The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Early in 1919 Rudolf Steiner was asked by the director of the Waldorf Astoria Tobacco Company in Stuttgart, Germany, to give lectures to the factory workers on the question of what new social impulses are necessary in the modern world. Responding to the lectures, the factory workers requested of Rudolf Steiner that he further help them in developing an education for their own children based on the knowledge of the human being and of society that he had opened up for them. By the end of April, that same spring, the decision had been made to establish a new school for the workers' children, the first Waldorf School.

Today, the Waldorf school movement, as it is still known (or the Rudolf Steiner school movement, as it is also called), is one of the largest, and perhaps the fastest growing, independent school movements in the world. In 1984 there were over 300 schools worldwide, throughout Europe, in the United States, Canada, South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. By 1995, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Waldorf movement, there were over 600 schools in almost forty countries. Based on a comprehensive and integrated understanding of the human being, a detailed account of child development, and with a curriculum and teaching practice that seek the unity of intellectual, emotional, and ethical development at every point, Waldorf education deserves the attention of everyone concerned with education and the human future.

This book is a transcript of eight lectures plus an introduction to a eurythmy performance, taken originally in shorthand, given by Rudolf Steiner in April, 1923, at Dornach, Switzerland, to a group of Waldorf teachers and others from several European countries—he especially mentions the Czech representatives—who at this early stage had also become interested in Waldorf education. The reader today can readily sense the quality of active engagement that runs through these lectures as Rudolf Steiner explores the basic principles of Waldorf education, and at the same time, as required, confronts specific problems that arose in those early beginnings of the movement when the first school was not yet five years old. The reader is also carried immediately into a rich discussion of issues of central concern for education today. Perhaps the most helpful contribution this foreword can make to the reader is simply to underscore some of these issues.

Rudolf Steiner's holistic understanding of the human being underlies all of Waldorf education. To be sure, nearly every educational reform movement in the modern world claims to be concerned with “the education of the whole child,” and in this way Waldorf education is no exception. In Waldorf education, however, this claim does not remain a generality. Rather, the many dimensions of the human being—physical, emotional, and intellectual, as well as the distinctive characteristics and myriad interrelationships of these dimensions—are presented with great care and precision. Further, their actual, concrete implications for the curriculum, the classroom, and the larger society are developed in detail and in a variety of ways.

In talking about the whole human being, Rudolf Steiner frequently employs the traditional terminology of body, soul, and spirit. Despite its venerable tradition, this terminology may, for many modern readers, strike a strange note at first, especially for most modern educators. And yet, those same readers will just as likely have no trouble at all with the original Greek term for “soul,” psyche, which has acquired a firm and familiar place in the modern vocabulary just as its more recent equivalent, soul, has become somewhat strange and unfamiliar. And “psychosomatic” is the au courant expression for a sophisticated awareness of the mind-body relationship and its interaction—a term that is, however, seldom spelled out, and that often covers more than it reveals. The attentive reader will find that Rudolf Steiner makes use of traditional terminology in a precise, truly nontraditional way to explore and delineate essential dimensions and functions of the human being, which the fashionable Greek of psyche and psychosomatic tend to generalize and blur, and which much modern educational literature ignores altogether. At the very least the reader is well-advised to work with the traditional terminology and test whether or not it is indeed being used with precision and with real efficacy.

Rudolf Steiner does not, however, limit himself by any means to traditional terminology. Many readers will immediately find themselves on familiar ground with Steiner's detailed account of child development. And they may recognize that many aspects of Steiner's description have been subsequently confirmed, and in certain areas filled out, by educational and developmental psychologists working independently of him (Gesell and Piaget come to mind). Readers may also notice some important differences that, together with obvious areas of overlap, invite more dialogue between Waldorf educators and non-Waldorf educators than has yet occurred. Likewise, the crucial importance that Steiner attributed to the early, preschool years—particularly as it relates to an individual's entire life—has since become a commonplace of almost all developmental psychology. No one, however, has explored the educational implications of these early years with the fullness and care for actual curriculum and classroom practice that marks Steiner's work. One example in these lectures is the care he gives to describing the educational and developmental importance of the child's learning to stand and walk, to speak, and to think—all on its own—and the unfolding implications that he indicates these early achievements have for the whole of an individual's life.

Central to Steiner's account of child development is that the child comes to know the world in ways that are specific to the physical age and development of the child, and which serve as an essential foundation for other ways of knowing that follow. The primary way, Steiner points out, by which the very young, pre-school age child comes to know the world and others is through physical, sensory activity. This is an immediate, participative way of knowing by which the child through physical activity, and above all, through imitation, emulation, and play first comes to know and to make the world its own.

There are many interesting potential points of contact between Steiner's description of the child's participative, imitative knowing, and the independent investigations accomplished since his death by others unacquainted with either Steiner's more general work or Waldorf education; these points of contact also offer the promise of a fruitful exchange between Waldorf education and others. For example, the importance, stressed by Steiner, of play, imitation, and activity as being the foundation for all subsequent knowing, even that of formal analytic cognition, which comes into its own with adolescence, has been explored in great detail by many developmental psychologists. Kurt Fischer, for instance, writes, “All cognition starts with action ...the higher-level cognition of childhood and adulthood derive directly from these sensorimotor actions....” And Piaget, early in his work wrote, “At this most imitative stage, the child mimics with his whole being, identifying himself with his model.” Many years before, in the lectures reprinted here, and with the actual implications for education much more at the center of his concern, Rudolf Steiner, in a stunning expression, said that “the young child, in a certain sense, really is just one great sense organ,” imitating and absorbing its whole environment.

The kind of deep knowing Steiner describes here seems akin to the kind of knowing that the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi described later in terms of “tacit knowing”: a knowing-by-doing, a knowing that exists primarily in what psychologist Lawrence Kubie, and others, have called the “pre-conscious.”

Moreover, Steiner's conception expressed in these lectures of the young child as “a sense organ” in which will forces are at work connects directly with all those investigators in the field of phenomenology for whom intentionality, or will, is central to all experience, including perception. As Steiner also emphasizes, this early participative knowing of the child encompasses the moral and the religious, because it involves participation with the environment, with other people, and with one's own experience in being. It is a kind of knowing that involves the being of the knower, and it is the essential foundation for what Philip Phenix has called, “learning to live well as persons.” It is a genuine knowing, which, as both Polanyi and Steiner stress, is always presupposed by more abstract, intellectual knowing. Indeed, Rudolf Steiner's description of the child's first experience of mathematics provides a vivid illustration of this crucially important point. Steiner indicates how the young child has first a lived, but pre-conscious experience of mathematics in its own early physical movements, an experience Steiner nicely describes as “bodily geometry,” a lived experience which then becomes the basis for the eventual development of abstract, mathematical conceptual thinking later on. It becomes clear how the full development of this pre-conscious, tacit knowing, grounded in lived experience is essential to the emergence of truly powerful and insightful abstract conceptuality in later years.

More than any others who have dealt with it, Rudolf Steiner developed in considerable detail the implications of the young child's participative, tacit knowing (to use Polanyi's term for education). Positively, it means that the educator's primary task for the pre-school child is to provide an environment and people worthy of imitation by, and interaction with, the child. Negatively, it means that every attempt to teach young children analytical, conceptual thinking—the wide-spread efforts to teach reading, calculating, and computer skills at an ever earlier age—is premature, and a destructive intrusion that threatens the full development of the tacit knowing so necessary for truly powerful, creative, and self-confident thinking in later life. Although the dominant tendency in modern education is to continue to “hot house” young children to acquire adult reading and calculating skills, some important educators, like David Elkind, are beginning to point out, as Waldorf schools have always done, how destructive this is to the child's eventual educational growth and even physical health.

In the primary school years, Rudolf Steiner points out, the child enters a new stage when the feeling life becomes dominant. The child lives in feelings, and these now become the child's primary way of knowing the world—through the feeling, pictorial, rich image-making capacities that the rhythmic, feeling life makes possible. One can say, perhaps, that while the intelligence of the pre-school child first awakens in the physical life of the child, the intelligence of the child in primary school now awakens mainly in the life of feelings. Steiner explicitly identified these years when the imagination emerges as central between the child's change of teeth and puberty. A few educators have apparently begun to recognize that the change of teeth may, indeed, be an important signal that the child is entering upon a new level of development. It is, Steiner said, a signal that the child's forces, previously involved in physical growth, now become available in a new way for imaginative thinking, and, therefore, need to be nourished and cultivated imaginatively.

It is here that we see the importance of the image in all thinking. Whenever we want to explain, understand, or integrate our experience, we must have recourse to our images. Our images give us our world, and the kind and quality of our world depends on the kind and quality of the images through which we approach and understand it. During the school years when the child lives and knows the world through an imaginative, feeling life, a powerful image-making capacity is either developed or not. It is this vital picture-making capacity that gives life and insight to logical and conceptual thinking. The primary task of education in the primary school years is, therefore, to educate and nourish the imaging powers of the child, and to lead him or her into the development of strong, flexible, and insightful conceptual capacities, which only developed imagination makes possible.

Here the moral dimension in knowing and education appears in yet another way. We are responsible for the kind of images we bring to bear on the world, and the ways we do it. And we are responsible for the care we take in helping children to develop their own strong image-making capacities. Much in modern American education, with its nearly exclusive emphasis on utilitarian, problem-solving skills, neglects entirely the development of the child's imagination. At the same time—through television, movies, literalistic picture books, and detailed toys, all of which leave nothing to the child's own imaginative powers—the children are made increasingly vulnerable to having their minds and feelings filled with readymade, supplied images—other people's images, often of the most banal, even violent and obsessive kind.

Steiner stresses, therefore, the importance of an education during the primary school years that is thoroughly artistic in nature. In these lectures he explicitly criticizes any one-sided emphasis on emotional development that ignores the importance of intellectual development. He also criticizes as nonsense notions that all learning should be play. (In this he transcends the current split between the partisans of so-called cognitive education and affective education.) Rather than emphasizing artistic as opposed to intellectual subjects, his chief concern is to bring together intellect, emotion, and the tacit knowing of will activity in an integral unity. Every subject, especially including mathematics and science, therefore, is to be presented in an imaginative, artistic way that speaks to and nourishes the child's own imagination. In the education sought in Waldorf schools, sound, tone, stories, poetry, music, movement, handwork, painting and colors, and direct acquaintance with living nature and other people permeate the pedagogy and the curriculum of these primary school years.

It is just such an artistic education in this fullest sense that leads to strong conceptual powers in the adolescent and adult years. Other people, such as the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and John MacMurray, have recognized the centrality of the imaging, feeling life of the primary school child, and have urged that an artistic sensitivity and approach characterize all teaching during these years. Even John Dewey, in one of his more recent books, Art as Experience, and in some later essays, speaks of art as the primary model for all knowing, and of the importance of conceiving of “education as an art.” In these writings Dewey saw how essential an artistic education is to all thinking. Dewey wrote: “... the production of a work of genuine art probably demands more intelligence than does most of the so-called thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves on being intellectuals.” But Dewey never developed the educational implications of his own recognition of the centrality of the artistic-imaginative experience, and American education—although it has been enamored with Dewey's other, narrower stress on problem-solving skills—has totally ignored his later emphasis on artistic imagination and education as an art. Only now are there signs, as in the work of Elliot Eisner that some educators are beginning to recognize how essential an artistic, imaginative approach in education is. Here, once again, Waldorf education, with its seventy-five years of experience, can make an essential contribution to the current educational dialogue. At a time when increasing numbers of Americans are concerned that our schools do everything necessary to develop genuinely self-confident and creative thinking, the importance of the attention given in Waldorf education to the deepest sources of imagination, creativity, and self-confidence becomes more and more apparent.

Perhaps two other elements in these lectures, which speak directly to current American educational concerns, should be briefly discussed. One has to do with the demand of many parents and public figures today that new attention be given in American schools to religious and moral education, and what is often called “teaching values.” In these lectures Rudolf Steiner stresses the importance of thinking about religious and moral education in a way very different from what is customary. At certain points in these lectures the reader will note that Rudolf Steiner and the first Waldorf schools had to grapple with difficult, specific problems posed by the current legal requirements in Germany regarding religious instruction. Even in the discussion of these specific issues, it is clear that Rudolf Steiner rejects any form of indoctrination or empty teaching of abstract religious concepts. Rather, he emphasizes the importance of the teacher. The child brings into life in its earliest years a natural gratitude for being—what Steiner suggestively terms a kind of natural “bodily religion.” And the religious-ethical task of the teacher is to respond in kind—to make available to the child an environment of things, people, and attitudes worthy of the child's grateful imitation; “the task of the teachers is through their actions and general behavior” to create a trustworthy reality for the children to live in.

As the imaginative life flowers in the primary school child, the fundamental ethical-religious education is again to be sought in providing the children with an experience of beauty, fairness, a reverence for life, and a life-giving attitude and conduct on the part of the teacher. The truly ethical and religious dimensions of education have nothing to do with indoctrination, the teaching of empty concepts, “thou-shalt” attitudes, but with the actual experience of gratitude, love, wonder, a devoted interest in one's life tasks and conduct, and a recognition of the worth of the developing individual. Instead of concerning ourselves so much with teaching the children moral concepts, writes Steiner, “we should strive towards a knowledge of how we, as teachers and educators, should conduct ourselves.”

And this points to another current concern within American education; namely, the need to recognize the essential importance of the person and being of the teacher (and the parent) in education. Many recent calls for reform in American education have pointed to the low standing of the teacher in our culture, and the necessity of rectifying this. In these lectures, as elsewhere, Rudolf Steiner has much of crucial importance to say. In this regard, his discussion of the complex, and necessary relationships between the child's experience of genuine authority (not authoritarianism) and the development of freedom and capacity for self-determination in later life is especially pertinent to current educational concerns.

It should, perhaps, also be noted in concluding that in these lectures Rudolf Steiner was speaking to people who had at least an acquaintance with the view of the human being, on which his lectures were based. Occasionally, therefore, the word anthroposophy appears without explanation, and the reader who is meeting Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf education for the first time may have difficulty understanding what is meant. Anthroposophy was the term Rudolf Steiner used to characterize the approach to understanding the whole human being as body, soul, and spirit; while at first foreign to the modern eye, a moment's reflection will show that the term is no more difficult than the more familiar word, anthropology, except that, instead of the Greek word, logos—or “wisdom”—sophie is joined with the Greek word for “human being”—or anthropos. Elsewhere, Steiner expressed his hope that anthroposophy would not be understood in a wooden and literal translation, but that it should be taken to mean “a recognition of our essential humanity.” The ground of Waldorf education is precisely this recognition of the essential human being. Central to Waldorf education is the conviction that each pupil, each person, is an individual, evolving self of infinite worth—a human spirit, for the essence of spirit, Steiner insisted, is to be found in the mystery of the individual self. As the English Waldorf educator John Davy once observed, this is not a fashionable view in a skeptical age, but it is one that carries a natural affinity with all who care about the education and evolving humanity of our children.

This foreword has attempted only to touch on some of the riches to be found in these lectures. Yet, this lecture cycle itself is far from an exhaustive account of Waldorf education. For those who want to explore further, the following lecture cycles by Rudolf Steiner are especially recommended as introductions to Waldorf education: The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education; The Spirit of the Waldorf School; and The Kingdom of Childhood. Steiner delivered other lecture series on education that require a deeper familiarity with Waldorf education and anthroposophy. [See pp. 210-211 for a more comprehensive list of titles.] Introductions to Waldorf education by others are also especially recommended: Mary Caroline Richards, “The Public School and the Education of the Whole Person” contained in Opening Our Moral Eye; A. C. Harwood, The Recovery of Man in Childhood: A Study in the Educational Work of Rudolf Steiner; Majorie Spock, Teaching as a Lively Art; and Frans Carlgren, Education Towards Freedom. Useful introductory articles will also be found in “An Introduction to Waldorf Education,” Teachers College Record, vol. 81 (Spring 1980): 322-370.

DOUGLAS SLOAN
Teachers College,
Columbia University

THE FIRST FREE WALDORF SCHOOL opened its doors in Stuttgart, Germany, in September, 1919, under the auspices of Emil Molt, the Director of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Company and a student of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science and particularly of Steiner's call for social renewal.

It was only the previous year—amid the social chaos following the end of World War I—that Emil Molt, responding to Steiner's prognosis that truly human change would not be possible unless a sufficient number of people received an education that developed the whole human being, decided to create a school for his workers' children. Conversations with the Minister of Education and with Rudolf Steiner, in early 1919, then led rapidly to the forming of the first school.

Since that time, more than six hundred schools have opened around the globe—from Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Great Britain, Norway, Finland and Sweden to Russia, Georgia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Israel, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Japan, etc.—making the Waldorf School Movement the largest independent school movement in the world. The United States, Canada, and Mexico alone now have more than 120 schools.

Although each Waldorf school is independent, and although there is a healthy oral tradition going back to the first Waldorf teachers and to Steiner himself, as well as a growing body of secondary literature, the true foundations of the Waldorf method and spirit remain the many lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave on the subject. For five years (1919-24), Rudolf Steiner, while simultaneously working on many other fronts, tirelessly dedicated himself to the dissemination of the idea of Waldorf education. He gave manifold lectures to teachers, parents, the general public, and even the children themselves. New schools were founded. The movement grew.

While many of Steiner's foundational lectures have been translated and published in the past, some have never appeared in English, and many have been virtually unobtainable for years. To remedy this situation and to establish a coherent basis for Waldorf education, Anthroposophic Press has decided to publish the complete series of Steiner lectures and writings on education in a uniform series. This series will thus constitute an authoritative foundation for work in educational renewal, for Waldorf teachers, parents, and educators generally.

When we wander at this time of year through the streets of large cities, we find them full of all sorts of things which our contemporaries want to have for their celebration of the approaching Christmas festival. Indeed, it is one of the greatest festivals of the year which humanity can celebrate: the festival which commemorates the most powerful impulse in the evolution of mankind. And yet, if we contemplate what will take place in the coming days in large cities such as ours, we may well ask: Does all of this correspond rightly to what is meant to flow through the souls and hearts of man?

If we don't give ourselves up to illusions but simply face the truth, then perhaps we cannot help but admit to ourselves: All these preparations and celebrations of the Christmas festival which we see in our time fit in very poorly on the one hand with all other happenings of modern civilization around us; and on the other hand they fit in equally poorly with what should live in the depth of the human heart as a commemorative thought of the greatest impulse which humanity received in the course of its evolution.

So it is perhaps no overstatement if we express the following view: There is a lack of harmony in what our eyes perceive, when we wish to permeate ourselves with the Christmas mood, and wish to receive this Christmas mood from what we can see in today's environment. There is a discord in seeing the streets bedecked with Christmas trees and other decorations in preparation for the festival, and then seeing modern traffic rushing through the midst of it all. And if modern man does not feel the full extent of this discord, the reason may well be that he has disaccustomed himself to be sensitive to all the depth and intimacy which can be connected with this approaching festival. Of all that the Christmas festival can do to deepen man's inner nature, basically no more is left today, especially for the city dweller, than a last faint echo. He is hardly in a position to feel even vaguely its former greatness. His habits prevent him from perceiving this greatness any longer, a greatness to which humanity had become accustomed in the course of centuries.

It would be totally wrong if we would look with pessimism at the fact that times have changed, and that in our modern cities it has become impossible to develop that mood of profound intimacy which prevailed in earlier times with regard to this festival. It would not be right to allow such a pessimistic mood to arise, for at the same time we can feel an intimation—in our circles this feeling should certainly be present—that humanity can once again come to experience the full depth and greatness of the impulse which belongs to this festival. Seeking souls have every reason to ask themselves: “What can this ‘Christ festival’ mean to us?”. And in their hearts they can admit: Precisely through Spiritual Science something will be given to humanity, which will bring again, in the fullest sense of the word, that depth and greatness which cannot be any more today. If we don't succumb to illusion and phantasy we must admit that these can no longer exist at present. What has become often a mere festival of gifts cannot be said to have the same meaning as what the Christmas festival meant to people for many centuries in the past. Through the celebration of this festival the souls used to blossom forth with hope-filled joy, with hope-borne certainty, and with the awareness of belonging to a spiritual Being, Who descended from Spiritual heights, and united Himself with the earth, so that every human soul of good will may share in His powers. Indeed, for many centuries the celebration of this festival awakened in the souls of men the consciousness that the individual human soul can feel firmly supported by the spiritual power just described, and that all men of good will can find themselves gathered together in the service of this spiritual power. Thereby they can also find together the right ways of life on earth, so that they can mean humanly as much as possible to one another, so that they can love each other as human beings on earth as much as possible.

Suppose we find it appropriate to let the following comparison work on our souls: What has the Christmas festival been for many centuries, and what should it become in the future? To this end, let us compare, on the one hand, the mood which social custom creates nowadays in certain parts of the world around us, with the mood that once permeated the Christmas festival. On the other hand, let us compare this mood of the present time with what can come about in the soul as a renewal of this festival, made as it were timeless, through Spiritual Science.

For a modern urban dweller it is hardly possible to appreciate truly the full depth of what is connected with our great seasonal festivals. It is hardly possible to experience that magic which like a gentle breeze permeated the mood of soul of those who believed that they bore the Christ in their hearts during the great festivities surrounding Christmas or Easter. Today it has become very difficult indeed, especially for the city dweller, to sense anything of this magic, which permeated humanity like a gentle spiritual breeze during those seasons. For those who have had the opportunity of experiencing even a little of this magic wind which permeated the soul mood in those times this will most certainly be a wonderful, glorious memory. As a young child I was able to behold the last remnants of such a magic wind as it permeated the souls, the mood, of country folk in certain remote German villages. When the Christmas season approached I could behold how something arose in the deepest, innermost soul life of young and old, which differed essentially from the feelings and sentiments that prevailed during the rest of the year. When Christmas approached this could still be sensed quite distinctly in certain farming villages as recently as a few decades ago. The souls had then a natural way of making themselves inwardly beautiful. And they really felt something like this: “Into deepest night-enveloped darkness has the physical sunlight descended during autumn. More outer physical darkness has come about. Long have the nights become, shortened are the days. We must stay home much of the time. During the other seasons we used to go outside, to the fields, where we would feel the golden rays of the morning sun coming to meet us, where we could feel the warmth of the sun, where we could work with our hands during the long days of summer. But now, we must sit inside much of the time, we must feel much, much darkness around us, and we must often see, as we look outside through windows, how the earth is being covered with its winter garment.”

It is not possible to depict in detail all the beautiful, the wonderful soul moods which awoke in the simplest farm homes on Sunday afternoons and evenings as the Christmas season approached. One would have to depict very intimate soul moods. One would have to tell how many, who had been involved in a good share of fights and mischief during the rest of the year, would feel a natural restraint in their souls, as a result of being filled with the thought: “The time of Christ draws near.” They would feel: Time itself is becoming too holy to allow mischief to occur during this season.—That is only a minor aspect of what was extensively present in past centuries, and what could still be seen in its last remnants in those remote villages in recent decades. When the celebration of Christmas retreated into the homes as a family festival you would see there no more than a little display representing the stable in Bethlehem. The children would enjoy everything connected with it, as they saw Joseph and Mary, with the shepherds in front, and the angels above, sometimes done in a very primitive way. In some villages you would find such a display of the “manger” in almost every home. What had thus retreated into the homes was more or less a last echo of something which we will touch upon later.—And when the main days of the Christmas festival, the 25th and 26th of December, had passed and Epiphany, the festival of the Three Kings, approached, you could still see a few decades ago small groups of actors wandering from village to village—the last actors to present plays of “the Holy Story.” The actual Christmas plays had already become quite rare, but a last echo of “The Play of the Three Kings” could often still be seen, as it might be even today (1910) in some remote villages. There were the “Three Holy Kings”, wearing strange costumes, different for each one, with paper crowns and a star on their heads. Thus would they move through the villages, seldom lacking humor, but with humor and reverence together. With their primitive voices they would awaken all those feelings which the soul should feel in connection with what the Bible tells of the great Christ Impulse of human evolution.

The essential thing is that a mood prevailed during the Christmas season, the days and weeks surrounding the Christmas festival, to which the heart was given over, a mood in which the whole village would participate, and which enabled people to take in with simple immediacy all the representations that were brought before their souls. Grotesque, comedy-like presentations of sacred scenes, such as have become customary in our time in imitation of the Passion Plays of Oberammergau, would have met with no understanding in those days. The memory and the thought of the great periods of humanity were then still alive. It would have been impossible to find anyone willing to experience the events of the Holy Night and of the Three Kings during any other days of the year. And it would have been just as impossible to accept the Passion story at any other time but Easter. People felt united with what spoke to them from the stars, the weeks, the seasons, what spoke out of snow and sunshine. And they listened to tales of what they wanted to feel and should feel, when the so-called “Star-Singers” went around, wearing paper crowns on their heads, and lately wearing simply a white jacket. One of them used to carry a star, attached to a scissor-like device, so that he could project the star some distance out. Thus they would wander through the villages, stopping at various homes, to present their simple tales. What mattered most was that just at this time people's hearts were rightly attuned, so that they were able to take in everything that was supposed to permeate their souls during this season. I myself have still heard quite a few times these “Star-Singers”, reciting their simple poems as they wandered through the villages, and this is for me still a beautiful memory. An example follows *:

In God's Name now our tale begins.
From Orient came the Holy Kings.
They ride with speed on distant ways,
Four hundred miles in thirteen days.
They ride by Herod's palace-walls
As Herod from his window calls:
Whither go ye, relax your speed!
To Bethlehem our journey does lead.
Ye Holy Three Kings be guests of mine,
I will draw plenty of beer and wine,
I will serve venison roast and fish;
To know of the newborn king is my wish.
In truth, we cannot tell just where;
We have to follow the star we bear:
Over the house the star will shine bright.
Over the mountains the holy men ride.
There found they Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Who is the Savior of all the world.¹

The whole village would take part in such things. As certain lines were recited the star would be projected far out. This star of Christmas, of the Three Kings, was an expression of the consonance of the season, the festivity, and the human hearts. That was a great thing, which had spread through centuries like a magic breath of air over large parts of the earth and into the simplest hearts and minds. We must try to place something like this before our souls. As seekers after spiritual knowledge we are able to do so, because through our years of contemplative work on this great event we were able to develop again a feeling for the real power which was thereby given for all of mankind and for the whole evolution of the earth. And it is to this event that our thoughts should be directed during this festival season.

So we may expect to gain some understanding of how in times past the whole Christmas season was immersed in a festive mood, especially among the people of Germany and Western Europe, and how this festive mood was achieved by the simplest means. But perhaps only the spiritual seeker can understand today what was essential in those ancient Christmas plays. What I have presented to you just now as the “Star-Song” is, in fact, only a last remnant, a last ruin. If we would go back several centuries we would find vast regions where Christmas plays were performed when this time approached, in the presentation of which entire villages took part. As regards our knowledge of these Christmas plays we may well say that we were merely in a position of collecting something that was rapidly vanishing.

I myself had the good fortune of having an old friend who was such a collector. From him I heard many stories of what he encountered as a scholarly collector of Christmas plays, especially in German-Hungarian regions. In certain “language islands” in Hungary the German language had been kept alive both as a mother tongue and for colloquial speech, up to the time of the so-called magyarization in the fifties and sixties of the nineteenth century, when the Hungarian language was imposed. There one could still find many of the Christmas plays and Christmas customs which had vanished long ago into the stream of oblivion in the German motherland. Individual colonists, who migrated into Slavic regions during the previous centuries, had preserved their ancient heritage of Christmas plays, and they renewed them, whenever they could find the right people to play the parts, always recruiting the players from among the villagers themselves. I can still well remember—and perhaps you will take my word for it—with how much enthusiasm the old professor Schröer spoke of these Christmas plays, when he told of having been present when these people performed these plays during the festival season.

We can say without exaggerating, that an understanding of the inner nature of the artistic element in these plays can only be reached by actually visiting these village people and witnessing how they have given birth to the simple artistry of such Christmas plays out of a truly most holy mood. There are people today, who believe that they can learn the art of speech and recitation from this or that teacher. They will go to all sorts of places in order to learn certain breathing exercises which are considered to be the right ones for this purpose. And there exist nowadays dozens of “right” breathing methods for singing and for declamation. These people believe that it is essential for them to make a real automaton of their body or their larynx. Thus they cultivate art in a materialistic way. I would only hope that this strange view will never really take root in our circles; for these people have no idea how a simple, yet true art was born out of a most reverent mood, a prayerful Christmas mood.

Such art was actually performed by village lads who engaged in good-for-nothing pranks and behaved in a very loose way during the rest of the year. These very same lads would act in the Christmas plays with a most profound Christmas mood in their souls and hearts. For, these simple people, who lived beneath their thatched roofs, knew infinitely more about the relation of the human soul, even the whole human being, and art, than is known today in our modern theaters or other art institutions, no matter how much ado surrounds these things. They knew that true art has to spring from the whole human being; and if it be sacred-art then it must spring from man's holy mood of devotion. That, indeed, these people knew! And this can be seen, for example, in the “four principle rules”, found in those regions which Schröer could still visit.

As the months of October or November approached, in the regions of Upper Hungary, one person who knew the Christmas plays would gather those people who he felt were suitable to perform them. These plays were passed on by oral tradition. They were never committed to writing. That would have been considered a profanation. And during the Christmas season some people were considered suited, of whom one would perhaps not have thought so at other times: really roguish good-for-nothing lads, who had been involved in all sorts of mischief during the rest of the year. But during this time of the year their souls immersed themselves in the required mood. The participants had to abide by some very strict rules during the many weeks of rehearsals. Anyone who wanted to take part had to adhere strictly to the following rules.—Try to imagine life in these villages, and what it would mean not to be allowed to participate in these Christmas plays. “Anyone wishing to act in the plays must:

1. stay away from the girls,
2. sing no bawdy songs during the entire Holy Season,
3. lead a decent life,
4. obey my orders.

A fine will be levied for all violations, and also for each error in memorizing your lines.”²

Do you recognize in this custom something like a last echo of the kind of consciousness that prevailed at the holy sites of the ancient mysteries? There too, one knew that wisdom cannot be achieved by mere schooling. Likewise, an awareness prevailed here that the whole human being, including his mind and morals, must be cleansed and purified, if he wished to partake in art in a worthy way. These plays had to be born out of the whole human being! And the attunement to the Christmas mood brought about something like this, brought about that devotion and piety would take hold even of the most roguish lads.

These Christmas plays, of which I have just told you, and which Schröer and others could still observe and collect, were the last remains of more ancient plays, indeed, merely the last ruins. But through these plays we can look back into earlier times, into the 16th, 15th, 14th century and even further, when the relations between villages and cities were quite different. Indeed, in the Christmas season the souls of village people would immerse themselves into an entirely different mood through what these plays would offer them, as they presented with the simplest, most primitive means the holy legend: the birth of Christ with all that belongs to it according to the Bible. And just as Christmas day, the 25th of December, was preceded in the church calendar by the “Day of Adam and Eve”, so what was considered the actual Christmas play was preceded by the so-called Paradise play, the play of Adam and Even in Paradise, where they fell victim to the devil, the snake. Thus in the most primitive regions where such plays were performed, people could gain an immediate insight into the connection between the descent of man from spiritual heights to the physical world—and that sudden reversal which was bestowed on man through the Christ Impulse, upward again towards the spiritual worlds.

Suppose when reading the Epistles of St. Paul you would sense the greatness of the Pauline conception of man, who descended as Adam from the spiritual world to the world of the senses, and then, of the “new Adam and Christ, in whom man ascends again from the world of the senses into the world of the spirit. This can be sensed and felt in Paul in a grandiose way. The simplest people, even down to the children, could sense this in an intimate, loving, fulfilling way in the depth of their hearts and souls when they beheld in this season in succession first the fall of man in the Paradise play of Adam and Eve, and then the revelation of Christ in the Christmas play. And they felt profoundly the mighty turning point that had occurred in the evolution of humanity through the Christ Event. A reversal of the path of evolution, that was the way the Christ Event was experienced! One path, that led so to say from heaven to earth, was the path from Adam to Christ; another path, that leads from earth to heaven, is the oath from Christ to the end of earth time. That is what many thousands of people felt in a most intimate way, when the two plays which I have just characterized were so primitively performed before their eyes. These people really could then experience the complete renewal of the human spirit in its very essence through the Christ-Impulse. Perhaps you can feel in all of this a kind of echo of something that was once felt in regard to this reversal of the entire progress of humanity through certain words which have come down to us from very ancient times, from the first Christian centuries. These words were often spoken, even in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, in those regions of Europe where Christianity had spread. There people felt something tremendous when words such as these were spoken:

Ave maris Stella
Dei mater alma
Atque semper virgo
Felix coeli porta

Sumens illud Ave
Gabrielis ore
Funda nos in pace
Mutans nomen Evae!

Ave (I greet you) star of the sea
Divine youthful mother³
And virgin eternal
Thou happy portal of heaven.

Receiving this “Ave” (greeting)
From the mouth of Gabriel
Be thou our foundation for peace
By reversing the name Eva!

When these words were spoken people felt man's path from heaven to earth through the Fall—and the ascent of man through Christ from earth to heaven. They felt this even in the names of the two female characters, the name Eva (Eve) and the name they associated with the mother of Jesus, with which one greeted her so to say: Ave! Ave is the reverse of the name Eva. When you spell Ave backwards you have Eva. That was felt in its full significance. These word; express what people sensed in the most elementary phenomena of nature, and at the same time, what they saw in the human elements of the Holy Legend:

Ave, star of the sea,
Divine young mother
And virgin eternal
Thou happy portal of heaven.

Receiving this “Ave”
As a greeting from Gabriel
Be thou our foundation for peace
By reversing the name Eva!

In such simple words one felt the greatest mysteries, the greatest secrets of human evolution. And in the reversal of the name Eva to Ave people would feel in a subtle way that same truth which we can learn in a grandiose way from the Epistles of Paul when we read his words about Adam, the “old” Adam, and Christ, the “new” Adam. This was the mood in the days of the Christ-festival when these plays were performed one after the other in that primitive way: the “Paradise play” which shows us the Fall of man, and the “Christmas play” which awakens the hope for the future, in which each single human soul can share by taking up the force that lies in the Christ-Impulse. But it should be perfectly clear that to feel this requires a mood, an inner attunement, which simply cannot exist in this way anymore today. Times have changed. Back then it was not as impossible to look towards the spiritual worlds as it is today. For, that fundamentally materialistic trait, which permeates today the minds of the simplest as well as the most sophisticated people did not exist then. In those times the spiritual world was accepted as self-evident. And likewise a certain understanding was present of this spiritual world and how it differs from the world of the senses. Today people can hardly conceive how one could feel spiritually as late as the 15th or 16th century, and how an awareness of spirituality was present essentially everywhere.

We intend to present such a Christmas play in our art center. It is one from the region known as the Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz). If we succeed, understanding can again be awakened, also in the outer world, for the spiritual mood that lives in such plays. For us, certain lines in such a Christmas play should become signposts, as it were, by which we recognize the spiritual sensitivity of the people who were to understand the Christmas play at the festival season. For example, if in one or another Christmas play Mary, expecting the Jesus-child, says, “The time has come, I see a little child”, this means she clairvoyantly beheld the child in a vision in the days preceding the birth. Thus it is in many Christmas plays. And I wonder where you could find a similar tale today for such an occasion. The time when a conscious connection with the spiritual world was present is no more. You should appreciate this fact neither with optimistic nor with pessimistic feelings. Nowadays you would have to go very far afield, to the most remote and primitive rural areas, to find instances of a vision of the child that is to be born in a few days. But it does still happen!

What people brought to the Christmas season by these primitive memories and thoughts of the greatest event of human evolution, this could only be carried by a mood such as we described. Therefore, we must find it quite understandable that in the place of this former poetry, this simple primitive art, we have today the prose of electric railways and automobiles, speeding forth so grotesquely between rows of Christmas trees. An aesthetically sensitive eye must find it impossible to view these two kinds of things together: Christmas trees, Christmas sales, and cars and electric trains running through their midst! Today this impossible situation is naturally accepted as a matter of course. But for an aesthetically sensitive eye it remains nevertheless something impossible. Even so, we want to be friends of our civilization, not enemies. We want to understand that it must be so as a matter of course.

But we want to understand too how much this is connected with the materialistic trait which has pervaded not only those who live in the city, but those who live in the country as well. Oh, by listening carefully, we can actually detect how this materialistic mood has taken hold of human minds. When we go back to the 14th or 13th century we find that people knew full well that something spiritual is meant when such a thing as the tree of knowledge in paradise is mentioned. They understood rightly what was presented in the Paradise play. When they were shown the tree of knowledge or the tree of life they knew to what to relate it spiritually. For in those days superstition about such matters had not yet spread to the extent it did later, in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. In fact it can be historically documented that already in the 15th century, in the vicinity of the city of Bamberg, people went out into the apple orchards on Christmas night because they expected to see physically, materially, that a specially chosen apple tree would bloom that night. Thus people's minds became materialistic, in the period beginning in the 13th or 14th century and extending into the 16th and 17th century. This happened not only in the cities, but also in the souls of simple country folk.

Even so, much of the ancient poetry found its way into the homes, with the Christmas tree. But what wafted through the ancient villages as a most sacred mood, like a mystery, has become merely external poetry, the poetry of the Christmas tree, still beautiful, yet merely an echo of something much greater.

Why is this so? Because in the course of time humanity must evolve, because what is most intimate, what is greatest and most significant at one time, cannot remain so in the same way for all times. Only an enemy of evolution would want to drag what was great in one time over into other times. Each period of time has its own special mission. In each period we must learn how to enliven in ever new ways what should enter the souls and hearts of man. Our time can only appreciate that real Christmas mood, which I have sketched here in brief outline, if this mood is seen as a historic memory, a thing of the past. Yet, if we do accept the symbol of the Christmas tree also into our own festival gatherings, we do so precisely because we connect with Spiritual Science the thought of a new Christmas mood of mankind, of progressively evolving mankind. For Spiritual Science means to introduce the secrets of Christ into the hearts and souls of man in a way that is appropriate for our time. Even though modern conveyances rush past us when we step outdoors, or perhaps will even fly away with us through the air—and soon these things will awaken humanity quite differently to the most sobering and terrifying prose—nevertheless men of today must have a chance to find again the divine-spiritual world, precisely by an even stronger and more meaningful deepening of the soul. This is the same divine-spiritual world which in bygone centuries appeared before the eyes of those primitive minds when they saw at Christmas time the Holy Child in the manger. Today we need other means to awaken this mood in the soul. Certainly we may like to immerse ourselves in what past times possessed as ways to find the Christ Event, but we must also transcend what depends on time. Ancient people approached the secrets of Nature by merging with her through feeling. That was only possible in a primitive time. Today we need other means.

I would still like to give you some idea how people felt their way into nature when the Christmas festival approached. They did this quite primitively, yet they could speak in a very real and living way out of their sensing and feeling of the elements of Nature. If I may share with you a little “Star Song”, you will perhaps feel only through one single line, how the elements of Nature spoke out of the soul—the rest of the song is rather primitive. But if you listen more carefully you will be able to observe this Nature mood in several other lines.

Namely, when the one who gathered his actors for the Christmas play, or for the Three Kings play, would wander with them, and when they would then perform at some place, they would first extend a greeting to those who were assembled there. For, the sort of abstract attitude which prevails today between actors and audience did not exist in those earlier times. People belonged together, and the whole gathering was enveloped by an atmosphere of community. Therefore the actors would start by greeting in a primitive way those who were present, as well as those of the community who were not there. This really would bring out the Christmas mood.

The Star-Song

The star singer:

Beloved singers mine, let's gather as a clan
Like fritters in a frying pan,
Beloved singers mine, take up your place,
We want to pass our while with singing in this space.
Beloved singers mine, so strong and smart,
With greetings do we want to start.
Let us greet God-Father on His highest throne
And let us greet also His only Son.
Let us greet the Holy Spirit by name
And then greet all three together again.

Joseph and Mary enter the stage.

Let us greet Joseph and Mary mild,
And we also greet the little child.
Let us greet the ox and also the ass,
Which stand near the crib with straw and grass.
Let us greet them through sunlight and moonshine
That shine on the sea and the river Rhine.
Let us greet them through foliage and grassy blade,
Through the holy rain that has wet us all made.
Let us greet the emperor and his crown,
And him who made it, a master of great renown.
Let us greet the squire, Sir Palfi by name,
Also his officers we greet the same.
Let us greet our fathers of the church, so stern,
Because this play they allowed us to learn.
Let us greet the judge and the jury elect
With worthy honor and respect.
The whole honored community we greet
All who together here we meet.
Let us greet the honored council of this place
By God ordained to serve in this space.
Let us greet them through the roots, large and small,
Which are in the earth, many and all.
Beloved singers mine, turn now to another thing.
To greet the star we shall now sing.
Let us greet the slats, so carefully matched,
To which our star is then attached.
Let us greet the scissors that can stretch out far
By which can wander around the star.
We greet all the little slats of wood
As many as make our star look so good.
Beloved singers mine, harken well to my words
We sang to the star and to all of its parts.
Now we greet our master singer with glee
And also his hat which here you see.
Let us greet our teacher, who indeed,
With God's help taught us what we need.
Beloved singers mine, note well this thing,
To all of these we did now sing.

Now I ask you, please notice what this means: to call upon Nature in such a way that one greets everyone whom one wishes to greet with a certain mood in one's heart, a mood which arises from: “the roots, large and small, which are in the earth, many and all.” That is empathy for Nature's own mood.—Thus we must recognize that people in those days were connected with all that was holy, with all that was great and spiritual, right down to the roots of trees and grass. If you can enter into such a feeling, then, through a line such as the one I have just cited, you will feel something grandiose in the secrets of the evolution of mankind. The times are past when such feelings were naturally present, when they were a matter of course. Today we need to make use of other means. We need ways which will lead us to a well-spring in human nature that lies deeper, to a wellspring of human nature which, in a certain sense, is independent of external time. For the course of modern civilization makes it impossible for us to be bound by the seasons. Therefore, if you truly understand the mood which was felt in olden times as the Christ mood of the holy Christmas night, you will also be able to understand our intent, as we attempt to deepen artistically what we can gain from Spiritual Science. We strive to enliven that well-spring in the human mind which can take in the Christ Impulse. No longer can we awaken this great impulse directly within our souls during the Christmas season, even though we would be happy if we could. Yet we constantly search for it. If we can see a “Christ-festival of the progress of humanity” in what Spiritual Science is intended to be for mankind, and if we compare this with what simple people could feel when the Child in the crib was displayed during the Holy Christmas Night then we must say to ourselves: Such moods and feelings can awake in us too, if we consider what can be born in our own soul when our inner-most wellspring is so well attuned to what is sacred, so purified through spiritual knowledge, that this wellspring can take in the holy mystery of the Christ Impulse.

From this point of view we also try to discover true art which springs from the spirit. This art can only be a child of true devotion, a child of the most sacred feelings, when we feel in this context the eternal, imperishable “Christ festival of humanity”: How the Christ-Impulse can be born in the human soul, in the human heart and mind. When we learn to experience again through Spiritual Science that this Christ Impulse is a reality, something which can actually flow into our souls and hearts as a living strength, then the Christ Impulse will not remain something abstract or dogmatic. Rather this Christ Impulse, which comes forth from our spiritual movement, will become something able to give us solace and comfort in the darkest hours of our lives, able also to give us joy in the hope that when Christ will be born in our soul at the “Christmastide of our soul”, we may then look forward to the Eastertide, the resurrection of the spirit in our own inner life.

In this way we must progress, from a material attitude which has entered and taken hold of all minds and hearts, towards a spiritual attitude. For, that renewal, which is necessary to counterbalance today's prosaic ways of life, can only be born out of the spirit. Outside, the traffic of cars may move by, electric trains may speed on, perhaps even balloons may fly across the sky. Nevertheless, in halls such as these, it will be possible that something of a holy mood lives and grows. This can however only happen as a result of what has flowed to us from spirit knowledge throughout the entire year. When this fruit of the entire year brings Christ closer to us, as could happen in former times in a much more childlike mood, then we may rightly hope that in a certain sense these halls will be “cribs”. We may then look upon these halls in a similar way as the children and the grown-ups used to look on Christmas eve upon the cradle that was set up for them at home, or in still earlier times, in the church. They used to look at the little Child, at the shepherds before Him, and at “the ox and also the ass which stand near the crib with straw and grass”. They felt that from this symbol strength would stream into their hearts, for all hope, for all love of man, for all that is great in mankind, and for all goals of the earth. If on this day, which shall be consecrated and dedicated to remembering the Christ Impulse, we can feel that our earnest spiritual scientific striving throughout the entire year has kindled something in our hearts, then on this day our hearts will feel: “These our meeting halls are truly cradles! And these candles are symbols! And just as Christmas is a preparation for Easter, so these cradles, by virtue of the holy mood that fills them, and these candles, through the symbolism of their light, are meant to be a preparation for a great era for humanity, the era of the resurrection of the most Holy Spirit, of truly spiritual life!”

So let us try to feel that in this Christmas season our meeting halls are cradles, places in which, secluded from the outer world, something great is being prepared. Let us learn to feel that if we study diligently throughout the year, our insights, our wisdom, can be condensed on Christmas eve into very warm feelings, which glow like a fire, fueled by what we have gained throughout the whole year by immersing ourselves into great teachings. And let us feel that thereby we nurture our remembrance of the greatest impulse in human evolution. Let us also feel, therefore, that in these halls we may have faith that what now begins to burn within such a confined cradle as a holy fire, and as a light, filled with certainty of hope, will find its way to all mankind at some future time. Then this fire and this light will be strong enough to extend its power even to the hardest, most down to earth prose of life, to permeate it, to enkindle it, to warm it, to enlighten it! Thus can we feel here the Christmas mood as a mood of hope in anticipation of that World-Easter-mood which is to express the living spirit, needed for a renewal of humanity.

We best celebrate Christmas when we fill our souls in the coming days with this mood: In our Christmas we spiritually prepare the “Easter festival of all mankind”, the resurrection of spiritual life. Yes indeed, cradles shall our places of work become at Christmas time! The child of light is to be born, whom we have nurtured throughout the entire year by immersing ourselves into the wisdom-treasures of Spiritual Science. In our places of work Christ is to be born within the human soul, in order that spiritual life may be resurrected at the great Eastertide of humanity. In its very essence humanity must come to feel spirituality as a resurrection, by virtue of what streams forth as Christmas mood from our halls into all humanity, in the present time as well as in the future.

• 1. From “Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungarn”, described and communicated by Karl Julius Schröer, Vienna, 1862, “Oberschützener Sternsinger” (The Star-Singers of Oberschützen), p. 160.
• 2. See “Weihnachtspiele aus altem Volkstum; Die Oberufer Spiele” (G.A. 43, Dornach 1965), Christmas Plays from Oberufer, translated by A.C. Harwood, Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 3. A more conventional translation of alma is ‘bountiful’, but Rudolf Steiner translates it as ‘young’.

Let us once more call up before our souls whither modern Initiation leads, after the first steps to Imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. A man then comes to the point where his previous abstract, purely ideal world of thought is permeated with inner life. The thoughts coming to him are no longer lifeless, passively acquired; they are an inward world of living force which he feels in the same way as he feels the pulsing of his blood or the streaming in and out of the air he breathes. It is therefore a question of the ideal element in thinking being replaced by an inward experience of reality. Then indeed the pictures that previously constituted a man's thoughts are no longer mere abstract, shadowy projections of the outside world, but are teeming with an inward, vivid existence. They are real Imaginations experienced in two dimensions, as indicated yesterday, but it is not as though a man were standing in front of a painting in the physical world, for then he may experience visions, not Imaginations. Rather is it as though, having lost the third dimension, he were himself moving about within the picture. Hence it is not like seeing something in the physical world; anything that has the look of the physical world will be a vision. Genuine Imagination comes to us only when, for example, we no longer see colours as we do in the physical world, but when we experience them. What does this mean?

When you see colours in the physical world, they give you different experiences. You perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to spring at you. A bull will react violently to this aggressive red; he experiences it far more vividly than does man, in whom the whole experience is toned down.

When you perceive green, it gives you a feeling of balance, an experience neither painful nor particularly pleasant; whereas blue induces a mood of devotion and humility. If we allow these various experiences of colour to penetrate right into us, we can realise how it is that when anything in the spiritual world comes at us in the aggressive way red does in physical life, it is something corresponding to the colour red. When we encounter something which calls up a mood of humility, this has the same effect as the experience of blue or blue-violet in the physical world. We can simplify this by saying: we have experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, for the sake of precision, we should always have to say: we have experienced something there in the way that red, or blue, is experienced in the physical world. To avoid so many words, one says simply that one has seen auric colours which can be distinguished as red, blue, green, and so on.

But we must realise thoroughly that this making our way into the super-sensible, this setting aside of all that comes to us through the senses, is always present as a concrete experience. And in the course of this experience we always have the feeling I described yesterday, as if thinking had become an organ of touch extending throughout the human organism, so that spiritually we feel that a new world is opening out and we are touching it. This is not yet the real spiritual world, but what I might call the etheric or formative-forces world. Anyone who would learn to know the etheric must grasp it in this way. For no speculation, no abstract reflection, about the etheric can lead to true knowledge of it. In this thinking that has become real we live with our own formative-forces or etheric body, but it is a different kind of living from life in the physical body. I should like to describe this other way by means of a comparison.

When you look at one of your fingers, you recognise it as a living member of your organism. Cut it off, and it is no longer what it was; it dies. If this finger of yours had a consciousness, it would say: I am no more than a part of your organism, I have no independent existence. That is what a man has to say directly he enters the etheric world with Imaginative cognition. He no longer feels himself as a separate being, but as a member of the whole etheric world, the whole etheric cosmos. After that he realises that it is only by having a physical body that he becomes a personality, an individuality. It is the physical body that individualises and makes of one a separate being.

We shall indeed see how even in the spiritual world we can be individualised—but I will speak of that later. If we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we are bound at first to feel ourself as just one member of the whole etheric Cosmos; and if our etheric body were to be cut off from the cosmic ether, it would mean for us etheric death. It is very important to grasp this, so that we may understand properly what has to be said later about a man's passage through the gate of death.

As I pointed out yesterday, this Imaginative experience in the etheric, which becomes a tableau of our whole life from birth up to the present moment of our existence on Earth, is accompanied by an extraordinarily intense feeling of happiness. And the flooding of the whole picture-world by this inward, wonderfully pleasurable feeling is a man's first higher experience.

We must then be able—as I also mentioned yesterday—to take all we have striven for through Imagination, through our life-tableau, and make it all disappear at will. It is only when we have thus emptied our consciousness that we understand how matters really are in the spiritual world. For then we know that what we have seen up to now was not the spiritual world, but merely an Imaginative picture of it. It is only at this stage of empty consciousness that—just as the physical world streams into us through our senses—so the spiritual world streams into us through our thinking. Here begins our first real experience, our first real knowledge, of the objective spiritual world. The life-tableau was only of our own inner world. Imaginative cognition reveals only this inner world, which appears to higher knowledge as a picture-world, a world of cosmic pictures. The Cosmos itself, together with our own true being, as it was before birth, before our earthly existence, appear first at the stage of Inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from outside. But when we have arrived at being able to empty our consciousness, our whole soul becomes awake; and in this stage of pure wakefulness we must be able to acquire a certain inner stillness and peace. This peace I can describe only in the following way.

Let us imagine we are in a very noisy city and hear the roar of it all around us. This is terrible—we say—when, from all sides, tumult assails our ears. Suppose it to be some great modern city, such as London. But now suppose we leave this city, and gradually, with every step we take as we walk away, it becomes quieter and quieter. Let us imagine vividly this fading away of noise. Stiller and stiller it becomes. Finally we come perhaps to a wood where all is perfectly silent; we have reached the zero-point where nothing can be heard.

Yet we can go even further. To illustrate how this can happen, I will use a quite trivial comparison. Suppose we have in our purse a certain sum of money. As we spend it from day to day, it dwindles, just as the noise dwindles as we leave the town. At length comes the day when there is nothing left—the purse is empty. We can compare this nothingness with the silence. But what do we do next if we are not to grow hungry? We get into debt. I am not recommending this; it is meant only as a comparison. How much have we then in our purse? Less than nothing; and the greater the debt, the more we have less than nothing.

And now let us imagine it to be the same with this silence. There would be not only the absolute peace of the zero-point of silence, but it would go further and come to the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent than silence. And this must in fact happen when, in the way described yesterday, we are able through enhanced powers to reach this inner peace and silence. When, however, we arrive at this inner negative of audibility, at this peace greater than the zero-point of peace, we are then so deeply in the spiritual world that we not only see it but hear it resounding. The world of pictures becomes a world of resounding life; and then we are in the midst of the true spiritual world. During the moments we spend there we are standing, as it were, on the shore of existence; the ordinary sense-world vanishes, and we know ourselves to be in the spiritual world. Certainly—I will say more of this later—we must be properly prepared so that we are at all times able to return. But there is something else to come—an experience previously unknown. Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is built on a foundation of cosmic suffering—of a cosmic element which can be experienced by the human being only as pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain. And when, through Initiation-knowledge, this cosmic experience of pain has made its impression upon us, then out of real inner knowledge we can say the following:

If we study the human eye—the eye that reveals to us the beauty of the physical world, and is so important for us that through it we receive nine-tenths of the impressions that make up our life between birth and death—we find that the eye is embedded in a bodily cavity which originates from a wound. What was done originally to bring about the eye-sockets could be done to-day only by actually cutting out a hollow in the physical body. The ordinary account of evolution gives a much too colourless impression of this. These sockets into which the eyeballs were inserted from outside—as indeed the physical record of evolution shows—were hollowed out at a time when man was still an unconscious being. If he had been conscious of it, it would have involved a painful wounding of the organism.

Indeed, the whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness, everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing, has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our feeling of pain.

When these facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have made a much simpler world.”

Strictly speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!

Genuine Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary, instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for completeness they need their physical limbs.

The world we meet in this way when we go on beyond Imagination into the stillness of existence, out of which the spiritual world reveals itself in colour and in sound—this world differs essentially from the world perceived by the senses. When we are living with it—and we have to live with the spiritual world when it is present for us—we see how all sense-perceptible, physical things and processes really proceed from out of the spiritual world. Hence as earthly men we see only one half of the world; the other half is occult, hidden from us. And through every opening, every happening, in the physical-material world, one might say, this hidden half reveals its spiritual nature first in the pictures of Imagination, and then through its own creative activity in Inspiration. In the world of Inspiration we can feel at home, for here we find the origins of all earthly things, all earthly creations. And here, as I have indicated, we discover our own pre-earthly existence.

Following an old image, I have called this world, lying beyond that of Imagination, the astral world—the name is not important—and what we bring along with us from that world, and have carried into our etheric and physical bodies, we may speak of as our astral body. In a certain sense, it encloses the Ego-organisation. For higher knowledge, accordingly, the human being consists of four members: physical body, etheric or formative-forces body, astral body, and Ego-organisation. Knowledge of the Ego, however, entails a further super-sensible step, which in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have called “Intuition”. The term Intuition may easily be misunderstood because, for example, anyone with imaginative, poetic gifts will often give the name of intuition to his sensitive feeling for the world. This kind of intuition is only a dim feeling; yet it has some relation to the Intuition of which I am speaking. For just as earthly man has his sense-perceptions, so in his feeling and his will he has a reflection of the highest kind of cognition, of Intuition. Otherwise he could not be a moral being. The dim promptings of conscience are a reflection, a kind of shadow-picture, of true Intuition, the highest form of cognition possible for man on Earth.

Earthly man has in him something of what is lowest, and also this shadow-picture of what is highest, accessible only through Intuition. It is the intermediate levels that are lacking in him; hence he has to acquire Imagination and Inspiration. He has also to acquire Intuition in its purity, in its light-filled inner quality. At present it is in his moral feeling, his moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly image of that which arises as Intuition. Hence we can say that when a man with Initiation-knowledge rises to actual Intuitive knowledge of the world, of which previously he has known only the natural laws, the world becomes as intimately connected with him on earth as only the moral world is now. And this is indeed a significant feature of human life on Earth—that out of a dim inner presentiment we connect with the highest realm of all something which, in its true form, is accessible only to enhanced cognition.

The third step in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force. What is revealed through Intuition can be attained only by developing and spiritualising to the highest degree the capacity for love. A man must be able to make this capacity for love into a cognitional force. A good preparation for this is to free ourselves in a certain sense from dependence on external things; for instance, by making it our regular practice to picture our past experiences not in their usual sequence but in reverse order.

In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings, and we gradually enable the inner experiences of our soul and spirit to reach a point where soul and spirit break loose from the bodily and also from the etheric element. A man can well prepare himself for this breaking away if every evening he makes a backward survey of his experiences during the day, beginning with the last and moving back. When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.

You will probably say: “But there are so many hours during the day, full of experiences.” Then first try taking episodes—picturing, for instance, this going up and down stairs in reverse. One thus acquires inner mobility, so that gradually one becomes able to go back in imagination through a whole day in three or four minutes.

But that, after all, is only the negative half of what is needed for enhancing and training spiritually our capacity for loving. This must be brought to the point when, for example, we lovingly follow each stage in the growth of a plant. In ordinary life this growth is seen only from outside—we do not take part in it. We must learn to enter into every detail of plant-growth, to dive right down into the plant, until in our own soul we become the plant, growing, blossoming, bringing forth fruit with it, and the plant becomes as dear to us as we are to ourselves. In the same way we can go above the plants to picture the life of animals, and down to the minerals. We can feel how the mineral forms itself into the crystal, and take inward pleasure in the shaping of its planes, corners, angles, and having a sensation as of pain in our own being when the minerals are split asunder. Then, in our souls, we enter not only with sympathy but with our will into every single event in nature.

All this must be preceded by a capacity for love extending to mankind as a whole. We shall never be able to love nature in the right way until we have first succeeded in loving all our fellow-men. When we have in this way won through to an understanding love for all nature, that which made itself perceptible first in the colours of the aura, and in the resounding of the spheres, rounds itself out and takes on the outlines of actual spiritual Beings.

Experiencing these spiritual Beings, however, is a different matter from experiencing physical things. When a physical object is in front of me, for example this clock, I stand here with the clock there, and can experience it only by looking at it from outside. My relation to it is determined by space. In this way one could never have any real experience of a spiritual Being. We can have it only by entering right into the spiritual Being, with the aid of the faculty for loving which we have cultivated first towards nature. Spiritual Intuition is possible only by applying—in stillness and emptiness of consciousness—the capacity for love we can first learn in the realm of nature. Imagine that you have developed this capacity for loving minerals, plants, animals and also man; you are now in the midst of a completely empty consciousness. All around is the peace which lies beyond its zero-point. You feel the suffering on which the whole existence of the world is founded, and this suffering is at the same time a loneliness. Nothing yet is there. But the capacity for love, flowing up from within in manifold forms, leads you on to enter with your own being into all that now appears visibly, audibly, as Inspiration. Through this capacity for love you enter first into one spiritual Being, then into another.

These Beings described in my book, Occult Science, these Beings of the higher Hierarchies—we now learn to live in our experience of them; they become for us the essential reality of the world. So we experience a concrete spiritual world, just as through eye and ear, through feeling and warmth, we experience a concrete physical world.

If anyone wishes to acquire knowledge particularly important for himself, he must have advanced to this stage. I have already mentioned that through Inspiration pre-earthly spiritual existence rises up in our soul; how in this way we learn what we were before we came down into an earthly body. When through the capacity for love we are able to enter clairvoyantly into spiritual Beings, in the way I have described, there is also revealed that which first makes a man, in his inner experience, a complete being. There is revealed what precedes our life in the spiritual world; we are shown what we were before ascending to the last spiritual life between death and rebirth. The preceding earthly life is revealed, and, one after another, the lives on Earth before that. For the true Ego, present in all the repeated lives on Earth, can manifest only when the faculty for love has been so greatly enhanced that any other being, whether outside in nature or in the spiritual world, has become just as dear to a man as in his self-love he is dear to himself. But the true Ego—the Ego that goes through all repeated births and deaths—is manifest to a man only when he no longer lives egotistically for momentary knowledge, but in a love that can forget self-love and can live in an objective Being in the way that in physical existence he lives in self-love. For this Ego of former lives on Earth has then become as objective for his present life as a stone or a plant is for us when we stand outside it. We must have learnt by then to comprehend in objective love something which, for our present subjective personality, has become quite objective, quite foreign. We must have gained mastery over ourselves during our present earthly existence in order to have any insight into a preceding one.

When we have achieved this knowledge, we see the complete life of a man passing rhythmically through the stages of earthly existence from birth or conception till death, and then through spiritual stages between death and rebirth, and then returning again to Earth, and so on. A complete earthly life reveals itself as a repeated passing through birth and death, with intermediate periods of life in purely spiritual worlds. Only through Intuition can this knowledge be acquired as real knowledge, derived directly from experience.

I have had to describe for you—in outline to begin with—the path of Initiation-knowledge that must be followed in our time, at this present stage of human evolution, in order to arrive at true spiritual knowledge of the world and of man. But as long as human beings have existed there has been Initiation-knowledge, although it has had to take various forms in different evolutionary periods. As man is a being who goes through each successive earthly life in a different way, conditions for his inner development in the various epochs of world-evolution have to vary considerably. We shall be learning more about these variations in course of the next few days; to-day I should like to say only that the Initiation-knowledge which had to be given out in early times was very different from what has to be given out to-day. We can go back some thousands of years, to a time long before the Mystery of Golgotha, and we find how greatly men's attitude to both the natural world and the spiritual world differed from that of the present time, and how different, accordingly, was their Initiation-knowledge from what is appropriate today.

We have now a very highly developed natural science; I shall not be speaking of its most advanced side but only of what is imparted to children of six or seven, as general knowledge. At this comparatively early age a child has to accept the laws relating, let us say, to the Copernican world-system, and on this system are built hypotheses as to the origin of the universe. The Kant-Laplace theory is then put forward and, though this theory has been revised, yet in its essentials it still holds good. The theory is based on a primeval nebula, demonstrated in physics by an experiment intended to show the earliest conditions of the world-system. This primeval nebula can be imitated experimentally, and out of it, through the rotation of certain forces, the planets are assumed to have come into being, and the sun left behind. One of the rings split off from the nebula is thought to have condensed into the shape of the Earth, and everything else—minerals, plants, animals, and finally man himself—is supposed to have evolved on this basis. And all this is described in a thoroughly scientific way.

The process is made comprehensible for children by means of a practical demonstration which seems to show it very clearly. A drop of oil is taken, sufficiently fluid to float on a little water; this is placed on a piece of card where the line of the equator is supposed to come; a pin is run through the card and the card is whirled round. It can then be shown how, one after another, drops of oil detach themselves and rotate, and you can get a miniature planetary system out of the oil, with a sun left in the middle. When that has been shown to us in childhood, why should we think it impossible for our planetary system to have arisen out of the primeval nebula? With our own eyes we have seen the process reproduced.

Now in moral life it may be admirable for us to be able to forget ourselves, but in a demonstration of natural phenomena it is not so good! This whole affair of the drop of oil would never have worked if there had been no-one there to twirl the pin. That has to be taken into account. If this hypothesis is to hold good, a giant schoolmaster would have had to be there in the Cosmos, to start the primeval nebula revolving and keep it turning. Otherwise the idea has no reality.

It is characteristic of this materialistic age, however, to conceive only a fraction of the truth, a quarter, an eighth, or even less, and this fraction then lives with terribly suggestive power in the souls of men. Thus we persist to-day in seeing one side only of nature and of nature's laws.

I could give you plenty of examples, from different spheres of life, clearly showing this attitude towards nature: how—because a man absorbs this with the culture of the day—he considers nature to be governed by what is called the law of cause and effect. This colours the whole of human existence to-day. At best, a man can still maintain some connection with the spiritual world through religious tradition, but if he wishes to rise to the actual spiritual world, he must undertake an inner training through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—as I have pictured them. He must be led by Initiation-knowledge away from this belief in nature as permeated throughout by law, and towards a real grasp of the spiritual. Initiation-knowledge to-day must aim at leading men from the naturalistic interpretation of the Cosmos, now taken for granted, to a realisation of its spirituality.

In the old Initiation-knowledge, thousands of years ago, the very opposite prevailed. The wise men of the Mysteries, the leaders in those centres which were school, church, and art-school at the same time, had around them people who knew nothing of nature in the Copernican sense, but in their soul and spirit had an instinctive, intimate experience of the Cosmos, expressed in their myths and legends, which in the ordinary civilisation of to-day are no longer understood. About this too we shall have more to say. The experience that men had in those early days was instinctive; an experience of soul and spirit. It filled their waking hours with the dreamlike pictures of imagination; and from these pictures came the legends, the myths, the sayings of the gods, which made up their life. A man looked out into the world, experiencing his dreamy imaginations; and at other times he lived in the being of nature. He saw the rainbows, the clouds, the stars, and the sun making its speedy way across the heavens; he saw the rivers, the hills arising; he saw the minerals, plants, animals.

For primeval man, everything he saw through his senses was a great riddle. For at the time of which I am speaking, some thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha—there were both earlier and later times when civilisation was different—a man had an inward feeling of being blessed when dreamlike imaginations came to him. The external world of the senses, where all that he perceived of rainbow, clouds, the moving sun, and the minerals, plants, animals, was what the eye could see, while in the starry world he saw only what the pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic system recorded. This external world presented itself to people generally in a way that led them to say: “With my soul I am living in a divine-spiritual world, but there outside is a nature forsaken by the gods. When with my senses I look at a spring of water, I see nothing spiritual there; I see nothing spiritual in the rainbow, in the minerals, plants, animals, or in the physical bodies of men.” Nature appeared to these people as a whole world that had fallen away from divine spirituality.

This was how people felt in that time when the whole visible Cosmos had for them the appearance of having fallen away from the divine. To connect these two experiences, the inward experience of God and the outer one of a fallen sense-world, it was not merely abstract knowledge they needed, but a knowledge that could console them for belonging to this fallen sense-world with their physical bodies and their etheric bodies. They needed a consolation which would assure them that this fallen sense-world was related to all they experienced through their instinctive imaginings, through an experience of the spiritual which, though dim and dreamlike, was adequate for the conditions of those times. Knowledge had to be consoling.

It was consolation, too, that was sought by those who turned eagerly to the Mysteries, either to receive only what could be given out externally, or to become pupils of the men of wisdom who could initiate them into the secrets of existence and the riddles that confronted them.

These wise men of the old Mysteries, who were at the same time priests, teachers, and artists, made clear to their pupils through everything contained in their Mysteries—yet to be described—that even in this fallen world, in its rising springs, in the blossoming trees and flowers, in the crystal-forming minerals, in rainbow and drifting clouds and journeying sun there live those divine-spiritual powers which were experienced instinctively in the dreamlike imaginations of men. They showed these people how to reconcile the godforsaken world with the divine world perceived in their imaginations. Through the Mysteries they gave them a consoling knowledge which enabled them once more to look on nature as filled with the divine.

Hence we learn from what is told of those past ages—told even of the Grecian age—that knowledge now taught to the youngest children in our schools, that the sun stands still and the earth circles around it, for instance, is the kind of knowledge which in the old Mysteries was preserved as occult. What with us is knowledge for everyone was for that age occult knowledge; and explanations of nature were an occult science. As anyone can see who follows the course of human development during our civilisation, nature and nature's laws are the chief concern of men today; and this has led the spiritual world to withdraw. The old dreamlike imaginations have ceased. A man feels nature to be neutral, not entirely satisfying, belonging not to a fallen, sinful Universe, but to a Cosmos that by reason of inner necessity has to be as it is. He then feels more sharply conscious of himself; he learns to find spirituality in that one point only, and he discovers an inner urge to unite this inner self with God. All he now needs—in addition to his knowledge of nature and in conformity with it—is that a new Initiation-knowledge shall lead him into the spiritual world. The old Initiation-knowledge could start from the spirit, which was then experienced by people instinctively, and, embodied in the myths, could lead them on to nature. The new Initiation-knowledge must begin with a man's immediate experience to-day, with his perception of the laws of nature in which he believes, and from there it must point the way back to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Thus, in human evolution, a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see the significant moment of time when men, starting out from an instinctive experience of the spirit, found their way to concepts and ideas which, as the most external form of occult science, included the laws of nature. To-day these laws of nature are known to us from childhood. In face of this indifferent, prosaic attitude to life, this naturalism, the spiritual world has withdrawn from the inner life of man. Today, Initiation-knowledge must point back from nature to the spirit. For the men of old, nature was in darkness, but the spirit was bright and clear. The old Initiation-knowledge had to carry the light of this brightness of the spirit into the darkness of nature, so that nature too might be illumined. Initiation-knowledge to-day has to start from the light thrown upon nature, in an external, naturalistic way, by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. This light has then to be rescued, given fresh life, in order to open the way for it to the spirit, which in its own light must be sought on the opposite path to that of the old Initiation.

Answers to Questions

Questions were asked about the nature of imagination, inspiration and intuition. The wording of the questions was not noted down by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: With regard to the question of the difficulty with such a word as “imagination”, I would like to remark the following:

When we take up a word in order to render a significant content, we should always go back to the original meaning of the word and not actually ask: “What meaning is given to the word just now in colloquial speech?”¹ because it is basically the case with all current colloquial languages that they have flattened the words. I have already had to draw attention to something this morning, but it has an inner justification. The word “intuition” is also used in, I would say, an everyday sense, but rightly so, because the highest knowledge of the spiritual life for the moral realm must come down to the simplest, even most primitive human mind. For such a word as “imagination” we cannot say the same thing, and one should therefore first of all always realize what is contained in such a word. The moment you peel off the prefix and suffix of the word and go to the middle, you immediately come to “magic”. “Magic” is in the word “imagination”: it is an internalization of the magical. If you go back to such an original meaning of the word, you will find that the linguistic usage on which it is based today is quite a flattened one.

Now I would like to know what one should actually do in anthroposophy and in spiritual deepening in general, if one does not make the requirement that all words must be brought back to their deeper meaning.

You see, you have to take something like anthroposophy so seriously that you also have to realize this thought: Can anthroposophy be represented at all in today's colloquial language in reality? Is it even possible to say anything so significant about anthroposophy in any colloquial language? - Well, all colloquial languages originally contain something deeper, and you can go back to these deeper meanings in all colloquial languages today.

When we speak of “imagination” today and also use the word for that which is incorporated into the imagination, we have simply taken the word for that which is known today solely and exclusively from an inner experience. Most people today, when speaking of inner experience, think that it is all fantastic, and they then describe the fantastic as the imaginative. From their point of view, they are quite right. But if one does not have the will to go back to the original meaning of the word “imagination”, then it will be very difficult to get anthroposophy into the language at all.

You have to realize the following: You see, there are many things in the word “magic”. First of all, there is something in the word “magic” that I would like to describe as follows: When we are scientifically curious today, we look into the microscope, and we then see that which is small in the world, that which is small in the world - be it the longed-for atom, which is also shown experimentally today, be it some germinal plant - today's materialistic science is always curious about this small thing. But the moment we go to the real causes of things, the moment we go to where the creative forces and powers of things are, we do not come to the small, but to the great. And the creation out of the great, the creation out of the mighty, the imposing, that which encompasses creative powers that surpass the small human being, to bring this into the human soul in an appropriate way, that is: to condense the magical so that it can be received and experienced by the human soul in the condensation.

And just as one should do with the word “imagination”, one should also do it with all other words that are used. Almost everyone today speaks of inspiration. I don't deny him the right - why should I deny him the right, because everyone has the right to use the word “inspiration” at the level at which he moves - but everyone speaks of “inspiration” today, even when he thinks of a joke. Now, of course, this interpretation of the word “inspiration”, when used in this way, is not appropriate for the paths of higher knowledge. But again, let us make it our principle to look at the words in the current languages of civilization in the same way as people were once looked at in general.

Just think about it: as late as the 18th century, here in England and on the continent, people everywhere were still very much occupied with so-called Martinism, with the philosophy that came from Saint-Martin, especially with his book: “Des erreurs et de la verité”. Yes, a book appeared in “Edimbourg” in 1775 that has been translated into all European languages, a book that dealt with the spiritual, so to speak, in the manner of the time, a final offshoot for the kind of spiritual contemplation that was still possible until the 18th century and into the beginning of the 19th century, but which is no longer possible today.

Now, if we take one of the main ideas of Saint-Martin's book “Des erreurs et de la verité”, then we find that man in his totality as an earthly being is seen as having fallen away from his original greatness; there the - I would like to say still complete man - is accused of the fall into sin. Man was once, in Saint Martin's sense, still a mighty being, girded with the so-called holy armor, which served him magically, made him magical in the face of all the forces and entities of the world, many of which were hostile to him. Man lived in the place described by Saint Martin as the place of the seven sacred trees, which in religious legend, or earlier for my sake in the Bible, is referred to as paradise. Man was gifted with the fiery spear, through which he exercised his corresponding power, and so on. All the things that are originally attributed to man are said to have been lost to man through his own pre-earthly guilt; even in his pre-earthly state a terrible sin is attributed to man, which even in social life today is shocking to mention. And so man is portrayed as a being who has fallen from his original greatness. And the whole of Martinism, the whole philosophy of Saint Martin, actually sets itself the task of showing what man could be if he had not fallen from his original greatness.

Now, these connections can no longer be made fully alive today; they are precisely the last offshoot of that way of looking at things which I described this morning as the old way of looking at things. Within the modern science of initiation we must proceed from the scientific way of knowing - not from natural science itself, but from the scientific way of knowing - for that alone will be able to satisfy man in the course of the near future. But with regard to special fields, if we really want to penetrate the anthroposophical content, all the content of any spiritual striving, with the necessary mood, with the necessary uplifting of the soul, with the holy enthusiasm with which we are to penetrate it in order to really understand it - if we want to do that, then we will not be allowed to take the words out of the ordinary colloquial language, but we will have to look at the words as if actually all words up to our civilization had undergone a fall from grace. Words today are no longer what they were: they have become sinful beings. They have fallen down into matter and no longer signify what they signified when they were once still close to that stage of human development in which they were used in the Mysteries. And we must, in a certain sense, take a step upwards in feeling the words. We must make an effort not to stop at what is common colloquial language; otherwise the words will also take on the color, the ‘timbre’ that these words have in colloquial language. The easiest thing to do today is to ascend from the words in the fall of man to a kind of sacred meaning of the words in the Hebrew language. For those languages that have been used more within modern life with its thoroughly unsacramental interests, it is of course difficult for these languages to move up to the sinlessness of words - if I may put it that way - it is not meant so badly, but in a certain respect we must do so. And so we have to be clear: the word “inspiration” has fallen to the point of sinfulness today, where anyone who makes a joke already says they are inspired. - So why not? Basically, the writers, even the cartoonists, of funny papers need a lot of inspiration in today's sense, but it's a profaned inspiration today.

But if we go back to the word in its more original meaning, then we are led into very deep regions of human aspiration.

There I must remind you of the way in which, for example, in India - at a decadent level - a wonderful, admirable form of knowledge has been preserved, which was once much more significant than it is today, but which did not, as it must be today, proceed directly from thinking, but which proceeded from a very specific regulation or even dysregulation of the breathing process. Within the original yoga method it was a matter of raising the breathing process, which otherwise always runs unconsciously in the human being, to consciousness. This can be achieved by changing the rhythm of inhalation, breath holding and exhalation from that which occurs unconsciously. If you give the breathing rhythm different numerical ratios than you have in ordinary everyday breathing, then you breathe differently in relation to inhaling, holding your breath and exhaling. What is called the yoga method is essentially based on such different shapes and forms of breathing. This yoga method brought the whole breathing process to consciousness. Man breathed by consciously changing the rhythm of his breathing: the flow of breath consciously entered into the circulation of the blood. The whole human being undulated and interwove with a changed breathing rhythm. And just as we receive sensory observation in the ray of sight or the ray of hearing, just as we receive knowledge of the colors of the surrounding things through sight, just as we receive knowledge of the sounds emanating from the surrounding things through the ray of hearing, so the one who made the breathing rhythm into an elevated, into a magical perception, felt the soul-spiritual, he perceived in the breathing process the soul-spiritual permeating him. At the moment when the breathing process became fully conscious, and when at the same time that disposition of soul was present which was present in South Asia about seven or eight thousand years before our era, at that moment, through this altered breathing rhythm, one not only sent the physical air into the body with this swelling and surging, but one sent soul and spirit into this flowing breath, and one experienced soul and spirit, insofar as the soul and spirit of man are in this flowing breath.

Now you can materially call the inhalation yes “inspiration” - that is the literal. If one spiritualizes the inspiration, one does what happened in ancient India: then one will experience the spiritualized inspiration, with the breath that has been inspired and spiritualized like any mental being. Then we are dealing with what the word “inspiration” actually always originally meant - even in non-Indian, European languages. So when we speak of the word “inspiration”, we also have to move up, I would say, to the sinlessness of the word. And for this reason I have always been reluctant to write so-called “popular” books on anthroposophy - even though such suggestions have always been made from all sides. Of course, that would be very easy. But even the beginner should not actually be given quite popular books on anthroposophy, but should have something in anthroposophical books that he can - I mean spiritually - break his teeth on, where he has to make a terrible effort, that is something that does not come easily! For in this effort, in the overcoming of that which one must overcome in order to understand something that is difficult to understand, there is at the same time something else. For if one is like - yes, how shall I put it? - popular anthroposophy like a popular speech, then one also has a different taste and a completely different attitude towards the meanings of the words, then one pulls the meanings of the words down into their sinfulness. But if you have to grit your teeth at the difficulty of a beginner's book, then you also acquire a taste for delving into the words. You may even be reminded of some historical events. Take a look at the wonderful way Jakob Böhme ponders the words first, ponders them deeply, before he uses them. I would say that Jakob Böhme distils entire worlds out of the words before he uses them. And so the position with regard to something like “imagination” or ‘inspiration’ or “intuition” or other words, as we use them in ordinary life, is at a lower level than we usually assume. And so I do think that one should not actually try to replace words that are rightly used - “imagination”, “inspiration” - with others, but that one should rather work to elevate these words to their sinlessness for the anthroposophical understanding, at least as long as one is dealing with anthroposophy. When one goes out into ordinary life, one can of course again fall into the sinfulness of the words, there is no harm in that. And so just such an attitude towards words could be extraordinarily beneficial to anthroposophical deepening. So, I mean, anyone who becomes aware of what is in the word “imagination” would in the end, if he is a fanatic, even cry out for a law that forbids the use of the word imagination for this “fantasy” game, so that such a word is preserved for the area where it is actually rightly used.

With regard to the question: “Who or what recognizes in man?” I would like to say the following: Unfortunately, these questions are asked faster than they can be answered, and there is a great deal to be said if one is to answer such a far-reaching, comprehensive question. When such a question is raised, it must be made clear what the content of this morning's speech was actually about. Is it not true that when we speak of the paths to supersensible knowledge, as I did this morning and also yesterday, what is it all about? It is a question of how this human soul, which is present in any human being in the present incarnation, how this spiritual-soul, which is thus present in a physical body between birth or conception and death, how it ascends to the gradual recognition, firstly, of the etheric world of formative forces in the imagination, secondly, through the stillness which I have described, through the empty consciousness, in inspiration, to the recognition of the pre-natal world. And then, through intuition, which is achieved through the special training of the ability to love, one arrives at the view of the previous, or one could also say the previous earth lives, those earth lives which - as I explained this morning - are already objectively confronting the human being, like some external object or process of nature, or for my sake I could also say like another human being is objectively confronting one. If I stand opposite another person in ordinary social life, I am related to that person through the inner kinship of the same human race, but I stand opposite him objectively. I must face my previous incarnations as objectively as another person if I want to perceive them in truth. Then one learns to recognize with the soul-spiritual, which is embodied in the present earthly body, the actual, true I, which goes through the repeated earthly lives.

Now the question seems to me to be this: Who is it actually, or what is it in man that now recognizes this true I that passes through the repeated earth lives, or which member in man is it? - This question itself, ladies and gentlemen, is not really a question that has any real, concrete content. It asks about the subject of cognition. This subject of cognition is precisely that I which is embodied in the present earthly life, which then soars up to cognition. The true I can only be attained by first embracing with one's consciousness that which is included in earthly life between birth and death; then one lives in the I on a certain level; one lives in this I, but one does not yet recognize the true I, which goes through many births and deaths. But through the methods I have described, this higher ego, which one carries in earthly life by bringing oneself to selflessness, is made capable of recognizing the true ego.

And remember: you change the subject during this path of cognition. Firstly, we are dealing with the ego that lives between birth and death; it does not yet recognize the true ego. Now this ego vibrates upwards and is initially the recognizer of the true ego, which goes through repeated earthly lives. In this way it actually identifies itself cognitively with the true I. Thus, by undergoing a metamorphosis, this higher ego is raised into the true ego. And then, when it is elevated into the true I, it can only recognize the true I.

So we cannot ask: “Who or what recognizes in man?”, but we must say: "What recognizes in man in ordinary life is in itself already made into another I, it goes through a metamorphosis, in that it rises from imagination through inspiration to intuition. But then it is a transformed ego for cognition. But the transformation is there precisely in order to reach the true self.

• 1. The word ‘imagination’ is also used in English for “phantasy”.

We have come to the point in our studies where we heard that the human being who is descending from spiritual regions is clothed in an etheric body and has, for a brief moment, a pre-vision of the life that is awaiting him on earth. We have heard of the abnormalities and conditions to which this may give rise. Before proceeding, we will answer a question which may seem of importance to one who turns his spiritual gaze to Devacha: In what sense is there community of life among human beings between death and a new birth? For there is community of life, not only among men on the physical earth but also in the higher worlds. Just as the activities of human beings in the spirit-realm reach down into the physical world, so all the relationships and connections that are established between men on the earth stretch up into the spiritual world.

We will take a concrete example of this, namely the relationship between mother and child. Is there a relationship between them which endures? There is indeed and moreover a much more intimate, much firmer relationship than can ever be established here on earth. Mother-love, to begin with, is a kind of natural-instinct, it has something of an animal-like character. As the child grows up this relationship becomes a moral, ethical spiritual one. When mother and child learn to think together, when they share experiences in common, natural instinct with draws more and more into the background; it has merely provided the opportunity for the forging of that beautiful bond of union which is present in the very highest sense in the mother's love for the child and the child's love for the mother. The mutual understanding and love which unfolds here continues on into the regions of the spiritual world, even although, as the result of the one dying earlier, the other seems for a time to be separated from the dead. After this period has passed, the link that was on earth is equally vital and intimate. The two are together, only all the purely natural, animal instincts must have been outlived. The feelings and thoughts which weave between one soul and another on earth are not hindered in yonder world by the encasements that exist here. Devachan actually assumes a particular appearance and structure as a result of the relationships that are woven here on earth.

Let us take another example. Friendships and affinities are born from the kinship of souls; they continue on into Devachan, and from them the social connections for the next life develop. By establishing connections with souls here, we are therefore working at the form which Devachan receives. We have all of us worked in this way if bonds of love were forged between us and other men; thereby we create something that has significance not only for the earth but which also shapes conditions in Devachan. What happens here as the fruit of love, of friendship, of mutual inner understanding—all these things are building stones of temples in the spiritual region above and men who have this certainty cannot but be inspired by the knowledge that when, here on earth, bonds are forged from soul to soul, this is the foundation of an eternal “Becoming.”

Let us suppose for a moment that on some other physical planet there were beings incapable of mutual sympathy, incapable of forming bonds of love among one another. Such beings would have a very barren Devachan. Only a planet where bonds of love are forged between one being and another can have a Devachan rich in content and variety. A being who is already in Devachan and whose presence, it is true, cannot be experienced by ordinary men, has, according to his stage of development, greater or less consciousness of communion with those who have remained behind on the earth. There are, indeed, means whereby consciousness of these bonds of communion can be intensified. If we send thoughts of love-but not of egotistic love-to the Dead, we strengthen the feeling of community with them.

It is a mistake to assume that the consciousness of the human being in Devachan is dim or shadowy. This is not the case. The degree of consciousness once attained by a man can never be lost, in spite of darkenings which occur during certain periods of transition. The human being in Devachan has, through his spiritual organs, clear consciousness of what is happening in the sphere of the earth. Occultism reveals that the human being in the spiritual world lives together with what is taking place on the earth.

Thus we see that life in Devachan, if viewed in its reality, loses every element of comfortlessness; that the human being, when he ceases to regard it from his earthly, egotistical standpoint, can experience it as a condition of infinite blessedness—even apart from the fact that all freedom from the physical body, freedom from the lower nature in which he is enclosed here, brings with it a feeling of intense relief. The fact that these encasements have fallen away—this in itself brings a feeling of beatitude. Devachan is thus a time of expansion and expression in all directions; there is a richness and an absence of restriction that are never experienced on the earth.

We have heard that on his descent to a new birth, man is clothed with a new etheric body by Beings of a rank similar to that of the Folk-Spirits. This etheric body is not perfectly adapted to the reincarnating human being; still less perfectly adapted is the physical sheath he receives. We will now speak, in broad outline, of the incorporation of the human being into the physical world. Much of the subject baffles any attempt at outer description.

We have heard that in accordance with his qualities, the human being clothes himself with an astral body. Through what is contained in this astral body he is attracted to certain human beings on the earth; through the etheric body, he is drawn to the folk and to the family in the wider sense, into which he is to be reborn. According to the way and manner in which he has developed his astral body, he is drawn to the mother; the essence, the substance, the Organisation of the astral body draws him to the mother. The ego draws him to the father. The ego was present even in ages of remote antiquity, when the soul descended for the first time from the bosom of the Godhead into an earthly body. This ego has developed through many incarnations; the ego, the “I,” of one human being is distinct from the ego of another and at the present stage of evolution gives rise to the force of attraction to the father. The etheric body attracts the human being to the folk, to the family; the astral body attracts him particularly to the mother; the “I” to the father. The whole descent to the new incarnation is guided in accordance with these principles.

It may happen that the astral body is attracted to a mother but that the ego is not attracted to the corresponding father; in such a case the wandering continues until suitable parents are found.

In the present phase of evolution, the “I” represents the element of will, the impulse of perceptivity. In the astral body lie the qualities of phantasy or imagination, of thinking. The latter qualities, therefore, are transmitted by the mother, the former by the father. The individuality who is approaching incarnation, seeks out through his unconscious forces the parents who are to provide the physical body.

What has here been described takes place, in essentials, by about the third week after conception. True, this being who consists of “I,” astral body and etheric body is, from the moment of conception onwards, near the mother who bears within her the fertilised germ-cell; but it works in upon the germ-cell from outside. At about the third week the astral and etheric bodies take hold, as it were, of the germ-cell and now begin to participate in the work on the embryo; up to that time the development of the physical body proceeds without the influence of the astral body and etheric body. From then onwards these bodies participate in the development of the embryo and themselves influence the further elaboration of the human-germ. Therefore what was said about the etheric body holds good still more for the physical body and complete suitability is even less easy to obtain here. These significant facts shed light upon a great deal that happens in the world.

Up to this point we have been speaking of the normal evolution of the average man of modern times; what has been said does not altogether hold good of a man in whom occult development began in a previous incarnation. The higher the stage to which he attained, the earlier does he begin to work upon his own physical body in order to make it more suitable for the mission he has to fulfil on the earth. The later he takes command of the physical germ, the less control he will have over the physical body. The most highly developed Individualities, those who are the guides and leaders of the spiritual life of the earth take command already at the time of conception. Nothing takes place without their collaboration; they direct their physical body right up to the time of their death and begin to prepare the new body directly the first impetus for this is given.

The substances of which the physical body is composed are perpetually changing; after about seven years, every particle has been renewed. The substance is exchanged but the form endures. Between birth and death the substances of the physical body must continually be born anew; they are the ever-changing element. What we develop in such a way that death has no power over it, is preserved and builds up a new organism.

The Initiate performs consciously, between death and a new birth, what the average human being performs unconsciously between birth and death; the Initiate consciously builds up his new physical body. For him, therefore, birth amounts to no more than an outstanding event in his existence. He exchanges the substances only once, but then fundamentally. Hence there is considerable similarity of stature and form in such Individualities from one incarnation to another, whereas in those who are but little developed there is no similarity of form whatever in their successive incarnations. The higher the development of a man, the greater is the similarity in two successive incarnations; this is clearly perceptible to clairvoyant sight. There is a definite phrase for indicating this higher stage of development; it is said that such a man is not born in a different body, any more than it is said of the average human being that he receives a new body every seven years. Of a Master it is said: he is born in the same body; he uses it for hundreds, even thousands of years. This is the case with the vast majority of leading Individualities. An exception is formed by certain Masters who have their own special mission; with them the physical body remains, so that death does not occur for them at all. These are the Masters whose task it is to watch over and bring about the transition from one race to another.

Two other questions arise at this point, namely, that of the duration of the sojourn in the spiritual worlds, and that of the sex in consecutive incarnations.

Occult investigation reveals that the human being returns to incarnation within an average period of from 1,000 to 1,300 years. The reason for this is that the human being may find the face of the earth changed on his return and therefore be able to have new experiences. The changes on the earth are closely connected with certain constellations of the stars. This is a most significant fact. At the beginning of spring the sun rises in a certain zodiacal constellation. The sun began to rise in the constellation of Aries (the Ram) 800 years before Christ; before that epoch it rose in the adjacent constellation of Taurus (the Bull). About 2,600 years are required for the passage through one constellation. The circuit through the whole twelve constellations is known in occultism as a Cosmic Year.

The peoples of antiquity were deeply sensible of what is connected with this passage through the zodiac. With feelings of awe and reverence they said: When the sun rises in spring, nature is renewed after her winter repose; nature is awakened from deep sleep by the divine rays of the vernal sun. And they connected this young, fresh power of spring with the constellation from which the sun was shining. They said: This constellation is the bestower of the sun with its new vigour, it is the bestower of the new, divinely creative power. And so the Lamb was regarded as the benefactor of humanity by men who lived in an epoch now lying 2,000 years behind us. All the sagas and legends concerning the Lamb originated in that age. Conceptions of the Godhead were associated with this symbol. During the early centuries of our era, the Redeemer Himself, Christ Jesus, was depicted by the symbol of the Cross and underneath it the Lamb. Not until; the sixth century A.D. was the Redeemer portrayed on the Cross.

This is the origin, too, of the well-known myth of Jason and the quest of the Golden Fleece.

In the epoch preceding 800 B.C. the sun was passing through the constellation of Taurus; in Egypt we find the veneration of Apis the Bull, in Persia the veneration of the Mithras Bull. Earlier still, the sun was passing through the constellation of Gemini, the Twins; in Indian and Germanic mythology we find definite indication of the Twins; the twin goats drawing the chariot of the God Donar are a last remnant of this. Then, finally, we come back to the epoch of Cancer which brings us near to the time of the Atlantean Flood. An ancient culture passed away and a new culture arose. This was designated by a particular occult sign, the vortex, which is the symbol of Cancer and to be found in every calendar.

Thus the peoples have always had a clear consciousness of the fact that what proceeds in the heavens runs parallel with the changes taking place on the earth beneath. When the sun has completed its passage through one constellation, the face of the earth has changed to such an extent that it is profitable for the human being to enter a new life. For this reason the time of reincarnation depends upon the progress of the vernal equinox. The period required by the sun for its passage through one zodiacal constellation is the period within which the human being is twice incarnated, once as a man and once as a woman. The experiences in a male and a female organism are so fundamentally different for spiritual life that the human being incarnates once as a woman and once as a man into the same conditions of the earth. This makes an average of 1,000 to 1,300 years between two incarnations.

Here we have the answer to the question concerning the sex. As a rule, the sex alternates. This rule, however, is often broken, so that sometimes there are three to five, but never more than seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex. To say that seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex are the rule, contradicts all occult experience.

Before we begin to study the karma of the individual human being, one fundamental fact must be borne in mind. There is a common karma, karma that is not determined by the single individual although it is adjusted in the course of his incarnations. Here is a concrete example:—

When in the Middle Ages the Huns poured over from Asia into the countries of Europe and caused alarming wars, this too had spiritual significance. The Huns were the last surviving remnants of ancient Atlantean peoples; they were in an advanced stage of decadence which expressed itself in a certain process of decay in their astral and etheric bodies. These products of decay found good soil in the fear and the terror caused among the peoples. The result was that these products of decay were inoculated into the astral bodies of the peoples and in a later generation this was carried over into the physical body. The skin absorbed the astral elements and the outcome was a disease prevalent in the Middle Ages, namely, leprosy. An ordinary doctor would, of course, attribute leprosy to physical causes. I have no wish to dispute what such doctors say but their line of reasoning is as follows:—In a fight, one man wounds another with a knife; he had harboured an old feeling of revenge against him. One person will say that the cause of the wound was the feeling of revenge, another that the knife was the cause.—Both are right. The knife was the final physical cause but behind it there is the spiritual cause. Those who seek for spiritual causes will always admit the validity of physical causes.

We see that historical events have a significant effect upon whole generations and we learn how, even in fundamental conditions of health, improvements extending over long periods of time can be brought about.

As a result of technical progress in recent centuries there developed among the European peoples an industrial proletariat, and together with it, untold racial and class hatred. This has its seat in the astral body and comes to physical expression as pulmonary tuberculosis. This knowledge is yielded by occult investigation. It is often not within our power to help the individual among those who are subject to general karma of this kind. We are often compelled, with aching hearts, to see an individual suffering without being able to make him well or, happy because he is connected with the general karma. Only by working for the improvement of the common karma can we also help the individual. It should not be our aim to promote the well being of the single, egoistic self, but to work in such a way that we serve the well being of humanity as a whole.

Another example, directly connected with topical events, is the following—Occult observations have revealed that among the astral beings who participated in the various battles of the Russian-Japanese war, there were dead Russians, working against their own people. This was due to the fact that during recent times in the development of the Russian people, many noble idealists perished in the dungeon or on the scaffold. They were men of high ideals, but they were not so far developed as to be able to forgive. They died with feelings of bitter revenge against those who had been the cause of their death. These feelings of revenge were lived out in their Kamaloca period, for only in Kamaloca is this possible. From the astral plane after their death, they filled the souls of the Japanese soldiers with hatred and revenge against the people to whom they themselves had belonged. Had they already been in Devachan they would have said: I forgive my enemies! For in Devachan, with the clouds of hatred and revenge confronting them from without, they would have realised how terrible and how unworthy such feelings are.—Thus occult investigation reveals that whole peoples stand under the influence of their forefathers.

The idealistic strivings of modern times cannot attain their goals because they are willing to work only with physical means on the physical plane. So, for example, the Society for the Promotion of Peace, which sets out to bring about peace by physical methods alone. Not until we learn how to influence the astral plane too can we recognise the right methods; not until then can we work in such a way that when the human being is born again he will find a world in which he can labour fruitfully.

I have brought to your notice on the one hand how problematical it is to conceive the celestial phenomena in their mathematical and geometrical aspect alone. This is now being recognized by many people and from diverse angles. Only quite unadvanced thinkers still maintain that the world-picture of Copernicus and Galileo represents downright reality. Increasingly, we hear the voice of those who find this way of thinking of the celestial phenomena useful and practical, no doubt, for purposes of calculation, yet emphasize that it represents only a certain mode of understanding, and that quite other syntheses might be conceived.

There are even those who say, somewhat as Ernst Mach used to say: In the last resort, one can uphold the Ptolemaic just as well as the Copernican world-system, and a third system might equally well be devised. These are but practical ways of correlating the observed facts. The entire realm should now be confronted with a far freer kind of outlook.

You see from this that the problematical nature of the celestial charts, described but a short time ago as replicas of the real facts, is now conceded by the widest circles. On the other hand an escape from the manifest problems and uncertainties of this realm can only be found through such views as were brought forward in outline yesterday,—views which no longer remove Man from the whole cosmic background, but on the contrary, put him into it from the outset. We have to recognize the processes within Man himself in their connection with solar phenomena, lunar phenomena and terrestrial phenomena, thus taking as a starting-point all that goes on in Man, in order to find the way to what is going on out there in the Cosmos, the latter being in some sense the cause of the processes in Man.

A path like this can of course only be trodden from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. Precisely when we try to bring Astronomy into connection with the most varied spheres of life, we shall find that we are being led through Astronomy itself into the views of Spiritual Science. Bear in mind that the visible celestial phenomena, perceptible to our senses and also to our re-inforced senses, appear at first a manifestation of something outside of man. Man confronts and, as it were, arrests with his senses whatever approaches him, introducing it into his conscious world-picture. But the impulses streaming towards us from all sides, certainly do not come to a standstill before our senses. All that goes on without being held up by man's senses and brought into consciousness, all that lives in the celestial influences that stream towards us from all sides, must be sought for within our bodily organism. The organism must in a certain way reflect it all, and it does this in the unconscious and subconscious processes which can only be raised into consciousness in more complicated ways.

We will now continue in a certain direction what we began yesterday. Only an abstraction of our earthly world is dealt with in Geology or Mineralogy; the Earth as described by Geology consists of minerals has evolved in the mineral sphere; true as it is that forces are there in the Earth by virtue of which it brings forth the minerals; yet is is equally true that all that is living in plants, animals and physical human beings also belongs to the Earth. We only see the Earth in its totality when we do not simply cast aside what lives in plant, animal and man and have in mind the mere abstraction "mineral earth ", but bring it all into our consciousness. The living beings and entities that grow up out of the Earth are also part and parcel of the whole.

Of all that belongs in this way to the Earth, let us first take the plant kingdom. We will approach it in order then to find the transition to what meets us in man. Whereas the mineral kingdom to a certain extent carries on an independent Earth-existence and is only related to the Cosmos outside the Earth in such a way as is shown, for example, in the changing of water into ice in winter, the plant kingdom retains a much greater inner connection with the cosmic surroundings of the Earth—with all that enters the Earth from the Cosmos. Through the plant-world the life of the Earth as it were opens itself to the Universe. In geographical regions where in a given season an intensive interaction is taking place between Earth and Cosmos. We must pay heed to a phenomenon like this, for it will lead us into the realm of Astronomy not only quantitatively, but qualitatively. We must be able to derive our ideas from such a thing as this, even as the astronomers of our time derive their ideas from angles, parallaxes and so on.

Then we shall say to ourselves, for example:—The plant-life, covering a given region of the Earth, is a kind of sense-organ, sensitive to all that is revealed towards the Earth out of the Cosmos. At seasons when the interplay is more intense between a portion of the Earth's surface and the Universe, it is as though a human being were opening his eyes to the outer world to receive sense-impressions. And when the interplay is less intense between the Earth and the Cosmos, the consequent decline and inward closure of the vegetative life is like a closing of the eyes to the Cosmos. It is more than a mere comparison to say that through its vegetation a given territory opens its eyes to the Universe in spring and summer and shuts its eyes in autumn and winter, and as by opening and closing of our eyes we do in a way converse with the outer world, so too it is a kind of information or revelation from the Universe which the Earth receives by the opening and closing of its eyes through the life of plants.

And to describe it a little more precisely, we may consider the vegetation of a given region of the Earth when exposed, as it were, so to speak, to the most vivid interplay with the solar life, and we may then turn our attention to the state of vegetation in this region when it is not thus exposed. The winter, I need hardly say, does not interrupt the vegetative life of the Earth. It goes without saying that the vegetative life continues through the winter. But it expresses itself in quite another way than when exposed to the intensive working of the Sun's rays—or, shall we say, of the Cosmos. Under the influence of the solar life, the vegetative life of the Earth shoots outward into form. The leaves unfold and grow more complex; flowers develop. But when this is followed by the closing of the eyes to the Universe, if we may call it so, the vegetative life goes back into itself—into the seed. Withdrawing from the outer world, it no longer shoots into outward form; it concentrates, if I may put it so, into a point; it becomes centered in itself.

We may describe this contrast truly as a law of Nature. The interplay between the earthly and the solar life reveals itself in the Earth's vegetation. Under the solar influence the vegetative life shoots outward into form; under the influence of the earthly life it closes up into a plant,—it becomes seed or germ. In all this there is a quality of expansion and contraction or gathering into a center. Here we begin to apprehend the relationships of space itself in a directly qualitative aspect. This is the very thing which we must practice in the development of our ideas, if we would attain to really fruitful notions and perceptions in this sphere.

And now we pass from plant-life to the life of man. Naturally, what comes to expression in the life of plants will find expression in man too. In what way will it do so? What we somehow perceive, my dear Friends, so outwardly and evidently in the life of plants—what we have visibly before our eyes if only we are attentive to the qualitative aspect—this we can recognize in man, properly speaking, only in the first years of childhood.

Let us then trace the interaction of the solar and terrestrial life for man in the age of childhood, as we have just been doing for the plant kingdom. The little child opens through the senses to receive the impressions of the outer world. In doing so, the human being is really opening to receive the solar life. You only need see things in the proper light to recognize that what pours in upon our senses is inherently connected with what is brought about in the terrestrial sphere by the Cosmos. You can reflect upon the special case of light. When light and darkness succeed each other in the alternation of day and night, impressions are made upon our eyes by day, and no impressions are made by night. You can apply this also to other perceptions, though it is more difficult to make it clear. You will then say that a certain effect of the daily alternations, solar and earthly, expresses itself in man's soul-life. Man has an activity of soul through what arises in the rhythm of the day. What the Sun here brings to the Earth comes to expression in the soul-life of man. But if we follow the growth of the child, particularly until the 7th year—the change of teeth—and go into all the details, we find how, notably in the first years of the child's development (less and less, the older the child becomes), it is plainly perceptible that the changing seasons, year by year, have just as much significance for human growth as for the sprouting and dying-down of the vegetation.

We will represent it diagrammatically. If, for example, we study carefully and intelligently the development of the human brain in the earliest stages from year to year, we shall find the following. We have the human skull with its brain-content. (Fig. 1)

It remodels itself, and one can follow how it remodels itself through what in the course of the changing year. Something which works formatively and creatively upon the human head, molding it from outside in a corporeal, physical sense,—we find this intimately connected with the forces playing between Earth and Sun in the course of the year. In the daily rhythm we find what enters through the senses, independent of growth, to work on the soul and spirit of man. We see how what takes place in man by reason of the Sun's activity in the daily rhythm, has an inner effect which frees itself from the external world and becomes of a soul-and-spirit nature; it is what the child learns, what it assimilates through observation, what takes place in effect, in soul and spirit. Then we see how in a totally different tempo—from a different aspect—the brain remodels itself, organizes itself, and grows. That is the other activity, the yearly activity of the solar forces. We will say nothing yet of the changes occurring in the Universe between Sun and Earth; we will consider manifestations in man himself which are united with certain changes in the solar and terrestrial life.

We consider the day and find the soul- and spirit-life of man connected with the course of the Sun. We consider the change of seasons through the year and find man's life of growth, the physical, corporeal life, connected with the course of the Sun. We can say: The change taking place between Earth and Sun in 24 hours has certain effects on the spirit and soul of man. What happens between Earth and Sun in the course of the year has certain effects on the physical, corporeal part of man. We shall have to bring these effects into connection with others and thence arrive at a world-concept which can no longer be deceptive, for it speaks to us of real processes within ourselves, no longer dependent on illusory sense-impressions or the like.

Thus we must gradually draw near to what can give us a sure basis for the astronomical world-conception. We can only take our start from what appears in man himself. So we can say: the day is something in man's connection with the Cosmos that expresses itself in soul and spirit; the year is something in man's connection with the Cosmos that expresses itself in the physical-corporeal life, as for example in growth, and so on.

Now let us look at another complex of facts, referred to yesterday. With human reproduction we must relate certain ideas referring to the life of the Cosmos. We indicated yesterday that the female organism shows in a striking manner how the monthly functions connected with the sex-life—though not, to be sure, coinciding with the Moon's phases—are yet a reflection of them in their time rhythm. The process wrests itself free from the Cosmos, as it were, but still reflects the Cosmic Moon-process in its periodic course. We have here an indication, my dear friends, of inner processes in the human organism which we can study better if we turn our attention to more familiar phenomena, such as may make these more remote phenomena easier to understand.

There is something in the soul-life which actually reproduces in miniature the organic processes to which we have just alluded. Let us say, we have an outer experience which affects us through the senses and the mind,—perhaps also through our feelings. We retain a memory of the experience. The recollection—the retention of the experience—leads to the possibility of the picture of it emerging again at a later time. Anyone who considers these facts, not on the basis of fanciful theories, but with sound qualitative observation, will have to admit that in all that arises within us by way of memory, our physical bodily organization plays a part. The remembering itself is no doubt an event in the life of soul, but it needs the inner basis of the physical body in order to come into being. The activity of remembering is directly interrelated with bodily processes; though this has not yet been investigated sufficiently by external science. Comparing what occurs in the female organism in the monthly periods (it occurs in the male organism too, only it is less evident; it can be observed more in the etheric organism and this is not usually done)—comparing this with what happens in ordinary experience when we remember something, one will certainly find a difference. Yet if with sound inner perception one recreates the process in one's consciousness, one cannot but say that the activity of remembering, this soul-occurrence arising out of the physical organism, is similar to what takes place in the monthly functions of the female organism, only is in miniature and is more drawn into the realm of soul, less impressed upon the body. From this point of view you will be able to say: Inasmuch as man individualizes himself from the Cosmos, he develops the faculty of memory; inasmuch as he still lives within the Cosmos, developing more his sub-conscious functions, something in the nature of a common experience with the Cosmos arises, connected with the Moon-processes in the Cosmos. This experience remains, just as a past experience remains in our memory, and later it emerges in an inner constitutional process, like a remembrance which has been drawn into the body and has become organic.

There is no other way, my dear friends, of understanding these matters than by thus proceeding from the simpler to the more complex. Just as it is not necessary for a recollection to coincide with a fresh outer experience, so it is not necessary for what appears in the female organism, as a memory of an earlier cosmic connection of the human organism with the phases of the Moon, to coincide in time with these phases. Nevertheless, it is connected with the Moon's phases no less essentially than is the recollection of an earlier experience with the experience itself. Here then we have an activity in the human organism, more on the psychological side and yet not unlike the effects—precipitated, as it were, into the life of time—of influences due originally to the Moon. For the organic periodicity of which we have been speaking embraces about 28 days, as you know.

Now take the following. If we consider the daily influence of the Sun, we find an inner activity of soul and spirit; if we consider the yearly influence of the Sun, then we find laws of growth belonging to the outer physical body. Thus we can say, for the Sun life:

1. Soul and Spirit: Day

2. Physical bodily nature: Year

And now we come to the Lunar activity. We pass on to consider the lunar life, the life of the Moon. What I have just described as taking place in rhythm of 28 days belongs indeed to the soul and spirit; it has only impressed itself deeply into the body. Physiologically, there is really no difference, in a finer sense, between what takes place in the body on the arising of a memory with respect to the event to which the memory refers, and what takes place in the monthly periods of the female body with respect to what the female organism experienced long ago in conjunction with the phases of the Moon. Only the latter is a stronger, a more intensive experience,—a soul spiritual experience pressed more intensively into the body. Thus, for the Lunar life:

Soul and Spirit: 28 day's activity

Let us now seek the corresponding phenomena for the physical body. What will they be? You can find it for yourselves by deduction. We will have bodily, physical effects with a 28-year period. As a day here corresponds to a year, we shall have 28 years.

Physical bodily nature: 28 year's activity

You need only remember that 28 years is the period bringing us to our full inner maturity of growth. It is then that we first cease to be in the ascending scale of growth. Just as the Sun works upon us from outside in its yearly activity, in order to complete in us an outward process corresponding to the daily process in the inner life o soul and spirit, so something works in the Cosmos in a 28-year period, organizing us from outside even as the female human being is organized inwardly. (In her it is more obvious than in the male, for in the man the corresponding daily rhythm is more withdrawn into the etheric.) Here then a 28-day period impresses itself inwardly in the realm of the soul and spirit, and we can say: As the daily Sun-life is related to the yearly Sun-life in regard to man, so the 28-day Moon-life related to the 28-year Moon-life with respect to the whole man (the former belonging, in effect, more to the human head).

You see how we place man, and rightly place him, into the whole Cosmos. We leave off speaking of Sun and Moon merely as if we stood isolated here on Earth, and only looked out with our eyes or with our telescopes to Sun and Moon. We speak of Sun and Moon as of something inwardly united with our very life, and we perceive the connection in the special configurations of our life in time. Until we place man again, my dear friends, into the picture of the doings of Sun and Moon, we shall not have evolved a firm foundation for true Astronomy.

Thus a new science of Astronomy must be built upon a spiritual-scientific basis. It must be evolved out of a more intimate knowledge of man himself. We shall only be able to find a meaning in what is taught by the external Astronomy of today, when we are in a position to base our hypotheses on man himself. We shall then be able profitably to study the rather schematic statements made in Astronomy today and we shall also be able to make essential corrections in this external Astronomy.

What follows from all this? It follows that in these processes—no matter, for the moment, what the underlying basis of them is—a universal life reveals itself. Whether it be (and we will speak of this later) that the daily and yearly rotations of the Earth underlie what I have here described as solar life with respect to the soul and spirit for the day, and to the physical bodily nature for the year; whether it be the movements of the Moon described by modern Astronomy or something very different;—we shall never reach an understanding of it merely by setting up the well-known picture taught in the Schools. But we must understand all that is expressed in this picture as being in reality a continuing, enduring universal life—a life which cannot be approached in its fullness by a mere series of diagrammatic pictures.

We will now set to work in another way. We will begin to work from the standpoint offered us in the Astronomical ideas of a man who still had very much from the past. We do not want to return to the older ideas; we must work out of new ideas This man, however, still had much of the old qualitative virtues in his ideas. I refer to Kepler. Astronomy has become more and more quantitative in modern time, and it would be a delusion to look on Astrophysics as the entry of a qualitative element into Astronomy; of an universal life that lay behind the work of Kepler. In him a feeling still persisted that behind all that is manifest to ordinary astronomical observation there lies hidden something like the gesture of a vast cosmic life—a cosmic life that here reveals its presence.

If we have a man before us and see him move a hand or an arm, we do not merely calculate the mechanics of the movement; we recognize it as the outer revelation of an inner life of soul and spirit. We understand as an expressive gesture something that can, after all, also be looked on from a purely spatial, mathematical point of view. The further back one goes in the history of man's approach to Astronomy, the more one find men conscious that the pictures they conceived of the path of the Sun or of the stars were no mere passive pictures of indifferent events but that these pictures were gestures of life and being. It is quite easy to discern in olden times this feeling of the gesture-like nature of the movements of the heavenly bodies. When my hand moves through the air I shall not merely calculate its path, but in this path I see an expression of the soul . So did the earlier observer see in the path of the Moon an expression. of a life of soul. In all the movements of the heavenly bodies he saw expressions of a soul-nature lie pictures it somewhat in this s way—If I could held an umbrella here so that only my hand were seen, my hand would make an inexplicable movement, for I am there behind the umbrella; only the hand is to be seen. Somewhat in this way the men of ancient times pictured that the movement of the Moon up in the sky was but the outer expression—a sort of terminal ‘limb’—end that the really active being stood behind it. So too in earlier times men did not speak of isolated heavenly bodies of the planets; they spoke of planetary spheres. They spoke of the several spheres, belonging to the heavenly bodies. Thus they distinguished the Moon-sphere, the Mercury-sphere, the Venus-sphere, the Sun-sphere, the Mars-sphere, the Jupiter-sphere, the Saturn-sphere, and then the eighth sphere—the Heaven of Fixed Stars They distinguished these eight spheres and saw in them something which expressed itself in outer gestures, so that a certain sphere expressed itself by lighting up now here, now there, and so on. The reality, for instance, was the sphere of the Moon. The Moon itself was not a separate entity,—only the gesture. Where the Moon appeared, the Moon-sphere was making a definite gesture I am relating this to show you the living nature of the old conceptions.

Kepler still retained in his whole consciousness a feeling for this universal life in space Only on this account was he able to draw up his three famous Laws For modern Astronomy the three famous Laws of Kepler are purely of a quantitative nature, to be regarded simply from the aspect of spatial and temporal concepts. For a man who still worked out of such a life of ideas as Kepler did, this was not the case. Let us now call to mind these Laws of Kepler. They are:

The First Law:
The Planets move in ellipses round the central body, which is situated in one of the foci of the ellipse.

The Second Law:
The Radius-vector of a Planet describes equal sectors, equal areas, in equal periods of time.

The Third Law:
The squares of the periods of revolution of the different Planets are proportional to the cubes of the major semi-axes

Now as we said, to the modern, purely quantitative view these laws too are purely quantitative To anyone like Kepler, the very expression ‘elliptical’ and the corresponding curve signified a greater livingness when it only moves in a circle, for it must use an inner impulse in order continually to alter the radius. When something simply moves in a circle it need do nothing to alter the radius. A more intense inner life must be employed in the radius-vector is continually altered. The simple. statement: “The Planets move in ellipses round the central body and the central body is not in the mid-point but in one of the foci of the ellipse”, implied an element of greater livingness than when something moves in a perfect circle.

Further: “The radius-vector describes equal sectors in equal periods of time”. We have here the transition from the line to the surface, to the plane. Please notice this.’ Inasmuch as at first only the ellipse is described, we remain in the line—the curve. When we are directed to the path that the radius-vector describes, we are led to the surface—the area. A more intensive condition in the planetary movement is disclosed, When the planet ‘rolls along’—if I may express so myself—it is not only expressing something within itself, but draws its tail after it, as it were. The whole area which the radius-vector describes belongs to it spiritually. Moreover, in equal periods of time equal areas are described, Special attention is thus drawn to the quality, the inherent character of the movement of the planets.

The third Law above all relates to the life that plays its part between the various planets. This Law assumes a more complicated form. “The squares of the periods of revolution of the Planets are in proportion to the cubes of the semi-major axes” (or of the mean distance from the central body). This Law, you see, contains a great deal if one still understands it in Kepler's living way. Newton then killed the law. He did this in a very simple fashion. Take Kepler's Third Law. You can write it thus:

or written differently:

Now write it in a somewhat different form. Write it thus:

(I might of course also have written it in the reverse order.)

What have we on the left-hand side of the equation, here in the left-hand ratio? No less than what is expressed by one half of Newton's Law, and on the other side the other half, the forces of Newton's Law. You need only write Kepler's Law thus differently and you can say: “The forces or attraction are inversely proportional to the squares of the distances.” Here then you have the Newtonian Law of Gravity deduced from the Law of Kepler. The force of gravity between the planets, the celestial bodies, is in inverse proportion to the squares of their distances apart. It is nothing else than the killing of Kepler's Third Law. In principle that is what it is.

But now take the matter actively and livingly. Do not set before yourself the dead product “force of gravity”—“the forces of attraction decrease with the squares of the distances”,—but take what is living still in Kepler's form, the squares of the periods of time. Fill out the caput mortum of the Newtonian force of attraction, which is a mere external concept, with what is implied in the square of the period of time, and you will fill with inner life of the Newtonian concept, which is really the corpse of an idea! For inner life has to do with time. And here you have before you not only time in its simple course, you have time squared—time to the second power! We shall yet have to come back to what it means to speak of ‘time squared’ But you can realize that to speak of time to the second power is to speak or something of an inward nature. It is, indeed, time which in the life of man actually represents the course of his inner soul-life. The point is that we should look right through it dead concept of the Newtonian force of attraction to that which suddenly darts into the center, bringing time into it and therewith bringing in an element of inner life.

Now look at the matter from another point of view. Notice that Kepler's first Law also has reference to the Earth. Not only does the Earth describe an ellipse, but you, since you are on the Earth, describe an ellipse together with it. What takes place outwardly is in you an inner process. Thus the arising of the ellipse from the circle, in the living way in which Kepler still conceived it, corresponds to a process in your own inner being. And inasmuch as you move in the line which is formed by the radius-vector describing equal sectors in equal times, it is you who continually relate yourself to the central body, placing yourself in relation to your own Sun. You, together with the curve, are describing a path in time, along which you are in continual relation to the Sun. If I may put it a little quaintly You must take care all the time that you do not ‘skid’ or side-slip, that you do not go too fast,—that your radius-vector does not describe too great an area. This outer point which moves in the ellipse must be continuously in the right relation to the Sun. There you have the movement you yourselves make, characterized as a pure line in space. The relation to the Sun is characterized in the Second Law.

And if we pass on to the Third Law, you have an inner experience of the relation to the other planets—your own living connection with the other planets.

Thus we not only have to find, in man himself, processes that lead us out again into the Cosmos. If we interpret rightly the mathematical pictures presented to us by the cosmic process, we also turn into an inner experience what is apparently external and quantitative. For the cosmic Mathematics indwells man. Man is himself in the midst of the living Mathematics. Of this we shall speak more tomorrow.

A report was presented on the following questions: How is the sanguine temperament expressed in a child? How should it be treated?

RUDOLF STEINER: This is where our work of individuating begins. We have said that we can group children according to temperament. In the larger groups children can all take part in the general drawing lesson, but by dividing them into smaller groups we can personalize to some extent. How is this individuating to be done? Copying will play a very small part, but in drawing you will try to awaken an inner feeling for form so that you can individuate. You will be able to differentiate by your choice of forms by taking either forms with straight lines or those with more movement in them—by taking simpler, clearer forms, or those with more detail. The more complicated, detailed forms would be used with the child whose temperament is sanguine. From the various temperaments you can learn how to teach each individual child.

A report was given on the same theme.

RUDOLF STEINER: We must also be very clear that there is no need to make our methods rigidly uniform, because, of course, one teacher can do something that is very good in a particular case, and another teacher something else equally good. So we need not strive for pedantic uniformity, but on the other hand we must adhere to certain important principles, which must be thoroughly comprehended.

The question about whether a sanguine child is difficult or easy to handle is very important. You must form your own opinion about this and you must be very clear. For example, suppose you have to teach or explain something to a sanguine child. The child has taken it in, but after some time you notice that the child has lost interest—attention has turned to something else. In this way the child’s progress is hindered. What would you do if you noticed, when you were talking about a horse, for example, that after awhile the sanguine child was far away from the subject and was paying attention to something entirely different, so that everything you were saying passed unnoticed? What would you do with a child like this?

In such a case much depends on whether or not you can give individual treatment. In a large class many of your guiding principles will be difficult to carry out. But you will have the sanguine children together in a group, and then you must work on them by showing them the melancholic pattern. If there is something wrong in the sanguine group, turn to the melancholic group and then bring the melancholic temperament into play so that it acts as an antidote to the other. In teaching large numbers you must pay great attention to this. It’s important that you should not only be serious and restful in yourself, but that you should also allow the serious restfulness of the melancholic children to act on the sanguine children, and vice versa.

Let’s suppose you are talking about a horse, and you notice that a child in the sanguine group has not been paying attention for a long time. Now try to verify this by asking the child a question that will make the lack of attention apparent. Then try to verify that one of the children in the melancholic group is still thinking about some piece of furniture you were talking about quite awhile ago, even though you have been speaking about the horse during that time. Make this clear by saying to the sanguine child, “You see, you forgot the horse a long time ago, but your friend over there is still thinking about that piece of furniture!”

A real situation of this kind works very strongly. In this way children act correctively on each other. It is very effective when they come to see themselves through these means. The subconscious soul has a strong feeling that such lack of cooperation will prevent a continuation of social life. You must make good use of this unconscious element in the soul, because teaching large numbers of children can be an excellent way to progress if you let your pupils wear off each other’s corners. To bring out the contrast you must have a very light touch and humor, so that the children see you are never annoyed nor bear a grudge against them—that things are revealed simply through your method of handling them.

The phlegmatic child was spoken of.

RUDOLF STEINER: What would you do if a phlegmatic child simply did not come out of herself or himself at all and nearly drove you to despair?

Suggestions were presented for the treatment of temperaments from the musical perspective and by relating them to Bible history.

Phlegmatics: Harmonium and piano; Harmony; Choral singing; The Gospel of Matthew; (variety)
Sanguines: Wind instruments; Melody; Whole orchestra; The Gospel of Luke; (Inwardness of soul)
Cholerics: Percussion and drum; Rhythm; Solo instruments; The Gospel of St. Mark; (Force, strength) Melancholics: Stringed Instruments; Counterpoint; Solo singing; The Gospel of St. John; (Deepening of the spirit)

RUDOLF STEINER: Much of this is very correct, especially the choice of instruments and musical instruction. Equally good is the contrast of solo singing for the melancholic, the whole orchestra for the sanguine, and choral singing for the phlegmatic. All this is very good, and also the way you have related the temperaments to the four Evangelists. But it wouldn’t be as good to delegate the four arts according to temperaments; it is precisely because art is multifaceted that any single art can bring harmony to each temperament.¹ Within each art the principle is correct, but I would not distribute the arts themselves in this way. For example, you could in some circumstances help a phlegmatic child very much through something that appeals to the child in dancing or painting. Thus the child would not be deprived of whatever might be useful in any of the various arts. In any single art it is possible to allocate the various branches and expressions of the art according to temperament. Whereas it is certainly necessary to prepare everything in the best way for individual children, it would not be good here to give too much consideration to the temperaments.

An account was given about the phlegmatic temperament and it was stated that the phlegmatic child sits with an open mouth.

RUDOLF STEINER: That is incorrect; the phlegmatic child will not sit with the mouth open but with a closed mouth and drooping lips. Through this kind of hint we can sometimes hit the nail on the head. It was very good that you touched on this, but as a rule it is not true that a phlegmatic child will sit with an open mouth, but just the opposite. This leads us back to the question of what to do with the phlegmatic child who is nearly driving us to despair. The ideal remedy would be to ask the mother to wake the child every day at least an hour earlier than the child prefers, and during this time (which you really take from the child’s sleep) keep the child busy with all kinds of things. This will not hurt the child, who usually sleeps much longer than necessary anyway. Provide things to do from the time of waking up until the usual waking hour. That would be an ideal cure. In this way, you can overcome much of the child’s phlegmatic qualities. It will not be possible very often to get parents to cooperate in this way, but much could be accomplished by carrying out such a plan.

You can however do the following, which is only a substitute but can help greatly. When your group of phlegmatics sit there (not with open mouths), and you go past their desks as you often do, you could do something like this: [Dr. Steiner jangled a bunch of keys]. This will jar them and wake them up. Their closed mouths would then open, and exactly at this moment when you have surprised them, you must try to occupy them for five minutes! You must rouse them, shake them out of their lethargy by some external means. By working on the unconscious you must combat this irregular connection between the etheric and physical bodies. You must continually find fresh ways to jolt the phlegmatics, thus changing their drooping lips to open mouths, and that means that you will be making them do just what they do not like doing. This is the answer when the phlegmatics drive you to despair, and if you keep trying patiently to shake up the phlegmatic group in this way, again and again, you will accomplish much.

Question: Wouldn’t it be possible to have the phlegmatic children come to school an hour earlier?

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes, if you could do that, and also see that the children are wakened with some kind of noise, that would naturally be very good; it would be good to include the phlegmatic children among those who come earliest to school.² The important thing with the phlegmatic children is to engage their attention as soon as you have changed their soul mood.

The subject of food in relation to the different temperaments was introduced.

RUDOLF STEINER: On the whole, the main time for digestion should not be during school hours, but smaller meals would be insignificant; on the contrary, if the children have had their breakfast they can be more attentive than when they come to school on empty stomachs. If they eat too much—and this applies especially to phlegmatic children—you cannot teach them anything. Sanguine children should not be given too much meat, nor phlegmatic too many eggs. The melancholic children, on the other hand, can have a good mixed diet, but not too many roots or too much cabbage. For melancholic children diet is very individual, and you have to watch that. With sanguine and phlegmatic children it is possible to generalize.

The melancholic temperament was spoken of.

RUDOLF STEINER: That was very good. When you teach you will also have to realize that melancholic children get left behind easily; they do not keep up easily with others. I ask you to remember this also.

The same theme was continued.

RUDOLF STEINER: It was excellent that you stressed the importance of the teacher’s attitude toward the melancholic children. Moreover, they are slow in the birth of the etheric body, which otherwise becomes free during the change of teeth. Therefore, these children have a greater aptitude for imitation; if they have become fond of you, everything you do in front of them will make a lasting impression on them. You must use the fact that they retain the principle of imitation longer than others.

A further report on the melancholic temperament.

RUDOLF STEINER: You will find it very difficult to treat the melancholic temperament if you fail to consider one thing that is almost always present: the melancholic lives in a strange condition of self-deception. Melancholics have the opinion that their experiences are peculiar to themselves. The moment you can bring home to them that others also have these or similar experiences, they will to some degree be cured, because they then perceive they are not the singularly interesting people they thought themselves to be. They are prepossessed by the illusion that they are very exceptional as they are.

When you can impress a melancholic child by saying, “Come on now, you’re not so extraordinary after all; there are plenty of people like you, who have had similar experiences,” then this will act as a very strong corrective to the impulses that lead to melancholy. Because of this it is good to make a point of presenting them with the biographies of great persons; they will be more interested in these individuals than in external nature. Such biographies should be used especially to help these children over their melancholy.

Two teachers spoke about the choleric temperament. Rudolf Steiner then drew the following figures on the board:

What do we see in these figures? They depict another characterization of the four temperaments. The melancholic children are as a rule tall and slender; the sanguine are the most normal; those with more protruding shoulders are the phlegmatic children; and those with a short stout build so that the head almost sinks down into the body are choleric.

Both Michelangelo and Beethoven have a combination of melancholic and choleric temperaments. Please remember particularly that when we are dealing with the temperament of a child, as teachers we should not assume that a certain temperament is a fault to be overcome. We must recognize the temperament and ask ourselves the following question: How should we treat it so that the child may reach the desired goal in life—so that the very best may be drawn out of the temperament and with the help of their own temperaments, children can reach their goals.

Particularly in the case of the choleric temperament, we would help very little by trying to drive it out and replacing it with something else. Indeed, much arises from the life and passion of choleric people—especially when we look at history and find that many things would have happened differently had there been no cholerics. So we must make it our task to bring the child, regardless of the temperament, to the goal in life belonging to that child’s nature.

For the choleric you should use as much as possible fictional situations, describing situations you have made up for the occasion, and that you bring to the child’s attention. If, for example, you have a child with a temper, describe such situations to the child and deal with them yourself, treating them in a choleric way. For example, I would tell a choleric child about a wild fellow whom I had met, whom I would then graphically describe to the child. I would get roused and excited about him, describing how I treated him, and what I thought of him, so that the child sees temper in someone else, in a fictitious way the child sees it in action. In this way you will bring together the inner forces of such a child, whose general power of understanding is thus increased.

The teachers asked Rudolf Steiner to relate the scene between Napoleon and his secretary.

Rudolf Steiner: For this you would first have to get permission from the Ministry of Housing! Through describing such a scene the choleric element would have to be brought out. But a scene such as I just mentioned must be described by the teacher so that the choleric element is apparent. This will always arouse the forces of a choleric child, with whom you can then continue to work. It would be ideal to describe such a situation to the choleric group in order to arouse their forces, the effect of which would then last a few days. During that few days the children will have no difficulty taking in what you want to teach them. Otherwise they fume inwardly against things that they should be getting through their understanding.

Now I would like you to try something: we should have a record of what we have been saying about the treatment of temperaments, and so I should like to ask Miss B. to write a comprehensive survey (approximately six pages) of the characteristics of the different temperaments and how to treat them, based on everything I have spoken about here. Also, I will ask Mrs. E. to imagine she has two groups of children in front of her, sanguine and melancholic and then, in a kind of drawing lesson, to use simple designs, varied according to sanguine and melancholic children. I will ask Mr. T. to do the same thing with drawings for phlegmatic and choleric children; and please bring these tomorrow when you have prepared them.

Then I will ask, let us say, Miss A., Miss D., and Mr. R. to deal with a problem: Imagine that you have to tell the same fairy tale twice—not twice in the same way, but clothed in different sentences, and so on. The first time pay more attention to the sanguine and the second time to the melancholic children, so that both get something from it.

Then I ask that perhaps Mr. M. and Mr. L. work at the difficult task of giving two separate descriptions of an animal or animal species, first for the cholerics and then for the phlegmatics. And I will ask Mr. O., Mr. N., and perhaps with the help of Mr. U. to solve the problem of how to consider the four temperaments in arithmetic.

When you consider something like the temperaments in working out your lessons, you must remember above all that the human being is constantly becoming, always changing and developing. This is something that we as teachers must have always in our consciousness—that the human being is constantly becoming, that in the course of life human beings are subject to metamorphosis. And just as we should give serious consideration to the temperamental dispositions of individual children, so we must also reflect on the element of growth, this becoming, so that we come to see that all children are primarily sanguine, even if they are also phlegmatic or choleric in certain things. All adolescents, boys and girls, are really cholerics, and if this is not so at this time of life it shows an unhealthy development. In mature life a person is melancholic and in old age phlegmatic.

This again sheds some light on the question of temperaments, because here you have something particularly necessary to remember at the present time. In our day we love to make fixed, sharply defined concepts. In reality, however, everything is interwoven so that, even while you are saying that a person is made up of head, breast, and limb organizations, you must be clear that these three really interpenetrate one another. Thus a choleric child is only mostly choleric, a sanguine mostly sanguine, and so on. Only at the age of adolescence can one become completely choleric. Some people remain adolescents till they die, because they preserve this age of adolescence within themselves throughout life. Nero and Napoleon never outgrew the age of youth. This shows us how qualities that follow each other during growth can still—through further change—permeate each other again.

What is the poet’s productivity actually based on—or indeed any spiritually creative power? How does it happen that a man, for example, can become a poet? It is because he has preserved throughout his whole life certain qualities that belonged to early manhood and childhood. The more such a man remains “young,” the more aptitude he has for the art of poetry. In a certain sense it is a misfortune for such a man if he cannot keep some of the qualities of youth, something of a sanguine nature, his whole life through. It is very important that teachers can become sanguine out of their own resolve. And it is moreover tremendously important for teachers to remember this so they may cherish this happy disposition of the child as something of particular value.

All creative qualities in life—everything that fosters the spiritual and cultural side of the social organism—all of this depends on the youthful qualities in a human being. These things will be accomplished by those who have preserved the temperament of youth. All economic life, on the other hand, depends on the qualities of old age finding their way into people, even when they are young. This is because all economic judgment depends on experience. Experience is best gained when certain qualities of old age enter into people, and the old person is indeed a phlegmatic. Those business people prosper most whose other attributes and qualities have an added touch of the phlegmatic, which really already bears the stamp of old age. That is the secret of very many business people—that in addition to their other good qualities as business people, they also have something of old age about them, especially in the way they manage their businesses. In the business world, a person who only developed the sanguine temperament would only get as far as the projects of youth, which are never finished. A choleric who remains at the stage of youth might spoil what was done earlier in life through policies adopted later. The melancholic cannot be a business person anyway, because a harmonious development in business life is connected with a quality of old age. A harmonious temperament, along with some of the phlegmatic’s unexcitability is the best combination for business life.

You see, if you are thinking of the future of humankind you must really notice such things and consider them. A person of thirty who is a poet or painter is also something more than “a person of thirty,” because that individual at the same time has the qualities of childhood and youth within, which have found their way into the person’s being. When people are creative you can see how another being lives in them, in which they have remained more or less childlike, in which the essence of childhood still dwells. Everything I have exemplified must become the subject of a new kind of psychology.

• 1. The teacher who presented the above suggestions had also allocated particular arts to the various temperaments.
• 2. This refers to the need for having school in shifts.

Those who study the soul-spiritual¹ life of mankind cannot make use of many of the concepts which are commonplace in every-day life and in our current way of thinking. One such idea which cannot be used is that of evolution or development – the idea that one thing, or better said one condition, arises from another. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood, so I should make it quite clear that I do not mean the concept of evolution is useless. Yesterday, for example, we made extensive use of it, when we needed the idea of evolution to speak about how soul-bodily life proceeds between birth and death. But we need quite different concepts if we want to talk about what soul-spiritual life really is.

As you know, our experience of soul-spiritual life within outer sensory reality takes place in thinking, feeling and willing. To understand what is really happening soul-spiritually within the processes of thinking, feeling and willing, we must bear in mind the following: –

If someone feels something and the feeling comes to expression via thinking, or if someone perceives something in the outer world and what is perceived comes to expression via thinking, or if someone does something so that the will is translated into action – in other words whenever someone lives in the soul-spiritual – then this must always be considered as relationships taking place between spiritual beings. Whenever we want to describe the soul-spiritual world within which the human soul exists, then we really can’t avoid speaking about these relationships between spiritual beings.

Suppose that the human being were more of a thinking type, although in reality it is never the case that the activities of thinking, feeling and willing are completely separate. While one is thinking and forming thoughts, the will is at work within the process of thinking, because one actually performs the thinking. And while one is doing something, performing some action, the will is also at work, executing the ‘what-is-wanted’. When we think or contemplate, we do a little more thinking and less willing, and when we act or surrender ourselves to some feeling, we do more willing and less thinking.

But so far everything that I have touched upon is in fact only an outer characteristic of the matter. To grasp the reality of these things we must speak about them quite differently. For example, I might perceive something in the outer world which prompts me to form mental images of it; I don’t do anything, but confine my will to direct my senses towards the outer world so that I can perceive and string thoughts together. I am therefore contemplating, actively perceiving. In reality this means that I shift myself into a spiritual region where ahrimanically inclined beings have the upper hand. Pictorially speaking, in a certain sense I stick my head into a region where ahrimanic beings rule. While on the face of it I say “I am contemplating something”, in reality I should say “I am busy in a spiritual region where certain beings have the upper hand, somewhat subduing other beings, and hold the balance which tends towards the ahrimanic.”

When we describe things this way, at first it all seems rather vague and indefinite, because they take place in the spiritual realm, and our language is made for sensory reality. One can however express them pictorially by removing the human being somewhat from the process and moving it more into the cosmos. For this reason a situation which could be characterised externally by saying “Something stimulates me and I ponder upon it”, would be expressed pictorially by initiation knowledge in something like the following way: –

The human being lives in and orients himself within the cosmos. As I have shown in the last few days, this is like a compass needle that points, cosmically speaking, north-south, its orientation not determined from within, but by the cosmos. This orientation varies so that it can follow the zodiac, alternating amongst Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. (See Figure). There is also at first a fundamental state, taking this orientation of the zodiac as a basis, in which the human being points upwards according to his head-nature and downwards according to his limb-nature. All this can then be viewed as a kind of balance beam which separates what is above from what is below.

Now what becomes of this human cosmic orientation if we were to look at someone who is neither thinking nor acting – I hope you are not doing this – someone who is casually given over to the feeling of being lulled by life, half asleep and half awake, neither active nor passive? Actually rather a lot happens to him, only he doesn’t notice it. And if we want to picture this condition – as I said, one that I hope you are not in right now – then we would say that the balance beam rested horizontally.

But if we want to describe a state of mind which I hope you are now in – contemplative, stimulated and absorbing what I’m talking about – then we must picture the balance beam differently. We would say that all the souls sitting here – or at least some of the souls sitting here – are shifted into a region where certain spiritual beings raise one side of the balance beam. In the physical world, when a beam moves because of an imbalance, we say that it drops, but in the spiritual world we say that the beam rises. When someone is in a state of contemplation, he shifts to a different spiritual region, and ahrimanic beings there raise the beam away from Libra and towards Virgo (see ‘blue’ in Figure).

So when someone is contemplating, it means that he takes advantage of his situation as a human being in the entire cosmos, exploiting those forces within which he oscillates, in order to shift into a spiritual region where a condition of balance once again holds sway. You start to contemplate, and while you are actively doing this, your spiritual space – if I can call it that – shifts to a region where a battle takes place, and then subsides. The beings here on the left fight against the beings on the right, and vice versa. But once you have achieved a state of contemplation, the battle is over, and peace is restored. This peace signifies that certain ahrimanically oriented beings have the upper hand, like when a tilted balance beam comes to rest, no longer oscillating because something is pulling at it. That would be the reality corresponding to contemplation, to thinking actively.

In normal sensory existence, what we call thinking is only maya, an illusion. You have to describe cosmically what thinking really is, asking about the person’s whole situation within the cosmos. And the answer you get about the person’s cosmic situation reveals both what certain spiritual beings are doing and what contemplative thinking is. So you see that it is basically an illusion if we describe thinking as we do in normal life, because in reality we find ourselves in a certain region in which thoughts take place in our ‘thinking space’ through the fact that certain ahrimanically inclined beings have tilted the balance beam to one side. That is what really happens.

Consider another event in human soul-spiritual life; we do something, not charging aimlessly around, but acting intentionally, an action filled with thought. How this is described in ordinary life is also a mere illusion, because when we are acting, we again shift into a specific cosmic region. But in this region there are certain luciferically inclined beings who raise the balance beam from its state of rest in the other direction, which we can picture with this arrow (see ‘red’ in Figure). So when we are acting intentionally, really willing our deeds, we are oriented in a region of the cosmos where the balance beam is held by certain luciferic beings. Now the state of rest is gone because we have shifted to a region where these luciferic beings begin to make the balance beam tremble, and we are transported into a kind of battle that takes place in the cosmos. Within our will the luciferic beings begin to fight against the ahrimanic beings, and this volatile situation expresses itself as the rocking of the balance beam. So what is called will in everyday language is also only maya, and is correctly described by saying that when we will something we are in a region where luciferic beings have raised the balance beam. We find exactly the region where the state of rest begins to change into rhythmical movement, and raising the beam takes place without our involvement.

I have mentioned in the first of my mystery dramas – of course in dramatic form – that when we think or feel soul-spiritually, we should not have the idea that this only happens within us, because cosmic forces are also set in motion. This was expressed pictorially in a scene in which Capesius and Strader do something, and at the same time great cosmic events take place. They do not happen in the sensory world but in the super-sensible, so one can only make them perceivable in the sensory world in the way it is done in the drama. All the same, it is quite clearly expressed in the play that human action as we normally describe it, is only a reflection of reality, and when one thinks or wills the slightest thing in one’s soul, significant events happen in the cosmos. We can never think or will something without shifting ourselves into regions where spiritual battles are taking place, or spiritual battles are subsiding, or spiritual battles have already been fought and we move into the outcome of these struggles, and so on.

What I have just described to you is present in the human soul-spiritual being, only it is hidden in the life we lead between birth and death; but it is the truth in the spiritual world. Recently I have spoken in other contexts about how modern man, behaving intellectually as is the custom today, really lives in hallucinations. Basically, the ideas we form about thinking, feeling and willing are hallucinations, and the reality that lies behind them is what we can illustrate pictorially in the way I have just done.

So what we have just described lies behind our soul-spiritual events, and reveals itself to us as a reflection, appearing as thinking, feeling and willing. And as soon as we consider the human being as he really is soul-spiritually, the concept of development, of evolution, becomes inapplicable.

For example, it would be complete nonsense to say that the human being becomes reasonable at a certain age, prior to which he is given over to a raging will, and that the one develops from the other. In spiritual regions nothing develops in this way; we can only say of the child that he thinks, feels and wills differently from an old man; that the child is shifted into a different spiritual region where the battles between the various beings take place in other ways. In spiritual regions, development, as we described it yesterday, does not take place. There we understand the past as a picture of battles, of relationships, of the changing circumstances of the spiritual beings that we look for behind the higher hierarchies. When we speak about the present there is a different picture of the interplay of the hierarchies, and there is yet another picture when we talk about the future. As we regard the past, present and future, so accordingly do we see different pictures in the relationships between the various beings of the hierarchies. And it would be absurd to suggest that the picture of the future battles develops out the picture of the past battles. These things belonging to the region of the spirit are in a certain relationship of juxtaposition, not one after the other. For this reason we cannot speak of development, only of spiritual perspective, as I have already told you in respect of other matters. What we can say is that when we consider the human being as a soul-spiritual being, then it makes no sense to speak of him first as a child who goes through the change of teeth, then puberty, and so on. So what appears as evolution, as development, in the region of the soul-bodily, cannot be spoken of as evolution when it is to do with the soul-spiritual. Instead it should be understood as transition from one picture to another within the changing relationships of the beings of the higher hierarchies.

If you fail to bring into consideration the connections between what I explained yesterday and today then you will never really understand the relationship between the temporal and the eternal.

I have already explained how the human being, as a soul-bodily being, is placed in temporal development in such a way that he needs to become an old man before he can first begin to understand what happened to him as a child. This has everything to do with the concept of evolution. But as a soul-spiritual being, we must recognize that the human being is not placed within evolution, that the concept of time as we know it in outer sensory life is totally inapplicable there, and that we make a mistake when we speak of the human soul-spiritual being and bring time into the sphere of the higher hierarchies. There, everything is eternal and things do not happen in time, only in perspectives within which we see battles and changing relationships. The concept of time is inapplicable to the changing relationships in the higher hierarchies, and if we do use it, then we are only using it to make an illustration of the essential being of these hierarchies. Hence you can follow in my Outline of Occult Science how carefully I suggest that what appears to be temporal must be presented in picture form. For example, where I speak about the stages of Old Saturn and Old Sun, I draw attention very clearly to the fact that the concept of time is only used pictorially to describe what preceded the Old Sun period and even into the first half of the Old Sun period itself. You can check all this in Occult Science where these apparently minor details in my book about spiritual science are of tremendous importance, because precisely in these details lies the basis for an understanding of the difference between what is temporal transitoriness and what endures eternally.

If you think about what I have just said, then you will see that yesterday I tried to describe the being of man purely in time. The concept of time played a really major role there, because it depends on time whether someone has gained a certain understanding by living through to old age, or not if he is still in childhood. Yesterday when we described what forms the basis of the soul-bodily being of mankind in the light of the spirit, it was based firmly on the concept of time. Today I have described what forms the basis of the soul-spiritual being which can only be portrayed by describing it in the sphere of eternity, in which – and this is rather difficult – the concept of time is completely inapplicable.

In this respect our being is indeed split in two, and insofar as we do develop through our lives, we do so on the one hand, by waiting calmly and patiently until we are mature enough in soul and body to understand something, while on the other hand we remain without development in the sphere of eternity, where to a certain extent we gaze simultaneously at our childhood in one region, and at our dotage in another. Here on earth, mankind lives in such a way that what happens in the sphere of eternity rays down into what happens in the temporal sphere, and vice versa, both being mixed up with each other.

The task of initiation wisdom is to separate what is mixed up, because only by being held apart can it be understood. Initiation wisdom has always called what is in the sphere of eternity – Above, and what is in the sphere of transitoriness – Below. But as the human being lives here on earth, he views a mixture of Above and Below, and can never come to an understanding of his own being when he sees it mixed up in this way. He can only understand himself when he understands how to separate what is mixed up.

So you can appreciate why the point of view that ordinary life provides makes it impossible to grasp in normal consciousness how things are the way I described them yesterday and today. Someone basing things on normal consciousness might say: “Yesterday, you outlined something about mankind that we can’t see, that isn’t reality at all, because people don’t develop the way you described; there are many people who are quite mature in their youth”, and so on. But this is an objection based on a deception, since reality is as I described it, and people today slip into dualism because they do not see what is Below as mobile and fluid in the way I presented it yesterday. The normal view is to look at a person as he stands before us, while the initiate considers the course of events that take place between birth and death and sees the human being in flux, taking the rigidity of what is Below and bringing it into flowing movement.

On the other hand, when an initiate considers the fluidity of thinking, feeling and willing, he brings this movement to a halt, and what is bound to the physical body apparently happening in time, he views in the sphere of eternity, the region of spiritual juxtaposition.

People strive towards initiation wisdom, and openly admit that the perceivable environment is maya, a great deception, an illusion. But when it gets serious, then they don’t accept it, and would rather describe the region Above with the same idea of maya that they use for the region Below. One should make beautiful schematic drawings based on the ideas of maya, and move about the spiritual world with them, up or down, above or below consciousness. People say to me: “Yes, but you’re not describing things so that I can understand”. But behind this lies “You challenge me with ideas and thoughts that are different from the ones in maya; you challenge me to come to grips with ideas which are in the sphere of reality.”

As another objection, someone might say: “Yes, but in the end, what concerns me in all this is what happens here below! If we just use the concept of time seriously in relation to human development, or we gaze out from life into the sphere of eternity, then one can get by quite well, thank you very much”. You could say this if you remained in maya, and if you formed concepts from what is all mixed up; and yes, you can survive, you can of course continue to live albeit asleep by remaining only in the sphere of eternity.

But here my first point is this. If you form concepts like these, which are sharp and which can stand up to modern scholarship, then you can just about live with them, but really only just live. What you cannot do with concepts like these is die. Nobody can die with concepts like these. And as soon as one touches upon this mystery, the full import of spiritual scientific knowledge begins to dawn on one, because concepts which are formed without initiation knowledge lead after death into an unlawful ahrimanic region. And if you spurn forming concepts like those in initiation wisdom, then after death you will not arrive in the region of humanity to which you are really predestined.

In former times higher spiritual beings taught those people with an atavistic clairvoyant predisposition the concepts of initiation in supersensible ways. In those days, and essentially up until the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, there was a kind of supersensible instruction available to people, which made them not only fit for life, but also fit for death. However, since that time the human being has had to prepare his soul, through his own effort here on earth, with concepts so that he can cross the threshold of death in the right way.

For initiation wisdom there is nothing more frivolous than the comment: “Well, we can wait until we enter the region after death, then we’ll see what’s there”. The answer to this is: “Whoever waits, sins against life”, because you would be utterly terrified if, per impossibile, an initiate showed you what deformed creatures you would be if, throughout your life between death and rebirth, you had had the same attitude and said: “I’ll wait until I’m born on earth to see what kind of being is clothed with flesh and blood”. There, higher beings take care of you, and because of their benevolent influence, you cannot avoid preparing for yourself those forces which before your birth protect you from becoming a misbegotten creature. And those beings that teach us say: “This spiritual life between death and new birth is not merely here for our region, it is also here in order for the region Below to be lawfully prepared so that finely formed people can come into being there, and not mis¬begotten creatures.”

Likewise life here on earth is not simply for the earth, but is here so that a person can die in the correct human way. And by adopting concepts from the higher region the human being can prepare his lower nature for this so that he does not enter an inappropriate ahrimanic region. There are of course appropriate ahrimanic regions, but those that are not in accordance with one’s humanity would be inappropriate.

That is the first point. The second point is this. If you disregard the sphere of eternity, you can just about survive as an individual person – although in reality nobody can live in isolation – but you would not be able to live within the human social order which is led and directed by beings of the higher hierarchies. When you enter into even the most trivial relationship with another person – and our whole life consists of inter-personal relationships – and if what streams into this relationship does not flow from a consciousness of what lies in the spiritual sphere of eternity, then you ruin social integrity, and you contribute to catastrophic manifestations of destruction on the planet. In addition, any social or political point of view that does not stem from the spirit, will also work in this destructive way. Only a point of view that reckons with the sphere of eternity, that is alive to what is becoming, can be effective in political, social, and especially in inter-personal life. This is the great serious truth which must increasingly confront humanity through initiation wisdom. And the signs of the times confirm this, that those days up to 333AD are long past, when higher beings supersensibly taught a humanity that did not need to participate consciously, because it could be educated mostly in sleep or in dimmed consciousness. But today people can only receive what they need so much by experiencing it person to person within humanity itself. People must simply put aside that arrogance which lets them say they can always form their own opinions. In the sphere of transitoriness we should recognise that the old have something to say to the young which only the old can tell them. If we understand this, then why should we not also understand that there is an initiation wisdom which we take in inter-personally? This is a kind of leaven of the social life which must develop in the future, so that at any moment – we are speaking of the sphere of time here – if someone cannot recognise what he needs, then he will receive it from others.

Yesterday I told you that our individual development in time makes it unnecessary for us to accept things merely by believing in authority; instead when we form an idea we can have it as a kind of conviction that flows from one’s own inner being. I have emphasized in a number of my books that belief in authority has no place in spiritual science. But it also needs to be clearly understood by all who are really grounded in spiritual science that someone cannot be initiated at any time of life simply by blowing his own trumpet and following his own convictions as is the fashion today. If that were the case people could draw up all manner of programmes that they believed in, that could rule the world, but which could never deliver the kind of wisdom that really flows into the life and workings of the world which increasingly need initiation knowledge.

In past times initiation was a kind of thinking that was given to humanity. But in the future people must use their own willpower to turn towards what comes into the world through initiation, even though this counters many subconscious desires. It is very difficult for people to find the right way to summon up the required degree of seriousness to engage with everything that I have been talking about.

It is becoming really hard to tell modern human beings how much goodwill they must have, because they often think that this goodwill is actually rather heartless. Whoever correctly penetrates the meaning of spiritual science knows that as we move towards the future, there is no alternative to the study of initiation wisdom for forming the soul substance that enables us to pass through the gate of death in the right manner, and which also allows us to stand properly within the social life of humanity. One can live into this, but then comes the contradictory thought: “Here’s someone in whose life there are people whom he loves for one reason or another, but they do not want to know anything about this great requirement of our time to turn towards the spiritual life. When he wishes that these people should also attain salvation, it seems to him heartless if the whole truth is spelled out”.

But whoever really has goodwill towards these things knows that it is not goodwill at all to close one’s eyes and say: “Oh well, although they don’t want to know anything about the spiritual life, they can attain salvation anyway”. Instead one should say: “Every effort should be made to bring the spiritual life to the earth”. It is not about giving in to the thought which is so closely connected with our own wishes for dealing with those who don’t want to know anything about spiritual life. Rather we should positively strive towards dedicating ourselves with goodwill to the spiritual life, attempting to bring it into the world so that people can be – if I might use the expression – brought to blessedness.

Behind what is often called a loving attitude, lies hidden not only superficiality, but also a misjudgment of the whole situation. Today if someone speaks out of initiation wisdom, he does so not to teach people theoretical knowledge, but with a warm heart, out of love of humanity, because he knows how much the signs of the times indicate that the next great task is to bring spiritual life to the soul, and to incorporate it into human life so that the spirit draws near to the soul. But it is also necessary to courageously face up to the challenge of humanity’s development in time. The views from Above and from Below which must be brought into the open today and clearly understood, if at all possible also need to be incorporated in the human soul.

If life is looked at as it is today – in a prejudiced and illusionary way – then one is not speaking about the whole of life but only about a tiny part of it. I tested this in the following way. I know the various biographies of Goethe, which provide information about many of the things that Goethe did, what he was motivated by, considered, and thought about, between his birth and his death. But as soon as Goethe’s soul passed through the gate of death, what is described in these biographies with their illusionary point of view, has not the slightest significance for the region which the soul enters after death, and constitutes another mixing up of the sphere of eternity with the sphere of transitoriness. It is indeed transitory when, through a new birth, the human being again steps into existence,

Everything that is recorded about life between birth and death in an illusionary biography based on an illusionary world view is of no use for the sphere which one enters through the gate of death. What matters is only the question: “How has the soul spoken to the cosmos?” Whatever somebody said to his neighbour, even if it was the most beautiful thing on earth, if it did not flow from spiritual knowledge, then it was not spoken to the cosmos.

However, what Goethe lived through was spoken to the cosmos, when one considers his life described in seven-year periods. How Goethe changed from one seven year period to the next! How remarkable was that great change in his life which happened at the end of a seven-year period when he went to Italy, or at least decided to go there! Whatever happens from one seven-year period to the next, beneath the sphere which forms normal biographies, this is what speaks to the cosmos; and something can be done with this once the human soul has passed through the gate of death. What Goethe said that was influenced by beings of the sphere of eternity, described as I have been doing today, this too has a connection to the sphere that one enters after death. Picture to yourselves Goethe’s life from the point of view of yesterday’s consideration of successive seven-year periods – what he felt when he wrote maxims above particular chapters of his works, such as “What youth desires, age receives in abundance”. Looking at Goethe’s life from the point of view of transitoriness, of evolution, if you run across words like these used as a motto above that one chapter, and you meet these words with knowledge of spiritual science, then to a certain extent you will have encountered the eternal Goethe. And if again with a spiritual scientific attitude, you come across something that Goethe said, resounding with what flows from the sphere of eternity where the hierarchies have their interplay, there too is the eternal Goethe. By accepting initiation wisdom, the task that accrues to humanity from now onwards is to get to know not just what is temporal in the world but also what is eternal; this can only be learned by turning to spiritual science. What in former times was freely offered, must be seen by modern humanity in the light of what approaches us from modern initiation wisdom.

Within the Catholic church today there is something that acts like a red rag to a certain kind of being. When the type of Catholic, who these days might often consider himself to be true-blue, chooses some world-view to twit, it is the doctrine of emanation. Any interpretation of the universe based on emanation is condemned – perhaps for himself personally a little less so – but certainly for those faithful little lambs to whom he is speaking or writing. All that’s needed is to be able to attach the description ‘emanating’ to any philosophy! According to dyed-in-the-wool Catholics, the doctrine of emanation is opposed to creationism, the philosophy of creation out of nothing. So here we have, in a kind of dualistic way, on one side the philosophy of emanation acting like a red rag, and on the other side creationism, the philosophy of creation from nothing. Creationism is accepted and the philosophy of emanation is rejected.

Now the doctrine of emanation became known in Western culture indirectly through the Gnosis. However, the manner in which it became known in the West – the underlying literature has been largely destroyed – means that the doctrine of emanation has become distorted, because within Catholicism only its distortion is known, which gives rise to great misunderstanding. Because what one knows as the doctrine of emanation – the outcome of one eon from another, where the less perfect always stems from the more perfect, which is usually described exoterically as the Gnosis – is in fact already a distortion. It points back to a completely different world view, particularly to ancient times when it was possible for spiritual teachers to instruct mankind directly out of the supersensible. The doctrine of emanation – although a corruption – points back to a wisdom that in its old form referred to the sphere of eternity, to what is Above. As such, one can to a certain extent defend emanation, not in the corrupt form that we know, but in the form where only a perspective within time is described and not from the point of view of true evolution. But if it cannot speak about real evolution, then neither can it speak about creation from nothing, because that too is a kind of evolution, albeit an extreme case. The idea that something stems from something else – as we have discussed today – is inappropriate for describing the sphere of eternity which consists of interrelationships between spiritual beings.

However, if we turn again to the sphere of transitoriness, then we can indeed speak about evolution, even about this extreme case, which basically has been implicit in much of what I have been speaking about these past few days. For when we say that present-day ideals are the seed of the future, and that present-day realities are the fruit of the past, isn’t that a continuous coming into being from what does not exist in the world? Rightly understood, this leads us to true, uncorrupted, creationism. The demand that goes out to humanity today is this: To understand in the correct light what was meant by the doctrine of emanation, and to apply it to the soul- spiritual world; and to rightly understand what is meant by true, uncorrupted, creationism, applying it, not to the creator, but to the created, to the soul-bodily. The salvation and resolution of this philosophy lies not in the nebulous confusion of dualism, but in recognising the duality and seeing through it, and by viewing correctly the spheres of eternity and of transitoriness, and being able to separate them. Then we will be able to say that in beholding reality as it exists before us, we see both a reflection and at the same time an effect; a reflection because it belongs to the sphere of transitoriness and is ruled by evolution, and an effect because it belongs to the sphere of eternity and is ruled by what we acquire when we comprehend the soul-spiritual life as described today. It is not correct to say that creationism is right and emanation is wrong, nor that emanation is right and creationism wrong, but that both are necessary factors for a true understanding of the totality of life. Overcoming dualism cannot be brought about theoretically, only by life itself. If you seek a resolution of what is Above with what is Below, of the sphere of transitoriness with the sphere of eternity, and look for it theoretically in concepts, thoughts, and ideas, then you will never manage it, you will arrive at a confused philosophy, because you would be seeking with the intellect what should really be sought in life itself.

In life one can look for the truth only when one knows that one has to set one’s gaze both in the sphere of eternity, to recognise there what does not otherwise appear in outer reality, and then to consider all human and other beings in the sphere of transitoriness, in a way that actually contradicts outer reality. Armed with both of these, when one comes upon something real, it begins to flow as one experiences reality as alive, as living seeing, arising from the combination of effect in the sphere of eternity and reflection in the sphere of transitoriness. This is the way to grasp reality, if one does not want to hold a theoretical worldview that only lives in concepts and ideas. One can grasp it if one is willing to adopt two worldviews, one for the realm of the soul-spiritual and the other for the realm of the soul-bodily, and in the living interplay of the two, not in a theory, one will have something that nourishes and stimulates life. Only in this way can we escape from dualism.

This is the challenge that faces humanity today. It has nothing to do with founders of religions appearing and teaching humanity about spiritualism; nor does it depend on founders of learned sects appearing and teaching humanity about materialism. But it does depend on us viewing matter as the material of evolution, that spirit is not matter and should be understood spiritually in the sphere of eternity, and that reality should be viewed as both of these. What must flow into a future world view is matter illuminated by the spirit, and the spirit substantiated by matter. It does not depend on philosophers appearing who offer mankind definitions of truth, or who offer definitions that in theory create a so-called monadic consistency, as the academics teach. But it does depend on recognising the duality between truth and knowledge, and actively looking for the relationship between these two in life itself, leading to a living epistemology, not a theoretical one.

It is not truth or knowledge, but truth and knowledge – knowledge borne by the significance of truth, itself illuminated by the light of knowledge – recognising the human being himself as a duality in the world who, in his life and in his becoming, can only surmount what as duality must be surmounted. The future task of humanity is not Kantianism which believes that appearances in the outer world are not the ‘thing-in-itself’, but should be to achieve truth and knowledge in the intellectual sphere too; and that means recognising that what surrounds us is indeed maya; but it is maya because of the way we are placed in the world, and as long as we appear this way, we are a duality. We create maya by our being placed in this way, and we overcome it, not in some idea or theory, but in life itself by bringing our own selves to life.

This is of course contained in my booklet Truth and Knowledge. It also appears in my book The Philosophy of Freedom, which in a few days’ time will appear in a new edition that you can get here. I have made some additions to it, not altering the original text, but considerably enlarging many of the notes.

In conclusion therefore, what is important is to understand the signs of the times, and from them to nurture the spiritual life in the various areas of human endeavour.

• 1. Dr Steiner uses the adjectives geistig-seelisch and seelisch-leiblich on many occasions throughout this lecture. We have chosen to translate them respectively as soul-spiritual and soul-bodily.

We cannot fully estimate the nature of man's being, as it appears at present, without fixing our eyes on extended periods through which he has passed in the course of his evolution. This will become evident when considering the facts described by me during recent days. Our souls undergo repeated earth-lives that are always separated from one another by the life between death and a new birth. In this manner our souls have passed through the most manifold periods of human evolution. By reflecting on these things, we shall clearly recognize that the nature of the human being can be comprehended only when we consider extended periods during which our souls have repeatedly lived on earth.

These matters have been discussed by me in previous Kristiania (Oslo) lectures, dealing with the sequence of evolutionary epochs, such as those that preceded and those that followed the Mystery of Golgotha. Today I wish to discuss this subject from a particular standpoint.

Mankind has undergone great changes in the course of its evolution. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated. People know that a Greek period existed, an Egyptian period, and other earlier periods. But, although they are aware of evolving culture-impulses, they believe that human beings in regard to their soul-life were just the same (at least, in historic ages) as they are today. This is not true. At a certain stage we come to a stop in this historic retrospect. We come to a long pause leading to a period which present-day scientists are very fond of describing as that of man's supposedly ape-like ancestors.

Mankind's evolution, however, was not in the least as people now imagine it. In order to understand the changes it has undergone, let us envisage the relatively great dependency, existing in the present age during the human being's first years of life, of the spirit and soul organism on the physical-bodily one.

You need only to consider the stage of early childhood until the change of teeth, and the extensive transformation accompanying the change of teeth which must strike every unprejudiced observer. The child's entire soul-constitution becomes different. We then find another life period lasting until puberty. We all know that at this age the development of spirit and soul is dependent on the development of the body. And, if we observe these things without prejudice, we notice the same dependence of spirit and soul on the body also at a later age lasting until the twenties, although today, in the time of youth movements (this is not said in a critical sense) it is just the young people who do not like to emphasize this dependence. Naturally, they consider themselves, at sixteen or seventeen, fully developed young women and young men; and those vaunting unusual mental faculties write newspaper articles at twenty-one. These young people would thus like to hush up the fact that their spirit and soul is greatly dependent on their bodily organism. At any rate, the present-day human being becomes more or less independent of the body once he has reached a certain age. A man in his twenties is an adult who does not feel himself as dependent upon his body as would a child were it to pass in full consciousness through the stages between change of teeth and puberty.

There was still a feeling in comparatively recent ages that the human being matured gradually. It was then clearly realized that the so-called apprentice had to be treated differently from the journey-man; and a master's rank could not be attained until relatively late in life.

As regards present-day man, however, it can be asserted that after a certain age, his spirit and soul are no longer greatly dependent on his body. Of course, on reaching a venerable age, we notice a renewed dependence on our physical organism. When the legs become shaky, when the face becomes wrinkled, when the hair becomes grey, we cannot then deny the influence of the body. This, however, is not ascribed to a genuine parallelism of body and soul. People of today feel that, even though the bodily forces decline, soul and spirit remain, and must remain, more or less independent of the bodily-physical. Yet this was not always the case. If we go back to earlier epochs of mankind's evolution, we find the human being even in his old age remaining as intensely dependent on his body as does a child's soul today remain dependent on its body between the change of teeth and puberty. And if we are enabled—not by external history, but by spiritual science—to go back to the first period of evolution after the great Atlantean catastrophe which caused a new configuration of the earth's continents, we come to what I called in my Occult Science the primeval Indian epoch. The human being then felt himself, even after having reached his fifties, to be just as dependent on the physical as the child's soul is dependent on the change of teeth, and the youthful person's soul on puberty. This means: Just as we experience today during childhood the ascending line of growth, so ancient man experienced, in his fifties, the descending line within spirit and soul. Then things happened in such a way that a man, on reaching his fifties, matured inwardly just by becoming older, in a similar manner as modern man matures on attaining puberty. And at that time, seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings eagerly looked forward, during their whole life, to this stage of existence. For everyone could say to himself: Something will be revealed to me out of my bodily constitution that I could not experience in younger years, before I became forty-nine or fifty. Naturally, such an idea is bound to shock modern men most profoundly. You only need to think of a present-day man who is absolutely sure of being a finished product after reaching the twenties. What could be said if he had to wait until the age of maturity revealed something to him which he could not know before, which he could not feel, and experience before!

In ancient India, however, man's bodily constitution enabled him to feel, already in his fifties, something like a gradual separation of the physical body from spirit and soul. He felt more and more how the physical approximated, as it were, the corpse-like. And he felt in this estrangement of the physical body, in this approach of the physical body to the earth-elements, a liberation of spirit and soul. By considering the body merely as a garment, he felt its relationship to the earth, to all that would belong to earth after death. It was less amazing to ancient than to modern men that the body had to be discarded, delivered to the earth-forces. For ancient man passed slowly and gradually through this process of discarding the body.

This sounds paradoxical, because it implies the terrifying conception of having a physical body that is slowly becoming a corpse. Ancient man, however, did not think of his body as a burdensome object passing, as it were, into a kind of putrefaction. Instead, he thought of it as an independent sheath or shell which, even though becoming earth-like, was yet full of life. Yet the physical body, at the age of fifty, assumed a sheath-like, shell-like character.

This gradual becoming similar to the earth taught ancient man something that can be known today only through abstract science. The inner nature of metals, for instance, became known to him. At the age of fifty, he was instinctively able to differentiate between copper, silver, and gold. He felt the resemblance of these metals to his own organism gradually turning to earth. A rock-crystal called forth in him other feelings than furrowed soil. By aging, man gained wisdom concerning terrestrial matters.

This fact influenced primeval civilization. The young, looking up to the old, said to themselves: These ancients are wise. Once I have become as old as they are, I shall also be wise. Such an attitude caused a profound veneration and a tremendous respect for old age.

In those ancient days of mankind's evolution (the epoch of primeval India), a lofty civilization, connected with a wondrous veneration, a wondrous respect for old age, existed in a certain part of the world (not in that part, however, inhabited by men with receding foreheads, such as are excavated today by anthropologists). And we must ask ourselves: How did it actually happen that men passed through these experiences?

It did happen, because primeval man lived less intensively in his physical body than we do. Today man crawls into the very core of his physical body, the experiences of which he shares. Thus he feels himself to be identical, at one with his physical body. And we must undergo a common destiny with whatever is felt to be at one with us. Because, in those ancient times, men felt themselves more self-dependent within the physical body; because their thinking was more imaginative; because their feeling was like an inward weaving and living in the world of reality—for all these reasons their physical body from the beginning seemed to them like a sheath in which they were encased. This sheath began to harden as life drew near its end. A man in his fifties could feel how the body developed increasingly in accord with the outer world, thus becoming a mediator that could instill in him wisdom concerning the outer world.

The situation changed when civilized mankind of those days passed into the next age, called by me in my Occult Science the primeval Persian. Then a man in his fifties could no longer experience this dependence of his physical body upon the earthly. Instead, the aging physical body exerted a different influence on those still in their forties, from the forty-second or forty-third year to the forty-ninth or fiftieth. During these years, they participated intensively in the change of seasons. They experienced spring, summer, autumn, winter within their body. As it were, their body began to bud and blossom during spring and summer, and went into decline during autumn and winter. Human life took part in the seasons, the changing air-currents ...

And this perception of the changing air-currents, the changing seasons, was connected with another thing. Man felt that his speech was being transformed into something no longer belonging essentially to him. Just as the primeval Indian felt that, once he had attained the fifties, his whole physical body did not really belong to him, but more or less to the earth, so the primeval Persian felt that the body, by producing speech, belonged to the people around him. At fifty, a member of primeval Indian culture no longer said: I am walking. If expressing his own feelings, he would say: My body is walking. He did not say: I enter through the door; but instead: My body carries me through the door. For he experienced his body as something related to the outer world, to the earth. And, five or six millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, a member of the Persian civilization felt that speech came forth by itself, that he had it in common with his whole surroundings. At that time, people all over the world did not live in such an international way as today, but as members of definite folk communities. They felt how speech became alienated from them; how, if expressing their real feelings, they could say: “It is speaking within me.”

It was really the case that people after attaining the forties expressed the following in a certain, very respectful sense: Divine-spiritual forces are speaking through me. And the human being also felt as if his breath did not belong to him any longer, but was dedicated to the surrounding world.

On reaching his late thirties, a member of the Egypto-Chaldaean culture—which lasted from the third or fourth millennium until the eighth or ninth pre-Christian century—had a similar feeling with regard to his thoughts, his mental images. The Egyptian or Chaldaean felt in his thirty-fifth year as if his mental images were connected with heavenly forces, the course of the stars.

As the primeval Indian, at the end of his life, felt the connection of his body with the earth, as the primeval Persian felt the connection of his speech, his breath, with the seasons and the surrounding world, so a member of ancient Egyptian, of ancient Chaldaean culture felt that his thoughts were directed by the course of the stars. And he felt how divine star-powers were interwoven with his thoughts.

In Egypto-Chaldaean culture, the human being felt this dependence of his thoughts upon heavenly powers until his forty-second or forty-third year. Subsequently no new element entered into human development. The primeval Persian, too, felt as if his thoughts had been given to him by the stars; but he attained, moreover, in his forties the relationship to speech that I have described. Likewise, the primeval Indian, from his thirty-fifth year, possessed this relationship to the star-powers. Therefore he considered astrology as something self-evident. In his forties, he also attained the dependence of speech upon his surroundings. In his fifties, moreover, he experienced how his physical body became objective, became shadow-like. He accustomed himself, as it were, to the dying, because dying had approached him already in his fifties. The soul was less firmly joined to the body. Hence outer conditions could bring forth these bodily changes. This fact was perceived by the soul, experienced by the soul. And thereby man, as he grew older, merged himself more and more with the world.

Then came the Graeco-Latin era, which lasted from the eighth pre-Christian century until the fifteenth post-Christian century, for until then, the echo of Graeco-Latin culture still resounded in all civilized countries. This marked the age when man felt himself until his thirties still dependent upon his physical body, but no longer dependent on the stars, the seasons, the earth. He felt himself firmly entrenched within his physical body. The Greek felt a concord, a harmony between the soul and spirit element and the bodily-physical. Only this bodily-physical element no longer separated itself from him. This is all very difficult to express, for we are prevented, by the customary and totally inadequate historical teaching given to us in school, from forming a conception of these changes in mankind's evolution.

There then came the time when the human being became connected with his physical body in such a way that his physical body was committed no longer to participate in the course of the universe directed by spiritual laws. Now man was completely bound to his physical body. Mankind did not reach this stage until the eighth pre-Christian century.

Thus a great transformation of mankind's whole evolution occurred in as far as it concerned civilized mankind. Although the human being on reaching the thirties felt himself still at one with his physical body, he no longer was separated from it. He felt himself united with his physical body. It could no longer unveil to him the world's mysteries. During this period, therefore, mankind attained an entirely new relation to death. At an earlier time, when the human being prepared himself for dying, as it were, by undergoing a separation from his physical body, this dying signified for him nothing but a transformation in the midst of life; for, in his fifties, he became familiar gradually with the process of dying. He experienced dying as a process which merged him, in a wisdom-filled and blissful way, with the universe. He experienced death as something guiding him into a world in which he had already lived during his earth-life. Death at that time was something entirely different from what it became later. It might be said: More and more the human being was confronted by the possibility that soul and spirit might participate in death.

Let us compare Hellenism with the primeval Indian epoch. In primeval India, the body gained independence. The individual was aware of being something else besides his body which became independent and sheath-like. He could not have possibly conceived the thought that death might be the end. Such a thought did not exist among human beings of the primeval Indian period. Only by degrees, and most decisively in the eighth pre-Christian century, did man say to himself (still out of an unconscious feeling, because he was unable to think about these things in a rationalistic way): My body dies; but, with regard to soul and spirit, I am at one with my body. No longer did he notice the difference between the bodily and the spirit and soul element.

The human being became dominated by a thought that terrified him when it first arose out of dark spiritual depths in the ninth or eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was the thought: Might not my soul pursue the same path as my body—die, as my body dies?

This thought which in the primeval Indian epoch would have been totally inconceivable now came more and more to the fore. Out of this mood emerged words like those famous ones of the Greek hero: Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.

This was the time when mankind nurtured a mood that grew in the right way towards the Mystery of Golgotha. For, what brought forth in ancient human beings the ability to preserve a freshness of soul which made it impossible for them to conceive that the soul might take the same path of death as the body?

This freshness of soul, this independence of soul with regard to feeling, was given to ancient man by this knowledge: I have had a life—for he could look into this life—which was pre-earthly; through it I passed with my soul and spirit before I descended to the physical world. While dwelling in this higher world, I was united with the exalted Sun-Being.

The ancient Mysteries had evolved a teaching which pointed out that man, in his pre-earthly existence, was united with the spirit of the sun, just as in earth-life his body is united with the physical light of the sun.

The teachers in the ancient Mysteries told the following to their pupils who, in their turn, told it again to others (they did not designate the exalted Sun-Being as the Christ, but He was the Christ, and we may therefore be permitted today to use this name): The Christ is a Being Who shall never descend to the earth. You, however, dwelt in your pre-earthly existence, before descending to earth, within spiritual worlds in communion with the Christ. And the force of the Christ has given you the faculty of making your soul independent of the body.

This instinctive memory of a pre-earthly existence was lost through the soul's increasing identification with its physical body. And, in the Greek epoch, earthly man could employ his instinctive consciousness-forces only by looking at physical life. The Greek was able to live such a harmonious earth-life, because his outlook into the divine worlds of the spirit had faded away. He was so successful in subduing the sensible-physical that the spiritual vanished more or less from his life's horizon. No longer did civilized men have a consciousness of the fact that before descending to earth, they dwelt in the presence of the exalted Sun-Being Who was later called the Christ. Now darkness encompassed those who looked at pre-earthly, prenatal existence. And thus arose the mystery of death.

What happened henceforth must be envisaged as something concerning not only mankind but also the gods. The divine-spiritual powers who sent the human being down to earth gave him the impulses towards the development that I have just described. Since his spirit and soul became increasingly merged with the physical body; since, as it were, his spirit and soul became identical with the physical, and since, therefore, the mystery of death confronted also the spirit and soul, the divine-spiritual powers who had sent the human being down to earth were threatened with the danger that he might be lost to the gods, that his soul, as well as his body, might die.

Yet man would never have become a free, independent being, had he not grown into his body during this epoch. Man could only become free in evolution if his view of the pre-earthly was dimmed. He was obliged to stand on earth—totally forsaken, as it were—within his physical body's abode. Thus his independent ego could radiate and gleam up.

For this shining forth of the independent ego can be best accomplished by the human being entering completely into his physical body. When man grows upward into the worlds of spirit and soul, his ego retreats; he is being merged with the objective element of spirit and soul. Man could become a free ego-being only if given the impulse by the gods to merge himself more and more with his physical body. He was thus, however, confronted by the mystery of death; for the physical body was bound to be claimed by death.

Now, if man's vision had not been awakened in another way, all of mankind on earth would have become more and more convinced that the soul and physical body were both dying together. And, if nothing else had happened; if history had continued its course in a straight line, all of us today would have come to the common conviction that the soul as well as the body are doomed to be laid in the grave.

At this point, the divine-spiritual powers decided to send down on earth the exalted Sun-Being, the Christ, in order that men, who no longer had any knowledge of their communion with the Christ during pre-earthly existence, could gain consciousness of their communion with the Christ after He had descended on earth and had shared on Golgotha and in Palestine their human destiny in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The God descended into the earthly world at the moment of mankind's world historic evolution when men had lost their feeling of communion with the Sun-Being beyond the earthly world.

Why did the Christ come down on earth? Because human beings, having fought their way to the attainment of complete ego-consciousness, needed Him on earth. Men had to experience the presence of a victor, who could die and resurrect himself—be the vanquisher of death.

In the course of history, this mystery had to be set before mankind at a time when man, no longer able to look back into pre-earthly existence, was granted a view of his communion with the giver of man's immortality, with the Christ. It is a divine event, and not merely for mankind, that the Christ was sent down on earth from higher worlds. For the human race would have fallen away from the gods, had they not sent down upon earth the loftiest among them, in order that He undergo a human destiny, a human existence, thus interweaving a divine event with earthly-human events and mankind's entire world evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be comprehended unless we regard it not only as a human event, but also as a divine event. The fact must be grasped that something which could be envisaged previously only in the divine worlds could now be envisaged in the earthly world.

Possibly you might raise the objection: Not all men have become followers of the Christ; many do not believe in the Christ. Must all these have the opinion that at death their soul would be laid in the grave with the body?

This, however, is not the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha may be interpreted. It is valid through all the centuries preceding ours that the Christ, in His infinite compassion overflowing with grace, died not only for His immediate followers, but for all men in all ages, everywhere on earth.

All men on earth have been redeemed from the riddle of death by the Christ. At first, this deed did not touch human consciousness. It is natural, however, that some men were found who could consciously grasp the grandeur and significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet the Christ did die and did rise as much for the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus as for the Christians.

Just because since the fifteenth century human evolution must increasingly regard intellectualism as its highest soul-force, and just because this intellectual impulse will become more and more powerful in the future, have we approached an epoch when it is incumbent upon the earth's entire population to grasp, with its ever growing consciousness, what was brought forth by the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus it will become necessary that the Mystery of Golgotha be penetrated by a knowledge that can be really understood by all men on earth.

In preceding centuries, Christianity developed in a way that still conformed to the peculiarities of ancient ethnic religions. Christian development had not yet attained universality. The Christian missionaries who went among the followers of other religions found little or no understanding, because the Christ was presented as a separate god who had the same qualities as those possessed by the ancient heathen folk deities. This was the manner in which Christianity had been disseminated. Why had Constantine, why Chlodvig, accepted Christianity?—Because they believed that the Christian god would be a more powerful helper than their former gods. They exchanged, as it were, their former gods for the Christian god. Hence the Christ had to take on many qualities of the ancient folk deities. These qualities have adhered to the Christ through the centuries.

In this way, however, Christianity could not become a universal religion. On the contrary, it had to retreat more and more before intellectualism. And we have seen, particularly in the nineteenth century, many a theological development which understood nothing whatsoever of the Christ-event in its super-sensible aspect. Here the desire was to speak only of Jesus, the man, although conceding that as man he towered above all other men. Yet, henceforth, the desire was only to speak of Jesus, the man, and not of Christ, the God.

We must, nevertheless, be able to speak again of Christ, the God, because this Christ, while undergoing His destiny through the Mystery of Golgotha, manifested to men on earth what He had formerly signified to them, before they had descended to earth from the high heavens.

Hence, we must state that the ancient folk religions were primarily local religions. People prayed to the god of Thebes, to the god on Mount Olympus. They were local deities who could be worshipped only in near-by places. Thus, from the beginning, these ancient faiths were bound to certain territories.

Later the local gods, who had their abode in a definite spot, were replaced by gods bound to the personalities of single men, of the guiding folk heroes. Yet a people's god was either a still living folk hero or his surviving soul, the ancestral folk soul. All religious faiths had a restricted character.

With Christianity, however, there appeared a world religion which bestowed a spiritual element upon the whole earth, just as the sun bestows a physical element upon the whole earth. The climate in the vicinity of Mount Olympus is different from the climate in the vicinity of Thebes; the latter, in its turn, is different from the climate in the vicinity of Bombay. If a religious faith nestles close to a locality, it cannot spread beyond this locality. The sun, however, sheds its light on all the earth's localities, shines upon all men as the same sun.

When, however, the human form was taken on by that God Whose physical reflection shone forth in the sun's radiance, then the human race received a God who could be accepted as God by all men on earth. If the possibility is found of penetrating the being of this Christ-Divinity, we shall be able to represent Him as the God acceptable to all mankind. Today we stand only at the beginning of anthroposophical teachings. As it were, we are still stammering the language of Anthroposophy. Yet Anthroposophy will continue to develop more and more. And a part of this development will consist in its capability of finding words to describe the Mystery of Golgotha—words of a kind that spiritual science can bring to the Hindus, the Chinese, to all men on earth; and which will elucidate the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese will be unable to reject what is told them concerning the Mystery of Golgotha.

For this purpose, we must attach a genuinely serious significance to all that represents Christian tradition. Throughout the centuries, people have subjected themselves more or less to the words of the Gospels. They have studied these Gospels in a way commensurate with their understanding of these ancient books. We have certainly no intention of speaking against the validity of the Gospels. Our cycles on each of the Gospels attempt to penetrate, by means of special anthroposophical interpretation, into the deeper meaning of these Gospels. Yet one thing must be said: Why is the passage at the end of one Gospel taken so lightly? There it is written: 1 have still many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. And why are the words of another Gospel not taken more seriously: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles? For the Christ spoke the full truth. He could have said to men other things than those recorded in the Gospels. Only those Christ-words are recorded in the Gospels, for the understanding of which the men of that epoch—few in number—were ready. But mankind must become more and more mature in the course of earthly evolution. From the Mystery of Golgotha on, the Christ dwelt among men as the Living Christ, and not as the dead Christ. And He is still present among us. If we learn to speak His language, we shall recognize His presence; we shall recognize the truth of His words: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles. And the anthroposophical world view desires to speak His language, His spiritual language. The anthroposophical world view desires to speak in such a way of nature, of all the beings on earth, of the starry sky and the sun that, by means of this language, the Mystery of Golgotha may be understood; that the Christ may be experienced as the One Who is ever present.

And, also after the Mystery of Golgotha, we may regard as Christ-words all that we have gained from the spiritual world; aided by that power which, through the Mystery of Golgotha, descended from heaven to earth. If as men we speak of the spiritual worlds, we may make true the word of St. Paul: Not I, but the Christ in me. For today we have entered an age in which we cannot even emulate the Greeks who, although feeling themselves still at one with their physical body, yet felt this physical body as something harmonious and independent. Today we penetrate at a still earlier age than the Greeks into that which underlies our physical body, thus separating ourselves from the spiritual around us. We can deepen our being only by seeking the union with the God Who descended from heaven to earth. And we can feel ourselves united only with that God Who entered the earthly sphere, because men on earth could no longer enter the heavenly sphere with their immediate and ordinary consciousness. By finding the Christ, we also find anew the approach to the super-sensible world; not now, however, by means of the physical body (this was the case in ancient times), but by means of heightened soul-power. And today, when the parallelism between the development of body and soul lasts only up to the age of twenty (later on it will last a still shorter period), this heightened soul-power can be attained alone by immersing ourselves, in the midst of the sensible events of earthly evolution, into the knowledge of a super-sensible event: the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything on earth took place in a sensible way. Only in the Mystery of Golgotha something super-sensible mingled with earthly events. And this can be understood only out of a super-sensible knowledge.

Hence the union with the Christ awakens in our human souls the powerful faculty of attaining a relationship to the super-sensible world—a relationship formerly attained by human beings through being connected with their physical body in such a way that the body could become sheath-like. Thus, feeling the approach of death before physical death occurred, they merged themselves with the spirit prevailing in their surroundings.

We must attain by means of the soul what could be attained, in earlier days, through the mediation of the body. For, although we admire in the highest degree what has been preserved of Indian writings—which did not originate, however, from the earliest primeval Indian epoch, but from a later period—although we admire what has been bequeathed to us through the glory of the Vedas, the grandeur of the Vedanta-philosophy, the radiant splendor of the Bhagavad-Gita, we must, nevertheless, recognize the fact that this could be attained in ancient times only because the body reflected to the human being, as he grew older, a certain spirituality. Ancient man was compensated for the waning of his physical existence, which set in after the thirty-fifth year, by having, as it were, the spirit pressing out of his body, as the latter became hard, withered and wrinkled. And this spirit was perceived by the human being. The great philosophical poems of ancient times were not composed by youths, but by patriarchs who had acquired wisdom. It resulted from what was given by the body. In the present stage of human evolution, which differs from the ancient ones, we must receive from the soul, as it grows more powerful, what was formerly contributed by the body. Our body becomes old. We must remain united with it. We cannot let the spirit emerge from this body, because we have utilized it since early childhood.

If we did not do this, we could never be free men. This must be accepted as our rightful earthly destiny. One fact, however, must be made clear to us: Our soul has to gain strength. Since the spiritual strength formerly corresponding to the waning body flows to us no longer we must attain it by strengthening our soul through our own effort. And we shall experience this strengthening of the soul by looking, in a genuine and living way, toward a great and powerful event: The divine event that took place as the Mystery of Golgotha in the midst of earthly life. In beholding the Mystery of Golgotha and becoming conscious that its after-effect is still dwelling among us, is still existing in the spiritual-super-sensible sphere, our spirit and soul become strengthened and approach the spiritual world anew.

The Christ has descended to earth in order that men, who no longer see Him in heaven by means of their memory, may be permitted to see Him on earth. Seen from today's viewpoint, this is what rightly places the Mystery of Golgotha before our spiritual eye.

The disciples, who had preserved a remnant of ancient clairvoyance, could still have the Christ as their teacher when He dwelt among them after the resurrection in the spiritual body.

Yet this power gradually fell away from them. And its complete disappearance is symbolically represented through the Festival of the Ascension.

The disciples sank into profound sadness, because they were forced to believe that the Christ was no longer among them. They had taken part in the event of Golgotha. Now, however, they had to believe that the Christ had moved away from their consciousness, that the Christ was no longer on earth. Thus they were plunged into deep sorrow, for they had seen the Christ-figure disappear in the clouds, that is, move away from their consciousness.

But every genuine knowledge is born out of sorrow, of suffering, of grief. True, profound knowledge is never born out of joy. True, profound knowledge is born out of suffering. And out of the suffering, which encompassed the disciples of the Christ at the Festival of the Ascension, out of this deep soul-anguish arose the Mystery of Pentecost. The disciples could no longer view the Christ by means of their outer, instinctive clairvoyance. But the force of the Christ unfolded within them. The Christ had sent to them the spirit enabling their soul to experience the Christ-existence in their innermost depths.

This experience gave meaning to the first Festival of Pentecost occurring in human evolution. The Christ, Who had disappeared from the outer, clairvoyant view still clinging to the disciples as a heritage of ancient evolutionary periods, appeared at Pentecost within the disciples' inner experience. The fiery tongues signify nothing but the arising of the inner Christ in the souls of His pupils, the souls of the disciples. Out of inner necessity, the Festival of Pentecost had to follow the Festival of the Ascension.

An important and far-reaching change takes place when children begin to lose their milk, or baby, teeth. This is not just a physical change in the life of a human being, but the whole human organization goes through a transformation. A true art of education demands a thorough appreciation and understanding of this metamorphosis. In our previous meetings, I spoke of the refined body of formative forces, the ether body. These forces are in the process of being freed from certain functions during the time between the change of teeth and puberty. Previously, the ether body worked directly into the physical body of the child, but now it begins to function in the realm of a child’s soul. This means that the physical body of children is held from within in a very different way than it was during the previous stage. The situation then was more or less as described by those of a materialistic outlook, who see the foundation of the human psyche in the physical processes of the human body. They see the soul and spirit of children as emanating from the physical and related to it much as a candle flame is related to the candle. And this is more or less correct for a young child until the change of teeth. During the early years, the soul and spiritual life of the child is completely connected to the physical and organic processes, and all of the physical and organic processes have a soul and spiritual quality. All of the shaping and forming of the body at that age is conducted from the head downward. This stage concludes when the second teeth are being pushed through. At this time, the forces working in the head cease to predominate while soul and spiritual activities enter the lower regions of the body—the rhythmic activities of the heart and breath. Previously, these forces, as they worked especially in the formation of the child’s brain, were also flowing down into the rest of the organism, shaping and molding and entering directly into the physical substances of the body. Here they gave rise to physical processes.

All this changes with the coming of the second teeth, and some of these forces begin to work more in the child’s soul and spiritual realm, affecting especially the rhythmic movement of heart and lungs. They are no longer as active in the physical processes themselves, but now they also work in the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. One can see this physically as the child’s breathing and pulse become noticeably stronger during this time. Children now have a strong desire to experience the emerging life of soul and spirit on waves of rhythm and beat within the body—quite subconsciously, of course. They have a real longing for this interplay of rhythm and beat in their organism. Consequently, adults must realize that whatever they bring to children after the change of teeth must be given with an inherent quality of rhythm and beat. Everything addressed to a child at this time must be imbued with these qualities. Educators must be able to get into the element of rhythm to the degree that whatever they present makes an impression on the children and allows them to live in their own musical element.

This is also the beginning of something else. If, at this stage, the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation is not treated properly, harm may result and extend irreparably into later life. Many weaknesses and unhealthy conditions of the respiratory and circulatory systems in adult life are the consequences of an improper education during these early school years. Through the change in the working of children’s ether body, the limbs begin to grow rapidly, and the life of the muscles and bones, including the entire skeleton, begins to play a dominant role. The life of muscles and bones tries to become attuned to the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. At this stage, children’s muscles vibrate in sympathy with the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation, so that their entire being takes on a musical quality. Previously, the child’s inborn activities were like those of a sculptor, but now an inner musician begins to work, albeit beyond the child’s consciousness. It is essential for teachers to realize that, when a child enters class one, they are dealing with a natural, though unconscious, musician. One must meet these inner needs of children, demanding a somewhat similar treatment, metaphorically, to that of a new violin responding to a violinist, adapting itself to the musician’s characteristic pattern of sound waves. Through ill treatment, a violin may be ruined for ever. But in the case of the living human organism, it is possible to plant principles that are harmful to growth, which increase and develop until they eventually ruin a person’s entire life.

Once you begin to study the human being, thus illuminating educational principles and methods, you find that the characteristics just mentioned occupy roughly the time between the change of teeth and puberty. You will also discover that this period again falls into three smaller phases. The first lasts from the change of teeth until approximately the end of the ninth year; the second roughly until the end of the twelfth year; and the third from the thirteenth year until sexual maturity.

If you observe the way children live entirely within a musical element, you can understand how these three phases differ from one another. During the first phase, approximately until the end of the ninth year, children want to experience everything that comes toward them in relation to their own inner rhythms—everything associated with beat and measure. They relate everything to the rhythms of breath and heartbeat and, indirectly, to the way their muscles and bones are taking shape. But if outer influences do not synchronize with their inner rhythms, these young people eventually grow into a kind of inner cripple, although this may not be discernible externally during the early stages.

Until the ninth year, children have a strong desire to experience inwardly everything they encounter as beat and rhythm. When children of this age hear music (and anyone who can observe the activity of a child’s soul will perceive it), they transform outer sounds into their own inner rhythms. They vibrate with the music, reproducing within what they perceive from without. At this stage, to a certain extent, children have retained features characteristic of their previous stages. Until the change of teeth children are essentially, so to speak, one sense organ, unconsciously reproducing outer sensory impressions as most sense organs do. Children live, above all, by imitation, as already shown in previous meetings. Consider the human eye, leaving aside the mental images resulting from the eye’s sensory perceptions, and you find that it reproduces outer stimuli by forming afterimages; the activity leading to mental representation takes hold of these aftermages. Insofar as very young children inwardly reproduce all they perceive, especially the people around them, they are like one great, unconscious sense organ. But the images reproduced inwardly do not remain mere images, since they also act as forces, even physically forming and shaping them.

And now, when the second teeth appear, these afterimages enter only as far as the rhythmic system of movement. Some of the previous formative activity remains, but now it is accompanied by a new element. There is a definite difference in the way children respond to rhythm and beat before and after the change of teeth. Before this, through imitation, rhythm and beat directly affected the formation of bodily organs. After the change of teeth, this is transformed into an inner musical element.

On completion of the ninth year and up to the twelfth year, children develop an understanding of rhythm and beat and what belongs to melody as such. They no longer have the same urge to reproduce inwardly everything in this realm, but now they begin to perceive it as something outside. Whereas, earlier on, children experienced rhythm and beat unconsciously, they now develop a conscious perception and understanding of it. This continues until the twelfth year, not just with music, but everything coming to meet them from outside.

Toward the twelfth year, perhaps a little earlier, children develop the ability to lead the elements of rhythm and beat into the thinking realm, whereas they previously experienced this only in imagination.

If, through understanding, you can perceive what happens in the realm of the soul, you can also recognize the corresponding effects in the physical body. I have just spoken of how children want to shape the muscles and bones in accordance with what is happening within the organs. Now, toward the twelfth year, they begin to be unsatisfied with living solely in the elements of rhythm and beat; now they want to lift this experience more into the realm of abstract and conscious understanding. And this coincides with the hardening of those parts of the muscles that lead into the tendons. Whereas previously all movement was oriented more toward the muscles themselves, now it is oriented toward the tendons. Everything that occurs in the realm of soul and spirit affects the physical realm. This inclusion of the life of the tendons, as the link between muscle and bone, is the external, physical sign that a child is sailing out of a feeling approach to rhythm and beat into what belongs to the realm of logic, which is devoid of rhythm and beat. This sort of discovery is an offshoot of a real knowledge of the human being and should be used as a guide for the art of education.

Most adults who think about things in ways that generalize, whether plants or animals (and as teachers you must introduce such general subjects to your students), will recall how they themselves studied botany or zoology, though at a later age than the children we are talking about. Unfortunately, most textbooks on botany or zoology are really unsuitable for teaching young people. Some of them may have great scientific merit (though this is usually not the case), but as teaching material for the age that concerns us here, they are useless. Everything that we bring to our students in plant or animal study must be woven into an artistic whole. We must try to highlight the harmonious configuration of the plant’s being. We must describe the harmonious relationships between one plant species and another. Whatever children can appreciate through a rhythmic, harmonious, and feeling approach must be of far greater significance for Waldorf teachers than what the ordinary textbooks can offer. The usual method of classifying plants is especially objectionable. Perhaps the least offensive of all the various systems is that of Linné. He looked only at the blossom of a plant, where the plant ceases to be merely plant and reaches with its forces into the whole cosmos. But these plant systems are unacceptable for use at school. We will see later what needs to be done in this respect.

It is really pitiful to see teachers enter the classroom, textbook in hand, and teach these younger classes what they themselves learned in botany or zoology. They become mere caricatures of a real teacher when they walk up and down in front of the students, reading from a totally unsuitable textbook in an attempt to remember what they were taught long ago. It is absolutely essential that we learn to talk about plants and animals in a living and artistic way. This is the only way our material will be attuned to the children’s inner musical needs. Always bear in mind that our teaching must spring from an artistic element; lessons must not merely be thought out. Even when it is correct, an abstract kind of observation is not good enough. Only what is imbued with a living element of sensitive and artistic experience provides children with the soul nourishment they need.

When children enter class one, we are expected to teach them writing as soon as possible, and we might be tempted to introduce the letters of the alphabet as they are used today. But children at this age—right at the onset of the change of teeth—do not have the slightest inner connection with the forms of these letters. What was it like when we still had such a direct human relationship to written letters? We need only look at what happened in early civilizations. In those ancient times, primitive people engraved images on tablets or painted pictures, which still had some resemblance to what they saw in nature. There was still a direct human link between outer objects and their written forms. As civilization progressed, these forms became increasingly abstract until, after going through numerous transformations, they finally emerged as today’s letters of the alphabet, which no longer bear any real human relationship to the person writing them.

In many ways, children show us how the people of earlier civilizations experienced the world; they need a direct connection with whatever we demand of their will. Therefore, when introducing writing, we must refrain from immediately teaching today’s abstract letters. Especially at this time of changing teeth, we must offer children a human and artistic bridge to whatever we teach. This implies that we have children connect what they have seen with their eyes and the results of their will activity on paper, which we call writing. Experiencing life actively through their own will is a primary need for children at this stage. We must give them an opportunity to express this innate artistic drive by, for example, allowing them to physically run in a curve on the floor (see image). Now, when we show them that they have made a curve with their legs on the floor, we lift their will activity into a partially conscious feeling. Next we ask them to draw this curve in the air, using their arms and hands. Now another form could be run on the floor, again to be written in the air.

Thus the form that was made by the entire body by running was then reproduced through the hand. This could be followed by the teacher asking the children to pronounce words beginning with the letter L. Gradually, under the teacher’s guidance, the children discover the link between the shape that was run and drawn and the sound of the letter L.

Once children experience their own inner movement, they are led to draw the letters themselves. This is one way to proceed, but there is also another possibility. After the change of teeth children are not only musicians inwardly, but, as an echo from earlier stages, they are also inner sculptors. Therefore, we can begin by talking to the children about a fish, gradually leading artistically to its outer form, which the children then draw. Then, appealing to their sense of sound, we direct their attention from the whole word fish to the initial sound “F,” thus relating the shape of the letter to its sound.

This method, to a certain extent, even follows the historical development of the letter F. However, there is no need to limit ourselves to historical examples, and it is certainly appropriate to use our imagination. What matters is not that children recapitulate the evolution of letters, but that they find their way into writing through the artistic activity of drawing pictures, which will finally lead to modern, abstract letter forms. For instance, one could remind the children of how water makes waves, drawing a picture like this first one, and gradually changing it into one like the second.

By repeating something like “washing waves of water—waving, washing water” while drawing the form, we connect the sound of the letter W with its written form. By beginning with the children’s own life experience, we go from the activity of drawing to the final letter forms.

Following our Waldorf method, children do not learn to write as quickly as they would in other schools. In the Waldorf school, we hold regular meetings for parents without their children present, and parents are invited to talk with the teachers about the effects of Waldorf education. In these meetings, some parents have expressed concern over the fact that their children, even at the age of eight, are still unable to write properly. We have to point out that our slower approach is really a blessing, because it allows children to integrate the art of writing with their whole being. We try to show parents that the children in our school learn to write at the appropriate age and in a far more humane way than if they had to absorb material that is essentially alien to their nature—alien because it represents the product of a long cultural evolution. We must help parents understand the importance of the children’s immediate and direct response to the introduction of writing. Naturally, we have to provide students with tools for learning, but we must do this by adapting our material to the child’s nature.

One aspect, so often left out today, concerns the relationship of a specific area to life as a whole. In our advanced stage of civilization, everything depends on specialization. Certainly, for a time this was necessary, but we have reached a stage where, for the sake of healthy human development, we must keep an open mind to spiritual investigation and what it can tell us about the human being. To believe that anthroposophists always rail against new technology is to seriously misunderstand this movement and its contribution to our knowledge of the human being. It is necessary to see the complexities of life from a holistic perspective. For example, I do not object at all to the use of typewriters. Typing is, of course, a far less human activity than writing by hand, but I do not remonstrate against it. Nevertheless, I find it is important to realize its implications, because everything we do in life has repercussions. So you must forgive me if, to illustrate my point, I say something about typewriting from the point of view of anthroposophic spiritual insight. Anyone unwilling to accept it is perfectly free to dismiss this aspect of life’s realities as foolish nonsense. But what I have to say does accord with the facts.

You see, if you are aware of spiritual processes, like those in ordinary life, using a typewriter creates a very definite impression. After I have been typing during the day (as you see, I am really not against it, and I’m pleased when I have time for it), it continues to affect me for quite a while afterward. In itself, this does not disturb me, but the effects are noticeable. When I finally reach a state of inner quiet, the activity of typing—seen in imaginative consciousness—is transformed into seeing myself. Facing oneself standing there, one is thus able to witness outwardly what is happening inwardly. All this must occur in full consciousness, which enables us to recognize that appearance, as form as an outer image, is simply a projection of what is or has been taking place, possibly much earlier, as inner organic activity. We can clearly see what is happening inside the human body once we have reached the stage of clairvoyant imagination. In objective seeing such as this, every stroke of a typewriter key becomes a flash of lightning. And during the state of imagination, what one sees as the human heart is constantly struck and pierced by those lightning flashes. As you know, typewriter keys are not arranged according to any spiritual principle, but according to frequency of their use, so that we can type more quickly. Consequently, when the fingers hit various keys, the flashes of lightning become completely chaotic. In other words, when seen with spiritual vision, a terrible thunderstorm rages when one is typing.

Such causes and effects are part of the pattern of life. There is no desire on our part to deride technical innovations, but we should be able to keep our eyes open to what they do to us, and we should find ways to compensate for any harmful effects. Such matters are especially important to teachers, because they have to relate education to ordinary life. What we do at school and with children is not the only thing that matters. The most important thing is that school and everything related to education must relate to life in the fullest sense. This implies that those who choose to be educators must be familiar with events in the larger world; they must know and recognize life in its widest context. What does this mean? It means simply that here we have an explanation of why so many people walk about with weak hearts; they are unable to balance the harmful effects of typing through the appropriate countermeasures. This is specially true of people who started typing when they were too young, when the heart is most susceptible to adverse effects. If typing continues to spread, we will soon see an increase in all sorts of heart complaints.

In Germany, the first railroad was built in 1835, from Fürth to Nuremberg. Before this, the Bavarian health authorities were asked whether, from a medical point of view, building such a railroad would be recommended. Before beginning major projects such as this, it was always the custom to seek expert advice. The Bavarian health authorities responded (this is documented) that expert medical opinion could not recommend building railroads, because passengers and railroad workers alike would suffer severe nervous strain by traveling on trains. However, they continued, if railroads were built despite their warning, all railroad lines should at least be closed off by high wooden walls to prevent brain concussions to farmers in nearby fields or others likely to be near moving trains.

These were the findings of medical experts employed by the Bavarian health authority. Today we can laugh about this and similar examples. Nevertheless, there are at least two sides to every problem, and from a certain point of view, one could even agree with some aspects of this report, which was made not so long ago—in fact not even a century ago. The fact is, people have become more nervous since the arrival of rail travel. And if we made the necessary investigation into the difference between people in our present age of the train and those who continued to traveled in the old and venerable but rather rough stagecoach, we would definitely be able to ascertain that the constitutions of these latter folks were different. Their nervous systems behaved quite differently. Although the the Bavarian health officials made fools of themselves, from a certain perspective they were not entirely wrong.

When new inventions affect modern life, we must take steps to balance any possible ill effects by finding appropriate countermeasures. We must try to compensate for any weakening of the human constitution through outer influences by strengthening ourselves from within. But, in this age of ever-increasing specialization, this is possible only through a new art of education based on true knowledge of the human being.

The only safe way of introducing writing to young children is the one just advocated, because at that age all learning must proceed from the realm of the will, and the inclination of children toward the world of rhythm and measure arises from the will. We must satisfy this inner urge of children by allowing them controlled will activities, not by appealing to their sense of observation and the ability to make mental images. Consequently, it would be inappropriate to teach reading before the children have been introduced to writing, for reading represents a transition from will activity to abstract observation. The first step is to introduce writing artistically and imaginatively and then to let children read what they have written. The last step, since modern life requires it, would be to help children read from printed texts. Teachers will be able to discern what needs to be done only by applying a deepened knowledge of the human being, based on the realities of life.

When children enter class one, they are certainly ready to learn how to calculate with simple numbers. And when we introduce arithmetic, here, too, we must carefully meet the inner needs of children. These needs spring from the same realm of rhythm and measure and from a sensitive apprehension of the harmony inherent in the world of number. However, if we begin with what I would call the “additive approach,” teaching children to count, again we fail to understand the nature of children. Of course, they must learn to count, but additive counting as such is not in harmony with the inner needs of children.

It is only because of our civilization that we gradually began to approach numbers through synthesis, by combining them. Today we have the concept of a unit, or oneness. Then we have a second unit, a third, and so on, and when we count, we mentally place one unit next to the other and add them up. But, by nature, children do not experience numbers this way; human evolution did not develop according to this principle. True, all counting began with a unit, the number one. But, originally, the second unit, number two, was not an outer repetition of the first unit but was felt to be contained within the first unit. Number one was the origin of number two, the two units of which were concealed within the original number. The same number one, when divided into three parts, gave number three, three units that were felt to be part of the one. Translated into contemporary terms, when reaching the concept of two, one did not leave the limits of number one but experienced an inner progression within number one. Twoness was inherent in oneness. Also three, four, and all other numbers were felt to be part of the all-comprising first unit, and all numbers were experienced as organic members arising from it.

Because of its musical, rhythmic nature, children experience the world of number in a similar way. Therefore, instead of beginning with addition in a rather pedantic way, it would be better to call on a child and offer some apples or any other suitable objects. Instead of offering, say, three apples, then four more, and finally another two, and asking the child to add them all together, we begin by offering a whole pile of apples, or whatever is convenient. This would begin the whole operation. Then one calls on two more children and says to the first, “Here you have a pile of apples. Give some to the other two children and keep some for yourself, but each of you must end up with the same number of apples.” In this way you help children comprehend the idea of sharing by three. We begin with the total amount and lead to the principle of division. Following this method, children will respond and comprehend this process naturally. According to our picture of the human being, and in order to attune ourselves to the children’s nature, we do not begin by adding but by dividing and subtracting. Then, retracing our steps and reversing the first two processes, we are led to multiplication and addition. Moving from the whole to the part, we follow the original experience of number, which was one of analyzing, or division, and not the contemporary method of synthesizing, or putting things together by adding.

These are just some examples to show how we can read in the development of children what and how one should teach during the various stages. Breathing and blood circulation are the physical bases of the life of feeling, just as the head is the basis for mental imagery, or thinking. With the change of teeth the life of feeling is liberated and, therefore, at this stage we can always reach children through the element of feeling, provided the teaching material is artistically attuned to the children’s nature.

To summarize, before the change of teeth, children are not yet aware of their separate identity and consequently cannot appreciate the characteristic nature of others, whose gestures, manners of speaking, and even sentiments they imitate in an imponderable way. Up to the seventh year, children cannot yet differentiate between themselves and another person. They experience others as directly connected with themselves, similar to the way they feel connected to their own arms and legs. They cannot yet distinguish between self and the surrounding world.

With the change of teeth new soul forces of feeling, linked to breathing and blood circulation, come into their own, with the result that children begin to distance themselves from others, whom they now experience as individuals. This creates in them a longing to follow the adult in every way, looking up to the adult with shy reverence. Their previous inclination was to imitate the more external features, but this changes after the second dentition. True to the nature of children, a strong feeling for authority begins to develop.

You would hardly expect sympathy for a general obedience to authority from one who, as a young person, published Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path in the early 1890s. But this sense for authority in children between the change of teeth and puberty must be respected and nurtured, because it represents an inborn need at this age. Before one can use freedom appropriately in later life, one must have experienced shy reverence and a feeling for adult authority between the change of teeth and puberty. This is another example of how education must be seen within the context of social life in general.

If you look back a few decades and see how proud many people were of their “modern” educational ideas, some strange feelings will begin to stir. After Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866, one often heard a certain remark in Austria, where I spent half my life. People expressed the opinion that the battle had been won by the Prussian schoolmaster. The education act was implemented earlier in Prussia than in Austria, which was always considered to have an inferior educational system, and it was the Prussian schoolmaster who was credited with having won the victory. However, after 1918 [and World War I], no one sang the praises of the Prussian schoolmaster.

This is an example to show how “modern” educational attitudes have been credited with the most extraordinary successes. Today we witness some of the results—our chaotic social life, which threatens to become more and more chaotic because, for so many, their strong sense of freedom is no longer controlled by the will and by morality, but by indulgence and license. There are many who have forgotten how to use real, inner freedom. Those who are able to observe life find definite connections between the general chaos of today and educational principles that, though highly satisfying to intellectual and naturalistic attitudes, do not lead to a full development of the human being. We must become aware of the polar effects in life. For example, people in later life become free in the right way only if, as a child, they went through the stage of looking up to and revering adults. It is healthy for children to believe that something is beautiful, true and good, or ugly, false, and evil, when a teacher says so.

With the change of teeth children enter a new relationship to the world. As the life of their own soul gradually emerges, which they now experience in its own right, they must first meet the world supported through an experience of authority. At this stage, educators represent the larger world, and children have to meet it through the eyes of their teachers. Therefore we would say that, from birth to the change of teeth, children have an instinctive tendency to imitate, and from the change of teeth to puberty, they need to experience the principle of authority. When we say “authority,” however, we mean children’s natural response to a teacher—never enforced authority. This is the kind of authority that, by intangible means, creates the right rapport between child and teacher.

Here we enter the realm of imponderables. I would like to show you, by way of an example, how they work. Imagine that we wish to give children a concept of the soul’s immortality, a task that is much more difficult than one might suppose. At the age we are speaking of, when children are so open to the artistic element in education, we cannot communicate such concepts through abstract reasoning or ideas, but must clothe them in pictures.

Now, imagine a teacher who feels drawn to the more intellectual and naturalistic side of life; how would this teacher proceed? Subconsciously she may say to herself, I am naturally more intelligent than a child who is, in fact, rather ignorant. Therefore I must invent a suitable picture that will give children an idea of the immortality of the human soul. The chrysalis from which the butterfly emerges offers a good metaphor. The butterfly is hidden in the chrysalis, just as the human soul is hidden in the body. The butterfly flies out of the chrysalis, and this gives us a visible picture of what happens at death, when the suprasensory soul leaves the body and flies into the spiritual world. This is the sort of idea that a skillful, though intellectually inclined, person might make up to pass on to children the concept of the soul’s immortality. With such an attitude of mind, however, children will not feel touched inwardly. They will accept this picture and quickly forget it.

But we can approach this task in a different way. It is inappropriate to feel, “I am intelligent, and this child is ignorant.” We have seen here how cosmic wisdom still works directly through children and that, from this point of view, it is children who are intelligent and the teacher who is, in reality, ignorant. I can keep this in mind and fully believe in my image of the emerging butterfly. A spiritual attitude toward the world teaches me to believe the truth of this picture. It tells me that this same process, which on a higher plane signifies the soul’s withdrawal from the body, is repeated on a lower level in a simple, sense-perceptible form when a butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. This picture is not my invention but was placed into the world by the forces of cosmic wisdom. Here, before my very eyes, I can watch a representation of what happens on a higher plane when the soul leaves the body at death.

If this picture leaves a deep impression on my soul, I will be convinced of its truth. If teachers have this experience, something begins to stir between their students and themselves, something we must attribute to the realm of imponderables. If teachers bring this picture to children with an inner warmth of belief, it will create a deep and lasting impression and become part of their being.

If you can see how the effects of natural authority lead to a kind of inner obedience, then in a similar light authority will be accepted as wholesome and positive. It will not be resented because of a mistaken notion of freedom. Teachers, as artists of education, must approach children as artists of life, because, after the change of teeth, children approach teachers as artists as well—as sculptors and musicians. In certain cases, the unconscious and inherent gifts of children are very highly developed, especially in children who later become virtuosi or geniuses. Such individuals never lose their artistic gifts. But inwardly, entirely subconsciously, every child is a great sculptor; they retain these gifts from before the change of teeth. After this, inner musical activities are interwoven with the inner formative activities. As educators, we must learn to cooperate in a living way with these artistic forces working through children. Proceeding along these lines, it becomes possible to prevent rampant growth in young people, and we enable them to develop their potential in the broadest possible sense.