The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Just like plant seeds, human beings take a multitude of seeds with them to Devachan, in order to develop them there anew. All the powers that rebuild the body are contained there; the archetypes of the human being are also found there.

Long ago, the physical eyes were formed by the light. The light drew out the eyes, they are products of the light. Before that, man was still blind; the food juices, which otherwise provided the strength to feel, grasp, scratch and so on, were transformed to form organs for seeing. In this way, the ear was formed for sound, the nose for aroma.

The archetype of the etheric body arises out of the watery region of Devachan. The archetype of the astral body arises out of the aerial region of Devachan. Out of these regions man creates the foundations for his physical shell. The time between death and birth teaches the reasons why he must come again and again. Man must always gain different experiences, otherwise it would be useless for him to come to the same earth. This is constantly changing. A million years ago, people could not live here in Germany because of the tropical heat. In our present homeland, there were the animals and plants of the equator.

About twenty thousand years ago, there was an ice age in the North German lowlands that extended down to Bavaria. After the birth of Christ until the fourth century, Germany was still a land without culture. From a chronicle of an archbishop of Bremen, one can read that the people in the east, in the Mark, drink blood and have other barbaric customs. The children of the Greeks and Romans were educated differently than those of the Germans. Man does not enter the scene of the earth again until it has changed and he experiences a completely new situation. There is always something new to experience, and the earth always shows a new face. Peoples who had their spiritual life through the secret schools of high teachers retained certain feelings for the transformation of the earth; they knew that these transformations were connected with events in the starry sky.

The point in the spring sky where the sun rises keeps moving. We are in the constellation of Pisces. At the time of Jesus' birth, the sun had been rising in the constellation of Aries for eight hundred years; two thousand one hundred and sixty years before that, it had been rising in the constellation of Taurus, and before that in the constellation of Gemini and Cancer. Thus, in about two thousand one hundred and sixty years, the sun passes through one constellation after another until it completes its cycle.

After the Atlantean world, the Indian epoch emerged, under the sign of Cancer, which is a spiral-shaped vortex and represents the Indian cult. The Persian epoch was ruled by Gemini, the Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian epochs by Taurus. Each new solar sign brought a savior. Eight hundred years before Christ, the nations hoped for the Lamb, hence the words of John the Baptist about Christ: “This is the Lamb of God.” The saga of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, which Jason brought, also belongs here.

It is often said that nature does not make leaps. But it does make huge leaps. A newborn child is a huge leap, and a plant's root, stem, leaf and flower are huge leaps! It meant a huge leap from the old Atlantic culture to the Indian one. In nature, everything is formed in a whirling manner, so Indian culture curled up into the Atlantic one. When the sun has passed from one constellation to another, the earth has always received a new face.

The Indians under the sign of Cancer always longed back to the deity, their ancient home; the Persians had to distinguish light and darkness in the sign of Gemini, the Egyptians worshiped the sacred bull. The time between two incarnations varies greatly because people's intimate circumstances differ. On average, there are two incarnations in a solar sign, one male and one female, in the same individual. In the overall process of development, there are as many male as female incarnations. Only in exceptional cases do up to seven incarnations of the male sex follow one another, when special tasks need to be fulfilled.

From the natural basis of motherly love an ethical bond develops. The networks that are woven from soul to soul on earth are much more intimate and lasting in the spirit world because the body as an obstacle no longer exists. The reunion there has its deepest satisfaction, the souls do not live next to each other, but in each other; time and space have ceased to exist.

What work does a person do in devachan? He would be a poor world citizen, and it would be sad if he only wanted to rebuild himself as well as possible for the next incarnation. He has something important to do there, to work on shaping the world. It is wrong to imagine the stay in the spirit world as idleness.

The hereafter is all around us, we can already be blissfully happy here; disincarnated, man works there on the transformation of the earth; what he then encounters again, he himself [helped to transform], he prepares his own bed. The forces of nature are only the outer, visible tone, which cannot be without spiritual impact.

Consider the flowers in a meadow bathed in sunshine. With an open [spiritual] eye, you can see the radiance of the etheric body around the flowers, and in the sunlight that falls on them, you can see the departed working on the flowers. It is our cosmic, divine duty to help with planetary evolution in joyful devotion. If we were to shirk this duty, we would be like a brick in a building that does not want to be integrated and causes the house to collapse.

If we were to indulge in a world-hostile asceticism, we would destroy the divine building. Every incarnation is important as a link in the being. There is nothing arbitrary about the personality. The limbs and the ego are nothing more than what man has acquired piece by piece.

Everything around us is valuable, we are called upon to ennoble even the smallest thing to the greatest. Every life is the pearl of a string that we must consider to be of infinite value.

When the human archetype has been formed, the astral body envelops it. Just as iron filings are drawn by the force of a magnet, so the astral substance forms around the I.

New souls are always pushing to be embodied. Bell-like figures rush through the astral plane with extraordinary speed, which is an expression of their power. This is followed by the selection of parents; this often drives them from one end of the earth to the other, hence their haste. At the moment when the nascent human being reaches the place where he fits best, higher beings attach the etheric body to the astral body. As soon as these bodies are reconnected, the person experiences the opposite of their retrospective account of their death, they see their new life in front of them. The soul can be horrified by what is about to happen. Some people are so frightened that they prevent higher beings from integrating. Then the etheric body hangs down partially from the head, and people become idiots.

It is delicate to talk about this, but the future child is already with its parents before conception and is incorporated into the small germ until about the seventeenth day after conception. The etheric body is then already active, and the higher members have a determining effect on the future person from there.

From his last stay in the realm of purification, man took with him the desire to make up for the pain he caused others and felt as an inhibition. That is the brand that puts man in a position to make amends for what he has done. Attractions, sympathy and antipathy, proceed from Kamaloka and form the causes of destinies. Through the causes of the laws we are led to the strict laws of karma. The occultist can investigate how destinies are interwoven. Example: Five femal judges killed a person. In a previous life, this person was an Indian chief and killed the five others.

We have heard in these lectures that through the coming of Christ Jesus the forces of the human Ego were to be gradually endowed with those faculties which in the ancient Mysteries could be acquired by man only through the suppression, the dulling, of his Ego. In all ancient Initiations there was the possibility of rising into the spiritual world, into the Kingdoms of Heaven. But owing to the character of human evolution in pre-Christian times, man's Ego could not ascend into the Kingdoms of Heaven in the same state or condition in which it confronts the physical-material world. Two conditions of the human soul must therefore be distinguished. The one is the condition familiar to the normal man of to-day as prevailing between the times of waking and going to sleep, when his Ego perceives and is aware of the objects of the material world. In the second condition there is no definite consciousness of Ego-hood. It was in this latter condition that in the ancient Mysteries man was transported into the Kingdoms of Heaven. According to the preaching of John the Baptist and then of Christ Jesus Himself, these Kingdoms of Heaven were, to be brought down to the Earth in order that mankind might receive an impetus for development enabling men to experience the higher worlds while maintaining full Ego-consciousness. It was thereby only natural that those who recorded the Christ-Jesus-Event should have described the different processes undergone by a candidate for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries, but that at the same time an indication should be given of a new element, showing that now it was not a matter of the second condition of soul but of a new condition in which the Ego is fully conscious.

In the lecture yesterday we studied the nine Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount from this point of view. Still more could be said about the contents of the present text of St. Matthew's Gospel which was translated, not always without ambiguity, from the Aramaic language into Greek. But even in the Greek text of the Gospel one can detect, in the continuation of the Sermon on the Mount too, definite indications of what a man formerly experienced while his Ego was suppressed and in a dulled condition. Whereas he was once able to say: ‘When I suppress my Ego and pass into the spiritual world, I shall grasp certain fundamental truths’—in the future this will be possible while retaining full Ego-consciousness. To understand what this implies it is essential to know something more about the use of names or designations in olden times. They were not chosen as they are to-day, but always with consciousness of the reality involved. And the expressions used in the Sermon on the Mount show clearly that Christ Jesus felt Himself to be the bringer of Ego-consciousness at a higher stage than that hitherto attained, and able to experience the Kingdoms of Heaven as an inner reality. He therefore brings home this contrast to the souls of His disciples: ‘In earlier times too it was said that revelations come from the Kingdoms of Heaven. But from now onwards you will experience these things when you let your Ego itself speak, in what your Ego says to you.’—Hence He constantly repeated words: ‘I say unto you!’—for Christ Jesus felt Himself to be ' the Representative of the human soul which comes to expression when uttering the words: ‘I say it,’ ‘I say it with my full Ego-consciousness.’ This utterance, which occurs many taken in a trivial sense. It calls attention repeatedly to the new impulse inculcated through Christ Jesus into the evolution of humanity. Read the continuation of the Sermon on the Mount—With this in mind and you will feel that Christ Jesus wished to say: Hitherto you could not call upon your Ego; but now, through what I have brought to you, you will be able gradually to acquire the treasures of the Kingdoms of Heaven through your own inner power, through the power of your own ‘I’.—The whole spirit of the Sermon on the Mount is pervaded by the new impulse of human Egohood; and it is the same when the narrative leads on to the so-called ‘healings’.

As everyone knows, these acts of healing have been the subject of widespread discussions. The point most often emphasised is that the Gospels are speaking here of miracles. But let us go more closely into this. In the lecture yesterday I said that people of to-day entirely disregard the changes and metamorphoses undergone by human nature in the course of evolution. If you were to compare a physical body of the time of Christ, let alone earlier, with one of the modern age, a very significant difference would be revealed, a difference that cannot, it is true, be established by anatomy, but certainly by occult investigation. You would find that the physical body has solidified, has become denser; at the time of Christ Jesus it was much more pliable. Above all, man's vision was such that he perceived things he no longer perceives to-day and moreover possessed some knowledge of certain forces working in and shaping the body. The muscles, for example, made a very distinct and much stronger impression on a more delicate faculty of perception. This kind of vision was gradually lost. Childish theories connected with the history of art point to old drawings where the lines indicating the muscles are very conspicuous and regard this as exaggeration and a sign of the artist's lack of skill. The reason is that originators of those theories do not know that such drawings were based on actual observation—a faculty that was right and proper in ancient times although it would be out of place in the modern age. But be that as it may, we will concern ourselves now with the characteristics of human bodies that were once quite differently constituted.

In those early times the power of the soul and of the spirit had a much more immediate influence on the human body than was the case later on, when the soul had lost power over the body because of its greater density. It was therefore far more possible in those early times for healing to be brought about by forces of the soul. With its far greater power, the soul was able to permeate a disordered body with the forces of healing drawn from the spiritual world, so that harmony might again be established. In the course of advancing evolution this power of the soul over the body had been gradually diminishing. Processes of healing in olden times were therefore spiritual processes to a far greater extent than was the case later on. Those who were regarded as doctors were not doctors in the modern, physical sense, but most of them were healers who worked upon the body by way of the soul. They purified the soul,instilled healthy feelings, impulses and will-forces into it through the spiritual influences they were able to bring to bear. This might have taken place either in the condition of ordinary waking life, in the so-called ‘temple sleep’, or in something akin to it—which at that time simply meant inducing a state in which a man became clairvoyant. In studying conditions of civilization at that time, therefore, it must be realised that those who were strong enough in soul to draw upon forces they had themselves acquired, were able to make a very real effect upon the souls of other men and therewith upon their bodies. So too, those who were in some way permeated with spirit and from whom forces of healing were known to radiate into their surroundings, were also called ‘healers’. As a matter of fact, not only the Therapeutae but the Essenes too, in a certain sense, would have to be called healers. Moreover in a certain dialect current in Asia Minor among those associated with the birth of Christianity, the word ‘Jesus’ was the translation of the expression ‘spiritual healer’. ‘Jesus’ expresses ‘spiritual physician’ and it is a fairly correct interpretation.¹ This is an indication of what was associated with names and designations in an age when men still felt that they pointed to certain realities.

But now let us throw our minds back to the civilization of those times. A person speaking of conditions of life as they then were, would have said: There are men who have been admitted into the Mysteries where, by sacrificing some degree of their Ego-consciousness, they can establish connection with certain forces of soul-and-spirit which then radiate into the environment through them; such men become healers. Supposing that such a man had become a follower of Christ Jesus, he would have said: Wondrous things have come to pass! Formerly those alone could become healers of the soul who had received spiritual forces into themselves in the Mysteries; but there has now been among us One who was a healer while maintaining full Ego-consciousness, who had not undergone the procedures of the Mysteries.—The fact that spiritual healings had taken place would not have astonished such a man, neither would the story of a spiritual healer narrated in the Gospel of St. Matthew have struck him as indicating anything particularly miraculous. His attitude would have been: What is wonderful about such men being spiritual healers? It is quite natural that they should be I—Accounts of such healings would not have seemed miraculous in those days. But the point of real significance is indicated when the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew speaks of One who had imparted a new power to mankind, who by drawing upon forces of his Ego—with which healing was not formerly possible—had actually healed the sick. So you see, the Gospels are speaking of something altogether different from what is usually thought. Many proofs, historical evidence too, could be presented in verification of what Spiritual Science establishes from occult sources.

If the statement just made is true, it must have been realised in the days of antiquity that under certain conditions the sight of the blind could be restored by spiritual influence. Attention has rightly been called to early portrayals of these things. The author referred to yesterday, John M. Robertson, mentions that there exists in Rome a figure of Aesclepius standing in front of two blind men, and Robertson naturally concluded that it indicated an act of healing and that the writers of the Gospels incorporated this into their narratives. The important point in this example is not that spiritual healings were miracles but that the aim of the artist was to indicate that Aesclepius was an Initiate who had acquired powers of healing through the suppression of his Ego-consciousness in the Mysteries. The writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew, however, wished to make it clear that although in the case of Christ Jesus healings were not achieved in this way, the impulse that was once active in Him must in time be acquired by all mankind, and can be acquired through the power of the Ego itself. This is beyond the reach of men to-day because the power is not to be instilled into humanity until a somewhat distant future. But what was accomplished by Christ at the beginning of our era will take root, and men will gradually become capable of bringing it to expression. This will happen and it was what the writer of St. Matthew's Gospel wished to convey in his narratives of the healings.—And so, speaking out of occult consciousness, I can say: The writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew had no desire to depict any ‘miracle’ but something entirely natural, entirely understandable. He wanted also to show that such healing was brought about in a new way. That is the strict truth of these matters. The Gospels have indeed been badly misunderstood!

How may we expect the narrative to continue? We have heard that what took place in the life of Christ Jesus in the form of the so-called Temptation was a descent into all the experiences undergone by a man when he penetrates into his physical body and etheric body. In the case of Christ, the forces streaming from the physical body and etheric body were able to work in the way that comes to expression in the Sermon on the Mount and in the healings that follow it. The power of Christ Jesus now worked as the power of an Initiate in the Mysteries would have worked, namely, by attracting pupils and disciples. And here again it was inevitable that Christ Jesus should attract disciples in His own unique way.

To understand the chapters in the Gospel of St. Matthew following the Sermon on the Mount and the accounts of the healings, preparation is necessary in the form of a certain knowledge of occult facts which we have acquired through the years. We know that when a man is being led upwards through Initiation into the higher worlds, he develops a kind of Imaginative vision, a vision consisting of true Imaginations. Those who were around Christ Jesus had necessarily to acquire not only the faculty of listening with a certain measure of understanding to utterances as majestic as those of the Sermon on the Mount, but of participating intelligently in the acts of healing performed by Christ Jesus; it was also necessary that the mighty power working in Him should gradually pass over to those who were His closest friends and disciples. This too is indicated in the Gospel. It is first of all shown how, after the Temptation, Christ Jesus is able to give a new form to the ancient teachings and to perform healings through a new impulse. But then it is shown how He worked upon His disciples in a new way, how the fullness of power incorporated in him affected the disciples and followers around Him. How is this shown? By the fact that for unreceptive, insensitive men, what He represented had also to be given expression in words. But the effect of His influence upon those who were receptive, whom He had Himself chosen and guided, was different. Imaginations arose in them and they attained the next stage of higher knowledge. The power emanating from Christ Jesus therefore worked in two ways: the effect upon those who were not His chosen disciples was that they heard His words and accepted them as theory; the effect upon the others whom He had chosen because they had witnessed the manifestations of His power and to whom, because of their special karma, He could transmit that power, was that Imaginations were awakened in their souls and insight pointing to a higher stage on the path into the spiritual worlds. This is indicated in the saying that those who are ‘without’ hear parables only—that is to say, pictures, are presented to them, symbolic images of happenings in the spiritual world. But to the others He said: You understand the meaning of the parables and the words that guide you into the higher worlds.—These verses must not be interpreted in a shallow sense but recognized as guidance whereby the disciples were led upwards into the spiritual worlds.

And now we will go into the question of how the disciples could be led into the higher worlds. To understand what I am now going to say needs not only attentive listening but also a certain goodwill, fortified by the spiritual-scientific knowledge you have already acquired. I want to convey as clearly as possible the real meaning of the happenings described in the next chapters of the Gospel of St. Matthew.

We will once more remind ourselves that there are two modes of Initiation. The process in one is that a man descends into his physical body and etheric body, learns to know his own inner nature and comes into contact with the forces that work creatively in him. And in the other mode of Initiation a man is led out into the spiritual world, into the Macrocosm. Now we know that this—as regards what actually happens, not as regards consciousness—takes place every time a human being goes to sleep; his astral body and Ego, withdrawn from his physical and etheric bodies, pour into the world of stars and absorb its forces—hence the designation, astral’ body. Through this form of Initiation a man is able not only to survey happenings on the Earth but to expand into the Cosmos, to gain knowledge of the world of the stars and absorb its forces, But the condition that can only gradually be attained by man (in Initiation) was present in the,Christ in the form consonant with His special nature after the Baptism by John. In Him, however, it was not comparable with the state of sleep; it was present in Him when He was not sleeping but was awake in his physical body and etheric body. He was able to unite Himself with the forces of the world of stars and carry those forces into the physical world.

What Christ Jesus brought. about can therefore be described as follows.—Through the force of attraction exercised by the physical and etheric bodies that had been specifically prepared for Him, He drew down through His very nature the power of the Sun, of the Moon, of the Stars, of the whole Cosmos connected with our Earth. And the deeds He performed became channels for the health-bestowing, strength-giving life otherwise streaming from the Cosmos through man when he is outside his physical and etheric bodies during sleep. The forces with which Christ Jesus worked were forces which streamed down from the Cosmos through the power of attraction exercised by Hi body and streamed forth again from this body to His disciples. Receptive as they were, the disciples now rightly began to feel: Verily Christ Jesus is a Being through whom the forces of the Cosmos are brought to us as spiritual nourishment; they pour upon us.

But the disciples themselves lived in two states of consciousness, for they were not yet men who had reached the highest stage of development; it was through Christ that the attainment of a higher stage was made possible for them. The two states of their consciousness may be compared with those of waking life and sleep. The magical power of Christ was able to work upon the disciples in both states of consciousness, not only by day, when He was actually near them, but also during sleep when they had left their physical and etheric bodies. Whereas in the ordinary way man's being expands into the worlds of stars unknowingly, Christ's power was now with the disciples and they actually beheld these worlds; they knew too: Christ's power gives us nourishment from the worlds of stars.

But these two states of consciousness in which the disciples lived had still another effect. In every human being—in a disciple of Christ Jesus too—we must pay attention both to what he is as a man in the immediate present and to the potentialities within him for future incarnations. In each and all of you lie the rudiments of what will present itself to the world in a quite different form when it appears again in a new incarnation during a future epoch of civilization. And if through these potential faculties that are already within you, you were to become clairvoyant, vision of the immediate future would arise as a first manifestation of super-sensible sight. Among the first clairvoyant experiences—provided they were genuine and pure—would be those concerning happenings of the immediate future.—This was the case in the disciples. In their normal waking consciousness Christ's power streamed into them and they could say: In our waking hours Christ's power takes effect in us in a way befitting our normal day-conscious-ness.—But what happened to them while they were sleeping? Because they were disciples of Jesus and the Christ-power had worked upon them, they always became clairvoyant at certain times during sleep. They did not, however, see what was taking place in the present but what would come to pass in the future. They plunged as it were into the ocean of astral vision and foresaw what was to happen to man in future time.

Thus the disciples lived in these two states of consciousness. Of the one they could say: In our waking state Christ brings us from the great Universe the forces of the cosmic worlds, communicating them to us as spiritual nourishment. Because He is an embodiment of the Sun's power, He brings down to us everything revealed by Zoroastrianism when understood in the light of Christianity. He is the intermediary for the powers which the Sun can send forth from the seven day-constellations of the Zodiac, From thence streams the nourishment for the day-consciousness. Of the night-consciousness the disciples could say: In this condition we become aware of how, through the power of Christ, the Sun that is invisible during the night while passing through the other five constellations sends the heavenly food into our souls.

With their Imaginative clairvoyance the disciples could feel: In our waking state we are united with the power of Christ, with the power of the Sun. This power transmits to us what is meet and right for men of the present (i.e. the fourth) epoch of civilization. And in the state of sleep the power of Christ conveys the strengthening forces of the nocturnal Sun from the five night-constellations. But this applies to the epoch that is to follow our own—to the fifth epoch of civilization.—That is what the disciples experienced. In what way could it be expressed? We shall go further into this in the next lecture. I want now to speak briefly about the following.—

In ancient terminology, human beings en masse were referred to as a ‘thousand’ and when it was desired to particularise, a specific number was added. For example, men of the fourth epoch of civilization were the ‘fourth thousand’ and those whose mode of life was already that of the fifth epoch were the ‘fifth thousand.’ These were simply termini technici. Hence the disciples could say: During the waking state we are aware of what Christ's power transmits to us from the Sun-forces radiating from the seven day-constellations; we receive the nourishment that is destined for men of the fourth epoch, the ‘fourth thousand’. And in our clairvoyant state during sleep we are made aware, through the forces radiating from the five night-constellations, of what applies to the immediate future, to the ‘fifth thousand.’—Food that is destined for men of the fourth epoch, that is to say for the ‘four thousand’, comes down from Heaven through the seven day-constellations, the seven ‘heavenly loaves’; and men of the fifth epoch—the ‘five thousand’—are fed through the five night-constellations, the five ‘heavenly loaves.’ The point of division between the day-constellations and the night constellations is indicated by specific mention of the constellation of Pisces, the Fishes.

A secret is touched upon here. Indication is given of something deeply significant, namely the magical intercourse of Christ with His disciples. Christ makes it clear to them that He is not speaking of the old leaven of the Pharisees but is bringing down heavenly food to them from the Sun-forces of the Cosmos. On one occasion He has at His disposal only the seven loaves of the seven day-constellations, and on another the five loaves of the five night-constellations. And between the day-constellations and the night-constellations stands the constellation of Pisces, the Fishes, indicating the division. Indeed in one place, for the sake of even greater clarification, mention, is made of two fishes.

These profundities in the Gospel of St. Matthew, lead back to the proclamation made by Zarathustra, who first pointed to the Sun-Spirit and was also one of the first missionaries to explain to those who were receptive, the mystery of the down-streaming, magical power of the Sun.

But what do glib expounders of the Bible say about these things? At one place in St. Matthew's Gospel they find a passage concerning the feeding of four thousand people with seven loaves, and at another a reference to the feeding of five thousand with five loaves, and they regard the second account as mere repetition. They say: The transcriber of the original text copied carelessly, as often happens. So on one occasion it is said that four thousand people were fed with seven loaves and on another that five thousand were fed with five loaves. After all, that sort of thing may well happen when a copyist is negligent!—I have no doubt that similar things may occur when books are being written in the modern age, but the Gospels did not by any means come into existence in that way! When a narrative occurs a second time there is deep meaning in it. But because accounts in the Gospel of St. Matthew harmonise with the indications given a century before the appearance of the Christ by Jeschu ben Pandira, the great Essene teacher, in order that when He came He might be understood—because this is so we must go deeply into the indications given in this Gospel if we are to grasp the truths it contains.—But let us continue.—

The power of Imaginative, astral vision streamed from Christ to His disciples. This too is quite clearly indicated. One might well say: he who has eyes to read, let him read!—as in earlier days, when it was not customary to write everything down, it was said: he who has ears to hear, let him hear!

He who has eyes to read, let him read the Gospels carefully. Is there any indication that this power of the Christ-Sun was revealed to the disciples in one way by day and in another by night? There is indeed. In an important place in St. Matthew's Gospel the following is said.—

In the fourth watch of the night—therefore between three and six o'clock in the morning—while the disciples were sleeping, they saw, walking on the sea, a figure whom they took at first to be a spirit—that is to say, the nocturnal Sun-power reflected through Christ. The actual hour is indicated because it was only at a particular time that the disciples could be made aware that this power from the Cosmos could stream to them through the mediation of Christ. Constant references to the position of the Sun and its relation to the constellations, to the heavenly loaves, indicate that through the presence of Christ Jesus in Palestine, through this one personality a.nd individuality, a means existed whereby the powers and forces of the Sun could penetrate into our Earth. It is upon this cosmic nature of Christ, this penetration of cosmic forces into the Earth through Christ that emphasis is everywhere laid.

Christ Jesus was to initiate in a particular way those of His disciples who were specially fit for it, so that they would be able not only to see the spiritual worlds with Imaginative vision, as it were in astral pictures, but actually to hear what was taking place in those realms—this, as we know, indicates ascent into Devachan.

Hence, having been transported into the higher worlds, these disciples would now be able to find in those worlds the personality known to them on the physical plane as Christ Jesus. They were to become clairvoyant in regions higher than the astral plane. This was not possible for all the disciples; it was possible only for those who were the most receptive to the power that could stream from Christ: these disciples were Peter, James and John. The Gospel of St. Matthew therefore relates how Christ led the three disciples to surroundings where He could guide them beyond the astral plane into the world of Devachan, where they could behold the spiritual Archetypes, first that of Christ Jesus Himself and—in order that they might be aware of the conditions under which He was working—also of two Beings who were connected with Him: Elias and Moses. Elias was the ancient prophet who, reincarnated as John the-Baptist, was also the forerunner of Christ Jesus. The scene takes place after the beheading of John, when he was already in the spiritual worlds. The disciples also beheld Moses, another spiritual forerunner of Christ.

Such an experience was only possible when the three chosen disciples were transported to the level of spiritual vision higher than that of astral vision. And the fact that they rose into Devachan is clearly indicated in St. Matthew's Gospel, for it is said that they not only beheld Christ filled with the power of the Sun but extra words are added: ‘And His face did shine as the Sun.’ It is also said that the three figures—Christ, Elias, Moses—were talking together. An ascent has therefore taken place into the realm of Devachan; the disciples hear the three talking together. (Matt. XVII, 1-13.)

Everything, therefore, is faithfully described and tallies with the characteristics of the spiritual world revealed to spiritual-scientific investigation. There is never any contradiction between the findings of this investigation and true accounts of the deeds of Christ. It was He Himself who led the disciples into the astral world and then into Devachan, the realm of spirit.

Christ Jesus is graphically depicted in the Gospel of St. Matthew as the vehicle, the bearer, of the Sun-power once proclaimed by Zarathustra. It is faithfully related in this Gospel that the Spirit of the Sun—Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd—of whom Zarathustra could only declare that He lived in the Sun, had lived on the Earth through the instrumentality of Jesus of Nazareth and had united Himself with the Earth in so real a way that through a single life in a physical body, etheric body and astral body, He became an impulse in Earth-evolution and as time goes on will become even more deeply united with it. Expressed in other words, this means: Egohood was once present in a Personality on the Earth in such full measure that if men receive Christ into themselves in the sense indicated by St. Paul, they will themselves acquire in the course of successive incarnations the forces and power of this Egohood. As they pass from incarnation to incarnation during the rest of earthly evolution, men who imbue their souls with the power of that Personality who once lived on the Earth, will rise to greater and greater heights. At that time, chosen ones were able with their physical eyes to behold Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Once in the course of the Earth's evolution, and for the sake of mankind, Christ, who formerly could only be revealed to men's vision as the Spirit of the Sun, descended and united Himself with the forces of the Earth.

Man is the being in whom the power of the Sun was to be present in its fullness—the power of the Sun that was once to descend and work in a human physical body. This was the inauguration of the, epoch during which the forces outpoured from the Sun will flow in ever greater measure into men as they live on from incarnation to incarnation, and—as far as the earthly body permits—gradually permeate themselves with the Christ-power. Obviously, this is not possible in the case of every physical body, just as it was only that very special body, prepared through the two Jesus figures in the complicated way described and then brought by Zarathustra to a very lofty stage of development—it was in that body only that the Christ could live in His fullness once!

Men who so resolve will permeate themselves with the Christ-Power, first inwardly,then outwardly. Thus humanity in the future will not only understand the nature of the Christ but will be filled with His Power. In the Rosicrucian Mystery Play² many of you have been shown what form this increasing experience of Christ will take in the evolution of humanity on the Earth. The seeress Theodora is to be regarded as a personality who has developed the power of seeing into the future, of perceiving the near approach of a period when a few human beings to begin with, and then greater and greater numbers, will be able, not only through spiritual training but through the stage of earthly evolution reached by humanity in general, actually to see the figure of Christ—but now in the etheric, not in the physical world. In a more distant future Christ will be seen in a form again different. Once and once only He was to be seen in physical form by men living on the physical plane. But the Christ Impulse would not have taken effect had it not worked in a way that would ensure its own further development.

We are approaching a time—this must be taken as a communication—when Christ will be visible to the higher faculties of men. Before the end of the twentieth century a few human beings will actually develop the faculties of Theodora; and those whose spiritual eyes are open will have the same experience that came to Paul at the gate of Damascus—an experience possible for him because he was ‘born out of due time’. Before the twentieth century has run its course, a number of people will experience Christ as Paul experienced Him and, like Paul, will need no Gospels or ancient records to convince them of the reality of Christ, for through their own inner experience they will recognize Him in the etheric world.

Christ now reveals Himself in etheric form as He revealed Himself to Paul, foreshadowing what would later come to pass. To us falls the task of emphasizing one aspect of the Christ Event, namely that He who once lived as Christ Jesus in a physical body will appear before the end of our epoch in an etheric form—as He appeared to Paul. If men develop their faculties to higher and higher stages they will learn to know the nature of Christ in its fullness; but to appear a second time in a physical body would mean that no progress had been made, for then His first appearance would have been in vain, would not have ensured the development of higher forces in human nature. The outcome of the Christ Event is that these higher faculties will unfold in men and that through them Christ will be seen in the sphere where He is working. Ours is the mission, if we understand the struggles of the present time, to point to this event in our own age, as the great Essene teacher, Jeschu ben Pandira, once pointed prophetically to the Christ who would come as the Lion born from David's line—thus again referring to the power of the Sun, in the constellation of Leo. And if—I say this merely as an indication—it were to be the happy fate of humanity that Jeschu ben Pandira—who was inspired at that time by the great Bodhisattva, the future Maitreya Buddha—should incarnate again in our epoch, he would consider the task of supreme importance to be that of pointing to the etheric Christ in the etheric world; and he would emphasize that the Christ came once, and once only, in a physical body.

Let us suppose that Jeschu ben Pandira—who was stoned to death approximately a hundred and five years before the Christ Event in Palestine—were to reincarnate in our time and announce the imminence of a revelation of Christ, he would point to the Christ who cannot appear in a physical body but is to become manifest in an etheric form, as He was revealed to Paul at Damascus. By this very teaching Jeschu ben Pandira could be recognized, assuming him to be reincarnated. It is also essential to recognize Essenism in its new form, to realise that from the one who in future time will be the Maitreya Buddha, we have to learn how the Christ will be revealed in our epoch, and that it behooves us to guard against harbouring false conceptions of Essenism due to its possible recrudescence in the present age.

There is a sure sign by which Jeschu ben Pandira could be recognized, were he to reincarnate in our epoch. The sign is that he would certainly not declare himself to be the Christ. If anyone were to come forward in our time claiming to bear the same power that was in Jesus of Nazareth, he could, by this very claim, be recognized as falsely identifying himself with the forerunner of Christ who lived a hundred years B.C. Such an assertion would be the surest possible sign that he is not an incarnation of that forerunner; a false prophet would be masquerading in him were he to claim any relationship with Christ.

The danger in this domain is very great, for in our time humanity fluctuates between two extremes. On the one side it is emphasized that modern man is unwilling to recognize spiritual forces working in the world. It has already become a truism, referred to constantly in newspapers, that our race has neither the insight nor the strength of mind to acknowledge any original spiritual power when there is evidence of it in some personality. This is one defect of our times. It is quite true that a reincarnation of the greatest possible significance might take place in our epoch and be unrecognized or treated with indifference. And the other defect is no less apparent—it is one which our epoch has in common with many others. Just as on the one side spiritual Individualities are undervalued and unacknowledged, on the other side there is present among men the liveliest tendency to deify individuals, to place them upon specially lofty pinnacles. Think of all the communities to-day, each with its special Messiah. Everywhere there is a tendency to deify, to idolize. It is, of course, a symptom that has been repeatedly evident in the course of the centuries.

Maimonides, for example, tells of a false Christ who appeared in France in 1137; he attracted many followers but was afterwards condemned to death by the public authority. Maimonides also relates that forty years earlier a man appeared in Cordova, in Spain, proclaiming himself to be the Christ. Again he relates that at the beginning of the twelfth century a false Messiah who pointed to one still greater, appeared in Fez, in Morocco. Finally it is reported that in the year 1147 there appeared in Persia an individual who did not, it is true, actually proclaim himself to be Christ, but who suggested something of the kind. And the most blatant phenomenon of all is the one of which I have already spoken: the appearance of Shabbethai Zebi in Smyrna, in the year 1666.

By observing that individual who declared himself to be a reincarnation of Christ, we can study in all detail the nature of a false Messiah and his effect upon the environment. At that time the proclamation went out from Smyrna that a new Christ had arisen in Shabbethai Zebi. Do not ever imagine that the movement connected with him was insignificant. People journeyed to Smyrna from all over Europe, from France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, the south of Russia, North Africa and Central Asia, to make contact with the alleged new-born Christ. It was a great world-movement. And if anyone had said to the people who regarded Shabbethai Zebi as a new Christ—until he finally betrayed himself, until the hoax was seen through—that he was not the true Christ, they would have fared badly, they would have gravely offended against a dogma rooted in a very large number of human beings.

Such things are signs of the other defect that constantly makes itself evident, perhaps not in definitely Christian regions, but certainly in others. A strong need is felt to announce the appearance of Messiahs in earthly incarnation. In Christian countries such occurrences are usually confined to small circles; although ‘Christs’ are to be found there too.

What matters is that through spiritual-scientific knowledge and enlightenment, through the unerring insight into facts that occultism is able to impart, both these pitfalls shall be avoided. If a person understands the relevant teachings, this will be possible; and then he will acquire insight into a most profound historical fact of modern times. It is that when we penetrate more deeply into the spiritual life we can participate in a renewal of Essene teaching which through the mouth of Jeschu ben Pandira once prophesied the Christ Event as a physical happening. And if Essene teaching is to be renewed in our days, if we are resolved to shape our lives in accordance with the living spirit of a new Bodhisattva, not with the spirit of a tradition concerning a Bodhisattva of the past, then we must make ourselves receptive to the inspiration of the Bodhisattva who will subsequently become the Maitreya Buddha. And this Bodhisattva will inspire us by drawing attention to the near approach of the time when in a new raiment, in an etheric body, Christ will bring life and blessing to those who unfold the new faculties through a new Essene wisdom. We shall speak entirely in the sense of the inspiring Bodhisattva who is to become the Maitreya Buddha and then we shall not speak of how the Christ is to become perceptible on the physical plane—in the manner of some religious denominations. We are not afraid to speak in a different sense because we recognize it to be the truth. We have no bias in favour of any oriental religious teaching but we live only for the truth. With the knowledge gained from the inspiration of the Bodhisattva himself we declare what form the future manifestation of Christ will take.

• 1. A learned and interesting account of the semantic interaction between the Greek word iaomai (‘heal’) and the Hebrew Jeshua (transliterated into Greek as Iesus), which was both a proper name and a word meaning ‘saviour’, will be found in Hastings' Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels (title: Jesus).
• 2. The Portal of Initiation, Scene I See also two lectures entitled The True Nature of the Second Coming, given in Carlsruhe and Stuttgart, 25th January and 6th March, 1910.

It is significant that the Christian calendar places the festival of Adam and Eve on 24 December, the festival of the birth of Christ Jesus in the night between 24 and 25 December. In the Christian view, the beginning of the world, that is, the beginning of our immediate earthly existence, and the greatest event of earthly existence, that event which gives meaning to earthly evolution, are thus brought together. They are brought together for the reason that it is to be indicated through this how the way man's relationship to the spiritual universe has undergone such a significant change through the entrance of the Mystery of Golgotha that everything that preceded it, while important for the understanding of this mystery itself, can be left out of consideration for the time being for the immediate Christian consciousness with regard to the reception of the impulses of the will.

We are aware that the greatest turning-point in the evolution of earthly existence occurred through the Mystery of Golgotha. It stands before the soul of him who understands that through his understanding the meaning of earthly evolution is revealed. One can say: If one looks at the way in which the ancients related to world wisdom as an impulse for man himself in the time before the Christ entered into the development of mankind on earth, and compares this behavior of the pre-Christian time with the attitude of the Christian consciousness towards world wisdom as an impulse for human activity, one is given, when one is then in a position to develop the corresponding thought, a deeply impressive meaning.

One need only recall a figure – which one is reminded of when the feast occurs that is, so to speak, under the motto: “Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine” – the image of the virgin Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greece, who is the daughter of Zeus herself, and the goddess who is considered the goddess of prudence. Zeus, the lord of lightning, of illuminating light, of the light that works in earthly existence, begets with Prudence the virgin Pallas Athena, the guardian of human wisdom before the mystery of Golgotha.

There is a deep meaning in the poetic invention of this figure of the virgin Pallas Athena. As the goddess of wisdom, she herself is a virgin. What does this actually mean in the higher sense? What did the Greek mystery guides mean when they spoke of the virgin Pallas Athena? They meant the wisdom through which man works in the historical context of the world. This wisdom was born out of what is not the world itself, but a reflection of the world, in the fourth period of time into which the development of Greek culture had just entered. Let us grasp this well: a reflection of the world, Maya. In the previous periods, the wisdom of the mystery priests was not presented as a virgin power because, as human wisdom, it was always fertilized by the ancient atavistic power of clairvoyance in the first, second, and third post-Atlantic periods. It was only in the fourth post-Atlantean period that the possibility arose of also knowing something from mere observation of what is not driven by those forces that underlie atavistic clairvoyance, by the affects, by the passions, by all that glows as fire in the human being, but by the virgin, by atavistic clairvoyance unfertilized mirror image of the world. The wisdom that is meant when its representative is depicted comes from Maja: Pallas Athena.

Pallas Athena is also a Maja, a Maria; but Pallas Athena is the Maja who still reflects the wisdom out of herself, who allows the wisdom to reveal itself to the human being out of herself. The great progress consists in the fact that this same Maja, this same Maria, is fertilized by the Cosmos, and a new wisdom is now born. Pallas Athene was the representative of wisdom. The Christ impulse is the son of Maja, of Maria, of the virgin representative of wisdom, and of the cosmic-divine, the cosmic-intelligent world power. Therefore, the ancient wisdom, as represented by Pallas Athena, was well suited to dissect and comprehend the mineral world up to the plant world, but not yet suited to grasp the human being himself, to comprehend the human being himself in his personality.

If one wanted to understand the human being in his personality in those days, one could do so in the mysteries, but one then had to attain atavistic clairvoyance in the mysteries. What is meant by Pallas Athene, the virgin representative of wisdom, denotes a beginning that was suitable as such for understanding the periphery of the earthly world. But only through the entrance of the Mystery of Golgotha, only through the union of the power of divine, intelligent love with the power of Maya, with the reflection of the world, is the human evolution confronted with the God of Man, the God who is no longer attainable only by transcending the physical plane, but the God who, in His essential being, can be found on the physical plane itself. The progress in the evolution of humanity that is meant by the Christmas mystery presents itself to the human soul when one composes the right legend of Pallas Athena with all that can be grasped in true form about the nature of the virgin Maja, from whom the Christ impulse for the evolution of the earth emerges.

In connection with such insights into human events, with such demands on human volition as we have discussed in order to grasp the Christmas mystery, it befits our very serious time – this time, for which it is so urgently needed – to gain insights that lie within the meaning of the thirty-three-year orbit, of which we spoke yesterday. Just as the ancients tried to unravel the stars and determine from their constellations what they wanted to do here on earth, so man should realize that he must now enter an age that can only bring hardship and misery and misfortune to mankind on earth if they do not decide to read the constellations of the stars of time in the development of humanity. With the achievements of which the materialistic age is so proud, nothing more will be attained in earthly existence in the future than what has already been achieved in this catastrophic time. Humanity must find the courage to make such a vow to its own soul as a sacred Christmas vow: to turn its gaze to the spiritual truths that are emerging in our time. Our time must find the courage to look unflinchingly, undaunted by weakness, into what is. Our humanity must acquire a new sense of truth if it is to follow again in the footsteps of the One Whose birth it celebrates at Christmas, but Who is not understood if His words are not grasped in sufficient depth: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

In such a solemn time, it is not enough merely to desire to give soothing speeches about the festival of peace, as it is most certainly done in these times from many pulpits; in such a solemn time, it is necessary to grasp the thought of how little creativity there actually is in our time. For the great things that seek to enter it can only be served if people develop creativity in their own souls. Consider this: the Mystery of Golgotha has entered the development of humanity at the beginning of our era; but could it not have passed without a trace if the people of that time had not had the creative power in their own souls to grasp it, to conceptualize it, to imagine it, to talk about it at all? Externally, a personality was born in an unknown province of the Roman Empire, of whom the Gospels speak. The people of that time had the creative power to grasp what lived in this personality. That is what it takes when the greatest divine powers unite with human events: that people can muster the will to creative power within themselves. That is why the question should be raised yesterday: In what way was this 19th century, this haughty 19th, 20th century, able to develop creative power to understand what has now been recognized by humanity for centuries as the content of the idea of redemption?

Let us add – we could cite hundreds and thousands of examples – some voices from this nineteenth century, to show how they tried to speak about Jesus Christ. I said I wanted to quote the best, most profound people, to show what was in their souls. It is not so important to me to answer the question: What influence do people have like those whose voices about the Christ Jesus I have quoted to you? – but rather to show how time affects the best. For these are the ideas that dominate the minds of even the most honest. The others talk about Christ Jesus, but without really coming close to the impulse of truth in their own intuitive perception. Let us add something more.

In the 19th century, when people began to develop free-thinking ideas, one of those who tried to absorb these new ideas in a morbidly profound way was Karl Gutzkow. In his book “Wally, the Doubting Thomas,” he included more or less the ideas that occurred to him about Christ Jesus:

An even more characteristic voice, because a voice that has emerged from the science of the soul in our time, is the following. It is a summary of the content of the book “Jesus. A Comparative Psychopathological Study” by Emil Rasmussen, a Danish book. The content can be summarized in the following way:

"Neither the apostles nor the three synoptic gospels regarded Jesus as God. He himself considered himself to be the ‘Son of Man’ (Daniel VII, 13) announced and, without ever claiming to be the Messiah, thought he was fulfilling a part of the prophecies that were particularly important to him. The Nazarene belongs to the category of prophets. The religious heroes or proclaimers, alias prophets, are aberrations from the normal type of the race. For their inner experiences or experiences can only be compared in degree and kind with the paroxysms of the epileptic or hystero-epileptic. The “men of God” present a picture of illness that the psychiatrist can diagnose precisely as epileptic mental illness; the stigmata are: hallucinations or visual illusions, fits of rage, convulsive merriment, absence of mind (absence), stupor, twilight state or dream-like subconscious, speech disorders, delirium, melancholy, sudden changes of mood , exaggerated religiosity, the idea of suffering for others and of having to reform the world, megalomania, obsessive ideas, the delusion of romantic family trees, vagabond-like restlessness, abnormal sex life, whether on the side of debauchery or asceticism. A series of outstanding religious seers, both ancient and modern, such as Ezekiel, Paul, Muhammad, Sören Kierkegaard and so on, can be used to test the example, whereby common characteristics can be identified, such as the terrible terrible threats and curses, the manifold forms and disguises of the sense of cruelty, the paroxysms of rage, the imagined suffering for humanity, asceticism, thoughts of resurrection and much more.

All these symptoms observed in ancient and modern prophets are also displayed by Jesus: He has an unparalleled experience of fear, falls into a rage when exorcising the temple, suffers from hallucinations, reveals an excessive sense of self in his contradictory character and an abnormal life of the senses, indulges in the delusion that he is suffering for humanity and can atone for it, and through his violence, unsteadiness and the increasing narrowing of his mind, which no longer absorbs and processes new ideas, he provides new confirmation of his elective affinity with the prophetic type, which has remained the same at all times and under all skies. His ethics, which are based on hating one's family, living on charity and in the all-blissful faith, have not been accepted by humanity. If one understands genius to mean a creator, then one must also give up this position with regard to Jesus, since, as scientific research has established, he is only an imitator in the content and form of his teaching. His promise, namely his return, which earned him world domination, has failed completely. Jesus was a person worthy of deep sorrow, who, in his tragic, magnificent fate, deserves our heartfelt compassion.

There could be hundreds, thousands of such voices, and the fact that they can be raised in this way is not the essential point. The essential point is something quite different, namely that people who speak in this way are speaking truly and correctly in terms of present-day science, and that from the point of view of present-day science, one cannot speak differently if one is honest and sincere. The question that arises is: Do you have enough courage and willpower to hold up this mirror to science, which only spiritual science can hold up? - Those cowardly compromises, which are made over and over again and again every day a hundredfold between materialistic science and between religious traditions, these are the dishonest ones, these are the sins against what people claim to celebrate in the Christmas mystery and in the Easter mystery. That is what it is about.

There is an either/or in the present: either a commitment to spiritual life or the continuation of the life that led to the events of 1914/17 and so on. Each person must allow what underlies this to arise in their heart as their own realization of Christ, and also allow the will to want, the impulse for the courage not to seek some kind of salvation in partial compromises, but to go straight the way that must be gone: the way that must be shown through the realization of the spiritual life of humanity. Concrete impulses that can be linked to something like the Christmas mystery must be connected with this will.

What has been said about the thirty-three-year cycle of events – just as the realization that under certain conditions oxygen and hydrogen combine and that water cannot be recognized other than through electrolysis , which chemically examines the behavior of oxygen and hydrogen, so should the awareness come that one can only find social laws if one is able to see through such constellations in the course of time. To think into the day, to see only what is immediately around us, that is what humanity has gradually come to regard as salutary in the last four centuries. But to recognize the process of becoming in such a way that one says to oneself: What is happening now will arise again after thirty-three years, it is my responsibility to do the present thing under the responsibility that wells up out of this idea — that is what must be demanded in the future by those who want to intervene in life from any point of view of life.

Our time should completely dispense with the old phrases of Christmas. The Romans, who had the courage to make a god of war - Janus - only close the Temple of Janus when there was peace. It was closed only twice in the time of Numa Pompilius, under whose reign it was completely closed, for the entire 724 years until the time of Emperor Augustus. But the Romans had the courage to distinguish between war and peace in their service for one of the most important gods. One wonders whether today's world would have the same courage to perhaps close the places of peace, the places that were supposed to serve peace when the whole world is engulfed in war? One would only be able to speak of courage if there were so much creativity in the present that one could see a real difference at the places where peace is talked about, if this happens in such times as the present ones.

It is very instructive to look back in the sense of the thirty-three-year cycle: the catastrophic events that we are facing today began in 1914. I have already mentioned some events that are connected with the three- to four-year catastrophic events following the thirty-three-year cycle. Many others could be mentioned. One need only think that thirty-three years before 1914, that is, in 1881, Alexander II came to power in St. Petersburg, the tsar under whom the persecutions began in the Baltic provinces, the tsar who is the incarnation of so much European misfortune. One could also look at more internal events, I do not mean “internal” in a spiritual sense. If you study the role that Gambetta played in 1881 during his two-month presidency at the time, you will find in it the signature of what was preparing at the moment when these catastrophic events broke out and what, as I have said here before, is now in the mood between northern and southern Russia, in the unleashing of the Russian-Ukrainian enmity, a symptom that shines much more meaningfully when one takes the events that are being prepared than all the things that people today, in their complacency, are so willing to accept as important events.

Much more could be said in this way. The question can be raised: How should a person, when he is in an important position, go about arriving at such conclusions that can bear fruit thirty-three years later? He should only try to understand the events of the past thirty-three years under the influence of such an idea, and out of the true understanding will arise what he has to do in the present: then it will be able to arise in a worthy way in thirty-three years. That such a thing is in vain should only be asserted when it has happened. But where has it happened? Where in the exoteric life of today is world evolution considered in accordance with its inner laws? Official representatives of what is often called Christianity today are always objecting, especially in contrast to spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy, that revelations from the spiritual world were possible in the time of Christ, but that the “fatal Gnosis” must not be allowed to resurface. Such things must not be interpreted with leniency. That these people mean well is something that unfortunately all too often crops up again and again as a fateful saying, even in our circles. It is a matter of really facing up to the truth. And above all we must have the will and the courage to take a stand against everything that is asserted today out of weakness against spiritual science.

There is one characteristic of spiritual science that is particularly not loved. It brings a concrete, real spiritual factual material, and speaks of the spiritual worlds as of real spiritual factual material. How often do we hear the words: Yes, that is difficult to understand, it is hard to find one's way into it. Such talk can still be understood by someone who, under the influence of the present school system, has not been able to learn how to think. However, such talk must be incomprehensible to those who claim to be taken seriously scientifically. Admittedly, something has gradually become scientific that makes the smallest possible demands on human thinking. Today, you can be a graduate with all kinds of diplomas and still be unable to grasp the simplest things with your mind, or tire quickly when you really need to think. People still prefer watered-down talk about all kinds of general spiritual things, pan-idealism and all that stuff. That relieves one of the effort of having to approach concrete spiritual facts. However, spiritual science must make demands on those who come to it. The good will must be there to use a little more of one's spirit than is necessary to further dilute general phrases about Panidealism and the like with one's watered-down heartfelt feelings. It is no longer time to revel in all kinds of “pan” and in all kinds of general, sentimental phrases. Today it is time to seriously face the concrete spiritual facts. Today it is time to muster the will to really think. Therefore, words must be spoken at the beginning of these Christmas celebrations that also sound serious in our time. For we will connect our souls all the more with what has entered into the evolution of the earth as the Christ impulse, the more we have the will to do so in a serious, dignified and urgent way.

For thousands of years, mankind has regarded space as that which is to be worshipped, the content of space, not the space of the earth, the space of heaven. It directed its gaze up to the constellations of the stars, to read in the stars what was to happen here on earth. It knew, this humanity: the dead read and must read in the stars, the dead must participate in earthly events. - So man must also learn to read that writing, which is the writing that the dead must read continuously. What happens here on earth, it was seen in these ancient times before the Mystery of Golgotha, that it was said: Up there, there are the Sun, Moon and Aries; or Sun, Moon and Taurus; or Sun, Moon and Gemini; or Gemini and Venus or the like, in such a constellation. It is a sign that certain impulses are coming in from the cosmos. When these impulses are present, then this or that must be done, because whatever happens here happens in time, and time delivers the Maya, time delivers the course of the great deception. In this sense, this deception only applied until the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of this Maja the Christ Impulse was born, as I explained at the beginning, out of the virgin Maja, that which is no longer fertilized by old atavistic clairvoyance, that which directly confronts the world powers untouched by the earth.

The veneration of that which passes in time, the recognition of that which passes in time, becomes a duty, just as in ancient times it was considered a duty to see the constellations in space. The old magician, whose representative appeared before the babe in the manger, looked up at the gold of the heavens, at the stars, and he said to himself: “As the stars are arranged, so it is written, and therein is to be read what must come to pass here on earth; for what is written in the stars is the result of the past. In the gold of the stars rests what the Ancient of Days, with his hosts, has written throughout the past, that it may come to pass in the present. The present has to carry out what can be seen in the gold of the stars; the present, which passes away at the moment it arises. The present is the continually flaming fire, represented by the incense; the present in the imagination of the incense. And the future rests in the present, fertilized by the past, under the imagination of myrrh.

The secrets of the ancient magicians were how the past, present and future are connected. But in this past, present and future they saw the veil of Maya, the veil of Pallas Athena herself, which only reflected the constellations of the stars. And the three magi who appeared before the manger understood that out of the content of time, out of that which is the mirror image of the constellation of space, out of the Maya of time, a new thing must develop, to which one must add past, present and future: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Insight into the Divine-Spiritual: gold; sacrificial service, human virtue: incense; the connection of the human soul with the Eternal, the immortal: myrrh.

So enormous is the turning point that lies between the time before the Mystery of Golgotha and the time after it, that one can say that the Holiest of Holies, which lay before, descended, united in love with Maja and gave birth to the impulse that will continue to carry the evolution of the earth: the Christ Jesus. To understand Christ Jesus – how the divine-cosmic love conceived Christ in the womb of Maya – means to understand a world-God who abolishes all those differentiations that must necessarily arise from looking up at mere spatial constellations. The star constellation is different for one spot on earth than for another. The old legends also depict how the initiated heroes move around, how the most diverse regions of the earth have the most diverse views of the gods. Thus, what originates in space as worthy of worship passes into time. Then time is the same for all human children of the earth, then a universal God will arise, a God to whom no narrower community has the right to claim him for itself, no human community may say for its interests that it does so in his name, but only the community of all people.

These are the thoughts with which we can turn our soul to grasp the meaning of the saying “Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine”: “And was incarnated by the Holy Spirit out of the Virgin Mary”. “ The voices of those who live in the physical body are joined by the voices of those who, in these times, pass through the gate of death, who know how the constellations of time are connected in the modern sense, just as the constellations of space are connected in the ancient sense.

In addition to the many things that could be said to build a bridge to the souls that live between death and a new birth, this too should be added, for in those thoughts that are linked to the Mystery of Golgotha, the so-called living and the so-called dead understand each other best. For the Christ has truly descended from heaven to earth and must be sought on earth ever since. Here man gets to know his secret in the fleshly body, just as the Christ Himself sought His mission on earth in the fleshly body. The dead person looks down from the spiritual realm on what he has experienced here as the basis for his impulses for the Mystery of Golgotha. Souls who live here on the physical plane and souls who live on the spiritual plane understand each other best in all that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. But it is not only what this mystery of Golgotha brings up at every opportunity that is linked to the mystery of Golgotha, but also everything that is researched in the sense of the word: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” He, whose birth we celebrate in the splendor of Christmas candles, is truly He who should not reveal Himself only once, and then only to serve as a convenient basis for those who do not want to learn anything new and rejects everything new, but He who may be celebrated alone under the glow of the Christmas candles, is He who wanted to reveal Himself to people in the entire time that follows the Mystery of Golgotha.

If, in this time, enough people make the decision to understand Christ Jesus under the signs that appear so meaningfully on the spiritual horizon today, then this is a Christmas thought, a thought that consecrates the night and will resurrect in a good way after thirty-three years, that will live as the power of humanity in the time from today until his resurrection. Let us take strong, courageous, and wisdom-filled Christmas thoughts and imbue ourselves with them for this Christmas, then we will live through it in a dignified way.

That is what I would like to convey to your souls as a Christmas greeting today. And I know that this Christmas greeting is in line with the impulse that one may truly and worthily celebrate only under the sign of the Christmas lights.

Lecture 3 of 16 from the volume: Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation. The volume of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner containing the original text of the this lecture, among sixteen others, is entitled: Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung. (No. 61 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961).

Words spoken by Shakespeare's most famous character: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy” are, of course, perfectly true; but no less true is the saying composed by Lichtenberg, a great German humourist, as a kind of rejoinder: “In philosophy there is much that will be found neither in heaven nor earth.” Both sayings are illustrations of the attitude adopted nowadays to many things in the domain of Spiritual Science. It seems inevitable that widespread circles, especially in the world of serious science, will repudiate such matters as prophecy even more emphatically than other branches of Spiritual Science. If in these other branches of Spiritual Science—in many of them at least—it is difficult to draw a clear line between genuine research and charlatanism, or maybe something even worse, it will certainly be admitted that wherever super-sensible investigation touches the element of human egoism, there its dangers begin. And in what realm of higher knowledge could this be more apparent than in all that is comprised in the theme of prophecy as it has appeared through the ages! Everything covered by the term ‘prophecy’ is closely connected with a widespread, and understandable, trait in the human mind, namely, desire to penetrate the darkness of the future, to know something of what earthly life in the future holds in store.

Interest in prophecy is connected not only with curiosity in the ordinary sense, but with curiosity concerning very intimate regions of the human soul. The search for knowledge concerning the deeper interests of the human soul has met with so many disappointments that earnest, serious science nowadays is unwilling to listen to such matters—and this is really not to be wondered at. Nevertheless it looks as though our times will be obliged at least to take notice of them, and also of the subjects of which we have been speaking in previous lectures and shall speak in the future. As will be known to many of you, the historian Kemmerich has written a book about prophecies, his aim being to compile facts which can be confirmed by history and go on to show that important happenings were pre-cognised or predicted in some way. This historian is driven to make the statement—at the moment we will not question the authenticity of his research—that there are very few important events in history that have not at some time been predicted, conjectured and announced in advance. Such statements are not well received in our time; but ultimately, in the sphere where history can speak with authority, it will not be possible to ignore them because proof will be forthcoming, both in respect of the past and of the present, from outer documents themselves.

The domain we are considering today has never been in such disrepute as it is nowadays, nor regarded as so dubious a path of human endeavour. Only a few centuries ago, for instance in the 16th century, very distinguished and influential scholars engaged in prognostication and prophecy. Think of one of the greatest natural scientists of all time and of his connection with a personage whose tendency to be influenced by prophecies is well known: think of Kepler, the great scientist, and his relations with Wallenstein. Schiller's deep interest in this latter personality was due in no small measure to the part played in his life by prophecy. The kind of prophecy in vogue in the days of Kepler—and only a couple of centuries ago leading scientific minds all over Europe were still occupied with it—was based upon the then prevailing view that there is a real connection between the world of the stars, the movements and positions of the stars, and the life of man. All prophesying in those times was really a form of astrology. The mere mention of this word reminds us that in our day too, many people are still convinced that there is some connection between the stars and coming events in the life of individuals, even, too, of races. But prophetic knowledge, the prophetic art as it is called, was never so directly connected with observation of the movements and constellations of the stars as was the case in Kepler's time.

In ancient Greece an art of prophecy was practised, as you know, by prophetesses or seeresses. It was an art of predicting the future induced by experiences arising perhaps from asceticism, or other experiences leading to the suppression of full self-consciousness and the presence of mind of ordinary life. The human being was thus given over to other Powers, was in an ecstatic condition and then made utterances which were either direct predictions of the future or were interpreted by the listening priests and soothsayers as referring to the future. We need only think of the Pythia at Delphi who under the influence of vapours rising from a chasm in the earth was transported into a state of consciousness quite different from that of ordinary life; she was controlled by other Powers and in this condition made prophetic utterances. This kind of prophecy has nothing to do with calculations of the movements of stars, constellations and the like. Again, everyone is familiar with the gift of prophecy among the people of the Old Testament, the authenticity of which will certainly be called into question by modern scholarship. Out of the mouths of these prophets there came not only utterances of deep wisdom, which influenced the life of these Old Testament people, but fore-shadowed the future. These predictions, however, were by no means always based upon the heavenly constellations as in the astrology current in the 15th and 16th centuries. Either as the result of inborn gifts, ascetic practices and the like, these prophets unfolded a different kind of consciousness from that of the people around them; they were torn away from the affairs of ordinary life. In such a condition they were entirely detached from the circumstances and thoughts of their personal lives, from their own material environment. Their attention was focused entirely on their people, on the weal and woe of their people. Because they experienced some thing superhuman, something reaching beyond the individual concerns of men, they broke through the boundaries of their personal consciousness and it was as though Jahve Himself spoke out of their mouths, so wise were their utterances concerning the tasks and the destiny of their people.

Thinking of all this, it seems evident that the kind of divination practised at the end of the Middle Ages, before the dawn of modern science, was only one specific form and that prophecy as a whole is a much wider sphere, connected in some way with definite states of consciousness to which a man can only attain when he throws off the shackles of his personality. Astrological prophecy, of course, can hardly be said to be an art in which a man rises above his own personality. The astrologer is given the date and hour of birth and from this discovers which constellation was rising on the horizon and the relative positions of other stars and constellations. From this he calculates how the positions of the constellations will change during the course of the man's life and, according to certain traditional observations of the favourable or unfavourable influences of heavenly bodies upon human life, predicts from these calculations what will transpire in the life of an individual or of a people. There seems to be no kind of similarity between this type of astrologer and the ancient Hebrew prophets, the Greek seeresses or others who, having passed out of their ordinary consciousness into a state of ecstasy, foretold the future entirely from knowledge acquired in the realm of the Supersensible. For those who consider themselves enlightened men of culture today, the greatest stumbling-block in these astrological predictions is the difficulty of realising how the courses of the stars and constellations can possibly have any connection with happenings in the life of an individual or a people, or in the procession of events on the Earth. And as the attention of modern scholarship is never focused on such connections, no particular interest is taken in what was accepted as authentic knowledge in times when astrological prophecy and enlightened science often went hand in hand.

Kepler, the very distinguished and learned scientist, was not only the discoverer of the Laws named after him; not only was he one of the greatest astronomers of all time, but he devoted himself to astrological prophecy. In his time—also during the periods immediately preceding and following it—numbers of truly enlightened men were votaries of this art. Indeed if we think objectively about life as it was in those days, we realise that from their standpoint it was as natural to them to take this prophetic art, this prophetic knowledge, as seriously as our contemporaries take any genuine branch of science. When some prediction based upon the constellations—and made perhaps, at the birth of an individual—comes true later on, it is of course easy to say that the connection of this constellation with the man's life was only a matter of chance. Certainly it must be admitted in countless cases that astonishment at the fulfilment of astrological prediction is caused simply because it came true and because people have forgotten what did not come true. The contention of a certain Greek atheist is, in a sense, correct. He once came in his ship to a coastal town where, in a sanctuary, tokens had been hung by men who had vowed at sea that if they were saved from shipwreck they would make such offerings. Many, many tokens were hanging there—all of them the offerings of men who had been saved from shipwreck. But the atheist maintained that the truth could only be brought to light if the tokens of everyone who in spite of vows had actually perished in shipwreck, were also displayed. It would then be obvious to which category the greater number of tokens belonged. This implies that a really objective judgment could only be reached if records were kept not only of those astrological predictions which have come true, but also of those which have not. This attitude is perfectly justified but on the other hand there is certainly much that is very astonishing. As in these public lectures I cannot take for granted a fundamental knowledge of all the teachings of Spiritual Science, I must speak in a way which will convey an idea of the significance of the subjects we are studying.

Even a confirmed sceptic must surely feel surprise when he hears the following. Keeping to well-known personages, let us take the case of Wallenstein. Wallenstein wished to have his horoscope drawn up by Kepler—a name honoured by every scientist. Kepler sent the horoscope. But the matter had been arranged with caution. Wallenstein did not write to Kepler giving him the year of his birth and saying that he would like him to draw up the horoscope, but an intermediary was chosen. Kepler therefore did not know for whom the horoscope was intended. The only indication given was the date of the birth. There had already been many important happenings in Wallenstein's life and he requested that they too should be recorded, as well as predictions made of those still to come. Kepler completed the horoscope as requested. As is the case with many horoscopes, Wallenstein found very much that tallied with his experiences. He began (it was often so in those days) to have great confidence in Kepler and on many occasions was able to adjust his life according to the prognostications. But it must be said too, that although many things tallied, many did not, so far as the past was concerned and, as subsequently transpired, the same was true of the predictions made about the future. It was so with numbers of horoscopes and in those days people were accustomed to say that there must be some inaccuracy in the alleged hour of birth and that the astrologer might be able to correct it. Wallenstein did the same. He begged Kepler to correct the hour of birth; the correction was only very slight but after it had been made, the prognostications were more accurate. It must be added here that Kepler was a thoroughly honest man and it went very much against the grain to correct the hour of birth. From a letter on the subject written by Kepler at the time it is obvious that he did not favour such procedure on account of the many possible consequences. Nevertheless he undertook to do what Wallenstein asked—it was in the year 1625—and gave further details about Wallenstein's future; above all he said that according to the new reading of the positions of the stars, the constellation that would be present in the year 1634 would be extremely unfavourable for Wallenstein. Kepler added—as well he might, for the date lay so far ahead—that even if this were a cause of alarm, the alarm would have passed away by the time of these unfavourable conditions. He did not therefore consider them dangerous for Wallenstein's plans. The prediction was for March 1634. And now think of it: within a few weeks of the period indicated, the causes occurred which led to the murder of Wallenstein. These things are at least striking!

But let us take other examples—not of second-rate astrologers but of really enlightened men. The name of an extraordinarily learned man in this sphere will at once occur to us—Nostradamus. Nostradamus was a doctor of high repute who, among other activities, had rendered wonderful service during an epidemic of the plague; he was a man of profound gifts and the selflessness with which he devoted himself to his profession as a doctor is well known. It is known, too, that when on account of his selflessness he had been much maligned by his colleagues, he retired from his medical work to the isolation of Salon where, in 1566, he died. In Salon he began to observe the stars, but not as Kepler or others like Kepler had observed them. Nostradamus had a special room in his house into which he often withdrew and, as can be gathered from what he himself says, from this room he watched the stars, just as they presented themselves to his gaze. In other words he made no special mathematical calculations but immersed himself in what the soul, the heart, the imagination can discover when gazing with wonder at the starry heavens. Nostradamus spent many an hour of reverent, fervent contemplation in this curious chamber with its open views on all sides to the heavens. And from him there came not only specific predictions, but long series of diverse and remarkably true prophecies of the future. So much so, that Kemmerich, the historian of whom I spoke just now, cannot but be astonished and attach a certain value to the prophetic utterances of Nostradamus. Nostradamus himself made some of his prophecies known to the public and was naturally laughed to scorn in his day, for he could quote no astrological calculations. As he gazed at the stars his predictions seemed to rise up in him in the form of strange pictures and imaginations, for instance of the outcome of the battle at Gravelingen in the year 1558, where the French were defeated with heavy loss. Another prediction, made long beforehand, for the year 1559, was to the effect that King Henry II of France would succumb “in a duel” as Nostradamus put it. People only laughed, including the Queen herself, who said that this clearly showed what reliance could be placed upon prediction—for a King was above engaging in a duel. But what happened? In the year predicted, the King was killed in a tournament. And it would be possible to quote many, many predictions that subsequently came true.

Again there is Tycho de Brahe, one of the brilliant minds of the 16th century and of outstanding significance as an astronomer. The modern world knows little of Tycho de Brahe beyond that he is said to have been one who only half accepted the Copernican view of the world. But those who are more closely acquainted with his life know what Tycho de Brahe achieved in the making of celestial charts, how vastly he improved the charts then existing, that he had discovered new stars and was, in short, an astronomer of great eminence in his day. Tycho de Brahe was also deeply convinced that not only are physical conditions on the Earth connected with the whole Universe, but that the spiritual experiences of men are connected with happenings in the great Cosmos. Tycho de Brahe did not simply observe the stars as an astronomer but he related the happenings of human life with happenings in the heavens. And when he came to Rostock at the age of 20, he caused a stir by predicting the death of the Sultan Soliman, which although it did not occur exactly on the day indicated, did nevertheless occur. The indication was not quite exact but this will probably not bring an outcry from historians, for they might well argue that if anyone were intent upon lying he would not tell a half-lie by introducing the difference of a mere day or so into the prediction.

Hearing of this, the King of Denmark requested Tycho de Brahe to cast the horoscopes of his three sons. Concerning his son, Christian, the indications were accurate; less so in the case of Ulrich. But about Hans, the third son, Tycho de Brahe made a remarkable prediction, derived from the movements of the stars. He said: The whole constellation and everything to be seen goes to show that he is and will remain frail and is unlikely to live to a great age. As the hour of birth was not quite accurate, Tycho de Brahe gave the indications very cautiously ... he might die in his eighteenth or perhaps in his nineteenth year, for the constellations then would be extremely unfavourable. I will leave it an open question whether it was out of pity for the parents or for other reasons, that Tycho de Brahe wrote of the possibility of this terrible constellation in the eighteenth or nineteenth year being overcome in the life of Duke Hans ... if so, he said, God would have been his protector; but it must be realised that these conditions would be there, that an extremely unfavourable constellation connected with Mars was revealed by the horoscope and that Hans would be entangled in the complications of war; as in this constellation, Venus had ascendancy over Mars, there was just a hope that Hans would pass this period safely, but then, in his eighteenth and nineteenth years, there would be the very unfavourable constellation due to the inimical influence of Saturn; this indicated the risk of a “moist, melancholic” illness caused by the strange environment in which Hans would find himself. And now, what was the history of Duke Hans' life? As a young man he was involved in the political complications of the time, was sent to war, took part in the battle of Ostend and in connection with this, as Tycho de Brahe had predicted, had to endure the ordeal of terrible storms at sea. He came very near death, but as the result of friendly negotiations set on foot for his marriage with the daughter of the Czar he was recalled to Denmark. According to Tycho de Brahe's interpretation, the complications due to the unfavourable influences of Mars had been stemmed by the influences of Venus—the protector of love-relationships: Venus had protected the Duke at this time. But then, in his eighteenth and nineteenth years the inimical influence of Saturn began to take effect. One can picture how the eyes of the Danish Court were upon the young Duke: all the preparations for the marriage were made and the news that it had taken place was hourly awaited. But there came instead the announcement that the marriage was delayed, then news of the Duke's illness, and finally of his death. Such things made a great impression upon people at the time and must surely surprise posterity.

Now world-history sometimes has its humorous sides! There was once, in a different domain altogether, a certain Professor who asserted that the brain of the female always weighs less than that of the male. After his death, however, his own brain was weighed and proved to be extremely light. He was the victim of humour in world-history!

The horoscope of Pico de Mirandola (a descendant of the famous philosopher) prophesied that Mars would bring him great misfortune. He was an opponent of all such predictions. Tycho de Brahe proved to him that all his arguments against prognostications from the stars were false, and he died in the year that had been indicated as the period of the unfavourable influence of Mars.

Numbers of examples could be quoted and we shall probably realise that in a certain sense it is not difficult to make objections. For example, a very distinguished modern astronomer—a man greatly to be respected too, for his humanitarian activities—has argued that Wallenstein's death cannot be said to have been correctly predicted in the horoscope drawn up by Kepler. In a certain respect such arguments must be taken seriously. We cannot altogether ignore Wilhelm Foerster's argument that Wallenstein knew what had been predicted; that in the corresponding year he remembered his horoscope, hesitated, did not take the firm stand he would otherwise have taken and so was himself the cause of the misfortune. Such objections are always possible.

But on the other side it must be remembered that although in illustrations produced by science, external data are of value, the modern age accepts these data as an absolutely adequate basis for scientific truths. Many things may be problematical. But we should not shut our eyes to the fact that careful comparison of events that had actually occurred in life with indications obtained from the stars, did indeed lead, in earlier times, to confidence in prognostications of the future. People were certainly alive to mistakes but they did not conceal things that were genuinely astonishing, nor did they accept these things entirely without criticism. In those times too they were quite capable of criticism and in all probability applied it on many occasions.

I wanted to quote very striking examples in order to show that in accordance with the standards of modern science too, it is possible to take these matters seriously. And even when we take what there is to be said against them, we shall have to admit that the reasons which in times of the relatively near past made brilliant minds place firm reliance in them, were not bad but sound and well-founded reasons. Even if these reasons are rejected, it must be admitted that the impression they made on brilliant and enlightened minds was such that these men believed—quite apart from details—that there is a connection between events in the lives of individuals and of peoples, and happenings in the Cosmos. These men believed that there is a real connection between the macrocosm, the great world, and the microcosm, the little world.

They believed that human life on the Earth is not a chaotic flow of events but that law manifests in these events, that just as celestial events are governed by cyclic law, so too a certain cyclic law, a certain rhythm is manifest in human and earthly conditions. To explain what is here meant, I shall speak of certain facts that can be collated by observation, as truly as the most exacting facts of chemistry or physics today. But the observations must be made in the appropriate spheres. Suppose we observe something that happens in a man's life during his childhood. If we study the longer sweep of human life, remarkable connections will come to light, for example, between the life of earliest childhood and that of very old age; a connection is perceptible between what a man experiences in the evening of his life and what he experienced in early youth. We shall be able to say: If, during youth, we were shaken by emotions due to alarm or fright, we may possibly have been exempt from their effects all through our life, but in old age things may appear of which we know that their causes are to be sought in very early childhood. Again there are connections between the years of adolescence and the period immediately preceding old age. Life runs a circular course.

We can go still further, taking as an example the case of someone who, say at the age of 18, was torn right away from the course his life had taken hitherto. Until then he may have been able to devote himself to study but was suddenly obliged to abandon this and become a merchant, perhaps because his father lost his money, or for some other reason. To begin with he gets on quite well but after a few years, great inner difficulties make their appearance. In trying to help such a person to overcome these difficulties, we cannot apply any general, abstract principles. We shall have to say to ourselves: At the age of 18 there was a sudden change in his life and at the age of 24—that is to say, six years later—difficulties cropped up in his life of soul. Six years earlier, in his twelfth year or thereabouts, certain things happened in his soul which actually explain the difficulties appearing in his twenty-fourth year: six years before, six years later—the change of profession lies between. Just as above a pendulum swinging to right and left there is a point of equilibrium, so, in the case quoted, the eighteenth year is a pivotal point. A cause generated before this pivotal point has its effect the same number of years afterwards. So it is in man's life as a whole. Human life takes its course not with irregularity but with regularity and according to law. Although the individual does not necessarily realise it, there is in every human life one centre-point; what lies before—youth and childhood—allows causes to rest in the depths of subsequent happenings, and then what took place a number of years before this centre-point of life reveals itself in its effects an equal number of years afterwards. In the sense that birth is the point polar to death, the happenings of childhood are the causes of happenings during the years that precede death. In this way life becomes comprehensible.

In the case, for example, of illness occurring, say, at the age of 54, the only really intelligent approach is to look for a pivotal point at which a man passed through a definite crisis, reckoning back from there to some event related to the fifty-fourth year somewhat in the same sense as death is related to birth, or the other way round. The fact that happenings in human life reveal conformity to law and principle does not gainsay our freedom. Many people are apt to say that this conformity to law in the course taken by events contradicts man's freedom of will. But this is not the case and it can only appear so to superficial thinking. A human being who at the age, say, of 15, lays into the womb of time some cause, the effects of which he experienced in, say, his fifty-fourth year, no more deprives himself of his freedom than does someone who builds a house and then moves into it when it is ultimately ready. Logical thinking will never say that the man deprives himself of his freedom when he moves into the house. Nobody deprives himself of freedom by anticipating that causes will have their effects later on. This principle has nothing directly to do with freedom in life.

Just as there are cyclic connections in the life of the individual, so too are there cyclic connections in the life of the peoples, and in life on the Earth in the general sense. The evolution of mankind on the Earth divides itself into successive epochs of culture. Two of the epochs most closely connected with our own, are the period of Assyrian-Egyptian-Chaldean civilisation and that of the later culture of Greece and Rome; then, reckoning from the decline of Greek and Roman culture and its aftermaths, comes our present epoch. According to all the signs of the times this will last for a very long time yet. There, then, we have three consecutive periods of culture.

Close observation of the life of the peoples during these three epochs will reveal, during the Greco-Latin period, something like a pivotal point in the evolution of mankind. Hence, too, the curious fascinating of the culture of Greece and Rome. Greek art, Greek and Roman political life, Roman equity, the conception of Roman citizenship ... it all seems to stand like a kind of pivotal point in the stream of the evolutionary process: After it—our own epoch; before it—the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. In a remarkable way, those who observe deeply enough will perceive certain conditions of life during the Egypto-Chaldean period operating again today, in quite a different but nevertheless related form. In those times, therefore, causes were laid into the womb of the ages, which now in their effects come again to the fore. Certain methods of hygiene, certain ablutions customary in ancient Egypt, also certain views of life are now, strangely enough, in the forefront again—naturally in absolutely different forms; in short, the effects of causes laid down in ancient Egypt are becoming perceptible today. In between—like a fulcrum—lies the culture of Greece and Rome.

The Egypto-Chaldean epoch was preceded by that of the most ancient Persian culture. According to the law of cyclic evolution, then, it can be foreshadowed that just as in our civilisation there is a cyclic re-emergence of Egypto-Chaldean culture, so ancient Persian culture will re-emerge in the epoch following our own. Law is revealed everywhere in the flow of evolution! Not irregularity, not chaos—but also not the kind of law conjectured by historians: that the causes of everything happening today are to be sought in the immediately preceding period, the causes of happenings in the recent past again in the immediately preceding period, and so forth. This is how historians build up a chain of events—the one directly following the other. Closer observation, however, reveals the existence of cycles, breaks ... what was once present appears again at a very much later time.

External observation itself can discern this. But it will be quite apparent to those who study the evolution of humanity in the light of Spiritual Science that there is evidence of spiritual law in the flow of happenings, in the stream of the ‘Becoming’ and that a certain deepening of the life of soul will enable men actually to perceive the threads of these inner connections. And although it is not easy to grasp everything that belongs to this sphere, although it may sometimes tend to charlatanry or humbug and direct its appeal to the lower impulses and instincts, nevertheless the following is true: When a man is able to eliminate personal interests and quicken the hidden forces of spiritual life, so that his knowledge is drawn not merely from his environment or from remembrances of his own life and that of his nearest acquaintances, when he is uninfluenced by material and personal considerations ... then he grows beyond his own personality and becomes conscious of the presence of higher forces with him, which it is only a matter of developing by appropriate exercises. When these deeper forces are brought to the surface, happenings in the life of a human being will also reveal their hidden causes and such a soul will then glimpse the truth that whatever has transpired through the ages throws its effects into the future. The law presented to us by Spiritual Science is that no happenings—and this also applies to the domain of the Spiritual—float meaninglessly along the stream of existence; they all have their effects and we must discover the law underlying the manifestation of these effects in later times. Therewith the insight will come that this law also embraces the return of the individuality into the present earthly life, where the effects of earlier lives are working themselves out.

Just as knowledge of the workings of Karma, the Law of Destiny, arises from insight into how causes lie in the womb of time and appear again in transformation, so too this insight was present in all those who have taken prophecy seriously or have actually engaged in it; they have been convinced that laws prevail in the course taken by human life and that the soul can awaken the forces whereby these laws may be fathomed. But the soul needs points of focus. In its facts, the world is an interconnected whole. Just as in his physical life the human being is affected by wind and weather, it is not difficult to assume that there are connections in everything around us, even though the details are obscure. Without actually seeking for laws of Nature, something in the courses of the stars and constellations evokes the thought: The harmonies perceptible there can call forth in us similar harmonies and rhythms according to which human life runs its course. Further observations will then lead on to the details.

As may be read in the little book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science, epochs can be distinguished in the life of the individual: from birth to the change of teeth, from then to puberty, then the years up to twenty-one and again from twenty-one to twenty-eight ... 7-year periods clearly different in character and after which new kinds of faculties are present. If we know how to investigate these things we shall find clear evidence of a rhythmic stream in human life, which can as it were be found again in the starry heavens. Strikingly enough, if life is observed from this point of view (but such observation must be calm and balanced, without the wonted fanaticism of opponents) it will be found that round about the twenty-eighth year something in the life of soul indicates, in many cases, a culmination of what has come into being after four periods of seven years each. Four times seven years—twenty-eight years ... although the figure is not absolutely exact, this is the approximate time of one revolution of Saturn. Saturn revolves in a circle consisting of four parts, passes therefore through the whole Zodiacal circle, and its course has an actual correspondence with the course of man's life from birth to the twenty-eighth year. Just as the circle divides into four parts, so too these twenty-eight years divide into four periods of seven years each. There, in the revolution of a star in cosmic space, we see indications of similarity with the course taken by human life.

Other movements in the heavens, too, correspond to rhythms in human life. Little attention is given today to the very brilliant researches made by Fliess, a doctor in Berlin; they are still only in the initial stage but if ever they are properly studied, the rhythmic flow of births and deaths in the life of humanity will be clearly perceived. All such research is only at the beginning; but in time to come it will be realised that one need only regard the stars and their movements as a great celestial clock and human life as a rhythm that runs its own course but is in a certain sense determined by the stars. Without looking for actual causes in the stars, it is quite possible to conceive that because of this inner relationship, human life runs its course with a like rhythm. Suppose, for example, we often go outside the door of our house or look out of the window at some particular time in the morning and always see a certain man on the way to his office ... we glance at the clock, knowing that every day he will pass at a definite time. Are the hands of the clock the cause of it? Of course not! ... but because of the invariable rhythm we can assume that the man will pass the house at a definite time. In this sense we can see in the stars a celestial clock according to which the life of man and of peoples runs its course.

Such things may well be vantage-points for the observation and study of life, and Spiritual Science is able to indicate these deeper connections. We shall now understand why Tycho de Brahe, Kepler and others, worked on the basis of calculations—Kepler especially, Tycho de Brahe less. For insight into the soul of Tycho de Brahe reveals a certain similarity with that of Nostradamus. Nostradamus, however, does not need to make calculations at all; he sits up in his attic and gives himself up to the impressions made by the stars. He ascribes this gift to certain inherited qualities in his organism, which for this reason is no cause of hindrance to him. But he also needs that inner tranquillity of soul that arises after he has put away all thoughts, emotions, cares, and excitements of everyday life. The soul must face the stars in purity and freedom. And then what Nostradamus prophesies rises up in him in pictures and images; he sees it all before him in pictures. If he spoke in astronomical terms of Saturn or Mars being injurious, he would not, in predicting destiny, have been thinking of the physical Saturn or the physical Mars, but he would have pondered in this way: Such and such a man has a warlike nature, a temperament that loves fighting, but he also has a kind of melancholy making him subject to moods of depression which may even affect him physically. Nostradamus lets this interweave in his contemplation and a picture rises before him of future happenings in the man's life: the tendency to melancholy and the fighting spirit intermingle—“Saturn” and “Mars.” This is only a sense-image. When he speaks of “Saturn” and “Mars,” his meaning is: There is something in this man which presents itself to me as a picture but which can be compared with the opposition or conjunction between Saturn and Mars in the heavens. This was merely a way of expressing it; contemplation of the stars evoked in Nostradamus the seership that enabled him to see more deeply into souls than is otherwise possible.

Nostradamus, therefore, was a man who by acting in a certain way was able to waken to life inner powers of soul otherwise slumbering within the human being. In a mood of devotion, of reverence, he completely put away all cares and anxieties, all concerns of the outer world. In utter forgetfulness of self, with no feeling of his own personality, his soul knew the truth of the axiom he always quoted: “It is God Who utters through my mouth anything I am able to tell you about your concerns. Take it as spoken to you by the Grace of your God I ...” Without such reverence there is no genuine seership. But this very attitude ensures that those who have it will not abuse or make illicit use of their gift.

Tycho de Brahe represents a stage of transition between Nostradamus and Kepler. When we contemplate the soul of Tycho de Brahe, he seems to be one who is calling up remembrances from an earlier life, rather reminiscent of Greek soothe-saying. He has in him something that is akin to the soul of an ancient Greek seeking everywhere for the manifestations of cosmic harmony. Such is the attunement of his soul—and his astrological insight is really an attitude of soul—it is as if astronomical calculation were merely a prop helping him to call up those powers which enable pictures of happenings in the past or the future to take shape before him. Kepler's mind is more abstract, in the sense that modern thought is abstract—in a still higher degree. Kepler has to rely more or less upon pure calculation in which there is, of course, accuracy, for according to knowledge derived from clairvoyance there is an actual relation between the constellations and the actions of men. As time went on, astrology became more and more a matter of reckoning and calculation only. The gift of seership gave place to purely intellectual thought and it can truly be said that astrological forecasts now are nothing but intellectual deduction.

The farther we go back into the past, the more we shall find that the utterances of the ancient prophets concerning the life of their peoples rose up from the very depths of their souls. So it was among the Hebrew prophets; in communion with their God and free of their personal interests and affairs, they were wholly given up to the great concerns of their people and could perceive what was in store. Just as a teacher foresees that certain qualities in a child will express themselves later on, and takes account of them, the Hebrew prophet beheld the soul of his people as one unit; the Past mellowed in his soul and worked in such a way that the consequences were revealed to him as a great vision of the Future.

But now, what does prophecy mean in human life, what does it really signify? We shall find the answer by thinking of the following: There are certain great figures to whom we always trace streams of happenings in history. Although today the preference is for everyone to be at one level, because it goes against the grain when a single personality towers over all the others (in their desire that all faculties shall be equal, people are loath to admit that certain men are more forceful than the rest)—in spite of this, great and advanced leaders are at work in the process of historical evolution. Things have come to such a pass nowadays that the mightiest happenings are conceived to be the outcome simply of ideas and not to lead back to any one personality. There is a certain school of theology, which still claims to be Christian, although it contends that there need have been no Christ Jesus as an individual. In reply to the retort that world-history is after all made by men, one of these theologians said: That is as obvious as the fact that a forest is composed of trees; human beings make history in the same sense that trees make a forest ... But think of it—surely the whole forest could have grown up from a few grains of seed? Certainly the forest is composed of trees but the primary step is to find out whether it did not originate from grains of seeds once laid in the soil. So, too, it is a matter of inquiring whether it is not, after all, the case that events in human evolution lead back to this or that individual who inspired the rest.

This conception of world-history suggests the thought of “surplus” forces in men who play leading parts in the evolution of humanity. Whether they apply these forces for good or ill is another matter. Such men work upon their environment out of the surplus forces within them. These surplus forces, which need not be drawn upon for the affairs of personal life, may express themselves in deeds or they may find no outlet in deeds; but with others, some kind of hindrance always seems to prevent this. Nostradamus is an interesting example: he was a doctor and in this capacity brought blessing to very many human beings. But the thought that someone is doing good, often goes against the grain! Nostradamus became an object of envy and jealousy and was accused of being a Calvinist. To be a Jew or a Calvinist was looked upon askance and circumstances therefore forced him to withdraw from his work of healing and abandon his profession. But were the forces used in this inspiring work no longer within him when he had retired? Of course they were! Physics believes in the conservation of energy or force. What happened in the case of Nostradamus was that when he threw up his work, the forces in him took a different direction. If his medical activities had continued, these forces would have produced quite other effects in the future. For where can our deeds really be said to end? If, like Nostradamus, we withdraw from some activity, the flow of our deeds is suddenly stemmed—but the forces themselves are still there. The forces in Nostradamus' soul remained and were transformed, so that what might have expressed itself in deeds at some future time, rose up before him in pictures. In his case, deeds were transformed into the gift of seership. The same may be true of human beings endowed with a faculty for prophecy today; and it was true in the case of the ancient Hebrew prophets. As biblical history indicates, these men had a real connection with forces belonging to the past and to the future of their people; their own soul, their personal life, was nothing to them. They were not war-like by nature but had within them surplus forces which from the very beginning took the same form as those of Nostradamus after their transformation. Forces, which in others poured into deeds, revealed themselves to the Hebrew prophets in the form of mighty pictures and visions. The gift of seership is directly connected with the urge to action in men, with the transformation of surplus forces in the soul.

Seership is therefore by no means an incomprehensible faculty; it can be reconciled with the kind of thinking pursued in natural science itself. But it is obvious, too, that the gift of seership leads beyond the immediate Present. What is the way, the only way, of reaching out beyond the Present? It is to have ideals. Ideals, however, are usually abstract: man sets them before him and believes that they conform to the realities of the Present. But instead of setting up abstract ideals, a man who desires to work in line with the aims of the super-sensible world tries to discover causes lying in the womb of the ages, asking himself: How do these causes express themselves in the flow of time? He approaches this problem not with his intellect but with his deeper faculty of seership. True knowledge of the Past—when this is acquired by the operations of deeper forces and not by way of the intellect—calls up before the soul pictures of the Future, which more or less conform to fact. And one who rightly exercises the gift of seership today, after having pondered the stream of evolution in olden times, will find a picture rising up before him as a concrete ideal. This picture seems to tell him: Mankind is standing at the threshold of transition; certain forces hitherto concealed in darkness are becoming more and more apparent. And just as today people are familiar with intellect and with imagination, so in a Future by no means distant, a new faculty of soul will be there to meet the urge for knowledge of the super-sensible world.

The dawn of this new power of soul can already be perceived. When such glimpses of the Future astonish us, our attitude will not be that of the fanatic, neither will it be that of the pure realist, but we shall know why we do this or that for the sake of spiritual evolution. This, fundamentally, is the purpose of all true prophecy. We realise that this purpose is achieved even when the pictures of the Future outlined by the seer may not be absolutely accurate. Anyone who is able to perceive the hidden forces of the human soul knows better than others that false pictures may arise of what the Future holds in store; he understands, too, why the pictures are capable of many interpretations. To say that although certain indications have been given, they are vague and ambiguous does not mean very much. Such pictures may well be ambiguous. What matters, is that impulses connected with evolution as it moves on towards the Future, shall work upon and awaken slumbering powers in man. These prophesyings may or may not be accurate in every detail: what matters is that powers shall be awakened in the human being!

Prophecy, therefore, is to be conceived less as a means of satisfying curiosity by prediction of the Future than as a stimulating realisation that the gift of seership is within man's grasp. Shadow-sides there may well be—but the good sides are there too! The good side will be revealed above all when men do not go blindly through the day nor blindly onwards into a remote future but can set their own goals and direct their impulses in the light of knowledge. Goethe, who has said so many wonderful things about the affairs of the world, was right when he wrote down the words: “If a man knew the Past, he would know what the Future holds; both are linked to the Present as a Whole complete in itself.” (“Wer das Vergangene kennte, der wusste das Kunftige; beides schliesst an heute sich rein, als ein Vollendetes, an.”) This is a beautiful saying from the “Prophecies of Bakis.”

And so the raison d'être of prophecy does not lie in the appeasement of curiosity or the thirst for knowledge, but in the impulses it can give to work for the sake of the Future. The unwillingness to be really objective about prophecy today is due to the fact that our age sets too high a value on purely intellectual knowledge—which does not kindle impulses of will. But Spiritual Science will bring the recognition that although there have been many shadow-sides in the realm of ancient and modern prophecy, nevertheless in this striving for consciousness of the Future a seed has formed, not for the appeasement of cravings for knowledge or of curiosity, but as fire for our will. And even those who insist upon judging everything in the human being by cold, intellectual standards, must learn from this vista of the world that the purpose of prophecy is to stimulate the impulses of will.

Having considered how attacks against prophecy may be met and having recognised its core and purpose, we have a certain right to say: In this domain lie many of those things with which academic philosophy will have nothing to do ... that is certainly true. But the light of this very knowledge will reveal, in connection with those facts which illustrate the other saying, that data of intellectual knowledge—however correct they may be—are sometimes completely valueless because they are incapable of engendering impulses of will. Just as it is true that there are many things undreamed of by philosophy, so on the other side it is true that a great deal in the realm of scientific research into the things of heaven and earth comes to nothing because it does not quicken the seed of right endeavour. But progress in life must be made in the light of a kind of knowledge which reveals that at the beginning, the middle and the end, everything turns upon human activity, human deeds!

Goethe often described, in many different ways, a feeling of which he was persistently aware. He said, in effect: When I see the irrelevance manifesting in the passions, emotions and actions of men, I feel the strong urge to turn to all-powerful Nature and be comforted by her majesty and consistency. In such utterances Goethe was referring to what since time immemorial humanity had brought to expression in the Festivals. The Festivals are reminders of the striving to turn away from the chaotic life of men's passions, urges and activities to the consistent, harmonious processes and events in Nature. The great Festivals are connected with definite and distinctive phenomena in the Heavens and with ever-recurring happenings in Nature. Easter is one such Festival. For Christians today, Easter is the Festival of the Resurrection of their Redeemer; it was celebrated not only as a symbol of Nature's awakening but also of Man's awakening. Man was urged to awaken to the reality underlying certain inner experiences.

In ancient Egypt we find a festival connected with Osiris. In Greece a Spring festival was celebrated in honour of Dionysos. There were similar institutions in Asia Minor, where the resurrection or return of a God was associated with the re-awakening of Nature. In India, too, there are festivals dedicated to the God Vishnu. Brahmanism speaks of three aspects of the Deity, namely, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. The supreme God, Brahma, is referred to as the Great Architect of the World, who brings about order and harmony: Vishnu is described as a kind of redeemer, liberator, an awakener of slumbering life. And Shiva, originally, is the Being who blesses the slumbering life that has been awakened by Vishnu and raises it to whatever heights can be reached. A particular festival was therefore dedicated to Vishnu It was said that he goes to sleep at the time of the year when we celebrate Christmas and wakes at the time of our Easter Festival. Those who adhere to this Eastern teaching celebrate the days of their Festival in a characteristic way. For the whole of this period they abstain from certain foods and drinks, for example, all pod-producing plants, all kinds of oils, all salt, all intoxicating beverages and all meat. This is the way in which people prepare themselves to understand what was actually celebrated in the Vishnu Festival, namely, the resurrection of the God and the awakening of all Nature.

The Christmas Festival too, the old festival of the Winter solstice, is connected with particular happenings in Nature. The days leading up to this point of time become progressively shorter and the Sun's power steadily weakens. But from Christmas onwards greater and greater warmth again streams from the Sun. Christmas is the Festival of the reborn Sun.

It was the wish of Christianity to establish a link with these ancient Festivals. The date of the birth of Jesus can be taken to be the day when the Sun's power again begins to increase in the heavens. In the Easter Festival the spiritual significance of the World's Saviour was thus connected with the physical Sun and with the awakening and returning life in Spring.

As in the case of all ancient festivals, the fixing of the date of the Easter Festival was also determined by a certain constellation in the heavens. In the first century A.D. the symbol of Christianity was the Cross, with a lamb at its foot. Lamb and Ram are synonymous. During the epoch when preparation was being made for Christianity, the Sun was rising in the constellation of the Ram or Lamb. As we all know, the Sun moves through all the zodiacal constellations, every year progressing a little farther forward. Approximately seven hundred years before the coming of Christ, the Sun began to rise in the constellation of the Ram (Aries). Before then it rose in the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). In those times the people expressed what seemed to them important in connection with the evolution of humanity, in the symbol of the Bull, because the Sun then rose in that constellation. When the rising Sun moved forward into the constellation of the Ram or Lamb, the Ram became a figure of significance in the sagas and myths of the people. Jason brings the golden fleece from Colchis. Christ Jesus Himself is called the Lamb of God and in the earliest period of Christianity He is portrayed as the Lamb at the foot of the Cross. Thus the Easter Festival is obviously connected with the Constellation of the Ram or Lamb. The Festival of the Resurrection of the Redeemer is celebrated at the time when, in Nature, everything awakens to new life after having lain as if dead during the Winter months.

Between the Christmas and the Easter Festivals there is certainly a correspondence but in their relation to the happenings in Nature there is a great difference. In its deepest significance, Easter is always felt to be the festival of the greatest mystery connected with Man. It is not merely a festival celebrating the re-awakening of Nature but is essentially more than that. It is an expression of the significance in Christianity of the Resurrection after death. Vishnu's sleep sets in at the time when, in Winter, the Sun again begins to ascend. It is precisely at this time that we celebrate our Christmas Festival. When the Easter Festival is celebrated the Sun is continuing its ascent which had been in process since the Christmas Festival.

We must penetrate very deeply into the mysteries of man's nature if we are to understand the feelings of Initiates when they wished to give expression to the true facts underlying the Easter Festival. Man is a two-fold being—on the one side he is a being of soul-and-spirit, and on the other side a physical being. The physical being is an actual confluence of all the phenomena of Nature in man's environment. Paracelsus speaks of man as the quintessence of all that is outspread in external Nature. Nature contains the letters, as it were, and Man forms the word that is composed of these letters.

When we observe a human being closely, we recognise the wisdom that is displayed in his constitution and structure. Not without reason has the body been called the temple of the soul. All the laws that can be observed in the dead stone, in the living plant—all have assembled in Man into a unity. When we study the marvellous structure of the human brain with its countless cells cooperating among themselves in a way that enables all the thoughts and sentient experiences filling the soul of man to come to expression, we realise with what supreme wisdom the human body has been constructed. But in the surrounding world too we behold an array of crystallised wisdom. When we look out into the world, applying what knowledge we possess to the laws in operation there, and then turn to observe the human being, we see all Nature concentrated in him. That is why sages have spoken of Man as the Microcosm, while in Nature they beheld the Macrocosm.

In this sense Schiller wrote to Goethe in a letter of 23rd August 1794: “You take the whole of Nature into your purview in order to shed light upon a single sentence; in the totality of her (Nature's) manifold external manifestations you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organisation you proceed, step by step, to the more complex, in order finally to build up genetically from the materials of Nature's whole edifice the most complex organisation of all—Man.” The wonderful organisation of the body enables the human soul to have sight of the surrounding world. Through the senses the soul beholds the world and endeavours to fathom the wisdom by which that world has been constructed.

With this in mind let us now think of an undeveloped human being. The wisdom made manifest in his bodily structure is the greatest that can possibly be imagined. The sum-total of divine wisdom is concentrated in a single human body. Yet in this body there dwells a childlike soul hardly capable of producing the most elementary thoughts that would enable it to understand the mysterious forces operating in its own heart, brain and blood. The soul develops slowly to a higher stage where it can understand the powers that have been at work with the object of producing the human body. This body itself bears the hallmark of an infinitely long past. Physical man is the crown of the rest of creation. What was it that had necessarily to precede the building of the human body, what had to come to pass before the cosmic wisdom was concentrated in this human being? The cosmic wisdom is concentrated in the body of a human being standing before us. Yet it is in the soul of an undeveloped human being that this wisdom first begins to manifest. The soul hardly so much as dreams of the great cosmic thoughts according to which the human being has evolved. Nevertheless, we can glimpse a future when people will be conscious of the reality of soul and spirit still lying in man as though asleep. Cosmic thought has been active through ages without number, has been active in Nature, always with the purpose of finally producing the crown of all its creative work—the human body.

Cosmic wisdom is now slumbering in the human body, in order subsequently to acquire self-knowledge in man's soul, in order to build an eye in man's being through which to be recognised. Cosmic wisdom without, cosmic wisdom within, creative in the present as it was in the past and will be in future time. Gazing upwards we glimpse the ultimate goal, surmising the existence of a great soul by which the cosmic wisdom that existed from the very beginning has been understood and absolved. Our deepest feelings rise up within us full of expectation when we contemplate the past and the future in this way.

When the soul begins to recognise the wonders accomplished by the cosmic wisdom and when clarity and illumination have been achieved, the Sun may well be accepted as the worthiest symbol of this inner awakening. Through the gate of the senses the soul is able to gaze into the external world because the Sun illumines the contents of that world. Fundamentally speaking, what man perceives in the external world is the result of the Sun's reflected light. It is the Sun that wakens in the soul the power to behold the external world. An awakening soul, one that is beginning to recognise the seasons as expressions of cosmic thought—such a soul sees the rising Sun as its liberation.

When the Sun again begins its ascent, when the days lengthen, the soul turns to the Sun, declaring: To you I owe the possibility of discerning, outspread around me, the cosmic thought that sleeps within me and within all other human beings.

Such an individual is now able to survey his earlier existence—one which preceded his present understanding of the activities of cosmic thought. Man himself is more ancient than his senses. Through spiritual investigation we are able eventually to reach the point in the far past when man's senses were in process of coming into existence, when only their very earliest beginnings were present. At that stage the senses were not yet doors enabling the soul to become aware of the environment.

Schopenhauer realised this and was referring to the turning-point when man acquired the faculty of sensory perception, when he stated: This visible world first came into existence when an eye was there to behold it.

The Sun formed the eye for itself and for the light. In still earlier times, when as yet man had no outer vision, he had inner vision. In the primeval ages of evolution, outer objects did not give rise to ideas or mental conceptions in man, but these rose up in him from within. Vision in those ancient times was vision in the astral light. Men were then endowed with a faculty of dim, shadowy clairvoyance. It was still with a faculty of dim, hazy vision that they beheld the world of the Germanic Gods and formed their conceptions of the Gods accordingly. This dim clairvoyance faded into darkness and gradually passed away altogether. It was extinguished by the strong light of the physical Sun whereby the physical world was made visible to the senses. Astral vision then died away altogether.

When man looks into the future, he realises that his astral vision must return, but at a higher stage. What has now been extinguished for the sake of physical vision will return and combine with physical vision in order to generate clairvoyance—clear seeing in the fullest sense. In the future, a still more lucid consciousness will accompany man's waking vision. To physical vision will be added vision in the astral light, that is to say, perception with organs of soul. Those whom we have called the leaders of men are individuals who through lives of renunciation have developed in themselves the condition which later on is established in all mankind—these leaders of men already possess the faculty of astral vision which makes soul and spirit visible to them.

The Easter Festival is connected spiritually not only with the awakening of the Sun but with the unfolding of the plant world in Spring. Just as the seed-corn is sunk into the soil and slumbers in order eventually to awaken anew, so the astral light in man's constitution was obliged to slumber in order eventually to be reawakened. The symbol of the Easter Festival is the seed-corn which sacrifices itself in order to enable a new plant to come into existence. This is the sacrifice of a phase in the life of Nature in order that a new one may begin. Sacrifice and Becoming are interwoven in the Easter Festival.

Richard Wagner was conscious of the beauty and majesty of this thought. In the year 1857 in the Villa Wesendonck by the Lake of Zurich, while he was looking at the spectacle of awakening Nature, the thought came to him of the Saviour who had died and had awakened, the thought of Jesus Christ, also of Parsifal who was seeking for what is most holy in the soul.

All the leaders of humanity who know how the higher life of man wakes out of the lower nature, have understood the Easter thought. Dante too, in his Divine Comedy describes his awakening on a Good Friday. This is brought to our attention at the very beginning of the poem. It was in his thirty-sixth year, that is to say, in the middle of his life, that Dante had the great vision he describes. Seventy years being the normal span of human life, thirty-five is the middle of this period. Thirty-five years are reckoned to be the period devoted to the development of physical experience. At the age of thirty-five the human being has reached the degree of maturity when spiritual experience can be added to physical experience. He is ready for perception of the spiritual world.

When all the waking, nascent forces of physical existence are amalgamated, the time begins for the spiritual awakening. Hence Dante connects his vision with the Easter Festival.

Whereas the original increase of the Sun's power is celebrated in the Christmas Festival, the Easter Festival takes place at the middle point of the Sun's increasing power. This was also the point when, in the middle of his life, Dante became aware of the dawn of spiritual life within himself. The Easter Festival is rightly celebrated at the middle point of the Sun's ascent; for this corresponds with the time when, in man, the slumbering astral light is reawakened. The Sun's power wakens the seed-corn that is slumbering in the earth. The seed-corn is an image of what arises in man when what occultists call the astral light is born within him. Therefore, Easter is also the festival of the resurrection that takes place in the inner nature of man.

It has been thought that there is a kind of contradiction between what a Christian sees in the Easter Festival, and the idea of Karma. There seems at first to be a contradiction between the idea of Karma and redemption by the Son of Man. Those who do not understand very much about the fundamentals of anthroposophical thought may see a contradiction between the redemption wrought by Christ Jesus and the idea of Karma. Such people say that the thought of redemption by the God contradicts the fact of self-redemption through Karma. But the truth is that they understand neither the Easter thought of redemption nor the thought of the justice of Karma. It would certainly not be right if someone seeing another person suffer were to say to him: you yourself were the cause of this suffering—and then were to refuse to help him because Karma must take its course. This would be a misunderstanding of Karma. What Karma says is this: help the one who is suffering for you are actually there in order to help him. You do not violate karmic necessity by helping your fellow man. On the contrary, you are helping him to bear his Karma. You are then yourself a redeemer of suffering.

So too, instead of a single individual, a whole group of people can be helped. By helping them we become part of their Karma.

When a Being as all-powerful as Christ Jesus comes to the help of the human race, His sacrificial death becomes a factor in the collective Karma of mankind. He could bear and help this Karma, and we may be sure that the redemption through Him plays an essential role in its fulfilment.

The thought of Resurrection and Redemption can in reality be fully grasped only through a knowledge of Spiritual Science. In the Christianity of the future there will be no contradiction between the idea of Karma and Redemption. Because cause and effect belong together in the spiritual life, this great deed of sacrifice by Christ Jesus must also have its effect in the life of mankind.

Spiritual Science adds depth to the thought underlying the Easter Festival—a thought that is inscribed and can be read in the world of the stars.

In the middle of his span of life the human being is surrounded by inharmonious, bewildering conditions. But he knows too that just as the world came forth from chaos, so will harmony eventually proceed from his still disorderly inner nature. The inner Saviour in man, the bringer of unity and harmony to counter all disharmony—this inner Saviour will arise, acting with the ordered regularity of the course of the planets around the Sun. Let everyone be reminded by the Easter Festival of the resurrection of the Spirit in the existing nature of man.

A truth, intimately united with human aspiration and for centuries closely associated in the human heart with the festival whose modern symbol is the Christmas tree, is expressed in the words that have resounded ever since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and that must be impressed still more deeply into the evolution of the earth. This truth, which has shone down through the ages, is associated with the words, et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine (and is born of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary).

Most of the people of today seem to attach just as little significance to these words as they do to the Easter mystery of the Resurrection. We might even say that the central mystery of Christianity, the resurrection from the dead, appears to modern thought, which is no longer directed to the truths of the spiritual world, just as incredible as the Christmas mystery, the mystery of the Word becoming flesh, the mystery of the virgin birth. The greater part of modern humanity is much more in sympathy with the scientist who described the virgin birth as “an impertinent mockery of human reason” than with those who desire to take this mystery in a spiritual sense.

Nevertheless, my dear friends, the mystery of the incarnation by the Holy Spirit through the Virgin begins to exert its influence from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; in another sense it had made itself felt before this event.

Those who brought the symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the babe lying in the manger knew of the Christmas mystery of the virgin birth through the ancient science of the stars. The magi who brought the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh were, in the sense of the ancient wisdom, astrologers, they had knowledge of those spiritual processes that work in the cosmos when certain signs appear in the starry heavens. One such sign they recognized when, in the night between December 24 and 25, in the year that we today regard as that of the birth of Jesus, the sun, the cosmic symbol of the Redeemer, shone toward the earth from the constellation of Virgo. They said, “When the constellation of the heavens is such that the sun stands in Virgo in the night between December 24 and 25, then an important change will take place in the earth. Then the time will have come for us to bring gold, the symbol of our knowledge of divine guidance, which hitherto we have sought only in the stars, to that impulse which now becomes part of the earthly evolution of mankind. Then the time will have come for us to offer frankincense, the emblem of sacrifice, the symbol of the highest human virtue. This virtue must be offered in such a way that it is united with the power proceeding from the Christ Who is to be incarnated in that human being to whom we bring the frankincense.

“And the third gift, the myrrh, is the symbol of the eternal in man, which we have felt for thousands of years to be connected with the powers that speak to us from starry constellations; we seek it further by bringing it as a gift to him who is to be a new impulse for humanity; through this we seek our own immortality, in that we unite our own souls with the impulse of the Christ. When the cosmic symbol of world power, the sun, shines in the constellation of Virgo, then a new time begins for the earth.”

This was the belief held for thousands of years, and as the magi felt compelled to lay at the feet of the Holy Child the wisdom of the gods, the virtues of man, and the realization of human immortality, symbolically expressed in the gold, frankincense, and myrrh, something was repeated as a historical event that had been expressed symbolically in innumerable mysteries and in countless sacrificial rituals for thousands of years. There had been presented in these mysteries and rituals a prophetic indication of the event that would take place when the sun stood at midnight between December 24 and 25 in the sign of the Virgin, for gold, frankincense, and myrrh were also offered on this holy night, to the symbol of the divine child preserved in ancient temples as the representation of the sun.

Thus, my dear friends, for nearly two thousand years the Christian words, “incarnatus de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine” have resounded in the world, and so it has been ever since human thought has existed on the earth. In our times we can now present the question, “Do human beings really know to what they should aspire when they celebrate Christmas?” Does there exist today a real consciousness of the fact that, out of cosmic heights, under a cosmic sign, a cosmic power appeared through a virgin birth—spiritually understood—and that the blazing candles on the Christmas tree should light up in our hearts an understanding of the fact that the human soul is most intimately and inwardly united with an event that is not merely an earthly but a cosmic earthly event? The times are grave, and it is necessary in such serious times to give serious answers to solemn questions, such as the one raised here. With this in mind we will take a glance at the thoughts of the leading people of the nineteenth century to see whether the idea of Christ Jesus has lived in modern humanity in such a way as to give rise to the thought: the Christmas mystery has its significance in the fact that man wills to celebrate something eternal in the light of the Christmas candles.

Firstly we will take the words of a writer, Ernst Renan, who has given much study to the personality of Jesus and who has tried to give a picture of Christ Jesus out of the consciousness of the nineteenth century. We will listen to some of the voices of leading thinkers of the nineteenth century. Ernst Renan regarded the cities of Palestine with his physical eyes in true materialistic fashion. He desired to awaken in his own soul, from a materialistic standpoint, a picture of the personality known through the centuries as the Redeemer of the world. This is what he says:

“A beautiful outer nature tended to produce a much less austere spirit—a spirit less sharply monotheistic, if I may use the expression—which imprinted a charming and idyllic character on all the dreams of Galilee. The saddest country in the world is perhaps the region round about Jerusalem. Galilee, on the other hand, was a green, shady, smiling district, the true home of the Song of Songs, and the songs of the well-beloved. During the months of March and April the country forms a carpet of flowers of an incomparable variety of colors. The animals are small and exceedingly gentle—delicate and lively turtle doves, blue birds so light that they rest on a blade of grass without bending it, crested larks that venture almost under the feet of the traveler, little river tortoises with mild, lively eyes, storks with grave and modest mien, which, laying aside all timidity, allow man to come near them, seem almost to invite his approach.”

Ernst Renan never tires of describing this idyll of Galilee, so remote from the world's historic events, so as to make it seem natural that in this idyll, in this unpretentious landscape, with its turtle doves and storks, those things could happen that humanity for centuries has associated with the life of the Savior of the world.

So, my dear friends, that truth from which the earth received its meaning, the truth toward which humanity has looked for centuries, is attractive to a thinker of the nineteenth century only as an idyll with turtle doves and storks.

Ernst Renan proceeds, “The whole history of infant Christianity has become in this manner a delightful pastorale. A Messiah at the marriage festival, the courtesan and the good Zaccheus called to his feasts, the founders of the Kingdom of Heaven like a bridal procession—that is what Galilee has boldly offered and what the world has accepted.”

This, my dear friends, is one of the voices of the nineteenth century. Let us listen now to another, the voice of John Stuart Mill, who also desires to find his way from the consciousness of the nineteenth century to the being whom humanity for hundreds of years, and to the prophetic mind of man for thousands of years, has recognized as the Savior of the world.

John Stuart Mill says, “Whatever the rationalist may destroy of Christianity, Christ remains, a unique figure as different from his predecessors as from his successors, and even from those who enjoyed the privilege of his personal instruction. This estimate is not diminished if we say the Christ of the Gospels is not historical, for we are not in a position to know how much of what is worthy in Him has been added by His followers, for who among His disciples, or their followers, has been able to think out the speeches ascribed to Jesus, or to imagine a life and personality such as is portrayed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fisher-folk from Galilee, nor even St. Paul, whose whole character and inclination are of quite another kind, nor the early Christian writers. The kind of words that could be added and inserted by a scholar can be seen in the mystical part of the Gospel of St. John, who borrowed words from Philo and the Platonists of Alexandria and put them into the mouth of the Savior, who said many things about Himself of which not the slightest trace appears in the other Gospels. The East was full of people who could have stolen any number of such sayings, even as the many sects of the Gnostics did in later times. The life and teachings of Jesus, however, bear the stamp and impression of such profundity and personal originality that, if we deny ourselves the expectation of finding scientific exactitude, the prophet of Nazareth is placed in the foremost rank of venerated people of whom the human race may boast, even in the estimation of those who do not believe his divine inspiration. As this extraordinary spirit was equipped with the qualities of the greatest reformers and martyrs who have ever lived on earth, we cannot say that religion has made a bad choice” (Made a choice! We even choose in the nineteenth century!) “that religion has made a bad choice in setting up this man as an ideal representative and leader of humanity; also it would not be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better way of giving concrete expression to the abstract laws of virtue than to accept Christ as the model for our way of living. If, finally, we admit that even for the skeptic there remains the possibility that Christ was actually the person He said He was—not God; He never made the slightest claim to that; He would have seen in such a claim as great a blasphemy as would the people who judged Him—but the man expressly entrusted by God with the unique mission of leading humanity to truth and virtue, we may surely conclude that the influences of religion upon character, which would remain after the rationalistic critic had done his utmost against religion, are worthy of retention and, though they may lack direct proof as compared with other beliefs for which better evidence exists, the greater truth and correctness of their morality more than compensate for this lack.”

There we have the picture that the rationalists of the nineteenth century, by denying their own spirit, have given to that being whom humanity for centuries has recognized as the Savior of the world. Let us hear another voice, the voice of the international spirit, Heinrich Heine, and what he has to say:

“Christ is the God whom I love most, not because He is a God by inheritance, whose Father was God who had ruled the universe from time immemorial, but because He had no love for courtly, ceremonial display, although He was born the prince of heaven; I love Him because He was no aristocratic God, no panoplied knight, but a humble God of the people, a God of the town, a good citizen. Verily if Christ were not a God, I would choose Him for one and would much rather listen to Him, the God of my choice, than to a self-decreed, absolute God.”

“Only so long as religions have to struggle with each other in rivalry, and are more persecuted than followed, are they beautiful and worthy of veneration, only then do we see enthusiasm, sacrifice, martyrs, and palms. How beautiful, holy, and loveable, how heavenly sweet was the Christianity of the first centuries, as it sought to equal its divine founder in the heroism of His suffering—there still remained the beautiful legend of a heavenly God who in mild and youthful form wandered under the palms of Palestine preaching human love and revealing the teaching of freedom and equality—the sense of which was recognized by some of the greatest thinkers, and which has had its influence in our times through the French Gospel” (of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity).

Here we have this Heine Creed which regarded Him, whom humanity for centuries has recognized as the Redeemer of the world, as worthy of praise because we ourselves would have chosen Him, in our democratic fashion, even if He had not already held that exalted position, and because He preached the same Gospel as was preached later, at the end of the eighteenth century. He was therefore good enough to be as great as those who understood this Gospel.

Let us take another thinker of the nineteenth century. You know that I think very highly of Edward von Hartmann. I mention only those whom I do admire in order to show the manner in which the thought of the nineteenth century about Christ Jesus expressed itself.

“We see,” says Edward von Hartmann, the philosopher, “that the spiritual faculties of Jesus could not have achieved such good results without the magic of an impressive and loveable personality. This personality was endowed with unusual oratorical power, but His quiet majesty and personal tenderness must have been extraordinarily charming to his followers, not only to the men but to the women who made up so large a part of his following, in which prostitutes (Luke 7:37), married women of high rank (Luke 8:3), and young maidens of all classes mingled without discrimination. They were mostly eccentric persons, the epileptic, hysterical, or crazy, who believed themselves to be healed by Him. It is a well-known fact that such women are very prone to project or individualize their religious emotions and enthusiasms onto the person of an attractive male whom they proceed to make the center of a cult. Nothing is more obvious than that these women were of such a kind, and that even if they did not awaken in Jesus the idea of His Messiah-ship, yet it was so nourished by their adoring homage that it struck deep roots. According to modern psychological and psychiatrical opinion it is not possible for healthy religious feeling to flourish in such unhealthy soil, and today we would advise any religious reformer or prophet to shake off such elements in his following as much as possible, for they would merely end in compromising both him and his mission.”

Yet another voice I wish to quote, the voice of one of the principal characters in a romance that exercised a wide and powerful influence during the latter third of the nineteenth century over the judgment of the so-called “educated” humanity. In Paul Heyse's book, Die Kinder der Welt, the diary of Lea, one of the characters in the book, is reproduced. It contains a criticism of Christ Jesus, and those who know the world well will recognize in this judgment of Lea's one which was common to large numbers of human beings in the nineteenth century. Paul Heyse has Lea write, “The day before yesterday I stopped writing because an impulse drove me to read the New Testament once again. I had not opened the New Testament for a long time; it had been a long time since its many threatening, damning, and incomprehensible speeches had estranged and repelled my heart. Now that I have lost that childish fear, and the voice of an infallible and all-knowing spirit can be heard, since I have seen therein the history of one of the noblest and most wonderful of human beings, I have found much that greatly refreshed and comforted me.

“But its somber mood again made me depressed. What is more liberating, gracious, and comforting than joy in the beauty, goodness, and serenity of the world, yet while we are reading this book (the New Testament) we hover in a twilight of expectation and hope, the eternal is never fulfilled, it will only dawn when we have struggled through time; the full glory of joy never shines, there is no pleasantry, no laughter—the joy of this world is vanity—we are directed to a future that makes the present worthless, and the highest earthly joy of sinking ourselves deep in pure and loving thoughts is also open to suspicion, for only those can enter heaven who are poor in spirit. I am such a one, but it makes me unhappy to feel so, yet at the same time if I could break through this limitation I should no longer be what I am, thus my salvation and blessedness are not certain, for what transcends me is no longer. And then this mild, God-conscious man, in order to belong to the whole human race, departed from his own people with such strange hardness that he became a homeless one—it had to be so, but it chilled my feeling. Everything great that I had formerly loved, even when shrouded in majesty, was yet happily and comfortably linked with my being by ties of human need.”

Here you see the New Testament represented as it had to be if it was to provide satisfaction to such a typical person of the nineteenth century. Thus she says that everything great that she had formerly loved, even when shrouded in majesty, was yet happily and comfortably linked with her being by ties of human need. Because the New Testament contains a power that cannot be described in these terms, therefore, the Gospel failed to meet the needs of a person of the nineteenth century.

“When I read the letters of Goethe, of the narrow home life of Schiller, of Luther and his followers, of all the ancients back to Socrates and his scolding wife—I sense a breath of Mother Earth, from which the seed of their spirit grew, which also nourishes and uplifts mine own which is so much smaller.” Lea thus finds herself more drawn even to characters like Xanthippe than to the people of the New Testament, and this was the opinion of thousands and thousands of people in the nineteenth century.

“But this picture of a world forlorn alarms and estranges me, and I am unable to justify it by any belief that everything is guided and ordered by God.”

It is fitting, my dear friends, to ask in these grave times what is really the attitude of soul of people today with regard to the candles they burn at Christmas? For this attitude of soul is a complex of such voices as we have just examined and that could be multiplied a hundred or thousand fold. But it is not fitting in serious times to ignore and disregard the things that have been said about the greatest mystery of earthly evolution. It is much more fitting today to ask what the official representatives of the many Christian sects are able to do to check a development that has led human beings right away from an inwardly true and genuine belief in that which stands behind the lights of Christmas time. For can humanity make of such a festival anything but a lie, when the opinions just quoted from its best representatives are imposed upon that which should be perceived through the Christmas mystery as an impulse coming from the cosmos to unite itself with earthly evolution? What did the magi from the East desire when they brought divine gifts of wisdom, virtue, and immortality to the manger, after the event whose sign had appeared to them in the skies during the night between December 24 and 25 in the first year of our era? What was it these wise men from the East wished to do? They wanted, by this act, to furnish direct historical proof that they had grasped the fact that, from this time onward, those powers who had hitherto radiated their forces down to earth from the cosmos were no longer accessible to man in the old way—that is, by gazing into the skies, by study of the starry constellations. They wished to show that man must now begin to give attention to the events of historical evolution, to social development, to the manners and customs of humanity itself. They wished to show that Christ had descended from heavenly regions where the sun shines in the constellation of Virgo, a region from which all the varied powers of the starry constellations proceed that enable the microcosm to appear as a copy of the macrocosm. They wished to show that this spirit now enters directly into earthly evolution, that earthly evolution can henceforth be understood only by inner wisdom, in the same way as the starry constellations were formerly understood. This was what the magi wished to show, and of this fact the humanity of today must ever be aware.

People of today tend to regard history as though the earlier were invariably the cause of the latter, as though in order to understand the events of the years 1914 to 1917 we need simply go back to 1913, 1912, 1911, and so on; historical development is regarded in the same way as evolution in nature, in which we can proceed from effect to impulse and in the impulse find the cause. From this method of thinking, that fable convenue which we call history has arisen, with which the youth of today are being inoculated to their detriment.

True Christianity, especially a reverent and sincere insight into the mysteries of Christmas and Easter, provides a sharp protest against this natural scientific caricature of world history. Christianity has brought cosmic mysteries into association with the course of the year; on December 24 and 25 it celebrates a memory of the original constellation of the year 1, the appearance of the sun in the constellation of Virgo; this date in every year is celebrated as the Christmas festival. This is the point in time that the Christian concept has fixed for the Christmas festival. The Easter festival is also established each year by taking a certain celestial arrangement, for we know that the Sunday that follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox is the chosen day, though the materialistic outlook of the present time is responsible for recent objections to this arrangement.

To those who wish, reverently and sincerely, to tune their thoughts in harmony with the Mystery of Golgotha, the period between Christmas and Easter is seen as a picture of the thirty-three years of Christ's life on earth. Previous to the Mystery of Golgotha, with which I include the mystery of Christmas, the magi studied the heavens when they wished to investigate the secrets of human evolution or any other mysterious event. They studied the constellations, and the relative positions of the heavenly bodies revealed to them the nature of events taking place upon earth. But at that moment in which they became aware of the important event that was happening on earth, by the sign given to them through the position of the sun in Virgo on December 24 and 25, they said, “From this time onward the heavenly constellations themselves will be directly revealed in human affairs on the earth.”

Can the starry constellations be perceived in human affairs? My dear friends, this perception is now demanded of us, the ability to read what is revealed through the wonderful key that is given us in the mysteries of the Christian year, which are the epitome of all the mysteries of the year of other peoples and times. The time interval between Christmas and Easter is to be understood as consisting of thirty-three years. This is the key. What does this mean? That the Christmas festival celebrated this year belongs to the Easter festival that follows thirty-three years later, while the Easter festival we celebrate this year belongs to the Christmas of 1884. In 1884 humanity celebrated a Christmas festival that really belongs to the Easter of this year (1917), and the Christmas festival we celebrate this year belongs, not to the Easter of next spring but to the one thirty-three years hence (1950). According to our reckoning, this period—thirty-three years—is the period of a human generation, thus a complete generation of humanity must elapse between Christmas festivals and the Easter festivals that are connected with them. This is the key, my dear friends, for reading the new astrology, in which attention is directed to the stars that shine within the historical evolution of humanity itself.

How can this be fulfilled? It can be fulfilled by human beings using the Christmas festival in order to realize that events happening at approximately the present time (we can only say approximately in such matters) refer back in their historical connections in such a way that we are able to perceive their birthdays or beginnings in the events of thirty-three years ago, and that events of today also provide a birthday or beginning for events that will ripen to fruition in the course of the next thirty-three years. Personal karma rules in our individual lives. In this field each one is responsible for himself; here he must endure whatever lies in his karma and must expect a direct karmic connection between past events and their subsequent consequences.

How do things stand, however, with regard to historical associations? Historical connections at the present time are of such a nature that we can neither perceive nor understand the real significance of any event that is taking place today unless we refer back to the time of its corresponding Christmas year, that is 1884 in this case. For the year 1914 we must therefore look back to 1881. All the actions of earlier generations, all the impulses with their combined activity, poured into the stream of historic evolution, have a life cycle of thirty-three years. Then comes its Easter time, the time of resurrection. When was the seed planted whose Easter time was experienced by man in 1914 and after? It was planted thirty-three years before.

Connections that reach over intervals of thirty-three years are essential for an understanding of the time rhythms of historic evolution, and a time must come when people in the holy time that begins with Christmas Eve will say to themselves, “What I do now will continue to work on, but will arise as outer fact or deed (not in a personal but in a historic sense) only after thirty-three years. Furthermore, I can understand what is happening now in the events of the outer world only by looking back across the thirty-three years of time needed for its fulfillment.”

When, at the beginning of the 1880's, the insurrection of the Mohammedan prophet, the Mahdi, resulted in the extension of English rule in Egypt, when at about the same time a war arose through French influence between greater India and China over European spheres of control, when the Congo Conference was being held, and other events of a like nature were taking place—study everything, my dear friends, that has now reached its thirty-three years fulfillment. It was then that the seeds were sown that have ripened into the events of today. At that time the question should have been asked: what do the Christmas events of this year promise for the Easter fulfillment thirty-three years hence? For, my dear friends, all things in historic evolution arise transfigured after thirty-three years, as from a grave, by virtue of a power connected with the holiest of all redemptions: the Mystery of Golgotha.

It does not suffice, however, to sentimentalize about the Mystery of Golgotha. An understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha demands the highest powers of wisdom of which the human being is capable. It must be experienced by the deepest forces that can stir the soul of man. When he searches its depths for the light kindled by wisdom, when he does not merely speak of love but is enflamed by it through the union of his soul with the cosmic soul that streams and pulses through this turning point of time, only then does he acquire insight and understanding into the mysteries of existence. In days of old the wise men who sought for guidance in the conduct of affairs of human beings asked knowledge of the stars, and the stars gave an answer; so, today, those who wish to act wisely in guiding the social life of humanity must give heed to the stars that rise and set in the course of historic evolution. Just as we calculate the cyclic rotations of celestial bodies, so must we learn to calculate the cyclic rotations of historic events by means of a true science of history. The time-cycles of history can be measured by the interval that extends from Christmas to the Easter thirty-three years ahead, and the spirits of these time-cycles regulate that element in which the human soul lives and weaves in so far as it is not a mere personal being but is part of the warp and woof of historic evolution.

When we meditate on the mystery of Christmas, we do so most effectively if we acquire a knowledge of those secrets of life that ought to be revealed in this age in order to enrich the stream of Christian tradition concerning the Mystery of Golgotha and the inner meaning of the Christmas mystery. Christ spoke to humanity in these words, “Lo! I am with you always even to the end of the world.” Those, however, who today call themselves His disciples often say that; though the revelations from spiritual worlds were certainly there when Jesus Christ was living on earth, they have now ceased, and they regard as blasphemous anyone who declares that wonderful revelations can still come to us from the spiritual world. Thus official Christianity has become, in many respects, an actual hindrance to the further development of Christianity.

What has remained, however? The holy symbols, one of the holiest of which is portrayed in the Christmas mystery—these constitute in themselves a living protest against that suppression of true Christianity that is too often practiced by the official churches.

The spiritual science we seek to express through anthroposophy desires, among other things, to proclaim the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and the mystery of Christmas. It is also its task to bear witness to that which gives to earth its meaning, and to human life its significance. Since the Christmas tree, which is but a few centuries old, has now become the symbol of the Christmas festival, then, my dear friends, those who stand under the Christmas tree should ask themselves this question, “Is the saying true for us that is written by the testimony of history above the Christmas tree: Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine? Is this saying true for us?” To realize its truth requires spiritual knowledge. No physical scientist can give answer to the questions of the virgin birth and the resurrection; on the contrary, every scientist must needs deny both events. Such events can only be understood when viewed from a plane of existence in which neither birth nor death plays the important part they do in the physical world. Just as Christ Jesus passed through death in such a way as to make death an illusion and resurrection the reality—this is the content of the Easter mystery—so did Christ Jesus pass through birth in such a way as to render birth an illusion and “transformation of being” within the spiritual world the reality, for in the spiritual world there is neither birth nor death, only changes of condition, only metamorphoses. Not until humanity is prepared to look up to that world in which birth and death both lose their physical meaning will the Christmas and Easter festivals regain their true import and sanctity.

Then, and only then, my dear friends, will our hearts and souls be filled with inner warmth of tone, fortified by which we shall be able again to speak to our little ones, to speak to them even in earliest childhood, of that Child who was laid in the manger, and of the three wise men who brought to him their gifts of wisdom, virtue, and immortality. We must be able to speak of these things to children, for what we say to the child about the Christmas mystery will be celebrated by him as an Easter festival, it will reappear in his life when he has lived through thirty-three years. For in historical evolution the responsibilities of humanity are such that one generation can only express as Christmas impulse those forces that the next generation will experience as Easter impulse. If we could realize this with consciousness, my dear friends, one generation would think of its successor in the following way: in the Christmas star I teach you to receive into your soul as truth that which will arise as the Easter star after thirty-three years. If we were conscious of this connection of the present generation and its successor, each one of us could say, “I have received an impulse for work that extends far beyond the limits of the day, for the period between Christmas and Easter is not merely the weeks that lie between these festivals but is really a period of thirty-three years; this is the true cycle of an impulse that I have implanted in the soul of a child as a Christmas impulse, and that after thirty-three years will arise again as an Easter impulse.”

Such things, my dear friends, should not encourage pride in mere theoretical knowledge; they achieve value only when they are expressed in practical deeds, when our souls become so filled with conviction concerning them that we can do nothing but to act according to their light. Only then is the soul filled with love for the great being for whom the deeds, in this light, are done; then this love becomes a concrete thing, filled with cosmic warmth, and quite distinct from that sentimental affectation that we find today on all lips but that has led, in these catastrophic times, to some of the greatest impulses of hatred among humanity. Those who for so long have talked about love have no further right to speak of it when it has turned to hate; to such persons falls rather the duty of asking themselves, “What have we neglected in our talk of love, of Christmas love, that out of it deeds of hatred have developed?” Humanity, however, must also ask, “What must we seek in the spiritual world in order to find that which is lost, that love that rules and lives warmingly in all beings but is only real love when it wells up from a vital understanding of life.”

To love another is to understand him; love does not mean filling one's heart with egotistical warmth that overflows in sentimental speeches; to love means to comprehend the being for whom we should do things, to understand not merely with the intellect but through our innermost being, to understand with the full nature and essence of our human being.

That such a love, springing from deepest spiritual understanding, may be able to find its place in human life, that desire and will should exist to cherish such love, may still be possible in these difficult times for him who is willing to tread again the path of the magi to the manger. He may say to himself, “Just as the wise men from the East sought understanding to find the way, the way of love, to the manger, so will I seek the way that will open my eyes to the light in which the true deeds of human love are performed. Just as the magi surrendered their faith in the authority of the starry heavens, added to their knowledge of the stars their sacrifice of this knowledge, and brought the union of immortality with this stellar wisdom to the Christ Child on that Christmas night, so must humanity in these later times bring its deepest impulses of soul as sacrifice to that being for whom the Christmas festival stands as the yearly symbol. Inspired by such a consciousness, the Christmas festival will again be celebrated by humanity sincerely and truly. Its celebration then will express not a denial but a knowledge of that being for whom the Christmas candles are lit.”

Question regarding earthquakes.

Dr. Steiner: You probably mean the earthquakes that are happening in America now? Of particular importance with regard to such questions are always those volcanic phenomena that, I might say, do not occur so intensely, not so powerfully at the same time, but which show in detail that something is happening over time in the earth's environment. And here I would like to draw your attention to something else, which is perhaps less noticeable, but which many people can relate to more than these individual phenomena, which of course had a terrible effect on those who were nearby, but which are of less significance for the greater part of humanity. And then you just remember that in the last few years people could talk about the fact that extraordinary weather conditions prevail. We cannot deny that in recent years there have not been any really proper, lasting summers, especially not in our areas. But that is spreading across a large part of Europe and further afield.

Now, when something like this is mentioned, people usually talk about how large icebergs float in the northern seas and how so-called cold spells then emanate from these mighty floating icebergs. You may also remember that during last year's so-called cold spell, it was reported by ships that if they took even a slight northerly course, these huge floating icebergs could be found everywhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

But we must realize that the things that occur in this way do not come from the earth alone, but are connected with the whole evolution of the world. And here we must ask ourselves: What about the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth?

I would like to draw your attention to something that I may have mentioned before, but in a different context, which can be important for us when considering this question. You may have heard that particularly in northern Siberia, in Asia, there are very special conditions in the ground. To give you an idea, I would just like to note the following. If we have the map of Europe like this (it is drawn), here is Norway, here is the north coast of Germany, here it goes over to Holland and so on, there would be Ireland, England, and there we would come over the large peninsula to Asia. There is the border between Asia and Europe. There is Russia. Here we come over to Asia and have Siberia. Over there is the so-called Arctic Ocean. That is just drawn to help you orient yourself. Now, elephant-like animals have been found in this area of Siberia a long time ago, which no longer exist today, and which therefore existed on Earth a very, very long time ago. And you also know that elephant-like animals no longer live up there at the Arctic Ocean. Elephant-like animals belong in much warmer areas. But the strange thing is that these elephant-like animals, which are deep in the ground, in the icy ground, were so fresh that you could still have eaten the meat if you like to eat elephant meat. These animals were in the icy ground just as if someone had wanted to eat the meat and had stored the animals in the ground for that purpose. So these animals in northern Siberia were simply preserved, as they say, their meat was kept fresh, for many, many millennia.

Now, you see, gentlemen, it is impossible that this could have happened slowly over time. Because if the animals had lived up there, simply died and gone into the ground, they would have rotted away long ago, and at most you would have found the remains of bones, as you would find anywhere else. But here you find whole fresh animals. This is only possible if these animals once lived there and an ice wave came very quickly, covering these animals, sealing them in, so that they could be preserved in the same state with the fresh meat for thousands of years. So you can see: there must have been a time when a mighty blast came from the south and blew water up into the ice region. The water froze instantly, and these animals were instantly frozen in this enormous Siberian ice cellar, where they remained for thousands of years.

Now you will all admit, of course, the earth has no reason to suddenly do something like that. Because where should the forces come from in the earth itself, that it could carry out something like that? These things can only come from the extraterrestrial stellar influences. So if you imagine that there is the earth (it is drawn), “since here the southern regions are the equatorial regions – only south in relation to the north, of course – then such a stellar constellation must have existed here once, which simply threw the water up again. So, through the constellation of the stars, through the position of the heavenly bodies, this water was thrown up, immediately froze and buried these animals. You can see from such things that the constellation of the stars has a powerful influence on the distribution of land and water and ice on Earth.

Now, I recently explained to you how volcanoes also originate from that which is outside of the earth, how that which is under the earth is, so to speak, brought out from the interior of the earth. So we can also say that when, for example, the mighty Etna erupts, things are not hurled out from below; rather, a stellar constellation acts from above downwards, and this brings these fiery masses out of the interior of the earth.

From this we see that today very many things interact, and this causes, on the one hand, that we have these cold spells. The cold spells are therefore also caused by the extraterrestrial. The fact that we have these volcanic eruptions and earthquakes also stems from the extraterrestrial. But now one can never fully assess such an occurrence if one is not clear about the fact that man himself is intimately connected with all these extraterrestrial conditions.

You see, you have probably already heard of so-called haemorrhages, where a person's blood no longer takes the right path, so that it spews out of the mouth instead of being distributed throughout the body. This is called a haemorrhage. Such haemorrhages occur particularly easily when a person is at certain stages in life. We must ask ourselves: What is the actual relationship between a hemorrhage and what is happening outside? — Now, if you remember that man does not consist only of his physical body, which we can touch with our hands, but that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I-body, then you will have to say to yourself: Of course, we can shed the physical body. It is heavy, it is heavy mass, it is connected with the earth. But the etheric body is connected with the environment. And when we look at things in the human being, it is the case that the moon has a huge influence on the human being. But the moon does not have such an influence on people as it does now; rather, we are led back to very ancient times. In ancient times, the moon had an extremely strong influence on people. People had to do something specific during the waxing moon, something specific during the waning moon, and so on. And in particular, in those older times, the reproduction of the human race was entirely based on the moon. It is so interesting to see how people who still have traditions from ancient times think about these things. They definitely think that it is of great importance whether a person is conceived in the waxing moon or the waning moon, for example. This is a very important thing in ancient traditions. And the moon then also exerts its influence on the whole development of the person, but in such a way that the person carries these lunar influences within them. So it is not that it has a direct influence on the person when there is a full moon or something like that; but we see the moon waxing and waning; that once had an influence on the person, and that has remained and continues. So it is not the current phase of the moon that has a great influence, but something that is similar to the old moon phase and is an old heirloom has a great influence. And so you could say that the moon has a certain influence.

But we wouldn't have any blood in our heads at all if it weren't for the moon. We would all walk around with very pale faces, terribly pale faces, if it were not for the influence of the moon. The moon draws our blood up from our body to our head. That is the influence of the moon, that the blood is willing to go to the head at all. This is extremely interesting. The blood only goes up into the human head because of the influence of the moon. Otherwise, the blood would always go down. Now, when a person becomes so weak in his entire body that he can no longer sufficiently resist these forces of the moon that draw the blood up, the blood rushes too strongly into the human head, and that is how a hemorrhage occurs. We must always have this influence, but when it becomes too strong, the blood rushes too strongly to the human head and that is how blood comes out.

And you see, what the hemorrhage is in the individual human being is something like water bursting out [pointing to Siberia] or erupting from a volcano in the great outdoors outside. Only there it is not the influence of the moon, but the influence of the more distant stars. You must imagine that when we simply develop as human beings, we are continually exposed to other influences. I will illustrate this to you. Imagine once again, here would be the earth (it is drawn), here the moon goes around the earth. I will draw it as it looks. So the moon goes around the earth, and it has its greatest influence on people first. But outside of the moon are the other stars, Venus, Mercury, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and so on, and then the fixed stars. Now you must be aware that it is different whether, let's say, Mars is behind the Sun or whether Mars has already moved on and is already next to the Sun. When Mars is behind the Sun, it has less effect on Earth because the Sun covers its effect. When Mars is in this position [next to the Sun], it has a stronger effect on Earth. And so it always depends on the position of the stars how strongly the earth is affected. This science of the position of the stars is almost not developed at all today, and so people only look at what is happening on earth, icebergs and so on, but they do not look at the stars.

Now one cannot investigate these things from the earth either, but one must be clear about the fact that one must investigate these things from the human being. These things must be investigated from the human being.

Now I would like to tell you something: if you go through the development of humanity in modern times, you will indeed find huge changes in this development of humanity. We do not want to go back very far, but let us go back, say, six hundred years. If we go back six hundred years – today is 1923 – we come to 1323. You have to bear in mind that if you had lived then, you would not have known that there was such a thing as America or Australia. People did not know any of this, they only knew about Europe and Asia and a small part of Africa, very little of Africa. So six centuries before our time, imagine, people only knew about a small part of the world. And above this earth they saw the moon rise and set, the sun rise and set, the stars, and everything was such that all life took place only in a small space. Yes, gentlemen, in those days people knew little about the earth and had no idea about the movement of the stars. But they knew something about the spiritual influences of the stars. This is connected with the fact that people lived in small circumstances. People got their influence from these small circumstances.

Well, you know, it didn't take long: in 1492, Christopher Columbus of Genoa set out with a small number of ships, and he was of the opinion that one could travel around the world. Christopher Columbus did not want to discover America at all, but he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. Before that, people thought the earth was flat. Now he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. And so he equipped himself with a number of ships. There was resistance, but he still got these ships from the government, equipped them, and believed that he could sail around the world. At least that's what he thought. He said to himself: if we go from Europe over there to the east, we'll find (pointing to the drawing) Asia, down there is Hither India, there is Farther India. — So he knew that if you go over there by land, you come to India. Now he wanted to go around the globe of the earth from Spain and come to India from the other side. That was what Columbus wanted. He wanted to travel around the world because he hoped, so to speak, to make the first practical use of the roundness of the earth. He wanted to travel around and discover India from the other side. Now he set out and came across America, and thought: This is the other side of India. — That is why this area was also called the West Indies, as it is still called in part today.

So you see how, through the thinking of people, the spherical shape of the earth has actually been gradually conquered for knowledge, how it was only gradually realized that one had come to the other side of America and realized that this was not India, but a new country. So 1492, that's only 431 years ago that people discovered America at all.

But the discovery of America means something completely different. And if you want to understand what the discovery of America means, then please consider the following. You see, in 1492, I told you, Christopher Columbus set out first and discovered America. In 1543, Copernicus came on the scene and was the first to put forward the world view that the sun stands still and the earth moves around the sun like the other planets. So what every child learns at school today has only been around since that time. Do you realize how many years that is? It's only 380 years! It is only since that time that people have had any idea at all of what is already taught in elementary school today. Before that, people knew nothing about any of these things. But they thought about it all the more, about what influence the moon has on people. People knew what I have told you now, that the moon drives the blood to the head. People recognized this influence on people.

Now you have to consider what the discovery of America actually means. You see, people talk so thoughtlessly and history presents it that way: discovery of America, people have possessed genius after all! - Yes, gentlemen, but you have to imagine it quite differently. What kind of people do you think lived in America at the time when Columbus came across it? Well, not even five hundred years ago, the copper-red Indians lived over there, and these Indians did not think like you do today in Europe. They knew a lot about the influence of the stars. So there lived in all of America at the time a population that knew an extraordinary amount about the influence of the stars. They oriented themselves entirely to the influence of the stars. And then the Europeans came, civilized humanity. Now, you see, as late as the 19th century, the Indians said that the Europeans always brought something strange with them, something white, with little ghosts on it. But these were very harmful ghosts, terribly harmful ghosts, and the Europeans would use them to conjure the Americans. At least that's what the Native Americans thought. And do you know what it was that the Native Americans feared so much, what they thought made the Europeans such terrible guys who caused so much havoc? It was the books, the white sheets of paper with the letters on them! The Native Americans looked at them, thought they were magic and said: “These people are using them to cast spells on us.

And so the people came together. And then the extermination of the Indians began. But where did the people who exterminated the Indians come from? They came from Europe! And if the people who still lived in Europe in 1323 had come over there, their beliefs would have been much more similar to those of the Indians. Because these people in 1323 in Europe still knew about the influence of the stars. They could have understood each other much better. But the people who came over did not understand the Indians at all, they could only exterminate them. And on the spot where the exterminated Indians were, European humanity developed. You just have to bear in mind that the Americans who developed there are, after all, Europeans. Isn't it true that the ideas that people often have based on what they learned at school are really quite stupid sometimes.

I would just like to point out one thing to you. Today people talk so much about the French. But around Nuremberg, the people are still called Franks today. The French are just the immigrated Germanic people who then adopted the Latin language in a modified form. So everything that is talked about, when one does not know how things came about and rages because it is presented that way in history, is sometimes so boundlessly foolish, so boundlessly stupid. And so it is boundlessly stupid there too. They don't even consider that the people of Europe who migrated to America had developed in Europe over the last three hundred years. The main immigration only happened much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's when America was first settled. And what kind of people came over then? Well, the illiterate ones also came over, but they didn't have much influence. Those who came over and had a great influence were those who had been educated in Europe, especially in science, who had learned the Copernican doctrine, who had completely different views about the stars.

Imagine how this all fits together in world history. On the one hand, the spherical shape of the earth is proven by the fact that one can travel around the earth at all, and on the other hand, that it is not the sun that rises and sets, but that there is space all around and the earth goes around the sun, that the earth is not a plane, that the sun does not sink into the water in the evening, but that the earth goes around the sun.

You see, people do not think about what the actual connection is between the discovery of America, which took place in 1492, and 1543, when Copernicus came up with his new view of the stars. There is a close connection. Don't think that what happened could have happened without the influence of the stars on people. Columbus did not think: “Now I will go over to the West” without the influence of the stars. You only have to consider how foggy it was. He did not know that he was discovering America. He just wanted to sail around the world. It's like a blind hen finding a grain of corn. You can't say that it was his own mind, but that people are driven by influences. And what drives them are the stellar influences. So we also have to ask ourselves: Why did Copernicus think the way he did about the stellar influences? — then we ourselves have to look for the causes in the stellar influences.

We have a time in the Middle Ages - I told you, it was still like this six hundred years ago - when people still have concepts that relate to a very small world. Then suddenly they get concepts that go all around on the earth and all around in the sky. All concepts diverge. Yes, gentlemen, you really have to think a little deeper about what is going on in people. One must penetrate into these things with real science. One must therefore study man. Now I have already told you many things about man. I will now tell you a well-attested fact again, so that you can see how things are.

There was an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who was transferred to Trieste as a secondary school teacher at a certain time, in 1855, and he took a great interest in everything that was going on. At the time, Robert Hamerling was also very interested in how all sorts of swindlers passed through Trieste, but so did some people who produced anomalies, so-called mediums. He liked to visit all such gatherings, but he was not at all superstitious. He really saw how most of these things were fraudulent. But once he thought to himself, when he saw a person with a particularly strange medium: now I want to see for myself. Now Hamerling had known a young girl in Graz, where he lived before coming to Trieste, who died very soon afterwards and from whom he had received a lock of hair. He had this lock of hair from the young girl made into a small wreath, tied it together, pinned it on a small piece of paper and then put it in a little box. He kept this as a souvenir. It had become particularly valuable to him after the person in question had died. He took it with him to Trieste among his other things. Nobody knew anything about it. He never told anybody anything about it – he remembered that very clearly – and never showed the box to anybody. Besides, the circumstances were such that he would not have liked to show it anyway. It was something that embarrassed him a great deal. So he had a secret box, so to speak, that contained this. He took it with him when he went to the meeting to see the medium. And with this medium it was the case that people gave all kinds of objects, which they put in envelopes or boxes; the medium took it in his hand, touched it and then said what was in the box. Now, such things are very often interspersed with fraud; you have to keep an open mind about these things.

For example, I was once at a meeting where a medium was brought in, and the man they call the impresario went around the audience and had all kinds of things written down on pieces of paper. He took these, but stopped walking. The medium was blindfolded. And while he was still standing there – he just said: Tell me, what do I have in my hand? – the medium immediately said what he had in his hand. So if someone wrote down his own name, he gave it to the impresario, who read it and then crumpled up the piece of paper. The medium could not see anything, but then said what was on it. Now, you see, the people at the table where I was sitting at the time were terribly curious – because the people were terribly amazed – and they said that now someone should write something down where the guy was not clever enough, where he could not communicate, because they all believed that he communicated with the medium through all kinds of signs. Well, I wrote down the name Spinoza and a work by Spinoza, the “Ethics”, because people believed that the impresario naturally did not know who Spinoza was. But he took over Spinoza and the “Ethics” just as well, and the medium answered correctly. People were terribly amazed. But, you see, the matter was very simple. The impresario was a ventriloquist and the medium only pretended to answer, while the impresario spoke from the medium's mouth. So one must not be taken in. I must always emphasize that one must not be taken in by these things. That is precisely the difference between superstitious, gullible people and those who can judge these things.

But Hamerling took the little box with him and no one knew anything about it. Then he sent this little box, the contents of which no one knew about, down among the other objects. The medium was sitting in front of a table. He sent up the box. Well, first the other things were determined. The medium did that fairly quickly. And the moment she came to his box, she took it in her hand and flung it away. Now Hamerling thought: now it is the case that this is of course agreed with all the others; with me it cannot be an agreement, the medium does not come to that and flings it away! - So he went and said that he still wanted to know what was in it. The box was picked up again. The medium flung it away again. It was picked up again. Then the medium said, very stammeringly: a lock of hair and a piece of paper! Now, of course, he was amazed. Any fraud was out of the question, absolutely out of the question. Then he asked why she kept throwing it away. She said: because it comes from a dead person. Now, that was even more surprising. So that is a case where – I am not mentioning other cases except those that you can find in the literature, otherwise I could mention hundreds of others – any deception is out of the question. And what is the underlying cause? The medium must not know what is there at that moment, but must seek it out from the unconscious. There is a very specific influence at work here.

I once told you that sometimes the influence of buckwheat groats down in the cellar can still be felt on the third floor. Do you remember how I told you that? Such an influence, which only manifests itself in the head, is the underlying cause. And the medium then says what is in there – why? Because the medium is a person in whom the blood is more subject to the influence of the moon than in other people. It does not have to be so strong as to cause a hemorrhage – it could also occur in a medium who is not subject to giddiness – but the blood is drawn to the head more than in other people. This results in a strong influence, and this kind of influence can be present.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, the powerful influences of the stars, of course, they are constantly affecting people. And everything that Europe has experienced together with America and the whole earth for four hundred years is under the influence of the stars. But what is this star influence like? Well, gentlemen, you have to imagine the following. Imagine that here is the Earth (it is being recorded). There was the piece of earth that people used to know only. Somehow the stars are above it, I am of course only drawing it schematically for you. People are under the influence of these stars. This is the time before the discovery of America. People have firmly established ideas. If you look at the pictures and portraits of the old councilmen, you will see that people have their fixed ideas and that they stand with both feet firmly on the ground. This is because in those days there was a constellation of stars where the stars were very close together. Since then, we have had a different star constellation. When the earth is there, the stars are, so to speak, much more oblique, of course again drawn very schematically. If you were to draw it in detail, each one would naturally stand out, so to speak. You will say: But the fixed stars have not changed? — But they have changed too, although not to such an extent. So you can see from this: the spaces between them became larger in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. The concepts have dissolved. And now there is again a time coming when the spaces become smaller, when the stars again contract. This is only very little with the fixed stars, but it is still the case. Even when one records the fixed stars, one sees that the fixed stars have to shift. And now men are exposed to the fact that they have acquired ideas through the influence of stars that were far apart. But now they have to get concepts under the influence of the stars that are close together again. There is a completely new star constellation in the world. This can be seen if one has lived awake from the previous century into this century. You see, I was born in 1861, so I consciously experienced the time in the seventies, eighties, nineties and now the 20th century. Yes, in my childhood it was quite different from today! In my childhood people simply thought quite differently than today. Everything has changed now, and in one area in particular it has changed completely. When I was a little boy of twelve, I didn't have much money back then to buy books, but every year we were given a school program; it contained the most important physical terms of the time. Well, I spent a lot of time chewing over those. They were hard to grasp. Even back then, I had to learn differential calculus to understand the concepts. But I know what the physical concepts were back then.

But today it is quite different. When someone studies physics at university today, he learns something completely different from what we learned as boys. And from what happened then, we can see that the physical concepts have disintegrated. Today, no physicist knows which concepts to use. In the past, we spoke of space and time as two different things. Today, the physicist speaks of four dimensions, taking the first, second, and third as dimensions of space and the fourth dimension as equivalent to time. Most people have no idea what teaching is like today. People who are outside of schools still live with the concepts that I learned as a boy. But in actual physics today, they are already talking about something completely different. This shows that the concepts have become completely mixed up. Today, the physicist knows least of all what he is supposed to do. Everything has become mixed up.

Yes, gentlemen, it shows you in the human mind that there is a different star constellation. For the story is that today's people all have more blood in their heads than people through all the centuries have had in their heads, because the moon is supported by the stars, which in turn are closer together. So if you study human evolution, you find that a wave of blood has gone up to the head through the star constellation. But this wave is not only happening in man, but on the whole earth. And it is this same influence that once threw the cold from south to north and buried the mammoths, which are still fresh meat in Siberia today, as if in a large ice cream factory. Just as it was thrown up then, just as blood is driven up into the head by the moon, so today these volcanic eruptions are thrown up by the stars. Thus we have today the effect of a star constellation coming from the other side of the Earth. It passes through North America, through Greenland, and throws cold air over here, so that today, as a result of the star constellation, large masses of cold air are continually being thrown from west to east.

And now I have told you: If you go to Italy, you only need to light a piece of paper on certain parts of the ground and it will smoke from below. It is not that the earth throws up the smoke, but that I make the air above warm and thin, causing these vapors to rise. Now the star constellation throws these air masses from west to east. We are exposed to them here, which is why we now have this climate. Here it goes from west to east. But this causes the ground below to throw out its masses, its fire masses. First they were thrown out over America by the huge volcanoes and the huge earthquakes. Now it is moving further and further east. Etna and Vesuvius are all beginning to erupt because the wave is flowing over there, and down below it is becoming elastic. It is not pushed up from below, but is brought to the surface by the star constellations. In the human being, blood is pushed into the brain, and on Earth, masses of air are thrown over and fiery masses of gas are thrown out from under the Earth and transported to other places. It is the same story. It all starts with the stars.

If people understood why they think differently now, they would also understand why Etna is spitting fire. But for that to happen, the human being must first know that he is not something that can be considered in isolation, but must be considered in connection with the whole universe. That is precisely it. And people have completely forgotten how to consider things in the universe. It is really quite interesting how animals, in this respect, as I have also told you before, are much cleverer than humans. Animals usually even migrate before a volcanic eruption or something like that occurs, while people stay put. Why do animals migrate? Yes, when the other influence comes, the other star influence, then it is like this with the animal: the animal is built so that it has its legs there (see drawing $. 138), its backbone, the vertebrae, its head there. When the stars move across it, the entire spine is continuously exposed to the stars, vertebra by vertebra exposed to the stars, and they belong together, they belong so closely together that we have 28 to 31 vertebrae in our back and the moon takes 28 to 31 days to go around. It is so closely related.

But man walks upright. With him only the head, this little piece of the head, is exposed to the starry sky. He has his spine lifted out. So that with man only the blood is exposed to the influence of the stars, not the nervous system. But with animals the nervous system is exposed to the influence of the stars. That is why the animal notices the influence of the stars much sooner than man and migrates when earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur. Man stays put. The mere fact that the animal can migrate and thus shows us that the star influence is acting on the animal, that in itself is proof that we are not dealing here with random waves coming from the earth, but that the star influence is acting from outside. That is what shows us this whole interesting connection with the whole universe. Man is not merely an earthly creature, but man is a being placed in the entire world of the stars.

Now, of course, this also leads us to understand that after people have forgotten their old knowledge of the stars, they have to get it again. So, I would like to say: It is indeed the case that with anthroposophy, we have to give humanity what it needs in a new way, otherwise humanity will remain confused. Because the stars, which are arranged more closely together, no longer fit the concepts from other times; only the concepts that anthroposophy can bring fit again.

Now I have already been given four questions today. We will see if we can make progress next time. I may have to be away on Wednesday. I will let you know when we will have the next session.

How does one come to see the spiritual world?

Christianity commemorates in three yearly festivals that Being Who, for the Christian, gives earth-life its meaning, and from Whom the strongest force of this earth-life radiates.

Of these three festivals Christmas makes the greatest demand on our feeling, and seeks as it were to make this feeling inward. The Easter festival makes its chief demand on what we call human understanding, human comprehension; and Whitsuntide on what is termed human will.

Basically we only grasp what is contained in the Christmas Mystery through inwardising and deepening of that feeling which makes present to us our entire human being, our worth and dignity as man. Only when we can feel in the right way and with sufficient inwardness what man is in the whole cosmos, are we able rightly to appreciate the mood of Christmas. Only when we can attain to the full understanding of that wonder which is contained in the Easter Mystery—the wonder of the resurrection—shall we rightly value the Easter Mystery; and only when we perceive something in the festival of Whitsuntide which helps to develop our will-impulse, do we perceive in the right light what Whitsuntide should be.

Christ Jesus is related to the Father principle of the world, and this is represented for us by the Christmas festival. Christ Jesus is related to what we call the Son principle, and this is represented by the Easter Mystery; while the relation of Christ to that which undulates and weaves through the world as spirit is made present to us in the Whitsuntide Mystery.

We see nature around us, and we see also that man enters into his physical existence through the forces of this same nature. We know through our study of Spiritual Science that we do not rightly regard nature if we only pay attention to its external physical features. We know that divine forces permeate it and we only become aware of our origin from nature in the true sense of the word when we perceive this divine element that weaves and works within it In this we perceive the Father principle of nature. All that permeates nature as the divine is the Father principle in the sense of the old religions and also in the sense of a rightly understood Christianity—whether it be the flowers of the field that we observe, and how they grow, or the roll of the thunder and the flash of the lightning; or whether we watch the sun in its path across the heavens or gaze upon the shining stars; or whether again we listen to the brooks and the streams rushing along—when we become aware of what is revealed so mysteriously in this external revelation of nature as the origin of all ‘becoming,’ then we are at the same time aware of what places us as men within this world through the mystery of physical birth.

But just in this mystery of physical birth there always remains something inexplicable as regards the nature of man as long as we do not bring it into connection with what may be inwardly experienced in the commemoration of the Christmas Mystery—in commemoration of the childhood which entered into humanity with the Jesus boys.

What does the presence of these Jesus boys say to us? It tells us nothing less than that in order to be fully human it does not suffice merely to be born, that is, merely to be here in the world through those forces which, as the forces of physical birth, bring all beings including man into existence. This holy Christmas Mystery tells us, as we look at the childhood of Christ, that the true human being in us cannot merely be born, but that in the innermost part of the soul it must be born anew; that man must in the course of his life experience something within his soul which alone makes him fully man. And what he should experience can only come to pass when it is brought into connection with that childhood which entered into earth evolution at Christmas time.

As we look upon this Jesus-child we must say to ourselves: “Only through the fact that this Being came down amongst men in the course of human evolution does it first become possible for man to be truly man in the full sense of the word, that is, to connect what he receives through birth with what he can experience above and beyond him as a result of a feeling of devoted love towards that Being Who descended from spiritual heights that He might, through great sacrifice, unite Himself with human existence.”

For many men of the early Christian centuries it was a great experience to gaze on the entrance of the Christ Being into earth evolution. It made evident to them, as it were, man's two-fold origin—his physical and his spiritual origin. It is a birth through which Jesus passes—it is to a little earth-born child the Christian looks when he thinks of Jesus in the world's Holy Night. Yet he says to himself: “What is born here is something different from the rest of mankind, it is a Being through whom the rest of humanity can receive what they cannot receive through physical birth.” Our feeling is deepened when we understand in the right sense and with the right love what is signified in the words: “We must be born twice; the first time through the forces of nature, the second time reborn through the forces of Christ Jesus.”

This is our communion with Christ Jesus; it is this which through Christ Jesus first gives us the full consciousness of our human worth and human character. If we are able, or have the desire, to form a judgment as to the course of development in the centuries, then we must ask the question: “Has this feeling about the birth of Christ Jesus always maintained this depth?” As we look around the world, my dear friends, we cannot say that the same inwardness of feeling concerning the Christmas Mystery is experienced today as it was experienced even five or six centuries ago in Europe.

Think of the Christmas tree—how beautiful it is, and in what a graceful way it appeals to the heart. But the Christmas tree is not something ancient, it is scarcely two centuries old—it became naturalised comparatively quickly within the countries of Europe, but it is only in recent times that it has adorned the Christmas festival What does it actually represent? I might say it represents the beautiful, lovable, more sympathetic side of that which in another way, a way which is less sympathetic and less fair, appears before the soul in modern human development. We may seek ever so deeply to discover the impulses out of which the Christmas tree has originated in what are really quite modern times, and we shall find mysterious and secret feelings out of which the Christmas tree has come, but these secret feelings all tend in the direction of seeing the Christmas tree as a symbol for the Tree of Paradise. What does this signify? It signifies that the feelings which people once experienced as they directed their gaze to the crib and the mystery of the birth of Christ Jesus at the beginning of our era are no longer there, such feelings have become more and more strange to us. It means that for modern humanity, this being born again within the soul has in a sense been lost and modern humanity desires to look back from the Christmas tree that displays the Cross to the origin of earth humanity which knows nothing as yet of the Christ, to the natural starting point of human existence—from Christ back to Paradise, from the festival of Christmas day on the 25th to the festival of Adam and Eve on the 24th day of December. This has become something beautiful, since humanity's origin in Paradise is also beautiful, but it is a diversion from the real birth-mystery of Christ Jesus. This regard for the Christmas tree has preserved all depth and inwardness of feeling and it comforts those who are men of good will as they look at the Christmas tree out of the inwardness of the human heart; it comforts them concerning that other aspect which in modern times has led men away from the Christ mystery to the primal natural forces of birth in human evolution.

Christ Jesus appeared amongst a people who worshipped Jahve or Jehovah, that Jehovah-God who is connected with all that is natural existence, who lives in thunder and lightning, in the motion of the clouds and stars, in the springs and rushing streams, in the growth of plants, animals and men. Jahve is that God who can never, if man is connected with Him alone, give man his completeness, for He gives man the consciousness of his natural birth, with an intermixture of course of a spiritual element which is not merely natural; but He does not give man the consciousness of his rebirth which he must attain through something which cannot be given him by means of natural physical forces. So we see how modern humanity is led away and diverted from Christ Jesus for Whom there is no distinction of class, nation or race, but for Whom there is only a single humanity. We see how the thoughts and feelings of modern humanity have been led aside to that which has already been overcome by the birth of Jesus Christ; to that which lies at the basis of man's origin through the forces of nature and which is connected with the differentiation of men into classes, nations and races. And if it was the one Jehovah that the Jews worshipped when Christ came, then the modern nations have returned to many Jehovahs. For what is worshipped today—even if it is no longer described by the ancient name—the powers to which men do worship when they divide themselves up into nations and make war on each other as nations—they are Jehovahs. We see the nations fighting each other in bloody wars—each at certain moments calling upon the name of Christ—in reality, however, it is not Christ on Whom the nations call, but only Jehovah, not the one Jehovah but a Jehovah. The people have simply returned to him and have forgotten how great a step forward was taken when the Jehovah principle gave place to the Christ principle.

In a beautiful way does the Christmas tree lead us back to man's origin; in an ugly and hateful way does the national Jehovah principle lead us back. In reality that which is only a Jehovah, through an unconscious lie, is often addressed as Christ, and the name of Christ is thus misused. Terribly is the name of Christ misused at the present time, and we shall not acquire the real depth of feeling that is necessary today in order rightly to experience the Christian mystery again unless we see clearly that the way to this feeling concerning Christ Jesus must be sought. We need a new understanding of what has been traditionally handed down about the birth of Christ Jesus.

It was to two kinds of people, my dear friends, who were nevertheless representatives of our ONE humanity, that Christ Jesus was announced at the Christmas festival. First he was announced to the poor uneducated shepherds of the field who had absorbed nothing of culture but were quite simple men both in intellect and heart And then it was also announced to the wise men from the East, that is, from the land of wisdom. To them it was announced through the highest summit of their wisdom, through their ability to read the stars. Thus Jesus Christ was announced to the simple shepherd hearts and the highest wisdom of the three Magi from the East. And most deeply significant is this double contrasted announcement of Christ Jesus. On the one side to the simple shepherds, and on the other side to the wisest of the world.

And how was Christ Jesus announced to the simple shepherds of the field? With the soul's eye they saw the light of the Angel Their clairvoyance and clairaudience were awakened. They heard the deepest words which for them signified the future meaning of earth life: “The Divine is revealed in the heights and there shall be peace among men on earth who can be of good will.” Out of the depths of the soul arose the capacity by which in the Holy Night the poor simple shepherds without any kind of wisdom experienced feelingly what was being revealed to the world; out of the perfection of that wisdom that could reach even to the Mystery of Golgotha, out of the finest observation of the course of the stars this revelation came to the wise men of the East, to the Magi, the same revelation. In the one case it is read within the human heart, the heart of the poor simple shepherd, and it penetrates to the deepest point within the human heart; it is there that they became clairvoyant and the heart reveals to them by its clairvoyant power the coming of the Saviour of mankind. The others looked up to the breadths of heaven, they knew the mystery of the widths of space and the evolution of time; they had attained a wisdom by which they could experience and solve the mysteries of space and time. The Christmas Mystery was revealed to them. Our attention is directed to the fact that what lives in man's innermost soul and what lives in the widths of space flow from the same source. And both, in the way they had been developed up to the Mystery of Golgotha, were already in a declining condition. The clairvoyance that emerged from the quickened human heart, that of the shepherds, to whom we are told the announcement came, was still strong enough to perceive the voice that proclaimed: “The Divine is revealed in the heights, in heaven, and peace shall be on earth among men of good will.” We might say that the last remnants of this clairvoyance through inner piety were still present in the shepherds whose karma, or destiny, had brought them together to that place where Christ was born. And from that primeval holy wisdom which first flourished in the post-atlantean times among the original Indians, then especially among the Persians, and again was transplanted among the Chaldeans, and of which at all events the last remnants were present among those whom we find as the three Magi from the East, out of this primeval holy wisdom which comprehended the world of space and time—out of this wisdom, through its representatives who had raised themselves to the highest point, was the Christmas Mystery again revealed.

For us, however, in the 5th culture epoch, both ways are in decline. For humanity in general, that which led to clairvoyance in the poor shepherds, as well as that which led the Magi from the East to the penetration of the mysteries of space and time is no longer livingly active. We must find the human being, the man who depends on himself. As men we must pass through the being forsaken by God in order—in this forsakenness and loneliness—to find freedom. But we must find our way back to a union with that which on the one side was the highest wisdom of the Magi of the East, and on the other side was announced to the shepherds through a deepened insight of the heart.

All forces, my dear friends, develop further. What has become of that which the Magi of the East understood through the development of their intellect which was still clairvoyant? What has become of their astrology? Their kind of astronomy? We cannot understand human evolution if we do not look into such things. Today it has become cold and gray mathematics and geometry. Today we see the abstract forms that are taught in schools as geometry and mathematics. This is the last remnant of that which in the living radiance of the cosmic light was mastered by that ancient wisdom which led the three Magi of the East to Christ. The outer wisdom has become the inner theories of space and time. And whilst the Magi of the East, through their understanding of the mysteries of space, were able in vision to reckon “In this night will the Saviour be born,” our astronomy, which is the successor to that astrology, can only reckon the future eclipses of the sun and moon and similar things. And whilst the poor shepherds of the field out of the inwardness of their hearts were raised to that which certainly stood in close relationship to them, namely, the vision of the Christmas Mystery, and the hearing of the heavenly announcement, there has only remained to present-day humanity the perception of external nature. This perception of external nature through the senses represents the last transformation of the simplicity of the shepherds, just as our reckoning of future eclipses of sun and moon is the last successor of the wisdom of the Magi.

The shepherds of the field were equipped with something. They were equipped with depth of heart, with deep feeling whereby, through clairvoyance, they came to the vision of the Christmas Mystery. Our contemporaries are equipped with the telescope and microscope. But no telescope or microscope will lead to the solution of man's deepest riddle as did the hearts of the poor shepherds. No foresight through calculation of sun and moon eclipses and so on will lead man to comprehend the necessary course of the world as did the star-wisdom of the Magi of the East. How all human differences flow together into a single human feeling when we realize that what the shepherds of the field, without wisdom, experienced through the piety of their hearts is the same as what stimulated the Magi of the East as the highest wisdom! In a wonderful way both facts are placed side by side in the Christian tradition.

We have practically lost both ways by which an understanding of the birth of Christ revealed itself to man. We have gone back, from the crib and the Holy Night, to the tree of paradise. We have gone back from a Christ Who belongs to the whole of humanity to the national gods which are just so many Jehovahs and no Christ For just as truly as that which reveals itself in the deepest nature of man is something common to all men, so truly is that which is revealed through all the widths of space and the mysteries of time, something common to all men.

My dear friends, there is something in the depths of man's heart that speaks of nothing else than of what is purely human and dissolves all differences. And it is just within these depths that we find the Christ And there is a wisdom which extends far beyond all that can be discovered concerning single spheres of world existence, a wisdom that is able to grasp the world in its unity, even in space and time. And this again is the star-wisdom that leads to Christ We need to have again in a new form that which led on the one hand the shepherds of the field, and on the other hand the Magi of the East to find the way to Christ In other words we need to deepen our external perception of nature through what the heart can develop as spiritual perception of nature. We must learn once again out of the piety of the human heart to approach all that to which in modern times the microscope, telescope, roentgen-rays apparatus and such instruments are applied. Then will the growing plant, the rushing stream, the murmuring spring, the lightning and thunder from the clouds, not merely speak to us in an indifferent way. There will speak to us from the flowers of the field, from the lightning and thunder of the clouds, from the shining stars and the radiant sun, there will, as it were, stream into our eyes and into our hearts, as the result of all our observation of nature, words that proclaim nothing else than this: “The divine is revealed in the heights of heaven, and peace shall be among men upon earth who are of good will.” The time must come when our observation of nature sets itself free from the dry, prosaic, non-human method pursued in the laboratories and clinics of today. The time must come when our observation of nature must be irradiated by such life so that the life which can no longer exist in the way it did for the shepherds of Bethlehem will nevertheless be able to speak to us through the voices of the plants and animals, from stars and springs and rivers. For the whole of nature utters what was uttered by the Angel: “The Divine is revealed in the heavenly heights and there can be peace among men on Earth who desire to be of good will”

What the Magi possessed through an outer observation of the stars we need to obtain by an awakening of our inner life. Just as we must, once more, listen outwards into nature and hear the Angels singing as it were from external nature, so must we be able through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to bring forth an astronomy, a solution of the world riddle, out of the inner nature of man. It must be a spirituality, a Spiritual Science created out of the inner being of man. We must found that which is really man's true nature. And the real nature of man must speak to us of the world's ‘becoming’ through the mysteries of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. We must feel the arising of a whole Cosmos within us. All that man can experience as insight into the deepest mysteries of the world has been reversed since the Mystery of Golgotha.

There is an ancient way of presenting the spheres of heaven, which was already known to the Persian Magi. They looked up towards the heavens and saw with their physical eyes the constellation of the Zodiac which is called the Virgin (Virgo), and by means of spiritual vision they projected into the constellation of the Virgin that which physically is only perceptible in the constellation of the Twins (Gemini). This wisdom has been preserved. It is by this wisdom that man can perceive, can experience, the consonance between the constellation of the Virgin and the constellation standing at right angles to it, in quadrature, the Twins. This was represented in such a way that in place of the constellation of Virgo, the Virgin was depicted not only with the ear of corn, but also with the child. But this child in fact represents the Twins. It is the representative of the two Jesus children. This was an astrological conception especially at the time of the ancient Persians.

Then came a different time, the time of the Egypto-Chaldean development. Then it was the constellation of the Lion that was looked up to in the same way that the Persians regarded the constellation of the Virgin. But now, in quadrature to the Lion stood the Bull, and there arose the Mithras religion, the worship of the Bull, because into the constellation of the Lion was projected that of the Bull.

Then came the time when Cancer, the Crab, played the same role in the Greco-Latin period as the Virgin among the Persians, and the constellation of the Ram was seen in quadrature standing, as it were, within the constellation of the Crab. After that came the reversal After that matters took a different path. Up to the Greco-Latin time, until the Mystery of Golgotha, astronomy was something that could be attained as external science, and human understanding was of such a nature that in gazing out into space and the mysteries of the star-world, the secrets of space and time were discovered; also in experiencing the human inner life through the piety of the heart, a vision of the inner mysteries was possible. In the Greco-Latin time these relations were reversed. That which formerly could be experienced inwardly had ever more and more to be experienced by beholding outer nature.

My dear friends, with respect to nature's revelation we must be as pious as the shepherds were in their hearts. Just as they came to spiritual vision in their inner world, we must come to a spiritual vision in nature. And on the other side we must find the way of Cancer the Crab; we must come to an astronomy inwardly, so that by the inner powers of vision we may awaken the course of the world that leads through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods. An astronomy from within where formerly there was an external astronomy—a piety in the observation of nature where formerly there was the kind of piety possessed by the shepherds of the field. If we can deepen what today is so unspiritual in our observation of nature, if on the other side we can render creative what today is so prosaically experienced in mere mathematical and geometrical pictures, if we can raise mathematics again through inner experience to that glory which the ancient astronomy had, if we can deepen our observation of nature to that heart's depth and piety which the shepherds of the field had, if we can inwardly experience what the Magi experienced from the stars, if in directing our gaze to outer nature we can be as pious as were the shepherds of the field, then, through piety in outer observation of nature and through a loving pursuit of world-events with our hearts, we shall again find the way to the Christmas Mystery just as the shepherds of the field through inner piety and the Magi from the East through an outer wisdom found their way to the crib.

The way must be found again to the Christmas Mystery. We must become as pious with regard to nature as the shepherds were in their hearts; we must in our inward vision become as wise as were the Magi in their observation of planets and stars in space. We must develop inwardly what the Magi developed outwardly. We must in our intercourse with the outer world develop what the simple shepherds of the field developed in their hearts; then we shall find the way, the right way, to a deepened experience of Christ, to a loving comprehension of Christ; and then we shall find the way to the Christmas Mystery. Then we shall be able with right thoughts and with right feelings to place the crib beside the original tree of paradise which does not only speak to us of how man enters the world through nature-forces but of how he can only become conscious of his full humanity by re-birth.

Anyone speaking of the Christmas Mystery today must make a demand upon mankind that reaches into the future. We live in serious times and we must see clearly that we need again to become man in the true sense. We have not yet attained to the inwardness of the Magi wisdom nor to the piety which from the shepherds flowed into the outer world. The social question that confronts humanity is terribly urgent. Fearful things have come about in recent years and the social problem becomes ever more and more threatening; only those who are asleep in their souls can overlook this fact Europe as regards its culture, threatens to become a heap of ruins. Nothing can raise it from its chaotic condition unless men find it possible once again to develop a true, a real humanity in their common life. They will not be able to do this unless their feeling is deepened and made inward by an observation of nature in which they are as pious as the shepherds of the field when through their inner forces they received the Angel's revelation of God above and peace on earth beneath. Only with these forces can the social life be mastered. This will happen when the secrets of space and time are so understood inwardly that men comprehend the nature of the world-spirit as a unity just as the one sun is beheld by the Chinese and by the Americans and by the Middle European. It would be absurd if the Chinese demanded a sun for themselves, the Russians another sun, the Middle European another, the French another, and the English yet another. Just as the sun is a unity, so is the Sun-Being that bears humanity a unity. If we look out into the widths of space we find there the challenge to a unification of humanity. The spiritual that lies open to our view without does not speak of the differentiation of humanity or of discord; neither does what speaks in the inmost depths of our being. To the shepherds of the field, the voice they were able to hear by the power of their hearts announced that the Godhead was revealed in the widths of the world spaces and that by receiving the divine within one's own soul peace can be among men of good will. This must again be proclaimed to modern humanity from the whole circumference of nature. To the Magi from the East, the secrets of the stars told that here on earth Christ Jesus is born. This must be proclaimed to modern humanity from out of what can begin to be revealed in the deep places of the human heart.

My dear friends, we need a new path. Once again the voice sounds to us: “Change your hearts and minds, look in a new way on the course of the world.” When we look rightly on the course of the world and consider the way of the humanity to which we ourselves belong, then we discover the path to that Mystery which could be revealed to the shepherds as well as to the cultured sages, and that will be revealed to our hearts and in our external beholding of the world. When we have sufficiently deepened our inner and outer perception of the world, when we are able to do this and find the inner Magi-wisdom that leads us just as the outer Magi-wisdom led the sages of the East, as well as the outer wisdom that leads us to that piety by which the shepherds of the field were also led, then we shall be able again with the right inner feeling to perceive what lies in this mystery, namely, that for all without distinction—as formerly He appeared among men, put away as it were from humanity, turned out in the solitude—for all, there is born that which thereafter became the Christ.

We must find again the Jesus Christmas Mystery, and we must find it by cultivating all that within ourselves of which we have spoken today. We must find the Christmas light within ourselves as the shepherds did the Angel's light in the field; and as the Magi of the East, so must we find the star through the power of that which is true Spiritual Science. Then will be opened for us the only way to the content of the Christmas Mystery. We shall recognise it again and it will remind us of humanity's rebirth.

Yes, my dear friends, it is for this we must work—that the Christmas Mystery be born again among men. Then we shall rightly understand the mystery of the rebirth of the human being. This is what has been communicated to us in a singular manner. For in a gospel that is not recognised by the Church it is related that the Jesus-child spoke to His Mother immediately after His birth in definite words. We certainly approach the Child in the crib today in the true way when we rightly hear the words which He wishes to speak to us: “Awaken the Christmas light within you, and the Christmas light will then also appear to you and to your fellow-men with you in the world outside.”

If we look into the deepest inner secrets of man, there too we find the same demand.

We have been concerned with the possible varieties of world-outlooks, of world-outlook-moods and so on, which can find place in the human soul, and, since I can take only single points of view from this wide field, I should like to illustrate one of these points of view by means of a special example.

Let us suppose that a person so lives in the world that among his natural predispositions we find the special forces through which he is influenced by the world-outlook of Idealism. We will say that he makes this world-outlook into a dominating factor in his inner life, so that the soul-mood which I designated yesterday as Mysticism, and called the Venus mood, flows towards Idealism and is nourished by its powers. Hence, if one speaks in the symbols of astrology, one would say that the spiritual constellation of such a man, according to his natural predispositions, is that Venus stands in Aries.

I remark expressly, so that no misunderstanding may arise, that these constellations are of much greater importance in the life of the person than the constellations of the external horoscope, and do not necessarily coincide with the “nativity”—the external horoscope. For the enhanced influence which is exerted on the soul by this standing of Mysticism in the sign of Idealism waits for the propitious moment when it can lay hold of the soul most fruitfully. Such influences need not assert themselves just at the time of birth; they can do so before birth, or after it. In short, they await the point of time when these predispositions can best be built into the human organism, according to its inner configuration.

Hence the ordinary astrological “nativity” does not come into account here. But one can say: A certain soul is by nature such that, spiritually speaking, Venus stands in Aries—Mysticism in the sign of Idealism. Now the forces which arise in this way do not remain constant throughout life. They change—that is, the person comes under other influences, under other spiritual signs and also under other moods of soul. Let us suppose that a man so changes that in the course of his life he comes into the soul-mood of Empiricism; that Mysticism has moved on, as it were, into Empiricism, and Empiricism stands in the sign of Rationalism. You see, as I drew it in the preceding lecture, going from inwards outwards in the symbolic picture, that Empiricism stands in relation to Mysticism as does the Sun to Venus. With regard to its mood the soul has progressed to Empiricism and has at the same time placed itself in the sign of Rationalism. The result is that such a soul changes its world-picture. What the soul formerly produced, perhaps as a specially strong personality in the time when in its case Mysticism stood in the sign of Idealism, this will pass over into another nuance of world-outlook. What the soul asserts and says will be different when in this way its world-outlook-mood has passed over from Mysticism to Empiricism, and the latter has placed itself in the sign of Rationalism. However, from what I have now explained, you can gather that human souls can have an inclination to change the sign and mood of their world-outlook. (See Diagram 11.) For these souls the tendency to change is already given. Let us suppose that such a soul wants to carry this tendency further in life. It wants to swing forward from Empiricism to the next soul-mood, i.e. to Voluntarism; and if it wants to swing forward also in the zodiacal signs, then it will come into Mathematism. It would then pass over to a world-outlook which in this symbolical picture leads away at an angle of 60 degrees from the first line, where Mysticism stood in the sign of Idealism; and such a soul, in the course of the same incarnation, would bring to expression a mathematical world-structure permeated by and based upon the will.

And now I ask you to notice how I work out this matter. It will be seen that two such constellations as are here present in the soul disturb each other in the course of time; they influence each other unfavourably when they are at an angle of 60 degrees with regard to each other. In physical astrology this a favourable constellation; in spiritual astrology this so-called sextile aspect is unfavourable. We can see this because this last position—Voluntarism in Mathematism—comes up against a severe hindrance in the soul. The soul is not able to develop, because it cannot find anything to lay hold of, since the person in question has no natural gift for Mathematism.

This is how the unfavourable character of the sextile aspect expresses itself. Hence this configuration, Voluntarism in the sign of Mathematism, cannot establish itself. The consequence is that the soul does not try to move forward in this way. But because it cannot take the path to Voluntarism in Mathematism, it turns away from the configuration it now has—Empiricism in Rationalism—and seeks an outlet by placing itself in opposition to the direction it cannot take. Such a soul, accordingly, would not swing forward to Voluntarism in the direction of Mathematism, but would place itself with Voluntarism in opposition to its Empiricism. The result is that Voluntarism would stand in opposition to Rationalism in the sign of Dynamism. And in the course of its life, such a soul would have as its possible configuration one in which it would defend a world-outlook based on a special pressing in of forces, of Dynamism permeated by will—a will that wants to effect its purpose by force. In spiritual astrology things are again different from what they are in physical astrology; in physical astrology “opposition” has a quite different significance. Here, “opposition” is brought about by the soul being unable to proceed further along an unfavourable path; it veers round into the opposing configuration.

I have shown you here what the soul of Nietzsche went through in the course of his life. If you try to understand the course he takes in his early works, you will find that the placing of Mysticism makes it comprehensible. From this period we have “The Birth of Tragedy”; “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer”; “The Use and Abuse of History”; “Schopenhauer as Educator”; “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”. Then the soul of Nietzsche moves on; a second epoch begins. Here we find “Human, all too Human”; “The Dawn of Day”; “The Joyful Wisdom”—all proceeding from the oppositional configuration. These are writings based on the will to power, on the will saturated with force, with power.

Thus you see how an inner conformity to law exists between the spiritual cosmos and the way in which man stands within it. If we employ the symbols of astrology, but taking them to express something different, we can say: In the case of Nietzsche, up to a certain time in his life Venus stood in Aries, but when for his soul this configuration passed over into “Sun in the sign of Taurus”, he could get no further. He could not go with Mars into the sign of Gemini, but went in the oppositional position; thus he went with Mars into the sign of Scorpio. His last phase was characterized by his standing with Mars in Scorpio. But one can sustain this configuration only if one penetrates into the lower position (below the line Idealism—Realism in Diagram 11) where one plunges into a spiritual world-outlook, Occultism or something similar; otherwise these configurations must work back unfavourably upon the person himself. Hence the tragic fate of Nietzsche. One can go through with the upper configurations if one is able, owing to external circumstances, to place oneself in the world in a corresponding way. The configurations below the line from Idealism to Realism can be sustained only if one dives down into the spiritual world—a thing that Nietzsche could not do. By “placing oneself externally in the world” I mean placing by means of education, by means of external conditions; they come into account for all that lies above the line running from Idealism to Realism. Meditative life, a life devoted to the study and understanding of Spiritual Science, comes into account for all that lies below the line.

In order to grasp the importance of what has been sketched out in these lectures, we must know the following things. We must make it clear to ourselves what thinking really is; how it enters into human experience.

The uncompromising materialist of our day finds it suits his purpose to say that the brain forms the thought—more exactly, that the central nervous system forms the thought. For anyone who sees through things, this is about as true as to say when one looks into a mirror that the mirror has “made” the face. In fact, the face is outside the mirror; the mirror only reflects the face, throws it back. The experience a man has of his thoughts is quite similar. (We will leave aside for the moment other aspects of the soul.) The experience of real, active thinking no more arises from the brain than the image of a face is created by the mirror. The brain, in fact, works only as a reflecting apparatus, whereby it throws back the soul-activity and this becomes visible to itself. The brain has as little to do with what a man perceives as thoughts as a mirror has to do with your face when you see it in a glass. But there is something more than that. When someone thinks, he really perceives only the last phases of his thinking-activity, of his thinking experience. And now, in order to make this clear, I want to take up once more the comparison with the mirror.

Imagine that you are standing there and want to see your face in a mirror. If you have no mirror, then you cannot see your face. You may look as long as you like, but you will not see your face. If you want to see it, you must work up some material so that is reflects your face. That is, you must first prepare the material so that it can produce the reflection. Then, when you gaze at the surface, you see your face. The soul has to do the same with the brain. The actual perceiving of a thought is preceded by a thinking activity that works upon the brain. For example, if you want to perceive the thought “lion”, your thinking activity first sets in motion certain parts of the brain, deep within it, so that they become the “mirror” for the perception of the thought “lion”. And the agent who thus makes the brain into a mirror is you yourself. What you finally perceive as thoughts are the reflections, the mirror-pictures; what you first have to prepare so that the right reflection may appear is some part or other of the brain. You, with your soul-activity, are the very thing that gives the brain the form and capacity for reflecting your thinking as thoughts. If you want to go back to the activity on which the thought is based, then it is the activity which, from out of the soul, takes hold of the brain and gets to work there. And when from out of your soul you set up a certain activity in your brain, this brings about a reflection such that you perceive the thought “lion”. You see, a soul-spiritual element has to be there first. Then, through its activity, the brain is made into a mirror-like apparatus for reflecting the thought. That is the real process, but such a muddled idea of it prevails that many people nowadays cannot grasp it at all.

A person who makes a little progress in occult perception can separate the two phases of his soul-activity. He can trace how it is that when he wants to think something or other, he has first not simply to grasp the thought, but to prepare his brain for it. If he has prepared it so that it reflects, then he has the thought. When one wants to investigate occultly, so that one can picture things, one always has, first, the task of carrying through the activity which prepares the picturing. It is this that is so important for us to notice. For it is only when we keep these things well in mind that we have before us the real activity of human thinking. Now for the first time we know how human thinking-activity is carried out. First, this activity lays hold of the brain, in connection somewhere with the central nervous system. It sets in motion—let us say if we wish—the atomistic portions in some way, brings them into some sort of movement; by this means they become a mirror-apparatus; the thought is reflected, and the soul becomes conscious of the thought. Thus we have to distinguish two phases: first the work on the brain from out of the psychic-spiritual in preparation for the external physical experience; then the perception takes place, after the work on the brain has prepared the ground for this act of perceiving by the soul. In the ordinary way this preparatory work on the brain remains entirely unconscious. But an occult researcher must start by actually experiencing it. He has to go through the experience of how the soul-activity is poured in, and the brain made ready to reflect the thought as an image.

What I have now explained happens continually to a person between waking up and going to sleep. The thinking activity is always working on the brain, and so, throughout the waking state, it makes the brain into a mirror-apparatus for the thoughts. But it is not sufficient that the only thinking-activity worked up in us should be that worked up by ourselves. For one might say it is a narrowly limited activity that is here worked up in this way by means of the psychic-spiritual. When we wake up in the morning and are awake through the day, and in the evening fall asleep again, then the psychic-spiritual activity which belongs to the thinking is working all day long upon the brain, and thereby the brain becomes a reflecting-apparatus. But the brain must first be there; then, the soul-spiritual activity can make little furrows in the brain, or, one might say, its memoranda and engravings. The main substance and form of the brain must first be there. But that is not enough for our human life.

Our brain could not be worked upon by our daily life if our whole organism were not so prepared that it provides a basis for this daily work. And this work of preparation comes from the cosmos. Thus as we work daily at the “engraving” of the brain, which makes it into a mirror-apparatus for our daily thought, so, in so far as we cannot ourselves do this engraving, this giving form, form has to be given to us from the cosmos. As our little thoughts work and make their little engravings, so must our whole organism be built up from out of the cosmos, according to the same pattern of thought-activity. For example, that which appears to us finally in the sign of Idealism is present in the spiritual cosmos as the activity producing Idealism, and it can so work upon a man that it prepares his whole organism so that he inclines to Idealism. In like manner are the other varieties of moods and signs worked in upon men from out of the spiritual cosmos.

Man is built up according to the thoughts of the cosmos. The cosmos is the “great thinker” which down to our last finger-nail engraves our form in us, just as our little thought-work makes its little imprints on our brain every day. As our brain—I am referring only to the small portions where imprints can be made—stands under the influence of the work of thinking, so does the whole man stand under the influence of cosmic thinking.

Take the example I gave you, the example of Nietzsche—what does it mean? It means that through an earlier incarnation Nietzsche was so prepared in his karma that at a certain point of time, by virtue of his earlier incarnation, the forces of Idealism and of Mysticism (working together because Mysticism stood in the sign of Idealism) so worked upon his whole bodily constitution that he was in the first place capable of becoming a mystical Idealist. Then his constellation altered in the way indicated.

We are thought out from the cosmos—the cosmos thinks us. And just as we, in our little daily thought-work, make little engravings in our brain, and then the ideas “lion”, “dog”, “table”, “rose”, “book”, “on”, “right”, “left”, come into our consciousness as reflections of that which we have prepared in our brain—i.e. just as we, through the working-up of the brain, finally perceive, lion, dog, table, rose, book, on, off, right, write, read—the Beings of the cosmic Hierarchies work in such a way that they carry out the great thought-activity which engraves upon the world things far more significant than our daily thought-activity can accomplish. So it comes to pass that not only the tiny little markings arise and are then reflected singly as our thoughts, but that we ourselves, in our whole being, appear again to the Beings of the higher Hierarchies as their thoughts. As our little brain-processes mirror our little thoughts, so do we mirror the thoughts of the cosmos which are engraved upon the world. When the Hierarchies of the cosmos “think”, they “think”, for example, men. As our little thoughts emerge from our little brain-processes, so do the thoughts of the Hierarchies arise from their work, to which we ourselves belong. As parts of our brain are for us the reflecting-apparatus which we first work up for our thoughts, so are we, we little beings, the substance which the Hierarchies of the cosmos prepare for their thoughts. Thus we might say, in a certain sense, that we can feel ourselves with regard to the cosmos as a little portion of our brain might feel with regard to ourselves. But as little as we, in our soul-spiritual nature, are our brains, so little are the Beings of the Hierarchies “we”. Hence we have an independent status in relation to the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And we can say that while in a certain manner we serve them so that they may be able to think through us, yet at the same time we are independent beings with identities of our own, as indeed, in a certain way, the particles of our brain have their own life.

Thus we find the connection between human and cosmic thoughts. Human thought is the regent of the brain; cosmic thought is such a regent that we belong with our whole being to that which it has to accomplish. Only, because in consequence of our karma it cannot direct its thoughts on to us all equally, we have to be constituted in accordance with its logic. Thus we men have a logic according to which we think, and so have the Spiritual Hierarchies of the cosmos their logic. And their logic was indicated in the diagram I drew for you (see lecture three, Diagram 11). As when we think, for example, “The lion is a mammal”, we bring two concepts together to make a statement, so the Spiritual Hierarchies of the cosmos think two things together, Mysticism and Idealism, and we then say: “Mysticism appears in Idealism.” Imagine this first as the preparatory activity of the cosmos. Then resounds the Creative Fiat, the Creative Word. For the Beings of the Spiritual Hierarchies the preparatory act consists in the choice of a human being whose karma is such that he can develop a natural bent for becoming a mystical Idealist. Into the Hierarchies of the cosmos there is rayed back something that we should call a “thought”, whereas for them it is the expression of a man who is a mystical Idealist. He is their “thought”, after they have prepared for themselves the cosmic decision—”Let Mysticism appear in Idealism.”

We have now, in a certain sense, depicted the inner aspect of the Cosmic Word, of Cosmic Thought. What we drew in a diagram as “cosmic logic” represents how the Spiritual Hierarchies of the cosmos think. For example: “Let Empiricism appear in the sign of Rationalism!” and so on. Let us try to realize what can be thought in the cosmos in this way. It can be thought: “Let Mysticism appear in the sign of Idealism! Let it change! Let it become Empiricism in the sign of Rationalism!” Opposition! The next move on would represent a false cosmic decision. After verification, the thought is changed round. The third standpoint must appear: “Voluntarism in the sign of Dynamism.” These three decisions, through being spoken over a period in the cosmic worlds, give the “man Nietzsche”. And he rays back as the thought of the cosmos.

Thus does the collectivity of the Hierarchies speak in the cosmos! And our human thinking-activity is a copy, a tiny copy, of it.

Worlds are related to the Spirit or to the Spirits of the cosmos as our brain is to our soul. Thus we may have a glimpse into something which we ought certainly to look upon only with a certain reverence, with a holy awe. For in contemplating it we stand before the mysteries of human individuality. We learn to understand—if I may express myself figuratively—that the eyes of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies roam over the single individualities among men, and that individuals are to them what the individual letters of a book are to us when we are reading. This we may look upon only with holy awe: we are overhearing the thought-activity of the cosmos.

In our day the veil over such a mystery as this must be lifted to a certain degree; for the laws which have here been shown as the laws of the thinking of the cosmos are active in man. And the knowledge of them can help us to understand life, and then to understand ourselves; so that even when, for one reason or another, we have to be placed one-sidedly in life, we know that we belong to a great whole, for we are links in the thought-logic of the cosmos. And in learning to grasp these relations, Spiritual Science acts as our guide. It teaches us to understand our one-sided predispositions as much as it enlarges our all-round knowledge. Thus we can find the frame of mind which is necessary precisely in our time. For today, when in many leading minds there is no trace of insight into the relationships we have touched on here, we experience the effects of these relations or connections but do not know how to live under them. And thus they create conditions which call for adjustment.

Let us take the example of Wundt, whom I mentioned yesterday. His one-sidedness is brought about through a quite definite constellation. Let us suppose that he could ever struggle on to an understanding of Spiritual Science, then he would look upon his one-sidedness in such a way that he would say to himself: “Now because I stand here with my Empiricism, etc., I am in a position to do good work in certain fields. I will remain in these, and will make up for it in other ways through Spiritual Science.” To such a decision as this he would come. But he refuses to know anything about Spiritual Science. What does he do in consequence? Whereas he could carry out something good and productive in the constellation which is his, he turns what lies within his range into a complete philosophy. Otherwise he could probably do something greater, much greater; indeed he would be most useful if he would leave philosophizing alone and go in for experimental psychology—a thing he understands—and if he would inquire into the nature of mathematical conclusions—which he also understands—instead of making a concoction of all kinds of philosophy; for then he would be on the right lines.

But this must be said of many. Therefore Spiritual Science, while it must evoke the feeling by which we recognize how there should be peace between world-outlooks, must also point sharply to cases where persons go beyond the necessary limits set for them by their constellations. These persons do great harm by hypnotizing the world with opinions that get by without any attention being paid to the constellation behind them. All forms of one-sidedness that try to claim universal validity must be strongly repulsed. The world does not admit of being explained by a person who has special predilections for this or that. And when he wants to explain it on his own, and so to found a philosophy, then this philosophy works harmfully, and Spiritual Science has the task of rejecting the arrogance of this pretentious claim to universality. In our time, the less feeling there is for Spiritual Science, the more strongly will this one-sidedness appear. Hence we see that knowledge of the nature of human and cosmic thought can lead us to understand rightly the significance and the task of Spiritual Science, and to see how it can bring into a right relationship other so-called spiritual streams, especially philosophic currents, in our time. It must be wished that knowledge of the kind that we have tried to bring together for ourselves in these four lectures should inscribe itself deeply into the hearts and souls of our friends, so that the course of the anthroposophical spiritual stream through the world would take a quite definite and right direction. It would thereby be recognized more and more how a man is formed through that which lives in him as cosmic thought.

With the aid of such an explanation as this we see more depth that we could otherwise do in a thought of Fichte's, where he says: “What kind of a philosophy a man has depends on the kind of man he is.” Yes, indeed, the kind of philosophy a man has does verily depend on the kind of man he is! The fact that Fichte (in the first period of the incarnation he was then living through as Fichte) could say, as the basic nerve of his philosophy of life: “Our world is the sensualised material of our duty” [see footnote 2], shows even as does the previously quoted saying (which he gave out later) how his soul changed its constellation in the spiritual cosmos. That is, it shows how richly this soul was endowed, so that the spiritual Hierarchies could remould it so that through it they could think various things for themselves. Something similar could be said of Nietzsche, for example.

Many different ways of viewing the world emerge if one keeps before one's soul such things as have been described in these four lectures. The best we can gain from these descriptions is that with their aid we should come to look ever more and more deeply, with perceptive feeling, into the spiritual features of the world.

If only one thing were to be achieved by means of such a lecture-course as this, it would be that as many as possible of you should say to yourselves: “Yes, if anyone wants to enter into the spiritual world—i.e. into the world of truth, and not into the world of error—he must really set out upon the path! For much, much must be taken into consideration along this path in order to come to the sources of truth. And if at the beginning it might seem to me as if a contradiction appears here or there, if in one place or another I could not understand something, I will still say to myself that the world is not there in order to be grasped by every condition of human understanding, and that I would rather be a seeker than a man whose sole attitude towards the world is such that he only inquires ‘What can I understand?’ ‘What can I not understand?’”

If one becomes a seeker, if one earnestly sets to work along the path of the seeker, then one learns to know that one must bring together impulses from the most varied sides in order to gain an understanding of the world. And then one unlearns every kind of attitude towards the world that asks “Do I understand that?” “Do I not understand that?”, and instead one seeks and seeks and goes on seeking. The worst enemies of truth are cosmic conceptions that are exclusive and strive after finality; the conceptions of those who want to frame a couple of thoughts and suppose that with them they can dare to build up a world-edifice.

The world is boundless, both qualitatively and quantitatively. And it will be a blessing when there are individual souls who wish for clear vision with regard to that which is appearing in our day with such terrible overweening narrow-mindedness, and wants to be “universal”. I might say: “With bleeding heart I declare that the greatest hindrance to knowledge of how a preparatory work of thought-activity is carried out in the brain, how the brain is thereby made into a mirror and the life of the soul reflected from it—a fact which could throw endless light on much other physiological knowledge—the greatest hindrance to the knowledge of this fact is the crazy modern physiology which speaks of two kinds of nerves, the ‘motor’ and the ‘sensory’ nerves.” (I have touched on this in many lectures already.) In order to produce this theory, which crops up everywhere in physiology, it is a fact that physiology had first to lose all understanding. Hence it is a theory now recognized all over the earth, and it acts as a hindrance to all true knowledge of the nature of thought and the nature of the soul. Never will it be possible to understand human thought if physiology sets up such an obstacle to true knowledge. But things have gone so far that an indefensible physiology forms the introduction to every textbook of psychology and teaching about the mind, and makes it dependent on this falsity. Therewith the door is bolted also against knowledge of cosmic thought.

One first learns to recognize what thought is in the cosmos when one comes to feel what human thinking is: that in its true nature it has nothing to do with the brain except that it is the master of the brain. But when one has thus recognized thought in its essence, when one has come to know oneself in thinking, then one feels oneself inwardly within the cosmic, and our knowledge of the true nature of cosmic thought. When we learn to know rightly what our thinking is, then we learn also to know how we are “thought” by the Powers of the cosmos. Indeed we may gain a glimpse into the logic of the Hierarchies. The single components of the decisions of the Hierarchies, the concepts of the Hierarchies, I have written down for you. In the twelve spiritual signs of the Zodiac, the seven world-outlook-moods, and so on, lie the concepts of the Hierarchies; and human beings are constituted in accordance with the verdicts of the cosmos which result from these concepts. Thus we feel ourselves within the logic of the cosmos—that is (if we really grasp it) within the logic of the Hierarchies of the cosmos. We feel ourselves as souls embedded in cosmic thought, just as we feel our thoughts, the little thoughts we think, embedded in our soul-life.

Meditate sometimes on the idea: “I think my thoughts,” and “I am a thought which is thought by the Hierarchies of the cosmos.” My eternal part consists in this—that the thought of the Hierarchies is eternal. And when I have once been thought out by one category of the Hierarchies, then I am passed on—as a human thought is passed on from teacher to pupil—from one category to another, so that this in turn may think me in my true, eternal nature. Thus I feel myself within the thought-world of the cosmos.

Today we shall consider the differentiations in mankind from another viewpoint, namely that of history. With the express aim of promoting an understanding for the present time we shall look at human evolution starting at a point immediately following the catastrophe of Atlantis. If human evolution can be considered to encompass any evolution of civilization, then we shall find the first decisive period of development to be the culture epoch of ancient India. In my book Occult Science¹ you will find this culture of ancient India described from a particular viewpoint. Though the Vedas and Indian philosophy are rightly admired, they are actually only echoes of that ancient culture, of which there exist no written records. In the words of today we have to describe the culture of ancient India as a religious culture in the highest sense. To understand this properly we shall have to discuss it more thoroughly.

The religious element of ancient Indian culture included what we today would call science and art. The total spiritual life of the whole human being was encompassed by this culture for which the most pertinent description is that it was a religious culture. This religious culture generates the feeling in human beings that in the depths of their being they are linked with a divine, spiritual world. This feeling was developed so intensely that the whole of life was illumined by it. Their clearer states of consciousness, which were preparations for today's waking state, and also their dream consciousness, which became lost in our chaotic dream and sleep life as evolution progressed, were both states of consciousness filled with an instinctive awareness of the links between the human realm and the divine, spiritual realm.

But our idea of religion today is of something rather general. The concept of religion makes us think too strongly of something general, something abstract and rather detached from everyday life. For the people about whom we are speaking, however, religion and the content they associated with it gave them a knowledge expressed in pictures, a knowledge of the being of man and an extensive picture knowledge of the structure of the universe.

We have to imagine, though, that what lived in these people's view of the world, by way of a picture knowledge of the structure of the universe, in no way resembled our modern knowledge of astronomy or astrophysics. Our astronomy and astrophysics show us the mechanics of the universe. The ancient Indian people had a universe of picture images populated with divine, spiritual beings. There was as yet no question, in the present sense, of any external, merely mechanical rules governing the relationships between heavenly bodies or their relative movements. When those people looked up to the starry heavens they saw in the external constellations and movements of the stars only something perfectly familiar to them in their picture consciousness. It was something which may be described as follows.

Suppose we were to see a vivid, lively scene with bustling crowds and people going about all kinds of business, perhaps a public festival with much going on. Then we go home, and next morning the newspaper carries a report about the festival we ourselves attended. Our eyes fall on the dead letters of the printed page. We know what they mean and when we read the words they give us a weak, pale idea of all the lively bustle we experienced the day before. This can be compared with what the ancient Indian people saw in their instinctive vision and in relation to this what they saw in the constellations and movements of the stars. The constellations and movements of the stars were no more than written characters, indeed pale written characters. If they had copied down these characters on paper, they would have felt them to be no more than a written description of reality.

What these people saw behind the written characters was something which they not only came to know with their understanding but also to love with their feelings. They were unable merely to take into their ideas all that they grasped in pictures about the universe; they also developed lively feelings for these things. At the same time they developed a permanent feeling that whatever they did, even the most complicated actions, was an expression of the cosmos filled with divine spiritual weaving. They felt their limbs to be filled with this divine, spiritual cosmic weaving. They felt their understanding to be filled with this divine spiritual weaving, and likewise their courage and their will. Thus, speaking of their own deeds, they were able to say: Divine, spiritual beings are doing this. And since in those ancient times people knew very well that Lucifer and Ahriman are also to be found among those divine, spiritual beings, so were they aware that because divine, spiritual beings worked in them, they were therefore capable of committing evil as well as good deeds.

With this description I want to call up in you an idea of what this religion was like. It filled the whole human being, it brought the whole human being into a relationship with the abundance of the cosmos. It was cosmic wisdom and at the same time it was a wisdom which revealed man. But then progress in human evolution first caused the most intense religious feelings to pale. Of course, religion remained, in all later ages, but the intensity of religious life as it was in this first Indian age paled. First of all what paled was the feeling of standing within the realm of divine, spiritual beings with one's deeds and will impulses. In the ancient Persian age, the second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, people still had this feeling to some extent, but it had paled. In the first post-Atlantean epoch this feeling was a matter of course. In the second cultural blossoming, the ancient Persian time, the profoundest, most intense religious feelings paled, so human beings had to start developing something out of themselves in order to maintain their link with the cosmic, divine spiritual realm in a more active manner than had at first been the case. So we might say: The first post-Atlantean period was the most intensely religious of all. And in the second period religion faded somewhat, but human beings had to develop something by inner activity , something which would unite them once more with the cosmic beings of spirit and soul.

Of all the words we know, there is one we could use to describe this, although it was coined in a later age. It comes from an age which still possessed an awareness of what had once been a part of human evolution in ancient times. When an ancient Indian looked up to the heavens, he sensed the presence of individual beings everywhere, one divine spiritual being next to another—a whole population of divine spiritual beings. But this faded, so that what had been individualized, what had been individual, divine, spiritual beings faded into a general, homogeneous spiritual cosmos. Think of the following picture: Imagine a swarm of birds close by. You see each individual bird, but as the swarm flies further and further away it becomes a black blur, a homogeneous shape. In the same way the divine spiritual cosmos became a blurred image when human beings moved spiritually away from it.

The ancient Greeks still had an inkling of the fact that once, in the distant past, something like this had been at the foundation of what human beings saw in the spiritual world. Therefore they took into their language the word ‘sophia’. A divine, spiritual cosmos had once, as a matter of course, poured itself into human beings and had taken human beings into itself. But now man had to approach what he saw from a spiritual distance—a homogeneous cosmos—by his own inner activity. This the Greeks, who still had a feeling for these things, called by the expression: ‘I love’; that is: ‘philo’. So we can say that in the second post-Atlantean period, that of ancient Persia, the initiates had a twofold religion where earlier on religion had been onefold. Now they had philosophy and religion. Philosophy had been achieved. Religion had come down from the more ancient past, but it had paled.

Passing now to the third post-Atlantean period, we reach a further paling of religion. But we also come to a paling of philosophy. The actual, concrete process that took place must be imagined as follows. In ancient Persian times there existed this homogeneous shape made up of cosmic beings and this was felt to be the light that flooded through the universe, the primeval light, the primeval aura, Ahura Mazda. But now people retreated even further from this vision and began in a certain way to pay more attention to the movements of the stars and of the starry constellations. They now sensed less in regard to the divine, spiritual beings who existed in the background and more in regard to the written characters. From this arose something which we find in two different forms in the Chaldean wisdom and the Egyptian wisdom, something which comprised knowledge about the constellations and the movements of the stars. At the same time, the inner activity of human beings had become even more important. They not only had to unite their love with this divine Sophia who shone through the universe as the primeval light, but they had to unite their own destiny, their own position in the world, with what they saw within the universe in a cosmic script provided by the starry constellations and the starry movements. Their new achievement was thus a Cosmo-Sophia. This cosmosophy still contained an indication of the divine, spiritual beings, but what was seen tended to be merely a cosmic script expressing the deeds of these beings. Beside this there still existed philosophy and religion, which had both faded.

In order to understand this we must realize that what we today call philosophy is naturally only an extremely weak, pale shadow image of what was still felt to be more alive in the Mysteries of the third post-Atlantean period and what in an even paler form the Greeks later called philosophy. In the culture of the third post-Atlantean period we see everywhere expressions of these three aspects of the human spirit: a cosmosophy, a philosophy and a religion.² And we only gain proper pictures of these when we know we have to remind ourselves that right up to this time human beings lived in their soul life more outside the earthly realm than within it. Looking for instance at the Egyptian culture from this point of view—and it was even more pronounced in the Chaldean—we see it rightly only if we remind ourselves that those who had any part in this culture indeed took the most intimate interest in the constellations of the stars as evening approached. For example they awaited certain manifestations from Sirius, they observed the planetary constellations and applied what they saw there to the way the Nile gave them what they needed for their earthly life. But they did not speak in the first instance of the earthly realm. This earthly realm was one field of their work, but when they spoke of the field they were tilling they did so in a way which related it to the extraterrestrial realm. And they named the varying appearances of the patch of earth they inhabited in accordance with whatever the stars revealed as the seasons followed one upon another. They judged the earth in accordance with the heavens. From the soul point of view, daytime brought them darkness. Light came into this darkness when they could interpret what the day brought in terms of what the starry heavens of the night showed them.

What people in those times saw might be expressed thus: The face of the earth is dark when the sun obscures my vision with dazzling brightness; but light falls on the field of my daily work when my soul shines upon it through starry wisdom.

Writing down a sentence like this gives us a sense for what the realm of feeling in this third post-Atlantean period was like. From this in turn we sense how those who still stood in the after-echoes of such a realm of feeling could say to the Greeks, to those who belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period: Your view of the world, indeed your whole life, is childlike, for you have knowledge only of the earth. Your ancestors in ancient times knew how to illumine the earth with the light of the heavens, but you live in the darkness of earth.

The ancient Greeks experienced this darkness of earth as something light. Their inclination was gradually to overcome and transform the older cosmosophy. So, as everything that looked down from the broad heavens became paler still, they transformed the older cosmosophy into a geosophy. Cosmosophy was nothing more than a tradition for them, something they could learn about when they looked back to those who had passed it down to them from earlier times.

Pythagoras, for instance, stood at the threshold of the fourth post-Atlantean period when he journeyed to the Egyptians, to the Chaldean and even further into Asia in order to gather whatever those who lived there could give him of the wisdom of their forefathers in the Mysteries, whatever they could give him of what had been their cosmosophy, their philosophy and their religion. And what was still comprehensible for him was then just that: cosmosophy, philosophy, religion.

However, there is something we today take far too little into consideration: This geosophy of the ancient Greeks was a knowledge, a wisdom which, in relation to the earthly world, gave human beings a feeling of being truly connected with the earth, and this connection with the earth was something which had a quality of soul. The connection with the earth of a cultured Greek had a quality of soul. It was characteristic for the Greeks to populate springs with nymphs, to populate Olympus with gods. All this points, not to a geology, which envelops the earth in nothing but concepts, but to a geosophy in which spiritual beings are livingly recognized and knowingly experienced. This is something which mankind today knows only in the abstract. Yet right into the fourth century AD it was still something that was filled with life.

Right into the fourth century AD a geosophy of this kind still existed. And something of this geosophy, too, came to be preserved in tradition. For instance we can only understand what we find in the work of Scotus Erigena,³ who brought over from the island of Ireland what he later expressed in his De divisione naturae, if we take it as a tradition arising out of a geosophical view. For in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which was in preparation then and which began in the fifteenth century, geosophy, too, paled. There then began the era in which human beings lost their inner connection with, and experience of, the universe. Geosophy is transformed, we might say, into geology. This is meant in the widest possible sense and comprises not only what today's academic philosophy means by the term. Cosmosophy was transformed into cosmology. Philosophy was retained but given an abstract nature—which in reality ought to be called philology, had this term not already been taken to denote something even more atrocious than anything one might like to include in philosophy.

There remains religion, which is now totally removed from any real knowledge and basically assumed by people to be nothing more than tradition. People of a nature capable of being creatively religious are no longer a feature of civilized life in general in this fifth post Atlantean period. Look at those who have come and gone. None have been creatively religious in the true sense of the word. And this is only right and proper. In the preceding epochs, in the first, second third and fourth post-Atlantean periods, there were always those who were creatively religious, personalities who were creative in the realm of religion, for it was always possible to bring down something from the cosmos, or at least to bring something up out of the realm of the earth. So in the Greek Mysteries—those called the Chthonian Mysteries in contrast to the heavenly Mysteries—which brought up their inspiration out of the depths of the earth in various ways—in these Mysteries geosophy was chiefly brought into being.

By entering into the fifth post-Atlantean period and standing full within it, human beings were thrown back upon themselves. The now made manifest what came out of themselves, ‘-logy ‘, the lore the knowledge out of themselves. Thus knowledge of the universe becomes a world of abstractions, of logical concepts, of abstract ideas. Human beings have lived in this world of abstract ideas since the fifteenth century. And with this world of abstract ideas, which they summarize in the laws of nature, they now seek to grasp out of themselves what was revealed to human beings of earlier times. It is quite justified that this age no longer brings forth any religiously creative natures, for the Mystery of Golgotha falls in the fourth post-Atlantean period, and this Mystery of Golgotha is the final synthesis of religious life. It leads to a religion that ought to be the conclusion of earthly religious streams and strivings. With regard to religion, all subsequent ages can really only point back to this Mystery of Golgotha.

So the statement, that since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period it is no longer possible for religiously productive individuals to appear, is not a criticism or a reprimand aimed at historical development. It is a statement of something positive because it can be justified by the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this way we conjure up before our eyes the course of human evolution with regard to spiritual streams and spiritual endeavours. In this way we can see how it has come about that we stand today in the midst of something that is, basically, no longer connected with the world about us but has come out of the human being, something in which the human being is productive and must become ever more productive. By further developing all these abstract things human beings will ascend once more through Imaginations to a kind of geosophy and cosmosophy. Through Inspiration they will deepen cosmosophy and ascend to a true philosophy, and through Intuition they will deepen philosophy until they can move towards a truly religious view of the world which will once more be able to unite with knowledge.

It is necessary to say that today we are only in the very first, most elementary beginnings of this progress. Since the final third of the nineteenth century there has shone into the earthly world from the spiritual world something which we can take to be a giving-back of spiritual revelations. But even with this we stand at the very beginning, a beginning which gives us a picture with which to characterize the attitude brought by external, abstract culture towards the first concrete statements that come from the spiritual world. When the representatives of current recognized knowledge hear what we have to say about the spiritual world, the understanding they bring to bear on what we say is of a kind that it can only be called a non-understanding. For it can be compared with the following: Suppose I were to write a sentence on this piece of paper, and suppose someone were to try to understand what I had written down by analysing the ink in which it is written. When our contemporaries write about Anthroposophy it is like somebody analysing the ink of a letter he has received. Again and again we have this impression. It is a picture very close to us, considering that we took our departure from a description of how, for human beings, in early post-Atlantean times even the starry constellations and starry movements were no more than a written expression for what they experienced as the spiritual population of the universe.

Such things are said today to a certain number of people in order to give them the feeling that Anthroposophy is not drawn from some sort of fantastic underworld but from real sources of knowledge, and that it is therefore capable of understanding the human beings of the earth to the very roots of their nature. Anthroposophy is capable of throwing light on today's differentiation of human beings into those of the West, of the middle realm and of the East, in the way mentioned yesterday. It is also capable of throwing light on differentiations which have existed in human evolution during the course of time. Only by connecting everything we can know about the differentiations according to regions of the earth with what we can know about how all this has come about can we gain an understanding of what kind of human beings inhabit our globe today.

Traditions of bygone ages have always been preserved, in some regions more, in others less. And according to those traditions the peoples of this globe are distinguished from one another. Looking eastwards we find that in later ages something was written down which during the first post-Atlantean period had existed unwritten, something which shines towards us out of the Vedas and their philosophy, something which touches us with its intimacy in the genuine philosophy of yoga. Letting all this work on us in our present-day consciousness, we begin to sense: If we immerse ourselves ever more deeply in these things, then we feel that even in the written works something lives of what existed in primeval times. But we have to add: Because the eastern world still echoes of its primeval times it is unsuited to receiving new impulses.

The western world has fewer traditions. At most, certain traditions stemming from the third post-Atlantean period, the age of cosmosophy, are contained in the writings of some secret orders. But they are traditions which are, no longer understood and are only brought before human beings in the form of incomprehensible symbols. But at the same time there is in the west an elemental strength capable of unfolding new impulses for development.

We might say that originally the primeval impulses existed. They developed by becoming ever weaker and weaker until, by about the fourth post-Atlantean period, they so to speak lost themselves in themselves, in what became Greek culture as such. Out of that, pointing towards the new, developed the abstract, prosaic sober culture of the Romans. (The lecturer draws on the blackboard). But this in turn must take spirituality into itself; it must, by becoming ever stronger and stronger, be filled with inner spirituality. Here, then, we have the symbol of the spiralling movement of humanity's impulses throughout the ages.

This symbol has always stood for important matters in the universe. If we have to speak of an atomistic world, we should not imagine it in the abstract way common today. We should imagine it in the image of this spiral, and this has often indeed been done. But on the greatest scale, too, we have to see this spiralling movement. Today I consider that we have arrived at it in a perfectly elementary manner by way of a concrete consideration of the course of human spiritual evolution.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science—An Outline. For the post-Atlantean cultural periods see the chapter ‘Man and the Evolution of the World’.
• 2 . See also Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1984, and Rudolf Steiner's own reports of these lectures in Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1984.
• 3 . Johannes Scotus Erigena c.810-877. Irish philosopher and theologian, one of the most notable thinkers of the Carolingian Middle Ages. His principal work De divisione naturae was burnt by Pope Honorius in Paris in 1225.