The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In today's additional consideration of the discussions that I was able to give here in Stuttgart this time, I will deal with adding a few things to what has already been said, in order to round it off, so to speak.

To begin with, it will be best if I pick up from where I left off in yesterday's public lecture. There we saw how the human soul, in its threefold nature, has relationships with the bodily and the spiritual. And we emphasized in particular that the feeling element of the soul has relationships with the body towards the respiratory life, that, so to speak, what is breathing in the body, and in a comprehensive sense, with all its ramifications and ramifications, is the tool for the emotional life. On the other hand, we have been able to show that the life of feeling has a special relationship to everything that is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world. But what is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world is also, at the same time, everything that is contained in the world to which we belong with that part of our being that passes through birth and death, the world that we live through between death and a new birth, the world in which we naturally also live between birth and death. This world is hidden by sense perception and ordinary thinking, that is, by the life of the body. So that what corresponds to breathing and feeling actually points us to the great, all-encompassing world into which we ascend when we pass through the gate of death, the world to which we belong when we no longer use the tool of our bodily life. The tool of our bodily life, so to speak, fetters us to earthly existence. From various lectures given over many years and recorded in the cycles, you know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it is not tied to earthly life, but rises into the cosmos to live in the spiritual worlds of that cosmos, in that which can be called the spiritual world. Is it not to be expected that precisely the emotional life, which corresponds bodily to breathing, spiritually to the inspired world, the emotional life with the breathing life, is in a much, much more comprehensive relationship to the cosmos, to the great world, to the macrocosm than our narrowly limited perception and imagination? What do we perceive in the end? We perceive a very small part of the world; a small part of the world plays into our physical existence between birth and death through our eyes and ears. Even if we are people who enjoy looking around and perceiving everything through our senses and then processing it in our imaginations, it is still a small part of the world that plays into our existence.

But what happens when we turn from the life of the nerves, to which the life of thinking belongs, to the life of breathing, to which the life of feeling belongs? A concept that is capable of elevating our feelings can be given to us by what can approach our soul in the following way: You all know that the sun rises at a certain point in spring. At the beginning of spring, on March 21, the sun rises in the morning at a certain point. But this point is not the same at all times, you know that. In ancient times, the sun rose at the beginning of spring in the constellation of Taurus, then in the constellation of Aries; the vernal point thus moves on and has now entered the constellation of Pisces. If you turn to what I mean now, you are therefore looking at the progression of the vernal point through the zodiac. The vernal point itself moves on in the zodiac. When a point in a circle moves on, it must of course arrive at the same point again after a certain time. Now, ordinary astronomy is familiar with this progression of the vernal point and its return to the same point in the zodiac. That is to say, if in a particular year of the past the vernal point was in Aries, the next year it will be a little further along, and so on, and then it will have moved out into Pisces and so on, and after a certain time it will be back in Aries again. The time it takes the vernal point to move through the entire zodiac is approximately 25,900 years, about 26,000 years. This number of 26,000 years expresses a measure of the outer cosmos: the measure by which the vernal point progresses. In this number, we have, so to speak, the means by which the course of the sun is measured in the cosmos. We could say, approximately. If we hold on to this number, we can add another consideration, which we now want to make.

A person breathes in and out, taking a certain number of breaths in one minute. We do not take the same number of breaths at every age between birth and death, but there is a certain average number of breaths per minute that a man of average strength can take. That is eighteen breaths in one minute. Now let's calculate how many breaths a person takes in the course of a twenty-four-hour day. First, we have to multiply the number of breaths taken in one minute by sixty, which gives us one thousand and eighty. Then we multiply that by twenty-four, which gives us the number of breaths a person takes in one day, including night and day: 25,920 breaths. It is remarkable that if we count the breaths of a person over the course of a twenty-four hour day, we get the same number as when we calculate the number of years that result from the advance of the sun in the great cosmos. The number of years that the equinox advances in fits and starts corresponds to the number of times that a person breathes in one day. The same number! Just think how wonderfully true that biblical saying is: that the wisdom of the world has ordered everything according to measure and number. — A number that is inscribed in the cosmos is reflected in our twenty-four-hour breathing. We can therefore also take this number into consideration, and we will find that human breathing is related to the great world in the way that was revealed yesterday by spiritual science.

But now, in a sense, we are again looking at something that is also a breathing, because breathing is nothing more than a special case of the general world rhythm. The essential thing in what was meant by breathing yesterday is the rhythmic movement, the rhythm. Let us look at something that is quite similar to breathing, another rhythmic movement that we know from our spiritual scientific considerations. When we fall asleep, our ego and our astral body leave our physical body and ether body; when we wake up again, our ego and our astral body enter our physical body and ether body. I have often compared the peculiar behavior of the ego and the astral body, this going out and coming in into the physical and ether bodies, with breathing out and breathing in. Just as we breathe in and out the air in an eighteenth of a minute, so, in the course of twenty-four hours, we breathe in our ego and our astral body, as it were, by waking up, by falling asleep; by waking up again, we breathe them in again, and by falling asleep again, we breathe them out. It is only a more comprehensive breathing out and breathing in of our ego and astral body in the course of the twenty-four hours of an ordinary astronomical day. How very remarkable, something is breathing! Let us first disregard what is breathing. There is a definite rhythm, which represents a kind of slow breathing, with each breath lasting twenty-four hours. Now, you know that the Bible speaks of the patriarchal age, of seventy, seventy-one years. Of course, this does not mean that this is something different from the average age. Some people die very young, some live to be a hundred, even over a hundred years old, but the patriarchal age is meant to be something average. So that when we mean something average in terms of human age, we can speak of seventy to one hundred and one years. Let's work out how many days that is. If we calculate that, we would find out how many such great breaths we take in an earthly life, where we exhale and inhale the ego and the astral body over the course of twenty-four hours. Let's calculate that: we take about three hundred and sixty-five such breaths in a year, as many as there are days in a year. So in seventy years it is seventy times as much: that would be 25,550. But let us assume that we are calculating for seventy-one years, and then we come a little closer: that makes 25,915. So a person only needs to live a little over seventy-one years to reach 25,920 such breaths. This means that if a person lives to be a little over seventy-one years old, he has breathed his I and his astral body in and out 25,920 times; that is, as often as a person breathes in and out during the day. Think about it: the same number again!

So you see that we can regard human life as a day, and the individual day that we live through as a breath: then our seventy-one to seventy-two year life is given by the number that is also the number of the advance of the vernal point, which is the number of breaths in one day. Our life is one great day, and the great Being at whose center we can imagine the Earth breathes out and in the I and astral body as often as we go out and in with our single breath. So our single life on Earth would be one day, one day of something. What is it a day of? If you multiply seventy-one by three hundred and sixty-five, you naturally get the year for the day of seventy-one years. If you count seventy-one years as one day and ask: What is one year of this day, it is three hundred and sixty-five times as much. But that is 25,920 years. That means, if we count our single life on earth with its 25,920 breaths, which are waking and sleeping, as one day, count a human life as one day, and see what year corresponds to this one human life with its 25,920 breaths: it is the orbit of the vernal point, 25,920 years! We get a wonderful numerical rhythm.

That is why I said: we get an idea that must be uplifting for our feelings, because we can feel that we are placed in the macrocosm through measure and number. Numbers reveal to us that which is true for us in the realization that what belongs to breathing, and therefore to the emotional life, is the inspiring world, the great world to which we belong not only between birth and death, but also in the time between death and a new birth and in repeated earthly lives. We are, as it were, in the bosom of the rhythm of our entire solar system, breathing in our individual breathing movements the great macrocosmic rhythm of our entire solar system. This is a thought that places us with certainty in the midst of the great life of our solar universe. In the course of time, people will have to make many more similar observations, and then they will be convinced that in this way they will again come to spirit-filled perceptions about the relationship between man and the universe. We need spirit-filled perceptions for our age and for the following ages in the sense that they are stimuli for our inner life, as was explained here the day before yesterday. In ancient times, it was the case that man's enlightenment came, so to speak, from outside. Today, this has been lost through the nature of the declining ages of humanity. We are now in an age in which, if humanity is not to descend into decadence, a development of the human soul from within must begin in an energetic way. And only he understands what our time needs who, as a necessity of earthly development, understands that spiritual life must take hold of the innermost part of the human soul from the fifth post-Atlantic period in which we live, into the time to which we are to develop further. What spiritual science says about this is not said out of some arbitrary idea or out of an agitative sentiment, but it is said out of the realization of the necessity of human development.

Now today we are once again looking at this human development from a slightly different point of view. Let us go back to the first post-Atlantic age, that is, the age immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe. The day before yesterday, after having done so from a different point of view on several occasions, we emphasized how, in this first post-Atlantean age, man was still related to that series of beings that we call archai or spirits of personality in the hierarchies. Spiritual life was still revealed in these ancient times of humanity because the age of life in those days was such that we can compare it to the present age between the fifty-sixth and forty-eighth year, as I explained the day before yesterday. Man had, so to speak, instruction from spiritual beings. How did these spiritual beings come to man? In those days, man did not look at nature in the same way as he does today. For man today, nature is a kind of mechanical order. Man today regards abstract, almost mathematical laws of nature as his ideal, an abstract order. Take the images that are spread out around you when you go out into nature. Compare what is out there with what is written in botanical and zoological textbooks about plants and animals. Compare these distorted, abstract ideas with life, and you can say: What is written in these books of botany and zoology is what is revealed to the human spirit today. Such botany and zoology, of which today's humanity is so tremendously proud, did not exist in that age. If we compare what modern botany, zoology and biology have to say about nature with the knowledge of nature that arose from the ancient way of knowing, we arrive at a different view. There was no botany or zoology of that kind in those days, but there was something else, something that is still very difficult for modern humanity to understand. It came from nature itself, and I would like to call what came out of nature: the light-filled, formed word. Just as we see nature today through our senses and minds, they did not see it that way, but nature sent them figures of light, and these figures of light also sounded, said something, expressed themselves about what they are. And every person could experience this atavistic clairvoyance in certain states of consciousness, whereby the light-filled, formed word came to meet him from nature; one could also say words, because a wealth of such figures came, speaking out of nature. The human being knew: You too belong to this world from which these words full of light come forth. You too belong there. But now you are here in nature, surrounded by minerals, plants and animals. You are in nature because you have an outer physical body; through this you belong to this nature. But nature lets the light-filled word sprout forth: you belong to it in your soul's nature just as your physical body belongs to the outer mineral, plant, and animal world. You were in this world of the light-filled, light-shaped word before your birth or conception, and you will be in it after your death. You will live in it again.

In the first post-Atlantean period, one could still see and feel an echo of the world in which one lives between death and a new birth by observing nature in certain states of consciousness. In the second post-Atlantean period, things were already somewhat different. The word was lost for these atavistic states. The figures no longer spoke themselves, but they were still there, light-filled figures were still there, only they had become mute. That which lay outwardly before the senses was felt as the darkness in this light-filled formation within, and one's own body was felt as a piece of the darkness. So that one could say: light and darkness! One's own body is ruled by darkness. By coming out of the light and going into darkness, he enters into earthly life through birth or conception; by going through the gate of death, he passes through the dark world back into the light. In the world there is a struggle between light and darkness, between Ormuzd and Ahriman. Thus Zarathustra, who was the teacher of this second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, spoke to his disciples. One does not understand what Zarathustrism means with its Ormuzd and Ahriman teachings if one does not relate it to the way people viewed the world at that time.

The situation had changed again in the third post-Atlantic period. If you look at the outward appearance, the light-filled figures had gradually disappeared in the third post-Atlantic period. But people still had the power to put themselves into an intermediate state between sleeping and waking, just as we put ourselves to sleep today. They only had to make a little effort. When sleeping, one does not need to make an effort, but in this different state, one had to make some effort. But if one made an effort, one could conjure up such a world of light around oneself, which now came from within and was similar to that which used to come from nature, from outside. So what was the actual progression from the second post-Atlantean cultural period to the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian period? What was the transition like? Well, in the second, in the Persian cultural period, people still saw the figures of light when they looked outwards and could say to themselves: Before my soul went through conception, it belonged to this world of light figures. In the third cultural period, this world of light no longer shone from the outside in, but the human being could, as it were, squeeze it out of himself; then he had conjured up out of his soul and in front of his soul what was there in the spiritual world before his birth or conception and what will be there in the spiritual world after his death. So that we can say: the third post-Atlantean period had the world of light as a soul experience. People had the world of light as a soul experience, so to a certain extent man had been pushed back from the external world more to his inner being. It was no longer the natural way for man to look at the outer world and see the world of light, that is, to see the spiritual world around him. Therefore, it had become necessary during this time to initiate a small circle of people in the manner of the Mysteries, so that they would be able to see the outer world of light again and bear witness to the fact that what was brought up from the depths of the soul was truly the same as that which lived in the spiritual realm.

Now came the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin one. In this fourth period, no more light came up when man put himself in a special state, as in the third period. The light no longer came, nor did that come up from the depths of the human being that would have been an echo of the soul's life before conception and after death. But there was still a certainty that the human being's inner being is filled with soul. This certainty came up. One still sensed something of what one had seen earlier when one inwardly brought the soul to see. One no longer saw the light, but one still felt the warmth of the light. That was the case in the Greco-Latin period. There we must say: the world of light was no longer experienced inwardly as a soul experience, but the soul itself was experienced as a soul experience.

But naturally this had to become weaker and weaker in the course of time. And how is the whole relationship expressed at all? It was expressed in the following way. We will have to look particularly at the Greeks if we want to understand the matter: the Greeks had, like the average person today, the consciousness of their body. But through what I have described, they also had the consciousness: the soul pervades the body. They felt the soul as invigorating, the body as it lives through. This feeling, which the Greeks still had, has been lost. The fact that history says nothing about the fact that this feeling has been lost today is only because we live in the age of materialism. No one really understands Homer, no one understands Sophocles or Aeschylus, if they do not read them with the feeling that the Greeks had a different spiritual experience than that of today's people. If one were to read Aeschylus with this feeling, one would provide different translations than those that are provided today and sometimes admired, and which, especially in the most intimate things, truly do not resemble Aeschylus. But the fact that it was so had a very definite consequence for the Greeks, namely that they felt the invigorating soul element in their bodies during the time between birth and death, and thus came to another realization: that body and soul actually belong together very intimately. Never in the development of humanity has this realization been as strong as in the Greek era. For in earlier epochs, which preceded the time of the Greeks, people actually always had the feeling that the soul belongs to the world of light, the world of the word, the world of the Logos, in which the human being lives before birth and after death. Now, in the materialistic age, it is the case that the human being no longer feels the soul at all. In Greek times, and to a lesser extent in Roman times, there was a sense of the intimate connection between body and soul. The Greeks regarded the body as the external form for the soul. Growth and decay of the body appeared to the Greeks as an expression of the growth and decay of the soul. The Greek loved the body as much as he loved the soul. This feeling, as it existed in the Greek, was not present in the same way in the past – as I have just explained – and is not present again today. But the consequence of this was the feeling that is so deeply expressed in the words put into the mouth of Achilles: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows.” The Greeks had to pay for the beautiful harmony they felt between body and soul with the fact that, if they were not members of the mysteries, any notion of how the soul fares in the spiritual world after death had completely disappeared. Now, the remarkable thing is that the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was a great thinker but not initiated into the mysteries, spoke in a grandiose way about the experience of the soul after death, as one could speak in those days if one was able to envision the intimate harmony between body and soul in the way of the Greek age.

And when in the Middle Ages, in the so-called scholastic philosophy, Aristotle was revived, the scholastics said: In philosophy, one must think about the soul as Aristotle thought. If one wants to know more about it, it can only come from faith. With mere human research, one cannot go further than Aristotle. — How far did Aristotle go, he who is so very much the philosophical expression of the Greek way of looking at body and soul? He really did arrive at what can be so beautifully expressed in the words of the recently deceased masterly Aristotle scholar Franz Brentano, who says: If a person has lost a limb, he can no longer make use of that limb; he is, as it were, no longer a whole person. If he has lost two limbs, he is even less of a whole person. If he has now lost his entire body – so says Aristotle and with him Franz Brentano – and is still a soul after death, which Aristotle does not deny, then he is in a state of incompleteness compared to the state in which he is between birth and death. He is not a complete human being. And that is indeed the true doctrine of immortality of Aristotle, the greatest thinker of the Greek world, that man is only here between birth and death a complete, a perfect human being. If he goes through the gate of death, he is only a piece of man; he is indeed immortal, but at the expense of no longer being a whole human being. This is indeed the price that Hellenism had to pay for its beauty and harmony, that it came to the age of man – you know, compared to the human age – where one could indeed sense the soul from within, but where one could not yet see the life of the soul in the spiritual world, where one had to say of the soul: it is no longer a complete human being after death. Only those who were initiated into the mysteries, that is, those who were endowed with powers of knowledge that went beyond the normal, were revealed what the soul experiences between death and a new birth. That is the great difference between Plato and Aristotle, that Plato was initiated into the mysteries and Aristotle was not. Therefore, Plato must be understood in a completely different sense than Aristotle, who came to the “Chimborasso of thought” but could not penetrate to the secrets of the spiritual world.

That is why those who had power in this age strove for something different from what one can achieve in normal human life. Who were the men who had the power, who were able to develop this power? Certainly, there was a great, significant world of initiation, spread by the mysteries here and there, filling the then cultural world; but these mysteries gave people that which Plato said lifted people above the mud of transience. Those who had power in this fourth post-Atlantean period were primarily searching for something in the soul that would enable them to participate in the spiritual world. According to the general karma of humanity, one normally had to wait until one was introduced to the mysteries in the sense of the initiation principle of that time. In Greece this was common practice. The Roman Caesars did not need that. The Roman Caesars, who gradually rose to dominate the world at that time, were able to use their power to be initiated into the mysteries.

And so we see that from the time of Augustus onwards, the Roman Caesars sought initiation simply through their power. They forced one priesthood or another to initiate them into the mysteries. So that in this fourth period a peculiar phenomenon can be observed: on the one hand we have the mystery principle, the mystery knowledge that was still there, but which gradually disappeared, gradually declined I have often described why this had to happen: because the Mystery of Golgotha took its place. On the other hand, the priests were forced to reveal their secrets to the Roman Caesars. Augustus was the first emperor to be initiated in the fourth post-Atlantic period; but his successors were also such initiates. They differed in their nature from the other initiates, who were initiated into the mysteries on the basis of moral qualities, namely, of moral development. The Roman Caesars were initiated on the basis of their power, in that they were able to force the priesthood to reveal their secrets to them. And so we see that even a successor of Augustus like Caligula was an initiate. But that is why a person like Caligula was familiar with the secrets of the spiritual universe. He was familiar with the fact that the impulses of this spiritual universe are revived in the soul, that the human ego is divine within the divine. That which was a sacred truth of humility for the initiated priests became a symbol of external world power for the Caesars. For what did a Caligula know? The others stared at the mythological figures of the gods that had come down to them from ancient times; they worshiped them. An initiate like Caligula knew what these gods meant. Above all, he knew that man belongs to the same world as his innermost being. From experience, Caligula knew that he belonged to the same world as those beings who have their images in these gods: Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, Apollo, Zeus. Caligula knew the secret of how he could commune with the gods of the lunar world in a sleep-like state. And it is not mere myth, but absolutely true, when it is said of Caligula that he was said to have associated in his sleep – but it is meant in another state of consciousness – with Luna, the moon goddess, and to have drawn from it nourishment for his sense of power. The world lives in me – he said to himself – for I am in it. By looking up at the gods, he saw himself as a god among gods. And the initiated Roman emperors meant it when they said that. The initiated priest knew how to enter the dwelling of the gods, and so the Roman Caesar forced himself into communion with the gods. “My brother Jupiter,” ‘My brother Zeus’: these were terms that Caligula in particular used again and again. And it was Caligula who once asked a tragedian which of them was greater, Jupiter or he, Caligula. And when the tragedian refused to answer that Caligula was greater than Jupiter, he had him flogged. These are not myths, these are historical facts. Hence the processions in which Caligula appeared before the people as Bacchus with 'thyrsus and ephhebe wreath', because he was aware that he could transform himself into those figures he knew as images of the gods. As Hercules he appeared with the club and lion skin, as Mercury with the Hermes wand, as Apollo with the corona and surrounded by choirs. Thus he appeared in order to instill in his people the awareness that he belonged to the gods and not to men. Such was the situation in those times, in which, one might say, the less favorable image of what was great in the Greek world was reflected in the Roman world. Of course, no one saw this better than a Caligula or other uninitiated emperors such as Commodus and others. Caligula once heard that a court case had taken place in which a judge sentenced a defendant to death. And when the matter was reported to him, since it was a special case, he said: “The judge could just as well have been sentenced to death, because he is worth just as much as the other.” This was how he viewed the moral state of his time. In Romanism, the opposite of Greek culture really appears. We no longer have any conception of the inner constitution of the Romans of the time of Caesar. But we must form a conception of it, for it is one of the roots from which our new, our fifth cultural epoch developed in the course of time.

Nero, too, was such an initiate, an initiated emperor. And precisely because of that, Nero was able to see something very special. Those who were initiated into the mysteries at that time knew that evolution had gone downhill to a certain point. It must go up again, but it must also become more spiritualized. That is really what is meant by the “Parousia,” by the new age, of which Christ Jesus also speaks.

If you compare what is alive in all these ancient cultural epochs up to the Greeks with later times, you will find that in these ancient cultural epochs, the soul-spiritual still reveals itself in a certain way through the physical. Then it ceases; it no longer reveals itself, and must now be sought through other means. If man wants to seek the spiritual and soul through what he can see with his eyes and hear with his ears, he can no longer find it. The Kingdoms of Heaven were once revealed through the bodies, but now they must arise in the spirit. The Kingdoms of Heaven must come near. This is the prophecy of John the Baptist. This is also what Christ Jesus meant by the Parousia. Only, in a certain sense, the theologians still stand to this day on the peculiar point of view that they believe that Christ meant by the Parousia that the earth must physically change. Blavatsky also criticizes the saying of Christ Jesus about the Parousia, the coming of the Kingdoms of Heaven, saying: “It was foretold that the Kingdoms of Heaven would come upon the Earth, but the grain has not improved; the grapes are no richer than before; no Heavens have come upon the Earth. All the people who speak in this way do not understand what is meant. What Christ Jesus meant, what John meant, had already come to pass: the Kingdom of Heaven had already descended upon the earth, in that the Christ had embodied Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. The event is to be understood as a spiritual one.

But an initiate like Nero, who knew this also from the mysteries, rebelled against it. He actually came to the delusion that he said to himself: Well, the world is in decline, so it shall perish! — And that is actually the psychological reason why Nero had Rome set on fire — which he really did — because he at least wanted to have the spectacle of the firebrand coming from there to burn the whole world. For he no longer thought much of this world. He did not want to admit the renewal that came through the mystery of Golgotha. He was a madman, but he was also a genius. Through his power, he had forced his initiation, so all his ideas were great, greater than those of others who did not have this prerequisite. In a sense, therefore, Nero was the first psychoanalyst, but a generous one, not a psychoanalyst like those who are called Freud or otherwise. For Nero idolized the physical, in that he, like the psychoanalyst, wanted to bring up what was spiritual and mental from the subconscious. Today's psychoanalyst says: What is down there in the soul? Disappointments, all kinds of wasted lives and so on, and then he says: the animalistic, basic sludge of the soul is down there, there is not much beauty down there. When you hear a psychoanalyst today, it is as if a person is describing a field that has just been fertilized and then cultivated with the seeds for the near future, but the person only sees the fertilizer, the manure. So the psychoanalyst sees only what is really dung in the soul, comparatively speaking, of course. He does not see the eternal in the soul, that which goes from life to life. This is why psychoanalysis is so dangerous: although it goes down to the subconscious, instead of the soul-spiritual essence of the soul, it sees the animalistic mud, as if one does not see the germinating seed but only the dung. Nero was a great psychoanalyst when he said: There is absolutely nothing in man but the animalistic primeval mud; everything else is mere appearance. It used to be different when people were still close to the divine, but now man consists only of this animalistic primeval mud; there is not even the slightest part that is chaste; everything in man is dissolute – so said Nero. One can see from this, one feels especially with those who had forced their way into initiation in this way, the materialization of the world. In these circles, the old, spiritual principle of initiation was generally translated into the material. When Commodus, who had made himself not only an initiate but also an initiator, wanted to give a symbolic blow to someone whom he himself had to initiate, he killed him on the spot. Instead of delivering him to spiritual death, that is to say, to raising him, he killed him! Thus Commodus, the initiator. This is an historical fact.

What occurred during this fourth period is the Mystery of Golgotha. And since the spiritual can no longer come from the external and material, the spiritual must be conquered again. The ascent within has received an impulse through the Mystery of Golgotha. But we live in the fifth period, where this conquest has not yet flourished, where precisely those forces that emerged so grotesquely in Roman times are still strong in people and fight against the impulse of ascent that was brought by the Mystery of Golgotha. And so it is understandable that in this fifth post-Atlantic period, the age of materialism in the way of thinking and feeling has mainly emerged.

The Mystery of Golgotha has already brought an impulse so that the great corruption of the Romans has somewhat diminished, but man has not yet brought it about that the spiritual-soul in his soul also naturally shines forth again. For this, further impulses are needed; for this, a more intensive, a more thorough becoming acquainted with the Christ Impulse is needed. This must become more and more familiar. And so, in the fifth cultural period, the normal human being no longer encounters the soul when they experience themselves. The sense of the soul, the inner experience of the soul, has disappeared for the normal human being. The human being experiences themselves in the experience of the body; they experience themselves as a body, as a natural body.

Self-awareness of the body! And that is why the soul has disappeared from science in particular, and is still disappearing more and more. This soul must be conquered again from within. The fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, which began around 1413-1415, is only just beginning. Humanity will have to develop further in it in such a way that the spiritual is truly conquered more and more within. But this is initially making itself felt in the realm of the soul through a peculiar phenomenon: the phenomenon that something in man himself is appearing materially that was not so material before: namely, thinking itself. Such thinking, as we have it in the fifth period, would have been impossible for the Greeks, and even more so for the Egyptians, Chaldeans or the ancient Persians. Behind the Greeks, imaginative ideas still existed to a certain extent, and even more so in older times; and anyone who can really read Aristotle will notice effective imaginations even in the dry Aristotle, because thinking was still more consciously taking place in the etheric body. Now thinking is completely drawn into the physical body, has become completely brain thinking, and then it takes on the abstract character of which our time is so proud. Thinking that becomes completely abstract is thinking that is really bound to matter, to the matter of the brain. And this thinking, it shows itself precisely in the most epoch-making impulses, which in turn must be deepened, otherwise thinking becomes more and more materialistic and materialistic. And as thinking becomes more and more materialistic, life must also become more and more materialistic. Fundamental ideas - that is the characteristic of our present fifth epoch, which should work as impulses, they only work as abstract ideas.

And there was a time when abstraction as a principle of life had reached its zenith. Everything is necessary – understand me correctly – I do not want to criticize, I am not speaking from the point of view of sympathy and antipathy, I am characterizing as one does scientifically. I do not want to criticize – nobody should think that – the fact that there was an epoch in which abstract world ideas celebrated their greatest triumph. That epoch was when three ideas were expressed in the most extreme abstraction: liberty, equality, fraternity. They were expressed in the most extreme abstraction. This is not said from a conservative or reactionary point of view, but to characterize the development of humanity. At the end of the 18th century, everything calls for freedom, equality, fraternity, not from the soul, but from the thinking brain. And this developed in the 19th century in such a way that we still feel it reverberating everywhere like a habit today. In the course of the nineteenth century, people became terribly accustomed to the abstraction of thinking and are content in the abstractness of thinking because it makes them feel so clever. They believe that in thinking they have truth and feel no need to immerse their thinking in reality. This must be learned again, to immerse oneself in reality; otherwise it remains with the declamation of abstract ideas that have no value for life.

This is the great disease of our time, the declaiming of abstract ideas that have no value for life. If someone says today that a time must come when the world offers the path to success to the hardworking, when the hardworking are given the right place, well, what could be better than this idea! Is it not a wonderful ideal: a free path for the brave! — Sometimes, in today's materialistic times, when one expresses such an ideal, one feels as if one were carrying the whole future in one's breast. But what use is such an abstract ideal if it means that one considers one's son-in-law or one's nephew to be the most capable? What matters is not that we recognize, express and proclaim an abstract ideal, but that we are able to immerse our souls in reality, to see through reality in its essence, to recognize, penetrate, experience and work with reality. Expressing beautiful ideas and enjoying expressing beautiful ideas will increasingly prove harmful. What must enter into our soul is love for reality, knowledge, and adaptation to reality. But this can only come about when people learn to recognize the whole of reality, for the reality of the senses is only the outer shell of reality. If someone who sees a horseshoe-shaped magnet says, “That's the best way to shoe a horse's hoof,” does he have the whole of reality? No, only when he recognizes that there is magnetism in the horseshoe does he have the whole reality. But just as the person who knows nothing else to do with a magnet but to shoe a horse acts, so too is the person who wants to found an external natural science or political science, under the assumption that everything is only the visible world and can be grasped with concepts borrowed from the visible world. This is precisely the extreme abstraction, the harmfulness of abstract ideals. And one does not recognize this harmfulness because the ideals are true, because they are also good, but they are ineffective. They only serve human epistemological egoism, which feels lust in living in such ideals. But no world is ruled by that. At best, it governs a world as it has become in the first half of the 20th century.

One must surrender oneself to such feelings if one wants to understand our time more deeply. The soul life must come alive in the human being, which has emerged so gradually, as I have described, from our environment, from our observed environment. The ideas must become concrete and alive again. Brotherhood is a beautiful idea, but as an abstraction it means nothing. If, firstly, we know that the human soul lives in the body, through the body, on the physical plane here, that is, in a bodily-spiritual, spiritual-bodily way, and secondly, if we know that the human being is not only spiritual-bodily, but is truly a soul, and thirdly, if we that the soul is filled with spirits, and so, if one knows the soul as threefold and the human being as threefold, one knows the human being in his composition of body, soul and spirit: then one has begun to give concrete form to the abstract three ideas of brotherhood, freedom and equality. To say of man in general, of this abstract man, that he should live in brotherhood, freedom and equality, is nothing but a torrent of words. What is necessary is to acquire a living realization of the fact that man, inasmuch as he lives in the body in the physical world, needs a social order that is based on the foundation of real brotherhood, but that brotherhood can only be understood if one regards man as a body. That is the beginning of the right idea of brotherhood. Brotherhood has only one meaning if one knows that man is a trinity and that brotherhood is applicable to the bodily. Freedom: To understand this, one must know that man has a soul, because bodies can never become free. There is no institution by which bodies can become free; the development of mankind can only be such that souls become free. Freedom, when expressed as a general human idea, is an abstraction. Free souls in relation to fraternally living bodies is a concrete idea. People are equal in spirit. An old folk saying was even aware of this: after death, everyone is equal. It was based on the spirit. By living as spirits, people are equal here on earth, but speaking of equality only makes sense when speaking of this third part of the human being, the spirit. It must come to life, my dear friends, so that one can say: that which walks around here on earth in any order lives in body, soul and spirit. Evolution must progress in such a way that bodies live in brotherhood, souls in freedom, and spirits in equality. There is not enough time today to develop this further, but you will already notice today the very significant difference between abstract ideas of equality, freedom and fraternity and the concrete ideas permeated by knowledge, which are then applied to the right thing.

But what is the reason for the fact that one has become so abstract? Well, what has been lost to humanity is that which, relatively late, was still a mystery truth: that the human being consists of body, soul and spirit. Among the Greeks, it was still common to regard the human being as body, soul and spirit. With the first Church Fathers it was still a matter of course. That which lay in the decline of human development, which in turn needs an ascent from the Christ principle, was dogmatically established by the Council of Constantinople in the year 869 by abolishing the spirit. Forgive me for expressing it so grotesquely. It is only on the surface that what emerged in human consciousness through the circumstances I have described has been established. Since that time, it was no longer permissible to teach in theology that man consists of body, soul and spirit, but rather that man consists only of body and soul, as philosophy professors still teach today. And if some good Wundt or other professor of philosophy in our own time has no inkling that man is a trinity, but always talks of body and soul, then he does not know that he is only following the decrees of the Council of Constantinople of the year 869. He is completely unaware that his teaching is only a reproduction of this council decision. Yes, this “presupposition-free” science, if one knows its developmental history more precisely, sometimes has very strange presuppositions. The presupposition-free science of our present age in philosophy is in fact inconceivable without the Council of Constantinople, only the gentlemen do not know it.

What has been obscured, namely that man consists of body, soul and spirit, must be regained through spiritual science. Therefore, the first thing I tried to do, with full awareness, was to apply it symptomatically to our Central European, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, namely, to the structure of the human being into body, soul and spirit, as described in the book “Theosophy”. The whole book is built upon this. This had to be presented to humanity radically again and again; humanity had to be made aware of the threefold nature of man through evolution.

You see how, when you are grounded in spiritual science, everything is justified down to the last detail, but also how spiritual science is suited to giving us such ideas, such impulses of feeling and will, that can make us true co-workers in the right progress of the newer development of humanity. And I always wish that I could evoke a feeling that spiritual science must not remain a theory, must not remain a doctrine, that it must not remain something that is cultivated as a science, but that it can become a truly living, inner soul life. This seems to me much more important than the mere enrichment with concepts, which is of course also necessary, because if something is to be enlivened, it must first be grasped. We must have the concepts within us, but the concepts must not remain dead, they must come to life. Then spiritual science works in such a way that when it is grasped in reality, it stimulates the whole person. But then it is also necessary that the whole person tries to understand it perceptively and willfully. But when the whole person understands this spiritual science perceptively and willfully, then he can live accordingly in it. But then he must never run short of love for true knowledge and for humanity as it continues to develop. In our time, this love is still a tender little plant. And it is understandable, even if it is infinitely sad, when in the field of the spiritual-scientific movement, as we understand it, personal interests, sometimes not of a noble kind, still disfigure the tender little plant of love for the knowledge demanded by the times, celebrates its orgies precisely among those who do not approach spiritual science out of a pure longing for knowledge, who approach it in such a way that, if their vanity is not satisfied, their apparent love immediately turns into hatred. For only real love can conquer hatred; apparent love is even a producer of hatred.

If we feel this correctly, then we will also be able to cope with the phenomena to which I have already referred twice, with those phenomena that are looming so sadly over our Anthroposophical Society, in which we see that the strong haters arise precisely from the circles of the Anthroposophical Society. We will not overcome these things as long as we apply a principle of our materialistic time, as we are so fond of doing today: “I want to be left in peace!” — when we close ourselves off to things or do not want to call things by their right name. If numerous defamatory writings are now appearing, nothing is achieved by taking these defamatory writings so seriously that one refutes the individual sentences. For gentlemen such as those who are now writing do not care whether they put this or that as a proposition. To such a gentleman, for example, who had to be rebuffed when he submitted a work that could not be published by us, who felt offended in his ambition as a result, who, while he then became an enemy, to whom one must say: What you write is simply nonsense, you know better yourself; you write all this because your writing has been rejected. That is the truth. If one understands how to serve spiritual science, it is not important to refute all these things in detail as inventions and fabrications, but rather to show in its true light the person who has belonged to the spiritual-scientific movement in appearance and then afterwards does such things as many are now beginning to do, and more will be done.

Or there is someone — as I told you a few days ago — who wanted to become a great painter, but tried it by begging to be allowed to learn; but when every effort was made to help him, he wanted to know everything better. He thought you didn't become a great painter by learning, but by declaring that you were a genius! If you then have the misfortune not to become one, and, despite being given teachers, you can't learn to paint, but only make a mess of things, and if others are not able to recognize the mess as great paintings, then you come and say that it is the fault of the exercises. You cure such a person in the right way by telling the truth. It must not appear as if spiritual science were endangered and things were not being corrected.

Things will fulfill themselves karmically. The right thing should also be done in many other details in our circles, as it has been done on important points of principle. Consider that since 1911 all ties with Mrs. Besant's Theosophical Society have been cut, and that England's war against Germany did not begin until 1914. This is something where it may be said: the Anthroposophical Society has acted prophetically. There is a lot of defamation in general – this is of course not directed against the English people, but against the defamers who today abuse the nationality principle in this way – but defamation against all better judgment, as Mrs. Besant defames our Anthroposophical Society and me, is a rarity. And after we first made the book “The Great Initiates” popular in Germany and staged Schure's plays, we now have to experience being attacked by Schure in the most impossible way. These are things that, to a certain extent, take place in the wide open spaces. But enemies are also gradually emerging in the narrow spaces.

The anthroposophist must acquire a little foresight and a little will to see what is happening and what will come. One acquires this foresight by taking seriously the motto of our Anthroposophical Society, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, even if it is correctly placed as a motto at the beginning. The one who is able to grasp this deeply enough, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, will take the right position.

With this, my dear friends, I must bid you farewell for this time. I hope that our meeting this time can be the starting point for good cooperation in the spirit, even if we cannot be together physically. Let us try to think, feel and will in the spirit of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then we will work together properly.

Dearly beloved! In many respects it is already extraordinarily difficult today to penetrate with a certain understanding into [the life and work of] figures of the past who are not too far behind us. But the difficulties become especially great when we are to penetrate into the depths of the soul and the workings of such human individuals who, in the very, very distant past – one might say in prehistoric times – placed themselves with their work in culture, in the development of humanity. And such a figure, such an individuality should arise before our spiritual gaze today in the often mentioned figure of the old Persian founder of religion and world view, Zarathustra, or, as it is also said, Zoroaster.

I said that it is relatively difficult for us today to really objectively understand thinking and feeling that is not so far behind us. Nowadays, one has the strong feeling that when one believes to have understood something and regards one's knowledge as the truth, it is in a sense the only true truth and that everything else is wrong, basically nonsense. The fact that truth and human knowledge itself are subject to development, that each epoch is forced to look at the riddles of the world in its own way and solve them to a certain degree, that each epoch must speak a different language, so to speak, about these riddles of the world – this is not well understood today. We can only hope that the descendants of today's human race will not behave towards it as we so easily behave towards our ancestors.

Who would not decree today from his strict, let us say scientific, throne that a mind like Paracelsus', who lived and worked so little time ago, was full of the prejudices of an era long past, with all kinds of judgments that are, of course, long outdated today. It does not occur to one, though it would be natural, that what we today consider to be seemingly irrevocable in relation to our science, will certainly be just as corrected and to a certain extent transformed when so much time has passed after us as between Paracelsus and us, as the Paracelsian views have been transformed by ours. We can only hope that future generations will be fairer than we are, that they will know that truth is in a state of development and that basically every way of expressing the truth is only a form of expression for what we would like to call original truth or original wisdom. In short, what we humans call truth is in a constant state of change, and therefore we must see the human pursuit of truth only as developing. If we imbibe this view and ask ourselves: How did our ancestors think? What about them can make a great impression on our souls today? — then we will also be able to look back without prejudice to minds as far back as the great, the shining Zarathustra.

There has never been any real agreement as to the age in which Zarathustra lived. There are even scholars today who claim that Zarathustra probably only lived six centuries before our era; other scholars point to a period of 1000 years before our era, and still others go back even further. What spiritual science has to say through its research will be mentioned here only briefly, because for us it is less a matter of establishing mere historical facts than of illuminating the soul of this great individuality. Therefore, it should only be briefly mentioned that spiritual science must go back at least five millennia before our era - even into the sixth millennium - if it wants to meet this luminous figure of Zarathustra with a backward glance.

Now, although one may argue about the age in which Zarathustra lived - one should not really argue about it, because the course of human cultural development speaks too clearly, because what is associated with the name Zarathustra and what has emerged from Zarathustra as a cultural movement has exerted the deepest, most significant, and even extraordinarily long-lasting influence on human progress. If we would fathom the soul of Zarathustra, if we would recognize the mission that this unique individuality has fulfilled in the progress of humanity, then we must attempt to understand Zarathustra's task on a larger scale. we must realize that we can only come close to what he was if we assign him a task of the very first order in the development of humanity since the great Atlantic catastrophe, as seen by spiritual science. Much is said about this catastrophe; the religious records, the religious traditions of all the peoples of the earth report about it - the Christian tradition speaks of it as the great flood.

We cannot now go into the details of the time when this catastrophe swept across our earth; but even the external, geological science is today increasingly being driven to recognize that such a great catastrophe once took place and that through this catastrophe the face of the earth was thoroughly changed. If spiritual science is forced by its research to recognize that where the Atlantic Ocean is today was once dry land, where people lived at a time when most of the present-day continents of Asia, Africa and Europe were still under water, it may be said that today, natural science is no longer far from admitting that the fauna and flora in the western regions of Europe and the eastern regions of America do indeed indicate that there was once land between the west of Europe and the east of America that became the bottom of the sea due to subsidence during that great catastrophe. And that our present continents have repeatedly risen and sunk has already become common truth even in geological circles.

For spiritual science, such great catastrophes, such changes in the face of the earth, are connected with significant processes within the development of mankind. Today I can only hint at what I have already explained in more detail to the listeners of my lectures on earlier occasions. I can only hint that the human race that lived on the Atlantic continent in that epoch had a very different state of soul from that of today's people, who are the descendants of those ancient Atlanteans. If we want to give a brief indication of what kind of culture was present in that primeval time of humanity, we can, if we do not misuse the word, call this culture a “clairvoyant culture”. However, the word “clairvoyant” must not be misused in the sense in which it is very, very often misused today. What does this tell us - “clairvoyant culture”?

Yes, if you want to speak from the point of view of spiritual science, then you have to honestly believe in human development, then you have to honestly be convinced of this human development, then you can't just be fascinated by the development that the popular Darwinists talk about today. We look back at an earlier humanity that had a very different kind of knowledge and soul capacity. We can briefly form an idea of this ancient state of mind by remembering what remains, as an inherited residue from that time, in the dream consciousness, where man sees echoes of the day's life in dream images. These dream images no longer have any reality for us today; they are echoes of what was experienced during the day – some pictorial representations of this or that that occurred. Dream consciousness, however, is like an old inheritance, a faded remnant of a prehistoric human consciousness, when people did not see and recognize their environment as directly as today's people, who only recognize everything with their senses and with the mind, which is tied to the brain. The people of that time saw what explained and solved the riddles for them in what, from today's point of view, were abnormal soul states. They saw with a kind of image consciousness, but these images were not phantasms like our dream images. Man did not speculate about the riddles of the world in terms of concepts and ideas, but experienced states – abnormal states by today's standards – in which images appeared that were not dream images, but which depicted the very foundations of existence.

And this humanity, which had such an awareness, also had guides and teachers who had led this awareness to a very special height and who - clairvoyantly - looked very deeply into the spiritual background of existence. I can only mention this today in the introduction. These teachers of old, who had clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world, related to humanity much as those who today, in their normal consciousness, come to ingenious insights, ideas and concepts. Just as these relate to humanity as a whole, so too did the great seers of old, because they had a concept of how to look into the spiritual world, because they had natural clairvoyance. The development of humanity begins with the fact that humanity really did come from spiritual origins. Today, we are no longer very aware of this; this awareness [of the spiritual origin of human beings] has actually been lost, although in the first centuries of the Christian era there was still a clear awareness of an ancient, inherited wisdom that had come from the forefathers of humanity and of which nothing else remained but traditions taken from that old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world. Plato, for example, speaks of the people of the Kronos realm, saying that they could see into the spiritual world and that they were the keepers of the original world wisdom. Plato was aware that much of that wisdom had simply been handed down from generation to generation. And Plato, the philosopher who had come a long way in what he was able to explore himself, was nevertheless aware that this primal wisdom could penetrate deeper into the very foundations of the world than anything he himself could give his students through the normal powers of human beings. We also find the greatest respect for the primal wisdom of the world in other thinkers. We must seek this primeval wisdom in its original form before the Atlantean catastrophe, which has been characterized above.

The development of humanity consists in the fact that in this post-Atlantean epoch, in which we live today, man has gradually, so to speak, seen this primeval wisdom dwindle, that he has lost the old, elementary because he should develop the sense to judge things by external, sensual perceptions and to penetrate the riddles as far as possible with the mind bound to the brain. Today's short-sighted people will naturally believe that today's knowledge is the sum of all wisdom, that there cannot be any other wisdom. But anyone who takes a broad view of human development knows that even knowledge bound to the intellect, which humanity had to gain in its present era (the previous one was the era of childhood), is only a transitory epoch, only a point of passage in human development.

They know that people will rise again to a future clairvoyance and that they will take with them what they have gained through the knowledge of the physical world. A necessary transition point is this kind of knowledge. And so we can say: What we today, as normal human beings, call our knowledge, and even more so, what we have under the influence of this knowledge in terms of moral and aesthetic ideals, in terms of moral judgments about the world, all this has only just been acquired. Everything that we have recognized as the actual characteristics of today's human being is based on the old clairvoyance that human beings lost for a while. But this present-day realization is so characteristic of our present epoch that we must say: The post-Atlantean time, the time in which the earth has the present physiognomy, is called to develop just this thinking and feeling and to close the door, so to speak, to all clairvoyance for the normal human condition, so that man is forced to fix his gaze on the sensual reality in order to also go through this epoch in his development of knowledge.

There were now two cultural currents in this post-Atlantic epoch, which really had the mission to lead humanity out of the wisdom of the forefathers into the wisdom of understanding and reason, as I have just characterized it. There were two currents. And strangely enough, the originators of these two currents are quite close to each other geographically and in terms of world history. We have to look for the one main current of the post-Atlantic period in the settlements that formed after the Atlantic catastrophe in India, the venerable cultural land. We have to look for the other main current to the north of it, in the area that was fertilized by the great, luminous spirit of Zarathustra. And although these two currents of human spiritual development are so close, although to the outside eye they look so similar that sometimes the words for this or that in the older languages of the two cultural currents are the same, we must, when we look deeper into things, see in these two currents of post-Atlantic cultures quite opposite ways of founding our present culture.

You see, when the spiritual researcher looks back to that ancient culture of time-honored India, which can only be seen with the spiritual eyes – because what is contained in the great, wonderful Vedas is only a late echo of the primeval world wisdom of the Indians . We are then led back to something that preceded all Vedic culture and that is of such sublimity that the human being, who has a sense for the transformation and development of the human spiritual life, stands with the deepest reverence before this ancient-holy culture of India. And there is some truth in what is usually taken only as legend: that this ancient Indian culture goes back to a series of great sages, to the seven Rishis of ancient India. If we examine this ancient Indian culture from a spiritual scientific point of view, how does it appear to us?

We cannot describe it more precisely than to say that it appears to us as a kind of ancient heritage that could be passed down from that wisdom that existed as the common wisdom of humanity before the Atlantic catastrophe. We must only imagine the right way of inheriting an ancient store of world wisdom. Just as it was still present in Atlantean humanity as primeval world wisdom, so this wisdom, based on clairvoyance, could not, of course, be directly transmitted to a humanity whose soul capacities were quite differently constituted. The ancient wisdom was adopted into Indian culture in the same way as a tradition that has to be adapted to a new faculty of the soul. Basically, only a few people were still able to develop something in their souls that could point to the realm that had been seen in ancient times through living clairvoyance behind the world of the senses. Whoever wanted to rise in living inwardness to the vision that was once normal for humanity in a certain way had to become what is called an initiate or an initiate. He had to develop certain abilities of the soul that are not normally present; he had to undergo certain exercises, a certain training of the soul, in order to develop an ability that otherwise slumbers in his soul. Then he was able to learn through his own observation what the great teachers of the Indians, the seven Rishis, had to proclaim. What was he led to then? He was led back, as it were, to an earlier state of development; he was able to see something that humanity in the normal state could no longer see, but which it had been able to see earlier.

This is essentially how we understand this ancient, pre-Vedic Indian culture, which then resonates in the Vedas. This is also the source of the underlying mood in which something is spread out over this ancient and sacred Indian culture, like a wistful look back that says: There was a time when people could see into the spiritual world, when the origin of people was revealed. That time is gone. The senses now have only the ability to see the external, physical reality. And only by developing a special ability can one transport oneself back to those ancient times; then one can again see the spiritual, which is hidden by the human being's sensory capacity for knowledge, by the intellect, which is bound to the brain. Thus did he feel who, in the world-view of the ancient Indian, lived with the realization that man is cut off from the contemplation of his spiritual origin, and he has a longing for this origin. Thus the ancient Indian believed that truth was only to be found beyond what humanity could see at that time. He believed that above and beyond all that humanity could see at that time, the great illusion spread out, “maha aja”, the great deception, “maja”, the great non-being. And behind that lay true being, which people had once seen.

A worldview, such as that of the pre-Vedic Indian, cannot be understood by merely looking at what appears to be dogmas, but only by putting oneself in the shoes of people felt at that time, how they felt cast out of their spiritual home into a world of maya, of illusion, and how they longed to return from this external, sensual-physical reality to that ancient, original world. And it is wonderfully moving, in the highest sense, to place oneself in this ancient Indian soul with its pessimism, which is not as frivolous as it sometimes appears today, but which is a heroic pessimism that does not complain about this great deception, but says: the sense world is simply not reality; reality is found by turning away from this sense world and going back into earlier epochs in one's soul.

What do we actually find when we go back to what the people of old in India were able to see? I have already pointed out that all spiritual science leads us to the fact that the soul that now lives in us between birth and death has often lived on earth and will live many more times. Spiritual science therefore leads us to the realization of repeated lives on earth, so that when we look back into past times, we do not find other souls, so to speak, but our own souls, that is, ourselves in earlier embodiments. And the soul of such an old Indian man could say to himself: As I now live between birth and death, I am bound to the illusion. I am now more entangled in the body of the senses than I was in earlier lives, for example when the primeval wisdom was experienced by myself. Basically, such a member of the ancient Indian culture looked back into his own earlier soul states. His soul used to live in such a way that it could look into the spiritual world itself. It descended into the world of the senses and can no longer see into the spiritual world. If a member of the ancient Indian faith wanted to regain this earlier vision, he basically ascended to his own earlier embodiment; he penetrated completely into himself. This is roughly how we can characterize the mood of ancient India.

In a sense, the exact opposite was offered by the cultural impact that occurred in the north of ancient India, in Bactria, Media, Persia, through Zarathustra. If we can call the ancient Indian wisdom a kind of heritage from ancient times, which also awakened a yearning for that ancient time, we must say that what was given to people through Zarathustra, what was imprinted on human development through him, points just as strongly to the future as the ancient Indian teaching points to primeval wisdom. There is a remarkable contrast between the teachings of Zarathustra and the ancient Indian teachings. If we allow not dogmas, not teachings, on which it actually matters little in human development, but moods, feelings to come before our soul, then we can say: the mood of the ancient Indian world view that has just been characterized is a mood of redemption: out of this body, which can no longer see the truth, into the earlier seeing! That was the mood of the ancient Indian: to be redeemed from a body that is dependent on maya. Therefore, in the best sense of the word, everything that emerged from ancient Indian culture, right up to Buddhism, is a kind of religion of redemption.

In Zarathustra's view, what appears first is not a religion of redemption, a worldview of redemption, but rather a worldview of resurrection, a worldview of awakening. And in this respect, the teaching of the doctrine in the north is the exact opposite of the teaching that arose in the south. Zarathustra was to be the first great leader of humanity to radically point out that it is a necessary point of passage for them to develop the senses for what is spreading before them, and to develop the mind for what is logical thinking, what is reasonable understanding. Only, the great Zarathustra does not stop at the materialistic level of the external sense world. As an initiate, he says in his own way: Certainly, post-Atlantean humanity has the task of sharpening the senses for what presents itself to the eyes, to the ears, to the entire sense-perceiving human being. Post-Atlantean humanity has the task of grasping the phenomena of the sensual world in accordance with reason and intellect, but as we grow together with the sensual world, we must become capable, if we develop certain slumbering powers in our soul, not of stopping at what the senses offer us, but of penetrating through the sensual cover to what lies behind this sensual world.

This is the great contrast between the Indian world-view mood and the Zarathustra world-view mood. The ancient Indian says: If I look at the world that spreads out in color, form and all its sensual qualities, it is not a true world, but Maya. I can only enter the true world by turning away from this external sense world; so I turn away my eyes and ears and the other senses, and I let the mind stand still, insofar as it combines ideas and concepts. I pay no attention to this sensual world if I want to see the truth, but I delve into the human interior, I live myself into that self that was there in previous embodiments; I climb up the ladder of embodiments to acquire the ability to see the truth. In a sense, the basic mood of the ancient Indian was to flee from the world of the senses and to ascend to the truth through strict immersion in one's own inner self, in that which can live in the soul when it disregards its surroundings. It was a mystical immersion in the inner life of the soul, distracted from the outside world, which wants to know nothing of “maha aja”, the great illusion: this is the tendency of ancient India.

Joyful acceptance of the reorganization of our soul-faculties, which shows us the world with all that it can offer to the open eye, what it can offer to all outer human possibilities, and also to the mind bound to the sense world; joyful acceptance of all that spreads out as an outer carpet of the senses before the senses: that was the mood of Zarathustra! If an Indian looked at the plant cover, at animals and clouds and air and mountains and stars, he said to himself: All this is only outer illusion. Dare to look at the one who has exhaled this great Maja, at Brahma, but who can only be found within! And Zarathustra says: Turn your gaze to that which spreads out before your external senses, use the soul capacity that is right for the present age of humanity. But don't stop there; grow together with the sensory world, penetrate it, go through it, and when you go through this sensory world and don't let yourself be held back, then you will find a spiritual world beyond it out there – beyond the stars, beyond the mineral, plant and animal world. Not only when you go into yourselves, no, also when you go out into the world of the senses, then you grow together through your new abilities with a spiritual world.

What expresses the individuality of Zarathustra most beautifully – take it as a comparison for my sake – is when it is said of him: When he was born, the first thing that happened to him as a miracle was that he smiled at the first glance at the world – the Zarathustra smile! One must be able to put oneself in the place of what is said with such a truly magically deep formula for such an individuality. It is suggested that in Zarathustra an individuality is born that looks at the whole carpet of the sensory world, but penetrates it as if clairvoyant and sees the spiritual behind it, and that in the consciousness of man's superiority to that which spreads around him, lets that exultation flow out of itself, for which the smile of Zarathustra is a symbol.

And so we see that in Zarathustrianism there is a completely different mood than in Indianism. Therefore, this Zarathustrianism could point to what the human soul is now to take up, what it is now to unite with itself. The fact that people look out onto the world of sense and normally no longer see in pictures what is not in the world of sense means that they take in something that they will carry over into the future and that will be a new component of the human soul in the future. Through this new component it will experience a resurrection: In the future, the human soul will not only be as it was in the past, but it has taken on this new element that can only be acquired in the sensory world. That is why this deep idea of resurrection lives in the Zarathustra teaching. I cannot today go into this in detail, justifying my views from this or that passage; I will merely characterize them, and everyone can see from the usual communications that what is to be given today as a characteristic of Zarathustrianism is well founded.

Zarathustra said to himself: It is basically not compatible with the right progress of humanity that only old heritage in humanity is praised as the highest. Why should people go back to earlier embodiments and the way they looked at the world then? They should take in what is offered to them as new, they should enrich and expand their world view, give it a greater scope. Thus did Zarathustra say to men: Look into the future, take in the new, look up to that spiritual world which presents itself to you when you sense the world of sense as a transparent covering. That was what he had to say to the world, and in saying it he felt a deep reverence for the spiritual world behind the whole world of sense. He felt that it was like the beginning of a new ascent [into the spiritual world] when we strive to penetrate the sensual world in order to enter the spiritual world, just as the old Indian wanted to enter a spiritual world by descending into his own inner self. He felt that humanity had actually fallen from a higher, spiritual point of view to a lower, physical one, and that it had the added awareness of wanting to longingly return to the old one by holding on to an old, inherited wisdom.

Zarathustra was deeply imbued with the fact that something had been working on the human soul that had led it down and entangled it in the world of the senses. But he was equally clear that this human soul could now be seized by something that would lead it up the path to the spiritual world. That, so to speak, was before Zarathustra's spiritual eyes: the opposition of two powers, one leading humanity down into the world of the senses and the other lifting it up into the spiritual world. This contrast is evident where we read that Zarathustra speaks of the one power that leads man upwards, of Ahura Mazdao, Auramazda, which later became Ormuzd, and opposes this to another power that leads the human soul downwards: Ahriman, Angra Mainyu.

Thus one must first perceive these two powers and how they work: the one leading the human soul down into the sensual world, the other leading it up into the spiritual world. But Zarathustra is completely consistent in the deepest sense, in that he does not accept the external, sensual world in the abstract and say that something spiritual is behind it - as the pantheists say today - but he says: the individual formations of the sensual world differ; one appears in one way and the other in another. One appears as mighty, luminous and effective for the rest of the sensual world, the other as small and insignificant. And everything that appears to our world as a great and mighty power through its external form, Zarathustra sensed, in the sense of the world view also adopted by his people, as a component of the sun - that sun which, every year anew, conjures up the plant world necessary for man, that sun without which there can be no life on earth.

But even with regard to the sun, which he felt to be the most powerful, the most powerful influence on earth, Zarathustra was clear that it too belongs to the external world of the senses, that what external science can fathom about this sun is only the external expression of what lives behind this sun. And he felt it so that he said: Just as plants are magically produced on earth in spring through the power of the sun's rays, so that which lives as the spiritual power behind the sun is that which draws man out of the world of the senses, that which can create the powers for man with which he can penetrate through the world of the senses. Behind the sun, therefore, for Zarathustra lives that mighty spiritual essence which he has just named Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd. But what is it?

We can only form an idea of the thoughts that lived in Zarathustra if we remember that in spiritual science we do not consider the physical body of the person as the only thing, just as the person stands before us, but that we say: this physical body is the outer expression of his spiritual being. And when the eye becomes clairvoyant, it sees this spiritual essence, and we call that which the clairvoyant eye sees as the content of the spirituality, the aura of the human being. We perceive the physical body as the expression of the human aura, the small aura. Now Zarathustra says: Just as man has his aura, as he has his spiritual behind the physical, so is the sun the outer body of a spiritual being, namely the great aura, the Great Ahura - the word always means the same - the solar aura. - There we have Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, in contrast to the small aura of man.

Thus, Zarathustra pointed people to what lives out there in the universe as a mighty spiritual being and has its body in the sun, just as a human being has a body that is permeated by a spiritual-soul being, the small aura. That is [also] Ormuzd, that is what can unleash all the powers of man that go towards the spiritual. For this spirit that lived in Zarathustra, this Ahura Mazdao, this great aura, was a truth, a reality, before the clairvoyant gaze. And he said to his disciples, to those he could initiate more intimately into his secrets, something like the following: Look here, if you seek that which urges and leads man to the good, then you must raise your gaze to that which stands spiritually behind the sun. Man is indeed called upon to ascend ever higher and higher in the course of his development on earth. Ahura Mazdao will help him to do so. But not always, says Zarathustra, will that which is the spirit of the sun be seen only up there behind the body of the sun, but it will become ever greater and greater, will embrace more and more of the earth and will finally expand to the earth. The spirit of the sun will one day become a spirit active on earth.

If we survey the time [of Zarathustra] and the development of humanity, we see that these are in harmony with each other. What Zarathustra saw behind the physical sun was, for his time, only to be found in the sun in outer space; today, however, it has expanded to such an extent that we find it within the earth aura itself. And the event in which Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, descended to earth, we see, if we stand on the ground of true spiritual science, in what took place through the Christ impulse, which played out on earth in the events of Palestine.

From the standpoint of spiritual science, we can understand what Zarathustra once said to his disciples: “I will speak; now come and listen to me, you who long for it from far and near - now I will speak and no longer shall he who leads men to error with evil will through his tongue be able to poison the development of mankind. I will speak of what in the world God has revealed to me, what He Himself reveals to me - He, the Great Ahura. And anyone who does not want to hear my words, as I mean them, will experience bad things when the circles of earth's development will approach their completion. - When Zarathustra spoke of the spirit of the sun, we, who stand on the ground of modern spiritual science, say: He spoke of the same spirit that in his time could only be found in the vastness of the heavens, and today we find it when we study the mystery of the origin of Christianity in its full truth, as it emerged from the Mosaic religion. Having evolved to the Christian era, Ahura Mazdao descended, as it were, from the sun, and the Christians call him Christ. And he who interferes with the development of the world in order to halt the progress of human evolution, which is brought about by the great power of Ahura Mazdao, is Ahriman.

Zarathustra did not see the development of the world and of humanity in such a one-sided way that he could have asked, as many modern people do: Yes, how can I actually believe in an all-wise, great God when there is so much evil in the world? This is generally said today; one does not want to believe in a wisdom that permeates and lives through the world when one has to notice so much evil. Zarathustra does not speak in this way, and he also guides his disciples not to speak in this way. Zarathustra was clear that what comes from Ahriman, what stands as an opponent in all life, and that it must be allowed by the wisdom of the world, so that people who are to undergo an upward development can strengthen themselves through the resistance and gradually also lead the bad to the good. In this way a higher development is attained than if man had been simply comfortably placed in all that is good and had nothing bad to overcome.

Thus, although Ahriman was felt by Zarathustra and by all those who professed him to be the enemy of Ahura Mazdao, he was felt to be a necessary part of the development of the world. If we wish to understand the inner structure of the Zarathustra teaching, we must draw attention to individual things that may indeed cause great offence among today's clever people, who believe that they are so firmly grounded in the most modern world view. But what good does it do to carefully want to conceal the truth over and over again? We must plunge into Zoroastrian clairvoyance and explain in detail the structure of the system of thought which I have just characterized in superficial terms. Here it must be clearly understood that Zarathustra was one of those thinkers who, although they turned their gaze joyfully to the sensual world, nevertheless sought the truth in the spiritual world and, in essence, saw the essence of all world content in the spiritual. Powers such as Ormuzd and Ahriman are spiritual forces; they confront us in the world as spiritual entities.

But how did such high spirits as Zarathustra think about the outer structure of the world in the face of these spiritual powers? Just as Zarathustra looks up at the sun and says, “This is the outer body of a spiritual power,” so he looked up at the starry sky and at everything that the outer, sensual gaze could grasp, and he and his disciples perceived what was spread out in space as writing, as symbols, as metaphors that expressed the weaving and essence of the spiritual powers. This is extraordinarily important. Not in the way that we are accustomed to today with our materialistic sense, did Zarathustra and his students look at the outer world of the stars and see only spheres moving through space, but they saw in this world of the stars the expression of spiritual entities and spiritual processes, and in the arrangement of the stars they saw the symbols for what the spiritual entities behind them were doing. The starry sky was a starry writing to them, expressing to them the deeds of the spiritual world that took place behind it. Neither in the direction of today's materialistic sense nor in that of today's materialistic astrology, which would like to see the cause of the fate of mankind in the stars themselves, while they are only signs - neither in one nor the other direction did Zarathustra's thinking go. For him, what he could see in the starry writing was something like the meaning of a sentence for us, which we put on paper with characters. For him, the stars were cosmic characters. And what mattered to him were the spiritual entities behind them.

Zarathustra saw the highest spiritual entities in Ormuzd and Ahriman. For him, they belonged together, even though one is the enemy of the other. They originated, so to speak, in a single, great spiritual entity. In the sense of the Persian language, this primal being can be called Zaruana Akarana or, as it is often expressed, “eternity shrouded in glory”. It is difficult for today's human sense to penetrate to the heights where the followers of Zarathustra stood and where they grasped what must be grasped if one wants to see Ormuzd and Ahriman in one. The best way to achieve this is to endeavor to gradually arrive at the idea that if I look back in time, further and further back, I come to that which existed in prehistoric times and where the causes of the present lie. I myself also come from that which has developed out of this past current. But in the opposite direction there is a future current, and if one can rise to the point of seeing that the future is something that comes towards us from the other side, that we go towards, then one gradually comes to a true understanding of what Zarathustra sees as the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Imagine a curved line, running forward and backward in such a way that it forms a small circle. If you make the circle larger, the line is less curved; make the circle even larger, and the line approaches more and more a straight line. If you take the diameter of the circle to infinity, then the arc of the circle gradually becomes a straight line that extends to infinity. Thus, we can assume that every straight line, by tracing it backwards and forwards, is a circle of infinite size. And so we can also say: if we go back into the past, we come to a point where the past and the future join together in a circle. This is the eternal current that Zarathustra pointed out – Zaruana Akarana. Past and future have become intertwined in the eternal cycle of the world, and from this the god of the sun, of light, of all that is good - Ormuzd, Ahura Mazdao - and likewise the god, through whose resistance the good forces must develop - Ahriman - both emanate from the snake of eternity: Zaruana Akarana. One must only feel one's way into these conceptions of eternity, then one gets a sense of the mood that prevailed among those who were around Zarathustra, then one feels something of the full magnitude of the feelings that flow from the teaching of Zarathustra, who continues to work in humanity to this day.

And so, for example, Zarathustra said to his disciple: Now you have a mental picture of the closing circle of the world, of one part of the world circle as the higher power of light, Ahura Mazdao, and of the other part as the dark power, Ahriman. What we have just spoken is written in the Star-writing, and in the Star-writing you see this circle, which closes in upon itself as a symbol of Zarana Akarana: the zodiac that closes around the vault of heaven. This is the symbol of the outer circle of the world, and when you stand on the earth and turn your gaze to the zodiac, imagine the sun as the great Ormuzd, passing through this circle. And what the deeds of the circle of light are, that shows itself to you as the realm of creation of Ormuzd, and what lies in the night, what is immersed in darkness for man and stands on the other half of the earth, that is what Ahriman symbolizes. The seven signs of the zodiac in the daytime course of the sun on one side and on the other side the five signs in the nighttime course of the sun: these are the symbols of Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Thus the stars were perceived as writing in the sky for what Ormuzd and Ahriman were. Such entities, which stand behind the sensory world, were imagined to have an effect on human nature, but it was realized that they were not a unified whole, but that there were partial spirits, sub-spirits. And in the individual signs of the zodiac, the symbols for seven or six serving spirits of Ormuzd were now felt. These were sub-spirits, called Amshaspands in the old Persian language. The best translation is the one that Goethe chose in his “Faust” when he said:

But you, the real sons of the gods,
Enjoy the living, rich beauties!

Sons of the gods! Six of them – on the light side of the Zodiac – were connected with Ormuzd, while the other five spirits, opposed by Ahriman, were called Devs. This sounds strange and shows the contrast to Hinduism, to what the Indians worshiped as their highest powers, the Devas. While for Zarathustra the highest spiritual powers are found in the penetration of the sense-covering - these are the Asurian powers that work in the outer world - so for the Indians the highest powers are those that are found by penetrating into the mystical interior of man. The simplest explanation for the fact that ancient India saw the highest in the devas, while the Persian religion, on the other hand, saw something dangerous in them, and that furthermore the Indians saw something in the asuras that they did not want to know anything about, while the Persians revered them, is this: In the Zarathustra sense, one should take leave of that world which relies on the inner alone, which can become seductive for man if he does not want to grasp the outer world of the senses. Therefore, delving into the inner, into the world of the Devas, became somewhat dangerous for the Persians, while for the Indians they were something of the highest.

Thus the five spirits of Ahriman are symbolized by the five dark winter constellations of the zodiac. And so there are twelve spiritual entities: Ormuzd with his servants and Ahriman with his servants. Basically, we have to think of the realms of Ormuzd and Ahriman in such a way that these twelve [spirits] work together in the spiritual world - Zaruana Akarana! How do they work? By communicating to the human being that which, for Zarathustra, is the expression of the goal of the world, by pouring into the human being that which they allow to flow through the universe. Zarathustra felt that man, as a small world, is a confluence of what is spread out as great cosmic forces throughout the universe. Thus he felt. Therefore, it would be only natural to find that Zarathustra did not see what is found today through anatomy, physiology and so on in the dissected human being. The Zarathustra wisdom did not dissect the human being, but there was a clear-sighted insight that showed how the spiritual forces worked into human nature and composed human nature. Zarathustra says: “Through the universe, twelve forces emanate from the twelve spirits of Ormuzd and Ahriman; they compose the human body. Like a seal imprint, the human body expresses in miniature what is spread out in the great world in the Amshaspands, the sons of the gods. In there, it continues to have an effect as currents from outside.

What does the disciple of Zarathustra actually mean by what continues to have an effect in there? What I am about to say is somewhat disturbing for modern science. In its own way, more recent science has rediscovered what flows in as the twelve currents, what makes human beings a being that can strive up into the spiritual world, that can have a brain, an intellect; it has rediscovered it in the twelve main nerves of the head. But that is a nuisance for modern science, almost the height of madness, when one says that these twelve nerves are the crystallized, condensed currents that the twelve Amshaspands, according to Zarathustra, channel into the human organism. And so, in materialistic research, we see a concentrated focus on the human being of what Zarathustra – the luminous, clairvoyant personality – revealed as a spiritual secret. At that time, one saw in spirit what was important. And it is our time's task to see in the material what is, as it were, the condensed spiritual.

Zarathustra continued: Yes, you see, just as today man, through his spirituality, which is bound to the brain, strives up into a higher world, to a higher development, so in earlier times he strove for something else. Just as man is connected with Ahura Mazdao today, he was once bound to lunar development. This is also something that annoys modern science. Nevertheless, it is a spiritual truth. This lunar development expresses itself in a further stage of condensation of spirituality. Lower spirits came into play here. Just as the twelve great Amshaspands worked into man, so before that other spiritual entities had brought about a lower spiritual activity. Today we would say: When a person reflects, it is a higher spiritual activity; when he reflexively chases a mosquito away from his face without thinking, it is a lower activity. We see these lower activities as connected to the nerves, which have their center in the spinal cord. What intruded into the human organization as a lower activity, Zarathustra attributed to an earlier spiritual influx.

He said that the twelve great spirits were opposed by 28 others, whom he called Izeds. These Izeds had an effect on the human body and constituted it. He further said that this implied a certain irregularity in that the lunar government had been replaced by the solar government. In addition to the 28 Izeds, which correspond to the 28 lunar days, there are three more, which are inserted by the [longer] solar cycle - up to three irregularly inserted days. So you can count 28 to 31 Izeds. This brings us close to what newer science has as these Izeds: They are the 28 to 31 nerves in man running to the spinal cord - these are the crystallized izeds. So you see the Zarathustra wisdom crystallized in the human anatomy, so to speak. It would never have occurred to anyone to direct human thinking in such a way that it could have researched and searched in the way it does today if Zarathustra had not provided the impetus for it.

He pointed to higher spiritual powers that radiated into man. And to the extent that these were Amshaspands, they became the twelve brain nerves in the physical organization of man; to the extent that they were Izeds, they became spinal nerves. This is something that seems even more twisted than what I said yesterday about reincarnation. But it is something that people will gradually come to recognize, namely, that humanity started out from a spiritual world view and only then descended into materialism. People will gradually come to see how useful it is to raise our eyes again to those great geniuses who, so to speak, saw it as their mission to give people a spiritual gift that can in turn lead them out of this world of the senses. From what it had previously seen in the spirit, humanity descended to sensual things.

Now, today people are not inclined to find such things anything other than annoying, but only because certain things are easily forgotten. For example, everyone will say: How should we actually imagine the structure of the world after Kepler's laws, other than as a sum of purely mechanical processes? Well, one should just remember that Kepler came to his laws precisely through a spiritual worldview and made the statement: “So I carried the sacred vessels of Egyptian secrets up to the north and translated them into the language of the present.” Those who were truly great cultural mediators knew how to tie in with the time when one could still see into the spiritual world. Thus, in essence, Zarathustra stands before us as the one who, in his spiritual worldview, feels the mission to point out to the human being who has the tool in the physical body for his work in the world, but who still points to it with spiritual means. That is why Zarathustra is so tremendously significant. He is always spoken of in connection with the entire outer life of the people in whom he was incarnated.

It is deeply significant that the legend, told so wonderfully, tells how this people, in whom Zarathustra lived, migrated down from the north. The legend, which is truer than history, tells us the following: This people once lived far to the northwest of the areas they later moved into. Before Zarathustra worked there, it was once able to live in these northwestern lands because the conditions there were favorable. But then strange changes occurred – so the legend goes: Winters came that lasted ten months; the people could no longer stay there, and King Dschemschid led them away [to more southern areas]. He received [from Ahura Mazdao] a golden dagger, which he plunged into the earth at various places. As a result, grain grew in those areas, and the people settled there.

If we translate what this legend tells us into the most sober truth, we have to say: This people, into which Zarathustra was introduced, was dependent as a people on cultivating the earth; it was dependent on tackling the real work of life with its hands. Zarathustra's mission for this people is, to begin with, the dissemination of spiritual wisdom, but at the same time it is a guidance to the immediate sensual reality. Hence their turning away from that world view, which wants to know nothing of work that has to be done in the sensual world and which perceives as Maja that towards which the work of the hands should be directed. No, for those who had Zarathustra as their teacher, the soil was not Maya. It was a reality as it was.

And it was a reality that was to be led higher and higher by extracting its fruits from the soil. By working, one connected with what Ormuzd wanted. Work was service to Ormuzd. And everyone felt the Zarathustra mood in their veins when they worked the soil: “I must not abandon myself to the mood that leads me to long for another world; no, here I will be a servant of Ormuzd. By thrusting the spade into the earth, I work as a servant of Ormuzd. And man has to live here on earth in truth. Therefore, in those who were the followers of Zarathustra, there was also the most sublime and beautiful belief in truth and truthfulness, in moral purity. And that is one of the most beautiful impacts associated with the mission of Zarathustra, that the sense of truth and truthfulness developed because of this connection with the outer world, in which one needs a sense of truth.

And so we also see that among all the things that were seen as something bad, as belonging to Ahriman - deception, lies, slander - the worst vices in the teaching of Zarathustra were seen.

Thus the gaze of Zarathustra and his people was directed towards external reality, but in such a way that the spiritual world was sought behind it. In this spiritual world, man hoped to find his resurrection, his future union with Ahura Mazdao, when he had worked his way through the world of sensuality. The religion of resurrection, the first religion of resurrection, is the teaching of Zarathustra. And so it became a world view that looked with kindness, love and goodwill at what further south was regarded only as Maja. Within the Zarathustra religion, that which instincts are for reality, for working on reality and for connection with reality developed. Therefore, in this religion there was not that tendency to chastise the body so that the spirit could emerge from it as easily as possible, but rather it had that instinct that wants to shape the body so that the senses can become as fine as possible and the thinking as sharp as possible. And that had to develop into instinct. And so one sees a wonderful sum of healthy rules of life developing, from such healthy rules to eating, that later Plato stood in admiration before the Zarathustra religion precisely in this respect.

Yes, how long one appreciated the mission of Zarathustra - until the materialistic time made this impossible - we can see from the fact that it was said that Pythagoras learned geometry from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Chaldeans, other sciences from the Greeks, but that he learned the worship of the gods and the wisdom of nature from the magicians of the Zarathustra religion. So they revered those people in the followers of Zarathustra, who are called the Magi, who understood something about how to see through the world of the senses into the spiritual, who knew that one does not come to the spiritual through mere mystical immersion into one's own inner self, but how to make the outer carpet of the senses transparent. In short, those who said of Pythagoras that he had learned the worship of the gods from Zarathustra saw in the followers of the Zarathustra religion – if I may express it thus – “specialists” with the right view of the spiritual world, with the right worship of the gods. This is how people thought of what Zarathustra gave to humanity. But the time will come when people will look up to Zarathustra in veneration again, and that will be when, through spiritual science, they will gain the possibility of understanding such great spirituality as can be found in Zarathustra.

It is useful and significant to turn our gaze back to the starting points of human cultures. When we do that, then among the luminous figures to whom we look back to see how we actually have become and how our present culture has gradually emerged, there will always be the one who was there, the “Goldstar” - Zoroaster, Zarathustra, because one can with some justification translate this honorific name as “Goldstar”. Gold has always been regarded as a symbol of wisdom, and for the followers of Zarathustra, wisdom was something vividly effective, not an abstract, dead science. It is therefore a tremendous aberration for people to believe that the Amshaspands were abstract ideas for Zarathustra and his followers. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at this cultural movement must realize that living spirits were meant.

Zarathustra's followers sensed that when he spoke of the spirits within himself, for example of “Vahumano”, of the attitude that draws man up to the spiritual world that lies behind the carpet of the world of the senses, the truth of the living spirituality that permeates space lived in him like a seal impression. They understood what Zarathustra had to give to humanity from the source of his soul when they heard him say: “Everything that weaves and lives through the world as a spirit of light, as the power of light and fire, can work in and ignite an inner fire in people. What is spread out in space can gather in a center, so that man feels placed in the macrocosm. And as the disciples of Zarathustra look up to the spirit of the macrocosm, they say: Something in us resounds like an echo of what flows to us as a secret [from the macrocosm]. We feel within us what the power of light - the being clothed in glory - can become in us if we allow to resound within us what flows towards us from all sides. - The students called what they experienced within “Ahuna Vairja”, which later became “the word”, “the logos”. And this was felt like a prayer detaching itself in the soul, humbly flowing back to the secrets of the world - like a living echo that man can send out as a prayer into the universe on all sides like an image of the primal light.

Only when one is able to understand that Zarathustra, the luminous spirit, was able to evoke such sublime feelings in his disciples and through them in a large part of posterity right up to our time, only then does one feel something of the mission of Zarathustra. It cannot be felt if one only points to dogmas and names, but only if one feels the living power of the feelings that ignite in the living interaction between Ahura Mazdao and the space-filling light and the Logos, the holy word that streams out as an echo from the primal light. If one feels this interaction and understands the world-historical mission of Zarathustra, then one looks back in the right way to that being who was embodied in a human body about 5000 years before Christ and who became essential for all humanity.

What Zarathustra was for humanity and what his mission was should be indicated today with a few words. It should be pointed out that Zarathustra is one of the great leaders of humanity, who from epoch to epoch proclaim the old, the present and the future truths that give comfort and security and strength to man in all situations of life. And we can summarize this in the words:

They speak to the human sense
The things in space
They change over time.
The human soul lives
Through space
Unlimited and unharmed through time.
It finds in the spiritual realm
The deepest reason of one's own being.

Dearly beloved! The subject of today's lecture may seem a little strange, for it seeks to combine two things: supersensible knowledge, spiritual research – or, as we are accustomed to saying, theosophy – and everyday life. It might seem as if nothing is further removed from each other than what we experience in everyday life and what the soul aspires to when we speak of supersensible research - of insights into the world that lies beyond our physical-sensual world, beyond the world that our senses perceive and our mind can grasp, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. But on closer inspection, these things are not as far apart as they appear at first glance. I would like to remind you that even the philosopher of pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer, made a strange statement, which should initially only be considered in relation to his point of view on our topic. He said: “Life is an unfortunate thing, and I have tried to make it bearable for myself by trying to understand it.

We want to completely disregard the fact that this saying is based on absolute pessimism, on the conviction that life is not worth living, and instead turn our attention to the other side. Despite the fact that Schopenhauer regards life as not worth living, despite the fact that he regards existence as one of suffering and pain, and despite the fact that he cannot find anything consoling in the world according to his view, he still thinks that if he rises to enlightenment, he will be able to find something that will enable him to cope with life in the right way and thus to come to terms with it. Thus, even the pessimist speaks of the possibility that a worldview that takes us beyond the world of sense perception may lead us to something that makes this life possible in the right sense.

Theosophy does not lead us to a pessimistic world view, but to a spiritual life that shows us that what presents itself as a material exterior has emerged from spiritual origins. And it also shows that human beings, who pass through the material world when they are schooled by experiences in this material world, have to ascend to a spiritual world again. And that means: the origin and the goal of all world experience must be sought in the spiritual. This alone shows that by looking at the great spiritual goal, through which physical life first acquires its value and dignity, man cannot be absorbed in pessimism if he is able to make this world view his own.

However, Theosophy is still something that evokes not only contradiction but even ridicule in the broadest circles of our present-day humanity. Or it is understood in such a way that those who profess it are only dreamers. Theosophy also still finds hatred and contempt in wide circles. Time and again, one can observe that some people who believe that they are very much part of the people of the present day wonder, when they learn one fine day that some acquaintance whom they thought of as a reasonably reasonable person after what he has done so far has become a theosophist: How can a reasonable person turn to such foolish stuff? They think that anyone who occupies themselves with Theosophy no longer lives in the real world, is no longer capable of anything sensible, and tries to make life as unpleasant as possible for themselves. They think that such a person no longer experiences any real joy, that they pursue all kinds of idle thoughts and shut themselves off from everything that gives other people joy. Perhaps on top of that, they don't eat meat and don't drink – then the disaster is complete, and one is only surprised that they don't hang their heads and look at the world with a gloomy expression. After all, one can have such experiences every day.

But another experience has been made often enough and is by no means an anecdote. A lady hears that her friend professes Theosophy and thinks that it alienates her from life, because Theosophers do not amuse themselves in the usual way and so on, and that her friend must be protected from such a cruel fate. So she goes and says: How can you profess Theosophy? It alienates you from life, it is dangerous; the Theosophists are not only dreamers, but they become half-crazy. Before the friend even gets a chance to say anything about it, the one she warned becomes thoughtful and asks: What is Theosophy actually?

It so happens that when it comes to things like Theosophy, which in a certain sense are supposed to live their way into culture as something new, one often does not allow oneself to form an opinion about the matter and content, but rather judges on the basis of secondary circumstances. It may therefore be useful to consider how Theosophy relates to what we have to go through in ordinary life. Indeed, we shall even see how valuable it can be for life to make some observations about it. Theosophy will admittedly say nothing about how to nourish oneself “theosophically”, how to prepare food, and how the purely external life is otherwise to be provided for through Theosophy. But since it has to bring down for us the knowledge from supersensible worlds, we will see how it can affect our soul life, our mood, our joy and suffering, our desire and pain, how it can intervene in our life practice.

One of the most important truths in this field is one that is viewed with hostility by many people today and as if no rational person could possibly believe such stuff. This truth has already been touched upon in earlier lectures, but since it is one of the fundamental truths, it must be referred to again and again. It is a truth that will become just as established in intellectual life in the not too distant future as another [truth has done in the past]. As late as the seventeenth century, there was still the opinion, not only among laymen but also among natural scientists, that lower animals and even fish could develop from river mud. It was Francesco Redi who first formulated the sentence: Living things can only come from living things. And for this truth, which he dared to speak, he was almost burned. Today there is no rationally thinking person - whether he has drawn his education from Haeckel's work or from his most radical opponents - who would not recognize that a living being cannot arise from the inanimate.

Spiritual research now shows that a similar truth can be spoken of in the realm of the spiritual soul, namely that a person does not merely show us the qualities he has inherited from his parents, grandparents and so on, but that we truly grasp him only when we recognize a spiritual-soul core in him. The life that a person now leads is not the first, and it is the starting point for many lives in the future. And the living essence of a person absorbs and permeates itself with what it can absorb in the way of inherited traits, just as the living germ of a worm absorbs the matter surrounding it. We must distinguish between [a purely spiritual life] between death and new birth of life between birth and death, where we again encase the spirit in matter. Thus, the entire existence is a chain of earthly lives and purely spiritual stages of existence.

If this is asserted today, it is considered to be fanaticism. It is said that [theosophists] know nothing about science and so on. And yet it is just as much a firm result of spiritual research as Darwin's theory is from a scientific point of view. But that is how it is with all truths. What is regarded as reality today was considered heresy when it was first proposed years ago. Later, one cannot understand how one could ever have thought differently. And with regard to the truth of repeated lives on earth, one will no longer be able to understand how one could ever have thought differently.

Another truth is connected with this, the doctrine of Karma. Karma means the law of our human destiny. If we wish to characterize this law, we find it not only in the human world, where it is developed in a special way, but everywhere we look. We need only remember that, for example, edelweiss can only grow on mountains. Every creature is driven into the environment to which it belongs. Every creature strives, as if attracted by magnetic forces, into its own environment, where it belongs. One must learn to understand that man, depending on how he has developed in previous lives or how he has acquired faults, is so constituted that he is driven to where he fits in terms of environment and destiny. What he experiences is not really alien to him, but through the general laws of nature he fits in there. That law is already recognized for non-human beings. In the future, man will learn to recognize: When good or bad luck befalls me, it was necessary for me, and I sought it in a certain way because I laid the groundwork for it in previous lives, which is why I fit into this environment. This law will be self-evident in the not too distant future.

When people talk about the causes of good and bad luck, talents and abilities lying in past lives, it may be said that this is far removed from our everyday way of looking at life and takes us into distant worlds. But the question is: does this law really only apply from one life to another, or must it not also apply in narrower circles, to our ordinary life between birth and death? Through supersensible research, we come closer to understanding this law in relation to our present life as well. People usually see only the shortest periods of time and have a certain aversion to connecting longer periods of time. But one can only recognize cause and effect if one tries, for example, to connect what took place in childhood with what happens at a later age, or similarly to connect the other ages with each other. In short, if one makes an effort to explore step by step - in the way a scientist researches in his field - how [the idea of] karma becomes fruitful for life.

To gain a more thorough understanding, we can start from circumstances that are obvious to everyone and look at them from the point of view of karma. Of course, external circumstances will modify the law of karma, but if we look at life seriously and worthily, we will always come back to the underlying law. We just must not come up with all sorts of objections and cite exceptions and so on – these do not apply in science either. There is a law that a stone thrown in a certain direction falls, but a gust of wind can come and modify that direction - that is why the law applies. Life can only become true and fruitful when we recognize the law of karma and when it becomes a way of life, as the laws of physics are in physics. Theosophy can become something that intervenes in our lives as the laws of physics do in the external processes and activities of life.

Let us move on to something very specific. Suppose that a person, in his youth, say up to the age of 15 or 16, shows us that he gets angry when he sees injustice in his environment. It is easy to do so when you are young. What is stirring in the soul should not be considered worthless, because if a person in his youth can become very angry about injustice and later manages to overcome this anger, to purify himself of it and to refine it through appropriate self-education, then something quite different will come of him than, for example, of a phlegmatic person. Anger is an affect, a part of a passion, and when it is transformed, it becomes something quite different, and the later it becomes, the earlier the anger-fortitude in childhood has occurred. The true student of life will recognize this everywhere. In a phlegmatic person, this transformation will never be seen. But how does anger transform? What we have as blind anger towards injustice [in youth] we apply as helpfulness for our fellow human beings in later life: anger-fortitude in youth transforms in such a way.

Today we are taught in school that warmth is transformed into propulsive force. A similar law, which works in the same way as that of the transformation of natural forces in external life, exists for our inner life, for what can be experienced and felt in the soul. It is no coincidence that a person like Goethe said: What one wishes for in youth, one has in abundance in old age. It is not meant to say that in youth one only has to wish, but Goethe thought: a person who is angry would like to help, but cannot in youth; this wish to help is transformed, and now in old age one has abundance. Today, people still do not believe that this is the case. We have, it is thought, ample opportunity in old age to develop love and goodwill of our own accord. But if you look more closely, you will find that it is precisely those who were wrathful in their youth who are most likely to be helping their fellow human beings.

Another example shows how karma enters our lives. If you have had the opportunity as a child to look up to relatives with reverence and awe, you cannot be grateful enough if you reflect on yourself with sufficient self-examination. And if one had the opportunity not only to worship people, but to rise in devotion before the great facts of life, then this is something to look back on with deepest gratitude. It is an instinctive feeling that the sense of reverence that one can experience in youth has causes that have effects in later life. The underlying principle could be expressed by the image of folded hands and bowed knees. One might say – and life proves it to be true – that those who were able to fold their hands a lot in their youth can figuratively raise their hands a lot in old age to bless and thus become a benefactor to those around them. There are people who enter any circle, and one feels, without them saying much, their mere presence as a blessing. They bless by their mere existence, because they have acquired the appropriate soul powers. Such powers occur in later life when in youth the karmic causes have been laid by shyly looking up to something worthy of veneration. Devotion is transformed into beneficial powers.

We can go much further in such a consideration of everyday experiences to something that most people hate very much and are frightened by, not at a low level of education, but at the highest levels of education - the lie and envy. Yet we never meet these qualities interwoven in character. They can be traced back to earlier experiences, but when we see them occurring, we can say that lies and envy are the causes of something that is already being lived out between birth and death. We know how a person despises himself, as it were, when he has to say to himself, 'I am envious' or 'I have a tendency to lie'. He is convinced from the outset that these are not good qualities. Goethe, for example, says in his self-observation that he is glad that he does not have envy as one of his vices, and Cellini says that he feels particularly fortunate not to be aware of any lies. People try to get rid of these things when they find them in themselves. Let us assume that a person realizes that he is envious; he wants to get rid of it, but he is not strong enough to uproot envy. You can't just uproot something like that, but only transform it, like external forces. The person fights envy so that he no longer thinks: I don't want this or that for this person. Thus, with the intellect, he has overcome envy, but in the depths of his character he cannot, and envy reappears in a transformed form.

There is a legitimate connection between envy and its transformation product, a kind of addiction to criticism. He criticizes everything he can find fault with, and such a person is often very pleased with himself. He no longer notices the envy, and criticizing - that is right and proper, because one must point out people's faults! Of course one must, but it depends on whether one does it to improve people or just to criticize them. In the latter case, it is transformed envy. This is very common in life. Many tea and coffee klatches and morning and evening chats would not exist if envy had not been transformed into criticism. There we see how a quality is transformed under the influence of human soul striving itself. Let us now follow what occurs later in a person when he develops envy and criticism, especially when these have raged in youth. He becomes what we might call a dependent being, a person who needs the advice and help of other people for even the smallest things, who does not know how to cope with life. One can doubt such things, but if one looks into life, one will see that they apply just as much as the physical laws in natural science.

From this, good educational principles for life can be derived. We must see that envy and carping do not run rampant. We cannot eradicate them, but we can transform them in the right way. The educator must use all the means at his disposal to ensure that these qualities do not degenerate into instability, but become what could be called a certain yearning to immerse oneself in the mind, so that the person gets the feeling that there is something inside of me that I sense as a faint presentiment, something that is asleep in me. This is one of the most beautiful fruits that can arise from properly transformed bad qualities when they are guided in the appropriate way.

In general, the worst qualities, when guided in the appropriate way, can have the most beautiful effects. For example, lies and dishonesty. We should pay attention to them as they arise in youth. It is not only telling untruths that is meant here, but one should recall again and again how difficult it is to always be truthful. It is easy to set up ideals in life, but always being truthful is not that easy, and it can even lead the best intention and the noblest of minds to be untrue in some respects. A teacher who tells a young child who is tormenting a worm [and cutting it in two] not to torment this worm, because it feels pain just like you, is telling an untruth, and yet he may be inspired by lofty ideals. When a worm is cut in two, one piece can continue to live. If you tell a child something like this, which it can transfer to itself, then you are drawing its attention to something that is not right, because it could not continue to live if the same thing happened to it. You would have to tell it something completely different to keep it from killing or torturing the worm.

The child may forget such things as “The worm feels pain like you do.” But where does the forgetting take place? In his conscious mind. However, there is a deeper core to the human being, and we may have long forgotten something with our everyday consciousness – but it sits in the astral and continues to have an effect. Something like this, which does not correspond exactly to reality and is not controlled by the conscious mind, nevertheless has the same consequence as a more direct lie. [Through this untruth] the child develops what we can call a shy nature. Such a child becomes shy and does not dare to look people in the eye. Every untruth has the effect of a physical law, even one implanted under the mask of a high ideal. From this example we can see how spiritual science can be useful.

Spiritual science instructs us on how careful we must be with every word. We can see how the study of spiritual science as such affects a person's life in general. Here is a concrete example: Many people suffer from poor memory, with which they themselves are not satisfied and which they claim is getting worse and worse. It is a result of supersensible research that the more a person absorbs only materialistic ideas, that is, only what he can hear, see, or grasp with his mind, the worse his memory must become. Such ideas fill the lives of most people today, but they are the least suitable for generating the powers to truly keep memory alive. We also take certain soul powers from a person whom we only fill with materialistic ideas.

What we, on the other hand, absorb as a result of supersensible research, what enters the soul as spiritual-scientific knowledge, what forces us to grasp very clear and very interlocking thoughts, that supplies the soul with strength. It is certainly not easy to grasp such thoughts, where not one stands next to the other, but one grows out of the other, as in a plant. The consequence of such thoughts is, quite apart from the fact that they convey truths to us, that our inner life becomes more concentrated. Even if he cannot see into the higher worlds himself, a person who deals with such thoughts will repeatedly have certain main concepts before his soul, provided he does not become bored with them. This holds together what we call the ether consciousness, which is not recognized by external science. It is strengthened, and the result is that man retains his memory in a much better condition than usual.

Of course, it is not difficult to refute this. It only takes one person to come and say: Look, this theosophist has spent his whole life dealing with supersensory ideas, and now he has almost no memory at all. - One would just have to look at what he would have become without spiritual science. Such things cannot be compared with each other by statistics and so on, but only by what the person can experience in himself. When memory begins to waver and when a person begins to occupy himself with the supersensible, it becomes easier for him to retrieve it. Memory will take on a different character. From this we can conclude how much our everyday life benefits when we fertilize and permeate it with supersensible ideas.

And further: What do we need as human beings for what we are supposed to achieve? Joie de vivre and contentment, interest in our surroundings. What fate assigns us often cannot be a source of joy, but a source of displeasure, of pain. Life can easily become bleak. But for those who are truly capable of striving for the truths of the supersensible world, there can be no complete desolation in life. For even if the outer world should bring misfortune upon misfortune, supersensible knowledge conjures up joy and delight and enlightens us with the consciousness: No matter where he stands, man belongs to the whole spiritual life, he has his destiny, his task and dignity and also his source of joy of existence and love of life, which no outer fate can take away.

A materialistic age should bear this in mind, because many people only find joy in what can be grasped with their hands. Then comes oversaturation and the greed to receive ever new impressions. And when these do not come and life always brings the same, then comes desolation, because man only knows a source of happiness in what comes from outside. But if he has grasped the concepts of a supersensible world, then these work from within, and so we can create the joy of life within ourselves from what we conjure up from within, even if we have no stimulus from outside. The smallest things in life can become the source of inexpressible joy of life and great happiness. That is the difference between the two kinds of concepts: The outer concepts satisfy only our intellect and only for a short time our feelings; then it stops. The pathfinders in the materialistic field can have the joy of research, but they will soon feel desolate in their souls. But what we take from the sources of supersensible knowledge offers a never-ending source of joy and the power of being.

One would like to refer again and again to something that Fichte, who did not live in the humanities but nevertheless strove for it, said to his audience. He once said: What I have to give you speaks of the facts of the supersensible world, but for this another, a new sense is necessary. He emphasizes the connection between man and this supersensible world in the following words: We only look at what surrounds us in life, such as fate, pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, with the right understanding and in the right measure, and only get the right view of our destiny when we see the connection between man and the divine. When man becomes conscious of this connection, then, says Fichte, he can say: “Ye clouds, descend and pour down upon me in streams; ye mountains, fall upon my body and bury me; ye thunders roll, ye lightnings crush me.” I defy your power, for I have grasped my destiny, and that is eternal, as the spirit is eternal.

A presentiment of such a sense of security can come to anyone who in any way becomes acquainted with supersensible research. It is necessary for human nature that these things should enter into our everyday life. How does this show itself? Take a person who lives in the country, in an area where few newspapers and enlightening literature still reach, and compare him to a city dweller who is at the center of modern education, reads newspapers and magazines of all kinds, and so on. This country dweller cannot, by his very nature, be satisfied with the consciousness that the old traditions give him. And since he has nothing else to read, he delves into the Bible. It often happens that the words of the Bible appeal to such a person's mind, but by not only seizing the consciousness but also the subconscious, they sink into the inner being, which is connected with the need for something superhuman. This is the source of many harmful superstitions. For example, the people concerned think they are prophets, they then found sects and so on. Because the urge for the supersensible lies at the deepest source of the soul, if he cannot find the right path, he seeks something else, and that can turn out to be harmful. Such a person only proves how deeply rooted it is in human nature to find the connection with the supersensible world.

The city dweller, on the other hand, has no opportunity to let the supersensible take effect on him. But the urge for it is there, and man fills the ordinary consciousness with all kinds of things: with spiritualism, with “world riddles” and so on. Many people go to “advanced” world-view meetings and also profess such views, and they do not know that their subconscious soul is longing for something completely different. There it continues to work, and later the effect appears, not as superstitious sectarianism as in the countryside, but as uneasiness, gloom; this or that, all kinds of ideas come over them, they become nervous, lose their mental balance, and if they have money, they go from sanatorium to sanatorium. They ask themselves: What is actually wrong with me? Without knowing it, they are missing the connection with supersensible truths.

Some people today are being deprived of supersensible truths because they are considered to be a flight of fancy. They are being deprived of that which gives mental health and emotional balance. And because the physical is the consequence of the spiritual, they are also deprived of their physical health. Here we see how the results of supersensible research find their way into ordinary life. We often have occasion to see how the very gravest mistakes are made because people do not know how the supersensible works. For example, parents and educators believe that they can do no better than to impose punishment immediately after the “crime” has occurred; they do not know that punishment that occurs only after some time has passed can be much milder and, secondly, much more fruitful. The child should never get the impression that the teacher's punishment is a kind of revenge; he should never see him angry. When some time has passed, this will hardly be the case anymore, and the educator will also see many things differently when he looks at the mistake soberly, with his everyday sense. While he does not believe he can get by without corporal punishment when he punishes immediately, he will be able to apply milder means later. Besides, the consciousness of his wrongdoing has a completely different effect on the child's mind if he is not immediately punished for it.

A true light only falls on this matter when man rises above his fate, which often appears to him as something dark, to what the insights from the supersensible world can open up to him. And this is something that is not just a matter of thought and intellect, but something that, like blood, flows through our whole body. Supersensible thoughts pour into our destiny. A person who is unskillful can even become skillful through them. When what sprouts from the supersensible world passes into the physical, physical mobility is attained. That is why what comes from the supersensible is clothed in such sentences that it can be examined by logic, so that man can accept the truths of the supersensible world with his mind. Then they can flow into our lives, fertilizing it and making us secure in the life we must lead within our destiny.

The application of this truth shows us more than any speculation that man is called to carry down the spiritual forces and facts from the spiritual world into the physical. And when man endeavors to do this, he will become quite certain of his connection with the supersensible world, for he will realize that he is a spiritual being and is rooted not only in the physical but also in the supersensible world, and from this certainty he will draw an ever more secure feeling and greater hope in life. No matter how much the external life may torment him with his impenetrable destiny, no matter how incomprehensible the mighty waves of fate or the pinpricks of everyday life may be to us, we know that there are hidden forces that can open our spiritual can open our spiritual eyes and bring us light about our dark destiny, so that we can face with strong, inner energy everything that comes to us in the storm of life - for the blessing of the world, for the work on ourselves, for the development of all humanity.

Dear attendees! When spiritual science sets itself the task of penetrating into the spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world – the world that we perceive with our senses and can understand with the mind that is connected to our brain – then this spiritual science seeks to gain strength and confidence for human life from the spiritual world in which the origin of man itself lies. And in doing so, it seeks to benefit the individual through the knowledge of what lies in the very foundations of things.

We face the spiritual world in a completely different way when we do not seek the sources of spiritual life in general, not only for our knowledge, but when we are, so to speak, dealing with the redemption of the spirit, the real spirit behind material existence, and when it can become the task of this real spirit to help it, so to speak, to break through the physical-material. How often do we not stand before the developing human being, the human being whom we see as having to work the spirit out of the hidden depths of his being, so to speak, from early childhood, the spirit that takes more and more possession of the physical limbs and the spiritual-soul abilities that are bound to the outer instrument of the body. When we as educators are dealing with this real spirit, which rests in the mystery of the human being itself and which is to be brought out, we are dealing with a still higher sense of seeking the spirit than with mere knowledge, which we seek, so to speak, as a satisfaction for the longing of our soul.

Now today the spiritual researcher is in a special position when he wants to observe the developing human being – this developing human being who gradually reveals his talents and abilities and demands that we devote ourselves to him educationally. The spiritual researcher is in a special position when faced with the developing human being because he must immediately point out one of the great facts of spiritual science with regard to this real life of the spirit, which today by no means enjoys the special favor of the educated world. This fact should be apparent to the attentive observer of life when he sees how, from the first moment of human existence, the spiritual rests, as it were, in the deep layers of the human being, how it then, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, that he must literally see this working out in the ever-more-detailed physiognomy, gestures, movements of the individual limbs and abilities that lie deeper within the human being. We see what is working its way from hidden depths to the surface in the growing human being, and we must ask ourselves: where do we find the origin of these predispositions, these abilities that are slowly emerging? And in regard to this search, the man of today is by no means inclined to approach the facts to which spiritual research must point. We have referred to this fact in various ways. Today it is to be used only as a basis for our actual consideration. On a higher level, this fact is a repetition of another fact that has not been known for very long in the development of mankind.

I have often pointed out – oh, human memory is generally very short in this regard – that in the 17th century not only laymen but also learned naturalists were convinced that matter, mud for example, could develop animals, fish and the like out of itself, without a germ of life having been placed in this mud – out of itself. It was a tremendous turning point for science when in the 17th century – just think, only in the 17th century! – the great naturalist Francesco Redi first put forward the proposition that opened up new, worldwide vistas for scientific knowledge: Living things can only come from living things. If you believe, he said, that living creatures can arise from river mud, then you have not examined it closely enough, otherwise you would have found that the source of life lies in the germ and that this germ only draws matter to itself in order to emerge. It is often the case with truths, as it was with Francesco Redi. He only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he too was considered a heretic. Today we can go from the most radical Haeckelians to Haeckel's opponents: within certain limits, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” is recognized everywhere. It is taken for granted. That is the fate of great truths. First they are considered heresies, then, after some time, taken for granted. People then cannot understand how anyone could ever have believed otherwise.

The task of spiritual science today is to advocate this principle at a higher level. It is an inaccurate observation to say that what struggles into existence in the developing human being as something mysterious and expresses itself more and more distinctly in gestures and facial features comes merely from the inherited traits of the father and mother and so on. If one proceeds scientifically, this cannot be explained from these inherited traits any more than the emergence of the earthworm from the matter of the river mud can be assumed without an earthworm germ. Today, spiritual science shows that for human life, what comes into existence as the core of a human being through birth must be traced back to another, a completely soul-like existence, in which its spiritual and soul germ lies. And just as the earthworm germ draws upon external physical substance to increase in size, so too, in the human being, this spiritual-soul germ draws upon the qualities and powers of the parents and ancestors to develop with their help.

We must trace back the spiritual-soul to the spiritual-soul. We must trace the soul that exists in man back to a soul germ, just as we must trace the spiritual that develops in man back to a spiritual germ. And by accepting this, it leads us to the fact of repeated earthly lives, which today not only annoys so many people, but is felt by many people as a dream or a fantasy, as something quite abominable. The doctrine of repeated earthly lives tells us that the life we are now living, in which our abilities and qualities unfold, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives and the basis of later lives. The stages of life in which we are enveloped in the physical body are interchanged with other forms of existence, in order to bring into the spiritual life what we have taken in during the present life, what we have gone through in the school of life life, and then, after this has happened, to enter again into a new physical existence, in which a germ of life again draws from the substance what it needs in terms of qualities and abilities in order to live itself into a body.

We can therefore say: We look spiritually when we see the human being emerging from the mysterious foundations of his existence, to a spiritual-soul core of being that unfolds according to his previous life and develops in the present existence by drawing on the inherited characteristics of father and mother and their ancestors. This is another truth that will slowly become part of human education. Today, of course, they no longer burn heretics, but people still say that those who claim such things know nothing about exact science, whereas spiritual science is based on the most exact science of all. They are branded as heretics in the way that heretics are branded today. But the truth of reincarnation will become established and accepted, and will no longer be questioned by people capable of judgment, but will be taken for granted.

Thus, we must look back from what appears in a child as developing abilities to what a person has acquired in previous lives on earth and expresses in this life. If we consider present-day science, we must say that a certain lack of clarity prevails everywhere, in all fields. Science believes it need only point to what comes from the father and mother, from grandparents and so on, and is happy if it can show that the qualities that are expressed here or there were also present in this or that way in the father or grandfather.

Let us look at the whole situation of what crystallizes out of the center of the human being, brought over from a previous existence; let us look at the relationship of this core to the inherited traits. When we consider everything that the human being brings into existence in terms of qualities and talents, we can see two factually related facts in the human soul. The first is what occurs in a person in terms of both mental qualities and abilities – the majority of mental qualities and abilities are independent of each other in some respect, so that one does not depend on the other. This is shown by the simple fact that someone can be very musical and yet have no aptitude for mathematics or any other field of science. An ability can shine in our soul without our being able to say that other abilities are present with it. In this respect, the individual abilities are independent of each other. But the same is also the case with regard to the [mental] qualities. A person can have a certain pride alongside other quite pleasant qualities of the soul. And again, pride is not dependent on the other qualities. That is one thing when we want to take a look at the human soul.

The second fact is that the abilities and qualities that a person has in his soul are held together by a certain center that we call the ego and that they are either in harmony or disharmony with each other. All the abilities and qualities that work together through the ego are, to a certain extent, independent of each other and work together through the fact that each person has a special core of being. If we keep to these two facts, we can, with healthy observation of life, get a clear view of how the qualities and abilities of parents and ancestors are inherited by children and descendants. The individual qualities and abilities really do appear to come from the ancestors to the descendants. On the one hand, it shows us that if a boy is haughty, he has inherited this haughtiness from his mother; another is musical, we find the same disposition in his father or in his mother. But the way in which he processes the qualities, how he relates them, we see clearly depends on his own core of being. And the more closely we examine this human life, the more the nature of this dependence becomes apparent. We can best understand this if we say: the individual qualities – pride, humility, compassionate heart and so on – are inherited by the human being from his ancestors, including the talents, but the way in which he combines them in his soul leads back to his earlier existence, to his spiritual and soul essence with all that has been achieved by his soul in his earlier existence. We can then see much more clearly how the conditions are when we observe this peculiar way of working with the inherited traits. I should also mention that the laws of heredity are laws that cannot be investigated by spiritual science in the same way as physical and chemical laws can. Therefore, I ask you to bear in mind that it is not an objection to a law of spiritual science if it is said: Yes, if you look into life, it shows that heredity does not happen in the way it has been said here. But we must take the laws as physical laws are taken. For example, physics teaches that the path traversed by a thrown stone represents a parabola; the stone falls in a parabola. But the resistance of the air causes the path of the thrown stone not to be an exact parabola. If someone comes and says that the path of the thrown stone does not form a parabola, that is not correct. The physical law is valid, and we only have the possibility of arriving at an understanding of the stone's trajectory by accepting a general law. And if someone says, “Yes, but the stone flies to the side, a gust of wind has blown it away,” the presence of the wind does not contradict the physical law as such. In this sense, the laws of spiritual science are to be taken; they can be modified by the circumstances, but they still apply in such a way that we can only understand the processes through these laws if we know them. Let us now consider the human being in terms of his characteristics, by dividing the human soul itself into two areas, which can clearly be distinguished from one another in human life. Wherever you look in human life, you will find clear distinctions everywhere. One area can be described as the area of interests that a person has, where their attention, sympathy and antipathy, their affects, drives and passions are directed. This area of the nature of will and affect is one area. The other is the area that can be called the intellectual, the rational, that is, the way in which a person forms ideas, whether he is rich or poor in concepts and images, whether these are flexible, whether a person can form symbols or whether he is unimaginative, whether he has the intellectual elements for one area or the other. These two areas should initially be distinguished in the developing human being. With the same precision with which we gain physical laws through healthy observation of life, we can find laws for these two areas that reveal the connection between the ancestors and the descendants.

We see that everything concerning the sphere of interests, affections, sympathy and antipathy, passions, that is, the instinctive direction of man, can always be traced back only to paternal inheritance, whereas that which concerns the formation of the elements of intellect, of the rational, can be traced back to maternal inheritance. Such laws result from a faithful observation of life. Of course, it is not possible to go into the hundreds of cases that could easily be cited from a healthy observation of life. It can only be pointed out that life everywhere confirms that we get the intellectual and imaginative side from our mother's side, and the spirited element, the interest in whether we are lively or casual or apathetic, comes more from our father's side.

I cannot go into general confirmatory considerations at this point, but can only illustrate what has been said with examples. One great example needs to be mentioned: Goethe, who characterized himself so beautifully in the words:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition
and the desire to tell stories.

We can find this in hundreds of cases when we observe world history or life. And because a faithful observation of life confirms these words everywhere, they make life appear so full of light.

But we still approach the subject far too abstractly when we look at life only in general terms. I said that in general the intellectual element can be traced back to inheritance from the mother's side. But it is not that simple. Instead, the qualities that are inherited undergo a transformation by metamorphosing. Spiritual science is still not fully recognized today, otherwise people would already be able to see how much it can benefit the natural sciences. It is instructive enough to observe how one natural force is transformed into another, for example heat into electricity, but spiritual science transfers this way of observing to other areas as well, and it will say that, for example, in the field of inheritance, one can only get to the bottom of it if one considers the transformation of characteristics.

And here it can be seen how maternal and paternal qualities enter into relationships when they are passed on to the children. We see how maternal qualities, when they are passed on, tend to pass over to the sons. If we look at the soul qualities in the mother, we can say: These soul qualities tend to pass over to the sons, but they tend to change in the process. What is basic [in soul terms] in the mother, she may not be able to develop into particular abilities because she lacks the organs. After all, you need the appropriate predispositions to do so. While the mother has to remain within the narrowest circle with her soul stirrings, we see how, in the sons, the mother's predispositions, as it were, shoot into the physical realm one step further, so that the same predispositions arise again in the son. And the son then shows us in his abilities, through which he can work in the world, what was predisposed in the soul of the mother. The mother has it as a soul disposition; the son has it in such a way that he can let it flow into the physical organs in order to carry it out into the world, in order to bring it to the world in the form of achievements. We see the soul qualities of the mother transformed in the sons right down to the physical level.

So we have the sentence: the soul qualities of the mother have the tendency to move into the physical organs of the sons and to confront us in turn in the soul forces bound to these organs. It only takes a healthy look at life and at the general development of humanity to find this confirmed. We can look to Goethe again, or to other personalities, for example, Hebbel. This peculiar natural dramatist Hebbel, who was never able to communicate with his father, had a great poetic gift; he shows us this gift in such a way that he had the simple primitive ability for it from his mother, who was just a simple bricklayer's wife. We can follow this in his diary entries. And this gift is manifested in him in such a way that the spiritual nature of the mother has been transformed into an organ system, descended into the physical system of the son, where it manifests itself in this way.

The remarkable thing, however, is that faithful observation of life reveals the opposite tendency in the paternal qualities, which have become more integrated into the physical, which rest more in the whole personality, including the physical predispositions. The qualities of the father tend to ascend by one degree in the daughter and to appear in the soul of the daughter as transformed into spiritual-soul qualities. Thus, something that is sober and pedantic in the father appears lovable in the daughter's soul.

I would like to give a brief example of how this relationship manifested itself in Goethe. One can point out that in fact the old Frau Rat Goethe had the art of storytelling in her soul; she had all the mobility, the imaginative gift, and we see how this particular type of gift was expressed in her circle of friends. We see how this type of gift was highly developed in the son, to the point of becoming a basic predisposition, so that it led to world-shaking facts. On the other hand, we see the father, the old Goethe. Anyone who, like me, has spent more than thirty years studying Goethe and everything related to him will not be misunderstood in a superficial way when he characterizes him as saying: “From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life.” The son takes over this character foundation from his father without transformation.

The old Goethe is a thoroughly sober, alert, honest man, even great within certain limits, but a man who, I might say, by the very way he comes across as a personality, cannot get along in life, cannot achieve anything worthwhile; he cannot get a proper position in the Frankfurt Council, he stops halfway. His character affects even his physical abilities. Let us now imagine this translated into the soul: how would it confront us in the soul - this stopping halfway, this never-ending? It would be possible for it to appear in the soul in such a way that it has the need on the one hand to join others, but never wants to make up its mind and repeatedly shies away from a decision. Here we have, as soul qualities, what we encounter as intellectual sobriety in the character of Goethe. But we can also have sobriety before us in its sentimental, soul-like transformation. It is easy to find where the outer qualities of the old Goethe live on in the soul: in Goethe's sister Cornelia, who, however, died young. In her, we see the entire soul qualities as a transformation of the qualities of the old Goethe. And now we also understand why Goethe, who received the external qualities from his father but what really mattered to him, what his greatness was based on, from his mother, could not really get along with his father, how the two repelled each other. In his sister, however, these qualities – transformed into kindness, passion and slight vanity – had such an effect that she became a dear companion for him, in whom the [qualities of the father], transformed into the soul, stood beside him. The whole way in which Goethe's life in his parents' house presents itself to us shows how precisely the abilities tied to active organ systems pass from father to daughter.

One could also point out that not only the father, but the entire paternal ancestry comes into consideration, and likewise on the other side the maternal. We see how Goethe repeats the sunny imagination and mystical character of his maternal ancestors – transformed into higher gifts. And in the nature of his sister, whom Goethe esteemed so highly and of whom he had to say that she lacked faith, hope and love, for she was a problematic nature who also withered away early, we see the paternal ancestry. But here we must think of these qualities, which were active in the sister, as having been transformed from the physical into the soul. We know, of course, that one of Goethe's uncles turned out to be a good-for-nothing. He was such a person that one must say of him that he had no head for anything and therefore could achieve nothing. We see the entire dilettantishness of this ancestry, which only in Goethe's father attained a certain greatness, transposed into the soul in the problematic nature of Goethe's sister.

If one wanted to, one could find mothers throughout history who transfer what they have in their souls into the physical traits of their sons. That is why mothers are so often depicted, so that we may understand the sons. Thus, in the fourth book of Maccabees, the mother of the seven sons who were killed is depicted precisely in her peculiar state of mind, which in the sons manifests itself as a stage-lowered, physical predisposition. In order to appreciate this fact, one must proceed according to laws, just as one would when investigating the dynamic force of a gust of wind. And here it can often be shown that the aptitude of a son, with all its intimacy, can be traced back to the nature of the soul struggles of the mother. Perhaps there are few cases as interesting as the relationship that the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mother had - through her character, through her sad fate - to the whole way of her son's poetry. And when we consider how closely Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was bound to his mother's personality, we see in the wonderfully noble, unassuming religiosity, in the delicate way of facing life, and in the full comprehension of tragic situations, what remained of the mother's soul.

In this way one could cite hundreds of great minds in history and intellectual life and of people we know in our ordinary daily lives and everywhere one would find this law confirmed. One can therefore say that what one is as a father tends to appear in the soul of the daughter and what one is as a mother in the disposition of the sons. A light spreads over numerous life circumstances when we survey this law; and much becomes understandable to us about the connection and the motives of different people.

What does spiritual research tell us about inheritance? It tells us that it would be a mistake to look only for inherited traits in a person. Rather, we have to go back, alongside all inherited characteristics, to the central spiritual-soul core of the human being, which comes from previous lives and integrates and incorporates the characteristics it finds, just as the earthworm germ integrates the external substance, absorbs this substance and enlarges itself according to its own nature. Thus we see in the human core of being that which is drawn in, as if by magnetic forces, into a family where the qualities in the father and other ancestors are suitable for this soul core, so that through the appropriate blending of these qualities and their transformation, the soul can express what its own inner being is. A soul that has acquired the ability in past lives, let us say, to achieve something poetic, for which it needs the gift of imagination, is attracted to a mother who has the gift of storytelling - the gift of thinking in images and, with a slight mobility of soul, transforming these images. But when this ability is passed down from mother to son, there is a tendency to carry these qualities down into the physical, and the spiritual and soul core must blend what it finds in the way of predispositions. The father's character traits are carried up into the soul, into the souls of the daughters, where they are transformed, but when they appear directly in the sons, they are not transformed.

We have to look at more complicated relationships if we want to explain the connection between how the actual human core being is attracted to the qualities of certain persons who then become its parents, and how this core being then mixes and harmonizes these qualities so that it can live out its own essence in them. Spiritual science, however, not only sees what is mixed and transformed from the qualities and dispositions of the ancestors, but it also directs our attention to the spiritual essence that we see coming into existence and must trace back to earlier forms of existence in which it has acquired what enables it to mix the qualities and dispositions that it can receive in the line of inheritance.

Now one could say that spiritual science is extremely easy to refute; one need only apply the most trivial concepts and it can be refuted with the greatest of ease. In an afterword to the small pamphlet “Theosophy and Christianity”, I myself pointed out how easy it is to refute certain presentations of Theosophy if one is determined to start from the prejudices of the present day. The examples given there could easily be multiplied. Regarding what are regarded as hereditary traits, Theosophy must point out the human individuality. It must say: The healthy human mind has the same interest in each individual human individuality, in each spiritual-soul essence of the human being, as it has in the animal in the species, in an animal species. We show the same interest in every single human being as we do, for example, in the lion species. We are as interested in human individuality as we are in animal species. You only have to misunderstand this sentence, or, if it is written, not read it properly, to refute it with tremendous ease.

Someone may object: But what do these spiritual researchers claim? They seem to be unaware that you can just as easily write the biography of a dog or a cat with all their individual characteristics as you can of a human being; you can also list all the differences between the individual animals. It is extremely easy to cite such a thing against spiritual science. But it has never been claimed that this is not possible with spiritual science. I myself was in a school class where a teacher tried to write the biography of a steel spring. You can transfer everything. But one thing can be said: the interest we show for an individual cat and so on is not the same interest as the one we show for a fellow human being. The interest we take in an individual of a species of animal can even be greater than the interest we have for an individual human being. But it is a different interest, not the same; it arises from different psychological roots. Spiritual science requires that the concepts be clearly defined. If someone does not do this, then they can put forward the kind of refutations that can be found on the street. We are dealing with a spiritual-soul core in the human being, and spiritual science does not merely trace this back to the parents and their ancestors, but says: He draws the qualities of these parents to himself, just as the earthworm germ draws the substance it needs for its growth. Now one can ask of spiritual science: Is there something that proves, and that from the human course of life, that such a spiritual-soul core of being actually exists? From the observation of the individual human life, it will be difficult to distinguish between what is nature of the cover and what is the core of the being. Regarding the individual human being, we take the view that the interaction of the covers and the core of the being unfolds gradually. We cannot easily distinguish this in the individual human being, but if we look at a larger, broader basis, at the human being in general, we see that people are very different from one another in terms of their development. Let us assume that this information from spiritual science is correct. Then, for example, there is a core of being in a person that goes back to a life in which this person acquired a strong individuality. Such an essential core will have a lot of trouble overcoming the resistance that the inherited traits present to it. It will have a lot of trouble developing these traits in such a way that they correspond to its spiritual abilities. It takes a long time for a strong essential core to integrate and develop the abilities that come from heredity. On the other hand, a spiritual core that has not yet acquired many abilities of its own will easily blend in with the characteristics of heredity.

This means that people who are stronger individuals, who have a strong inner core and who come from a previous life with a wealth of inner substance, are only slowly able to overcome the resistance that comes from heredity. And here we recall the fact that great minds are not so-called child prodigies, but that teachers often mistake them for the opposite. We only have to think of Alexander von Humboldt, who was considered stupid in his youth. His essential core simply took a long time to bring out the abilities resting within him. A rich core of being had come over to him, and it had a long time to do before it had reworked the characteristics of heredity according to the content of his soul. But through this soul content, which has long worked on the characteristics of heredity, something is also achieved that can achieve great things in humanity. On the other hand, we see souls that, so to speak, bring little with them from previous lives. They will quickly find their way into their new shells and will easily develop the characteristics of heredity. These are the prodigies who seem to be the most talented in the first years of life, but then very soon cease to be so.

Let us assume that the spiritual core of the being has to work its way through what is offered to it from the outside. It only takes a clear, correct observation of life to recognize that physical characteristics in particular are based on heredity. We can see the form of inheritance in the fingerprints. On the other hand, that which is seated as a germ in the soul will be all the less explainable by overcoming the inherited traits through external means, the more the qualities in question have their seat in the interior of the soul. This is why that which belongs to the subjective realm of the soul, the talents for music, mathematics, and so on, appear in the earliest years, as the numerous cases of child prodigies prove. On the other hand, talents that require more inheritance to be overcome will emerge later. In short, everything that comes to us in the course of a proper observation of life proves that a core essence of the human being emerges from all that seeks to envelop us as inherited traits. If we observe people carefully, we can see how the greatest individualities very slowly overcome the resistance of the outer human will. We do not want to focus on these facts today, but they can be seen among the greatest individuals.

I would like to remind you once again of Goethe. If we really understand his greatness, we can see in him how he stands before us as an old Goethe at the full height of life, at the height of art and wisdom; we can see that he has used his whole life to carve out his individuality against the opposing forces. And only the short-sighted could say [about Goethe's late works] that Goethe has grown old. Today, when judging great personalities, we can observe the tendency to exaggerate them in relation to their youth and to belittle them in relation to old age. We can even hear it said that the works of old age are old, dull things, and that those of youth are fresh. A book is being published today in which the true poets, the true individualities, are presented to readers from their youthful works.

People do not really consider that it is perhaps only through their own peculiarity that they are able to understand youth better. They would do better to go along with the individuality in question and not assume that the individuality has become duller in old age. This has already happened to Goethe during his lifetime. People have read the first part of his “Faust” and said: There is bubbling youthfulness in it; but what Goethe wrote in his old age is such that one must be lenient with the aging. But anyone who looks at what Goethe presents with this understanding will say: There, in the first part of “Faust,” Goethe's full individuality has not yet emerged; we see how he is still working his way through, and we see how this strong individuality, which educates itself throughout its entire life, works its way through the resistance of its covers. This is why Goethe says of the critics of his “Faust”:

There they praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The scum thinks,
One would no longer be!

Anyone who is familiar with the development of human nature knows that the stronger the individuality is, the longer it takes to work through.

We can already see a difference between what is the innermost core of our being, the origin of which we have to look for somewhere else, and what is the outer shell that joins this core of our being. We see this difference particularly when we look at the relationship between parents and children. Throughout life, the human being is in a kind of development. This development is an ascending and a descending one. The former includes the time up to the thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth year, when the core of our being works from within, so that what we go through in pain and suffering becomes life experience and expresses itself in our physicality, in our expressions and gestures. In these stages of life we always see the inner core of the being working on the outer shells and finally shaping them plastically, so that we can speak of the fact that, in an ascending line, the human being becomes more and more similar to his inner core. If we look at a person in their fortieth year and consider the physiognomy that they have been working on for forty years, we can say that the outer appearance is more similar to the inner being than it was in the twentieth year, when it was still inside, still a mere ability, and striving out from the inside out. Thus, in the physical body, a person is more similar to himself in later life than in earlier life. He is more similar to himself in the fortieth year than in the twentieth. This explains an important fact of life, which in turn appears important for many external facts. What is this fact, and why is there such a difference [between the different ages]?

For the observer of life, there is a difference between children of younger parents and those born later in marriage. Only those who are not observers of life do not notice this difference. The core of a child's being, who has moved into a young couple, will find little resistance in its shells because the parents have not yet worked much into their physicality. The individuality will be able to work more into their shells; they do not yet find such a plastic expression of the qualities in them that reproduce themselves in the line of inheritance. Therefore, we can say that children conceived by young parents are better able to shape the whole person from their own individuality. Children born later in a marriage are those whose own core of being is weaker and are therefore drawn to very specific traits that father or mother have imprinted. Thus we see that children born later generally bear more of their father and mother than those born earlier, because the qualities that go into inheritance have already become pronounced in the parents' bodies. We see how the work of the parents on themselves shows in different ways in the children. Strong individualities, which are less similar to the parents, are the children born of the dawn of a young marriage. Less strong individualities, which are more similar to the parents, are those born to older couples.

Spiritual science throws light on such facts in the same way that natural science throws light on natural facts. And if we have this law, we have the means to educate people in a way that is practical for life. Then we acquire a very specific attitude. Anyone who, as a teacher of children, acquires this attitude flowing from spiritual science always says to himself: You must look at what has come into existence through birth and is working its way out more and more like a sacred puzzle to be solved; it is something that comes from previous lives. To do this, you have to look at the ancestry, where the characteristics come from. From this there arises for the educational eye that harmony of will and ability, that sense of responsibility towards the developing human being as a sacred riddle to be solved. When we absorb such wisdom, which places us in this way with the pupil, then that seriousness is imprinted in us, which - without theorizing - finds the educational tact to really solve the riddle in each particular case. In each individual case, we have to act in accordance with this sense of tact in order to properly inspire the mind. We then take leave of the popular phrases of pedagogy.

Which phrase can be heard more often today than that: You have to educate the individuality of the human being. You must educate individually, not in a stereotyped way, and you must not do anything that would contradict the individuality. But anyone who truly observes life wonders: what exactly is individual education? This word remains a mere phrase as long as one does not know how the core of a being relates to what surrounds it. That is why what is said about individual education is just empty words. In most cases, we are unable to do much with them. We have to educate in the way that the demands of practical life arise. We have to realize that we cannot get by with these empty words, but that we have to say: we have to educate from what is assessed. Above all, we are called upon to give the human being what makes him a useful member of human society. He must be able to do what is demanded within certain circles of people, what his time and circumstances demand of him. The phrase of individuality must not shake this demand. Those who see how spiritual science understands the connection between the human being and the whole world are not at all powerless in the face of life's demands. It may be necessary, for example, that a son who has this or that quality takes this or that position in life; family circumstances demand it. Anyone who really looks into the laws of things knows that people are not so one-sided that it can be said that they are only useful for this or that. They can be made useful if not only one side is developed. People are more versatile than is usually assumed. And anyone who really looks through the combination of inherited traits to the spiritual and psychological core of the being is able to connect the various extraordinarily instructive processes with what presents itself as a real process to the spiritual researcher. If one seeks what the individuality of the pupil is, then the practical demands of life make it necessary to look at individuality differently than it is usually viewed in a stereotyped way. It must be said that anyone who allows themselves to be inspired by spiritual-scientific knowledge will, as if flowing into their entire attitude, acquire a fine sense of tact and not only a sense of responsibility, but also all the skills they need to do the right thing at the appropriate moment. It is quite remarkable that whenever you make such assumptions, you always know what to do at the right moment. To give an example: A child [was given to me to educate] who was denied all talents because he had developed in a strange way up to the age of eleven, so that one could say: “Nothing will come of this rascal; he has not even learned to read and write properly!” When this child was entrusted to me and I began to have a certain influence over him, I could say: “All this is only deceptive appearance.” The only difficulty was to break through the outer shell in order to reveal the inner core of the child's being. The core of the being had to be uncovered. Twenty years have passed since that time, and it has been shown that it was as I said. In a short time it was possible to help the spiritual core of the being to break through and to prove what has been said here.

Thus, the study of the developing human being shows how necessary it is not to remain with the outer, physical body alone, but to look through to the spiritual, which is everywhere behind the sensual and which we can see if we acquire the ability to do so. It is important for our knowledge in this direction as well if we can acquire concepts and ideas such as those found in spiritual science.

It is important for our practical lives that we believe in the spirit and seek it behind physical matter; this becomes clear to us when we stand before the developing human being and have to solve the real puzzle in education of how the spirit pours into physical matter. Spiritual science is there not only to talk about the three concepts of body, soul and spirit in a theoretical way, but to fertilize practical life in such a way that a direct result can be achieved through proper education.

When we look at the human being in this way, then, by participating in his development through education, the human soul is imbued with the high truth of the human being's mission in his earthly existence. Then we feel something of the fact that, although we human beings are fully immersed in the physical-sensual world, we are called upon to bring into this physical-sensual world that which we can draw from the spirit. From this realization, we can say: We are surrounded by physical and sensory phenomena; but behind them stands the active spirit. In the developing human being, we encounter the physical human being in indeterminate talents and indeterminate physiognomy, but at the same time we encounter the spirit, which has to struggle through physical matter and which we have to help to come into existence in the physical world from an enigmatic state. Wherever we look at our practical life's work, man is called upon to impress spirit on matter. The words in which we may summarize today's reflection are true everywhere. The spirit struggling for existence also shows us the truth that can be said with these words:

It presses to the human sense
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The material abundance.
It flows into human souls
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in the human heart
To a wisdom-filled reality.

There is a time when the experience of death, from the point of view of the physical plane, comes before our souls in many ways, in a broader and in a narrower sense, a thousandfold outside in humanity and also in our immediate circle, from which, especially in the course of the last few years and also months, dear friends have passed through the gate of death. It is perhaps appropriate to direct our thoughts, to which we can feel connected here in this branch, to certain aspects of the mystery of death and many things related to it. We direct our contemplative gaze to the riddle of death, not merely because we are plagued by curiosity or a thirst for knowledge to recognize what is mysteriously connected with death, but because we have already sufficiently gathered from the insights that spiritual science can impart to us how intimately connected with the mystery of death, with the knowledge of it, is that which we need in the way of strengthening forces of life, how, in fact, the contemplation of death removes the gulf between the two worlds — the world we live through in the physical and the world of the spiritual. We have often realized and rightly called to mind again and again in the face of concrete deaths how those souls that were connected to us in physical life remain so even after they have passed through the gate of death. In this context, I was also able to say in this branch that it is one of the strengthening, invigorating thoughts that we can let carry us, that we have friend souls in the spiritual worlds who, through the way they were connected with our cause here on earth, have become and will become our loyal helpers and co-workers. It must be emphasized that we are now living in a time in which we feel obliged to elaborate spiritual science, but in which this spiritual science is still met with much misunderstanding and opposition arising from this lack of understanding. And sometimes doubts may arise as to whether, in the face of ever-increasing opposition - and it will truly take on even stronger forms - what forces are given to us within the physical world can suffice. Then we are consoled by the thought that the souls of our friends who have passed away and are still united with us in our work, who are not hampered by the obstacles that still confront us here on earth, combine their forces with ours. And out of such conviction we believe in the victorious, if also slow, advance of spiritual scientific work.

When a person passes through the gate of death, it is indeed, I would say, close to our soul to experience how he, after leaving his physical body on the scene of earthly existence, then ascends into the spiritual worlds, so to speak, leaving these physical worlds. If we have gained convictions in spiritual science, then we perceive the passing through of the gate of death in a human being as a leaving of the physical world. If now the spiritual scientific view is directed to the experience of death, that is, to the passing through of a human being through the gate of death, then to this spiritual scientific view the matter presents itself somewhat differently. What comes into consideration is mainly what the so-called dead person experiences himself, how he feels and experiences passing through the gate of death in his innermost being, and how it then unfolds for him between death and a new birth. And here it must be said that what passes through the gate of death is, as we know, first of all the etheric body with the astral body and the ego. Now, however, the dead person, by entering the spiritual world in this triad of his being, first feels the scene of the physical world and, standing on it, those people with whom he felt connected in life, and also everything else to which he felt connected, actually as if it were all leaving him, as if it were moving away from him, so to speak. And then the one who has passed through the gate of death and is settling into the etheric world with his etheric body, becomes one with this etheric world. And we also already know this: a kind of overview of the experience on earth in the last incarnation occurs before his eyes. This experience can really be compared to a kind of universal 'dream experience'. Life goes on for days in surging, weaving images that are meaningful and full of meaning. One feels like saying that this panorama of life enlarges as the dead person feels: 'This is what you see, your life unwinds, flows away.' And beyond this flowing life, the scene on which you were standing leaves you.

This is a completely ethereal experience. While we, when we experience physically and sensually, come across the solid and sturdy with our senses and know exactly: what we experience with our senses is out there and we feel ourselves within the boundaries of our skin, the one who has passed through the gate of death experiences his existence and his connection to the world in such a way that he does not distinguish in such a strong way; he feels, so to speak, what he has as a tableau of life, as a piece of his self. Yes, this tableau of life is his world in the first instance. He surveys what he has lived through in a great panorama of life, as his immediate world, in which he is at first. In a sense, earthly existence fades away from him, and from this fading earthly existence he extracts what he has experienced since his birth within this earthly existence. This unfolds like a powerful, vivid panorama of images, not with a dull 'dream consciousness', but with a clear consciousness, in which not only images are seen, but in which everything that we have experienced in life in some other way is revived. Every single conversation we have had with people: we hear it again; everything we have experienced with people, everything we have exchanged with them in terms of feelings: we experience it again. The fact that everything is flooded with life makes possible that abundance of life which, compressed into a few days, gives a complete overview – which is actually always before us at the same time – of what we have gone through in a sometimes long life on earth. And we go through it in such a way that we then know: earlier, on earth, you went through it in such a way that experience followed experience. You had an experience and were in a context of life. It flowed by, remained partly in your memory, was partly forgotten. Then something new occurred, and so the stream of life was composed over the years. Now all of this is standing before the mind's eye at the same time, and now all of this is, one might say, in the self expanded into the world.

In these days after death, one does not distinguish between the world and the self, but both flow together, and the world is simply what one has experienced oneself. Otherwise, at first there is nothing but what one has experienced oneself, in which everything we have lived through with other people on earth is also included. And then we feel as if the external ethereal material, which initially appears to be the carrier of this world of images, were to leave us, and as if this world of images were no longer like one we have seen, but one that we have now completely connected with our own being, that now forms our innermost being. And by absorbing it, as it were, into ourselves, we are able to perceive and experience the rest of the spiritual world, to survey it with our consciousness.

Now, little by little, human souls appear in the rest of the spiritual world. These are either souls who have gone through the portal of death before us and are now there too, or human souls who are still in the physical body, in earthly existence. One sees these human souls from the spiritual world by seeing them in their spiritual-soul aspect. The physical is, of course, only perceptible to physical organs, but the spiritual-soul that lines the physical is then also in the person before our soul's eye, rising up. We feel much more intimately connected to all that is now being experienced by us than we could feel connected to when we were actually on earth, where there are separating barriers due to the physical body.

There is just one thing we must always bear in mind: we must choose our words carefully when we want to describe the spiritual, because the experience in the spiritual world is simply much more intimate than the experience here on the physical plane. When we visualize how a thought, which represents an experience long past, emerges from within us, reminding us of that experience, and when we now now, I might say, imagine the reality of such a shadowy memory experience, then we gradually get an idea of how spiritual reality actually appears to us after we have passed through the gate of death. As a rule, it does not approach us from outside like the experiences of the physical-sensory world. The imaginations come up as they are, only with infinitely greater vividness than the memory images, but in such a way that we do not distinguish our I and the imaginations as we distinguish ourselves from the outside world here. They arise from within us like memory images, but in such a way that we know: what arises on the horizon of our consciousness is reality. An image arises and we know that it is connected to us in the same way that a memory image is connected to us here on the physical plane. It arises with all its vitality. But we know that we are connected to it, our I is within it. In this way the soul arises, and we feel ourselves in union with the souls and soul beings of the higher hierarchies that gradually arise. The spiritual world comes to me, I would say, from the indefinite twilight darkness, approaching my own soul, like memories that arise in our soul. Only that the memories are very dim and depict only an external reality, while the imaginations that arise become speaking imaginations, announcing themselves essentially through their revealing language, which then becomes for us a revelation of the souls, of the spirits, with whom we continue to be in the most varied ways warmer, more intimate, than we can be with a person here on the physical plane.

One must now be particularly aware of the significance of the very first experience that a person undergoes when he passes through the gate of death. This looking back at the last life has a great, an enormous significance for the whole of the subsequent experience between death and a new birth, and we can realize this significance if we think about how we actually come to our sense of self in physical life on earth; not to our self, but to our sense of self. We know how we come to the I from our study of spiritual science: the spirits of form give us this I by advancing us from a moon-based existence to an earth-based existence. But this I is initially subconscious. It becomes conscious through being reflected in the physical body. How is it reflected here on the physical plane? Well, you know that even in the ordinary dream experience you can see it: The I only very rarely becomes clearly aware of itself in the dream experience; the I becomes blurred with the experiences, with the images of the dream that emerge. How do we experience I-consciousness during waking hours? Become aware of how this I-consciousness is actually connected to all external perceptions and all external experiences. When we move our hand through the air like this, we feel nothing. But in the moment when we push through the air, we feel something. But we actually feel our own experience, feel what we experience through our fingers. It is by touching the outside world that we become aware of our self. And in another sense, we actually become aware of our self when we wake up, in that we descend from the consciousness of sleep into our physical body, we collide with our physical body. In this collision with the physical body, the consciousness of self is actually summoned to the soul.

Let us be clear about the fact that the consciousness of self must not be confused with the I. The I initially remains in the subconscious, one could say, incomplete. Only during the volcanic period will man experience what the I really is. But the I acquires earthly consciousness by submerging with the astral body into the etheric body and colliding with the etheric body and physical body. And in this collision with the physical body, the ego becomes aware of itself: this is how the sense of self arises from the moment when the physical body is so hardened that this collision is strong enough, that is, from a certain point in early childhood, as far as we can remember.

Now the soul must also collide with something in the life between death and a new birth. Here in the physical life, it collides with the physical body, which is given from the physical forces and substances of the outer nature, in order to come to the I-consciousness. After death, between death and a new birth, the soul, in order to come to its now spiritual self-awareness, collides with its own life, which it has just seen in the days after passing through the gate of death and which it keeps looking back on. First, life presents itself in a way that allows us to see it, then it becomes a constant looking back. As spiritual beings, after we have passed through the gate of death and continue to live in the stream of time, looking back on what we have directly experienced in and with death, the soul, as it continues to progress, always encounters this panorama of life in retrospect, which one has had, but which now remains as a spiritual memory. And just as the I is ignited to its I-consciousness here through its collision with the physical body, so after death the I-consciousness is ignited by the look back at our own life, which encounters the last life on earth. As we look back on it, we experience this I-consciousness between death and a new birth. It is different, this sense of self after death, but it is by no means weaker.

What is this sense of self actually like here in the physical world? It is the case that here in the physical world, if we want to become aware of our self, we actually have to rely on it being shown to us through something else in our physical body. It appears to us, as it were, in the mirror of our physical body, this physical self of ours. We feel quite passive in the production of our self, at least if we do not happen to live according to a philosophy like that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. By contrast, after we have passed through the gate of death, we feel constantly active. We give ourselves, as it were, our now much more intense consciousness again and again by looking back at our own life and connecting with the consciousness of the self: we want us, and always want us again, and we may want us, because we remain unlosable to ourselves by the indelible impression of what we have once lived through. I would like to use these words to express very clearly what is experienced in the consciousness between death and a new birth. And the consciousness between death and a new birth is very different from the consciousness here on the physical plane. Here on the physical plane, no one can actually look back on their own birth from their own experience in normal consciousness. Someone cannot observe their own birth in their own experience with normal consciousness; remembering only begins later. I have said this before: if people only want to rely on experience, on what they have experienced themselves in life, then actually no one can believe in their own birth; basically, they only experience their birth when they look back clairvoyantly. If someone says: I will not believe in the spiritual world until I have seen it myself; I do not want to believe what spiritual science tells me, I only believe what I have seen myself - then one can basically answer: And your own birth? It seems as if you do believe that this has taken place? But you cannot have any experience of it. — This shows how even something quite significant for human life is only conscious of a conclusion for normal consciousness. We only ever assume for normal consciousness that we are born by concluding: we look just like the people we have already observed being born, so we must also be born. — But it is only based on a conclusion.

The situation is quite different in the time between death and a new birth. Just as little as one can look back in normal consciousness to one's own birth, so much one always looks with this remembered panorama of life to the moment of one's death. And just as birth fades away for earthly consciousness, so too does the event of death always stand in retrospective consciousness before the soul life between death and a new birth, but now viewed from the other side. Here on the physical plane, man sees the experience of death only from one side. There are many gruesome aspects to it. But one should not conclude from this that it is now terrible for the one who lives on to have to look back forever at the experience of death. Seen from there, this is the most beautiful, greatest, most significant experience that a human soul can ever have, because it always shows in a radiant way how the spirit conquers material existence. This continuous review of the experience of death has an invigorating, uplifting and elevating effect on all consciousness. It is mainly through this experience of death that the soul says to itself: I live here in the spiritual world, with the spiritual world. The fact that the soul has the strength to say this makes this experience of death of immense importance for the life that begins after death.

I said: Man feels how his body and everything that was on earth leaves him, and he feels how he must now balance his consciousness through inner activity, how he must achieve something for his consciousness that he used to receive through the instrument of the body. I can live consciously without the body within me: the possibility of grasping this thought produces a much stronger consciousness than one can have within earthly life. And this is the lesson that death teaches us: that one can feel that the body is leaving, but that now begins a time when you are no longer dependent on your body to feel yourself as an ego, now begins a time when you, so to speak, pour the spiritual forces into your soul-shell yourself, so that you continually call yourself to consciousness. By recognizing how this calling-oneself-to-consciousness can be there when one's body is snatched away, one has the life impression of the inner creation of existence. This begins with death, where one must begin to experience oneself as an ego without the body. This is the starting point for continuing to feel oneself as an ego without the body by looking back at the experience of death. When the spiritual researcher's gaze, by bringing the spiritual world to life within him, causes souls that have passed through the gateway of death to emerge in the imaginations on the field of consciousness within, one learns to recognize how the dead experience. One learns to recognize differences that arise. Of course, one can only describe individual cases. Let us consider one such difference.

One learns to recognize how human souls appear at the scene of the soul's observation after death. These human souls are of two kinds: those human souls that have already entered the spiritual world before our death, which we therefore find inside as disembodied souls, and those souls that are still embodied in the body on earth. We are also able to experience those that are still on earth in the same way. As the scene of earthly existence disappears from us, we are left with the possibility of still knowing ourselves connected to what was spiritual. Only the physical disappears from us, our soul expands, unites with the vast universe, and precisely because of this, the possibility is given to know and experience that we are still connected to the soul even as the physical, as it were, rushes away from us.

But there is now a difference between the experience of one kind of soul and the other kind of soul. When we experience a human soul in the spiritual world, then of course we do not experience it in such a way – it hardly needs saying, but those who have not yet understood anything about looking in the spiritual world believe that – that one confronts it as one confronts an external being; but one experiences it in such a way that one feels the being emerging in consciousness. And now, when we encounter a soul that has already been disembodied, that has already passed through the gate of death, we have the inner experience of its presence. This is where the impression begins. We know: there is a soul. But we must, as it were, live ourselves into it, feel into it. We must receive the imagination of it in such a way that we feel ourselves participating in the creation of the imagination.

It is really the case that one would like to describe the matter in the following way: One feels oneself in the spiritual world. The awareness arises: You are not alone now, a soul is approaching you. — Now it is as if, in the physical world, one carries a thought invisibly in one's soul. But one wants to make it visible. So one takes a piece of chalk and draws the thought, makes a picture of it. That is really how it is at first with experiences in the spiritual world. One knows that a real spiritual being is present. In order to see the soul, one must first come into contact with it in such a way that one draws it, as it were, into the spiritual realm as an image. And that is what one does, but one is aware of being active in creating the imagination. And when, through the music of the spheres, it wants to speak its essence to our essence, as the human being here announces his soul to us in the physical world through his speech, when it lets the music of the spheres resound from within, then one also feels that one cannot remain passive. If you hear someone speaking and you don't want to think about it, you don't have to understand it. You have to participate if you want to understand. So you have to participate everywhere here too. You live together so actively, you know that you have to co-create every piece of the manifestation of the essence of a soul that you can have before you as a manifestation. You create the manifestation, not the essence. There will also be times when you do not feel so intensely active that you know: now there is a human soul. But this soul impels us, without our participating as intensely as in the case just described, to imagination. Imagination arises more by itself before us. Then we are confronted with a soul that is still embodied on earth. And as the human being has passed through the gate of death and gradually lives on in the spiritual world, he gets to know the differences between souls, through the way he relates to the souls that he meets in the spiritual world and those that he imagines on earth.

This is one of the differences in how experiences take place in the spiritual world, as they are directly experienced. And so it is also necessary to distinguish between experiences, inner experiences, whether one is experiencing human souls or the souls of the beings of the higher hierarchies. Please consider what I have described as an experience of human souls. I said: One experiences human souls either in such a way that one creates or recreates the imaginations, or by creating them more or less by oneself. But then the experience can also be like this: One knows that a being is there. This being must also be present as an imagination, it must also be present in the experience if we really want to be with it. But we will not be able to produce the imagination directly in the same way as in the cases just described, where it even builds itself up by itself. We must, by having the experience that a being is there, develop something else in us. We must develop the feeling in us: we create this being in us. We give our powers so that the powers of this being may stream into us. While we feel ourselves as creating in our imagination with the human soul, we feel that with the beings of the higher hierarchies, the angeloi and the archangeloi, these beings create the imagination in us. And so we gradually live ourselves into this co-experience of the spiritual world.

We also know that in the concrete sense this co-experience happens in such a way that through a long series of years – we have already considered its length in relation to the last life on earth – life is experienced backwards again. First we have a few days of the panorama of life, then we begin to experience life on earth in reverse, but in a different way than we experienced it here between birth and death. We experience the last one first, then we experience what we experienced before that, and so back in our mind to birth. We experience it by looking at our life, but now from the other side. I can say that we look at it from the side of the effects. Let's assume something rough, I have said to a person at some time in my life: 'You are a base person', or I have hurt him in some way. Then I have experienced something during my life. What I have experienced is different from what he has experienced. He had experienced the hurt feeling, the insult, the pain, the suffering. Now, in the afterlife in the spiritual world, one experiences the effects of what one has done. The suffering that the other person experienced when we insulted him, we experience this suffering, this pain, in ourselves. We experience the effects of our actions in the other being by living back in this way. We get a certain insight into this experience after death when we focus on something that can reveal itself to the spiritual researcher as a connection between this experience after death and the experience here in the physical world.

What I am going to discuss now is something that can really make us aware of how the spiritual researcher gradually comes to his results, and how it is a prejudice to think that someone who has crossed the threshold to the spiritual world now knows the spiritual world from his own point of view, and that we can ask him anything. We must experience it again and again when the spiritual researcher talks about this and that, especially in public, and one - as it may seem desirable from certain points of view - gives a question-and-answer session on all things in heaven and on earth and the whole of infinity, by assuming that anyone who looks into the spiritual world already knows everything that can be known there. That is about as clever as if someone here would say: You have eyes, you know Munich, so describe California to me! — It is really the case in the spiritual world that one must acquire step by step what is to be understood from the spiritual world, and it is naive to believe that everything there does not have to be looked at step by step first. Now, the spiritual world is still different from here in the physical world. Here in the physical world, if you, I mean, have never been to Heidelberg and now want to describe Heidelberg, you go there, don't you, you set yourself in motion. In the spiritual world, things have to come to us, and we have to develop the power of waiting, the inner power of experience, in our souls. Things enter our field of vision when we have made ourselves capable of perceiving them. The Heidelberg of the spiritual world must come to us, we must prepare our soul for it. It is always in a sense dependent on the grace with which we are endowed, whether we can learn something about this or that in the spiritual world. In this way, the spiritual researcher can gradually be taught about the secrets of the spiritual world.

Now I would like to discuss a spiritual research result from a certain point of view today that I have not yet discussed here from this point of view. When, after developing certain inner, that is, spiritual powers of observation, one observes the soul experience of the human being between falling asleep and waking up in the spiritual world, when one observes the sleeping person as a soul, as he is outside of his physical body – one gets to know many things, but one must learn to look from a certain point of view if one wants to grasp something – then one notices that in sleep a person is actually constantly active in his soul, much more active than during waking hours. While awake, a person makes use of the activity that his body develops, and this is what he places himself in as a soul, this is what he lives in. In sleep, on the other hand, he lives in his own activity. And if you follow this, you will find that in sleep, man relives in a different way what he has experienced in the physical world from waking to falling asleep. Let us assume that I have done something, have read this or that: in my sleep I relive the whole reading, I go through everything again. We just don't have this kind of consciousness in our normal waking life yet, so that it also becomes I-conscious, but that is why it still takes place in the soul, only vaguely, but it is the soul that actually now actively processes what it has experienced during the day. The thoughts are transformed in such a way that they can bear fruit in the soul. We process as fruits of life what we have worked for during the day. During sleep, we always actively incorporate the fruits of life, the results of our life.

Then the spiritual researcher can make a discovery. When he compares this sleep experience that the person has here with the experiences that the person has in the years or decades after he has passed through the gate of death and thus walks through his life backwards, it is interesting that the person walks through his life in such a way that he actually lives through the nights, not the days. As he looked back on the day every night, he now experiences it in the world of the soul. It is the same thing that one experienced in the waking consciousness, but seen from sleep. We experience this in such a way that it is very strange. Most of the time, one does not think about it, but actually, in the physical life, our memory only extends to the experiences of the day. We remember what we have in our waking consciousness. Now, after death, we remember what we have relived during the nights, what we have gone through in our earthly life. Then the conscious memory of the night experiences occurs. I did not express this so clearly earlier, simply because I did not know it. Such things arise in a successive spiritual research.

But one thing comes to light that is important, important for the consciousness that we are to create in our collective work in the branches. I have previously – you can read about it – pointed out from a different point of view the fact that the life in the soul is about a third of the time one has lived through between birth and death. Reasons for this are given in the books. But these reasons are given from a different point of view than the one I am giving now. One lives through the nights of life. How long does one actually sleep normally? One sleeps through a third of one's life. It is approximately true that one sleeps a third of one's life. Now, by passing through the nights after death, a third of earthly life lasts. This is connected with passing through the nights. It is tremendously interesting and important. Because the previous statement was based on completely different reasons. I have recorded this again, for example in 'Occult Science in Outline': after death, reliving the same thing again takes a third of earthly life, the Kamaloka life. Now, from a completely different point of view, which was not thought of at all before, it turns out again: this Kamalokaleben is one third of earthly life - from the point of view that one lives through the nights. You see, these are the kinds of things that, when they occur again and again, are so tremendously supportive and strengthening as proving forces for what spiritual science can give to man. One searches for a truth from a certain starting point and arrives at the conclusion that the Kamaloka life lasts for a third of the earth-lives. Then one arrives at the same result from quite a different point of view. These results support each other. We come across this again and again and it gives precisely that certainty which is also given to him who cannot yet do research himself. I have often called attention to this harmony. By following in detail how things are found in the life of the branch, we gradually gain inner certainty and conviction, even though we still have a long way to go in making our own experiences and gaining our own experiences on our own path of knowledge.

And now, in conclusion, I would like to share with you a truth that is of particular interest for our time, although it can always interest people. In my public lecture, I already spoke from one point of view about the death that occurs when a person in the prime of life is hit by a bullet, for example, and his physical body is effectively taken away from him. As I said, I have shown what becomes of these unused forces. I have already shown this from various points of view. Today I would like to point out this experience of death from yet another point of view.

How does someone enter the spiritual world who has not lost his physical body through illness or old age, but who has lost his body violently through a bullet or other injury? I have discussed what remains of his unused powers. But how he enters the spiritual world himself, that becomes a mystery. Especially in a time like ours, when so many souls enter the spiritual world through the gate of death. Their body has been taken from them by an external influence. In the spiritual world they differ greatly from the souls whose bodies have been taken away through illness or old age. In order to explain and understand such things, one must be able to place the right thing next to the right thing in the spiritual world. One must now be able to ask: how must one combine the phenomenon that is becoming a mystery in order to solve it? And here it becomes evident that this phenomenon must be put together with something that is experienced in the physical world. Now, let us characterize the experience here in the physical world in such a way that we first look at the coarsely materialistic-minded spirits who want to accept nothing but what can be grasped in a rough way through sense experience, which, because it makes a rough impression, is designated as being. But there is something else in this world that makes this life valuable, and that something else is ideals. Of course, the most crude materialists will say: you cannot eat ideals, they have no proper being, they are mere thoughts. But those people who bring ideals into their lives are actually working for the right fertilization, elevation and enlivenment of earthly existence. That which is not in a purely materialistic sense must be brought into the course of earthly existence in order to make this life valuable. Idealists are those who, in a certain sense, are messengers from divine worlds for earthly existence. For ideals are something like messages from divine worlds, something that belongs to the physical world but does not come from it. You cannot observe ideals, nor can you experiment on ideals to demonstrate them through experience. Yet ideals are like messages from a spiritual world.

When the human soul, from whom the body has been taken, for example, by a bullet in the prime of life, passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, it not only leaves unused powers that are used in the way I have already indicated, but it also brings a very specific consciousness into the spiritual worlds. Such a soul enters the spiritual world through the gate of death differently than other souls who were able to complete their lives or whose body was taken from them by an illness. These souls enter the spiritual world bringing with them the thought of something that could have been down there in the physical world, namely their own life from the point at which they sacrificed themselves. As far as the abilities are concerned, what could have been, was already destined for the physical world, could have been its natural life for the next few years. There would have been the possibility that, say, two years after the death the body would have existed as a physical body in front of others. Now it does not exist. There could have been something in the physical world that is now not there. This is taken up by the soul, from whom the body has been taken away, into the spiritual world.

Now it is just as necessary for the spiritual world to be able to proclaim that something exists up there as for something to exist down there in the world that has the potential of this coarse existence, but which does not live out as a coarse material existence. This proclamation is something similar for the spiritual worlds as the proclamation of ideals is for the physical world. These are the reverse idealists. Here below, life can take such a course that inclinations do not live out, that souls return from the physical world that have found violent death. This makes a proclamation up there among those who have not experienced this, which means the same as the proclamation of ideals here. Here in the physical existence one proclaims: Not only is valuable that which makes an impression on the senses, but also valuable are the ideals that come from the spiritual world. In the spiritual world, those who have been deprived of their bodies proclaim that there is an effective force that, although intended for the sensual world, does not enter into this sensual world, but enters the world in a different way, and that it animates the spiritual world just as ideals animate the sensual world. This is a very significant result of spiritual research, and it indicates to us that sacrificial deaths also have a significance for the spiritual world, not only the significance that I explained yesterday for the physical world, but also for the spiritual world. Among the souls of the spiritual world, there are those who look to the ordinary course of life, but there are also those who have learned that inclinations can be cut off with a single blow. And they are, so to speak, the reverse idealists for the spiritual world.

And so, little by little, the phenomena of life reveal themselves, the riddles of existence, and one really gains the impression, especially in such times as ours, when so much that is mysterious can be sensed in blood and suffering, of how spiritual science can first place man in the whole of full life. Humanity is progressing. Natural science as it exists today did not exist in the past; it has emerged out of the dim darkness of soul striving. In the same way, spiritual science must come into being. In the future, man will not be able to do without it. Today it still has many opponents, but man will feel more and more the riddles of existence and thereby more and more the necessity of approaching the riddles of existence in a spiritual-scientific way. This must arise again and again in our souls as the thought that holds us together with our spiritual movement, that points out to us, as it were, how we seek within our spiritual movement something that must spread more and more in humanity, and that we must persevere through all the opposition that still exists in our present time in a very natural way.

I would like to emphasize this in our time, especially in view of today's reflection, as the seriousness of our time should remind us in these days to do everything we can, out of our strength, to truly incorporate spiritual science into the development of humanity, as far as it is up to us. And I would like to focus this admonition to the effect that we must now make this thought all the more alive in us, because the circumstances of the times can really lead to our not being able to be together as often as in normal times. And so let me address this admonition to our souls, that we work all the more faithfully and devotedly in our individual branches in these times of war, even if the collaboration between you and me, for example, may now be less frequent until we return to normal times, because traveling around the world is now much more difficult than usual, and it may be that we have to learn right now to rely on ourselves and work independently in the individual branches. What we can do in this direction will bear real fruit for that spiritual striving in our minds that must flow into the evolution of humanity. For it must be pointed out again and again that The great sacrifices that so many people have to make in the present, and which are so intimately connected with what death, as a mystery and as pain, hides in the development of mankind, these events can only have a proper relationship to our soul life if we can look at them from the point of view of spiritual science, in the context of the history of mankind.

It is not my intention to go into all kinds of inhibiting and hindering things, which may already have reached your ears in the last few days because they had to be discussed somewhere. But these things have shown how necessary it is that we allow ourselves to be taken up quite objectively by the fruitfulness and necessity of the spiritual-scientific movement, and that we can separate from it that which arises as our personal wishes and desires and will always stand in the way of the right course of our spiritual-scientific work as an obstacle and hindrance. Spiritual science is so rich in content that it can occupy us entirely objectively. Let us try to remind ourselves often how easy it is for personal, ambitious or vain striving to mix with what we should actually take hold of and allow ourselves to be taken hold of by as a spiritual life pulsating through the world.

Some events that have taken place within our society have already suggested to our souls: Oh, there is blood flowing out there, a large part of humanity is struggling for things whose significance cannot yet be measured, and there is a spiritual movement that could truly stimulate interest in purely objective terms, in which one does not need to focus on what is only personal, but there is so much of the personal in it, and at such a time when the soul must feel obliged to live together with the great events. That is also a source of pain, what was possible in terms of mixing the personal with what should be impersonal.

Now, again and again, and especially today, we should look from our isolated lives at what all of European humanity and humanity beyond is experiencing, and say to ourselves: the right fruits, the hard-won ones, will only arise in the future if what spiritual science wants to incorporate into the development of humanity is added to humanity. When what can be achieved in thought through spiritual science unites with the fruits of blood and pain, of suffering and deprivation, which will live on for the future, then one day a spiritual life, a human life, will flourish in the fields that today claim so many victims, a life worthy of these victims. Looking at this, we want to conclude with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

May many such souls arise within our ranks, directing their minds to the spiritual realm, then the fruits and blossoms that arise from their efforts will truly be able to become not only a personal blessing but also a blessing for all mankind. In this spirit, whatever life may bring, we want to continue to work together on our cause with great intensity!

Automated Translation

Yesterday we described the path of Christian initiation and saw how tremendously difficult it is, so difficult that from the first steps it requires a separation from daily life. Therefore, in our time, life is not compatible with that path. Because of this, the occultists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the need to create the possibility of making the path of initiation more accessible. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concepts of humanity had changed, as was particularly evident in the time of Copernicus and Galileo. The path therefore had to be in line with the new ways of thinking, especially with the natural science that was developing at the time. The Rosicrucian path accommodated this necessity. It leaves no question unanswered, be it in the field of religion or in that of science. This initiation reveals to us the deepest depths of biblical wisdom and empowers us to meet all the demands of modern life. This path is named after the founder of the Rosicrucian school, Christian Rosenkreutz, whose true name, however, is known only to the initiated.

The Rosicrucian path is different from the Christian one, although it has the same goal. Let's take a look at what it consists of. It consists of deeds and actions in the innermost part of the soul, so inward that other people need not notice them and they can easily be accomplished between all the ordinary pursuits of life. These are purification exercises that help a great deal, and they are:

1. concentration of thought,

2. initiative of action,

3. balance in joy and in suffering, 4. positivity in spiritual life,

5. impartiality of judgment,

6. carrying out all the above together in harmony.

The main condition is the constant repetition of such exercises. The result is the transformation of the etheric body, which is the carrier in which all our habits, which we owe to repetition, are, so to speak, registered. The plant, for example, which already has an etheric body, shows us this law of repetition by constantly producing new leaves; whereas where the plant's astral body is, this law fails.

The necessity for repetition also applies to human beings in relation to their higher development. Mere intellectual comprehension is not enough to transform the etheric body. This is the basis of the effect of religious exercises, in which repetition is always considered for the esoteric life. That is why, for example, the Lord's Prayer is repeated several times; and it is not enough just to understand it.

[First exercise:] Let us now describe the first exercise, that of concentration. We choose a time and place when our mind is at its calmest and begin to think about some random object. The object must be chosen by ourselves and should preferably be without suggestive properties, that is, be uninteresting, for example, a pin. Our thought must remain fixed on the pin, even when all possible concrete forms of the pin are considered, as are all the concepts that relate to it. Only the image of the pin should be held. This exercise must last five minutes, and the most important thing about it is not the object that is thought of, but the strength with which it is thought. The object of concentration can therefore be different every day, and can even be changed several times in one day.

Second exercise: initiative of action. You decide to perform some action at a certain time of the day; the more insignificant, the better, when you are sure not to be disturbed. For example, you say to yourself: “This time tomorrow, you will put a chair in that corner, and nothing will stop you from doing it.” Repeating such small actions develops a strong will in a short time.

Third exercise: balance and impartiality. The esoteric disciple must be able to control desire and suffering, suppressing the involuntary automatic laughter and crying, and being as little as possible elated or saddened to death. Of course, this does not make one insensitive. On the contrary, the student must become more and more sensitive and understand all levels of suffering and joy, but in everything he must always remain master of himself.

Fourth exercise: The positivity of the soul, that is, the nature of thinking and feeling, to seek in all things that which is good, beautiful and useful, even if it appears to be the opposite. Even in a madman, one can still find the divine spark of reason. To seek the truth in a world of error does not mean to become uncritical, but to take criticism so far as to discover what other people usually miss. In a Persian legend, we have an example of such positivity as understood by Christ. As he was traveling with his disciples, they saw the carcass of a dog in advanced decomposition. The apostles turned away in disgust, talking among themselves about the hideous sight. Christ, on the other hand, stopped in front of the carcass and pointed out to his disciples how beautiful the dog's teeth were.

Fifth exercise: Impartiality of judgment. This means giving up the absolute in personal opinion and always being prepared to change it when it is reasonable to do so. We must always be willing to learn something new, whether it comes from a child or a blade of grass.

[Sixth exercise:] Once you have practiced each of these exercises for a month, you should try to perform all five in harmony during the sixth month. This harmonization, by the way, must already begin gradually in the second month if the performance of the second exercise is not to detract from that of the first. In the third month, one should also do the first two exercises and continue in this way as far as one's daily duties permit. These exercises must act on the astral body; the impression made on it must be so strong that it retains it until the state of sleep when it is separated from the physical body. The training of the Rosicrucian must enable him to think without external stimulus. He must be able to draw the stimulus to think from within himself, so that the thought depends more and more on his will and is not simply produced by circumstances. These exercises gradually enable us to direct our attention to the facts of the supersensible world, the knowledge of which is the main thing in occult teachings. Many regret that Theosophy always speaks of worlds that are not accessible to ordinary perception, while science, on the other hand, proves everything it teaches. However, elementary Theosophy has always had this transcendental character in all occult schools.

Anyone who has understood the theory and tests it in life will see how everything fits together. Incidentally, there is an even higher stage, which is described in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. I apologize for quoting myself. But this book contains a sequence of thoughts, each of which follows from the one before in such a way that you could neither put one in the place of the other nor remove one from it.

The second stage is that you achieve the so-called “imagination” through a very special contemplation of yourself. One imagines pictures in the mind's eye, to which one devotes one's full attention, thereby awakening the imagination or imaginative consciousness. Again, at this point, a conversation takes place between the master and his student. The master says: See how the plant has its root in the earth, how it unfolds leaves and flowers; feel how it grows and how it has its juices within, and then look at the human being and learn to understand the difference. The plant is unconscious; but in man everything is reflected back as pleasure and suffering in varying degrees. In man, the red blood flows as the carrier of passions and instincts, while in the plant the chaste green sap moves, the passionless chlorophyll. Experience this! Then look to the real ideal of the future, when man will have transformed himself and his blood will have become as pure and chaste as the sap of the plant. The rose can serve as a symbol of this transformation, in which that which is green below turns red above without losing its purity and chastity. Feel this development towards ever higher levels! Feel further what is meant by the words: “Die and Become!” All passions must be overcome, and the red blood must become pure again. You see all this in the Rosicrucian symbol: in the black cross the death and in the seven roses the signs of the higher becoming.

In Jesus, the blood had become so pure that, according to legend, when the blood flowed from the five wounds, bees settled on the wound on the side and absorbed the blood, because it had become so pure that honey could be made from it, as from the pure blood of the plant. The main thing is to immerse yourself imaginatively in the imagined image, not just to imagine an image. The same applies to all symbols, for example the Key of Solomon: above is a white flying dragon, below is a black one that dies.

Through conscientious practice, one comes to wake up in the morning with the awareness that one has spent the night in a world of symbols. It is like emerging from the depths of the sea into the light, and the darkness brightens.

Then comes the third stage, the “reading of occult writing”. The images present themselves to the imagination, and it is no longer possible to think of deception. These images are the language of the higher beings: angels, archangels, seraphim, thrones and so on. Thus we experience the world of spiritual beings. From the real image, we learn to distinguish imagination through the effect it has on us. For example, the image of a glowing iron will never burn us like the glowing iron itself; and even though the image of a lemonade makes our mouths water, it will never quench our thirst. Through the imagination exercises, we learn to read the occult writing, and that is a significant step forward.

Then comes the fourth stage: the “preparation of the philosopher's stone”. This term might make you laugh when you think of the many ancient prescriptions that refer to it; but we know what it is about. Let us look at the plant again. Man inhales oxygen, accumulates carbon, and exhales carbonic acid. The plant, on the other hand, inhales carbonic acid, retains the carbon, and releases the oxygen, which man can use again. The breathing process of the plant, although considered unimportant as described in science, is of great importance in occultism. Because everything in the world is determined and ordered according to a law of harmony, the Master prescribes a rhythmic breathing method for the disciple, which we can only hint at because it belongs to the realm of esoteric teaching. The breathing process is arranged in such a way that the person processes carbon, as the plant does, so that here we actually have the purification and transformation of the blood, which is thereby made more plant-like. Carbon is the philosopher's stone. And here we have its preparation in broad strokes: the human being is the retort, learning to become a plant in the higher sense. But only those who can understand it in this higher sense learn it, and not those who would only seek a new source of material benefit in it.

Let us now turn to the fifth step. The Master says to the disciple: “Learn the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm!” Everything that surrounds the human being in the outer world is contained within him. We can, for example, mention the connection between the eye and the sun. If you abstract from everything external and concentrate solely on one point of the eye or the heart, then you understand the effect of the sun in the cosmos, because the solar substance is found in the eye and in the heart. Thus the disciple learns that the sun gave him the eye and the heart, just as he has different parts of the brain from the moon. In this way, the disciple gradually penetrates into his surroundings.

Now we come to the sixth stage: the disciple no longer thinks, let us say, of the heart, but of the forces that gave it to him, and so he does with all things. In this way one penetrates into the soul of things and experiences their unique life. For example, one would think that if one tore a leaf from a plant, it must feel pain like a body from which a finger is torn. But no, it is not. The plant enjoys being picked or burned or cut with a scythe. Nothing is more beautiful to see with the clairvoyant eye than at harvest time, when plants and flowers voluptuously enjoy the cut of the scythe. On the other hand, the plant suffers when it is pulled out of the earth by its roots. On the other hand, it is a pleasure for a stone to be split apart instead of being walled up with other stones to form a building. For salt, for example, being dissolved in water is a pleasure, whereas the crystallization process is suffering. In ancient times, the whole earth was embedded in water. Gradually it solidified, and it was born as if from the pains of the soul of the stones. We walk on fossilized suffering, as on the other hand, from their spiritualization, their bliss will arise. Paul said: Every created thing must pay for its birth with pain.

We have now reached the seventh stage, that of “bliss, which is inexpressible in human words. It provides the solution to the mystery of Christ.

As we can see, for this upward Rosicrucian path, one need only enter into oneself and at the same time remain in one's everyday life.

It has been requested that we also talk about what is usually called “white and black magic” and that this be linked to some other concepts that theosophists are familiar with.

Now, what needs to be touched upon here is a very wide-ranging and extensive field of occult and spiritual-scientific observation, and it will therefore only be possible to touch on a few elementary things in this area, so to speak. But even these presuppose that what we are now considering is taken up as if it were meant only for students of spiritual science and not for anyone else who is not equipped with a spiritual scientific attitude and way of thinking. Certain conditions must be met if one is to speak about such a subject.

The words “white and black magic” are often used in theosophical circles, and we are confronted with the term “black magician” as an accusation all too often, even from those who work in the theosophical tradition. Some of you will have heard it said with a light heart that this or that is “black magic”. Yes, it has even happened that after reading our “Mitteilungen” - as it seems to me it was the first issue - people in one place said: What happened at that general assembly and was reported in the “Mitteilungen” is black magic. At the time, some people had actually claimed that an evil spell must have been cast over the proceedings of that general assembly. This is just one example of something that occurs more often and that stems from a rather trivial conception not only of the term “black magic” but of the term “magic” in general.

We must first be clear about what is meant by “magic” in order to then understand what is meant by “black magic”. Many people believe the following: They say that occult powers can be acquired, and usually have in mind quite inferior, elementary occult powers. This is because those who talk about such things usually know nothing about higher occult powers; they generally have no idea at all of what occult powers actually are. Usually people then add that someone is practising black magic if they use such powers in the service of personal selfishness. Such a statement is one of those of which it cannot even be said that it is wrong. But it does not matter much that it is said to be right, because nothing special is said with it. It is the outgrowth of a completely abstract way of thinking. He who wishes to speak of such things must, above all, stand firmly on the ground of reality, whether it be physical or spiritual reality; he must know what is real, and then he will no longer prattle about all kinds of things that have no connection with reality.

Does such a statement, that occult powers should not be used for personal selfish ends, not in some respects represent an impossible demand for people in the present day? This question must be answered first. Of course, those who say this make “Thou shalt not be selfish” their first commandment! That is certainly a supreme commandment. But for the real thinker, the question is not whether such commandments should be established, but whether such commandments can be fulfilled at all. And anyone who believes that the commandment not to be selfish can be fulfilled by people of the present day without further ado is labouring under a very great illusion. He who recognizes it as his duty to dispel illusions must also dispel the illusion that such a commandment can easily be fulfilled.

Perhaps someone will say: I want to work in the world in an entirely selfless way! - At first he cannot know that among the forces with which he works, there are a great many occult forces. Occult forces emanate from every human being. If someone says they want to work in the world in a selfless way, that is a very, very beautiful ideal. But if you try to ask further: Why do you want to be selfless, why do you impose this commandment on yourself, to be selfless? - you will get strange answers, for example: Through selflessness I gradually ascend to higher levels of perfection; I cannot bear to be a worthless person; I want to be a person who is valuable in the world. If you were to analyze this feeling, you would discover that behind the reasons for selflessness there is often the most incredible selfishness, often much greater selfishness than is found in people who do not want to be selfless at all, but simply give in to their selfish instincts. Imagine the thought, and you will see how much selfishness there is in the urge for selflessness.

And how could it be otherwise? Selfishness is a force that was not planted in human nature by the gods for man to so readily deny or negate. Selfishness is one of the most essential things through which man works. When we inquire into the reasons for selfishness, when we ask ourselves why the gods, the kind gods, have implanted selfishness in man, Since this is something so abominable in the opinion of so many people, we are born out of real occultism the answer that selfishness is a very powerful protection against what would happen to man in the world if he did not have this selfishness. Do you know what best protects man from using certain rather evil powers, which we will talk about in a moment? It would be easy today for someone who wanted to practice black magic themselves to take on a student and teach them certain techniques and machinations of real black magic; they would be able to work in the most horrific ways in the world. But most people won't do that without further ado. And do you know why not? Not for the simple reason that they are afraid, because they fear for their personality. They perceive a little of the consequences in spirit and fear selfishly. And that is quite good, that they are afraid and therefore leave it at that. If, at the beginning of the development of the earth, people had received everything that exists in terms of forces to affect the astral, the etheric and the physical body, then these people would have done terrible things in the world. But selfishness was given to them, and that causes man to first take care only of himself, and to be completely absorbed in caring for himself. The gods have erected selfishness around people like a protective wall. It is selfishness that veils man's insight into the things that lie behind the world of appearances. It is extremely important to consider this. It is one of the wise brakes that the gods have set up so that man does not intrude too quickly into the spiritual realms. So that is egoism; it is a good protective device.

So we should not be throwing words around like that, because there is still a long way to go before man can become selfless, before he can become ripe for selflessness. There is no need to point out how all preaching of selflessness looks so strange in our age, in the age of the most potent egoism, where everyone wants to grab as much as they can of what is established in the social order. So this “selflessness” leads to surrounding oneself entirely with a whirlwind of illusions. You wouldn't believe, if you didn't think about it thoroughly, how people today wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions, how, in particular, “theories” allow our contemporaries to wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions. Social theories are being shaped and preached by professors and non-professors alike. But a large part of the theories about the social remedies of the social body are nothing more than an expression of “professorial psychopathy”. You can see it in practice, how people think and act wrongly. Wherever you go, in any society or community, you will find people pondering this or that remedy, for example against unemployment. When there is unemployment, there is hunger. But how do we go about remedying this? Then the decision is made: people have to be given work. And now we invent something to give people work, to keep them busy, so that they get money and can buy what they want. This seems to be a very effective way of averting social damage: giving people something to do. But giving people work at any price is a very dangerous strategy, as long as we don't distinguish between productive and unproductive work. As long as this distinction between productive and unproductive employment is not made, this is even a terrible means in its effect on society. Imagine the radical case: someone wanted to quickly provide work and bread to a number of people in a certain area because a new machine had been invented that had left a number of people without work. He invents an article in which he uses worthless waste products for toilet articles. The people can then earn something and buy bread. But this is only a means of transferring poverty from one side to the other, because nothing is produced in this way, nothing is created. Everyone can consider the following case for themselves: someone sits down in a restaurant in the countryside and says, “Waiter, give me ten postcards!” and sends them off without considering how many postmen have to go up four or five floors to deliver them, and without considering that this does not set any real power in motion in the world. No thought is given to the fact that nothing real is achieved that benefits the mind and body. If you tell the person concerned this, he will of course have an excuse. He could say, for example, that new postmen could be hired, thus giving more people work. But no thought is given to the fact that if new people are hired, nothing new is created by their work, but that poverty is only redistributed. This shows that people must first know something about the distribution of work on earth before they can begin with the smallest idea of reform. In the context of the world, ignorance that wants to reform is terrible. It is terrible that people often do not have the patience to wait until they have learned to have an overview of how to help, but instead engage in clubby activities to get this or that done. These are all illusions with which people shroud themselves. And it is also an illusion when people speak of selflessness in trivial theosophy. If we want to teach ourselves about white and black magic, we must first bring to mind some of the concepts of “magic”, of which those who have heard the last lectures already know something. I have also touched briefly on the nature of magic in public.

What is magic? In all the old occult schools, there were three ways of ascending to the highest realms of knowledge. The first way was that of the initiate, the second way was that of the clairvoyant, and the third way was that of the magician. These are three fundamentally different things: initiation, clairvoyance and magic. Let us first make clear to ourselves, by means of a simple comparison, what an initiate, what a clairvoyant and what a magician is. Imagine some region where no one has ever heard of railways, steamships and so on, where people live without railways and without steamships. In such a region, the fact that there are railways and steamships is pure occultism. Occult means something like secret, something that people know nothing about. Now when someone from the area where there are no railways and so on travels to another area where he sees railways and steamships, and then returns to his homeland, he tells his people that there are railways and steamships. He knows it from his own experience, because he has seen into a world that is still a secret for others.

Anyone who is introduced to the higher worlds through occult training is, in this respect, a clairvoyant. He knows from his own experience that there are spiritual worlds and beings, spiritual forces. The spiritual worlds have different levels. A person at one level can be clairvoyant, can see some phenomena but not others. Now you have to remember something that has been said here often: to find and independently explore occult truths, clairvoyance is needed. But clairvoyance is not needed to understand these truths. For that, ordinary human understanding is sufficient, if it is only applied correctly in a sufficiently comprehensive way. Anyone who says that they can only understand what is communicated in occult reports if they are a clairvoyant is simply not using their mind sufficiently. Man cannot find the occult truths with the mind, but he can see them. Everything that is told from spiritual research can be understood if one is willing to think about it thoroughly. However, one cannot find the occult truths without clairvoyance; clairvoyance is needed for that. So what is proclaimed by Theosophy can also be understood by those who think about it thoroughly.

You can receive the stories up to the highest realms of occult experiences, and then you can understand them. So there were always clairvoyants in the occult schools who learned to see into the spiritual worlds through the methods that were used. These were often very lengthy methods. But besides these clairvoyants, there were always initiates. These were those who, through their comprehensive and willing application of their powers of mind, had come to understand the facts and laws of the higher worlds. These were initiates. Today, this relationship between initiates and clairvoyants is hardly possible anymore because today every person is afflicted by the great selfishness of wanting to see for themselves. People today can hardly imagine the love and trust that prevailed in the occult schools of the past. There was the clairvoyant, who perhaps through incarnations, in a self-denying way, applied the methods and trained himself to look into the higher worlds, who could see much in these higher worlds, and who refrained from learning the laws of these higher worlds, in order not to be held back by laws, but to prove a greater service to humanity through a more rapid development of clairvoyant abilities. This renunciation is not to be taken lightly. It is a great and mighty step when anyone decides to become a seer without at the same time becoming acquainted with the whole system of laws in the higher worlds; and if he waits, perhaps for thousands of years, before he attains this, he can only do so on condition that he places himself under the strict care of a chosen guru or teacher. For if he approached the things of the spiritual world as a mere clairvoyant, without knowing its laws, he would soon go astray and into the most dreadful errors if he did not accept the guru's advice in all important matters.

There were others who renounced the development of higher clairvoyant gifts altogether because they wanted to be initiated into the laws of the higher worlds. They trusted in love and devotion what the seers told them, but they knew the laws. To explain this, one can cite an example from the ordinary world. Imagine a person who sees extremely well, who can see all kinds of phenomena with his eyes, but who understands nothing of the laws of light phenomena. And imagine another person who is very short-sighted and can hardly see a few centimetres in front of his eyes, but who is well acquainted with the physical laws of light phenomena. The two can work well together, one person knowing the laws and the other not knowing them at all, but instead seeing the phenomena. And this applies even more to the higher spheres. It is possible for one to become an initiate of higher degrees without laying claim to clairvoyant powers. In the old occult schools it was quite usual for these two classes to be side by side. Clairvoyants willingly accepted the advice of initiates who were not clairvoyant at all. This was especially necessary for cases where a high degree of clairvoyance and a high degree of initiation were required, for example, for everything related to the astrological field. It was the case that those who wanted to fully comprehend the complicated laws of astrology usually had to do without the high level of clairvoyance that the astral clairvoyants had to acquire. They complemented each other. Only in recent times, when man thinks and feels in a materialistic way, must it be realized that it is impossible to separate these two fields strictly, and therefore no distinction has been made between the two classes since the fourteenth century, so that the teacher gives no one an initiation without at the same time giving a certain degree of clairvoyance. This is necessary because it cannot be reconciled with the selfishness and lack of trust that prevail today. Therefore, no distinction is made between the two, because people today cannot be selfless.

Now, however, the magician differs from both the clairvoyant and the initiate. For someone who can see into the higher worlds, it does not follow that he can already control and apply the forces that are at work in the material world. Or do you think that a person who has brought knowledge of the locomotive, the steamship and the steam engine to a region could also build such a machine? He can tell them what such things look like, but he will not immediately understand how to build them. The fact that the clairvoyant can see into the higher worlds does not yet mean that he also knows how to control and apply the forces that work in the sensory world. Only he is a magician or adept who knows how to apply the higher forces, of which all physical events are an expression, in the world here, who is thus able not only to call upon the physical forces and powers when something is at stake in his actions, but who can set the higher forces in motion. In our time, it is no small thing to be a magician or adept. There has never been a time in the development of humanity when the path of the magician or adept was so completely opposed to our own as it is today. And today, under certain circumstances, one best serves humanity by limiting oneself to spreading the knowledge of the higher worlds, and even - perhaps with a bleeding heart - refraining from it in cases where the application of magical powers might be appropriate. For today's public life is so alien to the concept of magistery that under certain circumstances the influence of higher worlds on this world would mean a setback if magical powers were applied directly. He who has practised the use of these powers to a certain extent, and who has acquired the knowledge of the mechanism as well, must in certain cases refrain from using these powers, for the simple reason that it is impossible today to go against the current of the world. Not only clairvoyance and initiation belong to the magician, but also practice. That is what it is all about. The magician must practice certain tasks with great dedication over a long period of time. Just think about how much you can know - even in the physical world - without being able to actually do what you can talk about, what you know something about. You can be initiated into many things. You can know exactly how a locomotive is constructed, but without anyone giving you the order to build a locomotive, because he would risk throwing the money out the window. It is the same in the higher realms. Practice makes the magician, perception in the higher worlds makes the clairvoyant, knowledge and realization of the laws in the higher worlds makes the initiate.

In times gone by, it was absolutely forbidden to perform any magical operation without being in harmony with the leaders of the world, the “earthly government”, also known as the great masters of the so-called white lodge. All occult schools, all schools that exist at all and all teachings can only be the lowest step towards higher development; on this step, higher and higher steps must be built up, right up to the actual leaders of earthly development. Those who not only know wisdom but also “rule” the earth in its development, who let wisdom flow into earthly evolution, are on the highest level. They alone are able to indicate for each individual action, based on spiritual forces, whether it disturbs or does not disturb in the whole context. When you build a house and lay out the plan for the house, each individual workman on the house must work in harmony with the plan. And if someone comes along and decides to make a window different from what is provided for in the plan, no matter how beautiful and magnificent that window may be, the whole house is disturbed. If anyone in the world wants to accomplish something through spiritual powers, no matter how significant and grandiose it may be, if it does not fit into the original plan of earthly development, it disturbs earthly development and sometimes throws it back for a long time. A man who applies no spiritual forces can never disturb this plan of earthly development. And why not? Because in relation to spiritual forces, what people do without knowledge of the higher worlds is to natural phenomena as a house is to a house. Whatever is ruined by the weather, by heat and sunlight, must be ruined; that is self-evident in a certain sense. So it is with the intentions of those who have no connection with the higher world. But the actions of those who have some connection with the higher worlds behave, when they do something that is not in harmony with the spiritual world, like someone who hits something with a hammer. So what is necessary for the progress of the human race to take place? When occult forces are applied, it is absolutely necessary that the connection with the central spiritual powers of the world be maintained, and it is absolutely necessary that the spiritual forces not be delivered to anyone who does not want to seek this connection. It is connected with this that in all real occult schools a secret is held over the imparting of spiritual forces, and that no secrets are delivered to anyone who does not undertake to maintain the connection with the leading spiritual entities. Only the “central government” of the earth has the possibility of knowing what is at stake. And this must be known if one is to apply spiritual forces. If one imparts anything to another in an unauthorized manner, whereby this other person can oppose the great plan of earth development, then one commits the first kind of black magic act. Therefore, the following is a basic principle: The first black magic act is the betrayal of occult secrets. Gossip and divulging of occult secrets is the first case of black magic, because in doing so you surrender the occult secrets to those who oppose the central leadership of the earth's development because you do not know the context. Where does this occur, where does it become real? It becomes real wherever occult secrets are used in the service not of the entire earthly leadership but of some limited body that does not want to have any connection with the earthly leadership that serves humanity. If, for example, a person receives the things that he is only allowed to use when he has overcome all national and racial prejudices, earlier delivered, he uses them before he has overcome these prejudices and before he has an idea of what it means to be a “homeless person”, then exactly the same thing that is otherwise white magic goes into the service of black magic. Exactly the same. If that which is intended to serve humanity is used in the service of a separate race, for example to give that race supremacy over the earth, then on a large scale that is black magic, because it does not happen in accordance with the way the earth is run. It is the first requirement: to go beyond what connects us only to one part of humanity. For a modern white magician, this is the first principle. Man should not strive for unselfishness, but for love for all mankind. He can extend the field of his love. He can do that, and that is what it is all about.

Now it happens very often that people try to force through some machinations to get something that can never be communicated to them otherwise. Now we come to the actual methods, to the machinations that are necessary to carry out in order to gain possession of black magic powers. This is something that can be described in great detail. You have seen the first means, the first way to gain possession of black magic powers; it is to let the appointed powers and beings communicate the means to you. Yes, what are they then, these magical means? They are the means by which we can use the spiritual powers to work here in the world of the senses, to achieve results and success here. These are such means. But there are no other effects in the material world than those that emanate from the spiritual worlds. All effects, successes and deeds in the material world emanate from the spiritual worlds. Therefore, anyone who does not want to come to these things by the rightful way of slow study - through those who are initiates or clairvoyants or even adepts or magicians - can only choose another way, and that consists in , instead of turning to those who are the embodiments of higher spiritual entities, he turns to nature itself and tries to eavesdrop on nature and to discern how the spiritual forces have flowed into it. For everything in nature flows into it from the spiritual worlds, and we can again divine these spiritual forces through certain machinations and activities. But the moment we do not let nature act in regard to what we do not know, but instead carry out what we want ourselves, thus acting where we know nothing, in that moment we are also able to obtain forces from the realm of black magic. If we do not want to obtain the inner forces of nature indirectly through wisdom and insight, and if we avoid everything that happens through wisdom and insight on the path of developing inner forces, but choose other means, then we are always on the way to black magic through these other means.

You see, anyone who wanted to become a black magician today would have a large fund for black magic activities from the outset if they were a terrible coward and had a dreadful fear of everything that could happen to them. Such fear within a person is a very good starting point for a black magician, because this fear is only compressed selfishness. Suppose a person intends to practice black magic on a large scale. He would first look around in the world for individuals who are as cowardly as possible. For this stock of fear is a good material that can be so transformed and converted that the cowardly individuals in question acquire certain other powers and strength, without knowledge or insight, to a much greater extent than a person can otherwise have. What would such a magician have to do who wanted to have such arts? He would first have to set up a laboratory in which he trained these cowards to do so. I am speaking radically, but it will be most clear to you this way: to harden themselves completely by the means of constantly cutting into living flesh and seeing blood run. What the hare foot has to a high degree in terms of fear as a certain outward force can be converted into something opposite if one teaches people to harden themselves by cutting into living flesh. For a person who has no fear, this procedure would be of no use at all.

This is, so to speak, the ABC, the very first thing done in black magic. And when that was done, what had formerly been fear in man would change into powers by which he could indeed gain a certain influence over his surroundings; and he who would make use of such assistants would be able to perform the most incredible atrocities in the world. But he who, without assistants, wants to become a great black magician himself sometimes does something quite different. Such a black magician once wanted to become a man of the 15th century, Gilles de Rais, whom the profane world called “Knight Bluebeard”. This man sought to gain powerful occult powers, not by the rightful path of learning, but by transforming certain deeply-held selfish feelings. At the same time, he was an excellent observer of himself. Please excuse me if I use a word that will sound strange. This man was what one might call 'the most radical Christian egoist' or 'egoistic Christian'. There have been and still are people like that. They are the kind of people who see Christianity above all as a bridge to gain as much as possible for themselves, because it is clear to them that a good Christian can go far in bliss. Through self-knowledge he noticed this in his nature and when he had noticed it in himself, he already knew the best means by which one could transform this into incredible magical powers. He was indeed stopped early. He was put on trial and it was shown that the man had started to murder one child after another in 1432 in order to develop his special occult powers. He saw the destruction of life as a special means of extracting from nature the knowledge that he could not obtain himself. During the trial it came to light that the man had murdered 800 children in a short period of time. Now some of you who have read the novel by Mabel Collins, Flita: True Story of a Sorceress, will understand why there is a murder at the beginning. It is part of it. The novel “Flita” was written by someone who knows this. What the black magician wanted could only be developed under the influence of this murder, which is at the starting point of the story.

And now take a serious look at this story and ask yourself what could protect most people from these procedures that I have mentioned, and through which man could certainly be led to the mastery of black magic powers. Selfishness is a very good means of protection against it. Not everyone will be able to overcome themselves to cut into living flesh; most people would faint, and fainting is nothing more than an expression of selfishness. So, in its physical effect, it is a good means of being deterred from practising black magic. It is also difficult to become a Bluebeard; most people are protected from that by their perfectly healthy selfishness; it acts as a barrier to putting oneself in the shoes of the means of acquiring black magic powers.

Well, you see, I just wanted to mention that so as not to use empty phrases. That is not my style. I prefer to talk about real facts. I wanted to show you by example what the acquisition of machinations in the field of black magic consists of. The betrayal of occult secrets to the profane is the first and simplest kind. But the actions I have just characterized are among the teaching methods of black magic, they are, so to speak, the ABCs. And what comes after these ABCs, in which black magic students are taught to “read” – if I were to tell you about that, several of you here would probably faint. So we will stop at this first stage. These things are not at all something to be trifled with, not even in words; they are something most serious; and they are, unbeknownst to people, unfortunately all too widespread in the world. Most people do not even have the will to consider how these things are spread in the world.

Now the development of such things is intimately connected with the whole evolution of the earth, indeed with the evolution of a planet, and we understand such a thing in the right way only when we have an idea of the fact, a planet spiritually affects its successor, the next planet, how, for example, the moon affected the earth, and how, in turn, the earth affects its successor, Jupiter. You all know that the Earth is, in a sense, led by the so-called 'white lodge', in which certain highly developed human individuals are united with individuals of an even higher kind. What are they doing? They are working, they are guiding the evolution of the Earth. While guiding the evolution of the Earth, they are working out a very specific plan. It is actually the case that a specific plan is worked out by the guiding powers during the evolution of each planet. While the Earth is evolving, the plan for the details of how Jupiter, which is replacing the Earth, must be, is being drawn up in the so-called “white lodge” of the Earth. The entire plan is developed in every detail. And herein lies the blessing and the good fortune of progressive development: that we act in accordance with this plan. When a planetary development comes to an end, when our Earth has reached the end of its planetary development, then the Masters of the Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations will also have completed the plan they have worked out for Jupiter.

And now, at the end of such a planetary development, something highly peculiar happens. This plan is simultaneously infinitely reduced and infinitely multiplied by a procedure, so that an infinite number of copies of the entire Jupiter plan are available, but in miniature. It was the same on the moon. The plan of the evolution of the Earth was there, infinitely multiplied and infinitely reduced. And do you know what it is that was worked out by the Masters of Wisdom on the Moon at that time? These are the atoms, the atoms of the Earth. And it is the atoms of the Jupiter evolution whose plan is being worked out by the leading “white lodge” on our planet. That is the real atom, and all other talk about an atom is nothing. Only he recognizes the atom of a planet who recognizes in it the reduced plan of the evolution of the planet. If you want to gradually recognize this atom, which underlies the earth, then the very measures that emanate from the great magicians of the world will confront you with the knowledge of this atom. Now, of course, we can only hint at these things, but we can at least get to know something that gives us an idea of what this is about. In a certain sense, the Earth is composed of these atoms of hers, and every being, all of you yourselves, are in a sense composed of such atoms; and you are in harmony with the whole evolution of the Earth in that you carry within you, in infinite numbers, the reduced-scale plan of the Earth planet, which was worked out earlier. This plan for the earth could only be worked out on the preceding planetary state of our earth, on the moon, and thus on the planet that preceded our development on earth, through the activity of leading beings in harmony with the entire planetary development of Saturn, the sun, the moon, and so on. Now, however, the point is to give the infinite number of atoms that which brings them into the right relationships, arranging them in the right way. The leading spirits of the moon were only able to give them this if they steered the development of the earth in very specific directions. I have already described the paths into which they steered the development of the earth. When the earth emerged again after the development of the moon, it was actually not yet our present earth. It was the earth plus the sun plus the moon. These were one body. If you were to mix today's Earth with the Moon and the Sun and make a single body out of it, you would have what the Earth was at the beginning of its development. First the Sun separated from the Earth, and with it all those forces that were too thin, too spiritual, for man, under whose influence he would have spiritualized too quickly. If man had only been under the influence of the forces contained in this sun-moon-earth body, he would have spiritualized very quickly, he would not have developed down into physical materiality, and he would not have been able to attain a self-awareness, an I-consciousness, which he had to attain.

You all know that there is imaginative knowledge and occult characters [in which imaginative knowledge is expressed]. I can only give you two occult characters now. To discuss further would take us too far. The occult symbol for those forces that would have worked and given direction to the whole evolution of the earth if the sun had remained united with the earth, the occult symbol for those forces that would have spiritualized the earth too soon, is this: in this symbol, the one who is a student of occultism can recognize the forces that quickly lead humanity to spirituality. On the other hand, if humanity had separated from the sun with the whole earth but remained united with the moon, it would very quickly have become ossified and hardened. If the earth had kept the moon within itself, people would very soon have become a kind of puppet, a marionette. They would have descended too deeply into matter, as on the other hand they would have spiritualized too quickly, if the Sun had remained connected with the Earth. Therefore the Moon had to come out of the Earth. And all those forces that have been transported out and that today rule from the Moon and work in from the outside on the Earth, all these forces are represented together in this sign, which looks like a double hook. This is the sign of the beast or the lamb with two horns from the Apocalypse.

The one symbol is called Nachiel, the other Sorat. This second symbol is also called the symbol of the demonic element on earth. All the forces that the black magician develops by using such hideous methods lead to an occult increase on earth of the forces that belong to the demonic nature of the earth and that lead to the hardening of the earth. If many people became black magicians, the result would be that the earth would become more and more like the moon, while through the forces of white magic the earth would become more and more like the sun, like the forces that are in the sun's rays.

So what would an increase of black magic on our earth lead to? It would lead to the hardening of the globe, to the globe becoming a moon. The same forces that were eliminated with the moon, that had developed out of the substance of the earth, are still present in the layers of the earth as an inclination. In addition to all the forces that have the good inclination to become solar forces, the forces that have the inclination to become lunar forces are also still present. Through white magic the earth is more and more approximated to the nature of the sun; through the forces of black magic it is approximated to the nature of the moon. Through white magic everything must be conquered that does not lead to the control of spiritual forces on the path of enlightenment, of wisdom. For all such procedures, such activities, as they have been called, do not lead to the mastery of spiritual forces on the path of wisdom, of insight, not by really looking into them, but they are the nature of the trickery and procedures by which forces are to be gained without enlightenment. Thus the apocalyptic seal is at the same time the sign for the conquest of black magic by white magic. Through the human powers that are transformed, solar powers are born of man himself, so that the lunar powers lie at man's feet.

That is the path the magician must take on our Earth. Then, through the nine steps, which you will get an idea of if you read my 'Theosophy', the forces become the nine stars. So what must the true black magician say to his disciple? Very simple:

Despise reason and science alone,
Let the lying spirit only encourage you
In works of deception and magic,
Then I have you absolutely already!—
To him fate has given a spirit
That always presses forward, unrestrained
And whose hasty striving
skips over the joys of the earth.
I drag him through the wild life,
through shallow insignificance,
he shall fidget, stare, stick,
and his insatiability
shall make food and drink float before greedy lips:
He will beg for refreshment in vain,
And even if he had not given himself over to the devil,
He would still have to perish!

And even if he had not given himself over to the devil, It would be easy, tremendously easy, and here we come to a very subtle chapter on the one hand of human development and on the other of magic - it would be easy to simply wait until all people would be able to see things correctly, which they must first see before they can progress on the path of magical development. That would be quite easy under certain circumstances. But then one would delay the course of human development. It must be possible in some way to put people in charge of the dissemination of occult truths — and in a sense this is always something of the dissemination of occult powers — and to use these so that they have the right effect in the world. People must be given more occult truths and teachings so that they can, in a sense, become occult teachers. |

Now one might ask: But is not everyone who spreads occult teachings in some way a black magician? It is absolutely true that someone who spreads occult teachings today can easily become a black magician. This is the case when he is unable to grasp the full scope of the effects of his occult teachings. Therefore, the occult schools must ensure that no one spreads real occult teachings who is not able, through his own development, to grasp the scope and effect of occult truths. Today, occult teachings can be spread by one disciple repeating them to another or copying them from him. If the person wants to be a disciple or a disciple, that is all right, because in that way he spreads the original from which he has heard. But let us talk about the case when someone would spread occult teachings independently and even add his own judgment. If someone wants to spread occult truths in an independent way, then, above all, precautions must be taken to ensure that this person has the maturity to spread occult truths independently, and that does not depend on intellectual training, but the occult schools make it dependent on something quite different, namely on how the individual members of human nature develop gradually.

You know from the essay on “The Education of the Child” that at birth the physical body is born, that by the age of seven the etheric body comes out, by the age of fourteen the astral body, and by the age of twenty-one the I comes out. We can follow this up and see that by the age of thirty-five, or rather between the ages of thirty-five and forty, the etheric and astral bodies of the human being are so free that only then can the human being have the necessary sense of responsibility for the dissemination of occult truths. Therefore, all occult schools have the strict law that no one may act as a teacher of occult truths before reaching this age. And it is this law that the great poet Dante set forth when he says right at the beginning of his Divine Comedy: “It was in the middle of life that I lost my way in the forest...” and so on. If you do the math: In 1300, Dante was thirty-five years old. All these great things happened to his soul.

This is a strict law. If you look at this strict law and consider some of what is happening in the present, then you will simply know from this point of view that much of what is being spread does not come from occult sources. No occult school allows people to independently spread occult truths that have not reached that age. Of course, this does not mean that one cannot start learning something early enough. But to act as a teacher of occultism, one cannot start late enough. Much, much evil would be avoided if people really knew the occult and the strict laws that prevail.

These are things that must be considered in connection with the subject of “white and black magic,” which is not so easy to treat, and of which I have really only said a few words. If you take up some of the things that could only be hinted at here and develop them further in your meditation and serious study, you will see that even these imperfect suggestions provide the initial steps for many paths to further knowledge. Above all, you will have convinced yourself that one cannot talk about such things as white and black magic at all with ordinary, trivial terms, that one must even first formulate new terms if one wants to talk about such lofty or such hideous things. It is important today to know such things, because there is much in the world of which the ordinary person knows nothing, but which he should know in order to save himself from the influences of magical arts. People are also aware of some of it, but see it as something harmless. But it is not harmless at all.

We can only make a start when we discuss such a topic, and then we will make progress in this area. The beginning is best made when a sense of the seriousness and importance of such a matter could be awakened. Even though the presentations could only be incomplete in the short time available, I still hope that the fact that they were spoken in real terms has passed some of it on to you, in order to encourage you to consider the matter with the utmost seriousness.

On several Mondays here in the Besant-Zweige, an attempt was made to characterize the occult basis of Germanic myths, and on the last Monday an expansion of the entire mythical material was begun, as it extends in a broad spiritual belt from Persia through the East of Europe and through Europe itself. It might not be appropriate today to continue exactly there, because many of our friends who are present today were not present then. And so we will try to make today's lecture more independent; we will try to present some of the circle of European myths in general, without the prerequisites of the last two lectures. This means, of course, that today we have to treat some things very aphoristically in our consideration.

I would like to remind you that the number twelve of the higher gods, which is only the double number six, as we found it last time in the Amshaspands, also recurs in the Germanic number of gods, the number of gods whose meaning we learned eight days ago. Today we want to highlight only a few gods and only a few of their attributes to show the occult foundations of such gods and such divine qualities. We have recognized the relationship between Germanic mythology and Persian mythology. We have rediscovered how the same thing is presented in the mythology that originated in Asia as in the Central European myths. In the forces of the six Amshaspands, we recognized the twelve pairs of nerves that emanate from our head, and in the twenty-eight Izards, we recognized the forces that emanate from our spine.

You all know that Wotan-Odin belongs to this Germanic circle of gods as a kind of supreme god; furthermore, we have shown Thor and his daughter, the Truth, in their occult significance; and we have touched on Tyr, who was a kind of slaying deity, a god of war, but a strange god of war, and in some ways corresponds to the more southern Mars or Ares; it corresponds to him to the extent that Tuesday, as Tyrstag or Tiustag, is also dedicated to this god. But it is strange that we are told of other spiritual beings that play a certain role in the events that take place between the Germanic gods, and there a remarkable god, or let us say a family of gods, that of Loki, is brought into a certain relationship with Tyr. You know – and the occult basis has been explained to the members of the Besant Branch – that this Loki, who stands alongside the other Nordic gods, is descended from those fire powers whose southern origin we have characterized. While the Nordic gods are descended from the union of the fire element from the south and the cold, misty element from the north, in Loki we have an older god or at least an offshoot of an older deity, a kind of fire god. We may therefore say that Loki, who develops so much enmity towards the other gods, belongs to an older race of spiritual beings who had to cede their rule for a while to those to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong. Therefore, he has declared war on them and lives in conflict with the Aesir, with those gods who only came to power when the Atlantean human race developed out of the earlier conditions and evolved into the post-Atlantean human race; that is when the Aesir became important. The spiritual beings to which Loki belongs come from much earlier times. Among others, this Loki has three offspring of a very strange kind from his wife Angrboda, who came from the race of giants: the Fenris wolf, the Midgard snake and Hel, the goddess of the underworld. These three beings, which can be traced back to earlier times, must first be tamed by the new gods, the Aesir, so that the new states of consciousness can develop in humanity. The Midgard Serpent is tamed by being forced down into the sea and wrapped around the continents, so that it bites its own tail and is powerless for the time during which the new gods, the Aesir, rule, having replaced the earlier gods. The Fenris wolf is tamed and bound by all sorts of means, but it is precisely this that gives rise to a certain relationship between the god Tyr, the imperious god of war or battle, and his family and Loki. The god Tyr has to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf in order to be allowed to bind himself, and thereby loses his right hand. This is a very remarkable feature of Germanic mythology, which can only be understood from the occult point of view. We will visit this hand of Tyr later and see where it actually is. Hel, however, was banished to the underworld of Niflheim or Mistheim, where all those who did not fall on the battlefield had to come to her. Those who fell on the battlefield were reunited with the family of the gods; the Valkyrie appeared to them at death and took them up to the Aesir themselves. They died honorably. Those who have died the so-called death on the straw, who have fallen victim to an illness or old age, have a different fate; they must go down into the realm of Hel, where sorrow, deprivation, hunger and torment prevail. The dead who died on the straw were of no use to the realm of the Aesir, they were banished to Hel so that there would be peace during the reign of the Aesir. In this way, the children of Loki were shut out from the rule of the Aesir. Loki himself, however, was tricked and captured by the gods when he had transformed himself into a salmon. He was chained to three rock slabs and suffered great torment.

All these sagas take on a special coloration due to the fact that a remarkable tragic trait, which we have spoken about several times, is poured over all this divine existence of the Aesir. Those who have heard the lectures on Norse mythology know that this tragic trait was very much in evidence in the initiation sites of the Nordic mysteries. It was also transplanted into the myths of the gods. The Nordic gods, the Aesir, live in constant fear of their destruction, for they know that their realm will one day come to an end. We are confronted with a tragic element that tells us why this realm will come to an end. This tragic feature is that since the beginning of war and discord on earth, the seeds have been sown for what will one day be the great devastating world conflagration, when everything that the gods once bound will break free, when the Fenris wolf, the Midgard serpent and Loki himself will be freed and prepare the downfall of the Aesir. A particularly outstanding spirit from the realm of fire will come, Sutur, and the Aesir will have to yield to his power. The twilight of the gods will have come, and out of the world-fire of the old the new world will arise. Again, there is a strange feature which the saga tells us: when the Fenris wolf is released, it will open its jaws so wide that the upper jaw will reach up to the sky and the lower jaw will sink into the earth; its breath will burn up the whole world.

You all know this mythology. And now let us look at the occult basis of the traits we have just mentioned. In doing so, we will once again recall the fact that the Aesir, the gods to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong, have taken up their rule, have become world-ruling powers, after man in the late Atlantean period made the transition from an earlier state of clairvoyant consciousness, where he could still see into the spiritual world, to the post-Atlantic state, where he was only in the sensory world, in the world of externally, physically visible facts. We know that the first little group of people formed at the exact point on the Earth where warmth and cold met. We know that the ancient Atlantis was a land where the air was still completely filled with masses of haze and fog, with widespread water vapors. If we were to research the early times of Atlantis, we would recognize two regions: dense, cooler water vapors in the north and hot water vapors rising from the south. The Atlanteans had a very special memory of this time. This is evident in the part of the saga that alludes to the clash between the cold Nordic and the hot southern. As I have shown, this equalization of forces made it possible for that atmosphere to arise from which emerged what became the post-Atlantean spirituality. What the ancient Atlanteans had, spiritual perception, has departed from human beings; it has come to the gods. The gods, of course, have preserved the old clairvoyance, but they can only speak to people from the outside and influence them because people themselves no longer had clairvoyance. What people used to have themselves, clairvoyance, they now only attributed to the gods, who live far from them, above them.

Let us now recall how the heavy masses of fog from ancient Atlantis gradually descended, how Atlantis was flooded by great masses of water, and how gradually the physical emerged from the purifying air. Let us remember how that came into being which had never existed before, which could only come into being when the downpours ceased and the air gradually cleared: the rainbow arose. The rainbow was a phenomenon that people saw for the first time with the sinking of Atlantis. As the old clairvoyance of men vanished, they saw the rainbow rising for the first time, which had to form the bridge between them and the gods. That is the bridge Bifröst. All this men really saw, and the sagas only relate what they saw.

What have people lost as a result of this discovery? They have lost what they used to receive from the surrounding waters of wisdom. When the waters still filled the air, they whispered wisdom to people. The trickling of the springs, the rustling of the wind, the lapping of the waves – all this whispered wisdom to them. All this was understood by men; all was a language of spiritual beings, and this was now sunk down into the sea, into the rivers. This had been a different spiritual world from the world of the Aesir; it was a world which still contained within itself the last remnants of man's origin from the spiritual. All that had filled the air had sunk down into the sea. Wisdom had sunk down with the waters. This is a real fact. In the waters that had wrapped themselves around the continents and touched each other, the ancient ancestors of the Central European population saw the Midgard Serpent. It preserved the old wisdom that had sunk down, that people had possessed in the past and that they could no longer possess now. The power of clairvoyance had to disappear from the human race. The gods could never have ruled from without as long as the humans themselves were still clairvoyant. The Midgard Serpent, a daughter of the fire powers, had to be cast down into the sea.

The last descendant of these fire powers was Loki. Loki was the enemy of the gods. He had given people what was left of their clairvoyance: the Midgard Serpent, which was now bound. But Loki had given people something else, something else came from the old original fire beginning of the human race in the land of the Lemurians, which, however, could only develop in the land of the Atlanteans. What had gradually developed there as people developed from clairvoyance to reason? Language! We have often spoken about this. While man gradually learned to walk upright - that was in the Atlantean time - language also developed, little by little it developed, so that it was only finished at the end of the Atlantean time. When the Atlanteans, with their well-developed minds, moved east, language was already developed. But as long as it was the language of the Atlanteans, it was a unified language that was based on the unified sounds of nature itself. It was an imitation of what the Atlanteans had heard during their periods of clairvoyance and clairaudience, from the trickling springs, the roaring winds, the rustling of the trees, the rolling of the thunder, the lapping of the waves. They translated these sounds into their language, and that was the common language of the Atlanteans. It was only in the post-Atlantean period that what one might call the difference between the individual languages and idioms, the elements of the different languages, developed and became structured. The old Atlantean language, which was taken from the elements of nature, from those forces with which Loki is so intimately interwoven, had to take on different forms when the Aesir became rulers and men divided into nations and tribes. The separation of men into nations and the struggle of the individual nations among themselves led to what is called war. What was this war waged for? Why did it come? Through speech, man was given something for his development, through which he can turn his innermost feelings outward. From the occult point of view, it is one of the most important advances in evolution when the soul comes to utter its own pains, joys and desires in sounds. Language, when articulated from within, when it makes the soul resound, is something that gives man a mighty power. This power had to be suppressed by the Aesir, otherwise they could not have ruled. How did the Aesir suppress the old unified language? They did so by splitting people into different tribes and thus into different tongues. The undivided nature of the language was a mighty power – the Fenris wolf. To prevent this power from asserting itself on the stage of the Aesir, the Aesir had to tame the Fenris wolf, that is, they had to dismember the language, they had to make the language different so that they could rule over men. In doing so, they created war. War is connected with this diversity of languages. But one thing was necessary for the Aesir to become rulers: the god of war had to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf, and he had to leave his hand there. The hand of Tyr, the god of war, is stuck as a tongue in the jaws of the Fenris wolf. It is the human tongue that causes the different languages. The human tongue had to form in such a way that the old unity of language was lost. It is the individualization of language that is indicated in this profound myth of the Fenris wolf. In the myth, every organ is associated in some way with the influences of the gods from without. Here you have the organ of the tongue and the way in which the progressive organic development of man is expressed in images.

Something else occurred when the Atlanteans were gradually being prepared for the later post-Atlantean epoch. The individual states of consciousness of man were quite different at the time of ancient Atlantis than they are today. We have already mentioned that a certain degree of clairvoyance still existed; but this meant that the Atlanteans did not know the difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking as we know it today. The great difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking only arose in the post-Atlantean period. Of course, it was slowly preparing itself, but the preparation only gave the basis for what the change between waking and sleeping meant in the post-Atlantean period.

The old Atlantean dreamed during the day and dreamed at night. The dreams of the night corresponded more to reality than the dreams of today's man. And the dreams of the day were a real perception of the spiritual world that lived around the Atlantean people, especially in the early days of Atlantis. But it was only with the onset of this sharp change between the waking state of consciousness and the completely unconscious state of sleep that what is connected with the relationship of the astral body to the other bodies actually gained its full significance. Human illnesses in their present form only gained their significance in the post-Atlantic period. In the first Atlantic period, these illnesses did not yet exist; then, little by little, the illnesses that people got got worse and worse. You all know the healing influence of the astral body when it is outside the physical body during sleep. During the Atlantean period, the astral body was no longer completely outside the physical body, but it was still more outside than in the case of present-day man, and therefore it was still able to exert its healing influence. It was precisely through the penetration of the astral body into the etheric body and the physical body that completely new and different conditions arose between the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and this is how the diseases we know today were created. The diseases only gained their significance when the astral body could no longer work on the physical body even during the day.

This is also expressed in the myth. Only those who fall on the battlefield die in such a way that they do not fall prey to the powers of the underworld; they still belong to the higher powers, and may go up to the gods in Valhalla. But the others, who succumb to the forces of disease, must go down to Hel, which is black on one side and white on the other, clearly expressing the change between the states of consciousness of day and night. The Aesir save themselves by taking up only those who, through death on the battlefield, can unite with the astral world, while the others must go down to Hel, who leads them into her realms. This is a profound feature of Norse saga, and this feature, too, is thoroughly based on fact.

Now all legends that are based on occultism, and all really great legends have emerged from the secret schools, always contain prophecy. Here, too, we have a reference to a future state in the development of humanity and the earth. Man will only be afflicted with seeing only the external sense world for a time. But he will ascend again to the perception that he originally had. In the distant past he was clairvoyant, but he had to descend to physical perception in order to become self-aware, and he will ascend again to clairvoyant vision. This coincides remarkably with the entire constitution of the human being. You know, at least those of you who have followed the earlier lectures, that the legend ascribes the gift of the nervous system, the ability to perceive external things as they are perceived by today's human beings, to the influx of divine powers through the gates of the senses. But you now have a very remarkable difference in your senses, which is magnificently reflected in the legend. If you take the sense of hearing: its tool is a single organ, it is localized in the ear; if you take the sense of sight: its tool, its organ is localized in the eye; if you take the sense of smell: its tool is localized in the mucous membranes of the nose; taste is localized in the tongue and palate. But now let us take the sense of feeling, the sense of warmth; where is it localized? It extends over the whole body. It differs quite essentially from the other localized senses. The organ by which man perceives warmth is curiously distinct from the other sense organs.

Let us take this sense of the saying that the forces of the gods enter through the individual human sense organs. We must say to ourselves: the forces that live in the world of sound enter man through the ear; the forces that live in the world of light enter through the eye, and so on. But the forces that live in the all-animating and all-pervading warmth fill the whole human being; they have the whole human being as their organ of perception. When the human being emerged from the bosom of the deity at the beginning of his development, it was quite different. Then the human being had no senses for perceiving the environment. First, that peculiar organ of feeling developed in him, which one would wrongly call an eye; that organ developed from the radiations and inflows into the upper layers of his being. This organ was a continuation of the human being outwards; you can still feel the soft spot in the skull of a child today, where this organ protruded, like the hole that was open where these currents entered. This organ was then the localized sense of warmth, which is now spread throughout the entire body of the human being. Man had this organ in ancient Lemuria, the hot land of fire. He could use it to find out where he could go, he could use it to feel whether the temperature was agreeable to him or not. Today this organ has shrunk and become the pineal gland. In the future, what is now spread over the whole body will reappear in a transformed form at a higher level, localized in a certain other organ.

You see this expressed in the myth through the rule of Sutur in the southern region, in Lemuria. The power of fire is represented by Sutur. You see hinted at in the myth how Sutur comes under the rule of the other gods, the Ases, whose power flows into people through the localized senses. But Sutur will return and rule in the place of the Ases. Man will return to the elemental forces of fire, and the sense of warmth will no longer be spread over the whole body, but will again be localized in one organ. The saga wonderfully reflects what also corresponds to the facts that we know through spiritual science. What has man retained from that ancient world of fire, from that fire and warmth environment, which he perceived with his ancient organs, what is it? It is not the Sutur itself. For in order to enliven this area, in which the Sutur was, man needed his old organ, the organ of feeling, which protruded like a lantern from his head. It is that “descendant” of the old sense of feeling that must experience the destinies of the whole human body, that is completely interwoven with the destiny of man, and that is the son of Sutur, Loki. Loki is chained to the triple rock of the human head, the human torso and the human limbs, so that he cannot move and is therefore exposed to all human torments and sufferings.

This leads you even deeper into this world of Germanic myths, which are of an almost impenetrable depth. You really have to dig very deep to see what kind of enthusiasm, for example, seized an artist like Richard Wagner and drove him to his work. It should never be said that Richard Wagner could have specified the individual legends in the same way as it happens through occultism. But the spiritual powers that stood behind him and inspired him directed and guided his artistic inspirations so that his art became the most beautiful expression of what the myth is based on. That is the great thing, that one does not see in the work of art what is behind it, everything has flowed out in sound and word. A remarkable instinct - if one wants to call it trivial, otherwise one would have to call it artistic inspiration - prevails in Richard Wagner. It was like a spiritual hearing of those ancient modes of speech that arose in him. He sensed those most ancient modes of speech very well and [that caused him] not to remain in the end rhyme, for that belongs to a later stage, a stage of understanding, but to choose that stage of speech development that is an echo of the the rushing waves that splashed out of the mists of ancient Atlantis: that is alliteration, that is trochee, which, for those who can feel it, repeats in sound what can be called the music of the waves.

In Germanic mythology, it is prophesied that the twilight of the gods must come because the cause of the wars has arisen. Because Tyr lost a hand in the jaws of Woltfes, the seeds of the later downfall of the gods developed. The prophetic view of the Germanic saga of the twilight of the gods points to the state where people will understand each other again, where they will no longer be separated by languages. The saga tells us that after the Atlantean population had moved east, it split up and fragmented. Only those peoples who descended from the Mongolian race and who came under Etzel or Attila - Atli, the Atlantean - have retained something of the old Atlantis. They alone have preserved the life element of the Atlanteans, while the other peoples who had remained in Europe have developed out of the old blood community through splitting and have fallen apart into wars between the individual tribes. Thus these peoples in the West are always divided and at war. They are unable to withstand the impact of the Mongolian element, which has retained the old Atlantean foundations of life. Attila's or Etzel's march is not stopped by the Germanic tribes, because the individual tribes are something that cannot impress Attila, who has retained his old great spirit - a kind of monotheism. What opposed him as individual tribes could not stop him. A remarkable feature of the saga is that Attila was immediately persuaded to turn back when he was confronted by something that went beyond blood relationship, when he was confronted by Christianity, personified in the then Pope. Then Attila saw the spiritual powers that will unite men again, and that is what the Atlantean initiate bows down to. Christianity is to prepare the way for that state of humanity when Sutur will reappear and, regardless of the differentiation of people into individual tribes, will bring peace to the world. Thus, to the people of that time, Christianity seemed like a first announcement of the twilight of the gods and the return of the old days, when people were not yet divided, not yet divided and divided by wars. This is how Christianity was perceived, especially in the very first centuries of its spread, when it was not yet Christianity that was proclaimed from Rome, but when it came from the north and west through secret Christian societies that originated in England and Ireland, and later also in France, and which were completely independent of the external authority of Rome. It was Winfried, Boniface, who emerged from the ranks of those western secret students and made his peace with Rome, whereby Christianity could then gradually adopt the special coloration of the Roman-Christian Church.

Thus we see what forces were at work in the spread of Christianity out of the memory of an ancient time and as a prophetic indication of a later future. What first appeared in Christianity in Central Europe were the feelings that lived in those people at that time and filled the outlook of those people who belonged to the secret schools and who had been taught and inspired by the secret schools.

Let us pause for a moment at this phase of Central European spiritual development and visualize what Europe was like at that time, when the old world of the gods - as described in the Germanic sagas - was gradually dying away in the twilight brought about by the religious world of Christianity. The advent of Christianity was felt to be a harbinger of the great twilight of the gods, the twilight that would one day sweep away the powers of the old gods. Christianity brought about the fading of the old world of gods, the downfall of the old gods themselves will bring the great twilight of the gods, which will then bring as reality what Christianity only brought as faith. This is how it was felt.

Now let us put ourselves in this mood, which was there. The tribes of the Goths, the Franks and so on, were all under the impression of the approaching Mongol tribes, the Hun king Attila or Etzel, on the one hand, and the gradually spreading Christianity, on the other. As a result of the events we have characterized, they were divided into different tribes; they spoke in different tongues, they had fallen apart among themselves. In the end, of all these tribes, only one actually survived: the Franconian tribe; it remained, in name and in significance. What remains to remind us of all the tribes that once roamed here, if not history: the Lombards, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, the Cherusci, the Heruli, and so on? The Franconian tribe was actually the one that triumphed over the others. But how did those feel who belonged to the dying tribes? These feelings were most vividly felt by the secret schools and the knowledgeable of these dying tribes. Let us take a look at one such tribe, the Visigoths. They lived in northern Spain and southern France, although they had once migrated far to the east. As you know, the westward migration was only a retreat. The abilities they had were still an echo of the ancient Atlantic times. When these tribes had migrated from the east to the west, they had lost the old abilities during their wanderings, but a kind of clairvoyance still lived in people as an echo of those old abilities. These people were no longer completely clairvoyant, but at certain times they could still see into the spiritual worlds. However, they often experienced this as something unknown and oppressive, and that is where the name 'Alp' comes from. Alp – what kind of being is that? It is an astral being that people sensed but no longer really knew, that they had known in Atlantean times, in the days of old seeing and clairvoyance, and that now appeared like an intruder into the world, like the Truth that we got to know last time. Nevertheless, some people felt it as the looking in of a higher, astral world into the physical one. Especially with those tribes that could not adapt to the new conditions, one felt “when the nightmare came and oppressed” that one could look into the higher worlds. In all tribes, especially the Goths, but also the Burgundians and other Germanic tribes, there were always individuals who could withstand such states of emergency and interpret them as the astral world reaching into the physical world. One such man was the Goth King Alphard, who is mentioned in those times when the Goths inhabited southern France. He was King of Aquitaine and ruled there at the time when Attila was undertaking his march from east to west. Alphard's son was the legendary Walther of the Walthari Lay. It presents us with a true transition from that time when people still knew something from their fathers about the old abilities and the connections between the old tribes. How the tribe and tribes belonged together in ancient times - the fathers knew it; therefore, the father of Walther, Alphard, had long since discussed with the king of the Burgundians that his daughter Hildegund should become the wife of Walther, in order to bridge the threatening gap between the peoples. But the tribes were unable to withstand the onslaught of the Huns, who still possessed the old vitality that they themselves had lost. Therefore, Walther, the son of Alphard, Hildegund, the daughter of the Burgundian king, and Hagen of Tronje, a hostage from the Frankish court, were forced to go down to the court of Etzel, the king of the Huns. Because Gunther, the son of the King of the Franks, Gibich, could not yet be given as a hostage, Hagen, the descendant of the old Tronje line, had to be given as a hostage. We need not relate the content of the Song of Walthari further. At the court of King Etzel, they distinguish themselves as capable warriors, but there is one thing they cannot do: they may well be able to conquer what elevates man to the ego, but what brings the ego back to peace, they cannot acquire that, it is impossible for them. Each individual was efficient in his own place, and so they are efficient warriors even in the land of the enemy, at the court of Etzel or Attila. But when Gunther came to power in the Frankish Empire and no longer maintained a friendship with Etzel, they could no longer stand their ground and had to flee. Now something remarkable occurs. There is an older version of the Song of Walthari, in which Walther, after fleeing with Hildegund, fights against the pursuing Huns. This version comes from the Franconian region. We then have a later version, which was mentioned yesterday, that arises from purely Christian intentions; it was last brought into its present form in the 10th century by Ekkehard I, a monk at the monastery of St. Gallen. The two versions differ greatly from one another. The older version originated in the land of the Franks. It comes from those who were influenced by the current in which the original Christianity still lives as a secret Christian current, which wanted to teach: Turn to the new ideas, and you will overcome what is still in you of the old that confronts you physically in the Huns. This interest could only have been taken by someone who came from the land of the Franks. But the man who reinterpreted the saga in the monastery of St. Gall to teach Christians no longer had this interest. He had a different goal; he wanted to tell people: If you stick with the old conditions, you will consume yourselves. He showed them vividly how they were consuming themselves. And indeed, it was not the Huns who consumed them. When Walther and Hildegund return to their country, it is Gunther himself who confronts them with Hagen of Tronje. Now it is the three representatives of Germanic tribes themselves who tear each other apart in battle, leaving the leg of one, the eye of another and the hand of a third on the battlefield. Walther was cut off his hand, Gunther lost his leg, and Hagen lost an eye. The one who wrote down the saga knew why he had the hand cut off the one who descended from Alphard. He represents the discord between tribes and peoples. The cutting off of the hand is meant to remind them of what happened to Tyr, the god of war. Where tribes fall out, the individual loses his hand. This motif continues down to Götz von Berlichingen, who also loses his hand; it is the same motif that appears in Germanic mythology. Thus Ekkehard wanted to say to his people: If you cling to these old views, you will tear each other apart, for discord has been brought into your midst. What can bind you together is the spirit of Christianity. He presents to them in such a way as to evoke in their souls a feeling of repulsion. That was Ekkehard's Christian intention.

In the face of this Walthari-lay, one must be especially careful not to speculate or interpret anything into it. The individual traits: the striking out of the eye, the cutting off of the hand, the cutting off of the leg and similar traits are such that something of the type and form of the saga continues to work in them, and that returns when it seems necessary. It was rightly said yesterday that the person who wrote this Waltherilied is an initiate. But it must also be emphasized that it was a Christian initiate who wanted to present a very specific Christian teaching to people.

Thus we see how spiritual science can help to clarify these phenomena of human intellectual life, and how we can shed light on areas that are still little understood by today's philology. And if you have seen this morning the way in which spiritual science can intervene in everyday life, and add to what has been said now, then this will be proof to you of the inner truth of the spiritual facts brought down from the higher worlds. Our world needs such a deepening again. But you can also see from this the way in which we have to work, and that external agitation cannot be what can really bring the theosophical world movement into the right channel. If you just come with dogmas and want to explain them to people, then they have every right to tell us that this is all fantasy. Only he who penetrates deeply into what the theosophical stream can offer, and who penetrates into it from all sides, will gradually see the theosophical truths. We need not be surprised if followers of materialistic currents find what we say foolish. How should they understand it otherwise? And how can we succumb to the delusion that Theosophy could be something that can be spread by external propaganda, like popular monism? Only through positive work, by spreading the teachings as best we can, only in this way can Theosophy become established. No matter how many failures we have, we must not let them hinder or disconcert us in any way. Therefore, the Theosophical Society can be nothing more than a place within which theosophical work is carried out. The Society can never be the main thing; the main thing must be our spiritual science itself. Perhaps the Society will even be only - to use the Nietzschean word you have probably heard before - a “bridge” and a “transition to a higher” level, to a free theosophical current in the world. At present, however, we need this place from which we can work, and without which we cannot let spiritual science flow into the world. But we must adopt the liberal view that distinguishes the human being and the cause, and that puts the cause above any institution that comes from external organization.

This brings us to the end of our program for our time together.

During the last evenings of our study group, we dealt with the occult explanation of Central European legends and myths and saw the deep truths and insights contained in these legends and myths. Just two weeks ago today, when we were able to draw attention to the very deepest and most important of such truths, we were able to take a look at a related mythology, the Persian one, which originated over in Asia and which is quite similar to what we have on European soil as Germanic or similar mythologies. We have seen what is hidden behind the name of the Persian Amshaspands and behind the name of the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards. We have rediscovered the forces emanating from these spirits of the astral realm in the twelve pairs of nerves that emanate from our head and in the twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of nerves that emanate from our spine.

In Germanic and European mythology, we are told that the three gods Wotan, Wili and We - who also sometimes appear under other names - created man. As they once walked on the seashore, they found two trees there, and from these trees, Ask and Embla, they created the first human couple. Wotan gave these first humans spirit and the general soul life, Wili gave form, understanding and movement, and We gave countenance, speech, hearing and sight. If we hear this in European myth and have already been able to convince ourselves of the deep meaning of the other myths, then we may certainly also seek something deeper in this triad and in the endowment of man with various characteristics through the triad of gods. But we would do well to link the story of the creation of man as told in the Central European myth with the way in which the creation of man appears in the related Persian mythology. There it appears in a much larger context. At the same time, something very special can unfold for us about the spiritual power of human beings that forms myths and about the essence and nature of the human being and his connection to the earth. We know, of course, that myths and legends must not be interpreted through speculation, that their meaning must not be sought through speculation, but that we must try to clarify the origins of human knowledge and insight for ourselves, as they appear to us in the legends, in the original creative folk spirit on the one hand and in the gifts of the initiated priests on the other.

Legends and myths are nothing other than astral, spiritual perceptions. We have seen how the ancient Teuton or member of the old European population really saw the world ash tree, Yggdrasil, on the astral plane, how he heard the twelve currents that entered his head as forces and formed his twelve main nerves. We have come to know all of this as astral influences and not through some fantastic, ingenious speculation.

Now, let us first briefly and sketchily visualize the Persian myth of the origin of the world and the destiny of man. But let us bear in mind that the ancient Persian people – not the people you have met in history, but the ones from whom these legends of the gods actually originated – belonged to the most advanced part of the masses of peoples who migrated eastward from ancient Atlantis. When the old Atlantis was swept down, it was the peoples who later moved down to India and mixed with the peoples living there, and those who settled on the soil of present-day Persia, Bactria, Media, who moved furthest east; the other peoples had remained on the soil of present-day Europe.

In all these peoples, myths and legends took shape in the most diverse forms and guises, and in all of them, what was told in the images of their mythologies was nothing more than what individuals could see, either permanently or in special states, with their weak but still present clairvoyant abilities. People saw what the myths and legends tell. From this astral point of view, the members of this part of the population, which extended over the area of present-day Persia, told what they saw and what the great religious founder Zarathustra then clothed in a certain form and rounded off. Let us briefly sketch out what the people told. They traced everything that exists back to a unified cosmic ground, which they called “Zaruana Akarana”. This was a common source from which, according to this view, everything has arisen, everything that is mineral, plant, animal and human, but also everything that is higher spiritual, insofar as it is perceptible to humans. If one wanted to translate this expression “Zaruana Akarana”, one would have to do it with “luminous source” or “luminous background”. Now out of this “luminous source” emerged a deity with qualities of goodness, with qualities of intellectual spiritual perfection, a wise, good, spiritual being, Ormuzd, and another being that was opposed to this good spirit Ormuzd. This other spiritual entity is usually called Ahriman. So within the Persian myths and legends we have these two spiritual entities: Ormuzd and Ahriman; a good deity and an evil opposing deity. Ahriman could be translated into English with the term 'the resistive' or 'the opposing-minded'; that would be the sense of this term.

If we now want to relate the Amshaspands and the Izards to these spiritual beings, then we have to imagine that the higher spiritual beings, which we have come to know as Amshaspands and Izards, radiated and emanated from Ormuzd. They are the hosts through whom Ormuzd works, so that he is the supreme ruler who assigns them their places, dividing them according to the twelve months of the year and the twenty-eight or thirty-one days of the month, after which they change their dominion. But now the Persian myth of Ahriman tells us: He also descends from the general “illuminated source”, but from the very beginning he showed himself unruly and rebelled, opposing the six Amshaspands with his six evil spirits, the Devas or Devs, lower and higher. So you have to imagine that each of the Amshaspands has an adversary, and just as the Amshaspands belong to the regent Ormuzd, so these Devas, in the sense of the Persian myth, belong to the following of Ahriman. He has set up his hosts so that they may constantly confront the good hosts of the Amshaspands in a long-lasting battle. And likewise he has arrayed his countless hosts of the lower devas against the hosts of the Izards.

This Persian myth thus shows us all the events of the world in a certain way entangled in a long-lasting struggle. Everything that happens today is to be seen in the sense of this Persian myth in such a way that it is the outflow of this struggle. What is happening should actually be presented in such a way that in such an event in the world, on the one hand, the forces of good emanating from the Amshaspands and the Izards are on one side, and on the other hand, the forces of evil emanating from the Devas are on the other. Only when we understand the interaction of good and evil forces will we understand, according to the Persian myth, the events and facts of the present world.

We must now ask ourselves: Are the stories that confront us in these images also astral perceptions? We will see that they are, down to the last detail. To understand this fact, you will be helped by the circumstance that a certain role in ancient Persian worship is played by what could be called the worship of fire. This worship of fire should not be imagined as worship of physical fire; that is not the case. It is not worshiped, nor is there any special cult associated with physical fire. For Persian myth and Persian cult, physical fire is nothing more than a symbol, an outward expression of a certain spiritual power that reigns in fire. For the spirit of fire, the external, physical fire is the expression.

Now let us see where this fire worship comes from. It has a deep occult origin. Let us recall how, in our theosophical world view, the origin of the world is told. We know that our Earth was once united with what now accompanies it as the Moon, and that the Moon only separated from it after a certain time. We know that in even earlier times, our Earth was united with what is now the Sun. These were the two important cosmic events that preceded the evolution of man. These three cosmic bodies – the sun, moon and earth – once formed only one single body, which we can imagine as if we mixed the sun, moon and earth together and formed a single large cosmic body out of them. First the sun separated out, and while it had previously given its light to the beings from inside the earth, it now sent it to the earth and its beings from the outside. That was at the time when the earth still had the moon within it. It was the moon that had the bad forces within it, and these bad forces had to come out. If the moon had remained inside, the earth would never have been able to undergo the development that allowed it to become the setting for present-day humanity.

When the moon had separated, man was not yet on earth in his present form; he was not yet endowed with a soul, insofar as he existed at all as a physical being. Immediately after the moon had separated from the earth, this human form still led a plant-like existence. In this human form, which was present on the earth that had been abandoned by the moon, there was nothing more than the potential for today's physical body and today's etheric body. That which is present in man today as the astral body was not yet united with the earthly. Just as clouds float in the air today, so the astral bodies floated around in those days, and later sank into the physical human bodies. And the human bodies that walked around as the physical ancestors of today's man were in a state of perpetual sleep. Just as plants are in a perpetual state of sleep, so man at that time was in a kind of sleep state, he was endowed only with the physical and etheric bodies. Up to that time there was no being on earth at all that had the most important quality for today's humanity and higher animal world, the quality of red, warm blood: inner warmth.

If you would go back in time with me and examine the creatures of the old moon, you would find that all these creatures of the old moon, on which the ancestors of present-day man were already present, still had the warmth of their surroundings, just as the lower animals that have retained this stage still have today. They had, as one says, body fluids that could change their temperature, they had the warmth of their surroundings. What occurs as internal warmth in humans and higher animals, and what belongs to it, the red blood, was by no means present in the beings of that time.

But now we have heard that at the same time as the separation of the Sun and the Moon from the Earth, another cosmic event took place: the passage of Mars through the Earth. The substances of the two cosmic bodies, Mars and Earth, were so thin at that time that Mars was able to pass through the Earth's body in terms of its substance. It left behind a substance that the Earth had not had before: iron. The Earth only incorporated iron after the passage of Mars, and this iron was the necessary precondition for the formation of red blood. What was the consequence? When the Moon moved away from the Earth and the Earth remained alone, the Earth was in a kind of fiery state; it was surrounded by a warm atmosphere. And now we come to an idea that I ask you to grasp very precisely. Imagine all the warmth that is inside the bodies of the millions of warm-blooded humans and animals that inhabit the earth today, imagine that it lived as a warm atmosphere around the earth: then you have approximately the state in which the earth was immediately after the moon had gone.

The beings did not yet have the inner warmth; the warmth immediately surrounded the entire globe, it was still outside. So we can imagine the earth at that time as a still liquid body, in which the metals were dissolved in the most diverse ways, and which was surrounded by this sea of fire or warmth. Into this sea of warmth the sun, which was outside, sent its rays of light. For the occultist, light is by no means merely physical light. Rather, this physical light is the bodily expression of spirit. Thus, with the sun's rays, the essence of the spirits of the sun streamed down to earth. Light as an expression of the spirituality of light streamed into the fiery atmosphere, into the warm atmosphere of the earth. Imagine this vividly. You have the Earth, it is surrounded by the atmosphere of warmth, and falling into it are the rays of the sun, which for us are rays of spirit. Through the fact that these sun spirits in the sun's rays fall into the warmth of the Earth, the collective soul was formed first, the collective astral body of all humanity and of the higher animals. Down on the ground, there were these sleeping human plants, which had an etheric body and a physical body. And just as it would be today if all of you sitting here were to suddenly fall asleep – which, of course, is not desirable! -, then all your astral bodies would leave your physical bodies and mix with each other, so it was in those days; only then they mixed even more, they were an undifferentiated mass when they had the common warmth, into which the light of the sun, which was the expression of the spirit, shone. As is well known, the astral body of modern man is also called an aura because to the modern seer it appears as a halo of light surrounding the human being, somewhat like an oval, egg-shaped form of light radiating from all sides of the human being. In those days, the human being's astral body was contained in this warm atmosphere of the earth; it was not yet divided into the individual astral bodies; and the light of the sun, which was the bearer of the spirituality of the sun, shone into them.

Now imagine your own cosmic-universal development at that time. What is today your physical and etheric body, was then a plant existence, and grew, as it were, out of the earth. And what lives in you today as soul and spirit came from the atmosphere surrounding the earth, and was gradually absorbed by your physical and etheric body. And this had been prepared in the common aura of the earth, which must be conceived in physical terms as a common warmth, permeated and suffused by the sunlight filled with spirit. Thus you have absorbed the warmth that once enveloped the earth. What lives today in your warm blood is part of this primeval fire that flows around the earth. If it were possible today to draw all this warmth out of the bodies of animals and human beings, it would be possible to restore the ancient state of the primeval fire. The warmth that lives within us today is the divided warmth that once surrounded the earth as a sea of warmth, and the light flowed into this common blood body. This light, too, has been divided, little by little, and has created man's higher spirituality. Naturally, only dull, lower spirituality was present in the merely physical-etheric bodies. What is rooted in the human mind today, the higher spirituality, that which has been formed by the influx of the Amshaspands, comes from the spiritual forces of the sun.

And now imagine yourself in the astral vision of the clairvoyant. What does he see? He sees how the earth is formed, how the moon separates; the earth is surrounded by fire mist, by the collective warmth, into which radiates, wonderfully illuminating it from within, the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the world, which comes from the sun, transforms the sun-drenched earth into the earth aura. This is seen by the astral clairvoyant. And the old Persian clairvoyant called this “Aura Mazda”, the great aura, Ahura Mazdao, the great aura of wisdom from which the individual auras of human beings have emerged. Ormuzd is only a transformed expression for Ahura Mazdao, the great aura.

Now let us go a little further. How could this state, which the astral clairvoyant must perceive in such a great and powerful way when he transports himself back to this time, this state that is described in the Persian myth, which is, after all, a retelling of the results of astral clairvoyance? This condition is brought about by the fact that spiritual entities are also linked to the sun. For the materialist, only physical rays stream forth from the sun. But for the one who sees things occultly, it is the case that with the sunlight, the forces of the spiritual inhabitants of the sun stream down to the earth. Just as the earth is inhabited by people, the sun is also inhabited by mighty beings, who differ from the earthly beings in that they are much, much more developed than people. The Genesis, the Old Testament, calls these sun dwellers the Elohim, light beings. Just as people have a body of flesh, so these sun dwellers have a body of light. They are light beings. And their powers are not limited to a confined space; they can radiate out to the Earth. The deeds of the sun spirits, the Elohim, flow to all earthly beings with the sunlight. In every ray of light, in every ray of sunshine, we see the deeds of the sun dwellers. Human beings will only reach this level when the Earth has reached the state of Vulcan. You know that the evolution of the Earth proceeds from Saturn via the Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter and Venus to Vulcan, which we indicate as the last embodiment of the Earth. When the Earth has developed to the state of Vulcan, then human beings will have reached the stage that the present inhabitants of the Sun have reached in their evolutionary process today. This is also where we find the Amshaspands living today. Their actual home is in the sun, and from there they send us their deeds through the sunlight.

This is how the deeds of the Amshaspands could come into being in humans, as I have described to you. They sent their twelve currents into the human head and thus brought about the development of thinking and spirituality in humans. On the moon, the Izards had worked on the human being first and developed the twenty-eight spinal nerves. Then came the endowment of the human being with the twelve nerves of the head, which came from the Amshaspands, the hosts of Ahura Mazdao. But each time, certain entities were left behind in the evolutionary process of a world body. They do not come along. Not only high school students are left behind, but also world beings remain at a level that the others have already surpassed. During the moon phase of the earth, the Elohim, the sun-light spirits, have risen to the level that allows them to live in the sun and send their deeds to the earth and to earth humanity. Other spirits, who were already on the same level as the Elohim at that time, remained behind, “stayed seated”; they were unable to bring their development on the old moon so far that they could begin a higher existence with the sun as their arena. It was therefore not initially destined for these lagging spirits to work in the sun's rays, to work from the outside in. Rather, in their further development, they had to seek what they had not yet experienced on the moon in a lower existence, one connected with the earth itself, with the earthly sphere.

What was the new condition that now emerged on earth, giving the beings new characteristics? It showed itself in the fact that the warm atmosphere, the warm environment, now entered into the blood. Warm blood was created. In this state, the retarded spirit hosts sought to make up in their development what they had previously been unable to achieve. They sought to carry the deeds that they could not place in the sun's rays into the warmth, which was transformed into inner life.

Let us visualize this vividly, as it can be seen with clairvoyant vision. [During the following explanations, a drawing was made on the blackboard, but the scribes did not record it.] We see that the deeds of the Amshaspands and the Izards, which emanate from Ahura Mazdao, flow into the head and spine of man, while the inside of man is filled with warm blood. The human body, as it were, absorbs the warm blood; it is conducted from all sides from the outside into the interior of the body. And if we examine the occult anatomy of man, we find that each such stream, sent from the regions of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd, was accompanied by another stream of warmth flowing in from without, and this accompanied the nerve current. With this incoming warm blood, the forces of those spirits who had been left behind entered the human being; these were the hosts of Ahriman, who now, with warmth, sent their forces into the human being just as the Amshaspands sent their light force. So it is that we have sent a blood stream in the opposite direction to each of the currents of the Amshaspands. In this red blood stream, which flows parallel to the nerve currents, the opposing forces of the devas also flow. In the red blood flowing to the Amshaspands, what comes from the opponents of the Amshaspands and Izards, from the devas, the hosts of Ahriman, flows in the opposite direction. And now we feel pulsating in the blood that which came from the hosts of Ahriman.

That which the clairvoyant can see flowing into the physical body on the astral plane is reflected in a profound and inspired way in the Persian myth. We see the interaction of the great light of Ahura Mazdao with the incoming warmth that makes blood the power in man that it is. Now we know that blood is the expression of the I. And so we see how everything that flows out of the great wisdom, out of Ahura Mazdao, is accompanied by egoism, because it is confronted by the currents of Ahriman in the blood. Egoism flows into all of the spiritual activity of the human being. We see it flowing in properly when we devote ourselves to this imagination. In this way, you must work your way up to a true visualization of what has happened on our earth.

And now we remember that these spirits, who had remained behind from the lunar existence and did not make it to the solar existence, that these spirits on the moon were the same kind of beings as the sun spirits, the hosts of Ahura Mazdao, who had reached beyond the lunar existence. On the moon they had reached the stage of the I; they only remained behind and just preserved this stage. As long as they were on the moon, the spirits of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd, and the spirits of Ahriman were on the same level, of the same kind, they were of an ego-like nature. This ego, the original ego, Zaruana Akarana, is the divine ego that has not yet entered the body, that still rests in the bosom of the deity. Where this ego had developed to the point that it could have a solar existence, it formed an astral body that is under the rule of Ormuzd. But a lower power is incorporated into this, the power of the retarded hosts of Ahriman.

So you have now seen the emergence of this fourth link of human nature, the I, and the third link of the human being, the astral body, which is spiritualized by two entities. Incorporated into it are the good powers of Ormuzd and the powers of the egoistic nature, of Ahriman. The ego is placed in the struggle raging in one's own astral body between the good and the evil forces; it is the original entity Zaruana Akarana that splits into the good, true forces of the astral body and the opposing forces that are the forces of Ahriman. Ahriiman or Angramainyu means something like the one who resists or the spirit of opposition. Thus we understand how such a myth is actually nothing more than the retelling of what the ancient astral clairvoyants have seen.

Now let us take a closer look at these forces radiating from the Sun to the Earth and to man. What the Persian myth calls Ormuzd or Ahura Mazdao is actually an expression for “great soul”; it is the same as what the Hellenes call Psyche; and what we understand by the human astral body is the “little soul”. The human soul is composed of thinking, feeling and willing. These are the three basic powers of the soul, which for the occultist are actually three independent entities; we will learn more about this later. Just as the human soul is divided into these three parts, so is the great soul, the great aura, divided into three parts. This same trait can be found in Persian as well as in Central European myths. The Central European myth now calls these three basic forces Wotan, Wili and We, with Wotan representing the thinking, Wili the willing and We the feeling force.

We can immerse ourselves deeply in the whole astral contemplation of these ancient times when we see how the syllable “We” resonates with an original designation for the feeling force. In fact, all higher feeling, even when it is full of relish, has emerged from sorrow and pain. And why? Imagine once more the original human form, which, as it were, sprang out of the earth, the plant-human being with a physical body and an etheric body. Just as it sprang out at that time, the senses were only present as an inclination, just as a blossom is already contained in the plant germ. Man could not yet see. Eyes such as we have today only arose after a long, long process of development. These eyes, which today see the glory of sunlight, how did they arise according to occult physiology? Originally, when only the physical body and the etheric body were present, there was nothing here in these places where the eyes are now. However, these places proved to be particularly sensitive to the sun's rays sent to the earth. And what the sun first caused as an impression was pain. Two suffering points arose on the human body at these points, pain points that were constantly being injured. It was exactly the same as if you cut yourself and a scab formed at that point. So too, scabs formed at those sensitive points, and from these scabs the magnificent miracle of the eye gradually formed; albeit after a long, long development. What pain had torn out of the body became the glorious eye.

Nothing can arise in the world as enjoyment, as pleasure, that does not have pain as its basis. Just as satiety, with its enjoyment, has hunger as a prerequisite, so all knowledge and also all joy has pain as its basis. That is also the reason why, in tragedy, pain satisfies us like the presentiment of an expected release. Everything that will achieve perfection in the future undergoes a state of pain and suffering in the present. But this offers us consolation because we know that what is pain and suffering today will be states of perfection in the future. Overcome pain will become perfection in the future. The perfect eyes of today owe their existence to the earlier painful points on the human body; pain that has been overcome. This is what the initiate Paul meant when he uttered the mighty word: “All creatures groan in pain, awaiting adoption as children,” or “All creatures are afraid in the pain of existence and await adoption as children,” which expresses nothing other than the longing for a relationship of childship to God that will one day be attained again. He who comprehends existence sees pain flooding through all existence.

Now let us imagine the good spirits, whether we call them Ormuzd, as in the Persian myth, or Wotan, Wili and We, as in the Germanic myth, and see how these solar powers stream towards us. When the waters of Atlantis had been lost and the sun had been released, they worked in the sun's rays and permeated the air. That is why the light spirits are also air spirits, which were described as Wotan's wild army; these spirits were felt in the three parts Wotan, Wili and We. We want to get an idea of how it presents itself to the astral clairvoyant. Take the human being; when he was still a plant-human being, consisting of a physical and etheric body. The sun's power was at work through Wotan in thinking, through Wili, who gives everything will-like, and through We, who gives everything feeling-like; everything feeling-like rests in Weh, we feel this from the name.

How must this now be told if it is to be told appropriately? Wotan, Wilii and We were walking on the seashore; they found plants there and endowed these plants with their powers: Wotan with spirit and the general soul life, Wili with form, mind and movement, with everything rooted in the will, We with countenance and color, with speech, hearing and sight, with everything rooted in the feelings. Thus the first humans came into being. In these pictures of the Central European myth of the walk of the three gods on the seashore, of the finding of the trees and the bestowing of the divine powers and qualities upon them, we recognize how these spirits living in the sun gave their powers from their great aura and let them flow into the individual human aura. Through occultism we can take things literally again. We see how the images of mythology are based on real facts; and we look deep into the clairvoyant visions of the wise man who taught in the mystery schools and who, through his astral perception, was able to tell the people, who still had a certain degree of clairvoyance, about these visions in imaginative images. He gave the people truths that he experienced in a half-awake, clairvoyant intermediate state. He knew that he could count on understanding from those people who still had a certain degree of clairvoyance. If we immerse ourselves in the soul of such ancestors from the point of view of occultism, our view expands. Never can the arrogance and conceit of the Age of Enlightenment come over us, saying: How have we come so gloriously far! Is it not a terrible arrogance, the conceit of the people of the 19th century, that in the face of the truths that the 19th century has found, everything that people knew before is only childish fantasy, and that what is found today must apply for all time? Is it not a terrible arrogance when those who preach today from the lecterns of the universities and courtrooms, and those who tinker around, claim that the only form of truth is that which the last decades have produced? They consider themselves humble, but there is the worst kind of arrogance in this attitude. Beyond this attitude, the spirit-seeker is brought to the realization – which must seize his heart, his thoughts and his soul – that other times have also possessed the truth, only in a different form, that there are many forms of truth. And he also overcomes the other pride, that what is said by today's scholars should apply for all eternity. Just as the forms of knowledge have changed since our ancestors, as they told stories in pictures, which we today proclaim in a different form, in the form of occultism, so future times will proclaim the truth not in our forms, but in other forms that will have grown far beyond our own. We know that truth is eternal, but we also know that it flows through human souls in the most diverse forms.

One thing is that our view broadens; and the other is how such insights must flow into our inner being in a living way. We will realize this when we consider the following: What actually is this astral body that we carry within us? It is a part of that great wisdom aura, a part of the aura of Mazda, which is the body of wisdom of the whole earth, and to which forces flow from the sun. Thus we walk about on the earth and feel that we are the bearers of the sun's forces, which have been absorbed into the earth's aura. Our feeling grows for something that we have to develop: that this human body and these human bodies have been given to us by the great wisdom of the world, the great spirit of the world. In occultism, the human body is also called a temple. And we are responsible for bringing back to the radiant source what we have received, back in a corresponding refinement, purification and perfection. In this way we learn to feel at one with the existence of the world. Not in a fantastic way, but bit by bit we learn to be a note in the great orchestral music that resounds through the cosmos and which we call the music of the spheres. Our sense of responsibility grows, along with a certain elation, but combined with feelings of humility in the right balance. This is what theosophy teaches us: it teaches us in a precise way, not just that we are human beings and what kind of human beings we are, but it makes us spiritual people who know our place in the spiritual and cosmic existence. This is the ethics, the moral teaching, that flows from knowledge. When we grasp this, then moral feelings pulsate through us that have nothing of sentimentality and philistinism. A natural moral teaching passes through us when we perceive the moral teaching as a direct consequence of knowledge. Theosophy, when properly understood, cannot help but bring people the highest moral concepts, because it brings knowledge, the realization of how man is placed in the whole context of the world. Theosophy will never stoop to admonishing or preaching. No one becomes better when admonished: Be good! or: Do this, for it is good! - because that leads people to sentimentality and philistinism under all circumstances. Theosophy shows us what man is and how he is connected with the whole world, and it regards it as somewhat unseemly to approach man with moral principles, because man is so constituted that he follows the right morality all by himself out of knowledge - when he knows himself. Not in the lower, but in the higher sense, the occultist feels it as a violation of spiritual shame if he were to address himself directly and immediately to the feelings of men. He addresses himself directly to the intellect, but he presents the knowledge in such a way that the feelings attach themselves to it. He presents the objective facts to man, and then the feelings come of themselves. He does not approach man because he has the greatest respect for man, and because he has the sense that in every man the perfecting man is to be respected and esteemed. When a person learns the truth, he becomes good, because the soul of truth is kindness. When a person absorbs the knowledge of the truth, he absorbs kindness with it. This kindness does not follow from lower knowledge, but it follows from higher knowledge. Therefore, basically, the will to knowledge should flow into people through the theosophical current, because that is the sure path to perfection, to goodness.

And so we have seen at the same time how a directly practical question of life arises for us from such considerations, and how spiritual wisdom is incorporated into our culture and into our whole life.