| 236. Karmic Relationships II: Perception of Karma
09 May 1924, Dornach Translated by George Adams, Mabel Cotterell, Charles Davy, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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| Seven years later again, when I conceived my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—then only did the Fairy Tale reappear, transformed in such a way that it could be shaped and moulded plastically. |
| If the experience happened to be with another human being, then we have the feeling after this has all happened, that actually we did not only experience it through that human being, but that it was really brought to us. Other forces, spiritual forces, have been at play. It was they who brought it to us. The next day comes. This next day the picture is carried down from the etheric body into the physical body. |
| This is something that certainly ought to be carefully observed by the Anthroposophical Society which, since the Christmas Foundation, is intended to be a complete expression of the Anthroposophical Movement. Really a very great deal has been given within the Anthroposophical Society. |
| 236. Karmic Relationships II: Perception of Karma
09 May 1924, Dornach Translated by George Adams, Mabel Cotterell, Charles Davy, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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To-day we shall begin to consider the inner activities of the soul which can gradually lead man to acquire conceptions, to acquire thoughts, about karma. These thoughts and conceptions are such that they can ultimately enable a man to perceive, in the light of karma, experiences which have a karmic cause. Looking around our human environment, we really see in the physical world only what is caused by physical force in a physical way. And if we do see in the physical world something that is not caused by physical forces, we still become aware of it through external physical substances, through external physical objects of perception. Of course, when a man does something out of his own will, this is not caused by physical forces, by physical causes, for in many respects it comes out of the free will. But all that we perceive outwardly is exhausted in the physical phenomena of the world we thus observe. In the entire sphere of what we can thus observe, the karmic connection of an experience we ourselves pass through cannot reveal itself to us. For the whole picture of this karmic connection lies in the spiritual world, is really inscribed in what is the etheric world, in what underlies the etheric world as the astral world, or as the world of spiritual beings who inhabit this astral outer world. Nothing of all this is seen, as long as we merely direct our senses to the physical world. All that we perceive in the physical world is perceived through our senses. These senses work without our having much to do with it. Our eyes receive impressions of light, of colour, of their own accord. We can at most—and even that is half involuntary—adjust our gaze to a certain direction; we can gaze at something or we can look away from it. Even in this there is still much of the unconscious, but at all events a fragment of consciousness. And, above all, that which the eye must do inwardly in order to see colour, the wonderfully wise, inner activity which is exercised whenever we see anything—this we could never achieve as human beings if we were supposed to achieve it consciously. That would be out of the question. All this must, to begin with, happen unconsciously, because it is much too wise for man to be able in any way to help in it. To attain a correct point of view as regards the knowledge possessed by the human being, we must really fill our thoughts with all the wisdom-filled arrangements which exist in the world, and which are quite beyond the capacity of man. If a man thinks only of what he can achieve himself, then he really blocks all paths to knowledge. The path to knowledge really begins at the point where we realise, in all humility, all that we are incapable of doing, but which must nevertheless come to pass in cosmic existence. The eye, the ear—yes, and the other sense-organs—are, in reality, such profoundly wise instruments that men will have to study for a long time before they will be able even to have an inkling of understanding of them during earthly existence. This must be fully realised. Observation of the spiritual, however, cannot be unconscious in this sense. In earlier times of human evolution this was possible even for observation of the spiritual. There was an instinctive clairvoyance which has faded away in the course of the evolution of humanity. From now onwards, man must consciously attain an attitude to the cosmos through which he will be able to see through into the spiritual. And we must see through into the spiritual if we are to recognise the karmic connections of any experience we may have. Now it is necessary for the observation of karma that we at least begin by paying attention to what can happen within us to develop the faculty of observing karmic connections. We, on our part, must help a little in order to make these observations conscious. We must do more, for example, than we do for our eye in order to become conscious of colour. My dear friends, what we must learn first of all is summed up in one word: to wait. We must be able to wait for the inner experiences. About this “being able to wait”, I have already spoken. It was in the year 1889—I tell about this in the Story of my Life—that the inner spiritual construction of Goethe's “The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” first came before my mind's eye. And it was then, for the first time, that the perception as it were of a greater, wider connection than appears in the Fairy Tale itself presented itself to me. But I also knew at that time: I cannot yet make of this connection what I shall some day be able to make of it. And so what the Fairy Tale revealed to me at that time simply remained lying in the soul. Then, seven years later, in the year 1896, it welled up again, but still not in such a way that it could be properly shaped; and again, about 1903, seven years later. Even then, although it came with great definition and many connections it could not yet receive its right form. Seven years later again, when I conceived my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—then only did the Fairy Tale reappear, transformed in such a way that it could be shaped and moulded plastically. Such things, therefore, demand a real waiting, a time for ripening. We must bring our own experiences into relation with that which exists out there in the world. At a moment when only the seed of a plant is present, we obviously cannot have the plant. The seed must be brought into the right conditions for growth, and we must wait until the blossom, and finally the fruit, come out of the seed. And so it must be with the experiences through which we pass. We cannot take the line of being thrilled by an experience, simply because it happens to be there, and then forgetting it. The person who only wants his experiences when they are actually present will be doing little towards ultimate observation of the spiritual world. We must be able to wait. We must be able to let the experiences ripen within the soul. Now the possibility exists for a comparatively quick ripening of insight into karmic connections if, for a considerable time, we endeavour patiently, and with inner activity, to picture in our consciousness, more and more clearly, an experience which would otherwise simply take its course externally, without being properly grasped, so that it fades away in the course of life. After all, this fading away is what really happens with the events of life. For what does a man do with events and experiences, as they approach him in the course of the day? He experiences them, but in reality only half observes them. You can realise how experiences are only half observed if you sit down one day in the afternoon or in the evening—and I advise you to do it—and ask yourself: ‘What did I actually experience this morning at half-past nine?’ And now try to call up such an experience in all details before your soul, recall it as if it were actually there, say at half-past seven in the evening—as if you were creating it spiritually before you. You will see how much you will find lacking, how much you failed to observe, and how difficult it is. If you take a pen or pencil to write it all down, you will soon begin to bite at the pen or the pencil, because you cannot hit upon the details—and, in time, you want to bite them out of the pencil! Yes, but that is just the point, to take upon oneself the task of placing before the mind, in all precision, an experience one has had,—not at the moment when it is actually there, but afterwards. It must be placed before the soul as if one were going to paint it spiritually. If the experience were one in which somebody spoke, this must be made quite objectively real: the ring of the voice, the way in which the words were used, clumsily or cleverly—the picture must be made with strength and vigour. In short, we try to make a picture of what we have experienced. If we make a picture of such an experience of the day, then in the following night, the astral body, when it is outside the physical body and the etheric body, occupies itself with this picture. The astral body itself is, in reality, the bearer of the picture, and gives shape to it outside the body. The astral body takes the picture with it when it goes out on the first night. It shapes it there, outside the physical and etheric bodies. That is the first stage (we will take these stages quite exactly): the sleeping astral body, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, shapes the picture of the experience. Where does it do this? In the external ether. It is now in the external etheric world; it does this in the external ether. Now picture to yourself the human being: his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and the astral body is outside. We will leave aside the ego. There outside is the astral body, reshaping this picture that has been made. But the astral body does this in the external ether. In consequence of this the following happens—think of it: the astral body is there outside, shaping this picture. All this happens in the external ether which encrusts, as it were, with its own substance that which is formed as a picture within the astral body. So the external ether makes the etheric form (dotted (dark) outline) into a picture which is clearly and precisely visualised by the eye of spirit.  In the morning you return into the physical and etheric bodies and bear into them what has been made substantial by the external ether. That is to say: the sleeping astral body shapes the picture of the experience outside the physical and etheric bodies. The external ether then impregnates the picture with its own substance. You can imagine that the picture becomes stronger thereby, and that now, when the astral body returns in the morning with this stronger substantiality, it can make an impression upon the etheric body in the human being. With forces that are derived from the external ether, the astral body now stamps an impression into the etheric body. The second stage is therefore: The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body. There we have the events of the first day and the first night. Now we come to the second day. On the second day, while you are busying yourself with all the little things of life in full waking consciousness, there, underneath the consciousness, in the unconscious, the picture is descending into the etheric body. And in the next night, when the etheric body is undisturbed, when the astral body has gone out again, the etheric body elaborates this picture. Thus in the second night the picture is elaborated by the man's own etheric body. There we have the second stage:—The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body; and in the next night the etheric body elaborates the picture. Thus we have: the second day and the second night. Now if you do this, if you actually do not give up occupying yourself with the picture you formed on the preceding day—and you can continue to occupy yourself with it, for a reason which I shall immediately mention—if you do not disdain to do this, then you will find that you are living on further with the picture. What does this mean—to continue occupying yourself with it? If you really take pains to shape such a picture, vigorously, elaborating it plastically in characteristic, strong lines on the first day after you had the experience, then you have really exerted yourself spiritually. Such things cost spiritual exertion. I don't mean what I am going to say as a hint—present company is, of course, always excepted in these matters!—but after all, it must be said that the majority of men simply do not know what spiritual exertion is. Spiritual exertion, true spiritual exertion, comes about only by means of activity of soul. When you allow the world to work upon you, and let thoughts run their course without taking them in hand, then there is no spiritual exertion. We should not imagine, when something tires us, that we have exerted ourselves spiritually. Getting tired does not imply that there has been spiritual exertion. We can get tired, for instance, from reading. But if we have not ourselves been productive in some way during the reading, if we merely let the thoughts contained in the book act on us, then we are not exerting ourselves. On the contrary, a person who has really exerted himself spiritually, who has exerted himself out of the inner activity of his soul, may then take up a book, a very interesting one, and just “sleep off” his spiritual exertion in the best possible way, in the reading of it. Naturally, we can fall asleep over a book if we are tired. This getting tired is no sign at all of spiritual exertion. A sign of spiritual exertion, however, is this: that one feels—the brain is used up. It is just as we may feel that a demand has been made on the muscle of the arm when lifting things. Ordinary thought makes no such strong claims upon the brain. The process continues, and you will even notice that when you try it for the first time, the second, the third, the tenth, you get a slight headache. It is not that you get tired or fall asleep; on the contrary, you cannot fall asleep; you get a slight headache from it. Only you must not regard this headache as something baleful; on the contrary, you must take it as actual proof of the fact that you have exerted your head. Well, the process goes on ... it stays with you until you go to sleep. If you have really done this on the preceding day, then you will awake in the morning with the feeling: “There actually is something in me! I don't quite know what it is, but there is something in me, and it wants something from me. Yes, after all it is not a matter of indifference that I made this picture for myself yesterday. It really means something. This picture has changed. To-day it is giving me quite different feelings from those I had previously. The picture is making me have quite definite feelings.” All this stays with you through the next day as the remaining inner experience of the picture which you made for yourself. And what you feel, and cannot get rid of through the whole of the day—this is a witness to the fact that the picture is now descending into the etheric body, as I have described to you, and that the etheric body is receiving it. Now you will probably experience on waking after the next night—when you slip into your body after these two days—that you find this picture slightly changed, slightly transformed. You find it again ... precisely on waking the third day you find it again within you. It appears to you like a very real dream. But it has undergone a transformation. It will clothe itself in manifold pictures until it is other than it was. It will assume an appearance as if spiritual beings were now bringing you this experience. And you actually receive the impression: Yes, this experience which I had and which I subsequently formed into a picture, has actually been brought to me. If the experience happened to be with another human being, then we have the feeling after this has all happened, that actually we did not only experience it through that human being, but that it was really brought to us. Other forces, spiritual forces, have been at play. It was they who brought it to us. The next day comes. This next day the picture is carried down from the etheric body into the physical body. The etheric body impresses this picture into the physical body, into the nerve-processes, into the blood-processes. On the third day the picture is impressed into the physical body. So the third stage is: The picture is stamped into the physical body by the etheric body. And now comes the next night. You have been attending throughout the day to the ordinary little trifles of life, and underneath it all this important process is going on: the picture is being carried down into the physical body. All this goes on in the subconscious. When the following night comes, the picture is elaborated in the physical body. It is spiritualised in the physical body. First of all, throughout the day, the picture is brought down into the processes of the blood and nerves, but in the night it is spiritualised. Those who have vision see how this picture is now elaborated by the physical body, but it appears spiritually as an altogether changed picture. We can say: the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night. 1st Day and 1st Night: When outside the physical and etheric bodies, the astral body shapes the picture of the experience. The outer ether impregnates the picture with its own substance. 2nd Day and 2nd Night: The picture is stamped by the astral body into the etheric body. And the etheric body elaborates the picture during the next day. 3rd Day and 3rd Night: The picture is stamped by the etheric body into the physical body. And the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.  Now this is something of which you must make an absolutely correct mental picture. The physical body actually works up this picture spiritually. It spiritualises the picture. So that when all this has really been gone through, it does happen—when the human being is asleep—that his physical body works up the whole picture, but not in such a way that it remains within the physical body. Out of the physical body there arises a transformation, a greatly magnified transformation of the picture. And when you get up in the morning, this picture stands there, and in truth you hover in it; it is like a kind of cloud in which you yourself are. With this picture you get up in the morning. So this is the third day and the third night. With this picture, which is entirely transformed, you get out of bed on the fourth day. You rise from sleep, enveloped by this cloud. And if you have actually shaped the picture with the necessary strength on the first day, and if you have paid attention to what your feeling conveyed to you on the second day, you will notice now that your will is contained in the picture as it now is. The will is contained in it! But this will is unable to express itself; it is as though fettered. Put into somewhat radical terms, it is actually as if one had planned after the manner of an incredibly daring sprinter, who might resolve to make a display of a bravado race: I will run, now I am running to Ober-Dornach, I make a picture of it already, I've got it within me. It is my will ... But in the very moment when I want to start, when the will is strongest, somebody fetters me, so that I stand there quite rigidly. The whole will has unfolded, but I cannot carry out the will. Such, approximately, is the process. When this experience of feeling yourself in a pillory develops—for it is a feeling of being in a pillory after the third night—when you again awake in it, feeling in a pillory as it were, with the will fettered through and through, then, if you can pay attention to it, you will find that the will begins to transform itself. This will becomes sight. In itself it can do nothing, but it leads to our seeing something. It becomes an eye of the soul. And the picture, with which one rose from sleep, becomes objective. What it shows is the event of the previous earth-life, or of some previous earth-life, which had been the cause of the experience that we shaped into a picture on the first day. By means of this transformation through feeling and through will, one gets the picture of the causal event of a preceding incarnation. When we describe these things, they appear somewhat overpowering. This is not to be wondered at, for they are utterly unfamiliar to the human being of the present time. They were not so unknown to the men of earlier culture-epochs. Only, according to the opinion of modern men who are clever, those other men—in their whole way of living—were stupid! Nevertheless, those ‘stupid’ men of the earlier culture-epochs really had these experiences, only modern man darkens everything by his intellect, which makes him clever, but not exactly wise. As I said, the thing seems somewhat tumultuous, when one relates it. But after all, one is obliged to use such words; for since the things are utterly unknown to-day, they would not appear so striking if they were worded more mildly. They must appear striking. But the whole experience, from beginning to end, throughout the three days, as I have described it to you, must take its course in inner intimacy, in rest and peace of mind. For so-called occult experiences—and these are such—do not take their course in such a way that they can be bragged about. When one begins to brag about them, they immediately stop. They must take their course in inner repose and quietude. And it is best when, for the time being, nobody at all notices anything of the consecutive experiences except the person who is having them. Now you must not think that the thing succeeds immediately, from the outset. One always finds, of course, that people are pleased when such things are related. This is quite comprehensible ... and it is good. How much there is that one can learn to know! And then, with a tremendous diligence people start on it. They begin ... and it doesn't succeed. Then they become disheartened. Then, perhaps, they try it again, several times. Again it does not succeed. But, in effect, if one has tried it about 49 times, or, let us say, somebody else has tried it about 69 times, then the 50th or the 70th time it does succeed. For what really matters in all these things is the acquisition of a kind of habit of soul concerning them. To begin with, one must find one's way into these things, one must acquire habits of the soul. This is something that certainly ought to be carefully observed by the Anthroposophical Society which, since the Christmas Foundation, is intended to be a complete expression of the Anthroposophical Movement. Really a very great deal has been given within the Anthroposophical Society. It is enough to make one giddy to see standing in a row all the Lecture-Courses that have been printed. But in spite of it, people come again and again, asking one thing or the other. In the majority of cases this is not at all necessary, for if everything that is contained in the Lecture-Courses is really worked upon, then most of the questions find their own answer in a much surer way. One must have patience, really have patience. Truly, there is a great deal in anthroposophical literature that can work in the soul. We must take to heart all that has to be accomplished, and the time will be well filled with all that has to be done. But, on the other hand, in regard to many of the things which people want to know, it must be pointed out that the Lecture-Courses exist, that they have been left lying there, and after they have been given many people trouble about them only inasmuch as they want a “new” Course; they just lay the old ones aside. These things are closely connected with what I have to say to-day. One does not reach inner continuity in following up all that germinates and ripens in the soul, if there is a desire to hurry in this way, from the new to the new; the essential point is that things must mature within the soul. We must accustom ourselves to inner, active work of the soul, work in the spirit. This is what helps us to achieve such things as I have explained to you to-day; this alone will help us to have, after the third day, the inner attitude of soul in connection with some experience we may wish to see through in the light of karma. This must always be the mode of procedure if we are to learn to know the spiritual. To begin with, we must say to ourselves: the first moment when we approach the spiritual in thought in some way, was the first beginning; it is quite impossible to have any kind of result immediately; we must be able to wait. Suppose I have an experience to-day that is karmically caused in a preceding incarnation. I will make a diagrammatic sketch. Here I am, here is my experience, the experience of to-day (right). This is caused by the quite differently-constituted personality in the same ego in a previous earth-life (left). There it is. It has long ceased to belong to my personality, but it is stamped into the etheric world, or into the astral world, which lies behind the etheric world. Now I have to go back, to retrace the way backwards.  I told you that at first the thing appears as if some being were really bearing the experience towards me. This is so, on the second day. But after the third day it appears as if those who have brought it to me, those spiritual beings, withdraw, and I become aware of it as something of my own, which I myself, in a previous incarnation, laid down as cause. Because this is no longer within the present, because this is something I must behold in the past earth-life, I seem to be fettered. This state of being fettered ceases only when I have perceived the thing, when I have a picture of what was in the previous incarnation, and when I then look back to the event which I have not lost sight of through the three days. Then I become free, as I return, for now I can move about freely with the effect. As long as I am only within the cause, I cannot move about with the cause. Thus I go back into a previous incarnation, there become fettered as it were by the cause, and only when I now enter right into this present earth-life, is the thing resolved. Now let us take an example: suppose somebody experiences at a certain time on a certain day that a friend says something to him that is not altogether pleasant—perhaps he had not expected it. This friend says to him something not altogether pleasant. He now ponders what he experiences in listening to what his friend says. He makes a vivid picture of what he has experienced, how he got a slight shock, and how he got vexed, perhaps he was also hurt, or the like. This is an inner working, and as such it must be brought into the picture. Now he lets the three days elapse. The second day he goes about and says to himself: ‘This picture which I made yesterday has had a strange effect upon me. The whole day long I have had within me something like an acid, as it were, something that comes from the picture and makes me feel inwardly out of sorts ...’ At the end of the whole process, after the third day, he says to himself: ‘I get up in the morning and now I have the definite feeling that the picture is fettering me.’ Then this event of the previous incarnation is made known to me. I see it before me. Then I pass over to the experience which is still quite fresh, which is still quite present. The fettering ceases, and I say to myself: ‘So this is how it was in the previous earth-life! This is what caused it; now there is the effect. With this effect I can live again ... now the thing is present again.’ This must be practised over and over again, for generally the thread is broken on the very first day, when we make the first effort. And then nothing comes. It is particularly favourable to let things run parallel, so that we do not stop at one event, but bring a number of. events of the day into picture-form in this way. You will say: ‘Then I must live through the next day with the greatest variety of feelings.’ But this is quite possible. It is not at all harmful. Only try it; the things go quite well together. ‘And must I then be fettered so and so often after the third day?’ This does not matter either. Nothing of this matters. The things will adjust themselves in time. What belongs, from an earlier incarnation, to a later one, will find its way to it. But it will not succeed at once; it will not succeed at the first attempt; the thread breaks. We must have patience to try the thing over and over again. Then we feel something growing stronger within the soul. Then we feel that something awakens in the soul, and we say to ourselves: ‘Until now you were filled with blood. You have felt within you the pulsation of the blood and the breath. Now there is something within you besides the blood. You are filled with something.’ You can even have the feeling that you are filled with something of which you can say quite definitely that it is like a metal that has become aeriform. You actually feel something like metal, you feel it in you. It cannot be described differently; it really is so. You feel yourself permeated with metal, in your whole body. Just as one can say of certain waters, that they ‘taste metallic’, the whole body seems to ‘taste’ as if it were inwardly permeated by some delicate substance, which, in reality, is something spiritual. You feel this when you come upon something which was, of course, always in you, but to which you only now begin to pay attention. Then, when you begin to feel this, you again take courage. For if the thread is always breaking and everything is as it was before—if you want to get hold of a karmic connection, but the thread is always breaking—you may easily lose courage. But when you detect within yourself this sense of being inwardly filled, then you get courage again. And you say to yourself: it will come right in time. But, my dear friends, these things must be experienced in all quietude and calmness. Those who cannot experience them quietly but get excited and emotional, spread an inner mist over what really ought to happen, and nothing comes of it. There are people to-day in the outside world who know of Anthroposophy only by hearsay. Perhaps they have read nothing at all of it, or only what opponents have written. It is really very funny now.—Many of the antagonistic writings spring out of the earth like mushrooms—they quote literature, but among the literature they quote there are none of my books at all, only the books of opponents! The authors admit that they have not really approached the original sources, that they know only the antagonistic literature. Such things exist to-day. And so there are people outside who say: “The Anthroposophists are mad.” As a matter of fact, what one can least of all afford to be in order to reach anything at all in the spiritual world is to be mad. One must not be mad in the very slightest degree if one hopes to come to anything in the spiritual world. Even the tiniest fragment of madness is a hindrance to reaching anything. This simply must be avoided. Even a slight fancifulness, slight capriciousness, must be avoided. For all this giving way to the moods of the day, the caprices of the day, forms obstacles and handicaps on the way to progress in the spiritual world. If one desires to progress in the field of Anthroposophy, there is nothing for it but to have an absolutely sane head and an absolutely sane heart. With doting sentimentality (Schwärmerei) which is already the beginning of madness, one can achieve nothing. Things such as I have told you to-day, strange as they sound, must be experienced in the light of absolute clarity of mind, of absolute soundness of head and heart. Truly, there is nothing that can more surely save one from very slight daily madness, than Anthroposophy. All madness would [disappear] by means of Anthroposophy if people would only devote themselves to it with real intensity. If somebody were to set himself to go mad through Anthroposophy, this would certainly be an experiment with inadequate means! I do not say this in order to make a joke, but because it must be an integral part of the mood and tenor of anthroposophical endeavour. This is the attitude that must be adopted towards the matter, as I have just explained to you, half in joke, if we want to approach it in the right way, with the right orientation. We must set out to be as sane as possible; then we approach it in the right spirit. This is the least we can strive for, and above all, strive for in respect to the little madnesses of life. Once I was friends with a very clever professor of philosophy, now long since dead, who used to say on every occasion: “We all have some point or other on which we are a little mad!” He meant, all people are a little mad ... but he was a very clever man. I always believed there was something behind his words, that his assertion was not altogether without foundation! He did not become an Anthroposophist. |
| 187. How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again?: Experiences of the Old Year and Outlook over the New Year II
01 Jan 1919, Dornach Translated by Alan P. Shepherd, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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| One is the dismembering, differentiating way that today plays so great a role in science, where differences are looked for, where careful distinctions are made. |
| But people today do not have the courage to let the spiritual world really play into their consciousness. At least a few people should know that the important need of this moment is that the spiritual world should have immediate access to human consciousness. |
| Even this year all kinds of articles about Christmas have appeared in print again. One can hardly believe that such rubbish would reappear in these grave times. |
| 187. How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again?: Experiences of the Old Year and Outlook over the New Year II
01 Jan 1919, Dornach Translated by Alan P. Shepherd, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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A ray of light illumines the kind of retrospect we were engaged in yesterday evening if we take pains to consider the negative side of the matter. We might ask ourselves the following question—it has, of course, often been asked before: What are the deeper impulses that brought mankind to today's catastrophic events? Particularly, and more important, what are the deeper impulses that brought mankind to the catastrophic mood that is clearly to be perceived in these events? Obviously, we are not always able to look directly into the deeper causes that underlie events in time. Our gaze must turn first to what may be said to lie more on the surface of happenings. It is then possible to describe this or that, and such descriptions will by no means be incorrect. This is not to be overlooked by someone intending to observe earnestly in the manner of spiritual science. A spiritual scientific observer certainly does not wish to say that everything is wrong. But one would like to point out that when someone observes the world today it does not suffice—at this present moment in time—to stop short at what is on the surface; it is necessary to go more deeply into conditions. In this respect there is nothing exactly new to be said today; rather, we should place before our souls all that contributes to our view of the New Year that confronts us so frighteningly. You remember, I said recently that it belongs to the most essential, the most supremely important present-day knowledge that mankind is standing before a new revelation. This is the revelation that is to take place, from a certain aspect is already taking place, through the Spirits of Personality who—if it may be so expressed—are now rising to the new height of Creators. In the history of mankind up to the present day, we have only been able to attribute this capacity to the Spirits who in the Bible are called the Elohim, and whom we call the Spirits of Form. Thus, something creative will occur in what we can observe as we follow the events of the outer world. Now it is characteristic of human nature that at first people will be averse to recognizing any such intervention of a spiritual element. Particularly at the present time there is no desire to understand such a spiritual intervention. The moment we do give our attention to it, we will have to distinguish between two things. To make this more intelligible, I would like to say the following: At his investment in Rome the famous Cardinal Newman made a remarkable statement. He said that he saw no salvation for the Church except in a new revelation. This happened decades ago; since then, various reactions have been expressed at one place or another to this remarkable view of Cardinal Newman's.21 And when one examines what has been said on the side of the Church and by those related to the Church creed, one finds a universal opinion that the talk should not be of a new revelation, but far rather of holding fast to the old revelation, that if anything is necessary it is first and foremost that the old revelation should be better understood than has so far been the case. In the objections that were raised on all sides to this pronouncement by the Cardinal—who indeed had an intuition of the breaking-in of a new revelation—we can see how mankind opposes any such revelation. As I said, there are two things here to be distinguished. Mankind's struggle against receiving such a revelation is obviously not going to change the fact of its coming. It surges through the events in which man is entangled like a new wave of the spirit; man cannot push it back from the earth. It pours out over the earth. This is the one fact. Let me say it this way: For some time, especially from the beginning of the twentieth century—to be exact, since the year 1899—as we human beings come and go about the world, we have been immersed in a new wave of spiritual life that is pouring into the common life of all mankind. And a modern spiritual investigator is simply a person who acknowledges this fact. He is someone who is aware that such an event has intervened in the life of mankind. This is the one fact. The other fact is this, that people, by the very reason of their present attitude, need a certain shaking-up, a certain rousing, in order to notice that this wave is indeed pouring into their life. So there is a significant situation: on the one hand, the wave is actually pouring itself into life and is there; on the other hand, people refuse to notice it. They fight against it. And don't take what I say as mere imagery! For the centers, the coherers into which this wave discharges—in just the same way as the electric current in wireless telegraphy—in this sphere the coherers are human souls. Don't be deceived for a moment! For it is fact, that just by living on the earth as men of the twentieth century, human beings are the receiving apparatus for what pours into life as I have described. People may struggle against admitting this into their consciousness, but they cannot prevent their souls from receiving the impact of this spiritual wave. Nor can they prevent it from entering them. This fact must be examined more closely. Various hypotheses must now be considered after our deliberations of the last weeks. If one asks what is the most important faculty of the human soul in our epoch, the answer is: intellectuality. And if today some people maintain—quite justifiably—that one should not just develop intellectuality but also other soul forces, their emphasis is insistent because a modern person does indeed feel that intellectuality is now the outstanding faculty, but that as it floods in upon him, he should not simply allow his other capacities to be stunted. It is because intellectuality does play such an important role today in this age of the consciousness soul that we are so frequently warned not to let our feelings become cramped. This is tremendously important. But now we must gain a clear idea concerning this intellectuality. You know that I have spoken about it from the most varied points of view. Even in the public lectures I have not hesitated to say what was necessary about the intellectual element in our present age. I have shown, for instance, how the present scientific world conception makes particular use of it. This world conception has fastened its hold on people in all walks of life; everyone thinks in conformity with it even when he knows nothing at all about science. When someone experiments, even when someone simply observes, he works out the experiments and the results of the experiments, even his observations, with his intellect. Intellectuality is actively weaving and holding complete sway in the scientific world outlook to which at present mankind is so wedded. From such a standpoint, for instance, people even want to study social problems. But how does intellectuality really work into things? In my public lectures I have often raised the question: what sort of world picture is actually obtained from this scientific world conception? One finally realizes that a conception of the world acquired by the ordinary scientific way of thinking is not reality at all, but a specter, or a number of specters. This is true even of our atoms and of all ideas of the atomic world. Even those who take a more positivist stand and do not entirely subscribe to the atomic theory, persons like Poincare, Avenarius or Mach, conceive of nature in such a way that they never arrive at reality, where nature is actually at work: they only reach a specter of nature. This relates to what I said here a few days ago, that actually the world of concepts in which we are living today in this age of the consciousness soul does not contain realities but merely pictures, reflected images. And we already accomplish very much when we abandon the superstition that when we read a scientific book or hear a scientific talk, we are learning the truth. If we are really aware of what is being imparted, we know that it is only an image, a kind of specter of reality. In a certain sense, people today cherish inordinately, love inordinately, what lives in ideas of this kind, ideas that are ghostly images and not bound up with reality—in contrast, for instance, to Goethe's thoughts on metamorphosis. And people would dearly like to confine reality to this ghostly web of ideas. All those who talk today of a monistic world conception and the like, or in any way at all establish a positivist world conception, are actually believing in a curiously superstitious way in the importance of this ghostly web. They think that out of what is given them by modern scientific perception they should be able to produce a picture of reality. This indeed cannot be done. Thus, this ghostly kind of world-picture, which can be made by people at the present stage of human evolution, is very dear to their hearts. And souls are dominated today on the one hand by their love of an imagined world, and on the other hand by the fact that this imagined world yields only pictures. Moreover, the souls dominated in this way by their longing for ideas are the same souls that are struggling against the incoming spiritual wave that is in fact the true reality. It cannot possibly be turned aside by a mere ghostly web of ideas put forward by science. One only gains a correct view of these things when one realizes that this scientific way of thinking prepares people to reject all the truly real spiritual elements that are playing into the world. It is for this reason that they oppose, violently oppose, the wave that I said is nevertheless rolling in and spreading out and already living in men's souls. You see, there is something in modern human beings, indeed in the very people who are the most representative, something that does not like the feel of this wave. It is breaking in upon them, and there is something in their consciousness that wants to resist it. We can make a sketch of it like this. (See Diagram.) Let this be modern man; then here (I) we have one layer of the human soul, and here (II) a second layer of the human soul. In the upper layer (II) is consciousness, modern consciousness, especially well-schooled in science. But the wave I am speaking about is pressing forward through the lower layer (I). The important thing now for consciousness is that it should not simply be occupied by what becomes a ghostly web, but that it should allow what is below to flow up into it, that it should take up into itself what is there below.  If you think about this you will find something tremendously important for understanding the present constitution of the human soul. For, my dear friends, if there had not been a certain state of soul, we could never have had this terrible catastrophe of the war, or rather, the expression of this soul-catastrophe by the war. This catastrophe that is occurring in mankind takes different forms, has various aspects, and the war that has been raging for these four and a half years is only one aspect. To understand this fact of a soul-catastrophe, we must examine it minutely. One must indeed ask, what is really happening with this wave that has appeared as I have described? This wave is still for the present below the surface of what is usually observed. One may ask, what is actually living in this wave in which the Spirits of Personality are moving? Certainly the Spirits of Personality are living in it, those Beings who want to manifest as new Creators; but also, many other things are in it. You can picture to yourselves a sea with ships moving on it, carrying the most diverse personalities travelling in this way over the waves. These may stand for us as images of the Spirits of Personality. But the waves themselves are there and they also represent something. In the sea we have, so to speak, merely the blind watery element, but this can also have its moods. And in the spiritual wave of which I am speaking, something else is present. What is flooding human souls, what is actually pushing its way into our souls, is strife, world strife. This is being enacted, one may say, behind the scenes of our modern world. Humanity is entangled in this world strife. For the spiritual investigator to perceive the Spirits of Personality is by no means an easy or comfortable matter. It is not of such a nature that one could be told: I am making you into a seer because it will give you untold happiness; you will be able to float luxuriously in spiritual perception. This would please most people. When today they are to enter the spiritual world they would like to be given something of the nature of a festive drink. They shy away if nothing is offered them that gives them a comfortable feeling of wellbeing. There can indeed be no question of this today. Today one feels permeated through and through by the strife going on behind the scenes of the world, a battle that must be waged, that must be placed into world evolution in the course this world evolution has to take. It is possible to describe in various ways the form this world evolution has to take; I will mention only one. In old pre-Christian times, but gradually fading as the Mystery of Golgotha approached, it seemed a matter of course to souls who were observant, at least throughout the pagan world, that they had experiences revealing the reality of repeated earth-lives. Life in those olden days was on the whole quite different from the way modern man is inclined to picture it. Today—is it not so?—people are distinguished by whether they are educated or not. In ancient times a distinction was made between those who could observe repeated earth-lives and those who could not. But this knowledge had to recede, and I have often told you that it was the task of Christianity to hold back for a while this wave of evolution that normally would awaken in human beings a consciousness of reincarnation. In saying this, of course, one exposes oneself to all kinds of misunderstanding. Objections are put forward which if one were speaking more fully one would like, and be able, to put forward oneself. Recently somewhere or other I spoke on the subject, and then immediately received a letter asking whether I did not know that reincarnation was definitely spoken of in the Bible. Naturally you will find in my writings indications of where it may be found in the Bible; this goes without saying. But the question is not whether such reference can be found: the important fact is that in the Bible reincarnation is not openly referred to, not, one might say, held out in one's hand. It was indeed necessary in human evolution that for a time the consciousness of repeated earth-lives should recede, so that men would learn to live each separate earth-life fully and with all earnestness. Now, however, we face a reversal of the situation: we have reached the point where we can make no advance unless we turn our gaze to reincarnation. Now is the time when spiritual beings wishing to bring humanity the consciousness of repeated earth-lives have to wage a hard fight against those who would allow only old elements and impulses to enter human consciousness. This is a significant battle in which man must take part if he wants to see what is going on behind the scenes in either human evolution or the general evolution of the world. We should not simply imagine that behind the scenes of physical existence there is a place where we can lay ourselves down to go pleasantly to sleep. That is the paradise usually pictured by the materialists. Their dearest dream is to have a really good sleep once they have passed through the gate of death. They love to imagine this because sleeping is, after all, very comfortable. But I'm sure you know that the matter is not like that. On the contrary, behind the scenes of physical existence we could not possibly entertain a desire to satisfy certain instincts in order to enhance our own personal egotism. Consequently, we become participants in a battle, a real battle. Now the following is apparent: If people would not struggle against recognizing this battle, if they would prove themselves ready to look behind the scenes of life to what is described by the spiritual investigator, they would have a different outlook today on the whole of existence. I have always stressed the fact that we human beings should take an interest in one another. But this can only be a real interest if we let the light of spiritual science shine into our lives. Is it not true that when we enter into relation with someone—and we all do enter into relation with other people things happen like this: we become acquainted with people we call good, with other people whom we call neither good nor bad, and with still other people whom we call bad, who do us various kinds of harm. Certainly in external life on the physical plane we have no alternative but to relate ourselves to human beings. When someone boxes our ears and we are incited to give it right back to him in return, there is no alternative but to deal with that particular person himself. But this attitude no longer suffices for the conditions of our time. It is far more in keeping with present conditions to say to oneself: I've had my ears boxed; or someone has lied to me; this or that has been done by a human being. It is true that in physical life we have to restrict our dealings to our fellowmen, but it is important for us to realize that all kinds of spiritual forces are working in human beings with which we have to reckon. Naturally, if someone boxes our ears, we can't return it to the demon who incited him to the action; we have to deal with the man who confronts us in his physical body. However, what is so necessary on the surface of existence is not really adequate for understanding the world; it is particularly useless for grasping our social life. In other words, a person gets nowhere today if behind what goes on physically he does not fully recognize a spiritual world in its reality and concreteness. This is most important. But the majority of people are afraid of it. Their fear is not unfounded. If you are not dull, prosaic people (of course no one here is!), a shiver will run down your spine when you think how you provide all kinds of spiritual beings with a stage for their activities. This is indeed the case. If we are conscious of the fact, we can feel that we lose ourselves in the spiritual beings who fill us out. We are like sacks stuffed to the top with all kinds of beings. Admittedly a shivery feeling is not unjustified. Nevertheless, it cannot be got rid of by denying the fact that one is such a sack—by closing one's consciousness, as it were, to become blind and deaf to what is a reality. Help must be obtained in some other way. Now we are confronting a very significant fact. Let us assume that a man who is a human coherer into whom the wave of strife discharges but who is not inclined to acknowledge spiritual life in any way—let us assume that he gives himself up completely to the modern way of thinking, that is to say, to the thinking formed on the model of the scientific world conception. We must face these things really seriously. For at the present time unless we do so we cannot find a gleam of light, we can only succumb to Rathenau's pessimism. Take the following, for example. Suppose—shall we say—a man like Ludendorff had become a professor of botany. He would have been excellent as such; he would have done outstanding work. Indeed, he would have become quite a celebrity, as people say—so well-known that his ambition would have been satisfied. And… he would not have made so many human beings suffer as he has in fact done. Now Ludendorff has not had the position of a guiltless professor of botany (guiltless, that is, from a cosmic aspect, for probably he would in some way have tortured the students who were having to pass his examinations!) But let us assume he had become an innocent professor of botany, innocent from a cosmic point of view: then things would have gone quite well. But they did not go that way: he became a so-called strategist. And because of what lay within him, that is, a capacity only to think the thoughts of those ghostly webs woven by science, he could not draw up into his consciousness what discharged itself into his soul. For that way of thinking is not suited to bring up into consciousness what is discharged into the soul below. And so he became the cause of disaster for a great part of humanity. He is one of the thirty or forty individuals outwardly responsible for the present catastrophe. He is a man who from the place he occupies simply struggles against the recognition of any kind of spirituality. But the time has come when persons in influential positions who fight against acknowledging the spirit, who refuse to recognize that the spiritual world is indeed playing into human life, such persons can bring calamity upon mankind. It is most important that this fact be grasped. Now, today, even if they have not held responsible positions in the war itself, still there are countless individuals who, from fear or some other reason, are resisting the wave of spiritual life that is flowing in through the Spirits of Personality—resisting it because they only want to think as science thinks. That is the reason why today many personalities are incomprehensible, and why many are wrongly estimated. It is infinitely tragic, for example, that such a man as Ludendorff is looked upon as great. But it is true that the fact to which I have just alluded blurs people's judgment of individuals. All kinds of demonic forces play into these men, and are even imputed to them while actually they are pushing them back, because they carry in their souls a mere ghostly web on the scientific pattern and with this they cannot grasp a situation. The kind of person I have mentioned then lives his life so that in everything he does he may be insensible to the breach in his personality and to all that surges and rages deep within him. This is the case with very many people today. They are numb to what is raging within them when they attain a certain position in outer life; one cudgels his neighbor, another writes an utterly foolish book on botany, and so on; they are befogged about what is actually surging within them and causing the potential disintegration of their personality. This threatens them simply through the impact of today's inevitable events, because they are afraid of being hurled into the struggle now being enacted in the world behind the scenes, on the waves of which the Spirits of Personality wish to enter into our age. Recognition of the spiritual world requires our being alive to the question we are now examining. And, dear friends, it is tremendously important to take seriously what has so often been emphasized here, namely, that spiritual science should not be regarded as mere theory. If you are going to consider it mere theory, you would be better off reading a cookbook; for it is not just the content of spiritual science that is essential. The gist of the matter is how one has to think in order to do justice to spiritual science. It is a different kind of thinking from the thinking employed in the natural-scientific world of today. You see, there are definitely two ways to form thoughts. One is the dismembering, differentiating way that today plays so great a role in science, where differences are looked for, where careful distinctions are made. This is the prevailing scientific method. In science all that is said or written or done is under the influence of thinking that is dismembering, thinking that is differentiating. Exact definitions are demanded. Today when you so much as make a statement, you are nailed down to sharp definitions. But sharp, rigid definitions are simply distinguishing the things defined from the things not defined. This manner of thinking is a mask used with particular pleasure by the Spirits who are joined in this battle and who would like to tear us apart. Speaking trivially, one could say that a large number of the individuals responsible for the catastrophe of the war, or having to do with its aftermath, are really mad! But that, as I said, is speaking trivially. The important thing is to understand what has brought about the disintegration of their personalities. This first way of thinking is the thinking that is accessible to the various forces, various powers that are tearing man asunder. It must be clearly distinguished from the second way of thinking, which alone is employed in spiritual science. The second way of thinking is a totally different kind of mental process, a completely other way of thinking. In contrast to the dismembering kind, it is a shape-forming manner of thinking. If you look more closely, if you follow what I have tried to indicate in my various books on spiritual science, you will realize that the difference does not lie so much in the content that is imparted—this can be judged from various other viewpoints; but the way of seeing the whole world and of coordinating that knowledge, the entire mode of thought representation, is a different one. This is shape-producing; it gives separate pictures, rounded totalities; it gives contours, and through contours, color. Throughout the entire presentation in the printed books you will be able to see that it has none of the dismembering character that you find in all modern science. This difference of the “how” (the mode of thinking) must be brought out just as emphatically as the difference of the “what” (the content of subject matter). Thus there exists a formative (gestaltende) way of thinking that has been developed with the especial purpose of leading to the supersensible worlds. If you take the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, where such a path is marked out, you will find that every thought, every idea in it is based on this formative thinking. This is something essential for the present time. For this formative thinking has a quite definite quality. When you dissect with your thinking, like a present-day scientist, you are thinking just the way certain spirits of the ahrimanic world think and you are making it possible for them to enter your soul. If on the other hand you exercise creative, formative thinking (gestaltendes Denken), thinking that allows for metamorphosis, I could also say Goethean thinking—represented, for instance, in the shaping of our pillars and capitals; used too in all the books I have tried to give to spiritual science—this thinking is closely bound up with the human being. Only the beings connected with the normal evolution of mankind can work creatively, sculpturally as a human being works within himself with thinking. This is the amazing thing about it. You can never go astray on a wrong path if through spiritual science you engage in formative thinking. You can never lose yourself in the various spiritual beings who want to gain an influence over you. It is natural for them to permeate your being. As soon, however, as you practice formative thinking, as soon as you refrain from mere musing or from dissecting, and strive to think in the way modern spiritual science thinks, you retain possession of yourself and cannot then have the feeling of complete emptiness. This is the reason why from the standpoint of spiritual science we are always placing such great emphasis on the Christ Impulse. For the Christ Impulse stands in the direct line of formative thinking. Even the Gospels cannot be understood if they are simply dismembered. The result of that treatment is shown in modern Protestant theology, which has been pulling them to pieces: the result is that everything has fallen away; absolutely nothing has remained. The lecture cycles on the Gospels22 follow the opposite path. They build up and shape something so that through these new forms an understanding of the old Gospels is brought about. Actually, what people need today—and this is not exaggerating in the least—is to exercise the spiritual scientific mode of thinking: then those demonic beings who are the accompanying phenomena of the Spirits of Personality on the new incoming wave will not be able to do the people harm. You see how much mankind loses by fighting against the spiritual scientific way of thinking. I have already told you that the wave cannot be thrust aside, even if people will not go to meet it. Mankind may oppose it, may not wish to perceive it, but still the wave flows in. Then there follows what has really led to the deeper aspect of our present catastrophe, namely, the non-recognition of the spiritual world. That is finally the deeper cause of the present catastrophic events, and especially of the present tragic attitude of soul. And since it is a battle being waged in lower regions, there is no other way of experiencing this soul struggle than by developing the creativity of the human personality itself—through formative thinking. Otherwise the battle will be carried into the external world. Therefore this has to be said: that it is truly not right for people to be unwilling to examine the spiritual grounds of the present disastrous world situation. For, you notice, something extraordinarily new lies in what has been told you. It is a disclosure of the new wave that is to break upon present-day mankind through a quite special way of forming thoughts. If people give themselves up to thoughts modelled on those of science, they will simply be unable to grow to the stature required by the times. If they merely want to organize what is here in the physical world, merely want to reflect upon what surrounds them in the physical world, and have no desire for anything else to be valid, then they only destroy. And then they should not be surprised if the struggle that they do not want to fight out in the spiritual world is carried into physical life. For it has already entered humanity. If human beings will not fight it out in their souls, then it will set man against man, nation against nation, all against all. What happens here in the physical world can only be an image of the spiritual world. Either men take up the battle and fight it out in their souls—which means, they deepen themselves spiritually—or, if they persist in thinking as this present world thinks, the battle will go through their consciousness as through a sieve, and will finally end by their souls being abandoned to the external world. And this will be the cause of everything that is now going to happen. If you reflect on these things, you will realize that present-day human beings are really obliged to turn to the spirit, that this is forced upon them by world events. Let us now consider what is presented to us this New Year's Day when we are meant to look ahead at what is coming. This particular moment offers us, indeed, a shattering prospect. What we have to keep in mind, dear friends, is this, that we must not deceive ourselves by trying to sleep through this view into the future. That is why I read you yesterday the forecast that has been pronounced by a man who calculates, who does not throw words about from sympathy or antipathy but who reckons with them. I wanted you to see where a calculating materialist of this present time finds himself. People such as he are heading in quite a different direction from a serious perception that they have to acknowledge the spiritual world simply for their own good. Whoever penetrates into the spiritual world and sees its relation to the physical world knows that certain laws prevail even when they do not seem to apply logically—when the logical consequence lies, for instance, in thinking that is dismembering, not in thinking that is formative, intuitive (anschauendes), as I have been describing. You see, laws of this kind do not prevail even externally in a rigid, letter-of-the-law way; but they are definitely there. Take such a law as this, that about the same number of men are born into the world as women. Even this law has its exceptions, even though when considered theoretically it might appear detrimental to mankind if in some particular century only a twentieth of the population born were males and all the others females! Laws do indeed exist that are not founded on ordinary logic and that can only be explained by spiritual science. Such a law is the following: In the measure to which human beings in a certain epoch permeate their souls with recognition of the spiritual world, as I described it today, so that the spiritual world can flow into their consciousness, in the same measure can the common life of mankind also unfold and human beings be given the possibility to reach beyond their anti-social impulses and beyond all that works against true community. But people today do not have the courage to let the spiritual world really play into their consciousness. At least a few people should know that the important need of this moment is that the spiritual world should have immediate access to human consciousness. From this point of view consider certain phenomena of this time or, I might say, favorite attitudes of this time, and you will see how people today have the desire to exclude from their consciousness any connection with the spiritual laws of existence. I showed you recently how we have to reckon with this fact even in practical matters, where a conscious connection can easily be eliminated. I was speaking at the time of intelligence tests. With these there is no longer any desire to create a direct, simple connection with the pupils' gifts; instead, in order to avoid any need for thinking, there are all kinds of external measures to test the memory and the intellectual capacity. This is also the reason why people love mathematics. Certain rules are established and the rest is mathematical reckoning. There is no need to follow the details with one's intelligence—nor would it be possible to do so. You will agree that you can picture three or four or five beans in a row, even ten beans; to imagine twenty at one glance is already difficult; but think of having to picture a thousand at one glance, or an entire million! Yet you can reckon them perfectly well, because you can make the calculation mechanically, and have no need to follow with your intelligence the details of what you are doing. What modern people particularly love is to prove something without actually having to call upon their intelligence. They find it terribly irksome if asked to follow the single stages of the proof. They prefer that the matter prove itself without human intervention. What they would like most of all is that the spiritual world would prove its own existence outside there somewhere, through spiritualism or the like. It appalls people that spiritual science should call upon them to be active at each successive stage. That is why they love the symbols of old occultism and things of that kind—and rituals, of which they can say: they are performed before us and we don't have to use our intelligence to follow them; we don't have to form the slightest conception of what is taking place. But that is just what modern spiritual science has to insist upon: the following up of detail. Without it, spiritual science is unthinkable. It is worthy of notice that in eastern Europe we find the seeds of what really belongs to the next epoch. All kinds of things are being done in that eastern region that show how the human being wants to penetrate with his intelligence what is only meant to be encircled by a net of common intelligence. In this present age of the consciousness soul, some people are trying to bring sharp intellectual shrewdness down into the realm where intelligence alone should be active, where everything should simply be drawn into a net of common intelligence. Take, for example, the way propaganda has been carried on in Russia during the last two decades to bring about the gradual fall of czardom. Naturally this could not happen quite openly in the Russia of serfdom and the whip. Anything written and circulated normally would have been confiscated by the police. Nor was it possible to make speeches. And yet in a comparatively short time, from 1900 to 1904, 60,000,000 anti-czarist pamphlets appeared in Russia. Of these 60,000,000 the police tracked down only twenty to twenty-five percent; the others were distributed, and an immense number appeared just before the downfall of the Czar. Thus a large proportion of the population were prepared for the end of czardom. Now how did it ever come about that, in spite of all that was scented out and confiscated by the police, still out of sixty million pamphlets, each one of which called for revolution and the end of czardom, hardly a quarter were seized? The explanation is that those who led the agitation had discovered a very definite fact, which today is of great importance but which people simply fail to investigate. When they do investigate it in an ahrimanic way, as those Revolutionary leaders did, they have something that enables them to work with tremendous power. Those leaders discovered that the same words addressed to a strictly czarist member of the police worked in an entirely different way when addressed to an ordinary man in the street. The same words that, spoken in the proper manner, sound to a policeman as gentle as a lamb can under certain conditions work upon the populace in a most extreme socialistic sense. Certainly pamphlets were not written then as they are written now in Switzerland—and immediately confiscated; but books or pamphlets were distributed about botany, about plants, that simply by the way they were written prepared souls fully, so that in 1917 Russia was completely ready for the Revolution. It is enormously important to be aware of this secret: that what one says affects one person quite differently from the way it affects another person. In any case, this has all been carefully studied, and the studies made in this sphere are thoroughly characteristic of our time. In fact, they are part of what is struggling most bitterly against the spiritual science that is entering the world. For instance, I cannot think of anything more strongly opposed to the real essence of the spirit than such books as those by Nikolai Rubakin. Rubakin attempts to study the human soul—and in a new way, but in such a way that it completely denies everything that is alive in spiritual science: that is, in such a way that in a certain sense the intelligence is maintained as it works, but also the activity of the individual intelligence can be excluded in the working. Such a man as Rubakin is reckoning that everything that happens at the present time is bound up with intelligence, but that we should not always work through the subjective intelligence. In this sense he has made the following wide investigation: he has organized a study of people who read books. He asks them to name their favorite books and to say what particularly impressed them in those books, and what kind of influence the books have had upon them. He puts these questions to them in such a way that no account is taken of their sympathies and antipathies—these are expressly ignored, so that only the objective working of their intelligence comes into consideration. The readers give themselves up to a self-analysis of such a kind that simply through the questions he asks they say things that allow him to see more deeply into their souls than they do themselves. This is one method. The other method is this: again a questionnaire is sent to thousands and thousands of people, asking them to analyze current books. No notice is taken whether a book is on mathematics or botany or politics or socialism or anarchy; that is of minor importance, for that is merely the reading matter, and most readers are unaware that that constitutes only one part of a book. Rubakin establishes how the book works by the beauty of its phrasing, by its disclosure of the writer's temperament, or the monotony of his style. These are genuine qualities through which he can discover the prevailing objective intelligence. He establishes it statistically through these books. The whole method goes to show the outstreaming and intaking of intelligence that is active at the present time. Were such a science carried a bit further, someone could write a fearfully revolutionary book on Jupiter, and someone else a book on the right foreleg of the cockchafer, and the second book would serve the purpose of this Rubakin inquiry just as well as the first. For here it is not a question of what is said but of how it is said; from this it is learnt what works in people as objective intelligence, of which people themselves are not conscious. Here a person is not active subjectively, because he is not allowing his individual intelligence to play a part—any more than he allows it to do in arithmetic. The person is participating in a general prevailing intelligence and is not involved in what this normally brings into action in individual human beings, for his subjective intelligence has been completely excluded. On the basis of such a science one could found a college today that would undertake to spread revolutionary propaganda simply by following the lines I have indicated. There are such endeavors at the present time. The intention of all of them is, in this epoch of intelligence not to include man in the intelligence but to throw him out of it. This comes from the same source as the desire that man shall not receive the spiritual world consciously, that is, with the consciousness belonging to this present day. But, of course, that is essential. The only salvation for mankind today and in the immediate future is that we accept boldly and courageously the coming-in of the spiritual world. We will not have to give intelligence tests or collect statistics on books and their readers to discover what wants to reveal itself that is living in humanity right now. Another way will be taken, dear friends. For what is the purpose of all this? To speak quite simply, all those endeavors of Rubakin and the rest aim at pulling man out of his skin, because in his skin he has to make use of his intelligence and, what is more, to turn it toward a spiritual life. People would like to get outside their skin. They no longer want to live in it, because they know something living is streaming into it and they find it unpleasant to make the acquaintance of this living thing; they would prefer to escape it. They would like to objectify their intelligent nature, to get outside of it and sit down beside it, so that the wave would only go through it and not through them. But that is also what spiritual science wants!—a science that is not just shut up inside the skin. We should indeed get out of our skin, but not in the wrong way as the experiments I have described accomplish it. People have that wrong urge already. In reality they should accept a knowledge that simply has to be confirmed by their sound human understanding. They do not need to be free of their body to acquire a knowledge that is itself independent of what they do in their body. This is the task of truth—the other is a caricature of truth. And such caricatures of the true spiritual task of the present age are responsible for the evils of this age that have brought us to our present impasse. When we see in this way what is dominating our epoch, we know why it is that people who do not want to acknowledge the real spirit, but who are honest and do not delude themselves, are at the same time clear about what confronts mankind if it still clings to materialism. We must realize that in this signpost pointing to the spirit lies what need not necessarily make us pessimistic. When we find how little people are inclined even today to approach the spiritual world in the way spiritual science indicates, then we see where the deeper causes of the present ruin actually lie. Even this year all kinds of articles about Christmas have appeared in print again. One can hardly believe that such rubbish would reappear in these grave times. Everyone writes surprisingly well, in fact, quite beautifully of how people should love one another. Actually they hate one another as never before, but there it is in writing that we should love one another, we should love our enemies, and so on. There was even a letter printed entitled “A woman's letter to Walther Rathenau.” People write in such a manner that, looked at spiritually, the idea lying behind the writing appears in a very strange light. They write of human love, of Christianity, of every possible thing; it is all very beautiful, and the people reading it think it is exquisite. Yet it is nothing but obsolete concept-coins rumbling around in their heads or hearts. And while all this rumbles and rolls, the writer or the reader stands behind and feels a sensuous love for these words, so that all this has the effect upon him of rich sweetmeats. One can dream so deliciously when one says: Christ preached love for one's neighbor; Christianity must blossom again; and so on. With that kind of attitude, the people feel not the slightest necessity to accept the concrete spiritual world in the innermost depths of their soul, with their whole being—as spiritual science requires. The pressing need is for us to take these things in earnest. If we recognize them theoretically and then still do nothing more than stand in reverence before Wilsonism or fall into national chauvinism, still holding forth in the old way—then we shall never get beyond this catastrophe. It will continue until human beings make up their minds really to accept the spiritual world as it must be accepted today, that is, with consciousness that is concrete and without fear or timidity. And so when we gaze into the new cosmic year, we see on the one hand how some people, just to allay their fears, offer political forecasts and found Leagues of Nations that are to abolish war from the world. In spite of rejoicing that there will not be another Vienna Congress, people are already beginning to say that they would be content if the Congress of Versailles only procured for us as many months of peace as the Vienna Congress brought years of peace. For, in truth, men love to hold thoughts that act like narcotics. The strongest benumbing thought for people today, after they have rejected certain others, is that Wilson is the right man for the future. He is the great man, is he not?—a man who thinks fourteen abstract thoughts are able to transform life in our present world into a paradise! It is comforting, is it not?—something that can lull us to sleep. It is far less comfortable to say: If we are to be saved from a future such as Rathenau predicts, it is necessary that as many individuals as possible come to a conscious recognition of the spiritual world. This is what one would like to bring to pass in at least a few souls after the New Year's Eve retrospect that we shared last night. One hopes that the truth of that experience has stirred our souls so strongly that someone can say: if mankind continues with the thinking that has become customary, not only in one people but among all the peoples around the earth, then Rathenau's forecast must be correct. Dear friends, there is no necessity for it to be correct! Mankind has the chance to prove that there is no need for his forecast to be correct. This can be our New Year resolution, that we will exert our will so that the foreboding is proved to be false. For this, however, we will have to discard all the old prejudices in which even today we still indulge with such extreme pleasure—prejudices that are completely out of date. It is far more important to take up what is new. Anyone with insight will know where the spirit is being sought, and there he will find assurance of future security. Where there is no search for the spirit there will be no hope for the future—for conquered or conqueror. Let one part of the world population demand milliards from another part, and the milliards will become melted gold that burns and destroys—while poverty, if given wings by the spirit, can carry men to heights that lead to the future evolution of humanity. But this must be experienced by insight into the path of the spirit. No leaning toward anything external, no worshiping of new idols that are even now being made ready, can save mankind: only keeping to the spirit, holding fast to the spirit, working in the spirit.
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| 233a. The Easter Festival in relation to the Mysteries: Lecture I
19 Apr 1924, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| It leads us to the festivals which were held about the time of the Spring Equinox (which still plays a part in our calculation, at least, of the date of Easter). It points to those old festivals which were connected with the reawakening of Nature—with the springing of life that grows forth once more from the Earth. |
| The Michael thought, as was said at the proper season, must lie near to the anthroposophical heart and mind as the thought of the Herald of Christ. The Christmas thought too, must be made ever deeper in the heart of the anthroposophist. And the Easter thought must become especially sacred and joyful. |
| 233a. The Easter Festival in relation to the Mysteries: Lecture I
19 Apr 1924, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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Easter is felt by large numbers of human beings as a festival connected on the one hand with the deepest and most intimate feelings of the human soul, and on the other hand with cosmic mysteries and cosmic riddles of existence. Indeed we cannot but observe the connection of Easter with the secrets and riddles of the Universe when we bear in mind the fact that Easter is a movable festival, the date of which has to be reckoned year by year from that constellation of the stars which we shall shortly consider more in detail. At the same time we must observe how many customs and sacred ceremonies have been associated with the Easter Festival for centuries—customs and ceremonies which lie very near to the heart of large numbers of humanity. These things will show us the immense values which mankind has gradually laid into the Easter Festival in the course of historic evolution. In the first centuries of Christianity—not at its immediate foundation but in the course of the first centuries—Easter became a most important festival connected with the fundamental thought and impulse of Christianity, I mean, with that impulse which arises for the true Christian from the fact of the Resurrection of Christ. Easter is the festival of the Resurrection. Yet at the same time it leads us back into pre-Christian times. It leads us to the festivals which were held about the time of the Spring Equinox (which still plays a part in our calculation, at least, of the date of Easter). It points to those old festivals which were connected with the reawakening of Nature—with the springing of life that grows forth once more from the Earth. Here we already find ourselves within the very subject of these lectures; for here already we must touch upon the connection of Easter with the evolution of the Mysteries in the history of mankind. Easter as a Christian festival is a festival of Resurrection. The corresponding Heathen festival, taking place about the same time of the year as our Easter, was a kind of Resurrection festival of Nature—the coming forth again of what was asleep in Nature throughout the winter time. But we must emphasise most strongly at this point that the Christian Easter is by no means coincident as to its inner essence and meaning with the Heathen festivals of the Spring Equinox. On the contrary, if we do want to relate it to the old Pagan times, we must connect the Christian Easter with certain festivals which, proceeding from the ancient Mysteries, were enacted at the Autumn season. This is a remarkable fact in the determination of the Easter Festival, which by its very content is obviously connected with certain of the ancient Mysteries. Easter above all can remind us of the deep and radical misunderstandings that have arisen, in the course of evolution, in the world-conceptions of mankind with regard to matters of the greatest significance. Nothing less has happened than that the Easter Festival has been confused with an altogether different one, and has thus been removed from Autumn and turned into a festival of Springtime. We have here touched something of infinite significance in human evolution. Consider the content of this Easter Festival. What is it in its essence? It is this: Christ Jesus, the Being who stands at the centre of the Christian consciousness, passes through death. Good Friday is held in memory of this fact. Christ Jesus lies in the grave. It is a time that takes its course in three days, representing the union of Christ with Earth-existence. This time is celebrated in Christendom as a festival of mourning—the time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday is the day when the central Being of Christianity rises out of the grave; it is the day of remembrance of this. Such is the essential content of the Easter Festival: the Death, the lying in the Grave and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. Now let us look at the corresponding ancient Heathen festival in any one of its forms. Only then shall we be able to penetrate into the connection between the Easter Festival and the Mysteries. In many places and among many people, we come across ancient Heathen festivals whose external structure—and the structure of the ceremonies which were enacted in them—is decidedly similar to the Easter-content of Christianity. From the manifold festivals of ancient time, we may select for an example the Adonis festival. Through long, long periods of pre-Christian antiquity this festival was celebrated among certain peoples of Asia Minor. A sacred image was the central point of the festival. It was an image of Adonis—Adonis as the spiritual representative of all that is the springing and thriving force of youth in man, of all that appears as beauty in the human being. True it is that in many respects the ancient peoples confused the substance of the image with what the image represented. The ancient religions often thus present the character of fetish worship. Many human beings saw in the image the actual and present God—the God of beauty, of the youthful strength of man, of the unfolding germinating forces which reveal in outward glory all the inner worth and inner greatness that man contains, or can contain, within him. With songs and acts of ritual representing the deepest human grief and mourning, this image of the God was lowered into the waves of the sea, where it had to remain for three days. Or if the sea were not near it was lowered into a lake. Or again, an artificial pond was constructed near the sacred place of the Mysteries, so that the image of the God could be submerged and left for three days. During the three days the whole community associated with this cult remained in an atmosphere of deepest earnestness and stillness. After three days the image was withdrawn from the water. The songs of grief and mourning were transformed into songs of joy, hymns to the resurrected God, to the God who had come to life once more. This was an outward ceremony which deeply stirred the hearts of large circles of mankind. And this ceremony indicated, in an outward act of ritual, what took place in the Holy of Holies of the Mysteries with every human being who was about to reach initiation. For within the Mysteries in those ancient times every human being who was to receive initiation was led into a special chamber. The walls were black, the whole space was dark and gloomy, empty save for a coffin, or something not unlike a coffin. Beside the coffin those who accompanied the candidate for Initiation broke forth into songs of mourning, songs of death. The candidate was treated like one who is about to die. He was given to understand that when he was now laid in the coffin, he would have to undergo what the human being undergoes in the first three days after death. On the third day there appeared at a certain place, within sight of the one who lay in the coffin, a twig or a branch to represent springing, thriving life. And now the songs of mourning were transferred into hymns of joy and praise. With consciousness transformed, the man arose out of his grave. A new language, a new writing, was communicated to him; it was the language and writing of spiritual Beings. Henceforth he was allowed to see the world—for now indeed he could see it—from the standpoint of the Spirit. What was thus enacted in the hidden depths of the Mysteries with the candidates for Initiation was comparable to the sacred cults or rituals enacted in the outer world. The content of the sacred ritual, pictorial as it was, was none the less similar in structure to what took place with chosen human beings in the Mysteries. Indeed the cult—and we may take the special cult of Adonis as representative—the cult was explained at the proper season to all those who partook in it. It was enacted in the Autumn, and those who took part in it were instructed somewhat as follows: “Behold, it is the Autumn season! The Earth is losing her adornment of plants and green foliage. All things are fading and falling. In place of the green and springing life that began to cover the Earth in Springtime, snow will soon come to envelop, or drought to lay waste, the Earth. Nature is dying, but while all things are dying around you, you are to experience that in the human being which is only half like the death you see around you in all Nature. Man also has to die. For him, too, there comes the Autumn season. And when man's life draws to a close, it is right for the hearts and minds of those who remain behind to be filled with sorrow and deep mourning. And that the full earnestness of the passage through death may come before your souls, that you may not experience it only when death approaches you yourselves, but may be mindful of it ever and again—it is enacted before you Autumn by Autumn how the divine Being who is the representative of the beauty, youth and greatness of man, dies and undertakes the same journey as all the things of Nature. Nevertheless, just when Nature is laid waste and bare, when all things in Nature are on the way to death, you also are to remember another thing. Remember how man passes through the gate of death! All that he experienced here in this earthly life was like the things that die in Autumn-time. For in this earthly realm he experiences only what is transient. But when he has passed from the Earth and lives on out into the far spaces of the Cosmic Ether, then will he behold himself growing ever greater and greater, till the whole Universe becomes his own. For three days he will live outward and outward into the wide spaces of the Universe. And then, while here on Earth the earthly eye is turned to the image of death—for the earthly eye is turned to all that dies, to all things transient—yonder in the Spirit after three days the immortal soul of man awakens. Yonder the soul arises, arises to be born again for Spirit-land, three days after passing through the gate of death.” Deep and penetrating was the inner transformation when these things were enacted in the candidate's own person during the Initiation ceremony, in the hidden depths of the Mysteries. The profound impression, the immense and sudden jerk which the life of a man underwent in this ancient form of initiation, awakened inner forces of the soul within him. (As we shall presently see, in modern times it cannot be done in this way but must be done in quite another way.) The inner forces of the soul, the powers of seership were awakened in him. He knew that he stood henceforward no longer in the world of the senses but in the spiritual world. I may perhaps sum up in the following words the instruction that was given, once more at the right and proper time, to the pupils in the ancient Mysteries. They were told: That which is enacted in the Mysteries is an image of what takes place in spiritual worlds, in the Cosmos. Sacred cult is itself an image of what is enacted in the sacred Mysteries. For everyone who was admitted to the Mysteries was fully clear that events which the Mysteries concealed within the earthly realm—events enacted there upon the human being—were true images of what man experiences in the wide spaces of the astral-spiritual Cosmos in other forms of existence than in this earthly life. And those who in ancient times were not admitted to the Mysteries—since according to their stage in life they could not yet be chosen to receive the vision of the spiritual world directly—were instructed in the corresponding truths through the sacred cult or ritual, that is to say, through a picture of what was enacted in the Mysteries. Such, then, was the purport of the Mystery which we have learned to know in this example of the Adonis festival. Autumn, when earthly things were fading away, becoming waste and bare, Autumn, expressing so radically the transitory nature of all earthly things, the dying process and the fact of death—this Autumn time was to call forth in man the certainty, or at least the pictured vision, of how the death that overcomes all Nature in the Autumn, overcomes man too, nay even overcomes the representative of all beauty, youthfulness and greatness in the human soul, portrayed in the God Adonis. Even the God Adonis dies, and is dissolved in the earthly prototype of the cosmic Ether—in the Water. But even as he rises again out of the Water, even as he can be drawn forth from the Water, so is the soul of man drawn forth from the Waters of the world, that is to say, from the cosmic Ether, approximately three days after the human being here upon Earth passes through the gate of death. It was the secret of death itself which those ancient Mysteries sought to represent in the corresponding Autumn festival. They made it visible in picture form, in that the first half of the sacred ritual coincided with the dying and the death in Nature, while on the other hand the very opposite was shown to be the essential truth for man himself. Such was the meaning and intention of the Mysteries: the human being shall turn his gaze to the death of Nature, in order to become aware how he himself dies in the outward semblance, while in his inner being he is resurrected—resurrected, to begin with, for the spiritual world. To unveil the truth about death was the meaning and purpose of this ancient Pagan festival which was connected so closely with the Mysteries. Then in the further course of human evolution the great Event took place. What had been undergone at a certain level by the candidate for initiation in the Mysteries—the Death and Resurrection of the soul—took place even as to the body with Christ Jesus. For how does the Mystery of Golgotha appear to one who is acquainted with the Mysteries! He gazes back into the ancient Mysteries. He sees how the candidate for Initiation was led, in his soul, through death to the Resurrection of the soul; that is to say, to the awakening of a higher consciousness in the soul. The soul died, to rise again in a higher consciousness. We must above all hold fast to this, that the body did not die, but the soul died, in order to be awakened to a higher consciousness. What the soul of every candidate for Initiation underwent, Christ Jesus underwent even in the body. That is to say, He underwent it on a different level. For Christ was no earthly man. He was a Sun-Being dwelling in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence what the candidate for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries had undergone in his soul, could be undergone in the entire human nature by Christ Jesus upon Golgotha. Those who still had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries and of the above Initiation-rite—it was they who understood most deeply what had happened upon Golgotha. Indeed to this day, it is they who understood it most deeply. For they could say to themselves: For thousands and thousands of years, human beings have been led through the death and resurrection of their souls into the secrets of the spiritual world. The soul was kept separate from the body during the act of Initiation. The soul was led through death, to life eternal. What was thus experienced in the soul by a number of chosen human beings, was undergone even in the body by a Being who descended from the Sun at the Baptism by John in Jordan, and took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The act of Initiation that had been repeated again and again through long, long years, now became a historic fact. The essential thing was that man should know: because it was a Sun-Being who took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore what was accomplished for the Initiates only with respect to the soul and the soul's experience, could be accomplished now even into the bodily existence by this Being. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolving of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal Earth, there could be a Resurrection of the Christ. For the Christ rises higher than the soul of the initiate could rise. The candidate for Initiation could not carry the body into those deep regions of the sub-sensible into which Christ Jesus carried it. Hence, too, the candidate for Initiation could not rise so high in resurrection as the Christ. Yet it remains true that but for this difference in respect of cosmic greatness, the ancient rite of Initiation appeared as a historic fact at the sacred place of Golgotha. Yet even in the first centuries of Christianity there were only few who knew that a Being of the Sun, a cosmic Being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, that the Earth had really been fertilised by the descent from the Sun of a Being whom until then man upon Earth had only been able to behold within the Sun, by the methods cultivated at the places of Initiation. This was the essential point in Christianity, inasmuch as it was also accepted by those who had real knowledge of the ancient Mysteries. They could say: The Christ to whom we lifted ourselves up through our initiation, the Christ whom we could reach by our ascent to the Sun in the ancient Mysteries, has descended into a mortal body, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come down to Earth. It was indeed a festival mood, nay, a mood of sublime holiness which filled the hearts and souls of those who, living in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, had some understanding of this Mystery. Gradually, and by processes which we shall yet have to trace, what had thus been an immediate and living content of their consciousness became a memory, a festival in memory of the historic event on Golgotha. But while this “memory” was taking shape, the consciousness of who the Christ was as a Being of the Sun, became lost ever more and more. Those who had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries could not fail to know about the Being of the Christ. For they knew that the real Initiates, being made independent of the physical body and passing in their souls through death, rising into the Sun-sphere and there visiting the Christ, had received from Him—from Christ within the Sun—the impulse for the resurrection of their souls. They knew the nature of the Christ because they had raised themselves to Him. With their knowledge of this Initiation rite, the ancient Initiates knew from what took place on Golgotha that the same Being who formerly had to be sought for in the Sun, had now visited mankind on Earth. Why was it so? The sacred rite that had been enacted with the candidates for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries in order that they might reach up to the Christ within the Sun, could no longer be enacted in this way. For in the course of time, human nature had undergone a change. By the very evolution of the human being, the ancient ceremony of Initiation had become impossible. It would no longer have been possible through that ancient Initiation ceremony to visit the Christ in the Sun. It was then that He descended to enact on Earth a sacred deed to which human beings might henceforth turn their gaze. What is contained within this secret is one of the very holiest things that can possibly be uttered on this Earth. For how did it really appear to the human beings in the centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha? From an ancient Initiation sanctuary man upon Earth looked upward to the Sun-existence and became aware, through his Initiation, of Christ within the Sun. Man looked out into Space in order to approach the Christ. And how did the evolution of mankind go forward in the succeeding periods? I must now represent Time itself: the Earth in one year, the Earth in a second year, in a third year, and so on in the course of Time. Spatially, the Earth is of course always present but here I have represented the course of Time. The Mystery of Golgotha has taken place. A human being living, let us say, in the eighth century A.D., instead of looking upward to the Sun from a sacred place of the Mysteries so as to reach the Christ, looks backward through the course of Time—back to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the turning-point of Time—at the beginning of the Christian era—he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus he can find the Christ within an earthly action, within an event on Earth. He finds the Christ within the Mystery of Golgotha. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, what had formerly been a vision in Space, became henceforward a vision in Time. That was the significance of what had taken place. We must however especially contemplate what took place during Initiation in the ancient Mysteries. It was a picture of the death of man and of his resurrection in the life beyond. Then we must consider the structure of the sacred cults, the festival of Adonis, for instance. For this in turn was a picture of what took place within the Mysteries. When we contemplate all this, these things—the three united into one—come before us in a sublime and transcendent aspect concentrated in the one historic action upon Golgotha. Outwardly upon the scene of history there appears what was hitherto accomplished in the deep and inner Holy of Holies of the Mysteries. For all human beings there now exists what existed hitherto only for the Initiates. Men no longer need an image that is immersed and symbolically resurrected from the sea. Henceforth they shall have the thought—the memory—of what took place in all reality on Golgotha. The outward symbol, relating to a process that was experienced in Space, is now to be replaced by the inward thought and memory, without any picture to the senses—the memory of the historic event of Golgotha, experienced purely in the soul. Strange is the course of human evolution as we perceive it in the succeeding centuries. Man's penetration into spiritual things becomes ever less and less. The spiritual content of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot find its way into the minds of men. Evolution tends now to develop the sense for material things. Men lose the inner understanding of the heart, which once told them that just where outer Nature reveals her transitoriness and appears as a dying existence, the life of the Spirit can be seen, and with it they lose their understanding for that outer festival which can most truly be felt when Autumn comes with its fading, dying process, inasmuch as the death of the Earthly and Natural corresponds to the Resurrection of the Spiritual. Thus it becomes possible no longer for Autumn to be the time of the Resurrection Festival. Autumn loses its power to turn man's thought from the transitoriness of Nature to the eternity of the Spirit. Man now needs the support of material things, needs the support of what does not die in Nature, but springs forth again in Nature. He needs to connect his Resurrection Festival with that which is resurrected in outer Nature—the force of the seed which was laid into the Earth in Autumn-time. He takes the material as a symbol for the Spiritual because he is no longer able to receive inspiration for a true perception of the Spiritual itself. Autumn no longer has the power to make manifest through the inner power of the human soul the Eternity of the Spirit, over against what is transient in the world of Nature. Man needs the support of external Nature, of the external Resurrection in Nature. He needs to see how the plants spring out of the Earth, how the Sun increases in strength, how light and warmth increase in strength once more. He needs the Resurrection in Nature in order to celebrate the thought of the Resurrection. At the same time he loses that immediate inner relationship which he had with the Adonis Festival, and which he can also have with the Mystery of Golgotha. The inner experience which could arise at the earthly death of man, loses its power. In that inner experience the human soul was aware how the man who in the earthly sense passes through the gate of death, undergoes in three days what can indeed fill the soul with solemnity and earnestness. Then, however, the soul must become inwardly joyful, inasmuch as out of this very death the human soul arises after three days to spiritual immortality. The power that lay in the Adonis Festival was lost. To begin with, it was intended for humanity that this power should arise with still greater intensity. Man had gazed upon the death of the God, the death of all that is beautiful in mankind—of all that is great and filled with the strength of youth. This God was immersed in the ocean on the day of Mourning, on the day of Chara (Charfreitag is Good Friday; Chara means mourning). They fell into a solemn, earnest mood. This was the feeling they first wanted to unfold in view of the transitoriness of Nature. But then this very feeling of the transitoriness of Nature had to be transformed by the soul into a feeling of the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. When the God—or image of the God—was lifted out again, the true believer beheld the image of the human soul a few days after death. “What happens to the dead man in the Spirit, behold! it stands before thy soul in the image of the resurrected God of youthful strength and beauty!” This truth, deeply united with the whole destiny of man, was really awakened in the human spirit year by year in the Autumn season. In that ancient time men could not have thought it possible to take their start from external Nature. That which was perceptible in the Spirit was represented in the symbolic action of the sacred cult. But the time came when this picture of ancient times had to be blotted out in order that the memory, unassisted by any image—the inward memory, experienced purely within the soul, the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha in which the same truth is contained—should take the place of the picture. To begin with, humanity had not the power for it to be so. For the Spirit descended into the very depths of the soul of man. To this day it has remained so; man needs the support of external Nature. But external Nature provides no symbol—no perfect symbol—of the destinies of man in death. Thus the thought of death itself was able to live on, but the thought of the Resurrection disappeared more and more. Though the Resurrection is still referred to as an article of faith, the fact of the Resurrection is not a really living experience in the humanity of modern times. It must become alive again through the anthroposophical conception reawakening the sense of man to the true Resurrection thought. The Michael thought, as was said at the proper season, must lie near to the anthroposophical heart and mind as the thought of the Herald of Christ. The Christmas thought too, must be made ever deeper in the heart of the anthroposophist. And the Easter thought must become especially sacred and joyful. For Anthroposophy has to add to the thought of Death, the thought of the Resurrection. Anthroposophy itself must become like an inner festival of Resurrection for the human soul. It must bring an Easter mood into man's world-conception. This will indeed be possible if it is understood how the thought of the ancient Mysteries can live on in the true Easter thought. And this will still be possible if there arises a true conception of the body, soul and spirit of man, and of the destinies of body, soul and spirit, in the physical world, the soul-world and the spiritual world of Heaven. |
| 283. The Essence of Music: Questions and Answers: Question and Answer Session II
30 Sep 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| One need only recall that Goethe also rehearsed his plays, for example, “Iphigenia,” with his actors in such a way that he had a baton, that he placed the greatest value on meter. |
| It was in Hermannstadt in 1889, and I was traveling from Vienna to Hermannstadt on Christmas Eve. And I had the misfortune of missing the connecting train in Budapest. So I had to take a train that went via Szegedin instead of Debrecen, and I arrived at the Hungarian-Transylvanian border on that Christmas Eve. |
| 283. The Essence of Music: Questions and Answers: Question and Answer Session II
30 Sep 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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I would like to touch again today on some of the things I noted yesterday, which could no longer be properly discussed, with a few aphoristic remarks. First, I would like to say a few words about the relationship between major and minor. If you want to get right into the intimacies of musical life, you have to be absolutely aware of how, in essence, musical life corresponds to a fine organization of our human nature. One could say that what appears in musical facts corresponds in a certain way to the finer inner constitution of the human being. Yesterday I already hinted at a certain direction, how rhythm, which we experience musically, answers an inner rhythm in the rise and fall of the cerebral fluid and the connection that the cerebral fluid has on the one hand with the processes in the brain, and on the other hand with the processes in the metabolic system through the mediation of the blood system. But one can also point to, I would say, individually graded forms of the human constitution in this respect. Our most important rhythmic system is the respiratory system, and it is basically not difficult for most people, if they pay just a little attention, to experience how the course of thought, both the more logical course of thought and the more emotional, feeling-based course of thought, influence the breathing process. The breathing process is directly or indirectly connected with everything that a person experiences musically. Therefore, the particular breathing pattern of one or the other type of person sheds some light on the musical experience. You see, there are people who are, so to speak, oxygen voluptuaries. They are constituted in such a way that they assimilate oxygen with a certain greed, absorb oxygen into themselves. Of course, all this takes place more or less in the subconscious, but one can certainly use the expressions borrowed from conscious life for the subconscious. People who absorb oxygen with a certain greed, who, if I may say so, enjoy absorbing oxygen, who are voluptuous in absorbing oxygen, have a very active, strongly vibrating astral life. Their astral body is inwardly active. And because their astral body is inwardly active, it also digs into the physical body with great desire, as it were. Such people live very much in their physical body. Other people do not have this craving for oxygen. But they feel something, not like a lust now, but like a relief when they give up, exhale the carbonic acid. They are tuned to, as it were, removing the breathing air from themselves and finding a favor in the process that gives them a certain relief. One can, by speaking the truth, say something that I would like to say, that makes a person feel a little uncomfortable. But that is one of the reasons why people reject the deeper truths, because they do not want to hear them. They then invent logical reasons for themselves. In reality, the reason is that people are subconsciously repulsed by certain truths. So they push these truths aside. And that is why they then find logical reasons for their evasion. It is certainly not so easy, for example, if you are a respected scholar and are opposed to this or that philosophical system because of an unhealthy gall-bladder, to simply say to your students: My gall-bladder does not tolerate this philosophical system! — So you then invent logical reasons, sometimes of an extraordinarily astute nature, and you console yourself with these logical reasons. For those who know life, for those who look deeper into the secrets of existence, sometimes logical reasons that come from this or that side are not quite so valuable. And so, for example, sometimes the melancholic temperament is based merely on the fact that the person concerned is a voluptuary of oxygen. And life more in the sanguine, life that is turned to the outer world, that likes to change with the impressions of the outer world, that is based on a certain love of exhaling, on a certain love of pushing the carbonic acid away from oneself. However, these are only the external manifestations of the matter. For the rhythm, which we basically perceive only as the physical-secondary in the organism, is actually always a rhythm that takes place in the deeper sense between the astral body and the ether body. And ultimately one can say: we inhale with the astral body and with the etheric body we exhale again, so that in truth there is a rhythmic interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. And so now the individual types of people live, so to speak, in such a way that when one type of person's astral body strikes the ether body, a kind of lust occurs; when the ether body strikes back at the astral body, a kind of relief occurs in the other person, a kind of transition into the sanguine, experiencing the sanguine. And you see, the origin of the major and minor scales is connected with this contrast between types of people, in that everything that can be experienced in minor keys belongs, or corresponds, to the constitution of the person who is based on the lustfulness of oxygen, which is based on the fact that the astral body, when it strikes the etheric body is felt with a certain voluptuousness, while conversely the major scales are based on the fact that there is a feeling of well-being when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body, or there is a certain feeling of elevation, a feeling of relief, a feeling of momentum when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body. It is interesting that in the outer world things are often designated in the opposite direction. For example, one says: the melancholic person is the deeper person. Seen from the other side, he is not the deeper person, but the greater voluptuary for oxygen. Since the musical in its intimacies essentially draws on the subconscious, we can associate such things with the very subconscious, semi-conscious, and conscious aspects of the musical experience, without indulging in an inartistic, theoretical approach. You will notice in general that a truly spiritual-scientific consideration of art does not need to become inartistic itself, for one does not arrive at bloodless abstractions and a theoretical web of aestheticizing kind. If we want to understand things spiritually, we come to realities in a certain way, the mutual interaction of which is presented pictorially or even musically in such a way that we, with our description, are ourselves in it in a kind of musical experience. And I believe that this will be precisely the significant aspect in the further development of spiritual science: that in seeking to comprehend art, it itself seeks to create an art of comprehension, that it seeks to imbue its work and activity in ideas with pictoriality, with reality, and that in so doing, what we have today as such a dry, abstract science will be able to approach the artistic. But if we take something that has been approached purely and simply from a scientific point of view, such as education, and make it relevant to the tasks of our time, as we do in the Waldorf school , then we are in any case leading what used to be scientific pedagogy to the level of pedagogical art and talking about pedagogy in the sense that we actually understand it as an art of educating. If you read what I wrote in the last issue of “Social Future” about the art of education, you will see how there is an effort to transform the sober science of education into the art of education. Another thing I noted refers to the interesting comments Mr. Baumann made in his lecture about the relationship between vowels and tones and colors. He described, as you recall, the dark vowels U, O, as those that have the clearest effect in terms of tone. In the middle stands A, and at the other pole, so to speak, stand E and I, the light vowels, which appear the least tonal, which carry something noisy in them. But then the astonishment was expressed as to how it comes about that precisely the dark vowels also correspond to the dark colors, and the light vowels, I, E, correspond to light colors, but do not actually have the tonal in their characteristic, but rather the noisy. - If I understood correctly, that was the case, wasn't it?  Now I would like to make the following comment. If we do not write down the color scale in the abstract linearity that we are accustomed to in today's physics, but if we write down the color scale in a circle, as it must also be done in accordance with Goethe's color theory, so that we say: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — if we proceed in this direction (see drawing), if we write down the color scale in this way, then we will naturally be compelled, by bringing to mind the experiential relationships between tone and color, to write U and O towards the blue side. But if we continue in Mr. Baumann's spirit, we will come to A and from this side enter the red and yellow, the light. So when we move away from the blue in the sense of the accompanying colors of the individual tones, we are actually moving away from the color element and now touching it from behind. And therein lies the reason why we can no longer establish parallelism here in the same way as in the area where the tonal coincides with the color in a very evident way, because on the side of the color scale where the blue, the violet is, we are dealing, so to speak, with a going out of ourselves with the color. There is a sense of immersion in the external world. With sound, however, it is essentially also an outward movement. But when we come over here, we experience an onslaught of color: red and yellow colors rush at us. In this sense, behind this curtain, there is also painting here: it is the ability to paint from within the color. We live ourselves into the color. This is how we actually come out of the nature of the tones. This is the reason for the apparent incongruity that I pointed out to you yesterday. Then I would also like to make a few comments about something that has been mentioned, that has been found – and it has not only been found by the one person mentioned yesterday, but similar things are being said and spread by a great many people – that one can feel the vowels, the tones, in the organism: I in the head, E more in the larynx, A in the chest, O in the abdomen, U very low down. Now, these things are indeed correct, and you will no longer be surprised that these things have a certain correctness if you bear in mind that everything that exists in the outside world in the form of sound corresponds to very specific arrangements in our organism. But on the other hand, we must not forget: If such things are proclaimed without proper instruction – and proper in this case means only instruction that can speak from a certain spiritual-scientific experience – if such things are proclaimed without precise knowledge of the very interconnections that I have pointed out in a specific case today, that is, the interrelations between the astral body, the etheric body and so on, if they are trumpeted out into the world without reasonable guidance in the spiritual-scientific sense and people then do all kinds of exercises in this sense, then, indeed, quite embarrassing things can come about. If, for example, someone does breathing exercises of some kind and – as was hinted at yesterday – strongly visualizes the vowel when breathing and in doing so gets the feeling: the I sits in the head, the E in the larynx, and so on – this can certainly be right. But if he is not instructed in a sensible way, it can happen that the I remains in the head and sings continuously at the top of the head, and the E remains in the larynx and rumbles there. And if the A in the chest and abdomen also do their thing, then something similar to what Dr. Husemann has described in an excellent way for Staudenmaier in Munich, who also came up with very strange things because, as a person who has no experience at all in how to use such things, , he has actually gradually accumulated a whole legion of fools in his own organism, so many fools that these fools have simply suggested to him that this breeding of fools should now also be cultivated, that universities and schools should be founded so that all this folly can be taken even further. And you can really imagine that a naive mind has the answer for this: Now I'm supposed to pay taxes for him to live in his monkey cage with his magic, aren't I! But today there are actually a great many things that simply boil down to the fact that the people who devote themselves to such things – and there is a certain greed even for such things – that these people are really driven crazy, you could say they are actually driven crazy. So such things are not entirely harmless, and it is good when attention is drawn to them. You see, if you, as was the case with me before the war - now it is just no longer possible - if you had to travel, so to speak, through half of Europe more often, you really found a perpetual phenomenon throughout this half of Europe. I don't know how many people have noticed it, but those who live in spiritual science also acquire a certain talent for observation for external things, they simply see certain things. For example, they cannot simply stay in a hotel and not see all the letters in the porter's lodge for people who have arrived or who have not arrived. Letters are there from people who may have just skipped the city or this hotel due to the necessity of the trip and so on. Now, however, there was one recurring phenomenon in such porter's lodges, also in other places, again and again: these were the postings of a certain, as they were called, psychological-occult center. They sent such announcements to all possible addresses they could get hold of, about an “occult system” through which one could train oneself for all kinds of things. For example, one could train oneself to make a favorable impression on other people. In particular, one could train oneself as a commercial agent to easily persuade people to buy one's goods. Or one could also train oneself to do other interesting things, for example, to make the opposite sex fall in love with you easily and the like. Well, these things were sent out, and these things actually found a great deal of interest in the world. Then the war, didn't it, threw a bit of a wrench into these calculations for the simple reason that it had gradually become unpleasant that these things were being censored. And since censorship has not been abolished today either, at least in most areas, but on the contrary is still in effect in a very strange way, efforts to advocate occultism in this way have not yet been rewarded, and one notices less of these stories today. But I think they are being passed more and more from person to person, without using the postal system and similar things. So I just wanted to say that this vocal breathing game is not without significance and does have an embarrassing side. Now yesterday various questions were asked that obviously relate to the statements I made in the first recitation lesson, which were only a few remarks for the time being, and that were linked to what Mr. Baumann said about the musical aspect. Well, with regard to the most important thing, of course, I must refer to the following lessons on declamation, but perhaps I can also make some aphoristic remarks there. For example, the question was asked what changes in the way of speaking, in the art of acting, could be brought about by spiritual science. A term was used, if I understood it correctly – because it is possible that I did not understand it – that was supposed to replace physical eloquence. I think I remember this term, but I have absolutely no idea what is meant by “physical eloquence”!
Oh, facial expressions as physical eloquence? Well, if that is meant, it is a rather occult expression. But perhaps we can also make a few comments on the matter by anticipating some of what still needs to be said in the lessons in context, and which perhaps can only be presented here in somewhat aphoristic form. I would like to say something about the way of speaking and acting in the art of acting, which has also undergone a rich history. One need only recall that Goethe also rehearsed his plays, for example, “Iphigenia,” with his actors in such a way that he had a baton, that he placed the greatest value on meter. And people in the second half of the 19th century would probably have described what Goethe called the beauty of his acting as a kind of chanting or something similar. There was indeed a great emphasis on meter. And one should not imagine that when Goethe himself played Orestes, for example, he went wild in the way that I have seen some Orestes actors go wild in on stages that are not even modern. When a certain Krastel played Orestes, yes, sometimes you felt the need to get a cage to contain his wildness. So one should not imagine that Goethe himself might have played the role of Orestes. On the contrary: he softened and smoothed out the very thing that was present in the content as strength and intense inner life by carefully observing the meter. So that there was moderation and balance in the manner of delivery that Goethe used for his Orestes. As for facial expressions, it may be said that in earlier times – and these times are not so far back – these facial expressions were much more subject to the laws of theatrical art than they were in the last third of the 19th century. To a certain extent, stereotypical movements were used for certain types of feelings, and these were adhered to. So that it was less important, for example, to see in detail how some hand movement expresses some wild passion, but rather to see how some hand movement is, how it runs, how it has to connect to a previous hand movement, creating a beautiful form, and how it transitions to the next hand movement. So it was the inner shaping that was most important in facial expressions. And to the same extent that this artistry in both speech and facial expressions declined, to the same extent did the naturalistic immersion in the individual gesture and the individual word come about, and what then ultimately became the demand of naturalism for the entire drama was that which cannot actually be followed in the serious sense. Because, if it came down to only showing a front or back room in the stage set, where the same things happened that would naturally happen in a front or back room in three hours, , then one would actually have to say: the stage space would be designed in a completely naturalistic way if the side with the curtain were also closed – and the last naturalistic thing that one has striven for on the stage would actually have been achieved with something like that. It would have been quite interesting if, for example, the aesthetic wishes of Arno Holz had also led to the demand that the stage area be closed off at the front by a wall, so that it would now quite naturally depict a back room. One could have seen what impression such naturalism, such complete naturalism, would have made on the audience. I know that when you take things to such grotesque extremes, it is very easy to find fault with them. But in the end, extreme naturalism really comes down to the fact that you can't really say anything other than that it is the last consequence. And so it is with this pushing of the actor into the ordinary naturalistic way of speaking and into the naturalistic gesture. In more artistic times, the other tendency prevailed. There the gesture strove for the beautiful, plastic form, for the moving plastic form. And the spoken word strived more back to the musical. So that in fact the theatrical presentation was also lifted out of the ordinary naturalism, in that the actors moved as they did on stage for the older among us, with those tragedians and tragic actresses whom the younger ones no longer knew, like Klara Ziegler and others. There you could still see the last echoes of decadence. They couldn't do the things anymore, but they still did them with the last remnants of plastic stagecraft, and they still had in their manner of speaking what sound and even tone and even melos had in speaking. It was interesting: those who, on the one hand, went wild, went wild naturalistically, like Krastel, on the other hand, did not want to become naturalistic – their temperament got the better of them – they did not want to become naturalistic. Therefore, however, they also took their path to the musical in speaking in such a way as the others did to the plastic in movement. I don't know if any of you still remember such things; but if you have seen and heard Krastel on the Viennese stage more than once, you may still have the sound of Krastel's singing in your ears. So, by returning to earlier forms of acting and mime, we are dealing with a convergence of theatrical performance with the musical and the plastic. And basically, all art is based on the fact that certain archetypes of this art, I would say, split, that the individual forms, the differentiated forms of art emerged from what was a kind of singing art in prehistoric times. And when someone like Richard Wagner came along and directed his whole heart and soul back to the archetypes of artistry, then this striving for the Gesamtkunstwerk emerged from him. But the further we go back in the development of the human spirit, the more we find that what is separate today flows together. For example, at least for the older times of Greek civilization, we can assume that there was only a slight difference between recitation and song. Recitation was very much sung. And song approached recitation. What later became differentiated into recitation and song was thoroughly unified. And it was probably the same with the northern peoples. What the northern peoples had was not one-sided singing and one-sided saying, that is, declaiming; but it was the art of declamation that arose from the Nordic way— just as the art of recitation arose from the southern type. It was the art of declamation and the song of the north, which was based on quite different foundations than Greek song, which in turn were a kind of unity. So we are dealing with a differentiation of the arts. And it must be assumed that in the old form, singing, i.e. music, recitation or declamation and rhythmic movement, the art of dance, were connected in a unified way. They sounded together as a unified whole. This art of dance was then the older form of eurythmy. And it is absolutely — although this can only be recognized with spiritual scientific research methods — it is absolutely, albeit in a somewhat different form, because everything is of course subject to development, as a eurythmic part in the Greek unity of singing and recitation art, this eurythmy. So that this eurythmy is definitely something that was part of musical life in older times. And basically we are not doing anything different today than going back to earlier forms of artistic expression in eurythmy. Except that we naturally have to take into account the fact that the arts have now advanced so much. So that the close connection between singing, recitation and eurythmy, as it certainly still existed in Greece in the time of Aeschylus, cannot exist. We have to take more account of the fact that we have come to a differentiation. Therefore, the forms of eurythmy today must be sought through real inspiration, intuition and imagination. They are. I have always mentioned this in a certain way before eurythmic performances, in a kind of introduction: one must not imagine that something has simply been taken over from the old eurythmic forms; but what was previously done more instinctively has been raised into consciousness in the sense in which it must be done in our time. And this visible language of eurythmy is directly sensed and received from the spiritual world. For basically all human beings eurhythmy! All of you eurhythmy, namely your ether body. Then, when you speak, you eurhythmy. The secret of speaking consists in the fact that the entire ether body follows the impulses of the vowel and the consonant, the entire arrangement of the sentence formation. Everything that is presented in eurythmy is mirrored in the movements of the etheric body when people speak. And speaking is based only on the fact that what is spread throughout the entire etheric body in movements is concentrated in the physical through the larynx and its neighboring organs. So that he who can see the etheric body of the person speaking perceives speech twice: in the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs and in the etheric body as a whole. And when we practise eurythmy, we do nothing other than cause the physical body to perform the movements that the etheric body performs when a person speaks. The only difference is that we naturally have to round off, shape and transform everything that the ordinary human etheric body does into art, into beauty and the like.  If every person were to practise eurythmy continually, I can assure you that not everyone would be able to do so artistically! The results are not always beautiful, although the process itself can be extremely interesting. And I once saw an extremely interesting group doing eurythmy. It was in Hermannstadt in 1889, and I was traveling from Vienna to Hermannstadt on Christmas Eve. And I had the misfortune of missing the connecting train in Budapest. So I had to take a train that went via Szegedin instead of Debrecen, and I arrived at the Hungarian-Transylvanian border on that Christmas Eve. There, where I had to wait for twelve hours, I met a group of people playing cards. It was, as they say, a motley crew from all the different nationalities that can be found in this corner of the world. Well, I took up the position of an observer. It was not a pleasant position, because the table at which I was to eat my supper looked so tempting that one would have liked to take out one's pocket knife and scrape off the dirt. And similar things could be observed. But I watched. The first player dealt the cards. Now you should have seen the eurythmy that sprang from the eyes of the others! The second played the cards – there were already two of the company lying on the table. Then the third played the cards, and then two more were lying under the table. And when the other cards were played, there was a colorful jumble: a wonderful but not beautiful eurythmy performed by these etheric bodies! But there is so much to be learned about the human being and human nature by observing such scenes, where the human being's astral body comes into such a terribly angry movement, expressing all passions and then dominating the etheric body. And then there is the screeching of the etheric body when it screams! You can imagine that they shouted in confusion. And it was precisely this shouting that was then expressed in eurythmy. A lot can be studied from this. But when it comes to beautiful eurythmy, these movements must first be rounded off a little, translated into beauty. But I am drawing your attention to certain processes that must precede the establishment of eurythmy if this eurythmy is not to be something fantastically contrived, but if it is to be what I have always presented in the introductions to the eurythmic performances. And I say such things in particular because it is very often imagined that everything that is presented in spiritual science and the art that is built up out of it is just pulled out of a hat. It is not pulled out of a hat, but is based on very thorough work. Now this is, at least in essence, what I noted yesterday in relation to these matters. There is still something about the Chinese scale. What was mentioned yesterday about the Chinese scale is not uninteresting when considered in connection with what I have just spoken about today. I said: the musical fact that takes place in the outer world corresponds to something in the human constitution. And if it is said today that the human being consists of these and these limbs, which interact in this and that way – physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on – then one can say in a certain way: there is also inner music in it, and this inner music corresponds to our outer musical reality. But things are constantly changing as humanity develops. And a Chinese person is a different kind of human being from a European. A Chinese still has many connections between the physical body and the etheric body, the etheric body and the sentient soul, the sentient soul and the mind or emotional soul, and so on, which have already completely disappeared in European man. This constitution of the Chinese person now corresponds to the Chinese scale. And if one studies music history in such a way, for example, by taking a sensible approach to the development of the scale system, and if one has an understanding of the connection between the inner human organization and the outer musical facts, one can look back from the scales and from many other musical facts to the constitution of the respective human group or race, and so on. Now, just a moment ago, I was also made aware of a difference of opinion regarding what I meant by delving into the sound yesterday. I did not mean that tones are still present in the sequence of time, which might resonate together and then be perceived as one tone. This is not meant. Rather, what is meant is that today, in relation to the evolution of humanity, one begins to speak of an organization within the tone, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and going beyond the tone above, in contrast to what was experienced by many people until our world time simply as one tone. to speak of a division, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and, as it were, going beyond the tone above it to another tone. And then, I thought, when you have the actual tones that have been modified by the two neighboring tones that you have actually developed, when you have these three tones, you can express the varied main tone. It is then a slightly different tone. And you will notice that you have to shift one of the newly emerging tones downwards and the other upwards. But when you do that, you don't come across our usual tones, but tones that our current tone systems don't have. And in this way, I believe, an expansion of our tone system will indeed have to come about. And it is also the case that, in a sense, an opposite process to our present-day tone system has led to it again. Our present-day tone system has also only come about through all kinds of superimpositions of tone sensations. Our tones would not have been immediately understood in certain ages. I believe that a change is currently taking place in the way we experience sound, and that just as a very specific kind of music is emerging from the sometimes quite grotesque forms of experimentation, something is also announcing itself that wants to get out. For example, I have to say: either I don't understand Debussy at all, or I can only understand him in such a way that he foresaw something of this living into the sound. It is a completely different kind of musical feeling through Debussy than, for example, even in Wagner. Isn't it, you can say that. So that is what I actually meant, that you find a kind of melody from the individual tone, which you then just spread out in time. But you only get this melody if you have a different tone system. That is what I meant. There is still another question about Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone. This is, I would say, a somewhat complicated chapter, for Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone has not only one, but two sources, two starting points. From his correspondence with Zelter, we learn a great deal about the way in which Goethe, at his most mature point of view, thought about tone and music. But that actually had two sources. One source was that he had a certain naive musical understanding. He was not exactly diligent in music lessons. This may well be related to the fact that he was not exactly diligent in other subjects either, where the teachers were quite foolish. And, isn't it true that if we are familiar with Goethe's spelling at a certain age of his life, then we know that if someone were to get their hands on a Goethe manuscript from Goethe's archive today, say from around 1775 – so he was well into his twenties – a modern high school teacher would say of such a manuscript: “quite careless,” it would be full of red lines and “quite insufficient” would be written underneath. And so the one source actually shows more of his naive understanding of music than of what he had learned. But then there is another source of Goethe's theory of sound: his attempt to gain a view, which could be called a general physical view, from his theory of colors. And, isn't it true, this theory of colors is very original and formed with enormous inner diligence and entirely from the matter at hand. But he could not conduct original research in all fields of physics. And so he formed many of his views on the theory of sound by creating analogies to the theory of colors. He sketched out – he only presented everything schematically – and provided schematics for the theory of sound in which he tried to bring the phenomena of music into an analogy with what he experienced in color, in the phenomena of light. That is the second source. Now, as a third point — which is not a source but a way of looking at the matter — Goethe adds something else, namely that Goethe already had an instinctive feeling for those paths that we are uncovering today as spiritual-scientific paths. In many of Goethe's writings, one finds a remarkable experience that he then expresses in the most diverse ways, sometimes as theoretically as he did in his theory of colors, sometimes analogously theoretically as in his theory of sound, but also in poetry. What was instinctively present in Goethe's subconscious soul in this way lives its way into his works in a remarkable way. In this connection, those of his poems that remained unfinished, such as 'Pandora', are particularly interesting. Had this 'Pandora' been completed, it would have been something written entirely out of the spiritual world. It would have to be truly observed in the spiritual world. Now, Goethe did not arrive at spiritual insight, but he was completely true inwardly. Therefore, he did not finish the matter, which remained stuck in this way, out of an inner weighing back and forth. And to study this, how Goethe always got stuck in such things, and because he was a true personality, a true nature, then left the matter alone, is one of the most interesting things in Goethe's poetry. It shows how Goethe had a feeling that, I would say, was of a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical nature. And that was the third thing. So that in fact he saw more in the world of sounds in an ingenious way than would actually have corresponded to his learned understanding of music. But it was precisely this that helped him to overcome his prejudices. Therefore, a certain spiritual-scientific trait also comes into the schematic representation of Goethe's theory of sound. And what is found in these sound theory schemas, for example, about the relationships, the polar relationships between major and minor, can of course be interpreted in the most diverse ways. There is only a scheme, and there is one parallelized with the other, the other parallelized with the one. So of course you have to know Goethe very well if you want to understand how he thought of it himself. But you can see from it that there are ways to be found to get very favorable results. And Goethe's theory of sound could also be inspiring for a physicist in spiritual scientific terms, just as it would be for a musician. For there is certainly an artistic element at work in Goethe's scientific work. And in his scheme for the theory of sound, there is really something that gives a kind of, I would even say score-like impression. There is something musical in it. Just as you can also find something truly musical in the way Goethe's theory of colors is presented. Finally, read Goethe's theory of colors with regard to its composition, to the sequence of results, to the sequence in the description of the experiments! I recommend that you do so. And then read any standard physics book, that is, the optical chapter of a contemporary physics book, and you will perceive a huge difference. This difference also has a meaning, because the time will come when one will already feel towards the scientific presentation: That which considers, considers more the how. — It is actually only in the way something is presented that the way it is understood is expressed. And it is also one of the saddest achievements of modern times that, in a sense, the less artistically one can write, the worse the style, the better lecturer one becomes, and the more artistically one writes, the worse the lecturer one is. Of course, this is not stated, but the system is set up accordingly. And what has been achieved in terms of barbarisms in scientific stylization in recent times will no doubt be the subject of interesting cultural-historical chapters in the future, the likes of which present-day humanity can hardly imagine. “Scientific barbarism of style in the 19th and 20th centuries” will probably one day fill many pages of future literary works, if there are still oddballs around who write as much about things as the current oddballs write about some things. But now I believe that I have essentially exhausted the questions. I don't know if this or that has been left out, but you see, not everything can be exhausted at once. These things are only intended to stimulate here. These lectures and exercises are only intended to provide suggestions! I hope that you will not leave here without the feeling of having received such suggestions, after what I hope will be quite some time.
The question is posed in an extraordinarily abstract way and, in my opinion, in an extraordinarily inartistic way, for the simple reason that a statuary of a relationship to art and art science that boils down to a distinction cannot be properly felt in spiritual science. You see, if you want to understand how the spiritual scientific stimulates artistic comprehension, then you have to have a sense for the difference between the way some aestheticians have written about architecture, sculpture, music and the like. After all, Moriz Carriere was regarded by many people, not only in Munich, as a great esthete, perhaps not for an art historian in your sense, but that does not matter, one could also bring examples from this region. But when Carriere, the esthete, lived in Munich, there also lived a painter. I met one of those, and on a particular occasion, when I had all sorts of things to show him, we also talked about Carriere. And he said: Oh yes, I still remember quite well how we, when we were young painters, young badgers, were completely absorbed in the artistic, talked about Carriere and called him the “aesthetic grunt of delight”. Now, one may indeed have great respect for the abstract expression of one's thoughts on the artistic; but to demand - after speaking of an artistic conception of art that one must simply feel - that one should now in turn give a definition of the essence of art, I think that is something that does not go quite well. Of course it would be terribly easy to define the essence of art, because it has truly been defined many dozen times in the course of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. And if necessary, one can still imagine what someone who does not think that the artistic can be grasped through the approach of the humanities means by art science. But the point is not to get stuck with certain prejudices that one has once adopted, but to be able to place oneself in the living movement of intellectual life and go along with what is really demanded today from the depths of humanity: a coming together of science, art and religion, not a furthering of the splitting of these three currents of human spiritual life. Of course, you can still cause offence today if the way you look at art has to take a completely different form from the traditional, conventional approach of some art scholars. But today we are at the point where we have to move forward in the direction that has been indicated here. And that also means that questions such as What is the essence of art? What is the essence of man? - which, according to the definition, will eventually cease altogether. It is a matter of our having to understand more and more what people like Goethe meant when he says in his introduction to the theory of colors: One cannot really speak about the essence of light; colors are the acts of light. And anyone who gives a complete description of the color phenomena also says something about the essence of light. So anyone who addresses the facts of any field, any field of art, in a form that comes close to the experience of that field of art, gradually provides a kind of consideration of the essence of the field of art in question. But this will be overcome altogether, that definitions are placed at the top or somehow without context, that questions are raised: What is the essence of man, what is the essence of art and the like? We had such a strange case here yesterday; someone said: Wagner - thesis, Bruckner - antithesis, and spiritual science should now be the synthesis. Yes, you see, something like that, placed in a certain place, if, for example, I said something sensible about Wagner, then said something sensible about Bruckner, and then knew how to say something sensible about something traditional, then, so to speak, summarizing the many, I could use the abstract, bloodless concepts: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to summarize. Then it would make sense. But as a single dictum it is impossible. So you have to have a feeling for something when something is an organism, I will give you an example from another area: Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. The last chapter is about philosophy itself. Yes, what is said there about philosophy itself is said in addition to everything that has gone before. So that one has absorbed everything that has gone before. It is magnificent, a tremendous architectural conclusion. Please, take this last chapter away and take it for yourself, as something like a definition of philosophy – it is pure nonsense. It is pure nonsense! This is what draws attention to the fact that we must again enter into the experience of the whole from the understanding of the individual, how we must gradually rise from the stick we have been trained in, in terms of individual characteristics, to grasping the whole, to overlooking the whole. And in this sense, I think that it does lead to a kind of understanding when one shows what is happening externally as a musical fact in its other pole in inner experience; and when one then empathizes with what is going on in the person, then I believe that this is indeed a more artistic conception than that of some musicology! And I would like to add that today, for easily understandable reasons, we cannot go far enough. If we had already progressed so far that we could take it all the way to the imaginations and the description of the imaginations, then we might also be able to create something similar to what the Greeks created when they spoke of Apollo's lyre, actually meaning this inner part of the human being as a living musical instrument that reproduces the harmonies and the melos in the cosmos. We are not even yet so far advanced that we can feel what the Greeks felt when they heard the word Cosmos. This word is not connected with some abstraction of a modern scientist, with a certain description of the universe, but with the beauty of the universe, with the harmony of that in the cosmos which is actually connected with the beauty of the universe. Humanity once proceeded from a kind of interaction of that which is differentiated today. We must indeed be able to experience these differentiations, but we must in turn have the opportunity to see this differentiation together, to hear it resound together, to work ourselves into a living whole, so that what is the result of knowledge also becomes the content of an artistic work and the revelation of a religious experience. That is what we must strive for again. That which is wisdom can certainly appear in the form of beauty and reveal itself in the form of a religious impulse. Then we will experience something that still belongs to a more distant future: that we ourselves find a synthesis between an altar and a laboratory bench. When we can stand with the reverence for nature with which we should actually stand before it, then science becomes a form of worship for us. And when we as human beings imbibe those skills, that manual dexterity that corresponds to such an understanding of nature and of the spirit and the soul, then all our dealings with science will also flow into beautiful forms. Today this still seems like a fantasy. But it is a reality! For it is something that must be striven for and realized, lest humanity descend ever deeper into decadence.
That is not the reason, my dear Mr. Büttner, but I would like to say the following about it: I once said some things in Berlin and also gave some examples of the way in which spiritual science can be used to understand fairy tales, and I actually had to apply quite a lot of research effort to get to the bottom of fairy tales. Because, you see, I really don't want to be one of those people who live by the saying:
That was never my principle. Rather, it always took me a great deal of effort to get to the heart of a fairy tale, sometimes in all possible regions of research. And so I have to say: even if I were even more tired than I am today, it would give me the greatest pleasure to be able to make you happy with an interpretation, an explanation of the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians. But I have never studied it and therefore have nothing to say about it. And so I ask you to wait until an opportunity presents itself in this or in a next life, after the matter has been researched.
There doesn't seem to be much homeopathy in the question today! First, yes, that's right, after all, there is not much to be connected or connected to it, other than what is present in any other human ability. It is quite reasonable to assume, although I can only express this with caution here because it is a question that I have not yet dealt with in a truly research-based way, but it is reasonable to assume that this instinctive presence of an absolute sense of tone consciousness in a number of people – I believe in fewer people than one would usually think – is based on some peculiarity of the etheric or astral body, which is then somehow reflected in the physical body. But it would be necessary to conduct very specific research. It is only very likely to me that this absolute sound consciousness is based on the fact that a very specific configuration of the three semi-circular canals is also present in this case. So that is probable – but as I said, I would only like to express myself with caution here – this organ, which has many functions, including, among other things, an organ of equilibrium for certain equilibrium conditions, that this organ probably also has something to do with an absolute sense of tone. Now to what was said in connection with Dr. Steiner's declamation. I can assure you, the question is indeed asked, but not actually asked in such a way that one finds out something that the questioner actually wants when he asks: What should be taught in singing, how should it be taught, so that what one has in mind in the spiritual-scientific sense by good vocal art can be achieved as quickly as possible? – Yes, I must say that, in my feeling, there is a great deal of philistinism mixed up in this question. Because it is true that one must seriously admit that spiritual science has a certain influence on people, that it has a certain effect on people and that people are not remodeled by spiritual science – they are not worked on from the outside — but that they come into a position to bring out of themselves certain forces that have so far remained latent in the development of humanity and to reveal a deeper human nature through them. In this way the most diverse branches of human spiritual life will also be further developed. And among the many things that could be said about such a question, one thing can be said by pointing out that, above all, we should get away from talking about all the many methods of teaching singing. I do not like to say this at all, because the localities where these methods are hatched are so terribly populated that one does not know where to stop when expressing one's opinion about present-day methods of teaching singing! I do not want to dwell on this, but I would like to draw attention to one thing. I believe that one must begin to understand what it means not to work according to a method, not to ask: How must this and that be placed, how must breathing be arranged, how must the many preparations be made before one even gets around to singing anything? Most of today's methods are actually preparation methods, methods of attitudes, methods of breathing and so on. One must disregard all of this, which actually amounts to regarding the human organism a bit like a machine and oiling it in the right way, bringing the wheels to the right axis height and the like. It is a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but you get what I mean. Instead of this, one should see that especially in art lessons an enormous amount depends on the personal, imponderable relationship between teacher and pupil, and one should come to associate with it an idea of what it means to actually lift one's consciousness out of the larynx and everything that produces the sound, and to be more consciously in touch with the surrounding air, to sing more with the environment of the larynx than with the larynx itself. I know that many people today cannot yet connect with what is said, but one must just gain these concepts. More emphasis must be placed on how one experiences, I might say, listening back, by singing but hearing, by learning to listen to oneself, but in such a way that one does not do something while listening, as if one were walking and constantly stepping on one's feet; that would, of course, disturb the singing. So when you come to live less in the physiological and more in the artistic as such, and when the teaching also proceeds more in the intervention of the artistic, then you will come upon the path to which the questioner may have been pointed. However, I do believe that a pedagogy such as we cultivate through the Waldorf School will also gradually achieve success for art and singing lessons if we are given the external means to do so. What Mr. Baumann meant yesterday with regard to the Waldorf School is also present in eurythmy and in singing, in the musical element. If it is not yet possible to do with the musical and the vocal as it should be according to his ideal, it is truly not due to our education, not at all to our education, at least not to the education of our teachers , but rather it is more a matter of the education of those who, from completely different backgrounds, could perhaps provide appropriately large rooms in which musical instruments can also be properly accommodated, and well-ventilated rooms for eurythmy and the like. I would like to make a point of mentioning this. And I believe that what could already be achieved in Waldorf schools today, including in the field of music and eurythmy teaching, could be quite different if we only had to deal with the pedagogy of our teachers and not with the pedagogy of other things that are necessary when a school is to be founded. I was asked today – I don't know if the gentleman is here – whether he has a feeling that schools should also be founded in other places. I said that you just have to start at the beginning. If you have money, then we'll talk further! Well, that is perhaps also something that hits the nail on the head. Or did you mean it differently? I don't want to ascribe to you, Mr. Baumann, that you couldn't have meant it differently.
Dr. Steiner: Perhaps it would be a disappointment if I left it out altogether: Can a woman also work as a creator for a male voice? Since I have already said that it essentially depends on the personal imponderable, I would naturally like to extend this to answering this question, and I do believe that under certain circumstances this could even be a very favorable relationship, that this man could even learn a great deal, much more than if he were to be taught by a man – especially if the woman is still beautiful or otherwise intact! |