The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have seen how the study of karma, wherein the destiny of man is contained, leads us from the affairs of the farthest universe—from the worlds of the stars—down to the tenderest experiences of the human heart, inasmuch as the heart is an expression of all that man feels working upon him during life,—of all that happens to him in the whole nexus of earth-existence. When we try to arrive at our judgments through a deeper understanding of the karmic connections, we are driven again and again to look into these two domains of world-existence which lie so far removed from one another. Indeed we must say: Whatever else we may be studying,—be it Nature, or the more natural configuration of human evolution in history or in the life of nations—none of these leads us so high up into cosmic realms as the study of karma. The study of karma makes us altogether aware of the connections between human life here upon earth and that which goes on in the wide universe. We see this human life taking its course on earth, unfolding till about the 70th year of life, when in a certain connection it attains its limit. Whatever lies beyond this is in reality a life given by grace. What lies below this limit stands under karmic influences, and these we shall now have to study.

It is possible, as I have often mentioned from varied points of view, to put the length of human life on earth at about 72 years. Now 72 years, seen in relation to the secrets of the cosmos, is a remarkable number, the true significance of which only begins to dawn upon us when we consider what I may call the cosmic secret of human earthly life. We have already described what the world of the stars is from a spiritual point of view. When we enter on a new earthly life, we return, so to speak, from the world of stars to this life on earth.

At this point once more it is astonishing how the ancient ideas—even if we do not take our start from tradition—simply emerge again of their own accord when we approach these domains of life with the help of modern spiritual science. We have seen how the various planetary stars and fixed stars take part in human life and in all that permeates this human life on earth. If we have before us an earthly life that has taken its full course,—one that does not come to an end all too soon, but that has passed through half at least of the allotted earthly time,—then in the last resort we find this truth once more: The human being, inasmuch as he comes down from cosmic spiritual spaces into an earthly life, comes always from a certain star. We can trace the very direction of it, and it is not unreal—on the contrary, it is most exact, to say:—‘The human being has his star.’ If we take what is experienced beyond all space and time between death and a new birth, and translate this into its spatial image, we can say: Every man has his star, which determines what he has attained between death and a new birth.

He comes from the direction of a certain star. We may indeed receive into our minds this conception. The whole human race inhabiting the earth is to be found on the one hand by looking round about us upon earth, passing through these many continents, finding them peopled by the human beings who are now incarnated. And the others who are not on the earth, where in the universe shall we find them? Whither must we look in the great universe if we would turn our soul's gaze to them,—assuming that a certain time has elapsed since they went through the gate of death? The answer is: We look in the true direction when we look out upon the starry heavens. There are the souls—or at least the directions which will enable us to find the souls—-who are spending their life between death and a new birth. We see and comprehend the entire human race that inhabits the earth, when we look upward and downward.

Those alone who are now on the way thither or returning thence, we find in the planetary region. But we can certainly not speak of the midnight hour of existence between death and a new birth, without thinking of some star which the human being as it were indwells between death and a new birth (albeit we must always bear in mind what I have said about the beings of the stars).

Then, my dear friends, we shall approach the cosmos with this knowledge. Away there are the stars, the cosmic signs from which there shines and lightens down upon us the soul-life of those who are between death and a new birth. And then we become aware that we can look also at the constellations of stars, saying to ourselves: ‘How is all this, that we behold in cosmic spaces, connected with the life of man?’ We look up with a new fulness of heart and mind to the silvery moon, the dazzling blaze of the sun, the twinkling stars at night-time, and we feel ourselves united even humanly with all of these. This is what Anthroposophy is to attain at last for the souls of men: they shall feel themselves united even in a human way with the whole cosmos. It is at this point that certain secrets of cosmic existence first begin to dawn upon us.

The sun rises and sets; the stars rise and set. We can trace how the sun sets, for example in the region where there are certain groups of stars. We can trace what is now called the apparent course of the stars, circling round the earth. We can trace the course of the sun. In 24 hours, the sun circles around the earth—‘apparently’ as we say nowadays,—and the stars too circle around the earth. So we say: but it is not quite correct. For if again and again we attentively observe the course of stars and sun, we perceive at length that the sun does not always rise at the same time in relation to the stars. It grows ever a little later. Day after day it arrives a little later at the place where it was on the previous day in relation to the stars. These spaces of time, by which the sun remains behind the stars in their course, add up till they become an hour, two hours, three hours, and at length a day. Thus at length the time approaches when we can say: The sun has remained behind the star by a whole day.

Now let us assume: Someone was born on the 1st of March in a particular year. And, let us say, he lived till the end of his 72nd year. He always celebrates his birthday on the 1st of March, for the sun says: His birthday is on the 1st of March. And he can celebrate it so, for throughout the 72 years of his life (though it progresses in relation to the stars) the sun shines forth ever and again in the neighbourhood of the star that shone when he came down to earth. But when he has lived for 72 years, a full day has elapsed. He has arrived at an age in life when the sun leaves the star into which it entered when he began his life. At his birthday now he is beyond the 1st of March. The star no longer says the same as the sun; the stars say it is the 2nd of March; the sun says it is the 1st. The human being has lost a cosmic day, for it takes just 72 years for the sun to remain behind a star.

During this time which the sun can spend in the region of his star, a man can live on earth. Then (under normal conditions) when the sun is no longer there to comfort his star for his life on earth, when the sun no longer says to his star: ‘He is down there, and I from myself am giving thee what he—this human being—has to give to thee; and for the time being, as I cover thee, I am doing for him what thou dost for him between death and a new birth,’ when the sun can no longer speak thus to the star, the star summons the man back again.

Thus you perceive the processes in the heavens immediately connected with human existence upon earth. In the mysteries of the heavens we see the age of man's life expressed. Man can live 72 years, because in this time the sun remains a day behind. After that time the sun can no longer comfort the star which it could comfort while it stood before and covered it. The star has become free again for the soul-spiritual work of man within the cosmos.

These things cannot be understood in any other way than with reverence,—with that deep reverence which was called in the ancient Mysteries ‘the reverence for that which is above.’ For this reverence leads us ever and again to see what happens here on earth in connection with what is unfolded in the sublime, majestic writing of the stars. It is indeed a limited life men lead today, compared to what was still existing at the beginning of the 3rd Post-Atlantean epoch. They did not merely base their reckoning, their understanding of man, on that which describes his steps upon the earth; they reckoned with what the stars of the great universe are saying about the life of man.

Once we are attentive to such connections and able to receive them with reverence into our souls, then too we know: ‘Whatever happens here on earth has its corresponding counterpart in the spiritual worlds.’ In the writing of the stars is expressed the kind of connection that exists between what happens here, and what happened (to speak from the earthly point of view) ‘some time ago’ in the spiritual world. In truth our every reflection upon karma should be accompanied by holy reverence and awe before the secrets of the universe.

In such a mood of reverence, let us approach the studies of karma which we are to make here during the near future. To begin with let us take this fact: Here are sitting a number of human beings, a section of what we call the Anthroposophical Society; and though one of us may be united with this Anthroposophical Society by stronger links, and another by less strong, it is in all cases part of a man's destiny—and the destiny that underlies these things is powerful—it is a part of his destiny that he has found his way into the Anthroposophical Society. Moreover, it lies inherent in the spiritualisation which must come over the Anthroposophical Society since the Christmas Foundation Meeting:—We must become ever more conscious of the spiritual, cosmic realities that underlie such a community as this Society. For out of such a consciousness the individual will then be able to take his true stand in the Society. Hence you will understand—along with all the other responsibilities resulting from the Christmas Foundation Meeting—that we must now begin to say something too about the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. It is very complicated, for it is a karma of community,—a karma that arises from the karmic coming-together of many single human beings. Take in its true and deep meaning all that has been said in these lectures and all that results from the many relationships that have been unfolded here; then, my dear friends, you will yourselves perceive that what is taking place here in our midst—where a number of human beings are led by their karma into the Anthroposophical Society—has been preceded by many and important events which happened to these very human beings before they came down into this present earthly life—events moreover which were themselves the after-effects of what had taken place in former lives on earth.

Let your thought dwell for a moment on the great vistas that are opened up by such an idea as this. Then you will realise how this thought may by and by be deepened till there emerges the spiritual history that stands behind the Anthroposophical Society. But this cannot be accomplished all at once. It can only enter our consciousness slowly and gradually; then only will it be possible to build even the conduct and action of the Anthroposophical Society on the foundations which are actually there for anthroposophists.

It is of course Anthroposophy as such which holds the Society together. In one way or another, everyone who finds his way into the Society must be seeking for Anthroposophy. And the preceding causes are to be sought for in the experiences which were undergone, by the souls who now become anthroposophists, before they came down into this earthly life.

At the same time, if we look out into the world with a clear perception of what has happened hitherto, we are also bound to admit: There are many human beings whom we find here or there in the world today, and of whom—looking at their connection with their pre-earthly life—we must say that they were truly pre-destined by their pre-natal life for the Anthroposophical Society; and yet, owing to certain other things, they are unable to find their way into it. There are far more of them than we generally think.

This must bring still nearer to our hearts the question: What is the pre-destination that leads a soul to Anthroposophy?

I will take my start from extreme examples, which are all the more instructive in showing how the karmic forces work. In the Anthroposophical Society the question of karma does indeed arise before the individual in a more intensive way than in other realms of life. I need only say the following: The souls who are incarnated in a human body now,—to begin with we cannot possibly follow them back far enough to assume that they experienced directly in their past earthly lives anything that could lead them, for example, to Eurhythmy (to take this radical instance from within the Anthroposophical Movement). For Eurhythmy did not exist in the times when the souls who now seek for it were incarnated. Thus the burning question arises: How comes it that a soul finds its way into Eurhythmy out of the working of the karmic forces?

But so it is in all the domains of life. Souls are there today, seeking the way to that which Anthroposophy can give them. How do they come to unfold all the pre-dispositions of their karma from past earthly lives, precisely in this direction which leads them to Anthroposophy?

In the first place there are some souls who are driven to Anthroposophy with strong inner intensity. The intensity of these forces is not the same in all. Some souls are driven to Anthroposophy with such inward intensity that it seems as though they were steering straight towards it without any by-ways at all, finding their way directly into one domain or another of the anthroposophical life.

There are a number of souls who steer their cosmic way in this sense for the following reason: In past centuries, when they had their former life on earth, they felt with peculiar intensity that Christianity had reached a definite turning-point. They lived in an age when the main effect of Christianity was to pass over into a more or less instinctive human feeling. It was an age when Christianity was practised in a perfectly natural and simple way but quite instinctively; so that the question did not really occur to the souls of men: Why am I a Christian? Such souls we find especially if we turn our gaze to the 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, and 8th centuries after Christ. There we find Christ-permeated souls, who were growing and evolving towards the age of Consciousness (the age of the Spiritual Soul), but who, since this age had not yet begun, were still receiving Christianity into the pure Mind-Soul. On the other hand, with respect to the worldly affairs of life, they already experienced the dawn of what the Spiritual Soul is destined to bring.

Thus their Christianity lived in a way unconsciously. It was in many respects a deeply pious Christianity, but it lived, if I may say so, leaving the head on one side and entering straight into the functions of the organism. Now that which is unconscious in one life becomes a degree more conscious in the next life on earth: and so this Christianity which had not become fully clear or self-conscious, became at length a challenge and a question for these human souls: ‘Why are we Christians?’

The outcome was (I am speaking in an introductory way today, hinting at matters which will be spoken of more fully afterwards) the outcome was that in the life between death and a new birth these souls had a certain connection once more in the spiritual world, especially in the first half of the 19th century. In the first half of the 19th century there were gatherings of souls in the spiritual world,—souls who took the consequences of the Christianity they had experienced on earth, finding it again in the radiance, in the all embracing glory of the spiritual world. Above all in the first half of the 19th century, there were souls in the life between death and a new birth who strove to translate into cosmic Imaginations what they had felt in a preceding Christian life on earth. The very thing that I once described here as a great cult or act of ritual was there enacted in the Supersensible. A large number of souls were gathered in these mutually-woven cosmic Imaginations, in these mighty pictures of a future existence, which they were to seek again in an altered form during their next life on earth.

But in all this was also interwoven all that had taken place between the 7th and 13th or 14th centuries A.D. by way of dire and painful inner conflicts, which were indeed more painful than is generally thought. For the souls to whom I now refer had undergone very much during that time; and all that they had thus undergone, they wove it into the mighty cosmic Imaginations which were woven together by a large number of souls in common, during the first half of the 19th century.

The great cosmic Imaginations that were thus woven were shot through on the one hand by something that I cannot otherwise describe than as a kind of longing and expectant feeling. Working out these mighty Imaginations, the souls experienced within them a concentrated feeling, gathered from manifold experiences, a concentrated feeling within their disembodied souls. It was a feeling which I can describe somewhat as follows: ‘In our last life on earth we inclined towards the living experience of Christianity. Deeply we felt the Mysteries which tradition had preserved for all Christians, telling of the sacred and solemn happenings in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era. But did He really stand before us in all His glory, in His full radiance?’ The question arose out of their hearts. ‘Was it not only after our death that we learned how Christ had descended from cosmic heights, as a Being of the Sun, to the earth? Did we really experience Him as the Being of the Sun? He is here no longer, He is united with the earth. Here we can only find what is like a great cosmic memory of Him. We must find our way back again to the earth, in order to have the Christ before our souls.’

A longing for Christ accompanied these souls from that time forth, when with the Spirit-Beings of the Hierarchies they wove the mighty and sublime cosmic Imaginations. This longing went with them from their pre-earthly life into the present life on earth.

This can be experienced with overwhelming intensity by spiritual vision when it observes what was taking place in mankind, incarnate and discarnate, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. And as I said, all manner of things were mingled into these impressions. For we must remember that in their Christian experience the souls who are now returning had shared in all that was taking place as between those who were striving for Christianity and those who still stood within the old Pagan consciousness,—which was frequently the case during the centuries to which I just now referred. In these souls therefore, many of those influences are present which make it possible for man to fall a victim to the temptations of Lucifer on the one hand and Ahriman on the other. For in karma, Lucifer and Ahriman are weaving, no less than the good gods: this we have already seen.

All that was thus interwoven, and that works itself out karmically today, must be followed out in detail, if we would really penetrate the spiritual foundations of anthroposophical striving. If the Christmas Foundation Meeting is to be taken in real earnest, the time has now come when we must draw aside the veil from certain things. Only they must be taken with the necessary earnestness.

Let us begin, as I said, with a radical instance; and while we discuss the following, let there hold sway in the background, for the rest of this hour, all that has now been said.

From the pre-earthly into this earthly existence, through their education, through all that they experience on earth, human souls find their way. They seek and find their way into the Anthroposophical Society, and remain in it for a time. But there are isolated cases among them, where, having shown themselves zealous, nay over-zealous members of the Anthroposophical Society for a while, they become the most violent opponents. Let us observe the working of karma in an extreme case of this kind.

A person comes into the Anthroposophical Society. He proves a very zealous member, yet after a time he somehow manages to become not only an opponent but a maligner among opponents. We must admit, it is a very strange karma.

We will consider a single case. There is a soul. We look back into a past life on earth, into a time when old memories from the ages of Paganism still lingered on, enticingly for many people. It was a time when men were finding their way on the one hand into a Christianity that spread out with a certain warmth and fire, and yet, for many of them, with a certain superficiality.

When such things are spoken of, we must always remember that we have to begin somewhere or other, at some particular earthly life. Every such earthly life leads back to earlier ones in turn; therefore there will always be some things that remain unexplained—things to which we simply refer as matters of fact. They are of course the karmic consequences of still earlier events, but we have to begin somewhere.

In the period to which I have just referred we find a certain soul. We find him, indeed, in a way that very nearly concerned myself and other present members of this Society. We find him as a would-be maker of gold, in possession of writings, manuscripts which he is hardly able to understand but interprets in his own way and then makes experiments in accordance with the instructions, though he has no real notion what he is doing. For it is by no means a simple matter to look into the spiritually chemical relationships, if we may call them so. Thus we see him as an experimenter, with a little library containing the most varied instructions and recipes going far back into Moorish and Arabian sources. We see him unfolding this activity in an almost out-of-the-way place, though visited by many inquisitive persons. At length, under the influence of the practices in which he engages without understanding, he gets a strange physical debility,—a disease attacking especially the larynx,—and (this being a masculine incarnation) his voice becomes hoarser and hoarser till it has almost vanished.

Meanwhile the Christian teachings are spread abroad; they are taking hold of men on all hands. This man is filled on the one hand with the greedy longing to make gold, and, with the making of gold, to attain many other things attainable at that time if one had been successful in making gold. On the other hand Christianity comes near to him, in a way that is full of reproaches. There arises in him what I may perhaps describe as a kind of Faustian feeling, though not altogether pure. Strong becomes the feeling in him: ‘Have I not really done an awful wrong?’ By-and-by under the influence of such reflections the conclusion grows upon him, living with scepticism in his soul: ‘Your having lost your voice is the divine punishment, the just punishment, for meddling with unrighteous things.’

In this situation of his inner life, he sought out the advice of human beings who have also become united at this present time with the Anthroposophical Society, and who were able at that time really to play a helpful part in his destiny. For they were able to save his soul from deep and anxious doubt. We can really speak of a certain ‘salvation of the soul’ in this case. But all this took place under such conditions that he experienced it with feelings which remained to some extent external, no matter how intense they were. He was overwhelmed on the one hand with a sense of gratitude toward those who had saved his inner life. But on the other hand—unclear as it all was—an appalling Ahrimanic impulse became mingled with it. After the strong inclination towards unrighteous magic practices, and with his present feeling—which was not quite genuine—of having entered into Christian righteousness, an Ahrimanic trait became mixed up in all these things. For in effect the soul was brought into confusion; things were not really clear, and the result was that he brought an Ahrimanic trait into his gratitude. His thankfulness was transformed into something that found an unworthy expression in his soul, and that appeared to him in this light, during his life between death and new birth. It came before him especially when he had reached that point which I described, in the first half of the 19th century. There he had to live through it again; and he experienced the deep unworthiness of what his soul had evolved in that former life, by way of gratitude which was superficial, external, nay even cringing.

We see this picture of Ahrimanised gratitude mixed up in the cosmic Imaginations of which I spoke. And we see the soul descend from that pre-earthly existence into a new earthly life. We see him descend on the one hand with all those impulses that entered into him from the time when he was seeking to make gold,—the materialistic corruption of a spiritual striving. On the other hand we see evolving in him under the Ahrimanic influence something which is distinctly to be perceived as a sense of shame,—shame at his gratitude improperly expressed and superficial.

These two currents live in his soul as he descends to earth. And they express themselves in this way: The soul of whom I am speaking, having become a person again in earthly life, finds his way to those others who were also with him in the first half of the 19th century.

To begin with, a kind of memory arises in him of what he lived through in the Imaginative picture of the unworthy external gratitude. All these things become unfolded now, almost automatically. Then there awakens what is living there within him,—what I described as a sense of shame at his own attitude which had been unworthy of a man. This takes hold of his soul, but, influenced as it is by Ahriman (through the karma of former epochs too, of course), it finds vent as an appalling hatred against all that he had at first espoused. The sense of shame against himself becomes transformed into a wild and angry opposition. And this again is united with dreadful disappointment that all his old subconscious cravings have been so little satisfied. For they would have been satisfied if anything had arisen now, similar to what was contained in the old, improper art of making gold.

You see, my dear friends, here we have a radical example showing how such things turn inward. We have traced the strange mysterious by-ways of such a thing as this: the connection of a sense of shame with hatred. Such things must also be discovered in the connections of human life if we would understand a present life from its preceding conditions.

When we consider such things as these, a certain measure of understanding is indeed poured out over all that takes place through human beings in the world. Then indeed great difficulties of life begin, when we take the thought of karma in real earnest. But these difficulties are meant to come, for they are founded in the real essence of human life. Such a Movement as the Anthroposophical must indeed be exposed to many things, for only so can it evolve the strong forces which it needs.

I gave you this example first, so that you might see how we must seek—even for negative things—the karmic relationships with the whole stream of destiny which is causing the Anthroposophical Movement to arise out of the preceding incarnations of those who are joined together in this Society.

So, my dear friends, we may hope that there will awaken in us by-and-by an entirely new understanding of the essence of this Anthroposophical Society. We may hope to discover, as it were, the very soul of the Anthroposophical Society with all its many difficulties. For in this case too, we must not remain within the limits of the single human life, but trace it back to what is now being—I cannot say re-incarnated—but re-experienced in life. In this direction I wanted to begin today.

The conception of karma and its background given in the lecture yesterday can be deepened in many essential respects. We heard that behind human destiny there are worlds in relation to which the aspect of destiny usually observed amounts to no more than the letters of a script as compared with what is produced by the combinations of those letters in a work such as Goethe's Faust. Behind the destiny of a human being we can in very truth gaze at the life and weaving deeds of higher worlds and of the Beings belonging to those worlds. But this picture can be deepened and elaborated.—When man is passing through the Moon sphere after death, he lives in communion with the great primeval Teachers of humanity who have their abode in that sphere. Through the whole of the period between death and a new birth he is associated with human souls—particularly those with whom he is karmically connected—who have also passed through the gate of death and are living through the same period of spiritual existence. In the Moon sphere man lives in communion with the Beings we know as the Angeloi, Arch-angeloi and Archai, and as he passes through the following planetary spheres, with higher and ever higher Beings. It is not really correct to make demarcations and assign one particular Hierarchy to each heavenly sphere, for this is not in accord with reality. But in a general sense it can be said that the Archai, Archangeloi and Angeloi enter into communion with us before we pass into the Sun sphere; in that sphere we find our way into what has to be accomplished between death and a new birth in cooperation with the Hierarchy of the Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. And then we gradually live on into the realms of the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim as we approach the Mars sphere and the Jupiter sphere. It is not correct to say that one Hierarchy corresponds only to one particular planetary sphere; but there is something else that will have important bearings when we come to study karmic relationships in greater detail.

It will, however, be necessary to familiarise ourselves with a conception which, to begin with, will seem strange and perplexing to ordinary thinking. As we stand on the Earth and feel our way into existence, we conceive of the Earthly as being immediately around us, on, under, and a little above the surface of the Earth in the environment, and when our minds turn to the so-called super-Earthly, our gaze is instinctively directed upwards. We feel the super-Earthly to be above us. Strange as it seems, it is true nevertheless, that when we ourselves are within those super-Earthly realms to which we look upwards from the Earth, when we are actually within them, the opposite holds good; for then we look downwards to the Earthly—which now lies below. In a certain sense we do so through the whole of our existence between death and a new birth. The question will occur to you: Is our experience of earthly things during physical existence so inadequate that between death and rebirth we have to look down from those super-earthly spheres to the Earth as a kind of nether heaven below us? ... But something else must be remembered here. The vista of all that we behold around us and in the cosmic expanse while we live on Earth between birth and death in a physical body enclosed by the skin, this vista is majestic and splendid; it refreshes and delights us, or it may bring tragedy and pain. At any rate it is a vista of rich and abundant life and a man might well believe that in comparison with the majesty of the world of stars, with everything that is revealed to him as his outer world, what is enclosed within his skin during physical existence is puny and insignificant. But the vista before us in our life between death and a new birth is entirely different. All that was our outer world during life on Earth now becomes our inner world. We feel ourselves expanding ever more and more into the cosmic spheres. What is there experienced may be described in earthly language in somewhat the following way.

Here on Earth we say, ‘my heart’—meaning something that is inside our skin. Between death and a new birth we do not say, ‘my heart,’ but ‘my Sun.’ For at a certain stage between death and rebirth, when our being has expanded into the Universe, the Sun is within us just as here on Earth the heart is within us—and the same applies in a spiritual sense to the rest of the starry worlds as I have described. Conversely, what was enclosed within our skin on Earth now becomes our outer world. But do not imagine that it bears any resemblance to what an anatomist sees when he dissects a corpse. The spectacle is even grander and more majestic than the panorama of the Universe presented to us on Earth. From the vantage-point of our life between death and a new birth, a whole world is revealed in what the physical senses perceive merely as heart, lung, liver, and so forth; it is a world greater and more impressive than the outer Universe at which we gaze during life on Earth.

Another singular fact is the following.—You may say: ‘Yes, but as this world is present in every human being, everyone who dies must carry a separate world within him through death, and this suggests that the worlds to be perceived in the after-death existence greatly outnumber the individuals with whom one actually comes in contact there ...’ The secret lies in the fact that, firstly, all those human beings with whom we have some karmic tie are seen as a unity, as one world. Then there are the other souls who also form a unified, though less defined whole: this host of souls is linked with those with whom we have actual karmic ties, and again there is a unified whole. The moment we pass from the physical world into the spiritual world, everything is different. A great deal that has to be said will seem paradoxical to those unaccustomed to such conceptions but it is necessary now and again to draw attention to the conditions prevailing in the spiritual world as revealed to Initiation-wisdom. In the physical world we can count: one, two, three ... we can also count money—although perhaps not just at the present time!—but counting does not really mean anything in the spiritual world. Number has no particular significance there; everything is more or less a unity. If things are to be counted they must be distinct and separate from each other and this does not apply in the spiritual world. In describing the spiritual world and the physical world, quite different terms have to be used in each case. From the vantage-point of the spiritual world, that which in the physical world is within man, presents a very different appearance. Man's structure is even more splendid, more awe-inspiring than the structure of the Heavens as perceived from the Earth. And what we prepare in communion with the higher Hierarchies for the incarnation that will follow the life between death and a new birth must be an entelechy of soul-and-spirit that befits this human structure, permeates it, gives it life.

How does the life of a human being develop on Earth? When we are born from pre-earthly existence into earthly life, the whole physical body has, apparently, been provided by our parents. It may seem as though having come down from the super-sensible world we unite in a purely external way with what has been prepared for us in the physical world by our parents and has developed in the mother's body. What happens in reality, however, is the following.—

The substance of the physical body is constantly changing; it is all the time being thrown off and replaced. Think only of your finger-nails and your hair. You cut your finger-nails and they grow again. But this is only a process that is externally perceptible; in reality, man is all the time throwing off matter and replacing it from within, from the inner centre of his being. Substance is perpetually scaling off and in seven or eight years time all the physical substance that was within us seven years previously has been thrown off and replaced by new. Just think of this.—Seven years ago I was able, to my great joy, to lecture to friends here in Breslau. There they were, sitting on chairs in front of me; but nothing remains to-day of the physical substance contained in those bodies; it has all vanished and been replaced by other physical substance. What has remained in each case is the individuality of spirit-and-soul. The individuality was present before birth, in pre-earthly existence, in earlier earthly lives too, and has remained. But the substance of the bodies sitting in the chairs seven years ago has long since passed away into other regions of the Universe. Now this exchange of substance begins at birth and is complete after the lapse of seven years or so. What our parents provide is the substance and its particular organisation up to the time of the change of teeth. Thereafter the task of moulding the substance is taken over by the individuality. The change of teeth is a process of great significance. Until that time we have received from our parents a model, this model resembles our parents, embodies the hereditary traits. Then, in accordance with this model, the individuality of spirit-and-soul slowly builds up the second body which exists from the time of the change of teeth to the onset of puberty, is then cast off, and the third body begins to develop. Hereditary traits which remain in us are due to the fact that in the second body we have copied them from the model. What is copied from the model at a later stage is adapted and elaborated by the unconscious faculty, acquired in pre-earthly existence, to mould the human organism in accordance with the secrets it contains. The purpose of the first body which we bear until the time of the change of teeth is to enable us, in conformity with our karma, to resemble our parents. The real secrets, the deep, all-embracing secrets whereby the human organism is built up as the wonderful image of the outer structure of the Heavens—these secrets in their innermost essence have to be acquired during the life between death and a new birth.

Having lived through the first half of the Sun-existence we have to find our way into the second half, where the impulse to live out our karma is kindled. Here again a vista lies before us of wonderful happenings which take place between ourselves and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

Here on Earth we live and move among minerals, plants, animals, other human beings; between death and a new birth we live together with other human souls in the way described—but now, instead of minerals, plants, animals, there are the Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, and together with them we shape our karma. Through the whole of the time we gaze at the earthly realm below where our karma must take effect, gaze at it longingly, as something to which all our forces of feeling are directed,—just as here on Earth between birth and death we gaze upwards with longing to the Heavens. In ascending to the Moon sphere, Mercury sphere, Venus sphere, we find our way to the Beings of the Hierarchy of Archai, Archangeloi and Angeloi. These Beings are the judges of what is good and evil in us, also of the mutilation we undergo, as I described in the previous lecture. For the consequence of unrighteousness is that we suffer a kind of mutilation as beings of soul and spirit. There, in these higher spheres, we have our judges, we are involved in the operations of Cosmic Justice.—In the Sun-existence we reach the sphere of the Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. We are now within the ranks of Beings who do not only judge but actually work with us at the shaping of our karma. These Beings—Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—are primarily denizens of the Sun, and therewith of the whole Universe. They belong essentially to spiritual worlds. But mediators are necessary between the spiritual world and the material, physical world, and these mediators are the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. Their rank in the spiritual Cosmos is higher because they are mightier Beings—mightier not merely in the realm of spiritual life but because they bring to effect in the physical world what is thus lived through in the spiritual worlds. In the life between death and a new birth we gaze consciously and with longing at the earthly realm below, but in reality we are gazing at what is proceeding among the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, in their mutual connections with one another. It is a shattering, awe-inspiring experience. We learn, gradually, to understand the deeds performed between Seraphim and Seraphim, Cherubim and Cherubim, Thrones and Thrones, and again between Thrones and Seraphim, Thrones and Cherubim, and so forth. These Beings are engaged in bringing about a process of adjustment which, as we learn to understand it, we feel has something to do with ourselves. What is it, in reality? It is the image that arises in cosmic existence from the good and the evil for which we were responsible in our earthly life. The good must result in good; the evil must result in evil. Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones elaborate the consequences of what we have sown on Earth; our evil deeds have injurious consequences, in cosmic existence. We witness how Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are occupied with the consequences of our evil deeds. And the knowledge gradually dawns upon us that in what comes to pass in cosmic evolution among the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, our karma is being lived out in the Heavens before we can live it out on Earth. This awe-inspiring experience is enhanced inasmuch as we now realise with all the force we possess in this spiritual life between death and a new birth, that what the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones experience in their divine existence finds its just fulfilment when we ourselves experience it in the next earthly life. Thus in super-earthly realms our karma is lived through in advance by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. In very truth the Gods are the Creators of the Earthly. They live through everything in advance, in the realm of spirit; then in the physical realm it comes to fulfilment. Our karma is prefigured by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in their divine existence. Thus are the forces which shape our karma set in operation.

During existence in the planetary spheres we experience the deeds, the judgements, of the Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi. But Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are also at work, in order that they may live through our karma in advance. Thus are we made aware of the debt we owe to the world on account of our previous deeds, thus do we experience the divine foreshadowing of what our life is to be. These experiences are complex and intricate, but they are part and parcel of that super-earthly existence upon which earthly life is based.

Not until we realise how rich in content is the life between death and a new birth and think of this in conjunction with the happenings of earthly life do we obtain a really adequate conception of what comes to pass in the world through man and in man. Thus is self-knowledge deepened, enriched and spiritualised. The only way whereby we can obtain a true picture of the earthly life of humanity is to view it against the background of happenings in the spiritual world.

We see human beings appearing on the Earth; they are born, grow up, are creative or active according to their destiny and the particular faculties they possess. The historical life of humanity through the ages is, after all, the outcome of human faculties, human deeds, human thoughts and feelings. But all these human beings who appear in an earthly life between birth and death—all of them have passed through previous lives in which they experienced the Earthly in a different way, worked upon it in a different way. The influences of earlier lives make themselves felt in all later lives, but it is only possible to understand the sequence of connections by taking account, too, of the periods lying between death and rebirth. Then, for the first time, we have a true conception of history, for we realise that what appears on the Earth through human beings in one epoch is linked with the happenings of an earlier epoch. But the essential question is: How are the fruits and happenings of an earlier epoch carried over into later times?—Historians have long been content to record consecutive facts but from data of this kind it is impossible to understand why later events follow those that preceded them. Some have said that ideas are at work in history and then become actuality. But no genuine thinker can conceive why this should be so. Others—those who hold the materialistic view of history—say: Ideas—so much twaddle! Economic factors are the only reality, they lie at the root of everything!—Such is the materialistic, mechanistic conception of history.

But this is no more than a dabbling on the surface of things. The reality is that what came to pass in earlier epochs of history is carried over into later epochs by human beings themselves. All those who are sitting here now lived in earlier epochs. Their deeds and manner of acting are the consequences of what they experienced in earlier lives. And so it is with everything that comes to pass in the course of history, be it of importance or of little account. The earlier is carried over into the later by human souls themselves. The conception of life prevailing nowadays can be deepened in the true sense only by the realisation that historical evolution too is borne onwards by man himself. But everything is determined by what is achieved in the starry worlds between death and rebirth where man works in cooperation with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

And now let us take an example to illustrate what has been said. In comparatively early times, not long before the founding of Christianity, a certain Initiate was incarnated in the East, in the Indian civilisation. In his earthly life this individuality had poor eyesight—in describing karmic relationships one must go into details of this kind—and his perceptions remained more or less superficial. This life which was characterised by the mystical outlook typical of Indian culture, was followed by other, less important incarnations. But there was a life between death and a new birth during which the superficial experiences of the Indian incarnation were worked upon in the Mercury sphere, partly too in the Venus sphere and in the Mars sphere, in conjunction with Beings of the higher Hierarchies. In the majority of human beings the influences of one of the cosmic spheres are dominant in the shaping of the karma, but in the case of this particular individuality the influences of the Mercury sphere, the Venus sphere and the Mars sphere worked with almost equal strength at the karmic transformation of incipient faculties arising from the experiences of an Indian incarnation. In the nineteenth century this individuality appeared again as a somewhat complex personality, namely, Heinrich Heine.

Let us think about an example such as this which has been brought to light from the depths of spiritual life by very penetrating and exact investigation. A rigid, superficial thinker will argue that this tends to take away the whole atmosphere and quality of the personality, that what he wants is a picture of the elementary characteristics of the man in question ... well, he has every right to take this attitude if he chooses; it is his karma to be a philistine and he has the right to speak in this way ... but he will not succeed in reaching more than a fragment of the truth. When we look more deeply into the facts, the foundations and the background of the reality come to light. The life of an individual is certainly not impoverished but infinitely enriched in meaning when it is studied in the light of such foundations, when we can perceive the experiences of an earlier, Indian incarnation glimmering through that problematic, fitful Heine-life. Having absorbed the influences operating in the Mercury sphere and the Venus sphere, this individuality passed into the Mars sphere, where a certain strain of aggressiveness developed for the next earthly life; the experiences of an earlier life were transformed into a faculty in which there was a certain vein of aggressiveness. In the Mercury sphere the soul acquired the tendency to flit from one experience to another, one concept to another, and in the Venus sphere an element of eroticism—eroticism in the spiritual sense—crept into the imaginative, conceptual faculties.

In surveying a human life in this way we gaze into cosmic existence, and what we thus perceive is certainly not poorer in content than the commonplace picture of a man's elementary characteristics desired by superficial observers. We perceive how earlier history is carried over into later history through the instrumentality of the starry worlds and the Beings of those worlds. History becomes reality only when it is viewed in this setting; otherwise it remains so many disjointed ciphers. But now we begin to read from history how behind the individual destinies of men there are the deeds of Gods and of worlds which become manifest in ever greater grandeur and power in the process of the historical evolution of humanity—where we shall always discern the weaving of the destinies and the thoughts of individuals.

And now, another example.—There is an individuality who at the time when Islam was spreading across North Africa to Spain, had acquired much scholarship according to the standards then prevailing. Schools similar to that in which St. Augustine had received instruction still existed in North Africa, but now, in a later period, the School had fallen into decline. This individuality imbibed a great deal of the knowledge that had been preserved in these Schools in which much wisdom deriving from the ancient Mysteries still survived, although in a decadent form. Then his path took him to Spain where he came in contact with the earlier—not the later—Cabbalistic School, acquired much of this earlier Cabbalistic learning and thus became thoroughly versed in Manichean-Cabbalistic doctrine. In the course of further development during a life between death and a new birth, a certain strain of aggressiveness was acquired and, in addition, a talent which had something rather dangerously fascinating about it, namely, fluency of speech and language in dealing with all kinds of problems which arose in the soul from the earlier incarnation. With these characteristics the individuality in question was born again in the eighteenth century as Voltaire.

To know that the Voltaire-life leads back to experiences akin to those of St. Augustine in his early days, experiences which were associated with the Cabbalistic School and hence with all the irony peculiar to Cabbalistic learning, to know that all these elements play a part and, by penetrating into what happened during life between death and rebirth, to perceive the connection between the two lives—this alone can lead to a picture of the whole reality. At first sight there seems to be no connection between successive earthly lives; we do not perceive how the one reaches over into the other. The intervening periods are not perceived but for all that they are fragments of the whole picture in which everything is embraced. It is only by studying the spiritual background as well as the earthly nature of a man that we can hope to approach reality.

In this connection a new trend must take effect on our Movement, from now onwards. When the German Section of the Theosophical Society was founded in Berlin in 1902, I gave as the title of my first lecture: Studies of the concrete working of Karma. The lecture was announced but could not be delivered for the simple reason that the older members of the Theosophical Society had their own ideas of what may or may not be spoken about, and this attitude had determined the whole atmosphere. The leading Members would have been horrified if at that time one had spoken of the concrete workings of karma. The Theosophical Movement was not ready for it. A great deal of preparation was necessary and has, in fact, been going on now for more than two decades. But at the Christmas Foundation Meeting the impulse was given to speak without reserve, not only about the Spiritual in general but also about what can be discovered concerning man's life in the realm of spirit. And so in future we shall speak quite openly in the Anthroposophical Society of matters of which from the very beginning it was the intention to speak, but for which preparation had to be made. This is part of the esoteric trend and impulse with which the Anthroposophical Society was imbued through the Christmas Foundation Meeting. The Christmas Meeting was no trifling episode; it betokened the assumption of new responsibilities for the Anthroposophical Movement, responsibilities flowing from the realm of spirit.

To be able to gaze at what takes place between death and a new birth brings home to one the rich diversity and many-sidedness of the world. For when it is said that the qualities of aggressiveness and also of fluency of language are quickened in the Mars sphere, this is only one aspect; other aspects of life too are quickened in that sphere. And the same applies to the Jupiter sphere. The Jupiter sphere and its Beings are experienced when in the process of self-observation one looks back with the insight of Initiation over the period between the forty-ninth and fifty-sixth years of life—and then obliterates the pictures. The vista of the Jupiter sphere may be a shattering experience, for the Beings of Jupiter are utterly different from human beings. Think of a quality which is sometimes more and sometimes less in evidence, namely the quality of wisdom. Men insist that they are wise ... but what a struggle it is for them to acquire wisdom! The tiniest fragment of wisdom in any field is difficult to attain and demands inner effort. Nothing of the kind is necessary for the Jupiter Beings. Wisdom is an integral part of their very nature—I cannot say it is ‘born’ in them, for the Jupiter Beings do not come into existence through an embryo as men do on Earth. You must picture to yourselves that there is something around Jupiter like the cloud-masses around the Earth. If you were now to imagine bodies of men forming out of the clouds and flying down to the Earth, that would be a picture of how the new Beings come forth from a kind of cloud-mass on Jupiter; but these Beings have wisdom as an original, intrinsic characteristic. Just as we have circulating blood, so they have wisdom. But their wisdom is not a merited reward, nor has it been acquired by effort; they have it by nature. Therefore their thinking, too, is utterly different from the thinking of men. The experience is shattering, overwhelming, but we must gradually get accustomed to the idea. Just as we on Earth are pervaded by air, so everything on Jupiter is pervaded by wisdom. Wisdom there has substantiality, streams in the atmosphere, discharges itself like rain on Jupiter, rises like mist to the heights. But Beings are there—Beings who ascend in a cloud, a mist of wisdom. Herein live the Cherubim, who in this realm of existence gather up and give shape to the karma of human beings. Other impulses too are in operation, but what holds good unconditionally is that the experiences of an earlier incarnation are gathered together and moulded into shape by the forces of the self-subsisting wisdom of the Jupiter sphere. Then, when the individuality comes down again to incarnation on the Earth, he bears the stamp arising from the re-shaping of his earlier experiences by wisdom which ultimately takes effect in very diverse forms.—Again we will take an example.

There is an individuality who leads us back to ancient Greece, into a milieu of Platonism, and also of sculpture. This individuality had a very significant incarnation as a sculptor in Greece. What he there experienced was carried over into intermediate incarnations of less importance. This is an individuality whose karma for what is at the moment his latest incarnation was elaborated chiefly in the sphere of the Jupiter wisdom.

Another individuality takes us back to Central America, to Mexico, in times before European people had migrated to America. He was connected with the then declining Mysteries of the early, original inhabitants of Mexico and came into contact with the Mexican deities at a time when the pupils of the Mysteries still had real and living intercourse with these spiritual Beings. This was karma of a special—not a particularly favourable—kind. These Gods—Quetzalcoatl, Tetzkatlipoka, Taotl—are still mentioned by scholars to-day but hardly more than by name. The individuality of whom I am speaking was closely connected with those Mysteries which, in spite of their decadence, enabled a God such as Taotl or Quetzalcoatl to be a living reality to him. There, in those declining Mysteries, he became thoroughly versed in the magic arts—arts which were already rife with superstition—and a Being like Tetzkatlipoka was a vivid reality to him. Tetzkatlipoka was a kind of Serpent God with whom men felt themselves astrally connected. Unlike the other individuality whose life as a man in Greece was followed by female incarnations, this individuality had no intermediate incarnation. He lived as a man within the Mexican Mysteries, passed through the sphere of the Jupiter-wisdom in his life between death and a new birth and then incarnated in the eighteenth/nineteenth century. The other individuality who had lived in Greece also passed through the Jupiter sphere in the way that is possible for one who had been a sculptor and had unfolded the faculty of creative imagination which was still so potent a force in Greece. This was transformed and re-cast in the Jupiter sphere where the wisdom underlying the Greek talent for plastic representation of the human form, for pictorial conceptions of the world, is present in its very essence, and the individuality came down into a body with a strongly Grecian bent of mind that had been elaborated in the Jupiter sphere, being reborn as Goethe.

The other individuality also passed through the Jupiter sphere, where his experiences in the Mexican Mysteries were cast into a new form. But the Jupiter sphere could not produce identical results from an earthly life in Greece and an earthly life in Mexico of the kinds I have described. Both sets of experience were worked upon by the wisdom of the Jupiter sphere but both were conditioned by the formative forces that had been in operation in earlier lives. The individuality who had been connected with the Mexican Mysteries lived through the Jupiter sphere and was reborn as Eliphas Levi. There you have an example of how magic practices, magic rites and enactments have been transformed in a remarkable way into wisdom. It is Jupiter-karma of an inferior kind, but for all that replete with spirituality, replete with wisdom. From this we perceive how what a man has experienced in earthly life works into what he becomes during his life between death and a new birth. The later life is invariably conditioned by the earlier life. But the experiences of earthly life can be transformed by the selfsame sphere into very different karma. Our view of human life can only be deepened in the right way when we perceive how this life is shaped in conformity with karma. Then it is enriched, then and only then do we acquire a real knowledge of man and of human life.

I should like to carry to a still wider horizon the reflections I have already made here concerning the relationship between man and the cycle of Nature which was formed in ancient times under the influence of the Mysteries, and to go into what was believed in those times with regard to all that one as man received from the cosmos through this cycle of Nature. You may have gathered from yesterday's lecture as well perhaps as from the recollection of much that I could still say about such matters during the past Christmas season, in the Goetheanum which has now been taken from us—you may have gathered that the cycle of the year in its phenomena was perceived, and indeed today can still be perceived, as a result of life, as something which in its external events is just as much the expression of a living being standing behind it as the actions of the human organism are the manifestations of a being, of the human soul itself.

Let us remind ourselves how, in midsummer, the time we know as St. John's, the people became aware under this ancient Mystery-influence of a certain relationship to their ego, an ego which they did not yet consider as exclusively their own, but which they viewed as resting still in the bosom of the divine-spiritual.

These people believed that by means of the ceremonies I have described, they approached their “I” at midsummer, although throughout the rest of the year it was hidden from them. Of course they thought of themselves as dwelling in their beings altogether in the bosom of the divine-spiritual; but they thought that during the other three-quarters of the year nothing was revealed to them of what belonged to them as their ego. Only in this one quarter, which reached its high point at St. John's, did the essential being of their own ego manifest itself to them as through a window opening out of the divine spiritual world.

Now this essence of the individual ego within the divine spiritual world in which it revealed itself was by no means regarded in such a neutral, indifferent—one may even say phlegmatic—way as is the case today. When the “I” is spoken of today, a person is hardly likely to think of it as having any special connection either with this world or any other. Rather, he thinks of his “I” as a kind of point; what he does rays out from it and what he perceives rays in. But the feeling a person has today in regard to his “I” is of an altogether phlegmatic nature. We cannot really say that modern man even feels the “egoity” of his “I”—in spite of the fact that it is his ego; for anyone who wants to be honest cannot really claim that he is fond of his “I.” He is fond of his body; he is fond of his instincts; he may be fond of this or that experience. But the “I” is just a tiny word which is felt as a point in which all that has been indicated is more or less condensed. But in that period in which, after long preparations had been made, the approach to this “I” was undertaken ceremonially, each man was enabled in a certain sense to meet his “I” in the universe. Following this meeting, then, the “I” was perceived to be once more gradually withdrawing and leaving the human being alone with his bodily and soul nature, or as we would say today, with his physical-etheric-astral being. In that period man felt the “I” perceptively as having a real connection with the entire cosmos, with the whole world.

But what was felt above all else with regard to the relationship of this “I” to the world was not something “naturalistic,” to use the modern term; it was not something received as an external phenomenon. Rather, it was something which was deemed to be the very center of the most ancient moral conception of the world. Men did not expect great secrets of Nature to be revealed to them at this season. To be sure, such Nature secrets were spoken of, but man did not direct his attention primarily to them. Rather, he perceived through his feeling that above all he was to absorb into himself as moral impulse what is revealed at this time of midsummer when light and warmth reach their highest point.

This was the season man perceived as the time of divine-moral enlightenment. And what he wanted above all to obtain from the heavens as “answer” to the performances of music, poetry and dancing that were carried on at this season, what he waited for was that there should be revealed out of the heavens in all seriousness what they required of him morally.

And when all the ceremonies had been carried out that I described yesterday as belonging to the celebration of these festivals during the time of the sun's sultry heat—if it sometimes happened that a powerful storm broke forth with thunder and lightning, then just in this outbreak of thunder and lightning men felt the moral admonition of the heavens to earthly humanity.

There are vestiges from this ancient time in conceptions such as that of Zeus as the god of thunder, armed with a thunderbolt. Something similar is linked with the German god, Donar. This we have on one side. On the other side, man perceptively felt Nature, I might say, as warm, luminous, satisfied in itself. And he felt that this warming, luminous Nature as it was during the daytime remained also into the night time. Only he made a distinction, saying to himself: “During the day the air is filled with the warmth-element, with the light-element. In these elements of warmth and light there weave and live spiritual messengers through whom the higher divine beings want to make themselves known to men, want to endow them with moral impulses. But at night, when the higher spiritual beings withdraw, the messengers remain behind and reveal themselves in their own way.”

And thus it was that especially at midsummer people perceived the ruling and weaving of Nature in the summer nights, in the summer evenings. And what they felt then seemed to them to be a kind of summer dream which they experienced in reality; a summer dream through which they came especially near to the divine-spiritual; a summer dream by which they were convinced that every phenomenon of Nature was at the same time the moral utterance of the gods, but that all kinds of elemental beings were also active there who revealed themselves to men in their own way.

All the fanciful embellishment of the midsummer night's dream, of the St. John's night dream, is what remained later of the wondrous forms conjured by human imagination that wove through this midsummer time on the soul-spiritual level. This then, in all particulars, was taken to be a divine-spiritual moral revelation of the cosmos to man.

And so we may say that the conception underlying this was: at midsummer the divine-spiritual world revealed itself through moral impulses which were implanted in man as Enlightenment (see diagram). And what was felt in a quite special way at that time, what then worked upon man, was felt to be something super-human which played into the human order of things.

From his inner participation in the festivities celebrated in that time, man knew that he was lifted up above himself as he then was into the super-human, and that the Deity grasped the hand that man as it were reached toward him at this season. Everything that man believed to be divine-spiritual within him he ascribed to the revelations of this season of St. John's.

When the summer came to an end and autumn approached, when the leaves were withered and the seeds had ripened, when, that is, the full luxurious life of summer had faded and the trees become bare, then, because the insights of the Mysteries had flowed into all these perceptions, man felt: “The divine-spiritual world is withdrawing again from man.” He notices how he is directed back to himself; he is in a certain sense growing out of the spiritual into Nature.

Thus man felt this “living-into” the autumn as a “living-out-from” the spiritual, as a living into Nature. The tree leaves became mineralized; the seeds dried up and mineralized. Everything inclined in a certain way towards the death of Nature's year.

In being thus interwoven with what was becoming mineral on the Earth and around the Earth, man felt that he himself was becoming woven together with Nature. For in that period man still stood closer in his inner experience to what was going on outside. And he also thought, he pondered in his mind about how he experienced his being woven-together with Nature. His whole thinking took on this character. If we want to express in our language today what man felt when autumn came, we should have to say the following—I beg you, however, to realize that I am using present-day words, and that in those days man would not have been able to speak thus, for then everything rested on perceptive feeling and was not characterized through thinking—but if we want to speak in modern terms we shall have to say: With his particular trend of thinking, with his feeling way of perceiving, the human being experienced the transition from summer to autumn in such a way that he found in it a passing from spirit-knowledge to Nature-knowledge (see diagram). Toward autumn man felt that he was no longer in a time of spirit-knowledge but that autumn required of him that he should learn to know Nature. Thus at the autumn equinox we have, instead of moral impulse, knowledge of Nature, coming to know Nature.

The human being began to reflect about Nature. At this time also he began to take into account the fact that he was a creature, a being within the cosmos. In that time it would have been considered folly to present Nature-knowledge in its existing form to man during the summer. The purpose of summer is to bring man into relation with the spiritual in the world. With the arrival of what we today call the Michaelmas season, people said to themselves: “By everything that man perceives about him in the woods, in the trees, in the plants, he is stimulated to pursue nature-knowledge.” It was the season in which men were to occupy themselves above all with acquiring knowledge, with reflection. And indeed it was also the time when outer circumstances of life made this possible. Human life thus proceeded from Enlightenment to Knowledge. It was the right season for knowledge, for ever-increasing cognition.

When the pupils of the Mysteries received their instruction from the teachers, they were given certain mottoes of which we find adaptations in the maxims of the Greek sages. The “seven maxims” of the Seven Wise Men of Greece are, however, not actually those which originated in the primeval Mysteries.

In the very earliest Mysteries there was a saying associated with midsummer: “Receive the Light” (see diagram). By “Light,” spiritual wisdom was meant. It designated that within which the human being's own “I” shone.

For autumn (see diagram), the motto imprinted in the Mysteries as an admonition pointing to what should be carried on by the souls was: “Look around thee.”

Now there approached the next development of the year, and with it, what man felt within himself to be connected of itself with this year. The season of winter approached. We come to midwinter (see diagram), which includes our Christmas time. Just as the human being in midsummer felt himself lifted out above himself to the divine-spiritual existence of the cosmos, so he felt himself in midwinter to be unfolding downward below himself. He felt as if the forces of the Earth were washing around him and carrying him along. He felt as though his will nature, his instincts and impulses were infiltrated and permeated by gravity, by the force of destruction and other forces that are in the Earth. In these ancient times people did not feel winter as we feel it, that it merely gets cold and we have to put on warm boots, for example, in order not to get chilled. Rather, a man of that ancient time felt what was coming up out of the Earth as something that united itself with his own being. In contrast to the sultry, light-filled element, he felt what came up then in winter as a frosty element. We feel the chilliness today, too, because it is connected with the corporeality; but ancient man felt within his soul as a phenomenon accompanying the cold: darkness and gloom. He felt somewhat as if all around him, wherever he went, darkness rose up out of the Earth and enveloped him in a kind of cloud—only up to the middle of his body, to be sure, but this is the way he felt.

And he said to himself—again I have to describe it in more modern words—man said to himself: “During the height of summer I stand face to face with Enlightenment; then the heavenly, the super-terrestrial streams down into the earthly world. But now the earthly is streaming upward.”—Man already perceived and experienced something of the earthly during the autumnal equinox. But what he perceived and felt then of earthly nature was in conformity in a certain sense with his own nature; it was still connected with him. We might say: “At the time of the autumn equinox man felt in his Gemuet, in his realm of feeling, all that had to do with Nature. But now, in winter, he felt as though the Earth were laying claim to him, as if he were ensnared in his will nature by the forces of the Earth. He felt this to be the denial of the moral world order. He felt that together with the blackness that enveloped him like a cloud, forces opposed to the moral world order were ensnaring him. He felt the darkness rise up out of the Earth like a serpent and wind him about. But at the same time he was also aware of something quite different.”

Already during autumn he had felt something stirring within him that we today call intellect. Whereas in summer the intellect evaporates and there enters from outside a wisdom-filled moral element, during autumn the intellect is consolidated. The human being approaches evil but his intellect consolidates. Man felt an actual serpent-like manifestation in midwinter, but at the same time the solidification, the strengthening of shrewdness, of the reflective element, of all that made him sly and cunning and incited him to follow the principle of utility in life. All this he was aware of in this way. And just as in autumn the knowledge of nature gradually emerged, so in midwinter the Temptation of Hell approached the human being, the Temptation on the part of Evil. Thus he was aware of this. So when we write here: “Moral impulse, Knowledge of Nature” (see diagram), here (at midwinter) we must write “Temptation through Evil.”

This was just the time in which man had to develop what in any case was within him by way of Nature: everything associated with the intellect, slyness, cunning, all that was directed toward the utilitarian. This, man was to overcome through Temperance (Besonnenheit).¹ This was the season then in which man had to develop—not an open sense for wisdom, which in accordance with the ancient Mystery wisdom had been required of him during the time of Enlightenment, but something else. Just in that season in which evil revealed itself as we have indicated, man could experience in a fitting way resistance to evil: he was to become self-controlled (besonnen—see preceding footnote). Above all else at the season of change which he passed through in moving on from Enlightenment to Cognition, from Knowledge of Spirit to Knowledge of Nature, he was to progress from Nature knowledge to the contemplation of Evil (see diagram, arrow on left). This is the way it was understood.

And in giving instructions to the pupils of the Mysteries which could become mottoes, the teachers said to them—just as at midsummer they had said: “Receive the Light,” and in autumn “Look around you”—now in midwinter it was said: “Beware of Evil.” And it was expected that through “Temperance,” through this guarding of oneself against evil, men would come to a kind of self-knowledge which would lead them to realize how they had deviated from the moral impulses in the course of the year.

Deviation from the moral impulses through the contemplation of evil, its overcoming through moderation—this was to come to man's consciousness just in the time following midwinter. Hence in this ancient wisdom all sorts of things were undertaken that induced men to atone for what they recognized as deviations from the moral impulses they had received through Enlightenment. With this, we approach spring, the spring equinox (see diagram).

And just as here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, midwinter) we have Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, so for the spring equinox we have what was perceived as the activity of repentance. And in place of Cognition, and correspondingly, Temptation through Evil, there now entered something which we could call the Return—the reversion—to man's higher nature through Repentance. Where we have written here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, winter): Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, here we must write: Return to Human Nature.

If you look back once more to what was in the depths of winter the Temptation by Evil, you will have to say: At that time man felt as though he were lowered into the abysmal deeps of the Earth; he felt himself entrapped by Earth's darkness. Just as during the height of summer man was in a sense torn out of himself, his soul-nature being then lifted up above him, so now, in order not to be ensnared by Evil during the winter, his soul-being made itself inwardly free.

Through this there existed during the depths of winter, I might say a counter-image to what was present during the height of summer. At midsummer the phenomena of Nature spoke in a spiritual way. People sought especially in the thunder and the lightning for what the heavens had to say. They looked at the phenomena of Nature, but what they sought in these phenomena was a spiritual language. Even in small things, they sought at St. John's-tide the spiritual message of the elemental beings, but they looked for it outside themselves. They dreamed in a certain sense outside the human being. During the depths of winter, however, people sank into themselves and dreamed within their own being. To the extent that they tore themselves loose from the entanglement of the Earth, that is, whenever they could free their soul-element, they dreamed within their own being. Of this there has remained what is connected with the visions, with the inner beholding, of the Thirteen Nights following the winter solstice. Everywhere recollections have remained of these ancient times. You can look on the Norwegian Song of Olaf [&Åsteson]² as a later development of what existed quite extensively in ancient times.

Then the springtime drew near. In our time the situation has shifted somewhat; in those days spring was closer to winter, and the whole year was viewed as being divided into three periods. Things were compressed. Nevertheless what I am sharing with you here was taught in its turn. Thus, just as at midsummer they said: “Receive the light;” and in autumn, at Michaelmas: “Look around you;” just as at midwinter, at the time that we celebrate Christmas, they said: “Beware of the Evil,” so for the time of return they had a saying which was then thought to have effect only at this time: “Know thyself”—placing it in exact polarity to the Knowledge of Nature.

“Beware of the Evil” could also be expressed: “Beware, draw back from Earth's darkness.” But this they did not say. Whereas during midsummer men accepted the external natural phenomenon of light as Wisdom, that is, at midsummer they spoke in a certain way in accordance with Nature, they would never have put the motto for winter into the sentence: “Beware of the darkness”—for they expressed rather the moral interpretation: “Beware of Evil.”

Echoes of these festivals have persisted everywhere, so far as they have been understood. Naturally everything was changed when the great Event of Golgotha entered in.

It was in the season of the deepest human temptation, in winter, that the birth of Jesus occurred. The birth of Jesus took place in the very time when man was in the grip of the Earth powers, when he had plunged down, as it were, into the abysses of the Earth. Among the legends associated with the birth of Jesus, you will even find one which says that Jesus came into the world in a cave, thus hinting at something that was perceived as wisdom in the most ancient Mysteries, namely, that there the human being can find what he has to seek in spite of being held fast by the dark element of the Earth, which at the same time holds the reason for his falling prey to Evil.

It is in accord with all of this, too, that the time of Repentance is ascribed to the season when spring is approaching.

The understanding for the midsummer festival has quite naturally disappeared to a still greater extent than that for the other side of the year's course. For the more materialism overtook mankind, the less people felt themselves drawn to anything such as Enlightenment.

And what is of quite special importance to present-day humanity is precisely that time which leads on from Enlightenment, of which man still remains unconscious, toward the season of autumn. Here lies the point where man, who indeed has to enter into knowledge of nature, should grasp in the nature-knowledge a picture, a reflection, of a knowledge of divine spirits. For this there is no better festival of remembrance than Michaelmas.

If this is celebrated in the right way, it must follow that mankind everywhere will take hold of the question: How is spirit knowledge to be found in the glorified nature-knowledge of the present? How can man transform nature-knowledge so that out of what the human being possesses as the fruits of this nature-knowledge, spirit knowledge will arise? In other words, how is that to be overcome which, if it were to run its course on its own, would entrap man in the subhuman?

A turnaround must take place. The Michael festival must take on a particular meaning. This meaning emerges when one can perceive the following: Natural science has led man to recognize one side of world evolution, for example, that out of lower animal organisms higher more perfect ones have evolved in the course of time, right up to man; or, to take another example, that during the development of the embryo in the mother's body the human being passes through the animal forms one after the other. That, however, is only one side. The other side is what comes before our souls when we say to ourselves: “Man had to evolve out of his original divine-human beginning.” If this (see drawing) indicates the original human condition (lighter shading), then man had to evolve out of it to his present state of unfoldment. First, he had gradually to push out of himself the lower animals, then, stage by stage what exists as higher animal forms. He overcame all this, separated it out, thrust it aside (darker shading). In this way he has come to what was originally predestined for him.

It is the same in his embryonic development. The human being rejects, each in its turn, everything that he is not to be. We do not, however, derive the real import of present-day nature-knowledge from this fact. What then is the import of modern nature-knowledge. It lies in the sentence: You behold in what nature-knowledge shows you that which you need to exclude from knowledge of man.

What does this imply? It implies that man must study natural science. Why?—When he looks into a microscope he knows what is not spirit. When he looks through a telescope into the far spaces of the universe, there is revealed to him what spirit is not. When he makes some sort of experiment in the physics or chemistry laboratory, what is not spirit is revealed to him. Everything that is not spirit is manifest to him in its pure form.

In ancient times when men beheld what is today nature, they still saw the spirit shining through it. Today we have to study nature in order to be able to say: “All that is not spirit.” It is all winter wisdom. What pertains to summer wisdom must take a different form. In order that man may be spurred toward the spirit, may get an impulse toward the spirit, he must learn to know the unspiritual, the anti-spiritual. And man must be sensible of things that no one as yet admits today. For example, everyone says today: “If I have some sort of tiny living creature too small to be seen with the naked eye and I put it under a microscope, it will be enlarged for me so that I can see it.”—Then, however, one must conceive: “This size is illusory. I have increased the size of the creature, and I no longer have it. I have a phantom. What I am seeing is not a reality. I have put a lie in place of the truth!”—This is of course madness from the present-day point of view, but it is precisely the truth.

If we will only realize that natural science is needed in order from this counter-image of the truth to receive the impulse toward the truth, then the force will be developed which can be symbolically indicated in the overcoming of the Dragon by Michael.

But something else is connected with this which already stands in the annals in what I might call a spiritual way. It stands there in such a form, however, that when man no longer had any true feeling for what lives in the year's changing seasons, he related the whole thing instead to the human being. What leads to “Enlightenment” was replaced by the concept of “Wisdom” [called “Prudence” in English practice]; then what leads to “Knowledge” was replaced by the concept of “Courage” [“Fortitude”]; “Temperance” stayed the same (see diagram 1); and what corresponded to “Repentance” was replaced by the concept “Justice.”

Here you have the four Platonic concepts of virtue: Wisdom [Prudence], Fortitude, Temperance, Justice. What man had formerly received from the life of the year in its course was now taken into man himself. It will come into consideration just in connection with the Michaelmas festival, however, that there will have to be a festival in honor of human courage, of the human manifestation of the courage of Michael. For what is it that holds man back today from spirit-knowledge?—Lack of soul courage, not to say soul cowardice. Man wants to receive everything passively, wants to set himself down in front of the world as if it were a movie, and wants to let the microscope and the telescope tell him everything. He does not want to temper the instrument of his own spirit, of his own soul, by activity. He does not care to be a follower of Michael. This requires inner courage. This inner courage must have its festival in Michaelmas. Then from the Festival of Courage, from the festival of the inwardly courageous human soul, there will ray out what will give the other festivals of the year also the right content.

We must in fact continue the path further; we must take into human nature what was formerly outside. Man is no longer in such a position that he could develop the knowledge of Nature only in autumn. It is already so that in man today things lie one within the other, for only in this way can he unfold his freedom. Yet it nevertheless holds true that the celebrating of festivals, I might say in a transformed sense, is again becoming necessary.

If the festivals were formerly festivals of giving by the divine to the earthly, if man at the festivals formerly received the gifts of the heavenly powers directly, so today, when man has his capacities within himself, the metamorphosis of the festival-thought consists in the festivals now being festivals of remembrance or admonition.*³ In them man inscribes into his soul what he is to consummate within himself.

And thus again it will be best to have as the most strongly working festival of admonition and remembrance this festival with which autumn begins, the Michaelmas festival, for at the same time all Nature is speaking in meaningful cosmic language. The trees are becoming bare; the leaves are withering. The creatures, which all summer long have fluttered through the air, as butterflies, or have filled the air with their hum, as beetles, begin to withdraw; many animals fall into their winter sleep. Everything becomes paralyzed. Nature, which through her own activity has helped man during spring and summer—Nature, which has worked in man during spring and summer, herself withdraws. Man is referred back to himself. What must now awaken when Nature forsakes him is courage of soul. Once more we are shown how what we can conceive as a Michael festival must be a festival of soul-courage, of soul-strength, of soul-activity.

This is what will gradually give to the festival thought the character of remembrance or admonition, qualities already suggested in a monumental saying by which it was indicated that for all future time what previously had been festivals of gifts will become, or should become, festivals of remembrance. These monumental words, which must be the basis of all festival thoughts, also for those which will arise again,—this monumental saying is: “This do in remembrance of Me.” That is the festival thought which is turned toward the memory-aspect.

Just as the other thought that lies in the Christ-Impulse must work on livingly, must reform itself and not be allowed simply to remain as a dead product toward which we look back, so must this thought also work on further, kindling perceptive feeling and thought, and we must understand that the festivals must continue in spite of the fact that man is changing, but that because of this the festivals also must go through metamorphoses.

• 1. The third of the cardinal or “Platonic” virtues, called in Greek Sophrosyne, in English, Temperance or moderation, in German is Besonnenheit. According to Steiner, Besonnenheit is “enfilling one's impulses with the degree of consciousness possible.” “A man who rules his impulses through reflective thinking, feeling and perceiving is a man who is ‘besonnen.’” (From Das Raetsel des Menschen, 6th August, 1916). See also Spiritual Foundation of Morality by Steiner.
• 2. Because of Rudolf Steiner's lectures referring to “The Dream Song of Olaf &Åsteson” (December 26, 1911 and January 7, 1913), this unique poem of initiation experience has been translated into English.
• 3. Feste der Erinnerungen (a plural form). Erinnerung has two shades of meaning. One is “recollection” or “remembrance”; the other “admonition” or “reminder.” Both elements seem to apply in this passage.

The lunarian epoch is also called the “cosmic wisdom”. It was replaced on Earth by “cosmic love”. In terms of love, man is just as dependent on beings that are above him as he was in terms of wisdom. The wisdom involved here is Manas, and the ability that is poured in is Love. That is why it is said esoterically that the God of Wisdom is replaced by the God of Love.

The powers acquired the ability to infuse sexuality into beings through the lessons learned in wisdom on the moon. What they could now bring to man was the spark of manas, and they had to work from the outside, glowing the human body with love. In particular, it is so clear that Jehovah was connected to human love through man.

It became possible to fertilize from above, because certain beings had progressed further in their development. They were the good guides of the human manas, the first initiated Arhats. In a cool revelation from above, wisdom would have come to him. There were other beings who, with human kama, now achieved what they had not yet attained on the moon: They endowed him with passion for wisdom. These entities had to ascend with the people, sharing their destiny, to what they had not yet achieved on the moon. They also became man's best friend. With that, we have the Luciferian principle.

With divine love in the Christ principle, the luciferic principle has changed. This will give us the key to the story of the Fall of Man in Paradise. That Lucifer is, so to speak, the opposite of Christ was a self-evident truth in all religions before Christ's incarnation. And that the time would come when man would redeem Lucifer within himself is a beautiful process that has not yet come to an end. And the whole thing also underlies Christianity. It is best expressed in the legend and meaning of Christmas. Christ sends the spirit of light, the Paraclete, who fights for humanity. The explanation of the Luciferian principle can be found in the Vatican archives.

If you summarize this with what I started from, you will see that Lucifer has yet another meaning. He undergoes a development that he should have undergone during the lunar epoch. Therefore, with the great gift of human freedom, something has come that is out of place – and moral evil has its origin here. Man owes his further stage of development to the ability to do evil.

On an even higher level, we are once again faced with the mystery that higher development can only be achieved by leaving something else behind at a lower level. The higher Dhyan Cohans had to face the luciferic principle within themselves in order to gain the ability to shape beings endowed with Manas. Lucifer was left behind so that the Godhead could rise higher. Thus the Godhead owes its level in the present round to Lucifer.

Man is here to become an image of God. But the deity had to leave something behind to advance. When the Luciferian principle in humanity is redeemed, the deity will be redeemed from having set Lucifer aside. Man is not here for his own sake, but to contribute to the glory of God - according to the apostle Paul. A good God would never be able to create free human beings; to do that, he had to be a God who endowed human beings with impulses from only one side, and had to leave behind a being that endowed human beings with impulses from the other side.

The Pythagorean disciples first had to create the conditions for the highest questions before asking them.

Now you will also understand that there are different degrees of the luciferic principle in these retarded beings. Wisdom can be sought for its own sake, but it can also be put in the service of Kama.

The luciferic principle has therefore also created the arts and sciences, which can also be put in the service of sensual gratification.

At the forefront of events is the resignation of Puttkamer on the 8th. We shed light on this event in a leading position. The information circulated so far about the possible successor is based only on combinations. The appointment of the latter has probably been delayed due to the Emperor's state of health, which has unfortunately deteriorated regrettably in the last few days.

On the 9th, the delegation session opened in Pest. The following bills were submitted to the delegates: the joint estimate for 1889, the extraordinary credit for the troops in Bosnia, the supplementary credits of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Navy, the special credit for military precautionary measures, a bill concerning the extension of credits for the Navy, the final accounts for 1886, the statement of expenditure for 1887 and the Bosnian budget. The net requirement resulting from these bills is 192 million. If the amount of 17.6 million is deducted from this, which is made available to the joint government in case of urgent need - it must obtain the agreement of the Austrian and Hungarian governments for any use - the considerable sum of 175 million still remains. Approximately 96% of this is accounted for by military expenses and 29.7 million by the extraordinary armaments credit (of which ı6 million has already been used following the decision of the Crown Council at Christmas). The ordinary requirements of the army amounted to 115.9 million, the extraordinary 23.1 million and the Bosnian occupation credit 4.5 million. These figures shed all too bright a light on the political situation in Europe, which is touched upon in the Emperor's address to the delegations with the following words: "The relations of the monarchy with the foreign powers are of a thoroughly friendly character; but if, in spite of this, my government is compelled, in its dutiful care for the security of our frontiers and the promotion of our military strength, to draw on considerable credits, the reason for this lies mainly in the continuing uncertainty of the political situation in Europe." Our governments use words to express their hopes and figures to express their fears.

The Crown Prince and Crown Princess have traveled to Bosnia and arrived in Serajevo today.

A conflict has broken out between Italy and the Sultan of Zanzibar; the Sultan has refused to implement the treaty concluded with Italy by his predecessor, which decreed the cession of the coast between Cape Delgado and the Equator to Italy.

The University of Bologna celebrated its eighth centenary on the 12th of this month.

A surprising event is the fall of the Egyptian Prime Minister Nubar Pasha, which seems to have come as a surprise even to England, where people were used to seeing him as the promoter of English interests. The immediate cause is said to be the reforms that Nubar demanded with regard to the land tax and the agricultural system, for which Nubar was unable to obtain support from the English representative Baring, who had long been his opponent. The deeper reason, however, was probably the opposition of France to Nubar, which the latter had provoked by his intended suppression of the French journal in Egypt "Bosphore" a few years ago, as well as by a statement he is said to have made about France, which "since 1870 has been a corpse that can be trampled underfoot". France seems to have played a part in his downfall.

On the 12th, elections were held in Belgium to renew half of the members of the Chamber and Senate. The Liberals suffered a complete defeat. Not only did they not win a single seat, they even lost two. A run-off election between the candidate of the moderate Liberals and the Independents is necessary in Brussels.

Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria is about to decide on the Popov trial. He did not immediately confirm the court-martial verdict, but returned the case files to the Minister of War with the explanation that he still had to consider the matter. The reports that the Ministry had split into two parties, one or the other of which, depending on the Prince's decision, wished to resign, were declared by the "Agence Havas" to be fictitious. The Prince and Princess Clementine intend to spend some time in Eastern Rumelia.

Our time is characterized by reform. Reform movements and reform efforts are everywhere. Dissatisfied with the existing, the traditional and unsatisfied with the experiences they have made, people are seeking to shape and develop something new and to seek their salvation in something different. And that is how it should be; because everything in the universe, the big picture, all cultures, the individual human being, everything is in the process of becoming, of developing, there is no standstill.

How great and powerful the ideas of the individual reformers often are, but how distorted and taken to extremes they are by the masses. Let us take one of our most outstanding reform movements. There is a movement that has not yet been noticed in any cultural epoch, [which seems very strange to some:] it is the “women's movement”.

The urge to take part in the great tasks of culture and social life drives women to struggle for recognition and equality with men. The times also force women to do so. They no longer want to rule in a smaller circle, tied to unsatisfactory circumstances or standing alone in the world, without a supportive job, without a life's work. No, she wants to work in the cultural life, standing on her own two feet, with the same rights as men. The wonderful ideal of a housewife, which Schiller so beautifully shows us in his “Glocke”: “And within reigns the chaste housewife,” is no longer an ideal for the vast majority of our female world.

But how misunderstood and extreme this urge for independence and freedom is. Because women have not yet grasped that it is not only self-confidence in professional life that makes women free and independent, or that arbitrary action falls within the sphere of freedom, but that above all we must become independent and free within ourselves, that only the thorough working through of our entire psychological life, the ennoblement and purification of our character, makes women independent and free beings. Then external circumstances may be as they may, they will have little influence. The attainment of inner independence gives a woman the right to external freedom and independence; and only then can she become a man's equal, but not his rival. Only spiritual science can show us the way to this true inner independence; all other striving for freedom leads nowhere.

Let us turn to another area, that of naturopathy. It has been found that many of today's illnesses can be traced back to our current cultural life. The struggle for existence hardly allows people to rest, much less to recover. It is believed that because our ancestors lived so completely in nature, in the fresh air, unencumbered by clothing, [and with a simple diet], this was the decisive factor for their health. And because medical science can no longer find the right solution in some cases, people believe that a “back to nature”, a life with nature, would be the healthiest thing. They take earth, water, air and warmth and apply them wherever they can, in all conceivable cases.

But they do not consider that man is an individual being who no longer has a relationship with all elements. For some, sunbathing is not at all appropriate, while for others, water cures can be extremely harmful. If, from a secret scientific point of view, people are to become healthy, then an individual approach will have to be taken. Each person will receive the cure that is beneficial to their innermost nature, their temperament, their entire character, their spiritual makeup.

However, the human being is always in the closest connection with the eternal laws and only according to these can a complete healing of the same, a complete harmony of the human being with his physical and psychological organism be established. There is no “back to nature” for the human being in the sense that he believes he sees the highest in nature, but only a “through nature to the spirit”.

Vegetarianism usually goes hand in hand with natural healing methods. It is believed that animal food contains something that is not beneficial to health, and it is believed that it would be more beneficial for humans to enjoy plant-based food. This view goes so far as to consider that even milk, and the cheese and similar products made from it, are not suitable for nutrition. Everywhere, people are turning to plant products to get the right variety and a complete substitute for meat. This way of life is indeed very beneficial, but whether everyone can do it for a long time is another question. Because a vegetarian diet without spiritual pursuit inevitably leads to illness. It is said that [vegetarianism was known in Greece centuries before Christ, and] that the great sage of antiquity, Pythagoras, was the founder of vegetarianism. But this begs the question: Who was Pythagoras and why did he live as a vegetarian? And this brings us to the realm of secret schools, the mysteries.

From time immemorial, secret schools have existed all over the world, whose members endeavored to penetrate into the hidden being of the world, to see behind the veil of the ephemeral, through strict self-discipline, diligent study, and meditation. In Greece, it was especially Pythagoras, one of the great initiates, who worked in this sense. He had gathered students around him, whom he introduced to the mysteries through rigorous trials. At the same time, he also issued strict dietary regulations. Intoxicating drinks were completely frowned upon. Likewise, the consumption of meat and legumes was strictly forbidden. Even in later times, all secret schools gave instructions for the students' way of life. For the student should learn to choose food according to the principles of spiritual knowledge. He must know that in what he takes in as nourishment lies the power of certain entities. And if man wants to become the ruler of his organism, he must consciously choose his food.

When one first understands which entities are attracted by this or that food, one also recognizes the importance of nutrition. In the past, even in the great religious communities, for example in Judaism and Catholicism, the effects of food were known. Non-compliance with the regulations was punished with expulsion from the community.

In Brahmanism, too, the time between Christmas and Easter was dedicated to Vishnu. Those who called themselves his servants celebrated this time by abstaining from all legumes, oil, meat, salt and intoxicating drinks, for example. In those days, there still existed a living sense of the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and every adult member of the community was required to make himself more receptive to certain spiritual forces at very specific times, so that he might celebrate a rebirth and resurrection with all of nature. These were the times before Christmas and before Easter.

Now let us consider what nourishment actually is. Almost no other area attracts as much interest as nutrition; because the demands that today's world places on the individual's ability to perform, necessitate good [and strong] nutrition. We see that we need nourishment to sustain our body. Through nourishment we supply our body with building and sustaining forces. From an external scientific point of view, food is a supply of energy. But esoteric science says: the trinity manifests itself in all of nature. Every thing consists of form, life and consciousness.

Everything in nature is animated and spiritualized. We take our nourishment from the animal and plant kingdoms. The animal has its physical body, its etheric body and its astral body in the physical world; the group ego of animals is on the astral plane. When the animal is dead, the effect of the animal nature is not yet eliminated, because the principle of the animal continues to work after the animal's death.

The same applies to plants. The plant has its physical and etheric body on the physical plane, its astral body in the astral world, and the plant's I is in Devachan. The principle at work in the plant will also be effective after the preparation of the plant. But the nutritional effect extends not only to the physical and life body, but also to the other parts of the human being.

And now let us speak about nutrition in connection with our spiritual striving. Meditation and concentration exercises will be the main thing, [but how the striving person nourishes himself will not be as unimportant] when the work on the astral body begins.

Above all, it is important to avoid alcohol in any form; even alcohol-filled sweets can be very harmful. Alcohol and spiritual exercises lead to the worst paths! From a scientific point of view, the bad influence on brain function has already been proven; how much more should a person who directs all his striving towards the spiritual abstain from a pleasure that completely excludes the recognition of the spiritual.

The consumption of meat and fish is not advisable. In meat, man enjoys all the animal passion, and in fish, he enjoys the entire world Kama [...] with.

Mushrooms are extremely harmful. They contain inhibiting lunar energy, and everything that originated on the moon signifies rigidity. Legumes are also not very advisable because of their high nitrogen content. Nitrogen pollutes the ether body.

Let us single out some of the coarsest lower qualities and relate them to the various nutrients. If a person is very independent and tends to be very selfish, they should eat little concentrated sugar; because sugar promotes independence. On the other hand, if someone has no inner or outer support and always believes they need to lean on and be supported, they should eat plenty of sugar to become more independent. If someone is very much dominated by [anger], they should eat a lot of spices, especially salt and pepper, in their food. If someone is very inclined towards laziness and indolence, they should especially avoid nitrogenous food and choose fruit and vegetables as their food.

If someone wants to tackle the difficult problem of mastering the sexual passion – the passion that, when acted out in a base manner, degrades man below the animal, but when transformed brings him closest to his divinity – he should consume as little protein-rich food as possible. Excessive consumption of proteins causes the reproductive substances to become overabundant, and this makes it very difficult to control one's sexual passion.

If someone tends towards envy, resentment and deceit, cucumbers, gourds and all the tendril plants are not beneficial for them. You also have to be a little careful when enjoying fruit. People who are very prone to emotional enthusiasm should not enjoy melons. The sweet, intoxicating scent [of this fruit] obscures clear consciousness. Even very abundant apple consumption is not beneficial for everyone. In certain people, it increases the desire for power and often leads to rudeness and brutality. Cherries and strawberries are not digestible for everyone because of their high iron content. Bananas, dates and figs are more beneficial.

You can also make a certain selection when it comes to nuts. If someone wants to undergo a course of intellectual training, then above all they need a well-built, healthy brain. Rarely do parents in this day and age give their children such a well-built brain, and so it needs a supplement to strengthen the brain, and it is above all the hazelnut that provides the substance to build the brain. All other types of nuts are less valuable. Peanuts should be avoided altogether.

As for fats, we should give preference to butter made from milk. Hazelnut butter would also be advisable.

Now we come to the luxury foods: coffee and tea. Drinking coffee aids logical thinking. But drinking coffee alone will not make us logical thinkers, for there is more to it than that. In people who do not have a thinking mind, as is often the case with women, drinking too much coffee can lead to hysteria. Drinking tea produces good ideas. But one can also get good ideas through special exercises.

During the time of spiritual striving, it is especially necessary for a person to live in moderation! “Temperance purifies the feelings, awakens the ability, cheers the mind and strengthens the memory. Through temperance, the soul is almost freed from its earthly burden and thus enjoys a higher freedom,” says an old sage.

If a person were to eat a lot and often, they would not be able to produce any fruitful thoughts. This is because if digestion takes up a lot of energy, there is no strength left for thinking. Precisely those people who filled the world with the products of their minds lived on a very meager diet. Schiller, Shakespeare and many other poets, to whom we owe magnificent works, worked their way through severe privation. The mind is never as clear as after a long fast. Also in the history of religious orders and in the biographies of the saints, one finds numerous examples of the effects of an abstemious life. The greatest saints lived only on fruits, bread and water, and no miracle-working saint would be known to have shown divine powers in action at an opulent meal. Also, all the great sages of antiquity were known for their temperance.

When the human being goes further in his spiritual striving, when the laws of truth and good flow more and more into the I, when the rays of the great spiritual sun flood and illuminate the I more and more, then the conscious working through of the life or etheric body begins.

The eternal essence of man, that which goes from embodiment to embodiment, lives itself out in each new embodiment in such a way that it causes a certain interaction of the four limbs (physical, etheric, astral body and I) of human nature, and from the way these [four] limbs interact, the temperament of the human being arises. Depending on which of these elements is particularly prominent, a person will approach us with this or that temperament. Whether the forces of one or the other prevail and predominate over the others, the peculiar coloring of human nature depends on this, which we call the peculiar coloring of temperament. There are four main temperaments: the choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic temperaments. These are mixed in the most diverse ways in the individual human being, so that one can only speak of the fact that this or that predominates in a person. When a person works on himself, he brings harmony, order, and balance to these temperaments. Although spiritual exercises will be the main thing in working with the temperaments, how a person nourishes himself will also be important.

If the physical principle predominates in a person, this often becomes a kind of obstacle in development. But man must be master of his physical body if he wants to use it. Man is not able to use his instrument completely, so that the other principles experience an obstruction and disharmony arises between the physical body and the other limbs.

When the melancholic person works on himself, he should only eat food that grows very close to the sun. Food that grows far away from the earth, that has ripened under the full power of the sun, would be fruit food. Just as the spiritual sun glows and illuminates a person through spiritual exercises, so too should the solidifying and congealing tendencies in the melancholic be permeated and interwoven in the physical through the solar forces contained in fruit nutrition.

In the phlegmatic person, where the etheric body predominates, which keeps the individual functions in balance, where the inner life, which is limited in itself, generates inner comfort, and the person lives in this inner comfort preferentially, so that he feels so good when everything is in order in his organism, and is not at all inclined to turn his inner interest outward or even to develop a strong will: such a person should eat food that does not grow under the earth. Especially not foods that often take two years to flourish before they come to the surface; for example, a phlegmatic person should not eat black salsify. The seed of this plant takes so long to open up to external forces, and a phlegmatic person also needs a lot of work before they take an active interest in the outside world. The principle of this plant would only increase their inner complacency.

For sanguine persons, where the astral body predominates, where a person takes an interest in an object but soon lets it go, where a quick arousal and a rapid transition to another object is evident, even root vegetables should be chosen as food. One could almost say that a sanguine person must even be tied to the physical through food, otherwise his ease of movement could take him too far. So here, vegetables that thrive underground are even recommended.

When the ego is predominant, when the ego works with its powers in a particular way, and dominates the other elements of human nature, then the choleric temperament arises. The choleric person must above all beware of heating and exciting foods. Anything that is irritating and strongly spiced is extremely harmful to him.

One would assume that with higher development, temperament no longer plays a major role and that diet no longer has any influence. At the mastery level, this is indeed the case, because the master needs no solid food, nor will temperament influence or control him anymore. But he will use the temperaments to be effective in the physical world. He will use the choleric temperament to perform his magical acts; he will let the events and occurrences of the physical world pass by like a sanguine; he will behave like a phlegmatic in the enjoyment of life; and he will brood over his spiritual insights like a melancholic. But it will be a little while before we get there!

We should try to harmonize our whole life with our spiritual aspirations. Not just a small part of the day should be lived according to our ideals, but we should organize our occupations accordingly, choose our tasks with this in mind, and even regulate our nutrition in this way, striving to become a harmonious and established person, in order to then be able to engage in life to the best of our abilities. Life gives us nothing, everything must be achieved.

Goethe's beautiful saying belongs here:

“A serious will,
A persistent striving,
Is the only thing that leads you to your goal.
The purpose is no mere accident,
And life gives back only
What you gave to it.”

Ever since the early days of Christianity it has been the custom to draw a distinction between the festivals of Christmas and of Easter in that the Christmas festival has been made immovable, having been fixed at a point of time a few days after the 21st of December, the winter solstice, whereas the day of the Easter festival is determined by a particular constellation of the stars, a constellation of the stars which unites earth and man with the worlds beyond the earth. To-morrow will be the first full moon of spring and upon this full moon will fall the rays of the springtime sun, for since the 21st of March the sun has been in the sign of spring. When, therefore, men on earth celebrate a Sunday—a day, that is, which should remind them of their connection with the sun-forces—when the Sunday comes that is the first after the full moon of spring, then is the time to keep the Easter festival. Easter is thus a movable festival. In order to determine the time of the Easter festival, note must be taken each year of the constellations in the heavens.

Principles such as these were laid down at a time when traditions of wisdom were still current among mankind, traditions that originated from ancient atavistic clairvoyant faculties and gave man a knowledge far surpassing the knowledge that present-day science can offer. And such traditions were a means for bringing to expression man's connection with the worlds beyond the earth. They always point to something of supreme importance for the evolution [of] mankind.

The rigid point of time fixed for the Christmas festival indicates how closely that festival is bound up with the earthly, for its purpose is to remind us of the birth of the Man into whom the Christ Being afterwards entered. The Easter festival, on the other hand, is intended to remind us of an event whose significance lies, not merely within the course of earth-evolution, but within the whole world-order into which man has been placed. Therefore the time of the Easter festival must not be determined by ordinary earthly conditions; it is a time that can be ascertained only when man turns his thoughts to the worlds beyond the earth. And there is deeper meaning still in this plan of a movable time for the Easter festival. It indicates how through the Christ Impulse man is to be set free from the forces of earth-evolution pure and simple. For through knowledge of that which is beyond the earth, man is to become free of the evolution of the earth, and this truth is indicated in the manner of dating the Easter festival. It contains a call to man to lift himself up to the worlds beyond the earth; it contains a promise to man that in the course of world-history it shall be possible for him, through the working of the Christ Impulse, to become free of earthly conditions.

To understand all that is implied in this manner of dating the Easter festival, it will be helpful to turn our minds to early secrets of the beginnings of Christianity, to some of those early mysteries which during a certain period of earthly evolution have become more and more veiled and hidden from the materialistic view of the world which arose at the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch and must now be vanquished and superseded. In order to see the whole matter in a true light it will be necessary first of all to consider the part played by the figure of St. Paul in the evolution of the Christ Impulse within the whole history of mankind.

We should indeed remind ourselves again and again what a great event in the evolution of Christianity was the appearance of the figure of St. Paul. Paul had had abundant opportunity to inform himself, by external observation, of the events in Palestine that were associated with the personality of Jesus. All that came to his notice in this way in the physical world left Paul unconvinced; when these events in Palestine had come to an end in the physical sense, Paul [was] still an antagonist of Christianity. He became the Apostle of the Christians only after the event at Damascus, after he had experienced the very Being of the Christ in an extra-earthly, super-sensible manner. Thus Paul was a man who could not be persuaded of the meaning of the Christ Impulse by evidence of the physical senses, but who could be convinced only by a super-sensible experience. And the super-sensible experience that came to him cut deeply into his life—so deeply indeed, that from that moment he became another man. Nay, more: he became an Initiate.

Paul was well prepared for such an experience. He was thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of the religion of the Jews; he was familiar with their knowledge and their conception of the world. He was thus well equipped to judge of the nature of the event that befell him at Damascus and to have a right view and understanding of it. The writings of Paul, as we know them, convey only a weak reflection of all that he experienced inwardly. But even so, when he speaks of the event of Damascus we can discern that he speaks as one who through this event attained knowledge of cosmic happenings lying behind the veil of the world of sense. From the very manner in which he speaks it is plain that he is fully able to understand the difference between the super-sensible world and the world of sense.

When, even externally, we compare the life of Paul with the earthly experience of Christ Jesus, we discover a strange and astounding fact which becomes intelligible to us, only when with the help of spiritual science, we are able to survey the whole evolution of mankind in a particular aspect. [I] have often drawn attention to the great difference in the development of the human soul in the several epochs. I have shown you how man has changed in the course of evolution through the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin epochs, on to our own time. When we look back into the ancient past we find that man remained capable of organic physical development until an advanced age, The parallelism between the development of the soul and the development of the body continued until an advanced age of life; it is a parallelism that we can recognise now only in the three stages marked by the change of teeth, puberty and the beginning of the twenties. As far as out-ward appearance goes, mankind has lost the experience of such transitions in later life. In very ancient Indian times, however, men experienced a parallelism between the development of soul and of body up to the fiftieth year of life, in Persian and Egyptian times up to the fortieth year, and in Greco-Latin times up to the thirty-fifth year. In ordinary consciousness, we experience a like parallelism only up to the twenty-seventh year and it is not easy to detect even for so long as that. Now the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of mankind at a time when men—especially those of the Greek and Latin races—experienced this parallelism as late as into the thirtieth year. And Christ Jesus lived His days of physical earthly life for just so long as the duration of the span of life which ran in a parallelism between the physical organisation and the organisation of soul and spirit. Then, in relation to earthly life, He passed through the gate of death. What this passage through the gate of death means can be understood only from the point of view of spiritual science; it can be understood only when we are able to look into super-sensible worlds. For the passage through the gate of death is not an event that can be grasped by any thinking concerned entirely with the world of sense.

As physical man, Paul was of about the same age as Christ Jesus Himself. The time that Christ Jesus spent in His work on earth, Paul spent as an anti-Christian. And the second half of his life was determined entirely by what came to him from super-sensible experiences. In this second half of his life he had super-sensible experience of what men at that time could no longer receive in the second half of life through sense-experience, because the parallelism between soul-and-spirit development and physical development was not experienced beyond the thirty-fifth year of life. And the Event of Golgotha came before Paul in such a way that he received, by direct illumination, the understanding once possessed by men in an atavistic way through primeval wisdom, and which they can now again acquire through spiritual science. This understanding came to Paul in order that he might be the one to arouse in men a realisation of what had happened for mankind through the working of the Christ Impulse.

For about the same length of time that Christ had walked the earth, did Paul continue to live upon earth—that is, until about his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year. This time was spent in carrying the teaching of Christianity into earth-evolution. The parallelism between the life of Christ Jesus and the life of Paul is a remarkable one. The life of Christ Jesus was completely filled with the presence and Being of the Christ. Paul had such a strong after-experience (acquired through Initiation) of this event, that he was able to be the one to bring to mankind true and fitting ideas about Christianity—and to do so for a period of time corresponding very nearly to that of the life of Christ Jesus on earth. There is a great deal to be learned from a study of the connection between the life lived by Christ Jesus for the sake of the earthly evolution of mankind, and the teaching given by Paul concerning the Christ Being. To see this connection aright would mean a very great deal for us; only it is necessary to realise that the connection is a direct result of the super-sensible experience undergone by Paul.

When modern theology goes so far as to explain the event at Damascus as a kind of illusion, as a kind of hallucination, then it is only a proof that in our day even theology has succumbed to materialism. Even theology has no longer any knowledge of the nature of the super-sensible world, and entirely fails to recognise man's need to understand the super-sensible world before he can have any true comprehension of Christianity.

It is good that we should confess to-day, in all sincerity, how difficult it is to find our way into the ideas presented in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul—ideas that are so totally different from those to which we are accustomed. For the most part we have ceased to concern ourselves at all with such ideas. But it is a fact that a man who is completely given up to the habits and ways of thought of the present day, is far from being able to form the right ideas when he reads the words of Paul. Many present-day theologians put a materialistic interpretation upon the event of Damascus, even trying to disprove and deny the actual Resurrection of Christ Jesus—while professing at the time to be true Christians. Such persons themselves bear testimony that they have no intention of applying knowledge of the super-sensible to the essence of Christianity or to the event of the appearance of Christ Jesus in earthly evolution. The very fact that the figure of Paul stands at the summit of Christian tradition, the figure, that is, of one who acquired an understanding of Christianity through super-sensible experience, is like a challenge to man to possess himself of super-sensible knowledge. It is like a declaration that Christianity cannot possibly be comprehended without having recourse to knowledge that has its source in the super-sensible. It is essential that we should see in Paul a man who had been initiated into super-sensible, cosmic happenings; it is essential to see in this light what he laboured so hard to bring to mankind. Let us try in the language of the present day to place before our minds one of the things that seemed to Paul, as an Initiate, to be of peculiar significance.

Paul regarded it of supreme importance to make clear to men how through the Christ Impulse an entirely new way of relating themselves to cosmic evolution had come to them. He felt it essential to declare: that that period of the evolution of the world which carried within it the experiences of the heathen of older times, had run its course; it was finished for man. New experiences were now here for the human soul; they needed only to be perceived.

When Paul spoke in this way, he was pointing to the mighty Event which made such a deep incision into the evolution of man on earth; and indeed if we would understand history as it truly is, we must come back again and again to this Event. If we look back into pre-Christian times, and especially into those times which possess to a striking degree the characteristic qualities of pre-Christian life, we can feel how different was the whole outlook of men in those days. Not that a complete change took place in a single moment; nevertheless the Event of Golgotha did bring about an absolute separation of one phase in the evolution of mankind from another. The Event of Golgotha came at the end of a period of evolution during which men beheld, together with the world of the senses, also the spiritual. Incredible as it may appear to modern man it is a fact that in pre-Christian times men saw, together with the sense-perceptible, a spiritual reality. They did not see merely trees, or merely plants, but together with the trees, and together with the plants they saw something spiritual. But as the time of the Event of Golgotha drew near, the civilisation that bore within it this power of vision was coming to an end. Something completely new was now to enter into the evolution of mankind. As long as man beholds the spiritual in the physical things all around him, he cannot have a consciousness which allows the impulse of freedom to quicken within it. The birth of the impulse of freedom is necessarily accompanied by a loss of this vision; man has to find himself deserted by the divine and spiritual when he looks out upon the external world. The impulse of freedom inevitably implies that, if man would again have vision of the spiritual, he must exert himself inwardly and draw it forth from the depths of his own soul.

This is what Paul wanted to reveal to men. He told them how in ancient times, when men were only the race of Adam, they had no need to draw forth an active experience from the depths of their own being before they could behold the divine and spiritual. The divine and spiritual came to them in elemental form, with everything that lived in the air and on earth. But mankind had gradually to lose this living communion with the divine and spiritual in all the phenomena of the world of sense. A time had to come when man must perforce lift himself up to the divine and spiritual by an active strengthening of his own inner life. He had to learn to understand the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not to be allowed to go on receiving a divine and spiritual reality that came forth to meet him from all sense-phenomena. He had to find the way to a divine and spiritual kingdom that could be reached only by inward struggle and inward development.

People interpret Paul to-day in such a trivial manner! Again and again they show an inclination to translate what he said into the language of this materialistic age. So trivial is their interpretation of him that one is liable to be dubbed fantastic when one puts forward such a view as the following concerning the content of his message. And yet it is absolutely true.

Paul saw what a great crisis it was for the world that the ancient vision, which was at one and the same time a sense-vision and a spiritual vision, was fading away and disappearing, and that another vision of the spiritual was now to dawn for man in a new kingdom of light,¹ a vision which he must acquire for himself by his own inner initiative, and which is not immediately present for him in the vision of the senses. Paul knew from his own super-sensible experience in Initiation that ever since the Resurrection Christ Jesus has been united with earth-evolution. But he also knew that, although Christ Jesus is present, He can be found by man only through the awakening of an inner power of vision, not through any mere beholding with the senses. Should any man think he can reach the Christ with the mere vision of the senses, Paul knew that he must be giving himself up to delusions, he must be mistaking some demon for the Christ.

This was what Paul was continually emphasising to those of his hearers who were able to understand it: that the old spiritual vision brings no approach to Christ, that with this old vision one can only mistake some elemental being for the Christ. Therefore Paul exerted all his power to bring men out of the habit of looking to the spirits of air and of earth.² In earlier times men had been familiar with elemental spirits, and necessarily so, for in those times they still possessed atavistic faculties with which to behold them. But now these faculties could not rightly be possessed by man. On the other hand, Paul never wearied of exhorting men to develop within themselves a force whereby they might learn to understand what it was that had taken place, namely, an entirely new impulse, an entirely new Being had entered earth-evolution. “Christ will come again to you,” he said, “if you will only find the way out of your purely physical vision of the earth. Christ will come again to you, for He is there. Through the working of the Event of Golgotha, He is there. But you must find Him; He must come again for you.”

This is what Paul proclaimed, and in a language which at the time had quite another spiritual ring than has the mere echo left us in our translation. It sounded quite different then. Paul sought continually to awaken in man the conviction that if he would understand Christ, he must develop a new kind of vision; the vision that suffices for the world of sense is not enough. To-day, mankind has only come so far as to speak of the contrast between an external, sense-derived science, and faith. Modern theology is ready to admit of the former that it is complicated, that it is real and objective, that it requires to be learned; of faith it will allow no such thing. It is repeatedly emphasised that faith ought to make appeal to what is utterly childlike in man, to that in man which does not need to be learned.

Such is the attitude of mind which rejects the event of Damascus as unreal, preferring to regard it as a kind of hallucination that befell Paul. If, however, the event of Damascus was a mere hallucination—or I might just as well say, if the event of Damascus was what a great number of modern theologians would have it to be—then we ought also to have the courage to say: Away with Christianity! For Christianity has brought with it a belief that is absurd and senseless.

This would be the necessary outcome of the teaching of modern theology, if only people took it—first of all, seriously, and secondly, with courage. As a matter of fact they do neither. They shrink from having nothing but a merely external, sense-given science, and yet at the same time they deny the real, inner impulse of the event of Damascus, while still professing to hold fast to Christianity! It is precisely in such things that the soul-and-spirit sickness of our age comes to clearest expression; for a deep inner lack of truth is here laid bare. Truth would be obliged to confess: Either the event of Damascus was a reality, an event that can be placed in the realm of reality, then Christianity has meaning; or it was what it is asserted to be by modern theology, which wants always to associate itself with modern science; then Christianity has no meaning. It is important that people should face such conclusions, for there is no doubt we live in an age of severe testing. Through man's becoming inwardly untrue in regard to the very matters that are most sacred for him—for he ought no longer to call what he has, ‘Christianity’—through this, a tendency to untruth, often unconscious but no less destructive on that account, has taken hold of mankind. That is the real reason for the existence of this tendency. That is why this tendency to untruth is so closely interwoven with the events that will inevitably lead to decadence in the whole cultural life of Europe, unless men bethink themselves in time and turn to spiritual knowledge.

And if we would turn to spiritual knowledge, it is emphatically not enough in these days to rest content with looking at life in any superficial way; it is absolutely essential for us to take things in all their depth of meaning and to be ready to contemplate the necessity of mighty changes in our own time.

Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of a very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right to-day to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe—namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge—for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus—if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that men should bethink themselves how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in men's minds to-day: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?

We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest—for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter—these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology—that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!

Men must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life to-day.

During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a new tendency has been at work, a tendency towards a scientific knowledge that is adapted to the power of human reason and judgment; and now it is time that this should go further and develop into a knowledge of the super-sensible world. For the Event of Golgotha is an event that falls absolutely within the super-sensible world. And the event of Damascus, as Paul experienced it, is an event that can be understood only out of super-sensible ideas. On the understanding of this event depends whether one can in very truth feel something of the Christ Impulse, or whether one cannot. The man of the present day is faced with a severe test when he asks himself: In the time that has been christened ‘Easter,’ how do I stand to super-sensible knowledge? For Easter should remind man, by the very way its date is determined, to look up from the earthly to what is beyond the earth. The man of modern times has left himself no more outlook into what is beyond the earth than at most that which is given him in mathematics and mechanics, and now in spectro-analysis. These sciences are the groundwork upon which he tries to build up his knowledge concerning all that is beyond the earth. He no longer feels that he is himself united with those worlds, and that the Christ descended thence when He entered into the personality of Jesus.

Let me beg you to give these thoughts which are so pertinent to our present problems, your full and earnest attention. I have often pointed out what a fine spiritual nature such as Herman Grimm must needs think of the Kant-Laplace theory. It is true, the theory has undergone some modification in our day, nevertheless in all essentials it is still the prevailing theory of the universe. It is said that the solar system has come out of a primeval nebula, and in course of mighty changes undergone by the nebula and its densifications, plants, animals and also man have come into being. And carrying the theory further, a time will come when everything on the earth will have found its grave and when ideals and works of culture will no longer send their voice out into the universe, when the earth itself will fall like a bit of slag into the sun; and then, in a still later time, the sun will burn itself out and be scattered in the All, not merely burying, but annihilating everything that is now being made and done by man.

Such a view of the ordering of the world must inevitably arise in a time when man wants to grasp that which is beyond the earth with mathematical and mechanical knowledge alone. In a world in which he merely calculates or investigates qualities of the sun with the spectroscope—in such a world we shall never find the realm whence Christ came down to unite Himself with the life of the earth! There are people to-day who, because they cannot get clarity into their thoughts, prefer not to let themselves be troubled with thought at all, and go on repeating the words they have learned from the Gospels and from the Epistles of St. Paul, simply repeating by rote what they have learned, never stopping to think whether it is compatible with the view of the evolution of the earth and man that they acquire elsewhere. But that is the deep inward untruth of our time: men slink away into some comfortable dark corner instead of bringing together in their thought the things that essentially belong together. They want to raise a mist before their eyes so that they may not need to ‘think together’ the things that belong together. They raise a mist before their eyes when they keep a festival like Easter and are at the same time very far indeed from forming any true idea of the Resurrection of which they speak; for a true idea of it can only be formed with spiritual and super-sensible knowledge.

The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this—that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.

The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need to-day to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based—all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are to-day living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place—until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.

This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds to-day. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival—that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.

How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave—we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” but to have the right to say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

It is related of a learned English scientist³ that he said he would rather believe that he had by his own force worked his way up little by little from the ape stage to his present height as man, than that he had descended from a once ‘divine’ height, as his opponent, who could not give credence to the ideas of natural science, appeared to have done.

Such things only serve to show how urgent it is to find the way from the confession of faith: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” to that other confession of faith: “Not I, but Christ in me.” We must strive to understand this word of Paul. Not until then will it be possible for the true Easter message to rise up from the depths of our hearts and souls and enter into our consciousness.

• 1. See Epistle to the Romans, XIII, 12.
• 2. See Epistle to the Galatians, IV, 3, 9.
• 3. T. H. Huxley.

Someone might say that the spiritual scientific reflections touching on the problem of vocation are among the least interesting. But such is not the case. This must be recognized, especially in our fifth post-Atlantean period, because in this period all human relationships will be essentially modified in comparison with those that prevailed in earlier periods of the earth. They will be so modified that man must, out of his own freedom, bring more with him than in earlier ages when his mission in the evolution of earth could be carried out almost instinctively; that is, when he received by inspiration the direction into which he had to go.

When we look back, for example, to the Egypto-Chaldean culture or to other cultures of earlier times, we shall find that the measure of freedom now given to man toward forging his external destiny—and this freedom will constantly increase—was not given him in earlier times. During the Egypto-Chaldean period, the fact that each person belonged to a certain class into which he or she was forced similar to the way an animal is forced into its species, though not so irrevocably, removed from the sphere of man's freedom much that at present belongs there. To be sure, there was a compensation for this limitation of freedom. Students of the external history of culture who are generally quite shortsighted in their thinking, usually assume that conditions in ancient times were such that those who were then guiding human affairs did so with the same impulses as the leading personalities today. But you must bear in mind that there were quite definite processes in the mysteries in ancient times whereby the guiding personalities acquainted themselves with what was willed by beings who guide life from regions outside the earth. I have told you that at certain times—we do not need now to review them—sacrificial priests carried out specified mystery rituals. As a result, certain personalities in the temples who were suited for such purposes were brought into contact with the universe, the cosmos, the extraterrestrial relationships. The consciousness of these specially qualified personalities was then inspired by beings who guided the earth from extraterrestrial regions, and what was learned from these beings determined the course of action.

I will show you through a hypothetical case how things took their course in earlier times. Suppose that today the Christmas festival was not more or less an external holiday for most people, but that in its form and time of occurrence men knew that our earth is especially fitted to receive ideas into its aura that cannot enter, for example, in summer. I have explained how the earth is awake during the winter and that Christmas time is one of the most brilliant points of this waking state. At that time the aura of the earth is permeated, interwoven, with thoughts. We may say that the earth is permeated, interwoven, with thoughts. We may say that the earth ponders the outer universe, just as we men, while in the waking state of day, reflect in our thought on what is around us. In summer the earth sleeps, so it is not possible then to find certain thoughts in it. In winter the earth is awake, and most wide awake at Christmas; then the earth's aura is interpenetrated with thoughts, and it is possible to read the will of the cosmos for our earthly events from them.

Now the sacrificial priests educated some individuals in such a way that they became sensitive and receptive to what was alive in the earth's aura. By putting these individuals into contact with the earthly thoughts that gave expression to the cosmic will, the sacrificial priests in the temples could learn it from them. What they learned was to them, in a sense, the will of heaven, and from this they were able to determine who should remain in a particularly worthy position and who should be taken into the mysteries in order that he might assume a leading position in ancient government or priestly life. Humanity has now outgrown such things and is exposed to chaos in this respect; we must simply recognize this fact. The transition from the ancient, quite definite conditions in which men learned from the will of the gods what was to happen here on earth has already occurred. During the fourth post-Atlantean period, in which the individual freed himself from the will of the cosmos, these ancient customs passed over into our present more chaotic conditions. Everything tends to be handed over more completely to man. Thus, it is all the more necessary that the will of the cosmos shall penetrate earthly conditions in another way.

It would require much time to make clear how in the third Egypto-Babylonian culture period something still lived and wove in earthly life from the various vocations of men—to use a term adapted to our present conditions—that was in large measure a reproduction of the will of the cosmos. This came about as described and was disappearing during the fourth post-Atlantean period. It has vanished completely in our fifth post-Atlantean period which began, as we know, approximately in the fifteenth century. If men would pay more attention today to what is happening and stop offering a fable convenue in place of history, they would be able to recognize, even from external conditions, how man's relation to his vocation has changed since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They would recognize from present conditions how everything will increasingly become different in the future. But a sort of anarchy would inevitably overtake mankind if no one were to grasp these deeper connections and impart to the intellectual community ideas that take into account the modifications produced by the natural course of evolution. What it has been possible to establish even from external history regarding the emergence of what we might call the modern vocational life since the fifteenth century would cause astonishment to those who are at all able to observe human life. If they would submit to the influence of all that it is possible to recognize, they would find fault with themselves, in a way, for living in such a somnolent state and for having no conception of what is connected with evolving human destiny.

Last time, I called your attention to the fact that what constitutes real vocational life is by no means so insignificant for the cosmic complex as it may at first appear. I pointed out that, as men, we have gone successively through the Saturn evolution, where the first potentialities of the physical body were prepared; the Sun period, in which the etheric man was prepared; the Moon period, in which the astral man was prepared, and that we are now passing through the earth period in which the ego develops. But other periods are to follow: The Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan times. We may say that the earth is, in a way, the fourth stage of Saturn; likewise, Vulcan is the fourth stage of the earth. The earth is, in a sense, the Saturn of Vulcan. Just as on ancient Saturn processes occurred so intimately bound up with evolution that we owe the first potentiality of our physical body to them, which still continues to work in us, so must something happen on earth that will continue to work on in our evolution. On Vulcan it will attain a fourth stage of development, just as certain processes on Saturn have reached a fourth stage of development of earth. I pointed out that those processes that would correspond to Vulcan correspond to what we have on earth from the Saturn evolution; they represent, therefore, what works and lives in the various vocations that men take up on earth. As humans pursue vocational lives, something develops on earth within their vocational activity that will be the first potentiality for Vulcan, just as the Saturn activity was the first potentiality for our physical body.

If you add to this reflection the fact that vocational life has undergone a tremendous transformation since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, you will understand how increasingly important it will become to conceive of it as a component of the entire world evolution provided you do this by means of those points of view that may be developed through spiritual science. Only by learning first to recognize the objective aspects of vocational life can we form suitable concepts regarding the karma of vocation. Of even greater interest will be the question where vocational life is going and what it will develop into from our age onward because from this we shall derive more clear-cut concepts than from today's conditions.

As can easily be recognized when we take a common sense look out into the world today, the future evolution of vocational life will consist in the ever increasing differentiation and specialization of vocations. It is not too intelligent for people to criticize the fact that, in recent times, vocations have become more specialized and that not so many centuries ago a person could find in his vocation the connections between what he was producing and what this meant for the world. He thereby would take an interest in the forming and shaping of his product because he saw clearly what his product became in life. In our times, this is no longer the case for much of humanity.

To take a radical example, a man is placed by his destiny in a factory where he perhaps makes, not a whole nail, but only part of one; this piece is then joined with another part by another man. Thus, the man who makes only part of the nail can develop no interest in how what he produced from morning until night takes its place in the relationships of life. If we compare the earlier handicraft life with the factory life of today, we are immediately aware of a radical difference between what is contemporary and what existed not too long ago. What has already come to pass in the various branches of human activity will continue to develop, and more specialization and differentiation of vocational life will necessarily occur. It is by no means especially intelligent for people to criticize this because it is a necessity in evolution; it simply will happen, and will happen more and more.

What sort of outlook is opened to us by this fact? Fundamentally, it is that men must increasingly lose interest, as we can readily imagine, in the work that occupies the greater part of their lives; in a way, they must surrender like automatons to their work in the world. But the most essential point is something else. Man's inner nature must obviously acquire the color of his outer work. Anyone who observes the historic development of humanity will certainly discover to what a large extent the men of the recent fifth post-Atlantean period have become reproductions of their vocations and how their vocational lives influence their soul lives, specializing them. This does not apply to the majority of those who live today within our Anthroposophical Society, however. They are often in the fortunate position of having detached themselves from the interconnections of life. In the fortunate position? I might just as well say in the unfortunate position! This is good fortune often only for subjective egoistic feeling. For the world, it is often bad fortune because the world will demand increasingly of men that they excel in special fields and become specialists.

But what must happen in addition to this? Their specialization will be a necessary by-product of world evolution, and this question will soon become one of the weightiest of family problems; anyone who wishes to educate children will have to understand it. To place oneself rationally within the course of evolution then will depend altogether upon an understanding of the question: How shall I place my child into the evolution of humanity? What is still possible in many cases today, even though it is only a residue left over from ancient times that people routinely cling to, will soon prove to be empty phrases; that is, the fine manner of speaking so much admired today, according to which children must be allowed to become what corresponds to their observed talents. This will soon prove to be an empty phrase. In the first place, people will see that those who are born from now on will give indications of their previous incarnations in a more complex way than was the case with people in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. They will show complex potentialities that no one would have dreamed of before since these potentialities were far simpler in earlier times. Those who consider themselves especially clever in testing the potentialities of grown children to determine whether or not they are fitted for this or that vocation may learn that the insights derived from these tests are nothing but their own fantastic imaginations.

In the near future, however, life will be so complicated that the word profession will take on an entirely different meaning. Today we still often associate something quite inward with the word, calling it “vocation,” although for most people their vocations do not at all represent anything inward. We conceive vocation (calling) as something toward which a person is called by his inner qualities. However, if we would question people about their calling, especially in our cities, many would say, “I am in my profession because I am convinced this is the only one that corresponds to my talents and inclinations that I have had since childhood.” Yet, closer inspection of these cases would reveal that the answers given did not correspond with the facts, and I imagine they are not congruent with your own observation of life. Today, a vocation is increasingly that to which a person is called by the world's objective course of development. There outside of men is the organism, the interconnection; you may call it, if you please, the machine—this is not important—that gives orders, that calls him.

All this will constantly intensify and, as a result, what humanity accomplishes through vocational activity is also detached from man himself; it becomes more objective. Through this detachment, vocational activity grows increasingly into something that, in its further development through Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan, goes through a process of development similar to what has taken place for the earth through Saturn, Sun, and Moon. It is a peculiar fact that when one speaks as a spiritual scientist it is not possible to flatter human beings if the subject is related intimately to their lives. Spiritual science will be less and less exposed, you see, to the danger of expressing itself according to the model of wisdom to be found in the words:

At best a pompous moralistic play
With wonderfully edifying quips,
Most suitable to come from puppets' lips.⁶⁷

Spiritual science will certainly not be in a position to do this. It will often be compelled to set forth as something significantly great for the evolution of the world the very thing that people would prefer not to hear. It will therefore be inevitable that some people today who consider themselves exceedingly bright because their philistinism has crept into their brains will glibly declare, “Oh, professional life is a prosaic, mundane matter.” The way vocational life appears to true spiritual science compels us to declare that through the very fact that this life becomes detached from human interests, it contains the necessity to develop relationships possessing a cosmic significance. Many people might think that a depressing view of the future results from this: increasingly people are caught in the treadmill of life and spiritual science cannot even console them that this has happened.

It would, however, be a great deception should one draw such a conclusion from what has been said since the nature of the universe requires things to be unified through polar opposites. Just consider how these polarities thrust themselves upon you in the world! It is, for example, in their mutual relationship that positive and negative electricity produce their unified effects. Positive and negative electricity are necessary to each other. Male and female are necessary for the propagation of the human race. It is from polarities that unity evolves in the evolution of the world.

Now, the same principle is at the bottom of what has been said. When vocational labor is separated from the human being, we necessarily create the first cosmic potentiality for a far-reaching cosmic evolution. Everything that happens in the evolution of the world is related to the spiritual, and in what we create within the sphere of our vocations, whether by bodily or by mental labor, there lies the possibility for the incarnation of spiritual beings. At present, during this earth stage, these spiritual beings are, to be sure, still of an elemental kind; we might say an elemental kind of the fourth degree. But they will have become elemental beings of the third degree during the Jupiter evolution, and so on. The labor in the objective vocational process is detached from us and becomes the external sheath for elemental beings who thereby continue their development. But this occurs only under a certain condition.

If it be said that we must first begin to understand the meaning of what is often belittled as the prosaic part of life, we must also understand that this meaning is not clarified until we comprehend it completely in its comprehensive cosmic connection. What we produce in our vocational life can become meaningful for the Vulcan evolution, but something else is prerequisite to this. Just as positive electricity is necessary for negative, and the male necessary for the female, so also what will be released continuously from humanity as activity will require an opposite pole. A polarity of opposites was also present for humanity in its earlier evolutionary stages. Something absolutely new, of course, does not come into existence here because something similar was already present before. But when you look back at earlier cultural periods, if only two or three centuries ago, you will find that the human being was still far more immersed in his professional life with his feelings and passions, in fact with all his emotions, than today. When you compare the joy that a human being could still experience in his or her profession even a hundred years ago with the dissatisfaction of many people today who have nothing but their profession, you will be able to form an impression of what really needs to be said.

Such things are really considered rightly far too infrequently for the simple reason that those who discuss the character and choice of vocation are those who can least afford to talk about this subject matter. Schoolmasters, literary scholars, parsons—the very people who least experience the dark side of vocational activity in the modern world—write about these things. Thus you will find in ordinary literature and even in pedagogical books that people express themselves on this subject like the blind discussing colors. Of course, someone who has finished elementary and high school, and then looked around a little in a university because that's the thing to do, may easily consider himself unusually clever with the ideas he has absorbed; that is, if he now plays the role of a reformer of humanity who can tell us how everything should be done. There are, indeed, many such individuals. A person who has gained a proper perception of life knows that they are the ones who usually talk most stupidly about what must come about. This is ordinarily not observed simply because those who have acquired such educational credentials are at present highly respected. The time is yet to come when the feeling will develop that the so-called men of letters, the journalists and narrowly educated schoolmasters, understand the interrelationships of life least of all. This must gradually develop as a general opinion.

It is important that we come to see more clearly how in earlier times man's emotional life was intricately related with his professional life and how subsequently the latter has increasingly become disengaged from man's emotional life and must continue to do so. For this reason, the polar opposite of vocational life must become something different from what it was earlier. What was this element that was added earlier to vocational life? You have it before you today when you consider what constitutes the shell of culture. The buildings in which professions are practiced and in the midst of these, the church, have become the sheath and shell of culture; the days of the week reserved for work, and Sunday reserved for the needs of the soul. These were the two poles: the vocational life and the life dedicated to religious conceptions.

It would be one of the greatest mistakes that could be made to suppose that this other pole as it is still conceived today by the religious denominations could remain as it is, since it was made to fit a vocational life still bound up with the emotions of men. All of human life will deteriorate unless understanding increases in this sphere. So long as the elemental spirit that an individual creates in his vocation, as I have described, was not separated from him, the old religious conceptions still sufficed to some extent. Today they are no longer sufficient, and they will become less so the farther we advance into the future. The very idea that is most vociferously opposed by certain people must be revived; that is, the opposite pole, consisting of the fact that men shall be able to form concrete concepts regarding the spiritual worlds, should enter into evolution.

The representatives of the religious sects will often say, “Oh, there they are in spiritual science talking about many spirits and gods, but it is the one God that is important; with Him alone we have enough.” Thus, we can still make an impression on people today if we present them with the great advantage of coming into contact with one god, especially during after-dinner coffee and family music, when contemptuous remarks are made about other more recent endeavors, and ideas are expressed in an especially egotistic and philistine fashion. But what is really important is that human horizons should be broadened; that is, that we should learn to know that everything is permeated not just by a single divine spirit conceived in the vaguest way possible, but that spirit is also omnipresent in a concrete, special sense. People must learn to know that when a workman stands at his vice and the sparks fly about elemental spirits are being created which pass over into the world process and there have their significance. Those especially clever ones will claim that this is stupid. These elemental spirits, however, will certainly come into existence even though the one working at the vice is unconscious of them. Nevertheless, they will still be created, and it is important that they shall come into existence in the right way since elemental spirits both destructive and helpful to the world process can come into being.

You will most clearly understand what I mean if you consider it in a special context because in all these things we are standing today at the threshold of new evolutionary developments. Many people already have an inkling of this. Should it be transformed into reality and people fail to have spiritual scientific aspirations, it would be the worst thing that could happen to the earth. What has come about primarily during the course of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is that the human being has been liberated from the external, inorganic world which he embodied in his tools. Eventually, he will be reunited with what he has embodied in them.

Today, machines are constructed. Of course, they are at present objective, containing little of the human element. But it will not always be so. The course of the world tends to bring about a connection between what the human being is and what he produces and brings into existence. This connection will become ever more intimate. It will appear first in those areas that furnish the foundation for closer relations between one person and another—for example, in the treatment of chemical substances that are used in medicines. People still believe that when sulphur, oxygen, and some other substance—hydrogen or something else—have been combined, the product of this combination possesses only those effects that are derived from the individual substances. Today this is still true to a large extent, but the course of world evolution is tending toward something different. The subtle pulsations lying in the human being's life of will and disposition will weave and incorporate themselves gradually into what he produces. Thus, it will not be a matter of indifference from whom a certain preparation is received.

Even the most external and cold technical development tends toward a quite definite goal. Anyone who can form a vague conception of the future of technical development knows that an entire factory will operate in a completely individual way that will be in keeping with the one who directs it. His or her attitude of mind will enter into the factory and will pass over into the way in which the machines work. Human beings will blend with this objectivity. Everything that they touch will gradually come to bear a human impression. No matter how stupid it may seem today to the clever people—in spite of St. Paul having said that what men consider to be clever is often foolishness in the eyes of God⁶⁸—people will realize that the time will come when an individual will be able to step up to a mechanism standing at rest and will know that to set it in motion he must move his hand this way, that way, and another way. Through the vibrations of the air caused by this signal, the motor,⁶⁹ adjusted beforehand to respond to it, will be set in motion.

Then, national economic development will become such that to patent machines will be quite impossible; such things will be replaced by what I have just explained. Thus, everything will be excluded that has no relation to human nature, and by this it will be possible to bring about something quite definite. Just imagine what a truly good person who has reached an especially high level of morality will in future be able to do. He will construct machines with signals that can be governed only by individuals like himself. Evil minded people will produce quite different vibrations when they make these signals, and the machine will not respond.

People already have a faint inkling of this. It is not without purpose that I have called your attention to certain individuals who study flames dancing under the influence of definite tones. Further research in this direction will reveal the way to what I have just indicated. We might, indeed, say that it is the path back to those times when an alchemist who only wished to stuff money into his pocket could accomplish nothing, whereas another, who wished only to set up a sacrament for the glory of the gods and the welfare of humanity, would be successful.

In a sense, so long as what arose from human work bore the aura of the emotions and joys that men transferred into it, it was not accessible to the kind of influence that I have just described. But to the extent that the products of vocational labor can no longer be produced with special and absolutely necessary enthusiasm, what thus flows away from men and streams forth from them can become a motor force. The truth is that through the fact that individuals can no longer unite their emotions with the world of machinery, they, in a way, restore to this world the purity that arises from or serves their labor. In the future it will no longer be possible for people to bestow the warmth gained from the enthusiasm and joy derived from their work on the things produced. But these things themselves will be purer as they are put into the world by workers. They will also become more susceptible to what will emanate from, and be predetermined by, man as a motor force, as I have described.

Such a direction to human evolution can only be given by concrete knowledge of the spiritual forces that can be discovered by spiritual science. In order that this development may occur, it is necessary for an ever greater number of individuals in the world to gradually find the opposite pole. This consists in uniting one human being with another in what rises far above all vocational labor, while at the same time illumining and permeating it. Life in the spiritual scientific movement furnishes the foundation for a united life that can bind all professions together. If there were only an external advance of vocational evolution, this would result in a dissolution of human ties; people would become less able to understand one another or to develop relationships according to the requirements of human nature. They would increasingly disregard one another, seek only their own advantage, and have only competitive relationships with one another. This must not be permitted to come to pass lest humanity thereby fall into complete decadence. To prevent this from happening, spiritual science must be propagated.

It is possible to describe truly what many people are today unconsciously striving for, even though they deny it. There are many today, you know, who say, “This talk about the spiritual is ancient twaddle! The true advance that will really bring about human progress is to be found in the development of the physical sciences. When men get beyond all this twaddle about spiritual things, we will then, in a way, have a paradise on earth.”

Should nothing prevail in humanity except competition and the compensatory acquisitive instinct, however, it would not be paradise on earth but hell. After all, there would have to be another pole if real progress were to take place. If a spiritual pole were not sought for, there would have to be an ahrimanic pole. Then the following argument would prevail: “Should vocations continue to be specialized, there would always be a certain unity in that one person would be this, another that, but all would have the common characteristic of acquiring as much as possible through their jobs.” True, all would be made alike, but this is simply an ahrimanic principle. It is incorrect to think that the world can reach its goal through such a one-sided evolution, proceeding purely in the external sphere as we have described it. To follow this line of thinking would be tantamount to a woman's arguing that men had gradually become worse, were really utterly unfit for the world, and should be completely exterminated, and that then we would get the right evolution of the physical world.

It would require a weird person, indeed, to hold such a view since nothing whatever could be achieved by getting rid of all the men. Because this applies to the sensory world, people understand it, but they do not understand such foolishness in reference to the spiritual world. Yet, it is the same for spiritual relationships as if someone were to suppose that mere external evolution could continue to progress; it cannot. Just as the earlier evolutionary periods required the abstract religions, so this new stage requires a more concrete spiritual knowledge as it is striven for in the spiritual scientific movement. The elemental beings that are created and released through the vocational labor of men must be fructified by the human soul with what it takes into itself from impulses striving upward to the spiritual regions. Not that this is the only mission of spiritual science, but it is the mission related to the advancing and changing vocational life. Therefore, world evolution demands that as professions become more specialized and mechanized, people feel the need for the opposite pole to become proportionately more intensely active in them. This means that each human being should fill his soul with what brings him close to every other human being, no matter what their specialized work may be.

All this leads to much more. As we will hear in due course, a new age will emerge from what we may describe as our own time's indifference to and withdrawal from life, which is frequently the experience of working people these days. In the new age, human beings will again perform their work from different impulses. These will really be no worse than those good old vocational impulses that cannot be renewed, but must be replaced by others of a different sort. In this connection we can already point today, not merely abstractly but quite concretely, to a human ideal that spiritual science will develop. This will show what even a vocation may become to human beings when they understand how to observe the signs of the times in the right manner.

We shall continue our reflections regarding the significance of these matters for the individual, and for karma.

• 67. Kaufmann's translation. See footnote 21.
• 68. I Corinthians, 1:20: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?“
• 69. Rudolf Steiner says in the third lecture of “Weltwesen und Ichheit“ [The Essence of the World and Selfness], Bibl.-No. 169, CE (1963) that the American Keely invented such a motor in the 19th century.

Man perceives in himself and in nature both what we call growth and what we call destruction, or perhaps dissolution. And he instinctively forms his ideas in such a way that he is permeated with a certain belief in reality when, whether in himself or in nature, he perceives building up—growth: He forms ideas about what in a sense goes outside reality, loses reality, by directing his glance to destruction, to dissolution; so that it seems quite natural to him to describe what thus goes outside reality, when he perceives it being dissolved, as gradually passing over into the so-called nothingness of the physical world.

I have often said that if we want really to arrive at ideas concerning the spiritual world, we must modify in many respects those ideas acquired in the physical world. We must have different ideas from those acquired in the physical world if we wish to enter at all with our thinking into the spiritual world. It is especially important that we should form a concept which is actually found everywhere in our study of spiritual science, but which we cannot too often bring before our souls—the concept of a connection during physical life between our consciousness and the corresponding processes in our physical organism, We shall never grasp the working of consciousness in the physical world unless we can connect it with the concept of destruction or dissolution. Were there only growth, only development in us as physical beings, we could never be conscious beings in the physical world. In this physical world what is represented in growth, in budding and sprouting, never leads to consciousness. Consciousness can begin only where the processes of growth are invaded by destruction, by processes of dissolution. On this basis we should make ourselves familiar with the ideas which initiation gives us concerning man's so-called evolution

We know that at first the child grows into the world as in a kind of dream. This dream-life of the child is, however, closely united with his growth, with all the sprouting and budding processes; and the younger the child whom we consider, the more do these budding and sprouting processes meet our eye. Only when the individuality in the human organism gains sufficient power to oppose the sprouting and budding, and can bring into them processes of dissolution, does fuller and more complete consciousness appear. We become conscious to the extent to which we are capable of pulling down in us what inner Nature builds up.

When anyone who has gone through initiation observes how consciousness arises in man, he finds that every conscious thought that is grasped, and every conscious feeling that asserts itself, are bound up with the fact that processes of destruction are contending with the building-up processes in the organism. When we look at conscious life we look at destruction; and we must accustom ourselves to have not merely a positive feeling for reality wherever we see a process of sprouting, budding, a process of growth, but we must rise to a feeling for the conscious life of the spirit by observing what part this conscious life of spirit plays in the physical world, by observing, that is, the processes of death and destruction. It is for this reason that we have to alternate the conscious processes with the unconscious processes of sleep, so that what we have destroyed during our waking life of thought may be built up again by the unconscious forces of nature in our organism. That is the swing of life's pendulum—that the soul force when it wakes to consciousness wears out and destroys what mere nature creates in the human organism; and that from the moment the soul, in sleep, forsakes the natural life of the body, from that moment the processes, activities, of sprouting and budding go forward. Hence it is not correct to believe that man's waking life is to be compared with life in summertime, when the earth is budding and sprouting. No! the earth itself as spiritual being wakes when towards autumn the dying processes begin, and it is during the winter that the earth is fully awake. During summer, during the budding and sprouting processes, we have the sleeping life of the earth. The Earth-Spirit sleeps during the summer and during the winter it wakes.

I have previously pointed out that it is due to spiritual initiation that the moment of time when man is destined to unite himself with what in earth-evolution should call up the fullest waking life—with the Christ Impulse—that this moment has been placed in the middle of winter, not in the summer, namely, the Christmas festival. On the other handy I have also called attention to how in more ancient times, when manes knowledge proceeded more from his participation in the sleeping condition of the earth, when his soul had to sink into the sleeping Earth-soul in order to have Imagination, the. dream-like Imagination of the old spiritual vision, then the corresponding festival, the John festival, had to be held during the heat of summer. This festival might be said to signify union in dream and ecstasy with the sleeping, dreaming spirit of the earth. The Christmas festival signifies a conscious union with the waking Earth-spirit. It is just through conceptions such as these, my dear friends, that we come to feel man's renewed connection with the cosmos We enter into this connection concretely, not by merely enthusing in a general way about man being a microcosm of the macrocosm, but by gaining accurate knowledge of how the mighty Earth-being sleeps and wakes, taking the whole year for this alternation, whereas man sleeps and wakes in the course of twenty-four hours.

And now we must turn our gaze with more precision to what we experience in the physical world as consciousness. Let us sketch diagrammatically the sprouting, budding life of our nervous system (see diagram). Clairvoyance actually sees the sprouting, budding life, for example, of the nervous system, especially of the brain, in this form of a fiery wave. Now the human life of soul is in truth outside this sprouting, budding life, Were I to draw the human soul-life as it is in the night, in sleep, I should have to draw it completely outside this figure; in waking life, however, we must picture the soul-life as permeating itself with this budding, sprouting, let us say, fiery life. Thus were the soul-life to permeate the physical organic life only, no consciousness would arise, flow does consciousness arise? For that, the soul must work upon the physical. In the physical to begin with are budding, sprouting processes of growth which are as it were distributed over the life of the nerves. It is these processes of growth that are now broken down and destroyed. A process arises similar to what takes place when the budding and sprouting plant gradually withers and decays; thus the soul life induces processes of destruction in this budding, sprouting life. The destructive processes I indicate here by holes in the shading.

When we are awake, therefore, our soul-life destroys the physical processes of growths breaks them down. Man as a rule knows nothing of this destruction. Clairvoyant vision alone perceives it and makes it possible to say: “Now that you have put yourself into relation with the spiritual world (I say expressly with the spiritual not the physical world) if you wish to have ideas you must destroy something in you.” What makes initiation such a shattering experience is that we perceive this destruction, that we know that If we bring ourselves into relation, let us say, with an Angel or an Archangel being of the spiritual world and want to gain some ideas concerning that being, that is, if we want to perceive the being truly, we must first destroy something in ourselves.

Not that anything is actually destroyed by initiation, but through initiation we become conscious of what is all the time being destroyed in the everyday process of perception. It is just the same when we put ourselves in relation with a flower or an animal, only in the usual course of life we are not aware of it. We begin to know of it only when these processes of destruction work back as reflection into the life of the soul. That is the change. Suppose, for examples you see a red flower. What you experience in the red flower causes you to call forth in yourself a process of destruction, You are, however, unaware of this. But what is destroyed is reflected into your soul and brings about that you have the red flower as an idea, as a perception. Thus you must first create in yourself a copy of the red flower by destroying the sprouting and budding processes, and while you destroy these you create what you then see. Conscious life consists in such processes of destruction, which again are followed by building-up processes It is an inner working at one's own organism and, strictly speaking, lies at the root of all works of human culture. When we instigate cultural work we also destroy something in nature. We cannot build a house if we do not go outside to get wood for it by a process of destruction, and what is thus the product of destruction, torn away from nature, we build up into our artistic creations. Strictly speaking, we do this in all works of art. We do just the same as the destroying, demolishing processes do to the budding, sprouting, which arrest processes of growth. What is embedded into the living organism as an inserted element of death forms the content of conscious being. Every time we display consciousness we are planting what is dead into what is alive, and the more conscious we become the more do we insert a dead man into our living man. Then sleep has the task of dissolving away these dead elements, all but certain remains which, persisting as processes throughout the whole of physical life, lie at the foundation of memory, Were everything to be dissolved by sleep, we should have no memory, no recollection. Thus you see if we want to acquire consciousness we have to recognise in our life a real winter. Consciousness means spreading the destroying, withering life of.nter over the budding, sprouting summer life, We have to make winter within us if we wish to become conscious. Thus we must in a sense learn to value the winter, because were it always summer in our life the spirit could not experience the physical consciously but would remain for ever unconscious.

Something more may arise out of these considerations, my dear friends. A materialistic observer of the world may easily say: It is not possible to look into the way in which consciousness works in the physical body. But when through spiritual science we learn that a parallel exists, in the way referred to, between the individual life of man and the life of the Earth-spirit, then we come to the following conclusion - that if we wish to have a concept of sleeping man and what he really is, all we need do is to imagine ourselves in the budding; sprouting life of summer where everything buds and blossoms. What goes on outside in the earth goes on in miniature and imperceptibly in manes physical nature. We should simply experience summer in man when we look at him asleep, and winter when we look at him awake. If we wish to know what happens to consciousness when it makes use of the physical body as instrument, we must observe how in autumn everything begins to dry up and wither, everything begins to die away, In the external picture we can make of winter we have a true idea of what the waking consciousness brings about in man's physical organism by using it as an instrument. That is why when the soul is outside the body and clairvoyant consciousness looks at the body out of which the soul has departed, it perceives the body as a budding, sprouting world. It is childish to believe that the clairvoyant, when outside the body with his soul, sees the body in the same way as in physical life we see another human being. We are wrong in thinking that the man lies there with his soul hovering above and that the soul looks back on the body and sees the man lying there beneath. That is not so. The moment the soul goes forth, the body becomes the world, a summer world; and if the soul remains clairvoyant on returning to the body, it experiences in itself the personal, individual winter.

We can thus discover an inner connection between the life of man and the life of the earth. When we consider the life of the earth and look first at summer time, outside us we see in this summer time what works and weaves in us in the same way but works and weaves during our sleeping condition. If we now seek to express in a few words the feeling of this working and weaving in sleep, we can do so as follows. All this is the world of coming to birth, of arising, And when we feel ourselves in this world, we can say, “OUT OF THE DIVINE WE ARE BORN”. For in so far as with our own forces we belong to this world, this budding and sprouting world, we must say: EX DEO NASCIMUR, Out of the Divine we are born. Man has been able to say EX DEO NASCIMUR at every stage of earth evolution and will be able to say it also in each future evolutionary stages

On the other hand it is essential for our own cycle of time, which follows the Mystery of Golgotha, that we should now understand that the forces of dying life work in us; melting forces, dissolving life, and that with this melting away, this dissolution of life, consciousness is connected. We find the consciousness of the earth, the waking earth-life, in the winter time. In order in winter to live with the earth in the physical world, we must dive down into what is dying, But since the Mystery of Golgotha, we do this by taking the Christ Impulse with us into what is dying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. We make this into a guiding motto through the other half of the year, when the earth is awake, awake in the dying life: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

Thus the earth's year is divided for us into two halves, into the half which has its culminating point at Midsummer, for which the saying holds good: EX DEO NASCIMUR, and the other half which has its culminating point at Christmas time, for which we have the saying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

We should not think that the correct conception of man as the microcosm of the macrocosm is merely an abstraction, Nor should we think that we can do very much if we hold to abstract ideas about it. Rather should we be clear that we shall meet this conception more and more on really coming to the true life of the Spirit of the Earth. You see, when we observe the earth in winter with its dying, freezing life, this dying, freezing life is the expression of the thinking, feeling and perception of the waking Earth-spirit. But we must think of the Earth-spirit in connection with what surrounds us as our immediate world. We should picture the world, as it were, as a great spiritual being having the earth as physical instrument. And we get this idea of what the earth is thinking, especially of what it is thinking during winter, when we consider the whole manner in which the surroundings of the earth work into the earth. Imagine yourself on a night in winter, with your gaze directed to the stars, with perhaps the moon among the stars, and you have to say that the whole constellation of this starry world is an outward expression, a picture, of what is thought consciously on the earth, and we live in it because the cosmos enters into relation with the earth. You then see how we are standing in a living way within the thinking of the earth, in all that weaves and waves around the earth as earthly thinking, just as in summer, livingly with our own soul, we are within the earth-sleep;

Nevertheless, in summer we should take our place consciously in the life of the earth. We should call on. our astral forces so as not to succumb to the earth-sleep, Many people very easily fall asleep in the heat of summer, because during the universal sleep of the earth their astral forces are not strong enough to keep them awake. If we ourselves sleep during the summer time our activity is only equal in value to that of the earths In winter we should develop in the subconscious the forces for sleep which withstand the universal earth-life, whereas for the waking life during winter we need the forces lying more in the direction of the waking life of the Earth-spirit. So we might say we swing with our own life, with the lesser oscillations of our own life, within the yearly oscillations of the Earth-being, of the conscious Earth-being. And this conscious Earth-being is completely dependent on the star constellations There you have a living impression of the way in which our own soul-life is interwoven indirectly with the life of the stars in the sleeping and waking of the earth This gives us a living picture of what astrology is really meant to be, if it is at all to be taken seriously. Therefore, as I have often said Astrology is either the purest dilettantism, or it can only be striven for as an essential part in the deep study and knowledge of spiritual science.

Recently I have often emphasised, my dear Friends, how necessary it is that those who are drawn to spiritual science should acquire conceptions that will lead them from what is merely the content of thought into living reality, Think what entirely new sides of life open to us when we know that consciousness is based on a breaking-up, destruction, and that there has to be destruction for consciousness to have its physical instruments. For in very truth just as we cannot work in the physical world without destroying nature, so we cannot become conscious without the destruction in us of our processes of growth. Clairvoyance has to look upon these continuous processes of destruction, it has without bias to see how our whole life through, a gradual death is taking place for consciousness to be able to exist. Initiation consists in our receiving as it were a concentrated picture of this process of destruction spread out over the whole time between birth and death. This process is concentrated in actual physical death; were not physical death to come about, in the spiritual world after death we should never be able to develop consciousness. Death, the destruction of the physical and etheric bodies, is the primary condition for the development of consciousness in the time between death and a new birth. As a plant cannot be there if the root is not, so the consciousness between death and a new birth cannot exist if it is not rooted in the process of death. As in the first years of physical existence we have to strive for the possibility of destroying from the standpoint of the soul the early processes of budding and growth, consciousness only awaking to the extent to which we can embed the processes of destruction into the processes of growth—as only when the force of the destructive process has reached a certain stage a consciousness develops—so we have to destroy and discard the whole body. And the act we thus perform, this shedding first of the physical and then of the etheric body, is the starting point for the consciousness between death and a new birth. We acquire the faculty of consciousness between death and a new birth by being able to kill ourselves—we may be allowed to say this, for it corresponds with the truth—by being able, that is, to undergo the processes that take place in death. As life here between birth and death has its starting point in the merely plant-like life of the child, so the life between death and a new birth has its starting point in the process of death. We are here looking at strictly destructive processes, and it is important that we should adapt ourselves to the possibility of sharing in the life of the whole course of nature and that of the entire spiritual cosmos.

If you examine the modern life of spirit, my dear friends, you will find that in reality—I have pointed to this before—the development of man is gradually withdrawing more and more from the inner process of existence, and only the external world is considered. There is a growing disinclination to look at the whole of nature, the tendency being more and more to consider only half of her—the growing, budding and sprouting forces. Where annihilation begins, there existence is thought to cease. The materialist cannot think otherwise, since he can never form ideas about spiritual life in the physical world, because these ideas about spiritual life in the physical world begin just where the processes of destruction begin. He wants to investigate only the growing processes for to him they are the sole reality. When anything begins to wither he sets out to investigate what grows up over it, or he seeks in the dying process the chemical remains, that iso the material, the physical. The important point is that man has no wish to direct his attention to the other half, to the dying. Yet it is only from what passes away that men can acquire an insight into the existence of the conscious soul-life. This is a vastly important truth—that the modern world-outlook, because it has developed in the way indicated because it always directs attention to what is budding and sprouting, has deprived itself of the power to see the spiritual, the spiritual only betraying its presence in things when they begin to disintegrate. As long as there is budding and sprouting, the spiritual works within the beings, not appearing as spirit but manifesting externally through material processes. If the spiritual is to appear in the beings, processes of destruction must take place. The spirits of the blossoms, the elementary spirits of the plants, may not remain when the blossoms open and the flowers are developed, when the sun with its sounding waves charms forth the budding, sprouting life. “If it strikes you, you are deaf.” Read these words at the beginning of Part II in Goethe's “Faust” with understanding, The spirits must dive down, They can emerge only when the budding and sprouting life withdraws.

You see, the poetic perception of Goethe was so living that he thoroughly realised how the budding and sprouting that comes forth with the rising of the sun makes it necessary for the elves to recede. But this will become clear to us, my dear friends, that at the sight of the physically dying world there arises first the misty realm of the spirit and then the whole true spirit realm. It is not without meaning when in folklore we hear that to become spiritual the trees must first decay, that only when they are decaying do they let us see the spirit. If we go out into the country and see a decaying, dried-up tree-trunk, it is really showing for the first time its spiritual appearance. There must everywhere first be destruction before the spiritual is to appear.

Modern spiritual life, it is true, consists just in this—that souls have withdrawn from such an intimate living together with nature that they are able to feel the decaying forces and in them all that is spiritually alive. Hence it is that today when we speak of the spiritual, people can form no conception of it at all, for they only consider the world in so far as it buds and sprouts. When it ceases to do this, when decay sets in, for them it leaves the field of reality. If you speak to them of the realm of true life, if you say that the spiritual rises out of the dying, if you tell them all this, you will find that they are listening to something that has absolutely no meaning for them. It may actually happen that if you are speaking today to a gathering of people who have had no previous preparation through spiritual science and you talk of the spiritual living in the world, they have no notion of what is in question. To such people world-conceptions are a matter of complete indifference, They take no interest in discovering; what may be found at the basis of things:. One can have the same kind of experience that we once had at a lecture. You know that we try as far as possible to keep away those who are generally the least cultured of those attending our lectures, those who write for the newspapers. As a rule they understand the minimum of what is spoken about, But sometimes it happens that these very clever people of the present day cannot be kept away. One cannot always act in such a drastic way as was done recently at a certain place in Austria when a reporter came to the lecture and our chairman said to him: “You will certainly not understand anything and had better stay away.” The man had actually bought a ticket. It can't always happen like that, It happened on another occasion that a reporter wrote: “What is this spiritual science meant to be? It is obvious that one person pictures the world in one way and another somehow else, Everyone has a right to his opinion.” Thus in our time you find all over the place complete lack of interest mixed with utter frivolity whenever a world-conception is in question. And this was once written about a lecture: “One person sees the world as a box of bricks, another makes a brew of toads gall with tiger's intestines, a third is a monist, a fourth stares at the confusion without thinking at all, a fifth looks through two pairs of spectacles at the forces of the soul and so (says the writer) we could go on indefinitely.” He is completely indifferent to all these points of view.

This lack of interest towards a spiritual comprehension of the world is not diminishing, it is increasing, and will go on doing so unless a deepening comes about in the world through spiritual science, Deepening through spiritual science will prove of the greatest value, my dear friends, because it does not merely call upon man's faculty for forming concepts and ideas, but seizes upon his whole soul and permeates it so that he actually feels himself as microcosm in the macrocosm, and really experiences individually what has first to build itself up on the processes of destruction. We can attain an actual living-together-with-the-dead only when we can see in the destructive process of death a process that makes a foundation upon which the spiritual being of man rises after death—a process continuing to work up to the time of a new birth.

Thus spiritual science must mean both familiarizing ourselves with the truth of things and letting the truth of things take hold of our very being. Modern spiritual life is a withdrawal from the truth, a becoming apathetic It is becoming a matter of indifference whether there is real clairvoyant vision or whether “toads' gall is brewed with tiger's intestines”. In its culture and ethics modern spiritual life is on the way to the most frivolous and cynical indifference towards all existence that has to do with the depths of being, On the other hand, spiritual science is developing and can develop in a natural way, since the human soul, simply by interesting itself in the results of spiritual investigation, is taken hold of by the cosmic process, carried into it, interwoven with it. It is not necessary to be clairvoyant, but only to enter honestly into the experiences resulting from clairvoyance, getting to know spiritual science; then one will be laid hold of and carried along by what is received through anthroposophical concepts into a living mutual experience and mutual feeling with the cosmos, For this it is certainly necessary that spiritual science should not be looked upon as something adding to the enjoyment of life, but again and again we must penetrate further with our thought into what spiritual science gives. We need not be clairvoyant at first but must accustom ourselves to consider the things of life from many aspects, in the sense of spiritual science. Hence among us things are described from the most varied aspects. Then the experiences take hold of one and carry the soul in feeling if not with knowledge right into the life of the spiritual world, into the spiritual manifesting in the material.

But now my dear friends, in what spiritual science wishes to bring about in knowledge, in art, in religious feeling, and in ethical will—spiritual science takes its place in our spiritual life as something of which we have to be conscious that it is a new element in modern culture. Any anthroposophist must become conscious of this new thing. Yesterday I pointed this out in another connection—namely, that it is necessary for us to give a new form to the Christ Impulse, that our figure of the Christ is essentially different in form from that of Michelangelo's . Our thinking and feeling have to be thoroughly transformed in face of the new standpoint. Then men will begin to have an inkling of what life is as a whole—intensive, living life, For this has ceased. Wherever we look in our environment there is no longer the feeling Goethe expressed when he said: “Art must be the expression, the true expression, of living cosmic laws.” Art has to be an interpretation of the mysterious laws of nature. Today there is no longer any understanding for that. Hence one sees that in all spheres there is a gradual falling away from the real inner life of truth, in what appears as knowledge on the one hand, and on the other as art. In art today we are fond of speaking of compositions, of juxtapositions of individual parts. What art was in olden times, what it must again become—a creating out of the truth of the things themselves—has vanished. In the fullest sense there is an ahrimanic conspiracy against truth, which is spread abroad in the world, and this appears today in the sphere of art as well as in that of science. In the sphere of science we see everywhere a clinging to what is merely perceived by the senses.

In art, too, we see what resembles this. We see, in man, the possibility of feeling and perceiving the inner truth of things gradually dying out. Thus works of art can be produced and admired throughout the civilised world like “Jean Christophe”, the novel by Romain Rolland.

Anyone who creates out of true art, who feels inner truth, inner ruling truth, will never jumble together such a “work of art” as “Jean Christophe”; he would know that the individuality of a Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Strauss, Gustav Mahler, has its inner truth for each one of them. If we jumble them all together, we produce a vexatious chaos of decadent art like this tiresome “Jean Christophe”, which, however, to the regret of all concerned with real art, is admired throughout the civilised world. It is admired, let me say, because today there is a secret conspiracy against the real, essential truth. Indeed, people are no longer aware that they are sinning against the real, essential truth in admiring this so-called literary work and in letting pass as valid not the living individualities built up from a unity that is alive, but a chaotic, foolish work that is all patched together.

We must, my dear friends, be alive to the various sources of perversion out of which the soul willingly creates at the present time; we must calmly and courageously acknowledge what is thus perverted so as to bring to consciousness the significance of the impulse of spiritual science and its intervention in man's living world of truth. Then we shall understand. that we live in an age in which we must be clear that what confronts us as summer-life, budding, sprouting life, is EX DEO NASCIMUR; diminishing life, the destroying of the soul-life, but spirit issuing forth from this destruction in our life since the Mystery of Golgotha—IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. But in the future men must not remain standing on this ground; when this budding, sprouting life of summer when comes, when the Earth-spirit sleeps, we must find the strength to develop and carry into the sleep of the Earth-spirit a higher force arising from the life of soul resulting from clairvoyant knowledge. Then we have to say: As the world in summer is EX DEO NASCIMUR, so the world in winter; and since the Mystery of Golgotha, is IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

But as we go to meet the sleep, the summer life, the sleep of the external organism of the earth, let us be conscious that we can carry into this time what we now experience out of this actual living together with the spiritual world, what the spirit carries into this time of the earth's sleep—the mood of Whitsuntide. If we have felt: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR aright, we shall bear the Whitsun mood into this sleep-condition of the earth by receiving the impulse spiritual science is able to give.

We are born out of the Divine; the summer life of budding, sprouting nature is witness to this We live with the Christ, and feel that we do, by living ourselves into the winter; when the earth wakes we take the Christ Impulse with us into the life of dying Nature: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR, But by going forward again to meet the summer with the Mystery of Golgotha, we carry the Whitsun mood into life so that it may awake in the darkness of summer, in the budding and sprouting and that amidst the sleeping Earth-spirits we ourselves awake in spirit: PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS.

Today I would like to make a few aphoristic remarks on various pedagogical questions which we discussed in our first course and which I have since added to as I feel necessary at the present time. The Christmas course that I gave in Dornach, which in many ways complements the other explanations on pedagogy, I have not yet been able to print after the postscripts. I hope that this will happen some day. But for the time being it has been appearing continuously in the lectures of Steffen at the "Goetheanum". This reprint in the "Goetheanum" will now also be published in book form, so that at least these lectures by Steffen on this Christmas course, which I consider to be especially important for study by those interested in pedagogy, will be available.

Today I would like to point out some feelings that the teacher, the educator, should always have, and that he should also repeatedly, I would like to say meditatively, call into consciousness. The basic feeling must be what I have expressed in various ways: respect for the individuality of the child. We must be aware that there is a spiritual individuality embodied in every child, and that what we have before us as a physical child is not actually a true expression of the child's individuality. The regularity, the structure of the human organism, as you have seen from much that has come before our souls since the first Teacher's Course, is an extraordinarily complicated one. And for a variety of reasons, that which is the true individuality of a child is prevented from fully expressing itself by obstacles in the physical and also in the etheric organism, so that we actually always have before us in the child the more or less unknown true individuality and that which is actually concealed by the physical of the child. It is also possible to express the same truth in the other form that I tried to say in the public lectures in Vienna: We must be aware that in a certain individuality of a child, if we characterize it radically, there could be a genius, and it could also be that we ourselves as teachers and educators would not be a genius. If this relationship exists, that the child is a genius and the teacher is not a genius, it is a completely justified relationship, because not all teachers can be geniuses, and pedagogy has to deal with the general laws. But, of course, it would be quite wrong if the teacher then wanted to inculcate his own individuality or even his own sympathies and antipathies into the child, if he wanted to teach the child as right, as desirable, etc., what he himself thinks is right and desirable. Of course, he would hold the child back on his level, and we must not do that under any circumstances. We can help ourselves tremendously if we, I would say, once again meditate and become very deeply aware that all education basically has nothing to do with the real individuality of the human being, that we, as educators and teachers, actually have the main task, It is our duty as educators and teachers to stand before individuality with reverence, to offer it the possibility to follow its own laws of development, and to remove only those obstacles to development which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional, that is, in the physical body and in the etheric body. We are only called upon to remove those inhibitions which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional and to let the individuality develop freely; so that we should basically use what we teach the child in terms of knowledge only to bring the body, both the physical-emotional and the etheric-emotional, so far forward that the human being can just develop freely.

My dear friends, this seems abstract, but it is the most concrete thing in education, and at the same time it points to where one makes the most mistakes. Many people say that it is necessary to develop the individuality of the child. This is as true as it is empty. For if the physical and etheric inhibitions were not there, the individuality of each child would develop properly in life. But we have to remove these physical and etheric inhibitions. Just think of the terrible things we do when we teach six, seven, eight year old children to read and write. It is not often enough that this is brought home to us in all its gravity. For when the child grows up to be six, seven, eight years old, he really brings nothing with him to point out or even to imitate those little demonic things that appear before him on paper. There is no human relationship to the letter forms of today. Therefore, we must be aware of the fact that there is a terrible gap between what has developed in the later course of human civilization and what the child in his 7th year is. Today we have to teach the child something that it certainly does not want, so that it can grow into today's civilization. And if we don't want to spoil the child, we have to proceed in such a way that we treat the child in these years as it needs to be treated, so that the obstacles to its development are removed and it is gradually led, after the obstacles to its development are removed, to the point of view of the soul, to the state of the soul, where the adult people stood in that period of culture when the present forms of writing came into being. The nature of the child itself gives cause for this, of course.

You see, today experiments are being conducted on the tiredness of children. The fact that such figures have been found should not be the end of the research, but the beginning. We should ask ourselves: Why are children so tired? - We are looking at a system, we are looking at the head system, and probably also at the metabolic system and the limb system, which are tired, while the rhythmic system, which is in the highest flower of its development from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, is not really tired. For the heart beats even when it is tired, and the respiratory rhythm and all rhythms go on unharmed by any fatigue, so that the present figures of experimental psychology say something different from what is usually assumed today. They say that the rhythmic system is not taken into account enough in the education of children. But the rhythmic system is stimulated directly from the soul when the whole teaching is artistic, plastic-artistic or musical-artistic. Then you will find that the child will hardly get tired to a great extent because of this kind of teaching. And the teacher should indeed acquire a watchful eye to see whether his children tire too much; he should acquire a certain instinct to see whether the fatigue is much greater than it should be according to the mere external conditions, whether the air in the classroom is somewhat worse than it should be, whether the children have to sit for hours on end, that is, the purely physical things that occupy the metabolic-limb organism. On the other hand, the child has to think. If the thoughts echo in a quiet rhythm, they are not too tired. They get a little tired, but not too tired. The rhythmic system is the physical organ of education and teaching that must be used especially by the child. Now, in the subjects that are not directly artistic, we must try to make the teaching as artistic as possible. This must be taken very seriously, for this is the only real means of education: the artistic between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Yesterday I said that what is very important for this age of life is that we transform everything into the image, either into the musical image or into the plastic image. Now, of course, you may find how extraordinarily difficult it is in some subjects to work through the image. It will be relatively easy to work through the image in history, where you can make an image of what you are describing; it will be relatively easy in this or that subject, for example, in natural history, where you should also make an image of what you want to teach the child. In other subjects it will be more difficult. In languages, for example, it will not be so difficult to bring things into the picture, if one attaches any importance at all to taking the pictorial aspect of language into account in teaching. One should not miss any opportunity to look at how sentences are structured, for example, a three-part sentence structure consisting of the main clause, the relative clause and the conditional clause, even with ten, eleven, twelve-year-old children. Not true, the grammatical aspect is not the main thing; it should be treated by us only as a means to get the picture, but we should not neglect to give the child, I would say, even a spatial-visual idea of a main clause and a relative clause. Of course, this can be done in many different ways. You can make the main proposition a large circle, the relative proposition a small circle, perhaps placed eccentrically - without theorizing, by staying in the picture - and you can make the conditional proposition, the if proposition, so vivid that you introduce, say, rays against the circle as the conditional factors. It is not necessary to exaggerate these things, but it is really necessary to come back to these things again and again after a good preparation of the subject. And even with ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old children, one should pay attention to what I would call the moral-characterological aspects of pictorial style. Not that you should have style lessons at that age. We discussed yesterday where that should be in the class. Rather, the matter should be grasped more from the inner intuitive. You can go very far. For example, you can treat the individual reading piece, not the pedantic reading pieces that are in our reading books, but what you really prepare carefully, you can treat it according to your temperament. You can talk about a melancholic style or a choleric style, not about the content. So please leave out the content completely, even the poetic content, I mean the sentence structure. There is no need to take things apart, which should be avoided; but the transformation into the image, which should be cultivated, when I say: into the moral-characterological. One can find the possibility to have a stimulating effect on the children already in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th years, if one restrains oneself in an appropriate way to make the necessary studies..

You see, my dear friends, I do not want to mend anybody's things, I only want to characterize something. Again, at our Vienna Congress, I was able to make quite meaningful studies, meaningful for me, when I compared the attitude, the stylistic attitude of those who spoke, let us say, from Northern Germany, and those who spoke as our Viennese, who were called here. I always thought to myself, when Baravalle or Stein or another Viennese comes again, will he again begin his lecture with "if"? That is so characteristic of the Austrian, it is infinitely meaningful to begin with a conditional sentence, it immediately leads into the moral-characterological. I think you yourself are hardly aware of how you begin your lectures with "If"! The North Germans and the Swiss do not begin with "if," they immediately blurt out an unconditional, affirmative sentence. This is so characteristic, and this is how one should learn to approach things, first of all, so that one can become free, if I may say so, from one's own conditions, and so that in this becoming free one can also achieve an artistic treatment, which is not pedantic, an artistic treatment of any teaching material. If you learn to pay attention to such things, you can achieve an artistic treatment of any subject. And I would like to point out that it is extremely important to feel oneself in artistic things in such a way that one pays attention to details in artistic things, if one wants to be a good teacher for children from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Again, look at the photographs*; look at how Dr. Kolisko and Walleen are standing, and do not look at them with an interpretive, commenting sense, but look at them with an artistic sense, and you will see how much they give you. It is very important not to force things like that; of course, if you make a judgment with your mind, that someone always holds a folder in a certain hand position and things like that, it comes out immediately as nonsense. But if you grasp it with an artistic sense, something comes out that cannot be completely put into words, but which pours the artistic into your limbs in a tremendously significant way, which is exactly what you need as an educator. It is very important to be able to transform things into a picture, because the picture brings the things that we want to teach the child closer to the human being.

With what we, after our own scientific education, what we have taken up and what we are always confronted with when we prepare ourselves - the books we prepare ourselves from contain nothing but abominations - we burden ourselves with something that is scientific systematics, and when we do not have enough time to get rid of the whole thing - when we prepare ourselves for a lesson, we have to take a contemporary book in which things are arranged scientifically - then this haunts our minds. When we bring this to the children, it is something that is not possible. And we have to realize that this causes us great difficulties, that today scientific systematics, not human systematics, have crept into the preparation books that we can use. So we have to get rid of it absolutely. We have to get everything that we bring into the school for this age absolutely free of all scientific systematics.

And here it is good to remember times when older children, older young people were taught in such a way that it was taken for granted that the appeal was not to the head, but to the whole person. One only has to remember the medieval education: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, where it was not important to teach this or that, but to get the child to be able to express himself in a sentence that was grammatically correct. There, grammar was not taught, but the child was given the opportunity to think in such a pictorial way that his sentences had a pictorial character. Then, not true, rhetoric: the child should be accustomed to feel the beauty of the word in its formation; dialectic: the child should be accustomed to let the thought free in itself, and so on; there it was a matter of ability. And basically it must also come to ability in the most spiritual things, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. But the ability is reached only at that age when everything is brought into the picture.

Well, that's where the trivialities sometimes play an extraordinarily large role. For example, when presenting mathematics, it really makes a difference whether you put one line of letters that is wider and then another that is shorter, whether you put it at the beginning or in the middle. You can make a picture out of what is an arithmetic operation at the end, which the students have in front of them, and put a certain value on something like that, so that even what you write on the blackboard becomes a picture; that even in the trivialities these things are thoroughly taken into account. Sometimes there are opportunities to bring out the picture from a very special corner of life, I would say. Mathematical formulas or sequences of formulas can sometimes be described by figures that are immediately perceived as beautiful. We should not miss such opportunities. It would be a sin and a pity if we missed such an opportunity to make something descriptive, which might be a kind of unnecessary tendril for those who can only think in a philistine way. We should gradually inoculate the philistro-logical way out of our souls for this age, if I may say so. Today we inoculate it much too much more and more. We should inoculate it out; we should work with all our might towards the imaginative or towards the musical, and then actually come close to rhythm for this age of life.

And now we should not close our minds to the realization that truly imponderables play a great role in the totality of teaching. You see, in our very first pedagogical courses, we spoke of a pedagogical relationship between the four temperaments. The task of the educator is to study these four temperaments in the child continuously, to study them in such a way that he can take them into account continuously. This is because, as I say, the right karma of a class is created through the right treatment of the temperaments of the children in the class. After all, such a class is together; they are souls that are together. As they work with the teacher and with each other, a part of their life karma is played out. All kinds of threads of life are being spun, but a piece of karma is being played out; especially between the 7th and 14th years, a piece of karma is being played out very strongly. And how the individual temperaments work into that karma is what we should look at. In this respect, the class can be a constant subject of inner apercus, if we let this be the quiet undertone of our pedagogical work. And above all, one should not let it happen that in any class there are sleeping, co-sleeping students. By sleeping students I mean those who, during the course of the lesson, give only half or three-quarters or a quarter of their whole being. It can happen that the few gifted ones, as they are usually called - they are not always - show up and the others remain asleep. Then the lesson will be really lively with a few, and the others will always be a kind of extras, and this is what must be avoided at all costs. Because, of course, this becoming an extra or being a chatterbox - I don't mean that in a bad way - is also based on other moments. But it is also based on the contrast of temperaments. Of course, among the students there are those who have, let's say, a sanguine or even a choleric temperament, and they will always show off, and you will always have to deal with them if you don't pay special pedagogical attention to them; and there are others, the more melancholic, phlegmatic ones, who then become the extras. This must be avoided at all costs, because the best thing we can do for the students who think more quickly and speak more easily is to make those who think more slowly and do not open their mouths so readily take part in everything, speak, cooperate, and so on. It is absolutely necessary that we go along with this inconvenience. Then we will feel that for a short time we may make less progress than if we left the extras to themselves, but in the long run it will be different. In the long run it will turn out that we have a tremendous effect on the memory retention of the children by not allowing the extras. What is justified in memory is essentially supported by the fact that we do not allow extras.

And so I would say that the possibility of working quite pictorially depends also on the effectiveness of these imponderables. We will see from experience that if we allow all the temperaments, all the possible dispositions of a class to really live themselves out, that for the age from the change of teeth to sexual maturity we are much more likely to arrive at a pictoriality seated in the soul than if we do not. Of course, a certain, I would say, strong devotion to the lesson is necessary if the things to be taught are really always to be taught with the consideration that they will become pictorial; but nevertheless, one should never end a lesson for this age without giving the child something pictorial. Those who are able to draw with the children from the very beginning have an easier time in this respect; but those who, let us say, give the children something pictorial, for example in languages or arithmetic, have all the more effect on them. And, in fact, there is no other real preparation for the educator for this pictorial work than that which I have indicated: to sharpen our sense of observation of life in such a way that we can respond objectively to what life reveals, especially in the human being. A healthy artistic physiognomics, not only human physiognomics, but also, for example, animal physiognomics, should indeed be revived among educators, a healthy, not the sentimental physiognomics of Lavater and the like, but a healthy physiognomics in which the pictorial is sought, without going so far as to close the concept, staying in the picture, being satisfied with it, when one has brought things into the picture, such a healthy physiognomy should be revived, and it will then pass over of itself into all kinds of actions, into all kinds of processes that the teacher develops during the lesson. Nowhere should we pay so much attention to the how and not so much to the what as in teaching and education. It is not the what that is important, but the fact that the what appears in a certain way, in a certain way in the lesson. And there is no greater enemy for the teacher than an incomplete preparation, because it always makes him stop at the "what," whereas a complete preparation always makes him go from the "what" to the "how," makes him rejoice to see how he can prepare it for the child, how he can form it before the child, because the forming itself has become like an inspiration and the like. We should not shrink back when we ourselves often bring incomprehensible things to the children in this respect. Incomprehensible things which the children accept on our authority - and for the children, between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, authority decides - are better taught to the children than trivial things which are comprehensible to them and which they grasp out of their own intellect.

These are quite, I would say, finer nuances of what the teacher, the educator, should do with his own soul life. You will notice, if you perhaps look again at the Christmas course on education, that there is actually everywhere an emphasis on answering the question: How do we form the shell of the human being, the physical body, the etheric body? - Not, how do we form the individuality? That will form itself. If you say, "How do we form the physical body? -...people today, in this materialistic age, have no idea that it is only through the spiritual-mental processes, the spiritual-mental processes that you develop during the teaching, that you form the physical body.

For example, suppose a child stumbles over its own words, cannot find the next word. You see, in the child, before he has reached sexual maturity, this stumbling over his own words is a trait that is still based in physical corporeality in the Upper Man. The upper man is the man in physical relationship, who undergoes his main development in the first and even in the infantile period of life. If you find the possibility to find out the right tempo for what you make the child sing, tell, to get the right tempo for such a person who makes us wait there when he has to look for the transition from one word to the other, then you are in a position to cure this in the child up to sexual maturity absolutely from the spiritual. You are removing a physical inhibition. If you have not removed it from the physical up to sexual maturity, then you have formed its counterpart in the metabolic limb system, then it has become a property of the intestines, then you cannot get it out. Then whatever you do in the ordinary sense as spiritual practices will not help you. They have to be done in such a way that they affect the digestive system, and of course it is not always possible to introduce this, I would say, in a general way. That would lead to the abuse of certain exercises. But with the child, we have to watch carefully to see if he goes from one word to another, from one thought to another, subnormally slowly. And in the child we can still make the body healthy. We make the digestive system sick if we do not cure such waiting from one word to another in youth. This is our duty, and it is more important than any content - which we need, because we have to teach, and therefore we have to have content - to teach the child. This is simply how the mind works in the whole physical organism. In order to learn to control the physical organism in the right way, we have to know the spiritual science, because it is the spirit that works in the physical organism. Therefore, we need to bring healthy medical thinking closer to educational thinking in a certain way. So that we really know how to take such a thing seriously, let us say that when it is said in the Old Testament that someone was tormented by bad dreams, the expression is not used: My brain has done something special, God has afflicted me through my brain. - No one who was active in the Old Testament would have said that. But he said: God is afflicting me through my kidneys. - And why? For the simple reason that it is true. People today are proud to know that spiritual things come from the brain, and they arrogantly disregard what is written in the Old Testament. Not only the brain is spiritualized, but the whole organism is spiritualized. Dreams, for example, come from the kidneys; the expression in the Old Testament is very serious. Just as it is clever in the modern sense to say that compassion also comes from the brain; but in the deeper sense it is nonsense, and the Old Testament form, that compassion comes from the bowels, is the correct one.

And so we must know that when we approach the child with the soul-spiritual, we are treating its whole body. We are the very ones who, with medical wisdom, take care of the physical-spiritual of the child when we do this or that in the construction of sentences, in the treatment of colors, in the treatment of sounds, in the treatment of this or that object. We are influencing the whole physical; for in the physical is the spirit, and we are influencing this spirit, not only the spirit which is only directly in the brain, for there, strangely enough, is the most ineffective thing. And so we must see ourselves as educators, either as people who are constantly bringing up in children something that nourishes and shapes life, or something that is poisonous and destroys the body. If we exaggerate a little in the direction of formalism, if we make the children think until they are tired, then we condemn them between the ages of 7 and 14 to relatively early sclerosis. We just have to be aware that we are working on the whole life when we develop this or that in the child's environment in education and teaching. And if we are not aware of this, we will certainly not approach pedagogical issues in the right way: We are really entitled to remove only the obstacles and hindrances that arise from the physical and etheric nature of man.

As for the rest, today's man, who is much more selfish than he thinks, will naturally say - this seems right to me, that seems wrong to me - and will then bring up the child to feel and think as much as possible like himself. That, of course, is wrong. What is right in all matters is life - not the individual teacher - whom we must ask. Today, of course, we have to teach a child to write. I must confess that I cannot find in myself any judgment of taste that would give me an answer directly from human nature as to whether a child should learn to write or not; it arises only from consideration of the development of civilization. Mankind has now come to the point where a certain content of civilization has an effect on the way of writing and reading. In order to educate the child not for another world but for this world, we must teach him to read and write. This is something we must accept as a condition of civilization, and we must remove the obstacles to development that come with living in a certain age. We have an enormous amount of work to do if we want to answer the question: How can we make the objects that are already given for the human development of the child as harmless as possible? - Because we can always assume that by giving the child a certain material, we are doing the child more harm than good. So we must always ask ourselves: How can we avoid the harm that must always be done when we teach the child something? Well, of course, this is all the less true the more artistic the material is, and all the more true the more cognitive the material is. But this fact must always be before our minds. And now we should be very clear about this: the right authoritative relationship that should exist between the change of teeth and sexual maturity between the educator and the child, this right authoritative relationship is brought about under no other circumstances than when we make an effort to make the teaching artistic-pictorial. If we can do that, then the authoritative relationship will certainly develop. You see, what undermines the authoritative relationship is one-sided intellectuality. Of course, it is easiest to cultivate one-sided intellectuality in the fields of arithmetic, science, and so on. But it is there that we should work into the pictorial. Often we are too unimaginative in language teaching. Let us be clear about this: when we create figuratively, there is a certain selflessness involved. It is much easier to think cleverly, it is much more selfish to think cleverly, than to create pictorially; and we face the child unselfishly when we create pictorially in our teaching. When the child has reached sexual maturity, and knowledge is to pass into cognition, then, because its intellect is now awakened, it simply rejects the judgment of the teacher, the educator, of its own accord. Then nothing is achieved by mere authority, then we have to be able to compete, then we really have to compete with the child, because actually at the age of 17 one is as clever as at the age of 35 in terms of the ability to judge. There are certain nuances, but basically you are as smart at 17 as you are at 35 in terms of formal logic. So you really have to compete with the child as soon as they reach sexual maturity. And therefore, what I said yesterday, that one must not show oneself in any way, must come true. Of course, this will be easy for the younger child if you devote yourself to an artistic organization of the lessons. And a great deal will be achieved if one gets a feeling for how different parts of one or the other can be formed artistically in different ways. Let's say you take the children through a series of plants. You talk about the blossoms; now you try to describe the blossoms in the whole tone, I would say, up to the tone of voice, in such a way that the whole words and ideas are something flowing, that they are light. Now, when you develop this, you try to appeal to the sanguine children in particular, so that the sanguine children contribute to the whole class what they have especially in the ability to perceive, in the easy ability to perceive, let us say, for such ideas as an artistic person develops when he describes blossoms. If you turn to the leaves, you may find that you strike such a tone that the melancholy children are more interested in the leaves; the dialog with the class now passes to the melancholy children. If you describe the roots, which are not usually seen, but which you can describe in such a way that their power can be felt in the flowers, if you describe what is usually invisible, then you must no longer describe statically, but dynamically, and then the choleric children help you to have a real dialog. In this way the whole class can be used for mutual stimulation, if only one develops the sense for it, which can become instinctive. Only, isn't it, it is necessary to pay attention to such things.

Well, actually the thing is that you imagine it to be much more difficult than it actually is. Because once you have brought yourself a quarter in such a direction, then you yourself have the need to bring yourself in 'such a direction'. But there is a catch. You start with great desire. You say to yourself: I want to do this now, I really want to create a picture, I want to create a picture for the lessons, tomorrow I will start. - Now it goes on for eight days, but after that you get lazy, and that is the catch. You have to persevere for a quarter of a year, and then you have to persevere longer. Eight days won't do it, but a quarter of a year will do it, if you are serious about training yourself for a quarter of a year.

And now today, my dear friends, I do not want to have given you one rule or another for one thing or another in class. Perhaps we will always organize pedagogical lectures at future meetings, so that we always move forward. But I would have liked to give you something today that would have made you meditate and put you in a pedagogical and pedagogical mood. I would have liked to see an arm move differently here and there in a class, so that it would create a different image in front of the students. Sometimes I wish that the always unimaginative bumpiness, for example, would not be one of the first things in the classroom. Sometimes I wish that this or that ungraceful wiping of the blackboard would be replaced by a more graceful one. All this comes naturally. It is worked out from the unartistic to the artistic when the general sense for it is there, and the general sense is actually much more important for the pedagogue than the individual dogmatic rule. I would like you to have taken up this today, which draws your attention to the importance of the heartbeat with which one is in pedagogy.