The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the middle one of these three lectures there are a number of anthroposophical truths in particular that I would like to develop for you. We shall then see what a great impact on a person's everyday life these particular truths have, and that is what we will talk about tomorrow. Today I just want to draw you attention to some deeper aspects of the being of man.

People very often do not ask the question as to which of man's forces are used to acquire knowledge of supersensible worlds. They try to answer this question merely by saying that there is a possibility of acquiring supersensible knowledge by means of certain forces in man. But what the actual connections are between these forces and man's being, they do not usually ask. That is why so little importance is attached to making knowledge of supersensible worlds really fruitful in ordinary life. It can be said that supersensible knowledge is becoming more and more essential to man, just in our time. In that case it is vital to understand what its connection is with ordinary everyday life.

As you know, the first of the capacities that leads man into supersensible realms is the force of Imagination, the second capacity is the force of Inspiration and the third capacity the force of Intuition. The question now is whether these capacities need concern us at all except in their connection with knowledge of supersensible worlds or whether these capacities have any part to play in the rest of man's life?—You will see that the latter is the case. As my little book Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy tells you, we can see human life running its course in three stages: from birth to the change of teeth, from the change of teeth to puberty, and from puberty till about the twenty-first year. If you do not regard man purely superficially you will be struck by the fact that the nature of man's development is entirely different in the three different seven-year stages. The pushing through of our permanent teeth, as I have often mentioned, is connected with the development of forces that are not merely confined, let us say, to our jaws or their neighbouring organs, but fill our whole physical body. There is work in progress within our physical body between birth and the seventh year, and this work comes to an end with the pushing through of our permanent teeth.

It is obvious that the forces doing this work of developing the physical body are supersensible, isn't it? The perceptible body is only the material in which they work. These supersensible forces, active in the whole of man's organisation during the first seven years of his life, become, as it were, suspended when their purpose has been achieved and the permanent teeth have appeared. At the age of seven these forces go to sleep. They are hidden within the being of man; they go to sleep within him. And they can be drawn forth from your being when you do the sort of exercises I describe in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds as leading to Intuition. For the forces that are applied in the acquisition of intuitive knowledge are the same forces that you grow with at the time of life when this growth culminates in the change of teeth. These sleeping forces that are active within the human body until the seventh year are the forces you use in supersensible knowledge to reach Intuition.

Now the forces that are active from the seventh year to the fourteenth year and go to sleep at puberty in the depths of the body, are drawn forth and form the power of Inspiration. And the forces that in bygone times used to be the source of youthful ideals between the fourteenth and the twenty-first year—it would be too much of an assertion to say that this still happens today—the forces that create organs in the physical body for these ideals of youth, are the same forces you can draw forth from their state of slumber and use for the acquisition of Imagination.

From this you will see that the forces of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are not just any old forces got from we do not know where, but are the same forces as those we grow with from our birth to the age of twenty-one. So the forces that live in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are very healthy forces. They are the forces a human being uses for his healthy growth and that go to sleep within his body when the corresponding phases of growth are completed.

I have just shown you the connections between the forces of supersensible knowledge and man's everyday existence. Something similar, though, can be said about the forces of man's normal nature, man's nature as it appears in ordinary life. Only there it is not so obvious. A very important force in ordinary life—and we have discussed it many times—is the force of memory. The power of memory is active within us when, as we say, we remember something we have experienced. But, as you all know, there is something peculiar about the power of memory. We have got it and yet we haven't got it. Many a person struggles at some moment of his life to try and remember something that he cannot remember. This wanting to remember but not being able to remember entirely, arises through the fact that the force we use in our souls to remember with is the same force that transforms the food we eat into the kind of substances our body can make use of. If you eat a piece of bread and this bread is transformed inside your body into the sort of substance that serves life, this is apparently a physical process. This physical process, however, is governed by supersensible forces. These supersensible forces are the same forces you use when you remember. So the same kind of forces are being used on the one hand for memory and on the other hand for the assimilation of foodstuffs in the human body. And you actually always have to oscillate a bit between your soul and your body if you want to dwell in memory. If your body is carrying out the process of digesting too well, you may find you will not be able to draw enough forces away from it to remember certain things. There is an inner struggle going on the whole time in the unconscious between a soul process and a bodily process every time you want to remember something. Looking at memory is the best way to understand how absurd it is basically, from a higher point of view, for some people to be idealists and other people materialists. The assimilation of foodstuffs in the human body is doubtless a material process. The forces controlling it are the same as the forces at work in a process of ideas, namely the force of memory. You only see the world aright if you see it as being neither materialistic nor idealistic, but are capable of following up the ideal aspect of what is presented in a material way and following up the material aspect of what is presented as idea. The spiritual quality of a world conception is hot being able to say 'Over there is base materialism, which is for the 'dregs' of humanity, and over here is idealism, which is for the elect—and the speaker usually includes himself among these—but the essential quality of a really spiritual world conception lies in its capacity to take what it has grasped in the spirit and bring it down into material existence so that material existence can be understood and not despised. That is the fallacy of many religious denominations, that they despise material existence instead of understanding it and looking for the spirit within it.

The crux of the matter is really to go into these things, and not, as is still largely the case, to deal in empty phrases where mysticism is concerned. After having as it were shown you how these things can really be gone into, I would now like to bring something of very great importance. When people speak of material existence and supersensible existence they usually speak of them as though material existence were spread out in the world and as though supersensible, non-perceptible existence were somewhere behind or above this. If you imagine you simply have physical-perceptible existence on the one hand and supersensible existence on the other, you will never understand man. There is no way of really grasping man if you look at things from the point of view of the perceptible world versus the supersensible world. In reality it is like this: The world of the senses and the world in which we work and live socially are spread out around us. Let us represent diagrammatically by means of this line this world that is spread out around us (see horizontal line of drawing). You will only have a complete picture of what is actually there in the world if you imagine that there are forces above this line, supersensible forces (red side). We neither perceive these supersensible forces by means of our ordinary senses nor by means of our intellect bound to our ordinary senses. We perceive only what is in the realm of this line.

But there are forces under this line as well. If we actually want to include the whole of the imperceptible or spiritual realm we must speak of subsensible as well as supersensible forces. So we must imagine that there are also subsensible forces here (orange side).

Thus we have the sense world, supersensible forces and subsensible forces. Where does man himself, as an ordinary person, belong? The part of him you see standing in front of you belongs entirely to this line. But supersensible forces from one side and subsensible forces from the other side work into the part of man that belongs to the line. Man is the result of supersensible and subsensible forces. Now which of man's forces are supersensible and which are subsensible? All the forces connected with understanding are supersensible, that is, everything we make use of for understanding. And these are the same forces that also form our head. So we can say that the supersensible forces are the forces of understanding.

Now subsensible forces also work into man. What kind of forces are these? These are will forces. All the will forces, everything in man that is of the nature of will, is subsensible.

An obvious question is where do these subsensible forces, these will forces, come from? They are the same forces as the forces of the planets, that is, from our point of view, the forces of the earth. Yes indeed, the forces of the earth are perpetually working into man. And it is our forces of will that are connected with these forces of the planets, these forces of the earth. The forces of understanding come to us from the world's periphery, and pour into us as it were from outside, from the outside of the planet. The forces of will enter into us from the planet itself. This is how the forces of our own planet earth live within us. The moment we enter birth the forces of planet earth are active within us.

The question now arises as to how this activity is distributed. There is a considerable difference in this respect in the first, second and third stage of life, that is, up till the seventh year, the fourteenth year and the twenty-first year. The will working in us up till the seventh year works entirely from out of the planet's interior. It is very interesting to see spiritual-scientifically that in everything working in the child up till the age of seven it is the forces of the earth's depths that are active. If you want to see an actual manifestation of the forces of the earth's interior, then make a study of everything going on in the child up till the age of seven, for these are the forces from within the earth. To delve down into the earth to find the forces of the earth's interior would be absolutely wrong. You would only find earth substances. The forces that are active in the earth come to manifestation in the work they do in the human being up till his seventh year. And from the seventh to the fourteenth year it is the forces of the encircling air that work in man, forces that still belong to the earth, to the earth's atmosphere. These are predominantly at work in everything developing in the human being between seven and fourteen. Then comes the most important stage of all, from fourteen to twenty-one. At this stage the subsensible passes over into the supersensible. Here a kind of balance is created between the subsensible and supersensible. Now the forces of the earth's whole solar system work at organising the human being.

So we have the earth's interior in the first period of life; encircling air in the second period of life, that is, what the earth itself is embedded in. The forces streaming down from cosmic spaces in so far as these cosmic spaces are filled with our own actual planetary system, up till the twenty-first year. Not until the age of twenty-one does man tear himself away, as it were, from the influences brought about in him from outside by the planets and the planetary system belonging to these.

Please notice that in everything I have referred to as having an influence on man, bodily influences are of course included. They are bodily processes that the forces from the planet's interior bring about up till the seventh year. They are bodily processes that are formed by the circulating air in connection with the breathing and so on between the seventh and the fourteenth year. There is no doubt that they are bodily processes, in fact actual transformations of bodily organs are brought about; everything being connected with man's growing and becoming larger. Thus man grows beyond all this work being done on him by the earth; all this ceases at twenty-one.

What happens then, however? What happens after twenty-one? Up till twenty-one we draw on what comes from the earth and its planetary system in the way we have described. We build up our constitution with the earth's help. Then, after we have reached the age of twenty-one, we have to draw on ourselves. We gradually have to release what we have put into our organism from out of the forces of the planet and the planetary system.

Activities going on in the blood forces always used to ensure that this happened in the past. As you will probably know, man has not learnt to release the planetary forces, himself, after the age of twenty-one. And yet he has been doing so. He did it as an unconscious process. The capacity was in his blood. It was built into him to do it. The important change in our present time—and the present extends over a long period of several centuries, of course—is that man's blood is losing the capacity to release what we have put into the organism in this way, before twenty-one

The important changes taking place in humanity at the present time are based on the waning of the forces in the blood. These things cannot be testified by external anatomy and physiology; to do that they would need to investigate bodies from the tenth or ninth centuries in order to discover that blood was different then. And they would not even have had the chemical tests to do it. But through spiritual science we can know with certainty that man's blood has grown weaker. And the great turning-point when human blood began to grow weak lay in the middle of the fifteenth century.

What are the consequences? The consequences of this are that what we cannot carry out unconsciously any more by means of our blood, we have to carry out consciously. We have to educate ourselves to do consciously what was simply done unconsciously by man's blood in the past. For the strength in our blood is in the process of fading away. What would happen if a time were to come when human beings completely lost hold of their youth, and were unable to draw on their youthful forces, if there were no means of resorting to doing consciously what was once done unconsciously by the blood?

You must not take these things in a purely theoretical way, of course. As theories, they may be interesting, but to take them as theories is not enough. Nowadays they have to be put into practice, for they are connected with the practical matter of the evolution of mankind. They must be put into practice to the point of making us conscious that man's whole educational system has to change. We have to help man to develop a strong, conscious capacity to re-experience later in life, as though with the force of elemental memory, what he has received in his youth.

Everywhere, people are still working contrary to this requirement. For instance they are proud of the visual aids used in primary school education, and they attach great importance to getting down to the mental level of the child as far as possible, and not teaching him anything that extends beyond his mental capacity. They actually rig up calculating machines so that they can teach the children to do all kinds of sums by counting balls. Nothing must go beyond the child's mental capacity. These visual aid lessons get frightfully trivial and trite. It is bound to lead to nothing but commonplace concepts if they avoid giving the child anything beyond its own mental capacity. People who do this, thoroughly overlook an important yet subtle observation of human life.

Supposing a child is taught in such a way that he takes a particular thing in, not because it is absolutely on his own mental level, but because his teacher's warmth of enthusiasm gets passed on to him, and the child takes the thing in because the teacher in his enthusiasm tells him about it. The child takes it in just because it lives in the warmth emanating from the teacher. If the child absorbs something that reaches beyond his understanding, purely because of the infectious quality of his teacher's enthusiasm, he will not yet understand what he has taken in, as people say in superficial life. Yet what he has taken in lives in his soul. At the age of thirty the grown-up will remember what the child took in, perhaps at the age of ten. He re-experiences it. He has become mature now, and he can understand what he is able to release from the depths of his soul; he can understand the thing he was taught purely through the force of enthusiasm, and which he is now able to release from his mature mind. You know, these are the most valuable moments in life, when your mental life does not have to be restricted to what comes to meet you from outside, but you re-experience what you took in in your younger days with inadequate understanding, and which you can now release and absorb with your more mature mind. The more care you take that the child does not just get the sort of lessons where it matter-of-factly takes in what it understands—for that will disappear with the passing years, and neither joy nor enthusiasm will come from it later—the more you will be doing for the person's later development; for lessons taken in purely through the teacher's warmth are life giving when they are re-experienced.

Nowadays this is of particular importance in teaching- In earlier times it was not so important, for in those days the releasing was carried out by the blood, whereas now it has to be brought to consciousness. It certainly makes a difference if you understand the kind of things that are being put to practical use by spiritual science. Because if you understand them in the right way you will find an opportunity somewhere in life of making practical use of them for the good of humanity. In this case, if you understand it properly, you will find an opportunity to make use of the fact that our blood is becoming weak, by attaching all the more importance to the teacher's capacity for enthusiasm.

But people are so little aware nowadays of what is at stake. For standardised education still plays a great part, that is, the kind of education that works with a whole set of standard rules. Education is learnt, how to teach a child is learnt, how to arrange the lesson is learnt. Comparing this with our present day consciousness it would be like learning that man consists of carbohydrates, protein and so on—these are our constituents and they undergo such and such changes inside our body, and we cannot eat before we have understood this; for we do not eat in a physiological sense until we understand it.—I told you once, and you may even have experienced this yourselves—, that you can already come across a thing like this:—You visit someone who has a scale standing beside his plate, and he carefully puts a piece of meat on the scales to find out how much it weighs, for he may only eat a piece of meat of a quite specific weight. Physiology already determines his appetite. But not everybody does it this way yet, thank goodness! It is important to understand that physiology is not part of the eating process but covers other aspects, and that a person can eat without having studied physiology, the physiology of the nutritional process. But we do not take it for granted that we also ought to teach, that is, teach in a living way, without having absorbed standardised education. This standardised education is exactly the same thing to a good teacher as the aesthetics of colour is to an artist. He can have studied aesthetics of colour very well, but he will not be able to paint because of that. The ability to paint comes from an entirely different quarter from the study of the aesthetics of colour. The ability to teach comes from an entirely different quarter from the study of education. The important thing, today, is not to give would-be teachers a seminar of some sort of standardised education that prescribes dogmas, but to give them the sort of thing that makes them become teachers and educators in the same way as people become artists or botanists. It is that the educator has to be born in a person and not that education has to be learnt.

What has to be understood just because of this very change in man's set-up is that education has to be a real art. In the time of transition people were at sixes and sevens as to what to do about education. That is why they invented so many abstract educational systems. The essential thing today, however, is to give people a real knowledge of man, especially if they are teachers. You see, if you possess this real knowledge of man and work out of it with children, a remarkable thing will happen: Let us suppose you are a teacher and have your pupils in front of you. If you are a student of standardised education, the kind that follows the rules, then you will know exactly how you have to teach, because you will have learnt the rules. You will teach according to these rules, today, just as you taught according to these rules yesterday and will teach according to them tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But if you are the artist kind of teacher you are not nearly so well off. For now you cannot teach yesterday, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow according to the same rules, but have to learn from the child afresh each time, how he has to be taught; it must be man's own nature every time that determines what you do. And it is ideal if the teacher can teach the way the child tells him to teach, and can keep on forgetting actual education and has not got a clue about the rules. For the moment the child stands in front of him again he will again be electrified by the growing child and will know what he has to do with him.

You must pay attention to the way things have to be said, to the way things have to be spoken about today. You cannot speak about these things today in such a way that they can be put into so and so many satisfying principles, but you can only speak about them by pointing to something alive, something that cannot be reduced to abstract principles but which is alive and produces ever more life. That is the crux of the matter. That is why spiritual science is needed in actual life today, because spiritual science is not merely for the head but is for the whole of man and releases will impulses. Indeed it ought to enter into many realms of life, so that impulses of will are eventually brought into every sphere of human activity.

I have demonstrated this in one particular realm of life, namely education, and shown how the education of children under the age of twenty-one can be made to bear fruit for later life. People do not receive an education only up to the age of twenty-one, though, for education carries on throughout the whole of life. But this only happens in a healthy way if people learn from one another.

This too was done by the blood in earlier ages of history. When people met in social life they used to learn things from one another unconsciously, some people learning more and others less, according to the way their blood worked. But our blood has grown weak and has lost its power. This activity, too, has to be replaced by more consciousness. People must achieve the art of acquiring relatively more for themselves from other people compared with what they produce from out of themselves. In earlier times it was sufficient to rely on life. The blood did everything. Now it is essential for people really to develop a sense for the other person's being. This will come about as a matter of course if people steer their thoughts in the direction of spiritual science. Different kinds of thoughts are stimulated with spiritual science than without it.

You will not doubt this fact, for the way spiritual science is received by people who do not want to know anything about their thoughts shows that spiritual scientific thoughts are different from thoughts without spiritual science. It is necessary to develop a totally new way of thinking. The kind of thinking we develop when we accustom ourselves to working with supersensible thoughts is the kind of thinking that has an effect on our organism. And when I told you today that memory is the same force that transforms food into substances man needs for his organism you will no longer be astonished to find that other forces can be transformed in man, like for instance the force with which we understand supersensible things being the same one that helps us to know the human being better than we would know him if we had no healthy longing for supersensible knowledge.

You people study what is in my Occult Science, and to do that you have to develop certain concepts that most people would still call 'Utter madness'. A few days ago I got yet another letter from someone studying Occult Science, and he says that nearly every chapter is pure nonsense. You can understand people saying it is pure nonsense. Why, it is quite obvious that they often say it these days. Yet these people who do not put themselves out to accept the kind of concepts that lead to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, and do not get down to developing ideas about a world that is not limited to the senses will also not acquire any knowledge of man. They do not see the human being in the other person but notice at the most that one person has a more pointed nose than the other, and one has blue eyes whereas the other has brown. But they notice nothing of man's inner being that manifests as his soul and organises his body. The same force which enables us to take an interest, and I am not saying now that it enables us to have supersensible occult powers, but the same force that enables us to take an interest in supersensible knowledge also gives us the kind of knowledge of man that we need today.

You can set up the most grandiose social programmes and develop the finest social ideas, but if people shy away from acquiring any knowledge of man and do not see any real humanity in one another, they will never be able to bring about social conditions. They cannot produce social conditions unless they establish the possibility that people can be social. But people cannot be social if they do not see the human quality in one another, but live entirely within themselves. Human beings can only become social if they really meet one another in life, and something passes between them. This is the root of the social problem. Most people say of the social question nowadays, that if certain things were arranged in such and such a way people would be able to lead a social existence.—But it is not like that. If things are arranged like that, social people will be good people in a social sense, and anti-social people will be anti-social with any sort of arrangement.

The essential thing is to make the sort of arrangements that allow for human beings to develop really social impulses. And one of these social impulses is knowledge. But as long as you go on educating people, for instance, with an eye to their becoming clerks or army officers or some other kind of civil servant, you will not educate them to recognise the human quality in others. For the sort of education that is good for becoming a clerk or an officer only helps you to see clerks and officers in other people. The kind of education that makes human beings of people also enables them to recognise people as human beings. But it is impossible to recognise people as human beings if you do not develop a sense for supersensible knowledge. And the realm in which supersensible knowledge is most indispensable is in the art of education. Therefore the natural scientific, materialistic way of thinking has done more damage in the field of education than anywhere else. And here you can experience the most amazing things.

In every department you find well-meaning people today, who want to reform everything, even revolutionise them. But if you talk to these people about these things, something very strange transpires. They will admit quite honestly to a particular conviction about reforming things. Yet one of them who happens to be a tailor will ask you how his existence as a tailor is going to be affected when things change. And another person, who is, let us say, a railway clerk, asks you how his life as a railway clerk is going to suffer when things are changed.—These are only given as examples to show you that people are perfectly in agreement that everything should be changed as long as nothing changes and everything remains exactly the same. The vast majority of people today are convinced that everything must stay exactly the same when it changes. Make no mistake about the fact that the sort of social improvement people long for today is of extremely abstract dimensions. People long for a great deal, but nothing must change where their comfort is concerned.

And this is particularly true where it is a of people taking an inner step into an entirely new situation. Nevertheless the essential thing is that people open themseIves to the possibility of making the transition to thinking in quite a new way about man changing himself in his innermost being.

All sorts of questions arise from these considerations, questions that are absolutely pertinent to life. What we must realise is that we have constructed a deeper foundation for these questions, by saying that although certain forces appear to be of a spiritual-soul nature, they also come to expression in our bodily nature. For the capacity is terribly lacking today, to bring down to a material level what we think of on a spiritual level. Not until we are capable of bringing down on to a material level what we think of as being spiritual shall we be able to grasp the actual nerve of the social question.

Thus it is virtually a matter of aiming towards a way of thinking that really develops a knowledge of man that is at one and the same time a social impulse. A way of thinking based on anything else is not adequate. A mentality based on the life of the state or the life of economics creates clerks and officers. But the sort of mentality we need creates human beings. This can only be the sort of thought life that breaks away from the sphere of economics and the life of the state. That is why our Threefold Social Organism had to happen. We had to show in a radical way that any kind of dependency of thought life on economics or on the life of the state had to stop, and thought life had to be set up on its own basis. Then thought life will be able to give economics and the life of the state what economics and the state cannot give to the life of thought.

That is the important thing, that is what is vital! Whole human beings will only arise again when we work out of an independent life of thought.

The essential purpose of the lectures I have been giving here for some weeks past was to show how through his spiritual life man partakes in what we may call the world of the Stars, just as through his physical life on Earth he partakes in earthly existence, earthly happenings. In the light of the outlook acquired through Anthroposophy we distinguish in man the forces that lie in his physical body and in his etheric or formative-forces body, and those that lie in his Ego and his astral body. You know, of course, that these two sides of his being are separated whenever he sleeps. And now we will think for a short time of a man while he is asleep. On the one side the physical body and the etheric body lie there in a state of unconsciousness; but the Ego and the astral body are also without consciousness.

We may now ask: Are these two unconscious sides of human nature also related during sleep?—We know indeed that in the waking state, where the ordinary consciousness of modern man functions, the two sides are related through thinking, through feeling and through willing. We must therefore picture to ourselves that when the Ego and astral body plunge down, as it were, into the etheric body and the physical body, thinking, feeling, and willing arise from this union.

Now when man is asleep, thinking, feeling, and willing cease. But when we consider his physical body we shall have to say: All the forces which, according to our human observation belong to Earth-existence are active in this physical body. This physical body can be weighed; put it on scales and it will prove to have a certain weight. We can investigate how material processes take their course within it—or at least we can imagine hypothetically that this is possible. We should find in it material processes that are a continuation of those processes to be found outside in Earth-existence; these continue within man's physical body in the process of nutrition. In his physical body we should also find what is achieved through the breathing process. It is only what proceeds from the head-organization of man, all that belongs to the system of senses and nerves, that is either dimmed or plunged in complete darkness during sleep.

If we then pass on to consider the etheric body which permeates the physical, it is by no means so easy to understand how this etheric body works during sleep. Anyone, however, who is already versed to a certain extent in what Spiritual Science has to say about man will realize without difficulty how through his etheric body the human being lives, even while asleep, amid all the conditions of the ether-world and all the etheric forces surrounding existence on Earth. So that we can say: Within the physical body of man while he is asleep, everything that belongs to Earth-existence is active. So too in the etheric body all that belongs to the ether-world enveloping and permeating the Earth is active.

But matters become more difficult when we turn our attention—naturally our soul's attention—to what is now (during sleep) outside the physical and etheric bodies, namely, to the Ego and astral body of man. We cannot possibly accept the idea that this has anything to do with the physical Earth, or with what surrounds and permeates the Earth as ether. As to what takes place during sleep, I indicated it to you in a more descriptive way in the lectures given here a short time ago, and I will outline it today from a different point of view. We can in reality only understand what goes on in the Ego and astral body of man when with the help of Spiritual Science we penetrate into what takes place on and around the Earth over and above the physical and etheric forces and activities.

To begin with, we turn our gaze upon the plant-world. Speaking in the general sense and leaving out of account evergreen trees and the like—we see the plant-world sprouting out of the Earth in spring. We see the plants becoming richer and richer in color, more luxuriant, and then in autumn fading away again. In a certain sense we see them disappear from the Earth when the Earth is covered with snow.

But that is only one aspect of the unfolding of the plant-world. Physical knowledge tells us that this unfolding of the plant-world in spring and its fading towards autumn is connected with the Sun, also that, for example, the green coloring of the plants can be produced only under the influence of sunlight. Physical knowledge, therefore, shows us what comes about in the realm of physical effects; but it does not show us that while all the budding, the blossoming and withering of the plants is going on, spiritual events are also taking place. In reality, just as in the physical human organism there is for example the circulation of the blood, just as etheric processes express themselves in the physical organism as vascular action and so forth, and just as this physical organism is permeated by the soul and spirit, so also the processes of sprouting, greening, blossoming and fading of the plants which we regard as physical processes, are everywhere permeated by workings of the cosmic world of soul and spirit.

Now when we look into the countenance of a man and his glance falls on us, when we see his expression, maybe the flushing of the face, then indeed the eyes of our soul are looking right through the physical to the soul and spirit. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise in our life among our fellow-men. In like manner we must accustom ourselves also to see spirit-and-soul in the physiognomy—if I may call it so—and changing coloring of the plant-world on our Earth.

If we are only willing to recognize the physical, we say that the Sun's warmth and light work upon the plants, forming in them the saps, the chlorophyll and so forth. But if we contemplate all this with spiritual insight, if we take the same attitude to this plant-physiognomy of the Earth as we are accustomed to take to the human physiognomy, then something unveils itself to us that I should like to express with a particular word, because this word actually conveys the reality.

The Sun, of which we say, outwardly speaking, that it sends its light to the Earth, is not merely a radiant globe of gas but infinitely more than that. It sends its rays down to the Earth but whenever we look at the Sun it is the outer side of the rays that we see. The rays have, however, an inner side. If someone were able to look through the Sun's light, to regard the light only as an outer husk and look through to the soul of it, he would behold the Soul-Power, the Soul-Being of the Sun. With ordinary human consciousness we see the Sun as we should see a man who was made of papier-maché. An effigy in which there is nothing but the form, the lifeless form, is of course something different from the human being we actually see before us. In the case of the living human being, we see through this outer form and perceive soul-and-spirit. For ordinary consciousness the Sun is changed as it were into a papier-maché cast. We do not see through its outer husk that is woven of Light.

But if we were able to see through this, we should see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun. We can be conscious of its activity just as we are conscious of the physical papier-maché husk of the Sun. From the standpoint of physical knowledge we say: ‘The Sun shines upon the Earth; it sparkles upon the stones, upon the soil. The light is thrown back and thereby we see everything that is mineral. The rays of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them green, making them bud.’—All that is external. If we see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun, we cannot merely say: ‘The sunlight sparkles on the minerals, is reflected, enabling us to see the minerals,’ or, ‘The light and heat of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them verdant’—but we shall have to say, meaning now the countless spiritual Beings who people the Sun and who constitute its soul and spirit: ‘The Sun dreams and its dreams envelop the Earth and fashion the plants.’

If you picture the surface of the Earth with the physical plants growing from it, coming to blossom, you have there the working of the physical rays of the Sun. But above it is the weaving life of the dream-world of the Sun—a world of pure Imaginations. And one can say: When the mantle of snow melts in the spring, the Sun regains its power, then the Sun-Imaginations weave anew around the Earth. These Imaginations of the Sun are Imaginative forces, playing in upon the world of plants. Now although it is true that this Imaginative world—this Imaginative atmosphere surrounding the Earth—is very specially active from spring until autumn in any given region of the Earth, nevertheless this dreamlike character of the Sun's activity is also present in a certain way during the time of winter. Only during winter the dreams are, as it were, dull and brooding, whereas in summer they are mobile, creative, formative. Now it is in this element in which the Sun-Imaginations unfold that the Ego and astral body of man live and weave when they are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

You will realize from what I have said that sleep in summer is actually quite a different matter from sleep in winter, although in the present state of evolution, man's life and consciousness are so dull and lacking in vitality that these things go unperceived. In earlier times men distinguished very definitely through their feelings between winter-sleep and summer-sleep, and they knew too what meaning winter-sleep and summer-sleep had for them. In those ancient times men knew that of summer-sleep they could say: During the summer the Earth is enveloped by picture-thoughts. And they expressed this by saying: The Upper Gods come down during the summer and hover around the Earth; during the winter the Lower Gods ascend out of the Earth and hover around it.—This Imaginative world, differently constituted in winter and in summer, was conceived as the weaving of the Upper and the Lower Gods. But in those olden times it was also known that man himself, with his Ego and his astral body, lives in this world of weaving Imaginations.

Now the very truths of which I have here spoken, show us, if we ponder them in the light of Spiritual Science, in what connection man stands, even during his earthly existence, with the extra-earthly Universe. You see, in summer—when it is summer in any region of the Earth—the human being during his sleep is always woven around by a sharply contoured world of Cosmic Imaginations. The result is that during the time of summer he is, so to speak, pressed near to the Earth with his soul and spirit. During the time of winter it is different. During winter the contours, the meshes, of the Cosmic Imaginations widen out, as it were. During the summer we live with our Ego and astral body while we are asleep within very clearly defined Imaginations, within manifold figures and forms. During winter the figures around the Earth are wide-meshed and the consequence of this is that whenever autumn begins, that which lives in our Ego and astral body is borne far out into the Universe by night. During summer and its heat, that which lives in our Ego and astral body remains more, so to speak, in the psycho-spiritual atmosphere of the human world. During winter this same content is borne out into the far distances of the Universe. Indeed without speaking figuratively, since one is saying something that is quite real, one can say: that which man cultivates in himself, in his soul, and which through his Ego and astral body he can draw out from his physical and etheric bodies between the times of going to sleep and waking—that stores itself up during the summer and streams out during winter into the wide expanse of the Cosmos.

Now we cannot conceive that we men shut ourselves away, as it were, in earthly existence and that the wide Universe knows nothing of us. It is far from being so. True, at the time of Midsummer man can conceal himself from the Spirits of the Universe, and he may also succeed in harboring reprehensible feelings of evil. The dense net of Imaginations does not let these feelings through; they still remain. And at Christmastime the Gods look in upon the Earth and everything that lives in man's nature is revealed and goes forth with his Ego and astral being. Using a picture which truly represents the facts, we may say: In winter the windows of the Earth open and the Angels and Archangels behold what men actually are on the Earth.

We on Earth have gradually accustomed ourselves in modern civilization to express all that we allow to pass as knowledge in humdrum, dry, unpoetic phrases. The higher Beings are ever poets, therefore we never give a true impression of their nature if we describe it in barren physical words; we must resort to words such as I have just now used: at Christmastime the Earth's windows open and through these windows the Angels and Archangels behold what men's deeds have been the whole year through. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are poets and artists even in their thinking. The logic we are generally at pains to apply is only an outcome of the Earth's gravity—by which I do not at all imply that it is not highly useful on Earth.

It is what lives in the minds and hearts of men as I have just pictured it, that is of essential interest to these higher Beings; the Angels who look in through the Christmas windows are not interested in the speculations of professors; they overlook them. Nor, to begin with, are they much concerned with a man's thoughts. It is what goes on in his feelings, in his heart, that in its cosmic aspect is connected with the Sun's yearly course. So it is not so much whether we are foolish or clever on Earth that comes before the gaze of the Divine-Spiritual Beings at the time of Christmas, but simply whether we are good or evil men, whether we feel for others or are egoists. That is what is communicated to the cosmic worlds through the course of the yearly seasons.

You may believe that our thoughts remain near the Earth, because I have said that the Angels and Archangels are not concerned with them when they look in through the Christmas windows. They are not concerned with our thoughts because, if I may use a rather prosaic figure of speech, they receive the richer coinage, the more valuable coinage that is minted by the soul-and-spirit of man. And this more valuable coinage is minted by the heart, the feelings, by what a man is worth because of what his heart and feeling contain. For the Cosmos, our thoughts are only the small change, the lesser coinage, and this lesser coinage is spied out by subordinate spiritual beings every night. Whether we are foolish or clever is spied out for the Cosmos every night—not indeed for the very far regions of the Cosmos but only for the regions around the Earth—spied out by beings who are closest to the Earth in its environment and therefore the most subordinate in rank. The daily revolution of the Sun takes place in order to impart to the Cosmos the worth of our thoughts. Thus far do our thoughts extend; they belong merely to the environment of the Earth. The yearly revolution of the Sun takes place in order to carry our heart-nature, our feeling-nature, farther out into the cosmic worlds.

Our will-nature cannot be carried in this way out into the Cosmos, for the cycle of the day is strictly regulated. It runs its course in twenty-four hours. The yearly course of the Sun is strictly regulated too. We perceive the regularity of the daily cycle in the strictly logical sequences of our thoughts. The regularity of the yearly cycle—we perceive the after-effect of this in our heart and soul, in that there are certain feelings which say to one thing that a man does: it is good, and to another: it is bad.

But there is a third faculty in man, namely, the will. True, the will is bound up with feeling, and feeling cannot but say that certain actions are morally good, and others morally not good. But the will can do what is morally good and also what is morally not good. Here, then, there is no strict regularity. The relation of our will to our nature as human beings is not strictly regulated in the sense that thinking and feeling are regulated. We cannot call a bad action good, or a good action bad, nor can we call a logical thought illogical, an illogical thought logical. This is due to the fact that our thoughts stand under the influence of the daily revolution of the Sun, our feelings under the influence of its yearly revolution. The will, however, is left in the hands of humanity itself on Earth. And now a man might say: ‘The most that happens to me is that if I think illogically, my illogical thoughts are carried out every night into the Cosmos and do mischief there—but what does that matter to me? I am not here to bring order into the Cosmos.’—Here on Earth, where his life is lived in illusion, a man might in certain circumstances speak like this, but between death and a new birth he would never do so. For between death and a new birth he himself is in the worlds in which he may have caused mischief through his foolish thoughts; and he must live through all the harm that he has done. So, too, between death and a new birth, he is in those worlds into which his feelings have flowed. But here again he might say on Earth: ‘What lives in my feelings evaporates into the Cosmos; but I leave it to the Gods to deal with any harm that may have been caused there through me. My will, however, is not bound on Earth by any regulation.’—

The materialist who considers that man's life is limited to the time between birth and death, can never conceive that his will has any cosmic significance; neither can he conceive that human thoughts or feelings have any meaning for the Cosmos. But even one who knows quite well that thoughts have a cosmic significance as the result of the daily revolution of the Sun, and feelings through the yearly revolution—even he, when he sees what is accomplished on the Earth by the good or evil will-impulses of man, must turn away from the Cosmos and to human nature itself in order to see how what works in man's will goes out into the Cosmos. For what works in man's will must be borne out into the Cosmos by man himself, and he bears it out when he passes through the gate of death. Therefore it is not through the daily or the yearly cycles but through the gate of death that man carries forth the good or the evil he has brought about here on Earth through his will.

It is a strange relationship that man has to the Cosmos in his life of soul. We say of our thoughts: ‘We have thoughts but they are not subject to our arbitrary will; we must conform to the laws of the Universe when we think, otherwise we shall come into conflict with everything that goes on in the world.’—If a little child is standing in front of me, and I think: That is an old man—I may flatter myself that I have determined the thought, but I am certainly out of touch with the world. Thus in respect of our thoughts we are by no means independent, so little independent that our thoughts are carried out into the Cosmos by the daily cycle of the Sun. Nor are we independent in our life of feelings, for they are carried out through the yearly cycle of the Sun. Thus even during earthly life, that which lives in our head through our thoughts and, through our feelings in our breast, does not live only within us but also partakes in a cosmic existence. That alone which lives in our will we keep with us until our death. Then, when we have laid aside the body, when we have no longer anything to do with earthly forces, we bear it forth with us through the gate of death.

Man passes through the gate of death laden with what has come out of his acts of will. Just as here on Earth he has around him all that lives in minerals, plants, animals and in physical humanity, all that lives in clouds, streams, mountains, stars, in so far as they are externally visible through the light—just as he has all this around him during his existence between birth and death, so he has a world around him when he has laid aside the physical and etheric bodies and has passed through the gate of death. In truth he has around him the very world into which his thoughts have entered every night, into which his feelings have entered with the fulfilment of every yearly cycle ... “That thou hast thought; that thou hast felt.” ... It now seems to him as though the Beings of the Hierarchies were bearing his thoughts and his feelings towards him. They have perceived it all, as I have indicated. His mental life and his feeling-life now stream towards him.

In earthly existence the Sun gives light from morning to evening; it goes down and night sets in. When we have passed through the gate of death, our wisdom rays out towards us as day; through our accumulated acts of folly, the spiritual lights grow dark and dim around us and it becomes night. Here on Earth we have day and night; when we have passed through the gate of death, we have as day and night the results of our wisdom and our foolishness. And what man experiences here on this Earth as spring, summer, autumn and winter in the yearly cycle, as changing temperatures and other sentient experiences, of all this he becomes aware—when he has passed through the gate of death—also as a kind of cycle, although of much longer duration. He experiences the warmth-giving, life-giving quality (life-giving, that is to say, for his spiritual Self) of his good feelings, of his sympathy with goodness; he experiences as icy cold his sympathy with evil, with the immoral. Just as here on Earth we live through the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so do we live after death warmed by our good feelings, chilled by our evil feelings; and we bear the effects of our will through these spiritual years and days. After death we are the product of our moral nature on Earth. And we have an environment that is permeated by our follies and our wisdom, by our sympathies and antipathies for the good.

So that we can say: Just as here on Earth we have the summer air around us giving warmth and life, and as we have the cold and frosty winter air around us, so, after death, we are surrounded by an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit that is warm and life-giving in so far as it is produced through our good feelings, and chilling in so far as it is produced through our evil feelings. Here on Earth, in certain regions at least, the summer and winter temperatures are the same for all of us. In the time after death, each human being has his own atmosphere, engendered by himself. And the most moving experiences after death are connected with the fact that one man lives in icy cold and the other, close beside him, in life-giving warmth.

Such are the experiences that may be undergone after death. And as I described in my book Theosophy, one of the main experiences passed through in the soul-world, is that those human beings who have harbored evil feelings here on Earth, must undergo their hard experiences in the sight of those who developed and harbored good feelings.

It can indeed be said: All that remains concealed to begin with in the inner being of man, discloses itself when he has passed through the gate of death. Sleep too acquires a cosmic significance, likewise our life during wintertime. We sleep every night in order that we may prepare for ourselves the light in which we must live after death. We go through our winter experiences in order to prepare the soul-spiritual warmth into which we enter after death. And into this atmosphere of the spiritual world which we have ourselves prepared we bear the effects of our deeds.

Here on Earth we live, through our physical body, as beings subject to earthly gravity. Through our breathing we live in the surrounding air, and far away we see the stars. When we have passed through the gate of death we are in the world of spirit-and-soul, far removed from the Earth; we are beyond the stars, we see the stars from the other side, look back to the world of stars. Our very being lives in the cosmic thoughts and cosmic forces. We look back upon the stars, no longer seeing them shine, but seeing instead the Hierarchies, the Spiritual Beings who have merely their reflection in the stars.

Thus man on Earth can gain more and more knowledge of what the nature of his life will be when he passes through the gate of death. There are people who say: ‘Why do I need to know all this? I shall surely see it all after death!’—That attitude is just as if a man were to doubt the value of eyesight. For as the Earth's evolution takes its course, man enters more and more into a life in which he must acquire the power to partake in these after-death experiences by grasping them, to begin with in thought, here on the Earth. To shut out knowledge of the spiritual worlds while we are on the Earth is to blind ourselves in soul and spirit after death. A man will enter the spiritual world as a cripple when he passes through the gate of death, if here, in this world, he disdains to learn about the world of spirit, for humanity is evolving towards freedom—towards free spiritual activity. This fact should become clearer and clearer to mankind and should make men realize the urgent necessity of gaining knowledge about the spiritual world.

Yesterday I tried to show how, by developing the ability to form imaginative vision, it is possible to gain a different kind of insight into human sense perception than can be gained when we approach it with the logic of the mind. I emphasized especially that this imaginative picturing that lives in the soul—as I said, I will describe its development in due course—has to be built up the way mathematical imagery is built up, the way mathematical constructs are developed, analyzed, and so on.

From this, the rest of what I said will also be clear: how we apply the results of our inner mathematical activity to the outer mineral-physical realm; and how in a similar way we apply our imaginative activity to the human senses. In this way we may know what takes place in those "gulfs"—as I called them yesterday—which the physical sense world sends into the human organism. The fact is that with the development of such an imaginative faculty and of knowledge of the real nature of the senses—of what is mainly the head organization—we also gain something else. We become able, for example, to form mental pictures of the plant kingdom. I indicated this yesterday. When we use only spatial and algebraic mathematics to approach plant growth and plant formation, we do not find that this mathematical form of consciousness is able to penetrate into the plant kingdom as it can penetrate into the mineral kingdom.

When on the other hand we have developed imaginative cognition, at first just inwardly, then we become able to form mental images applicable to the plant kingdom just as we found it possible with the mineral kingdom.

At this point, however, something peculiar appears: we now approach the plant world in such a way that the individual plant appears to us as only part of a great whole. In this way, for the first time we have a clear picture of what the plant nature in the earthly world really is. The picture we receive allows us to see the entire plant kingdom of the earth forming a complete unity with the earth-world. This is given purely empirically to the imaginative view. Of course, with our physical make-up we cannot possibly hold more than part of the earth's plant life in our consciousness. We observe only the plant world of a particular territory. Even if we are botanists, our practical knowledge of the plant world will always remain incomplete in the face of the entire plant world of the earth. This we know by the most simple thought. We know we do not have a whole, we have only part of the whole, something that belongs together with the rest. The impression we have in looking at the partial plant world is very much like being confronted by someone who is completely hidden from view except for a single arm and hand. We know that what is before us is not a complete whole, but just part of a whole, and that this part can only exist by virtue of being connected with the whole. At the same time we arrive at a concept that is completely unlike that of the physicist, mineralogist, or geologist: we see that the forces in the plant world are just as integral a part of the earth as those in the geological realm. Not in the sense of a vague analogy but as a directly perceived truth, the earth becomes a kind of organic being for us—an organic being that has cast off the mineral kingdom in the course of its various stages of development, and has in turn differentiated the plant kingdom.

The thoughts I am developing here for you can, of course, be arrived at very easily by mere analogy, as we see happening in the case of Gustav Theodor Fechner. Such conclusions arrived at by analogy have no value for the spiritual science intended here—what we value is direct perception. For this reason it must always be emphasized that in order to speak of the earth as an organism, for example, one must first speak of imaginative mental pictures. For the earth as an integral being reveals itself only to the imaginative faculty, not to the logical intellect with its analogies.

There is something else that one acquires in this process, and I wish especially to mention it because it would be most useful to students as regards methodology. In present-day discussions on the subject of thinking and also on how we apprehend the world in general, there is a great lack of clarity. Let us take an example. A crystal is held up to view—a cubic salt crystal, for instance—with the idea of illustrating something or other: perhaps something about its relation to human knowledge, its position in nature as a whole, or something similar. Now it could happen that in the same way that the salt cube is used, a single rose is held up for illustration. The person who holds up the rose feels it is acceptable to ascribe objective life to the rose in the same way as to the salt cube. To someone who does not strive for just a kind of formal knowledge, but who aspires to an experience of reality, it is clear that there is a difference. It is clear that the salt cube has an existence within its own limits. The plucked rose, on the other hand, even on its stem is not living its life as a rose. For it cannot develop independently to the same degree (please note the word) as the salt does. It must develop on the rosebush. The whole bush belongs to the development of the rose; separated from the bush, the rose is not quite real. An isolated rose only appears to have life.

I say all this in an effort to be clear. In all observations that we make, we must take care not to theorize about the observations before we have grasped them in their totality. It is only to the entire rosebush that we can attribute an independent existence in the same sense as to the salt cube. When we rise to imaginative mental Images, we acquire the ability to experience reality in a certain completeness.Then what I have just said about the plant world can be accepted. We see it as a whole only if our consciousness is able to apprehend it as a whole, if we can regard everything confronting us separately—all the different families and species—as part of the entire plant organism which covers the earth, or better said, which grows out of the earth.

Thus through imaginative mental images one not only gains understanding of the sense world, one also has important inner experiences of knowledge. I would like to speak of these inner experiences of knowledge in purely empirical terms.

As human beings we are in a position to look back with our ordinary memory to what took place in our waking life, back to a certain year in our childhood; with our power of memory we can call up one or another event in pictorial form out of the stream of our experiences. Still, we are clearly aware that to do this we must exert a distinct effort to raise individual pictures out of the past stream of time. As this imaginative vision develops further, however, we arrive gradually at a point where time takes on the quality of space. This comes about very gradually. It should not be imagined that the results of something like imaginative vision come all at once. It is pointless to think that the acquisition of the imaginative method is easier than the methods employed in the clinic, the observatory, and so on. Both require years of work: one, mental work; the other, inner work in the soul. The result of this inner work is that the individual pictorial experiences join one another. At this point, time—which we usually experience as “running” when we look over the course of our experiences and draw up one or another memory experience—now time, at least to some extent, becomes spatial to us. All that we have lived through in life—almost from birth—comes together in a meaningful memory picture. Through this exertion of imaginative life, of “looking back,” of remembering back, individual moments appear before the soul. These moments are more than a mere remembering. We have a subjective experience of viewing our life lived here on earth. This, as I said, is a practical result of imaginative mental imaging.

What kind of inner experience arises parallel to this inner viewing, this panorama of our experiences? We are quite clear that the strength of our soul which brings these memory pictures to consciousness is related to our ordinary bright, clear power of understanding. It is not itself the power of understanding, but it is related to it.

One can say: What we have been striving to attain—that our consciousness will be illuminated by this imaginative cognition in all our activities as it is in mathematical activity—happens for us when we come to these memory pictures. We have images and we hold them as tightly as we hold the content of our intellect. Thereby we come to a definite kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of how the power of understanding works. For we do not merely look back at our life: our life presents itself to us in mirror images. It shows itself in such a way that this comparison with a mirror really holds true. We can extend the comparison and speak of understanding reflected images in a mirror by applying optical laws. Similarly, when we come to inner imaginative perceptions, we can recognize the power of the soul that we usually think of as our mental capacity becoming enhanced, so that we experience our intellect creating not only abstract pictures but concrete pictures of our experiences.

At first a kind of subjective difficulty arises, but once we understand it we can proceed. We experience clarity as in mathematics when we experience these pictures. But the feeling of being free—not in a behavioral sense, but in one's intellectual activity—is not present in this kind of imagining. Please do not misunderstand me. The entire imaginative activity is just as voluntary as our ordinary intellectual activity. The difference is that in intellectual activity one always has a subjective experience (I say "experience" because it is more than a mere sensation), one is really in a realm of imagery, a realm that means nothing from the point of view of the outer world. We do not have this feeling in relation to the content of the imaginative world. We have the very definite experience that what we are producing in the form of imaginations is at the same time really there. We find ourselves living and weaving in a reality. To be sure, at first this is a reality which does not have an especially strong grip on us and yet we can really feel it.

What we can gather from this reality, what we become aware of as we think back from our life panorama to the inner activity that created it, acquaints us inwardly, "mathematically," with something that is similar to the formative force of the human being. Just as mathematical mental images match and explain outer physical-mineral reality, so this something coincides with what is contained in the human formative force or growth force. (It also coincides with the formative force of other living beings, but I will not speak of that now.) We begin to see a certain inner relation between something that lives purely in the soul—namely, imagination—and something that weaves through the human being as the force of growth, the force that makes a child grow into an adult, that makes limbs grow larger, that permeates the human being as an organizing power. In short, we experience what is really active in the growth principle of the human being. This insight appears first in one definite area: namely, the nerves. The life panorama and the experiences described in connection with it give us insight at first into the growth principle in the human nerve organism—that is, the creative principle which continues inward in the nerve-sense organism. We receive a mental picture of an imaginative kind that enables us to begin to understand what our sense organs actually represent. This also gives us the possibility of seeing the entire nervous system as a synthetic sense organ that is in the process of becoming, and as embracing the present sense organs. We learn to realize that at birth, though our sense organs are not fully mature, they are complete with regard to their inner forces; this may be evident from the way I spoke about the relation of imagination to the sense world. At the same time we can see that what lives in our nerve organism is permeated by the same force as are the sense organs, but that it is in the process of becoming. It is really one large sense organ in the process of becoming. This image comes to us as a real perception. The different senses as they open outward and continue inward in the nerve organism—during our whole life up to a certain age—are organized by the power we have come to know in imagination.

You see what we are striving to accomplish. We wish to make transparent the forces that work in the human being which would otherwise remain spiritually opaque. For what does the human being know of the way in which these forces are active within him? Something that cannot be mastered by ordinary knowledge, something that can be characterized as ordinarily opaque to the soul and spirit, now begins to be clear. One has the possibility, through a higher kind of qualitative mathematics—if I may use such a phrase—of penetrating the world of the senses and the world of our nerve organism. One might think that when we reach this point we would become arrogant or immodest, but just the contrary, we learn true modesty through knowledge of the human being. For what I have described to you in a very few words is really acquired over a long period of time. For one, the knowledge comes quickly; for another, much more slowly. And often someone who applies the methods of spiritual research with patient inner work is surprised by the extraordinary results. The results that such inner work brings to light, if they are properly described, can be grasped by a healthy human understanding. But to draw these results forth from the recesses of the soul requires persistent and energetic soul work. And what especially teaches us modesty is the recognition that after much hard work, the results of imaginative cognition acquaint us only with our nerve-sense organism. We can realize how shrouded in darkness is the rest of the human organism.

Then, however, to reach beyond mere self-knowledge regarding the nerve-sense system, we must attain a higher level of knowledge. (The word "higher" is of course just a term.) Above all I must emphasize (I will go into it in more detail later) that the attainment of imaginative knowledge is based on meditation—not a confused, but a clear methodically-exercised meditation (to repeat the phrase I used in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment), in which over and over again we set before our soul easily surveyable images. What is essential is that they shall be easy to view as a well-defined whole, not some vague memories, reminiscences or the like. Vague memories would lead us away from a clear mathematical type of experience. Easily pictured mental images are required, and preferably symbolic images, for these are most easily viewed as a whole. The important thing is what we experience in our soul through these images. We seek to bring them into clear consciousness in such a manner that they are like a clear memory image. Thus through voluntary activity mental images we have evoked are taken into our soul in the same way that we take memory images into the soul. In a way, we imitate what happens in our activity of remembering. In remembering, certain experiences are continually being made into pictures. Our aim is to get behind this activity of the human soul; how we do this, I will describe in due course. In our effort to get behind the way remembering takes place, we gain the ability to hold easily-surveyable images in our consciousness (just as we hold memory images) for a certain length of time. As we become used to this activity, we are able to extend the time from a few seconds to minutes. The particular images themselves are of no importance. What is important is that through the effort of holding these self-chosen images, we develop a certain inner power of soul. We can compare the development of the muscles of the arm through exertion to the way certain soul forces are strengthened when mental images (of the kind I have described) are repeatedly held in our consciousness by voluntary effort. The soul must really exert itself to bring this about, and it is this exertion of soul that is crucial. As we practice on the mental images we ourselves have made, something begins to appear in us that is the power of imagination. This power is developed similarly to the power of memory, but it is not to be confused with the power of memory. We will come to see that what we conceive of as imaginations (we have already partly described this) are in fact outer realities, and not just our own experiences as is the case with memory images. That is the basic difference between imaginations and memory images. Memory images reproduce our own experiences in pictorial form, while imaginations, although they arise in the same way as memory images, show through their content that they do not refer merely to our own experiences but can refer to phenomena in the world that are completely objective. So you see, through the further development of the memory capacity, we form the imaginative power of the soul.

And now, just as the power of remembering can be further developed, so it is also possible to develop another capacity. It will seem almost comical to you when I name it—but the further development of this capacity is more difficult than that of memory. In ordinary life there are certain powers by which we remember, but also by which we forget. It seems sometimes that we do not need to exert ourselves in order to forget. But the situation changes when we have developed the power of memory in meditation. For oddly enough, this power to hold onto certain imaginations brings it about that the imaginations want to remain in our consciousness. Once there, they are not so easily got rid of—they assert themselves. This fact is connected with what I said earlier, that in this situation we have to deal with actually dwelling in a reality. The reality makes itself felt; it asserts itself and wishes to remain. We succeeded in forming the power of imagination (in a manner modeled on mathematical thought); now through further exertion we must be able voluntarily to throw these imaginative pictures out of our consciousness. This capacity of the voluntarily developed "enhanced forgetting" must be especially cultivated.

In the forming of these inner cognitive powers—enhanced memory and enhanced forgetting—we must be careful to avoid causing actual harm to the soul. However, just to point out the dangers involved would be like forbidding certain experiments in a laboratory for the reason that something might explode someday. I myself once had a professor of chemistry at the university who had lost an eye while conducting an experiment. Happenings of this nature are of course not a valid reason for preventing the development of certain methods. I think I can correctly say that if all the precautionary measures are applied which I have described in my books regarding the inner development of soul forces, then dangers cannot arise for the soul life. To continue—if we do not develop the capacity to obliterate the imaginative pictures again, then there is a real danger that we could be tethered to what we have given rise to in our meditations. If this happened, we would not be able to go further. The development of enhanced forgetting is really necessary for the next stage.

There is a certain way in which we can help ourselves achieve this enhanced power of forgetting. Perhaps those who are involved in any of the present-day epistemological studies will find this discussion quite dilettante and I am fully aware of all the objections, but I am obliged to present the facts as they happen to be. So—to continue—one can gain help in enhancing the power of forgetting if we further develop, through self-discipline, a quality which appears in ordinary life as the ability to love. Naturally it can be said: love is not a cognitive power, it does not concern knowledge. Perhaps this is true today because of the way cognition is understood. But here it is not a matter of keeping the power of love just as it appears in ordinary life. Here the power to love is to be developed further through work an oneself. We can achieve this by keeping the following in mind.

Is it not so?—living our lives as human beings, we must admit that with each passing year we have actually become a slightly different person. When we compare ourselves at a certain age with what we were, say, ten years earlier—if we are honest—we are sure to find that certain things have changed in the course of time. The content of our soul life has changed—not just the particular form of our thoughts, feelings, or life of will, but the whole make-up of our soul life. We have become a different person “inside.” And if we search for the factors through which we have changed inwardly, we will find the following: We may notice first of all what has happened to our physical organism—for this is always changing. In the first half of life it changes progressively through growth; in the second half it is changing through regression. Then we must look at our outer experiences: what confronts us as our own mental world; all those things that leave pain, suffering, pleasure, and joy in the soul; the forces we have tried to develop in our will life. These are the things that make us a different person again and again in the course of life. If we want to be honest about what is really taking place, we have to say we are just swimming along in the current of life. But whoever wishes to become a spiritual scientist must take his development in hand through a certain self-discipline. He might, for instance, take a habit—little habits are sometimes of tremendous importance—and within a certain time transform it through conscious work. In this way we can transform ourselves in the course of our life. We are transformed through being in the current of life, as well as through the work we do on ourselves with full consciousness. Then when we observe our life panorama, we can see what has changed in our life as a result of this self-discipline. This works back in a remarkable way on our soul life. It does not have the effect of enhancing our egotism, rather it enhances our power to love. We become more and more able to embrace the outer world with love, to enter deeply into the outer world. Only someone who has made efforts in such self-discipline can judge what this means. If one has made such efforts, one can appreciate what it means to have the thoughts we form about some process or some thing accompanied by the results of such self-discipline. We enter with a much stronger personal involvement into whatever our thoughts penetrate. We even enter into the physical-mineral world with a certain power of love—that world which if approached only mathematically leaves us indifferent. We feel clearly the difference between penetrating the world with just our weak power of mental imaging, and penetrating it with a developed power of love.

You may take offense at what I am saying about the developed power of love: you may want to assert that the power of love has no place in a quest for knowledge of the outer world, that the only correct objective knowledge is that which is obtained by logical intellectual activity. Certainly there is need for a faculty that can penetrate the phenomena of the outer world by means of the bare sober intellect alone, excluding all other powers of the soul. But the outer world will not give us its all if we try to get it in this manner. The world will only give us its all if we approach it with a power of love that strengthens the mind's mental activity. After all, it is not a matter of commanding and expecting that nature will unveil herself to us through certain theories of knowledge. What is really important is to ask: How will nature reveal herself to us? How will she yield her secrets to us? Nature will reveal herself only if we permeate our mental powers with the forces of love.

Let me return to the enhancement of forgetting: with the power of love the exercises in forgetting can be practiced with greater force, and the results will be more sure, than without it. By practicing self-discipline, which gives us a greater capacity for love, we are able to experience an enhanced faculty of forgetting, just as surely a part of our volition as the enhanced faculty of remembering. We gain the ability to put something definite, something of positive soul content, in the place of what is normally the end of an experience. Normally when we forget something, this marks the end of some sequence of experiences. Thus in place of what would normally be nothing, we are able to put something positive. In the enhanced power of forgetting, we develop actively what otherwise runs its course passively.

When we have come this far, it is as if we had crossed an abyss within ourselves and reached a region of experience through which a new existence flows toward us. And it is really so. Up to this point we have had our imaginations. If in these imaginations we remain human beings equipped with a mathematical attitude of soul, and are not fools, we will see quite clearly that in this imaginative world we have pictures. The physiologists may argue whether or not what our senses give us are pictures or reality. (I have dealt with this question in my Riddles of Philosophy.) The fact is, we are well aware that these are pictures, pictures that point to a reality, but still they are just pictures. Indeed, to achieve a healthy experience in this region we must know that they are pictures—images—confronting us. However, at the moment when we experience something of the enhanced power of forgetting, these images fill with something coming from the other side of life, so to say. They fill with spiritual reality. And we go to meet this reality. We begin, as it were, to have perceptions of the other side of life. Just as through our senses we perceive one side of life, the physical-sensible side, so we learn to look toward the other side and become aware of a spiritual reality flowing into the images of imaginative life. This flowing of spiritual reality into the depth of our soul this is what in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment I have called “inspiration.” Please do not take exception to the name—just listen to how the word is being used. Do not try to remember instances where you have met the word before. We have to find words for what we want to say, and often we must use words that already have older meanings. So for the phenomenon just described, I have chosen the word inspiration.

Through developing inspiration we finally gain insight into the human rhythmic system, which is bound up in a certain way with the realm of feeling. This leads us to something I must emphasize: the method leading to inspiration which I have just described can actually be followed only by modern man. In earlier periods of human evolution, this faculty was developed more instinctively—for example, in the Indian yoga system. This, however, is not renewable in our age. It goes against the stream of history. And in the spiritual-scientific sense, one could be called a dilettante if one wanted to renew the yoga system in these modern times. Yoga set into motion certain human forces that were appropriate only for an earlier stage of human evolution. It had to do with the development of certain rhythmic processes, with conscious respiratory processes. By breathing in a certain manner, the yogi worked to develop in a physical way what modern man must develop in a soul-spiritual way—as I have described. Nevertheless, there is something similar in the instinctive inspiration we find running through the Vedanta philosophy and what we achieve through fully conscious inspiration. The way we choose to achieve this, leads us through what I have described.

As modern human beings, we approach this from above downwards, so to say. Purely through soul-spiritual exercises we work to develop the power within us that then finds its way in to the rhythmic system as inspiration. The Indian worked to find his way into the rhythmic system directly through yoga breathing. He took the physical organism as his starting-point; we take the soul-spiritual being as ours. Both ways aim to affect the human being in his middle system, the rhythmic system. We shall see how what we are given in imaginative cognition (which combines the sense system and nervous system) is in fact enhanced when we penetrate the rhythmic system through inspiration. We shall also see how the ancient, more childlike, instinctive forms of higher knowledge (for example, yoga) come to new life in the present day in the consciously free human being.

Next time I will speak further on the relation of the earlier yoga development of the rhythmic system and the modern approach which leads through inner soul-spiritual work to inspiration.

It might perhaps appear as if the art of education described in these lectures would lead away from practical life into some remote, purely spiritual region: as though this art of education laid too much stress on the purely spiritual domain. From what I have said so far in describing the spiritual foundation of the education, this might appear to be the case. But this is only in appearance. For in reality the art of education which arises from this philosophy has the most practical objects in view. Thus it should be realised that the main object of speaking of spiritual facts here is to answer the educational question: how can we best develop the physical organism in childhood and youth?

That a spiritual philosophy should consider firstly the development of the physical organism may seem to be a fundamental contradiction. The treatment of my theme in the next few days, however, will do more towards dispelling this contradiction than any abstract statements I could make at the outset. To-day, I would merely like to say that when one speaks on educational questions at the present day one finds oneself in a peculiar situation. For if one sees much that needs reforming in education, it is as much as to say that one is not satisfied with one's own education. One implies that one's own education has been exceedingly bad. And yet, as a product of this very bad education, of this education in which one finds so much to criticise—for other-wise why be a reformer?—one sets up to know the right way to educate! This is the first thing that involves a contradiction. The second thing is one which gives one a slight feeling of shame in face of the audience when speaking on education,—for one realises that one is speaking of what education ought to be and how it must be different from present day practice. So that it amounts to saying: you are all badly educated. And yet one is appealing to those who are badly educated to bring about a better education. One assumes that both the speaker and the audience know very well what good education should be in spite of the fact that they have been exceedingly badly educated.

Now this is a contradiction, but it is one which life itself presents us, and it can really only be solved by the view of education which is here being described. For one can perfectly well know what is the matter with education and in what respects it should be improved, just as one can know that a picture is well painted without possessing the faintest capacity for painting a picture oneself. You can consider yourself capable of appreciating the merits of a picture by Raphael without thinking yourself capable of painting a Raphael picture. In fact it would be a good thing to-day if people would think like this. But they are not content with merely knowing, where education is concerned, they claim straightaway to know how to educate; as though someone who is no painter and could not possibly become a painter, should set up to show how a badly painted picture should be painted well.

Now it is here contended that it is not enough to know what good education is but that one must have a grasp of the technique and detail of educational art, one must acquire practical skill. And for this, knowledge and understanding are necessary. Hence yesterday I tried to explain the elementary principles of guidance in this ability, and I will now continue this review.

It is easy to say man undergoes development during his lifetime, and that he develops in successive stages. But this is not enough. Yesterday we saw that man is a three-fold being: that his thinking is entirely bound up physically with the nerve-senses-system of his organism, his feeling is bound up with the rhythmic system, particularly the breathing and circulation system, and that his will is bound up with the system of movement and metabolism.

The development of these three systems in man is not alike. Throughout the different epochs of life they develop in different ways. During the first epoch which extends to the change of teeth—as I have repeatedly stated—the child is entirely sense organ, entirely head, and all its development proceeds from the nerve-senses system. The nerve-senses system permeates the whole organism; and all impressions of the outside world affect the whole organism, work right through it, just as, later in life, light acts upon the eye,

In other words, in an adult light comes to a standstill in the eye, and only sends the idea of itself, the concept of light, into the organism. In a child it is as if every little blood corpuscle were inwardly illumined, were transfused with light—to express it in a somewhat exaggerated and pictorial way. The child is as yet entirely exposed to those etheric essences, (effluvia), which in later life we arrest at the surface of our bodies, in the sense organs,—while we develop inwardly something of an entirely different nature. Thus a child is exposed to sense impressions in a far greater degree than is the adult.

Observe a concrete instance of this: take a person who has charge of the nurture of a very young child, perhaps a tiny baby; a person with his own world of inner experience. Let us suppose the person m charge of the child is a heavy hearted being, one to whom life has brought sorrow. In the mature man the physical consequences of the experiences he has been through will not be obvious, but will leave only faint traces. When we are sad our mouth is always a little dry. And when sadness becomes a habitual and continuous state, the sorrowful person goes about with dry mouth, with parched tongue, with a bitter taste in the mouth and even a chronic catarrh. In the adult these physical conditions are merely faint undertones of life.

The child who is growing up in the company of the adult is an imitator; he models himself entirely on the physiognomy of the adult, on what he perceives:—on the adult's sad manner of speaking, his sad feelings. For there is a subtle interplay betwixt child and adult, an interplay of imponderables. When we have an inner sadness and all its physical consequences, the child being an imitator, takes up these physical effects through inward gestures: through an inward mimicry he takes up the parched tongue, the bitter taste in the mouth; and this—as I pointed out yesterday—flows through the whole organism. He absorbs the paleness of the long sad face of the adult. The child cannot imitate the soul content of the sorrow, but it imitates the physical effects of the sorrow. And the result is that, since the spirit is still working into the child's whole organism, his whole organism will be permeated in such a manner as to build up his organs in accordance with the physical effects which he has taken up into himself. Thus the very condition of the child's organism will make a sad being of him. In later life he will have a particular aptitude for perceiving everything that is sad or sorrowful. Such is the fine and delicate knowledge that one must have in order to educate in a proper way.

This is the manner of a child's life up to the changing of the teeth. It is entirely given up to what its organism has absorbed from the adults around it. And the inner conflict taking place here is only perceptible to spiritual science; this struggle which goes on can only be described as the fight between inherited characteristics and adaptation to environment.

We are born with certain inherited characteristics.—This can be seen by anybody who has the opportunity of observing a child during its first weeks or years. Science has produced an extensive teaching on this subject.—But the child has more and more to adapt itself to the world. Little by little he must transform his inherited characteristics until he is not merely the bearer of a heredity from his parents and ancestors, but is open in his senses and soul and spirit to receive what goes on at large in his environment. Otherwise he would become an egotistic man, a man who only wants what accords with his inherited characteristics.

Now we have to educate men to be susceptible to all that goes on in the world: men who each time they see a new thing can bring their judgment and their feelings to meet this new thing. We must not educate men to be selfishly shut up within themselves, we must educate men to meet the world with a free and open mind, and to act in accordance with the demands of the world.

This attitude is the natural outcome of such a position as I described yesterday.

Thus we must observe in all its details the inner struggle which takes place during the child's early years between heredity and adaptation to environment. Try to study with the utmost human devotion the wonderful process that goes on where the first teeth are replaced by the second. The first teeth are an inherited thing. They seem almost unsuitable for the outer world. They are inherited. Gradually above each inherited tooth another tooth is formed. In the modelling of this tooth the form of the first tooth is made use of, but the form of the second tooth, which is permanent, is a thing adapted to the world.

I always refer to this process of the teeth as characteristic of this particular period of life, up to the seventh year. But it is only one symptom. For what takes place in the case of the teeth conspicuously, because the teeth are hard organs, is taking place throughout the organism. When we are born into the world we bear within us an inherited organism. In the course of the first seven years of our life we model a new organism over it. The whole process is physical. But while it is physical it is the deed of the spirit and soul within the child. And we who stand at the child's side must endeavour so to guide this soul and spirit that it goes with and not against the health of the organism. We must therefore know what spiritual and psychic processes have to take place for the child to be able to model a healthy organism in the stead of the inherited organism. We must know and do a spiritual thing in order to promote a physical thing.

And now, if we follow up what I said to you to-day in the introduction we come to something else. Suppose that as a teacher or educator we enter a classroom. Now we must never think that we are the most intelligent of human beings, men at the summit of human intelligence—that, indeed, would mean that we were very bad teachers. We really should think ourselves only comparatively intelligent. This is a sounder state of mind than the other. Now with this state of consciousness we enter the classroom. But as we go in we must say to ourselves: there may be among the children a very intelligent being, one who in later life will be far more intelligent than we. Now if we, who are only comparatively intelligent, should bring him up to be only as intelligent as ourselves, we should be making him a copy of ourselves. That would be quite wrong. For the right thing would be so to educate this very intelligent individual that he may grow up to be far more intelligent than we are ourselves or ever could be. Now this means that there is something in a man which we may not touch, something we must regard with sensitive reverence if we are to exercise the art of education rightly. And this is part of the answer to the question I asked.

Often, in earlier life, we know exceedingly well what we ought to do—only we cannot carry it out. We feel unequal to it. What it is that prevents us from doing what we ought to do is generally very obscure. It is always some condition of the physical organism,—for example, an imitated disposition to sadness such as I spoke of. The organism has incorporated this, it has become habitual. We want to do some-thing which does not suit an organism with a bent to sadness. Yet such is our organism. In us we have the effects of the parched tongue and bitter taste from our childhood, now we want to do something quite different and we feel difficulty.

If we realise the full import of this we shall say to our-selves: the main task of the teacher or educator is to bring up the body to be as healthy as it possibly can be; this means, to use every spiritual measure to ensure that in later life a man's body shall give the least possible hindrance to the will of his spirit. If we make this our purpose in school we can develop the powers which lead to an education for freedom.

The extent to which spiritual education works healthily upon the physical organism, and thus upon man as a whole, can be seen particularly well when the great range of facts provided by our magnificent modern natural science is brought together and co-ordinated in a manner only possible to spiritual science. It then becomes apparent how one can work in the spirit for the healing of man. To take a single instance. The English doctor, Dr. Clifford Albert, has said a very significant thing about the influence of grieving and sadness in human beings upon the development of their digestive organs, and—in particular—upon the kidneys. People who have a lot of trouble and grief in life show signs after a time of malformation of the kidneys, deformed kidneys. This has been very finely demonstrated by the physician Dr. Clifford Albert. That is a finding of natural science.

The important thing is that one should know how to use a scientific discovery like this in educational practice. One must know, as a teacher or educator, that if one lets the child imitate one's own sorrow and grief, then through one's sorrowful bearing one is damaging the child's digestive system to the utmost degree. In so far as we let our sorrow overflow into the child we damage its digestive system. You see, this is the tragedy of this materialistic age, that it discovers many physical facts,—if you take the external aspect, but it lacks the connections between them;—it is this very materialistic science which fails to perceive the significance of the physical and material. What spiritual science can do is to show, on all hands, how spirit and what is spiritual work within the physical realm. Then instead of yearning in dreamy mysticism for castles in the clouds, one will be able to follow up the spirit in all its details and singular workings. For one is a spiritual being only when one recognises spirit as that which creates, as that which everywhere works upon and shapes the material:—not when one worships some abstract spirit in the clouds like a mystic, and for the rest, holds matter to be merely the concern of the material world.

Hence it is actually a matter of coming to realise how in a young child, up to the seventh year, nerve-senses activity, rhythmic breathing and circulation activity, and the activity of movement and metabolism are everywhere interplaying:—only the nerve-senses activity predominates, it has the upper hand; and thus the nerve-senses activity in a child always affects his breathing. If a child has to look at a face that is furrowed with grief, this affects his senses to begin with; but it reacts upon the manner of his breathing, and hence in turn, upon his whole movement and metabolic system.

If we take a child after the change of teeth, that is after about the seventh year, we find the nerve-senses system no longer preponderating; this has now become more separate, more turned towards the outer world. In a child between the change of teeth and puberty it is the rhythmic system which preponderates, which has the upper hand. And it is most important that this should be borne in mind in the primary school. For in the primary school we have children between the change of teeth and puberty. Hence we must know here: the essential thing is to work with the child's rhythmic system, and everything which works upon some-thing other than the rhythmic system is wrong. But now what is it that works upon the rhythmic system? It is art that works upon the rhythmic system, everything that is conveyed in artistic form.

Consider how much everything to do with music is connected with the rhythmic system. Music is nothing else but rhythm carried over into the rhythmic system of the human being himself. The inner man himself becomes a lyre, the inner man becomes a violin. His whole rhythmic system reproduces what the violin has played, what has sounded from the piano. And as in the case of music, so it is also, in a finer, more delicate way, in the case of plastic art, and of painting. Colour harmonies and colour melodies also are reproduced and revived as inner rhythmic processes in the inner man. If our instruction is to be truly educational we must know that throughout this period everything that the child is taught must be conveyed in an artistic form. According to Waldorf School principles the first consideration in the elementary school period is to compose all lessons in a way that appeals to the child's rhythmic system.

How little this is regarded to-day can be seen from the number of excellent scientific observations which are continuously being accumulated and which sin directly against this appeal to the rhythmic system. Research is carried on in experimental psychology to find out how soon a child will tire in one activity or another; and the instruction must take account of this fatigue. This is all very fine, splendid, as long as one does not think spiritually. But if one thinks spiritually the matter appears in a very different light. The experiments can still be made. They are very good. Nothing is said here against the excellence of natural science. But one says: if the child shows a certain degree of fatigue in the period between its change of teeth and puberty, you have not been appealing, as you should do, to the rhythmic system, but to some other system. For throughout life the rhythmic system never tires. Throughout the whole of life the heart beats night and day. It is in his intellectual system and in his metabolic system that a man becomes tired. When we know that we have to appeal to his rhythmic system we know that what we have to do is to work artistically (Manuscript defective.); and the experiments on fatigue show where we have gone wrong, where we have paid too little attention to the rhythmic system. When we find a child has got overtired we must say to ourselves: How can you contrive to plan your lesson so that the child shall not get tired? It is not that one sets up to condemn the modern age and says: natural science is bad, we must oppose it. The spiritual man has no such intention. He says rather: we need the higher outlook because it is just this that makes it possible to apply the results of natural science to life.

If we now turn to the moral aspect, the question is how we can best get the child to develop moral impulses. And here we are dealing with the most important of all educational questions. Now we do not endow a child with moral impulses by giving him commands, by saying: you must do this, this has to be done, this is good,—by wanting to prove to him that a thing is good, and must be done. Or by saying: That is bad, that is wicked, you must not do that,—and by wanting to prove that a certain thing is bad. A child has not as yet the intellectual attitude of an adult towards good and evil, towards the whole world of morality,—he has to grow up to it. And this he will only do on reaching puberty, when the rhythmic system has accomplished its essential task and the intellectual powers are ripe for complete development. Then the human being may experience the satisfaction of forming moral judgment in contact with life itself. We must not engraft moral judgment onto the child. We must so lay the foundation for moral judgment that when the child awakens at puberty he can form his own moral judgment from observation of life.

The last way to attain this is to give finite commands to a child. We can achieve it however if we work by examples, or by presenting pictures to the child's imagination: for instance through biographies or descriptions of good men or bad men; or by inventing circumstances which present a picture, an imagination of goodness to the child's mind. For, since the rhythmic system is particularly active in the child during this period, pleasure and displeasure can arise in him, not judgment as to good and evil,—but sympathy with the good which the child beholds presented in an image,—or antipathy to the evil which he beholds so presented. It is not a case of appealing to the child's intellect, of saying ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not,’ but of fostering aesthetic judgment, so that the child shall begin to take pleasure in goodness, shall feel sympathy when he sees goodness, and feel dislike and antipathy when he beholds evil. This is a very different thing from working on the intellect, by way of precepts formulated by the intellect. For the child will only be awake for such precepts when it is no longer our business to educate him, namely, when he is a man and learns from life itself. And we should not rob the child of the satis-faction of awakening to morality of his own accord. And we shall not do this if we give him the right preparation during the rhythmic period of his life; if we train him to take an aesthetic pleasure in goodness, an aesthetic dislike of evil; that is, if also here, we work through imagery.

Otherwise, when the child awakens after puberty he will feel an inward bondage, He will not perhaps realise this bondage consciously, but throughout his subsequent life he will lack the important experience: morality has awakened within me, moral judgment has developed. We cannot attain this inner satisfaction by means of abstract moral instruction, it must be rightly prepared by working in this manner for the child's morality.

Thus it is everywhere a case of ‘how’ a thing is done. And we can see this both in that part of life which is concerned with the external world and that part of life concerned with morality: both when we study the realm of nature in the best way, and when we know how best morals can be laid down in, the rhythmic system—in the system of breathing and blood circulation. If we know how to enter with the spirit into what is physical, and if we can come to observe how spirit weaves continuously in the physical, we shall be able to educate in the right way.

While a knowledge of man is sought in the erst instance for the art of education and instruction, yet in practice the effect of such a spiritual outlook on the teacher's or educator's state of mind is of the greatest importance. And what this is can best be shown in relation to the attitude of many of our contemporaries.

Every age has its shadow side, no doubt, and there is much in past ages we have no wish to revive; nevertheless anyone who can look upon the historical life of man with certain intuitive sense will perceive that in this our own age many men have very little inner joy, on the contrary they are beset by heavy doubts and questions as to destiny. This age has less capacity than any other for deriving answers to its problems from out of the universe, the world at large. Though I may be very unhappy in myself, and with good reason, yet there is always a possibility of finding something in the universe which can counterbalance my unhappiness. But modern man has not the strength to find consolation in a view of the universe when his personal situation makes him downcast. Why is this? Because in his education and development modern man has little opportunity to acquire a feeling of gratitude: gratitude namely that we should be alive at all as human beings within this universe. Rightly speaking all our feelings should take their rise from a fundamental feeling of gratitude that the cosmic world has given us birth and given us a place within itself. A philosophy which concludes with abstract observations and does not flow out in gratitude towards the universe is no complete philosophy. The final chapter of every philosophy, in its effect on human feeling at all events, should be gratitude towards the cosmic powers. This feeling is essential in a teacher and educator, and it should be instinctive in every person who has the nurture of a child entrusted to him. Therefore the first thing of importance to be striven for in spiritual knowledge is the acquiring of thankfulness that a child has been given into our keeping by the universe.

In this respect reverence for the child, reverence and thankfulness, are not to be sundered. There is only one attitude towards a child which can give us the right impulse in education and nurture and that is the religious attitude, neither more nor less. We feel religious in regard to many things. A flower in the meadow can make us feel religious when we can take it as the creation of the divine spiritual order of the world. In face of lightning lashes in the clouds we feel religious if we see them in relation to the divine spiritual order of the world. And above all we must feel religious towards the child, for it comes to us from the depths of the universe as the highest manifestation of the nature of the universe, a bringer of tidings as to what the world is. In this mood lies one of the most important impulses of educational technique. Educational technique is of a different nature from the technique devoted to un-spiritual things. Educational technique essentially involves a religious moral impulse in the teacher or educator.

Now you will perhaps say: nowadays, although people are so terribly objective in regard to many things—things possibly of less vital importance—nowadays we shall yet find some who will think it a tragic thing that they should have a religious feeling for a child who may turn out to be a ne'er-do-well. But why must I regard it as a tragedy to have a child who turns out a ne'er-do-well?—To-day, as we said before, there are many parents, even in this terribly objective age, who will own that their children are ne'er-do-wells whereas this was not the case in former times; then every child was good in its parents' eyes. At all events this was a better attitude than the modern one.—Nevertheless we do get a feeling of tragedy if we receive as a gift from spiritual worlds, and as a manifestation of the highest, a difficult child. But we must live through this feeling of tragedy. For this very feeling of tragedy will help us over the rocks and crags of education. If we can feel thankfulness even for a naughty child, and feel the tragedy of it, and can rouse ourselves to overcome this feeling of tragedy we shall then be in a position to feel a right gratitude to the divine world; for we must learn to perceive how what is bad can also be a divine thing,—though this is a very complicated matter. Gratitude must permeate teachers and educators of children throughout the period up to the change of teeth, it must be their fundamental mood.

Then we come to that part of a child's development which is based principally on the rhythmic system, in which, as we have seen, we must work artistically in education. This we shall never achieve unless we can join to the religious attitude we have towards the child a love of our educational activity; we must saturate our educational practice with love. Between the Change of Teeth and Puberty nothing that is not born of Love for the Educational Deed itself has any effect on the child. We must say to ourselves with regard to the child: clever a teacher or educator may be, the child reveals to us in his life infinitely significant spiritual and divine things. But we, on our part, must surround with love the spiritual deed we do for the child in education. Hence there must be no pedagogy and didactics of a purely intellectual kind, but only such guidance as can help the teacher to carry out his education with loving enthusiasm.

In the Waldorf School what a teacher is is far more important than any technical ability he may have acquired in an intellectual way. The important thing is that the teacher should not only be able to love the child but to love the method he uses, to love his whole procedure. Only to love the children does not suffice for a teacher. To love teaching, to love educating, and love it with objectivity—this constitutes the spiritual foundation of spiritual, moral and physical education. And if we can acquire this right love for education, for teaching, we shall be able so to develop the child up to the age of puberty that by that time we can really hand him over to freedom, to the free use of his own intelligence.

If we have received the child in religious reverence, if we have educated him in love up to the time of puberty, then our proper course after this will be to leave the youth's spirit free, and to hold intercourse with him on terms of equality. We aim,—that is not to touch the spirit but to let it be awakened. When the child reaches puberty we shall best attain our aim of giving the child over to free use of his intellectual and spiritual powers if we respect the spirit and say to ourselves: you can remove hindrances from the spirit, physical hindrances and also, up to a point, hindrances of the soul. What the spirit has to learn it learns because you have removed the impediments. If we remove impediments the spirit will develop in contact with life itself even in very early youth. Our rightful place as educators is to be removers of hindrances.

Hence we must see to it that we do not make the children into copies of ourselves, that we do not seek forcibly and tyrannically to perpetuate what was in ourselves in those who in the natural course of things develop beyond us. Each child in every age brings something new into the world from divine regions, and it is our task as educators to remove bodily and psychical obstacles out of its way; to remove hindrances so that his spirit may enter in full freedom into life. These then must be regarded as the three golden rules of the art of education, rules which must imbue the teacher's whole attitude and all the impulse of his work. The golden rules which must be embraced by the teacher's whole being, not held as theory, are: reverent gratitude to the world in the person of the child which we contemplate every day, for the child presents a problem set us by divine worlds: Thankfulness to the universe. Love for what we have to do with the child. Respect for the freedom of the child—a freedom we must not endanger; for it is to this freedom we educate the child, that he may stand in freedom in the world at our side.

Every profound soul must repeatedly ask itself the question about the meaning of life and must always ask itself anew about the mystery of death. Not only when we look up at the starry heavens, at the far reaches of the world, but at every step of everyday life, questions arise about the essential riddles of life. When one person is born under such circumstances that we can already see at his cradle that hopelessness and hardship will accompany him through life, while another is born under the most favorable circumstances and with the most favorable disposition, so that it is known that he is destined for a happy life and will be able to bring many blessings to his fellow human beings, we ask: Why is that so? We ask: How is it that one person seems to be born and grows up in need and misery through no fault of their own, while the other seems to be able to lead a happy existence through no merit of their own?

Man is never able to answer the riddles of life by merely considering them physically. Theosophy seeks the answers in the spiritual realization of the background of existence, which leads beyond the sensual world. Not because idle curiosity plagues people, does Theosophy want to answer their questions about the riddles of life, but because humanity needs that confidence for its healthy existence, which comes from the sources that give us answers to the questions about the riddles of life.

If we want to explore the sources of life in the sense of the theosophical worldview, we must remember the structure of the human being. What the senses see in a person is only a part of the human being, which it shares with so-called mineral beings. Spiritual science shows us how the physical organism is kept alive by a second principle of human existence, the etheric or life body, which is a continuous fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. Furthermore, we have seen from the study of Theosophy how everything that lives in the soul in the way of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, instincts, desires and passions, has a third link in the human being as a carrier – the astral body. While the physical body is shared with all mineral beings, the etheric body is shared with all living beings, but the astral body is shared only with animals. The sum of powers, that which the human being has at the center of his being, he is able to summarize with the words “I am”. The “I am” is proper only to man among all the living beings around him.

From this I, he becomes the master and transformer of his other three limbs. As the I works, it first transforms part of the astral body into the spirit self or manas. By working on itself through powerful impulses, the life body is transformed into the life spirit or budhi. When the ego works down into the physical principle, Atman or the spiritual man develops from it.

The ordinary human being has the four limbs up to the I. Large parts of Manas are also usually already developed. In the course of his development, the human being will achieve the ability to independently develop the seven limbs of his being. Actually, the seven parts are only four limbs, because Manas is the transformed astral body, Budhi is the transformed etheric body, and Atman is the transformed principle of the physical body.

When a person wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night, we have the four limbs in front of us: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I.

In the state of sleep and in the state of death, these four members are present in different proportions. The state of sleep is also called the brother of death. When a person falls asleep in the evening, all the things that the astral body carries, such as desire and suffering, joy and pain, sink into an indeterminate darkness. The I also sinks into an indeterminate darkness when a person falls asleep in the evening. For those who view the human being from the standpoint of spiritual science, the state of the sleeping person is as follows: the physical body and the etheric body are lying in bed; the astral body and the ego are lifted out. In today's human beings, the astral being and the ego do not yet have spiritual organs of perception. In order to perceive the world, they still need the organs of the physical and etheric bodies. Otherwise, he cannot perceive consciously. Naively, man does not say, quite correctly, “My eye sees, my ear hears,” but “I see” and “I hear.” The sense organs of the physical body are the instruments of the astral body and the I.

Sleep thus presents itself as that state of man in which the astral body and the inner man, the I, are in a purely spiritual world. Is the astral body inactive during the night? It is not. During the night it is outside the physical and etheric bodies. For those who can explore these things, it can be observed that the astral body works on the physical and etheric bodies of the person throughout the night. Its actual home is where it is at night. There are the forces into which it immerses itself during the night. During the day, it absorbs all kinds of impressions through the external senses: form, color, light and so on. All of this surges back and forth in the astral body.

The astral body is not yet in complete harmony with the physical body; this is what causes fatigue. This has to be removed at night by the astral body immersing itself in the forces of its spiritual home and refreshing itself. Once complete harmony has been established between the astral body and the physical body, a very different state will have been reached. The surging and swaying of the impressions absorbed during the day from the physical environment manifests itself in the evening as fatigue. During the night, the astral body works off the fatigue. We feel the consequences of this work on the physical and etheric bodies early in the morning. We can see the manifestations of what the astral body does during the night in the refreshment we experience in the morning. Even when the physical and etheric bodies are ill, the astral body has a harmonizing effect on the disturbed etheric and physical bodies during sleep.

Physical science may object to some of these things, but spiritual processes at work behind the facts do not contradict the results of scientific research. If, time and again, physical research wants to object to the teachings of spiritual science about spiritual and psychological processes, the following example of a similar assessment can be pointed out. Let us assume: A person gives another a slap in the face. A has observed that the first person had a fit of anger and was therefore tempted to give the other a slap in the face. But B says: “I saw his hand rise and move towards the other person's face, and that's why he slapped him.” The part about the fit of anger is nonsense! This is the verdict of physical research when it insists on the truth of external facts in the face of the results of spiritual research. We only recognize a small part of the world when we only judge and observe external facts. Everything that happens in the world, that physics researches, that external observation shows us, these are only the gestures of the soul life of the world. The situation is quite different for a person in death than in sleep. Then not only the ego dissolves with the astral body, but the etheric body also goes with it and only the physical body remains behind. During life, the etheric body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body. But the physical body disintegrates the moment the etheric body leaves it. Immediately after death, the ego, the astral body and the etheric body are together – for a short while. Not all people experience this togetherness right after death; for each person, it lasts as long as that person has been able to exist without sleep.

The experiences that a person has during this time are very strange. They literally feel how they grow out of themselves, become greater. During this time, they see all the events of their past life around them as in a large memory tableau. This moment is extraordinary. Only in exceptional cases does a person experience something similar during their lifetime. It may be that in the event of a strong fright, when he is close to drowning or falling, he experiences a loosening of the etheric body from the physical body to such an extent that the memory of his entire past life then comes to him. However, this is only the case if the ego and the astral body do not lose consciousness. The astral body must remain within the etheric body.

Another example of the etheric body being disconnected from the physical body in places is when a limb, for example a hand, has fallen asleep. Children have a very telling expression for this; they say: “It feels like seltzer water.” The seer knows that at this moment the etheric body is protruding from the physical body at that point. The different blood circulation is only a consequence of the etheric body being partially released. Like the fingers of a glove, we can see the etheric body hanging out of the hand. When someone is hypnotized, you can see how the etheric body protrudes to the left and right, hanging down like rags.

Perhaps some will say that these explanations are nonsense and consider them foolishness. It is very good when we can cite examples from people who might otherwise laugh at theosophy to support our stories about the facts of the spiritual world. Criminal anthropologist Benedikt recounts the following experience: When he was once close to drowning while bathing, he suddenly saw his entire life before him.

We can explain this fact, that after death a person sees their entire previous life in front of them, and the similar experience of a tremendous shock, as follows: the etheric body is, among other things, also the carrier of memory. In ordinary life it is connected with the physical brain. At the moment when the vehicle of memory is freed from the physical brain, but while the astral body is still within the etheric body, the whole of life presents itself to the human soul as a great tableau of memories. Bit by bit it fades away into darkness, and a second corpse remains of the human being. From the etheric or life body, something remains for him like an essence, like an extract of the great memory picture, as if the content of a large book had been summarized in one page. So after death, the essence of earthly life remains for us from this memory tableau; this is incorporated into the astral body on its journey after death.

Now the human being still consists of his ego, the astral body and the imprinted essence of his last life. If we want to know what fate the astral body has after death, we must remember the experiences of ordinary life. Let us see who actually experiences the enjoyment of physical things. That is the astral body, which uses the physical organs only as tools. For example, in the case of a gourmet, it is also the astral body that uses the physical organs only as tools. But it is the astral body that craves the delicious food. Let us imagine ourselves in the astral body after death. It has the same desires and instincts as it had before, but now it lacks the instruments to satisfy them. The astral body is now in a special situation. It has desires but no tools to satisfy them. The human being is in a state of burning thirst. The more a person depends on everything that can only be satisfied by the physical body, the more burning the thirst. This thirst lasts until the astral body can recognize that it must get rid of these desires. The time of burning thirst is called the Kamaloka time; Kama - desire; Loka - place. It is the sum of experiences that can only be satisfied by the physical body and must be given up.

When man learns to seek the Divine-Spiritual in the world, he will lack nothing after death. It is a method of shortening the Kamaloka time if one frees oneself from the lower pleasures and learns to let one's inner being be satisfied by spiritual interests. The highest by which man can free himself from the sensual in the sensual is art, true art. The more idealistic and spiritual the art that affects a person, the shorter the Kamaloka period. Art that is directed towards the external, the sensual, is not suitable for the whole of the human being. For one person it is relatively longer, for another person it is relatively shorter, the time in which he must unlearn what connects him to the physical world.

Then there is the shedding of a third corpse. After a long time, the human being discards the astral corpse. The ego cannot take anything with it on the further pilgrimage through life that is not purified by the ego. The unpurified, unprocessed parts of the astral body remain in the astral world. These astral corpses are always around us. People who are or have been closely connected to the material world leave dense astral corpses behind.

Some influence on a person comes from the fact that he walks through spiritual entities, that his soul is permeated by such spiritual entities. These also include such astral corpses. Because if a person is not armed against it, he is open to such influences. A restlessness arises in him, perhaps also bad impulses. But a good person, full of character, will not succumb to these harmful influences.

We have now followed the human being to the point where only the ego remains, with the purified parts of the astral and etheric bodies. Now a purely spiritual state occurs, which is called devachan. The human being is stripped of his covers; he is a purely spiritual being. We now still have the I before us. It has sprung out of the bodily sheaths and has become spiritual in itself. The I in man is almost like a plant that has been enclosed in crevices and has been freed and unfolds freely. The I unfolds in all directions when the astral corpse has fallen away. It feels a bliss of the deepest kind.

If we want to get to know these feelings, we have to compare them with a feeling that is only a very weak echo of these feelings. When the hen on the egg uses her body heat to guide the developing being towards maturation, we have a small something in this feeling of bliss that the I experiences during this time.

Then comes the time when the fruit ripens, as an extract of the last life. It is not for nothing that the I has absorbed this extract of the last life. The I has absorbed the world in a thousand and one impressions. The I has faced life with the intellect and the mind. Everything it has absorbed is compressed into this small extract, and this extract has become a creator through the feeling of inner bliss.

The I is preparing to build a new human being. We have built ourselves as we are. Only the outer disposition and something of what is in the etheric body has been passed down to us by inheritance. What we have already seen developing in the child's body took this long time after death to utilize the fruits of the last life. Every time after death, the human being takes with them an extract of their last life. Each time, the human being builds a new life through what they have experienced. In addition to what we have brought with us from previous lives, after death we take with us the extract of our last life. The ego experiences this bringing in of the fruit of the last human life and its use as a blessing. So the ego works to use this fruit of the last life to build a new human being. Physical inheritance provides the building blocks. How they are put together comes from the last life. The extract of the last life contains the design of the new life.

But after death, people have more to do than just occupy themselves with themselves. If we look at the development of the earth, we have to realize that everything on earth is changing. People will not reappear on earth until they can have new experiences on earth. Imagine Europe a few centuries before Christ, when everything was covered with mighty forests, and how every corner of the earth has changed since then. The face of the earth is constantly changing, and so is the cultural face of the earth. Our children learn something completely different at school than the children of ancient Rome learned. The face of the earth has also changed in spiritual and mental terms. Where are the forces that bring about these changes?

The forces that transformed the Germany that existed in the first centuries after the birth of Christ lie in the spiritual world. The co-workers in this change are the people themselves. After death, they continue to work on the physiognomy of the earth. The seer sees how the earthly beings are surrounded and enveloped by the bodiless human beings who are preparing the soil into which they will be born into a new life. In the physical life, we build cities, construct instruments, machines, and so on. But after death we transform the face of the earth. We prepare the bed in which the human being will be embedded when he is ready to take on a new form. We see the human being creating in the spiritual world; he is one of the architects, one of the co-creators in the transformation of the earth.

It takes a long time for the earth to change in such a way that the soul returns to a completely different scene. Once man appeared for the first time in the earthly body. Before that he was in a purely spiritual world, in the bosom of the Godhead. What man experiences in the physical body in the physical world can only be experienced within the physical body. With each life he adds a new page to the previous one, so to speak. At the end of his incarnations, these earthly experiences are added to his soul, and he lays them down before the altar of the Deity.

As long as the human being can be enriched by special forms of earthly existence, he embodies himself. This is how the individual life is comprehensible. It is an effect of previous lives and is a preparation for a later life. This law was not created for brooding, for idle speculation and for looking back at the past without taking action. This law tells us: the experiences of this life are the consequences of previous lives and the preparations for later lives. If I am in need and misery, then this is the preparation for later experiences. This is a law of life that knows how to solve the riddles of life in a wonderful way.

If someone, invoking this law, were to object, as sometimes happens, that one could not then help someone who is in need, then that is completely nonsensical. Just as a merchant's balance is a specific one, but a new item can be entered on the debit and credit side every day, so you can take stock of all your good and bad deeds at any moment in your life, but a new item can also be added to either side at any moment. It is never out of the question for us to add completely new items. Through the law of karma, we are able to help people. It is a law that gives impetus to life and mobilizes all energy. The law of karma is often misunderstood from two sides: from theologians and from some theosophists. The theologians object that salvation was brought to all of humanity by Christ Jesus, and therefore people cannot do anything themselves for their salvation. On the other hand, many a theosophist believes that he must oppose the teaching of redemption through Christ Jesus because he believes in the law of karma. But if he understands the law of karma correctly, then he knows that you can always add a new item to your life account and that you can therefore always help another person. Thus, the more powerful a person is, the more he can help other people. A mighty being, such as Christ, can have an effect on an infinite number of people. The act of redemption is inscribed in the karma of all humanity. The law of karma is in beautiful harmony with the redemption of Christ Jesus.

The most beautiful instrument for comprehending the great religious truths is Theosophy. Through it, the modern human being receives the form that is right for his soul.

The meaning of life arises when we recognize that which is behind life and incorporate it into the impulses of our actions. Theosophy is for energetic people who want to create in this life. When we learn to recognize spiritual forces, we also learn to introduce them into life. The theosophist is indifferent to arguments for or against Theosophy based on the usual dialectical arguments. What matters for Theosophy is that it becomes an instrument for life, that it increasingly intervenes in life. In the next period of cultural development, it will become clear what people owe to Theosophy: that people become joyful in their work and hopeful through Theosophy.

Theosophy is a remedy for humanity. If it proves to be such, then it needs no other logical proof. If Theosophy has a healing effect on people, then it will be proven by the facts of life.

The latter part of the Bhagavad Gita is permeated by feelings and shades of meaning saturated with ideas of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In these last chapters our whole mode of thinking and feeling must be attuned so as to understand what is said in the sense of those three conditions. In the last lecture I sought to give an idea of those important concepts by making use of present-day experiences. Certainly anyone who enters deeply into this poem must perceive that since the time when it arose those concepts have shifted to some extent. Nevertheless, it would not have been correct to describe them simply by verbal quotations from the poem because our mode of feeling is different from what is contained there and we are unable to make those very different feelings our own. If we tried to we would only be describing the unknown by the unknown.

So in the Bhagavad Gita you will find with regard to food that the concepts we developed last time have shifted a little. What is true for man today about plant food was true for the ancient Indian of that food Krishna calls mild, gentle food. Whereas rajas food, which we described correctly for man today as mineral food (salt, for instance), would have been designated at that time as sour or sharp. For our constitution meat is essentially a tamas food, but the Indian meant by this something that could hardly be considered food at present, which gives us an idea of how different men were then. They called tamas food what had become rotten, had stood too long, and had a foul smell. For our present incarnation we could not properly call that tamas food because man's organism has changed, even as far as his physical body.

Thus, in order to understand these feelings of sattwa, rajas and tamas, so fundamental in the Gita, it is well for us to apply them to our own conditions. Now if we would consider what sattwa really is, it is best to begin by taking the most striking conception of it. In our time the man who can give himself up to knowledge as penetrating as our present knowledge of the mineral kingdom is a sattwa man. For the Indian he was not one who had such knowledge, but was one who went through the world with intelligent understanding as we would say, with heart and head in the right place. A man who takes without prejudice and bias the phenomena the world offers. A man who always perceives the world with sympathy and conceives it with intelligence; who receives the light of ideas, of feelings and sentiments streaming out from all the beauty and loveliness of the world; who avoids all that is ugly, developing himself rightly. He who does all this in the physical world is a sattwa man. In the inorganic world a sattwa impression is that of a surface not too brilliant, illuminated in such a way that its details of color can be seen in their right lustre yet bright also.

A rajas impression is one where a man is in a certain way prevented by his own emotions, his impulses and reactions, or by the thing itself, from fully penetrating what lies around him, so that he does not give himself up to it but meets it with what he himself is. For example, he becomes acquainted with the plant kingdom. He can admire it, but he brings his own emotions to bear on it and therefore cannot penetrate it to its depths.

Tamas is where a man is altogether given up to his bodily life, so that he is blunt and apathetic toward his environment, as we are toward a consciousness different from our own. While we dwell on the physical plane we know nothing of the consciousness of a dog or a horse, not even of another human being. In this respect man, as a rule, is blunt and dull. He withdraws into his own bodily life. He lives in impressions of tamas. But man must gradually become apathetic to the physical world in order to have access to the spiritual worlds in clairvoyance. In this way we can best read the ideas of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. In external nature a rajas impression would be that of a moderately bright surface, say of green, a uniform green shade; a dark-colored surface would represent a tamas impression. Where man looks out into the darkness of universal space, when the beautiful spectacle of the free heavens appears to him, the impression he gains is none other than that blue color that is almost a tamas color.

If we saturate ourselves with the feeling these ideas give we can apply them to everything that surrounds us. These ideas are really comprehensive. For the ancient Indian, to know well about this threefold nature of his surroundings meant not only a certain understanding of the outer world, it also meant bringing to life his own inner being. He felt it somewhat as follows. Imagine a primitive country man who sees the glory of nature around him—the early morning sky, the sun and stars, everything he can see. He does not think about it however. He does not build up concepts and ideas about the world but just lives on in utmost harmony with it. If he begins to feel himself an individual person, distinguishing his soul from his environment, he has to do so by learning to understand his surroundings through ideas about them.

To set up one's environment objectively before one is always a certain way of grasping the reality of one's own being. The Indian of the time of the Bhagavad Gita said, “So long as one does not penetrate and perceive the sattwa, rajas, and tamas conditions in one's environment, one continues merely to live in it. A person is not yet there, independently in his own being, but is bound up with his surroundings. However, when the world about him becomes so objective that one can pursue it everywhere with the awareness that this is a sattwa condition, this a rajas, that a tamas, then one becomes more and more free of the world, more independent in himself.” This therefore is one way of bringing about consciousness of self. At bottom this is Krishna's concern—to free Arjuna's soul from all those things that surround him and are characteristic of the time in which he lives. So Krishna explains, “Behold all the life there on the bloody field of battle where brothers confront brothers, with all that thou feelest thyself bound to, dissolved in, a part of. Learn to know that all that is there outside you runs its course in conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Then wilt thou contrast thyself with it; know that in thine own highest self thou dost not belong to it, and wilt experience thy separate being within thyself, the spirit in thee.”

Here we have another of the beautiful elements in the dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. At first we are gradually made acquainted with its ideas as abstract concepts, but afterward these become more and more vivid. The concepts of sattwa, rajas, and tamas take on living shape and form in the most varied spheres of life. Then at length the separation of Arjuna's soul from it all is accomplished, so to say, before our spiritual gaze. Krishna explains to him how we must free ourselves from all that is bound up with these three conditions, from that in which men are ordinarily interwoven.

There are sattwa men who are so bound up with existence as to be attached to all the happiness and joy they can draw from their environment. They speed through the world, drinking in their blissfulness from all that can give it to them. Rajas men are diligent, men of action; but they act because actions have such and such consequences to which they are attached. They depend on the joy of action, on the impression action makes upon them. Tamas men are attached to laziness, they want to be comfortable. They really do not want to act at all. Thus are men to be distinguished. Those whose souls and spirits are bound into external conditions belong to one or other of these three groups.

“But thine eyes shall see the daybreak of the age of self-consciousness. Thou shalt learn to hold thy soul apart. Thou shalt be neither sattwa, rajas nor tamas man.” Thus is Krishna the great educator of the human ego. He shows its separation from its environment. He explains soul activities according to how they partake of sattwa, rajas or tamas. If a man raises his belief to the divine creators of the world he is a sattwa man. Just in that time of the Gita, however, there were men who in a certain sense knew nothing of the Divine Beings guiding the universe. They were completely attached to the so-called nature spirits, those behind the immediate beings of nature. Such men are rajas men. The tamas men are those who in viewing the world get only so far as what we may call the ghost-like, which in its spiritual nature is nearest to the material. So, in regard to religious feeling also these three groups may be distinguished.

If we wished to apply these concepts to religious feeling in our time we should say (but without flattery) that those who strive after anthroposophy are sattwa men; those attached to external faith are rajas men; those who, in a material or spiritual sense, will only believe in what has bodily shape and form—the materialists and spiritualists—are the tamas men. The spiritualist does not ask for spiritual beings in whom he may believe; he is quite prepared to believe in them, but he does not want to lift himself up to them. He wants them to come down to him. They must rap, because he can hear rapping with physical ears. They must appear in clouds of light because such are visible to his eyes. Such are tamas men in a certain conscious sense, and quite in the sense too of the tamas men of Krishna's time.

There are also unconscious tamas men; the materialistic thinkers of our time who deny all that is spiritual. When materialists meet in conference today they persuade themselves that they adhere to materialism on logical grounds, but this is an illusion. Materialists are people who remain so not on the basis of logic but for fear of the spiritual. They deny the spirit because they are afraid of it. They are in effect compelled to deny it by the logic of their own unconscious soul, which does indeed penetrate to the door of the spiritual but cannot pass through. One who can see reality can see in a materialistic congress how each person in the depths of his soul is afraid of the spirit. Materialism is not logic, it is cowardice before the spiritual. All its arguments are nothing but an opiate to damp down this fear. Actually, Ahriman—the giver of fear—has every materialist by the neck. This is a grotesque but an austere and fundamental truth that one may recognize if one goes into any materialistic meeting. Why is such a meeting called? The illusion is that people there discuss views of the universe, but in reality it is a meeting to conjure up the devil Ahriman, to beckon him into their chambers.

Krishna, then, indicates to Arjuna how the different religious beliefs may be classified, and he also speaks to him of the different ways men may approach the Gods in actual prayer. In all cases the temper of man's soul can be described in terms of these three conditions. Sattwa, rajas, and tamas men are different in the way they relate to their Gods. Tamas men are such as priests, but whose priesthood depends on a kind of habit. They have their office but no living connection with the spiritual world. So they repeat Aum, Aum, Aum, which proceeds from the dullness, the tamas condition of their spirit. They pour forth their subjective nature in the Aum.

Rajas men look out on the surrounding world and begin to feel that it has something in it akin to themselves, that it is related to them and therefore worthy to be worshipped. They are the men of “Tat” who worship the “That,” the Cosmos, as being akin to themselves. Sattwa men perceive that what lives within us is one with all that surrounds us in the universe outside. In their prayer they have a sense for “Sat,” the All-being, the unity without and within, unity of the objective and the subjective. Krishna says that he who would truly become free in his soul, who does not wish to be merely a sattwa, rajas or tamas man in any one respect or another, must attain to a transformation of these conditions in himself so that he wears them like a garment, while in his real self he grows out beyond them.

This is the impulse that Krishna as the creator of self-consciousness must give. Thus he stands before Arjuna and teaches him to “Look upon all the conditions of the world, with all that is to man highest and deepest, but free thyself from the highest and deepest of the three conditions and in thine own self become as one who lays hold of himself. Learn and know that thou canst live without feeling thyself bound up with rajas, or tamas, or sattwa.” One had to learn this at that time because it was the beginning of the dawn in self-liberation, but here again, what then required the greatest effort can today be found right at hand. This is the tragedy of present life. There are too many today who stand in the world and burrow down into their own soul, finding no connection with the outer world; who in their feelings and all their inner experiences are lonely souls. They neither feel themselves bound up with the conditions of sattwa, rajas or tamas, nor are they free from them, but are cast out into the world like an endlessly, aimlessly revolving wheel. Such men who live only in themselves and cannot understand the world, who are unhappy because in their soul-life they are separated from all external existence—these represent the shadow side of the fruit that it was Krishna's task to develop in Arjuna and in all his contemporaries and successors. What had to be Arjuna's highest endeavor has become the greatest suffering for many men today.

Thus do successive ages change. Today we must say that we are at the end of the age that began with the time of the Bhagavad Gita. This may penetrate our feelings with deep significance. It may also tell us that just as in that ancient time those seeking self-consciousness had to hear what Krishna told Arjuna, those seeking their soul's salvation today, in whom self-consciousness is developed to a morbid degree, these too should listen. They should listen to what can lead them once more to an understanding of the three external conditions. What can do this?

Let us put forward some more preliminary ideas before we set out to answer this question. Let us ask again, what is it that Krishna really wants for Arjuna, whose relation to external conditions was a right one for his time? What is it that he says with divine simplicity and naïveté? He reveals what he wishes to be even to our present time. We have described how a kind of picture-consciousness, a living imagery, lighted up man's soul; how there was hovering above it, so to say, what today is self-consciousness, which men at that time had to strive for with all their might but which today is right at hand. Try to live into the soul condition of that time before Krishna introduced the new age. The world around men did not call forth clear concepts and ideas, but pictures like those of our dreams today. Thus the lowest region of soul-life was a picture-like consciousness, and this was illumined from the higher region—of sleep consciousness—through inspiration. In this way they could rise to still higher conditions. This ascent was called “entering into Brahma.” To ask a soul today, living in Western lands, to enter into Brahma would be a senseless anachronism. It would be like requiring a man who is halfway up a mountain to reach the top by the same way as one still down in the valley. With equal right could one ask a Western soul today to do Eastern exercises and “enter into Brahma” because this presupposes that a man is at the stage of picture consciousness, which as a matter of fact certain Easterners still are. What the men of the Gita age found in rising into Brahma, the Western man already has in his concepts and ideas. This is really true, that Shankaracharya would today introduce the ideas of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte to his revering disciples as the first stage of rising into Brahma. It is not the content, however, it is the pains of the way, that are important.

Krishna indicates a main characteristic of this rising into Brahma, by which we have a beautiful characterization of Krishna himself. At that time the constitution of the soul was all passive. The world of pictures came to you, you gave yourself up to these flowing pictures. Compare this with the altogether different nature of our everyday world. Devotion, giving ourselves up to things, does not help us to understand them, even though there are many who do not wish to advance to what must necessarily take place in our time. Nevertheless, for our age we have to exert ourselves, to be alive and active, in order to get ideas and concepts of our surrounding world. Herein lies all the trouble in our education. We have to educate children so that their minds are awake when their concepts of the surrounding world are being formed. Today the soul must be more active than it was in the age before the origin of the Bhagavad Gita. We can put it so:

Bhagavad Gita Age—rising to Brahma with passive souls.

Intellectual Age (our present age)—actively working our way up into the higher worlds.

What then must Krishna say when he wishes to introduce that new age in which the active way of gaining an understanding of the universe is gradually to begin? He must say, “I have to come; I have to give thee the ego-man, a gift that shall impel thee to activity.” If it had all remained passive as before—a being interwoven with the world, devoted to the world—the new age would never have begun. Everything connected with the entry of the soul into the spiritual world before the time of the Gita, Krishna calls devotion. “All is devotion to Brahma.” This he compares to the feminine in man; while what is the self in man, the active working element that is to create self-consciousness, that pushes up from within as the generator of the self-consciousness that is to come, Krishna calls the masculine in man. What man can attain in Brahma must be fertilized by Krishna. So his teaching to Arjuna is, “All men until now were Brahma-men. Brahma is all that is spread out as the mother-womb of the whole world. But I am the father, who came into the world to fertilize the maternal womb.”

Thus the consciousness of self is created, which is to work on all men. This is indicated as clearly as possible. Krishna and Brahma are related to each other as father and mother in the world. Together they produce the self-consciousness man must have in the further course of his evolution—the self-consciousness that makes it possible for him to become ever more perfect as an individual being. The Krishna faith has altogether to do with the single man, the individual person. To follow his teaching exclusively means to strive for the perfection of oneself as an individual. This can be achieved only by liberating the self; loosening it from all that adheres to external conditions. Fix your attention on this backbone of Krishna's teaching, how it directs man to put aside all externals, to become free from the life that takes its course in continually changing conditions of every kind; to comprehend oneself in the self alone, that it may be borne ever onward to higher perfection. See how this perfection depends on man's leaving behind him all the external configuration of things, casting off the whole of outer life like a shell, becoming free and ever more inwardly alive in himself. Man tearing himself away from his environment, no longer asking what goes on in external processes of perfection but asking how shall he perfect himself. This is the teaching of Krishna.

Krishna—that is, the spirit who worked through Krishna—appeared again in the Jesus child of the Nathan line of the House of David, described in St. Luke's Gospel. Thus, fundamentally, this child embodied the impulse, all the forces that tend to make man independent and loosen him from external reality. What was the intention of this soul that did not enter human evolution but worked in Krishna and again in this Jesus child? At a far distant time this soul had had to go through the experience of remaining outside human evolution because the antagonist Lucifer had come; he who said, “Your eyes will be opened and you will distinguish good and evil, and be as God.” In the ancient Indian sense Lucifer said to man, “You will be as the Gods, and will have power to find the sattwa, rajas and tamas conditions in the world.”

Lucifer directed man's attention to the outer world. By his instigation man had to learn to know the external, and therefore had to go through the long course of evolution down to the time of Christ. Then he came who was once withdrawn from Lucifer; came in Krishna and later in the Luke Jesus child. In two stages he gave that teaching that from another side was to be the antithesis of the teaching of Lucifer in Paradise. “He wanted to open your eyes to the conditions of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. Shut your eyes to these conditions and you will find yourselves as men, as self-conscious human beings.” Thus does the Imagination appear before us. On the one side the Imagination of Paradise, where Lucifer opens man's eyes to the three conditions in the external world, when for a while the Opponent of Lucifer withdraws. Then men go through their evolution and reach the point where in two stages another teaching is given them, of self-consciousness, which bids them close their eyes to the three external conditions. Both teachings are one-sided. If the Krishna-Jesus influence alone had continued, one one-sidedness would have been added to another. Man would have taken leave of all that surrounds him, would have lost all interest in external evolution. Each person would only have sought his own perfection. Striving for perfection is right; but such striving bought at the price of a lack of interest in the whole of humanity is one-sided, even as the Luciferic influence was one-sided. Hence the all-embracing Christ Impulse entered the higher synthesis of the two one-sided tendencies.

In the personality of the St. Luke Jesus child Himself the Christ Impulse lived for three years; the Christ who came to mankind to bring together these two extremes. Through each of them mankind would have fallen into weakness and sin. Through Lucifer humanity would have been condemned to live one-sidedly in the external conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Through Krishna they were to be educated for the other extreme, to close their eyes and seek only their own perfection. Christ took the sin upon Himself. He gave to men what reconciles the two one-sided tendencies. He took upon Himself the sin of self-consciousness that would close its eyes to the world outside. He took upon Himself the sin of Krishna, and of all who would commit his sin, and He took upon Himself the sin of Lucifer and of all who would commit the sin of fixing their attention on externalities. By taking both extremes upon Himself he makes it possible for humanity by degrees to find a harmony between the inner and the outer world because in that harmony alone man's salvation is to be found.

An evolution that has once begun, however, cannot end suddenly. The urge to self-consciousness that began with Krishna went on and on, increasing and intensifying self-consciousness more and more, bringing about estrangement from the outer world. In our time too this course is tending to continue. At the time when the Krishna impulse was received by the Luke Jesus child mankind was in the midst of this development, this increase of self-consciousness and estrangement from the outer world. It was this that was brought home to the men who received the baptism of John in the Jordan, so that they understood the Baptist when he said to them, “Change your disposition; walk no longer in the path of Krishna”—though he did not use this word. The path on which mankind had then entered we may call the Jesus-path if we would speak in an occult sense. In effect, the pursuit of this Jesus-path alone went on and on through the following centuries. In many respects human civilization in the centuries following the foundation of Christianity was only related to Jesus, not to the Christ Who lived in Jesus for the three years from the baptism by John until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Every line of evolution, however, works its way onward up to a certain tension. In the course of time this longing for individual perfection was driven to such a pitch that men were in a certain sense brought more and more into the tragedy of estrangement from the divine in nature, from the outer world. Today we are experiencing this in many ways. Many people are going about among us who have little understanding left of our environment. Therefore, it is just in our time that an understanding of the Christ Impulse must break in upon us. The Christ-path must be added to the Jesus-path. The path of one-sided striving for perfection has become too strong. It has gone so far that in many respects men are so remote from their surroundings that certain movements, when they arise, over-reach themselves immediately, and the longing for the opposite is awakened. Many human souls now feel how little they can escape from this enhanced self-consciousness, and this creates an impulse to know the divinity of the outer world. It is such souls as these who in our time will seek the understanding of the Christ Impulse that is opened up by true anthroposophy; the force that does not merely strive for the one-sided perfection of the individual soul but belongs to the whole progress of humanity. To understand the Christ means not merely to strive toward perfection, but to receive in oneself something expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” “I” is the Krishna word. “Not I, but Christ in me,” is the Christian word.

So we see how every spiritual movement in history has in a certain sphere its justification. No one must imagine that the Krishna impulse could have been dispensed with. No one should ever think either that one human spiritual movement is fully justified in its one-sidedness. The two extremes—the Luciferic and the Krishna impulses—had to find their higher unity in the mission of the Christ.

He who would understand in the true anthroposophic sense the impulse necessary for the further evolution of mankind, must realize how anthroposophy has to become a means of shedding light on all religions. He must learn to see how the different streams in evolution all flow into the one main current of development. It would be a dilettante way of beginning to do this if one tried to find again in the Krishna stream what can be found in the stream of Christianity. Only when we regard the matter in this way do we understand what it means to seek a unity in all religions. There is, however, another way of doing so. One may repeat over and over, “In all religions the same fundamental essence is contained.” In effect, the same essence is contained in the root of a plant, in the stem, leaves, flowers, the pollen, and the fruit. That is true, but it is an abstract truth. It is no more profound than if one were to say, “Why make any distinctions? Salt, pepper, vinegar, and milk all have their place on the table; all are one, for all are substance.” Here you can tell how futile such a way of thought can be, but you do not notice it so easily when it comes to comparing religions. It will not do to compare the Chinese, Brahmin, Krishnan, Buddhist, Persian, Moslem, and Christian faiths in this abstract way, saying, “Look, everywhere we find the same principles. In each case there is a Savior.”

Abstractions can indeed be found in countless places and in countless ways, but this is a dilettante method because it leads to nothing. One may form societies to pursue the study of all religions, and do so in the same sense as saying pepper, salt, etc. are one because they are all substance. That has no importance. What is important is to regard things as they really are. To the way of looking at things that goes so far in occult dilettantism as to keep on declaiming the equality of all religions, it is one and the same whether what lived in the Christ is the pivot of the whole of evolution or whether it can be found in the first man you meet in the street. For one who wishes to guide his life by truth it is an atrocity to associate the impulse in the world's history that is bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha and for which the name Christ has been preserved—to associate that impulse with any other impulse in history, because in truth it is the central point of the whole of earthly evolution.

In these lectures I have tried by means of a particular instance to indicate how present-day occultism must try to throw light on the different spiritual movements that have appeared in the course of human history. Though each has its right and proper point of contact, one must distinguish between them as between the stem of a plant and the green leaf, and the green leaf from the colored petal, though all together form a unity. If one tries with this truly modern occultism to penetrate with one's soul into what has flowed into humanity in diverse currents, one recognizes how the different religious faiths lose nothing of their greatness and majesty. How sublime was the greatness that appeared to us in the figure of Krishna even when we simply tried to get a definite view of his place in evolution. All such lines of thought as we can give only in outline are indeed imperfect enough, and you may be assured that no one is more aware of their imperfection than the present speaker. But the endeavor has been to show in what spirit a true consideration of the spiritual movement toward individuality in mankind must be carried out. I purposely tried to derive our thoughts from a spiritual creation remote from us, the Bhagavad Gita, to show how Western minds can perceive and feel what they owe to Krishna; what he, through the continued working of his impulse, still signifies for their own upward striving.

However, the spiritual movement we here represent necessarily demands that we enter concretely, and with real love, into the special nature of every current in man's spiritual history. This is a bit inconvenient because it brings us all too near to the humble thought of how little after all we really penetrate into their depths. Another idea follows upon this, that we must go on striving further and ever further. Both of these ideas are inconvenient. It is the sad fate of that movement we call anthroposophy, that it produces inconvenient results for many souls. It requires that we actively lay hold of the definite, separate facts of the world's development. At the same time it requires each of us to say earnestly to himself, “I can indeed reach something higher, and I will. Always it is only a certain stage and standpoint that I have attained. I must forever go on striving—on—and on—without end.”

Thus, all along it has been not quite comfortable to belong to that spiritual movement that by our efforts is endeavoring to take its place in what is called the Theosophical Movement.¹ It has not been easy, because we demand that people shall learn to strive ever more deeply to penetrate the sacred mysteries. We could not supply you with anything so easy as introducing some person's son or even daughter, saying, “You need only wait, the Savior of mankind will appear physically embodied in this boy or girl.” We could not do this because we must be true. Yet, one who perceives what is happening cannot but regard these latest proceedings as the final grotesque outcome of the dilettante comparison of religions that can also be put forward so easily, and that continually repeats what should be taken as a matter of course, the tritest of all sayings, “All religions contain the same essence.”

The last weeks and months have shown—and my speaking here on this significant subject has shown it again—that a circle of people can be found at the present time who are ready to seek spiritual truths. We have no other concern than to put these truths forward, though many, or even everyone, may leave us. If so, it will make no difference in the way the spiritual truths are here proclaimed. The sacred obligation to truth will guide that movement that underlies this cycle of lectures. Whoever would go with us must do so under the conditions that have now become necessary. It is certainly more convenient to proceed otherwise, not entering into another side of the matter as we do by pointing out the reality in all things. But that also is part of our obligation to truth. It is simpler to inform people of the equality and unity of religions, or tell them they are to wait for the incarnation of a Savior who is predestined, whom they are to recognize not by themselves but on someone's authority.

Human souls today will themselves have to decide how far a spiritual movement can be carried on and upheld by pure devotion to the ideal of truthfulness. In our time it had to come to that sharp cleavage, whose climax was reached when those who had no other desire than to set forth what is true and genuine in evolution, were described as Jesuits. This was a convenient way of separating, but the external evidence was the work of objective falsehood. This cycle of lectures may once more have shown you that we have been working out of no one-sided tendency, since it comprises the present, the past, and the primal past, in order to reveal the unique, fundamental impulse of human evolution. So I too may say that it fills me with the deepest satisfaction to have been able to give these lectures here before you. This shows me there is hope because there are souls here who have the impulse, the urge toward that which works also in the super-sensible with nothing but simple, honest truthfulness.

I was forced to add this final word to these lectures, for it is necessary in view of all that has happened to us in the course of time down to the point of being excluded from the Theosophical Society. Considering all we have suffered, and all that is now being falsely asserted in numerous pamphlets, it was necessary to say something, although a discussion of these matters is always painful to me.

Those who desire to work with us must know that we have taken for our banner the humble, yet unconditional, honest, striving for truth; striving ever upward into the higher worlds.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring here, and in the following passages, to his break with the Theosophical Society and to the formation of the Anthroposophical Society. A full account of these events can be found in G. Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, pp. 186–189, available from the Anthroposophic Press, Inc.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! A number of questions have been handed in, which lead up in quite an interesting way to what we want to discuss today. Someone has asked:

“How did man's cultural development come about?” I will consider this in connection with a second question:

“Why did primitive man have such a strong belief in the spirit?”

It is certainly interesting to investigate how human beings lived in earlier times. As you know, even from a superficial view there are two opposing opinions about this. One is that man was originally at a high level of perfection, from which he has fallen to his present imperfect state. We don't need to take exception to this, or to be concerned with the way different peoples have interpreted this perfection—some talking of paradise, some of other things. But until a short time ago the belief existed that man was originally perfect and gradually degenerated to his present state of imperfection. The other view is the one you've probably come to know as supposedly the only true one, namely, that man was originally imperfect, like some kind of higher animal, and that he gradually evolved to greater and greater perfection. You know how people point to the primitive conditions prevailing among the savage peoples—the so-called savage peoples—in trying to form an idea of what man could have been like when he still resembled an animal. People say: We Europeans and the Americans are highly civilized, while in Africa, Australia, and so on, there still live uncivilized races at their original stage, or at least at a stage very near the original. From these one can study what humanity was like originally.

But, gentlemen, this is making far too simple a picture of human evolution. First of all, it is not true that all civilized peoples imagine man to have been a physically perfect being originally. The people of India are certainly not much in agreement with opinions of our modern materialists, and yet, even so, their conception is that the physical man who went about on the earth in primitive times looked like an animal. Indeed, when the Indians, the wise men of India, speak of man in his original state on earth, they speak of the ape-like Hanuman. So you see, it is not true that even people with a spiritual world view picture primeval man similarly to the way we imagine him in paradise. And in fact, it is not so.

We must rather have a clear knowledge that man is a being who bears within him body, soul, and spirit, with each of these three parts undergoing its own particular evolution. Naturally, if people have no thought of spirit, they can't speak of the evolution of spirit. But once we acknowledge that a human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, we can go on to ask how the body evolves, how the soul evolves, and how the spirit evolves. When we speak of the human body we will have to say: Man's body has gradually been perfected from lower stages. We must also say that the evidence we have for this provides us with living proof. As I have already pointed out, we find original man in the strata of the earth, exhibiting a very animal-like body—not indeed like any present animal but nevertheless animal-like, and this must have developed gradually to its present state of perfection. There is no question, therefore, of spiritual science as pursued here at the Goetheanum coming to loggerheads with natural science, for it simply accepts the truths of natural science.

On the other hand, gentlemen, we must be able to recognize that in the period of time of only three or four thousand years ago, views prevailed from which we can learn a great deal and which we also can't help but admire. When we are guided by genuine knowledge in seriously studying and understanding the writings that appeared in India, Asia, Egypt, and even Greece, we find that the people of those times were far ahead of us. What they knew, however, was acquired in quite a different way from the way we acquire knowledge today.

Today there are many things we know very little about. For instance, from what I have told you in connection with nutrition you will have seen how necessary it is for spiritual science to come to people's aid in the simplest nutritional matters. Natural science is unable to do so. But we have only to read what physicians of old had to say, and rightly understand it, to become aware that actually people up to the time of, for instance, Hippocrates¹² in Greece knew far more than is known by our modern materialistic physicians. We come to respect, deeply respect, the knowledge once possessed. The only thing is, gentlemen, that knowledge was not then imparted in the same form as it is today. Today we express our knowledge in concepts. This was not so with ancient peoples; they clothed their knowledge in poetical imaginations, so that what remained of it is now just taken figuratively as poetry. It was not poetry to those men of old; that was their way of expressing what they knew. Thus we find when we are able to test and thoroughly study the documents still existing, that there can no longer be any question of original humanity being undeveloped spiritually. They may once have gone about in animal-like bodies, but in spirit they were infinitely wiser than we are!

But there is something else to remember. You see, when man went about in primeval times, he acquired great wisdom spiritually. His face was more or less what we would certainly call animal-like, whereas today in man's face his spirit finds expression; now his spirit is, as it were, embodied in the physical substance of his face. This, gentlemen, is a necessity if man is to be free, if he is to be a free being. These clever men of ancient times were very wise; but they possessed wisdom in the way the animal today possesses instinct. They lived in a dazed condition, as if in a cloud. They wrote without guiding their own hand. They spoke with the feeling that it was not they who were speaking but the spirit speaking through them. In those primeval times, therefore, there was no question of man being free.

This is something in the history of culture that constitutes a real step forward for the human race: that man acquired consciousness, that he is a free being. He no longer feels the spirit driving him as instinct drives the animal. He feels the spirit actually within him, and this distinguishes him from the man of former times.

When from this point of view we consider the savages of today, it must strike us that the men of primeval times—called in the question here primitive men—were not like the modern savages, but that the latter have, of course, descended from the former, from the primeval men. You will get a better idea of this evolution if I tell you the following.

In certain regions there are people who have the idea that if they bury some small thing belonging to a sick person—for instance, bury a shirttail of his in the cemetery—that this can have the magical effect of healing him. I have even known such people personally. I knew one person who, at the time the Emperor Frederick¹³ was ill (when he was still Crown Prince—you know all about that), wrote to the Empress (as she was later), asking for the shirttails belonging to her husband. He would bury them in the cemetery and the Emperor would then be cured. You can imagine how this request was received. But the man had simply done what he thought would lead to the Emperor's recovery. He himself told me about it, adding that it would have been much less foolish to let him have that shirttail than to send for the English Doctor Mackenzie, and so on; that had been absurd—they should have given him the shirttail.

Now when this kind of thing comes to the notice of a materialist he says: That's a superstition which has sprung up somewhere. At some time or other someone got it into his head that burying the shirttails of a sick man in the cemetery and saying a little prayer over it would cure the man.

Gentlemen, nothing has ever arisen in that way. No superstition arises by being thought out. It comes about in an entirely different way. There was once a time when people had great reverence for their dead and said to themselves: So long as a man is going about on earth he is a sinful being; beside doing good things he does many bad things. But, they thought, the dead man lives on as soul and spirit, and death makes up for all deficiencies. Thus when they thought of the dead, they thought of what was good, and by thinking of the dead they tried to make themselves better.

Now it is characteristic of human beings to forget easily. Just think how quickly those who have left us—the dead—are forgotten today! In earlier times there were persons who would give their fellowman various signs to make them think of the dead and thus to improve them. Someone in a village would think that if a man was ill, the other villagers should look after him. It was certainly not the custom to collect sick pay; that kind of thing is a modern invention. In those days the villagers all helped one another out of kindness; everyone had to think of those who were ill. The leading man in the village might say: People are egoists, so they have no thought of the sick unless they are encouraged to get out of themselves and have thoughts, for instance, of the dead. So he would tell them they should take—well, perhaps the shirttail of the sick man by which to remember him, and they should bury this in the earth, then they would surely remember him. By thinking of the dead they would remember to take care of someone living. This outer deed was contrived simply to help people's memory.

Later, people forgot the reason for this and it was put down to magic, superstition. This happens with very much that lives on as superstition; it has arisen from something perfectly reasonable. What is perfect never arises from what is imperfect. The assertion that something perfect can come from what is not perfect appears to anyone with insight as if it were said: You're to make a table, but you must make it as clumsy and unfinished as you can to begin with, so that it may in time become a perfect table. But things don't happen that way. We never get a well-made table from one that is ill-made. The table begins by being a good one and becomes battered in the course of time. And that's the way it happens outside in nature too, anywhere in the world. You first have things in a perfect state, then out of them comes the imperfect. It is the same with the human being: his spirit in the beginning, though lacking freedom, was in a certain state of perfection. But his body—it is true—was imperfect. And yet precisely in this lay the body's perfection: it was soft and therefore capable of being formed by the spirit so that cultural progress could be made.

So you see, gentlemen, we are not justified in thinking that human beings were originally like the savages of today. The savages have developed into what they now are—with their superstitions, their magical practices and their unclean appearance-from states originally more perfect. The only superiority we have over them is that, while starting from the same conditions, we did not degenerate as they did. I might therefore say: The evolution of man has taken two paths. It is not true that the savages of today represent the original condition of mankind. Mankind, though to begin with it looked more animal-like, was highly civilized.

Now perhaps you will ask: But were those original animal-like men the descendants of apes or of other animals? That is a natural question. You look at the apes as they are today and say: We are descended from those apes. Ah! but when human beings had their animal form, there were no such animals as our present apes! Men have not descended, therefore, from the apes. On the contrary! Just as the present savages have fallen from the level of the human beings of primeval times, so the apes are beings who have fallen still lower.

On going back further in the evolution of the earth, we find human beings formed in the way I described here recently, out of a soft element-not out of our present animals. Human beings can never evolve out of the apes of today. On the other hand it could easily be possible that if conditions prevailing on earth today continue, conditions in which everything is based on violence and power, and wisdom counts for nothing—well, it could indeed happen that the men who want to found everything on power would gradually take on animal-like bodies again, and that two races would then appear. One race would be those who stand for peace, for the spirit, and for wisdom, while the other would be those who revert to an animal form. It might indeed be said that those who care nothing today for the progress of mankind, for spiritual realities, may be running the risk of degenerating into an ape species.

You see, all manner of strange things are experienced today. Of course, what newspapers report is largely untrue, but sometimes it shows the trend of people's thinking in a remarkable way. During our recent trip to Holland we bought an illustrated paper, and on the last page there was a curious picture: a child, a small child, really a baby—and as its nurse, taking care of it, bringing it up, an ape, an orangutan. There it was, holding the baby quite properly, and it was to be engaged, the paper said,—somewhere in America, of course—as a nursemaid.

Now it is possible that this may not yet be actual fact, but it shows what some people are fancying: they would like to use apes today as nursemaids. And if apes become nursemaids, gentlemen, what an outlook for mankind! Once it is discovered that apes can be employed to look after children—it is, of course, possible to train them to do many things; the child will have to suffer for it, but the ape could be so trained: in certain circumstances it could be trained to look after the physical needs of children—well, then people will carry the idea further and the social question will be on a new level. You will see far-reaching proposals for breeding apes and putting them to work in factories. Apes will be found to be cheaper than men, hence this will be looked upon as the solution of the social problem. If people really succeed in having apes look after their children—well, we'll be deluged by pamphlets on how to solve the social question by breeding apes!

It is indeed conceivable that this might easily happen. Only think: other animals beside apes can be trained to do many things. Dogs, for instance, are very teachable. But the question is whether this will be for the advance or the decline of civilization. Civilization will most definitely decline. It will deteriorate. The children brought up by ape-nurses will quite certainly become ape-like. Then indeed we shall have perfection changing into imperfection. We must realize clearly that it is indeed possible for certain human beings to have an ape-like nature in the future, but that the human race in the past was never such that mankind evolved from the ape. For when man still had an animal form—quite different indeed from that of the ape—the present apes were not yet in existence. The apes themselves are degenerate beings; they have fallen from a higher stage.

When we consider those primitive peoples who may be said to have been rich in spirit but animal-like in body, we find they were still undeveloped in reason, in intelligence—the faculty of which we are so proud. Those men of ancient times were not capable of thinking. Hence, when anyone today who prides himself particularly on his thinking comes across ancient documents, he looks for them to be based on thought—and looks in vain. He says, therefore: This is all very beautiful, but it's simply poetry. But, gentlemen, we can't judge everything by our own standards alone, for then we go astray. That ancient humanity had, above all, great powers of imagination, an imagination that worked like an instinct. When we today use our imagination we often pull ourselves up and think: Imagination has no place in what is real. This is quite right for us today, but the men of primeval times, primitive men, would never have been able to carry on without imagination.

Now it will seem strange to you how this lively imagination possessed by primitive men could have been applied to anything real. But here too we have wrong conceptions. In your history books at school you will have read about the tremendous importance for human evolution that is accorded to the invention of paper. The paper we write on—made of rags—has been in existence for only a few centuries. Before that, people had to write on parchment, which has a different origin. Only at the end of the Middle Ages did someone discover the possibility of making paper from the fibers of plants, fibers worn threadbare after having first been used for clothes. Human beings were late in acquiring the intellect that was needed for making this paper.

But the same thing (except that it is not as white as we like it for our black ink) was discovered long ago. The same stuff as is used for our present paper was discovered not just two or three thousand years ago but many, many thousands of years before our day. By whom, then? Not by human beings at all, but by wasps! Just look at any wasp's nest you find hanging in a tree. Look at the material it consists of—paper! Not white paper, not the kind you write on, for the wasps are not yet in the habit of writing, otherwise they would have made white paper, but such paper as you might use for a package. We do have a drab-colored paper for packages that is just what the wasps use for making their nests. The wasps found out how to make paper thousands and thousands of years ago, long before human beings arrived at it through their intellect.

The difference is that instinct works in animals while in the man of primeval times it was imagination; they would have been incapable of making anything if imagination had not enabled them to do so, for they lacked intelligence. We must therefore conclude that in outward appearance these primeval men were more like animals than are the men of today, but to a certain extent they were possessed by the spirit, the spirit worked in them. It was not they who possessed the spirit through their own powers, they were possessed by it and their souls had great power of imagination. With imagination they made their tools; imagination helped them in all they did, and enabled them to make everything they needed.

We, gentlemen, are terribly proud of all our inventions, but we should consider whether we really have cause to be so; for much of what constitutes the greatness of our culture has actually developed from quite simple ideas. Listen to this, for instance: When you read about the Trojan War, do you realize when it took place?—about 1200 years before the founding of Christianity. Now when we hear about wars like that—which didn't take place in Greece, but far away, over there in Asia—well, hearing the outcome the next day in Greece by telegram, as we would now do: that, gentlemen, didn't happen in those days! Today if we receive a telegram, the Post Office dispatches it to us. Naturally this didn't happen at that time in Greece, for the Greeks had no telegraph. What then could they do? Well, now look, the war was over here in one place; then there was the sea and an island, a mountain and again sea; over there another island, a mountain and then sea; and so on, till you came to Greece—here Asia, sea, and here in the midst, Greece. It was agreed that when the war was ended three fires would be kindled on the mountains. Whoever was posted on the nearest mountain was to give the first signal by running up and lighting three fires. The watch on the next mountain, upon seeing the three fires, lit three fires in his turn; the next watchman again three fires; and in this way the message arrived in Greece in quite a short time. This was their method of sending a telegram. It was done like that. It's a simple way of telegraphing. It worked fast—and before the days of the telegram people had to make do with this.

And how is it today? When you telephone—not telegraph but telephone—I will show you in the simplest possible way what happens. We have a kind of magnet which, it is true, is produced by electricity; and we have something called an armature. When the circuit is closed, this is pulled close; when the circuit is open, the armature is released, and thus it oscillates back and forth. It is connected by a wire with a plate, which vibrates with it and transmits what is generated by the armature—in just the same way as in those olden times the three fires conveyed messages to men. This is rather more complicated, and, of course, electricity has been used in applying it, but it is still the same idea.

When we hear such things we must surely respect what the human beings of those ancient times devised and organized out of their imaginative faculty. And when we read the old documents with this feeling we must surely say: Those men accomplished great things on a purely spiritual level and all out of imagination. To come to a thorough realization of this you need only to consider what people believe today. They believe they know something about the old Germanic gods—Wotan, Loki, for instance. You find pictures of them in human form in books: Wotan with a flowing beard; Loki looking like a devil, with red hair, and so on. It is thought that the men of old, the ancient Germans, had the same ideas about Wotan and Loki. But that is not true. The men of old had rather the following conception: When the wind blows, there is something spiritual in it—which is indeed true—and that is Wotan blowing in the wind. They never imagined that when they went into the woods, they would meet Wotan there in the guise of an ordinary man. To describe a meeting with Wotan they would have spoken of the wind blowing through the woods. This can still be felt in the very word Wotan by anyone who is sensitive to these things. And Loki—they had no image of Loki sitting quietly in a corner staring stupidly; Loki lived in the fire!

Indeed, in various ways the people were always talking about Wotan and Loki. Someone would say, for instance: When you go over the mountain, you may meet Wotan. He will make you either strong or weak, whichever you deserve. That is how people felt, how they understood these things. Today one says that's just superstition. But in those times they didn't understand it to be so. They knew: When you go up there to that corner so difficult to reach, you don't meet a man in a body like any ordinary man. But the very shape of the mountain gives rise to a special whirlwind in that place, and a special kind of air is wafted up to that corner from an abyss. If you withstand this and keep to your path, you may become well or you may become ill. In what way you become well or ill, the people were ready to tell; they were in harmony with nature and would speak not in an intellectual way but out of their imagination. Your modern doctor would try to express himself intellectually: If you have a tendency to tuberculosis, go up to a certain height on the mountain and sit there every day. Continue to do this for some time, for it will be most beneficial. That is the intellectual way of talking. But if you speak imaginatively you say: Wotan is always to be found in that high corner; if you visit him at a certain time every day for a couple of weeks, he will help you.

This is the way people coped with life out of their imagination. They worked in this way, too. Surely at some time or other you have all been far out in the country where threshing is not done by machine but is still being done by hand. You can hear the people threshing in perfect rhythm. They know that when they have to thresh for days at a time, if they go at their work without any order, just each one on his own, they will very soon be overcome by exhaustion. Threshing can't be done that way. If, however, they work rhythmically, all keeping time together, exhaustion is avoided—because their rhythm is then in harmony with the rhythm of their breathing and circulation. It even makes a difference whether they strike their flail on the out-breathing or the in-breathing or whether they do it as they are changing over from one to the other. Now why is this? You can see that it has nothing to do with intellect, for today this old way of threshing is almost unheard of. Everything of that kind is being wiped out. But in the past, all work was done rhythmically and out of imagination. The beginnings of human culture developed out of rhythm.

Now I don't suppose you really think that if you take a chunk of wood and some bits of string and fool about with them in some amateurish fashion, you'll suddenly have a violin. A violin comes about when mind, when spirit, is exerted, when the wood is carefully shaped in a particular way, when the string is put through a special process, and so forth. We have to say then: These primeval people, who were not yet thinking for themselves, could attribute the way machines were originally made only to the spirit that possessed them, that worked in them. Therefore, these people, working not out of the intellect, but out of their imagination, naturally tended to speak of the spirit everywhere.

When today someone constructs a machine by the work of his intellect, he does not say that the spirit helped him—and rightly so. But when a man of those early times who knew nothing about thinking, who had no capacity for, thinking, when that man constructed something, he felt immediately: the spirit is helping me.

It happened therefore that when the Europeans, those “superior” humans, first arrived in America and also later, in the nineteenth century, when they came to the regions where Indians such as belonged to ancient times were still living, these Indians spoke of (it was possible to find out what they were saying) the “Great Spirit” ruling everywhere. These primitive men have always continued to speak in this way of the Being ruling in everything. It was this “Great Spirit” that was venerated particularly by the human beings living in Atlantean times when there was still land between Europe and America; the Indians retained this veneration, and knew nothing as yet of intellect. They then came gradually to know the “superior” men before being exterminated by them. They came to know the Europeans' printed paper on which there were little signs which they took to be small devils. They abhorred the paper and the little signs, for these were intellectual in origin, and a man whose activities arise out of imagination abominates what comes from the intellect.

Now the European with his materialistic civilization knows how to construct a locomotive. The intellectual method by which he constructs his engine could never have been the way the ancient Greeks would have set about it, for the Greeks still lacked intellect. Intellect first came to man in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Greeks would have carried out their construction with the help of their imagination. Since the Greeks ascribed all natural forms to good spirits and all that is not nature, all that is artificially produced, to bad spirits, they would have said: An evil spirit lives in the locomotive. They would certainly have contrived their construction from imagination; nothing else would ever have occurred to them than that they were being aided by the spirit.

Therefore, gentlemen, you see that we have actually to ascribe a lofty spirit to the original, primitive human being; for imagination is of a far more spiritual nature in the human soul than the mere intellect that is prized so highly today.

Former conditions, however, can never come back. We have to go forward—but not with the idea that what exists today in the animal as pure instinct could ever have developed into spirit. We ought not, therefore, to picture primitive men as having been possessed of mere instinct. They knew that it was the spirit working in them. That is why they had, as we say nowadays, such a strong belief in the spirit.

Perhaps this contributes a little to our understanding of how human culture has evolved. Also, we must concede that the people are right who contend that human beings have arisen from animal forms, for so indeed they have—but not from such forms as the present animals, for these forms only came into being later when humanity was already in existence. The early animal-like forms of man which gradually developed in the course of human evolution into his present form, together with the faculties which he already had at that time, came about because man's spiritual entity was originally more perfect than it is today—not in terms of intellect but of imagination. We have to remember always that this original perfection was due to the fact that man was not free; man was, as it were, possessed by the spirit. Only intellect enables man to become free. By means of his intellect man can become free.

You see, anyone who works with his intellect can say: now at a certain hour I'm going to think out such and such a thing. This can't be done by a poet, for even today a poet still works out of his imagination. Goethe was a great poet. Sometimes when someone asked him to write a poem or when he himself felt inclined to do so, he sat himself down to write one at a certain time—and, well, the result was pitiful! That people are not aware of this today comes simply from their inability to distinguish good poetry from bad. Among Goethe's poems there are many bad ones. Imaginative work can be done only when the mood for it is there, and when the mood has seized a poet, he must write the poem down at once. And that's how it was in the case of primeval humans. They were never able to do things out of free will. Free will developed gradually-but not wisdom. Wisdom was originally greater than free will and it must now regain its greatness. That means, we have to come back to the spirit by way of the intellect.

And that, you see, is the task of anthroposophy. It has no wish to do what would please many people, that is, to bring primitive conditions back to humanity-ancient Indian wisdom, for example. It is nonsense when people harp on that. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, sets value on a return to the spirit, but a return to the spirit precisely in full possession of the intellect, with the intellect fully alive. It is important, gentlemen, and must be borne strictly in mind, that we have nothing at all against the intellect; rather, the point is that we have to go forward with it. Originally human beings had spirit without intellect; then the spirit gradually fell away and the intellect increased. Now, by means of the intellect, we have to regain the spirit. Culture is obliged to take this course.

If it does not do so—well, gentlemen, people are always saying that the World War was unlike anything ever experienced before, and it is indeed a fact that men have never before so viciously torn one another to pieces. But if men refuse to take the course of returning to the spirit and bringing their intellect with them, then still greater wars will come upon us, wars that will become more and more savage. Men will really destroy one another as the two rats did that, shut up together in a cage, gnawed at each other till there was nothing left of them but two tails. That is putting it rather brutally, but in fact mankind is on the way to total extermination. It is very important to know this.

• 12. Hippocrates of Cos, 460–377 BC. Greek physician, founder of ancient medicine.
• 13. Emperor Frederick III, 1831–1888. Suffered from a disease of the larynx. It is not known who wrote the request.

Arithmetic and geometry, indeed all mathematics, occupy a unique position in education. Education can only be filled with the necessary vitality and give rise to a real interplay between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the child, if the teacher fully realizes the consequences of his actions and methods. He must know exactly what effect is made on the child by the treatment he receives in school, or anywhere else.

Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; his bodily nature is formed and moulded by the spirit. The teacher, then, must always be aware of what is taking place in the soul and spirit when any change occurs in the body, and again, what effect is produced in the body when influences are brought to bear on the life of spirit or soul.

Anything that works upon the child's conceptual and imaginative faculties, anything that is to say of the nature of painting or drawing which is then led over into writing, or again, botany taught in the way indicated yesterday, all this has a definite effect. And here, above all, we must consider a higher member of man's being, a member to which I have already referred as the etheric body, or body of formative forces. The human being has, in the first place, his physical body. It is revealed to ordinary physical sense-perception. Besides this physical body, however, he has an inner organization, perceptible only to Imaginative Cognition, a super-sensible, etheric body. Again he has an organization perceptible only to Inspiration, the next stage of super-sensible knowledge. (These expressions need not confuse us; they are merely terms.) Inspiration gives insight into the so-called astral body and into the real Ego, the Self of the human being.

From birth till death, this etheric body, this body of formative forces which is the first super-sensible member of man's being never separates from the physical body. Only at death does this occur. During sleep, the etheric organization remains with the physical body lying there in bed. When man sleeps, the astral body and Ego-organization leave the physical and etheric bodies and enter them again at the moment of waking.

Now it is the physical and etheric bodies which are affected when the child is taught arithmetic or geometry, or when we lead him on to writing from the basis of drawing and painting. All this remains in the etheric body and its vibrations persist during sleep. On the other hand, history and such a study of the animal kingdom as I spoke of in yesterday's lecture work only upon the astral body and Ego-organization. What results from these studies passes out of the physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world during sleep.

If, therefore, we are teaching the child plant-lore or writing, the effects are preserved by the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, whereas the results of history lessons or lessons on the nature of man are different, for they are carried out into the spiritual world by the Ego and astral body. This points to an essential difference between the effects produced by the different lessons.

We must realize that all impressions of an imaginative or pictorial nature made on the child have the tendency to become more and more perfect during sleep. On the other hand, everything we tell the child on the subject of history or the being of man works on his organization of soul and spirit and tends to be forgotten, to fade away and grow dim during sleep. In teaching therefore, we have necessarily to consider whether the subject-matter works upon the etheric and physical bodies or upon the astral body and Ego-organization.

Thus on the one hand, the study of the plant kingdom, the rudiments of writing and reading of which I spoke yesterday affect the physical and etheric bodies. (I shall speak about the teaching of history later on.) On the other hand, all that is learnt of man's relation to the animal kingdom affects the astral body and Ego-organization, those higher members which pass out of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. But the remarkable thing is that arithmetic and geometry work upon both the physical-etheric and the astral and Ego. As regards their role in education arithmetic and geometry are really like a chameleon; by their very nature they are allied to every part of man's being. Whereas lessons on the plant and animal kingdoms should be given at a definite age, arithmetic and geometry must be taught throughout the whole period of childhood, though naturally in a form suited to the changing characteristics of the different life-periods.

It is all-important to remember that the body of formative forces, the etheric body, begins to function independently when it is abandoned by the Ego and astral body. By virtue of its own inherent forces, it has ever the tendency to bring to perfection and develop what has been brought to it. So far as our astral body and Ego are concerned, we are—stupid, shall I say? For instead of perfecting what has been conveyed to these members of our being, we make it less perfect. During sleep, however, our body of formative forces continues to calculate, continues all that it has received as arithmetic and the like. We ourselves are then no longer within the physical and etheric bodies; but supersensibly, they continue to calculate or to draw geometrical figures and perfect them. If we are aware of this fact and plan our teaching accordingly, great vitality can be generated in the being of the child. We must, however, make it possible for the body of formative forces to perfect and develop what it has previously received.

In geometry, therefore, we must not take as our starting point the abstractions and intellectual formulae that are usually considered the right groundwork. We must begin with inner, not outer perception, by stimulating in the child a strong sense of symmetry for instance.

Even in the case of the very youngest children we can begin to do this. For example: we draw some figure on the blackboard and indicate the beginning of the symmetrical line. Then we try to make the child realize that the figure is not complete; he himself must find out how to complete it. In this way we awaken an inner, active urge in the child to complete something as yet unfinished. This helps him to express an absolutely right conception of something that is a reality. The teacher, of course, must have inventive talent but that is always a very good thing. Above all else the teacher must have mobile, inventive thought.

When he has given these exercises for a certain time, he will proceed to others. For instance, he may draw some such figure as this (left) on the blackboard, and then he tries to awaken in the child an inner conception of its spatial proportions. The outer line is then varied and the child gradually learns to draw an inner form corresponding to the outer (right). In the one the curves are absolutely straightforward and simple. In the other, the lines curve outwards at various points. Then we should explain to the child that for the sake of inner symmetry

he must make in the inner figure an inward curve at the place where the lines curve outwards in the outer figure. In the first diagram a simple line corresponds to another simple line, whereas in the second, an inward curve corresponds to an outward curve.

Or again we draw something of this kind, where the figures together form a harmonious whole. We vary this by leaving the forms incomplete, so that the lines flow away from each other to infinity. It is as if the lines were running away and one would like to go with them. This leads to the idea that they should be bent inwards to regulate and complete the figure, and so on. I can only indicate the principle of the thing. Briefly, by working in this way, we give the child an idea of “a-symmetrical symmetries” and so prepare the body of formative forces in his waking life that during sleep it elaborates and perfects what has been absorbed during the day. Then the child will wake in an etheric body, and a physical body also, inwardly and organically vibrant. He will be full of life and vitality. This can, of course, only be achieved when the teacher has some knowledge of the working of the etheric body; if there is no such knowledge, all efforts in this direction will be mechanical and superficial.

A true teacher is not only concerned with the waking life but also with what takes place during sleep. In this connection it is important to understand certain things that happen to us all now and again. For instance, we may have pondered over some problem in the evening without finding a solution. In the morning we have solved the problem. Why? Because the etheric body, the body of formative forces, has continued its independent activity during the night.

In many respects waking life is not a perfecting but a disturbing process. It is necessary for us to leave our physical and etheric bodies to themselves for a time and not limit them by the activity of the astral body and Ego. This is proved by many things in life; for instance by the example already given of someone who is puzzling over a problem in the evening. When he wakes up in the morning he may feel slightly restless but suddenly finds that the solution has come to him unconsciously during the night. These things are not fables; they actually happen and have been proved as conclusively as many another experiment. What has happened in this particular case? The work of the etheric body has continued through the night and the human being has been asleep the whole time. You will say: “Yes, but that is not a normal occurrence, one cannot work on such a principle.” Be that as it may, it is possible to assist the continued activity of the etheric body during sleep, if, instead of beginning geometry with triangles and the like, where the intellectual element is already in evidence, we begin by conveying a concrete conception of space. In arithmetic, too, we must proceed in the same way. I will speak of this next.

A pamphlet on physics and mathematics written by Dr. von Baravalle (a teacher at the Waldorf School) will give you an excellent idea of how to bring concreteness into arithmetic and geometry. This whole mode of thought is extended in the pamphlet to the realm of physics as well, though it deals chiefly with higher mathematics. If we penetrate to its underlying essence, it is a splendid guide for teaching mathematics in a way that corresponds to the organic needs of the child's being. A starting-point has indeed been found for a reform in the method of teaching mathematics and physics from earliest childhood up to the highest stages of instruction. And we can apply to the domain of arithmetic what is said in this pamphlet about concrete conceptions of space.

Now the point is that everything conveyed in an external way to the child by arithmetic or even by counting deadens something in the human organism. To start from the single thing and add to it piece by piece is simply to deaden the organism of man. But if we first awaken a conception of the whole, starting from the whole and then proceeding to its parts, the organism is vitalised. This must be borne in mind even when the child is learning to count. As a rule we learn to count by being made to observe purely external things—things of material, physical life.

First we have the 1—we call this Unity. Then 2, 3, 4, and so forth, are added, unit by unit, and we have no idea whatever why the one follows the other, nor of what happens in the end. We are taught to count by being shown an arbitrary juxtaposition of units. I am well aware that there are many different methods of teaching children to count, but very little attention is paid nowadays to the principle of starting from the whole and then proceeding to the parts. Unity it is which first of all must be grasped as the whole and by the child as well. Anything whatever can be this Unity. Here we are obliged to illustrate it in a drawing. We must therefore draw a line; but we could use an apple just as well to show what I shall now show with a line.

This then is 1. And now we go on from the whole to the parts, or members. Here then we have made of the 1 a 2, but the 1 still remains. The unit has been divided into two. Thus we arrive at the 2. And now we go on. By a further partition the 3 comes into being, but the unit always remains as the all-embracing whole. Then we go on through the 4, 5, and so on. Moreover, at the same time and by other means we can give an idea of the extent to which it is possible to hold together in the mind the things that relate to number and we shall discover how really limited man is in his power of mental presentation where number is concerned.

In certain nations to-day the concept of number that is clearly held in the mind's eye only goes up to 10. Here in this country money is reckoned up to 12. But that really represents the maximum of what is mentally visualised for in reality we then begin over again and in fact count what has been counted. We first count up to 10, then we begin counting the tens, 2 times 10=20, 3 times 10=30. Here we are no longer considering the things themselves. We begin to calculate by using number itself, whereas the more elementary concept requires the things themselves to be clearly present in the mind.

We are very proud of the fact that we are far advanced in our methods of counting compared with primitive peoples who depend on their ten fingers. But there is little foundation for this pride. We count up to 10 because we sense our hands as members. We feel our two hands symmetrically with their 10 fingers. This feeling also arises and is inwardly experienced by the child, and we must call forth the sense of number by a transition from the whole to the parts. Then we shall easily find the other transition which leads us to the counting in which one is added to another. Eventually, of course, we can pass on to the ordinary 1, 2, 3, etc. But this mere adding of one or more units must only be introduced as a second stage, for it has significance only here in physical space, whereas to divide a unity into its members has an inner significance such that it can continue to vibrate in the etheric body even though quite beneath our consciousness. It is important to know these things.

Having taught the child to count in this way, the following will also be important. We must not pass on to addition in a lifeless, mechanical way merely adding one item to another in series. Life comes into the thing when we take our start not from the parts of the addition sum but from the sum total itself. We take a number of objects; for example, a number of little balls. We have now got far enough in counting to be able to say: Here are 14 balls. Now we divide them, extending this concept of a part still further. Here we have 5, here 4, here 5 again. Thus we have separated the sum into 5 and 4 and 5. That is, we go from the sum to the items composing it, from the whole to the parts. The method we should use with the child is first to set down the sum before him and then let the child himself perceive how the given sum can be divided into several items.

This is exceedingly important. Just as to drive a horse we do not harness him tail foremost, so in the teaching of arithmetic we must have the right direction. We must start from a whole which is always actually present, from a reality, from what is present as a whole and then pass on to the separate parts; later, we find our way to the ordinary addition sum.

Continuing thus, from the living whole to the separate parts, one touches the reality underlying all arithmetical calculations: i.e., the setting in vibration of the body of formative forces. This body needs a living stimulus for its formative activity and once energised it will continually perfect the vibrations without the need of drawing upon the astral body and Ego-organization with their disturbing elements.

Your teaching work will also be essentially enhanced and vivified if you similarly reverse the other simple forms of calculation. To-day, one might say, they are standing on their heads and must be reversed. Try, for instance, to bring the child to say: “If I have 7, how much must I take away to get 3,” instead of “What remains over if I take 4 from 7?” That we have 7 is the real thing and that 3 remains is also real; how much must we take away from 7 to get 3? Beginning with this form of thought we stand in the midst of life, whereas with the opposite form we are dealing with abstractions. Proceeding in this way, we can easily find our way further. Thus, once more, in multiplication and division we should not ask what will result when we divide 10 into two parts, but how must we divide 10 to get the number 5. The real aspect is given; moreover in life we want eventually to get at something which has real significance. Here are two children, 10 apples are to be divided among them. Each of them is to get 5. These are the realities. What we have to deal with is the abstract part that comes in the middle. Done in this way, things are always immediately adapted to life and should we succeed in this, the result will be that what is the usual, purely external way of adding, by counting up one thing after another with a deadening effect upon the arithmetic lessons, will become a vivifying force, of especial importance in this branch of our educational work. And it is evident that precisely by this method we take into account the sub-conscious in man, that is, the part which works on during sleep and which also works subconsciously during the waking hours. For one is aware of a small part only of the soul's experience; nevertheless the rest is continually active. Let us make it possible for the physical and etheric bodies of the child to work in a healthy way, realizing that we can only do so if we bring an intense life, an awakened interest and attention, especially into our teaching of arithmetic and geometry.

The question has arisen during this Conference as to whether it is really a good thing to continue the different lessons for certain periods of time as we do in the Waldorf School. Now a right division of the lessons into periods is fruitful in the very highest degree. “Period” teaching means that one lesson shall not perpetually encroach upon another. Instead of having timetables setting forth definite hours:—8 – 9, arithmetic, 9 – 10, history, religion, or whatever it may be, we give one main lesson on the same subject for two hours every morning for a period of three, four, or five weeks. Then for perhaps five or six weeks we pass on to another subject, but one which in my view should develop out of the other, and which is always the same during the two hours. The child thus concentrates upon a definite subject for some weeks.

The question was asked whether too much would not be forgotten, whether in this way the children would not lose what they had been taught. If the lessons have been rightly given, however, the previous subject will go on working in the subconscious regions while another is being taken. In “period” lessons we must always reckon with the subconscious processes in the child. There is nothing more fruitful than to allow the results of the teaching given during a period of three or four weeks to rest within the soul and so work on in the human being without interference.

It will soon be apparent that when a subject has been rightly taught and the time comes round for taking it up again for a further period it emerges in a different form from what it does when it has not been well taught. To make the objection that because the subjects will be forgotten it cannot be right to teach in this way, is to ignore the factors that are at work. We must naturally reckon on being able to forget, for just think of all we should have to carry about in our heads if we could not forget and then remember again! The part played by the fact of forgetting therefore as well as the actual instruction must be reckoned with in true education.

This does not mean that it should be a matter for rejoicing whenever children forget. That may safely be left to them! Everything depends on what has so passed down into the subconscious regions, that it can be duly recalled. The unconscious belongs to the being of man as well as the conscious. In regard to all these matters we must realize that it is the task of education to appeal not only to the whole human being, but also to his different parts and members. Here again it is essential to start from the whole; there must first be comprehension of the whole and then of the parts. But to this end it is also necessary to take one's start from the whole. First we must grasp the whole and then the parts. If in counting we simply place one thing beside another, and add, and add, and add, we are leaving out the human being as a whole. But we do appeal to the whole human being when we lay hold of Unity and go from that to Numbers, when we lay hold of the sum, the minuend, the product and thence pass on to the parts.

The teaching of history is very open to the danger of our losing sight of the human being. We have seen that in really fruitful education everything must be given its right place. The plants must be studied in their connection with the earth and the different animal species in their connection with man. Whatever the subject-matter, the concrete human element must be retained; everything must be related in some way to man.

But when we begin to teach the child history, we must understand that at the age when it is quite possible for him to realize the connection of plant-life with the earth and the earth itself as an organism, when he can see in the human being a living synthesis of the whole animal kingdom, he is still unable to form any idea of so-called causal connections in history. We may teach history very skilfully in the ordinary sense, describing one epoch after another and showing how the first is the cause of the second; we may describe how in the history of art, Michelangelo followed Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, in a natural sequence of cause and effect. But before the age of twelve, the child has no understanding for the working of cause and effect, a principle which has become conventional in more advanced studies. To deduce the later from the earlier seems to him like so much unmusical strumming on a piano, and it is only by dint of coercion that he will take it in at all. It has the same effect on his soul as a piece of stone that is swallowed and passes into the stomach. Just as we would never dream of giving the stomach a stone instead of bread, so we must make sure that we nourish the soul not with stones but with food that it can assimilate. And so history too, must be brought into connection with Man and to that end our first care must be to awaken a conception of the historical sequence of time in connection with the human being.

Let us take three history books, the first dealing with antiquity, the second with the Middle Ages, and the third with our modern age. As a rule, little attention is paid to the conception of time in itself. But suppose I begin by saying to the child: “You are now ten years old, so you were alive in the year 1913. Your father is much older than you and he was alive in the year 1890; his father, again, was alive in 1850. Now imagine that you are standing here and stretching your arm back to someone who represents your father; he stretches his arm back to his father (your grandfather), now you have reached the year 1850.” The child then begins to realize that approximately one century is represented by three or four generations. The line of generations running backwards from the twentieth century brings him finally to his very early ancestors. Thus the sixtieth generation back leads into the epoch of the birth of Christ. In a large room it will be possible to arrange some sixty children standing in a line, stretching an arm backwards to each other. Space is, as it were, changed into time.

If the teacher has a fertile, inventive mind, he can find other ways and means of expressing the same thing—I am merely indicating a principle. In this way the child begins to realize that he himself is part of history; figures like Alfred the Great, Cromwell and others are made to appear as if they themselves were ancestors. The whole of history thus becomes an actual part of life at school when it is presented to the child in the form of a living conception of time.

History must never be separated from the human being. The child must not think of it as so much book-lore. Many people seem to think that history is something contained in books, although of course it is not always quite as bad as that. At all events, we must try by every possible means to awaken a realization that history is a living process and that man himself stands within its stream.

When a true conception of time has been awakened, we can begin to imbue history with inner life and soul, just as we did in the case of arithmetic and geometry, by unfolding not a dead but a living perception. There is a great deal of quibbling to-day about the nature of perception, but the whole point is that we must unfold living and not dead perception. In the symmetry-exercises of which I spoke, the soul actually lives in the act of perception. That is living perception. Just as our aim is to awaken a living perception of space, so must all healthy teaching of history given to a child between the ages of nine and twelve be filled with an element proceeding in this case not from the qualities of space, but from the qualities of heart and soul.

The history lessons must be permeated through and through with a quality proceeding from the heart. And so we must present it as far as possible in the form of pictures. Figures, real forms must stand there and they must never be described in a cold, prosaic way. Without falling into the error of using them as examples for moral or religious admonition, our descriptions must nevertheless be coloured with both morality and religion. History must above all lay hold of the child's life of feeling and will. He must be able to enter into a personal relationship with historic figures and with the modes of life prevailing in the various historical epochs. Nor need we confine ourselves merely to descriptions of human beings. We may, for instance, describe the life of some town in the twelfth century, but everything we say must enter the domains of feeling and will in the child. He must himself be able to live in the events, to form his own sympathies and antipathies. His life of feeling and will must be stimulated.

This will show you that the element of art must everywhere enter into the teaching of history. The element of art comes into play when, as I often describe it, a true economy is exercised in teaching. This economy can be exercised if the teacher has thoroughly mastered his subject-matter before he goes into the classroom; if it is no longer necessary for him to ponder over anything because if rightly prepared it is there plastically before his soul. He must be so well prepared that the only thing still to be done is the artistic moulding of his lesson. The problem of teaching is thus not merely a question of the pupil's interest and diligence, but first and foremost of the teacher's interest, diligence and sincerity.

No lesson should be given that has not previously been a matter of deep experience on the part of the teacher. Obviously, therefore, the organization of the body of teachers must be such that every teacher is given ample time to make himself completely master of the lessons he has to give.

It is a dreadful thing to see a teacher walking round the desks with a book in his hands, still wrestling with the subject-matter. Those who do not realize how contrary such a thing is to all true principles of education do not know what is going on unconsciously in the souls of the children, nor do they realize the terrible effect of this unconscious experience. If we give history lessons in school from note-books, the child comes to a certain definite conclusion, not consciously, but unconsciously. It is an unconscious, intellectual conclusion, but it is deeply rooted in his organism: “Why should I learn all these things? The teacher himself doesn't know them, for he has to read from notes. I can do that too, later on, so there is no need for me to learn them first.” The child does not of course come to this conclusion consciously, but as a matter of fact when judgments are rooted in the unconscious life of heart and mind, they have all the greater force. The lessons must pulsate with inner vitality and freshness proceeding from the teacher's own being. When he is describing historical figures for instance the teacher should not first of all have to verify dates. I have already spoken of the way in which we should convey a conception of time by a picture of successive generations. Another element too must pervade the teaching of history. It must flow forth from the teacher himself. Nothing must be abstract; the teacher himself as a human being must be the vital factor.

It has been said many times that education should work upon the being of man as a whole and not merely on one part of his nature. Important as it is to consider what the child ought to learn and whether we are primarily concerned with his intellect or his will, the question of the teacher's influence is equally important. Since it is a matter of educating the whole nature and being of man, the teacher must himself be “man” in the full sense of the word, that is to say, not one who teaches and works on the basis of mechanical memory or mechanical knowledge, but who teaches out of his own being, his full manhood. That is the essential thing.

The Genesis of the Trinity of Sun, Moon, and Earth. Osiris and Typhon.

Up to this point in these lectures we have tried to construct a picture of the earth's evolution in connection with the evolution of man, because we had to demonstrate how the earth's past, how the facts of its evolution, were reflected in the knowledge displayed by the various cultural periods of the post-Atlantean time. The deepest experiences of the pupils of the Rishis were characterized, and it was shown how these inner experiences of the neophyte portrayed, in inward clairvoyantly-perceived pictures, the relationships and events that prevailed in the primeval earth, when sun and moon were still contained in it. We also saw what a high stage of initiation such a pupil had to reach in order to build for himself such a world-conception, which appears as a recapitulation of what occurred in the remotest past. We also saw what the Greeks thought when, in the campaigns of Alexander, they became acquainted with what was experienced by such an Indian neophyte, in whose soul arose the picture of the divine-spiritual creative force that began to express itself in the primeval mist when sun and moon were still united with the earth. This picture, the Brahman of the Indians, which was later called I-Brahma (Aham Brahma) and which appeared to the Greeks as Heracles—this picture, we sought to bring before our souls as an inner recapitulation of the facts that actually occurred in the past.

It was also emphasized that the succeeding evolutionary periods of the earth were reflected in the Persian and Egyptian cultures. What occurred in the second epoch, when the sun withdrew from the earth, appeared in pictures to the Persian initiates. All that happened as the moon gradually withdrew became the world-conception and the initiation-principle of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Assyrians.

Now, in order to look quite clearly into the soul of the ancient Egyptian, which is the most important thing for us—and considering the Persian initiation only as a sort of preparation—we must examine a little more narrowly just what happened to our earth during the periods when the sun and moon were separating from it. We shall sketch how the earth itself gradually evolved during these times. We shall disregard the great cosmic events and direct our attention to what happened on the earth itself.

If again we look back on our earth in its primeval condition, when it was still united with sun and moon, we do not find our animals or plants, and especially not our minerals. At first the earth was composed only of man, only of the human germs. Of course it is true that the animal and plant germs were laid down on the old Sun and the old Moon, and that they were already contained in the earliest condition of the Earth, but in a certain way they were still slumbering, so that one could not perceive that they would really be able to bring forth anything. It was only when the sun began to withdraw that the germs that later became animals first became capable of germinating. Not until the sun had completely withdrawn from the earth, leaving earth and moon alone, did the same thing happen to the germs that later became plants. The mineral germs formed themselves gradually, only when the moon had begun to withdraw. We must keep this clearly in mind.

Now, for once, let us look at the earth itself. When it still had sun and moon within itself, the earth was only a sort of etheric mist of vast extent, within which the human germs were active, while the germs of the other beings—animals, plants, and minerals—slumbered. Since only human germs were present, there were no eyes to behold these events externally, hence the description given here is visible only for the clairvoyant vision in retrospect. It is given on the hypothesis that it is what one would have seen had one been able at that time to observe from a point in universal space.

On ancient Saturn, too, a physical eye would have seen nothing. In that primeval condition, the earth was merely a vaporous mist that could be felt physically only as warmth. Out of this mass, this primeval etheric mist, there gradually took shape a shining ball of vapor, which could have been seen had a physical eye been present. Could one have penetrated this with a feeling-sense, it would have appeared as a heated space, somewhat like the interior of an oven. But soon this mist became luminous, and this ball of vapor that thus took shape contained all the germs of which we have just spoken. We must be quite clear that this mist was nothing like a fog or cloud-formation of today; rather did it contain in solution all the substances which at present are solid or liquid. All metals, all minerals, everything, were then present in the mist in transparent and translucent form. There was a translucent vapor, permeated by warmth and light. Think yourself into this. What had grown out of the etheric mist was a translucent gas. This grew brighter and brighter, and through the condensation of the gases the light grew ever stronger, so that ultimately this vapor-mist appeared like a great sun that shone out into world-space.

This was the period when the earth still contained the sun, when the earth was still irradiated by light and rayed its light into world-space. But this light made it possible, not only that man should live with the earth in that primeval condition, but that in the fullness of the light there should also live all those other high beings who, although not assuming a physical body, were connected with the evolution of man: Angels, Archangels and Principalities. But not only were these present. In the fullness of the light lived still higher beings also: the Powers, or Exusiai, or Spirits of Form; the Virtues, or Dynameis, or Spirits of Motion; the Dominions, or Kyriotetes, or Spirits of Wisdom; those spirits who are called the Thrones, or Spirits of Will; finally, in looser connection with the fullness of the light, more and more detaching themselves therefrom, the Cherubim and Seraphim. The earth was a world inhabited by a whole hierarchy of lower and higher beings, all sublime. What radiated out into space as light, the light with which the earth-body was permeated, was not light only but also what was later the mission of the earth: It was the force of love. This contained the light as its most important component. We must imagine that not only light was rayed forth, not physical light alone, but that this light was ensouled, inspirited, by the force of love. This is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. There are people today who describe the sun as though it were a gaseous ball that simply radiates light. Such a purely material conception of the sun prevails exclusively today. The occultists are the only exception. One who reads a description of the sun today as it is represented in popular books, in the books that are the spiritual nourishment of countless people, does not learn to know the true being of the sun. What these books say about the sun is worth about as much as if one described a corpse as the true being of man. The corpse is no more man than what astrophysics says of the sun is really the sun.

Just as one who describes a corpse leaves out the most important thing about man, so the physicist who describes the sun today leaves out the most important thing. He does not reach its essence, although he may believe that with the help of spectroanalysis he has found its inner elements. What is described is only the outer body of the sun.¹ In every sunbeam there streams down on all the inhabitants of the earth the force of those higher beings who live on the sun, and in the light of the sun there descends the force of love, which here on earth streams from man to man, from heart to heart. The sun can never send mere physical light to earth; the warmest, most ardent, feeling of love is invisibly present in the sunlight. With the sunlight there stream to earth the forces of the Thrones, the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and the whole hierarchy of higher beings who inhabit the sun and have no need of any body other than the light. But since all this that is present in the sun today was at that time still united with the earth, those higher beings themselves were also united with the earth. Even today they are connected with earth-evolution.

We must reflect that man, the lowest of the higher beings, was at that time already present in the germ as the new child of the earth, borne and nourished in the womb by these divine beings. The man who lived in the period of earth-evolution that we are now considering, had to have a much more refined body, since he was still in the womb of these beings. The clairvoyant consciousness perceives that the body of the man of that time consisted only of a fine mist-form or vapor-form; it was a body of air or gas, a gas-body rayed through and entirely permeated by light. If we imagine a cloud formed with some regularity, a chalice-like formation expanding in an upward direction, the chalice glowing with inner light, we have the men of that time who, for the first time in this earth-evolution, began to have a dim consciousness, such a consciousness as the plant-world has today. These men were not like plants in the modern sense. They were cloud-masses in chalice-like form, illuminated and warmed by the light, with no firm boundaries dividing them from the collective earth-mass.

This was once the form of man, a form that was a physical light-body, participating still in the forces of the light. Because of the refinement of this body there could descend into it not only an etheric and an astral body, not only the ego in its first beginnings, but also the higher spiritual beings who were connected with the earth. Man was, as it were, rooted above in the divine spiritual beings, and these permeated him. It is really not easy to portray the splendor of the earth at that time. We must picture it as a light-filled globe, shone round by light-bearing clouds and generating wonderful phenomena of light and color. Had one been able to feel this earth with his hands, he would have perceived warmth-phenomena. The luminous masses surged back and forth. Within them were all the human beings of today, woven through by all the spiritual beings, who rayed forth light in manifold grandeur and beauty. Outside was the earth-cosmos in its great variety; inside, with the light flowing about him, was man, in close connection with the divine-spiritual beings, raying streams of light into the outer light-sphere. As though by an umbilical cord that sprang from the divine, man hung upon this totality, on the light-womb, the world-womb of our earth. It was a collective world-womb in which the light-plant man lived at that time, feeling himself one with the light-mantle of the earth. In this refined vaporous plant-form, man hung as though on the umbilical cord of the earth-mother and he was cherished and nourished by the whole mother earth. As in a cruder sense the child of today is cherished and nourished in the maternal body, so the human germ was cherished and nourished at that time. Thus did man live in the primeval age of the earth.

Then the sun began to withdraw itself, taking the finest substances with it. There came a time when the high sun-beings forsook men, for all that today belongs to the sun forsook our earth and left the coarser substances behind. As a result of this departure of the sun, the mist cooled to water; and where there was formerly a mist-earth, now there was a water-sphere. In the middle were the primeval waters, but not surrounded by air; going outward, the waters changed into thick, heavy mist, which gradually became more refined. The earth of that time was a water-earth. It contained various materials in a soft state, which were enveloped by mists that became ever finer until, in the highest spheres, they became extremely rarefied. Thus did our earth once appear and thus was it altered. Men had to sink the formerly luminous gas-form into the turbid waters and incarnate there as shaped water-masses swimming in the water, as previously they had been air-forms floating in the air. Man became a water-form, but not entirely. Never did man descend entirely into the water.

This is an important moment. It has been described how the earth was a water-earth, but man was only partially a water-being. He protruded into the mist-sheath, so that he was half a water, half a vapor-being. Below, in the water, man could not be reached by the sun; the water-mass was so thick that the sunlight could not penetrate it. The light of the sun could penetrate into the vapor to some extent, so that man dwelt partly in the dark light-deprived water and partly in the light-permeated vapor. Of one thing, however, the water was not deprived, and this we must describe more minutely.

From the beginning, the earth was not only glowing and shining, but was also resounding, and the tone had remained in the earth, so that when the light departed the water became dark, but also became drenched with tone. It was the tone that gave form to the water, as one may learn from the well-known experiment in physics. We see that tone is something formative, a shaping force, since through tone the parts are arranged in order. Tone is a shaping power, and it was this that formed the body out of the water. That was the force of tone, which had remained in the earth. It was tone, it was the sound that rings through the earth, out of which the human form shaped itself. The light could reach only to the part of man that protruded out of the water. Below was a water-body; above was a vapor-body, which the external light touched, and which, in this light, was accessible to the beings who had gone out with the sun. Formerly, when the sun was still united with the earth, man felt himself to be in their womb. Now they shone down on him in the light and irradiated him with their power.

We must not forget, however, that in what remained behind after the separation of the sun other forces, the Moon-forces, were present. The earth had to separate these forces from itself.

Here we have a period during which only the sun was withdrawn, when the plant-man had to descend gradually into the water-earth. This stage, at which man had then arrived in his body, we see preserved today in a degenerated form in fishes. The fishes that we see in the water today are relics of those men, although naturally in a decadent form. We must think of a goldfish, for example, in a fantastic plant-form, agile, but with a feeling of sadness because the light had been withdrawn from the water. It was a very deep longing that arose. The light was no longer there, but the desire for the light called up this longing. There was a moment in the earth's evolution when the sun was not yet entirely outside the earth; there one can see that form still permeated with light—man with his upper part still at the sun-stage, while below he is already in the shape preserved in the fishes.

Through the fact that man lived in darkness with half his being, he had in his lower parts a baser nature, for in the submerged parts he had the Moon-forces. This part was not petrified like lava, as in the present moon, but these were dark forces. Only the worst parts of the astral could penetrate here. Above was a vapor-form, resembling the head parts, into which the light shone from outside and gave him form. So man consisted of a lower and an upper part. Swimming and floating, he moved about in the vaporous atmosphere. This thick atmosphere of the earth was not yet air; it was vapor, and the sun could not penetrate it. Warmth could penetrate, but not light. The sun-rays could not kiss the whole earth, but only its surface; the earth-ocean remained dark. In this ocean were the forces that later went out as the moon.

As the light-forces penetrated into the earth, so also did the gods penetrate. Thus we have, below, the godless, god-deserted mantle of waters, permeated only by the force of tone, and, all around this, the vapor, into which extended the forces of the sun. Therefore in this vapor-body, which rose above the surface of the water, man still participated in what streamed to him as light and love from the spiritual world. But why did the world of tone permeate the dark watery core? Because one of the high sun-spirits had remained behind, binding his existence to the earth. This is the same spirit whom we know as Yahweh or Jehovah. Yahweh alone remained with the earth, sacrificing himself. It was he whose inner being resounded through the water-earth as shaping tone.

But since the worst forces had remained as the ingredients of the water-earth, and since these forces were dreadful elements, man's vapor-portion was drawn ever further down, and out of the earlier plant-form a being gradually evolved that stood at the stage of the amphibian. In saga and myth this form, which stood far below later humanity, is described as the dragon, the human amphibian, the lindworm. Man's other part, which was a citizen of the realm of light, is presented as a being which cannot descend, which fights the lower nature; for example, as Michael, the dragon-slayer, or as Saint George combating the dragon. Even in the figure of Siegfried with the dragon, although transformed, we have pictures of man's rudiments in their primeval duality. Warmth penetrated into the upper part of the earth and into the upper part of physical man, and formed something like a fiery dragon. But above that rose the ether body, in which the sun's force was preserved. Thus we have a form that the Old Testament well describes as the tempting serpent, which is also an amphibian.

The time was now approaching during which the basest forces were hurled out. Mighty catastrophes shook the earth, and for the occultist the basalt formations appear as remnants of the cleansing forces that rocked the globe when the moon had to separate from the earth. This was also the time when the water-core of the earth condensed more and more, and the firm mineral kernel gradually evolved. On the one hand, the earth grew denser through the departure of the moon; on the other the upper parts gave off their heavier, coarser substances to the lower. Above, there arose something which, although still permeated by water, became more and more similar to our air. The earth gradually acquired a firm kernel in the middle, around which was the water everywhere. At first, the mist was still impenetrable for the sun's rays, but by relinquishing its substances the mist grew thinner and thinner. Later, much later, air developed out of this, and gradually the sun's rays, which earlier could not reach the earth itself, were able to penetrate it.

Now came a stage that we, must picture correctly. Earlier, man dived down into the water and extended up into the mist. Now, through the condensation of the earth, the water-man slowly acquired the possibility of solidifying his form and taking on a hard bony system. Man hardened himself within himself. Thereby he transformed his upper part in such a way that it became suited for something new. This new thing, which previously was impossible, was the breathing of air. Now we find the first beginning of the lungs. In the upper part there has previously been something that took up the light, but could do nothing more. Now man felt the light again in his dull consciousness. He could feel what streamed down in it as divine forces coming toward him. In this transitional stage man felt that what streamed down upon him was divided into two parts. The air penetrated into him as breath. Previously only the light had reached him, but now the air was inside him. Feeling this, man had to say to himself, “Formerly I felt that the force that is above me gave me what I now use for breathing. The light was my breath.”

What now streamed into him appeared to man as two brothers. Light and air were two brothers for him; they had become a duality for him. All earthly breath that streamed into man was at the same time an annunciation that he had to learn to feel something entirely new. As long as there was light alone, he did not know birth and death. The light-permeated cloud transformed itself perpetually, but man felt this only as the changing of a garment. He did not feel that he was born or that he died. He felt that he was eternal, and that birth and death were only episodes. With the first drawing of breath, the consciousness of birth and death entered into him. He felt that the air-breath, which had split off from its brother the light-ray, and which thereby had split off also the beings who earlier had flowed in with the light, had brought death to him.

Formerly, man had the consciousness, “I have a dark form, but I am connected with the eternal being.” Who was it that destroyed this consciousness? It was the air-breath that entered into man—Typhon. Typhon is the name of the air-breath. When the Egyptian soul experienced within itself how the formerly united stream divided itself into light and air, the cosmic event became a symbolic picture for this soul—the murder of Osiris by Typhon, or Set, the air-breath.

A mighty cosmic event is hidden in the Egyptian myth that allows Osiris to be killed by Typhon.² The Egyptian experienced the god who came from the sun and was still in harmony with his brother, as Osiris. Typhon was the air-breath that had brought mortality to man. Here we see one of the most pregnant examples of how the facts of cosmic evolution repeat themselves in man's inner knowledge.

In this way the trinity of sun, moon, and earth came into being. All of this was communicated to the Egyptian pupil in deep and consciously formed pictures.

• 1. This sentiment as to the sun is eloquently expressed in English by D. H. Lawrence in his Apocalypse (New York, Viking, 1932), pp. 41-46.
• 2. Fairly complete versions of this myth may be found in Padraic Colum: Orpheus Myths of the World (New York, Macmillan, 1930) and in Lewis Spence: Mysteries of Egypt (London, Rider & Co., 1929).

We saw last time that the initiatory process is the antithesis of the great world doctrines of the origin of the cosmos in the spiritual sense, and that there is a strict correspondence between the small and the great world, so that we can almost see how the images of Genesis, which have to do with cosmological views, with contemplations of the universe, recur in the history of the Redeemer.

The personality of Christ is to be placed at the center in such a decisive way that it was not only a consequence of the Messiah-consciousness of Christ himself, but that it was also something that lay in the whole time at that time. The whole time had the need to place a personality, a person reborn on the heights of spiritual development, at the center of the whole world view, so that there was a profound need not only among those who founded Christianity, but also in the spirit of the time, not only in the expectation of the Messiah among the Jewish people, but also among the pagan peoples. So there was also an urge to come face to face with this personality, to see him. We see that one or the other could be mistaken for him. Paganism virtually created a counter-image in Apollonius of Tyana. He is perhaps as interesting a figure in paganism as Socrates, Plato and so on. But he still has a special interest in that a pagan-human deity was to be tendentiously created, which was to be contrasted with Christ. There is, however, a clear difference between the world of thought associated with Christ and that associated with Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is seen more as a man loved by God. Basically, it is the same view that emerged from the Jewish consciousness. I would say, from the pagan point of view, while the deity is emphasized more in Christ, in Apollonius it is said more that he is a man who has come to divinity, a man loved by God, not a god.

And this man loved by God appears to us only as a later development of Socrates, of Plato. [Just as Plato had a special relationship with the god of medicine, Asclepius, the son of Apollo, so did Apollonius:] He was a healer, a sage, and likewise prophecy is said to have been one of his gifts. These ideas were formed from Pythagorean ideas. Just as these live on in the people, following in secret, mystical connection, Apollonius was imagined to be the reborn Plato, a savior.

We are told of Apollonius that he traveled far and wide, seeking less to enrich his own wisdom - which was available to him as he was at a higher stage of reincarnation - than to connect the various religions through a spiritual bond. A cosmopolitan [religion-uniting activity] is attributed to him. He is said to have been with the Indians, Persian magicians and Egyptian priests. Among the Indian sages he was immediately recognized as a deified personality. We are also told that he got to know the Egyptian religion in its various forms, but that he was able to tell the Egyptian priests more than they could tell him. He was able to tell them that they should have their religious ideas about India. He was able to show them their own in the Indian. Thus we see how Apollonius endeavored to see the common ground in the various religions, and so he appears to us at this time as the bearer of a real theosophical striving. He set himself the task of searching for the common ground in all religions. Therefore, when we delve into his teaching, it appears to us as an extract from all the religious teachings existing at that time. He had collected the extract from all of them. It is also a mature teaching. The idea of reincarnation appears to us to have been fertilized in the old Pythagorean sense.

He speaks of the popular religions as an external symbol of what it is really supposed to be. Apollonius draws attention to a very important idea that he can only have drawn from pagan mysticism. He draws attention to the fact that in the various acts of worship performed with the mystic, we are not only dealing with events that represent the world process, but that we are also dealing with the representation of phenomena of nature in symbolic acts. Apollonius therefore presents us with a highly important concept that leads us into the relationship that exists between Christianity and the time. He shows that everything we can see around us and also what is in the starry sky, the stars, can be regarded as a symbol, that all this is nothing other than a symbol of spiritual processes that dominate the world cosmos. Those who heard my lecture on Goethe's "Faust" the day before yesterday will remember that something similar was said there: Everything external, "everything transient is only a parable". This is what Apollonius says. But it is the common view of the entire age at that time.

I must draw attention here to a misunderstanding which consists in the belief that this great symbolism between the small and the great world, between man and the small world occurrences and the great world mysteries is a product of the imagination. In our nineteenth century this doctrine has developed. We see in the popular religions the fairy tale that creates religion, the imagination that creates religion, which personifies the processes [in nature] in the circle of air, lightning, thunder and so on in manifold ways and forms gods for itself. The laws that the stars obey are seen as the expression of a divine-spiritual world order. But within the actual priestly theosophy there was the conviction that when the sun is followed as it moves across the celestial vault, it is not only the process of moving across the celestial vault that is to be seen. This process is only a symbol for the process taking place behind it. That which the popular imagination originally possessed in an exoteric way was later taught as a symbol by the priest. But he saw in the laws - we know that there was a highly developed astronomy in the Assyrian empire - he did not see in the laws the dry naturalistic law, he saw in them the language of the deity, only a symbol for the deeper spiritual process.

For Apollonius of Tyana, the subordinate folk symbolism was only one stage. The initiate was later given a higher parable. David Friedrich Strauss, Darwin and so on were wrong in saying that the imagination [of the people] had imagined the lightning passing through the clouds as a divine fact, that it had then progressed from that to the gods, to the god Zeus and so on. But these were only ideas of the imagination, of popular mythology. In this way they have stripped away everything religious. The [scientific] truth has taken its place. But this matter has never been represented [in this way] within the mystical teachings. Even if there was an ascent from [the ideas of] popular religion to the scientific investigation of the course of the stars, the divine was first sought behind the phenomena. Not that which man absorbed within himself was to be a symbol for the external process, no, just the opposite. The whole of nature itself became a parable. In the mysticism of those centuries we have to do with exactly the opposite of what the materialistic scholars of the nineteenth century imagine. They believe that what the ancients thought up was only a parable. No, it is just the opposite. The scientific idea is only a parable for what lies behind it.

Oriental scholars knew that Christianity drew from the same source as they did. They therefore long regarded Christianity only as a Persian sect.

However, this whole context of the theosophical doctrine of the whole world as a parable for the eternal divine [...] confronts us clearly and particularly deeply in the Apocalypse, which is nothing other than an interpretation of the older mysteries in Christian terms.

But first I have to say something in advance. I said that the whole of external nature was regarded as a parable, as was the case with Assyrian-Babylonian or Persian scholars. They had a precise idea of the laws to be observed in the course of the stars. This will also be clear to other circles because you have heard Professor Delitzsch's lecture on "Babel and the Bible". I could have started from Asian ideas, you find the same thing everywhere. If science now unearths things of which Theosophy must claim otherwise for other reasons, we will nevertheless see confirmation through the excavations of Babylonian antiquities. One finds the results of the excavations compiled in an easy and fine manner by this Professor Delitzsch. I said that from Oriental priestly religions a part of the views emerged which regarded nature as a parable for the eternal divine. You can understand this if you look at the oriental religions. The Egyptians attached more importance to great monuments and laid them down on the outside, while the Orientals sought the parable more in the [theoretical].

When we follow the literature of the pagan writers, we see how the awareness becomes clearer and clearer that in the teachings of astronomy we are dealing with a language for the eternal word of the gods in the world. I only wish to draw attention to a few facts which will make the whole matter clearer. [In the writer Apollonius of Rhodes], then also in Plutarch - although there only sparsely - one finds precise references to this and to the world of legends - such as the legend of Heracles, the legend of the Golden Fleece - and so on, which I have already dealt with earlier. But we can also see from their writers that these legends also presented themselves to the first Christians in such a way that they concealed great world truths.

We see that the sun, in its annual course, in its annual movement, is a symbol of the eternally changing, sinking and renewing world. Given the brevity of time, I can only hint at what the main point is. It is not without reason that the twelve labors of Heracles have been related to the twelve constellations of the zodiac. It is a repetition of what happens in the sky above. The upper and lower correspond to each other.

When we follow these views, we find that great importance is attached to the fact that the sun, the god of light, was worshipped with the annual arrival of spring - just as in theosophy, which sees light symbolized in the sun and truth in the light. It was not the sun itself that was worshipped, but the sun was only a symbol. With the rejuvenating sun, it was seen as a symbol of eternally reborn nature, of spiritual rebirth, of the God who renews himself again and again.

What the Egyptians saw in the firmament is also seen in the sun renewing itself in spring. And the fact that the sun [in spring] is in the sign of the lamb, the ram, means that the sun gains power in the world order through the lamb. This becomes a symbol for the world redeemer. This is why we encounter the lamb, which signifies the rebirth of the sun in spring, the rebirth of the new God. This is why the beginning of spring was also referred to as the point at which the young god is born. The virgin at Sais gives birth to the new god Heracles.

Where the legends are not completely correct, we can prove where the changes came from. The same legends are interpreted by pagan writers in the same way, namely that nothing else can be found in them than what can also be read in the sky. The mystics of that time saw the serpent in the sky as a symbol of the downfall of the god in dark matter. The passage of the sun in the snake symbolizes this. On December 21, in the middle of winter, when the days are getting longer, the sun enters the constellation of Sagittarius. In the middle of winter, Virgo receives the child. Easter is actually the resurrection, the redemption. There the sun enters the constellation of the Lamb of Aries. In summer we have the lion reflected in the course of the sun. What takes place in the individual personalities first took place in the celestial vault. Seen in this way, the course of life of the individual personalities is a mystery of the eternal course of the world. Also in the Greek mysteries, also in the Orient and in Persia, [Zeus] transforms himself into the Golden Fleece at this time.

So we see that the passage of the sun through Aries is given to us as a resurrection festival. Nonnos] mentions a relationship between Zeus and his son Dionysus. He is to ascend to his father and sit at his father's right hand. Here you have the pagan version of the Christian creed. Christianity means the new form of the teachings of paganism. A large number of Christians can be shown to have been inspired by pagan mysticism. These ideas appear again and again in Christianity. There is an indication even in Christianity that isolated spirits of paganism have turned to Christianity and then sought a symbolic expression for the fact that they were able to understand Christianity all the more. The expression can be found in the Gospel, namely that magicians follow the stars to find Christ. They read the stars, and all they had to do was follow what they read in the stars. After following [the star], they see what is given to Christianity. Christianity is represented there in a single person. That is why the Indian scholar said: "In Christianity, we are dealing with nothing other than a Persian sect."

If you take the sun myth and try to translate it into the personal as the course of life of a single personality, then you can say nothing other than that the Christians sought the truth in a humanized way, which was previously sought in the firmament.

The fact that at Easter time the sun passes through the constellation of the Lamb, the Ram, is quite natural [for that time]. At other, earlier times, the Lamb was replaced by Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and so on. This has to do with the fact that these ideas were formed at a time when the position of the constellations was different [from today]. They are always shifting. Our astronomical data is also no longer correct today. So we can say that this Christianity was actually born out of the ancient mysteries and religions. This is not a degradation, but merely shows that it was a necessity of the times.

I have shown how the individual teachings in the Orient are already pre-formed. What interests us in particular, however, is how they are incorporated into the Apocalypse. If one does not grasp the basic idea in this way, it cannot be understood. It cannot be understood that the world of imagination, the sum of [religious] feelings, was already present and reappears in a new form in Christianity. The author [of the Apocalypse] was aware of this. He did not want to reproduce anything other than the old mystical mysteries. He says that everything he has read from the starry world has now taken place as a direct experience in the life of an individual personality. What you previously only saw as cosmic-historical events has become the life of an individual person. That is the basic idea of the Apocalypse. We see how the old priestly concepts confront us in all the descriptions: the seven trumpets, the seven seals and so on. In all this we see nothing other than the expression of ancient, long-existing mysteries, and what is presented to us in the Apocalypse is nothing other than the fulfillment of these things in Christianity. At one point I will show how this old teaching is presented to us there and how the new teaching is then brought into connection with it, how the new teaching develops out of the old. I will deal with the earlier chapters later. First the whole passage from the middle.

The 11th chapter: Measuring the temple of God. Two witnesses killed and alive again. [Gap in the transcript] The seventh trumpet.

"1 And there was given me a reed like a rod, and he said, Arise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. (2) But the court outside the temple, throw it out and do not measure it. For it has been given to the nations, and they will trample the holy city underfoot for forty-two months. 003 And I will give unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. 004 These are the two olive trees and the torches that stand before the Lord of the earth: 005 And if any man will hurt them, fire shall proceed out of their mouth, and shall devour their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he shall be put to death. 006 These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and they have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. 007 And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war with them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. 008 And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. 009 And some of the nations and kindreds and tongues shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not leave their dead bodies in graves. 10th And they that dwell on the earth shall rejoice over them, and shall live well, and shall send gifts one to another: for these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth." - Being born again is nothing other than being born again in the initiation process. - 11 "And after three days and a half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon those who saw them. 12 And they heard a great voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come up here! And they ascended into heaven in a cloud, and saw their enemies. 013 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell: and in the earthquake were slain seven thousand names of men: and the rest were afraid, and gave glory to the God of heaven. 014 The second woe is past; behold, the third woe cometh quickly. 015 And the seventh angel sounded, and there were great voices in heaven, saying: The kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever."

It is to be described here that, whereas previously only the individual was permitted, now the Good News is to be brought to all people through Christ.

The 12th chapter: The woman clothed with the sun and the dragon. Michael's conflict with him: "1 And there appeared a great sign in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. 002 And she was with child, and cried out in travail, and was in great pain in childbirth. 003 And there appeared another sign in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. 004 And his tail drew away the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. 005 And she brought forth a son, a little child, which should feed all nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and to his throne. 6 And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared of God, that she may be nourished there a thousand two hundred and threescore days. 007 And there was a battle in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon fought with his angels. 008 And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. 009 And the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. 010 And I heard a great voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ; because that accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before God day and night. 011 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives unto the death. 12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell therein. Woe to those who dwell on the earth and on the sea! For the devil cometh down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. 013 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child. 014 And the woman was given two wings like a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she would be nourished for a time and times and half a time before the face of the serpent. 015 And the serpent cast out of his mouth water like a flood after the woman, that he might drown her. 016 But the earth helped the woman, and opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth. 17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."

The stream from the serpent's mouth symbolizes nothing other than the element through which man must return in order to find his way back to God.

The 13th chapter: Seven-headed beast from the sea. "001 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. 002 And the beast that I saw was like a pardel, and his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority. 003 And I saw one of his heads as if it had a deadly wound, and his deadly wound was healed. And the whole earth marveled at the beast, 4. and they worshiped the dragon that gave power to the beast, and worshiped the beast, saying: Who is like the beast, and who can war with him? 005 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and it was given unto him to continue with him forty and two months. 006 And he opened his mouth to blaspheme against God, and to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. 007 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. 008 And all that dwell on the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 009 If any man have an ear, let him hear. 010 If any man lead into prison, he shall go into prison: if any man kill with the sword, he shall be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and faith of the saints."

Two-horned beast from the earth.

"11 And I saw another beast come up out of the earth, having two horns like a lamb, and speaking as a dragon. 012 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 013 And he doeth great signs, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven in the sight of men: 014 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. 015 And it was given unto him to give the spirit to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. 016 And he made the small and the great, the rich and the poor, the free and the bond, all put a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 017 so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of his name. 18 Here is wisdom! Let him who has understanding consider the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six."

The secret of the mysteries was generalized, was brought to all people. This can be clearly seen in the symbol in the Apocalypse of the four beasts and the three powers that are above the beasts, so that we are confronted by seven powers. We are then told that ten kings, the kings of the new kingdom, will overcome these seven old powers. Now we have to see what all this means.

First I would like to develop it as it has been stated in the ancient mysteries. Then you will realize it for yourself. The Apocalypse sees the world and man as made up of seven principles. The four lower or inferior principles or powers are represented by the four beasts. These must be overcome. By overcoming the lower, the three upper ones are built up. After this has been presented to us, we are shown how the entire seven-membered nature of the world and of man is scorched in fire, that the divine lightning strikes and that the entire material, in which the seven-membered nature is immersed, is once again overcome. The eighth stage is when the actual material, the evil, really perishes. We are then shown that in addition to the three spiritual elements, the fourth physical element appears as an overcomer; the fourth physical element is seized by the three spiritual elements and then also the three lower ones. The fourth element is man himself. Eagle, [bull], lion and man. Man represents nothing other than KamaRupa. The fourth, the human being, combines the three lower physical elements and the three upper ones and gives birth to three new ones from the three physical elements. The physical elements are spiritually reborn, as it were. So we have ten elements instead of seven. This is what the Apocalypse wants to depict with the ten kings.

These are ancient mystical teachings, nothing other than what pagan ideas already knew. From the transformation and victory of the ten kings, we can see that they represent nothing other than the victory of the spiritual over the material, the victory of the Mystery Doctrine.

At the opening of the first six seals, John saw four horses, a white horse, a red horse, a black horse and a pale horse. Death and hell followed them. "And when the fifth seal was opened, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held." This killing symbolizes being born again in the spirit and the killing of the lower nature. Man must devour the book, he must become one with the book. The same is also indicated by a Christian mystic, Angelus Silesius. He said: ["Friend, it is enough. If you want to read more, go and become the scripture and the being yourself."] - With this he concludes his "Cherubinischer Wandermann".

The ancient mysteries were a preparation for Christianity. They were reborn through the Lamb. Those who cannot fully comprehend that they have to go further, that they actually have to seek bodily death and spiritual resurrection in Christ, are not yet mature. They are the ones who are to be admonished.

The Apocalypse is one of the most important books of the New Testament. It must not and cannot be understood in any other way than that we see in it a fusion of the Christian mystery truths with the ancient mysteries. It contains the ancient mysteries born out of Christianity.