The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In a former lecture I pointed out that Christianity is wider in reach and compass than the sphere of religion as we normally understand it. I said that when, in future times, men have outgrown what they are now wont to call religion, the substance and content of Christianity will have thrown off the outmoded forms of religious life and will have become a potent spiritual influence in the whole of human culture. Christianity has the power in itself of transcending the forms in which, in the cultural development of our day, we quite rightly express our religious life.

Since that lecture, many significant expressions of cultural life have come to my notice. I have had a brief period of lecturing in the Northern countries—in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The week before last I had to give a lecture in Stockholm, among other towns in Sweden. Because of the low rate of population—remember that London alone has as many inhabitants as the whole of Sweden—there is much unoccupied territory, and people are separated by far greater distances than is the case in our Middle European countries. This will help you to understand what I mean when I tell you that the influences of the old Nordic Gods and Beings are still perceptible in the spiritual environment of those districts. To one who has some knowledge of the Spiritual it is in a sense an actual fact, that wherever the gaze turns one can glimpse the contenances of those ancient Nordic Gods who appeared to the Initiates in the Northern Mysteries, in times long before Christianity had spread over the world.

In the very heart of these lands, enwreathed as they are by myth and legend, not only in the poetic, but also in the spiritual sense, another symptom came into evidence. Between the lectures in Stockholm I had also to give one in Uppsala. In the Library there—in the very midst of all the evidences of spirituality dating from the times of the ancient Gods—lies the first Germanic version of the Bible; the so-called ‘Silver Codex,’ consisting of the four Gospels translated in the 4th century by the Gothic Bishop Wulfila. During the Thirty Years' War, through strange workings of karma, this remarkable document was taken as booty from Prague and brought to the North, where it is now preserved in the midst of the spirit-beings who, in remembrance at least, pervade the spiritual atmosphere of those regions. And as though it were right and proper that this document should lie where it does, a strange occurrence played a part in the story. Eleven leaves of this Silver Codex were stolen by an antiquarian, but after some time his heir suffered such pricks of conscience that he sent the eleven leaves back again to Uppsala, where they now lie, together with the rest of the first Germanic translation of the Bible.

The subject of the three public lectures in Stockholm was Wagner's “Ring of the Nibelungs,” and, walking along the streets, the announcements of the last performance at the Opera of Wagner's Ragnarök, the “Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods), were to be seen on the kiosks. These things are really symptomatic, interweaving in a most remarkable way. Underlying the old Nordic sagas there is a note of deep tragedy, indicating that the Nordic Gods and Divinities would be superseded by One yet to come. This motif and trend of the Nordic sagas reappears in a medieval form in Wagner's. Siegfried is killed by a thrust between his shoulder-blades, his only vulnerable part. This is a prophetic intimation that here, at this place in his body, something is lacking, and that through One yet to come it will be covered by the arms of the Cross. This is no mere poetic image, but something that has been drawn from the inspiration belonging to the world of saga and legend. For this same note of tragic destiny was implicit in the Nordic sagas, in the Mystery-truth underlying them, that the Nordic Gods would be replaced by the later, Christian Principle. In the Northern Mysteries the significance of this ‘Twilight’ of the Gods was everywhere made plain.

It is also significant—and here again I mean something more than a poetic image—that in the very hearts of these people to-day the remembrance of those ancient Gods lives on in peaceful reconciliation with all that has been brought there or made its way thither from Christianity. The presence of the Gothic Bible amid the memories of ancient times is verily a symptom. One can also feel it as a symptom, as a foreshadowing of the future, that in lands where more intensely than anywhere else the ancient Gods are felt as living realities, these Gods should be presented again in their Wagnerian form, outside the narrow bounds of ordinary religion.

Anyone in the slightest degree capable of interpreting the signs of the times will perceive in the art of Richard Wagner the first rays of Christianity emerging from the narrow framework of the religious life into the wider horizons of modern spiritual culture. One can discern quite unmistakably how in the soul of Richard Wagner himself the central idea of Christianity comes to birth, how it bursts the bonds of religion and becomes universal. When on Good Friday, in the year 1857, he looks out of the Villa Wesendonck by the Lake of Zürich at the budding flowers of early spring, and the first seed of “Parsifal” quickens to life within him, this is a transformation, on a wider scale, of what already lives in Christianity, as a religious idea. And after he had reached the heights of that prophetic foreshadowing of Christianity to which he gave such magnificent expression in the “Ring of the Nibelungs,” this central Idea of Christianity found still wider horizons in “Parsifal,” becoming the seed of that future time when Christianity will embrace, not only the religious life, but the life of knowledge, of art, of beauty, in the widest sense of the words.

This is the theme that will be presented to you to-day, in order to kindle the feeling of what Christianity can be for mankind in times to come.

In connection with this, we will penetrate deeply to-day into the evolution of humanity, for the purpose of discovering the real relation between religion in the ordinary sense and Christianity. The present point of time is itself not unsuitable, lying as it does just before the great Festival symbolising the victory of the Spirit over Death. The Festival of Easter is close upon us and we remember, perhaps, those Christmas lectures in which we endeavoured to grasp the meaning of Christmas in the light of the Mystery-knowledge. If from a higher vantage-point we think of the Christmas Festival on the one side and the Easter Festival, with its prospect of Whitsuntide, on the other, the relation between religion and Christianity, if rightly conceived, is brought in a most wonderful way before the eye of spirit.

It will be necessary to go far, far afield in laying the basis of this study, but by doing so we shall realise what has been preserved in such Festivals and what they can bring to life in the soul. We shall go far, far back in evolution—although not so far either in time or space as in our last lectures, when we dealt with the Spiritual Hierarchies. Those lectures, however, will have been a help, because of the vistas they opened up of the earth's evolution and its connection with that of the Beings of the heavens. To-day we shall go back only to about the middle of the Atlantean epoch, when the ancestors of present-day humanity were living in the West, between Europe and America, on the continent now lying beneath the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. In those times the face of the earth was quite different. Where now there is water, then there was land, and on this land dwelt the early ancestors of men who now constitute the civilised humanity of Europe and Asia. When the eye of spirit is directed upon the soul-life of these antediluvian, Atlantean peoples, it is seen to have been quite different from the soul-life of Post-Atlantean humanity. We have learnt, from earlier studies, of the mighty changes that have taken place in earth-evolution since that time, including changes in the life of the human soul. The whole of man's consciousness, even the alternating states of waking consciousness by day and sleep by night, have changed. The normal state to-day is that when a man wakes in the morning he comes down with his astral body and Ego into the physical and etheric bodies, making use of the physical senses: the eyes for seeing, the ears for hearing, and all the other senses, in order to receive the impressions coming from the material world around him. He plunges with his astral body down into his brain, into his nerves, combining and relating his multifarious sense-impressions. Such is the life of day. At night, the Ego and astral body draw out of the physical and etheric bodies, and sleep ensues. The physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed, but the Ego and astral body have passed out of them and all the impressions of the sense-world and of the waking life of day are obliterated; joy, suffering, pleasure, pain—everything that composes man's inner waking life of soul passes away, and in the present cycle of human evolution darkness enshrouds him during the night.

At approximately the middle of the Atlantean epoch it was not so. Man's consciousness in those times was essentially different. When in the morning he entered into his physical and etheric bodies he was not confronted with sharply outlined pictures of the outer, material world. The pictures were much less distinct and definite, rather as when street lamps in thick fog appear surrounded with an aura of rainbow-like colours. This homely illustration will help you to envisage what the mid-Atlantean man saw and perceived, but you must remember that these colourforms surrounding and blurring the sharp outlines of objects, and also the tones resounding from them, revealed a great deal more than the colours and tones familiar to us to-day. These encircling colours were the expressions of living beings—of the inner, soul-qualities of these beings. And so when a man had come down into his physical and etheric bodies he still had some perception of the spiritual beings, around him—unlike to-day when, on waking in the morning he merely perceives physical objects with their sharp outlines and coloured surfaces.

Moreover, when at night the Atlantean left his physical and etheric bodies, the world into which he passed was not a world of darkness and silence; the pictures were hardly less numerous than by day, with this difference only, that whereas in the waking life of day man perceived outer objects, belonging to the mineral-, plant-, animal- and human kingdoms, at night the whole space around him was filled with colour-forms and tones, with impressions of smell, taste and so forth. But these colours and tones, these impressions of warmth and cold of which he was conscious, were the garments, the sheaths, of spiritual Beings who never descend to physical incarnation, Beings whose names and images are preserved in the myths and sagas. Myths and sagas are not just folk-songs; they are memories of the visions which in olden times came to men in these conditions of existence. Men were aware of the spiritual alike by day and by night. By night they were surrounded by that world of Nordic gods of which the legends tell. Odin, Freya, and all the other figures in Nordic mythology were not inventions; they were experienced in the spiritual world with as much reality as a man experiences his fellow-men around him to-day. And the sagas are the memories of the experiences actually undergone by men in their shadowy, clairvoyant consciousness.

At the time when this kind of consciousness had evolved from a still earlier form, the sun in the heavens rose at the vernal equinox in the constellation of Libra (the Scales). As the Atlantean epoch took its further course, the kind of consciousness that is ours to-day gradually developed. The impressions received by man during the night when his Ego and astral body were outside his physical and etheric bodies became dimmer, less and less distinct; whereas the images of waking life coming to him when he was within his physical and etheric bodies by day, increased in clarity and definition. Paradoxically speaking, night became more intensely night, day more intensely day.

Then came the Atlantean Flood and the dawn of the later, Post-Atlantean epochs of civilisation: the ancient Indian civilisation when the Holy Rishis themselves were the teachers of men; the epoch of ancient Persian culture; the epoch of Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian culture; the epoch of Greco-Roman culture, and finally our own. These epochs of civilisation followed one another after the submergence of Atlantis. And the mood-of-soul prevailing in men during early Post-Atlantean times, and to some extent also during the last phases of the Atlantean epoch itself, can be indicated by saying that among the peoples everywhere, including those who, as the descendants of the Atlanteans, had wandered across to the East and settled there, the ancient memories still survived, as well as the old myths and legends describing the experiences of the earlier form of Atlantean consciousness. These legends and myths which originated in Atlantis had come over with the migrating peoples, who preserved and narrated them. They were their inspiration, and the oldest inhabitants of the North were still vitally aware of the power flowing from these myths, because their ancestors remembered that their own forefathers had actually seen what was narrated in the legends.

Something else too had been preserved, namely the things that had been experienced, not it is true by the masses of the people, but by those who were the Initiates in olden times, the priests and sages of the Mysteries. Their eyes of spirit had penetrated into the same depths of world-existence that are disclosed to-day through spiritual investigation. The Initiation-consciousness of man's early forefathers worked in the spiritual world as powerfully as the Folk-Soul. Clairvoyance, although dim and shadowy, was still a real and vital power in those olden days. Folk-lore and saga preserved and proclaimed, in revelations often fragmentary and broken, realities that had once been experienced. What had been seen in vision and cultivated in the Mysteries was preserved in the form of an ancient wisdom. It was then possible, in the Mysteries, to infuse into the individual consciousness of those who became Initiates, a wide, all-embracing vista of the universe. But forms of consciousness which had been natural in remote ages had in the later times of the Mysteries to be artificially induced.

Why was spiritual vision a natural condition in the far distant past? The reason is that the connection between the physical body and the etheric body was different. The connection existing to-day did not develop until the later phases of the Atlantean epoch. Before that time the upper part of the etheric head extended far outside the boundaries of the physical head; towards the end of Atlantis the etheric head gradually drew completely into the physical head until it coincided with it. This gave rise to the later form of consciousness which became natural in Post-Atlantean man, enabling him to perceive physical objects in sharp outlines, as we do to-day. The fact that man can hear tones, be aware of scents, see colours on surfaces—although these are no longer expressions of the inmost spiritual reality of things—all this is connected with the firm and gradual interlocking of the physical body and etheric body.

In earlier times, when the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body, this projecting part of the etheric body was able to receive impressions from the astral body, and it was these impressions that were perceived by the old, dreamlike clairvoyance. Not until the etheric body had sunk right down into the physical body was man wholly bereft of his dim clairvoyance. Hence in the ancient Mysteries it became necessary for the priests to use special methods in order to induce in the candidates for Initiation the condition which, in Atlantis, had been natural and normal. When pupils were to receive Initiation in the Mystery-temples, the procedure was that, after the appropriate impressions had been received by the astral body, the priests conducting the Initiation induced a partial loosening of the etheric body, in consequence of which the physical body lay for three and a half days in a trancelike sleep, in a kind of paralytic condition. The astral body was then able to imprint into the loosened etheric body experiences which had once come to Atlantean man in his normal state. Then the candidate for Initiation was able to see around him realities that henceforth were no longer merely preserved for him in scripts, or in tradition, but had become his own, individual experiences.

Let us try to picture what actually happened to the candidate for Initiation.—When the priests in the Mysteries raised the etheric body partially out of the physical body and guided the impressions issuing from the astral body into this released etheric body, the candidate experienced in his etheric body the spiritual worlds. So strong and intense were the experiences that when he was restored from the trance and his etheric body was reunited to the physical body, he brought back the memory of these experiences into his physical consciousness. He had been a witness of the spiritual worlds, could himself bear witness to what was happening there; he had risen above and beyond all division into peoples or nations, for he had been initiated into that by which all peoples are united; the primal wisdom, primal truth.

Thus it was in the ancient Mysteries; so too it was in those moments of which I told you in connection with the Christmas Mystery, when the boundaries which were to characterise the consciousness of later times disappeared before the gaze of the Initiate. Think for a moment of the fundamental characteristic of Post-Atlantean consciousness. Man is no longer able to see into the innermost nature of things; between him and this innermost core of being a boundary is fixed. He sees only the surfaces of things in the physical world. What man's consciousness in the Post-Atlantean epoch could no longer penetrate, was transparent and clear to the one who in olden times was about to receive Initiation. And then, when the great moment came, in what is called the “Holy Night,” he was able to see through the solid earth and to behold the Sun, the spiritual “Sun at midnight.”

In essentials, therefore, this pre-Christian Initiation consisted in re-evoking what in ancient times had been the natural condition, the normal state of consciousness. Little by little, as civilisation advanced, these memories of olden times receded and the power to experience reality outside the physical body became increasingly rare. Nevertheless, in the earliest periods of the Post-Atlantean epoch there were still many in the ancient Indian, Persian, Chaldean civilisations, indeed even in ancient Egypt, whose etheric bodies were not yet so firmly anchored in the physical body as to prevent them from receiving the impressions of the spiritual world—in the form of atavistic remains of an earlier age. Later, during Greco-Roman times, even these vestiges disappeared and it was less and less possible for Initiation to be achieved in the same way as before. It became increasingly difficult to preserve for humanity the memories of the ancient, primal wisdom.

At this point we are drawing near the time of our own Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch which denotes something of peculiar significance in the evolution of humanity. In the Greco-Latin epoch it was still true to speak of an equal possibility, on the one side of remembering the visions arising in the ancient, shadowy clairvoyance, and on the other, of living wholly within the physical body, and of being thereby completely cut off from the spiritual worlds. Individuals here and there had this experience. The whole trend of modern life goes to show that the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch has descended still more deeply into the physical body—the outer sign being the birth of materialistic concepts. These made their appearance for the first time in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, with the Atomists of ancient Greece. Then, having passed from the scene for a time, we find them cropping up again, and during the last four centuries their influence has so greatly increased that man has lost, not only the content of the old memories of the spiritual worlds, but, gradually, all belief in the very existence of those worlds. There you have the true state of affairs. In this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, man has sunk so deeply into the physical body that he has lost even belief! In a very large number of people, belief in the existence of a spiritual world has simply vanished.

And now let us look from a different point of view at the course taken by evolution. Looking back into those ancient Atlantean times of which we have been trying to form a concrete picture, we can say that man was still living with and among his gods. He believed not only in his own existence and that of the three kingdoms of nature, but also in the reality of the higher realms of the spiritual worlds, for in the Atlantean epoch he was an actual witness of them. His spiritual consciousness by night and his physical consciousness by day did not greatly differ; they were in balance, and it would have been foolish of a man to deny the reality of that which was perceptibly around him—for he actually beheld the gods. There was no need for religion in our modern sense. What now forms the content of the various religions was a perceived reality to the majority of human beings in the times of Atlantis. Just as little as you yourselves need religion in order to believe in the existence of roses or lilies, rocks or trees, as little did the Atlantean need religion in order to believe in gods, for to him they were realities. But this immediate reality faded away, and more and more the content of the spiritual worlds became mere memory—partly preserved in traditions of the visions of very ancient forefathers, partly in the myths and sagas, and in what a few individuals gifted with special powers of clairvoyance had themselves witnessed of these spiritual worlds. Above all, however, this content of the spiritual worlds was preserved in the Mysteries, guarded by the priests of the Mysteries. The secret knowledge under the guardianship of the Priests of Hermes in Egypt, of Zarathustra in Persia, and the sages of Chaldea, the successors of the Holy Rishis in India, was nothing else than the art of enabling human beings, through Initiation, to witness what men in days of yore had seen around them in a perfectly natural way. Later, what the Mysteries preserved was expressed in the form of the folk-religion—here in one, there in another religion—according to the constitution of a people, according to its particular faculties and powers of perception, even according to its native climate. But the primal wisdom was the basis of them all, as the one great unity. This wisdom was one and the same, whether cultivated by Pythagoras in his School, by the Chaldean sages in Western Asia, by Zarathustra in Persia, or by the Brahmans in India. Everywhere it was the same primal wisdom—expressed in varied form according to the needs and conditions obtaining in the folk-religions of the different regions. Here, then, we see the primal wisdom as the fount and basis of all religion.

What is religion, fundamentally speaking? It is the intermediary between the spiritual worlds and mankind when men are no longer able to experience these spiritual worlds through their own organs of perception. Religion was the proclamation, the announcement of the existence of spiritual worlds, made for the sake of men who could no longer experience spiritual reality. Thus was the spiritual life spread over the earth as religious culture in the several epochs of civilisation, in ancient India, ancient Persia and the rest, down to our own time.

As I have already said, the purpose of man's descent into a physical body was that he might gain knowledge of the external world, experiencing existence through his physical senses, in order, finally, to spiritualise what he thus experienced, and so lead it to future stages of evolution. But at the present time, having plunged deeply into the physical body, and having already passed the middle point of the Post-Atlantean civilisations, we are facing a very definite eventuality.

The whole evolution of mankind has a certain strange quality. It goes forward in one direction until a certain point is reached and then it begins to stream in the opposite direction. Having streamed downwards to a certain point, it turns again upwards, reaching the same stages as on the descent, but now in a higher form. To-day man stands in very truth before a fateful future, that future when, as is known to everyone who is aware of this deeply significant truth of evolution, his etheric body will gradually loosen itself again, freeing itself from its submergence in the physical body, where the things of the physical world are perceived in their sharply outlined forms. The etheric body must release itself again in order that man's being may become spiritualised and once again have vision of the spiritual world. To-day humanity has actually reached the point when in a great number of individuals the etheric body is beginning to loosen.

A destiny in the very highest degree significant is approaching us, and here we come near to the secret of our own epoch of civilisation.

We must realise that the etheric body, which has descended very deeply into the physical body, must now take the path upwards, carrying with it from the physical body everything that has been experienced through the physical senses. But just because the etheric body is loosening itself from the physical, everything that was formerly reality—in the physical sense—must gradually be spiritualised. It will be essential for mankind in times to come to have conscious certainty that the spiritual is reality. What will happen otherwise? The etheric body will be freed from the physical body while men still believe only in the reality of the physical world, and have no consciousness of the reality of the spiritual, which will be manifest in the loosened etheric body as the fruit of man's past experience in the physical body. In such conditions men may be faced with the danger of losing all relationship to this loosening of their etheric bodies.

Let us consider the point at which a man's etheric body, which has been firmly anchored in the physical body, begins to loosen from it again and to emerge. Suppose that this happens to a man who in his physical existence has lost all belief in, all consciousness of, the spiritual world, and has cut himself off from any connection with it. Let us assume that he descended so firmly and deeply into the physical body that he has been able to retain nothing save the belief that the physical life is the one and only reality. Now he passes into the next phase of human existence. Relentlessly the etheric body emerges from the physical body, while he is still incapable of realising the existence of a spiritual world. He neither recognises nor knows anything of the spiritual world about him. This is the fate which may confront men in the near future, that they do not recognise the spiritual world which, as the result of the loosening of the etheric body, they must inevitably experience, but regard it as a phantasy, illusion, vain imagination. And those who have experienced most ably, with the utmost perfection, the physical body, the men who have become the pundits of materialism and are full of fixed, rigid notions of matter, it is they who, with the loosening of the etheric body, will face the greatest danger of being without a single inkling that there is a spiritual world. They will regard everything that then comes to them from the spiritual world as illusion, fancy, as so many figments of dream.

If in times to come, when the etheric body has again loosened itself from the physical, man is to live his life in any real sense, he must have consciousness of what will then present itself to the etheric body. In order that he may be conscious that what then comes to him is knowledge of the spiritual world, it is essential that realisation of the existence of the spiritual world shall be preserved in humanity and carried through the period when man is most deeply immersed in the material world. For the sake of the future, the link between the religious life and the life of knowledge must never be lost. Man came forth from a life among the gods; to a life among the gods he will again return. But he must be able to recognise them; he must know that in very truth the gods are realities. When the etheric body has loosened he will no longer be able to rely on remembrances of ancient human times. If meanwhile he has lost consciousness of the spiritual world, has come to believe that life in the physical body and things to be seen in the physical world are the only realities, then for all ages of time he must dangle, as it were, in mid-air. He will have lost his bearings in the spiritual world and will have no ground under his feet. He will be threatened, in this condition, with what is known as the “spiritual death.” For around him there is only phantasy, illusion, a world of whose reality he has no consciousness, in which he does not believe, and so ... he dies! That is the death in the spiritual world. It is the doom which threatens men if, before passing again into the spiritual worlds, they fail to bring with them any consciousness of those worlds.

At what point in the evolution of humanity was attainment of consciousness of the spiritual world made possible for man? It was at the point where man's descent into the physical body was countered by victory over that body, and there was placed before men the great Prototype of Christ Himself. The understanding of Christ forms for man the bridge between the memories of his ancient past and the foreshadowings of his future. When Jesus of Nazareth had reached the age of 30, the Christ came down into his body. For the first and last time Christ lived in a physical body. And His victory over death—when it is rightly understood—reveals to man what the manner of his own life must be if, for all ages of time, he is to be conscious of the reality of the spiritual world. That is the true union with Christ.

What will the Christ Mystery, the Christ Deed, come to mean in the life of man in the future? The man of the future will look back upon our present epoch, when he lived wholly within the physical body, just as Post-Atlantean man looks back to those Atlantean times when he was living together with the gods. As he ascends again into the spiritual world, man will know that through the Christ Deed he has gained the victory over what he experienced in the physical body; he will point to the physical as something that has been overcome, surmounted. We should feel the Easter Miracle, then, as a mighty Deed, a foreshadowing of the Future.

Two possibilities lie before the man of the future. The one possibility is that he will look back in remembrance to the time of his experiences in the physical body, and he will say, “These alone were real. Now there is about me only a world of illusion. Life in the physical body—that was the reality.” Such a man will be gazing into a grave and what he sees in the grave is a corpse. But the corpse—the physical thing—will still be for him the true reality. That is the one possibility.

The other is that man will look back upon what was experienced in the physical world, and will know that it is a grave. Then, with deep consciousness of the import of his words, he will say to those who still believe the physical to have been the one and only reality: “He Whom thou seekest is no longer here! The grave is empty and He Who lay within it has risen!”

The empty Grave and the Risen Christ—this is the Easter Mystery, the Mystery that is a foreshadowing, a prophecy. Christ came to establish the great synthesis between the Easter Mystery and the Christmas Mystery. To the Christmas re-enactment of the ancient Mysteries is added the Mystery of future time, the Mystery of the Risen Christ. This is the Mystery enshrined in the Festival of Easter. The future of Christianity is that Christianity will not merely proclaim the existence of higher worlds, nor be mere religion, but an inner affirmation, a powerful impulse in life itself. It will be an inner affirmation, because in the Risen Christ man will behold that which he himself will experience through the ages of time to come. This Mystery is a Deed, a reality of life, inasmuch as man looks up to Christ not merely as the Saviour but as the great Prototype with whom his life conforms, in that he too will eventually overcome death. To live and work in the spirit of Christianity, to see in Christ not merely the Comforter but the One Who goes before us, Who is related in the deepest sense with our innermost being and Whose example we follow—this is what the Christ Idea will be in the future, pervading all knowledge, all art, all life. And if we remind ourselves of what is contained in the Easter Idea, we shall find there a Christian symbol of true Deed, true Life.

In times when men will have long since ceased to need the teachings of religion to tell them of the ancient gods, because they will again be living among gods, they will find in Christ that source of strength which enables them to find their own firm centre among the gods. Men will no longer require religion in order to believe in gods whom they will once again behold, any more than they required religion in former times when they lived and moved among gods. Themselves spiritualised, men will live consciously among spiritual Beings, fulfilling their tasks in communion with these Beings. In a future by no means far distant, man will find that the physical world is losing its importance for him, that physical things are becoming evanescent. Their reality will have already paled long before man's existence on the earth has drawn to its close.¹ But when the things of the physical world of sense cease to be all-important and fade into shadow, man will either find that the physical is losing its importance while he is still incapable of believing in the spiritual realities before him, or he will be able to believe and preserve for himself the consciousness of these spiritual realities—and then for such a man there will be no spiritual death.

To confront a reality that is unrecognisable, means to be shattered in the spirit. And men would come to this pass if, with the loosening of the etheric body, the spiritual worlds were to appear before them without being recognised and known as such. Many a man to-day could have consciousness of the spiritual worlds but has it not. Therefore these worlds take vengeance, and this shows itself in man's restlessness, his neurasthenic condition, his pathological fears, which are nothing else than the consequences of failure to unfold consciousness of the spiritual worlds. Those who realise the significance of these things feel the necessity of a spiritual Movement which, for those who are outgrowing the substance of ordinary religion, preserves belief in man, in the whole man, including, therefore, the spiritual man.

To know Christ means to know man as a spiritual being. To be filled with the Christ Mystery in the future will mean that Christianity as mere religion will be surmounted and will be carried as knowledge to infinite horizons. Christianity will permeate art, will broaden and inspire it, will bestow in abundance the power of artistic creation. Richard Wagner's “Parsifal” is the first foreshadowing of this.

Christianity will flow into all life and activity on the earth and when the formal religions have long ceased to be necessary, mankind will have been strengthened and invigorated by the Christ Impulse which had once to be given in the middle of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, during the Greco-Latin epoch, when Christ came down among men. Just as it was man's destiny to sink into the deepest depths of material life, so must he be lifted again to knowledge of the Spirit. With the Coming of Christ this Impulse was given.

These are the feelings that should inspire us in the days when we have the Easter Mystery in symbols around us. For the Easter Mystery is not merely a Mystery of Remembrance. It is also a Mystery of the Future, foreshadowing the destiny of those who free themselves more and more from the shackles, ensnarements and pitfalls of the purely material life.

• 1. This is the answer to the scientific prognostication of the end of the human race.

Ever since the early days of Christianity it has been the custom to draw a distinction between the festivals of Christmas and of Easter in that the Christmas festival has been made immovable, having been fixed at a point of time a few days after the 21st of December, the winter solstice, whereas the day of the Easter festival is determined by a particular constellation of the stars, a constellation of the stars which unites earth and man with the worlds beyond the earth. To-morrow will be the first full moon of spring and upon this full moon will fall the rays of the springtime sun, for since the 21st of March the sun has been in the sign of spring. When, therefore, men on earth celebrate a Sunday—a day, that is, which should remind them of their connection with the sun-forces—when the Sunday comes that is the first after the full moon of spring, then is the time to keep the Easter festival. Easter is thus a movable festival. In order to determine the time of the Easter festival, note must be taken each year of the constellations in the heavens.

Principles such as these were laid down at a time when traditions of wisdom were still current among mankind, traditions that originated from ancient atavistic clairvoyant faculties and gave man a knowledge far surpassing the knowledge that present-day science can offer. And such traditions were a means for bringing to expression man's connection with the worlds beyond the earth. They always point to something of supreme importance for the evolution [of] mankind.

The rigid point of time fixed for the Christmas festival indicates how closely that festival is bound up with the earthly, for its purpose is to remind us of the birth of the Man into whom the Christ Being afterwards entered. The Easter festival, on the other hand, is intended to remind us of an event whose significance lies, not merely within the course of earth-evolution, but within the whole world-order into which man has been placed. Therefore the time of the Easter festival must not be determined by ordinary earthly conditions; it is a time that can be ascertained only when man turns his thoughts to the worlds beyond the earth. And there is deeper meaning still in this plan of a movable time for the Easter festival. It indicates how through the Christ Impulse man is to be set free from the forces of earth-evolution pure and simple. For through knowledge of that which is beyond the earth, man is to become free of the evolution of the earth, and this truth is indicated in the manner of dating the Easter festival. It contains a call to man to lift himself up to the worlds beyond the earth; it contains a promise to man that in the course of world-history it shall be possible for him, through the working of the Christ Impulse, to become free of earthly conditions.

To understand all that is implied in this manner of dating the Easter festival, it will be helpful to turn our minds to early secrets of the beginnings of Christianity, to some of those early mysteries which during a certain period of earthly evolution have become more and more veiled and hidden from the materialistic view of the world which arose at the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch and must now be vanquished and superseded. In order to see the whole matter in a true light it will be necessary first of all to consider the part played by the figure of St. Paul in the evolution of the Christ Impulse within the whole history of mankind.

We should indeed remind ourselves again and again what a great event in the evolution of Christianity was the appearance of the figure of St. Paul. Paul had had abundant opportunity to inform himself, by external observation, of the events in Palestine that were associated with the personality of Jesus. All that came to his notice in this way in the physical world left Paul unconvinced; when these events in Palestine had come to an end in the physical sense, Paul [was] still an antagonist of Christianity. He became the Apostle of the Christians only after the event at Damascus, after he had experienced the very Being of the Christ in an extra-earthly, super-sensible manner. Thus Paul was a man who could not be persuaded of the meaning of the Christ Impulse by evidence of the physical senses, but who could be convinced only by a super-sensible experience. And the super-sensible experience that came to him cut deeply into his life—so deeply indeed, that from that moment he became another man. Nay, more: he became an Initiate.

Paul was well prepared for such an experience. He was thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of the religion of the Jews; he was familiar with their knowledge and their conception of the world. He was thus well equipped to judge of the nature of the event that befell him at Damascus and to have a right view and understanding of it. The writings of Paul, as we know them, convey only a weak reflection of all that he experienced inwardly. But even so, when he speaks of the event of Damascus we can discern that he speaks as one who through this event attained knowledge of cosmic happenings lying behind the veil of the world of sense. From the very manner in which he speaks it is plain that he is fully able to understand the difference between the super-sensible world and the world of sense.

When, even externally, we compare the life of Paul with the earthly experience of Christ Jesus, we discover a strange and astounding fact which becomes intelligible to us, only when with the help of spiritual science, we are able to survey the whole evolution of mankind in a particular aspect. [I] have often drawn attention to the great difference in the development of the human soul in the several epochs. I have shown you how man has changed in the course of evolution through the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin epochs, on to our own time. When we look back into the ancient past we find that man remained capable of organic physical development until an advanced age, The parallelism between the development of the soul and the development of the body continued until an advanced age of life; it is a parallelism that we can recognise now only in the three stages marked by the change of teeth, puberty and the beginning of the twenties. As far as out-ward appearance goes, mankind has lost the experience of such transitions in later life. In very ancient Indian times, however, men experienced a parallelism between the development of soul and of body up to the fiftieth year of life, in Persian and Egyptian times up to the fortieth year, and in Greco-Latin times up to the thirty-fifth year. In ordinary consciousness, we experience a like parallelism only up to the twenty-seventh year and it is not easy to detect even for so long as that. Now the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of mankind at a time when men—especially those of the Greek and Latin races—experienced this parallelism as late as into the thirtieth year. And Christ Jesus lived His days of physical earthly life for just so long as the duration of the span of life which ran in a parallelism between the physical organisation and the organisation of soul and spirit. Then, in relation to earthly life, He passed through the gate of death. What this passage through the gate of death means can be understood only from the point of view of spiritual science; it can be understood only when we are able to look into super-sensible worlds. For the passage through the gate of death is not an event that can be grasped by any thinking concerned entirely with the world of sense.

As physical man, Paul was of about the same age as Christ Jesus Himself. The time that Christ Jesus spent in His work on earth, Paul spent as an anti-Christian. And the second half of his life was determined entirely by what came to him from super-sensible experiences. In this second half of his life he had super-sensible experience of what men at that time could no longer receive in the second half of life through sense-experience, because the parallelism between soul-and-spirit development and physical development was not experienced beyond the thirty-fifth year of life. And the Event of Golgotha came before Paul in such a way that he received, by direct illumination, the understanding once possessed by men in an atavistic way through primeval wisdom, and which they can now again acquire through spiritual science. This understanding came to Paul in order that he might be the one to arouse in men a realisation of what had happened for mankind through the working of the Christ Impulse.

For about the same length of time that Christ had walked the earth, did Paul continue to live upon earth—that is, until about his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year. This time was spent in carrying the teaching of Christianity into earth-evolution. The parallelism between the life of Christ Jesus and the life of Paul is a remarkable one. The life of Christ Jesus was completely filled with the presence and Being of the Christ. Paul had such a strong after-experience (acquired through Initiation) of this event, that he was able to be the one to bring to mankind true and fitting ideas about Christianity—and to do so for a period of time corresponding very nearly to that of the life of Christ Jesus on earth. There is a great deal to be learned from a study of the connection between the life lived by Christ Jesus for the sake of the earthly evolution of mankind, and the teaching given by Paul concerning the Christ Being. To see this connection aright would mean a very great deal for us; only it is necessary to realise that the connection is a direct result of the super-sensible experience undergone by Paul.

When modern theology goes so far as to explain the event at Damascus as a kind of illusion, as a kind of hallucination, then it is only a proof that in our day even theology has succumbed to materialism. Even theology has no longer any knowledge of the nature of the super-sensible world, and entirely fails to recognise man's need to understand the super-sensible world before he can have any true comprehension of Christianity.

It is good that we should confess to-day, in all sincerity, how difficult it is to find our way into the ideas presented in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul—ideas that are so totally different from those to which we are accustomed. For the most part we have ceased to concern ourselves at all with such ideas. But it is a fact that a man who is completely given up to the habits and ways of thought of the present day, is far from being able to form the right ideas when he reads the words of Paul. Many present-day theologians put a materialistic interpretation upon the event of Damascus, even trying to disprove and deny the actual Resurrection of Christ Jesus—while professing at the time to be true Christians. Such persons themselves bear testimony that they have no intention of applying knowledge of the super-sensible to the essence of Christianity or to the event of the appearance of Christ Jesus in earthly evolution. The very fact that the figure of Paul stands at the summit of Christian tradition, the figure, that is, of one who acquired an understanding of Christianity through super-sensible experience, is like a challenge to man to possess himself of super-sensible knowledge. It is like a declaration that Christianity cannot possibly be comprehended without having recourse to knowledge that has its source in the super-sensible. It is essential that we should see in Paul a man who had been initiated into super-sensible, cosmic happenings; it is essential to see in this light what he laboured so hard to bring to mankind. Let us try in the language of the present day to place before our minds one of the things that seemed to Paul, as an Initiate, to be of peculiar significance.

Paul regarded it of supreme importance to make clear to men how through the Christ Impulse an entirely new way of relating themselves to cosmic evolution had come to them. He felt it essential to declare: that that period of the evolution of the world which carried within it the experiences of the heathen of older times, had run its course; it was finished for man. New experiences were now here for the human soul; they needed only to be perceived.

When Paul spoke in this way, he was pointing to the mighty Event which made such a deep incision into the evolution of man on earth; and indeed if we would understand history as it truly is, we must come back again and again to this Event. If we look back into pre-Christian times, and especially into those times which possess to a striking degree the characteristic qualities of pre-Christian life, we can feel how different was the whole outlook of men in those days. Not that a complete change took place in a single moment; nevertheless the Event of Golgotha did bring about an absolute separation of one phase in the evolution of mankind from another. The Event of Golgotha came at the end of a period of evolution during which men beheld, together with the world of the senses, also the spiritual. Incredible as it may appear to modern man it is a fact that in pre-Christian times men saw, together with the sense-perceptible, a spiritual reality. They did not see merely trees, or merely plants, but together with the trees, and together with the plants they saw something spiritual. But as the time of the Event of Golgotha drew near, the civilisation that bore within it this power of vision was coming to an end. Something completely new was now to enter into the evolution of mankind. As long as man beholds the spiritual in the physical things all around him, he cannot have a consciousness which allows the impulse of freedom to quicken within it. The birth of the impulse of freedom is necessarily accompanied by a loss of this vision; man has to find himself deserted by the divine and spiritual when he looks out upon the external world. The impulse of freedom inevitably implies that, if man would again have vision of the spiritual, he must exert himself inwardly and draw it forth from the depths of his own soul.

This is what Paul wanted to reveal to men. He told them how in ancient times, when men were only the race of Adam, they had no need to draw forth an active experience from the depths of their own being before they could behold the divine and spiritual. The divine and spiritual came to them in elemental form, with everything that lived in the air and on earth. But mankind had gradually to lose this living communion with the divine and spiritual in all the phenomena of the world of sense. A time had to come when man must perforce lift himself up to the divine and spiritual by an active strengthening of his own inner life. He had to learn to understand the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not to be allowed to go on receiving a divine and spiritual reality that came forth to meet him from all sense-phenomena. He had to find the way to a divine and spiritual kingdom that could be reached only by inward struggle and inward development.

People interpret Paul to-day in such a trivial manner! Again and again they show an inclination to translate what he said into the language of this materialistic age. So trivial is their interpretation of him that one is liable to be dubbed fantastic when one puts forward such a view as the following concerning the content of his message. And yet it is absolutely true.

Paul saw what a great crisis it was for the world that the ancient vision, which was at one and the same time a sense-vision and a spiritual vision, was fading away and disappearing, and that another vision of the spiritual was now to dawn for man in a new kingdom of light,¹ a vision which he must acquire for himself by his own inner initiative, and which is not immediately present for him in the vision of the senses. Paul knew from his own super-sensible experience in Initiation that ever since the Resurrection Christ Jesus has been united with earth-evolution. But he also knew that, although Christ Jesus is present, He can be found by man only through the awakening of an inner power of vision, not through any mere beholding with the senses. Should any man think he can reach the Christ with the mere vision of the senses, Paul knew that he must be giving himself up to delusions, he must be mistaking some demon for the Christ.

This was what Paul was continually emphasising to those of his hearers who were able to understand it: that the old spiritual vision brings no approach to Christ, that with this old vision one can only mistake some elemental being for the Christ. Therefore Paul exerted all his power to bring men out of the habit of looking to the spirits of air and of earth.² In earlier times men had been familiar with elemental spirits, and necessarily so, for in those times they still possessed atavistic faculties with which to behold them. But now these faculties could not rightly be possessed by man. On the other hand, Paul never wearied of exhorting men to develop within themselves a force whereby they might learn to understand what it was that had taken place, namely, an entirely new impulse, an entirely new Being had entered earth-evolution. “Christ will come again to you,” he said, “if you will only find the way out of your purely physical vision of the earth. Christ will come again to you, for He is there. Through the working of the Event of Golgotha, He is there. But you must find Him; He must come again for you.”

This is what Paul proclaimed, and in a language which at the time had quite another spiritual ring than has the mere echo left us in our translation. It sounded quite different then. Paul sought continually to awaken in man the conviction that if he would understand Christ, he must develop a new kind of vision; the vision that suffices for the world of sense is not enough. To-day, mankind has only come so far as to speak of the contrast between an external, sense-derived science, and faith. Modern theology is ready to admit of the former that it is complicated, that it is real and objective, that it requires to be learned; of faith it will allow no such thing. It is repeatedly emphasised that faith ought to make appeal to what is utterly childlike in man, to that in man which does not need to be learned.

Such is the attitude of mind which rejects the event of Damascus as unreal, preferring to regard it as a kind of hallucination that befell Paul. If, however, the event of Damascus was a mere hallucination—or I might just as well say, if the event of Damascus was what a great number of modern theologians would have it to be—then we ought also to have the courage to say: Away with Christianity! For Christianity has brought with it a belief that is absurd and senseless.

This would be the necessary outcome of the teaching of modern theology, if only people took it—first of all, seriously, and secondly, with courage. As a matter of fact they do neither. They shrink from having nothing but a merely external, sense-given science, and yet at the same time they deny the real, inner impulse of the event of Damascus, while still professing to hold fast to Christianity! It is precisely in such things that the soul-and-spirit sickness of our age comes to clearest expression; for a deep inner lack of truth is here laid bare. Truth would be obliged to confess: Either the event of Damascus was a reality, an event that can be placed in the realm of reality, then Christianity has meaning; or it was what it is asserted to be by modern theology, which wants always to associate itself with modern science; then Christianity has no meaning. It is important that people should face such conclusions, for there is no doubt we live in an age of severe testing. Through man's becoming inwardly untrue in regard to the very matters that are most sacred for him—for he ought no longer to call what he has, ‘Christianity’—through this, a tendency to untruth, often unconscious but no less destructive on that account, has taken hold of mankind. That is the real reason for the existence of this tendency. That is why this tendency to untruth is so closely interwoven with the events that will inevitably lead to decadence in the whole cultural life of Europe, unless men bethink themselves in time and turn to spiritual knowledge.

And if we would turn to spiritual knowledge, it is emphatically not enough in these days to rest content with looking at life in any superficial way; it is absolutely essential for us to take things in all their depth of meaning and to be ready to contemplate the necessity of mighty changes in our own time.

Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of a very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right to-day to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe—namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge—for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus—if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that men should bethink themselves how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in men's minds to-day: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?

We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest—for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter—these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology—that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!

Men must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life to-day.

During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a new tendency has been at work, a tendency towards a scientific knowledge that is adapted to the power of human reason and judgment; and now it is time that this should go further and develop into a knowledge of the super-sensible world. For the Event of Golgotha is an event that falls absolutely within the super-sensible world. And the event of Damascus, as Paul experienced it, is an event that can be understood only out of super-sensible ideas. On the understanding of this event depends whether one can in very truth feel something of the Christ Impulse, or whether one cannot. The man of the present day is faced with a severe test when he asks himself: In the time that has been christened ‘Easter,’ how do I stand to super-sensible knowledge? For Easter should remind man, by the very way its date is determined, to look up from the earthly to what is beyond the earth. The man of modern times has left himself no more outlook into what is beyond the earth than at most that which is given him in mathematics and mechanics, and now in spectro-analysis. These sciences are the groundwork upon which he tries to build up his knowledge concerning all that is beyond the earth. He no longer feels that he is himself united with those worlds, and that the Christ descended thence when He entered into the personality of Jesus.

Let me beg you to give these thoughts which are so pertinent to our present problems, your full and earnest attention. I have often pointed out what a fine spiritual nature such as Herman Grimm must needs think of the Kant-Laplace theory. It is true, the theory has undergone some modification in our day, nevertheless in all essentials it is still the prevailing theory of the universe. It is said that the solar system has come out of a primeval nebula, and in course of mighty changes undergone by the nebula and its densifications, plants, animals and also man have come into being. And carrying the theory further, a time will come when everything on the earth will have found its grave and when ideals and works of culture will no longer send their voice out into the universe, when the earth itself will fall like a bit of slag into the sun; and then, in a still later time, the sun will burn itself out and be scattered in the All, not merely burying, but annihilating everything that is now being made and done by man.

Such a view of the ordering of the world must inevitably arise in a time when man wants to grasp that which is beyond the earth with mathematical and mechanical knowledge alone. In a world in which he merely calculates or investigates qualities of the sun with the spectroscope—in such a world we shall never find the realm whence Christ came down to unite Himself with the life of the earth! There are people to-day who, because they cannot get clarity into their thoughts, prefer not to let themselves be troubled with thought at all, and go on repeating the words they have learned from the Gospels and from the Epistles of St. Paul, simply repeating by rote what they have learned, never stopping to think whether it is compatible with the view of the evolution of the earth and man that they acquire elsewhere. But that is the deep inward untruth of our time: men slink away into some comfortable dark corner instead of bringing together in their thought the things that essentially belong together. They want to raise a mist before their eyes so that they may not need to ‘think together’ the things that belong together. They raise a mist before their eyes when they keep a festival like Easter and are at the same time very far indeed from forming any true idea of the Resurrection of which they speak; for a true idea of it can only be formed with spiritual and super-sensible knowledge.

The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this—that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.

The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need to-day to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based—all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are to-day living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place—until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.

This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds to-day. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival—that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.

How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave—we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” but to have the right to say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

It is related of a learned English scientist³ that he said he would rather believe that he had by his own force worked his way up little by little from the ape stage to his present height as man, than that he had descended from a once ‘divine’ height, as his opponent, who could not give credence to the ideas of natural science, appeared to have done.

Such things only serve to show how urgent it is to find the way from the confession of faith: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” to that other confession of faith: “Not I, but Christ in me.” We must strive to understand this word of Paul. Not until then will it be possible for the true Easter message to rise up from the depths of our hearts and souls and enter into our consciousness.

• 1. See Epistle to the Romans, XIII, 12.
• 2. See Epistle to the Galatians, IV, 3, 9.
• 3. T. H. Huxley.

Translator Unknown, revised

It may well be said that the anthroposophical conception of the world is distinguished from any other we may meet because it can satisfy to such a great extent the desire for knowledge. In the present time we so often hear that it is impossible to gain knowledge of certain things—that our capacity for knowledge has limits and cannot rise above a certain height. On becoming acquainted with modern philosophical research we constantly hear of such limits to knowledge, especially among those schools of philosophy which owe their origin to Kant. The understanding of anthroposophists and of those who practice mysticism is distinguished from all such doctrines through never setting limits to man's capacity for knowledge, but rather looking upon it as capable of being both widened and uplifted. Is it not, to a certain extent, the greatest arrogance for anyone to regard his own capacity for knowledge, from the point at which it stands, as something decisive, and then to say that with our capacities we cannot go beyond definite limits of knowledge? The anthroposophist says: “I stand today at a certain point in human knowledge, from which I am able to know certain things and not others. But it is possible to cultivate the human capacity for knowledge, to heighten it.” What is called a school of initiation has as its essential aim to raise to a higher stage this human capacity for knowledge. So it is quite correct if one from a lower stage of knowledge says that there are limits to his knowledge and that certain things cannot be known. One can, however, raise oneself above this stage of knowledge and press on to a higher stage, so that it becomes possible to know what at a lower stage was impossible. This is the essence of initiation, and this deepening or heightening of knowledge is the task of the initiation schools. This means raising man to a stage of knowledge to which nature has not brought him, but which he must acquire for himself through long years of patient exercise.

In all ages there have been these initiation schools. Among all peoples, those having a higher kind of knowledge have arisen from these initiation schools. And the essential nature of such schools—and of the great Initiates themselves, who have soared above the lower stages of the human capacity for knowledge and, through their inspirations, have been acquainted with the highest knowledge accessible to us in this world—finds expression in Initiates giving to the various peoples on earth their various religions and world-conceptions.

Today we wish with a few strokes to illuminate the essential being of these great Initiates. As in every science, in every spiritual process one must first learn the method through which one penetrates to knowledge. This is also the case in the initiation schools. And here too it is a matter of our being led through certain methods to the higher stages of knowledge, about which we have spoken precisely. I shall now briefly refer to the stages that here concern us. Certain stages of knowledge can only be attained in the intimate schools of initiation where there are teachers who have themselves in their own experience gone through each school, have devoted themselves to every exercise, and have really pondered every single step, every single stage. And one must entrust oneself only to such teachers in the initiation schools.

In these schools there is, it is true, no hint of authority, nothing that smacks of dogmatism; the governing principle is entirely that of counsel, the imparting of advice. Whoever has gone through a certain stage of learning, and has himself acquired experiences of the higher, super-sensible life, knows the inner way that leads to this higher knowledge. And it is only one such as this who is qualified to say what one must do. What is necessary is simply that there be trust between pupil and teacher in this sphere. Whoever lacks this trust can learn nothing; but whoever has it will very soon perceive that nothing is recommended by any occult, mystic, or mystery teacher other than what the teacher has himself gone through. What concerns us here is that, of the whole being of man as he stands before us today, it is essentially only the outward visible part already within human nature that is today complete. This must be made clear to anyone aspiring to become a student of the mysteries—that man as he stands before us today is by no means a completed being, but is in the process of developing so that in the future he will reach many higher stages.

That which today has attained to an image of God, that which has arrived at the highest stage in man, is the human physical body, that which we can see with our eyes and perceive in any way with our senses. That is not, however, the only thing that man has. He has still higher members of his nature. To begin with, he further possesses a member that we call his etheric body. This etheric body can be seen by anyone who has cultivated his soul organs. Through this etheric body man is not simply a creation in which work chemical and physical forces, but a living creation, a creation that lives and is endowed with capacities for growth, life, and propagation. One can see this etheric body, which represents a kind of archetype of man, if, with the methods of the art of clairvoyance—which will be characterized still further—one suggests away the ordinary physical body. You know how, by the ordinary methods of hypnotism and suggestion, the point can be reached when, if you say to anyone that there is no lamp here, he actually sees no lamp. So you can also, if you develop in yourself sufficiently strong willpower—a willpower that shuts out, entirely shuts out, all observation of the physical body—so you can, in spite of seeing into space, completely suggest away physical space. Then you see space not empty but filled by a kind of archetype. This archetype has practically the same form as the physical body. It is, however, not of the same nature through and through, but is fully organized. It is not only interlaced with fine veins and streams but it also has organs. This creation, this etheric body, produces man's essential life. Its color can only be compared with the color of the young peach blossom. It is no color that is contained in the sun spectrum; but it is something between a violet and a reddish tinge. This is then the second body.

The third body is the aura, which I have often described—that cloud-like formation of which I spoke last time when describing man's origin, in which man is as if in an egg-shaped cloud. In this is expressed all that lives in man as lust, passion, and feeling. Joyful self-sacrificing feelings express themselves in this aura in luminous streams of color. Feelings of hate, physical feelings, express themselves in dark color tones. Sharp, logical thoughts express themselves in sharply outlined forms. Illogical, confused thoughts come to expression in figures with blurred outline. Thus, we have in this aura an image of what is living in man's soul as feeling, passion, and impulse.

As man has now been described, so he was set down on the earth—from the hand of nature, so to speak—at the point of time that lies approximately at the beginning of the Atlantean race. Last time I described what is to be understood by “the Atlantean race.” At the moment when the fertilization by the eternal spirit had already taken place, man confronts us with the three members—body, soul, and spirit. Today this threefold nature of man has taken a somewhat different form, as since that time, since nature has released him, since he has become a being with self-consciousness, man has worked on his own being. This work on himself means the refining of his aura; it also means sending light into the aura out of this self-consciousness. A man who stands at a very low stage of development and has never worked on himself—let us say a savage—has the aura which nature has provided him. But all those within our civilization, our cultural world, have auras on which they themselves have helped to work, for in so far as man is a self-conscious being he works upon himself and this work comes into expression first through changing his aura. All that man has learned through nature, all that he has absorbed since he was able to speak and think self-consciously, is a recent acquisition in his aura brought about by his own activity.

If you put yourself back into the Lemurian age, in which man had already had warm blood flowing in his veins for some time, and in which, in the middle of this Lemurian age, his fertilization with the spirit had taken place, man then was not yet a being capable of clear thinking. All this occurred at the beginning of evolution when the spirit had just taken possession of the corporeality. At that time the aura was still completely a consequence of forces of nature. One could then perceive—as one still can with men at a very low stage of development—how at a certain place in the interior of the head (that is to say, a place that we have to seek in the interior of the head) there exists a smaller aura of a bluish color. This smaller aura is the outer auric expression of the self-consciousness. And the more a man has developed this self-consciousness through his thought and through his work, the more this smaller aura spreads itself over the other, so that often in a short time both become totally different. A man who lives in outer culture, a refined man of culture, works on his aura in the particular way that this culture impels him. Our ordinary knowledge, which they offer in our schools, our experiences that life brings us, are absorbed by us and they are perpetually transforming our aura. But this transformation must be continuous if a man wishes to enter into practical mysticism. Then he must make a special effort to work upon himself. For then he must not incorporate into his aura only what culture offers him, but must exercise an influence upon it in a definite, orderly manner. And this happens through so-called meditation. This meditation, this inner immersion, is the first stage which a student of initiation must undergo.

Now in what does this meditation take an interest? Just try to bring to mind and reflect upon the thoughts that you shelter from morning to night, and upon how these thoughts are influenced by the time and the place in which you live. See whether you can hinder your thoughts, and ask yourself whether you would have them if you did not happen by chance to be living in Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, men did not think in the same way as men do today. If you consider how the world has changed in the course of the last century, and what kind of changes time has brought about, you will see that what passes through your soul from morning to night is dependent upon time and space. It is different when we give ourselves up to thoughts that have an eternal worth. Actually it is only certain abstract, scientific thoughts to which men have given themselves up, the highest thoughts of mathematics and geometry, that have an eternal worth. Twice two is four holds good at all times and in all places. It is the same with the geometrical truths that we accept. But leaving aside a certain fundamental stock of such truths, we may say that the average man has very few thoughts that are not dependent on time and space. What is thus dependent unites us with the world, and only exerts a trifling influence upon that essence which is in itself enduring.

Meditation means nothing other than surrendering oneself to thoughts which have eternal worth, in order to raise oneself up in a conscious way to what lies above both space and time. Such thoughts are contained in the great religious writings: the Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gospel of John from the thirteenth chapter to the end, and the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis. He who sinks himself with patience and perseverance so that he lives in such writings; he who deepens himself anew every day—perhaps working for weeks on one single sentence, thinking it through, feeling it through—will gain unlimited benefit. Just as each day one learns more nearly to know and love a child with all its individual characteristics, so one can daily draw into one's soul an eternal truth of the kind that flows from the great Initiates, or from inspired men. This has the effect of filling us with new life. Very significant also are the sayings in the “Light on the Path” that have been written down by Mabel Collins, under the instruction of higher powers. Actually in the first four sentences there is something that, when applied with patience in the appropriate way, is capable of so seizing upon man's aura that this aura is completely shot through with new light. One can see this light in the human aura shining and glistening. Bluish shades arise in the place of the reddish or of the reddishbrown shimmering shades of color, and, in the place of yellow, clear reddish ones arise, and so on. The whole coloring of the aura transforms itself under the influence of such eternal thoughts. The student cannot yet perceive this in the beginning, but he gradually begins to notice the deep influence that emanates from the greatly transformed aura.

If a man, in addition to these meditations, consciously and in a most scrupulous way practices certain virtues, certain achievements of the soul, then, within this aura, his sense-organs of the soul develop. We must have these if we want to see into the soul-world, just as we must have physical sense-organs to be able to see into the material world. As the outer senses were planted into the body by nature, so must man, in a regular way, implant the higher sense-organs of the soul into his aura. Meditation leads man to become ripe from within outwards, forming, developing, and interweaving the available capacities of the soul's senses.

But if we wish to cultivate these sense organs we must turn our attention to quite definite accomplishments of the soul. You see, man has a series of such organs in his organization. We call these sense organs the so-called Lotus flowers because the astral image, which man begins to evolve in his aura when he is developing himself in the way described, takes on a form that may be compared with that of a Lotus flower. It goes without saying that this is only a comparison, just as one can speak of the wings of the lung, which also bear only a resemblance to wings. The two-petalled Lotus flower is found in the middle of the head above the root of the nose, between the eyes. Near the larynx is the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower, while in the region of the heart there is the twelve-petalled one, and in the region of the pit of the stomach the one with ten petals. Still farther down are found the six-petalled and four-petalled Lotus flowers. Today I want to talk only about the Lotus flowers that have sixteen petals and twelve petals.

In Buddha's teachings you are given an account of the so-called eightfold path. Now ask yourselves once why Buddha offered precisely this eightfold path as particularly important in the attainment of the higher stages of man's development. This eightfold path is: right resolve, right thinking, right speech, right action, right living, right striving, right memory, right self-immersion, or meditation. A great Initiate such as Buddha does not speak out of a vaguely felt ideal, but out of knowledge of human nature. He knows what influence the practice of such exercises of the soul will have on the future development of the body. If we look at the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower in the average man of today we actually see very little. If I can so express it, it is in the process of flaring up again. In the far-distant past this Lotus flower was once present; it has gone backward in its development. Today it is appearing again, partly through man's cultural activity. In the future, however, this sixteen-petalled Lotus flower will come again to full development. It will glisten vividly with its sixteen spokes or petals, each petal appearing in a different shade of color; and finally, it will move from left to right. What everyone in the future will possess and experience is today being cultivated by those who seek in a conscious way their development in the school of initiation, in order to become leaders of mankind. Now eight of these sixteen petals have already been formed in the far-distant past; today eight have still to be developed, if the mystery pupil wishes to have the use of these sense-organs. These will be developed if man treads the eightfold path in a conscious way, observantly and clearly, if he consciously practices these eight soul activities given by Buddha, and if he arranges his whole life of soul so that he takes himself in hand, practicing these eight virtues as vigorously as he can only do when sustained by his meditation work, thus bringing the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower not only into bloom but also into movement, into actual perception.

I will now speak of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower in the region of the heart. Six petals of this flower were already developed in the far-distant past, and six must be developed by all men in the future, by present-day Initiates and their pupils. In all anthroposophical handbooks you can find reference to certain virtues in the forefront of those that should be acquired by anyone aspiring to the stage of Chela, or pupil. These six virtues which you find mentioned in every anthroposophical handbook concerned with man's development are: control of thought, control of action, tolerance, steadfastness, impartiality, and equilibrium, or what Angelus Silesius calls composure. These six virtues, which one must practice consciously and attentively in conjunction with meditation, bring to unfolding the six further petals of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And these are not gathered blindly in the anthroposophical textbooks, nor are they stamped by haphazard or individual inner feeling, but they are spoken out of the great Initiates' deepest knowledge. Initiates know that whoever really wishes to evolve to the higher super-sensible stages of development must bring about the unfolding of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And to this end he must today develop, through these six virtues, the six petals that were undeveloped in the past. Thus you see how the great Initiates essentially gave their directions for life out of their own deeper knowledge of the human being. I could extend these remarks to still other organs of knowledge and observation, but I only wish to give you a brief sketch of the process of initiation, and for that these indications should suffice.

When the pupil has progressed so far that he begins to form the astral sense-organs, when he has progressed so far that he is capable of perceiving not only the physical impressions in his surroundings but also what belongs to the soul—in other words, to see what is in the aura of man himself as well as what is in the aura of animals and plants—he then begins a completely new stage of instruction. No one can see in his environment that which has to do with his soul before his Lotus flowers revolve, just as one without eyes can see no color and no light. But when the barrier is pierced, when the pupil has gone beyond the preliminary stages of knowledge so that he has insight into the soul-world, then true “pupil-ship” first begins for him. This leads through four stages of knowledge. Now what happens in this moment, when man has passed beyond the first steps and has become a Chela? We have seen how all that we have just described related to the astral body. This is organized throughout by the human body. Whoever has undergone such a development has a totally different aura. When man out of his self-consciousness has illuminated his astral body, when he himself has become the luminous organization of his astral body, then we say that this pupil has illuminated his astral body with Manas. Manas is nothing other than an astral body dominated by self-consciousness. Manas and astral body are one and the same, but at different stages of development.

One must understand this if, in the practice of mysticism, one wishes to apply in a practical way what is given in anthroposophical handbooks as the seven principles. Everyone acquainted with the mystic path of development, everyone who knows something about initiation, will say that these have a theoretical value for study but for the practicing mystic they have value only if the relation existing between the lower and the higher principles is known. No practicing mystic recognizes more than four members: the physical body, in which work chemical and physical laws, the etheric body, the astral body, and finally the self- or Ego-consciousness, called at the present stage of development Kama-Manas, the self-conscious thinking principle. Manas is nothing other than that which has been worked into the body by the self-consciousness. The etheric body in its present form is deprived of any influence of the self-consciousness. We can indirectly influence our growth and nourishment, but not in the same way as we cause our wishes, our thoughts and ideas to proceed from self-consciousness. We cannot ourselves influence our nourishment, digestion, and growth. In men, these are without connection to the self-consciousness. The etheric body has to be brought under the influence of the astral body, the so-called aura. The self-consciousness of the astral body has to penetrate the etheric body—to be able to work out of itself upon the etheric body—as man, in the way already shown, works upon his astral body, his aura. Then, when man through meditation, through inner immersion, and through practicing activities of the soul, which I have described, has come so far that the astral body has organized itself, then the work extends to the etheric body, and the etheric body receives the inner word. Then man not only hears what lives in the world around him, but there resounds in him his etheric body, the inner meaning of things.

I have often said here before that the essentially spiritual in things is a resounding. I have drawn your attention to how the practicing mystic, when speaking in a correct sense, talks of a sound in the spiritual world in the same way as of a light in the astral world, or world of desire. Not for nothing does Goethe say, when guiding his Faust to heaven: “Die Sonne tönt nach alten Weise im Bruderspharen Wettgesang ...” (“The sun resounds in ancient fashion, contending with his brother spheres”). Nor are the words of Ariel empty when Faust is being escorted by the spirits into the spiritual world: “Tönend wird für Geistesohren schon der neue Tag geboren” (“Hear the new day being born, Spirit ears can hear its ringing”).

This inner sounding which, of course, is not at all a sound perceptible to the outer physical ear, this inner word through which things can express their own nature, is an experience that man has when he becomes able to influence his etheric body from his astral body. Then he has become a Chela, a real student of the great Initiates. Then he can be led further upon this path. A man who has thus ascended this step is called a homeless man, because fundamentally he has found the connection with a new world, because it rings to him out of the spiritual world, and because he thereby no longer has his home, so to speak, in this physical world. One must not misunderstand this. The Chela who has reached this stage is just as good a citizen and family man, just as good a friend, as he was before he had reached the stage of Chela. He need not be torn away from anything. What he has experienced is an evolution of the soul, thus acquiring a new home in a world lying behind this physical one.

What then has happened? The spiritual world sounds within man, and through this sounding of the spiritual world man overcomes an illusion, the illusion which takes in all men before they begin this stage of development. This is the illusion of the personal self. Man believes himself to be a personality separate from the rest of the world. Mere reflection could teach him that even physically he himself is not an independent being. Bear in mind that if the temperature in this room were 200 degrees higher than it now is, none of us would be able to survive as we now survive. As soon as the outer situation changes, the conditions for our physical existence are no longer there. We are simply a continuation of the external world, and are as separate beings absolutely inconceivable. This is still more the case in the world of the soul and of the spirit. Thus we see that man conceived of as a self is only an illusion—that he is a member of the universal divine spirituality. Here man overcomes the personal self. Here arises what in the mystic chorus of Faust Goethe has expressed in the words: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.” (“All that is transitory is but a likeness.”) What we see is only a picture of an eternal being. We ourselves are only a picture of an eternal being. When we have surrendered our separate being—for we live a separate life through our etheric body—then we have overcome our outer, separate life, we have become part of universal life.

There arises in man something which we have called Buddhi. Buddhi is now practically reached as a stage in the development of the etheric body, that etheric body which no longer occasions a separate existence but enters into universal life. The man who has attained this has arrived at the second state of Chela-ship. Then all doubts and reservations fall away from his soul; he can no longer be superstitious any more than he can be a doubter. Then he has no more need to secure the truth in order to compare his ideas with the outer environment; then he lives in tone, in the word of things; then what it is sounds and resounds out of its being. And there is no more superstition, no more doubt. This is called the surrendering of the keys of knowledge to the Chela. When he has reached this stage, within it there sounds a word from the spiritual world. Then his own words no longer proclaim an echo of what is in this world, but his words are an echo of what stems from another world, which works into this world, but which cannot be perceived with our outer senses. These words are messengers of the Godhead.

When this stage is passed beyond, a new one comes. This is entered by man gaining influence over what is done directly by his physical body. Before this, his influence only extended to his etheric body, but now it extends to his physical body. His actions must set the physical body in motion. What man does is incorporated into what we call his karma. Man, however, does not work on this consciously; he does not know how each of his deeds causes a consequence. It is only now that he begins in a conscious way so to fulfill his actions in the physical world that he consciously works on his karma. Thus, through his physical actions, he wins influence over his karma. And now there is not only a sounding from the objects in his environment, but he has come far enough to be able to utter the name of all things. Man lives in our present stage of culture in such a way that he is only able to utter one single name. That is the name he gives himself: “I.” That is the only name man can really give to himself. (Whoever immerses himself in deeper knowledge can arrive at depths of which psychology does not dream.) It is the only instance in which you yourself can give the name in question. No one else can say “I” to you, only you yourself. To everyone else you must say “you,” and they in return must say the same. There is something in everyone to which only they themselves can apply the name “I.” On this account the Jewish mystery teachings speak also of an inexpressible name of God. That is something which is immediately a proclamation of God in man. It was forbidden to utter this name unworthily, sacrilegiously; hence the sacred awe, the significance and reality when the Jewish mystery teachers uttered this name. “I” is the one word that says something to you that can never approach you from the outer world. So now, as the average man alone names his “I,” so the Chela in the third stage gives to all things in the world names which he has received out of intuition. That means he has passed into the world “I.” He speaks out of the world “I” itself. He may call everything by its most profound name, whereas the man today standing at the average stage can only say “I” to himself. When the Chela has arrived at this stage, he is called a Swan. The Chela who has been able to raise himself to the point of naming all things is called Swan because he is the messenger of all things.

What lies beyond these three stages cannot be expressed in ordinary language. It demands knowledge of a special script only taught in mystery schools. The next stage is the stage of what is veiled. And beyond this lie the stages which belong to the great Initiates, those Initiates who at all times have given the great impulses to our culture. They were Chelas to begin with. To begin with they acquired the keys of knowledge. Next they were led further to the regions where were disclosed to them the universal and the names of things. Then they raised themselves to the stage of the universal, where they could have the deep experiences through which they were qualified to found the great religions of the world.

But it was not only the great religions that came forth from the great Initiates; it was every mighty impulse, all that is important in the world. Let us take just two examples that show the kind of influence that has been exercised on the world by the great Initiates who have gone through the schooling. Let us go back to everyday life at the time when the pupils of the initiation schools were guided under the leadership of Hermes. This guidance was in the end an ordinary, so-called esoteric, scientific instruction. I can sketch for you in only a few strokes what such instruction contained. It was shown how the Cosmic Spirit descended into the physical world, incarnated himself here, and how he began afresh a material existence, how he then reached the highest stage of man and celebrated his resurrection. Paracelsus in particular has expressed this very beautifully in the following words: “The individual beings we meet in the outer world are the single letters, and the word that is formed from them is MAN.” Outwardly we have all contributed human virtues or failings to this creation. Man, however, is the fusion of all this. It was taught as esoteric instruction in the Egyptian mystery schools, in all detail and with great richness of spirit, how there lives in man, as microcosm, the fusion of the rest of the macrocosm.

After this instruction came the Hermetic instruction. What I have said one can grasp with the senses and the understanding. But what is offered in the Hermetic instruction can only be grasped if one has attained the first stage of Chelaship. Then one can learn that special script which is neither arbitrary nor a matter of chance, but which gives us the great laws of the spiritual world. This script is not, like ours, an external picture arbitrarily fixed in single letters and parts; it is born out of the spiritual law of nature itself, because the man who becomes versed in this script is in possession of this natural law. All his conception of soul and astral space itself thus becomes regulated by law. What he conceives is conceived in the sense of the great signs of this script. He is capable of this when he has renounced his self. He unites himself with primal everlasting law. Now he has his Hermetic instruction behind him. Henceforward he himself can be admitted to the first stage of a still deeper initiation. Now, as the next stage, he should experience something in the astral world, the essential soul world, that has a significance reaching beyond the cosmic cycles. After he has acquired the capacity for the astral senses to be fully effective, so that they work right down into the etheric body, then for three days he is ushered into a deep mystery of the astral world. In that astral world he then experiences what last time I described to you as the primal origin of the Earth and man. He has before him and he experiences this descent of the spirit, this separation of Sun, Moon, and Earth, and the coming forth of man—this whole series of phenomena. And at the same time they form themselves into a picture before him. And then he emerges. After he has this great experience in the mystery school behind him, he goes among the people and relates what he has experienced in the soul and astral world. And what he relates runs approximately like this:

“There was once a divine couple who were united with the earth, Osiris and Isis. This divine pair were regents of everything that happens on earth. But Osiris was pursued by Typhon and cut into pieces, and Isis had to search for the corpse. She did not bring it home, but graves of Osiris were distributed among the various parts of the earth. So he was brought completely down into the earth and buried there. But a ray from the spiritual world fell upon Isis, fertilizing her through immaculate conception with the new Horns.”

This picture is nothing other than a mighty representation of what we have come to know as the exit of Sun and Moon, as the separation of Sun and Moon and as the dawning of mankind. Isis is the image of the Moon; Horns stands for earthly mankind, the earth itself. Before man was endowed with warm blood, before he was clothed with his physical body, he felt in mighty pictures what proceeded in the soul world. In the beginning of the Lemurian, of the Atlantean and the Arian evolutions, man was always prepared by the great Initiates to receive the mighty truths contained in such pictures. For this reason, the truths were not simply represented but were given in the pictures of Osiris and Isis. All the great religions we meet in antiquity are from what the great Initiates experienced in astral space. And the great Initiates emerged from these experiences and spoke to each particular people in the way they could understand, that is to say in pictures of what the Initiates themselves had experienced in the mystery schools. This was so in ancient times. Only through being in such a school of initiation could one rise to higher astral experience.

All this was changed with the coming of Christianity. It cut into evolution with great significance. And since the appearance of Christ it has been possible for man to be initiated as an initiate of nature, just as one speaks of a poet of nature. There have been Christian mystics who by grace have received initiation. The first who was called to carry Christianity into all the world under the influence of the words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” was Paul. The appearance on the road to Damascus was an initiation outside the mysteries. I cannot go into further detail here.

It was the great Initiates who gave the impulse to all great movements and founding's of culture. From medieval times there comes a beautiful myth that may be said to show us this in a time when one did not yet demand materialistic foundations. The myth arose in Bavaria and has, therefore, assumed the garb of Catholicism. What then happened we will make clear as follows. There arose at that time in Europe the so-called civic culture—modern citizenship. The onward development of man, the progress of each soul to a higher stage, was understood by the mystic as the advancing of the soul, of the womanly element in man. The mystic sees in the soul something womanly that was fertilized by the lower sense impressions of nature and by the eternal truths. In every historical process the mystic sees such a process of fertilization. For those who see more deeply into man's path of development, for those who see the spiritual forces behind physical appearances, the great and deep impulses for the progress of mankind are given by the great Initiates. Thus the man with a medieval world outlook ascribed to the great Initiates the raising up of the soul to higher stages during the new period of culture that was brought about by means of cities. This city-development was attained by souls making a sudden move forward in history. And it was an Initiate who brought about this move. All mighty impulses were ascribed to the great lodge of Initiates surrounding the Holy Grail. From there came the great Initiates who are not visible to ordinary men. And the Initiate who at that time provided the civic culture with its impulse was called, in the Middle Ages, Lohengrin. It is he who was the missionary of the Holy Grail, of the great lodge; and Elsa of Brabant stands for the soul of the city, the womanly element that was to be fructified through the great Initiate. The mediator is the swan. Lohengrin was brought by the swan into this physical world. The Initiate must not be asked his name. He belongs to a higher world. The Chela, the Swan, has been the mediator of this influence.

I have merely been able to indicate how this great event has again been symbolized for the people in a myth. It is in this way that the great Initiates have worked and have put into their teachings what they have to make known. And in this way worked all those who have founded man's early culture—Hermes in Egypt, Krishna in India, Zarathustra in Persia, Moses among the Jewish people. Orpheus continued the work—then Pythagoras, and finally the Initiate of all Initiates, Jesus, who bore within Him the Christ.

Here only the greatest of Initiates are mentioned. We have tried in these descriptions to characterize their connection with the world. What has been described here will still remain remote to many people's thoughts. But those who have become aware of something of the higher worlds in their own souls have always raised their eyes not only to the spiritual world but also to the leaders of mankind. It was only from this standpoint that they have been able to speak in as inspired a way as Goethe. But you find among others, too, something of the divine spark leading towards the point to which spiritual science should again bring us. You find it in the case of a German, a young, intelligent German poet and thinker, whose life has all the appearance of a blessed memory of some former existence as a great Initiate. Those who read Novalis will notice something of the breath that guides us into the higher world. There is something in him that also contains the magic word, though not expressed as explicitly as usual. Thus he has written the beautiful words about the relation of our planet to mankind that convey as much to the lowly and undeveloped as they do to the Initiate:

“Mankind is the sense of our earth-planet, mankind is the nerve that binds the earth-planet with the higher worlds; mankind is the eye through which this earth-planet lifts its gaze to the heavenly Kingdoms of the Cosmos.”

During this Easter-Tide, a stately procession of events has been passing before our spiritual vision.¹ Amongst these events there have been those which represented the struggles of a soul. This soul, of its own free will, was about to pass through the Portals of Death, but, at the last moment, it was recalled to this mortal existence by the Easter message.

It seems to me that of all the impressions which the great poem Faust is likely to make upon the mind, the impression created by this episode will be the deepest and the most lasting.

And now—that is to say, today, after the transformation of the scenery, representing the world and its evolution, (N.B. At the words: ‘Christ has arisen,’ the black scenery is changed to red)—now, consider, what your souls have assimilated from this view into the hidden meaning of Faust. Consider this in connection with what I said yesterday, when I spoke of that true vision which must appear before the soul of man, as it approaches the symbolical representation of Christ Jesus at rest in the sepulchre. You will remember that we saw yesterday, that according to the extent a man is connected in his earthly evolution with the Luciferic or the Ahrimanic. world, so in a corresponding measure will his spiritual insight or his spiritual sensations be quickened.

We must consider that in Faust we meet at once with a soul which from the very first confesses that it is steeped in Ahrimanic wisdom and experience. In watching this soul, we see it tear itself away from its bondage in Ahrimanic wisdom and—from our spiritual level we may dare to express it thus—fly to the spring of Life, whose source is in Christ. What a tremendous movement in the history of a human soul is this, which is here presented to our spiritual vision! Let us pause and contemplate this human soul with all the powers of our spiritual understanding. There it lies before us with all the knowledge which it has assimilated during its investigation of the outward material world and its connections. There it lies before us, with all the knowledge and experience which it has been able to gain, to grasp by means of those instruments which the investigator of external nature uses in his endeavour to penetrate her secrets .... And to what goal has this soul arrived? To what has it attained with all its investigations with various instruments and also by means of the phial which contains the juices, which in this earthly life ‘do drunken make without delay.’ (Latham). We feel already that the Ahrimanic being is ruling at the side of the Faust-Soul, and we also feel how inseparable this Ahrimanic being is from earthly death. Does it not seem as if this human soul, so steeped in Ahrimanic knowledge, hesitates before the consequences of its Ahrimanic perception? And it is this perception and these consequences, which Ahriman is able to bestow upon mortal man, which find expression in the words:

‘Now hail, thrice hail, incomparable phial!
With reverent hand I bid thee to the trial.
In thee I honour human wit and skill.
Compendium of kindly, slumberous juices,
Essence compact of deadly, delicate uses,
Show now a favour at the master’s will!
I see thee, all the pain sinks into slumber;
I grasp thee, all the strife ceases to cumber;
The spirit’s flood ebbs with slow pulse away.
It draws me to the Deep, resistless streaming,
Full at my feet the glassy sea lies gleaming,
On to new shores, woos me the newer day.’¹

And this soul has already the vision of arrival upon the other shore, where perhaps it may find that which, as it is forced to believe, it cannot find on this earth through its Ahrimanic bondage. Already the soul sees itself sinking gently downwards to the other shore.

‘A flaming car floats down on wafting pinions
Hither to me. Ready to cleave am I
On pathways new, the ethereal dominions,
Borne to new spheres of pure activity.
That life divine, that bliss of God-like being,
Dar’st thou, but now a worm, make it thy goal?
Aye, thou hast but to turn thy face from seeing
The Earth’s sweet sun, with dauntless soul!
Be bold to wrench the brazen gates asunder,
Past which no mortal but is fain to slink!
’Tis time by deeds to show that e’en not under
The majesty of Gods, Man’s dignity need shrink.
To face yon gloomy cavern never tremble,
Where fancy dooms herself but self-bred torments to,
And though all Hell its flames assemble
About the narrow mouth, press boldly through;
Blench not, but blithely let the step be taken,
Were it with jeopardy, ne’er from the Naught to waken!’

And having grasped the other Ahrimanic instrument he is ready to make his way over into those regions of which he has learned in the Ahrimanic school, that he will never have any knowledge, so long as he is imprisoned in the physical body.

From this frame of mind the soul is suddenly snatched away by the sound of the Easter bells and the voices of the Easter choir. And Faust’s soul once more assumes the physical body, so that now it may seek in the secret meaning of physical life for that which, as a result of its search while in the physical body, it must take with it through the Portals of Death, so that it may carry it above into those spiritual regions where it will be needed for the soul’s further development.

What you have heard today from the first part of Goethe’s Faust, as well as much that belongs both to this part and to this scene, appeared in Goethe’s Faust, when it was first published in completed form in 1808. But Faust, a Fragment, by Goethe, had already appeared as early as 1790. This Fragment, however, was without the Gretchen scene, also without the scene we have been considering today,—the one containing the episode of such vast importance for Faust’s soul. In 1790 Goethe published his Fragment again without the Easter scene and without the monologue, which probes into the innermost secrets of the human soul on earth. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was discovered how much Goethe had completed in 1780 and even in 1770, also what he had completed in 1790. This was published under the insipid title of The Original Faust. In this Original Faust, of course, we do not find the Easter scene. We say ‘of course’ advisedly.—Why is the Easter scene not there? My dear friends! Goethe was the child of his time. In order to be able to depict the effect of the Christ-Impulse upon the soul of Faust, from his own standpoint and according to the essential quality of his own soul, it was necessary for him to reach maturity. And up to 1790 Goethe had not reached maturity. About 1790 that expansion of Goethe’s soul took place, which is reflected in the well-known Fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This was written during that period of time extending from the first publication of Faust without the Easter scene, to the Second publication of Faust, which included it. An infinitely profound expansion of Goethe’s soul took place owing to the experience which he has related in the Fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. And not until he had undergone this experience, could Goethe understand how he should allow the Easter Resurrection scene to influence the soul of Faust.

Now, having gained an insight into this Faust soul itself, let us go to the opening lines of Goethe’s Faust which coincide fairly closely with the sequence of Goethe’s revelations about himself. We know that:

‘I have studied, alas I Philosophy,
And Jurisprudence, and Medicine too,
And, saddest of all, Theology,
With ardent labour, through and through I
And here I stick, as wise, poor fool,
As when my steps first turned to school.
Master they style me, nay, Doctor, forsooth,
And nigh ten years, o’er rough and smooth,
And up and down, and acrook and across,
I lead my pupils by the nose,
And know that in truth we can know—naught!’

Thus he had been a professor for ten years! We will take it for granted that he had followed the regular course necessary for a professorship. In this case he would have become a professor at the age of thirty. From his thirtieth year onward, he had been dragging his pupils by the nose around after him. Now recollect what I said yesterday.

Between the age of thirty and forty man will be faced with the Image of the Jupiter Existence, when the temptation of which I spoke yesterday will rise up before him. And a vision, a prophetic vision of that temptation passes before everyone, as they stand before the Christ lying in the sepulchre. Is it not this vision which is represented in the drama of Faust? Do we not see plainly, that he is standing before the Easter Mystery? And has he not reached the late thirties as regards age? May we not take it for granted that something is stirring amongst his perceptions and that something, a kind of foreshadowing of the Jupiter experiences with Lucifer and Ahriman which come to all who are brought face to face with the Easter Mystery.

In Goethe’s time, it was impossible to represent this as it can be represented today. But Goethe could represent the feelings which the Easter Mystery awakened in his heart, and these were the feelings which were stirring in the soul of Faust. And when Mephisto-Ahriman approaches him, does it not seem as if Faust realised how completely his soul is forfeited to the Ahrimanic powers? As if he must save himself from something? Yes I But from what? What is it from which he must save himself? May we not say that this was Goethe’s own experience? That after he had attained to maturity in body and soul, he had let work upon him the Faust-mood of his youth and in so doing, as far as it was possible in his times, Goethe had undergone the Easter experience as we recognise it today. Hence, the necessity for the insertion of the Easter scene into his Faust. By the insertion of the Easter scene between 1790 and 1800, Faust was transposed into the Christ-Consciousness.

What years were those which Faust had to endure? Which years were those from which he shrank so terribly that he was ready of his own accord to seize the phial? Those years which mark the second, that is, the descending, half of human life. That part of life when, as we have seen, man, as he is confronted with the vision of the Jupiter Existence, becomes aware that later, on Jupiter, he must carry with him the food that Christ can give him. Otherwise, he will have to suffer hunger during the second half of his life. What is it that Faust seeks? Nourishment for his soul during the second half of his life. We all seek for that as a matter of fact. Ever since the time when the Mystery of Golgotha disappeared from our earthly evolution, we have all been seeking it. For that which upon Jupiter will take a physico-psychic form, exists already in the depths of our souls and we must all share to some extent in this Faust-experience. We need a strength which we cannot obtain by those means which give us freedom only while we are mortals, and which afterwards lead us to Lucifer or Ahriman. It is the Christ-force, the Christ-strength, my dear friends! The Christ-strength which Christ Himself possessed, after he had passed through the Gates of Death. But Christ did not pass the second half of earthly life in the physical body. Christ came down and passed a part of the first half of human life in the physical body, but not the second part. Why did he not do this? Because this force which must be expended by man during the second half of his earthly existence, was to circulate into the earthly aura, so that all mankind might be able to find it in themselves during their earthly evolution. Through the Easter Mystery arises that which we require for the pilgrimage of our soul, our whole life long.

And now, mark the deep significance of this in Goethe’s Faust. Faust had acquired—and Goethe knew by what means, for he published Faust, the first time, without the Easter scene—had acquired all that can be learnt from a compact with Lucifer and Ahriman, all that makes it possible to liberate the soul. But he who has fathomed the depths of his own soul sees clearly that he can no longer live by them. In order to live any longer he requires something else. And Goethe having arrived at maturity was in a position to show, that what Faust needed was the Impulse of the Easter-Mystery. Does not the Easter-Mystery in all its profundity come before us as we note this alteration made by Goethe in his Faust, after he had attained maturity? The Easter-scene could not have found a place in the first edition of Faust in 1790, because at that time Goethe did not yet understand it.

How did the idea of this poetic drama arise in young Goethe’s mind, by means of which we have been led into such immeasurable depths? We know that Goethe as a young man was deeply impressed both by the puppet play of Faust, where the fate of Faust was merely enacted by dolls, and also by the popular drama of Doctor Faust. The latter, though quite a play for the people, sank deeply into Goethe’s soul. And in Goethe’s soul the question arose at once, ‘What is the meaning of this Faust’? This Faust must represent struggling humanity in general. The man, who by his struggles can probe into all the hidden paths of the life of the human soul, and who must find the way above into the clear heights of the spirit. That a secret path must be travelled by the human soul, the young Goethe was certain. For what Faust’s soul experiences, at the sight of the various signs, is nothing else, in fact, but a meditation—a meditation which in the end leads him to a vision of the Earth spirit ranging over and permeating the earth. The answer to the meditation is contained in the words:

‘In floods of being, in action’s storm,
Up and down I wave! '
To and fro I flee,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A changeful weaving,
An ardent living;
The ringing loom of Time is my care,
And I weave God’s living garment there.’

Meditation and contra-meditation! This carries Faust at once into the very depths of life. But what about the way out? How is he to escape to the spiritual heights?

My dear friends, when we consider the greatness of Goethe’s conception of the struggling man—Faust—which owed its origin to the puppet play and to the popular drama, and then consider the form which this powerful conception took, after Goethe had realised the Easter Mystery in the depths of his own soul, the question arises: How much did Goethe contribute to Faust during his own life?

Again, when we consider the powerful conception aroused in Goethe’s mind through the influence of the Faust-impulse, the question arises: How has this conception been treated from the artistic and poetical point of view? Considering what I have said before, it will be helpful for our purpose to understand Faust from this standpoint also.

In 1790, Goethe published A Fragment, which ends approximately with the Cathedral Scene. But the scene which makes Faust so wonderful for us today was not there. Goethe composed it later and added it when he was in Rome. In 1787, he added the scene which is now called ‘The Witches' kitchen.’ From time to time he added different scenes to the original manuscript which was written over and corrected so much that by the time the later scenes were added, it was described by himself as a ‘dog-eared, time-stained manuscript.’ When Schiller at the end of the eighteenth century urged Goethe to take up Faust once more and finish it, Goethe replied, that after having left the old monster Faust for so long, it would be difficult for him to take up the threads of it again and finish it in a consistent manner. Goethe was afraid to insert into Faust, which represented himself, as he was and as he appeared to be up to 1790, the experiences he had undergone after he had reached maturity.

And now let us consider this first part of Faust in general. Is it not a work which, as a close study shows, has been woven together out of material collected at various periods of time? If we do not adhere too closely to traditional criticism, we shall see in Faust the most powerful conception of isolated human nature that has ever been given to the world. At the same time we must confess that from the artistic and poetical point of view Faust lacks unity, that it is throughout an inharmonious work. That everywhere there are gaps and chasms into which much might be inserted which is not there. Considered artistically, it is not even really finished. It is not, in fact, an artistically complete work. The great genius of Goethe could only gradually complete, in a fragmentary manner, the events which were passing in his own soul. And much as we must admire, the intense beauty of many of the scenes, just as little can we conceal from ourselves (that is, if we are impartial, and do not rely solely upon the traditional judgment passed by literature and history) that Faust as it stands is not in itself a harmonious work of art, but that it is patchy in many places and full of gaps and chasms, as a whole. Why is this, my dear friends? Why is this? Goethe, in advanced old age had once more undertaken to finish the second part of Faust. Isolated scenes for this were already completed, and these he incorporated with the Faust of his extreme old age. For example, the whole classical-romantic phantasmagoria, the Helena Interlude, was completed in 1799-1800, and many parts were written earlier still. Further, there is no ground whatever for saying, as some historians of literature say, that no one can ever understand Faust; or, to quote the words of a man who was by no means foolish, but, on the contrary, extremely clever, that ‘Faust is a bungling performance patched together by an old man in his dotage.’ It is not that, by any means. On the other hand, it is a work the scope of which was so tremendous that even the profound and long experience of life of Goethe himself was not sufficient to carry it out. Everyone may have his own opinion about even the very greatest in this world. Yes! Their own opinion. But why is this so? In a course of lectures given at the Hague, I pointed out that Faust is by no means anything new in the history of the world. Faust, as he existed in the popular drama which Goethe saw, and as he existed in the puppet play, represented a man descending into the very depths of spiritual experience in order that he might rise to the heights of knowledge. This representation was so realistic that it moved the greatest poet of modern times to invoke the aid of the Easter-Mystery in order to save the man’s soul.

The Faust of the popular drama was taken almost directly from real life. He is taken from Doctor George Faustus, a vagrant scholar who lived in the second half of the Middle Ages. This we learn from Tritheim von Sponheim and other celebrated men who had met him and who even had a certain respect for him—the respect commanded by a striking personality endowed with intellectual knowledge and some spiritual power. And it was not without reason that this Doctor Faust was so styled. I quote his titles below: ‘Master Georgius Sabellicus, the younger Faustus, Second Magician, the well-head of Necromancers, astrologer, cheiromancer, agromancer, pyromancer, the second in the hydric art.’

Thus he styled himself . At that time it was the custom to bear as many titles as possible, and a long list of similar high-sounding appellations might be compiled, from those borne by Giordano Bruno and many other famous spirits of the Middle Ages. If today we find it extraordinary that learned men like Tritheim von Sponheim and others, who were aware of the existence of the real Faust, should have believed that he was in communication with the demon-world and the secret earth forces, and that through them he could work wonders, we must recollect that even in Luther’s time such phenomena were not considered anything very extraordinary. We know, indeed, that Luther himself wrestled with the devil. We know that all this sort of thing, with its visions and marvellous tales, formed an important part of the life of those times. But there was a feeling in all this which contributed to fix the figure of Faust in the popular consciousness. I say ‘feeling’; not a ‘conception,’ not ‘an idea.’ The feeling that natural science is advancing, natural science which brings the Ahrimanic part of true activity before the human soul. And from that arose the feeling that Faust is, and, in fact, always was, a personality who is in league with the Ahrimanic Powers. Simultaneously the secret threads are seen by which Faust is bound to the Ahrimanic Powers, and the fate of Faust was seen to be inevitable after his surrender to these powers. It was felt and acknowledged that Lucifer and Ahriman were inseparably connected with the whole evolution of the human soul. So much remained from the ancient clairvoyance and clairvoyant experience. The figure of Faust was connected with the feeling of man’s dependence upon the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers. At this time this perception was already disappearing in the twilight, and such matters had already become confused and indistinct. Still the feeling arose that struggling humanity with all its endeavours and trials and in all the dangers to which its soul is exposed might be adequately represented in the figure of Faust. But the exact nature of the relationship of struggling humanity with Ahriman and Lucifer was no longer understood. Little by little that knowledge had vanished. Hence the wild confusion, which meets us as we take up the Faust Book of the Middle Ages. Here all the experiences and adventures which this popular hero is supposed to have gone through, are jumbled up in the greatest confusion with all lands of adventures and experiences with which the human soul could meet during its struggles on earth: besides all possible and impossible demons, elementary spirits as well as Lucifer and Ahriman. Truly, a grotesque hash or ragout!

When Lucifer and Ahriman could no longer be visualised, after they had been dismembered and ground into a pulp with all the elementary spirits of nature, the figure of Doctor Faustus was introduced into the mixture, namely, this popular Book of Faust. The keen insight and wide sympathies of Goethe enabled him to recognise the greatness of the root idea of this horrible mixture. He rescued it from the depths and brought it up to meet the fight of the Easter-Mystery.

It is really most interesting to notice how from time to time Lucifer and Ahriman are cut up and made into these ragouts. If we look back and seek for the prototype of Faust in olden times, we shall find it in the popular books of the age, which were in the hands of everybody; and they all dealt with such matters.

Augustine was a great favourite at the time when this book was patched, cobbled, glued together, which seems more as if it had been compiled by a bookseller whose one idea was to make as fat a book as possible, than written by a literary man or an author. But whoever he was he must have known his Augustine, that is to say, the biography of Augustine.

Now the whole development of Augustine appears to us very remarkable. At first he cannot understand what the essence of Christianity is. Then, by degrees, he works his way through the secret antagonism to Christianity which develops with the evolution of his soul, and turns first to see what the Manichean doctrine has to teach him. From one of the most important men of the Manichean sect, Augustine hears about the Manichean Bishop Faustus. And we can almost guess now who the Faust senior was, as distinguished from that other Faust, who, as I mentioned just now, styled himself Faust Junior. This is he whom Augustine once came across in ancient times and who as Faustus, Bishop of the Manicheans, preserved something of the earlier Manichean doctrine. And what was this? It was that which has since been devoured by Ahriman, so that mankind no longer understands the way in which man is connected with his soul, with the whole cosmos, with all the impulses from the stars. We may say that the girdle of knowledge leading to cosmic enlightenment, which shows how man was born out of the cosmos, which knowledge man must have if he would understand the Easter Mystery, was already sundered in the time of the Manichean Bishop Faustus. And it was possible for the compiler of the Horn-Book of Doctor Faustus to make Faust, the prisoner of Ahriman, arise out of the figure described by Augustine as the Manichean Bishop, Doctor Faustus. But as all these matters had become so confused, he did not understand that Ahriman was the adversary. We see traces of Ahrimanic danger glimmering through the plot of the popular drama, but they are very faint. It arouses, however, a distinct feeling that Faust is the representative of struggling humanity and that he is threatened with danger from the Ahrimanic powers.

And there was much in the figure of Faust as he was portrayed until the time of Goethe, which was borrowed from that Manichean Bishop, Faustus Senior. Many chapters of the ‘Faust Book’ appear to have been copied, very badly, it is true, directly from the book in which Augustine describes his own development and his meeting with the Bishop Faustus. So we can prove clearly that the Ahrimanic features in Faust spring from this source, and also that when the ‘Faust Book’ came to be written down, only the last faint impulse was left to imprint the Ahrimanic elements in human nature upon the figure of Faust.

And now what about the Luciferic element? How have the Luciferic elements been dismembered in those bits of the ragout, which were then cooked up in the hash of elementary spirits, with bits of Lucifer and bits of Ahriman, as I said before? Yes, we shall have to hunt if we wish to discover Faust’s connection with Lucifer. And we must also seek in history. For this we need not travel very far, only to Basle, where we can halt and find out how Lucifer has been dismembered for the ragout. It is related that Erasmus of Rotterdam met Faust at Basle. They wished to have a meal in the College, but they could not find the food they wanted. Then suddenly it occurred to Erasmus what he would like to have and he told Faust, who sat next to him and was going to dine with him. But they could not get what they wanted. Then the Faustsaga relates that Faust suddenly produced strange birds on the table, no one knew from whence, for they were unobtainable in the Basle Market—cooked, baked and ready to eat. Here we have a scene between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faust, in which Faust has power to set before Erasmus birds which could not be bought either in Basle or the neighbourhood at that time. What does this mean? As it stands in the saga it is incomprehensible, one must say utterly incomprehensible. But if we go further and seek amongst the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the matter becomes more comprehensible. Erasmus himself tells us that in Paris he made the acquaintance of a certain Doctor Faustus Andrelinus. This Faustus Andrelinus was not only an extraordinarily learned man, but an extraordinarily sensuous man. Erasmus soon became well acquainted with this Faust, but had no liking for the sensuous side of his character. However, he speaks of a meal which the two had together. Now, certainly, two learned gentlemen of that time such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faustus Andrelinus would neither of them set before the other such a bird and in such a manner as Faustus is supposed to have put before Erasmus in Basle; we cannot entertain such an idea for a moment. It is probable that the tale has arisen from some kind of joke exchanged by the two during the meal. But we can see a little behind these joking words if we recollect that Faust—this time it really is Faust—had declared that he did not like what had been set before him and he would like to satisfy himself by eating strange birds and rabbits. Yes! Strange birds and young rabbits. Erasmus at once had the idea that this must have some hidden meaning. He behaved in exactly the same way as some theosophists do who meditate on the meaning of things and believe everything must have a meaning. Erasmus thought to himself: Might he not mean flies and ants? Now, he will forego the young rabbits, but the birds must really be flies, and these he particularly wished to partake of. Now we see daylight. Now the birds, through an astral change, have become flies. And in Goethe we find the figure of Mephisto as the god of flies. It only needs the presence of the spirit who rules these beings to bring them by magic to the place. And so we have found the connecting link between the incomprehensible Legend of Basle with the wonderful birds and the flies who came simply from the devil. And we need not be surprised that the devil should set flies before his guests. If we follow Erasmus a little further to his stay in Paris, we shall see more clearly the kind of soul possessed by Faustus Andrelinus. In Paris, Erasmus was not very willing to fall in with the views of this Faustus Andrelinus. However, he then had to go to London. From there he writes that he, Erasmus—can you believe it that he has now learnt how to behave in a salon, whereas before he had the manners of a rough peasant—that now he has learnt to bow and even how to move about upon the polished floors of the Court. And, yes!—Erasmus himself writes—that he is living in an atmosphere in which everyone kisses their neighbour on meeting and at parting. We see from this time that he wishes to please his Paris friend. He writes: ‘Come over here, and if the gout detains you, fly over in your magic car, through the air. That is one of your elements.’ Here is a reference to the Luciferic tendencies of Faust’s soul.

In Goethe’s account we meet the Luciferic influence and its temptations in the betrayal of Gretchen. Lucifer has now become so faint among the influences which surround Faust, that we are obliged to make these kind of literary investigations if we wish to prove the connection between the Faust in Paris and Lucifer. But in the Horn-Book of Faust we see clearly Faust as he stands—with Lucifer and Ahriman beside him—although showing faintly through the confusion of that time, all jumbled together into a ragout. Need we be surprised to find in the popular play and in the drama and even in Marlowe’s Faust a remnant of the original intuition belonging to those times, when by means of an atavistic clairvoyance, the connection of humanity with Lucifer and Ahriman was recognised? But all that had become confused and in the literary productions of which I have spoken was always represented in a confused manner. Goethe indeed perceived the profound connection, but then what was there that he could not do? He could not, however, separate Lucifer from Ahriman. He welded them into the mongrel being, Mephisto, of whom we cannot rightly say whether he be the devil, or Ahriman, or the real Mephisto, for Goethe has invested him with some of the Luciferic qualities. Goethe takes the ragout, so to speak, he perceives that both Ahriman and Lucifer reign there, but he cannot as yet tear them apart, he combines them both in what—from an occult standpoint—is the impossible figure of Mephisto, who is a cross between Lucifer and Ahriman. The time of which Goethe caught a glimpse when he became acquainted with the book of Faust, may be termed the last aftermath of the ancient cognisance of Lucifer and Ahriman. And Goethe’s Faust is the early dawn of a knowledge, not yet above the horizon, of Ahriman and Lucifer. It is dim and confused in the figure of Mephisto, who is a combination of Lucifer and Ahriman.

But already the need had arisen of showing how mankind may profit by what was poured into the earth-aura, when the Christ-Being passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, if man will permit this to work upon his soul. The Easter Mystery itself in Goethe’s Faust appears to us as the beginning of a new era in the spiritual life of humanity. About this work, in spite of the masterly way in which the theme is handled, there is always a feeling of confusion, something of that dim, misty, morning twilight, which we see below us, if we climb a mountain to see the sun rise earlier than we should have done had we remained below.

If we allow the Faust of Goethe to work upon our minds, we shall feel how one of the greatest of men, through his endeavours to revive the ancient knowledge, turns his soul to the Easter Mystery. And if we let it work on our souls in the right sense, my dear friends, we shall feel what takes place in the heart of a really great man, when that man’s heart is moved by the Easter Mystery—as was that of Goethe himself. We shall see also that in this early perception by Goethe of the Easter Mystery there is something which also demonstrates that after the red dawn into which the first faint, clear rays of the Easter Mystery are already streaming, the Sun of a new spiritual experience will rise. The human soul itself will arise from the grave of the darkened perception into which it had to descend.

In the course of its evolution the human soul will itself experience the Easter Mystery, the resurrection of the Christ-Impulse which lies buried in the deep underworld of its being, if it unites itself with the force gained by a contemplation of the Christ-Easter-Mystery.

Let us thus realise Goethe’s appeal; and after we have meditated on the tragedy of the Easter Mystery let us transform it into an appeal for a corresponding resurrection of spiritual experience in the hearts and souls of men, in the future. May the hearts and souls of men receive the deep Mysteries of Easter with joy I Yes, after the realisation of this, the greatest of all tragedies, may they experience with holy joy the glories of the resurrection of Christ in the depths of their own being.

May you, my dear friends, through these words which I have permitted myself to speak to you today, experience something of this perception in your souls, that the reason you are here, the reason why we are gathered together around our Bau,² dedicated as it is to spiritual investigation, is that you may thus, through the strength drawn into your souls, carry away into the future something of the Resurrection-Impulse that has appeared so plainly to us in the Easter Mystery, and towards which, as we have seen, the greatest minds of the past pressed so eagerly.

• 1. These lectures were given in connection with scenes from Goethe’s Faust, demonstrated in Eurhythmy.
• 1. The quotations from Faust in these lectures are (unless otherwise stated) taken from Latham’s translation.
• 2. The Johannes building or Goetheanum, at Dornach, Switzerland, then in course of erection, but later destroyed by fire.

Goethe who gave simple expression to so much that men find great and moving, once wrote: “Each man should consider with what part of himself he can and will influence his time!”

When we allow such a saying—with all that we know may have passed through Goethe's mind as he said it—to affect us, we are initiated into the whole relationship of man to history. For most people, of course, the search for their own particular standpoint, from which they can deploy their powers in the development of humanity in accordance with the spirit of the age in which they live, is more or less unconscious. Yet even a superficial examination of human development shows that men have increasingly been compelled to organize their lives in a conscious manner. Instinctive living was a feature of earlier civilizations. The transition to increasing consciousness is itself a factor in history. Nowadays, indeed, we can see that the increasing complications of life require man to participate in the development of humanity with a certain degree of consciousness, however humble his position. It is unfortunate that as yet we really have very few points d'appui in the study of mankind's historical development to help us in our efforts to reach this point of view.

As a scientific discipline, this study is of fairly recent origin, after all. Its novelty is apparent, one might say, in the historical writing that has been published.

Historians have produced magnificent things. In developing from the unscientific chronicle-writing that still prevailed even in the eighteenth century, however, history, falling as it did within the age of natural science, attempted increasingly to take on the forms appropriate to that science. Thus the historical attitude gradually became identified with the concept post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Although this way of looking at human history as cause and effect does indeed carry us a long way, yet to the unprejudiced observer there remain countless facts in history which are not consistent with a simple causal interpretation. And at this point we are struck by an image that can symbolize history: the image of a flowing river. We cannot simply derive its features at a given point from what lies a little farther upstream, but must realize that in its depths there operate all kinds of forces that may come to the surface at any point, and may throw up waves which are not determined by those that went before.

So, too, human history seems to point to unspoken depths, to resemble a surface on which countless forces impinge from below. And human observation can scarcely presume to gain a complete picture of the particular features of a given epoch. For this reason, the study of history will doubtless have to come more and more to be what I would call symptomatological. In the human organism itself, which is such a richly differentiated whole, a great deal has to be discovered about its health and ill-health by observing the symptoms through which the organism expresses itself. In the same way, we must gradually accustom ourselves to study historical symptomatology. We must learn to interpret surface features precisely, and, by including more and more symptoms in our interpretation, contrive to allow the vital essence of historical development to work on us. In this way, by a spiritual comprehension of the forces of human history—which in all kinds of indirect ways also affect our own soul—we can find our own place in the development of mankind.

A view of the world and of life such as I have put before you is particularly fitted to reveal how, even in one's most intimate inner experiences, what is historically symptomatic is manifest. What I have described to you, the awakening of cognitive capacities that are not present in ordinary consciousness, being dormant deep down in the soul—this awakening of capacities appropriate to modern man leads us to see that we must develop these cognitive powers differently nowadays from the way they were developed in earlier times. Not only this: when we do develop these powers, the spiritual vision that results is something quite different to the man of today from what it was, for example, to the men of the ancient East, which we touched on the day before yesterday in describing yoga exercises.

Looking at these ancient Oriental attitudes, as they were developed by men who sought to elicit, from within, powers of cognition reaching into the super-sensible sphere, we conclude: everything we know about it indicates that such knowledge, in gaining a place within the soul, took on a permanent and enduring character there. What men think in ordinary life, what they absorb from the experiences of earthly existence, and what then takes root as memories—these have permanence in the soul; and we are simply unhealthy in spirit if we have any considerable gaps in our capacity to remember what we have experienced in the world from a given point in childhood onwards. To this state of mental permanence were admitted all the insights into the spiritual world gained by ancient Oriental methods. They deposited memories, as the ordinary experiences of the day deposit memories. The characteristic of the early Oriental seer was precisely that he found himself increasingly absorbed into a lasting communion with the spiritual world, as he made his way into it. Once inside the divine and spiritual world, he knew himself to be secure. He knew that it also represented something enduring for his soul.

The opposite, we may say, is true of anyone today who, by virtue of the powers to which mankind has advanced since those early days, rises to a certain spiritual vision. He develops his views on the spiritual sphere to the point of experiencing them; but they cannot possibly become memories for him in the way that the thoughts we experience daily in the outside world become memories.

It is certainly a great disappointment to many who struggle to gain a certain spiritual vision by modern methods to find that, although they do gain glimpses of this spiritual world, these are transitory, like the sight of a real object in the outside world, which we no longer perceive when we go away from it. In this mental activity, there is no incorporation into memory in the ordinary sense, but a momentary contact with the spiritual world. If we later wish to regain this contact, we cannot simply call up the experience from our recollection. What we can do, however, is to recollect something that was an ordinary experience in the physical world: how by developing our powers we achieved our experience of the spiritual world. We can then retrace our steps and repeat the experience, exactly as we return to a sensory perception. This is one of the most important factors that authenticate this modern vision: that what we see does not combine with our physical being; for if thoughts are to gain some permanence as memories, they must always be combined with our physical being, held fast by our organism.

Perhaps I may interpolate a personal observation here by way of explanation. Anyone who has some contact with the spiritual world, and wishes to communicate what he has experienced, is unable to make this communication from memory in the usual sense. He always has to make a certain effort to attain again to direct spiritual observation. For this reason, even if someone who speaks out of the spiritual world gives a lecture thirty times, no lecture will be an exact repetition of the one before: each must be drawn direct from experience.

Here is something which, in my view, can remove certain anxieties that might arise in troubled minds about this modern spiritual vision. Many people today, with some justification, see the grandeur of the most significant riddles of existence in the very fact that they can never be completely solved. Such people are frightened of a philistinism of spiritual vision which might confront them with the assertion that the riddles of existence could be finally “solved” by a philosophy. Well, the view of life we are discussing here cannot speak of such a “solution,” for the reason that has just been given: what is always being forgotten must constantly be re-acquired.

But therein lies its vitality! We are brought back again to life as it is revealed externally in nature, as opposed to what we experience inwardly on seeing our thoughts become memories. Perhaps what I want to say will sound banal to many people; but it is not meant to be banal. No one can say: I ate yesterday and so I am full, I do not need to eat today or tomorrow or the day after; similarly, no one can say of modern spiritual vision: It is complete, it has now become part of memory, and we know where we are with it once and for all.

Indeed, it is not just that we must always struggle afresh to perceive what seeks to manifest itself to man; but that, if we dwell continuously over a long period on the same concepts from the spiritual world, seeking them out repeatedly, it will even happen that doubts and uncertainties appear; it is characteristic of true spiritual vision that we should have to conquer these doubts and uncertainties again and again in the vital life of the soul. We are thus never condemned to the calm of completion when we strive towards spiritual vision in the modern sense.

There is another point, too. This modern spiritual vision demands above all what may be called “presence of mind.” The spiritual visionary of ancient Oriental times could take his time. What he achieved was a permanent possession. If man as he is today wishes to look at the spiritual world, he must be spiritually quick-witted, if I may so put it; he must realize that the revelations of the spiritual world appear, only to vanish again at the next moment. They must therefore be caught by “presence of mind” at the moment of their occurrence. And many people prepare themselves carefully for spiritual vision, but fail to attain it through omitting to train this “presence of mind.” Only by doing so can we avoid a situation in which we only become sufficiently attentive when the thing itself is past.

I have now described to you many of the features that the modern seeker after the spiritual world encounters. In the course of my lectures, other features will become apparent. Today, I should like to point to just one more of them, since it will lead directly to a certain historical view of humanity.

When we try as modern men in this sense to find our way with certainty into the spiritual world, without becoming eccentrics, it is best for us to start from concepts and ways of thinking we have obtained from a fundamental study of nature and by immersion in a fundamental natural science. No concepts are quite so suitable for the meditative life I have described as those gained from modern science—not just for us to absorb their content, but rather to meditate upon it. As modern men, we have really learnt to think through science. We must always remember that we have learnt through science the thinking that is suited to our present epoch. Yet what we gain in thinking techniques from modern science is only a preparation for a true spiritual vision.

No logical argument or philosophical speculation will enable us to use ordinary thinking, trained on the objects of the outside world and on experiment and observation, as anything more than a preparation. We must then wait until the spiritual world approaches us in the way I have been describing. For each step we take in the observation of the spiritual world we must first become ripe. We cannot of our own volition do anything except make of ourselves an organ to which the spiritual world is willing to reveal itself. Objective revelation is something we must wait for. And anyone who has experience in such things knows that he has to wait years or decades for certain kinds of knowledge. Again, it is precisely this that guarantees the objectivity of what is real in the spiritual world—that is, of knowledge.

This again was not so for those in ancient times in the Orient who sought through their exercises the way into the super-sensible world. The nature of their thinking from the beginning was such that they needed only to extend it to find the way into the spiritual world which I described two days ago. Even in ordinary life, therefore, their thinking needed only to be extended to lead to a certain clairvoyance. But because it developed from the ordinary life of the times, this was a rather dream-like vision, whereas the vision towards which we as modern men strive operates with complete self-possession, like that which is active in the solution of mathematical problems. It is just when we turn our attention to the intimate experiences of spiritual research that we see in this change the expression of great transformations in human nature as a whole in the course of historical times. I mean times that are “historical” in the sense that they are approachable not only by anyone who can examine the history both of men and of the cosmos through spiritual vision, but also by anyone who examines the external documents quite straightforwardly. In these external documents, too, we can look at early periods in the spiritual life of humanity and perceive how they differ from the position within this spiritual world which we and our time must aspire to.

By virtue of the fact that our thinking cannot just be extended automatically to bring us to spiritual vision, but can only make us ready to see the spiritual world when it appears to us, it is suited to operate within the field of experiment and observation, within the field that natural science has made its own. Yet just because we perceive what inner rigour and strength our thinking has achieved, we shall be all the more likely to apply it to our training, and thus be able to await the revelation of the spiritual world in the true sense of the word. Even here, it is apparent that our thinking today is rather different from that of earlier times.

I shall have opportunities later on for historical digressions. Much that refers to the outside world can then be deduced from what I have to say today. Today, I shall speak rather about the inner powers of man's development. This is a subject that brings us in the end to thinking and to the transformation of this thinking in the course of man's development. But in the last analysis all external history is dependent on thinking, and what he achieves in history man produces from his thoughts, together with his feelings and impulses of will; and therefore, if we want to find the deepest historical impulses, we must turn to human thinking.

But the thinking employed today for natural science on the one hand, and for achieving human freedom on the other, differs quite considerably from that which we find in earlier ages of mankind. There will, of course, be many people who will say: thinking is thinking, whether it occurs in John Stuart Mill or in Soloviev, in Plato, Aristotle and Heraclitus or in the thinkers of the ancient East. Anyone with an intuitive insight into the way thoughts have functioned within humanity, however, will conclude: our thinking today is fundamentally something very different from that of earlier epochs. This raises an important problem in human development.

Let us examine our present-day way of thinking. (I shall have an opportunity later to give evidence from natural science for what I am now expounding historically.) What we call thinking actually developed from the handling of language. Anyone with a sense of what is operative in a people's language—of the logic, familiar to us from childhood, operative in the language—and with enough psychological awareness to observe this in life, will find that our thinking today actually derives from what language makes of our soul's potentialities. I would say: from language we gradually separate thoughts and the laws thoughts obey: our thinking today is given us by speech.

Yet this thinking that is given us by speech is also the thinking that has come of age in human civilization since the days of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, in periods when humanity has been devoting its attention principally to the observation of nature in the modern sense. The thinking that is applied to observation and experiment inevitably becomes a part of us; we refine what we absorb with language as part of our common heritage until it becomes a thought-structure by which we then apprehend the outside world.

But we need only go back a relatively short distance in human history to encounter something quite different. Let us go back, for example, to the civilization of Greece. Anyone who can enter the world of Greek art, Greek literature, Greek philosophy—can catch, in fact, the mood of Greece—will discover quite empirically that the Greeks still experienced thoughts closely interwoven with words. Thought and word were one. By the concept logos, they meant something different from what we mean when we speak of a thought or a thought sequence. They spoke of thought as if the element of speech was its natural physical aspect. Just as in the physical world we cannot conceive our soul as spatially separated from our physical organism, so too in Greek consciousness thought was not separated from word. The two were felt as a unity, and thought flowed along on the waves of words.

But this produces an attitude to the outside world quite different from ours, where thought has already separated from word. And thus, when we go back into Hellenic civilization, fundamentally we have to adopt a quite different temper of soul if we are to penetrate into the real experiences of the Greek soul. By the same token, all the science, for example, that was produced in Greece no longer seems like science by modern standards. The scientist of today will say: the Greeks really had no natural science; they had a natural philosophy. And he will be right. But he will have perceived only a quarter, so to speak, of the problem. Something much more profound is involved. What this is we can explore only by regaining spiritual vision.

If we make use of the way of thinking which is particularly apt for scientific research, and to which we now train ourselves by inheritance and education, and develop what we call scientific concepts, then in the nature of our consciousness we separate these concepts strictly from what we call artistic experience and what we call religious experience. It is a fundamental characteristic of our age that modern man demands a science which involves no element of artistic creation or outlook, and nothing that claims to be the object of religious consciousness and religious devotion to the temporal or the divine. This, we conclude, is a characteristic of our present civilization. And we find this characteristic increasingly well developed the further West we go in our examination of the foundations of human civilization. This is the characteristic: that modern man keeps science, art and religious life separate in his soul. He even endeavours to form a special concept of science, to prevent art from invading science, to exclude the imagination from everything that is “scientific,” except for that part concerned with inventions; and then to put forward another kind of certainty—that of faith—to play its part in religious life.

If you try, in the manner I have described, to rise to a spiritual perception, then, starting of course from the trained scientific thought of the present, you arrive at what I have characterized as vital, plastic thinking. With this plastic thinking, too, you feel equipped to comprehend, in what I will call a qualitatively mathematical way, what cannot be comprehended with ordinary mathematics and geometry: living things. With vital thinking you feel yourself equipped to apprehend living things.

When we look at the purely chemical compounds in the inorganic world, we find that all their materials and forces are in a state of more or less unstable equilibrium. The equilibrium becomes increasingly unstable and the interaction increasingly complicated, the further we ascend towards living things. And as the equilibrium becomes more unstable, so the living structure increasingly evades quantitative understanding: only vital thought can connect up with a living structure in the way that mathematical thought does with a lifeless one. We thus arrive (and as I have previously indicated, I am saying something now that will be shocking to many people) at an epistemological position where ordinary logical abstract thinking is continually being converted into a kind of artistic thinking or artistic outlook, yet one as exact as ever mathematics or mechanics can be.

I know how, impelled by the modern spirit of science, people shrink from transposing anything exact into the artistic sphere, which represents a kind of qualitative mathesis. But what is the good of epistemology insisting that we can only arrive at objective knowledge by moving from one logical deduction to the next, and by excluding from knowledge all these artistic features—if nature and reality do in fact operate artistically at a certain level, so that they only yield to an artistic mode of comprehension?

In particular, we cannot examine what it is that shapes the human organism from within, as I described the day before yesterday—that operates in us as a first approximation to a super-sensible man—unless we allow logical thinking to flow over into a kind of artistic creation, and unless from a qualitative mathematics we can recreate the creative human form. All we need is to retain the scientific spirit and absorb the artistic spirit.

In short, we must create from the science of today an artistic outlook, whilst maintaining the whole spirit of science. In so doing, however, we approach the reconciliation of science and art that Goethe sensed when he said: “The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature—laws which, but for its appearance, would have remained eternally hidden from us.” Goethe was well aware that, if we seek to comprehend nature or the world as a whole solely with the kinds of thought that prove to be healthy and correct for the inorganic world, then the totality of the world simply will not yield to our enquiry. And we shall not find the bridge from inorganic to organic science until we transpose abstract cognition into inwardly vitalized cognition, which is at the same time an inward freedom of action.

In thus turning, within the mental endeavour of today, to a comprehension of living things, we also come closer to what was present in the Greek mind, not in the controlled and conscious way at which we aim, but rather instinctively. And no one can really understand what was being expressed even in Plato, still less in the pre-Socratic philosophers, unless he is aware of the presence there of a co-operation between the artistic and the philosophical and scientific elements in man. Only at the end of the Hellenic age—in philosophy, for instance, with Aristotle—does thought become separated from language and later develop via scholasticism into scientific thought. Only at the end of the Hellenic age is thought sifted out. Earlier on, thought is an artistic element in Greece. And, fundamentally, Greek philosophy can only be understood if it is also apprehended with an artistic understanding.

But this now leads us to see Greece in general as the civilization where science and art are still linked together. This is apparent both in its art and in its science. Naturally, I cannot go into every aspect of this in detail. But if you will look at Greek sculpture with sound common sense and a sound, spiritually informed eye, you will find that the Greek sculptor did not work from a model as is done today: his plastic creation sprang from an inner experience. In forming the muscle, the bent arm, the hand, he made what he felt within him. He felt an inner, living, second man—what I will call an ethereal man; he experienced himself through his soul and in this way felt his outward envelope. His inner experience went over into the sculpture. Art was a revelation of this vision. And the vision, which was carried over into the thought living in the language, became a science that retained an artistic character by being one with what the spirit of the Greek language made manifest to a Greek.

We thus enter, with Greece, a world accessible to us otherwise only if we advance from our own science, divorced from art, to a kind of knowledge that flows over into the artistic sphere. I would say: what we now evolve consciously was once instinctively experienced. Indeed, we can actually see how, in the course of history, this association of art and science gradually passes into the present complete separation of the two.

As humanity developed through Roman times into the Middle Ages, the higher levels of education and training had a quite different basis from that which later prevailed. Later, in the scientific age, the main concern was to communicate to men the results of observation and experiment. In our education, we live almost entirely by absorbing these results. Looking back at the period when some influence of Greek civilization was still at work, we can see that even scientific training touched man closely then and was aimed rather at developing abilities in him. We see how in the Middle Ages the student had to work through the seven liberal arts, as they were called: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. What mattered was abilities. What you were to become as a scientist you achieved through the seven liberal arts—and yet these were already well on the way to becoming knowledge and science, as later happened.

If you study the now much-despised scholasticism of the Middle Ages, which stands at the meeting-place of earlier times and our own, you will see what a wonderful training it provided in the art of thinking. One could wish that people today would only assimilate something of the best type of medieval scholasticism, which fostered in men a technique and art of thinking. This is particularly necessary if, as indeed we must, we are to arrive at clear-cut concepts. By starting from the attitude of today, however, with its strict separation of science, art and religion, and tracing human development back through the Middle Ages, we approach the civilization of Greece. And the further we go back in this, the more clearly we see the fusion of science and art.

Yet even in Greek civilization there is something separate from science and art: religious life. It affects men quite differently from scientific or artistic experience. The vital element in art and science exists objectively in space and time: the content of religious consciousness is beyond space and time. It belongs to eternity; admittedly, it is brought to birth by space and time, but we cannot approach it by remaining within space and time.

We can see even from the external documents what spiritual science today needs to discover about these things. And I should like to draw attention to a work which has just appeared in Austria and which is extraordinarily helpful in this connection. It is Otto Willmann's History of Idealism, a book that stands head and shoulders above many other currently concerned with similar problems. (One can judge such things dispassionately, even if they spring from views opposed to one's own, provided that they lead to something beneficial to spiritual life.)

In Greece we find on the one hand this unity of art and science, and on the other hand the religious life to which the Greek devotes himself. In popular religion, it is true, this is represented plastically, but in the religious mysteries it is gained by initiation in a deeper sense. But everywhere we can see that religion plays no part in the soul-powers evolved in science and art. Instead, in order to partake of the religious life, the soul must first take on that temper of piety, that universal love, in which it can comprehend revelations of the divine and spiritual realm with which man can unite in religious devotion.

Let us now look across at the Orient! The further back we go, the more we find that its spiritual life is something different again. Here, once more, we can be guided by what we have gained through our modern spiritual training: we ascend from experience of the vital concept to that inner pain and suffering which we have to overcome in order that our whole self may become a sense-organ or spiritual organ; and we cease to experience the world in the physical body alone, by existing in the world independently of our physical body. In so doing, we exist in the world in such a way that we learn to experience a reality outside space and time. We thus experience the reality of the spiritual sphere and its influence on the temporal in the way I have described. But if by overcoming pain and suffering within ourselves we do gain spiritual vision, we shall have brought into knowledge something of this other element—the element which, whilst remaining intact as real knowledge, real spiritual cognition, is continually leading knowledge into religious experience. And while continuing to experience what has survived from ancient times as a religious element in venerable traditional concepts, we also experience a similar spiritual element of more recent origin, if we work our way up to a cognition that can exist in the sphere of religious devotion.

Only then do we understand how deep in man lie the springs of the unity of religion, art and science in the ancient East. They were once united: what man knew and admitted to his corpus of ideas was another aspect of what he set up to shine before him in artistic beauty; and what he thus knew and comprehended, and made to radiate beauty, was also something spiritual to which he made his devotions and which he treated as subject to a higher order. Here we see religion, art and science united.

This, however, takes us back into an age where not only did thought live on the waves of words, but where also it was man's experience that thought inhabited regions deeper even than words, and was connected with the innermost texture of human nature. For this reason, the Indian yogi elicited thoughts from breathing, which goes deeper than words. Only gradually did thought raise itself into words and then, in modern civilization, beyond words. Originally, however, thought was connected with more intimate and deeper human experience, and that was when the unity of religious, artistic and scientific life could unfold in complete harmony.

Today, there remains in the Orient an echo of what I have described to you as a harmonious unity of religion, art and philosophy, as it appears for instance in the vedas. But it is an echo which requires to be understood—and which we cannot easily understand simply from the standpoint of that isolation of religion, art and science which exists in Western civilization. We do truly understand it, however, if by a new spiritual science we rise to an outlook that can again produce a harmony of religion, art and science. In the Orient, meanwhile, we still have the remnants of that early unity before us. If you look, you will see that just where the East touches and influences Europe, the echo still persists. A past historical epoch remains present at a certain spot on the earth. We can perceive this presence in a great philosopher of Eastern Europe, in Soloviev.

This philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century has a quite special effect on us. When we look at the philosophers of the West, John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer or others, we find that their standpoint has grown out of the scientific thinking I have described today. In Soloviev, however, something survives which presents religion, art and science as a unity. When we first begin to read Soloviev, it is true, we notice that he uses the philosophical language he found in Kant or Comte; he has complete command of the modes of expression of these philosophers of Western and Central Europe. But when we become at home in his mind and in what he expresses by the use of these modes, our awareness of him changes. He arouses a sense of the past; he seems like someone who has come to life again from the discussions that preceded the Council of Nicaea. We perceive, in fact, the tone that prevails in the discussions of the early Christian fathers; and in those early centuries of Christianity there certainly did survive an echo of the unity of religion and science. This unity, in which volition and thought also flow together, informs Soloviev's East European philosophy of life.

And if we look at the culture and civilization around us today, we do indeed find in the more Westerly parts just that separation of religion, art and science; what really belongs to our moment of history, the real basis of our activities and our picture of the world, is the discipline that is strictly built up on scientific thinking, whereas in art forms and religious matters we take over older traditional material. We can see today how few new styles are produced in art, and how everywhere old ones live on. The vital element in our time is what is vital in scientific thinking. We must wait for a time that will have lively imaginal thinking as I have described it—a thinking that will again lead to what is vital and will be capable of artistic creativity in new styles, without becoming insipidly allegorical and inartistic.

Scientific thought, we find, is thus the motive impulse of the immediate present, especially the further West we move; while in the East we find an echo of an earlier unity of religion, art and science.

This religious strain forms part of the temperament of East Europeans, with which they look at the world. They are able to understand the West only indirectly, via a spiritual development like that contained in our spiritual science movement; they have no direct understanding of the West, precisely because people in the West attempt to distinguish sharply religion and art from scientific thought.

We who live between the two must allow the world of the senses to obtrude on us and must entertain the thought appropriate to it; but we cannot help also looking inward and experiencing our inner self, and for the inner self we need religious experience. But I would say: more deeply buried in human nature than the religious experience we need within us and the scientific experience we need for observing the outside world, is the link between the two, artistic experience.

Artistic experience is thus something which today is not a first demand on life. We have seen that Western civilization is concerned with scientific thoughts, and Eastern civilization with religious ones. We have seen that we are part of an artistic tradition, but that we cannot feel entirely at home in it, indeed that the artistic tradition itself is in many ways a revival. And yet one must say: the yearning for a balance of this kind is certainly present in the central region between East and West. We see it, for example, when we look at Goethe.

For what was Goethe's great longing when, with what I would call his predominantly artistic talents, he was faced by the riddles of nature? His artistic sense transformed itself naturally into his scientific outlook. One could say: in Goethe, the representative Central European, we find art and science all of a piece; all of a piece, too, is Goethe's life when we follow its development and know how to locate it properly within the history of recent times. Goethe made himself at home in the collaboration of art and science. There thus arose in him a longing that can only be understood historically: the urge towards Italy, to a more southerly civilization. After looking at the works of art he found in the South, he wrote to his friends in Weimar something that followed on from the philosophy and science he had come to know there in Weimar. In Spinoza he had found divine power represented philosophically. That did not satisfy him. He wanted an extended and spiritualized approach to the world and to spirituality. And in the sight of the Southern works of art he wrote to his friends: “Here is necessity, here is God!” “I have an idea that the Greeks operated according to the laws by which nature herself operates; I am on their track.” Here Goethe is trying to merge science and art.

If in conclusion I introduce a personal note, I do so only to show you how a single pointer can reveal the way in which the Middle region can take up a position between East and West. I encountered this pointer some forty years ago here in Vienna. In my youth I made the acquaintance of Karl Julius Schröer—he was then lecturing on the history of German literature from Goethe onwards. In his introductory lecture he made a number of important points; and he then said something entirely characteristic of the longing that instinctively inspired the best minds in Central Europe. Schröer's words, too, were instinctive. Yet in fact he expressed a longing to combine art and science, to combine Western scientific thought and Eastern religious thought in artistic vision; and he summed up what he wanted to say in the, to me, significant words: “The Germans have an aesthetic conscience.”

Of course, this does not describe an actual state of affairs. It expresses a longing, the longing to look at art and science together. And the feeling when we do look at them together has been finely expressed by another Central European, one whom I have just characterized: when we can look at science and art together, we can then raise ourselves to religious experience, if only the science and art contain true spirituality in Goethe's sense. This is what he meant by saying:

Whoever has science and art.
Has religion too;
Whoever does not have them,
Let him have religion.

Anyone with an aesthetic conscience attains to scientific and religious conscientiousness too. From this we can see where we stand today.

I do not like using the word “transition”—all periods are transitional—but today, in a time of transition, what matters is the kind of transition. In our time we have experienced and developed to its supreme triumph the separation of religion, art and science. What must now be sought, and what alone can provide an understanding between East and West, is the harmonization, the inner unity of religion, art and science. And this inner unity is what the philosophy of life of which I have been speaking seeks to attain.

We describe the features of the earth in accordance with the principles of physical geography. In the same way, the spiritual impulses at work on earth (and already briefly characterized in these lectures) can be described by a kind of spiritual geography—especially the interplay of Eastern and Western impulses in human life, with all their various differences. What I have to say today in this direction is bound to remain rather sketchy; but it is more important to find a specific point of view for looking at much that I have already outlined than to give a detailed description.

The relationship of East and West is often expressed symbolically by saying that light comes from the East. Looking at the East, Western man—the man of recent civilization in general—receives the impression of a dream-like spiritual life. Modern spiritual life is used to sharply delineated concepts, closely linked to external observation; in contrast, the notions of the Orient—shifting, fluctuating, less closely and less sharply linked to externals—show up as dream-like. Admittedly, from this dream-like spiritual life, embodied in the most splendid poems, the Vedas, there did of course then develop the clear-cut concepts of a comprehensive philosophy—Vedanta, for example. These concepts were not gained by examining external data, that is analytically, but emerged from an inwardly experienced and apprehended spiritual life.

When this dream-like spiritual life works on us, however, and we lovingly submit to it without at first noticing how much it differs from our own, it has a curious effect. Once we allow its various configurations to affect our soul, we cannot stop there. We cannot merely take over its concepts and ideas. In absorbing them, whether from the literature or the philosophy (including such forms of these as have survived in the East down to the present), we feel a spiritual need to go beyond these images, ideas and concepts. When an Oriental idea, such as that of man's relation to the secrets and the mysterious workings of nature and the world, affects us, it is often accompanied in our mind by something that symbolizes it for the Orient too: the flower of the lotus, as it folds its petals about what must remain mysteriously hidden. We may immerse ourselves lovingly in shifting concepts that are more fitted gently to touch external phenomena and surround them with a mist, than to perceive them in sharp contours, and we may enter their intertwining branches; and if we do, there will inevitably appear to us all the intertwining, branching vegetation of the East and, with it, all that the human hand, the human spirit and civilization have produced from stone and other materials in line with these flowing, branching concepts. We may say: in immersing itself in these concepts, our soul inevitably sees before it a nature similar in its life, diversity and imaginative working to the soul's experience of the concepts themselves.

There appears to be no objective reason for man to abandon this Oriental spiritual activity in favour of a “faithful observation of nature;” indeed, it seems to me rather that there is in the Oriental concepts themselves an incentive not merely to accept them, but to apply them to the outside world. Europeans may feel that such things cannot be applied to the outside world, because of their vagueness, their (to them) fantastic character. If so, we may ask: How, then, can we track, with sharply delineated concepts, the shapes of clouds, fluctuating and rapidly changing as they are? Yet track them we must, if we wish to observe nature's workings in immediate revelation, as they appear to the human senses and the human soul.

Why is this so? It seems to me that there can be only one reason: that in what reaches us from this Eastern spiritual activity, there survives an element from which it was once directly created.

At the time when the Oriental was developing the finest part of his philosophy of life (which has since come down to his descendants in a partially decadent condition), the East created everything with devoted love. Love lives in each of its ideas, concepts and images and in them we perceive love. The love seeks to flow out into objects. And it flows out according to its nature, and conjures up before our soul the symbols that the Oriental established, with an inner understanding of much that functions supersensibly, in seeking to establish what he perceived as the spiritual dement in things. Of course, this is not to assert that this configuration of spirit, if extended over all the earth, would be an unmixed blessing for the development of the world. But once it has appeared on earth, and exerted its influence over other regions, it must be considered objectively, especially at a time when we need to foster understanding between men.

Against it, we may set the particular outlook that has developed, certainly with no less justification, but in a quite different form, further West—and in this respect we ourselves belong in many ways to the West. Here, we find, it is regarded as an ideal to stand back from what the senses observe directly, what extends in space and time, and to test what nature offers, and what should lead us to the world's secret, for position, motion, dimensions and weight. What presents itself directly to the eye is dissected and placed under a microscope, and gives rise to notions that could only emerge under a microscope.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are in the laboratory: how heavily equipped we are with these concepts, so remote from direct observation! Look how we regard the light flooding through the world! How we regard it by means of abstract concepts! We need them, if we are to reach understanding. But how remote are the observations we record on light and colour from what we encounter in wood and meadow, cloud-shape and sun! We may say: what we formulate in our sharply delineated concepts—with the balance, the measuring-rod, the most varied counting devices—takes us into some of nature's shallows and solves some riddles, but it does not take us to direct observation of nature. It is all very well to say: direct your attention to sensory observation and then try to derive your philosophy of life from it. But this is not what happens at all! The scientific view of life we establish is far removed from what the senses observe.

What we ought to say is this: if we establish our knowledge by using the equipment of learning with which we have harvested perhaps the finest fruits of present-day natural science, we shall have to retune our soul before we can approach nature again. If as botanists we have used the microscope extensively and learnt about cell-life, and formed concepts in the atomistic manner of today, we shall have to retune our soul before we can recapture a love of the immediate world of plants as it grows and flowers. If we have formed a scientific concept of the structure of animal and man, again we shall have to retune if we want to move on to direct observation of the animal's shape and actions, and to enjoy the way it plays in the meadow or turns its melancholy or unmoving gaze upon us or looks at us confidingly. Equally, we shall have to retune our soul to share in what the eye can see when it looks at the human shape, tracing its planes with an artistic eye. The Oriental has no retuning to do. Since what he called his science was shot through with love, it led him out to immediate observation. And this was a direct echo of what he experienced in his soul.

These are differences of temper in the attitude to life of East and West. And these different tempers multifariously combine in the man of the region between. In what we experience scientifically, artistically and religiously, there flows much of the temper I have just been characterizing as the one that comes to us from the Orient. In other respects again, we are moved by something of the way of experiencing the world kindled by that scientific attitude which the West has developed—by youthful science and knowledge, so to speak, as against the old-established ones of the East. And in every soul in the civilization that lies between, these two currents flow together. In the last analysis, the life that surrounds us in Europe is a fusion—and one whose component currents we really need to understand.

The contact between the tempers of East and West in our present spiritual life can be characterized in another way.

From what I have just said of the East, one thing is clear about the Oriental. In growing into his spiritual life, he experiences it as immediate reality; he bears it with him in his soul as the reality self-evident to him. External nature, and indeed the entire external world right up to the constellations, seems to him an echo which is, however, fundamentally the same as what he bears within him. Yet he cannot regard as reality what strikes him as an echo, what seems to him a reflection, as he can regard as reality what he experiences directly in his soul. He is closely linked with what he experiences in the spiritual sphere and can say “It is,” because he feels its existence as if it were his own, and in this way understands its mode of being. When he looks out at the reflection of this existence, he knows that it is not reality in the same sense. If he did not illuminate it with the light that streams from within him, it would be dumb and dark. And in becoming more and more aware of this, he arrives at a temper of soul that says: truth and reality reside in what the soul experiences directly. What is reflected to it from without is illusion, maya, incomplete reality, becoming reality only when it is touched by what must first reveal itself through the human soul.

Thus we see how the East developed the view that the spiritual world is reality, and the outside world, that of the senses, is semblance, the great illusion, maya. It would, however, be wrong to believe on this account that, in the pre-Buddhist period for example, the Oriental averted his glance completely from the outside world. He accepts) it, even if in a higher sense he must admit that in what extends in space and time he is dealing not with complete reality but with an illusion, the great non-being, maya. But this in turn gives a particular temper to the life of the soul in the East: the soul feels a close link with the spiritual world and sees, in all that exists in the external world of the senses, a replica of the original shape of the world as it exists in the spirit. And in the end this grows into the view that one's own human sensuous substance is a replica of a human being whose true existence is in the spiritual world. And here I would say: the Oriental, quite consistently, regards the world as made up of replicas of a spiritual world, just as he regards himself as a replica of what he was before he descended into the physical and sensuous world. From his standpoint, the view of man and the view of nature are in complete harmony.

This harmony is possible; though no longer consonant with our views, it does indeed express a truth, if somewhat one-sidedly, as we can see once again if, with the research methods of spiritual science, which I have been describing in the last few days, we ourselves take a look at this Oriental mode of knowledge.

As I have shown, by awakening powers dormant in the soul we can attain a view of the spiritual world that yet suits modern man; we can look once more into a spiritual world; and find this spiritual world unfolding before our “mind's eye” just as the physical and sensuous world unfolds before our physical eye. When we develop this vision, however, the spiritual world does not remain a mere pantheistic and nebulous embodiment of universal spirituality; it becomes just as concrete in its individual forms as the world of the senses in those of the realms of nature. There will then follow a view of man that I should now like to characterize.

Let us start with something familiar to us at every moment in our lives: an experience of the outside world. We have entered into this external experience through our sensory perception and perhaps also through setting our will in motion in some activity. We live in conjunction with the data of the outside world. For us, this is an immediate experience. In the last analysis, human existence on earth is composed of such experiences. From them, we retain thought-images, which become our memories. We can look back on our experiences through bearing within us faded, shadowy and, in fact, mental images of them.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves and consider whether, at any moment in life, our consciousness contains very much more than memories of external, factual, sensory experiences. Of course, many a nebulous mystic believes that he can summon up eternal things from the depths of his soul. If he looked more closely and could really test the structures he summons from his soul, he would discover that as a rule they are no more than transformed external perceptions. Within man, memories are not only faithfully preserved; they are also transformed in many ways, and man then fails to recognize them. He thinks that he is acting as a mystic and summoning something from the depths of his soul, when he has only called up from his memory a transformed external experience. Of course, we need only think of mathematical truths to realize that all kinds of mental structures do establish themselves in the life of the soul. But as a rule it is not these structures that the mystic seeks.

However, anyone who simply wishes to accept the everyday life of the soul, as it appears in ordinary consciousness, must say: This life is made up of images that are the remains of our experiences gained-through perceptions, and of other experiences within the external sensuous world. When we look at our soul and at the spiritual element that permeates it, as we have it in physical life on earth, we can therefore say: outside is the physical world extending in space, the world that unfolds its causes and effects in time, the world, that is, of facts. Here within is the world of shadows in the soul; we do indeed experience it in general as something spiritual and vital, but its content we experience only as a replica of the world of facts and of the senses. Now, paradoxical as the outlook of today may find it, for the attitude that I have been expounding in the last few days, the reverse comes about: in empty consciousness, as a result of meditation, the spiritual in the world, the spiritual within natural phenomena, is really experienced; it is observed also as the soul-spiritual element in man himself, as he is before he descends into his physical existence from a spiritual world; the spiritual is observed concretely by the spirit-organ we have developed; the world about us becomes spiritual, just as to our senses it is sensuous and physical. And when all this happens, we begin to perceive—as if in recollection of the times when we lived as spiritual beings in purely spiritual worlds—how in its particulars our physical organism is a replica of the spiritual world that surrounds us. With physiology and anatomy we can observe our lungs, heart and other organs only as outer objects; but when we can see the spiritual world about us, then the lungs and heart as they really are within us will become for us a replica in the physical sphere of what is spiritually prefigured. Just as in our ordinary consciousness the world outside is physical, and our soul creates replicas as its experiences; so now we learn that there is a spiritual world outside and that the replicas of this spiritual world exist in our own organs. We come to know man's structure only in coming to know the spiritual world. What is usually called matter then ceases to have the significance it has assumed in recent civilization, just as spirit ceases to have the significance of something abstract that it has had in recent civilization. We can thus see that in our organic functioning there is in fact a replica of what we were before we descended into our earthly existence.

At this stage, we need no longer be frightened even by materialism, in so far as there is justification for it—and even materialism has done some good and brought us countless discoveries. We look at the human brain and the human nervous system in its physical operation. Of course, we agree that ordinary, everyday thinking is a function of these physical organs. We are entirely in agreement with what exact science must hold about these matters today. But on the other hand we know that the material forms operating within us are themselves simply a transformed reflection of the spiritual sphere. For this reason, the material is acceptable, and because, in transforming itself into mortal man, the spiritual has sought out the capacity of brain and nerves to achieve in a material replica what is spiritually prefigured.

Modern man can see this in his “mind's eye” by developing the powers of cognition of which I have been speaking in the last few days. Yet there is a dream-like anticipation of it, I would say, in the Oriental philosophy of life I have outlined. This philosophy has become old and senile, but certain of its features still work effectively in our heart and soul. In its instinctive clairvoyance, the ancient Orient sensed that the spiritual world is a reality with which it felt closely linked, and that nature, and the natural element in man himself, is a replica of the spiritual; it provides an external garment for the revelation of what is inwardly spiritual.

Yet it would be wrong to say that the Oriental did not observe nature. His organs were finely attuned to its observation. For him, however, from everything that he faithfully observed and lovingly honoured as a replica, something of the spirit shone. Nature revealed spirit to him, shone spirit upon him at every turn. And this spirit was his reality. What lay before him outside was maya.

Even in Buddhism, which gained a far greater influence on Oriental life than we usually think—since it later assumed the most varied forms—we can see how the sense of inhabiting a spiritual world paled as man and world developed. The gaze was increasingly directed upon what was maya, and experience of the great illusion, the great non-being, maya, gradually became predominant. There thus arose an awareness of the need for redemption from what can be experienced within maya—experienced, that is, in the manner of Buddha, who regarded our direct experiences of this maya as a crowd of sorrows that flow in on man.

But it faded, this sense of inhabiting a spiritual world; and this is what justifies us in considering the early Oriental philosophy of life as something instinctive and even partial: if we do return to something like it, we must do so with complete self-possession and lucid consciousness. The impairment of human activity relative to the demands of the physical, external world must not occur a second time in the world's development. Man must never again escape into spiritual activity and so prevent himself from devoting his full strength to earthly tasks—which are what the Oriental perceives as maya, even if in deference to modern concepts he does not say so; whereas he perceives as reality what reveals itself within him. He has within him a light that is a direct reflection of the divine and spiritual elements in the world.

Against what I have thus described as the spiritual geography influencing our modern life, I should now like to set another illustration from the development of the human spirit and the world, but this time from the immediate present. Our civilization, which even in Europe is now of some antiquity, is subject to pressures from certain spheres, whence arise social longings and also social conflicts. Anyone who has moved in these spheres will have come across the phenomenon I am about to describe.

Although no one could properly accuse me of Socialist opinions, I was for some long time a teacher in Socialist circles. My intention was to do something for which in fact the time had not yet come (it is more than twenty years ago now): to propagate a spiritual life that could lead to theories that are in closer accord with reality than those derived from abstract or modified Marxism, which in many respects indeed are not realistic at all. There exists in these circles a basic attitude—something we can recognize as a first step, yet which is as deeply rooted in the soul as was the sense of maya at which the Oriental finally arrived. And in observing this attitude, we are profoundly struck by a word that expresses many unconscious feelings, unconscious ideas and concepts, unconscious longings too, a word that we hear again and again and must recognize as having characterized wide circles of humanity for centuries. Encompassing millions of people is a mood that this word expresses. The word is “ideology,” by which is meant “idealistic theorizing.” It derives from an attitude that the proletarian class in particular has absorbed into its education. The scientific method, with its increasing emphasis on matter, has given rise to the view that historical reality consists simply of economic struggles, economic patterns, class struggles, in short of the immediate material elements, externally sensuous and physical, in human life and history; and that therefore economic forces are the true reality.

This economic materialism, which is far more widespread than many upper-class people today believe, is a consequence of the general materialistic outlook. Nowadays, this is taken to be overcome even in science; yet it has a wide following particularly in the West.

And what is this “ideology?” It is law, morality, the realm of the beautiful, religious concepts, political theory, in short everything that makes up spiritual life. These things are not true reality, but bubbles and baubles arising from true reality, which resides in material struggles and patterns. “Ideology” is a way of indicating that what man experiences within himself—whether it is art or science or law or maxims of state or religious impulses—is maya, to use the Oriental term.

If we do not just take it at its face value, but can feel what millions of people are thinking, then the word “ideology” points to something that must inevitably assume the most formidable dimensions unless it can be set on the right course in good time. What the soul experiences and shapes within is not reality: true reality is only what exists externally in tangible facts.

Inside Western civilization, therefore, there has developed an outlook diametrically opposed to that which long ruled the Orient and still survives even today as a kind of antiquated trimming. There, true reality is what is experienced in the spirit, and maya what proceeds outside in physical actuality; here, maya or “ideology” (which is indeed a translation of the word “maya,” but applied to the spiritual sphere) is what is experienced in the spirit, and reality what is tangibly displayed, palpably there in the world.

In its development, the world aims at complete realization of its various potentialities. Just as the one extreme developed, in the Orient, so too the other was bound in its turn to take hold of humanity. To bring about a fruitful development of man and world, however, and to change the forces of decline into constructive ones, we must understand the significance of this mood, this “ideology.” It is recent and therefore a first step.

Let us look once more at what modern spiritual science can tell us. In the Orient, there was a dreamy, dark, instinctive knowledge that there exists a spiritual reality, with a sensory replica here in the physical realm. Because the soul's attention was devoted primarily to this spiritual reality, sensory reality came to be regarded as unreality, external appearance, maya. Yet this maya is important in more than one way. Although the world may be maya, our efforts, which are a reality for us, must still be applied to it in the first instance. But it is important also for the precept “Know thyself,” for a truly human attitude. Why? Well, it is true that we can now elevate ourselves to a life in the spiritual world, as I have described; that we can see by means of sharply delineated concepts and thus understand what appeared to the Orient like a dream. But the experience of such a world would never have created in human development the impulse to freedom.

When man feels closely linked to the spiritual world, he feels at the same time inwardly determined by and dependent on it. Therefore he and his consciousness had to move out of it and, for a passing phase of history (in which we now are), to turn to a world of mere fact. Confronted with this external actuality, the life of man's soul becomes an image of it. The spirit informing this life turns into abstract concepts and gradually becomes a mere image, to be recognized as a replica.

I have already suggested that, by having images within us, we can be free. Mirror-images do not determine our actions. If we wish to conform to mirror-images, which in themselves are powerless, the impulse to do so must come from us. The same is true of abstract concepts. And in making its appearance in pure thinking, our noblest feature, the moral and religious element, becomes for us an impulse of freedom. It is a most valuable component of human life. But in a period when man finds himself confronted with physical actuality, it makes its appearance in abstract thinking.

At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of moral intuition, makes its appearance in pure thinking, the task of the epoch is fulfilled. The epoch has developed from spirit-reality to the spirit as abstraction and (I would say, exaggerating a little) it now interprets everything spiritual as maya, as mere illusion, as “ideology.” We have a certain right to interpret as “ideology” everything that is a reflection of external natural existence. At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of intuition, enters this maya-thinking, this “ideology,” we reach the first stage at which we can recognize once more that we must awaken this “ideology,” which we experience as mere semblance, to inner life by energizing ourselves and allowing the life that is hidden within us to stream forth. The meaning of the world had to become “ideology” for humanity in order that man himself could infuse it with his own reality.

This was necessary for man's experience of freedom, which is something that has only been attained in the West and in recent civilization. It was necessary that man should first feel himself to be in a sphere of unreality when in contact with everything that is most valuable to him—his art, his science, his moral concepts, in short his entire spiritual life—and that everything transitory that shone on him should appear to be the only reality. For this reality, rightly contemplated, cannot in any way impair his freedom—the freedom that depends on his being himself a spiritual being who creates in physical and sensuous actuality only a replica of the spirit.

We see, therefore, that “ideology” represents in an extreme form an attitude that we really need in face of such concepts of nature as position, motion, dimensions and numbers. If nature were to provide us with anything other than concepts, it would never make us free. Only if we rise to concepts that will then appear as mere “ideology” to someone who is still stranded at the previous stage, can a new and spiritually real form of the higher world infuse these initially unreal concepts. This is the first step, from which must emerge for man a new form of the spiritual world. And when we encounter the exaggerated notion of “ideology,” those of us who are not bogged down in the immediate opinions of the day but can see beyond them to the world's development, must conclude: it was necessary for man to reach a stage of development at which, looking at only one side of the world and himself, he could speak of “ideology;” it is equally necessary now for him to attain the decision, conviction, power and courage to infuse into this “ideology” a spiritually perceived and experienced world. Otherwise, although perhaps it may be discussed philosophically, the “ideology” will remain merely “ideology.” And as we shall see in the second part of these lectures, which will be devoted to Anthroposophy and Sociology, in that case the forces of decline will quite definitely proliferate.

Before us, then, are two pictures: spiritual world as reality and world of the senses as maya—world of the senses as reality and spiritual world as maya. We need a philosophy of life that is capable of injecting the spiritual world, regarded as “ideology,” with spiritual intuition, spiritual imagination and inspiration, so that what today appears unutterably empty is filled once more with spiritual meaning. At the same time, it must be able to perceive that what the Orient regards as illusion and maya is a reality in the sense that it is a true and faithful replica, a transformation of the spiritual world, which was necessary for the development of humanity in freedom. If we are to reach an understanding of these two diametrically opposed world-pictures, we need a philosophy that can combine them and not just add them together mechanically, one that will develop through its own inner life, not from the one or the other, but in a spiritual progression from human substance itself.

And these world-pictures do ultimately affect everything that we experience spiritually. They certainly condition individual features of life and of human attitudes. As a Central European here in Central Europe, I would rather not give my own opinion on this particular point. I prefer to pass on the opinion expressed some years ago by an Englishman who compared Western and

Central Europe in relation to a certain aspect of spiritual life. This Englishman wanted to exemplify the way in which spiritual life has revealed itself in particular phenomena. He referred to the appearance, at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties of the last century, of Buckle's important work, The History of Civilization. Buckle, he noted, views history mainly—if not so exclusively as do the Marxists, for example—in terms of economic drives, so that ultimately spiritual life is taken to arise from the action and interaction of economic forces. We do not always have to condemn a view of this kind; we can take a positive attitude, and say: since man is in part an economic being, a historical consideration of human life from this standpoint also was needed at a certain stage in human development. The Englishman then refers to another book that was produced in Central Europe at the same time as Buckle wrote his History of Civilization—Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The Englishman himself observes that a quite different spirit prevails here; Burckhardt describes how men feel, what their attitude to one another is, and how through the opinions they have of each other they enter into certain relationships, which in turn determine other events occurring among them. And the Englishman finally sums up—I am simply quoting his opinion here—by saying that Buckle describes man as he eats and drinks, whilst Burckhardt describes man as he thinks and feels.

And if I may now add something myself: if, as we have heard, the West looks at eternal actuality and derives spiritual life from it, and the Central European looks at what inhabits the realm of the soul, but the soul in its earthly existence, then one would have to add, thirdly, that Eastern man (and in many respects even the East European) describes man as he preaches and sacrifices.

And so we might say, supplementing the Englishman's verdict: in the West, man is described as he eats and drinks (I say this in no pejorative sense); in the Middle region, as he thinks and feels; in the East, as he preaches and sacrifices. In this preaching and sacrificing is operative what I have described as the attitude of the East. Similarly, in the view of history that has become generally familiar today and that is also reflected in the notion of “ideology,” there operates what I have described as the attitude of the West. But we also need to see how in the mode attributed to the Centre, where man is presented as he thinks and feels, the two currents meet. We are called upon today to understand this confluence correctly, by taking a first step that will gradually lead us onward to spirituality.

I will try to sum up in a single image the two attitudes I have sought to represent, in order to show where understanding is really needed between East and West. To do so, I should like to recall that, at a time when the physical and sensuous world, and human existence also, was already felt as maya in the East, he who is called the Buddha encountered in his wanderings the most varied manifestations of human suffering on earth. Among these manifestations was a corpse; death confronted the Buddha, and through contemplation of death he reached his conclusion: Life is Suffering.

This was the tenor of Oriental civilization six hundred years before the establishment of Christianity. Six hundred years later, Christianity was founded, and henceforward we have a significant symbol: the crucifix, the raised cross with the Redeemer, the human body on it. In the West, countless men look at this body, at the image of it; just as countless men, who have become disciples of Buddha, have looked at the body from which Buddha drew his teaching. The East acknowledged: Life is suffering, we long for redemption. Western men, in looking at the image of the dead body, however, did not simply say: Life is suffering! For them, the sight of death became a symbol of resurrection, resurrection of the spirit through inner human power. It became a symbol of the fact that suffering can be redeemed by overcoming the physical; that it is overcome, not by turning away from it in asceticism, but by keeping it in full view, not regarding it as maya, and overcoming it through work, activity, and the vigour of the will. Out of the introspective life of the East arose a contemplation of the dead body, with the conclusion: Life is suffering, man must be redeemed from life. Out of the life of the West, attempting always activity, there arose, at the sight of the body, the view: Life must develop power within itself, so that even the forces of death can be overcome, and human work can do its task in the development of the world.

The one philosophy is old and jaded. Yet it contains things of such great value that, even though we may treat it as senile, we still approach it as something venerable. We honour an old man without expecting him to profess the views of youth. What we encounter in the West, however, has the character of a first step. We have shown what the “ideology” in its attitude must become. It is young, it must develop youthful power in itself so that it may attain spiritual meaning in its own way, just as the Orient did.

In honouring the Orient for its spirituality, there is something we still need to be clear about: we must build up our own spirituality from the first step we have taken here in the West. We must so shape it, however, that we can achieve an understanding with any view that may exist on earth, especially old and venerable ones. This will be possible if, as Central and Western men, we come to understand that, although our philosophy of life has faults, they are the faults of youth.

If we do understand this, it is a summons to have the courage to be strong. If for all our respect, love and admiration for its spirituality, we take what we need from the East, not with passive receptivity, but with a busy activity rooted in what, today, is still perhaps unspiritual in the West, yet contains the germ of spirituality—if we add strength to respect, then we shall do the right thing for human development.

If you are seeking, within the present social system, forces that inspire confidence, you will have to look in hidden places. Social distresses and deficiencies are only too evident; prospects, genuine ones at any rate, rather less so.

There are, of course, self-deceivers, on a greater or lesser scale, who even in face of the grave difficulties of the present seek salvation in this or that recipe; they devise all kinds of social institutions in which they claim that mankind, or at any rate a section of mankind, would prosper better than it ever has before. It seems to me, however, that nowadays we have become so clever, if I may so express it, that it is relatively easy to work out, on a would-be national basis, any kind of social system. It is possible today to be familiar with quite a lot of social systems advocated by the various shades of party opinion, wthout finding anything really bad about them; and yet, we do not expect anything very much from them, either. Certainly, anyone who considers the society of today, not simply as raw material for sociological theories, but from the standpoint of a knowledge of man, can only talk of the emergence of social prospects when man is able once again to come close to his real self.

The most important thing at this stage is not the excogitation of institutions, but the possibility of discovering man and including him in the social institutions we inhabit. And at this point it must even be admitted that, when it does become possible to discover man within the social order—or, at the present day, within the social chaos—then any given institution can serve the same purpose, more or less. The fact is that mankind can prosper socially in all kinds of different ways, within the most varied institutions.

What matters today is human beings, not just institutions. For this reason, I evoked a certain amount of satisfaction, particularly in circles where they feel the social problem more than they think about it, with my book The Threefold Commonwealth, by not merely showing how a given institution might be different. Instead, I argued that a great deal nowadays depends on whether the man who has to run a business, for instance, is able to bring his whole personality to bear, either directly or through assistants, on his work-people, so that he comes close to them by really discussing with them, as man to man, everything that goes on in the business, from the purchase of the raw material to the marketing of the finished product and the means by which it reaches the consumer. If you repeatedly discuss this chain of production with your employees, in a way that is attuned to human considerations, you establish a basis on which you can build the other things that are socially desirable and worth striving for today.

Yet it is still not enough to talk to people technically, in this way; something further is needed. What is needed, if we are to have hope in the prospects of society once more, is what I want to talk about today.

For a long time, the view has been widespread that the man who is a leader in the social sphere must first and foremost establish contact with the masses. Efforts in this direction were made throughout the nineteenth century. And as the social problem became more and more of a burning question, you could see people working in factories for months on end, in an attempt to get to know the life of the workers. There have been senior civil servants who, after reaching the retiring age and so completing their work in society, have gone among the working people and been astonished to discover what it is really like there. In short, there have long been efforts to get to know the common man, and in particular the proletariat. We may say, too, that the achievements of our literature and art in this respect have been considerable. The mode of existence of the workers and the masses in general, often impressively presented through works of art and literature, certainly deserves full recognition. With the major problems of the present, however, the most important point is not really that the leaders should know what goes on among the workers or the masses in general. Fundamentally, very little depends on our artistic depiction, from the inside, of the life of the masses: the miseries and cares that beset them, their struggles, their ideas and goals, and so on. I would say:

What we need today is not so much a way of understanding the masses, as a way of being understood by them; of going into the factory and business, whatever its kind, and being able to speak in such a way that we are not felt to be academic or “educated” or theoretical, but are taken as men who have something to say that appeals to men's souls.

For a long time now there have been laudable attempts to establish institutions for adult education, up to university level. What is made available to the people in this way does, it is true, interest them for a while by virtue of the piquancy of many scientific results; there is some excitement if the lecture is illustrated by lantern slides, or if we take people to zoos and the like. But we ought not to be under any illusion that this really appeals to their souls or touches their hearts. To do this, we must have something to say about man's relation to existence as a whole. On this point, it is true, leading personalities today still have rather odd opinions. They consider that the masses are not really interested in “philosophical questions,” as they call them. But they are! If you can only find the right language to express it, then eyes light up and hearts unfold. For example, if you start with quite simple scientific facts, and know how to handle them in such a way that, out of your reflections, human essence and human destiny ultimately emerge; and if you show people that what you say is well founded, and at the same time that it is not fragmentary knowledge that at best can occupy us in our moments of leisure, but something a man can absorb as nourishment for his soul—only if you succeed in doing this will you have made a start on the creation of confidence between the people, as they are called, and the leaders. It is possible today to speak from a party viewpoint, to provide the people with concepts such as “capitalism,” “labour,” “surplus value” and the like: the people will gradually assimilate these concepts, and then you can talk on party lines. But by doing so you will not provide men with systems in which they can participate with all their humanity, or enable them to co-operate in the creation of the society we must hope for if the forces of advancement, and not those of decline, are to prevail.

If you want to, you can soon see what the real situation is today, and where the real obstacles and restrictions occur. I was for some years a teacher at a workers' educational college, where I had to teach all kinds of subjects. I never kowtowed to any party dogma; at the same time, I never encountered any resistance on the part of a worker to understanding, when I presented history, for example, in such a way as to reveal at every point that it is not something that can be comprehended by a historical materialist interpretation, but something in which spiritual forces and spiritual impulses are operative. I was even able to evoke some understanding of why it was that Marx, whose ideas were thoroughly familiar to the members of my audiences, arrived at the view that is called “historical materialism,” the view that regards all spiritual phenomena as merely the effect of mechanistic and economic factors and the like. I was able to show them that this is because in fact, from about the sixteenth century onwards, there have increasingly come into play the forces that have made economic life dominant and decisive. In consequence, art and science and the rest really seem like—and in a sense even are—the results of economic life, mechanistic life. Marx made the mistake he did because he was only familiar with modern history.

It is not my wish to argue for one view or the other, however, but simply to observe that even this point was understood. It was not a lack of confidence on the part of the audiences that made my kind of popular instruction impossible, but the fact that one day the authorities noticed: the teaching here is not in accord with party dogma; instead, what is presented by way of illustration is drawn, to the best of the teacher's knowledge and judgment, from what appeals to human nature. And they grew anxious lest the audience should increase. One day, their emissary appeared at a meeting that was summoned for the purpose, to investigate whether I was fit to be a teacher at the workers' educational college. One of the workers' leaders appeared. And when I commented that, if the principle of progress was to be established in these circles, then the teacher must at least have freedom to teach as he wished, the representative replied: “Freedom is something we don't recognize! We recognize only a proper compulsion.”

This was the attitude that led to my expulsion from the teaching staff of that workers' educational college. From my point of view, however, it was really an illuminating experience. Not so much the expulsion itself, as the preceding acquaintance with the wide variety of people that make up the modern proletariat. An illuminating experience, because you could see that, if only you will speak out of your full humanity, so that your hearers

feel you are saying something to them that reaches into their hearts and affects their human and earthly being, they will regard thinking, when it springs from a philosophy of life, as the most important thing they can be offered. There exists today a feeling that enlightenment—not in any party sense, but in a general human sense—must spread among the masses. People long, more or less unconsciously, for something that springs from a really far-reaching philosophy of life.

And how should it be otherwise? For, after all, vast sections of mankind today are employed in such a way that their work cannot conceivably interest them. They perform it as if faced with something that has no relationship whatever with their humanity. Hence, although the clubs, guilds and unions that tend to be formed in these circles are indeed organized on the basis of the various trades—there are metal workers' unions, printers' unions, and so on—fundamentally they have surprisingly little to do with the business of production. They are primarily concerned with the element in the material sphere of life which is of general human interest—with consumption and the satisfaction of human needs. Mankind has had to become resigned about production, but not to anything like the same extent about consumption. And so large numbers of people are faced at present with work that turns them back upon themselves. Their environment cannot interest them, nor what they do from morning till night, unless it be so presented to them that they can find it interesting; what interests them first and foremost—and this is where we must begin—is what confronts a man when he is alone with himself after work and can simply concentrate his attention on his own humanity. We must also admit that, when we examine the social chaos of our time, we can see quite clearly that there are also many people in executive positions who are cut off from a direct interest in and relationship with what they are doing. It should be, not just an open secret, but something known to the widest possible circles, that even people whose work is intellectual often have so little interest in their profession that they too are reduced to waiting until after working hours in order to pursue their genuine and human interests. For that very reason it is obvious that we must provide human beings with things of human significance, if we wish to establish a basis for social optimism.

In the intellectual sector of civilization, we have accomplished an extraordinary amount. Today, we can point to all the things that human intelligence has achieved. And undoubtedly, people can learn an enormous amount when we acquaint them with the results of man's achievements in science and art. But that is not the point; the point is that we should be capable not only of disseminating intellectual culture, as a foundation for social structures, but also of exciting people, of inspiring them—not by producing grandiose utterances or well-rounded periods, but by having something to say, something that makes men feel: This touches my humanity.

If, on the other hand, we go to people with a philosophy of life derived from what is now popular and from what is recognized as true by our excellent natural sciences, you can see at once how impossible it is really to grip men's hearts with it and give them something that touches their humanity. Men will always regard the sort of thing they are usually given, as something superficial. In particular, what a man will say if he is willing to speak freely—because you have gained his confidence in other ways—is: “That's all very well: but in the first place we can't really understand what you say, because so much of it needs special preparation; and secondly it isn't straightforward enough for us; there is something that says to us: No thoroughfare!” I have heard many people talk like this about adult education colleges, public libraries and the like, as they are today. If now we seek to base on this experience an approach to society, we must look more deeply for the causes of the difficulty. And here once more I am compelled to introduce—in parenthesis, so to speak—part of a philosophy of life.

When, as we have often done during the last few days, we look at the Asiatic civilizations, so many legacies from which survive in our schools (even our secondary schools and universities), we find there, at any rate where the culture was at its height, something that must still be of inestimable value to us today. Its characteristic feature is that the knowledge of the world and philosophy of life discovered there were apprehended by the human spirit; and this in turn developed into the intellect, which I have described as the specific force of modern times. Our modern highly-developed intellect is, fundamentally, a late development of what, in the East, was dream-like clairvoyance. This dream-like clairvoyance has cast off its direct insight into the outside world and evolved into our inner logical order—into the great modern means of acquiring knowledge of nature.

And in the last analysis we must recognize, in the medium of philosophical communication in Europe today, yet another legacy from the Orient. It is not only the medieval schoolmen who still made use of words and concepts and ideas imbued with powers of the soul which derived from the East; we ourselves, however much we may deny it, speak, even in chemistry and physics, in language that we should not use if our education, right up to university level, were not conditioned by something derived from the Orient.

But in becoming intellect, this early clairvoyance has thrown off at the same time another shoot, which has affected the outlook on life of the masses in many ways. It has given rise to views which for the most part have already died out in Europe today, views which have been eradicated by modern elementary school education, and of which only vestiges survive among the most uneducated classes. While on the one hand the intellect has been developing to amazing heights, there has also developed deep down among the people (and far more than present-day psychology has yet revealed) something that projected certain subjective experiences, quite involuntarily, on to the outside world. These assumed the most varied forms, but they can all be covered by the single word “superstition.” Superstition, which signifies the projection of subjective experiences outwards into space and time, played a much greater rôle in mankind's development than is thought today. Even people who are only half-educated can now recognize the belief in ghosts as a superstition; yet there still persist in us, atavistically, many of the feelings that developed under the influence of this belief. In so far as we are the descendants of Oriental humanity in this respect too, we operate in our art and in other branches of life with at least the feelings that spring from this current in human development.

It is possible to examine what is emerging from the depths of social humanity, so to speak, at the present time; to look at the man who has developed out of the technical and mechanical world of modern times; to look into his heart and his quality of soul. And anyone who does so will see that this man—who has not gone through the process that makes the intellect supremely valuable to us today, the process of secondary and university education—has no genuine personal interest in all that can be achieved within the sphere of intelligence; what he has is something quite different. I would say: Something elemental reveals itself in such a man, welling up from depths that are rising to the surface in our social order—something elemental which, in Europe today, is quite inadequately understood, because fundamentally it is something new. But, when it is understood, it can show us the right way to bring a philosophy of life to the masses.

Anyone today who, growing up within mankind, has no contact with our inheritance from the Orient and is thus thrown back upon himself, as the working-man is and very many members of the upper classes too, is not interested first and foremost in the intellect. For him, it is above all the will that he is interested in—and will is something which rises up into the soul from deep below, something which emerges exclusively from man himself. Since this fact has, of course, been noticed in a superficial way, there exists today a certain longing to regard man as a being of will. Many people, indeed, believe that they can speak to the masses in terms of philosophy only if they deal primarily with the element of will in man. As a result of hankerings of this kind, it has come about—as frequently happens—that people have described to the masses “primitive culture,” in which man is still a creature of instinct. They describe to the working-man how these primitive people lived in simple circumstances, and then attempt to draw inferences about what the social order should be like today. In primary education today, a great deal of time is spent in describing the living conditions of these primitive, instinctive people. And there is a good deal of other evidence for the existence of a certain instinctive tendency to put forward the element of will, when people are called upon to expound a philosophy of life.

Out of a certain appetite for the sensational, the man of today does, it is true, accept these descriptions; to some extent, too, he feels in his own being, which has not advanced to a higher level of education, something akin to this instinctive element in human nature. But if you want to warm people, if you want to preserve their souls from desiccation, if you want to make contact with the whole man, then accounts of this kind will not help you.

Why is this? It is because, when you have scaled the peaks of science and acquired what science currently accepts as true, you develop, simply by doing so, something that really constitutes a modern superstition. Admittedly, it is not yet recognized as such; but just as the educated man of more recent times has learnt to regard the old belief in ghosts as a superstition, so to some extent the masses today—as it were prophetically, looking into the future—regard as a kind of superstition the ideas and concepts and notions that we assert about these primitive conditions of humanity.

What do we assert? We assert that mankind was originally governed by instinctive drives. These are something quite obscure, operating in unconscious regions that people are unwilling to define more precisely; they include the instincts, which are also found in animals, and all that is indefinite in man's feelings and expressions of will. People point to the element of natural creature active in man. Many thinkers today regard it as an ideal to depict man in such a way that what is inside him is presented as far as possible in terms of material processes, only elevated into those indefinite concepts that we call drives or instincts.

Let us, however, remember the view of man's inner make-up that I have developed in the last few days. I have shown how the exercises of spiritual science, by developing man, enable him to really see inside himself. He thereby reaches the stage of contemplating his inner organism, not as does the modern physiologist or anatomist from without, but in such a way that the parts of the organism can be inwardly experienced. When you have broken through the reflector of memory, you can look down upon the lungs, heart, etc., as something whose physical structure is merely the outward expression or manifestation of the spiritual—of that spiritual element which I have been able to represent as a world-memory linked with the great cosmos.

This can be sensed by the very man who today is thrown back by his work on to himself. Everywhere he longs to attain an understanding of it. But we achieve this understanding only when we clearly perceive what we are actually doing, when we perceive in its spiritual essence the element of spirit and soul which lies within us—which is not even our property and does not belong to our human personality, but which is the gulf, so to speak, that the cosmos sends into us as human beings. Man can come to know man only when, looking into himself, he finds as the basic substance of his physical being a spiritual element. Once we realize this, however, we also know that to speak of drives, instincts, and all the other things that people are always speaking of nowadays, is to interpose something in front of our real inner nature, just as superstition formerly interposed ghosts in front of external nature. When we speak of drives, instincts and the like in man, we mean only the psyche obscured, so to speak, by our own outlook. In speaking of our human make-up as it really is, we must ignore these spectres that we call instinctive drives, passions and the like, and see through them to reality. We must leave behind the spectres within us, represented by all these definitions of drives, lusts, passions, will and the like, in the same way as we have left behind the ghosts in the sphere of the external, natural order. With those ghosts, we interposed something from within us in front of external nature, and so projected what was subjective on to the objective sphere. Nowadays, we are setting up something that is, objectively, of a spiritual nature, as if it were something material; our drives and instincts, as usually defined, are materialized and internalized ghosts that obscure the true spiritual sphere. This is something which, as a matter of cognitive fact, is little understood nowadays, although it is felt when, with a true knowledge of man, we seek to approach anyone who, from the depths of his unconscious—and in the depths of this unconscious lies the spiritual sphere—instinctively feels: Don't talk to me about your materialized ghosts! You ought to be telling me something about the way in which man and the cosmos have grown up together.

If you have a feeling for society, you will rejoice over experiences like the one I had a few weeks ago, when I was lecturing to a group of working-men. I was originally supposed to speak about political economy. But I always arrange for the audience to choose the subject themselves; before the lecture begins, I let them hand it up to me or tell me, so that the knowledge imparted to them is of a kind that they themselves determine. On this occasion, a working-man took out a copy of our periodical The Three. He said he had read an article of mine in it, but couldn't quite understand what the planet was actually like which preceded the earth, subsequently went over into darkness, and eventually gave rise to the earth. I was able to lay before this man, in a straightforward and simple manner, an explanation in terms of spiritual science. And you could see that, whereas if you speak drily, in abstract concepts, they may feel: There's nothing much for us here! Yet when you speak of this kind of thing, their eyes light up, because they feel that here is something their souls can feed on, just as their bodies feed on what they eat. How their eyes light up when you give them something that grips their whole personality, their heart and soul—something that is not simply a concept of life, but an outlook, a philosophy of life in the sense that it really contains life and can excite enthusiasm, even when the worker comes straight from the machine.

And I certainly believe that social influence of this kind must be exerted first, before we can win men over in any other way—and they must be won over—to establish the appropriate social structures. How long this will take depends on men's determination. I know that many people say: “Oh, you are fobbing us off with something that will only be realized in four or five hundred years time.” To this I always reply: “Quite true, if not enough people want it; but in affairs of this kind, the important thing is not to calculate how long it may take for men to reach these social structures, but to forsake calculation and put our trust in the will.” If the will is present in a sufficiently large number of men, we may hope to attain, in not too great a length of time, what we might otherwise intellectually suppose would take centuries. Nothing is more of an obstacle to our reaching these social configurations than the hesitation that derives from such calculations. You should start, not by worrying about the results of intellectual calculation, but by attempting to come close to man. Then, you will see that, with a philosophy of life that does not interpose materialized ghosts before people's souls, but reveals to them man's link with the cosmos, you will soon meet with an appreciative reception.

Today, the usual reception you will get is as follows: If you take this kind of philosophy of life to those who are professionally qualified to judge it, they will compare it with what is already in existence, and will then take the view that it is amateurish, dilettante and so forth. Or the converse will happen: You wish to speak about these things, which so affect man's innermost self that drives, instincts and the like become spiritualized, and you feel obliged to adopt the scientific forms of expression customary today; otherwise what you have to say will be rejected before you start. But if you do adopt them, you are then told that you are speaking a language that is not for the people. You already knew this. That was why, when speaking to people who expect a great deal from those with scientific education, you set it in quite different contexts of ideas. What is said, however, is exactly the same. And that is how you come to realize that the man whose intellect has not been taught to run along a few particular lines by his specific intellectual training, will understand it. We shall, it is true, first have to leave behind an age in which, for doing this, a man can be thrown out of workers' educational colleges by those who regard themselves as the authentic leaders of the people.

I have had to demonstrate to you, then, that because of the very nature of the masses of humanity, there must exist today a philosophy of life in the form of an anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. For only out of such a philosophy, which can really talk about the spiritual sphere in speaking of man, can there arise any hope of attaining a social understanding. And then, from this social understanding, with people understanding one another, we can go forward to other things.

We can hope for this. This hope is native to us in Central Europe where, throughout the nineteenth century, the best minds sought a method of education by which it would be possible to lay hold of the child, so to speak, in the sphere of the will. They had perceived that a modern human being must be taken hold of in his will. They had not, of course, seen this as clearly as it can be seen with the aid of the philosophy of life I am propounding. But they had a notion of it. That is why they exerted themselves to find intellectual methods which would enable them to reach the child's will by way of his ideas, to lay hold of his will through his thought-forces. And an enormous amount of good was achieved in Central Europe, as a result of the German spirit—this is fully acknowledged in the West, or was at least until the Great War. Attention has always been drawn, in England, to the way in which, in Central Europe, people tried to take hold of the will indirectly, via a pedagogic method, and how this has been transplanted to England. This has always been recognized and described.

When we go still further West, to America, however, we find that, by the circumstances of spiritual geography, they have developed over there a distinct form of primitive philosophy of life—if I may so put it without offence—which yet carries within itself striking potentialities for the future. We find, for example, that in America, when educated people sum up what they think about human beings, they will say: What a man works out intellectually depends on the political party into which circumstances have led him, and on the church he belongs to. In reflecting the opinions of his church, his class, or his party, he does of course make use of his intellect; the real source, however, is not the intellect but the will. Again and again we can see American writers pointing to man's will as his primary substance. Present-day Americans like to quote writers who say: The intellect is nowadays nothing but a minister of state, and the will is the ruler—even though, as Carlyle said, the intellect may be an expensive minister.

This view, moreover, is not an invented abstraction, but something that is in the bones of educated Americans. Even the physiologists there talk in these terms. Anyone who has an ear for such things can perceive a marked difference between the language of physiologists in Europe and that of physiologists in America. Over there, people explicitly discuss how a man's brain is shaped by his situation in the world. They consider the brain to be a mechanism which is dependent, even down to its speech-centres, on the company a man keeps, the extent to which he gets on in life, and so forth. They therefore see the development of the will within the world as the primary aspect of man, and regard all the products of the brain as subordinate, as something which, fundamentally, has very little to do with a man's individuality. These people say: If you want to discover a man's individuality, you must examine his will and see how it developed in his childhood, in the context of his family, his church, his political allegiance, etc.; and then consider how he acquires an intellect which—as an American has said—has about as much to do with his essential being as the horse you ride has to do with the rider.

Although the legacy of the East has also extended as far as America, then, we have there, emerging directly from educated circles, something that in Europe lies in the subterranean depths of human existence. Our own America so to speak, the America that is within Europe, is the instinctive direction of humanity towards the will, and thus towards a very large class of people here. This also gives us the ground on which Europe must in fact reach an understanding with America, if a world-wide social rapprochement is to come about.

We do indeed find that a good deal of what the Americans have developed represents a primitive form of the exercises by which a spiritual vision is attained. Thus, we find Americans repeatedly commending self-control, self-discipline, self-education as all-important: what matters is not having learned something, but implanting it in your will by the constant repetition of a given exercise. We know the effect of rhythmically repeating concepts, and we know how the influence thus brought to bear on man's true centre in turn affects the will. It sometimes takes curious forms, this conscious direction to what, for modern man, must represent the innermost kernel of his being.

And precisely from a rapprochement of this kind we shall be able to develop the further recognition that we must pass through contemplation of the will to reach the spiritual element of man. There follows the prospect of a philosophy of life which (even though the working man cannot help being materialistic at present) can yet be such as I have expounded here—a power that can be developed from the social conditions themselves, so to speak, precisely through a rapprochement between Europe and America.

It was in Central Europe that the finest minds sought for intellectual topics that would be capable of taking hold of the temperament, the volitional side of children. Central European educators in the nineteenth century tried to discover the art of capturing the will by starting from the intellect. But they did not get beyond abstract thinking, which had not then advanced to the living thought. They were still caught up in the Oriental world and its legacy, and on the basis of this early Oriental heritage they sought to take hold of the will.

Then came a great mass of humanity who made will sovereign everywhere. And today we live in a period that contrasts with an earlier age when forces existed to uphold the social order. Even those of us whose outlook is not reactionary cannot help understanding that, in earlier times, a prince attended the same sermon as the lowest peasant in the district; and the man who spoke from within the spiritual life, on behalf of all, had something to say that affected everyone. A perfectly clear public image of the consolidation of the social orders by means of the spirit was definitely there in those earlier periods. It was a definite legacy from the Orient, this image which is apprehended by the head and only later sinks down into the heart. Now something else, something that springs from the will, has appeared. We must find once more a way of speaking philosophically out of a spirit that embraces us all, from the most uneducated to the most educated. Only in this way can we work together, think, feel and will together, so as to establish, in the present, social prospects for the future.

This will come about if we can create a rapprochement between the embryonic beginnings in Europe, as they have been described in the last few days, and what has emerged in America, at a higher level of civilization, so to speak, among educated people in general. A rapprochement aimed at moving westwards will create a basis for an understanding of the development of spirit in the West.

Only if we as Western men show that we are able, out of what we can apprehend within ourselves, to summon up something spiritual and to counter the Oriental spirit, which today is in a state of decadence, with a European-American spirit, will a world economy and a world commerce, such as exists only externally today, be possible, in a framework of genuine confidence between men. Today, even though the Asiatic trades in one form or another with us Western men, in his heart there is still the feeling: Your machines do not impress us! With them, you are turning yourselves into intellectualized machines; that is the kind of men you are, inside. Even X-rays do not impress them. The Oriental will say: With their aid, you can look inside man physically; but what is really important requires no apparatus, it arises from our clairvoyant inner self. Whether legitimate or not, this is the attitude of the Orient. They have a profound belief in the spirit in human nature, and look down with contempt on anything that accepts the constraint, as it seems to them, of technology and the machine, in such a way that man himself operates, in society, like a cog in a machine.

The gap between us and the Orient will be bridged only when we ourselves create a spiritual dimension in our philosophy of life, on foundations such as I have described, combining the spirit of Europe and America. This, however, will require the world to look more closely at Central Europe, which has gone furthest in the evolution of the intellect towards living thought. It is the men of the early part of the nineteenth century—Hegel, Fichte, Schelling—who have gone furthest in the evolution of thought towards life. At least they believed that in what they experienced as the substance of the world, albeit in thoughts that were still abstract, they had something vital and spiritual. What they had, of course, was only the germ of vital thought. That is why Central Europe itself forsook the paths it had been following. They need to be rediscovered by making thought genuinely vital. A rapprochement with Central Europe can bring this about.

When the West has brought forth spirit once again, and when the East not only sees its own spirit, but can also see, even in the trader and merchant, the representative of a spiritual philosophy of life, then the Oriental will no longer look down on us in arrogance; he will be able to reach an understanding. This is what we must seek if we are to have hopes for society. We cannot have them at all unless we realize what has to disappear.

There existed in Central Europe a spirit which proclaimed that everything ultimately collapses but that a new life springs up from the ruins. This is a hope we shall realize only when we look past the externals of society to its inner being. But then we must cease to try to maintain the old order at all costs, and instead have the courage to regard as expendable the things that must be overthrown. The old saying remains true: Nothing can come to fruition which has not first been cast into the earth as a seed, so that it may decay. Well, the word “decay” is not quite accurate here, but the image still holds. In discerning what we need to abandon as decayed, we must move forward to new impulses and to the new life that must blossom out of the ruins. Only in this way can we, in this age, have social hopes for the future.

When, some three years ago, at the request of a group of friends who were disturbed by the social aftermath of the Great War, I published my book The Threefold Commonwealth, the immediate result, from my point of view, was the profound misunderstanding it met with on every side. This was because it was promptly classed among the writings that have attempted, in a more or less Utopian manner, to advocate institutions which their creators envisaged as a sort of nostrum against the chaotic social conditions thrown up in the course of man's recent development. My book was intended not as a call for reflection about possible institutions, but as a direct appeal to human nature. It could not have been otherwise, given the fundamentals of spiritual science, as will be apparent from the whole tone of my lectures so far.

In many cases, for example, what I included solely to illustrate the central argument was taken to be my main point. In order to demonstrate how mankind could achieve social thinking and feeling and a social will, I gave as an example the way the circulation of capital might be transformed so that it would no longer be felt by many people to be oppressive, as frequently happens at present. I had to say one or two things about the price mechanism, the value of labour, and so on. All this solely by way of illustration. Anyone who seeks to influence human life as a whole must surely hearken to it first, in order to derive from it the human remedies for its aberrations, instead of extolling a few stereotyped formulae and recommending their indiscriminate application.

For anyone who has reacted to the social life of Europe in the last thirty or forty years, not with some preconceived attitude or other but with an open mind, it is clear above all that what is needed in the social sphere today is already prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe. Everywhere we find these unconscious tendencies. They exist already in men's souls, and all that is needed is to put them into words.

That is what made me give in to my friends and write the book I have mentioned. My purpose was to attempt, out of the sense of reality which—in all modesty we can say this—spiritual science instils in man, to observe what has been going on in Europe in recent years, beneath the surface of events and institutions, among all ranks and classes of society. What I wanted to say was not: I think that this or that is correct, but rather: This or that is secretly desired by the unconscious, and all that is required is for us to become conscious of the direction in which mankind is really trying to go. The reason for many of our social abuses today is precisely that this unconscious movement contradicts in part what mankind has worked out intellectually and embodied in institutions. Our institutions, in fact, run counter to what men today desire in the depths of their hearts.

There is another reason why I do not believe there is any real point today in simply advocating some particular Utopian institution. In the historical development of mankind in the civilized world we have entered a phase where any judgment about relationships among and between men, however shrewd, can be of no significance unless men accept it—unless it is something towards which they are themselves impelled, though for the most part unconsciously.

If we wish to reflect at all upon these things at the present time, therefore, I believe we must reckon with the democratic mood which has emerged in the course of man's history, and which now exists in the depths of men's souls—the democratic feeling that something is really valuable in the social sphere only if it aims, not at saying democratic things, but at enabling men to express their own opinions and put them over. My main concern was thus to answer the question: Under what conditions are men really in a position to give expression to their opinions and their will in social matters?

When we consider the world around us from a social standpoint, we cannot help concluding that, although it would be easy to point to a great deal that should be different, the obstacles to change are legion, so that what we may know perfectly well and be perfectly willing to put into practice, cannot be realized! There are differences of rank and class, and the gulfs between classes. These gulfs cannot be bridged simply by having a theory of how to bridge them; they result from the fact that—as I stressed so much yesterday—the will, which is the true centre of man's nature, is involved in the way we have grown into our rank or class or any other social grouping. And again, if you look for the obstacles which, in recent times, with their complicated economic conditions, have ranged themselves alongside the prejudices, feelings and impulses of class consciousness, you will find them in economic institutions themselves. We are born into particular economic institutions and cannot escape from them. And there also exists, I would say, a third kind of obstacle to true social co-operation among men; for those who might perhaps, as leaders, be in a position to exert that profound influence of which I have been speaking, have other limitations—limitations that derive from certain dogmatic teachings and feelings about life. While many men cannot escape from economic limitations and limitations of class, many others cannot rise above their conceptual and intellectual limitations. All this is already widespread in life and results in a great deal of confusion.

If, however, we now attempt to reach a clear understanding of everything which, through these obstacles and gulfs, has affected the unconscious depths of men's souls in recent decades, we become aware that in fact the essentials of the social problem are not by any means located where they are usually looked for. They reside in the fact that there has arisen in the recent development of civilized man, alongside the technology which is so complicating life, a faith in the supreme power of the monolithic state. This faith became stronger and stronger as the nineteenth century wore on. It became so strong and so fixed that it has never been shaken even in the face of the many shattering verdicts on the organization of society that multitudes of people have reached.

With this dogmatic faith that thus takes hold of men, something else is associated. Through their faith, people seek to cling to the proposition that the object of their faith represents a kind of sovereign remedy, enabling them to decide which is the best political system, and also—I will not say to conjure up paradise, but at least to believe that they are creating the best institutions conceivable.

This attitude, however, leaves out of account something that obtrudes itself particularly on those who observe life realistically, as it has been observed here in the last few days. Anyone who, just because he is compelled to mould his ideas to the spiritual world, acquires a true sense of reality, will discover that the best institutions that can be devised for a particular period never remain valid beyond that period and that what is true of man's natural organism is also true of the social organism.

I am not going to play the boring game of analogies, but by way of illustration I should like to indicate what can be discovered about society from a study of the human organism. We can never say that the human organism—or, for that matter, the animal or plant—will display only an upward development. If organisms are to flourish and to develop their powers from within themselves, they must also be capable of ageing and of dying off. Anyone who studies the human organism in detail finds that this atrophying is going on at every moment. Forces of ascent, growth and maturation are present continuously; but so too are the forces of decomposition. And man owes a great deal to them. To overcome materialism completely, he must direct his attention to just these forces of decomposition in the human organism. He must seek, everywhere in the human organ, ism, the points at which matter is disintegrating as a result of the process of organization. And he will find that the development of man's spiritual life is closely linked to the disintegration of matter. We can only understand the human organism by perceiving, side by side with the forces of ascent, growth and maturation, the continuous process of decay.

I have given this simply by way of illustration, but it really does illustrate what the impartial observer will discover in the social organism too. It is true that the social organism does not die, and to this extent it differs from the human organism; but it changes, and forces of advancement and decline are inherent in it. You can only comprehend the social organism when you know that, even if you put into practice the wisest designs and establish, in a given area of social life, something that has been learnt from conditions as they really are, it will after a time reveal moribund forces, forces of decline, because men with their individual personalities are active in it. What is correct for a given year will have changed so greatly, twenty years later, that it will already contain the seeds of its own decline. This sort of thing, it is true, is often appreciated, in an abstract way. But in this age of intellectualism, people do not go beyond abstractions, however much they may fancy themselves as practical thinkers. People in general, we thus discover, may admit that the social organism contains forces of dissolution and decline, that it must always be in process of transformation, and that forces of decline must always operate alongside the constructive ones. Yet at the point where these people affect the social order through their intentions and volition, they do not recognize in practice what they have admitted in theory.

Thus, in the social order that existed before the Great War, you could see that, whenever capitalism formed part of an upward development, it resulted in a certain satisfaction even for the masses. When in any branch of life capitalism was expanding, wages rose. As the process advanced further and further, therefore, and capitalism was able to operate with increasing freedom, you could see that wages and opportunities for the employment of labour rose steadily. But it was less noticed that this upward movement contained at the same time other social factors, which move in a parallel direction and involve the appearance of forces of decline. Thus with rising wages, for instance, conditions of life would be such that the rising wages themselves would gradually create a situation in which the standard of life was in fact raised relatively little. Such things were, of course, noticed, but not with any lively and practical awareness of the social currents involved.

Hence today, when we stand at a milestone in history, it is the fundamentals, not the surface phenomena of social life that we must consider. And so we are led to the distinct branches that go to make up our social life.

One of these is the spiritual life of mankind. This spiritual life—though we cannot, of course, consider it in isolation from the rest of social life—has its own determinants, which are connected with human personalities. The spiritual life draws its nourishment from the human individuals active in any period, and all the rest of social life depends on this. Consider the changes that have occurred in many social spheres simply because someone or other has made some invention or discovery. But when you ask: How did this invention or discovery come about? then you have to look into the depths of men's souls. You see how they have undergone a certain development and have been led to find, in the stillness of their rooms, so to speak, something that afterwards transformed broad areas of social life. Ask yourselves what is the significance, for social life as a whole, of the fact that the differential and integral calculus was discovered by Leibniz. If from this standpoint you consider realistically the influence of spiritual life on social life, you will come to see that, because spiritual life has its own determinants, it represents a distinctive branch of social life as a whole.

If asked to define its special quality, we would say: Everything that is really to flourish in the spiritual life of mankind must spring from man's innermost productive power. And we inevitably find that the elements that develop freely in the depths of the human soul are what is most favourable for social life as a whole.

We are, however, also affected by another factor, one that has become increasingly apparent in recent decades. It is the impulse—subsequently absorbed into a faith in the omnipotence of political life—for civilized humanity, out of the depths of its being, to become more and more democratic. In other words, aspirations are present in the masses of humanity for every human being to have a voice in determining human institutions. This democratic trend may be sympathetic or unsympathetic to us—that is not a matter of primary importance. What matters is that the trend has shown itself to be a real force in the history of modern man. But in looking at this democratic trend, we are particularly struck, if our thinking is realistic, by the way in which, out of an inner pressure, out of the spiritual life of Middle Europe ideas evolved, in the noblest minds, about the political community of men.

I do not mean to suggest that today we must still attach any special value to the “closed commercial state” put forward by one of the noblest of Germans. We need pay attention less to the content of Fichte's thought than to his noble purpose. I should, however, like to emphasize the emergence in a very popular form, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, of what we may call the search for concepts of natural law. At that time, certain eminent and high-minded men devoted themselves to the question: What is the relation of man to man? And what in general is man's innermost essence, socially speaking? They believed that, by a right understanding of man, they would also be able to find what is the law for men. They called this “the law of reason” or “natural law.” They believed that they could work out rationally which are the best legal institutions, the ones under which men can best prosper. You need only look at Rotteck's work to see how the idea of natural law still operated for many writers in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In opposition to this, however, there emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe the historical school of law. This was inspired by the conviction that you cannot determine the law among men by a process of reason.

Yet this historical school of law failed to notice what it is that really makes any excogitation of a rational law unfruitful; they failed to see that, under the influence of the age of intellectualism, a certain sterility had invaded the spiritual life of mankind. Instead, the opponents of natural law concluded that men are not competent to discover, from within their souls, anything about law, and that therefore law must be studied historically. You must look, they said, at man's historical development, and see how, from customs and instinctive relationships, systems of law have resulted.

The historical study of law? Against such a study Nietzsche's independent spirit rebelled in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. He believed that, if we are always looking solely at what has exercised mankind historically, we cannot be productive and evolve fruitful ideas for the present; the elemental forces that live in man must revolt against the historical sense, in order that, from these forces, there may develop a constitution of social relationships.

Among leading personalities there developed in the nineteenth century, at the height of intellectualism, a battle over the real foundations of law. And this also involved a battle over the foundations of the state. At least, it was generally assumed so at the time. For the state is, ultimately, no more than the sum total of the individual institutions in which the forces of law reside. The fact that the ability to detect the foundations of law had been lost also meant, therefore, that it was no longer possible to attain clarity about the real nature of the state. That is why we find—not simply in theory, but in real life as well—that, during the nineteenth century, the essence of the state became, for countless people, including the masses, a problem that they had to solve.

Yet this applied more particularly, I would say, to the upper and more conscious reaches of civilized humanity. From underground, the democratic attitude I have described was tunnelling its way towards the surface. Its appearance, if properly understood, leads us to conceive the problem of the nature of law in a way that is much deeper and much closer to reality than is usual today. There are many people today who think it self-evident that, from within the individual, you can somehow arrive at what is actually the law in a given sphere. Modern jurists, it is true, soon lose sight of the ground when they attempt to do so; and what they find, when they philosophize in this way or indeed think they are reflecting in a practical way upon life, is that law loses its content for them and becomes an empty form. And then they say: This empty form must be given a content; the economic element must be decanted into it.

On the one hand, then, there exists a definite sense of man's powerlessness to reach a concept or feeling of law from within himself. On the other hand, we do continually attempt to derive the nature of law from man himself. And yet the democratic attitude jibs at any such attempt. What it says is that there is no such thing as a general abstract determination of law; there is only the possibility that the members of a particular community may reach an understanding and say to one another: “You want this from me, I want that from you,” and that they will then come to some agreement about their resulting relations. Here, law springs exclusively from the reality of what men desire from one another. There cannot therefore be any such thing as a law of reason; and the “historical law” that has come into being can always do so again if only we find the right foundation for it. On this foundation, men can enter into a relationship in which, through mutual understanding, they can evolve a realistic law. “I want to have my say when law is being made”—so speaks the democratic attitude. Anyone, then, who wishes to write theoretically about the nature of law cannot spin it out of himself; he just has to look at the law that appears among men, and record it. In natural science too, our view of the phenomenal world does not allow us to fashion the laws of nature out of our head; we allow things to speak to us and shape natural laws accordingly. We assume that what we try to encompass in the laws of nature is already created, but that what exists in the legal sphere has to be created among men. This is a different stage of life. In this realm, man stands in the position of creator—but as a social being, alongside other men—so that a life may come about that shall infuse the meaning of human evolution into the social order. This is precisely the democratic spirit.

The third thing that presents itself to people today and calls for social reorganization is the complicated economic pattern which has developed in recent times, and which I need not describe, since it has been accurately described by many people. We can only say: This economic pattern certainly results from factors quite different from those controlling the other two fields of the social organism—spiritual life, where all that is fruitful in the social order must spring from the individual human personality (only the creativity of the individual can make the right contribution here to the social order as a whole), and the sphere of law, where law, and with it the body politic, can only derive from an understanding between men. Both factors—the one applicable to spiritual life and the other to political and legal life—are absent from economic life.

In economic life, what may come about cannot be determined by the individual. In the nineteenth century, when intellectualism enjoyed such a vogue among men, we can see how various important people—I do not say this ironically—people in the most varied walks of life, gave their opinion about one thing and another—people who were well placed in economic life, and whose judgment one would have expected to trust. When they came to express an opinion about something outside their own speciality, something that affected legislation, you often found that what they said, about the practical effect of the gold standard for example, was significant and sensible. If you follow what went on in the various economic associations during the period when certain countries were going over to the gold standard, you will be astonished at the amount of common sense that was generated. But when you go further and examine how the things that had been prophesied then developed, you will see, for instance, that some very important person or other considered that, under the influence of the gold standard, customs barriers would disappear! The exact opposite occurred!

The fact is that, in the economic sphere, common sense, which can help one a very great deal in the spiritual sphere, is not always a safe guide. You gradually discover that, as far as economic life is concerned, the individual cannot reach valid judgments at all. Judgments here can only be arrived at collectively, through the co-operation of many people in very different walks of life. It is not just theory, but something that will have to become practical wisdom, that truly valid judgments here can arise only from the consonance of many voices.

The whole of social life thus falls into three distinct fields. In that of spiritual life, it is for the individual to speak. In the democratic sphere of law, it is for all men to speak, since what matters here is the relationship of man to man on a basis of simple humanity—where any human being can express a view. In the sphere of economic life, neither the judgment of the individual, nor that which flows from the un-sifted judgments of all men, is possible. In this sphere, the individual contributes, to the whole, expert knowledge and experience in his own particular field; and then, from associations, a collective judgment can emerge in the proper manner. It can do so only if the legitimate judgments of individuals can rub shoulders with one another. For this, however, the associations must be so constituted as to contain views that can rub shoulders and then produce a collective judgment.—The whole of social life, therefore, falls into these three regions. This is not deduced from some Utopian notion, but from a realistic observation of life.

At the same time, however—and this must be emphasized over and over again—the social organism, whether small or large, contains within itself, together with constructive forces, also the forces of decline. Thus everything that we feed into social life also contains its own destructive forces. A constant curative process is needed in the social organism.

When we look at spiritual life from this standpoint, we can even say, on the lines of the observations put forward here in the last few days: in Oriental society, the life of the spirit was universally predominant. All individual phenomena—even those in political and in economic life—derived from the impulses of spiritual life, in the way I have been describing. If now you consider the functioning of society, you find that for a given period—every period is different—there flow forth from the life of the spirit impulses that inform the social structures; economic associations come into being on the basis of ideas from spiritual life, and the state founds institutions out of spiritual life. But you can also see that spiritual life has a constant tendency to develop forces of decline, or forces from which such forces of decline can arise. If we could see spiritual life in its all-powerful ramifications, we should perceive how it constantly impels men to separate into ranks and classes. And if you study the reasons for the powerful hold of the caste system in the Orient, you will find that it is regarded as a necessary concomitant of the fact that society sprang from spiritual impulses. Thus we see that Plato still stresses how, in the ideal state, humanity must be divided into the producer class, the scholar class and the warrior class—must be divided, that is, into classes. If you analyse the reasons for this, you will find that differences of rank and class follow from the gradation which is implicit in the supreme power of spiritual life. Within the classes, there then appears once more the sense of human personality, which experiences them as prejudicial to the social system. There thus always exist, within spiritual life, opportunities for the appearance of gulfs between classes, ranks, even castes.

We now turn to the field of politics, and it is here especially that we must look for what I have been calling the subjection of labour, in the course of man's development, to the unitary social organism. It is precisely because theocracy, coming from Asia, developed into a political system that is now dominated by concepts of law, that the problem of labour arises. In so far as each individual was to attain his rights, there developed a demand for labour to be properly integrated into society. Yet as law cast off its links with religion and moved further and further towards democracy, there insinuated itself more and more into men's lives a certain formalized element of social thinking.

Law developed in fact from what one individual has to say to another. It cannot be spun out of a man's own reasoning faculty. Yet from the mutual intercourse of men's reasoning faculties—if I may so put it—a true life of law arises. Law is inclined, therefore, towards logic and formalized thought. But humanity, on its way down the ages, goes through phases of one-sided development. It went through the one-sided phase we call theocracy, and similarly, later on, it goes through the one we call the state. When it does so, the logical element of social life is cultivated—the element of excogitation. Just think how much human ratiocination has been expended on law in the course of history!

In consequence of this, however, mankind also proceeds towards the capacity for abstraction. You can sense how human thinking, under the influence of the principle of law, becomes increasingly abstract. What mankind acquires in one sphere, however, is extended at certain periods to the whole of human life. In this way, I would say, even religion was, as I have indicated earlier, absorbed into the juridical current. The God of the Orient, universal legislator and giver of Grace to men, became a God of judgment. Universal law in the cosmos became universal justice. We see this especially in the Middle Ages. As a result, however, there was imported into men's habits of thought and feeling a kind of abstraction. People tried increasingly to run their lives by means of abstractions.

In this way, abstraction came to extend to religion and spiritual life, on the one hand, and economic life, on the other. Men began to trust more and more in the omnipotence of the state, with its abstract administrative and constitutional activity. Increasingly, men regarded it as progressive for spiritual life, in the shape of education, to be absorbed completely into the sphere of the state. Here, however, it could not avoid being caught up in abstract relationships, such as are associated with the law. Economic activity, too, was absorbed into something that was felt to be appropriate when the state is in control. And at the time when the modern concept of the economy was formed, it was the general opinion that the state should be the power above all which determined the proper organization of economic activity. In this way, however, we subject the other branches of life to the rule of abstraction. This statement itself may sound abstract, but in fact it is realistic. Let me demonstrate this with regard to education.

In our age, where common sense is so commonplace, men can come together in a committee, in order to work out the best pedagogic procedures. When they meet together in this way and work out how education should be organized and just what should be covered by this class or the other in the timetable, they will—and I say this without irony—work out first-rate things. I am convinced that, so long as they are fairly sensible—and most people are nowadays—they will draw up ideal programmes. We live—or did live at least, for some attempt is being made to escape—in the age of planning. There is certainly no shortage of programmes, of guiding principles in any given area of life! Society after society is founded and draws up its programme: a thing is to be done in this way or that. I have no objection to these programmes, and indeed I am convinced that no one who criticizes them could draw up better ones. But that is not the point. What we work out, we can impose on reality; only reality will not then be suitable for men to live in. And that is what really matters.

And so we have reached a kind of dead end in the matter of programmes. We have seen recently how, with the best and noblest of intentions for the development of mankind, a man drew up one of these programmes for the entire civilized world, in fourteen admirable points. It was shattered immediately it came into contact with reality. From the fate of Wilson's fourteen abstract points—which were the product of shrewd intellects, but were not in accordance with reality, not quarried from life itself—an enormous amount can be learnt.

In education and teaching, it is not programmes that matter, for they after all are only a product of politics and law. You can, with the best of intentions, issue a directive that this or that must be done; in reality, however, we are dealing with a staff composed of teachers with a particular set of capacities. You have to take these capacities into account in a vital way. You cannot realize a programme. Only what springs from the individual personalities of the teachers can be realized. You must have a feeling for these personalities. You will need to decide afresh, each day, out of the immediate life of the individual, what is to happen. You will not be able to set up a comprehensive programme: this remains an abstraction. Only out of life itself can something be created. Let us imagine an extreme case: In some subject or other, there are available only teachers of mediocre ability. If, at a time when they were free of teaching and had nothing to do but think, these teachers were to work out pedagogic aims and issue regulations, even they would no doubt come up with something extremely sensible. But the actual business of teaching is another thing altogether; all that matters there is their capabilities as whole men. It is one thing to reckon with what derives solely from the intellect, and quite another to reckon with life itself. For the intellect has the property of overreaching; fundamentally, it is always seeking to encompass the boundless nature of the world. In real life, it should remain a tool in a specific concrete activity.

Now if we reflect particularly on the fact that what takes place between human beings, when they confront each other as equals, can turn into law—then we must say: The things humanity develops are all right when they are the outcome of contemporary abstraction; for that is how men do feel. Men establish legal relations with one another, based on certain abstract concepts of man, and they arrive at these legal relations through the circumstance that they stand together on democratic ground. Yet it will never be possible in this way to create for the whole of humanity something that springs directly from the life of the individual; but only what is common to the whole of humanity. In other words: to be quite honest, there cannot well up, from a democratic foundation, what ought to spring from the individuality of man within spiritual life.

We must, of course, realize that a belief in the predominance of law and politics was a historical phenomenon, and that it was historically legitimate for modern states, at the time when they came into being, to take over responsibility for the schools, since they had to take them away from other authorities who were no longer administering them properly. You should not try to correct history retrospectively. Yet we must also perceive clearly that in recent years there has developed a movement to shape the life of the spirit once again as something independent, so that it contains within itself its own social structure and its own administration; and also that what takes place in individual classes can stem from the vital life of the teacher and not from adherence to some regulation or other. Despite the fact that it has been regarded as a step forward to hand over spiritual life, and with it schools, to the state, we must make up our minds to reverse this trend. Only then will it be possible for the free human personality to achieve expression within spiritual life, including the sphere of education. Nor need anyone be afraid that authority would suffer in consequence! Where a productive influence is exercised by the human personality, the individuals concerned yearn for a natural authority. We can see this at work in the Waldorf School. Everyone there is pleased when one person or the other can be his authority, because he needs what the individual talents of that person have to offer.

It then remains possible for politics and law to function on a democratic basis.

Here again, however, the fact is that, simply through its tendency to abstractness, the state contains within itself the germ of what are later to become forces of decline. Anyone who studies how, by virtue of the existence of this tendency, what men do in the political and legal sphere cannot help becoming increasingly cut off from any concrete interest in a particular aspect of life, will also realize that it is precisely political life which provides the basis for the abstractness that has become increasingly apparent in connection with the circulation of capital. The formation of capital nowadays is much criticized by the masses. But the campaign against it, as conducted at present, reveals an ignorance of the true situation. Anyone who wanted to abolish capital or capitalism would have to abolish modern economic and social life as a whole, because this social life cannot survive without the division of labour, and this in turn implies the formation of capital. In recent times, this has been demonstrated particularly by the fact that a large part of capital is represented by the means of production. The essential point, however, is that in the first place capitalism is a necessary feature of modern life, while on the other hand, precisely when it becomes nationalized, it leads to the divorce of money from specific concrete activities. In the nineteenth century, this was carried so far that now what actually circulates in social life is as completely divorced from specific concrete activities, as the bloodless ideas of a thinker who lives only in abstractions are divorced from real life. The economic element that is thus divorced from specific activities is money. When I have a certain sum in my pocket, this sum can represent any given object in the economy or even in spiritual life. This element stands in the same relation to specific concrete activities as a wholly general concept does to specific experiences. That is why crises must inevitably arise within the social order.

These crises have been extensively studied. A theory of crises is prominent in Marxism, for example. The mistake lies in attributing the crises to a single chain of causes, whereas in fact they are due to two underlying trends. There may be too much capital, in which case the excess that is circulating gives rise to crises. It may also happen, however, that too little capital is available, and this also leads to crises. These are two different types of crisis. Such things are not examined objectively, even by political economists today. The fact is that, in the real world, a single phenomenon may have very varied causes.

We can see, therefore, that, just as spiritual life tends to develop forces of decline arising from differences of class, rank and caste, so too the life that is moving towards abstractions—and rightly so—includes a tendency, on the one hand to develop the constructive forces that are part of a legitimate formation of capital, but on the other hand to give rise to crises because capitalism results in abstract economic activity, in which a capital sum can be used indifferently for one purpose or another.

When people realize this, they become social reformers and work out something that is designed to produce a cure. But now you come up against the fact that, although the individual does shape economic life by contributing his experiences through the appropriate associations, he cannot as a single individual determine the shape of economic life. That is why, when we go beyond the political and legal and the spiritual spheres, I have posited the association as a necessity of economic life.

In this connection, I was struck by the fact that, when I was speaking in Germany to a fairly small group of working-men about associations, they said to me: We have heard of very many things, but we don't really know what associations are; we haven't really heard anything about them. An association is not an organization and not a combination. It comes into being through the conflux of the individuals within the economy. The individual does not have to adopt something handed out from a central body, but is able to contribute the knowledge and ability he has in his own field. From a collaboration in which each gives of his best, and where what is done springs from the agreement of many—only from such associations does economic life in general derive.

Associations of this kind will come into being. They are certain to arise, I have no doubt of that. To anyone who tells me this is Utopian, my reply is: I know that these associations spring only from subconscious forces in man. We can, however, foster them by the reason and make them arise more quickly, or we can wait until they arise from necessity. They will link together those engaged in production and commerce, and the consumers. Only production, distribution and consumption will have any part in them. Labour will come more and more under the aegis of law. On the question of labour, men must reach an understanding in a democratic manner. In consequence, labour will be insulated from the only force which can be effective in economic life—that which is the resultant of a collective judgment in associations linking producers and consumers, together with distributors.

In the sphere of economic life, therefore—in the associations—goods alone will have a part to play. This will, in turn, have an important consequence: we shall cease entirely to have any fixed notions of the price and value of an article. Instead, we shall say: the price and value of an article is something that changes with the surrounding circumstances. Price and value will be set by the collective judgment of the associations. I cannot go into this at length here; but you can follow it up in my book The Threefold Commonwealth.

I have been trying to outline how, from our observation, we become aware that social life falls into three regions, shaped by quite distinct and different factors: spiritual life, legal and political life, and economic life. Within the recent development of civilization, these three have been achieving some degree of independence. To understand this independence, and gradually to allocate to each field what belongs to it, so that they may collaborate in an appropriate manner, is the important task today.

Men have reflected in very different ways on this tripartite articulation of the social organism. And, as my Threefold Commonwealth began to attract attention here and there, people pointed out various things in it that were already foreshadowed by earlier writers. Now I do not wish to raise the question of priority at all. What matters is not whether it was a particular individual who discovered something, but how it can become established in life. If a lot of people were to hit on it, one would be only too pleased. One point must be noted, however: when Montesquieu in France outlines a sort of tripartite division of the social organism, it is merely a division. He points out that the three sections have quite different determinants, and that we must therefore keep them separate. This is not the tenor of my book. I do not try to distinguish spiritual life, legal life and economic life, in the way that you would distinguish in man the nervous system, the respiratory system and the metabolic system, if at the same time you wanted to insist that they are three systems, each separate from the other. In itself, such a division leads nowhere; you can advance only by seeing how these three different systems function together, and how they best combine into a single whole by each operating on its own terms. The same is true of the social organism. When we know how to establish spiritual life, political and legal life, and economic life on the terms that are native to each, and how to let them run off their native sources of power, then the unity of the social organism will also follow. And then you will find that certain forces of decline are released within each of these fields, but that they are countered through collaboration with other fields. This suggests, not a tripartite division of the social organism, as in Montesquieu, but a threefold articulation of it, which yet comes together in the unity of the social organism as a whole, by virtue of the fact that, after all, every individual belongs to all three regions. The human personality—and that is what is all-important—inhabits this triform social organism in such a way as to unite the three parts.

Especially in the light of what I have been saying, then, we find that what we must aim at is not a division but an articulation of the social organism, in order that a satisfying unity may be attained. And in a more superficial way, you can also see that, for over a century, mankind in Europe has tended to seek such an articulation. It will come about, even if men do not consciously desire it; unconsciously, they will so conduct themselves, in the economic, spiritual, and political and legal spheres, that it will come about. It is demanded by the actual evolution of humanity.

And we can also point to the fact that the impulses which correspond to these three different aspects of life entered European civilization at a particular moment in the shape of three quintessential ideals, three maxims for social life. At the end of the eighteenth century in Western Europe, a demand spread abroad for liberty, equality and fraternity. Is there anyone who bears with the development that has taken place in modern times, who would deny that these maxims contain three quintessential human ideals? Yet on the other hand it must be admitted that there were many people in the nineteenth century who argued ingeniously against the view that a unified social organism or state can exist if it has to realize these three ideals all together. Several persuasive books were written to demonstrate that liberty, equality and fraternity cannot be completely and simultaneously combined within the state. And one must admit that these ingenious arguments do evoke a certain scepticism. In consequence, people once again found themselves face to face with a contradiction imposed by life itself.

Yet it is not the nature of life to avoid contradictions; life is contradictory at every point. It involves the repeated reconciliation of the contradictions that are thrown up. It is in the propagation and reconciliation of contradictions that life consists. It is, therefore, absolutely right that the three great ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity should have been put forward. Because it was believed in the nineteenth century, however, and right down to our own times, that everything must be centrally organized, people went off the rails. They failed to perceive that it is of no importance to argue about the way in which the means of production be employed, capitalism developed, etc. What matters is to enable men to arrange their social system to accord with the innermost impulses of their being. And in this connection we must say: We need to comprehend, in a vital way, how liberty should function in spiritual life, as the free and productive development of the personality; how equality should function in the political and legal sphere, where all, jointly and in a democratic manner, must evolve what is due to each individual; and how fraternity should function in the associations, as we have called them. Only by viewing life in this way do we see it in its true perspective.

When we do so, however, we perceive that the theoretical belief that it is possible to accommodate all three ideals uniformly in the monolithic state has led to a contradiction within life. The three ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity can be understood in a vital way only when we realize that liberty has to prevail in spiritual life, equality in the political and legal sphere, and fraternity in the economic sphere. And this not in a sentimental manner, but in a way that leads to social systems within which men can experience their human dignity and their human worth. If we understand that the unified organism can come into being only when out of liberty spirit develops in a productive way, when equality functions in the political and legal sphere and fraternity in the economic one, in the associations, then we shall rise above the worst social dilemmas of the present.

For man gains a spiritual life that is rooted in truth only out of what can freely spring from him as an individual; and this truth can only make its appearance if it flows directly from men's hearts. The democratic tendency will not rest easy until it has established equality in the political and legal sphere. This can be achieved by rational processes; if not, we expose ourselves to revolutions. And in the economic field, fraternity must exist in the associations.

When this happens, the law—which is founded on a human relationship in which like meets like—will be a vital law. Any other kind of law turns into convention. True law must spring from the meeting of men, otherwise it becomes convention.

And true fraternity can found a way of life only if this derives from economic conditions themselves, through the medium of the associations; otherwise, the collaboration of men within groups will establish not a way of life, but a routine existence, such as is almost invariably the case at the present time.

Only when we have learnt to perceive the chaotic nature of social conditions that spring from the predominance of catchwords instead of truth in the spiritual sphere, convention instead of law in the political and legal sphere, and routine instead of a way of life in the economic sphere, shall we be seeing the problem clearly. And we shall then be following the only path that affords a correct approach to the social problem.

People will be rather shocked, perhaps, to find that I am not going to approach the social problem in the way many people think it ought to be approached. What I am saying now, however, is based solely on what can be learnt from reality itself with the aid of spiritual science, which is everywhere orientated towards reality. And it turns out that the fundamental questions of social life today are these:

How can we, by a correct articulation of the social organism, move from the all too prevalent catch-word (which is thrown up by the human personality when its creative spirit is subordinated to another) to truth, from convention to law, and from a routine existence to a real way of life?

Only when we realize that a threefold social organism is necessary for the creation of liberty, equality and fraternity, shall we understand the social problem aright. We shall then be able to link up the present time properly with the eighteenth century. And Middle Europe will then be able, out of its spiritual life, to reply, to the Western European demand for liberty, equality, fraternity: Liberty in spiritual life, equality in political and legal life, and fraternity in economic life.

This will mean much for the solution of the social problem, and we shall be able to form some idea of how the three spheres in the social organism can collaborate, through liberty, equality and fraternity, in our recovery from the chaotic situation—spiritual, legal, and economic—which we are in today.

The End.

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

I have taken the liberty of describing the development of Greek spiritual life in the centuries before Plato - as a kind of preparation for Greek mysticism proper, that is, for the time in which the mystery system merged into what is usually called mysticism.

I note provisionally that Plato, who belongs to the fifth to fourth centuries before the birth of Christ, appears as a great confluence of all that Greek intellectual life had produced before Plato. He died at the age of eighty in 347 BC. Into this life was squeezed a continuous development that must appear particularly ascending [and] great to those who know how to read the Platonic writings correctly.

Plato's history of development in Greece took place at a time when life in Greece had taken on the strangest character. We must be clear about the fact that when Plato appeared, a kind of split also occurred, so that we only have to see the [one] branch of Platonic mysticism that developed after him and which can be called the "striving for truth". [The other branch, which has detached itself from the unified mystery being, has become art], above all in the form that confronts us in Greek tragedy, in the tragedy of Aeschylus and in the less important tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides.

Plato's [life] coincided with this period. Mystery became flattened into mere tragedy. Mystery united in undivided unity that which art and Greek mysticism had sought on separate paths. Such a division between truth and beauty, between mysticism and art, did not yet exist at the time of the ancient Greek Mysteries, and to a certain extent we will also see that a large part of the Mysteries took refuge in art. The most fleeting thing is the ideal.

We do not understand the concept of art at all if we do not understand it as something that has arisen as a distillation of the Greek Mysteries. But we can only understand this when we have penetrated the meaning of the ancient Greeks of the pre-Platonic period, who understood the really deep meaning of the word mystery. The Greek mystery being of pre-Platonic times united everything that can be expressed in inner aspirations. And what confronts us on the surface - including Heraclitus' philosophy - are only the diluted products of those who penetrated the depths of the mystery being, who threw them into the others because they could not penetrate, so that they could at least suspect, even if they could not see.

What the Greeks were looking for is something that Plato also gradually became aware of. It is that which presents itself to us in the writings that are usually referred to as the writings of the first eight years of Plato's writing career.

If you take these writings from the first period of Plato's writings, you will see that you are dealing with purely philosophical writings, ethical writings, moral writings. And that is the character of the so-called "Socratic philosophy". Socrates boasts that he was never initiated into the mysteries. After Socrates' death, an extremely important development begins for Plato, which then reaches its climax in Plato's most important work, the "Timaeus".

That which was present [in the heyday of spiritual life in Greece, before Christianity had a transforming effect on Greek spiritual life] and which Plato went through, this entire developmental process was called "initiation" in Greek spiritual life. It is what those who wanted to be initiated into the Mysteries strove for. For the Greeks, receiving initiation and becoming an initiate were one and the same thing.

And now, if I want to develop Platonic mysticism before you in the form in which it will appear to us as a process of continuous initiations, I must say something in advance. I must say in advance that what the Greeks had about the nature of initiation was expressed in a strange myth which cannot be understood if it is not regarded as a symbolic representation of initiation. It forms a parallel to the myth of Dionysus, a side piece to it; it is, however, quite different.

We know: Dionysus is the son of a mortal, Semele. Semele perished. She had asked Zeus to appear to her in his heavenly splendor and glory. When he granted her this, he had to appear like this and she was struck by his lightning bolt and burned to death. Dionysus had to be born a second time, [after Zeus had saved him by bringing the still immature child to maturity in his own thigh,] so that Dionysus, who was born as a man, was then burnt and then appeared as god-born.

This Dionysus myth presents us with the world process, the world's evolution, as the process of the incarnated god, as the process that the god goes through, that the one who has become god goes through. These myths were mysteries that related to the world process without taking into account the role that man plays within the world.

This Dionysus myth is accompanied by another myth, like a side piece. This is the myth of Heracles. It presents itself to us as a humanized Dionysus myth. Heracles was also the son of a mortal: He really is born of Alcmene. Now it turns out that this birth is delayed by Hera's jealousy, that he is born too late. Eurystheus was born beforehand, to whom he ceded the birthright. Because he was born second in line, Heracles had to perform his twelve well-known labors in the service of Eurystheus. So here we see the myth of Dionysus in a humanized form. So both were fire. Heracles then performs his human labors, and only after completing them is he transported to Olympus. Then he dissolves in fire.

So Heracles appears to us like the humanized Dionysus. He appears to us as one who has taken all suffering upon himself, in contrast to Dionysus, who has been spared this suffering. These twelve labors are nothing other than human trials that man has to pass in order to gradually ascend to the highest level he can reach. This whole myth can only be understood as a symbolic representation of the initiation process, and the twelve labors represent twelve successive states of the human soul. Through these, man gradually reaches an elevated consciousness, the entrance, the attainment of the actual divine consciousness.

The nature of these labors proves that the twelve labors of Heracles are nothing other than tests that man has to undergo in the course of the initiation process. It might seem to us that these labors have been juxtaposed by poetry as the overcoming of twelve monsters. 'But if you compare them, you will find that they are not tests of strength by a strong man, but meaningful symbolic things.

These are monsters, which were brought forth by the brother and sister Phorkis and Keto, from which the actual earthly things emerged. In connection with the Pontus, it is the deities who bring forth the liquid - standing between the fire and the earthly. Phorkis' and Ketos' descendants are the monsters that Heracles has to overcome. They must be overcome, these entities, they must be cast off. Let's take a look at these monsters against which Heracles fights:

[Firstly:] The 'Nemean Lion': He presents himself to us as a descendant of the sibling pair Phorkis - Keto. Citing the relationship would lead nowhere, but the genealogical structure is completely correct. The important thing is that the lion has an impenetrable hide. Heracles can only strangle him. He does so and brings him to his master. But his master is now afraid of him, so Heracles has to stay outside the city on his orders. The impenetrable force of nature is fully represented by the impenetrable fur. You cannot pierce the veil, you cannot pierce it with arrows; you can only leave it in place, you can only paralyze its mighty willpower. But you have to let it exist as an entity next to you. It cannot be killed completely.

We can only remain partial victors in this battle. We can only achieve the beginning, only a part. That is the important thing in this work. In the whole struggle, the forces of nature appear to us as voiceless powers whose voice we cannot recognize on the lower stages of development. Nature stands before us as a mute goddess. We must allow her to exist, we can only partially conquer her. This is symbolized for us in this first work.

[Secondly:] The second work that Heracles undertakes is the battle against the 'Lernaean serpent'. It has nine heads, of which the middle one is immortal. These have the property that they are always renewed when they are cut off. The battle is therefore a very difficult one. Heracles can only overcome this renewal by burning them with fire. This reveals something significant to us: he handles fire.

But we will see that this second work has a special meaning. It presents itself to us as a link between the temporal and the eternal. The middle, immortal head is nevertheless an obstacle to actual entry into the eternal. This can only be overcome through spirituality. But Heracles is not at the stage where he can accomplish this work. We must realize that it is like playing with fire by someone who does not know how to handle it properly. So this second work seems to be something that cannot really be of importance to Heracles. It is strange that the link between the temporal and the eternal should appear so early.

[Thirdly:] The third work is the conquest of the "Kerynite hind", which is sacred to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt. In the reference to the virgin Artemis, to the arts of peace, we see that it is an ascending process. This hind [Heracles] caught alive. He was only allowed to catch her alive and bring her home alive. This was a work that he accomplishes in the purely earthly. He abandons the struggle for the immortal. He endeavors to stand firm and turn around.

[Fourthly:] Having gained strength in this way, he sets about another task, [namely capturing the "Erymanthian boar alive]. He brings it bound to Mycenae. This is warlike work. This tells us that, having overcome his warlike longing, he must descend again and can now go on to more meaningful work. We see that he now - as if by chance - accomplishes something else: he wounds the Centaur Chiron, who has to fulfill the important task of standing up for Prometheus. We see how the Prometheus legend is linked here with the Heracles legend. We see how the element of will is linked here with the actual course of Heracles' development. We see how Heracles creates and orders the being that is to deliver Prometheus from his torments. Thus we see how Heracles at this stage, after he has overcome himself and desisted from the struggle, after he has gone through the renewed conflict, is now called to do something for striving humanity. This is the meaning behind the connection between the Heracles myth and the Prometheus myth.

[Fifth:] The cleansing work of the stable of Augeas. Those who sought admission to the Mysteries had to undergo a kind of purification, a baptism. This fifth work can be accomplished by those who have completed the first. It is not an actual work, it comes to man of its own accord. It is not an actual work of Heracles. The second and fifth labors cannot really be considered Heracles labors. The second leads too early to the eternal, and the fifth is something that comes to him of its own accord. They are therefore a kind of intermediate stages.

[Sixthly:] A special work of Heracles is that which he accomplishes with the "Stymphalian birds". These are birds with which he also has to do battle. Pallas-Athena comes to his aid in this work. We have already seen what she is. She has great significance in the Odysseus saga. She is the deity of wisdom, of heavenly wisdom. Now, after the purification, Pallas-Athena stands at his side. Pallas-Athena is - in contrast to knowledge - the right wisdom.

[Seventh:] Overcoming the birds was only one stage of development. But only with the help of Athena is he able to bring the "Cretan Bull alive to Mycenae.

The bull is a symbol in all mysteries that was widespread in the ancient world at that time, a symbol that passed from Persia through Asia Minor, Egypt and then spread from there through Greece. It is a symbol for the fruitful living nature. Therefore, in the Mysteries of Mithras, we see the bull paired with a strange symbol, a symbol of living nature. The tail of the bull runs out into a bunch of ears of wheat. This is definitely the symbolic representation of fertile and living nature. And the Mithras symbolism represents nothing other than this work of Heracles. This appears as a higher work of Heracles: the "Nemeijic lion is the lower, the bull the higher. The bull is the nature from which life sprouts, while the lion is the nature that is blind, dull.

This bull is sacred to Poseidon. We also know that this bull is depicted for those who were admitted to the battles of Mithras, as a bull on which a youth sits, thrusting his sword into the bull's side. A dog jumps in. Below is a snake, lengthwise. In front of and behind the bull are two attendants. The youth represents nothing other than the one on the path of initiation. On one side he has a companion with a raised torch, on the other side a companion with a lowered torch. This represents a process between life and death, which is the process of initiation. The upper part represents the passing sun god, the ascending and descending one. This rightly represents to us as spiritual what goes on below. This is the corresponding process in the realm of Dionysus, while the lower one is that in which Heracles finds himself. The image contains nothing other than the seventh work of Heracles. This is contained in all the representations of the Mysteries throughout the ancient world.

[Eighth:] Now Heracles can accomplish a very important work. He can overcome the world hostile to man at his highest level. The trials are renewed again and again, and that which is now to be overcome presents itself to us in the eighth work, the overcoming of the "fire-breathing horses of the son of Ares Diomedes. These "fire-breathing horses become immediately clear to us when we hear that they have to be fed with human flesh. The misanthropic violence on the higher level is that which can still impose a test on man, even if he has already achieved a high level of spiritual conquest. Here he overcomes by presenting the horses himself and then leading them to Olympus, where they are torn apart by wild animals. Now he is able to carry out the further trials. We see how what man can achieve on his path of development gradually forms into a well-rounded whole.

[Ninth:] He then conquered the "Belt of the Amazon Queen". This represents the empowerment of that which prevents us, as it were, from attaining the higher levels of consciousness as something with which we are connected. We are dealing here with a female element. It must take possession of the "belt of the Amazon Queen".

[Eleventh:] But it is significant for us because he erects the pillars of Heracles on one side of the world and on the other. The test course is now completed for him with the erection of the two border pillars.

Heracles could thus appear to us as a kind of initiate. However, the second and fifth works have something questionable about them. In the works of the "Cleansing of the Augean Stable and the 'Lernaean Serpent', however, it is expressed that he did not achieve his complete initiation. The two works were not accepted.

11 b: "He had to seize the apples of the Hesperidens. They were the bridal gift of Hera, [which Gaea had given to Hera at her marriage,] the symbol of knowledge itself. Heracles must first retrieve it from Hera's garden, [where they were guarded by four maidens, the Hesperides, and the dragon Ladon, a descendant of Phorkys and Keto]. 11 c: In this way he frees Prometheus and 11 d overcomes Antaios, the giant figure who is always sucking new power from the earth, who only needed to touch the earth to receive new power, natural power. Only after Heracles has passed these almost insurmountable tests of nature can he fetch the apples of the Hesperides. The [overcoming of] natural power is not yet something permanent. At this stage he must realize that this knowledge must be continually renewed. This test must always be carried out anew. The only thing that can be achieved is that the Antaios must always be fought anew. It will always gain new strength when it touches the earth. It is therefore an ongoing battle.

[Twelfth:] Before Heracles accomplishes the twelfth labor, he is initiated into the mysteries. That is what we are told. We don't need to interpret it. Before he does his twelfth labor, he is initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. And what does he accomplish here? He descends into the underworld, frees Theseus and achieves what is described by the words: he can bring Cerberus up from the underworld. The secret of the underworld becomes clear to him. Heracles acquires the Heraclitean wisdom of "overcoming life with death". He learns to understand Heraclitus' formula, in which he says: "The worship of Dionysus is at the same time the worship of Hades. In it, the highest deity of life flows together with the god of the underworld, Hades. The fruit is therefore the attainment of the underworld, something that we already encounter in Odysseus. It is the symbolic representation of the initiation process that we find in the Heracles legend. It only remains so incomprehensible that we don't really know what to do with it because it didn't really grow out of Greek philosophy, but out of mystery.

When we understand the legend of Heracles, we understand the corresponding teachings of all peoples, of the Indians, Persians and Egyptians. The mysteries of Heracles have existed alongside the mysteries of others. They all represent to us the initiatory process, and the initiatory process is the same throughout the ancient world. I have cited the Mithras myth only to show how the Heracles myth lives throughout antiquity and how the Greek spiritual life in the Dionysus myth represents the higher development of the Heracles myth, representing the higher as opposed to the lower. [This is illustrated by the parallelism of the Dionysus process with that of the others. It is also shown in Angelus Silesius that the Initiate is not something indifferent in the world process, but something significant.

The Greek spiritual world also created an equivalent for the "above" and "below". What went on in Dionysus was referred to as the "spiritual process", the "above"; what went on in man was referred to as the "below". For the purpose of mediating between the two, an image was created, the figure of Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He takes care of errands, love letters and so on, but also has a deep esoteric meaning. He presents himself as the mediator of the Dionysian and the Heraclean. He is the son of Zeus and a mortal, Zeus with a daughter of Atlas, Maja, who lives in the Arcadian caves. Through the mediation, the connection of Maja with Zeus, the mediation between the "upper" and "lower" arises. Hermes is the symbol for the actual human spiritual power, which represents the mediation between the "above" and the "below".

The whole myth of Hermes is proof that the human striving for knowledge is simultaneously a matter of earthly and spiritual nature. This dual striving for knowledge is expressed in Hermes. He is the "clever one, the 'cunning one'. Even as a child he raids Apollo's herd of cattle and drags away a number of cattle. His cunning as a child is already so great that the pursuer cannot even follow their trail. He leads them in such a way that the cattle go the other way. The pursuer is thus misled. Apollo [does] solve the mystery with the help of Zeus.

Hermes has succeeded in forming a lyre from a tortoise shell. Here you can see how the power of the spirit leads through man from the "lower" to the "upper". He gives this turtle-shell lyre to Apollo for the herd of cattle.

There we see how a separation occurs: on the one hand, we have the actual pursuit of knowledge. - Music and the arts have passed to the other messenger of the gods; Apollo is also a messenger of the gods. Hermes and Apollo are two messengers of the gods. In Hermes we have the sense of truth and in Apollo the sense of beauty. Here again we have the gift of imagination as a connection between the lower and the higher. Thus Hermes and Apollo appear to us as mediators of the lower and the higher. They are the two forces that connect the Dionysian with the Heraclean. They present to us separately that which was present to us as a unified process on the original level.

This is how the later mystery teachings developed. These are the later myths that could only arise from those that contained truth, beauty and goodness in an undivided form. When the festivals that were celebrated in the mystery temples contained everything as if in one trunk, "Hermes and "Apollo" could not exist. But when the artistic striving arose, as in the tragedies of Aeschylus, and the striving for truth in Socrates and Plato, these two branches of the original trunk appeared. On the one hand, we have the pursuit of knowledge, which originated with Socrates and Plato, and on the other, art, which strangely enough has never - not even to this day - been connected with the pursuit of truth in the consciousness of the majority of humanity.

It was only at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the realization dawned that these two tribes belong together, that neither of them can exist without the other and that real deepening is only possible when these two tribes reunite. For a large part of human consciousness, this unification cannot be described as achievable. But where we have encountered something significant in this respect, it can be found in Goethe. How deeply Goethe looked into these things can be seen from the content of the following words: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceed according to the eternal laws according to which nature itself has proceeded."

There dawned upon [him] a ray of that [primal ray] from which Greek spiritual life developed. And the result was many a thing that has come to us as a shining point.

Answer to the question:

[Question:] What is the relationship between the emergence of Plato's mystical philosophy on the one hand and the emergence of tragedy on the other?

[Answer:] The origin of tragedy has been sought in the origin of tragedy in Greek life. In Wagner's camp, it is clear that in late Greek times there was still an idea of what the mere shadow of the mysteries, tragedy, was all about. We can see this from Aristotle's description of tragedy and epic. What he writes about it has been incredibly misunderstood. A myriad of books have been written with conjectures about what he might have meant by "purification through fear and pity". Through catharsis we are purified from fear and pity. One cannot know what catharsis represents if one does not consider it on the basis of the wisdom of the Mysteries, the Mystery Being. The passions were calmed by soothing music. Only then did the players appear. This is the first stage of the initiation process. Tragedy presents this process to us exoterically. It is the shadowed great catharsis within the Greek mysteries. If one reads Aristotle's poetry, the "Poetics", with this presupposition, then one can also understand what Aristotle was able to say. Without this background, it is completely worthless.

In this way, you really understand that art has grown out of immense depths. It is not something eternal; it presents itself as something temporal alongside the pursuit of truth. Art presents itself to us as something against which the convincing power of truth has dwindled in human consciousness. Therefore, it is not even felt that art basically also wants to strive for truth. This awareness has been lost. It has been deprived of the core of truth.

The other tree appears to us in Platonic philosophy, in Philonic philosophy as a new striving for truth. In Platonic philosophy we have before us a striving to advance towards knowledge by the one-sided path of striving for truth. It is quite natural that Plato arrived at the doctrine of ideas: For Plato, the world process was, on the one hand, emergence from chaos, and on the other, emergence from ideas. The world process consists of the continuous interpenetration of the spiritual with the material, of ideas with chaos.

The demiurgos, the world soul, arises as the first product. It is the first matter into which the breath of the spirit has penetrated. Plato depicts this in the form of a cross. And connected with this form is the entire world of ideas of the Logoi, as the Platonic world of ideas must be called. Thus it presents itself as the pursuit of pure truth and then again in the "Timaeus" as truth itself. This truth is presented to us under the new image, under the new symbol "of the Logos stretched on the world cross. We have the Logos in connection with the world cross.

You will now see that it was already in the original Platonic mystic that in the form in which Christianity later developed - after it had passed through a Greek spiritual consciousness - [...] it had to deepen from mere myth to true mysticism. After all, the Logos crucified on the world cross is found in Greek.

The last time we met I told you that we need to use allegory if we are to put things clearly in occultism.¹¹¹ The world we have around us has only been like this for a relatively short period of time. Our forebears lived under utterly different conditions in Atlantean and Lemurian times. Today people cannot have any idea of this. However, if we want to understand today’s world rightly, we must rise to the concepts and ideas... [gap in notes]. Speech and language is not very old; it only developed in Atlantean times. Our Lemurian forebears did not have speech, they had a kind of singing, producing sounds with great magical powers. They might perhaps sound unarticulated to people today, but went beyond anything we can find in the highest animals today as far as beauty and melodiousness were concerned. These sounds could make flowers grow faster, for instance, or set dead objects in motion. We cannot compare them with our ordinary speech today. We are therefore unable to speak in our language of something which is among the most sublime things.

In the occult schools people therefore always used an allegorical language and alphabet. Those allegorical signs are regular formulas which one must first learn to understand. One formula, for example, is the book of ten pages. What is this book of ten pages?

The book of ten pages is something very real. Its content is great, and the formulas only appear to be simple. It is something very real for the occult student, but it is read in a different way from other books, where the human being, with his ordinary understanding, must create a word from letters and a sentence from words. The occult investigator thinks differently. His thinking grasps wholes, getting a complete overview of major complexes; it is empirical living experience, a vision of higher realities. People develop a common idea on the basis of individual details. The occult investigator gains an intuitive idea all at once from inner experience and does not have to depend on learning many individual details. It is just the way someone being able to have the ‘lion idea’ once they have seen a lion, for instance.

The occult investigator thus also gains the concept of astral and mental spirits in one go, for he sees these things together. There are archetypes for all things of the spirit. Just as a painter may have a particular intuitive image in his head and is able to paint a hundred pictures based on it, so there are archetypal images for all things on the higher planes, and clairvoyants see them. Reading the archetypes of things, in the spiritual ground and origin, is in occult terms called ‘reading in the book of ten pages’. People were able to read in this book of ten pages in every occult school; everyone was able to read in it even at the time when humanity did not yet have the vestment of a physical body.

Let us go back to Lemurian times when the human being vested himself in physical matter. He then lived in ideas that were all images. He did not see these outside but inside himself; he would feel a degree of warmth, or bright colour images arising in his soul as he approached another human being, for instance. It was like a lively dream, in images, but not conscious. Only the teachers and leaders of humanity had a real overview of the things which others only felt surging up and down in a twilit soul. Their vision was not limited, everything lay spread out before them as in a tableau; they only had to turn their attention to it. This is the idea of that all-encompassing oneness which presented itself to the initiate and the occult student. Today we cannot see everything at once because we use our senses as instruments of perception. People would have seen no difference between New York and Berlin at that time, for instance. Anyone who sees things outside his physical body, finds that spatial differences present themselves only through the senses. The whole of modem science consists of individual details which are put together. Anything that happens in the world of the spirit is not discovered bit by bit. Once a particular level of higher insight has been gained, it all lies open before one.

There are ten levels, and they are the ten pages of the book. Let me give you an idea of them.

What does it say on the first page? There is a lot there, but it has to be gained through living experience. Think of a flower. If we planted it this year, we’ll see that it has produced a root, and that stem, branches, leaves and flowers develop and finally the seed which we put in the soil again. We don’t see anything of the plant in the seed, but it is there inside it, contracted into a point. Look at a tulip, how it is contracted to a point and then spreads out again. We see essential tulip nature alternate between tremendous expansion and contraction into point-nature, as if squeezed together to make a nothing. This is something we can see everywhere in the world, in nature and in the human being. A whole solar system will also unfold, go through a sleep state, and then wake up again. In theosophy, we call the two states manvantara = expansion, and pralaya = shrink down to a point. There is no difference for external perception between seed of solar system and of flower; they do not exist in that case. Our present cosmic system will also contract to such a point one day; but the whole of life will be condensed in this, and it will well forth again from it. If we enter in our minds into this manifold life of the cosmos condensed to a point, we have an idea of the divine creative power which creates out of nothing. Anyone wishing to penetrate the secrets of the universe must learn to concentrate his thoughts in a point, not a dead but a living point which is nothing and everything at the same time. It is not easy to enter into this general dormant state of nature which is zero life and at the same time also all life; one must have felt, thought and willed it. One must have thought this through before one is able to read the remaining pages.

Reading the first page is to grasp this oneness of time, space and energy and immerse oneself in it. A truly wonderful description is given in a verse in the Dzyan book.¹¹²

The second page shows us the duality everywhere in the world. You find this wherever you go in the natural world—light and shade, positive and negative, male and female, left and right, straight and not straight, good and evil. Duality is deeply rooted in the nature of all evolution, and anyone who wishes to understand nature must be very clear in his mind about this duality. We only come to understand the world when we see the duality in our own lives. The occult student must make it an obligation for himself to learn to think in such dualities. He should never think of only the one, but always the two together. If he thinks of his relationship to the divine principle, for instance: ‘a divine I lives in me’, this is only one thing, and a second thing belongs to it: ‘and I live in the divine I.’ Both are true. The occult student must say to himself: ‘The human being is a sensual nature but he will be a spiritual entity; I was a spiritual entity once and had to become a sensual one.’

We can only perceive all truth if we make it an inner obligation never to think of just one but always of two. People who learn to think in such dualities are thinking in the right, objective way.

This is reading the second page in the book of ten pages. You will find this duality presented many times in the mythology of ancient Germanic gods and also in Gnostic works.¹¹³ Some crude ideas have ... [gap in notes], seeing above all the duality between the male and female principle and ascribing everything to it. In reality, however, the male and female principle is just a special case of a much higher duality. To make this special case the explanation for everything is to blindfold yourself, to shut out the spiritual reality and cling to the lowest aspect.

The third page presents the triad. Threefold ideas may be found anywhere. The human being is threefold, consisting of body, soul and spirit. Gnostics speak of Father, Word and Spirit. In Egyptian culture we have the three deities Osiris, Isis and Horus. The triad holds an important secret. Anyone who gets in the habit of translating duality into the triad gains something that leads to understanding the whole world. To think the world through in its threefold nature is to penetrate it with wisdom.

Fourth page. Pythagorean square. I perceive the human being as fourfold, consisting of body, soul and spirit, with the fourth principle, self-awareness, dwelling within them. Pythagoras therefore said ... [gap in notes]. Human nature which is at a lower level develops higher nature out of itself. This is the secret of the four evolving from the three. We find this fourfold nature in all entities. To the all-encompassing eye of the great initiate who surveys all periods of time, all entities are alike. The human being is a fourfold entity living on the physical plane. The lion does not live on the physical plane with its fourfold nature; here it has only its threefold nature—physical body, ether body and astral body; its I, as fourth principle, lives in the world of the spirit.

Higher nature only appears as sensual nature on a lower level. When human beings will be able to govern their physical bodies in every fibre, they will be atman; when they govern the ether body they will be budhi; when they govern the astral body, manas. That is fourfold nature: the three principles of lower nature which will one day be transformed into higher nature. Four-foldness is to be found in all entities existing in this world. To the eye of the great initiate who surveys all periods of time, all entities are alike, only different to [gap in notes]. How does a lion differ from a human being? To the human eye, a lion is lower than a human being, and this is because human beings have limited vision. They live on the physical plane today, whereas the lion has left its spirit in the mental and its soul in the astral sphere.

Plants and minerals also have fourfold nature. The plant has only its physical body and ether body on the physical plane. Plants and minerals have the other parts of their fourfold nature in the world of the spirit. But human beings, animals, plant and minerals all have fourfold nature. The student of occultism must always live this inwardly if he wants to read the fourth page. Fifth page.

On reading the fifth page, everything becomes manifest which the human being projects into the world like a shadow image. This is more than just four-foldness. He begins to venerate. It is called ‘idolatry’. The human being is able to think and form ideas. When he begins to reflect on things, he ascribes divine causes to them. Myths arise in which the human being relates the supersensible to the sensible. The world of myth and legend presents ancient cultures in many different ways. The whole process lies open before the initiate, and the moment comes when he begins to perceive the thread which runs through all myths.

The horse, for instance. What is its meaning? It is an entity which has remained behind on a particular level, whilst the physical human being has gone beyond this in his evolution. There was, however, a moment in Hyperborean times when the human being had first of all to develop the potential for intelligence. Potentials evolve a long time in advance. I have told you that all higher development has a price, and this is that something else remains behind. If one wants to rise, another has to go down. At that time, when the human being developed the potential for intelligence, this was only possible because human nature eliminated something which later developed the horse nature. The horse evolved in Atlantean times, and human beings instinctively knew that their evolution was connected with the horse. Later this instinct became a myth. The Atlanteans had instinctive awareness of their intelligence being related to the horse, and the horse was therefore venerated as a symbol of intelligence during the first post-Atlantean period. Intelligence had to evolve in the early post-Atlantean periods. In Revelation, horses appear therefore when the seven seals have been removed. Ulysses invented a wooden horse.

Three things are needed if we want to understand myths. Firstly the myth must be taken literally, secondly it must be taken in an allegorical sense—which happens in religions—and thirdly we have to take them literally again in a higher sense. When this marvellous connection presents itself to the intuitive eye it is called ‘reading the fifth page’.

Sixth page. This contains the secrets of what human beings perceive to be the supersensible and which they seek. The ideals human beings create out of their own nature appear on this sixth page, for instance the great ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood. On this sixth page, human nature comes together with something which does not yet exist, something human beings must struggle to gain—going beyond themselves in their activity and active will. ‘I love someone who asks the impossible.’ One learns to look to future states of humanity, to see the seeds of the future in the present. An initiate can read the sixth page the way John described the future states of humanity in Revelation.

Seventh page. The student comes to understand the secret and significance of the figure seven. Things evolve in seven stages because the three, on which the seven is based, is repeated, and they themselves are the seventh. The human being must learn to say to himself: ‘I am threefold, from this three a higher three must arise; that is the six.’ Starting from the three, he returns to a higher three, which is the six. He himself is the seventh. To understand this process is to read the seventh page.

We will speak of the eighth, ninth and tenth pages the next time.¹¹⁴ The book of ten pages is an allegory, summing up in a few words what would otherwise need many words to describe. The principle of comprehensive life in abbreviation. Paracelsus said that a physician must read the whole of nature, he must pass nature’s examination, finding the word from the individual letters and not gain his wisdom only from books.¹¹⁵

In our time, the spiritual principle had to move into the background; this had to be so that the great conquests of the physical plane would be possible, and perfection could be achieved in controlling the world perceived through the senses. Now the time approaches when humanity needs to go more deeply into the spiritual again. At present human beings are rushing towards a stage on the physical plane that could not be borne if spiritual life did not develop again. An image of how necessary it is for humanity to deepen their spirituality: You know the tremendous advances made for example in the theory of electricity. A tremendous power lives in these energies, and this means there is a possibility that humanity will abuse them. Humanity will master terrible powers which will be put into effect on the physical plane, and this in the not too far distant future.¹¹⁶ They will be able, for instance, to cause detonations, explosions by remote control, with no one able to determine the originator. Humanity will have power. Woe, however, if they have not reached a high moral level and use those terrible powers for other than only good purposes! The masters who guide humanity foresaw that this time would come. It is the mission of theosophical teaching to prepare hearts and minds for what is coming, to warn them, and to show them the way and the goal.

• 111. Lecture of 27 March 1905 on symbols reflecting original wisdom.
• 112. Verse I, in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.
• 113. See G. R. S. Mead, note 81.
• 114Rudolf Steiner never spoke of the 8th, 9th and 10th pages as he then went on a lecture tour and had to give a public lecture in Hamburg the following Monday. Below is Saint-Martin’s description of the book of ten pages.
  ‘These unutterable benefits were connected with the possession and understanding of a most precious book, one of the gifts humanity had received as part of existence. Although this book had only ten pages, it held all insights and all knowledge of what has been, what is and what will be, and human beings were able at that time to read in all ten pages of the book at once, taking it all in with just one look.
  In his case, the book was still there for him, but he had lost the ability to read it easily, and could no longer get to know all its pages at once, but only one after the other. Yet he will never be wholly restored to his rights until he has studied them all; for although each of these ten pages contains specific knowledge belonging to that page only, they are nevertheless interrelated in such a way that it is impossible to have one of them perfectly in mind unless one has learned to know them all; and although I said that human beings could no longer read them except one after the other, each of their steps would lack certainty unless they had gone through them all in one, above all the fourth, which is the point of unification for them all.
  This is a truth to which people have paid little heed, and yet it would be infinitely necessary for them to take them to heart and understand them; for they are all born with the book in their hand; and since the study and understanding of this book is the mission they must fulfil, we can judge how important it is for them not to take a wrong step with this.
  However, they have been utterly remiss in this point; you find hardly any who may have noticed the essential connection between the ten pages of the book, so that they are inseparable in all ways. Some have stopped half-way, others on the third page, others on the first; hence atheists, materialists and deists have come forth; some had an inkling of the connection, but they did not understand the important distinction which had to be made between each of these pages, taking them to be all the same and of one kind, being pages of the one book.
  What has been the consequence of this? It is this. Those who limited themselves to the one part of the book beyond which they did not have the courage to go, nevertheless maintained that they spoke according to the book, thinking to themselves that they understood it; and led astray by this, they considered themselves infallible in their doctrine, doing everything possible to make the world believe this. But these isolated truths, cut off from all nourishment, soon wilted in the hands of those who had thus isolated them, and nothing remained for these ignorant people but a vain spectre of knowledge, something they could not pretend was something solid or the truth unless they resorted to deceit.
  This is indeed the source of all the errors we will have to examine in this treatise, and all the errors we have already touched on concerning the two opposite principles, the natural world, the laws of bodily entities, the different abilities of human beings, and the principles and origin of their religion and worship.
  It will also be apparent to which part of the book the errors mainly relate; however, before we come to this, let us first consider the idea we must have to this incomparable book in its fullness, and to this end refer fully to the different kinds of knowledge and the different qualities of which each of its pages holds the knowledge.
  The first had to do with the general principle, or the centre, from which all central points flow without cease.
  The second with the occasional cause of the universe; of the dual bodily law on which it is based; with the law which is understood in two ways and functions in time; with the dual nature of the human being; and altogether with everything made up and evolved from two actions.
  The third with the foundation of the body; with all the results and productions of all kinds; and here we have the number of the immaterial spirits that do not think.
  The fourth with everything which is active; with the principle of all languages, both in time and outside time; with religion and worship; and here we have the number of the immaterial spirits that do think.
  The fifth with idolatry and decay.
  The sixth with the laws of generation and development in the temporal world, and with the natural division of the circle by the radius.
  The seventh with the cause of the winds and with ebb and flood; with the geographical measure of man; with his true insight, and with the source spring of his intelligent or sensual productions.
  The eighth with the temporal number of the element which is the only support, the only strength and the only hope of man, that is with the real, physical entity that has two names and four numbers, in so far as it is both active and intelligent, and extends its action over the four worlds. It was also concerned with justice, and the whole of legislative power; which encompasses the rights of princes and the authority of generals and judges.
  The ninth with the evolution of the physical human being in the woman’s womb, and with the resolution of the general and specific triangle.
  The tenth finally was the way and the complement of the nine that went before. It was without doubt the most essential and really the page without which none of those that went before would be known; for if you arrange all ten in circumference, in their numerical order, you find the most relationship between it and the first, from which all flows; and if you want to judge its importance, you must know that the originator of things is invincible exactly because of this page, for it is a barricade of wagons around him which no entity can cross.
  Since this work therefore contains all knowledge which the human being may seek and the laws set for him, it is evident that he will never be able to gain any insight, nor ever fulfil his true mission unless he draws on this source; we also know now the hand which must guide him there, and that, if he is not able to walks the steps to this fruitful source by himself, he may nevertheless be certain to get there if he forgets his will and lets the will of the active and intelligent cause take effect, the cause which alone must act for him.’
• 115. See the lecture given in Berlin on 26 April 1906 [in German] in GA 54.
• 116. See also the lectures given in Berlin on 9, 16 and 23 December 1904, in The Temple Legend (note 22).