The Rudolf Steiner Archive

AT the point of time in modern spiritual evolution when we see the dawn of the new world-conception breaking forth, at that time in which we must record the great achievements of Kepler and Galileo, in which Giordano Bruno, in a certain measure, outlines the great problem of a modern world-conception,—at this moment we meet the solitary thinker to whom the present reflections shall be dedicated, the simple shoemaker of Goerlitz, Jacob Boehme. He struggled with the highest problems of existence in a way which can occupy our thinking and feeling to this day in the deepest manner, and will probably occupy the thinking and feeling of human beings for a long time to come.

A peculiar figure this Jacob Boehme, a figure who strove and struggled in solitude, whereas elsewhere in the spiritual life the single currents united to form a great comprehensive tableau. And in a certain sense one might say that the solitary striving of Jacob Boehme appears almost as interesting, from a certain standpoint, as the flowing together of the different points of view which meet us elsewhere in that epoch. And then we see how, very strangely, what Jacob Boehme found in his own solitary mind, even in his century, received the greatest imaginable dissemination—the greatest imaginable dissemination we may say, considering the fact that we are dealing with a deeply significant spiritual matter. Precisely through the manifestations of his adversaries we see how far his influence extended after only a few decades had passed since his death. Again and again, Jacob Boehme was the object of appreciative and admiring, or rejecting and ridiculing, contemplation. And when we observe what came into being as his following, or as his opposition, we have the impression that both the adherents and the attackers knew they were dealing with a very strange phenomenon.

This phenomenon is strange, especially to those who wish to understand every personality that appears in the spiritual life of humanity on the basis of the immediate conditions, so to speak, of the age and the surroundings. We see, for instance, how people try to understand Goethe by collecting all sorts of details of his life, even the most unimportant, and believe that by assembling these details they can acquire this or that to explain his corresponding spiritual life. It is not possible in this manner really to acquire much for the understanding of Jacob Boehme. External influences are difficult to verify through external science, and it is still harder to understand how Jacob Boehme grew out of that which constituted the spiritual life of his time.

Many, therefore, have professed the opinion that in Jacob Boehme we have to do with a kind of spiritual meteor. All that arose there, all that this personality had to give, appears as if it had suddenly sprung up, revealing itself out of the depths of his strange soul. Others then have tried to explain that many a turn of expression, many a way of presenting his ideas, shows similarity in words and turns of expression to the formulae of the alchemists, or to some philosophical or other tendencies that were still alive in his time. But whoever enters more deeply into the whole mentality of Jacob Boehme will find that such a procedure has hardly more value than if one were to examine the “language” in connection with an eminent personality, who, after all, must always express himself in a language. For when Jacob Boehme makes use of alchemistic formulae, or such things, it is only verbal clothing. That which makes such an exceedingly powerful impression, however, on one who seeks to understand him presents itself with an originality such as is found only in the very greatest minds.

In contrast to this, there are a few clues which are not quite compatible with modern thinking—with the modern world-conception—but which, for the person who is capable of entering into such things, throw light on how Jacob Boehme was able to soar up to his high spiritual standpoint. In order to connect our reflections with his life, to the extent that it has a bearing here, we need mention only a few biographical facts.

Jacob Boehme was the son of very poor parents and came from Alt-Seidenberg in the vicinity of Goerlitz. He was born in 1575. In his youth he had to tend the cattle with other village boys. As is apparent from this, he grew up in complete poverty, and since a person growing up in this way does not have any particular means of education, we shall find it understandable that even as a boy of twelve or thirteen years Jacob Boehme could hardly read and only barely write. But another experience confronts us even during his boyhood, of which a faithful biographer heard from him out of his own mouth. We shall first tell this experience. As we have said, it is not one of those things which are quite intelligible to modern consciousness.

When Jacob Boehme was once tending the cattle with other shepherd boys, he withdrew from the company of the boys and climbed a moderately high mountain in the vicinity of his native locality, the “Landskrone.” He declared that he had seen there in the bright noontime something like an entrance-gate into the mountain. He went inside and there found a vessel, a kind of vat, filled with pure gold. That made such an impression of fearful awe on his soul that he ran away and retained only the memory of this peculiar experience.

One can, to be sure, speak of a “dream dreamed in the waking state.” One may, for all that, grant the right to those who are satisfied with such an explanation. But the essential point is not whether one calls such an occurrence a “dream,” or gives it another name, but what it releases in the mind of the person who “dreams” it, what effect it produces in the soul. And from the way in which Jacob Boehme later told this occurrence to his friend we see that it had engraved itself deeply on his mind, that it had released significant forces in his soul so that it had the highest psychological significance for him.

Let us, therefore, grant to the rationalists the right to explain such an experience, which was in any case a significant happening in Jacob Boehme's soul, in the way in which they likewise wish to explain the event of the appearance of Christ before Paul at Damascus. Only, an explanation which resorts to these things must also admit that such significant work as that of Paul, which is so intimately connected with Christianity, proceeded from a “dream.”

Even the boy Jacob Boehme, when he had this experience, felt something like the deepest stirring up of soul forces which are otherwise not active in the soul. The important thing is this inner releasing of deeper-lying forces of the soul. The important thing is the testimony of such a fact which proves that we have to do here with a human being who could descend to a far greater profundity in his soul life than thousands and thousands of others.

Another event of a similar nature must also be borne in mind, of which we must again say that it remained so fixed in Jacob Boehme's memory that the brightness and the significance of this event shone over his whole life, in so far as this life was an inner one.

In his fourteenth year Jacob Boehme was sent to a shoemaker as an apprentice and often had to stand guard, so to speak, in his master's shop. He was not permitted to sell anything. On one occasion—and this story, again, came from the mouth of his loyal biographer, Abraham von Frankenberg—an individuality who immediately made a singular impression on Jacob Boehme came into the shop and wanted to buy shoes. But, because the boy was forbidden to sell shoes, he said this to the stranger. The latter offered him a high price and it came about that the shoes were sold.

Then, however, the following took place, which remained in Jacob Boehme's memory throughout his life. When the stranger had departed and a short time had passed, Jacob Boehme heard his name called: “Jacob, Jacob!” and when he went out the stranger seemed to him even more singular than at first. There was something sun-like, shining in his eyes and he said words to him which sounded very strange: “Jacob, you are now still small, but you will once become an entirely different human being, about whom the world will break out in amazement. But remain humble before your God and read the Bible diligently. You will have to endure much persecution, but be strong, for your God loves you and will be merciful to you.”—Jacob Boehme regarded such an occurrence as much more essential than any other, external biographic experiences.

And his biographer relates further how Jacob Boehme himself told him the following: It was in the year 1600 when, during seven days, Jacob Boehme felt as if withdrawn from his physical body, felt as if he were in an entirely different world, felt as if, with regard to his soul, he was re-born.

We have to do here—if one wants to call it that—with a permanently abnormal condition of the soul. But Jacob Boehme experienced this, his “re-birth,” also simply more or less as something which could, according to his conception, take place with a human soul. He did not become, let us say, a visionary or a false idealist through this, nor did he become an arrogant person, but continued to practice his shoemaker's trade in all humility—or, we might say, in all sobriety. And even the experience of the year 1600, the withdrawal into another world, remained to him a phenomenon of which he said to himself: “You have looked into a kingdom of joy, into a kingdom of spiritual reality, but that is a thing of the past.” And he continued to live from day to clay pursuing his trade in his sober manner.

In the year 1610 this experience of re-birth was repeated. He then began to record what he had experienced in his states of exaltation, since he felt called upon to do this. Thus, in 1612 his first work, The Dawn in Its Ascent, came into being, later entitled Aurora. Regarding it, he said that he did not write it down through his ordinary ego, but that it was given to him word for word; that, in comparison with his ordinary ego, he lived in a being which was encompassing, which reached into all parts of the world and immersed itself in this world.

To be sure, the revelations did not do him much good. When several people noticed what he had to say, what he had written down, a few copies of the manuscript of Aurora were made and circulated. The result was that Gregorius Richter, the deacon of Goerlitz—where Jacob Boehme had meanwhile, in 1594, established himself as shoemaker—railed at Jacob Boehme from the pulpit and not only condemned his work, but also succeeded in having him called before the council of the city of Goerlitz. About this I will now simply repeat the words that we know from his biographer. He relates that the verdict of the council was that Jacob Boehme must be forbidden to write further, for only those who were academicians were permitted to write and Jacob Boehme was not an academician, but an idiot, and must, therefore, refrain from writing!

Thus Jacob Boehme was branded as an idiot. And, since he was a good-natured man on the whole, who could not quite believe—because of the simplicity in his nature—that he would be considered one of the damned entirely without reason, he did indeed resolve to write nothing further in the near future.

But then came the time when he could no longer do otherwise. And in the years 1620 to 1624, up to his death, he wrote rapidly, one after another, a great number of his works, as for instance: The Book of the Contemplative Life, De Signatura Rerum, or Concerning the Birth and Designation of All Beings, or the elucidation of the first book of Moses. But the number of his works is rather large and in this connection, many a reader may fare strangely. Some have said that Jacob Boehme repeats himself again and again. It is true; one cannot deny that certain things appear over and over again in his writings. If, however, a person draws the conclusion from this that you know the whole Jacob Boehme if you know a few of his works, because he always repeats himself—though we cannot simply contradict persons who say this—it must be said that whoever contents himself with having read one work of Jacob Boehme's and has no appetite to read the other works also, does not understand much of Jacob Boehme. But whoever takes the trouble to go through his other works will not rest, in spite of all the repetitions, until he has read even the very last ones.

If, from this characterization of his nature, we try to penetrate more into his train of thought, into the spiritual nature of Jacob Boehme, it must be said that for modern man, who lives only in the cultural life of our time, much indeed must be unintelligible, not only in the content of Jacob Boehme's works, but also in his whole manner of presentation. At first the presentation appears completely chaotic. To be sure, one becomes slowly accustomed to it. But then there still remains for many persons something that is a hard nut to crack. We find that he has very peculiar definitions of words—quite unintelligible for the modern mind. Thus we find that in his explanation of the world he again and again uses words such as “salt,” “mercury” and “sulphur.” And if he wishes to analyse what “sul” signifies, what “phur” signifies, and finds all sorts of deep thoughts therein, then these modern minds must say to themselves that one cannot do anything with this, for what can be the significance of offering explanations about a universal principle by explaining the syllables of a word individually, such as “sul” and “phur”? That is quite alien to the modern mind.

To be sure, if a person enters further into the mind of Jacob Boehme, he will find that Jacob Boehme clothes what he wishes tó say in all kinds of alchemistic formulae. But only when one penetrates through to what expresses itself livingly as the spirit of Jacob Boehme in what he found available, only then does one find that something entirely different lives in these formulae from what we know today as scientific thinking, as thinking with regard to world-conceptions, or any other thinking.

What lives in Jacob Boehme's soul resembles most closely that which has been characterized here in these lectures as the first stage of a higher spiritual life, as the stage of imaginative cognition. We have emphasized the fact that he who ascends from ordinary life in the sense world comes, through a special development of his soul, to the point where he perceives a new world of pictures, of imaginations. And we have stressed the fact—I beg you to call to mind precisely the character of this discussion¹ that, when the human being has brought it about that he does not only form imaginations, but that pictures, imaginative conceptions, shoot up out of the unknown depths of the soul-life and he experiences a new world, then he who desires to ascend to new cognition must make the firm resolution to suppress completely this first flashing up of an imaginative world in the soul and to wait until it rises up a second time from a much deeper-lying world.

The whole state of soul, the whole inner mood to which Jacob Boehme comes is, therefore, most nearly comparable to that which meets a person in his soul-life who ascends to supersensible knowledge. Nowhere, to be sure, does it appear that something like that which modern spiritual-science proclaims as its conscious methods is already to be found in Jacob Boehme. But whoever were to believe that all this appeared in Jacob Boehme as if of its own accord would, nevertheless, be wrong. He himself once said that he had striven unceasingly for the spirit's—for God's—assistance, and that a luminous, imaginative world resulted from this unceasing striving.

Thus, we cannot say that he was simply a naive, imaginatively cognizant person, but we must say that he grasped naively at the means which lead the human being to the height of imaginative cognition. It is to be assumed, naturally, that such an imaginative force was in his soul. In other words, he arrived at imaginative cognition by just the same paths, only more quickly, more as a matter of course, than one can arrive at it through such methods as are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Thus Jacob Boehme stands before us as an imaginatively cognizant human being. But this imaginative knowledge struggles to the surface with primal power, as if it were a matter of course, as if borne by a strong inner will.

Thus, we see this strong inner will, which cannot express itself in external deeds—his humble occupation prevents this—surrounding his soul like a flood, so that the soul immerses itself in this flood. We see powerful pictures being born out of this will, through which he tries to solve the riddles of the universe. In Jacob Boehme, it is not so much the individual results that matter, as this mood and condition of his soul. And he feels that, in his striving, he is driven to something which is not the ordinary cognizing human ego, but which is connected with the forces that bind the human being—out of the subconscious in his soul, out of the depths of his soul—to the whole cosmos; that is, to what lives and weaves outside in nature.

The human being who really has an earnest desire for knowledge feels that there is not only something rational in the act of cognition, but something that he achieves for himself through suffering and pain, and through the overcoming of suffering and pain. And he notices, when he tries to penetrate into nature and existence with present-day, ordinary means, how he really separates himself from nature and existence through all such means. But when we expose forces in our soul which rest otherwise in the subconscious, then we feel that these are connected with nature and existence in quite another, more intimate sense. In order to explain this, I should like to draw upon the following.

It is a well-known fact, and one hears it often related, that in regions where an earthquake or some other elemental event is imminent, certain animals flee from the locality of the earthquake or some similar occurrence, or at least become restless, so that they are like prophetic announcers of what is to happen. We may say that the instinctive life of the animal is more closely connected with what takes place outside in nature than the whole state of soul of the human being. But in the depths of the human soul, there lives something which is not the same as the instinct of animals, but which is deeper than this animal instinct, and which is also closely connected with the forces of nature. And in descending into the depths of his soul, Jacob Boehme felt himself more closely interwoven with the forces of nature.

But one thing stands out particularly. It has been emphasized that only when that which appears as imaginations and an imaginative world has been suppressed, extinguished, and then lights up again as if of its own accord,—only then does this second imaginative world have value. (As I said, I beg you to call to mind the earlier discussions.) Now, it is most singular if we compare the path of Jacob Boehme with this.

In the year 1600 he experiences a re-birth, feels himself transported into a spiritual world, into a “kingdom of joy.” Then he continues to live in sober simplicity. For ten years it is as if what he had experienced were submerged. Then it emerges a second time in the year 1610. Did not then the path which we represented as the right one appear as a natural phenomenon in Jacob Boehme's soul? For us, it is this that makes Jacob Boehme approach so closely that upon which we ourselves have focused our attention as being the natural way into the supersensible worlds. If we take this into account his experience will not seem as strange to us as it may have seemed at first sight.²

It will have no value for the objective cognition of the sceptic, to be sure, if one reflects profoundly on the combination out of the syllables “sul” and “phur,” or about other such things. But I beg you to call to mind what we explained concerning human speech once on an earlier occasion³ how we showed that in the course of human evolution “speech” really preceded abstract, conceptual thinking, and how Jean Paul is entirely right when he emphasizes that the child learns to think through speech, instead of forming speech through thinking. Speech, therefore, is something more elementary, primal than thinking. When we see how the whole of nature arises again in our thoughts, then we feel how thought is separated from the realities of nature by a world chasm. But, when the sound as something more like the sounds in nature—and, after all, speech was originally composed of such sounds,—when the sound of speech is wrested from the human soul, then something of the whole system of law in the universe works into the depths of the soul. And then a kind of echo in relation to nature tears itself loose in an entirely different way from that occurring when something is released out of thoughts as an echo.

A soul of the present time no longer has any feeling for the affinity of speech and sounds in nature. As a contemporary soul one can only slowly struggle through to the feeling that in all speech there is something which directly resembles an echo of the impressions of the external world. In such a personality as Jacob Boehme, who draws deeper forces from his soul with elemental power, it is only natural that in this respect also, in feeling also, as it were, he is carried back to that impression of speech which was once characteristic of humanity and which the child, more or less unconsciously, still develops.

And now if we extend what has just been set forth to include the strange analyses concerning the joining together of syllables into words, then we can understand that what nature brings about in the human soul is only a feeling by means of the sounds; that nature wishes to create her own language through sound itself. Precisely because Jacob Boehme stood closer to nature in his soul, he also lived more in speech than in thought, and his whole philosophy is more a feeling with, a sympathizing with, that which lives and weaves outside in nature than any abstract grasping of things. What I mean to say is that, when a person lets a thought of Jacob Boehme's really have its effect on him, he feels as if the thought were as akin to what Jacob Boehme observed as he himself is akin only to that which he senses as some kind of taste, when he also feels contact with nature.

Thus, does Jacob Boehme feel the contact with nature. He feels in the inner being what weaves and works and lives outside in nature. He lives nature's life with it, and in his representations he gives, really, that wherein he participates, so that one feels what he perceived vibrating in his words. To him, therefore, words are something which he feels especially to be like that which is the “How” in nature itself. One does not have to ponder, therefore, over the question whether such discussions as the above-mentioned about “sul” and “phur” mean anything particular in Jacob Boehme, but one should try to re-experience in connection with this soul how it makes the experience of the universe into the experience of the soul and gives as its revelations that which the soul can experience.

No one understands Jacob Boehme who simply supposes that he perceived thunder and lightning, clouds, or cloud transformations, or the growth of grass like a modern human being. A person understands him only if he knows that with the flashing lightning, with the rolling thunder, with the changing clouds something is transformed for his soul-life, so that something takes place in his soul which stands there as the solution of the corresponding riddle. Thus, what takes place in the world becomes for Jacob Boehme a riddle of his own experience.

And now, if we look at him thus, we understand how he could wrestle with a task which meets us elsewhere during his time also, and which long occupied other spirits, even the greatest spirit of recent times. This same sixteenth century, in which occurred the birth of Jacob Boehme, gave birth to the Faust riddle, which places next to the striving and struggling man the enemy of man, who drags down man's striving nature into the base, sensual—into that which Jacob Boehme's age called “the

Devilish.” Poetically, Goethe still struggled with the problem which places “evil” in the world structure. Must not the human being ask again and again: How does it come about that the irregular, the unsuitable, places itself antagonistically in the harmonious universe, in the wise guidance of the world? And the question of the origin of evil lies in the riddle of Faust. It is really already in the book of Job, but it appeared especially powerfully in the sixteenth century.

In what manner could this question appear before the mind of Jacob Boehme?

We need only to take a few words from the Dawn in Its Ascent and we shall see at once how that which is elsewhere a world problem becomes for Jacob Boehme at first an inner soul problem. There he says approximately the following words: If an understanding and thoughtful man shows himself anywhere in the world, the Devil at once meddles with his soul and seeks to drag his nature down into the vulgar, common, sensual,—seeks to ensnare the man in pride and conceit.

Here we see at once how the problem is grasped by Jacob Boehme as a soul problem. We see how he searches in the soul itself for the power of evil, which interferes with the good soul forces. And the question arises for him: What does the soul have to do with the soul forces that strive towards evil? Thus the problem of evil becomes for Jacob Boehme finally an inner soul question.⁴ But because for him soul and universe correspond to each other, the soul at once expands into a universe. And now the peculiar thing for him is that the question of evil is transformed into an entirely different question, into the question of human consciousness—in fact, of all spiritual consciousness, of the whole character of the life of consciousness.

It is difficult today with our current conceptions to illuminate Jacob Boehme's soul life and what the cosmic questions and their solutions became for him, and a person cannot make himself very clear if he uses the words of Jacob Boehme, because they are no longer current coin in our time. I will try, therefore — entirely in the spirit of Jacob Boehme, but with somewhat different words — to approach what he wished to say about the question of evil, which becomes with him a question concerning the whole nature of spiritual consciousness in general.

Let us once try to think how our consciousness works, what our whole consciousness would be if we were not in a position to hold fast in memory, as thought, what we once experienced in our soul, in our consciousness. Let us try to think how our consciousness would have to be something entirely different if we were not capable of drawing up out of our memory what we experienced yesterday, the day before yesterday, years ago. The whole content of consciousness rests on the fact that we can remember past experience, and our consciousness does not extend back beyond that point of time to which we can remember. We began then to grasp ourselves as an “ego,” to have the coherent thread of our consciousness, to be at home in our soul life.

Upon what, therefore, does the whole nature of consciousness depend? Upon the fact that we know: Now we are at this moment experiencing something in our consciousness. When we experience something, we are directly connected with this experience. In the moment when we experience something we are nothing else than our experience itself. A person who visualizes a red colour is united with the experience of it at the moment when he visualizes this red colour. Whoever conceives an ideal is, at that moment, one with the ideal. I le distinguishes himself only afterwards from his experience, while before he was one with it. Thus our whole consciousness is something that we first experienced and then stored up as an objective thing in our inner soul life. Such storing away in the objective makes our consciousness possible. We could not develop any consciousness if everything that we experienced were always forgotten—completely removed. By placing our experience before ourselves as counterpart (Gegenwurf),⁵ as Jacob Boehme says,—by confronting ourselves with it as with an opposite—only thereby does our real consciousness ignite. We must observe this in connection with the simplest fact of our consciousness.

In his clairvoyant contemplation Jacob Boehme extends this experience, which any and every consciousness can have, over all the world. He says: And if a Divine Being in the world had once had the capacity only to live in Himself, but not to confront Himself with His experience—as counterpart—consciousness would never have come to be, even in a Divine Being. But for the Divine Being the counterpart is the world. Just as we confront ourselves with our conceptions, just as we become conscious of ourselves through the object, so the counterpart for Divine Consciousness is the world. And everything that surrounds us Divine Consciousness set out of Itself, in order to become aware of Itself thereby,—just as we develop our consciousness only when we set up our own experiences as counterpart.

For Jacob Boehme the grasping of this thought was not a theory, but something that brought him satisfaction with regard to a question which signified a matter of destiny for him—the great Faust question. He could now say to himself: “If I am carried back in thought into Divine Consciousness prior to the world, as it were, this Divine Consciousness could come to Itself, become real consciousness, only by confronting Itself with the world, in order to become aware of Itself through Its counterpart.” Thus, everything that lives and weaves and is took its rise from the Divine-Psychic, from a Will of this Divine-Psychic, which developed the craving, as Will, to become aware of Itself. And in that moment (this now became clear to Jacob Boehme) when the Unitary Consciousness set up Its counterpart and wanted to become aware of Itself—that is, duplicated Itself, created, as it were, the reflected image of Itself—It created this reflected image in a variety, in the multiplicity of single members, just as the single human soul does not have its life only in single limbs, but in limbs that have a certain independence, such as hand, and foot, and head. A person does not get close to the reality of Jacob Boehme if he describes him as a pantheist. He must go through the train of thought in a similar way, must understand how Jacob Boehme conceived everything that appears before us as a “counterpart of the Godhead.”

To the counterpart of the Godhead, which the Godhead set out of Itself in order to become aware of Itself thereby, belongs also the human being as he is. From this point of view of his. Jacob Boehme says: Men direct their gaze upwards; see the stars, the masses of clouds, the mountains and the plants, and would often assume the existence of still another special region of the Godhead. But I say to you, you unreasoning human being, that you yourself belong to the counterpart of the Godhead; for how could you sense anything and become aware of anything of Divine Being in yourself if you had not flowed forth from this Divine Being? You have sprung from this Divine Being. He placed you opposite Himself, as He also gave birth to you out of Himself, and you shall be buried in Him. And how could you be raised from the dead if an alien Godhead stood confronting you? How could you call yourself a child of God if you were not one with the substance and being of God!

That he does not refer to any ordinary pantheism is expressed by him through the fact that he says: “The external world is not God; it will never in eternity be called God, but a being in which God reveals Himself. … If one says that God is all. that God is heaven and earth and also the external world, it is true, for everything has its origin and genesis in Him. But what can I do with such a speech, which is no religion?”

One cannot call him a pantheist. Just as the question concerning the essential nature of the world is not, for him, something artificially sought after, neither is that which he gives himself as an answer to it. Rather is it an experience for him. He felt the prerequisite conditions determining his own consciousness and extended these over Divine Consciousness, because he knew clearly that the nature of his own capacity for consciousness was an echo of the actualities of the world.

And in the answer to the question of the soul and the Divine in the soul he finds also the answer to the question concerning the origin of evil. This is something exceedingly characteristic of Jacob Boehme, which has again and again aroused the admiration of profound thinkers. Thus, for instance, Schelling was very significantly affected when he became aware of the manner in which Jacob Boehme approached the question concerning the significance of evil in the world, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century also admired the profundity of thought with which Jacob Boehme took hold of this question.

One may say, with regard to many persons who have sought an answer to the question concerning the origin of evil, that they searched for the primal cause of evil. It is characteristic of Jacob Boehme that he went further than that point which, according to the opinion of many people, is the sole and only limit to which one can go. For where else should a person go if he does not wish to stop at this primal cause? Jacob Boehme goes beyond the primal cause when he wishes to solve the question concerning the significance of evil. He goes to that which he calls, significantly, not the primal cause, or primal ground (Urgrund), but the groundlessness, (Ungrund), and here we actually stand before an experience of the human soul in Jacob Boehme which can be admired in the highest degree if one has the requisite organ.

Certainly, the ordinary soul which has its roots in the modern world conception does not, perhaps, possess this organ; but one can have this organ which feels admiration when, in Jacob Boehme, the transition is made from the primal ground to the groundlessness. And, after all, it is really something like the egg of Columbus, something exceedingly simple. For, at the moment when Jacob Boehme had solved the world riddle for himself in the way we have just described—when it was clear to him that there is a relationship between God and the world like that between the soul and the limbs of the body—then he could also say to himself: When the world came into existence as counterpart of the Godhead, there appeared in this counterpart the dividedness, the differences among the limbs, as we should say.⁶ The dividedness of the single limbs of the body confronting the single soul made its appearance. Is not every single limb of the body good with regard to functions of the soul? Can we not say that the right hand is good, the left hand is good, everything is good in as much as it serves the functions of the soul? But cannot the right hand, because of its relative independence, indeed just because of its excellence, injure the left hand?

Here we have the independence of the corporeal, that which needs to have “no ground” (cause), set up against that which constitutes harmony. We see this placed in the primal ground (cause), which simply results from the fact that from the “primal ground” we pass on to the “groundlessness.” Just as we do not need to seek in light the cause of darkness, so we do not need to seek in good the cause of evil. But as the world proves itself, for Jacob Boehme, to be the counterpart of the Godhead, the possibility arises in this world of dividedness for the individual limbs to work against each other, in that, because they must have their independence for the sake of the purpose of the world—according to the goal-seeking character of the world—they must also develop this independence.

Thus, for Jacob Boehme, evil does not have its roots in that which one explains, but in that which we find as “groundlessness” without the need for explaining it. But the latter appears thereby, as if of its own accord, as a counterpart of good. And now evil, the unsuitable, the harmful in the world becomes for Jacob Boehme itself a counterpart, in contrast to good,—just as we become aware of ourselves through contact with an object. We move along in space; we do not think of ourselves. But we begin at once to think of ourselves if, for instance, we knock our head against a window. Then we become aware of ourselves through the counterpart, through the object. Just as Jacob Boehme confronts consciousness with the counterpart, just as he experiences himself through the counterpart, so the good, the suitable, the advantageous and useful becomes aware of itself, for Jacob Boehme, through the fact that it has to preserve itself in the presence of the harmful and unsuitable. It becomes aware of itself in that “evil” became the counterpart of good, like the objects that are experienced through collision with the external world.

Thus Jacob Boehme sees in good the force which assimilates its counterpart, just as man, in his memory, assimilates more and more what he himself first set out of his consciousness. We find thus a constant absorption of evil and, thereby, an enriching of the good with the evil. And as darkness relates itself to light, in that light shines into darkness and thereby first becomes visible, so does good first become effective by working into evil and relating itself to evil as light to darkness. Just as light graduates to the different colours through darkness and could not appear as light if darkness were not opposed to it, so can good perform its world-function only by experiencing itself through its counterpart, through evil.

Thus Jacob Boehme looks into the world. He sees the good effective in such a way that it finds itself confronted by evil, but that it takes evil into its own domain, absorbs it, so to speak. Thus a pre-earthly occurrence appears for Jacob Boehme in such a way that he says to himself: The Deity once placed other spiritual beings opposite Himself. These were, like our present nature at a later stage, a counterpart of the Deity. Thus these beings were already a counterpart of the Deity, whereby the Deity achieved consciousness of Himself. But they behaved towards the Deity like the limbs that turn against their own body.

Thereby the Being Lucifer came into existence for Jacob Boehme. What is Lucifer for him? He is the Being who, after the counterpart was created, used the separateness, the multiplicity, to rebel against his Creator as independent counterpart. Thus, in the forces of the world which differ from and struggle against one another Jacob Boehme finds that which must be, but which contributes to the general evolution, nevertheless, by being absorbed in the course of development. In the same way he also conceives that all deeds of the opponent of the Gods—in order that the deeds of the Deity Himself may come to realization so much the more powerfully through the counterpart—are absorbed by the Deity, and that the self-realization of the Deity becomes only so much the more glorious through the forces which the opponent develops.

Into the depths of the world Jacob Boehme pursues the thought which extends the experiencing of consciousness to the cosmic experience of the origin and primal state of evil. And he puts into a simple formula—not what he gave theoretically, we must say, as the solution of the cosmic riddles, but what he experienced,—into the formula: No “Yes” without a “No,” for the “Yes” must first experience itself through its counterpart, through the “No.” “No Yes without a No” is the simple formula into which Jacob Boehme brought the whole problem of evil. And it is not a theoretical formula, but in this philosophy, there lies something like a most primal, most elemental experience.

For to know that there is no Yes without a No, that evil is absorbed by good and contributes to the evolution of the world,—that may yet be nothing. But it is something else to be a struggling soul, a soul that experiences pain and suffering, temptations and seductions, and to say to oneself: “All of this must be present, and although it is present I can procure for myself out of my living philosophical word—not by theorizing—the certainty and the consolation and the hope that the best in me will find the possibility of overcoming what is only the counterpart, the “No,” through the primal, through the Primordial Impulse (Wurf),⁷ through the “Yes.” And no matter how much I become entangled in evil, and no matter how small the ray of light is that extends over it,—I can and may hope for liberation, so that the good in me and not the evil will win the victory!

If such a philosophy passes over into certainty of redemption, then it is something which is, in this manner, connected with the personality, to be sure, but which has with this character of personality at the same time general human significance. If a person allows this to work upon his soul, he will gladly go on from this struggling soul which rises into the cold abstractions of the “Yes” and “No” in order to acquire therefrom the warmest soul content and the warmest soul experiences—then he will gladly go on from this soul, which gains through struggle confidence in its world conception, to the lonely man in Goerlitz who had no opportunity to found a school, for the time which men, under other circumstances, spend in spiritual things he had to spend in making shoes ... he had to gain the time by strenuous effort for his numerous works. Such a person will gladly go to the man whose books reveal how he struggled with language because his external education was so limited, but whose teachings, nevertheless, were disseminated and spread abroad after his death; who sat on his shoemaker's bench and had only few friends to whom he could open his heart. He had friends, it is true, to whom he wrote letters, but their number was small.

One sees him thus in his loneliness and feels as if a necessary connection existed herein. Just as one can think of Giordano Bruno only as journeying through the world, moving from land to land in order to proclaim something about the world as if with trumpet tone—just as one feels in him, who enters into the multiplicity of phenomena, that this journeying belongs to this world conception—so does one feel in the other case that this lonely shoemaker experienced something which could be experienced only in such a way that it took place as if in a solitary dialogue with the spirits of existence—in this solitary seership which we characterized at the beginning.

If we feel thus, then the sentiment grows in us, with regard to what the human being needs in order to solve the riddles of the world in a thoughtful, feeling way, that the greatest which the human being can experience in the world is independent of place and time, is subject only to the human soul's capacity for profound meditation, and that the soul can undertake the greatest world-migrations, the migrations into the spirit-regions, everywhere and always. Then there rings out to us from Jacob Boehme's soul, and touches our understanding, that which characterizes his world conception in such a significant expression when he says:

Wem Zeit wie Ewigkeit
Und Ewigkeit als wie die Zeit,
Der ist befreit von allem Streit.

To whom time is like eternity
And eternity like time,
He is freed from all strife.

This does not characterize his world conception in a theoretical respect, but it characterizes what his world conception really came to be through the fact that he was such a very special human being. For we have been able to emphasize that through his whole being he was more intimately connected with nature than the normal human being,—that he experienced the weaving and activity of nature in his own soul experiences. This leads us to sense a certain necessity in a designation which Jacob Boehme's friends gave him. They gave him a happy designation. For let us just consider the following:

When there was already a widely diffused, wonderfully detailed science over in the East, in the Orient, whose wisdom we admire if we learn to know it, we still find the very simplest spiritual culture on Central European soil. We find that something lives in all the souls of Central Europe which is like an intimate connection of the forces in the depths of the soul with the forces of nature and the nature-beings, and that the people threw twigs on the ground and saw in the “Runes” which took form all kinds of riddles which they sought to solve. These human beings were decipherers of “Rune riddles.” And of all that speaks out of the souls of the human beings in the forests of ancient Germania about what lives in nature, about what rustles through the trees, or lives mysteriously in human souls themselves,—we feel as if something of all this were active in Jacob Boehme's soul.

Then something in Jacob Boehme may well become comprehensible to us which would otherwise be the most difficult thing for us to comprehend today. We are not forcing things if we compare with the picture of the decipherer of runic riddles, who solves all sorts of riddles through the twigs which have been thrown on the ground and claims to perceive the revelations of the Divinity Himself—if we compare with this the way, for instance, in which Jacob Boehme sets up the syllables “sul” and “phur” runically out of his relationship with the feeling for speech, and wants to solve world riddles thereby. Here he appears to us like a last offspring of the forests of ancient Germania, and we understand why his friends gave him the name “Philosophus Teutonicus.” This includes, however, his significance for the coming times.

We look towards him and see how he struggled with the most exciting problems that can play into the human soul, how he arrived at peace in this struggle, and how his last words: “I enter into Paradise” were the seal to consistency of soul, to soul-practice. It is this that led him to peace of the soul. A breath of faith lives in all his books, and from this point of view Jacob Boehme can have significance for us and for all times. When it comes to the practical life consequence of a philosophy, this “Philosophus Teutonicus” will always be a dominant influence as regards that which he can really be for the soul if it becomes familiar with him.⁸

His adversaries sometimes make a strange impression—beginning in the year 1684, when the first rather strong refutation of Jacob Boehme by Kallo appeared, up until our time, when we also have a writing against Jacob Boehme, by a Leipzig scholar of the past century, Dr. Harles. It seems rather peculiar how Harles wishes to show that Jacob Boehme did nothing but warm up old alchemistic things, and then says that, after he had often tormented himself for days in order to present Jacob Boehme in this way, he was often glad when he could approach Matthias Claudius in the evening in order to find recuperation and edification in his words, after he had had to concern himself thus with Jacob Boehme throughout the day. And he desires also for his readers that they not allow themselves to be beguiled by the glistening and glimmering formulae of Jacob Boehme, but that they also take refuge in the simple and naive Matthias Claudius, whose gift to the soul is such that the soul does not have to seek its salvation in being elevated to the highest heights of spiritual life.

It may be that this Dr. Harles, the antagonist of Jacob Boehme, had to take refuge in Matthias Claudius in order to escape from the glistening, high-flown formulae of Jacob Boehme, and that he could find peace in Claudius, in contrast to his experience with Jacob Boehme. Only, it makes a strange impression on one who knows that Matthias Claudius himself took refuge, after he had achieved what Dr. Harles found in his works, in some one who not only knew Jacob Boehme, but even translated him—in Saint Martin, who was a faithful pupil of Jacob Boehme! Thus it is very good not only to know wherein Dr. Harles, the antagonist of Jacob Boehme, sought edification, but also to know wherein Matthias Claudius sought his edification!

But the world conception of Jacob Boehme is one that is suited to lead beyond contradictions, if only one does not stop at it. The whole nature of the lectures that have been given here has shown that within the world conception which is represented here we should not remain standing at any one phenomenon, but that whatever of the spiritual world can be grasped directly through the forces of our age should be grasped. Certainly Jacob Boehme remains a significant personality, a star of the first magnitude in the spirit-heavens of humanity—yet no one will stop at him. The representations of spiritual-science which are given today are, therefore, by no means given from the standpoint of Jacob Boehme, but from that of our age, and the next time we shall show, in contrast, what an entirely modern spirit has to say.⁹

But Jacob Boehme becomes still more interesting if we transport ourselves into his spirit-nature—which stands upright in simplicity and solitude, and takes flight with his soul into the highest region of clairvoyance,—and if we find how this spirit-nature could spread peace over Jacob Boehme's soul, which can subsequently be felt by all who approach him with understanding or, at least, seeking for understanding. For this reason, intellectual characterizations will not come close to the reality of Jacob Boehme, but only such characterizations as endeavour to feel what a human being like Jacob Boehme felt, what streamed forth from him—as, for instance, in the three lines which I have cited.

And only then can the words with which I essayed to characterize Jacob Boehme gain their significance if those present feel that they were not said in order to culminate in a theory or theoretical characterization of Jacob Boehme, but to culminate in this: that, when we are directly confronted by the personality of Jacob Boehme, something streams out from it—and streams out so much the more warmly and intensively the more we learn to know it—which can sum up what has been said in words designating his peace, his serenity:

To whom time is like eternity
And eternity like time,
He is freed from all strife.

• 1. See lecture by Rudolf Steiner entitled: Die Wege der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis.
• 2. See also: Rudolf Steiner, Kosmischc und menschliche Geschichte,, Vol. V, Lecture 3.
• 3. See: Rudolf Steiner - Geisteswissenschaft und de Sprache.
• 4. See also: Rudolf Steiner, Geisteswissenschaft als Forderung unserer Zeit; Vol. VII, Das Böse im Lichte der Erkenntnis vom Geiste.
• 5. The term Wurf is almost untranslatable. It is apparently intended to suggest the primordial source from which all that is takes its rise. Gegenwurf is that which is created by the Wurf, its counterpart.
• 6. He did not use these words, but we wish to characterize according to the essence rather than the words, for we shall, thereby, come closer to understanding him.
• 7. The term Wurf is almost untranslatable. It is apparently intended to suggest the primordial source from which all that is takes its rise. Gegenwurf is that which is created by the Wurf, its counterpart.
• 8. Compare: Rudolf Steiner—Die Rätsel der Philosophie, Vol. I.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner, Die Weltanschauung eines Kulturforschers der Gegenwart (Herman Grimm) und die Geistesforschuug.

Spiritual Science should above all things be conceived of, by those who have already noted for a long time, in the sense that the question should come before the soul as to how Spiritual Science can be most intensely effective for human life. This has certainly often been emphasized, but we cannot often enough to bring forward the side of the reality of Spiritual Science and its significance for our age. Spiritual Science is certainly in a sense a Science, and as such it is, we may say, still in a “fragmentary” stage at the present day, only partly established; what it may eventually become can really only be present in the first beginnings at the present time.

What I mean by this is the content of Spiritual Science, through which we can learn something of man in so far as this has its life on the other side of the gates of physical life: which are birth, or conception, and death. Through spiritual Science we can also learn something about the evolution of the Earth and the Cosmos, and as to how this evolution of Earth and the Cosmos is connected with man, and so on. Thus, through Spiritual Science the human desire for knowledge can be satisfied in a more comprehensive and complete manner than is possible through external sensible science. We can answer the questions which weigh on man's soul and so on.

Besides this significance of Spiritual Science from the view of ‘content’ there is another very essential one. This can be observed if we keep in view what we can become, what can be made of our soul-life, our soul-disposition, our soul-constitution, when we busy ourselves with the thoughts and ideas which come to us from Spiritual Science. It might even be—in what science has this not been the case in the course of the development of mankind!—that much of what can and must be proclaimed today quite conscientiously from the sources of Spiritual Science might have to be corrected; that much may appear in another form in the future through the further progress of Spiritual Science. Then perhaps there may be a different content in one or another department of this Spiritual Science. But what it may become for the disposition and constitution of our soul through its ideas and its thoughts, would not be affected thereby, and this is fundamentally connected with certain basic qualities of our present day. We will today review certain basic characteristics of our time, particularly as regards the constitution of the soul of man. We will dwell on the four most important soul-activities which we know well from our observation: the perception of man with respects to outer sense-processes; imagination (the forming of ideas) through which we then work upon these outer sense-impressions; our feeling; and our willing. Our soul-life runs its course from waking till going to sleep in perception, imagination, feeling and willing.

First we will consider perception. When the soul's eye is sharpened by Spiritual Science we can observe what has of necessity developed as the basic cultural characteristic of the human soul in the course of the last three or four centuries, in those countries which come into our consideration. (What I say is not setting criticism: it is only a characterization.) It may be asked what this is. It only needs a superficial observer of life to discover that men, in regard to their faculty of perception (in respects to the immediate relation of the soul to the outer world through the senses), have come to a point when they constantly need livelier, more violent, more fascinating impressions, to satisfy the faculty of perception of their senses. Those of you who are somewhat older may think back to your youth; just compare many of the phenomena of life in your youth, which you could perceive around you, with similar phenomena of life now—the further you go back the more striking this is—and ask yourselves to what a high degree that which is known as the impulse, the tendency to the ‘sensational,’ has not gained the upper hand! What is really this sensational element? It rests on the fact that man needs today forceful, exaggeratedly quick-changing and purely sensuous impressions, so that he may be thrilled and carried away from the outer world; he wants to be taken hold of and fascinated. The sensational has gained the upper hand to an uncommon extent. But something significant is connected with this. Through the domination of the sensational, the strength and energy of the human Ego is modified. Spiritual Science alone can lead to an understanding of what comes under consideration here; for he shows what perception of the outer world really is.

If we search through philosophical literature we find nothing more spoken of in the nature of external perception, or ‘sensing’ as it is called. All sorts of theories have been set up as to what sensing, perceiving really is, within the human physical soul life. I need not enlighten you as to that. But the point of view of Spiritual Science in this respect shall be indicated.

I have already mentioned here in Berlin, in a public lecture, that the development of natural science in the 19th century and into our own times has accomplished great things, great things in regard to the understanding of certain sensible connections of the external world of realities. But it sees the evolution of man in particular as far too direct and simple. It simply imagines that at one time there were only the lower animals, then higher animals, then still higher ones, and out of these men finally developed as, in a sense, the highest animal all. The evolution of man, however, is not so simple as this. We have often pointed out that man, who must appear to us in his external bodily form has an image of the divine reality of the Cosmos, can be thought of as represented in the most varied manner. He can even be thought of, in regard to certain natural-scientific points of view, as being divided into three parts: first the head- or senses-man (this is not exact but as the most important senses lie in the head, we may say ‘head-man’). Secondly, the trunk-man; and thirdly, the extremities-man. Of these three members of the human organization, the trunk-man, the heart- and lung-man, alone is really formed as natural science imagines him today. The head-man is really not in the process of progressive development but of a retrogressive one. The head of man arrests the progressive development at a certain stage and turns it back again. It has been repeatedly said that such an idea is difficult, and it has been asked how one can simplify it for oneself. I have pointed out in several places even the external rightly understood facts of natural science confirms my statements—only one must be a real natural scientist and not merely follow the pattern of certain scholars of the present day. Observe the human eye, and compare it with the eye of animals which have reached a certain stage of evolution. We cannot say that the human eye is more complicated in its outer form than the eyes of these animals, for that would not be true. There are animals which have, for example, in the inside of their eye—where we, from an outer physical point of view, have nothing at all—the ‘cell-apophysis’ and the ‘sword-apophysis.’ These are certain organs in the inside of the eye which are continuations of the blood vessels into the inside of the eye. Through these an intimate connection between the whole life of feeling of the animal and his perceptive life is established in the eye. The animal feels much more intensely in the eye than man does. In man there is no ‘cell-apophysis’ or ‘sword-apophysis.’ The human eye is simplified. In its form is not merely progressive, it is retrogressive. One could prove in the smallest details of the human head-organism that man is really retrograding in respect to his head, especially compared with the rest of the human make-up, which is progressive.

Someone who thought that this backward development of the head was difficult to imagine asked me whether I could point to a significant fact or clue by which one could understand this better. I told him to think of the following: In the process of development of the different animals ending with man, it comes about a certain period of the embryonic stage that the human being turns back to the hairy state. Man himself is not hairy, but the head belongs to the hairy portions, in general; the fact that man, as regards the formation of his head, reverts to the rank of the animal, likewise shows the retrograde development of the head. This is a superficial, external indication. The inner signs speak much more distinctly. I beg you to keep in mind the vast importance of these facts.

For the very reason that the head is retrogressive, that evolution does not progress in a straight line but is retrogressive in the head, is dammed up and turned back, room is thereby created for the psycho-spiritual development of man. Those natural scientists who are of the opinion that the psycho-spiritual life of man is only a result of his physical organism, do not understand their own natural science aright. They do not understand that in order to bring his soul and spirit nature into being it is necessary that the physical organization of man should not shoot and sprout, but that it should withdraw. It flags and is turned back and makes room for the psycho-spiritual development. Where man most develops his soul and spirit nature, there the physical development draws back.

One becomes inwardly aware, when one has gone through a psycho-spiritual development, that, simply through inner observation, one can get an answer to the question: What really is ordinary imagination and perception? What is the ordinary waking life, in which imagination and perception are mingled?

As regards the head of man, perception and imagination and the waking life in general is a state of ‘hungering.’ Man is so peculiarly organized that, in his inner equipoise, from waking till sleeping, the head, that is his inner organization, is continually ‘hungry’ as compared with the rest of the body. Certain ascetics who seek an increase of psycho-spiritual life have made use of this; they allow the whole body to be hungry, because the hunger-process, extended to the whole body, is said to bring about certain inner illumination. This is false. The normal state is that our head in the waking state is nourished less through the inner processes than the rest of the organism, and we can only be awake and perceive because the head is less nourished than the rest of the body.

Now the question arises: if our head hungers whilst we are undergoing this backward development of the head—in sleep there is an attempt to arrest this process—what then do we perceive? Through Spiritual Science we learn to distinguish between two things which in practice are always linked together, but which are two quite different things. There is first the mere waking life, and then the outer perceptions and the ordinary concept of memory. What then goes on when in waking consciousness we are hungering in our head?

First of all we are aware on the one hand of our Ego from the last incarnation. When we are merely awake we are aware of what we brought with us from the spiritual world, and with which we entered into existence through birth or conception. That enters and fills the space made for it in our organism; but when we perceive outer sensible objects, these external objects step into the space of the Ego, which otherwise we perceive when we have no external impression but are merely awake. In ordinary life these two things are intermingled: we are continually perceiving external objects, and are very seldom in such a state of soul that we are merely awake. The state of soul directed to external things is however always interwoven with an inclination to perceive our former Ego and to replace it by something, by external colors and sounds; then again, to perceive the former Ego and then again the external things. As soon as we perceive externally, as soon as an outer object works upon us, it suppresses our tendency, our power, to perceive the Ego of our last incarnation. It remains unconscious, we know nothing of it; but in this sense-perceiving there is really a conflict between the object which now stands before us and the Ego from our last incarnation.

Now you can imagine what it means when we are developing a striving after the sensational, when we wish to give ourselves up to the outer world. That never makes us stronger in life, but always weaker; for in so doing we weaken our Ego from the past incarnation, which in a certain sense constitutes our strength. Thus you can clearly see that with the inclination of man towards the sensational, a certain weakening of the human nature appears, and the Ego becomes weaker.

Now when we do not perceive, but think, imagine, what process takes place? Either our thoughts are silent or—which is not so frequent in present-day man—they link onto some external perception. When they are silent in waking-life, all we have gone through between the last incarnation and the present one works in us, in that which is able to work where room has been made for it by the body. Thus the last incarnation works in the place where perception arises; and in the place where conceptions arises, works the life which we have spent between death and the present birth. If we develop powerful thoughts within ourselves, it means that we are trying to develop these out of what we brought with us from the last birth, upon which we must take our stand. If only we have all thoughts which are called up within us from an external stimulus, which only revolve in our soul because we receive them from outside, we continually weaken what we have brought over from the time he dreamed death and birth, that is to say, our Ego. The search for sensation weakens our present life. The desire to animate our Club evenings with the dusky pints of beer so that we need to make as little demand as possible on ourselves, or the excitement of playing games, in short all this seeking for excitement from without, is not a strengthening but a weakening of the Ego, and it rests fundamentally on the fact that we do not feel strong enough to occupy ourselves with something pertaining to our soul-life. Through Spiritual Science we can clearly see the underlying reason why people are so desirous of sensation and in need of stimulus at the present time. What enters from this side into our present-day culture can be designated by a common name. Do not be offended by this name; it betokens a fundamental feature of many of the currents in the life of the present day: a limitation and narrowness of outlook. No one can deny, even taking present-day science and other activities into consideration, that one of the chief characteristics of the present-day man is his limited outlook, that limitation which prevents him from seeking the rich material in his own soul which comes from his past life and from his prenatal life. He does not believe, and he would have first to believe it, that one could be incited to do this through Spiritual Science.

Let us observe from this point of view what thoughts and ideas of Spiritual Science can be for the mood and disposition of the soul. They are certainly not external stimuli, nor anything sensational, and they decidedly did not aim at this. They do not take possession of the senses through external sensations. Many people miss this. In matters of Spiritual Science people must themselves reflect, and if they do not bring forth anything from the fund of their own soul, they are likely to fall asleep over Spiritual Science.

Spiritual Science gives us just this animation and shaking up of the soul-life, so that we gain the possibility of developing thoughts from our own inner self. It works against the sensational. It does this specially by giving us the possibility of thinking much about a few impressions of the senses. We need not hasten from sensation to sensation. We can give much thought to all possible sorts of sense-impressions. All the simple things which approach us personally become a riddle. Every detail makes us think a great deal; and thoughts about Saturn, Sun, Moon, the different Earth and so on, which many find so complicated, make the mind active and mobile and do not allow narrow-mindedness to any extent. Thus does our Spiritual Science work against a certain attribute of culture; it fights against a narrow outlook in the realm of perception and imagination. That is different again from the content which one can get from Spiritual Science; it is something that it can make up our soul, and we should take note of that.

Now in regard to the life of feeling. What is the most noticeable thing about a person who approaches Spiritual Science in any way? And what is the most noticeable thing about most people who do not wish to know anything about it, and who turn aside from it altogether? In the latter it is lack of interest in the great circumstances of the world. We must first of all enlarge our interests beyond what lies nearest, if we are to become interested in Spiritual Science. For what do most people in our time care about what the Earth was before it became “Earth”? What do most people of the present day care what civilization was before our own time? To do so one must develop more comprehensive interests. It is a question of extending one's interests beyond the thing lying nearest. Our age has the tendency to narrow the sphere of our interests as much as possible. What is really the tendency of our age? Allow me to use the following expression: it is not at all flattering, but I do not wish to criticize, only to characterize. Our time is striving in all ways towards narrow-mindedness, towards Philistinism, and if this takes hold of the majority of people, the consequence will be that the Philistinism will gradually be introduced into the most public departments. In this respect we have a remarkable example, which in respect to the things of the present day, must have a most depressing effect on those who can see through things.

In the East we have a nation which today is certainly in its infancy as regards the basic forces of its soul, but which possesses basic forces which in the future—in the sixth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture—are to develop to a remarkable height; basic soul forces which will work spiritually and have a spiritual character, and which we ought to recognize and cultivate as such. But what has established itself as public life in a remarkable manner today over a great part of this national force? Leninism! One cannot imagine anything more grotesque than the coupling together—I do not now refer to the man but to the thing—of this “aping of the civilization of the West” with the prophetic civilization of the East. There are no two things more opposite, and yet they are coupled together here. It is the most grotesque expression of materialistic striving; for out of the Folk-Spirit of the East something absolutely anti-philistine will be formed; but Leninism is the most absolute basic force of philistinism, the negation of all cultural interests of a far-reaching nature and the limitation of the interests of civilization to the narrowest realm of philistinism. We must clearly understand that. Nothing can better help us to penetrate these things, then the knowledge of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science also works against philistinism, by appealing to the wide comprehensive interests of man. For one cannot possibly become a Spiritual Scientist without taking an interest in what binds man to the Cosmos, in what passes beyond all that is narrow and pulses into all that is great. So, in the realm of the life of feeling, spiritual knowledge is also the opponent of philistinism and of narrow-mindedness, which must inevitably result from materialism; as in the realm of the perceptive and conceptual life is also the opponent of narrow-mindedness and limitation.

In the domain of the will-life also, he who observes life even but to a small extent, can make a noteworthy observations. In respect to the expressions of the will, not materialism itself but what it brings in its train leads to the development of something remarkable in collective human life. The will must indeed always express itself with the help of the bodily nature, if it is to have an effect on the outer world. In regard to the will, present-day materialism makes man awkward. By reason of man's directing his bodily forces only in to quite distinct channels in his earliest youth and wielding them only in some particular directions, he becomes awkward in wider spheres. There are men today who, when they first find themselves in need of it, cannot even sew on a trouser-button for themselves, let alone anything else, strange as this may sound. If a man does not regard Spiritual Science as theory or doctrine but as something that works warmly within him and is taken into his whole personality, he will find that this passes over into the muscles and the pulsation of the blood and makes him dexterous. If we imparted a spiritually-scientific way of picturing things to our children, we should see the result; we should see that they would become adroit, that they would be able to do things more easily, their fingers would become more flexible. The possibility of making the ideas more mobile, occasions the will also do become more active in its methods of expression. Thus in the sphere of the will-life, Spiritual Science fights against that which threatens mankind: awkwardness. This is a characteristic of our time to a far greater extent than we realize. Just observe how little fitted men are today to do anything at all outside the narrow concerns of their professions; they are no longer able to do anything else besides; and they only do more or less work in their professions for the reason that their soul's course has been laid out for them. Confront a man who is thoroughly routine in his profession with something different, and you will see how very one-sided our present-day culture is. That cannot be obviated by external means; for the whole political economy tends towards specializing everything. To try to fight against this would be absurd. It is possible, however, so to fortify men's inner nature that they would receive the impulse of dexterity from the center of there being. For that it is necessary however to be quite permeated, thoroughly permeated, with the knowledge of the super-sensible world, and chiefly of the super-sensible nature of man. We cannot understand perception and conception, even from a spiritually-scientific point of view, if we do not know what I have said before, that the human organism makes room, through the backward activity of the head-organism, for the past life and also the life between death and rebirth to flow in. The life after death also close into our organism.

The opinions of natural science about the human organization are, as I have already said, far too one-sided. The trunk-man alone might be thus one-sidedly observed, but not so the extremities-man. If we observe the extremities: arms, hands, feet, legs (which organism is continued inwardly), this extremity-organism is seen to be the reverse of the head-organism: and over-development exists there which forces the development beyond the normal. If we accurately study man's development in regard to these relations we shall see that it shoots beyond the needs between birth and death. Let us consider only what is external: the armed organism in connection with the breasts; the secondary organs which serve propagation; the legs in connection with the primary sexual organs—the extremities in connection physically with that whereby man even physically looks out beyond himself. The extremities organism at its center serves not nearly what is poured out over the individual human life, but that by means of which his vision extends beyond himself: the psycho-spiritual. What lies—as soul and spirit—beyond the extremities extends beyond what serves human life between birth and death. Thus, just as man physically out of his own organism functions into that of the child through the center of his extremities, so that is present in him spiritually as imagination which he carries through the portal of death by virtue of his being an arm- and leg-man. Through imaginative cognition it can be very clearly seen that man bears quite distinctly—and even anatomically—his future state after death, spiritually in his extremities-organism. If we study natural science properly, we shall gradually cease to say that Spiritual Science is something that we cannot understand. If we really observe the human organism not as rectilinear, for that it is not, but as it really is, then natural science itself will make it necessary to turn to Spiritual Science. Mankind will of course have to overcome something—the belief in the similarity of all other sense-impressions. The similarity of all external sense-impressions is believed today, not only by the unlearned, but also by the scientific investigator who has a man before him in the clinic and examines him anatomically. To him the heart is a similar organism to the head, but this is not correct; the head as compared with the heart stands at the retrogressive stage in its whole organization. Only we do not know how to observe; that is the trouble. If we want to learn to observe correctly, we can gain from natural science itself fundamental conviction of the spiritual in man, which passes through births and deaths. When however we arrive at this, we shall also take into account this soul and spirit nature in the whole movement and growth of culture and we shall then understand the importance of the struggle against having a narrow outlook, against philistinism, and gaucherie, and we shall copperhead much else as well. Above all we shall learn to reckon with the spirit in practical life. The physicist is allowed to speak freely today of positive and negative electricity, of positive and negative magnetism; and yet it is taken amiss when the spiritual scientist in his domain speaks of two currents of force in the human soul, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic. But these two currents of force are just as much a polarity for the human soul as positive and negative magnetism or electricity in the physical. If we wish to understand humanity in its development we must take the trouble to observe what is at work in regard to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic element in life. An example:

Our social structure was for a long period of time influenced in a one-sided manner by Luciferic beings. Yet we could not simply eradicate the Luciferic element from life! A person who is always saying, “I will protect myself from the Luciferic element” is the very one to fall into it. There can only be a question of conceding it the right place in life and of knowing what is Luciferic and what is Ahrimanic: then we shall not exaggerate their effects and not put them in a false light. For centuries our social structure in Europe and also in other parts of the world has been ruled by strong one-sided Luciferic impulses. These strong Luciferic impulses lay hold of the instincts and habits of man, of that which works from within. All this is not criticism, only a characterization of these times. How did the Luciferic element work? Now great consideration has been given to determining social culture, the position of a man in life by laying great value on his vanity, on his ambition. These are Luciferic impulses. The vanity and ambition of a man had been stimulated. I would remind you how much weight is attached to pride and ambition in schools, even up to our times; and pride and ambition has led a man in many respects to acquire this or that, in order to gain an important place in life.

We have now reached an important point in life. It can scarcely escape the notice of a close observer that these Luciferic impulses are on the decline. To use a superficial expression, they no longer draw. But now something else is to be brought in, something essentially Ahrimanic; and one Ahrimanic feature is creeping into the customs of our present day. Our beloved populist so free from authority, which never wants to believe in authority, and which therefore, as a matter of course, falls a victim to all authorities, will again unsuspectingly allow to pass unobserved what is now about to take root as a one-sided Ahrimanic power in regard to the form the social structure. Something quite remarkable is now making itself felt, so-called “Intelligence tests.” Experimental psychology, which at the universities is doubtless to a certain extent justifiable, can discover many things as regards the working of the human body and as to how it expresses various things. But this psychology desires to have a certain occupation, and testing is easier than any other examination of the soul. The experimenter has a certain instrument which makes records on an electrical course; it places students at certain points and notes how long it takes for an impression to be received and to be brought to their consciousness. He thus works, from he an external clinical point of view, in a business-like way. That is easier than to investigate inwardly. For certain things the value of this experimental psychology is undeniable, but it wants to have a wider field. It now wants to take in hand “Intelligence tests.” For that, a number of children are taken from various grades of school classes and are tested as regards their “talents,” their memory, their power of observation, and so on; but the way in which the test is carried out by the methods of experimental psychology is very remarkable. Memory, for instance, is tested in the following way: On the blackboard two rows of words are written which have no connection with one another; for example, “head” and “crystal,” then two other disconnected words, and so on. After they have all been rubbed out again, the first word only is written down and the child has quickly to add the second one from memory. Those children who have best observed which word came next are considered to have the best memories, and the others who can recollect nothing at all or need a longer time are supposed to have a worse one. That is how the memory or the intelligence is tested. I will read a prize example of this (from the newspaper “German Politics,” 1918: “The discovery of the psycho-technique in Germany during the War” by Dr. Curt Piorkowski):

“For instance, in getting the concepts of ‘mirror,’ ‘murderer,’ ‘escape,’ a whole row of different connections between the mirror and the escape assert themselves, for the discovery of which no sort of special knowledge is necessary, only a distinct combination. The obvious connection (which will be made by the less intelligent persons) is of course that the person threatened sees in the mirror the murderer creeping along. Yet quite other suggestions are also possible! A stealthy murderer can for instance knock up against a mirror and waken the threatened sleeper by the clatter, so that he can escape; or the designing murderer may be blinded by a reflecting mirror.”

Imagine how intelligent a boy or girl must be if they are to hit upon such an idea!

“But motives of feeling may also be related. So for instance the murderer may be so terrified at his own image, indistinctly seen in the mirror in the semi-darkness, that he desists from the carrying-out of the deed, be it that horror or prickings of conscious seize him at the sight of himself in the mirror, or that in the dim light he takes his own reflected image for that of another.”

It is considered quite especially intelligent if the person under examination thinks that the murderer might see himself in the mirror, and take his own face for that of another.

“Another idea is the discovery of the stealthy murderer reflected in the water of the calm peaceful forest lake near threatened man, and so on.”

Just according to whether the examinee interpolates the obvious thing or not is he considered more or less intelligent, and as a child who is shown to be the more intelligent in this respect will be supported by scholarships or in some other way; while the one who could think of nothing further then that one might see a murderer in the mirror receives no scholarships. In such a way is the intelligence to be tested today and with regard to these tests there is enthusiasm. By this means social order is to be influenced even if not arranged. The dear public however will welcome such things with all their hearts as the issue of the true and sincere science of the present day, for these things create a great stir today. In this way sought to find ways and means of methodically “putting the right man in the right place,” and essays are written beginning as follows: “More than almost any other science has applied psychology blossomed during the war. It is not a chance appearance, for war with its waste of men and its various requirements has proved the importance of not using human forces extravagantly and aimlessly; but using them to the best advantage. Up till now pedagogy alone dealt practically with exact psychology; now three new questions are added: for what vocation as the man best suited? (Problem of the suitability of a profession) How is a substitute be found for the many intelligences that have been destroyed? (Selection of talent); What possibilities of healing are there for those wounded in the head or those with otherwise damaged nerves? (Practice of psychical therapy).”—And so it goes on in the style. An error of the times is coupled with a significant phrase and the matter will be less noticed, because there are, of course, vocations which must be conducted according to this method. It is quite obvious that airmen for instance have to be examined in a similar way, with a certain justification. But this should not be applied to all. For in such a one-sided development something Ahrimanic will thereby be brought into our social structure. All that comes from the soul-nature, from the elemental, impulsive soul-nature, would thus be eliminated from human aspirations and endeavor. To put the matter roughly: Do we believe that if such intelligence tests could really be determinative, a phrase like “Joy and Love are the wings of great deeds” could still have significance? If people would only think of their own great men! We can be quite sure that if such an examiner had to examine Helmholtz he would have represented him quite certainly as a fellow without talent. Read the biography of Helmholtz!

That is an Ahrimanic feature. Things appear disguised as well. If people are not able to observe things through Spiritual Science, they cannot see where the harm is. It does not suffice that in our time people like to wallow in all kinds of sensual feelings, it is necessary they should wake up in regard to their judgment of life. A great deal would be gained in regard to this nonsense of intelligence tests if there were at least a few people who formed an objective opinion about it. For it will blossom and flourish, you may be quite sure of that! It will become what the “prejudice-free soul-test” has at last made it, and it will be glorified as one of the finest outcomes of that philosophical tendency which has at last stripped off the old idealistic prejudices and methods and now goes in for “the real.” Spiritual Science must work practically in this sense.

Now much is connected with these things, and above all this, that breadth of interest and reality must at last become fundamental attributes of the human soul. I should like to give you two pretty examples of the way in which reality works in our day, and how a certain interest is not present. If I choose personal examples I take it for granted that you will not take it amiss, for you indeed know that I do not do so from any personal foolishness. Recently I held a lecture in Munich on the experiences which the seer makes in art. I have never supposed that any newspaper reporter would be able to understand the subject of Spiritual Science or to write anything in praise of it. If a newspaper reporter should begin to write about Spiritual Science in a flattering manner I should think that something was not in order; but we may study some examples of their work. In the lecture mentioned I also spoke of the art of music and of how musical experience affects the whole man in a remarkable way, that really whenever there is a musical experience a rhythm is set up in the inner man. I then spoke on the one hand in reference to the physiological side, explaining the flowing to and fro of the brain-fluid through the arachnoidal space and further demonstrated how the spinal-marrow canal is elastic to a greater or less degree and how a wonderful inner rhythm is in fact brought about thereby. Musical experiences create a glorious rhythm in life; I mentioned these rhythmical movements of the brain-fluid as being connected with inspiration and expiration; and as I also spoke in this lecture of symbolic ideas, a newspaper reporter wrote that I myself used symbolic ideas which were untenable: the idea of ‘brain-fluid’! We need only recollect that without the ‘brain-fluid’ the brain, which according to the principle of Archimedes becomes lighter than the brain-fluid, would compress and crush to pieces the blood vessels lying beneath it. Thus the ‘brain-fluid’ is a very real thing. But thus do matters stand with respect to the interests which men have, and such is the nonsense written in consequence.

Then an example, only a small illustration, of truth and untruth. I have often mentioned that the remarkable scholar Max Dessoir has also written a chapter about Anthroposophy in his book “The Other Side of the Soul.” I tried to point out to him the many different misrepresentations. Even from an external point of view his method of relating is really very comical by reason of its absolute superficiality. Thus for instance he mentioned my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” and said of it that it was my first literary production. I could not do otherwise than reply, although it was out of place to do so, that for 10 years before it appeared I had already written and had my books published. But “The Other Side of the Soul” by Max Dessoir aroused attention; it was discussed everywhere by the journalists (who consider the brain-fluid as a symbolical idea). It caught on, and now a second edition has appeared. In the preface to this, Max Dessoir tries to justify himself, and again in the same fashion. He cannot get out of it and says the context proved quite clearly that I did not grasp what he meant; he meant that the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” was my first “theosophical” book. Thus apart from the fact that everyone must smile at his statement that he did not mean my first literary work, everyone must again laugh when the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” is called my first “theosophical” book. For a far-reaching discussion exists as to whether I abandoned philosophical authorship in my theosophical works. That is how far veracity is regarded, and it is necessary to attract people's notice to it. But without veracity we cannot progress, and we dare not let such things simply pass in this manner. To anyone who has knowledge of the things concerned, the whole book of Max Dessoir is compiled like the chapter on Anthroposophy . And yet, what happened? A newspaper, the “Kant Studien,” which regards itself as extremely serious (I mention this because in this paper no attack is made on Anthroposophy)—the “Kant Studien”—which prides itself tremendously on its purely scholarly scientific bent, speaks of this product of Dessoir as a serious scientific book in many ways. One of the saddest experiences one can have is to find a book which evinces the greatest superficiality considered by a philosophical magazine as a “serious scientific book,” as it is called there. Now I ask: What then is the public, the public which has no belief in authority, to do today? It takes such works as the “Kant Studien” (Studies of Kant) and so on, as a matter of course out of the libraries. And yet such things are to be found in it.

We must go back to what lies at the base of human nature through the spirit if the will be present. And this foundation is only touched by the strivings of Spiritual Science today. In this one cannot do otherwise than work towards reality, breadth of interest, towards anti-philistinism and activity as regards life. I wished to speak to you again of these things so that our consciousness may not grow faint; in Spiritual Science it is not merely the content that matters, but also the special nature of the concept, ideas and thought in our soul, so that it may be raised out of limitations, philistinism and awkwardness. That is something which the observer of the special impulses which lie in Spiritual Science must consider more and more. We must grasp the practical value of Spiritual Science. In the next lecture we shall speak further of these things.

The kind of truths we passed in review before our souls yesterday cannot be absorbed with an abstract, theoretical understanding. It is not just a matter of knowing that things are like this or like that. All the human consequences of these things must be inwardly comprehended, for they are very significant. Today I will sketch just a few of them. There is, of course, very much more that could be said along these lines, but we have to begin somewhere. At the very least, we must consider the direction in which such factual, spiritual-scientific presuppositions lead our thinking and our will.

Let us review yesterday's conclusions. The zones of the twelve senses can be seen as a kind of human zodiac. Flowing through all these sense-zones are the seven life processes: breathing, warming, nourishing, secretion, maintenance, growth and reproduction. (See drawing, Lecture Seven.)

To understand these things in their entirety we must be clear that the actual truth is very different from what our materialistic sciences teach us. They believe, for example, that the sense of taste and the related sense of smell are confined to the narrow limits of the tongue and the nasal mucous membrane. But this is not how things really are. The physical organs associated with the senses are more like the capital cities governing the realms of those senses. The realms corresponding to the senses are much more extended. I think that anyone who has applied a little self-observation to the sense of hearing, for example, will know that hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ears. A tone lives in much more of the organism than just the ear, and the other senses occupy similarly extended territories. Liver and spleen, for example, are perceptibly involved in taste and the related sense of smell; so they involve a wider area than materialistic science recognises. This being the case, you will also see that the sense-zones are intimately connected with the vital organs and with the life forces they continuously send streaming through the entire organism. It follows that the relationship between the sense-zones and the vital organs has a manifold influence on a person's inner constitution, on his state of being as regards spirit, soul and body. So we are justified in speaking, let us say, of the forces of secretion being in the sphere of the sense of sight, or of their interacting with the sphere of sight, or of an interaction between the spheres of growth and hearing—just as we speak in astronomy of Saturn being in the Ram or of the Sun standing in the Lion. Furthermore, each sense-zone can come into a relationship with one or the other of the life spheres, since the regions of the senses and the regions of life are related differently in different people. So there really are circumstances in the inner human world that reflect how things are out there in the starry heavens of the macrocosm.

You will therefore be right in supposing that the activities called up in us by the senses are relatively static in comparison with what goes on in the life processes and their central organs. Remember how we described the sense regions as a comparatively stable part of the human being. They are stabilised through being organised around a particular physical organ: the sense of sight around the eyes—even though it involves more besides—the sense of hearing around the ears, and so on. And remember how mobile the life processes are as they circulate uninterruptedly through the whole body, reaching every part of it. The life processes move through us.

If we consider what was said yesterday about how our sense experiences on Old Moon were more like life processes, we must conclude that human existence on Old Moon was altogether more mobile than that of our present Earth era. Moon man was more mobile, more inwardly mobile. Earth man really does relate to what he consciously experiences in the way the relatively fixed constellations of the zodiac relate to one another. During the Earth era the outer surface of man has become motionless, still, as the constellations of the zodiac are still. During the Moon phase, the present-day human senses contained a life and mobility such as that displayed by the planets of our present-day cosmos; for our planets' relationship to one another is constantly changing.

Moon man was capable of transformation, of metamorphosis. Now, I have often drawn your attention to the fact that when a person of today achieves the level of initiation that gives him access to imaginative knowledge, his conscious life becomes more mobile than that afforded by normal, earth-bound sense experience. In such cases everything again becomes mobile, but the mobility is experienced through super-sensible consciousness. And this is how the knowledge obtained from this sphere must be understood. I have often put before you the necessity of making our concepts and ideas more mobile in order to be able to enter into what super-sensible consciousness reveals to us. Concepts appropriate to the sensible world are shut up in their own little boxes and everyone likes to have them arranged prettily beside one another. But for spiritual science we need mobile concepts, concepts that can be transformed and metamorphosed, one into the other. In this you can see one of the consequences of the facts we have been describing.

Another consequence is the following: you will be able to see that a sense life that is as unperturbed and still as the zodiac is only possible for a human being living in the Earth sphere. The twelve sense-zones only are meaningful in the context of life as it is lived between birth and death in an earthly body. When it comes to life between death and birth, things are quite different. One remarkable difference is that the senses that are seen as higher, as far as life on earth goes, lose their higher status when we pass over the threshold of death into spiritual spheres. Just recall what I said in Occult Science about how the relationships between people change during the time between death, and a new birth, and how they are mediated in a much more intimate manner than is the case here on earth. There we do not need the ego sense which is essential to us on earth, nor do we need the senses of thought and speech as we need them on earth. On the other hand, we do need the transformed sense of hearing, but in a form that has been genuinely spiritualised. A spiritualised sense of hearing gives us access to the harmony of the spheres. That it is spiritualised is, however, already evident from the fact that over there we hear without the presence of physical air, whereas here the physical medium of the air must be present in order for us to hear anything. Furthermore, everything is heard in reverse, proceeding backwards towards its beginning. It is precisely because our earthly sense of hearing is dependent on the air that it is particularly difficult for us to imagine what it is like to hear things backwards. We run into difficulties trying to imagine a melody backwards. For spiritual perception this presents no problems at all.

Now, the sense of hearing is the borderline sense; in its spiritualised form it is the sense that most resembles the senses of the physical world. When we come to the sense of warmth as it is in the spiritual world, we already have a sense that is very changed; sight is even more altered; and the senses of smell and taste even more so, for they play an important role in the spiritual world. The very senses that here we call lower, play an important role in the spiritual world. But that role has been very, very spiritualised. A significant role is also played by the senses of balance and movement. But then, when we come to the sense of life we find that it is less significant. And the sense of touch has no special role at all.

So we could say that when death leads us over into the spiritual world the sun sets in the region ruled by the sense of hearing. That sense is located on the horizon of the spiritual world. The sense of hearing is more or less bisected by that horizon. Over yonder, the sun rises in the sense of hearing and then proceeds through the spiritualised senses of warmth, sight, taste and smell—all these are especially important for spiritual perception over there. There, the sense of balance not only reveals to us our inner state of balance, it also shows us how we are balanced with regard to the beings of the higher hierarchies into whose realms we are ascending. Thus the sense of balance has an important role to play; it guides us through the expanses of the cosmos. Here, it is hidden away in our physical organism as one of the lesser senses, but over there it has the important role of enabling us to sense whether we are poised in a state of equilibrium between an Archangel and an Angel, or between a Spirit of Personality and an Archangel, or between a Spirit of Form and an Angel. This is the sense that shows us how we are balanced among the various beings of the spiritual world. And the spiritualised sense of movement, which is now directed outwards, mediates between us and our movements—for in the spiritual world we are in constant movement. The sense of life, however, is no longer necessary because we are, so to speak, swimming in the totality of life. Like a swimmer in water, the spirit moves in the element of life.

Just below the horizon are the lower senses, the senses that lead earthly perception to the internal world of the organism. But when we die, the sun of our life descends to the constellations that are below the horizon just as the setting sun enters the constellations below the horizon. And when we are born again, our sun rises in those constellations—in the senses of touch, life, speech, thought, ego—that stand over us now and allow as to perceive this physical world of earthly existence.

And the life processes are even more spiritualised than these lower senses. More than a few persons who claim to represent a particularly lofty mystical point of view speak of the life processes as something ‘lower’. To be sure, they are low here, but what here is low is high in the spiritual world, for what lives in our organism is a reflection of what lives in the spiritual world. This is a very noteworthy statement. Outside us in the spiritual world there are significant spiritual beings whose nature is reflected within us—within the bounds of the zodiac of our senses through which the planets of our life processes move. So we can say: the four life processes of secretion, maintenance, growth and reproduction are reflections of what exists in the spiritual world—as are the processes of breathing, warming and nourishing. The fourfold process of secretion, maintaining, growth and reproduction mirrors a lofty region of the spiritual world. That region receives us after death and there we live and weave, spiritually preparing our organism for the next earthly incarnation. Everything in our physical organism that is comparatively low corresponds to something that is high and can only be perceived through the faculty of Imagination. There is a whole world that can be perceived through Imagination, through imaginative knowledge. This world that is accessible to imagination is reflected from beyond the constellations of the zodiac into the senses of the human organism. To picture this, imagine that

Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon are reflections of what exists beyond the limits of the zodiac: they have spiritual counterparts that exist there and the astronomical bodies we can observe within the bounds of the zodiac are only reflections of these counterparts.

And then there is yet another super-sensible region. It is beyond the limits of the human senses and perceptible only through the faculty of Inspiration. This is the world of Inspiration. The processes of breathing, warming and nourishing are a reflection of this world, just as Saturn, Jupiter and mars are reflections of their spiritual counterparts from beyond the limits of the zodiac. Moreover there is a profound relationship between what is out there in the cosmos and what, as lower nature, is present in man. These spiritual counterparts of the life processes actually exist. ...And this is how we should mark out the boundaries of the human senses and life processes.

Now we approach that which is higher than life, those true regions of the soul which are the home of human astrality and human egoity, of the I. We leave behind the world of the senses and the realms of space and time and really enter the spiritual world. Now on earth, because there is a certain connection between the twelve sense-zones and our I, it is possible for our I to live in the consciousness sustained by these sense-zones. Beneath this consciousness there is another, an astral consciousness which, in the present stage of human development, is intimately related to the human vital processes, to the sphere of life. The I is intimately related to the sphere of the senses; astral consciousness is intimately related to the sphere of life. Just as our knowledge of the zodiac comes through—or from within—our I, so knowledge of our life processes comes from astral consciousness. It is a form of awareness that is still subconscious in people of today: it is not apparent in normal circumstances, it still lies on the other side of the threshold. In physical existence such a knowing consists of an inner awareness of the life processes. Sometimes, in abnormal circumstances, the sphere of life is included in the sphere of consciousness; it is thrust up into normal consciousness. But for us this is a pathological state. It is an astonishing thing for our doctors and natural scientists to behold when the subconscious intrudes and allows what is normally hidden beneath our twelve-fold sense-awareness to emerge—when eruptions of the subconscious allow the planets to intrude their life into the sphere of the zodiac. Such a consciousness is appropriate when it has been cultivated and developed, really developed in the fashion that is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But if it has not been developed properly, it is pathological.

Recently, a book written by a doctor who is interested in these things has been published. Since he is unaware of any of the contents of spiritual science, his thinking is still wholly materialistic. But he is so free in his investigations that, especially more recently, he has actually worked his way into this realm. I am referring to Carl Ludwig Schleich¹¹ and his book, The Mechanisms of Thought (Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken.) There you will find some interesting accounts of his experiences as a doctor. Let us look at one of the simplest of these: it concerns a woman who comes to him for a medical consultation. He suggests she sit down to wait for him. Just at that moment the wheel in a ventilator cover moves. Immediately she exclaims. ‘Oh, that is a huge fly that is going to bite me!’ And almost immediately after she has said this, her eye begins to swell. Soon the swelling has grown to the size of a hen's egg. The doctor calms her, saying the injury is not so bad and can soon be healed.

It is not possible to reach so deeply into the life sphere that something there actually changes, not if one is employing the consciousness that is contained in the human zodiac of the twelve senses. But we do affect the life sphere when the subconscious erupts into our usual daytime consciousness. The concepts and ideas that occupy our normal consciousness do not yet sink deeply enough into us to reach the depths of the life processes. Now and then, however, the life processes are stirred up and occasionally the ensuing wave is very strong. But with today's proper and normal, externally-orientated consciousness it is not possible—thank God!—for a person to affect the life processes, for otherwise people would make a real mess of themselves with some of the thoughts they entertain. Human thoughts are not strong enough to have this kind of effect. But if some of the ideas people harbour today were to well up out of their unconscious into the sphere of life, as did the ideas of the woman we were describing, then you would see some people walking about with extremely swollen faces and some with much worse problems, too. Thus you see that beneath our surface, which is connected with the zodiac, there is a subconscious world that is intimately connected with the life processes and can profoundly affect them in abnormal circumstances. For example, Schleich reports a case in which a young woman comes to the doctor and tells him that she has gone astray. She continues to insist on this, even after the medical examination shows it could not have been so. She will not tell with whom she has gone astray. But in the next few months she begins to show all the external and internal signs of an expectant mother. Later on, at the appropriate time, when the quasi-expectant mother is examined, the heartbeat of a child is discernible alongside her own. Everything proceeds quite normally—except that no child arrives in the ninth month! The tenth month comes and finally it is realised that something else is going on. At last they decide they must operate. When they do, there is nothing there, nothing at all, and there never has been! It was a hysterical pregnancy with all the physical symptoms of a normal pregnancy. Today's doctors are already describing this kind of thing, and it is good that they are doing so, for such things will force people to think of the human being in different terms from those in which they are accustomed to think.

Here is another case: a man comes to Schleich saying that he has stuck himself with a pen while working in his office. There is a slight scratch. Schleich examines it and finds nothing to be concerned about. But the man says, ‘Yes, but I can already feel blood poisoning in my arm and I know I shall die of it unless my arm is amputated.’ Schleich replies, ‘I cannot remove your arm when there is no problem there. It is certain that you will not die of blood poisoning.’ As a precaution, he cleanses the wound and then he dismisses the man. But he was still in such a state that Schleich, who is a good-hearted man, decides to visit him that evening. He finds the man still filled with the thought that he is bound to die. When his blood is tested later, there still is no sign of blood poisoning. Again Schleich reassures him; but later that night the man dies. He really dies! A death from purely psychic causes!

Now, I can assure you that a man cannot die as a result of the thoughts he forms under the influence of his inner zodiac-one certainly cannot die of such thoughts. Thoughts do not penetrate so deeply into the life processes. And the other case I just mentioned—I mean the hysterical pregnancy—cannot be the result of mere thoughts, any more than it is possible to die of the mere thought that you have blood poisoning.

When it comes to this last case, where imagined, but untrue, circumstances seem to have led to death, our present-day science must look to spiritual science for clarification. Perhaps we can look a little at this case and consider what really happened. We have a man who scratches himself with his pen while he is writing and then dies as a result of what he imagines around this event. Actually, something quite different happened. That man had an etheric body, and death was already present in his etheric body before he scratched himself. Death, therefore, was already expressed in his etheric body when he went into his office that morning, In other words, his etheric body had begun to accept into itself the processes that lead to death. But these were only transmitted to his physical body very gradually. And the man would not have acted so strangely if death had not already taken up residence in him. He just happened to scratch himself while this was going on within him, and the scratch was insignificant in itself. But through it, the thought that he was going to die was able to well up out of his subconscious life sphere. The external events were only the trimmings, only the outer show. But because the outer show was there, the whole thing was able to well up into his waking consciousness. So his death had nothing to do with the usual processes of forming imaginations that are part of our day-time consciousness, absolutely nothing; death was already present in him.

Such things as these will gradually force our natural scientists to enter more and more deeply into the substance of spiritual science. We are already dealing with something complicated when we consider the relationship between the planetary spheres and the life processes, or the zodiac and the zones of the senses. But things get even more complicated when we move on to consider the processes of consciousness that relate in various ways to these spheres: the I relating to the zodiac and the astral body relating to the planetary spheres within man, that mobile life-sphere within the human being. But if we continue to think as we think in the everyday physical world, using the powers of the zodiac within us, we shall be unable to approach matters that concern the mobile human life-sphere., nor shall we be able to approach the relationship of the I to the zodiac. Those things can only be approached when we have taught ourselves to think in entirely new ways.

In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you are advised to imagine things backwards from time to time, to review things backwards. A backwards review involves picturing events as if they proceeded in the opposite direction from that in which they proceed in our normal world. Among other things, this picturing backwards gradually builds the spiritual forces that make one capable of entering a world that is the wrong way round when compared with the physical world. That is how the spiritual world is. It reverses many aspects of the physical world. I have often pointed out to you that it is not simply a matter of abstractly turning around what is in the physical world; among the powers that one needs to develop are the powers connected with the ability to imagine backwards. What is the consequence of this? Those people who do not want to see human culture dry up and who are trying to achieve a spiritually illumined view of the world are eventually forced to imagine a world in reverse. For spiritual consciousness only begins when the life processes or the sense processes are reversed and run backwards. Therefore people need to prepare for the future by getting accustomed to thinking backwards. Then they will begin to take hold of the spiritual world through this thinking backwards, just as they take hold of the physical world by means of thinking forwards. Our ability to imagine the physical world is a result of the direction of our thinking.

So, now that I have guided you through the human zodiac of the twelve sense-zones and through the seven planetary life-spheres, I can only proceed further if I introduce a completely different way of looking at things: a way of thinking that proceeds backwards.

Now, you are aware that our contemporaries are not particularly inclined to devote themselves to spiritual science and really absorb it. They reject it because they are accustomed to materialistic thinking. But for someone who has gone only a little way beyond the threshold of the spiritual world, it is just as foolish to assert that the world only goes forward, never backward, as it is to say that the sun only goes in one direction and can never return! Of course it comes back along this apparent path on the other side. (Steiner illustrated this with a drawing.)

It is easy to imagine that someone who is well and truly frozen into contemporary modes of thought might shrink in horror from thinking backwards and from imagining the world turned backwards. And yet without this world turned backwards there would not be any consciousness at all. For consciousness is already a kind of spiritual science—even though the materialists deny the fact. Consequently, this imagining backwards particularly horrifies our contemporaries. We could picture one of them asking himself, ‘Is it illogical to picture the course of the world backwards as well as forwards?’ And he could also come to the conclusion that it is not really illogical to follow a drama backwards starting from its fifth act, and that it is not illogical to follow the drama of world development backwards, either. Nevertheless, this is a terrible thing with which to confront contemporary habits of thought. Someone who lives entirely in present-day habits of thought, believes it is a fact that one cannot think the world backwards, and that it is a fact that the world does not move backwards. As soon as such a person stumbles across this question he senses that there is something special in it. One can imagine a solitary thinker wrestling with the problem of thinking backwards and drawing particular philosophical conclusions from the impossibility of thinking backwards.

One can make a further assumption. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that thinking backwards is especially difficult to imagine in the constellation in which the sun goes down, in the sense of hearing. Over the course of time, the sense of hearing has undergone some changes, particularly in relation to music. Historians do not usually notice these subtle changes, but they are more important for the inner human life than the grosser changes described in historical accounts. For example, it is of great significance for the transformation of hearing—which is already a relatively spiritual sense as far as the physical world goes—that the octave was experienced as a uniquely pleasant, sympathetic combination of tones during the Greco-Roman period, and that the fifth was particularly loved during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In those days it was called the ‘sweet tone.’ During the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the fifth was experienced in the way people experience the third today. So you see how our inner constitution changes over relatively short periods of time.

On the physical plane, a musical ear listens with deep satisfaction to things going in the one direction. So someone with an especially musical ear might well be repelled by the thought of going backwards, for music is one of the most profound things we have on the physical plane. Of course this could only apply to a time when materialism is at its height. Those who are not so musical will not feel this conflict so readily. But a musical person whose thinking is fundamentally materialistic can easily come to the conclusion that thinking backwards is simply beyond the scope of our human head. In this fashion he will resist the spiritual world. So we can assume that somewhere or other there is bound to be such a thinker.

Strangely enough, a book has been published recently: Kosmogonie, by Christian von Ehrenfels.¹² Its first chapter is called, ‘The “reversion”, a paradox of knowledge’. There, looking at it from many sides, in the fashion of present-day philosophy, Ehrenfels asks what it would be like to see the course of world events backwards—from the other side, the asymmetrical side, so to speak. He actually comes up with the idea of thinking things backwards, really backwards. He tries to deal with this paradox. He attempts to think some particular cases backwards. I would like to show you one of these as an example. He starts with a series of events going forwards, rather than backwards:

In the vertical world of the high mountains, moisture and frost break loose a chunk from a compact mass of rock. When the ice thaws, the chunk breaks free. It falls from the overhanging cliff wall, crashes on to a stony surface and shatters into many pieces. Following one of these pieces, we see it go raging down a lower slope shedding further splinters of stone as it collides with other stones, until it finally comes to rest on a slope. At last it has given up the whole of its kinetic energy in the form of warmth conveyed to the places where it collided with earth and stone, and to the air that resisted its motion.—Now how would this certainly not uncommon event look in the backwards world?

A stone is lying on a slope. Suddenly it is struck by apparently chaotic bursts of warmth coming from the earth beneath it. These combine in such an extraordinary fashion that they propel the stone diagonally upwards. The air offers no resistance. On the contrary, there are a series of extraordinary transactions: the air transmits some of its own warmth to the stone and thus gives it free passage, making way for it and encouraging it, with its accumulation of small but well-aimed gifts of warmth, on its diagonally ascending pathway. The stone collides with an overhanging stone. But this neither causes it to lose any fragment of itself, nor does it cause it to lose any of its enthusiasm for movement. In fact, the contrary is the case. Another little stone happens to arrive at the same place of impact, propelled by a collection of gusts of warmth from the earth. And, behold!—always under the influence of impulses of warmth-this small stone collides with our original stone. Their-apparently accidentally formed—irregular surfaces fit together so perfectly, and they meet with such force, that the powers of cohesion take effect and the two grow together to form one compact mass. Further bursts of warmth from the overhanging mountain with which they have collided direct them further on their upward, diagonal path, which they pursue with increased speed.

The bits of stone that earlier were broken apart are joined together again. The whole stone comes together, lying on the mountain cliff. The energies are brought once more into balance, all goes back into its original place, and so forth. This he describes with great exactitude, thinking the whole event backwards. He describes further examples, which he also thinks through backwards. One can see that he really plagues himself with this; he really strains at the yoke:

On a sunny winter's day, a hare makes its way through the snow, leaving its tracks behind it. In many places the wind immediately blows them away, but they are preserved along southerly stretches of path where the snow thaws in the sunshine during the day and freezes again at night. There they remain visible for many weeks until they disappear in the spring thaw. In the ‘backwards world’ the hare's prints would be the first thing to appear, but only a bit at a time, not all at once. At first they would show up in the frozen snow (more accurately, in the ice which is thawing into snow again), and then, after weeks, during which the imprints gradually get deeper and change into more accurate copies of the hare's paws, the prints also begin to appear on the connecting parts of path as gusts of warmth chase loose flakes of snow together—and the whole track is complete. Then the hare himself appears, tail foremost, head facing behind, and he is not moving along the line of the path—rather he is being dragged along in a direction contrary to the impulses of his muscles by the impact of gusts of warmth (always it is through warmth) and this is done so artfully that his paws always fall into the waiting paw-prints of the tracks. Nor do the wonders cease here: each time a paw comes out of a print, well-directed gusts of warmth fill it with loose snow. So well is this accomplished that the filled print exactly merges with the surrounding snowfield, whose faultlessly smooth surface covers the former tracks of the hare as if it had never been otherwise.

You can see how Schleich exerts himself. Now he goes further, saying: if it is difficult with the hare, how much more difficult will it be with an entire hunt:

It is easy to see that the same sort of unbelievable things occur as in the example from inorganic nature, only intensified to the point of being grotesque and uncanny. And the present organic example of the hare's tracks is relatively simple. Just imagine the tracks left behind in the snow, not by a single hare, but by an entire winter hunting party with all its hunters, drivers, hounds, and numerous deer, foxes and elk—imagine how these tracks would criss-cross and cover one another, and how sometimes one would step in the print of another, leaving untrodden patches in between, and so on. Now one must turn these events around and observe how the same type of gusts of warmth seem to guide each living creature through this chaos of apparently fragmentary tracks so that every foot or paw or hoof falls into a print that exactly matches it—the deer into one, elk into another, every hunter's shoe finding an imprint that exactly matches, and always moved, slid, pressed into it by these extraordinary gusts of warmth that issue from the earth, the air and from within the creatures themselves, so that everything matches perfectly. After all this one begins to get some bare notion of the extent of our concept of ‘leaving tracks’, as it applies to our right-way-up, right-way-round world.

You see how hard the man tries to arrive at the concepts he needs. This effort drags up some things of which people today are not conscious. You can see how naturally spiritual science can come into being, for men are longing for it in their souls. Schleich really struggles to come to some degree of understanding of these processes that run backwards. He really sweats over the matter—spiritually speaking. There truly is a thinker in him, a thinker who will not be denied. He declares that it is entirely logical to picture things in this fashion—logical, but unbelievable. For us, this simply means that he is going against his own habitual thinking and, ultimately, that he is completely unable to conceive of the spiritual world.

Ehrenfels concludes, ‘Let us go even further. Imagine that a backward world is actually forced upon us—that the relentless force of our experience actually compels us to deal with a real situation like our “backwards world”!’ Thus he imagines that he might really see his hare or his hunting party proceeding backwards out there in the physical world—the world which, for him, is the only reality. We are asked to imagine that we have been forced to enter a physical world in which all is really backwards:

How would we respond to such a world, how could we try to interpret it? Even if our experience repeatedly forced us to think, as we tried to think in the preceding pages, of a world in which the shapes of the future are sucked backwards, we would have to reject it as absurd.

This, he says, would be terrible. We would be confronted with a world which we could not and ought not think about! And this terrible world is the world Ehrenfels really would have to see if he were to enter the spiritual world. He imagines that it would be terrible if such a thing were to be forced upon him in the physical world!

Forms would take shape with apparent spontaneity. But we would have no alternative but to view them as only apparently spontaneous—and as actually being the result of teleological, intentional, preconceived combinations of material particles and their movements. And the same would hold for the extraordinary interplay of their paths as they converge and leave us with ever fewer and ever diminishing phenomena.

Thus he thinks the whole thing back to the beginnings of the earth in a Darwinian state of unity.

What could the goal of this creative power that sees ahead and plans ahead, possibly be? Can the sudden appearance of a form and its gradual transition into formlessness be the ultimate goal? No, and no again! The very opposite of this is what the goal of the whole must be.

Then he asks himself, ‘How it would feel to be confronted with such a world, to see such a world?’ To which he answers, ‘This world of experience could only be the grotesque joke of a demonic, cosmic power to whom we must deliver up everything but knowledge.’

At this point he stops himself; he cannot go any deeper into the matter. For the knowledge to which he clings consists simply of his old habits of thought. He can go no further. He feels that a world that has to be seen in reverse must be the grotesque production of some cosmic demon, of the devil; it would be the world of the devil. And he is afraid when confronted with what inevitably must seem to him to be the work of the devil. Here you have an example of how one soul experiences something I have often described: fear is what holds us back from the spiritual world. And Ehrenfels expresses this overtly: if he were to see a physical world that is similar to the spiritual world, he would view it as the paradoxical work of some devilish being. So he shrinks back in fear.

There must be some other, comprehensive, universal law that transcends the bounds of our world of experience! In other words: even if the backward world existed, ultimately we would not use backward principles to understand it.

What would the good Ehrenfels do if he were transported into a backward world that contrived to manifest itself to him physically? He would say, ‘Nay, I do not believe this; I will not allow it to be; I will picture it the other way around.’ And this is just what people do with the spiritual world; they really do not want to admit the existence of things that look different from what is presently in front of them.

We would regard this as an exception, as a special enclave, as a counter-stream to the great stream of all cosmic evolution—and yet we would continue to attribute to the evolution of the world those physiognomic features that we find believable.

Thus one would put one's foot down and say, ‘Nay, even though this world conjures up a demon for us, we will not believe in it. We will think about it in the way in which we are accustomed to think.’ There you see the whole story—of how a philosopher resists what has to come. It is helpful to notice such moments in human evolution. What spiritual science shows us must come, and that, my dear friends, that will most assuredly come. And even though people today resist the spiritual in their normal consciousness, as we have often discussed here, at deeper levels of their consciousness they are beginning to turn toward the spiritual. It is only that people are still pretending; they still deny it is there. It will not be long before it is impossible to continue denying the spirit. Men's thoughts are turning with a virtual compulsion towards the sort of things one can observe in Christian von Ehrenfels' Kosmogonie.

I wanted to talk about this book because it has just appeared and is bound to be discussed frequently in the near future. Even though it is written in a philosophical language that is difficult to understand, it will be discussed frequently. The discussions are likely to be very grotesque because it is difficult to grasp the implications of the book. So I wanted to speak to you here about Christian von Ehrenfel's Kosmogonie in order that what needs to be said about it is spoken about accurately for once. We are dealing with a philosopher who is a university professor and who has lectured in philosophy at the University of Prague for many years. This book appeared in 1915. In the foreword he speaks of his own path of development, acknowledging points on which he is indebted to certain earlier philosophers with whom he is more or less in agreement. At the conclusion of this foreword, having cited his indebtedness for one thing and another to the earlier philosophers, Franz Brentano and Meinong, he says the following:

On the other hand, my greatest burden of thanks lies in a direction that is far removed from what is generally recognised as the domain of philosophy.—Throughout my life I have devoted far more physical energy to becoming inwardly acquainted with German music than I have devoted to assimilating philosophical literature. (As a philosophy professor he presents us with this confession!) Nor do I regret this, looking back from the middle of the sixth decade of my life, (So you see, he is far beyond his fiftieth year) rather I attribute to this one of the sources of my philosophical productivity. (And he has only been productive as a philosopher!) For, even though Schopenhauer's account of music as being a unique objectification of the world of the will must probably be rejected, it nevertheless seems to me that his fundamental intentions go to the heart of the matter. Of all mortal beings, the revelations of the truly productive musician bring him nearest to the spirit of the cosmos. Those other ‘mortals’ who claim to understand this metaphysical language of music experience it as a duty of the highest order to translate this received meaning into a conceptual form that is accessible to the understanding of their fellow men.

If one understands religion to be a spiritual possession that bequeaths trust in the world, moral strength and inner power to its possessor, then you must say that German music has been my religion in a time in which humanity has been beset by agnosticism, the loss of metaphysics, and the loss of belief. This applies from the day—in the year 1880—I definitively separated myself from the dogmas of Catholicism, to those weeks in the spring of 1911 when the metaphysical teachings expressed in this book first began to reveal themselves to me.

And this metaphysics takes as its starting point the paradox of reversibility, the impossibility of reversing our ideas.

Yes, today German music is still my religion in the sense that even if all the arguments of my work were proven false, I would not fall victim to despair. The trust in the world in which this work originated would not desert me and I would remain convinced that I am essentially on the right path. I would remain convinced because German music would still be there, and the world that can produce such a thing must surely be essentially good and worthy of respect.

The music of the B Minor Mass, of the statue's visit in Don Giovanni, the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth symphonies, the music of Tristan, The Ring, Parsifal—this music cannot be proven false, for it is a reality, a wellspring of life. Thanks be to its creators! And a salute to all those who are appointed to quench the thirst for eternity from its wondrous springs! The best that I have been fortunate enough to create—and I hold this present work to be my best—is nothing more than insignificant small change out of the riches that I have ‘received’ from that source—from music.

And I am convinced, my dear friends, that this philosopher's special way of relating to the spiritual world could only be found in a person who has Ehrenfels' spiritual kinship with the music of our materialistic age. There are deep inner relationships between everything that goes on in the human soul, even between things that seem to lie in quite different areas. Here I wanted to give you an example of the special way in which someone who is a believer—not just a listener, but a true believer—in the elements of modern music must relate to the habits of materialistic thinking and how he must allow them to flow through his soul. It is different for someone who is not such a musical believer. For if we are to gradually approach the riddles of life and the human riddles, we must investigate those mysterious relationships in the human soul that introduce so many harmonies and disharmonies into its life.

• 11. Carl Ludwig Schleich (1859 – 1922): Doctor, philosopher and poet. Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken, Berlin, 1916.
• 12. Christian von Ehrenfels (1859 – 1922): Philosopher. Kosmogonie, Jena, 1916. The cited passages are to be found on pages VII, VIII, 49-56.

In our spiritual-scientific endeavors, it is important to acquaint ourselves gradually from the most diverse points of view with what we are supposed to understand. One can say that, particularly in regard to spiritual-scientific subjects, the world expects an uncomplicated, facile approach towards conviction; however, this is not easily provided. For as far as spiritual-scientific facts are concerned, it is actually necessary to attain our conviction in a gradually evolving manner. To begin with, this conviction is still weak. One becomes acquainted with the same things from ever changing new viewpoints; thus, conviction increasingly gains in strength. This is the one premise from which I should like to start today. The other will relate to various matters that I have discussed here for weeks; it will relate to what has been said concerning the differentiation of humanity throughout the civilized world.⁸⁴ Let me indicate briefly a few of the most salient facts that are of some importance to our considerations in the next three days.

I have pointed out in what sense the Orient is the source of humanity's essential spiritual life. I then indicated that in the central areas, in Greece, Middle Europe and the Roman Empire—what must be discussed covers vast periods of time—there primarily exists the predisposition for developing the legal, political concepts. The West is notably predisposed to contribute economic concepts to the totality of human civilization. It has already been mentioned that when we look across to the Orient, we find that the life of its civilization is basically decadent today. In order to evaluate properly what the Orient really signifies for the whole of human civilization, we have to turn back to more ancient periods of time. Among the historically accessible documents which are proof of the Orient's essential nature, the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, stand out above all; they and others are in turn evidence, however, of what was present in the Orient in still more ancient epochs. They indicate how a cultural life was born out of a primeval, wholly spiritual disposition of Oriental humanity. Subsequently, for the Orient too, ensued the times of obscuration of this spiritual life. Yet, a person who is able to contemplate in the right way what is happening in the Orient at present—although it is a mere caricature of what was formerly there—even today will still note the aftereffect of the ancient spiritual life in the decadent phenomena.

During a somewhat later period, the essentially legalistic, political thinking developed throughout the central regions of the earth. It evolved in ancient Greece and Rome, later on in the regions spread over Europe from the Middle Ages onward. The Orient originally possessed no actual political thinking, particularly not what we today define as juridical thinking. This is not in contradiction to the existence of codes of law such as Hammurabi's and others. For if you study the contents of these codes, you recognize from the whole tone and attitude that you are dealing with something quite different from the mode of thinking defined in the Occident as juridical. It is only in recent times that an actually economic form of thinking has developed in the West. As I have already explained, even science as it is practiced now is assuming those forms that really belong to the economic life.

As far as the Oriental spiritual life is concerned, it is interesting to observe how everything that the Occident has possessed up to now is basically also a legacy of the Oriental spiritual life, although in metamorphosed forms. Some time ago, I pointed out here how considerably this spiritual life of the Orient has been transformed in Europe. We are confronted by the fact that the capacities that held sway in the Orient have yielded up a perception of the immortal human soul, but in such a manner that this immortality was intrinsically bound up with prenatal existence before birth. The soul perception of the Oriental mind had a view, above all else, of preexistent life, of the soul's life between birth and death preceding this earthly existence. Everything else followed in consequence of this in a manner of speaking. From this view resulted the mighty relationships, only dimly glimpsed by the Westerner to this day, that one might call the karmic relationships, which subsequently left a reflection, albeit only a faint one, in the Greek concept of destiny. What is it, really, that passed over, that flowed across into the Occidental version of those concepts, even those with which an attempt was made to understand the Mystery of Golgotha? It was something that was strongly tinged by legalistic thinking. There is a radical contrast between contemplating the path of the soul in the sense of the Oriental world conception as descending from a spiritual world into the physical realm, noting how the karmic relationships are viewed there from wide perspectives, and considering the juridical idea of holding court over the soul that, in the Occident, has invaded these Oriental concepts. We need only recall Michelangelo's magnificent painting in the Vatican, in the Sistine Chapel, where the World Judge, like a cosmic magistrate, adjudicates upon good and evil men. This is the Oriental world view translated into Occidental legalism; this is in no way the original Eastern world conception. This legalistic thinking lies entirely outside Oriental perception. Indeed, the more advanced the concept of the spirit became in Central Europe, the more it culminated in the Roman legalistic element.

Hence, in the central regions, we are dealing primarily with the element predisposed for the juridical and political thinking. Civilization is, however, not only differentiated over the earth in this manner but in yet another way. If we study the accomplishments of the East, if we consider the special nuance of Oriental soul life, in particular where it is at its greatest, we find that this soul life is most eminently atavistic and instinctive, notwithstanding the fact that its fruits are primarily cultural; and all of mankind has continued to sustain itself on them. This spiritual life emerges out of unconscious imaginations that are, however, already muted by a certain ray of consciousness. Nevertheless, it contains much that is unconscious and instinctive.

The spiritual life produced by humanity up until now is indeed brought forth in a way that points to the highest spheres of which the human soul can partake, but the lofty heights of these spheres were reached in a sort of instinctive flight. It does not suffice to retrace the concepts or images produced by the Orient. Rather, it is necessary to focus on the singular kind of spiritual and soul life, by means of which, especially in its flowering time, the Oriental arrived at these conceptions. To be sure, we only gain an idea of this distinctive soul quality that I have already characterized by relating it with the life of the metabolism, if we want to have a feeling for the whole original soul structure contained in the Vedas and other texts. We simply must not overlook the fact that the Orient has reached its decadence today; for example, we should in no way confuse the mystic, nebulous manner which, despite his greatness, distinguishes Rabindranath Tagore,⁸⁵ from the true essence of Oriental soul life. For, although Rabindranath Tagore possesses what has been handed down to this day of the ancient Eastern soul life, he permeates it with all manner of modern, Western European affectations and is, above all, an affected individual.

Spiritual science must indeed lay hold of these matters, step by step, and in such a way that we do not merely accept some rigidly set up concepts, but really envision the unique soul nuance involved here. Thus, we find in the Orient an instinctive cultural life, permeated through and through with the trend for the legalistic and political soul life developing in the central regions. There, we come to the development of the half instinctive, the half conscious. It is most interesting to examine how a purely juridical thinking is produced from the souls of people, say, like Fichte, Goethe, Schelling or Hegel. It is purely juridical, but it is partly instinctive, partly a fully conscious thinking; something that is, for example, the special charm of Hegel's mode of thinking. A completely conscious element only appears in the Western soul, where consciousness develops out of the instincts themselves. The conscious element is still instinctive in the Western soul, but instinctively the conscious emerges in Western economic thinking. Here, for the first time, mankind is called upon to attain to a conscious penetration of even public, social affairs.

Now we come across something quite strange. One might actually recommend that those to whom it matters for one reason or another should now try to understand the configuration of civilized humanity's thinking by becoming acquainted with the attempts of the English thinkers to arrive at a mode of social thinking, say, the attempts of Spencer, Bentham, particularly Huxley, and so on. These thinkers are indeed all rooted in the same atmosphere of thought in which Darwin was rooted; they all really think as Darwin thought, except that they try, as does Huxley, to develop a social view out of their scientific way of thinking. A strange feeling pervades us when we delve into the attempts by Huxley⁸⁶ to achieve a social thinking, for instance, about the state, about the legal aspects of human relationships. It gives one a strange feeling. Let us suppose the following: Someone wishes to acquire a sense, a feeling for what I have here in mind, and to that end reads Hegel's book on natural rights,⁸⁷ on political sciences, Fichte's philosophy of rights,⁸⁸ or something else by a minor Middle European mind; afterwards, he reads, possibly, Huxley's attempts to advance from scientific to political thinking. He would experience something like the following. He would say to himself, "I read Hegel and Fichte; the concepts here are fully developed, they have strong contours and are precisely drawn. Now I read Huxley or Spencer, and I find the concepts primitive; it as though one had just begun to contemplate these questions. Confronted by such things, it does not do to say, “Well, the one was perfect, the other imperfect.” This does not suffice at all when one confronts realities.

Let me present to you a parallel taken from an entirely different realm. It can happen that one lectures on some spiritual-scientific subject, say, the former embodiment of the earth, the Moon embodiment. A variety of facts are set forth. Someone reads or listens to this lecture who is clairvoyant in a quite atavistic manner. It could be an individual who is outwardly illogical, who in practical life is unable to put five words together in logical sequence, who is inept in everything and therefore of no use in ordinary life. Such a person listens to what is being related about the configuration of some Moon era. Now, this same person who is quite dull and blundering in outer life and unable to count up to five properly, yet who is atavistically clairvoyant, can take in what he has heard, enlarge upon it, develop it further and discover additional facts not mentioned earlier. The things that such a person then adds can be infused with extraordinarily penetrating logic, a logic that arouses admiration, while, in everyday life, this person is clumsy and illogical. This is entirely possible, for if someone is atavistically clairvoyant, it is not his ego that joins his images together in a logical manner, although he can discover the images by himself. The images are joined by various spiritual beings dwelling within him. We become acquainted with their logic, not his.

This is why we cannot simply say that one view is on a higher, the other on a lower level; in every case we have to go into the specific character of the matter. This is true here too. The views of Fichte, Hegel and other less illustrious minds are half instinctive, only partly fully conscious ones. What arises, on the other hand, in the West as primitive economic thinking is indeed fully conscious. The concepts such as those thought out by Huxley, Spencer and others are impertinently conscious, but conceived in a primitive way. What had appeared in former times in instinctive or half instinctive form emerges here consciously but in quite an elementary way. I shall illustrate this by means of a concrete example.

Huxley tells himself that if we observe nature—he naturally looks at it from the Darwinian standpoint—we find the struggle for survival. Every creature fights ruthlessly for self-preservation, and the whole animal kingdom's struggle is waged so that the naturally strong survive by annihilating the weak. This theory has penetrated into Huxley's flesh and blood. This, however, cannot be continued on into humanity. Freedom such as we must seek in human social life is nonexistent in nature, for there can be no freedom—thinks Huxley—in a realm where every creature must either assert itself ruthlessly or perish. There can be no equality where the fittest must always eliminate the less fit. Now Huxley turns from the natural realm to the social sphere and is compelled to conclude that, indeed, this is true, but in the social realm goodness should prevail, freedom should reign. Something should come to pass that as yet cannot be found in nature.

It is again the great chasm that I have characterized from so many points of view. Once, Huxley very aptly calls man “the splendid rebel,” who, in order to establish a human kingdom, rebels against all that prevails in nature. Something therefore ensues here that is not yet found in nature. Now again, Huxley actually thinks along scientific lines. He is compelled to search for natural forces in man that constitute the social life and rebel against nature herself. He looks in man for something concrete that serves as the basis for the human social community. The other forces of the kingdoms of nature cannot establish this social community; in nature, the struggle for survival holds sway, and there is nothing that could hold humanity together in a social structure. Nonetheless, as far as Huxley is concerned, there is nothing but this natural cohesion. Hence, this “splendid rebel” must in turn have natural forces which, although they are forces of nature, rebel against the natural forces in general. Now, Huxley finds two natural forces that are at the same time the basic forces of the social life. The first one is actually worked out wrongly, for it is not yet capable of establishing a social life, only family egoism. It is what Huxley calls the family attraction, something that is active within blood relationships. The second force he lists that could form a sort of natural foundation for the social life is something that he calls “the human instinct for mimicry,” the human talent for imitation.

Now, there is something that appears in the human being in the sense referred to by Huxley, namely, the faculty of imitation. It means that one person follows what the other does. This is the reason the individual pursues not merely his own directions, but society as a whole, the social life, runs along the same lines, as it were, because one person imitates the other. This is as far as Huxley goes. It is very interesting, because you know that in describing the human being we list the following: The element of imitation from the first to the seventh year; from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the element of authority; the one of independent judgment from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year. All three, of course, participate in the social development. Huxley, however, stops short at the first; he is only laboring to emerge from the primitive level. He has taken hold of nothing but the force that is active in the human being only until his seventh year. We are confronted with nothing less than the fact that if the social community as envisioned by Huxley were actually to exist, it would have to consist entirely of children; human beings would have to remain children perpetually. Thus, in envisioning the social life, Western society has, in fact, only advanced to the stage applicable to children. The social science striven for in full consciousness has progressed no further than this That is most interesting.

Here, you can detect the primitive aspect in connection with a particular element. The West works its way out of the scientific-economic thinking and attains something in a conscious manner that has been reached in the central regions in a half conscious, half instinctive way on a higher level. We can actually follow up these things in detail and they can thus become most interesting. All matters brought to light by spiritual science can invariably be followed up by means of details. It only requires a sufficiently large number of people to develop enough diligence to pursue all details of spiritual-scientific matters.

Is it not actually rubbed into us in this instance that something else must be present that cooperates in the social development of existence? For, certainly, social structures cannot be established in which only forces of imitation hold sway. Otherwise, they could only contain children; human beings would have to remain children forever, if the social life would originate only through mutual imitation. In order to arrive at something that can throw light on the primitive attempts, and can also bring together East, Middle and West, we must proceed from initiation science. This means that we have to link the train of thought that we tried to connect with the above to what initiation science can offer to humanity, so that mankind may be capable of developing a social life truly structured in conformity with the Spirit.

People fail to observe how the environment of the human being is pervaded with quite clearly differentiated forces. Modern science has reached the point where it states that we are surrounded by air, for we inhale and exhale it; but there is something that is even more obvious in our life than “the air around us,” something that people fail to notice. Take the following simple fact that no one today takes into consideration, yet is something that could be understood by anybody. An animal kingdom is spread out around our human kingdom. This animal kingdom includes creatures of every imaginable form. Let us picture to ourselves this whole manifold animal kingdom around us. In the case of a table, everybody knows that there are forces present that gave this table its shape. In regard to the animal kingdom surrounding us, we ought, naturally, to assume the same, namely, that just as air is present, so, in the environment, the forces are contained that bestow form upon the creatures of the animal kingdom. We all dwell within the same realm. The dog, the horse, the oxen and donkey do not move about in a different world from the one which we also inhabit. And the forces that bestow the donkey shape on the donkey affect us human beings too; yet—forgive me for speaking so bluntly—we do not acquire the form of a donkey. There are also elephants in our environment, but we do not assume the shape of elephants. Yet all the forces fashioning these shapes surround us everywhere. Why is it that we do not take on the forms of, say, a donkey or an elephant? We possess other forces that counteract them. We would indeed acquire these shapes if we did not have these other opposing forces. It is a fact that if we as human beings confront a donkey, our etheric body constantly has the tendency to assume the shape of a donkey. We restrain our etheric body from doing so only because we have a physical body possessing a solid form. Again, if we face an elephant, our etheric body endeavors to assume the elephant shape and is prevented from doing so only because of the physical body's solid shape. Whether it be elephant, stag-beetle or dirt-beetle, the etheric body tries to assume the shapes of any and all creatures. Potentially, all the forms are present in our etheric body, and we comprehend these forms only when we retrace them inwardly, as it were. Our physical body merely prevents us from turning into all these shapes. Therefore, we can say that we carry the entire animal kingdom within our etheric body. We are human only in our physical body. In our etheric body, we bear with us the whole animal kingdom.

Again, there flows all around us the same complex of forces that creates the plant forms. Just as our etheric body is predisposed to assume all animal shapes, our astral body is inclined to reproduce all the plant forms. Here it is already more pleasant to make comparisons, for, while the etheric body is imbued with the tendency to become a donkey when it sees one, the astral body wishes merely to become the thistle on which the donkey feeds. But this astral body is definately ensouled with the tendency to accommodate itself to those forces that find their external expression in the plant forms. Thus we may say that the astral body reacts to the complex of forces that shapes the plant kingdom.

The mineral kingdom is again a force complex that develops the various shapes of this specific realm. This acts within our ego. It is quite evident in the case of the ego, for you only think in terms of the mineral realm. After all, it has been reiterated time and again that the intellect can only grasp the inanimate. Hence, what is contained in the human ego understands the lifeless. Consequently, our ego dwells in the complex of forces that creates the mineral kingdom. The physical body, as such, lives in none of these realms; it has, as you know, a realm of its own. In my Occult Science, an Outline, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms are dealt with separately; this signifies that the physical body possesses a domain of its own. The animal kingdom, on the other hand, is actually found in the etheric body; as far as this viewpoint is concerned, the plant kingdom is found in the astral body, and the mineral kingdom in the ego. From my various books, however, you are familiar with something else. You know that during earthly life these various bodies are worked upon. I have described how the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and even the physical body are worked on. I initially outlined it there, I might say, from the human, the humanistic intention. Now let us try to depict it from another point of view.

Take the mineral concepts that the human being acquires. He experiences the external world, after all, by experiencing it in mineral concepts and forms. Only enlightened minds like Goethe work their way up to the pictorial forms, to the morphology of plants, to metamorphosis. Here, the shapes are transformed. The ordinary view, still prevailing today, on the other hand, only dwells in the solid, mineral forms. If, now, the ego works on these forms and develops them, what is the result? Then, the result is the conscious cultural life, one of the domains of the threefold social organism. The ego creates the cultural life while working inwardly upon itself. All cultural life is, in fact, inner formative development of the ego. What the ego acquires from the mineral realm and in turn transforms into art, religion, science, and so forth, that is the cultural sphere, the transformed mineral kingdom, the spiritual realm.

What results from the tendency of the astral body, residing in the subconscious depths of most human beings, to assume every plant form possible? When you transform this tendency indwelling the astral body, when it radiates up into consciousness in half instinctive, half conscious form, what comes about then? The domain of rights, of the state, comes about.

Now, if you comprehend what holds sway in the relationships between human beings, namely, what is now, within external life, transformed from man's experiences of animality in the ether body, then you arrive at the third domain of the threefold social organism. Were we to stop at the etheric body as it comes to us from birth, we would only have the tendency in this etheric body to turn now into a donkey, now into an oxen, now into a cow, now into a Butterfly. We would reproduce the entire animal kingdom. As human beings we do not merely do this, however, we also transform the ether body. We accomplish this within the social life by living together with others. When we face a donkey, our etheric body wishes to become a donkey. When we confront another human being, we certainly cannot say without uttering a real insult that now, too, we wish to turn into a donkey. This is not possible, at least not in ordinary life; here we must change in another way. I should like to say that, here, the transformation becomes visible; here, those forces come into play that are effective in the economic life. These are the forces that assert themselves when a human being confronts his fellowman in brotherliness. In this way, in the brotherly confrontation, those forces are active that represent the work on the etheric body; thus, through the work on this body, the third realm, the economic sphere, comes into being.

Animal Kingdom: Etheric Body Economic Realm
Plant Kingdom: Astral Body Realm of Rights, of State
Mineral Kingdom: Ego
60; Cultural, Spiritual Realm

Thus, just as man is connected on the one side with the animal kingdom through his etheric body, he is related on the other side in the external environment with the economic sphere of the social organism. We could say that if man is viewed inwardly, spiritually, from the physical body towards the etheric, we find the animal kingdom within man. Outwardly, in his surroundings, we find the economic life.

When we penetrate into the human being and search out what he represents by virtue of his astral body, we find the plant kingdom. Outwardly, in the social configuration, the life of rights corresponds to the plant kingdom. Again, penetrating the human being, we discover the mineral kingdom corresponding to the ego. Outside, in the environment, corresponding to the mineral kingdom, we have the cultural life. Thus, through his constitution, man is linked to the three kingdoms of nature. By working on his whole being, he becomes a social being.

You see that we can never arrive at a comprehension of the social life if we are not in a position to ascend to the etheric body, astral body and ego. For we do not understand man's relationship to the social order if we don't ascend like that. If one proceeds merely from natural science, one stops short at the “human instinct for mimicry,” the faculty of imitation; one cannot progress. In thoughts, one makes the whole world puerile, for it is the child that still retains most of the natural forces. If one wishes to advance further, one needs the insight into initiation science. We need the insight into the fact that the human being is bound up with his etheric body through the animal kingdom, with the astral body through the plant world, and with the ego through the mineral realm. We need to know that owing to his observation of the mineral world man attains to his cultural life; that due to the transformation of the deep instincts harbored by him and owing to his kinship with the surrounding plant world he attains to the life of rights, of the state. We realize that these deep instincts correspond to the sphere of rights and the state. This is why, at first, the life of the state contains so much of the instinctive element if it is not infused with the cultural element of jurisprudence. Finally, we have the economic sphere which basically represents the metamorphosis of those inner experiences gained in the etheric body.

Now, these experiences are not brought to the surface from within by the science of initiation, for Huxley is not motivated in any sense by initiation science to explore the connection between man and the economic life. He observes the exterior, the conditions economically present outside. The whole complex of relations between the economic sphere, the etheric body and the animal kingdom is unclear to him. He looks at what is outwardly present. Consequently, he can certainly not advance beyond the most primitive, elementary level, the faculty of imitation.

From this we realize that if people would wish to continue extracting social thinking from modern science, they would remain caught up in absurdities and something quite dreadful would have to ensue. Over the whole earth, a social life would have to arise that would bring about the most primitive conditions; it would lead humanity back to a puerile social life. Gradually, untruth and lying would become a matter of course simply because people could not do otherwise even if they wanted to. They would be thirty, forty, fifty or even older, yet they would have to behave like children, if, with their consciousness, they only wanted to comprehend what is derived from science. People would only be able to develop the instincts of imitation. Even today we frequently have the feeling that only these instincts of imitation are being developed. We watch the appearance, somewhere, of yet another reform movement of a radical nature. It really only contains the instincts of imitation derived from some university philistine. Much of what, today, looks most illustrious when given the polish derived from the customary falsehoods would appear very different in the light of initiation science. Modern comprehension of the world, however, is limited to what can be seen in the light of the concept of imitation unless one is willing to advance from ordinary, official science to the science of initiation, the science that draws its substance from the inner impulses of existence.

Thus I have tried to show you how the aspects that are lacking in the present, the very. aspects through which it becomes evident where the present age must remain stuck because of its inability to penetrate reality, can be fructified and illuminated by the science of initiation.

• 84 . See Lecture VII of this volume.
• 85 . See Note #54
• 86 . Thomas Huxley: 1825–1895.
• 87 . Friedrich Hegel: Grundlinien einer Philosophie des Rechts, 1821.
• 88 . Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Grundlage des Naturrechts, 1796.

[ 1 ] A saying by Goethe that delicately explains the relationship between humans and the world is this: “We actually undertake in vain to express the essence of a thing. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would probably encompass the essence of that thing. We strive in vain to describe the character of a person; on the other hand, if we put together his actions, his deeds, we will be confronted with a picture of his character. Colors are deeds of light, deeds and suffering... Colors and light are in the most exact relationship to each other, but we must think of both as belonging to the whole of nature: for it is the whole of nature that wants to reveal itself to the eye in this way. In the same way, the whole of nature reveals itself to another sense... Thus nature speaks downwards to other senses, to known, unrecognized, unknown senses; thus it speaks to itself and to us through a thousand phenomena. To the attentive, it is never dead or mute.»

[ 2 ] To fully appreciate the significance of this statement, , one need only consider how very differently the world must reveal itself to the lowest forms of life, which have only a kind of sense of touch or feeling spread over the entire surface of their bodies. Light, color and sound cannot be present for them in the same way that they are present for beings that are endowed with eyes and ears. The air vibrations that a shot from a gun causes may also have an effect on them if they are hit by them. An ear is necessary for these air vibrations to be perceived as a bang. And that certain processes, which reveal themselves in the fine substance called ether as light and color, require an eye. In this sense, the philosopher Lotze's statement applies: “Without a light-sensitive eye and a sound-sensitive ear, the whole world would be dark and silent. There would be no light or sound in it, just as a toothache would be impossible without a tooth nerve that can feel pain.»

[ 3 ] The poet Robert Hamerling says in his philosophical book («Atomistik des Willens») about this insight: «If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your your mind bends before this fact like a shy horse, then do not read another line; leave this and all other books that deal with philosophical matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to take in a fact without prejudice and to hold it in your thoughts.»

[ 4 ] But a conclusion necessarily follows from this fact. Goethe expresses it beautifully: “The eye owes its existence to light. From indifferent animal auxiliary organs, light calls forth an organ that becomes its equal; and so the eye is formed by light for light, so that the inner light may confront the outer.” This means nothing other than that the external processes that man perceives through the eye as light would be there even without the eye; this however creates the sensation of light from them. Man must never say that only that which he perceives exists; he must recognize that of all that exists, he can only perceive that for which he has organs. And with each new organ, the world must reveal new aspects of its nature. The naturalist Tyndall aptly describes this: “The effect of light in the animal kingdom seems to be only a change in chemical composition, as occurs in the leaves of plants. Gradually this effect is localized in individual pigment cells that are more sensitive to light than the surrounding tissue. The eye begins. It is initially able to reveal the differences between light and shadow that are produced by very close objects. Because the interruption of light is almost always followed by contact with the opaque nearby object, it must be concluded that seeing is a kind of anticipated feeling. The adaptation continues (in higher animals). A slight swelling of the skin forms above the pigment cells; a lens begins to form, and through an infinite number of adaptations, the sense of sight achieves a sharpness that ultimately reaches the perfection of the hawk or eagle eye. It is the same with the other senses.“

[ 5 ] How much of what is real is revealed to a being through sensation depends on the organs that have developed in it. Man must never say that only that which he can perceive is real. There may be many things that are real, but which he has no organs to perceive. And a man who declared only that which is ordinarily perceptible to the senses to be real would be like a lower animal that declared the unreality of colors and sounds, since it cannot perceive them.

[ 6 ] Now every man knows of a real world which he cannot perceive with his ordinary senses. That is his own inner world. His feelings, impulses, passions and thoughts are real. They live in him. But no ear can hear them; no eye can see them. They are “dark and silent” for another, as Lotze says in the above quotation, “without a light-sensitive eye and without a sound-sensitive ear, the whole world would be dark and silent.” And this world ceases to be “dark and silent” as soon as there are sensitive eyes and ears. Only such a being can know that the world of colors and sounds arises from this “mute and dark” world, that it experiences this latter world by means of the eye and ear. Only direct experience can decide this.

[ 7 ] Can someone who cannot perceive the real inner world of man as a sensation claim that it is impossible to perceive it? Anyone who recognizes the significance of the facts presented will do so. He will have to say to himself: whether this is possible is for those who have such a perception to decide, not for those who do not. For the eye-gifted, not the eyeless being, can give an account of the reality of the world of colors. This thought must be followed by the following, which Hamerling brilliantly summarizes in what he has to say in this direction: “Our sensory world is the world of effects. The active element in every being produces the idea in others, as a touch on the strings produces the sound. Every being is a harpist on foreign strings and, at the same time, a harp for foreign fingers.»

[ 8 ] Just as external nature transforms the “indifferent animal organs” into the eye, in the sense of Goethe, so man can develop within himself the organs through which feelings, drives, instincts, passions, thoughts, etc. become a world of senses, a world of effects, just as air vibrations become sound perception through the ear, and ether vibrations become color perception through the eye. The paths that the soul must take to develop these senses will be discussed in a later issue of this journal. Here, we will say a few words about the perceptions of these “spiritual senses” themselves.

[ 9 ] It is clear that only a part of a person is visible to the external eye. It is the part that is referred to as the physical body. This physical body consists of the same components as the external natural objects. And the physical and chemical forces that are also active in minerals are active in it. Now every thinking person will admit that the life of the soul can never be explained by these substances and their processes. The natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond expresses himself on this subject as follows: “It may seem, at a superficial glance, that by knowing the material processes in the brain, we could understand certain mental processes and dispositions. I include in this the memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, specific talents and the like. The slightest reflection teaches that this is an illusion. We would only be informed about certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are more or less equivalent to the outer conditions set by the sensory impressions, but not about the origin of the mental life through these conditions. What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the original, indefinable, undeniable facts for me: I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste sweetness, I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ, I see red, and the equally immediate certainty that follows from this: So I am? It is simply inconceivable, forever and ever, that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they lie and will move.” – Du Bois-Reymond is certainly wrong with what he concludes from this, but not with the fact itself. (Compare my book “Welt-und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert”, Berlin, Siegfr. Cronbach, second volume, page 78 ff.) - It must be made clear what facts underlie such a statement. The natural scientist uses the external senses for his investigations. He does indeed strengthen their power by means of instruments, and he combines the facts they supply with his understanding, and determines their proportions by calculation; but the basis for everything he determines is external, sensuous observation. Now, this can indeed determine processes in the material world; or where these are too small to be perceived directly, they can be supplemented by hypotheses: but it can never perceive anything spiritual or mental. Du Bois-Reymond is therefore saying nothing other than that where the material process passes over into the mental, external sensory observation ceases. How carbon, oxygen, etc. atoms lie and move can be imagined in such a way because it is similar to perceivable material processes. “I feel pain, I feel pleasure, etc.” can no longer be grasped by the external senses. — A higher faculty of perception must intervene, just as the higher faculty of perception of the eye must intervene when the world of tactile sensations of the lower animal is to be supplemented by the world of color. - And for such a higher faculty of perception, a transition also takes place between physical processes and the “facts that cannot be denied: I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I smell the scent of roses, etc.” as between the movement of a rolling ivory ball and the state of the other, which, as a result of the impact of the first, passes from rest into motion. For this higher perceptive faculty, the physical human body is only the middle part of a larger body, in which the former is enveloped as in a cloud. And just as the physical eye perceives the ether vibrations emitted by the physical body as the colors of this body, so the spiritual eye perceives, through a corresponding mediation, the feelings, drives, passions and ideas, which are just as “undeniable facts” as the movements of carbon, hydrogen, etc. in the brain,

[ 10 ] Through a special process of transformation, which will be described later, the inner world of causes of the human being presents itself to the “spiritual eye” as a world of effects in colors in the same way as the physical processes in the body present themselves to the external eye as color effects. The color effects that can be perceived by the “spiritual eye”, which radiate around the physical human being and envelop him like a cloud (perhaps in the shape of an egg), are called the human aura. It must be considered as much a part of the human being as the physical body. The size of this aura differs from person to person. But on average, one can imagine that the whole person is twice as long and four times as wide as the physical one.

[ 11 ] A wide range of colors now floods this aura. And this flooding is a true reflection of inner human life. The individual colors are as varied as this. But certain permanent characteristics are expressed in the basic colors: talents, habits, character traits.

[ 12 ] The aura is very different according to the various temperaments and dispositions of people; it also varies according to the degree of spiritual development. A person who gives himself completely to his animal instincts has a completely different aura than one who lives much in thought. The aura of a person with a religious disposition differs significantly from that of someone who is absorbed in the trivial events of the day. In addition, all changing moods, inclinations, joys and pains find expression in the aura.

[ 13 ] The auras of different types of people must be compared with each other in order to understand the meaning of the color tones. First, take people who have strongly developed affects. They can be divided into two different types. Those who are driven to these affects primarily by their animal nature, and those in whom the same affects take on a more refined form, where they are, so to speak, strongly influenced by reflection. In the first type of person, brown and brown-red color currents of all shades flow through the aura in certain places. In those with more refined affects, tones of lighter red and green appear in the same places. It can be observed that the green tones become more frequent with increasing intelligence. Very intelligent people who are completely absorbed in satisfying their animal instincts have a lot of green in their aura. However, this green will always have a stronger or weaker touch of brown or brown-red. Unintelligent people show a large part of the aura flooded with brown-red or even dark blood-red currents.

[ 14 ] The aura of calm, thoughtful people is very different from that of such emotional natures. The brownish and reddish tones recede; and various shades of green come to the fore. In thinkers, the aura shows a pleasant green undertone. This is how those people look who can be said to know how to find their way in every situation in life.

[ 15 ] The blue color tones appear in devoted natures. (I would like to expressly note that I am happy to be corrected by other researchers. Observations in this field are, of course, uncertain. And this uncertainty cannot be compared with that which is possible in the physical field, although this is also very great, as researchers know. For comparison with my statements, I would like to draw your attention to the book by C. W. Leadbeater: “Man visible and invisible”, which was published in London in 1902 by the Theosophical Publishing Society. The more a person places his self in the service of a cause, the more significant the blue nuances become. In this respect, too, one encounters two quite different types of people. There are natures of little mental power, passive souls, who, as it were, have nothing to throw into the stream of world events except their “good nature”. Their aura glows in a beautiful blue. This is also the case with many devotional, religious natures. Compassionate souls and those who like to live out their existence in a state of well-being have a similar aura. If such people are also intelligent, green and blue currents alternate, or the blue itself may even take on a greenish nuance. It is the peculiarity of active souls, in contrast to passive ones, that their blue is imbued with bright colors from within. Inventive natures, those who have fruitful thoughts, radiate bright colors from an inner point, as it were. In general, everything that indicates mental activity has more the form of rays that spread from within; while everything that comes from animal life has the form of irregular clouds that flood the aura.

[ 16 ] The color formations show different shades depending on whether the ideas that arise from an active soul are used to serve one's own animal instincts or ideal, objective interests. The inventive mind that uses all its thoughts to satisfy its sensual passions shows dark blue-red nuances; on the other hand, the one who selflessly puts his fertile thoughts into a factual interest shows light red-blue color tones. A life in the spirit, coupled with noble devotion and a capacity for self-sacrifice, reveal pink or light violet colors.

[ 17 ] Not only the basic state of the soul, but also temporary emotions, moods and other inner experiences show their color waves in the aura. A sudden outburst of violent anger produces red waves; offended honor, which is expressed in a sudden outburst, can be seen appearing in dark green clouds. — But the color phenomena do not only occur in irregular cloud formations, but also in certain limited, regularly shaped figures. For example, a sudden attack of fear is shown by the aura from top to bottom by wavy stripes in blue color, which have a reddish shimmer. In a person who is waiting with tension for a certain event, one can see continuous red-blue stripes radiating from the inside outwards through the aura.

[ 18 ] For an accurate spiritual perception, every sensation that a person receives from the outside must be noticed. People who are strongly stimulated by every external impression show a continuous flickering of small reddish spots and flecks in the aura. In people who do not feel vividly, these spots have an orange-yellow or even a beautiful yellow color. So-called “distracted” people show bluish spots of more or less changing shape.

[ 19 ] The following is intended to show to what extent this aura, as characterized here, is a very composite phenomenon. It should also be shown how it is the expression of the whole being of the human being. The explanations given here should be considered as an introduction.

[ 20 ] In the foregoing, the auric cloud within which the physical body of the human being is located has been described in some general terms. — For a more highly developed “spiritual vision,” three types of color phenomena can be distinguished within this “aura” that surrounds and radiates around the human being. First, there are colors that have more or less the character of opacity and dullness. However, when we compare these colors with those that our physical eye sees, they appear lively and transparent in comparison. Within the supersensible world itself, however, they make the space they fill comparatively opaque; they fill it like fog. — A second type of color is that which is, as it were, completely light. They illuminate the space they fill. This space itself becomes a space of light. The third type of colored appearance is quite different from these two. These have a radiant, sparkling, glittering character. They not only illuminate the space they fill, they also shine and radiate through it. There is something active, inherently mobile about these colors. The others have something in them that is at rest, immobile. These, on the other hand, generate themselves out of themselves, as it were, continually. - Through the first two types of color, space is filled as if with a fine liquid that remains calm in it; through the third, it is filled with a constantly fanning life, with never-resting activity.

[ 21 ] These three color types are not located next to each other in the human aura; they are not located in separate parts of space; instead, they partially penetrate each other. At one point in the aura, all three types can be seen mixed together, just as a physical body, for example a bell, can be seen and heard at the same time. This makes the aura an extraordinarily complicated phenomenon. For, as it were, one has to deal with three auras that are located within each other and interpenetrate. (Aura of a higher order is not considered here.) But one can get a clear picture by directing one's attention alternately to one of these three auras. In the supersensible world one does something similar to what one does in the sensible world, for example, when one closes one's eyes to fully enjoy the impression of a piece of music. The “seer” has three kinds of organs for the three color types. And in order to observe one undisturbed by the others, he can open one or the other type of organ to the impressions and close the others. — In the beginning, a “seer” can only have developed one type of organ, that for the first type of color. Such a person can only see one aura; the other two remain invisible to him. Likewise, someone may be able to perceive the first two types, but not the third. — The higher level of the “gift of seeing” then consists in a person being able to observe all three auras and to direct his attention alternately to one or the other for the purpose of study.

[ 22 ] The triple aura is the supersensory visible expression of the human being. For this being is composed of three members: the body, soul and spirit. The body is the transitory part of man; that which is born and dies. The spirit is the immortal part. After the death of the body, it experiences various states and conditions in realms that are not accessible to the external senses, in order to be reborn in a new body after a shorter or longer period of time. (More detailed information on the conditions between death and a new incarnation can be found in the essay “How Karma Works.”) The link between the perishable body and the imperishable spirit is the soul. One has to imagine that the impressions of the sensual external world are first received by the soul and then passed on to the spirit. The ear, for example, as a physical organ, receives an impression through an air vibration. The soul transforms this air vibration into the sensation of sound. Only through this experience does the human being inwardly — as a sensation — experience that which would otherwise be a mute process in the external air. — And within the human being, the spirit again perceives the sensation. In this way, it receives information about the sensuous, earthly world from the soul. The spirit cannot communicate directly with the sensuous world. The soul is its messenger. Through the soul, the immortal spirit of man enters into communication with the earthly world. (Those who seek more precise information about the relationship between spirit, soul and body will find it in my forthcoming book, “Theosophy.”) The soul is thus the actual bearer of what man experiences within himself between birth and death. The spirit preserves these experiences and carries them over from one embodiment to another.

[ 23 ] The soul is influenced by two sides in man. The body influences it to convey the sensual-physical impressions. The spirit influences it from the other side, in order to impress upon it the eternal laws that are its own. The soul is connected, on the one hand, with the body, and on the other with the spirit. Therefore, in the living human being, one has to distinguish between a threefold inner life. The first includes everything that continually flows from the body to the soul; the second are the processes in the soul itself. The third are the influences that the soul experiences from the spirit. A simple example can make it clear how these three forms of human inner life differ. Let us assume that a person has not eaten for a long time. As a result, certain processes take place in the body that are not beneficial to his physical life. This has an effect on the soul as a feeling of hunger.

[ 24 ] This feeling is a process in the soul; but the cause of it lies in the body. - Let us further assume that a person passes a person in need. He supports him. The cause for this lies in the realization of the spirit that man must help others. The soul carries out the action; the spirit gives the order. The soul feels compassion. This compassion is again a process in the soul. The cause for this lies in the spirit. Between these two types of soul experiences there is now a third. It is the one in which neither body nor spirit are directly involved. At first, the immediate stimulus of hunger repeatedly prompts a person to eat. But when he begins to reflect on the connection between hunger and his way of life, he regulates this way of life through thinking. He uses thinking, as it were, to take into account the needs of his sensuality. In this way, he makes his spiritual life independent of the immediate stimuli of sensual corporeality. The more undeveloped a person is, the more he will surrender to sensual stimuli. With higher development, he will increasingly place his inner life at the service of thinking, but in doing so, he will also become increasingly receptive to the influences of spirituality. An undeveloped person who must surrender to every stimulus of his body will be insensitive to the eternal laws of truth and goodness that come from the spirit. He will be completely absorbed in what his body demands of him. The more independent a person becomes of these influences, the more will that which is imperishable, eternally true and eternally good, shine forth in him. And he will ultimately recognize that he is there to place his powers, his abilities, all his actions at the service of the eternal. The first is that which is dependent on the bodily causes; the second is that part of the life of the soul which, to a certain extent, has made itself independent of every external stimulus through reflection, but which still absorbs itself in the satisfaction of the outer life; the third part, finally, is that which places its own life in the service of the eternal. In the undeveloped human being, the first part is predominant; in the more highly developed, the third comes to the fore. The average human being holds the middle between the two.

[ 25 ] These three parts of the human inner life find expression in the triple aura in a way that is visible to the supernatural. The extent to which the soul is dependent on the body, and is influenced by its processes, is expressed in the dull, opaque color phenomena. A person who lives entirely according to his physical nature has this part of the aura particularly vividly developed. — Everything that has become independent of the direct influences of the body through education, through reflection, in short, through external culture, is expressed in the colors that illuminate the space in transparent brightness. And all the true spirituality of man, the selfless devotion to the true and good, in other words the treasures that man collects for eternity, appear in the sparkling, radiant color phenomena of the aura.

[ 26 ] The first aura is a reflection of the influence that the body exerts on the soul of man; the second characterizes the soul's independent life, which has risen above the immediately sensuous, but is not yet dedicated to the service of the eternal; the third reflects the dominion that the eternal spirit has gained over the mortal human being.

[ 27 ] For the “seer”, the degree of a person's development can be judged from the nature of their aura. If he meets an undeveloped person who is completely devoted to the respective sensual impulses, desires and momentary external stimuli, he will see the first aura in the most glaring colors; the second, on the other hand, is only weakly developed. Only sparse color formations can be seen in it; the third, however, is hardly indicated. Here and there a glimmering spark of color appears, indicating that the eternal also lives in this person as a predisposition, but that it will still need a long course of development – through many embodiments – before it will gain an outstanding influence on the outer life of this bearer. The more a person strips off his instinctive nature, the less conspicuous the first part of the aura becomes. The second part grows larger and larger and fills the color body, within which the physical human being lives, more and more completely with its luminous power. And the “servants of the Eternal” show the wondrous third aura, that part which testifies to the extent to which the human being has become a citizen of the spiritual world. For the divine itself radiates through this part of the human aura into the earthly world. People in whom this aura is developed are the flames through which the deity illuminates this world. They have learned to live not for themselves but for the eternal truth and good; they have wrested it from their narrow self, sacrificing themselves on the altar of the great world work.

[ 28 ] Thus, the aura expresses what a person has made of himself in the course of his incarnations.

[ 29 ] All three parts of the aura contain colors of the most diverse nuances. However, the character of these nuances changes with the degree of development of the human being. In the first part of the aura of the undeveloped instinctive human being, one can see all the nuances from red to blue. In him, these nuances have a dull, dirty character. The obtrusive red nuances indicate sensual desires, carnal lusts, and an addiction to the pleasures of the palate and stomach. Green nuances seem to be found primarily in those of a lower nature who tend towards dullness and indifference, who greedily indulge in every pleasure, but who nevertheless shy away from the efforts that would bring them to it. It is not a pleasant sight to see the sluggish street loafers in our big cities loitering around in their dirty green clouds. Certain modern professions, however, breed this kind of aura. A personal sense of self that is rooted entirely in base inclinations, that is, the lowest level of egoism, is manifested in dirty yellow to brown tones. Now it is clear that the animalistic life of the instincts can also take on a pleasing character. There is a purely natural capacity for self-sacrifice, which is found to a high degree in the animal kingdom. In the natural love of a mother, this development of an animalistic instinct finds its most beautiful completion. These selfless natural instincts are expressed in the first aura in shades of light red to pink. Cowardly timidity, nervousness in the face of obvious stimuli is shown by brown-blue or grey-blue colors in the aura.

[ 30 ] The second aura again shows the most diverse color gradations. Brown and orange structures indicate a highly developed sense of self, pride and ambition. Bright yellow reflects clear thinking and intelligence; green is the expression of an understanding of life and the world. Children who are quick to grasp things have a lot of green in this part of their aura. Greenish yellow in the second aura seems to indicate a good memory. Rose-red indicates a benevolent, loving nature; blue is the sign of piety here. The more piety approaches religious fervor, the more the blue turns to violet. Idealism and a serious approach to life in a higher sense are seen as indigo blue.

[ 31 ] The basic colors of the third aura are yellow, green and blue. Yellow appears here when the thinking is filled with high, comprehensive ideas that grasp the individual from the whole of the divine world order. This yellow then has a golden glow when the thinking is intuitive and it is given complete purity of sensual imagining. Green indicates love for all beings; blue is the sign of selfless willingness to sacrifice oneself for all beings. If this willingness to sacrifice oneself increases to the point of strong will, which actively places itself in the service of the world, then the blue lightens to light violet. If pride and the craving for honor still exist in a highly developed person, as the last remnants of personal egoism, then shades of yellow appear alongside those that play towards orange. It should be noted, however, that in this part of the aura the colors are quite different from the shades that a person is accustomed to seeing in the world of the senses. A beauty and sublimity confront the “seer” here, with which nothing in the ordinary world can be compared.

[ 32 ] In the following, it will be shown how the various fundamental components of the human being are expressed through the auras described here.

[ 33 ] The human aura can be understood by observing the human being. As a physical body, the human being is composed of the same substances that are found in the mineral world. And the forces that are active in this world are also active in him. The oxygen that the human being acquires through the breathing process is the same as that found in the air, in the liquid and solid components of the earth. And so it is with the substances that man takes in with his food. These substances and their powers can be studied in man as they are studied in other natural bodies. If we look at man in this way, we recognize him as a member of the mineral world. Furthermore, we can look at man in so far as he is a living being. He shows how the substances and forces of the mineral world build up an organism that takes the form of limbs, that grows and reproduces, whose parts work together in common activity. This way of being has in common with everything that lives. The question arises for anyone who devotes himself to such contemplation: how does a being live? A certain school of modern natural science makes it easy to answer this question. It simply says that the action of mineral substances and forces in a living organism is exactly the same as in inorganic nature, only much more complicated. According to this school, an organism has been understood when the complicated physical and chemical processes that take place within it have been understood. This view denies that there are special causes that transform the mineral substances and forces in the organism into life processes. A lively struggle developed in the nineteenth century against the advocates of a special life force. Clear thinking should have prevented this struggle. For just as no one should dispute that one understands a clock once one has grasped the mechanism of its parts, so too a clear-thinking representative of the life force could not object to the claim that one understands the organism in this sense scientifically if one knows the effectiveness of its substances and forces. But can anyone deny that the clock, which is completely comprehensible in mechanical terms, could not come into being without the clockmaker? Anyone who can really distinguish between the comprehensibility of an organism as a physical fact and the conditions of its origin cannot be in any doubt that the above comprehensibility affects the existence of special causes of life just as little as the existence of the watchmaker is affected by the mechanical comprehensibility of the watch. And just as the mechanic who wants to make the clock understandable does not need to describe the clockmaker, so the purely physical researcher does not need to take into account the special causes of life. But for those who delve deeper into the essence of phenomena, it becomes clear that the entities that make the physical organism appear physically comprehensible are not sufficient for the realization of the physical organism. That is why the perceptive speak of special causes of life. Life is something that is added to the physical effect in the organism and that eludes the senses and the intellect, which only adheres to the sensory facts. Life is the object of a special perception, just as the watchmaker is the object of a special perception. One must observe the organism with the “eyes of the spirit”, then the special causes of life, which elude sensory observation, reveal themselves. Those who observe with the “eyes of the spirit” have therefore called the natural builder of organisms “prana” (power of life). For them, the “life force” cannot be disputed, because for them it is a perception. And everything that is said against these defenders of a life force is only a fight against windmills. It will only be said as long as one misunderstands what they mean. In their sense, prana or the life force should be attributed to man, insofar as he is an organism, as the second link of his being, next to the physical-mineral body.

[ 34 ] In sensation, one has given something that goes beyond mere life. Through life, a being builds its organism. Through sensation, it opens itself to the outside world. It is different when I say: I live, and it is different when I say: I perceive the world of colors around me. In order to become a sentient being, the organism must give its organs properties that go beyond their ability to sustain life and to reproduce life through it. What makes the living organism a sentient organism is what the researcher who sees with “spiritual eyes” calls the sentient body, or, as has become common among theosophists, the astral body. This name “astral”, which means “star-like”, comes from the fact that the supersensory image of it appears in the aura, the luminosity of which has been compared to that of the stars. Here, this part of the human being shall be called the sensory body, as the third limb of the human being. Within this sentient body, the individual life of a person appears. It expresses itself in pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, in inclinations and aversions, etc. With a certain justification, everything that belongs to this is called the inner life of a being. The starry sky is outside in space, my living organism belongs to the same space. This organism is connected to the starry sky in its sensory organs. I experience the joy and the feeling of admiration for the starry sky within myself. I carry this within me, even when the starry sky has long since withdrawn from my sensory eye. What I confront as myself in relation to the outside world, what leads a life within itself, is the soul. And insofar as this soul appropriates the sensations, insofar as it appropriates processes that are given to it from the outside and transforms them into a life of its own, it may be called the sentient soul. This sentient soul fills the sentient body as it were; it transforms everything that it takes in from the outside into an inner experience. In this way, it forms a whole with the sentient body. This is why, in theosophical writings, it is referred to as the astral body. However, a thorough understanding will have to distinguish between the two. In the aura, the two can also be distinguished in that each color tone of the astral body is subject to two influences. One will depend on how the organs of the human being are formed, the other on how his soul, according to its inner nature, responds to external impressions. A person can have a good or bad eye. The picture he receives of an external object depends on this; he can be more or less sensitive in his soul, and this determines the feeling he experiences in his inner being through this picture.

[ 35 ] Man does not stop at the impressions he receives from the outside world and the feelings he experiences through these impressions. He connects these impressions. In this way, overall images of what he perceives are formed in his soul. A person sees a stone fall; afterwards he sees that a cavity has formed in the ground at the place where the stone fell. He connects the two impressions. He says: the stone has hollowed out the earth. In this connection, thinking is expressed. Within the sentient soul, the thinking, intellectual soul comes to life. Only through it does the soul, through the influences of the outside world, create an image of this outside world that is regulated by itself. The soul continually carries out this regulation of its external impressions. And what it thus produces is a description of what it perceives, determined by its nature. That it is determined by its nature can be seen by comparing such a description with what is described. Two people can have the same object in front of them; their descriptions will be different according to the inner nature of their souls. They combine their impressions in different ways.

[ 36 ] But descriptive thinking also leads man beyond his own life. He acquires something that extends beyond his soul. It is a matter of course for him that his descriptions of things are related to these things themselves. He orients himself in the world by thinking about it. He thereby experiences a certain correspondence between his own life and the order of the facts of the world. The rational soul thereby creates harmony between the soul and the world. In his soul, man seeks truth; and through this truth, not only does the soul express itself, but also the things of the world. What is recognized as truth through thinking has an independent significance, not merely one for the human soul. With my delight in the starry sky, I live alone in myself; the thoughts that I form about the paths of the heavenly bodies have the same significance for the thinking of every other person as for mine. It would be pointless to speak of my delight if I did not exist; but it is not pointless in the same way to speak of my thoughts even without reference to myself. For the truth that I think today was also true yesterday, and will also be true tomorrow, although I am only concerned with it today. If a realization gives me pleasure, this pleasure is only of significance as long as I experience it; the truth of this realization has its significance quite independently of this pleasure. In connection with the truth, the soul grasps something that carries its value within itself. And this value does not disappear with the soul's own experience; nor did it arise with it. There is an essential difference between descriptions in which the intellectual soul merely leaves itself to its combinations, and thoughts in which it submits to the laws of truth. A thought that acquires a significance beyond the inner life by being imbued with these laws of truth can only be regarded as knowledge. When truth shines into the intellectual soul, it becomes the conscious soul. Just as there are three parts to the body: the physical body, the life body and the sentient body, so too there are three parts to the soul: the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the conscious soul.

[ 37 ] The threefold aura is to be understood from these three members of the soul. For through these three members it becomes understandable that the inner life of man suffers influences from two sides. As a sentient soul, this inner life is dependent on the sentient body. The interplay between the sentient soul and the sentient body is expressed in the first of the three auras described. The combining intellectual soul, which lives in itself and in its experiences is completely subject to its nature, is expressed in the second aura; and the consciousness soul receives its supersensible-visible expression in the third, brightest aura.

[ 38 ] In order to fully understand the nature of these auras, it is necessary to consider a fact that, when properly interpreted, opens up an understanding of the human being. — In the course of childhood development, a moment occurs in the life of a human being when he or she feels for the first time as an independent being in relation to the whole other world. For people with a fine sensibility, this is a significant event. The poet Jean Paul tells in his autobiography: “I will never forget the phenomenon in me, which I have never told anyone about, where I stood at the birth of my self-awareness, of which I know the place and time. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left at the woodpile when, suddenly, the inner vision, I am an I, came to me like a flash of lightning from heaven and has remained shining ever since: that was the first time my I had seen itself and forever. Deceptions of memory are hardly conceivable here, since no foreign narrative could mix with additions to an event that occurred only in the veiled sanctum of man, the novelty of which alone gave it permanence in such everyday circumstances.» — In his self-awareness, man has given what makes him an independent being. Self-awareness must therefore shed light on his entire being. From this starting point, one will therefore only be able to fully understand the meaning of the body and the soul. More about this at the end of this article.

[ 39 ] There is a veiled holy of holies in man, which is designated by his self-consciousness. Anyone who realizes this will see that this word actually expresses the meaning of human existence. Self-consciousness is the ability to know oneself as an “I”. The following fact seems simple, but it contains an infinitely significant meaning: “I” is the only word that anyone can say only to himself. No one else can say it to the person; and he cannot say it to anyone else. Anyone else can use any other word in the same sense as I myself. What makes a person independent, separate from everything else, and with which he can only be with himself: that is what he calls his “I”. — This fact corresponds to a very specific phenomenon in the aura: no healer can see anything in the part of the aura that corresponds to the “I”. The consciousness of the “I” is indicated in the aura by a dark oval, a completely dark area. If one could look at this oval by itself, it would appear completely black. But one cannot do that. For one sees it through what has been called the first and second aura in the two previous essays. That is why it appears blue. The “I” of the completely undeveloped human being appears as a small blue oval. As the human being develops, it grows larger and larger; and in the average person of the present day it is about the same size as the rest of the aura. Within this blue oval, a special radiation now begins to emanate. All the other parts of the aura only reflect in a certain way what comes to the human being from outside. But the radiation mentioned is the expression of what the human being makes of himself. The first aura expresses that which works in man from the animal; the second that which he experiences in himself through the impressions of the world of sense; the third is an expression of the knowledge which he acquires from this world of sense. But that which begins to shine within the dark aura of the self is that which man acquires through his work on himself. No sensory world can give him the strength to do this. It must therefore flow to him from elsewhere. It flows to him from the spirit. The more the spirit flows to the human ego, the more it shines in the aura. And in contrast to the transient phenomena of the sensory world, the spirit is eternal, immortal. That which lives out itself in the other auras is also transient in the human being; that which shines in the aura of the I is the expression of his eternal spirit. It is the permanent in him that reappears in each subsequent embodiment (incarnation). We have recognized the consciousness soul as the third part of the soul. And within the consciousness soul, the “I” awakens. In the “I”, the eternal spirit of the human being awakens again. Like the body and the soul, the spirit is also tripartite. The highest part is the actual spiritual being (called “Atma” in theosophical literature). Just as the physical body is built from the substances and forces of the external physical world, so the spiritual being is built from those of the general spiritual world. He is a part of it, just as the physical body is a part of the physical world. And just as the physical body becomes a physical living being through the physical life force, so the spiritual being becomes a life spirit through the spiritual life force (called Budhi in theosophical literature). — And just as the physical body acquires knowledge of the physical world through the senses, so the spiritual being acquires knowledge of the spiritual world through the spiritual senses, which are called intuition. The sensory body of the physical world is therefore matched by a special sensory spirit in this higher realm. Just as the lower self-life begins with sensation, so does the higher with intuition. This spiritual self-life is therefore called the spirit self (in theosophical literature it is called the “higher manas”).

[ 40 ] Man is therefore composed of the following parts: 1. The physical body, consisting of the physical body, the life body (the life force) and the sentient body; 2. < em>The soul, consisting of the sentient soul, the rational soul, and the consciousness soul, in which the “I” awakens; and 3. The spirit, consisting of the spirit self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human being. The sentient soul fills the sentient body and merges with it to form a whole. This becomes clear when one imagines the following: the fact that an impression of the external world evokes the color “red” is based on an activity of the sentient body. That the soul experiences this “red” within itself is due to the fact that the sentient soul is directly linked to the sentient body, and immediately makes the effect received from the outside its own. In the same way, the consciousness soul and the spirit self merge into a whole through the activity of the “I” itself. (Those who wish to learn more about all this will find information in my recently published book, Theosophy.) — Man's being is therefore rightly divided into the following seven parts (we have put the terms used in theosophical literature in brackets): 1. the physical body (Sthula sharira), 2. the life body (Linga sharira), 3. the sentient body connected with the sentient soul (astral body, Kama rupa), 4. the mind soul (lower Manas, Kama manas), 5. the spirit-filled consciousness soul that gives birth to the “I” (higher higher manas), 6. the life spirit (spiritual body, Budhi), 7. the spirit man (Atma).

[ 41 ] It is clear from the above that the radiant spiritual aura is only very weakly indicated in the undeveloped human being and develops more and more the more perfect the human being becomes. Just as the three auras described correspond to the bearers of the “I”, so the I-aura itself becomes the bearer of the eternal spirit. Through the “I”, the human being becomes an independent, separate being. This develops the content of the spirit within itself; it fulfills itself with it. But this means that the “I” gives itself to the eternal All-Spirit. The stages that the “I” reaches in this devotion to the All-Spirit are expressed by the color nuances of the higher spirit aura. These nuances cannot be compared to physical colors in their radiant brilliance. A description of them cannot be given here.

[ 42 ] For the sake of completeness, a part of the aura that has not yet been discussed should be mentioned. It is the part that corresponds to the life body. It fills approximately the same space as the physical body. The clairvoyant can only observe it if he has the ability to completely imagine away (suggerate away) the physical body. Then the life body (Linga sharira) appears as a complete double image of the physical body in a color that is reminiscent of that of the apricot blossoms. In this life body, a continuous inflow and outflow can be observed. The life force contained in the universe flows in, is consumed by the life process and flows out again.

[ 43 ] This concludes the preliminary indications that can be given here about the human aura. Should anyone take offense at the fact that some of what has been said here seems to be at odds with what is otherwise expressed in theosophical literature, I would ask him to take a closer look. Behind the apparent differences, he will find a deeper harmony. However, it is better if each person describes exactly what he has to say. In this area, only good can come from weighing the statements of the individual observers against each other and mutually supplementing each other. We will not get anywhere by merely repeating the theosophical dogmas. However, the individual must be aware of his great responsibility with regard to his statements. On the other hand, it must be noted that at these heights of observation, errors in the details are quite possible; indeed, they are certainly much more likely here than in scientific observations in the sensory world. The writer of these remarks therefore asks for the appropriate indulgence from all those who have something to say in this field.

[ 1 ] The significance of the Mysteries in the spiritual life of Greece can be seen in Plato's conception of the world. There is only one means of understanding him fully: he must be placed in the light which shines forth from the Mysteries. The later pupils of Plato, the Neoplatonists, attribute to him a secret teaching, to which he admitted only those who were worthy, and then strictly under the “seal of silence.” His teaching was considered secret in the same sense as the Mystery wisdom. Even if Plato himself is not the author of the seventh Platonic Epistle, as some people assert, this makes no difference for our purpose; it need not concern us whether Plato or someone else expresses the attitude of mind contained in this letter. This attitude of mind was inherent in his conception of the world. It says in this Epistle: “But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers, or prospective writers who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgment at least, that these men understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith, for it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself.”³⁰ These words could only indicate a powerlessness in the use of words due to personal weakness, if one could not find in them the sense contained in the Mysteries. What Plato never wrote and never intended to write about must be something that defies expression in writing. It must be a feeling, a sensation, an experience that cannot be conveyed in a moment, but is attained through “continued application ... and communion.” The intimate training Plato was able to give to the elect is indicated here. For them fire flashed forth from his words; for the others, only thoughts. It is of great consequence how one approaches Plato's Dialogues. They mean more or less according to one's frame of mind. To Plato's pupils more than the mere literal sense of his expositions was conveyed. Where he taught, the participants experienced the atmosphere of the Mysteries. The words had overtones which vibrated with them. But these overtones needed the atmosphere of the Mysteries. Otherwise they died away unheard.

[ 2 ] In the center of the world of Plato's Dialogues stands the personality of Socrates. We need not touch on the historical aspect here. What matters is the character of Socrates as represented by Plato. Socrates is a person sanctified through death for the cause of truth. He died as only an initiate can die, one to whom death is but a moment of life like other moments. He meets death as any other occurrence of earthly existence. His behavior was such that not even in his friends were the feelings usual to such an occasion aroused. Phaedo says in the Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul: “For my part, I had strange emotions when I was there. For I was not filled with pity as I might naturally be when present at the death of a friend; since he seemed to me to be happy, both in his bearing and his words, he was meeting death so fearlessly and nobly. And so I thought that even in going to the abode of the dead he was not going without the protection of the gods, and that when he arrived there it would be well with him, if it ever was well with anyone. And for this reason I was not at all filled with pity, as might seem natural when I was present at a scene of mourning; nor on the other hand did I feel pleasure, as was our custom when we were occupied with philosophy—although our talk was of philosophy—but a very strange feeling came over me, an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and of pain together, when I thought that Socrates was presently to die.”³¹ And the dying Socrates instructs his pupils about immortality. His personality, knowing by experience the valuelessness of life, here acts as proof of a quality very different from all logic and intellectual reasoning. It is not as though a man were conversing—for this man is at the point of crossing the threshold of death—but as though the eternal truth itself which had made its abode in a transitory personality, were speaking. Where the temporal dissolves into nothingness we seem to find the air in which the eternal can resound.

[ 3 ] We hear no proofs of immortality in the logical sense. The whole dialogue is directed toward leading the friends to the point where they can behold the eternal. Then they will need no proofs. Is one to prove that the rose is red to someone who sees it? Is one to prove that the spirit is eternal to someone whose eyes have been opened so that he can see this spirit? Socrates indicates living experiences. First of all it is a meeting with wisdom itself. What is the aim of the person who pursues wisdom? He wishes to free himself from all that his senses offer him in everyday observation. He wishes to seek the spirit in the material world. Is not this a fact which can be compared to dying? “Other people”—this is Socrates' opinion—“are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be reluctant when that came for which they had been eagerly practicing all along.”³² To reinforce this, Socrates asks one of his friends, “Do you think a philosopher would be likely to care much about the so-called pleasures, such as eating or drinking? ... Or about the pleasures of sexual desire? ... Do you believe such a man would think much of the other cares of the body—I mean such as the possession of fine clothes and shoes and the other personal adornments? Do you think he would care about them or despise them, except so far as it is necessary to have them? ... Altogether, then, you think that such a man would not devote himself to the body, but would, so far as he was able, turn away from the body and concern himself with the soul? ... To begin with, then, it is clear that in such matters the philosopher, more than other men, separates the soul from association with the body”³³ After this Socrates is entitled to say: Striving for wisdom is comparable to dying, in that man turns from physical things. But where does he turn? He turns to the spiritual. However, can he expect the same of the spirit as of his senses? Socrates explains himself on this: “Now, how about the acquisition of intelligent insight? Is the body a hindrance or not, if it is made to share in the search for wisdom? What I mean is this: Have the sight and hearing of men any truth in them, or is it true, as the poets are always telling us, that we neither hear nor see accurately? ... Then, when does the soul attain to truth? For when it tries to consider anything in company with the body, it is evidently deceived by it.” All that we perceive with³⁴ the physical senses comes into existence and dies away. And this coming into existence and dying away is the cause of our being deceived. But if we examine objects more thoroughly with intelligent insight, then we partake of the eternal in them. But the physical senses do not convey to us the eternal in its true form. They deceive us when we rely implicitly upon them. They cease to deceive us if we confront them with logical insight, making everything conveyed by the senses subject to examination by this insight. But if logical insight is to judge the statements of the senses, must not something live within this insight which transcends the perceptions of the senses? Hence what is true and false in objects is judged by something in us which opposes the material body, and therefore is not subject to its laws. Above all, this something must not be subjected to the laws of growth and decay, for it bears truth within itself. Truth cannot have a yesterday and a tomorrow; it cannot be this on one occasion and that on another, as material things are. Hence truth in itself must be eternal. As the philosopher turns away from the transitory material world, and turns to truth, he approaches an eternal element, dwelling within him. If we immerse ourselves wholly in the spirit, then we live entirely in truth. The material world around us is no longer present in its material form only. “Would not that man,” asks Socrates, “do this most perfectly who approaches each thing, so far as possible, with the reason alone, not introducing sight into his reasoning nor dragging in any of the other senses along with his thinking, but who employs pure, absolute reason in his attempt to search out the pure, absolute essence of things, and who removes himself, so far as possible, from eyes and ears, and, in a word, from his whole body because he feels that its companionship disturbs the soul and hinders it from attaining truth and wisdom? ... Well, then, this that we call death, is it not a release and separation from the body? But, as we hold, the true philosophers and they alone are always most eager to release the soul, and just this—the release and separation of the soul from the body—is their study ... Then, as I said in the beginning, it would be absurd if a man who had been all his life fitting himself to live as nearly in a state of death as he could, should then be disturbed when death came to him ... In fact, then, the true philosophers practice dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men.”³⁵ Socrates also bases all higher morality on the liberation of the soul from the body. One who obeys only the demands of his body is not moral. Who has courage? asks Socrates. He has courage who not only disregards his body but follows the demands of his spirit when this endangers his body. And who is self-restrained? He who is “not excited by the passions and in being superior to them acts in a seemly way. Is self-restraint therefore not a characteristic of those alone who despise the body and pass their lives in philosophy?”³⁶ And thus it is with all virtues, according to Socrates.

[ 4 ] Socrates proceeds to characterize intelligent insight itself. What does cognition really mean? Doubtless we attain cognition through forming judgments. Very well, I form a judgment about something; for instance, I say to myself, This thing that stands before me is a tree. How do I arrive at such a statement? I shall be able to do so only if I already know what a tree is. I must remember my idea of a tree. A tree is a material thing. If I remember a tree, I remember a material object. I say that a thing is a tree if it reminds me of other things I have perceived before, and which I know to be trees. Memory enables me to reach cognition. Through memory I can compare the various material things with each other. But in this my cognition is not exhausted. If I see two similar things I form the judgment, These things are similar. But in reality two things are never completely similar. Wherever I find similarity it is only relative. Therefore I think of similarity without finding it in material realty. The thought of similarity helps me toward judgment, as memory helps me toward judgment and cognition. Just as I remember trees when I see a tree, so I remember the thought of similarity when I see two similar things. Therefore thoughts arise within me like memories which are not gained from material reality. All cognition not derived from this reality is based on such thoughts. The whole of mathematics consists only of such thoughts. It would be a poor geometrician who could relate mathematically only what he sees with his eyes and grasps with his hands. It follows that we have thoughts which do not stem from transitory nature, but which arise from the spirit. And precisely these thoughts bear the stamp of eternal truth upon them. What mathematics teaches will be eternally true, even if the whole universe were to collapse tomorrow, and a totally new one arise. The present mathematical truths might not be applicable to the conditions prevailing in a new universe, nevertheless they would remain true in themselves. Only when the soul is alone with itself can it bring forth such eternal truths out of itself. The soul therefore is related to truth, to the eternal, and not to the transitory, the seemingly real. For this reason Socrates says, “When the soul reflects alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these, it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom ... Then see, if this is not the conclusion from all that we have said, that the soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and ever unchanging, and the body, on the contrary, most like the human and mortal and multiform and unintellectual and dissoluble and ever-changing ...Then if it is in such a condition, the soul goes away into what is like itself, into the invisible, divine, immortal and wise, and when it arrives there it is happy, freed from error, folly, fear, fierce loves and all the other human ills and, as the initiated say, lives in truth through all after-time with the gods.”³⁷ Here we cannot undertake to show all the paths along which Socrates guides his friends to the eternal. All these paths breathe the same spirit. All are intended to show that man finds one thing when he follows the paths of transitory sense perception, and another when his spirit is alone with itself. Socrates points to the archetypal nature of the spirit for those who listen to him. If they find it they can see with spiritual eyes that it is eternal. The dying Socrates does not prove immortality: he simply demonstrates the essence of the soul. It then becomes evident that growth and decay, birth and death have nothing to do with this soul. The essence of the soul lies in truth, but truth itself cannot grow and decay. The soul has as much to do with growth as the crooked has to do with the straight. Death, however, belongs to this process of “growth.” Therefore the soul has nothing to do with death. Must we not say that the immortal assumes mortality as little as the straight assumes crookedness. Continuing from this, Socrates says, “If the immortal is also imperishable, it is impossible for the soul to perish when death comes to meet it. For, as our argument has shown, it will not admit death and will not be dead, just as the number three, we said, will never be even.”³⁸

[ 5 ] Let us trace the whole development of this dialogue, in which Socrates leads his listeners to the point where they are able to see the eternal in the human personality. The listeners absorb his thoughts; they search within themselves for something in their own inner experiences through which they can say “yes” to his ideas. They put forward the objections that spring to their minds. What has happened to the listeners when the dialogue has reached its end? They have found something in themselves which they did not possess before. They have not merely absorbed an abstract truth; they have gone through a process of development. Something has come to life within them which was not alive in them before. Is not this comparable to an initiation? Does not this throw light on the reason why Plato expressed his philosophy in the form of dialogue? These dialogues are intended to be nothing but a literary form of the proceedings in the Mystery places. What Plato himself says at various points convinces us of this. As a teacher of philosophy, Plato wanted, insofar as possible through this medium, to be what the initiator was in the Mysteries. Well does Plato know himself to be at one with the methods of the Mysteries! He considers his method to be the right one only if it leads to the place to which the mystic should be led! He expresses this in the Timaeus: “All men who possess even a small share of good sense call upon God always at the outset of every undertaking, be it small or great: we therefore who are purposing to deliver a discourse concerning the Universe, how far it is created or is uncreated, must needs invoke gods and goddesses (if so be that we are not utterly demented), praying that all we say may be approved by them in the first place, and secondly by ourselves.”³⁹ And to those who seek along such a path, Plato promises “that the Godhead, as Savior, makes it possible that such a distant and difficult investigation—one so prone to error—can be accomplished through an enlightened philosophy.”⁴⁰

[ 6 ] The Timaeus in particular reveals to us the relationship of Plato's world conception with the Mysteries. At the very beginning of this dialogue, reference is made to an “initiation.” Solon is “initiated” into the creation of worlds by an Egyptian priest, and also into the manner in which myths that have been handed down, express eternal truths in picture form. “There have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind,” (thus the Egyptian priest instructs Solon) “of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country as well as in ours, how once upon a time Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and, because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself perished by a thunderbolt -that story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move round the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.”⁴¹ This point in the Timaeus clearly refers to the relationship between the initiate and the myths of the people. He perceives the truths hidden in their pictures.

[ 7 ] The drama of the world's creation is presented in the Timaeus. Whoever wishes to retrace the paths leading to this creation comes to the point of divining the archetypal force from which everything has sprung. “Now to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed; and having discovered Him, to declare Him unto all men were a thing impossible.”⁴² The mystic knew what was meant by this “thing impossible.” It indicates the drama of God. God is not present for him in the materially comprehensible world. There He is present as nature. He lies spell-bound in nature. According to the ancient mystics, only he can approach Him who awakens the divine within himself. Therefore He cannot so easily be made comprehensible to everyone. He does not appear in person, even to those who approach Him. This is what the Timaeus says. The Father has created the world out of the cosmic body and the cosmic soul. In perfect proportions He has united harmoniously the elements which came into being when He offered His own, separate existence by diffusing Himself. Thus the body of the world came into existence. On this body of the world, the soul of the world is stretched in the form of a cross.⁴³ This soul is the divine element in the world. It has met with death on the cross in order that the world may exist. Plato is able to call nature the tomb of the divine element.⁴⁴ This is not a tomb containing something dead, but something eternal, for which death only gives the opportunity to express the omnipotence of life. Man sees this nature in the right light when he approaches it in order to deliver the crucified soul of the world. It must be raised from death, the spell must be lifted from it. Where can it come to life again? Only in the soul of the man who is initiated. In this way wisdom finds its right relationship to the cosmos. The resurrection, the deliverance of the Godhead: this is cognition. The evolution of the world from the least to the most perfect is traced in the Timaeus. An ascending process is represented. The beings develop. God reveals Himself in this development. The process of creation is a resurrection of God from the tomb. Man makes his appearance in this stream of evolution. Plato shows that with man something special has arrived. True, the whole world is divine. And man is no more divine than the other beings. But in the other beings God is concealed, and in man He is manifest. The end of the Timaeus reads: “And now at length we may say that our discourse concerning the Universe has reached its termination. For this our Cosmos has received the living creatures both mortal and immortal and been thereby fulfilled; it being itself a visible Living Creature embracing the visible creatures, a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible, most great and good and fair and perfect in its creation—even this one and only begotten world.”⁴⁵

[ 8 ] But this one and only begotten world would be incomplete if it did not have among its images the image of the Creator Himself. Only out of the soul of man can this image be born. It is not the Father Himself who can be born of man, but the Son, the offspring of God living in the soul, who is like unto the Father.

[ 9 ] Philo of whom it was said that he was Plato reborn, called the wisdom born of man, the “Son of God;”⁴⁶ this wisdom lives in the soul and contains the intelligence that exists in the world. This world-intelligence, the Logos, appears as the book in which “has been inscribed and engraved the formation of the world.”⁴⁷ Further it appears as the Son of God, who “followed the ways of his Father, and shaped the different kinds, looking to the archetypal patterns which that Father supplied.”⁴⁸ In the manner of Plato, Philo speaks of this Logos as the Christ: “For since God is the first and sole King of the universe, the road leading to Him, being a king's road, is rightly called royal. This road you must take to be philosophy ... the philosophy which the ancient circle of ascetics pursued in hard-fought contest, eschewing the soft enchantments of pleasure, engaged with a fine severity in the study of what is good and fair. This royal road then, which we have just said to be true and genuine philosophy, is called in the Law, the utterance and word of God.”⁴⁹

[ 10 ] Philo experiences this as an initiation when he sets forth on the path to meet the Logos who is, for him, the Son of God. “I feel no shame in recording my own experience, a thing I know from its having happened to me a thousand times. On some occasions, after making up my mind to follow the usual course of writing on philosophical tenets, and knowing definitely the substance of what I was to set down, I have found my understanding incapable of giving birth to a single idea, and have given up without accomplishing anything, reviling my understanding for its self-conceit, and filled with amazement at the might of Him Who is, to Whom is due the opening and closing of the womb of the soul. On other occasions, I have approached my work empty and suddenly become full, the ideas falling in a shower from above and being sown invisibly, so that under the influence of the divine possession I have been filled with corybantic frenzy and been unconscious of anything, place, persons present, myself, words spoken, lines written. For I obtained language, ideas, an enjoyment of light, keenest vision, pellucid distinctness of objects, such as might be received through the inner eye as the result of clearest cognition.”⁵⁰ This is the description of a path to cognition which is so arranged that whoever takes this path is conscious that he becomes one with the divine when the Logos comes to life within him. This is clearly expressed in the words: “When the mind is mastered by the love of the divine, when it strains its powers to reach the inmost shrine, when it puts forth every effort and ardor on its forward march, under the divine impelling force it forgets all else, forgets itself and fixes its thoughts and memories on Him alone Whose attendant and servant it is, to Whom it dedicates incense, the incense of consecrated virtues.”⁵¹ For Philo there are only two paths. Either man can pursue the material world which is offered by perception and intellect, but then he is limited to his own personality, he withdraws from the cosmos; or he can become conscious of the all-embracing cosmic powers, experiencing the eternal within his personality. “One who runs away from God takes refuge in himself. There are two minds, that of the universe, which is God, and the individual mind. One who flees from his own mind flees for refuge to the Mind of all things. For one who abandons his own mind acknowledges all that makes the human mind its standard to be naught, and he refers all things to God. On the other hand, one who runs away from God declares Him to be the cause of nothing, and himself to be the cause of all things that come into being.”⁵²

[ 12 ] Plato's “dialogue on love,” the Symposium, also describes an “initiation.” Here love appears as the herald of wisdom. If wisdom, the Eternal Word (Logos), is the Son of the Eternal Creator of the world, then love has a maternal relationship with this Logos. Before it is possible for even a spark of the light of wisdom to light up in the human soul, there must be an unconscious longing, which draws the soul toward the divine. Man must be drawn unconsciously toward that which, when raised into consciousness, subsequently brings him supreme joy. What Heraclitus designates as the daemon in man is united with the idea of love. In the Symposium men of the most varied status, possessing the most varied views on life, speak of love; the man in the street, the politician, the scientist, the poet of comedy, Aristophanes and the serious poet, Agathon. Each has his conception of love according to how he experiences life. How they express themselves reveals the stage at which their “daemon” stands. Through love one being is drawn to another. The manifold variety of things into which the divine unity is diffused strives through love toward oneness and harmony. Love therefore has a divine quality. Hence each man is capable of understanding it only insofar as he has partaken of this divine quality. After these men, representing varying stages of maturity, have declared their views on love, Socrates takes up the discussion. He considers love from the viewpoint of a thinker capable of cognition. For him love is not a god. But it is something leading man to God. Eros, love, is no god for him. God is perfect, and therefore possesses beauty and goodness. But Eros is only the longing for beauty and goodness. Therefore he stands between man and God. He is a “daemon,” a mediator between the earthly and the divine. It is significant that Socrates does not pretend to give his thoughts when he speaks about love. He says he is only recounting a revelation about it, which a woman gave him. He has conceived an idea of love's nature through mantic art.^c7 The priestess Diotima awakened in Socrates the daemonic force which was to lead him to the divine. She “initiated” him. This passage in the Symposium is most revealing. We must ask, Who is this “wise woman” who awakens the daemon in Socrates? We should not think of mere poetic fantasy here. No actual wise woman could have awakened the daemon in the soul if the force for this awakening were not within the soul itself. We must seek this “wise woman” in the soul of Socrates himself. There must, however, be a basis which allows what brings the daemon to birth in the soul to appear as a being in external reality. This force cannot work in the same way as the forces we can observe in the soul as belonging to it and at home with it. We see that it is the force of the soul before it has received wisdom, which Socrates represents as the “wise woman.” It is the maternal principle which gives birth to the Son of God, Wisdom, the Logos. The unconscious force of the soul is presented as a feminine element, which allows the divine to enter consciousness. The soul which as yet lacks wisdom is the mother of what leads to the divine. This leads us to an important idea of mysticism. The soul is recognized as the mother of the divine. With the inevitability of a natural force it unconsciously leads man toward the divine. This point throws light on the conception held in the Mysteries regarding Greek mythology. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man regards as his gods what he himself creates in the form of pictures. But he must progress to another idea. He must transform into pictures of the gods the divine force present in himself which is active before the creation of these pictures of the gods. The mother of the divine appears behind the divine, and this is none other than the original force in the human soul. Man places goddesses beside his gods. Let us look at the myth of Dionysus in the light of the above. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. Zeus tears the premature infant from the mother as she lies slain by lightning, keeping him in his own thigh until he is mature. Hera, the mother of the gods, stirs up the Titans against Dionysus. They dismember the boy. But Pallas Athene rescues the still beating heart and brings it to Zeus. Thereupon Zeus begets the son for the second time. In this myth we have an exact description of a process which takes place in the depths of the human soul. Whoever wishes to speak in the sense of the Egyptian priest who instructs Solon about the nature of a myth could speak as follows: What you tell us, that Dionysus, the son of a god and a mortal mother, is dismembered and is born again, may sound like a fable, but what is true about it is the birth of the divine and its destiny in the human soul. The divine unites with the temporal-earthly soul of man. As soon as this divine element, Dionysus, comes to life, the soul experiences a great longing for its true spiritual status. The consciousness which once again appears in the image of a female divinity, Hera, is jealous of the birth out of a better consciousness. It stirs up the lower nature of man—the Titans. The child of god, still immature, is dismembered. It is present in man as a dismembered material-intellectual science. But if in man sufficient higher wisdom (Zeus) is at work, it cherishes and cares for the immature child, which then is born again as the second son of god (Dionysus). Thus out of science, out of the dismembered divine force in man, is born the harmonizing wisdom, which is the Logos, the son of God and of a mortal mother, who is the transitory soul of man striving unconsciously for the divine. We are far from the spiritual reality represented in all this as long as we see in it only a mere process of the soul and take it as a picture of this process. In this spiritual reality the soul does not merely experience something within itself; it is completely disconnected from itself and participates in a cosmic process which in truth takes place outside itself and not within it.

[ 13 ] Platonic wisdom and Greek mythology unite; so, equally, do Mystery wisdom and mythology. The gods that they created were the objects of the religion of the people; the history of their coming into existence was the secret of the Mysteries. No wonder that it was accounted dangerous to “betray” the Mysteries. This meant “betraying” the origin of the gods of the people. And the right understanding of this origin is wholesome; misunderstanding is destructive.

• 30. Plato, Epistle VII, 341 C.
• 31. Plato, Phaedo, 58 E.
• 32. Plato, Phaedo, 64 A.
• 33. Plato, Phaedo, 64 D.
• 34. Plato, Phaedo, 65 B.
• 35. Plato, Phaedo, 66 A, 67 D, 67 E.
• 36. Plato, Phaedo, 68 C.
• 37. Plato, Phaedo, 79 D, 80 B, 81 A.
• 38. Plato, Phaedo, 106 B.
• 39. Plato, Timaeus, 27 C.
• 40. Plato, Timaeus, 48 D.
• 41. Plato, Timaeus, 22 C, 22 D.
• 42. Plato, Timaeus, 28 C.
• 43. Plato, Timaeus, 36—“... like a great cross †.” Here Plato refers to the Greek letter &Chi, “Chi.”
• 44. Plato, Cratylus 400 BC: “... some say it (the body) is the tomb of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life.” The Greek words for “body” and “tomb” suggest a mystical similarity between the two. This was a part of the Orphic doctrine.
• 45. Plato, Timaeus, 92 C.
• 46. Philo of Alexandria, De Profugis, I, 562. Philo or otherwise known as Philo Judaeus, a Jewish philosopher, was born at Alexandria in Egypt, c. 10 B.C., where he spent most of his life. In the year 40 A.D., he headed a Jewish embassy to Rome to petition the Emperor Gaius to refrain from requiring homage from the Jews as a divinity. Eusebius and other Church Fathers advanced a tradition that in Rome Philo met St. Peter, but this is not confirmed. Philo was the most important representative of Hellenistic Judaism, and his many writings extant are brilliant expositions of the Mosaic law and the Jewish religion.
• 47. Philo, Legum allegoriarum, Allegorical Interpretation, Lib. I, 19. (Includes commentary on Genesis 2:1–17)—“Book is Moses' name for the Logos of God in which has been inscribed and engraved the formation of the world.”
• 48. Philo, De confusione linguarum, The Confusion of Tongues, 63. A part of Philo's Allegories of the Sacred Laws, though published under a separate title. The work contains a commentary on Genesis 11:1–9
• 49. Philo, De poseritate, Caini, The Posterity and Exile of Cain, 101, 102. A part of Philo's Allegories of the Sacred Laws, this work includes commentary on Genesis 4:16–25.
• 50. Philo, De migratione Abrahami, The Migration of Abraham, 34, 35. Commentary on Genesis 12:1–6.
• 51. Philo, Quod a Deo mittantur somnia, On Dreams, that they are sent by God, II, 232. A commentary on the two dreams of Jacob, Genesis 28 and 29, and Book II refers to dreams of Joseph, the chief butler, the chief baker, and Pharaoh, Genesis 37, 40, 41.
• 52. Philo, Legum allegoriarum, Allegorical Interpretation, III, 29. See Note 47, above.

  [ 11 ] Plato's world-conception aims to be a form of cognition which in its whole nature is religion. It brings cognition into relationship with the highest man can reach through his feelings. Plato allows cognition to be valid only when it completely satisfies man's feelings. Then it is not pictorial knowledge; it is the content of life. It is a higher man in man. The personality is but an image of this higher man. In man himself the superior, the archetypal man is born. And with this another secret of the Mysteries is expressed in Plato's philosophy. The Church Father Hippolytus points to this secret: “This is the great and ineffable mystery of the Samothracians (the guardians of a particular Mystery-cult) which it is permissible only for the initiated to know. For the Samothracians expressly hand down, in the Mysteries that are celebrated among them, that Adam is the archetypal man.”

• 53. Hippolytus, born probably 2nd half of 2nd century A.D. in Rome; according to legend he was a Roman soldier converted by St. Lawrence. Died c. 326 in Rome. Steiner's reference is to Hippolytus' The Refutation of All Heresies, Book V, ch. 3. Otherwise known as the Philosophumena, Book I was long printed with the works of Origen, Books 2 and 3 have been lost, and Books 4 through 10 were found in ms. form at Mount Athos by a Greek scholar in 1842.
• c7. In ancient mysticism “Mantic” signifies everything relevant to knowledge gained through “spiritual eyes.” On the other hand, “Telestic” is the indication of the paths which lead to initiation.

It relates to an elementary need of every human soul that on the last day of the year our thoughts should dwell on the transitory nature of time. For this need we may well look back in self-examination to find what has entered our external life and also our soul during the course of the year. We may well cast a glance back to the progress we have made in life, to the fruits of the experiences life has offered us. From such retrospect some degree of light may fall upon feelings that made our life seem more or less worthwhile, more or less difficult, or more or less satisfactory. We are indeed never able to observe our life as if it were the life of an isolated human being; we are obliged to consider it in its connection with the world as a whole and mankind as a whole. And if we are earnestly striving for an anthroposophical view of the world, we will feel the need with particular insistence to consider our relation to the world again and again at this constant turning-point of time, this ending of one year and beginning of another.

Since, however, our present review takes place at a time when there is so much turmoil in our souls, when all that mankind has suffered in these last four-and-a-half years is still burdening us, when as anthroposophists we observe our relation to the world and to humanity against the background of unprecedented world events, then our survey of the past year takes on quite a special character.

The thoughts I particularly wish to bring you this evening may perhaps be looked upon as an insertion, irrelevant to our previous context. At the moment we are holding before our mind's eye the transitory nature of time and of events in time, and how all this affects the human soul. But as students of spiritual science we cannot forget that when we look upon time flowing by and upon our experiences during its passing, we meet with many difficulties. Those especially whose hearts and minds are given over seriously to anthroposophical thought confront these difficulties in their observation of the world.

You all know the strange experience people have who have not travelled very much in trains. As they look out the window they receive the impression that the whole landscape is moving, hurrying past them. Of course it is they themselves who are moving with the train, but they ascribe the movement to the land the train is passing through. Gradually by accustoming themselves to their situation they get the better of this illusion and put in its place the correct idea of the sights they see through the window. Now, fundamentally but in a more complicated way, we ourselves—where the affairs of the world are concerned—are in a similar situation to those good people in the train. They are deceived about what is at rest in the landscape and what is moving. We sit within our physical and etheric bodily nature that was given to us as a kind of vehicle when we left the spiritual realms to come into physical existence between birth and death, and in this vehicle we hurry through the events of this world. We observe the world by means of this physical vehicle in which we rush along the course of earthly existence. And the world as we observe it in this way is in most cases an illusory experience. So that really we may venture on the following comparison: we see the world as falsely as the man in the train who imagines the landscape is rushing past him. But to correct the illusory view of the world to which we are prone is not so easy as correcting the illusion one has while looking out of the train window.

It is at this special moment of New Year's Eve, dear friends, when we are still within the year in which we have had to correct so many current conceptions of the world, that such a thought may enter your souls. You know what I have told you of the experiences we would have if we were to live consciously the life from childhood to a ripe age that now we live unconsciously. I have told you how the human being matures in definite life periods, so that at definite stages he is able to know certain things out of his own power. People have to give up all manner of illusions concerning the various conditions of maturity in human life—for the reasons I have just been mentioning.

There are two kinds of illusions to which we are most subject in life, illusions that impress themselves upon our minds at such a time as this, as we glance over the past year and toward the coming one. These illusions arise from our having no idea in ordinary consciousness of how we relate to certain conditions of the outer world. This outer world is not only an aggregate of things kept in order in space; it is also a succession of events in time. Through your senses you observe the outer events taking place around you, in so far as these are natural events. You observe in the same way natural events in the human kingdom. The world is engaged in the processes of becoming. This is not generally recognized, but it is so. The processes go on at a definite speed. There is always a certain speed in what is coming about. But then turn your gaze from these events to what goes on within yourself. You know how processes go on in you both consciously and unconsciously. You do not stand in the world as a finished, self-contained spatial being, but you stand within continual happening, continual becoming, within processes continually going on and continually proceeding at a definite speed.

Let us consider the speed at which we ourselves hurry through the world in relation to the speed belonging to natural events. Natural science pays no heed to the tremendous difference existing between the speed of our own Passage through the world and the speed of natural events. When we compare the part of our life that is bound up with sense observation of the outer world and the drawing of our life experiences from such observation, when we consider this part of our life in its processes of arising and passing away and compare it to the external natural events toward which our senses are directed, we find that our passage through the stream of time is far slower than that of natural events. This is important for us to bear in mind. Events in nature take place comparatively quickly; we go more slowly. Perhaps you will remember that I referred to this difference when I gave a lecture at one time not far away, at Liestal, on “Human Life from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science.” From birth to change of teeth takes seven years for us human beings, that is, for the development of the physical body. Then we need another seven years for the development of our etheric body. Comparing ourselves with the plant kingdom, for instance—which can be regarded for the moment as corresponding to our etheric body—we can say that it takes just one year for the plant kingdom, represented by an annual plant, to go through all the development that can be gone through in the etheric body. We human beings need seven years for what the annual plant goes through in a single year. In other words, external nature, as revealed in the plant world, hurries along seven times more quickly than ourselves. And where the etheric world is concerned, everything is subject to the laws revealed in the plant kingdom.

You will see the significance of this, dear friends, if you reflect, for instance, on how things appear when you are traveling in a slow train beside another, faster train going in the same direction. When you yourself are traveling along slowly, the speed of the other train will not seem to you as great as if you were standing still. Or if you are traveling in a train fairly fast, but one that is still going more slowly than an express train, the express will appear to you quite slow. But go just as fast as the express and you will stay beside it. Thus the picture you have of the other train changes according to the speed at which you yourself are moving.

Now, the speed about which we want to talk here, that is, the speed at which we let our etheric body flow along, has to do with much more than merely spatial relations. It has to do with our whole judgment and experience of, and our whole attitude toward, the outer world. The spiritual scientist able to investigate these matters will say: How would it be if human beings were differently organized? if, for instance, we were so organized that we needed only one year to pass from change-of-teeth to puberty? How would it be if we had exactly the same speed as everything in outer nature that is subject to the laws of etheric life? if we got our second teeth in our first year of life, and by the end of our second year were as advanced as we are now at puberty at the age of fourteen or fifteen? Well, dear friends, then in the course of our own life we would be entirely within the course of natural events in so far as they are subject to the etheric life. We would no longer be able to distinguish ourselves from nature. For in reality we are distinguished from nature through the fact of having a different speed in moving forward through the stream of time. Otherwise we would take it for granted that we belonged to nature. And one thing above all must be pointed out: if we human beings were to parallel the speed of events in external nature, we could never become ill from an inner cause. For an illness coming to man from within actually has its origin in the difference in speed of human beings from that of natural events subject to the etheric life. Thus our human life would be quite different if we were not distinguished from the outer world by living seven times more slowly.

So we look back over the year on this New Year's Eve unaware that in our experience during the year we have fallen out of the life of the world. We first come to realize this when after having lived a fairly good part of our life, we begin to carry out repeatedly and really earnestly these New Year reflections. People who can judge these things and who practice this retrospect regularly, will agree with me out of their quite ordinary life-experience that by the age, say, of fifty, after constant practice of this retrospect, we are obliged to admit that we have never actually drawn out of the year what it is possible to draw out. In many ways we leave unused the experiences that could have enriched us. We learn seven times less than we could learn from nature if we did not go through life seven times more slowly than nature herself. Upon arriving at our fiftieth year we have to say to ourselves: Had you actually been able to make full use of each year by absorbing everything that the year wanted to give you, then you would really only need to be seven or eight years old, at the most ten or twelve; for during that much time you would have sucked out everything that has in fact taken you five decades to absorb.

But there is something else. We would never be able to perceive that the world is a material world if we had the same speed of movement. Because we do have a different speed, the world outside, moving more quickly, appears to us as material while our own life appears to us as soul and spirit. If we were to move forward with the same speed as external nature, there would be no distinction between our soul-spiritual character and the course of outer nature. We would consider ourselves part of outer nature and experience everything as having the same soul-spiritual significance as ourselves. We would be fitted into the world quite differently. When we look back over the year on New Year's Eve we are deceived by reason of our own speed being so much slower than that of the world. For although we may look back carefully, much escapes us that would not if we were proceeding at the same pace as the world. This, my dear friends, is an undertone arising from the ground of anthroposophy, that should permeate the serious mood that befits such retrospect on the part of those dedicated to spiritual science. It should tell us that we human beings must look for other approaches to the world than those that can only be found on the external path of life, for that way only leads us to illusions.

This is one illusion. In confronting the world with our senses we move much more slowly through the world than does external nature.

But there is still another illusion. It confronts us when we reflect upon all that lights up our thinking, all that lends wings to our thinking, in so far as this arises from within us. It confronts us when we observe the kind of thinking that depends upon our will. The outer world of the senses does not indeed give us what it could give us in response to our will. We have first to go to meet the things, or events come to meet us. That is different from when we grasp our concepts and ideas as they throw their faint light out of our will. This again has another speed. When we consider our soul-life in so far as it is a life of thought, though connected with our will, our desires and wishes, we find that we have a different speed from the speed of the world we are passing through between birth and death. And if we investigate the matter anthroposophically we come upon the curious fact that in our thoughts, in so far as they depend upon our will, we move much more quickly than the external world.

Thus you see that in all that is connected with our senses we move more slowly, in all that depends upon our thinking we move more quickly, than the pace of life outside us. Actually, we move so quickly in our thoughts—to the extent that they are governed by our will, our longing, our wishes—that we have the feeling, even though unconsciously, (and this is true of everyone) that the year is really much too long. For our sense perception it is seven times too short. For our comprehension through thought, in so far as thoughts depend on our wishes and longings, we have the deep unconscious feeling that the year is much too long. We would like it to be much shorter, convinced that we would be able in a far shorter time to understand the thoughts grasped from our own wishes, our own will. In the depths of every human soul there is something that is never brought into consciousness but that is working in the whole soul experience, the whole soul-mood, and coloring all our subjective life. It is something that tells us that so far as our thoughts are concerned, it would suffice us to have a year of only Sundays and no weekdays at all. For in this kind of thinking a human being lives in such a way that actually he only wishes to experience the Sundays. Even if he is no longer conscious of it, he thinks of the weekdays as holding him up; their place in his life is only as something of which he has no need for his progress in thinking. When we are concerned with thoughts dependent on our will, on our longings and wishes, we are soon finished; in this sphere we move quickly. This is one of the reasons for our egotism. And it is one of the reasons for our obstinacy about what we ourselves think.

If you were not organized, dear friends, in the way I have just described, if with your thoughts you would really follow the course of the external world and not go forward so fast—seven times as fast as the outer world, if you did not only want to use Sundays, then your soul would be so attuned to the world that your own opinion would never seem more valuable to you than anyone else's. You would be able to adjust yourself easily to another's opinion. Just think how large a part it plays in us as human beings, this insistence of ours on the value of our own opinion! From a certain point of view we always think others are in the wrong, and they only become right when we feel disposed to consider them so.

Human beings are indeed curiously contradictory creatures! On the one hand, in so far as we have senses we move much more slowly than the outer world; on the other hand, in so far as we have will in our thinking, we move much more swiftly. So our view is blurred when we look out upon the world, because we are always given to illusion. We do not realize that we have fallen away from nature and are therefore able to become ill. Nor do we realize how we acquire materialistic ideas about the world. Such materialistic ideas are just as false as the idea that the landscape is rushing past us in the opposite direction to our train. We only have these false conceptions because we are moving seven times more slowly than the world. And then also, we cherish the secret thought: if only it were always Sunday!—because, comparatively speaking, the weekdays seem quite unnecessary for the external ideas we want to form about the world out of our wishes and out of our will. Everyone has this secret thought. The human soul-attitude is not always described so truthfully as Bismarck once described it. Bismarck made a curious remark about the last Hohenzollern emperor. While expressing his opinion about what would happen to Germany because of this emperor, he said, “This man wants to live as if every day were his birthday. Most of us are glad to get our birthday out of the way with all its good wishes and excitements, but he wants a birthday all the time!” That was Bismarck's careful characterization at the beginning of the nineties of the last century. Now, it is human egotism that makes our birthday different from all other days. No one really wants to have a birthday all the time, but from a certain point of view one would like it always to be Sunday—one could easily manage with that much knowledge! And although it wears a deceptive mask, much in our mood of soul rests upon this wish of ours to have only Sundays.

In former epochs of evolution the illusions arising from these things were corrected in manifold ways by atavistic clairvoyance. They are corrected least of all in our age. What will correct them, however, what must arise, what I ask you to take into your souls today as a kind of social impulse, is this, that we go deeply into spiritual science as it is intended here, that we do not take it as theory but in the living way I have often described. We then have the possibility within spiritual science of correcting inwardly, in our souls, the illusions originating in those two sources of error. Anthroposophical spiritual science—and let us be particularly clear about this at the turning-point of the year—is something that lets us experience the world outside us in accordance with reality, the world that otherwise one does not experience truly, due to one's going through the world too slowly. Everything depends, actually, on how we ourselves relate to things. Just think for a moment how everything does depend upon our own attitude toward the world! To become clear about these things we should sometimes hold ideas before our souls that as hypotheses are quite impossible. Think how the physicist tells you that certain notes—C - D - E, say, in a certain octave—have a certain number of vibrations, that is, the air vibrates a certain number of times. You perceive nothing of the vibrations; you just hear the notes. But imagine you were organized in such a way (this is of course an impossible idea but it helps us to make something else intelligible)—imagine that you could perceive each separate vibration in the air: then you would hear nothing of the notes. The speed of your own life depends entirely on how you perceive things. The world appears to us as it does according to the speed we ourselves have as compared to the world speed. But spiritual science makes us aware of existing reality, apart from our personal relation to the world.

We speak in anthroposophy, or spiritual science, of how our earth has gradually developed by first going through a Saturn period, then a Sun period, and a Moon period, finally arriving at this Earth period. But naturally everything continues to be present. In the period in which we now live, our Earth existence, other worlds are preparing their Saturn period, still others their Sun period. This may be observed by spiritual science. Even now our Saturn existence is still here. We know that our earth has gone beyond that stage; other worlds have just reached it. One can observe how the Saturn stage arises. The power to observe it, however, depends upon first changing the speed in which one will follow the events; otherwise they cannot be seen. Thus spiritual science in a certain connection enables us to live with what is true and real, with what actually takes place in the world. And if we take it up in a living way—this anthroposophical spiritual science which I have described as the new creative work of the Spirits of Personality—if we do not merely take it as a work of man for our time but as a revelation from heavenly heights, if we receive the impulses of spiritual science into ourselves livingly, then the Spirits of Personality will do what is so necessary for our time: that is, they will carry us out beyond the illusions caused by our speed being different from that of the world. They will unite us properly with the world so that, at least in our feelings about the world, we will be able to correct many things.

Then we can experience the results of our spiritual scientific striving. In the course of the past year I have mentioned many of them. Tonight in this New Year's Eve retrospect I want only to remind you of something I have spoken of before from another aspect: that spiritual science, when taken up earnestly, keeps us young in a certain way, does not let us grow old as we would without it. This is one of the results of spiritual science. And it is of quite special importance for the present time. It means that we are able, however old we may be, to learn something in the way we learnt as a child. Usually when someone arrives at his fiftieth year, he feels from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness that he has lived in the world a long time. Ask your contemporaries whether at fifty they still feel inclined to do much in the way of learning! Even if they say “yes,” notice whether they really do it. A lively acceptance of anthroposophical concepts and ideas can gradually confer on people of a ripe age the power still to learn as children learn—in other words, to become increasingly young in soul—not abstractedly as often happens, but in such a way that they are actually able to learn just as formerly they learnt when eight or nine years old. Thereby the effect of the difference between our speed and that of the world is in a certain way adjusted. Thereby, though we may be of mature age chronologically, our soul does not allow us to be old; our soul makes us a child in a certain sense, makes us behave toward the world as a child. When we are at the age of fifty we can say to ourselves: by living more slowly than the external world we have actually only received into ourselves what we would have received in seven or ten years if we had lived at the same pace as the world. But by remaining fresh we have kept the power to behave as we would have behaved at seven, eight, nine or ten years. That makes a balance. And—because things always do balance in the world—this brings about the other adjustment: the reducing, in a way, what has a greater speed, namely, arbitrary thinking, those Sunday wishes as I described them. This will make it possible not always to want it to be Sunday but to use the weekdays too for learning, making a school of the whole of life.

It is true that I am suggesting a kind of ideal to you, one that is strictly anthroposophical. But perhaps, dear friends, many of you will have had deeper experiences on the last four New Year's Eves than on former ones. Anyone, however, studying world events very seriously may well regard this present New Year's Eve, in comparison to the last four, the gravest of them all. It demands of us that we enter deeply into world events, uniting our thoughts with all the ideas we can grasp through our relation to spiritual science, concerning what is necessary for the world now and in the nearest future. With the help of spiritual science we should stop sleeping in regard to world events. We must become fully awake. A mere glance today will show you that people are fast asleep. Compare modern life with the life of former ages, and you will see how much it has changed for young and old alike. How does this materialistic age affect youth today in an overwhelming majority of cases? Truly, the ideals of our modern youth are no longer as fresh, as bright, as alive, as they were in earlier times. Youth has become a youth that makes demands. There is no great desire on the part of youth to direct their soul-mood to looking forward in life, to painting ideals so full of light for the future that they are able to ennoble life. Already in youth there is the wish to exploit what they find in life. But this results in the old being unable to receive what can only be suitably received during old age. Youth uses up its forces, and old age leaves the treasures of life strewn on its path. Youth is no longer sufficiently hopeful, and old age has a resignation that is not real. Today youth no longer turns to the old to ask: will the young dreams that flow out of my heart be realized? Age hardly finds it possible today to answer: Yes, they will be realized. Too frequently it says: I too have dreamt, and alas, my youthful dreams have not been fulfilled.—Life has a sobering effect upon us.

All these things are bound up with the misfortunes of our time. They are all connected with what has so profoundly shattered mankind. When you look at them carefully, however, you will feel the need for anthroposophical impulses to be deeply inscribed in your souls. For if we wish to be awake at this turning-point of the year, we must ask ourselves: What does this era really signify? What can the future bring? What can possibly evolve out of all that civilized mankind has undergone in the chaos of these last years? If we face these questions as wide-awake human beings, then another question arises, one that is deeply connected with all our possible hopes for the future of mankind. These hopes, I could also say these anxieties, have often faced us in recent years, especially when we were giving our attention to the human beings who are now four, five, six, seven or eight years old. We who are older have much behind us that can support our souls against what is coming. There was much in the past that gave us joy, a joy that will not be experienced by those who are now five or six or eight or nine.

But when we look back over the year, dear friends, on this New Year's Eve, we find nothing in the world is absolute. Everything appears to be an illusion to us, because on the one hand we go too slowly, on the other hand too quickly in relation to the world. Nothing is absolute; all is relative. And, as you will see at once, the question that arises for us is not merely theoretical, it is a very real question: When people wonder about the future of mankind, how does it look in their souls if they have no connection with the ideas of spiritual science? One can, of course, sleep; but even if one is unconscious, this implies a lack of responsibility toward human progress. One can also be awake, and we should be awake.Then that question can still be asked concerning people's attitude in general: How is mankind's future regarded by the human souls who are not able to approach spiritual science? People of this kind are only too numerous in the world. I am referring not only to the dried-up, self-satisfied materialists, but to those countless others who today would like to be idealists in their own fashion but have a certain fear of the real spiritual. They are the abstract idealists who talk of all kinds of beautiful things, of “Love your enemy,” and of splendid social reforms, but who never succeed in coming to grips concretely with the world. They are idealists from weakness, not from spiritual vision. They have no desire to see the spirit; they want to keep it at a distance.

Tonight at this turning-point of time, I should like to put the following question: When a man of this kind is sincere in the belief that he lives for the spirit, when he is convinced of the creative weaving of the spirit throughout the world, but does not have the courage to meet it in all its concrete reality as it wants to reveal itself today through spiritual science: if such a man is a true representative of the whole, or even part, of the modern world, what kind of picture do we have of him? I don't want to give you an abstract description; I would rather give you one taken from the newspapers of the world, of a man whom I have already mentioned in another connection. It is a man who for the reasons just described holds back from taking up spiritual science, believing that he can attain social ideals without it, believing that he can speak of human progress and the true being of man without taking up spiritual science, a man who from his own standpoint is honest. I have often mentioned his name—Walther Rathenau—and I have pointed out what is decidedly weak about him; you will remember, however, that I once referred favorably to his “Critique of the Times.” He is so eminently a type, indeed, one of the best examples of the people of our day who are idealists, people who hold the belief that a spiritual something pervades and permeates the world, but who are not able to find it in its concreteness, that spiritual reality which alone can bring healing for all that is now pulsing so destructively through the world. It would be helpful, therefore, to learn how such a man regards the present course of the world from his standpoint outside spiritual science, what such a man says to himself in all honesty. That is always instructive, my dear friends. I would like, therefore—because all of you may not have read it—to bring before our souls the message Walther Rathenau²⁰ has just written to the world at large.

He writes the following: “A German calls to all the nations. With what right? With the right of one who foretold the war, who foresaw how the war would end, who recognized the catastrophe that was coming, who braved mockery, scorn, and doubt and for four long years exhorted those in power to seek reconciliation. With the right of one who for decades carried in his heart the premonition of complete collapse, who knows it is far more serious than either friends or enemies think it to be. Furthermore, with the right of one who has never been silent when his own people were in the wrong and who dares to stand up for the rights of his people.

“The German people are guiltless. In innocence they have done wrong. Out of the old, childlike dependence they have in all innocence placed themselves at the service of their lords and masters. They did not know that these lords and masters, though outwardly the same, had changed inwardly. They knew nothing of the independent responsibility a people can have. They never thought of revolution. They put up with militarism, they put up with feudalism, letting themselves be led and organized. They allowed themselves to kill and be killed as ordered, and believed what was said to them by their hereditary leader. The German people have innocently done wrong by believing. Our wrong will weigh heavily upon us. If the Powers will look into our hearts they will recognize our guiltlessness.”

You see here a man pointing to what Judaism and Christianity point, namely, a Providence—Who is grasped, however, in an abstract form.

“ Germany is like those artificially fertile lands that flourish as long as they are watered by a canal system. If a single sluice bursts, all life is destroyed and the land becomes a desert.

“We have food for half the population. The other half have to work for the wages of other nations, buying raw materials and selling manufactured goods. If either the work or the return on the work is withheld, they die or lose their house. By working to the extremity of their powers our people saved five or six milliards a year. This went into the building of plants and factories, railways and harbors, and the carrying on of research. This enabled us to maintain a profit and a normal growth. If we are to be deprived of our colonies, our empire, our metals, our ships, we will become a powerless, indigent country. If it comes to that—well, our forefathers were also poor and powerless, and they served the spirit of the earth better than we. If our imports and exports are restricted—and, contrary to the spirit of Wilson's Fourteen Points, we are threatened with having to pay three or four times the amount of the damage in Belgium and northern France, which probably runs to twenty milliards—well, what happens then? Our trade will be without profit. We will work to live miserably with nothing to spare. We will be unable to maintain things, renew things, develop things, and the country with its buildings, its streets, its organization, will go to rack and ruin. Technology will lose ground; research will come to an end. We have the choice of unproductive trade or emigration or profoundest misery.

“It means extermination. We will not complain but accept our destiny and silently go under. The best of us will neither emigrate nor commit suicide but share in this fate with our fellows. Most of the people have not yet realized their fate; they do not yet know that they and their children have been sacrificed. Even the other peoples of the earth do not yet realize that this is a question of the very life of an entire race of human beings. Perhaps this is not even realized by those with whom we have been fighting. Some of them say ‘Justice!’, others say ‘Reparation!’; there are even those who say ‘Vengeance!’ Do they realize that what they are calling ‘Justice,’ ‘Reparation,’ ‘Vengeance’ is murder?

“We who go forward mutely but not blindly to meet our destiny, now once more raise our voice and make our plaint for the whole world to hear. In our profound and solemn suffering, in the sadness of separation, in the heat of lament, we call to the souls of the peoples of the earth—those who were neutral, those who were friendly, those belonging to free countries beyond the seas, to the young builders of new states. We call to the souls of the nations who were our enemies, peoples of the present day and those who will come after us:

“We are being annihilated. The living body and spirit of Germany is being put to death. Millions of German human creatures are being driven to hunger and death, to homelessness, slavery and despair. One of the most spiritual peoples on the whole earth is perishing. Her mothers, her children, those still unborn, are being condemned to death.”

There is no passion, dear friends, in all this; it is shrewd forethought—dispassionately, intellectually calculated. The man is a genuine materialist able to assess the real conditions calmly and intellectually. He entertains no illusions, but from his own materialistic standpoint honestly faces the truth. He has thought it all out; it is not something that can be disproved by a few words or by feelings of sympathy or antipathy. It has been thought through by the dispassionate intellect of a man who for decades has been able to say “this will come,” who has also had the courage to say these things during the war.

It was to no avail. In Berlin and other places in Germany I always introduced into my lectures just what Rathenau was saying at the time.

“We, knowing, seeing, are being annihilated, exterminated, by those who also know and see. Not like the dull people of olden times who were led stupid and unsuspecting into banishment and slavery; and not by idolators who fancy they are doing honor to a Moloch. No, we are being annihilated by peoples who are our brothers, who have European blood, who acknowledge God and Christ upon Whom they have built their life and customs and moral foundations, peoples who lay claim to humanity, chivalry, and civilization, who deplore the shedding of human blood, who talk of ‘a just peace’ and ‘a League of Nations’ and take upon themselves the responsibility for the destiny of the entire world.

“Woe to those, and to the souls of those, who dare to give this blood-rule the name ‘justice’! Have courage, speak out, call it by its name—for its name is Vengeance!

“But I ask you, you spiritual men among all the peoples, priests of all the religions, and you who are scholars, statesmen, artists. I ask you, reverend Father, highest dignitary of the Catholic Church, I ask you in the name of God:

“Were it the last, most wretched of all nations, would it be right that for vengeance' sake one of the peoples of the earth should be exterminated by other peoples who are their brothers? Ought a living race of spiritual Europeans, with their children and those still unborn, ought they to be robbed of their spiritual and bodily existence, condemned to forced labor, cast out from the community of the living?

“If this monstrous thing comes to pass, in comparison with which this most terrible war was only a prelude, the world shall know what is happening, the world shall know what it is in the very act of perpetrating. It shall never dare to say: ‘We did not know this. We did not wish it.’ Before God, in the face of its own responsibility to eternity, it shall say openly, calmly, coldly: ‘We know it and we desire it.’

Rathenau also wishes mankind to awake and to see!

“Milliards! Fifty, a hundred, two hundred milliards—what is that? Is it a question of money?

“Money, the wealth or poverty of a man, these count for little. Every one of us will face poverty with joy and pride if it will save our country. Yet in the unfortunate language of economic thought we have no other way of expressing the living force of a people except in the wretched concept of millions and tens of millions. We do not measure a man's life-force according to the grams of blood he has, and yet we can measure the life-force of a nation according to the two or three hundred billion it possesses. Loss of fortune is then not only poverty and want but slavery, double slavery for a people having to buy half of what they need to sustain life. This is not the arbitrary, personal slavery of old that was either terrible or mild; this is the anonymous, systematic, scientific forced-labor between peoples. In the abstract concept of a hundred billion we find not money and well-being alone, but blood and freedom. The demand is not that of a merchant, ‘Pay me money!’ but Shylock's demand, ‘Give me the blood of your body!’ It is not a matter of the Stock Exchange; by the mutilation of the body of the state, by the withdrawal of land and power, it is life itself. Anyone coming to Germany in twenty years' time…”

What now follows is once more the result of cold intellectual foresight. This is not spoken in the way people speak who are asleep when they observe world events!

“In twenty years' time anyone coming to Germany who knew it as one of the most flourishing countries on the earth, will bow their heads in shame and grief. The great cities of antiquity, Babylon, Nineva, Thebes, were built of white clay. Nature let them fall into decay and leveled them to the ground, or rounded them off into hills. German cities will not survive as ruins but as half-destroyed stone blocks, still partly occupied by wretched people. A few quarters in a town will be alive, but everything bright, everything cheerful will have disappeared. A company of tired people move along the crumbling footpaths. Liquor joints are conspicuous by their lights. Country roads are in terrible condition, woods have been cut down, in the fields little grain is sprouting. Harbors, railways and canals have fallen into disrepair, and everywhere there stand as unhappy landmarks the high buildings of former greatness falling into ruin. And all around us are flourishing countries, old ones grown stronger and new ones in the brilliance and vigor of modern technique and power, nourished on the blood of this dying country, and served by its slave-driven sons. The German spirit that has sung and thought for the world becomes a thing of the past. A people God created to live, a people still young and vigorous, leads an existence of living death.

“There are Frenchmen who say, ‘Let this people die. No longer do we want a strong neighbor.’ There are Englishmen who say, ‘Let this people die. No longer do we want a rival on the continent.’ There are Americans who say, ‘Let this people die. No longer do we want an economic competitor.’—Are these persons really representative of their nations? No, indeed. All strong nations forswear fear and envy. Are those who thirst for vengeance voicing the feelings of their nations? Emphatically, no. This ugly passion is of short duration in civilized men.

“Nevertheless, if those who are fearful or envious or revengeful prevail for a single hour, in the hour of decision, and if the three great statesmen of their nations violently contend with one another, then destiny is fulfilled.

“Then the cornerstone of Europe's arch, once the strongest stone, is crushed; the boundaries of Asia are pushed forward to the Rhine; the Balkans reach out to the North Sea. And a despairing horde, a spirit alien to European ways, encamp before the gates of Western civilization, threatening the entrenched nations not with weapons but with deadly infection.

“Right and prosperity can never arise out of wrong.

“In a way that no wrong has ever yet been expiated, Germany is expiating the sin of its innocent dependence and irresponsibility. If, however, after calm and cool reflection the Western nations put Germany slowly to death out of foresight, interest or revenge, and call this ‘justice’ while announcing a new life for the peoples, a Peace of Reconciliation to last forever, and a League of Nations, then justice will never again be what it was and, in spite of all their triumphs, mankind will never again find happiness. A leaden weight will lie upon our planet and the coming race will be born with a conscience no longer clear. The stain of guilt, which now might still be wiped out, will then become ineradicable and lasting on the body of the earth. In the future, dissension and strife will become more bitter and disintegrating than ever before, drenched in a feeling of common wrongs. Never has such power, such responsibility, weighed upon the brows of a triumvirate. If the history of mankind has willed that three men in a single hour should make their decision concerning the fate of centuries and of millions of men on the earth, then it has willed this: that a single great question of faith should be addressed to the victorious civilized and religious nations. The question is: Humanity or power? reconciliation or vengeance? freedom or oppression?

“Think! consider! you people of every land! This hour is not only decisive for us Germans, it is decisive for you and us—for us all.

“If the decision is made against us we will shoulder our destiny and go to our earthly extermination. You will not hear us complain. But our plaint will be heard where no human voice has ever cried in vain.”

My dear friends, this is the product of sober intellectual foresight, most assuredly not arising from chauvinism but from materialistic thinking. I have brought it to you because we live in a world in which people are most disinclined, even today, to consider the gravity of the present situation. Plenty of people will celebrate this New Year's Eve not only as it has been celebrated during the last four years but also as it was celebrated before this catastrophe. And countless people will take it as disturbing their peace, as upsetting their carefree souls, if one merely draws their attention to the situation.

“Oh, it won't be as bad as all that!”—though it may not be put into words, this is what is inwardly felt, otherwise people would be judging the times differently.

For how many individuals will acknowledge the truth of what we have had to repeat over and over again during these years?—years in which we have always been hearing the following: “When peace comes, everything will be just the same as it used to be, this way and that way and the other way.” How many individuals are awake to what has had to be repeated so constantly: the impossible prospect of finding conditions again as people are still allowing themselves to picture them?

We are dealing here with matters that have been thoughtfully estimated. And things appear quite differently according to whether they are estimated in a spirit of materialism or from the standpoint of anthroposophical impulses. From an external view the statements seem so right! But since there is no prospect of individuals responding consciously to what Walther Rathenau has brought forward as a last-moment expedient—namely, that the peoples should consult their conscience—alas, this talk of conscience!—what can one say? it will certainly not be consulted! Outwardly that is the way events will happen.

One can see only one hope as one looks back at how this was all prepared in the past, certainly not by any particular nation but by the whole of civilized mankind. There is just one hope: to look back on this New Year's Eve to a great universal picture, to what has previously been experienced by mankind; to realize that in a certain sense men have now become sufficiently mature to bring this to an end; and to accept what the new Spirits of Personality now wish to bring down to earth from the heavenly heights. But here, dear friends, insight and will must meet. What the Spirits of Personality as new Creators are wishing to reveal will only be able to come into the world when it finds a fruitful soil in human hearts, human souls, human minds, when mankind is ready to accept the impulses of spiritual science. And what this prosaic materialistic mind has been saying about the material impulses that are actively working, is indeed correct. People should pay attention to what comes from a sober mind like Walther Rathenau—that is, the people who are asserting from a more frivolous standpoint what our times are going to bring forth. When people were in a state of utter intoxication and dreaming, when, if one speaks truly, they were talking complete nonsense—if they could only have looked ahead a little!—but they have stopped now, at least some of them—at that time one might have heard: Out of this war will come a new idealism, a new sense of religion. How often I have heard this! And it was being written over and over again, especially by professors, even professors of theology. You don't even have to go very far; it doesn't even have to be Sunday for you to find in less than ten minutes a theological professor announcing wise prophecies of this kind. But people are already talking differently. Some who have come to the top are saying that now a time of healthy atheism may well be coming, and mankind will be cured of the religion-game instigated in recent times so particularly by the poets and writers. Such opinions are already forthcoming. And they come from persons who should be listening to some of the things a man is saying who is able to judge soberly how reality is taking shape.

In response to all this one can only say: World affairs would indeed develop as we have just heard if only materialistic impulses were working in the world, in human heads and human hearts! If this were actually the case, truly not only Germany, Middle Europe and Russia would be in chains of frightful slavery but the whole civilized world would gradually be similarly enchained, never to know happiness again. For it is what has come from the past that has now made the world come to an end! New impulses do not come from that source. New impulses come from the spiritual world. They do not come, however, unless human beings go to meet them, unless they receive them with a free will. Deliverance can only come when there are human souls ready to meet the spirit, the spirit that will reveal itself in a new way through the Spirits of Personality. There must be human souls who will become creative through these very Time Spirits. There is no other way out. There are only two ways to be honest: either to speak as Walther Rathenau has spoken, or to point to the necessity of turning toward the spiritual world.

The latter way will be the subject of our New Year's Day reflections tomorrow.

Our survey on this New Year's Eve is not meant to be a mere comfortable transition into the new year. It should not be—for anyone who is awake. It should be taken in all earnestness. It should make us aware of what is lying in the womb of time if the Spirit-Child is not to be given its place there. A true perspective of the new year can only be experienced in the light of the spirit. Let us try at this moment between now and tomorrow to tune our souls to this serious mood. Tonight I would conclude only with an earnest word of direction. I myself do not yet wish to show you the actual way; I would only draw your attention to how this New Year's Eve has been received in the soul of an honest man who finds as he observes the world only material powers holding sway. It must be so regarded by the heads, the hearts, the minds and souls—if sincere—of those who do not want to turn to the spirit. There are others, also materialists, who are not sincere; they are sleeping, because then they do not need to admit their insincerity.

This is the view presenting itself to our retrospective vision. This is the New Year's Eve mood! Tomorrow we want to see, from a consideration of the spiritual world, what impression is made upon us by the outlook into the future, by the mood of the New Year.

• 20. Walther Rathenau: 1867–1922. Zürcher Zeitung, Dec. 28, 1918.

[ 1 ] In the observation of man from the point of view of a supersensible mode of cognition, the general principles of this method become immediately applicable. This observation rests upon the recognition of the “revealed mystery” within the individual human being. Only a part of what supersensible cognition apprehends as the human being is accessible to the senses and to the intellect dependent upon them, namely, the physical body. In order to elucidate the concept of this physical body, our attention must first be turned to that phenomenon which, as the great riddle, lies spread out over all observation of life, that is, to death and, in connection with it, to so-called lifeless nature—the mineral kingdom—which always bears death within it. We have, thereby, referred to facts that are only fully explainable through supersensible knowledge, and to which a large part of this volume must be devoted. Here, however, a few thoughts must first be offered for the sake of orientation.

[ 2 ] Within the manifest world, the physical body is the part of man having the same nature as the mineral world. On the other hand, what differentiates man from the mineral cannot be considered as physical body. Especially important in an unbiased consideration is the fact that death lays bare the part of man that, after death, is of the same nature as the mineral world. We can point to the corpse as that part of man subject to the processes of the mineral realm. It can be emphasized that in this member of man's being, the corpse, the same substances and forces are active as in the mineral realm, but it is necessary to emphasize, equally strongly, the fact that at death the decay of the physical body occurs. Yet we are also justified in saying that while it is true that the same substances and forces are active in both the human physical body and the mineral, their activity during life is dedicated to a higher purpose. Only when death has occurred is their activity similar to that of the mineral world. They then appear as they must appear, according to their own nature, namely, as the dissolver of the physical bodily form.

[ 3 ] Thus, in man we have to differentiate sharply between the visible and the concealed. For during life the concealed must wage constant battle against the substances and forces of the mineral element in the physical body. When this battle ceases, the mineral activity comes to the fore. We have thereby drawn attention to the point where the science of the supersensible must enter. It must seek that which wages the above-mentioned battle. It is just this that is hidden from sense-observation and is only accessible to supersensible observation. In a later chapter of this work we shall consider how the human being is able to reach the point where this hidden something becomes manifest to him just as the phenomena of the senses are manifest to the ordinary eye. Here, however, we shall describe the result of supersensible observation.

[ 4 ] It has already been indicated that the description of the path on which man attains to a higher perception can be of value to him only after he has become acquainted in simple narrative form with the disclosures of supersensible research. For in regard to the supersensible realm it is possible to comprehend what has not yet been observed. Indeed, the right path toward perception is that which proceeds from comprehension.

[ 5 ] Even though that hidden something, which in the physical body carries on the battle against disintegration, is only observable by higher perception, yet its effects are clearly evident to the reasoning power that limits itself to the manifest. These effects express themselves in the form or shape into which the mineral substances and forces of the physical body are fashioned during life. This form disappears by degrees and the physical body becomes a part of the rest of the mineral world when death has occurred. Supersensible perception, however, is able to observe, as an independent member of the human entity, what prevents the physical substances and forces during life from taking their own path, which leads to dissolution of the physical body. Let us call the independent member the ether or lifebody.—In order to prevent misunderstandings from the very beginning, two things should be borne in mind concerning this designation of a second member of the human entity. The word “ether” is used here in a sense quite different from the one in use in present day physics, which, for example, designates the vehicle of light as ether. Here, however, the word will be limited to the meaning given above. It will be used for what is accessible to higher perception and for what is recognizable to sense-observation only in its effects, that is through its ability to give a definite form and shape to the mineral substances and forces existing in the physical body. The word “body” also must not be misunderstood. In designating the higher things of existence, it is necessary to use the words of ordinary language, and for sense-observation these words express only the sensory. From the standpoint of the senses, the ether body is, naturally, nothing of a bodily nature, however tenuous we may picture it.¹

[ 6 ] Having reached, in the presentation of the supersensible, the mention of this ether body or life body, the point has also been reached where such a concept will have to encounter the opposition of many present-day opinions. The evolution of the human spirit has led to the point where in our age the discussion of such a member of the human organism must be considered as something unscientific. The materialistic mode of thought has reached the point of seeing in the living body nothing but a combination of physical substances and forces, like those to be found in the so-called lifeless body, in the mineral. The combination in the living is supposed to be more complicated than in the lifeless, however. Not so long ago, ordinary science, too, held still other points of view. Whoever has followed the writings of many serious scientists of the first half of the nineteenth century realizes that at that time “real natural scientists” were conscious of the fact that something exists in the living body besides what is present in the lifeless mineral. They spoke of a “life force.” This “life force,” to be sure, is not visualized as having the nature of the lifebody designated here, but an inkling that something of the kind exists, underlies such a concept. This “life force” was thought of as though supplementing in the living body the physical substances and forces as the magnetic force supplements the mere iron in the magnet. Then came the time when this “life force” was discarded from the store of scientific concepts. Purely physical and chemical causes were to suffice for everything. In this respect, a reaction has set in today among many modern scientific thinkers. It is admitted on many sides that the assumption of something similar to “life force” is not, after all, pure nonsense. The scientist who admits this, however, will not be inclined to make common cause with the point of view presented here concerning the life body. It is useless, as a rule, to enter into a discussion, from the standpoint of supersensible knowledge, with people holding such views. It ought rather be the concern of this knowledge to recognize that the materialistic mode of thought is a necessary concomitant phenomenon of the great progress in natural science in our age. This progress rests upon an enormous improvement in the means of sense-observation, and it lies in the nature of man, during his evolution, at times to bring to a certain degree of perfection particular faculties at the cost of others. Exact sense-observation, which has developed so significantly through natural science, caused the cultivation of those human capacities that lead into “hidden worlds” to retreat into the background, but the time has come again when this cultivation is necessary. Acknowledgment of the concealed, however, will not be won by contending against opinions that result with logical accuracy from the denial of the concealed, but by placing the concealed itself in the proper light. Then those for whom “the time has come” will acknowledge it.

[ 7 ] It was necessary to speak of this here in order to keep people from assuming that the author is ignorant of the viewpoint of natural science when he speaks of an “ether body” that in many circles is considered as something purely fantastic.

[ 8 ] This ether body, then, is a second member of the human entity. For supersensible cognition, it possesses a higher degree of reality than the physical body. A description of its appearance to supersensible perception can only be given in a subsequent chapter of this book after the sense in which such descriptions are to be taken has become clear. For the present it may suffice to say that the ether body penetrates the physical completely and that it is to be looked upon as a kind of architect of the latter. All organs are preserved in their form and shape by means of the currents and movements of the ether body. The physical heart is based upon an “etheric heart,” the physical brain upon an “etheric brain,” and so forth. The ether body is organized like the physical body, only with greater complexity. Wherever in the physical body separated parts exist, in the ether body everything is in living, interweaving motion.

[ 9 ] The human being possesses this ether body in common with the plants, just as he possesses the physical body in common with the mineral element. Everything living has its ether body.

[ 10 ] Supersensible observation advances from the ether body to a further member of the human entity. In order to aid the student in forming a visualization of this member, it points to the phenomenon of sleep, just as it pointed to the phenomenon of death when it spoke of the ether body. All human endeavor rests upon activity in the waking state, in so far as the manifest is concerned. This activity, however, is only possible if man again and again gathers new strength for his exhausted forces from sleep. Action and thought disappear in sleep; all suffering, all pleasure are submerged for conscious life. As though out of hidden, mysterious depths, conscious forces arise out of the unconsciousness of sleep as man awakens. It is the same consciousness that sinks into shadowy depths when we go to sleep and arises again when we awaken. The power that awakens life again and again out of a state of unconsciousness is, according to supersensible cognition, the third member of the human entity, We may call it the astral body. Just as the physical body is unable to retain its form by means of the mineral substances and forces contained in it, but only by being interpenetrated by the ether body, so likewise the forces of the ether body are unable, by themselves, to illuminate this body with the light of consciousness. An ether body, left entirely to itself, would have to remain in a continuous state of sleep. We might also say: it could only maintain a plant-existence within the physical body. An awakened ether body is illuminated by an astral body. For sense-observation, the activity of the astral body disappears when man sinks into sleep. For supersensible observation, the astral body still exists, but it appears to be separated or withdrawn from the ether body. Sense-observation is not concerned with the astral body itself, but only with its effects within the manifest, and during sleep these effects are not directly present. In the same sense that man has his physical body in common with the minerals, his ether body with the plants, he is, in regard to his astral body, of the same nature as the animals. Plants are in a continuous state of sleep. A person who does not judge accurately in these things can easily fall into the error of ascribing a kind of consciousness also to plants that is similar to that of animals and men in their waking state. That, however, can happen only if he has an unclear idea of the nature of consciousness. It is then stated that if an external stimulus is applied to the plant it makes certain movements like the animal. One speaks of the “sensitivity” of some plants that, for example, contract their leaves if certain outer stimuli act upon them. Yet it is not the characteristic of consciousness that a being reacts to certain stimuli, but that the being experiences something in its inner nature that adds something new to the mere reaction. Otherwise, one could also speak of consciousness when a piece of iron expands under the influence of heat. Consciousness is present only when, through the effect of heat, the being, for example, inwardly experiences pain.

[ 11 ] The fourth member of his being that supersensible cognition must ascribe to man has nothing in common with the world of the manifest surrounding him. It is what distinguishes him from his fellow-creatures and through which he is the crown of creation belonging to him. Supersensible cognition forms a conception of this additional member of the human entity by calling attention to the essential difference in the experiences of waking life. This difference appears at once when man realizes that in the waking state he stands, on the one hand, always in the midst of experiences that of necessity come and go, and that, on the other hand, he has experiences in which this is not the case. This becomes especially clear when human and animal experiences are compared. The animal experiences with great regularity the influences of the outer world, and under the influence of heat and cold, pain and pleasure, under certain regularly recurring processes of its body, it becomes conscious of hunger and thirst. The life of man is not exhausted with such experiences. He can develop passions and desires that transcend all this. In the case of the animal it would always be possible, were we able to go far enough, to show where the cause for an action or sensation lies, outside of or within the body. With man this is by no means the case. He can produce desires and passions for whose origin neither the cause within nor without his body is sufficient. We must ascribe a special source to everything that falls within this domain. In the light of supersensible science this source can be seen in the human ego. The ego can, therefore, be called the fourth member of the human entity.—If the astral body were left to itself, pleasure and pain, feelings of hunger and thirst would take place in it; but what would not occur Is the feeling that there is something permanent in all this. Not the permanent as such is here called the “ego,” but what experiences this permanency. We must formulate the concepts precisely in this realm, if misunderstandings are not to arise. With the becoming aware of something enduring something permanent in the change of the inner experiences the dawning of the “ego feeling” begins. The fact that a being feels hunger, for example, cannot give it an ego feeling. Hunger arises when the renewed causes of it make themselves felt within the being in question. It pounces upon its food just because these renewed causes are present. The ego feeling appears when not only these renewed impulses drive the human being to seek food, but when pleasure has arisen at a previous appeasement of hunger and the consciousness of this pleasure has remained, thus making not only the present experience of hunger, but the past experience of pleasure the driving force in the human being's search for food.—Without the presence of the ether body, the physical body would decay. Without the illumination by the astral body, the ether body would sink into unconsciousness. In like manner the astral body would have to let the past sink, again and again, into oblivion, were it not for the “ego” to carry this past over into the present. What death is for the physical body, and sleep for the ether body, oblivion is for the astral body. One might also say that life belongs to the ether body, consciousness to the astral body, and memory to the ego.^c1

[ 12 ] It is even easier to fall into the error of ascribing memory to animals than it is to ascribe consciousness to plants. It is very natural to think of memory when a dog recognizes its master whom he has not seen perhaps for a long time. Yet, in reality, this recognition does not rest upon memory, but upon something quite different. The dog feels a certain attraction to its master. This attraction proceeds from the master's personality. This personality causes pleasure in the dog when the master is in its presence, and every time the master's presence reoccurs, it causes a renewal of this pleasure. Memory, however, is only present when a being not only feels with its experiences in the present, but when it retains also those of the past. One might acknowledge this and still fall into the error of thinking that the dog has memory. For it might be said that the dog mourns when its master leaves it, therefore it has retained a memory of him. That also is an incorrect conclusion. Through sharing the master's life, his presence becomes a need to the dog and it, therefore, experiences his absence in the same way that it experiences hunger. Whoever does not make these distinctions, will not arrive at clarity concerning the true relationships of life.

[ 13 ] Out of certain prejudices, one might object to this exposition by maintaining that it cannot be known whether or not there exists in the animal anything similar to human memory. Such an objection, however, is the result of untrained observation. Anyone who can observe quite factually how the animal behaves in the complex of its experiences notices the difference between its behavior and that of the human being, and he realizes that the animal's behavior corresponds to the non-existence of memory. For supersensible observation this is quite clear. Yet, what arises as direct experience in supersensible observation may also be known by its effects in this domain through sense-perception permeated by thought activity. If one says that man is aware of his memory through inner soul-observation, something he cannot carry out in the case of the animal, one states something based upon a fatal error. What man has to say to himself about his capacity for memory he cannot derive from inner soul-observation, but only from what he experiences with himself in relation to the things and occurrences of the outer world. Man has these experiences with himself and with another human being and also with animals in exactly the same way. He is blinded by pure illusion when he believes that he judges the existence of memory merely by means of inner observation. The power underlying memory may be called an inner power; the judgment concerning this power is acquired, also in regard to one's own person, through the outer world by directing one's attention to the relationships of life. Just as one is able to judge these relationships in regard to oneself, so one can judge them in regard to the animal. In regard to such things our current psychology suffers from its wholly untrained, inexact ideas, deceptive to a great degree because of errors in observation.

[ 14 ] Memory and oblivion signify for the ego what waking and sleeping signify for the astral body. Just as sleep permits the cares and troubles of the day to disappear into nothingness, oblivion spreads a veil over the bad experiences of life, blotting out a part of the past. Just as sleep is necessary for the restoration of the exhausted life forces, so man has to eradicate certain parts of the past from his memory if he is to approach new experiences freely and without bias. But precisely through forgetting, strength develops for perception of the new. Consider certain facts, like that of learning to write. All the details the child has to experience in learning to write are forgotten. What remains is the ability to write. How would man be able to write if at every stroke of the pen all the past experiences in learning to write were to arise again in the soul as memory?

[ 15 ] Memory appears in various stages. Its simplest form occurs when a person observes an object and, after turning away, is able to call up its mental image, is able to visualize it. He has formed this image while perceiving the object. A process has taken place between his astral body and his ego. The astral body has aroused the consciousness of the outer impression of the object. Yet knowledge of the object would last only as long as the latter is present, if the ego were not to absorb this knowledge and make it its own.—It is at this point that supersensible perception separates the bodily element from the soul nature. One speaks of the astral body as long as one considers the arising of knowledge of an object that is present. What, however, gives permanence to this knowledge one designates as soul. From what has been said we can see at the same time how closely the human astral body is connected with that part of the soul that gives permanence to knowledge. Both are united into one member of the human entity. This union, therefore, may also be called astral body. If we desire an exact designation, we may call the human astral body the soul body, the soul, in so far as it is united with this soul body, we may call the sentient soul.

[ 16 ] The ego rises to a higher stage of its being when it directs its activity toward what it has made its own out of the knowledge of the objects. This is the activity by which the ego severs itself more and more from the objects of perception in order to work within what it has made its own. The part of the soul in which this occurs may be designated the intellectual or mind soul.—It is characteristic of both the sentient and intellectual souls that they work with what they receive through the impressions of the objects perceived by the senses, and what is retained from this in memory. The soul is here completely surrendered to what is external to it. What it makes its own through memory it has also received from outside. But it can pass beyond all this. It is not alone sentient soul and intellectual soul. For supersensible perception it is easiest to give an idea of this passing beyond by pointing to a simple fact, the comprehensive significance of which, however, must be appreciated. This fact is the following: In the whole range of language there is one name that, through its very nature, distinguishes itself from every other name. That name is “I.” Every other name may be given by every man to the object or being to whom it applies. The “I” as designation for a being has meaning only when this being applies it to itself. The name “I” can never resound to the ear of a human being from without as his designation; only the being himself can apply it to himself. “I am an ‘I’ to myself only. For every other person I am a ‘you’ and everyone else is for me a ‘you.’ ” This fact is the outer expression of a deeply significant truth. The true nature of the “I” is independent of all that is external; therefore its name “I” cannot be called to it by anything external. Those religious denominations that have consciously maintained their relationship with supersensible perception designate the “I” as the “Ineffable Name of God.” By using this expression, reference is made to what has been indicated. Nothing of an external nature has access to that part of the soul with which we are concerned here. Here is the “hidden sanctuary” of the soul. Only a being with whom the soul is of like nature can gain entrance there. The God who dwells within man speaks when the soul becomes aware of itself as an I. Just as the sentient and intellectual souls live in the outer world, so a third soul member immerses itself in the Divine when the soul gains a perception of its own being.

[ 17 ] The above conceptions may easily be misunderstood as an attempt to identify the I with God. But it has not been stated that the I is God, but only that it is of the same nature and essence as the Divine. Would anyone contend that a drop of water is the sea when he says that the drop is of the same essence or substance as the sea? If we wish to use a comparison, we may say that the drop of water has the same relationship to the sea that the I has to the Divine. Man can find the Divine within himself because his innermost being is drawn from the Divine. Thus he acquires, through this, the third member of his soul, an inner knowledge of himself, just as he gains through his astral body a knowledge of the outer world. Therefore, occult science can call this third member of the soul the consciousness soul; and, in this sense, the soul consists of three members: the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul, just as the corporeal part of man consists of three members—the physical body, the ether body, and the astral body.

[ 18 ] Psychological errors of observation, similar to those already mentioned concerning the judging of the capacity of memory, make it difficult to gain the proper insight into the nature of the I. Much that people believe they understand can be regarded as a refutation of the above, yet it is in reality a confirmation. This is the case, for example, with the remarks about the I which Eduard von Hartmann makes in his Outline of Psychology ² “In the first place, consciousness of self is more ancient than the word I. Personal pronouns are a rather late product of the evolution of languages and have only the value of abbreviations. The word I is a short substitute for the speaker's own name, but a substitute that each speaker, as such, uses for himself, no matter by what proper name others may call him. Consciousness of self can be developed in animals and in uneducated deaf and dumb persons to a high degree, even without reference to a proper name. Consciousness of the proper name can fully replace the lack of use of the word I. With this insight the magical nimbus is eliminated which for many people envelops the little word I; it cannot add the slightest thing to the concept of self-consciousness, but receives its whole content solely from the latter.” It is possible to be quite in agreement with such points of view; also with the contention that no magical nimbus be bestowed upon the little word, I, which would only dim a thoughtful consideration of the matter. But the nature of a thing is not decided by the way the verbal designation for this thing has gradually been brought about. The important point is the fact that the essential nature of the ego in self-consciousness is “more ancient than the word I” and that man is compelled to use this little word—endowed with the qualities belonging to it alone—for what he experiences, in his reciprocal relationship with the outer world, differently from the way the animal can experience it. Nothing can be known concerning the nature of the triangle by showing how the “word” triangle has been evolved; likewise, nothing can be decided concerning the nature of the I by knowing how this word has taken form in the evolution of language out of a different verbal usage.

[ 19 ] The true nature of the I reveals itself only in the consciousness soul. For while the soul sinks itself into other things in feeling and intellect, as consciousness soul it takes hold of its own being. Therefore this I can be perceived by the consciousness soul only through a certain inner activity. The visualizations of external objects are formed just as these objects come and go, and these visualizations continue to work in the Intellect by means of their own force. But if the I is to observe itself, it cannot simply surrender itself; it must, through inner activity, first lift its being out of its own depths in order to have a consciousness of it. With the perception of the I, with self-contemplation, an inner activity of the I begins. Through this activity, the perception of the I within the consciousness soul has a significance for man quite different from the observation of all that reaches him through the three corporeal members and the two other members of the soul. The force that discloses the I within the consciousness soul is indeed the same force that manifests in all the rest of the world. This force does not, however, appear directly in the body and in the lower members of the soul, but reveals itself by degrees in its effects. The lowest manifestation is the manifestation through the physical body; this then mounts up by stages to what fills the intellectual soul. One might say that, with each step upward, one of the veils that envelop the hidden falls away. In what fills the consciousness soul, the hidden enters unveiled into the innermost temple of the soul. Yet it appears there only like a drop out of the ocean of all-pervading spirituality. Here, however, man must first take hold of this spirituality. He must recognize it in himself, then he will be able to find it also in its manifestations.

What here like a drop penetrates into the consciousness soul, occult science calls the spirit. Thus the consciousness soul is united with the spirit, which is the hidden in all that is manifest. If man wishes to take hold of the spirit in all manifestation, he must do it in the same way he takes hold of the ego in the consciousness soul. He must direct the activity that has led him to the perception of this I toward the manifest world. He, thereby, develops to higher stages of his being. He adds something new to the corporeal and soul members. The next thing is that he, himself, also conquer what lies hidden within the lower members of his soul, and this happens through his work on his soul, proceeding from the ego. How man is engaged in this work becomes evident if one compares a person who still surrenders himself to his lower passions and so-called sensual lust, with a noble idealist. The latter develops out of the former if he rids himself of certain low inclinations and turns toward nobler ones. In doing so he has worked on his soul, ennobling and spiritualizing it out of his ego. The ego has become master within the soul-life. This can be carried so far that no desire, no enjoyment can gain entrance into the soul without the I being the power that makes the entrance possible. In this way, the whole soul now becomes a manifestation of the I, as this was previously the case with the consciousness soul alone. In fact, all cultural life and all spiritual human endeavor consists in a work that has as its aim this rulership of the ego. Every human being living in the present age is engaged in this work whether he wants it or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.

[ 20 ] Through this work, however, higher stages of the being of man are reached. Through it, man develops new members of his being. These lie as the concealed behind what is manifest to him. Not only can he become master of the soul by working on the latter through the power of the ego so that the soul drives the concealed into manifestation, but he can also extend this work. He can extend it to the astral body. The I thus takes possession of this astral body by uniting itself with the latter's hidden nature. This astral body, overcome and transformed by the ego, may be called the spirit self. (This is what, in connection with oriental wisdom, is called “manas.”) In the spirit self we have a higher member of man's being, one which, so to speak, exists within it as a germ and which emerges more and more as it actively works upon itself.^c2

[ 21 ] Just as the human being conquers his astral body by penetrating to the hidden forces standing behind it, so, too, in the course of evolution, does this happen with the ether body. The work upon the ether body is, however, more intensive than the work upon the astral body, for what is concealed in the former is enveloped by two veils, while the concealed in the astral body is veiled by only one. It is possible to form a concept of the difference in the work on these two bodies by pointing to certain changes that can take place in man in the course of his development. Let us call to mind how certain human soul qualities develop when the ego is working upon the soul; how passion and desire, joy and sorrow may change. It is only necessary to think back to the time of childhood. At that time, what was man's source of pleasure? What caused him pain? What has he learned in addition to what he was able to do in childhood? All this is only an expression of the way the ego has gained mastery over the astral body. For this body is the bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow. Compare this with how little certain other qualities of man change in the course of time, for example, his temperament, the deeper peculiarities of his character, and so forth. A person, hot-tempered as a child, will often retain certain aspects of this violent temper in later life. This is such a striking fact that there are thinkers who wholly deny the possibility of any change in the fundamental character of a human being. They assume that this is something that remains unchanged throughout life, manifesting in one way or another. Such a judgment is merely based upon lack of observation. Anyone who has the capacity of observing such things can perceive clearly that also man's temperament and character change under the influence of his ego. To be sure, this change is slow when compared with the change in the qualities described above. The relationship between the two kinds of changes may be compared with the advancing of the hour hand of a clock in relation to the minute hand. The forces that bring about this change of character or temperament belong to the hidden realm of the ether body. They are of like nature with the forces that rule in the kingdom of life, that is to say, with the forces of growth and nutrition and those that bring about reproduction. Subsequent explanations in this book will shed the right light upon these matters.—The I is not working upon the astral body if the human being simply gives himself up to pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, but if the peculiarities of these soul qualities change. Likewise, the work extends to the ether body if the ego applies its activity to the changing of its traits of character, of its temperament, and so forth. Also on this latter change every human being is working, whether he is conscious of it or not. The strongest impulses producing this change in ordinary life are the religious ones. When the I allows the impulses that flow from religion to act upon it again and again, they form within it a power that works right into the ether body and transforms it in much the same way that lesser life-impulses cause a transformation of the astral body. These lesser impulses of life, which come to man through study, contemplation, ennobling of the feelings, and so forth, are subject to the manifold changes of existence; religious experiences, however, imprint upon all thinking, feeling, and willing a uniform character. They shed, as it were, a common, uniform light over the entire soul-life. A man thinks and feels this way today, tomorrow differently. The most varied causes bring this about. But if a person through his religious feelings, whatever they may be, divines something that persists throughout all changes, he will relate his current soul experiences of thinking and feeling to that fundamental feeling just as he does with his soul experiences of tomorrow. Religious creed, therefore, has a far-reaching effect upon the whole soul-life; its influence becomes ever stronger in the course of time, because it works by means of constant repetition. It therefore acquires the power of working upon the ether body.—The influence of true art has a similar effect upon the human being. If, through outer form, through color and tone of a work of art, he penetrates to its spiritual basis with thought and feeling, then the impulses that the I thus receives work down even into the ether body. If we think this thought through to the end we can estimate what a tremendous significance art has for all human evolution. We have referred here only to a few instances that give to the I the impulse to act upon the ether body. There are many similar influences in human life that are not so apparent to the observing eye as those that have been mentioned. But from these it is evident that hidden within man there is another member of his being that the I gradually develops. This member may be called the second spiritual member, the life spirit. (It is called “buddhi” in oriental wisdom.) The expression “life spirit” is the appropriate term for the reason that the same forces are active in what it designates as in the “life body”; only, in these forces, when they manifest themselves as life body, the human ego is not active. If they manifest as life spirit, however, they are permeated by the activity of the I.

[ 22 ] The intellectual development of man, his purification and ennobling of the utterances of feeling and will are the measure of his transformation of the astral body in spirit self; his religious and many other experiences imprint themselves upon the ether body and transform it into life spirit. In the usual course of life this occurs more or less unconsciously. On the other hand, what is called initiation of man consists in his being directed by supersensible knowledge to the means that enable him to undertake this work on the spirit self and life spirit in full consciousness. These means will be discussed in later parts of this book. For the present, it was a question of showing that, beside the soul and the body, the spirit is also active within the human being. We shall see later how this spirit, in contrast to the transient body, belongs to the Eternal in man.

[ 23 ] The activity of the I is not exhausted with its work upon the astral and ether bodies; it extends also to the physical body. A trace of the influence of the I upon the physical body can be seen when, for example, under certain circumstances a person blushes or turns pale. In this case the I is actually the cause of a process in the physical body. If, through the activity of the I, changes take place in man in respect of its influence upon the physical body, the I is actually united with the hidden forces of this physical body, with the same forces that cause the physical processes to take place. It can be said, then, that the I, through this activity, works upon the physical body. This expression must not be misunderstood. It must not be imagined that this activity is something grossly material. What appears in the physical body as gross matter is only the manifested part of it. Behind this manifested part lie the hidden forces of its being, and these forces are of a spiritual nature. We are not speaking here of work upon a material substance, of which the physical body seems to consist, but of the spiritual work upon the invisible forces that bring this body into existence and allow it to decay. In ordinary life this work of the I on the physical body enters human consciousness indistinctly. Complete clarity of consciousness in this respect is acquired only if man, under the influence of supersensible knowledge, takes this activity consciously in hand. Then the fact emerges that there is still a third spiritual member in man. It is what may be called spirit man, in contrast to the physical man. (In oriental wisdom this spirit-man is called “atma.”)

[ 24 ] It is easy to be misled in respect of the spirit man, owing to the fact that in the physical body we see the lowest member of man's being, and it is, therefore, hard to be reconciled to the idea that work on the physical body brings into being the highest member of the human entity. But just because the physical body conceals the active spirit within it behind three veils, the highest form of human endeavor is needed to unite the I with this hidden spirit.

[ 25 ] Thus in occult science man presents himself as a being composed of various members. Those of a corporeal nature are the physical body, the ether body, and the astral body. Those belonging to the soul are sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul. The I, the ego, spreads out its light within the soul. The members possessing a spiritual nature are spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. We see from the above descriptions that the sentient soul and the astral body are closely united and in a certain respect form a whole. In a similar manner, consciousness soul and spirit self are a whole, for the spirit flashes up within the consciousness soul and from there rays through the other members of human nature. With this in mind, we can also speak of the following membering of the human being. We may combine astral body and sentient soul into a single member, likewise consciousness soul and spirit self, and the intellectual soul we may call the I, since it partakes of the I nature and, in a certain respect, is already the I that has not yet become conscious of its spiritual nature. We have, therefore, seven members of man: 1. physical body, 2. ether or life body, 3. astral body, 4. I, 5. spirit self, 6. life spirit, and 7. spirit man.

[ 26 ] Even for those who are accustomed to materialistic ideas this membering of man according to the number seven would not possess anything “vaguely magical,” which they often ascribe to it, if they but held to the meaning of the above description and did not, from the very outset, themselves introduce this magical element into the matter. It is from the standpoint of a higher form of observing the world and in no other way that we ought to speak of these seven members of man, just as we speak of the seven colors of light or of the seven tones of the scale, (considering the octave as a repetition of the tonic.) Just as light appears in seven colors, and tone in a sevenfold scale, so does the homogeneous human nature appear in the above-mentioned seven members. Just as the number seven in tone and color bears nothing of “superstition” in it, so is this also the case in regard to the sevenfold membering of the human being. (On one occasion, when this question was discussed verbally, it was said that in the case of colors the number seven does not hold good, since beyond red and violet there are other colors that are not visible to the eye. Even in this respect, however, the comparison with the colors agrees, for the being of man extends beyond the physical body on the one side and spirit man on the other, only these extensions are “spiritually invisible” to the spiritual means of observation in the same way that the colors beyond red and violet are invisible to the physical eye. This comment had to be made because the opinion so easily arises that supersensible perception is not particular with respect to natural scientific thinking, that it is amateurish in this regard. But whoever pays strict attention to what is meant by the statements made here will find that, in fact, they are nowhere in contradiction to true natural science—neither when facts of natural science are used for illustration nor when, in the remarks made here, a direct relationship to natural-scientific research is indicated.)

• 1. In his book, Theosophy, the author has discussed the fact that with the designation “ether body” or “life body” he has no intention of renewing the old concept of “life force” discarded by natural science.
• c1. Expositions of the kind in this book about the faculty of memory can easily be misunderstood. For those who only observe external processes will not readily detect the difference between what happens in the animal or even in the plant when something appears that resembles memory, and what is here described as actual memory in man. Certainly, if an animal carries out an action a third or fourth time, it may then so perform it that the outer process appears as though the action were the result of memory and what is learned through it. Like some natural scientists and their adherents, one may, indeed, extend the concept of memory or recollection to such a point that one says that when the little chick pops from the shell and immediately pecks at the grain, knowing even how to make the movements of its head and body in order to reach its object, it could not have learned this in the shell, but that it was learned through the thousands and thousands of creatures from which it has descended. (Ewald Hering, for example, states this.) We may declare that the phenomenon under discussion has the appearance of memory. We shall, however, never gain a real comprehension of man's being if we do not hold in mind what appears quite especially unique in the human being as the process of real perception of previous experiences at subsequent times, not merely as an influence of past states into later ones. Here in this book this perception of the past, not merely the reappearance—even though changed—of the previous in the subsequent, is called memory. If one were to use the word memory for the corresponding processes in the plant and animal kingdoms, then one ought to have a different word for the processes of memory in man. It is not the word, however, that is important in the above presentation, but, for the sake of understanding the human being, the significant thing is the recognition of the difference between what occurs in man on the one hand, and in animal and plant on the other. What may appear as highly intelligent actions in animals has also no connection whatever with what is here called memory.
• 2. Eduard von Hartmann, Grundniss der Psychologie, Vol. 111, p.55. Bad Sachsa, 1908.
• c2. No fixed boundary can be drawn between the changes resulting from the activity of the ego in the astral body and those taking place in the ether body. They pass over into each other. If man learns something and through it gains a certain power of discrimination, then a change has occurred in the astral body; if however, this judgment or discrimination so alters his soul condition that he becomes accustomed, after he has learned something about a matter, to feel differently about it from previously, a change has then taken place in the ether body. Everything that becomes a possession of the human soul that can be recalled in memory is based upon a change in the ether body. What becomes, by degrees, an immutable treasure of memory, rests on the fact that the work performed on the astral body has been transferred to the ether body.

Munich, March 7, 1909

It is now my task to speak to the various groups about the more intimate aspects of reincarnation and various matters related to it because deep inside we must become more and more familiar with this subject matter and allow it to penetrate our being. In this context, we will also have to say a few things about the significance of the topic for the life of all humanity. Although we will also little by little discuss relevant questions of importance to the present age, we shall have to take very ancient times as our starting point. This is necessary because the method of inquiry in Spiritual Science differs from that employed by other theories of life or by the disciplines studying social problems. We in Spiritual Science treat the facts of life first in a general way, and then we elaborate on the details.

First of all, we express our world view in the most elementary sense through the statement that the human innermost core—an individual's divine ego—continues to develop from one life to another in successive incarnations. In the second instance, however, such a statement covers the question of reincarnation only in a very elementary way, and that is why we now want to speak about these things in greater detail and in a more intimate sense. Just saying that the ego of a human being hurries from one incarnation to another is not enough; there are many other phenomena connected with the subject of reincarnation, and only a discussion of how they are related to life itself will shed the right light on the issue. Let us begin to characterize reincarnation from this point of view by looking back into ancient times.

We have often talked about the fact that humanity must consider its ancestors to have come from ancient Atlantis, a former geographical region situated between what is today Africa and Europe on the one hand and America on the other. All the souls that are present today had already been incarnated in Atlantis, but in bodies that were in part considerably different from the ones we are accustomed to seeing. The Atlantean humanity had its own special form of leadership, and the soul-forces—indeed all the faculties—of the Atlanteans differed greatly from those of human beings. Hence, leadership as we know it today was nonexistent. In Atlantis, for example, there were no churches, ceremonial centers, or schools in the modern sense, but there existed an intermediate institution between ceremonial center and school; that is what we call the mystery sanctuaries or centers. Leadership of the Atlanteans with respect to learning and the conditions of external life was vested in these sanctuaries, and one could say that the spiritual leaders were at the same time kings of the Atlantean tribes. Initiates, whose mission can be circumscribed by a word of later coinage, by the word oracle, imported knowledge and exercised leadership in the mysteries. We therefore designate the great centers of Atlantean culture as the “Atlantean Oracles.”

We have to get a clear understanding of the function of these oracles. They had to impart knowledge to human beings about the spiritual world behind the physical world. Knowledge such as this is different from ordinary knowledge in many ways; to stress only one difference, spiritual knowledge is not confined to space as is our present knowledge of the physical world. Anyone who, for example, knows about the mysteries of Mars also knows a great deal about the spiritual mysteries of the entire universe. All the heavenly bodies of our solar system are interconnected, and as such they are the exterior expression of spiritual beings. The individual who knows these spiritual beings also knows the forces that are at work from one planet to another as well as in the spiritual world during the time between death and rebirth. And so it was the primary task of one oracle in Atlantis to transmit and proclaim to human beings the mysteries of Mars, whereas the primary task of another was to communicate the mysteries of Jupiter, and so on; and these compartmentalized insights made it possible to lead certain sections of the population. We shall speak about the reason for this at another occasion since our task today is a different one.

The Atlanteans were divided into groups, and part of the whole developmental process was that one group of human beings had to be governed especially by the forces that could be acquired through the knowledge of Mars. Other groups had to be governed by the forces acquired through the knowledge of Venus, or Mercury, and so on. In ancient Atlantis there were actually human beings alive whom we could call “Jupiter People” or “Mars People,” and there were seven oracle centers because the populace in ancient Atlantis was divided into seven groups according to racial characteristics. The names applicable to these oracle centers corresponded to the names of the planets, but they were assigned to the oracles at a later time. The leadership of, and supreme sovereignty over, all other oracles was vested in what we may designate as the Atlantean Sun Oracle. Whatever oracles existed in the post-Atlantean periods—in Greece, Egypt, Asia, all were successors of the Sun Oracle in Atlantis. This is true also for the Apollo Oracle in Greece. The initiate who headed this Sun Oracle was the guardian of the deepest mysteries of our solar system. Together with his subordinates, he was called upon to investigate the nature of the spiritual life on the sun itself. His role was to proclaim to Atlantean humanity the secrets of the whole planetary system and to exercise supreme authority over the other oracle centers.

A very special task devolved on the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. It was to guide humanity in such a way that when the great catastrophe culminating in the submergence of Atlantis was over, the human race would be able to propagate and establish what we have often discussed as the postAtlantean cultures. Specifically, the task of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle was to prepare human beings during the Atlantean time in such a way that they could enter the ancient Indian, Persian, Egypto-Babylonian-Hebraic, and Graeco-Roman cultures. To put it differently, the Great Initiate had to see to it that enough suitable soul material was available for these cultural epochs.

We must now inform ourselves a little about the task of this Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. What were the essential features of Atlantean culture? Certainly it was quite different from later cultures. In ancient Atlantis, an individual belonging to the highest level of cultural life—the levels at which today's great leaders in, say, scholarship, art, industry, or commerce can be found—was one who possessed extraordinary clairvoyant faculties and who was especially skilled in the use of magical powers. The qualities usually attributed to a leader or to a scholar were nonexistent in those days, or they were known only in the most primitive form. But although modern arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were unknown to the Atlanteans, they did possess primitive clairvoyant faculties and powers with which they could pierce into the spiritual worlds. Without the modern ego-consciousness, the Atlanteans saw into the spiritual world, and those whose vision was the most penetrating became the pillars of Atlantean culture. We have already stressed that the Atlanteans were able to manipulate certain inner forces of nature, for example the seed forces of plants; they propelled their vehicles with them, just as we utilize coal to propel our vehicles.

To repeat, the leaders of the Atlantean culture were not the people who tried, as the leaders of our time try, to unlock the secrets of the universe with their intellectual powers; rather, the leading individuals in Atlantis were those who excelled as clairvoyants and magicians. And those human beings who had the first rudimentary inkling about arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were in a certain sense despised because of their simplicity and were not considered as belonging to the aristocracy of cultural life. But it was precisely those human beings who possessed the very first rudimentary knowledge of the aforementioned skills and who were the most lacking in clairvoyant and magical powers whom the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle gathered from all regions. Yes, he assembled the most simple and, in a sense, the most despised people of ancient Atlantis—those who had first developed intellectual capacities. But those who were then at the highest level of cultural life and who were the acknowledged masters of a dimmed clairvoyance were not suitable material to be led through and beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe. No, the call of the Initiate went out to the simple people.

Incidentally, it may be said that we are living in an epoch today when a similar call is once again going out to humanity. To be sure, this appeal is what is appropriate for today, a time when humanity sees only what is in the physical world. The call to humanity issues from unknown depths of the spirit, depths that humanity will gradually become acquainted with, asking that humanity prepare itself for a new culture of the future, which will be permeated with clairvoyant powers. As with Atlantis, a catastrophe will occur, and afterwards a new culture imbued with spiritual capacities will arise, and it will be linked to what we call the idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity.

But today, as in Atlantean times, the call cannot go out to those who stand at the highest levels of cultural life because they will not understand. The Atlantean clairvoyants and magicians, who were in a way destined to die out with their culture, occupied a position similar to that of people in contemporary life who occupy the highest positions in the realms of scholarship and external industrial life—the great inventors and discoverers of our time. No matter how much the present leaders feel there is still to be done, they nevertheless occupy the same position as their Atlantean counterparts. Contemptuously they look down on those who are beginning to feel something of the spiritual life to come. The consciousness of this fact must be awakened in the soul of anyone whose cooperative efforts in the theosophical workshops are to be strengthened. When leading representatives of modern culture look contemptuously down at these small circles, those who are participating diligently in the preparation of future conditions must say to themselves that the intellectual giants of today cannot be counted on to lead the way in this task. It is precisely the people who are held in contempt because they are not considered to have reached the heights of contemporary erudition who are being assembled today, just as the leader of the Sun Oracle once gathered around him the simple of Atlantis. These disdained people are being assembled to prepare the dawn of a new culture whereas erudition of the modern form will bring about the twilight of our culture. This is mentioned in passing to fortify those who have to endure and hold their own against the attacks of the people who consider themselves to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture.

The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle gathered his simple people in a region approximately to the west of present-day Ireland. Now we have to get a clear picture of the situation. It took Atlantis a long, long time to come to its end. Great masses of people were continually moving from the West toward the East. In the various regions of Asia, Europe, and Africa there were tribes who had arrived at different times and had intermingled. Then the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle took His small group of chosen people and made His way to Central Asia, where he established a colony from which the currents were to emanate that would later found the post-Atlantean cultures. However, in addition to His simple people, the Great Leader has taken something else with Him. And here we arrive at one of the chapters of human evolution, the truth of which we can comprehend only if we draw on the inner assurance gained by a steadfast engagement in Spiritual Science.

The Great Leader inspected, as it were, the other oracle centers for the purpose of finding in them the most notable initiates. Now there is a certain method by means of which “spiritual economy,” as it may be called, can be put into practice. As you know, it is quite correct to say that the etheric body dissolves after a human being has died; what remains is an extract, and that is taken along. But the extract is only the elementary truth, which must be modified as one advances to higher levels of spiritual knowledge. It is not the case that the etheric bodies of all human beings are dissolved in the universal ether. Etheric bodies such as those possessed by the most notable initiates of the seven Atlantean Oracles are valuable. The spiritual achievements of these initiates were woven into their etheric bodies, and it would be against the principle of spiritual economy if the etheric bodies of the great initiates had simply been dissolved. They were to be preserved as prototypes for a later time, and it was incumbent upon the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to preserve the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates for this purpose. While leading His small group of simple people to Asia, He carried the etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates of Atlantis with Him. Such a thing is possible through the methods that had been developed in the mystery centers. You have to visualize this as purely a spiritual process and not in the way as if one could wrap up etheric bodies and put them into boxes for safekeeping. What is certain, however, is that etheric bodies can be preserved for later times.

Over in Asia, the following happened. The simple people around the Leader propagated from one generation to another. Above all, these people had a tremendous devotion to and affection for their Great Leader. Their education was guided with wisdom and insight so that after many generations certain things occurred through one of the methods worked out in the mystery centers. Such methods are employed behind the scenes of external life, and we shall presently see how they take effect. Today's lecture will be the first in a series of several lectures designed to explain some of the details.

When a human being is descending to a new incarnation, he must envelop himself again with a new etheric body. Now, through the methods alluded to above, it is perfectly possible to weave into this new etheric body an old one that was preserved. And so after a diligent educational process, when the time had come, there were to emerge from the immigrants and their descendants seven individuals whose souls at their birth were sufficiently prepared to have the preserved etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the Atlantean Oracles woven into their own etheric bodies. Thus, the preserved etheric body of the most important Saturn initiate was woven into that of one of the individuals gathered around the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle, the etheric body of the Mars initiate into another, the etheric body of the Jupiter initiate into a third, and so on. Hence the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle had seven individuals whose etheric bodies were interwoven with those of the most important initiates of the ancient Atlantean Oracles.

If you had met these seven individuals somewhere in everyday life, you would have found them to be simple human beings, for they were not the reincarnated egos of the Atlantean initiates; they were merely simple human beings possessing the new faculties of the post-Atlantean era. Their egos were not much different from the egos of those who became the bearers of the first primitive and simple culture immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. What made them different was that their etheric bodies contained the forces of the seven great Atlantean initiates, so we are dealing here not with a re-embodiment of the ego, but rather of the etheric bodies of these great initiates. Thus we see not only that the ego but also that the second member of the super-sensible constitution—the etheric body—is capable of reincarnation. The seven individuals from among the followers of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle were inspired human beings simply by the fact that they had received these etheric bodies containing the forces and powers of the Atlantean era. At certain times their etheric bodies were capable of letting the forces stream into themselves that unveiled the mysteries of the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and so forth. Hence they appeared to be inspired individuals, but their utterances certainly exceeded anything their astral bodies or egos were able to understand.

What these seven inspired individuals taught from various parts of the world sounded like a wonderful harmonious choir, and after the seven had been united in the Lodge of the Seven Rishis, they were sent to India to inspire that country's ancient culture. Much that was profound in this culture has been preserved in a magnificent form in the Vedas,²⁷ and just as many wonderful ideas that give testimony to the deeply scientific nature of Indian culture have been preserved in the Upanishads,²⁸ in the Vedanta philosophy, and so on. However, the teachings of the ancient Holy Rishis, given in times when nothing was recorded, far exceed in beauty anything conveyed to us by the Indian scripts. What was written down in later times is at most a faint echo, for no records were kept of the primeval, sacred culture inspired by the Rishis; everything they taught was transmitted in a spiritual way through the mysteries.

We are interested today in learning how etheric bodies can be reincarnated, how the legacies of the ancient Atlantean epoch were transmitted by the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle into the post-Atlantean era, and how they were then carried into the first culture of that era—into the resplendent Indian culture.

The mysteries of the Sun Oracle itself could not be directly revealed in ancient India, and that is why the seven Rishis spoke of a Being beyond their cognitive reach. They spoke of a Being who is the Leader of the Sun and directs its forces to the earth; they spoke of Vishva-Karman as a Being beyond the range of their knowledge. Vishva-Karman is none other than the Christ who was to appear later and whose coming had already been proclaimed in the ancient Indian culture.

The most important disciple of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to receive the secrets of the Sun's essence was Zarathustra, who was subsequently to establish the second post-Atlantean culture. He was not the Zarathustra history talks about however. It was customary in ancient times that the successor of a great teacher or humanity took the name of his esteemed predecessor. No document contains any reference to the Zarathustra of whom we are now speaking; only his last successor is mentioned in history books. Yet it was the original Zarathustra who founded the primordial Persian culture and who was the first to point out to his Persian peoples that the sun not only possesses physical energy but also spiritual power that streams down to earth. In his endeavor to awaken in his people a realization of this truth, Zarathustra's argument was as follows: If we direct our eyes to plants and everything else around us that contains life, we have to ask ourselves what we would be without sunlight. But together with the physical sunlight, a spiritual force also streams down to earth under the direction of a great sublime Being. Just as a human being has his or her physical body and an aura—we call it the small aura—so the sun has its physical body and its aura. Ahura Mazdao, the “great aura,” consists of the group of great sun beings and their leader. Zarathustra spoke of this Ahura Mazdao, or Aura Mazdao—the Great Aura—and proclaimed the power of the sun aura by which the flow of evolution was made possible. However, Zarathustra also proclaimed that the forces of Ahriman would oppose the Sun Being. This then is what can be said about the external teachings of Zarathustra, but there is more to be said about him.

Zarathustra had some close disciples whom he initiated into the great mysteries of the world. We shall mention two of them in this context. To begin with the first, Zarathustra communicated to him all the wisdom necessary to bring about clairvoyance in the astral body, as well as the ability to perceive in one's present time frame simultaneously everything that is happening and all the mysteries spread out in both physical and spiritual space. To the second disciple Zarathustra transmitted what one might call the power to read the Akasha Chronicle, and this is nothing less than the clairvoyant power of the etheric body enabling the human being to perceive the successive phases of evolution in time. Thus, one disciple received the ability to perceive simultaneous events, and the other the vision of the Akasha Chronicle to perceive successive events that could lead to an understanding of the evolution of the earth and sun. By imparting these faculties to these disciples, Zarathustra had a profound effect on the continuation of culture in the postAtlantean era.

The first disciple was reincarnated as the great individual who was to inspire and inaugurate the new currents of Egyptian culture, the being whom we know by the name of Hermes or Hermes Trismegistos. Through processes that are known, the astral body of Zarathustra was transmitted to Hermes so that he could proclaim the message of the higher worlds and their mysteries and incorporate them into Egyptian culture. Thus by processes we will gradually learn to understand, the astral body of Zarathustra was preserved and was transmitted to one disciple when he was born again as Hermes. Hermes wore Zarathustra's astral body as if it were a garment.

The other disciple was also reincarnated, and in him everything was meant to be revealed that is presented to the earth in the Akasha Chronicle. Since the etheric body of Zarathustra was to be woven into that of a disciple, a very special event had to take place to make this possible. The forces of the new etheric body somehow had to be illuminated in the disciple for his awakening. The Biblical story relates to us in a beautiful and marvelous way what this special event was. Allow your souls to visualize how it had to unfold.

You must first realize that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra possessed his own astral body and ego, and he was now to have the etheric body of Zarathustra woven into his soul. As a small child, he first had to feel how the forces of the etheric body of Zarathustra became active in him, and he had to feel this before the powers of judgment could be activated by his own astral body and before his own ego was able to interfere. So the special event that had to take place was some sort of initiation. The forces of Zarathustra's etheric body had to be awakened in this reborn disciple when he was a very small child, that is before his own individual development could come into play. For this reason, the child was placed into an ark of bulrushes that was then put into the water, so that he was completely cut off from the rest of the world and was unable to interact with it. That is when the forces of Zarathustra's etheric body that had been woven into him germinated and, as we said earlier, became illuminated.

I am sure you know by now that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra was none other than Moses. The Biblical story about his abandonment is really a presentation of that profound mystery behind the scenes of the external world dealing with the preservation of Zarathustra's etheric body and its reawakening in Moses. And this is how Hermes and Moses were able to guide the post-Atlantean culture through its recorded stages.

After hearing about these examples of the reincarnation of etheric bodies and of an astral body, we know it is insufficient to speak only of the reincarnation of the ego. Rather, the other members of the human constitution that we have become acquainted with—the etheric body and the astral body—can also be reincarnated. It is a principle of spiritual economy that what has once been gained cannot perish, but is preserved and transplanted on the spiritual soil of posterity. However, what we have described can be accomplished in another way. We shall see from an example that there are still other methods whereby the past is transported into the future.

You will remember a personality mentioned in the Bible: Shem, a son of Noah and progenitor of the Semitic people. Occult research confirms that there is an individual behind Shem that must be regarded as the tribal individuality of all Semitic peoples. When a number of human beings are to descend from a particular progenitor, a special provision must be made for this in the spiritual world. In the case of Shem, the provision was that an etheric body was specially woven for him from the spiritual world, which he was to carry. This enabled him to bear in his own etheric body an especially exalted being from the spiritual world, a being who could not otherwise have incarnated on earth because it was incapable of descending into a compact physical body. This being was capable of incarnating only by virtue of the fact that it could now enter the etheric body of Shem. Since Shem had his own physical, etheric, and astral body, as well as his ego, he was first an individual in his own right. Beyond that, however, he was an individual whose etheric body was interwoven with the etheric body of another high being of the spiritual world, specially prepared for the purpose of founding a nation, as characterized above. If clairvoyant perception had confronted Shem, it would have seen Shem himself, but with a second entity extending out of him like a second being, yet still united with Shem's etheric body. This higher being was not Shem, but it incarnated in Shem—the human being—for a special mission. Unlike ordinary human beings, this higher being did not undergo various incarnations, but descended only once into a human body. Such a being is called an avatar. An avatar does not feel at home in the world as a human being would; he descends but once into this world for the sole purpose of carrying out a certain mission.

The part of a human being that is indwelled by such an avatar being acquires a special character in that it is able to multiply. When a grain of seed is sown into the ground, the stalk grows from it, and the grain is multiplied into the ears of grain. In the same way, the etheric body of Shem multiplied into many copies, and these were woven into all his descendants. That's what happened, and thus the copies of the etheric body that had been specially prepared in Shem as the prototype were woven into the etheric bodies of his direct descendants.

But this etheric body of Shem was later used in yet another way. How this was done can best be placed before our souls by the visualization of an analogy. You may be a highly cultured European, but if you want to acquaint the Hottentots with your culture, you simply must learn their language. By analogy, the exalted beings that descend to earth to guide humanity must weave into themselves the forces by which they will be put into a position to communicate with human beings on earth. Now in the later phase of the evolution of the Semitic people, it became necessary that a very exalted being descend to earth in order to communicate with them and provide an impetus to their culture. Such a being was the Melchizedek of Biblical history who, as it were, had to "put on" the preserved etheric body of Shem—the very etheric body that was still inhabited by an avatar being. Once it was woven into him, Melchizedek was able to transmit to Abraham the impulse necessary for the continued progress of Semitic culture. Here, then, we have become acquainted with another unique way in which an etheric body develops in a particular human being and is subsequently allotted to a specially selected individuality for the fulfillment of a mission.

Such examples can be found up to the most recent times, and as we trace them, we gradually realize the truth of what occultism is able to say today about this subject matter. Occultism conveys to us that most human beings living at present no longer have etheric or astral bodies that were originally woven anew from the general fabric of the world Almost every human being has in his or her etheric and astral body a fragment that has been preserved from ancient times because the principle of spiritual economy is at work preserving useful elements for repeated utilization.

Let us mention two more examples from the modern age that can illustrate to us how mysteries are at work from one epoch to another. The first example is related to the personality who is discussed in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nicholas of Cusa. He called one of his writings De docta ignorantia, a Latin title that can be translated “Learned Ignorance”; yet it contains more erudition than many a book claiming to contain learned knowledge. There were certain reasons for the title. If you read other writings by Nicholas of Cusa, you will find that a prophetic presentation of the Copernican picture of the universe is woven into them in a curious way. Those who read carefully cannot fail to recognize it. Yet it was not until the time of Copernicus that the world was mature enough to accept this view of the universe in its actual form. Investigation into the connection reveals the following: One of the members of Cusa's super-sensible constitution contained an ancient individuality of the highest rank, and that made it possible for the astral body of Nicholas of Cusa to be preserved and then to be woven into the astral body of Nicholas Copernicus. The wisdom once possessed by Nicholas of Cusa could, as it were, be resurrected in Copernicus, and that is an example of how the astral body has reincarnated.

The second example deals with Galileo, who has been immensely important for modern thought, as many of you who have thought about the matter know. Without him, there would have been no physics in the modern sense because the whole mode of thinking in terms of physics today must be attributed to Galileo. Every schoolboy today will read in the most elementary books of Galileo's law of inertia, of continuity, which indicates that a body in motion tends to continue its movement until it encounters an obstacle. Thus, if we throw some object, it will travel forward by its own momentum until it is stopped by an obstacle or outer force. This is how we think today, and this is what children in school learn from their textbooks. However, people living before Galileo thought in a different manner. They thought that if a stone were thrown, its flight could not continue unless the air drove or pushed it from behind. So we see that the laws of falling bodies, of the pendulum, and of simple machines are all derived from Galileo.

Galileo received his insights through a certain inspiration. I need only to remind you of how he discovered the law of the pendulum by observing the swinging lamp in the Cathedral at Pisa—a stroke of genius. Many people had walked past this lamp without noticing a thing, but when Galileo observed it, the fundamental laws of mechanics dawned on him. A human being who can be inspired in such a profound way has an etheric body of enormous richness; to allow it to perish would contradict the law of spiritual economy.

It is for this reason that Galileo's etheric body too was preserved and reappeared after a comparatively short period of time in an individual whose achievements were also to be of great significance. It was woven into a personality who grew up in a remote peasant village in Russia, ran away from his parents, and journeyed to Moscow. The great talent of this young man became apparent very soon, and he rapidly absorbed the knowledge of his day in the schools of Russia and Germany, so that he had soon encompassed the total of the general knowledge available in the culture of his time. All he had to do was to accumulate the knowledge developed on earth since he had died—in his etheric body—as Galileo. And then this very same person became, so to speak, the founder of the whole classical literature movement in Russia, creating lasting literary treasures practically out of the void. But more than that, he also provided important stimuli to every scientific discipline related to physics and chemistry, and particularly to all areas of mechanics. This individual was none other than Michail Lomonosov, whose achievements and reforms were possible only because the etheric body of Galileo had been woven into him. Galileo died in the middle of the seventeenth century, and Michail Lomonosov was born early in the eighteenth century with Galileo's etheric body, representing one of those intimate reincarnations where a member of the super-sensible constitution of the human being other than the ego is reincarnated. Such things lead us toward a deep understanding of the entire evolutionary process and of many other factors that have developed in the course of time, leading to the conditions prevailing at present.

The greatest avatar on earth was Christ Himself, who lived for three years in the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Because Christ lived in the three bodies of the super-sensible constitution of Jesus of Nazareth, it was possible for the latter's etheric and astral bodies, and of the ego too in a lesser degree, to multiply in the same way as we have discussed it before. After the Mystery of Golgotha and as a result of the wonderful laws of spiritual economy, quite a few copies of the astral body and of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth were present as archetypes in the spiritual world. If an avatar enters a human sheath, the essence of the host is dispersed into many replicas. In contrast to the copies of Shem's etheric body, the copies of the astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth had another special characteristic. The copies of Shem's etheric body could be implanted only into his own descendants whereas the copies of the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted into all human beings of the most diverse peoples and races. A copy of the archetypal astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted in anyone who through his or her personal development had become ready for this transfer, no matter what race such an individual belonged to. And we see how in this subsequent evolution of Christendom, strange developments take place behind the external historical facade, and only such developments can render the external course of events intelligible.

Now, how did Christianity spread? We can say that in the first few centuries the dissemination of the idea of Christianity depended on what happened on the physical plane. In this era we see that Christianity is decidedly propagated through everything that lives on the physical plane. The Apostles stressed the fact that the propagation of Christianity was based on direct physical perception of eyewitnesses. "We have laid our hands into His wounds" was a statement of proof that the Christ had walked on earth in a human body. In other words, the stress was put on anything on the physical plane that could serve as documentation for the development of Christianity. Time and again during those first few centuries, it was asserted that those who had been disciples of the Apostles themselves were responsible for the continuing propagation of Christianity, and it was emphasized that they had known the immediate followers of the Lord Himself. So we see that people in this era relied, as it were, on eyewitness reports, and this continues in a still deeper sense up to the time of St. Augustine, who said: “I would not believe in the truth of the Gospels if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do so.” Why, then, did he believe? Because it was his conviction that the visible Church has propagated the Gospel on the physical plane from one decade and from one century to another. However, in the following centuries, from the fifth to the tenth, Christianity was propagated in a different way. Why and how? It is instructive to learn the answer to this question if we are interested in following the spiritual progress of human evolution.

You can visualize the method of propagation in this next period by considering, for example, the Old Saxon gospel epic entitled Heliand. In this work, a kind of initiate presents his readers with his version of the Christ idea and with his perception of the Christ-Being. The Heliand, the Savior, presented by this Saxon initiate is a super-sensible being. Yet, He is portrayed not within the context of the events in Palestine, but rather as a prince of a Germanic tribe. The disciples are individuals from Germanic lands, and the whole of Christianity is clothed in Central European imagery. Why was this done? It was done because the initiate who wrote the Heliand at the suggestion of Louis the Pious had clairvoyant faculties, so that he was able to see Christ in a way similar to Paul's perception of Christ at Damascus. Through the event at Golgotha the Christ-Being had united Himself with the astral body of the earth, thereby infusing His power into the aura of the earth; and when Paul became clairvoyant, he could clearly perceive: The Christ is present! Paul did not allow himself to become a believer merely on the strength of what was reported to have happened in Palestine. Only after he had seen the being that was woven into the earth with his own eyes did he change from Saul to Paul. In a similar vision, the Risen Christ, the eternal Christ living in the spiritual world after Golgotha, was revealed to the writer of the Heliand, and He was more important to him than was the historical Christ of Palestine. And so he presents Him in another setting because the spiritual Christ was more important to him than was the external image of the Christ. You may want to ask why the author of the Heliand was able to communicate such an image from clairvoyant perception. He was able to do this because a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This was the case because during these centuries—starting with the fifth or sixth and ending with the ninth or tenth century—the etheric bodies of those who were destined to do something for the advancement of Christianity were interwoven with a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and one of these special individuals was the writer of the Heliand.

Since there were many others who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric body, we can readily see that human beings in these centuries lived in imaginations that were closely related to the events in Golgotha. All those who created the original artistic portrayals of the Savior on the cross and of Mary with the Jesus Child had been inspired to do pictorial representations of anything connected with the event in Golgotha by one and the same thing: a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the etheric body of each of these individuals. If the paintings of the events in Golgotha seemed like representations of a type, this points to the fact that all the artists were clairvoyant; what they created was then transmitted to posterity by the forces of tradition. In these early centuries, not all the inspired individuals destined to propagate the idea of Christianity were, of course, artists. Take, for example, John Scotus Erigena,²⁹ the scholastic philosopher, who in the days of Charles the Bald wrote the famous De Division Naturae. He, too, had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into his own etheric body.

If human beings were born during the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric bodies, human beings living in the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries received copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth rather than copies of His etheric body. Only by considering this fact do we fully understand some of the important personalities of that time. How will a personality whose own astral body is interwoven with a copy of the astral body of Jesus appear to the outside world? After all, the ego of Jesus is not incarnated in such an individual; each personality retains his or her own ego. Ego judgment can cause many an error to creep into the life of such an individual; but because the copy of the great prototype has been woven into his or her astral body, devotion, all the feelings, everything in short that permeates and weaves through this astral body will come to the fore as the intrinsic essence of the astral body, even though it may perhaps be at variance with the ego itself. Think of Francis of Assisi. There you have a personality into whose astral body a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven. You may have found many extremes in the biography of Francis of Assisi, and if you did, you should consider that they were caused by his ego, which was not on the same level with his astral body. But the moment you study his soul under the assumption that his ego was not always capable of making the right judgments about the wonderful feelings and the humility contained in the astral body, then you will understand him. A copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was reincarnated in Francis of Assisi, and this was the case with many individuals of that time—Franciscans, Dominicans, and all other personalities of that time who will be intelligible only when studied in the light of this knowledge. For example, one of those personalities was the renowned St. Elisabeth of Thüringen.

And so what has happened in the external life of our existence becomes fully intelligible only when we see how spiritual impulses are conveyed in each era and how they are propagated in the course of time.

When Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, something like an imprint of the ego was made in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. When the Christ-Being entered the astral body, we can easily conceive that something like a replica of the ego could be produced in the surrounding parts of the astral body. This copy of the ego of Christ Jesus produced many duplicates that were preserved, so to speak, in the spiritual world. In the case of a few individuals who were to be prophets for their own age, something was woven into their ego. Among them were the German mystics who proclaimed the inner Christ with such fervor because something like a copy of the ego of Christ was incarnated in them—only a copy or image of Christ's ego, of course. Only human beings who prepare themselves gradually for a full understanding of the Christ and who understand through their knowledge of the spiritual worlds what the Christ really is, as He surfaces time and again in ever changing forms during the course of human evolution—only those human beings will also gradually gain the maturity necessary to experience Christ in themselves. They will be ready to absorb, so to speak, the waiting replicas of the Christ-Ego, ready to absorb the ego that the Christ imprinted in the body of Jesus.

Part of the inner mission of the universal stream of spirituality is to prepare human beings to become so mature in soul that an ever-increasing number of them will be able to absorb a copy of the Ego-Being of Christ Jesus. For this is the course of Christian evolution: first, propagation on the physical plane, then through etheric bodies, and then through astral bodies that, by and large, were reincarnated astral bodies of Jesus. Now the time is at hand when the ego-nature of Christ Jesus will increasingly light up in human beings as the innermost essence of their souls. Yes, these imprinted copies of the Christ Jesus individuality are waiting to be taken in by human souls—they are waiting!

And now you see from what depths the universal stream of Spiritual Science flows into our souls. Spiritual Science is not a theory, not the sum total of concepts given merely for the intellectual enlightenment of human beings; it is a reality, and it intends to offer realities to the human soul. Those who wish to gain a spiritual understanding of Christianity and experience it within themselves will strive to make a personal contribution so that either in the present or in a later incarnation a copy of the Christ Jesus individuality can be woven into their own egos. A person who understands the true, inmost essence—the actuality—of the universal stream of Spiritual Science will prepare himself or herself not just for knowledge, but rather for an encounter with actual reality. You must develop a feeling that we in our world movement are not concerned with the mere communication of theories, but rather with preparing human beings to accept facts. We are also concerned that human beings receive what is waiting in the spiritual world and what they have the power to receive, provided they prepare themselves for this task in the right way.

• 27. The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. The Veda is the literature of the Aryans who invaded NW India about 1500 B.C. and pertains to the fire sacrifice central to their religious beliefs.
• 28. The Upanishads constitute the last section of the Hindu Veda and are said to have been composed around 900 B.C. As the wellspring of Hindu speculative and religious thought, they became the basis for the later schools of Vedanta. “Vedanta” literally means “The end of the Veda” and refers to how the Upanishads are to be taught and interpreted.
• 29. John Scotus Erigena (c. 810–c. 877) was an Irish scholastic philosopher.

This lecture is the third lecture in the lecture series entitled, The Karma of Human Vocation as related to Goethe's Life. It was later published in the lecture series, The Karma of Human Vocation.

All of these lectures are tending more or less to the central question of man's calling or profession. Some people may think that the study of this question from the spiritual-scientific point of view is one of the least interesting subjects. But it is not so,—especially not in this present period, the 5th post-Atlantean. For in this period all the conditions in which men live will very largely be changed, as against the conditions that obtained in former periods on Earth. And for this change, man himself, out of his freedom, will have to bring with him more than he brought with him in former times, when his allotted task in earthly evolution worked itself out more or less instinctively, and the direction he had to take in one respect or another was suggested to him, as it were, from a higher source.

Let us look back for instance to the Egypto-Chaldean civilization, or any other civilization of former times. As to the forming of his outer destiny, not nearly so much was left in man's own hands as is the case to-day (and it will be more and more so in the future). In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch each man had his station—his rank in life—and was fastened in it (albeit not so firmly), much like an animal is fixed within its species. Thus many things that come within the scope of human freedom to-day did not do so in the past. There was, however, a certain counterpoise to this restriction of man's freedom in olden times. Our external historians think in a very short-sighted way. People often imagine that it was in olden times as it is to-day; that the leaders of human affairs were inspired by mere human impulses like the leading personalities of our day and generation. But you must remember that in the Mysteries of olden time there were quite definite procedures whereby the leaders informed themselves of the will and intention—not of earthly Beings, but of the Beings who guide this earthly life from realms beyond the Earth. I have told you how the high priest's conducted certain ceremonies of the Mysteries at certain seasons—we need not describe them again in detail now. The purport of the ceremony was, as it were, to place into connection with the Cosmos—with processes beyond the Earth—chosen individuals within the temple-service. For then, into the consciousness of these chosen individuals—who were especially suited to receive Their influence—Beings who guided the Earth from regions far beyond, could work. What the priests thus received of the will of the guiding spiritual Beings, this they accepted as instruction for the measures which they had to take. We may illustrate it by a hypothetical assumption,—though of cour.se in our time things are not done in this way. Let us suppose that our Christmas festival did not take its course as it does to-day, where it remains for most people a more or less external festivity. Let us suppose we were aware throughout the Christmas festival: ‘During the Christmas Season, our Earth as a living Being is peculiarly adapted to receive into its aura Ideas which cannot enter the Earth's aura at other seasons—in summer time for instance.’ I have explained how the Earth is awake during the winter season. One of the brightest points of this awakeness is the time of Christmas. At this time the aura of the Earth is woven through and through with Thoughts. At this time the Earth is meditating on the surrounding Universe, just as we human beings in our day-waking Life meditate in thought upon the things that surround us. In summer the Earth is asleep. In summer, therefore, certain Thoughts cannot be found in the Earth. In winter it is awake,—and most radiantly of all at the time of Christmas. For then the aura of the Earth is woven through and through with Thoughts, and in these Thoughts we may read what the Cosmos requires of our earthly happenings.

Certain human beings had to undergo an individual training, so as to become sensitive and receptive to what was living in the Earth's aura. The priests of the sacrifice who trained them were then able, as it were, at certain moments to connect them in the temples with these Thoughts of the Earth, which voiced the cosmic Will. So were the priests enabled to find out the cosmic Will. According to what they thus discovered as the ‘Will of Heaven,’ they could then determine who was to remain within a certain tribe, or who should be received within the Mysteries, thereafter to assume a leading place in statecraft or priesthood.

Mankind has grown out of all these things. Mankind, in a certain sense, is handed over to chaos in this respect. Of that we must be well aware. The transition from these old and definite conditions, when men discovered from the Will of Gods what should take place here on the Earth, took place throughout the fourth post-Atlantean period. For in that period the human individuality was emancipating itself, so to speak, from the cosmic Will, and the old customs gradually passed over into our present, somewhat chaotic conditions. Everything is tending to be placed more into the hands of man. But it is all the more necessary for the Will of the Cosmos to enter into our earthly conditions in a new way. Even in the Egyptian and Babylonian period of civilization (the 3rd post-Atlantean), that which works and weaves into the earthly realm out of the several human trades and callings was to a high degree an image of the cosmic will. It would take us a long time to explain this, but we might well do so. It was brought about in the way above described. But in the course of the 4th post-Atlantean time, all this was growing vague and confused, and it became utterly so during the present time (the 5th post-Atlantean) which, as you know, began about the 15th century. It is a pity the people of to-day do not observe what really happens. It is a pity they dish up a fable convenue in place of real History. If they were more observant they would recognize, even from the outer facts, to how large an extent everything has changed since the 14th and 15th centuries in the living-together of men in their several callings. And from the present conditions they would then perceive how increasingly different these things will become in future. Truly a kind of anarchy would overwhelm the human race if there were no-one to perceive these deeper relationships, and communicate to the spiritual life of man on Earth ideas which can reckon with these changes. For the changes are inherent in the very course of evolution.

Anyone who has a real feeling for human life would be astonished to discover all that is observable even in outer History, in the rise of the modern life of callings and vocations, since the 15th century. Anyone who really let work upon him what is quite recognisable even in this way, would assuredly reproach himself with having lived so sleepily, without giving a thought to what is connected so profoundly with the evolving destinies of mankind.

Now as I pointed out in our last lecture, the life of human callings and professions is by no means without meaning for the cosmic whole, though at first sight if might appear so. We human beings, as I said, have undergone successively the Saturn evolution (when the first plan of the physical human body was prepared), the Sun epoch (when the etheric man was prepared), the Moon epoch (when the astral man was prepared), and we are now undergoing the Earth epoch, during which the Ego is growing and developing. These will be followed by others—the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan epochs. And we may say: As the Earth is the fourth stage from Saturn, so is Vulcan the fourth stage from Earth. Earth is, in a manner speaking, the Saturn of Vulcan. The processes that took place on old Saturn are intimately connected with our evolution, for we owe to them the first plan and beginning of our physical body, which is still working in us. So likewise on the present Earth, something must take place, which, working on in evolution, will attain on Vulcan a fourth stage of development, even as the processes on Saturn have attained a fourth stage of development during the Earth epoch. Moreover, as I showed you, these processes which will correspond on Vulcan to what we have on Earth from Saturn evolution, are none other than what lives and works in the varied callings which men take up upon Earth. Men upon Earth are working at their several callings, and as they do so there evolves on Earth, within their work, something which is a first beginning for Vulcan, just as the Saturn activity was a first beginning for the physical human body of to-day.

Consider now in this connection the tremendous change which the life of callings and professions has undergone since the fifth post-Atlantean age began. Then you will realise how increasingly necessary it will be to place the life of human callings into the whole course of cosmic evolution, thinking of it from the points of view which spiritual science can evolve. We must first acquaint ourselves with the objective aspects of the vocational life of man. Only then can we arrive at true conceptions of the Karma of vocation. And we must be still more interested in the present tendencies of evolution in this respect. For the tendencies which are at work will give us a clearer idea than the actual conditions which prevail to-day.

Further developments in this respect will lead to the several callings growing more and more specialised and differentiated. This we can easily recognise, if only we look out into the world to-day with common sense. People to-day sometimes speak critically of this increasing specialisation of callings and occupations in modern time. But there is little wisdom in such criticism. ‘Not many centuries ago,’ they say, ‘man at his daily work was still able to see the connection of the thing he made with its use and meaning for the world. He had an intimate vision of what would become of his product in the lives of men.’ So indeed it was in former times, while to-day, for the majority of men, it is no longer so.

Take a radical instance. Destiny places a man into a factory. Maybe he does not even make a nail, but only part of a nail, which another man will then piece together with a different part. He cannot develop any real interest in the way in which, what he has manufactured from early morning till late evening, will place itself into the whole nexus of human life. Compare the former handicrafts with the present factory system. There is a radical difference between what now obtains and what existed not so very long ago. Moreover, what has already taken place to a high degree in certain branches of work will take place more and more. Increasing specialization and differentiation will inevitably come into the life and work of men. Really it is not very wise to criticise the fact. It is a necessity of evolution and it will come about, more and more. There is no escaping it.

What sort of a prospect does this open up? This prospect, we might imagine: Men would increasingly lose interest in that which occupies the greater part of their lives. They would be more or less mechanically given up to their work in the external world. And yet, that is not even the most important aspect. For it goes without saying that the outer habit of man's life must affect his inner being—and that is far more important. Study once more the historic evolution of mankind and you will find to what a degree men have become the impress of their several occupations during the 5th post-Atlantean age. Man's occupation works its way down into his inner soul. The human beings themselves grow specialised. You must not adopt as your standard the majority of those who are now living in the Anthroposophical Society. For many of these are in the happy position to be able to sever themselves from the whole complex of modern life. In the happy position, did I say? ... I might equally well have said, in the unhappy position. For to a large extent it is happiness only for our subjective, selfish human feeling; not for the World at large. The World will more and more require men to do good work in special spheres. The World itself will require men to specialise. More and more, therefore, this will be the question: What is to happen alongside of the specialising of men? They will specialize; the necessities of World-evolution will see to that, quickly enough. But what must happen in addition?

In a none too distant future this will become one of the most important ‘family questions,’ and people will need an understanding of it if they want to educate their children. They will need to place themselves intelligently into the whole course and trend of human evolution when the question comes before them: How shall I place my child into this human evolution? It will depend on their large-minded understanding of this question. Today, out of a certain sloppiness of thought, it may still be possible to adhere to the old phrases which are a mere relic of former times and will soon reveal their emptiness—pretty phrases, which so many people still admire: ‘Observe the child's predisposition. Let him take up what accords with his native talents.’ This above all will soon be proved—an empty phrase. For in the first place, as we shall presently see, those who are born into the world henceforth will be related to their former incarnations in a far more complicated way than in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The whole system of predispositions will be of a complexity hitherto unknown.

Predispositions were simpler in former times. We shall live and learn, ... and as to those who think themselves peculiarly wise in examining the talents and predispositions of adolescent children and declaring them fit for this or that calling, we shall soon discover that such insight is often no more than the fantastic imaginings of men who think themselves too clever. And apart from that, the life of men will in the none too distant future grow so complicated that the word ‘calling’ will assume quite another meaning. To-day, when we speak of ‘calling,’ or ‘vocation,’ we still often think of something inwardly determined; But in reality most people's ‘calling’ is no longer so. We speak of ‘calling’; we imagine: ‘That to which the man is called by virtue of his inner qualities.’ Well, let us inquire objectively, especially in the towns and cities. How many people will answer, I am in my calling because I recognise that this is the only one which answers to my talents and predispositions from a child. Of the town populations, at any rate, a very small proportion will reply that they are in the very calling which answers to their talents. I think, from your own observations of life, you will scarcely believe that it is otherwise. To-day already, in a high degree, our ‘calling’ is that to which we are called by the objective course of evolution of the World. It will be more and more so in future. Outside, in the outer World, is the organism, the complex, or if you will, the machine,—it matters not how you name it—which makes its demands on man, i.e., which ‘calls’ him.

All this will become more and more intensified. Nevertheless, in this very process, what mankind achieves in vocational work is loosed from the man himself and grows more objective. And precisely inasmuch as it is thus severed from man, it will increasingly become what in the further development through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan will undergo a similar process to what was undergone for the Earth through Saturn, Sun and Moon.

It is strange. When as a spiritual scientist one speaks of things that touch the life of man so nearly, one cannot generally speak so as to please. Spiritual Science will be less and less exposed to the danger of speaking after the pattern of that ‘wisdom’ which is expressed in the quotation: ‘At most a deed of State with excellent pragmatic maxims, suitable for puppets to declaim.’ On the contrary, Spiritual Science will often be obliged to declare great and fraught with meaning for World-evolution, precisely the things which human beings would not gladly have. Many a person of today—who thinks himself a man of genius because his head is filled with modern, Philistine ideas,—may say of these things, ‘How prosaic and external!’ To a true Spiritual Science the vocational life of man appears in quite a different light. Spiritual Science must say: The vocational life is necessary for the development of relationships which have a cosmic meaning, precisely inasmuch as it is in a certain measure loosed and separated from human interest.

Some will say, perhaps: ‘What a sad perspective for the future! Man is having to enter the treadmill of life more and more; and not even Spiritual Science can give him comfort at this prospect.’ But to draw this conclusion would again be a great mistake. For in the Universe it is so: things work themselves out through a balancing of polar opposites. You need only think how it forces itself on your attention everywhere. Positive and negative electricity produce their effects in the balancing-out of their mutual relation; they are necessary one to another. The male and female are necessary for the propagation of the human race. In World-evolution the totality evolves out of one-sidednesses.

And this, too, underlies the matter we have just explained. In the vocational work which is severed from the human being, we have to create the first cosmic beginnings of a far-reaching World-evolution. All that happens in World-evolution stands in relation to the spiritual; and in all that we do in trades and callings and professions—whether by manual or by so-called mental work—there lies as it were the starting-point for the incorporation of spiritual beings. Now, during earthly time, the.se beings are still of an elemental kind—we might call them elemental of the fourth degree. But when the Jupiter evolution has arrived, they will be elementals of the third degree, ... and so on. The work we do, precisely in the objective process of our callings, is severed from us and becomes the outer garment, the outer vehicle, for elemental beings who will develop on through cosmic evolution. Yet this will happen only under one condition. On the one hand we must say: We are only beginning to understand the meaning of what is so often maligned as the mere prosaic life. Yet at the same time we must realise that the meaning of it will not be fully unveiled till we understand it as a whole, in the great World-connection. What we create in our daily occupations can indeed gain significance for Vulcan evolution. But to this end another thing is necessary. As positive electricity is needed for negative, and male for female, so, too, an opposite pole is needed, to add to these occupational activities which will more and more be loosed and severed from mankind. Such polarity, depending upon contrasts, existed already in former evolutionary epochs of mankind. It is not altogether new, needless to say; something not unlike it was already there before. But as you look back on former periods of culture—even a few centuries ago—you will find things very different. For with his feelings, even his passions—his whole emotional life, in a word,—man was far more engaged in his daily occupation than he can be to-day. Compare the many joys a man could have in his calling-, even a hundred years ago, with all the unhappy drudgery which many a one to-day already has to undergo if he has nothing else in life beside his calling. Then you will gain an idea of what I mean. Such things are far too little considered nowadays, and for a simple reason: Those who do most of the talking about vocations—about the different kinds and characters and choices of vocation—are generally people for whom it is easy enough to talk: schoolmasters, litterateurs and parsons, people who experience least of all the disadvantages of modern vocational life. To hear people talk in the usual literature of to-day (not excluding that on education) one generally feels, they are like blind people talking about colours. For a man of to-day, who with a certain social background went to public school, and then, maybe, looked around him a little at some University, it is easy enough to¹ feel very clever when he sets himself up as a reformer of mankind and knows how all things should be done. For he has absorbed all manner of ideas. There are many such reformers; but to anyone who sees through life, these people who tell us how things should be done generally appear the most foolish of all. Their foolishness only passes unobserved, because, for the moment, there is still a great respect for those who have undergone such education. The time is yet to come, when it will rather be the prevailing feeling that a litterateur, a journalist, a schoolmaster—trained in the way schoolmasters generally are nowadays—understands least of all of the real facts of life. This, too, must gradually become the prevailing judgment.

The point is now, that we should see more clearly: The vocational life of former times was connected with the emotional life of men, and it is of the very essence of evolution in this respect that the vocational life has grown out of the human life of emotions and will do so more and more in future. Hence, too, the opposite pole, which the vocational life requires, must become different from what it was before. What was it in former times? You have it before you still when you observe with sympathy what has to-day become a more or less outer husk of culture (and will inevitably become so more and more). There are the houses in the village, wherein the several trades and callings are pursued, gathered around the Church. The Church in the centre. Six days of the week are devoted to trade and craft and calling, and Sunday to what the human being shall receive only for his soul. Such were the two poles before: the vocational life and the life in religious thoughts.

It would be the greatest possible mistake to suppose that this other pole can remain to-day as the religious societies and sects imagine. It cannot remain as it now is, for it is altogether adapted to a kind of vocational life which is bound up with the human emotions. All human life would be parched and stunted if an insight into these matters did not now arise. The old religious ideas were to some extent sufficient so long as the elemental spirituality which man created at his calling—for he did create elemental spirituality in the above-described sense—did not sever itself from man. To-day, they are no longer sufficient, and they will be less and less so the farther we go on into the future. What is necessary now is the very thing which is most attacked in certain quarters. There must now enter into human evolution the other pole which will consist in this: Men must be able to form clear and detailed ideas about the Spiritual Worlds.

The existing representatives of religious faiths will often say, ‘There goes Spiritual Science, talking of many Spirits, many Gods. One God is all that matters. Is not one God enough?’ To-day one can still make a certain impression by telling people of the great advantage of reaching out to the one God—especially if one does so at the family tea party, pouring derision on ‘these modern movements,’ and putting the thing forward in a more than usually Philistine and self-sufficient way. Nevertheless, it is essential that the points of view of men grow wider. Humanity must learn to know not only that everything is permeated by one Divine Spirituality (conceived as vaguely as possible), but that Spirituality is everywhere—concrete, detailed Spirituality. The workman who stands at the lathe will have to know: As the sparks fly out, so too are the elemental spirits created, who then pass out into the World-process and have their significance in the World-process. Some who believe themselves unduly clever may reply: ‘That is unwise; the elemental spirits will arise, even if one who has no notion of it is standing at the lathe.’ They will arise, no doubt. But the point is, that they should arise in the right way. The point is not that they must arise at all, but that they should arise in the right way. For there may either arise elemental spirits who disturb the cosmic process, or who serve it.

You will best see what I mean if you consider it in one especial sphere. In all these matters, we are now at the beginning of an evolution which stands directly at our doors. Many a man is beginning already now to divine something of it. If it were translated into reality without passing over at once into spiritual-scientific strivings, it would be the worst thing that could happen to the Earth. For what has chiefly happened during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is this: Man has been loosed, to begin with, from the outer inorganic world which he embodies in his tools. He will be brought together again with what he embodies in his tools. Nowadays, many machines are constructed. It goes without saying, the machines today are objective. There is little of the human element in them as yet. But it will not always be so. The tendency of World-evolution is for a connection to arise between what a man is and what he creates—what he produces. This connection will become more and more intimate. It will emerge to begin with in those spheres on which a closer relationship between man and man is founded—in the treatment of chemical substances for instance, when they are worked up into medicines. People today may still believe that a substance consists of sulphur and oxygen and hydrogen and what-not besides; and that the product of combination will only contain the effects that proceed from the several substances combined. To-day, to a large extent, this is still true; but the tendency of World-evolution is in another direction altogether. Intimate pulsations which are inherent in man's life of will and feeling, will more and more be woven and incorporated in that which he produces. It will no longer be a matter of indifference whether we receive a preparation from one man or another.

Even the coldest and most external technical developments are tending in a very definite direction. He to-day who can divine with his imagination future technical developments, is well aware that in the time to come whole factories will work in an individual way according to the manager. The spirit, the mood and outlook of the man will go into the factory and be transmitted to the way in which the machines work. Thus man will grow together with the objective things. All that we touch will by and by bear the impress of human being. Humanity will learn, however foolish it may yet appear to the clever people. (Did not St. Paul already say, What men hold wise is often foolish before God?) The times are coming when a machine will stand there and remain at rest. A human being will approach it, knowing that he must make one movement of the hand in this way, another in a definite relation to it, and a third again; and through the pulsations in the air which thus arise out of a certain sign, the motor, being attuned to this particular sign, will be set in motion.

Then the development of economic life will assume an aspect such that external patents and the like will be out of the question; for the effect of these things will be replaced by what I have just explained. Moreover, anything that has no relation at all to human nature will be excluded, and a quite definite result will be made possible. Imagine at some future time a really good man, highly evolved in his whole mood and outlook. He will be able to construct machines and to determine signs for them—signs which can only be made by men of a like spirit, men who are also good like himself. While all who are evilly disposed will, if they try to use the sign, create a quite different pulsation and the machine will not work.

It was not for nothing that I told you how certain people can see flames dance under the influence of certain notes. If further researches are made in this direction, the way will presently be found to what I have just indicated. Or, as we might also put it, the way will be found again to those old times when the one alchemist, who only wanted money for his purse, could attain nothing, where, with the very same process, another one who did not want to put money in his purse but desired to enact a sacrament in honour of the Gods and for the healing of Mankind, succeeded.

So long as the product of the daily work of men carried the aura of their emotions—of the joy and gladness which they put into their work—it was inaccessible to the kind of influence which I have just described. But now that the work done by the labour of men at their several vocations can no longer be produced with special enthusiasm, what thus goes out from men will be able to become a motive force—and in like measure. In a certain sense, man is giving back, to the world of machines which proceed from his labour or which serve his labour, its chastity and purity, inasmuch as he can no longer connect it with his emotions. In future it will no longer be possible, so to speak, from the glowing hearth of joyful work at one's vocation to endow the things one makes with one's own human warmth. But on the other hand one will place them into the world more chastely, and thereby also make them more receptive to the motor force, which, as above described—proceeding from man himself—will be destined by man for the several objects. But to give human evolution this direction, detailed knowledge is necessary of the spiritual forces which can be investigated only by Spiritual Science. Only in this way can it come about. For such a thing to happen as we have just described, depends upon a larger number of people in the world finding increasingly the other pole. For in this they will find their way to one another—from man to man—in those interests which, though they go beyond our daily work, our callings, can nevertheless illumine and penetrate them through and through. Life in the spiritual-scientific movement can lay the foundations of a united human life which will lead all the vocations together. Purely external progress in the development of the vocations would soon lead to the dissolution of all bonds of humanity. Men would understand one another less and less; they could unfold less and less of those relations that accord with the true human nature. Increasingly, they would pass one another by, seeking no longer any more than their advantage. They would come into no other relation to one another than that of competition. This must not be allowed to happen, for otherwise the human race would fall into utter decadence. Spiritual Science must be spread in order that this may not be so.

But there is the possibility to describe in the right way what many people—though they may deny it—are striving for unconsciously to-day. You know how many there are nowadays who say, ‘To talk of the spiritual—what antiquated nonsense! We will develop the purely physical sciences in all domains. That is the real advancement of mankind. Once men grow beyond the stage of talking antiquated nonsense about spiritual things, then there will be as it were the Paradise on Earth.’ But it would not be Paradise, it would be Hell on Earth if the human race were dominated by no more than competition and the acquisitive impulse, with this as the balancing and equalising principle. After all, if things are to go on at all, there must be another pole; and if people refuse to look for the spiritual pole, then perforce they must have an Ahrimanic one. When human occupations grow more and more specialised, we might, after all, still have this unifying principle. We could say, ‘The one man is this, the other that, but they all have this much in common; each one desires through his calling to earn, to gain as much as possible. That is what makes all people equal.’ No doubt! But it is purely Ahrimanic principle.

To imagine that the world can manage with a one-sided development, advancing purely on external lines as we have here described it, would be precisely the same in this sphere as if someone were to declare (for let us assume that there was such a queer crank—or shall we say, for politeness, ‘lady-crank’): ‘Men have become worse and worse and worse; they are quite impossible people; they ought to be exterminated. Then only shall we have the right kind of evolution on the physical plane.’ She would be a queer crank, would she not, who imagined this, for nothing at all would be the result if all the men were exterminated. Because it is in the world of the senses, people understand this. In the Spiritual World they fail to understand the corresponding ‘crankiness.’ And yet, for spiritual things it is precisely the same when anyone imagines that external evolution can go forward by itself. It cannot.

Just as the former periods of evolution demanded the abstract religions, so does the evolution of modern time demand the more concrete spiritual knowledge which we are striving after in the spiritual-scientific movement. Born of the occupational work of man which is now severed from the man himself, the elemental spirits will have to be fertilised by the human soul, through what the human soul receives from the impulses that rise to spiritual regions. Not that this is the only task of Spiritual Science. But it is its task in face of the developing and changing life of human callings. Demanded as it is by World-evolution itself upon the Earth, this insight must come into the hearts of men, in like measure as their occupations mechanise the human being. This counter-pole must become more and more active, precisely for the human beings of to-day who are becoming specialised and mechanised. The counter-pole is this: Man must be able to fill his soul with that which brings him near to every other human soul, no matter in what direction specialised.

And this will lead us to far more ... Our time, with the indifference and solitude and separation which it often involves for specialists and workers, must give way to quite another age, when men will work inspired once more by very different impulses. These will truly be no worse than the good old impulses of trade and craft and calling; but the latter cannot ever be renewed. They must be replaced by others. In this respect, we to-day can no longer merely indicate in abstract terms a human ideal which Spiritual Science wishes to unfold. In all detail, we must point to an ideal which will shew what the callings and professions too can become for man when he has the understanding rightly to perceive the signs of the time.

Of all these things, and their significance for human individuality and karma, we shall continue to speak in the next lecture.