The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It was stated yesterday, that those beings who are to be considered as Folk-spirits, are at the stage at which they in their present existence work from within their ‘I’ upon their etheric or life-body, that therefore they are fashioning this body from out of the very inmost part of their soul.

Now of course it might be said: It must certainly be admitted that the work upon this etheric or life-body cannot be directly seen with external organs of perception, with physical eyes, but that this is something belonging to clairvoyant consciousness. But, if the activity of these beings, of these Folk-spirits plays a part in human life, then on the other hand we must be able to point out something which is to a certain extent visible externally, a kind of impression, a kind of reflection of this work of the Folk-spirits or Archangelic beings. Besides that, these beings must in a certain sense also possess a physical body. Their corporeality must be expressed in some form or other. And this physical form in which the work, the activity of these beings is expressed, must also in some way or other be indicated in the world in which man lives, for after all, the human body must also be concerned in the work of these spiritual beings.

Let us begin with the etheric or life-body of these beings, and with the work which they accomplish in it. Here we must in the first place turn to the researches made by clairvoyant consciousness. Now where does clairvoyant research find something which may be designated as the etheric body of these Archangelic beings, of these Archangels? and how are we to understand this work? You all know that the features of the surface of the earth vary in different parts, and that in the different parts of our earth there are very different conditions for the unfolding of the characteristics peculiar to the various peoples. The materialist will say that the climate, the vegetation, or perhaps the water of a country and other things determine the characteristics and peculiarities manifested by the people of that country. It is not to be wondered at that one whose consciousness is limited to the things of the physical world should speak thus, for he only knows what he can see with his eyes; but to clairvoyant consciousness it is quite another matter.

Anyone who with clairvoyant consciousness travels through different countries in various parts of the earth knows that the peculiar form of vegetation, the characteristic configuration of the rocks, does not exhaust what he knows about this particular country. When we speak of a peculiar aroma, or, of an aura of a certain part of our earth, it is comprehensible that for a materialist we are only speaking of an abstraction. To clairvoyant consciousness there arises over every part of our earth a peculiar spiritual cloudlike formation which we must designate as the etheric aura of that special part of the earth. This etheric aura is quite different over the land of Switzerland from what it is over the land of Italy, and again different over the lands of Norway, Denmark or Germany. It is true that every man has his own etheric body, and it is also true that a kind of etheric aura towers up over every part of the surface of our earth. This etheric aura differs very considerably from other etheric auras, for example from that of man. If we observe a living human being, we find that his etheric aura is united to him as long as he lives, that is, from his birth to his death. It is united to his physical body, and only alters in so far as the man during his lifetime goes through a development, when he rises higher as regards intelligence, morals, etc. But then we always see that this etheric aura of man alters from within, it develops certain parts which shine out from within. The case is different with those etheric auras which can be perceived over the various countries. Certainly these preserve throughout long periods a fundamental tone, they have something which continues throughout long ages. But in these etheric auras there are also changes which take place quickly, and these distinguish them from human auras which alter slowly and gradually, and when they do alter, the alteration only takes place from within. The auras over the various countries alter in the course of the evolution of humanity on the earth when one people leaves its dwelling place and takes possession of another part of the earth. The essential is, that the etheric aura over a certain part of the earth does not only depend upon what rises out of the ground, so to speak, but upon the last inhabitants of that territory. So that those who wish to follow the destinies of our human race in their true form on earth, endeavor to follow the interpenetration of this particular part of the etheric auras of the different parts of our earth. The various etheric auras of Europe altered very much at the time which we designate as the period of the migrations of the peoples. You may already see, that in the etheric aura over any particular part of the earth there is something which can be altered, which may indeed change suddenly, and that this change may even be brought about from outside, in a certain sense. Every one of these etheric auras is in a certain respect a fusion of what comes from the ground and of what has been brought there by the migrations of the peoples. When we consider this aura we must clearly understand that, in a certain respect, the saying which is so lightly quoted in Theosophy, but which is never really understood, at least not in all its depths, holds good in the widest sense; everything seen outside in the world with physical consciousness is only maya or illusion. It is often mentioned among theosophists, but is seldom observed in such detail, as to play a part in one's life. It is rather quoted in an abstract form, but if concrete connections are sought for, it is forgotten and only material consciousness comes into play. In truth that which mysteriously confronts us in the part of the earth inhabited by a certain people, is the etheric aura of that particular part of the earth. That which confronts the physical eyes in the green vegetation, in the peculiar configuration of the earth and so on, is fundamentally only maya or external illusion; it is a condensation, as it were, of what is at work in the etheric aura. Albeit, only that part of the external is dependent upon this etheric aura upon which it—that is to say, a living organizing principle can have an influence. The Archangels, who have the spiritual laws within them, cannot intervene in the physical laws. Where, therefore, only the physical laws work and come into consideration, as in the relations of mountain and plain, in the contours of the ground and so on, in all cases where that which determined the great changes of the people depends upon the physical conditions, there the influence of the Archangels does not extend; they have not as yet gone far enough in their evolution to be able to intervene in physical conditions. Because they are unable to do this, but are in this matter dependent, they are compelled at certain times to wander over the earth; and they embody themselves, as in a physical body, in that which is represented by the configuration of the land, in that therefore, which is ruled by physical laws. The etheric body of the people cannot as yet enter in there, it cannot as yet extend into it and organize it. Therefore the ground is sought out, if it proves to be suitable, and from this union between the etheric body which is worked through by spiritual soul-forces, and the physical piece of ground, there arises that which we meet with as the peculiar charm appertaining to the characteristics of a people, that which a man who is not clairvoyant can merely feel in a country, but which a man who observes country and people with clairvoyant consciousness, is able to see.

Now how does what may be called the work of the Archangels, the Folksouls, take place in this etheric body which rises above the ground? What is the work of the Archangel, how does he work into the human beings who move about upon this ground and live within this cloud of the Folk-spirit? He works into it in such a way that his power expresses itself in three ways in man. It is the etheric aura of the people that works into them, weaves through them, is active within them. Indeed this etheric aura works into the human being in such a way that three parts in him are affected by it. Through the mingling of these three parts arises the peculiar character which belongs to a man who lives in this etheric aura of the people. What part of man does this affect? It acts on a threefold nature in the temperaments. It acts on the temperaments which are themselves immersed in the emotional life of man, those that work in the etheric body of man, but not on the so-called melancholic temperament. The etheric aura of the folk acts upon the choleric, the phlegmatic and the sanguine temperaments; on the whole, therefore, the power of the etheric aura of the folk flows into these three temperaments. Now these three may be mingled in many different ways and may co-operate differently in different human individuals. You may think of an endless variety of ways in which the three forces co-operate, when one influences another, or conquers it, etc. Thus arise the many configurations which we meet with, e.g., in Russia, in Norway or Germany. That which works into the temperaments constitutes the national character of man. The difference existing in this respect between the several individuals, is only caused by the degree of the mingling. National temperaments are therefore mingled according to the interpenetration of the folk aura.

Thus we find the Folk-spirits at work all over the earth. But they also have their own paths to follow; for this working into the temperaments is not to them the essential thing for their own affairs, they only do this because the forces in the world mutually affect one another. They do it first of all as their own intentional acts, as that which it is their mission to do. But besides this the affairs of their own ‘I’ also come into consideration. These consist in the fact, that they themselves advance in their evolution, that they themselves pass over the earth and embody themselves in one or another region of the earth. This is their own affair. The other, what they do in the temperaments of man, is something they do besides their calling. Naturally man himself also advances through their work; it reacts upon him. Hence human work reacts upon the Folk-spirit. Later on we shall see the significance of the individual human beings to the Folk-spirit. That is important. But the essential thing is that we should be able to follow one of these Folk-spirits; and see how he embodies himself in the world, lives again for a time in the spiritual world, and then embodies himself again somewhere else. When we observe these occurrences we are still only observing the affairs of the egos of these beings. Now in order to form quite a concrete idea, picture to yourselves the human etheric body embedded in the folk's etheric body; picture the interaction of the human etheric body and folk's etheric body and imagine further that the folk's etheric body is reflected in the folk temperament in the mingling of the temperaments of the single individuals. You then possess the secret of how the Folk-spirit shows himself to us in his way within a folk. Now after we have said this, we have in reality exhausted the most important work of the true Archangel or Folk-spirit. We should have not nearly exhausted the characteristics of a people if we were only to take into consideration the character possessed by an individual belonging to the people. The Archangelic Beings, who are the true Spirits of tribal tree, have that task.

But now to a folk, as you may easily suppose, there belongs much besides this. Why? If the Archangel, the guiding Folk-spirit, did not meet with other Beings on the same piece of ground, and did not work in conjunction with them in the etheric body of man, many of the attributes of a people would not originate at all. Man is the scene of action for the meeting between the Archangels and yet other Beings who co-operate with the Archangels, and so to speak, work in conjunction with them. Now from this co-operative work arises something else in addition. Clairvoyant consciousness, when it studies the peoples, finds, strange to say, besides the Archangelic Beings already described, other mysterious Beings who are in certain respects related to the Archangels, but who in other respects are completely different from them, above all, in that they are able to employ much greater forces than can the Archangels themselves.

The Folk-spirit acts in an exceptionally delicate and intimate way upon the several human souls in this interweaving into the temperaments; but there are yet other Beings who act upon them in a much stronger, more powerful manner. We must once for all be quite clear as to these Beings, from our general knowledge of the Hierarchies; we shall then, so to speak, find the names of these other Beings who are observed by clairvoyant consciousness.

You must think of the Hierarchies of Spirits in the following way:

1. Man,
2. Angels,
3. Archangels,
4. First Beginnings, or Spirits of Personality, Archai,
5. Powers, or Spirits of Form.

We should then come to yet others, which we do not, however, wish to take into consideration to-day. If you remember what we spoke of yesterday—and you will also find it described in detail in the Akashic Record and in my book Occult Science,—you will say that of these Beings it was the Archangels who went through their human stage in the old Sun period. At that time those Beings whom we call Spirits of Form or Powers, who are now two stages higher than the Archangels, were at the Archangel stage; they were Beings such as the Folk-spirits we have described to-day. That was then their normal stage of evolution. There is, however, a remarkable mystery in evolution; it is the law of the lagging behind of certain Beings, the law which brings it about that at every stage certain Beings remain behind, so that at the following stage they have not attained their normal height, but actually have the character they should have had at the earlier stages. Now throughout the evolution of our humanity there have always been beings who have remained behind. Among these laggards are also some of these Spirits of Form or Powers, and they have remained behind in a very singular way, namely so, that although in respect of certain attributes they are Spirits of Form or Powers, and by means of certain attributes can do what at the present day can only be done by the Spirits of Form who have bestowed the ‘I’ upon man at the earth stage, they cannot, however, as yet do this completely, because they do not possess all the necessary attributes. They have so lagged behind that they did not go through their Archangel stage upon the Sun but are going through it now during the earth period, so that they are Beings who are now at the stage of Folk-spirits, but possess quite different attributes. Whereas the Folk-spirits work into human life in an intimate way because they are only two stages higher up than man and consequently are still related to him, these Powers, these Spirits of Form, tower four stages above the human stage. They possess on that account very many and mighty powers that would not be suitable for working so intimately into man. They would act more robustly, but no other domain have they for their activities than that in which are the normal Folk-spirits, the Archangels. That is the difficulty, one must first learn to discriminate in the higher world. Those who imagine that in the higher worlds they can manage with a few ideas, are very much mistaken. The man who, with a few superficial ideas, ascends into the higher worlds, would certainly find the Archangels. But one must discriminate whether these are Beings who have now normally reached the Archangel stage, or those who ought to have attained that stage during the Sun-state of our earth. There are therefore in the same domain as the Spirits of the Peoples or Archangels, other Beings at work who belong by rank, so to speak, to the Archangels, but are gifted with very different, much robuster attributes, such as are possessed by the other Spirits of Form, and who can on that account penetrate deeply into human nature. For what have the Spirits of Form made of man during the earth existence? just think how man could not have said ‘I’ to himself if the Spirits of Form had not formed the brain into that which man possesses at the present day. Therefore Beings such as these are able to work even into the physical form, although they are only at the stage of the Archangels. They enter upon a sort of trial of strength with the Folk-spirits on the very ground upon which the latter are active.

The first and chief thing brought about by this contact between these Spirits coming from these two directions, is speech, that which could not come about without the whole structure and form of the human body. In the structure of man you have the activity of these other Folk-spirits, who are connected with the powers of Nature as well as with man. We must not therefore ascribe our speech merely to those Beings who work so intimately into the folk temperament, and who as Beings two stages above man, imprint their configuration upon a people. The Beings who give language have great strength, they are really ‘Powers’, they are active upon the earth because they have remained on earth, whilst their other companions work in the ‘I’, from the sun into universal space. Before the appearance of Christ Jesus, Jahve or the Jehovah-Being was worshipped by man, and afterwards he worshipped the Christ-Being as the One Who works in universal space. As regards the Spirits of Language we must admit that man particularly likes just that part of speech which has remained with the earth.

We must accustom ourselves to quite different ideas. Man is accustomed to apply his own ideas to the whole universe. He is naturally quite wrong to look upon the fact of these high Beings having remained behind in evolution like a school-girl left behind in her class. They do not remain behind because they have not studied, but for reasons pertaining to the great Wisdom which rules the world. If certain Beings had not renounced their normal evolution, and instead of going on further with the Sun, continued their evolution on the earth, then that which we call speech could not have arisen on the earth. In certain respects man ought to love his language, for the very reason that, so to speak, out of love high Beings remained behind with him and renounced certain attributes in order that man should be able to evolve in accordance with what wisdom decrees. Just as we must look upon the ‘hurrying forward’ as a kind of sacrifice, so must we also look upon the ‘remaining behind’ at earlier epochs of evolution as a sort of sacrifice, and we must clearly understand that man could in no wise have attained certain attributes if such sacrifices had not been made.

Thus, we see how in the etheric body of man, and in that of the Folk-spirit under consideration, two different sorts of Beings exchange work with each other: the normally developed Archangels, and those Spirits of Form who have remained behind at the Archangel stage and have renounced their own evolution, in order to embody in man during his life on earth, his national language. They had to have the power so to transform the larynx, so to transform the entire instrument of speech that it should produce a physical manifestation, and that is speech itself. We must therefore look upon what confronts us as national feeling, national temperament, and its language, as being united in a co-operative work. That which man is able to express in words, that by which he shows himself to be a member of his people, that which he sounds forth into the air, that it is which those Spirits of Form who are united with the Folk-spirits can only bring about, because they with their great forces and powers remained behind at the stage of the Archangels. Therefore a co-operation of this sort takes place in the domains, in the realms where the Folk-spirits are active.

A similar co-operation is however to be found in yet another domain. I pointed out yesterday, that there are yet other forces at work; these are the First Beginnings, the Archai, or Spirits of Personality, who during the earth existence represent what is called the Zeitgeist, or Spirit of the Age. These work so, that from their own ‘I’, from their soul organization, they work into the physical body, so that they set the forces of the physical body in motion. We must therefore presume, that if at a certain time something appears as a result of the activity of the Zeitgeist, something which manifests itself in the Spirit of an Age by which mankind progresses, that this corresponds to a working with physical forces within our earth existence. You can very easily perceive this, you need only think it over in order to understand that real physical preliminary conditions are necessary in order that this or that should arise in the spirit of the age; Kepler, Copernicus or Pericles could not have lived in any other age, or under other laws. Personalities grow forth from quite definite conditions of the times, from those conditions which at a definite epoch of time are formed and organized by the physical work of higher Beings. These are in reality the physical conditions, naturally they are physical conditions, which we must not conceive of as being material blocks, but as certain configurations in the physical part of our earth in general. Sometimes these configurations stand out in strong relief; at other times when the Spirit of the Age is using his influence in any particular way, a quite definite physical constellation has to come about. Only remember that on one occasion, when some children were playing in a glass-cutter's workshop with some pieces of glass that were cut in a certain way, these pieces were so combined that one could observe the optical effect as a telescope, so that the inventor of the telescope only needed to realize his observation of this law of the telescope.

That is an historical fact. Just think however, what physical occurrences were necessary, in order that all this might take place. The lenses had first to be invented, cut, and put together in the corresponding manner. You may, here, very well use the word ‘chance’, but you may only do so if you also refrain from comprehending the law which operates in such occurrences. These physical conditions are brought together by the Archai, the Primal Forces. The reflection of their work is that which draws together into one spot on the earth that which otherwise, as Spirit of the Age, works in a variety of ways. Just imagine what would have become of many physical things in modern times, if this work of the Archai in their physical bodies had not taken place. It is really the work of the Archai which acts in this way and in this direction. Now if the Archai act thus and direct the Spirit of the Age, we may enquire again, ‘How do these Spirits of the Age really guide human progress by means of intuition?’ They do it in such a way that a human being is stimulated as if by chance, by something that takes place in the physical world. This is not merely legendary, it does sometimes occur. I need only remind you of the swinging lamp in the Cathedral at Pisa, where by observing the regularity of the swing of the lamp Galileo discovered the law of the pendulum, and how later Kepler and Newton were stimulated to make their discoveries. We could relate hundreds and thousands of cases in which physical events and human thought were brought together, by which it could be perceived how the Archai or Primal Forces give through intuition the ideas which go forth into the world as the ideas of the age, which then influence man in his development, regulate his progress and permeate it with law.

But in this domain also, those Beings who have normally become Spirits of Personality during our earth existence, work in conjunction with others, who, because of their having remained behind upon the Moon are now not Spirits of Form or Powers as they ought to be on the earth, but are also only now working as Spirits of Personality. Thus those Beings who made their renunciation not upon the Sun stage but only that of the Moon, are now Spirits of Personality, but they do not possess the attributes they ought normally to have; that is to say, they do not give intuitions in the same way as do the normal Spirits of Personality, but as do the belated Spirits of Form. They do not stimulate from outside, leaving it to man himself to observe what is brought about in the physical, but they stimulate inwardly, they work within the brain and give a certain tendency to thought. Hence the thought of man at the different epochs is stimulated from within, so that each epoch has a distinct kind of thought. This is connected with the delicate formations of thought, with inner constellations. Here the belated Spirits of Form who have the character of Spirits of Personality, work within man and produce a certain kind of thought, a quite definite form of ideas. Hence it comes about that man is not only guided from epoch to epoch according to the will of the intuiting Spirits of Personality by whom he allows himself to be stirred to do this or that, but he is urged along as if by inner forces so that the thought manifests itself physically from within, just as in the spoken language there is manifested that which, on the other hand, remained behind as Spirit of Form. Thus in the method of thought there is a manifestation of those Spirits of Form who appear in our age as Spirits of Personality. These, therefore, are not those delicately working Spirits of Personality who allow a man to do as he will, but those who take possession of him and forcefully push him on. Hence in those men who are stimulated by the Spirit of the Age you can always observe these two types. In those persons who are stimulated by the true Spirits of the Age who are at their normal stage, you may see the true representatives of their time. We may look upon these as men who had to come, and at their activities as something which could take place in no other way. But there are other persons, in whom are active those Spirits of Personality who are in reality Spirits of Form. Those are the other Spirits whom we have just named as the Thought-Spirits, those who during the old Moon-cycle moved forward to their present standpoint.

Now man is the scene of action upon which all this works together. This co-operation is shown through the fact that speech and thought enter into reciprocal relations, that not only the Spirits who are at the same stage enter into reciprocal relations, but the normal Archangels also, who govern the national feeling and temperament enter into reciprocal relations with those just described, not only therefore with the Spirits of Form who are at the Archangel stage, but also with those Spirits of Personality who are in reality belated Spirits of Form.

These two kinds appear in human nature and in human being. This relation is one extremely interesting to study when with occult knowledge and occult power of vision one goes from one people to another. Then one can see how the normal Folk-Spirits act, and how they then receive their orders from the Spirits of the Age. But these Folk-spirits work within man together with the Spirits of Language and also with the Thought-spirits who work into the thoughts of man. Within man there are not only normal and abnormal Archangels, but also Archangels in contradistinction to the abnormal Spirits of Personality who from within govern the work of thought in a particular age.

Now it is extremely interesting,—I have said that conditions will be touched upon which you must meet with your spiritual understanding, which must be clothed in ordinary words because no language has as yet been created which would make all this credible and clear; one has to express everything in words which can depict the facts somewhat figuratively, which however correspond to an important fact in the evolution of humanity,—it is extremely interesting and important to follow the evolution of humanity in more recent times; it is important to know that a reciprocal agreement was once arrived at between one of the guiding Spirits of the Peoples, who is a normal Archangel, and one of those Spirits who work inwardly as Spirits of the Thought-forces, an abnormal Spirit of Personality, and in a certain historical epoch the serious and important result of this agreement is to be seen. In order to make this agreement more especially complete, a harmonious relationship was established with the corresponding abnormal Archangel, who was the guiding Spirit of Language at that time; so that there was a point in the evolution of mankind, when so to speak, the normal and abnormal Archangels worked together and when, besides this, there worked in as an additional impulse the kind of thought which was brought about from within by an abnormal Spirit of Personality. The agreement made between these three parties was reflected in one particular people. That was the Indian people, who introduced the post-Atlantean civilization in the first post-Atlantean age. It was during this Indian civilization that the constellation arose in which these three Beings were able to work most harmoniously together. The consequence of that is all that we may call the historical rôle of this Indian people. Even in those ages of which the historical traditions still remain, the effects of what was formerly concluded in that agreement still continued to work. That is the reason why the ancient sacred language of the Indians acted with such power and produced those mighty historical effects in civilization, and why it could act so powerfully even in succeeding times. This power was brought in by the abnormal Archangels who worked in the language. The power of the Sanskrit language rests upon the agreement of which I have just spoken. And again the unique Indian philosophy, which as creative thought acting from within man has not yet been equaled by any other people in the world, also rests upon it; the inner completeness of thought belonging to the Indian culture rests also upon this agreement. In all other parts of the world we observe different conditions; but in all of them there could at that time be observed what has just been described. Hence it is so infinitely fascinating to follow up these trains of thought, which take the peculiar form they do, because they have not proceeded from the predominance of the normal Archangel over the abnormal one, but from their harmonizing so completely, because each thought was actually absorbed by the temperament of the people and was lovingly spun on into details at that time when the Indian people represented the first blossom of the culture of the post-Atlantean epoch. And the language worked on in this way because the conflict had not arisen there which would have taken place everywhere else, because such a cooperation took place between the Archangel of the normal evolution and the Archangel of the abnormal evolution. Thus one may say that this language, poured forth from the purest temperament, is itself a product of that temperament. That is the secret of the first civilization of the post-Atlantean epoch. That, however, is what must be observed in all other peoples, namely, that in them an unique co-operation takes place between these three forces, between the normal Folk-spirit or Archangel, the abnormal Archangel, and that which acts inwardly in the abnormal Spirit of the Age, who works, not as a Spirit of the Age, but from within, and finally that which the true Spirit of the Age has to convey inwardly to the nation.

The true knowledge of a people comes from listening to these forces within, and weighing the share which each factor has in the constitution of the people. Hence it has become difficult for persons who do not take the occult forces of human evolution into consideration, really to define the word ‘folk’. Examine the several books in which in any, part of the world the conception of a ‘folk’ is defined, and you will see what curious definitions there are, and how greatly they differ from each other. They have indeed to differ, because one writer feels more what comes from one side, from the normal Archangels, another what proceeds from the abnormal Archangels, and again a third that which comes from the several personalities of the people. Each one feels something different and uses that in his definition. That is just what Spiritual Science has made clear to us, that these definitions need not always be wrong; but they are always bathed in maya, in illusion. From what a writer says it can be seen that he only observes maya, and that he leaves unnoticed the various forces at work.

Hence one will naturally always obtain very different conceptions, if from the anthroposophical standpoint one observes a people like the Swiss, who live in one and the same country and speak three languages, and on the other hand peoples who speak one language only.

As to why some folks act more under the influence of the Spirit of Personality, that is to say, why their life is especially made up of the cooperation of the several personalities, we shall have to speak later. Peoples whose existence is more under the influence of the abnormal Spirit of Personality are also to be found on the earth; those Spirits of Personality do not work for the further progress of evolution. You need only study the character of the North American people, there you have a people absolutely founded on this principle.

Thus you will see, that we shall only understand the history of the world, in so far as it consists of the histories of peoples, if we follow up the normal and abnormal Archangels, the normal and abnormal Spirits of Personality in their reciprocal positions, and in their co-operative work, and at the same time follow up their work in peoples that succeed each other in the course of the world's history.

It has already been mentioned here that in the group meetings this winter we want to gather together all the threads as it were that will eventually link up to form a deeper understanding of the being of man and various other things connected with man's whole life and evolution that will lead us deeper and deeper into the secrets of the world. Today I would like to remind you of the group lecture the time before last (21st December 1908) and take our start from there. You will remember that we spoke of a certain rhythm existing in the four members of man's being. We want to start there today and find an answer to the question: How can a knowledge of these things help us understand in a deeper way both the necessity and the object of the anthroposophical movement?

Today we shall have to link up two things apparently very far removed from one another. You will remember that there are certain relationships between man's ego, astral body, etheric body and physical body. What there is to say about the fourth member, the ego, is best seen if we bear in mind the two alternating states of consciousness experienced by the ego in the course of the twenty-four hours of the day. One day with its twenty-four hours, during which the ego experiences day and night, sleeping and waking, will be seen as a kind of unity. So when we say that what the ego goes through in a day is based on the number one, we shall have to say that the number that corresponds in a similar way to our astral body is the number seven. Whereas the ego as it is today comes back as it were to its starting-point in twenty-four hours or a day, our astral body does the same thing in seven days. Let us go into this in greater detail.

Think of waking up in the morning; that is, you rise up out of the darkness of unconsciousness, as people say incorrectly in ordinary life, and the objects of the physical sense world appear round you again. You experience this in the morning and again twenty-four hours later, with the occasional exception. This is the regular course of events, and we can say that our ego returns to its starting-point after a day of twenty-four hours. If we look in the same way for the astral body's corresponding rhythm, we have to say that if the ordered regularity of the astral body is really there, then the astral body returns to the same point after seven days. So whilst the ego goes through its cycle in a day, the astral body goes considerably slower, and carries out its cycle in seven days. The cycle of the etheric body, on the other hand, takes four times seven days; after four times seven days it returns to the same point. And now please bear in mind what was said the time before last. With the physical body it is not as regular as with the astral and the etheric bodies. We can, however, establish a rough figure, and say that it goes through its cycle in about ten times twenty-eight days, and then returns to its starting-point. You know of course that a great difference exists and that the female etheric body is male and the male etheric body female. From this we can see that in a certain respect an irregularity is bound to occur in the rhythm of the etheric bodies. But on the whole the numbers 1:7:(4 x 7):(10 x 7 x 4) are the proportional figures that so to say specify the ‘speeds of rotation’ for the four members of man's being. This is of course speaking figuratively, for they are not really rotations but repetitions of the same conditions; rhythm ratios. A fortnight ago I had to point out that phenomena of daily life are comprehensible only when we know things like this that lie behind the sense perceptible world. And in a public lecture I also indicated a remarkable fact which cannot be denied by even the most materialistic scientist or doctor or be ranked among the ‘spectres of superstition’, because it is an indisputable fact. It is something that really ought to make people think, namely that in pneumonia a special phenomena occurs on the seventh day. A crisis arises, and the patient has to be pulled through this seventh day. The temperature suddenly falls, and if the patient cannot be brought through this crisis then in certain circumstances there is no recovery. This fact is known by most people, but as a rule the starting-point of the illness is not always correctly ascertained, and if you do not know which the first day is then as a rule you do not know which the seventh day is either. But the fact remains, so we have to ask why the temperature drops with pneumonia on the seventh day. Why does a special phenomenon occur at all on the seventh day?

Only a person who sees behind the scenes of existence, behind the physical sense phenomena into the spiritual world, knows of these rhythms, and why phenomena like a temperature arise. What actually is a temperature? Why does it occur? The temperature is not the illness. On the contrary, the temperature is something that the organism calls up to fight against the actual process of the illness. The temperature is the organism's defence against the illness. There is some damage in the organism, in the lungs, say. When the human being is healthy and all his inner activities are working harmoniously, these inner activities are bound to fall into disorder if one particular organ of the human body is upset. Then the whole organism attempts to pull itself together and develop the forces within itself to counterbalance the local upset. There is really a revolution going on in the whole organism, otherwise the organism would not need to gather its forces because there is no enemy to fight. The expressing of this massing of forces in the organism is the temperature.

Now the person who looks behind the scenes of existence knows that the various organs of the human body came into existence and developed at very different periods of human evolution. What from the spiritual scientific point of view is called ‘the study of the human body’ is the most complicated matter imaginable, for the human organism is extremely complex and its individual organs came into existence at quite different times. The rudimentary beginnings of these organs were developed further at a later stage of evolution. Everything in the physical organism is an expression or outcome of man's higher members, so that each physical organ expresses the higher Organisation of the higher members. What we call the lungs today have their origins in the astral body and are to a certain extent connected with it. We will eventually come to talk about what the lungs have to do with the astral body, how the very first, archetype basis of the lungs came into man on the predecessor of our Earth, ancient Moon, and how at that time the astral body was as it were planted into man by higher spiritual beings. But today I want you to look at the fact of the lungs being an expression of the astral body. The actual expression of the astral body is of course the nervous system. But man is complicated, and the development of the various parts always runs parallel. The construction of the lungs began at the same time as the development of the astral body and the incorporation of the present-day nervous system. This in a way includes the lungs in the rhythm of the astral body, that rhythm that is governed by the number seven. The phenomenon of a rising temperature is connected with certain functions of the etheric body. Something must be happening in the etheric body if a temperature runs a certain course. The temperature, then, is somehow within the rhythm of the etheric body. Whenever you have a temperature it has this rhythm, but in what way? We shall have to be clear about the following:

The etheric body, which completes its cycle in four times seven days, moves considerably slower than the astral body with its seven day rhythm. So if we relate the rhythmic course of the etheric body to that of the astral body, we can compare them with the hands of a clock. The clock's hour hand goes round once whilst the minute hand, in the same span of time, goes round twelve times. There you have the relationship of 1:12. Now suppose you look at the clock at noon, when the minute hand lies on top of the hour hand. The two hands coincide. Then the minute hand goes round one, and when it returns to the twelve it can no longer coincide with the hour hand, for this has meanwhile moved on to one. It will be roughly another five minutes before the two hands can coincide, so the minute hand does not point to the same place as the hour hand an hour later but after an hour and just over five minutes later. Now you have a similar relationship between the movement of the astral body and the movement of the etheric body. Imagine that your astral body, that is connected the whole time with the etheric body, were to be in a certain position in relation to the etheric body. Now the astral body begins to rotate. When after seven days it returns to its original position, it does not coincide again with the etheric body, for, after seven days, the etheric body has moved round a quarter of its cycle. So seven days later the position of the astral body does not coincide with the same position of the etheric body but with a position that is a quarter of the cycle behind the original one. Now imagine you have a case of the illness in question. A definite position of the astral body is connected with a definite position of the etheric body. And at this moment, with the co-operation of these two positions working together, the temperature appears, as a summons to fight the enemy. Seven days later the astral body covers an entirely different part of the etheric body. Now in the etheric body there must be not only the power to produce a temperature, for in that case, once it had really got going, it would never drop again; so seven days later this point of the etheric body that is now covered by the part of the astral body that produced the temperature seven days previously has the tendency to counteract the temperature and bring it down. If the patient's disorder has been overcome in seven days, then all is well. But if the disorder has not been overcome, and the astral body has not got the tendency now to push the illness out, the patient comes into the unfortunate position in which the etheric body has the tendency to bring the temperature down. It is important to pay good heed to these two points of coincidence. We could discover points like this for all kinds of phenomena in human life. And just through these rhythms, these mysterious inner workings, man's whole being could be understood. The etheric body really has a tendency that expresses itself in four times seven. In the case of other illnesses you will notice that the fourteenth day is of special importance; that is, two times seven. And we can definitely say that with certain phenomena the paroxysm has to be especially strong after four times seven; The point being that if the trouble decreases then, you can definitely hope for recovery. All these things are connected with rhythms of the kind we touched on three weeks ago and have dealt with in greater detail today. With such things as these, which appear difficult but which can nevertheless be understood, we can begin to penetrate a little way beneath the surface of the physical sense world. And we must penetrate further and further. Now let us enquire into the origin of such rhythms.

We have to look once again to the great cosmic relationships to find the origin of such rhythms. We have often drawn your attention to the fact that what we call the four members of man, physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego have evolved through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth existence. If we look back to our old Moon we find that it also separated itself from the sun for a certain length of time, though a large part of what is the moon today was then part of the earth. But outside there was a sun, and when such heavenly bodies belong together then their forces, which are the expression of their beings, always have an influence on regulating the life of their creatures. The orbiting of a planet around its sun or of a satellite around its planet is by no means mere chance, nor is it unconnected with life, on the contrary it is regulated by those beings we have learnt about in the hierarchies of spirits. We have seen that it is absolutely untrue that the heavenly bodies rotate by themselves through mere lifeless forces. We have pointed out how grotesquely the modern physicist explains the Kant-Laplace theory by means of his experiment with the blob of fat. A cardboard disc is inserted through the floating blob of farm the direction of the equator and a needle stuck through it from above, and then the whole thing is rotated, whereupon small droplets break off from the large drop and rotate as well. Thus the experimenter shows how a planetary system in miniature arises, and physicists generally draw the conclusion that this is how the large planetary system must have arisen. Although it is usually good to forget yourself, in this particular case it is not. For the good man usually forgets that the miniature planetary system could not arise if he did not turn the handle. It is perfectly permissible to do such experiments, and they are very useful, but you should not forget the most important part. What an infinite number of people fall victim to such suggestions! They overlook the fact that the professor was doing it. There is no gigantic professor out yonder of course, it is the hierarchies of spiritual beings who regulate the rhythms of the heavenly bodies and actually bring about all the ordering of matter in the cosmos, so that the individual planetary bodies revolve around one another. And if we could go into the movements of the planetary spheres that form a correlated system—and a time will come for this—we should recognise the rhythms of our own human members. For the time being, however, we need only point to one thing.

Modern man, with his materialistic mode of thought, laughs at the idea that in earlier times certain conditions in man's life were organised in connection with the four quarters of the moon. Now just with the moon in particular there is in a wonderful way a cosmic reflection of the relationship existing between the astral and the etheric body. The moon moves round its cycle in four times seven days. Those are the positions of the etheric body, and these four times seven positions of the etheric body are exactly mirrored in the four quarters of the moon. It is by no means nonsense to look for a connection between the phenomenon of the rising temperature we described and just these quarters of the moon. Just think, there really is a different quarter of the moon at the end of seven days, just as there is another quarter of the etheric body and the astral body covers a different quarter of the etheric body. Originally the relationship of the human astral body to the etheric body was indeed regulated by spiritual beings bringing the moon into a corresponding orbiting of the earth. And you can see how the things are to a certain extent connected, in that even modern medicine reckons with an ancient heritage of rhythmic knowledge. As the rhythm of the body is ten times twenty-eight and the physical body is as it were back at the same point ten times twenty-eight days later, there are about ten times twenty-eight days between the conception of a human being and his birth, ten lunar months. All these things are connected with the regulating of the great cosmic relationships. Man as microcosm is a true image of the great world relationships, for he is created out of them.

Today we want to turn our thoughts to evolution in the middle of Atlantean times. That was a very important point for earth evolution. Before that time we can distinguish three races in human evolution; the Polarian, the Hyperborean and the Lemurian race. Then comes the Atlantean race. We are now in the fifth race and two races will follow us, so the Atlantean epoch lies right in the middle. The middle of Atlantean times is the most important point in earth evolution. If we were to go back before this time, even then we should have found an exact reflection of cosmic relationships in the relationships of external human life. It would have had a very bad effect on man if he had done the kind of things then that he does now. Nowadays man does not adjust himself very much to the cosmic situation. In town life things often have to be arranged in such a way that people are awake when they would otherwise be asleep and asleep when they ought to be awake. If anything like being awake at night or sleeping in the daytime had occurred in Lemurian times, and man had paid so little attention to the external phenomena that belong to certain inner processes, he would not have survived. Of course such a thing was quite impossible then, because it was a matter of course that man in his inner rhythm conformed with outer rhythm. Man lived as it were with the cycles of the sun and the moon and modeled the rhythm of his astral and etheric bodies on the cycle of sun and moon.

Let us come back to the clock. In a certain respect this also conforms to the great cosmic cycle, when the hour and minute hands coincide at twelve o'clock, that is because there is a certain constellation of the sun and stars. We set our clocks according to this and a clock is unreliable if the two hands do not coincide the following day as soon as this constellation of stars occurs again. In Berlin the clocks are set daily by electricity from the Enckeplatz observatory. So we may say that the movements or rhythms of the clock hands are set every day according to the rhythm of the cosmos. Our clock is correct if it synchronises with the central clock which, in its turn, synchronises with the cosmos. In ancient times man had no need of a clock, for he himself was a clock. His life's course, which he could clearly feel, absolutely conformed to cosmic relationships. Man really was a clock. And if he had not conformed to the cosmic situation, exactly the same thing would have happened to him as happens to a clock if its movement does not correspond to the outer situation: it goes wrong, and he would have gone wrong too. The inner rhythm had to correspond to the outer. And the essential part of man's evolution on earth is that since the middle of Atlantean times the outer situation does not absolutely coincide with the inner one. Something else has come about. Just imagine someone fancying that he could not bear the two hands of his watch coinciding at noon. Supposing he alters them to three o'clock, then when it is one o'clock for other people he makes it four p.m., at two o'clock he makes it 5 p.m., and so on. The inner working of his clock will not have changed, it will only have become displaced compared with the outer situation. Twenty-four hours later he will make it three o'clock again; that it, his clock's movement will not coincide with the cosmic situation but its inner rhythm will still agree with it, for it has only been displaced. Man's rhythm has also been displaced. Man would never have become an independent being if all his activity had remained in cosmic leading strings. The basis of his freedom lies in his having preserved his inner rhythm while severing himself from external rhythm. He has become like a clock that at the nodal points no longer coincides with cosmic occurrences yet is inwardly in harmony with them. Thus in the far distant past a human being could be conceived in one particular stellar constellation only and be born ten lunar months later. This coinciding of conception with a cosmic situation has ceased but the rhythm has remained, just as a clock keeps to its rhythm even though at midday you set it at three o'clock. Of course it is not man's circumstances only though, that have become displaced, the times have become displaced as well. Even if we disregard the last-mentioned cosmic displacement, something very special has occurred in man's inner life, in that he has lifted himself as it were out of the cosmic situation and is no longer a ‘clock’ in the proper sense of the word. He is more or less like a man who has put his clock forward three hours and then, forgetting how much he has put it forward, cannot sort himself out any more. This is what happened to man in earthly evolution once he was free of the situation in which he was like a clock in the cosmos. In certain respects he brought his astral body into disorder. The more the conditions of human life were regulated by the physical, the more the old rhythm was preserved; but the more his life conditions became influenced by thought, the greater the disorder that came into them. I would like to clarify this from another angle.

Men are not the only beings we know of, we also know of beings that are superior to present-day earth man. We know of the sons of life or the angels, and we know that they went through their human stage on ancient Moon. We know of the spirits of fire or the archangels, that went through their human stage on the old Sun condition of the earth, and we also know of the primeval forces, who went through their human stage on ancient Saturn. These beings are in advance of man in their cosmic evolution. If we were to study them today we would find that they are beings of a much more spiritual nature than man. Therefore they live in higher-worlds. But in regard to the particular things we have been mentioning today, their situation is totally different from man's. In spiritual matters they conform absolutely to the cosmic rhythm. An angel would not think in such a disordered way as man, for the simple reason that his thought process is regulated by the cosmic powers which guide him. It is right out of the question for a being like an angel not to think in harmony with the great spiritual processes of the cosmos. The laws of logic for the angels are written in the universal harmony. They need no textbooks. Man needs textbooks because he has brought his inner thought processes into disorder. He no longer knows how to take guidance from the great script of the stars. Angels know the course of the cosmos, and the course of their thought corresponds with the ordered rhythm. When man came on to the earth in his present form he fell out of this rhythm, hence the lack of order in his life of thought and feeling. Regularity still holds sway in the things man has less influence on in his astral and etheric bodies, but in the parts that have been given into man's hands, that is, his sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul disorder and lack of rhythm have entered in. It is one of the least important matters that in our cities man turns night into day. It is of far greater significance that in his inner life of thought man has torn himself away from the great universal rhythm. The way man thinks all day long is in a certain respect in contradiction to the life of the great universe.

Do not imagine though, that all this is being said to encourage a world conception that will bring man back into this kind of rhythm again. Man had to get away from the old rhythm; his progress depends on this: When certain prophets go around today preaching ‘Back to Nature’, they want to bring life into reverse instead of helping it forward. All this chatter about returning to nature contains no understanding of real evolution. When a movement today recommends people to eat certain foods only at certain times of the year because nature herself indicates this by making foods grow only at certain times, this is the abstract talk of the amateur. The essential thing about evolution is that man grows more and more independent of outer rhythm. But we must not lose the ground from under our feet. It is not the best thing for man's progress and salvation to return to the old rhythm and ask himself how he should live in harmony with the four quarters of the moon. For it was essential in olden times for man to be like an impress of the cosmos. But it is important too that man should not believe he can live without rhythm. Just as his inner life was formed from outside inwards he must now create rhythm from inside outwards. That is the essential thing. His inner life must become rhythmic. Just as rhythm created the cosmos, man has to permeate himself with a new rhythm if he wants to share in the creating of a new cosmos. It is characteristic of our age that it has lost the old, external rhythm and has not yet attained a new inner one. Man has outgrown nature—if we call the outer expression of spirit ‘nature’—but has not yet grown into the spirit. He is still floundering today between nature and spirit. This is just what is characteristic of our time. This floundering between nature and spirit reached its climax in the second third of the nineteenth century. Consequently the beings who know and interpret the signs of the times had to ask themselves at that time: What can be done so that man does not lose all trace of rhythm but acquires an inner rhythm?

What you can see today as the characteristic of mental life is its chaotic nature. Today, when you see something that has been thought out, the first thing that is bound to strike you is its chaotic nature, its inner lack of order. This is the case in almost every sphere. Only the spheres that still possess good old traditions have something of the old order left. In new spheres man has first of all to create a new order. That is why men can see facts today, like the fall in temperature on the seventh day of pneumonia, but their explanation of them is an absolute chaos of thoughts. When the human being thinks about it, then—because he does not think in an ordered way—he piles up a medley of thoughts around the fact. All our sciences take an external fact of the world and stir up a mass of thoughts about it with no inner order, because man has gone astray in a kind of mental abyss. He has no guiding principles of thought today, no inner thought rhythm, and humanity would become completely decadent were they not to acquire an inner rhythm. Look at spiritual science from this point of view.

You will see the element you are in when you begin to study spiritual science. To begin with you hear—and gradually understand—that man has four members of his being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. And then you hear that work is done by the ego, and the astral body is changed into manas or spirit-self, the etheric body into buddhi or life-spirit and the principle of physical man into spirit-man or atma. Now just think how much ground we have covered with this basic formula of spiritual science. Think of the many themes that were really fundamental themes, and how we had to build up our whole thought structure time and again out of this basic scheme: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. You know, some people actually get tired of hearing these basic facts over and over again in certain public lectures. But this is and remains a reliable thread on which to string our thoughts: these four members of man's being and their inter-working; and then on a higher level, the transformation of the three lower members: the third into the fifth, the second into the sixth and the first into the seventh member of our being. If you count all the members of man's being that we know of physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man, you have seven. And if you count those that form the foundation of these, namely the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, you have four. And you are reproducing in thought the macrocosmic rhythm of 7:4 and 4:7 when you follow this train of thought. You are producing the outer, macrocosmic rhythm again from out of yourself You are repeating the rhythm that was once there macrocosmically in the universe and bringing it to birth again. You are laying down the plan or basis for your system of thought, as once the gods laid down the plan for the wisdom of the world. When we bring the inner rhythm of number to life in us again in this way, then out of the chaos of thought life a cosmos of thought is developed out of the innermost being of the soul. Men have freed themselves from external rhythm. By means of what is truly a science of the spirit we return to rhythm again, creating a cosmic structure from within outwards that is inwardly rhythmic. And if we turn to the cosmos and look at the earth's past, at Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, we find four, then the Moon in spiritualised form at the fifth stage as Jupiter, the Sun at the sixth stage as Venus, and ancient Saturn at the seventh stage as Vulcan. Thus in Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan our evolutionary phases add up to seven. Our physical body as it is today, has developed through the number four, through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. In the future it will gradually become completely transformed and spiritualised. So that here too, when we look at the past we have the number four, and when we look to the future the number three: again there is 4:3, or if we include the past in the whole of evolution, 4:7.

We are still only at the beginning of our spiritual scientific activity, even if we have been working at it for many years. Today we could only point out what men meant by the ‘inner number’ at the root of all phenomena. And we see that in order to gain freedom man had to fall away from the original rhythm. But he has to rediscover within himself the laws with which to regulate the ‘clock’, his astral body. And the great regulator is spiritual science, because it is in harmony with the great laws of the cosmos beheld by the seer. The future as created by man will have the same great numerical relationships as the cosmos had in the past, but on a higher level. Therefore men have to bring the future to birth out of number, like the gods created the cosmos out of number.

We can see how spiritual science is connected with the course of the macrocosm. When we grasp what is there in the spiritual world behind man, the number four and the number seven, we shall understand why we must look to the spiritual world to find the impulse to carry forward what we know to be the evolutionary course of humanity. And we shall understand why just in an age when men have reached the greatest chaos in their inner life of thought, feeling and will those individualities who have to interpret the signs of the times had to draw attention to the kind of wisdom that enables man to create his soul life in a regulated way from within outwards. We shall learn to think with inner rhythm in a way that is necessary for the future, when we think in accordance with these basic relationships. And man will take into himself more and more from the world of his origins. At present he is acquiring what we can see to be the ground plan of the cosmos. He will go further and feel himself filled with certain fundamental forces and ultimately with fundamental beings.

All this is just in its beginnings today. And we appreciate the importance and world significance of the anthroposophical mission when we regard it not as an arbitrary act of this or that individual, but rather set about understanding it with all the inner force of our very existence. Then we can reach the point of being able to say that it is not a matter of choice whether we take up the anthroposophical mission or not, for if we want to understand our times we must recognise and fill ourselves with the thoughts of the divine-spiritual worlds which are the basis of anthroposophy. And then we must let them flow out of us again into the world, so that our actions and our being acquire, in place of chaos, the stature of a cosmos, like the cosmos out of which we were born.

The ordinary earthly soul life runs its course in the inwardly experienced manifestations of thinking, feeling and will. In reality, as we have seen in the previous lectures, the reason for this is that when we wake up an etheric and astral organism as well as an ego being are contained in man's physical organization. In a certain respect, man's astral organization and ego being are outside his physical body during sleep, or, more accurately, outside the head organization of the physical body. When man is awake in earthly life, however, the etheric and astral organisms and the ego being are completely united with the physical organism. They are active in the physical corporeality. During sleep, the soul's own system of forces is not strong enough to become conscious of what it experiences in the astral and ego organisms. On the other hand, in the waking condition only that enters clearly into ordinary consciousness which the physical body reflects as thoughts from the activity of the etheric and astral organism and the ego being.

If, in his waking state, man were fully capable of experiencing the activity of his own entire soul being, he would experience first of all the course of his own life, namely, what underlies the memories as the reality of the course of life. He would be equally aware of the cosmic experience in the higher worlds that we have learned about and which, during sleep, remains unperceived and beyond consciousness. For if man were fully capable of using his astral body, there would descend into his waking consciousness what he experiences each night as a replica of the planetary movements. He would feel how the after-images of these planetary movements stream through his breathing and circulatory system. As paradoxical as it sounds to ordinary consciousness, he could say: Through my veins streams the power of the Sun, intensified by the force of Mars, permeated by the substantial force of Jupiter, etc. Man would be able to say that he was feeling an after-effect in his own being of the planetary movements. And if he could experience his complete ego being during waking consciousness, he would also feel how the spiritual essence of the fixed stars in the sky permeates his own self.

All this is suppressed during ordinary waking consciousness. Man experiences nothing in waking consciousness of the ether body's activity, which, after all, comprises the actual foundation that underlies the course of his life. He knows nothing of the impulses that come from the movements of the planets and live as stimuli in his breathing, and pulse through his blood circulation. Nothing comes to experience in ordinary waking consciousness of the many activities of the astral organization. He also experiences nothing of what is expressed in the constellations of the fixed stars and is reproduced in the eternal core of his ego being, and which, if he could experience it, would lead him to say, “I am permeated by God.” This too does not come into awareness in ordinary consciousness because the activities that are carried out in the everyday condition of wakefulness by the etheric and astral bodies and the ego relate to the physical organization in the same manner in which man clothes himself with it anew each morning. Although unaware of them, he actively permeates his physical organism with the forces that he has gathered during sleep out of the starry world and has acquired from the planetary movements. Because man actively penetrates his physical body, because his three soul elements—etheric and astral organizations and the ego being—affect the physical organism with their activity from the moment of waking up until the moment of falling asleep, the bodily organization is worked upon in a specific way. For the purely physical activity which then arises in the body itself causes and enables the whole soul life to express itself in concepts, in thoughts that are reflected images thrown by the physical body back into the soul.

Man has no awareness of the vitality that courses through him, he is not conscious of the planetary movements and the world of the fixed stars, because all the activity of his inner being is reflected during waking life onto the physical body. Through its senses, the physical body carries the effects of the outer world into the physical inner being; the phenomena of light stream in through the eyes and through the ear, the world of sounds; the realities of heat and cold enter through the sense of warmth. By means of the activity put forth by the soul all this is reflected as thoughts in the physical organism, and the soul experiences these reflected thoughts in its clear, ordinary consciousness.

These are the facts surrounding the soul's experience in ordinary wakefulness, and this poses the question to us: What does the soul actually do to the physical organism so that thoughts appear as reflections?—But first, let us keep firmly in mind that the physical organism really prevents the soul from having a consciousness of the cosmic facts, which actually reverberate and produce after-effects in it. We shall next occupy ourselves with the details of how the waking consciousness unfolds.

Let us examine to begin with what it is that this triad—the etheric and astral bodies and the ego being—produces as it works in the physical head organization of man. It turns out that the activity that is exercised on the human head organization by this triad has a degenerative effect. If the human etheric body alone were to penetrate the physical organization, a continuous revitalizing activity would be present in the physical head system. In a manner of speaking, the head's activities would be completely filled with life. But in that case no physical consciousness would arise. Physical consciousness only arises because the astral organism intervenes in the head organization. This astral organism is adapted and attuned to man's pre-earthly life, something that we have already become familiar with. The astral organism must consider it its task, if I may put it like this, not to work upon this densely material, physical corporeality but to fill with its own astral activity the body's cosmic spirit form as it did in pre-earthly existence. This astral organism of man is, after all, an after-image of what the soul brought forth out of the secrets of the planetary movements and the constellations of the fixed stars in order to form what I have called earlier the cosmic germ of the physical organization. The activity of the astral organism is therefore not directed to the earthly metamorphosis of the physical body, but toward the cosmic spirit-metamorphosis of the physical organism. This means that while the astral organism is active in the physical organism, it continually wants to spiritualize the physical insofar as the brain or head organization is concerned. Indeed, our astral organism works constantly to transform our head organization into something spiritual. An actual, outwardly visible transformation is not achieved, only the tendency toward transformation is always there.

This tendency, then, is present continually. Degenerative forces are constantly added by the head organization of the astral body to the regenerative forces of the human head organization that would otherwise produce fresh, sparkling, but unconscious life in the human head. To the extent that it is head organization, these degenerative forces try to destroy the physical organism, making it feasible for a spirit organization to shine forth from it, for that is what the astral organism is accustomed to from pre-earthly life. The physical head configuration, however, offers resistance, it cannot be broken down. This resistance is expressed in the fact that each time sleep must intervene at the moment when the physical configuration of the head would otherwise disintegrate due to the astral body's activity. Then, in sleep, the forces of the etheric body alone are active once again in the head.

The alternating states of waking and sleeping may also be characterized by saying that during the waking state the astral forces continually expose the human head organization to death. The instant their destructive activity is on the verge of changing from a latent to an active state, if I may put it that way, sleep intervenes. The imaginative consciousness of modern initiation knowledge can observe these facts in the appearance of man's etheric body during the periods of waking and sleeping.

In regard to the head organization, the etheric body, which permeates the physical body as spiritual activity, becomes increasingly undifferentiated during the waking hours. In a man who is awake you find an etheric organism that is markedly differentiated inwardly and possesses complicated forms in those parts of the physical body where the lungs, the liver, the stomach, and limbs are located. The etheric organism has an abundance of shapes in these areas during waking hours. By contrast, the longer wakefulness lasts, the more undifferentiated the ether body in the head organization becomes. Finally, it turns into something comparable to a uniform cloud in the head, for the characteristic regenerative forces that are otherwise present in this etheric organism lose their impact as the degenerative forces of the astral organism in the waking state exercise their deadening effect upon the head system.

It is quite different during the state of sleep. You see with imaginative consciousness how this element of differentiation, of manifoldness of the etheric organism penetrates the etheric head system. In sleep, the head's etheric organization acquires the same kind of forms as possessed by the rest of the etheric organism during the waking state. In sleep, the life forces, the formative forces of the etheric body wake up in the head. Then, the head becomes an unconscious but most alive organization.

So you can see that in earth existence, due to waking consciousness, man bears potential death continually in his head organization. The tendency to die is present in the head all the time. The astral organism wants to transform the head system continually into spirit. It wants to make the head into an organ of planetary motion, into an image of the starry constellations. The astral organization is an ever-present destroyer of the physical head configuration.

If present-day science knew about these facts, it would find it utterly impossible to succumb to materialism. For what is it that those people say who want to interpret the whole human organization in a materialistic way? They say that the organic processes of life take place in the head just as they do in the liver or in the stomach, only in the brain they are expressed as thoughts, as soul activity. Compared to the facts, however, this is sheer nonsense. We do not think and experience the soul in ordinary consciousness due to constructive life processes that go on in the head, but because our nervous system is continually on the verge of being destroyed as a result of the presence of death in us. To be awake in the life of soul in ordinary consciousness signifies that organic processes are not developed but rather made to die down. They must first die down within themselves and make room for the soul, if they are to unfold in ordinary consciousness. If this were correctly understood, people would have to say that quite certainly soul life cannot originate from organic processes, because these processes have to come first to the point of dying down. They must first withdraw from the head organization if the soul is to be active there.

These are the true facts in regard to the way man's soul and his physical body function together. This also shows how, through being born, man at once bears within his head system the predisposition for death. Through supersensible knowledge we learn to understand that death has the tendency to occur continually in us and is constantly kept in check only by sleep. The once-in-a-lifetime event of dying, death in the physical sense, is indeed only a summing up, a more pronounced process in comparison to the continuous, if I may say so, atomistically minute death processes that take place all the time in waking consciousness. As long as we possess a physical organism, it defends itself against the destruction wrought by the astral organism. This is how matters stand with the head organization.

Man's astral organization, however, does not merely have this effect in waking life, only a part of it does. Another part finds its way into earthly life more in the form in which it is active in pre-earthly existence. This part of man's astral body is not active in the head organization but in everything that constitutes the rhythmic system, that is to say, those organs of the physical body in which breathing, blood circulation and the other rhythmic processes take place. Although this part of the astral body, to which I refer now, lives in man's rhythmic system, it does not unite itself as closely with the rhythmic system as does the other part that is active in the head. That part takes hold of the head organization so strongly that it continually makes it incline toward death by breaking it up, whereas the part of the astral body that enters the human rhythmic system permeates this organization. It lives in the breathing and in the blood circulation, but because it does not take hold of this organization in such an intense manner, it leaves it in some respects undisturbed. It does not lay hold of this system for the purpose of destroying it. But for this reason, no thought life comes into being through this union of the astral organization of man and the rhythmic system. The expressions of the soul life are reflected in the physical head organism which has the constant tendency to die. This produces fully conscious thinking. On the other hand, what is continually taking place in the streaming together of the astral and the rhythmic organizations is not reflected in the same manner as in the life of thoughts so that a clear consciousness could result. It is expressed in the more vague form of soul life: man's emotional life, his feelings. Emotions arise, because, in waking life, the astral organism pulses through the breathing and blood circulation but does not destroy these processes and does not immerse itself so deeply into them. Instead, through its interplay with the rhythmic system, man's life of feeling is roused.

While an element of what the human being has experienced in his pre-earthly, cosmic sojourn lives in the rhythmic-organic system, it does not reach clear consciousness. This has a quite definite consequence. Through this interplay between the astral and the physical-rhythmic organisms which I have described, something continually takes place below in the unconscious that enters ordinary daytime consciousness only as a weak reflection. Let us study this in detail. Say that a person carries out his activities, his deeds in physical life. These actions of his do not express themselves in him as do mere natural phenomena. Out of a certain impulse that arises from his subconscious, he feels impelled to judge whether these activities are moral or immoral, valuable or worthless, wise or unwise. Moral evaluation, moral judgement joins in with the otherwise amoral, not anti-moral life of thinking.

Now, what is it that flashes up from the depth of soul experience and tells us: This action is good, that one is bad, this deed is wise, that one is foolish? It is a soul activity which has remained as it was in pre-earthly existence, which penetrates man's rhythmic organism of breathing and blood circulation but cannot fully stream up into the life of thoughts. It only colors it. This way, we also have reflections of this inner experience in our conscious life of thoughts, which are valuable for the activities we carry on in the physical world. We do not bear within us only what we express in our actions as the conscious judgement of thinking. No, in the rhythmic system of man there lives and pulses an astral-spiritual element that is similar in form to what it was already in pre-earthly life and which—distinctly for itself but indistinctly for ordinary consciousness—says Yes or No to his actions. Here, within us, lives a judge who judges the worthiness of our soul, and this soul-judge is as real as is our soul that lives as thinking-soul within our head organization.

In ancient times of humanity's evolution, those who wanted to attain higher perception in the old manner sought, therefore, to bring the rhythmic system into consciousness, the breathing and also the blood circulation. Now observe what resulted from their efforts to use an older method of entering into the spiritual world, a method no longer to be employed today. It turned out that those people were able to discern their own human value from what the cosmos inscribed into their breathing, considering it good or bad, wise or foolish. In the old Indian Yogi, judgement as to what was morally natural and naturally moral in him was carried up into the brain by the breath from the rhythmic system. During his Yoga perception, he made his brain into a breathing organ for a while and experienced what the cosmos said about his activity.

This judgement by the cosmos concerning our deeds is very real in the astral human organization. When man's physical body is laid aside at death, the obstacle is removed which prevents what lives in man's breathing and blood circulation from entering his consciousness. The physical organism is like a non-transparent cover for what takes place in the astral organism in the way that I have just described. Therefore, the astral experiences that live in the breathing and blood circulation between birth and death continue to live on in man's being beyond death. We shall comprehend how this works when, directly after the translation of this part, I shall describe what the human soul undergoes when it actually passes through the portal of death.

When, at death, man's physical organism falls away from the human entity and disintegrates, man remains at the outset in the etheric and astral organisms and his ego being. Inasmuch as the physical organism is no longer an obstacle to the soul's unfolding into the cosmic element and ceases to hold the soul back in its own sphere, the possibility of cosmic consciousness arises at once for the human soul. The human soul is now clothed in the etheric organism that is no longer bound to a physical body. While this etheric organism represents the course of man's life on the one hand, it is at the same time the vehicle for the continuous in-streaming of cosmic forces of life. As the soul gradually passes through death along with the ether body, it experiences the cosmic world-ether in the etheric organism. The activities that take place in this world-ether now stream into the etheric organism, for only the physical body had prevented this earlier. Now this obstacle is gone. In its inner activities, the etheric organism is not as separated from the outer cosmic events and realities as is the physical organism. The occurrences outside in the cosmic world-ether stream actively into man's etheric organism, and what occurs in the human etheric organism pulsates out into the world-ether. After death, man not only lives directly in his own etheric organism, but, inasmuch as he has liberated it from the physical organization he finds his way into the cosmic-etheric element, which continually streams in and out of him.

Since the human soul is a unity, however, man's astral and ego being are drawn along into the cosmic-etheric realm. Increasingly, cosmic-etheric awareness lights up in the human soul as its own inner being. But in comparison to this great, mighty cosmic consciousness, man's own ether body represents only a very small etheric element; and the cosmic ether actually lives within this minute etheric element. For this reason, man's own etheric experiences, which were held together again and again by his physical organization, no longer have any significance in the great cosmic ocean of ether with its cosmic consciousness. This, however, means nothing less than the fact that man's etheric organism dissolves quite soon after death. Then, along with the cosmic consciousness that he has attained, man retains his astral organization and his ego being.

In this astral organism, however, the after-effects are contained of what it experienced on earth while within the physical body. I have characterized how a part of the astral organism retains its cosmic nature, as it were, since it is only loosely connected with the breathing and circulatory rhythms. Now that the physical organs of breathing and circulation are cast off, man's inner nature, which developed along with the physical processes of breathing and circulation during earthly life, lives on with its content of moral qualities and evaluation. Permeated by cosmic consciousness, this lives on and is experienced after death. The element that found its reflection during earth life in physical breathing and the blood circulation comes to expression in a cosmic rhythm after death. A rhythm is present again, but it is one in which man feels that the moral quality-valuation holds sway which he brought along from earthly life. He experiences his astral content as moral qualities; how they came to be good or bad, wise or foolish during life on earth. This is a kind of inner pulse beat.

The cosmic process that is not yet permeated by the moral element but represents a purely cosmic element streams continually into this inner pulse-beat from outside. It represents an amoral, not an anti-moral process that is reflected on earth in the processes of nature. We do not distinguish between “good” or “bad” in nature, everything proceeds according to neutral natural laws. All that goes on in nature is a reflection of a cosmic process, and that cosmic process pulses rhythmically into the after-effect of the rhythmic-moral valuation. After death, man thus experiences himself as existing in a cosmic rhythm, he inhales the cosmos in its moral innocence and exhales into the cosmos the moral judgements he has accumulated. A cosmic rhythm has taken the place of the physical rhythm, and the human soul experiences in this cosmic rhythm how a moral element arises in the cosmos—which is designed to reflect itself amorally in outer nature—an element which, because of human experiences on earth, is carried out through the gate of death into this cosmos. The moral evaluations of its deeds that the human soul bears through the portal of death into the cosmos is incorporated into the cosmic amorality. The moral results of man's life that have been carried through death are now imbedded into the depths of the cosmos. By means of his consciousness that is no longer impeded by anything, man becomes a witness of how a moral element develops for a future world in the depths of the amoral cosmos. Our world is morally neutral inasmuch as nature is a reflection of the cosmos. A future world will arise out of ours whose nature in its reflection (of the cosmos) will not be morally neutral; instead, everything moral will be natural and everything natural will be moral. The seed for this is carried by man into the cosmos through his moral deeds. During this experience, the human soul consciously faces the great question: As my existence continues, do the moral qualities that I have acquired make me worthy to take part in the future cosmos that no longer will have a merely neutral image in nature but a moral one?

This experience of the soul after death in the cosmic rhythm, described above as sensations and feelings—we can use these terms even though they do not quite represent the supersensible experience—is proof of the impact of morality upon the physical world. This lends a nuance of its own to the soul's experiences for a certain length of time following death. I once described these experiences, which are now pictured from another side, in my book, Theosophy, and there I called them the “soul world.”

But if, after death, man had to remain only within these experiences, he could not reach the point where he could properly prepare the spiritual archetype of his future physical organism that I have described earlier, and which he must bear within him in a new earth life. It could not be developed in a proper, healthy way out of a soul life filled with moral imperfections from the preceding earth life. Consequently, at a certain point after death, the soul must enter a world where it lives only in the purified cosmos, where the experiences of the cosmic rhythm that I have describe abate. This is because all moral valuation of the soul's activities affects this cosmic rhythm, and this would only produce a decadent spiritual archetype for the future physical organism. A healthy physical body can only be created when the soul is allowed to enter a world where it is no longer influenced by the after-effects of the earthly soul experiences of its past incarnation, where, instead, the nonhuman spiritual impulses of the cosmos are active, as I have pictured it. These experiences that have to be undergone by the human soul in the purified cosmos of the spirit were also characterized by me in my book, Theosophy, from another side than is done here. There I have called them “spirit land.” Man has to enter this spirit land of the soul, for it is only then that he will be able to collaborate in the universal, all-embracing creation of the spiritual organism that in future time metamorphoses into the physical organism. Man must be relieved for a while of the imperfections stemming from an earlier life, otherwise he would have to reincarnate in a misshapen physical organism in his next earth-life.

We thus arrive through inner perception at a description of what man experiences by means of his soul forces in the spiritual cosmos after death. Along with his astral body, he naturally also carries into the cosmic spirit world what lives in his ego being. This ego being, however, must be worked on in still another way. That can be the subject of tomorrow's lecture. Today, I will have to describe in the last portion of my lecture how the form assumed by man after death relates to Christian evolution and the Mystery of Golgotha.

You will understand that a true cosmology can only come into being when we include in it what inspiration can know concerning the incorporation of such a moral, cosmic germ, as I have described. Any cosmology would remain incomplete if it did not know that the present cosmos, which finds a neutral, amoral reflection in physical nature, will through the lives of men become a cosmos one day in which the natural is at the same time moral, and the moral is natural. For this reason, a true cosmology can only arise when ordinary knowledge is enriched by inspiration, just as a true philosophy can only receive a living content when it includes the results of imagination, as I brought out yesterday. Such a cosmology, however, also requires Christianity.

In the age that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha there were initiates who employed methods other than those that must be used in initiation of the present day. Those ancient initiates, who lived prior to this Mystery of Golgotha and who knew what happens in the spiritual worlds that man en counters after death, were already able to say to their followers: “After death, you enter a soul world in which you have to experience the consequences of your moral qualities and qualities similar to them. But you cannot enter the spirit land with the same soul forces that unfolded in the soul world, for even if you were to enter there the after-effect, present in your consciousness, of the moral evaluation present in the astral organism would dull and extinguish your ego consciousness, the consciousness of your self that you would otherwise attain in spirit land after death.”

As I said, ego consciousness has developed here in the physical world on the basis of the physical organism. But precisely for the cultivation of man's spirit germ, an ego consciousness had to be present for the sojourn in spirit land even in ancient times of human evolution.

“Man cannot possess this ego consciousness by means of his own forces,” said the old initiates to those of their followers who wanted to listen. “He can only have it, if, at a certain moment after he has passed through the soul world, the lofty Spiritual Being, Whose physical reflection is the physical sun, comes and stands beside him, and leads him from the soul world into the spirit land, being his Guide from then on. As man here in the physical world experiences his best physical forces under the influence of the physical sun,” thus spoke the initiates of old, “so he must be taken by the hand, pictorially speaking, when he passes out of the soul world into spirit land in order to receive his best forces from the impulses of that Sun Being, whose physical reflection here is the physical sun. “ In this way, the ancient initiates presented the spiritual Sun Being as the lofty Companion of the human soul through spirit land.

The initiates, who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and three to four centuries later, said to those who wished to be their followers and wanted to hear what they said: Because of the direction taken by the physical development of man's organization, the inner human being, after his passage through the soul world, is so obsessed by what he has perceived of the moral consequences that if he were to remain dependent upon his own powers, his consciousness would darken there and he would not be able to receive the influence of that Sun Being. For this reason, the Sun Being Itself descended to earth, assumed a human nature in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and accomplished the deed of the Mystery of Golgotha.

If man, in addition to what he can attain here on earth by means of his sense perception and the development of his ego consciousness, can also become aware of the Christ Being in his feelings, if he acquires an insight into the Mystery of Golgotha in his feelings—which are tied to the astral body—then, the after-effect of the relationship between earth events and Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha also exercises its effect upon the astral being of man which lives on after death in the manner that I have described. By means of this after-effect, man's consciousness, which would otherwise remain cloudy and dark, is given strength when he passes from the soul world into spirit land after death. It is made capable of perception in the spiritual world, which in turn enables the soul to prepare the spiritual archetype of the next physical organization between death and a new birth.

Therefore, the initiates, who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, or lived a few centuries afterwards, said to their followers: Although man has developed in such a way that he does not carry the forces through death that can lead him from the soul world into the spirit land, Christ did descend to the earth and accomplished the Deed of Golgotha. Through the effects of this Deed of Golgotha on the human soul, the forces of the soul can be strengthened in such a manner that after death, in the transition from the soul world into the spirit land, man has such rich experiences in the cosmic world that out of its impulses he is able to cooperate in working out the physical organism for his next earthly life. Through the Deed of Christ, the human soul is purified during the transition from the soul world into the spirit land. Thus spoke the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, as had the initiates of antiquity: Through the guidance of the sublime Sun Being, the human soul is purified during its transition from the soul world into the spirit land.

From this you see that what has to be summed up as the mystery of death is connected with the Christian evolution of earthly humanity. After the fourth century, however, as I have set forth already, the initiation knowledge that could have spoken to men who wished to become its followers in the way mentioned above faded away. Now, however, the time has come when a new initiation science is once again able to reveal the connection between men and Christ Jesus. This new initiation science must again say: Whosoever accepts the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha into his life of feelings during earthly life thereby so strengthens and invigorates his inner soul being in the transition from the soul world to the spirit land that it can become strong enough to avoid forming the kind of physical organization it would form if there were no such impulse from a renewed Christianity. For, without this impulse, physical organizations would inevitably arise in future earth evolution that would be pathological. Through a renewed Christianity, we can unite ourselves with the impulse that makes possible physical organizations that will be healthy and vigorous throughout the rest of earth existence.

Thus, there is a profound connection between man's development after death and the Christ Being. In a true cosmology, Christ stands as a World Power, a Cosmic Force. His Power can be perceived in man's transition after death from the soul world to spirit land.

In the next lecture we will consider how the element that lives in the human soul and is expressed in impulses of the will in ordinary consciousness passes through death. We shall see how between death and rebirth it can become the germinal basis for certain forces that will only come to expression in the next life, and how man's destiny—formerly called karma—continues from one earth life to another. Tomorrow's lecture will add a contemplation of the sphere of the human will to today's considerations of the spheres of human thinking and feeling. That will once again show how the significant relationship between man and the Christ Being, the Mystery of Golgotha and the whole of Christian evolution, must be developed in regard to the human will. Today we have placed Christ into cosmological evolution, into true cosmological insight; it will be our task in tomorrow's lecture to place Christ into a renewed Christian perception of religion.

The fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the development of humanity's intellect, was guided by the Greek mystery centers. Initially, the mysteries provided the basis of this intellectual or mind culture for the general population of Asia Minor and southern Europe. The secret of human life and its connection with the sun played a major role in these mysteries. We know from the descriptions given in my book Theosophy how the ego lights up within man's intellectual or mind soul, after which it is meant to attain to its full inner power through the consciousness soul. Now, insofar as man's ego was destined to be developed during the age of the intellectual culture, the mysteries of that age had to be occupied with the secrets of the sun's life and particularly the sun's links with the human ego. You also know from my description in Riddles of Philosophy that the Greeks still perceived their ideas and concepts in the outer world, just as we today perceive colors, sounds, and so on. For the ancient Greeks, the element that dwells in concepts was not something merely created within the mind. It was something they beheld with the objects. In this respect, Goethe definitely possessed something of a Greek nature. He made this evident in the famous conversation with Schiller. When he heard Schiller say that his mental images—something conceptual and ideal—were not perceptions but ideas, Goethe replied that in this case he saw his ideas just as he saw external perceptions around him.

The Greeks' relationship to concepts was associated with a quite definite sensation the Greeks experienced when they directed their glance upon the outer world. In fact, they regarded the conceptual content that shone forth to them everywhere as the offspring of the sun's life. When the sun rose in the morning, they sensed the rising of conceptual life in space. With the setting sun they experienced the disappearance of the life of thought. We cannot understand the evolution of nations if we do not take into consideration this change in the soul life.

That faculty, my dear friends, has actually been lost from the soul life of human beings, namely, the faculty to sense and experience the spirituality of the whole environment. Today, a person sees the rise of the sun's round globe and only has an awareness of what is encountered there in the way of colored and shining atmospheric phenomena; it is the same when the sun is viewed as it disappears in the red glow of a sunset. The Greeks had the feeling that in the morning the world arose and bestowed on them their world of ideas. It vanished in the evening and a world then appeared that withdrew from them their world of ideas. In the darkness of night, they felt bereft of their ideas. When they looked up at the sky, which appears blue to us, but for which they used the same term as for “darkness,” they actually felt that the boundaries of space consisted of what was beyond conceptual life.

Where the Greeks saw the universe reaching a boundary, there ended for them the world of ideas with which the human being is endowed. Beyond this universe, the Greeks divined the existence of other worlds, the thought worlds of the gods. Those worlds seemed to them closely linked to what they designated as light.

They were revealed to them concentrated, as it were, in the sun's life, whereas, otherwise, they withdrew into the expanse of the dark cosmic firmament. We have to have insight into this quite different world of sensations if we are to understand the way in which this manner of perception in all its inner vitality affected the evolution of the human being for some time. We have to realize what the most advanced representatives of mankind felt when they could no longer experience the spiritual reflection of the sun's life in the cosmos upon them. And especially the most advanced representatives of humanity who had received their education in the Greek mysteries then experienced the Mystery of Golgotha as a salvation inasmuch as it once again brought about the possibility of enkindling this light within their being. The light such individuals had actually experienced earlier as a divine element they now wished to experience by means of participating with their soul and spirit in the events of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We do not acquire an actual knowledge of what has come to pass in mankind in the course of millennia when we merely study these things with the intellect. We have to focus on the transformation of the whole human mind and soul life. Living since the beginning of the fifteenth century in the age of the consciousness soul development, we have retained only the shadowy nature of our inner intellectual activity, of the spirituality of reason that existed in the fourth post-Atlantean period. I have outlined this here during the past few weeks. Now, once again, we have to struggle to attain an awareness of what can permeate our form of shadowy intellect with a living perception of the universe. It was precisely because of the modern culture of the shadowy intellect that the human being, in a manner of speaking, has been fettered to the earth. Today we actually consider only what the earth offers to us, particularly when we allow ourselves to be infected by the constantly expanding, purely scientific culture. People have no idea that they belong not only to the earth with their whole being but to the whole extraterrestrial universe as well. This knowledge of their connection with the cosmos beyond earth is something mankind must acquire once again.

We simply take earthly life today as the basis of our ideas and concepts and construe a view of the whole universe in accordance with conditions on earth. The resulting picture of the universe is then not much else than the transference of earthly conditions to extraterrestrial ones. Thus, by means of the tremendous achievements of modern science, through spectral analysis and other methods, a view of the sun was developed that is really modeled entirely upon earthly conditions. A conception is formed of what a luminous body of gas might look like. This conception is then transferred to what meets our eye as the sun in the cosmos. We must once again learn to use the materials of spiritual science to arrive at a conception of the sun. The physicist believes that the sun would present itself to him as a luminous sphere of gas if he were able to travel out into space. Yet, despite the fact that it reflects the cosmic light to us in its own way in the manner it receives it, the sun is a spiritual entity through and through. We are not dealing with a physical entity that moves about somewhere out there in the universe but with a completely spiritual being.

The Greeks still had the right feeling when they experienced the light, shining down upon them from the sun, as something that must be brought into a connec tion with their ego development insofar as this ego development is tied to the conceptual nature of the intellect. The sun's rays were to the Greeks something that enkindled their ego within them. It is therefore obvious that the Greeks still had a feeling for the spirituality of the cosmos. To them, the sun being was substantially a being related to the ego. The element the human being becomes aware of when he says "I" to himself, the force that works in him and enables him to say “I” to himself, this is what the Greeks looked at. They felt called upon to address the sun in the same way they addressed their ego, to regard the sun with the same feelings they had for their ego.

Ego and sun are the inner and the outer aspects of the same being. What orbits out there through space as the sun is the cosmic I. What lives within me is the human I.

One is inclined to say that this sensation is still faintly perceptible to those who have a somewhat deeper feeling of affinity for nature. The basis of such an experience has already vanished to a large degree. Yet, something is still alive in the human being today that is attuned to the rise of the sun in springtime, that can still experience the spirituality of the sunbeam and can feel how the ego is imbued with new life when the rays of the sun illuminate the earth with greater intensity. Yet, it is but a last, faint sensation that, even in this external manner, is dying out in mankind. It is about to disappear in the abstract, shadowy culture of the intellect that has gradually become prevalent in the whole of civilized life today. However, we must once again reach the point where some recognition can be gained of humanity's relationship with super-sensible existence. In this respect I want to point out a number of things today.

By bringing together all the references found here and there in anthroposophical literature, we shall be able, first of all, to comprehend once more the sun's connection with the ego. We shall be able to perceive the significant contrast between the forces radiating from the sun to the earth and those forces that are active in what we term the moon. Sun and moon are in a certain respect total opposites. Complete polarity exists between them. When we study the sun by means of spiritual science, we find that the sun sends down to us everything that fashions us into bearers of our ego. We owe to the rays of the sun what in fact bestows on us the human form and, in the latter, molds us into an image of the ego. What works in the human being from outside and determines his form from without even as early as the embryonic stage are influences from the sun. When the human embryo is developing in the womb, a great deal more is taking place than what present-day science is dreaming about, namely, that forces originate from the impregnated mother that then develop the human being. No, the human embryo merely rests in the mother's body; it is given form by the sun's forces. It is true, however, that we must bring these sun forces into connection with the moon's forces that have opposite effects. The moon forces become evident, above all, as the inner influence in the lower, metabolic nature of man. In drawing an outline, we may therefore say: The sun's forces are the element molding the human being from outside. What develops in the metabolic processes from within are the moon's forces, positioning themselves within the human organism and radiating outward from the center.

This does not contradict the fact that these moon forces also play a part, for instance, in forming the human countenance, They shape the face because the effects that proceed from the center, from the lower, metabolic system, exert an attracting power, as it were, from outside on the development of the human face. The moon forces have a differentiating effect on this development due to adding their influence to that of the sun's forces while counteracting the latter from within the human being. For this reason, the organism connected with human reproduction depends on the moon forces, which bestow the form. On the other hand, the result of procreation depends on the sun forces. With their whole being human beings are placed into the polarity between sun forces and moon forces.

In seeking the moon forces within the inner human organism, we have to distinguish them in the metabolic process from the forces originating within this process itself. The moon forces play into the metabolism but the latter possesses its own forces. These are the earth forces. The forces contained in food substances, in vegetables and other foods, work in the human being by virtue of their own nature. Here, they are active as earth forces. Metabolism is primarily a result of the earth's forces, but elements of the moon's forces work into them. If the human being possessed only the metabolic process with its forces, if only the substances of his foods would unfold their forces in his body after having been consumed, then he would have nothing but a chaotic play of all kinds of forces. The fact that these forces continuously work to renew the human being from within does not depend at all on the earth; it is due to the moon that is added to earth. The human being is shaped from within outwards by the moon, from without inwards by the sun. Inasmuch as the sun's rays are received through the eye into the human head organization, they also have an inward effect; nevertheless, they still work from outside in.

Thus, on the one hand, in regard to his whole ego development the human being depends on the influence of the sun; without the sun he could not be an ego dwelling solidly on the earth. On the other hand, there would be no human race, no propagation, if the moon were not the earth's companion. It is possible to say that it is the sun that firmly places the human being as a personality, as an individual, on the earth. It is the moon that conjured human beings in their multitude, in their whole evolution, upon the earth. The human race in its physical succession of generations is the result of the moon forces, which stimulate human beings. Man as a single being, an individuality, is the product of the sun forces. Therefore, if we wish to study the human being as well as the human race, we cannot study merely the conditions of earth. Geologists seek in vain to investigate the earth's conditions in order to comprehend the human being; they study in vain the other forces of earth so as to arrive at this understanding. Human beings are not primarily a creation of the earth. They are formed out of the cosmos; they are the offspring of the world of the stars, above all, of sun and moon. From the earth, only those forces are derived that are contained in matter itself. They are effective outside man and then continue their effects when, through eating and drinking, they have entered into the human being, but there they are received by something that is of an unearthly nature.

The processes that take place within the human being are by no means merely earthly ones; they are definitely something provided for out of starry worlds. It is this insight that human beings have to struggle to attain once again.

When we observe the human being further, we can take into consideration, first of all, that he is a physical body. This body absorbs the external foods. They in turn extend their forces into this physical body. But the latter is also taken hold of by the astral body, and in it the moon's influence is active in the manner I have just described. The sun's effect also plays into this astral body. Imbuing it with their forces, sun and moon permeate the astral body, and the latter works in the manner I have outlined above. The etheric body stands in the middle between physical and astral body.

When we study the forces coming from foodstuffs, we find, to begin with, that they are active in the physical body, and, in the manner I described earlier, are then taken hold of by the astral body containing the sun and moon influences. But in between the physical and astral bodies we find something else that is active in the etheric body. It, too, is not derived from the earth but from the whole surrounding cosmos. When we study the earth with its products in relation to the human being, the substances composed of solid, liquid, or aeriform ingredients, we see that they are consumed by the human being and then worked upon by the forces of sun and moon. In addition, there are also active in man forces that stream in from all directions of the universe. The forces active in the foodstuffs come from the earth. Those streaming into the human being from all corners of the universe are the etheric forces. They also take hold of the foodstuffs, but in a much more uniform manner, and transform them in such a way that they become inwardly capable of life. In addition, the etheric forces turn these foodstuffs into something that can inwardly experience the etheric element as such, namely, light and warmth. Thus, we can say that because of his physical body the human being is part of the earth, because of his etheric body he is related to the whole surrounding sphere, and because of his astral body man in connected above all with the effects of moon and sun.

Now, these effects of moon and sun contained in the astral body are in turn modified. They are modified to the extent that a powerful difference exists between the effects upon the upper human organization and those on the lower human organism.

Let us refer today to the part of the human being that is permeated by the bloodstream flowing upwards toward the head as “upper human organization”; let us refer to what lies below the heart as “lower human organism.” In viewing the human being thus, we have, first of all, the upper part including his head and whatever is organically connected with it. Its formation is dependent mainly on the sun's effects and also develops first during embryonic life. Already in the embryo, the sun's effects work on this organization in a quite special way, but these effects then continue after birth when the human being is present physically in the life between birth and death. Roughly speaking, what lies in this part of the human organism above the heart—a more detailed description would have to trace the blood circulation above the heart—is then modified in regard to the astral influences by Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars (see outline p. 248).

According to the Copernican world view, Saturn has forces it develops in its orbit around the sun and then sends down to the earth. It possesses those forces that are effective in the whole human astral body, particularly in the part belonging to the above mentioned upper organism of man. Saturn possesses the forces that stream into this astral body. As these forces penetrate and enliven the latter, they essentially determine the extent to which the astral body places itself in a proper relationship to the physical body. When a person cannot sleep well, for example, when his astral body does not properly emerge from the etheric and physical bodies, when it does not correctly reenter them upon awakening, or in some other way does not fit itself properly into the physical body, then this is an effect, but an irregular one, of the Saturn forces. Saturn is chiefly that celestial body that, by way of the human head, brings about a correct relationship of the astral body to the human physical and etheric bodies. By means of this, on the other hand, it is the Saturn forces that produce the connection between astral body and ego because of Saturn's relation to the sun. This relationship of Saturn to the sun's effect is expressed in regard to space and time in the fact that Saturn completes its orbit around the sun in a period of thirty years.

In the human being this relationship of Saturn to the sun comes to expression in the ego achieving an appropriate relationship to the astral body, and above all, in the proper incorporation of the astral body into the whole human organization. Thus, we can say Saturn possesses a relationship to the upper part of the whole human astral body. This relationship was definitely an important factor for people in ancient times. Even in Egypto-Chaldean times, going back to the third and fourth millennium prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, we would find that among the teachers, the sages in the mysteries, every individual was judged according to how he had determined his relationship to Saturn by the date of his birth. For these wise men knew quite well that depending on whether a person was born during one or another of Saturn's celestial positions, he was one who could use his astral body in the physical body in a more efficient or less efficient manner. Insight into such things played an important role in ancient times. The progress of mankind's evolution, however, is denoted precisely by the fact that in our age, which, as you know, began in the fifteenth century, we are freeing ourselves of the influences affecting us there.

My dear friends, do not misunderstand this. It does not mean that Saturn is not active in us today. It works in us just as it did in antiquity; the point is that we have to free ourselves from it. And do you know in what this freeing ourselves in the proper way from the Saturn influences consists? You free yourself most poorly from the Saturn influences if you follow the shadowy intellect of the present time. In doing so you actually permit the Saturn effects to run riot within yourself, to shoot hither and thither, and actually to turn you into what is nowadays called a nervous person. A nervous condition in a person is caused mainly by the fact that the astral body does not fit properly into the whole physical configuration. The nervousness of our age is due to this. Human beings must be induced to strive for real perception, for Imagination. If they remain with abstract conception, they will become more and more nervous, for they are actually growing out of the Saturn activity, which is nevertheless within them, shooting back and forth, pulling the astral body out of the nerves, thus making people nervous. In a cosmic sense, the nervousness of our age has to be recognized as an effect of Saturn.

Just as Saturn is chiefly involved with the upper part of the whole astral body inasmuch as the latter is connected with the whole organism through the nervous system, so Jupiter is active in thinking (see outline p. 248).

Human thinking, after all, is also based in a certain way on a partial activity of the astral body. I should say, a smaller part of the astral body is active in thinking than in sustaining the whole human being. It is Jupiter's effect that works in our astral body and, above all, strengthens our thinking. The effect of Jupiter deals mainly with the astral permeation and organization of the human brain.

Now, Saturn's effects actually extend over the whole of adult human life after the first three decades of our life. For our whole life and health depend on how we develop in our astral body during the periods of growth, and in fact, they only cease after age thirty. That is why Saturn requires thirty years to circle around the sun. This completely fits the human being. The thinking that develops in us has to do with the first twelve years of life. After all, what orbits out there in space is not without a connection to the human being.

Just as Jupiter has to do with thinking, so Mars has to do with speech.

Saturn—upper part of the whole astral body

Jupiter—thinking

Mars—speech

Mars separates a still smaller part of the astral body from its incorporation into the remaining human organization than the one that comes into play in regard to thinking. And it depends on the Mars effects within us that the forces can unfold that then pour into speech. The small revolution of Mars also has a bearing on this. A human being acquires the first sounds of speech within a time span that corresponds roughly to half the Martian orbit around the sun.

Ascending and descending development! We see how this whole development is linked with the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars insofar as it is tied to the region of the human head.

We have thus considered the outer planets' activity in the human astral body. Whereas the sun is connected more with the ego, these three cosmic bodies, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, have to do with the development of what is tied to the astral body, namely, speech, thinking, and the whole conduct of the human soul in the human organism.

Besides the sun, which has to do with the actual ego, we also have in addition those planets called the inner planets. They are the ones that are closer to earth than to the sun, having their place between earth and sun, whereas, seen from the earth, the other planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, are on the other side of the sun. When we focus on these inner planets, we likewise arrive at a consideration of the connections between their forces and the human being. To begin with, we shall consider Mercury.

Similar to the moon, Mercury has its target points more in the inner being of man, working from outside only on the human countenance. In the part lying below the region of the heart, its forces are effective by taking hold inwardly of the human organization and, in turn, streaming forth from there. Mercury's chief task is to bring the astral body's activity into all breathing and circulation processes of the human being. Mercury is the intercessor between the astral body and the rhythmic processes in man. Thus, we are able to say that its forces intercede between the astral element and the rhythmic activity (see outline on p. 250). Due to this, similar to the moon forces, the Mercury forces also intervene in the whole human metabolism, but only insofar as the metabolism is subject to rhythm, reacting upon rhythmic activity.

Then there is Venus. Venus is active especially in the human etheric body, in what works out of the cosmos in the human etheric body and its activities.

Finally we have the moon, which we have already mentioned. It is the element in the human being that is the polar opposite of the sun forces. From within, it leads substances into the realm of life and therefore is also connected with reproduction. In the fullest sense, the moon stimulates inner reproduction as well as the procreative process of reproduction.

You realize now that what actually takes place in the human being is becoming evident to you in its dependence on the surrounding cosmos. On the one hand, with the physical body, the human being is tied to the earthly forces. On the other hand, he is linked to the whole cosmic environment with his etheric body. In that body, differentiations occur in the manner I have just outlined, and inasmuch as the differentiation proceeds primarily from man's astral body, the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and moon integrate themselves into this body. By way of the ego, the sun is also active in man. Now take into consideration that due to the fact that the human being is integrated into the cosmos in this manner, it makes a difference whether a person stands at a given spot on the earth, and Jupiter, for instance, shines down on him from the sky, or whether he is in a location where Jupiter is covered by the earth. In the first case, Jupiter's effects on the person are direct ones; in the second case, the earth is placed in between. This results in a significant difference.

We have said that Jupiter is connected with thinking. Let us assume a person receives the direct Jupiter influence during the period when his physical organ of thinking is in the stage of major development after birth. His brain will be formed into a quite special organ of thinking; the person receives a certain predisposition to thinking. Assume that a person spends these years in a place where Jupiter is on the opposite side of the earth, the latter thus hindering Jupiter's influences. Such a person's brain is less developed into an organ for thinking. If, on the other hand, the earth with its substances and forces is active in a person and everything proceeding from them is transformed, say, by the moon influences, which, in a certain sense, are always present, such a person turns into a dull dreamer, one who is barely aware. Between these two possibilities we find any number of variations.

Let us take the case of an individual possessing forces from his former incarnation that predestine his thinking to develop in a pronounced way in the earth life on which he is about to embark. He is on the verge of descending to earth. Since Jupiter has its set time for completing its orbit, he chooses the moment when he is to appear on earth, when he is to be born, so that Jupiter sends down its rays directly.

In this manner, the starry constellation provides the setting into which the human being allows himself to be born, depending on the conditions of his former incarnations.

Today, in the age of the consciousness soul, the human being must free himself increasingly from what is becoming evident to you here. It is a matter, however, of freeing oneself from these forces in the proper manner, of actually doing something I have indicated in regard to the Saturn effects, namely of trying to turn once again from the mere shadowy, intellectual developing of thoughts to a pictorial, concrete one. What is developed out of spiritual science in the way I described it in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is also a guideline for human beings to become independent in the right way from the cosmic forces that are nevertheless active in them.

It depends on the starry constellations how a human being finds his way into earth life as he allows himself to be born. Yet, he has to equip himself with forces that make him independent in the right way from this starry constellation.

It is to such insights that our civilization must attain once again, insights concerning the relationship of the human being with the cosmos beyond the earth. Human beings must acquire an attitude that makes them realize that it is not only the ordinary forces of heredity acknowledged by today's science that are active in the human organization. In regard to the actual facts it is sheer nonsense, for example, to believe that the forces transmitted through heredity are contained in the structure of the female organism. Nowadays, heredity is an unclear, mystical concept; it is thought that the above forces then develop a heart, a liver, and so on. There would be no heart in the human organism if the sun did not incorporate it into the latter, and proceeding from the head at that. There would be no liver if Venus would not incorporate it into the human organism. And so it is with each single organ. They are certainly connected with extraterrestrial effects. The Jupiter forces are active in the human brain. The Saturn forces influence the healthy or pathological way in which the astral body is fitted into the physical organization. Human beings learn to speak because the Mars forces work in them; they become evident through speech.

These are matters humanity must once again learn to understand. We must realize that human beings cannot be explained by a science that merely considers earthly phenomena. Then, the connection between the human being and the earth will also become better known. After all, the other beings dwelling in our surroundings are also not merely creatures of the earth. To begin with, only the minerals are earth beings. Yet, in the minerals, too, changes have taken place that in turn were dependent upon forces in the earth's cosmic environment. Insofar as they are crystallized, all our metals owe their shape to extraterrestrial forces. They were formed when the earth had not yet evolved its own forces intensely but when forces from outside the earth were still active in it. Healing properties contained in minerals and particularly in metals are connected with the way the metals developed within the earth through cosmic forces.

When we go back in the post-Atlantean age to the first epoch, when the ancient Indian culture was at its prime, we see that the human being definitely experienced himself in the whole universe, as a citizen of the cosmos. Although he had not yet developed the faculties mankind is so proud of today, he was Man in the true sense of the word.

Subsequently, the human being was more or less diverted from the cosmic forces. Still, in the whole Chaldean epoch and early Greek time, we see that human beings looked up at least to the sun. In a certain sense, they were still like a kind of amphibian, a being that was happy when the rays of the sun poured down upon it and it no longer had to burrow in the earth's dankness. The human being had turned into an amphibian. Now, inasmuch as he believes he is related only to the earth's forces, one cannot even say any longer that man is like a mole. At most, he is really an earthworm that is aware of the return of something that rose in the first place from earth into space, namely, of rain water. This is the only thing the human being still perceives of extraterrestrial forces. But even earthworms perceive that—you could have seen it this morning if you had set foot in the streets! In his materialism, the human being today has basically turned into an earthworm. Once again, we must overcome this earthworm nature. We can do that only when we develop to the point of recognizing our connection with the cosmos outside the earth.

Therefore, my dear friends, the point is that we must bring it about in our age to lift ourselves out of our civilization and this earthworm-state to a new spirituality.

Today we will deal with the initiation steps of the so-called Rosicrucian, Occidental occult training. Everything that is presented here is by no means to be understood as general rules for life, but can only be the task of the one who voluntarily submits to this training and thus initially stands out from the general human race in order to later be able to pass on what he has achieved. Once he has decided to become a disciple, there should be no possibility for him to criticize this training, the way it is conducted, or the behavior of the occult teacher. He must put himself into the hands of the teacher's experience. If this is impossible, and if he entertains any trace of mistrust or dissatisfaction towards his teacher, then it is better to sever the tie between himself and the teacher. For only an affection based on trust and recognizing the teacher's authority can establish the right relationship between the student and the teacher, which should be beneficial for the student. The student is always free to leave the occult training. But if one wants to undergo it, one must also be clear about the fact that the rules in question are given out of a firmly established truth in the sense of the most advanced individualities, those whom we have to regard as the great teachers of mankind, and that one can only progress if one obeys the rules. It must also be clear that this path with its instructions has already been tried and tested by many hundreds and has been successful.

In the three paths that we have now discussed, the relationship between the student and the teacher is different. In the Indian yoga training, the relationship between student and guru is very strict: absolute, complete submission to the guru is an absolute requirement. Since the student is not yet familiar with the higher worlds when following the Indian path, it is necessary that he is guided by his personal guru.

The relation is different in the case of the Christian training. There the teacher is the guide to the great Guru, Christ Jesus. A personal connection, a personal relationship of mind to Christ Jesus, is absolutely necessary for the disciple. If he cannot believe with all the power of his soul in Christ Jesus and in what He has done and exemplified for humanity, he cannot follow the Christian Path.

In the Rosicrucian training, the relationship is the freest and easiest. The teacher is the faithful friend, the guide within the narrower limits of his student's occult experience. He is not concerned with the student's daily activities, he trusts him and allows him full freedom. There is no compulsion or command anywhere, only advice is given. But there must be a friendly relationship of trust between teacher and student. Without this, the training would remain in the realm of the manasic, without it, Budhi could not be implanted at all. The power generated by the relationship of trust is necessary for occult training. Without it, the dormant powers in the student cannot be awakened.

Since the Rose Cross Way indicates study as the first step, it might be thought that this training is not for everyone. However, this is not correct; it is there for everyone, even for the simplest person. Because this study is understood to mean popular Theosophy, everything that you hear and read here in these lectures and in my or other spiritual scientific writings; that is already such a study. It is the elementary occult teaching given to man. Through it he is to become free from the prejudices of life, from the suggestion of science, which completely dominates the modern man and has already caused much mischief, blocking his unbiased view of the world, the way to impartiality, which he must find in order to have a clear judgment. In the Occident, free thinking is no longer common; instead, everything is suggestion, established dogma through power and authority. Even in the simplest concepts we have this suggestive influence: the suggestion of scholars, the suggestion of science, the suggestion that emanates from the individual. Our modern life is dominated by the family, by the relationship between the sexes. The theosophist, however, should penetrate more deeply into preparatory, logical, and sense-free thinking. He should immerse himself in such trains of thought as far as possible. For this purpose, to train such a way of thinking, I have written the two books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom', so that one can immerse oneself in such trains of thought. It is less important to understand the content in question than to live in these trains of thought. Free, sharp, rational thinking is necessary because it gives the student a certain independence, but this thinking is also a sure guide to the higher worlds. We encounter new and different things in the various worlds; but what remains the same in all worlds is thinking. Everywhere there are different perceptions, different experiences, but logic is the same in all worlds. This only changes on the Budhiplan. A remarkable change now occurs in the student. His thoughts expand to embrace other worlds. The thoughts that a person usually has here are not mental, they relate only to the physical plane. They are only the shadow images of mental reality. Now he is approaching its reality.

Next to study, the second faculty we have is imagination. Everyone must go through it at some time. Man gradually frees himself from the dry sensual contemplation of things. He tries to see in them only the expression of something that stands behind them and begins to look at the world in the Goethean sense according to the word: “Everything that is transitory is only a parable.” The pupil must carry out this deepened way of thinking systematically. Things must become parables, symbols, to him. When we look at the rose, it is a symbol for a certain form of beauty; the autumn crocus is the image of a fine, melancholy inwardness.

And so every thing has a meaning at its basis. Things are in fact parables in reality. The whole sensual world is an illusion; the spiritual world is the real one. There must be and be achieved an interaction between people and the spiritual world. We must keep our thoughts and our soul life fluid; we must not form rigid forms. It has already been pointed out in Lucifer-Gnosis that through a continuous, loving contemplation, the qualities are released from things and then flow through space. Thus, for example, something like a flame formation seems to rise from a plant; behind this is the spiritual. In these flowing, flooding sensations of color and taste, which have no correlate here on the physical plane, the human being must now find his way, and then he is ready for the teaching of occult writing to begin.

The third thing to learn is how to read the occult writing. This helps us to correctly line up the manifold phenomena like pearls on a string. The occult writing is not arbitrarily conceived, but represents the currents that flow through the world. Something that plays a major role in spiritual reality is two spirals rolled into one another, forming a vortex. At the root of the nose is the predisposition for the two-petalled lotus flower, which will develop into a higher organ of perception in the future. The sign of the vortex corresponds to this etheric organ. It is similar to the sign of Cancer, in which the Sun was at the dawn of the Atlantean race. We still have this and the other signs of the constellations in the calendar. A very important occult symbol is the staff of Mercury with the snake coiled around it. It is the archetypal form of the letter S. Those who know the occult language can evoke the relevant signs as thought-forms; in certain cases they then have power over others. In John's Gospel 8:3-11, there is an account of Christ and the adulteress: Christ wrote signs of the occult writing on the ground with his finger to create the right thought forms in the accusing crowd and to prompt them to the right action at the right moment. “Let him who is without guilt throw the first stone at her.” He hands over her guilt to karma, to the law of equal return. Christ wanted to say: every deed carries its reward within itself. “Go and sin no more.” Moses received instruction in the seeing of these occult signs in his conversation with God (Exodus 3 and 4). There Moses learned to know the occult writing and was endowed with the power to enable him to fulfill his task. That he had to throw a rod, which became a snake, means that he learned the occult writing.

If we imagine a vortex and think of its two parts in red and blue, we see the two etheric currents that underlie the red and blue blood.

A fourth is the rhythm of life. All higher life is based on it. Nature and the cosmos know nothing but rhythmic laws. The orbits of the stars, every flower, even the intimate life of animals know an exact rhythm. Could you imagine a violet blooming in August instead of March? Rhythm is everywhere present in nature. But the closer we get to the human being, the more the rhythm changes into chaos. The weekly timetable of our schoolchildren is still a true blessing. A person should bring a certain rhythm into themselves, create a new cosmos. This happens through daily repetitive actions, meditation at a certain time of day, and also through regulating the breathing process.

The fifth is the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. When a person finds something within himself that corresponds to a fact in the macrocosm, he first really gets to know himself. How can a person know when the sun was separated from the earth? He can find out by looking into the inside of his eye. Another point in time is when man began to say “I” to himself. This happened in Atlantis, at the time of the Primitive Semites, when a certain point in the physical head coincided with another in the etheric head. The earth was still covered with dense fog, and certain conditions outside and inside man corresponded. An important exercise is for the student to concentrate on a certain point between the eyebrows and to allow himself to be guided by an idea given to him by his teacher.

In the sixth stage, contemplation, the student goes out of himself and expands his consciousness to include the whole world. The higher self is outside of us, we must seek it in all beings, for we are all one. This also speaks from Jupiter and Venus. There are Theosophists who only want to seek the divine within themselves. But in truth, it is the lower personality that speaks from them. One such person once went around saying, “I am Atman, I am Atman.” That was the only thing he knew. Brooding within oneself leads nowhere. We are everything, and we must immerse ourselves in all beings. Immersing oneself in one's own inner being is only a detour to doing so.

When you have come so far as to be able to empathize with all beings, then you have reached the seventh stage, that of divinity. The whole nature of the world takes on a spiritual physiognomy. Everything that man sees around him becomes an expression of something higher. Just as tears are not just salty drops with a certain chemical composition, but an expression of the soul, so the plant cover of the earth is an expression of the earth soul, which is a reality. Some flowers appear to us as joyful eyes, others as tears of the earth spirit, which it weeps over the sadness that prevails in the cosmos. It is true what Goethe has the earth spirit say:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth
birth and grave,
an eternal sea,
a changing weaving,
a glowing life:
So I create at the whirring loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

This is how we got to know the skeleton of the Rosicrucian schooling.

Which training you undergo is not crucial. You can develop your soul powers and gain insights into the supersensible world through all three paths. Of course, it is good to consider which path you choose based on where you are at the foot of the mountain you are climbing.

What does the disciple achieve when the initiation has taken him to the summit up there? A very real thing. Remember the description of the human being. At the time of Christ Jesus, the majority of people had developed part of the astral body and part of the etheric body. It was different for the initiates. When the chela had passed the necessary stages, he was admitted to the initiation. He had to have worked through his entire astral body. There was nothing left in his astral body that he did not control. In general, passions rule over man, not man over passions. Man must be master of his desires and passions if he wants to become a disciple. Then he must work on his etheric body, he must transform the qualities of his temperament and bring it to the point where he can consciously change his movements, his gait, his writing. So it is not only about becoming moral, but one must become a completely different person.

When the entire astral body has been worked through by the I, it has become manas, the spiritual self, and is transformed into it. The transformation of the etheric body is called Budhi; he has become the spirit of life. When the initiate seizes the physical body for transformation, he then influences the planet and makes himself the center of cosmic forces; then he develops in himself Atman, the Father, the spiritual man.

At first it is an unconscious work that man does on his etheric body and his astral body. This takes place in the general process of human development. The chela begins to consciously take this work into his own hands. With unceasing practice, a certain moment is reached where the entire astral body is transformed. Then everything in the astral body can imprint itself into the etheric body. Only then may this happen, not before, because otherwise bad qualities would be imprinted. What has been acquired then goes through all incarnations with the causal body. The immortalization, the vitalization of all that the astral body contains, is an extremely important process. The astral body cannot discard this in any Kamaloka, it carries this with it forever. Therefore, the previous purification is very necessary.

The impressing of what the astral body contains into the etheric body was carried out in the old initiation by placing the disciple in a crypt and laying him in a kind of coffin. Sometimes he was also tied to a kind of cross and placed in a lethargic state, in which the etheric body emerged from the physical body at the same time as the astral body. Something similar, namely the emergence of a part of the etheric body, occurs when a limb falls asleep; one can then see the affected part of the etheric body hanging out of the body. The initiation itself was performed by a particularly high initiate. Much else was done according to prescribed rules. Such a sleep was different from an ordinary sleep. Only the physical body remained behind in the so-called coffin, and the etheric and astral bodies went out; so it was a kind of death. This was necessary to free the etheric body, because only then could the astral body imprint itself on the etheric body. This state lasted three and a half days. When the initiate was then directed by the initiator back to the physical body, one last formula was impressed upon him, with which he woke up. These were the words: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” that is, “My God, my God, how hast Thou glorified me!” At the same time, a certain star, Sirius in the Egyptian initiation, shone towards him. Now he had become a new man. There was a very specific reason why the completely spiritualized astral body was given a very special name: it was called the “virgin,” the “Virgin Sophia.” And the etheric body, which absorbs what the Virgin Sophia carried within herself, was called the “Holy Spirit.” And that which arose from both was the “Son of Man”. The proclamation and birth of Jesus of Nazareth are based on these mystery teachings.

This inner experience was also depicted in the image of the Holy Ghost as a dove hovering over the chalice. This is the moment described in the Gospel of John 1:32: “And John bore witness, saying, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on Him’.” Imagine this happening on the astral plane, and you have a real event. The one who was allowed to experience these great things outside of the mysteries in the physical world was allowed to initiate others as an initiator. John's Gospel 11, 1-45: the resurrection of Lazarus is nothing more than an initiation performed on Lazarus.

We cannot take the gospel of John deeply enough. Even the giving of names is something extremely important. The names that appear in the Bible are taken from the inner being of man. An example of this are the names of the twelve apostles. They point to the relationship between them and the Lord, the Christ, who is the head and has as a sign the ram or the lamb. John means the one who proclaims the Budhi. You can divide the human being into twelve parts; the whole human being is a twelve-fold being. The human being as he is now gradually came into being. Each time the sun entered a new constellation, a new organ developed in the human being. For example, when the sun was in the sign of Leo, the heart developed. As the human being ascends, he incorporates a group soul. The twelve parts of the human being can be found in the names of the twelve apostles, where they are incorporated. What the twelve constituent parts are in an ordinary body, that is what the twelve apostles signify in the collective body of Christ. The part that represents the ego, in which selfishness rules and brings about the death of Christ, is called Judas Iscariot. In this naming, it was added that he had the bag, the money, the lower principle of greed.

The significance of this naming can also be seen from the fact that the one who, in the great plan of the world, is the spiritual representative of the development of mankind, is given the name “the Son of Man”. His father is the “Holy Spirit” and his mother “the Virgin Sophia”. You can find this again in the Gospel of John 19:25-27, in the scene under the cross: “Woman, behold, your son!” “Behold, your mother!” The writer of the Gospel of John, the disciple whom Christ Himself initiated, took the wisdom and wrote the Gospel of John, which contains the wisdom of Christianity.

We must not forget that these things are facts, but as such they are the expression of profound spiritual realities.

My dear Friends,

We shall now see how many of the difficulties with which we are faced in eurhythmy are bound to arise if we do not work out of a deep and inward understanding of the gestures and movements as we learned to understand them yesterday. These difficulties present themselves when, for example, it is necessary to pass over from one consonant to another, or from one vowel to another; and you will have seen, from what has already been said, that as far as the spiritual element of language is concerned, what lies between the sounds is of paramount importance, just as in music that which is truly musical lies between the tones. The tones are the physical, as it were, the material element; the spiritual element of the music lies in the inner movement leading from one tone to the next.

In just the same way the spiritual essence of language is to be found in the transition from sound to sound. If, for instance, I am conscious of the existence of spirit in matter and on the other hand, am conscious that the sound as such is a physical, material, means of expression, it will not be difficult for me to perceive that the spiritual element must necessarily lie in the transition from sound to sound. Yesterday we learned to know the spiritual significance, the spiritual reality underlying certain movements and postures. Today we must try gradually to link up all that we learned yesterday with what we already know as the eurhythmic formation of the sounds.

With this in view, we will begin as follows: First of all, I must ask those eurhythmists who represented the Zodiac to take up the same position on the stage as they had yesterday … and now we must add those who represented the planets. You know already from the previous lecture which of the animals in the Zodiacal circle each one of you represents, so that now I can ask you to note carefully what follows. We shall connect each of the signs of the Zodiac with a different consonant:

Aries: v
Taurus: r

These are really half vowel sounds, and should be thought of as vowels into which there enters a consonantal element. (Both are related to the vowel sound a.)

Gemini: h
Cancer: f (in the German language v also)
Sagittarius: g
Capricorn: l
Aquarius: m
Pisces: n
Leo: t (Tao)
Virgo: b
Libra: ts
Scorpio: z

(It is essential, my dear friends, to take careful note of these correspondences).

Now we will take the inner planetary circle:—

Sun: au
Venus: a
Mercury: i
Moon: ei
Mars: e
Jupiter: o
Saturn: u

At this point I must ask each of you to take up your own position, that is to say, each one of you must make the movement or gesture that you made yesterday. Now you must pass, over from this movement to the corresponding sound, and from this sound return once more to your original position or movement.

In this way you get a gesture corresponding to the sound, both preceding and following the sound itself; and it is from these gestures that you should seek to discover the transition leading from one sound to the next.

You will, of course, have to work out all this in detail later on, so that you do not lay undue emphasis on what lies between the sounds. Today we have in the first place to see what can be drawn out of the constellation we have formed already, and which we now have standing before us. You each of you know your own sound, and must make it whenever it occurs. In this way the whole poem will arise out of a combination of 12 plus 7, and we shall see how a poem can be interpreted in eurhythmy by making use of such a constellation. As a preliminary you must each make your own gesture or movement, and continue to make it while I begin to read the poem quite slowly. As the sounds follow one another you will each make your own particular sound as it occurs, passing into the sound from your previous movement, and returning to this again. (But you must all be as alert as terriers, because it is from out of the whole complex of sounds that the poem takes its shape.)

Edel sei der Mensch
Hilfreich und gut!
Denn das allein
Unterscheidet ihn
Von allen Wesen,
Die wir kennen.

Heil den unbekannten
Höhern Wesen,
Die wir ahnen!
Ihnen gleiche der Mensch;
Sein Beispiel lehr’ uns
Jene glauben.

Now I shall continue to read the poem, and you will make the same movements you made yesterday—movements that correspond to the zodiacal and planetary circles. At the same time, while still holding the gestures, you will move round in a circle, each of you making your own sound as it occurs in the text. You will see that the effect is now much more beautiful:

Denn unfühlend
Ist die Natur:
Es leuchtet die Sonne
Über Bös’ und Gute,
Und dem Verbrecher
Glänzen, wie dem Besten,
Der Mond und die Sterne.

Wind und Ströme,
Donner und Hagel
Rauschen ihren Weg
Und ergreifen
Vorüber eilend
Einen um den Andern.

Auch so das Glück
Tappt unter die Menge,
Fasst bald des Knaben
Lockige Unschuld,
Bald auch den kahlen
Schuldigen Scheitel.

If you are careful to keep at exactly the right distance from one another, you will see how, by this means, by allowing the whole thing to develop out of a reality, out of the living movement of the circle and out of the spiritual gestures, each separate sound stands out against a background suitable to it, a background which imbues it with a new spirituality.

What I have said in this connection is of the very greatest importance for those of you who have already learned the elements of eurhythmy and are far enough advanced to be able, for instance, to express in eurhythmy such a poem as Goethe’s ‘Zauberlehrling’. This marks a quite definite stage in one’s eurhythmic development, and is, up to a point, a stage that may be regarded as complete in itself. But once having reached this stage it becomes necessary to work very intensively along the lines I have just indicated. For, by practising the gestures that you were shown yesterday, and by studying the why in which these gestures may be made to lead over into the individual sounds, an unusual, and at the same time most necessary flexibility will be brought into the fashioning of the sounds themselves.

See how beautiful it is when the eurhythmist representing Capricorn frames her sound in such a way that, before and after the sound, this gesture makes its appearance. The sound, the letter, must be drawn forth from the gesture, and must be allowed to sink back into the gesture once more. In this way you obtain gestures that provide a frame for the sounds. In other words: a sound is correctly expressed in eurhythmy only when—well, shall we say at any rate, to some extent—it is consciously made to grow out of this gesture and to return to it again. It is, of course, obvious that these gestures can only be touched upon in passing.

You will also gain very much—not as yet with regard to public performance, about which I shall speak later—but for the actual learning of eurhythmy, when you introduce these things into solos, duets, trios, etc. Let us take the case of a single individual, the eurhythmist who represents Capricorn, for instance, and let us suppose that this eurhythmist were asked to express a poem by means of consonants only, leaving out the vowel sounds. She would then have to choose the shortest possible way of getting to the place of the particular consonant in question, forming it only when actually reaching the spot. Then, passing on her way from this consonant to the following one she would have to make the gesture corresponding to the latter—and so on, throughout the poem. These things are of the very greatest importance. By such means eurhythmy can gradually be led over into the very nature of man’s being, for the gestures are of such a kind that they are actually based upon the being of man. Thus we gain the possibility of building up the whole form, the eurhythmic form of a poem in such a way that it expresses not merely the inner judgment of the individual performer, but in addition to this the living relationship between one eurhythmist and another, when several are taking part, and a living relationship with space.

Now today you will naturally not be in a position to do more than carry out the particular movement, the particular sound each one of you has been given. At this point, however, we will for once permit ourselves to stand, not facing the audience in the usual way, but turned towards the centre of the circle, so that you can all watch the eurhythmist who is making the consonants, each in its appropriate place. This eurhythmist, after making a particular consonant—for the moment we will leave the vowels on one side—moves towards the place of the next consonant, and makes the movement expressing this towards the eurhythmist representing it in the circle … You see how well it is going already, and how beautiful it looks.

The twelve eurhythmists forming the outer circle have, therefore, to pay due attention to their own sounds. The first sound that occurs must be made by the eurhythmist to whom the particular sound belongs; then the one who is running the form must be on the look out for the next consonant, and must move towards the eurhythmist representing it. The latter must likewise be ready, and must make the consonant also. Thus both will make the same consonant face to face. You will see that in this way we get a very beautiful movement.

At a later stage the same exercise must be practised without the circle actually being formed. Then one eurhythmist does the whole thing alone, as though surrounded by a phantom circle, and seeing in imagination each movement being carried out by a phantom eurhythmist.

I will now read a short poem, and you will express it in the way I have indicated. Everybody must remain standing with the exception of Frl. S... whom we will ask to undertake the moving part.

Ach (now begin to move) ihr Götter! grosse Götter (the r is here similar to a)

In dem weiten Himmel droben!
Gäbet ihr uns auf der Erde
Festen Sinn und guten Mut:
O, wir liessen euch, ihr Guten,
Euren weiten Himmel droben!

In this way it will immediately become clear to you that the forms which one makes, need in no wise be arbitrary, but should always be built up on a sound and reasonable basis. Nothing obvious or trivial should be allowed to enter into form. If, for instance, the word “Bauch” (stomach) should occur in a poem, we should be going to work in quite the wrong way were we to try and express this word by means of a realistically shaped form. What we have to do is to base our forms on language as such; we have to make use of the forms hidden in the sounds and in the spiritual gestures which we studied together yesterday.

And now we will see how beautiful it looks when we express the same poem by means of the vowel sounds. Frl. H... will you take the principal part this time? The others join in with the vowels.

You know the relative position of the letters towards which you have to move.

Ach, ihr Götter! grosse Götter

Be careful to make no intermediary movement, but stand still when no new vowel sound occurs. When the same vowel comes twice running one should remain standing quite quietly on the particular spot one has reached in the form. In this way a very beautiful effect is obtained.

Ach, ihr Götter! grosse Götter
In dem weiten Himmel droben!
Gäbet ihr uns auf der Erde

Just think what a splendid exercise you can make out of these few lines; they provide you with an example in which, having arrived at a certain spot with a vowel sound, you must stand quite still when it is repeated.

You can, however, only experience such an exercise in the right way, if you have developed a true feeling for all that lives in speech. I will take these first three lines as an illustration of my meaning. I cannot say that I will recite these lines; I cannot say that I will declaim them; but I will intone them in two different ways, so that you can see what really lies in speech, and what is absolutely necessary for the eurhythmist to feel if the content of a poem is to come to expression.

a i ö e o e ö e
i e ei e i e o e
ä e i u i au e e e

You must realize how entirely different the feeling is when we have: der Erde—e e e, compared with the feeling that arises when one vowel sound follows another. If you practise such exercises you will become very sensitive to these things.

Something similar is to be found in the consonants also, and it is upon this that the beauty of the poem largely depends. It is, moreover, fundamentally true that one has in no way mastered speech if one does not prepare a poem in some way such as this: To begin with, the vowels should be made to ring out while the consonants are barely indicated, and then the vowels should be allowed to fall into the background while the consonants resound in their turn. Just imagine the mood, the character you get by taking the consonants:

ch hr g tt r gr ss g tt r
n d m w t n h mm l dr bn
g b t hr ns f d r rd
fst n s nn nd g t n m t

In this way you have entered into the feeling of the vowels and consonants, one after the other. And it is this which the eurhythmist must make a point of practising; then the body will become supple; it will actually be what it must become if it is to be used as an instrument. You must have a certain reverence for eurhythmy if you wish to be eurhythmists. This reverence must become conviction. If you are actually to imitate all the movements made by your larynx when you say even a moderately complicated sentence, then indeed you have much to learn. You have learned it already in your pre-earthly life.

In earthly existence we have some slight repetition of this in the response made by the larynx to the sounds heard in the environment, for the larynx imitates such sounds. In the spiritual world, however, knowledge of this kind is never acquired intellectually, but is of such a nature that it is intimately connected with feeling. By means, therefore, of exercises such as those we have been practising here, the feeling life is intensified and stimulated.

The point is not so much that we should immediately think of performing this Dance of the Planets (Planetentanz); for then, having decided upon this dance, for which one requires 12 plus 7 people—thus 19 people in all—we are liable to be told by those for whom the performances are to be given: You must please bring only seven eurhythmists (including dressers), for we cannot possibly afford more. So there you are; what is one to do? If the matter is rightly understood the point will be not so much the actual performing of such a Dance of the Planets, but rather the making of one’s own all that has been given in, these two lectures dealing with the transition from the spiritual gestures to the gestures expressing the sounds. If you do this you will have done much towards making your bodies supple and you will develop a fine and delicate feeling for what is essential in eurhythmy.

In this course of lectures we wish not only to go once more over the old ground, but also to consider everything that is likely to further the progress of eurhythmy.

Now this progress is often hindered by the belief frequently held that it is not necessary to study eurhythmy in order to be able to do it. Certain people have even gone so far as to wish to be teachers of eurhythmy after having watched eurhythmy performances for a matter of two or three weeks. Imagine how ridiculous such pretensions would be considered with regard to music or painting! We must gain sufficient insight into these things to know that eurhythmy is something that makes man, in accordance with the possibilities of his organism, into an instrument, a means of expression. This, however, can only be achieved if those things are also practised which are not necessarily intended to be shown, but which, nevertheless, help to develop that suppleness of movement essential to performance. Consider for a moment all that is done by those specializing in other arts. You have probably all heard of the famous Liszt piano—very likely other composers have made use of it also—a piano having keys but no strings. Liszt practised on this piano; he always had it with him, and practised on it constantly. He naturally did not do this in order to make music, but in order to acquire technical dexterity. His neighbours heard nothing of it; thus it is good for other people also when one practises in this way! The neighbours are not disturbed the whole night long; one can practise throughout the night without disturbing a soul. It is only there for the purpose of bringing about organic flexibility.

What we have been studying in these two lectures is absolutely fundamental to eurhythmy in that it brings into the organism a eurhythmic technique of movement and posture.

After this digression we will go back to the last lines of the poem:

‘Festen Sinn und guten Mut:’

Think of all we have here, of all that we absorb into ourselves with these words: Und gu (you must remain quietly in u) ten (you return to the previous place): Mut. The gradual finding of one’s way into the movement which one feels to be natural when passing from one vowel to another, or which one feels to be natural when the same vowel occurs more than once in succession, this it is which creates the right mood and impression.

‘O, wir liessen euch ihr Guten
Euren weiten Himmel droben!’

By this means it is possible to experience the vowels and consonants in their juxtaposition. In this connection I must expressly point out that it is not a question here of absolute position; I might just as well have asked the eurhythmist representing t (Leo) to stand somewhere else, in which case the others would then have grouped themselves accordingly… In any case, you come to different places when the whole circle moves. It is not a question of absolute position, but of the relative position each has to the other. On reaction you will see how great are the possibilities of form to be obtained in this way. These possibilities arise when one takes one’s start from a particular spot: for instance, we might begin a poem with t... and obtaining thus a definite starting point, something to hold on to, we can proceed to make the form accordingly, for we know in what direction we now have to move.

Thus the main thing is to understand that by studying the content of the lectures given yesterday and today it is possible to find one’s way into the essential nature of gesture and form.

Once again, let us first of all direct our thoughts to those who are out there at the front, in the arena of present-day events, where they have to stand for what the time demands of them:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we have been seeking for so many gears in our movement, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, be present above you, may it stream through you and strengthen you for your difficult task.

It seems that not everyone is quite clear about the verse I have just spoken, so I am told. Let me stress that the proper version reads: Spirit of your souls. The verse has been phrased in such a way that it can be used when many people want to speak for one person or one for many or, indeed, many for many—as in the present case. If it refers to just one person, the only change which has to be made is to say ‘Spirit of your soul’ and so forth. It appears that I made a slip of the tongue when I said the verse for the first time here some weeks ago, so that the view has arisen that the words ‘Spirits of your souls’ may not be quite correct. But they are correct as they stand. The first line is addressed to the spirits of the souls requiring protection, as it were and the ‘your’ refers to those to whom our thoughts are directed. In the second line on the other hand, the 'your' relates to the 'guardians'. Let me remark that such verses are always such by nature that there can be problems with the purely grammatical construction. But they are given from the spiritual world for the specific Purpose, and it is true that there are occasional problems with putting the words together for such verses.

Dear friends, it was for good reason and, spiritually, also very much in accord with the work that has to be done in the present time, that two days ago we turned our attention to events in the evolution of man that show how spiritual impulses—and particularly the spiritual Impulses linked with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Christ impulse—are living impulses within the evolution of man. We have seen how they were active in the evolution of man even though men were unable to grasp the nature of the Christ impulse with their reason, with their intellect.

It was with this intention that reference was made among other historical events to Joan of Arc through whom this Christ impulse resolved a major issue in the 15th century through its servant, the Michaelic spirit, and for the good and advancement of mankind. The reason why it was particularly important to refer to this event was that in our day, too, it does hold true that everything destined to regulate events on the historical scale is ordered and regulated from the spiritual worlds. We need to be aware that the forces, the impulses, for what is to happen come to us from the spiritual worlds. In this respect the same holds true today as in the days of Joan of Arc. But the times are different. What would happen in a particular way in the days of Joan or Arc has to happen in a different way in our time and in times to come; it has to take a different course. For our time is one that is entirely different. Since the 15th and 16th century—and the Joan of Arc event did, of course, come in that period—mankind had been guided in quite a different way. It is this difference, and consequently the basic nature of our time, that we shall consider to some extent today.

Between going to sleep and waking up we are in a soul state where that which we really are is outside our physical and our ether bodies. Asleep, we live in our astral body and our ego. We need to have a very clear picture of this. That which we really are is then outside our physical and our ether bodies. Asleep, we live in our astral body and our ego. We need to have a very clear picture of this. That which we really are is then outside the body. We are, of course, bound to our body to an extraordinary degree between birth and death so that in terms of space we are not far away from our body when asleep. Our soul element is spread out in our surroundings, as it were; that is in everything that specifically makes up our environment.
Let us get a clear picture of how the environment has changed specifically over the last centuries—since the 15th and 16 centuries—at least for the great majority of the people whom we have to consider in relation to what fate has decreed for the present age. Just consider whether any of the machinery or the mechanical contrivances we use today also existed at the time when Joan of Arc did her work. We can certainly say that the world has changed completely since that time as far as mechanical things are concerned. Everything we experience in relation to machines has only come since then. There may be some observant people among you who have taken a ‘sleeper’ (train) to travel overnight. They may have had the strange experience of waking up—and this is the kind of occasion when one may wake up quite frequently—and finding that something was still rumbling on that was inherent in the machinery of the train all about them. Something can be perceived, as it were, when one is waking up but still in a dream state, of the croaking and squealing of the train or boat one happens to be on. This happens because the soul is not really in the body but in the area around the body and is placed among those mechanical contrivances.

Yet it is not only on such less usual occasions that we live among the hustle and bustle of the present age, and we can certainly say that the mechanized life has also spread to the countryside today. Fundamentally speaking, we are always within the mechanized life of the present age. When asleep, the soul merges into everything that is mechanism. Those are mechanisms, however, which we have constructed ourselves. A mechanism we have built is something quite different from nature outside us, for this has been constructed by the elemental spirits. When we are out in the woods, for instance, where everything has been built up by the spirits of nature, we are in an environment that is totally different from the environment of mechanical contrivances created by ourselves. What are we doing when we take things from nature and put them together to make the machines and appliances we use in our lives? We are in that case not merely putting together physical components, for in putting together physical components we always provide opportunity for a demonic Ahrimanic servant to unite with the machine. We do this with every machine, every mechanism, in everything of this kind that is part of modern civilization, providing a point of attachment for demonic elemental spirits of Ahrimanic nature. And living surrounded by machines we live together with these demonic Ahrimanic elementals. We allow them to enter into us; we allow not only the squealing and groaning of machines to enter into us but also an element that is eminently destructive for our spirit and our soul.

Please note—and I have often made a similar comment on similar occasions—what I am saying is not intended to be a criticism of our Ahrimanic age. It has to be like this, that we allow demons to stream into everything and allow ourselves to the surrounded by them. It is part of the evolution of mankind. We have to acknowledge the simple necessity for this and understand the real impulse of spiritual science. And so we shall not sing the praises of people who say it is necessary, as far as possible, to protect oneself from the demons and to shun civilization and that we should set up a colony as far away as possible in the wilderness to save us from having anything to do with these demonic Ahrimanic elementals. That has never been the tenor of my words. I have always said that we must entirely accept what comes to us out of the necessity of evolution, that we must not let ourselves be induced to flee from the world. We need to take heed, however, we need to understand, that conditions are such in our age that we are filling our environment more and more with beings of a demonic nature, that we are more and more involved with the principle that is mechanizing our civilization. An age such as this cans for something quite different than the age out of which Joan of Arc was called to do her work. In the time of Joan of Arc it was necessary for the impulse out of which she was to act to be born out of the gentlest, the most subtle powers of the human soul. Just consider: she was a shepherd girl living a very simple, natural life, with nature at her most idyllic. She was very young when her visions came to her, and through the Imaginations given to her she had a direct link with the spiritual world. Out of her inner being she was to bring forth everything that was to be the foundation from which she acted, she was to let it grow forth from her inner being. And not only this, but it was necessary for very special circumstances to be brought about so that through the most subtle powers inherent in the human soul her mission could be imprinted in her soul, in her very heart of hearts.

We know that everything in the world goes in cycles, that things happen in such a way that important events come up in definite cycles. If we take the year of Joan's birth, 1412, we can ask a specific question relating to this. We are able to say that the year this Maid of Orleans was born the sun would of course have been in a particular position, astronomical position, coinciding with one of the constellations in the zodiac. The progress of the sun from one sign of the zodiac to the next marks a major time interval. Passing right through the zodiac the sun will go through all twelve constellations; the time interval needed for the sun to progress from one constellation in the zodiac to the next is approximately 2,160 years, and this is important. Going back approximately 2,160 years from the birth of Joan of Arc we come to the founding of Rome.

In the days when Rome was founded anyone needing information on major issues concerning the city which was then coming into being would go to see the nymph Egeria. There it was possible to get information, from a seeress. But, as I said, that was one solar cycle earlier. And so the times are renewed and everything goes in cycles. Let us visualize it like this: at the time when Rome was founded the sun was at a certain point in the constellation of the Ram, Aries. It then progressed to the Fishes, Pisces, so that it had moved through one-twelfth of the zodiac. And thus the cycle which inevitably has to be there In the evolution of mankind takes us from the nymph Egeria to the inspired deed of Joan of Arc. In ancient Rome, however, it was a matter of pagan Inspiration, of pagan deeds. If we try to think of the same visionary element that operated at the time when Rome was founded also having to operate in a Christian age, acting from within, through the most tender powers inherent in man, what did have to come about? You can imagine that something had to come about which again, in some way or other, had to do with the subtlest powers of the Christian faith.

Most of you will remember my telling you of the variation we get in the course of the year in the forces that link us with the spiritual world. In summer, at St John's tide when the sun's rays are most Powerful externally, one might perhaps achieve an external ecstasy and, as in the old Celtic mysteries, lift oneself up into the spiritual world in some way, but certainly in ecstasy. Yet when the days are shortest, when the sun's rays are least powerful and the winter night the darkest, around Christmas therefore, the opportunity exists also to win through to the spiritual worlds in our innermost soul life. All who have known of the cycle of the year have always maintained, quite rightly, that those who have the gift for it are able to enter into the most intimate aspect of our connection with the spiritual worlds during the time from the 21st, the 23rd of December to about the 6th of January—during those days and particularly the nights. There are legends—the Legend of Olaf Asteson has been read to you here—which tell of people having their most profound Inspirations during those days.²⁶ This, again, is connected with the celebration of Christmas at that time, of the birth of the spirit who went through the Mystery of Golgotha and is connected with the innermost powers in human soul development. So, if the Inspiration of pagan Rome of old was to be resurrected one sun cycle later, 2,160 years later, it had to come in through the aspect of man that is most utterly childlike. This means that the soul of Joan of Arc had to be taken hold of at the point where souls are taken hold of most profoundly, where they are weakest in relation to earthly things, and where the Christ impulse is not yet hampered by worldly impressions—the souls not yet having taken up the earthly element, so that the Christ impulse can be the only one to enter into the soul sphere. The most favourable timing for this would have been for the Maid of Orleans to have gone through the time of the Thirteen Nights in her mother's womb immediately before her birth, before she took her first breath. And, indeed, she did—for she was born on the 6th of January.

Here we perceive the more profound forces at work which enter into the physical world from the spiritual worlds. We see how they find the channels they need, deeply mysterious channels. There can be nothing more marvellous for someone with insight into such things, nothing more open to explanation through spiritual science, than this fact that the Maid of Orleans took her first breath on earth in the time around Christmas, on the 6th of January, with the days of Christmas immediately preceding her entry on to the physical plane. We see how the girl who was to go through death at the age of 19 was taken hold of at the point where the most subtle of human powers lie, and we are therefore looking into a time when it was necessary for the divine spiritual powers to find a channel through the inmost inwardness of the human soul. That, however, was the last time when such a thing was to be. It was the time when a particular order was brought into Europe through the Christ impulse, as I indicated to you the last time, and this happened in the wonderful way in which it did happen through Joan of Arc. Since then, however, times have changed. Today is not the time when divine spiritual powers approach the human soul in such intimate fashion.

What was the mission of Joan of Arc, really, if we consider something that was present throughout her whole life? She was taken hold of from within by the forces of the divine spiritual world. In her soul these forces encountered the Luciferic forces. These Luciferic forces were mighty and powerful at that time. Joan of Arc bore something within her that made her vanquish the Luciferic forces. She vanquished the Luciferic forces, that is entirely obvious to anyone who wants to see. We have briefly considered the miracle of her birth and seen that she went through an unconscious initiation, in a way, up to Epiphany, the day known as that of the manifestation of Christ. But we can also point to her death which occurred because all the Luciferic forces of her enemies joined together to bring about her death. Her misadventure in a battle was brought about through the jealousy of the men who were the official leaders, appointed to guide the battle. All the jealousy then came to the fore over the manifestations of spiritual forces and spiritual powers that were made through her. She was put on trial. The records of the trial still exist and anyone studying them can see—unless of course his mind is as closed as that of Anatole France—that this Maid of Orleans, having come into the physical world in a very special way, through the thirteen nights, also left it in such a way. For it says in the records, so that there is historical proof, that she said that she would indeed die but that after her death the English would meet with a much greater reverse than any they had known before, and that this would happen within the next seven years.

If we take this rightly, in its spiritual sense, it means nothing less than that the soul of Joan of Arc on going through the gate of death was prepared to continue contributing to the work of shaping events after her death, to share in the work whatever her form of existence. And she did so. What the spiritual powers have to bring about will be brought about whatever the external conditions may be. Joan's adversaries were able to bring about her death, to mount the strongest possible attack against her, as it were. They were not able to prevent her mission.

However, the forces of Joan of Arc were only able to work in the subtle way they did during her time. In everything she did the Luciferic forces were ranged against her. We are also having to deal with hostile forces in our time, but these are predominantly Ahrimanic forces, the Ahrimanic forces that have come up with the materialistic age. These are in evidence even in the outer form and fashion of the whole of our age if we turn our attention to the mechanisms, the mechanical element of the age; if we are aware that, fundamentally speaking, we are offering an abode to demons when we produce our mechanical contrivances, surrounding ourselves with a whole world of Ahrimanic demons. It is evident also from other things that Ahrimanic powers are at work everywhere in our age. We need only look back a few years and pay a little attention to the occult substrate to our life on earth and we can see Ahrimanic forces influencing all aspects of our physical life on earth. Not only the kind of demons we create in our machines influence our earth life but also other kinds of Ahrimanic forces. The occultist has to put into words something I have often put into words for one group of friends or another: that, fundamentally speaking, the sad and painful events now happening all over Europe and a large part of the globe have long been in preparation. War has been present for a long time, as it were, in the astral world but was held back by something that was also astral: by the fear everybody was feeling. Fear is an astral element; it was able to hold the war back, to prevent it; fear was able to stop war from breaking out for all that time.

For fear was abroad everywhere. Fear is altogether something that is most dreadfully widespread in the depths of our souls in the present age. A time came, however, when there was an external indication in time of something often referred to when the starting points of this war are discussed. This outer aspect is not the one that matters, however, it is merely a symbol. As I said on a previous occasion, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke occurred and there emerged the event, so terrible to the soul, that I have already referred to. I had never before known anything like this, not from personal experience nor through other occultists. We know what the soul goes through when it has undergone death. In the case of the soul that went through death at that time something very specific showed itself. All the elements of fear began to gather around it, as though around a focal point, and something of a cosmic power could now be perceived in it. We know already that anything that has a specific character on the physical plane will have the opposite character in the spiritual world. This also held true in the present case. An element that first had had a dispersive effect where war was concerned was now acting in the opposite way, as a spur, an incitement, to war. So we see that a metamorphosis, as it were, of the elements of fear, of the Ahrimanic elements, became mixed up with all the things that finally led to the sad and painful events of the present time. Ahrimanic elements are indeed at work everywhere in our time. We must not rebel against this, nor should we aim to protect ourselves against it. We have to see it as something that is necessary in our time, something that has to be present in our time. The question is: How do we find the right attitude to this? How do we find the one thing that will show us what should be our attitude now, in the present age, if we want to make it possible for divine spiritual forces and powers to enter into our actions?

Here I must refer to an event in the spiritual world that happened a few decades ago. I have mentioned this on a number of occasions, in all kinds of different contexts. It is an event that occurred behind the scenes of our existence, in the spiritual world, in or about November 1879.²⁷ We know that there is a different regent of earth life for every epoch, as it were; one regent follows another. Until 1879 the spirit acting out of the spiritual world was the one we call the spirit Gabriel, if a name is to be used. From 1879 onwards it was the spirit we call Michael. It is Michael who directs events in our time. Anyone able to see into the spiritual worlds in conscious awareness will feel the spirit Michael to be the spirit who truly is the one to lead and govern in our time. Michael is in a way the most Powerful of the leading spirits of the age that follow one another. In a way, I said, he is the most powerful of these spirits. The others have been predominantly active in the spirit sphere. Michael had the strength to push the spirit right through into the physical world. He was the spirit who descended to earth ahead of the Christ, as it were, before the Mystery of Golgotha approached, and governed world affairs for four or five centuries at that time. Now in our time he is again the leading spirit on earth. We may make a comparison by saying that Michael is among the spirits belonging to the hierarchy of the Archangeloi as gold is among the metals. Whilst all other metals act predominantly on the ether body, gold also acts as a medicine for the physical body. In the same way all the other leading spirits act on the soul whilst it is Michael who at the same time is able to act on the physical intellect, on physical reason. Now that his age has come it is possible to act out of the spirit on the physical intellect, on physical reason. In the 15th century he was not the actual leader and therefore had to find a way in the case of Joan without making use of the human intellect, human understanding, human ability to form ideas; a way that was wholly an inner one, as it were, through the innermost powers of the human soul. The Christ influenced Joan of Arc through his Michaelic spirit, but he achieved what had to be done by any other means rather than the forces of the intellect and of reason.

Luciferic spirits are also present today. and these prefer to attack man from within. They want to generate all kinds of passions, but not the error of the intellect, the error of common reason that we have to struggle with in our present age. We therefore have to say that anything we wish to achieve in the spiritual sphere must be achieved in such a way that it is in accord with the forces that Michael, the leading spirit of the age, commands. We are in close alliance with Michael when we try to grasp what we have been attempting to grasp these last few days, when we try and grasp things as phenomena, to grasp what we call the German folk spirit. Two powers: Michael and the German folk spirit. These two are entirely in harmony, and it is their mission to bring the Christ impulse to expression specifically in our time, in accord with the character of our time. For it would be wrong for the people of our time to think that the same inward way of working that was appropriate to the 15th century could still be appropriate now that we are in the fifth post-Atlantean era. In the present age it is a matter above all of understanding that it is necessary to be chained to Ahriman, to Ahrimanic elements we ourselves create in our machines, and that it is necessary to recognize clearly how these things are connected. Otherwise we live in fear of many of the things that exist in the present age.

The question therefore arises: How do we offer resistance to this Ahrimanic element in our age, the way resistance was offered to the Luciferic element at the time of Joan of Arc? We offer resistance to the Ahrimanic element by taking exactly the path that has been so emphatically pointed out over and over again within our stream of spiritual science—the path towards a spiritualization of human culture, of man's ability to form ideas and concepts. This is why it has been stressed again and again that there is a way in which everything spiritual science can give us, even if to begin with it is largely presented to us from the spiritual world, can truly and wholly and utterly be grasped with the intellect, the reason man has been gifted with from the 16th century to this day. And if we say we do not understand, then that is only because we listen to the prejudices current in the materialism of our age. We must stop listening ever and again to the voice of present-day materialism, a voice that speaks loudly at times and then again in the faintest of whispers. Instead we must try and firmly focus our mind on such powers of understanding as we have. Then the things spiritual science produces for us will one day appear to be perfectly understandable, as something that can be understood just as well as some event or other in the outside world can be understood. We generate the great strength we need to offer resistance to the Ahrimanic forces by approaching the spirit not merely through the inmost powers of revelation and of faith, as in the case of Joan of Arc, but by trying to concentrate our powers of understanding most intensely on what spiritual science has to give. If we do this, the hour, the moment, will come when we have to say to ourselves: What comes to us out of spiritual science is the only thing that is rational and at the same time makes the world around us understandable, filling it with light. And when we are taken hold of in this way we are taken hold of by what the spirit has to give in our time so that we shall indeed be strong enough to face the Ahrimanic forces.

Someone with a disposition like that of Joan of Arc would not be able to achieve anything in our day and age. She would be an interesting personality and would be able to reveal many marvellous things through prophesy and in other ways. Such a person capable of making intimate revelations is capable of effectively countering Luciferic forces. Today, however, man has to resist Ahrimanic forces, has to make himself strong to cope with these forces, developing the strength required in the Michaelic age. Sun-like qualities are called for in the age of Michael, qualities we take into ourselves by spiritualizing the powers we have at our command between waking up and going to sleep: the powers of the intellect, of understanding, of insight. For these powers of understanding we possess will undergo a transformation in the soul if only we have sufficient patience. They are transformed to such effect that out of what emerges for us in spiritual science there arises the certainty that what we are grasping there is the direct expression of the thoughts of the spiritual world. So there can be no question today of withdrawing from the outside world which has Ahrimanic forces in it everywhere. No, it is necessary for us to stand in this world but at the same time also make ourselves strong to meet those Ahrimanic forces.

It is a matter therefore of finding the way towards understanding the spiritual world with the very same powers we also use to understand the outside world. That, of course, is the way—as we have said on these few occasions—that is inwardly bound up with the whole mission of the German people, and specifically with this mission as it has been from the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. This mission was in preparation during the preceding centuries. This is what is so remarkable—what has been going on in the intellectual life of Germany, through its poets, its artists and philosophers, is intimately bound up with the spiritual life. Here it really is a matter of boldly looking the facts in the face, without sympathy or antipathy, and seeing how they were first in preparation and gradually took shape. We have ourselves had the experience of simply having to stress one day that there is this necessity to be active in the life of the intellect and spirit as it continues to progress. Why should that be so?

Let us try and take a look at the theosophical movement we had external links with for a time, the theosophical movement in England. Try and build a bridge for yourselves between the general intellectual life in England, including the field of philosophy, and English theosophy. Externally they stand side by side, are two streams running side by side, and a bridge between the two is something we can only make in a very external way. Try on the other hand and consider the life of the mind and spirit that had its preparatory stages in the German mystics Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, and then evolved further through Jakob Boehme and Angelus Silesius.²⁸ In Lessing²¹ it brought acceptance of the idea of repeated earth lives, and in Goethe's Faust an out-and-out glorification of the ascent to the spiritual worlds.

There you have the straight route from the outer worlds to the spiritual world. If you then also include the stream that led from Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Fair Lily²⁹ to the dramatization of the basic forces of initiation³⁰ and take the two streams together, you will have the inner connection. There is an inner connection between that which finally makes its appearance as spiritual science and that which is striven for quite exoterically in the intellectual life of the physical world. The life of the mind and spirit which unfolds outside of spiritual science is of course striven for with the powers of the intellect, but it is compelled to move in the direction of what is found outside the body. I should like to put it like this: It is the mission of the German people that they cannot do anything else but let the river of all their endeavours finally enter into spiritual life. In spiritual terms that really means that the German people are called to unite inwardly with the element that comes into the world because Michael is the leader. Such a union is not achieved by passively, fatalistically, allowing oneself to be governed by the powers of destiny. It is achieved by recognizing the challenge of the time.

What I am trying to show has been revealed not only inwardly, in the evolution of German mysticism, but also outwardly in the whole way German life has developed within the context of European life. In the first of the last two public lectures I have given, ‘The Germanic Soul and the German Intellect’, I discussed the way the soul quality of the Germanic tribes flowed into the peoples of the West and the South, as it were, through those who became the outposts of those tribes, the Goths, Lombards, Vandals. The Germanic soul element was sacrificed on the altar of mankind. Later this was to repeat itself, though less obviously so. Consider first of all the most eastern part of Austria³¹ and the people known as the Transylvanian Saxons. They had emigrated from the Rhine, from the Siebengebirge (Seven Mountains), and there is external evidence to prove this. As time went on they lost their special characteristics. The soul substance gave itself up, to merge into that of the other nation, and little will be left of them one day except for some elements from their language; it was as folk substance that they flowed into the other nation. Now let us move on south to the Banat.³² Swabian immigrants settled there and the Magyar element overgrew the Swabian element. The same thing has happened in the Carpathian mountains in Hungary. To all appearances these immigrant elements have disappeared today. Yet they are still alive everywhere among the present-day population, sometimes emerging in tiny rivulets, like in the fascinating linguistic enclave of the people of Gottschee in Krain [Carniola]. And elsewhere as well. We see—and it would be possible to purse this a great deal further—how the Germanic soul-element has been sent out into the world, how it has an effect there. This happens out of an inner necessity. It happened like this in earlier ages and particularly also during the age of Gabriel. It happened throughout the age of Gabriel in that the blood—I would say the blood and the mixing of blood—was active, everything which, whilst connected with external circumstances in life, yet cannot be grasped externally, but again takes place at a more inward level.

Now the Michael age has come,the age when we must grasp how, through the whole past development of the life of the mind and intellect, the German spirit is able to take its place within the Sun force of Michael. That we simply have to realize. And it can be realized by giving recognition to spiritual science, by gradually—on the basis of what spiritual science is considering—getting an idea and an awareness of the spiritual powers that are at work, of the reality of spiritual powers. Then we shall gradually come to understand how senseless it is for people to say: ‘There are no spiritual forces, I cannot acknowledge them. And if I have a bar of iron in horseshoe form here, then it is just that, a bar of iron, and I see nothing but iron.’ But there may be magnetic forces within it. And in the same way something else, something quite different from magnetic forces, lies within the whole of the outside world. We come to recognize it if we really consider all that is presented to us as the characteristic form of things. That is the way to achieve the powers of mind needed in the age of Michael to resist the Ahrimanic powers, at a time when it is indeed our duty to withstand the Ahrimanic powers. Fundamentally speaking, everything the study of spiritual science has to offer is merely preparatory. One day an awakening of the soul will spring forth from the study of spiritual science, and the soul will know: Within you lives the spiritual world, from the Christ impulse down through Michael to the folk spirit which puts into effect what has to be put into effect.

I have said that the time of Joan of Arc was one when it was possible to act on the weakest, physically the weakest, powers of man. Our age is one where it is necessary to act on the strongest powers of man, to take hold of the will at a point where it is least inclined truly to unfold its powers. We can see it again and again: the thing people find most difficult to do is to unfold the will at the point where our earthly powers, the powers by which we form concepts, are made inwardly active. To bring ‘will-power’ to bear externally is something people still find relatively easy. But a different kind of ‘will-power’ is needed to guide our thoughts in such a way that they encompass the spiritual world. Spiritual science as such has to appeal to that strong will-power, for this must be there if spiritual science is truly to lead where it ought to lead in our Michaelic age. For we are not called to discuss the mechanical element in our age; we are not called to point out that this mechanical element in our age has laid hold of mankind; we are called to do something else.

Of course, if we squeeze the facts a little it will be possible for us to become a philosopher, to some degree even a great philosopher—this we admit without reserve. It is possible to look at the machines in our age and start to consider this very mechanistic aspect as the most pernicious of all things, ascribing it specifically to our enemies. And one then has the inclination, even if one may be considered a great philosopher, to hurl abuse like a market woman. One can then do the same as the philosopher Bergson³³ who only recently again managed to point out rather one sidedly—and many things tend to be perfectly correct if a one sided view is presented—how the mechanistic effect of the forces relates to the essential nature of the German people. But that is not the only thing we can point to—that German brainpower has achieved things in certain areas by applying mechanical principles—for something else may be pointed out as well. Nor is it necessary to hurl abuse like a market woman when discussing such matters, and instead we may say: Perhaps the very place where the intellect has the greatest powers to give form to the mechanistic and demonic element is also the place where these mechanistic and demonic powers can be overcome on the basis of our particular spiritual mission. Then however, a German may easily get himself misunderstood as he comes to see, in conjunction with the way the intellectual life has developed, that it is not his function to stop at the purely mechanical element that is of such great service to him also in the present day, with the challenges presented by the war. He must not stop at what is merely mechanism, for then he would merely create demons. No, he must develop powerful forces within him that can boldly face these demons. This means that we have to stand in the spiritual world, not blindly but in a way that arises from, and is guided by, conviction. If we set out to acknowledge that we are surrounding ourselves with a world of demons, a veritable hell, as we design and build machine after machine, we can of course understand why people speaking out of the materialistic spirit of the present age are saying over and over again that this scientific and materialistic age has taken us to the greatest height ever achieved by man. Of course we can understand this for it is in line with the materialistic thought of the present time, but we must know that with those machines we are introducing nothing but demons for mankind and we must know how to develop the right powers to resist these demons. We only gain the right attitude to the spiritual world by recognizing these demonic Ahrimanic forces, by knowing full well that they are present. For the harmful powers are harmful only when we remain unconscious of them, when we know nothing about them. Let me illustrate this by means of a comparison.

As you know, we hope after some time to have a building at Dornach near Basle where we can nurture our spiritual stream in suitable surroundings. It is not a question of erecting this building to escape the pressures of our time in some way or other, but rather of building it entirely out of the pressures of our time. It was necessary for instance to design a lighting system out of the most Ahrimanic forces of the present age, electric lighting, electric heating and so on. It is a matter of using the architectural form as such to render such potentially harmful things harmless. It could have been the case that anyone entering the building in the future would have been surrounded with everything the Ahrimanic culture of the present age leads to. The point, however, is not that it is present, but that people do not notice it. We are not suppose to notice it. To achieve this, a number of friends got together and they are erecting a separate building for this, giving it a special form, so that the demonic Ahrimanic forces are banished to this place. Anyone approaching the building, and also anyone entering it, will have it brought to their notice that the Ahrimanic forces are at work there. For as soon as we know this they are no longer harmful. The point is that the powers that have a bad effect on man cease to do so when we take a good look at the places where they are active, when we do not look at a machine thoughtlessly and say ‘a machine is simply a machine’ , but rather acknowledge that a machine is a place where a demonic Ahrimanic entity may be found.

If we take our stand in the world with knowledge in our souls we take the right stand in the Michaelic age. It means that we relate to the spiritual world in such a way that Michael, too, can be active within us; Michael with his present mission, as we have described it. The Point is that in every case we can either enter without thought into what exists in the mechanical contrivances men are producing at an unconscious level or we can see through life. If we see through it, if we become aware of the demonic elemental powers at work in the machines we produce, we shall find the way to the rightful givers of Inspiration who are true to the spirit. They are connected with the spirit who is to the other spirits concerned with guidance of man as gold is to the other metals—with Michael.

My aim today has been to show that the mission of our age is to seek the divine spiritual powers that will work for the good of mankind. It is different from the mission given to the human souls who lived at the time of Joan of Arc. At that time it was much more a question of holding back anything intellectual, holding back the Power of reasoning. Today, however, it is a question of cultivating everything to do with reason and intellect to attain to clairvoyance, for it is possible to cultivate it and attain to clairvoyance. Once there are people who cultivate the human soul in this way, the twilight period we are now living through will evolve into what it destined to evolve. Everything that evolves on the physical plane can only be the outer garment for the spiritual life that is to arise for mankind out of the Present time.

And it is true that those who are now sacrificing their powers in the years of their youth are prepared to send these powers down into our earthly existence. For these powers are never lost, they are indestructible- Now, however, they are destined to continue to act spiritually as they would have continued to act physically if the people concerned had not gone through the gate of death on the field of battle. They will continue to send their powers down to earth and into our time, so that we shall know what to do with these powers. These powers need to stream down into a human race that shall use them in such a way, during the time of peace that will follow the war, that spiritual life spreads more and more on earth. As the light of day always arises from the night, so a future filled with light will have to arise out of our present which so often seems like a dark night to us. This future will have to be filled not only with light but with everything the Michaelic age, which started in 1871, has to bring for mankind. Once there are souls capable of establishing as intimate a bond with the spiritual world as has been indicated today, we shall be able to hope that where the events of the present time are concerned, the thought expressed in the seven lines of the mantram will come to fruition. We may hope that it will all be fulfilled—if the first five lines are really and truly connected with the last two:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 26. See also Rudolf Steiner, ‘Welten-Neujahr—Das Traumlied von Olaf Asteson’, Dornach 31 December 1914, in Der Zusammenhang des Menschen mit der elementarischen Welt (GA 158). In English as extract ‘World New Year’ in Anthroposophical News Sheet 14: 1, 2.
• 27. See, above all, Rudolf Steiner's lectures on 18 and 20 May 1913 in Vorstufen zum Mysterium von Golgotha (GA 152). In English, Michaelmas—The Festivals and Their Meaning (London) Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1957. Lecture of 18 May also as typescript translation Z 136, ‘The Michael Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha’ in Rudolf Steiner Library, London.
• 28. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c.1327).
  Johannes Tauler (c.1300 –c.1361).
  Jakob Boehme (1575 –1624).
  Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler) (1624–1677). Concerning the above mystics, see Rudolf Steiner: Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens und ihr Verhältnis zur modernen Weltanschauung (GA 7). In English as Eleven European Mystics (tr. K. Zimmer) (New York) Rudolf Steiner Publications 1971.
• 21. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlecthtes (1780) paragraph 98:
  
  ‘Why should I not return as often as I am sent to gain new knowledge, new skills? Do I carry off so much at one go that it is not worth the effort to return?’
• 29. Rudolf Steiner: Goethes Geistesart in ihrer Offenbarung durch semen Faust und durch das Marchen von der Schlange und der Lille (GA 22). In English as The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World Conception (tr.O.D. Wannamaker) (New York & London) Anthroposophic Press and Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1940.
• 30. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Die Pforte der Einweihung’ in Vier Mysteriendramen (GA 14). In English as ‘The Portal of Initiation’, in the Mystery Plays/Dramas tr. A. Bittleston/R. and H. Pusch.
• 31. Rudolf Steiner was referring to the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Transylvania (Siebenbuergen) is now part of one of the successor states—Rumania (translator).
• 32. The Banat lies just south-west of Transylvania and north of the Danube, in Yugoslavia and Rumania (translator).
• 33. Henri Bergson (1859–1941). See ‘La Signification de la Guerre’ in Pages Actuelles 1914/15 Paris 1915.

The human soul is capable of development, its present state may be changed by training, particularly by a training of the etheric body. People who precede others in their inner development are called Initiates. The path which they tread and teach is that of occult schooling.

Our root-race (5th post-Atlantean epoch), the Aryan, descends from the most highly developed sub-race of the Atlanteans, the original Semitic race, that lived approximately in the region of present-day Ireland. The island Poseidonis mentioned by Plato may be considered as a last remnant of descending Atlantis. Manu, a leader of the Atlanteans, guided the most mature men to the East. From there, they wandered into the region of present-day India. An ancient civilisation arose: This ancient Indian civilisation arose long before the time of the Vedas. It still had a dream-like, altogether inner character. The soul-constitution of the ancient Hindoo was the very opposite of our modern one. To him everything external and visible was Maya, Illusion; he saw reality only in Brahman and in what could be grasped by Brahman.

A second civilisation arose further west. This second culture is the ancient Persian one, whose inaugurator and chief guide was the great Zarathustra, or Zoroaster. The Persias were already able to harmonize spirit and matter and. began to work and to transform the physical world through the human spirit.

A third civilisation arose still further west, namely the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian culture. Man's gaze turned still more towards the physical world, the external branches of science arose, with the study of the forces of Nature and of their laws.

From the very outset, this ancient primeval science revealed the following truths concerning our earth: The earth too is a being subjected to reincarnation. It passed through earlier stages and in future it will pass through further incarnations. One speaks of seven planetary conditions or Planets", through which the earth passes in its development. The names of these "Planets" are not identical with our present planets, but refer to past or future condition of the earth. But these conditions are related to the planets after which they are named. The first incarnation of our earth is called. "Saturn". Then comes the "Sun", followed by Moon"; "Mars" and Mercury" are the designations for the first and second half of the earth's development. The conditions which will follow are "Jupiter" and "Venus", These seven incarnations of the earth are intimately connected with man's development and are therefore even mirrored in ordinary life; names of the days of the week.

Saturday - Saturn
Sunday - Sun
Monday - Moon
Tuesday - Zeus-day, Mardi - Mars
Wednesday - Mercredi, Mercury
Thursday - Wotan-day, Jupiter
Friday - Freya-day, Vendredi, Venus

The world of the stars is thus closely connected with ordinary life. The ancient Egyptians still arranged their whole civilisation in accordance with the stars, the affairs of State, agriculture, and so forth. The genius of the Dog-star, Sirius, was the one who indicated the inundations of the Nile, when that star appeared in a special constellation. A fourth epoch of culture is the Graeco-Latin one. It imprints on matter the Wisdom of things. This is how works of art arise. In the middle of this epoch falls the deed of Christ; the Mystery of Golgotha.

We ourselves live in the fifth epoch of culture, of the fifth root-race belonging to the fifth age of the earth. This is the Germanic-English-American culture; its chief task is the conquest of the physical plane. The task of the subsequent sixth epoch will be to lead external civilisation again to a more spiritual life. Its standard-bearer is Anthroposophy. The future task or civilisation as a whole consists in becoming reunited with the Spirit.

Every epoch has its particular tasks. Modern science has rejected the Ptolemaic world-system as erroneous and has adopted the world-systems of Galilei and Copernicus: but for the astral plane the Ptolemaic system is correct; for there one sets out from quite different perspectives. The sixth epoch of Culture still reposes as a seed in the East of Europe; it will be the carrier of the spiritual culture of the future.

A time will come when the human being will have overcome bi-sexuality. Lower forces, sexual instincts will change into higher ones. It is not a question of destroying any instinct, but of refining, ennobling them. Thus phantasy is a product of spiritual ennoblement, the result of already purified passions. When phantasy reaches a higher stage of development it leads to clairvoyant imagination. In future all human beings will be able to perceive as Initiates do now, the soul-content of their fellows. To-day the word can transmit spiritual experiences through the medium of the air; in the future spiritual beings will be produced through the word, and finally the word itself will become creative; then the human beings will be magicians of the word.

The indications on occult training come from a deeply-founded knowledge. There are two fundamental qualities which man must have; he must be able to bear what one calls great loneliness, and he must gain a certain fundamental mood of devotion. In regard to the first, the loneliness of a few minutes each day is meant, in the middle of the active life of daily living, minutes dedicated to concentration and meditation. Even this can give inner strength to the soul. At first there will be an inner feeling of emptiness and sadness; but this must be overcome. All people who achieved a great deal require this inner loneliness for their concentration. The second fundamental requirement is devotion, the capacity to look up to something with feelings of reverence and devotion. Those who wish to ascend to higher stages of development must first be below and feel that they are there below.

The occult training of India calls for a complete submission of the pupil to his Guru. The Rosicrucian Initiation is the right one for Modern people of the West.

Before that there was the Christian Initiation. All three kinds of Initiation are in reality the expression of one and the same initiation, but the forms of initiation must change with the times.

This lecture is the 4th of 12 lectures from the lecture series entitled, The Human's Connection with the Elemental World, and the 3rd of 4 lectures in the series entitled, Olaf Asteson and the Awakening of the Earth Spirit.

The period from about Christmas to the present date (Jan. 7th) is really an important and significant period of the year, also in an occult connection. It is called “The period of the Thirteen Days.” The remarkable thing is that the importance of these thirteen days is felt by those who through the constitution of their souls have preserved an inkling of the ancient connection of the human soul with the spiritual world, of which we have often spoken. We know that the primitive human being who lives in the country or in a community which is little infected by our town life, preserves more of the connection with the spiritual world which existed in ancient times than one belonging to a town.We find many things in folk-poems regarding experiences of the soul during the period from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, Jan.6th.

This is the time when—after darkness has been greatest over the earth, directly after the winter solstice, when the sun again begins his victorious course,—together with the deepest immersion and subsequent liberation and redemption of nature,—the human soul can also have special experiences if it still has a definite connection with the spiritual world. Those who o longer possess the old clairvoyance, but who in their souls are still connected with the spiritual world, perceive a difference in the abnormal world of dreams at this period of the year. What the soul can then experience is important, because the soul—if it is still susceptible—can then really penetrate best into the spiritual world. To the modern man the course of the year is such that he can no longer distinguish the various seasons of the year; for while the snowstorms rage outside, when the darkness descends about 4 p.m. and it grows light late in the morning, the city man feels the same as in the summer months when the sun develops its greatest power. Man has been torn out of his ancient connection with the Cosmos in which he lived when he was outside in nature. To those however who have kept in touch with nature, what happens at Christmas time is not the same as what takes place at some other time in the year, for example, at midsummer. Whereas at midsummer the soul is most emancipated from what is connected with the spiritual world, at the time when nature has died away the most it is connected with the spiritual world and formerly had special experiences during this time.

Now there is a beautiful folk-poem in the old Norwegian language, a poem which was re-discovered a short time ago and has quickly become popular again owing to the peculiarly sympathetic understanding of the Norwegian people. It treats of a man who was still in connection with the spiritual world,—Olaf Oesteson. What he goes through in the time between Christmas and Epiphany is beautifully described in this poem. At the New Year Festival in Hanover on Jan. 1st, 1912, I tried to put this folk-poem “Olaf Oesteson” into German verse, so that it might come before our souls too. We will begin this evening with the song of Olaf Oesteson, which contains his experiences during the “Thirteen Nights.”

The Dream Song

O listen to my song!
I will sing to thee
Of a certain youth:
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A deep sleep fell upon him soon,
And he could not awake,
Till on the thirteenth day
The people went to Church.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long,
Of him I sing to thee.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve:
Long, long did he sleep!
And he could not awake,
Till the thirteenth day
The birds were spreading their wings.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long
Of him will I sing to thee.

Olaf could not awake
Till on the thirteenth day
The sun shone o'er the mountains
Then did he saddle his nimble steed,
And rode to the church in haste.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long,
Of him will I sing to thee.

The priest already stood
By the altar saying mass.
When by the church-door Olaf seated himself
To give tidings of many dreams,
Which during this long sleep
Had filled his soul.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

Young folk and old ones too,
Give heed unto the words
Which Olaf speaks about his dreams.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

II

I went to rest on Christmas Eve,
A deep sleep soon enveloped me;
And I could not awake,
Till on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

Up to the clouds was I lifted,
And flung to the depths of the sea.
Mirth cannot fall upon
ONe who follow me.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

Up to the clouds was I lifted
And thrust into dismal swamps,
beheld the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.
Brightly shone the moon
and the paths stretched far away.

Into earth's depths did I journey,
Where streams of Gods roar frightfully,
To look at them I was not able,
But I could hear their roaring.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

My black steed did not neigh,
And my dogs did not bark,
Nor did the bird of morning sing;
There was but one marvel everywhere.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

My spirit-land I had to travel o'er
The wide plane of a thorny heath,
And also the nails on my feet.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I came to Gjaller-Bridge
It hangs high up in windy heights;
It is covered with red gold
and has nails with sharp points.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

The ghostly snake did strike me,
The ghostly hound did bite me.
The bull, he stood across the way
These are three beasts of the bridge:
Of frightfully evil nature are they.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

The dog to bite is ready
The snake desires to sting,
The bull, he threatens violence:
They let none pass across the bridge
Who will not honour truth.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I went across the bridge
Narrow it is, and makes one dismay.
I had to wade through swamps ...
They lie behind me now!
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I had to wade in swamps,
Bottomless did they seem.
When I passed o'er the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth—
Like the dead who lie in the grave.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

III

Then I came to waters
In which, like blue flames,
Masses of ice gleaned bright.
And God my purpose guided,
So that I shunned that region.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I turned my steps to the winter-path
On the right could I perceive it.—
I looked as into Paradise,
That threw its light afar.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

And the holy Mother of God—
I saw her there in radiance!
She made no travel to Brooksvaline:
Saying that there men's souls are judged!
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

IV

In other worlds I tarried
Through the length of many nights;
And God alone can know
How much distress of soul I saw
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

A young man there I saw,
Who had recklessly a boy had killed:
Now he must carry him eternally
In his own arms!
He stood deep in mire,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Also an old man did I see,
He wore a cloak as though of lead.
Thus was he punished, because he
In avarice had lived on earth.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Ad men came into sight
Who carried fiery burdens;
Dishonesty weighs heavily
On their poor souls,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Children too could I behold.
With glowing coals beneath their feet.
These worked their parents ill in life,
Which hurt their spirits grievously
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

I was charged to approach that house,
Where witches had to work
In the blood which in life
Had stirred them up to wrath,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Down from the North in savage troops,
Come riding wicked spirits,
Led by the Prince of Hell.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

What came from out of the North
Seemed worst of all;
In front rode he, the Prince of Hell,
On his black charger.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

But from the South there came
In serene tranquility yet other bands.
Foremost rode St. Michael
At the side of Jesus Christ.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

The souls laden with sin
Could but in terror tremble!
Their tears ran down in streams—
The result of their bad deeds.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

In majesty stood Michael there
Weighing the human souls
Upon his scales for sin;
And giving judgment stood
The judge of the world, Jesus Christ.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

V

Happy is he who in earth-life
Gives shoes to those in need;
He need not walk with naked feet
In the field of thorns.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he who in earth-life
Hath given bread to the poor!
He cannot in that world
Be injured by the dogs.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he, who in earth-life
Hath given corn to the poor!
Threatened he cannot be
By the sharp horns of the bull,
When he must pass the Gjaller-bridge.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he, who in earth-life
Gives clothing to the poor!
The ice-masses in Brooksvaline
Cannot avail to freeze him.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

VI

Young folk and old ones too,
Give heed unto the words
Which Olaf spake about his dreams.
Long didst thou sleep indeed ...
Wake now, Olaf Oesteson!

The poem itself is old; but as we have already said, it has recently reappeared as if of itself among the Norwegian people and is spreading with great rapidity. The fact of this poem spreading id one among the many things at the present time which shows how people are longing to understand the secrets now being opened up by Theosophy, for the fact that what is here described takes place—or at least could take place a comparatively short time ago—in a soul, is not merely “imagination.” Olaf Oesteson is a type of those people living in the North who, even in the Middle Ages, about the middle of that period, were able to experience literally, one might say, the things mentioned in this poem. When our Norwegian friends gave me this poem on my visit to Christiania the time before last, and wished me to say something about it, it was the fact just mentioned, one of general theosophical interest, which came particularly to notice, but what led up to include this poem in our theosophical understanding we can really penetrate more and more deeply into what comes to light in it. Thus for instance, it was significant to me that Olaf (that is an old Norwegian name) has the surname “Oesteson.” “Oesteson”—the son of what? Of “Oste”; and I tried to find what sort of mother this is the son of. Now of course we might adduce many things—including some that might lead to dispute—about he meaning of the word “Oste” (East): but it would be impossible to-day to explain all that is connected with it. If, however, we take into account all that comes into question, “Olaf Oesteson” means approximately this: One who is still a son of that soul which passes down from generation to generation, and is connected with the blood which is handed on from generation to generation. Thus we have traced this name back to what we have so often spoken of in Theosophy, namely, that in ancient times the old clairvoyance was connected with the relationship of the blood which passes through generations. We might translate “Olaf Oesteson” thus: Olaf, the one born of many generations and who still bears in his soul the characteristics of many generations.

Now when we examine his experiences, it is extremely interesting to notice that what Olaf Oesteson went through while he was asleep for thirteen days, beginning from Christmas Eve, during which time he did not woke was in a sort of psychic state. When we read these verses describing his various experiences with the broad homeliness of the nation, we are reminded of certain descriptions of the first stages of initiation, where we are told that so and so was led to the portal of death. We are shown in many places in the poem that Olaf Oesteson arrives at the portal of death. It is pointed out particularly clearly where he says that he feels like a corpse, even to the earth which feels between his teeth. When we remember that in initiation the etheric body extends beyond the limits of the skin and the neophite becomes larger and larger, so that he lives into the large, into the wide expanse of space, we are told in this poem how Olaf Oesteson descends deeply, feels himself in the depths of the earth and ascends to the clouds. Olaf Oesteson experience what man has to go through after death, for example, in the sphere of the moon. It is poetically described how the moon shines clearly and how the paths stretch far away, then the chasm is described which has to be passed over in the world which lies between the human world and the one leading out into cosmic space. The heavenly bridge connects what is human with what is cosmic. Our attention is then drawn to the beings expressed in the constellations; the bull and the serpent. To one who can look spiritually into the world, the constellations are only the expression of what exists spiritually in space. Then the world of Kamaloca is disclosed in the description of “Brooksvaline.” It describes how there is a sort of recompense, how people have there to experience what they have not acquired here on earth,—but in a compensating way.—We need not, however, go into all the details of the poem. We should not do this at all with poems such as this. We ought to feel they have originated from a frame of mind still closely connected with something which existed in such a people as this, much longer than among nations which lived in the more interior part of the continent or who were connected with the life in cities. In the Norwegian people, which still possesses in its national language many things which border closely upon occult secrets, it is possible to keep souls in touch for a long time with what exists behind outer material phenomena.

Remember who I explained that, parallel with the seasons of the year, there are spiritual facts taking place, how in the spring when the plants spring forth the earth, when everything wakens, as it were, when the days grow longer, we have to recognize what may be called a sort of sleeping of the elementary and higher spirits connected with the earth. In spring, when outwardly the earth awakens, we see that spiritually this is connected with a sort of falling asleep of the earth; and when outer nature dies down again it is connected with an awakening of the spiritual nature of the earth. When about Christmas time outer nature is as though asleep, it is the time when the spiritual part of the earth is most active, and includes elemental, less important beings, as well as great and mighty beings connected with earthly life. It is only when it is observed outwardly that it seems as though we must compare spring with the awakening of the earth and winter to its going to sleep. Seen occultly it is the reverse. The “Spirit of the Earth” which however, consists of many spirits, is awake in winter and asleep in summer. Just as in the human organism the organic and plant activities are most active during sleep, as these forces then work even into the brain, and as the purely organic activity is subdued while the person is awake, so is it also with the earth. When the earth is most active, when everything has sprouted forth, when the sun has reached its zenith about St. John's Day, the Spirit of the earth is asleep. In accord with this occult truth the festival of Christmas, the festival of the awakening of the spirit, was fixed in winter. Things which have been handed down as customs from ancient times often correspond to these occult verities.

Now one who knows how to live with the spirit of the earth celebrates, for example, the festival of St. John in summer, for this festival is a kind of materialistic festival; it celebrates that which is revealed in an outward materialistic form. One who is connected with the Spirit of the Earth, with what lives spiritually in the earth, awakens in his inner being—that is, he sleeps outwardly like Olaf Oesteson—best at Christmas time, during the “Thirteen days.” This is an occult fact, which to occultism signifies exactly the same as, for example, the fact of the outer solstitial point to ordinary materialistic science. Of course materialistic science will consider it to be an obvious thing that in astronomy it should describe the activity of the sun in summer and in winter in a purely external manner, it will consider foolish what to occultists is a fact, namely that the spiritual solstice is at its highest point in winter, that therefore the conditions are then the most favorable for those who wish to come in touch with the Spirit of the Earth and all that is spiritual. Therefore to one who wishes to strengthen his soul's powers it may come about that he can have his best experiences during the thirteen days after Christmas. At that time, without noticing it, experiences come forth from the soul,—although the modern man is emancipated from outer processes, so that occult experiences can come at any time, but in so far as outer conditions can have an influence, the time between Christmas and New Year is most important.

Thus are we reminded by this poem in quite a natural manner, that a great deal of what we are able to relate regarding the period between death and rebirth was known among certain peoples a comparatively short time ago, many knew it from direct experience.

Question: Has liquid manure the same Ego-organising force as manure itself?

Answer: The essential point is to have the manure and the liquid manure properly combined. Use them in such a way that they work together, each contributing to the organising forces of the soil. The connection with the Ego applies in the fullest sense to the manure, though this does not hold good, generally speaking, for the liquid manure. Every Ego—even the potentiality of an Ego, as it is in the manure—must work in some kind of connection with an astral factor. The manure would have no astrality if “manure juice” did not accompany it. Thus liquid manure helps—it has the stronger astral force, the dung itself the stronger Ego-force. The dung is like the brain; the liquid manure is like the brain-secretion—the astral force, the fluid portion of the brain, i.e. the cerebral fluid.

Question: Might we have the indications as to the proper constellations?

Answer (by Dr. Vreede): The exact indications cannot be given now. The necessary calculations cannot be done in a moment. Broadly speaking, the period from the beginning of February until August will hold good for the insect preparations. For field-mice, the periods will vary from year to year. For this year (1924) the time from the second half of November to the first half of December would be right.

Dr. Steiner: The principles of an anthroposophical calendar, such as was planned at the time, should be carried out more fully. Then you could follow such a calendar precisely.

Question: Speaking of full Moon and new Moon, do you mean the actual day of the full or new Moon, or do you include the time shortly before and after?

Answer: You call it new Moon from the moment when this picture appears, approximately speaking (Diagram 22). This picture is there; then it vanishes. And you reckon it full Moon from the time when the following picture occurs. New Moon, therefore, from the time when the Moon appears as a quite narrow crescent, and then disappears. Twelve to fourteen days in each case.

Question: Can insects, unobtainable at the season of the given constellation, be kept until the proper time arrives?

Answer: We shall give more exact indications of the time when the preparations should be made. The several forms of insects can no doubt be kept.

Question: Must the weed-seeds be burnt in summer, or can it be done at any time?

Answer: Not too long after collecting the seed.

Question: What of the sprinkling of insect-pepper taken from insects that have never come into actual contact with the earth?

Answer: Sprinkle it on the earth just the same. For the insect, the process does not depend on physical contact, but on the quality communicated by these homoeopathic doses. The insect has quite another kind of sensitiveness; it flees from what ensues when the preparation is sprinkled in the earth. That the insect does not come into direct contact with the earth makes no difference at all.

Question: What of the harmfulness of frost in farming, especially for the tomato? In what cosmic relationship is frost to be understood?

Answer: If the tomato is to grow nice and big, it must be kept warm; it suffers greatly from frost.

As to frost in general, you must realise what it is that comes to expression in the effects of frost. These effects always represent a great enhancement of the cosmic influences at work in the earth. This cosmic influence has its normal mean when certain degrees of temperature are prevalent; then it is just as the plant requires it. If, on occasion, we get frost of long duration or too intense and deeply penetrating, the influence of the heavens on the earth is too strong, and the plants will tend to ramify in various directions, to form thread-like growths, to spread out thinly. And the resulting growths, being thin, will under certain conditions naturally be received by the prevailing frost, and destroyed. Frost, therefore, when it goes too far, is undoubtedly harmful to plant-growth, simply because too much of the heavens comes into the soil of the earth.

Question: Should one treat the bodies of animals with the burnt relics of horse-flies and the like, or should these relics be scattered over the meadows and pastures?

Answer: Wherever the animal feeds. Sprinkle the relics over the fields; they are all to be thought of as additions to the manure.

Question: What is the best way of combating couch-grass? It is very difficult, is it not, to get the seeds?

Answer: The mode of propagation of the couch-grass you have in mind—where it never goes so far as to form seed—will in the end eliminate itself. If you get no seed, you have not really got the weed. If, on the other hand, it establishes itself so strongly that it plants itself and continues to grow rampantly, you then have the means to combat it, for you will soon find as much seed as you require, because, in fact, you need so very little. After all, you can also find four-leaved clover.

Question: Is it permissible to conserve masses of fodder with the electric current?

Answer: What would you attain by so doing? You must consider the whole part played by electricity in Nature. It is at least comforting that voices are now being heard in America—where, on the whole, a better gift of observation is appearing than in Europe—voices, I mean, to the effect that human beings cannot go on developing in the same way in an atmosphere permeated on all sides by electric currents and radiations. It has an influence on the whole development of man.

This is quite true; man's inner life will become different if these things are carried as far as is now intended. It makes a difference whether you simply supply a certain district with steam-engines or electrify the railway lines. Steam works more consciously, whereas electricity has an appallingly unconscious influence; people simply do not know where certain things are coming from. Without a doubt, there is a trend of evolution in the following direction. Consider how electricity is now being used above the earth as radiant and as conducted electricity, to carry the news as quickly as possible from one place to another. This life of men in the midst of electricity, notably radiant electricity, will presently affect them in such a way that they will no longer be able to understand the news which they receive so rapidly. The effect is to damp down their intelligence. Such effects are already to be seen to-day. Even to-day you can notice how people understand the things that come to them with far greater difficulty than they did a few decades ago. It is comforting that from America, at least, a certain perception of these facts is at last beginning to arise.

It is a remarkable fact that whenever something new appears, as a rule in the early stages it is heralded as a remedy—a means of healing. Then the prophets get hold of it. It is strange, where a new thing appears, clairvoyant perception is often reduced to a very human level! Here is a man who makes all sorts of prophecies about the healing powers of electricity, where no such thing would previously have occurred to him. Things become fashionable! No one was able to imagine healing people by electricity so long as electricity was not there. Now—not because it is there, but because it has become the fashion—now it is suddenly proclaimed as a means of healing. Electricity—applied as radiant electricity—is often no more a means of healing than it would be to take tiny little needles and prick the patient all over with them. It is not the electricity—it is the shock that has the healing effect.

Now you must not forget that electricity always works on the higher organisation, the head-organisation both of man and animal; and correspondingly, on the root-organisation in the plant. It works very strongly there. If, therefore, you use electricity in this way—if you pour electricity through the foodstuffs—you create foodstuffs which will gradually cause the animal that feeds on them to grow sclerotic. It is a slow process; it will not be observed at once. The first thing will be, that in one way or another the animals will die sooner than they should. Electricity will not at first be recognised as the cause; it will be ascribed to all manner of other things.

Electricity, once for all, is not intended to work into the realm of the living—it is not meant to help living things especially; it cannot do so. You must know that electricity is at a lower level than that of living things. Whatever is alive—the higher it is, the more it will tend to ward off electricity. It is a definite repulsion. If now you train a living thing to use its means of defence where there is nothing for it to ward off, the living creature will thereby become nervous or fidgety, and eventually sclerotic.

Question: What does Spiritual Science say to the preservation of foodstuffs by acidification, as in the Silage-process?

Answer: If you are using salt-like materials at all in the process—taken in the wider Sense—it makes comparatively little difference whether you add the salt at the moment of consumption or add it to the fodder. If you have fodder with insufficient salt-content to drive the foodstuffs to the parts of the organism where they should be working, the souring of such fodder will certainly be beneficial.

For instance, suppose you have turnips, swedes, etc., in a certain district. We have seen that they are especially fitted to influence the head-organisation. They are excellent fodder for certain animals—young cattle, for example. If, on the other hand, in some district you notice that as a result of such fodder the animal tends to lose hair too early or too much, then you will salt the fodder. For you will know that it is not being sufficiently deposited at those parts of the organism which it should reach; it is not getting far enough. Salt, as a rule, has an exceedingly strong influence in this direction, causing a foodstuff to reach the place in the organism where it ought to work.

Question: What is the attitude of Spiritual Science to the ensiling of the leaves of sugar-beet, etc., and other green plants?

Answer: You should See that you get the optimum effect; you must not go beyond the optimum in the method used. Generally speaking, the souring will not have a harmful effect unless carried to excess by the addition of excessive quantities of admixtures. For the salt-like constituents are precisely those that tend most strongly to remain as they are in the living organism.

Usually the organism (the animal organism also, and the human to a still greater extent) is so constituted that it changes whatever it absorbs in the most manifold ways. It is mere prejudice to think, for example, that any part of the protein you introduce through the stomach is still available after this point in the same form in which you introduce it. The protein must be completely transformed into dead substance, and must then be changed back again by the etheric body of man himself (or of the animal) into a protein which is then specifically human or animal protein.

Thus, everything that penetrates into the organism must undergo a complete change. What I am saying applies even to the ordinary warmth. I will draw it diagrammatically (Diagram 23). Assume that you have here a living organism; here you have warmth in its environment. Suppose on the other hand that you here have a piece of wood, which, though it comes from a living organism, is already dead, and you have warmth in its environment. Into the living organism the warmth cannot simply penetrate; it does not merely penetrate it. The moment the warmth begins to come inside, it is already worked upon by the living organism; it changes into warmth that has been assimilated and transmuted by the living organism itself. Indeed, it cannot rightly be otherwise. Into the dead wood, on the other hand, the warmth will simply penetrate; the warmth inside is the Same as in the surrounding mineral kingdom of the earth.

Not so with living bodies. The moment any warmth begins to penetrate unchanged into our organism, for example—as it would penetrate into a piece of wood—that moment, we catch cold. Whatever enters from outside into the living organism must not remain as it is; it must at once be changed. This process takes place least of all in salt. Hence, with the salts, used in the way you indicate for ensiling the foodstuffs—provided you are just a little sensible and do not give too much (for then in any case the animal would reject the food because of its taste)—you will do no great harm. If it is necessary for preservation, that in itself is a sign that the process is right.

Question: Is it advisable to ensile the fodder without salt?

Answer: That is a process much too far advanced. It is, I would say, a super-organic process. When it has gone too far, it can under certain circumstances be extremely harmful.

Question: Is the Spanish whiting (sometimes used to mitigate the souring effects) harmful to animals?

Answer: Certain animals cannot stand it at all; they become ill at once. Some animals can stand it; I cannot say which at the moment. Generally speaking, it will not do the animals much good; they will tend to become ill.

Question: I imagine the gastric juice will be dulled by using it?

Answer: Yes, it will be made ineffective.

Question: I should like to ask if it is not of great importance in what frame of mind one approaches these matters? It makes a great difference whether you are sowing corn or scattering a preparation for destructive ends. Surely the attitude of mind must come into question. If you work against the insects by such means as are here indicated, will it not have a greater karmic effect than if in single instances you get rid of the animals by some mechanical means?

Answer: As to the attitude of mind—surely the chief point is whether it be good or bad! What do you mean by the “destruction”? You need but consider the whole way in which you have to think about these things in any case. Take to-day's lecture, for instance, and the way it has been held; when, for example, I pointed out how one must know about the things of Nature: how one must see from the outer appearance, say, of the linseed or the carrot, what kind of process it will undergo inside the animal.

You will go through such an objective education if this knowledge becomes a reality in you at all, that it is surely quite unthinkable without your being permeated with a certain piety and reverence. Then you will also have the impulse to do these things in the service of mankind and of the Universe.

If harm were to result from the spirit in which you do them, it could only be a question of your bringing in deliberately evil intentions. Yes—you would have to have downright bad intentions. If, therefore, common morality is at the same time fostered, I cannot imagine how it should have bad effects in any way. Do you conceive that to run after an animal and kill it would be less bad?

Question: I was referring to the manner of destruction—whether it be by mechanical means, or by these cosmic workings—whether that makes a difference.

Answer: This question raises very complicated issues, the understanding of which depends upon your seeing them in large connections. Let us assume, for instance, that you draw a fish out of the sea and kill it. Then you have killed a living thing. You have carried out a process which takes place upon a certain level. Now let us assume that for some purpose you scoop up a vessel of sea-water in which much fish-spawn is contained. You will thus be destroying a whole host of life. Thereby you will have done something very different than in destroying the single fish. You will have carried out a process on an entirely different level.

When such an entity in Nature passes on into the finished fish, it has followed a certain path. If you reverse this path, you are bringing something into disorder. But if I hold up, at an earlier stage, a process which is not yet completed (or which has not yet come to an end in the blind-alley of the finished organism), then I have not by any means done the same thing as when I kill the finished organism.

I must therefore reduce your question to this: What is the wrong I do when I make the pepper? What I destroy by the pepper scarcely comes into question. The only thing that could come into question would be the creatures I need to make the pepper. And to do this, I shall obviously in most cases destroy far fewer animals than if I had to catch them all with much trouble, and kill them. I fancy, if you think it over in a practical way and not so abstractly, it will no longer seem to you so monstrous.

Question: Can human faeces be used, and to what treatment must it be submitted before use?

Answer: Human faeces should be used as little as possible. It has very little effect as manure, and it is far more harmful than any kind of manure could possibly be. If you will use human faeces, so much as will find its way into the manure of its own accord on a normal farm is quite sufficient. Take that as your maximum measure of what is not yet harmful. You know there are so and so many people on a normal farm, and if with all the manure you get from the animals and in other ways there is also mixed what comes from the human beings—that is the maximum amount which may be used.

It is the greatest abuse when human manure is used in the neighbourhood of Large cities; for in large cities there is enough for an agricultural district of immense proportions. Surely you cannot fall a prey to the demented idea of using up the human dung on a Small territory in the neighbourhood of a large city—say, Berlin. You need only eat the plants that grow there; they will soon show you what it means. If you do it with asparagus, or anything that remains more or less sincere and upright, you will soon see what happens.

Moreover, you must bear in mind that if you eat this kind of dung for growing plants which animals will eat, the eventual result is even more harmful, for in the animals much of it will remain at this level. In passing through the organism, many things remain at the level which the asparagus preserves when it goes through the human body. In this respect crass ignorance is responsible for the most awful abuses.

Question: How can red murrain (Erysipelas) in swine be combated?

Answer: That is a veterinary question. I have not considered it, because no one has yet asked my advice about it. But I think you will be able to treat it by external applications of grey antimony ore in the proper doses. It is a veterinary, a medical question, for this is a specific disease.

Question: Can the Wild Radish,¹ which is a bastard, also be combated with these peppers?

Answer: The powders of which I have spoken are specifically effective only for the plants from which they are derived. Thus, if a plant is really the outcome of crossing with other species, one would expect it to be immune. Symbioses will not be affected.

Question: What about green manuring?

Answer: It also has its good side, especially if you use it for fruit-culture, in orchardry. Such questions cannot be answered in an absolutely general way. For certain things, green manuring is useful. You must apply it to those plants where you wish to induce a strong effect on the growth of the green leaves. If this is your intention, you may well supplement other manures with a little green manuring.

• 1. Raphanus raphinastnrm