The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A number of things make it seem precarious to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual investigation. One of them is the difficulty of the subject itself, since the sources of a genuine and true fairy tale mood have in fact to be sought at deep levels of the human soul. The methods of spiritual research often described by me must follow convoluted paths before these sources can be discovered. Genuine fairy tales originate from sources lying at greater depths of the human soul than is generally supposed, speaking to us magically out of every epoch of humanity's development.

A second difficulty is that, in regard to what is magical in fairy tales, one has to a considerable extent the feeling that the original, elementary impression, indeed the essential nature of the fairy tale itself is destroyed through intellectual observations and a conceptual penetration of the fairy tale. If one has the justified conviction in regard to explanations and commentaries that they destroy the immediate living impression the fairy tale ought to make in simply letting it work on one, then one would far rather not accept explanations in place of their subtle and enchanting qualities. These well up from seemingly unfathomable sources of the folk-spirit or of the individual human soul-disposition. It is really as though one were to destroy the blossom of a plant, if one intrudes with one's power of judgment in what wells up so pristinely from the human soul as do these fairy tale compositions.

Even so, with the methods of spiritual science it proves possible nonetheless to illumine at least to some extent those regions of the soul-life from which fairy tale moods arise. Actual experience would seem to gainsay the second reservation as well. Just because the origin of fairy tales has to be sought at such profound depths of the human soul, one arrives as a matter of course at the conviction that what may be offered as a kind of spiritual scientific explanation remains something that touches the source so slightly after all as not to harm it by such investigation. Far from being impoverished, one has the feeling that everything of profound significance in those regions of the human soul remains so new, unique and original that one would like best of all to bring it to expression oneself in the form of a fairy tale of some kind. One senses how impossible any other approach is in speaking out of these hidden sources.

It may be regarded as entirely natural that someone like Goethe who attempted, alongside his artistic activity, to penetrate deeply into the background, into the sources of existence, in having something to communicate of the soul's profoundest experiences, did not resort to theoretical discussion. Instead, having gained insight into the underlying sources, he makes use of the fairy tale once again for the soul's most noteworthy experiences. This is what Goethe did in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, wanting, in his fashion, to bring to expression those profound experiences of the human soul that Schiller set forth in a more philosophical-abstract form in his Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race. It lies in the nature of what is magical in fairy tales that explanations cannot ultimately destroy their productive mood. For, whoever is able to arrive at the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual investigation, discovers a peculiar fact. (If I were to say all that I should like to say about the nature of fairy tales, I would have to hold many lectures. Hence, it will only be possible today to put forward a few indications and results of investigation.)

That is to say, whoever seeks to come to the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual research finds that these fairy tale sources lie far deeper down in the human soul than do the sources of creativity and artistic appreciation otherwise. This applies even with regard to the most compelling works of art—the most moving tragedies for instance. Tragedy depicts what the human soul can experience in connection with powers the poet tells us derive from the tremendous destiny uplifting it, while overwhelming the individual. The shock-waves of tragedy derive from this destiny, but such that we can say: The entanglements, the threads spun in the course of the tragedy and unraveled again are inherent in definite experiences of the human soul in the external world. These are in many respects hard to foresee, since for the most part we penetrate only with difficulty into the particular make up of the individual. Still, they can be surmised and fathomed in sensing what takes place in the human soul in consequence of its relation to life. In experiencing something tragic, one has the feeling, in one way or another, a particular soul is entangled in a particular destiny, as this is presented to us.

The sources of fairy tales and of the moods out of which they arise lie deeper than these entanglements of tragedy. The tragic, as well as other forms of artistic expression, results for us, we may feel, in seeing the human being—for instance at a particular age, a particular period of life—at the mercy of certain blows of destiny. In being affected by a tragedy, we necessarily assume that the human being is led to the corresponding involvements of destiny as a result of particular inner experiences. We sense the need to understand the specific human beings presented to us in the tragedy with their particular sets of experiences. A certain circumscribed range of what is human comes to meet us in the tragedy, as in other works of art.

In approaching fairy tales with sympathetic understanding, we have a different feeling than the one just described, since the effect of the fairy tale on the human soul is an original and elemental one, belonging to effects that are hence unconscious. In sensing what comes to meet us in fairy tales we find something altogether different from what a human being in a particular life situation may become involved in. It is not a matter of a narrowly circumscribed range of human experience, but of something lying so deep, and so integral to the soul, as to be “generally human.” We cannot say, a particular human soul at a particular age of life, in a certain situation, encounters something of the kind. Rather, what comes to expression in the fairy tale is so deeply rooted in the soul that we identify with it no matter whether as a child in the first years of life, whether in our middle years, or whether in having grown old.

What comes to expression in the fairy tale accompanies us throughout our lives in the deepest recesses of the soul. Only, the fairy tale is often a quite freewheeling and playful, pictorial expression of underlying experiences. The aesthetic, artistic enjoyment of the fairy tale may be as far removed for the soul from the corresponding inner experience—the comparison can be ventured—as say, the experience of taste on the tongue when we partake of food is removed from the complicated, hidden processes this food undergoes in the total organism in contributing to building up the organism. What the food undergoes initially evades human observation and knowledge. All the human being has is the enjoyment in tasting. The two things have seemingly little to do with each other in the first instance, and from how a particular food tastes, no one is capable of determining what purpose this food has in the whole life-process of the human organism. What we experience in the aesthetic enjoyment of the fairy tale is likewise far removed from what takes place deep down in the unconscious, where what the fairy tale radiates and pours forth out of itself joins forces with the human soul. The soul has a deep-rooted need to let the substance of the fairy tale run through its spiritual “veins,” just as the organism has a need to allow the nutrients to circulate through it.

Applying the methods of spiritual research that have been described for penetrating the spiritual worlds, at a certain stage one acquires knowledge of spiritual processes that continually take place quite unconsciously in the depths of the human soul. In normal everyday life, such spiritual processes unfolding in the soul's depths surface only occasionally in faint dream experiences caught by day-consciousness. Awakening from sleep under especially favorable circumstances, one may have the feeling: You are emerging out of a spiritual world in which thinking, in which a kind of pondering has taken place, in which something has happened in the deep, unfathomable background of existence. Though apparently similar to daytime experiences, and intimately connected with one's whole being, this remains profoundly concealed for conscious daily life.

For the spiritual researcher who has made some progress and is capable of initial experiences in the world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts, things often proceed in much the same way. As far as one advances, one still arrives again and again, so to speak, only at the boundary of a world in which spiritual processes approach one out of the deep unconscious. These processes, it must be said, are connected with one's own being. They can be apprehended almost the same way as a fata morgana appearing to one's spiritual gaze, not revealing themselves in their totality.

That is one of the strangest experiences—this peering into the unfathomable spiritual connections within which the human soul stands. In attentively following up these intimate soul occurrences, it turns out that conflicts experienced in the depths of the soul and portrayed in works of art, in tragedies, are relatively easy to survey, as compared to the generally-human soul conflicts of which we have no presentiment in daily life. Every person does nonetheless undergo these conflicts at every age of life.

Such a soul conflict discovered by means of spiritual investigation takes place for example, without ordinary consciousness knowing anything of it, every day on awakening, when the soul emerges from the world in which it unconsciously resides during sleep and immerses itself once again in the physical body. As already mentioned, ordinary consciousness has no notion of this, and yet a battle takes place every day in the soul's foundations, glimpsed only in spiritual investigation. This can be designated the battle of the solitary soul seeking its spiritual path, with the stupendous forces of natural existence, such as we face in external life in being helplessly subjected to thunder and lightning—in experiencing how the elements vent themselves upon the defenseless human being.

Though arising with stupendous force, even such rare occurrences of Nature experienced by the human being are a trifling matter as compared with the inner battle taking place unconsciously upon awakening. Experiencing itself existentially, the soul has now to unite itself with the forces and substances of the physical body in which it immerses itself, so as to make use of the senses and of the limbs once again, these being ruled by natural forces. The human soul has something like a yearning to submerge itself in the purely natural, a longing that fulfils itself with every awakening. There is at the same time, as though a shrinking back, a sense of helplessness as against what stands in perpetual contrast to the human soul—the purely natural, manifesting in the external corporeality into which it awakens. Strange as it may sound that such a battle takes place daily in the soul's foundations, it is nonetheless an experience that does transpire unconsciously. The soul cannot know precisely what happens, but it experiences this battle every morning, and each and every soul stands under the impression of this battle despite knowing nothing of it—through all that the soul inherently is, the whole way it is attuned to existence.

Something else that takes place in the depths of the soul and can be apprehended by means of spiritual investigation presents itself at the moment of falling asleep. Having withdrawn itself from the senses and from the limbs, having in a sense left the external body behind in the physical sense-world, what then approaches the human soul may be called a feeling of its own “inwardness.” Only then does it go through the inner battles that arise unconsciously by virtue of its being bound to external matter in life—and having to act in accordance with this entanglement. It feels the attachment to the sense world with which it is burdened as a hindrance, holding it back morally. Other moral moods can give us no conception of what thus transpires unconsciously after falling asleep, when the human soul is alone with itself. And all sorts of further moods then take their course in the soul when free of the body, in leading a purely spiritual existence between falling asleep and waking up.

However, it should not be supposed that these events taking place in the soul's depths are not there in the waking state. Spiritual investigation reveals one very interesting fact in particular, namely that people not only dream when they think they do, but all day long. The soul is in truth always full of dreams, only the human being does not notice this, since day consciousness is stronger as compared to dream consciousness. Just as a weaker light is drowned out by a stronger one, so what continually takes place in the course of waking consciousness as an ongoing dream-experience is drowned out by day consciousness. Though not generally aware of it, we dream all the time. And out of the abundance of dream experiences, of dreams that remain unconscious, presenting themselves as boundless in relation to the experiences of day consciousness, those dreams of which the human being does actually become conscious, separate themselves off. They do so much as a single drop of water might separate itself from a vast lake. But this dreaming activity that remains unconscious is a soul-spiritual experience. Things take place there in the soul's depths. Such spiritual experiences of the soul located in unconscious regions take their course much as chemical processes, of which we are unconscious, take place in the body.

Connecting this with a further fact arising from these lectures, additional light may be shed on hidden aspects of the soul-life spoken of here. We have often stressed—this was emphasized again in the previous lecture—that in the course of humanity's development on the earth, the soul-life of human beings has changed. Looking back far enough, we find that primeval human beings had quite different experiences from those of the human soul today. We have already spoken of the fact—and will do so again in coming lectures—that the primeval human being in early periods of evolution had a certain original clairvoyance. In the manner of looking at the world normal today in the waking state, we receive sense impressions from an external stimulus. We connect them by means of our understanding, our reason, feeling and will. This is merely the consciousness belonging to the present, having developed out of older forms of human consciousness. Applying the word in the positive sense, these were clairvoyant states. In an entirely normal way, in certain intermediate states between waking and sleeping, human beings were able to experience something of spiritual worlds. Thus, even if not yet fully self-conscious, human beings were by no means as unfamiliar in their normal consciousness with experiences taking place in the depths of the soul, such as those we have spoken of today.

In ancient times human beings perceived more fully their connection with the spiritual world around them. They saw what takes place in the soul, the events occurring deep within the soul, as connected with the spiritual in the universe. They saw spiritual realities passing through the soul and felt themselves much more related to the soul-spiritual beings and facts of the universe. This was characteristic of the original clairvoyant state of humanity. Just as it is possible today to come to a feeling such as the following only under quite exceptional conditions, in ancient times it occurred frequently—not only in artistic, but also in quite primitive human beings.

An experience of a quite vague and indefinite nature may lie buried in the depths of the soul, not rising into consciousness—an experience such as we have described. Nothing of this experience enters the conscious life of day. Something is nonetheless there in the soul, just as hunger is present in the bodily organism. And just as one needs something to satisfy hunger, so one needs something to satisfy this indefinite mood deriving from the experience lying deep within the soul. One then feels the urge to reach either for an existing fairy tale, for a saga, or if one is of an artistic disposition, perhaps to elaborate something of the kind oneself. Here it is as though all theoretical words one might make use of amount to stammering; and that is how fairy tales arise. Filling the soul with fairy tale pictures in this way constitutes nourishment for the soul as regards the “hunger” referred to.

In past ages of humanity's development every human being still stood closer to a clairvoyant perception of these inner spiritual experiences of the soul, and with their simpler constitution people were able—in sensing the hunger described here far more directly than is the case today—to seek nourishment from the pictures we possess today in the fairy tale traditions of various peoples. The human soul felt a kinship with spiritual existence. Without understanding them, it sensed more or less consciously the inner battles it had to undergo, giving pictorial form to them in pictures bearing only a distant similarity to what had taken place in the soul's substrata. Yet there is a palpable connection between what expresses itself in fairy tales and these unfathomable experiences of the human soul.

Ordinary experience shows us that a childlike soul disposition frequently creates something for itself inwardly, such as a simple “companion”—a companion really only there for this childlike mind, accompanying it nonetheless and taking part in the various occurrences of life. Who does not know, for instance, of children who take certain invisible friends along with them through life? You have to imagine that these “friends” are there when something happens that pleases the child, participating as invisible spirit companions, soul companions, when the child experiences this or that. Quite often one can witness how badly it affects the child's soul disposition when a “sensible” person comes, hears the child has such a soul companion, and now wants to talk it out of this soul companion, even perhaps considering it salutary for the child to be talked out of it. The child grieves for its soul companion. And if the child is receptive for soul-spiritual moods, this grieving signifies still more. It can mean the child begins to ail, becoming constitutionally infirm. This is an altogether real experience connected with profound inner occurrences of the human soul.

Without dispersing the “aroma” of the fairy tale, we can sense this simple experience in the fairy tale which tells of the child and the toad, related by the Brothers Grimm.¹ They tell us of the girl who always has a toad accompany her while eating. The toad, however, only likes the milk. The child talks to the animal as though with a human being. One day she wants the toad to eat some of her bread as well. The mother overhears this; she comes and strikes the animal dead. The child ails, sickens, and dies.

In fairy tales we feel soul moods reverberate that do absolutely in fact take place in the depths of the soul, such that the human soul is actually not only cognizant of them in certain periods of life, but simply by virtue of being human, irrespective of being a child or an adult. Thus, every human soul can sense something re-echo of what it experiences without comprehending it—not even raising it into consciousness—connected with what in the fairy tale works on the soul as food works on the taste buds. For the soul, the fairy tale then becomes something similar to the nutritional substance as applied to the organism. It is fascinating to seek out in deep soul experiences what re-echoes in various fairy tales. It would of course be quite a major undertaking actually to examine individual fairy tales in this regard, collected as they are in such numbers. This would require a lot of time. But what can perhaps be illustrated with a few fairy tales can be applied to all of them, in so far as they are genuine.

Let us take another fairy tale also collected by the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin.” A miller asserts to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold and is requested to have her come to the castle, so the king can ascertain her art for himself. The daughter goes to the castle. She is locked in a room and given a bundle of straw with which to demonstrate her art. In the room she is quite helpless. And while she is in this helpless state, a manikin appears before her. He says to her: “What will you give me, if I spin the straw into gold for you?” The miller's daughter gives him her necklace and the little man thereupon spins the straw into gold for her. The king is quite amazed, but he wants still more, and she is to spin straw into gold once again. The miller's daughter is again locked in a room, and as she sits in front of all the straw, the little man appears and says, “What will you give me, if I spin the straw to gold for you?” She gives him a little ring, and the straw is once more spun into gold by the little man. But the king wants still more. And when she now sits for the third time in the room and the little man again appears, she has nothing further to give him. At that the little man says, if she becomes queen one day, she is to grant him the first child she gives birth to. She promises to do so. And when the child is there, and the little man comes and reminds her of her promise, the miller's daughter wants a postponement. The little man then says to her: “If you can tell me what my name is, you can be free of your promise.” The miller's daughter sends everywhere, inquiring after every name. In learning every name, she wants to find out what the little man's name is. Finally, after a number of vain attempts, she actually succeeds in discovering his name—Rumpelstiltskin.

With really no work of art other than fairy tales does one have such a sense of joy over the immediate picture presented, while yet knowing of the profound inner soul-experience out of which the fairy tale is born. Though the comparison may be trivial, it is perhaps still apt: Just as a person can be aware of the chemistry of food and still find a bite to eat flavorful, so it is possible to know something of the profound inner experiences of soul that are only experienced, not “known,” and that come to expression in fairy tale pictures in the manner indicated. In fact, unknowingly the solitary human soul—it is after all alone with itself during sleep, as also in the rest of life even when united with the body—feels and experiences, albeit unconsciously, the whole disparate relation in which it finds itself in regard to its own immense tasks, its place within the divine order of the world.

The human soul does indeed feel how little it is capable of in comparing its ability with what external Nature can do, in transforming one thing into another. Nature is really a great magician, such as the human soul itself would like to be. In conscious life it may light-heartedly look past this gulf between the human soul and the wise omniscience and omnipotence of the spirit of Nature. But at deeper levels of soul experience, the matter is not done away with so easily. There, the human soul would necessarily go to rack and ruin if it were not after all to feel within it a more profound being inside the initially perceptible one, a being it can rely on, of which it can say to itself: As imperfect as you now still are—this being within you is cleverer. It is at work within you; it can carry you to the point of attaining the greatest skill. It can grant you wings, enabling you to see an endless perspective spread out before you, leading into a limitless future. You will be capable of accomplishing what you cannot as yet accomplish, for within you there is something that is infinitely more than your “knowing” self. It is your loyal helper. You must only gain a relation to it. You have really only to be able to form a conception of this cleverer, wiser, more skillful being than you yourself are, residing within you.

In calling to mind this discourse of the human soul with itself, this unconscious discourse with the more adroit part of the soul, we may feel reverberating in this fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin” what the soul experiences in the miller's daughter who cannot spin straw into gold, but finds in the little man a skillful, loyal helper. There, deep in the substrata of the soul—in pictures, the distinctive aura of which is not destroyed through knowing their origin—the profound inner life of soul is given.

Or, let us take another fairy tale.—Please do not take it amiss, however, if I connect this with matters having an apparently personal tinge, though not at all meant in a personal sense. The essential point will become clear in adding a few observations.

In my Esoteric Science you will find a description of world evolution. It is not my intention to talk specifically about this now—that can be left for another occasion. In this world evolution our earth is spoken of as having gone through certain stages as a planet in the cosmos, comparable to human lives that follow one upon the other. Just as the individual human being goes through lives that follow each other sequentially, so our earth has gone through various planetary life-stages, various incarnations. In spiritual science, we speak, for certain reasons, of the earth as having gone through a kind of “Moon” existence before beginning its “Earth” existence, and prior to this a kind of “Sun” existence. Thus, we may speak of a Sun-existence, a planetary predecessor existence of our Earth-existence, as having been present in a primeval past—an ancient Sun, with which the earth was still united. Then, in the course of evolution a splitting off of Sun and earth took place. From what had originally been “Sun,” the moon separated itself off as well, and our sun of today, which is not the original Sun, but only a piece of it, so to speak. Thus, we may speak, as it were, of the original Sun and of its successor, the sun of today. And we may also refer to the moon of today as a product of the old Sun. If spiritual scientific investigation follows the evolution of the earth retrospectively to where the second sun, the sun of today, developed as an independent cosmic body, it has to be said that at that time, of the creatures that might have been externally perceptible to the senses, among the animals, only those existed that had developed to the stage of the fishes.

These things can all be looked up more precisely in Esoteric Science. They can be discovered only by means of spiritual scientific investigation. At the time they had been discovered and written down by me in EsotericScience, the fairy tale in question was quite unknown to me. That is the personal factor I should like to add here. I am able to establish with certainty that it was quite unknown to me, since I only later came across it in Wilhelm Wundt's Ethnic Psychology,² whose sources I only then followed up further.

Before briefly outlining the fairy tale, I should like to say one thing in advance: Everything the spiritual researcher is able to investigate in this way in the spiritual world—and the things just referred to do have to be investigated in the spiritual world, since they are otherwise no longer extant—everything investigated in this way presents a world with which the human soul is united even so. We are connected with this world in the deepest recesses of our souls. It is always present, indeed we unconsciously enter this spiritual world in normal life upon falling asleep. Our soul is united with it and has within it not only the soul's experiences during sleep, but also those relating to the whole of evolution referred to here. Were it not paradoxical, one would like to say: in the unconscious state, the soul knows of this and experiences itself in the ongoing stream issuing from the original Sun and subsequently from the daughter sun we now see shining in the sky, as well as from the moon, also a descendant of the original Sun. And in addition, the soul experiences the fact that it has undergone an existence, soul-spiritually, in which it was not yet connected with earthly matter, in which it could look down on earthly processes; for instance, on the time in which the fish species were the highest animal organisms, where the present sun, the present moon, arose and split off from the Earth. In unconscious regions, the soul is linked to these events.

We shall now briefly follow the outline of a fairy tale found among primitive peoples, who tell us: There was once a man. As a human being, he was, however, actually of the nature of tree resin and could only perform his work during the night, since, had he carried out his work by day, he would have been melted by the Sun. One day, however, it happened that he did go out by day, in order to catch fish. And behold, the man who actually consisted of tree resin, melted away. His sons decided to avenge him. And they shot arrows. They shot arrows that formed certain figures, towering one over the other, so that a ladder arose reaching up to heaven. They climbed up this ladder, one of them during the day, the other during the night. One of them became the sun, and the other became the moon.

It is not my habit to interpret such things in an abstract way and to introduce intellectual concepts. But it is a different matter to have a feeling for the results of investigation—that the human soul in its depths is united with what happens in the world, to be grasped only spiritually, that the human soul is connected with all this and has a hunger to savor its deepest unconscious experiences in pictures. In citing the fairy tale just outlined, one feels a reverberation of what the human soul experienced as the original Sun, and as the arising of sun and moon during the fish epoch of the Earth. It was in some respects a quite momentous experience for me—this is once more the personal note—when I came across this fairy tale, long after the facts I have mentioned stood printed in my Esoteric Science. Though the notion of interpreting the whole matter abstractly still does not occur to me, a certain kindred feeling arises when I consider world evolution in the context of another, parallel portrayal—when I give myself up to the wonderful pictures of this fairy tale.

Or, as a further example, let us take a peculiar Melanesian fairy tale. Before speaking of this fairy tale, let us remind ourselves that, as shown by spiritual investigation, the human soul is also closely linked to prevailing occurrences and facts of the universe. Even if stated rather too graphically, it is still nonetheless true in a certain respect, from a spiritual scientific point of view, if we say: When the human soul leaves the physical body in sleep, it leads an existence in direct connection with the entire cosmos, feeling itself related to the entire cosmos. We may remind ourselves of the relationship of the human soul, or for example, of the human “I” with the cosmos—at least with something of significance in the cosmos. We direct our gaze to the plant world and tell ourselves: The plant grows, but it can only do so under the influence of the sun's light and warmth. We have before us the plant rooted in the earth. In spiritual science we say: the plant consists of its physical body and of the life-body which permeates it. But that does not suffice for the plant to grow and unfold itself. For that, the forces are required that work on the plant from the sun.

If we now contemplate the human body while the human being sleeps, this sleeping human body is in a sense equivalent to a plant. As a sleeping body it is comparable to the plant in having the same potential to grow as the plant. However, the human being is emancipated from the cosmic order which envelops the plant. The plant has to wait for the sun to exert its influence on it, for the rising and setting of the sun. It is bound to the external cosmic order. The human being is not so bound. Why not? Because what spiritual science points out is in fact true: the human being exerts an influence from the “I”—outside the physical body in sleep—upon the plant-like physical body, equivalent to what the sun exerts on the plant. Just as the sun pours its light out over the plants, so does the human “I” pour its light over the now plant-like physical body when the human being sleeps. As the sun “reigns” over the plants, so the human “I” reigns, spiritually, over the plant-like sleeping physical body. The “I” of the human being is thus related to the sun-existence. Indeed, the “I” of the human being is itself a kind of “sun” for the sleeping human body, and brings about its enlivening during sleep, brings it about that those forces are replenished that have been used up in the waking state. If we have a feeling for this, then we recognize how the human “I” is related to the sun. Spiritual science shows us in addition that, just as the sun traverses the arc of heaven—I am of course speaking of the apparent movement of the sun—and in a certain respect the effect of its rays differs according to whether it stands in this or that constellation of the zodiac, so the human “I” also goes through various phases in its experience. Thus, from one phase it works in one way, from a different phase it works in another way on the physical body. In spiritual science one acquires a feeling for how the sun works differently onto the earth according to whether it does so, for example, from the constellation of Aries, or from the constellation of Taurus, and so on. For that reason, one does not speak of the sun in general, but of its effect in connection with the twelve signs of the zodiac—indicating the correspondence of the changing “I” with the changing activity of the sun.

Let us now take everything that could only be sketched here, but which is developed further in Esoteric Science, as something to be gained as soul-spiritual knowledge. Let us regard it as what takes place in the depths of the soul and remains unconscious but takes place in such a way that it signifies an inner participation in the spiritual forces of the cosmos that manifest themselves in the fixed stars and planets. And let us compare all this, proclaimed by spiritual science as the secrets of the universe, with a Melanesian fairy tale, that I shall again outline only briefly:

On a country road lies a stone. This stone is the mother of Quatl. And Quatl has eleven brothers. After the eleven brothers and Quatl have been created, Quatl begins to create the present world. In this world he created, a difference between day and night was still unknown. Quatl then learns that there is an island somewhere, on which there is a difference between day and night. He travels to this island and brings a few inhabitants from this island back to his country. And, by virtue of their influence on those in his country, they too come to experience the alternating states of sleeping and waking, and the rising and setting of the sun takes place for them as a soul experience.

It is remarkable what reverberates once again in this fairy tale. Considering the fairy tale as a whole there re-echoes, with every sentence, so to speak, something of world secrets, something of what, in the sense of spiritual science, the soul experiences in its depths. One then has to say: The sources of fairy tale moods, of fairy tales generally, lie in hidden depths of the human soul. These fairy tales are presented in the form of pictures, since external happenings have to be made use of in order to provide what is to be spiritual nourishment for the hunger that wells up as an outcome of the soul's experiences. Though we are far removed from the actual experiences in question, we can sense how they reverberate in the fairy tale pictures.

With this in mind, we need not wonder that the finest, most characteristic fairy tales are those handed down from former ages when people still had a certain clairvoyant consciousness and found easier access to the sources of these fairy tale moods. Further, it need not surprise us that in regions of the world where human beings stand closer to spirituality than do the souls of the Occident, for example in India, in the Orient in general, fairy tales can have a much more distinctive character.

Neither need we be surprised that in the German fairy tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected in the form told them by relatives and others, often simple people, we come upon accounts reminiscent of the periods of European life in which the great heroic sagas arose. Fairy tales contain attributes found in the great heroic sagas. It need not surprise us to hear that it belatedly came to light that the most significant fairy tales are even older than the heroic sagas. Heroic sagas after all show human beings only at a particular age of life and in particular situations, while what lives in fairy tales is of a generally-human nature, accompanying human beings at every age, from their first to their last breath. It need not surprise us if the fairy tale also insistently depicts, for example, what we have referred to as a profound experience of the soul, the feeling of the soul's inadequacy on awakening in regard to the forces of Nature it helplessly faces and is only a match for, if it has the consolation of knowing at the same time: Within you, there is something that transcends your personal self, and makes you in a certain respect the victor once again over the forces of Nature.

In sensing this mood, one has a feeling for why human beings so often find themselves up against giants in fairy tales. Why do these giants appear? Well, as an image, these giants arise as a matter of course from the whole tone of the soul in wanting to make its way into the body again in the morning, seeing itself confronted by the “giant” forces of Nature occupying the body. What the soul senses there as a battle, what it then feels is altogether real—not in rational terms, but as corresponds to depictions of the manifold battles of the human being with giants. When all this comes to meet it, it clearly senses how it possesses only one thing, its shrewdness, in this whole battle—in its stand in confronting giants. For, this entails the feeling: You could now reenter your body, but what are you, as against the immense forces of the universe! However, you do have something not there in these giants, and that is cunning—reason! This does in fact stand unconsciously before the soul, even if it has also to say to itself, that it can do nothing against the immense forces of the universe. We see how the soul transposes this literally into a picture in giving expression to the mood in question:

A man goes along a country road and comes to an inn. In the inn he asks for milk-soup (blancmange). Flies enter the soup. He finishes eating the milk-soup, leaving the flies. Then he strikes the plate, counts the flies he has killed, and brags: “A hundred at one blow!” The innkeeper hangs a sign around his neck: “He has killed a hundred at one blow.” Continuing along the country road, this man comes to a different region. There a king looks out the window of his castle. He sees the man with the sign around his neck and says to himself: I could well use him. He takes him into his service and assigns him a definite task. He says to him: “You see, the problem is, whole packs of bears always come into my kingdom. If you have struck a hundred dead, then you can certainly also strike the bears dead for me.” The man says: “I am willing to do it!” But, until the bears are there, he wants a good wage and proper meals, for, having thought about it, he says to himself: If I can't do it, I shall at least have lived well until then.—When the time came, and the bears were approaching, he collected all kinds of food and various good things bears like to eat. Then he approached them and laid these things out. When the bears got there, they ate until they were full to excess, finally lying there as though paralyzed; and now he struck them dead one after the other. The king arrived and saw what he had accomplished. However, the man told him: “I simply had the bears jump over a stick and chopped off their heads at the same time!” Delighted, the king assigns him another task. He says to him: “Now the giants will soon also be coming into my land, and you must help me against them as well.” The man promised to do so. And when the time approached, he again took a quantity of provisions with him, including a lark and a piece of cheese. On actually encountering the giants, he first entered into a conversation with them about his strength. One of the giants said: “We shall certainly show you that we are stronger,” taking a stone and crushing it in his hand. Then he said to the man: “That is how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” Another giant took an arrow, shooting it so high that only after a long time did the arrow come down again and said: “That's how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” At this, the man who had killed a hundred at one blow said: “I can do all that and more!” He took a small piece of cheese and a stone, spreading the stone with cheese, and said to the giants: “I can squeeze water out of a stone!” And he squashed the cheese so that water squirted out of it. The giants were astonished at his strength in being able to squeeze water from a stone. Then the man took the lark and let it fly off, saying to the giants: “Your arrow came back down again, the one I have shot, however, goes up so high that it does not come back down at all!” For the lark did not return at all. At that, the giants were so amazed, they agreed among themselves that they would only be able to overcome him with cunning. They no longer thought of being able to overcome him with the strength of giants. Nonetheless, they did not succeed in outwitting him; on the contrary, he outwitted them. While they all slept, he put an inflated pig's bladder over his head, inside which there was some blood. The giants had said to themselves: Awake, we shall not be able to get the better of him, so we shall do it while he sleeps. They struck him while he slept, smashing the pig's bladder. Seeing the blood that spurted out, they thought they had finished him off. And they soon fell asleep. In the peaceful quiet that overcame them, they slept so soundly that he was able to put an end to them.

Even though, like some dreams, the fairy tale ends here somewhat indefinitely and on an unsatisfactory note, we nonetheless have before us a portrayal of the battle of the human soul against the forces of Nature—first against the “bears,” then against the “giants.” But something else becomes evident in this fairy tale. We have the man who has “killed a hundred at one blow.” We have an echo of what lives at the deepest unconscious levels of the soul: the consolation in becoming aware of its own shrewdness over against these stronger, overwhelming forces. It is not a good thing when what has been presented artistically in pictures is interpreted abstractly. That is not at all what matters. On the other hand, nothing of the artistic form of the fairy tale is diminished if one has a feeling for the fact that the fairy tale is an after-echo of events taking place deep within the soul. These events are such that we can know a great deal about them, as much as one can come to know by means of spiritual investigation—yet, in immersing ourselves in fairy tales and experiencing them, they still remain original and elementary.

In researching them, it is certainly agreeable to know that fairy tales present what the soul needs on account of its deepest experiences, as we have indicated. At the same time, no fairy tale mood is destroyed in arriving at a deeper recognition of the sources of subconscious life. Presented only abstractly, we find these sources are impoverished for our consciousness, whereas the fairy tale form is really the more comprehensive one for expressing the deepest experiences of the soul.

It is then comprehensible that Goethe expressed in the significant and evocative pictures of the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he was abundantly able to experience, and which Schiller chose to express in abstract-philosophical concepts. Thus, despite having thought a great deal, Goethe wanted to say in pictures what he felt concerning the deepest underlying strata of human soul-life. And because the fairy tale relates in this way to the innermost soul, it is precisely the form most suited to the child. For it may be said of fairy tales that they have brought it about that what is most profound in spiritual life is expressed in the simplest possible form. In fact, one gradually comes to feel that in all conscious artistic life there is no greater art than that which completes the path from the uncomprehended depths of soul-life to the delightful, often playful pictures of the fairy tale.

An art capable of expressing in the most self-evident form what is hard to comprehend is the greatest and most natural art, an art intimately related to the human being. And just because, in the case of the child, the essential human being is still united in an unspoilt way with the whole of existence, with the whole of life, the child especially needs the fairy tale as nourishment for its soul. What depicts spiritual powers can come alive more fully in the child. The childlike soul may not be enmeshed in abstract theoretical concepts if it is not to be obliterated. It has to remain connected with what is rooted in the depths of existence.

Hence, we can do nothing of greater benefit for the soul of the child than in allowing what unites the human being with the roots of existence to act upon it. As the child still has to work creatively on its own physical formation, summoning the formative forces for its own growth, for the unfolding of its natural abilities, it senses wonderful soul nourishment in fairy tale pictures that connect it with the roots of existence. Since, even in giving themselves over to what is rational and intellectual, human beings can still never be wholly torn away from the roots of existence, they gladly turn again at every age to the fairy tale, provided they are of a sufficiently healthy and straightforward soul disposition. For there is no stage of life and no human situation that can estrange us altogether from what flows from fairy tales—in consequence of which we could cease having anything more to do with what is most profound in human nature or have no sense for what is so incomprehensible for the intellect, expressed in the self-evident, simple, primitive fairy tale and fairy tale mood.

Hence, those who have concerned themselves for a long time with restoring to humanity the fairy tales that had been rather glossed over by civilization, individuals such as the Brothers Grimm, understandably had the feeling—even if they did not adopt a spiritual scientific view—that they were renewing something that belongs intimately to human nature. After an intellectual culture had done its part over a period of centuries to estrange the human soul, including the soul of the child, such collections of fairy tales as those of the Brothers Grimm have quite properly found their way again to all human beings receptive for such things. In this way they have become once more the common heritage of children's souls, indeed of all human souls. They will do so increasingly, the more spiritual science is not just taken as theory, but becomes an underlying mood of the soul, uniting it more and more in feeling with the spiritual roots of its existence.³

In this way, by means of the dissemination of spiritual science, what genuine fairy tale collectors, those truly receptive for fairy tales as well as those who present them have declared, will prove well-founded. This is what a certain individual, a true friend of fairy tales, often said in lectures I was able to hear.⁴ It is a wonderfully poetic utterance which at the same time summarizes what results from such spiritual scientific considerations as we have presented today. It may be formulated in words this man spoke—knowing as he did how to love fairy tales, collecting them, and appreciating them. He always liked to add the saying:

“Fairy tales and sagas are comparable to a good angel, granted human beings as a companion from birth on their life's wanderings, to be a trustworthy comrade throughout—offering comradeship, and making life inwardly into a truly ensouled fairy tale!”⁵

• 1. in “Tales About Toads”
• 2. published in 10 volumes, 1900-1920
• 3. In 1856 Wilhelm Grimm wrote: “Common to all fairy tales is a residual faith reaching back into ancient times, expressing itself in a pictorial grasp of supersensible things.”
• 4. This is in all probability a reference to Rudolf Steiner's friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer (1825-1900), professor of literature at the Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Vienna, discoverer of the Oberufer Christmas Plays, and described by Rudolf Steiner as “a researcher in the style of the Brothers Grimm.” (Document of Barr, Sept. 1907.)
• 5. Schröer was in turn quoting Wilhelm Grimm

My dear friends! I agree with Licentiate Bock who suggested it would be best to take up yesterday's reflections plus those of the afternoon and orientate ourselves toward questions that had arisen.

Yesterday I tried to present a kind of overview of the seven sacraments. I tried to show how the sacraments either determine a kind of value of involution to an evolution value, or the reverse. In the questions which have been asked, there is a wish for something to be said about the sacrament of priest ordination. We have looked at how five sacraments essentially are arranged along the developmental line of each individual human being, how this line connects from birth up to death. We have seen how both the sacraments of priest ordination and marriage in the Christian sense fall away from the other (five) sacraments, and how the priest ordination ceremony points out the evolutionary element which is present in each human being as an involutionary process, namely the mysterious connection each individual human being has with the Divine.

Now let us first of all try to place the concept of this sacrament of ordination in front of us according to its development, how its Christian content has gone over into Christian ceremonies and gradually crystallized life in Catholicism as the culmination of all ceremonies.

We must very clearly understand that the connection of human beings with the Divine in the sense of the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, was such that it certainly existed way back, behind the consciousness of modern man today. If we go back far into the cultural development of humanity, we discover another kind of selection for the priesthood than what was later the case, and of the kind we actually want to talk about here. You must clearly understand that ceremonies, rituals and sacraments only become comprehensible within the entire relationship of human evolution, because the Christian sacraments are a kind of transformation of older sacraments. So, regarding priesthood, the relationship is different compared to olden times. In earlier times the one who was taken up into the mysteries by leaders of the mysteries was elected according to his soul characteristics; his entire human development was regarded as being worthy—if today we could select an apt term we would say: 'to be chosen'. This is a concept which has so much more meaning, the further we look back in human evolution. The point of view that people are equal is a modern-day opinion; it is actually essentially something that only emerged from the consciousness of the epoch around the Mystery of Golgotha. By contrast they believed that in fact, in olden times, one person was more worthy of being chosen than another, so that those who were worthy to be inducted into the Mysteries—or to be initiated, as one can clearly impress the imagination with other expressions—was to be discovered within the masses of people. When these individuals were in this or that way discovered, which was believed as predestination for a priestly calling, he had to go through with the initiation. This process of initiation meant that the person was brought into a situation where he had to manage another state of consciousness other than merely the one he experienced in the outer world. In olden times another state of consciousness prevailed, quite different from what it is today. Today quite a different state of consciousness is needed to be able to manage Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. So when I take today's second kind of consciousness as a start, perhaps it can lead to greater understanding, in such a way that the usual daily consciousness still remains complete. A person should not for a moment—without falling sick—be somehow impaired by exercises or the like, as I have described in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds"; a person should not be impaired in the management of his daily consciousness, it must be present. The other consciousness which lacks real freedom which consist in managing Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition must be there as something which can always change quickly, in an instant change to ordinary daily consciousness, like sleep can be changed into the waking state, only that this changing between seeing consciousness and ordinary day consciousness would be completely situated within human capriciousness. This is certainly something which can only be attained after practice and needs to be examined in all its being, in order to talk about this at all.

It is precisely this other consciousness which presents a completely different world compared with the world developed out of the senses and understood with the mind, aspects which feed back into the being of the human I, to stick to the human ego. The human I is present in the other consciousness with great power, one doesn't have something which is merely permeated with a single imagination or feeling, but one has an image. One has the possibility of looking at it and knows, this I is something in which one not merely lives, but it is present as an objectivity. The other thing about this higher consciousness is that one doesn't gain any insight into the mineral kingdom—the mineral kingdom belongs only to ordinary human daily consciousness—by contrast it is fully aware towards anything plant-like, animal-like and the human self. One really lives in another world. What is between these two worlds is called the threshold; it must be crossed over but can only be crossed over after preparations have been achieved, after one has really faithfully practiced the exercises which I have presented in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment." If one has not really prepared for this crossing, one could, through the acquisition of this new consciousness, slip down into physicality. (During the following presentation a central drawing is made on the blackboard.)

I would like to sketch it in the following way. Let's accept that this daily consciousness is connected to human physicality. This higher consciousness is now lifted from it and one sees a completely new world. However, now one has to retain this higher consciousness; it must be purely soul-spiritual. It can't happen however, if one has not previously developed the strength through exercises—it can't happen if not accomplished in a lively way; what I'm implying is more of a hypothesis—so, when one has not acquired the strength through exercises, it can all collapse into physicality. This means one is not living in a free soul-spiritual consciousness but the processes in human organs will reveal what this consciousness observes; then one has to do with dreams, one does not really have actual objective imaginations full of content. The objective, content-filled imagination exists as a result of, what one experiences, not being impregnated with bodily processes, but processes of the supersensible world. This must be achieved through exercises and by having achieved this, being able to step over the boundary between the sensual and supersensible which is designated as the threshold. This is the case today. Today our ordinary consciousness contains content known to everyone, but we have another content—which of course can be described as I have done now again from a certain point of view - which is certainly described as the content of a higher world as opposed to that of the ordinary world.

If we now go back to the times of human earthly development which I want to speak to you about here, in which the chosen ones were inaugurated, then we find they also sought another condition of consciousness but it was different to that of today in as far as the condition of consciousness which we regard as the normal human consciousness, was most extraordinary in each mystery pupil, and a certain image-rich imagination, observing the Divine in all the individual things, was the norm. So, what at that time in the old Mysteries was indicated as the threshold lay in quite a different place to where the threshold is situated for us today. We can even see this in outer things. You see, today there is something which a child already learns at school, and that is the heliocentric world system. The heliocentric world system—you can find this actually historically handed down—has passed into literature through a kind of betrayal. The heliocentric world system already existed in Greek times, it was already clearly present earlier; it was taught in the Mysteries. What an ordinary child learns today at school, which forms their attitude towards the view of the world, this was taught in olden times only in the Mysteries. In outer normal consciousness people of that time had an image-rich consciousness. We can really say: in comparison to olden times, today every human being who has gone through school, has gone beyond the threshold. Those in the old Mysteries would regard it quite dangerous for people who have not gone through a regular initiation but through some or other elementary experience, to have gone over the threshold, for example by not adhering to the geocentric system—that the earth remains stationary and the sun and stars move—but believe in the immobility of the sun as the initiated students believed in olden times. People said you had to be prepared to tolerate what lies, for example, in the heliocentric world system or what lies, for example, in our current biology or psychology, and so on. This seems like a paradox to people today, yet it was so. One can say that historically human kind as such in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha crossed over the threshold which in earlier epochs in the Mysteries had to be artificially crossed in order to reach initiation. At that time those to be initiated learnt what every child learns today. Today we again learn to gain insight into Higher Worlds which later would be the norm. So it is with the evolution of humanity. It is not recognised through examples from olden writings that it was a given—for human consciousness was image-rich—in such a way that things were not seen outwardly but that all things were perceived for their inner spirituality. One must be aware that the words of these ancient writers are to be read in a different way to the way today's ancient language researchers or cultural historians or anthropologists and their equivalents read, because the consciousness at that time was image-rich. We could therefore say, in olden times the initiate was led towards the world we know today.

I would like to still add one more detail. When we go back to olden Greek times, we find people couldn't clearly perceive the colour blue as we can today. They had no sensual experience of the colour blue, they had much more of a sense developed towards the other side, towards vital colours, red and so on, so that for the Greeks blue appeared more green than it is for us today. From this point of view, one must understand everything as the ancients did. We must clearly understand that active thinking is connected to humankind's development towards an experience of blue. If blue is mentioned in ancient scriptures it is always in error, because those people didn't have the experience of blue as we have in today's active experience of understanding. Those people, upon looking at blue, didn't have the ability to be objective, for the out-flowing of the I as an objective, they had far more the experience of what stirred in red, which goes from the objective towards the subjective, which is outwardly active and touches and is sensed, where the awareness of the Divine lay in the objects.

So this initiation was already something quite definite, it involved the initiation being carried out in these olden times by the fact that man himself had to do things which he had to endure physically which to a certain extent formed a kind of inner sacrament. The sacraments in olden times were more inward. Take for instance some outer events which throw a person into a state of fear, caused by these external actions. For example, in Greece there existed Mysteries in which one of the most important processes consisted in a person being placed in total darkness, where he has to live into this darkness, and then suddenly the room was lit up completely—this is the perception he would have been given. What it meant at that time was the transformation of the state of consciousness from being in the darkness, in the blackness, to going into the light. Something happened in a person, fine processes took place inside. These fine processes which were happening in people, I can describe in the following manner.

When a human being, after he has for some time experienced this transformation out of the darkness into the light, salt is separated in him—depending on his individual nature - which is deposited. Salt deposits actually took place as a result of the transfer of going from a dark state to a light state, taking place during the change. These processes became something of which a person became completely aware as being accompanied by the feeling very similar to fear. These salt deposits were observed by a person; he was inwardly observing an interrelation taking place inside himself. At that moment when it happened in him through an external action, man had gone through an initiation process because in olden times initiation consisted in a person experiencing such processes out of himself. What is important now however, was what accompanied such a process of salt deposits within him. Such a salt depositing process within was accompanied by the person's consciousness being impregnated by the process of light perception, not merely of the light perception but from the inner light containing spirituality; he was thus taking in the light which contained spirituality. By the salt coagulating in his inner being, a person felt this coagulation of salts as a penetration of the Divine. To make these conditions conscious was the art of initiation in ancient times. A person could speak quite differently, in them the life of light was not a mere observation by the senses but it was a penetration of light, so that he could say: 'By me living in the light, matter coagulates in me'. With that which is contained in ordinary matter, in a certain sense he directly perceived the effect of that which lies above the substance of ordinary matter.

Now we will not understand these things, my dear friends, if we don't know that the entire constitution of people in older times was different to what it became later. Such a process, which I have sketched for you, you can observe today when waking up or going to sleep. When physical development reaches puberty, the conditions are such that you won't be able to do these things any longer. The influence on the human being is no longer possible in this intense way; people have hardened more in themselves. Today it doesn't happen for these fine spiritual processes which are taking place there, to be observed just like that. In this respect it will even change the human race. As a result, it has happened that what had taken place within, during earlier times, now is to be looked for outwardly. To a certain extent the opposite of the inner process is performed as a ceremony.

The old process of initiation, the process through which a person allows the spirit to reign, this process is now performed outwardly. The priest ordination was in olden times not at all the weakened process of today, but a process, despite it being performed outwardly, still making a deep impression on people. In later times, still in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and afterwards, the act of baptism, for example, was at least performed as a deed which still accomplished something in people themselves. Those being baptised were immersed in water and thus brought in the same situation as someone being drowned, who sees the retrograde perspective of their life processes flash through them in a spiritual vision. This was part of baptism in earlier times; a person's past life was brought before his soul, so that he learned to see spiritually in a certain way. Later on the sacrament of baptism was temporarily postponed and so it could not be performed in this way, but only symbolically. It is the same with the priest ordination.

The priest ordination in itself is to a certain extent an outer process for that which earlier was evoked inwardly in those going through initiation, through the inversion of outer processes; it is what in fact places the human being in another world. A person is then made aware—I can depict this even more precisely—of certain interrelationships in the cosmos, which can't be studied in the outer world. A person is made aware that physical processes are taking place which do not coincide with the usual outer sensually perceptible processes and he becomes attentive to what is actually sacramental. He learns to see for instance, in dissolving salt in water, that something is happening which isn't created in a physical-chemical process of dissolution, but what happens in salt dissolving in water is actually something inward, I could call it, something radiant. He learns to recognise how processes happen which are only conceivable through the spirit in man. This becoming transported into the world of such revelations which can't be seen with the outer senses or understood with ordinary minds, essentially belongs to the priest consecration. Therefore, through the priest ordination the person will as much be penetrated by this world of the Divine, as the person in olden times was initiated through not merely sensing the penetration of his physicality with light, but that he feels permeated also with the soul-spiritual of the light.

So, I can put it like this: through priest ordination human consciousness is brought into such a condition that a person can with total inner conviction say: the world around us is actually only a fragment of the world; it is there to hide many things from us, namely hiding spiritual processes, from us. We see spiritually in the processes when we are prepared in the appropriate way to do so. Priest ordination involves such preparation which would allow for spiritual perception, to see, everywhere, the sense perceptible as well as the spiritual processes. Let's take a concrete example.

We can look at the development of leaves on a plant, the development of the flowers, the ovary, the stamens and see the ovary mature. (He draws on the blackboard, left.) We then observe how the pollen flies around, how it fertilises the flowers. If you only observe outwardly then you will evaluate according to the sense perceptible outer processes which you then combine in your mind. Someone who has become mature in spiritual seeing, must see a supersensible weaving which expands as a kind of wavering transmission over plant growth and all that is involved in plant fertilization. Through this however, the earth in which the plants have their roots, is brought into a reciprocal relationship with the spiritual environment of the earth.

A renewed way of looking must be introduced through priest ordination. Only then, when you have been introduced to this spiritual observing through the priest ordination, will you learn to recognise how the human word evolves in the world, how the human word is not a mere material movement of air but that the word carries spirit on physical air movement, how this spirit permeates certain substances which are fleeting, like for instance the smoke. So being a priest means: seeing how the expressed word grip the smoke, how the smoke weaves the matter, the words, and how through this, that it penetrates the words, how the words tinged with smoke envelops the matter in the words, changing the words themselves, just like in fact evolution continues, how a real, a spiritual reality is there in what happens in the outer world, in phenomena of the world. So being consecrated also means: to be able to perform actions which, besides their physical meaning, also have a spiritual meaning.

This is of course something—I always must stress this—which lies extraordinarily far from modern consciousness, but unbelievably close to that consciousness which was available at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. During that time people stood in the middle, between the old and the new, they still knew about seeing the Divine-spiritual in everything natural, either through tradition or through atavistic vision, and they lived in fear of the conditions which would arrive when what is natural would no longer be regarded as natural and as a result the Divine-spiritual would be only be understood as a derived abstraction. At that time people still understood the weaving of the spiritual with the sense perceptible. The disciples of Christ Jesus simply knew that this being-in-his-presence meant something different than being in the presence of one another. They knew that he was the carrier of a supersensible being, they felt moved by this supersensible being, and this togetherness with him was for them without doubt the glow of supersensible consciousness.

Let's think about this. We see a number of people around Christ Jesus in a world, who say: When one is in his presence, one is brought into a world where one can see the Divine-spiritual.—Now, in connection with this, I want to call your attention to important concepts necessary for the understanding of the earliest Christian times. Those individuals who could still call themselves the apostles of the Lord, who, for the affirmation of their mission, did not only refer to the fact that they had heard his words. Having heard his words didn't really carry as much weight as we would experience today when we listen to some or other speech, or a teaching. The teaching of Christ Jesus was something that was felt to be completely charitable in his environment, but it wasn't the first thing you would consider as the most important. It was far more important for them to stress the results: we have lain our hands in his wounds, we have participated in looking at his Being.—The direct togetherness with Christ Jesus is something in particular which I ask you to please consider seriously.

You see, you will reach a conclusion of what actually is at a soul foundation when I say to you: you need to first sense the difference between what you experience when you place your one hand on an outer object, or on your own hand, or when you place it on some part of your body. You must come to the conclusion that you sense a difference, that there is a difference. You must also be able to feel something else; you must be able to feel you possess two eyes with two lines of vision which meet and cross. (He draws on the blackboard, right.) These two lines of sight which cross at what we are looking at—it is quite like when I hug myself with my two arms encircling myself. Just think about the difference between man and animal. An animal has, to a much reduced degree, the possibility to experience what we for instance experience when our one hand touches the other. Just look at the position of particular animal eyes; you can clearly distinguish how strong the egoism of an animal is, according to its eye positions. Animals which have eye positions with eye axes which can't cross are unable to develop egoism, because the experience, the sense of having an I, depends on a person being able to "grasp" his I, and that the right gaze of the eye can meet the left gaze by crossing. On this the sense of the I is dependant.

The disciples knew themselves to be so connected to the Christ that in a certain sense it was as similar as feeling their own hands, when they touched his wounds. So this direct connection with the Christ was something which gave them the awareness that they lived with him in a higher world. This was actually what the disciples felt, it was as if a spiritual island surrounded them and their Lord, and when they felt that their Lord had gone away and they had now become the teachers, they called themselves teachers, training for this how-to-be-together-with-him.

Then again, the disciples of the Apostles in turn depended on the imagery which they had experienced; you can even read this in individual letters. When some or other apostolic disciple, Polycarp of Smyrna for instance, could describe what some or other person who had taught him, looked like, the description was unbelievably more important than the communication of mere words. What is most essential here, was recalling the feeling of being-together-with everything in connection with the Christ, so that one can say the Apostles sensed the succession, but they could no longer inwardly experience every transformation which had been experienced in the old initiation mysteries. Don't misunderstand me, I don't suggest that the apostles or apostle disciples have made such deliberations, but their soul constitution was so that they could make such deliberations and it was characteristic of their soul constitution to formulate such deliberations. When they were asked to formulate their soul constitution, they would have said: Yes, we couldn't go through with it in the same way as was still possible in the earlier Mysteries, for instance experiencing the transformation of light to darkness; we can no longer experience how one is anointed with oil and so on, and we can no longer experience the inner pain through recalling; but here a God has incarnated in the form of Jesus who was here, and with whom we have relations and when we really in our consciousness take it up, not merely with intellectual grasping but when in all concreteness we live in it, then something lifts us up into the supersensible world.

With the apostles it was the direct living-in-community with the Christ, with the apostle disciples it was the community living-with-him, being carried over to them, who had laid their hands on those who had still been touched by the Lord, and transmitted to those in the third generation who had again laid their hands on someone who had had the Lord touch them. They would get a sense of apostolic succession when they would recall what I've just said, and they would also get a feeling for what it meant to stand inside a world which is spiritually, as it were, like standing in a physical line of ancestors. The physical line of ancestors flows through from birth. The spiritual ancestral line however, must go up to the spiritual father ancestor, the Christ Jesus, it flows through the ongoing, continuous fulfilment of consecrated ceremonies, which lead to the Christ, which certainly must always become more and more outward, because it must ever more make an intensive impression on people. As a result, besides the laying on of hands, other ceremonies were recorded in the next centuries, to make the outer impressions even stronger. A process of internalisation existed with those surrounding Christ Jesus: here Christ Jesus was performing a ritual himself. My dear friends, why was this necessary?

The life of Christ Jesus was the ritual for that which was around him, that which was accomplished in reality, that was the ritual/cult: the great offering of mass was fulfilled on Golgotha. Here we are led back to the first fulfilment of the ritual: at least this is what lives in Christian consciousness. This was followed by outward signs: it required the necessity for an outward imprint of activity, like remembrance, to show the eyes and to impress it on the soul in prayer, which could not be as alive as it had been with the apostles and the apostle disciples.

I know that many people who hear such things with today's consciousness say: Why don't you simply express it in a short and sweet answer, shaped in sharply outlined terms, this or that is apostolic succession?—If someone wants such sharply outlined concepts, his argument is inwardly untruthful. One only speaks truth when it introduces the view of something that has been experienced. Such a thing can't be understood in sharply outlined concepts.

Apostolic succession is something experienced first and then one knows that actually something is being experienced in a spiritual line of ancestors leading back to Christ, just like the ancestral line flowing through the blood links to the natural ancestral line, to any of the ancestors. This spiritual blood lies in the continuous fulfilment of the priestly ordination ceremony. It forms therefore the direct connection, for those who become priests, to the spiritual world. It is consecrated by someone who have themselves received such a consecration, and these, to those, and so on, up to the point where the supersensible descended into a human body and in this way for the first time brought a new, substantial fructification in the earth, which had become old.

We will want to develop the particular format of the priest ordination, into a ritual form. I would like, still today, to point out that you could eventually find something which remains incomprehensible in the priest ordination. Now, by me saying something like this you will understand, also in connection with the regular previous lectures up to this morning, that in fact a complete break had to take place regarding the understanding of such things, when the changed consciousness appeared from the middle of the 15th century. In me expressing these things, I'm using words, which actually for the general consciousness could only have been fully understood before the middle of the 15th century. Then people actually stopped having a real sense for the meaning of these words. It is basically only through the trust you have been able to put in me, that you can hear something here in the manner and way it happened in former times when the soul constitution experienced things in quite a different way. Then came the time when less importance was attached to a concrete connection, when people who still knew how to attach importance to this concrete connection, became rare. Now, the most importance was attributed to the comprehensible content of the Gospels, to the comprehensible content of religion as such. Thus, gradually it took on particular importance to discuss the content of the Gospels, to discuss the content of the sacraments and to a certain extent particularly look into the teaching material, at the teaching content. The teaching content gradually became the most important. Not actually the concrete, but the abstract, became the most important, that is the essential thing. While for the catholic consciousness—I don't mean merely the roman catholic, but the catholic Christian consciousness—the priest ordination placed the chosen one in a spiritual ancestry up to Christ, which actually for the modern person made everything quite comprehensible, from definitions to declarations which places nothing into a reality. However, we must be very clear about it, that we live again in a time where we need deepening again in that direction.

Well, the catholic consciousness has basically always acted quite consistently according to these prerequisites; quite consistently. In order not to be misunderstood regarding what follows, I would like to introduce it like this. When today we want to prepare someone—in fact, I mean for something which we see as a new ritual—when we, today, want to prepare someone to perform ceremonial actions, then we would for those who stand outside Catholicism in the world, no longer with full inner devotion be able to integrate a person into the apostolic succession. As I've mentioned to you, there have been remarkable Theosophists like Leadbeater and similar ones, who have likewise tried to place themselves in the apostolic succession, but that's going to resist any man who's honest with the world, if he is not imbued with Catholic consciousness.

We need to look for something else. We need to fully understand that a reality is not something which is spoken about, something abstract. We must also learn to understand the sacramental. We must learn to understand, throughout, that the content of the teaching does not contain the essential but that something must be added from real processes and in such a way that these actual processes are carried on the waves of reality as the weaving of the Divine. There have only been single individuals, like Novalis, who understood this—do read his Aphorisms, then you'll see. He spoke about magical idealism; he knew this wasn't alive in outer sensory worlds, but within people, there lived the soul—spiritual. Then there was Schelling—in his old age, that's why he was hardly understood—for whom it was quite absurd to believe that the essence of Christianity consisted in the acceptance of what Christ taught; rather, Schelling recognised the essential much more according to the account of Jesus going through the process of the entire Golgotha drama, in the description of actions which took place around Golgotha. However, there are individuals who tend towards the reality, who in turn want to enter into actual experiences connected to the spiritual. In totality one could say that the way Catholicism experiences it, is something quite antiquated which can't be introduced into modern consciousness any longer. For this reason we mustn't only search for a renewal of old rituals but we must search for a ritual which we can create out of ourselves, but created in such a way that it creates the Divine in us in the sense we have spoken about, so that the words of Paul become the truth—in Gospel interpretation, and in all religious activities: Not I, but Christ in me.

Catholicism, as Roman Catholicism, has actually always known how to act consistently. To a certain extent it has turned out, lifted out, from general humanity, all those who were descendants of Christ Jesus himself and so a sharp awareness has come about, separating the priestly spiritual generation, meaning those people connected to consecration, from all other people who had not attended consecration. Like a member of the nobility who for instance connects his bloodline back to the 18th ancestor and knows who carry this blood in their veins, their ancestral connection differs from that of the rest of humanity, in the same way there's a difference from those consecrated into the apostolic succession up to Christ himself, who have continuously and consistently received consecration, right down to those who had not received it. They felt themselves placed in this connection and felt others were different; that's why it was quite necessary during a certain time period that certain things were presented to people. A person gradually absorbed what had more or less consciously existed in his awareness and allowed this to be expressed in his actions. After this, because of the ever-increasing sharper awareness related to the Christ developed, came the necessity for greater withdrawal for the uninitiated: celibacy. The celibate already had his inner foundation and there where the celibate was dogmatised it was found throughout that the priest had to withdraw from connecting to all others, was a human personality who found it far more important to practice the priest consecration as a conscious inheritance of the father of his ancestors and because he was placed in this ancestral blood of a spiritual ancestry, he could not be in contact with that world from which he was taken out by the consecration ceremony. The moment a person strongly experienced this particular situation of priesthood in relation to the world, the necessity for celibacy was added, and of course there's no denying that one could also feel the political usefulness for Rome, and so on. However, you can be quite certain that during the time when celibacy was introduced—it was a time when the celibate person came from the monk priesthood—in the unconscious impulses was the urge for a certain honesty and truthfulness. It was certainly the case that the creation of celibacy was understood in the way I have presented it now. Just as in the 19th century, in a kind of natural way—as I said—the consequential process living in the Catholic consciousness resulted in the dogma of immaculate conception and how this resulted in the infallibility dogma, so at a certain time causes led to the consequences of celibacy.

Well, if you take all of this in then we already come to what is of particular importance today. Of particular importance today for us is to again return to the ritual, to ceremonies. You are experiencing, at least many of you have said you experience it like this: you are actually experiencing necessities based on what has come out of, and is given by, this time. Of course we can't undo events, we can't go back to untruths for instance, we can't reverse an untruth, such as taking something which no longer feels alive were to be changed externally, like being ordained by an olden-time Catholic priest. That would be contradictory to those who have already ignited the Protestant consciousness too strongly in themselves because for the Protestant consciousness this possibility doesn't exist; in their experience one can't oppose something which has been created out of quite other circumstances.

What you need to arrive at, if reality is at all part of your striving, is what can flow out of the spiritual world itself, which can be seen as flowing directly from Christ Jesus. We must strengthen ourselves in the words of Jesus: I am with you until the end of earthly days.—

These words out of the Gospels also announce such a process of the Christ impulse will be found on the earth for so long, that it will last until the end of the earth comes about. For this reason, one must firstly announce this as a postulate to a certain extent, that it must be possible—as a reality—to come to Christ, like with the Catholic consciousness, through the apostolic succession historically the spiritual family tree is searched for, reaching right to Christ. It must be able to find Him again, in a moment in the present; a connection to the Divine, a connection to the Christianized Divine as it was historically found by the Catholics in the apostolic succession right up to the Christian ancestors of this apostolic succession. That is why it must take place this way, that we find the spiritual again, not only in words about the Christian aspect, but so that we actually connect with what is real in the Christian aspect. Then we can create the ritual out of this, like the ritual was created within the apostolic succession. However, we need to penetrate it with an understanding which goes far beyond the understanding of the time.

We must indeed move towards an understanding that can be expressed—I want to first formulate it as follows: In the world and in ordinary human thinking we experience the phenomenal: we however want to experience the nominal, we want to try and enter into the essential and out of this essence find the ritual. If you really want to find the ritual, then it must finally be so that this ritual is discovered as it had been during the second century, where gradually, what used to exist in simpler forms—only a few of which have been recorded—has now been transferred to the forms of later rituals. How was the ritual experienced? A person was caught up in it, just like a person who smokes knows what he is doing by smoking; he knows he can express what he wants to, only by smoking. So you must again learn to feel that you, when you perform some or other ceremony, know for yourself: the ceremony must be performed in this way. A person knows what he has to say today when he turns to other people, he knows how to clothe his inner life with words. My dear friends, there is a moment in life, where one inwardly experiences that it is impossible to continue using words, where what you want to say no longer translates into words, where you have to stop with words or at most continue with words by carrying out the sacred act by starting to not merely letting the word sound out but where, for instance, the development of smoke must take place, where in particular one of the other actions must be carried out imaginatively. Where the words connect with a particular action, by coming into the original consciousness, where also, like your soul content, being enlivened by the Divine, pours into the words, now your soul content will no longer be merely a phenomenal one but a nominal one, then you will be lifted out of what the outer world comprises, there you will gradually enter into the sacramental.

Somewhat in this way, I've tried to clarify how one must enter into the sacramental. It actually makes no sense, let's say, in simply transforming holy water as is often done today by subordinate clerics. There is simply no point in performing the transubstantiation in this way, as is done by many subordinate clerics today, who are left in the dark in relation to the esoteric consecration of the Catholic Church. Regarding the old soul constitutions, it had made sense to be fully aware of one's actions when a certain word was spoken over the salt substance, and that they knew the salt substance had changed as a result.

Today experiments have already been done to make the gentle sensitivity of a flame visible, by placing a flame somewhere and a person speaking rhythmically at a distance from it, to see the flame copy the rhythm. Here a rhythm is being copied by something inorganic. If I know the right words in the right word correlation over the salt substance, then the salt substance will change. If I now allow this salt substance which has been permeated, to enter into water, then I have kindled a process, which, if I understand it, when I have performed it in spirit, is a sacramental act. We must be able, once again, to look at the nominal as such. This we will address tomorrow. I think, in any case, my dear friends, that many questions could be conjured out of the soul by me speaking about these things, and I would love it if the questions, while you are all here, not in general, could also be formulated concretely so that no doubt remains. I completely understand that with earnestness your small circle has turned to me with the clear intention to really work toward a renewal of the religious life. It is not possible to do so by merely changing the teaching content; it is only possible when you enter with a changed soul constitution. We are now entering more deeply into things and, triggered through your questions we will become ever more acquainted with these things so that you're actually going to understand what I mean to convey.

The different incarnations of the human individuality are a kind of swinging of the pendulum to and fro until the rhythm is brought to rest and the higher part of man has found in the physical a fitting expression, a suitable instrument. Approximately ever since human beings have reincarnated, the position of sun, moon and earth has existed as it is now. We must understand that man belongs to the great cosmic organism. In the times in which great changes take place in the life of humanity, mighty changes also occur in the cosmos. Earlier than this, before there was reincarnation, sun, moon and earth were not yet separated as now. Kant and Laplace made their observation from the physical plane only, and to this extent their theory is quite correct, but they did not know the connection with spiritual forces. When out of the primal fire-vapour sun, moon and earth came into existence as separate bodies, man also began to incarnate. When human incarnations will have come to an end, the sun also will be re-united with the earth. On the large scale as in the single details, one must bear in mind these relationships of man to the universe.

You will often have heard that man usually incarnates after a period of about two thousand years. One can investigate when people who are alive today had their earlier incarnation. The souls who are now incarnated, one finds as a rule about 300 to 400 years after the birth of Christ. In addition, however, one finds others who are incarnated at various times, some earlier, some later. But there is another way to determine incarnations, a way which leads more certainly to the goal. One can say: Were the human beings who die today to return in a short time they would meet almost the same conditions as now. But man ought to learn as much as possible on the Earth. This can only happen when in the next incarnation he finds something new which is essentially different from the earlier conditions.

Let us for instance imagine ourselves back into the time about 600 to 800 years before Christ; that is about the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey. With the advanced peoples of that time the conditions of life were quite different from what they are now. One would for instance be astonished to see with what curious implements people ate. At that time also people had not yet learnt to write. The great poems were transmitted by word of mouth. When a person of those times is reincarnated today he must as a child learn quite other things. As a child he must learn to write. The stream of culture has meanwhile progressed. One must distinguish between the stream of culture and the development of the individual soul. As a child one must catch up with the civilisation and for this reason one must be born again as a child.

Now we must ask: What causes such utterly different conditions on earth? This is connected with the progression of the spring equinox. About 800 years before Christ the sun in spring entered the constellation of Aries, of the Ram. Every year at the vernal point it shifts a little. Because of this the conditions on the earth are always slightly changing. Eight hundred years before Christ the sun stood in the constellation of Aries. Earlier it stood in the constellation of Taurus, still earlier in Gemini and still earlier in Cancer. Now already for some hundred of years it rises in the constellation of Pisces. After this comes Aquarius. The advance of civilisations is also connected with the progression of the sun from one constellation to the other.

At the time when the sun rose in the constellation of Cancer the ancient Vedic culture of the Indians, the culture of the Rishis reached its highest point. The Rishis, those still half-divine beings, were the teachers of men. The Atlantean civilisation had met its destruction; a new impulse broke in. In occultism this is called a ‘vortex’ (wirbel). This is also why, in the age in which the sun stood in the constellation of Cancer, the sign was made in this way:

Cancer signifies a breaking in of something new, a ‘vortex’ (a double spiral).

The second cultural epoch is named the constellation of the Twins. At that time the dual nature of the world was understood, the opposing forces of the world, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Good and Evil. Thus the Persians also speak of the Twins.

The third cultural epoch is that of the Sumerians in Asia Minor and of the Egyptians. The constellation of the Bull corresponds to this epoch. This is why in Asia the Bull was venerated and in Egypt, Apis. At that time in Babylon and Assyria the Sumerian language was the language of wisdom. Then the Bull fell into decadence and the Ram came into the ascendant. The first indication of this is the Saga of the Golden Fleece.

The fourth culture is that of the Ram, or Lamb; Christ stands in the sign of the Ram, or Lamb; hence he calls himself the Lamb of God.

As fifth culture the external materialistic civilisation follows, in the constellation of the Fishes. This developed principally from the 12th century onwards and reached its climax about the year 1800. This is the culture of the Fifth sub-race, the present time.

In the constellation of the Water-Man in the future, the new Christianity will be proclaimed. ‘Water-Man’ is also the one who will bring it, he who has already been here: John the Baptist. Later he will again be the forerunner of Christ, when the Sixth, the spiritual sub-race will be founded. The Theosophical Movement should be the preparation for that time.

In the New Testament the expression ‘on the mountain’ is used on various occasions. ‘On the mountain’ means: in the mystery, in the innermost, in the intimate. Even the Sermon on the Mount is not to be understood as a sermon for the people, but as an intimate teaching for the disciples. The Transfiguration on the Mountain has also to be understood in this sense. Jesus went up into the mountain with the three disciples, Peter, James and John. There, we are told, the disciples were caught up out of themselves; then Moses and Elias appeared on either side of Jesus. For a moment space and time were extinguished and the disciples found themselves with their consciousness on the mental plane. Those who were no longer physically present, Moses and Elias, appeared. In direct revelation they had before them: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.’ The way = Elias, Moses = the truth, Christ = the life. This appeared here to the disciples in actual form. Jesus once said to them: ‘Elias has come again;²⁹ John was Elias, he has only not been recognised.’ But he said further: ‘Tell it to no man until I come again.’ Christianity was not to teach reincarnation for two thousand years, not for any arbitrary reason, but on educational grounds. People were to know nothing of it for two thousand years. In the gospel of St. John there is an indication of this in the miracle of the wedding at Cana where water is turned into wine. In the old Mysteries only water was distributed, but in the Christian Mysteries wine. For in the priesthood, through the partaking of wine, knowledge of reincarnation was blotted out. Whoever partakes of wine cannot attain to any true knowledge of Manas, Buddhi and Atma. He can never comprehend reincarnation. By his coming again Christ means his reappearance in the Sixth sub-race when he will be proclaimed by the ‘Water-Man’. Theosophy actually carries out the testament of Christianity and works towards this epoch of time.

Every time the sun progresses from one sign of the Zodiac to another incisive changes take place in civilisation. In between there elapses a period of about two thousand six hundred years.³⁰ If we take the moment of time when the sun entered the sign of the Ram or Lamb, about 800 years before Christ and 1800 years after Christ, then we have two thousand six hundred years. About the year 1800 we entered the sign of the Fishes. This is the time when materialistic culture reached its highest point. It was prepared for in the Middle Ages and has now begun to decline. About the year 4,400 mankind enters the sign of spiritual culture, that of the Water-Man. Preparation has also to be made for this.

Thus conditions change also with the constellation. With the progression from one sign to another new conditions also arise, so that rebirth has meaning. The human being is reborn approximately every two thousand six hundred years, but the experiences he makes as man and as woman are so radically different that two such incarnations, as man and as woman, are reckoned as one. About one thousand three hundred years elapse between two incarnations as man or as woman, and about two thousand six hundred years between such double incarnations if one reckons both as one. The human being is only man or woman in regard to the physical body. When the physical body is masculine the etheric body is feminine; and vice versa, when the physical body is feminine the etheric body is masculine. Only the astral body is at the same time masculine and feminine. The human being bears within him the opposite sex as etheric body. Thus in the etheric the man is feminine and in the etheric the woman masculine. The physical woman has therefore many concealed masculine qualities; the physical incarnation is present only exoterically. The human being therefore goes through a constellation every time as man and as woman. This is why the Master said to Sinnett that the human being is incarnated about twice in a sub-race. Occultly both incarnations are reckoned together as one. There must come a time in which the woman actually approaches the culture dominated by the man. The present woman's movement is to be recognized as the preparation for another later and quite different woman's movement. In the future, sex differentiation will be totally overcome.

There was a special reason why, for about two thousand years, the teaching of reincarnation was completely suppressed. The human being was to learn to know and value the importance of the one life. Every slave in Ancient Egypt was still convinced of the fact that he would return, that one day he would be master instead of slave, but that he had to pay his karmic debts. The single life was therefore not so important to him. But the lesson people now had to learn was to gain firm ground under their feet; thus during one life, reincarnation was to remain unknown. Christ therefore expressly forbade any teaching about reincarnation. But from 800 years before Christ until about 1800 years after Christ, the time had elapsed during which nearly everyone had gone through the one life without experiencing anything of reincarnation. The great Masters³¹ have the task not always to impart the whole truth at any one time, but only that part needed by man. This withholding of the consciousness of reincarnation came to poetic expression in this epoch in Dante's Divine Comedy. In monastic esotericism on the other hand, reincarnation was definitely taught when the occasion arose. The Trappists³² had to remain silent throughout one incarnation, so that in the next they might become eloquent speakers. They were intentionally trained in this way to become eloquent speakers, for of these the Church can make good use. When St. Augustine put forward the doctrine of predestination he was entirely consistent.³³ Because in the age of materialism reincarnation was not to be taught, the Augustinian doctrine of predestination had to make its appearance. Only in this way could the differences in people's circumstances be explained.

Connected with this is the deeply materialistic character of traditional Christianity, which lies in the fact that the Beyond is made dependent on one physical existence. This materialistic teaching of Christianity has, so to say, borne its fruit. Today there is no longer any consciousness of the Beyond. Social democracy is the ultimate consequence of traditional Christianity. But now a new impulse must come into the world. When one epoch comes to an end something new breaks in. Christianity worked towards the gradual dawning of the materialistic age. In order to bring about the materialistic civilisation, human beings for a period of one thousand three hundred years had to have such a teaching as was brought by Christianity; namely, that man should make the whole of eternity dependent upon one earthly life. Urban bourgeoisie then became the actual founder of the age of materialism. Already at the time of Christ the spiritual had to be betrayed by the purely material. Judas Iscariot had to betray Christ. One can however say: had there been no Judas there would also have been no Christianity. Judas is the first to attach prime importance to money, that is to say, to materialism. In Judas was incarnated the entire materialistic age. This materialistic age has obscured and darkened the spiritual. Through his death Christ becomes the Redeemer of materialism.

• 29. Matthew, Chapter 17. 12 – 13
• 30. Later Rudolf Steiner indicated these epochs more precisely. According to this the point at which the sun rises on the vernal equinox moves backwards through the 12 constellations of the Zodiac in 12 x 2160 = 25,920 years—the Platonic World Year—generally speaking, re-embodiments are connected with these epochs of 2160 years (though there are exceptions). See: Theosophy of the Rosicrucian, Rhythms in the Cosmos and in the Human Being (Typescript) 20.25.28.7.1923
• 31. According to Rudolf Steiner these are beings of great significance for the evolution of mankind. ‘These lofty beings have already left behind them the path that the rest of mankind has yet to tread. They work now as the great Teachers of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feeling.’ (Letter to a member 2.1.1905.) See also lecture 13.10.1904.
• 32. Order founded in 1140 in the Cistercian monastery of La Trappe in France. The reform in 1665 imposed strict ascetic practices and silence.
• 33. The teaching of God's eternal decree which results in only a part of humanity being chosen for salvation while the other part is doomed to perdition. Compare lecture 7.10.1917 ‘The Crumbling of the Earth and the Souls and Bodies of Men’ Anthroposophical Quarterly Volume 19 No. 1.

Today we will characterise certain general principles of the art of education for the period between the change of teeth and puberty, passing on in the next lecture to more detailed treatment of single subjects and particular conditions which may arise.

When the child reaches his ninth or tenth year he begins to differentiate himself from his environment. For the first time there is a difference between subject and object; subject is what belongs to oneself, object is what belongs to the other person or other thing; and now we can begin to speak of external things as such, whereas before this time we must treat them as though these external objects formed one whole together with the child's own body. I showed yesterday how we speak of animals and plants, for instance, as though they were human beings who speak and act. The child thereby has the feeling that the outside world is simply a continuation of his own being.

But now when the child has passed his ninth or tenth year we must introduce him to certain elementary facts of the outside world, the facts of the plant and animal kingdoms. Other subjects I shall speak of later. But it is particularly in this realm that we must be guided by what the child's own nature needs and asks of us.

The first thing we have to do is to dispense with all the textbooks. For textbooks as they are written at the present time contain nothing about the plant and animal kingdoms which one can use in teaching. They are good for instructing grown up people about plants and animals, but we shall ruin the individuality of the child if we use them at school. And indeed there are no textbooks or handbooks today which show one how these things should be taught. Now the important point is really this.

If you put single plants in front of the child and demonstrate different things from them, you are doing something which has no reality. A plant by itself is not a reality. If you pull out a hair and examine it as though it were a thing by itself, that would not be a reality either. In ordinary life we say of everything of which we can sec the outlines with our eyes that it is real. But if you look at a stone and form some opinion about it, that is one thing; if you look at a hair or a rose, it is another. In ten years' time the stone will be exactly as it is now, but in two days the rose will have changed. The rose is only a reality together with the whole rosebush. The hair is nothing in itself, but is only a reality when considered with the whole head, as part of the whole human being. Now if you go out into the fields and pull up plants, it is as though you had torn out the hair of the earth. For the plants belong to the earth just in the same way as the hair belongs to the organism of the human being. And it is nonsense to examine a hair by itself as though it could suddenly grow anywhere of its own accord.

It is just as foolish to take a botanical tin and bring home plants to be examined by themselves. This has no relation to reality, and such a method cannot lead one to a right knowledge of nature or of the human being.

Here we have a plant (see drawing) but this alone is not the plant, for there also belongs to it the soil beneath it spread out on all sides, maybe a very long way. There are some plants which send out little roots a very long way. And when you realise that the small clod of earth containing the plant belongs to a much greater area of soil around it, then you will see how necessary it is to manure the earth in order to promote

healthy plant growth. Something else is living besides the actual plant; this part here (below the line in drawing) lives with it and belongs to the plant; the earth lives with the plant.

There are some plants which blossom in the spring, about May or June, and bear fruit in autumn. Then they wither and die and remain in the earth which belongs to them. But there are other plants which take the earth forces out of their environment. If this is the earth, then the root takes into itself the forces which are around it, and because it has done so these forces shoot upwards and a tree is formed.

For what is actually a tree? A tree is a colony of many plants. And it does not matter whether you are considering a hill which has less life in itself but which has many plants growing on it, or a tree trunk where the living earth itself has as it were withdrawn into the tree. Under no circumstances can you understand any plant properly if you examine it by itself.

If you go (preferably on foot) into a district in which there are definite geological formations, let us say red sand, and look at the plants there, you will find that most of them have reddish-yellow flowers. The flowers belong to the soil. Soil and plant make up a unity, just as your head and your hair also make a unity.

Therefore you must not teach Geography and Geology by themselves, and then Botany separately. That would be absurd. Geography must be taught together with a description of the country and observation of the plants, for the earth is an organism and the plants are like the hair of this organism. The child must be able to see that the earth and the plants belong together, and that each portion of soil bears those plants which belong to it.

Thus the only right way is to speak of the plants in connection with the earth, and to give the child a clear feeling that the earth is a living being that has hair growing on it. The plants are the hair of the earth. People speak of the earth as having the force of gravity. This is spoken of as belonging to the earth. But the plants with their force of growth belong to the earth just as much. The earth and the plants are no more separate entities than a man and his hair would be. They belong together just as the hair on the head belongs to the man.

If you show a child plants out of a botanical tin and tell him their names, you will be teaching something which is quite unreal. This will have consequences for his whole life, for this kind of plant knowledge will never give him an understanding, for example, of how the soil must be treated, and of how it must be manured, made living by the manure that is put into it. The child can only gain an understanding of how to cultivate the land if he knows how the soil is really part of the plant. The men of our time have less and less conception of reality, the so-called “practical” people least of all, for they are really all theoretical as I showed you in our first lecture, and it is just because men have no longer any idea of reality that they look at everything in a disintegrated, isolated way.

Thus it has come about that in many districts during the last fifty or sixty years all agricultural products have become decadent. Not long ago there was a Conference on Agriculture in Central Europe, on which occasion the agriculturists themselves admitted that crops are now becoming so poor that there is no hope of their being suitable for human consumption in fifty years' time.

Why is this so? It is because people do not understand how to make the soil living by means of manure. It is impossible that they should understand it if they have been given conceptions of plants as being something in themselves apart from the earth. The plant is no more an object in itself than a hair is. For if this were so, you might expect it to grow just as well in a piece of wax or tallow as in the skin of the head. But it is only in the head that it will grow.

In order to understand how the earth is really a part of plant life you must find out what kind of soil each plant belongs to; the art of manuring can only be arrived at by considering earth and plant world as a unity, and by looking upon the earth as an organism and the plant as something that grows with this organism.

Thus a child feels, from the very start, that he is standing on a living earth. This is of great significance for his whole life. For think what kind of conception people have today of the origin of geological strata. They think of it as one layer deposited upon another. But what you see as geological strata is only hardened plants, hardened living matter. It is not only coal that was formerly a plant (having its roots more in water than in the firm ground and belonging completely to the earth) but also granite, gneiss and so on were originally of plant and animal nature.

This too one can only understand by considering earth and plants as one whole. And in these things it is not only a question of giving children knowledge but of giving them also the right feelings about it. You only come to see that this is so when you consider such things from the point of view of Spiritual Science.

You may have the best will in the world. You may say to yourself that the child must learn about everything, including plants, by examining them. At an early age then I will encourage him to bring home a nice lot of plants in a beautiful tin box. I will examine them all with him for here is something real. I firmly believe that this is a reality, for it is an object lesson, but all the time you are looking at something which is not a reality at all. This kind of object-lesson teaching of the present day is utter nonsense.

This way of learning about plants is just as unreal as though it were a matter of indifference whether a hair grew in wax or in the human skin. It cannot grow in wax. Ideas of this kind are completely contradictory to what the child received in the spiritual worlds before he descended to the earth. For there the earth looked quite different. This intimate relationship between the mineral earth kingdom and the plant world was then something that the child's soul could receive as a living picture. Why is this so? It is because, in order that the human being may incarnate at all, he has to absorb something which is not yet mineral but which is only on the way to becoming mineral, namely the etheric element. He has to grow into the element of the plants, and this plant world appears to him as related to the earth.

This series of feelings which the child experiences when he descends from the pre-earthly world into the earthly world—this whole world of richness is made confused and chaotic for him if it is introduced to him by the kind of Botany teaching which is usually pursued, whereas the child rejoices inwardly if he hears about the plant world in connection with the earth.

In a similar manner we must consider how to introduce our children to the animal world. Even a superficial glance will show us that the animal does not belong to the earth. It runs over the earth and can be in this place or that, so the relationship of the animal to the earth is quite different from that of the plant. Something else strikes us about the animal.

When we come to examine the different animals which live on the earth, let us say according to their soul qualities first of all, we find cruel beasts of prey, gentle lambs or animals of courage. Some of the birds are brave fighters and we find courageous animals amongst the mammals too. We find majestic beasts. like the lion. In fact, there is the greatest variety of soul qualities, and we characterise each single species of animal by saying that it has this or that quality. We call the tiger cruel, for cruelty is his most important and significant quality. We call the sheep patient. Patience is his most outstanding characteristic. We call the donkey lazy, because although in reality he may not be so fearfully lazy yet his whole bearing and behaviour somehow reminds us of laziness. The donkey is especially lazy about changing his position in life. If he happens to be in a mood to go slowly, nothing will induce him to go quickly. And so every animal has its own particular characteristics.

But we cannot think of human beings in this way. We cannot think of one man as being only gentle and patient, another only cruel and a third only brave. We should find it a very one-sided arrangement if people were distributed over the earth in this way. You do sometimes find such qualities developed in a one-sided way, but not to the same extent as in animals. Rather what we find with a human being, especially when we are to educate him, is that there are certain things and facts of life which he must meet with patience or again with courage, and other things and situations even maybe with a certain cruelty, although this last should be administered in homeopathic doses. Or in face of certain situations a human being may show cruelty simply out of his own natural development, and so on.

Now what is really the truth about these soul qualities of man and the animals? With man we find that he can really possess all qualities, or at least the sum of all the qualities that the animals have between them (each possessing a different one). Man has a little of each one. He is not as majestic as the lion, but he has something of majesty within him. He is not as cruel as the tiger but he has a certain cruelty. He is not as patient as the sheep, but he has some patience. He is not as lazy as the donkey—at least everybody is not—but he has some of this laziness in him. Every human being has these things within him. When we think of this matter in the right way we can say that man has within him the lion-nature, sheep-nature, tiger-nature and donkey-nature. He bears all these within him, but harmonised. All the qualities tone each other down, as it were, and man is the harmonious flowing together, or, to put it more academically, the synthesis of all the different soul qualities that the animal possesses. Man reaches his goal if in his whole being he has the proper dose of lion-ness, sheep-ness, tiger-ness, the proper dose of donkey-ness and so on, if all this is present in his nature in the right proportions and has the right relationship to everything else.

There is a beautiful old Greek proverb which says: If courage be united with cleverness it will bring thee blessing, but if it goes alone ruin will follow. If man were only courageous with the courage of certain birds which are continually fighting, he would not bring much blessing into his life. But if his courage is so developed in his life that it unites with cleverness—the cleverness which in the animal is only one-sided—then it takes its right place in man's being.

With man, then, it is a question of a synthesis, a harmonising of everything that is spread out in the animal kingdom. We can express it like this: here is one kind of animal (I am representing it diagrammatically), here a second, a third, a fourth and so on, all the possible kinds of animals on the earth. How are they related to man?

The relationship is such that man has, let us say, some

thing of this first kind of animal (see drawing), but modified, not in its entirety. Then comes another kind, but again not the whole of it. This leads us to the next, and to yet another, so that man contains all the animals within him. The animal kingdom is a man spread out, and man is the animal kingdom drawn together; all the animals are united synthetically in man, and if you analyse a human being you get the whole animal kingdom.

This is also the case with the external human form. Imagine a human face and cut away part of it here (see drawing) and

pull another part forwards here, so that this latter part is not harmonised with the whole face, while the forehead recedes; then you get a dog's head. If you form the head in a somewhat different way, you get a lion's head, and so on.

And so with all his other organs you can find that man, even in his external figure, has what is distributed amongst the animals in a modified harmonised form.

Think for instance of a waddling duck; you have a relic of this waddling part between your fingers, only shrunken. Thus everything which is to be found in the animal kingdom even in external form is present also in the human kingdom. Indeed this is the way man can find his relationship to the animal kingdom, by coming to know that the animals, taken all together, make up man. Man exists on earth, eighteen hundred millions of him, of greater or less value, but he exists again as a giant human being. The whole animal kingdom is a giant human being, not brought together in a synthesis but analysed out into single examples.

It is as though your were made of elastic which could be pulled out in varying degrees in different directions; if you were thus stretched out in one direction more than in others, one kind of animal would be formed. Or again if the upper part of your face were to be pushed up and stretched out (if it were sufficiently elastic) then another animal would arise. Thus man bears the whole animal kingdom within him.

This is how the history of the animal kingdom used to be taught in olden times. This was a right and healthy knowledge, which has now been lost, though only comparatively recently. In the eighteenth century for instance people still knew quite well that if the olfactory nerve of the nose were sufficiently large and extended backwards then you would have a dog. But if the olfactory nerve is shrivelled up and only a small portion remains, the rest of it being metamorphosed, then there arises the nerve that we need for our intellectual life.

For observe how a dog smells; the olfactory nerve is extended backwards from the nose. A dog smells the special peculiarity of each thing. He does not make a mental picture of it, but everything comes to him through smell. He has not will and imagination but he has will and a sense of smell for everything. A wonderful sense of smell! A dog does not find the world less interesting than a man does. A man can make mental images of it all, a dog can smell it all. We experience various smells, do we not, both pleasant and unpleasant, but a dog has many kinds of smell; just think how a dog specialises in his sense of smell. Nowadays we have police dogs. They are led to the place where someone has pilfered something. The dog immediately takes up the scent of the man, follows it and finds him. All this is due to the fact that there is really an immense variety, a whole world of scents for a dog. The bearer of these scents is the olfactory nerve that passes backwards into the head, into the skull.

If we were to draw the olfactory nerve of a dog, which passes through his nose, we should have to draw it going backwards. In man only a little piece at the bottom of it has remained. The rest of it is present in a morphosed form and lies here below the forehead. It is a metamorphosed, transformed olfactory nerve, and with this organ we form our mental images. For this reason we cannot smell like a dog, but we can make mental pictures. We bear within us the dog with his sense of smell, only this latter has been transformed into something else. And so it is with all animals.

We must get this clear in our minds. Now a German philosopher called Schopenhauer wrote a book called The World as Will and Idea. But this book is only intended for human beings. If a dog of genius had written it he would have called it The World as Will and Smell and I am convinced that this book would have been much more interesting than Schopenhauer's.

You must look at the various forms of the animals and describe them, not as though each animal existed in an isolated way, but so that you always arouse in the children the thought: This is a picture of man. If you think of a man altered in one direction or another, simplified or combined, then you have an animal. If you take a lower animal, for example, a tortoise, and put it on the top of a kangaroo, then you have something like a hardened head on the top, for that is the tortoise form, and the kangaroo below stands for the limbs of the human being.

And so everywhere in the wide world you can find some connection between man and the different animals.

You are laughing now about these things. That does not matter at all. It js quite good to laugh about them in the lessons also, for there is nothing better you can bring into the classroom than humour, and it is good for the children to laugh too, for if they always see the teacher come in with a terribly long face they will be tempted to make long faces themselves and to imagine that that is what one has to do when one sits at a desk in a classroom. But if humour is brought in and you can make the children laugh this is the very best method of teaching. Teachers who are always solemn will never achieve anything with the children.

So here you have the principle of the animal kingdom as I wished to put it before you. We can speak of the details later if we have time. But from. this you will see that you can teach about the animal kingdom by considering it as a human being spread out into all the animal forms.

This will give the child a very beautiful and delicate feeling. For as I have pointed out to you the child comes to know of the plant world as belonging to the earth, and the animals as belonging to himself. The child grows with all the kingdoms of the earth. He no longer merely stands on the dead ground of the earth, but he stands on the living ground, for he feels the earth as something living. He gradually comes to think of himself standing on the earth as though he were standing on some great living creature, like a whale. This is the right feeling. This alone can lead him to a really human feeling about the whole world.

So with regard to the animal the child comes to feel that all animals are related to man, but that man has something that reaches out beyond them all, for he unites all the animals in himself. And all this idle talk of the scientists about man descending from an animal will be laughed at by people who have been educated in this way. For they will know that man unites within himself the whole animal kingdom, he is a synthesis of all the single members of it.

As I have said, between the ninth and tenth year the human being comes to the point of discriminating between himself as subject and the outer world as object. He makes a distinction between himself and the world around him. Up to this time one could only tell fairy stories and legends in which the stones and plants speak and act like human beings, for the child did not yet differentiate between himself and his environment. But now when he does thus differentiate we must bring him into touch with his environment on a higher level. We must speak of the earth on which we stand in such a way that he cannot but feel how earth and plant belong together as a matter of course. Then, as I have shown you, the child will also get practical ideas for agriculture. He will know that the farmer manures the ground because he needs a certain life in it for one particular species of plant. The child will not then take a plant out of a botanical tin and examine it by itself, nor will he examine animals in an isolated way, but he will think of the whole animal kingdom as the great analysis of a human being spread out over the whole earth. Thus he, a human being, comes to know himself as he stands on the earth, and how the animals stand in relationship to him.

It is of very great importance that from the tenth year until towards the twelfth year we should awaken these thoughts of plant-earth and animal-man. Thereby the child takes his place in the world in a very definite way, with his whole life of soul, body and spirit.

All this must be brought to him through the feelings in an artistic way, for it is through learning to feel how plants belong to the earth and to the soil that the child really becomes clever and intelligent. His thinking will then be in accordance with nature. Through our efforts to show the child how he is related to the animal world, he will see how the force of will which is in all animals lives again in man, but differentiated, in individualised forms suited to man's nature. All animal qualities, all feeling of form which is stamped into the animal nature lives in the human being. Human will receives its impulses in this way and man himself thereby takes his place rightly in the world according to his own nature.

Why is it that people go about in the world today as though they had lost their roots? Anyone can see that people do not walk properly nowadays; they do not step properly but drag their legs after them. They learn differently in their sport, but there again there is something unnatural about it. But above all they have no idea how to think nor what to do with their lives. They know well enough what to do if you put them to the sewing machine or the telephone, or if an excursion or a world tour is being arranged. But they do not know what to do out of themselves because their education has not led them to find their right place in the world. You cannot put this right by coining phrases about educating people rightly; you can only do it if in the concrete details you can find the right way of speaking of the plants in their true relationship to the soil and of the animals in their rightful place by the side of man. Then the human being will stand on the earth as he should and will have the right attitude towards the world. This must be achieved in all your lessons. It is important—nay, it is essential.

Now it will always be a question of finding out what the development of the child demands at each age of life. For this we need real observation and knowledge of man. Think once again of the two things of which I have spoken, and you will see that the child up to its ninth or tenth year is really demanding that the whole world of external nature shall be made alive, because he does not yet see himself as separate from this external nature; therefore we shall tell the child fairy tales, myths and legends. We shall invent something ourselves for the things that are in our immediate environment, in order that in the form of stories, descriptions and pictorial representations of all kinds we may give the child in an artistic form what he himself finds in his own soul, in the hidden depths which he brings with him into the world. And then after the ninth or tenth year, let us say between the tenth and twelfth year, we introduce the child to the animal and plant world as we have described.

We must be perfectly clear that the conception of causality, of cause and effect, that is so popular today has no place at all in what the child needs to understand even at this age, at the tenth or eleventh year. We are accustomed nowadays to consider everything in its relation to cause and effect. The education based on Natural Science has brought this about. But to talk to children under eleven or twelve about cause and effect, as is the practice in the everyday life of today, is like talking about colours to someone who is colour blind. You will be speaking entirely beyond the child if you speak of cause and effect in the style that is customary today. First and foremost he needs living pictures where there is no question of cause and effect. Even after the tenth year these conceptions should only be brought to the child in the form of pictures.

It is only towards the twelfth year that the child is ready to hear causes and effects spoken of. So that those branches of knowledge which have principally to do with cause and effect in the sense of the words used today—the lifeless sciences such as Physics, etc.—should not really be introduced into the curriculum until between the eleventh and twelfth year. Before this time one should not speak to the children about minerals, Physics or Chemistry. None of these things is suitable for him before this age.

Now with regard to History, up to the twelfth year the child should be given pictures of single personalities and well-drawn graphic accounts of events that make History come alive for him, not a historical review where what follows is always shown to be the effect of what has gone before, the pragmatic method of regarding History, of which humanity has become so proud. This pragmatic method of seeking causes and effects in History is no more comprehensible to the child than colours to the colour-blind. And moreover one gets a completely wrong conception of life as it runs its course if one is taught everything according to the idea of cause and effect. I should like to make this clear to you in a picture.

Imagine a river flowing along like this (see drawing). It has

waves. But it would not always be a true picture if you make the wave (C) come out of the wave (B), and this again out of the wave (A), that is, if you say that C is the effect of B and B of A; there are in fact all kinds of forces at work below, which throw these waves up. So it is in History. What happens in 1910 is not always the effect of what happened in 1909, and so on. But quite early on the child ought to have a feeling for the things that work in evolution out of the depths of the course of time, a feeling of what throws the waves up, as it were. But he can only get that feeling if you postpone the teaching of cause and effect until later on, towards the twelfth year, and up to this time give him only pictures.

Here again this makes demands on the teacher's fantasy. But he must be equal to these demands, and he will be so if he has acquired a knowledge of man for himself. This is the one thing needful.

You must teach and educate out of the very nature of man himself, arid for this reason education for moral life must run parallel to the actual teaching which I have been describing to you. So now in conclusion I should like to add a few remarks on this subject, for here too we must read from the nature of the child how he should be treated. If you give a child of seven a conception of cause and effect you are working against the development of his human nature, and punishments also are often opposed to the real development of the child's nature.

In the Waldorf School we have had some very gratifying experiences of this. What is the usual method of punishment in schools? If a child has done something badly he has to “stay in” and do some Arithmetic for instance. Now in the Waldorf School we once had rather a strange experience: three or four children were told that they had done their work badly and must therefore stay in and do some sums. Whereupon the others said: “But we want to stay and do sums too!” For they had been brought up to think of Arithmetic as something nice to do, not as something which is used as a punishment. You should not arouse in the children the idea that staying in to do sums is something bad, but that it is a good thing to do. That is why the whole class wanted to stay and do sums. So that you must not choose punishments that cannot be regarded as such if the child is to be educated in a healthy way in his soul life.

To take another example: Dr. Stein, a teacher at the Waldorf School, often thought of very good educational methods on the spur of the moment. He once noticed that his pupils were passing notes under the desk. They were not attending to the lesson, but were writing notes and passing them under their desks to their neighbours who then wrote notes in reply. Now Dr. Stein did not scold them for writing notes and say: “I shall have to punish you,” or something of that sort, but quite suddenly he began to speak about the Postal System and give them a lecture on it. At first the children were quite mystified as to why they were suddenly being given a lesson on the Postal System, but then they realised why it was being done. This subtle method of changing the subject made the children feel ashamed. They began to feel ashamed of themselves and stopped writing notes simply on account of the thoughts about the postal system which the teacher had woven into the lesson.

Thus to take charge of a class it is necessary to have an inventive talent. Instead of simply following stereotyped traditional methods you must actually be able to enter into the whole being of the child, and you must know that in certain cases improvement, which is really what we are aiming at in punishment, is much more likely to ensue if the children are brought to a sense of shame in this way without drawing special attention to it or to any one child; this is far more effective than employing some crude kind of punishment. If the teacher follows such methods as these he will stand before the children active in spirit, and much will be balanced out in the class which would otherwise be in disorder.

The first essential for a teacher is self-knowledge. If for instance a child makes blots on his book or on his desk because he has got impatient or angry with something his neighbour has done, then the teacher must never shout at the child for making blots and say: “You mustn't get angry! Getting angry is a thing that a good man never does! A man should never get angry but should bear everything calmly. If I see you getting angry once more, why then—then I shall throw the inkpot at your head!”

If you educate like this (which is very often done) you will accomplish very little. The teacher must always keep himself in hand, and above all must never fall into the faults which he is blaming his children for. But here you must know how the unconscious part of the child's nature works. A man's conscious intelligence, feeling and will are all only one part of his soul life; in the depths of human nature, even in the child, there holds sway the astral body with its wonderful prudence and wisdom.¹

Now it always fills me with horror to see a teacher standing in his class with a book in his hand teaching out of the book, or a notebook in which he has noted down the questions he wants to ask the children and to which he keeps referring. The child does not appear to notice this with his upper consciousness, it is true; but if you are aware of these things then you will see that the children have subconscious wisdom and say to themselves: He does not himself know what I am supposed to be learning. Why should I learn what he does not know? This is always the judgment that is passed by the subconscious nature of children who are taught by their teacher out of a book.

Such are the imponderable and subtle things that are so extremely important in teaching. For as soon as the subconscious of the child, his astral nature, notices that the teacher himself does not know something he has to teach, but has to look it up in a book first, then the child considers it unnecessary that he should learn it either. And the astral body works with much more certainty than the upper consciousness of the child.

These are the thoughts I wished to include in today's lecture. In the next few days we will deal with special subjects and stages in the child's education.

• 1. For an elucidation of the “astral body” and other higher members of man's being, see Rudolf Steiner:The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.

There are several reasons why it would seem a somewhat risky enterprise to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual science.

First of all, the subject is indeed difficult, for the source of what one can call the true fairy tale mood lies deep down within the human soul. The methods of spiritual science that I have often described must take their way along extremely convoluted and lengthy paths in order to find this source. We little suspect how deeply hidden lie the springs that have given rise through centuries of human history to all the enchantment of genuine fairy tale poetry.

In the second place, it is just this poetic enchantment that causes one to feel strongly about fairy tales; studying them or trying to explain them with one's own ideas must surely destroy their fresh spontaneity, yes, even the whole effect of the tales. We often hear it said quite rightly that explanations and commentaries of poetry spoil the immediate, lively, artistic impression that a poem should give us; we want it to affect us simply on its own. All the more should this apply to the infinitely subtle and bewitching quality of the poetic tales arising from the deep, almost bottomless springs of the folk soul or from single human hearts. They flow out in such an original way that intruding our own strong judgment would seem like tearing a flower to pieces.

Nevertheless, spiritual research does find it possible to throw some light into those regions of soul that give rise to the poetic mood of the fairy tale. In doing this, the second doubt will be allayed. Simply by searching out the sources and wellsprings from which fairy tales flow, deep down in human soul nature, we can be completely sure that the explanations of spiritual science will touch those depths so gently that they are not harmed. Just the opposite: the wonder of everything lying down there in the human soul is so new, so original, so individual that one has oneself to resort to a kind of fairy tale in speaking about it all; nothing else will do to describe these hidden springs.

Goethe, for one, moving beyond his work as an artist in order to plunge fully into the wellsprings and sources of life, would not take to theoretical discussion nor destroy the fairy tale's living water with his scrutiny when he wanted to reveal one of the most profound insights into the human soul. No, as soon as he had won these insights, it seemed natural to use the fairy tale itself to describe what lives and comes to expression in the soul at its deepest level. In his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe tried to express in his own way the extraordinary soul experiences that Schiller brought forward in a more abstract, philosophical style in the Aesthetic Education of Man.

The very nature of fairy tale enchantment leads us to believe that explaining and trying to understand it will probably never destroy the creative mood; to dig down into those wellsprings with the resources of spiritual research is to discover something quite remarkable. If I were to talk about fairy tales as much as I'd like to do, I would have to give many lectures. Today it will be possible to bring only a few hints regarding the results of research.

A person who attempts the spiritual exploration of the fairy tale sources will find that they lie in far more profound depths of the soul than those from which other works of art emerge, even for instance, the most awe-inspiring tragic drama. In a tragedy, the poet shows us how the human soul experiences the gigantic powers of fate that exalt as well as crush their victim. Fate is the cause of the ordeals and shocks of tragedy. We find that the tangled threads woven together and then unraveled in tragic drama belong more or less to what an individual has to suffer from the outside world. However difficult this may be to discern, requiring as it does our finding the way into the uniqueness of a human soul, it is nevertheless quite possible for anyone sensitive to the impact of life itself upon the soul. A tragedy, we feel, shows us how an individual is entangled in this or that fateful life-situation.

However, the source of fairy tale mood and fairy tale poetry lies still deeper than the complexities of tragedy. For one thing, we can feel that tragedy concerns itself—as do other artistic creations—with an individual who in a certain period of life, at a certain age, is exposed to some kind of misfortune. We take it for granted that when tragic drama affects us, it is because a human being is brought through his own unique experiences to what is happening; we realize that it is one single person with his own special destiny that we must come to understand. Here, as in other works of art, we meet a particular, circumscribed sphere of life.

It is altogether different, we feel, when we come knowingly to fairy tale poetry and its mood. The effect of a fairy tale on our soul is spontaneous, elementary, and therefore remains unconscious. When we try to get a feeling for it, however, we can find that what a fairy tale expresses is not about one person in a particular situation in life, is not a limited portion of life, but rather something so integrated in human experience that it has to do with the comprehensive truth of all mankind. It is not about some special individual who finds himself at a certain time of life in a singular dilemma; what the fairy tale describes lies so completely in everyone's soul nature that it represents actual experience to children in their early years to persons of middle age and even to old men and women.

Throughout our whole lifetime the fairy tale happenings picture our most profound experiences of soul, even though the style is light, playful and picturesque. The artistic enjoyment of a fairy tale, in its correspondence to inner soul experiences, can be compared—a rather bold comparison—to the relationship of an enjoyable taste on the tongue to the hidden, complex proceedings in the rest of the body, where the food takes up its task of nourishing the organism. What lies in that further process, after our pleasure in its taste, is not at all evident to our observation or understanding. Both things seem at first to have little to do with each other; no one is able to say, from savoring a food, what its particular use will be in the life processes of the body. And so it is with our joy in the art of the fairy tale. It is far, far removed from what is happening at the same time, all unconsciously, deep in the soul. There the essence of the fairy tale is pouring forth, satisfying the soul's persistent hunger for it. Just as our body has to have nutritive substances circulating through the organism, the soul needs fairy tale substance flowing through its spiritual veins.

Using the methods of research described in my books as a way to approach the higher worlds, you will discover, at a certain level of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual processes working unconsciously in the depths of the soul. In our ordinary life we are aware of these spirit impulses within our soul only when they surface as gentle dreams, caught at rare times by our waking consciousness. Now and then we may have such a special waking up that we realize: You are emerging out of a spiritual world where there is thinking and where there are intentions, and where something was happening down in the unapproachable grounds of your existence that was somehow akin to daily happenings; this something seems an intimate part of your own being but is completely hidden from your waking, everyday life.

It is often the same story with the spiritual researcher, even when he has progressed as far as experiencing a world of spiritual beings and spiritual deeds. However much further he then advances, he nonetheless reaches again and again the same edge of a world out of whose deep unconsciousness there come towards him spiritual impulses, impulses connected with himself. They appear to his spiritual gaze like a Fata Morgana but they do not yield themselves up to him completely.

This very peculiar experience is what awaits one on looking into the unfathomable spiritual relationships belonging to the human soul. It is fairly easy to follow attentively and understand certain intimate soul happenings, for example, the emotional conflicts that also lie there within the soul and that are revealed in art, in tragic drama. But far more difficult are the quite common human conflicts, which in our daily life we simply cannot imagine are there, and yet every one of us undergoes them at every period of our life.

One such soul conflict discovered by spiritual research takes place without the ordinary consciousness being aware of it: our waking up every day, when the soul leaves the world it has been in during sleep and slips down into the physical body. As I said, we have normally not the slightest knowledge of this, yet every morning our soul is engaged in a battle that the spiritual researcher can catch only to a slight degree: it is the battle of the single, lonely human soul meeting the gigantic powers of nature. Thunder and lightning and everything else in the elements that we have to confront out in the world unload their great strengths on us as we stand there more or less helplessly. All that tremendous power, however, even when we meet it head on, is a small thing compared to the unconscious battle at the moment of waking up, when our soul—alive only to itself up to then—has to unite with the pressures and substances of a purely physical body. The soul needs this organism in order to use the bodily senses that are governed by the laws of nature and to use also the bodily limbs in which the powers of nature prevail. There is something like a yearning in the soul to dip down into this sheer natural state, a yearning satisfied each time by waking up, and yet at this very moment there is a shrinking back, a feeling of utter helplessness in the face of the eternal opposition existing between the soul and the nature-related physical body, into which one awakens. It may sound strange that this daily battle takes place in the depths of our soul—but then it takes place in complete unconsciousness. The soul knows nothing of what it has to undergo every single morning, but nevertheless it is burdened by the conflict, which affects its very nature and its individual character.

There is something else happening in these depths, which can be caught on the wing by spiritual research; it occurs at the moment of falling asleep. The human soul withdraws from the sense world and from the bodily limbs and has more or less left behind the physical body in the physical-sense world. Then there comes to the soul what one may describe as an awareness of its inwardness. At that moment it begins to experience unconsciously the inner battles caused by its constraint in a physical body in the waking state, where it has to act in consequence of its entanglement in matter. It is aware of its bent toward the burdensome sense-world, which, however, represses its morality. In falling asleep and during sleep, the soul is alone with itself and pervaded unconsciously by so moral an atmosphere that it can hardly be compared to the morality we know in ordinary life. Besides other impressions, it is this that the soul experiences when it is outside the physical body and living a purely spiritual existence between falling asleep and waking up.

We should not imagine that all these occurrences in our soul are simply absent when we are awake. Spiritual research can show one very interesting effect as an example: we do not dream only when we believe we are dreaming but we actually dream the whole day long. In truth, our soul is full of dreams all the time, even though we don't notice it, for our waking consciousness is more forceful than the dream consciousness. As a somewhat weak light is extinguished altogether in the presence of a stronger one, our day-consciousness extinguishes what is continually running parallel to it, the dream experience in the depths of our soul. We dream all the time, but we are seldom conscious of it. Out of those abundant and unconscious dream experiences—an infinitely greater number than our waking perceptions—a few rise up like single drops of water shaken out of an immense lake; these are the dreams we become conscious of. But the dreaming that stays unconscious is perceived by the soul spiritually. In its depths many things are being experienced. Just as chemical processes that we are unaware of take place in the body, there are spiritual experiences taking place within us in unconscious regions of the soul.

We can throw more light into these hidden depths of soul life by adding something else to the facts we have mentioned. It has often been emphasized, and especially so in my last lecture, [Raphaels Mission im Lichte der Wissenschaft vom Geiste (January 30, 1913); The Mission of Raphael (unpublished MS).] that in the course of evolution on earth, human soul life has undergone a complete change. When we look far, far back into the past of humankind, we find the soul of ancient man having totally different experiences from those today. In earlier lectures we spoke about early mankind's primitive clairvoyance; we will speak further about it in the future. We look out at the world today in the wide-awake condition of soul that is normal, taking in sense impressions from outer stimuli, working on them with our intelligence, reason, emotions, and will forces—but this form of consciousness is merely the one that holds good for the present day. This modern consciousness has developed out of the earlier forms in ancient days that we can call—in the best sense of the word—clairvoyant; people were able in certain intermediate conditions between waking and sleeping quite normally to experience something of the spiritual worlds. At that time a person, even though he could not become really conscious of himself, would not find the experiences we have been describing as taking place in the depths of the soul at all unfamiliar or strange.

In ancient times the human being could more fully perceive his union with the spiritual world outside himself. He saw how everything going on in his soul, the happenings deep in his soul, were related to certain spiritual realities alive in the universe. He saw these realities moving through his soul, felt closely related to the spirit-soul beings and realities of the universe. This was a characteristic of mankind's primeval clairvoyance. In ancient times, not only artists but quite primitive people frequently had a feeling that I am going to describe, which today we arrive at only in quite special moods.

It can really happen that, living gently in the depths of the soul, as gently as anything can be, there is an experience of the spiritual realities mentioned above, one that does not come to consciousness. Nothing of it is perceived in the wide-awake life of the day. But something is there in the soul, just as hunger often is there in the physical organism, and just as we have a need for something to satisfy our hunger, we have also a need for something to satisfy this delicate need in our soul.

It is at this moment that one feels urged either to come to a fairy tale or a legend that one knows, or else, perhaps, if one has an artistic nature, to create something of the kind oneself, even though one senses that all the words one could theoretically use would only reach a kind of stammering about such experiences. This is how the fairy tale images arise. The nourishment that satisfies the hunger we spoke of is just this conscious filling of the soul with fairy tale pictures. In the earlier times of mankind's evolution, the human soul was closer to a clairvoyant perception of its inner spiritual experiences; often, therefore, the simple country folk felt this hunger more distinctly than we do today, and this led them to search for nourishing pictures arising out of their creative soul life; we find these today in the fairy tales coming down to us as folk traditions in various parts of the world. In those earlier times the human soul felt its connection to spiritual existence and felt more or less consciously the inner battles it had to undergo, even without understanding them. The soul formed these into pictures and images which had only a distant resemblance to what was happening in its depths. But still one can feel that there is a connection between the happenings of a fairy tale and the unfathomable, profound experiences of the soul.

It is evident—many can confirm this—that the heart of a child often succeeds in creating for itself a comrade or “friend” who is present only for that child and who stays at its side through all its coming and going. Probably everyone knows children with such invisible spirit-friends. These unseen playmates you have to imagine as being with the child wherever he is, sharing all his joys and sorrows. And then you see someone coming along, a so-called “intelligent” person, who hears about this invisible playmate and tries to talk the child out of it, even believes it's a healthy thing he's doing—but it has a bad effect on the child's feeling-life. A child will grieve for his soul-comrade and if he is susceptible to spiritual-soul moods, the grief will be weighty and can develop into a pining away or sickliness. This is actual experience, related to deep, inward happenings of the human soul.

We can take to heart, without dispelling the fragrance of such a tale, the Grimms' story of the child and the paddock (a small frog). A little girl lets the paddock eat with her out of her bowl of bread and milk; the paddock only drinks the milk. The child talks to the little creature as to another human being, saying one day, “Eat the bread crumbs as well, little thing.” The mother hears this, comes out to the yard, and kills the paddock. And now the child loses her rosy cheeks, wastes away and dies.

In this tale we can feel an echo of certain moods that really and truly are present in the depths of our soul. They are there not only at certain periods of our life, but whether we are children or adults, we recognize such moods because we are human beings.

Every one of us can feel reverberating in us how this something we experience but don't understand, something we don't even bring to consciousness, is connected with the effect of the fairy tale on our soul like the taste of food on our tongue. And then the fairy tale becomes for the soul very much like nutritious food when it is put to use by the whole organism. It is tempting to search in these deep-lying soul experiences for what reverberates in each different tale. Of course it would be a tremendous task over a long time, given the great collections of fairy tales from everywhere in the world, to probe into them just for this. However, what can be looked at in a few tales can be used in a general way for all of them, if the few are genuine fairy tales.

Take one of the stories that the brothers Grimm collected, “Rumpelstiltskin”. When a miller claims that his daughter can spin straw into gold, the king has him bring her to the castle in order to test her art. She comes to the king, is locked in a room with a bundle of straw and “there sat the poor miller's daughter and for the life of her could not tell what to do”. As she begins to weep, there appears a little man who says, “What will you give me if I spin the straw into gold for you?” The girl gives him her necklace and the little man spins the straw into gold. The king next morning is astonished and delighted but wants more; she should spin straw into gold again. She is locked in another room with even more straw, and when the little man appears again and asks, “What will you give me if I spin the straw into gold for you?” she gives him her ring. By morning all the straw is spun into glittering gold. But the king is still not satisfied. The manikin comes again, but now the girl has nothing more to give him. “Then promise me, if you should become queen, to give me your first child,” says the little man, and so she promises. And when, after a year, the child is there and the manikin comes and reminds the queen of her promise, she begs him to wait. “I will give you three days' time,” he replies. “If you know my name by that time, you shall keep your child.” The miller's daughter sends messengers far and wide. She must find every name and also the particular name of the little man. Finally, after several wrong guesses, she succeeds in naming the little man by his right name: Rumpelstiltskin.

No other work of art gives us the feeling of utmost inner joy as the fairy tale with its unsophisticated pictures, yet we can also know the deep soul experience from which such a tale arises. It is a prosaic but accurate comparison to say, we can know a great deal about the chemistry of our food and still take pleasure in something delicious we're eating. And so we can know and understand something about these deep inner soul experiences in us that are felt but not “known”—and that emerge as the pictures of fairy tales.

Indeed our solitary soul, this miller's daughter, is a lonely thing, both in sleep and in waking life, even though she is harbored in our body. The soul feels (but unconsciously) the great antithesis she has to live in; she experiences (but does not understand) her unending task, her own anchorage in divine worlds.

The soul will always be aware of other insignificant abilities in comparison to those of outside nature. Nature is the mighty enchantress, who can transform one thing into another in a trice—something the soul would like to be and do.

In everyday consciousness, one can submit with a good grace to this disparity between the human being and the omnipotent wisdom of the spirit of nature. In the depths of the soul, however, things are not so simple. The soul would certainly come to grief if she did not surmise that within her own conscious being a still deeper being is present, something she can trust, something she might be able to describe like this:

You, Soul, are still at such an imperfect stage—but there is something in you, another entity, who is far more clever than you, who can help you to accomplish the most difficult tasks and give you wings to rise up and look over wide perspectives into an infinite future. Someday you will be able to do what is still impossible, for there is something within you that is far, far greater than the part of you now that “knows”; it will be a loyal helper if you can enter into an alliance with it. But you must truly be able to form a concept of this creature who lives within you and is so much wiser, cleverer, more skilful than you are yourself.

When you try to imagine this conversation of the soul with itself, an unconscious conversation with the more capable part of the soul, you can then try to catch this nuance in the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale: what the miller's daughter had to experience in not being able to spin straw into gold and then finding a loyal helper in the little manikin. It is impossible to blow away the fragrance of those pictures, even when we know their origin, deep down in our soul life. Let us take another tale. Please forgive me if it is connected with things that seem to have a personal coloring; it is not meant to be personal. It makes it somewhat easier to explain if I add this small personal note.

In my book Occult Science [ An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1972.] you will find a description of the evolution of the world. I don't intend to speak about it now—possibly on another occasion. During this evolution of the world our earth has passed through certain stages as a planet in the universe, and these stages can be compared to the stages of life in the individual human being. Just as individuals go through one life after another, the earth itself has had various planetary stages or embodiments. In spiritual science, for certain reasons, we speak about the earth—before its “earth” stage began—as having a “moon” stage and before that, a “sun” stage. There was a sun evolutionary period as a planetary pre-stage of our earth in the primordial past; an ancient sun was still united with the earth, from which—at a later stage—it split away. The moon also split away from what originally was the sun. Our sun today is not the original one but only a piece of it; we can speak of an ancient sun-stage of the earth and also of our present sun. Spiritual research can look back to the time in earth evolution when the second sun, our present one, developed as an independent body in the universe. In searching for the existence at that time of beings actually perceptible to the senses, it finds only the lower species up to the level of the fishes.

You can read all this in more detail in Occult Science, and there you will be able to understand it. The actual details, however, can be found only through the scientific methods of spiritual research. At the time they were discovered and I wrote them down (more precisely, they were not discovered just when I wrote them down but they were, one can say, discovered for me and I wrote them down in Occult Science) the following fairy tale was quite unknown to me—and this is the personal note I wanted to add. I can verify the fact that it was unknown then, for I found it much later in Wundt's Elements of Folk Psychology and traced it then back to its source.

Before I give you a short summary of the fairy tale, let me say this: Everything the spiritual researcher finds in the spiritual world—and what was just described had to be found in the spiritual world, for otherwise it would no longer exist—everything in that world is very much connected with the human soul. In the very deepest roots of our soul we are united with that world. It is always at hand; we enter it unconsciously as soon as we fall asleep in a normal way. In our union with that world, our soul holds within itself not only its sleep experiences but also all those experiences related to world evolution as we have described them. It is a paradox but one can say that the soul knows unconsciously that it experienced the stream of evolution from the original sun to its daughter, the sun we see shining in the sky, and to the moon that is also a child of the original sun. Moreover, the soul can recognize that it was living through a soul-spiritual existence at that time, for it was not yet united with earthly substance. It could look down then on earthly happenings, for example, when the highest animal organisms were the fish-prototypes, at the time when the present sun and moon developed by separating from the earth. In the unconscious, the soul is connected with these happenings.

Now look at this short folk tale that can be found among several primitive peoples: There was once a man who was made of resin. He worked only at night. If he had worked in the daytime, the sun would have melted him. One day, however, he did go outside, for he wanted to catch some fish. And lo! the man made of resin melted away. His sons made up their minds to take revenge. They shot off their arrows. They shot so well that the arrows formed figures, towering one above the other. They became a ladder, reaching right up into the sky. The two sons climbed up the ladder, one by day, the other by night. And one son became the sun, the other son became the moon.

It is not my custom to explain such tales with abstract, intellectual ideas. Everyone can realize, however, through spiritual research how the human soul is deeply connected with everything happening in the world, how the soul can be understood only through spiritual means, and how it hungers to enjoy the picture-images of its unconscious experiences—this is truly different. If you feel this, you will also feel, vibrating like an echo of this folk tale, just what human souls experienced at the time of the primordial sun and then at the origin of the sun and moon during the time of fish-development in earth evolution. It was for me a most important event—and this is the personal note—to discover, long after these things were described in Occult Science, this particular tale. Even though I would never wish to explain it in an abstract way, a certain feeling comes over me when I look at the evolution of the world, a feeling that is twin-brother to the one I get from immersing myself in the wonderful picture-images of the folk tale.

We can look at another story, this one from the Melanesian Islands. Before we hear it, let us recall that according to spiritual research the human soul is closely connected to the present-day happenings and facts of the universe. It may be too picturesque, but nevertheless quite correct from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, to describe the life of the soul when it leaves the body in sleep as completely related to and united with the whole universe. One possibility of remembering or understanding this relationship of our ego, for example, to the cosmos, at least to something significant in the cosmos is to look at the plants. They can grow only when they have the light and warmth of the sun. They are rooted in the earth and consist, as spiritual science tells us, of a physical body interwoven by an etheric body. This is not enough, however, to cause the plants to unfold and blossom; they must also have the forces of the sun shining down on them.

Looking at the human body during sleep, we see to some degree its equivalence to a plant. Our sleeping body is like a plant, in that it has the same power to grow. But the human being has freed himself from the cosmic order in which the plant is caught. A plant has to wait for sunlight to come to it, the rising and setting of the sun. It is dependent, as we humans are not, on the external cosmic order. Why are we not? Because of a fact that spiritual research has discovered, that the human ego, which in sleep is outside the plant-like body, unfolds for the body what the sun unfolds for the plant. The sun pours its light over the plant; the human ego shines too, resting spiritually over the sleeping body. And the human ego is related to the life of the sun; it is itself a kind of sun for the plant-like human body, engendering its growth during sleep, repairing its various forces that have been used up during the daytime. In perceiving this, we realize how much like the sun our ego is. As the sun moves across the sky—of course I am speaking of its apparent movement—the effect of the sun's rays changes according to the constellations of the zodiac from which they come to earth. In the same way, spiritual science shows us ever more clearly that the human ego passes through the various phases of its experience; the physical body is influenced according to each aspect. We perceive the sun's effect on earth, with the help of spiritual science, according to whether it is passing through Aries, or Taurus, or any other constellation. Rather than refer to the sun in general terms, it is preferable to describe the effect of the sun from one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. As we consider the sun's passage through the constellations, we become aware of its relationship to the ever-changing ego.

All this is described much more fully in Occult Science; it can be acquired as spirit-soul knowledge. We can perceive it as something that takes place unconsciously in the depths of the soul and yet takes place as an inward involvement with the spiritual powers of the cosmos alive in the planets and constellations.

Let us compare these secrets of the universe, disclosed by spiritual science, with the following Melanesian tale, which I will sketch very briefly.

In the road is a stone. The stone is the mother of Quatl, and Quatl has eleven brothers. After Quatl and his brothers were created, Quatl began to create the world. But in this world that Quatl created, there was no change of night and day. Quatl heard about an island where there was a difference between the day and the night. He traveled to that island and brought a host of beings back to his own land. And through the power of these beings, those in Quatl's land came into the alternation of sleeping and waking. Sunrise and sunset occurred for them as soul happenings.

It is amazing what vibrates as echo from this story. If you read the whole thing, you will find that every sentence vibrates with the tones of world secrets, just as our soul vibrates in its depths when it hears how spiritual science describes those secrets. It is true: the source of fairy tale mood and fairy tale poetry lies in the depths of the human soul! The tales are simply pictures using external happenings to help characterize the soul experiences we have described; the pictures are nourishment for the hunger arising from these experiences. This must also be true: we are quite distant from the experience but nevertheless we can feel them echoing in the fairy tale picture-images.

When all this has been said, we should not be surprised to find that the most beautiful and characteristic fairy tales have come to us from those very early times when human beings had a certain clairvoyant consciousness. Because of this, they were able to come close to the wellsprings of fairy tale mood and poetry; it is not at all strange that from those parts of the earth where souls are closer to spiritual sources than in the western world, for example in India or the Orient, fairy tales can have an especially distinctive character.

Furthermore, in German we find Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Children's and Household Tales, which they collected by listening to their relatives or other more or less simple, unsophisticated people telling stories that remind us of the ancient European sagas; even the fairy tales contain elements of the great stories of heroes and gods. We should not be surprised to hear that the most significant fairy tales have now been proven older than the sagas. The hero stories, after all, describe someone at a certain time of life in a particular difficulty, while the fairy tales show us what is relevant to every single person at every period of life from his first breath to his last. Then we understand how a fairy tale can press into itself the deep-seated soul experience on awakening from sleep, of feeling completely inadequate in the face of the powers of nature; how, too, one feels equal to it only with the consoling knowledge that something greater than oneself is present in the soul that may even allow one to triumph over the forces of nature.

When you have a feeling like this, you will understand why there are so many giants that have to be dealt with in the tales. Indeed, they make their appearance without fail as an image out of the soul's mood on waking up—of its wanting to enter the body and seeing the “gigantic” forces of nature alive there. The battle the soul has to undergo is exactly what corresponds—though this cannot be understood perhaps with the intellect—to the various descriptions of people having to fight giants. The soul realizes when confronted by battles with giants that it has only one advantage—and that is its cleverness. This is the soul's perception: You can slip into your body but what can you do about those tremendous forces of the universe? Why, there's one thing the giants don't have that you do have ... cleverness! reason! Unconsciously this lives in the soul even when it realizes the small strength it has; we find that the soul, put into this position, can express itself in the following pictures:

A man was going along the road. He came to an inn, went in, and asked for a bowl of milk soup. Flies by the dozen were buzzing around; some fell into the soup, the others he swatted. When he counted a hundred dead flies on the table, he boasted, “A hundred with one blow!” The innkeeper hung a medallion around his neck that said: He killed a hundred with one blow.

The man went further and came to a castle where the king was looking out of his window. When he caught sight of the wayfarer and his medallion, the king thought to himself, “This is a fellow I can make use of!” The king hurried out and took the man into his service to do a certain task. “There is a pack of bears coming ever and again into my kingdom. Look! if you've killed a hundred with one blow, you can put an end to those bears.” The man said, “I'll do it!” But first he demanded his wages and plenty of food before the bears should arrive, for he thought he might as well enjoy his life for a while, in case it should be cut short. Now came the time when the bears were expected; he collected together all the sweet things bears like to eat, and laid them ready.

The bears came, ate up everything they found and were so well stuffed that they had to lie down to sleep off their greed. And now as they lay helpless, the man came and finished them off. When the King arrived, the man told him, “I simply chopped off their heads while they jumped over my stick!” The King was delighted with this brave fellow and gave him a still harder task. “Look! The giants will soon be coming back into my kingdom. You must help me with them.” The man promised and when the time came, he collected a great amount of good things to eat, which he took along with him, besides a young lark and a piece of cheese. Sure enough, he met the giants and began to boast about how strong he was. One of them said, “We'll show you how much stronger we are!” Taking up a stone, he squeezed it into a powder. “Do that likewise, little man, if you're as strong as we are.” The other giant aimed an arrow up into the sky, shot it off, and only after a very long time, it dropped down again. “Do that likewise, little man, if you're as strong as we are.” At that, the man who had killed a hundred with one blow told them, “I can do better than that.” He took up a stone, stuck his piece of cheese on it and said, “Watch me press water out of the stone!” Sure enough, when he squeezed, water squirted out of the cheese. The giants were astonished. Then the man took the lark and let it fly upwards, saying, “Your arrow came back, but mine will go up so high that it never comes back!” Sure enough, the lark did not return. The giants were so astonished that they decided that they would have to overcome him with cunning, for it seemed that they couldn't manage it with strength. However, they failed to get the better of the man with cunning, for he got the better of them. They lay down together to sleep and in the dark the man put over his head a pig's bladder that was blown up and filled with blood. The giants told one another, “We can't overcome him when he's awake, so we'll have to wait until he sleeps.” As soon as he was asleep, they attacked him with great blows on the head and broke the pig's bladder. The blood gushed out; the giants were sure they had finished him off. Therefore they laid themselves to rest and slept so peacefully that it was easy for the man to put an end to them.

Just as it is in dreams, this fairy tale peters out in a somewhat vague, unsatisfactory way; nevertheless we do find in it the conflict of the human soul with the forces of nature, first with the “Bears” and then with the “Giants.” But something more is in the fairy tale. The man who “killed a hundred with one blow” stands out so clearly that we feel something vibrating in the unconscious depths of our soul to the utter trust he had in his cleverness, even in the face of those powerful forces he found so “gigantic.” It is wrong to try to explain in abstract detail the picture-images created with such artistry, and this is not the intention here. Nothing actually can disturb the character of a fairy tale if you feel how it echoes our inward soul processes. And these inner processes—however much one knows about them, however much as spiritual science itself can know about them—you do become ever and again entangled in them; then, experiencing them in a fairy tale, you see them in their most elemental, primary form. Knowledge of these soul-happenings, when it is present, does not destroy the ability to transform them into fairy tale magic.

It is certainly stimulating for the spiritual researcher to discover in fairy tales just what the human soul has need of when confronting its innermost experiences. The fairy tale mood can never be disturbed, for research that is able to arrive at the wellsprings of the tales in subconscious life will find there something that becomes poorer for the ordinary consciousness when it is described abstractly. The fairy tale itself is the most perfect description of these deepest of soul experiences. Now one can understand why Goethe put into the manifold eloquent picture-images of his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily the rich experiences of life that Schiller expressed in abstract philosophical terms. It was pictures that Goethe wanted to use—even though he was otherwise very much given to thought—in order to express his most profound perception of the subconscious roots of human soul life.

Because fairy tales belong to our innermost feeling and emotional life and to everything connected with it, they are of all forms of literature the most appropriate for children's hearts and minds. It is evident that they are able to combine the richest spiritual wisdom with the simplest manner of expression. One has the feeling that in the magnificent world of art there is no greater art than this one, which traces the path from the unknown, unknowable depths of the soul to the charming and often playful fairy tale pictures.

When what is most difficult to understand is able to be put in the most clearly perceptible form, the result will be great art, intrinsic art, art that belongs at a fundamental level to the human being. Human nature in the child is linked to the life of the whole world in such a primary way that children must have fairy tales as soul-nourishment. The expression of spiritual force can move much more freely when it comes towards a child. It should not be entangled in abstract, theoretical ideas if the child's soul is not to become dry and disturbed, instead of remaining linked to the deep roots of human life.

Therefore there is nothing of greater blessing for a child than to nourish it with everything that brings the roots of human life together with those of cosmic life. A child is still having to work creatively, forming itself, bringing about the growth of its body, unfolding its inner tendencies; it needs the wonderful soul-nourishment it finds in fairy tale pictures, for in them the child's roots are united with the life of the world. Even we adults, given to reason and intelligence, can never be torn away from these roots of existence; we are most connected with them just when we have to be fully involved with the life of the time. Therefore at various parts of our life, if we have a healthy, open-hearted mind, we will happily turn back to fairy tales. Certainly there is not a single age or stage of human life that can take us away from what flows out of a fairy tale, for otherwise we would be giving up the deepest and most important part of our nature; we would be giving up what is incomprehensible for the intellect: a sensing within ourselves, a sense for what is pictured in a simple fairy tale and in the simple, artless, primordial fairy tale mood.

The brothers Grimm, and other collectors like them, devoted long years to bringing the world the somewhat civilized fairy tales they had gathered out of the folk tradition. Although they had no help from spiritual science, they lived wholeheartedly with these tales, convinced that they were giving human beings what belonged intrinsically to human nature itself. When you know this, you will understand that although the age of reason did its best for a hundred years or so to alienate everyone, even children, away from fairy tales, now things are changing. Fairy tale collections like the Grimms' have found their way to every person who is alive to such things; they have become the property and treasure of every child's heart, yes, property of all our hearts. This will grow even stronger when spiritual science is no longer considered just a theory but becomes a mood of soul, one that will lead the soul perceptively towards its spiritual roots. Then spiritual science, moving and spreading outwards, will be able to confirm everything that the genuine fairy tale collectors, fairy tale lovers, fairy tale tellers wanted to do.

To sum up what spiritual science would like to say today in describing the fairy tale, we can take the poetic and charming tribute that a devoted friend of the tales [Ludwig Laistner (1848 – 1896)] liked to use in his lectures, some of which I was able to hear. He was a man who understood how to collect the tales and how to value them.

“The fairy tale is like a good angel, given us at birth to go with us from our home to our earthly path through life, to be our trusted comrade throughout the journey and to give us angelic companionship, so that our life itself can become a truly heart- and soul-enlivened fairy tale!”

In recent weeks we have been considering the human being from all kinds of different points of view, with the aim of getting a better idea of complex human nature and the relationship of the human being to the world.

Let us begin by recalling something very simple, something we know about the elemental aspects: the fact that in the present world cycle, the human being has four effective aspects—physical body, ether body, astral body and I. Let us also consider how these four essentially manifest. We have to say that the I mainly comes to revelation in all expressions of the human will. When we sleep, the will is essentially at rest. In other words: the will principle does not then come to expression through the physical organization. The I is outside the physical body when we sleep. The fact that the will principle does not come to expression reveals to us that the I is then not present in the physical body.

The activity of the astral body essentially can be observed in the whole sphere of feelings. The astral body is also outside the human being in sleep, when the sphere of feelings moves to the dim, dark part of the conscious mind. Consciousness is altogether silent in sleep, and we may thus be in some doubt as to what really comes to revelation through the physical body and the ether body. Let us leave this aside for the moment. The physical body is the most obvious part of the human being. Even someone not able to have imaginative vision can perceive the reality of the ether body in a number of ways. For the moment, however, let us leave aside the physical and the etheric from the point of view we have just taken of the I as the will aspect and the astral as the feeling aspect.

If we follow a person’s life from morning to evening, in the waking state, the I and astral body are at work in the physical and ether bodies with regard to will and feelings. Taking all the inner experiences arising in the waking state, we have first of all the world of sensory perceptions, which are bound to the physical body. We also have the world of thoughts and ideas as the consequence of sensory perception. We know very well that our world of ideas in the waking state has elements of will and feeling in it.

We have often stressed that in the sphere of the soul it is easy to make the abstract distinction between ideas, feelings and will elements. But in reality these three inner activities blend into each other. We can sense the will element in the linking or separating of ideas. We can also perceive that the idea is imbued with feeling. We can feel ourselves in sympathy with one idea and perhaps in antipathy with another. Let us now turn to the I and the astral body as they leave the living body on going to sleep. They leave something behind in the physical world which, while it does not appear at first sight to be the same as plant life, essentially is nevertheless like it, for it has a physical and an ether body just like a plant. In our astral principle we have something which comes to outward revelation in the animal world, and in our I we have something which emerges in the specifically human form, thus also coming to outward revelation. Since, however, I and astral body are outside the physical and ether bodies from when we go to sleep until we wake up again, we cannot say that this human form or animal nature is part of the inner nature of I and astral body. We have to realize that I and astral body do not come to revelation in that case; when I and astral body are on their own, during sleep, they cannot reveal themselves to the physical world in a way perceptible to the senses or to the rational mind.

I and astral body are therefore entirely beyond sensory perception. Now we also know that when we look at something in the plant world, we are not at all inclined to see it the way we see a human being. Looking at a human being we are interested in the moral element, for instance, whether the individual is good or bad. This means that there is no point in thinking in terms of good or evil with reference to the physical and ether body, the principles which remain in the physical world when we have gone to sleep. The whole human moral element is brought back when we wake up and I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies.

Even people who do not have higher vision may take this as a sign that I and astral body have to do with what we call “the moral world order”. Our physical and ether bodies soak this up, as it were, as we wake up. And it is in no way absurd for those who do not have higher vision to say: Essentially, I and astral body belong to a completely different world, for the physical and ether bodies are neutral when it comes to being good or evil, just as plants are. I and astral body take moral responsibility into them.

Even those who do not achieve higher vision through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy, but whose thinking relates to everyday life, will be able to realize that we are dealing with polar opposites here: physical body and ether body inclined to nature-given form, and I and astral body inclined to moral form. To take this further, however, we will need to draw on observations made through higher vision. When we use this to study the I and the astral body in the world to which they belong between going to sleep and waking up, they are seen to have the world of the spirit as their environment just as the natural world is the environment of the physical body. I and astral body bring the inner mortality to human beings from the world of the spirit. As the physical and ether bodies are morally neutral, they cannot possibly draw on them for moral impulses. They do in truth gain the moral impulses from the world in which they are between going to sleep and waking up.

In the science of the spirit, the following is said with regard to this: When human beings leave their physical and ether bodies on going to sleep, they meet, without being aware of it, the spiritual entities of the world, presenting to them all the inner morality they developed when conscious in their physical and ether bodies. They are compelled to let the world of soul and spirit work on the moral elements they have brought. This brings us to a different aspect of something we have often considered in our efforts to build a bridge between etheric and physical worlds on one hand and moral and spiritual worlds on the other.

The I has will quality. It develops its whole structure and constitution between waking up and falling asleep in the physical and ether bodies. When we go to sleep, the I meets the entities of the spiritual world. Here, as people walking around in the physical world, we perceive solid bodies with our organs of touch; we see colours, we use sensory perception. We relate to the physical forces of the world in a specific way The I also enters into a specific relationship to the powers of the world where it lives between going to sleep and waking up. Let me present this in graphic form It can only be schematic, of course. Let us say this is the physical man being in the process of going to sleep (Fig. 40, yellow).

This, which I am drawing here, is the ether body which fills the human being. If I were to draw the human being in the waking state, I’d have to draw in the astral body and the I. I am not going to do so, because I want to characterize the condition of going to sleep. The will element, that is, the I, meets the entities of the spiritual world.

It relates to them in the way we relate to physical entities with our physical body when awake. The relationship between the will-related I and the entities of the spiritual world is, however, much more real than the maya-like relationship which the physical body has with its environment. The relationship in sleep comes to expression above all in the following way, more or less, I can only put these things into images for you): When the I is in touch with the powers of the spiritual entities between going to sleep and waking up, everything evil in our state of soul makes the I waste away; everything good allows the will-related I to develop in freedom.

Showing this in graphic form we arrive at a specific form of the spiritual, will-related I form as it leaves the body (remember, these are only images). With regard to the human being of limbs, the I is quite intensely inside the human being even during sleep. Let me show it like this: These furrowed lines (light-coloured) have evolved from counter activities of the spiritual entities, their form depending entirely on the moral constitution. We may indeed say that the 1 assumes a spiritual form based on its moral constitution as it enters the world of the spirit.

When we go to sleep, the astral body also goes into the world outside us which is a world of soul quality. The will-related I meets the entities of the spiritual world, the feeling-related astral body enters into the soul sphere outside us.

The constitution of our will, with reference to good and evil, also has elements, or powers, of feeling in it. We merely have to recall the different feeling mood we have after doing a good deed compared to after doing something bad. 1 need only mention the whole sphere of self-reproach and inner satisfaction and you can see how our moral constitution is imbued with feeling. The feeling element as a whole enters the soul sphere when we fall asleep, and this enters into a relationship with the soul world outside. When we are awake we relate to the physical world around us through our ideas and in doing so develop the inner life of feelings—though the life of feeling merely connects with the life of ideas inside us. When we are asleep, our feeling-related astral principle makes direct contact with the astral world.

It is not given form, however. The will-related I is given form (I have shown this by drawing furrowed lines). Interaction between the astral body and the soul environment results in something I cannot draw as furrowing. I have to call it colouring, imbuing the astral body. To draw it I would, according to whether we are full of self-reproach or inner satisfaction, feelings of sympathy and antipathy, show the astral coloured by something with schematically may be shown as a particular colour (Fig. 41, reddish, blue).

Through the I, therefore, our higher nature is given form, and the astral is coloured through and through. This is of course a schematic way of putting it. It is perfectly justifiable to express these processes in colour images, but it has to be said that only part of the process can be expressed in this way. Instead of colouring the image I might just as well have all kinds of musical instruments at hand, for instance, and give expression to the above in combinations of sounds. One might even bring in qualities of taste. All this whirls and swirls together in the astral body when it is outside the physical body between going to sleep and waking up.

The situation is such, however, that the direction of the effective powers which bring about everything I have drawn, really derive, seen in schematic form, from the human being of limbs and metabolism. The spiritual entities and the soul world giving form and colour are working from below upwards, as it were.

If we try to discover the true nature of that which is given form and colour outside the human being between going to sleep and waking up, we finally arrive at the following. Between waking up and going to sleep the human form is complete, with I, astral body, ether body and physical body forming an interrelated whole. This goes hand in hand with a specific intensity of conscious awareness which is intellectual and has qualities of feeling and will. Compared to it, the element which is outside during sleep has an infantile quality. We think of a child’s dimmed-down state of consciousness, something we can only come close to when our consciousness is filled with dreams. Now imagine the child’s dimmed-down consciousness becoming even less developed—this would be closer to the nature of what is outside us during sleep. We might say: The element which is outside the human being during sleep is more infantile than the mind and spirit of a child.

What is the real nature of the element of human soul and spirit which lives outside during sleep? In the light of spiritual science, the determining factor is characteristically seen to come from the human being of limbs and metabolism. Studying what can be observed through higher vision one has the feeling—which gradually grows into the definite realization—that by taking this whole aspect here to be a photographic negative and visualizing the positive, we actually get the structure of the human brain. The scale is not the same, but if you see it as a negative and visualize the positive you get the human brain.

Think back to the various aspects I have presented. I have said that the structure of the human head in one particular life inwardly, in the structure of its powers, represents the individual from the previous life on earth, minus the head. What you are today contains the powers your head will have in your next life on earth. We see the same thing in what a human being puts into the outside world between going to sleep and waking up, except that it is infantile, childlike in form and, of course, converted into a negative.

Between going to sleep and waking up human beings in fact put an image into the world of what will incarnate into a physical form in their next life on earth. This is extraordinarily significant. If we now recall that it is the moral constitution of the soul which determines this form and coloration (Fig. 41), we must consider the powers inherent in the human head in the next life on earth to be the embodiment of the moral constitution of the soul in the present life. Since the powers of the human being come to expression in our ability to think and form ideas, this ability will therefore be the outcome of our moral constitution of soul in the present life. All of this exists as an image in what human beings put into the outside world on going to sleep.

In the light of the science of the spirit it would thus be fair to say: During the night, when we are asleep, we put a quite specific question to another world, the world of the spirit. We do not do this consciously but with a part of us that moves out of the physical and ether bodies at that time. The question we put is: How does my moral constitution of soul appear to the entities in the world of the spirit?

And we are given an answer which consists in the shaping of the furrows and the colouring we are given, both in accord with our moral constitution of soul. Every morning we enter into our physical and etheric bodies on waking up with an answer gained in the world of soul and spirit. Going to sleep, we always unconsciously ask a question; waking up, the answer is given at the unconscious level from the world of the spirit. At that level, we are all the time in dialogue with the world of the spirit, gathering there the answers which tell us the true state of our inner nature.

This allows you to see something which otherwise is always extraordinarily abstract. You see, when we speak of our conscience, this is something very real to us; yet when we are asked to speak of the specific nature of our conscience we immediately become rather vague. With reference to our moral impulses, conscience is something of which we have a real inner experience. Yet if we use the methods of ordinary science to reflect on conscience, we fall into chaos and are unable to arrive at anything definite. Here you are given something definite, which is, that your moral constitution of soul wins a continuous response from the world of the spirit. You bring the forms developed by the world of the spirit into your physical and etheric reality, and with this you bring the voice of conscience to it. In waking life, the answer given in form and colour is transformed into the voice of conscience. In fact we depend on the sleep state for everything we have by way of inner moral attitude.

Many examples have been given of the greater wisdom inherent in the instinctive perception of earlier times and the instinctive perception, which are not intellectual; it is greater than our modern science, though it takes the form of images. The moral principles of instinctive perception contain much of what comes back to us again through the true science of the spirit, though it is now clearer, more transparent and defined. One of the principles which is part of popular belief is that if someone has offended you, do not take your inner reaction to this through sleep but if at all possible settle the matter before you go to sleep. Do not take your anger through sleep, therefore, but try to calm it before you go to sleep.

When you know that going to sleep means you are putting a question to the world of the spirit and that waking up is the answer to your question, you will be able to say to yourself: The answer you receive from the world of the spirit and take into your physical body as you wake up will be different if you moderated your anger the night before, or reduced the offence you felt, than if you take the feelings of offence into sleep and put your question out of injured feelings or in such anger that the fire of your anger fills the whole question. If you take an angry mood into the world of the spirit it is as if a stream of volcanic fire were to pour into that world. The soul world outside then has to colour this stream of volcanic fire (Fig. 41, reddish). This is very different from the situation where you have let your anger go down before going to sleep.

The effects of much of what I have said here can be seen not only in the human heart and mind but also in the way physical life and the life of the internal organs, is tuned. The causes of many diseases lie in the questions we receive to the answers we unconsciously put to the spiritual world as we go to sleep. In the waking state, our physical and etheric organs have to deal fully with everything the will-related I and the feeling-related astral body bring with them from the world of the spirit as we wake up.

It is quite wrong to think we have lots of experiences when awake but none in our sleep. When awake we experience processes that mostly take place between ourselves and the physical outside world. Satisfaction feit about these processes accompanies our clear perception of our relationship to the world rather like an inner dream in heart and mind—you will remember that the feeling element only has dream-level intensity of consciousness. When we are between going to sleep and waking up, however, considerable inner activity goes an in the I and astral body: The will-related I is given form, the feeling-imbued astral body is imbued with the powers of the outside world of soul and spirit. These real, factual processes penetrate and stream through the physical and ether bodies, and the way we behave in the physical world is determined by this. We do more for our inner life during sleep than we do in our waking hours. 011 the other hand, what we do when asleep depends an those waking hours. I'd say that the whole significance of sleep essentially lies not only in physical experience but in the moral structure of our inner nature.

I have shown on a number of occasions that superficial ideas about the way in which the human physical and ether bodies relate to the process of going to sleep are wrong. It is usually said that human beings grow tired because they use their limbs, because they work, and they need to sleep to make up for this. Merely to remember that we do not always go to sleep because we are tired will put us on the right track. Think of the well-rested retired gentleman who may go to a lecture, for instance, because it is the done thing; he’ll usually be fast asleep after the first five minutes, which is hardly due to his being tired.

Considering the superficial experiences to be gained in this field, we come to realize that people generally confuse cause and effect in this instance. We are in fact tired because we want to go to sleep. The impulse to go to sleep is a much more inward one than the physical tiredness which is its counterpart. When the outside world offers nothing of interest, the longing arises to withdraw from it. Soul and spirit then leave the living physical body, which grows tired. We grow tired because we want to go to sleep, not the other way round. Anyone can see this, if they have the will to do so. It is of course extraordinarily difficult to accept the truth of things that are so closely bound up with people’s self-satisfied life interest. But if we are prepared to accept truth, we will reach the point where we do not merely see going to sleep as a physical and physiological process, but consider it in relation to the whole cosmos which, as I have shown from many different points of view, also contains the moral impulses as real impulses, not just mere words. The alternation between sleeping and waking thus shows us how a bridge can be built between the physical and the moral elements in our world order.

Du Bois-Reymond,⁴⁰ the physiologist who gave that famous lecture on the limits of natural science, once said: “It is utterly beyond us to grasp the human being as he is in waking life.” Well, we know what to think of such a statement. Du Bois-Reymond believes, however, that it is possible for us to grasp the sleeping human being. According to him, the laws and relationship of the physical world outside, which we are able to grasp, also pertain to the sleeping human being, only in a more complex fashion. We know this to be incorrect, but let us merely consider the statement, which is, that we can have scientific understanding of the sleeping human being, but not of the waking human being.

So here a scientist is admitting that we cannot use the tools of science to discover what pervades the whole human being in the waking sate, and that the sleeping individual as a physical entity looks very different from an individual who is awake even in the eyes of scientists.

Scientists know nothing, of course, of the will-related I and feeling-related astral body which leave the human being for the non-physical world. But this “nothing”, what is it in the light of our present study? It is something which belongs to the moral world order. The activity of the moral principle is a real world which begins at the very point where people taking the scientific approach cease their observations. After waking up, the real effects of the moral principle show themselves only in the inner constitution of the human being. To enter into the sphere where moral reality is to be found we must therefore consider the world in which human beings live between waking up and going to sleep. It is not surprising, therefore, that people who take the scientific view and do not enter into this world only know a real world which does not contain the moral impulses and therefore relegate moral impulses to the realm of pure belief.

Such belief, however, becomes insight as real as that achieved by the followers of the scientific approach once we turn our attention to the other sphere. Our discussion will, of course, have to be based on completely different premises if we want to consider this sphere of spirit and soul imbued with moral principles.

If my drawing represented something from the physical world, I would have to base myself on the physical. My drawing would be an image of this, and we would progress from external reality to something which is merely image. We have to take the opposite route if we want to represent the non-physical. We have to experience it inwardly and then go outside and represent inward experience in an image. This kind of inward experience is extremely mobile and I should really show this colouring as glittering and gleaming, shifting and changing, growing luminous and fading away again, which is exactly what the spiritual scientist observes when considering the human being as a whole.

If one gains a vision of the astral body and I during sleep—I am trying to be extremely accurate here—the form given to the I and the colouring given to the astral body is bright and distinct. When I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies, this bright, glittering and gleaming principle grows dark and dull. Outside the body the I aspect has definite contours; inside the body it grows indefinite. You get quite a specific feeling when you watch the I and astral body becoming submerged in the physical and ether bodies on waking. To use abstract words to describe this, means expressing oneself rather clumsily as a rule. It is however possible to define it relatively clearly. Observing the process you have a feeling which is rather like being aware of the coming of autumn and winter and letting this influence your soul. To consider the waking-up process in terms of the whole human being is to enter into a mood like that experienced with the coming of winter. Going to sleep, with the spirit and soul principles going outside the human being, you experience an inner mood similar to the one experienced with the coming of spring and summer. It is indeed the case that you enter into something very special here.

Dear friends, for several weeks I have tried to show how by taking the approach of spiritual science we come to see the human in relationship to the whole cosmos. I have shown you the human form in its relationship to the world of the fixed stars, and the levels of human life in relation to the world of the planets. Considering the human being in the light of spiritual science, we are always taken outside the human being. Today we have considered the alternating states of waking and sleeping; entering into them with inner feeling, we are again taken outside the human being, this time not into the world of the stars but into the world of time. So we said to ourselves: We understand the waking-up process if we understand the coming of autumn and winter; we understand the process of going to sleep if we understand the coming of spring and summer. From the progress of time in the human being we are taken into the progress of time in the cosmos, into the changing seasons. The human being is seen to be an image also of what happens in time. In the preceding weeks we endeavoured to see the human being as an image of the macrocosm more in terms of space.

We thus relate the human being to the world, and understand him in terms of the world. And then the moral world order also becomes reality for us and not a world of empty words. If we enter into everything we are able to feel in considering our relationship to the world, religious impulses enter into our ethical and moral world. The ethical will then comes to express the divine will which reigns in the human being, and the ethical and moral sphere is lifted up into the ethical and religious sphere. This is how anthroposophy as science of the spirit seeks to find the way to the ethical and religious. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 40. Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), German physiologist born in Berlin of French parentage, professor of physics at Berlin. The lecture referred to was published in Leipzig in 1916.

This winter we have given a whole series of talks on spiritual science with the specific purpose of coming more closely in touch with the whole nature of man's being. We have looked at the great riddle of man from as many aspects as possible. Today we will make it our task to speak of something that is absolutely a part of everyday life. And perhaps, for the very reason that we start from something really commonplace, we shall see that life's riddles really encounter us on all sides, and that we ought to take hold of them, so that in understanding them we see into the depths of the world. For the things of the spirit, and altogether that which is greatest, is not to be sought in unknown distances, for it reveals itself in the most ordinary things of life. In the smallest most insignificant things of life we can find the greatest wisdom, if we can only understand this. Therefore let us include in this cycle of lectures this winter a study of the everyday theme of laughing and weeping from the spiritual scientific point of view.

Laughing and weeping are certainly very common things in human life. But only spiritual science can bring a deeper understanding of these phenomena, because spiritual science is the only thing that can penetrate into the deepest parts of man's being where he is distinctly different from the other kingdoms with whom he shares this globe. By virtue of the fact that man has acquired on this globe the greatest and most powerful share of divinity, he towers above his fellow creatures. Therefore only a knowledge and understanding that reaches the spirit will really fathom man's real nature. Laughing and weeping deserve to be properly observed and appreciated, for they alone can remove the preconception that would rank man's nature too close to that of animals. The way of thinking that would so dearly like to reduce man as near as possible to animal level, emphasises as strongly as it can that a high level of intelligence is to be found in the various accomplishments of animals, an intelligence often far superior to that of man. But this does not particularly surprise the spiritual scientist, for he knows that when the animal does something intelligent it does not arise out of an individual element in the animal but out of the group soul. It is very difficult, of course, to make the concept of the group soul convincing for external observation, even though it is not absolutely impossible. But one thing should be noticed, for it is accessible to any kind of external observation if it is extensive enough: the animal, neither weeps nor laughs. Certainly there will be people who maintain that animals also laugh and weep. But you cannot help such people if they do not want to know what laughing and weeping really imply, and therefore ascribe it to animals as well. A person who really observes the soul knows that the animal cannot weep but at the most howl, nor can it laugh but only grin. We must be alive to the difference between howling and weeping, grinning and laughing. We must go back to some very significant events if we want to throw light on the real nature of laughing and weeping.

From lectures given in various places, including Berlin, and particularly the one about the nature of the temperaments, you will remember that there are two streams in human life. One stream includes all the human capacities and characteristics we inherit from our parents and other ancestors, and which can be passed on to our descendants, and the other stream consists of the qualities and characteristics we have by virtue of being born an individuality. This stream takes on the inherited characteristics like a sheath, its own qualities and characteristics originating from past lives in previous incarnations.

Man is essentially a twofold being: one part of his nature he inherits from his forefathers, the other part he brings with him from earlier incarnations. Thus we differentiate between the actual kernel of man's being which passes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation, and the sheaths surrounding it, comprising the inherited characteristics. Now it is true that the actual individual kernel of a man's being, that passes from incarnation to incarnation, is already united with his physical bodily nature before birth, so you should not imagine that when a man is born it is possible under normal conditions for his individuality to be exchanged. The individuality is already united with the human body before birth.

But at what moment this kernel of individuality can start its formative work on man is a different matter. The individual kernel is already in the child, as we said, when the child is born. But before birth as such it cannot bring to effect the capacities it has acquired in past lives. It must wait until after birth. So we can say that before birth there are active in man the causes of all those characteristics and qualities we can inherit from parents and ancestors. Although the kernel of man's being is there, as we said, it cannot take control until the child has come into the world.

When the child has entered the world this kernel of individuality begins to transform man's organism, assuming that circumstances are normal, of course, as it is different in exceptional cases. It changes the brain and the other organs so that they may become its instruments. Thus it is chiefly the inherited qualities that are visible in the child at birth, and little by little the individual qualities work their way into the general organism. If we wanted to speak of the individuality's work on the organism before birth, that is quite another chapter. We can for instance also say that the individuality is actively engaged in choosing his parents. But this, too, is basically done from without. All the work that is done before birth by the individuality takes place from without, for example through the mother. But the actual work of the individuality on the organism itself does not begin until the child has come into the world. And because this is so, the really human part can only start, little by little, to come to expression in the human being after birth.

To start with, therefore, the child has certain qualities in common with animal nature, and these are just those qualities that find their expression in today's subject, laughing and weeping. In the first weeks after birth the child really cannot either laugh or weep in the proper sense of the words. As a rule it is forty days after birth when the child cries its first tears and also smiles, because that is the moment when the kernel from previous lives first enters the body and works on it to make it a vehicle of expression. It is just this which gives man his superiority over the animal, that in the case of animals we cannot say that an individual soul passes from incarnation to incarnation. The basis of animal nature is the group soul, and we cannot say that what is individual in the animal is reincarnated. It returns to the group soul and becomes something that only lives on in the animal group soul. It is only in man that the fruits of his efforts in one incarnation survive and, after he has gone through Devachan, pass into a new incarnation. In this new incarnation it gradually transforms the organism, so that it becomes not only the expression of the characteristics of his physical ancestors but also of his individual abilities, talents, and so on.

Now it is just the activity of the ego in the organism that calls forth laughing and weeping in a being such as man. Laughing and weeping are only possible in a being that has his ego within his own organism and whose ego is not a group ego as it is with the animals. For laughing and weeping are nothing less than a delicate, intimate expression of the ego-hood within the bodily nature. What happens when a person weeps? Weeping can only come about when the ego feels weak in relation to what faces it in the environment. If the ego is not in the organism, that is, if it is not individual, the feeling of weakness in relation to the outer world cannot occur. Being in possession of ego-hood, man feels a certain disharmony in his relationship to the environment. And this feeling of disharmony is expressed in the desire to defend himself and restore the balance. How does he restore the balance? He does so in that his ego contracts the astral body. In the case of sorrow that leads to weeping, we can say that the ego feels itself to be in a certain disharmony with the environment, and it tries to restore the balance by contracting the astral body within itself, squeezing together its forces, as it were. That is the spiritual process underlying weeping. Take weeping as an expression of sorrow, for example. You would have to examine sorrow carefully in every single case, if you wanted to see what was causing it. For example, sorrow can be the expression of being forsaken by something you previously had. There would be a harmonious relationship of the ego to the environment if what we have lost were still there. Disharmony occurs when we have lost something and the ego feels forsaken. So the ego contracts the forces of its astral body, compresses it as it were, to defend itself against being forsaken. This is the expression of sorrow leading to tears, that the ego, the fourth member of man's being, contracts the forces of the astral body, the third member.

What is laughter? Laughter is something that is based on the opposite process. The ego tries as it were to loosen the astral body, to expand and stretch it. Whilst weeping is brought about by contraction, laughing is produced through the relaxing and expanding of the astral body. That is the spiritual state of affairs. Every time someone weeps, the clairvoyant consciousness can confirm that the ego is contracting the astral body. Every time someone laughs, the ego is expanding and making a bulge in the astral body. Only because the ego is active within man's being and not working as a group ego from outside can laughing and weeping arise. Now because the ego only gradually begins to be active in the child, and at birth it is not yet actually active, and has as it were not yet taken hold of the strings which direct the organism from within, the child can neither laugh nor weep in its earliest days but only learns to do so to the extent that the ego becomes master of the inner strings that are, in the first place, active in the astral body. And because everything spiritual in man finds expression in the body, and the body is the physiognomy of the spirit—condensed spirit—these qualities we have been describing are expressed in bodily processes. And we can learn to understand these bodily processes from the spiritual point of view if we become clear about the following:

The animal has a group soul, or we could say a group ego. Its form is imprinted upon it by this group ego. Then why has the animal such a definite form, a form that is complete in itself? This is because this form is imprinted upon it out of the astral world, and essentially it has to keep it. Man has a form, which, as we have stressed many a time, contains as it were all the other animal forms within it as a harmonious whole. But this harmonious human form, the human physical body, has to be more mobile within itself than an animal body. It must not have such a rigid form as an animal body. We can see that this is so in man's changing facial expressions. Look at the fundamentally immobile face of the animal, how rigid it is, and compare that with the mobile human form, with its change of gesture, physiognomy, and so on. You will admit that within certain limits, of course, man has a certain mobility, and that in a way it is left to him to imprint his own form on himself because his ego dwells within him. Nobody is likely to say that a dog or a parrot has as individual an expression of intelligence on its face as a human being, unless he were just making comparisons. Speaking of them in general it could certainly be so, but not individually, because with dogs, parrots, lions or elephants the general character predominates.

With man we find his individual character written in his face.

And we can see the way his particular individual soul forms itself more and more in his physiognomy, especially in its mobile parts. Man still has this mobility because man can give himself his own form from within. It is this fact of being able to work creatively on himself that raises man above the other kingdoms.

As soon as man changes the general balance of forces in his astral body from out of his ego this also appears physically in the expression of his face. The normal facial expression and muscular tension that a man has all day is bound to change when the ego makes a change in the forces of the astral body. When, instead of holding the astral body in its normal tension, the ego lets it go slack and expands it, it will work with less force on the etheric and physical bodies, resulting in certain muscles changing their position. So when in the case of a certain display of feeling the ego makes the astral body slack, certain muscles are bound to have a different tension from normal. Laughter, therefore, is nothing else than the physical or physiognomical expression of that slackening of the astral body that the ego brings about. It is the astral body, from within, under the ego's influence, that brings man's muscles into those positions that give him his normal expression. When the astral body relaxes its tension the muscles expand and laughter occurs. Laughter is a direct expression of the ego's inner work on the astral body. When the astral body is compressed by the ego in the grip of sorrow, this compression continues into the body, resulting in the secretion of tears which in a certain respect is like a flow of blood brought about by the compression of the astral body. This is what these processes really are. And that is why only a being that is capable of taking an individual ego into himself and working from out of it on himself can laugh and weep. The individuality of the ego begins at the point where the person is capable of tensing or relaxing the forces of the astral body from within.

Every time we see someone smiling or weeping we are confronting the proof of man's superiority over the animals. For in the astral body of the animal the ego works from outside. Therefore all the conditions of tension in the animal's astral body can only be produced from outside, and the inner quality of such an existence cannot express itself in an external form like laughter and weeping.

Now we shall see much more in the phenomena of laughing and weeping if we observe the breathing process when people laugh or cry. This enables us to see deeply into what is happening. If you watch the breathing of someone who is weeping, you will notice that it consists essentially of a long out-breath and a short in-breath. It is the opposite with laughing: a short out-breath and a long in-breath. Thus the breathing process changes when the human being is under the influence of the phenomena we have been describing. And you only need a little imagination to find the reasons why this must be so.

In the phenomena of weeping the astral body is compressed by the ego. This is like a squeezing out of the breath: a long out-breath. In the phenomenon of laughing there is a slackening of the astral body. That is just as though you were to pump the air out of a certain space, rarefy the air, and the air whistles in. It is like this with the long in-breath when you laugh. Here, so to say, in the change in the breathing process we see the ego at work within the astral body. That which is outside in the case of the animal, the group ego, can actually be glimpsed at work in man, for this particular activity is even accompanied by a change of breathing. Therefore let us show the universal significance of this phenomenon.

Animals have a breathing process that is so to speak strictly governed from outside and is not subject to the inner individual ego in the way it has been described today. That which sustains the breathing process and actually regulates it was called in the occult teaching of the Old Testament ‘Nephesh’. This is really what we call the ‘animal soul’. The group ego of the animal is the nephesh. And in the Bible it is stated quite correctly: And God breathed into man the nephesh—the animal soul—and man became a living soul. This is often wrongly understood, of course, because people cannot read such profound writings today, they are too biased. For instance when it says: And God breathed nephesh, the animal soul, into man, it does not mean He created it at that moment, for it already existed. It does not say that it was not previously in existence. It was there, outside. And what God did was to take what had previously been in existence outside as group soul and put it into man's inner being. The essential thing is to understand the reality of an expression like this. One can ask what came about through the fact that the nephesh was put into man? It made it possible for man to rise above the animals and to develop his ego with inner activity, so that he can laugh and cry and experience joy and pain in such a way that they work creatively in him.

And that brings us to the significant effect that pain and joy have in life. If man did not have his ego within him he could not experience pain and joy inwardly and these would have to pass him by meaninglessly. However, as he has his ego within him and can work from within on his astral body and consequently on his whole bodily nature, pain and joy become forces that can work creatively in him. All the joy and pain we experience in one incarnation become part of us, to carry over into the next incarnation; they work creatively in our being. Thus you could say that pain and joy became creative world forces at the same time as man learnt to weep and laugh, that is, at the same time as man's ego was put into his inner being. Weeping and laughter are everyday occurrences, but we do not understand them unless we know what is actually happening in the spiritual part of man, what actually goes on between the ego and the astral body when a man laughs or cries.

Now all that forms man is in continuous development. That man has the ability to laugh or cry is due to the fact that he can work on his astral body from out of his ego. This is certainly correct. But on the other hand man's physical body and also his etheric body were already predestined to have an ego working within them when man entered his first earthly incarnation. Man was capable of it. If we could squeeze an individual ego into a horse, it would feel highly uncomfortable in there, because it would not be able to do a thing; it could find no outlet for the individual work of the ego. Imagine an individual ego in a horse. The individual ego would want to work on the astral body of the horse by compressing or expanding it, and so on. But if an astral body is joined to a physical and etheric body that cannot adapt themselves to the forms of the astral body, then the physical and etheric bodies create a tremendous hindrance. It would be like trying to fight a wall. The ego inside the being of the horse would want to compress the astral body but the physical and etheric bodies would not follow suit, and this would drive the horse mad. Man had to be predestined for such an activity. For that to be so he had right at the beginning to receive the kind of physical body that could really become an instrument for an ego and could gradually be mastered by the ego. Therefore the following can also occur: The physical and the etheric body can be mobile within themselves, proper vehicles of the ego, so to speak, but the ego can be very undeveloped and not yet exercise proper mastery over the physical and etheric body. We can see this in the fact that the physical and etheric bodies act as sheaths for the ego but not so that they are a complete expression of the ego. This is the case with the kind of people who laugh and cry involuntarily, giggle on every occasion and have no control over the laughter muscles. This shows that they have a higher human nature in their physical and etheric bodies but have at the same time not yet brought their humanity under the control of the ego. This is why giggling makes such an unpleasant impression. It shows that man is at a higher level with regard to that which he can do nothing about than he is with regard to that which he can already do something about. It always makes such an unpleasant impression when there is a being who does not prove to be at the level to which external conditions have brought him. Thus laughing and weeping are in a certain respect absolutely the expression of the ego nature of man, because they can only arise through the fact that the ego dwells in the being of man. Weeping can be an expression of the most terrible egoism, for in a certain way weeping is only too often a kind of wallowing in sensual pleasure. The person who feels forsaken compresses his astral body with his ego. He tries to make himself inwardly strong because he feels outwardly weak. And he feels this inner strength through being able to do something, namely shedding tears. A certain feeling of satisfaction—whether it is admitted or not—is always connected with the shedding of tears. Just as in different circumstances a kind of satisfaction is obtained from smashing a chair, tears are often shed for no further reason than the sensual pleasure of inner activity; pleasure wearing the mask of tears, even if the person is not conscious of it.

Laughter can be seen to be a kind of expression of ego nature because if you really enquire into it you will find that laughter can always be attributed to the fact that the person feels superior to the people and happenings around him. Why does a person laugh? Someone invariably laughs when he fancies himself to be above what he sees. You can always find this statement verified. Whether you are laughing at yourself or at someone else your ego is always feeling superior to something. And out of this feeling of superiority it expands the forces of its astral body, broadens and puffs them up. Strictly speaking this is what is really at the root of laughter. And this is why laughter can be such a healthy thing. And this pluming oneself should not be condemned in the abstract as egoistic, for laughter can be very healthy when it strengthens man's feeling of selfhood, especially if it is warranted and leads him beyond himself. If you see something in your surroundings or in yourself or others that is absurd, a feeling of being above such absurdity is sparked off and makes you laugh. It is bound to happen that man feels superior to something or other in the environment, and the ego brings this to expression by expanding the astral body.

If in the breathing process you understand what we tried to explain with the statement: And God breathed nephesh into man, and man became a living soul, you will also sense the connection this has with laughing and weeping, for you know that whilst laughing and weeping even man's breathing process itself changes. By means of this example we have shown that really the most everyday things can be understood only when we take spirit as the starting point. We can understand laughing and weeping only when we understand the connection between the four members of man's being. In the days when people still to some degree possessed clairvoyant traditions and had at the same time the ability to portray the gods with real imagination, they portrayed them as happy beings, whose chief quality was a kind of happy laughter. And not for nothing did people ascribe howling and gnashing of teeth to those regions of world existence in which primarily something resembling exaggerated egoism holds sway. Why was this? It was because laughter on the one hand signifies a raising of oneself, a setting up of the ego above its environment; that is, the victory of the higher over the lower. Whereas weeping signifies a knuckling under, a withdrawal from what is outside, a becoming smaller, the ego feeling forsaken, a withdrawal into itself. Sadness in life is so moving, because we know that it will and must be overcome, but how very different, hopeless and not at all moving is the appearance of sorrow and tears in that world where they can no longer be overcome. There they appear as the expression of damnation, of being cast into darkness.

We must pay good attention to these feelings that can come over us when we make a broad survey of what comes to expression in man as the work of the ego upon itself, and follow them up in their subtlest details. Then we shall have understood a great deal of things that meet us in the course of time. We must be conscious of the fact that there is a spiritual world behind the physical, and that what appears in human life as the alternations between laughing and weeping, when we meet them apart from man, appear on the one hand as the happy light of Heaven and on the other hand as the dark, bitter misery of Hell. These two aspects are absolutely there at the root of our world, and we must understand our middle world as deriving its forces from these two realms.

We shall get to know many more things about the being of man. But I would like to say that one of the deepest chapters on the being of man is that of laughing and weeping, despite the fact that laughing and weeping are such everyday occurrences. The animal does not laugh or cry because it does not have the drop of divinity within it that man bears in his ego-hood. And we can say that when in the course of his life the human being begins to smile and to weep, this proves to anyone who can read the great script of nature that a divine spark is really living within man, and when a man laughs this spark of God is active in him seeking to raise him above all that is base. For smiling and laughing are elevating. On the other hand when a man weeps it is again the spark of God warning him that his ego could lose itself if it did not strengthen itself inwardly against all feelings of weakness and of being forsaken. It is the God in man admonishing the soul, in laughing and weeping. This accounts for the wrath that comes over anyone who understands life when he sees unnecessary weeping. For unnecessary weeping betrays the fact that instead of living and feeling with the environment, the pleasure of being within ones own ego is too great. But bitter feelings also arise in anyone who understands the world when the elevating of the ego above its surroundings, which otherwise expresses itself in healthy laughter, is found in someone as an end in itself, as indiscriminate laughter, or as malicious criticism. For he realises that if the ego does not draw into itself all it can from its environment, and does not want to live with its environment, but raises its ego nature above it without cause, then this ego nature will not have the necessary depth or necessary upward thrust that we can only acquire by taking from the environment everything we possibly can for the development of the ego. Then the ego will move backwards instead of forwards. The right balance between sorrow and joy makes a tremendous important contribution to human development. When sorrow and joy are not just within a man's own self but have their justification in the environment, and when the ego wants to establish the correct relationship between sorrow and joy and the surrounding world all the time, then sorrow and joy will be real evolutionary factors for man.

Great poets often find such beautiful words for the kind of sorrow and joy that are in no way rooted in arrogance nor in a contraction of the ego but originate out of the relationship between the ego and the environment, where their balance has been disturbed from outside, and which alone explains why a man laughs and weeps. We can understand it because we can see that it is in and through the outer world that the relationship between ego and outer world has been disturbed. That is why man must laugh or weep; whereas if it only lies within man, we cannot understand why he is laughing or crying because then it is always unfounded egoism. That is why it is so moving when Homer says of Andromache, when she is under the twofold grip of concern for her husband and concern for her baby: ‘She could laugh while she cried!’ This is a wonderful way of describing something normal in weeping. She is neither laughing nor weeping on her own account. The right relationship is there with the outside world, when she has to be concerned about her husband on the one hand and on the other about her child. And here we have the true relationship of laughing and weeping, that they balance one another: smiling while crying—crying while laughing. A natural child often expresses itself this way too, for its ego has not become so hardened in itself as later on in adulthood, and it can still cry while it laughs and laugh while it cries. And the one who understands these things can again ascertain the fact that whoever has overcome his ego to the point of no longer seeking the causes of laughter and weeping in himself but finding them in the outer world, can also laugh while he cries and cry while he laughs. Indeed, in what goes on around us every day, we have, if we understand it, the real expression of the spiritual. Laughing and weeping are something which can in the highest sense be called the physiognomy of the divine in man.

Life and form are the two ideas which have to lead us through the labyrinth of the world phenomena. Life perpetually changes into thousand and thousand forms. This life expresses itself in its most manifold shaping. It could not manifest in the world unless it appeared in new forms again and again. Form is the manifestation of life. But everything would disappear in the inflexibility of the form, all life would have to lose itself unless the form were continuously renewed in life unless it became the seed again and again to create new forms out of the old ones. The seed of the plant grows up to the organised form of the plant, and this plant must again become a seed and give existence to a new form. It is in nature everywhere that way, and just it is in the spiritual life of the human being. Also in the spiritual life of the human being and humanity the forms change, and life keeps itself in the most manifold forms. However, life would ossify unless the forms were perpetually renewed, unless new life emerged from old forms.

As the ages change in the course of human history, we see life changing in these epochs into the most manifold forms also in the big history. We have seen in the talk on Theosophy and Darwin in which manifold forms the human cultures and history have expressed themselves. We have seen some of the forms in the ancient Vedic culture of India. We have seen these forms changing in the ancient Persian epoch, then in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian epoch, then in the Graeco-Latin culture and, finally, in the Christian culture up to our time. However, this is just the significant of the mental development of our time that more and more a common life pours forth into forms, and our age may be almost called the age of forms, the age in which the human being is taught in every respect to enjoy life in the form.

We see the dominance of form everywhere. We have Darwin as the most brilliant example. What had Darwin investigated and delivered to humanity in his theory? The origin and metamorphosis of the animal and plant genera in the struggle for existence. This shows that our science is oriented to the outer form. What had just Darwin to say and explained openly? I have shown that he emphasised that plants and animals enjoy life in the most manifold forms that, however, according to his conviction there were primal forms which were animated by a creator of the universe. This is Darwin's own saying. Darwin looked at the development of the forms, of the outer figure, and he himself feels the impossibility to penetrate into the life of these forms. He accepts this life as given; he does not want to explain this life. He does not at all look at it; he rather asks only how life forms.

If we consider life in another field, in the field of art. I want to speak only of a typical phenomenon of our artistic life; however, I want to illuminate it in its most radical appearance just in this regard. What a lot of dust did the catchword naturalism not meant in the bad sense blow up in the seventies and eighties! This catchword naturalism completely corresponds to the character of our time. This naturalism appeared most radically with the French Zola (Emil Z., 1840–1902, writer). How stupendously he describes the human life! But he does not look directly at the human life, but at the forms in which this human life expresses itself. How it expresses itself in mines, in factories, in city quarters where the human being perishes in immorality et etcetera Zola describes all these different configurations of life, and all naturalists describe the same basically. They do not look at life, but only at the forms in which life expresses itself.

Look at our sociologists who should deliver the dates how life has developed and should develop in future. The catchword of the materialistic historical view and of the historical materialism became a talking point. However, how do the sociologists consider the matter? They do not look at the human soul, not at the inside of the human mind; they look at the outer life how it represents itself in our economic life how in this or that area trade and industry blossom, and how the human being must live as a result of this external configuration of life. The sociologists consider life this way. They say: we do not concern ourselves with ethics and the idea of morality! Provide better external living conditions to the human beings, then their morality and way of life progress by themselves. Yes, in the form of Marxism modern sociology has asserted that not the ideal forces are the most principal, but the external forms of the economic life.

All that shows you that we have arrived at a phase of development in which the human beings look preferably at the form of the external existence. If you take the greatest poet of our present, Ibsen, then you just see him looking at this form of existence and almost falling into despair, so to speak. For he is filled with the warmest feeling for the soul-life, for a free life, he despairs of the forms that have come into being. I mean Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian playwright and poet). He shows life in the most different forms, he shows us how living in the forms always causes contradictions, how the souls perish and atrophy under the pressure of the forms of life. It is really symbolic for the oblivion of soul and spirit finishing his poem When We Dead Awaken (1899). It is, as if he had wanted to say: we modern human beings are enclosed so completely in the external form of life which we have mastered so often ... and if we awake, what shows the soul-life in the inflexible forms of society and view of the West? This is the basic trend of Ibsen's dramas which finds expression in his dramatic will, too.

Thus we have thrown some sidelights on the western culture of form. Considering Darwinism we have seen how the form culture is directed to the external mechanical life of nature, and how our soul is clamped in completely measured forms of life and society. We have seen how this was achieved slowly and bit by bit, how our fifth, the Aryan race, went from the spirit of the ancient Vedic culture, which imagined life ensouled as a result of immediate observation, through the Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cultures, then through the Graeco-Latin culture with its view that the whole nature is ensouled. With the Greeks even the philosophers conceive the whole nature ensouled.

Then there came Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. He still finds life in the whole nature, in the whole universe, in the whole big star world. In even later time, life climbed down and is completely entangled in the external form. This is the deepest level. I do not say this disparagingly, because every point of view is necessary. The external form, what develops from any sprout makes the plant beautiful. Our cultural life is externalised in many respects, has attained the most diverse external form. This must be like that. Theosophy has to understand this as an absolute necessity. Least of all the theosophists are allowed to reprove. Just as once the spirit-imbued and life-imbued culture was necessary, the form culture is necessary for our age. A form culture came into being in science, in Darwinism, in naturalism, and in sociology.

In the middle of this consideration we have to hold still and ask ourselves: what must happen in our spiritual-scientific sense when the form has found expression? The form must be renewed; new, embryonic life must come again into the form! We will consider the necessary reversal of the human mind again in the series of talks entitled Basic Concepts of Theosophy.

Someone who considers Zola's contemporary Tolstoy carefully and impartially at first the artist from the point of view which I have just given will already find that with the artist the viewer of the different types of the Russian people, possibly of the soldier type which he described in his War and Peace (1869) and later in Anna Karenina (1879) another keynote prevails than in the naturalism of the West. Everywhere Tolstoy seeks something else. He can describe the soldier, the official, the human being of any social class, the human being within a gender or a race he seeks the soul, the living soul everywhere which expresses itself in them, even if not in the same way. He demonstrates the simple, straight lines of the soul but on the most different levels and in the most different forms of life. What is life in its different forms, what is this life in its diverse variety? This goes like a basic question through Tolstoy's creative work. From here he finds the possibility to understand life also where it cancels out itself apparently where this life changes into death. Death remains the big stumbling block for the materialistic world view. Who accepts the external material world only, how should he understand death, how should he cope with life, finally, because death stands like a gate at the end of this life, fulfilling him with fear and fright? Also as an artist Tolstoy has already advanced beyond this point of view of materialism. Already in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) you can see how artistically the most material is overcome how there in this figure of Ivan an entire harmony is produced in his innermost life. We have an ill human being before ourselves, not his body is ill but his soul.

We hear it and see it in all words which Tolstoy says to us that he is not of the opinion that in the body a soul lives which has nothing to do with the body; but we hear from his words that he finds the expression of the soul in the physical expression that the ill soul sickens the body that the soul flows through the veins of the body. We see from this form of artistic representation how life is found. A peculiar view of death faces us there, not as a theory, not as a dogma, but in the feeling. This idea gives the possibility to understand death not as an end, but as outpouring the personality into the universe, as disappearing in the infinite and as retrieval in the great primal spirit of the world. The problem of death is thereby artistically solved in marvellous way. Death has become fortune in life. The dying human being feels the metamorphosis of one life form to the other.

Leo Tolstoy as an artistic contemporary of the naturalists was the viewfinder of life, the questioner of the riddle of life in its different forms. That is why this riddle of life had also to be in the centre of his soul, of his thinking and feeling in scientific and in religious respect. He attempted to investigate this riddle of life that way; he also sought for life except the form, where he met it. Hence, he has become the prophet of a new epoch which must overcome ours, an epoch which again feels and recognises life in contrast to the configuration of natural sciences. In Tolstoy's whole criticism about the western civilisation we see nothing else than the expression of that spirit which represents a young, fresh, child-like life which wants to pour it into the developing humanity which cannot satisfy itself with a mature, indeed overripe, in the external form expressed civilisation. This is the contrast between Tolstoy and the western civilisation. From this point of view he criticises the social system and the life forms of the West everything in general. This is the point of view of his criticism.

We have seen in Darwinism that the western science has come to understand the forms of life that, however, Darwin said to not be able to understand anything of life which he presupposes as a fact. The whole western civilisation is based on the consideration of form: we look at the external form in the evolution of the minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. Wherever you open any book of the western science, it is the form that has priority. Remember again what we have already thought of: that just the researchers of the West admit that they face the riddle of life and are not able to penetrate it. The words “ignoramus, ignorabimus” sound toward us time and again if science should give information about life. This science knows something how life develops in forms. However, how this life itself behaves about that it knows nothing. It despairs of the task to solve this riddle and says only: ignorabimus. There Tolstoy found the right word, the right principle considering life itself. I would like to read out a crucial passage from which you see how he represents the point of view of life compared with all science of the forms of life:

“The wrong knowledge of our time” (of the West) “supposes that we know what we cannot know, and that we cannot know what we really know. The human being with wrong knowledge believes that he knows everything that appears to him in space and time, and that he does not know what is known to him by his reasonable consciousness.

It seems to such a person that the general welfare and his welfare is the most unexplorable object. His reason, his reasonable consciousness appears to him almost as unexplorable; he appears to himself somewhat more explorable as animal; the animals and plants appear as still more explorable beings, and the most explorable thing is the dead, endlessly distributed matter.

Something similar takes place with the human vision. The human being turns his look always unconsciously upon the most distant objects because their colours and contours appear to him the simplest: upon the sky, horizon, distant fields and forests. These objects appear to him the more certain and simpler, the more distant they are, and on the contrary, the closer the object is, the more manifold are its contours and colours.” – “Does not the same take place with the wrong knowledge of the human being? What is known to him certainly his reasonable consciousness appears to him unexplorable because it is not simple, however, what is inaccessible to him the limitless, everlasting matter seems to him easily explorable because it appears simple from a distance. However, this is just the opposite.”

The western scientist considers the lifeless matter as his reliable starting point. Then he observes how the plants, animals and human beings build themselves up out of the chemical and physical forces; he observes how the lifeless matter moves, conglomerates and finally produces the movement of the brain. But he cannot understand how life comes about: because what he investigates is nothing else than the form of life. Tolstoy says: life is next to us, we are in it, we are life; of course, if we want to understand life observing and investigating its forms, then we never understand it. We only need to see it in ourselves, we only need to live it, and then we have life. People who believe to be unable to understand it do not understand life at all. Here Tolstoy starts with his consideration of life and examines what the human being can conceive as his life, even if the refined, overripe way of thinking cannot understand it along the lines of simple thinking: if you want to understand the form correctly, you have to look into the inside. If you want to investigate the formal laws of nature only, how do you want to distinguish a meaningful life from a meaningless life?

According to the same higher principles the organisms are healthy and the organisms fall ill; exactly according to the same principles of nature the human being falls ill as he is healthy. Tolstoy expresses himself again characteristically in his treatise On Life (1887): “As strong and rapid the movements of the human being may be in the fever delirium, in insanity or death struggle, in drunkenness, even in the burst of passion, we do not accept the human being as living, do not treat him as a living human being and allot the possibility of life to him only. But as weak and immobile a human being may be if we see that his animal personality has submitted to reason, we accept him as living and treat him correspondingly.”

Tolstoy thinks that the outer form gets sense for us unless we study it only externally, but if we try to directly understand what not form is what is mind only, and what is the essential part. We cannot understand the true life if we try only to conceive its form; but we understand the forms if we move from life on the forms.

However, Tolstoy did not understand his problem only in this scientific way; he understood it also from the moral side. How do we come in our human form to this real life, up to the lawfulness of the external form? Tolstoy got this clear in his mind asking himself: how do I and my fellow men satisfy the need of our own well-being? How do I satisfy my immediate personal life? Going out from the configuration of the animal life, the human being has no other question than: how do I satisfy the needs of the external form of life? This is a low view. Those have a somewhat superior view who say: the single person has not to satisfy his needs, but he has to adapt himself to the public welfare to fit into a community. He has not only to provide what satisfies his own external life, but he has to ensure that this form of life is satisfied with all living beings. We should fit into the community and subordinate to the needs of the society. Numerous personalities, numerous ethicists and sociologists regard this as the western ideal of the cultural development: subordination of the needs of the single to the needs of the community. However, this is not the highest goal Tolstoy says , because what else I have in mind than the external form? It refers only to the outer form how one lives in the community how one fits into it. These outer forms change perpetually. If my single personal life is not directly meaningful, why should the other lives be meaningful? If the personal welfare of the single human life form is not an ideal, an ideal of the public welfare cannot originate from the summation of many single forms of life. Not the well-being of the single, not the well-being of all can be the ideal: this only concerns the forms in which life only lives. Where do we recognise life? To whom should we submit, if not to the needs dictated by our low nature, if not to that which the public welfare or humanity dictates?

Life of the most manifold forms is that which longs for well-being and happiness of the single and the community. We want to understand our moral, our innermost ideal not according to external forms, but according to that which results as an ideal from the inside of the soul, from God who lives in it. That is why Tolstoy resorts again to a kind of higher organised Christianity, which he considers as the true Christianity: do not look for the kingdom of God in external gestures, in the forms, but inside. Then you understand your duty if you understand the life of the soul if you can be inspired by the God in yourselves, if you listen to your soul. Do not be wrapped up in the forms, as large and immense they may be! Go back to the original unified life, to the divine life in yourselves. If the human being does not take up the ethical and cultural ideals from without, but allows rising from his soul what rises in his heart what God has lowered in his soul, then he has stopped living only in the form, then he really has a moral character. This is internal morality and inspiration.

From this viewpoint he attempts an entire renewal of all views of life and world in the form of what he calls early Christianity. Christianity has externalised itself according to him, has adapted itself to the different life forms which have come from the culture of the different centuries. He expects a time again, when the form must be penetrated with new internal life when life is seized immediately. Therefore, he does not get tired of pointing in new forms repeatedly to the fact that it is necessary to understand the simplicity of the soul, not the intricate life which always wants to get to know something new. No! The fact that the simplicity of the soul must meet the right thing that first of all the confusing of the external science, of the outer artistic representation, the luxurious of modern life must be connected with the immediately simple that emerges in the soul of everybody no matter in which life form and social system he is: Tolstoy regards this as an ideal. Thus he becomes a strict critic of the various cultural forms of Western Europe; he becomes a strict critic of western science. He states that this science has solidified bit by bit in dogmas like theology, and that the western scientists appear as the real dogmatists imbued with wrong mind. He is hard on these scientists. Above all, he criticises the ideal, which is striven for in these scientific forms, and those who consider our sensuous well-being as the only goal of any striving.

For centuries humanity intended to develop the forms highly and to regard the external possession, the external well-being as the highest. And now we know that we do not have to reprove this, but have to consider it as a necessity , well-being should not be limited only to single social ranks and classes, but everybody should take part in it. Indeed, nothing is to be argued against that, but Tolstoy opposes the form in which this is tried to achieve by the western sociology and the western socialism. What does this socialism say? It takes the transformation of the outer forms of life as starting point. The material culture should induce the human being to get a higher level of living. Then one believes that those who feel better who have a better external livelihood also have a higher morality. All moral endeavours of socialisation are directed to subject the external formation to a revolution.

Tolstoy opposes that. For this is just the result of the cultural development that it developed the most manifold differences of ranks and classes. Do you believe if you develop this form culture highly that you really get to a higher cultural ideal? You have to understand the human being where he gives himself form. You have to improve his soul, to pour divine-moral forces into his soul, and then he reshapes the form from the soul. This is Tolstoy's socialism, and it is his view that a renewal of the moral culture can never arise from any transformation of the western form culture, but that this renewal has to take place from the soul, from the inside.

Hence, he does not become the preacher of a dogmatic ethical ideal, but the furtherer of a perfect transformation of the human soul. He does not say that the human morality increases if the external situation of the human being is improved, but he says: just because you have taken the external form as starting point, your dismal circumstances of life came into being. You are able to overcome this life form again if you reshape the human being from the inside. In sociology we have, just as in the Darwinist scientific consideration, the last branches of the old form culture. On the other hand, we have the incipient stages of a new life culture. As we have the descending line there, we have the ascending one here. As little as the old man, who has got to his determination, to his life form, is able to be renewed completely, as rather from the growing up child the new life form arises from internal stimulation, just as little a new life form can arise from an old cultural nation.

That is why Tolstoy regards the Russian nation, which is not yet taken in with the cultural forms of the west, as that nation within which this future life has to originate. Considering this Slavic people, which still looks at the European cultural ideals in dull indifference today at the European science as well as at the European art , Tolstoy states that in it an undifferentiated spirit lives that has to become the supporter of the future cultural ideal. His criticism is based on the big principle of evolution, on that principle which teaches the change of the forms and the perpetual merging of life.

In the tenth chapter of his book On Life one reads: “And the principle which we know in ourselves as the principle of our life is the same principle according to which also all external phenomena of the world take place, only with the difference that we know this principle in ourselves which we ourselves must carry out however, in the external phenomena as something that takes place without our assistance according to these principles.”

Thus Tolstoy positions himself in the forever developing and changing life. We would be rather bad representatives of spiritual science if we could not understand such a phenomenon correctly; we would be bad spiritual scientists if we wanted to preach ancient truth only. Why do we make the contents of the ancient wisdom our own? Because the ancient wisdom teaches us to understand life in its profoundness because it shows us how in the most manifold figures the one divine appears again and again. A bad representative of spiritual science would be that who would become a dogmatist, who only wanted to preach what contains the ancient wisdom, who would withdraw and would face life cold and distantly, who would be blind and deaf to what happens in the immediate present. The doctrine of wisdom has not taught the ancient wisdom to us, so that we repeat it in words, but live with it and learn to understand what is round us. The development of our own race, which has disintegrated into different forms since the ancient Indian culture up to ours, this development is exactly described and predetermined in that ancient wisdom. There is also spoken of a future development, of a development in the immediate future. One says to us that we stand at the starting point of a new era. Our reason, our intelligence, they attained their configuration as a result of the way through the different fields of existence. The forces of our physical intelligence have attained their biggest triumphs in the form culture of our time. Reason has penetrated the principles of form and masters them to the highest degree; it produced the big and immense progress of technology, the big and immense progress of our life. Now we stand at the starting point of that epoch in which something has to pour out in this reason that must seize and form the human being from within.

Hence, the theosophical movement has chosen its motto and is dedicated to establishing the core, the rudiment of a general human fraternisation. One must not make distinctions of views, classes, religions, gender, and skin colour; one has to look for life in all these forms. Our spiritual ideal is an ideal of love which the human being experiences as the kingdom of God if he becomes aware of his divinity. Theosophy calls the culture of intellectuality manas; it calls buddhi what is filled with the inner being, with love, what does not want to be wise without being filled with love. As our race has got to the manas culture because of its reason, the next will be now that we get to the individuality imbued with love where the human being acts out of the higher, internal, divine nature, and neither is wrapped up in the chaos of the external nature nor in science nor in the social life. If we understand the spiritual ideal this way, we are allowed to say that we understand this ideal correctly and then we are also not allowed to misjudge a person who lives among us who wants to give new life impulses to the human development.

How nice and congruent with our teachings is something that just Tolstoy says concerning the view of the human being in his directness. I would like to read out a passage that is distinctive especially of his moral ideal: “The whole life of these human beings is turned upon the imaginary increase of their personal welfare. They see the personal welfare only in the satisfaction of their needs. They call personal needs all those living conditions upon which they have directed their reason. The conscious needs, nevertheless those upon which their reason is directed always grow as a result of this consciousness ad infinitum. The satisfaction of these growing needs closes up the demands of their true life to them.”

Tolstoy says: however, the personality does not comprise the reasonable consciousness. Personality is a quality of the animal and the human being as an animal. The reasonable consciousness is the quality of the human being only. Not before the human being advances beyond the mere personality if he realises the preponderance of the individuality over the personal if he understands to become impersonal to let the impersonal life prevail in himself, he leaves the culture entangled in the external form and enters a future culture full of life.

Even if that is not the ideal of theosophy and also not the ethical consequence which we theosophists draw, it is a step toward the ideal, because the human being learns to live only unless he looks at the personality but at the eternal and imperishable.

This eternal and imperishable, the buddhi, is the rudiment of wisdom which rests in the soul, it has to replace the civilisation of mere reason. There are many proofs that theosophy is right with this view of the future development of the human being. However, the most important one is that similar forces already make themselves noticeable in life which we have to understand really to fulfil us with their ideals.

This is great with Tolstoy that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his thoughts and to deepen him spiritually that he wants to show him that the ideals are not outside in the material world, but can stream only from the soul.

If we are right theosophists, we recognise the development, then we do not remain blind and deaf towards that which shines to us in the theosophical sense in our present, but we really recognise these forces of which is normally spoken poetically in theosophical writings.

This must be just the typical of a theosophist that he has overcome darkness and error, that he learns to appreciate and recognise life and world.

A theosophist who withdraws, who faces life cold and distantly, would be a bad theosophist even if he knew a lot. Such theosophists who lead us from the sensuous world to a higher one, who are able to behold super-sensible worlds, they should teach us also to be able to observe the super-sensible on the physical plane and not to be carried away with the sensuous.

We investigate the causes which come from the spiritual in order to completely understand the sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensuous if we stop within the sensuous, because the causes of the sensuous life come from the spiritual one.

Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensuous; therefore, it talks of the ancient wisdom. It wants to reshape the human being so that he clairvoyantly beholds the lofty super-sensible secrets of existence, but this should not be purchased with lack of understanding for that which exists immediately around us.

Someone would be a bad clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to that which happens in the sensuous world, to that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in his immediate surroundings and, moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were not able to recognise that of a personality by which in our time the human beings are led to the super-sensible. And what is the use in us becoming clairvoyant and not being able to recognise the next task immediately before us?

A theosophist must not withdraw from life; he has to understand how to apply theosophy directly to life. If theosophy has to lead us to higher worlds, we have to bring the super-sensible knowledge down to our physical plane. We must recognise the causes which are in the spiritual. The theosophist has to stand in life, has to understand the world, in which his contemporaries live, and has to recognise the spiritual causes of the different epochs of evolution.

In the last lecture I spoke to you of the way in which man is subject during his life to that which, from the natural scientific point of view, we are accustomed to call heredity. I spoke further of how man is subject to the influences of the outer world, to adaptation to environment; how everything which is bound up with heredity is connected with the Ahrimanic sphere, while that which, in the widest sense, is comprised in adaptation to the external world is connected with the Luciferic realm. I told you also how in the cosmos, i.e., within the spiritual substance which lies at the foundation of the cosmos care has been taken that the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences should play their part in the right way in human life. We shall add certain things today to what has been said, keeping in mind, at the same time what was explained in the first of these lectures.

We have seen how memory, everything in the nature of memory, fashions man within as regards the soul. In reality, far more than we think we are fashioned as soul-beings by our memories. The way in which our experiences have become memories has really fashioned our souls; we are a result of our memory-life more than we think, and he who can exercise even a little self-observation, so far as to enter into the life of memory will see what a great part the impressions of childhood play throughout the entire earthly life. The manner in which our childhood was spent, which indeed plays no great part in conscious life, the time, for instance, during which we learned to speak and walk, during which we received our first, the inherited teeth, the impressions received during all these periods of development play a great part in the human soul-life throughout the entire life on earth. Many things which rise up inwardly as thoughts which are connected with memories—and everything we grasp in thought that is not caused by external impressions is connected with memories—everything which arises in this way making us inwardly joyful or causing us inner pain (these are generally delicate shades of pleasure and pain which accompany our thoughts when they arise freely) all the life of memory within us is carried out by our astral body when we pass over into the condition of sleep. If now with Imaginative vision we can behold man in sleep as a psychic spiritual being the matter presents itself in the following way. Picture to yourselves during sleep the etheric and physical bodies remaining within the human skin while the astral body is outside (the ego we will consider later). We can then observe the astral body, really consisting in memories. We can also see how these memories which live in the astral body outside of man whirl around in and out of each other. Experiences which lie far asunder in time and in regard to space also are brought together, while some things are left out of certain experiences altogether. In this way the whole memory-life is transformed during sleep. If man dreams it is just because this transformed life of memory appears before his consciousness, and in the constitution of the dream he can inwardly perceive that whirling in and out, inwardly perceive that which, observed from outside can be seen by Imaginative clairvoyance.

But something else presents itself; that which from falling asleep until waking up figures in this way as memories, that which forms the chief content of the human astral soul-life unites during sleep with the forces which lie behind the phenomena of nature. We can therefore say: All that lives as astral body in these memories forms a union with the forces that lie behind the minerals, actually in the inner being of the minerals, in the inner being of the plant forces, and the forces which lie behind the clouds, and so on.

To one who can perceive this truth it is really terrible, I must say, when people say that behind the phenomena of nature there are only material atoms. Not with material atoms do our memories unite during sleep, but with that which really lies behind the phenomena of nature, with the spiritually active forces. It is with these that our memories unite during sleep. Our memories rest in them during sleep.

Thus we can really say: During sleep our soul with its memories dives down into the inner being of nature, and you are saying nothing untrue, nothing unreal if you utter the following: “When I fall asleep I consign my memories to the powers which rule spiritually in the crystal, in plants, in all the phenomena of nature.” You may go for a walk and see by the wayside yellow flowers, blue flowers, green grass and shining promising ears of corn and you can say: “When I pass you by in the daytime I see you from outside, but when I sleep I sink my memories into your spiritual being. You take up what I have transformed during life from experiences into memories. You take up these memories of mine when I go to sleep.” It is perhaps the most beautiful of all feeling for nature to have with the rose-bush not only an external relationship but to be able also to say: “I love the rose-bush especially because the rose-bush has this peculiarity (bear in mind that space plays no part in these things; no matter how far the rose may be removed from us in space we find our way to it in sleep)—the rose-bush has this peculiarity, that it receives the earliest memories of our childhood.” That is the reason why people love roses so much, only they are not aware of it; but they love roses because they are the recipients of the very first memories of childhood.

When we were children other people loved us and often made us smile. We have forgotten it but it forms part of our life of feeling; and the rose-bush absorbs into its own being while we are asleep at night the memories which we have ourselves forgotten. Man is far more united than he realizes with the outer world of nature, that is, with the spirit which rules in the external world. These memories of the first years of childhood are especially remarkable with reference to human sleep, because in reality, during those years and during the years extending to the change of teeth—that means to about the seventh year of life—the soul-element alone is taken up during sleep. As regards human beings it is the case that the spiritual inner part of nature takes into itself of our childhood only the soul part. Other things also of course hold good. The soul-element which we develop during our early childhood (for instance if we were childishly cruel) remains also in us but this is taken up by the thistle. This is said by way of comparison, but nevertheless it actually points to a significant reality. That which is not taken up from the child into the inner part of nature will be immediately evident from what follows.

In the first seven years of life everything has been inherited that is of a bodily nature. The first teeth are entirely inherited; everything of a material nature which we have within us in the first seven years of life is essentially inherited. But after about seven years all the material substance is thrown off; it falls away and is formed anew. Man remains as a form, as a spiritual form, his material part he gradually throws off. After seven or eight years everything that was in his body seven or eight years before has gone. It is a fact that when we have reached the age of nine years our whole human being has been renewed. We then build it in accordance with our external impressions.

As a matter of fact it is extremely important, especially for the child in the first periods of life, that it should be in a position to build its new body—now no longer the inherited body but a body developed out of its inner being—according to good impressions from its environment, and in a healthy adaptation to its environment. Whereas the body which a child has when it comes into the world depends on whether the inherited impulses it has received are good or bad, the later body which it bears from the seventh to fourteenth year depends very much on the impressions it receives from its environment.

Every seven years we build our body anew, but it is our ego that builds it anew. Although the ego is not yet born as regards the outer world in a child of seven years (as you know it is only born later), yet it is working already, for naturally it is bound up with the body, and it is the ego which is building therein. It develops those things of which we have already spoken; it builds up that which appears as the physiognomy, the gestures, the external material revelation of the soul and spirit in man. It is a fact that a human being who has an active interest in the world, who is interested in many things, and because of his active interest in them ponders over them and inwardly digests them, reveals in a material way in the external expression of his countenance and in his gestures what he has been interested in and absorbed. On the face of the human being who has an intensely active interest in the outer world, who inwardly works upon the fruits of this interest in external things one will see in each wrinkle later in life how he formed these himself, and one will be able to read much in his countenance, for the ego is expressed in the gestures and in the physiognomy. A man who goes through the world bored or without interest in the outer world remains throughout his whole life with an unchanged countenance; finer experiences are not imprinted in the physiognomy and gestures. In many a face we may read a whole biography; in many others we cannot read much more than the fact that he was once a child—which is nothing very special.

The fact that man in this way through the changing of his substance every seven or eight years shapes his own outer appearance signifies a great deal. This work of man on his own external appearance, in physiognomy and gesture, is also something which he carries in sleep into the inner being of nature. If one then looks at a man with imaginative clairvoyance and observes the ego outside him as it is during sleep one sees that it really consists in physiognomy and gesture. With those human beings who express much of their inner being in their countenance we find a radiating and shining ego. Now this resulting gesture and physiognomy unites itself also with forces in the inner being of nature. If we have been friendly and kind nature is inclined, as soon as this kindliness has become a facial expression, shown in the countenance, to take this up during our sleep into its own being. Nature takes up our memories into her forces and our gesture-formation into her very essence, into the nature-beings.

Man is so intimately connected with external nature that what he experiences in his inner being as memories is of enormous significance to external nature, as is also the way in which he expresses his inner soul-life in his physiognomy and gestures, for that lives on further in the inner being of nature.

I have often mentioned a saying of Goethe, which was really a criticism of a remark by Haller. Haller said: “Into the inner being of nature no created spirit can enter. Fortunate is the man to whom she reveals even her external husk.” To this, Goethe replied: “You pedant! We are everywhere in the inner being of nature. Nothing is within her, nothing is outside her; that which is within is without, and that which is without is within. Only ask yourself which you are, whether the kernel or the husk.” Goethe says that he heard this remark in the sixties and secretly cursed it; for he felt (naturally he did not then know Spiritual Science) that when one whom he could only regard as a pedant said: “Into the inner being of nature no created spirit can enter,” he knows nothing of the fact that man, simply because he is a being of memories, and a being of physiognomy and gesture is continually entering into the inner being of nature. We are not beings who only stand at the door of nature and knock in vain. Just through that which is our innermost being do we stand in most intimate communion with the inner being of nature.

Because the young child, up to his seventh year, has a body which is entirely inherited, nothing of his ego, of his physiognomy and gesture pass over into the inner being of nature. Only at the change of teeth do we begin to develop our real being. Therefore only after the change of teeth do we gradually become ripe to think about nature. Before that time more important thoughts arise in the child, thoughts which have not much to do with nature, and are so full of charm just for that reason.

The best way to approach a child is to make poetry in its presence, to represent the stars as the eyes of heaven, for example, when things we speak of to the child are as far as possible from external physical reality.

Only from the change of teeth onwards does the child grow in such a way that his thoughts can coincide with the thoughts of nature; fundamentally the whole life from the age of seven to fourteen is such that the child grows in an inward direction, and he then carries his memories outside his soul into nature, as also his gestures and physiognomy, and this then continues throughout his whole life. As regards any relationship with the inner being of nature we, as single human individuals, are only born at the change of teeth. For this reason those beings whom I have designated as elementary spirits, the gnomes and undines, listen so eagerly when man relates something of his child life up to the seventh year, because, as far as these spirits of nature are concerned man is only born at the change of teeth. The change of teeth to them is an extremely interesting phenomenon. Previous to this age man is to the gnomes and undines a being “on the other side,” and it is for them something of an enigma that man appears at this age having already reached a certain perfection! It would be extraordinarily inspiring for pedagogical or educational phantasy if a man, having imbibed spiritual knowledge, could really transpose himself into these dialogues with the nature-spirits, and enter into the soul of the spirits of nature in order to obtain their views concerning what he is able to tell them about children; for in this very way the most beautiful fairy-tales arise. When, in ancient times fairy-tales were so wonderfully apt and rich in content, this is because the poets who composed them could converse with gnomes and undines, could tell them something and not merely hear something from them.

These nature-spirits are often very egoistic, they become silent also if one does not tell them something of that concerning which they are curious. Their favourite stories are about the deeds of babies. In return, one may hear many things from them which can then be woven into the form of fairy-tales.

Thus, for the practical spiritual life that which today appears highly fantastic to us may become extremely important. It is the case that these dialogues with the spirits of nature, on account of the conditions I have mentioned, may be extremely instructive to both sides.

On the other hand, what I have said may in a sense naturally cause anxiety, because while he is asleep man continually creates pictures of his innermost being. Behind the phenomena of nature, behind the flowers of the field, and extending right up into the etheric world there exist reproductions of our memories, both good and useless memories; for the earth is simply teeming with what lives in human souls, and in reality human life is very intimately connected with such things.

We find therefore first of all the spirits of nature, those beings into whom we penetrate with our world of gesture; but we also find the world of the Angels, Archangels and Archai, and grow also into these Beings. We enter into them. We plunge into the deeds of the Angels through our memories. We enter into the living beings of the angelic world through what we have imprinted in ourselves as physiognomy and gesture. This penetration which takes place in sleep is such that we can say: When we pass over livingly into nature the process is that the further we go out in a direct line the more do we come into the regions of the Angels and Archangels and the Archai. We come into the sphere of the third Hierarchy. And when in sleep we dive down with our memories and our gestures as into a flowing sea of weaving beings of Angels, Archangels and Archai, then from one side there comes another stream of spiritual beings, the second Hierarchy, Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. If we wish to express in the outer world that which we have just described, we must say: This stream flows in such a way that the course of the sun by day from east to west marks the way the second Hierarchy crosses the third Hierarchy. The third Hierarchy, the Angels, Archangels and Archai, are as if floating up and down “offering one another the golden buckets.” In this presentation we have the second Hierarchy going with the sun, as it were, from east to west. This is not apparent, because here the Copernican world-conception does not hold good, but this stream actually does go from east to west, following the course of the sun during the day.

Thus we see—i.e., if we have the ability to see—how man during sleep grows into the third Hierarchy; but this third Hierarchy is continually being graciously permeated from one side by the second Hierarchy. Thus this second Hierarchy also makes itself felt in the life of our soul.

I pointed out in the last lecture but one the significance of transposing oneself vividly again into the experiences of one's youth. In this connection you can get a very impressive feeling if you take up the Mystery Plays, and there read, perhaps now with greater understanding than was formerly the case, what is represented there in regard to the appearance of the Youth of Johannes. It is indeed the case that man can vivify his own inner nature and make it intensely perceptible to himself if he goes back actively over his youth. I told you how he might take up old school-books from which he might perhaps have learned something (or perhaps not!). He immerses himself in what he learnt, or did not learn. It makes no difference whether one learned anything or not; the point is that one should immerse oneself intensely in what one formerly went through with it. For in this way one may have personal experiences. For instance, it was of immense significance to me personally, a few years ago, to transpose myself into such a situation belonging to my own youth. I then needed to intensify the forces of spiritual understanding. The following events occurred to me quite accidentally when I was just eleven years of age. I was given a school-book. The first thing that happened to it was that I carelessly upset the ink-pot on it and thereby damaged two pages, so that I could no longer read them. That was an event of many years ago, but I have often lived through this event again, this school-book with the damaged pages, with all that I experienced thereby; for this book had to be replaced by a poor family. It was something dreadful, all that one could experience through this school-book, with its gigantic ink smudges. As I said, it is not a question of having behaved well in connection with the circumstance which one recalls; it is rather a question of having experienced them with intensity. If you attempt this with all inner intensity you will also experience something else. You will experience in a true vision a scene which you have inwardly lived through and evoked in the soul. When night has come and everything is dark around you and you are by yourself you will experience the situation as if spread out in space, which you had previously experienced in time. Suppose, for instance, that you evoke before your soul a scene which you once experienced, let us say, at 11 o'clock. Afterwards you went to a place where you sat with and amongst other human beings. You sat down and other people sat around you. Here you have recalled something which you experienced inwardly. What was then around you externally now meets you entirely as a spatial vision. One only needs to look for such connections and then quite important discoveries can be made. Let us say for instance, that when you are seventeen years of age you had your midday meal in a pension where the guests were continually changing. Call up inwardly in your soul one such scene which you experienced. Recall it vividly. Then in the night you find yourself sitting down at the table. Around you people are sitting, people whom you did not often see, because in this pension they continually came and went. In one face you recognize, “That is something I experienced at that time.” External space is added to the soul-experience, when you make your memories active in this way.

This means in reality that you are living with this stream which flows from east to west; because gradually you feel more and more strongly: There in the spiritual world which you enter in sleep your life does not merely consist in being merged with the spiritual, but in this spiritual there transpires something which was reflected externally at the time you sat around the pension table with these human beings. You have forgotten it long ago but it is still there. You behold, it as you can behold those things which can often be seen inscribed in the Akashic Record. The moment you have this before you, you have identified yourself with this stream flowing from east to west, the stream of the second Hierarchy. In this stream of the second Hierarchy something lives which is outwardly reflected by day.

Now days vary in the course of the whole year. In Spring a day is longer, in Autumn shorter; in summer it is longest, in winter shortest. The day is subject to change throughout the year. That is caused by a stream which flows from west to east, counter to the stream from east to west; and that is the stream of the first Hierarchy, of the Seraphim, the Cherubim and the Thrones. Observe therefore how the day changes in the course of the year. If you pass on from the day to the year then you come in contact with what meets you during sleep as the opposite stream. As a matter of fact it is the case that we go forth in sleep into the spiritual world in a direct line, not in the direction which goes from west to east, nor in the direction which goes from east to west.

If we realize this, then, as I have told you, when we vividly recall some memory we must place spatial winter before our souls.

This is also the case when we become conscious of our will. When we become conscious of our will, that is what enters into our gestures and our physiognomy.

That which I am now saying should have a certain significance especially for eurhythmists, although, naturally there is not any intention in Eurhythmy of bringing to expression what I am now about to say. It is a fact that when a man really fashions his external appearance more and more from out of his inner being, when his ego is expressed more and more in his physiognomy and gestures, he not only receives an impression from the day to pass over from vivid inner experiences of memory to the vision of spatial external things. He experiences over again what he learnt, let us say at the age of seventeen, and sees the people with whom he sat in that pension. He sees them in picture-form, as in the Akashic Record. That is Day experience. But one can also experience the year. This is done by paying attention to the way in which the will works in us, and observing that it is relatively easy to bring the will to expression when we are really warm, whereas it is difficult to let the will stream through the body if we are very cold. Anyone who can experience in this way the relation between the will and the fact of being warm or cold will gradually be able to speak of a winter-will and a summer-will.

We find that the best expression of this will comes from the seasons. Let us observe, for example, the will that carries our thoughts out into the cosmos. They escape, as it were, out of the finger-tips, and we feel that it is easy to develop the will.

If we stand before a tree, something at the top of the tree may give us particular pleasure; and if the will becomes warm in us our thoughts are carried to the top of the tree. Indeed they often go even to the stars, if in summer nights we feel endowed with this warm will.

On the other hand, if the will has cooled within us it is as though all our thoughts were carried in our heads, as if they could not penetrate into the arms or legs; everything goes into the head. The head carries this coldness of the will, and if the coldness does not become so severe as to produce a frosty feeling the head becomes warm through its own inner reaction and then develops thoughts.

Thus we can say: summer-will leads us out into the expanses of the universe. Summer-will, warm will carries our thoughts in all directions. Winter-will carries them into our head. We can thus learn to differentiate our will, and then we shall feel that the will which carries us out everywhere into the cosmos is related to the course of summer; while the will which carries the thoughts into our head we feel to be related to the winter. Through the will we come to experience the year in the same way as we formerly did the day.

There is a possibility of feeling as a reality the words which I am now going to write on the board. If a man experiences winter in his human will he can perceive it in such a way that he says:—

O, Cosmic Pictures!
Ye float down to me
From cosmic distances,
Ye strive to reach me,
Ye penetrate into
The thinking forces
Of my head.

These words are not a mere abstraction; for if a man feels his own will united with nature, he can, at the approach of winter feel as if from out of space his own experiences are borne towards him, experiences which he himself had first given to nature. He can perceive on the waves of these words his own experiences which have already passed over into nature.

That is the feeling of the winter-will; but man can also feel the summer-will which expands our thoughts out into the universe:—

Ye creative Soul-forces of my head
Ye fill out mine own being.
Ye press out of my being
Into universal space,
And unite me
With world-creative powers.

That means, the thoughts which are first experienced in the head pass over into the whole body. They first fill the body and then press out of the body again. These words express the nature of the summer-will, the will in us which is related to the summer. We may also say: “I have called up from my inner being the active memory of something experienced long ago; the day with its night confronts me with it in supplementing it with the external perception of space; and that corresponds to the stream from east to west.” We may also say: “In us winter-will changes into summer-will, and summer-will into winter-will.” We are no longer related to the day with its interchange of light and darkness. We are related to the year through our will, and thereby are identified with the stream flowing from west to east, the stream of the first Hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and the Thrones.

As we go on we shall see how man is hindered or helped through heredity or external adaptation to environment with reference to this relationship with the inner being of nature; for what I have explained to you today relates to the way in which man, if he is hindered as little as possible by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, can grow in this way with his thought and will into the inner being of nature, and is received by the time-forces, the day-forces and the year-forces,—the third Hierarchy, the second Hierarchy and the first Hierarchy. But the Ahrimanic forces as they appear in heredity and the Luciferic forces as they appear in adaptation to environment have an essential influence on all this. This great question shall occupy us in the next lecture.