The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

In these lectures, some of the occult signs and symbols will be discussed in such a way that the meaning and significance of such symbols and signs will be revealed not only to the mind but also to the senses and the soul.

You all know that in occultism, in Theosophy, the most diverse symbols and signs are used, and you also know that sometimes a great deal of ingenuity and speculation is applied to interpreting such signs and symbols. These lectures will now show us that much of this acumen and speculation is misplaced, and that speculation and acumen are not at all the abilities by which one can come close to the real meaning of occult signs and symbols. For the occultist, signs and symbols are by no means limited to what is listed as such in the usual manuals and writings. Rather, we find occult signs and symbols most frequently where we might least expect them: In myths and tales rooted in the people, deep occult truths are hidden. The mistake usually made in the interpretation of such myths and legends is simply that too much ingenuity, too much speculation is applied; one might almost say that too much is sought in a rational, too much reason is sought in a deep sense. Of course, a series of four lectures cannot exhaust this subject, but only treat it aphoristically. Nevertheless, what we discuss should be presented in such a way that we can form a conception of the relationship between the occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds, namely, what is called the astral world and the devachanic or spiritual world.

You know that even in ordinary language, when we want to imply something higher, we often use certain figurative similes. For example, if we want to use an image for knowledge or for insight, we say “light” or also “light of knowledge”. Behind these simple expressions of our language there is sometimes something extraordinarily profound. Those who use such expressions are often not even aware of the origin and therefore often have no idea how, for example, the image of light relates to knowledge or insight. They take it as a figure of speech, just as poets use figures of speech today. We would be quite wrong if we thought of occultism only in terms of such a figurative meaning. Things are much, much deeper. What in modern language is called symbolic, what is called pictorial, and what is also called an allegory, is as a rule misleading. It is easy to think that a sign has been arbitrarily chosen for something. In occultism, no sign is ever chosen arbitrarily. When a sign is used in occultism for a thing, there is always a deeper connection.

However, we will not be able to truly understand this connection between occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds if we do not delve a little into how man, from the point of view of occultism, relates to his environment. When occultism, or that elementary part of occultism that is proclaimed today as Theosophy, will one day fulfill its mission in the world in a deeper sense - with that only a beginning has been made - when it will one day come to the various branches of our life and culture are permeated by the truths and impulses of occultism, then the whole emotional and intuitive life of man, his whole relationship to the world around him, will change fundamentally. If we want to describe how today's human being relates to the environment, we have to say: for a number of centuries, the human being has increasingly developed a relationship to the environment that is very abstract, very intellectual, very materialistic. A person walking through the fields today, whether in spring, summer or fall, usually sees what meets the eye, what the senses can perceive, what the mind can combine from the sensory perceptions. If a person is aesthetically inclined and has a poetic sensibility, they imbue their perceptions with feelings and emotions, feeling sadness and pain at one natural phenomenon and elation, joy, and delight at another.

But even where, in the case of modern man, dry, sober sensual perception gives way to poetic and artistic feeling, it is actually only a beginning of what must be given through occultism, not to reason, not to the mind, not to the heads, but to the souls and the hearts. Only then will Theosophy become a significant factor in life, when it gives us not just a mental summary of all kinds of events in the physical, astral and devachanic planes, but when it becomes so ingrained in our souls that our souls feel, sense and learn differently. We must realize that through Theosophy and Occultism there will really come to pass more and more what we emphasized in our lecture yesterday: Humanity will learn to see in what is expressed in the outer world, as it presents itself to the senses, the physiognomy, the gestures, the facial expressions, through which what is soulful and spiritual is revealed behind things. We will learn to see an expression of the spiritual and soul-life in what is going on outside in the surrounding world, in the movements of the stars, just as we see an expression of something soul-like in the hand movements or in the gaze of a person. And so we will learn, for example, to see in the brightening air an external manifestation of internal processes of spiritual beings that truly permeate the air, the water and the earth.

Let us try to imagine how nature appears around us when we elevate ourselves to a concept of the soul and spirit that lives around us. Once we have opened ourselves up to this, we have to ask ourselves: What about the souls of the creatures living around us on the physical plane, the souls of animals, plants and minerals? What is in these three kingdoms of nature, besides what is physically presented to our senses? If we consider the animal kingdom, it differs quite substantially from the human being in spiritual and mental terms. What we have in the individual human being, enclosed within the boundaries of his skin, we do not have in the same way in the individual animal. The individual animal can rather be compared to an individual limb of a human being. We can compare all formally identical animals, so for that matter all lions, all tigers, all pikes, all flies and so on, everything in the animal kingdom that has the same form, with a limb of the human being, for example with the fingers of the hand. If we take the ten fingers of the human being, we will not be tempted to ascribe a soul to each of the ten fingers that would be endowed with ego. We know that all ten fingers belong to a single human being. We ascribe the I-soul to the individual human being. Just as we ascribe the I-soul to a single human being, we ascribe an I-soul to an entire species of animal; whether you call it the same group or species soul is not important. What is important is that we think of things as flowing into each other, fluctuating. Thus, in the case of a group of animals of the same form, we must assume that the same thing underlies them as underlies the individual human being: the I-soul. However, we must not look for this soul of the animal groups where we look for the I-soul of the human being. The place where this I-soul of the human being is between birth and death is the physical plane. This is not to say that this I-soul, by its nature and essence, belongs only to the physical plane, but the human I-soul lives on the physical plane. This is not the case with the group I-ness of animals. For these group Iches of animals, to which the individual animals belong that are of the same nature, it does not depend on the place where the individual animals are; whether a lion is in Africa or here in a menagerie, it makes no difference. The individual animals all belong to the same group I, and the group I is on the astral plane. So if we want to find the ego of a group of similarly shaped animals, we have to go clairvoyantly to the astral plane; and on the astral plane, the group ego of the animals in question is as complete a personality as a human being is on the physical plane. If a man puts out his ten fingers, and you put up a wall here, and the man puts his ten fingers through the ten holes in the wall, then someone standing outside the wall sees only the ten fingers; if he wants to find the ego behind the ten fingers, he must go behind the wall. So you must imagine that we have to see the individual lion as part of the group ego of all lions. If you go to the astral plane, you will find there a lion-genus individuality or personality of all lions, just as you find the individuality for the ten fingers of the human being behind the wall. The same applies to the other similarly formed animal species. And when you “walk” on the astral plane, you will find the astral plane populated by these animal group-I's, which you will encounter there just as you would encounter individual people here on the physical plane. The only difference is that these group-I's reach out for the separate animal individuals on the physical plane, just as you reach through the wall for the individual ten fingers.

But there is an enormous difference between the nature, the inner character of the group-I of the animals and that which is the character of the individual human being. This difference will seem very paradoxical to you, but it exists. There is a peculiar fact here: if you compare the intelligence and wisdom of the animal group-I on the astral plane with the intelligence and wisdom of humans here on the physical plane, you will find that the animal group-I are much cleverer. Everything they have to do is done with the greatest matter-of-factness. In the course of evolution, the human being must first bring his I to that wisdom which the animal group-Iche already have on the astral plane. These animal group-Iche lack one thing, however, which the human being here on the physical plane has to develop throughout the entire evolution on earth. This specific element is not to be found at all in the animal group-Iche. This is the element of love, everything that is love - from the simplest form of blood love between blood relatives to the highest ideal love of a universal brotherhood of man. This element is being developed by humanity within the evolution of the earth. The animal group-egos also have feelings, perceptions and volitional impulses. The mission of the human being here on earth is to develop love; this is lacking in the animals. The basic element of the group ego of animals is wisdom, just as the basic element of the human ego is love.

If we now want to find out how we ourselves are to perceive the revelations of these animal group-Iche within the surrounding nature, we only have to remember that everything around us here are revelations of spiritual events and spiritual beings. Those who are not endowed with clairvoyant abilities cannot, of course, take those “walks” on the astral plane whereby they encounter the population of animal group-Iche there as they encounter physical human Iche here on the earth. But even those who are not clairvoyant can perceive the effects, the deeds of what the group-Iche do here on the physical plane. He can observe how every year, when autumn approaches, the birds fly in the direction from northeast to southwest to the warmer regions, and how they fly back in very specific paths when summer approaches. If you compare the individual paths according to their height and direction for the individual bird species, you begin to suspect that there is wisdom, deep wisdom in all of this. Who is in charge of all this? The animal group egos are in charge. Everything that the various animal species accomplish here on our planet is an effect, an action of the animal group egos. And if you follow these actions of the animal group egos, you will find that, essentially, these animal group egos span the circumference of the earth, that they unfold as forces around the circumference of the earth. The earth is circled by forces of the most manifold kind, by forces that go around the earth in the most manifold convolutions, in straight and crooked and snake-like lines. Man can see these forces here only in their effects, in their revelations. When he grasps these revelations, he can divine what, with clairvoyant ability, leads him to the group Iches of the animals. Thus we can learn to empathize with the wisdom that takes place in our animal kingdom. What the genera and species do reveals something of the deeds of the animal group-I.

The situation is different for the plant world. For the plant world, too, the occult observer sees a series of I's, but there are far fewer I's for the plant world than for the animal world; they are more limited in number. Again, whole groups of plants belong to a common I, and these lie, when we visit them, in an even higher world. While the animal group I's are on the astral plane and live out their lives in the astral that flows around and envelops our Earth, the plant group I's are to be found in the lower regions of the Devachan plane, in what we are accustomed to calling in Theosophy the Rupa parts of the Devachan plane. There they live as closed personalities; just as people do here, the group-I-ities of plants walk there. Along with other beings that do not have a physical body at all, the plant-I-ities are there and form the population on the lower devachan plan.

How does a person find their way into the perception of these plant group-I-ities? The perception itself is ultimately tied to the development of clairvoyant abilities. But this development leads from lower levels upwards, ever higher and higher. What one must first develop in order to ascend to these abilities is feeling and sensation for the matter. Real, true clairvoyant abilities are always based first on the development of feelings and sensations, but not on trivial, egoistic feelings, no, on deeper and more devoted feelings. This is something completely different.

When you look at a plant, you must first of all focus your attention on the fact that the plant develops its roots into the soil, that it pushes its stem upwards, unfolds its leaves upwards, gradually transforming them into sepals and a corolla, in which the fruit then forms. It is important to realize that we cannot compare the plant to the human being in this way. We must not compare the human being to the plant in such a way that we compare the head of the human being to the corolla of the plant and his feet to the root. That is completely wrong. In occult schools, it has always been pointed out and said: You must compare the plant and the human being. But you have to compare them in such a way that you compare the head of man with the root of the plant. Just as the plant turns its root towards the center of the earth, so man turns his head into the universe; and just as the plant chaste turns its blossom and its fruit organs towards the sun, man shamefully turns his fruit organs straight down, where the plant turns its root. That is why occultism says: Man is the upturned plant. The plant appears like a human being standing on its head; the animal stands in between.

In what is usually called a plant, only the physical body and the etheric body of the plant are present. But the plant also has its astral body and its I. But where is the astral body, and where is the I of the plant? We can ask about this place, because it is only a general definition of the matter when one says that the group I of plants is on the lower Devachan plan. We can indicate quite precisely where the astral body of the plants and where the ego of the plants is. The astral body of the plants, and indeed the astral body of all plants that exist on our globe, is the same as the astral body of the earth itself, so that the plant is immersed in the astral body of the earth. In terms of location, the plant-I am in the center of the earth. From the occult point of view, we can understand the earth as a great organism, as a living being that has its astral body; and the individual plants that are on our earth are the limbs. Individually, separately, they only have the physical body and the etheric body. In the individual plant, the individual lily, the individual tulip and so on, there is no consciousness; the earth has its consciousness, its astral body and its I. But there are not only plant 'I's; there are also other spiritual entities. We must not ask whether there is room for all of them. They are interwoven, and they can get along very well there. So when you look at the individual plant, you can only ascribe to it the properties of a physical body and a life body, but not consciousness as an individual being. But plants do have a consciousness, and it is connected with the consciousness of the Earth, it is part of the consciousness of the Earth. Just as we human beings have a consciousness that encompasses joy and sadness, and these interpenetrate each other, so the individual astral bodies of plants permeate the astral body of the Earth, and the plant 'I's permeate the center of the Earth. The living plant occupies the same position in the organism of our earth as milk in the animal organism. Similar astral forces underlie the process by which the plant sprouts from the earth, greens and flowers, and by which the cow gives milk. When you pick a plant with its flower, it does not feel unpleasant for the earth. The earth has its astral body and has feelings there, and when you pick a plant, it feels the same as when a calf sucksleaks, it feels a kind of sense of well-being. When you remove what has grown out of the ground, the earth does not have the individual plant - a sense of well-being. If, on the other hand, you tear out the plant by the roots, it is for the earth as if you were tearing flesh from an animal; it has a kind of feeling of pain.

If we delve into this, not just in the abstract terms of group-I-ness, but in such a way that we transform the empty abstract concepts into feelings and sensations, then we learn to live with the processes of nature; our observation of nature becomes a living sensation. When we walk through the fields in autumn and see the man with the scythe mowing the grain, we get an inkling that, to the same extent as the scythe passes through the stalks and cuts them off, something like spiritual winds is breathing feelings of well-being over the field. And so it is. What the clairvoyant sees in the astral body of the earth is the spiritual source of what has just been described. For the one who sees into these things, the mowing of the grain is not an indifferent process. Just as one can feel and see in a person, through one experience or another, that astral forms of a very specific kind arise, so one can see these astral expressions of the earth's sense of well-being sweeping across the fields in autumn. It is different when the plow cuts furrows through the earth and reworks the roots of the plants. The plowing through with the plow causes pain to the earth; we see feelings of pain emerging. In response to what has just been said, one could easily object that it would be better under certain circumstances to remove plants from the earth by their roots and replant them than to walk across a meadow and tear up all kinds of flowers out of idleness. Such an objection may well be correct from a moral point of view, but here we have a completely different point of view. It could, of course, be better for a person who is just beginning to go gray to pluck out the first gray hairs if he finds this right for aesthetic reasons, but it still hurts him. It is a completely different point of view when we say: plucking the flowers does the earth good, and when we dig up the plant by the roots, it hurts the earth. Life enters the world through pain. The child that is born causes pain to the mother who gives birth to it. This is an example of how we must learn not only to recognize but also to empathize with nature in our environment.

This extends to the mineral kingdom. Minerals also have their I, only the I of minerals lies even higher; it lies in the upper parts of the Devachan plan, which theosophical literature is accustomed to call the Aupa-Devachan. These group 'I's of the minerals are also partially self-contained entities, just as the human 'I's are on the physical plane, as the group 'I's of the plants are on the lower devachan plane, and as the group 'I's of the animals are on the astral plane. On the physical plane, you have only a physical body of minerals, but the minerals also have an astral body and an etheric body. The seer sees the living connections; he knows that when he goes out to a quarry and sees the workers cutting stones there, something is felt there just as when you cut into the flesh of an organism. And while the workers are at work, astral currents flow through the stone realm. What belongs to the mineral as an astral body can be found in the lower parts of the Devachan plan, and the I of the minerals is to be found in the upper parts of the Devachan plan. The group I of the stones feels pain and pleasure. When you break stones, the mineral group I feels pleasure, pleasure. This may seem paradoxical at first, but it is true nonetheless. If you only think in analogies, you might believe that when you smash a stone, it hurts the stone just as much as if you were to wound a living being. But the more you smash the stone, the more pleasure the mineral ego feels. Now you may ask: When does the mineral ego feel pain? You can perceive pain for the mineral ego in the following example. Take a glass of water in which table salt has been dissolved. Now cool the water in the glass until the salt separates out as solid crystals, thereby re-solidifying the mineral substance. Pain arises in this separation of the solid. Similarly, pain would arise if you were to reassemble all the individual pieces into which you had broken a stone. In the group ego of the minerals, pleasure arises whenever the mineral dissolves, and pain arises whenever it solidifies. A feeling of well-being arises when you dissolve salt in heated water, and a feeling of pain arises when the cooling of the water causes the salt to crystallize.

If we imagine this in a larger, cosmic context, we can see how the formation of our earth and our minerals is connected to such a process. If we trace the formation of our Earth far back in time, we come to ever higher temperatures, to ever greater warmth of our Earth; and we encounter a state of our Earth in the Lemurian period when the individual stones had dissolved, when even the minerals that have now crystallized into solid form ran out, as iron runs out today in ironworks when it is liquefied. All our minerals have undergone a process similar to the one you are experiencing on a small scale when the dissolved salt is deposited in a glass when the water cools down. In this way, everything has solidified and contracted on earth. This solidification has taken place in such a way that solid crystals have gradually been embedded in the liquid earth through contraction. Only through this solidification could the earth become the dwelling place for today's physical humanity.

However, this solidification is to be understood in such a way that it reached a peak in a certain period of time. This peak has now been passed in a certain way, and today we can already see a process of dissolution to a greater or lesser extent. When the Earth has reached its goal, when people have purified and spiritualized themselves to the extent that they can no longer draw anything out of the Earth, then the Earth itself will also be spiritualized again. Then all its mineral inclusions will have become fine and ethereal, so that the Earth can pass into an astral state, which it also had before it became physical. The physical process of dissolution is a transitional state to this.

When we look at the earth at the time when it was preparing to become the solid place, the solid ground on which we walk at our present stage of development, we see an ongoing process of suffering for the earth. As it becomes more and more solid, it suffers and “groans in pain”. Our existence has been achieved through its pain. And we find an increase of this pain in the early part of the so-called Atlantean period. From the time when man gradually brought about his own purification, the earth also attained liberation from pain and suffering. This process is not yet far advanced. The greater part of the solid ground that lies under our feet still suffers today, and when we turn our clairvoyant gaze to it, the solid ground is a revelation of the sighs of the earth's being. Whoever studies these facts from the occult and then rediscovers them in the great religious scriptures, will realize from what depth of the spiritual world these scriptures are written. We develop more and more a feeling of reverence for these religious documents. Through our experience, we can thus empirically recognize, by looking at the facts of the outer world, what real foundations underlie St. Paul's saying: “All nature groans in pain, awaiting adoption as a child.” Translate this saying of St. Paul's for yourself: All becoming earth is a becoming under pain, a drawing together into the firm under pain, so that afterwards for their beings the “adoption as children,” the spiritualization, can take place.

In what is really called the Secret School we must begin with such images from our environment, which, when they are looked at, awaken feelings in us. One begins by imparting to the pupil who wishes to undergo a training such images and concepts that enable him to see what is happening in nature not only as an external process, but to feel it as an inner experience with his whole soul, to feel how the becoming of our earth, its solidification, is like pain. This image of pain represents a real spiritual fact. In true occultism, images are not something invented, but are derived from real spiritual facts. No philosophy, no speculation, not the greatest acumen can unravel such an image; only the knowledge of the facts of the higher worlds leads to understanding. In occultism, all images are expressions of spiritual facts.

I just wanted to give you a hint today of how what we acquire in elementary theosophy as ideas, concepts and notions gradually leads to experiences; and every image in occultism is taken only from experiences. If you take, for example, the well-known image of the swastika, you can find the most astute interpretations for this image in the various scriptures. How did it originally come into occultism? This image is nothing other than the reflection of what we call the astral sense organs. Through a certain approach, through training, the human being can develop astral sense organs. These two lines (it is being drawn) are actually movements in the astral body, which are seen by the clairvoyant as fiery wheels or flowers. They are called lotuses.

For these wheels or lotus flowers – of which, for example, the two-petalled one is located in the area of the eyes and the sixteen-petalled one in the area of the larynx – for these astral sense organs, which appear as a luminous phenomenon in the astral world, is the sign, the image, the swastika. Or let us take another symbol, the so-called pentagram. You cannot find the original meaning of the pentagram by speculation or philosophy. The pentagram is a reality; it is a picture of the working of currents, of force currents that are found in the etheric body of the human being. There is a certain flow of forces in a person from the left foot up to a certain point on the head, from there to the right foot, from there to the left hand, from there through the body, through the heart to the right hand, and from there back to the left foot, so that you can draw into the person – into his head, arms, hands, legs, feet – the pentagram.

You have to imagine it as a force effect, not just as a geometric figure. In the etheric body of the human being you have the pentagram. The force effects follow exactly these lines of the pentagram. The lines can take the most varied contortions, but they always remain drawn as a pentagram on the human body. The pentagram is an etheric reality, not a symbol, but a fact.

Thus every symbol in occultism is an image of a fact in the spiritual world. One recognizes its significance only when one can point to the world in which this fact is rooted. Therefore, even the greatest acumen cannot lead to the interpretation of occult signs. The meaning of occult signs and symbols can only be found through experience [of spiritual worlds], and only with the realization of their meaning can man do something with them. It is therefore by no means useless for man to be told and told something that was first found through clairvoyant ability. And from the fact that has been researched, man can in turn be led back to the causes of that fact itself.

The same applies to signs and symbols as to ancient legends and myths. It is a theory based on erudition that legends and myths were invented by folk poetry. The people do not make up stories. All legends and myths are remnants of a time when man was still clairvoyant to a certain extent. What we are told in European legends and myths are records of facts that people saw in the past. Everything in these legends, fairy tales and myths was originally seen clairvoyantly and is the retelling of original clairvoyant experiences. That is what mythology is all about: the retelling of clairvoyant experiences.

Even today we can follow all the events related in mythology on the astral plane. The deeds of Wotan or Odin are real happenings. We must seek realities behind the occult signs, symbols and seals. And the less one allows oneself to be tempted to undertake an interpretation of these signs out of speculation, the better it is.

This lecture series is intended to guide us into the factual sense of occultism. No sign is invented or conceived; it is a picture or reproduction of a real process in the spiritual world. And all the stories we encounter in mythologies are renditions of what people saw when a large proportion of people still had clairvoyant powers.

I would like to discuss some more characteristic symbols and signs today, so that we can become clearer and clearer about the actual basic theme of our lectures, which should consist of showing how signs and symbols relate to the astral and spiritual worlds, also called the devachanic world.

We have seen that the symbols and pictures and the numerical and formal relationships really taken from the nature and essence of the higher worlds, when absorbed by the soul, evoke in it real soul forces in the form of perceptions, thoughts, ideas and feelings, which have a formative effect. Yes, we could even see that Noah's Ark was formative for the present physical body of man, and that the Temple of Solomon, when it works in its forms on the people of the present, will have a great significance for the shaping of man in the sixth race. From these statements you can already see that the path taken by the guides of humanity, who are constantly working on the course of human development, is actually similar to that taken by the individual in the elementary secret schools. There, too, we are dealing with a concentration of sensations, thoughts, images, and so on - many other things are added - that are effective and formative for the human being.

In many cases, the various occult currents of the present day are of the opinion that in our time there may be an ascent into the higher worlds by other means than through the application of imaginative and symbolic ideas. And for people of the present day, ascending into the astral world with the help of symbolic signs or other occult means of education is associated with a certain fear, even aversion. If you raise the question: Are such states of fear justified?, then you can say: Yes and no. In a certain respect they are justified; in another respect they are completely out of place, because no one can really go up into the higher worlds without passing through the astral world. It is a mistaken assumption if someone thinks that he can pass through the astral world blindfolded. You must realize, however, that the spiritual world as such has different regions. Man has descended from the spiritual world into the physical world, and he must ascend from the spiritual world back into the spiritual world. What must be avoided is that man, in his development, falls back into earlier states. Man must never fall back into earlier states. Every mediumistic state is a falling back into an earlier state, whereas true secret schooling is an ascent into higher states. Man must ascend through the astral world with full, bright day-consciousness in order to reach the higher regions of the spiritual world. Whatever longings, passions, instincts today's man carries within himself is anchored in the astral body, of which the astral body is the carrier. If a person wants to ascend to higher worlds, he must work with feelings and sensations; there is no other way. But the point is that he should never try to ascend to the higher worlds other than by fully maintaining the achievements of our physical world, that is, never with a damping of consciousness. When we look at mediums, we always find that they are thrown back into an earlier state of consciousness. Their bright day consciousness is dampened down, weakened, and an earlier state of consciousness, which the person has already overcome, is evoked. Anyone who wants to become a clairvoyant in the modern sense must retain their present bright day consciousness and take it with them. He can only do this by passing through the point of “sensuality-free thinking”, and nothing can ever happen when a person passes through sensuality-free thinking. Let us be quite clear about what this means.

Sensual thinking and imagining is anything that starts from the sensual perception of the objects around us. If you form your ideas in such a way that you first look at an object, perceive it, and then keep it in your memory, and your thoughts are such that you are stimulated by such ideas, then you have sensual thinking. This thinking fills by far the greatest part of the soul experiences of the present human being. And when a person examines himself to see how much remains to him when he throws out of his soul all ideas that are caused by sensory perception, then he will first become aware of what content is still there in the soul. When the ideas that were stimulated by external impressions have been removed, then he will grasp what the Greek philosopher Plato meant when he wrote over the entrance to his school, “No one unfamiliar with geometry shall enter.” This means that no one should enter who has not been able to rise to thinking free of sensuality. He did not demand ordinary geometry. Nor is it required today by those who want to ascend to higher worlds. Nor would it be necessary today for intrinsic, objective reasons. But from geometric representations one can form an idea of what thinking is that is free of sensuality. If you put three beans here, add three more beans, and another three beans, then you can learn from this sensual impression that 3 times 3 = 9. The child or primitive man learns it by the fingers. This is sensual thinking. When you no longer need the fingers or the beans, but when you learn the same thing through pure mental contemplation, then it is sensual-free thinking. The child starts learning from a bridge [beans or fingers] and only later rises to sensual-free thinking. If we draw a circle on the blackboard, it is not really a circle; what we draw there is a collection of little chalk mountains. You will not be able to grasp what a real circle is with sensory perception alone. Only the spiritually viewed, inwardly constructed circle is free of sensuality.

The best means for a larger circle of people to arrive at a thinking free of sensuality is today Theosophy, if Theosophy is understood in the sense that the human being learns to detach the images from sensuality. Particularly in those areas that go a little beyond the most elementary, man is led by theosophy to thinking that is free of sensuality. If, for example, you want to understand what the etheric body or the astral body is, you cannot see them externally. That is precisely what theosophy gives you: it describes things that you cannot see externally. Or when we describe the old moon in Theosophy, we create a picture of it, a very drastic one, in fact, in which we combine sensual and supersensible ideas, so that a materialistically minded person would say: He is painting something that is not possible. Yes, in Theosophy one must teach something that is almost impossible for today's conditions and describe the old moon in such a way that there were no such rocks, minerals and stones on it as there are on our earth today. The entire old moon consisted of a living substance that could be compared in density to a kind of spinach puree or cooked salad, a body halfway between minerals and plants, half plant, half mineral. We find something like a semi-vegetable life on the old moon. Minerals as they are today did not yet exist at that time. If you look at today's peat bogs, where there is also a kind of semi-vegetable substance, you would get an outwardly similar picture to the substance of the old moon. Instead of rocks and mountains, you would have found at most something on the old moon that is like the bark of our trees today. Now every naturalist will object that something like that could not exist as a planet. But it is precisely this that is needed, and it is a necessity in order to understand other epochs of development, for the human being to tear his thinking away from what today adheres to the conceptions of ordinary sensory thinking and feeling, and to arrive at a thinking that is free of the senses. Thinking that is free of the senses is not abstract thinking, but very, very real thinking. If we think of the old moon as a kind of large salad with its bark and so on included, then this is “sensual-supersensual” thinking, as Goethe says. By detaching color and form from sensuality and projecting them freely into space, you have gained imaginations through sensual-free thinking. Anyone who regards this as a firm foundation will never be able to stumble when ascending to higher worlds.

Let us make a schematic drawing for ourselves. Some things become unclear due to incorrect symbolic drawing. So, although it is sufficient for understanding certain relationships if the physical plane, the astral plane and the devachan plane are drawn on top of each other, it is more correct to imagine the physical world as a self-contained sphere, where the astral is all around, and the devachanic is around that again. Instead of drawing horizontal layers, it is good to draw it this way (see drawing), because this provides a way to distinguish two areas of the astral plane from each other. If we look into two very specific areas of the astral plane, which we indicate here with arrow 1, we see that in the astral world, what we call the male and the female here on earth are the two opposites of “form” and “life”. Form and life are opposites on the astral plane. Now, if we want to encounter form and life on the astral plane, we will only encounter them if we go in that direction (from the center upwards, see arrow 2). If we go in the other direction (center downwards, see arrow 3), we will by no means encounter the beneficial contrast of form and life, but rather the contrast of “decay” and “disease”. So if we start from the physical world, we encounter the opposite of form and life on the astral plane above; this corresponds to the opposite of decay and disease in the astral world below, i.e. going down below the physical plane. Whenever we go to one side, where we see beneficial properties for the physical world, these correspond on the other side to destructive, harmful influences for the physical world. We now have an opportunity to distinguish between the parts of the astral plane. There are actually two quite different areas of the astral plane that affect the human soul. If we want to form an idea of how these two very different areas affect the soul, we have to imagine that in a human being we have: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body; and depending on their development, which has been described many times: manas or spirit self, budhi or life spirit, and atma or spiritual man; and in between we have, filled by the I, the soul. So that we can distinguish in a certain respect: body - which actually includes the three bodies -, soul and spirit. Now the three lower members, astral body, ether body and physical body, are reflected in the soul. Insofar as the physical body, ether body and astral body are reflected in their original nature, they introduce lower, downward-pulling qualities into the human soul. But that which is higher is also reflected in man: manas, buddhi, atma, and thus we also have uplifting, purifying elements in the soul. In strict Christianity, people also knew about this twofold way of being reflected in the human soul. One saw that the higher human nature was reflected in the soul, or the lower nature was reflected in the soul. Many sensed this, even if they were not esotericists. That is why it was said: When a person dies, he perceives the reflection of the spiritual world as the collection of laws of Moses; and when the lower nature is reflected in the soul, the devil reads the record of sins to the soul in death.

This means that the soul is presented with all the qualities that adhere to it: That which is reflected from above is held up to it as the tablets of the law of Moses; and that which is reflected from below is described by saying: the devil reads the soul's record of sins to it. If the soul does not take the right path, it can indeed sink into its lower passions; that can happen. But this must not be presented to man as a deterrent.

All imagistic, pictorial representations educate the human being in order to gradually bring him to that point in the development of life where he learns to look more and more into the higher worlds. Pictorial representations, such as the image of the old moon, are a powerful educational tool in this direction. Through such images, the idea of development is introduced to the human being in the right esoteric way. If one only presents dry, abstract concepts to the human being, he remains on the physical plane with his thinking, because ordinary thinking as such never comes from the physical plane. It is indeed a reflection of the Devachan plan; but the thought that the human being entertains is something that belongs to the physical plan, it is only a shadow image of the higher processes. No matter how fine your conceptions may be regarding the process of development, how a being on the first step of existence differentiates itself, descends and envelops itself, these are all only conceptions that give you ideas of the physical plan, but do not help you in your development. Only concepts and ideas that are both sensual and supersensible can gradually help you to really advance one step. First, you have to transform the concepts into images, into imaginations, and then repeat this process over and over again.

If one were to express this process, which was taught, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools, in a dialogue between teacher and student, one could put it like this: - In reality, such a dialogue never took place in this way, but we can present it in this way to show what the student had to go through step by step in long, drawn-out experiences. The teacher said to the student: “Look at the plant and see how it directs its root into the earth, how it grows towards the sun with its stem and blossom, and how it develops its fruit organs. And now imagine the human being in contrast. The human being is poorly compared to the plant when one compares his head with the flower and his reproductive organs with the root of the plant. Even Darwin, the great naturalist, used this comparison correctly by comparing the head of the human being with the root of the plant, so that even for Darwin, the plant is the human being turned upside down. What the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam, its reproductive organs, man directs to the center of the earth. Thus, in man we have to think of an inversion of the plant, in that he freely directs all the forces that in the plant are directed toward the center of the earth to the sun-filled cosmos, and shamefully directs those organs that the plant holds up chastely to the sunbeam toward the earth. The animal stands in the midst of it.

If we therefore want to draw the real directions of power that exist in the world, we can do so as follows: the true esoteric meaning of the sign of the cross is a sum of forces. One direction of force goes downwards: the plant being is directed by this force. In the human being, it is directed in the opposite direction. The animal has a horizontally aligned spine, and in it this force is manifested as orbiting the earth horizontally. The soul principle ascends from plant existence to animal existence to human existence. And Plato, who so often expressed things that originated in the mysteries, spoke the beautiful sentence: The world soul is crucified on the world body. That is, the world soul passes through the plant, animal and human; it is crucified in the forces of the three realms: plant, animal and human. And if we thus inscribe the cross into the three natural realms, then the cross becomes for us the sign of the direction of development.

Now the teacher said to the student: You have to imagine how the plant stretches its calyx towards the sunbeam, how the fruit organs reach maturity when the plant is kissed by the sunbeam. - The development into a human being happens through the fact that the pure, chaste plant substance is permeated by desires, instincts and passions. In this way man conquers his consciousness, in this way he becomes human by passing through his animal nature. By interweaving the lower nature of desire into the pure plant nature, man has ascended from the dull plant consciousness to the bright consciousness of day.

From this level of present-day man, the teacher pointed the student to a higher level. Just as man has developed from a state similar to that of a plant, so too will he purify his instincts and desires to a higher, chaste level. The teacher showed the student the structures in the physical body of man through which the higher levels of consciousness can be attained and human substance can in turn become a substance similar to that of plants. Every being must use a physical body if it wants to appear on earth. But the body of man will change more and more in the future. We distinguish between a descending and an ascending development with regard to the human organs. Some human organs are in a state of descending development; in the course of time, which admittedly counts in millennia, the human being will discard them. Other organs are in the process of becoming; in the future they will undergo an upward development, for example the human larynx; it is only at the beginning of its development. The human heart will undergo a further upward development, becoming a completely different organ in the future. While other organs have already passed their zenith, becoming detached from human nature and withering away, we have an organ in the heart that is only at the beginning of its development.

We can distinguish between striated and longitudinally striated muscles in the human body; these are voluntary and involuntary muscles. The voluntary muscles of the hand, for example, are striated. The muscles of the intestines, on the other hand, which involuntarily push food forward, are longitudinally striped. The heart is an exception here, and this is a crux for today's physiological and anatomical scientists. The heart belongs to the involuntary muscles, but it has striated musculature. Therefore, our anatomists cannot understand the heart either. They consider all organs to be the same. If we consider the organs spiritually, they may well consist chemically of the same components, but one may be in a descending development and the other in an ascending one. The heart is on the way to becoming a voluntary muscle in the future; its anatomical structure already bears the characteristic features for this. Today, however, it contributes to the effect of emotional experiences on the blood. You can see how, when you feel fear, the blood mass withdraws from the periphery of the body and moves inward, or how, when you feel shame, the blood is driven from the center of the body to the periphery. In the future, in addition to the transformation of the heart, there will also be a transformation of our larynx. Today, the larynx serves to translate my thoughts into words by making the air vibrate. You can pick up and hear my words with your ears; this is caused by the vibrations of the air. The present human larynx is capable of transforming into air vibrations what is going on in the soul. The human body of the future will transform its larynx into a fertilizing organ, and the word, which today only creates in the air, will in the future become creative in our environment. Reproduction will then take place through the larynx, which will create the race of the future.

Just as the teacher pointed out to the student the chaste chalice of the plant, and how he pointed out to the human being who, in descending, has permeated his plant substance with the lower nature of passions, desires and instincts, but But in exchange for this, has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, the teacher showed how the present human being will ascend to higher states of consciousness, and how the future human being will transform the substance, filled with desires, back into pure and chaste organs. The pupil's attention was drawn to the past, present and future. Just as the chalice of the plant extends chastely towards the sun and its fruit organs grow towards the sun, this will be there again on a higher level, where man will offer his larynx as a chalice to the spiritual sunbeam. This spiritual chalice, the transformed organ of speech, was called the Holy Grail. This is a real ideal. The beginning, middle and end of human development: here you see the idea of human development transformed into a picture.

Through the feelings that we develop from these pictures, the forces flow to us that truly open up the higher worlds for us. All this takes place without magic. The images stimulate the feelings that lead the human being into the higher worlds. Feelings and sensations lead the human being into the astral world, just as the will leads him into the devachanic or spiritual world. Thinking corresponds to the physical world, feeling to the astral world, and the purified will to the devachanic world.

If we look at the plant in its original chaste substance, we find green as the color in the life of the plant. The plant is permeated by chlorophyll, by what is called chlorophyll, in those parts where the etheric body is actively alive. The etheric body has a basic law, which is the law of repetition. If only the etheric body were active in the plant, then one and the same form would be repeated again and again; leaf by leaf it sets in. But when the astral body of the earth begins to affect the plant, it completes growth and sets in the flowering. The effect of the etheric body is revealed in the repetition. This principle also applies to human growth. The etheric body shows its influence in the formation of the spinal vertebrae, but this only goes as far as the arching of the cranial vault, where the astral body begins to take effect. We can therefore only influence the etheric body through the principle of repetition. When you think and comprehend, you only affect the astral body. But when you pray or meditate, for example, and repeat the same prayer or meditation every day, you have an effect that extends into the etheric body. The way it is in the cosmos is that the principle of repetition first manifests itself in the deeds of the etheric body, then the principle of closure through the astral body. Where the astral body withdraws, the principle of repetition naturally reappears. This is how your hair and nails grow, because the astral body has withdrawn there. It doesn't hurt when you cut your hair, because pain is an expression of the astral body.

We initially have the pure, chaste plant substance, where the plant, subject only to the law of the ether body, adds leaf after leaf. Now this pure, chaste plant substance is increasingly permeated by what is called kama in theosophy, the realm of instincts and feelings, the realm of desires, right up to the images. And now, in man, that which has developed in him since he had a plant nature is to be overcome again. As man developed, he took in the red blood. The red blood brings about in the human being that which makes him self-conscious. The chlorophyll of the plant, permeated by astral substance and the I, has been transformed into the red blood. If you could permeate the green plant substance with the I and the astral substance, you would get the red blood. Now think of the image of the cross. In the image of the cross you also have something that points to the future of man. Where does man's future lie? He is to regain his plant nature, but connected with the higher level of consciousness that today's man has already gained. The red roses of the Rose Cross signify what has been gained through blood, but also what he had as plant nature and is to have again. This is prefigured in the rose. It has a plant nature, and it also has the red color of blood. The etheric body is active in the green leaves, and the astral body is active in the red blossom, where the closure is; the rose blossom owes its red to the most intense effects of the astral body of the earth.

In the future, the human being's astral body will become free and consciously active from the outside, from outside the physical body, just as the earth's astral body now acts on the rose. Then what is now present as a plant rose at a lower level will appear at a higher level as the human rose. Thus, in the wreath of roses surrounding the black wood of the cross, we actually have a sign of the development of the human being. In the black wood we see what dies; it is an image of what will also die in man. And in the red rose we see what will continue to develop until it becomes that chalice which, like the chalice of a plant towards the sun, holds out towards the spiritual sun-rays. And the rose cross, where the red roses surround the black cross, presents this process to us in an image.

The important thing about the symbols is that we do not merely think them, but that we feel and sense them. For only when we feel that the red rose is saying: that is what you will become one day, that is what the goal of human development represents to us – and when our hearts open and our feelings become pure, then the forces within us are released that lead us up into a higher world. Thus these symbols are workers at our soul. They permeate and interweave our soul; they are the greatest and most effective educators of our human race.

Just as we place images and imaginations before our soul here, so in still higher spheres the inner forces of numbers are placed before man. Man must learn to feel the inner relationships of numbers like spiritual music. One can describe the relationships of the physical body, ether body, astral body and I to one another by attempting to provide images of the relationship between these four aspects of human nature. In doing so, one experiences a kind of imagination. Thus, one can describe the relationship between the physical body and the etheric body by saying: the physical body comes into being because all the forces and substances that are spread out in the mineral kingdom are connected by the etheric body; it would disintegrate if the etheric body did not permeate it; the etheric body is an inner fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. In this way we work our way up to an image of the etheric body.

And if we try to gain a pictorial representation of the astral body, we imagine how it moves out at night and works on the etheric and physical bodies from the outside, by removing the fatigue substances. Let us make this clear to ourselves pictorially. But there is an even higher way of imagining this relationship; here one has to imagine the inner value of certain numbers. You have to recognize that the ratio of 1:3 is something quite different than the ratio of 1:7. This is not irrelevant. With the ratio of 1:3, you have to imagine that the 3 is differentiated within itself, and you have to imagine the interrelations of the individual quantities to the others.

But what is important is the ratio of 1:3:7:12. If you understand the relationship between these numbers as a tone ratio, in that you imagine that a tone makes three vibrations in a certain time, another seven vibrations in the same time, and yet another twelve vibrations, then you have expressed in these numbers the ratio that indicates the ratio of the I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body in spiritual music.

I = 1
astral body = 3
etheric body = 7
physical body = 12

There is good reason for this in the existence of the world. If we were to follow the development from the oldest Saturn existence to the present earthly existence, we would soon be able to find how this is rooted in the human existence. The Earth, in its first, in the Saturn embodiment, was surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac. They provided the first germinal formation of the physical body. Through the influence of the corresponding signs on the body, this relationship of the number twelve to the individual limbs of the physical body came into being. The seven planets influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was a sun, the other planets were around it, and so the number seven influenced the etheric body. When the Earth was in its lunar embodiment, it was first affected by the Sun. But then, as a result of the Sun and then the Moon separating from the Earth, three bodies emerged from one body, and so the number three was effective in the formation of the astral body. And when the I came down from the higher worlds, this was expressed in the number one. The ratio of 1:3 gives you the ratio of the I to the astral body, to 7 the ratio to the etheric body, and to 12 the ratio to the physical body.

1:3:7:12 thus denotes the ratio of the four elements of human nature, which you must feel inwardly. It is not easy to awaken the sensations that one has to imagine the physical body as the most perfect of the four parts, the etheric body as the less perfect, the astral body even less perfect, and the I as the “baby” among the four members of human nature. We must think of the physical body as being twelve times more perfect than the I, the etheric body as being seven times more perfect, and the astral body as being three times more perfect. These numbers indicate the degrees of perfection for the four aspects of human nature. These numbers are therefore profound symbols for the real conditions.

Occult schools provided instructions for gradually becoming familiar with the numerical values. For example, the significance of the number three was taught by saying: “Let us consider the development of a plant and pay attention to three things.” Let us start with the plant germ. You have an inconspicuous, small plant germ, from which the plant gradually develops. We can depict this in a drawing by letting the plant germ diverge in a radiating manner, up to the leaves, flowers and fruit. Now the germ has become a plant and then the plant germ has become a plant again. What has diverged in the plant to become leaves, flowers and fruit is all wrapped up together in the germ; it has, as it were, slipped into the germ. In a developed plant, everything is revealed in the senses. Then the senses enter into a completely different realm, into the germ. There we have in the germ the senses as small as possible and the spiritual as large as possible.

But a third thing also takes place. While the germ is forming out of the plant and the new plant is developing out of this germ, elemental forces from the environment are continually acting on the plant from the outside. The germ is there, which developed from the plant, and out of it the new plant develops again; but the third comes from the whole surrounding world; and it is this third that changes each plant again a little. The higher a being stands, the more the influence of the third changes it.

Let us now turn again to the human soul and consider how it lives between birth and death. There it spreads out what it has brought with it as the fruits of a previous embodiment. Just as external influences affect unconscious plant life, so man consciously experiences the most diverse influences from outside in the life between birth and death. And everything he experiences there was not yet present in the seed; it is something entirely new, an enrichment, the fruits of which the person takes with him into a later life, into a following incarnation. What was present in the old plant continues to work in the new plant; but in the development of the new plant something else appears that was not present in the old plant.

Thus, in all development, we have three aspects to consider: first, the unfolding from a, as it were, wrapped-up state; we call this development or evolution. Then, what lies in the germ must come into being through the reverse process, the wrapping or involution. These two processes alone, however, do not yet give progress. Only when a being is able to take in influences from outside and process them into inner experiences can something new and progressive come into the world. That is the third thing; it is called creation out of nothing. You are constantly developing what is predisposed in you from the past, constantly taking in something from your environment that you transform into experiences, and then you carry that into a new embodiment. In all life, the trinity of evolution, involution and creation out of nothing is at work. In the case of human beings, we have this creation out of nothing in the work of their consciousness. They experience the processes in their environment and process them into ideas, thoughts and concepts. Dispositions come from previous embodiments, but all progress in life is based on the production of new thoughts and new ideas. The circumstances of the environment are “consumed”, and the inner experiences lead to new thoughts and ideas. Therefore, three is the number of life, it is called the number of creation or of action.

On the other hand, another number is called the number of revelation. You can easily imagine which number is called the number of revelation. If you look at anything in the world, it must always reveal itself in a duality. As we cannot perceive light without darkness, so we always encounter an attenuated or opposite aspect of every real concept. Light and darkness, good and evil, and so on. Duality reigns in all that is revealed. Therefore, the number two is the number of revelation. Opposites are only united in the realm of the occult, which lies beneath the revealed. Therefore, the number one is the number of unity. Evolution and involution are not contradictions, because they would always unfold in the same way without the third - from germ to plant and from plant to germ. Only in connection with the third, creation out of nothing, does the new arise, which is expressed by the number three.

Thus, in the first three numbers you have important symbols of the spiritual world. It should be indicated to you by individual examples how that which is called symbols relates to the higher worlds, and how, for example, symbols such as the Holy Grail or the Rosicrucian in the picture express higher development.

Another beautiful symbol is the image of the mirror. We often call that which surrounds us a mirror of the spiritual, because in truth nothing external shows us anything other than the reflection of spiritual beings. You can observe this yourself in physical life. When you perceive a physical object, what does your eye see? Your eye would not see the object at all if the sun's rays did not fall on it and reflect off the object into your eye. In truth, your eye does not see ordinary objects, but the sunlight reflected from the objects, and that is how an object appears to you in a certain form. In truth, you do not see yourself when you look in the mirror either, because your spiritual part is outside of your physical being. What you see in the mirror is the reflection of the rays that fall on you from the spiritual world. What you see reflects the light of the spirit just as ordinary objects reflect sunlight. The outer body of man is actually the mirror in which his true being is reflected.

In the Atlantean period, man did not see objects outside at all. He knew that he was in a spiritual substance and therefore could see spiritually inwardly. Only in the last third of the Atlantean period did the spiritual light go out, and man only saw the reflected rays of the spiritual light. Imagine looking into a glass pane and being aware of your own spiritual qualities. Now someone applies a mirror substance to the back of the glass pane; as a result, you no longer see your own being in the glass pane, but only the image reflected by the mirror. Man now sees his image; and now the illusion arises for him that what he sees there is his ego. This illusion is wonderfully expressed in the Bible. Man lost Paradise when he became so absorbed in sensuality that he saw himself. Before that Adam and Eve had not “seen”; now “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” And because here an illusion actually occurred, legend attributes the fact of the externalization of objects to the Luciferic principle.

In Eastern Europe there is a folk tale that tells of a monk who wanted to test whether the biblical saying was based on truth: Those who seek will find, and to those who ask, it will be given. He wanted to test whether this was really true, so he prayed for what he wanted to beg for. He wanted nothing more nor less than the king's daughter herself. He proposed to the king's daughter. She told him that she would be his on one condition: he had to bring her an instrument in which she could see herself from top to bottom. This was at a time when there were no mirrors. So he went off searching, and met the devil, who told him the secret of the mirror principle. When he returned with this, he received the princess's hand in marriage; however, he later renounced her. So in order to obtain the mirror, he had to resort to the devil.

In the manifold signs and symbols that have come to us in these lectures, we have been able to see the real meaning of these images. Sensory perception is the content of the physical world. Images and imaginations are the expression of the astral world. Harmony of the spheres, sound of the spheres is the expression of the spiritual world. Those who ascend to this spiritual world perceive its inner spiritual sonority, it penetrates into them. Inspiration is the vital element of the spiritual world, just as imagination is the vital element of the astral world. A truly inspired world is created out of the spirit. IV

Esteemed attendees! Among the ideas that the theosophical movement is trying to bring to people's attention again, the two words “reincarnation” and “karma” are combined in the title of today's lecture as the solution to the human riddle. Our contemporaries have very different interpretations of these two words. Some are quick to declare Theosophy fantastic and nonsensical; they say, “How can anyone possibly know something like that?” For others, this knowledge is a kind of deliverance; the word to the riddle is the riddle's solution, which they have found; the nightmare under which they have been suffering has been lifted. The mystery of why some people are in deepest misery while others seem to walk in the highest happiness is solved when we consider that in times gone by the foundations were laid for both the abilities with which a person is born and his destiny in this life on earth.

Those, however, to whom this seems so fantastic, do not consider that their environment is not the only one on earth. There are many people who believe in repeated lives on earth, just as many as those for whom this idea has been pushed out of their field of vision. For the Asian peoples, re-embodiment is not a dry theory, but a truth of life from which they draw vitality. In earlier times, until the advent of Christianity, this view was widespread in Europe, even in the early days of Christianity. It was not just a view for visionaries; the best of the leaders professed this view. Plato, Giordano Bruno, who was executed for standing up for Copernicus, stood up for it. Their doctrine cannot be separated from the concept of repeated lives on earth. Lessing professes it in his “Education of the Human Race”. It is not just the fanciful spirits of some subordinate religious system that advocate this, but great minds such as Goethe and Jean Paul, because this is the only way they can explain life. One behaves remarkably against the great spiritual heroes such as Plato, Lessing and so on, whose names one mentions with more or less feigned reverence – there is even a tie named after Giordano Bruno – when one comes across their deepest conviction of repeated life on earth and then shrugs and says: That is one of the weaknesses of this great man. – Is there a greater immodesty than to judge like this? I ask anyone who speaks in this way where they learned the best things they know. It was probably from those whose names are associated with this teaching. Yet they claim to be their judges! They accept from them what suits them and discard what does not.

The theosophical movement seeks to bring the awareness of repeated earthly life to people in a modern way. Science still resists recognizing this teaching. If only they would accept it as a hypothesis, the time will soon come when they will see that without this teaching they cannot solve the mystery of man. Every human being carries within himself an imperishable core of being. What is born and dies with him is only the shell of this core of being. This was there before birth, will be there after death. This core of being has already repeatedly lived on earth and will be born again and again in the womb. The present life is only one among many.

This is not immediately apparent when considered superficially. On first glance, the teaching may seem improbable. The naturalistic way of thinking in the West makes it impossible for us to grasp the matter correctly. There is a certain higher spiritual teaching, as it was cultivated in the East. Many Westerners who have received this teaching have naturally come to separate their outer appearance from their inner core of being in their thoughts when they are alone or with those who have undergone the same schooling and know about this inner core of being.

They think or say: “It is not my actual core of being that is walking around the room, but my body. My body is hungry, my brain is thinking, and so on.

There are spiritual teachings that teach us that the physical body is only a tool for the spiritual essence, that all sense organs only serve to enable it to occupy itself on earth. The average person thinks of their body as “I”; the spiritually trained person has the sensation of a duality, a spiritual “I” that has nothing to do with the external one; more and more, they distinguish the imperishable core of their being from the physical body. What was there before birth has nothing to do with the physical body, but a lot to do with physical needs.

The idea that it is Mr. Smith or John Doe who returns is wrong. Only someone who can detach himself from the idea that he is his body can recognize what it is that reincarnates itself as Fritz Schulze or Johann Maier. Only when he is able to do this can he begin to understand what it is that reincarnates itself.

Now we must once again briefly consider what remains and returns to earthly existence and what passes away. Firstly, the physical body disintegrates at death because it consists of physical matter – it passes away.

Secondly, the etheric body, the life body: this is what enables the physical organs to perform their function; the moving, the invigorating in the body. The clock also moves, it consists of a wheel train; if I take out a wheel, it stops working; if I put the clock down and the wheel next to it, they can lie there for a long time, they do not change. But if I cut off a hand from the human body, it does not remain as it was; it withers away because it was connected with the body, of which I have separated it, in a living, organic way. This etheric body also disintegrates. It merges into the general ether.

The third body can be recognized when we consider what lives in the human being – not just the connection between skin and bones – but what he carries within him in terms of suffering and joy, desires and passions; these are things that live in him just as much as blood and heart; they are just as alive. This is the astral body.

Fourthly, there is the I, which distinguishes human beings from the creatures of the other realms. The physical body is shared with minerals, the etheric body with plants, and the astral body with animals.

The I works on the astral body. We must keep reminding ourselves of this. The example often given can make this clear to us. What Darwin experienced with a “savage” who eats his own kind: this “savage” also consists of the four basic parts of the human being mentioned; but his astral body still differs little from that of the animal. He still blindly follows his instincts. Darwin tried to make it clear to the “savage” how wrong it was for him to eat his brother. The “savage” said that Darwin could not possibly know whether it was bad or good before he had eaten it. — From this we can see that this “savage” had no concept of right and wrong at all; he could not yet make a distinction between good and evil. What he likes, what tastes good to him, is good for him; what tastes bad or displeases him is bad for him. His ego has not yet worked on his astral body; he has not yet ennobled it. Culture ennobles the instincts and makes them subservient to duty. The ideal of duty teaches man to distinguish between what attracts him and what he should avoid. In this way he recognizes right and wrong. When man has come so far that he is able to distinguish between what he may follow and what he may not follow, he has learned to control his astral body from the ego.

When we look at people today, we find that they have worked on one part of their astral body and not the other. We must make a strict distinction between these two parts of the astral body. One part is still like that of an animal, blindly following its inclinations and impulses. The other part is the part of the astral body that man has transformed from a purely natural state into something nobler. There is a sharp and important boundary between these two parts. The part that the human being has not yet worked on will be lost after a short time when he dies. The part of the astral body that we have not made our own is given back to nature. What we have purified and transformed from astral matter remains our imperishable property. The unrefined part of the instinct must fall away; what has been refined remains and is incorporated into the ego. Thus man works on the immortalization, on the making immortal of his astral body. It is obvious that this work cannot be completed in one life. Logically structured, the doctrine of repeated earth lives appears through this contemplation.

For anyone who, through personal insight, knows the inner life of man, re-embodiment is a fact as certain as the fact that there are so and so many people sitting here in this hall. He knows of this fact through higher vision; he has not arrived at it through logical speculation.

But this evening we want to make clear to ourselves the logic of the matter. — Let us compare the “savage” who has done very little work with, say, St. Francis of Assisi, who had almost nothing left in him that he had not ennobled. He had brought the remainder of the earth down to the smallest degree. To reach this level, he must have had completely different abilities and powers at his disposal than that “savage”. Would it not be just as nonsensical to assume that these abilities came out of nothing as it would be to assume that a lower animal could arise from the mud, or that a lion did not descend from a lion? If you wanted to claim that, you would consider it foolish in the physical realm. We are reluctant to assume miracles in the physical realm, but not such a much greater miracle in the higher realm! What is inherited in the animal, so that only lions descend from a lion, only tigers from a tiger, and so on, are generic characteristics. But in the individual human being, there can be no question of the genus. Every human being has individual characteristics; only someone who chooses to ignore them can fail to see this. For human beings, the individual is as important as the species is for animals. An animal repeats the species, a human being repeats the individual. The individual human being not only displays the characteristics of his parents, but is also something in itself.

This must be explained. In addition to what we have inherited from our parents, something spiritual lives in us; that is, something spiritual lives in each of us that can be traced back to a previous existence. Just as the physical person has acquired physical characteristics through heredity, so the spiritual person has acquired spiritual qualities. And he has acquired them in previous lives by learning to control his astral body. And he has brought this ability with him into this life. It is always only the core of his being that reappears on earth.

Some might well object: Yes, if that is so, then shouldn't a person remember their previous lives? The question is wrongly put. Imagine you have a four-year-old child in front of you and someone asks: Why can't people do arithmetic? Of course, the four-year-old child can't do arithmetic. Let him reach the age of ten and he will be able to do it. There comes a time for everyone when they will realize that the more they ascend, the more they will also come to understand their previous lives on earth. For the majority it is still quite impossible. One must first know what is embodied before one can recognize what happens to it. Man desires to remember, but that which he wants to remember has fallen away from him, that which has significance for him. Only when he can grasp himself as a spirit can there be any question of remembering.

Whoever needs external impressions to feel does not become aware of the immortal, cannot learn anything about it. It only shines forth in the one who conquers the spiritual core. Certain phenomena occur here and there where memory becomes clairvoyant; for example, in the face of mortal danger, the whole of life sometimes arises in memory.

We must be clear about this. If man, as he is now, is to remember, he must call upon the etheric body for help. Memory lies in the etheric body. The instincts are in the astral body. We could not have memories without the etheric body, but they are clouded and inadequate because they are hindered by the physical body and drowned out by the surging feelings of the astral body. During sleep, the etheric body remains connected to the physical body and causes dreams. Shortly after death, the astral and etheric bodies separate from the physical body; then the magnetic bond that tied them to the body is broken. In the short time between the lifting of the finer bodies and their separation from the physical body, the whole of life flashes before the soul as in a great painting. It is written in the etheric body; memories emerge of long, long times; there is a dead calm over the soul; it is blind and deaf to its surroundings; deep inside, it comes to life with a sublime content.

Thomas a Kempis, in his “Nachfolge Christi” (The Imitation of Christ), has much to say about this language of the soul. His book is almost on a par with the New Testament.

When this spiritual power arises deep within us, it gradually allows us to recognize our spiritual essence. It is a very specific experience, the inner realization of the self-generating thought. We can get some idea of the process if we become completely absorbed in a work of art, to the extent that we forget ourselves completely. If you want to know yourself, your innermost self, there must be perfect calm. Nothing, absolutely nothing of the personal ego must interfere. This requires a degree of living in the object that takes place in the chaste ether element. When a person has learned to let the divine thought live in him and is able to trace his life back to his birth, then an image appears before his soul. It is the image of what he saw at the hour of death in the previous life, the overview of the previous earthly life. He cannot remember the whole earthly life; that comes only later.

At first, this memory will be repeated until it becomes certain, before the memory goes back further and further. Anyone who knows what happens to a person will understand the context. Anyone who believes that a person receives everything from nature will find it strange. But to those who believe in the work that man has to do, it will be clear. What a person's character is, that person has created for himself: What you think today, you will be tomorrow. — Beautiful, pure thoughts, often, often cherished, duties faithfully fulfilled, will pass into character. Thought forms character.

On the other hand, it is obvious – and easy to notice – that a person's environment, their surroundings, their occupation, has a great influence on their character. On closer examination, we will find that the opportunities offered to people in life are related to their inclinations, desires and cravings. Compare a North American bank official with a botanist. The botanist draws very different things to himself than the bank official. This is quite natural and natural. They are the consequences of the innate dispositions that each person has acquired in their previous life. The actions are the counter-shock to the environment. An example: a carpenter has worked all day. The half-finished table that he finds in the morning causes him to continue working on this table. He does not work out of nothing. The half-finished table determines my fate for tomorrow, the carpenter can say. So the previous day is the karma for the next.

Those animals that crawled into a dark cave and could not find their way out again gradually lost their eyesight because they could not use it in the dark. Their offspring lacked the organs of sight altogether; in the dark they needed other organs. These animals prepared their own fate. Their migration into the dark cave was their karma. In the past they created their future. What I do changes the outside world. If I break off a twig, I have changed the course of the world. The tree does not continue to grow as it was in its nature to do. With every deed we change the course of events; it would have been different if I had not done that deed.

The same applies to the spiritual life. Through our feelings and thoughts, we change the world. Because all my actions have an influence on the world, my karma consists of the changes that I have brought about in the world through my actions. Thoughts form character; actions form counter-actions. They fall back on the doer in the next life.

Example: I have offended a person. By doing so, I have brought about a change; now I am obliged to restore the world to the state from which I disturbed it. I have made the world imperfect; it demands that I make it perfect again. I am bound by my obligation until I have restored the disturbed harmony. If the harmony is not restored in this life, the guilt remains until the next life on earth and must be compensated for.

This is how repeated lives on earth are connected. If I was born into hardship and misery in this life, it was because I had previously brought disharmony into the world. This is how world justice is administered. Man is answerable for his actions; there is no other forgiveness for these than the counter-action that is performed as atonement. This is the unpardonable sin against the spirit. What he does in the lower world must be made good by him in the lower world. Natural life brings about nature in him; if he errs there, it will be forgiven him. Man is answerable for what he has done himself. If he does evil, consciously goes against the cosmic order, it is a sin against the self, against the spirit. The self has been violated by the conscious act. Theosophy is not dogma, it does not form a sect. It is life, full life. Mere theory is of no use. Even if I knew everything perfectly and did not want to apply it in life, it would be of no use to me. You have to be convinced of the truth in a practical way.

How should we relate to this? We have to be thorough and look at the bottom of things. If we know the reason and the cause of the bad things in the world, it is depressing at first. Then I have to say to myself: I have prepared my destiny, my character myself. But on the other hand, consciousness also has an uplifting effect. We are the masters of the future. What I do now forms the basis for the future. If I work on improving my character today, I know that this work is not in vain. This gives a blessed consolation to those who are inwardly convinced of the matter. The deepest peace of mind sprouts from this teaching. Life becomes different, also in relation to our fellow human beings. We are only too easily inclined to judge when we see in others what we do not like. If we have gained an understanding of karma, how different it becomes. Then we say: 'You may be bad now, you may lie and cheat, but perhaps this is not the first time you have faced me, and who knows whether I am not perhaps to blame for the fact that you are so bad today.

If someone finds this ridiculous, it is a sign that they have not yet penetrated deeply into the law of karma. Once you have come to the realization of the higher self, you will no longer pass by your fellow human beings indifferently or criticize them; you will learn to understand the connection between person and person. He meets people on every street corner; he thinks, can I help you, maybe I can make you better if I did something wrong in a past life. This idea, which is possible today, applied to life, makes life clearer, more transparent. We learn to understand people better and to help them better.

It is nonsense to say: I should not help him, he has brought his evil karma upon himself. — The moment you are standing in front of him, his karma is that you help him. If you do not help him, he will be helped in some other way. But you have neglected your duty. If you help him, you can say to yourself: If I help him, his future life will be better. The doctrine of karma teaches us to help ourselves. Through my own practical life, the doctrine becomes ever clearer; those who live by it will find it to be true - and only in life. Through recurring experiences, it will be proven to you throughout your entire life.

Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, summarized this teaching in a confession. He spoke of the whole world as of the body of his Father, as every body of man is a dwelling place of the Father. Man is unconscious of the Father; he needs a guide to the Father. Only through the Son do we come to the Father; he wants to be our guide. After every life on earth, the soul returns to the Father's body. In every life on earth, the soul passes through a dwelling that is taken from the divine Father Body. Jesus Christ says: “In my Father's house are many mansions.”

We speak of the mysteries of the world. Fundamentally, man is surrounded by such mysteries [of existence everywhere]; [and] we can ask questions about every thing and every being that lead deep, deep into the depths of life and being. But there are certain individual, particularly towering pillars within this mysteriousness of existence, and among these are undoubtedly those that are designated by the two words that are to be the subject of our consideration today: illness and death.

If life is a mystery to many people – illness and death intrude into this life to make it quite mysterious to us, with death as that which confronts life as its opposite, and illness as a troublemaker. And not only in this respect are these two things mysteries of life, in that they encourage us to reflect, but they are mysterious because they cause us worry, and for many people fear and trepidation. Therefore, we should not be surprised that illness and death have always, since time immemorial, challenged the research instinct of all those who have wanted to reflect on existence, on the world. A long list of great thinkers would have to be cited here if I wanted to tell you everything that has been said about the two concepts of illness and, in particular, death. That cannot be my task. We want to penetrate into these two questions in the sense of spiritual science.

Just so that you can see what a beautiful task awaits us, let us look at a few things that have been taught by important people in order to approach these things more closely. Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who reflected on the suffering of life and was touched by it, said that life is an unfortunate thing and that he first wanted to get to the bottom of it by thinking about it. He has put forward a variety of ideas about death. But if we look at them just a little, we see that even a deep thinker can easily fail on these questions. One thing seems grotesque to us: Schopenhauer tried to open up a kind of emotional understanding of humanity towards death. He said: Man is afraid of death. Truly, since life is such a bad thing, he does not need it, because death is a release. If one feels that life is a painful thing, then death is consoling. One can say to oneself, it puts an end to it. — Thus Schopenhauer saw in the bad sides of life a consolation in the face of death, and in death a consolation in the face of the bad thing of life.

In another part of his writings, he attempts to express himself on the necessity of death in a manner that is not so grotesque, but not much more fortunate. There he lets the earth spirit speak. [He says:] I need space for my many living creatures, so I have to clear them away, so I need death. Thus, for the guiding spirit of the earth, death is merely a matter of space.

Eduard von Hartmann says in his last book: It is in the nature of living beings, [and] especially of man.

I would like to point out that today we will only be talking about humans in the sense of spiritual science when it comes to death and illness. The world's mysteries are so diverse, and only those who want to put everything in the same category can apply what has been researched about one thing to something else. For the genuine spiritual researcher, things that appear to be the same, such as illness and death, are so very different for different beings. Hartmann says that man is so constituted that at a certain time in his life he loses his understanding of his environment, and a younger generation must follow that has this understanding. Man would be a stranger within the world if he were not taken away. — You see, again nothing substantial! What are we to make of this?

But one word shines through the ages, which for thousands and thousands of people has contained a kind of solution to the problem of death, albeit a word that is not even understood in its literal sense today; it comes from Paul and is:

Death is the wages of sin. (Rom 6:23)

It is understandable that a person with today's concepts and ideas, who has little knowledge of spiritual science, cannot become familiar with such a word. He has learned to see death and illness as natural processes, and it is completely foreign to him to see something [purely] natural that takes place within the world of purely natural processes as an effect of something moral, of something that depends on the arbitrariness and free will of man, of sin. That something moral can be the cause of something organic is far removed from the thinking of our time. If the apostle's word were correctly understood according to the wording, it would be quite futile to talk about it to our contemporaries. But it is not even understood correctly according to the wording. The Bible is a strange book of secrets, and those who think they understand it best usually penetrate its spirit the least.

We shall gain a better insight into our subject and a better understanding of it if we first try to understand it entirely from the mind of its author and from the thinking of the people from whose circle the Apostle Paul grew, the ancient Hebrew scholars.

In this context, “sin” means something quite different from what we call moral transgression today. And anyone who understands sin in the way that it is understood in today's church doctrine does not understand this word. We arrive at an understanding if we imagine what Paul called a doctrine of development. I would like to tell you about it not in a scholarly way, but only in outline. It is a superstition of modern science that the word “development” was only discovered in the last few centuries. People have always talked and thought about development, about the emergence of the perfect from the imperfect. It is just that the secret scientists of the time from which Paul grew up said: living beings represent a sequence of stages, from the most imperfect being up to the most perfect being. The human organism was literally thought of as a goal towards which all other living beings strive. They become more and more perfect in order to become like the human organism.

But what is the point of the human organism being structured in this way and the other living beings having it as their goal? For Paul, it makes sense that the human body should contain a soul with independence. He said: If a soul is to live, if it can find within itself the impulse to act, to make decisions out of itself, which is expressed in the word “freedom” or “arbitrariness” as a center of the being, then it must have just such a body. Therefore, the whole series of living beings would have to take this path under the influence of this freedom. The human organism is organized in such a way that a free soul can express itself independently within it.

What is an independent soul? Look at the universe, the cosmos. Look at the living beings! They are all connected to their environment; this connection becomes looser the higher we go in the evolutionary scale. The living beings become more independent, and humans are the most independent of all. He confronts the cosmos as a being that can act independently. But he, too, has outgrown this universe. Is it not the case that we can make the whole thing clear to ourselves through a very simple comparison? Take a glass of water; there are many drops in it. Each drop is contained in this mass of water without us being able to distinguish it from the mass. But if you single it out, if it becomes independent, then it presents itself as something independent of the whole, and if it were to develop forces within itself, then we could compare its position to the position of man in the cosmos. As long as the drop is in the whole of the water in it, it expresses those currents that come out of the mass. Having become independent, it has an effect back, like an opposing force on the mass.

It is the same with human beings, that is, to be “independent”. But if everything were to stand out as something special, it would destroy the whole harmony, and it must destroy it if harmony is not found again. Thus, from a certain point of view, the human being does go through the universe, opposing it. In other words, it is rooted in Paul's theory of development that the human being, in order to achieve independence, enters into a kind of hostile relationship with the universe. Paul says: independence and freedom must arise out of egoism. If man had never been led to egoism, he could not become free. A being that was always being led by the hand could never become an egoist and could never become free.

This liberation, which is built on the basis of egoism, this acceptance of selfishness by a being, is what Paul calls sin. For him, selfishness is the original sin. And so it was connected with the being of man, which developed into sin, that a body was organized through which the whole process of development led to this sin. But such a body could not help being mortal because of its detachment. So the essence of man requires a mortal body for its independence. Whoever penetrates into this will see that what has been said completely coincides with Paul's view. And that will give us the mood for what we have to consider.

Another person has also said a beautiful word about death: Goethe. In the essay: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it” — there is also the word: Nature is alive everywhere, it has invented death in order to have much life. — These are to be introductory words to give you an indication of the direction from which we now want to penetrate our topic in the sense of spiritual science.

If we want to understand these two important events of human life, illness and death, we have to look at the essence and nature of the human being; and so, with your permission, I will repeat what this essence of the human being is. I can only do this very briefly. What the naturalistic [materialistic] thinker, the sensory perception, regards as the whole of the human being, his physical body, is for spiritual science only a part of the human being. Man has this physical body in common with all so-called inanimate beings that surround us. In this physical body, all substances and forces are found together, or precisely such forces as are at work out there in the so-called inanimate world. It is the same as the mineral.

At the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was also scientifically accepted to say in a certain direction: That which lives is not merely a combination of substances and forces, but rather that which lives has a special power within itself, which brings the substances and forces of the inanimate world into very specific combinations, brings them into inner activity, kindles them into life; and this was called the vital force. Thus, it was said, humans, animals, and plants have vital force within them. And this makes it so that not only a chemical process takes place in the stomach and in the blood mixture, but that the whole thing is alive. The word “vital force” has become a term that could only be pronounced in the second half of the nineteenth century, and from a certain direction one was regarded as backward, as a fool.

But today, for a number of years, one is not such a great fool [before science] when one utters this word. For those who today consider the somewhat advanced state of the science of life phenomena cannot help but say to themselves: there is more to beings than a mere chemical-physical process. And many are of the opinion that they are speaking of a life force. They know that this is speculation. Spiritual science does not take this speculative point of view. It takes the view that there is a higher experience, that man is able to see more when certain powers slumbering in his soul are awakened. Comparison with the man born blind and the man who has received sight: the one who does not see can never decide whether something is there or not, but the one who sees it can. There is no possibility of speaking of limits to knowledge. For man makes the discovery that he has as many worlds around him as he has organs to perceive them. This is how spiritual science differs from what is called science today: it starts from discussing things that enter our existence as something new through the awakening of organs.

Imagine there is a piano here, a player is playing, and a deaf person is sitting next to it. They cannot hear anything that the player draws from the strings. But there is a method of making them perceptible to him, these things that are happening. You put paper tabs on the strings, they are thrown off by playing, and he can get a certain idea of what the others hear. The relationship between the world of sounds as perceived by the deaf man, who can only hear them indirectly through the little tags, and the world of the hearing, is the same as that between what is investigated within the material world and what can be experienced by those with higher organs. And the only thing that this claims as its assertion is the truth that there have always been people who had such higher organs and saw another world. Not through speculation, but through a higher perception, spiritual science comes upon what it now calls the life body or ether body, similar to the speculated life force. This is what brings the inanimate substances, the mere chemical-physical processes, to life and what man has in common with the plant and animal world.

The third link in the human being is the so-called astral body. It is the carrier of all that we call pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, affects, passions, drives and so on. Plants do not yet have this astral body, only animals and humans. The being that has it relates to the outside world differently. Today, even scholars often blur the difference between plants and animals by saying that plants also have certain sensations, and [they] refer to the fact that certain plants contract their leaves when a stimulus is applied. This is amateurish talk compared to spiritual science. If it only mattered that a being responds with a movement from within when it is stimulated, one could also claim that blotting paper, which absorbs ink, is a sentient being.

These are things that, because they occur, are highly dangerous because they confuse the senses of man when they are put forward by authorities, as they are today. What is true is only that what belongs to feeling is a reflection of the external stimulus, not what only moves and gives an answer. Not only must the being do something under the influence of a stimulus, but a reflection of the stimulus must take place in the innermost being. Not only must the tip of a needle touch us and we must defend ourselves against it, but the pricking must be linked to an inner process - pain or pleasure; that is part of it. A being that has such inner processes has an astral body. Man has this in common with the animal.

Man has become the pride of creation by being able to say “I” to himself. The “I”, that power that enables him to do so - let us say the “ego body” - is the fourth link in the human being, so that we initially recognize four links in the human being. We can disregard the higher links. We will understand the conditions that arise in the course of a human life, as well as illness and death, if we get to know the relationships between these four members a little better. Both today's lecture and tomorrow's are based on a correct presentation of the different members of the human being. We can do this by following human development. This can only be done sketchily here; it is intended as a suggestion.

We start from the physical birth of the human being and realize what this represents. Before this birth, the human germ is closed off from the outside world. It rests in the mother's body; the physical human body is surrounded on all sides by another physical matter, and birth means that this enveloping matter is pushed back and that which has developed as organs in the human body is directly exposed to the external physical world. Thus, physical birth is a pushing back of the physical shell and a free emergence of the human body into the physical environment.

Spiritual science does not just speak of this birth of man, but also of others; and this must be understood. Until this physical birth, the physical human body is surrounded by an outer physical shell that nourishes and protects it, sending its juices into it. What happens to the physical human body until physical birth happens to the etheric body until a certain point in human development. Even after the human being has been physically born, the etheric body is still enveloped by a protective motherly shell of etheric matter for the initiate. When the human being is physically born, he is not yet born eterally.

The birth of the etheric body does not take place as quickly as the physical birth; it happens gradually; little by little [the etheric body pushes the etheric covers away from itself, little by little] it emerges, at the time when the young person is undergoing the so-called change of teeth, towards the seventh year. Just as the physical body is surrounded by the physical sheath until physical birth, so the etheric body is surrounded by the protective etheric sheath until the birth of the etheric body. For spiritual science, the change of teeth is something very similar to the physical birth as seen from the outside.

And when the etheric body is born, the astral body has not yet lost its protective shell; and a third birth takes place. The third birth of the protective shell takes place in a similar way to the reining back of the etheric shell with the maturing of the human being in a sexual way, with sexual maturity. This is a third birth. Just as the physical body is exposed on all sides to physical impressions, so the etheric body in its nature and the astral body in its nature are exposed to their external world.

We have to take these facts of [spiritual science] as a basis if we want to understand human development. Therefore, we will recognize that the time from birth to the seventh year is a particularly important one for the development of the physical body. Not because the physical body does not develop afterwards. But the physical body develops in a very specific direction up to the seventh year, to a very specific point. [And] something happens in terms of physical human development that is characteristic: this is the hardening, [the] consolidation of the physical body. The human physical body is characterized by undergoing a process of hardening. The solid parts that serve as its support are bones. And from the softest parts to the solid bone system, there is a process of solidification, and this process of solidification goes through its main characteristics up to the seventh year; and the change of teeth, the acquisition of one's own teeth, is the conclusion of the solidification. There the power of solidification has reached its conclusion, has put out what it can work into the physical body in terms of solidification.

This is important. One must realize that this working into the solid structure happens more and more, and with the pushing out of one's own teeth, it reaches a kind of conclusion. The power that gives us teeth works within us. The previous teeth are inherited; what lies within us, in our own personality, in terms of creative power, is expressed [in the end] in our own teeth. When this point has been reached, the life force at work in the human being no longer has the constraint that it would have to have. Now the etheric body pushes back the protective etheric covering, becomes free and works differently. Now it mainly does the things in the body alone that are its task: growth, enlargement of the body and so on, whereas before it was busy creating forms. Now what is predisposed is increased. Now, in fact, until sexual maturity, the etheric body is the dominant factor in human development, the etheric body that has become free. It again puts a full stop, it pushes the power of forming, of growing, to the point where growth transcends itself.

Just as the power of solidification has been fulfilled in the teeth, so the power of the etheric body, in the maturing individual, reaches its potential in the moment of sexual reproduction. And at that moment the astral body is born. It is now free, no longer constrained. Human development is indeed so complicated when we look at the four elements that compose it.

We must now realize how these limbs, [whether they are more or less bound as] before the individual births; [or whether] they are free, [how they actually work in man]. First, let us look at the etheric body. We see that the etheric body is that which works in the human being, the power of growth, nutrition, reproduction; the etheric body is the carrier of this.

But that which brings the human being into a relationship with his surroundings, [which] enables him to enter into an interaction, that is his astral body.

While the etheric body of the human being works mainly within, enlarging the organs, working from [within] outwards in reproduction, the astral body is what is there to make the outside accessible to the inside and connect it to it. This happens all the time. Every ray of light, every piece of nourishment that a person takes in, is an interaction between the person's inner being and the outside world. The regulator is the astral body, and essentially the relationship is regulated by needs, by pleasure and pain, by desire. What a person desires, he appropriates, and the faculty of desire is the expression of the astral body. [This is what man demands of his environment.] You see, then, that man fulfills various tasks through his limbs. This now requires a significant distinction to be made with regard to the limbs in the whole of human life. This distinction will become clear to us when we consider the nature of sleep. When a person sleeps, all desire and suffering, all interaction with the outside world, everything that the astral body conveys, has sunk down. No sensible person will say that a person decays in the evening and is reborn in the morning. His astral body is there, but not as it is during the day. While during the day this astral body dwells in the physical body and allows the things of the outside world to flow out through the organs of the physical body and processes them, at night it is separated from the physical body, it does not touch the physical body. This is not the case with the etheric body. What it has to do continues during sleep.

When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed. The astral body with the ego has stepped out. What does this astral body do at night? If we look at this, it sheds light on the nature of the entire human activity in the world. The spiritual scientist knows that the astral body, if it remains within the physical body, could never remove that which finds its expression in fatigue. Call it an accumulation of fatigue substances or something else, it is there and must be removed. Where does the fatigue come from? How is it removed?

Fatigue is a by-product of what the astral body does in the physical body. As long as the astral body is in the physical body and uses the physical organs, the physical body will tire; and as long as the astral body is in the physical body, it cannot get rid of the fatigue. It must go out and work on the physical body from the outside, and this work takes place at night when the person is asleep. Then the seer sees the astral body working on the physical body and removing the fatigue. This is the source of the refreshing effect of healthy sleep. There is something healing about sleep. What is worn out in the physical body – the physical body is used by the astral body like a machine – all this is removed. An astral body that works on the physical body from the outside works to repair it; an astral body in the physical body consumes it; even destroys it within certain limits.

This is related to another phenomenon about which a man who is little known today said a great deal: Paracelsus. He knew the essence of sleep, but he knew something else as well. He realized that something special happens to this astral body when it emerges. It will become clear to us through a comparison. Imagine a vessel of water; there is water inside. Take a small sponge that can hold a drop and throw this sponge into the water, and it soaks up a drop. It used to be in all the water; now it is outside.

This is how it is in fact with the relationship between the astral body and the physical body. The astral body is not something that is original and separate from something greater. There is a mighty astral body, which is the astral body of our entire planet, and this astral body is like the mass of water in the vessel. The physical body is like the little sponge. When we are awake, the physical body has the astral body within it, and then it has separated a drop for itself from the astral sea, and this drop of the earth spirit works separately from the rest of the earth's astral body; and that is why it has an eroding effect during the day, it has to erode. Imagine a finger, separate it, and in a short time it will wither. Why? Because this finger must be connected to the whole life process, to the whole astral process, if it is to exist, and because the drop of astral mass that remains in the finger cannot lead its own life as a detached drop. The human being's astral body can do this to a certain extent, but it needs to return from time to time to draw strength from the entire astral body; this happens at night.

Thus, every human astral body connects with the entire astral body of the earth at night. This is why Paracelsus says: At night, man rests in the whole womb of spiritual nature and absorbs that harmony which has been destroyed during the day. — Thus we see that when a part is rejected from the spiritual world, it must return to gather strength there. In the state of separation, the astral body consumes the physical body.

Let us look at the ether body in relation to this. It is in the same position, it is also a piece of the general ether mass. But it does not return at night, and remains united with the physical body until death; it has a wearing effect on the physical body. The latter has drawn it out and made it independent, like the sponge and the drop of water. But now independent, the etheric body wears away the physical body, and this process of wear and tear is the life process of an individual being.

Now we can say: From the moment when this etheric body is born, when it emerges as an independent entity, it is completely independent and draws on the physical body. It draws in the way you can make clear by means of a comparison. Imagine a piece of wood that is burning; there is never a flame without a piece of wood. Just as the flame is released from the wood, so the etheric body is released from the physical body at the end of the seventh year; it shines like a flame. Just as the flame consumes the wood, just as it consumes its nourishment, so the etheric body consumes the physical body.

Until the etheric body has brought its own power to the final point at sexual maturity, until that time it replaces in some way what it has consumed. But at the end, it has nothing more to add, so it draws on the physical body. And a being that could not replace from any other side [what the ether body consumes, which in turn could not supply the ether body with new strength] would have to die when it reaches sexual maturity. In the animal world, there are such beings. How is it then that in the case of human beings the etheric body [after sexual maturity] receives further strength to grow? Because with sexual maturity the astral body is born, and this is now in a period of free growth.

What is this astral body? It is the forces accumulated by the person from a previous incarnation. The more capital a person has accumulated, the more they have to invest; and the more strength they have for their astral body, the longer their ascending line of life will last. The astral body rises; the time that expresses itself externally in the life of a person, morally, begins with sexual maturity. The human being is full of ideals, his longing goes beyond the measure of his reflection. All a sign that there is excess power in him. That is the excess power of his astral body.

Just as the physical body grows until the second dentition changes, and the etheric body until sexual maturity, so the astral body grows until mid-life. If you, as a clairvoyant, could measure the power that the astral body contains and distribute it over the years, you would be able to calculate mid-life. Because at that moment, when the astral body has given back everything that was put into it, has developed, then the middle of life has arrived. At that point, the astral body begins to consume. It consumes itself. Now the time comes when ideals fade, when man is no longer full of hope, when prudence sets in, when the astral body looks more to its surroundings, to experiences, whereas before it drew from within in the ascending current. The ideals of the young man, born from within, often do not correspond to the external. Then the time comes when harmony is established, and now he has the descending line. What the astral body has produced earlier is gradually used up, and then, when the astral body has used up itself, it begins to draw on the ether body, then it takes the strength from the ether body.

You may know that the etheric body is not only the seat of growth and so on, but also of memory, habits and temperaments. You see, just as the astral body begins to consume the forces of the etheric body from a certain point in life, so it later uses up the qualities we have just described. Memory begins to weaken and so on, and when the powers of the etheric body are consumed, what then? Then it goes to the physical body. This is then no longer able to work on itself, it ceases to stir up the life process within itself.

As long as the physical body can still enjoy the powers of the ether body, it processes what comes from outside to strengthen itself. When the ether body can no longer do this, substances are still absorbed from the outside, but are no longer integrated organically. Now the opposite of what happened earlier takes place. Whereas the substances that were taken in were integrated organically, now they are merely deposited like physical ballast substances in the tendons, in the soft parts of the human being, so that these harden; the bones become harder and harder. The physical body is actually consumed in the descending life. Just as the astral body can be born through the etheric body like a flame from wood, so the astral body first consumes itself like a flame from wood, then the etheric body, and then the physical body. What life has brought forth, what life has brought out, is at the same time what consumes this life. Just as the flame would not be without the wood, so the life of the astral body would not be, nor would consciousness, nor pleasure and pain, without the etheric and physical bodies. But just as the flame consumes the wood, so the independent life consumes its basis, the physical body. Therefore, death is not a process that takes place outside of life; rather, it is produced by life itself. This is the main thing we must realize: we could not have life at all if this life did not give birth to death.

Another thing is that the astral body is the mediator of everything that can come in from outside. If this is to happen, it must be appropriated by the physical body through the process of life. What does that mean? Light approaches us; if it were not for light, we would have no eyes. It is the same with everything that arises from the interaction of the physical body with the environment. The physical body appropriates the external environment and transforms it into organs. We transform the elements into organs when the life process is ascending.

We have to consider the following fact. A certain tribe in Africa that hunts needs certain dogs for hunting. Now there lives a poisonous fly there, the tsetse fly; it stings the hunting dogs, and they perish. Now, as so often, the “savages” have come up with something extraordinarily clever – spiritual science is familiar with the processes. This “savage” tribe now takes its hunting dog to the areas where the poisonous fly is found, just at the time when the dog can give birth to her puppies before she dies from the bite. The puppies are now immune; they can be stung and yet not die. This is an example of the adoption of an external aspect of the internal life process in the ascending line of life. Where life rekindles, where it passes through to the point of inner illumination, where the life process is re-established, it takes the poison within itself, integrates it and makes the organism strong against the poison.

This is basically how our organs came into being in the body. In ancient times, when there was no eye, a ray of sunlight fell on the skin; something like a small pain could be felt. The light had to integrate and the life process digested the light, appropriated it, transformed it into an eye, so that man had an eye to face the light.

This is how man interacts with his environment. This is to suggest that through external influences, which occur by means of the astral body, the physical body of man is organized as a receptive being that integrates the outside world; and the extent to which one can integrate the outside world gives pleasure, joy, desire. Where joy and desire are healthy, they are nothing more than the expression of a need, and that is the most reliable indicator of the life process. This can be seen in children. If their original instincts for nourishment are corrupted, they have no instinct for what is good for them. For example, if you overfeed a child with eggs from an early age, you will notice that this child loses the security of the food instinct. If not, the child is always ready to reject what is harmful to it and to want exactly what is beneficial to it. Such a child is much less exposed to damage to the organism. Too much protein is harmful.

So you see how desire is the measure for the life process itself. The life process is entirely under the influence of desire. But this also enables the human being to go beyond the measure of enjoyment and need. In order for life to be maintained, need must arise. Without hunger, life could not be maintained. Enjoyment is the concomitant of satiety. This is always the case where the external world is appropriated.

Because enjoyment is the concomitant of the life process, it can go beyond in terms of the appropriation of external substances. And so what it appropriates becomes a destroyer because it goes beyond measure; and there you have what predisposes the disease process through the activity of the astral body. Of course, we must not believe that this simply happens because it is expressed in the life between birth and death. Certainly, every excess has a destructive effect on this one life, and all moderation has a beneficial effect; but this happens to a greater extent beyond death. Here we must again consider the idea of reincarnation. The destructive forces, which are not yet harmful in life, are taken along into the next life, so that debauchery in one life means a disposition to illness in the next.

These are the most important foundations of illness. From this you can see how things are connected, but you can also see that what are actually internal causes of illness are necessarily linked to the life process, that they really arise from it. And now you will understand that we make our body stronger when we bring it into such interaction with the outside world in the ascending life process that it acquires something. This makes it strong against disease. We do not need to investigate other causes of disease. These are the ones that have less significance for life.

You know that today the bacillus plague does not only consist of being infected by it, but also of looking for the bacilli everywhere. This bacillus plague actually comes into consideration only in the second place in relation to spiritual science. Being invaded by bacilli is no different than being shot through with a bullet. In this case, the organism is so badly destroyed that the ether organism can no longer compensate for the destruction. As long as it is not destroyed, this ether organism also has the ability to compensate. The more it is connected with the ether, the more it has the power of compensation. You can cut up a polyp, and a new polyp will arise from each piece, because the etheric body of the polyp is still connected to the whole - [from which it can draw power, because in every drop of the etheric body there is the same power as in the whole] - and the connection still exists. Insofar as the etheric body becomes independent, it must lose this power. If, therefore, independence is at the same time a growth in relation to the impossibility of overcoming disturbances of the organism, then you have the Pauline sentence in a modern form: selfishness is the cause of destruction and death, and death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23). It is to be understood only in this sense. But someone may say: Yes, but is it compatible with the wise process of the world? Yes, if there were no possibility of illness, the great incentive for the etheric organism to become strong in order to grow by overcoming the illness would be missing. The etheric body emerges strengthened from every illness it has overcome. When germs attack us, it is important that we have a strong etheric body to overcome them. And does not the etheric body, precisely because it is forced to become an overcomer in the illness, give rise to higher forms of the etheric body? Yes, it develops itself upwards through this. Therefore, it can be said that illness is like the pearl oyster and the pearl; the noble pearl emerges from an illness of the oyster. Many things in the world have emerged as higher forms by building themselves on the basis of a process of destruction.

All this makes us understand, in a certain forceful way, illness and death. We can understand that we could not have life as we have it; if this life did not itself provoke death; as one could not have the flame if the fuel were not destroyed. Certain increases, intensifications are not possible without the possibility of illness. Sometimes strong health is the result of illness. Perhaps you will say: nature is healthy in all its parts, and even if it gives disease, it gives it to have much and strong life. In any case, it is clear that nature is everywhere, and it has, that is true, invented death in order to have much life, to have strong life, to have life. Because this can only exist if it creates death as its opposite pole.

Last time I spoke to you here, I spoke about an area of unconscious life, that is, of that life which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness of man as he has it today in his earthly existence. I spoke about the character of the life of sleep and tried to describe to you in detail and very specifically what the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up. Perhaps you have been able to recognize that these experiences of the human soul between falling asleep and waking up are clear revelations of the eternal, immortal life of the human soul, because you must have seen that what the soul goes through in the state of sleep are experiences from the spiritual world. And you know, of course, that the cognitions of such supersensible experiences can be gained through that which I have often explained to you verbally and which I have set forth in writing in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, in my Occult Science and so forth. You know that what is present as knowledge in the ordinary consciousness of man can be developed into so-called imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. The experiences that the soul has unconsciously in sleep are, as it were, illuminated by the power that the cognizant human soul can acquire when it develops itself upward to imagination, inspiration and intuition. But by the same development it is also possible to fathom to a certain degree that part of man's unconscious experience of which sleep-life is but a reflection, the part from which the human soul emerges when it enters physical earthly existence through birth, or, let us say, conception, and which it enters again when it detaches itself from this physical earthly existence through death. And today I will at least give you a rough outline of some of the things that lie behind the events of birth or conception and death for the soul and spiritual life of man.

If a person first arrives at imaginative knowledge — I will not describe this here, I have often done so, as well as how it can be acquired — the first thing is that his physical life on earth lies spread out before him as a unity, as in a large tableau. In ordinary physical consciousness, a person has his earthly life only as a memory in his soul. What then are memories? They are something that consists of pictures, pictures that through their own inner essence point to the experiences that the person has gone through since birth or since a point in time somewhat later. But they are images that cannot be said to unfold an existence independently of the body, based on the knowledge of ordinary human life as it is today on earth. Today's physical science is absolutely right when it points out to people how these memory images are dependent on the constitution of the physical body. It is right when it points out that this memory is not yet present in the very first years of a person's life, how it develops with the physical organism, and how it also declines again when the physical organism of the person itself approaches its twilight. And it can also be established from certain symptoms of disease, from examinations of the physical organism of sick people after death, how the loss of memory is caused by certain physical organs. Of course, science has not yet come to a conclusion in such matters; but anyone who penetrates the spirit of the relevant physical scientific results can already see through how the time will come when it will be possible to show how ordinary memory images are connected to the physical human organism. But what we have as individual images of memory, as it were, surging up out of the stream of our experiences, when we look back over our lives, is not what is meant when it is said that imaginative knowledge has the earthly life of the human being, in so far as it is a spiritual-soul life, spread out before it in a great tableau. What one surveys in imaginative knowledge is truly not the abstract memory images that ordinary memory preserves. Rather, imaginative knowledge is preceded by an active, organic experience that not only has the passivity of memory images, but also an inner strength, like the growth forces that are active in our organism when we transform the substances of the external world that we take in as food in a – now, it is permissible to say – wonderful way into that which we need to constitute our organism. What lives and works in us, creating and generating, is something different from what is merely in our memory images in a more passive way. Look at the thoughts. They brighten our consciousness; certainly, we owe an infinite debt to the life of thought during our earthly existence. It is only through this that we actually become human and only through these thought images do we become fully aware of our human dignity. But these are fleeting images, bound to the physical human organism, like the flame to the fuel of the candle. That which the imaginative cognizer surveys as the spiritual-soul life that underlies physical earthly existence, that which he surveys as a wonderful, great tableau, is not something passive. It is an inwardly living alive, and one that, although it presents itself to us spiritually and soulfully, we know through direct soul perception just as we know through the eye what a red-colored external object is. And we can say in imaginative knowledge that we not only have thoughts that flash into our consciousness, but that we become truly aware of such forces at work in our organism.

I would even say that it has been taken amiss, as an absurdity, that I once said in my book “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity” that all the wisdom of the adult human being is not as capable as the wisdom of the young child, which, however, unconsciously in this little child; but look with the most developed, with the most learned human knowledge of the way in which a human brain, how a human whole organism is in the first human years of life, and look at how man actually forms himself inwardly. All the activity of even the most ingenious sculptor is insignificant compared to what is powerfully carried out by the child's inner spiritual soul through plastic activity, as it develops its brain in a plastic way. Only when we consider and understand this can we gain a true insight into the mysterious wisdom at work here, a wisdom that is a forceful one, not just one that is stored in a person's head to enlighten itself about the world, but of a wisdom that contains within itself a spiritual-soul organism of forces that, so to speak, penetrates the child's outer organization hour by hour and only makes it a full human being. Just try to form a fleeting mental image of what is working there, so full of wisdom and magnificent that the human being, with his intellect and intellectual wisdom, cannot possibly keep up with what is working in the child, what must work for many years out of the unconscious , for example, the miracle of human speech. Try to form a picture, albeit an abstract one, of this wisdom-filled work up to the point where the human being becomes conscious enough to be able to use his intellect. Then, I would like to say, this intellect creates an ephemeral wisdom according to that wisdom that first formed man out of the innermost forces of the world. But we must also be clear about the fact that when we develop the human intellectual mind, I would say, in the upper layers of our being, in the lower layers of our human beingness, that which continues to shape our organism in childhood, full of wisdom, as a wonderful sculptor, continues to do so. What lies at the basis as a system, as an organism of forces, is surveyed in a unified tableau by imaginative knowledge. This imaginative insight is not confronted with abstract memory images, which cannot be said to persist when the organism disintegrates into its elements because they are bound to that organism. Rather, this imaginative insight is confronted with the system of forces that builds this organism, that is, is not bound to it, that is bound to the material no more than the creative, ingenious power of the sculptor is bound to it. In order for the material to become what it becomes, the sculptor's formative power must first be applied to it. For the human being to become what he is in his earthly existence as a physical organism, these entirely non-physical, supersensible forces must underlie it as a spiritual-soul organization that governs the human being's physical existence.

This is the first thing we acquire as an insight when we ascend to imaginative knowledge.

But at the same moment that we are able to do so, that is, to see what it is that works in us as a spiritual-soul element during our earthly existence, which is not only independent of the physical organism but actually brings about the shaping of this physical organism itself . At the same moment that we are able to do this, we are also able to disregard our earthly existence, to abstract from it, as we can abstract from a thought in physical life. We must gain this power through those meditation exercises of which I have often spoken to you, not only to be able to refrain from a thought, not only to be able to suppress a thought, but to be able to erase from our consciousness that which we have only just acquired with great effort in our contemplation of the spiritual and soul in our physical existence on earth. But then, when we are in a position, I would say, in a knowing selflessness, in a knowing altruism, to be able to erase from our inner vision what we are spiritually-soulfully during earthly life, then, before our consciousness, our true spiritual-soul eternal appears before our consciousness, then what we were before we descended from spiritual-soul worlds into physical earthly existence appears before our consciousness as a concrete spiritual-soul being. We learn to look at ourselves as spiritual-soul human beings in our pre-earthly existence. And we learn to speak not only in general, abstract terms about this pre-earthly existence, but we learn to look at it in its development, and today I have described some of this development to you.

You see, when we are here on earth, when we speak of ourselves, we feel connected to our physical body; in our waking state we feel connected to this physical body. No matter how dull the feeling of connection with the physical body may be, it is there, and it becomes particularly apparent when something is wrong with this physical body. Then we feel not only the physical body in general in a dull sensation of life, but also its individual parts. We may feel our lungs, our stomach, our heart, our head organs. In ordinary life, all this is immersed in a dull sensation of life; but unless a person is exclusively healthy throughout his or her entire life, there will come a time when he or she has the opportunity to feel his or her individual organs. In short, man feels himself during his waking consciousness between birth and death in earthly life, in that he feels himself in his being, together with his physical body, with all that is enclosed within his skin. But in the moment when man is not connected with his physical life on earth, in those times when he has a spiritual-soul existence before entering his physical earthly existence, he does not feel as his inner self, of course, what his physical body or its limbs are, but he also has an inner self then. I had to hint to you how the soul experiences inner images between falling asleep and waking up, even if it is not conscious of these images. But in the state in which the soul was before it descended from the spiritual-soul existence into the physical earthly existence, it had the consciousness of a different inwardness. This consciousness of a different inwardness is only hidden, only veiled by the fact that in our physical earthly existence our physical body also becomes an organ of knowledge. And it obscures the soul's introspection, which is only present when the soul is free of the body. But what the soul then experiences as its inwardness is now not what is enclosed within the skin of the physical body, but what the organization of the cosmos is. And just as the human being here in this physical earthly existence is connected with his lungs, with his stomach, with his heart, with his other bodily organs, so in the supersensible existence he is connected with what otherwise appears to our eyes, to our other sense organs, as the outer world of the cosmos. What is the outer world for us in our earthly existence is the inner world for us when we are in our extra-earthly existence. And we look down on our earthly existence as on an outer world from the supersensible existence that we spend between death and a new birth. And just as we are, I might say, steeped in our lungs, our heart and so on here, we are embodied before we descend to physical life on earth in that which appears to us in the outer reflection in the planetary movements, in the constellations of the fixed stars, as forces that permeate and interweave the cosmos. That which is the cosmic external world during our earthly existence is our internal world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence.

You must not be misled by the thought that the external world is one for all earthly people with different bodies; it is precisely that which is significant, that we have a common world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence, that the same world that one person has is also the same world that another person has, and that people who are spatially separate from one another here on Earth, in that each is enclosed in his own skin, are then separate from one another through the inner strength of the soul. In the extra-terrestrial existence, everyone is also an individuality; but he is not separated from the other individualities by space, but by the inner strength of his soul, by the cohesive forces within him. But what flows into these cohesive forces is that which corresponds spiritually to the universe, which appears to us in the physical image of the sun, the moon, the planets, the fixed stars.

Just as we here on earth see a person with our outer senses, only the shape of his face, the shine of his eyes, the movements of his limbs, but we become aware that we ourselves are spiritual-soul beings, that in these formations of his face, in the shine of his eyes, in the incarnadine of his skin, in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is of his skin, and in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is living itself out. Thus, the person who is able to view the world spiritually and soulfully recognizes that it is not true when it is claimed that the sun and moon, fixed stars and planets, and the movements of the planets are only that which our present-day physical astronomy describes. This description is actually similar to that which someone would give if they only wanted to describe the external movements of a muscle in our face, if they only wanted to describe the movement of the eyelashes, and did not want to see the expression of a spiritual soul in the movements of the facial muscles, in this movement of the eyelids. The one who is able to look at the world spiritually and soulfully sees the physiognomic expression of a cosmic spiritual-soul life in the phenomena of the moon and the sun just as we see the expression of a spiritual-soul life in the human face. In the movements of the planets, he sees expressions of spiritual-soul events, just as one sees in the movements of the limbs of human beings the revelations of spiritual-soul impulses. And in these spiritual-soul backgrounds of what appears to us in the physical image of the outer physical sun, the outer physical moon, the stars and their movements, in this spiritual-soul that corresponds in the cosmos to the spiritual-soul of the individual human being, the human being lives, if he is a supersensible being, before he descends into earthly existence. And just as I can say here as an earthly human being: I have lungs and a heart within me, so as a supermundane human being, before I descend into the sensual-physical existence in order to constitute my physical body, I can say: I have moon and sun within me. However, I must be aware that I do not mean the sensual earthly reflection of the sun and moon, but that which underlies them as spiritual-soul. The entire spiritual world of divinity interweaves and lives in me, in that I am in a supermundane human existence. Only when one sees through this does one get that deep reverence for all real world existence into which man has been woven. For one now sees through the wonderful connections that exist between man and the universe. One learns to look at man as he stands there in his physical earthly existence, and one learns to say to oneself: In that which is enclosed within the walls of the skin, not only what you see with your physical eyes, what the anatomist can look at and unravel on the dissecting table after death, but the ultimate goal of all cosmic activity lives within it. The wonderful saying of ancient religious times, that man is an image of God Himself, takes on a new meaning of infinite intimacy. And inspired knowledge teaches us to look at what man actually experiences in connection with the spiritual-divine powers that underlie the cosmos in his pre-earthly existence.

In scientific terms, when we survey earthly human life, we first speak of the human germ that develops from the mother's body into the physical human form of the growing child. We naturally address the germ as something small that gradually enlarges. In a kind of germ, the human being lives in his pre-earthly existence, only this germ is the experience of the entire spiritual-soul cosmos. In a sense, the human being has become one with the spiritual-soul cosmos; the divine spiritual forces live in him, they are active in him, they permeate him and they develop within him the great spirit germ, which contains within itself the forces that must pass through the spiritual existence until birth or conception, so that they then emerge again when the human being, as the inner sculptor, has to shape his physical organism in earthly life. The formation of the physical organism becomes clear; for this physical organism is the goal of that which the human being experiences in an immeasurably magnificent way in spiritual-soul, fully aware of himself as the cosmic germ of his inner life. The human being receives the physical germ from the physical world; the human being receives the spiritual germ from the spiritual world. And we are, so to speak, in a certain time before we have descended to the physical existence on earth, a huge spiritual-soul human germ that has poured out into the whole world, which then unites with the physical human germ that receives us here when we descend into earthly existence.

We look at our cosmic existence when we look through the inspired knowledge into the pre-earthly existence. Just as we know ourselves as one with our organism here, we know ourselves as one with the whole world through this looking. Here, in this world, the human being looks at the outer revelations of the spiritual in nature and in the human existence; he senses the divine-spiritual behind these physical-sensory revelations. In the pre-earthly existence, he is permeated, imbued and interwoven with this divine-spiritual existence, and this divine-spiritual existence lives itself out in him in such a way that it implants in him those forces that tend towards physical earthly existence. Just as we direct our eyes up to the marvelous starry sky here, so we direct our eyes from our extra-terrestrial existence to the marvelous structure of the physical human being as he lives here in his earthly existence. I would like to say that we look from the earth to heaven in our physical earthly existence, but we look from heaven to earth in our pre-earthly existence. There the earth becomes understandable to us as the work of the gods, as it should actually live in our soul. And all of this is direct experience, initially in the pre-earthly existence.

But after we have gone through this pre-earthly existence, after a certain time something happens: the divine spiritual beings withdraw from us human beings. We do not yet have nature around us, because in this spiritual-soul existence we also have no physical eyes, no physical organs, and so we could not see nature at all. We have around us something that is only like a shining in of the divine-spiritual. That is the great change in the pre-earthly existence, that we first experience an immediate being in, being permeated by and with the divine-spiritual existence, but that then a point in time comes when we look at the spiritual world that surrounds us, which is still a spiritual world, but we have to say to ourselves: before that we lived with the divine spiritual beings, now they show themselves to us through their actions, now their appearance is there. It is a spiritual-soul manifestation that we do not have only in our earthly life, but it is only a revelation of what we ourselves have experienced earlier. We enter from the sphere of experience into the sphere of revelation. And to the same extent that we enter from experience into revelation, we have to say to ourselves: The divine spiritual beings have withdrawn from us human beings for direct experience, we can now only look at them, they are certainly there for us human beings, but only for our spiritual-soul contemplation. In the same moment, in our spiritual-soul pre-earthly existence, that which I can compare to what lives in our physical organism as a desire awakens. Man is inwardly permeated by desire to the extent that the world becomes a revelation before birth. Only now do we actually feel ourselves as a self that is separate from the rest of the world. We move away from an experience that is at once a world experience and an experience of our own human nature. Between death and a new birth, we are not only human beings, we are world beings. World consciousness and human consciousness coincide. Then comes the time when world consciousness and human consciousness part, when we no longer experience the world but it reveals itself to us, when an inner life separate from the world arises in us. In the past, our inner life was one with the world; now an inner life separate from the world arises, and this first announces itself as an inner desire, as a wish, a will. A wish, a want, a desire is always directed at something. This wish and this want and this desire is directed at our future life on earth, to which we will descend after some time. We are filled with the visions of our future life on earth and we absorb those forces, which then become unconscious when we go through the embryonic life on earth. We are conscious there; but consciousness becomes more and more dimmed, and there comes a time when desire grows strong and even the revelation of the divine spiritual world, in which we previously lived and moved, becomes more and more obscured. As spiritual beings in the pre-earthly existence, we feel that we must say: The spiritual world around us becomes increasingly shadowy and shadowy. That which previously still shone brightly as divine revelation becomes increasingly shadowy. As the external world becomes increasingly shadowy, the inner desires become more vehement, the external world darkens within our spiritual existence, the inner world becomes more powerful, but after some time this powerful inner world completely takes away our awareness of future earthly life. For a time, not long before earthly conception, the view of earthly existence darkens. We used to look down on this earthly existence; it was, as it were, the target appearance, that magnificent, mighty world tableau in which we lived. Now our view of the earth is lost to us, but instead another view opens up to us. It is not long before we descend to the earth, but just as we descend, our view of the earth is lost to us and our view of the etheric world opens up. What the ether phenomena are that hold the light, that hold the forces of life, that are spread out in space, but not centrally from the earth up into space, but rather as if from the periphery of the world, pouring in upon the earth, the etheric becomes visible to us. As in a great cosmic fog containing the most diverse formations, an etheric world becomes spiritually visible around us, and from this etheric world we can, with the power that remains to us, with the power of desire, take from the general etheric cosmic fog our own etheric body, can shape it, and by shaping our own etheric form our own etheric body, we form with this etheric body an image of what we used to be in the spiritual-soul world, integrate this etheric body with what is brought to us from the evolution of heredity, what is brought to us by our ancestors in physical substantiality, and we descend to the earthly existence.

I have been able to sketch for you only what arises for imaginative and inspired knowledge when man expands his consciousness beyond ordinary earthly consciousness. In the course of earthly development, man has progressed to the consciousness he has today, which is bound in the narrowest sense to physical corporeality, and has lost an original consciousness. I have often pointed this out. I have pointed out how history actually only describes the external aspects of the earthly life of mankind, how we need a soul history, how this soul history shows us that people have not always had the same state of consciousness as today, when they can only combine with their intellect what the sensory organs perceive, and when they can only bring up what rises from the physical body to consciousness. The further we go back in time to earlier periods of human history, the more we see that people had a kind of original, if dreamlike, clairvoyance. What the human being acquires today in imaginative, inspired knowledge is a fully conscious realization, I would say, as fully conscious as mathematical realization; the people of an earlier time had a dull, dream-like clairvoyance, but it was no less imbued with wisdom. These people of an earlier time not only perceived what today's human being experiences with ordinary consciousness when he looks within, but they also saw something of what I have described to you now. If we go back even further, to the most ancient Egyptian times, and then still further back to still more ancient times, of which there are no records in the form of external history but only in the form of the kind of history I have described in Occult Science, we find men who did not have to acquire the power through such exercises as I have often described to you, but who could speak of this pre-earthly existence because something of this pre-earthly existence lived in their souls during their earthly existence, like a memory. Modern man has bought his freedom by only being able to have a memory in abstract thoughts of the events and experiences that he encounters during his life on earth. Mankind in earlier primeval times did not only have such memories living in the soul, but by looking into this soul, they brought forth, in addition to these memories of this physical life, images from the soul of what I have now told you. Just as one remembers today in the ordinary consciousness what one experienced on earth twenty or thirty years ago, so in a certain sense a person of older epochs remembered what he had experienced in his pre-earthly existence and what I have described to you today from spiritual science. But just as the human being of today is certain, through his memory, that he was not born this morning but was already here before this morning, so the human being of older epochs knew of his pre-earthly existence through what he experienced in his soul. But from this also arose the certainty that what he experienced as such already existed in a spiritual-soul world before he descended to physical earthly existence, that it goes through the passes through the gate of death and is not dependent on the physical organism, that just as it builds up the physical organism for earthly existence, it finds its further existence when the gate of death is passed.

But what goes out of physical earthly existence? What we experience here in physical earthly existence as thoughts is also bound to the physical organism; but what wells up as will in such a wonderful way from within the human being that he can actually grasp his volitional acts only in thoughts, only in images, and can only say: I will raise my hand or arm. But he does not know what happens between these thoughts and between the actual raising of the arm, the whole miracle that lies in between, the tensing of the muscle. All this is in the unconscious, just as the events of the life of sleep itself are for the soul. That which arises as will remains unconscious for the most part, that is, it is reflected only in the life of thought. But he who looks down into this life of will with inspired and intuitive knowledge makes tremendous discoveries within it. Here in our physical existence on earth, which we only view externally, we perform our actions, and a materialistic age could even believe that these actions are exhausted in the physical existence on earth, that they have no further significance.

But he who looks into the true nature of the human will, which remains unconscious to ordinary day-consciousness, sees there how, not out of thinking, but out of willing, to the same extent that man progresses in physical earthly existence, something is formed which is composed of the evaluation of his actions. In our physical existence on earth, we say: an action is good, an action is evil, we are satisfied or dissatisfied with some deed. We can perhaps believe that this is only an abstract judgment that we add to the deed. If we look into the human being's volitional existence with our truly true inspiration and intuition, we see how a real being weaves itself out of what is only a thought here, such as the judgment: I can be satisfied with an action — or: I must be dissatisfied —, inwardly, in accordance with our will, becomes a fact, how a whole being is woven in the depths of our human nature, a being that, if I may express it this way, has a countenance, depending on our actions here in our earthly existence. If we have done bad deeds, which we cannot be satisfied with while fully conscious of our humanity, then an entity with an ugly face develops within us; if we have done deeds that we can be satisfied with, then an entity with a sympathetic face develops. Indeed, the evaluation of our actions becomes an inner being in us, and to the same extent that our thoughts become more and more dependent on the physical organism - in the child they were not yet dependent on the physical organism, they worked on the physical organization, then they became abstract - the same measure in which, I might say, our thoughts become a corpse in our physical organism, for they are not alive, they are dead thoughts. In the same measure, the human being's moral being stirs down there, which he develops during his life. This moral being is there, and this moral being unites with his ego, and this moral being he now carries through the gate of death into the spiritual world. When the human being passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, he has first laid aside his physical body, as described in my book Theosophy. He is now in his etheric body, and still has a consciousness of his earthly deeds. But this consciousness begins to be permeated by a cosmic world consciousness. That which is the etheric body dissolves into the general world ether; just as it was contracted hard before birth, it now dissolves into the world ether. With the astral body, which you will find in my book called 'Theosophy', the human being gradually reintegrates with the cosmos, but he still lives together with his newly formed moral-spiritual organism; he carries this out with him, and with it he lives out.

And now a task arises for him that is connected with what I already told you the last time I spoke to you about the life of sleep in humans: I explained to you how humans have the strength to re-enter their physical organism during sleep, that they have this strength through what can be described as lunar forces. The lunar forces are what bring the human being back into physical earthly existence, even every morning. Man is initially within this sphere of the lunar forces when he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies. But within these lunar forces he cannot receive the comprehensive world consciousness that I described to you earlier; rather, there the human being still has something that connects him to the earth through this moral earth organism. He must snatch himself from the lunar forces; he must leave behind in the lunar sphere that which he has woven for himself out of his moral actions, out of all that he has done as a moral or immoral act; he must leave that behind in the lunar sphere and must penetrate into the solar sphere, into the world of the stars. Now he must not only penetrate into the image, as I have described it for the state of sleep, but into the real world of sun and stars; he must snatch himself from the lunar sphere.

The clairvoyant consciousness of primitive man also had an experience of this, could speak of these things, which today man can only gain if he develops his spiritual and soul powers. Primitive man could speak of these things through the natural elementary powers with which he was endowed. But primitive man was at the same time always guided, just as man is today guided by science, just as he is guided by the various educational institutions (such as did not exist in ancient times). What human beings could see of the pre-earthly and post-earthly existence was, so to speak, oriented by what the initiates of the mysteries knew through their higher knowledge. And so the members of primitive humanity learned what became an inner experience for some of them, who were knowledgeable in the sense of the word at that time: that man cannot escape the lunar sphere through his own strength after death, that a spiritual being from the cosmos must come to meet him, of which the sun is the external physical reflection. That must come to meet him, that must snatch him from the lunar sphere. He must leave behind what he carries with him from the earth in the form of guilt; he must be led up into the guilt-free sphere of the cosmos by what the ancient initiates called the high being of the sun, which found a wonderful description in all the ancient mysteries. You need, as people said in those days, the power that comes to meet you from the heavens. But man was organized differently in those days. I have already indicated today how differently man was organized in those days. He had clairvoyant powers within him; he knew from inner vision that there is a supersensible world on earth. He had no real fear of death, for what was death? An experience in life. He saw that something within him was independent of death. He had that which was independent in his body, and because he had that in the body, he could see the sun being coming to meet him, he could accept the help after death.

But therein consists the earthly progress of men, that men have lost the natural way of looking at their Eternal. Mankind has acquired an intellectual consciousness that is completely bound to the physical body, that is dependent on the physical body; we have an earthly consciousness depending on the organization of the physical body. This earthly consciousness obscures the spiritual world for us, even before we are born and after we die. For today's man, it is not the same as for prehistoric man or even for man in the older Egyptian times, that he brings a certain light with him through the gate of death and can illuminate the space — if I may express it this way; it is only a figure of speech — of the supersensible world, and can, as it were, hasten towards the high solar being that comes to lead him out of the lunar sphere. Through what he had within him between birth and death, he was able to recognize this high being of the sun.

You see, you need not be offended by the expression; the old initiates, out of their knowledge, had the right to call this being the high being of the sun. But there came a time in the development of mankind when mankind would have lost the possibility of penetrating into those worlds after death, into which it must penetrate if it does not want to lose itself. On the other hand, mankind on earth had to penetrate to that consciousness in which one can only and alone acquire freedom as a human being. As a result, a terrible state would have occurred for mankind at a certain time. The terrible situation that would have arisen for humanity would have been that people would have been cut off from the supersensible world, that precisely because of the perfection they attain here on earth, which predestines them would have been deprived of the supersensible world, because they could no longer find the connection to that spiritual being that would snatch them from that which holds them together with the earth for life after death.

And what has happened to further real progress of mankind? Not an external abstract knowledge, not a theory could help. The only thing that could help was that being, which had previously only lived in the supersensible worlds and came to meet people when they were between death and birth in the supersensible, could only help if the being descended to earth, so that the earthly human being could have a connection with it already on earth. And this descent is the event of Golgotha. The Christ-Being has descended and has assumed an earthly existence in Jesus of Nazareth.

Within his earthly existence, the Meusch gains a connection with the Christ Jesus. What he adds to his earthly consciousness by looking to the Christ Jesus, by feeling with, sympathizing with the mystery of Golgotha, what he instills into his earthly consciousness by not only calling himself an ego that can be free, but by fulfilling Paul's words: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” could he make this word a truth in his earthly life by connecting his ego, which he attains here but which would at the same time cut him off from the supersensible world, by connecting this earthly consciousness with what has entered into earthly existence through the sacrifice of the Christ Being: this is what man carries through death. The ability that used to come to him only through the fact that he had elemental powers within him: since the Mystery of Golgotha, it is the connection of the earthly human being in his consciousness, in his soul life, with Christ, with the Mystery of Golgotha, which secures his life when he passes through the gate of death. For the consciousness that one attains through the physical body would have to be lost with the physical body; one would not find the way through the spiritual worlds. If one finds on earth the Guide, that is to say, the Christ, who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and if one's spiritual powers are linked with those of humanity on earth in the sense of St. Paul's words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” then one will find a living way through the gate of death. Therefore St. Paul's words can be taken in all seriousness: And if the Christ had not come to earth, that is, if He had not conquered death, then all would avail man nothing in his faith.

The old adepts told men: A supermundane Being will take up the thread of your consciousness, which you have here of your entire human nature, and will lead you out of your lunar existence into pure cosmic world existence. The more recently initiated must tell people: Look to what was accomplished by the Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha, take into your consciousness the substantiality of the Christ with all its power! This goes with you through death and leads you towards those worlds which you must pass through between death and a new birth. In the lunar sphere you will leave behind your moral being, only to find it again when you return to the lunar sphere. And in your earthly fate will appear the image of that which you first left behind and then will find again in the lunar sphere.

From what I can tell you now, human science, through the natural human science, only knows through those powers that came to humanity in the last third of the 19th century. In the past, these powers were more or less obscured in humanity. They were still there, but in the form of dreams from the ancient times that I described to you earlier. In the first centuries of Christianity, people did not have what we can achieve today through imagination, inspiration and intuition, but they had a natural, atavistic clairvoyance, and there were still old initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; they were able to tell their people who trusted them: The Christ, who was in that world, which you remember as the time of your pre-earthly existence, the Christ, who used to be only in extraterrestrial spheres, descended to Earth through the cross of Golgotha. Therefore, in the first four centuries of the development of Christianity in the West, the main focus was on the descended Christ. Everywhere you find descriptions from the first centuries AD (most of the literature has been destroyed) of how the Christ descended from cosmic and spiritual worlds and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, the greatest value was placed on this descent, on this leaning towards the earth. But when, with the fourth century A.D., the old initiates began to die out and the new science of initiation was not yet there, which could only come with the last third of the 19th century, when these old initiates had died out, then what had previously been a direct vision had to be hardened into the documents. It had to be handed down traditionally; in order to attain the consciousness of freedom, people had to forget the old, initiated science for a time. That is why, the more humanity approached the 19th century, the more was forgotten about how the supermundane Christ-Being descended into earthly existence and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, people only looked at the historical event, and gradually they lost sight of the Christ in Jesus. We must begin again today to speak of the Christ as a supersensible entity. We must understand what it means for the Christ to keep the human soul alive, for the body has changed in the course of human evolution. Why did the ancients have clairvoyance? Because the body was softer and the glands within the human body were even more active. It is precisely the glandular activity that has approached a hardening, and the more this hardening progresses, the more the human body hardens, the glandular activity becomes a tougher one, that which can serve as a can serve as a hardened human body for intellectualism, which is becoming more and more developed, as the glandular activity in the human body hardens, the human body itself becomes extraordinarily useful for the intellect. But man must acquire the connection with the spiritual world all the more with the soul. The initiates of the early Christian centuries still knew all this, but they expressed it with a courage that is no longer spoken of today. They said that people would have gradually become physically sicker and sicker if Christ had not come and healed them from the soul. Therefore, in the first Christian centuries, Christ was not only revered in our abstraction, but above all revered as the healer, as the great world physician, as the savior.

Today, all these things must be achieved again; they can only be achieved if man can once more look into the secrets of birth and death. The ability to look into these secrets of birth and death can only be acquired through the path of imaginative, inspired and intuitive science. We must gradually receive knowledge of this, for the one who receives knowledge of it also acquires the vision of it in his soul.

This is what I had to say to you today about the connection between man and those worlds that he leaves through birth and reenters through death.

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to you once again, to be able to speak to you in the branch of our Anthroposophical Society in which I was able to develop the main part of my work for many years. Today I would like to speak to you about a number of things that I believe are important to consider in the present day. I would like to speak to you about the relationship between the human being and the supersensible world.

This is actually the constant theme of our discussions within the anthroposophical movement. But you will already have become accustomed to the fact that the truths about the supersensible worlds can only come into the full possession of the human mind when they are viewed from the most diverse points of view, so that, as I have often said, an overall impression can arise through the assimilation of images from the most diverse sides.

You know that spiritual scientific observation shows that human life on earth falls into two parts that are separated by time: the fully conscious waking state and the sleeping state. They also know that during sleep, those parts of the human being that we call the physical body, the etheric or formative body, the astral body and the ego are separated, so that the human being, so to speak, physical body and his etheric body, and that he initially leads an unconscious existence in his astral body and in his ego-being outside of the physical body and the etheric body. When one ascends to higher knowledge, it is not the case that one gains something for the human being through this ascent itself, through the knowledge, any more than we gain something for our digestion by having theoretical knowledge about this digestion, or at least we gain nothing for the immediate nature of digestion, as it takes place in our normally organized human being. It can be said that higher knowledge brings nothing new into the human being. Everything that higher knowledge provides is already in the human being. But it is the case that what can definitely be said to bring nothing new into the human being points to what remains unknown to the human being for ordinary consciousness and what, by not only is recognized but is experienced with the full content of the soul, with all the soul's powers, it does indeed bring something higher into the human being: not knowledge as such, but the experience of this knowledge.

In saying this, I have indicated what I would like to present as a threefold aspect of anthroposophical endeavour. First of all, there is the fact that there must be individuals who acquire spiritual-scientific methods in such a way that they can bring about knowledge of the supersensible worlds through higher vision in the supersensible worlds. What one calls the acquisition of these cognitions during one's existence on earth is not so important. If one does not associate the nebulous mystical ideas that are very often associated with the term clairvoyance, then one can speak of clairvoyant knowledge. Through this, then, what must increasingly become the purpose in life in our present age comes about.

The second thing is that through the ordinary, as one says, healthy human understanding, if it is only unbiased enough, that which is revealed through clairvoyant knowledge can be understood. I have often emphasized that one does not need to be a clairvoyant oneself to understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research. But it is also important for those who come to clairvoyant insight themselves to translate what they see into ordinary human terms. For that is precisely the significance that the clairvoyant has for man in the present time of his development: that it can be translated into those terms that we have in today's civilization as the terms of man in general. Therefore, whether one is clairvoyant or not, one must understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research.

And the third thing is this: what can be translated from clairvoyant research into concepts, what can be presented from clairvoyant research, must become an inner purpose in life, must become such that the human being thereby understands: I am a being that is not only bound to earthly existence between birth and death, but I am a being for whom earthly existence is only one phase, only one temporary metamorphosis. And everything that can appeal to the human soul will enter the soul if anthroposophy becomes the purpose in life in this sense. Firstly, the human being knows that he belongs to the spiritual worlds and he also knows that his earthly existence must receive its tasks from the spiritual worlds. Secondly, however, the human being knows that he is responsible to the spiritual worlds. All this elevates him above mere earthly existence, but not in such a way that he leaves it in a rapturously mystical way and holds it in low esteem, but rather by drawing his tasks for earthly existence from the supersensible world and thereby influencing the whole character, the whole status of his earthly existence.

This is especially important for our time, that we first learn to listen to what can be said through clairvoyant research; that we then endeavor to understand the content of this research through common sense, and that we make this content our life's work, to illuminate life with tasks, to increase our responsibility in life towards the spiritual worlds. In saying this, I would like to convey the color nuance that I would like to permeate my remarks today. I would like to give you some new information about man's relationship to the supersensible world.

The human being who lives here on earth opens his senses to the physical world. By looking into himself, he perceives his thinking, feeling and willing in a certain way. What he perceives through his senses and makes the content of his soul is what he calls his earthly surroundings. Note that, as earth people in this physical environment, we are actually quite familiar with what we call the outside world, the natural outside world, as far as it lies within our horizon, but that, basically, we are quite unfamiliar with what lies within our own being, even often physically. Man does indeed learn to know his inner organs through an external science, but only when he makes these inner organs external beings on the dissecting table or the like. Man cannot get to know his lungs, his heart and so on through looking inside himself with ordinary knowledge. At most, we learn to feel our inner organs, to perceive them when they are diseased. In a healthy state, man does not really perceive his inner self. He lives in his inner being, it is active in him. But precisely because he lives in it, is in it, is himself in it, he does not perceive it as he perceives the outer world, which is not himself.

This shows us that during our time on earth we focus on the outside world and have a world with content around us, and that when we look inward, we have a general, vague feeling of an ego, of which, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to say: it is very dark and very unclear. And that we can alternate between this looking into our inner selves, in which we experience something quite unclear and dark in our soul, and the experience of the external world, which is concrete in itself, determined and full of content everywhere. We can alternate between the two with our consciousness. This is essentially our experience between birth and death.

Between death and a new birth, the experience is essentially different. Especially in those times of existence between death and a new birth, which can be compared to the middle part of our life on earth, when we are at the height of our physical strength as thirty- or forty-year-olds, just in the time that is the middle part between death and a new birth, it is the opposite of life on earth. There we look into our inner being through a different consciousness that we then have, and by looking into our inner being, we have something so concrete and so full of content as when we look into the outer world here on earth. Only when we look at the external world here on earth do we have the beings of the three or four realms around us, the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and of the physical human kingdom. We have them around us in that they present themselves to us as sensory content. When we look into ourselves between death and a new birth in the marked time – that is already the case – then we do not have things of nature in us, but we have a world of entities in us, a world of those entities that we describe as the entities of the higher, of the spiritual hierarchies. Here we have world perception, external perception, perception of things; in the spiritual world we have inner perception, perception of beings. We look into ourselves, but we do not find such organs as we carry in us here on earth; rather, we find the whole world of entities when we can have the right awareness for it. And he who describes these entities of the higher hierarchies actually describes nothing other than the external experience of man between death and new birth. And just as we can turn our gaze back from the external world to ourselves, now, conversely, between death and new birth, we can turn our gaze from within, where we find the beings of the higher hierarchies within us, to the outside world, and there we find ourselves. The external world is actually the internal world there, the internal being is the external being, in the way I have just explained it.

But what we see there as an inner, fully-fledged world of spiritual beings within us is presented to us here, during our earthly existence, in its image, presented to us in such a way that we see the sensual images of those beings that we otherwise perceive within us between death and new birth. However, we do not see the same beings here, but, so to speak, the dwelling places of these beings, and that is - because there are always a number of these beings in common - the world of stars around us. So what do we describe when we speak of the stars, for example of the sun, full of knowledge - not with the knowledge between birth and death that is inherent in ordinary consciousness? The sun presents a certain image to our senses: but what presents itself here as the image of the sun, we experience between death and a new birth as a realm of spiritual beings. We do not see the sun as it is here now, but as a realm of spiritual beings. From our earthly existence, we have something like a memory, which tells us that this realm of spiritual entities corresponds to the sun, as seen from Earth. And it is the same for the other stars. That is, our spiritual consciousness between death and new birth becomes a cosmic consciousness. We are not just here within our own skin; we truly are the whole world. But you must not imagine it spatially. But we are the whole world, we carry the starry sky within us. And it is like this: just as we carry our lungs, our heart, our stomach and so on within us here on earth, so we carry the sun, the moon, Saturn, the other stars within us between death and new birth as our inner organs, but they are spiritual beings. It is their spiritual correlate, their spiritual archetype, that we then carry within us.

If we were always in this state, we would never come to ourselves in the spiritual world; we would always feel at one with the world of the higher hierarchies. But that cannot be. It would be just as if we only wanted to breathe in here on earth and never breathe out. Therefore, our life between death and new birth consists of a rhythmic change: in a life in these higher hierarchies and - in cosmic consciousness - in looking out; that is, there: coming to ourselves. Just as we have inhalation and exhalation here, I could also say waking and sleeping, so we alternate there between experiencing the hierarchical spiritual world and experiencing ourselves, where we are alone in our own soul, where we come to ourselves. This is how the rhythmic change in a person's experience arises between being spread out over the whole of world existence and coming to oneself: Being spread out over the whole of world existence – coming to oneself and so on.

This life between death and new birth within the spiritual world, of which the world of the stars is a physical reflection, is truly no less rich than life on earth. But in earthly life we can only recognize the result – and in a very unclear state – of what we experience between death and new birth. Let us imagine the following: we live here on earth, one of us makes shoes, the other skirts, the third cuts people's hair, the fourth builds locomotives and so on. By doing this here on earth in our physical existence, so-called human culture, civilization, comes about. Now, imagine that all of this civilization, in its manifestations, were to be summarized from time to time in a kind of result in a completely different area, for example on the sun. Let us assume that everything that comes into being here on earth, as I have indicated, would simply produce many copies on the sun. This is in fact the reality of what we do in the context described with the beings of the higher hierarchies between death and new birth: we work there with these beings on the spiritual form of our physical earthly body. And this work that is being done, where the human being between death and new birth works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies to bring about the spirit form of the physical earthly body, this work is truly a richer, a more diverse one than what we here as cultural work in physical existence, even if the physical human body that stands before us does not immediately reveal to us that it is the result of the work of divine beings in connection with man in the time of his existence between death and new birth. But older worldviews knew what they were talking about when they called the human body a “temple of the gods.” For this human body is actually, as little as we pay attention to it with our ordinary consciousness here on earth, the most complicated thing in the universe. And what a single human body is, that is precisely the combined work of innumerable beings, to which we ourselves also belong; for we work on the body with which we clothe ourselves in an earthly incarnation, only we cannot work on it individually for ourselves, but we must work on it in community with innumerable spiritual beings of the most diverse hierarchies.

If we speak from the point of view of earthly life, we are accustomed to calling a germ that which is small at first and then grows large in the physical sense. If we call that which man develops between death and a new birth the spirit germ of the physical body, we must say that this spirit germ is as great as the universe and then, as it passes through the embryonic life of man, becomes 'small' in the physical life. The small human germ contains an image of the great spirit germ, which has been worked out by the human being in connection with the higher beings. So that, by looking into the world that the human being passes through between death and rebirth, we actually see how the microcosm, the human body, is formed in ever new specimens from the tasks of the macrocosm. And that is a more sublime task than all the cultural work that a person does between birth and death. And the life that a human being undergoes by working on the human germ from the universe is a more varied and richer life than the one we spend here on earth, for example, by making shoes, making skirts, teaching children, governing states, and so on. Anyone who wants to understand the world must realize that there is something tremendously exalted in shaping the human body, as it exists here in its physical form, out of the tasks of the universe, and that the experience of this shaping is something tremendous, in terms of sublimity, not comparable to what man accomplishes here, even if he also helps to fabricate the most valuable cultural products of physical life on earth.

Thus man actually stands between death and a new birth in the spiritual world: he has an external world, which is himself; his gaze is directed towards his future life on earth, and in the prospect of this future life on earth lies the fact that he withdraws into himself, that he comes to himself. In the moment when his consciousness is filled with looking at his future life on earth and with looking back at his earlier life on earth, he is with himself. At the moment when he works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the task of bringing about the complicated physical body in the spirit-germ, he is, so to speak, outside of himself, but he has become one with the spiritual being, he lives in the spiritual being outside. It is at this highpoint of experience between death and a new birth, which I have called the midnight hour of human existence in one of my Mystery Dramas, that the human being experiences inwardly what he sees here in the image of the fixed starry sky. The firmament of the fixed stars or its representative – as the old worldviews also called it – the zodiac, seen from here, is the physical image of the spiritual world in which the human being lives between death and rebirth, and which he experiences as his inner world.

This continues for some time, and then, as it were, the human being leaves this living, this active, this, from an earthly point of view, sublime direct work with the spirits of the higher hierarchies. And the next thing that is then experienced is the point of view of co-experiencing with those higher beings who are revelations of higher beings. From a certain point in time, the human being knows: Yes, direct participation with the higher beings is no longer there, but the higher beings show themselves to me in an image. Seen from the earthly point of view, one can describe this as follows: the human being finds the transition from the world of the fixed stars to the world of the planets. As man passes through the planetary sphere, moving towards an earthly existence, he no longer feels the life of the higher worlds as his inner life; before, he felt it as his inner life. Here in the physical world, we feel our blood circulation, our breathing and so on, as our inner life; there, in the life between death and a new birth, we feel the life and essence of the higher hierarchies as our inner life. We are in a spiritual reality and we participate. Now, from a certain point in time on, we say to ourselves: Now we no longer participate, now what we used to participate in appears to us as in a picture; before we were in the actuality of the spiritual world, now we are in its revelations. But that means in reality: we have passed from the sphere of the fixed stars to the planetary sphere.

There we have to overcome a certain difficulty first: that is the entry into the sphere of Saturn. Certain spiritual forces radiate from Saturn. When we have passed through death, we first enter the planetary sphere and only then come to the sphere of the fixed stars; because then we take the path that I have just described, in reverse order. So when we leave our earthly life through death, Saturn is the dwelling place of those entities that do not want to leave us on earth, that want to lift us up from the earth, want to free us from our earthly powers and want to transport us into the world of pure spirituality. In my Theosophy, I have described this experience from a different point of view than the transition from the life in the soul's realm to the spirit world. These two descriptions are related to each other in the same way that you can always photograph a tree from different sides: it is always the same, but it always looks different. So, on our return journey, towards a new life on earth, we have the influence of the Saturn beings. And those people who, through their previous life on earth, have such karma that when they return to a new life on earth the forces of Saturn have a great influence on them, easily become alienated from the earth; people who either enthuse about how earthly things are actually worthless and how one should flee into a conceptual cloud-cuckoo-land, or people who, because they only looked at human conditions superficially, develop an inclination to organize spiritualistic séances and the like, in which the most diverse spiritual entities can cavort. All this is caused by the fact that in a previous life on earth a person had acquired such karma that, on returning to the terrestrial sphere, he comes into a stronger relationship with the forces of Saturn.

But when man enters the planetary sphere and approaches the solar sphere, he also comes under the influence of the counterpart of the Saturn forces, that is, those spiritual entities that have their dwelling place in the moon. These beings have above all the task of guiding the human being back into earthly existence, so that the person who absorbs the effects of the moon's forces is indeed firmly rooted in earthly existence , although on the other hand it may of course be the lunar forces that permeate the human being all too strongly with the purely physical existence, that is to say with the preference, with the inclination for this purely physical existence.

So we can say: Here on earth we walk among trees, flowers, grasses, animals and so on, between death and a new birth we walk under stars. And it is not so unreal if you simply imagine in a comprehensive picture that you are here on earth during your life on earth, that after death you pass through the spheres of the planets, leaving the lunar sphere, losing your inclination for earthly life, being transported out through Saturn, spheres, and then return again, enter the planetary sphere, and in particular, by coming under the influence of the moon, you will be prompted to return to earthly life in the supersensible world by what the lunar forces are. It urges you to return to earthly life. Just as we are connected here on earth with what we call our sensory environment, so we are also connected with this life through the world of the stars. And all this has great significance for our work with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the spirit germ of the physical human body. For until we descend to the planetary sphere for a new life on earth, it even remains undecided in our being, which we are building for our future life on earth, whether we will become man or woman. Yes, it even remains undecided for a certain time when we are already in the planetary sphere as soul-spiritual beings. In the sphere of the fixed stars, to speak of anything similar to what we have here as man and woman would be pure nonsense. But in the picture I have now begun to paint, you can well imagine that as you move away from the earth, you first see the moon from the front, then from behind. You also see Venus, Mercury and the Sun from behind, then you see the zodiac sphere and so on. But as you pass through these spheres, what is otherwise a physical image for us here is transformed into a sum of spiritual entities that you look at. When you look at the moon from behind, you see spiritual beings, for example those spiritual beings that were of particular interest to the initiates of the Old Testament: the presence of Yahweh and the beings that belong to it. But if you now return to Earth, you can, through your past karma, approach the lunar sphere by choosing the point in time when, as seen from Earth, there is a full moon in the sky; that is, you see, as seen from Earth, a full moon, the illuminated disc of the moon, but as seen from behind, when approaching Earth, the moon looks black. Choose the time for your approach to Earth so that you are influenced by the black sphere of the moon, unaffected by the sun, when there is a full moon on Earth. If, on the other hand, you choose a time when we do not see the moon here on earth, when there is a new moon and the effects of the sun go out freely into space in all directions, then you will establish a male earthly existence. So you see, we have to derive what we are here on earth in the physical body from the experiences that we have in the stellar sphere, that is, in the spiritual sphere, as it were, from the other side, between death and new birth. These things can be traced in great detail. Just as we on earth can say what a person experiences by eating cabbage or eggs or ox meat, for example, because his physical existence on earth depends on it, so too are there corresponding relationships in the spiritual worlds, the result of which then appears in the formation and inner experience of the person on earth. Here on earth we eat ox meat or eggs; in the spiritual world, between death and a new birth, we choose, according to our karma, the new moon or full moon for the time of our transition and thus become man or woman. But the full human existence in connection with the existence of the world can only be grasped if we do not merely consider what happens here between birth and death, but if we can understand what happens in earthly life in connection with what happens between death and a new birth for man.

This is something that man today does not yet understand in its full, real significance for earthly life either. But man today actually only knows the world as a mole knows museums. The mole that digs through the soil under the museums can perhaps list its experiences about it; but there will not be much of what is above him. This is more or less the position of the world as far as the earth sciences can reveal it. The only difference is that the mole could live without a museum above it. It has little connection with the museum, but man is intimately connected with the supersensible world, with that by which he is connected. Humanity must regain an awareness of this. Once there was a dim, muffled awareness of these things, which was illuminated in the ancient mysteries, but also with the old methods. These ancient mysteries were not merely one-sided cultic places. It is only in recent times that humanity has had a need for one-sided cultic places. Modern humanity must practise separate cults because it has become egotistical and wants to have an assurance of immortality for its own self. This can be given, it is a fact. But today man is inclined to practise all this separately from one another. In Paracelsus' time it was not yet so, there healing was still divine service. We must - although we must have transitions - come again to see all earthly work as a completion of spiritual work. It is only incumbent upon man today, as it were, to go through earthly events cut off from the spiritual world during his earthly existence; otherwise he would not be able to gain his consciousness of freedom. But the time is fulfilled in which man may keep himself cut off from spiritual existence. He must again permeate his consciousness with inner enlightenment from spiritual existence, and for this he cannot use the old methods today. He must go through what can be revealed to him in this direction in the present.

For suppose that some ancient mystery center provided for the affairs of the surrounding area. The care of this mystery center extended to all the affairs of the people who lived around it, to all those affairs that could only be fulfilled and ordered through the connection of earthly life with the spiritual world. Suppose a person fell ill. In those ancient times, people did not ask: What substances have we tried that have had an effect on humans in this or that direction? — They least of all asked themselves about the effect of substances that they had tried out on animals and so on. Today, people have to go through all of this. This is not meant as a derogatory criticism of medicine, but only as a way of putting it in its proper place in the development of the earth and of humanity. But in ancient times, a sick person who was afflicted with something sought refuge in the mystery temples, for the priests were also artists and doctors. Art, religion and science were one; this was cultivated in the mysteries. In those ancient times, there was still an overall view of man. It was known that when a person is afflicted by something at a certain age, it is not only related to the chemical mixture or separation of his substances, but from a higher point of view, it is related to the experiences and adventures he has undergone when he was in the world of the stars and sought his earthly existence from there.

Let us assume, then, that such a sick person came, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, seeking help at a mystery center that was also a medical center. In ancient times, when only instinctive, half-dreamlike knowledge was at work in the mystery centers, when such a sick person came for treatment, the examination that was carried out with him was often nevertheless clearer than today's examinations. I have actually met physicians who, when you entered into conversation with them about the most important thing about the patient and asked, “How old is the patient?” did not know. As if one could possibly contribute to any person's health if one does not have an exact idea of his age! Because in each year of life, man must, so to speak, be cured differently, because human life is constantly changing. No one would think of taking a flower petal, for example, and planting it in the ground, and believing that a new plant would grow from it. Instead, he would take the seed from the fruit and plant it in the ground, because he knows that the development of the plant is something. And so human life must also be considered. If a sick person seeking help came to a mystery doctor between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one – these are approximate figures – the doctor knew that there are a number of illnesses that are simply related to the human being's passage through the solar sphere as he descends from the planetary world into the physical world. If the patient was between the ages of thirty-five and forty-two, the mystery priest knew which diseases had something to do with the passage of man through the sphere of Saturn in his descent. So he asked himself above all about the connection of earthly life with the experiences and adventures of man in existence between death and new birth: then he knew what is here on earth again related to the beings of the higher hierarchies, or rather their physical images, the stars. Now, certain plants on Earth have a more intimate relationship with the Sun than others, and others in turn have a more intimate relationship with Saturn and so on. You will be able to tell by healthy instinct that the sprouting flowering plants, for example, have a different relationship to the Sun than a fungus or lichen on a tree. And someone who, for example, suffers from a stomach or heart condition between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one will certainly not be cured with buckthorn tea, as the ancient mystery doctor would not have treated him with buckthorn tea, but with a sun-related plant juice; but this is based on the knowledge of the connection between human life and the universe.

These things are, so to speak, “buried” knowledge; they must be rediscovered at a higher level, illuminated by our modern intelligence, after humanity has passed through darkness for a period of time. They must be rediscovered and they can be rediscovered, and the anthroposophical world view is the beginning of this rediscovery of spiritual enlightenment for humanity in all areas of life.

I have now described this descent of the human being until he enters the planetary sphere. Then there comes a time, after the influence of the moon has already begun, when the human being loses the spirit germ of his physical body, which has already shrunk very much. The expressions are of course rough, but you will not misunderstand them. This spirit-germ of the physical body descends earlier than the human being himself. It is handed over to a pair of fallopian tubes, sinks into a fertilized human germ, and forms the element of growth there before the human being himself has descended. So there comes a time when the human being has already handed over this physical germ to earthly life, when he looks down on the earth, as it were: This is what he will become, the person to whom I will belong. But for a short time the human being still lives freely in the cosmos. Then the human being draws the forces for his etheric body from the ethereal world of the cosmos, so that he then consists of I-being, astral body and etheric body. And after he has acquired his etheric body in this way, he now unites with what has become his physical germ, which he himself first sent down.

There is an enormous amount of wisdom in this sending forward of the physical human germ and in the subsequent agglomeration, if I may call it that, of the etheric body. For suppose we kept our physical body while we collect the etheric body, and the physical body would not be permeated with physical matter, but rather the forces that could be permeated with physical matter in the womb, but suppose we did not send it ahead, but still permeate it with the etheric body before we arrived in the substance of the physical embryo and in what is offered to us there. What would happen then? Precisely because we can know what might happen, we begin to marvel at the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe. For if it were otherwise, every thought we conceive and every inclination we have for evil would constantly stand before us. There would be, as it were, a living memory of what we had done, even as the slightest evil, only in thought or in feeling on earth. We would be overrun by the contents of conscience, especially from its evil side, and we would not be able to form a neutral thought, we would not be able to come to any knowledge of nature, for example. If we were to look at plants neutrally, according to natural laws, then such thoughts would easily mix into our observation of nature: “Oh, what a bad guy you were at seventeen, what you did then!” This would become ingrained in our observation of nature, and we would never arrive at a neutral view. We are able to distinguish our simple, neutral reflection from our own moral or immoral instincts because we first send down our physical spirit germ and only then, after we have gathered the etheric body, do we connect with the physical body. In this way we keep these two so far apart that the memory can be stored in the physical body, so that it is not always there, and also leaves us free, so that not our whole, namely moral life, is always before us.

I have now described man's descent from the spiritual world to the moment when he unites with the physical substance of the earth in order to continue living on earth. What do we find out now that we have arrived here? I already said that it turns out that we have to say: When I realize that man first sends down the forces that shape his physical body and then follows, I am led to unreservedly admire the wise guidance of world affairs. If I grasp this with all my being, I cannot stand there like a blockhead who makes a machine and does not need to admire it, because I would have to be a very dry person who is revealed such tremendous wisdom of world leadership and does not have admiration for this wisdom welling up within him! And so it is with all anthroposophical insights.

In other words, the ordinary earthly knowledge that we acquire in our waking hours appeals to our intellect, but less so to our feelings. This is not the case with the knowledge that we receive from the spiritual world in our inner experience. They engage our whole being; indeed, our whole nature is organized differently when we acquire these insights. Spiritual knowledge does not want to leave us cold in our minds, as physical knowledge does, but it is no less objective knowledge. If someone were to say, for example, that knowledge that touches the mind is not objective, that it is subjective, then one need only imagine the following: If someone stands before Raphael's Sistine Madonna, then he would have to be a strange fellow if he did not feel admiration for this painting; but no one would be able to say: That is merely subjective, Raphael's Madonna is not objective. For it is not a matter of our not actively feeling forces of sympathy or antipathy in our minds when we look at something objective, but rather of not disturbing the objective through our subjectivity. Of course, if we recognize something because it suits us to take something objectively, then we are not objective, since in this case we assume something because we like it. But if something were to appear before us as objectively as such insights, and we were then to burst into admiration at it, then this admiration would certainly not impair the objectivity of the insight. That is the essential thing about anthroposophical spiritual-scientific insights: they engage not only our intellect, our head, but our whole being. And the more and more we learn about such truths that relate to the life of man between death and new birth, the more our emotional life sprouts and later our life of will. That is, the human being permeates the impulses for his deeds with what he recognizes from the spiritual worlds. He feels here on earth as a fulfiller of what he was in the spiritual life between death and new birth.

Thus, everything that comes from experienced anthroposophy has the power to fulfill the whole person of its own accord, just as the instinctive clairvoyance, that is, the instinctive connection with the spiritual world, was once present in ancient humanity through the whole person. How did we become such intellectual guys today, and why were the ancient people not? Because the ancient people also knew what the instructions from the whole human being were. Today, for example, people learn geometry; they are taught what a perpendicular is. But what a perpendicular is hovers only in the realm of ideas. You can't even say it hovers in the air; it hovers in the realm of ideas, and the connection is simply not known. Man would never have developed a feeling for the vertical if in the course of his life he had not himself become upright and thus felt in his movements what the vertical is. And what the human being experiences in this way is also experienced by his head and made into the vertical. In the same way, what a person experiences when spreading out his arms becomes an experience of the horizontal. Man, who originally was active in his soul life as a whole human being, has gradually limited himself to the head, which can only depict everything figuratively. And how does the head do it in man? Yes, when I walk, I live differently than when I drive in a car: the car goes, and I am quiet. And so it is with the head in man: it is lazy, it has its vehicle in the rest of my organism and lets itself be driven, everything comes to rest, just as when I sit in a train. Therefore everything becomes pictorial, abstract. In the course of our earthly existence, we have come to this abstractness. But we must come again to that which allows us to grasp the spiritual in existence. And this then takes hold of the whole human being. It is the reverse process of what happened with the old man, but through this reverse process we can come again to the study of the whole human being. In this way we then also come again to a culture that fulfills the whole human being.

There are people today who hear what spiritual science has to offer and then say: There are some strange people who are proclaiming a spiritual truth today and think it is necessary for humanity. We do not want to doubt that it may be true that these worlds all exist, as the spiritual scientists talk about them; but what do they have to do with us? We can just wait until we die, then we will see what it is all about. Why should we strain here to understand what it is like in the spiritual world? But it is not like that. It is actually like this: if you want to understand what spiritual knowledge means – that is, the kind of knowledge that can be acquired through common sense after a spiritual researcher has communicated with a person – then the best way to learn about it is to have a spiritual researcher explain how the first step of extrasensory knowledge, imaginative knowledge, is acquired. I will give a few examples of this.

As man usually lives, he has only a consciousness of the present. He has this consciousness through his physical body. It is in space. Space represents the present with its three dimensions. Man therefore always has only a consciousness of the present. And when he has a memory, it is a memory of the present; he does not live himself into what he experienced ten years ago, for instance, but only into the image of what he experienced at that time. This is therefore sufficiently shadowy and abstract. If one seriously practices the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the purpose of attaining imaginative knowledge, one comes to not only live in the present, but gradually to overcome the shadowy of memory and to live in one's own past experiences. In this way, in 1922, one can still relive one's experiences from 1911 as one experienced them in 1911. And anyone who makes a special effort to live in thoughts, not in abstractions but in a fully concrete way, will be able to grasp how the life of thoughts brings turns of fate and all sorts of , deep sympathy and antipathy, as otherwise only the rough material earth-squeezing - that also comes to experience his time body, as he experiences his space body at all through the ordinary consciousness. If, for example, I cut my big toe, it hurts, and I have not only a memory of this pain in my head, because the head is far removed from the big toe, but I have an immediately experienced sensation of pain. Of course, the head is spatially connected to the big toe, but one does not experience time in this way. When a thirty-year-old person thinks back to what they experienced as a seventeen-year-old, and has now distanced themselves from in terms of time, it seems faded. If you lost a loved one thirteen years ago, how powerful the experience of pain was at the time compared to the present memory. But anyone who, through the exercises described in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” has attained this imaginative knowledge, so that he understands how to live in thought, namely, to live in pure thoughts free of sensuality, as I have described in “Philosophy of Freedom,” lives then, as he lives here in the space body in every part, so there in every part of his time body simultaneously and in every strength. When you place yourself back in time as a fifty- or sixty-year-old person, or even as an eighty-year-old, you see not only five years back — for the present existence extends over the entire course of life —: you are immediately present in every single point. However, this presence is bought at the price of fleetingness. If you are able to have an experience in the most vivid way in your eighteenth year, it does not fade from your mind as quickly as a “dream, but you cannot hold on to it, you have to forget it. And as a spiritual researcher, for example, if there were no other aids, you could get into a very bad situation. You could establish the connections through which you can see something in the etheric world, but you immediately forget it. Therefore, you also have to resort to all kinds of aids - I have given details about this in 'How to Obtain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds' - so that what you acquire in this way as a spiritual-etheric vision does not immediately disappear again. It disappears with great certainty after a few days, and what the person still carries with him as his etheric body after death disappears just as quickly.

One gets to know the whole nature of the etheric from this experience, as I have described it. The things that are told about life after death are not constructed, but gained from a living realization. But if you want to apply such aids, mere mental activity is never enough. I am not afraid to talk about my own experiences when I noticed how fleeting such experiences are in the etheric cosmos. If you see so much, you take recourse to something else to tell your experiences to other people a week later. But these aids are not taken from the mind remedies. One remedy that was very effective was to write down the experience while it was still fresh in my mind, so that the activity was not carried out through the mind but through the writing hand. In this case it is not a matter of mediumistic writing, nor of the purpose of having written it down. Writing things down, even rewriting lectures, is something that is extremely unappealing to someone who works in the spiritual field anyway. But it helps to fix what would otherwise be fleeting by allowing the whole organism to participate, as one would when executing a drawing or a painting. It then remains in one's own organism, one does not need to appropriate it again afterwards. It is only a matter of fixing the things. But for this you cannot use head-aids. If you are a spiritual researcher, you cannot fix it by means of any head-aids; you have to fix it by something that takes up your whole being. One such means would be to write down what you have experienced. But do not take into account that you are incorporating an intellectual activity, but only the characteristic style of the writing; or you can even make a symbolic drawing, a painting, or the like.

From this you can see how intimately connected with the whole human being it is, what must be there, so that one can lead over into the ordinary conceptions, what one sees in the spiritual world. But when one leads it over, then one can communicate it to other people who cannot see spiritually themselves and who then, with their ordinary, healthy human understanding, grasp it through the same conceptions in which one transmits it to them. They then have the same ideas about what the clairvoyant presents to them. To discover spiritual truths, one needs the art of clairvoyance; to live with these truths, one does not need this art of clairvoyance, but only a healthy understanding of what is presented.

But you can see something else from what is presented here. What man is spiritually in his etheric body does not live in space, it lives in time. Now look at the physical organism, for example the eye: with it you see visible things. If you were to tear out your eye, you would no longer be able to see visible things. If you look at the spiritual human being, he is, so to speak, the whole stream that passes from life to life, living once in existence between death and a new birth, then in physical life on earth, then again in life between death and a new birth, and so on. That is a unity. People in ancient times were endowed with instinctive clairvoyance at birth, that is, a connection with the spiritual world through the forces of nature themselves, and this developed in them in such a way that they could take it with them again through death; but the knowledge of the spiritual was not allowed to cease. Nor must it disappear in the newer man. Man must acquire this knowledge of the spiritual here on earth, for he is a continuous stream on earth. If you have had an earthly life that knew nothing at all about the spiritual, then for your spiritual life it is as if you were to pluck out the eye of your physical body. For what you acquire here on earth as knowledge of the spiritual life belongs to you, it is your eye with which you later “see” between death and a new birth. And if you remain “dark” here on earth with regard to knowledge of the spiritual life, then after death you have no eye; then you walk in life between death and a new birth as if through a dark valley. For this eye you must have through what you have acquired here. You tear out the eye of the spirit by excluding knowledge of the spiritual world.

This is a realization that humanity must come to terms with. Now that the old instinctive vision of the spiritual has completely faded away, humanity must realize that organs for the spiritual life must be acquired again along the lines of the path pursued by the anthroposophical movement. It is not a matter of saying: We will wait until after death, we do not need to make an effort now to understand the spiritual worlds, because after death we will see what it is like in the spiritual worlds. Certainly, we will see it after death. But for the soul it will be like a dark dungeon if we have not opened our eyes to life in the spiritual worlds here during our life between birth and death. Therefore you can see how impossible it is when a person virtually sets up a dogma that he need not concern himself with the transcendental existence here in earthly life. For we live rather in a time when, in the true sense of the word, the one who says to himself: Here, in life between birth and death, you must acquire the eye so that it is not dark for you in the spiritual world after death, and so that you can also experience the light that is around you, is also fulfilling his supersensible duty towards the world.

When I was able to speak here in this circle some time ago, I presented man in his relationship to the spiritual world from a certain point of view and concluded by saying: It can be seen from all this how we have arrived at the point in the present age where a core of people must form who recognize the necessity of spiritual-scientific knowledge. From what I have said again today, one can see this necessity even more clearly. We live today in an age in which the spiritual world wants to show itself to us during our earthly lives. We must not close the doors and windows through which it can enter. We must let the light of the spiritual world come in, we must let it come in for the sake of life on earth, we must let it come in for the sake of the life we live between death and a new birth. Man must hear the voices that speak to man from the spiritual world in a spiritual way, and he must say to himself: It is time that man perceived the light of the spirit, that he heard the voice of the spirit. And when we have familiarized ourselves with what can be understood in this way from a spiritual-scientific point of view as the necessities of the time, then the right attitude prevails in such a working space, when one regards oneself as obliged to lead humanity to recognize that now is the time to see the light of the spirit, to hear and understand the voice of the spirit.

It is in this thought, in particular in this feeling and primarily in this attitude that we want to be together and stick together in the times when we are spatially separated again. That is what I would like to say to you as a greeting, a greeting to the effect: Let what we can say to each other when fate brings us together be the occasion for it to prevail as a thought among us, as a sense of belonging together that is there in the spiritual, even when we cannot be together in space! Nevertheless, I hope that it will soon be possible for me to speak to you in person about the continuation of what I have presented today.

One can express the facts of the spiritual world in different ways, illuminating them from the most diverse sides. This sometimes sounds different. But it is precisely through these various illuminations that the facts of the spiritual world are fully presented to the soul. And so this evening, in a slightly different language and in a different light, I will share some of the things I have discussed in the last two lectures in the Goetheanum building for the human being's experience between death and a new birth.

We have heard how the human being initially, when the physical body has fallen away from him, enters into a state of cosmic experience. After the physical body has fallen away, he still carries his etheric organism within him; but he no longer feels, as it were, within this etheric organism, but he feels himself spread out soulfully into the world. But in these cosmic expanses, over which his consciousness is now beginning to spread, he cannot yet clearly distinguish the entities and processes from one another. He has a cosmic consciousness, but this cosmic consciousness still has no inner clarity. And besides, in the first days after death, this consciousness is occupied by the still existing etheric body. What is lost first is that in man which is bound to the head organization. I do not want to say anything ironic, but something very serious: one loses one's head, also meant in a spiritual sense, first of all when one passes through the gate of death. The head organization ceases to function.

Now it is precisely the head organization that mediates thinking in earthly existence. It is through the head organization that man forms his thoughts during his earthly existence in a certain activity. One loses the head organization first when one has passed through the gate of death, but one does not lose one's thoughts; they remain. They only become interspersed with a certain liveliness. They become dull, dusky, spiritual entities that point one out into the world. It is as if the thoughts had detached themselves from the human head, as if they still shone back on the last human life, which one experiences as one's etheric organism, but as if at the same time they would point to the world. One does not yet know what they want to tell us, these human ideas, which were, as it were, harnessed and penned up in the head organization and are now freed and point out into the world wide.

When the etheric body has dissolved for the reasons and in the way I characterized yesterday over at the building site, when the cosmic consciousness is no longer banished in this way to the last course of earthly life - in the other way, which I also characterized , it remains transfixed for the time being. When this etheric body has also been released from the human being, then the ideas that have been wrested from the head organization become, as it were, brighter, and one now notices how these ideas point one out into the cosmos, into the universe.

It is the case that one comes out into the cosmos in such a way that, initially, the plant world of the earth is the mediator. Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that the plants covering the ground at the place where one died are the ones that prepare the way out, but when we look at the plant world of the earth, it presents itself to the spiritual vision in such a way that what the physical eyes see is only a part of that plant world. I will draw what is taking place in a schematic way on the board (see drawing). Let us assume that this is the surface of the earth; plants grow out of the earth's surface (green). It is, of course, drawn out of all proportion, but you will understand what I mean. One follows these plants with the senses to the flowers (red). The spiritual view of these plants, however, shows that this is only part of the plant world, that from the flowers upwards an astral event and weaving begins. In a sense, an astral substance is poured out over the earth, and spiral formations (yellow) arise from this astral substance. Wherever the earth provides the opportunity for plants to arise, the flowing over of these astral world spirals gives rise to plant life.

These world spirals now surround the earth everywhere, so you must not believe that the downpouring, downshining and downglittering of these astral world spirals is only where plants grow. It is present everywhere in different ways, so that one could also die in the desert and yet have the opportunity to encounter these plant spirals as they pour out into space.

These spirals of vegetation are the path by which one moves from the earth to the planetary sphere. So, in a sense, one slips out of the earthly realm through the spiritual extensions of the plant world of the earth. This becomes wider and wider. These spirals expand more and more, becoming wider and wider circles. They are the highways out to the spiritual world. But one would not get out there, one would have to stand still, so to speak, if one did not gain the possibility of having a kind of negative weights, weights that do not weigh down, but weights that push one up. And these weights are the spiritual contents, the ideas of the mineral formations in the earth, especially of the metals; so that one moves out into the world on the plant paths and is supported by the power that carries one from the metals of the earth to the planet stars. All mineral formations have the peculiarity that the ideas inherent in them carry us to a particular planet. Thus, let us say, we are carried by tin-like minerals, that is, by their ideas, to a particular planet; we are carried to a particular planet by what is in the earth as iron, that is, by the idea of iron. What the physical human being takes in from the mineral and plant world during his earthly existence is taken over in his spiritual counter-images, guiding the human being after death into the world's vastness. And one is really carried into the planetary movements, into the whole rhythm of the planetary movements through the mineral and plant kingdoms of the earth.

By gradually expanding one's consciousness to include the entire planetary sphere, so that one is aware of the planetary life in one's own inner world of the soul, one passes through the entire planetary sphere in this way. If there were nothing in the planetary sphere except the outpourings of plant and mineral existence in its vastness, one would experience everything that can be experienced in the secrets of the mineral and plant kingdoms. And these secrets are extraordinarily manifold, magnificent, powerful, they are full of content, and no one need think that the life that begins there for the spiritual person when he has left his physical organism is somehow poorer than the earthly life we spend from day to day. It is manifold in itself, but it is also majestic in itself. You can experience more from the secrets of a single mineral than you experience in earthly life from all the kingdoms of nature combined.

But there is something else in this sphere, which one passes through as the planetary sphere. These are the lunar forces, the spiritual lunar forces, which were characterized in the last 'Days'. The lunar sphere is there. However, the further one enters into an extra-terrestrial existence, the weaker and weaker its effectiveness becomes. Its effectiveness announces itself strongly in the first times, which are counted in years after death; but it becomes weaker and weaker the more the cosmic consciousness expands. If this lunar sphere were not there, one would not be able to experience two things after death. The first is that entity which I mentioned in the last days and which one has developed oneself during the last earth life from the forces which represent the moral-spiritual evaluation of one's own earth life. One has developed a spiritual being, a kind of spiritual elemental presence, which has as its limbs, as its tentacle formations, what is actually an image of the human moral-spiritual value. If I may express myself in this way: a living photograph, formed out of the substance of the astral cosmos, lives with the soul, but it is a real, living photograph on which one can see what kind of person one actually was in one's last life on earth. This photograph is in front of one as long as one is in the sphere of the moon. But in addition, in this sphere of the moon, one experiences all kinds of diverse elemental beings, of whom one very soon notices that they have a kind of dream-like but very bright dream-like consciousness, which alternates with a brighter state of consciousness, which is even brighter than human consciousness on earth. These entities oscillate, as it were, between a dull, dream-like state of consciousness and a brighter state of consciousness than that of a person on earth. You get to know these entities. They are numerous and their forms are extremely different from one another. In the condition of life I am now describing, these entities are experienced in such a way that when they enter a duller, dream-like consciousness, they float down to the earth, as it were, through the moon's spirituality, and then float back again. A rich life presents itself from such figures, floating down to earth and back again, flowing up and down, as I have just described. One learns to recognize that the animal kingdom on earth is related to these formations. One learns to recognize that these figures are the so-called group souls of the animals. These group souls of the animals descend. This means that some animal form wakes up on the earth below. When this animal form is more in a state of sleeping below, then the group soul comes up. In short, it can be seen that the animal kingdom is related to the cosmos in such a way that within the lunar sphere is the living environment for the group souls of the animals. Animals do not have individual souls, but whole groups of animals, the lions, tigers, cats and so on have common group souls. These group souls just lead their existence in the lunar sphere, floating up and down. And in this up and down floating, the life of the animals from the lunar sphere is brought about.

It is a law of the world that in this sphere, where we find the group souls of the animals, that is, in the lunar sphere, our moral-astral counterpart also has its life. For when one then, with cosmic consciousness, lives one's way further out into the cosmic expanses, one leaves behind in the lunar sphere, as I have described it, this living photograph of what one has achieved as a moral-spiritual being during one's last life on earth and also in earlier ones. In this way, one enters the planetary sphere, experiencing the plant, mineral and animal worlds. One is still absorbed in the lunar sphere, but in this way one lives one's way into the planetary sphere. One experiences the movements of the planets. One has stepped out into the cosmos on the paths of the plant being. One has been carried by the ideas of the mineral, especially the metallic beings. One feels that a particular kind of plant on Earth is an earthly image of what leads one there as a spiral path that widens more and more, let us say to Jupiter. But the fact that one is led to Jupiter depends on experiencing the idea of a particular metal and certain minerals of the Earth in a living way.

Once the path of the plants has led one to a planet – one always has with one the idea of the mineral on the earth that carried one out – one has arrived at the planet in question, then this idea that carried one out of the mineral, this idea that has become ever more and more alive, begins to resound in the planet in question. So that after death one experiences a gradual development along the lines of the plant kingdom, the mineral inner beings experiencing themselves in ideas that are more and more alive. These ideas become spiritual beings. When the one living idea arrives at one planet and the other at another planet, the mineral ideas that have now become spiritual beings feel at home. One type of mineral feels at home in Jupiter, the other type in Mars, and so on. And that which was only regarded as inconspicuous on earth now begins to resound in the respective planet when it has arrived, and to resound in the most diverse ways. So that what has mineral images on earth, which can only be seen with the senses, can now be heard resounding from the interior of the planets and in this way one lives into the harmony of the spheres. For in the universe, in the cosmos, everything is connected internally. What grows out of the ground down here on earth as the plant world is a reflection of what connects the earth to the planetary system as if along plant pathways. What is in the ground as a mineral is actually only an inconspicuous image of what works as a force up along the plant paths, but what has its home outside in the planets and what introduces world tones into the planet, which combine to form a great world harmony.

Thus, when one understands what is here on earth, one speaks the truth when one says to gold: I see in gold, which shines with its own peculiar color, the image of that which, in the sun, resonates a central cosmic tone for my soul when I have carried it up into the sun along certain plant pathways.

When a person has gone through this, when what I have described as necessary in the last days occurs, then the possibility begins for him to rise above the planetary sphere and enter the sphere of the fixed stars. He can only do this by extricating himself from the lunar sphere. This must, as it were, remain behind him. But what he experiences in the way described in the planetary sphere, what he experiences as the sense of the mineral-metallic realm of the physical earth, what he experiences as the guiding directions of the plant world of the earth, all the magnificent things he goes through there, are disturbed in a certain way disturbed by the impacts of the lunar sphere, it is darkened for him in a certain way by the fact that he experiences the elemental beings that belong to the animal kingdom and that, in addition to those actually quite harmonious movements in which they ascend and descend, thus in addition to these vertical movements, also have horizontal movements. In these horizontal movements, which are carried out by the group souls of the animals within the sphere of the moon, terrible archetypes for disharmonious, discrepant forces in the animal kingdom take place. There are terrible, savage struggles between the group souls of the animal kingdom. Through this impact of the lunar sphere into the planetary sphere, what can otherwise be experienced in inner peace and with dignity and majesty through the archetypal nature of the plant and mineral kingdoms is disturbed to a certain extent.

When the human being escapes from the lunar sphere and enters the sphere of the fixed stars, then what remains for him is a cosmic memory – we can call it that – of these powerful, majestic experiences of the planetary sphere with the archetypal nature of the earthly mineral and plant kingdoms. This remains with him as a memory. And he enters into a world of spiritual beings, of which, as I have already said, the physical, sensory image is the constellations of the stars, those star constellations which, when understood in the right way, are the expression, so to speak, the written characters from which one can experience the peculiarity, the deeds and the volitional intentions of the spiritual beings in the sphere of the stars. In a sense, one now experiences by vision the spiritual beings that do not walk on earth in physical bodies, which can only be experienced in this sphere of the stars. And one enters this sphere in order to penetrate one's own being with the deeds of these divine spiritual beings, within the same, one's own being with the cosmic consciousness – which has now expanded, for which spatial vision has passed over into a qualitative vision, for which temporal vision has passed over into simultaneity.

While here on earth we are enclosed in our own skin and the other human beings outside in theirs, doing what they have to do, while we are all next to each other here on earth, in this sphere of stars we are not only in each other as human souls, but we are also such that our cosmic consciousness expands and we feel the entities of the divine spiritual world within us. Here on earth we say “we” to ourselves, or rather, each of us says “I”. Out there, he says “I” by which he means: Within this my I, I experience the world of the divine-spiritual hierarchies; I experience them as my own cosmic consciousness. This is, of course, an even more powerful, expansive, diverse, meaningful and majestic world of experience that one now enters. And when one becomes aware of the forces that play into the soul of man from the most diverse entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, then one sees: they are forces that all interact, having cosmic intentions, which all, so to speak, aim at one point. One's own spiritual and soul activity is interwoven with the intentions of the divine spiritual hierarchies and their individual entities. And everything in which one is enveloped, into which one's own cosmic activity, felt within and encompassed by cosmic consciousness, passes, all this ultimately aims at constructing the spirit germ, as I have described it, of the human physical organism.

Indeed, the ancient mystery centers spoke of a profound truth when they said that man is a temple of the gods. What is built first in mighty, majestic grandeur out of the spiritual cosmos and then contracts into the human physical body, so as to be transformed that one no longer recognizes the original image, the mighty, majestic original image, is actually what the context of the divine-spiritual hierarchies builds in order to have its goal in this building.

This sphere of experience is such that, when we are in this sphere, we see the cosmos, which we see from the inside when we are in the earthly position, from a point from which we look out in all directions, from the outside. For when we enter the sphere of the stars, we feel even at the moment when we have snatched ourselves from the sphere of the moon that we are outside in the universe and actually looking at the cosmos from the outside.

I will try to sketch what is taking place (see drawing). Let us assume that the Earth is here. Of course, the proportions are not correct, but we will understand each other. We look out into the vastness of the cosmos. We see stars wandering outside, the planets, and the fixed stars are outside. Here on Earth, our consciousness is concentrated as if in a small point (red). We look out centrally into the universe. In the moment when we have escaped from the sphere of the moon, we arrive with our consciousness in the sphere of the stars. But we pass, as it were, only through the sphere of the stars, guided by the memory that remains to us from the experiences of the planetary sphere, and enter the sphere beyond the stars.

In this sphere beyond the stars, space no longer actually exists. Of course, when I draw here, I have to draw what is actually qualitative in spatial terms. I can then draw it like this: While our consciousness on earth is, as it were, concentrated at this point as our ego (red), it is peripheral when it has reached beyond the sphere of the stars (blue). We look inwards from each point (blue arrows). This looking is only represented in the image of space. We look inward. If we have the constellation of Aries here (red at the top left) and if we see the sun (yellow) standing in the constellation of Aries from the earth, so that the sun, as it were, covers the constellation of Aries for us, and if we then go out into space, we see Aries standing in front of the sun. But to understand from the cosmic consciousness means something else: to see Aries standing before the Sun — than to look with the earthly consciousness and see the Sun standing before Aries. We see everything spiritually in this way. We look at the universe from the outside.

And in the development of the spirit germ of the physical organism, we actually have the powers of the spiritual-divine beings within us, but in such a way that, basically, we feel outside the whole cosmos, which we experience from the earth. And now, in our cosmic consciousness, we experience being with the divine-spiritual beings.

When we then look back and see, as it were, the constellations — but all in a qualitative rather than a spatial sense — above the sun, one time this, the other time that, then we recognize in what we are experiencing, by connecting it with the memory we have of how the metals and minerals, after the plant paths had been completed, had sounded in the planets, then we experience that this sounding, which was initially a world music, is transformed into the cosmic language, into the Logos. We read the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings among whom we are by experiencing the individual signs of this cosmic writing: The standing of Aries before the Sun, the standing of Taurus before the Sun and so on — by experiencing how this takes place and how the sounds that the metals make in the planets resonate with this writing. This instructs us how to work on the spiritual germ of the physical organism on earth.

As long as we are in the lunar sphere, we have a vivid feeling for this photograph of our moral and spiritual life on earth. We have a vivid feeling for what is going on among the group souls of the animals. But these are a kind of demonic, elemental entities. Now that we find the zodiac on the other side of the sun, we are learning to recognize what we have actually seen. For the memory of these animal forms, of these group soul forms of the animals, remains with us into the beyond of the sphere of the stars, and we make the discovery that these group souls of the animals are, so to speak, lower — if one human language), are the caricatured after-images of the magnificent forms that now permeate our cosmic consciousness beyond the sphere of the stars as the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies.

Thus, outside the sphere of the stars we have the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, and within the sphere of the stars, insofar as it is interspersed with what spiritually belongs to the sphere of the moon, we have the caricatures of the divine-spiritual entities in the group souls of the animals. When I say caricatures, please do not take this in a pejorative sense. What a caricature is in the human-humorous-artistic view is, of course, something extraordinarily trivial compared to the grandiose caricature of the divine spiritual beings in the world of the moon sphere, which is at the same time the world of the group soul beings of the earthly animal kingdom. We owe an extraordinary debt to the experience we have in this sphere. I have already mentioned this in a more conceptual form in the last few days, now I would like to express it more in an imaginative way.

Imagine the human being is up there (see drawing on page 19, red). He looks back here. His actual area of perception of his spiritual and soul world is beyond the star sphere. This is where he has the field of his current activity. It is like standing on a high mountain, with sunshine above and fog below. In this cosmic experience, you have the entire surging, struggling, and discordant group soul of the animals below, but also their harmonious ascent and descent. Like a multiform mist, it propagates itself down below, lives itself out down there. And while gazing at the constellations, beholding the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while reading the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while learning in cosmic consciousness to understand how the temple the temple of the gods, this spirit germ of the physical body, has its secrets in itself, those secrets that correspond to the pure world of extra-terrestrial and extra-lunar existence, one looks down and sees what is going on in the sphere of spirituality of the animal kingdom. And by looking down as if from a sun-drenched mountain peak into a lower mass of fog clouds, one has the same experience as one has in cosmic thoughts: If you do not take with you all the strength with which you have now imbued yourself from this divine spiritual world as you descend back down, you will not emerge unscathed from this world of the foggy clouds of animal group souls. There you will find the image of your previous earthly life with a moral and spiritual evaluation. This will be floating in the fog down there. You have to take it up again. But there will be all the group souls of the animals, wildly rushing into each other; there will be all the wild hustle and bustle. You must take such strong powers with you from your beyond the sphere of the stars that you can take these powers of the group soul nature of the animals as far away from your destiny as possible. Otherwise, just as matter attaches itself to a crystal, what these group souls of the animals cosmetically exude towards your moral-spiritual core of being will attach itself to you. And you will have to take with you everything that you cannot then hold back through the powers you have accumulated, and you will have to integrate it as all kinds of urges and instincts for your next earthly existence.

However, one will only be able to draw from the hereafter the forces of the sphere of the stars that one has made oneself capable of drawing by developing in the inclination towards Christ, in the inclination towards the Mystery of Golgotha, in the truly religious, not in the egoistic religious, permeation of the soul in the sense of the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” This makes one strong to penetrate beyond the sphere of the stars, in the company of the divine spiritual beings, with those forces that one has to take with one as one's destiny core when going back down through the sphere of the moon from that which which is grouped in the disharmonious, discrepant play of the spiritual-animal environment and permeates this spiritual-soul core.

If one wants to describe what the human soul experiences between birth and death, what unites it with itself, what it incorporates into its perceptions, feelings and impulses of will, then one must describe the earthly world around the human being. But if one wants to describe what the human being experiences between death and a new birth, then one must describe what the archetypes of what is on earth are. If one wants to know what the minerals really are, then one must hear their essence resounding in the life between death and a new birth from the planets. If one wants to know what the plants really are, then one must study the essence of what grows out of the earth in a faint afterimage in the plant, on the paths that lead from the plant kingdom out into space and that are traced in the forms of plant formations. If one wishes to study the animal kingdom, one must become acquainted with the ebb and flow of the group souls of the animals in the sphere of the moon. And when one has extricated oneself from all this, when one has entered the sphere beyond the world of the stars, only then does one learn to recognize the actual secrets of the human being. And one learns to look back on all that one has experienced in the archetypal worlds of the mineral, the plant, and the animal.

One carries this out into those regions of the cosmos where one not only recognizes the actual secrets of the human being, but also experiences them vividly and is active in shaping them. One carries into these regions, like a cosmic memory, everything one has experienced with reference to minerals, plants and animals on the ascent. A rich and varied life takes place in the confluence of these memories and what one sees as the secrets of human existence, what one actively experiences and participates in, and in the confluence of this memory and this activity. And it is this varied life that a person goes through between death and a new birth.

Today's lecture is intended to be just one episode in the series of lectures I have given, an insertion, in fact, for the reason that it is necessary for anthroposophists to be alert people, that is, to form an opinion by looking at the world in a certain way. And so it is necessary from time to time to insert one or other of these into lectures that otherwise deal with anthroposophical material, in order to open up a view of the other events, of the other state of our civilization. And today I would like to expand on what I briefly mentioned in the last article in the “Goetheanum”, where I talked about a publication that has just been released: “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture” by Albert Schweitzer. It describes itself as the first part of a philosophy of culture and is essentially concerned with a kind of critique of contemporary culture. However, in order to support some of the characteristics that Albert Schweitzer gives of the present, I would like to start by presenting the existence of the culture that Albert Schweitzer wants to address through a single, but perhaps characteristic example. I could have chosen thousands. You can only pick and choose from the full cultural life of the present, but rather from the full cultural death of the present, and you will always find enough. That is precisely the point, as I also noted in the pedagogical lectures yesterday and today, that we are getting used to looking at such things with an honestly alert eye. And so, to establish a kind of foundation, I have selected something from the series that can always be considered a representation of contemporary intellectual culture. I have chosen a rector's speech that was delivered in Berlin on October 15, 1910. I chose this speech because it was given by a medical doctor, a person who is not one-sidedly immersed in some kind of philosophical cultural observation, but who, from a scientific point of view, wanted to give a kind of contemporary tableau.

Now I do not want to trouble you with the first part of this rectorate speech, which is mainly about the Berlin University, but I would like to familiarize you more with the general world view that the physician Rubner – because that is who it is – expressed on a solemn occasion at the time. It is perhaps a characteristic example because it dates back to 1910, when everyone in Europe and far beyond was optimistically convinced that there was a tremendous intellectual upturn and that great things had been achieved. The passage I want to select is a kind of apostrophe to the student body, but one that allows us to see into the heart of a representative figure of the present age and understand what is really going on there. First of all, the student body is addressed as follows: “We all have to learn. We bring nothing into the world but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world.”

Well, if you have gone through this materialistic culture of the present day, you can indeed have this view. There is no need to be narrow-minded. You have to be clear about the power that materialistic culture exerts on contemporary personalities, and then you can understand when someone says that you come into the world with a blank sheet, the brain, and that you receive everything from the outside world. But let us continue to listen to what this address to students has to say. It begins by explaining, apparently somewhat more clearly, how we are a blank slate, how the child of the most important mathematician must learn the multiplication table again, because, unfortunately, he has not inherited advanced mathematics from his father, how the child of the greatest linguist must learn his mother tongue again, and so on. No brain can grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned. But now these brains are being advised what they, as completely blank slates, should do in the world in order to be written on. It goes on to say: “What billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...” — not true, that is said for two pages in a row, it is inculcated into people: they are born with their brains as a blank slate and should just be careful to absorb what the spiritual heroes have created.

Yes, if these intellectual heroes were all blank slates, where did it all come from, what they created, and what the other blank slates are supposed to absorb? A strange train of thought, isn't it! - So: “What our spiritual heroes have helped to create is received” by this blank sheet of brain “in short sentences through education, and from this its uniqueness and individual life can now unfold.”

On the next page, these blank pages, these brains, are now presented with a strange sentence: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” So now, all at once, productive thinking appears on the blank pages, these brains. It would be natural, though, for someone who speaks of brains as blank pages not to speak of productive thinking.

Now a sentence that shows quite clearly how solidly materialistic the best of them gradually came to think. For Rubner is not one of the worst. He is a physician and has even read the philosopher Zeller, which is saying something. So he is not narrow-minded at all, you see. But how does he think? He wants to present the refreshing side of life, so he says: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” So when a student has studied something for a while and now moves on to a different subject, it means that he is now tilling a new field of the brain. As you can see, the thought patterns have gradually taken on a very characteristic materialistic note. “Because,” he continues, “some fields of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but eventually bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

It is extremely difficult to follow this train of thought, because the brain is supposed to be a blank slate, and now it is supposed to learn everything from the written pages, which must also have been blank when they were born. Now this brain is supposed to be plowed. But now at least one farmer should be there. The more one would go into such completely incredible, impossible thinking, the more confused one would become. But Max Rubner is very concerned about his students, and so he advises them to work the brain properly. So they should work the brain. Now he cannot help but say that thinking works the brain. But now he wants to recommend thinking. His materialistic way of thinking strikes him in the neck again, and then he comes up with an extraordinarily pretty sentence: “Thinking strengthens the brain, the latter increases in performance through exercise just like any other organ, like our muscle strength through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

Well, now the Berlin students in 1910 knew what to think: “Thinking is brain sport.” Yes, it does not occur to the representative personality of the present what is much more interesting in sport than what is happening externally. What is actually going on in the limbs of the human being during the various sporting movements, what inner processes are taking place, would be much more interesting to consider in sport. Then one would even come across something very interesting. If one were to consider this interesting aspect of sport, one would come to the conclusion that sport is one of those activities that belong to the human being with limbs, the human being with a metabolism. Thinking belongs to the nervous-sensory human being. There the relationship is reversed. What is turned inward in the human being, the processes within the human being, come to the outside in thinking. And what comes to the outside in sport comes to the inside. So one would have to consider the more interesting thing in thinking. But the representative personality has simply forgotten how to think, cannot bring any thought to an end at all.

Our entire modern culture has emerged from such thinking, which is actually incomplete in itself and always remains incomplete. You only catch a glimpse of the thinking that has produced our culture on such representative occasions. You catch it, as it were. But unfortunately, those who make such discoveries are not all that common. Because in a Berlin rectorate speech, a university speech on a festive occasion: “Our goals for the future” - if you are a real person of the present, you are taken seriously. That's what science says, that's what the invincible authority of science says, it knows everything. And if it is proven that thinking is brain sport, well, then you just have to accept it; then after millennia and millennia, people have become so clever that they have finally come to the conclusion that thinking is brain sport.

I could continue these reflections now into the most diverse areas, and we would see everywhere that I cannot say the same spirit, that the same evil spirit prevails, but that it is naturally admired. Well, some insightful people saw what had become of it even before the outwardly visible decline occurred. And one must say, for example: Albert Schweitzer, the excellent author of the book “History of Life-Jesus Research, from Reimarus to Wrede,” who, after all, was able to advance in life-Jesus research to the apocalyptic through careful, thorough, penetrating and sharp thinking, could be trusted to also get a clear view of the symptoms of decay in contemporary culture. Now he assured us that this writing of his, “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture,” was not written after the war, but that the first draft was conceived as early as 1900, and that it was then elaborated from 1914 to 1917. Now it has been published. And it must be said that here is someone who sees the decline of culture with open eyes. And it is interesting to visualize what such an observer of the decline of culture has to say about what has been wrought on this culture, as if with sharp critical knives. The phrases with which contemporary culture is characterized come across like cutting knives. Let us let a few of these phrases sink in. The first sentence of the book is: “We are in the throes of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It is only one manifestation of it. What was given spiritually has been transformed into facts, which in turn now have a deteriorating effect on the spiritual in every respect.” - “We lost our culture because there was no reflection on culture among us.” — “So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” — “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway.”

Albert Schweitzer also sees it in his own way – I would say, somewhat forcefully – that this decline of culture began around the middle of the 19th century, around that middle of the 19th century that I have so often referred to here as an important point in time that must be considered if one wants to understand the present in some kind of awareness. Schweitzer says about this: “But around the middle of the 19th century, this confrontation between ethical ideals of reason and reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it.” - And Schweitzer brings up something else that is actually surprising, but which we can understand well because it has been discussed here often in a much deeper sense than Schweitzer is able to present. He is clear about one thing: in earlier times there was a total worldview. All phenomena of life, from the stone below to the highest human ideals, were a totality of life. In this totality of life, the divine-spiritual being was at work. If one wanted to know how the laws of nature work in nature, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. If one wanted to know how the moral laws worked, how religious impulses worked, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. There was a total world view that had anchored morality in objectivity just as the laws of nature are anchored in objectivity. The last world view that emerged and still had some knowledge of such a total world view was the Enlightenment, which wanted to get everything out of the intellect, but which still brought the moral world into a certain inner connection with what the natural world is.

Consider how often I have said it here: If someone today honestly believes in the laws of nature as they are presented, they can only believe in a beginning of the world, similar to how the Kant-Laplacean theory presents it, and an end of the world, as it will one day be in the heat death. But then one must imagine that all moral ideals have been boiled out of the swirling particles of the cosmic fog, which have gradually coalesced into crystals and organisms and finally into humans, and out of humans the idealistic ethical view swirls. But these ethical ideals, being only illusions, born out of the swirling atoms of man, will have vanished when the earth has disappeared in heat death. That is to say, a world view has emerged that refers only to the natural and has not anchored moral ideals in it. And only because the man of the present is dishonest and does not admit it to himself, does not want to look at these facts, does he believe that the moral ideals are still somehow anchored. But anyone who believes in today's natural science and is honest must not believe in the eternity of moral ideals. He does it out of cowardly dishonesty if he does. We must look into the present with this seriousness.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees this in his own way, and he seeks to find out where the blame lies for this state of affairs. He says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” Now one can have one's own particular thoughts about this matter. One can believe that philosophers are the hermits of the world, that other people have nothing to do with philosophers. But Albert Schweitzer says quite correctly at a later point in his writing: “Kant and Hegel ruled millions who never read a line of theirs and did not even know that they obeyed them.” The paths that the world's thoughts take are not at all as one usually imagines. I know very well, because I have often experienced it, that until the end of the 19th century the most important works of Hegel lay in the libraries and were not even cut open. They were not studied. But the few copies that were studied by a few have passed into the whole of educational life. And there is hardly a single one of you whose thinking does not involve Kant and Hegel, because the paths are, I would say, mysterious. And if people in the most remote mountain villages have come to read newspapers, it also applies to them, to these people in the mountain villages, that they are dominated by Kant and Hegel, not only to this illustrious and enlightened society sitting here in the hall.

So you can say, like Albert Schweitzer: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” In the 18th and early 19th centuries, philosophy was the leader of public opinion. She had dealt with the questions that arose for people and the time, and kept a reflection on them alive in the sense of culture. In philosophy at that time, there was an elementary philosophizing about man, society, people, humanity and culture, which naturally produced a lively popular philosophy that often dominated opinion and maintained cultural enthusiasm.

And now Albert Schweitzer comments on the further progress: “It was not clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the 19th century, the same work that I once criticized in a public lecture, this work on the history of philosophy, “this is defined as the process in which,” and now he quotes the other historian of philosophy, ”with ever clearer and more certain consciousness, the reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universality of which is the subject of philosophy itself.” Schweitzer now says: “In doing so, the author forgot the essential point: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to emerge as active ideas in public opinion, whereas from the second half of the 19th century onwards they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.”

People have not realized what has actually happened to the thinking of humanity. Just read most of these century reflections that appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. If one did it differently, as I did in my book, which was later called “The Riddles of Philosophy”, then of course it was considered unhistorical. And one of these noble philosophers reproached me because the book was then called “World and Life Views in the 19th Century” for saying nothing about Bismarck in it. Yes, a philosopher reproached this book for that. Many other similar accusations have been made against this book because it tried to extract from the past that which has an effect on the future. But what did these critics usually do? They reflected. They reflected on what culture is, on what already exists. These thinkers no longer had any idea that earlier centuries had created culture.

But now Albert Schweitzer comes along and I would like to say that he seems to have resigned himself to the future of philosophy. He says: It is actually not the fault of philosophy that it no longer plays an actual productive role in thinking. It was more the fate of philosophy. For the world in general has forgotten how to think, and philosophy has forgotten it along with the rest. In a certain respect, Schweitzer is even very indulgent, because one could also think: If the whole world has forgotten how to think, then at least the philosophers could have maintained it. But Schweitzer finds it quite natural that the philosophers have simply forgotten how to think along with all the other people. He says: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of an optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a world view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought.” - So that was the case with all people. —- “But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit the fact and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture.”

So, with the other people, the philosophers have, as Albert Schweitzer says with his razor-sharp criticism, forgotten how to think; but that is not really their fault, that is just a fact, they have just forgotten how to think with the other people. But their real fault is that they haven't even noticed that. They should have noticed it at least and should have talked about it. That is the only thing Schweitzer accuses the philosophers of. “According to its ultimate destiny, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total world view, as they used to, but were left to their own devices for the time being and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone.” And then he concludes this first chapter by saying: “So little philosophy was made about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.”

Now, however, I ask you not to do this with these sentences of Albert Schweitzer, for example, by saying to yourself or a part of you: Well, that is just a criticism of German culture, and it does not apply to England, to America, and least of all to France, of course! Albert Schweitzer has written a great number of works. Among these are the following, written in English: “The Mystery of the Kingdom of God”; then another work: “The Question of the Historical Jesus”; then a third; and he has written some others in French. So the man is international and certainly does not just speak of German culture, but of the culture of the present day. Therefore it would not be very nice if this view were to be treated the way we experienced something in Berlin once. We had an anthroposophical meeting and there was a member who had a dog. I always had to explain that people have repeated lives on earth, reincarnation, but not animals, because it is the generic souls, the group souls, that are in the same stage, not the individual animal. But this personality loved her dog so much that she thought, even though she admitted that other animals, even other dogs, do not have repeated lives, her dog does have repeated lives, she knows that for sure. There was a little discussion about this matter – discussions are sometimes stimulating, as you know, and one could now think that this personality could never be convinced and that the others were convinced. This also became clear immediately when we were sitting in a coffee house. This other member said that it was actually terribly foolish of this personality to think that her dog had repeated earthly lives; she had realized this immediately, it was quite clear from anthroposophy that this was an impossibility. Yes, if it were my parrot! That's what it applies to! — I would not want that this thought form would be transferred by the different nationalities in such a way that they say: Yes, for the people for whom Albert Schweitzer speaks, it is true that culture is in decline, that philosophers have not realized it themselves, but — our parrot has repeated lives on earth!

In the second chapter, Albert Schweitzer talks about “circumstances that inhibit culture in our economic and intellectual life,” and here, too, he is extremely sharp. Of course, there are also trivialities, I would say, of what is quite obvious. But then Albert Schweitzer sees through a shortcoming of modern man, this cultureless modern man, by finding that modern man, because he has lost his culture, has become unfree, and is unsettled. Well, I have read sentences to you by Max Rubner – they do not, however, indicate a strong collection of thoughts. The representative modern man is unsettled.

Then Albert Schweitzer adds a cute epithet to this modern man. He is, in addition to being unfree and uncollected, also “incomplete”. Now imagine that these modern people all believe that they are walking around the world as complete specimens of humanity. But Albert Schweitzer believes that today, due to modern education, everyone is put into a very one-sided professional life, developing only one side of their abilities while allowing the others to wither away, and thus becoming an incomplete human being in reality. And in connection with this lack of freedom, incompleteness and lack of focus in modern man, Albert Schweitzer asserts that modern man is becoming somewhat inhumane: “In fact, thoughts of complete inhumanity have been moving among us with the ugly clarity of words and the authority of logical principles for two generations. A mentality has emerged in society that alienates individuals from humanity. The courtesy of natural feeling is fading.” - I recall the Annual General Meeting we had here, where courtesy was discussed! — ”In its place comes behavior of absolute indifference, with more or less formality. The aloofness and apathy emphasized in every way possible towards strangers is no longer felt as inner coarseness at all, but is considered to be a sign of sophistication. Our society has also ceased to recognize all people as having human value and dignity. Parts of humanity have become human material and human things for us. If for decades it has been possible to talk about war and conquest among us with increasing carelessness, as if it were a matter of operating on a chessboard, this was only possible because an overall attitude had been created in which the fate of the individual was no longer imagined, but only present as figures and objects. When war came, the inhumanity that was in us had free rein. And what fine and coarse rudeness has appeared in our colonial literature and in our parliaments over the past decades as a rational truth about people of color, and passed into public opinion! Twenty years ago, in one of the parliaments of continental Europe, it was even accepted that, with regard to deported blacks who had been left to die of hunger and disease, it was said from the rostrum that they had “died as if they were animals.

Now Albert Schweitzer also discusses the role of over-organization in our cultural decline. He believes that public conditions also have a culture-inhibiting effect due to the fact that over-organization is occurring everywhere. After all, organizing decrees, ordinances, laws are being created everywhere today. You are in an organization for everything. People experience this thoughtlessly. They also act thoughtlessly. They are always organized in something, so Albert Schweitzer finds that this “over-organization” has also had a culture-inhibiting effect.

“The terrible truth that with the progress of history and economic development, culture does not become easier, but more difficult, was not addressed.” — “The bankruptcy of the cultural state, which is becoming more apparent from decade to decade, is destroying modern man. The demoralization of the individual by the whole is in full swing.

A person who is unfree, uncollected, incomplete, and lost in a lack of humanity, who has surrendered his intellectual independence and moral judgment to organized society, and who experiences inhibitions of cultural awareness in every respect: this is how modern man trod his dark path in dark times. Philosophy had no understanding for the danger in which he found himself. So she made no attempt to help him. Not even to reflect on what was happening to him did she stop him."

In the third chapter, Albert Schweitzer then talks about how a real culture would have to have an ethical character. Earlier worldviews gave birth to ethical values; since the mid-19th century, people have continued to live with the old ethical values without somehow anchoring them in a total worldview, and they didn't even notice: “They in the situation created by the ethical cultural movement, without realizing that it had now become untenable, and without looking ahead to what was preparing between and within nations. So our time, thoughtless as it was, came to the conclusion that culture consists primarily of scientific, technical and artistic achievements and can do without ethics or with a minimum of ethics. This externalized conception of culture gained authority in public opinion in that it was universally held even by persons whose social position and scientific education seemed to indicate that they were competent in matters of intellectual life.” — ”Our sense of reality, then, consists in our allowing the next most obvious fact to arise from one fact through passions and short-sighted considerations of utility, and so on and on. Since we lack the purposeful intention of a whole to be realized, our activity falls under the concept of natural events.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees with full clarity that because people no longer had anything creative, they turned to nationalism.

"It was characteristic of the morbid nature of the realpolitik of nationalism that it sought in every way to adorn itself with the trappings of the ideal. The struggle for power became the struggle for law and culture. The selfish communities of interests that nations entered into with each other against others presented themselves as friendships and affinities. As such, they were backdated to the past, even when history knew more of hereditary enmity than of inner kinship.

Ultimately, it was not enough for nationalism to set aside any intention of realizing a cultural humanity in its politics. It even destroyed the very notion of culture by proclaiming national culture.

You see, Albert Schweitzer sees quite clearly in the most diverse areas of life, it must be said. And he finds words to express this negative aspect of our time. So, I would say, it is also quite clear to him what our time has become through the great influence of science. But since he also realizes that our time is incapable of thinking – I have shown you this with the example of Max Rubner – Albert Schweitzer also knows that science has become thoughtless and therefore cannot have the vocation to lead humanity in culture in our time.

"Today, thinking has nothing more to do with science because science has become independent and indifferent to it. The most advanced knowledge now goes hand in hand with the most thoughtless world view. It claims to deal only with individual findings, since only these preserve objective science. It is not its business to summarize knowledge and assert its consequences for world view. In the past, every scientific person was, as Albert Schweitzer says, at the same time a thinker who meant something in the general intellectual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. That is why we still have freedom of science, but almost no thinking science anymore.

You see, Schweitzer sees the negative side extremely clearly, and he also knows how to say what is important: that it is important to bring the spirit back into culture. He knows that culture has become spiritless. But this morning in my lecture on education I explained how only the words remain of what people knew about the soul in earlier times. People talk about the soul in words, but they no longer associate anything real with those words. And so it is with the spirit. That is why there is no awareness of the spirit today. One has only the word. And then, when someone has so astutely characterized the negative of modern culture, then at most he can still come to it, according to certain traditional feelings that one has when one speaks of spirit today – but because no one knows anything about spirit – then at most one can come to say: the spirit is necessary.

But if you are supposed to say how the spirit is to enter into culture, then it becomes so - forgive me: when I was a very young boy, I lived near a village, and chickens were stolen from a person who was one of the village's most important residents. Now it came to a lawsuit. It came to a court hearing. The judge wanted to gauge how severe the punishment should be, and to do that it was necessary to get an idea of what kind of chickens they were. So he asked the village dignitary to describe the chickens. “Tell us something more about what kind of chickens they were. Describe them to us a little!” Yes, Mr. Judge, they were beautiful chickens. — You can't do anything with that if you can't tell us anything more precise! You had these chickens, describe these chickens to us a little. — Yes, Mr. Judge, they were just beautiful chickens! - And so this personality continued. Nothing more could be brought out of her than: They were beautiful chickens.

And you see, in the next chapter Albert Schweitzer also comes to the point of saying how he thinks a total world view should be: “But what kind of thinking world view must there be for cultural ideas and cultural attitudes to be grounded in it?” He says, “Optimistic and ethical.” They were just beautiful chickens! It must be optimistic and ethical. Yes, but how should it be? Just imagine that an architect is building a house for someone and wants to find out what the house should be like. The person in question simply replies: “The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and it should be pleasant to live in.” Now you can make the plan and know how he wants it! But that is exactly what happens when someone tells you that a worldview should be optimistic and ethical. If you want to build a house, you have to design the plan; it has to be a concretely designed plan. But the ever-so-shrewd Albert Schweitzer has nothing to say except: “There were just beautiful chickens.” Or: “The house should be beautiful, that is, it should be optimistic and ethical.

He even goes a little further, but it doesn't come out much differently than the beautiful chickens. He says, for example, that because thinking has gone so much out of fashion, because thinking is no longer possible at all and the philosophers themselves do not notice that it is no longer there, but still believe that they can think, so many people have come to mysticism who want to work free of thought, who want to arrive at a world view without thinking. Now he says: Yes, but why should one not enter mysticism with thinking? So the worldview that is to come must enter mysticism with thinking. Yes, but what will it be like then? The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that one can live comfortably inside. The worldview should be such that it enters mysticism through thinking. That is exactly the same. A real content is not even hinted at anywhere. It does not exist.

So how does anthroposophy differ from such cultural criticism? It can certainly agree with the negative aspects, but it is not satisfied with describing the house in terms of what it should be: solid and weatherproof and beautiful and such that it is comfortable to live in. Instead, it draws up plans for the house, it really sketches out the image of a culture. Now, Albert Schweitzer does object to this to some extent, saying, “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in and for which we live cannot be achieved by talking other, better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have. It can only be achieved by the many reflecting on the meaning of life...” So that's not possible, talking better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have, that's not possible! Yes, what should one do then in the sense of Albert Schweitzer? He admonishes people to go within themselves, to get out of themselves what they have out of themselves, so that one does not need to talk into them thoughts that are somehow different from those they already have.

Yes, but by searching within themselves for what they already have, people have brought about the situation that we are now in: “We are in the throes of the decline of civilization.” “We lost our way culturally because there was no thinking about culture among us,” and so on. Yes, all this has come about - and this is what Schweitzer hits so hard and with such intense thinking - because people have neglected any real, concrete planning of culture. And now he says: It is not enough for people to absorb something; they have to go within themselves. You see, you can say that not only Max Rubner, who cannot cope with his thinking everywhere, but even a thinker as sharp as Albert Schweitzer is not able to make the transition from a negative critique of culture to an acknowledgment of what must enter this culture as a new spiritual life. Anthroposophy has been around for just as long as Albert Schweitzer, who admittedly wrote this book from 1900 onwards. But he failed to notice that Anthroposophy positively seeks to achieve what he merely criticizes in negative terms: to bring spirit into culture. In this regard, he even gets very facetious. Because towards the end of the last part of his writing he says:

“In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a significance. If such reflection arises again among us” – it is the conditional sentence, only worsened, because it should actually read: If such reflection arose again among us! - “then the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...” he comes to the conclusion that it would be good for people if they looked up at the starry sky for three minutes every evening! If you tell them so, they will certainly not do it; but read how these things should be done in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. One does not understand why the step from the negative to the positive cannot be taken here, one does not understand it! “and when attending a funeral, we would devote ourselves to the riddle of life and death, instead of walking thoughtlessly behind the coffin in conversation.”

You see, when you are so negative, you conclude such a reflection on culture in such a way that you say: “Previous thinking thought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us. Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we have to go is clear.

As clear as it was that his chickens were beautiful chickens, and as clear as it is that someone says about the plan of his house: The house should be solid, weatherproof, and beautiful. Most people in the present see it as clear when they characterize something in this way, and do not even notice how unclear it is.

"We have to think about the meaning of life together, to struggle together to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening... ” - The house should be beautiful and solid and weatherproof and in such a way that one can live well in it. In regard to a house one says so, in regard to a Weltanschhauung one says: The Weltanschhauung should be such that it can work justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening! - “and thereupon become capable of setting up and realizing definite cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity.”

Now we have it. The sharpest, fully recognizable thinking about the negative, absolute powerlessness to see anything positive. Those people who deserve the most praise today – and Albert Schweitzer is one of them – are in such a position. Anthroposophists in particular should develop a keen awareness of this, so that they know what to expect when one of those who are “philosophers” in the sense of this astute Albert Schweitzer comes along, for example a neo-Kantian, as these people call themselves, and who now do not even realize that they have not only overslept thinking, but that they have not even noticed how they have overslept thinking. Of course, one cannot expect them to understand anthroposophy. But one should still keep a watchful eye on the way in which such people, who are rightly described by Schweitzer as the sleepy philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, now speak of anthroposophy. We should look into the present with an alert eye on all sides.

A newspaper article begins by saying how ineffective Bergson seems in comparison to Kant. But then it goes on to say: Steiner's wild speculations and great spiritual tirades stand even less up to an epistemological test based on Kant. Steiner also believes that he can go beyond Kant and the neo-Kantians to higher insights. In fact, he falls far short of them and, as can easily be proven from his writings, has misunderstood them completely at crucial points.

This is of course trumpeted out without any justification whatsoever in the world's newspapers. And then these people, who can think in this way, or who are far from being able to think the way Rubner can, say: You only have to ask contemporary science and you know very well what these supposed insights - these brain bubbles, as he calls them - actually mean.

We have to pay attention to these things, and we must not oversleep them. Because this - as Albert Schweitzer calls it - thoughtless science can assert itself, it can assert itself in the world, and for the time being it has power. Today many people say that one should not look at power but at the law; but unfortunately they then call the power they have the law. Well, I will spare you the rest of the gibberish he presents, because it now goes into spiritual phenomena, which must also be examined by science today, and so on.

But if the poor students do get hold of anthroposophy and absorb the “brain bubbles”, then Max Rubner gives them this advice: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” Some fields have been plowed over and over again! Now, when the poor students in anthroposophy get “brain bubbles” and then plow these brains, the bubbles in front of the plowshare will certainly disappear. So in this respect, the story is true again. To understand that which wants to enter our culture, which, according to the best minds, is admittedly disintegrating, indeed has already disintegrated, that is not really given to the best minds of the present either, insofar as they are involved in the present cultural industry. So it remains the case that when they are supposed to say what the house should be like, they do not take the pencil or the model substance to design the house – which is what anthroposophy does – but then they say: The house should be beautiful and strong and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it. With the house one says so. With a worldview, one says that it should be optimistic, it should be ethical, one should be able to orient oneself in it, and now how all the things have been called, but which mean nothing other than what I have told you.

You can see that it is necessary – and you will recognize it from the matter itself that this is necessary – to sometimes go a little beyond what is happening in civilization. That is why I have presented today's episodic reflection. Next Friday we want to talk further about these things, not say any more that the house should be beautiful and firm and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it, the world view should be optimistic and ethical and so that one can orient oneself in it, and so on, but we really want to point to the real anthroposophy, to the spiritual life that our culture needs.