The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To understand the world without understanding Man is impossible. That is the net result to be derived from our studies here. And for that very reason I wish today to contribute a little more to the understanding of Man. Let us then start from the disparity between the organisation of the head and that of the limb man—a subject on which we have already frequently spoken here.

First of all I would remind you that the head-organisation, as it meets us in the life between birth and death, is the outcome of all those formative processes which have been undergone from the last death to the earthly embodiment of this present life. From this we must conclude that everything connected with the head-organisation does not, in its conformity to law, follow those rules and forces to which we are adapted as earthly beings. Through the bodily organisation which we receive in this particular incarnation we are adapted to Earth-life. We have spoken a little of how this is manifested. We complete one revolution, of taking nourishment and digesting it, every 24 hours. Thereby we are adjusted with respect to the cycle of nourishment and digestion to the movement of the Earth in 24 hours. Something is accomplished in us, as it were, resembling what takes place in the processes of the Earth within the Universe. Our head, however, we virtually bring with us in its organisation at birth; therefore the head is primarily adjusted not to earthly relationships, but to such as are really from beyond the Earth. The head therefore is in a peculiar position in relation to the rest of man. A comparison may serve to make clear the position of man's head during the early epochs of his Earth-life.

Suppose we were on board a ship. The ship makes various movements in different directions. If we have a compass, we see that the set of the magnetic needle does not follow the movement of the ship, but points always to the magnetic North Pole. It is independent of the movements of the ship. The ship's movements can indeed be themselves regulated by the constant position of the magnetic needle. In a sense it is the same with the human head. Man does many things in the physical world with the rest of his organism: the head in a sense has no part in what he does in earthly life. It is always organised with its inborn forces in accordance with the extra-earthly. It is a very important fact that we have in the human head something organised in this way for the extra-earthly. Nevertheless there is always an interaction between the organisation of the head and that of the rest of man. This interaction is only gradually brought to completion in the course of the time that passes between birth and death. The head, as we receive it from the super-earthly worlds at birth, is organised primarily for the life of ideation. It is in a sense so constructed that the life of ideas can use it as an instrument. If it were to develop only on the basis of the forces which it receives on leaving the super-earthly worlds, it would develop solely as an organ of ideation or thought; our connection with the world through the head-organisation would in course of time be entirely lost. We should, as it were, so pass through earthly life with our consciousness as to develop by means of the head ideas only—that is, no more than pictures of earthly life. We should become more and more conscious of extending beyond our organisation which is connected with the Earth-being, of extending beyond it with our head; as though through our head we were beings who were strange to the Earth and developed only pictures of all that is connected with earthly life.

This is not so, and precisely for the reason that the rest of the organism sends its forces into the head. If we enquire into the quality of these forces, which from childhood onwards are more and more directed from the rest of the organism into the head, if we wish to describe them, we must look for them particularly in the forces of the Will. The rest of the organism is continually impregnating the Thought-nature of the head with Will-forces. Thus we can say, in effect, speaking diagrammatically, that we acquire the head as the bearer of ideas, as the result of the foregoing incarnation; while the Will-forces are sent into it from the rest of the organism. What has just been said takes place not only in the life of soul, but shows its effects in the bodily life also.

As head-man we are born in this earthly world as beings of thought and ideation, and the forces of ideation are at first very powerful. They ray out from the head into the rest of the organism, and it is they which during the first seven years of life enable the forces which manifest in the second dentition to work out of the rest of our organism, these same forces consolidate in us also the life of Thought, which is not consolidated until we acquire the second teeth. They are the actual forces which produce the teeth; so that when we have the teeth, these forces are set free, and can assert themselves in the life of ideas. They can then form ideas, and in a corresponding way build the power of memory. Clearly outlined ideas can begin to find a place in our thought. As long however as we are employing the forces in the formation of the teeth, they cannot show themselves as true consolidating forces in the life of ideas.

As we grow beyond the seventh or eighth year, the Will which is essentially bound up with the lower man and not with the head, begins to manifest, and now comes the time when it would, as it were, shoot its forces up into the head. This cannot however come about so easily; for our head, which is organised for the extra-earthly, would not be able to receive these strong forces which the metabolic system, as vehicle of the Will, wishes to send forth to it. These forces must first be stemmed; they must make a halt until sufficiently filtered, toned down, given more of a ‘soul’ character, to make their influence felt in the head. This halt is made at the end of the second septennial period. When the Will-forces are arrested in the organisation of the larynx—for that is the way they manifest; in the male organisation they suddenly break forth in the change of voice. In the female organisation they manifest differently. These are the Will-forces coming to a standstill, as it were, before they reach the head. Thus we may say that at the end of our second septennial period, the Will-forces are arrested in the speech organisation. At that time they are sufficiently filtered and “souled” to make their influence felt in the head-organisation. Having reached the age of puberty, and the change of voice which runs parallel with it, we have reached the point when the faculty of thought and ideation can work together with the Will in the head.

Here we have an example of how with our Spiritual Science we can point concretely to events. The abstract philosophies which make their influence felt in modern times—Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea for instance—all remain in the abstract. Schopenhauer took pains to describe the world in its ideal character on the one hand, and its will character on the other; but he remains, as it were, in the mere abstract. So also does Eduard von Hartmann. They all remain in the abstract. To be concrete is to observe how, through these two halts—at the first and second septennial periods—in quite definite and distinct ways Idea and Will meet in the cosmic system of the human head. The essential thing is that we can point to that which is of the soul and spirit and show how it manifests and reveals itself in the outer physical world. So too, we see the forces of the head, which are sent forth to the body and manifest therein in the forming of the teeth, work together with the forces of the body sent to the head, which prepare themselves, by what they undergo in the formation of speech, to become true soul-will. In the formation of speech they are arrested and held back and only then do they press forward into the head.

Thus we must understand Man in his process of formation, and look at what actually goes on with him. I have said that the human head is no more adjusted to the earthly relations of man than is the magnetic needle to the movements of the ship. The needle is independent of them, and the human head is in the same way independent of the earthly connection.

Here we have something which gradually leads to the physiological concept of freedom. Here we have the physiology of what I have set forth in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, namely, that one can only understand freedom by grasping it in sense-free thinking—that is to say, in the processes taking place in man when he directs pure thinking by his Will and orientates it in accordance with certain defined directions.

We see how man comes step by step to study rightly the mutual relationship of the soul-and-spirit and the physical-corporeal, and how the process of speech-formation can be really understood by conceiving of it as a product of two sources from which the human being is supplied—the sources which are in the head-man on the one hand and in the limb-man on the other.

We can now experience more fully how impossible it is to say that some kind of communication of the will is carried from the brain through the motor nerves. The brain only derives its full power of volition from the rest of the organism. Of course you are not to imagine this as if you could draw it in a diagram, for the process of speech-formation not only was prepared earlier, but is something which goes through the whole of life and only appears in its most characteristic feature in the special time of transition. Thus we must understand clearly how man is adapted to an earthly as well as an extra-earthly life.

He is so adapted to earthly life that certain forces which the animal brings to their conclusion, man does not bring to a conclusion in his purely natural organisation. The animal is, as it were, born ready-equipped for all its functions. Man has to be taught to acquire these functions for himself. What thus takes place in man is really only an outer expression of something that takes place in him organically If we study the metabolism of the animal correctly, we find that it goes further than that of man. The metabolism of man must be held back at an earlier halting place. What in the animal is carried to a certain stage—must in man be arrested at an earlier stage. Superficially expressed, man does not carry digestion so far as the animal; the digestive process ceases earlier. He retains, through the arrested digestion, forces which become the vehicle for what he sends to the head through the Will.

As you see, human nature is complicated; and if one does not wish to take the trouble really to study its complications—why then, one arrives at a science such as we have in the external science of today! One does not arrive at the real nature of Man. The essential nature of Man will only be revealed when Spiritual Science is allowed to illuminate natural science. If however, it is with Man as I have described, and the connection between Man and the extra-human world outside him is as we have described it in these studies, then you will see that the extra-human world can only exist for Man if it has a certain resemblance to him, to his organisation. We have seen that as limb-men we are adapted to earthly relationships, but that through the head-organisation we have removed ourselves as it were out of earthly relations, like the ship's compass on the ship. Now something of this kind must take place also in the extra-human world. There must, for instance, be adaptation to the human limb-nature. Something must lift itself out beyond, there must be something that does not belong.

How does modern natural science study Man? It studies him as though he had no head. Of course it studies the head too, but how? As a kind of appendage to the rest of his organism. What natural science produces for the comprehension of human nature is only calculated to explain the part outside the head, not the human head itself; that must be explained from the spiritual world.

I might have used the following comparison. I might have said—I have already spoken of it recently—that the human head sits upon the rest of the human organism as people sit in a railway carriage. They take no personal part in the movement. They sit still and allow the carriage to move. In the same way, the human head sits at ease. It regards the rest of the organism which is adapted to the outer world, as its coach, and allows itself to be carried. It is itself organised for a very different world. And this is how it must be in the outer world also. A natural history of man, such as we have today, really speaks of a headless man, it does not understand his true nature at all. And an astronomy constructed on the same principles would not correspond to the whole extra-earthly world, but only to a certain part of it; the other part that is withdrawn from this main part, is not considered at all. As a matter of fact the trend of natural science for the last three or four centuries has been such that it has developed the movements of the Universe, disregarding a certain content of this Universe, just as the rest of natural science disregards the human head. Therefore astronomy has derived forms of movements such as ‘The Earth revolves in an elliptical path round the Sun’, which are as little correct for the Universe as the natural science of today is for the whole being of Man. They do not correspond to the actual facts. Hence we must so often point out that the Copernican view must be fructified by Spiritual Science. Many mystics, and theosophists too, are fond of preaching: ‘The world of senses around us is Maya.’ But they do not draw the ultimate logical conclusion, otherwise they would have to say: ‘Even the world of the Copernican system, this movement of the Earth around the Sun is maya, is an illusion, and must be revised.’ For we must realise that within it is something which can no more be recognised on the basis of the hypothesis employed by Copernicus, Galileo—or even Kepler—than the whole nature of Man can be understood from the principles of modern science.

Now when we come to treat of a subject like this, we must at the same time point to something which has already taken place in human evolution. If we call to mind what we have often said—that in olden times there was a kind of primeval wisdom of which man had but a dreamy atavistic consciousness, but which in its content far surpassed what we have since acquired—if we remember all this, we shall not find it difficult to bear in mind also that the idea of the world which was held in olden times was quite different from any cosmology possible today. For what was the cosmology of our forefathers—that is, of ourselves in our former Earth-lives? What was it?

The cosmology that man had in those times consisted far more than it does now in what man brought into the world at physical birth. We may still find in children, if we understand how to observe them aright, something like a picture of the world in which man lived before descending to physical life. In later life however, and indeed very early in later life, this picture vanishes. In olden times this picture endured. What existed in earlier epochs of spiritual evolution as an astronomical description of the solar or planetary system and its relation to man, was something man felt within him, although he experienced it in a dream-like state. Today we look back upon those times of our ancestors with a certain arrogance, yet they were times when we really knew there was something within ourselves that had connection with Mars, Mercury, and so on. That was part of the inner consciousness of the human being. It disappeared however as man developed further. In primeval times he saw only the outer constellation, but felt within himself an inner constellation, an inner cosmic system. Not only did he perceive a cosmic system outside him; but in his own head, which today is merely the vehicle of the—shall I say—indefinite life of ideas, there within, shone the Sun, with the planets circling round. In his head man carried this cosmic picture, and it had an inner force which worked upon the rest of the organism and influenced what he received at birth, or rather at conception, from the Earth-forces; that too was influenced, so that the rest of man was also drawn into this adaptation to the planetary forces.

And now we can carry the thought a little further. Man is born into this world, and as a heritage he receives—let us say—in the first place, the power to acquire his teeth, the milk-teeth. These are completed approximately in the circle of the first year. The second teeth need seven times as long; they are brought forth by the human organism itself. This points in the deepest sense to the fact that a certain rhythm which we bring with us at birth and which relates to the yearly revolution is slowed down by seven times in our earthly life. By seven times is the yearly revolution slowed down, and this is expressed in the fact that man has introduced into his division of time the relation of one to seven—day and week. The week is seven times as long as the day. This is an expression of how something takes its course in man which goes seven times slower than what he brings into physical existence at birth. Man will not understand the actual processes in the human being until he is able to see quite clearly and exactly how something within him which, as it were, was brought in from conditions outside the Earth, has to be slowed down by seven times during the earthly period.

The ancient Mystery teaching spoke much of these facts. If I were to express in our language what the old Mystery teachings—the ancient Hebrew Mystery teaching, for example—said from their atavistic knowledge of these matters, I should have to put it in this way.—The old Hebrew teachers explained to their pupils: Jehovah, who is the true Earth God, who added the Earth-organisation to that of Saturn, Sun and Moon—Jehovah has the tendency to slow down seven times what comes from the Moon-organisation. In relation to the course of the Earth something in the human being wants to go at accelerated speed. I might even say that the old Hebrew Mystery teacher said to his pupils: Lucifer runs seven times as fast as Jehovah. This points to two movements, two currents in human nature. These two currents also exist in extra-earthly nature—only there they are present in a somewhat different form. The thought however, which we here approach, is one not very easy to understand. We can perhaps gain insight into it by starting from social relationships, and then coming back to the cosmic-tellurian relationships.

I have often spoken in public lectures of something I should like to express here. When we contemplate the misery of the present time, we find the peculiar fact that the whole intelligence of modern humanity has developed in a way that is quite estranged from reality. It is a peculiar fact that, in practical life, we find more inefficient people than efficient. This is patent, for instance, as I have shown, in the fact that in the nineteenth century there was much discussion concerning the effect of the gold-standard upon international economic relations. You can go through the Parliamentary reports of that century, and try to form an idea from them of what people then thought would be the result of mono-metalism, the gold-standard. They regarded it as something which would make free trade possible unhindered by imposition of duty. Throughout the united economic domains of the world this was predicted wherever the gold-standard was extolled. What has actually come about? The imposition of duty. Little by little the actual relations have developed in such a way that everywhere duties have been imposed. That is the actual outcome.

Judging superficially one might say: Well, those people must have been very stupid! But they were not at all stupid; among those who had pledged themselves to the promotion of free trade by the gold-standard, were very able and clever persons, but they had no sense of reality, they reckoned only according to logic. They could not dive into the true relationships, any more than can our modern scientists comprehend the organisation of the heart, liver, spleen and so on. They make abstract theories and hold on to them; although they are materialists they remain rooted in the abstract. That is why such an occurrence is possible as that related in the following anecdote, which is founded on fact and is really very illuminating.

In a certain Academy of science there was a physiologist, a learned man, who developed a theory as to the varying length of time particular birds can fast. He made out a beautiful schedule. He had large cages of birds placed in his corridor and he starved those birds to ascertain how long they could live without food. He registered the times and obtained some lovely big numbers as a result. He elaborated these in a paper which he read at an Academical Meeting. Now in the same house there lived on the floor above another physiologist who did not apply the same methods. After the learned treatise had been read, he rose and said: ‘I must unfortunately object that these figures are not correct, for I had such pity on the poor birds that I fed them in passing.’ Now things do not always have to happen just like this! This is an anecdote. But it is founded on fact; and really much of the material underlying our exact science has been obtained in a like way. Someone in the background has ‘fed the birds’ instead of their having starved as long as the schedule showed. If one has a sense for reality, one cannot very well work with statistical methods of that kind; they do not hold out much promise. But this sense for reality is wholly lacking in modern humanity. Why is this so? It is due to a certain necessity of the evolution of humanity; and we can understand the matter as follows:

Picture it to yourselves in this way. The man of ancient times looked into this outer world. By means of all that he bore within him, he viewed the relationships and connections of the world outside. He formed also his theory of the stars from out of his own inner stellar system. He had ‘a sense for reality’ and he carried it in his senses. This sense for reality has disappeared in the course of man's evolution. It will have to be developed again, it will have to be developed to the same degree inwardly as it formerly was outwardly. We must really cultivate this sense for reality in our inner being by the training we receive in Spiritual Science; only then shall we be able to develop it in the world outside. If man were to keep straight on in the path in which he has been evolving with modern intellectuality, he would at length be quite unable to perceive what is going on around him, and then it could easily happen that while the cry is heard, ‘Free Trade is coming!’ in reality it will be Customs restrictions that are being established. This is continually happening in the various domains of so-called practical life. What happened then in a big thing happens today in small things everywhere. The ‘practical’ man predicts one thing, the opposite happens. It would be interesting to keep an account of what ‘practical’ men have predicted as ‘certain to happen’ during the last years of the war. Always the opposite came about, especially in the later years, precisely because there was no longer any sense for reality among the people. This sense however, can arise in no other way than by developing it first within. In future times no one will be considered a practical man or a thinker attuned to reality, who disdains to educate himself in his inner being through Spiritual Science, in a manner that cannot be done through the outer world today. We must carry into the world outside what we develop within. Hence the necessity for Spiritual Science; for people cannot arrive at the relation of the heart to the liver if they do not first acquire the method for it by means of a training in Spiritual Science. In earlier times people could say: the heart is related to the liver somewhat as the Sun to Mercury in the outer world; and man knew something of how this relationship of Sun to Mercury was drawn from the super-sensible world into the sense world. This is now no longer understood, nor can it ever be thoroughly understood if the foundation, the basic impulse for this comprehension, be not acquired from within. It is not through clairvoyance alone that man can make it his own. By clairvoyance the facts of Spiritual Science are investigated; but man acquires this sense when he enters with his whole thought and feeling into what has already been discovered by clairvoyant methods, and regulates his life accordingly. That is the essential point. What is of moment is to study the conclusions of Spiritual Science, not to satisfy a curiosity for clairvoyance. That must be emphasised again and again. For in the whole development of human culture, this application of the methods of Spiritual Science to outer life and to the knowledge of the great world, the world outside man, is of quite special importance.

When we consider what we thus have to look upon as the original head-organisation, when we consider it in the course of our life, we see how it gradually becomes permeated with all in our organisation that is adapted to the world outside. Thus we must learn to understand the world outside man from man's own organism, from the human limb-organisation; and there, only such things as I have already hinted at can help us. I have shown the contrast that exists between the waking and sleeping conditions of man. These are contrasting conditions, and when one condition is passing over into the other, that is to say, when we wake up and when we go to sleep, then we pass through a zero-point of our existence. The moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep must have something to do with one another.

This indicates that if we try to turn the day-course of man into a geometrical figure, we can employ neither a circle nor an ellipse; for if we were to ascribe to the sleep condition one part of the ellipse, the conditions of awaking and falling asleep should fall apart; and this they cannot do. We shall see how even in outer appearance they present a similarity; they cannot fall apart. Thus we cannot draw the geometrical figure which is to correspond with man's daily round in a circular form nor in an elliptic form. We can only draw it as a looped line, a lemniscate. When we say: Man falls asleep out of the waking condition into the sleep condition, then with the lemniscate it is possible to show him coming out of sleep again through the same condition; and we have a curve, a line which truly corresponds to the daily course of human life. There is no other line for the daily course of life than the lemniscate, for no other line would lead the awaking through the same point as the falling asleep.

There is more than this. If we give attention to human evolution in childhood especially, we have to say: we wake up virtually the same as we went to sleep. We wake up the same in respect of the principal alternating conditions of

waking and sleeping. But if we rightly observe life, we cannot exclude the sleeping condition from human life as a whole. We instruct our children during the day. Out of all we bring to the child, much of it is not his at once, but becomes so only the next day, after the Ego and astral body have passed through the night-condition; only then does the child duly receive what we have given him by day. We must always have this in mind and regulate our teaching and education accordingly. Thus in regard to the alternating condition of day and night, we can say: we sleep, and on awaking come to the same place where we fell asleep; but in regard to human evolution, we shall have to say: we press forwards a little. We progress in another direction.

Hence we may not draw the line quite as a lemniscate; but in such a way that we come out a little further on, and so attain a progressive lemniscate. (A).

Thus when we observe the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, and continue the evolution, we obtain a spiral. This spiral is ultimately connected with our evolution, and our evolution again is connected with the whole cosmic system. Therefore we must seek this same line as the basis of the movements of the Universe. If, instead of abstract geometry, man had applied concrete geometry to celestial space, the concrete geometry that proceeds from a study of the whole man, he would have arrived at something different. For in the ancient wisdom one had this line (A). And one did not speak of Mars as moving along any other kind of line than this one. Gradually it was all forgotten. Man calculated instead of knowing. What was the result? It was a line which goes forward like this (B). But in that line one can get no further.

So man took this line and set circles upon it (C) and acquired the epicycloid theory.

The Ptolemaic theory is the last remnant of the old primeval wisdom. On its foundation Copernicus made a further simplification, and modern astronomy still speculates on that today—but in such a way that it much prefers to consider ellipses and circles than that inwardly curving line which presents a continuous spiral. Then people wonder that the observations do not agree with the calculations, and that fresh corrections have to be made continually.

Reflect how the whole theory of Relativity has been constructed on an error in Mercury's time of rotation. Only, the correction was attempted in a different way than would have been the case if one had gone back to Man's relation to the whole Cosmos. Of this more in the next lecture.

When it is a question of understanding the Event of Golgotha in the sense of the Christmas Mystery we may look in two directions: Towards the starry heavens with all their secrets on the one side and towards the inner being of man with all its secrets on the other. During these lectures I have spoken of how the Magi from the East recognised, from the starry heavens, the Coming of Christ Jesus upon the earth and of how from the visions arising out of man's inner being the simple shepherds in the field received the proclamation of this Saviour of mankind. And once again today we will turn our attention to these two directions whence, in reality, all knowledge comes to man—whence the highest knowledge of all, the knowledge of the very meaning of the earth, had to come.

In the epochs which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha the attitude of the human soul to the universe and to itself was quite different from what it was after the Mystery of Golgotha. This fact, of course, is not very vividly apparent to an external study of history because the ancient form of knowledge belongs to ages lying long, long before, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha. By the time the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, this form of knowledge had already become feebler, and truth to tell it was only individual, very outstanding men like the three Magi from the East who possessed such far-reaching knowledge as was then manifest. And on the other side it was only possible for men particularly sensitive to inner things like the shepherds—men of the people—to bring such visions out of sleep as these shepherds brought. But in both the Magi and the shepherds it was a legacy of that ancient knowledge through which men had once been related to the universe. Even in our time we could not say, especially not in regard to the actual present, that men give very clear expression to that form of knowledge which has entered into the evolution of humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. Speaking generally, however, what we are going to speak about this evening, holds good. The pre-Christian attitude to the starry heavens was such that men did not regard the stars in the prosaic, abstract way that is current nowadays. The fact that these men of olden times spoke of the stars as if they were living Beings was not due, as an imperfect science believes, to mere fantasy, but to a spiritual, although instinctive, atavistic perception of the starry heavens. Looking at the starry heavens in olden times men did not merely see points or surfaces of light but something spiritual, something that made them able to describe the constellations as they did, for to them the several planets of our system were ensouled by living beings. Men beheld the spiritual in the wide heaven of the stars. They saw the starry heavens as well as the mineral and plant kingdoms in their spiritual reality. It was with one and the same faculty of knowledge that men of old beheld these three regions of existence. They spoke of the stars as beings endowed with soul and also of the minerals and the plants as beings endowed with soul.

We must not think that the faculties of knowledge in olden times were similar to ours. A little while ago I spoke to you about a stage of knowledge which, although it was not so very different from our own, is nevertheless difficult for many people today to picture. I said that the Greeks, in the earliest period of their culture, did not see the colour blue, that the heavens were not blue to them. They perceived the colours that lie more towards the active side, towards the side of red-yellow. Nor did they paint in the shades of blue known to us. Blue came only later into the range of human perception.

Think of all shades of blue being absent from the world, and therefore of green looking different from what it does today, and you will realise that the world around the Greek did not appear to him as it appears to humanity today. For the men of much earlier times the surrounding world differed still more. And then from the world seen by men of old, the spiritual withdrew—withdrew from the worlds of stars, of minerals, of plants. The vivid active colours became duller and out of the depths there appeared what is experienced as blue. As the faculty for the perception of blue, of the darker colours arose, what the men of old experienced in the astrology which spoke to them in a living language, active and full of colour, changed into the grey, colourless geometry and mechanics which, drawing it as we do from our inner being, no longer enables us to read from the environment the secrets of the starry worlds. The ancient astrology was transformed into the world we picture today in the sense of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, into the world of celestial mechanics, of mathematics.

That is the one side. The other side is that in those olden times men possessed a deep, inner faculty for perceiving what was streaming around them out of the earth—the fluids of the earth. The fluids of the earth, the qualities of earth announced themselves as the counterpart of the starry heavens to certain inner faculties of perception. Man in olden times was highly sensitive to the characteristics of the climate of his country, of the soil on which he lived. A chalk or granite soil was experienced as different radiations from the Earth. But this was not a dim feeling or experience; it arose like colours or clouds inwardly felt, inwardly experienced. Thus man experienced the earth's depths; thus, too, the soul in his fellow-man and the life of animals. The experiences were more living, more intense. It was with a faculty of external knowledge that man gazed into the spirituality of the starry heavens, into the spirituality of the minerals and plants, with his atavistic, instinctive clairvoyance; and it was with instinctive inner vision that he perceived what was living spiritually in the earth's depths. He spoke not merely of chalk soil but he experienced specific elemental beings: one kind from chalk soil, other kinds from granite or gneiss. He felt what was living in other human beings as an aura but an aura bestowed upon man from the earth; particularly did he feel the animals with their aura as beings of the earth. It was as though the ground, soil and the inner warmth of the earth continued on in the whole animal world. When a man of old saw the butterflies over the plants he saw them drawing along with them what was rising from the earth; as in an auric cloud he saw animal life flowing over the earth.

All this gradually withdrew and the prosaic world remained for man's faculty of perception which now became external He began now to behold the world around him as we behold it, in its colours and so forth—without perceiving the spiritual. And what man had once seen through faculties of inner perception was transformed into our modern knowledge of nature; what he had seen spiritually through faculties of external knowledge was transformed into our modern mathematics and mechanics.

Thus out of the qualities which the simple shepherds in the field brought to their inner vision we have developed the modern view of nature; and out of what the Magi from the East brought to their faculty of perceiving the Star, we have developed our dry mathematics and mechanics. The faculties of outer and inner perception were still so rich in individual men at that time that the mystery of the birth of Jesus could announce itself from these two sides.

What really underlay this faculty of perception? During the period between death and a new birth, during the time through which we lived before entering through birth into earthly existence we have literally passed through the cosmic expanses. Our individuality was not then bound to the space enclosed by the skin; our existence was spread over cosmic expanses. And the faculty of magical vision still possessed by the wise men from the East was essentially a faculty which entered strongly into the human being from the period between death and birth—that is to say, it was a ‘pre-natal’ faculty. What the soul lived through before birth within the world of stars awakened to become a special faculty in those who were pupils of the Magi. And when the pupils of the Magi developed this particular faculty they were able to say: “Before I came down to this earth I had definite experiences with Mercury, with Sun, with Moon, with Saturn, with Jupiter.” And this cosmic memory enabled them to behold the spiritual in the whole external world as well, to see the destiny of man on earth. They saw it out of their memory of existence before birth within the world of stars.

The faculties by means of which the earth's depths, the mysteries of the souls of men and of the nature of the animals were perceived, were faculties which at first developed in germinal form in the human being and which manifested for the first time after death—but they were youthful faculties, potentially germinal. Although it is after death that these faculties become particularly creative, in earthly life they arise as potentially germinal forces during the first period of earthly life, in the child. The forces of growth in the child which bud and sprout forth from the spiritual, these forces of the child withdraw in later life from the human being. They withdraw and we are then filled more with those forces which were there before birth. But after death these child forces appear again. It was only specially gifted men who retained them on into old age. I have already said here that such faculties of genius as we have in the later years of life are due to the fact that we have remained more childlike than those who do not have these faculties or have them in a lesser degree. The maintenance of childlike faculties on into later life equips us with inventive faculties and the like. The more we can retain childlike faculties in mature years, the more creative we are. But these creative forces appear again more particularly after death.

Among individual peoples of pre-Christian times it had been possible for the after-death faculties to be fructified by those that had remained from before birth. Because such men allowed the kind of knowledge possessed by the Magi from the East to withdraw and the after-death knowledge to come more to the fore, and because the pre-birth faculties were able to fructify the after-death faculties, the gift of prophecy developed in these men, the gift of foretelling the future prophetically with the after-death faculties. Those whom we call the Jewish Prophets were men in whom the after-death faculties were particularly developed; but these faculties did not remain merely in the instinctive life as in the simple shepherds in the field to whom the annunciation was made, they were penetrated by those other faculties which had developed to greater intensity among such people as the Magi from the East, and which led to special knowledge relating to the secrets of the stars and the happenings in the heavens.

 Starry heavens ................................ 

 Earth's depths

 Mineral world ................................. 

 Human soul

 Plant world ................................... 

 Animal life

 Pre-birth faculties ........................... 

 After-death faculties

It will now be clear to you that the proclamation to the shepherds in the field and the knowledge of the Magi from the East were necessarily in agreement. The knowledge possessed by the Magi from the East was such that they were able to behold deep secrets of the starry heavens. Out of those worlds in which man lives between death and a new birth, out of those worlds whence came the faculties enabling them to penetrate the starry heavens, out of an enhancement of this knowledge this vision came to them: From that world which does not primarily belong to life between birth and death but to the life between death and a new birth—from that world a Being, the Christ, is coming down to the earth. The approach of Christ was revealed to the Magi out of their knowledge of the stars.

And what was the revelation to the shepherds in the field whose special faculty was to experience the Earth's depths?—The Earth became something different when the Christ was drawing near. The Earth felt this approach of Christ, bore in herself new forces because of Christ's approach. The pure-hearted shepherds in the field felt, from out of the depths, what the Earth was reflecting, the way in which the Earth was reacting to the approach of Christ. Thus the cosmic expanses proclaimed to the Magi from the East the same as the earth's depths proclaimed to the shepherds.

This happened at a time when remains of the old knowledge were still in existence. We are concerned here with men who were exceptional, even in those days, with men like the three. Magi from the East and these particular shepherds in the field. Both had retained, each in their own way, what had more or less disappeared from humanity in general. This was the reason why the Mystery of Golgotha, when its time was drawing near, could be proclaimed to them as it was.

In studying these things we must add to the ordinary, historical view, the knowledge that comes from Spiritual Science. We must try, as it were, to fathom the expanses of space and the depths of the life of the soul. And if we fathom the expanses of space in the right way we begin to understand how the wise men from the East experienced the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we try to plumb the depths of the life of soul we begin to understand how the shepherds received the tidings of what was coming so near to the earth that the earth herself became aware of the approach of these forces. The faculties connected with existence before birth, which were manifested in the Magi, correspond more to an intellectual element—different, of course, in those times from what it is today; they correspond more to knowledge. What worked in the shepherds corresponds more to will, and it is the will that represents the forces of growth in the universe. The shepherds were united in their will with the Christ Being Who was approaching the earth. We feel, too, how the stories of the wise men from the East—although they are so inadequately recorded in the modern Bible—we feel how they express the kind of knowledge with which the wise men approached the Mystery of Golgotha; it came from their consciousness to the external universe. We feel that the story of the proclamation to the shepherds points to the will, to the heart, to the life of inner emotion. “Revelation of the God from the heavens and Peace to those men on Earth who are of good will.” We feel the streaming of the will in the proclamation to the shepherds. The light-filled knowledge possessed by the Magi is of a quite different character.

We realise the profundity and significance of the knowledge in the Magi and the proclamation to the shepherds as narrated in the New Testament when we try to fathom the nature of human knowledge and of human will—faculties connected with existence before birth and after death.

Starry heavens		Earth's depths
Mineral world		Human soul
Plant world		Animal life
Pre-birth		After-death
faculties		faculties
Intellect		Will

I have said that what was a world of spirit to the men of old—the stars, the minerals, the plants—I have said that this has become for us the tapestry of the sense-world; what was formerly inner knowledge has drawn to the surface. If we picture to ourselves the knowledge in the shepherds as being inward and what manifested in the Magi as being outward, it was this outward external knowledge in the Magi which reached out into space and there perceived the spirit The inner life leads to perception of the earth's depths.

The inner kind of knowledge manifested in the shepherds (red in diagram) grows, during the further evolution of humanity, more and more outwards and becomes the external perception of today, becomes what we call empirical perception. What gave the Magi their knowledge of the world of stars draws inwards, more backwards towards the brain and becomes our mathematical, mechanistic world (green in diagram). A crossing took place; what was inner knowledge, pictorial, naive, instinctive imagination in pre-Christian times becomes our external knowledge, perception through the senses. What was once external knowledge encompassing the world of stars draws inwards and becomes the dry, geometrical-mathematical, mechanistic world which we now draw forth from within us.

Through inner enlightenment man of today experiences a mathematical, mechanistic world. It is only outstanding persons like Novalis who were able to feel and give expression to the poetry and deep imagination of this inner, mathematical world. This world of which Novalis sings the praises in such beautiful language is, for the ordinary man of today, the dry world of triangles and quadrangles, of squares and—sums and differences. The ordinary human being is prosaic enough to feel this world to be barren, dry; he has no love for it. Novalis, who was an outstanding person, sings its praises because there was still alive in him an echo of what this world was before it had drawn inwards. In those times it was the world out of which the Jupiter Spirit, the Saturn Spirit, the Spirit of Aries, of Taurus, of Gemini was perceived. It was the ancient light-filled world of stars which has withdrawn and in the first stage of its withdrawal becomes the world which seems to us to be dry, mathematical, mechanistic.

The faculty that intensified in a different form in the shepherds in the field to a perception of the voice of the Angel in the heights has become dry, barren and feeble in us—it has become our perception of the external world of sense; with it today we perceive minerals and plants, whereas with the old faculty, although it was hardly articulate, men perceived the earth's depths or the world of men and animals.

What today has faded into the mathematical-mechanistic universe, what was once astrology, contained such a power that the Christ was revealed to the Magi as a Being of the Heavens. What today is our ordinary knowledge through the senses, with which we see nothing but the green surface of grass, the brown skins of animals and the like—to this kind of knowledge when it was still inward, when it had not yet drawn outwards to the eyes, to the skin, there was revealed to the shepherds in the field the deep influence on the earth, the power with which the Christ would work in the earth, what the Christ was to be for the earth.

We, my dear friends, must find the way whereby the inner faculty that is now dry mathematics may intensify pictorially to Imagination. We must learn to grasp the Imagination given us by Initiation Science. What is contained in these Imaginations? They are in truth a continuation of the faculty with which the Magi from the East recognised the approach of Christ. The Imaginations are the budding, the offspring of what the men of old saw in the starry constellations, the star-imaginations, the mineral imaginations, in gold, silver, copper. The men of old perceived in Imaginations, and their offspring are the mathematical faculties of today. The mathematical faculties of today will become those faculties which understand the Imaginations. Thus by the development of the inner faculties men will have to seek for the understanding of the Christ Being.

But external perception must also be deepened, become more profound. External perception has itself descended from what was once the life of inner experiences, of instinct in man. The power which among the shepherds in the field was still inward, in their hearts, is today only in eyes and ears; it has shifted entirely to the external part of man and therefore perceives only the outer tapestry of the sense-world. This power must go still further outwards. To this end man must be able to leave his body and attain Inspiration. This Inspiration—a faculty of perception which can be attained today—will then, out of Initiation Science, be able to give the same as was given in the proclamation to the naive, inner knowledge of the shepherds in the field.

Astrology as it was to the Magi, heart-vision as it was in the shepherds. With the knowledge that comes from Initiation Science through Imagination and Inspiration modern man will rise to the spiritual realisation to the living Christ. Men must learn to understand how Isis, the living, divine Sophia, had to disappear when the time came for the development which has driven astrology into mathematics, into geometry, into the science of mechanics. But it will also be understood that when living Imagination resurrects from mathematics, phoronomy and geometry, this means the finding of Isis, of the new Isis, of the divine Sophia whom man must find if the Christ Power that is his since the Mystery of Golgotha is to become alive, completely alive, that is to say, filled with light within him.

We are standing before this very point of time, my dear friends. The outer earth will not provide man with those things which he has become accustomed to desire in modern times. The conflicts called into being by the terrible catastrophes of recent years have already changed a large part of the earth into a field where culture lies in ruins. Further conflicts will follow. Men are preparing for the next great world war. Culture will be wrecked in more ways. There will be nothing gained directly from what seems to modern humanity to be of most value for knowledge and the will External earth life, insofar as it is a product of earlier times, will pass away—and it is an entirely vain hope to believe that the old habits of thought and will can continue. What must arise is a new kind of knowledge, a new kind of willing in all domains. We must familiarise ourselves with the thought of the vanishing of a civilisation; but we must look into the human heart, into the spirit dwelling in man; we must have faith in the heart and the spirit of man in order that through all we are able to do within the wreckage of the old civilisation, new forms may arise, forms that are truly new.

Nor will these forms arise if we do not bear in mind with all seriousness what it is that must happen for the sake of humanity. Read in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and you will find it said that a man when he desires to attain higher knowledge must understand what is there called the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. It is said that this meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold means that willing, feeling, thinking separate in a certain way, that a trinity must arise out of the chaotic unity in man. The understanding that must come to the pupil of Spiritual Science through his knowledge of what the Guardian of the Threshold is, must come to the whole of modern mankind in regard to the course of civilisation. In inner experience, though not in outer consciousness, humanity is passing through the region that can also be called a region of the Guardian of the Threshold.

It is so indeed, my dear friends; modern humanity is passing over a threshold at which stands a Guardian, a Guardian full of meaning, and grave. And this grave Guardian speaks: “Cling not to what has come as a transplant from olden times; look into your hearts, into your souls, that you may be capable of creating new forms. You can only create these new forms when you have faith that the powers of knowledge and of will for this spiritual creation can come out of the spiritual world.” What is an event of great intensity for the individual who enters the worlds of higher knowledge, proceeds unconsciously in present-day mankind as a whole. And those who have linked themselves together as the anthroposophical community must realise that it is one of the most needed of all things in our days to bring men to understand this passing through the region which is a threshold.

Just as man, the knower, must realise that his thinking, feeling and willing separate in a certain sense and must be held together in a higher way, so it must be made intelligible to modern humanity that the spiritual life, the life of rights, and the economic life must separate from one another and a higher form of union created than the State as it has been up to now. No programmes, ideas, ideologies can bring individuals to recognise the necessity of this threefoldness of the social organism. It is only profound knowledge of the onward development of mankind that reveals this development to have reached a threshold where a grave Guardian stands. This Guardian demands of an individual who is advancing to higher knowledge: Submit to the separation in thinking, feeling and willing. He demands of humanity as a whole: Separate what has up to now been interwoven in a chaotic unity in the State idol; separate this into a Spiritual Life, an Equity State, and an Economic State ... otherwise there is no progress possible for humanity, and the old chaos will burst asunder. If this happens it will not take the form that is necessary to humanity but an ahrimanic or luciferic form. It is only through spiritual-scientific knowledge of the passing of the threshold in our present day that can give the Christ-form to this chaos.

This, my dear friends, is something that we must say to ourselves at the time of Christmas too, if we rightly understand Anthroposophy. The little child in the crib must be the child representing the spiritual development towards man's future. Just as the shepherds in the field and the Magi from the East went after the proclamation to see how that which was to bring humanity forward appeared as a little child, so must modern man make his way to Initiation Science in order to perceive, in the form of a little child, what must be done for the future by the Threefold Social Organism based on Spiritual Science. If the old form of the state is not made threefold it will have to burst—and burst in such a way that it would develop on the one side a wholly chaotic spiritual life, completely ahrimanic and luciferic in character, and on the other side an economic life again luciferic-ahrimanic in character. And both the one and the other would drag the state in rags after them. In the Orient there will take place the development more of ahrimanic-luciferic spiritual states; in the West there will be the development more of ahrimanic-luciferic economic life—if man does not realise through the permeation of his being by Christ how he can avoid this, how out of his knowledge and out of his will he can proceed to bring about the ‘threefolding’ of what is striving to separate.

This will be human knowledge permeated by Christ; it will be human willing permeated by Christ. And it will express itself in no other way than that the idol of the unitary state will become threefold. And those who stand properly in the spiritual life will recognise, as did the shepherds in the field, what it is that the earth experiences through the Christ. And those who stand rightly within the economic life, within the economic associations will unfold, in the true sense, a will that brings a Christ-filled social order.

Yesterday we discussed the way the inner and outer human form is created out of the universe. We also found that this was something people knew instinctively in earlier times. It is important, however, to note the following. In one of my drawings I showed that the whole zodiac can be seen to lie in the human form, but this had to be the form of the human embryo. If we draw this we have literally recreated the zodiac within the human form.

During life on earth between birth and death, human beings tear themselves away from this embryonic form. They certainly have their form given by the universe during the embryonic period, but they “stretch” during their time on earth, lifting the head up and out of the circle that reflects the zodiac. They then have the form given to them as embryos, but no longer allow it to relate to the fixed stars, and this means that human beings become able to take into the form of the head what they have brought with them from their previous life on earth.

Animals keep their backbones horizontal, and essentially continue much more in the position given by the zodiac, with the head merely attached to the front part of the backbone. This means that animals are not able to use the head to take in anything from a previous life. The situation is such that if we consider the human form in one respect, we would have to say that the human form based entirely on the zodiac would be like this (embryo). And if human beings continued to have this form throughout life, the form of the human head would not be able to take in the essential nature of a person which comes from the previous incarnation. By lifting the head out of that position, it becomes possible for the form to hold and protect the element that comes from the previous life.

Human beings also lift the other side out of the embryonic form, which is the side that takes its orientation from the last four signs of the zodiac, from Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes. As we saw yesterday, this relates to life and conditions of life in the outside world—to hunting, animal breeding, agriculture and trade, or shipping. Human beings follow these pursuits out of will impulses, out of the system of limbs which they have lifted out of its orientation on the zodiac. The result is that everything people do holds the potential, or seed, for future lives on earth. Animals retain their orientation on the zodiac and are therefore unable to take in anything from a previous life on earth or to look towards any future life on earth.

Out of the profound wisdom people had as instinctive knowledge in the past they called the circle of constellations “the zodiac”.¹³ Today we use not instinct but clear thinking to discover the same truths, and we consider the original wisdom human beings once possessed with growing respect.

So much, then, about the human form. Into this form is poured life, and we find this life localized in the human ether body just as we find form localized in the human physical body. It is quite right to consider the human physical body with regard to its form, for that is the essence of it. The ether body essentially represents life, and this is what we want to consider today. Yesterday we saw that the human form is really made up of twelve different forms and we made the attempt to study those forms. The human form as a whole, in its inner and outer aspects, arises from twelve individual forms.

Human life also has a number of levels, and in the first place these may be considered as follows.

The first, and to our everyday thinking this is not yet a level of life, is the life of the senses. Although they are part of the whole human being, the senses are so much at the periphery that we tend to forget that the life of the senses is the outermost layer of our life.

Moving inwards from the periphery—now thinking only in terms of life—we come to the life of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the life of the senses just as the nerves go inwards from the sense organs.

The life of the nerves in turn is in touch with another level that develops in the living human being. I have shown some aspects of it on earlier occasions, when I drew your attention to the way we draw breath. We take in air and the air we inhale creates a kind of inner rhythm which continues through the spinal canal and on into the brain. There the life of the nerves comes in contact with the life of our breathing, which is the next level as we move inwards.

The life of breathing in turn connects with another level of life. The breath, we may say, continually renews the blood. Thus the breathing rhythm is connected with the blood rhythm and we can move on from the life of our breathing to the life that exists in the rhythm of the circulation.

The circulation, however, is also connected with the whole of metabolism; it takes in metabolism, and we thus come to the next level, the life of metabolism.

Metabolism stimulates the movements we make in the world around us. It is thanks to our metabolism that we are actually able to move around. The nature of the human—and also the animal—metabolism is such that the soul is able to use the metabolic processes to produce movements. In the life of movement we are again becoming part of the outside world, for anything we achieve at that level of life connects us with the outside world.

There is one more level of life: the life of reproduction. In movement we continually use ourselves up, and internal “reproduction” has to take place for the very reason that we are in motion. Instead of “life of movement”, we may thus also put “internal reproduction, or regeneration”, providing we remain inside the human skin. And when this reproduction occurs independently, it becomes life of reproduction in the true sense.

1. Life of the senses
2. Life of the nerves
3. Life of breathing
4. Life of circulation
5. Life of metabolism
6. Life of movement
7. Life of reproduction

Yesterday we had twelve elements of form, today we have evolved seven levels of life, and it is true to say that in terms of the ether body, human beings live differently on each of these seven levels. If we are to take these things seriously, we cannot speak of a single kind of life that is all at the same level.

In the first place, then, our ether body may be said to live at the level of the senses, and this is a form of life that barely feels like life to us. Through it, we are involved in the outside world. If we take the eye, for example, we say the ether body is alive in the eye and in a manner of speaking enlivens it. It does however come in touch with a form of matter that is close to death in the eye, which is a living organ only in so far as the ether body enters into it. Apart from the ether body, the eye is really a physical apparatus.

Individual sense organs are always both a physical apparatus and penetrated by the ether body, each in its own particular way. Generally speaking, however, our sense organs are dead organs, except that the ether body enters into them. It would therefore be reasonable to say that the life of the senses is life in the process of dying.

The life of the nerves takes the experiences gained through the senses and makes them into something that can preserve the life of the senses. All lingering effects are due to the life of the nerves, therefore—lingering sounds, for example, and in the case of the eye, after-images. The life of the nerves, then, is a kind of resting life, or a life that holds and keeps.

The life of breathing gives image quality to the fleeting life of the senses that tends to preserve itself. We are able to have images of the outside world because the breathing rhythm is in touch with the currents that pass through the nerves. Ideas and abstract thoughts are still entirely bound to the life of the nerves, but anything to do with images is connected with the life of breathing. When we breathe we have creative life in us, a life we may call the image-creating life. This lives in the human form and therefore also takes part in the human form.

We have seen that the human form arises out of the zodiac, and because the creative life that comes with our breathing lives in the human form, it also has part in the whole outer form that has been created out of the starry heavens.

This form is therefore also part of the inner aspect of the human being. And it is thanks to our breathing that we have not only the contents of our conscious mind but also images of all our internal organs, images based on the outer form. Our internal organs therefore arise at first in a roundabout way—as images created in the breathing process. They do not yet have substance at this point. The breath creates an image of the internal human being. With our breathing we are in the outside world, moving within the zodiac with the earth, and we are continually inhaling the images of our internal organization.

These images are inhaled from life outside us. This, then is our creative life. The images we inhale are spread through the whole organism by the life of circulation. This and the life of breathing take human beings to the point where they are inwardly image of the world. Thus we may say:

The life of circulation is in touch with the life of metabolism, with the result that the images are given physical substance and physical organs develop on the fifth level of life. Matter infiltrates the images; it suffuses or tinges them. Thus the upper human being creates images in the life of breathing and these images are made tangible reality by the matter that infiltrates and tinges them.

Energy then enters into the physical organs from the life of movement. We may put it like this: We have physical organs and here we have life that generates power in the organs. The life of reproduction, finally, renews itself.

You can also see how the threefold human being arises: nerves and senses, circulation and rhythm, and metabolism and limbs, or metabolism and movement. Reproduction, finally, gives rise to a new human being.

The attributes I have added on the right (Fig. 14) give you an idea of the differences between the levels of life. Living in the senses, our ether body is in a kind of life that is dying. In the life of the nerves, the currents in the nerves, it is in a life that holds and keeps. The breathing life is where our ether body truly becomes a body of creative powers that designs images. The life of circulation ensures that those images become our whole internal organization. Physical substance is then brought in through the life of metabolism. The ether body enters into metabolism and suffuses the actual body of creative powers with matter. Subjective human energy is added through the life of the limbs, and so on.

The instinctive wisdom of old gave people understanding of this, too, and they knew, therefore, that human beings take in the life that is outside and develop it further inside them. That is more or less how the sages of old would see it. They would say: Let us take the outermost layer of the universe that is around the earth, then the next, and the next. The outermost layer is closest to the fixed stars in the sky, to the universe to which we owe the human form. Human life, they would say, does not come from the fixed stars, however, but from the planets in the sky. (Fig. 15).

They would first of all speak of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the sun. If we consider the true nature of the sun—this is something I have said many times before—it differs from the other planets in so far as it presents itself as a source of light. This is also why in popular astronomy it is called a fixed star. The other planets do not appear as light sources but as images. This is why it is said in popular astronomy that their light is borrowed light, for they reflect the light of the sun. Just consider the difference between the sun, which lets its own essential nature emerge with the light, and the other heavenly bodies, the planets, which merely present an image of their outer nature, or of whatever they have on the surface, making this visible by reflecting the light of the sun. It is a major difference. And being the source of light, the sun is also the source of life.

It is also the source of something else. At all times, even when people had only instinctive knowledge, it was said that the sun was threefold, the source of light, life and love. This trinity is to be found in the sun.

No need to go against the Copernican system today, you can keep it and still understand what the ancients meant with their system, based on instinctive perception of the cosmos. Let us assume that, in Copernican terms, we have the sun at the centre—or at a focal point, if you like, but we can ignore that for the moment. Mercury, Venus, earth and Mars—we can ignore the minor planets for present purposes—Jupiter and Saturn are in orbit around the sun. But now we’ll look at it like this:

Let us say, and this is certainly also possible, that we have Saturn, Jupiter and Mars here, and then come sun, Mercury, Venus and earth, with the moon, however, which we’ll position here.

It is not essential, of course, to take this particular position, I am merely presenting it to show you that even with the Copernican system it is possible to get the sequence that was thought to be the right one in ancient times: moon, Venus, Mercury, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. All we need is for the relative positions to be such that the earth is to one side of the sun and the outer planets are somewhere on the other side. It is not necessary to have this kind of opposition or conjunction—which may happen in alternation—but the sequence is certainly feasible. And it is the sequence that was in people’s minds out of the old instinctive wisdom. This sequence seemed important to them.

The ancients would say: Let us think of the human beings here on earth. They are exposed to the universe. They experience the rays of the sun as their source of light, life and love. These three enter into them from the sun. Yet human beings are also exposed to the image quality of Saturn. If they were only exposed to the life of the sun as they developed on earth they would not be able to develop the life of the senses. Thus the eyes would not become a distinct physical apparatus but would be just like any other part of the human body—muscular organs, or vessels, or the like. Continuously exposed to the sun, human beings would not be able to develop eyes, nor any other senses. They are able to do develop them because Saturn, the outermost planet, reduces the influence of the sun. Saturn dries the vessel out, as it were, and this, roughly speaking, produces the physical apparatus. The ancients had as instinctive knowledge what we are discovering again today: The life of the senses develops under the influence of Saturn.

Human beings also would not be able to develop the life of the nerves if they were continuously exposed to the sun. Thanks to the influence of Jupiter, the life of the nerves dries up and does not become as vital as the muscles and similar organs. The ancients would say: The life of the nerves is stimulated by Jupiter.

Saturn orbits the sun in about 30 years. During their life on earth, human beings have it happen about once that Saturn is blocked out by the sun, in a way. If someone has the good fortune to have Saturn blocked out very strongly by the sun, a powerful sun life dawns in their life of the senses. We might say that their eyes or other senses are stimulated—the eyes are in fact least affected, but they make the best example, being so obvious. So if once during life on earth a person is in the position where Saturn does not influence the senses, that person may discover that a specific cosmic influence comes in through the senses. The individual is given a stimulus and is strengthened in the sphere of the senses.

People try to explain these things in all kinds of ways. There is a considerable literature on the subject in America. William James, for instance, wrote of all kinds of “awakenings” that happened in people’s lives.¹⁴ If you read his books and those of his followers you’ll find that a particular phenomenon occurs when someone receives a special stimulus at some point in time. These people have no idea as to the cause; they do not know that this is due to the position relative to Saturn or Jupiter. When the life of Saturn is blocked out, the life of the senses receives a special stimulus; when the life of Jupiter is blocked out, which happens all the more easily because Jupiter takes only 12 years to orbit, the life of the nerves is stimulated.

All these things are said to be in the subconscious, which is an absolute sludge tank today for people like William James and all psychoanalysts. This subconscious of theirs is a negative term, a waste bin for all the things that cannot be explained. Everything has to go in there; there you’ll find the hidden “provinces” of the soul that will react occasionally, and so on. It would certainly be highly desirable to take a good look at those pragmatic and psychoanalytical ideas one of these days.

The third planet, Mars, reduces heaving life to the point where breathing becomes possible. Mars, too, may be blocked out by the sun, and the life of breathing then receives a special stimulus. Mars orbits quite rapidly, taking about two years, and everybody therefore gets certain stimuli in the breathing life, the life of images. These stimuli are not always of the first quality, but people become poets or composers, or something like that, through receiving this stimulus in their breathing life. It does not go deep enough to make people like William James want to investigate and speculate; it seems quite clear to them. People with the old, instinctive wisdom thus felt that Mars stimulated the breathing life.

The life of the sun arouses light in the outside world, love in our hearts, and life in our dealings with the outside world. The location for this is midway between the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as the ancients also knew. Between those two lives lies the heart, which does not act as a motor but reflects the interplay between circulation and breathing.

Next we come to metabolism. People who had the old wisdom looked at Mercury not to see how far the sun is able to block it out, the way it does with the other planets, but how far Mercury itself blocks out the sun for the earth. Its position between sun and earth was considered to be the most important aspect, just as in the case of Jupiter the position beyond the sun was considered most important. When Mercury blocks out the sun, the life of the sun is reduced. As the life of the sun is weakened, this weakened life stirs inside human beings. If it were not reduced, people would immediately spit out any food or drink they had taken; they would not tolerate anything that comes from the outside world. They would then get out of the habit of eating, finding it too much of a bore. That is how powerful the life of the sun is in us. If we had only the life of the heart, or the sun, we would not be able to digest anything and immediately spit, or indeed vomit, everything out again. We owe the development of our metabolism to the fact that the life of Mercury weakens the life of the sun a little in this respect. The ancients therefore thought that the Mercury principle came between the life of circulation and the life of metabolism. The Mercury principle thus pushes physical matter through the human organism and into its individual organs.

Energy comes in through the life of movement which depends on Venus life, just as the life of metabolism depends on Mercury life. The ancients therefore ascribed to Venus the power that streams through the human being, this inner self renewal, the feeling that there is another human being, an energy human being, inside one.

The life of the moon, which is close to the life of the earth, does more than reduce the life of the sun and thus enable human beings to digest physical matter and process energies. The background to reproduction is something I have spoken of before: a space is created, with matter pushed back at the organic level, as it were. The embryo is able to develop because matter is pushed aside and in energy terms the embryo is organized from the cosmos. In this respect the life of reproduction depends on the moon life.

Yesterday I spoke of the relationship of the human form in its twelve aspects relating to the fixed stars. Today I have tried to show you how the new science of anthroposophy is in agreement with the instinctive wisdom of old in saying that the different levels of human life are connected with the life of the planets in the cosmos. Depending on the position of the earth in relation to the different members of the planetary system and the sun at its centre, life is modified in many different ways. Life is made to die, it is preserved and made creative in the upper human being. It is reduced in the lower human being so that physical matter and energies can be taken up from the earth. Human beings simply take the earth’s power of repulsion, make it their own and in this way develop the power that is in their own organs, and so on.

We see, then, that human life, too, comes from the cosmos. Looking up to the fixed stars, we see the zodiac as representing the principles that give rise to the human form. Observing the movements of the planets, we find the explanation for the different levels of human life. We look to Saturn for the life of the senses, to Jupiter for the life of the nerves, to Mars for the life of breathing, which is active in images.

Let us take a special look at this life of breathing. I told you that the images are received from the cosmos: form. The movements experienced in the zodiac stream inwards as images of our internal organs. Between birth and death, human beings are on earth, however, and the lower acts into the upper, with the result that everything has its polar opposite. The images enter into us and become suffused with matter, otherwise we would have no internal organs. But there is also always a counter process. So we are able to say that when we breathe, the images are pushed inwards, the image of the kidney, for example.

Matter then fills this out (red); but the opposite also happens, this time in an upward direction, with the images thrown back, as it were, like an echo, but do not think of this as a once-only event. The organs are in existence, having been developed in the early stages of earth existence; but the counter action may go on all the time.—The role played by the soul element in this will be considered tomorrow.

Consider each on its own, therefore. You take in the images of your internal organs with the life process. Then comes the counter action, in which the echoes of those images rise up again, as does the zodiac, especially with the life of breathing in it. Well, just think of your ears, and there you have the counter process. These images are created and go out into the air—they are the vowels and consonants! The vowels come more from the planets, the consonants from the zodiac. The counter process to the images coming in is reflected in speech. Consonants and vowels are pushed into us, as it were, to be the foundation for our organs. Anything that is more by way of form inside us comes essentially from the zodiac, anything that is more by way of life comes essentially from the planets. If the counter action relates more to life, we produce vowels, if it relates more to form, we produce consonants. All this is to some extent connected with the life of breathing, and we can see that quite clearly in speech.

You see, it is not really a good idea to try and understand the human being by putting him on the dissecting table and investigating what lies inside the skin. The result of this is no better than if someone were to take a magnetic needle and ignore the fact that the earth itself is a large magnet, making one end point north and the other south. If anyone were to insist on producing a theory that the magnetic needle takes that position of its own accord, ignoring the fact that the forces of the earth give it that particular direction, it would be just like anatomists and physiologists trying to understand the human being on the basis of what is to be found inside the skin. You cannot understand the human being on the basis of what lies inside the skin. All the people who seek to explain speech and language on the basis of what lies inside the human being are also working at the level of that explanation for the function of a magnetic needle. The truth is that human beings take their form from the life of the fixed stars and reproduce this as an echo, which gives rise to the consonants. They take in the movements of planetary life which influence their own life. The life of breathing in particular creates images of all this. The counter action then produces the vowels. Human speech can only be understood if consonants are seen in relation to the constellations of fixed stars and the vowels in relation to planetary conjunctions and oppositions. Thus human speech and language is seen to derive from the whole cosmos.

The sun, here (horizontal line in Fig 14), marks the middle. Take the three upper principles and you have the upper human being. Take the three lower principles and you have the lower human being. The reproductive life then gives rise to a new human being.

Take the life of breathing and the life of circulation. The latter essentially reflects the planetary movements. Our blood circulation is basically no more than an image of planetary life. We may thus also say that the vowels come from the life of the circulation and the consonants from the life of breathing. And now we get another strange relationship. We can relate the life of metabolism to the life of the nerves and the life of movement to the life of the senses. The life of the senses, however, relates to the movements of Saturn, which may be said to be closest to the zodiac, just as human beings present themselves most clearly to the outside world in their life of movement. If we want to show how human beings reflect the secrets of the cosmos, we have on the one hand the life of the senses and on the other hand the life of movement and this gives us—eurythmy. Eurythmy is the direct image of the relationship human beings have to the cosmic periphery. I just wanted to mention this briefly.

My purpose today has been to show you how the human being relates to the cosmos in regard to life. Yesterday it was my purpose to show the relationship of the human being to the cosmos in regard to form. Tomorrow we’ll consider the third aspect of the relationship between human being and cosmos—the soul. After considering the human soul in relation to the life of the cosmos we will have the three aspects of form, life and soul.

• 13. Zodiac from the Greek and Latin zodiakus, derived from “circle of the figures”, being the Greek for the sculptured figure of an animal.
• 14. William James (1842–1910), American physiologist and pragmatic philosopher, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), chapter 3: The Reality of the Unseen.

Today we shall consider the passage of the human spirit and soul through the sense-perceptible physical organism. We shall look first at how this element of spirit and soul prepares for physical incarnation by descending from the spiritual worlds, and then at how it departs from physical incarnation through the portal of death and returns to the spiritual world. We shall take particular account of what happens in the soul during this process, for we must understand that on entering the physical organism, right at the moment of conception, a tremendous transformation takes place, and that another tremendous transformation takes place when the human being departs from physical incarnation through the portal of death.

We have described these things from numerous standpoints already. But today we shall be concerned with the inner experience of the soul itself. What are the last experiences of the soul before it descends to physical life on earth?

Between birth and death our soul is filled with an intricate fabric of thoughts, feelings and impulses of will. All these work together and intermingle to form the total structure of the soul. Our language has words for all the different forms of thought, of feeling, and of will impulses, so that we can describe all these things that are experienced during physical earthly life. And by considering our more subconscious feelings and our soul experiences as a whole, we can throw at least some light on what lives in the soul before it enters earthly life.

First of all we must be clear that the thought element leads a shadowy existence in the soul during physical earthly life. Thoughts are quite rightly described as pale and abstract. At best, the thoughts and mental pictures of the human being during earthly life are no more than mirror images of the external world. Human beings make thoughts about what they have perceived with their senses in the external world. As you know, if you subtract from your thought life everything you have perceived through your senses and everything you have experienced with the help of your senses during the course of earthly life, there is very little left. This is different, of course, if a study of spiritual science has led to the acquisition of other kinds of thought content than those drawn from the sense-perceptible world. Our thought world is shadowy because it has lost its inner vitality as a result of our descent into the physical sense-perceptible world. You could say that as a solid earthly object is to its shadow on the wall, so is the real content of thoughts to what lives in our thinking during earthly existence. If we seek to make the transition from the earthly thoughts of our life between birth and death to the true stature of our thought life, we find that this really only exists in our purely spiritual life before conception has taken place. It is like going from a shadow picture to whatever is casting the shadow. Before birth, or rather before conception, there is a vivid, fully alive existence which later becomes shadowy thoughts. The thought world existing as an inner weaving of soul before conception might well be described as our actual spiritual existence, our actual spiritual being. This inner weaving life before conception is, of course, something that fills the whole of the universe known to us. Before conception we live throughout the totality of the universe which otherwise surrounds us. The thoughts that then live in us during our life on earth are the shadows, confined within our human physical organism, of something that has life on a cosmic scale prior to conception.

This is a description of one element of our soul before birth, or before conception. Before the human being descends to the physical world we find, as one part of the content of his soul, something that is like thoughts when he is on earth but which is actually a spiritual element of his being when he is in the super-sensible world. The other part of the content of his soul cannot be described as anything other than fear, to use a concept taken from earthly life. In the period prior to physical life something lives in the soul which, as fear, fills it entirely. You must understand, however, that fear as an experience outside the physical body is something quite different from fear within the human physical body.

Before descending to earth man is a being of spirit and soul filled with an element of feeling which can only be compared with what is experienced in earthly life as fear. This fear is well justified for that period of human life about which I am now speaking. In the life between death and a new birth the human being has undergone manifold experiences of the kind which are possible while he is united with the cosmos. By the end of the life between death and a new birth he has, in a way, grown tired of this cosmic life, just as he grows tired of earthly life when, towards the end, his bodily organization shrivels up and becomes infirm. This tiring of life beyond the earth is expressed not so much in actual tiredness as in fear of the cosmos. The human being takes flight from the cosmos. He senses that the fundamental aspect of the cosmos is something that has now become foreign to him; it no longer has anything to offer him. He feels a kind of timidity, comparable with fear, towards the element in which he finds himself. He longs to withdraw from this cosmic feeling and contract into a human physical body.

From the earth a certain force of attraction comes to meet this state of fear in the human being. In a diagram it would look like this. Think of the cranium, and the brain within. Here is the base of the cranium. As I have frequently suggested, the human brain with its remarkable convolutions is a kind of copy of the starry heavens, of the universe. This brain structure made up of cells is indeed a copy of the starry heavens (see diagram). While living before birth in the cosmos the

human being encompasses with his spirituality the whole of the starry world. But now he fears it. He withdraws into an earthly image of the starry heavens, an image in the human brain.

Now we come to the choice made by man's spirit and soul. For now the soul chooses whichever brain—in the process of being formed—most closely resembles the starry constellation in which it stood before descending into the earthly realm. Naturally, the brain of one embryo depicts the starry heavens differently from that of another embryo. And the soul feels attracted towards the brain which has the most similarity with the starry constellation in which it existed before descending to earth.

So it is, in the main, a feeling of timidity which leads the soul down to the confines of a human being—a feeling of fearfulness with regard to infinity, you might say. This feeling of fear pertains more to the soul. And the thought world which unfolds more and more from childhood into adulthood pertains more to the spirit. Both—the feeling of fear and also the spiritual element which is transformed into shadowy thoughts—undergo a substantial metamorphosis which I should now like to describe to you. I can only use expressions which will seem unusual as far as ordinary thinking goes, but ordinary thinking lacks points of reference which might serve to describe these things. Ordinary thinking lies far from all aspects of this theme, so we cannot avoid using unusual expressions if we want to give an adequate description of them.

Let us start with the spiritual element which lives in the cosmos and then makes its way to the confined dwelling place of the human body, unfolding chiefly through the nervous system and the brain and undergoing metamorphosis as it does so. There are two aspects of this. First of all it is definitely true to say that the being who is man in the world of spirit and soul prior to conception dies during the transition into the physical body. Birth in the physical body is a dying for the spirit and soul life of man. And when a death takes place there is always a corpse. Just as a corpse remains when man dies on earth, so a corpse also remains when the element of spirit and soul goes down to the earth through conception and dies in the heavenly region. For the whole of our earthly life we then live, as far as our thoughts are concerned, on what remains as a corpse. The corpse is our world of thoughts. Something that is dead is the world of shadowy thoughts. So we can say that as the spiritual aspect of man descends to life on earth through conception, it dies for the world of spirit and soul and leaves this corpse behind.

Just as the corpse of the physical human being dissolves into the elements of earth, so the element of spirit and soul dissolves in the spiritual world and becomes the force which is unfolded in physical thoughts. Just as the earth goes to work on the corpse when we bury it, or as fire does when we cremate it, so throughout life we go to work on the corpse of our spirit and soul element in our world of physical thoughts. The world of physical thoughts is the continuing in death of what exists as real spiritual life before man descends into physical earthly life.

The other living element which enters into man from his pre-earthly life comes into play in the physical human being, not through the world of thoughts, but in the widest possible sense in everything which we can call feelings—feelings to do with man as well as feelings to do with nature. Everything by which you spread into your environment in a feeling way (see chart) is an element which represents a living echo of pre-earthly life.

You do not experience your pre-earthly life in a living way in your thoughts but only in your feelings for other creatures. If we love a flower or a person, this is a force which has been given to us out of our pre-earthly life, but in a living way. So if we love a person we can say that we love him or her not only out of our experiences in this earthly life, but also out of karma, out of being connected in earlier earthly lives. Something living is carried over from pre-earthly life in so far as the sympathetic sphere of the human being is concerned. On the other hand, what is a living spiritual element between death and a new birth dies into our thought world during earthly life.

That is why our thought world is so pale and shadowy and dead during earthly life, because it actually represents a part of our pre-earthly experience which has died.

Now let us turn to the second element—timidity, fear—which is also metamorphosed in such a way that it falls into two parts. What we experience prior to our descent into the earthly world as a fear which fills our whole soul and makes us want to flee from the spiritual world, becomes, on entering the body, on the one hand something that I should like to describe as a feeling of self. This feeling of self is metamorphosed fear. Transformed fear from pre-earthly life is what makes you feel that you are a self, that you are self-contained.

The other part into which fear is transmuted is our will. All our will impulses, everything on which our activity in the world is based—all this exists as fear before we descend into earthly life.

You see once again what a good thing it is for earthly life that human beings do not step consciously past the Guardian of the Threshold. I have frequently said that human beings sleep through what the will represents, down there in the human organism. They have an intention, then they carry it out, and then they perceive the consequence. But what lies between the intention to do a deed and the accomplished deed, that in which the will actually consists—this is something in which human beings are as much asleep as they are between falling asleep and waking up again. If they were to look down and see what lay at the foundation of their will they would feel, strongly welling up out of their organism, the fear coming in from their pre-earthly life.

This is also something that has to be overcome in initiation. But if we look into ourselves, the first thing we see is the feeling of self. This is something which must not be caused to increase too much as a result of the training. Otherwise, when the human being finally steps into the spiritual world he might fall into megalomania. But at the foundation of all his will impulses he will find fear and he must therefore be strengthened to withstand this fear.

As you see, in all the exercises contained in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds the aim is to learn to bear the fear which we come to perceive in the way I have described. This fear is something that has to be there amongst the forces of development, otherwise human beings would never descend from the spiritual world into earthly existence. They would not flee from the spiritual world. They would not develop the urge to enter into the limitations of the physical body. The fact that they do develop this urge stems from this fear of the spiritual world, which quite naturally becomes a part of their soul configuration once they have lived for a time between death and a new birth.

So thoughts are attached to us like a corpse—or rather the power of the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. We can describe this even more exactly. However, to consider this more exact description it will benecessary to develop certain very precise ideas. The spiritual force which dies in our thoughts and becomes a corpse when we descend into physical earthly existence is the same force which builds our organs out of the cosmos. Our lung, heart, stomach—all our specific organs—are formed out of the power of thought of the universe.

When we enter into earthly life this power of thought enters the narrow confines of our organism. What does the earth and its environment want of us? It wants us to create an image of it within ourselves. But if we were to create an image in ourselves, then during the course of our lifetime all our inner organs, such as our lungs—but, above all, the manifold convolutions of our brain—would be transformed into crystal-like formations. We should all become statues resembling not human beings but crystals in various contrasting groups. We should gradually come to be inorganic, lifeless shapes—statues after a fashion.

The human organism resists this. It stands by the shape of its inner organs. It will not have it that, for instance, its lungs might be formed to represent, let us say, a range of mountains. It will not allow its heart to be transformed into a cluster of crystals. It resists this. And this resistance brings it about that instead of forming images of our earthly environment in our organs we do so only in the shadow images of our thoughts. So our power of thought is actually always on the way to making us into an image of our physical earth, of the physical form of our earth. We constantly want to become a system of crystals. But our organism will not permit this. It has so much which has to be developed in the living realm, in the realm of sympathy, in the realm of feeling of self and in the realm of will impulses, that it does not permit it. It will not allow our lungs to be transformed into something that looks like crystals growing out of the earth. It resists this formation into earthly shapes, and so the images of earthly shapes only come about in geometry and in whatever other thoughts we form about our earthly environment. As I said, you must think with absolute exactitude if you want to reach the point where you can imagine all this.

But the tendency is always there of coming to resemble the system of our thoughts. We have to fight constantly in order not to take onthis resemblance. We are constantly striving to become a kind of work of art—though given the kind of thoughts human beings have on the whole, it would not be a very beautiful work of art to look at. But we strive to attain an external appearance that resembles what exists in our thoughts as no more than images and shadows. We do not achieve this resemblance, but we mirror back what we are aiming for, so that it turns into our thoughts instead. It is a process that can truly be likened to the creation of mirror images.

If you have a mirror with an object in front of it, then you get a mirror image of the object. The object is not inside the mirror. Everything we see before our eyes constantly wants to bring about an actual structure within us. But we resist this. We keep our brain as it is. Because of this, the object is mirrored back and becomes the mental image. A table wants to make your very brain into a table but you do not allow this to happen. In consequence an image of the table arises in you. This act of rejection is the mirroring process. That is why, in our thought life, our thoughts are only shadow images of the external world. When it comes to our feelings, however, the situation is different. Try once to imagine absolutely accurately what is involved in feeling something. A round table feels different from one with corners. You feel the corners. The thought of this angular table does not affect you very much, whereas getting the feel of the corners is more painful than gently following the curve of a round table. When we feel, therefore, external forms come more to life within us than when we think.

This is an indication of the metamorphosis undergone by our element of soul and spirit when it comes into earthly existence from pre-earthly existence. But now what occurs when we go through the portal of death? Our world of thought is, so far as its strength is concerned, only the corpse of pre-earthly existence. It is of little significance. It disappears when we go through the portal of death, just as our mirror image disappears if we suddenly take away the mirror. So, in speaking of immortality, there is absolutely no point in reflecting on the earthly power of thought for it certainly does not accompany us through the portal of death. What does go through the portal of death with us is everything we have developed in the way of sympathy, of feeling and sensing towards earthly things. Our feeling of sympathy goes through the portal of death. Inasmuch as we have sympathy towards our environment, we develop the strength (see table) in the spiritual world to stand among the spiritual beings in the spiritual element of thought. Our sympathy, which our body keeps separate from our earthly environment, streams out now, after death, into our spiritual environment and unites with the spiritual thought element of the world into which we step on going through the portal of death.

Because we flow with our sympathy into the spiritual element of thought, we develop once again a kind of thought body, a living thought body which is ours for the time between death and our next birth. And the feeling of self we have on earth becomes a kind of ‘standing within’ other beings. Whilst we are on earth, our feeling of self only lets us know that we are within our body, but once we have passed through the portal of death we learn to know that we are in other beings, the beings of the higher hierarchies. And because we stand within spiritual beings we receive from them forces which lead us onwards on our course through life between death and a new birth. In this way our own being of forces develops. This is the metamorphosis of the element of spirit and soul which takes place when we pass through the portal of death.

Unlike our world of thought, our will does not disappear at death. It is the source of the content of our feelings of self. Imagine that you want something which satisfies you. This wanting in itself gives you something that satisfies you, it gives your feeling of self a particular nuance. If you have done something that does not satisfy you, this too gives your feeling of self a particular nuance. Our will is not only something that acts outwards. It also rays forcefully back into our inner being. We know what we are from what we can do. And this nuance of our feeling of self, this raying back into us of our will element, is something which we take into the spiritual world with us, together with our feeling of self. So we take our will—or rather the raying back of our will into our feeling of self—with us when we submerge ourselves in the beings of the higher hierarchies. And because we take with us this element, which has either strengthened or weakened our feeling of self, we find the force of our karma, our destiny.

Gaining an understanding of these things helps us to see what the human being really is. And we also learn to recognize certain symptoms which accompany earthly life. In earthly life fear certainly puts in an appearance here and there. But it must never be allowed to fill our soul entirely. It would be sad if this were to happen. But before we come down to earthly life our soul is indeed entirely filled with fear, and in that situation fear is what we need so that we really do descend into physical earthly life.

Our feeling of self, though, is something that must not be allowed to exceed more than a certain degree; indeed it really ought not to be felt independently at all in earthly life. Someone who develops his feeling of self with too much independence turns into a person who knows only himself. Our feeling of self is actually only with us during earthly life, so that we keep a hold on our body until we die, returning to it every morning after sleep. If we lacked this feeling of self during earthly life we would fail to return. But after death we need it when we become submerged in the world of spiritual beings, because without it we would all the time lose ourselves.

We do indeed submerge ourselves there in real spiritual beings. The earth, on the other hand, makes no such demands on us. If you go for a walk in the woods, you stay on the path, and the trees are to the left and right of you, and in front and behind. You see the trees but the trees do not expect you to enter into them—they do not expect you to become tree nymphs and submerge yourselves in them. But the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, whose world we enter after death—they do expect us to submerge ourselves in them. We have to become all of them. So if, on passing through the portal of death, we were to enter this spiritual world without our feeling of self, we would lose ourselves. We need our feeling of self there simply in order to maintain ourselves. And moral deeds we have done during earthly life, deeds which have justifiably enhanced our feeling of self—these protect us from losing ourselves after death.

These are thoughts and ideas which, from now on, ought to enter once again into human consciousness for the near future of earthly evolution. These thoughts and ideas simply flowed into mankind in earliest times, when understanding was still instinctively clairvoyant. Human beings used to have a strong feeling of what they had been before they descended into earthly life. This was strongly developed in primeval times. But hope of a life after death was less strongly developed in primeval times. This was something that was taken for granted. Today we are chiefly interested in what we might experience after we die. In primeval times, thousands of years ago, people were more concerned about their life prior to descending to the earth.

A time then came when clairvoyance, which had originally been instinctive, waned, and the intense connection of the soul with life before birth also waned. Then two spiritual streams sprang up which prepared what had now to develop in human civilization. We now have two clearly distinct streams which we have described from varying standpoints. Today we shall approach them from a particular standpoint which will also be a help to us in our considerations tomorrow and the next day.

Take earthly evolution prior to the Mystery of Golgotha. You find, spread over the earth, the heathen culture, and in a certain way separated from this, a culture which one could say was that of the Old Testament. What was particularly characteristic of this heathen culture? It contained a definite awareness of the fact that everything physical surrounding man contained a spiritual element. The heathen culture had a strong awareness of the nature of living thoughts which become transformed into dead thoughts. In the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, this culture saw everywhere the living element of which human thoughts were the dead counterpart. Heathen culture perceived the living thoughts of the cosmos and regarded man as belonging to these living thoughts of the cosmos.

One part of this heathen world that was particularly filled with life was that of the peoples of ancient Greece. You know that the idea of destiny was particularly strong in the world of these ancient Greek peoples. And—think of certain Greek dramas—this idea of destiny permeated human life with laws in the way the natural laws permeate nature. The ancient Greeks felt that they stood in life permeated with destiny, just as natural things stand permeated with the laws of nature. Destiny descended on human beings within this Greek outlook like a force of nature. This feeling was characteristic of all heathen cultures, but it was particularly marked among the Greeks. The heathen world saw spirit in all of nature. There was no specific knowledge of nature in the sense of the natural science we have today, but there was an all-embracing knowledge of nature. Where people saw nature, they spoke of the spirit. This was a science of nature which was, at the same time, a science of the spirit. The heathen peoples were less interested in the inner being of man. They looked on man from the outside as a being of nature. They could do this because they saw all the other natural things as being filled with a soul element too. They did not think of trees, plants, or clouds as soulless objects. So they could look at human beings from outside in a similar way and yet not think of them as being soulless. Filling all nature with soul in this way, the ancient heathen was able to regard human beings as natural creatures. Thus the ancient heathen world was something which contained from the start a spiritual element which inclined towards the world of spirit.

The creed which then ran its course in the Old Testament was the polar opposite of this. The Old Testament knew nature neither in the way we know it—I mean in the way we come to know it as we turn towards spiritual science—nor in the way the ancient heathen knew it. The Old Testament knew only a moral world order, and Jahve is the ruler of this moral world order; only what Jahve wills takes place. So in the world of the Old Testament the view arose as a matter of course that one must not make images of the soul and spirit element. The heathen world could never have come to such a view, for it saw images of the spirit in every tree and every plant. In the world of the Old Testament no images were seen, for everywhere the invisible, imageless spirit ruled.

We ought to see in the New Testament a coming together of these two spiritual streams. People have always given prominence to either one view or the other. Thus, for instance, the heathen element was always predominant where religion was more a matter of seeing the objects of religion. Pictures were made of spiritual beings, pictures copied from nature. In contrast, the Old Testament element developed wherever the newer scientific attitude arose with its tendency towards a lack of images. In many ways modern materialistic science contains an echo of the Old Testament, of the imageless Old Testament. Materialistic science strives for a clear distinction between the material element in which no trace of spirit is left, and the spiritual element which is supposed to live in the moral sphere only, and of which no image may be made, or which we may not be allowed to see in the earthly realm.

This particular characteristic which is prevalent in today's materialistic form of science is, actually, an Old Testament impulse which has come over to our time. Science has not yet become Christian. The science of materialism is fundamentally an Old Testament science. One of the main tasks as civilization progresses will be to overcome both streams and resolve them in a higher synthesis. We must understand that both the heathen stream and the Jewish stream are one-sided and that, in the way they still exercise an influence today, they need to be overcome.

Science will have to raise itself up to the spirit. Art, which contains much that is heathen, has made various attempts to become Christian but most of these attempts have fallen into luciferic and heathen ways. Art will have to lead to a Christian element. What we have today is but an echo of the heathen and the Old Testament elements. Our consciousness is not yet fully Christian. This is what we must particularly feel when we consider factually, as described by spiritual science, the way in which human beings pass through birth and death.

We have heard how there grew out of the Mysteries that which unites the consciousness of men with the world in such manner that this union comes to expression in the festivals of the year. We have understood above all how the Easter Festival grew out of the principle of initiation. From all this you will have realised how great a part the Mysteries have played in the whole evolution of mankind. All the spiritual life that passed through the world and evolved through mankind proceeded in ancient times from the Mysteries. The Mysteries were very powerful with respect to the whole guidance of the spiritual life.

Now mankind was predestined from the outset to evolve to spiritual freedom. The development of freedom necessarily involved a decline in the ancient Mysteries. For a period of time human beings had to stand less in connection with such a mighty guidance as proceeded from the Mysteries; they had to be left more to their own resources. Certainly we cannot say that the time has already come today when men have won true inner freedom and are ripe to pass on to what should follow the age of freedom. Decidedly we cannot say so. Nevertheless a sufficient number of human beings have passed through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was felt less than in former ages. And though the fruits of these incarnations are not yet ripe today, though the harvest is not yet, nevertheless it is there within the human being, it is latent in their souls.

If, as we have often said, a more spiritual age is now approaching once again, human beings will indeed evolve in time what in their dim consciousness they have not yet evolved today. But this above all will be necessary, that the knowledge, the vision, the conscious experience of the Spiritual that can arise from present-day Initiation shall be met out of the very freedom which men have gained with reverence and true respect. For if we do not revere, if we do not treasure it, true knowledge or indeed any spiritual life of mankind is in reality impossible. And in this sense we shall rightly use the times of the sacred festivals, we shall use them by trying to plant, however little, into our souls all this reverence for the spiritual life that has evolved in the course of human history. We shall learn to look as intimately as we can and see how the outer historical events signify facts and carry the spiritual life from one age into another.

We know in the first place that human individuals themselves return to the Earth again and again in their repeated earthly lives. Thus they carry with them experiences of former epochs into later ones. The human beings themselves are the most important factor in the progressive evolution of all that has taken place in human history. But the human beings of every age live in a particular environment. And the environment created by the Mysteries is among the most important. Thus it is a most important factor in the progress of mankind to carry from one age into another what human beings experienced in the Mysteries and what they then experience again, be it once more in sacred Mysteries working forth into mankind, or be it in some other forms of knowledge. Today it has to be in other forms of knowledge. For the real life of the Mysteries has more or less receded so far as the outer world is concerned and has not yet emerged again.

It is indeed the case that when that spiritual impulse which has gone forth from here, from the Goetheanum through the Christmas Foundation meeting, really finds its way into the life of the Anthroposophical Society—(the Society leading on to the Classes partially begun)—this Anthroposophical Society will provide the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. The future life of the Mysteries must consciously and deliberately be planted by this Anthroposophical Society. For this Anthroposophical Society has ever before it an event which can be turned to good account in future evolution even as a similar event was turned to good account once upon a time, namely, the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Then and now, a great and deep wrong was done. Yet on the different planes of life these things appear in different ways and it lies in the freedom of mankind to turn to good account that which on one plane is a dreadful wrong, for it is just through these terrible events that a real progress of mankind can be achieved.

Now to enter into these things with sympathetic understanding we must grasp them, as I already said, as intimately as possible. How did the spiritual life of the world live in the Mysteries? I showed yesterday how the fixing of the yearly Easter Festival proceeds from the constellations of the Sun and Moon considered in a spiritual sense. I showed how the other planets are seen from the standpoint of the Moon. According to what is there experienced in beholding the other planets, man as he descends from his pre-earthly life into his earthly life is guided and instructed in the forming of his light-ether body.

We want to gain a true and vivid conception of how this light-ether body is created through the Moon forces, through the observation if I may put it so, in the spiritual Moon observatory. We want to understand how these ethereal forces are transmitted to the human being. To this end we may either observe it, as we have tried to do, out of the Cosmos directly, where these things are inscribed, where they exist as a real fact; but it is also important to let our hearts and minds be impressed by the part which human beings took in such a truth as this in different ages.

Never did human hearts and minds partake so intimately in this descent from the pre-earthly into the earthly life with regard to the final stage, the investment of man with his etheric body, never did they partake in this fact so intimately and deeply as in the Mysteries of Ephesus.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus the whole service that was devoted to her who is exoterically known as Diana or Artemis, the Goddess of Ephesus, was calculated to enable man to experience and enter into the spiritual life and movement within the ether of the Cosmos. We may say indeed that when the adherents of the Mystery of Ephesus approached the image of the Goddess they had a feeling, a sensation which grew into a spiritual listening and may be thus expressed. It was as though the Goddess spoke: “I delight in all things fruitful and creative in the far cosmic ether.”

A deep impression was made on those present when the Temple Goddess thus expressed her joy in all things growing, springing, sprouting in the far-spread ether of the world. And there was a feeling deeply akin to the springing and sprouting of life, a feeling that was wafted through the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as a magic breath. For the Mystery was so arranged and instituted that we may truly say, nowhere have men lived with the growth of the plant life, with the springing and sprouting of the Earth into the plants, as they did in Ephesus.

And as a consequence a certain instruction could be given with great clearness in these Ephesian Mysteries, an instruction, if I may call it so, whose aim was to bring specially near to the heart and mind of those who belonged to Ephesus the secret of the Moon of which I told you yesterday.

This was something that every one of them had as his own experience. He knew what it was to feel himself as a form of light, for this process of receiving one's form of light through the Moon was made alive and vivid to the Ephesian pupils and Initiates. And there was a certain institution in the Ephesian Mysteries such that he who could let it work upon him in the sanctuary was altogether transplanted into this creating of one's being out of the Sunlight that wove around the Moon. And then there sounded forth towards him as though it were sounding from the Sun: J O A. (I O A).

He knew that this J O A calls to life his “I” and his astral body. J O—“I”, astral body; and then the approach of the light-ether body in the A—J O A. Now, as the J O A vibrated within him he felt himself as Ego, as astral body, as ether body.

And then it was as though there sounded forth and upward from the Earth—for man himself was transported into cosmic regions—it was as though there sounded to him upward from the Earth that which should permeate the J O A: eh-v. These were the forces of the Earth rising upwards in the eh-v.—J eh O v A.

And now in the JehOvA he felt the entire human being. He felt a premonition of the physical body which he would only have on Earth in the consonants belonging to the vowels; while the latter indicate, in the J O A, the “I”, the astral body, the etheric body. It was through this living penetration into the JehOvA that the Ephesian disciple could experience the final steps of man in his descent out of the spiritual world.

And in this feeling of the J O A one felt oneself as the very sound J O A within the light. Then one was truly MAN - resounding “I”, resounding astral body, clothed in the light-radiant etheric body. One was sound within the light. And so indeed one is as cosmic man, and as such one is able to perceive what is seen in the surrounding Cosmos just as here on Earth one is able to perceive through the eye what takes place within the physical horizon of the Earth.

And when the Ephesian pupil bore within him this J O A, when he bore this within him, he really felt himself as though transported into the Moon sphere; he partook in all that could be observed from the standpoint of the Moon.

At this stage the human being was still human being in the widest sense. Only at his descent to Earth did he become man and woman. But the disciple felt himself transported up into this region of the pre-earthly life which we pass through as we approach the Earth once more. It was in Ephesus that it became most intimately possible thus to arise into the Moon sphere, and then the disciples bore in their hearts and souls what they had witnessed and experienced, and it resounded in them somewhat as follows: [e.Ed: The original German is printed at the end of this lecture.]

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song, And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs, Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

Every Ephesian was permeated by this experience which he felt among the greatest things that pulsated through his human being.

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song, And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs. Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

It was indeed an experience in which the adherent of the Ephesian Mysteries felt himself as man fully and intensely, when there resounded in his ears that which lies hidden in these verses. For he felt: Now it has dawned upon me how I am connected with the planetary system in the forces of my etheric body. Pregnantly he brought this to expression, for these words are addressed to the etheric body by the great universe:

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might. 

Here man is feeling himself within the power of the Moonlight.

 Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song. 

The sound which has an active, a creative, quality sounded forth to him from Mars. And then came that which fills the limbs of man with strength so that he becomes a mobile being:

 And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs. 

And from Jupiter the light pours forth:

 Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom, 

And from Venus:

 And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—

So at length Saturn may gather it all up, rounding man off both inwardly and outwardly, preparing him to descend to the Earth and clothe himself in a physical body that he may live on, on Earth, as this being who in a physical garment bears the God within him:

 That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

From all that I have here described, you will see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was filled with radiant light and colour. In this life of inner light and colour there was contained all that they knew of the true dignity of man throughout the Cosmos gathered together in the Easter thought. Many of the wanderers of whom I told you yesterday, who went from Mystery to Mystery that they might experience the life of the Mysteries in its totality, many of them declared ever and again with inner light and intimate joy how the harmony of the spheres had sounded forth to them in Ephesus when they had gazed into the Cosmos from the standpoint of the Moon, how the radiant astral light of the world had shone forth for them, how they had felt it in the Sunlight quivering around the Moon, the Sunlight filled with the spirit of the astral light, even as man himself is filled with living soul. In other places they had not experienced it thus, not at any rate with such joy and gladness and inner artistic understanding.

Now all these things were bound up with the Temple Sanctuary which then went up in the flames lit by the hand of a criminal or of a madman; but as I told you during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, [e.Ed: See: World History in the Light of Anthroposophy. (Eight lectures given at Dornach, 24^th – 31^st December, 1923. Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)] two Initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were reincarnated in Aristotle and in Alexander. And these Individualities then came near what was still to be felt of these things in their time in the Mysteries of Samothrace.

At this point a seemingly chance event is of great spiritual significance in the evolution of the world. We have already mentioned it in our circle, indeed we mentioned it many years ago. When the Temple of Ephesus was burning it was the hour of Alexander's birth. But as the Temple burned something was really taking place.

How infinitely much had happened in the course of centuries for those who had belonged to this Temple. How much of spiritual light and wisdom had passed through these Temple spaces! Now that the flames broke forth from the Temple, all that had gone on in these Temple spaces was communicated to the cosmic ether. Thus we may truly say: The continuous Easter Festival at Ephesus which had been contained within these Temple spaces has since been written—albeit in letters less clearly visible—written in the great orb of the heavens inasmuch as the heavens are ethereal.

And it is so with many things. Very much of what is now human wisdom was in ancient times enclosed in Temple walls. It escaped the Temple walls, it is written in the cosmic ether and is visible there as soon as a man rises to spiritual Imagination. Spiritual Imagination is, as it were, the interpreter of the secret of the stars. Thus we may say, into the cosmic ether are written what were once upon a time the secrets of the Temples and we can read them imaginatively.

But we can also put it differently and it still remains the same. We can also say: I rise in the starlit night and look up to the heavens and give myself up to the impression of it all. And if I have the necessary faculty, all that is contained in the forms of the constellations and in the movements of the planets is transformed as it were into a great cosmic script.—And when we read the cosmic script a real content emerges of the kind which I described yesterday for the secret of the Moon. These things are really to be read in the cosmic writing, when the stars mean more to us than something merely to be calculated mechanically, mathematically, namely when they become for us the letters of the cosmic script.

To develop this idea still further, I must now refer to the following. In the time when the ancient Mysteries were already receding, the Mysteries of the Kabiri at Samothrace still existed. At the time of Alexander, Samothrace was still there as a place of remembrance, nay more, as a place for the active cultivation of the Mysteries, while as a general rule the life of the Mysteries was in its decline.

And there came the moment when through the influence of the Mysteries of the Kabiri there arose for Alexander and Aristotle something like a memory of the old Ephesian time which both of them had lived through during a certain century. And once more the J O A resounded and once again the words resounded:

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs, Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

But in this remembrance, in this historic remembrance of an ancient time, there lay a certain power to create something new. And from that moment there went forth the power to create a new thing, yet a strange new thing which has been little noticed by mankind. You must come to understand what was the real character of the new creation that went forth from the working together of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any great work of poetry or any other work. Take the most beautiful works written in German if you like, take a German translation of the Bhagavad Gita, take Goethe's Faust, or Iphigenia, or anything you value highly. Think of the rich and imposing content, let us say, of Goethe's Faust, and now think, my dear friends, through what is this great content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted to you as it is to most people. At some time in your life you read Goethe's Faust. What is it that meets you on the physical plane? What is there on the paper? Nothing else but combinations of abcdef, and so forth. The whole mighty content of Faust dawns upon you simply by using combinations of the letters of the alphabet. There is nothing there on the paper that does not coincide with one or other of its twenty or so letters. From these twenty letters there is conjured on to the paper that which awakens for you, if you can read, the abundant content of Goethe's Faust. Nay more, you are free to say that this perpetual repetition of abcdef is a dreadful bore, it is the most abstract thing imaginable. And yet these most abstract things rightly combined give us the whole of Faust.

Now when the cosmic sounding in the Moon was there again and Aristotle and Alexander recognised what the fire at Ephesus had signified, when they saw how this fire had carried forth into the far ether of the world the content of the Mysteries of Ephesus, then it was that there arose in these two the inspiration to found the Cosmic Script. Only the Cosmic Script is not founded on abcdef. As our book writing is founded on letters, so is the Cosmic Writing founded on thoughts. Now there arose the letters of the Cosmic Writing.

If I now write them down before you they are as abstract as abcd:

 Quantity Quality Relation Space Time Position Activity (or Action) Passivity (or Suffering) 

There you have so many concepts. Take these concepts which Aristotle first expounded to Alexander and learn to do the same with them as you have learnt to do with abcd. Then with Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Position, Activity, Passivity, you will learn to read in the Cosmos.

But in the age of the abstract a strange thing happened in the logic of the schools. Imagine a school in which it was the custom not to teach people to read, but if you will, to manufacture books in which they have to learn abcd etc., again and again, in all manner of combinations, ac, ab, be, and so on. And suppose they never came to the point of using these letters in order to place before the soul rich and abundant contents. That would be the very thing which the world has done with Aristotle's Logic. In the textbooks of Logic these Categories, as they call them, are introduced. We learn them off by heart but do not know what to do with them. It is just as though we learn abcd off by heart and do not know what to do with the letters. Just as the content of Faust can be resolved into something as simple as the letters abcd and so forth, so the reading in the Cosmic Script resolves itself into these simple things which we must only learn to deal with. And fundamentally speaking, all that Anthroposophy has brought forth, and all that it can ever bring forth, is experienced from out of these concepts just as what you read in Faust is experienced from out of the letters. For in these simple concepts as the Cosmic Alphabet, all secrets of the spiritual and physical worlds are contained.

This was what happened in the further evolution of the world. Formerly there had been immediate spiritual experience for which the realities of Ephesus were still most characteristic. But now another thing came to take its place. It takes its start in the time of Alexander, but it was only in later times, throughout the Middle Ages, that it evolved in its peculiar form. It is a doubly hidden, double esoteric thing. Doubly esoteric is the meaning that dwells within these eight or nine concepts (for we may also extend the number to nine). Indeed we learn ever more and more to live in these simple concepts, and to experience them in our souls as vividly as we experience the abcd when we have before us the rich and manifold spiritual content of a book.

Thus you see, what was a mighty revelation of instinctive wisdom through thousands and thousands of years flowed at length into concepts whose inner force of life and strength must once more be revealed in time to come. In very truth the time will come when man will find again what is truly resting as in a grave, namely the cosmic wisdom and the cosmic light. Man will learn to read once more in the great universe. He will experience the resurrection of what lay hidden in the intervening time of human evolution between the two spiritual epochs.

And we, my dear friends, are here to make manifest once more the things that are hidden. We are here to create an Easter Festival as an experience of all mankind. And as on other occasions we could say: “Anthroposophy is a Christmas experience”—so we may say today: “Anthroposophy itself, in all its working, is an Easter experience, an experience of resurrection bound up with the experience of the grave.” It is important just at this present Easter Gathering for us to feel, if I may so describe it, the full festivity of the Anthroposophical striving. For we must feel that today we may go to some Spiritual Being who may perhaps be near to us immediately behind the threshold, and in face of him we say: “Ah! once upon a time mankind was blessed with a divine-spiritual revelation whose light still shone most radiantly in Ephesus. But now all this lies buried. How shall I dig out of the grave what thus lies buried? For surely one would imagine that that which has been can still be found in some historic way, can be found lying in the grave.” And then the Being will answer us as in a similar case once upon a time the corresponding Being answered: “That which ye seek is no longer here; it is in your hearts, if only ye open your hearts in the true way.”

Anthroposophy is there indeed; it lies at rest in human hearts, only these human hearts must be able to open themselves in the true way. This is what we must feel. Then in full consciousness, not instinctively as in ancient time, we shall be led back again into that wisdom which lived and shed its light in the ancient Mysteries.

This is what I would fain bring to your hearts at the present Easter time. For to permeate ourselves with this sacred, solemn feeling which can arise from Anthroposophy—this too will play its part and carry us upward into the spiritual world. This too must be united with the Christmas impulse which was given to us at Dornach. For the Christmas impulse must not remain a merely intellectual, theoretic and abstract one. It must be an impulse of the heart, it must not be dry and matter-of-fact. It must be sacred, solemn, joyful, not in sentimentality but out of the reality of the thing itself. Then even as Aristotle and Alexander used the fire of Ephesus when it flamed forth anew in their hearts, when it flamed forth in the Cosmic ether and bore down to them anew the secrets that were afterwards gathered up into the very simple concepts—then even as they could use the fire of Ephesus, so will it be our part to use what has also been carried out into the ether—for we may say so in all humility—in the names of the Goetheanum; namely all that has been intended and that shall be intended with Anthroposophy. But what does this imply? at the annual festival of mourning, at the time of Christmas and New Year, the very time in which our misfortune came upon us, it was granted us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. Why was it so? Because we may rightly feel that what hitherto was more or less an earthly thing, what was achieved and won and founded as an earthly thing, was carried forth with the names into the cosmic spaces. Just because this misfortune came upon us, when we recognise and know the consequence of it, we may justly say: henceforth we understand that we can no longer merely represent an earthly concern, but we represent a concern of the wide ethereal universe wherein the Spirit lives. For the concern of the Goetheanum is indeed a concern of the far and wide ether wherein there dwells the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried forth and we may now fill ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses as with impulses coming in towards us from the Cosmos.

Take this as we will, take it as a picture. The picture signifies the deepest truth and this deep truth is expressed in simple words when we say: Since the Christmas Foundation impulse anthroposophical work shall be permeated with an esoteric character. This esoteric character is here because what was once earthly rayed forth into the cosmic spaces through the astral light that played its part in the physical fire, and because this returns again as a living power into the impulses of the Anthroposophical Movement if only we are able to receive them.

Then, when we can do this, we shall feel as one part of all that lives in Anthroposophy the Anthroposophical Easter mood which can never, never think that the spirit dies, but that it rises again and again. And Anthroposophy must hold to this Spirit that arises ever again out of eternal foundations.

Let us receive this as an Easter thought and as an Easter feeling into our hearts. Then, my dear friends, we shall carry with us from this Gathering feelings that will give us courage and strength to work when we stand once more in our different places when this Easter visit is over.

 (Original of verse in this lecture): Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt, Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt, Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen, Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit—Dass Saturn's weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe! 

We have seen how out of the Mysteries has grown that which has bound the consciousness of man so closely to the universe that this bond found expression in the annual round of festivals, and we have seen especially how the Festival of Easter has evolved out of the principle of Initiation. From all that has been said, you must have been struck by the great importance of the part played by the Mysteries in the development of mankind.

Everything spiritual that passed through the world in ancient times, by which men were able to develop, did in fact have its rise out of the whole life and content of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen). Making use of a modern expression, one might say: the Mysteries had a great deal of power in respect of the guidance of all spiritual life.

Now humanity was ordained from the beginning to develop freedom. That this might develop, it was necessary that the life of the Mysteries should decline, so for a long time men were not so closely associated with the powerful guidance coming from the Mysteries and were left more to themselves.

It is very certain we cannot yet say that the time has come when men have attained true inner freedom, that they are now sufficiently ripe to pass on to the next age following the one in which freedom has been gained. Truly we are unable to say this. All the same, there are a sufficient number who have gone through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less apparent than formerly; and if to-day the seed of their passage through these incarnations has not yet germinated, still it is there—it is implanted in the souls of men. And as an age is now approaching which will be again an age of greater spirituality, men must begin to develop what in their present state of dullness they have not yet developed. Without appreciation, without reverence and true knowledge, a spiritual life is really not possible. We make a right use of these festival seasons when we employ them to develop, and to some small extent to implant in our souls, this feeling of appreciation and reverence for what is spiritual that has evolved in the course of human history; when we endeavour to learn as intimately as possible how and why external historical events point to spiritual facts, and carry over what is spiritual from one age into another. This is mainly possible because men come again and again into earthly existence in recurring earthly lives, and therefore carry with them into later epochs what they had experienced in earlier ones. Men are the most important factors in the further development of human history. In every age they live in a definite surrounding or atmosphere (Umgebung), and one of the most important of these was that of the Mysteries. Thus one of the most important agents in human progress is the power to carry over what was experienced in the Mysteries and to live this again, whether it be in the Mysteries themselves, where it works into humanity at large, or simply as cognition or knowledge. To-day this must be in some form of conscious knowledge (Erkennen), for the true life of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen) has withdrawn more or less from the external life of to-day and must come forth into it again.

We are here constrained to say: It is indeed the case that if that impulse which went forth from the Christmas session here at the GStheanum really enters into the life of the Anthroposophical Society, this society, by pressing onwards to ever greater depths of knowledge, can provide the foundation of a further “living content of the Mysteries” (Mysterienwesen). This must be nurtured consciously within the Anthroposophical Society. For this society has experienced an event that can be utilized in evolution in the same way as a similar event was once utilized: the burning of the temple at Ephesus. Both there and here a great wrong lies at the root of what was done. Things present, however, different aspects on different levels, and what at one level is a dreadful wrong, may be used in accordance with human freedom in such a way that real human progress can be achieved through it.

If we are to enter into such matters with understanding we must grasp them, as I have already said, in as intimate a way as possible. We must study the special way in which the spiritual things of the world were cultivated in the Mysteries. I indicated in the last lecture how out of the spiritual observation of the constellations of the sun and moon, as practised in the Mysteries, the fixing of the annual festival of Easter was determined; further, that the other planets were regarded from the point of view of the moon. I said that according to what was experienced in the observation of the other planets a man was guided at his descent from pre-earthly to earthly existence, that his luminous etheric body was constructed in accordance with what was then seen.

Now if anyone desires to gain some comprehension of how through the forces of the moon—or rather through the spiritual observations by the moon—these etheric forces are transmitted to man, this can be done, as we have tried to do, from observation of the cosmos itself, where it is inscribed, where it exists as fact.

But it is most important that the human interest, which throughout the ages has been felt in these truths, should be permitted to influence the soul. Never did the souls and minds of men take so much interest in the descent of the soul from pre-earthly existence, never was so intimate an interest felt in the last stage of this descent, in man's clothing of himself with the etheric body, as in the Mysteries of Ephesus.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus the whole ritual practised by the goddess of Ephesus, who is named esoterically Artemis, was really directed towards participating in the spiritual blending and interweaving of life in the ether of the universe—in the cosmic ether.

We can venture to say that, when those taking part in the Mystery of Ephesus approached the image of the goddess, an enhancement of perception occurred which amounted to hearing, and what was heard might be given in the words of the goddess somewhat as follows: “I rejoice in all that is fruitful within the wide-spreading universal ether.” This expression of inward joy on the part of the goddess exercised a very profound influence on all growing, blossoming life in the universal ether. And feelings inwardly connected with this springing life breathed like a magic sigh through the spiritual atmosphere of the sacred precincts of the temple of Ephesus.

All the arrangements at this centre of the Mysteries were so directed as to enable people to say: Nowhere but at Ephesus is there so close a union with the growth of living plants, with this sprouting and springing of the being of plants from the earth. This led to the fact that within those Mysteries especially clear instructions were given concerning those secrets of the moon of which I spoke in the last lecture, and which were for the special purpose of bringing an understanding of such things to the souls of those who were adherents of the Ephesian Mysteries.

To feel himself as a light-form was an individual experience to each of these Ephesian pupils and initiates, for it was a real and living fact to them that their light-forms came to them through the moon. The instruction they received was somewhat as follows:

Those able to let the instructions they received in the places of consecration work on them were entirely taken up with this self-construction out of Sunlight that came to them, though changed, by way of the moon. They then heard as if coming to them from the sun the tones: J O A.

They knew that these tones, J O A, stimulated their ego and their astral body. J O equalled the I (ego) and astral body, and they perceived the approach of the Etheric-Light-Body in the A, forming together J O A. When these tones vibrated within the pupil for initiation he was conscious of his ego, of his astral body and etheric body.

Then it was as if there rang forth from the earth (for the man was now entered into cosmic conditions) something which enforced the J O A, making of it eh v, J_ehO_vA. It was the forces of the earth that revealed themselves in the eh v.

The pupil now felt his whole human being in the J_ehO_vA. He felt a premonition of the physical body as it was first on earth in the consonants which accompanied the vocalization, which in the J O A indicated the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body. It was the experiencing of himself in the J_ehO_vA that enabled the pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries to experience the final steps in his descent from the spiritual world. At the same time the consciousness of the J O A was such that he felt himself to be in the light, that he was this tone, J O A. He was then a Man: a resounding (Klingendes) ego, a resounding astral body, within the luminous, shining etheric body. Man was then tone in light. This is the cosmic man.

Thus man is capable of accepting (aufzunehmen) that which he sees out in the cosmos, in the same way as here on earth he accepts the things he sees with his eyes when he looks out to his physical surroundings on the earth. The pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries really felt when he bore the J O A within him as if transported to the Moon-sphere. He shared in what was observed from the point of view of the moon. At that time the human being was still a universal being (Mensch im allgemeinen). It first became man and woman at its descent to earth. But man then felt he was transported to the realms of pre-earthly existence, though aware of the approach of what was earthly. This transporting of themselves into the Moon-sphere was, to the Ephesian pupils, an act of the greatest possible intimacy. They then bore within their hearts and within their souls all the things they had experienced and which sounded in their ears somewhat as follows:

Thou Being, offspring of worlds, who in thy Light-form art strengthened by the Sun under the Moon's control,

Thou art endowed by Mars with his creative resonance, with Mercury's swinging movement of thy limbs ;

Enlightened by the rays of Jupiter's wisdom, And by the love-bearing beauty of Venus,

And Saturn's age-old spiritual inwardness consecrates thee to life in space, to growth in time!

Consciousness of this filled each pupil of Ephesus. He realised that this consciousness which pulsated through him was of the greatest consequence to his humanity.

One can say: this was something which enabled a pupil belonging to the Ephesian Mysteries to feel himself most truly man. To put it trivially—when these words sounded in his ears he felt a consciousness dawn in him that connected him, through the powers of his etheric body, with the whole planetary system:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

This is expressed most pregnantly in the following words spoken to the etheric body by the universe:

“Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt, Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt.”

The man now consciously felt himself within the power of the moonlight.

“Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

Here the resonance, which has something creative in it, comes to him from Mars. And that which imparts power to his limbs, that enables him to become a being of movement, comes from Mercury:

“Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

From Jupiter illumination comes to him:

“Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit.”

And from Venus there comes:

“Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit.”

In order that Saturn can gather together all that completes man inwardly and outwardly, preparing him for his descent to earth, clothing him with his physical body and enabling this physically clothed being, who bears God within him, to carry on his life on earth:

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

From all I have described you can gather that the spiritual life at Ephesus was inwardly bright and full of colour. And this inwardly bright and colourful life contained precisely all that is summed up in the thoughts of Easter, all that the consciousness of man was able to grasp as his own intrinsic worth in the whole cosmos, the whole universe.

Many of those wanderers to whom I alluded in the last lecture, who passed from Mystery to Mystery in order that they might gather the full sum of those influences that came from the Mysteries—many of these wanderers have given us the assurance: that nowhere had the Sphere-harmonies resounded so clearly, so inwardly, as they sounded at Ephesus, because of the perception they had of things as seen from the aspect of the moon. In no other place had the astral light of the world appeared so luminous as when perceived in the light of the sun flooded by the softly glimmering light of the moon—and spiritualized by this astral light as man is ensouled by it—in no other place had they been able to perceive this, or at least not with the same joyousness and inward artistic acceptance.

All this was associated with the temple which later went up in flames through criminal or crazy folly. Initiates of these Ephesian Mysteries were incarnated, as I informed you at the Christmas meeting, in Aristotle and Alexander the Great. These individuals came in touch at that time with what could still be traced of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now an external, apparently chance event is sometimes of great importance in the evolution of the world. Some considerable time ago I informed you that the time of the burning of the temple at Ephesus coincided with the birth of Alexander the Great. But other things also took place through this burning of the temple. Oh, how manifold and tremendous are the things that have happened in the course of centuries to those who belonged to this Temple! How much of spiritual light and wisdom has passed through these Temple Halls! And all that passed within these halls was recorded in the world-ether while the flames burst forth from out the Temple. So that one can say: the continuous Easter festival at Ephesus, enclosed as it was within the Temple Halls, has been inscribed ever since on the vast dome of the universe in respect of this dome's ether-nature, though perhaps in letters that are not perceptible to all.

And so has it been with many things. Much of the wisdom of humanity was in ancient times enclosed within Temple walls. It has escaped from these walls, has been inscribed on the universal ether, and henceforth is immediately visible there to those who have risen to real imaginative knowledge.

This imaginative knowledge is to a certain extent the interpretation of the secrets of the stars. What once was Temple-wisdom has been inscribed on the universal ether, and can thence be read by those possessing Imagination.

This can be put in a different way; yet it is the same in whatever way it is put. One can say: I go forth into the night, and gaze on the starry heavens, allowing the impression they make to sink into me. And if the necessary faculties have been acquired, that which is contained in the grouping of the constellations, in the movements of the planets, is transformed into a mighty script. And when this cosmic script is read, something emerges from it of a similar kind to what I described in the last lecture concerning the Secrets of the Moon. These things can absolutely be read in the script of the firmament by those to whom the stars are not merely objects for mathematical calculations but when they are letters in a cosmic script. Something further might here be added for the elucidation of this matter.

At the very time the Mysteries of the Kabiri arose in Samothrace, and the older Mysteries were declining, something emerged through the influence of these Kabiri Mysteries which for Alexander and Aristotle were like a remembrance of the earlier times they had passed through together in a certain century at Ephesus. (Samothrace was not a Mystery-establishment of remembrance, nor was it a place for work where development was practised; as a matter of fact the life of the Mysteries was in general decline at the time of Alexander.) In this remembrance they heard again the sound of the word J O A. Once more there sounded within them:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,

Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen

Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit

Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit

Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe.

In this remembrance—in this historical remembrance of things long past—there lay a certain power for the creation of something new. From that moment a power went forth for the creation of something new—a very remarkable new thing which has attracted very little attention from mankind. You must try to understand how this new creation which proceeded from Alexander and Aristotle was really brought about.

Take some well-known poetic work, or any other work—the most beautiful you can find—take for instance a German translation of the “Bhagavad Gita,” GSthe's “Faust,” or the “Iphigeneia,” anything on which you set a high value, and think of its rich and mighty content, that of GSthe's “Faust,” for example. By what means is this rich content communicated to you, my dear friends? Let us take it that it is communicated to you as is done in the case of the majority of men: that at some time of your life you read GSthe's “Faust.” What came to you on this occasion on the physical plane? What was on the paper? Nothing was on the paper but certain combinations of a b c d e f, etc. These combinations were the only means by which the mighty content of “Faust” was passed on to you. When you know the Alphabet there is nothing on the printed page that is not comprised in its 26 letters. But the rich content of the “Faust” is conjured from the paper in a magic way by means of these letters. It is clear to the eye that the repetition of a b c is wearisome; it is the most abstract thing imaginable. Yet this abstract thing, rightly combined, gives you the complete “Faust”!

And now, when that cosmic world-tone of the moon was heard again—the tone in which Aristotle or Alexander were versed—the meaning of the fire of Ephesus became clear, they knew how this fire had borne out into the far spaces of the world-ether the secret of Ephesus—and there now arose in Aristotle the inspiration to establish (zu begründen) the Cosmic-script. Only this world-script could not be built on the foundation of a b c d e f; but just as ordinary script was founded on letters, the world-script was founded on thoughts. In this way letters of the world-script came into being.

When I write down the following list, the words are just as abstract as a b c d e:

You have here a few ideas. Learn to accomplish with these ideas which were first propounded to Alexander by Aristotle—learn to do with these ideas what you have learnt to do with abed; you then learn how from Being, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Place, Having, Doing, Suffering, to read the Cosmos.

In the age of abstraction something extraordinary occurred in the schools of logic. Only suppose, if in certain schools concern was not with teaching people to read, but with compiling books in which every possible combinations of a b c d had to be learnt—a c, a b, b e, and so on—but not so as to learn by this to make use of the letter in a way that could bring any rich content to their souls, this would be to do exactly the same as the world has done to the logic of Aristotle. In his logic what were called categories were put forward; they were learnt by heart, but people did not know how to make use of them. This is similar to learning the a b c by heart without knowing how to use it.

Reading in the script of the universe can be traced back to something as simple as the learning of a b c is to the content of “Faust.”

In fact, what has been put forward by Anthroposophy, and can continue to be put forward, is arrived at from these ideas in the same way as the reading of “Faust” is arrived at by means of letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are contained, as a world-alphabet, within these simple concepts.

You have to realize that in the course of the world's development it happened, that as opposed to the earlier direct perception of which the events at Ephesus were still the most characteristic example, something arose which had its beginning at the time of Alexander, and continued to evolve more especially during the Middle Ages, something most profoundly hidden and esoteric.

Most profoundly esoteric is the thought living in these ten simple conceptions. We must learn really to live more and more in them; we must strive to experience them in our souls, when these have a richly organized spirit-filled content, as vividly as we experience the a b c.

Thus we see, how in these ten concepts whose inner illumination and source of power has once more to be discovered, was comprised something which like a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom endured through thousands of years. And it will one day come to pass that what seems actually to have been laid within a grave—that is, the Wisdom of the world—will once more emerge and find the Light of the world, men will learn to read in the cosmos once more, and the resurrection of that which has been kept in concealment during the interval of human evolution between the two spiritual epochs, will again be experienced.

Our purpose, my dear friends, is to reveal to mankind that which has been hidden. I can therefore say, as on other occasions: Anthroposophy is a Christmas event, and in all its acts it is also an Easter event, a resurrection experience that is connected with a burial. And it is important that we should feel, especially at this Easter Assembly, the solemn sanctity—if I may so express it—of our Anthroposophical aspirations, in that we have some perception of being able to go to-day to a Spiritual Being who stands near us, perhaps immediately beyond the threshold, and to Whom we can say: Ah! at that time humanity was blessed by a divine spiritual revelation, which shone with exceptional clarity at Ephesus, but now all that lies buried. How can I again bring forth what thus lies buried! Yet we can believe that what once has been can somewhere be found again—can be found in the grave where it was hidden.

Then a Being will answer us, as on a similar occasion this same Being answered once before: “That which ye seek is no longer here, it is in your hearts, if only ye will open them to receive it in the right way.”

Anthroposophy already dwells in the hearts of men. These men have only to open their hearts to it in the right way. Then we shall experience in full sunlight, not in the old-time instinctive way, our return to that Wisdom which lived in, and illumined the Mysteries.

These are the things, my dear friends, which I desired to bring before you at this Easter season. For to fill ourselves with that which like a sacred breath can inflame the heart of everyone who holds to Anthroposophy, and can bear us with it into the spiritual world, is an impulse which is closely associated with the Christmas Impulse given at Dornach. This impulse must not remain something that can be thought out; it cannot stop at intellectuality; it must be an impulse coming from the heart, not dry or insipid—not sentimental, but in accordance with its whole nature it must be a very solemn one.

In the same way as the flames at Ephesus were used by Aristotle to fire his heart anew, and after they had streamed up into the outer ether they had brought to him again the secrets which he was then able to grasp in their primal significance ... as the fire at Ephesus could be used in this way, it is laid upon us, and we shall soon be able to carry out the demand (I say this in all humility), it is laid upon us to use that which as the aim and purpose of Anthroposophy was carried up into the ether along with the flames of the GStheanum for the further carrying out of this purpose.

What is to be the outcome of this, my dear friends? The outcome is to be that we receive a new impulse from the GStheanum. At the annual commemoration of the sad event which falls at Christmas time, the time in which this misfortune overtook us, we must receive a fresh impulse from the GStheanum. And why? Because we should feel what formerly was more or less an earthly concern, founded and constructed as a thing of earth, has been borne up by the flames into the wide spaces of the cosmos. Because this misfortune has come upon us we ought to be able to say in recognizing the results of this misfortune: We now realize that we should not have carried this out as a merely earthly concern (Erdensache) but as one appertaining to the whole far-reaching etheric world in which the Spirit dwells: then what happened to the GStheanum becomes something that concerns the wide ether in which dwells the spirit-filled wisdom of the universe. It has been carried out far into the beyond, and we must fill ourselves with the impulses of the GStheanum that comes to us from out the cosmos.

Let us take this as we will, let us take it as an image. But the image contains a profound truth. And this profound truth can be expressed in simple words when we say: The activities (Wirken) of Anthroposophy have been permeated with an esoteric tendency since the time of the Christmas impulse, 1923. This esoteric impulse or tendency exists, for though the earthly part through the co-operation of physical fire streamed out into space as astral light ... this impulse works back again into the Anthroposophical movement if only we are in a position to receive it.

When we are able to do this we are aware of a most important factor in all that lives in Anthroposophy. This important factor or part (Glied) is the Easter-feeling (Osterstimmung), that Anthroposophical feeling that can never be persuaded that the spirit can possibly die, but that, when owing to the world it has to die, it rises eternally anew. Anthroposophy must hold to the spirit that from eternal foundations ever rises again.

Let us take this to our hearts as an Easter thought, an Easter feeling. We will then take with us from this place of meeting, when we take our way into other walks of life, something which will give us courage and power to carry on our work.

[ 2 ] Man is surrounded today by a world which was once of a wholly divine-spiritual nature—divine-spiritual being of which he also was a member. Thus at that time the world belonging to man was a world of divine-spiritual being. But this was no longer so in a later stage of evolution. The world had then become a cosmic manifestation of the Divine Spiritual; the Divine Being hovered behind the manifestation. Nevertheless, the Divine-Spiritual lived and moved in all that was thus manifested. A world of stars was already there, in the light and movement of which the Divine-Spiritual lived and moved and manifested itself. One may say that at that time, in the position or movement of a star, the activity of the Divine and Spiritual was directly evident.

[ 3 ] And in all this—in the working of the Divine Spirit in the Cosmos, and in the life of man resulting from this divine activity—Michael was as yet in his own element—unhindered, unresisted. The adjustment of the relation between the Divine and the Human was in his hands.

[ 4 ] But other ages dawned. The world of the stars ceased to be a direct and present manifestation of Divine-Spiritual activity. The constellations lived and moved, maintaining what the Divine activity had been in them in the past. The Divine-Spiritual dwelt in the Cosmos in manifestation no longer, but in the manner of its working only. There was now a certain distinct separation between the Divine Spiritual and the cosmic World. Michael, by virtue of his own nature, adhered to the Divine-Spiritual, and endeavoured to keep mankind as closely as possible in touch with it.

This he continued to do, more and more. His will was to preserve man from living too intensely in a world which represents only the Working of the Divine and Spiritual—which is not the real Being, nor its Manifestation.

[ 5 ] It is a deep source of satisfaction to Michael that through man himself he has succeeded in keeping the world of the stars in direct union with the Divine and Spiritual. For when man, having fulfilled his life between death and a new birth, enters on the way to a new Earth-life, in his descent he seeks to establish a harmony between the course of the stars and his coming life on Earth. In olden times this harmony existed as a matter of course, because the Divine-Spiritual was active in the stars, where human life too had its source. But today, when ‘the course of the stars is only a continuing of the manner in which the Divine-Spiritual worked in the past, this harmony could not exist unless man sought it. Man brings his divine-spiritual portion—which he has preserved from the past—into relation with the stars, which now only bear their divine-spiritual nature within them as an after-working from an earlier time.

In this way there comes into man's relation to the world something of the Divine, which corresponds to former ages and yet appears in these later times. That this is so, is the deed of Michael. And this deed gives him such deep satisfaction that in it he finds a portion of his very life, a portion of his sun-like, living energy.

[ 6 ] But at the present time, when Michael directs his spiritual eyes to the Earth, he sees another fact as well—very different from the above. During his physical life between birth and death man has a world around him in which even the Working of the Divine-Spiritual no longer appears directly, but only something which has remained over as its result;—we may describe it by saying it is only the accomplished Work of the Divine-Spiritual. This accomplished Work, in all its forms, is essentially of a Divine and Spiritual kind. To human vision the Divine is manifested in the forms and in the processes of Nature; but it is no longer indwelling as a living principle. Nature is this divinely accomplished work of God; Nature everywhere around us is an image of the Divine Working.

[ 7 ] In this world of sun-like Divine glory, but no longer livingly Divine, man dwells. Yet as a result of Michael's working upon him man has maintained his connection with the essential Being of the Divine and Spiritual. He lives as a being permeated by God in a world that is no longer permeated by God.

[ 8 ] Into this world that has become empty of God, man will carry what is in him—what his being has become in this present age.

[ 9 ] Humanity will evolve into a new world-evolution. The Divine and Spiritual from which man originates can become the cosmically expanding Human Being, radiating with a new light through the Cosmos which now exists only as an image of the Divine and Spiritual.

[ 10 ] The Divine Being which will thus shine forth through Humanity will no longer be the same Divine Being which was once the Cosmos. In its passage through Humanity the Divine-Spiritual will come to a realisation of Being which it could not manifest before.

[ 11 ] The Ahrimanic Powers try to prevent evolution from taking the course here described. It is not their will that the original Divine-Spiritual Powers should illumine the Universe in its further course. They want the cosmic intellectuality which they themselves have absorbed to radiate through the whole of the new Cosmos, and in this intellectualised and Ahrimanised Cosmos they want man to live on.

[ 12 ] Were he to live such a life man would lose Christ. For Christ came into the world with an Intellectuality that is still of the very same essence as once lived in the Divine Spiritual, when the Divine-Spiritual in its own Being still informed the Cosmos. But if at the present time we speak in such a manner that our thoughts can also be the thoughts of Christ, we set over against the Ahrimanic Powers something which can save us from succumbing to them.

[ 13 ] To understand the meaning of Michael's mission in the Cosmos is to be able to speak in this way. In the present time we must be able to speak of Nature in the way demanded by the evolutionary stage of the Consciousness Soul or Spiritual Soul. We must be able to receive into ourselves the purely natural-scientific way of thinking. But we ought also to learn to feel and speak about Nature in a way that is according to Christ. We ought to learn the Christ-Language—not only about redemption from Nature, about the soul and things Divine—but about the things of the Cosmos.

[ 14 ] When with inward, heartfelt feeling we realise the mission and the deeds of Michael and those belonging to him, when we enter into all that they are in our midst, then we shall be able to maintain our human connection with the Divine and Spiritual origin, and understand how to cultivate the Christ Language about the Cosmos. For to understand Michael is to find the way in our time to the Logos, as lived by Christ here on Earth and among men.

[ 15 ] Anthroposophy truly values what the natural-scientific way of thinking has learned to say about the world during the last four or five centuries. But in addition to this language it speaks another, about the nature of man, about his evolution and that of the Cosmos; for it would fain speak the language of Christ and Michael.

[ 16 ] If both these languages are spoken it will not be possible for evolution to be broken off or to pass over to Ahriman before the original Divine-Spiritual is found. To speak only in the natural-scientific way corresponds to the separation of intellectuality from the original Divine and Spiritual. This can indeed lead over into the Ahrimanic realm if Michael's mission remains unobserved. But it will not do so if through the power of Michael's example the intellect which has become free finds itself again in the original cosmic intellectuality, which has separated from man and become objective to him. For that cosmic intellectuality lies in the original source of man, and it appeared in Christ in full reality of being within the sphere of humanity, after it had left man for a time so that he might unfold his freedom.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with reference to the preceding study)

[ 17 ] 112. The Divine-Spiritual comes to expression in the Cosmos in different ways, in succeeding stages: (1) through its own and inmost Being; (2) through the Manifestation of this Being; (3) through the active Working, when the Being withdraws from the Manifestation; (4) through the accomplished Work, when in the outwardly apparent Universe no longer the Divine itself, but only the forms of the Divine are there.

[ 18 ] 113. In the modern conception of Nature man has no relation to the Divine, but only to the accomplished Work. With all that is imparted to the human soul by this science of Nature, man can unite himself either with the powers of Christ or with the dominions of Ahriman.

[ 19 ] 114. Michael is filled with the striving—working through his example in perfect freedom—to embody in human cosmic evolution the relation to the Cosmos which is still preserved in man himself from the ages when the Divine Being and the Divine Manifestation held sway. In this way, all that is said by the modern view of Nature—relating as it does purely to the image, purely to the form of the Divine—will merge into a higher, spiritual view of Nature. The latter will indeed exist in man; but it will be an echo in human experience of the Divine relation to the Cosmos which prevailed in the first two stages of cosmic evolution. This is how Anthroposophy confirms the view of Nature which the age of the Spiritual Soul has evolved, while supplementing it with that which is revealed to spiritual seership.

[ 1 ] WE speak to-day of the ‘Unconscious’ of ‘Subconscious’, when we wish to signify that the soul-experiences of ordinary consciousness—observation, representation, realization, volition—are dependent on a state which is not included in this consciousness. That knowledge which would base itself only on these experiences can no doubt, by logical sequence of argument, point to such a ‘subconscious’; but that is all it can do. It can bring no contribution to a definition of the unconscious.

[ 2 ] The imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge which has been described in the foregoing considerations, can give such a definition. Now we shall try to do the same for the soul-experiences of man during sleep.

[ 3 ] The sleep-experiences of the soul do not enter upon ordinary consciousness, for this rests on the basis of the physical organization; and during sleep the experience of the soul is outside the body. When in waking the soul begins, with the help of the body, to imagine, to feel, and to will, it joins up in its memory with those experiences which took place before sleep on the basis of the physical organization. The experiences of sleep reveal themselves only to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. They do not appear in the guise of memory, but as if in a psychic review of it.

[ 4 ] I shall now have to describe what is revealed in this review. Because it is hid from ordinary consciousness, such a description of this review must, when the consciousness is faced with it unprepared, naturally appear grotesque. But the foregoing explanations have shown that such a description is possible, and how it is to be taken. Although it may even be laughed at from some quarter or another, I shall give it as it emerges from the states of consciousness already described.

[ 5 ] At first, in falling asleep, a man finds himself in an inwardly vague, undifferentiated state of being. He sees there no difference between his own being and that of the universe; nor any between separate objects or people. His state of existence is universal and vague. Taken up into the imaginative consciousness, this experience becomes an ‘Ego-feeling’, in which the ‘universe-feeling’ is included. He has left the sphere of the senses, and has not yet clearly entered upon another world.

[ 6 ] We shall now have to use expressions such as ‘Feeling’, ‘longing’, etc., which also in ordinary life refer to something known; and yet we shall have to use them to denote processes which remain unknown to the ordinary soul-life. But the soul experiences them as facts during sleep. Think, for instance, how in daily life joy is experienced consciously. Physically an enlargement of the small blood vessels takes place, and other things, and this enlargement is a fact; when it takes place, joy is consciously felt. Similarly, the soul goes through real experiences in sleep; and this will be described in terms which refer to corresponding experience of the imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness. If, for example, we speak of ‘longing’ we shall mean an actual soul-process which is imaginatively revealed as longing. Thus the unconscious states and experiences of the soul will be described as if they were conscious.

[ 7 ] Simultaneously with the feeling of vagueness arid the absence of differentiation, there arises in the soul a longing for rest in what is spiritual and divine. The human soul evolves this longing as a counterbalance to the feeling of being lost in infinity. Having lost the sphere of the senses, it craves for a state out of the spiritual world that will support it.

[ 8 ] Dreams interweave themselves into the state of soul just described. They traverse the unconscious with half-conscious experiences. The real form of sleep experiences is not made clearer through ordinary dreams, but still less clear. This lack of clearness applies also to the imaginative consciousness if this latter is clouded by dreams arising spontaneously. One perceives the truth on the further side of life both awake and in dream by means of that conception of the soul which is attained by free will through the exercises previously explained.

[ 9 ] The next state through which the soul lives then is like a division or partition of itself into inner happenings which are differentiated from each other. During this period of sleep, the soul feels itself to be not a unity but an inner plurality, and this state is one suffused with anxiety. Were it felt consciously, it would be soul-fear. But the human soul experiences the real counterpart of this anxiety every night, though remaining unconscious of it.

[ 10 ] In the case of modern man there appears at this moment of sleep the soul-saving effect which corresponds in the waking condition to his self surrender to Christ. It was different, of course, before the events of Golgotha. Then men, when awake, received from their religious beliefs the antidote which carried over into the condition of sleep and was the medicine for this fear. For the man who lives after the events of Golgotha are substituted the religious experiences which he has in the contemplation of the life and death and being of Christ. He overcomes his fears through the working of this into his sleep. This fear prevents, as long as it is present, the inner vision of that which should be experienced by the soul in sleep, as the body prevents it in the waking state. The leadership of Christ overcomes the inner division and transforms the plurality into a unity. And the soul comes now to the point of having an inner life different from that of the waking condition. The physical and etheric organisms belong now to its outer world. On the other hand in its present inner self it experiences a reflection of the planetary movements. The soul experiences something cosmic in place of the individual, conditioned by the physical and etheric organisms. The soul lives outside the body; and its inner life is an inner reflection of the planetary motions. This being so, the inspired consciousness is aware of the corresponding inner processes in the manner which has been described in our previous studies. This consciousness perceives also how that which the soul receives through its contact with the planets continues to have an after-effect in the consciousness after waking. This planetary influence continues in awakeness as a stimulant in the rhythm of breathing and blood-circulation. During sleep the physical and etheric organisms are subjected to the effect of the planet-stimulation, which by day influence them, as described, as the after-effect of the previous night.

[ 11 ] There are other experiences side by side with these. In this phase of its sleep-existence, the soul experiences its relation to all human souls with which it had come into contact in earthly life. Considered intuitively this leads to certainty on the subject of repeated earth life; for these earth-lives reveal themselves in their relation to the soul. And the connection with other spirit-beings, which live in the world without ever assuming a human body, is also one of the soul's experiences. [ 12 ] But in this condition of sleep the soul experiences also what point to good and evil tendencies, and good and evil events in the predestined course of earthly life. In fact, what older philosophers have termed ‘Karma’ is now presented to the soul.

[ 13 ] In daily life all these happenings of the soul have so much effect that they help to cause the feelings, the general mood of the soul, of happiness or unhappiness.

[ 14 ] In the further course of sleep another state of the soul is added to the one just described. It goes through a copy or imitation of state of the Twin Stars. As the bodily organs are sensed in waking, so a reconstructing of the fixed constellations is now attempted. The cosmic experience of the soul is widening. It is now a spirit amongst spirits. ‘Intuition’ sees the sun and the other fixed stars as physical projections of spirits, in the manner just described. These adventures of the soul reverberate during daily life as its religious leanings, its religious feeling and willing. It can be said indeed that the religious longing, stirring in the depth of the soul, is in awake life the aftermath of the stellar experience during the state of sleep.

[ 15 ] But it is significant above all that in this state the soul is faced with the facts of life and death. It sees itself as a spirit-being, entering into a physical body through conception and the life of the cell, and unconsciously it sees the event of death as a passing over into a purely spiritual world. That the soul in its waking state cannot believe in the reality of what outwardly represents itself to the senses as the events of birth and death is therefore not only the imaginative picturing of a longing but a vaguely-felt reliving through things presented to the soul in sleep.

If man could recall to his consciousness everything he lives through unconsciously from falling asleep to waking up, he would have a consciousness-content giving the experiences of truth to his philosophical ideas in the first occurrence in which sense-phenomena merge Into a universal inner cosmic life, and in which a kind of pantheistic knowledge of God occurs. If he was conscious of this planet and fixed-star life of sleep he would indeed have a cosmology full of content. And the conclusion could be formed from the experience of star-life, that a human being has a life as spirit among spirits.

From falling asleep, through further states of sleep, man actually becomes an unconscious philosopher, cosmologist, and God-filled being. From the depths of experiences otherwise only possible in sleep, ‘Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition’ lift up that which shows what kind of being man himself really is; how he is part of the Cosmos and how he becomes one with God.

[ 16 ] This last happens to man in the deepest stage of sleep. From there the soul begins to return to the world of the senses. In the impulse leading to this return the intuitive consciousness recognizes the activity of those spirit beings which have their physical counterpart in the moon. The spiritual moon-activities are the ones recalling men in their sleep back to their presence on earth. Naturally these same lunar activities are also present in the New Moon. But the transformation of whatever changes visibly in the moon has its significance concerning the part lunar activities play in man's holding on to his earthly life from birth or conception to death.

[ 17 ] After the deepest state of sleep man returns to his waking state through the same intermediate states. Before awakening he goes once more through experiencing the universal world state, and the longing for God, in which dreams can play their part.

This occult lecture was inspired by the question: Do the souls of stillborn or deceased young children also reincarnate after 1500 to 1800 years? And does such a re-embodiment serve a purpose?

1500 to 1800 years is an average period. There are souls that only reincarnate after 4000 to 2000 years. However, the question asked is connected with much deeper questions. There are seven great mysteries of existence in the becoming of our earth. Of these seven great mysteries of existence, one of these secrets is handed over to people from time to time in the succession of human races. Our present race will receive the fourth. Our theosophical current is nothing more than the preparation for the communication of the fourth of the so-called unspeakable secrets. Only a small part of what the great masters learn from the fourth secret may we communicate in lectures. There are things that it is sinful to utter with words, says the Apostle Paul.

One of these things is the fourth secret. It is the secret of life and death. The theosophical current has the task of enabling us to learn about birth and death and how they are related in a lawful way. It is not yet time for the whole of the fourth secret to be revealed to us, but parts of it are being revealed little by little. We have spirits who have already anticipated the stages of development of future stages. Plato, for example, is a “fifth rounder”. Gautama Buddha anticipated what humanity will only achieve in the sixth round.

I will now try to say something about what reincarnation depends on. When a person dies, he does not discard a worthless garment. This physical incarnation really has a purpose. We bear the fruits of it into the other incarnation. Learning the art of writing may serve as an example here. You learn the steps, form letters and learn to put them together in a context. Just as you take one thing from the various individual activities, namely the ability to write, and you no longer remember your individual tasks at a later time, it is the same with rebirth. The ability to write has remained, the individual stages of learning have been forgotten.

It is the same with rebirth. The individual experiences have been forgotten, the abilities gained from them have remained. The voice of conscience, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, we have learned all this in previous incarnations. The savage who originally eats his fellow human beings gradually learns that he is not allowed to do so because it causes him to incur the hostility of his fellow human beings, because it causes enmity.

Our organs are the means of acquiring experience and skills. It is the organs that we receive in the new incarnation. If we are incarnated today and incarnate again in fifty years' time, or even immediately after our death, could we really learn something new that we could add to what we have already learned in the broader sense?

No, things on Earth don't change that quickly. What we learn up to the age of seventy is one lesson, and the following seventy years would not differ much from the previous ones. So we only incarnate again when the Earth has changed enough for us to learn something substantial again. This is related to the law that a person is reincarnated after an average of two thousand years. [...] Within two thousand four hundred or two thousand six hundred years, cosmic conditions change. So there is something new to learn again. Man must therefore wait until new constellations occur between the sun and the earth that can influence our being in a completely new way. But there are also deviations because what man has to do within the rounds is not the only thing.

At a certain stage of development, the human being will leave the earth. He will then continue to live on a new planet. However, he can only enter the scene of the new earth, or rather the new planet, when he has reached a certain level of development. The human being has to develop his ego to such an extent that he will be able to enter this new scene.

The thought that lives in you is not just what lives in your head. Every thought is a living force. Just as any air wave propagates and can still be perceived far away from its original location, so does my thought propagate. It continues to have an effect in the mental world. We have to see it as such a force. A thought is a force as strong as if you were splitting wood with an axe. You can cut and work with thoughts – and also with your drives – deep into the astral world. The changes you bring about there are much more significant than any physical events.

We have to become clear about these forces and we have to learn what changes we are causing. This is the first consecration, the experience and clarification of the inner drives, the terrible beings. We cannot think without affecting a whole host of beings. The adept is fundamentally different from other people because the adept does what others do unconsciously, consciously.

We affect the entire world around us. If it were only a matter of human development, we would regularly be reincarnated. However, a higher individuality may be needed for human development, in which case it must incarnate more quickly. The laws that cause an individual to reincarnate do not only apply to that person's development; the demands and laws for the entire environment also apply.

When such conditions arise, then such a personality may have died immediately beforehand or a few years before, and they incarnate again immediately. In the Theosophical Society, we have such personalities who were re-embodied almost immediately after death.

It depends on a great many circumstances after how many years an individuality has to reincarnate. A personality that has taken in a lot can take a long time to process the substances it has taken in. We know from a great personality in the development of German thought, Goethe, that he was previously incarnated in Greece at the time of Plato. And we know that he was reborn as Goethe in the eighteenth century. It was one of the most harmonious incarnations he experienced in Greece. He was a student of sculpture. The student of sculpture had absorbed so much that it took him so long to process it all. “Iphigenia in Tauris” could only be written with a great knowledge of Greek sculpture. Plato's lofty idealism flows towards us again in the profound passages of Goethe's “Faust”. The “fairytale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily contains the revelation of Goethe's harmonious development at the time of his Greek incarnation.

Bismarck could not work like Goethe.

Not all abilities need to be expressed in the embodiment. If someone who is in the devachan is able to carry out a necessary task on earth at a certain time, he will be re-embodied. He must then sacrifice himself for the sake of all humanity.

“Creare” is usually translated as “creating”. It has the same root as the Sanskrit word “kri”, which is the same as what we recognize in “karma”. It means “to will”. The body is willed by certain forces, by so-called “destiny directors”. The body is then brought into a suitable connection and mixture. Aristotle still used the word for human labor, but at that time it still meant “choosing,” “wanting.”

The physical body is an instrument for the soul, just as the piano is for a person who wants to make music. When we use the instrument, we take the fruits of our development with us. However, even the most highly developed individuals can still make mistakes when choosing a body. It may be that a person who would be capable of great achievements cannot find the body in which he can bring the forces within him to fruition. These are possibilities that must always be taken into account when doing research in this area. A student of Plato will be able to take quite different things with them into the next life.

But those who only have monotonous experiences in one incarnation will have few germinal forces to carry through. And therefore they will be able to reincarnate quickly. Savages who have little experience only spend a short time in Devachan. Chelas, on the other hand, those who have already acquired the right to the championship, can do without Devachan. They do not undergo Devachan. Therefore, they can re-incarnate immediately after death to continue serving humanity.

In childhood, the soul of the child has weak, soft powers that still need to be developed and refined. If you were unable to develop the astral body in one incarnation, it is possible that you will be reborn as a child for the sole purpose of developing the emotional body. A scholar who has a highly developed mind but no feelings will then only need a short period of tutoring as a child and will soon leave the body again.

An attempt to be born can also fail. Then a new attempt is made if the previous body was unable to express the forces. There are even examples in the Bible where re-embodiment occurs immediately after death. It is important to know that re-embodiment not only has a purpose, but that it is a necessity. (Here the example of the clock was given.) The [clock] is a product of development. It could only come into being when different sciences had reached the same level of development at the same time. It took the ability to work with metal and people who had mastered the laws of scientific mechanics. All these people combine at a certain level, and then you have the ability to make a clock in that age.

Those who look only in one direction make a mistake. Those who have developed in only one direction, like a Darwinist, for example, also make a mistake. Monism is not a unity because it has emerged from a unity, but the other way around: body and soul are one because they have connected at a certain level and thus form a unity. The wheel in the clock broke, and with it the unity. The clock is unusable. It is the same when an organism has a “bad wheel”.

The next question was whether the facts in the world are based on a plan or whether chance rules them. (The answer was:)

Development depends on temperature, on mountain air or sea air, on city or country. Let us assume that a brick fell on a person's head. Is that a coincidence or is it part of a plan? A person falls into the water, another jumps in after him, helps him, but he catches a cold and dies. Now let us take a counterpart to this: a person sees his enemy, pushes him into the water. But he also falls in and subsequently dies. These are two very different internal cases. But outwardly it seems as if they are the same cases. Both die as a result of falling into the water. The question of whether the world is governed by a plan full of wisdom or just by coincidence is something we will deal with in more detail in the near future.

Today we will discuss some topics that have played a certain role in our current development of the spiritual movement within Germany. As you know, and as some of you have already experienced, we have discussed the various spiritual truths and insights based on the Gospels. We have talked about what can be said in connection with the Gospel of John in a wide variety of places, and we have also discussed what can be said in connection with the Gospel of Luke. Now, admittedly, not all of you have heard these things. Nor is it intended to speak today in the sense of presupposing something of what has been said there. Rather, it is intended only to mention to you some of the overall field of this spiritual-scientific field, which must be important for everyone.

It has often been mentioned here in Stuttgart that Christianity, and everything connected with it, has made a deep incision in the overall development of humanity and that what is happening around us today, what the human soul can experience today, cannot be properly understood without considering the full significance of the Christ event within our Earth's history. For every single human soul, it is of infinite importance to become acquainted with the significance of this event.

Now you know that this Christ event for humanity is described in four documents, in the so-called four Gospels. You are all familiar with these four documents and have certainly followed them in a variety of ways. These four documents, the Gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke and the Gospel according to John, have met with the most diverse fates in the course of human development since the founding of Christianity. Great transformations have taken place in the judgment and position of man regarding these four documents. If we ask ourselves first how these four documents appear to today's man, even to today's theologian, the answer is quite obvious. One says to oneself: First of all, we have the three documents of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. They at least agree – so the general opinion today – on some points. But the fourth, the Gospel of John, is quite different from these three documents. At first, this Gospel of John makes such an impression on people that they say to themselves: If we take the first three Gospels as historical documents, as descriptions of the life of Christ Jesus, then the fourth document contradicts the first three so fundamentally that we cannot take this fourth as a description that corresponds to the historical facts. Thus, the opinion exists that this fourth document is merely a writing that arose from the confession of a man who was faithfully devoted to the mission of Christ Jesus, a kind of hymn that arose from the heart to express in an enthusiastic way what the narrator had to say. The other three gospels are also called the canonical gospels because they attempt to provide a kind of historical picture and because it is believed that they reflect the historical facts to a certain extent. However, if one wants to look for contradictions that the external mind, bound to physical conditions, seeks, then the first three gospels truly present such contradictions. For should there be no contradictions in the fact that the Gospel of Matthew tells of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, tells of the flight to Egypt, of the appearance of the Magi from the Orient, whereas the Gospel of Luke tells of a journey to Bethlehem, but completely omits what is told in the Gospel of Matthew about the Magi, that the flight to Egypt is kept secret and so on? We do not want to go into the details of the three years of Christ Jesus' ministry. We could find contradiction upon contradiction.

Now one could raise the question: How has the development of the judgment about the Gospels actually progressed over the course of Christian times? Was it always the case that people looked at the Gospels and saw contradictions in them above all else? We must be clear about how this development of judgment about the Gospels has taken place. It is not so very long ago that people have had access to the Gospels as they do today. They have only been available to the general public for a short time. Before the invention of the printing press, the Gospels were basically only in the hands of a few people, and truly not of the most ignorant, but of those people who had studied them in the most erudite way, who had made them the subject of their lives. And it is not the case that the further back in time we go, the more and more people said: There are contradictions – but the opposite is true. The further back we go, the more it appears that these contradictions were not perceived, that people had the four gospels next to each other and did not see the contradictions. The whole mood that people had towards the Gospels was quite different in the first Christian centuries. If we wanted to characterize this mood, we would have to say that the people of the first Christian centuries were filled with tremendous reverence for what is described in the Gospels. This whole mood was permeated by looking up to the great figure of Christ Jesus.

So how were the Gospels perceived? How did people perceive the fact that the Gospel of Matthew tells a different story than the Gospel of Luke? They perceived it similarly to how someone today - I have already used the comparison in the various lectures that have been given here and there - photographs a tree from one side. A photograph like this gives a view of the tree. If you went among people with it and wanted to create an impression of the tree based on it, this impression would be highly one-sided. And you could hope to create a more accurate impression of the tree if you photographed it from four sides. Then you would show four pictures of the one tree. These would agree with each other very little, they would be very different. Nevertheless, no one would have the feeling that it could not be that these four photographs were the pictures of a single tree. Everyone would say: I can only get a somewhat complete picture of the tree by having seen it from four sides. That is more or less how people in the early centuries of Christianity felt about the Gospels. They said: the whole great event is described from four sides, and we get a complete picture of it when we really take these four descriptions together and thus, so to speak, get an overall view. But then we must be clear about how these four descriptions from the sides actually relate to each other. The great event is indeed described from four different points of view. If we want to understand what each individual point of view describes, we must first realize the following.

We have before us an enormous individuality, Christ Jesus, an individuality of whom we know from descriptions already given here that he descended from the spiritual world and appeared in Palestine at the beginning of our era. What came to earth as an individuality now appears as a great, all-embracing ideal for every single human being. The individual human being strives upwards, as it were, intuiting that perfection in an individuality that is expressed in the Christ Jesus, and strives towards this ideal. Now, in the beginning, man sees what he can regard as his striving in intellectual, moral and so on. But he sees even more when he enters into what we call the spiritual-scientific movement. There he sees the development into the spiritual world. He knows that man can grow beyond his ordinary self, that he can grow to see into the spiritual world, that he can develop his spiritual senses in order to live up into the spiritual world. That is what man recognizes. In the essay “How to Know Higher Worlds” you have described one side of this upward life, of entering into the spiritual worlds, in which you have described what is called “splitting of the personality”. When a person develops spiritually so that he gradually grows into the spiritual worlds and becomes a seer himself, something similar to a kind of splitting of the personality does indeed occur. Three forces are initially expressed in the personality: thinking, feeling and willing. These three forces are, so to speak, united in the ordinary person; they work together, thinking, feeling and willing. You go out into the meadow, see a flower, that is, you have an idea of the flower; you have thought. You like the flower; you call it beautiful, that is, you have felt. A feeling has connected with thinking. You pluck the flower and take it home, that is, you have desired it. And so the entire outer life of man actually flows. He perceives, thinks, feels and wills, and the three go into each other. Perception gives rise to feeling, feeling to will or abhorrence and the like. When man now develops upward into the higher worlds, develops himself to clairvoyance, to participation in the spiritual worlds, then a splitting of these three forces takes place. In him who has reached a certain level of clairvoyant consciousness, not every thought evokes a feeling, but the thought occurs in isolation, and the feeling can occur in isolation and the will can occur in isolation. And precisely because he is divided into three beings, so to speak, whereas otherwise thinking, feeling and willing are only powers in his soul, man must become all the stronger in his individuality. He must not only then balance three powers, but become master of three beings, of a willing being, of a feeling being, of a thinking being. He must be the leader of a band of these three entities. He must create order; he must rule them, otherwise something evil will happen: the will will pull him in one direction and the intellect in the other, and he will then really be split and no longer find his way. Therefore, man must grow strong within himself, become powerful, so that he can be master in the entities that have become his soul forces. When man therefore develops upwards into the higher worlds, he splits himself, so to speak, into three different entities. When the entities come to meet us from above out of the spiritual worlds and one sees them in their actual entity, which one can only recognize through spiritual vision, then they appear from the outset sharply separated as thinking beings, volitional beings and feeling beings. That is what man develops them into.

This was particularly the case with the great individuality who came to us as the Christ. Therefore, those who first described the Christ said: You cannot describe the Christ by choosing only one point of view; you have to describe him as you first see a thinking, wisdom-filled being, then as you see a willing being, and then as you see a feeling being. He must be described from the point of view of wisdom, from the point of view of will, from the point of view of feeling. That is how one must describe him, people said. And they were especially prepared for this by the whole education that was customary in ancient times. If a person was to be developed at all into the higher worlds - today something different is needed for the first steps of attaining higher knowledge; in ancient times a different approach was taken - when someone was ripe to be led up, so to speak, to be made a citizen of the spiritual worlds, it was said: Well, he is ripe to be led up into the higher worlds. But let us take a closer look at him! Should we particularly develop wisdom or thinking powers or will in him?

In the old secret schools, not all powers were developed equally. Depending on the karma of the person concerned, one person's thinking was developed to the point of clairvoyance, another's feeling to the point of clairaudience, and a third's will to the point of magical power. Therefore, in the old secret schools there were three classes of developed abilities, those pupils who had developed especially the ability to see through illumination, to see the spiritual world with wisdom - these were the people in the mysteries who were asked when one wanted to know how things are in the higher worlds and how they are connected according to law. If we want to use a trivial expression today, we can say that they were the experts of knowledge within the mysteries. Then there was another class of initiates. In these, feeling was particularly developed. In order for this feeling to be particularly developed, they refrained from training in knowledge and will, and developed feeling in itself. When feeling is particularly developed in a person, then, as a result, he becomes a healer, a physician, something that is almost no longer known today. For in ancient times the physician had exerted a spiritual influence proceeding from the spheres of feeling, and had healed the receptive soul by means of a more highly developed feeling than exists today. This was the second class of initiates. They had trained their feeling to the highest willingness to sacrifice, to the surrender of all the powers they had within them. They divided the work among themselves. If someone wanted to know what was wrong with someone, they went to those who had developed the wisdom. They determined what was wrong and what needed to be done. Then came those who could not say what was wrong with the sick person because they had not developed the ability to think; but they came and sacrificed their strength because they had developed the powers of feeling. At the same time, these were the people who also had other functions, who showed their willingness to make sacrifices in the event of accidents or similar occurrences. The third category of initiates were the magicians. These were the ones who had developed the sphere of will. They had to take the external measures. The magicians had developed the powers of will and were able to carry out the task at hand. So there were three types of initiate: initiates of thinking, initiates of feeling, and initiates of willing. And a fourth class or category consisted of those in whom an attempt had been made to develop something of each of the three remaining faculties: something of thinking, something of feeling, and something of willing. Therefore, they did not advance as far as the others in any one sphere, but they showed how, with a certain initiation into the three spheres, things are connected. Thus there were powerful initiates of wisdom, powerful initiates of sacrifice, powerful initiates of magistery, and a fourth category, which had something of each of the first three.

When now the Christ Jesus was to be described, so to speak, from all sides, there were found - this can be explained in more detail another time, today it can only be done in broad strokes - four people who now described the abilities that were naturally united in him from their four points of view. One of them, for example, was particularly initiated into the secrets of thinking. He described the Christ Jesus from the standpoint of the one who could understand him particularly well, an initiate of wisdom. He left out the other sides. Another was an initiate of feeling. He described the Christ Jesus from the standpoint of feeling, as a physician, so to speak, as a healer. A third was an initiate of magisterial power. He described the powers that the Christ could unfold to organize all of humanity. And a fourth was an initiate of the fourth class, in which the powers worked together, working in harmony. He described primarily the human work of Christ Jesus. He did not see the full power of wisdom, of sacrificial service, nor the mighty magic strength of the willpower of Christ Jesus; but he saw how the three powers of thought, feeling and will were harmoniously combined in Christ Jesus. He described the human Christ Jesus.

Thus we have described the Christ Jesus to four initiates. The one who described the Christ Jesus as an initiate of wisdom was the writer of the Gospel of John; the one who described him as an initiate of feeling was the writer of the Gospel of Luke ; the one who described him in terms of magical power, that was the writer of the Gospel of Mark; and the one who described the harmonious synthesis of the lower three human members, that was the writer of the Gospel of Matthew. Thus each described that in Christ Jesus in which he was initiated.

Thus we shall understand that we can gain a complete picture of Christ Jesus through the four Gospels, in that they describe what was particularly close to the four personalities on which they are based. Anyone who has the necessary reverence for such a great individuality as the Christ will say: Precisely because of this I can gain a comprehensive picture, that the writers of the Gospels, each one, gave the best they could give. But that is why it is also necessary that you do not always take what is said in spiritual science in reference to the four Gospels, to the fourth for instance, or the third, or the second, or the first, as if you had the whole truth about Christ Jesus in each such chapter. It could easily have been thought from the various lectures that have been given here and there: Now the Christ Jesus has been described, and at most it would still be interesting to describe him with reference to another gospel. It is not so. One gets only the picture from one side, if one describes the Christ Jesus according to one gospel. We must wait until, in the course of our spiritual movement, the Christ Jesus has been described in connection with all four gospels. Only then will you have all the secrets that can be said about him.

Now we will have to start from a certain one-sided description in order to gather together, so to speak, a picture of Christ Jesus, but in such a way that you really have to keep to what has just been said. You must not go away today from the lecture and say: Well, now we have the truth in these matters - but you must say to yourself: It has now been described from one point of view and the other must be added and must be illuminated with what is said from other points of view.

In the Christ Jesus we actually have a confluence of all previous spiritual currents of humanity and at the same time a rebirth of the same. In the Christ Jesus, all spiritual currents flow together and are reborn, reborn to a higher degree. We could mention many such currents of pre-Christian times that arise from spiritual science in the context of those considerations that tie in with the four Gospels, currents that we see flowing together in the Christ event; but for now we will draw attention to only three currents.

First of all, there is a powerful spiritual current that has been active in Asia since ancient times. This is what we can call Zarathustrianism. A second spiritual current is that which flourished in India and reached a certain high point with the appearance of Gautama Buddha, six hundred years before our era. A third spiritual current is that which found expression in the ancient Hebrew people. So that we have the confluence in Christ Jesus of the ancient Hebrew spiritual current, then that which was realized in Gautama Buddha, and that which was associated with the name Zarathustra. We could mention many more such spiritual currents, but that would make the matter too confusing.

Now, in a certain way, everything that actually happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era comes to light in the four Gospels – if we really understand them correctly. It is not the task of spiritual science to draw from the Gospels what it has to say. Nothing at all of what is said about me is drawn from the Gospels. The only source for the spiritual researcher is what is called the Akasha Chronicle, that which can be observed clairvoyantly. If all the Gospels had been lost due to some catastrophe, everything that is said about the Christ in spiritual science could still be said. It is based on spiritual research. Only afterwards is the result of this spiritual research compared with what is in the Gospels. And that is precisely what gives the Gospels their objective reverence when one sees what is presented in the Gospels. You must never lose sight of this point of view. We are not drawing on the Gospels; therefore what I am going to tell you now is not drawn from the Gospels either. But we can compare it afterwards with what is in the Gospels, and we will find it to be in agreement.

One of the spiritual currents that then flowed into Christianity is the one that reached its peak in the personality that was incarnated in India as Gautama Buddha about six hundred years before our era. What kind of individuality is this? We understand this individuality when we consider the following: Everything that has gradually emerged in the development of humanity is precisely a product that develops and gradually settles in. You would be mistaken if you believed that the abilities of today's human beings have always been there. Today, for example, there is something called the voice of conscience. It has not always existed. We can almost grasp when conscience arose in the course of human development. If you go back to Aeschylus, you will find nothing of a description of conscience in his works. It is only in Euripides that we find a description of conscience. Thus, the Greek consciousness first developed the concept of conscience between these two. What man today calls an inner voice has only just developed. Before that, there was, within humanity, we can say, a kind of clairvoyant consciousness. If a person had done something he should not have done, a picture would appear to him like a vengeful spirit, and it would pursue him. This was what the Greeks called the Furies. He really saw the fruits and the avenging spirits of his evil deeds around him. This phenomenon, which was outside of man, has been drawn into the human soul as the voice of conscience. And so, too, did the other faculties of men come into being only gradually, and it is only short-sightedness on the part of men, who do not see farther than the end of their own noses, so to speak, which outer science amply does, to believe that men have always been as they are today.

Thus, people have not had what we might call the teaching of compassion and love. We have to imagine the teaching of compassion and love in ancient times as being very different from today. Today, people can, so to speak, go within themselves. When this or that happens outside, he can allow the feeling of compassion and love to arise within him, and he knows that this is good. He can find the principles of love and compassion within himself. This was not the case in the past; rather, in the past, it was instilled in people purely by suggestion from those charged with instilling it, and they were told how they should behave. People themselves had to be guided. There were individual leaders and guides for humanity who indicated how people should behave. The guides for humanity dictated what should be done in the way of acts of love and compassion. And those who were the guides in the field of love and compassion were in turn under higher guides and all together under a guide who is called the Bodhisattva of love and compassion. He had the mission to spread the teaching of compassion and love. But this Bodhisattva, who was the leader in terms of compassion and love, was not like an ordinary incarnated human being, in that not his entire being was absorbed in the physical human being. He had, so to speak, a connecting bridge up to the spiritual world.

The Bodhisattva of compassion and love lived only partly in the physical man; for the rest, his spiritual being reached up into the spiritual worlds. There he brought down the impulses he had to instill. If we wanted to describe this spiritually, we would have to say: the clairvoyant saw the image of the person in whom the bodhisattva was partially embodied, and behind him a mighty spiritual-astral figure that rose up into the spiritual worlds and was only partially in the physical body. That was what this bodhisattva was like. This Bodhisattva was the same one who was then reborn as the king's son Gautama Buddha in India, and for this Bodhisattva, so to speak, this was the ascent to a higher dignity. He had earlier, so to speak, allowed himself to be guided from above, had received impulses from the spiritual world and passed them on. But in this incarnation, six hundred years before our era, he was elevated to the dignity of Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life. That is to say, in this incarnation he experienced his entire individuality entering the physical body. While he had to remain outside as a bodhisattva with a part of himself in order to build the bridge, it was this progress to the dignity of Buddha that allowed him to be fully incarnated in the body. This enabled him not only to receive the teaching of compassion and love through inspiration, but also to look within himself and receive this teaching as the very voice of his heart. This was the enlightenment of the Buddha at the age of twenty-nine, under the bodhi tree. Then it dawned on him: the teaching of compassion and love, independent of the connections with the spiritual world, as a human soul property, that he could think the teaching of compassion and love, which he pronounced in the eightfold path. And the sermon that followed is the great teaching of compassion and love for the first time from a human breast.

This must happen with every human capacity. At some point in the development of humanity, an ability must first be expressed in an individuality; only then can it gradually develop as a separate ability in people in general. The teaching of compassion and love could only be felt as something that man brings out of himself after it has been brought by an individuality. In Oriental philosophy, this is called “turning the wheel” of dharma, compassion and love. This happened through the full individuality of the Bodhisattva sinking into the king's son Gautama Buddha. From that time on, there are people who can find the teaching of compassion and love within themselves. And it will develop in such a way that more and more people will find the teaching of compassion and love within themselves, and three thousand years after our era, a sufficient number of people will live on earth to develop in their own hearts what Buddha has found. Then the mission of the Buddha in this respect will be fulfilled on earth. For at the time when the Bodhisattva descended to become a Buddha, the dignity of the Bodhisattva was taken over by another. Until then, what we call the Buddha today was a Bodhisattva. The next rank after the Bodhisattva is that of the Buddha. From the Bodhisattva, the ascending being becomes a Buddha.

Oriental philosophy expressed it this way: When the Bodhisattva descended to earth, he handed over the crown of the Bodhisattva to his successor. This successor still lives today as a Bodhisattva. He will only ascend to the dignity of Buddha three thousand years after our present time. This is the one whom Oriental philosophy calls the Maitreya Buddha. This one is a Bodhisattva today and will be the Maitreya Buddha in three thousand years. He has a different mission from Gautama Buddha, which is connected with things that people today cannot yet find within themselves. That is a line of development. So that we can say: That Bodhisattva, who contains within himself the teaching of compassion and love, has indeed advanced to the dignity of a Buddha, and in so doing has given his mission a tremendous impetus. The fact that he was in a human body with his entire being six hundred years before our era earned him the right not to be incarnated in a physical body on earth again. In fact, the incarnation of that time was the last incarnation of this Bodhisattva. He no longer needed to incarnate in a physical body, but only needed to descend to the etheric body. All the following embodiments of the Buddha are therefore not such that he can be seen externally on the physical plane, but such that he can only be seen by those powers that enable people to see the etheric body. In the entire following period, the Buddha therefore only embodied himself in an etheric body. Six hundred years after his presence on earth, Buddha incorporated what he had to bring to humanity into what had been initiated by Christianity. He offered what he had to bring as a sacrifice to the founding of Christianity, so to speak, he let it flow in like a spiritual tributary into the great overall stream. This is the current that reaches its climax in the Buddha. That is the one current.

Another came about in the following way. We can form an idea of it by looking a little at the development of humanity itself. You all know that after the great Atlantic catastrophe, people did not have the same abilities as they do today, but that after the great Atlantic catastrophe they still had remnants of an old, dim clairvoyance. Logical thinking developed only gradually. The culture that we call ancient Indian culture was entirely a culture that emerged from ethereal clairvoyance. The Zarathustra culture was also still one in which people worked with ancient, dimmed clairvoyance, and the Chaldean-Egyptian cultures were not yet cultures in which people thought as they do today. Everything was still inspiration; it was not yet permeated with logic, but everything that came to light in Chaldean astrology and in Hermes wisdom was more or less inspired imagination. The human ability to think logically had not yet developed in these cultures. It was reserved for a completely different current to develop what could be called a logical culture, a culture of thinking. The first post-Atlantean culture was still entirely based on ethereal clairvoyance. The Zarathustra culture was still one of these as well, even if it was no longer as pronounced. Likewise, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture was still based on inspiration. Thought in those days was not yet permeated by logic; it was interwoven with imaginations that are expressed in the astrology of the Chaldeans and in the Hermes wisdom of Egypt in magnificent images.

The post-Atlantean cultures emerged from two streams. Apart from those who went west and populated present-day America, two streams of migrating people poured east under the leadership of their leaders, one in a northerly direction and the other in a southerly direction.

The northern stream, parts of which remained in Europe, penetrated further into Asia. While new cultures were developing and unfolding there, the population of Europe lived through the centuries as if biding its time. Its energies were, as it were, reserved for what was to come. In their essential cultural elements they were influenced by that great initiate who chose this field as his own as far as the Siberian regions and who is called the Scythian initiate. The leaders of the original European culture were inspired by him. This culture was not based on what came into humanity as thinking, but on an ability to absorb an element that was halfway between what could be called recitative-rhythmic language and a kind of singing accompanied by a peculiar music that no longer exists today but was based on an interplay of whistling instruments. It was a peculiar element, the last remnants of which lived in the bards and skalds. Everything that the Greek myths of Apollo and Orpheus tell us has developed from this. In addition, practical skills were developed in Europe through colonization, construction and so on.

The other masses of people migrated under the leadership of the great sun-initiates to Asia. The outpost formed the first post-Atlantean culture under the leadership of the Rishis. Further in Western Asia the most ancient Zarathustra culture developed; but we are not speaking here of the historical Zarathustra. What he brought forth is in some respects opposed to ancient India. The latter was entirely built upon ethereal clairvoyance; Zarathustra turned his gaze to the sun. He saw the spirit of the sun, the “great aura,” Ahura Mazda. Zarathustra was the first to express the peculiarities of northern culture here. All that followed is built upon this.

The other trend that came over, the southern one, formed the basis for the Chaldean-Egyptian culture, which arose from a merging of the one with the other. This can be schematically represented: Indian culture signifies the development of the human etheric body; in Persian culture, the sentient body developed; the Egyptian-Chaldean culture gave the sentient soul; it is essentially an inner culture, going through an inward path. And just as the sentient body and the sentient soul join together, so it is the case for all of humanity. This can be seen particularly in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture. The same will be the case with the consciousness soul and the spirit self. This can only happen through the transition of progressive culture into that region where spirituality has been held back: this can only happen in Europe. There the development towards the intellectual and consciousness soul had still been held back and only developed after the Christ event. It is there that the fusion with the spirit-self qualities will also be able to take place in the future. This can only happen through a spiritual current such as the spiritual-scientific one. This will be brought about by the sixth period of our culture.

While the two currents described were still under the influence of the old, dim clairvoyance, the third current, which merged with the others and prepared the Christ event, was followed by a fourth cultural current, which could be called a logical-intellectual one. To understand each other clearly, you have to realize that all clairvoyance comes about because the etheric body works independently in a certain way, namely the etheric body of the brain. Where the etheric body of the brain and the physical tool of logical thinking are strictly united, clairvoyance cannot come about. Only when the etheric body retains something in order to be independent can clairvoyance come about. When the etheric body of the brain is completely linked to the physical brain, it works out the brain in the finest way; but it also engages in the elaboration of the physical brain and nothing is left over to develop clairvoyance. But it was necessary that precisely this ability, which is connected with brain thinking, with the brain's synthesizing of the world phenomena, should make its appearance in humanity. For this to happen, something had to happen in humanity that can be characterized by saying that it had to be selected from humanity – well, let us take an individuality in whom, so to speak, what was called ancient clairvoyance was least present, whereas the physical tool of the brain was highly developed, chiseled, and carved out. This individuality was able to survey the phenomena of the external physical world in terms of measure, number, order and harmony, to seek unity in the externally manifested phenomena. While all the members of the earlier cultures knew something from the spiritual world through inspiration from within, so to speak, this individuality had to direct its gaze out into the surrounding world of phenomena, had to combine, logically weigh and say to itself: “Out there are the phenomena, everything falls into place in harmony when one sees everything in a large unified picture. That which appears as unity there appeared as unity in the external world, as God behind the phenomena of the physical plane. That was one difference compared to the other views of God. The other views of God said: The idea of God arises from within. But this individuality directed his gaze everywhere, organized the phenomena, looked at the different kingdoms of nature, brought them under one unity, in short, he was the great organizer of the world phenomena according to measure and number, who was chosen from the whole of humanity. This individuality, who was chosen from the whole of humanity, to first survey the external physical world and find the unity in it, was Abraham. Abraham or Abram was the one who was chosen, so to speak, by the spiritual-divine powers to receive this special mission, to convey to humanity the powers bound to the measure and number of external appearances. He emerged from Chaldean culture. Chaldean culture itself had recognized its astrology out of clairvoyance. Abraham, the forefather of arithmetic, emerged to find all this through combination, through the physical brain having undergone a very special process here. Thus a very special mission was entrusted to him.

Now we must bear in mind that the way the mission was to proceed was not to remain with him alone, but was to become the common property of mankind. But since the thinking was bound to the physical brain, how could it become common property? It could only become common property by being transmitted through physical inheritance. That is to say, a people had to come forth from this individuality, in whom this special quality was inherited as long as it was to enter humanity as a mission. A nation had to come forth from it. A nation had to be founded, not just a culture, where something had been taught: what one has received clairvoyantly can be taught. What was now to be received by humanity had to be transmitted to the descendants through physical inheritance, so that it could be realized in all its details. What was to be realized? It should be found through human combination, that order which was first brought into humanity through Abraham. If one looks up at the order of the stars, one can find the order through combination. The wise men of Chaldean astrology have reflected on the thoughts of the gods. Now it was a matter of finding this particular transition to combining, to logically grasping the phenomena, in the external world. Therefore, there had to be an inherited property in the physical human body that resulted from the work of thinking itself, which is spread out in space as order. This is expressed very beautifully when the one who assigns this mission to Abraham says: Your descendants shall be arranged according to the order, according to the number of stars - which the Bible nonsensically translates as: “Your descendants shall be like the sand of the sea.” It means that there should be an order in Abraham's descendants, the descendants should be structured in such a way that there is an image of the stars in the sky. This is also expressed in the twelve sons of Jacob. They are an image of the twelve constellations. This is where the dimensions come in, which are modeled in the sky. In the line of generations there should be an image of the number in the sky. Just as the number is written in the sky, so the order of the number is to be written in the line of generations. This is the profound wisdom contained in these words, which are foolishly translated: “Your descendants shall be as the sand of the sea.”

Thus we see the meaning of Abraham's entire mission. But the symbolism of this mission, which is meant to reflect the secrets of the world, is also expressed in other ways. First of all, we ask ourselves the following: what is meant to be sacrificed, so to speak, is ancient, dimmed clairvoyance. Everything that has been rooted in humanity since the earliest times is to be sacrificed. The innermost conviction in this whole mission is that everything is received as a gift from outside. What is to come into being should come into being through physical descendants. Through them, this mission should enter the world. Abraham must receive this himself as a gift from God. This happens when he is first called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac and then prevented from doing so. What does he actually receive from the hand of God? He receives his whole mission. For if he had really sacrificed Isaac, he would have sacrificed his whole mission. He gets his people back by getting Isaac back. He receives as a gift from the divine order of the world in Isaac what he is actually meant to give to the world. Thus everything that followed Abraham was a gift from God Himself. The last gift of clairvoyance that still existed – you will understand later how the individual gifts of clairvoyance express themselves; each one can be related to one of the constellations – the last gift of clairvoyance to be voluntarily sacrificed is linked to the constellation of Aries. That is why we see the ram in the sacrifice of Isaac. This is a symbolic expression of the sacrifice of the last gift of clairvoyance in exchange for the gift of being able to judge the outer phenomena of the world in terms of number and measure. That is this mission of Abraham.

And how does this mission continue? The last gift of clairvoyance is sacrificed, it must be expelled from this mission, and if it still shows itself as an inheritance, it is, so to speak, not tolerated within the straight line of succession. Joseph shows a relapse. He has his dreams, he has the old gift of clairvoyance. The brothers cast him out. This shows how tightly this entire mission was drawn: Joseph is cast out. He migrates to Egypt to establish the connection that was now necessary, the connection with the other wing of our entire cultural development, with Egyptian culture. Joseph had united within himself that which was general in character within this mission and at the same time remnants of ancient clairvoyance. He brought about a complete revolution in Egypt by correcting the declining Egyptian culture in accordance with his clairvoyant gift. He placed his gift at the service of external institutions. This is the basis of Joseph's cultural mission in Egypt.

And now we see a peculiar spectacle. Now we see that those who were the missionaries for outer thinking in terms of measure and number are no longer on the earlier path, but are seeking the outer connection through Joseph by seeking in return what they could not bring forth from themselves in Egypt. There they go, there they take in — the descendants of Abraham take in what they need in Egypt. That is where they go. What is necessary for the further organization of this mission is given from the outside through the Egyptian initiation, because it cannot be brought forth from within. Moses brings this from the outside and connects Egyptian culture with this special mission of Abraham. And now we see how it is passed on from generation to generation, what is the human comprehension of the outer world, what is the recognition of the outer world in terms of measure, weight and number. A new element has entered. This is transmitted through blood relationship and can only be transmitted in this way, because it is bound to that which must be inherited. This is the second of the currents.

The third stream is the one that connects with Zarathustra, which is what was expressed in ancient Persia and spread to the Near East, as we have already learned in the various lectures. These three streams are what flow together in the Christ Jesus. The individuality that is the Christ Jesus must have had to do with all three currents. They must unite in him. How does that happen? This happens in the following complicated way. First of all, we have to realize that one of the things that was to flow into the general world current took place in India six hundred years before our era. At about the same time, something also happened within the Babylonian-Chaldean culture in that Zarathustra reappeared in ancient Chaldea under the name Zarathos or Nazarathos. There he lived and worked as a great teacher at the same time as some of the chosen teachers and leaders of the ancient Hebrew people were led into Babylonian captivity, because that is also the time when the Jews were led into captivity. There you see how the first contact of the Hebrew people with Zarathos took place at that time and how the Hebrew people, through their members, were under the personal influence of the reborn Zarathustra or Zoroaster. The events took place as described in the Bible. The following happened. At the beginning of our era, there were two sets of parents, both named Joseph and Mary. One of them lived in Nazareth and the other in Bethlehem. The husband of the couple in Bethlehem was descended from the Solomonic line of the House of David. The other couple in Nazareth was descended from the Nathanic line of the House of David. Solomon and Nathan are both sons of David. Both sets of parents have a son. To the Nazareth parents, the Nazareth Jesus child is born, as described in the Gospel of Luke, and to the Bethlehem parents, the Bethlehem Jesus child is born, as described in the Gospel of Matthew. So we have two Jesus children at the beginning of our era.

Let us follow the story of the Bethlehem Jesus Child! How did he actually come into being as a physical child, so to speak? As a physical child, we see in the physical line of descent, which the writer of the Gospel of Matthew traces very beautifully back to Abraham, descended from this line. We have to follow the line from Ur of the Chaldees to the land of Canaan, then to Egypt and back to Canaan again. That would approximately give the line of the Israelite people from Chaldea to Palestine, to Egypt and back again. These were the ancestors of the Bet-lehemitic Jesus-child. And because he carried the blood of these ancestors within him, he went through this journey, so to speak. That individuality, which now wanted to embody itself in this Jesus boy of Bethlehem, quickly passed through the same path, albeit in a shortened form. That individuality had been active as Zarathustra in ancient Chaldea. Thus, at the moment when the Bethlehem Jesus child was born, a spiritual individuality, which exactly imitated the traits of Abraham, came spiritually from Chaldea to Canaan. There it was born into the Bethlehem Jesus child. Then it had to briefly imitate the move to Egypt and later back again, until it settled in Nazareth. There you have the individuality that, so to speak, spiritually went through the whole journey of the people of Israel. You can go through this journey that you have described in the Bible and you will find that it is true. The Bible describes better than any external records. What can be found in the Akasha Chronicle for the clairvoyant eye is confirmed by the Bible: the journey that the Israelite people went through from Chaldea to Canaan, to Egypt and back. And the parallels are wonderful everywhere. Who leads the Jews to Egypt? Joseph's dreams lead them there. Who leads the Bethelehemitic Jesus child to Egypt? Also the dreams of Joseph, his father. These parallels go as far as these details. It is again a special gift of clairvoyance that has remained, that establishes the connection.

So the Jesus child is born in Bethlehem, having received the element that came into humanity through Abraham by inheritance, the individuality of Zarathustra. And those who were connected with Zarathustra in the Chaldean secret schools are now pursuing the path. In the spiritual world, their star leads the way: Zoroaster himself, who is going to be born in Bethlehem. They can follow them, the three magi, they appear in the Bible. They know him, who lives in the Bethelehemitic Jesus child.

This is the one Jesus child, the Bethelehemitic. In the other Jesus child, who was also born in Bethlehem only through a journey, something completely different lives, something that is already announced by the fact that this Jesus child was different in all his qualities from the Bethelehemitic Jesus child. From the very beginning, the Bethlehem Jesus Child showed himself to be an extraordinarily gifted human being beyond all human measure, for he had a powerful individuality within him. He was gifted for everything that humanity had so far conquered in terms of cultural means. He showed himself to be extraordinarily gifted for everything that could be learned from the environment. The Nazarene Jesus Child was not at all gifted for the external things of culture. He had only a deep, deep, emotional inwardness. It was precisely the quality of the soul and mind that was developed in him. But he was not gifted to learn what was externally available in terms of cultural means. He had no inclination for that. He had something that people cannot even imagine in terms of distinguishing good from evil. But what had arisen on earth in the way of culture was foreign to him. It was foreign to him because something had been born in him that had not gone through the whole development of humanity.

We can understand this if we consider the following. In the ancient Lemurian times, what we call the Luciferic influence took place within humanity. Then the Luciferic powers crept into the human being's astral body. As a result, humanity has become what it has become. Now, in those days, the guiding powers of the human being's etheric body had to be held back a little so that it would not be infected by anything that the astral body, which was under Luciferic influence, could give it. Part of the etheric body was withdrawn from the influence of the astral body by the fact that man retained influence only over his etheric body, in so far as he is a thinking and feeling being, but not with regard to everything of a thinking nature. This was, so to speak, withheld and conveyed from the spiritual-divine world from above. Therefore, from the very beginning of their earthly existence, human beings have, so to speak, their individual desires and personal feelings, and they could not have their personal thoughts, nor the expression of personal thoughts, language. Thinking was such that it was guided by a continuous spirituality in all of them. As a result, they all think the same. But even language was at least guided by the folk gods, so that not every person has their own language. That which is expressed in the spirit of language was, with respect to the etheric body, removed from the arbitrariness of the individual personality; it was held back. What was withheld in Lemurian times is related in the Paradise Myth: Man partook of the Tree of Knowledge but not of the Tree of Life; he acquired freedom of will, but what was not given to man at that time was now mysteriously transmitted to this Jesus child, to the Jesus child of Nazareth, whose etheric body it was. There was that which had been withdrawn from humanity in the very beginning, and that prevented the Nazarene Jesus Child from taking an interest in the culture that humanity had acquired. He had something much more original, something that reminded of the time when humanity had not yet fallen into the sin of the arbitrariness of the individual. The author of the Gospel of Luke expresses this by leading the family tree up to Adam. So that in the Nazarene Jesus-child something appears which had sunk in Adam, which had been withdrawn from the Luciferic influence. What mankind was before this Luciferic influence, that was in this Nazarene Jesus-child.

These two Jesus-boys lived side by side. When they were both twelve years old, the following happened: the Zarathustra in the Bethlehem Jesus-boy decided to merge with the Nazarene Jesus-boy. This is hinted at in the Bible in the event known as the loss of the twelve-year-old Jesus, where the parents are amazed to find him again. He was quite different from what he had been before, the Nazarene Jesus-child. Now, all at once, he took an interest in external culture because Zarathustra's individuality was in him. This happened at that moment in time which is described in the Bible as the twelve-year-old Jesus getting lost. Something else had happened as well. At the birth of the Nazarene Jesus Child, that which we can call the later embodiment of the Buddha descended into the astral body. From the time of his birth, the Buddha in his etheric body was connected with this Jesus child of Nazareth at his re-embodiment, so that in the aura of the Jesus child of Nazareth in his astral body we have the Buddha. This is alluded to in a profound way in the Gospel of Luke. The Indian legend tells us that at the time when the royal son Gautama Buddha was born, there was a remarkable sage who was to become the Buddha. His name was Asita. He had learned through his clairvoyant abilities that the Bodhisattva had now been born. He looked at the boy in the royal palace and was full of enthusiasm. He began to weep. “Why are you weeping?” the king asked him. “O king, there is no danger of misfortune. On the contrary, the one who has been born is the Bodhisattva and will become the Buddha. I weep because I, as an old man, will not live to see this Buddha.” Then Asita died. The Bodhisattva became the Buddha. The Buddha descends and unites with the aura of the Nazarene Jesus child, in order to contribute his mite to the great event in Palestine. At the same time, through a karmic connection, the old Asita is reborn. He becomes the old Simeon. And he now sees the Buddha, who had become this from a bodhisattva. What he had not been able to see in India six hundred years before our era, the becoming Buddha, he now saw it when the Buddha floated in the aura of the Nazarene Jesus child, whom he held in his arms, and now he said the beautiful word: “Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace, for I have seen my master,” the Buddha in the aura of the Jesus child.

Thus we see how the three currents flow together: through the blood, the current of Abraham; through the individuality of the Bethelehemitic Jesus-child, the Zarathustra current; and the third current through the Buddha's etheric body or Nirmanakaya floating down and being seen by the shepherds. Thus we see these three currents flowing together. And how these currents live on within Christianity, and how he who lives in the Nazarene Jesus-child, endowed with the individuality of Zarathustra, carries them forward, can only be described at another time.

It should also be said that after the Zarathustra individuality had passed over into the personality, into the body of the Nazarene Jesus child, that the Bethlehem Jesus child gradually wasted away and soon died.

The important thing is that you understand how this guidance of the Zarathustra individuality into the Jesus child took place. You know that the development of the human being proceeds in such a way that from birth to the age of seven the development of the physical body takes place, from seven to fourteen the development of the etheric body takes place, the special unfolding, and that then the astral body is born. The special I, the egoity, as it was born in man in the Lemurian time, was not at all in the Nazarene Jesus child. If He had developed further without the Zarathustra going over to Him, no I could have been born. He had what had been joined together as the holy three members, as they were before the Fall: physical body, etheric body and astral body, and only then received the gift of the I through Zarathustra. All this joined together in a wonderful way. In the Gospels we have the facts mirrored, which can be found in the Akasha Chronicle.

I have only been able to sketch out a few individual features of the confluence of these great, powerful spiritual currents of the Buddha, Zarathustra and the ancient Hebrew stream in Western Asia, where, at the beginning of our era, Christianity was reborn from these three currents. These are a few lines that we can continue another time.