The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today, we want to look at some details of the occult world. Some of what will be said today will build on the observations we made last time. Some of it is meant to broaden your perspective in the direction we headed the last time, allowing us to see more and more how the space around us is alive and spiritualised by supersensible facts and supersensible beings.

Last time,¹ we observed how the different realms of nature that surround us—the mineral, the plant, and the animal kingdom—contain beings who we can call group-Egos. We have explained how underlying the animal world are group-Egos, self-contained individualities, or, one could say, personalities, who can be found on the astral plane and how they, as it were, encircle the Earth.

We have seen how the plant-Egos are located in the centre of the Earth. We did not name a particular location where the group-Egos of the minerals are located, as they reside in the higher regions of Devachan.

From this you will have seen that beings are constantly around us, through which we walk all the time, who penetrate us, and who live in the same space as we do. For example, an animal group-soul that belongs to a whole group of similarly shaped animals is able to pass through us. This is because in the astral the principle of penetration, of permeability, holds sway, in contrast to our physical world where the principle of impermeability prevails.

First, I would like to add a note in order to expand on what was said before. Previously, you have seen that we have to think of a plant’s root as its head stuck in the ground; then the stem grows out of it and develops leaf by leaf, and so on. Depicted schematically, we would have to search for the group-Egos at the centre of the Earth. What we see with our eyes is the plant’s physical body. This is embedded into what we call the etheric body of the plant. What is the characteristic of the plant’s etheric body? Everything we know as the etheric body has, as a characteristic, the property of repetition. Where the etheric body as such is active, the principle of repetition rules. We see how in the plant, growth leaf by leaf is repeated. Why? Because underlying this repetition is the power of the etheric body. In a human being too, this principle of the etheric body holds sway. For example, we find it in the spinal cord, where it attaches itself ring by ring. Indeed, when the clairvoyant observes the plant in its entirety, he sees the etheric body underlying the whole plant, but above it, the plant is enveloped by astral clouds. Thus, we see the physical body of a plant, which consists of roots, leaves, and so on, saturated by the etheric body and surrounded from above by a kind of glow-light, or astral light. And the astral that works on the plant produces its completion in blossom and fruit. If the etheric body only had an effect, then the plant would endlessly unfold leaf by leaf; the astral body brings this to a close. The etheric body will be subdued, so to speak, by the astral. Clairvoyantly, we can see the Ego of the plant as if it were a sheath² that extends to the centre of the Earth.

When you approach the plant from the outside, you will first see only the physical and etheric bodies. The glow surrounding the plant is part of the astral atmosphere of the whole Earth. Thus, you can see how the spiritual, as it were, washes around the globe. The sequence of the spinal marrow vortices, is the effect of the etheric body principle that you have within yourself. This is brought to a close by the strongly intervening astral force which surrounds the spinal cord. As the astral body unfolds, the spinal vortices are closing themselves off as cranial bones. Thus, one could actually track the collaboration of the etheric with the astral everywhere in the world. Underlying this is a mystery, namely the secret that everything alive must be dampened, or, as it were, killed by the astral. The purpose of this killing in the astral is to bring the etheric to a close. If we imagine it as a powerful effect, then it is called Azote.³ Thinking spiritually, Azote means the force in the cosmos that prevents the etheric unfolding with an overabundant power without ever coming to an end. The call to that which is alive to become conscious, is based on the power of Azote, for without the astral there would be no consciousness.

Everything spiritual also has its expression in the physical, just as for a spiritual observer all physical matter is nothing but the embodiment of the spirit. Spiritually speaking, we have now seen the collaboration of the continuously developing etheric, and the astral that holds back the etheric, and contained in the holding back is consciousness.

If you observe the interaction of the two substances contained in our air, oxygen and nitrogen, you will find the physical expression of this as it applies to humans and animals. The oxygen in our air is the embodiment of the etheric, the great life-body of the Earth. You would devour yourself in a vehement life if you breathed only oxygen. You would be old right away after your birth, so to speak. Consciousness as such couldn’t develop in the way it exists for human beings and animals. Therefore, the developing life, the oxygen principle, must be subdued. It is being subdued by the admixture of nitrogen. This regulates and limits the effect of oxygen. If you only breathed nitrogen, you would die instantly. The interaction of both creates the balance that moderates life so that it can become conscious. The physical embodiment of Azote is the power that finds its expression in nitrogen. Thus, you are learning the spiritual background of what you continuously take in and what you give out.

You now have an example of how all life comes into being through the establishment of a balance between opposing powers. This equilibrium between two powers can also be seen in the larger cosmos, for example in our solar system. Thus, we arrive at a chapter where we can point out that our solar system does not only represent a range of bodies of physical substance, but that all those bodies that belong to our system, are in the physical world solely as an expression of something spiritual. Just as you have a physical body that belongs to a soul, likewise, every planetary body belongs to something of “soul” and of “spirit”; and the spiritual sheaths of the individual world bodies are very varied.

If one could look at our Earth clairvoyantly from the outside, one would see not only rocks, and so on, of material substance, as well as animal and human shapes walking around in between, but above all, the group-souls of plants, animals, and so on. This is already a spiritual population on our Earth. Furthermore, the clairvoyant would see the individual human souls, the folk-soul, and so on. In any case, one must not imagine the spirit of a celestial body simply as a sphere in space with a spirit and a soul, but rather as a complete spiritual population that forms an entity and resides on this celestial body. And all these individual spirits, group-souls and so on are, in a sense, subordinate to one we can call a leader. And all of this together corresponds to the total spirit of our Earth, to the one we call the Earth-spirit.

Even from these hints, you can see that the spiritual life of a planet is complicated. We now endeavour to delve deeper and deeper into the details of the spiritual life of a planet. You must be patient; we will always progress a bit further.

Today, we can follow our planetary system a bit further, remembering that our Earth was not always like it is now and that it only became so through slow evolution. As you are aware, Earth was a different planet prior to becoming Earth. We call the earlier embodiment of our Earth the “old Moon.” This is not our current Moon, which is only a fragment of it. Even earlier, the Earth was what we call the Sun-planet. This does not, once again, refer to the current Sun. Even earlier, our Earth was Saturn. What is the relationship of our current Sun to the old Sun, when our Earth was still the Sun?

The position of the Sun in the cosmos was not like it is nowadays, because then a sun, separate from the Earth, did not exist. That which you all were at that time was the preparation for the current physical, etheric, and astral body that lived within the old Sun itself. The first rudiments of the physical body had been given on Saturn, the rudiments of the etheric body on the Sun, the rudiments of the astral body on the Moon, and then it is on the Earth that the Ego is added. If you put this together with the current state, then you will understand how you have lived on the old Sun. Your life consisted only of a physical and an etheric body. Your Ego was not yet in the body and neither was your astral body. If you wish to imagine the old Sun-life, you will gain an idea of this if you imagine that all of you here have suddenly fallen asleep. The physical and the etheric bodies will remain seated on the chairs, while the astral body and your Ego floats in the air above you. The conditions on the Sun were permanently like this—that’s how it used to be on the old Sun. You floated around the Sun, following behind your Ego and your astral body, governing and leading from above what was below. Your physical body, of course, was not like it is today. If you imagine it like today’s plants, you will gain an idea of what the physical body was like. Flesh, in the present sense, didn’t yet exist. What you had was a kind of plant life. But it was impossible for the Sun to hold onto such a shape because then an Earth with such human beings as you are today could never have emerged.

During the transition to the Moon, those beings capable of bearing the solar existence needed to split off from the Earth, because the solar existence was swift and fast-paced. As a result, the Sun, with all of those substances that necessitated a fast-paced, rushing life, split itself off from the Earth. Hence, the Sun took along with it all those substances and beings that developed swiftly, and Earth was left behind with all those beings that were not able to cope with the rapid pace. The human being was one of those beings. The best of all beings and substances on the old Sun separated and took on a life of their own. We see, in the fiery, gaseous masses of the current Sun, the bodies of highly exalted beings, who have developed far beyond human beings. They are able to endure today’s Sun-existence because they are already so far advanced that they no longer need to live within a body. The Sun is an existence that developed out of a planetary existence—it is a fixed star, as it is called in occultism.

A fixed star is an advanced planet that has ejected anything that couldn’t keep up. The higher entities have founded an existence for themselves on the fixed star. Each fixed star has arisen from a planet. Advancement, or upward movement, is also taking place in the cosmos. Our Earth, too, will go through the following embodiments: it will become Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. On Venus, Earth will have already reached a kind of fixed star existence. We will transform ourselves, together with the Earth, into beings of a higher kind, who will be able to endure the fixed star existence.

As we have seen, a fixed star comes into being by a planet expelling its bad materials and beings and retaining the better substances and beings to lead them upwards to a more exalted existence. You might ask: if such a fixed star continues to advance upwards, what will become of it then? What will become of the Sun with all the sublime beings?—First of all, there is still a while to go, because what happens next will be that our Earth will once again unite with this Sun. But then there will be a further separation because our Earth will gradually become a fixed star. Once our Earth has reached its Venus or Vulcan-existence, then, what the Sun is today will also slowly have become something different. What will become of a Sun?—A sun becomes what we see today glittering down from the sky as the Zodiac. The higher stage of development of a Sun is that it unfolds into a Zodiac. A Zodiac consists of twelve constellations: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. For the materialistic astronomer, these are simply group pictures. Though the clairvoyant knows, that they have not simply been placed into space, but that their constellations correspond to spiritual beings who are grouped around in this belt in the sky. Once beings have completed their sun-existence, they will become such a Zodiac. This too goes through a kind of evolution.

The Zodiac is known today as a particular spatial order of certain stars, which is related in a certain way to our life and existence—but it was not always this way. It has developed out of a type of nebulous substance. Imagine the old Saturn that once represented the Earth, then evolved into the Sun, the Moon, and finally became today’s Earth. Saturn was already surrounded by our Zodiac, but the stars in our Zodiac were not distinct then, and the matter was like foggy rain. With the advancement of Saturn to the Sun and to the Moon, the matter grouped itself together and the constellations lit up.

Where did this Zodiac, that surrounded Saturn at that time come from, and which will vanish because it will have served its purpose as soon as our Sun becomes a Zodiac? Now, you can imagine that Saturn was preceded by other evolutionary stages. An earlier Sun, that shone above the earlier embodiments of our Earth when it was Saturn, had sacrificed itself and had become this Zodiac. When we look from an occult perspective at this Zodiac, we can see that it has only come about through a great sacrifice. Substances and beings that preceded our existence have sacrificed themselves and formed this Zodiac, initially as a nebulous formation of matter and then as a grouping of stars. That which was described to you as the creative entities of our beings, all of that was united with the old Zodiac when Earth was still Saturn. All those sublime beings, who had already passed through a higher stage before, had to work downwards; they streamed out the rudiments of the physical body. This is what exists as the secret of the genesis of the world: that all beings will ascend from beings that receive, to become beings that produce and create. It is the aim of beings to become creators.

Once they have ascended from “receiving” to “giving”, the beings gather together in a Zodiac. The matter for the first rudiments of a human being’s physical body flowed from the Zodiac. Thus, we learn to look more and more into the cosmos and at what floats through it. And the physical bodies appear to us to be only the physical expression of higher spiritual beings. Those higher spiritual beings have exuded matter through their will. This is the powerful, magical work where the will becomes so strong that it can pour out substance. The substance that rained down out of these beings, who were called upon to create this matter on the old Saturn, has transformed itself over time into our present physical body. We call those exalted beings the Thrones or the Spirits of Will, who have developed to such a height that they were able to trickle down the cosmic rain that was the first rudiment of the physical human body.

This is another new point we would like to capture, there will come a time when a confluence of all these viewpoints comes about. But one must have patience to discover all the details, so that by and by a more complete picture of the greatness of the cosmos emerges.

We now move on from these global spaces to another chapter. We will return to that point in our Earth’s evolution where the Sun has separated itself off from our Earth—to where once, in the pre-historic past, the Sun and Earth were still forming one body. The Sun, together with the higher developed beings, left our Earth behind as a setting suitable for us slower-developing beings. The Sun then shone on the Earth from the outside. The Sun beings are sublime and powerful beings, but they are creative in a different way than the Thrones, the spirits of the Zodiac. What streams from the Sun to the Earth is light. This is also an enormous deed, but it is cosmically less than the trickling down of matter itself.

What we call the Moon today was originally still united with the Earth. Our Moon was created by the shedding of less developed substances and beings that were still connected with the Earth. If Earth had kept the Moon in itself, then our development would also not have proceeded correctly. The development would have become too slow. Earth would have become, so to speak, mummified like a statue. Life would have perished. Too much would have been killed off, and eventually, the Earth would have become a field of the dead. That is why the Moon had to depart, and the Earth, which remained, was able to maintain balance. As a result, the Sun and Moon are now affecting the Earth from the outside; they maintain the Earth’s equilibrium so that human evolution can take place. Everything is kept in balance through opposing forces. Only by both opposing forces, those of the Sun and of the Moon influencing Earth, was the human Ego able to gain a foothold in mankind. And now recall our first elementary description of the human being. A human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an Ego. The Ego works on the astral body and transforms it into Manas, the etheric body into Buddhi, and the physical body into Atma or Spirit-Man. But it would have been impossible for this development to happen right from the start. Here, the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul had to insert themselves. These sheaths that lie between the human body—the physical, the etheric, and the astral body—and the spirit—Manas, Buddhi, and Atma, were temporary transformations. Now the Ego, at its level of spiritual development, integrates the Spirit-Self, Manas, into the astral body. Everything that happens now is purely the work of Manas or the Spirit-Self. But that was not long ago—we did not start doing this until the Atlantean era. However, it had been prepared earlier, albeit unconsciously, through the three middle sheaths: the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul.

When the human being came over from the Moon to the Earth, he consisted of only three bodies: the physical, the etheric, and the astral body, and a bridge had to be built. The human being was not able to build such a bridge by himself; he needed help. In Lemurian and Atlantean times, work on it had already been done unconsciously, as you are now working consciously on this. First work was undertaken on the astral body, and the Sentient Soul emerged. Then work was done on the etheric body and the Rational Soul emerged. Finally, work was even done on the physical body out of which the Consciousness-Soul unfolded, which came about by enabling the physical body to drive its physical organs outwards. With this development, the clairvoyant stage of Atlantean consciousness transitioned into today’s consciousness. Thus, as a manifestation the Consciousness-Soul will be lit up last.

Only in the old Atlantean times did man gain the maturity to work on himself. Who helped him during that time when the human being wanted to evolve out of a being that had a physical, etheric, and astral body into someone who possessed a Sentient-Soul, a Rational-Soul, and Consciousness-Soul? We will understand who helped when we look at our Earth-development, how it happened through the Sun, Moon, and so on. As you know, Earth has separated itself from the Sun and has sent out the Moon. The Sun had highly exalted beings who were so advanced creatively that they were able to send light into the cosmos. I have often mentioned that not only may one have to repeat a grade in school, but also in cosmic development. The human being had come so far as to be able to endure on Earth, and the higher beings had come so far that they could endure life on the Sun. The beings who live on the Sun today had a human existence previously. But during this initial development, some beings had fallen behind, for whom it was impossible to complete their set tasks. They could not yet readily live on the Sun. If they had gone there, they would have fared badly—the human being also would not have been able to endure it. However, these beings stood between the Sun-gods and human beings. For this reason, they had to obtain a different world body where the conditions were suitable for their existence. In fact, these beings were also taken care of during cosmic development. Even before our Sun separated Earth from itself, our Jupiter separated himself from the Sun at about the same time. Later, after the Sun had already released the Earth, our current Venus separated itself from the Sun, and even later, our current Mercury separated from the Sun.

Thus, for those beings who had not kept up, planetary existence stages were created, and they now inhabit those planets. At the time when the Moon also separated from Earth, a very occult process took place in our karmic development, called the Passage of Mars through our Earth, which is very difficult to explain. Indeed this process is extremely difficult to explain because when the Earth was still connected with the Sun, the Mars substance was within the Earth. The Sun then separated itself from the Earth, and Mars stepped out, leaving behind the substance known as iron on Earth. Mars, too, became a location for those beings who had fallen behind. These Mars beings are the initiators of the development of the Sentient Soul. If they had not exerted their influence on our planet, then the Sentient Soul would not have been able to form itself. This illustrates to you the importance of those beings who we pointed out at the beginning of this lecture, and who spiritually belong to the physical substances of the solar system and stand in an interrelationship with what we have within ourselves.

Just as the Sentient Soul has been stimulated by the Mars beings, so has the Rational Soul been stimulated by the Mercury beings, and the Consciousness Soul by the Jupiter beings. Already at the time when the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul were stimulated, the impulse was given to set Manas into motion. Because this too still needed an initial impulse. Once it was in flow, the human being could, so to speak, take his development into his own hands.

This happened in the last third of Atlantean time. The initiators were those beings who resided on Venus. Thus, you will be able to gain an idea of the interactions between the various parts of our planetary system. We must remember that the human being has brought along his physical body, his etheric body, and his astral body. Then three more sheaths develop: the Sentient Soul, the Rational Soul, and the Consciousness Soul, and eventually Manas. The Consciousness Soul has its strength from Jupiter, the Rational Soul has its from Mercury, the Sentient Soul has its from Mars, and the Spirit-Self has received its impulse from Venus. Thus, you must look up at the relevant stars if you want to track down the forces within yourself. Man is a complicated being; he has come into being because the powers of the cosmos have converged within him. Finally, all of this shall be presented in a picture. Imagine, someone would see here on the wall a small Sun spectrum, a rainbow, i.e. the colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Imagine that this is not projected onto the wall but only visible in the sun-dust. This is what you would look at first. Then, when you investigate how this comes about, you would see how the sunlight enters the room through a crack and that through different contraptions, through a prism, or through another type of light-breaking substance, this spectrum, this “spectre” comes about. You cannot remove it, but if you take away the separate parts of it that are outside the spectrum, then the spectre disappears. Take the outer light away—gone is the ghost—take away the prism, the wall with the light—and the ghost disappears. It had formed itself purely as a result of outside influences.

When a clairvoyant looks at a human being, it is the same with him as it is here with the spectrum. Man is actually nothing in and of himself, for what the clairvoyant sees, where the human being stands, are forces from Venus, from Mercury, and from Mars. Take away the Venus forces—and the human being vanishes. Take away the influences of Mercury and Mars—and the human being vanishes. The clairvoyant sees the human being as a convergence of cosmic forces. For the clairvoyant, the only thing that solely remains real in this spectre is the “Ego”. This working “Ego” is the true reality; it is the reason for everything flowing together; it works on the absorption of all such influences. Under the gaze of the clairvoyant, all converging streams disappear, leaving solely the “Ego” behind as the only truth. This Ego, that so few people nowadays recognise as reality, is the only thing that remains. What the physical perception considers to be a human being, is in reality only a ghost whose individual parts are held together by the almost magnetic force of the Ego. Everything about the human being, apart from the working Ego, is an optical illusion.

Now we have gone through a thought process together. Please, now transform this into a feeling, because only then will this become truly valuable. Go through the world with this feeling. Imagine our earthly beings dissolved into ghosts, apart from the Egos working within. When you feel this, you feel what the materialistic mind calls existence, reality, dissolve like a mist, and you will see the true reality in the spiritual Ego. Only then will you feel something of what, in the Oriental world-view, is meant by the expression “Reality is Maya.” All other talk is just phrases. If one starts right away with the phrase, “The world is Maya”, then this is an absurdity. We do not even want to say the word Maya without first having gained this kind of sentiment through such an observation.

You will now have gained a certain idea about what true occult training with its long preparation aims for. You see, it is actually quite a blatant phrase to tell people that existence is only an illusion. First, such contemplations need to proceed patiently and calmly so that the spiritual sensations become ignited. First, we all want to learn to pronounce the words we need in the proper way. To a large extent, our words are spoken only like empty sounds by people, whilst these words indeed, when they were spoken in those cultures where they originated from, were connected with deeply meaningful feelings.

Such an observation that shows us what Maya is, and that shows us the true reality inside the illusion, first pours into our soul what we must extract as a feeling from Theosophy. Therefore, it is necessary that you not only leave with knowledge but also with an emotional tone, with this emotional colour that falls on such a word. In this way, the imaginative observation joins with what we take along into life, what lives within our soul as an emotion, as a feeling.

• 1. In the lecture dated 7 December 1907, GA98-02-03—The relation of the Human Being to Nature.
• 2. Re: “like a sheath” refer to the drawing: “Astral substance above the plant” in a previous lecture, dated 6 December, evening, GA98-02-06.
• 3. Azote: Expression for nitrogen (N), ‘Azote” French for Nitrogen, from the Greek “A” = not and “zoe” = life.

We have already spoken of how the cultural development of mankind, in so far as it is spiritual, is permeated by all kinds of brotherhoods which bring to expression in their total content the symbolic actions which have been taken from certain imaginative ideas. The most significant symbol of such brotherhoods is that which is connected with the thought of death and resurrection. Again and again the thought of death and the thought of resurrection is brought together before such brotherhoods. Thus, one can say that as a middle point symbol man is shown how the thought of immortality proceeds out of both of these thoughts. First a man dies and is buried.

Now, in most of these brotherhoods, the personality to which this symbol is attached is called Hiram; this symbol is connected with what is called the legend of Hiram. Thus the name of Hiram, the architect of King Solomon who according to the legend built the Solomon Temple with King Solomon and then as a result of certain of his servants becoming his enemies, Hiram was killed and his death is shown in a symbolic way. It is shown how he is buried and the presentation is brought to a certain resurrection out of the grave, a proceeding of Hiram out of the grave. Through this symbol, they want to carry the thought of immortality to the soul in a much more penetrating way than is possible through mere theories. Through this symbol which takes hold of the unconscious forces of man, through this imagination one wants to show what the situation really is when one passes through death and then is resurrected.

Now, when you consider that the death of Hiram, the resurrection of Hiram is led before the brothers of the lodges, so indeed, we have the connection with the Easter thought. Now you know that in the Catholic cult there is also a symbolic presentation occurring; that the festivities of Maundy Thursday pass over to the Good Friday, and then the Festival is concluded in the symbolic placing of Christ Jesus in the grave. Then you have Christ Jesus lying in the grave from Good Friday through Saturday evening; and as is the modern custom the Resurrection is celebrated, which means that Christ is again taken out of the grave and you have celebration with the Resurrected Christ. When one considers the action which occurs there in the cult, particularly in the Catholic cult, it is just the same as that which occurs in occult brotherhoods as the putting in the grave and the resurrection of Hiram. So you see, the Easter thought stands as the center point in a certain connection in these occult brotherhoods. The meaning which is connected with this ceremony is that the human being, by gazing on this symbolic activity, goes deeper into his soul than he would with the normal forces which are present in his consciousness; it goes much deeper than that. Such a symbolic action would actually have no significance if you could not presuppose that deep down in the human soul you have an activity where the consciousness does not reach. The human soul contains activity below his conscious awareness.

We speak in art of the fact that that which gives the artist power enabling him to produce works of art or to reproduce them cannot originate from the ordinary conscious forces of the soul, but come up out of the unconscious and then enter into the consciousness. Hence, in connection with the artist, it is so that for him any sort of rules to which he might direct himself to, will become a disturbing factor; he cannot regulate himself according to rules; he must direct himself to that which as an elementary consciousness in his soul gives wings to those forces which he needs. He can, if he wants, subsequently to look back and give a certain explanation of that which comes to the surface from the subconscious aspect of his being. Therefore we must assume that many other hidden qualities hold sway in the soul, forces which do not play up into consciousness.

We speak of the fact as we have often spoken about it, that the astral life of man is much broader, much more extensive than the conscious ego life of this human being and these forces play out of the astral life of man into the conscious ego experience. Hence,these forces are present underneath. There is already a large number of people in our time who have so adapted themselves to the external, purely materialistic life and look for their salvation in this external materialistic life so that, in the main, in their soul life they only possess that which is connected with the external material life. You can really notice the difference when you lead a symbol such as the death and resurrection of Hiram in front of human beings who have only been educated for the external material life. They find it very comical, very superfluous. However, those people who have the unconscious soul forces, who are able to perceive the unconscious forces which hold sway in the astral, are taken hold of in the deepest sense by the symbol and call up those faculties out of their soul which are able to understand what is meant by immortality; whereas the ordinary forces which are bound to the physical life cannot understand this immortality.

Something has remained in the Easter Festival of what in the primal consciousness of mankind was connected, in the main, with the thought of this festival. We have often spoken about the question—When do we celebrate this Easter Festival? Well, we celebrate it on the Sunday following the first full moon after the beginning of Spring which falls on the 21st of March. Thus the establishment of the point of time of the Easter Festival is dependent upon the relationship between the sun and moon positions, which means that we upon the earth celebrate the festival which is dependent upon the cosmic connections. What does the human soul say in so far as it has undertaken such an establishment of the Easter Festival. It says the following: Here upon this earth everything shall not be regulated according to purely earthly relationships. However, at least that which touches the soul most deeply ought to be directed according to extra earthly relationships. Man should gaze upon the symbol of immortality; the placing in the grave and the Resurrection; the thought of immortality of the living; the soul going through the Portal of death. That should be carried in front of the human being either in the occult picture as in the Catholic cult or more in thoughts as happens in other confessions—that is not so important at the present time. However, in so far as the human being allows the picture of the placing in the grave and the Resurrection to sway in his soul, this should happen when the sun and the moon come into a corresponding constellation. This is a protest of the human soul, that the gazing upon such an important symbol should not be carried out purely under earthly conditions; it is a recognition that the gazing upon this symbol should be bound up with the cosmic relationships external to the earth.

Here, as I am giving a lecture, certain things are happening to your human soul. Just imagine that so-called Monists were sitting here instead of you. Naturally, there would be an entirely different effect upon their soul than is upon your soul, because you have taken up into your soul certain preliminary ideas from spiritual science. Man is continuously changed by that which he has experienced. You have been exposed to anthroposophical spiritual science; your soul is different from those people who have not been exposed to it. It is not realistic to speak in general terms abut the human being as is done by the academic would. As soon as one goes into the realities, one sees how unrealistic the way the human being is considered by anthropologists.

Now, you see, it is very easy for you not to assess correctly or even to overlook what has happened to your soul in so far as the work of spiritual science has impinged upon it. Much, much more is imprinted upon this soul. Much is imprinted in the human soul, because there is the unconscious, the astral united with the human soul and you will be able to say: That which plays into the human being from the external world and which remains unconscious is nevertheless far more powerful, far more significant, than that which enters consciously. You all know the beautiful love poems which unite themselves with the light of the moon. Here we see that the unconscious soul itself stands in a connection with the non-earthly, that which comes into the earth with the light of the moon. Here you have the moon with its light streaming in and it is something that you have coming from the cosmos, from the extra earthly and has to do with the unconscious weaving and swaying of the human soul. And, if you remember what I said to you on Thursday and again that which I said on Saturday evening at the public lectures about the swaying, the dominating, the ruling and weaving of the Folk Soul element in the human soul life, then, indeed, you must say to yourself that this Folk Soul element comes up out of the unconscious much more than from the conscious. It is really true that that which rules in the depths of our soul and can only echo faintly up into the consciousness, is precisely what rules and weaves in the astral body; that is very important and is of a non-earthly nature. And that person whose soul is open for the impressions of the spiritual world knows that our earth is not only different in spring and in Autumn, that in spring the vegetation shoots up and in autumn there is harvesting, but the portion of the earth which is illuminated by the light of the moon is something different than the earth when it is not illuminated by the light of the moon. After the 21st of March the sun stands in a different relationship to the earth than it had before the 21st of March and that which is reflected back to us as sunlight from the moon upon the earth is therefore something quite different from that which radiated down before the 21st of March. The first full moon after the beginning of Spring gives back to us the first strength of the resurrected sun and this is quite different from any other full moon. Thus our astral nature would not be the same if, shall we say, we would gaze upon the symbol of laying in the grave and Resurrection in December; it is not the same as when we do it in the week after the streaming down of the spring full moon. Our soul is in another condition at this particular time. Now, if our soul is something quite different through the fact that we have taken up spiritual science into it and are not just Monists, so our soul is also something different in the moonlight after the Spring Equinox than, shall we say, after the Winter Solstice. Hence our soul can experience something different at this time as compared with any other time.

Now, when spiritual science appears today, it does so in order that the circle of vision of human beings which has been shrunken by the materialistic development can again be expanded. If you take the thoughts of spiritual science into yourself in a thoroughly correct sense, then you actually are expanding the thinking, the perception, the willing, the feeling of your soul. Today people are not sufficiently clear about the fact that materialistic development has brought not only that which one calls materialism, but this materialistic development has brought something else; it has brought, I might say, short-sightedness of the thought life into all things. The thoughts have become small and now they must be made much larger. The possibility of seeing things in their larger perspective must again arise among human beings.

Just think if the human being were again to become clear about the fact that man actually consists of two parts, out of the head which stands at a much later stage of development and which, one might say, is much more hardened than the rest of the organism and the rest of the organism which stands at a much older stage of evolution. Just think what proceeds from the working together, of this head organism with the rest of the human organism. When we move a hand, the body is at the basis of this movement which participates in this movement. What occurs when I move a hand? I have previously told you about this. The physical hands and the ether hands both move, they move together. When I think, the left and the right lobes of the brain also execute ether movements, that is to say, the ether portion of the left and right brain lobes also execute movements which are quite similar to the hand movements. The ether movements are there, but the physical movements are imprisoned, they are enclosed in the solid skull. It is a bound Promethius and because of this, it is possible to have thinking. If it were not through this external imprisonment, but through the organic fettering of the human being man's arms would now be imprisoned as they will be in the future when the earth will have disappeared and developed into the Jupiter existence just as the brain lobes are imprisoned now. Man's arms will be imprisoned in the future as now the lobes of his brain are imprisoned. Then that which we call thinking will also be left over from the movement of the hands. I will show you what can be made clear with a much more concrete example presicely from the history of our time. It can be clearly shown how the thoughts of the best man of our age are very short.

Now, let us consider Eduard von Hartmann who was the philosopher of the unconscious. As far as his own estimation of himself was concerned, he would never consider hinself to be a materialistic thinker. However, how we think of ourselves does not depend on what we think, but the point is, are our thought habits of a materialistic nature? A person can establish a quite idealistic philosophy and nevertheless can still possess quite materialistic habits of thought; and these habits of thought determine whether he has short carrying thoughts or wide carrying thoughts. Now, as far as Eduard von Hartmann is concerned, among many of his contributions he has also written a great deal about politics, and I want to present Hartmann, the political author, to you, because in his age he was held in the highest esteem as one of the best German, nay, one of the best Prussian patriots as well as being a good political writer. Obviously Eduard von Hartmann's thoughts were so wide carrying that he was able to represent the constellation of the different great powers of Europe to himself: Germany, Austria, Italy, France, England, Russia and in between them the different small neutral states. He continually studied and wrote papers about the different political interest of these single states. Now, he wrote a very significant thesis which came out in 1888 and appeared in book form in 1889, and in it he set forth his ideas as to what represents the best political constellation for Europe.

Now, I have to make the preliminary comment that he was not only a German, but also a Prussian patriot, he spoke so obviously from the standpoint of Prussian patriotism. He attempted to represent what the best thing for Germany and Europe would be as far as alliances which must be developed were concerned, and he saw the salvation of Germany and of Europe in an alliance of common neutrality in the arising of an alliance between Switzerland, Belgium and Holland under English leadership. Just think, Eduard von Hartmann wanted Belgium, Switzerland and Holland under English leadership. You can see exactly what I am driving at from such a concrete example, and the same thing can be seen in other domains of life; When you look back 30 years you can see how ridiculous these thoughts were; how the whole development which one can describe as the age of materialism brings with it short thoughts, thoughts when they relate themselves to time relationships are perhaps valid for 2 or 3 centuries.

Now I will give you an example from the realm of medicine, but things do not go as easily here as in the realm of politics. Nevertheless here is an example from the philosopher Lotse, who had a well developed medical background. He said: “The enthusiasm for any given remedy, as a general rule, is only valid for five years. The enthusiasm for a remedy discovery today disappears and soon as another remedy comes into fashion.” this is noticed far more easily in the medical field than with politics. Gustav Theodore Fechner who really was a very intelligent person wrote a very interesting thesis in the 1820's. At that time iodine, a new medicament, appeared on the scene. Everyone began to claim that it could cure numerous types of illnesses. Then Gustav Theodore Fechner wrote a very neat thesis in which, according to the rules of science, and all you need to do is develop a method of receiving the light of the moon and then this universal medicament could be used in a wonderful way everywhere. Can you see from this that a shortness of judgment, a certain living concepts which cannot be carried very far.

Now, when you entered the domain of folk psychology or race psychology and read what the foremost writers had to say and then placed these side by side, you would be surprised at what you had before you. For example, you could find that men, in so far as they claim to be objective scientists with present ways of thinking, depict the population of Middle Europe as being descended from the Germans. Now, they depict these Germans as having all sorts of qualities. Then the Frenchman, shall we say tries to describe the French and says that they became wise through the fact that France descends partly from the ancient Celts and then he describes the Celts. When you compare and find that person who describes the Germans in Central Europe attributes the same qualities to the Germans which the Frenchman ascribes to the ancient Celts. However, there is much more of a Celtic element living within central Europe than within France. But this the people.

I can repeat numerous examples which will show you how the concepts are so very small that they do not carry very far. You can see what happens today when these so-called secure natural scientific methods attempt to go on into the spiritual life. When you realize all these things, then you will see how necessary it is that the spirit should beat into this realm. How long will it take however until one has such a psychology, a science of the soul of the type which I attempted to give in the lecture last Thursday? Only such a science of the soul can make that which actually rules in Europe understandable, and can also bring that understanding which is necessary if a culture your is to proceed further. One can think of all sorts of domains which are so advanced in materialistic directions, directions which are without any spiritual value. Then we see that this material element—it can be a state or any other structure—can never succeed, can never get better, because the way things are is that everyone needs a soul.

Now, that which we foster, that which we have as our science of the spirit within the Anthroposophical Society cannot be just one society among others. Why not? The answer lies in the following question: what do other societies do when they establish themselves? They set up programs and one unites round a certain program. You print the agreement of this program and when you leave this society, that means you no longer agree with the program. When the whole society dissolves, no one is hurt about these programs. One can get together and then one can also depart. That is the case which happens with every mechanism in the world.

Now, Weissman once attempted to characterize an organism from the natural scientific standpoint. Naturally he could only bring a negative quality, but this negative quality really is correct. He asks the question: how can you tell if something is living? His answer is: that which, when it does, leaves behind a corpse. Now, naturally in this way he is not characterizing that which is living. However, one has to concur that he is quite correct when he says: “The living is negatively characterized by the fact that this living being leaves behind a corpse.” Now, our Anthroposophical Society is a living being through the fact that there are a large number of cycles in the hands of our members of which, in the first place we know as a general rule non-members should not receive these cycles. However, one can now go into second hand stores everywhere and buy these cycles. You see from that that the Anthroposophical Society must be an organism, because just imagine, if the Anthroposophical Society dissolved itself away, then it would leave a corpse behind, and the corpse would be the cycles.

Now, one must be able to think about all these things. Other societies, when they dissolve away, can actually do so without leaving behind a corpse, because they are more mechanistically built. These people depart, the point of the program cannot be called a corpse because nothing is left behind. We are trying to deal in realities. This is something that must enter into our souls. When spiritual science becomes a real perception in us, every thought is felt in such a way that this thought stands in reality; whereas the abstract thinking which corresponds to the materialistic thinking does not bother itself with whether thoughts stand in reality or not. All this, my dear friends, show how limited the thinking is when it only restricts itself to the consciousness; when it is only bound up to the material aspect. Hence we should not wonder when those particular cultural streams in the development progress of mankind they want to take hold of everyday life, must also reckon with other than that which works only upon the ordinary consciousness. And so it has always been with the deep religious cultural impulses.

Why, for example, did something like the cult of Easter enter into the evolutionary history of mankind? Why was this Easter Cult brought into connection with cosmology, with that which occurs in a wide spaces of heaven between the Sun and moon? Because if man were only restricted to the experiences of the Earth, he would fall into the most extreme shortsightedness thinking, feeling and willing. Only through the fact that man is able to receive a greater perspective for his life can his thoughts be made much wider so that not only his physical ego consciousness is inserted in the right way into the earthly experiences but also his astral subconsciousness is membered into the great cosmic events. When the most important thought, the thought of immortality, is attached to the cosmos, it finds its fundamental basis in the religious connection. If man were only to originate out of that which is earthly, he would never be able to grasp the thought of immortality. If man was actually that which the materialistic natural science tries to say he is, if he was merely a highly developed ape, there would be nothing inside of him which would arrive at this thought of immortality.

I can give you a beautiful example from the philosophical aspect about how short the thoughts of natural researchers are in this domain. A few days ago I opened a book in which a person spoke about the connection of man with the apes in the sense that the monists do, in the material sense, not in the sense in which it is justified, but in the sense in which it is quite often expressed. At the beginning of his thesis, he says that he could prove that people who travel in certain districts where the cultural situation of the human being have so deteriorated could see that these people have the same instincts and drives as the apes. Now he says: “If it can be experienced that man can sink down to an ape condition, then it is logical that man can develop out of the apes.” Obviously, that is logical and quite clear. If a person becomes older, then you can get an old man out of the child; you can realize that without having to travel. In the same sense when you say that through cultural decadence man sinks down to ape condition, that is just as logical the same day man can become ape, why shouldn't the eighth also become a man! Therefore with the same logic you can say that if the child can become an old man, why shouldn't a child develop out of an old man; the logic is exactly the same. Material aspect is not that these people develop such logic, but that everyone reads this and no one notices what utter nonsense is being expressed.

If the present type of science, the present type of culture continues as it has, it can give people thoughts and feelings and perceptions only about what is earthly. Nevertheless there lives in man's depths that which is present as super sensible forces. They live there, but they must be repressed. And gradually as a result of this repressed spirituality in human soul, you would get the illness of culture. We cannot sufficiently emphasized the earnestness of our times. If from the heavy trials and tribulations which mankind is going through now, a small number of people can be permeated by the consciousness that what mankind needs is a spirituality, then out of this difficult time of trial something would happen which would be in the sense of the world spirit. But unless we get this spiritualization, nothing will go well for mankind.

We understand spiritual science only when we see in it not just a Christmas Festival but also an Easter Festival; that we understand what actually is meant when we have the thought of immortality for the whole being of man. When we grasp that which is immortal in the human being, only then are we able to understand immortality. Fichte, Hegel, many others knew that the human soul does not only become immortal when it passes through death, it is immortal now; that mortal element can now be found in us. Hence a science must be sought for, which besides taking into view the mortal body, takes into view the immortal soul of man.

It was natural that under the great advances and brilliance of natural scientific development in the last four centuries, that the consideration of spiritual life had to recede and the tendency towards the spiritual was also being eliminated from the external world. However, a time must come again when that Hiram, or shall we say that portion of Christ which always is there and which speaks of the super sensible, when that again resurrects itself after it has been buried in the Good Friday period of cultural development. We grasp the thoughts which at the time when the great Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo are all those who in the first place in a true way and can call that time cosmic Maunday Thursday. This has to be followed by a Good Friday. This view of the immortal element had to be buried. However, now the time has arrived when the cosmic Easter Sunday has to come and when we must celebrate the Holy Resurrection of the human soul and of the spirit knowledge.

Now, it is quite all right if, for example, we celebrate the Good Friday mood of soul in our present age. However, only when we have the power to gird ourselves for the Cosmic Easter Sunday, shall we also be able to perform the cult activity within our soul life which is there externally as the Easter Cult. Black mood of soul—that belongs to the days of Good Friday. The priests wear black clothes, because the corpse of the dead Christ rests in the grave. Then follows the Resurrection in the place of the thought of the grave. Today it is appropriate for us to carry in our soul the sorrow and the tragic. However, we ought to be able to know ourselves that we will be able to carry the spiritual Easter clothes when the times will again be different.

In these studies I wanted to draw your attention to certain things which can lead us back to a more concrete study of the Universe than is contained in the cosmogony of Copernicus. We must not forget that the Copernican cosmogony arose during the epoch after the middle of the fifteenth century when there was an increasing tendency towards an abstract conception of the Universe. It came indeed at a moment of time when the tendency to make everything abstract was at its height. We must also remember that it is essential now that we should get free of this tendency and bring to our thought about the Universe concepts that contain something more than mere abstract ideas. It is not a matter simply of constructing a cosmogony similar in kind to that of Copernicus, on slightly different lines. This was brought home to me in the questions arising out of the last lecture. For the point in these questions turned on the possibility of being able at once to draw lines that would give us a picture of the world—once more a picture in quite external abstractions. That of course is not what is wanted. What we have to do is to grasp in its spiritual nature all that is not man, in order to build a bridge from the spiritual in Man to the spiritual outside him. You must understand that here, at this particular time at all events, it cannot be our task to discuss a mathematical astronomy. That would necessitate beginning over again from the very rudiments; for the fundamental concepts employed to-day have their source in the whole materialistic mode of thinking in use since the middle of the fifteenth century. If we wanted to develop and complete the cosmogony we have sketched, it would be necessary to begin with the most elementary principles and elaborate them anew. The fate that befell Copernicanism came about, as we shall see, because of the strong tendency to abstraction, which may so easily lead to intellectual excesses. True Copernicanism is not really the same as that which it has become in the hands of the followers of Copernicus. Certain theories have been selected from Copernicanism which were quite in keeping with the ways of thought of the last few centuries, and from them the cosmogony now taught in all the schools has arisen.

It is not my wish to do anything in the direction of a similar cosmogony, where, instead of the well-known ellipse in which the Sun is placed as one of the foci, and in which the Earth moves with an inclined axis, we simply put a screw-shaped line! What I want rather to do is to present the relation of Man to the Universe and it is in this direction that we will now pursue the matter further.

I have tried to show you how, the moment one begins to pass to a more intensive experience of the three directions of space in one's own form, one realises how these directions differ in nature and kind from one another; it is only the faculty of mental abstraction in the head which makes these three dimensions abstract and does not distinguish between above and below, left and right, before and behind, but simply takes them as three lines. And a similar error would immediately again be incurred if one set out to build any other construction into space in a purely abstract way. The point at issue can be made clearer if for a moment we turn to something else.

Let us consider colours. We will take colour once more as an example. Suppose we have a blue surface and, let us say, a yellow one. The conception of the world which, in its abstract thinking, gave rise to the Copernican cosmogony, has indeed succeeded in saying: “I see before me blue, I see before me yellow. That is due to the fact that some object has made an impression on me. This impression appears to me as yellow, as blue.” The point is that we should not begin to theorise in this way at all, saying: “Before me is yellow, before me is blue, and they make a certain impression upon me.” That is really just as if you were to treat the word PICTURE in the following way. Suppose you were to set about making deep researches into the word and think: “ ‘P’, something must be at the back of this; behind ‘P’ I must seek the vibrations which cause it. Then again, behind the ‘I’ there must be vibrations, and behind the ‘C’ more vibrations, and so on.” There is no sense in this. We find sense only when we unite the seven letters, connecting then one with another in their own plane, and read the whole word ‘Picture’; when we do not speculate as to what lies behind, but read the word—‘Picture’. So here too the point is that we should say: “This first surface makes me penetrate, as it were, behind it, makes me plunge into it. This other surface makes me turn away from it.” It is to these feelings into which the impression passes over that we must pay attention; then we come to something concrete. If we thus seek in the world outside what we experience inwardly, we come indeed to the feeling that we are not really within ourself at all, but that with our real Ego we are in the Universe, poured out into the Universe. Instead of searching behind the external Universe for ‘vibrations’, the atomists should seek for their own Ego behind the phenomena and then try to find out how their own Ego is placed into the outer Universe is, as it were, poured out into it. Just as with colour we should try to ascertain whether we feel we must plunge into it or whether we feel ourselves repelled by it, so, as regards the structure of our organism, we should feel how the three directions, above and below, forwards and backwards, right and left, differ concretely from one another; we should feel how differently we experience them inwardly, when we project ourselves into the Universe. When we are aware of ourselves as Man standing on the Earth, surrounded by the planets and fixed stars, we begin to feel ourselves as part of all these; it is not a matter merely of drawing three dimensions at right angles, but of thinking concretely about the Cosmos and penetrating into the concrete reality of the dimensions.

Now there is a series of constellations that is immediately evident to those who study the outer Universe at night-time, and has indeed always been seen when men have studied the stars. It is what we call the Zodiac. It is immaterial whether we believe in the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system; if we follow the apparent course of the Sun it always seems to pass through the Zodiac in its yearly round. Now if we imagine ourselves placed into the Universe in a living way, we find that the Zodiac is of very great significance. We cannot conceive of any other Plane in celestial space as being of like value with the Zodiac, any more than we could conceive the plane which divides us in two and creates our symmetry, as being placed at random just anywhere. We then perceive the Zodiac as something through which a plane may be described. (Drawing.) Let us suppose this plane to be the plane of the blackboard, so that we have here the plane of the Zodiac; the plane of the Zodiac is just the plane of the blackboard. We shall then have one plane before us in Cosmic space, precisely as we imagined the three planes sketched in Man. That is certainly a plane of which we can say that it is fixed there for us. We see the Sun run its course through the Zodiac; we relate all the phenomena of the heavens to this plane. And we have here an analogy of an extra-human kind for what we must perceive and experience as planes in Man himself. Now when we draw the Symmetry plane in Man, and have on one side of the Symmetry-axis the liver organised in one way, and on the other side the stomach organised in a different way, we cannot think of such a fact without feeling at the same time some inner concrete relation; we cannot imagine mere lines of space lying there, but what is in the space must manifest definite forces of activity; it will not be a matter of indifference whether something is on the right or on the left. In the same way we must imagine that in the organisation of the Universe it is a matter of consequence whether a thing is above or below the Zodiac. We shall begin to think of Cosmic space—as we see it there, sown with stars—we shall begin to think of it as having form.

Now just as we can think of this plane on the blackboard, so we can also think of another at right angles to it. Let us think of a plane extending from the constellation Leo to that of Aquarius on the other side. Then we can go further and imagine a third plane at right angles again to this one, running from Taurus to Scorpio. We have now three planes at right angles to one another in Cosmic space.

These three planes are analogous to the three we have imagined described in Man. If we think of the plane we have denoted as that of Will—the plane namely which separates us behind and before—we have the plane of the Zodiac itself.

If we think of the plane running from Taurus to Scorpio, we have the plane of Thinking; that is, our Thought Plane would be co-ordinated to this plane. And the third plane would be that of Feeling. Thus we have divided Cosmic space by means of three planes, just as we divided Man in our first lecture.

What is primarily of importance is not simply to unlearn as quickly as possible the Copernican Cosmic system, but to enter into this concrete picture, to imagine Cosmic space itself so organised that one can distinguish in it three planes at right angles to one another, just as can be done in the case of Man.

The next question to arise for us must be: Is really the whole of Man to be thought of as forming an integral part of what appears to us as an outer Cosmogony, in which Man is included? We emphasised in the last lecture that the Earth with the Sun and other planets progress in a spiral. Such a statement is, of course, merely diagrammatic, for the spiral line itself is curved. That however does not concern us here; what is important for us at the moment is that the Earth as we have seen, follows the Sun in such a spiral, and the question is whether Man too is so interwoven in this movement that he is absolutely compelled to take part in it in any case; for if that be so, if he absolutely must follow completely, then there is no place at all for free will or for moral activity on his part. Let us not forget that we began our study with this very question: how to build a bridge leading from pure natural necessity to morality, to what takes place under the impulse of free will.

Here we can go no further if we rely only on the Copernican system; for what have we there? We picture the Earth upon which we stand; whether the Earth or the Sun goes rushing along is of no moment ... If Man is connected with all this in an absolute natural causality, it is impossible for him to develop free will. We must therefore put the question: Does the entire being of Man lie within this natural causality, or does the being of Man move up out of it at some point? We must not however put the question out of the mood of thought of the materialists of the nineteenth century, who remarked that so many people have died on Earth that it would not be possible to find room for all their souls. They wanted to know about the space required for souls. But the point in question really is: What meaning is there in asking about a place for souls?

We must above all clearly understand that the full sense and meaning of the events in the Universe—and movement is also an event—only becomes clear to us when we grasp it in definite cases. We distinguish in some way what takes place in the four realms,—what is above and below the plane of the Zodiac (Will), and what is right and left of the plane of Feeling; or again, we can consider what lies on this or on the other side of the plane of Thinking. We feel that something is connected with this differentiation, something of Cosmic happening, namely, that which manifests in recapitulation, as we have it for instance in what we designate as the “course of the year”. And we must now ask in a concrete way: How can we find a connection between Man and the yearly course of the outer Universe? Well, first of all we find that when Man descends from the spiritual world into the physical, he passes through conception. He remains for about nine months in the embryonic condition—that is to say, three months less than the year's course. We might be inclined to call this a very irregular proceeding. In his evolution Man seems to show, even at the very genesis of his physical earthly existence, that he pays no attention to the course of Cosmic events outside. This is however not the case. If we have the faculty for observing the child during the first three months of his earthly existence, we find that these first three months—which make the year complete—manifest in a very true sense a continuation of his embryonic life; what takes place in the brain, as well as other things happening with the little child, can from a certain aspect be considered as still belonging to its embryonic life. Thus we can say that in a certain respect the first year of human development can after all be identified with the year's course.

Then comes another year—or about a year. If we observe the child after the first year, we see that the second year is approximately the time of the growth of the milk teeth. We observe the child during the second year after its conception, and we find that this year corresponds on an average with the growth of the first teeth. Now let us ask, does this continue? No, it does not. The first ‘teething’ seems to represent an inner year of Man. And so it does, just as the first year is at the same time an inner year of Man. In the formation of the milk teeth, the Universe obviously works in the child. But then something different happens.

In a space of time seven times as long—it is indeed far from completion even then, but at least it begins its activity during this period—in a period seven times as long from birth, the force which pushes out the second teeth is at work in the child. Here something occurs which we can not connect with the world's course but with something that is withdrawn out of it, and works from the inner being of the child.

Here, then, we have a concrete instance. We have, first of all, in respect to one series of facts, the world organism projected into Man in the formation of his milk teeth. And then again, when we look at the permanent teeth, which grow forth from Man, we find that these are Man's own production. An inner human Cosmic system has placed them into the other Cosmic system. Here we have the first herald of Man's becoming free, in the fact that he engages in something which clearly shows his independence of the Universe; because although this process retains within it in Man's being the time-course of the Universe, Man has slowed it down within him, he has given the same process a different velocity, seven times as slow, thus taking seven times as long. Here we have the contrast between the inner being of Man and the outer being of the Universe.

Another independence of the outer Universe is very clearly demonstrated in the alternation between sleeping and waking. Positions of the Earth alternate in respect to certain constellations, but they alternate always with day and night. How is it with Man?

What does this alternation between waking and sleeping signify to us human beings? It means, roughly speaking, that we go about at one time with our Ego and astral body united with our etheric and physical bodies, and at another time with the Ego and the astral body separated from the etheric and physical bodies.

Now a man in the present cycle of civilisation, especially one who calls himself a civilised man, is no longer entirely dependent in this respect on the cycle of Nature. The cycle of waking and sleeping, in its measure of time, seems to resemble the cycle of Nature; but there are persons at the present time—I have known such!—who turn night into day and day into night. In short, Man can wrest himself free from connection with the world's course. The sequence in him of the sleeping and waking states shows however that he still has within him a copy of this conformity to law. The same is true of many phenomena of the human being. When we observe how Man alternates between waking and sleeping, and Nature alternates between day and night, and how Man is still today bound to the alternation of waking and sleeping though not to that of day and night, we must say: Man was at one time, as regards his inner conditions, bound to the outer course of the Universe, but he has broken away from it. Civilised Man today has almost entirely broken away from the course of outer Nature. He is really returning to it when he perceives, when he discovers with his intellect, that it is better for him to sleep at night rather than by day. It is not the case however, that night takes possession of Man in such a way that he must under any circumstances sleep. No civilised man really feels: ‘Night makes me sleep, day wakes me up.’ At most, if night falls and a lecture is still going on here, the two facts taken together may perhaps affect some in such a way they experience an absolute demand of Nature that they should fall asleep. These however are incidents not necessarily involved in our cosmogony.

Thus the point to observe is that Man has wrested himself away from the course of Nature, but that nevertheless in his periodicity he still shows a reflection of it. Let us see how transitions from one to the other condition manifest themselves. We may say that in our waking and sleeping we still distinctly show the course of Nature in picture, but that we have wrested ourselves free from it. In the appearance of the second teeth, we no longer show in chronological sequence a picture of the course of Nature such as is still expressed in the growth of the first teeth. When we receive our second teeth, a new course of Nature arises in us; for this is not in our control like sleeping and waking. Our free choice does not enter here. Here something appears belonging to Nature and yet not following the larger course of Nature, something which Man has for his own. And yet it is not within his free choice, it is inserted as a second natural organisation within the first.

In all these things, I am speaking of quite simple everyday matters, but it is a question of noticing them in the right way. We must now say to ourselves: There is a certain natural ‘happening’, within which is interwoven the growth of the first teeth. Let us draw it in diagram. Within this natural event or process, as a part of the process, goes forward the formation of Man's first teeth. Then we have another natural happening, one of Man's own, not all within the general happening of the world—the growth of the second teeth (red). To draw it, we must present it as a different stream. Yet the difference is not yet clear in the drawing, they both look alike. The fact is, we must represent

it in a quite different way if we want to depict the connection between the receiving of the first and second teeth; we must draw the first teeth seven times deeper in. If we draw them side by side, parallel, we have no picture of the relation of

the first teeth to the second; we only get a picture of the force upon which the growth of the first teeth depends by drawing it encircled by another force, upon which the growth of the second teeth depends. Here, through the difference of velocity, the necessity arises for the movement to curve. Thus, when we say that there is a star somewhere in space with another circling round it ... then through the simple fact of the revolution, something qualitative arises—a creative activity.

I might also say: we look at the growth of the first teeth and of the second; that must have something to do in Cosmic space, with certain forces, one of which circles round the other. I put this example before you, because from it you will see what it means to speak of concrete movements in space, and how empty is the kind of talk which says: Jupiter—or, it may be Saturn—is so and so many miles distant from the Sun and encircles it in such and such a line. That tells one nothing at all, it is an empty phrase. We can only know anything about facts like these when we unite some content with them, such as: the orbit of Jupiter is like this, the orbit of Saturn like that, and the revolution of the one serves the revolution of the other.

I have here merely pointed out the necessity for certain definite processes and happenings. Some of you may say that they are difficult to understand. Or perhaps you will not say so, but will consider that there is no need to discuss them! Not until people learn to study such things will they be able to progress to a definite and clear view of the Universe. And then they will give up what is presented so superficially in Copernicanism—the conception of the celestial movements solely in lines. Rather should an impulse enter humanity which says: It is necessary to be clear first about our own most elementary experiences before turning our attention to the outer mysteries of the Universe.

We only learn the significance of certain connections which we read from the stars, when we understand the corresponding processes in our organism; for what lies within our skin is no other than a reflection of the organism of the outer world. Thus if we draw a man in diagram, we have here the blood circulation (in diagram only) and we can trace its path. It is all in the inner being of Man. If we now go out into the Universe and look for the Sun, it is the Sun which corresponds to the heart within Man. What goes out from the heart through the body, or in point of fact out from the body to the heart, does in truth approximately resemble the movements connected with the course of the Sun. Instead of drawing abstract lines, we should look into the human being. Within his skin would be found what is outside in celestial space. Man too would be found to have his part in the Cosmic order. And, on the other hand, his independence of the Cosmic system would also be seen; and how he gains this independence little by little, as I have shown. We will speak further about this in the next lecture; for the present we must realise that we are dealing with it here merely in a diagrammatic way.

Look at the principal course of the blood-vessels in the human organism. Seen from above it is like a looped line. Instead of drawing it, we should follow the hieroglyphs inscribed in our own selves; for then we would learn to understand the nature of the qualities in the Universe outside. This we can only do when we are able to recognise and experience livingly the fact of which I have also spoken in public lectures, the fact namely, that the heart does not work like a pump driving the blood through the body, but that the heart is moved by the circulation, which is itself a living thing, and the circulation is in its turn conditioned by the organs. The heart, as can be followed in embryology, is really nothing more than a product of the blood circulation. If we can understand what the heart is in the human body, we shall learn to understand also that the Sun is not, as Newton calls it, the general cable-pulley which sends its ropes (called the force of gravitation) towards the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and so forth, drawing them by these unseen forces of attraction, or spraying out light to them, and the like; but that just as the movement of the heart is the product of the life-force of the circulation, so the Sun is no other than the product of the whole Planetary system. The Sun is the result, not the point of departure. The living co-operation of the solar system produces in the centre a hollow, which reflects as a mirror. That is the Sun! I have often said that the physicist would be greatly astonished if he could travel to the Sun and find there nothing of what he now imagines, but simply a hollow space; nay, even a hollow space of suction which annihilates everything within it. A space indeed that is less than hollow. A hollow space merely receives what is put into it; but the Sun is a hollow space of such a nature that anything brought to it is immediately absorbed and disappears. There in the Sun is not only nothing, but less than nothing. What shines to us in the light is the reflection of what first comes in from Cosmic space—just as the movement of the heart is, as it were, what is arrested there in the co-operation of the organs, in the blood-movement, through the activity of thirst and hunger and so forth.

If we understand the processes in the inner being of the organism, we can also understand from them the processes in outer Cosmic space. The abstract dimensions of space are only there to enable us to follow up these things in an easy indolent way. If we wish to follow them up in conformity with the truth, we must try to experience ourselves inwardly, and then turn outwards with inner understanding. They understand the Sun who understand the human heart; and so it is with the rest of Man's inner being.

Thus it is a matter of supreme moment to take the saying ‘Know Thyself’ seriously, and from that to pass on to the comprehension of the Universe. By a self-knowledge which embraces the whole Man, we shall understand the Universe outside Man.

You see we cannot get on so quickly with the construction of a cosmogony! In order to make a few of the features of this cosmogony clear, we can draw a spiral; but this does not yet show the actual state of things. For to describe a few more features, we must make the spiral itself move spirally; we must make the line itself curve. And even then we have not come far, for in order to describe certain facts such as the difference between the growth of the first year's teeth and the growth of the seven years' teeth we must describe a displacement of the line itself.

So you see that the construction of a Universe is not a thing that can be done very quickly. The wish to construct a cosmogony with a few lines must be relinquished, and man must learn to regard the present conception of the world as an absolute delusion.

This is intended as a preparatory study for what I mean to say in the next lecture. It had to be rather more difficult; but when we have overcome these initial difficulties, we shall have constructed the preliminary conditions for uniting the three important domains of life—Nature, Morality and Religion—by means of two corresponding bridges.

In expanding today what we have been discussing in the previous lectures I should like to take up the astronomical aspect of the Easter Festival; and in order to do this it will be necessary to touch upon some of the facts referring to the so-called secret of the Moon.

During all epochs in which people knew of the Mystery wisdom, the secret of the Moon was a familiar concept and was invariably associated with the being of man, in so far as the latter is related to the whole cosmos. We must keep clearly in mind that in his entirety man is related to the whole cosmos, just as he is connected with the Earth as regards his physical body. Now, it is a concomitant of the materialistic age that of the vast cosmos, which expresses its spirituality in the form of the fixed star constellations and the movements of the planets, nothing has remained in human consciousness but the outer appearance of the stars and the computation of their movements (if they are planets) and so forth.

The manner in which astronomy is studied today is the same as it would be if one studied the relative measurements and the outer conditions of movement in the human organism, remaining unaware that a psycho-spiritual element pervades the physical organism and comes to expression in these measurements and conditions of movement.

In the human being a unified psycho-spiritual element manifests itself, held together by the ego. But spiritual observation discloses that the cosmic organism expresses itself, not in a unified psycho-spiritual entity, but in a multiplicity, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings that reveal themselves through the forms of the fixed star constellations, through the movements of the planets, through the light raying forth from the stars, and so on.

Inner man is related to this spiritual multiplicity in the stars as is physical man to Earth substances that can serve as nourishment. And man's closest connection with the universe has to do with what we can call the secret of the Moon.

External observation of the Moon shows it to be in a state of metamorphosis as seen from the Earth. We see the full luminous face, we see it half-illuminated, then one-quarter—and there is also that stage in which it entirely withdraws from outer view, called the stage of new Moon. And then we have again the return to full Moon.

All this is nowadays explained as though the Moon were merely some kind of a body moving about in cosmic space, illuminated by the Sun from different directions and hence presenting various aspects. But that does not exhaust what the Moon means to the Earth, and especially to Earth men. In the case of the Moon in particular we must understand that if we look out at something as readily perceptible in its physical surfaces as, say, the full Moon—that is, something that presents a physical aspect—this aspect embodies something totally different from what is inherent in a new Moon. True, the new Moon cannot achieve direct physical expression on account of correlated cosmic conditions; but we must not conclude that because it does not express itself as a physical phenomenon, it has no effect. When our knowledge of the firmament tells us that it is new Moon, this means that the Moon is present in an invisible but all the more spiritual way than when appearing as full Moon in physical light. So the Moon is present—now wholly physical, now wholly spiritual, and we have the rhythmic alternation of its physical and spiritual expression.

And now, in order to understand the crux of the matter, we must recall a fact with which you are familiar from my Occult Science, an Outline, namely, that at one time the Moon was within the Earth: it was part of the Earth body. It passed out of the Earth and became a satellite, as the term goes. In other words, it split off from the Earth and now circles it. When it was one with the Earth its influences upon human beings were exerted from the Earth.

Naturally, in the time when man existed and developed upon an Earth that still contained the Moon, he was a very different being. When this Moon withdrew, the Earth became poorer by exactly what the Moon represented; and henceforth the lower

part of man was formed and held fast by the other forces—no longer by the Earth-and-Moon forces, but by the former only. On the other hand, the influences that emanated from within the Earth at the time it still contained the Moon now act upon man from without, from the Moon.

We can put it this way: formerly the Moon forces came in contact first with the lower limbs—the feet and legs—and then streamed upward from below; but since the Moon withdrew from the Earth they act in the opposite direction, from the head downward. But this implies that the task of these forces has become a very different one, and the nature of this task comes into evidence in the experiences man has when he descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly life. When he has completed the period between death and a new birth and has absolved all the requirements of soul and spirit demanded during that period, he prepares to descend to Earth, to unite with the bodily-physical principle transmitted to him by his father and mother. But before it is possible for his ego and astral body to unite with the physical body he must provide himself with an etheric body, which he attracts from the surrounding cosmos.

This process has radically changed since the Moon withdrew from the Earth. Before that time man needed forces, when approaching the Earth again, that would enable him to shape the all-pervading ether into the form of an etheric body around his ego and astral body. These forces he drew, as he approached the Earth, from the Moon which was then within it. He still does; but the point is that since the splitting off of the Moon they come to him from outside the Earth. This means that immediately before entering the Earth life he must appeal to the power of the Moon forces—that is, to something cosmic—if he would build his etheric body.

This etheric body must be formed in such a way that it has, as it were, an outer side and an inner side. Let us think of it quite graphically, formed with an outer side and an inner side. When the outer side is being formed the forces of light are needed, for, like other things of substance, the etheric body is fashioned principally out of the flooding light of the cosmos. But sunlight cannot be employed for this purpose: it does not provide the forces that would enable man to build his etheric body. This calls for sunlight that is reflected by the Moon and thereby radically altered; and all the light coming to us from the Moon—in fact, all the light shining from the Moon into the cosmos—contains the forces that enable man to form the outer side of his etheric body when he descends to Earth.

And on the other hand, the forces man needs to form the inner side of his etheric body are the spiritual emanations of the new Moon; so that his ability to form the outer and the inner side is related to this rhythm of the outer light and dark of the Moon.

But all this that the Moon forces achieve for man, as it were, goes back to the fact that the Moon is truly not the mere physical body about which modern science tells us fairy tales, but a body wholly permeated by spirituality, comprising a multiplicity of spiritual beings. I have repeatedly explained that when the Moon withdrew from the Earth, it was not merely physical matter that streamed out into cosmic space: those ancient beings, man's primordial teachers, who lived on the Earth not in physical bodies but in a spiritual form, these passed with the Moon out into the universe and there founded a sort of Moon colony. We have therefore to distinguish between the physico-etheric and the psycho-spiritual constituents of the Moon, remembering that again the latter is not a unity but a multiplicity.

Now, the entire life of this spirituality in the Moon depends upon the manner in which those beings observe cosmic conditions from their point of view, from the point of view of the Moon. Figuratively expressed: the spiritual beings of the Moon direct their gaze primarily to what is of greatest importance for them, to the planets of our orbit; and upon the inferences of these observations depends all that takes place on the Moon, as well as all that contributes to providing man in the right way with the forces needed for forming his etheric body.

Certain of the Mysteries knew this. It was ancient Mystery knowledge in some of the sanctuaries that the constellations and the movements in the planetary system were observed from the Moon, and the actions of the Moon beings determined accordingly. This was expressed by relating, in human consciousness, the Moon with the forces of other planets, the Moon being the point from which are determined those cosmic contexts that are linked with the forming of the human etheric body. This is reflected in the names of the days of the week:

Thus we see how everything pertaining to the point of view of the Moon was brought into relation with all that tended to quicken man's awareness of the planets in connection with reckoning time. And the burden of the admonition given in the old Mysteries was something as follows: Remember, oh man, that before descending to Earth you needed forces engendered in the Moon by the act of the Moon-beings in observing the other planets. For the configuration of your etheric body, when you descended to earthly life, you are indebted to the Moon's share in what is expressed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and so forth.

So on the one hand we have the rhythmical passage of the Moon through light and darkness in its course around the Earth, and on the other we find the whole sequence of the planets inscribed in human consciousness. The Mysteries even added the following: Due to the ability of the Moon-beings to behold Mars, the capacity for speech is organized into man's etheric body, and through their observation of Mercury, the capacity for movement is concentrated there.

If we wish to employ these secrets of the Moon as a medium of expression, this can be done in an entirely different form: speech becomes eurythmy. It comes about as follows: if we study the secrets of speech by finding out what the Moon-beings observed when questioning Mars, and then discover what changes these observations undergo when the Moon-beings turn to Mercury, then speech becomes eurythmy. In other words, if we transform the Moon-beings' Mars experiences into their Mercury experiences, the human capacity for speech becomes the capacity for eurythmy. That expresses the matter cosmically.

The current engendering in man the capacity for wisdom derives from the Moon-beings' experiences with Jupiter; what streams through the soul as love and beauty, from Venus; and that which permeates the etheric body with inner soul warmth is gained from the experience acquired by the Moon-beings' observation of Saturn.

There remains that which must be kept away—pushed back, as it were—to prevent its interfering with the formation of the etheric body immediately before the descent to Earth: that which comes from the Sun. From the Sun—or from the observation of the Sun—derive the forces from which man must be protected if he is to become complete in himself through the integration of the etheric body—that is, through protective forces.

It can be said that in this way we learn what occurs on the Moon, and at the same time we learn how the human etheric body is formed and constituted when man descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence. Those are the facts connected with the secret of the Moon. Nowadays we can recount such matters, but in certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely narrated but actually experienced. What I shall now write on the blackboard was not only known; it was an inner experience.

By means of initiation into the Mysteries, of which I spoke yesterday, it was possible to get beyond looking outward and listening outward with eyes and ears in the physical vicinity of the Earth. It was possible to become free of the physical body, to keep aloof from it, and to live only in the etheric body; and then the initiate lived with all that has been described. He did not live with the speech formed in the larynx, but with the speech resounding in Mars as cosmic language. He moved in conformity with the way in which Mercury guided the movements in the cosmos: not merely with feet and legs did he move, but in accord with the manner in which Mercury directs the movements of the human being. Nor did he possess that wisdom so laboriously acquired during childhood and early youth—really an unwisdom in the materialistic age—but he lived actually in the wisdom of Jupiter, because he could unite with the Moon-beings who observed Jupiter.

This sort of initiation really meant that the mystic was wholly in the light shining from the Moon. He had left the Earth, no longer a creature of flesh and blood, and lived in moonlight modified by forces from the other planets. During these periods of spiritual observation he simply became a light-being of the Moon—not in a symbolical sense or in any way to be thought of as abstract, but rather, as a man might today go to Basel and back, fully conscious of a reality, knowing he had experienced something real. The mystic was equally conscious of reality when he was led through the initiation ritual to the Moon-beings.

The initiate knew that for the time being he had taken leave of his physical body, that his soul and spirit had passed into the light-sphere of the Moon, and that he had borne a light-body; and because he had been united with the Moon-beings he had looked out into planetary space, truly able to behold what could be revealed in this vast realm.

And what was that? Well, among other things, he observed principally that from the Sun there emanated the forces of beings that must not be allowed to intervene in the building of the human etheric body. The Sun appeared as something that tended to dissolve, destroy the etheric body; hence he knew that forces to be received by the Sun-beings must not proceed from his etheric body, but from his higher principles, from his ego and astral body. Only upon these must the Sun forces be allowed to act. So he knew that for the forming of his etheric body he must not look to the Sun but to the planets, and that he must turn to the Sun for his astral body and especially for his ego and its whole inner strength. The second point, then, that became manifest through this recurring initiation into the secret of the Moon was this, that in what pertained to his etheric body man belonged to the planets; but for the strengthening of his astral body and most of all his ego he must look to the Sun.

This initiation was really of such a nature as to make the mystic one with the moonlight; but it was by means of his own moonlight existence that he looked into the Sun.

And now he reflected as follows: the Sun sends its light to the Moon because this must not be imparted to man directly. The result is moonlight in conjunction with the planetary forces, and out of this the etheric body is formed.—That was the secret known to him who was initiated in this way. He also knew to what extent he bore within him the power of the spiritual Sun: he had seen it, become conscious of it; and this was the stage of initiation at which the initiate became a Christ bearer—that is, a Sun-being bearer, not a Sun-being recipient. Just as the Moon itself, when at full, is a sunlight bearer, so man became a Christ bearer, a christophoros. This initiation leading to the stage of christophoros was thus an absolutely real experience.

Now imagine this actual experience through which the mystic sped away from the Earth, as it were, and ascended as an initiated Earth-man to the light-being; and imagine this inner, human Easter experience of former times transformed into a cosmic festival. In later ages men no longer knew that such things could happen; that man is really able to withdraw from Earth conditions, unite with those of the Moon, and from the Moon behold the Sun. But the memory of it was to be preserved, and this we have in the Easter Festival.

The ability to experience all this did not pass over into the later consciousness that was becoming materialistic; instead it turned into an abstract conception. Men no longer looked inward and said, I can unite with the moonlight. They looked at the Moon, the full Moon, and said, It is not a question of my aspiring upward: it is the Earth that strives to ascend. And when is this effort at its height? When spring begins, when there burst forth from the surface of the Earth all the forces that had lain dormant in seeds and plants under the ground. On the Earth they become plants, but they go further: they stream out into cosmic space.

The old Mysteries employed this image: man can most easily attain to the Moon-Sun initiation and become a christophoros in the season when the inner Earth forces, by means of the stems and leaves of plants, carry out of the ground what then streams forth from the Earth into the cosmos; for then he floats, as it were, on the forces that in spring ray out from the Earth and up to the Moon. But it must be the light of the full Moon.

All this, then, became a memory, but it also became abstract ... It must be the light of the full Moon. ... Subconsciously, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could be a human experience, people imagined that something or other—not man himself—streamed toward the full Moon, the first one after the beginning of spring. And what can this full Moon do now? It beholds the Sun; that is, the first day dedicated to the Sun: the first succeeding Sunday. Just as once a christophoros, from the viewpoint of the Moon, beheld the Sun-being, so now the Moon beholds the Sun—that is, its symbolization in Sunday.

We have the beginning of spring, March 21st, and the forces of the Earth are burgeoning forth into the universe. We must await the proper observer, the full Moon.

March 21st—full Moon—Sunday.

What does the Moon observe? The Sun; and the following Sunday is fixed as Easter Sunday. This is an abstract way of determining the date, surviving from a very real Mystery event that in former times frequently occurred for many men.

That is actually what our present spring Easter Festival has come to be. It represents a Mystery act that has often been performed in spring; but it is not the one I described day before yesterday. The latter led man to a comprehension of the death event. I explained that the idea of resurrection, clarified by something like the Adonis celebration in the fall, really led men to the experience of death, to the spiritual resurrection after about three days; and this process of resurrection really belongs in the autumn, for the reasons I gave.

The process I described today is a different one, performed in other Mysteries for certain initiations—those of the Sun and Moon; and this process confronted the neophyte with life's beginning. So you see, we can look back at a period in which certain Mysteries saw the descent of man from the pre-earthly to the earthly life, while others dwelt on the ascent in the spirit. But in later epochs, when the living substance of man's relation to the cosmic spirit could no longer be discerned, men went so far as simply to combine the autumn Mystery of the ascent with the spring Mystery of the descent into one festival.

Thus the confusion manifesting itself in the course of human evolution is evidence of the gradual effect of materialism: not only has the latter engendered false beliefs, but it has completely confused men's minds concerning an issue that at one period of human events existed, I might say, in a sacred order that caused mankind at the approach of autumn to celebrate a cosmic festival. But this in turn pointed to a Mystery act that evoked the thought: Nature falls into barrenness, it wilts and dies away, and this is like the physical dying of man; but while in Nature only the perishable is seen to be active, there lives in man the eternal, which must now be observed spiritually, disregarding the course of Nature, as the element of resurrection in the spiritual world after death. The spring Mysteries made it clear that Nature is conquered by the spirit, that, in turn, the spirit acts out of the cosmos, and that matter germinates and sprouts from the ground because it is driven by the spirit.

But this was intended to remind men—not of their passing into the spirit through death, but of their origin in the spirit, their descent from the spiritual world. Precisely where Nature begins to ascend, man was to remember his descent into the physical; and where Nature disintegrates, man was to contemplate his ascent, his spiritual resurrection. There is no doubt that such an understanding of man's relation to the cosmos intensified his soul life enormously.

But this varied according to the locality. In olden times some were definitely inclined to be autumn peoples and others rather spring peoples. Among the former were to be found the Adonis Mysteries; among the latter, other Mysteries concerned with what I have set forth today. And only those seekers after wisdom of whom it is correctly reported that, like Pythagoras, they moved about from place to place, from one Mystery to another, only those enjoyed the fullness of human experience. They would pass from a sanctuary where they could participate in the autumn secret, which is really the Sun secret, to one where the spring secret was revealed, the Moon secret. For this reason it was reported again and again of the consummate old initiates that they traveled from one sanctuary to another. It can truly be said of these that they had a certain inner experience of the year and its festivals. An old initiate of that sort could say to himself, I come to a place where the Adonis Festivals are celebrated, and I can witness the cosmic autumn and the rays of the spiritual Sun at the beginning of winter's night; I wander to another, where the Mysteries of spring are observed, and I can behold the secret of the Moon.—Thus he acquired an inner knowledge of all that relates to the whole meaning of the year.

You see, our Easter Festival has really had something saddled on it that is not right. It should really be a spring commemoration of burial; and this commemoration of burial in the spring should at the same time be an incentive to work, such as the more primitive man needed during the summer time: that is what such burial festivals were in their appeal to the human spirit. Easter was a festival of admonition regarding the work of summer, just as the autumn festival of the resurrection of the spiritual world was a festival celebrated in the season when the labor was completed. But it was of the utmost importance for man's soul and spirit that, when his work was finished, he should become aware of and inwardly experience the eternal in himself by contemplating the resurrection in the spiritual world, the days that follow upon death.

In passing, then, from Earth secrets to cosmic secrets, from Earth wisdom to cosmic wisdom, we can come to know what I should like to call the inner structure of the order of the year, as indicated by the festivals. But much of what had been hidden in them has disappeared.

Today I wanted to present this subject to you by considering the conditions of the firmament itself. Tomorrow I shall endeavor, as far as time permits, to penetrate still deeper into it in the light of certain Mystery sanctuaries.

Continuing our subject of the last two lectures, I shall now indicate the astronomical aspect of the Easter Festival. To this end it will be first be necessary to touch upon some of the facts relating to the so-called secret of the Moon.

In all ages, wherever there was knowledge of the Mystery Wisdom, men spoke of the secret of the Moon which was connected with the being of man, inasmuch as man himself, in his full nature, is connected with the whole Cosmos, just as he is connected, with respect to his physical body, with the Earth. Now with the epoch of materialism it has come about that of these far spaces of the Cosmos whose spiritual life is expressed in the forms of the constellations and in the movements of the wandering stars, nothing at all has remained in human consciousness save the external appearance of the stars, the calculation of their movements if they are planets, and so forth.

To study these things in the way of modern astronomy is just as though one were to consider the outer measurements and proportions and conditions of movement of the human body in complete unconsciousness of the fact that a soul-and-spirit permeates this physical body. It is just as though one were to forget that in the proportions and movements of this body a soul-and-spirit comes to expression.

Now in the human being a single soul-and-spirit gathered together in an Ego makes its appearance. But in the organism of the universe, spiritually seen and considered, it is not a single soul-and-spirit that comes to expression, but a multiplicity. It is an immeasurable, infinite multiplicity of spiritual beings who express themselves in the forms of the constellations, in the movements of the planets, in the radiating light of the stars, and so forth.

All the multitude of spiritual beings who live in the stars are connected with the human being's inner life, just as the substances of the Earth environment available for human nourishment are connected with the physical man on Earth. And the first and nearest relationship of man to the great universe has to do with what we may call the secret of the Moon.

Outwardly regarded, the Moon appears from the earthly aspect in constant metamorphosis. At the present moment we see the full disc of the Moon shining brightly. Then we see it differently and have to assume that it is partially illumined, half illumined, quarter illumined, and so on. Moreover there is that appearance of the Moon when it withdraws entirely from our external vision, the time we call the New Moon, and at length we have again the return to the Full Moon.

Nowadays all this is explained as though the Moon were some material body moving out there in cosmic space, illumined in various directions by the Sun and thus showing itself to our vision in varying shapes and forms. But this by no means exhausts what the Moon is for the Earth and notably for humanity on Earth. For the Moon especially we must clearly understand the following.—When we look at something that represents itself to us so evidently in physical surfaces as the Full Moon, showing us a physical aspect, we see something altogether different in its appearance from what it is when it reveals itself as the New Moon. The New Moon, through all the cosmic relationships in which it stands, cannot reveal itself directly. We must now, however, imagine that in its influence the Moon is absent when it does not reveal itself as an outward phenomenon. At the times when through the whole world-relationships we become conscious of the appearance of the New Moon—at these times the Moon is present invisibly and for this very reason is present in a more spiritual way than when it appears to us in the physical light as the Full Moon. Thus the Moon is present, now in a fully physical way and now again in a fully spiritual way. We have indeed the perpetual rhythmic alternation between the physical manifestation and the spiritual manifestation of the Moon.

To understand what this really means we must look back to the event which is described, for instance, in my book, Occult Science. The Moon was once within the Earth; it belonged to the Earth body. It went forth from the Earth body and became a satellite as we say, or accompanying planet of the Earth. It split off from the Earth and circles around the Earth.

Now in the time when it was united with the Earth it influenced the human being from the Earth. Man was of course a very different being when he stood and evolved on an Earth which still had the Moon within its body. The Earth was impoverished by all that the Moon contains when the Moon went forth from it; and now from beneath, man is shaped and held fast by other forces, namely, by the Earth forces alone, no longer by the Earth-and-Moon forces together. On the other hand that which worked upon him from the Earth, from within outward when the Moon was still within the Earth, now works upon him from without inward, namely from the Moon.

Thus we may say: The Moon forces once rayed through the human being, impinging first upon his limbs, upon his feet and legs and then streaming through him from below upwards. But since the Moon has left the Earth, the Moon forces work on him inversely, from the head downwards. And as a result the Moon forces now have a quite different task for man than they had before. How does this manifest itself? It manifests itself as follows. When man descends from the pre-earthly into this earthly life he undergoes certain definite experiences. He has passed through the time between death and a new birth. He has absolved, so far as his soul-and-spirit is concerned, all that must be absolved between death and a new birth, and now he prepares to descend to Earth to unite with the physical bodily nature that is given to him by the father and the mother. Yet before he can find the possibility for his Ego and astral body to unite with the physical, he must first clothe himself in an etheric body which he draws into him from the surrounding Cosmos.

It is this process which has changed fundamentally since the time when the Moon left the Earth. Before the departure of the Moon, when man had absolved the life between death and a new birth and was approaching the Earth once more, he needed certain forces with which to attract and incorporate in the form of an etheric body around the Ego and astral body, the ether which is scattered through the whole universe. These forces which he received as he approached this earthly life, he received from the Moon which was then within the Earth. Since the Moon left the Earth man has received the forces which he needs to build his etheric body from outside the Earth, namely from the Moon which is now split off. Thus immediately before his entry into the earthly life man must have recourse to what lies inherent in the Moon forces, that is to say, to a cosmic principle, in order to build his etheric body.

Now this etheric body must be built in such a way that it has, so to speak, an outer and an inner aspect. When man forms the outer aspect of this etheric body he needs the forces of the light, for along with other substances the etheric body is created above all out of the flowing light of the Cosmos. But Sunlight is useless for this purpose; Sunlight can provide no forces enabling the human body to form his etheric body. For this, the light shining from the Sun to the Moon and raying back again from the Moon is needed. And by this process of reflection the Sunlight is essentially transformed. In effect, all the light that rays forth from the Moon into the Cosmos contains the force whereby man as he descends is enabled to form the outer aspect of his etheric body. On the other hand all that rays forth spiritually from the Moon when it is a New Moon, all this rays out into the Cosmos the forces which man needs to form the inner aspect of his etheric body. This rhythm, therefore, of the external shining of the Moon and of its darkening enables man to form the outer and the inner side of his etheric body.

Now what the Moon forces thus do for man essentially depends upon the fact that the Moon is not the mere physical body of which modern science tells its tales, but is permeated everywhere by spirituality. The Moon itself in fact contains a multitude of spiritual beings.

I have often explained how these things are. The Moon once separated from the Earth. But it was not only physical matter that went forth into cosmic space. There were also those Beings who lived in ancient time upon the Earth, not in a physical body but in a spiritual form, the Beings who were the primeval Teachers of mankind. These too journeyed forth with the Moon into the Cosmos and there founded a kind of lunar colony. Thus we must distinguish in the Moon the physical and etheric from the soul-and-spirit, only that the soul-and-spirit is not a unity but a multiplicity of Beings.

Now all the spiritual life in the Moon depends upon the way in which the Beings who inhabit it look out into the universe around. If I may express myself pictorially I would say: the spiritual Beings of the Moon turn their gaze to begin with on what for them is most important, namely, upon the wandering stars that belong to our planetary system. And all that happens on the Moon—including all that happens in order that man may properly receive the forces he needs to build up his etheric body—all this depends on the results of observation arrived at by the Beings in the Moon who, living as it were within the Moon, look out and observe around them the stars of our planetary system, Mercury, Sun, and so forth.

Knowledge of this was contained in certain ancient Mysteries. They knew that constellations, relationships and movements of the planetary system belonging to our Earth were observed from the Moon and that the deeds of the Moon Beings were determined accordingly. They not only knew, but they expressed the fact; for they brought these Moon forces into the consciousness of mankind in relation to the forces of the other planets, taking the Moon, as it were, as the point whence the cosmic relationships connected with the forming of the human etheric body are determined. They did so in the days of the week: Moon—Monday. The Moon in its observation has to do with Mars—Mars day—Tuesday; with Mercury—Mercury day, Mercredi, Wednesday; with Jupiter—Jupiter is the Germanic Thor or Donar—Thursday. Then again with Venus, the Germanic Freya—Friday; and with Saturn Saturday, and at length with the Sun itself. The Sun cannot influence the forming of the etheric body with its own forces directly, but in the reflection from the Moon it plays its part—Sunday.

Thus the facts related to the standpoint of the Moon were taken as the starting-point in bringing home the planetary system to the consciousness of man in the division of time. It was as though they meant to say in the ancient Mysteries: “Oh Man, remember that before you came down to the Earth you had need of the forces which are fashioned on the Moon when the Moon Beings look out upon the other Beings of the Planetary system. You owe to what the Moon receives from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday . . . the peculiar configuration which your etheric body can assume when descending into this earthly life.”

Thus we have on the one hand the rhythmic course of the Moon around our Earth through light and darkness, and on the other hand we have recorded in the consciousness of man the whole succession of the planets. And the Mysteries also proclaimed the knowledge that through the fact of the Moon Beings turning their gaze to Mars man receives the faculty of speech incorporated into his etheric body. Through the fact that the Moon Beings can turn their gaze to Mercury, man can receive the faculty of movement concentrated into his etheric body.

To speak for a moment in terms of these Moon secrets, we may express in quite a different form how Eurythmy arises out of speech. We may say, Eurythmy is born from speech, when having discovered the mysteries of speech by letting the Moon Beings tell us the observations that they make when they gaze on Mars, we hear from them how these observations change when they now turn their gaze to Mercury. That is to say, when we transform the Mars experiences of the Moon Beings into their Mercury experiences we receive from the faculty of spoken sound in man the faculty of Eurythmy. This is the cosmic aspect of it.

Then we come to that which permeates the human being with the faculty of wisdom. This we receive through the experiences of the Moon Beings with Jupiter. And that which flows through the human being by way of love and beauty in his soul, this we receive through the experiences of the Moon Beings with Venus. And what they experience by observing Saturn instils into the etheric body the inner warmth of soul which man requires. And at length we come to something that must be warded off as it were, which must be held aloof lest it should disturb and mar the forming of the etheric body. It is that which proceeds directly from the Sun before man's descent to Earth. Thus from the Sun—or the beholding of the Sun—proceed the forces from which the human being must be protected so that he may become a human being self-contained through the incorporation of the etheric body.

Thus we learn to recognise what happens on the Moon and by this we also learn to recognise how the human etheric body is formed when man descends from the pre-earthly into this earthly life. These are the things that relate to the secret of the Moon.

Such things as these can be told today; but in certain ancient Mysteries they were not merely told, they were consciously experienced. Men did not merely know these things; they inwardly discovered them.

 Monday Tuesday: Speech Wednesday: Movement Thursday: Wisdom Friday: Love, Beauty Saturday: Inner warmth of soul Sunday: Protecting forces (reflected from the Moon) 

By Initiation into the Mysteries of which I told you yesterday, man could get beyond the mere looking outward through the eyes or listening outward through the ears, to see and hear the physical earthly environment. He could free himself from his physical body and live in his etheric body. He could hold himself apart from the physical body and live in the etheric body only. And when he thus lived in the etheric body he lived with all the things of which I have just spoken, he lived not with the speech that is formed through the physical larynx but with the speech that resounds in Mars as cosmic speech. He moved in the way that Mercury guides the movements in the Cosmos; he moved not with the physical feet and legs but in the sense in which Mercury guides the movements of the human being. Nor did he have the wisdom that is acquired with such pains in childhood and adolescence, a wisdom which in this materialistic age is, to speak truly, an unwisdom. He lived directly within the wisdom of Jupiter; he lived in the wisdom of Jupiter because he could unite with the Moon Beings who observed Jupiter. When he was initiated in this way man was altogether within the Moon-radiating light. He had left the Earth. He was not a being of flesh and blood on Earth, he had gone away from the Earth and lived as a being in the Moon light. But this Moon light was configurated, differentiated, modified by what lived in the other planets of our planetary system.

At the time of spiritual observations in such Mysteries man did indeed become a light being of the Moon. I do not mean it in a symbolic sense or conceived abstractly, but just as the ordinary man of today, if he has gone to Basle and come back again, is conscious of the reality of it, he knows he has experienced something quite real—so was man conscious of a reality when through the Initiation rite he had paid his visit to the Moon Beings. He knew that he had taken leave of his physical body for a while. With his soul and spirit he had gone out into the light-radiating spheres of the Moon Beings, clothed in a light body, and through his unison with the Moon Beings he had looked out into the far planetary spaces, he had really been able to observe all that could be revealed to him in the far spaces of the planetary system.

And what did he see? This in the main—all the other things he observed too, but this he observed above all—he saw that from the Sun there come the forces of Beings who may have nothing to do with the form of the etheric body of man. He looked up to the Sun as to something that had a dissolving, destructive effect for the etheric body. By this experience he knew that the forces which were received by the Sun Beings must take their start not from the etheric body but from the higher members of man's nature, from the Ego and the astral body. The Sun forces must be allowed to work only upon these higher members. Thus he knew that for the human etheric body he cannot turn to the Sun, for the etheric body he must turn to the planets.

It is for the astral body and especially for the human Ego that he will turn to the Sun. He knew that for the full inner force of the Ego, of the “I am”, he must go to the Sun. This was the second great experience in the Initiation that took its start from the Moon Mystery. This was the second thing. Man learned that for the etheric body he belongs to the planetary system, whereas for the inner force and permeation of his Ego above all and of his astral body, he must look up to the Sun. Such indeed was this initiation. Man himself became one with the Moonlight. But through the Moonlight life of his own being he gazed into the Sun. And now he said to himself: The Sun sends its light to the Moon because he may not give it to man directly. Thence we have the Moonlight in unison with the planetary forces and from these we build up our etheric body.

This secret was known to him who was thus initiated. And so he knew to what extent he bore within him the force of the spiritual Sun, for he had seen it in his vision. He had gained a consciousness of how he bore the spiritual forces of the Sun within him, and this in effect was the degree of Initiation whereby man became a Christ-Bearer, that is to say, a bearer of the Sun Being, not a receiver of the Sun Being, but a bearer of the Sun Being. Just as the Moon itself when it is Full Moon is a bearer of Sunlight, so man became a bearer of the Christ, a Christophoros.

This initiation whereby a man became Christophoros was an absolutely real experience.

And now imagine this real experience whereby man sped away from the Earth and rose to the Light-Being as earthly man upon the way of Initiation—imagine this inner human Easter experience of former times transformed into a cosmic Festival. In later times men no longer knew that such a thing could happen. They no longer knew that man can really go forth from the earthly realm, unite himself with the Moon nature and from the Moon behold the Sun. But a certain remembrance of it had been preserved. This remembrance in effect was preserved in the Easter Festival.

For the real way in which man can experience these things was not transmitted to the later, increasingly materialistic consciousness. In abstract idea however it was transmitted. Man no longer looked into himself and said: “I can unite myself with the Moonlight”, but he looked up to the Moon, to the Full Moon. Gazing upward to the Full Moon he said, not “I myself can evolve up yonder”, but “The Earth strives yonder”. When does it do so most of all? It is when the Springtime begins, when the forces that were hitherto with the seeds, with the plants within the Earth, stream forth from the surface of the Earth. On Earth they become plants, but they go further. They stream outward into the far spaces of the Cosmos.

In the ancient Mysteries they used this image: When the forces of the Earth bear outward through stem and leaf of plant that which is raying forth from the Earth into the Cosmos, then man can most easily attain the Moon-Sun Initiation and become Christophoros. For then, as it were, he can float upward to the Moon—borne upward by the forces that in Springtime ray forth from Earth to Moon. Only he must enter into the Full Moonlight.

All this afterwards became a remembrance but it grew abstract—“he must enter into the Full Moonlight”. Subconsciously therefore, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could become a human experience, it was conceived that something or other, not man himself, goes out towards the Full Moon, the first Full Moon after the beginning of Springtime. And what can this Full Moon of Springtime do? It looks out towards the Sun, that is to say it looks towards the first Sun-consecrated day, towards the first Sunday that follows after it. As in former times the Christophoros from his Moon standpoint looked out and gazed upon the Being of the Sun, so now the Moon looks to the Sun, that is to say, to its symbolisation in the Sunday.

Thus we have first the beginning of Spring, the 21^st of March. The forces of the Earth are sprouting forth into the universe.

But we must await the coming of the right observer, namely, the Full Moon.

21^st March—Full Moon—Sun day.

And what does the Full Moon observe? He observes the Sun. We await the first Sun-day after the Full Moon and that is Easter Sunday. Thus all that is left of a real process of the Mysteries which many human beings often underwent in ancient Mysteries—all that has remained is an abstract fixation of time.

And so it is indeed with this Easter Festival. Our present spiritual Festival of Easter represents an event in the Mysteries which was indeed everywhere enacted in the Springtime. But this is a different Mystery from the one I described the day before yesterday. The event in the Mysteries which I described the day before yesterday led the human being to understand the fact of death. I told you of how the idea of resurrection was brought home to man by such festivals as the Adonis Festival in Autumn time. It really led the human being into the experience of death and into the resurrection in the Spirit after about three days. This event of resurrection truly belongs to the Autumn time for the reasons which I explained in that lecture.

The process which I have described today is a different one. It was celebrated or enacted in other Mysteries for certain Initiations, namely for the Sun and Moon Initiation. And this later process confronted the human being with the beginning of his life.

Thus we look back to ancient times when the descent of man from pre-earthly life into this earthly life was recognised in certain Mysteries, while the ascent, the resurrection in the Spirit, was recognised in other Mysteries, namely in the Autumn Mysteries.

In later days man was no longer able to penetrate the living reality of this his relationship to the Spiritual in the Cosmos. And at length things went so far that the Autumn Mysteries of resurrection were simply superimposed on the Springtime Mystery of the descent. The confusion that thus arose in the course of human evolution shows how deeply materialism worked in the course of time. For it not only created false opinions but brought mankind into real confusion with regard to those things which, if I may put it so, were once in sacred, holy order in the course of human earthly life. Once upon a time there was a sacred order in these things. As Autumn came near, mankind celebrated a Cosmic Festival, a Festival which pointed to a real process of the Mysteries. Nature, they said, is fading and dying away, Nature is laid waste. It is like the gradual death of man as to his physical life. But whereas when we look at Nature we see only the transitory at work in her, in men there lives the Eternal which we must now behold apart from what takes place in outer Nature, for we must behold it in the spirit as that which is resurrected after death in the spiritual world.

And through the Mysteries of springtime it was made clear to man that Nature herself is overcome by the Spiritual; the spiritual works in again from the Cosmos, the Physical springs and sprouts forth from the Earth, because it is impelled by the Spiritual. This however was to lead man to remember, not how they passed through death into the Spiritual, but how they have come hither and descended out of the Spiritual. Just when Nature is springing and ascending, man was to remember his descent into the Physical; and again when Nature is declining man was to remember his ascent, his resurrection in the Spiritual. And indeed it infinitely deepened the life of the soul thus to experience how man is related to the Cosmos.

These things varied according to the different regions of the Earth. In ancient times there were indeed some peoples who were more Autumn peoples, and others who were more Springtime peoples. Within the Autumn peoples there were the Mysteries of Adonis, while in the Springtime peoples there were other Mysteries related to what I have described today. And only those seekers after knowledge of whom it is truly related how they journeyed from place to place, from one Mystery to another, like Pythagoras, only they underwent the real totality of human experience. From a place of the Mysteries where they could behold the Autumn secret which is the real secret of the Sun, they wandered to another place where they could behold the Springtime secret, that is the secret of the Moon. Hence of the greatest Initiates of ancient times it is again and again related how they wandered from one place to another of the Mysteries. And we may truly say that those old Initiates in a certain sense experienced the year in their inner life, the year with its sacred Festivities. An old Initiate might say: “When I come to such and such a place where Adonis Festivals are celebrated, I behold the cosmic Autumn, the shining of the spiritual Sun in the beginning of the night of Winter.” And as he came to another place where the Springtime Mysteries were celebrated, he would say: “Now I shall witness the secret of the Moon.” Thus in his inner life he learned to know that which determines the whole meaning of the year.

So you see our Easter Festival has in fact been burdened with things with which it ought not properly to have been burdened. It ought really to be a Festival of the “laying in the grave”, and as was the case in such festivals in relation to the spiritual part of man, so this Springtime Festival of the laying in the grave should at the same time be a Festival to stir man to work, a Festival such as a man of more strong and pristine impulses needs for the Summer season. The Easter Festival was indeed a Festival to summon man to work during the Summer. And the Autumn Resurrection Festival was for the spiritual world a Festival celebrated in the time when man departed from his work once more. But as he departed from his work he was to experience in his inmost being that which is most important for his soul and spirit. He was to become conscious of his eternal being as he gazed upon the resurrection in the spiritual world three days after death.

Passing thus from earthly secrets to cosmic secrets, from earthly knowledge to cosmic knowledge, we may indeed recognise what I may call the inner structure in the order of our festivals throughout the year. But there are still many secrets that were hidden in these Mysteries which have disappeared.

Tomorrow, as far as possible, I shall try to deepen these things still further, referring more nearly to certain places of the Mysteries. Thus I shall try to deepen what I explained to you today in our study of the relationships in the Heavens.

First - without taking notes - let us be reminded of the admonition which directs human beings to the ancient holy words of knowledge:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.

Who speaks so vastly cosmic?
Who speaks so deeply heartfelt?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Is it you yourself who
In feeling space, in experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

*

We can, my dear friends, look up to the distant stars and let our vision rest upon what radiates down to us from the universe in the forms the constellations possess. When we immerse ourselves in the sublimity of what the vast universe offers, we will gain enhanced inner strength. And especially for the strength to hold the soul separate from the body, we need to inwardly direct our gaze toward the heavenly bodies. By “inwardly” is meant the following: We have seen the stars so often and have stored the vision in our hearts and minds so that we no longer need to even look up at the heavenly bodies in order to make the powerful image of the star-embedded heaven's vault effective in our inner consciousness. If this picture arises from our own inner being, if the soul empowers itself to create it, then it will be able, through this empowered force, to liberate itself from its corporeality.

And we can also observe all that radiates down and streams through us from the planets which circle the earth, and in their circling directly affect the earth's wind and weather. And when we again create a picture in our hearts of all this, the sensation of being integrated in the movement of the circling constitutes the second experience.

And then when we are conscious of all that binds us to the earth, that we are heavy bodies among other heavy bodies. In other words what lives in us as a feeling of being bound to the earth becomes a facet of our soul, and it is the third aspect.

And from these three inner experiences: what we have gained in luminous, radiant, living thought derived from the stars; and then when we merge with the path of our earth in the universe, merge with what the planets say to us meaningfully from space by their movements - so that having felt ourselves to be at rest in respect to the stars, now we feel ourselves to be set in movement through the cosmos itself. And thirdly, if we then feel ourselves bound to the earth by the force of the earth itself, then we will gradually and harmoniously be more and more able to make a beginning at entering into the spiritual world. And today everyone can make this beginning.

This leads to the question: Why is it then that so few do so? The answer to this must be: most people don't want to experience things so intimately in order to enter into the spiritual world. They disdain experiencing so intimately. They prefer titillating experiences such as the spiritual world approaching them with all the characteristics of the sensory world.

It would be easy to convince people about the spiritual world if for example a table from the spiritual world were to approach them. But there are no tables in the spiritual world, there are only spiritual beings in the spiritual world, and they must be perceived with what is spiritual in man. But spiritual is what we can read in the stars, what we can feel in the movements of the planets, what we can experience in the forces which hold us to the earth and make us people of the earth. Therefore whoever desires to understand in the right way must do so inwardly. With common sense we can understand all of anthroposophy, but to understand inwardly means to transfer more and more what is understood to inner life. Whoever wishes to do this must decide to undertake a really intimate exercise of these three sensations - or experiences, it doesn't matter what we call them.

And now, my dear sisters and brothers, what is flowing to you from the spiritual world through this School wishes to speak to you about how by means of an intimate exercise you can become more aware of the connection of humanity with the world than you are accustomed to through normal consciousness.

Firstly, we humans should in later life be more like we were to a great extent when we were children. As children we are almost all sensory organs: eyes, ears. The child experiences everything that happens in its environment as though its whole body were a sense organ. That's why he imitates everything, because everything continues to vibrate within him; and in the same way in which it vibrates within him, it seeks to emerge by means of the will.

The child retains this characteristic only as long as we protect it from doing with its senses what we as adults do with them. The child develops this inner sensory capacity only as long as we carry it, protecting it so that it is not yet exposed to the forces of the earth. And it is really wonderful how the growing child's sensory-being is protected from the effects of the earth forces as long as this sensory-being is especially vital and alive.

At the moment when the child stands on its feet and begins to move about is when its movements become susceptible to the earth's forces and it must find its own equilibrium, at that moment the intimate sensory-being ends. The human being of course does not remember back to this first stage of infancy, and therefore does not know what it means to feel his whole being as a sensory-organ. But we must, if we want to experience the human in us more and more, be able to feel and experience our whole human being as such a sensory organ.

You grasp something, my dear sisters and brothers. It presses on you. You perceive the pressure. Or you perceive the texture of the surface you are touching. But in reality, you are continually touching in that you place your whole body from top to bottom on the earth and feel the earth under the soles of your feet. Only you are so used to it that you don't notice. When you begin to notice it, then you will first feel yourselves as human beings standing amidst the earth's forces. Therefore, the admonition at the threshold to the spiritual world.

[written on the blackboard:]

O man, touch and sense in your body's being
How earth forces support your existence.

[Certain essential words are underlined later, as described in the text. Trans.]

Thus, we let the first stage of this inner experience work in us.

Now we can feel ourselves as the ones touching, sensing. We can experience this touching, feel inwardly as the person doing the vibrant touching. When we advance enough to feel this touching itself, we are then not perceiving earth forces, but we begin to feel the vibrating water forces in us, the fluid forces which as blood and other liquids course through our bodies. And in these forces, we feel how all the fluids which course through our bodies are connected to the ether in the universe.

[writing on the blackboard:]

O man, experience in the whole round of your touch
How water-beings are the framers of your being.

If we only had earth forces to touch in our whole being, we would be constituted as something continually crumbling away. The water forces in us shape the form of the human body from the cosmic ether. Only the earth has influence over what is solid in us. But the whole wide world of ether has influence over the liquids in us .

But then during the third stage we can immerse ourselves in what lives and weaves in the fluidity. We can feel it dimly, inwardly. When we feel our breathing, for example, we will realize how we are continually nurtured by the essence of breathing and of the air. We would be helpless children if we weren't continually nurtured by the forces of breathing flowing through us.

[writing on the blackboard:]

O man, feel in the whole weaving of your life
How the powers of the air nurture your existence.

And now if we have advanced to the third stage of inner experience, we can come to the fourth, if we feel inner warmth, and are attentive to our own fulfilling warmth which is in breath, which lives in everything air-forming within us. For only through what is air-forming in us is our warmth created.

But what lives in us as warmth can be reached with thoughts. And here we have a most important secret of human nature.

My dear sisters and brothers, you cannot reach with thought, but only with the sense of touch, how earth forces act on you and support you. You cannot reach with thought, but only with inner experience, how the water forces are your formative builders. You cannot reach with thought, but only with inner feeling, how the airy powers in you are your nurturers. You can be thankful for this nurturing, you can love these nurturers, but you cannot directly reach them with thought. But what man can reach by thought, by meditating on his warmth, is to experience himself as a being of warmth.

The physician comes with a thermometer; he measures warmth from without. Just as warmth can differ on different places of the body, it is also different in the individual inner organs. You can direct your thoughts down to the individual organs and will find that the whole inner warmth-organism is differentiated. One can reach his own warmth organism with thought.

But then, having done that, you have a specific feeling. This feeling, my dear sisters and brothers, will now be revealed to your souls. Imagine that you have achieved it, that in thought you have descended into your organism, reached the differentiating warmth - the warmth of the lungs, the warmth of the liver, the warmth of the heart, which are all God-spirit created entities within you. You achieve this with thought. Now for the first time you know what thought is. Before you didn't know what thought is. You know now that thought, by descending into what was before only warmth, turns the warmth into flame, into fire. For in ordinary life thought appears to you in its imperceptible inwardness as abstract thought. When you sink it down into your own body, the thought appears to you as luminous, radiantly penetrating into the lungs, into the heart, into the liver. Just as the light which goes out from your brow stretches downward, so does thought illumine the inner organs, differentiating itself into various nuances of color.

One cannot merely say: I think through to the differentiations of my warmth; one must say: I enlighten myself by thinking through to the differentiations of my warmth.

[writing on the blackboard:]

O man, think in the full flow of your feeling
How the fire-powers are your helpers in being.

Everything in these eight lines can be summarized by letting what has been intimately worked through be summed up in your souls with the words:

[On the blackboard each element is placed after the corresponding mantra-phrase.]

O man, see yourself in the kingdom of elements.

Elements:

Earth Water Air Fire

Thus, do you measure yourselves, radiate, strengthen yourselves in respect to the body. But note how this strengthening, this measuring of the mere physical extends to the moral:

Here we have the support of man, the physical support. [In the first mantra sentence “support” is underlined.]

Here we have the formative forces. [In the second mantra sentence “formers” is underlined.] Still somewhat physical, but permeated with the etheric.

Here we have nurturer. [In the third mantra sentence “nurture” is underlined.] It already has a certain morality. Then as we ascend from water to air we feel that the beings who are in the air are permeated with morality.

And in the fire, we have not only nurturer, but also helpers, [“helpers” in the fourth mantra sentence in underlined], comrades, beings similar to us.

Just as we feel through to our bodies, we can also feel through to our souls. For this we must not concentrate on the elements, rather must we concentrate on what pulls the planets that circle the earth and pulls the air and sea currents along with it. We feel our physicality in our spirituality when we measure the body as has been explained; but we directly experience our soul-life.

[written on the blackboard:]

O man, let act in the depths of your soul
The cosmic powers that guide the planets.

It can also be summarized in the sentence:

O man, through the cosmic circling renew yourself.

We realize and experience the spiritual in us when we elevate the spirit to the stars, which reach us in their groupings and formations and become like a celestial script to us. If we preserve what is thus written in the starry heavens we will become aware of our own spirituality, that spirituality which doesn't speak about man personally, but about the entire universe.

[written on the blackboard:]

O man, retain in your spirit's creativity
The constellations' cosmological words.

Summarizing:

O man, recreate yourself through celestial wisdom.

Not by vague generalities, not by vague sensations are we able to gradually extract our souls from our physical bodies and pass over to the universe, but rather by grasping the elements in the specified way, by the movement of the planets, by the meaning in the stars. We unite with the universe when we do this.

And we will note that once the first part of the exercise is accomplished we feel a life in us, the life of the universe.

[Alongside the first eight lines of the mantra is written:]

Life

Once we have finished the second part of the exercise we feel love towards the whole world.

[Alongside the tenth and eleventh lines is written:]

Love

Once we have finished the third part we feel a sense of piety in us.

[Alongside the thirteenth and fourteenth lines is written:]

Piety

And it really is an ascension from life through love to piety, to a truly religious cosmic sense which can be undergone through such mantric words.

But if it is really undergone, if we really end up being pious through such an exercise, then the world ceases to be physical for us. Then we say to ourselves with total certainty: the physical in the world is only semblance, maya; the world is everywhere through and through spirit. As humans we belong to this spirit. And if we feel ourselves as spirit in the spirit-world, then we are beyond the threshold to the spiritual world.

Then, however, once we are beyond the threshold to the spiritual world, we sense how here, on this side, our body holds thinking, feeling and willing together through its own bodily force; how at the moment we are body-free in our experiencing, thinking, feeling and willing are no longer one, but threefold. Then it is as though by binding ourselves to the earth-powers in water, air, fire, earth, that by sending our will to the earth we become one with the earth through our will.

Furthermore, because we feel love in our souls for the movements of the planets, that is, for the spiritual beings who live therein, it is so that we experience the Powers circling cosmic space as feeling. And if we can say: the sun moves in the feeling of cosmic space, Mercury moves in the feeling of cosmic space, Mars moves in the feeling of cosmic space, then we have grasped feeling in its cosmic being separated from thinking and separated from willing.

And if we are able to grasp thinking in such a way that thoughts are freed from physical existence, it is as though our thinking were to fly out to the [resting] stars and rest there themselves.

[Translator's Note: in German the stars themselves can be referred to as “resting” stars, in contrast to the “wandering” or “moving” stars: the planets. In this lecture there is much play on words between the two concepts, which is necessarily lost in translation.]

And we say to ourselves when we have arrived on the other side of the threshold: my thinking rests in the resting stars; my feeling moves in the wandering stars [planets]; my willing unites with the earth forces. So thinking, feeling, willing are separated in the cosmos.

And they must be again joined together. Here on the earth man does not need to bind thinking, feeling and willing together, because they already are so due to the physical body being a unity. Thinking, feeling and willing would be constantly falling apart if they were not held together by the physical man, without his intention or awareness. Now though, on the other side of the threshold, they are divided so that thinking rests above with the stars, feeling circles with the planets, and willing unites with the forces of the earth. And with strong inner determination, with our own forces, we must bring them back together as a unity.

In doing this we must experience thinking, feeling and willing in such a way that we can communicate to thinking, which has gone to the stars, something of feeling and willing; to feeling, which is circling with the planets, communicate something of thinking and willing; to willing, which is bound to the earth, something of thinking and feeling. This something we indeed can do using such a mantric formula.

We must look up to the stars and with devotion say to ourselves: there is where your thinking lies. But I will bring the starry sky into movement; just as feeling likewise does for the planets, in spirit I will slowly move the starry sky. I feel myself attracted to the starry sky; I want to go up there and be at one with that star-filled heavens. Thus have I incorporated feeling and willing into thinking, which is bound to the stars.

Then I look up to the planets and feel: In these planets [Ger. wandering stars] my own feeling wanders. But I will attempt to fix the moment as the stars [Ger. fixed stars] are fixed in place. And through my rhythmic system - to which heart and lungs belong - I will become as one with the entire planetary system. Then I have assigned thinking and willing to feeling.

And when I become aware of how, through this mantric formula, I am bound to the earth as a human being, then I should add feeling and thinking to this being bound to the earth. In thought I should set the earth in motion so that like a planet I accompany it on its rounds without perceiving its weight: bound to it as if I were guiding the earth through cosmic space. Feeling is combined with willing. I add thinking to the mixture when I accompany the earth's movement in thought, but can bring it again to a standstill, thus making the earth itself a [fixed] star by my own meditating force of thought.

When I carry out such a meditation again and again, I gradually come to feel myself as a human being outside my body in the cosmos. For this, my dear sisters and brothers, this mantric formula can work on the soul with special force.

[written on the blackboard:]

Bring to thinking life
What as pure contemplation

(that is: as meditation, as contemplation)

in the soul light-filled
shine:
Feeling and willing
And you are spirit
Among pure spirits.

Secondly:

Bring to force of feeling
What as noble love
Through the soul warmly
weave:
Thinking and willing,
you are soul
In the realm of spirits.

Thirdly:

Bring to the Powers of will
What as spiritual impulse
For the soul actively
live:
Thinking and feeling,
And you shall see yourself
As body from spiritual heights.

Only seen thus does the human body appear in its true form.

What is gleaned from the spiritual world, what the initiate experiences in the spiritual world, if it is expressed in words, they are mantric words, and he who experiences them will be led into the spiritual world.

Therefore, if you let the words work on your soul, they are a true guide to the spiritual world:

Bring to thinking life
What as pure contemplation
On the soul light-filled
shine:
Feeling and willing,
And you are spirit
Among pure spirits.

Bring to force of feeling
What as noble love
Through the soul warmly
weave:
Thinking and willing
And you are soul
In the realm of spirits.

Bring to the Powers of will
What as spiritual impulse
For the soul actively
live:
Thinking and feeling,
And you shall see yourself
As body from spiritual heights.

Then, my dear sisters and brothers, when what lies in these mantric words is clearer and clearer to you, then when you come again and again to these lessons it will be with greater understanding, that is, with ever greater cosmic experience that you will hear these words:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.

Who speaks so vastly cosmic?
Who speaks so deeply heartfelt?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Is it you yourself who
In feeling space, in experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

Blackboard Texts for the Ninth Class Lesson

Life

O man, touch and sense in your body's being

How earth forces support your existence. Earth

O man, experience in the whole round of your touch

How water-beings are the framers of your being. Water

O man, feel in the whole weaving of your life

How the powers of the air nurture your existence. Air

O man, think in the full flow of your feeling

How the fire-powers are your helpers in being. Fire

O man, see yourself in the kingdom of elements.

Love

O man, let act in the depths of your soul

The cosmic powers that guide the planets.

O man, through the cosmic circling renew yourself.

Piety

O man, retain in your spirit's creativity

The constellations' cosmological words.

Bring to thinking life What as pure contemplation On the soul light-filled shine: Feeling and willing, And you are spirit Among pure spirits. Bring to force of feeling What as noble love Through the soul warmly weave: Thinking and willing And you are soul In the realm of spirits. Bring to the Powers of will What as spiritual impulse For the soul actively live: Thinking and feeling, And you shall see yourself As body from spiritual heights.

In the two preceding talks I tried to explain the basic symbols in Goethe's profound fairy tale. We have seen, how Goethe, how the mystics of all times have given the truths which they counted among the deepest ones in characteristic coloured symbols.

Today you allow to me to add two other fairy tales: The New Melusine and The New Paris. It may seem that something unnatural, something worked out is in these fairy tales, but you will see, if you delve in these pictures that also here only an esoteric, mystic interpretation enables us to give an explanation.

Goethe inserted the fairy tale The New Melusine at a typical passage of Meister Wilhelm's Journeyman Years (1807, 1821, 1829). Who penetrates into Goethe's mind will never abandon himself to the superficial view that Goethe deals only with putting pictures next to each other like in a kaleidoscope, that it concerns a mere play with pictures. But he realises that Goethe expressed his most profound inside.

A man relates it who wants to develop his soul to higher capacities and, hence, “refrains from speaking as far as speech expresses something ordinary or accidental, however, another talent of speech has developed to him that has a intentionally prudent and pleasant effect.” Like this man, also Wilhelm Meister deals with secret societies, is directed by mysterious guides.

The man repeats and arranges the rich experiences of his life calmly. Imagination combines with it and gives life and movement to the events. He is a philosopher who speaks in this fairy tale to us, and at the moment when in the end of the story he gets the longing for developing his soul to a higher condition, he also understands the ideals of the philosophers.

Let now the fairy tale of The New Melusine pass our souls in its main trains which deeply lead us into Goethe's nature.

A young man gets to know a strange woman in an inn who deeply impresses him. He sees her carrying a small box and keeping it carefully. He asks whether he cannot do anything for her, to oblige her. She asks him to continue the journey with the small box instead of her because she has to stay here some days. However, he should always take a special room for the small box and close it with a special key, so that the door cannot be opened with any other key. He departs. On the way his money runs out; the lady appears and helps him. Again he spends the money; he believes that in the small box something could be that may be sold for money. He discovers a crack in the small box, looks into it, something bright gleams in it. He sees a chamber with many dwarfs, a girl among them. It exists in double figure (as lady and as dwarfish girl), outside in a big, inside in a small size. He is deeply horrified; the lady appears again, and he receives explanation about the small box. The lady says that her true figure is that of the dwarfish girl.

This race of dwarfs has been there long before the human beings, when the earth was still in the igneous state. It had not been able to hold their ground because a race of dragons waged war on them. To save the dwarfs a race of giants is created, however, these soon position themselves on the side of the dragons. Hence, for the protection of the dwarfs who withdrew into the mountains still a new race of the knights or the race of heroes as it is called in the original version had to originate. With it dragons and giants, on the one hand, dwarfs and heroes, on the other hand, face each other. However, the dwarfs become smaller and smaller, so that it became necessary that every now and then somebody of them comes to the upper world to get new force from the realm of the human beings.

The young man wants to combine with the lady, and after some other adventures she says to him that he himself must become a dwarf. She slips a ring on his finger, the young man becomes small like a dwarf and enters into the world which he has seen in the small box. Now he is united with the lady. But longing for the land of the human beings soon awakes in him, he gets a file, saws through the ring, shoots up suddenly and is a human being again.

Goethe makes an interesting remark at the end of the fairy tale when in the young man the longing awakes for being a human being again. This remark is important to understand the fairy tale. He lets the young man say: “now I understood for the first time what the philosophers might understand by their ideals by which the human beings are supposed to be tormented so strongly. I had an ideal of myself, and appeared to myself sometimes in the dream as a giant!”

We want to see now what Goethe wanted to say with this fairy tale. The race of dwarfs, created before dragons, giants and human being, leads us to the track. The people of the dwarfs “is still active and busy since time immemorial. But, in olden times, their most famous works were swords which pursued the enemy if one threw them to him, invisibly and mysteriously binding chains, and impenetrable shields. Now, however, they occupy themselves chiefly with things of comfort and finery.” There it is pointed to that which the mystics call the “sparklet” in the human soul, to the self of the human being, which God sank in the human body. This self of the human being had magic powers, secret magic forces once; now it serves to make the earth in all cultural works subject to the human being; in all that the human mind, the self works.

What is the small box? A world, a small world, indeed, but an entire world. The human being is a microcosm, a small world in a big one. The small box is nothing but a picture of the human soul. The human reason, the present consciousness, as we have got to know it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake in the wife of the old man, designs pictures of the whole big world, pictures on the small scale. What is summarised in the human soul as the sum of the thoughts? It is the spiritual spark. If we saw into the human soul, we would discover the spiritual spark with the seeds of the future stages. This spark was enkindled in distant past in the human being who was only gifted with a vague dream consciousness. This spiritual spark which smoulders in the human soul preceded all physical states. Compared with the future size, with the perfection of the human being is that which lives today in him only seed, only something dwarfish.

There were other human races once; before our age the Atlanteans and the Lemurians lived et etcetera In the middle of the third, the Lemurian race the endowment with the spiritual spark, with the consciousness occurred. The self is in the human being the seed of the eternal which is able to rise by development of the human being to self-conscious life.

This consciousness came from another world, preceded the origin of the human being and was there earlier than the other components of the human being (kama manas). This self-consciousness is paired with passion even today. The true philosopher strives for freeing the divine in the human being from the sensuous, so that it realises its divine origin; manas is released from kama. Then this released manas develops buddhi from itself, the consciousness of being in the divine world to strive then to atma.

We know that this spiritual entity of the human being experienced the most different forms. One of these stages is called that of the dragons. Also in the Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky we hear of igneous dragons as symbols of the time in which the human being descended from his higher spirituality .

The way through the raw physical figure is shown with the giants. The human being must be refined, he rises up to finer and finer figures, he becomes the hero, the knight. These spiritual knights have always tried to form an alliance with the ideal of true humanity; they should live with the dwarfs in good harmony. “And it is found that afterwards giants and dragons, as well as the knights and dwarfs have always held together.”

Now the woman tells “that everything that has been big once must become small and decrease; thus we are also in the case that we always decrease since the creation of the world and become smaller, above all the royal family.” Hence, a princess of the royal house must be sent “every now and then to the country to get married with an honourable knight, so that the race of dwarfs would be refreshed again and saved from total expiration.” For the later-born brother has been so small, “that the attendants have lost him even from the nappies and one does not know where he has got to.”

Now a ring is brought the ring is always a symbol of the personality and by this ring the dwarf becomes a human being and combines with the spiritual knight.

In what way does the race of dwarfs develop? It goes through the physical humanity, through the different states of consciousness. In what way does the present consciousness develop? By the law of the karmic human development. We consider it at an example at first. The child learns to read and write; the efforts, the exercises which it does, all that passes; what has remained is the ability to read and to write. The human being has taken up the fruit of his efforts. What was outside at first, in the physical nature, has become a part of his.

“You are tomorrow what you think and act today” or as the Bible (Galatians 6:7) expresses it: “everyone reaps what he sows.”

We are the products of past times. Our soul would be empty if it did not collect experience from the external world. The soul would die away if it did not take up the lessons from the outside world.

If we want to make the things which we experience really our own, we must process them. This is the law of evolution and involution by which we increase our being. We have to collect force from the surroundings. We collect experiences in the outside world to make them our spiritual property. Then the mind processes the experience, which he has collected to return over and over again to the outside world, in the hours of leisure. Our concepts would atrophy if we withdrew from the outside world. It is a spiritual respiratory process, a “giving and taking.” We develop our inside world outwardly, we soak up the outside world. Goethe showed this evolution and involution process in this fairy tale in important way. The words of the young man concerning the ideals point to it. Ideals are what is not yet, what should be realised in future. What the human beings lifts out above all is the possibility that he puts ideals, is the possibility to approach a higher future. Because the human being gives reality the possibility to grow into a higher future, he cares for idealism.

Goethe also nicely expressed this truth in the fairy tale The New Paris. In this fairy tale Goethe speaks of himself. You find it in the outset of Poetry and Truth. Shortly before, in Poetry and Truth, the young child Goethe tries “to approach the great God of nature, the creator and preserver of heaven and earth” setting up an altar. “Natural products should represent the world allegorically, about these a flame should burn and signify the human soul longing for its creator.” The boy lights the flame of the little aromatic candles in the light of the rising sun. But he damages some things, and concludes that “it is generally dangerous to want to approach God on such ways.” It was a certain fact to Goethe that one can approach the divinity only if the human being awakes the abilities slumbering in him as we could show that in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Also in The New Paris he points to this way.

In the outset of the fairy tale, Goethe describes how the god Mercury appears to him as boy at Whitsun Sunday in the dream and gives him three nice apples, a red, a yellow and a green one. They change in his hand into precious stones and he sees three female figures in them for which he should select three worthy young men at Mercury's behest.

While he admires them, they disappear from him; the fourth female being appears, dances on his hand and gives him a slap on the forehead, because he wants to catch it, so that he loses consciousness.

When he awakes, he dresses himself festively to make visits and comes before the gate where he finds a strange gate in the wall. It has no key.

A man with a long beard opens from within; he resembles an Oriental, however, he crosses himself and shows in such a way that he is a Christian. He shows the marvellous garden to the boy. From the bushes the birds shout quite clearly: “Paris, Paris”, then again “Narcissus, Narcissus.”

The new Paris now sees an even more marvellous garden behind a kind of living wall. He asks whether he is allowed to enter. The old man permits it, after he has taken off hat and sword. Led by the hand of the old man, he sees even more marvellous things. He sees behind a fence of swords and partisans an even nicer garden, surrounded by a canal. Now he must put on another robe; he receives a kind of oriental costume. Three strange ropes are shown to him as warning. Now the swords and partisans put themselves over the water and form a golden bridge, and he enters. Over there the girl meets him that he has had dancing on his hand and which has escaped from him. It leads him to the three young ladies from the apples who are dressed here in suitable garments and play certain instruments.

The girl who he has recognised as belonging to him refreshes him with fruits. He delights in marvellous music. Then he and the girl begin a game with little warriors. Against the warning he and the girl gets in zeal; he destroys her fighters; they hurl themselves into the water, this foams, the bridge bursts on which the play took place, and the boy finds himself sodden and thrown out on the other side.

The old man comes, threatens with the three ropes which should punish that who betrays his trust. The boy escapes, while he says that he is chosen to find three worthy young men for the three young ladies. Now he is politely led out of the door. The old man shows him different marks to find the gate again. The significance of their positions to each other points to the medieval astrology/astronomy.

When the boy returns, the gate is no longer there, the three objects, plate, well and trees are differently positioned to each other. However, he believes to note that after some time they have changed their positions a little bit, and he hopes that once all marks will coincide. He closes typically: “Whether I can tell to you what takes place further on, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I cannot say.”

The fairy tale, which is written in 1811, shows in every line that we have to search something deeper in it. Not without reason Goethe tied it on the legend of Paris, changed it in such a way not without reason. The legend of Paris and Helena, of the Trojan War, is known. Paris has to pass the apple to the most beautiful one of three goddesses; in return he wins Helena. Goethe reversed the matter, three, later four young women are there for whom the new Paris should choose the young men. The boy is led into a kind of mystery that is triply enclosed, he must always meet new conditions. A kind of war game develops, an image not a real war. Let us now pursue the fairy tale step by step.

While Goethe says that the contents of the fairy tale come from the god Mercury, he points to the fact that he perceives that which he experiences in this fairy tale as a message of the divinity. Mercury says to the young man that he were sent by the gods to him with an important order.

Goethe always wants to represent the states of human consciousness by women. In this fairy tale are also four young women who meet the young man immediately in the beginning, as sent from the god Mercury. Significantly, Mercury gives him apples at first. The apples change into wonderful precious stones, namely a red, a yellow, and a green one. Then the three precious stones become three beautiful young women whose clothes have the colours of the precious stones. However, they waft away from the young man when he wants to retain them. But instead of theirs a fourth young woman appears who then becomes his guide.

Also in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily Goethe points to four states of consciousness of the human soul using four female figures. In The New Paris these four women are characterised even more intimately by the mystic colours which they wear. If we want to understand the nature of these women closer as well as the colours which they wear, we have to look at states of consciousness which the human being has presently, and those which he can acquire to himself developing his soul forces.

Today, humanity lives on the earth in the mineral cycle; the human being is related to the mineral by means of his physical body. All substances that are found in the physical human body in chemical compounds may they be salts, sorts of lime, metals et etcetera-, are also found outside in nature. The human soul lives within this physical body. From incarnation to incarnation the human soul lives a life between birth and death again and again in a body that it receives at birth or already at conception.

In every incarnation, the human soul has to go through a plenty of experiences. It thereby becomes richer and richer. One can also say that it thereby becomes purer and purer, because the soul living originally in raw desires and impulses appears then within a cultural world in a new body again, lives differently in this cultural world than, for example, within a body that belongs to a savage tribe. The human soul lives now in kama-manas, that is in a spirituality that is still used, indeed, to satisfy the impulses and passions of the human being. But more and more the longing also arises in the human soul to ascend to a higher spirituality. This soul state is expressed in esotericism with the red colour which shines through from within no dead red colour , a bright one, illuminated from within. The red colour signifies the consciousness for the astral world in the initiatory knowledge. If the human being takes his soul contents, his inner soul-life less and less from the physical surroundings, if he kindles an internal, spiritual life in his soul, this life of the human soul is signified yellow, again a bright, beaming yellow colour.

If the human being has achieved to live no longer in his narrow stubbornness, if he feels linked in sympathy with the whole world, if he feels like merging in the universe, this state of the human soul is signified in esotericism with a nuance of green, with a bright green colour. This is the colour which shows the human soul in the aura if the single consciousness pours out itself in the whole world.

Thus these women who are also precious stones, are signs of that which the young man should make of his soul. The present consciousness that leads us to all knowledge produces the connection with these soul conditions. It is symbolised by the fourth figure, by the small figure that “steps dancing to and fro“ on the finger points of the young man. This is the usual reason. The human being penetrates to something higher with the help of his present consciousness, it is the guide in the sanctum. Only the fourth state of consciousness that is represented by the girl already exists; the other three exist only as rudiments, are to be developed. There is something that appears like remembrance in the soul; something lives in the soul that points back to former states. At especially ceremonious moments the human being penetrates into these former soul conditions. The young man has got a particular order from Mercury. Goethe points here to his mission. He remembers former initiations.

In the fairy tale it is now told how the young man is led in miraculous way to a place that he has not entered up to now nay, at which he has never looked in the surroundings well-known to him. An old man meets him, leads him in the inside of a nice garden; at first he leads him within the garden in the round of an external circle. Birds call to the young man, the chatty starlings in particular; “ Paris! Paris!” the ones call and “Narcissus! Narcissus!” the others. The young man would also like to penetrate into the inside of the garden, he asks the old man for it; this accepts his request only on condition that he takes off his hat and sword and leaves them behind.

After it the old man leads him closer to the centre of the garden. There he finds a golden lattice. Behind it he sees a gently flowing water which shows a big number of golden and silver fish in its clear depths. He wants to go further to find out the state of the centre of the garden. The old man accepts it, but only on new conditions: the young man must change. He receives an oriental garment which he likes. Besides, he notices three green little ropes, any tied in a special way, so that it seems to be a tool to just not very desired use. On his question for the meaning of the ropes the old man says that it is for those who betray his confidence which one would be ready to give them here. Now the old man leads him to the golden lattice; these are two rows of golden spits, an external one and an internal one; both fall mutually, so that a bridge originates on which the young man comes now into the centre. Music sounds from a temple, and when he enters it, he sees three female figures sitting in a triangle; the miraculous music sounds from their instruments. Also the little guide is there again and takes care of the young man.

These are three fields of existence in which the boy is gradually introduced by the old man. He enters into the first region, the astral world, coming from the world of the everyday life; there he finds the animals who call to him. But he wants to go further into the centre of existence. Something in his soul pushes him that he should develop higher and higher. He brings the disposition of this rise with him since his birth; there he has come from a world, in which he was a psychic-spiritual being, into the darkening of his psycho-spiritual being caused by the physical world. But the urge for the spirit has remained awake in his soul it points the soul to the fact that there is something that it remembers at solemn moments of life. There also the memory of former stages of existence appears and that from these a mission results for the present stage of existence. The boy feels that this mission is based on experiences of his former incarnations. “I once received the initiation,” he has brought this initiation from former stages of existence with him. The memory of a previous initiation appears in him he got in a previous life. There the master took him also with the hand and led him from stage to stage. There he also had to perform the symbolic action: taking off the hat and sword. He had to take off everything that connects him with everyday things of life in the physical world. Somebody who ascends to a chela, to a spiritual student has always to do that; in his inside he has to do it. This is why he/she is called a “homeless human being;” he has put away what the usual human being calls his home. This does not mean tearing out from life; he/she stands firmly on his/her position, but his/her own life is lifted out from the surrounding world.

When he wants to be led by the master further on, he gets to the second stage; he has to completely get changed to put away all clothes of his present existence. He is fitted with a new set of oriental clothes. This is an indication that all impulses to attain new wisdom have come from the East to humankind. (Ex Oriente lux.)

The boy in his oriental clothes is endowed with the ancient wisdom which the old man with the lamp represents in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; he is endowed with a soul capacity remembering ancient initiatory states. He is led to the river that the soul world separates from the real spiritual world. The river of passions, the astral world, does not rage and roar, it is the “gently running waters which let see a big number of golden and silvery fish in its clear depths which gently moved to and fro, partly single ones, partly shoals of them.” This is an image how the human being can find valuable knowledge instead of raging passions if he has quietened down the astral world in himself.

Swords tilt downwards across the river separating the astral world from the internal, the spiritual realm. The human being has to sacrifice what he has, otherwise, for his protection. He has to sacrifice his personal ego; it has to become the bridge to the spiritual realm. He has to experience the “dying and growing.” Two rows of swords, an internal and an external row, tilt downwards and form the bridge which the boy crosses. This is an image of the fact that a lower and a higher ego-consciousness must join with each other to make the transition into the spiritual world possible to the human being.

Now we can also see why this fairy tale bears the name: The New Paris. It is Paris about whom the Greek mythology tells that before his birth the parents were scared by the prophecy that the fire of the boy, who is born, consumes everything. Hence, he is abandoned after his birth; a bearess nurses him for five days. He grows up and after various adventures he is recompensed, he got married to Helena. However, Helena is synonymous with Selene the daughter of the light of wisdom. Selene is the symbol of the moon. Thus the Greek mythology shows the union of the human being with the consciousness which should lead him to higher and higher stages in the marriage of Paris with Helena.

Narcissus is the other word which the chatty starlings called to the boy. About Narcissus it is told that he is the son of the river god Kephissos and a nymph. So Narcissus is not of earthly, but of supernatural origin.

One tells also that he once saw his image in the mirror of a spring. This delighted him so much that he always stared at himself only. He rejected all temptations of a nymph, approaching him, and he completely sank into his own image.

Narcissus is a symbol of the human ego which wants to insist on its separate existence, on its own self. If the human being remains concluded in his ego, hardens in his ahamkara, if he is not able to get out of his own little human being, if he looks always only into himself, has fallen in love with his own ego, then he does not get beyond himself, then he loses the consciousness that his ego has its real home in a spiritual world, then he cannot ascend to his spiritual home, he remains “a dull guest on the dark earth.” Then he cannot develop the higher consciousness in himself which leads him upwards, he must pine away. Only somebody who can combine with the higher female principle in his soul will thereby ascend. Paris gets married to the daughter of the light, to Selene-Helena. However, Narcissus fell in love with his own nature and rejects the union with the spiritual being, which approaches him as a nymph.

While the birds call the boy: “Paris – Narcissus,” he finds himself faced with the choice: what do you want to bear in yourself, the Paris nature or the Narcissus nature? This question is put to everybody who wants to become a chela, a spiritual student. Everybody must choose the way himself which his soul has to go.

The boy chooses the way of Paris, according to the urge working from a former incarnation in his soul; he wants to become the “new Paris.” Hence, he must also get to know the so-called threats of initiation if he chooses the way of initiation. They are shown symbolically with three ropes. In the initiatory schools, the ropes, which lie around the neck of the neophyte, show different symbols. Among other things, they represent the threefold nature of the human being in the world. What is due to this threefold nature of the human being laces itself around his neck if he breaks the confidence which is put in him with the initiation.
Since the young man wants to become the “new Paris,” he is allowed to be led by the old man who leads him over the bridge. He comes into the second circle which is flowed around by the river, the water of the astral world. There he finds a wonderful garden which appears to him like an image of heaven on earth. In the midst of this wonderful garden, he sees the innermost centre, a temple surrounded by porticoes from which a heavenly music issues forth. He has arrived at the region of the spiritual world which manifests itself sounding: in the region of the creative world word, which sounds through the world as the sphere-harmony. Here he finds the three women again who were sent to him by the god Mercury at first.

In the image which now the boy experiences is expressed what the human being can experience if he has attained the stage of initiation. The human being is able there to receive messages from higher worlds.
The woman in red turns first to the boy; the red stone gives him the strength that he can have insight in the spiritual world. This is the first stage of initiation. The second stage is not mere imagination, but life in the spiritual world. Indeed, there the human being still feels as a special being, he feels as a spirit among spirits, but still separated. He feels, so to speak, like a sound which is not yet part of a symphony. This stage is shown in the yellow robe.

Then the human spirit learns to adapt itself in the sphere-harmony, it learns to regard itself as a member of the spiritual world, as a sound that resonates in the world symphony. Then the human being gains the green stone; this represents the woman in green pictorially. You read in the fairy tale about this woman in green: “she was that who seemed to care mostly for me and to turn her play to me; however, I was not able to figure her out ..., she could behave howsoever, she gained little from me, because my small neighbour ... had completely taken me in for herself ... and although I saw the sylphids of my dream and the colours of the apples quite clearly in those three ladies, I probably understood that I would have no cause to retain them.”

Although the boy gets insight in those lofty realms by initiation, he feels that he has hard to work for the life in them. At first he must still dispute with his small guide, the fourth woman, the human reason.

This happens by a war game. You read in the fairy tale: the little one led the boy to the golden bridge; there the war game should take place. They put up their armies. Against the warning he and the girl get into zeal, the boy overcomes the troops of the little lady, “which running forth and back disappeared toward the wall finally, I do not know how.”

The Paris of the Greek mythology is the cause of the Trojan War, in which symbolically the decline of a human race and the rise of the new race is shown in which the ego of the single human being has to show its effectiveness. “The new Paris” is victorious in a fight which is, actually, a game that is only the image of a fight, which is nothing that has external reality. This war game between the human reason and that in the human being which carries the consciousness that issues from the divine is not anything that has external reality; it is something that lives only in spirit that is in such a way that it takes place like in the mirror image of spiritual events in the human soul. Goethe should announce the higher things which he beheld not in life but in the art. He should speak in mental pictures, in images.

After the fight, the boy meets the old man again, his first guide, and now the consciousness of his own deepest nature is kindled within him with such certainty that he can call the words to the old man which should live from now on in his inside. “I am a darling of the gods!” he calls. But he still wants to live with that what he requests from the old man as reward: he wants his guide, the small creature. He wants to lead his life as a human being striving for knowledge in such a way that the good human reason becomes his guide at first.

Then he is outdoors. The old man “indicated some objects at the wall, beyond the way, at the same time pointing backward to the little gate. I understood him well; he wanted that I memorise the objects to find the little gate again which shut behind me all of a sudden. I noticed thoroughly what faced me. Above a high wall, I saw the branches of ancient walnut-trees. ... The branches reached up to a flagstone; however, I could not read the inscription on it. It rested on a corbel; a niche in which an artificially worked well poured forth water from bowl to bowl... that disappeared in the ground. The well, the inscription, and the walnut-trees stood vertically about each another.”

The young man stands outdoors; looking back he remembers the experiences of his previous incarnation, and at the same time he looks at a moment in future. A second initiation follows after this one which he remembers; once the spiritual initiation followed the initiation of wisdom.

In the image of the tree, the flagstone with the inscription, the well from which the water flows, a symbol of knowledge is dressed which found its expression in mediaeval times in old astrological mysticism. It gives the boy the view to the future: if the same constellation of the stars happens again which allowed you to find the place where the human being is initiated, if the constellation of the stars in the future recurs for you, the gate is opened to you again, and then the initiation on higher level is repeated for you.

He looks at a moment of reality where he will live through what he has experienced as a prelude with the initiation. He looks at a distant future in which he appears on the scene and explains what he has experienced in former incarnations.

A certain constellation existed at the moment when he was initiated. These signs must recur if on a higher level the initiation is possible. Then the gate is visible again, and it depends on the permission, whether one is able to tell more about the future events.

One must take into consideration this fine mood, the intimate forces which play a role there speaking about this fairy tale.

As we see, Goethe also depicts the evolution of the human soul in these both fairy tales. On the one side, he expressed his conviction of soul development in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in coloured pictures which is valid to all human beings, on the other side, he puts the initiation of the higher secrets before our souls in these both fairy tales, The New Melusine and The New Paris, a Fairy Tale of a Boy, as it was commensurate with his own nature. An individual way of his own soul development is represented by Goethe in these two fairy tales. His whole later soul striving adequate to Goethe's attitude is included in the Fairy Tale of a Boy in particular.

In a fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons it was begun in 1792, but was not continued , Goethe likewise wanted to show a developmental way of the human soul. Also this fragment indicates the greatness of what he had to say, also here he points to a constellation. “Venus” and “Mars” are the last words of it which are kept to us.

A father sends his seven sons on a far journey in foreign countries that are not discovered by others. These are the seven basic members of the human being which theosophy refers to. The father gives his sons the wish with them: “happiness and welfare, good courage and glad use of the forces.” Every son has received own talents from nature; now he should apply them and seek his happiness and perfection by means of them, every brother in his way. In this fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons, the journey to the spiritual land of ancient wisdom should be shown that the human being can attain if he develops that from the basic members of his nature which is predisposed as rudiments in them; if he attains higher states of consciousness by this development. A found piece of the plan of the spiritual journey shows how Goethe wanted to depict this voyage.

So we have done some looks only at Goethe's most intimate inside and have discovered more and more profundities which shine through his marvellous poems.

So it is comprehensible if his contemporaries looked up at him like to a signpost to unknown worlds. Schiller and some others, they have recognised or, nevertheless, have anticipated what lived in him. However, many have passed without understanding him. The German still has a lot to do to exhaust what is manifested in his great spirits. But the words can apply to them only too well, which Lessing (1729–1781 expressed about Klopstock (1724–1803, German poet):

Who does not praise Klopstock?
But does anybody read him? No.
We want to be praised less
But be read all the more.

Our great spirits want to be recognised, and then they lead to intense spiritual deepening.

They also lead to the world view which theosophy represents. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of those who anticipated what lived in Goethe's soul welcomed the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1823) with the deepest understanding. “It is worthwhile”, he says “to have lived so long to take these treasures up in oneself.”

Thus those human beings who learnt from Goethe were prepared for the theosophical world view.

Oh, a lot can still be learnt from Goethe!

The glimpse into the development of individualities such as those whom we were able, in the lecture yesterday, to follow through two incarnations allows us to discern something of the mysterious inflow and activity of the cosmic Spirits during the evolution and history of mankind. For when we keep before our minds the pictures which, in brief outline at least, came before us yesterday, the pictures of Julian the Apostate and of a later expression of this individuality in history as Tycho Brahe, the great astronomer, one thing may strike us particularly. Precisely in the case of personalities who signify something in history we can observe that the special qualities of the individuality work over from one incarnation into another; but that what spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies desire to accomplish in history, using single individuals as their instrument, asserts itself in the straightforward course of reincarnation as a modifying factor.

For we shall realise that in the 4th century A.D. it was the function of the individuality who appeared as Julian the Apostate to give as it were a last impetus for the final flaring up of the spiritual wisdom belonging to earlier epochs, and thus to preserve it from the fate that might easily have befallen it if struggling Christianity alone had been left to handle such treasures. And on the other hand we shall realise that an individuality incarnated in a man whose good fortune it was to be initiated into the Elusinian Mysteries had opportunities, on reincarnating, for receiving in endless abundance the impulses of the time and the influences of beings working in the way destined for the 16th century. We shall find entirely understandable the greatness and power of the personality of Tycho Brahe, as outlined yesterday, if we realise that precisely because he had been an Initiate in an earlier incarnation he was able to bring to light an untold fund of macrocosmic science in its application to the microcosm. Such studies of occult history make us aware that it is men themselves who make history, but that history in the last resort becomes comprehensible only when we find the connection between the single personalities who appear and pass away and the individual threads which run through the whole course of human evolution, reincarnating in personalities. But if we are to understand the historical life of mankind on our earth, we must always associate with it that which streams in from other worlds, super-sensible worlds, through the Powers of other Hierarchies.

In the course of these lectures we have heard how certain high-ranking Powers of the Hierarchies have worked, through human beings, into all the civilisation-epochs since the Atlantean catastrophe. This was most strongly evident in the ancient Indian soul which may be said to have been simply an arena for the inflowing of higher spiritual Beings. In the soul of the ancient Persian it was not so to the Same extent. And then we heard how in Egypto-Chaldean civilisation it was even then the mission of the human soul—noticeable particularly in the Babylonian people—to bring the super-personal down into the personal, the spiritual down to the physical plane. The significance of personality constantly increases the nearer we come to the Greek epoch, when the ego works and weaves in the ego. In the strong and forceful figures of the Greek epoch the stamp of personality is complete. It is with the Greeks, and later with the Romans, that what can at first be bestowed on the individuality only from higher worlds withdraws to the greatest extent, while what a man expresses in his personality as his proper humanity comes to the forefront.

The question may arise: Which particular Spirits, from which Hierarchies, worked through the ancient Indians, the ancient Persians, the Babylonians, Chaldeans and Egyptians respectively It is the answer to this question that alone can give us deeper insight into the occult course of history.²⁶ The investigations made possible from occult sources enable us, in a certain sense at any rate, to say which particular Beings of the higher Hierarchies worked through men as their instruments in each of these periods. Into the ancient Indian soul, which created the civilisation immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the Beings we call the Angeloi, the Angels, poured their forces. And in a certain connection it is true to say that when a man of ancient India spoke, when he gave expression to what was active in his soul, it was not his own egohood speaking directly, but an Angelos, an Angel. Ranking only one stage higher than man, the Angel is the hierarchical Being most closely related to him and therefore able, as it were, to speak more directly. It is in the ancient Indian mode of speech that an element foreign to the human comes most strongly into evidence, because the Angel, as the Being most closely related to man, is able to speak with the greatest directness.

This direct expression was less possible for the Beings of the higher Hierarchies who spoke through the souls of the ancient Persian people, for they were Beings of the next higher rank—the Archangels. And because these Beings stand two stages higher than man, what they were able to express by means of human instruments was farther away from their own inherent nature than what the Angels could express through the ancient Indians. Thus, stage by stage, everything becomes more human. Nevertheless this downflow from the higher Hierarchies is continuous, unbroken. Through the souls of the Babylonian, Chaldean, Egyptian peoples, the Spirits of Personality (the Archai) express themselves. Hence it is in this period that the emergence of personality is most prominent, and what man is still able to give out from the forces streaming down to him is therefore the farthest removed from its origin, bearing the essential stamp of the human-personal. And so, as evolution advances to the Egypto-Babylonian epoch, there is a continuing manifestation of the Angels, the Archangels and the Spirits of Personality.

In the ancient Persians, especially, we can see very exactly how they had an awareness that the Archangels—the Spirits of paramount importance in that epoch—were working into the human organism, the human organism in its totality. We must not, to be sure, take an average Persian when considering the downflowing of forces from the Hierarchies. The forces streamed down, too, upon the average Persian, but only those who were the immediate pupils of the inspirer of the ancient Persian culture, of Zarathustra himself, were capable of knowing how this happened, of seeing through to the reality. And they did indeed possess this knowledge. For you will remember from many descriptions I have given of the teachings of Zarathustra, or from exoteric traditions, that according to the view of the ancient Persians the primal Divinity, Zervana Akarana, reveals himself through the two opposing powers, Ormuzd and Ahriman. The ancient Persians were clearly aware that whatever comes to manifestation in the human being derives from the macrocosm, and that the phenomena of the macrocosm—especially, therefore, the movements and positions of the stars—are mysteriously connected with the microcosm, with man. Hence the pupils of Zarathustra saw in the Zodiac the external expression, the image, of Zervana Akarana, of the primal reality of Being living and weaving through eternity. Even the very word “Zodiac” is reminiscent of the word Zervana Akarana. The pupils of Zarathustra saw twelve powers proceeding from the twelve directions of the Zodiac, six directed towards the light side of the Zodiac traversed by the sun by day; the other six towards the dark side—turned, as they said, towards Ahriman. Thus the Persian conceived of the macrocosmic forces coming from the twelve directions of the universe and penetrating into, working into humanity, so that they are immediately present in man. Consequently, what unfolds through the working of the twelve forces must reveal itself also in its microcosmic form, in human intelligence; that is to say, it must come to expression in the microcosm, too, through the twelve Amshaspands²⁷ (Archangels), and indeed as a final manifestation, so to say, of these twelve spiritual, macrocosmic Beings who had already worked in former ages, preparing that which merely reached a last stage of development during the epoch of Persian civilisation.

It should not be beyond the scope of modern physiology to know where the microcosmic counterparts of the twelve Amshaspands are to be found. They are the twelve main nerves proceeding from the head; these are nothing else than material densifications of what arose in the human belong through the instreaming of the twelve macrocosmic powers. The ancient Persians pictured the twelve Archangel-Beings working from the twelve directions of the Zodiac, working into the human head in twelve rays, in order gradually to produce what is now our intelligence. Naturally they did not work into man for the first time in the ancient Persian epoch, but finally they worked in such a way that we can speak of twelve cosmic radiations, twelve Archangel-radiations, which then densified in the human head into twelve main cerebral nerves. And just as knowledge in a later age includes what was already known in an earlier one, so could the Persians also know that Spirits of a lower rank than the Archangels had been at work previously, in the Indian epoch. The Persians called the Beings of the rank below the Amshaspands, “Izads,” and of these they enumerated 28 to 31. The Izads, therefore, are Beings who give rise to a less lofty activity; to soul-activity in man. They send in their rays, which correspond to the 28, 30 to 31 spinal nerves. And so in Zarathustrianism you have our modern physiology translated into terms of the spiritual, the macrocosmic, in the twelve Amshaspands and in the 28 to 31 Izads of the next lower Hierarchy.

A true fact of historical evolution is that what was originally seen spiritually is now presented to us through anatomical dissection; things that were formerly accessible to clairvoyant vision appear in later epochs in materialistic form. A wonderful bridge is disclosed here between Zarathustrianism, with its spirituality, and modern physiology, with its materialism. Of course, the destiny of the great majority of mankind makes it inevitable that such an idea as that of the connection between the Persian Amshaspands and Izads and our nerves is regarded as lunacy, especially by those who study the materialistic physiology of to-day. But after all, we have plenty of time, for the Persian epoch will be fully recapitulated only in the Sixth epoch which follows our own. Then, for the first time, the conditions prevailing will enable such things to be intelligible to a large part of humanity. Therefore we have to content ourselves with the fact that indications of them can be given to-day as part of the spiritual-scientific outlook. And such indications must be given if a spiritual-scientific conception of the world is to be spoken of in the true sense, and attention called, not merely in general phrases, to the fact that man is a microcosmic replica of the macrocosm.

In other regions, too, it has been known that what comes to manifestation in the human being flows in from outside. For example, in certain periods of Germanic mythology mention is made of twelve streams flowing from Niflheim to Muspelheim. The twelve streams are not meant in the physical-material sense, but they are that which, seen by clairvoyance, flows as a kind of reflection from the macrocosm into the human microcosm, the human being who moves over the earth and whose evolution is to be brought about through macrocosmic forces.

It must however be emphasised that these streams are to be regarded to-day as astral streams, whereas in the Atlantean epoch, which immediately followed that of Lemuria, and in Lemuria itself, they could be seen as etheric streams. So a planet which is related to the earth, but represents an earlier stage of development, must reveal some similar phenomenon. And as from a distance things can often be observed which in proximity escape our observation, because what we see is then broken up into details, so in the case of a planet resembling the earth, when it is sufficiently distant and passing through earlier stages of development such as those undergone by our earth, it might be possible, even to-day, to observe these twelve streams.

To be sure, they will not look quite the Same as once they appeared when seen an the earth. Distance is an essential factor, for if, to take an example, you are standing in the midst of a swarm of gnats, you do not see the swarm with its different shades of density; these are perceived only when you see the swarm from some way off. What I have just said lies at the root of the observations of so-called “canals” an Mars. It is there a matter of certain streams of force which correspond to an earlier stage of the earth²⁸ and are described in the old Germanic myths as streams flowing from Niflheim to Muspelheim. Naturally this is rank heresy from the point of view of modern academic physiology and astronomy, but these sciences will have to submit to a great deal of revision in the course of the next few thousand years.²⁹

All these things show us what profound wisdom is to be divined in the simple saying: The human microcosm is a kind of image of the macrocosm. Such sayings themselves bear witness that the words touch directly upon the deepest treasures of wisdom. The saying that man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm can be just a trivial phrase, but rightly understood it epitomises an untold multitude of concrete truths. All this has been said in order to indicate to you the configuration of soul in the man of ancient Persian civilisation; especially in the leading personalities there was a living feeling of man's connection with the macrocosm.

After the Beings whom we have named in their sequence as Angels, Archangels and Spirits of Personality had worked until the age of the Babylonian-Egyptian civilisation, there followed that remarkable Greco-Latin civilisation which brought the personality as such, the weaving of the ego in the ego, particularly to expression. There, too, certain Beings made themselves manifest—the Spirits of Form, who are one stage higher than the Spirits of Personality. But the manifestation of these Spirits of Form was different from that of the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels and the Angels. How do the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels and the Angels manifest in the Post-Atlantean epoch? They work into man's inner nature. The Angels worked as inspirers of the ancient Indians; the Archangels similarly in the ancient Persians, but here the influence of the human element already asserted itself to a somewhat greater degree. The Spirits of Personality stood as it were behind the souls of the Egyptians, urging them to project the spiritual on to the physical plane. The Spirits of Form manifest in a different way. They manifest from below upwards as far more powerful Spirits who are not dependent upon using man merely as an instrument; they manifest in the kingdoms of Nature around us, in the configuration of the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. And if man would recognise the Spirits of Form in their manifestation, he must direct his gaze outwards, he must observe Nature and investigate what has been woven into her by the Spirits of Form. Consequently in the Greek epoch, when the paramount manifestation is that of the Spirits of Form, man does not receive any direct influence as an inspiration. The influence of the Spirits of Form works far rather in such a way that man is allured by the outer world of sense; his senses are directed with joy and delight towards everything spread out around him, and he tries to elaborate and perfect it. Thus the Spirits of Form attract him from without. And one of the chief Spirits of Form is the Being designated as Jahve or Jehovah. Although there are seven Spirits of Form and they work in the different kingdoms of Nature, men of the present age have a faculty of perception only for the one Spirit, Jehovah.—If we reflect on all this, it will be intelligible to us that with the approach of the fourth epoch, man is more or less forsaken by these inner Guiding-Powers, by the Angels, Archangels and Spirits of Personality, and that he turn his gaze entirely to the external world, to the physical horizon where the Spirits of Form are in manifestation. They were of course already present behind the physical world in earlier times, but they had not as it were yielded themselves to human recognition. In the period immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the Spirits of Form had been at work; they had been at work in the kingdoms of Nature, in the laws governing wind and weather, in the laws of the plants, animals and minerals. They had also worked in times more ancient still. But man did not direct his gaze to what then came to meet him externally, for he was inwardly inspired by the other Spirits. His attention was diverted from the outer world.

How is this to be explained? In what sense are we to understand the fact that these other Hierarchies, who are of a lower rank than the Spirits of Form, asserted their influence so dominantly over against the already existing activity of the Spirits of Form? This is connected with a definite period in the evolution of the earth as a whole. To the clairvoyant vision which with the help of the Akasha Chronicle looks back into the past, these things present an appearance entirely different from the speculative pictures based on the geological data of the present day. When we go back before the activity of the Spirits of Personality in the Chaldean epoch, before that of the Archangels in the ancient Persian and of the Angels in the ancient Indian epoch, we come to the period when the Atlantean cataclysm was at the height of its fury. We find our way gradually into the conditions then prevailing. This is the time to which the legends of the Deluge existing among the different peoples refer, but their picture of it was very different from that drawn by the hypotheses of modern geology. In still earlier Atlantean times, the picture was again quite different. Man was a being capable of transformation. Before this catastrophe the whole face of the earth was different from anything that can be imagined to-day. You can well conceive that at that time Spiritual Hierarchies worked into the earth still more strongly.

Between the old influences in the Atlantean epoch and those in the Post-Atlantean, there was a boundary-period filled by the Atlantean catastrophe—by those events whereby the face of the earth was totally changed in regard to the distribution of water and land. Such periods and changes consequent upon them are connected with mighty processes in the constellation, position and movement of the cosmic bodies connected with the sun. In fact, such periods in the earth's evolution are determined and directed from macrocosmic space. It would lead too far if I were to attempt to describe to you how these successive periods are directed and regulated by what is called in modern astronomy the precession of the equinoxes. This is connected with the position of the earth's axis in relation to the axis of the ecliptic, with mighty processes in the constellation of neighbouring celestial bodies; and there are definite times when, on account of the particular position of the earth's axis in relation to these other bodies of the cosmic system, the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth is radically changed. This position of the earth's axis in relation to the neighbouring stars causes the climatic conditions to change. In the course of something over 25,000 years, the axis of the earth describes a kind of conical or spherical movement, so that conditions undergone by the earth at a certain time are undergone again, in a different form and indeed at a higher stage, after 25,000 to 26,000 years. But between these great periods of time there are always shorter periods. The process does not go forward in absolute, unvarying continuity, but in such a way that certain years are crucial points, deeply incisive times in which momentous happenings take place. And here, because it is of essential significance in the whole historical development of earthly humanity, we may point particularly to the fact that in the seventh millennium before Christ there was a very specially important astronomical epoch—important because, on account of the constellation brought about by the relative position of the earth's axis to the neighbouring stars, the climatic conditions on earth culminated in the Atlantean cataclysm. This happened six to eight thousand years before our era, and the effects of it continued for long ages. Here we can only emphasise what is correct, as opposed to the fantastic periods of time that are mentioned, for these happenings lie much less far behind us than is generally believed. During this period the macrocosmic conditions worked into the physical in such a way as to bring about the mighty physical upheavals of the Atlantean cataclysm, which completely changed the face of the earth. This was the greatest physical transformation of all, the most drastic action of the macrocosm upon the physical earth. Hence the influence from the macrocosm upon the spirit of man at that time was at its lowest; this epoch therefore provided an opportunity for the less powerful Beings of the Hierarchies to begin to exercise on man a potent influence, which then ebbed gradually away.

Thus when the Spirits of Form were working powerfully to revolutionise the physical, they had less time to work also upon the spirit of man, with the result that the physical vanished as it were from under man's feet. But an the other hand it was precisely during the time of the Atlantean catastrophe that men were transported most completely into spiritual realms and only gradually found their way again into the physical world in the Post-Atlantean epoch. Now when you picture that at this time—six to eight thousand years before the Christian era—the least influence was exercised upon the human spirit and the strongest influence on the physical conditions of the earth, it will not be difficult for you to conceive that there may be another point of time when the opposite situation comes about: when those who are cognisant of such a matter experience the reverse of these conditions—namely, the least influence upon the physical and the greatest influence, precisely of the Spirits of Form, upon the human spirit. Hypothetically you can conceive that there may he a point in history where the reverse of the great Atlantean catastrophe applies. Of course it will not be so easily noticeable, for the Atlantean catastrophe, when parts of the very earth were blotted out, is bound to be a very striking event for people of our Post-Atlantean epoch, with their strong leanings to the physical. When the Spirits of Form are exercising a powerful influence on the human personality and have only a little influence upon what is taking place in the external world, the impression will be less vivid. The point of time when this condition—in the nature of things, less perceptible to men—set in, was the year A.D. 1250 This year 1250 is of momentous importance in history.³⁰ It fell in a period that can be characterised briefly as follows.

The spirits of men felt as though impelled to express with the greatest possible precision how the mind and heart can look upwards to the Divine Beings above the other Hierarchies, how man seeks to come into relation with these Beings, conceived primarily as a unity, first through Jehovah, then through Christ, and how all human knowledge is to be applied to the unveiling of the mystery of Christ Jesus. That was a point of time especially adapted for conveying to mankind the mysteries which come to direct expression in the connection of the Spiritual with the working of Nature. Hence we see that this year 1250 was the starting-point of great and detailed elaborations of what was formerly only believed, only divined: it was the starting-point of Scholasticism, which is greatly undervalued to-day.³¹ It was also the starting-point of revelations which found expression in spirits such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, and which took effect most deeply in Rosicrucianism. This shows that if we want to search for the deeper forces of historical development, we must take stock of conditions quite other than those outwardly in evidence. In point of fact, behind the things of which I have just been speaking there are also hidden the forces working, for example, in the waves and subsequent ebbing of the Crusades. The whole of European history, especially the flow of happenings between East and West is attributable solely to the fact that forces are at work behind the events, as I have now elucidated.

We may therefore say: There are two points of time, one of them marked by a great upheaval an the outer physical plane and the other by a change in character of all that had once resounded in the secrecy of the Mysteries. But we must keep well in mind that in all such matters there are again other laws which cut across the main laws. Hence we can understand that in this period there lies the starting-point for great revelations; that this period is entirely in keeping with the appearance of a man such as Julian the Apostate, who had once been inspired in the Eleusinian Mysteries. At that time he had opened his soul to the revelations coming from the Spirits of Form. But the initial onset of a powerful influence always works for a period of about four hundred years, then it begins to ebb and the streams as it were to separate. Hence the eventual effect of what had been perceived at that time as spiritual reality behind the manifestations of Nature was that men forgot the Spiritual and paid attention only to the manifestations of Nature. That is the modern mentality. Tycho Brahe is one of the last of those who still grasped the reality of the Spiritual behind the data constituting the sciences of external Nature. Tycho Brahe was a truly wonderful personality, because with. his supreme mastery of external astronomy he discovered thousands of stars, and at the same time he had such deep inner knowledge of the sway of the spiritual Powers that he could astonish all Europe by boldly predicting the death of the Sultan Soliman. We see how out of the spiritual nature-knowledge, which begins to appear in 1250 and is exemplified in Spirits such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, there gradually emerges what later on amounts merely to perception of the manifestations of external Nature; while the inner, the Spiritual, remains in that mysterious stream known to us as Rosicrucianism. Then the two streams flow on.

It is indeed remarkable how this process shows itself in actual personalities. Once, near the beginning of our German Movement, I drew your attention to how in a personality of the 15th century there appears the continuance of a spiritual movement still connected with a certain knowledge of Nature, and how the Spiritual is then cast aside and the further course is a purely external one. We can follow this in the case of a single individuality: Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464). The mere reading of his works—and one can do much more than read—shows clearly that he combined a most penetrating spiritual vision with knowledge of outer Nature, especially where this knowledge is clothed in mathematical forms. And because he perceived how difficult this was, in an age moving more and more towards external learning, he entitled his work, with epoch-making humility, Docta Ignorantia, “Learned Ignorante.” He did not of course mean to imply that he was himself an utter dunce, but that what he had to say was above the level of what was going to develop as mere external learning. To use a prefix much in vogue nowadays, we may say: this “Learned Ignorance” is a “super”-learnedness. Then, as you know, he was born again—it was a case of a very quick reincarnation—as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)³² The same being who had lived in Nicolaus Cusanus continued to work in Nicolaus Copernicus. But you can see how far human mentality had moved by that time towards the physical, for the depth of knowledge possessed by Nicolaus Cusanus could work in Copernicus only in such a way as to produce the plan of the outer, physical cosmos. The knowledge that had lived in Nicolaus Cusanus was as it were filtered; the Spiritual was ignored and re-cast in terms of external science. There we have a tangible illustration of how that mighty impulse was to work within a short period from the year 1250, which was its central point in time. What streamed into our earth at this point of time worked on its own way. It worked an in there two streams, one of which is materialistic and will become ever more so, while the other strives for the Spiritual, manifesting particularly in what we know as the Rosicrucian revelation, which flowed in greatest intensity from this very starting-point, although there had of course been previous preparation.

So you see that there is a certain epoch, lasting for about six to eight thousand years, during which earth-evolution passes through an important cycle in regard to the historical facts with which man's development is interwoven. Such cycles are again intersected by others, for periodic forces of the most diverse kinds work into our earth-evolution. Only when we analyse, when we investigate the particular forces and their configurations—only then can we really fathom how things come to pass on the earth. Through all such forces and laws mankind is brought forward and human progress effected. You know, too, that in our century, but proceeding from a different stream, there is an important point of time indicated in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation: vision once again into the etheric world and the revelation of Christ in that world.³³ But that belongs to a different stream—I am speaking now more of forces that work into the broad basis of historical happenings.

If we want to understand there happenings fully, we must also take into consideration that such crucial points in evolution are always connected with certain positions of the stars, and that in the year 1250 the earth's axis lay in a definite position and was therefore related in a particular way to the so-called minor axis of the ecliptic. When we take account of the fact that what happens on the earth is brought about by great celestial conditions, even external climates show us that further specialisation and differentiation take place in the sphere of the earth itself. Because the forces work in a certain way from the cosmos, the earth is girdled by the torrid zone, then the temperate zone, then the arctic zone. This can be taken as a kind of example of how what is brought about by spiritual happenings, through the sun and other factors, takes effect on the physical plane. But there is again differentiation an the earth itself; in the torrid zone the climate of low-lying land is not the same as on heights, where it can be extremely cold. Hence in the same latitude there is a quite different distribution of climatic conditions to be observed in Africa, say, as compared with America. There is also something in spiritual evolution which allows of comparison with this kind of differentiation; for it is really true that in epochs during which a definite character due to the stellar constellations is widely predominant over the earth, modifications, special conditions, come about in the activities of the spiritual Beings and in the souls of men.

This is of great importance, for from time to time provision has obviously to be made for the distant future. Just imagine—naturally this is said hypothetically—that the wise leadership of the world was obliged, thousands of years ago, to say: There is a group of souls who must be prepared in order to accomplish this or that task in their next incarnations.—In such a case, connections have to be created so that perhaps a small group of men who have undergone some quite definite happening, who are incarnated together an a little corner of the earth, can pass through an experience which, at that particular time, may seem unimportant. But when we perceive how such men, having been crowded together in a small area, are scattered abroad in their next incarnations, and make effective for humanity as a whole what they received when they were living in this narrow compass—then the matter takes an a very different aspect. And so we can understand that in times when the general character of mankind has a certain definite quality, something very surprising may make its appearance in separate sections of civilisation, something that is entirely distinct from the prevailing character. I will give you an example of this, because it lies fairly near our own time.

In Steinthal, near Strassburg, Oberlin lived.³⁴ The deep-thinking German psychologist and researcher, G. H. von Schubert, has repeatedly referred to him This Oberlin was an unusual personality and he had a strange effect upon people. He was clairvoyant—I can allude to this only briefly—and after he had lost his wife comparatively early, he was able to live with her individuality in a communion as real as with a living person. Day by day he made notes of what was happening in the world where his wife now dwelt; he also marked this an a map of the heavens and showed it to the people who gathered around him, so that actually a whole community shared in the life Oberlin was leading with his deceased wife. Such a thing is strangely out of place at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries; but if you take what I have said into consideration, you will grasp what it portends. Things such as were revealed to Oberlin are among the most significant in this domain in modern times. I may perhaps remind you that we now have a very fine literary and historical work dealing with Oberlin and these affairs: it is the novel by Fritz Lienhard.³⁵ You will find it extraordinarily stimulating reading, with regard not only to the character of this priest but also to the cultural conditions of those days. Such things, which can easily be underestimated and regarded as chance, are able to show us how an occurrence of this kind strikes into evolution, how it can take effect in the whole process of the evolution of mankind. For the human beings who are thrown together in such circumstances, who gather round a personality as the central figure, are destined to undertake certain tasks in later incarnations.

So you see—and this is what I wanted to bring before you today—how the great macrocosmic penetration from the vast universe into the souls of men is connected with what may take place in a minute arena. But these things become especially interesting if we connect them with another law, with such points of intersection in evolution as was the year 1250. At that time there was the strongest possible penetration into the souls of men—and that is not so readily noticed as the upheavals of continents. During the Atlantean catastrophe the Spirits of Form worked so little into the souls of men that the younger hierarchies held the field, as it were, at that time. Thus the activities of the different ranks of hierarchical Beings are distributed. And it is important to know that again in these cyclic movements certain laws of ascent and decline prevail. I indicated something of this when I said that in the year 1250 there was an impetus and then an ebbing away which manifested in the current of materialism. Such things are often to be perceived. And it is interesting to notice how cycles of ascent and of decline alternate in the history of mankind.

• 26. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Lectures II and III.
• 27. See Rudolf Steiner, Turning-Points in Spiritual History. Lecture I.
• 28. See Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Hierarchies. Lecture 8. “Mars is a repetition of the ancient Moon and stands in the Same orbit to which the ancient Moon extended. ...” See also, Arenson's Index to Rudolf Steiner's Lecture-Courses, Vol. II, p. 181: “The Mars of to-day arose when the Earth was repeating the ancient Moon existence. What separated off and remained behind at this stage of repetition is the Mars of to-day.”
• 29. See Rudolf Steiner, The Whitsuntide Festival: its place in the study of Karma. (Lecture given at Dornach, 4th June, 1924.) “ ... The physical science of to-day looks to find also in the Universe everything which is on the Earth. But the physical organisation is not there in the Universe at all. Man begins with his physical organisation: then he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe an the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical is only on the Earth and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. ...”
• 30. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Lecture II.
• 31. See Rudolf Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking: a Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. With an Introduction, Epilogue and Appendices by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicoll. (Hodder and Stoughton, 1956.)
• 32. See Rudolf Steiner, The Life between Death and Rebirth in relation to Cosmic Facts. Lecture 5.
• 33. See Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation, Scene I. Four Mystery Plays, Vol. I, p. 28. The following is the English version of words spoken by Theodora, a seeress:
  
  “... Once, long ago, Christ lived upon the earth,
  And from this life ensured the consequence
  That in soul-substance clad He hovers o'er
  The evolution of Humanity,
  In union with the earth's own spirit-sphere;
  And though as yet invisible to men,
  When in such form He manifests Himself,
  Since now their being Lacks that spirit-sight
  Which first will show itself in future times;
  Yet even now this future draweth nigh
  When that new sight shall come to men an earth.
  What once the senses saw, when Christ did live
  Upon the earth: this shall be seen by souls
  When soon the time shall reach its fullness due.”
  
  See also, Rudolf Steiner, The Vision of Christ's Advent in the Etheric World.
• 34. Johann Freidrich Oberlin. Protestant priest in Steinthal.
• 35. Oberlin. A novel by Fritz Lienhard. (Stuttgart, 84th ed., 1920.)

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). A very learned and exhaustive work in English is that by J. L. E. Dreyer, Ph.D., Director of the Armagh Observatory, published in Edinburgh by Adam and Charles Black in 1890, entitled Tycho Brahe: a Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century. The following data and quotations bearing on certain points mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in these lectures, are taken from Dr. Dreyer's book.

(1) The “Nova Stella.” This was noticed in the constellation of Cassiopea by Tycho Brahe while returning to his house in the evening of 11th November, 1542. His account of the star was printed in 1593 in a little book entitled De Nova Stella, the important parts being reprinted in the great work Astronomie Instauratæ Progymnasmata on which Tycho Brahe was engaged for fourteen years. “... the Star of Cassiopea started astronomical science on the brilliant career which it has pursued ever since, and swept away the mist that obscured the true system of the world. As Kepler truly said, ‘If that star did nothing else, at least it announced and produced a great astronomer.’” (p. 197.)

(2) Tycho Brahe and Kepler. “The most important inheritance which Tycho left to Kepler and to posterity was the vast mass of observations, of which Kepler justly said that they deserved to be kept among the royal treasures, as the reform of astronomy could not be accomplished without them. He even added that there was no hope of anyone ever making more accurate observations ... Kepler was not only a great genius, he was also a pure and noble character, and he never forgot in his writings to do honour to the man without whose labours he never could have found out the secrets of the planetary motions ... Kepler and Tycho had squabbled often enough while the latter was alive, but after his death this was forgotten, and Kepler's mind had only room for gratitude for having become heir to the great treasures left by Tycho.” (pp. 312-3)

(3) Practice of Medicine. In his laboratory at Uraniborg on the island of Hveen, Tycho Brahe prepared medicines, “and as he distributed his remedies without payment, it is not strange that numbers of people are said to have flocked to Hveen to obtain them. In the official Danish PharmacopSa of 1658 several of Tycho's elixirs are given, and in 1599 he provided the Emperor Rudolph with one against epidemic diseases, of which the principal ingredient was theriaca Andromachi, or Venice treacle, mixed with spirits of wine, and submitted to a variety of chemical operations and admixtures with sulphur, aloes, myrrh, saffron, etc. This medicine he considered more valuable than gold, and if the Emperor should wish to improve it still more, he might add a single scruple of either tincture of coral or of sapphire, of garnet, or of dissolved pearls, or of liquid gold if free from corrosive matter. If combined with antimony, this elixir would cure all diseases which can be cured by perspiration, and which form a third part of those which afflict the human body.” (pp. 129-30)

(4) Macrocosmic Science applied to the Microcosm. On the subject of the reciprocal action between the “aethereal and elementary worlds,” Tycho Brahe mentioned that he had studied Hermes Trismegistus, Geber, Arnoldus de Villa Nova, Raymundus Lullius, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, etc. (see p. 129)

From September, 1574 until early in 1575, Tycho Brahe delivered a course of lectures an the mathematical sciences at the University of Copenhagen. The following passage is taken from Dr. Dreyer's abstract of the contents of the opening oration:

“While many people admitted the influence of the stars an nature, they denied it where mankind were concerned. But man is made from the elements, and absorbs them just as much as food and drink, from which it follows that man must also, like the elements, be subject to the influence of the planets; and there is, besides, a great analogy between the parts of the human body and the seven planets. The heart, being the seat of the breath of life, corresponds to the sun, and the brain to the moon. As the heart and brain are the most important parts of the body, so the sun and moon are the most powerful celestial bodies; and as there is much reciprocal action between the former, so is there much mutual dependence between the latter. In the same way the liver corresponds to Jupiter, the kidneys to Venus, the milt to Saturn the gall to Mars, and the lungs to Mercury, and the resemblance of the functions of there various organs to the assumed astrological character of the planets is pointed out in a manner similar to that followed by other astrological writers. ...” (pp. 76-7)

A significant folk tale is to be presented: It is about the young Olaf Åsteson, who lives in the saga of the Norwegian people. A dream of this Olaf Åsteson is told in a truly folksy poetic form. A dream that the people imagined filled a long sleep of thirteen days and nights, those thirteen nights and days that lie between Christmas Eve and Epiphany, on January 6. These thirteen days play a role in many folk traditions. To understand what is expressed in such traditions, one must imagine how, relatively recently, people in rural and mountainous areas felt an intimate connection with the course of nature. They felt differently when the plants sprouted out of the earth in spring than when the ground stretched bare in autumn; differently when the sun burned hot in the sky at Midsummer, and differently when the snow clouds hid all the sun's rays in December. In summer, the soul lived with nature; in winter, it withdrew into itself, lived within itself. This withdrawal of the soul became particularly intense towards Christmas time, when the nights are longest. And then it was so for the soul that it withdrew from the outside world as in falling asleep, when the eyes no longer see and the ears no longer hear. A brooding of the soul occupied with itself occurred, which became like a dream in particularly predisposed people. Then some souls experienced their immersion in the spiritual world particularly vividly. Everything they felt, about guilt and sin, about hope in life and worries of the soul, came before them. And just as dreams take on special forms when morning approaches and the first ray of sunshine falls on the dreamer's still sleeping face, so the brooding and dreaming of the soul takes on a special form when, from Christmas onwards, the sun begins to appear earlier in the day, when the approach of the new dawn is felt. Anyone who has ever lived with mountain or rural people is familiar with the dream experiences that we are considering here, which introduce the folk soul to other worlds. Nowadays, however, such experiences are no longer common. They are actually disappearing as locomotives and factory chimneys invade the landscape. In many areas, even the legends of those old dream worlds have already faded away. In areas that have been less influenced by modern industrial and transportation culture, such as certain areas of Norway, beautiful parts of that mythology have been preserved, as in our song about Olaf Åsteson. It comes from ancient times, but was recently rediscovered by the Norwegian people and is spreading quickly, so that many people know it again today, after it was long lost.

It tells of a long dream that Olaf Åsteson dreams in which he experiences the fate of souls after death. The idea behind it is that after death the soul wanders among the stars, that it comes, for example, to areas where the constellations of Taurus, the Serpent, and Canis Major are close, that it comes into the spiritual proximity of the moon. The soul enters these worlds by crossing the Gjallarbridge, which connects the earthly world with the spiritual. In many folk tales, the rainbow is presented as this bridge. Part of this spiritual world is Brooksvalin, where the deeds of the souls are weighed and retribution is meted out to them. The way the song presents the experience points to the time in which it was formed through folk poetry. The ideas about life after death are not yet entirely Christian; they are partly those that were still formed in the old pagan times. However, the time in which Olaf experiences his dream is already presented as Christian. This is evident not only from the fact that he tells his dream at the church door, but also from the fact that Christian ideas of Michael and Christ play into the pagan ideas of the Gjallarbridge and Brooksvalin. Indeed, one can immediately recognize the penetration of Christianity into Norway from the south in the approach of Christ from the south. We are dealing with a folk tale that is probably eight to nine centuries old, because that is how long ago Christianity entered Norway.

By presenting this poetry, we would like to draw your attention to the life of the folk soul, which, through the formation of legends such as that of Olaf Åsteson, shows that it was aware of its connection to the spiritual world, which inwardly experienced images of this connection that gave it the certainty that the spiritual world exists. For anyone who approached Olaf Åsteson and said, “There is no such thing, science has proven that,” would have been looked at quite sympathetically by Olaf Åsteson, who would then have smiled sympathetically and said, “There are more things in heaven and on earth than you can dream of in your school wisdom.