The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us on this day in particular, turn our hearts with special devotion to those who are without on the scene of action, and who have to devote their lives and souls to the great task of the age; and let us say:

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the Earth-men committed to your care,
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may radiate helpfully
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And for those who have already passed through the portal of death in consequence of the severe duties demanded of them in these times, we will repeat the same words in a slightly altered form:

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the sphere-men committed to your care,
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may radiate helpfully
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And may that Spirit Whom we seek in our spiritual strivings, the Spirit who went through the Mystery of Golgotha for the sake of the freedom and progress of humanity, the Spirit Whom we must specially bear in mind to-day, may He be with you in your severe tasks.

Let us call to mind the decree ringing forth from the depths of the Mystery of the Earth's evolution.

‘Revelation of the Divine in the heights of existence and peace to men on earth who are permeated by good will.’ And as Christmas Eve approaches, we must (this year in particular) ask ourselves: ‘What are the feelings that unite us with this saying and its deep cosmic meaning?’ That deep cosmic meaning in which countless men feel the word ‘peace’ resounding, at a time when peace keeps away from a very large part of our earth. How should we think of these Christmas words at such a time?

There is one thought, which, in connection with this verdict, sounding through the world, must concern us far more deeply at this present epoch than at any other time—one thought. Nations are facing each other in enmity. Much blood has saturated our earth. We see and feel countless dead around us at this time. The atmosphere of sensation and feeling around us is interwoven with infinite sorrow. Hate and aversion are heard murmuring through the spiritual realm and might easily testify how very far removed men still are in our day from that love which He wishes to announce Whose birth is celebrated on Christmas Eve. One thought, however, arises: we think how opponents can face each other, enemy face enemy, how men can mutually bring death to one another and how they can all pass through the same Gate of Death with the thought of Christ Jesus, the Divine Light-Bringer. We recall how, in the whole earth, over which war, suffering and discord are spread abroad, these men can still be one at heart, however greatly they may otherwise be disunited, who in the depths of their hearts are united in their connection with Him Who entered the world on the day we commemorate at Christmas. We see how through all enmity, aversion and hatred, one and the same feeling may everywhere penetrate the human soul at this time: out of the blood and hatred may spring the thought of an inner union with One, with Him Who has united the hearts through something higher than anything which can ever separate mankind on earth. Thus the thought of Christ Jesus is a thought of immeasurable depth of feeling, a thought of infinite greatness uniting mankind, however disunited it may be as regards all that is going on in the world. If we grasp the thought in this way, we shall want to comprehend it still more deeply at the present time. We shall feel how much there is that can become strong and powerful within human evolution if connected with this thought—this thought which must develop in order that many things may be acquired by human hearts and souls in a different way from the present tragic method of learning them.

That He may strengthen us,
That He may invigorate us,

That He may teach us all over the earth really to experience in the truest sense of the words the utterance of the Christmas Eve saying, which transcends all that separates men from one another. This it is which he who really feels himself united with Christ Jesus solemnly vows anew at Christmas time.

There is a tradition in the history of Christianity which repeatedly appears in later times and for centuries became a custom in certain Christian regions. In olden times representations of the Christian Mysteries were organised chiefly by the Christian Churches for believers in many different regions. And in the remotest times these representations began by reading, occasionally even by enacting, the story of Creation as it occurs at the beginning of the Bible. There was first shown just at Christmas time, how the Cosmic Word sounded forth from the depths of the Cosmos and how out of the Cosmic Word Creation gradually arose: how Lucifer appeared to man, and how men thereby began their earth-existence in a manner different from what was originally destined for them before the approach of Lucifer. The entire story of the temptation of Adam and Eve was brought forward, and it was then shown how man was, as it were, embodied in the Old Testament history. Then as time went on there was added that which was presented in more or less detail in the performances which evolved during the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries in the countries of Central Europe (of which we have just seen one small example). Very little now remains of the grand thought which united the beginning of the Old Testament at this Christmas Eve festival with the secret history of the Mystery of Golgotha. Only this one thing remains, that in our calendar, before the actual Christmas Day comes the day of Adam and Eve. This has its origin in the same thought. But in olden times, for those who through deeper thinking, through deeper feeling, or through a deeper knowledge, were to grasp the Mystery of Christmas and the Mystery of Golgotha, with the help of their teachers, there was exhibited also again and again a great comprehensive thought: the thought of the Origin of the Cross. The God Who is introduced to man in the Old Testament gives to man, as represented by Adam and Eve, this commandment: ‘Ye may eat of all the fruits of the garden, but not of the tree—not of the fruits which grow on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ Because they did eat of this they were driven from the original scene of action of their being.

But the tree—as was shown in many different ways—came by some means into the line of generations, into the original family from which proceeded the bodily covering of Christ Jesus. And it so came about that (as was shown at certain times) when Adam, the man of sin, was buried, there grew out of his grave the tree which had been removed from Paradise. Thus the following thoughts are aroused: Adam rests in his grave: the man who was led astray by Lucifer and passed through sin, rests in his grave. He has united himself with the Earth-body. But from his grave sprouts the tree which can now grow out of the earth, with which Adam's body is united. The wood of this tree descends to the generations to which Abraham and David belong. And from the wood of this tree, which stood in Paradise and which grew forth from Adam's grave, was made the Cross upon which Christ Jesus hung.

That is the thought which again and again was made clear by their teachers to those who had to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and its secrets from a deeper point of view. A deep meaning lies in the fact that in olden times profound thoughts were expressed in such pictures. And even at the present day this is still the case, as we shall presently see.

We have made ourselves acquainted with the thought of the Mystery of Golgotha which reveals to us that the Being Who passed through the body of Jesus has poured out over the Earth and into the Earth's aura what He was able to bring to the Earth. That which the Christ brought to the Earth is since united with the whole body of the Earth. The Earth has become quite different since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Earth-aura there lives what the Christ brought out of the heavenly heights to the Earth. If we unite this spiritually with that old picture of the tree, it shows us the whole connection from another point of view. The Luciferic principle drew into man as he began his earthly career. Man as he now is belongs to the Earth, through his union with the Luciferic principle. He forms part of the Earth. And when we lay his body in the earth, this body is not merely that which anatomy sees, but is at the same time the outer mould of what man is in his inner being within his earthly nature. Spiritual Science makes it quite clear to us that what goes through the gates of death into the spiritual worlds is not the only part of man's being, but that man through his whole activity, through his deeds, is united with the Earth. He is really united with the Earth as are those events which the geologists, mineralogists and zoologists, connect with the Earth. We might say that that which binds man to the Earth is at first concealed from the human individuality on going through the gates of death. But we surrender our external form in some manner to the Earth. It enters the Earth-body. It carries in itself the imprint of what the Earth has become through Lucifer's entering the Earth evolution. That which man accomplishes on the Earth bears the Luciferic principle in it. Man brings this Luciferic principle into the Earth-aura. There springs forth and blossoms from man's deeds and activities not only that which was originally intended for man but that which has mingled with the Luciferic principle. This is in the Earth-aura. And when we now see on the grave of the man Adam led away by Lucifer, that tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which through the Luciferic temptation has become different from what it originally was, we then see everything that man has become through forsaking his original state, when he submitted to the Luciferic temptation and brought something into the Earth's evolution not previously determined. We see the tree grow out of what the physical body is for the Earth, that which has been stamped in its Earth form, and causes man to appear in a lower sphere on the Earth than the one originally destined for him, which would have been his if he had not succumbed to Lucifer. There grows out of the whole Earth existence of man something which has entered human evolution through the Luciferic temptation. While we seek knowledge, we seek it in another way than that originally destined for us. That however allows us to recognise that what grows out of our earthly deeds is different from what it would have been according to the original Divine decree. We form an earth existence other than the one laid down by the original Divine Will. We mingle something else with it; something else, concerning which we must form quite definite conceptions if we want to understand it.

We must form such ideas as these, if we wish to understand correctly. We must say to ourselves as follows: I am placed in the Earth evolution. What I give to the Earth evolution through my deeds bears fruit. It bears the fruit of knowledge which comes to me through my participation in the knowledge of good and evil on the Earth. This knowledge lives on in the evolution of the Earth and is present therein. When, however, I behold this knowledge it becomes in me something different from what it would have been originally, it becomes something which I must alter if the Earth's goal and task are to be reached. I see something grow out of my Earth deeds which must become different. The tree grows up, the tree which becomes the Cross of earth existence. It becomes something to which man must acquire a new relation, for the old relation does no more than allow the tree to grow.

The tree of the Cross, that Cross that grows out of the Luciferically tainted Earth evolution, springs up out of Adam's grave, out of the man-nature which Adam acquired after the fall. The tree of knowledge must become the stem of the Cross because man must unite himself anew with the correctly recognised tree of knowledge as it now is in order to reach the Earth's goal and task.

Let us now ask—and here we touch a significant Mystery of Spiritual Science: How does the case stand with those principles which we have learnt to recognise as the principles of human nature? Now we all know that the highest member of human nature is the Ego. We learn to utter ‘I’ at a definite time of our childhood. We enter into relation with the Ego from the time to which in later years memory carries us back. This we know through various lectures and books upon Spiritual Science. Up to that time the Ego worked formatively upon us, up to the moment when we have a conscious relation to our Ego. The Ego is present in our childhood, it works within us, but at first only builds up our physical body. It first creates the super-sensible forces in the spiritual world. After passing through conception and birth, it still works for a time—lasting for some years—on our body, until that becomes an instrument capable of consciously grasping the Ego. A deep mystery is connected with this entry of the Ego into the human bodily nature. We ask a man we meet how old he is, and he gives as his age the years which have passed since his birth. As has been said, we here touch a certain mystery of Spiritual Science that will become ever clearer and clearer in the course of the near future, but to which I shall now merely refer. What a man gives as his age at a definite time of his life, refers only to his physical body. All he tells us is that his physical body has been so many years evolving since his birth. The Ego takes no part in this evolution of the physical body but remains stationary. It is a Mystery difficult to grasp, that the Ego, from the time to which our memory carries us back, really remains stationary: it does not change with the body, but stands still. We have it always before us, because it reflects back to us our experiences. The Ego does not share our Earth journey. Only when we pass through the gates of death we have to travel back again to our birth along the path we call Kamaloka in order to meet our Ego again and take it on our further journey. Thus the Ego remains behind. The body goes forward through the years. This is difficult to understand because we cannot grasp the fact that something remains stationary in time, while time itself progresses. But this is actually the case. The Ego remains stationary, because it does not unite with what comes to man from the Earth-existence, but remains connected with those forces which we call our own in the spiritual world. There the Ego remains; it remains practically in the form in which it was bestowed on us by the Spirits of Form. The Ego is retained in the spiritual world. It must remain there, otherwise we could never, as man, fulfil our original task on Earth and attain the goal of our Earth-evolution. That which man here on Earth has undergone through his

Adam-nature, of which he left an imprint in the grave when he died in Adam, that belongs to the physical body, etheric and astral body and comes from these. The Ego waits; it waits with all that belongs to it the whole time man remains on Earth, ever looking forward to the further evolution of man, beholding how man recapitulates when he has passed through the gates of death, and retraces his path. This implies that as regards our Ego we remain in a certain respect behind in the spiritual world. Man will have to become conscious of this, and humanity can only become conscious of it because at a certain time the Christ descended from those worlds to which mankind belongs, out of the spiritual worlds Christ descended, and in the body of Jesus prepared, in the twofold manner we already know, that which had to serve Him as a body on Earth.

When we understand ourselves aright, we continually look back through our whole Earth life to our childhood. There, in our childhood, precisely the spiritual part of us has remained behind. And humanity should be educated to look back on that to which the spirit from the heights can say: ‘Suffer the little children to come to Me!’ Not the man who is bound to the Earth, but the little child. Humanity should be educated to this, for the Feast of Christmas has been given to it, that Feast which has been added to the Mystery of Golgotha, which need otherwise only have been bestowed on humanity as regards the three last years of the Christ life, when the Christ was in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It shows how Christ prepared for Himself this human body in childhood. This is what should underlie our feelings at Christmas: the knowledge of how man, through what remains behind in heavenly heights during his years of growth, has really always been united with what is now coming. In the figure of the Child man should be reminded of the Human-Divine, which he left behind in descending to Earth, but which has now again come to him. Man should be reminded by the Child of that which has again brought his child-nature to him. This was no easy task, but in the very way in which this Festival of the Cosmic Child, this Christmas Festival, was developed in Central Europe, we see the wonderful, active, sustaining force within it.

What we have seen to-day is only one of many Nativity Plays. There have remained from olden times a number of so-called Paradise Plays which were produced at Christmas and in which the story of Creation is enacted. In connection with the representation of to-day, which is merely a pastoral play, there has also remained behind the Play of the Three Kings offering their gifts. A great deal of this was recorded in numerous plays which for the most part have now disappeared.

About the middle of the eighteenth century the time begins in which they disappear in country districts. But it is wonderful to trace their existence. In West Hungary, about 1850, Karl Julius Schröer, made a collection of Christmas Plays such as these in the neighbourhood of Pressburg. Other people made similar collections in other places. But what Schröer then discovered of the customs connected with the performance of these plays may sink deeply into our hearts. These plays were there in manuscript in certain families of the villages and were regarded as something especially sacred. With the approach of October preparations were always begun to perform this play at Christmas before the people of the place. The well- behaved youths and maidens were sought out and during this time of preparation they ceased to drink wine or alcohol. They might no longer romp and wrestle on Sundays. They had really to lead what is called a holy life. And thus a feeling prevailed that a certain moral tone of the soul was necessary in those who devoted themselves at Christmas to the performance of such plays, for they could not be performed in the quite worldly atmosphere. They were performed with all the simplicity of the villagers, but profound seriousness prevailed in the entire performance. In all the plays collected by Schröer and earlier by Weinhold and others in many different regions, there is everywhere this deep earnestness with which the Christmas Mystery was approached. But this was not always so. We need only go back two centuries further to find something else which strikes us in the highest degree as peculiar. The very manner in which these Christmas plays became part of the life of the central European villages in which they arose and gradually evolved, shows us how powerfully the Christmas thought worked there. It was not immediately taken up in the manner just described; the people did not always approach it with holy awe, with deep earnestness, with a living feeling of the significance of the occurrence.

In many regions it was begun by erecting a manger before the side altar of some church. This was in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; but it goes back to still earlier times. A manger was erected, a stall with an ox and an ass, the Child and two figures representing Joseph and Mary. Thus at first it was attempted with simple art; later an attempt was made to bring more life into it, but on the spiritual side. That is, priests took part; one priest represented Joseph and another Mary. In earlier times they spoke their parts in the Latin tongue, for in the old churches great stress was laid on this—it was considered very important that the spectators should understand as little as possible of the matter and should only behold the external acting. But this could no longer continue to please, for there were among the spectators those who wanted to understand something of what was being enacted before them. Gradually it became customary to recite certain parts in the dialect used in the district. Finally the wish arose in people to participate, to take part in the experiences themselves. But the thing was still quite strange to them. We must remember that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was not as yet the knowledge of the Holy Mysteries, of the Mystery of Christmas, for instance, which we to-day regard as a matter of course. We must remember that although the people year in and year out attended Mass, and at Christmas the Midnight Mass, they did not possess the Bible, which was only there for the priests to read; they were only acquainted with a few extracts from the Holy Scripture. And it was at first really to acquaint them with what had once occurred that these things were dramatised in this fashion for them by the priests. The people first learnt to know of them in this way.

Something must now be said which I must ask you not to misunderstand, but it may be brought forward because it expresses purely historical truth. It was not that the participation in the Christmas plays proceeded from some mysterious influence or anything of that nature; what attracted the people was rather the desire to take part in what was presented before them and to draw nearer to it. At last they were permitted to share in it. Things had to be made more comprehensible to the laity. And this clearer understanding progressed step by step. At first the people understood absolutely nothing about the child lying in the manger. They had never seen such a thing as a child in a manger. Ear her when they were not allowed to understand anything, they accepted it: but now they wanted to share in it, it had to be made comprehensible to them. And so a cradle was brought and as the people passed, each one took part by rocking the child for a moment. Thus similar details were developed in which they took part. Indeed there were even districts in which all was quite serious at first, but when the child was brought, they made a tremendous uproar, everyone screaming and showing by dancing and shouting the pleasure they felt in the birth of the child. It was then received in a mood that felt a passion for movement and a desire to experience the story. But in this story lay something so great and mighty that, out of this quite profane feeling there gradually evolved that holy awe of which I have already spoken. The subject itself impressed its holiness on a performance which could not at first have been called in the least holy. Precisely in the Middle Ages the holy story of Christmas had first to conquer mankind. And it conquered the people to such an extent that in the performance of their plays, they desired to prepare their lives with this moral intensity.

What was it that thus overcame the feelings, the soul of man? It was the sight of the Child, of that which remains holy in man whilst his other three bodies unite with the Earth evolution. Even though in some districts at different times the story of Bethlehem took on grotesque forms, yet it lay in human nature to evolve this holy regard for the child-nature, which is connected with what entered into the development of Christianity from the very beginning. And that is the consciousness of the necessity of a reunion of what remains stationary in man when he commences his Earth evolution, with what has connected itself with Earth-man, so that man gives over to the Earth the wood from which the cross must be made with which man has to form the new union.

In the more remote times of Christian development in Central Europe, nothing but the conception of Easter was popularised, and only in the manner described was the conception of Christmas gradually developed. For what appears in ‘Heliand,’ for instance, was composed by various individuals, but never became popular.

The observance of Christmas grew into a popular custom as described, and it shows in a manner really startling how man acquired the thought of the union with the child-nature, that pure and noble childlike character that appeared in a new form in the Jesus-Child. When we so grasp the power of this thought that it lives in the soul as the only conception in our existence capable of uniting all men, then we have the true Christian conception. This Christ-Thought becomes mighty in us, it becomes something which must grow strong within us if the further Earth evolution is to proceed aright. Let us remember here how far removed man is in his present Earth-existence from what is really contained in the depths of the Christ-Thought.

A book by Ernst Haeckel has recently appeared called Thoughts about Life, Death, Immortality and Religion, in Connection with the World-War. Now a book by Ernst Haeckel certainly springs from a deep love of truth, certainly the deepest truth is sought for in it. The following may give some idea of what the book is intended to convey. It sets out to indicate what now transpires on the Earth, how the nations are at war with each other, living in hate, how countless deaths take place every day. All these thoughts which obtrude so painfully on mankind are mentioned by Haeckel, but naturally with the underlying thought of considering the world from his own point of view. We have said that Haeckel may, even by Spiritual Science, be considered a profound investigator. His point of view may indeed lead to other results, but leads to what can be observed in the newer phases of Haeckel's evolution. Now Haeckel forms thoughts on the world-war. He too remarks how much blood is flowing, how greatly we are encompassed by death. And he asks: ‘Can the thoughts of religion endure by the side of this? Can one anyhow believe (he asks) that some wise Providence—a kindly God—rules the world, when one sees so many dying every day through mere chance (so he says)? They do not perish from any cause attributable to a wise cosmic ordering, but through the accident of meeting a possible shell. Have these thoughts of the wisdom of Providence any meaning in the face of this? Must not just such events as these prove that man is nothing more than what external materialistic history of evolution declares and that all earth existence is fundamentally directed not by a wise Providence but by chance? In the face of this, can there be any other thought than that of resignation (continues Haeckel), of saying: ‘We give up our bodies and pass out into the thought of the cosmic all?’ But if one questions further, (though Haeckel does not put the question), if this ‘all’ is nothing but the play of endless atoms, has the life of man any meaning in earth-existence? As said above, Haeckel does not pursue the question, but in his Christmas book he gives the answer: ‘These very events which touch us so painfully show us that we have no right to believe that a good Providence or wise cosmic ruling or anything of the kind moves and lives in the whole world. So we must be resigned—we must put up with things as they are!’

And this is a Christmas book! A book nobly and honourably planned. But this book is based on the remarkable prejudice that it is useless to seek for a meaning to the earth. That it is denied to humanity to seek in a spiritual way for a meaning!

If we only observe the external course of events we do not see this meaning. Then it is as Haeckel says. And at that it has to remain, that is, that this life has no meaning! That is his opinion. A purpose may not be sought. But perhaps someone else may say: The events now taking place show us, for the very reason that, if we look at them externally and point only to the fact that numberless bullets are ending the lives of men to-day, they appear without purpose—those very events show us that we must seek more deeply to find the purpose. We must not simply seek a purpose in that which happens on the Earth alone, when these human souls forsake the body, but we must investigate the life that now begins for them when they pass through the gate of death. In short, another man may say: ‘Just because no meaning can be found in the external, it must be sought elsewhere, in the super-sensible.’ Is that anything else than to take the same thought into another—quite different—domain? Haeckel's science may lead those who think as he does to-day to deny all meaning to Earth-existence. It may seem to prove, from what happens so painfully to-day, that the Earth-life as such has no meaning. But if we grasp it in our way—as we have often done before—then this very same science becomes a starting point for showing what deep and mighty purpose can be discovered by us in the world phenomena. For this, however, there must be the spiritual active in the world; we must be able to unite ourselves with the spiritual. For man in the sphere of erudition does not yet understand how to let that power work on him which has so wonderfully conquered the hearts and souls that on beholding the Christmas Mystery, out of a profane comprehension, there has arisen a holy understanding. Because the learned cannot yet grasp this and cannot yet unite the Christ-Impulse with what they see in the external world, it is impossible for them to find a real true meaning in the Earth. And so we must say: The Science of which man is so proud to-day—and rightly so—with all its immense progress is not in itself in a position to lead man to any satisfactory philosophy. It can just as easily lead to a lack of sense and meaning as to a meaning for the Earth, just as in any other domain. Let us consider science in the later centuries, especially in the nineteenth and up to the present day—evolving so proudly all its wonderful laws, and let us look at what surrounds us to-day. It has all been produced by science. We no longer burn, as Goethe did, a night-light. We burn something else and illumine our rooms in a very different fashion. All that possesses our souls to-day, as the result of our science has arisen through the immense progress of which man is so proud, so justly proud. But how does this science work? It works beneficially when man evolves what is good. But to-day, just through its very perfection, it produces invincible instruments of murder. Its progress serves the cause of destruction as well as that of construction. Just as on the one side that science of which Haeckel is a follower may lead either to sense and meaning or to nonsense and lack of meaning, so, in spite of its greatness, it may serve both destruction and construction. And if it depended on science alone what was produced, then, from the same sources from which it constructs, science would bring forth ever more and more fearful instruments of destruction. Science itself has no direct impulse to bring humanity forward! If this could be realised, science would then, and then only, be valued in the right way. We should then know that in the evolution of man there must be something more than man can reach by means of science.

What is this science of ours? In reality none other than the tree growing out of Adam's grave; and the time is drawing near when man will recognise this. The time will come when man will know that this tree must become the wood which is the Cross of humanity and which can only become a blessing when on it is crucified and properly united with it, that which lies on the further side of death, yet fives already here in man. That it is to which we look up in the Holy Christmas Eve, if we feel this Mystery of the sacred Festival aright—and that is what can be represented in childlike fashion, and yet is the cloak of the greatest Mysteries. Is it not really wonderful that in this simple way it could be brought home to people that something had appeared which, though it cannot extend beyond childhood, yet governs a man during his whole Earth- life? It is related to that to which man, as a super-sensible being, belongs. Is it not wonderful that this, which is in the highest degree invisible and super-sensible, could approach so near to those simple human souls through simple pictures such as these?

Indeed those who are learned will also have to follow the same path as those simple souls. There was even a time when the Child was not represented in the cradle nor in the manger, but when the sleeping child was placed upon the Cross! The Child sleeping on the Cross! A wonderful, profound picture, which expresses the whole thought I wished to lay before your souls to-day.

Cannot this thought in reality be very simply stated? Indeed it can! Let us just seek the origin of those impulses which to-day oppose each other so terribly in the world. Whence do they originate? Whence originates all that to-day is in such bitter conflict, all that makes life so difficult for humanity? It all originates in what we become in the world after the time of our earliest recollection. Let us go back beyond that time, let us go right back to the point when we are called the little children who may enter the kingdom of heaven. We do not find it then, there was then nothing in the human soul of what to-day is strife and hatred. In this simple way the thought can be expressed and to-day we must visualise spiritually that there is in the human soul an original condition rising above all human strife and disharmony.

We have often spoken of the old Mysteries, which were intended to awaken in the nature of man that which allowed him to perceive the super-sensible; and we have said that the Mystery of Golgotha represents on the stage of history clearly for all mankind, the story of the super-sensible Mystery. Now that which unites us with the true Christ-Thought is within us, it is really in us—to enable us to have moments in our life (this is to be taken literally not symbolically) moments when, in spite of everything we may be in the external world, we can yet make that which we have received as children alive within us, moments in which we behold man in his development between birth and death, and can feel the child-nature in ourselves.

In my public lecture on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, I might have added a few words more—perhaps they might not have been thoroughly understood then, they would, however, have explained many things which dwelt in this particularly devout person. I might have said why he became such a very special person; it was because, in spite of his age, he retained more than most people of the child-nature. There is more of the child-nature in such men than in others. Men like these, men who retain more of their child-nature, keep their youth and do not grow old as do others. This is really the secret of many great men, that they can in a sense remain children—speaking relatively, of course, for they have had to lead the life of men.

The Christmas Mystery appeals to the child-nature within us. It points us to the vision of the Divine Child that is destined to take up the Christ—and to which we look up as to something over which the Christ, Who went through Golgotha for the salvation of the Earth, already hovers.

Let us be conscious of this when we give over the imprint of our higher man, our physical body, to the Earth. This is not a mere physical event, for something spiritual takes place. But this spiritual event only takes place aright because the Christ-Being, by going through the Mystery of Golgotha, has flowed into the aura of the Earth. We do not behold the entire Earth in its completeness unless we visualise also the Christ, Who, since the Mystery of Golgotha, is united with it. We may pass Him by, as we pass by anything super-sensible if we are merely equipped in a materialistic sense; but we cannot pass Him by if the Earth is really to have for us a true and actual purpose. Everything rests upon our being able to awaken in ourselves that which opens our gaze to the spiritual world.

Let us make this Christmas Festival what it should be to us, a Festival which not merely serves the past—but also the future; that future which is gradually to bring forth the birth of the spiritual life for the whole of humanity. We must unite ourselves with the prophetic feeling, with the prophetic premonition, that such a birth of the spiritual life in man must be accomplished, that a mighty Christmas must work to influence the future of humanity, a bringing to birth of that which in the thoughts of man gives a meaning to the Earth, that meaning which became the objective of the Earth when the Christ-Being united Himself with the Earth-aura, through the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us meditate at Christmas on the thought how from the depths of darkness light must enter human evolution. The old light of the spiritual life which was gradually dying out before Golgotha had to pass away and has now to arise anew, it must since Golgotha be born again through the consciousness in the human soul that this soul of man is connected with what the Christ had become to the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha.

When more and more men arise who can thus grasp Christmas in the sense of Spiritual Science, it will become a force in the hearts and souls of men which has a meaning for all times, whether in such times as men give themselves over to feelings of happiness, or when they must feel sorrow and pain such as we feel to-day, when we think of the great misery of our time.

Concerning the vision of the spiritual which gives meaning to the Earth, it has been expressed in beautiful words which I will put before you to-day: (Here follows a rough translation):—

That which gives mine eyes the power
To cause deformity to disappear,
To turn dark nights to radiant suns of brightness,
To turn disorder into order, and decay to life;—
Life, which through the ages,
Weaves invisibly in space,
Leading me on to th' eternal sources
Of the Beautiful, the True, the Good.
The source of all Delight,
In which immersed, my strivings are but vain.
Life it is, which since in Urania's eyes I gazed,
The deep, the clear, the blue—pure flames of light—
I have silently perceived and looked upon.
Since then I see those eyes in deeps profound,
The only permanent things in my existence,
They live on in me, part of my life,
And see through my beholding.

And in another small poem:—

Nothing is but God, and God is naught but Life.
Thou knowest this, as I myself know too,
And yet our knowing would ne'er have power to be,
Unless t'were knowledge of the Life of God.
How fain would I devote myself to this!
But where shall it be found; if into some knowledge it doth flow,
Forthwith it is transformed into a semblance.
Commingled with Him, surrounded by His sheath,
When thou dost wake the true sheath to behold, It is thy Self!
Let all that perishable is, decay.
Henceforth let God alone dwell in thy strivings,
Learn to discern what beyond all striving yet lives on;
Then will the Sheath itself become perceptible,
And unveiled be the Life Divine.

It is true men do not always know how to understand those who lead them to a vision of the spiritual which gives a meaning to the Earth. The materialists are not alone in this. Others, who believe themselves to be no materialists because they continually repeat, ‘God, God,’ or ‘Lord, Lord,’ too often do not know what to make of these guides to the spiritual. For what could one make of a man who says:

‘Learn to discern what beyond all striving yet lives on;
Then will the sheath itself become perceptible,
And unveiled be the Life Divine.’

Who sees Divine Life in everything? He might be reproached with holding the world away from him, with denying its existence. Such a man might be accused of denying the existence of the world. His contemporaries accused him of denying God, of being an atheist, and drove him away from the High School on that account. For the words I have just quoted were written by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He is a case in point. When there lives on in a human soul all through his earthly life that which dwells as an impulse from the Mystery of Golgotha and the notes of which may be heard in the Christmas Mystery, a way is then opened in which we can find that consciousness in which our own ego flows in union with the Earth-Ego. For the Earth-Ego is the Christ. In this way something is developed in man which must become greater and greater if the Earth is to achieve that evolution for which it was destined from the beginning of all things.

And so from the spirit of our Spiritual Science we have to-day tried to transform the Christmas thought into an impulse; and while looking up to it from that which is now going on around us, we shall try not to behold a want of purpose in the Earth-evolution, but rather in the midst of sorrow and pain, even in strife and hatred, to see something which finally helps man a step forward.

More important than the search for the causes of what happens to-day is this: that we should turn our gaze to the possible effects, to those effects which we must conceive as bringing healing to mankind.

That nation or people will do the right thing which is able to fashion something healing for mankind in the future, from what springs up out of the blood- saturated Earth. But this healing can only come about when man finds his way to the spiritual worlds: when he does not forget that not only a transitory but an eternal Christmas exists, an everlasting bringing to birth of the Divine Spiritual in the physical Earth-man.

Especially to-day let us retain the holiness of this thought in our souls, and keep it there, even beyond the Christmas season, during the time which can be for us in its external course, a symbol of the evolution of light. Darkness, the most intense Earth-darkness prevails at this time of the year. But we know that when the Earth lives m the deepest outer darkness, the Earth-soul experiences its light, its greatest time of growth begins.

The spiritual time of awakening coincides with Christmas and with this spiritual awakening should be united the thought of the spiritual awakening of the earth-evolution through Christ Jesus. For this reason the Christmas Festival was placed just at this particular time.

In this cosmic and at the same time earthly and moral sense let us fill our souls with the thoughts of Christmas and then, strengthened and invigorated with this moral thought, let us, as far as we can, turn our gaze on everything around us, desiring what is right for the progress of events and especially as regards the present occurrences. And as we begin at once to make active within us the strength we have been able to acquire from this Christmas Festival, let us conclude once more by turning to the Guardian Spirit of those who have to take a difficult part in the great events of the times.

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the earth-men committed to your charge,
That, united with your power,
Our prayers may helpfully irradiate
The souls they lovingly seek.

And for those who have already passed through the gates of death while fulfilling the severe tasks given to man as a result of the great demands of our present time, let us repeat those words again in a slightly altered form:

Spirits of their souls, active Guardians,
May your vibrations carry
The imploring love of our souls
To the sphere-men committed to your charge,
That united with your power,
Our prayers may helpfully irradiate
The souls they lovingly seek.

And may the Spirit Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, that Spirit Who, for the progress and salvation of the Earth, has made Himself known in the Mystery of Christmas, which men will gradually learn to understand better and better, may He be with you in the severe tasks that he before you.

Today—since Dr. Trapesnikoff has ordered them—we will show you some pictures arranged from a different point of view than in our former lectures; more from the point of view of subject-matter. The pictures today will relate especially to the birth of Christ Jesus, the Adoration by the Shepherds and by the Three Wise Men, and finally the Flight into Egypt. Comprising an evolution through several centuries, they will bring before our souls, from another aspect, that which is living in the Old Christmas Plays of which we have been speaking in the last lectures. We shall thus be concerned today, not in the first place with the artistic elements, as such, but with the treatment of a certain theme in the history of Art, and I will therefore speak not so much of the evolution of artistic principles, but draw your attention to some other points of view which may be of interest in relation to these pictures. You will, however, bear in mind the general lines of development of Christian Art, which we have described in the past lectures of this series. You will observe the same great trend of evolution, as we pass from the artistic representations of the early Christian centuries into the times of the Renaissance. First you will see the more typical representations of an early time. These, as we have seen, were still under the influence of Revelations from the Spiritual World. Less concerned with naturalistic expressions of form and color, they try to reproduce the spiritual Imaginations, revealed out of the Spiritual World. Thenceforward you will see this Christian Art evolve towards Naturalism, that is, towards a certain reproduction of that which may be called reality from the point of view of the physical plane. As we follow the evolution of this Art, the sacred personalities stand before us in a more and more human form.

We shall first show some pictures relating more especially to the Birth of Christ. Then we shall show the Adoration of the Child by the Shepherds; indeed, these two, to some extent, will go together. The next series of pictures will deal mainly with the story of the Three Wise Men of the East—the Magi. Here I beg you to observe how the two streams evolve: the stream of St. Luke's Gospel, as we may call it, and that of the Gospel of St. Matthew. They are the streams which take their start from the two Jesus Children. Artistically, too, we can recognise the difference. The Adoration by the Shepherds—all that is more or less related to this theme—could best be understood (understood, that is to say, by the inner feelings) under the influence of what remained from those Northern Mysteries whose center, as I told you, was in Denmark. This stream is connected with all that related to the Birth of Jesus—springing forth, as it were, with Jesus, out of the earthly evolution, out of the spiritual beings that are bound up with the life of Nature.

In the Adoration by the Magi, on the other hand—the mission of the Three Wise Men from the East—we always find a direct expression of the “Gnostic” stream. Under the influence of the “Star”—which means, something that is made known out of the Cosmos—the Wise Men draw near to the Christ Who heralds His approach and develops in the Zarathustra Jesus. In all that is connected with the Adoration by the Three Wise Men, we have, therefore the Gnostic stream: the consciousness that the Christ-Event was a cosmic one; that a fertilisation of the Earth had taken place out of the Cosmos.

Our friends have been kind enough to put up here a drawing of the Three Wise Men. The picture is taken from an old Gospel Book. We see them looking up in adoration, that is, in quest of spiritual knowledge, by striving upward with all their inner being, and looking up to the Star wherein the Spirit Who shall liberate the Earth draws near.

1. Three Wise Men.

It may truly be said that this stream, which finds expression in St. Matthew's Gospel, was less and less understood in the further course of centuries. True, it also came to life, as you know, in the Old Christmas Plays. But the appearance of the Three Wise Men of the East cannot really be understood with the same understanding, as the appearance of Jesus to the Shepherds according to St. Luke's Gospel. For the latter is a simple understanding of the heart, of inner feeling; while the understanding which we must bring to bear on all that is connected with the Wise Men from the East must needs be of a “Gnostic” character. All that is signified by the Wise Men “following the Star” will only come into the consciousness of humanity again when—not the Gnosis this time, it is true—but anthroposophical Spiritual Science gains acceptance.

Finally, we shall show some pictures of the Flight into Egypt. This, too, is connected with the “Gnostic” Revelation concerning Jesus Christ. We cannot speak of it at great length today; we may return to it another time.

To begin with, it is important here, again, to realise that there is a certain underlying composition in all that the Gospels contain. The composition is always important. We need only faithfully follow the Gospel narrative. The Flight into Egypt appears in direct connection with the Mission of the Three Wise Men. It happens, as it were, on the basis of what was first undertaken by the Three Wise Men. This bears witness to the fact that the Gospel is taking into account the connection with all that was related about Egypt in the Old Testament. Moses was learned in the Wisdom of the Egyptians. Now we are told in the Gospel that the Three Wise Men of the East came to the birthplace of Christ Jesus, led by the Star which is really the Star of Christ. But it goes on to relate that something now had to take place which did not entirely accord, as it were, with the course of the Star; something which was not in the consciousness of the Wise Men themselves—for so the Gospel explicitly tells us. Here we are shown one of those cases where the astrological determination, as it were, of certain great events has to be broken through. How precisely the astrological determination corresponds to what is known of the historic facts—you could see this from the instance which we spoke of recently. Our friends drew up the Horoscope for that point in the course of Time which was indicated as the day of Christ Jesus's Death.

But we see that the Jesus Child, in whom the Zarathustra Soul was living, had to be taken out of the domain of this Star. He was taken into Egypt, and from Egypt He was then led back again into the realm of the Star. In this is contained the whole Mystery of the ebbing away of that ancient stream of evolution which had grown atavistic in the Egyptian Gnosis. The new Revelation had to enter once more into a certain union with the Old in order that it might free itself consciously.

These are the underlying Mysteries, and though they are little recognised, none the less they lie inherent in the composition. I may take this opportunity to point out once more, how important it is to pay attention to the composition when we read the Gospels. For the text is frequently corrupt and can only be read in its true form by those who are able to read with the help, if I may say so, of the Occult Text. Notably in the translations, naturally enough, the text is often quite unintelligible. But in the composition (compare my Lecture Cycle held in Cassel on the Gospel of St. John)—in the composition there is something which will strike any reader immediately, if he reads the Gospel carefully.

One more remark I would like to make, before we go on to show the pictures. The materialistic consciousness of our age has altogether lost the point of view which would indicate such inner connections as underlie the revelation to the Three Wise Men. Whatever goes by the name of Astrology today has fallen into the hands of utter dilettanti, who carry on all kinds of nonsense and abuses with it. Few people nowadays are in true earnest when they speak of that relation of the Earth to the Cosmos which finds expression in actual physical relationships—in the constellations of the Stars. On the other hand, for the official Science of today Astrology of whatever kind is a mere antiquated superstition.

Nevertheless, the knowledge of these things did not decay or die out absolutely until the 18th century. Even as late as the 18th century people still spoke of something which is of extreme importance if we wish to understand the deep, deep truths that underlie the appearance of the Three Wise Men. In the 18th century, those who had still preserved some knowledge of the old Initiations spoke of the significance of the physical constellations. But not only so: they also spoke of the significance of invisible constellations. Even in the 18th century it was expressly stated in certain circles who possessed Initiation Knowledge. “There are also Stars which only the Initiate can see.” This is a true statement, and this, above all, must be taken into account if we wish to understand why it was that “Imaginations” appeared to the Shepherds, while “Stars” appeared to the Three Wise Men. Such is the indication: The Revelation came to the Shepherds inasmuch as they still had dreamlike clairvoyance in the old atavistic sense. But the Wise Men of the East had their knowledge through the ancient Science that had been handed down. Through this they knew of the relation between the Cosmos, the Heavens and the Earth. Through this they knew—could calculate, as it were—what was drawing near.

Hence we can see in the evolution of these pictures—and you will now have opportunity to observe it for yourselves—we see, with all the transition to Naturalism, the pictorial representations growing less and less adequate to the theme of the Wise Men. For the Wise Men or Magi, the most ancient and typical representations are the most fitting. For the real truth that is intended in this story is lifted right out of the earthly domain. On the other hand, the representations of Jesus grow the more intimate and tender, the more naturalistic they become. For in this case the naturalistic quality is fitting. All that goes out to meet the approaching Christ from the physical plane—all that is connected, therefore, with the life of Nature—is naturally best portrayed by such means.

We will now go on to the pictures, first of the Nativity itself and of the Adoration by the Shepherds, and then of the Three Wise Men or Kings.

2. The Nativity. (mosaic) (Palermo, Chiesa della Martorana.)

In these old compositions, as you see, everything is conceived in typical form—based on the typical representations of the ancient Myths which came over largely from the East. In a most natural way the typical representations of the Myth grew into the representations of the Christian theme. The Orpheus type, for instance, the type of the Good Shepherd, was handed down from earlier representations of Myth or Cult or Ritual, and taken to represent the new impulse, the Christ event; and so it was with many another theme and composition.

3. A Page of the Biblia Pauperum. 1st Edition. (15th century) The Nativity, etc. (German Woodcuts.)

These early Bibles generally showed parallel representations from the Old and New Testaments. They bore in mind that the New Testament is the fulfilment of the Old; this idea is brought out again and again in these “Bibles of the Poor.” The Nativity, which interests us mainly now, is shown in the middle of the page.

4. The Nativity, 11th Century. (Limburg Monestary.)

This is at Cologne. Beneath is the Flight into Egypt; the two are together in this slide. Apart from this one, we shall show the Flight into Egypt at the end of the lecture. Here you have a beautifully naive conception of the Nativity. You will feel the connection of it with what is given in the old Christmas Plays with which we are familiar. Though the latter belong, of course, to a later time, nevertheless they are from earlier Christmas Plays which are no longer extant.

5. The Flight into Egypt. (Evangeliar of the 12th century. Cathedral of Cologne.)

It is interesting to see, all around the picture, representations of what was cosmically connected with the Event, showing how they were still aware of the spiritual relationships. And now we will take the same motif as it appears in the work of Niccola Pisano.

6. Niccola Pisano. The Nativity. (Baptistery at Pisa.)

7. Giotto. The Nativity. (San Francesco. Assisi.)

You see how the representations of the theme are gradually passing into Naturalism.

8. della Robbia. The Nativity. (Hamburg. Altarpiece.) (National Museum. Florence.)

9. Meister Francke. The Nativity. (Hamburg.)

This picture is at Hamburg; I remember having seen it there myself not long ago.

10. Philippo Lippi. The Nativity. (Cathedral at Spoleto.)

You really see how in the course of time Naturalism takes hold of it more and more.

11. Piero della Francesca. The Nativity. (National Gallery. London.)

Here we are in the fifteenth century once more; and we now go on to Correggio.

12. Correggio. Holy Night. (Dresden.)

We pass again to the more Northern Masters, whose names you know. First we have a work of Schongauer' s.

13. Martin Schongauer. The Nativity. (Alto Pinakothek. Munich.)

Most interesting to see the Italian and the Northern Masters one after the other. In the former you still find a stronger adherence to ideal types, while here there is more individualisation—creation out of inwardness of soul, as we have seen before. Down to the tiny feet, all is pervaded with feeling, albeit the artistic perfection is not so great as in the Southern Masters.

14. Herlin. Nativity from the Altar of St. George. (Museum at Nordlingen.)

We come now to the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, to Albrecht Dürer.

15. Dürer. The Nativity. (Alto Pinakothek. Munich.)

See how the Art is taken hold of here by all that I described to you—the working out of the element of light. It is most interesting to study this in Dürer.

16. Altdorfer. The Holy Night. (Berlin.)

Altdorfer was Dürer's successor in Nuremberg.

We shall now give a series of pictures relating mainly to the Adoration by the Shepherds. First, some older Miniatures from Bible and Gospel Manuscripts.

17. Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds. (Codex Egberti. Trier. 10th century.)

18. Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds, from Menologion of Basil II (Vatican. Rome. 11th Century.)

We go on to the Italian representations of the Adoration of the Child by the Shepherds.

19. Cimabue. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Assisi.)

With Cimabue, as you know, we find ourselves in the 13th century. We go on into the 15th and come to Ghirlandajo, the Master of whom we lately spoke.

20. Ghirlandajo. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Akademia. Florence.)

Another Master of the 15th century is Piero di Cosimo.

21. Piero di Cosimo. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Berlin.)

And now we come to the Art of the Netherlands, with which we are familiar.

22. Hugo van der Goes. Adoration of the Child. (Uffizi. Florence.)

23. Hugo van der Goes. Adoration of the Child. (detail.)

Finally we give two works by Rembrandt.

24. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Shepherds. (In the Lantern Light. Etching, about 1652.)

25. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

We now go on to the pictures representing the Adoration by the Three Wise Men. To begin with, an old Mosaic, of the 6th century.

26. Mosaic. Chiesa della Martotana. Palermo. Three Wise Men.

27. Mosaic. Sant Apollinare Nuovo. Ravenna.

In these older pictures the events are shown thoroughly in connection with the Spiritual World—remote from all Naturalism, lifted into a higher sphere.

28. Nativity and Adoration by the Wise Men. (Menologium Basilius. Vatican. 11th century)

29. Niccola Pisano. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Baptistery at Pisa.)

This is the famous Golden Gate at Freiberg, second half of the 12th century:

30. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Cathedral of Freiberg. The Golden Gate.)

31. Domenico Veneziano. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Berlin.) Formerly attributed to Pisanello (Vittore Pisano).

We go on to the 15th, to Stephen Lochner:

32. Stephen Lochner. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Cathedral of Cologne.)

The next is by Gentile da Fabriano, also of the 15th century.

33. Gentile da Fabriano. Adoration of the Child. (Florence.)

34. Fra Angelico. Adoration of the Kings. (St. Marco. Florence.)

Fra Angelico is as tender and lovely in this as in all other subjects.

35. Filippo Lippi. Adoration by the Wise Men.

Whichever subject it is, you see how Naturalism progresses. This is especially interesting when one follows the treatment of one and the same subject through the centuries.

36. Sandro Botticelli. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

Now we come to the second half of the 15th century.

37. Ghirlandajo. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Spedale degli Innodenti. Florence.)

End of the 15th century:

38. Mantegna. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

39. Giorgione. The Wise Men of the East. (Vienna.)

40. Giorgione. Adoration by the Wise Men. (National Gallery. London.)

41. Giovanni Bellini. Adoration by the Kings. (Layard Gallery. London.)

And now I ask you to call to mind once more the various Dutch and Flemish Masters of whom we have spoken in a former lecture. For we now have the same subject by

42. Rogier van der Weyden. Adoration by the Kings. (Alte Pinakothek.Munich)

43. Dieric Bouts. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Alte Piankothek. Munich.)

44. Adoration by the Wise Men, 15th centry, from the Brevarium Grimani.

We have spoken of the characte of these painters. The next is by the artist who worked in Bruges and died about 1523.

45. Gerard David. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

And now the same theme treated by Leonardo.

46. Leonardo da Vinci. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Uffizi.Florence) And by his pupil,

47. Luini Bernadino. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Saronno.)

Going North again:

48. Dürer. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

49. Brueghel. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Vienna.)

And finally, Rembrandt.

50. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Buckingham Palace.)

And now we come to our last theme: the Flight into Egypt. First we have a painter of the late 15th and early 16th century.

51. Herrad von Lanndsberg. The Flight into Egypt.

52. Joachim de Patinir. Rest in the Flight. (Prado. Madrid.)

53. Correggio. Madonna della Scodella. (Parma)

The next, a little later.

54. Bernhard Strigel. The Flight into Egypt. (Stuttgart.)

Strigel painted also in Vienna, and died in 1528.

55. Albrecht Dürer. Resting on the Flight into Egypt.

56. Workshop of Albrecht Dürer. Resting on the Flight into Egypt.

Next is Hans Baldung or Hans Grun, going on into the 16th century.

57. Hans Balding (Baldung). Rest in the Flight. (Germanisches Museum. Nuremberg.)

58. Lucas Cranach. Rest in the Flight. (Berlin.)

Finally, Rembrandt:

59. Rembrandt. Rest in the Flight. (Etching.)

So much for today. Perhaps you will now take the opportunity to see at close quarters this impressive picture of the Wise Men which indicates so clearly the worship of the Star with the incoming of the Christ Jesus Soul.

Today I would like to approach the subject from a different angle and consider the connections that exist between the human being as a microcosmic entity and the whole macrocosm of the world, of which the human being is a part, a member, an organ, as it were. These things can be considered from the most diverse points of view, and in doing so, the most diverse relationships will come to light, which sometimes seem to contradict each other; but the contradictions consist in the fact that the matter must always be viewed from different sides.

From certain considerations that we have been making in these days, you have seen that actually man, as he relates to the world around him, mixes something of himself into his view of the world, that he actually does not take the world of sense as it is; that, as I have tried to express it drastically, he mixes into his view of the world something that rises from within, that is formed from within and that is actually a kind of transformation of the sense of smell. It is what man combines about the world in the most diverse ways, what comes out when he applies his ordinary acumen, as it is called, which comes to him through his body; one could also call it a sense of intuition. What else would be given to man if he could easily make the attempt at all - he can't even do it easily, because he can't easily switch off his intuition - if man would simply take the sensory world as it presents itself to him, without his mind, his combining mind immediately interfering in all sorts of ways.

This touches on a subject that may perhaps present some difficulties for understanding. But you can get an idea of what is actually meant if you consider how nature, the essence of a sense, comes to you. It is the same with the other senses, but the matter does not become apparent with the same clarity to the external observer, not as clearly as when you consider what is actually meant here for the sense of sight, for the eye. Consider that this eye as a physical apparatus is actually located as a fairly independent organ in the human skull and is actually only extended backwards into the human body by the appendages, the appendages of the blood vessels, the appendages of the nerves. One can say: this is the human eye, here is the extension (see drawing); but as an eye it lies here in the bony skull cavity with a great deal of independence, insofar as it is a physical apparatus. Here the lens, the incidence of the light rays, the vitreous body, so everything that is a physical apparatus is actually very independent. Only through the optic nerve, the choroid, which extends into the body, does the eye itself extend into the body, so that one can say that this eye, as a physical apparatus, insofar as it perceives the external sensory world in its visibility, is an independent organism, at least to a certain extent.

It is actually the same for every sense, it is just not so obvious for the other senses. Each sense as a sense is basically something independent, so that one can already speak of a sensory zone. It is actually surprising that the study of the senses is not enough to drive the scholars concerned to some spirituality. Because it is precisely this independence of the senses that could drive the scholars to some spirituality. Why? You see, what is experienced through the optic nerve, through the choroid, that would – and this could easily be proven with ordinary science – that would not be enough to make a person aware of what he experiences in his senses. The remarkable thing about the senses is that the etheric body projects into this purely physical apparatus, and it is a purely physical apparatus. In all our senses we are dealing with something that is outside the organism and is only experienced by the etheric body. You would not be able to unite what is caused in your eye by the incidence of light with your consciousness if you did not permeate the sense of the eye, and thus the other senses too, with your etheric body.

A ray of light falls into the eye. This ray of light has exactly the same physical effect in the eye as the ray of light in a camera obscura, in a photographic apparatus. And you only become aware of what is happening in this natural camera of the eye because your etheric body lines the eye and captures what is not captured in the mere physical apparatus by an etheric body. In the mere physical apparatus, in the mere photographic apparatus, only the physical process takes place; so that man, in the totality of his senses, really has a kind of continuation of the external world. As physical apparatus, the receiving senses, at least the majority of the receiving senses, belong more to the external world than to man. Your eye belongs much more to the external world than to your own body.

In animals, the eye belongs much more to the body than it does to humans. The fact that humans, as sensory beings, have senses that are less connected to the body than the senses of animals, makes them superior to animals. In certain lower animals, this can be demonstrated anatomically. There are all kinds of organic extensions; for example, the fan is inside in lower animals. These are very complicated formations, partly of the nerve, partly of the blood corpuscles, which the lower animals have more completely than the higher animals and especially than man.

The fact that in man the physical body takes so little part in his senses and leaves the part very much to the etheric body, that is what makes man a relatively so perfect being. So that we can say: Man is, first of all, this inner bodily man, considered physically, and the senses are inserted everywhere in him, but they are actually - as I once said in a public lecture in Zurich - like gulfs that extend into the outside world. It would be much more correct to draw it schematically like this. Instead of drawing: there is a sense, and there is a sense, and there is a sense (see drawing), it would be much more correct to draw it like this: there is the human body, and that is where the human world is built, for example the eye or the organ of smell, their continuation into the outside world, and their gulfs through the sense organs. The outer world intrudes through the senses, the eye and so on, and from the inside we only encounter it with the etheric body and permeate what the outer world sends in with our etheric body. It thereby takes part in the outer world. As a result, we are dependent on our etheric body to somehow grasp what the outer world sends in.

The fact that what I have just said is not known has meant that for more than a hundred years philosophy has been talking about nothing more fantastic than the way in which man perceives the outside world through his senses. You can get an overview of all this basically fantastic stuff by reading the chapter “The World as Illusion” in my “Riddles of Philosophy”. Because of the belief that the senses can only be understood from the inside out, from the body out, people do not understand how man can actually know something about the world through his senses. They always talk about it in this way: the world makes an impression on the senses, but then what is caused in the senses must be grasped by the soul. The truth is that the external world itself builds into us, that we therefore grasp the external world at the tip, with our etheric body grasp the external world at the tip, when we perceive the external world as human beings with our senses. Everything that Locke, Hume, Kant, the neo-Kantian philosophers of the 19th century, Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Wundt and all the rest, everything that people have said about sensory perception, has been said to the exclusion of knowledge of the true conditions. As I said, you can read about it in the chapter 'The World as Illusion' in my book 'Riddles of Philosophy'. There you will see, in philosophical terms, the calamity that has been caused by the fact that, with the exclusion of spiritual knowledge of the matter, a giant cabbage as sense physiology actually took hold in the 19th century.

Now it is important to really understand what I just said. If you want to check to some extent the truth of what I just called a giant cabbage, it is interesting that in a certain sense what Locke, Hume, Kant, Helmholtz, Wundt and so on said about the senses is true; but curiously enough it is true for animals. Nineteenth-century man, in his quest to understand the human being through science, cannot go beyond understanding the conditions in the animal world. It is no wonder that he also stops at the animal world when it comes to the origin of man! But this is connected to much more complicated conditions. For, as I said, the etheric body touches what is called the external world of the senses at one corner. But what is the ether body in the last analysis? The ether body is ultimately that which the human being now receives from the cosmos, from the macrocosm. So that, by cutting off its ether body from the macrocosmic relationship, the macrocosm takes hold of itself in the human being through the senses. We can feel ourselves as a son of the macrocosm, in that we are an etheric body, and grasp the earthly sense world with our macrocosmic part.

The fact that this only became the case relatively late can, in turn, be proven with external science, I would like to say, with pinpoint accuracy, only that this external science cannot see the real conditions if it is not oriented by spiritual science. I have already pointed out that the Greek language does not actually have the expression that we have when we say: I see a man coming to meet us. We say: I see a man coming. The corresponding Greek expression would be: I see a coming man. In the Greco-Latin era there was still a much stronger sense that one is actually doing something when one sees or hears something, that one is grasping something with one's etheric body when one is in the sensory world. This active element is lacking in the drowsy humanity of modern times. This drowsy humanity of modern times would actually prefer to sleep through world events altogether, that is, to let them approach it as dreams. It does not want to develop the consciousness to participate when sensory perceptions occur. That is why it is so difficult to understand the Greek way of thinking today, because the Greeks had a much more active concept of the human being. They felt much more active even in what we today call the passivity of sensory perception. The Greeks would not have invented the incomplete, one-sided theory that man sleeps because he is tired; but they knew that man becomes tired when he wants to sleep, that sleeping is brought about by essentially different impulses, and that tiredness then arises from the impulse to want to sleep.

But it is not only this theory of sleep that was actually invented out of the laziness of modern man. Modern man wants to be as passive as possible, to be an active being as little as possible. He can do that, and in a sense, modern man has trained himself to be a passive being. And it is with this passivity that I presented yesterday, perhaps somewhat abruptly, the superstition, the idolatry of modern times.

So the outermost post of the external world enters into us, I would say, the outermost post of this external world. Let us draw this again schematically. Let us assume that we draw the human body here (see drawing), the outermost post of the external world enters into our body; we reach over it with our etheric body (red and blue).

You know that we actually have twelve senses; these twelve senses are therefore twelve different ways in which the external world penetrates into our body. What is it that actually penetrates into our body? That is the big question. What actually penetrates into our body?

We actually see only one side of what is penetrating; without clairvoyance we cannot turn around and look at it from the other side. With his etheric body, the human being receives the incoming ray of light or the incoming sound vibration. But it does not run from the outside into the ear according to the tone; it does not run from the outside into the eye according to the light ray. If it did, the human being would run with the sound wave, with the light beam, with the heat evolution from the outside into his sensory apparatus, as far as the senses extend from the outside. And this area is the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form.

So if you could turn around so that you could follow what is entering here through the senses (arrows), you would be in the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form. You can see how the beings of the world are intimately intertwined. We walk through the world as human beings, opening our senses and actually carrying the exusiai, the spirits of form, within us, which reveal themselves to us as we open our senses to the external world. This world of exusiai, the spiritual world, is thus hidden behind the veil of the sensory world. But this world of the Exusiai, which is hidden behind the veil of the sensory world, the world that reveals itself in man, also has a universal cosmic side, because it permeates the cosmos. That which enters our senses vibrates and undulates throughout the cosmos. So that we can say, this area that projects into our senses is not only there in the senses, but also has its manifestation out in the world. What is it there? There are the planets that belong to our solar system.

Truly, the connection of the planets of our solar system forms a body that belongs to a spiritual being, and this spiritual being includes the exusiai, which are manifested in the revelations of our senses and which have their objective side out in the universe, in the planets. And embedded in all that is, embedded in this whole stream of exusiai activity, are other beings. They lie behind these Exusiai. I would like to say that other beings do not penetrate as far as the Exusiai do. They are out there in the same area, but they do not come close to us (see drawing): these are the beings of the hierarchy of the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi.

They are all already present in that which is revealed in our senses, but man cannot take this up into his consciousness. It has an effect on him, but he cannot take it up into his consciousness. So you can say: Through our senses we encounter a world - the realm of the exusiai with the planetary system (red, blue, orange, see drawing on p. 97), and embedded in this whole realm is also the hierarchy of the archai, the archangeloi, the angeloi. These are, so to speak, the ministers of the exusiai. But the human being perceives only the outer appearance of all this; he perceives only the sensory tapestry spread out before him.

This is how it is with what is outside of us. It is different again with what is inside us, now also physically inside us. After hearing what is adjacent to our senses, you can go and ask: What is located directly behind our senses inwards? — We have seen: the eye continues inwards in the optic nerve. All the senses continue inward in their corresponding nerve. When the senses continue inward in this way, you get a wonderful structure from the twelve senses inward. It is very complicated. You could simplify it by saying: twelve strands to the inside, twelve sensory spheres; so on the outside the sensory zone, connected to it what the senses now send inward.

This is a very complicated structure. How does it come about when we look at the human being as a macrocosmic being? That which lies behind the senses inwards comes from the Dynamis, from the Spirits of Movement. So that, going further inwards, the deeds of the Dynamis, the Spirits of Movement, join the senses here (see drawing on p. 97). You could not think if the spirits of movement did not work on the thinking apparatus, which is the continuation of the sense apparatus. If you look outward, you see the Exusiai making the natural order. You see these Exusiai approaching people with their servants, the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi. But when you think of your inner being, you must remember that you owe this inner being to the spirits of the movement, who prepare the thinking apparatus for you as a continuation of your sense apparatus inwards; not the combining apparatus, which is a mere transformation of the sense of smell, but the thinking apparatus, which man does not use at all in ordinary physical life. For man uses the sense of smell, the sense of smell merely transformed. He has already ceased to use the sense sphere; he would think quite differently if he could really use the twelve inward continuations of the sense sphere.

In the brain, for example, the visual sphere lies behind the frontal lobe, which is essentially a reworked organ of smell. Man hardly uses it, he only thinks habitually through the olfactory sphere. He uses it in a reworked form by combining. If he were to use it directly, he would switch off his forebrain, this forebrain that is only prepared for the external sensory world, and think with the direct, with the four-hill section, with the visual section, where it enters the brain. Then he would have imaginations.

It is the same with the other senses. Man also has imaginations in the physical world, because one world always extends into the other. But man does not recognize these imaginations in the physical world as real imaginations: they are in fact olfactory imaginations. What a person smells is actually the only imaginative realm in the ordinary sensory life. But a much nobler imaginative realm could, for example, come from the sphere of vision and from other sensory spheres.

Looking inwards, we find the Spirits of Movement. And going further inwards, we come to the regions which do not dominate thinking but feeling, the organs of feeling, which are mostly glandular organs in reality. These organs are the deeds of the Spirits that we call the Kyriotetes, the Spirits of Wisdom. We are sentient beings because the Spirits of Wisdom work in us. We are volitional beings because the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, work in us. Located even further inward, the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, work on the organs of our will (see diagram on p. 97).

Just as the exusiai, the spirits of form, have their macrocosmic body in the planets, which, as it were, present the outer visible side to us for ordinary consciousness, so the spirits of movement have their outer side, strangely enough, but it is so, in the fixed stars. Only the dead person between death and a new birth can see their inner side; this is the spiritual side, seen from the other side. In contrast, the Spirits of Wisdom and the Thrones no longer have external visibility at all; they are spiritual in nature. It can be said that they lie behind the planets and behind the fixed stars. And as the deceased looks down on what affects the person in human feeling and human will, the deceased constantly looks at the Kyriotetes, at the Thrones. What I have told you, that the dead person has a connection with the people with whom he is karmically connected, is conveyed to him by the Kyriotetes and by the thrones. The dead person looks into the sphere that invisibly works outside in the objective world and actually only becomes visible in its creature, in human feeling and in human will. What people feel and will here shines up to the dead, and the dead says: In the body of Dynamis, in the body of Kyriotetes, in the body of the thrones, the thinking, feeling and willing of people shines. Just as we look up at the stars, the dead look down into the earthly sphere, into the human sphere. Only, we look at the mineral aspect of the stars, the external physical; the dead do not see the external physical of the glands, the organs of movement, and thus also of the blood, but instead see the spiritual side, the Kyriotetes, the thrones. Just as we look up at the sky, seeing its visible meaning from the outside, the dead person looks down to see the firmament of humanity. The spiritual of this firmament appears to him. That is the dead person's secret.

You see what reciprocity reigns in the universe. When you recognize this reciprocity, the human being takes on a strange countenance! Strangely enough, it takes on the countenance that you say to yourself: We look up at the stars, seek the spirits of form in their exterior in the planets, the spirits of movement in the fixed stars; then that in the distant perspectives fades into the spirit. From this sphere the dead person looks down, looks at that which the human being dreamily oversleeps here. But in that he sees his beyond; there the spirit stars shine up into his world. And the human being is embedded in this being.

What is said in the first scenes of the mystery “The Testing of the Soul” is given a peculiar illumination. Read these first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul', the words of Capesius, and you will see that from the ethical point of view everything is said there that is now being said, so to speak, from the point of view of celestial knowledge. The way in which this celestial knowledge can work in the consciousness of man is pointed out in the first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul'.

And then come the higher worlds, if one wants to apply the word 'higher', that which lies beyond the human being and this universe. I will try to present this schematically, but I must appeal to your goodwill to understand. We can say that if there is a kind of boundary here (see also the drawing on p. 97, yellow), the world of the planets, the world of the fixed stars, loses itself here into the spiritual – and from the other side it comes again. So that here we have the sphere of human will, the sphere of feeling, there the Spirits of Wisdom appear. There we have this order.

But now you can think of an order that is common to both, where man and the universe are included, where we are embedded in such a way that on the one hand we, who shine up to the dead, and on the other hand the starry sky, which shines down to us, are embedded in it. Then we come to the hierarchies, which, if you want to use the word, are higher than the thrones: to the cherubim and seraphim. You can imagine that from this point of view, which has now been mentioned, one cannot speak of the physical exteriors of the cherubim and seraphim, because they are of course even higher spirits; but they are already so spiritual — here I really must appeal to your very good will to understand — they are already so spiritual, these cherubim and seraphim, that their effect comes from another, quite unknown side.

Is it not true that the exusiai, the spirits of form, can be perceived directly by the senses in the planets; that is simply the side they turn towards us. The spirits of movement are directly perceptible in the fixed stars; that is the side they turn towards us. But the cherubim and seraphim are not perceptible to the senses in such a way that they turn their other side towards us, so to speak. But they are so imperceptible that the imperceptibility itself becomes perceptible. So that which lives in the world through cherubim and seraphim is so imperceptible that imperceptibility itself is perceived. It withdraws so strongly from human consciousness that man notices this withdrawal from consciousness.

Thus we can say: the cherubim do in fact reappear, even if this is manifested in such a way that they are so deeply hidden that one perceives their hiddenness. The cherubim appear not only symbolically, but quite objectively in what takes place in the thundercloud, in what takes place when a planet is ruled by volcanic forces. And the seraphim truly appear in what flashes as lightning from the cloud, or in what manifests as fire in the volcanic eruptions, in such a way that their very imperceptibility in these gigantic effects of nature becomes perceptible.

Therefore, in ancient times, when people saw through such things, they looked up at the starry sky, which revealed the most diverse things to them: the secrets of the Exusiai, the secrets of Dynamis. Then they tried to reveal the higher secrets in what man today ridicules: from the interior of the human body - as one says trivially - from the bowels. But then they were aware that the greatest effects, which are really common to the solar system, announce themselves from a completely opposite side in the effects of fire and thunderstorms, in earthquakes and volcanic effects. The most creative aspect of the seraphim and cherubim is announced through its most destructive side, curiously enough. It is precisely the other side, it is the absolute negative, but the spiritual is so spiritually strong that even its imperceptibility, its non-existence, is perceived by the senses.

There you have placed man back into the macrocosm. And at the same time you can see that in this whole macrocosm there is something that begins with the cherubim and goes up to themselves, and that only, I would say, reflects, shadows itself in the gigantic effects that we have just mentioned. This gives you the perspective of a natural science that is at the same time a spiritual science; it gives you the perspective of a science that really sees the whole universe as spirit, that is not content with a vague pantheism and other “pantheisms”, but that really goes into what lies at the basis of the universe as spiritual.

These things will also make it clear to you that man must have a dual nature in a certain respect. Let us take man as he lives from waking to sleeping; he lives in his senses, in the sensual environment, if one perceives the outside as I have indicated. But the other part of a person lives between falling asleep and waking up. It is only so imperfect in the present human cycle that a person is not aware of what he experiences during sleep. But during sleep, a person experiences his being with the cosmos, with the extraterrestrial cosmos, just as he experiences his coexistence with the earthly cosmos with his senses while awake. The only difference is that he is unaware of the other coexistence, the coexistence with the extraterrestrial cosmos. The moment you fall asleep, you join in the movements of the cosmos spiritually, you enter into a completely different sphere. You make yourself ready when you wake up; you make yourself flexible in relation to the cosmos by falling asleep. You live the life of the cosmos by falling asleep; you tear yourself out of the cosmos by waking up. So that you can say: Man can recognize in his own nature, in his own being, a part that swims in the cosmos, that lives in the cosmos. If the ancient astrologer, in the sense in which it was meant in the last reflections, explored the cosmos with its secrets, he explored that in which man swims with that part of his being that sleeps. Man swims with that which the astrologer tries to explore, the real astrologer, not the merely calculating, mathematical one of modern times.

In the moment when the human being sees what he experiences with the part of his being that sleeps, in that moment he stands before what, roughly until the 15th century, was actually called nature. What the human being experiences there was called nature. The Greeks called the same thing that was called nature in the Middle Ages, Proserpina, Persephone. Of course, the mysteries of Persephone were described differently in Greece and in the Middle Ages. But you can see that the Middle Ages knew these things when you read descriptions of nature and its secrets as found in the works of Bernardus Silvestris. In the work 'De mundi universitate' by Bernardus Silvestris, the description begins of the experiences that man has when he awakens to the part that participates in the cosmos, which is otherwise overslept.

These things are particularly well described by Alanus ab Insulis, from the area we have mentioned several times; for in Alanus ab Insulis's 'Island', he means Ireland, Hybernia. In his work 'De planctu naturae' and in his 'Anticlaudianus', you will find parallels to the Proserpina myth and what he has to say about nature. And you will find that everything is resurrected in the great teacher of Dante, whom I once mentioned here, in Brunetto Latini. You will find the teachings of Brunetto Latini incorporated into Dante's own ideas. Read the parts of the Divine Comedy in which Dante describes the Matelda, the part that really resembles the Proserpina myth like two peas in a pod, which even the outer science has already noticed. You will acquire an awareness of it – from Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, from Brunetto Latini and from Dante, you can acquire an awareness, from many others as well - as until the times when the new era dawned, people had an awareness of that other world of the coexistence of man as a microcosm with the macrocosm.

On the one hand, there was nature, the human being's experience of the cosmos, which the Middle Ages called Natura and which antiquity called Proserpina. This was personified and distinguished from Urania, who rules over the celestial sphere just as nature rules over what the human being experiences from falling asleep to waking up. And these medieval people believed they saw a deep secret when they spoke of the marriage of nature in man with the nus, with the mind, with the intellect in man. And in a right and wrong way, these people tried to experience in man the marriage of nature with the Nus, with the mind or intellect, as a mystical wedding, which was contrasted with the alchemical wedding, as I described in the essay that is the first about Christian Rosenkreutz.

These are things that are not so infinitely far behind us. And Dante's haunting work - which on the one hand describes the world and man, the human secrets, with as much sublimity as humor - is like the work that wanted to preserve what has been known for centuries and millennia about man's connection to the macrocosm. In Brunetto Latini we find the same thing that Dante describes in his own poetic way, from the point of view of initiation, also linked to an external event.

The consciousness of the connection between man and these spiritual secrets had to be hidden for a time, so to speak, so that what man can experience when it is separated out from the universe and, as it were, dependent on itself, could be kindled in man. We are now living in the age in which, on the one hand, man is exposed to the radiations that permeate him from Pisces, but on the other hand, he is exposed to the radiations of the differently acting, opposite constellation of Virgo. But this age must find the way out of spiritual infertility. Of course, we can no longer simply take over what humanity once knew, because that knowledge was in a form that was useful for ancient humanity. Dante's “Divine Comedy” is, although a great revelation, more a testament of a bygone era. A new era needs the revelations of the spiritual cosmos from a different source.

But one thing is possible. When one considers that, I might say, people knew spiritual secrets until a few centuries ago, this has such an effect on the human mind that it can inspire him to seek the way to these secrets in a new way. Therefore, we can also draw impulses from historical observation; only we must take this historical observation in such a way that we go back to what is really historical. Consider what all the external events related in history are worth – in this history, with which, lamentably, our schoolchildren up to the oldest are pampered – what these stories, which are recorded as history, are worth compared to the facts that people like Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, Brunetto Latini, Dante and so on, Pico de Mirandola, Fludd , and even Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, if we take a certain sphere of wisdom, and right up to the 18th century we could cite the disciple of Jakob Böhme, Saint-Martin — what are the usual events recorded in history compared to the facts that there were people who carried such cosmic knowledge within them and worked with such cosmic knowledge! Yes, the present is often proud of what it has achieved. This present-day intelligentsia – I mentioned it in connection with the Christmas plays today – has always been quite dismissive of the spiritual content; even when this intelligentsia, as in Oberufer, where the Christmas plays were performed until the middle of the 19th century, consisted of a single personality, the schoolmaster, who was also the village notary, and thus the legal personality and at the same time the mayor. He was the intellectual, he was the only enemy of all the Christmas plays. In his opinion, they were stupid, foolish. Schröer still experienced this, that the intelligentsia of Oberufer was hostile to what was in the Christmas plays. It is very often the intelligentsia that is hostile to what is actually fruitful in human evolution.

It is a matter of encouraging that which may be called the enthusiasm of history by looking at real history, by really immersing oneself in what history is. The spiritual part of the event also belongs to history, and it proceeds differently than the external physical-material part.

Especially in the harsh present, we must try again and again to stimulate the spiritual impulses by making ourselves aware of how spirit has ruled in the historical development of humanity. Whether you can count the details on the fingers of one hand: That is how the Dynamis work, that is how the Exusiai work — that is much less important than awakening this overall consciousness, how it wants to bring the individual human being together with the spirit of humanity. For in the awakening of this consciousness lies that which is to bring salvation into the evolution of mankind. Sometimes it is good to realize how far removed what passes as world opinion today is from what moves human souls, or at least seems to move them. As a result, there is often no sense of the weight of the individual facts. The spirit weighs the facts correctly.

More important than many other things for the assessment of the present – just think about it with the help of what you have heard here – more important than many other things is the news that came in the last few days that the American state administration has taken the railways into self-government. For this is one of a number of symptoms that clearly point to things that are being prepared in order to divert humanity as far as possible from the path along which it can only be preserved if it becomes fully aware that without spirit reality can only be a dying reality. One can indeed choose to die; then life must flee from the areas for which one chooses to die to other areas. The field of truth already carries the victory. But one looks at a field where, so to speak, those who look deeper into the world are also confronted with such powers of a left and a right, as Dante at the starting point of his description of his “Divine Comedy”, or as Brunetto Latini at the beginning of his initiation.

Oh, it would be so necessary for the world to grasp thoughts of spirituality in the broadest sense! Instead of this, it is true, we are only faced with the necessity of having to emphasize again and again that we must look towards the spirit. Again and again we are faced with the longing to be able to emphasize the seriousness of the matter sufficiently. People do not want to see where germs are, but they want to be passive, to let things happen to them if possible, to sleep through the course of the world if possible. If many people did not sleep as they do in the present, oversleeping events, then one would see that behind what is now buzzing through the world in such an untrue way, there is a strange tendency. It may well be said, since Woodrow Wilson, the universal idol of modern times, of the present time, of the present, has boasted of such things himself, that four-fifths of humanity is facing one-fifth. This idol of modern humanity, who has been raised to the altar much more than one might think, has indeed boasted of this himself.

It will have to be said that it would be a shame if humanity were to oversleep what lies in such an ideal as the ideal of this idol, whose slogans, even those that are not copied from the brave Don Pedro of 1864 like its last manifestation, but rather grew in its own hollow—pardon me, I mean head—go back to what is actually inherent in it as a tendency. What is it then? The aim is to be able to say one day on earth: centuries ago there was a legendary humanity in the middle of Europe; they managed to wipe it out. They had to be wiped out because they were terribly proud. They descended from the gods and even called the main poet Goethe to suggest that they had received a spirit directly from the gods. Although we shall not express ourselves in such spiritual terms, the germ or tendency of Wilsonianism will be recognizable in this. It will only be a matter of whether this can be the path of humanity, whether this can be the future path of the earth, or whether we should not rather reflect on how the earth can be saved from the so-called ideals of Wilsonianism and similar things. One need not fall into nationalism or anti-nationalism with such things. The phrases of nations and the freedom of nations can also be left to Wilsonianism in modern times. But one cannot point out seriously enough what is actually behind the idol that is meant.

I know that present-day humanity will not give much credence to such things, but I also know that in the future many a voice will be raised in agreement with what has been said here. May the voices of the future always be added to those of the past: Humanity allowed itself to be led in all sorts of ways by a strange idol; thank the world spirits that the goals of this strange leader of humanity were not fulfilled, who, after all, also to the world by theoretically proclaiming, in grand words, the republic as the only true form of government and by copying out his own republican manifestos from the Brazilian emperor of 1864. The fact that one is actually standing here before a grotesque phenomenon is something that can be said within closed walls. Outside, truth is not the highest value, but is weighed on the political scales. One must not say what is true or not true, but what is prescribed. Until March 15, one was not allowed to say anything against tsarism in the various countries; since March 15, one is of course allowed to say anything against it.

Unfortunately, truth is not the highest standard. But to speak out against it is the only way to touch the conditions that are necessary to write into the soul today. It makes sense to add to the great views into the cosmos the small thoughts that passive, sleepy humanity has today, but which unfortunately have great effects on deeds. For humanity must awaken, and the spirit must be the awakener.

Introductory words before the evening lecture

My dear friends! ¹ Before the lecture, I too would like to raise the issues that I have already raised to some extent, but which I would like to raise again, since friends are happily arriving every day.

The first thing has already been arranged: due to the gratifyingly large number of visitors, we had to expand our premises by adding this lecture villa here, and I would like to ask that the friends who would otherwise be able to listen to lectures here please take a seat in the adjoining room if possible, so that the main room here remains free for those friends who have come from out of town and are only rarely able to attend our events. But it would be interesting to hear whether it is possible, with this arrangement, to hear what is being said here outside. (Answered in the affirmative from the adjoining room.

The second thing is that we would have to ask our friends to bear in mind that we can only open the rooms here half an hour before the start of an event and that we have to close them again half an hour after an event. Otherwise, we will not be able to maintain order with so many visitors, especially with regard to ventilation and the like. So I would ask you not to arrive earlier than half an hour before the start of a meeting, and not to stay longer than half an hour afterwards. Furthermore, we would ask you to always bring your membership cards to each individual event, even the older members — otherwise there is no distinction between older and younger members. We have to have strict control for obvious reasons. Those friends – I do believe that there will be none, because, as I said, one does not forget among anthroposophists – but those friends who nevertheless forget their membership card are asked to have an interim card issued to them at Haus Friedwart.

Then, today, I would like to ask once again that every chair be left exactly where it is, so that all aisles and rows of seats remain in the order in which they have been set up. Otherwise we cannot manage, not even in terms of the police regulations. You see, we need the aisles to be free.

Then I would like to ask you to accept the unusualness of eating in series. I will give you more details tomorrow. You get numbers from 1-113, let's say, that's the first series; they can go down to the cafeteria together and get their food there. But those with 114 who are not in the series that ends with 113 can only come in the second series. Then there will be a third series. It must be adhered to in this way in order to cope. It is also still possible to make individual changes. The cards will only be numbered, so one person can exchange his card for a card from another. You won't be able to tell from the card 125 whether it has been exchanged or not. But nobody is allowed to issue a 125 to themselves in order to get the second instead of the third series.

Then I have to announce that the tickets for all Christmas plays that are given will always be available before and after each performance at the table where tickets for eurythmy and other plays are usually available. It will be good to stock up on these tickets so that an overview can be created of how to organize visits to these events.

Then, from the abundance of what will have to be negotiated tomorrow, I have to report again what I reported at the end yesterday, because it is connected with the whole arrangement of our delegates' meeting, which of course had to be prepared and which also has to be administered, so to speak, before it begins. I should also mention that I have recently given the matter a great deal of thought and have come to the conclusion that if the Anthroposophical Society is to fulfill its task, it will need to be organized differently in the future.

I have repeatedly emphasized in various places that the Anthroposophical Society should take on a certain form here at Christmas, which can arise on the basis of what has come about in the individual national societies. I never thought, my dear friends, of a mere synthetic summary of the national societies. We would then arrive at an abstraction. We must here — if anything is to come about at all still with this Anthroposophical Society — we must here actually form a society that carries its own forces of existence within itself. After the various experiences I have had, after all that I have come to know, I have decided not just to work on the formation of the Society in the way that was done in the early days, but to work intensively and centrally on the formation of this Society. I will therefore present a draft of the statutes to my colleagues tomorrow, which has emerged from the closest circle of my colleagues here in Dornach; and I would like to announce today – as I did yesterday – that, however heavy my heart may be, I have no choice but to make the following proposal to you, in view of the way in which the affairs of the Anthroposophical Society have developed: that in future the leadership of the Society be formed in such a way that I myself have this leadership as the chairman of the Society, which is formed here in Dornach. And then it will be necessary for me to have at my side, in the closest circle, precisely those co-workers who have so far actually participated in the work at Dornach in the way that I will describe tomorrow, so that I can expect the right development of the Anthroposophical Society from the continuation of this work.

And so I myself have the suggestion to make that I myself should exercise the presidency of the Anthroposophical Society, which is being founded here; that Mr. Steffen should then stand by my side as deputy chairman. Then there would be further members of this board: Dr. Steiner; then Dr. Wegman as secretary. Furthermore, Dr. Vreede and Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth would be part of this inner working committee. This would be my working committee, and tomorrow in my opening lecture I would explain why it is necessary to think of me in this way regarding the establishment and progress of the Anthroposophical Society.

It is indeed the case that at present things must be taken very, very seriously, bitterly seriously. Otherwise, what I have often spoken of would actually have to happen, that I would have to withdraw from the Anthroposophical Society.

• 1. For years a document has been in circulation that purports to contain comments by Rudolf Steiner made at a meeting with the personalities designated as the founding board of directors, which took place before the evening lecture. However, this text, with some variants, cannot be considered authentic for various reasons. For more details see “Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe”, No. 105 (1990).

[ 1 ] I could not at that time bring myself to reflections concerning public life in Austria which might have taken a deeper hold in any way whatever upon my mind. I merely continued to observe the extraordinarily complicated relationships involved. Expressions which won my deeper interest I could find only in connection with Karl Julius Schröer. I had the pleasure of being with him often just at this time. His own fate was closely bound up with that of German Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Tobias Schröer, who conducted a German school in Presburg and wrote dramas as well as books on historical and aesthetic subjects. The last appeared under the name Christian Oeser, and they were favourite text-books. The poetic writings of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, although they are doubtless significant and received marked recognition within restricted circles, did not become widely known. The sentiment that breathes through them was opposed to the dominant political current in Hungary. They had to be published in part without the author's name in German regions outside of Hungary. Had the tendencies of the author's mind been known in Hungary, he would have risked, not only dismissal from his post, but also severe punishment.

[ 2 ] Karl Julius Schröer thus experienced the impulse toward Germanism even as a young man in his own home. Under this impulse he developed his intimate devotion to the German nature and German literature as well as a great devotion to everything belonging to Goethe or concerning him. The history of German poetry by Gervinus had a profound influence upon him. [ 3 ] He went in the fortieth year of the nineteenth century to Germany to pursue his studies in the German language and literature at the universities of Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin. After his return he was occupied in teaching German literature in his father's school, and in conducting a Seminar. He now became acquainted with the Christmas folk-plays which were enacted every year by the German colonists in the region of Presburg. There he was face to face with Germanism in a form profoundly congenial to him. The roving Germans who had come from the west into Hungary hundreds of years before had brought with them these plays of the old home, and continued to perform them as they had done at the Christmas festival in regions which no doubt lay in the neighbourhood of the Rhine. The Paradise story, the birth of Christ, the coming of the three kings were alive in popular form in these plays. Schröer then published them, as he heard them, or as he read them in old manuscripts that he was able to see at peasants' homes, using the title Deutsche Weinachtspiele aus Ungarn.¹

[ 4 ] The delightful experience of living in the German folk life took an even stronger hold upon Schröer's mind. He made journeys in order to study German dialects in the most widely separated parts of Austria. Wherever the German folk was scattered in the Slavic, Magyar, or Italian geographical regions, he wished to learn their individuality. Thus came into being his glossary and grammar of the Zipser dialect, which was native to the south of the Carpathians; of the Gottschze dialect, which survived with a little fragment of German folk in Krain; the language of the Heanzen, which was spoken in western Hungary.

[ 5 ] For Schröer these studies were never merely a scientific task. He lived with his whole soul in the revelation of the folk-life, and wished by word and writing to bring its nature to the consciousness of those men who have been uprooted from it by life. He was then a professor in Budapest. There he could not feel at home in the presence of the prevailing current of thought; so he removed to Vienna, where at first he was entrusted with the direction of the evangelical schools, and where he later became a professor of the German language and literature. When he already occupied this position, I had the privilege of knowing him and of becoming intimate with him. At the time when this occurred, his whole sentiment and life were directed toward Goethe. He was engaged in editing the second part of Faust, and writing an introduction for this, and had already published the first part.

[ 6 ] When I went to call at Schröer's little library, which was also his work-room, I felt that I was in a spiritual atmosphere in the highest degree beneficial to my mental life. I understood at once why Schröer was maligned by those who accepted the prevailing literary-historical methods on account of his writings, and especially on account of his Geschichte der Deutschen Dichtung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.² He did not write at all like the members of the Scherer school, who treated literary phenomena after the fashion of investigators in natural science. He had certain sentiments and ideas concerning literary phenomena, and he spoke these out in frank, manly fashion without turning his eyes much at the moment of writing to the “sources.” It had even been said that he had written his exposition “from the wrist out.”

[ 7 ] This interested me very little. I experienced a spiritual warmth when I was with him. I could sit by his side for hours. Out of his inspired heart the Christmas plays lived on his lips, the spirit of the German dialect, the course of the life of literature. The relation between dialect and cultured speech became perceptible to me in a practical way. I experienced a real joy when he spoke to me, as he had already done in his lectures, of the poet of the Lower Austrian dialect, Joseph Misson, who wrote the splendid poem, Da Naaz, a niederösterreichischer Bauernbua, geht ind Fremd.³ Schröer then constantly gave me books from his library in which I could pursue further what was the content of this conversation. I always had, in truth, when I sat there alone with Schröer, the feeling that still another was present – Goethe's spirit. For Schröer lived so strongly in the spirit and the work of Goethe that in every sentiment or idea which entered his soul he feelingly asked the question, “Would Goethe have felt or thought thus?”

[ 8 ] I listened in a spiritual sense with the greatest possible sympathy to everything that came from Schröer. Yet I could not do otherwise even in his presence than build up independently in my own mind that toward which I was striving in my innermost spirit. Schröer was an idealist, and the world of ideas as such was for him that which worked as a propulsive force in the creation of nature and of man. I then found it indeed difficult to express in words for myself the difference between Schröer's way of thinking and mine. He spoke of ideas as the propelling forces in history. He felt life in the idea itself. For me the life of the spirit was behind the ideas, and these were only the phenomena of that life in the human soul. I could then find no other terms for my way of thinking than “objective idealism.” I wished thereby to denote that for me the reality is not in the idea; that the idea appears in man as the subject, but that just as colour appears on a physical object, so the idea appears on the spiritual object, and that the human mind – the subject – perceives it there as the eye perceives colour on a living being.

[ 9 ] My conception, however, Schröer very largely satisfied in the form of expression he used when we talked about that which reveals itself as “folk-soul.” He spoke of this as of a real spiritual being which lives in the group of individual men who belong to a folk. In this matter his words took on a character which did not pertain merely to the designation of an idea abstractly held. And thus we both observed the texture of ancient Austria and the individualities of the several folk-souls active in Austria. From this side it was possible for me to conceive thoughts concerning the state of public life which penetrated more deeply into my mind.

[ 10 ] Thus my experience at that time was strongly bound up with my relationship to Karl Julius Schröer. What, however, were more remote from him, and in which I strove most of all for an inner explanation, were the natural sciences. I wished to know that my “objective idealism” was in harmony with the knowledge of nature.

[ 11 ] It was during the period of my most earnest intercourse with Schröer that the question of the relation between the spiritual and natural worlds came before my mind in a new form. This happened at first quite independently of Goethe's way of thought concerning the natural sciences. For even Schröer could tell me nothing distinctive concerning this realm of Goethe's creative work. He was happy whenever he found in one or another natural scientist a generous recognition of Goethe's observations concerning the beings of plants and animals. As regards Goethe's theory of colour, however, he was met on all sides by natural scientific conceptions utterly opposed. So in this direction he developed no special opinion.

[ 12 ] My relationship to natural science was not at this time of my life influenced from this side, in spite of the fact that in my intercourse with Schröer I came into close touch with Goethe's spiritual life. It was determined much more by the difficulties I experienced when I had to think out the facts of optics in the sense of the physicist.

[ 13 ] I found that light and sound were thought of in an analogy which is invalid. The expressions “sound in general” and “light in general” were used. The analogy lay in the following: The individual tones and sounds were viewed as specially modified air-vibrations; and objective sound, outside of the human perception, was viewed as a state of vibration of the air. Light was thought of similarly. That which occurs outside of man when he has a perception by means of phenomena caused by light was defined as vibration in ether. The colours, then, are especially formed ether-vibrations. These analogies became at that time an actual torment to my inner life. For I believed myself perfectly clear in the perception that the concept “sound” is merely an abstract union of the individual occurrences in the sphere of sound; whereas “light” signifies a concrete thing over against the phenomena in the sphere of illumination. “Sound” was for me a composite abstract concept; “light” a concrete reality. I said to myself that light is really not perceived by the senses; “colours” are perceived by means of light, which manifests itself everywhere in the perception of colours but is not itself sensibly perceived. “White” light is not light, but that also is a colour. [ 14 ] Thus for me light became a reality in the sense-world, yet in itself not perceptible to the senses. Now there came before my mind the conflict between nominalism and realism as this was developed within scholasticism. The realists maintained that concepts were realities which lived in things and were simply reproduced out of these by human understanding. The nominalists maintained, on the contrary, that concepts were merely names formed by man which include together a complex of what is in the things, but names which have no existence themselves. It now seemed to me that the sound experience must be viewed in the nominalist manner and the experiences which proceed from light in the realist manner.

[ 15 ] I carried this orientation into the optics of the physicist. I had to reject much in this science. Then I arrived at perceptions which gave me a way to Goethe's colour theory.

On this side the door opened before me through which to approach Goethe's writings on natural science. I first took to Schröer brief treatises I had written on the basis of my views in the field of natural science. He could make but little of them; for they were not yet worked out on the basis of Goethe's way of thinking, but I had merely attached at the end this remark: “When men come to the point of thinking about nature as I have here set forth, then only will Goethe's researches in science be confirmed.” Schröer felt an inner pleasure when I made such a statement, but beyond this nothing then came of the matter. The situation in which I then found myself comes out in the following: Schröer related to me one day that he had spoken with a colleague who was a physicist. But, said the man, Goethe opposed himself to Newton, and Newton was “such a genius”; to which Schröer replied: But Goethe “also was a genius.” Thus again I felt that I had a riddle to solve with which I struggled entirely alone.

[ 16 ] In the views at which I had arrived in the physics of optics there seemed to me to be a bridge between what is revealed to insight into the spiritual world and that which comes out of researches in the natural sciences. I felt then a need to prove to sense experience, by means of certain experiments in optics in a form of my own, the thoughts which I had formed concerning the nature of light and that of colour.

It was not easy for me to buy the things needed for such experiments; for the means of living I derived from tutoring was little enough. Whatever was in any way possible for me I did in order to arrive at such plans of experimentation in the theory of light as would lead to an unprejudiced insight into the facts of nature in this field.

[ 17 ] With the physicist's usual arrangements for experiments I was familiar through my work in Reitlinger's physics laboratory. The mathematical treatment of optics was easy to me, for I had already pursued thorough courses in this field. In spite of all objections raised by the physicists against Goethe's theory of colour, I was driven by my own experiments farther and farther away from the customary attitude of the physicist toward Goethe. I became aware that all such experimentation is only the establishing of certain facts “about light” – to use an expression of Goethe's – and not experimentation with light itself. I said to myself: “The colours are not, in Newton's way of thinking, produced out of light; they come to manifestation when obstructions hinder the free unfolding of the light.” It seemed to me that this was the lesson to be learned directly from my experiments. [ 18 ] Through this, however, light was for me removed from the properly physical realities. It took its place as a midway stage between the realities perceptible to the senses and those visible to the spirit.

[ 19 ] I was not inclined forthwith to engage in a merely philosophical course of thinking about these things. But I held strongly to this: to read the facts of nature aright. And then it became constantly clearer to me how light itself does not enter the realm of the sense-perceptible, but remains on the farther side of this, while colours appear when the sense perceptible is brought into the realm of light. [ 20 ] I now felt myself compelled anew to press inward to the understanding of nature from the most diverse directions. I was led again to the study of anatomy and physiology. I observed the members of the human, animal, and plant organisms in their formations. In this study I came in my own way to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. I became more and more aware how that conception of nature which is attainable through the senses penetrates through to that which was visible to me in spiritual fashion.

[ 21 ] If in this spiritual way I directed my look to the soul-activity of man, thinking, feeling, and willing, then the “spiritual man” took form for me, a clearly visible image. I could not linger in the abstractions in which men generally think when they speak of thinking, feeling, and willing. In these living manifestations I saw creative forces which set “the man as spirit” there before me. If I then turned my glance to the sense-manifestation of man, this became complete to my observation by means of the spirit-form which ruled in the sense-perceptible.

[ 22 ] I came upon the sensible-supersensible form of which Goethe speaks and which thrusts itself, both for the true natural vision and for the spiritual vision, between what the senses grasp and what the spirit perceives.

[ 23 ] Anatomy and physiology struggled through step by step to the sensible-supersensible form. And in this struggling I through my look fell, at first in a very imperfect way, upon the threefold organization of the human being, concerning which – after having pursued my studies regarding this for thirty years in silence – I first began to speak openly in my book Von Seelenrätzeln.⁴ It then became clear to me that in that portion of the human organization in which the shaping is chiefly directed to the elements of the nerves and the senses, the sensible-supersensible form also stamps itself most strongly in the sense-perceptible. The head organization appeared to me as that in which the sensible-supersensible becomes most strongly visible in the sensible form. On the other hand, I was forced to look upon the organization consisting of the limbs as that in which the sensible-supersensible most completely submerges itself, so that in this organization the forces active in nature external to man pursue their work in the shaping of the human body. Between these poles of the human organization everything seemed to me to exist which expresses itself in a rhythmic manner, the processes of breathing, circulation, and the like. [ 24 ] At that time I found no one to whom I could have spoken of these perceptions. If I referred here or there to something of this, then it was looked upon at once as the result of a philosophic idea, whereas I was certain that I had disclosed these things to myself by means of an understanding drawn from unbiased anatomical and physiological experimentation.

[ 25 ] For the mood which depressed my soul by reason of this isolation in my perceptions I found an inner release only when I read over and over the conversation which Goethe had with Schiller as the two went away from a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in Jena. They were both agreed in the view that nature should not be observed in such piece-meal fashion as had been done in the paper of the botanist Batsch which they had heard read. And Goethe with a few strokes drew before Schiller's eyes his “archetypal plant.” This through a sensible-supersensible form represents the plant as a whole out of which leaf, blossom, etc., reproducing the whole in detail, shape themselves. Schiller, because he had not yet overcome his Kantian point of view, could see in this “whole” only an “idea” which human understanding formed through observation of the details. Goethe would not allow this to pass. He saw spiritually the whole as he saw with his senses the group of details, and he admitted no difference in principle between the spiritual and the sensible perception, but only a transition from the one to the other. To him it was clear that both had the right to a place in the reality of experience. Schiller, however, did not cease to maintain that the archetypal plant was no experience, but an idea. Then Goethe replied, in his way of thinking, that in this case he perceived his ideas with his eyes. [ 26 ] There was for me a rest after a long struggle in my mind, in that which came to me out of the understanding of these words of Goethe, to which I believed I had penetrated Goethe's perception of nature revealed itself before my mind as a spiritual perception.

[ 27 ] Now, by reason of an inner necessity, I had to strive to work in detail through all of Goethe's scientific writings. At first I did not think of undertaking an interpretation of these writings, such as I soon afterward published in an introduction to them in Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur. I thought much more of setting forth independently some field or other of natural science in the way in which this science now hovered before me as “spiritual.” [ 28 ] My external life was at that time not so ordered that I could accomplish this. I had to do tutoring in the most diverse subjects. The “pedagogical” situations through which I had to find my way were complex enough. For example, there appeared in Vienna a Prussian officer who for some reason or other had been forced to leave the German military service. He wished to prepare himself to enter the Austrian army as an officer of engineers. Through a peculiar course of fate I became his teacher in mathematics and physical-scientific subjects. I found in this teaching the deepest satisfaction; for my “scholar” was an extraordinarily lovable man who formed a human relationship with me when we had put behind us the mathematical and scientific developments he needed for his preparation. In other cases also, as in those of students who had completed their work and who were preparing for doctoral examinations, I had to give the instruction, especially in mathematics and the physical sciences.

[ 29 ] Because of this necessity of working again and again through the physical sciences of that time, I had ample opportunity of immersing myself in the contemporary views in these fields. In teaching I could give out only these views; what was most important to me in relation to the knowledge of nature I had still to carry locked up within myself.

[ 30 ] My activity as a tutor, which afforded me at that time the sole means of a livelihood, preserved me from one-sidedness. I had to learn many things from the foundation up in order to be able to teach them. Thus I found my way into the “mysteries” of book-keeping, for I found opportunity to give instruction even in this subject.

[ 31 ] Moreover, in the matter of pedagogical thought, there came to me from Schröer the most fruitful stimulus. He had worked for years as director of the Evangelical schools in Vienna, and he had set forth his experiences in the charming little book, Unterrichtsfrage.⁵ What I read in this could then be discussed with him. In regard to education and instruction, he spoke often against the mere imparting of information, and in favour of the evolution of the full and entire human being.

• 1. German Christmas Plays from Hungary.
• 2. History of German Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.
• 3. Ignatius, a peasant boy of Lower Austria, goes abroad.
• 4. Riddles of the Soul.
• 5. Questions on Teaching.

Introductory words before the evening lecture.

My dear friends! I too have various matters to bring up in connection with the delegates' meeting.¹ Some of these matters have already been brought up by me. I will also repeat those things that I have already mentioned, because new friends arrive here every day.

First of all, we will need to make an extension because of the gratifyingly large number of visitors here. I already said yesterday that it would be a kind of “inner, internal villa” to make it possible for all visitors to really listen to the things that can be brought up during these days.

But then I would also ask you to take into account the fact that the first two rows this time should remain reserved without exception for all those friends who are somehow hard of hearing or lame or the like and who need these rows.

In this context, I would also like to ask you to please note that we are obliged to put the chairs in their places because of the large number of visitors, and we depend on the chairs staying in their places. So, for fire safety reasons, we have to create empty seats – we ask you not to do what usually happens after lectures here; so that every chair stays in the place where it was standing.

Furthermore, I ask that you please note that the rooms will only be opened half an hour before an event and will only be closed half an hour after the event. There is no other way.

I would also like to mention once again that we are dependent on exercising strict control this time; therefore, even older friends have to show their membership cards when entering. Otherwise it would be very difficult to tell who should and should not show it. As I said yesterday, it doesn't happen, but if it should happen that someone forgets their membership card, I ask that they have an interim card issued that they show every time they enter.

Then I would like to point out that there will be a eurythmy performance here tomorrow at five o'clock. These performances, the eurythmy performance and the Christmas play performance, can of course only ever be held in front of a smaller group. Now, the fact that most of them are repeated twice will ensure that everyone can attend the performances, provided that our friends are accommodating. Tomorrow, tickets will be issued for seats from which you can see something. And then the friends who can't get tickets tomorrow should just make an effort and say that tomorrow's performance will be repeated on Friday, December 28, so that everyone will have the opportunity to see it. But I really ask you not to take this as an excuse not to come tomorrow and then say to yourself, “We'll see it next Friday.” So, I ask you, despite the snow and so on, to take it upon yourself not to get tickets if you come too late. So, tomorrow at five o'clock.

Then, my esteemed attendees, I have something else to bring up, especially with regard to what is about to happen during the days of our delegates' meeting here. This assembly of delegates will have to shape the Anthroposophical Society, and this shaping will already have to be such, my dear friends, that this Anthroposophical Society fulfills the conditions that simply arise from today's circumstances. And I have to say that this Christmas meeting must proceed in such a way that one can expect from it: Now a workable Anthroposophical Society will emerge. I must say that if this prospect does not exist, I would have to draw the consequences that I have repeatedly mentioned. Therefore, I consider what has to happen during and through this Christmas event, for the founding of the Anthroposophical Society, which was preceded by the founding of the national societies, to be something extraordinarily serious and meaningful. So that here in Dornach, something will actually have to be created that is real simply by its existence. I will have to speak about the essentials at the inaugural meeting, which will take place next Monday; but what must be said today — because even the, I would like to say, original beginning must happen in such a way that one sees: the tone of the Anthroposophical Society will now be different. This is because, right from tomorrow, when most of the friends who want to co-found this Society will be here, there will be a provisional board of directors, which must become a definitive board of directors in the next few days, so that it can really work as such. And truly, my dear friends, I have been very, very much concerned with the question of how to shape the Society in recent times. I have also been involved in many foundations of regional societies, learned many things that are now alive among the members and so on, and I have been quite thoroughly involved with what is immediately necessary in the near future. And so today I would like to present my proposals first, preliminarily, because the matter must simply be dealt with before we begin.

You see, it cannot be otherwise: the seriousness of the matter will not be taken into account if the conditions for the continued existence, that is, actually for the reestablishment of the Society, of which I will speak on Monday, if these conditions are not met. But in order to fulfill these conditions, I myself have to set certain conditions, which may at first seem somewhat radical to some people. However, they are conditions that I feel I must set, and I say that I see no possibility of continuing to work with the Society on anthroposophical ground unless these conditions are met. And so, in order for you to familiarize yourselves with the idea, I would like to make the following proposal for the constitution of the executive council, which will function provisionally at first simply because I am making the proposal to you today, and I hope it will become a definitive executive council.

This executive council must be such that it can actually place Dornach at the center of the Anthroposophical Society. As I said, I have given a great deal of thought to the question of how to constitute the Society, and I assure you I have given it a great deal of thought. And after this thorough consideration, I can make no other proposal, my dear friends, than that you elect me as the chairperson of the Anthroposophical Society, and indeed as the official chairperson. I must therefore draw the conclusion from the experiences of recent years that I can actually only continue to work if I myself am elected as the real chairman. I want to renounce all honorary chairs and the like; I will not go into all those things where one only has to stand behind the scenes and be good for what others do. I will therefore only be able to continue working if I myself am elected as the real chairman of the Anthroposophical Society that is to be founded here. Of course, it is then necessary that, since I will be taking the work into my own hands, I will be assisted by those people who, due to the conditions in the work that has been prepared, are now the closest ones who can work here with me at the center. So, if I am elected as chairperson – otherwise I would not participate at all – I will propose the following: as second chairperson, or deputy chairperson, Mr. Steffen; as third board member Dr. Steiner; as fourth board member Dr. Wegman as secretary; As the fifth member of the Executive Council, I propose Dr. Vreede; as the sixth member, Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth, who would then take on the office of secretary and treasurer.

On Monday I will explain the reasons why I am only proposing people who live here in Dornach for the actual central council. A council that has to be sought out all over the world will never be able to work properly and cannot actually work. So they must be people living in Dornach. And those whom I have now proposed, as I said, myself, Mr. Steffen as deputy, Dr. Steiner, Dr. Wegman as secretary, Dr. Vreede, and Dr. Wachsmuth as secretary and treasurer, that would be the board, which would have to work from here.

But now, as I have already shown some friends in The Hague,* I understand the board of directorship in such a way that it is not only on paper, but that it stands in all responsibility on the board and represents the association. Therefore, I will ask that from tomorrow on, this provisional board of directors actually places itself in a representative position here in front of our friends at every opportunity, so that the matter is really as I made clear to our friends in The Hague: it cannot be done without a certain form in a proper company that is to function. Form must be there from the very beginning. I therefore request that this be taken into account, that as many as are provisional members of the board initially, there are chairs and that these board members

* See page 664 f. are seated facing the other members, so that one is constantly aware that this is the board. If one sits there and the other sits there, you can never get them together when you need them. So the point is that things are now really being taken up as realities. As I said, it's just because I wanted us to have a board of directors from tomorrow, so I have appointed this provisional board. The reasons for these things, which are already contained in what I have said, I will explain in detail on Monday in my opening address. On Monday I will also make a proposal for a constitution — I hope the statutes will be printed by then — which, based on the current conditions, is to underlie the constitution of the Society.

And now, my dear friends, I have said what I wanted to say at the starting point of our Christmas Conference here. But I still have to expand and continue in these two lectures today and tomorrow what I said in the last lectures about the mystery of the different times.

• 1. Earlier, Dr. Wachsmuth spoke of handing over the passports.

To turn our minds to thoughts connected with the Whitsun festival seems to me less appropriate during these grave days¹ than would have been the case in earlier years. For mankind is passing through fateful ordeals and at such times it is not really fitting to call up feelings of inner warmth and exhilaration. If our feelings are right and true we can never for a single moment forget the suffering that is now so universal, and in a certain sense it is actually selfish to wish to forget it in order to give ourselves up to thoughts that warm and uplift the soul. It will therefore be more fitting to-day to speak of certain matters bearing on the needs of the age, for our recent studies have shown very clearly that many of the reasons for the sufferings of the present time lie in the prevailing attitude to the spiritual, and that it is vitally urgent to work for the development of the human soul in order that mankind may go forward to better days. Nevertheless I want at least to start with thoughts which will bring home to us the meaning of a festival such as Whitsun.

There are three festivals of main importance in the course of the year: Christmas, Easter, Whitsun. Everyone who has not become indifferent, as is the case with the majority of our contemporaries, to the significance of such festivals in the evolution of the world and of humanity will at once perceive the contrasts between these three festivals, for the difference in the kind of experiences associated with each is expressed in their outer symbolism. Christmas is a festival connected above all with the joys of childhood, a festival in which a part is usually, if not always, played by the Christmas Tree brought into the house from snow-clad nature outside. Our thought also turns to the Christmas Plays so often performed among us and which for centuries have brought uplift to the simplest human hearts at this season by reminding them of the great and unique event in earth-evolution when Jesus of Nazareth, or, to be quite exact, Jesus who came from Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem. The festival of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a festival connected with a world of feeling engendered by the Gospel of St. Luke, by those parts of the Gospel which make the most general appeal to simple hearts and are the easiest to understand. It is therefore a festival of universal humanity, intelligible, to a certain extent at least, even to the child and to men who have preserved a childlike quality of heart and mind. Yet it brings to such childlike hearts something great and mighty which then becomes part of their consciousness.

The Easter festival, although it is celebrated during the season when nature is waking to life, leads our minds to the portal of death. By contrast with the tenderness and universal appeal of the Christmas festival, the festival of Easter contains something infinitely sublime. If human souls are able to celebrate the Easter festival truly, they cannot fail to be aware of its transcendent majesty. It brings the sublime conception of the Divine Being who descended into a human body and passed through death. The whole riddle of death and the preservation in death itself of the eternal life of the soul—this is the great vista presented by the Easter festival.

These times of festival can be experienced in their depths only when we recall many things made real to us by Spiritual Science. Think only of how closely connected with all the festivals celebrated in the world in commemoration of the births of saviours are the thoughts arising from the Christmas festival. We are reminded, for example, of the Mithras festival celebrating the birth of Mithras in a cave. All these things are evidence of an intimate connection with nature. That Christmas is a festival linked with nature is symbolised in the Christmas Tree, and the birth, too, leads our minds to the workings and powers of nature. But because the birth of which Spiritual Science has so many things to say is that of Jesus of Nazareth, it is a birth fraught with infinite significance. And remembering that the Spirit of the earth wakens in winter, is most active during the season when outer nature appears to lie sleeping in a mantle of ice and snow, we can feel that the Christmas festival leads us into elemental nature herself, and that the lighting of the Christmas candles is a symbol of how the Spirit is awakening in the wintry darkness of nature.

If we would relate the Christmas festival to the life and being of man, we can do so by remembering that man is also connected with nature when he has separated from her spiritually, as he does in sleep, when in his ego and astral body he has gone into the spiritual world. His etheric body remains bound, supersensibly, to the physical body, and represents the part of man's being which belongs to elemental nature, to that elemental nature which wakens to life within the earth when the earth is shrouded in the ice of winter. It is far more than an analogy, indeed it is a profound truth to say that in addition to everything else, the Christmas festival is a token that man has in his being an etheric, elemental principle, an etheric body through which he is linked with elemental nature.

If you think, now, of all that has been said in the course of many years about the gradual darkening and decline of man's forces, you will realise how closely all the forces in the human astral body are connected with the death-bringing processes. The fact that we have to develop the astral body during our life, and that in the astral body we have to receive the spiritual, means that, in doing so, we bring the seeds of death into our being. It is quite incorrect to believe that death is connected with life in an external sense only, for the connection is most inward and fundamental. Our life is as it is only because we are able to die in the way we do. But this is bound up with the whole development of man's astral body. Again it is more than an analogy when we say: The Easter festival is a symbol for everything that has to do with the astral nature of man, with that principle of his being which, whenever he sleeps, leaves the physical body together with him and enters the spiritual world whence descended that Divine-Spiritual Being Who in Jesus of Nazareth actually passed through death. If one were speaking in an age more alive to the spiritual than is our own, what I have just said would be recognised as reality, whereas in our days it is taken merely as symbolism. It would then be realised that the purpose of instituting the Christmas and Easter festivals was to provide man with tokens of remembrance that he is connected with spiritual nature, with that nature that brings death to the physical, and to provide him with tokens reminding him that in his etheric body and astral body he is himself a bearer of the spiritual.—In our days these things have been forgotten. They will come to light again when humanity has the will to acquire understanding of spiritual truths such as these.

But now, besides the etheric body and the astral body, we bear within us as that which is supremely spiritual, our Ego. We know something of the complex nature of the Ego. We know especially that it is the Ego which passes from incarnation to incarnation, that the inner forces of the Ego build themselves up and shape themselves to that form which we carry forward into our being in each new incarnation. In the Ego we rise again from death to prepare for a new incarnation. It is by virtue of the Ego that we are individuals. If we can say that the etheric body represents in a certain sense that which is akin to birth and is connected with the elemental forces of nature, that the astral body symbolises the death-bringing principle that is connected with the higher spirituality, so we can say that the Ego represents our continual rising again in the spirit, our resurrection into the spiritual realm which is neither nature nor the world of stars, but pervades them all. And just as the Christmas festival can be connected with the etheric body and the Easter festival with the astral body, so the Whitsun festival can be connected with the Ego. This is the festival which, representing the immortality of the Ego, is a token of the fact that we, as men, do not share only in the universal life of nature, do not merely undergo death, but that we are individual immortal beings, rising ever and again from death.

And how beautifully this comes to expression when the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought are carried further! The Christmas festival is directly connected with earthly happenings, with the winter solstice, the time when the earth is shrouded in deepest darkness. In celebrating the Christmas festival we follow as it were the law by which earth-existence itself is governed; when the nights are longest and the days shortest, when the earth is frost-bound, we withdraw into ourselves and seek for the spiritual that is now alive within the earth. The Christmas festival is linked with the Spirit of the earth; it reminds us ever and again that we belong to the earth, that the Spirit had perforce to come down from cosmic heights and take earthly form in order to be a child of earth among the children of earth.

The Easter festival has a different setting. You know well that Easter is determined by the relation of the sun to the moon on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, the first full moon after the 21st March. The Easter festival, therefore, is fixed according to the relative position of the sun to the moon. In a wonderful way, then, the Christmas festival is linked with the earth, and the Easter festival with the cosmos. At Christmas we are reminded of what is most holy in the earth, at Easter of what is most holy in the heavens. But the thought underlying the Christian festival of Whitsun is associated in a most beautiful way with what is even above the stars—the universal, spiritual, cosmic fire which individualises and in the fiery tongues descends upon the Apostles. It is the fire that is neither heavenly alone nor earthly alone; it is the all-pervading fire which individualises and passes into each single human being. In very truth the Whitsun festival is linked with the whole universe. Just as the Christmas festival is connected with the earth and the Easter festival with the stars, so is the Whitsun festival directly connected with man, with individual man, inasmuch as he receives the spark of spiritual life out of the whole universe. What is bestowed upon mankind in general through the descent to the earth of the Being who was both God and Man, is made ready for every individual human being in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. These fiery tongues represent what lives alike in man, in the stars, in the world.

And so for those who are seeking for the spiritual, this festival of Whitsun has a meaning and content of special profundity, calling ever and again for perpetual renewal of the spiritual quest.

In our days it is necessary that these thoughts of the festival should be taken in a deeper sense than at other times. For how we shall emerge from the grievous events of this age will depend very largely upon how deeply men are able to experience these thoughts. That souls will have themselves to work their way out of the present catastrophic conditions is already beginning to be realised here and there. And those who have come to Spiritual Science should feel with even greater intensity the need of the age for new strength to be infused into the spiritual life, the need to surmount materialism. This victory over materialism will only be possible if men have the will to kindle the spiritual world into living activity within them, to celebrate the Whitsun festival inwardly and with true earnestness.

• 1. Berlin, 1916.

(For a different translation of this lecture, see: The Proclamations to the Magi and the Shepherds)

Let us begin to-day by considering certain questions connected with this time of festival, with this season which yearly renews the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, renews also a direct experience of it in our feeling.

We really have three such times of festival in Christian tradition: the Christmas, the Easter and the Whitsuntide festivals. And we may say that, each in a different way, these three festivals bring man into connection, into relationship, with that in which the Christian tradition sees the meaning of all earth-evolution. These three festivals also differ as regards the human soul-forces. Christmas appeals more to the feeling and in a certain sense is the most popular festival, because to understand it requires a deepening of the feeling-life, and because it is the most readily approachable for the large masses of humanity. The Easter festival, which requires that we raise ourselves to an understanding of the real Mystery of Golgotha, of the entrance of a super-sensible Being into human evolution, is the most challenging to the human powers of understanding. It is a festival which lifts human understanding to the highest level, and which, although it is also generally celebrated, cannot however be popular in the same sense as the Christmas festival.

The third, the Whitsun festival, establishes a relationship particularly between the human will and the super-sensible world, the world to which the Christ-Being as such belongs. The carrying over of will-impulses into execution in the world is brought to human consciousness through a right understanding of the Whitsun festival.

Thus what we may call the secret of Christianity is given form in these yearly celebrations. The way in which the Christmas mystery touches man can be brought before our consciousness in the most manifold ways; and with the recurrence of the Christmas festival during the course of the years, we have considered the Christmas-Thought from the most varied standpoints. This time let us call to mind something which can become clear to any one who considers the Christmas mystery in the light of the Gospels.

In the Gospels we find a twofold announcement of the birth of Christ Jesus. One annunciation is made to the poor shepherds out in the fields. An Angel announces the birth of Christ Jesus to them—in a dream, or however one may wish to call it. Here we have to do with the perception of this event through inner soul-forces, soul-forces which, in the case of these shepherds in the vicinity where Christ Jesus was born, were in a special condition. And a second annunciation is set forth in the Gospels, the annunciation to the Three Kings, the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are told that they followed a star which announced to them the advent of Christ Jesus on the earth.

Thus we are shown two ways by which this earlier humanity reached what we may call its higher knowledge. This is another example of something which is never properly grasped in the present age. To-day we usually conceive of human beings as possessing thought and perception, and we imagine this thinking and perceiving, in fact, all use of the inner soul-forces, to have been in all past centuries and millenia essentially the same—only more primitive—as it is to-day. We know from anthroposophical spiritual science how the soul-constitution of man has changed with the passage of time; how differently in ancient times—for instance, seven or eight thousand years after the beginning of the post-Atlantean period, or even earlier—humanity regarded its own life and the nature of the surrounding universe. Moreover we know how this soul-constitution underwent many changes before it became that reasoning analytical faculty existing to-day, which in its approach to the outer world knows only the purely sense-perceptible aspect of things. This evolution takes its starting-point from a certain ancient instinctive clairvoyance and proceeds through the state found in our modern soul-condition, to return again in future to a clairvoyant perception of the world which will be permeated by full human consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth the ancient instinctive clairvoyance was already greatly dimmed. Men's souls were indeed differently constituted than they are to-day, although they no longer had the old clairvoyance; gone also were their old wise ways of fathoming the universe. The ancient wisdom-teachings as well as the old instinctive clairvoyance had grown very dim as the Mystery of Golgotha approached humanity. But remnants of both still existed, and we are clearly shown in the Gospels, if we rightly understand them, that this was the case. Such remnants were still present among single favoured individuals. We may recognise as such the poor shepherds out in the fields, who in the piety of their hearts possessed a certain clairvoyant capacity of a dreamlike nature. And we also recognise as such the Three Magi from the East, who are pictured as standing on the topmost rung of human society, and had retained from ancient times a capacity gained from a certain stream of wisdom, giving them insight into the course of world-events. Thus, on the one hand, the poor shepherds could be approached in a kind of dream-experience, in inward perception, by the event of Christ Jesus' birth, while, on the other, the Three Magi from the East developed a science which enabled them, by the study of world-phenomena, the appearances in the heavens, to be aware of significant events taking place open the earth quite beyond ordinary human ken.

Thus there are pointed out to us two quite definite, but widely differing, modes of knowledge. Let us turn our attention for the moment to what was present as the last remnant of an ancient stream of wisdom in the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are shown clearly that these Wisemen were able to read the riddles in the movements of the stars. In the existing descriptions we are made aware of an ancient knowledge of the stars whereby access was gained to the mysteries of the starry worlds and wherein the secrets of human events were also revealed. This ancient knowledge of the stars was something quite different from that of to-day. Our astronomy is in a certain sense also prophetic; it can prophesy eclipses of the sun and moon and so on, but it is merely mathematical and mechanical. It only speaks of space and time-relationships in so far as these may be represented mathematically, whereas the ancient wisdom of, the stars perceived in these movements something of higher significance, remote from space and time, taking place in the inner life of man. If we examine the science of humanity in olden times, we find its content essentially one of this wisdom of the stars. Men sought in the stars for a deeper understanding of earthly happenings. For to them the starry world was not the abstract mechanical thing it has become for modern humanity. For them the starry world was something full of life. They felt the presence of an essential Being in the universe, in the case of every planet. By means of an inner soul-language, in a certain sense, they even spoke with the individual planets, as we to-day speak merely from man to man in external words. People were conscious of inward soul-experience which was a reflection of what was going on out in universal space in the movement of the stars. This was a living, spiritualized way of looking at the universe. And man felt himself connected as a soul and spirit with this universe. This wisdom of the world was fostered in schools, in what may be described as Mystery schools, where the pupils were prepared in a careful, intimate and inner way to gain an understanding of the movements of the stars such as might illuminate human life upon the earth.

Of what nature were these preparations? These preparations for a knowledge of the starry heavens and their influences were of such a character that, even then, in the age of instinctive clairvoyance, the pupil was led to develop a more wide-awake life than normally. The large mass of mankind had a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, corresponding to a state of soul which was less wide awake than the one normal for us to-day. In ancient periods of human evolution people were not able to think as clearly as we can now. Geometry and mathematics as we know them could not then exist. The whole of life between birth and death had more of a dreaming character; but just because it was dreamlike it had a far more lively way of perceiving the surrounding universe than does our waking life to-day. And the strange thing was that the pupils of those ancient Mysteries existing 2000 years, or even 1000 years, before the Mystery of Golgotha (such men as the Magi may be counted among the last remaining disciples of this training), were trained in a knowledge which was very similar to our geometry and mathematics. Euclid was the first to give geometry to humanity; but he merely communicated it to humanity in general. What Euclid gave in the way of geometry had already lived in the Mysteries for thousands of years as something communicated only to the most carefully selected Mystery-pupils. It had a different effect then than in later times. It may seem strange and paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that what our children learn as arithmetic and geometry was taught in the Mystery-schools to selected individuals who were considered specially endowed and so accepted in the Mysteries.

To-day we often hear reference made to the mysterious matters supposedly taught in the Mysteries. Actually, in their purely abstract content, these mysterious matters are none other than those taught to children to-day. They are nothing else; and their Mystery-character lies not in the fact of their being unknown to us, but in the different way in which at that time they were taught. It is quite a different matter to call upon the reasoning of children through the content of geometry in an age in which, from the moment of awaking until falling asleep again man lives in a wide-awake consciousness, than it was to present these matters to specially selected human beings, whose consciousness was more mature, during the age of ancient instinctive clairvoyance and dreaming consciousness.

Our modern conceptions of these things are by no means always accurate. For example, there is a poem to Varuna in Oriental literature describing Varuna as appearing in the air, as wafting like the wind through the woods; Varuna appears in the lightning flashing out of the dripping clouds; in the human heart when the will is roused to action; in the heavens when the sun moves across them. Varuna is to be found on the mountains in the juice of the Soma.

What the juice of the Soma is, modern books profess not to know. To-day in our great learning we agree that we do not know what the juice of the Soma is, although there are people who drink it by the quart, and certainly know it very well from a certain standpoint. But it is a different matter to know these things—from the standpoint of the Mysteries than from the standpoint of waking consciousness in profane feeling.

You can read to-day of the Philosopher's Stone, which was accounted precious in an age when the nature of substance was somewhat differently regarded than it is to-day. Again the historians of alchemy will tell you that the Philosopher's Stone is quite unknown. Here and there in my lectures I have indicated that the Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most human beings; they simply do not know its qualities, or why it is so named. But since it is used by the ton, it is very familiar to most human beings.

The facts are simply upon occasion quite different from the concepts we hold of them with our present-day abstract, theoretical grasp of things, so remote from life and reality. There is not even a true grasp of what it might mean to take in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry with quite another soul-constitution than we have to-day, with a mature soul-condition. I have referred to this particular type of Mystery-schooling in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”; but just such important things as these are usually not properly understood, they are not ordinarily understood in their real significance. The fact that the way in which people were approached with things constituted the very kernel of the Mysteries in ancient times is something which should be grasped. And it was thus also in the case of such purely mathematical considerations, the content of feeling and the human fullness of which Novalis still sensed when he felt mathematics to be like great poetry—something which most people now-a-days will not agree with. And it is to such grasping of the world, permeated as it was with feeling, but poured into mathematical mould, that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was thus brought to a mathematical understanding of the universe, he developed just such a world-outlook as that possessed by the Wisemen from the East, as they are described to us.

The mathematics of the universe, which have become so thoroughly abstract to us, revealed at that time something really living, because the revelation found completion in what was brought to understand it. Thus what sprang as science from an ancient culture, and was still preserved in its last fragments to the Magi, made possible the one annunciation, through the channel of the teachers of wisdom, through external science, the annunciation experienced by the Magi.

On the other hand, it was possible for the inner experience of the secrets of humanity to develop in human beings who, like the shepherds in the fields, had a special predisposition in this direction. In such cases the inner forces of man had to reach certain heights; then what took place in the world of men became direct imaginative perception, an instinctive, imaginative picture-perception. Thus, through inner vision, the poor shepherds in the fields partook in the annunciation: “God makes revelation of His Being in the heavenly heights, and His peace shall be with all men of good will.” Thus did the secrets of the universe speak to the innermost being of the poor shepherds in the fields, as well as to the utmost heights attainable to human wisdom at that time, to the Wisemen of the East. Thus the great mystery of earthly life was imparted from two different sides.

What did these Wisemen of the East experience? What was the special development brought about in the souls of these pupils through the introduction of mathematics into their soul-condition, when this was found especially mature and ready? Kant speaks of mathematics as being “a priori” truth. With “a priori” he means a truth which is present within us before our external, empirical knowledge, before our experience of it existed. This is mere word-wisdom; nothing at all is said with this “a priori”! A meaning attaches to it only when it can be shown by spiritual science that mathematics is something that rises up within us, that rises to consciousness out of man's inner being.

Whence does it come? It proceeds from the experiences we went through in the spiritual world before birth, or conception. There we lived in the great wide universe. There we experienced what could be experienced before we had bodily eyes and ears. There we had “a priori” experience, when considered in relation to our life on earth. These “a priori” experiences rise in an unconscious way out of our inner being into the sphere of consciousness. Unless modern man has a premonition of this, as had Novalis, he does not know that when he does mathematics, experiences of the time before conception and birth are rising up within him. But for a person with true insight into these matter the mathematical capacity is in itself a proof of man's life in the spiritual world before conception. As far as those are concerned for whom this is not a proof of pre-natal existence, the fact remains that they do not think thoroughly enough about life's phenomena and have no idea what the true origin of mathematics is.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who possessed that wise outlook, still extant in its last fragments in the Wisemen of the East, had the clear impression: “When we study the stars and apply our mathematical forms and reckoning to them, we are spreading out again over the outer reaches of universal space what we actually lived in before our birth.” And it seemed to such a pupil of the ancient Mysteries as though he must say: “Now I am living on earth; my eyes look out into universal space and see my spatial surroundings. In these same phenomena of the spatial universe I lived before my birth; there I myself counted from star to star what I now merely copy and symbolize in mathematics. With my innermost forces I moved from star to star, living in what I now merely draw.”

Thus they experienced again all they had gone through before birth, or conception, and consequently it was holy to them. They realized that they had lived in a spiritual world before they walked on earth. This knowledge of the world in which man lives before he descends to the earth was present in its last remnants in the Wisemen of the East, and by its means they knew of the advent of the Christ-Being.

Whence came this Christ-Being? He came out of that time which we live through between death and rebirth, and He united Himself with the life we live through between birth and death. For this reason the science that concerns itself with the world we live in between death and rebirth can unveil such a mystery as the Mystery of Golgotha. And out of this science announcement was made to the Magi of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery.

As man lives here on the earth and concerns himself with gaining knowledge of his surroundings, with developing impulses for his actions, for his social life, he has still another unconscious experience. He knows nothing of it; but just as he experiences the after-effects of his pre-natal life, so does he also experience what passes through the gates of death and becomes the content of life after death, namely, the forces already present like a seed between birth and death, which only come to their full blossoming in the life after death. These forces worked with great intensity in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And they worked in their last remnants in the poor shepherds in the fields because of their special piety. Moreover, it is in these forces especially that we live between falling asleep and awaking, when our souls are outside of our bodies in outer space. The soul then lives as it will live consciously in future when it has laid aside the physical body after death. These forces, which under special conditions can penetrate from the world of sleep and dream into waking life, were once very active in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And these the poor shepherds experienced, receiving through them a revelation of the Mystery of Golgotha from a different quarter than that from which the annunciation came to the three Magi.

What does one experience by means of the forces peculiar to man between death and rebirth when, as in the case of the Wisemen from the Orient, they are kindled in the life between birth and death? One experiences what takes place beyond what is earthly. One is borne away from the earth out into the world of the stars where we live between death and rebirth. This was the world into which the Wisemen of the East were led away from the earth out into cosmic space.

And what does one experience by means of the forces which rise up from the inner being of man, especially in the world of dreams? One experiences what goes on within the earth. Here the Tellurian forces, the forces of which we partake because we live in our bodies, are at work. These forces work particularly in what we live through between falling asleep and awaking. Here, too, we are in the outer world, but essentially in that outer world belonging to the earth.

You will say that this is a contradiction of the truth that we are outside of our bodies. But it is not a contradiction. We always perceive only what is external to ourselves; that wherein we live is never perceived. Only people who are especially ignorant about certain subjects, and who are bent on establishing a knowledge consisting solely of phrases, are capable of skipping lightly over such matters with their phrases and of saying, for example, that the point is not to found a science of the spirit upon knowledge gained outside man, but to add to natural science a science derived from man's inner being.

With such a torrent of phrases Darmstadt wisdom-schools may indeed be founded, but one may still remain a mere phrase-maker even when founding schools of wisdom. For rightly understood, the matter is as follows. We may indeed say that, to arrive at the super-sensible, the world must be described from within; but we must first get into the inner being and then look at what is external from outside the body, by looking back upon the body. Keyserling's talks concerning observation from the standpoint of the soul do not attempt to enter man's inner being, they merely use phrases.

The fact really is such that when we are in the condition experienced between falling asleep and awaking, we look back, we feel our way back, as it were, into our bodies. We feel what is of the earth in our bodies; for they are of the earth. The poor shepherds in the fields really, felt the revelation of the earth through their bodies when in a dreamlike condition, they perceived what was happening in the form of the perception of an angel's voice.

These are the two absolute contrasts: the Magi with their knowledge of the heavens, and the shepherds with their earth-revelation. And it corresponds completely to the Mystery of Golgotha that the revelation came from two such different quarters. For a heavenly Being, as yet untouched by earth, was descending to it, and this descent had to make itself known by means of the wisdom of the heavens, which knew that something heavenly was descending.

In the shepherds' wisdom we learn to know the earth by feeling our way into its weaving life as it perceived the descent of the heavenly Being. It is the same annunciation, only from another side. Wonderfully unified, we thus see what, although it was one and the same event, was announced in a twofold way to men.

And when we see how humanity received the event of Golgotha, we must say that, in regard to this and other matters, there were only the merest remnants of the ancient wisdom left to man. I have already shown how the Mystery of Golgotha was grasped in the first centuries of Christianity with the help of the fragments of an ancient wisdom known as Gnosis. From then on it became more and more a matter of trying to penetrate into the nature of the event of Golgotha with analytical reasoning powers alone. And in the 19th century naturalism gradually made its appearance in the confessional sphere. The super-sensible content of the event of Golgotha was no longer grasped at all, Christ became merely the “wise man of Nazareth”, naturalistically conceived. A new, spiritual grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha became necessary. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha must not be confused with the way in which human understanding has dealt with this fact.

Now a soul-constitution such as the shepherds in the fields and the Wisemen of the East possessed still existed in its last fragmentary form at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. But all this changed in the course of human evolution. Everything changes and undergoes metamorphosis. What then became of the wisdom of the Eastern Magi? It has become our mathematics, with its knowledge of the heavens! The Magi possessed a super-earthly science based on sublime recollections of pre-natal life. All this has been shrunken and cramped into our mathematical, mechanical grasp of the heavens, so that we apply nothing but the laws of mathematics and mechanics to their phenomena. What we have in the way of mathematical astronomy is all that still rises up out of our inner being as the modern metamorphosis of what the Magi once possessed.

And looking at our external sense-knowledge, which is merely a perceiving with eyes and ears, we find it to be the externalized inner knowledge of the shepherds in the fields. What could once convey to the shepherds in the fields the inner secrets of earthly existence now permits only of that cold, natural-scientific observation of the outer world which is the offspring of the shepherds' wisdom. The child bears but slight resemblance to its mother. And our mathematics, our astronomy, are the offspring of the wisdom of the Magi.

Humanity had to go through this development. Our scientific researchers, sitting in their laboratories and clinics, have very little in common with the shepherds but theirs is a direct metamorphosis of the shepherds' wisdom. And our mathematicians likewise are in direct line of descent from the Eastern Wisemen. The outer has become the inner, and the inner, outer. And so we have indeed grown remote from the Mystery of Golgotha. We must become aware of this fact. We have become far removed indeed from such understanding. Perhaps many of those who call themselves preachers and ministers of Christianity in the official sense are the most remote from it of all.

The forces of knowledge, faith and feeling that live in man to-day can never penetrate through to the true being of the Mystery of Golgotha. It must be found entirely anew.

The wisdom of the Magi too has become dry mathematics, perceiving the heavens only in designs. It has become an inner thing. But inwardness must take on life once more. What was once outer must be built up again from within.

And now let us try to understand the content of a book such as my Occult Science from this standpoint. The Magi had a real penetration into the starry heavens; they saw what was spiritual there because they had insight into human pre-natal experience. This has become abstract in our mathematics. But the very same forces out of which we develop mathematics can be brought back to life, and intensified as imaginative vision. Then there is born from out our inner being a world which, although we create it within us, we see as the outer world, as though: containing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We see the heavens in inner vision just as the Eastern Wisemen externally perceived the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. The external has become an inner thing, has become mathematical abstraction; and in like manner the inner must be widened out until it becomes a universe around us, until inner vision leads us to a new astronomy experienced within.

Only by thus reaching out for a new understanding of the Christ can we fill the festival of Christmas with a certain meaning. Has the Christmas festival any meaning for most human beings nowadays? It is a very beautiful custom, scarcely 150 years old, to have the Christmas Tree as a symbol of the Christmas festival. The custom of having a Christmas Tree came into being only in the 19th century. What is this Christmas Tree really? It is not so easy to find its meaning. In making the effort to find it, and by discovering how the Christmas Tree gradually came into use, how it grew from being the little branch, carried on St. Nicholas' arm on the 6th of December, into being our Christmas Tree, we come to realize that this Christmas Tree is also directly connected with the Tree of Paradise.

Human consciousness thus looks back here to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. What does this signify? This is one aspect of the way we make the Mystery of Golgotha known to-day. We turn back from the Mystery of Golgotha to the creation of the world, to the beginning of the world. We fail to grasp the meaning of the world's redemption, and instead turn back to the God who created the universe. This is expressed in the gradual disappearance of the real Christmas symbol, of the manger—so sublime a part of the Christmas plays of earlier centuries—and in the appearance of the Christmas Tree which is really the Tree of Paradise.

Thus the old Jehovah-religion again took the place of the Christ-religion; the Christmas Tree is the symbol of the reappearance of the religion of Jehovah. This Jehovah-religion makes its appearance in many shapes and forms to-day. For Jahve was once rightly worshipped as the one and only God in an age when his people felt themselves to be a unified folk, content within their limits, and living in the expectation of some day filling the entire earth. In our age people talk of Christ Jesus, but really worship only Jehovah. For, as we saw during the war, the people of the various nations talked of Christ, but were really concerned with the original God, Jehovah, who lives in the forces of nature and heredity.

On the one hand, the Christmas Tree, on the other, the national gods so remote from Christianity—with these humanity has turned back from grasping the Mystery of Golgotha to lay hold again on something belonging to a much earlier period. There has been a retrogression into the ancient Jehovah religion in the adherence to the nationalistic principle, in the announcement that the various peoples would follow their national gods.

You see, what must be taken into consideration is that in the annunciation, to the shepherds, and in the annunciation that came to the Magi, there is a human element common to all men. For the earth is the common property of all. The earth-annunciation received by the shepherds was one which could make no national distinctions and differentiations. And the Magi, who received a sun-annunciation, an annunciation from the heavens, also received a purely human element. For after the sun shines upon the lands of one folk, it shines on the lands of others also. Heaven and earth belong to all in common. With Christianity, a common human element is roused in all humanity.

This fact is pointed to in the twofold annunciation of the Christmas story. Such matters which were fully understood when man's soul-constitution was an entirely different one, will only be comprehensible to-day with the help of spiritual science.

We should inscribe this into our hearts to-day when we think of the Christmas festival. To-day, in thinking of the Christmas Mystery, we have need to look for a birth. We should not merely busy ourselves with idle talk about the Christmas festival and our own feelings, but should look for what must be born anew in this our age. For truly, real Christianity must be born anew. We need a cosmic Christmas festival for humanity.