must be a real spiritual process; but there is no need to speak about that now.

Now let's imagine the things which describe the self in various languages the self was not given a name in the older languages; it was in the verb. The ego was not a direct designation. One described oneself through what one did in a kind of demonstrative way, but no name for the self-existed. This name for the self of one's human being only began to be used later; it's a significant symbolic fact that the German word for I—“ich”—contains the initials of Jesus Christ. But now let's think of an enhancement of this fact that we have a name in our languages which every one can only say in connection with himself. The enhancement consists in what is now said in the Apocalypse—that He who comes down from the supersensible world has a name written on Himself where He not only is the only one who can use it to refer to Himself, but where He is the only one who understands it; no one else understands it.

Now just think that this Revealer approaches John showing him in a prophetic picture what will later occur for humanity. There He comes down in future times the one who has the name which He alone understands. What can all of this really mean? If one honestly wants to understand it, the whole thing seems to be meaningless at first. Why does He come, the one who is to bring the salvation of the world, the justice of the world all of this is written in the Apocalypse—, “who shall make faith and knowledge true;” not what the (King James version has: “was called Faithful and True”) but “who shall make faith and knowledge true.” This is really like hide-and-seek, for if He has an inscribed name which only He understands, what is that supposed to mean? It makes us ask a question which goes deeper. What is this really all about?

Imagine it quite vividly: He has a name which only He understands. How can we relate to this name? It should really acquire a significance for us; this name should really be able to live in us. How can this occur? It can occur if the being who understands this name becomes united with us and enters our own self, then this being in us will understand the name and we will understand it also. We will have Him in us and we will continually have the awareness of Christ in us. He is the only one who understands the things, which are connected with His being; but He understands them in us, and the Christ-insight of the Christ being in us gives the light which is rayed out in us, because He becomes this light in us, in our own being. It will be an insight which dwells in men.

You see, something has occurred thereby. The first thing which has occurred is an intended, necessary consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha. This being who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, this being who must enter us, so that we comprehend the world with his understanding and not with our understanding, this being wears a garment which is sprinkled with blood, the blood of Golgotha. And we take in this picture. However, John the Apocalypticer tells us that this garment which is sprinkled with the blood of Golgotha has a name. This is not the same name he was talking about before; this is the name of the garment which is sprinkled with blood. And the name of this vesture dipped in blood is the logos of God, the Logos, God, the word of God. Thus the one who should live in us and should give the light in us through his own understanding fills us with the word of God.

The pagans read the word of God in natural phenomena. They had to receive it through outer manifestations. Christians must receive the word of God or the Creative word by taking the Christ into themselves. The time will come when all human beings who take Christianity into their souls in an honest way will know through the course of the events that the word of God is with Christ, and that this word of God has its seed in the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the garment which is sprinkled with blood. Thus we have the Christ, enclosed in the Mystery of Golgotha in the language of the Apocalypticer.

However, a third thing appears. Christ in three forms: firstly, through himself, secondly through his garment, and thirdly through the deeds which he does for men on earth. Here again a condition is described which must set in, and which will of course not begin in such a way that one can point to a particular year but Christian development must move in that direction.

The third thing that our attention is drawn to is the sword with which he works, which is the sword of his will, the sword of his deeds, the sword of what he has done among human beings upon earth by living in them. But what he's doing now, what he does in his comings and goings, as it were, bears the third name: King of all Kings, Lord of all Lords. That is the third form. What is the nature of a king or the nature of a lord? If we go into the real inner meaning of the Latin word dominus, we arrive at what linguistic usage indicates in this case, quite independently of spiritual investigation: A lord is someone who is designated to give guidance to some other being on earth or in the whole world. 3ut how long will external lords be necessary upon earth? How long will one need the commands of outer lords upon earth and even the commands of external spiritual lords above the earth? Until that point in time when Christ lives in men with the name which only he understands. Then everyone will be able to follow Christ in his own being and in his own soul. Then everyone will try to realize in himself what man's will wants to realize out of inner love. Then the Lord of lords and King of kings will live in each individual.

Seen from an inner spiritual viewpoint, this is really the time in which we're living now. The fact that we're living in it is concealed by the fact that men are continuing to live in their old ruts, and they're really denying this indwelling of the Christ as much as possible, denying it as much as possible, they're denying it as much as possible in all fields. One can certainly say that a great deal exists in a large number of people today which is preparing in the right way for the etheric appearance of the Christ, who is a being that came down from the divine world. But men must prepare themselves by finding the source of their actions and deeds in themselves.

Therewith we really touch upon a difficulty with the present-day activities of priests out of the spirit of the Apocalypse. A priest should guide and direct in a certain sense. A priest has the faithful before him, and his priestly dignity presupposes that he, the leader, is a king over the ones he is to lead' in a certain way. He is the giver of the sacraments; he is the minister. On the other hand, we live in a time where men have the potential to take in the Christ to such an extent that they can become their own leaders ever more.

You see, this is the situation which the one who wants to become a priest gets into today. And yet the ordination of priests is fully justified today, completely justified. It's fully justified because although men really do bear something in them as an essence, it must be brought out of them, it must really be brought out of them. And one really needs everything which lies behind priestly dignity in order to bring out what is in human beings today. For we live in a time which really requires something quite definite. The outer world cannot really completely confront what is required here. For the outer world must deal with men insofar as they are bearers of a physical body. But it would be a terrible prospect if men—the way they are through our civilization, which hasn't arrived at the standpoint on which man is standing—would live over into the next earth life in this form.

We know that one tries to avoid this in the Anthroposophical sphere. Human souls are offered something whereby they are supposed to live over into the next incarnation with the things men are supposed to take in today. But this must become universally human. Men must develop an ego or an individuality with which they can live over into the next incarnation. This is only possible if what is given through the grace of sacrifice, through the grace of a sacrament is added to men's experiences. This doesn't separate men from their karma but it does separate them from what is clinging to them in a very intensive way today. Human beings are walking around with masks on. They're going around masked. And it can lead to tragic conflicts if the need arises at some point to really see human beings and their individualities.

Such a tragic conflict arises with Hölderlin, who once said: when he looks around in the world he sees Germans, Frenchmen, Turks and Englishmen, but no human beings, young, mature and old people but no human beings. And he enumerates more types. Men bear an extra-human stamp, as it were.

We need a priestly activity today which speaks to human beings as human beings and which cultivates humanity. Of course none of the present-day confessions can really do this. Just consider how dependent the confessions are. The community for Christian renewal must get beyond the dependency of these confessions. It must do this through its own destiny. No one who grows out of Anthroposophy is in the same position that priests are. That is a quite special position. And it is perhaps quite right to point to what is present here out of the spirit of the Apocalypse. Just consider that in every other activity which grows out of Anthroposophy today, people become dependent upon the outer world in some way through the powers that be.

If someone becomes a teacher out of Anthroposophy, one can see the tremendous obstacles which are put in their way. People deceive themselves about this. But we won't get a second Waldorf school, because they will set up the condition everywhere that all the teachers one hires must be approved by the state in some way. The Waldorf School could only come into existence because we started at a time when no such school law existed in Württemberg yet.

Take doctors: we cannot make doctors out of people in the Anthroposophical movement from scratch without further ado. To be sure, we could make doctors. But they wouldn't be recognized, they would not be accredited. To some extent we even have this difficulty in artistic things. It won't be very long before things will tend in the direction of what is happening in Russia, and people will demand a stamp from the state. A priest who grows out of the Anthroposophical Society is the only one who can strip everything off, as it were. It's all right if he learned something, but he throws off everything in his work. He's really laying the first foundation stone of the new Jerusalem in the theology which he supports; for he represents a theology which doesn't have to be recognized by anyone besides himself. That is the important thing.

You are the only ones who are in this position. You should also feel that you are in this position, and you will feel the specific quality of your priestly dignity. If one is dealing with a country like Russia they can drive out certain kinds of priests, but people in such a country will never do anything which would make it necessary for priests to get an official stamp of approval. For one will either leave priests the way they are, or one will not want them, which has already been realized in Russia as far as the tendency goes. Thus priests are the first ones who will be able to feel the approach of the new Jerusalem, the approach of the indwelling Christ, the Christ who becomes the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords.

Hence it is very good for a priest to dwell on this passage \in the Apocalypse, to dwell on it with an ardent heart and to develop the entire enthusiasm of his priestly soul which he should develop at this place in the Apocalypse. For the Apocalypse should not be a teaching; the Apocalypse should be life which works in each of our souls. We should feel that we are united with the Apocalypse. We should be able to place what we're working and living with into the stream of prophetic things in the Apocalypse. Here we see ourselves gathered around John the Apocalypticer, who has the vision Heaven has been opened, the one who only understands his name himself comes, the one whose garment bears the name the “word of God,” the one who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords—he comes. The priesthood which gathers around the John who sees this, the priesthood that unites itself with the cultic rite which has been drawn from the spiritual world, that raises up the transubstantiation in the sense of the Holy Spirit again, that has the new act of, consecration of man, the transformed old one which has taken the valid things from the old one, but which has taken on the form which flows out of the spiritual world today—this priesthood may gather around John the Apocalypticer, who looks up into the opened heaven.

For we are permitted to look at the inauguration which took placed in the room which the fire then took hold of—, we should look at it in the light which rays out here when heaven opens—the white horse comes out with the one who sits upon it and who only knows his name himself, who must be incorporated into us if this name is to mean something to us, and who has the other characteristics which are mentioned. This is how one should understand the Apocalypse, for the Apocalypse must be understood in a living way and not just with the top of one's head.

However, I would like to say that very deep wisdom is connected with the magnificent Imagination that appears here. Just consider what appears in close proximity to this significant vision, as it were. The reader is told how active the beast that I described is—the beast which induces human beings to go down from the spiritual to the physical, which the Apocalypticer divided into three stages; the beast whose one form is a materialistic way of living and not just a materialistic view of life. However, the Apocalypticer refers to two points in time. He tells us how the beast is overcome, and on the other hand he tells us that the adversary of mankind, the stronger adversary of mankind, is bound for a thousand years and is then released again for a short time. Thus we really have to do with two adversaries of the good principle, with the beast and with what is traditionally referred to as Satan.

Now the beast is overcome with respect to the outer physical world, in the sense that a spiritual world view can always be opposed to materialism. And Satan is chained at the present time in a certain way. But he will be released again. Satan is fettered, and anyone who sees through the important things in evolution knows that he is fettered. For if Satan was not chained at the present time and if everything which could really pour out the vials of wrath would appear—if Satan was not bound,—the connection between the materialistic way of living and the materialistic view of life which is present on earth today would show up in the outer world in a ghastly way. Then the people who proclaim materialism as a truth with the deepest inner cynicism today would arouse such a desire in the unbound Satan that one would see this extraction of the materialistic view and a materialistic way of living and their acquisition by Ahrimanic powers, one would see this as the most horrible and most terrible diseases.

If Satan was not bound one would not only have to speak of materialism as a view and a way of living, one would have to speak of materialism as the worst kind of a disease. Instead of this people go through the world with the cynicism and frivolity of materialism and even with religious materialism, and nothing happens to them. But the only reason nothing happens to them is because Satan is bound and the Godhead still makes it possible for one to come to spiritual things without succumbing to Satan. If Satan was here, many a teacher who is standing in some confession and is infected by materialism would be a terrible, gruesome sight for mankind. The idea which arises when one points to the possible disease of materialism, to the leprosy of materialism which would really be there if Satan were not bound, if one points to this, it certainly gives rise to a terrible mental image.

However, anyone who is aware of his spiritual responsibility towards knowledge today will not make use of such an idea within any other context than the context of the Apocalypse. I myself would not speak of the leprosy of materialism in any other context than in the one I'm speaking of it here, where I have to connect things with the Apocalypse and where the one who becomes familiar with the ideas of the Apocalypse has these gruesome pictures before him, which however definitely correspond to the real state of the spiritual affairs.

The Apocalypse should not only permeate, our life, it should also permeate our words. If we take in the Apocalypse it is not only an enlivening element in priests' work, it is something that, permits us to point to things which we otherwise point to in exoteric life. The Apocalypse should not only live with our ego, if we want to understand it, the Apocalypse also wants to speak in our words: and if you are real priests there will be some things which you will say to each other when you are in a room with other priests so that they will live in you and remain amongst yourselves. Then you will gain the strength to say the right words when you are standing before your faithful followers.

Priests are priests today because they are the first ones who may speak about the Apocalypse freely amongst themselves. This Apocalypse is a priestly thing, that is, it is a priests' book which is appended to the Gospels. You will become priests all the more, the more you find your way into the inner spirit of the Apocalypse. We will speak about this some more tomorrow.

Our considerations will begin with the so-called Pentecost event. In the first lecture I indicated that our investigation can at least begin with this event. For this event presents itself to clairvoyance as a kind of awakening which the personalities on a certain day, Pentecost, experienced—the personalities normally called the apostles or disciples of Christ Jesus. It is not easy to evoke an exact perception of all those extraordinary events, and we will have to recall – from the depths of our souls, so to speak – much of what we have already gained from our anthroposophical considerations if we want to combine exact perceptions with all which our lecture cycle has to say about this subject.

The apostles felt like awakened individuals who had lived for a long time in an unusual state of consciousness. It was really like a kind of awakening from a deep sleep, from a strange, dream-filled sleep, in which one carries out the everyday tasks of life as reasonable people do, so that others do not notice that one is in a different state of consciousness. Then came the moment when it seemed to the apostles that they had lived through a long time as in a dream from which they awoke with the Pentecost event. And they experienced this awakening in an extraordinary way: they really felt as though something we can only call the substance of all-encompassing love had descended on them from out of the universe. The apostles felt impregnated by all-encompassing love and awakened from the described dream-like state. As though they had been awakened by all that which as the source of the power of love pervades and warms the universe, as though this source of the power of love had penetrated the soul of each one of them. They seemed very strange to the others who heard how they talked. Those others knew that they had previously led very simple lives, but some of them had been acting strangely in the previous days, as though lost in dreams. Now, however, they were as transformed: like people who had achieved a new state of mind or soul disposition, like people who had lost all the narrow restrictions, all the egotism of life, who had gained an infinitely wide heart and all-embracing tolerance, a deeply heartfelt understanding of all that is human on earth. They could also express themselves so that everyone present could understand them. One felt also that they could see into each heart and soul and clarify the secrets of the soul, so they could comfort the other, could tell him exactly what he needed.

It was of course astonishing that such a transformation could happen to a number of people. But those people who experienced the transformation, who had been awakened by the cosmic spirit of love, those people felt in themselves a new understanding for what had acted in common in their souls, but which they had until then not understood. Now, in that instant, understanding of what actually happened on Golgotha appeared before their minds' eye. And if we look into the soul of one of those apostles, the one usually called Peter in the other gospels, clairvoyant observation sees his normal consciousness as having been completely obliterated from the moment the gospels usually call the denial. He looked back to the denial scene, when he was asked if he had a connection to the Galilean, and he knew now that he denied it because his consciousness had begun to fade and an abnormal state to take its place, a kind of dream state, which meant removal into a completely different world. For him it was like a person who upon waking in the morning remembers the last events before going to sleep the night before; that's how Peter remembered what is called the denial, the triple denial before the cock crowed twice. And then the intermediate state of Peter's consciousness unfurled. It wasn't filled with mere dream-images, but with images presented by a kind of higher state of consciousness, which presented an experience of purely spiritual matters. And everything that happened, that Peter had slept through since that time, appeared before his soul as a clairvoyant dream. Above all he learned to see the event, about which one can truly say he slept through, because for a full understanding of that event the fecundation by all-encompassing love was necessary. Now the images of the mystery of Golgotha appeared before his eyes in a way similar to how we can recall them with clairvoyant vision if we establish the necessary conditions.

Frankly, it is with a unique feeling that one decides to put into words what is revealed when looking into the consciousness of Peter and the others who were gathered on that Pentecost day. One can only bring one's self to speak of these things with a holy awe. One could even say that he is almost overcome with awareness that he is treading on the holy ground of human esteem when expressing what is revealed to the soul's vision. However, it seems to him necessary, due to certain spiritual considerations, to speak of these things in our times; with full knowledge that other times will come in which these things will meet with more understanding than is the case now. For in order to understand much of what will be said at this opportunity, the human soul must free itself of quite a few things which are necessary to it during this cultural period.

First of all, something which is offensive to contemporary natural scientific consciousness appears to clairvoyant vision. Nevertheless, I feel myself obliged to express in words as well as I can what appears to the soul's vision. I can't do anything about it if what I must say is communicated to less prepared minds and souls and the whole thing is exaggeratedly described as something which cannot stand up to the scientific concepts which dominate the present time.

The clairvoyant glance first falls on an image that depicts a reality which is also indicated in other gospels, but which presents a very special view when selected from the fullness of views which clairvoyant observation can receive when looking back in time. Clairvoyant observation is drawn to a kind of darkening of the earth. And one feels, as in an imagination, the meaningful moment when for hours the physical sun is darkened over the land of Palestine, over the site of Golgotha, like an eclipse of the sun.

One has the impression that spiritual-scientifically trained observation can now verify if a physical eclipse of the sun really occurred over that land: that for this observation the whole human environment takes on a completely different aspect. I would like to put aside what human technology has to say about a solar eclipse. A strong mind and the conviction that all had to happen as it did are necessary in order to withstand the demonic powers which arise during a solar eclipse. But I prefer not to go into that further, only to bring to your attention the fact that during such a moment what otherwise can only be obtained through difficult meditation appears light-filled. One sees plants and animals differently, every butterfly looks different. It is something which in the deepest sense can bring forth the conviction of how in the cosmos a certain spiritual life – which belongs to the sun and what one sees in the sun also as its physical life – is connected to life on the earth. And how when the physical glow is drastically darkened by the covering moon, it is different from when the sun simply doesn't glow during the night. The appearance of the earth around us is quite different during a solar eclipse than when it is night. One feels the group-souls of the plants and animals arise during a solar eclipse. One feels a dimming of the corporality of plants and animals and a brightening of their group-souls.

This experience is especially strong for clairvoyant observation when directed towards the moment in earthly evolution which we call the Mystery of Golgotha. And then one learns what this notable natural phenomenon means. I really can't help it if I am obliged to read in the occult text about a natural phenomenon as it occurred exactly at that point in the earth's evolution – as it has of course also earlier and later occurred – in contradiction to contemporary materialistic thinking. When one opens a book and reads the text, one has the impression that what one should read comes forth from the letters. Thus also from the cosmic letters comes forth the necessity of reading something which humanity should learn. It appears as a word written in the cosmos, as a cosmic phonetic symbol.

And what does one read when he opens his soul to it? Yesterday I pointed out that during Greek times humanity had developed to the point in which through Plato and Aristotle it rose to a very high level of learning, of intellectuality. In many respects the knowledge achieved by Plato and Aristotle could not be superseded in later times, for the summit of human intellectuality had already been reached. And when we consider that this intellectual knowledge was made extremely popular in the Greek and Italian peninsulas by wandering preachers during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when we consider how this knowledge was spread in a way which we cannot understand, then one has the possibility of an impression of reading the letters of the occult cosmic text. When one has attained to clairvoyant consciousness he can say: everything which humanity had gathered as knowledge in pre-Christian times comes under the sign of the moon, which from the viewpoint of the earth travels through space, and it is the moon because for higher human perception this knowledge had not enlightened, had not solved riddles, but for higher perception was darkening, as the moon darkens the sun during an eclipse. That is what one reads.

So at that time knowledge was not enlightening, but acted as a darkening of the riddle of the world, and one feels as a clairvoyant the darkening of the higher, spiritual regions of the world through the knowledge of ancient times, which acted in respect to higher knowledge as the moon acts during a solar eclipse. And this external event is an expression of man having achieved a stage in which man's self-created knowledge was placed in front of higher knowledge as the moon stands before the sun during an eclipse. In that solar eclipse one feels humanity's darkening of the sun within the earth's evolution written in an awesome sign of the cosmic occult text. I said that contemporary consciousness can consider this offensive because it has no understanding of the spiritual power in the universe. I do not wish to speak of miracles in the usual sense, of the breaking of natural laws, but I can do no other than inform you how one can read that solar eclipse – how one can do no other than position one's soul before that solar eclipse as though reading what that natural event signifies: With moon-knowledge an eclipse of the higher solar message occurred.

And then one's clairvoyant consciousness perceives the raised cross on Golgotha on which the body of Jesus hangs between the two thieves. Then the removal from the cross and the burial appears – and I might add that the more one tries to avoid this image the stronger it appears. Now a second powerful sign appears which must be read in order to understand it as a symbol of what has happened in the evolution of humanity: One follows the image of Jesus taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb, and one is thoroughly shaken by an earthquake which went through the area.

Perhaps the relation between that solar eclipse and the earthquake will someday be better understood scientifically, for certain teachings which are prevalent today but incoherent, indicate a relation between solar eclipses and earthquakes and even firedamps in mines. That earthquake was a consequence of the solar eclipse. That earthquake shook the tomb in which Jesus' body lay – and the stone which had been placed before the tomb was ripped away and a crevice opened in the ground and the body fell onto the crevice. Further vibrations caused the ground to close over the crevice. And when the people came in the morning the tomb was empty, for the earth had received Jesus' body; the stone, however, remained apart from the tomb.

Let us follow the sequence of images! Jesus dies on the cross. Darkness suddenly covers the earth. Jesus' body is laid in the tomb. An earthquake opens the earth's crust and Jesus' body is received by the earth. The crevice caused by the quake closes. The stone is thrown aside. These are all factual events; I can do naught else but describe them as such. May those who wish to approach these things from a natural scientific viewpoint judge as they wish and use every possible argument against them. What clairvoyant observation sees is as I have described it. And if someone wishes to say that such things cannot happen, that a symbol is placed in the cosmos as a powerful sign-language to indicate that something new has occurred in human evolution; when someone wishes to say that the divine powers do not write about what happens on the earth with such sign-language as a solar eclipse and an earthquake, I can only reply: All respect to your belief that it can not be so. But it happened anyway! I can imagine that an Ernest Renan, who wrote the peculiar “Life of Jesus” would come and say: One does not believe such things, for one only believes what can be duplicated by experiment. But that argument is unfeasible, for would a Renan not believe in the ice age although it is impossible to reproduce it by experiment? It is of course impossible to reproduce the ice age, and nevertheless all scientific investigators believe in it. It is also impossible to reproduce that once-occurring cosmic sign. Nevertheless, it happened.

We can only approach these events if we clairvoyantly take the path which I have indicated, if we first examine Peter's or one of the other apostle's souls, who felt themselves fecundated by all-encompassing cosmic love. Only if we look into their souls and see how they experienced things do we find via this detour the ability to observe the raised cross on Golgotha, the darkening of the earth and the earthquake which followed it. That the eclipse and the quake were normal natural events is not denied; but he who follows these events clairvoyantly reads them as I have described, insofar as he has created the necessary conditions in his soul. For in fact what I have described was for Peter's consciousness something which had crystallized from the basis of the long sleep. From the many images which crossed through Peter's consciousness the following were emphasized: The cross raised on Golgotha, the eclipse and the quake. Those were for Peter the first fruits of the fecundation by all-encompassing love at the Pentecost event. And now he knew something which he had not previously known: that the event of Golgotha really took place, and that the body which hung on the cross was the same body with which he had often wandered in life. Now he knew that Jesus died on the cross, that this death was really a birth, the birth of that spirit who as all-encompassing love exuded in the souls of the apostles gathered at Pentecost. Peter sensed it as a ray of the infinite, aeonic love. He sensed it as what was born as Jesus died on the cross. An awesome truth penetrated Peter's soul: a death only seemed to have taken place on the cross.

In reality that death, preceded by infinite suffering, was the birth of what entered his soul like a ray. With the death of Jesus something entered the earth which had previously existed only externally: all-encompassing cosmic love. That's easy to say abstractly. But one must penetrate the Peter-soul for a moment to imagine how it felt: In the instant that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross at Golgotha, something had been born to the earth which previously only existed in the cosmos. The death of Jesus of Nazareth was the birth of cosmic love within the earth's sphere.

That is the first insight which we can gather from what we call the Fifth Gospel. With what is called in the New Testament the arrival, the pouring out of the spirit, begins with what I have now described. The apostles, due to their soul constitution, were not able to accompany the death of Jesus of Nazareth except with an anomalous consciousness.

Peter, also John and James, recollected still another moment in his life, which can only be revealed to us in all its grandeur through the Fifth Gospel. He with whom they wandered led them to the mount and said: Stand guard! And they fell asleep. Their souls were already being gradually overtaken by the sleeping state. Their normal consciousness sank into a sleep which lasted through the event of Golgotha, and out of which beamed what I have been trying to describe in stammering words. And Peter, John and James had to recall how they fell into that state and how now, as they looked back, the great events dawned on them which had to do with the physical body of him with whom they had wandered. And gradually, as dreams emerge in human consciousness, in human souls, the previous days emerged in the apostles' consciousness. What emerged was the whole time which they had experienced from the Mystery of Golgotha to Pentecost, which had remained hidden in their subconscious. Especially the ten days between the so-called Ascension until the Pentecost event seemed to be a period of deep sleep. Looking back, however, the time between the Mystery of Golgotha and the Ascension of Christ Jesus emerged day by day. They had experienced it, but it only emerged now, and in a remarkable way.

Excuse me if I add a personal comment. I must admit that I was astonished when I became aware of how what they experienced between the Mystery of Golgotha and the so-called Ascension emerged in the apostles' souls. Images like these: Yes, you were together with him who was born on the cross, you encountered him – like when one wakes up in the morning and it seems like out of a dream emerges: you were with someone during the night. But it was peculiar how the individual events emerged in the apostles' souls. They had to ask themselves: Who was it with whom we were together? And they didn't recognize him again and again. They knew: We certainly wandered around with him – but they didn't recognize him in the form in which he then stood before them, and which now appeared in images as they received fecundation by all-encompassing love. They saw themselves wandering after the Mystery of Golgotha with him whom we call Christ. And they saw how he had really taught them about the kingdom of the spirit. And they were able to understand how they had wandered with the being who was born on the cross, how this being – the all-encompassing love born from the cosmos – was their teacher, how they were not mature enough to understand what this being had to say, how they had to receive it with the subconscious powers of their souls and couldn't receive what this being had to give with normal reason, how they went like sleepwalkers alongside Christ during those forty days and couldn't understand with normal reason what he had to give them. He appeared to them as their spiritual teacher and instructed them in secrets which they could only understand when he transferred them to a completely different consciousness. And now they realized that they had been with the Christ, had walked with the resurrected Christ. Now they realized what had happened to him. But how did they recognize that he was really the same one with whom they had traveled with love before the Mystery of Golgotha? That happened as follows.

Let us imagine that such an image appeared before the soul of one of the apostles after Pentecost. He saw that he had walked with the resurrected one. But he didn't recognize him. He saw a heavenly spiritual being, but he didn't recognize him. Another image, which showed that the apostles had really been with Christ Jesus before the Mystery of Golgotha, interfered with the purely spiritual one. There was a scene in which they felt they were instructed in the secrets of the spirit by Christ Jesus. But they didn't recognize him, they saw themselves standing before this spiritual being. And in order to recognize him, this image was transformed into the image of the Last Supper, which they had experienced together with Christ Jesus. Just imagine that the apostle had before him the super-sensible experience of the resurrected one and, as though hovering in the background, the image of the Last Supper. Then they recognized that the one with whom they had wandered with love was the same as the one who now taught them, in a completely different form, which he had taken on after the Mystery of Golgotha. It was a flowing together of the memories from the sleeping consciousness with the memories which preceded it. They experienced two images: one image of the occurrences after the Mystery of Golgotha, and one of the occurrences before their consciousness had been dimmed. They therefore realized that the two beings belong together: the resurrected one and he with whom they had lovingly wandered a relatively short time ago. And they thought: Before we were awakened through the fecundation by all-encompassing love, our normal consciousness was taken away. And Christ, the resurrected one, was with us. He had taken us into his kingdom without our knowing it; he wandered with us and revealed to us the secrets of his kingdom, which now, after the Pentecost-Mystery, emerge as having been experienced in a dream.

This is what causes such astonishment: the coinciding of an image of an apostle's experience with the Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha with an image before the Mystery of Golgotha, which they experienced in the physical body in a normal state of consciousness.

We have begun to indicate what can be read in the so-called Fifth Gospel, and I would like to say a few words to you at the end of this report as an aside. I feel myself obliged to speak of these things now. What I would like to say though, is the following. I know very well that we live in a time in which much is being prepared for the earthly future of humanity, and that we within our – now Anthroposophical – Society, should realize that something must be prepared for the future in human souls. I know that the time will come when one will be able to speak of such things in a different way than is allowed in our times. For we are all children of our time. But a near future will come in which one can speak more precisely, in which perhaps much of what can be perceived today only by way of indication will be much more precisely perceived in the spiritual Script of Becoming. Such times will come, even though it seems so improbable to the people of today. Nevertheless, it is just for this reason that a certain obligation exists to speak of these things today as a kind of preparation. And although I had to overcome a certain resistance to speak on this theme, the obligation for preparation in these our times outweighed the resistance. That led to my speaking to you for the first time about these things.

When I say “overcoming”, please understand the word as it is meant. I explicitly request that what I have to say on this occasion be understood as a stimulation, as something which in the future will be explained much better and more precisely. And you will understand the word “overcoming” better if you allow me to make a personal remark. It is completely clear to me that for the spiritual investigation to which I have devoted myself, it is at first extremely difficult to extract many things from the Script of the World – especially things of this nature! And I would not be surprised if the word “indication”, which I used, may have a more difficult and broader meaning than it normally has. I can not at all say that I am able today to say precisely what is in the Spiritual Script. For it is very difficult and takes much effort to extract images from the Akasha Record which have to with Christianity. It takes much effort to give these images the necessary condensation, to hold them fast, and I consider it my karma that my duty is to say what I am saying. Without doubt it would cost me less effort if in my early youth I had received a real Christian upbringing. I did not have that; I was brought up in a completely free cultural environment. My education was purely scientific. And for that reason it costs me effort to find these things about which I am obligated to speak.

I make this personal comment for two reasons: because of a peculiar unscrupulousness, a foolish, silly fairy tale about my relationship with certain Catholic currents is being spread about. Not one word of this is true. And what that which is often called Theosophy today has come to may be judged by the fact that such unscrupulous assertions and rumors come from that source. And because we are obliged to tell the truth and not avoid such assertions, this personal remark is made.

On the other hand, due to my lack of contact with Christianity during my youth I feel more objective about Christianity and believe that I have been led to Christianity and to Christ by the spirit. Especially in this area I think I have a certain right to claim objectivity and lack of prejudice. Perhaps one can rely more on the words of a person who comes from a scientific background, who in his youth was distant from Christianity, than one who had a relationship with Christianity from early youth on. But when you hear these words, you may feel an indication of what lives in me when I speak about the secrets which I would like to call the secrets of the so-called Fifth Gospel.

[At the beginning of the meeting, the “Community Order for the Soul Shepherds of the Christian Community” drafted by the founding circle was discussed. First, the draft for point 1 was read out:]

"Affiliation. The Christian Community was founded in Dornach between September 6 and 22, 1922 as an original community, consisting of 45 priests authorized to perform the rituals entrusted to the Christian Community.

The Church of Christ recognizes as authorized helpers for the practice of the three rituals and for giving religious instruction the personalities who, on behalf of Dr. Steiner, give the free religious instruction and celebrate the cultural rites at the independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart and at sister schools.

Ernst Uehli [a teacher of religion at the Waldorf School] points out that the individuals currently teaching religion at the Waldorf School have been appointed by Dr. Steiner. Since Dr. Steiner is in overall charge of the Waldorf School, he will also have to decide who will continue to perform the cultic service there.

Rudolf Steiner: I think that the Waldorf School will always be seen as a kind of model school for this pedagogical approach, which is cultivated within the anthroposophical movement. And for the part that figures as religious education, of course, the complete idea of Waldorf school education must be considered, so that the previous practice must certainly be continued there. For those whom one is still obliged to appoint as religion teachers, exactly the same must apply as for the present religion teachers. That should be the case. There is hardly anything in contradiction to what you have here. I just don't want to be restricted in the event that I consider someone to be a proper religion teacher and then the same does not apply to the person concerned as to the current Waldorf teachers. That is something I cannot even consider. In making the appointment I can only consider personal suitability. So the question here is whether you mean by the sentence that the subsequent religion teachers should be members of the Christian Community. Has anything been done about that yet?

Emil Bock: Perhaps this formulation is not clear enough after all. This sentence could perhaps be worded as follows: Those who are appointed by Dr. Steiner to these functions will be recognized without these conditions being met. The sentence that religious education and rituals should not be carried out by all those who are not appointed by Dr. Steiner is intended only for those schools that may receive a different leadership.

Rudolf Steiner: No, the only schools that will come into question for this paragraph of yours are those that are recognized as Waldorf schools. And I will appoint the people for these until I die [to teach religion and celebrate the rites]. So until then, it will be a matter of recognizing those I appoint. And afterwards, recognition will perhaps also be sought in accordance with what is decreed for the constitution after my death, insofar as I have not settled it.

[Further points of the draft of the community order are read out. This was only partially recorded by the stenographer. Regarding point 2c:]

"The appointment of successors and the expansion of the leadership and guidance is carried out by election from among the consecrated workers, namely by the senior leaders for the office of senior leader, and by senior leaders and leaders in community for the office of leader. If a territorial structure of the work develops, the proposals of the consecrated workers working in a particular area should be sought by those to be elected before each election of a leader or leader for that area.

Rudolf Steiner: That can certainly be done. The only difficulty arises in the one point, the very last paragraph that you read. It is not entirely clear whether the appointment or co-option of the senior leaders and leaders can be changed in the paragraphs. If it can be changed at any time, then that is something that thwarts the purpose of this paragraph, which you draw up so that something other than what you want does not take place. If you formulate the last paragraph in such general terms, this paragraph in particular calls into question something that is otherwise quite clear. It could then be changed every year. Since you consider this mode of election to be something very salutary, you would be contradicting yourself if you did not add something to the paragraph to the effect that this mode of election cannot be changed or only at very long intervals, in other words, something to protect it; otherwise you would very easily end up with a democratic election after a short time.

[The stenographer's transcript shows a gap here.

Rudolf Steiner: I might have a few words to say before you leave. This can be done tomorrow.

A request has been made for clarification of the Credo.

Rudolf Steiner: What I wanted to say about the creed has already been said to some extent in other things. The creed I gave you was taken from genuine spiritual knowledge. There is something different about this creed compared to rituals. Rituals are given as something that now arises as a form of ceremony. This creed gives something that the religious person of the present day presents as their confession. You can agree or disagree with it. Or perhaps you can say to yourself today, “You have faith that I have given this creed.” You want to declare your agreement with this creed today and regard this agreement initially as an agreement with the teaching. It will hardly be possible to object to the creed in any way. However, I believe that you have described a table 5

sentence that comes from the Credo as unclear, the sentence “to spiritually heal the disease of sin from the body of humanity”. You asked whether it should not read “to spiritually heal the body of humanity from the disease of sin”.

What is meant is this: To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity – to spiritually heal the sin-sickness present in the body. That is the meaning. “To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity” – well, that wouldn't make sense. You could also say “to spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity”. I would prefer: “on the physical.” — “To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the physical of humanity,” that is a genitive objective. I have paraphrased it because these two genitives are in succession, but they are simply given by the text. Otherwise, I have nothing to say in relation to the Credo.

[You still have the question:] Why are there monthly sayings that apply to the whole week? – The reason for this must be understood from a higher point of view. Suppose I were to explain the human soul, I would say: will, feeling and thinking are the three members of the soul, or at least the outer manifestation of it. (I write on the board – middle –: will, feeling, thinking.) Now I must not present it by writing: here thinking, feeling, willing.

No.

So it would be wrong. I have to draw it so that there is thinking, feeling and willing in the head, only the willing is weakest. In the metabolic-limb organism of man, the will is predominant. There is always one that takes over the others. And so, in spiritual activities, you have to have something that takes over the lower levels from a higher level.

A participant: When is the beret handed over to the priest when he is installed in office?

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to carry out this ceremony of handing over the beret after the ceremony. The handover would take place when the person concerned reads the first mass, then when you carry out the ceremony. Then he will simply receive the beret with the words I will speak tomorrow. That is the handing over of the office. Otherwise one would hand over a diploma, here one hands over the beret. This will be handed over when you read the first mass, with a few words spoken after communion.

I have tried to find a name to replace the word “priest”, but apart from the names “shepherd of souls” or “caretaker of souls”, I have not yet come up with any other. It is

new German language, it is hardly possible to form a word for the word “priest”. “Seelenhirte” (shepherd of souls) seems too sentimental, but you won't easily find a non-sentimental word.

[A participant] suggests retaining the word “priest”.

Rudolf Steiner: That is the simplest. But it is something that has been perceived as offensive in Protestant circles. Basically, “priest” also originally goes back to “shepherd of souls”. There are, of course, no objective reasons [not to use the name “priest”]. It is only the reason that all these things should be avoided that are common in Roman Catholicism. The “Act of Consecration of Man” is a very adequate term for “mass,” but for “priest” one would have to use the word “soul carer,” which also sounds sentimental. And a word that would not so much denote the priesthood as the dignity of a priest would be the word “consecrated person”, which denotes one who has been consecrated. “Consecrated person” is something that would be quite adequate, not so much for the word “priest” as for the word used in the ancient mysteries.

A participant: Are there any rules about the type of incense?

Rudolf Steiner: We use ordinary incense. The essential thing is that the incense spreads this kind of ethereal odor. That is essential to the matter. It is not correct that incense is only used in Catholic communities; it is used wherever ceremonies are performed that have a real spiritual basis. You mean, whether one can take an incense that does not have this ethereal smell, because the incense could be slandered to the effect that it puts people to sleep? There is no other option, as long as this prejudice has to be combated, than not to burn incense. You can omit the incense.

Werner Klein: Would that not substantially alter the spiritual facts?

Rudolf Steiner: By merely imagining the incense, it will be one degree less real. But you will have to make such allowances in relation to various things. I cannot see how you can fulfill the ideal if you want to see it fulfilled. You have incense everywhere. I have already mentioned the Freemasons; the Indians also have it. It is everywhere where serious occult practices are performed. Only in Protestant circles, when smoking is used, it smells Catholic. - One could also say, it smells Masonic or Indian.

A participant: We can get a small chapel for our worship in Frankfurt. Are there certain things to consider when furnishing the church? What color for the walls or the details?

Rudolf Steiner: I would not go to extremes here. I would keep it to a dull purple, not too loud, but a dull purple. That is the best way to get the mood right. The things that differ are done in a darker purple.

A participant: Could other rooms also be considered, for example, Masonic ritual rooms or similar?

Rudolf Steiner: Of the Freemasons you could only get those rooms that do not have their symbols, so the ballroom. The ballroom you could take under certain circumstances readily. This is a matter of opportunity. I could imagine that is no obstacle to use the ballroom of the Freemasons for your purposes.

Friedrich Ritielmeyer: Auditoriums and schools would also work, of course. For smaller communities, I would even consider private rooms to be the most suitable. But people don't have many rooms anymore. Only a few people in Germany still have large private rooms. The rooms of the Anthroposophical Societies are also increasingly at risk. In Munich, there are no longer any such rooms. Where they still exist, they would of course be usable in agreement with the boards of directors. Public education rooms would also be considered.

Rudolf Steiner: In these matters, I must say that I am only familiar with one adult education centre that I have come into contact with. Adult education rooms are those that also have a public character. The adult education association led by Raphael Löwenfeld had its lecture room in the Berlin City Hall. Of course, one can use these rooms. One could also use the hall of the Bernoullianum in Basel if one gets it. I would only say in such cases, if I were to take over the hall as the person in charge: Please don't be alarmed; we have ceremonies in which we use incense. —You would always have to tell the hall providers this.

A participant: There is no longer any smell of incense the next morning.

Rudolf Steiner: It depends entirely on the sense of smell of those who enter the room. Of course, you will find people who can still detect the smell days later.

A participant: How should our group relate to Freemasonry? Several of us have become more familiar with Freemasonry.

Rudolf Steiner: The Circle as such does not relate to Freemasonry. I regard it as a purely individual matter. It cannot be that anything is brought in from Freemasonry as such, because in reality Freemasonry no longer has anything Christian. That is not something we need to discuss here. Freemasonry as such has nothing Christian. A participant: Could we exert influence on Freemasonry?

Rudolf Steiner: I think that is hardly possible. It is different if someone works in Freemasonry with the impulses that he has and receives through this community. In that way he can influence them. But that is not very easy either. Now, I do not think that is particularly desirable either. What is desirable is that this community spreads as widely as possible and that everything is done to promote this spread. With Freemasonry, you will find least of all that it has a progressive effect. I also do not believe that you can come into a conflict of duty there. I do not know where that could lie. But I will not ask you if you do not want to hint at the conflict.

A participant: I think that our movement here, our circle, is much more valuable than what Freemasonry can offer. I was already a Freemason before I joined our circle. Now I am striving to devote all my energy to our movement. I don't think I will have the time and energy to be able to give to Freemasonry what it demands.

Rudolf Steiner: There is no real conflict of duty. At most, it would make it possible for you to be less active in the lodge. But it does not give rise to a real inner conflict of duty. If you were to become a Roman Catholic priest, however, there would be a conflict of duty. But as it is, there is no conflict of duty for you at all, except that you cannot be in the lodge as much. That could also be caused by something else.

Emil Bock: We would be very grateful if you could at least give us some pointers on pastoral psychology and pathology. We then asked about the sexual question in a pastoral relationship, for guidelines for pastoral care in this area.

Rudolf Steiner: This can hardly be achieved in any other way than perhaps by you first trying, together with our doctors, to gain some insights into psychiatry in general and how it is practised in our country. This must then be incorporated into the confession. Because you can only go as far as it is an object of confession. Otherwise you will hardly be able to do anything. All physical treatment you must leave to the doctor for the time being. But the confession must be aimed at being a real sedative for those who have some kind of defect. This will be an item that must be worked out step by step in Stuttgart. It cannot be done in a few minutes. But you should also talk about pastoral therapy. It is quite possible that you will need knowledge in this area when you are ready to found village communities. Since the pastors in the villages often give physical medicine at the same time, they acquire knowledge that they can then use in their pastoral care.

[A question was asked that was not recorded by the stenographer.]

Rudolf Steiner: The wives of the married may be present at tomorrow's celebration, but may not receive communion.

A participant: How can we officially identify ourselves to the authorities? Rudolf Steiner: Is the name of pastor monopolized?

Emil Bock: I believe it is legally reserved. Only those with the title of pastor in the recognized denominations may use it.

Rudolf Steiner: As soon as I find a name for “priest”, you can also use that as an official title. But I have to find it first; perhaps it will come while you are still here. For the time being it has not been possible to find anything except these three names: “Seelenpfleger”, “Seelenhirte”, “Weiheträger”. These are adequate names, but they sound a little sentimental in modern language. Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Is there a German name for “Hostie”?

Rudolf Steiner: Why do you need a German name for it? We should only strive for a word if it can truly be a word. For something as solemn as the Mass, it is acceptable to use a word like “Human Consecration Ritual”; for the host, however, it is of course difficult to use a different word. “Altar bread” and ‘altar wine’ is a very adequate name that works quite well, but it is a long name. I cannot find a word for ‘priest’ and ‘pastor’ alone. I would even find ‘pastor’ very painful if it were not used. Perhaps it would even be better to let you use the official title of “pastor”. I think “priest” is different from “pastor”. “Priest” refers to the consecration, but “pastor” refers directly to the person who is an official as a shepherd of souls.

A participant asks whether the word “clergyman” could be used.

Rudolf Steiner: Of course there is nothing wrong with the word “clergyman”. But Dr. Rittelmeyer shook his head?

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: All these words are too heavily burdened for me.

Rudolf Steiner: “Spiritual” too? “Ordained minister” is the term to be used for the priest. Outwardly, it is a demotion if you cannot bear the name “pastor”. Why is that not possible? Do you yourself have something against the title “pastor”? “Pastor” is, for the time being, a title that encompasses both Catholic and Protestant clergy.

Emil Bock: The title “clergyman” would not be confirmed as an official title for us.

Rudolf Steiner: The German language does not have a clear word, so the word “pastor” is to be aimed for. A question is asked about the doctrine of predestination. [The stenographer did not record the wording of the question, and only parts of the following remarks by Rudolf Steiner were recorded.]

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question that cannot easily be answered in a pastoral setting because it is fundamentally a profound question of world view. In ancient times, predestination meant the names of those who were entered in the Book of Creation. But now you must realize that actually until the 5th or 6th century, at least until the time of Augustine, all thinking that referred to the spiritual world itself was thought from the spiritual world to the physical world and not the other way around. It is only in the last few centuries that thinking has been from the bottom up and no longer from the top down. So if you take the way of thinking that was natural for Augustine from the moment he was able to think philosophically at all, predestination meant the names of those who were chosen by God to be written in the book of life; they meant a configuration of the world in which the names were there. So you would get the scheme: The heavenly; now comes the first name: those who gave alms, so we have the almsgivers. As a second, those who cared for the sick; and as a third name: those who taught. And now, in what is conceived from above downwards, you do not yet have people in it at all; they must first acquire the right to these names themselves, must first integrate themselves. All these designations are type designations that descend from above, so that people must first acquire the right to these type designations. It is not people who are nurses, it is not people who are alms-givers, soul-shepherds and so on; these are the names – but they are not names that the individual bears – they must first be acquired.

It is the completely different way of thinking from which one must try to understand such a word as “predestination”. Otherwise, how do you get along with the teachings of Augustine and with the whole dispute of the minds at that time about predestination? You cannot get along. You cannot possibly ascribe to Augustine that he divided humanity on earth into two groups, one predetermined for good, the other for evil. What he meant is that he placed the types on the one hand and the other types on the other. But people themselves do not belong to one type or the other from the outset; they must first acquire their claim to a name.

Gnostic? There it is in the most eminent sense that only the one who acquires the possibility to do so in the course of earthly life belongs to those who can be so designated. Blessed is everyone who acquires the name in earthly life; anyone who does not do so will not be blessed. One must come to blessedness through the name. That is a Gnostic principle. If you hear the word “name” in the language of the older times, you will find that outwardly.... [gap].

Take these two things for the time being in my “Theosophy”. There is the human being who goes up to the consciousness soul; he wants to come to the spiritual man, there the impact from the spiritual world is “poured over”, and the germ of the “I” lies in this, which is poured over there. This also corresponds to Indian terminology. The Indian uses the word 'Nama', the Indian word for 'name'. Nama points upwards to 'Manas', not to what is below. It is the same in Egyptian. So what corresponds to the name is predetermined. If I may express myself very roughly, one could say that there is a map of heaven, where all those who will be blessed and all those who can be damned are written down; but one must acquire that which corresponds to what is written there as one's name. There is a typology that is nothing other than the expression of predestination. Augustine cannot be understood any differently; he is truly a follower of absolute predestination. With Calvin's doctrine of predestination, one really doesn't know what he wants; he ends it rather confusingly. I imagine – I haven't studied it, it's never interested me much, I haven't studied Calvin – but I imagine that with him it is so that he started from a moment when he sensed something, and then he couldn't face saying it clearly. His followers felt the need to bring it to an understanding. Today, people treat such things as if they were none of their business. I don't think that [the teaching] of Augustine can be treated in the same way as that of the Gnostics. Augustine is to be seen as an excellent human being.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: What is the significance of Christ's resurrection after three days?

Rudolf Steiner: For three days it was undecided whether he would die or not. It was a three-day struggle with death. So it is to be understood that the things that are there [in the Gospels] are realities. It is not the case that the Christ did not really go through the pain that had to be suffered during the scourging and the crucifixion. It is to be understood that for three days there was the possibility that he would not overcome death. The struggle lasted so long. You can say that from a higher point of view that is out of the question. But he had to fight with death for three days and had this tableau of the past life and led the fight against dissolution [of the body], which he went through with his divine nature like the human being in his human nature. The human body disintegrates at death. The body of Christ Jesus has dissolved into the substance of the earth. You can just as well call that “disappearance” as “dissolving” and “remaining”.

Something redemptive is taking place; an effect on elemental spirits is being exerted by drawing them into their realm.