The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Goethe has said that the best thing about History is the enthusiasm it arouses, leading to encouragement to like deeds. In a certain sense all knowledge and all understanding have their true value only when they emerge into life. In History, it is necessary to look very far back in order to find the causes of later developments. Just as, to understand individual branches of external evolution—for instance, in building of bridges and roads—we must cling to the fact that these are the fruits of achievements in individual sciences, such as Mathematics and Physics, so also we see everywhere in actual History the fruits of earlier happenings. What comes to expression in our lifetime has its origin in far back ages.

We are now going to study a section of time, upon which many do not care to look back, a time which they would prefer to delete from History as “the dark Middle Ages.” And yet in it we are facing an important section of History—barbaric peoples, knowing nothing of Civilisation and Art, appear on the arena. These tribes, pressed back by the Mongols from their dwelling-place in the Russia of to-day, pushed on far towards the west. We will follow the struggles and destinies of these peoples; then our path will lead us on to the discovery of America, to that point of time at which the Middle Ages merge into the modern epoch, to the time of the great discoveries, when that invention took place which probably had the deepest significance of all, the invention of Printing; the time in which Copernicus gave us a new picture of the world. This evolution led mankind from the folk-migrations to the discoveries of the modern age.

It is much more difficult to point out, in History, the relation between cause and effect, than it is in Chemistry or Physics; for cause and effect often lie far apart.

Not until to-day have men regarded mutual tolerance for the various confessions of faith, as a requisite condition of culture. Yet, as early as the 3rd century before Christ, there existed in India a reciprocal respect and tolerance for the most diverse faiths, as a monument of King Asoka proves. The Christian feeling which sprang up later, in the Roman Empire, shed its influence over the whole of the Middle Ages; but its origin lay neither in the Roman Empire nor in Germania, but in a closed order of the little Jewish race the Essenes. Before we can understand what influence the Middle Ages have upon us, we must first grasp what it is that flows to us from them. An eminent Roman writer, Tacitus, has preserved for us in his Germania, a picture of that race which settled in the Germany of to-day. He describes them as separate tribes, similar in speech, and, though regarding themselves as different races, yet appearing very much alike to the outsider. He found out what was common to them all and gave them the general name of Germani.

Now if we examine the folk-soul of these Germanic tribesmen, we are confronted by the difference between them and the Greeks and Romans. In the construction of their soul-qualities, there is an important chronological difference. Greek culture with its incomparable Art, marks a particular point in human evolution. We saw that before the conquest by the invading Hellenes, there was in Greece a very ancient race, something like the later Germani; these were the Pelasgi, who lived in a community of freedom. After the immigration of the Hellenes, we find two strata of population, victors and vanquished, the contrast of free and unfree. From the folk-migrations and the conquests sprang Greek authority. Hence it follows that only a small section of the population had any share in the assets of culture. Another result was the low value set upon work; even artistic work was considered unworthy of the free Greek citizen. It was through this contempt for work that Greece went under. This culture of the Greeks, unrivalled in many points; was a culture only possible among conquerors. The Roman Empire is a history of continual conquests; when it could conquer nothing more, it went to pieces.

The distinguishing Germanic characteristic impressed itself, in all its component parts, before conquest, and did not allow itself to be subjugated by contact with other races. Its evloution stood firm in face of conflict.

Thus we see the development of the folk-spirit completed in the Greeks after, in the Romans during and in the Germanic before, the great historical struggles. If we are to study their characteristics, we must distinguish more accurately these racial groups in Central Europe. Three races come under consideration. In Spain, France, Ireland and Southern Germany, we find, first of all the ancient race of Celts. They were driven from their original dwelling-place by the Germani. Then came the Slavs, from the East, and forced the German tribes farther back. Thus we find in the Germani, hemmed in by the other two races, a strong intermingling of Celts and Slavonic blood. And this mixture of the Celtic and Slavonic element, influenced the whole culture of the Middle Ages.

When we look back into the far past we see a great and remarkable culture of the ancient Celts. Even to this day the Celtic blood shows itself as active, energetic, mentally alert, inclined to revolutionary impulses. To the Celtic race we owe magnificent poems, songs and scientific ideas. It was the Celts who gave the stimulus for the legends elaborated by German poets in the Middle Ages—Roland, Tristan, Parsifal, etc. This remarkable race has almost disappeared, either pressed farther westward, or amalgamated with the Germanic.

The outstanding features of the Germanic character are courage, the roaming spirit, and a strong feeling for Nature. In it are developed the domestic and martial virtues, practical efficiency and activity directed to useful ends. Hunting and cattle-rearing formed the chief occupations of the Germani; they had only a few simple poems, derived from older races. In its fundamental qualities, the Germanic character remained as it was in the age of barbarism. Within the Germanic element rise the driving forces of a contrasted evolution. A noticeable change took place during the Middle Ages. Greece had developed its sublime Art, Rome its life of Rights, and the concept of the state. The simple Germanic conception of law was based on quite different premises. In Rome, judgment was given on a basis of property-relationships, especially with reference to land or realty. The complicated ideas of justice in the Roman State were derived from the endeavor to bring harmony between the free citizen and the land-owner. All the contention between plebians and patricians, the fighting of the Gracchi, even the party-struggles of the later Republic, were struggles for the rights of the free citizen as opposed to those who gained possession of power because they were in possession of land. Nominally, equal rights in the State pertained to every Roman citizen. Yes, even in the later epoch of the Empire, every emperor possessed nominal rights in the State, because he united in his person, the rights of all free citizens, and exercised them in their stead.

Such factitious ideas were alien to the simple Germanic conception of justice. The special value of free citizenship met with no legal recognition. What evolved from these points of view was club-law, the right of the stronger; he was the mightiest who could make his right felt by force. To begin with, it was physical strength which asserted itself; then everyone must submit and adapt himself to the stronger. The fruit, however, of what was prepared in the Germanic age, appeared later as the right of the free personality, conditioned by nothing but self-acquired proficiency. This is clearly marked in the founding of the Cities. This development of the cities, which took place in the 11th century throughout the whole of Western Europe, presents a significant phenomenon. Whence did they arise? They were founded by those who, feeling themselves oppressed by the land-owners, sought a place where they could enjoy, undisturbed, what they owed to their own activity, to their personal activity. The free citizen of ancient Rome relied upon his title; his rights depended upon it. In the Middle Ages, the title of citizen was of no value; only that counted, which a man acquired for himself. The struggles for independence and freedom which the princes and knights carried on, were merely the expression of a struggle for free personality. It was not like this either in ancient Greece or in ancient Rome. It was a significant transition stage.

Why then did people gather together in the Cities? The reason was, in the first place, a material consideration; they wished to be free from oppression, in order to direct their activity to what was useful, to material gain.

And it was from this city-culture—but not from these new foundations—that there arose in Italy, on the scene of an ancient dying civilisation, the mighty poet-personality of the Middle Ages—Dante. In the Germanic cities, the first inventions were practical: the compass, gunpowder, and finally, the fruit-bearing event of the invention of printing. All this, which led to a complete transformation of conditioins, was born out of the practical achievements of man. At first sight, that may seem very far-fetched, but—as already emphasised—cause and effect in History lie far asunder. An example may illustrate this.

In 1846, Franz Palecky, the Czech historian, referred to the reform movement of the Middle Ages, in his work on the Czech race in the 15th century. Long before the so-called Reformation, this movement was tentatively considering a re-organisation of the Church. Dealing with the Hussite movement most sympathetically, Polacky, who had himself taken an active part in the Revolution of 1848, called particular attention to these currents. In a quite original way, he pointed out in them what had been developed in the days of city-culture. It is a common property of the Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic tribes. If we study the sagas and songs of these peoples, we understand it. They are distinguished form the sagas of ancient Greece and Rome in that they depict what the human heart can suffer, and what redeems it.

This is the feeling for tragedy. Among the Greeks and Romans, the hero of the story was he who was externally victorious, not he, who maintained his soul in uprightness. The heart of the people was always with him who was outwardly favoured by fortune. It was different with the Germanic peoples. The heart of the Germanic and Slavonic races beat for the heroes who externally failed, but whose souls stood firm. They lived in the soul, in the spirit. Heroes like Siegfried or Roland, or the king's son Mark, were extolled in the poems of these races. It is not to the external victories of these heroes, but ih their courage in suffering and failure, their unbowed spirit, that homage is paid. Everything gives place to the rectitude of spirit and soul. In the Imperium Romanum we see courage and consciousness of justice flourishing; in Greece we see Art; but with the Germani, it is the life of the soul that confronts us. They had no images of their gods; no splendid statues, such as the Greeks had. Their souls worked out the images of their gods; deep within their hearts they formed their God.

From this tendency of the races sprang, too, the thought of reformation. To be themselves collaborators in what faith was to be—that is what these people desired. A hundred years before Luther, Wycliffe had introduced a reform movement in England. The folk-spirit demanded that men should take the Bible into their own hands. From this spirit the Huss movement also arose. As far back as the early Middle Ages there were already preliminary efforts in this direction. The Emperor Henry II, of Saxon lineage, who was later canonised by the Catholic Church, demanded an ecclesia non romana. Militz, the inadequately appreciated savant, wrote his book on Antichrist, while pining in a prison in Prague. That which came to light in such demands and movements—the emancipation from external coercion, the spiritual deepening—was claimed by Palacky for the Slavs: he sees the thought of human kindness, as expressed by Herder, represented in the Fraternal Fellowship, developed on Bohemian soil. It lies deep in the nature of the Germanic races to regard an untrammelled organisation as the ideal.

It was neither after, nor during, conquest, that the Germanic character was formed; but the quality which marked it before this time, was maintained throughout this stage, and eventually developed to these ideals. The thought of freedom was evolved during the Middle Ages in spite of all the counter-currents which gave this period the name of “the dark Middle Ages.” If to many to-day the Middle Ages appear as a gloomy epoch, yet it was in the Middle Ages that that was developed which later, the poets sought, namely, the consciousness of freedom, a consciousness for which the 18th century fought bitterly, and with which the struggles of the present day are concerned.

We must free ourselves from the state of coercion which many are still bound to-day, though the consciousness that, as regards the feeling of freedom, all men are equal, has spread more and more. Men have grasped that by right no man can be a slave or a bondsman. To-day man feels himself free by right. But another form of unfreedom, material unfreedom, has persisted. In ancient Greece, the oppressed, the vanquished, the slaves, were unfree. Unfree in ancient Rome were those who had no claim to citizenship, no share in the State. In the Middle Ages men were made unfree by physical force. None of these forms could be maintained; economic unfreedom alone persists.

More and more clearly has the striving for complete freedom of personality shown itself. The ancient Greek valued distinction or race; the Roman, distinction of person; modern man attaches value to capitalism, to a show of wealth. Thus evolution points to the fall of more and more of those barriers which shut the personality off from the outside. Then the ground becomes free for the new ideal. History teaches us that the free man acquires a new value from out the spirit. The man who fulfils the ideal will be he who is freed from all these forms of oppression, he who, released from earthly gravity, can direct his gaze upwards. Only then will Hegel's words become wholly true: “History is the progress of humanity to consciousness of freedom.”

The experiences of life often lead to apparent contradictions. However, it is just when we carefully examine the contradictions that we discover deep and intrinsic relationships. If you ponder somewhat carefully what I explained in my first talk and restated in the second, and you compare this with my examples yesterday of the inner connections between European languages, you will find such a contradiction. Look at the two series of facts that were characterized. We find in modern German many linguistic “immigrants.” We can feel how many words accompanied Christianity from the South and were added to the original treasure house of the Germanic languages. These words came to us together with Christian concepts and Christian perceptions; they belong today very much to our language. I spoke, too, of other immigrant words as significant because they belong to the widened range of our language possibilities, those that came in from the western Romance languages in the twelfth century. At that time the genius of the German language still possessed the power of adaptation; it transformed in its own way what was received from Western Europe, not only as to sound but also as to meaning. Few people suspect, I said before, that the German word fein (fine) is really of French origin: fin, and that it entered our language only after the twelfth century.

I mentioned Spanish elements coming in at a later time, when German no longer had the same strength of transformation—and how this strength was totally at an end when English words entered the German language during the last part of the eighteenth but particularly during the nineteenth century. Thus we see words being continually taken over in Central Europe, from the Latin or from the Greek through Latin, or from the western Romance languages. Because of all this, we can say that our present vocabulary has absorbed foreign elements but also that our language in its very origin is related to the languages that gave it seemingly foreign components in later times.

We can easily establish the fact—not in the widest sense but through characteristic examples—that languages over far-flung areas of the earth have a common origin. Take naus for instance, the Sanskrit word for ‘ship’. In Greek it is also naus, in Latin navis. In areas of Celtic coloring you will find nau. In Old Norse and the older Scandinavian tongues you have nor: [In English there is nautical, nautilus, navy, navigate, and so forth]. It is unimportant that this word root has been thrown overboard [German has Schiff noun, and schiffen, verb, as English ship, noun and verb]. Despite this, we can observe that there exists a relationship encompassing an exceedingly large area across Europe and Asia.

Take the ancient East Indian word aritras. We find the word later as eretmón in Greek and then, with some consonants dropped, as remus in Latin. We find it in Celtic areas as rame and in Old High German as ruodar. We still have this word; it is our Ruder tudder’, ‘oar’. In this way one can name many, many words that exist in adaptations, in metamorphoses, across wide language sectors; the Gothic, the Norse, the Friesian, Low German, and High German—also in the Baltic tongues, the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Prussian. We can also find such words in the Slavic languages, in Armenian, Iranian, Indian, Greek, Latin, and Celtic. All across the regions where these languages were spoken, we discover that a primeval relationship exists; we can easily imagine that at a very ancient time the primordial origins of language-forming were similar right across these territories and only later became differentiated.

I did say at the beginning that the two series of facts contradict each other, but it is just by observing such contradictions that we can penetrate more deeply into certain areas of life. The appearance of such phenomena leads to our discovering that human evolution through the course of history has not at all taken place in a continuously even way, but rather in a kind of wave movement. How could you possibly imagine this whole process, expressed in two seemingly contradictory bodies of fact, without supposing that some relationship existed between the populations of these far-flung territories? We can imagine that these peoples kept themselves shut off at certain times, so that they developed their own unique language idioms, and that periods of isolation alternated with periods of influencing or being influenced by another folk. This is a somewhat rough and ready characterization, but only by looking at such rising and falling movements can we explain certain facts. Looking at the development of language in both directions, as I have just indicated, it is possible to gain deeper insights also into the essential nature of folk development.

Consider how certain elements of language develop—and this we will do now for the German language—when a country closes itself off from outside influences and at other times takes in foreign components that contribute their part to the spirit-soul elements expressed through language. We can already guess that these two alternating movements evoke quite different reactions in the spirit and soul life of the peoples.

On one hand it is most significant that a primordial and striking relationship exists between important words in Latin and in the older forms of the Central European languages—for instance, Latin verus ‘true’, German wahr ‘true’, Old High German wâr [in German /w/ is pronounced /v/. We have in English verity, very, from Old French veras]. If you take such obvious things as Latin, velle = wollen ‘will’ or even Latin, taceo ‘I am silent’ and the Gothic thahan [English tacit, taciturn, you realize that in ancient times there prevailed related, similar-sounding language elements over vast areas of Europe—and this could be proven also for Asia.

On the other hand, it is really remarkable that the inhabitants of Central Europe from whom the present German population originated, accepted foreign elements into their languages relatively early, even earlier than I have described it. There was a time when Europe was much more strongly pervaded by the Celtic element than in later historic times, but the Celts were subsequently crowded into the western areas of Europe; then the Germanic tribes moved into Central Europe, quite certainly coming from northern areas. The Germans accepted foreign word elements from the Celts, who were then their western neighbors, much as they later accepted them from the Romans coming from the South. This shows that the inhabitants of Central Europe, after their separate, more closed-off development, later accepted foreign language elements from the neighbors on their outer boundaries, whose languages had been originally closely related to their own.

If the external development of language could be traced back far enough—of course, it cant be—we would ultimately arrive at that primeval language-forming power of ancient times when language came about through what I described yesterday as a relationship to consonants and vowels, a relationship of sound and meaning. Languages start out with a primitive structure. What then brings about the differences in them? Variety is due, for instance, to whether a tribe lives in a mountainous area or perhaps on the plain. The larynx and its related organs wish to sound forth differently according to whether people live high up in the mountains or in a low-lying area, and so on, even though at the very beginning of speech, what emerges from the nature of the human being forms itself in the same way.

We note that as the word moves from one area to another, a transformation of the sound takes place. The corresponding step to German /z/ is in other languages a step to /th/.

This is by no means off-base theorizing. To describe the process in detail we should have to collect many examples, yet this sequence corresponds to Grimm’s Law in the metamorphosis of language.¹Take, for instance, the Greek word thyra, ‘door’. If we take it as an early step, arrested at the first stage, we must expect the next step to use a /d/, and sure enough, we find it in English: door: The final change would arrive clockwise at /t/, and there it is: modern German Tür, ‘door’.

Therefore we can find, if we look, the oldest “language-geological stratum,” where the metamorphosing word stands on any one of these steps. The next change will stand on the following step, and then on the final step as modern German.

If the step expressed in Latin or Greek contains /t/, English (which has remained behind) will have the /th/, and modern German (which has progressed beyond English) will have a /d/ [cf. Latin tu, Anglo-Saxon thu ‘thou’, German du ‘you'].

When modern German has /z/ (corresponding to English /th/ the previous step would have been /t/, and the original GrecoLatin word would have had a /d/. This can be discovered.

We would then expect, following a word with a /t/ in Gothic, to find as the second step a /z/. Take the word Zimmer ‘room’, for the relationship of modern German to the next lower, earlier step in the Gothic or in Old Saxon, both of which stand on the same level: Zimmer has come from timbar. From /z/ we have to think back to /t/. This is merely the principle; you yourselves can find all this in the dictionary.²

There are many other lively language metamorphoses; as a parallel to the just-mentioned sequence, there is also this one: if an earlier word has a /b/, this becomes on the next step a /p/, followed on the third step by /f/, /ph/, or /pf/ [Latin labi ‘slip’, Anglo-Saxon, hleapan ‘leap’, German laufen ‘run’].

In the same way the connection /g/—/k/—/h/ or /ch/ exists. You will find corresponding examples [cf. Latin ego, Anglo-Saxon ic, Dutch ik German ich]. We can sum up as follows: Greek and Latin have retained language elements at an early stage of metamorphosis. Whatever then became Gothic advanced to a later stage and this second stage still exists today, for instance in Dutch and in English. A last shift of consonants took place finally around the sixth century A.D., when language advanced one stage further to the level of modern German. We can assume that the first stage will probably be found spread far into Europe, in time perhaps only up to about 1500 B.C. Then we find the second stage reigning over vast areas, with the exception of the southern lands where the oldest stage still remained. And finally there crystallizes in the sixth century A.D. the modern German stage. While English and Dutch remain back in the earlier second stage, modern German crystallizes out.

I urge you now to take into account the following: The relationship that people have to their surroundings is expressed by the consonants forming their speech, completely out of a feeling for the word-sound character. And this can only happen once—that is, only once in such a way that word and outer surroundings are in complete attunement. Centuries ago, if the forerunners of the Central European languages used, let’s say, a /z/ on the first step to form certain words, they had the feeling that the consonant character must be in harmony with the outside phenomena. They formed the /z/ according to the outer world.

The next stage of change can no longer be brought about according to the outside world. The word now exists; the next stages are being formed internally, within human beings themselves and no longer in harmony with their surroundings. The reshaping is in a way the independent achievement of the folk soul. Speech is first formed in attunement with the outer world, but then the following stages would be experienced only inwardly. An attuning to the external does not take place again.

Therefore we can say that Greek and Latin have remained at a stage where in many respects a sensitive attunement of the language-forming element to the outer surroundings has been brought to expression. The next stage, forming Gothic, Old High German, Old English, and so forth, has proceeded beyond this immediate correspondence and has undergone a change to the element of soul. These languages have therefore a far more soul-filled character. We see that the first change that occurs gives language an inner soul coloring. Everything that enters our sensing of language on reaching this second stage gives inwardness to our speech and language. Slowly and gradually this has come about since 1500 B.Cc. This kind of inwardness is characteristic of certain ancient epochs. Carried over into later ages, however, it changed into a simpler, more primitive quality. Where it still exists today, in Dutch and English, it has passed over into a more elemental feeling for words and sounds.

Around the sixth century A.D. modern German reached the third stage.³ Now the distancing from the original close attunement to the outside proceeds still further. Through a strong inward process the form of modern German proceeds out of its earlier stage. It had reached the second stage of its development and moved into the realm of soul; the third stage takes the language a good distance away from ordinary life. Hence the peculiar, often remote, abstract element in the German language today, something that presses down on the German soul and that many other people in the rest of Europe cannot understand at all. Where the High German element has been wielded to a special degree, by Goethe and Hegel for instance, it really can't be translated into English or into the Romance languages. What comes out are merely pseudo-translations. People have to make the attempt, of course, since it is better to reproduce things somehow or other rather than not at all. Works that belong permanently to this German organism are penetrated by a strong quality of spirit, not merely a quality of soul. And spirit cannot be taken over easily into other languages, for they simply have no expressions for it.

The ascent of a language to the second step, then, is not only the ensouling of the language, but also the ensouling of the folk-group’s inwardness through the language. The ascent to the third step that you can study especially in modern German [and especially in written German], is more a distancing from life, so that by means of its words such abstract heights can be reached as were reached, for instance, by Hegel, or also, in certain cases, by Goethe and Schiller. That is very much dependent on this reaching-the-third-step. Here German becomes an example. The language-forming, the language-development frees itself from attuning to the external world. It becomes an internal, independent process. Through this the human-individual soul element progresses which, in a sense, develops independently of nature.

Thus the Central European language structure passed through stages where from a beginning step of instinctive, animal-like attuning to the outer world, it acquired soul qualities and then became spiritual. Other languages, such as Greek and Latin, developed differently in their other circumstances. As we study these two ancient languages primarily from the standpoint of word formation, we have to conclude that their word and sound structures are very much attuned to their surroundings. But the peoples who spoke these languages did not stop with this primitive attunement to the world around them. Through a variety of foreign influences, from Egypt and from Asia, whose effects were different from those in Europe, Greek and Latin became the mere outer garment for an alien culture introduced to them from outside, essentially a mystery culture. The mysteries of Africa and Asia were carried over to the Greeks and to a certain degree to the Romans; there was enough power in them to clothe the Asian mysteries and the Egyptian mysteries with the Greek and Latin languages. They became the outer garments of a spiritual content flowing into them drop by drop. This was a process that the languages of central and northern Europe did not participate in. Instead, theirs was the course of development I have already described: On the first step they did not simply take in the spiritual as the Greeks had done but first formed the second stage; they were about to reach the third stage when Christianity with its new vocabulary entered as a foreign, spiritual element. Evidently, too, the second stage had been reached when the Celtic element made its way in, as I described earlier. With this we see that the spiritual influence made its entrance only after an inner transforming of the Germanic languages had taken place. In Greek and Latin there was no transforming of this kind but rather an influx of spirituality into the first stage.

To determine the character of a single people, we have to study concrete situations or events, in order to discover the changes in its language and its relationship to spiritual life. Thus we find in modern German a language that, on reaching its third stage, removed itself a good distance from ordinary life. Yet there are in German so many words that entered it through those various channels: Christianity from the South, scholasticism from the South, French and Spanish influences from the West. All these influences came later, flowing together now in modern German from many different sources.

Whatever has been accepted as a foreign element from another language cannot cause in us as sensitive a response as a word, a sound combination, that has been formed out of our own folk-cultural relationship to nature or to the world around us. What do we feel when we utter the word Quelle ‘spring’, ‘source’, ‘fountain’; ‘cognate, well? We can sense that this word is so attuned to the being of what it describes, we can hardly imagine calling it anything else if with all our sensitivity we were asked to name it. The word expresses everything we feel about a Quelle. This was the way speech sounds and words were originally formed: consonants and vowels conformed totally to the surrounding world. [English speakers can feel the same certainty about spring. Anglo-Saxon springan. Arnold Wadler has pointed out the particularly lively quality of all spr- words, such as sprout, sprig, sprite, spray, sprinkle, surprise, even sport—and of course spirit.] But now listen to such words as Essenz ‘essence’ or Kategorie ‘category’ or Rhetorik ‘rhetoric’. Can you feel equally the relationship to what the word meant at its beginning? No! As members of a folk-group we have taken in a particular word-sound, but we have to make an effort to reach the concept carried on the wings of those sounds. We are not at all able to repeat that inner experience of harmony between word-sound and concept or feeling. Deep wisdom lies in the fact that a people accepted from other peoples such words in either their ascending or descending development, words it has not formed from the beginning, words in which the sound is experienced but not its relationship to what is meant. For the more a people accepts such words, the more it needs to call upon very special qualities in its own soul life in order to come to terms with such words at all. Just think: In our expletives and exclamations we are still able today to experience this attuning of the language-forming power to what is happening in our surroundings. Pfui! ‘pooh! ugh!’, Tratsch! ‘stupid nonsense!’, Tralle walle! [probably an Austrian dialect term. English examples: ‘Ow!’, ‘Damn!’, ‘Hah!’, ‘Drat it!']. How close we come to what we want to express with such words! And what a difference you find when you're in school and take up a subject—it needn't even be logic or philosophy—but simply a modern science course. You will immediately be confronted with words that arouse soul forces quite different from those that let you sense, for instance, the feeling you get from Moo! that echoes in a “word” the forming of sounds you hear from a cow. When you say the word Moo, the experience of the cow is still resounding in you.

When you hear a word in a foreign language, a very different kind of inner activity is demanded than when you merely hear from the sound of the word what you are supposed to hear. You have to use your power of abstraction, the pure power of conceptualizing. You have to learn to visualize an idea. Hence a people that has so strongly taken up foreign language elements, as have the Central Europeans, will have educated in itself—by accepting these foreign elements—its capacity for thinking in ideas.

Two things come together in Central Europe when we look at modern German: on the one hand the singular inwardness, actually an inner estrangement from life, that results from moving into the third stage of language development; on the other hand, everything connected with the continuous takingin of foreign elements. Because these two factors have come together, the most powerful ability to form ideas has developed in the German language; there is the possibility to rise up to completely clear concepts and to move about freely within them. Through these two streams of language development, a prodigious education came about for Central Europe, the education of INNER WORDLESS THINKING, where we truly can proceed to a thinking without words. This was brought about in abundant measure by means of the phenomena just described.

These are the things that have evolved; we will not understand the nature of modern German at all if we don't take them into account. We should observe carefully the sound-metamorphoses and word-metamorphoses that occur through the appropriation of foreign words at the various stages of development.

This is what I wanted to present to you today, in order to characterize the Central European languages.

• 1. Jakob Grimm in his book on Germanic grammar codified this consonant shift so that it is known as Grimm’s Law. See lecture 2, pp. 29-30.
• 2. See also Rudolf Steiner, The Realm of Language and Arnold Wadler, One Language.
• 3. “Starting most probably in the southernmost reaches of the German-speaking lands, some time in the fifth century, a series of sound changes gradually resulted in restructuring the phonetic systems of all the southern and many of the midland dialects, resulting in High German”—John T. Waterman, A History of the German Language (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).

Before we can develop all that can be extracted from the significant picture of the ‘Twilight of the Gods’, it will be well to form a foundation, a basis, to work from. For we shall deal with the nature of the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-soul, and from the results of our investigation describe it more minutely. We must see how in Europe the whole collective spiritual life worked in co-operation, how through the activity of the various Folkspirits progress was brought about in mankind, beginning from the earliest ages and proceeding through our present age on into the future.

Each individual people, yea, even all the smaller subdivisions of peoples have their special task in this great collective picture; and you will perceive from what has been said, that in a certain respect it was just to the pre-Christian and post-Christian cultures of Europe that the task, the mission was given to educate the ‘I’ through the different stages of the human being, to form it and gradually to develop it. As we have shown to be the case in the Germanic Scandinavian people, the ‘I’ was in primal ages still clairvoyantly shown to man from the spiritual world. It was shown that this ‘I’ was bestowed upon man by an Angelic Being, who stands between man and the Folk-soul, by Donar or Thor. We have seen that each single individual felt himself to be ‘I’-less, impersonal; to him the ‘I’ was a gift, presented to him from the spiritual world. Naturally in the East, when the ‘I’ actually awoke, they did not find it in that way. There man had already evolved subjectively to such a high stage of human perfection, that he did not feel the ‘I’ as something foreign to him, but as his own. When in the East man awoke to the ‘I’, Eastern culture had already proceeded so far, that it was capable of gradually developing that delicately spun speculation, logic and wisdom, which we have before us in the Eastern Wisdom.

Therefore the East did not experience the whole process of receiving the ‘I’ as though coming from a higher spiritual world, with the assistance of a divine spiritual individuality such as Thor. This was experienced in Europe, and hence the European felt this gradual ascent to the individual ‘I’ as the emerging from a kind of group-soul. The Germanic Scandinavian still felt himself attached to a group-soul, belonging to a whole community, as if he were a part in the great body of his people. Thus only could it come about that nearly 100 years after the Christ-impulse had been given to the earth, Tacitus could describe the Germans of Central Europe as appearing to belong to separate tribes, and yet as members of one organism and belonging to the unity of the organism. At that time each individual still felt himself to be a member of the tribal ‘I’. He felt his individual ‘I’ being gradually born out of the tribal ‘I’, and in the God Thor he recognized the giver, the bestower of the ‘I’, the God who really presented him with the individual ‘I’. But he felt this God to be still united with the collective spirit of the tribe, with that which dwelt in the group-soul. To this group-soul was given the name Sif. That is the name of the spouse of Thor. Sif must linguistically be connected with the word Sippe-tribal relationship,—and this connection really exists, although veiled and hidden. Occultly, however, Sif signifies the group-soul of the individual community from which the single individual grows forth. Sif is the being who unites herself with the God of the individual ‘I’, with the giver of the individual ‘I’, with Thor. The individual man recognized Sif and Thor as the Beings who gave him his ‘I’. The Northman still felt thus about them, at a time when to the peoples in other parts of Europe other tasks had already been given in the educating of man up to the ‘I’.

Every single people has its particular task. There above all we find that people, that collection of peoples, that community of peoples whom we know by the name of Celts. The Folk-spirit of the Celts—of whom from former lectures we know that later he received quite different tasks—then had the task of educating the still youthful ‘I’ of the peoples of Europe. For this it was necessary that the Celts should receive an education and instruction which was communicated directly from the higher world. Hence it is perfectly true that through their Initiates, the Druid Priests, the Celts did receive instruction from the higher worlds which they could not have acquired by their own strength, and which they then had to hand on further to the other nations.

The collective culture of Europe is a gift of the European Mysteries. The progressive Folk-souls are, as they progress, always the leaders of the collective culture of humanity. But at the time when these Folk-spirits of Europe had to direct men to work from out of themselves, it became necessary that the Mysteries should begin to withdraw. Hence with the withdrawal of the Celtic element there took place a kind of withdrawal of the Mysteries into much more secret depths. At the time of the old Celts there was, through the Mysteries, a much more direct intercourse between the spiritual Beings and the people, because the ‘I’ was still united to the group-soul nature, and yet the Celtic element was to be the donor of the ‘I’ to the other part of the population. We might therefore say, that before the actual Germanic Scandinavian evolution began, the mystery-education could only be given to European civilization by the old Celtic Mysteries. This mystery-education allowed just so much to come to the surface as was necessary to form a foundation for the whole culture of Europe. Now out of this old culture, through intermingling with the many different races, peoples and subdivisions of peoples, the most varied Folk-souls and Folkspirits were able to fertilize themselves, and they brought the ‘I’ into ever different conditions in order to educate it, the ‘I’ which has worked its way up out of the foundations of all that lies below the ‘I’ of man.

After the old Greek culture had to a certain extent reached a culminating point in the fulfillment of its special mission, we see quite a different aspect of this same mission in the Roman Empire and its various stages of culture. We have already mentioned that the several post-Atlantean civilizations follow one another in certain order. If we wish to obtain a survey over these successive stages of post-Atlantean civilization, we may say that the old Indian culture worked upon the human etheric body. Hence the wonderfully wise, clairvoyant character of the old Indian culture, because—after the development of the special human capacities—it was a culture that was in the human etheric body; so that we may say, the ancient Indian culture is to be understood somewhat as follows (see diagram).

From the Atlantean down to the later post-Atlantean epoch the Indian Folk-spirit went through the whole of the development of the inner soul forces, without his ‘I’ being wakened. He then returned to his work in the human etheric body. The essential thing in the old Indian culture is that the Indian, with completely developed soul-forces, with soul-forces refined to the highest point, goes back again into the etheric body, and within that he perfects those wonderfully delicate powers, the later reflection of which we see in the Vedas and in a still more refined condition in the Vedantic philosophy. All this was only possible because the Indian Folk-soul had evolved to high degree before the ‘I’ was seen and realized, and this again occurred at a time when man could perceive by means of the forces of the etheric body itself.

The Persian Folk-soul had not progressed so far as this, only so far as to perception in the sentient body or astral body. It was again different at the time of the Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldæan culture. That part of man which we describe as the Sentient Soul was then able to perceive, and we must therefore describe this Egyptian-Chaldæan culture as working in the Sentient Soul. The Græco-Latin Folk-spirit was directed to the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, and worked in that. He himself was only able to work upon this Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings because it had a sort of expression of its nature in the etheric body. But this form of world-conception which now appeared in Greece was less real, as it were, less objective, it bore less of the stamp of reality. Whereas in the old Indian culture there was a more direct activity in the etheric body, there was a more blurred, a fainter image of the reality, which, as I have said, was like a memory of what these peoples had once experienced, a memory reflected in their etheric body.

In the other peoples which then follow upon the Greek people we have to deal principally with the use of the physical body for the development, stage by stage, of the Spiritual Soul. Hence the Greek culture was one which we can only understand if we try to do so from within, if we realize that in this culture what is important in external experience is that which pours forth from the inner nature of the Greeks. On the other hand the peoples lying more towards the West and the North have the task, under the guidance of their Folk-souls, of directing their gaze out into the world, and of seeing what is there to be seen on the physical plane, and of perfecting that which has to play a part on that plane. The Germanic Scandinavian peoples had also the special task of perfecting this as they alone could, because they still enjoyed the blessing of being able to see into the spiritual world with the old clairvoyance, and to carry the primeval experiences which they perceived so vividly, into that which had to be arranged on the physical plane.

One people there was, which, at its later stage no longer possessed this blessing; which in the first place had not gone through such a previous evolution, but had been placed on the physical plane at one bound, as it were, before the birth of the human ‘I’ and therefore was only able under the guidance of its Folk-soul, of its Archangel, to look after that which helped this human ‘I’ on the physical plane, that which was necessary for its well-being there. This was the Roman people. Everything that the Roman people had, under the guidance of its Folk-spirit, to accomplish for the collective mission of Europe, was for the purpose of giving importance to the ‘I’ of man as such. Hence the Roman people was able to develop that which places the ego among other egos. It was able to found the whole system of the rights of the individual. Hence it was the creator of jurisprudence, which is built up purely on the ‘I’. The relation of one ‘I’ to another was the great question in the mission of the Roman people. The other peoples, which grew out of the Roman civilization, already possessed more of what—coming so to say from the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings and from the Spiritual Soul itself—in some way or other fertilizes the ‘I’ and drives it out into the world. Therefore all the mixtures of races of which external history relates, which occurred on the Italian and Pyrenean Peninsula, in present-day France and in present-day Great Britain, were necessary in order to develop the ‘I’ in the different shades of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, and the Spiritual Soul on the physical plane. That was the great mission of those peoples which gradually developed in various ways in Western Europe.

All the several shades of culture and the missions of the peoples of Western Europe can finally be explained by the fact that there had to be developed in the direction of the Italian and Pyrenean peninsulas that which could be formed in the ‘I’ through the impulse of the Sentient Soul. If you study the several folk-characters in their light and shadow sides, you will find that in the peoples of the Italian and Pyrenean peninsulas there is a peculiar mingling of the ‘I’ with the Sentient Soul.

Then you will be able to understand the peculiar nature of those peoples who till now have lived in the land of France, if you consider the growth and mingling of the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, with the ‘I’.

The great world-historical effects, however, which we may consider as represented by Great Britain, are to be traced back to the impulse of the Spiritual Soul penetrating into the human ‘I’. With the world-historical mission that proceeded from Great Britain is also connected that which proceeded from the founding of the external constitutional form. The union of the Spiritual Soul with the ‘I’ did not exist as yet inwardly. If, however, you recognize how this union came about between the Spiritual Soul and the ‘I’ that had been driven outwards, you will find that the great historical conquests made by the inhabitants of that island proceed from that impulse. You will also find that what took place there in the founding of the parliamentary forms of government at once becomes comprehensible, if you know that an impulse of the Spiritual Soul was to be placed on the plane of the world's history.

Thus many shades were necessary, for the several peoples had to be guided through many stages of the ‘I’. If we had sufficient time to follow these things on further we should find pictures in history which would show us how the basic forces branch and work out in the most various ways. Thus did the peculiar constitution of the soul work among the western peoples, who had not preserved in themselves the direct elementary remembrance of the clairvoyantly experienced things of the spiritual world of former times.

In later times, in the Germanic Scandinavian domains, that which proceeded directly from a gradual, successive evolution of primeval clairvoyance and which had already been poured into the Sentient Soul, had to develop in quite a different way. Hence that current of inwardness, which indeed is only the after-effect of a more inward clairvoyant experience gone through in a former age. The Southern Germanic peoples had in the first place their task in the domain of the Spiritual Soul.

The Græco-Latin age had to develop the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings. But it had not merely to give the impulse with this soul, it had to work also with a wonderful premature development that was endowed with clairvoyant experience. All this was poured into the Spiritual Souls of the Central European and Northern Germanic peoples. It worked among these souls as an inner capacity, and the Germanic peoples living more to the South had first of all to develop what pertains to the inward preparation of the Spiritual Soul, to fill it inwardly with the consciousness resulting from the old clairvoyance, but transposed on to the physical plane.

The philosophies of Central Europe, those philosophies which were represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel as late as in the nineteenth century, are apparently far removed from the sphere of mythology, but they are nevertheless nothing but the result of the most penetrating old clairvoyance, acquired by man when he worked in co-operation with the divine spiritual Beings. It would otherwise have been impossible for a Hegel to have looked upon his ideas as realities, it would have been impossible for him to make the strange statement so characteristic of him, when, in answer to the question, ‘what is the abstract?’, he replied, ‘The abstract is for instance an individual man who performs his daily duties, let us say a carpenter.’ That, therefore, which to the abstract scientist is concrete, was abstract to Hegel. That which to the abstract scientist are mere thoughts, to him were the great, mighty architects of the world. Hegel's world of ideas is the final, the most highly sublimated expression of the Spiritual Soul, and contains in pure concepts that which the Northman still saw as sensible-super-sensible, divine spiritual powers in connection with the ‘I’. And when the ‘I’ was expressed in Fichte, it was nothing but a precipitation of what the God Thor had given to the human soul, now viewed from the Spiritual Soul in what seems to be the simplest of thoughts, the thought ‘I am,’ which is the starting-point of Fichte's philosophy. A straight line of evolution goes from the presentation of the ‘I’ by the God Thor or Donar to the old Northern peoples from the spiritual world, down to this philosophy. This God had to prepare all this for the Spiritual Soul in order that the latter might receive its fitting contents, for its task is to look out into the outer world and to work within that world. But this philosophy does not discover merely the external, crude, materialistic experience, it discovers in the external world the contents of the Spiritual Soul itself, and looks upon Nature merely as the other side of idea. Take this on-working impulse, and in it you have the mission of the Northern Germanic peoples in Central Europe.

Now, as all evolution has to progress, we must inquire: How does this evolution advance? When we look back into the ancient times we can see something remarkable. As we have said, in old India the first culture took place in the etheric body, after the necessary perfecting of the spiritual forces had been accomplished. But there are other civilizations besides, which have preserved the old Atlantean culture and carried it over into the people of the post-Atlantean epoch. Whereas on the one hand we have the Indian, coming thus to his etheric body, and from this and its forces creating his mighty civilization and his magnificent spiritual life, we have coming from the other side a culture which originated in Atlantis and continued to work on in the post-Atlantean epoch; a culture which for its foundation and development works out the other side, as it were, of the consciousness of the etheric body. That is the Chinese culture. If you bear this connection in mind, and remember that the Atlantean culture was directly related to what in our earlier lectures we called ‘The Great Spirit,’ you will understand the details of the Chinese culture. This culture was directly connected with the highest stages of the evolution of the world. But it still works into modern human bodies, and from a completely different side. It will therefore seem quite comprehensible that the two great opposites of the post-Atlantean epoch will one day clash in these two civilizations: the Indian, which, within certain limits, is capable of development; and the Chinese, that shuts itself off and remains rigid, repeating what existed in the old Atlantean epoch.

You really obtain an occult, scientific, poetic impression of this Chinese Empire if you observe it in its evolution, and think of the Great Wall of China, which was intended to enclose on all sides that which came from the primal ages and developed in the post-Atlantean epoch. I say that something like an occult poetic feeling steals over one, if one compares the Wall of China with something which existed in former times. I can only indicate these things. If you compare this with the results that have been obtained by science, you will find how extraordinarily illuminating these things are.

Let us clairvoyantly observe the old continent of Atlantis, which must be sought where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, between Africa and Europe on the one side, and America on the other. This continent was encircled by a sort of warm stream, a stream about which clairvoyant consciousness reveals that, strange as it may sound, it flowed upwards from the South, through Baffins Bay, towards the north of Greenland, encircling it and then, flowing over to the East, gradually cooled down; then, at a time when Siberia and Russia had not yet risen to the surface, it flowed down near the Ural mountains, turned, touched the Eastern Carpathians, flowed into the region occupied by the present Sahara, and finally streamed towards the Atlantic Ocean near the Bay of Biscay; so that it flowed in a perfectly unbroken stream. You will understand that only the remnants of this stream still remain. This is the Gulf Stream, which at that time encircled the Atlantean Continent. You will now also understand that, with the Greeks, the life of the soul is remembrance. The picture of Oceanos arose in them, which is a memory of that Atlantean epoch. Their picture of the world is not so very incorrect, because it was drawn from the old Atlantean epoch. The stream that came down by Spitzbergen as a warm current, and gradually cooled and so on,—the region encircled by this stream the Chinese have literally reproduced by enclosing within their Great Wall the culture which they rescued from the Atlantean epoch. There was as yet no history in the Atlantean civilization, hence the Chinese civilization is also in some ways lacking in history. Thus we have there something pre-Indian, something coming from Atlantis.

Let us now turn, in the further progress of the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-spirit, to the description of what follows it. What happens first of all, when a Folk-spirit so leads his people that the Spirit-Self can specially develop? Let us recollect that the Etheric Body was evolved during the Indian civilization, the Sentient Body in the Persian, the Sentient Soul in the Egyptian-Chaldæan, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings in the Græco-Latin, the Spiritual Soul in our own, which is not yet completed. Then comes the laying hold of the Spirit-Self by the Spiritual Soul, so that the Spirit-Self shines into the Spiritual Soul, which, as that is the task of the sixth stage of civilization, must be prepared for gradually. That civilization, which must be pre-eminently a receptive one, for it must reverently await the penetrating of the Spirit-Self into the Spiritual Soul, is being prepared by the peoples of Western Asia and the Slav peoples of Eastern Europe. These latter were pushed forward with their Folk-souls, for the very good reason that everything which is to happen in the future, must in a certain way be prepared beforehand, must already push itself in, in order to provide the elements for what is to follow.

It is extremely interesting to study these advance guards of a Folk-soul who is preparing himself for later epochs. This accounts for the peculiar nature of the Slav peoples at present living to the East of us. Their whole culture gives the Western European the impression of being in a preparatory stage, and they put forward in quite a curious way, through the medium of their advance guards, that which in spirit is quite different from any mythology.

It would be misunderstanding what is being pushed forward from the East as a civilization of the future, it would be misunderstanding this culture if we were to compare it with that which the Western European peoples possess, viz., an impulse that continues in a straight line, which is still rooted in and has its source in the old clairvoyance. The peculiarity attaching to the souls of these Eastern European peoples is expressed in the whole attitude they have always shown when their relations to the higher worlds have come into question. This relation, if we compare it with what appears in our mythology in Western Europe and the strange divine figures worked out even down to the individual character, is quite different. That which it offers appears to us in such a way that we may compare what it gives us as a direct out-pouring of the Folk-spirit, with our various planes or worlds, through which we prepare ourselves to understand a spiritual, a higher culture. For instance, we find there in the East the following conception: The West has received a series of successive worlds, lying side by side. In the East we find in the first place a distinct consciousness of a world of the Cosmic Father. Everything that is creatively active in air and fire, in all the elements in and above the earth, meets us as one great, all-embracing idea, which is at the same time an all-embracing feeling, the concept of the Heavenly Father. In somewhat the same way as we think of the Devachanic world as fertilizing our earth, so do we find this heavenly world, the world of the Father, coming towards us from the East, and it fertilizes that which is felt to be the Mother, the Spirit of the Earth. We have no other expression and can think of no other way of picturing the whole Spirit of the Earth than in the picture of the fertilization of Mother Earth.

Two worlds, then, confront one another there, instead of single individual Divine Figures. And what is felt to be the Blessed Child of these two worlds, stands in front of them as a third world. That is not an individual being, not a feeling in the soul, but something which is the product of the Heavenly Father and the Earth-Mother. In this way the relation of Devachan to the Earth is felt from the spiritual world. There, that which blossoms in the material body is felt as something altogether spiritual; and that which grows and blossoms in the soul, is perceived as the world which is at the same time felt to be the Blessed Child of the Heavenly Father and the Earth-Mother. Universal as these conceptions are we find them among the Slav peoples which have been pushed forward towards the West. In no Western European mythology do we find this conception so universal. We find in them clearly defined Divine Figures, but not that which we present in our Anthroposophy as the different worlds; these we find more in the Heavenly Father, the Earth-Mother, and the Blessed Child of the East.

In the Blessed Child there is again a world which permeates another one. It is a world which is, however, conceived of as being individual, because it is connected with the physical sun and its light. The Slav element also has this Being,—although in a differently developed form of conception and feeling,—which we have so often found in the Persian mythology; it has the Sun-being who so pours his blessings into the other three worlds that the destiny of man is woven into the creation, into the Earth, through the fertilization of the Earth-Mother by the Heavenly Father, and through that which the Sun-spirit weaves into both these worlds.

A fifth world is that which comprises everything spiritual. The Eastern European element feels the spiritual world as underlying all the forces of Nature and their creations. But this we must think of in quite a different shade of feeling, connected more with the facts, creations and beings of Nature. We must conceive of this Eastern soul as being in a position to see an entity in an occurrence of Nature, of seeing not only the physically-sensible, but the astrally-spiritual. Hence the ideas of an immense number of beings in this unique spiritual world, which we may at the most compare with the world of the Elves of Light. It is that spiritual world, which is looked upon in Anthroposophy as the fifth world, which dawns more or less in the feelings of the peoples of the East. Whether they call it by this name or that, does not signify; what does signify is that the feelings are colored and shaded, that the concepts which characterize this fifth plane or spiritual world are to be found in the world of the East. By means of these feelings this world of the East is preparing for that Spirit which is to bring the Spirit-Self into man, in readiness for that epoch when the Spiritual-Soul shall ascend to Spirit-Self, in the sixth age of post-Atlantean civilization, which is to succeed our own. We meet with this in a very unique manner not only in the creations of the Folk-Souls, which are as I have just described, but also in a wonderful preparatory fashion, in the various externalities of Eastern Europe and its culture.

It is very remarkable and extremely interesting to see how the Eastern European expresses his tendency of receptivity towards the pure Spirit by receiving with great devotion Western European culture, thus indicating prophetically that he will be able to unite something still greater with his being. Hence also the little interest he has in the details of this Western European culture. He receives what is presented to him more in broad outlines and less in details, because he is preparing himself to take up that which as Spirit-Self is to enter into mankind. It is particularly interesting to see how, under this influence, a much more advanced conception of Christ has been able to come in the East than in Western Europe, excepting where it has come about through Anthroposophy. Of all non-Anthroposophists the most advanced conception of Christ is that held by the Russian philosopher, Solovioff. It is so advanced that it can only be understood by Anthroposophists, because he develops it higher and higher and gives it an endless perspective, showing that what man is able to recognize in Christ to-day is only the beginning, because the Christ-impulse has as yet only been able to reveal to man a small degree of what it contains within it. But as regards the conception of Christ, if we look for instance at the way in which Hegel understood Him, we shall find that one may say: Hegel understood Him as only the most refined, most sublimated Spiritual Soul could.

But in Solovioff the concept of Christ is a very different one. He fully recognizes the two parts in this conception, and everything which has been expressed in the many theological disputes, and which in reality rest upon great misunderstandings, is put aside, because the ordinary conceptions do not suffice to make the idea of Christ in His twofold nature comprehensible; they do not suffice to make one understand that therein the human and the spiritual must be clearly distinguished. The concept of Christ rests upon clearly grasping what took place when the Christ entered into the Man Jesus of Nazareth, who had developed all the necessary qualities. There were, then, two natures which must first of all be comprehended as such, although at a higher stage they again form unity. As long as one has not grasped this duality, one has not realized Christ in His complete form. This can, however, only be done by the philosophical comprehension which has a premonition that man himself will reach a culture in which his Spiritual Soul will attain to a state into which the Spirit-Self can come; so that man will in the sixth age of civilization feel himself to be a duality in whom the higher nature will hold the lower nature under complete control.

Solovioff carries this duality into his conception of Christ and brings emphatically into notice that there can be no meaning in it unless one accepts the facts of a divine and a human nature, both really working together, so that they do not merely form an abstract but an organic unity, that thus only can this be understood. Solovioff recognizes that two Will-centers must be thought of in this Being. If you take the teachings of Spiritual Science as to the true significance of the Christ-Being, which proceed from the existence of, not an imaginary, but a spiritually real Indian influence, you then have to think of Christ as having developed within His three bodies the capacities of feeling, thought and will. There you have a human feeling, thinking and willing into which the divine Feeling, Thinking and Willing has immersed itself. The European will only thoroughly assimilate this when he has risen to the sixth stage of culture. This has been prophetically expressed in a wonderful way in Solovioff's conception of Christ, which like a rosy dawn announces a later civilization. Hence this philosophy of Eastern Europe strides with giant steps beyond that of Hegel and Kant, and when one enters the atmosphere of this philosophy, one suddenly feels as it were the germ for a future unfolding. It goes so much further because this conception of Christ is felt to be a fore-shining, the morning dawn of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization. By means of this the whole Christ-Being and the whole significance of Christ becomes the central point of philosophy, and it thus becomes a very different thing from what the Western European conceptions are able to offer concerning it. The conception of Christ,—so far as it has been worked out in non-Anthroposophical circles, in which it is comprehended as living substance which, as a spiritual personality, is to work into the social life and the life of the States, which is felt as a Personality in Whose service man finds himself as ‘man with the Spirit-Self,’—this Christ-Personality is worked out in a wonderful, plastic manner in the various expositions Solovioff gives of St. John's Gospel and its opening words. Again it is only on the ground of Spiritual Science that a comprehension can be found of what is so profoundly understood by Solovioff in the sentence, ‘In the beginning was the Word, or the Logos,’ and so on, of how differently St. John's Gospel is understood by a philosophy, which can be felt as a germinating philosophy which points in a remarkable manner to the future. Although on the one hand it must be admitted that in the domain of philosophy Hegel's work represents a most mature fruit, something that is born from the Spiritual Soul as a very ripe philosophical fruit, on the other hand this philosophy of Solovioff is the germ in the Spiritual Soul for the philosophy of the Spirit-Self, which will be added in the sixth age of culture.

There is perhaps no greater contrast than that eminently Christian conception of the State which hovers as a great ideal before Solovioff as a dream of the future, that Christian idea of the State and the people, which takes everything it finds in order to offer it to the down-streaming Spirit-Self to hold it towards the future so that it may be Christianized by the powers of the future:—there is really no greater contrast than this conception by Solovioff of a Christian community in which the Christ-idea is still a future one,—and the conception of the divine State held by St. Augustine, who accepted, it is true, the Christ-idea, but constructed the State in such a way that it was still the Roman State; he took up Christ into the idea of the State given him by the Roman State. The essential point is, that which provides the knowledge for the Christianity which is growing on into the future. In Solovioff's State Christ is the blood which runs through all social life, and the essential point is that the State is thought of in all the concreteness of personality, so that it acts indeed as a spiritual being, but it will fulfill its mission with all the characteristic peculiarities of a personality. No other philosophy is so permeated by the Christ-idea,—the Christ-idea which shines forth to us from still greater heights in Anthroposophy,—and yet remaining only at the germinal stage.

Everything that we find in the East, from the general feeling of the people up to its philosophy, comes to us as something that bears only the germ of a future evolution within it, and that therefore had to submit to the special education of that Spirit of the Age whom we already know; for we have said that the Spirit of the Age of the ancient Greeks was given as an impulse to Christianity, and was entrusted with the mission of becoming later on the active Spirit of the Age for Europe. The national temperament which will have to develop the germs for the sixth age of civilization had not only to be educated but to be taken care of, from the first stages of its existence, by that Spirit of the Age. So that we may literally say,—whereby the ideas of Father and Mother lose their separate sense,—that the Russian temperament, which is gradually to evolve into the Folk-soul, was not only brought up, but was suckled and fed by that which, as we have seen, was formed out of the old Greek Spirit of the Age and then acquired another rank, outwardly.

Thus are the missions divided between Western, Central, Northern and Eastern Europe. I wished to give you an indication of these things. We shall work further on the foundations of these indications, and show what will distinguish the future of Europe, and also show that we must form our ideals from such knowledge. We shall show how through this influence the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-spirit gradually transforms himself into a Spirit of the Age.

Eight days ago I was allowed to speak to you about the esoteric core, about the spiritual contents of those great legends in which Central European thinking and feeling express themselves in the first third of the Middle Ages with the renewal of which Richard Wagner achieved something prophetic for our art at the same time. Today another legend type has to occupy us, two legends that Richard Wagner also renewed and which were made accessible to art significantly in our time. The Parzival and the Lohengrin legends should occupy us today. With both these legends we touch a land different from that was which occupied us eight days ago. I want to characterise in a few words once again, what takes, actually, the Siegfried and the Nibelungs legends up and what lives in them. The old spiritual experience of the ancestors expresses itself in the consciousness of the Central European population. This consciousness is sunken in the darkness of the time, and the usual sensory view has already substituted it in the epoch in which these legends originated. It was the old spiritual experience, which still lived like an echo, just as the world of the gods or legends.

The legends of the Nibelungs and of Siegfried are echoes of the ancient pagan time with its secret doctrines, with its views of the initiation of the old leaders of the people, and we have found Siegfried as such a great initiate of the Teutons. However, Lohengrin and Parzival are individualities of quite different type. We enter that time with them when Christianity, a worldview completely new to Central Europe, had spread out and won influence. Now the whole being of the newly emerging Christianity and everything that is connected as a result with it lives in these both legends, in the Parzival and in the Lohengrin legends. We want to imagine how the being of medieval-European development expresses itself in this legend world at first. We have emphasised eight days ago that to us the legends of Siegfried and the Nibelungs point to an ancient prehistoric time in which a kind of natural ties of love connected the single tribes, the single parts of the population. Something like an echo of this time is contained in that which Tacitus reports when he says that the Germans still revered an old tribal god at whom they looked up like at a father with whom they were connected by family ties, which extended to tribal communities.

The blood, the natural relationship gave that love. Every single tribe had such a tribal divinity that had a kind of ancestor again. This natural love is a result of the blood relationship, resting like a breath on these old times, and just the recollection of these old times and tribal communities, of this old love, based on blood relationship, is expressed in the legend type of the Nibelungs. We have seen that the legend type of the Song of the Nibelungs originated in a time in which the tribal love had already withdrawn. Something else replaced it: greed, everything that is symbolised by the gold that is connected with egoism and is based on it. The old love based on blood relationship was no longer authoritative, but new connections that were based on statutes, contracts and laws. This reversal is reflected in the legend of the Nibelungs.

Later, other aims replaced these old communities, which were based on gold, so to say, on possession and mere warlike knightly bravery, which were out for possession. Other ideals gradually appeared with Christianity. The inner being of Christianity maybe was nowhere expressed as magnificently and tremendously as in the legends into which we settle down bit by bit and in which the task of Christianity within Central Europe is represented allegorically: in the Lohengrin and Parzival legends.

What did Christianity have as its elixir of life? The absolute equality of all human beings. One felt Christianity that way at least at that time. One felt freedom, equality before the highest that the human being can imagine as the jewel, as the real mission of Christianity. The ancestors of the Teutons were proud of the name of their ancestors, of the name of a tribe or of a family name. They referred to it if they wanted to assign value to themselves in the world. They referred to the law, to titles and names in the time, which had superseded the family love. Now both should no longer be valid, but simply the human being had to be important who felt intrinsically in his core. The human being without title, without name was the Christian ideal. Something great was said with it. The Lohengrin and the Parzival legends express this.

How do both legends express this? If we take the Parzival legend, we need only to visualise the structure of the Parzival legend how it lived in the Middle Ages, lived in Wolfram von Eschenbach (~1170-~1220). We have to deal with a young person who grows on, torn out from any community, torn out from that which gave distinction and weight to the human beings at that time. The mother Herzeloide experienced that sufferings, pains could be connected with the old order that was based on titles, distinctions, and names. In the old order, her husband was led to the East where he had an accident. Now she wants to bring her son up far from all those things. He should know nothing about the striving of the worldly knights. However, one day he sees such worldly knights. There he decides to depart, and he starts hiking. We know that this hike leads him to two places that we must consider as something particularly important for the spiritual perception in the middle of the Middle Ages.

The first place to which the Parzival comes is the Round Table of King Arthur; the other place is the castle of the Holy Grail. What are these? In the Middle Ages one imagined the Round Table of King Arthur as a community from which all spiritual strength goes out for that which existed in the Middle Ages before the influence of Christianity as worldly knighthood, generally as all worldly. We come back to ancient times, to those times to which we could point already last time in the talk on the Song of the Nibelungs. We know that the Teutons, the ancestors of the German and Anglo-Saxon tribes took an area in possession that other tribes inhabited, the Celts in primeval times. The Celts: one only knows a little about them; history tells a little only about these past times of Europe in which these strange people had big influence which was pushed then by the invading Teutons to the west, but was also forced back there as people. The Celts were forced back as people. Their influence has remained. A spiritual sediment of this old Celtic time exists in Europe. In this Celtic time people still beheld clairvoyantly into the spiritual regions. Ideas of the spiritual world remained from that.

Among the Celts, the old clairvoyance was preferably home, the immediate consciousness that one could have experiences in the divine-spiritual world. The stories and dramatic actions are an echo of the instructions that the initiate Celtic priests gave to their pupils and via the pupils to the whole people. There we refer to those primeval times of Europe, when there were real initiates, initiates of the old Celtic paganism on European territory.

What I have told to you about the initiation of Siegfried, of Wotan and so on, all that leads back to the old initiations of the old Celtic priests. These old Celtic priests were of the same spirit as in ancient Egypt, in ancient Chaldea or ancient Persia the priest sages were as rulers. They were the rulers. Everything that happened in the world that belonged to the external organisation was done according to the instructions of the priest sages. Everything public, everything common was controlled by the wisdom of these original scholars of Europe.

King Arthur about whom one says that he withdrew with his Round Table to Wales and lived there was nothing else than the learnt lord of these sages who formed a spiritual centre, a kind of spiritual monarchy. One felt that this spiritual centre, I would like to say of “original scholars,” with his choice twelve companions was there. This has good reasons. Thus, one tells that King Arthur was nothing else than the successor of that directing scholar of the old Celtic priests in Wales. With it, we immediately recognise that there was something in Europe that we call a Grand Lodge in spiritual science.

Let us now realise the concept of a Grand Lodge. You know that we think seriously of development, that humanity develops, that humanity ascends higher and higher, that every single human being can ascend the path of knowledge up to those stages where he himself beholds into the spiritual worlds, where the primal ground behind the world manifests to him.

If we speak of the possibility of development of humanity, it is also not abstruse to realise that there are higher developed individualities in humanity already today who have run ahead of the remaining humanity and have walked the paths of knowledge and wisdom due to a life full of renunciation, so that they can be leaders of modern humanity. Today where one levels everything, where one does not want to recognise anything, where one talks of development, but does not want to believe in development, one does not accept this. However, in the times when one knew something of it one really spoke of the existing development.

According to a natural principle, we find twelve different forces of the spirit. I have said about Goethe that he himself talks about such a secret brotherhood that he considers as Rosicrucians. One spoke of such a Grand White Lodge in the Middle Ages. From this, the strands went out which controlled life. One recognised that who directed all that in King Arthur, who lived concealed in Wales. Around him were his knights who were, indeed, no longer at the height of the priests of the old Celtic time for whom the time of love had transformed into a time of egoism when one attempted to conquer countries with the sword in the hand. However, they were still under the guidance of the White Lodge.

Indeed, the question immediately suggests itself: if there are such lodges—also even today—, why do they not appear?—I have said often enough that it depends not only on the fact that somebody appears, but also on the fact that he can be recognised. Today also, Jesus would probably not be recognised. It is hard to recognise a sage within his time. It belongs just that to it which theosophy or spiritual science wants to bring again to humanity. If it finds its way, one understands such a thing as the Round Table of King Arthur, the directing white lodge.

This was the one: Arthur. The other is the castle of the Holy Grail. Only by way of a hint, we can deal with it. One says that the Holy Grail is the chalice in which once Christ Jesus with his disciples took the Last Supper, the wine, and in which his blood was then collected. Then the lance was also brought to Europe with which the side of Jesus was pierced. The chalice of the Holy Grail is on monsalvaesche (mons salvationis = mountain of salvation) where a holy castle was built up. The Holy Grail has the capacity to give everlasting youth, the force of everlasting life generally to somebody who is familiar with its miracles who lives with its sun of grace.

Again, these are twelve, but Christian spiritual knights now. The old Templars guard the Holy Grail, and they used the forces, which they suck from this guard to pour out the spiritual knighthood of the heart, of the inner life, over Europe. Thus, one countered the white lodge of the worldly knighthood that moved to Wales with the spiritual knighthood in the castle of the Holy Grail, which is placed on the Spanish mountain monsalvaesche.

Which task did the knights have who were in the castle of the Holy Grail? The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was not to make conquests, not to acquire external possession, not to appropriate seigneuries; their task was to make the conquest of the soul life. One tells to us about the treasure of the Nibelungs, about the gold as a symbol of possession, as an aim worth striving for by the Nibelungs, the Holy Grail is the spiritualised treasure of the Nibelungs, the treasure of the soul. What is the strength that goes out from the Holy Grail in reality? What do those twelve knights work who are in its castle? A spark of the divine lives in every human being, as often the theosophical worldview emphasises. The mystics of the Middle Ages had their great ideas in the same time in which also these legends originated. They spoke of the fact that the human being is a fourfold being. There is at first the external physical human being who lives here in this world who strives for possession who is on the lookout for gold. The second one is the mental human being who suffers and is glad who has instincts, desires, and sensations who must be gradually improved. The third human being is an even more internal one. He is a spiritual human being who attains admission to the spiritual world bit by bit. The innermost human being is the divine human being. This is that who today and this was felt in particular in the Middle Ages—is only in the earliest stages. To develop this disposition of the divine spark more and more, to raise the human being to the higher worlds, this one had aimed at in the initiation of the old paganism. One aims at this now within the Christian world in a new way. In addition, the Christian initiation was internalised.

You remember from the former talks how the initiation ceremonies were in the old times how the human being had to go through procedures that lifted out the internal soul from the physical body, so that the human being was enraptured to the higher world and could witness the qualities of the higher world. An external procedure belonged to it to go through all that. Christianity should bring an initiation that takes place only in the deepest inside, in the concealed sanctum of the soul. There the god should be searched for, the god, who brought salvation to Christianity by pouring his blood; every single human being in his soul should find this god. The single human being should really be able to attain that which Angelus Silesius, the great Christian mystic, later expressed with the words: “If you rise above yourself and allow God to prevail, then ascension takes place in your mind.” The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was to develop the internal vital spark in the human being.

The Holy Grail was nothing else than the deepest inside of the human nature, and it was something uniform because the internal human nature is a uniform one, because a life spent in the pursuit of wisdom raises hope that one could understand what is meant with the big unity, with the big divine spark. They were there as the brothers of the Holy Grail. Parzival wanted to find the way to the Holy Grail. The legend tells now that when he came to the Holy Grail, he found King Amfortas bleeding at that time. One had said to him to ask not much and nothing wrong. Hence, he did not ask for the wounds of the king and not for the meaning of the Holy Grail. That is why he is cast out. He should ask for the qualities of the Holy Grail and the wounds of the king. This belongs to the experiences that are to be done in the divine life that one must ask for it. He must long for it. The Holy Grail exists; one can find it, it is bestowed on everybody, but it does not impose itself. It does not come to us; we must feel the longing for the Holy Grail, the internal sanctum, the divine vital spark in the human soul. We must have the desire to ask for it. If the human soul has found the path up to the god, the god descends to it. The secret of the Holy Grail is the descent of the god who descends, if the human being develops up to the divine.

John the Baptist shows this following the baptism of Jesus: a dove came down and sat down on the head, and a voice spoke from heaven: “You are my beloved Son; in you I take delight” (Mark 1:11). The Holy Grail is shown in the figure of a dove allegorically.

Parzival was not yet ripe with his first visit in the Grail castle to experience what we have just described. When he felt cast out, something came to his soul that must come to every soul once if it should really become ripe for the last stages of knowledge. Doubt, disbelief, inner mental darkness come to Parzival's soul. Indeed, someone who wants to ascend to knowledge must go through the hard school of doubt once. Not before one has doubted and has gone through the tortures and everything that doubts may bring along, he has acquired that certainty in his inside that he will never lose knowledge again. Doubt is a bad brother, but a purifying brother. Parzival goes through these doubts now, and he brings himself to that knowledge which consists of something else than of intellectual knowledge. Richard Wagner expresses this knowledge with magnificent correctness, maybe not quite philosophically or psychologically correctly but analogously, while he calls Parzival (Parsifal) the “pure fool” who becomes knowing by compassion.

Thus, we come to the description of the way that someone has to go through who still has to struggle through to the stages of higher knowledge. You know that it is the path of the pupils and that one distinguishes there three stages. If anybody has acquired the qualities that constitute the preparatory path, if he has purified himself of the uncontrolled ideas and leads a pure life, then he becomes ripe for chelahood, then he becomes ripe to get the guru, the spiritual leader. The first stage of the path to higher knowledge consists of the fact that one learns to behave quite impartially to the world, to practice love without the slightest trace of any prejudice from the inside. Why do the human beings love in the usual life at first?

Because they have a blood relationship, because they have been connected by any ties for long. This is right. However, who wants to go the path of knowledge must penetrate to another form of love. Nothing that ties me together with a human being in a special way is allowed to prefer him regarding my love. I am only allowed to ask for that which is outside me. Has my brother or my brother-in-law any advantage? No! With it, I say nothing against the love for our relatives; it should concern only the traits of the human being. Even if he is quite foreign to us, we recognise that he is worthy of our love, then we love him like one who is connected with us for long. Such a human being is on the first level of chelahood. We call him the homeless human being because he has lost what one calls home in the ideal sense. This is also meant by the sentence you find in the New Testament: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine” (Luke 14:26). This sentence means the same, and one felt Christianity that way in Central Europe. No name and no title should give a preference of love. Someone who ascends the path of knowledge should found love for any human being on his innermost worthiness and value.

If the human being has climbed up the first steps of the path of knowledge, the hard moments of doubt come. While we get to know the world more and more and delve into love more and more, the more we also get to know the black and bad side of the world. These are the hard days of the initiates. The initiate struggles upwards bit by bit. Then there awakes that soul light which like an internal sun illuminates the spiritual things and beings. We see the objects round ourselves with eyes because the light shines on these objects. Actually, we see the rays only which are reflected by the objects to us. We do not see the spiritual things because no spiritual light shines on them.

However, who has advanced so far that the so-called kundalini light shines to him is on the second stage of the path of knowledge. Someone has arrived at the third stage who has succeeded in feeling his ego without preference, who does not esteem himself higher than other human beings, who finds his higher ego in the love to all beings. Who does no longer hope for his own selfish ego, but hears the properties of the beings speaking has arrived at the third stage of the path of knowledge. We call him a swan in the secret doctrine, and this is a term that is used all over the world where there is spiritual research.

What does this degree bring? It brings the effluxion about all beings. There we are no longer concluded like within a skin from the world. Foreign pain is our pain, foreign joy is our joy, and we live and are active in the whole existence. The whole earth belongs to us. We feel in everything. Then one does no longer know that one looks at the objects from the outside, then it is, as if one is in them, as if one had penetrated into them by love and thereby knows them. By compassion, by this empathy all knowledge has originated.

A hermit, Trevrizent, initiated Parzival in this wisdom. The fact that he is a hermit is typical. He is somebody who is lifted out of the remaining humanity who has really left everything behind: father, mother, brother, sister, and has become a disciple of that who does not know such differences. There Parzival is informed of the higher virtues, and there he becomes ripe for entering the castle of the Holy Grail and for asking which the miracles of the Holy Grail are. He is taken up; he releases the wounded Amfortas and becomes Grail King. An internal, human way, the way that the secret doctrine prescribes all over the world, transferred into the Christian, a way on which Parzival is described. Lohengrin belongs to the Grail Table. He is the son of Parzival. Whereas the passageway of the human being to the higher self is described in Parzival, a historical-social mission of the middle of the Middle Ages is described in Lohengrin.

Initiates led the medieval folk consciousness, it was not blind as the scholars imagine. This folk consciousness recorded an important epoch in the middle of the Middle Ages. What happens there? Briefly: an important historical event happened, the so-called urban civilisation started. The old feudal time experiences a mighty revolution. Whereas one dealt once only with land ownership, only with a rural population, now we see in Germany, France, Belgium, in Russia everywhere single cities originating. Cities are founded; one notes a jerk forward in the human development. What had happened there in these foundations of cities? The human beings were torn out from the connections to which they have belonged once. Everybody who felt enslaved went to the city. There he was on his own. There he was only as much worth as he could achieve. The bourgeoisie came into being in the middle of the Middle Ages. This mighty reversal is expressed in the legend of Lohengrin.

Whereas Parzival shows how the human being finds a higher ego in himself, how he dedicates himself to the pilgrimage to the higher ego, Lohengrin shows how the medieval folk goes through a tremendous epoch of human development, namely the human being is freed and his personality comes to light from the old organisations.

If we want to understand the connection of this historical event with the legend of Lohengrin, we have to know that in all mysticism this stage is symbolised by a female personality. Therefore, Goethe also spoke at the end of the second part of his Faust of the fact that the everlasting-female draws us upwards. This must not be interpreted trivially. In truth, the human soul is meant which pulls up the human being. In the general, the soul is shown as female and that which surrounds the human being from without as male. The striving soul is always shown as female.

In the secret doctrine, one knows that the great leaders of humanity, the initiates, further humanity always to a higher stage. Lohengrin is the herald of the Holy Grail. The medieval consciousness regards him as the great initiate leader who furthers humanity to a higher stage in the middle of the Middle Ages. He was the bringer of the urban civilisation, who inspired the bourgeoisie in its originating. This is the individuality of Lohengrin. Elsa of Brabant is nothing else than the symbol of the medieval folk soul which has again to make a developmental step forward under the influence of Lohengrin. This progress in the history of humanity is nicely and tremendously shown in the legend.

We have seen that the pupil initiated in the third degree is called a swan. The master who is deeply initiated rises higher, he rises into the transcendent world, in those worlds, to which the human consciousness does not extend. He knows everything that expresses itself in humanity only in his inside. One cannot ask him, where from you are, which name do you have?—It is the swan that brings him from even higher spheres. Hence, the swan brings Lohengrin into the epoch of urban civilisation. Look at the progress, which has been made in the old Hellenism. The gods in Greece are nothing else than deified initiates. Take Zeus, who consorts with Semele; from this affair Dionysus originates. The Greek culture arises from it. All great proceedings of humanity are shown in this way. Elsa should not ask for the name and origin of that who leads her and becomes her husband. It is with all great masters that way; they go unrecognized and unnoticed through humanity. If one asked them, they would be shooed away from humanity. It is necessary that they save the sanctum from profane looks and questions. This would be also the case if one gave people an understanding of the being of such an initiate. At such a moment, such a being would also disappear as Lohengrin also did. Lohengrin is called a son of Parzival. That means that the liberation of the medieval bourgeoisie took place under the influence of Christianity.

Thus, we look into the legends of the Middle Ages and see how nicely the facts of the spiritual life are expressed in both legends. The mission of Christianity for the medieval culture became with it the mission of the liberation of the human being from the earthly human body. This mission was shown in both legends. It worked on Richard Wagner in particular. He always tried to show the pure love that makes the human being clairvoyant. Already in 1856, he started a drama, called The Victors: a Jandala girl loves Ananda, a Brahmin young man. However, Ananda is far separated from the love of the Jandala girl because of the caste division. He is not allowed to pursue the love of the Jandala girl. He becomes a victor about his nature becoming a pupil of Buddha. As adherer of Buddha, he finds the victory, there he finds himself again, and there he overcomes the human affection. One tells that the Jandala girl was a Brahmin girl in a former life and rejected the love of a Jandala young man. Then she also becomes a victor and is spiritually united with Ananda, the Brahmin. Later, Wagner wanted to use the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in a drama.

He had in mind the complete inner nature of Christianity and the teaching of the free human being who is not bound to title and to anything else. The Holy Grail seeks in the inside of the human soul. In 1857, on Good Friday—Wagner tells—he faced a wonderful nature in Zurich. There something flowed out to him for a moment that expressed the whole mood in him that penetrated the whole knighthood and the Christian knighthood. He says to himself, like by an inspiration, at that day when Christ Jesus died, no one is allowed to bear weapons.

At that time, he realised the whole greatness of the figure of Parzival who attained knowledge becoming engrossed in humanity and in all beings. Now he resumes his incomplete piece The Victors in a Christian-modern way. He shows Parzival as somebody who leaves his home who knows nothing about names and titles, about ties and nothing of father and mother. He meets, on one side, the magic castle of Klingsor and the enchantress Kundry. Meeting Kundry he experiences the whole significance of the earthly sensuous life and what it means if the human being gets to know it only by desires. On the other side, he realises in that moment when Kundry kisses him that this sensuous appears in its true acceptation in the human being only if it is free of desires. Richard Wagner nicely shows the sensuousness free of desires how it is gained by the internal strength of the spirit, the Parzival spirit that he calls the Christian one. He shows how it is gained on one side by the Holy Grail and on the other side in the magic castle. On one side by overcoming it, on the other side by deadening it. These are two sides, which are used to ascend to the spirit. The ones deaden the sensuous living ascetically; they take the organs away from themselves in order not to become addicted to weakness.

The others remain human beings, they do not want to ascend to higher knowledge this way, but they want to develop the higher to a bigger strength in themselves. Parzival recognised this way as the right one. One has to become stronger as strong as the temptations may be. Then it is that time to be taken up in the Holy Grail. Now he asks correctly and is initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail, he is ripe for becoming the Grail King.

Wagner endeavours to show the Holy Grail. For years, he pursued studies, not academically, but fulfilled with artistic and visionary gifts. He pursued studies, while he complied with the spirit of the medieval legends, so that he really expresses that guidance caused by initiates of the Middle Ages where the old order is represented by Ortrud, the new order by the emerging consciousness of the people which wants to free itself. This consciousness, which the swans introduce, the chelas of the third degree, is symbolised quite appropriately by Elsa of Brabant and Lohengrin.

Wagner appropriately shows the greatness that is in it. The renewal of art was crucial to Wagner. He wanted to make something out of art again that came close to religion, he wanted to embody moods with his pieces of art that lead the human beings again to the divine by which he wanted to make the artists religious leaders. Wagner needed topics that led beyond the usual life. He also wanted to represent the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of love for humanity artistically. He felt deeply and seriously, how in the newer time the spirit of egoism, the spirit of the external possession, substituted the spirit of love. He describes that which developed as social order and with which he went along intensively and radically, as pursuit of gold, as a time the real Christian spirit of love must supersede again. He wanted to represent something like love flowing in a world where the gold rules in his music dramas with the means of the supernatural and divine living in the human being. Hence, he also resorts with these questions to the great legends of the Middle Ages. This lived in Richard Wagner.

You can realise how theosophy or spiritual science approaches with its view of the myths the art of Wagner. The theosophist realises above all that we have to see in the legends nothing else than pictures and expressions of great truth. The pictures of the development of the external life and the soul were given to the ancient peoples. In the Lohengrin legend, something is made clear, so that the human being knew what happens to him if he has arrived at certain stages. Truth is announced to people in such a way that they can grasp it. There were and there are tribes and peoples that can grasp the great truth only in legend form. Today we are no longer talking pictorially. Spiritual science contains the same truth that was put before the folk in magnificent legends, which Wagner tries to renew. Spiritual science speaks in another way, but what it lets stream into the world is the same spirit. Thus, we feel that not only that is true which Schopenhauer says that the great spirits like Plato and Spinoza, Buddha and Goethe, Giordano Bruno and Socrates, Hermes and Pythagoras understand each other, talk with each other, communicate mentally. Not only this is true, not only the choice individualities understand each other, but also that which lives as truth in the spirit of the people. This sounds together for a big historical sound of the spheres, and we feel this if today we realise what lives in the legends and myths, if we let it rise for the higher soul of the present. Truth lives at all times and expresses itself in the most various forms. If we penetrate into this truth, we understand how the peoples and times speak in these single forms, and we hear it echoing how in the manifold tones the one truth announces itself to all peoples, to all human beings.

Before we enlarge upon what will emerge from any further elaboration of the significant image of the Twilight of the Gods, it will be well to establish a firm foundation from which to proceed. For we shall deal with the nature of the Germanic and Scandinavian Folk Soul, and from the results of our investigation describe it in greater detail. We shall discover how the whole spiritual life of Europe works in concert, how the activity of the various Folk Spirits has furthered the development of mankind in the remote past, in the present and will continue to do so in the future. Every single people, even isolated fragments of peoples, have their special contribution to make to this great collective task. You will realize from what has been said that, in certain respects, the task, the mission of educating the ‘I’ through the evolutionary stages of the human being, of shaping it and of gradually developing it, devolved upon the Christian and post Christian cultures of Europe in particular. In primitive times, as we have shown in the case of the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples, the ‘I’ was revealed clairvoyantly to man. According to tradition this ‘I’ was bestowed upon man by an Angelic Being, Donar or Thor, who stands midway between man and the Folk Soul. We have seen that the individual still felt himself to be ego-less, devoid of personality; he looked upon the ‘I’ as a gift from the spiritual world.

In the East, when the ‘I’ really awoke, it was not of course experienced in the same way. There man had already reached subjectively such a high degree of perfection that he did not feel the ‘I’ as something extraneous, but as his own property. At the time when man became ego-conscious in the East, Eastern culture was already so far advanced that it was capable of gradually developing that finely-spun speculation, logic and wisdom which is reflected in Eastern wisdom. The East, therefore, no longer experienced the whole process of receiving the ego as if it were bestowed by a higher spiritual world through the instrumentality of a divine-spiritual Being such as Thor. That was the experience of Europe; hence the European felt this gradual unfolding of the individual ‘I’ as the emergence out of the Group Soul. The Germanic-Scandinavian man still felt himself attached to a Group Soul, to be a member of a closely-knit unit or family, that he belonged to an integrated community. For this reason, nearly a hundred years after Christ, Tacitus could describe the Teutons of Central Europe as apparently belonging to separate tribes and yet as members of an organism, and belonging to the unity of the organism. Thus each individual still felt himself at that time to be a member of the tribal ‘I’. He felt his individual ‘I’ gradually emerging from the tribal ‘I’ and be recognized in the God Thor the bestower of the ‘I’, the God who really endowed him with his individual ‘I’. But at the same time he felt that this God was still united with the collective spirit of the tribe with that which lives in the Group Soul. To this Group Soul was given the name “Sif “. This is the name of the spouse of Thor. Sif is related linguistically to the word Sippe, kinship, although the relationship is veiled or concealed. Occultly, however, Sif signifies the Group Soul of the individual community from which the individual emerges. Sif is the Being who unites herself with the God of the individual ‘I’, with Thor, the bestower of the individual ‘I’. The individual perceives Sif and Thor as the Beings who endowed him with his ‘I’. It was in this way that Nordic man experienced them at a time when the peoples in other regions of Europe had already been given other tasks in preparing man's ego-development.

Each individual people had its appointed task; chief amongst them was that homogeneous group of peoples, that widely distributed folk community whom we know by the name of Celts. It was the responsibility of the ancient Celtic Folk Spirit, who, as we know from earlier lectures, was later given quite different tasks, to educate the still youthful ‘I’ of the peoples of Europe. To this end it was necessary that the Celts themselves should receive an education and instruction which was mediated directly from the higher world. Hence it was entirely appropriate that through their Initiates, the Druid priests, the Celts should transmit to other nations instruction received from higher worlds and which they could not have acquired of themselves.

The whole of European culture is a legacy of the European Mysteries. The progressive Folk Souls are always the leaders of the collective culture of mankind as it unfolds. But at the time when these European Folk Spirits enjoined upon men to act more on their own initiative it was necessary that the Mysteries should gradually withdraw. Hence with the withdrawal of the Celtic element there followed a gradual withdrawal of the Mysteries into more secret places. At the time of the ancient Celts the Mysteries established a much more direct relationship between the spiritual Beings and the people, because the ‘I’ was still attached to the group-soul-life and yet the Celtic element was to bring the gift of the ‘I’ to the other Germanic tribes. Thus in the period preceding the evolution proper of the Northern and Germanic peoples, the Mystery teachings could be given to European civilization only by the ancient Celtic Mysteries. These Mystery teachings allowed just so much to be revealed as was necessary in order to establish a basis for the whole culture of Europe. Now the most diverse Folk Souls and Folk Spirits were able to draw nourishment from this old culture by mingling with the widely diverse racial fragments, national communities and folk elements, and they brought the ‘I’ into ever new situations in order to nurture it, the ‘I’ which was struggling to free itself from its attachment to the group-soul.

After the old Greek culture had to a certain extent reached its high point in the fulfillment of its special mission, we see a totally different aspect of this same mission in the spirit of ancient Rome and its various stages of culture. We have already mentioned that the several post-Atlantean civilizations follow upon one another in strict sequence. If we wish to have an overall picture of the successive stages of post-Atlantean civilization we may summarize them as follows: the old Indian culture worked upon the human etheric body. Hence the remarkable wisdom and clairvoyant insight of the ancient Indian culture, because—after the development of special human capacities—it was a culture reflected in the human etheric body. We may envisage the ancient Indian Culture somewhat as follows:

Between the Atlantean epoch and the later post-Atlantean epoch the Indian Folk Spirit developed to the full his inner soul-forces without developing ego-consciousness. He then returned to his activity in the etheric body. The essential element in the ancient Indian culture is that the ancient Indian was able to return again to the etheric body with his highly developed, highly refined faculties of soul and within that body he developed those marvelously delicate forces the later reflection of which we can still see in the Vedas, and in a still more refined form in the Vedanta philosophy. This was only possible because the Indian Folk Soul had achieved a high degree of development before it was conscious of the ‘I’, and this again at a time when man could perceive by means of the forces of the etheric body.

The Persian Folk Soul had not developed so far; its organ of perception was limited to the sentient body or astral body. The Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean culture was again different. Here the organ of perception was the Sentient Soul; and the characteristic of the Egypto-Chaldean culture was the ability to work in the Sentient Soul. The Graeco-Latin Folk Spirit was related to the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in which he was active. He himself was only able to work upon this Intellectual Soul because the Intellectual Soul, in its turn, had a kind of psychic counterpart in the etheric body. But the form of cosmogony that now emerged in Greece was, to some extent, less real, less clear-cut; it had less the stamp of reality. Whilst the form of cognition in the ancient Indian culture was directly related to the activity of the etheric body, the Greek culture presented a blurred, pale, lifeless image of reality; as I have already said, it was like the memory of what these people had once experienced, like a memory reflected in their etheric body.

In the other peoples who followed the Greeks we are chiefly concerned with the use of the physical body for the progressive development of the Spiritual Soul (or Consciousness-Soul). Hence the Greek culture was a culture that we can only understand from within, if we realize that in this culture what is important in external experience is that which springs from the inner life of the Greeks. On the other hand, the peoples living more towards the West and the North had, under the guidance of their Folk Souls, to turn increasingly towards the external world, towards the phenomena of the physical plane, and to develop whatsoever has a part to play on that plane. This was the special task of the Northern and Germanic peoples which they alone could fulfil, because they still enjoyed the gift, the supremely important gift of the old clairvoyance which enabled them to see into the spiritual world and to incorporate the primeval spiritual experiences which were still vital in their souls into that which was to be established upon the physical plane.

There was one people who, at its later stage, no longer possessed this gift, who had not undergone such preliminary evolution and who had incarnated suddenly on the physical plane before the birth of the human ‘I’ and was only able therefore to attend to whatsoever furthered the development of this ‘I’ on the physical plane, to whatsoever was necessary for its well-being there under the guidance of its Folk Soul, its Archangel. This was the Roman people. Everything that the Roman people had to accomplish for the collective mission of Europe under the guidance of its Folk Spirit was directed to winning recognition for the ‘I’ of man. Hence the Roman people was able to develop human and social relationships. They were the founders of civil law and jurisprudence which are built up purely on the ‘I’. The relation of human ‘I’ to human ‘I’ was the great question in the mission of the Roman people. The Western peoples whose civilizations grew out of the Roman civilization already possessed more of that which, coming from the Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul and from the Spiritual or Consciousness-Soul itself, fructifies the ‘I’ in some way and projects it outward into the world. Therefore all the mingling of races which external history records and which is found in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, in France and Great Britain today, was necessary in order to develop the ‘I’ on the physical plane in accordance with the different nuances of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Spiritual Soul. Such was the great mission of those peoples who gradually developed in the most diverse ways in Western Europe.

All the individual shades of culture, all the particular missions of the peoples of Western Europe can finally be explained by the fact that in the area of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas was to be developed that which could be formed in the ‘I’ through the impulses of the Sentient Soul. If you study the individual folk characters in their positive and negative aspects you will find that the peoples of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas reflect a peculiar fusion of the ‘I’ with the Sentient Soul. You will be able to understand, however, the peculiar characteristics of those peoples who, until recent times, lived on the soil of France, if you study the growth and fusion of the Intellectual Soul with the ‘I’. The great worldwide achievements of a country such as Great Britain can be attributed to the fact that the impulse of the Spiritual Soul has penetrated into the human ‘I’. With the world mission of the British Empire is also associated parliamentary forms of government and the founding of constitutional rights. The union of the Spiritual Soul with the human ego had not yet been realized inwardly. If you recognize how this union between the Spiritual Soul and the ‘I’ that was oriented outwards originated, you will find that the great historical conquests of the inhabitants of that island proceed from this impulse. You will also find that the establishment of parliamentary forms of government at once becomes comprehensible if one realizes that, in consequence of this, an impulse of the Spiritual Soul was to find expression on the plane of world-history.

Thus cultural diversities were a necessity, for the individual peoples had to be guided through the many stages of ego development. If we had sufficient time to enlarge upon these matters we could find examples from history which show the ramifications of these basic forces and how they manifest in the most diverse ways. Thus the peculiar constitution of soul influenced the Western peoples who had not preserved the direct, original memory of the old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world of former times. In the Germanic and Northern regions in later times, that which proceeded directly from a gradual, continuous evolution of the original clairvoyance with which the Sentient Soul had already been imbued, had to develop in a wholly different way. This accounts for that characteristic trait of inwardness which is only the after-effect of a clairvoyant insight experienced in a former age. The task of the Southern Germanic peoples lay primarily in the domain of the Spiritual Soul. The Graeco-Latin age had to develop the Intellectual Soul (or Mind-Soul). But not only this; it had also to include a wonderful development still working in from prehistoric times and imbued with clairvoyant insight. All this was then poured into the Spiritual Soul of the Central European and Scandinavian peoples and its after-effects lived on as an inner disposition of soul. It was the task of the Southern Germanic peoples to develop first of all what pertains to the inward preparation of the Spiritual Soul, imbuing it with spiritual substance of the old clairvoyance, transposed now on to the physical plane.

The philosophies of Central Europe represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the nineteenth century seem far removed from the sphere of mythology. Nevertheless they are simply the products of the highest sublimation of the old clairvoyant insight, of the cooperation of the divine-spiritual Beings within the heart of man. Otherwise it would not have been possible for a Hegel to have looked upon his ideas as realities; it would have been impossible for him to make the strange remark, so characteristic of the man, when, in answer to the question, “What is the abstract?” he replied: “The abstract is for instance an individual who fulfils his daily duties—the carpenter, for example.” What is concrete to the purely abstract theorist was therefore abstract to Hegel. What to the purely abstract theorist are mere thoughts, were to him great, mighty architects of the world. Hegel's philosophy is the final, the most highly sublimated expression of the Spiritual Soul and embodies in the form of pure concepts that which Nordic man still saw as sensible-super-sensible, divine spiritual powers associated with the ‘I’. The ‘I’ of Fichte's philosophy was simply the precipitation of what the God Thor had given to the human soul, only viewed from the standpoint of the Spiritual Soul and clothed seemingly in the barest of thoughts, the thought of “I am”, which is the starting-point of Fichte's philosophy. From the gift of the ‘I’ by the God Thor or Donar to the ancient Nordic peoples from the spiritual world, down to this philosophy, evolution follows a straight line. Thor had to prepare this development for the Spiritual Soul in order that this Soul might have the content appropriate for its task which is to turn towards the external world and to work within that world. But this philosophy is aware not only of the external world of crude empiric experience, but finds in the external world the content of the Spiritual Soul itself and regards nature simply as the idea in its other aspect. The mission of the Nordic Germanic peoples in Central Europe is to ensure that this impulse lives on.

Now since all evolution is a continuous process we must ask ourselves what form it takes. When we look back into ancient times we observe a remarkable phenomenon. We have already said that the first manifestations of ancient Indian culture were expressed through the etheric body after the spiritual forces of soul had been adequately developed. There are however other civilizations which have also preserved the old Atlantean culture and carried it over into the post-Atlantean epoch. Whilst, on the one hand, the ancient Indian was able to return to the etheric body with highly developed faculties of soul and out of the forces of this body created his great civilization and lofty spiritual life, we have, on the other hand, a culture which originated in Atlantis and continued to work on in the post-Atlantean epoch, a culture which owes its origin and development to its emphasis upon the other aspect of the consciousness of the etheric body. This is the Chinese culture. If you bear this connection in mind and remember that the Atlantean culture was directly related to what in our earlier lectures we called the “Great Spirit”; you will understand the peculiarities of Chinese culture. This culture was directly connected with the highest stages of world-evolution. But it still works into the bodies of men today and from an entirely different angle. It seems very likely, therefore, that these two civilizations, the two great polarities of the post-Atlantean epoch, will clash at some future time—the Indian which, within certain limits, is capable of development, and the Chinese that isolates itself and remains static, repeating what existed in the old Atlantean epoch. One literally receives an occult, scientific, poetic impression if one follows the evolution of the Chinese Empire, if one thinks of the Great Wall of China which sought to exclude completely everything which originated in primeval times and had been developed in the post-Atlantean epoch. Something like an occult, poetic feeling steals over one if one compares the Wall of China with what had once existed in former times. I can give only the barest indications about these matters. If you compare them with the existing findings of science you will find how extraordinary illuminating they are. Let us consider clairvoyantly the old continent of Atlantis which will be found where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, between Africa and Europe on the one side and America on the other. This continent was encircled by a warm stream which, strange as it may seem, was seen clairvoyantly to flow from the South through Baffin Bay towards the North of Greenland, encircling it. Then, turning eastward, it gradually cooled down. Long before the continents of Russia and Siberia had emerged, it flowed past the Ural mountains, changed course, skirted the Eastern Carpathians, debauched into the region now occupied by the Sahara and finally reached the Atlantic Ocean in the neighbourhood of the Bay of Biscay. Thus it followed a strictly delimited course. Only the last remaining traces of this stream are still extant. This stream is the Gulf Stream which at that time encircled the Atlantean continent. Now you will recall that in their psychic life the Greeks experienced a memory of the spiritual worlds. The picture of Oceanus which is a memory of that Atlantean epoch arose within them. Their picture of the world, their cosmogony, was very near the truth because it was derived from the old Atlantean epoch. The stream that flowed southward via Spitzbergen as a warm current and gradually cooled, etc. followed a strictly delimited course. This circumscribed course was unmistakably echoed in the Chinese culture, a culture circumscribed by the Great Wall and which had been brought over from Atlantis. The Atlantean civilization had as yet no history; hence the Chinese civilization also has preserved an element of the unhistorical. It preserves something of the pre Indian culture, something surviving from old Atlantis.

Let us now describe the further progress of the Germanic and Nordic Folk Spirit. What consequences will ensue when a Folk Spirit so directs his people that the Spirit Self in particular can develop? Let us remember that the etheric body was developed in the ancient Indian epoch, the sentient body in the Persian, the Sentient Soul in the Egypto-Chaldean, the Intellectual Soul (or Mind-Soul) in the Graeco-Latin, the Spiritual Soul (or Consciousness-Soul) in our present epoch which is not yet concluded. The next epoch will see the invasion of the Spiritual Soul by the Spirit Self, so that the Spirit Self shall irradiate the Spiritual Soul. This is the task of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization and must be prepared for gradually. This civilization which must be preeminently a receptive one, for it must reverently await the influx of the Spirit Self into the Spiritual Soul, is being prepared by the peoples of Western Asia and their outposts in Eastern Europe, the Slavonic peoples. The latter with their Folk Souls were the outposts of the coming sixth post-Atlantean epoch for the very good reason that future contingencies must to a certain extent be prepared beforehand, must already be anticipated in order to prepare the ground for future development. It is extremely interesting to study these outposts of a Folk Soul who is preparing himself for future epochs. This accounts for the peculiar character of the Slavonic peoples who are our immediate Eastern neighbours. In the eyes of the Western European their whole culture gives the impression of being in a preparatory stage and in a curious way, through the medium of their outposts, they present that which in spirit is wholly different from any other mythology. We should give a false impression of these Eastern outposts as a future’ civilization if we were to compare them with the culture of the Western European peoples who enjoy a continuous, unbroken tradition which is still rooted in, and has its source in the old clairvoyance. The peculiarity attaching to the souls of these Eastern European peoples is reflected in the whole attitude they have always shown when the question of their relations to the higher worlds arose. In comparison with our ‘mythology’ in Western Europe with its individual deities, their (i.e. the Slavonic peoples) relation to the higher worlds is totally different. What this Slavonic ‘mythology’ presents to us as the direct outpouring of the inner being of the people may be compared to the anthroposophical conception of successive planes or worlds through which we prepare ourselves to understand a higher spiritual culture. We find in the East, for example, the following conception: the West has been moulded by the influence of successive and related cultures. In the East we find, in the first place, a distinct consciousness of a world of the Cosmic Father. Everything that is creatively active in air and fire, in all the elements in and above the Earth, is embodied in the concept of the Heavenly Father, in one seemingly great, all-embracing idea which is at the same time an all-embracing feeling. Just as we think of the Devachanic world as fructifying our Earth, so this Divine world, the world of the Father, draws nigh from the East, fructifying that which is experienced as the Mother, the Spirit of the Earth. We have no other expression and can think of no other way of picturing the whole Spirit of the Earth than in the fertilization of Mother Earth. Instead of individual deities we have then two contrasting worlds. And confronting these two worlds as a third world is that which we feel to be the Blessed Child of these two worlds. This Blessed Child is not an individual being, not an emotional feeling, but something that is the creation of the Heavenly Father and the Earth Mother. The relation of Devachan to the Earth is perceived in this way from the spiritual world. The birth of new life, the coming of springtime, and that which grows and multiplies in the material body is felt as something wholly spiritual; and that which grows and multiplies in the soul is perceived as the world which at the same time is felt to be the Blessed Child of the Heavenly Father and the Earth Mother. Universal as these conceptions are, we find them among the outposts of the Slavonic peoples who have advanced westwards. In no Western European mythology is this conception so universal. In the West we find clearly defined deities; but they are not the same as those which we depict in our spiritual cosmogony; these are more nearly represented by the Heavenly Father, the Earth Mother and the Blessed Child of the East. In the conception of the Blessed Child there is again a world which permeates another world. It is a world that is envisaged as a separate world because it is associated with the physical sun and its light. The Slavonic element also recognizes this Being—though different, of course, in conception and feeling—which we have so often met with in Persian mythology; it recognizes the Sun Being who sheds his blessings upon the other three worlds, so that the destiny of man is woven into creation, into the Earth, through the fertilization of the Earth Mother by the Heavenly Father and through that which the Sun Spirit weaves into both these worlds. A fifth world is that which embraces everything spiritual. The Eastern European feels the spiritual world underlying all the forces of nature and all animate beings. We must think of this as a wholly different sentient response, as associated more perhaps with the phenomena, creations and beings of nature.

We must think of this Slavonic soul as being able to see entities in natural phenomena, to see not only the physical and sensory aspects, but also the astral and spiritual. Hence the Slavonic soul conceived of a vast number of Beings in this strange spiritual world which we can at best compare with the world of the Elves of Light. The spiritual world which is looked upon in Spiritual Science as the fifth world is approximately the world which dawns in the hearts and minds of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Whatever name we attach to it is of no importance; what is of importance are the subtle shades and gradations of feelings of the Slavonic peoples and that the concepts which characterize this fifth plane or spiritual world are to be found in Eastern Europe. In this frame of mind this world of Eastern Europe was preparing for that Spirit which is to pour the Spirit Self into man in anticipation of the epoch when the Spiritual Soul shall be uplifted to receive the Spirit Self in the sixth post Atlantean age which is to succeed our own. We meet with this in a unique manner not only in the creations of the Folk Souls who are as I have just described them, but we find it remarkably anticipated in the diverse manifestations of Eastern Europe and its culture.

It is most interesting to observe bow the Eastern European expresses his natural receptivity to pure Spirit by assimilating Western European culture with great devotion, thus looking forward prophetically to the time when he will be able to unite something even greater with his being. Hence also his limited interest in isolated aspects of this Western European culture. He absorbs what is offered him more in broad outlines, ignoring the details, because he is preparing himself to assimilate that which is to enter mankind as the Spirit Self. It is particularly interesting to see how, under this influence, it has been possible for Eastern Europe to develop a much more advanced conception of the Christ than Western Europe, except in those areas of the West where the conception of the Christ has been introduced by Spiritual Science. Amongst those who do not accept the teachings of Spiritual Science the most advanced conception of Christ is that of the Russian philosopher, Solovieff. His conception of Christ is such that it can only be understood by students of Spiritual Science because he lifts it to ever higher planes and reveals its infinite potentialities, showing that our understanding of Christ today is only a beginning, because the Christ Impulse has only been able to reveal to mankind a fraction of what it holds in store. But if we look at the conception of Christ as presented by Hegel, for example, we find that Hegel understood Him as only the most refined, the most sublimated Spiritual Soul could understand Him. But Solovieff's conception of Christ is very different. He fully recognizes the dual nature of this conception. He rejects the endless theological polemics which in reality rest upon deep misunderstandings, because ordinary conceptions are inadequate for an understanding of the dual nature of Christ, and because they fail to develop in us any realization that the two aspects, the Human and the Divine, must be clearly distinguished. The concept of Christ rests upon a clear realization of what took place when the Christ Spirit entered into the man Jesus of Nazareth who had already developed all the necessary attributes. We must first of all understand the two natures of Christ and the union of both at a higher stage. As long as we have not grasped this duality, we have not understood the Christ in all His fullness. Only that philosophical understanding can achieve this which foresees that man himself will participate in a culture in which his Spiritual Soul will be able to receive the Spirit Self, so that in the sixth epoch of civilization man will feel himself to be a duality in whom the higher nature will curb the lower.

Solovieff carries this duality into his conception of Christ and emphasizes that this conception can be meaningful only if one accepts the existence of a divine and human nature which can only be understood if one recognizes that their cooperation is a reality, that they form not an abstract, but an organic unity. Solovieff already recognizes that we must think of this Being as possessing two centres of will. If you accept the teachings of Spiritual Science concerning the true significance of the Christ Being in their original form which stemmed, not from an imaginary, but from a spiritually real Indian influence, you will then have to think of Christ as having developed in His three bodies the capacities of feeling, thinking and willing. It is a human feeling, thinking and willing into which the Divine feeling, thinking and willing descends. The European man will only assimilate this completely when he has risen to the sixth stage of civilization. This had been prophetically expressed in Solovieff's anticipatory conception of Christ which announces the dawn of a later civilization. This philosophy of Eastern Europe therefore reaches far beyond that of Hegel and Kant, and in the presence of this philosophy one suddenly senses the first stirrings of a later development. It is far in advance because this conception of Christ is felt to be a prophetic anticipation, the dawn of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization. Consequently the whole Christ Being, the whole significance of Christ occupies a central place in philosophy and thus becomes totally different from the Western European conceptions of it. The conception of Christ, in so far as it has been developed outside Spiritual Science and is conceived as a living substance, as a living spiritual entity which shall permeate all social life and social institutions—which is felt as a Personality in whose service man finds himself as ‘man endowed with Spirit Self’—this Christ-Personality is portrayed in a wonderfully concrete manner in Solovieff's various expositions of St. John's Gospel and its opening words. Only if we stand upon the ground of Spiritual Science can we comprehend Solovieff's profound interpretation of the sentence, “In the Beginning was the Word or Logos”, and how differently St. John's Gospel is understood by a philosophy which in a remarkable way anticipates the future.

If, on the one hand, Hegel's philosophy marks a high point, something that is born out of the Spiritual Soul as the highest philosophical achievement, this philosophy of Solovieff, on the other hand, provides the seed in the Spiritual Soul for the philosophy of the Spirit Self which will be incorporated in the sixth cultural epoch. There is perhaps no greater contrast than that eminently Christian conception of the State which hovers as a great ideal before Solovieff as a dream of the future, that Christian conception of the social State which takes everything implicit in that conception in order to present it as an offering to the in-streaming Spirit Self, in order to hold it up as an ideal of the future to be Christianized by the powers of the future—there is indeed no greater contrast than this idea of Solovieff's of a Christian community in which the Christ conception lies wholly in the future and the Divine State of St. Augustine who accepts, it is true, the Christ idea, but whose Divine State is simply the Roman State with Christ incorporated in the Roman idea of the State. What provides the knowledge for the emergent Christianity of the future is the decisive question. In Solovieff's State Christ is the blood which circulates in the body social, and the essential point is that the State is envisaged as a concrete personality so that it will act as a living spiritual entity, but at the same time will fulfil its mission with all the idiosyncrasies of a personality. No other philosophy is so deeply permeated by the Christ idea—the Christ idea which is anticipated in Spiritual Science at a higher level—and yet at the same time has remained so long in the germinal stage. Everything that we find in the East, from the make-up of the people to its philosophy, appears to us as something which contains only the germinal beginning of a future evolution and which, therefore, had also to submit to the special education of the Time Spirit of ancient Greece, the guiding Spirit of exoteric Christianity who was entrusted with the mission of becoming later on the Time Spirit for Europe. The make-up of this people whose task will be to develop the seed of the sixth culture-epoch had from the very beginning to be not only educated, but nursed and nurtured by that Time Spirit. And so we can literally say—and here Father concept and Mother concept lose their dual aspect—that the make-up of the Russian people which is destined to evolve gradually into the Folk Soul, was not only educated, but was nursed and nurtured by that which as we have seen, had been developed out of the old Greek Time Spirit and had then assumed externally another rank.

Thus the various missions are distributed between Western, Central, Northern and Eastern Europe. I wished to give you an indication of these various missions. On the basis of these indications I propose to add further observations and show what the Europe of the future will be like, a future that will ensure that we must form our ideals on the basis of such knowledge. I propose to show how, through this influence, the Germanic and Nordic Folk Spirit is gradually transformed into a Time Spirit.

It is only necessary to mention one of all the facts which speak to the same purpose, in order to see what far-reaching changes preceded the fifth century. At the end of the fourth century we find the Visigoths east of the Danube; a century later the map shows them in Spain. And just as this race travelled from one end of Europe to the other, so did many more. They penetrated into countries where they met with different civilisations, and adopted other customs. To understand the revolution which a hundred years produced in Central Europe, we must cast a glance back to the previous historical epochs. If we follow the records of the Romans, we find warlike tribes along the Rhine, whose main occupation, apart from fighting, was the chase. Farther east we find agriculture and cattle raising among the Germani; and farther still the Romans speak of the tribes in the northeast as of something nebulous and obscure.

We are told that this race, which dwelt by the sea, worshipped the Sun, believing that it saw the Sun goddess rising from the ocean. Of the Semnones, who lived in the Electorate of Bradenburg, it is told that their divine service was characterised by blood sacrifices. True, with them it was not, as a rule, human beings, but animals, that were offered up to the Gods. Nevertheless their sacrificial services bore a reputation for cruelty, which distinguished them from other tribes. And there would be much besides to relate concerning this epoch.

Then followed a comparatively quiet time.

Gradually the frontiers of the Roman Empire were crossed by various tribes. To begin with, in the third century the Burgundians advanced against the Roman Empire in the southwest, and farther north the Franks, who invaded Gaul. Farther east, too, on the Danube, other tribes moved against the Roman Empire. Thus the Romans, with their highly developed culture, had to defend themselves againse those peoples. We find here a great difference in levels of culture. Among the Germani everywhere, a system of barter still prevailed, among the Romans money transactions had been developed. Trade among the Germani was a matter of exchange; trading with money was still unknown to them. We see the clash of highly developed culture with barbaric tribes.

Then the Huns broke in. In the year 375 occurred the first clash with the Herulern and the Ostrogoths, whose dwelling place was on the Black Sea. They were forced westwards, and consequently the Visigoths were also obliged to break up their settlements. Where were they to go but into the Roman Empire, which they inundated as far as the Danube. Already the Roman Empire was split into an East and West Empire, the former with Byzantium, the latter with Rome, as its capital. The East Roman ruler assigned dwelling places to the Visigoths; but they nevertheless first had to fight for them at the battle of Adrianople. There, in that neighbourhood, Ulfils wrote his translation of the Bible. Soon, however, the Visigoths were obliged to resume their wanderings. Slavonic tribes followed in their footsteps, pressing them farther westward. Under their king Alarich, they conquered Rome, and, in the fifth century, founded the Visigothic Empire in Spain.

The Ostrogoths followed them, and likewise sought to establish a dwelling place in the domain of the Roman Empire. The Germanic tribe of Vandals conquered Spain, then sailed over to Africa, and, in the region where Carthage once stood, founded a Vandal Empire, and thence harassed Rome with incursions. Thus the whole character of these races is such, that into every part of the new configuration of Christian Rome, the Germanic races pressed. From this type of conquest new configurations of quite a special character arose.

In the domain of the former Gauls, rose a mighty empire—the empire of the Franks—which, for a whole century, imprinted its stamp on Central Europe. Within it, above all grew up what is commonly called Roman Christianity. Those other races—Goths, Vandals—who, in rapid triumphal marches, had subdued for themselves parts of the Roman Empire, soon disappeared again, completely, out of History. With the Franks we see a mighty empire extending over Europe. What is the reason for this?

To find that out, we must cast a glance at the way in which these tribes extended their empire. It was done in this way: a third, or two-thirds, of the region which they had invaded, was divided among the conquerors. Thus the leaders received great tracts of land, which they cultivated for themselves. For this work the conquered inhabitants were employed; a part of the population became slaves, or unfree. This was the policy of the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy. You may suppose that, under the existing circumstances where the population lived at a high level of culture, this mode of procedure caused great hardship and could not be permanently maintained.

It was different in Gaul.

There, there were great forests and uninhabited tracts of land. There, too, the conquered regions were divided, and large portions fell to the leaders, so that the leaders became great landowners, and rulers over the vanquished tribes. Here, however, they were not trammelled by already existing circumstances; there was room for expansion. And, although the leaders became rulers, circumstances made it possible for this to happen without great oppression. In the days before folk migrations, members of one tribe had, in essentials, resembled one another. Freedom was a common Germanic possession; in a certain sense, every man was his own master, responsible to no one, on his own land and soil. The independence and power of the leaders increased, because so many had become dependent on them.

Hence, they were in a position to protect themselves better; and small proprietors placed themselves under the protection of greater. Thus arose a protective relationship of the powerful towards the less powerful. Many small feuds were carried on by many small landowners who could not adequately protect themselves, in dependence upon more powerful protectors. Some swore fealty in case of war; others relinquished parts of their property, or paid tribute to their protectors. Such dependents were called vassals. Others held land under feudal tenure from the big proprietors, as payment for their service in case of war; this was the fief. The powerful warriors were feudal lords, the others were vassals. Thus, in the most natural way in the world, proprietary relationships grew up.

The invasions of the Goths had no lasting effect. Those peoples who had forced their way into civilised lands, came to nothing; their power was soon broken.

It was different in Gaul. Here, where extensive tracts had still to be cleared, the immigration of new tribal masses could only be welcomed, in the interest of culture. The great men in the Empire of the Franks were unimpeded in the cultivation of their racial character.

The Goths and Vandals were wiped out, they and all the Germanic tribes who came into the regions where industry was already developed. We see the Franks as independent of an industrial foundation; and the Franks gave their impress to the character of the ensuing age, especially because they provided a base upon which evolving Christianity was able to expand. Although the Visigoths were originally Aryan Christians, other ideas were engrafted into their belief; among the industrial assumptions which were foreign to their nature, that was developed which may be regarded as the stamp of materialistic conditions. It was not so among the Frankish tribes, where the Church was the great landowner. Undaunted by material considerations, these abbots, bishops, priests and theologians devoted themselves to the service of religion. Unalloyed, as it emanated from the nature of these men, the characteristic culture of this form of Christianity was developed. The spiritual strivings of the free ranks were encouraged by the influx of the Celtic element. The Celts, whose fiery blood again manifested itself, became the teachers and leaders of the spiritually less active Franks. From Scotland and Ireland came Celtic monks and priests in great numbers, to spread their faith among the Franks.

All this made it possible for Christianity to be, at that time, not a mirror of external conditions, but to develop freely, unconstrained by material considerations. The conditions of Central Europe were determined by Christianity. All the knowledge of antiquity was thus preserved by Christianity for the Germanic tribes. Aristotle gave the spiritual kernel, which Christianity sought to grasp. At that time there was no dependence on Rome. The Christian life could develop freely in the Empire of the Franks. Plato's world of ideas found entrance too into this spiritual life. This was brought about especially through the influence of Scottish monks, above all through Scotus Erigene in his work De Divisioni Naturae, a work which is well-known as indicating a high level of spiritual life. Thus we see how spiritual life was being formed, unhindered by external conditions. Spiritual currents received their characteristic independently of industrial conditions. Later when the material pressure increased they accepted, retrospectively, the character of these conditions; then, however, when they themselves joined them, they exercised influence on them in their turn.

Several small kingdoms formed what we know as the Merovingian Empire, which later came under the power of one ruler.

From the foregoing description you will see that southern Christianity was bound to be different from that with which it was later amalgamated. The Christianity of the Franks was comparatively independent, and could make use of political relationships, to its own advantage. The farther the Roman rule was pressed back, the more clerics came from among the Franks. Their education lagged far behind that of the other clergy; the learned priests and monks were all Celts.

In these centuries, therefore, the most divine tribes were gradually shaken up together; the invasion of the Huns gave rise to these changes While that which has been described was taking shape within the actual currents of civilisation, great struggles had been going on outside. But what we call the evolution of civilisation was not essentially affected by these external struggles.

The Huns had penetrated far to the west; if we are not blind to what the old legends relate, we know that they pushed as far as the south of France.

In the old heroic poem of Walther on der Vogelweide, handed down to us in a Latin translation, we are told how the princes of the Germanic tribes, the Burgundians and Franks, had to scourge the Huns, among them that Walther, son of the prince of a Germanic tribe, who ruled in Aquitania. This heroic song narrates the feats of Walther, Hagen and Gunther. In continuous succession followed incursions of the Huns, harassing the Germanic races far into the west, until eventually the Franks, the Goths and what was left of the Roman race, formed the force which opposed the Huns in battle on the Catalaunian Plain in the year 451. This is the first defeat that the Huns suffered. Their rule, however, which had weighed heavily upon the peoples, left no lasting impression.

In manners and customs the Huns were so alien to the people of Europe, that their whole type and form is described as something quite peculiar. An important point was that this race formed a compact unity; a submissiveness, amounting to idolatry, under their king, Attila, made them an irresistible terror to other races. After their defeat on the Catalaunian Plain, this army received its last decisive defeat through Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome, who withstood Attila, and induced him to retreat. Leo knew the power which Attila exercised over his people. But with all his power Attila did not know what was opposing him, namely, Christianity; therefore he bowed before it.

The rule of the Huns remained merely an episode; what came from the west made a much more lasting influence. After Attila's death in 453, his army soon collapsed. Neither was the rule of the Goths, Gepidae, or Vandals, of lasting duration; they found themselves hemmed in by conditions already settled, and were not able to maintain their own character. Things happened differently in France: the culture there proved faithful to the character of the Frankish tribe, and it may be seen how powerfully this race evolved. Later, however, we see too how this tribe forced other to accept Christianity. We see further that there existed nothing better calculated to develop material culture than Christianity; all sorts of culture forms received their stamp from external Christianity. And because they were able to maintain their free character, they provided a framework for mobile forms in which spiritual life could develop, and in this way the spiritual, industrial communities—monasteries, etc.—grew up. In process of time, however, spiritual and industrial culture were separated. Although the empire of Charlemagne considered itself a Christian empire, in spreading Christianity by force, it set itself in opposition to the spirit of Christianity. Hence Christianity was soon no longer suited to industrial life. The conditions of industrial life were felt to be oppressive—and thus the “free cities” originated.

This, in outline, is the evolution of spiritual and material evolution. You see that it was only when the spiritual currents no longer coincided with the material conditions, that this disparity found expression in a purely material culture, the city-culture. From these industrial formations grew out of material interests. The population which could not be supported on the land, pressed into the towns to find protection and security. Thus we see empires rising and falling, and new creations taking the place of old. We can, however, only understand their organisation, if we realise how the first model realm, the empire of the Franks, was formed. Not having pressed into already existing conditions, but going where space was offered for free expansion, this tribe had evolved its character and was able to develop its rule.

The tribes driven from their homes during the great folk migrations, were not only thoroughly mingled together, they were also newly constructed. Some had disappeared from History altogether, others had taken their place. This great metamorphosis was accomplished, not merely from outside, but still more in the deepest depth of their character. At the beginning of the epoch of the folk migrations, we see the various Germanic tribes asking a question of destiny. For the Goths, who had chosen for themselves a tolerant Christianity, this question signified extermination. For the Franks, confrontation with it under other freer, more favourable circumstances, it meant increase of power throughout the centuries. Whether or not for the good of all, we shall see in what follows.

We have already spoken of how the cultural development of mankind, in so far as it is spiritual, is permeated by all kinds of brotherhoods which bring to expression in their total content the symbolic actions which have been taken from certain imaginative ideas. The most significant symbol of such brotherhoods is that which is connected with the thought of death and resurrection. Again and again the thought of death and the thought of resurrection is brought together before such brotherhoods. Thus, one can say that as a middle point symbol man is shown how the thought of immortality proceeds out of both of these thoughts. First a man dies and is buried.

Now, in most of these brotherhoods, the personality to which this symbol is attached is called Hiram; this symbol is connected with what is called the legend of Hiram. Thus the name of Hiram, the architect of King Solomon who according to the legend built the Solomon Temple with King Solomon and then as a result of certain of his servants becoming his enemies, Hiram was killed and his death is shown in a symbolic way. It is shown how he is buried and the presentation is brought to a certain resurrection out of the grave, a proceeding of Hiram out of the grave. Through this symbol, they want to carry the thought of immortality to the soul in a much more penetrating way than is possible through mere theories. Through this symbol which takes hold of the unconscious forces of man, through this imagination one wants to show what the situation really is when one passes through death and then is resurrected.

Now, when you consider that the death of Hiram, the resurrection of Hiram is led before the brothers of the lodges, so indeed, we have the connection with the Easter thought. Now you know that in the Catholic cult there is also a symbolic presentation occurring; that the festivities of Maundy Thursday pass over to the Good Friday, and then the Festival is concluded in the symbolic placing of Christ Jesus in the grave. Then you have Christ Jesus lying in the grave from Good Friday through Saturday evening; and as is the modern custom the Resurrection is celebrated, which means that Christ is again taken out of the grave and you have celebration with the Resurrected Christ. When one considers the action which occurs there in the cult, particularly in the Catholic cult, it is just the same as that which occurs in occult brotherhoods as the putting in the grave and the resurrection of Hiram. So you see, the Easter thought stands as the center point in a certain connection in these occult brotherhoods. The meaning which is connected with this ceremony is that the human being, by gazing on this symbolic activity, goes deeper into his soul than he would with the normal forces which are present in his consciousness; it goes much deeper than that. Such a symbolic action would actually have no significance if you could not presuppose that deep down in the human soul you have an activity where the consciousness does not reach. The human soul contains activity below his conscious awareness.

We speak in art of the fact that that which gives the artist power enabling him to produce works of art or to reproduce them cannot originate from the ordinary conscious forces of the soul, but come up out of the unconscious and then enter into the consciousness. Hence, in connection with the artist, it is so that for him any sort of rules to which he might direct himself to, will become a disturbing factor; he cannot regulate himself according to rules; he must direct himself to that which as an elementary consciousness in his soul gives wings to those forces which he needs. He can, if he wants, subsequently to look back and give a certain explanation of that which comes to the surface from the subconscious aspect of his being. Therefore we must assume that many other hidden qualities hold sway in the soul, forces which do not play up into consciousness.

We speak of the fact as we have often spoken about it, that the astral life of man is much broader, much more extensive than the conscious ego life of this human being and these forces play out of the astral life of man into the conscious ego experience. Hence,these forces are present underneath. There is already a large number of people in our time who have so adapted themselves to the external, purely materialistic life and look for their salvation in this external materialistic life so that, in the main, in their soul life they only possess that which is connected with the external material life. You can really notice the difference when you lead a symbol such as the death and resurrection of Hiram in front of human beings who have only been educated for the external material life. They find it very comical, very superfluous. However, those people who have the unconscious soul forces, who are able to perceive the unconscious forces which hold sway in the astral, are taken hold of in the deepest sense by the symbol and call up those faculties out of their soul which are able to understand what is meant by immortality; whereas the ordinary forces which are bound to the physical life cannot understand this immortality.

Something has remained in the Easter Festival of what in the primal consciousness of mankind was connected, in the main, with the thought of this festival. We have often spoken about the question—When do we celebrate this Easter Festival? Well, we celebrate it on the Sunday following the first full moon after the beginning of Spring which falls on the 21st of March. Thus the establishment of the point of time of the Easter Festival is dependent upon the relationship between the sun and moon positions, which means that we upon the earth celebrate the festival which is dependent upon the cosmic connections. What does the human soul say in so far as it has undertaken such an establishment of the Easter Festival. It says the following: Here upon this earth everything shall not be regulated according to purely earthly relationships. However, at least that which touches the soul most deeply ought to be directed according to extra earthly relationships. Man should gaze upon the symbol of immortality; the placing in the grave and the Resurrection; the thought of immortality of the living; the soul going through the Portal of death. That should be carried in front of the human being either in the occult picture as in the Catholic cult or more in thoughts as happens in other confessions—that is not so important at the present time. However, in so far as the human being allows the picture of the placing in the grave and the Resurrection to sway in his soul, this should happen when the sun and the moon come into a corresponding constellation. This is a protest of the human soul, that the gazing upon such an important symbol should not be carried out purely under earthly conditions; it is a recognition that the gazing upon this symbol should be bound up with the cosmic relationships external to the earth.

Here, as I am giving a lecture, certain things are happening to your human soul. Just imagine that so-called Monists were sitting here instead of you. Naturally, there would be an entirely different effect upon their soul than is upon your soul, because you have taken up into your soul certain preliminary ideas from spiritual science. Man is continuously changed by that which he has experienced. You have been exposed to anthroposophical spiritual science; your soul is different from those people who have not been exposed to it. It is not realistic to speak in general terms abut the human being as is done by the academic would. As soon as one goes into the realities, one sees how unrealistic the way the human being is considered by anthropologists.

Now, you see, it is very easy for you not to assess correctly or even to overlook what has happened to your soul in so far as the work of spiritual science has impinged upon it. Much, much more is imprinted upon this soul. Much is imprinted in the human soul, because there is the unconscious, the astral united with the human soul and you will be able to say: That which plays into the human being from the external world and which remains unconscious is nevertheless far more powerful, far more significant, than that which enters consciously. You all know the beautiful love poems which unite themselves with the light of the moon. Here we see that the unconscious soul itself stands in a connection with the non-earthly, that which comes into the earth with the light of the moon. Here you have the moon with its light streaming in and it is something that you have coming from the cosmos, from the extra earthly and has to do with the unconscious weaving and swaying of the human soul. And, if you remember what I said to you on Thursday and again that which I said on Saturday evening at the public lectures about the swaying, the dominating, the ruling and weaving of the Folk Soul element in the human soul life, then, indeed, you must say to yourself that this Folk Soul element comes up out of the unconscious much more than from the conscious. It is really true that that which rules in the depths of our soul and can only echo faintly up into the consciousness, is precisely what rules and weaves in the astral body; that is very important and is of a non-earthly nature. And that person whose soul is open for the impressions of the spiritual world knows that our earth is not only different in spring and in Autumn, that in spring the vegetation shoots up and in autumn there is harvesting, but the portion of the earth which is illuminated by the light of the moon is something different than the earth when it is not illuminated by the light of the moon. After the 21st of March the sun stands in a different relationship to the earth than it had before the 21st of March and that which is reflected back to us as sunlight from the moon upon the earth is therefore something quite different from that which radiated down before the 21st of March. The first full moon after the beginning of Spring gives back to us the first strength of the resurrected sun and this is quite different from any other full moon. Thus our astral nature would not be the same if, shall we say, we would gaze upon the symbol of laying in the grave and Resurrection in December; it is not the same as when we do it in the week after the streaming down of the spring full moon. Our soul is in another condition at this particular time. Now, if our soul is something quite different through the fact that we have taken up spiritual science into it and are not just Monists, so our soul is also something different in the moonlight after the Spring Equinox than, shall we say, after the Winter Solstice. Hence our soul can experience something different at this time as compared with any other time.

Now, when spiritual science appears today, it does so in order that the circle of vision of human beings which has been shrunken by the materialistic development can again be expanded. If you take the thoughts of spiritual science into yourself in a thoroughly correct sense, then you actually are expanding the thinking, the perception, the willing, the feeling of your soul. Today people are not sufficiently clear about the fact that materialistic development has brought not only that which one calls materialism, but this materialistic development has brought something else; it has brought, I might say, short-sightedness of the thought life into all things. The thoughts have become small and now they must be made much larger. The possibility of seeing things in their larger perspective must again arise among human beings.

Just think if the human being were again to become clear about the fact that man actually consists of two parts, out of the head which stands at a much later stage of development and which, one might say, is much more hardened than the rest of the organism and the rest of the organism which stands at a much older stage of evolution. Just think what proceeds from the working together, of this head organism with the rest of the human organism. When we move a hand, the body is at the basis of this movement which participates in this movement. What occurs when I move a hand? I have previously told you about this. The physical hands and the ether hands both move, they move together. When I think, the left and the right lobes of the brain also execute ether movements, that is to say, the ether portion of the left and right brain lobes also execute movements which are quite similar to the hand movements. The ether movements are there, but the physical movements are imprisoned, they are enclosed in the solid skull. It is a bound Promethius and because of this, it is possible to have thinking. If it were not through this external imprisonment, but through the organic fettering of the human being man's arms would now be imprisoned as they will be in the future when the earth will have disappeared and developed into the Jupiter existence just as the brain lobes are imprisoned now. Man's arms will be imprisoned in the future as now the lobes of his brain are imprisoned. Then that which we call thinking will also be left over from the movement of the hands. I will show you what can be made clear with a much more concrete example presicely from the history of our time. It can be clearly shown how the thoughts of the best man of our age are very short.

Now, let us consider Eduard von Hartmann who was the philosopher of the unconscious. As far as his own estimation of himself was concerned, he would never consider hinself to be a materialistic thinker. However, how we think of ourselves does not depend on what we think, but the point is, are our thought habits of a materialistic nature? A person can establish a quite idealistic philosophy and nevertheless can still possess quite materialistic habits of thought; and these habits of thought determine whether he has short carrying thoughts or wide carrying thoughts. Now, as far as Eduard von Hartmann is concerned, among many of his contributions he has also written a great deal about politics, and I want to present Hartmann, the political author, to you, because in his age he was held in the highest esteem as one of the best German, nay, one of the best Prussian patriots as well as being a good political writer. Obviously Eduard von Hartmann's thoughts were so wide carrying that he was able to represent the constellation of the different great powers of Europe to himself: Germany, Austria, Italy, France, England, Russia and in between them the different small neutral states. He continually studied and wrote papers about the different political interest of these single states. Now, he wrote a very significant thesis which came out in 1888 and appeared in book form in 1889, and in it he set forth his ideas as to what represents the best political constellation for Europe.

Now, I have to make the preliminary comment that he was not only a German, but also a Prussian patriot, he spoke so obviously from the standpoint of Prussian patriotism. He attempted to represent what the best thing for Germany and Europe would be as far as alliances which must be developed were concerned, and he saw the salvation of Germany and of Europe in an alliance of common neutrality in the arising of an alliance between Switzerland, Belgium and Holland under English leadership. Just think, Eduard von Hartmann wanted Belgium, Switzerland and Holland under English leadership. You can see exactly what I am driving at from such a concrete example, and the same thing can be seen in other domains of life; When you look back 30 years you can see how ridiculous these thoughts were; how the whole development which one can describe as the age of materialism brings with it short thoughts, thoughts when they relate themselves to time relationships are perhaps valid for 2 or 3 centuries.

Now I will give you an example from the realm of medicine, but things do not go as easily here as in the realm of politics. Nevertheless here is an example from the philosopher Lotse, who had a well developed medical background. He said: “The enthusiasm for any given remedy, as a general rule, is only valid for five years. The enthusiasm for a remedy discovery today disappears and soon as another remedy comes into fashion.” this is noticed far more easily in the medical field than with politics. Gustav Theodore Fechner who really was a very intelligent person wrote a very interesting thesis in the 1820's. At that time iodine, a new medicament, appeared on the scene. Everyone began to claim that it could cure numerous types of illnesses. Then Gustav Theodore Fechner wrote a very neat thesis in which, according to the rules of science, and all you need to do is develop a method of receiving the light of the moon and then this universal medicament could be used in a wonderful way everywhere. Can you see from this that a shortness of judgment, a certain living concepts which cannot be carried very far.

Now, when you entered the domain of folk psychology or race psychology and read what the foremost writers had to say and then placed these side by side, you would be surprised at what you had before you. For example, you could find that men, in so far as they claim to be objective scientists with present ways of thinking, depict the population of Middle Europe as being descended from the Germans. Now, they depict these Germans as having all sorts of qualities. Then the Frenchman, shall we say tries to describe the French and says that they became wise through the fact that France descends partly from the ancient Celts and then he describes the Celts. When you compare and find that person who describes the Germans in Central Europe attributes the same qualities to the Germans which the Frenchman ascribes to the ancient Celts. However, there is much more of a Celtic element living within central Europe than within France. But this the people.

I can repeat numerous examples which will show you how the concepts are so very small that they do not carry very far. You can see what happens today when these so-called secure natural scientific methods attempt to go on into the spiritual life. When you realize all these things, then you will see how necessary it is that the spirit should beat into this realm. How long will it take however until one has such a psychology, a science of the soul of the type which I attempted to give in the lecture last Thursday? Only such a science of the soul can make that which actually rules in Europe understandable, and can also bring that understanding which is necessary if a culture your is to proceed further. One can think of all sorts of domains which are so advanced in materialistic directions, directions which are without any spiritual value. Then we see that this material element—it can be a state or any other structure—can never succeed, can never get better, because the way things are is that everyone needs a soul.

Now, that which we foster, that which we have as our science of the spirit within the Anthroposophical Society cannot be just one society among others. Why not? The answer lies in the following question: what do other societies do when they establish themselves? They set up programs and one unites round a certain program. You print the agreement of this program and when you leave this society, that means you no longer agree with the program. When the whole society dissolves, no one is hurt about these programs. One can get together and then one can also depart. That is the case which happens with every mechanism in the world.

Now, Weissman once attempted to characterize an organism from the natural scientific standpoint. Naturally he could only bring a negative quality, but this negative quality really is correct. He asks the question: how can you tell if something is living? His answer is: that which, when it does, leaves behind a corpse. Now, naturally in this way he is not characterizing that which is living. However, one has to concur that he is quite correct when he says: “The living is negatively characterized by the fact that this living being leaves behind a corpse.” Now, our Anthroposophical Society is a living being through the fact that there are a large number of cycles in the hands of our members of which, in the first place we know as a general rule non-members should not receive these cycles. However, one can now go into second hand stores everywhere and buy these cycles. You see from that that the Anthroposophical Society must be an organism, because just imagine, if the Anthroposophical Society dissolved itself away, then it would leave a corpse behind, and the corpse would be the cycles.

Now, one must be able to think about all these things. Other societies, when they dissolve away, can actually do so without leaving behind a corpse, because they are more mechanistically built. These people depart, the point of the program cannot be called a corpse because nothing is left behind. We are trying to deal in realities. This is something that must enter into our souls. When spiritual science becomes a real perception in us, every thought is felt in such a way that this thought stands in reality; whereas the abstract thinking which corresponds to the materialistic thinking does not bother itself with whether thoughts stand in reality or not. All this, my dear friends, show how limited the thinking is when it only restricts itself to the consciousness; when it is only bound up to the material aspect. Hence we should not wonder when those particular cultural streams in the development progress of mankind they want to take hold of everyday life, must also reckon with other than that which works only upon the ordinary consciousness. And so it has always been with the deep religious cultural impulses.

Why, for example, did something like the cult of Easter enter into the evolutionary history of mankind? Why was this Easter Cult brought into connection with cosmology, with that which occurs in a wide spaces of heaven between the Sun and moon? Because if man were only restricted to the experiences of the Earth, he would fall into the most extreme shortsightedness thinking, feeling and willing. Only through the fact that man is able to receive a greater perspective for his life can his thoughts be made much wider so that not only his physical ego consciousness is inserted in the right way into the earthly experiences but also his astral subconsciousness is membered into the great cosmic events. When the most important thought, the thought of immortality, is attached to the cosmos, it finds its fundamental basis in the religious connection. If man were only to originate out of that which is earthly, he would never be able to grasp the thought of immortality. If man was actually that which the materialistic natural science tries to say he is, if he was merely a highly developed ape, there would be nothing inside of him which would arrive at this thought of immortality.

I can give you a beautiful example from the philosophical aspect about how short the thoughts of natural researchers are in this domain. A few days ago I opened a book in which a person spoke about the connection of man with the apes in the sense that the monists do, in the material sense, not in the sense in which it is justified, but in the sense in which it is quite often expressed. At the beginning of his thesis, he says that he could prove that people who travel in certain districts where the cultural situation of the human being have so deteriorated could see that these people have the same instincts and drives as the apes. Now he says: “If it can be experienced that man can sink down to an ape condition, then it is logical that man can develop out of the apes.” Obviously, that is logical and quite clear. If a person becomes older, then you can get an old man out of the child; you can realize that without having to travel. In the same sense when you say that through cultural decadence man sinks down to ape condition, that is just as logical the same day man can become ape, why shouldn't the eighth also become a man! Therefore with the same logic you can say that if the child can become an old man, why shouldn't a child develop out of an old man; the logic is exactly the same. Material aspect is not that these people develop such logic, but that everyone reads this and no one notices what utter nonsense is being expressed.

If the present type of science, the present type of culture continues as it has, it can give people thoughts and feelings and perceptions only about what is earthly. Nevertheless there lives in man's depths that which is present as super sensible forces. They live there, but they must be repressed. And gradually as a result of this repressed spirituality in human soul, you would get the illness of culture. We cannot sufficiently emphasized the earnestness of our times. If from the heavy trials and tribulations which mankind is going through now, a small number of people can be permeated by the consciousness that what mankind needs is a spirituality, then out of this difficult time of trial something would happen which would be in the sense of the world spirit. But unless we get this spiritualization, nothing will go well for mankind.

We understand spiritual science only when we see in it not just a Christmas Festival but also an Easter Festival; that we understand what actually is meant when we have the thought of immortality for the whole being of man. When we grasp that which is immortal in the human being, only then are we able to understand immortality. Fichte, Hegel, many others knew that the human soul does not only become immortal when it passes through death, it is immortal now; that mortal element can now be found in us. Hence a science must be sought for, which besides taking into view the mortal body, takes into view the immortal soul of man.

It was natural that under the great advances and brilliance of natural scientific development in the last four centuries, that the consideration of spiritual life had to recede and the tendency towards the spiritual was also being eliminated from the external world. However, a time must come again when that Hiram, or shall we say that portion of Christ which always is there and which speaks of the super sensible, when that again resurrects itself after it has been buried in the Good Friday period of cultural development. We grasp the thoughts which at the time when the great Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo are all those who in the first place in a true way and can call that time cosmic Maunday Thursday. This has to be followed by a Good Friday. This view of the immortal element had to be buried. However, now the time has arrived when the cosmic Easter Sunday has to come and when we must celebrate the Holy Resurrection of the human soul and of the spirit knowledge.

Now, it is quite all right if, for example, we celebrate the Good Friday mood of soul in our present age. However, only when we have the power to gird ourselves for the Cosmic Easter Sunday, shall we also be able to perform the cult activity within our soul life which is there externally as the Easter Cult. Black mood of soul—that belongs to the days of Good Friday. The priests wear black clothes, because the corpse of the dead Christ rests in the grave. Then follows the Resurrection in the place of the thought of the grave. Today it is appropriate for us to carry in our soul the sorrow and the tragic. However, we ought to be able to know ourselves that we will be able to carry the spiritual Easter clothes when the times will again be different.

A teacher who took over the seventh and eighth grades in the fall reports about teaching the humanities.

Dr. Steiner: You should begin by developing an outline of Roman history and then, from the general character, go into the details. There is no particular reason to go into everything, for instance, the history of the Lucretians. In Rome, much more occurred than what has been handed down, and there is really no reason to tell about everything that has been handed down by chance.

A teacher: Who were the Etruscans?

Dr. Steiner: The Etruscans were a southern Celtic element, a branch of the Celts transplanted in the south.

A teacher asks about books on Oriental history.

Dr. Steiner: Well, there are the chapters about Babylonian and Assyrian history by Stahl and Hugo Winkler in Helmolt’s Weltgeschichte [World History], and also the things written by Friedrich Delitzsch, for example, his Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens (History of Babylonia and Assyria).

A teacher: What is Baal?

Dr. Steiner: Baal was originally a Sun god.

A teacher speaks about the practical subjects in the seventh and eighth grades.

A teacher reports about teaching Latin.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to direct the children’s attention away from the linguistic aspects and toward the meaning, toward the subject itself. There is too little personal contact with the students.

A teacher reports about shop class.

Dr. Steiner: We should learn what we want to teach, for example, how to bind books or to make shoes. We should not bring too much in from outside.

On Friday, December 26 at 9:00 a.m., those children in the first through fourth grades who are causing the teachers difficulties in some ways are to be called in for a “discussion” and on Monday, December 29 at 9:00 a.m., there will be another such meeting for children from the fifth through eighth grades. A list is made of those children.

Two teachers report about the independent religious instruction.

Dr. Steiner: In the independent religious instruction, you could try to bring in something imaginative, mythical religious pictures, for example, the story of Mithras as a picture of how we overcome our lower nature. You could use such pictures to bring something to the fore, that is, to integrate mythical stories pictorially.

A teacher asks about reports.

Dr. Steiner: We must first determine what we have to do [to meet the state requirements]. We can give two reports, one in the middle of the year, as an interim report, and one at the end of the school year. To the extent allowable by the regulations, we should speak about the student only in general terms. We should describe the student and only when there is something of particular note in a subject, should we mention that. We should carefully formulate everything, so that in moving to the higher grades, there is as little differentiation as possible.

When the student goes to another school, we must report everything that the new school requires.

This is the 8th of 17 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities, in 1911. The title of this series of lectures is: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. This address was given following a Concert at the Berlin Group of the Anthroposophical Society, at which Mendelssohn's Overture of the Hebrides had been played).

Through the tones and harmonies of this Overture we have been led in spirit to the shores of Scotland, and in our souls, we have thus followed again a path of travel which, during the course of human evolution, has been deeply influenced by the secrets of karma. For, from entirely different parts of the western hemisphere of our earth, as if through a karmic current of migration, various peoples were once transplanted into that region, and its vicinity, to which these tones now lead us. And many strange destinies are made known to us. We are told, both by what Occultism relates as well as by outer historical documents, of what these peoples experienced in very ancient times on this particular part of the earth.

A memory of the mysterious destinies of these peoples arose again, as if newly awakened, when about 1772 the cave on the Island of Staffa belonging to the Hebrides, known as Fingal's Cave, was rediscovered. Those who beheld it were reminded of mysterious ancient destinies when they saw how Nature herself seemed to have constructed something which may be likened to a wonderful cathedral. It is constructed with great symmetry in long aisles of countless pillars towering aloft: above there arches a ceiling of the same stonework, while below the bases of the pillars are washed by the inrushing foaming waves of the sea which ceaselessly beat and resound with a music which is like thunder within this mighty temple. Dropping water drips steadily from strange stone formations upon the stalactites beneath, making melodious magical music.

A spectacle of this kind actually exists there. And those who, upon discovering it, had a sense for the mysterious things which once took place in this region, must have been reminded of the hero who once upon a time, as one of the most famous individualities of the West, guided destiny here in such a strange way, and whose fame was sung by his son, the blind Ossian, who is like a western Homer—a blind singer.

If we look back and see how deeply people were impressed by what they heard about this place, we shall be able to understand how it was that Macpherson's revival of this ancient song in the 18^th Century made such a mighty impression upon Europe. There is nothing which may be compared with the impression made by this poem. Goethe, Herder, Napoleon harkened to it—and all believed to discern in its rhythms and sounds something of the magic of primeval days. Here we must understand that a spiritual world such as still existed at that time, arose within their hearts, and felt itself drawn to what sounded forth out of this song! And what was it that thus sounded forth?

We must now turn our gaze to those times which fall together with the first impulses of Christianity and the few centuries which followed. What happened up there in the vicinity of the Hebrides, in Ireland and Scotland—in ancient Erin, which included all the neighboring islands between Ireland and Scotland, as well as the northern part of Scotland itself. Here we must seek for the kernel of those peoples, of Celtic origin, who had most of all preserved the ancient Atlantian clairvoyance in its full purity. The others who had wandered farther to the East had developed further, and so no longer remained in connection with the ancient gods. The western peoples, however, had preserved for themselves the possibility of experiencing an ancient clairvoyance now entirely immersed in the personality, in the individuality. And they were led to this particular part of the earth, as if for a special mission, where a structure confronted them which mirrored their own music's inner depths and was itself architecturally formed entirely out of the spiritual world, a structure which I have just tried to characterize with a few words—Fingal's Cave. We shall imagine these events rightly if we realize that the cave acted as a focus point, mirroring what lived in the souls of these human beings who, through their karma, were sent hither as to a temple erected by the gods themselves. Here those human beings were prepared who should later receive the Christ Impulse with their full human being and were here to undergo something extremely strange by way of preparation.

Again we shall be able to imagine all this if we realize that here particularly those ancient folk customs were preserved whereby the tribe was divided into smaller groups based upon family. Those who were related by blood felt themselves closely connected, while all others were looked upon as strangers, as belong[ing] to another Group Ego. During the migrations from Atlantis toward the East, all that the Druid priests, who remained behind here in the West, were able to give to the people poured itself out over these individual groups as a harmonizing influence. And what they were able to give still lived on in the bards. We shall only rightly understand what worked through these bards, however, if we make clear to ourselves that here the most elemental passions met together with the ancient powers of sight into the spiritual world, and that those who, with powerful life forces, sometimes with rage and passion, fought as representatives of their clan against other clans, perceived at the same time impulses working out of the spiritual world which directed them in battle.

Such an active connection between the physical and the soul realms cannot be conceived of today. When a hero raised his sword he believed that a spirit out of the air guided it, and in the spirit he beheld an ancestor who had fought upon this same battlefield in former times and who had gone up yonder to help now from over there. In their battle ranks they felt their ancestors actively aiding them, their ancestors on both sides—and they did not only feel them ... they heard them clairaudiently! It was a wonderful conception which lived in these peoples, that the heroes had to fight upon the battlefields and to shed their blood, but that after death they ascended into the spiritual world, and that their spirits then vibrated as tone—sounding through the air as a spiritual reality.

Those who had proven themselves in battle, but had trained themselves at the same time so that they could listen to what sounded out of the winds as the voice of the past, who were blind for the physical world, who could no longer see the flashing of the swords but were blind for the physical plane—these were highly honoured! And one of these was Ossian. When the heroes swung their swords, they were conscious that their deeds would resound further into the spiritual world and that bards would appear who would preserve all this in their songs. This was perceived in living reality by these peoples.

But all this creates an altogether different conception of humanity. It creates the conception that the human being is united with spiritual powers which sound forth out of the whole of Nature. For he cannot look upon a storm or a flash of lightning, he cannot hear the thunder or the surging of the sea without sensing that out of all the activities of Nature spirits work who are connected with the souls of the past, with the souls of his own ancestors. Thus the activity of Nature was at that time something altogether different than for us today. And it is for this reason that the rhythms and sounds of this song are so important, which, after being handed down for centuries through tradition only, were revived by the Scotsman Macpherson so that they create for us again a consciousness of the connection of the human being with the souls of his ancestors and with the phenomena of Nature.

We can understand how this Scotsman had in a certain sense a congenial feeling when he described how a line of battle stormed into the field, sweeping darkness before it, even as did the spirits who took part in the battle. This song is in reality something which was able to make a great impression upon spiritual Europe. The whole character of the description, even though given in a rather free poetical form, awakes in us a feeling for the kind of perception which lived in these ancient peoples. There was active in them a living knowledge, a living wisdom, concerning their connection with the spiritual world and the world of Nature in which the spiritual world works.

Out of such wisdom the finest sons from the different tribes—that is, those who had the strongest connection with the spirits of the past, who more than others allowed these spirits of the past to live in their deeds—were chosen as a picked band. And those who had the strongest clairvoyant forces were placed at its head. This band had to defend the kernel of the Celtic peoples against the peoples of the surrounding world. And one of these leaders was the clairvoyant hero, who has come down to us under the name of Fingal. How Fingal was active in the defense of the ancient gods against those who wished to endanger them—all this was handed down in ancient songs, heard out of the spiritual world—the ancient songs of the bard Ossian, Fingal's son, so that it remained alive even into the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. What Fingal achieved, what his son Ossian heard when Fingal had ascended into the spiritual realm, what their descendants heard in the rhythms and sounds of Ossian's songs with which they ever and again ensouled their deeds, this it was which worked on so mightily even into the 18^th Century. And we shall win a conception of this if we realize how Ossian allowed the voice of his father, Fingal, to sound forth in his songs.

We are told how the heroes find themselves in a difficult position. They are almost overthrown ... when new life fills the band: “The king stood by the stone of Lubar. Thrice he reared his terrible voice. The deer started from the fountains of Cromia. The rocks shook on all their hills. Like the noise of a hundred mountain streams, that burst, and roar, and foam! Like the clouds, that gather to a tempest on the blue face of the sky! So met the sons of the desert round the terrible voice of Fingal. Pleasant was the voice of the king of Morven to the warriors of his land. Often had he led them to battle; often returned with the spoils of the foe.”

“‘Come to battle,’ said the king, ‘ye children of echoing Selma! Come to the death of thousands. Comhal's son will see the fight. My sword shall wave on the hill, the defense of my people in war. But never may you need it, warriors; while the son of Morni fights, the chief of mighty men! He shall lead my battle, that his fame may rise in song! O ye ghosts of heroes dead! Ye riders of the storm of Cromia! Receive my falling people with joy, and bear them to your hills. And may the blast of Lena carry them over my seas, that they may come to my silent dreams, and delight my soul in rest’ ...”

“Now like a dark and stormy cloud, edges round with the red lightning of heaven, flying westward from the morning's beam, the king of Selma removed. Terrible is the light of his armor; two spears are in his hand. His gray hair falls on the wind. He often looks back on the war. Three bards attend the son of fame, to bear his words to the chiefs. High on Cromia's side he sat, waving the lightning of his sword, and as he waved we moved ...”

“Fingal at once arose in arms. Thrice he reared his dreadful voice. Cromia answered around. The sons of the desert stood still. They bent their blushing faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of the king. He came like a cloud of rain in the day of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields expect the shower. Silence attends its slow progress aloft: but the tempest is soon to arise. Swaran beheld the terrible kings of Morven. He stopped in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear, rolling his red eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed, as an oak on the banks of Lubar, which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. It bends over the stream: the grey moss whistles in the wind: so stood the king. Then slowly he retired to the rising heath of Lena. His thousands pour around the hero. Darkness gathers on the hill!”

“Fingal, like a beam from heaven, shone in the midst of his people. His heroes gather around him. He sends forth the voice of his power: ‘Raise my standards on high, spread them on Lena's wind, like the flames of an hundred hills! Let them sound on the winds of Erin, and remind us of the fight. Ye sons of the roaring streams, that pour from a thousand hills, be near the king of Morven! Attend to the words of his power! Gaul, strongest arm of death! O! Oscar of the future fights! Connal, son of the blue shields of Sora! Dermid, of the dark brown hair! Ossian, king of many songs!—Be near your father's arm!’ We reared the sunbeam of battle; the standard of the king! Each hero exulted with joy, as, waving, it flew in the wind. It was studded with gold above, as the blue wide shell of the nightly sky. Each hero had his standard, too, and each his gloomy mien!”

Thus Fingal stormed into battle, thus he is described by his son Ossian.

No wonder that this life, this consciousness of a connection with the spiritual world which sank deep into these peoples, into the souls of the ancient Celts, is the best preparation whereby they could spread the personal divine element throughout the West in their own way and from their own soil. For what they had experienced in the form of passion and desire, what they had heard sounding forth in the melodies of the spiritual world, prepared them for a later time when they brought into the world sons who revealed these passions in their souls in a purified and milder form. And thus we may say—it seems to us as if Erin's finest sons were to hear again the voices of their ancient bards singing of what they once heard out of the spiritual world as the deeds of their forefathers, but as if in Erin's finest sons the ancient battle cries had now been formed and clarified, and had become words which could express the greatest impulse of mankind.

All this sounded forth out of olden times in the songs about the deeds of the ancient Celts who fought out many things in mighty battles in order to prepare themselves for further deeds of spiritual life in later times, as we recognize them again today in that which the finest sons of the West have achieved. These were the impulses which flowed into the souls of human beings in the 18^th Century, when these ancient songs were revived. And it is this which was remembered by those who saw again the wonderful cathedral, built as if by Nature herself, and which caused them to say to themselves—“Here is a site, a gathering place, given to man by karma, in order that what the bards were able to sing about the deeds of their ancestors, about all that the heroes did to steel their forces, might sound back to them as in an echo out of this temple which they themselves did not have to build—out of their holy temple which was built for them by the spirits of Nature and which could be an instrument of enthusiasm for all who beheld it.”

So the tones and harmonies of this Overture which we have just heard offer an opportunity which allows us to sense, in our own way at least, something of the deep and mysterious events which do indeed reign in the history of mankind, events which occurred long before our present era on almost the same soil upon which they now continue to live. As we must deepen ourselves in all that lives within us, and as all that lives within us is only a further resounding of what was there in the past, so this feeling, this sense, for what once was and now works further in mankind is of great significance for occult life.

We left human evolution at the point where the human being entered into what we would call the mineral realm. He had now become mineral. A brain had been developing from the middle of the Lemurian age. The mineral world achieved its highest quality when the brain developed, with intellectuality establishing itself within it. This descent of humanity to the mineral world was only possible because earlier stages of evolution had taken the human being through the first, second and third elemental worlds.⁵¹ Before going through the three elemental worlds the human being was pure monad, pure spirit (atman, budhi, manas). He then descended through the three elemental worlds into the fourth. The mineral world is the fourth world. Who was actively involved in this development?

Spirits called 'dhyani of wisdom' were active, putting the body together in its mineral form from the outside. And it was only when the brain was finished that the stream of evolution could continue from inside. If the dhyanic spirits of wisdom had continued to work from outside for themselves at this time, the human being would have grown harder even than the mineral world; he would have had no inwardness, no spirituality to counter the hardening tendencies of matter, and he would have been lost to cosmic life. He would have dropped away like a cinder in the course of evolution, cast out from the successive natural worlds. If a life in mind and spirit had not intervened from inside, a world of completely petrified human concretions would have arisen that would have been incapable of evolving further. Such a petrified world must drop out from the succession of worlds. Occultists call this hypothetical world the 'eighth sphere'.

As they were lagging behind at the time, the dhyani of wisdom would have taken humanity to a dead end. At this point the dhyani that had lagged behind before and were now ascending took hold of humanity. This spiritual principle took humanity, then moving towards hardening, to bring spirituality into human evolution. The dhyani working from inside sought to spiritualize the human being more and more, and in that case there would have been wisdom only. The human being then had two avenues open to him—to fall to the eighth sphere,⁵² or to be wholly spiritualized. Either would inevitably have led to something other than humanity is today—humanity would either have vanished into the eighth sphere, or it would have been steadily getting more spiritual. These two streams worked against each other from the middle of the Lemurian age. The situation would have remained like this if the dhyani that had built up the human being from outside and would have taken him onward into the eighth sphere had not taken in budhi or love. (In Marie Steiner-von Sivers’ notes, this sentence reads: ‘It would have remained like this if the dhyanic spirits of love had not incarnated in order to bring love also into matter.’) They thus saved the material aspect of the human being from perdition. They joined the others as a third stream; these were working from the outside.

With the three streams acting together, part of the material, mineral world became this tripartite human being made up of matter, or body, of soul and spirit. Anything that could not be taken along because the streams were not equal did indeed turn into cinders. That is [today’s] moon. It is a piece of the eighth sphere; cinder. In the moon we have a symbol, for the time being, of what the first dhyani might have achieved. The activity of the dhyanic spirits, which had given the human being his form until then is thus symbolized in the moon. In Jewish esoteric language they are collectively called Yahveh or Jehovah, the god of macrocosmic wisdom, of form. H. P. Blavatsky therefore calls him a moon god, the god of form. In [A. P. Sinnet’s] Esoteric Buddhism, the moon is seen as part of the eighth sphere. It is only a part of it, however, a symbol of what the human being would have been in the eighth sphere. Yahveh is the elohim of the fourth round, the lord of wisdom-filled form (the fourth elohim).

From the middle of the fourth round, the lord of love was active—the Christ, the world's love, the second Logos. The lord of form, the fourth elohim, was wisdom, the third Logos. Jehovah is the spirit of the third Logos. In the spirit, the Christ principle, the principle of love, began in the middle of the Lemurian age. Lucifer intervened at the same time. We must get to know the difference between things perishable and imperishable. Greek sculptors, for example, created magnificent, glorious works, but a time will come when they will all have perished. If those works were all, we would have to say that they are perishable. Everything on the physical plane is mortal in this way. But the fact that artists work on the physical plane means something that will remain for the artist's spirit, something that would not exist if he had not been working on the physical plane. Taking in something done on a lower plane is the faculty of the spirit on a higher plane—that is evolution. It is only by incarnating that human beings gain riches in their spirit which they would not otherwise have. That is what the perishable means for the imperishable.

The skeletal system is the most mineral aspect of the human being. It also gives physical human beings at the present time their most perfect form. In future Earth evolution, the digestion, the heart, and so on will be more and more perfect, but not the skeletal system. This will gradually vanish. Standing firm in the physical world with one’s skeletal system is important. Human beings will be able to take with them what they have become through their skeletal system.

The fact that the bones of the Christ must not be broken means that the part of him which belonged to the mineral world must not be destroyed, had to be left intact. The symbols from the mysteries were then for the first time lived out in the world. The Christ becoming a human being was one of the most important cosmic events in the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race. The founders of earlier religions had taught wisdom; the Christ teaches love.

The sub-races of the fifth root-race

• 51. Luke 18:19, Matthew 19:17.
• 52. See Note 6.
• 53. See the 6th and 12th lectures in this series. Also lectures given in Berlin on 9 and 16 October 1915, in Foundations of Esotericism, note 13, and the lecture given on 18 October in The Occult Movement, note 23.