The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In today's additional consideration of the discussions that I was able to give here in Stuttgart this time, I will deal with adding a few things to what has already been said, in order to round it off, so to speak.

To begin with, it will be best if I pick up from where I left off in yesterday's public lecture. There we saw how the human soul, in its threefold nature, has relationships with the bodily and the spiritual. And we emphasized in particular that the feeling element of the soul has relationships with the body towards the respiratory life, that, so to speak, what is breathing in the body, and in a comprehensive sense, with all its ramifications and ramifications, is the tool for the emotional life. On the other hand, we have been able to show that the life of feeling has a special relationship to everything that is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world. But what is accessible to inspiration in the spiritual world is also, at the same time, everything that is contained in the world to which we belong with that part of our being that passes through birth and death, the world that we live through between death and a new birth, the world in which we naturally also live between birth and death. This world is hidden by sense perception and ordinary thinking, that is, by the life of the body. So that what corresponds to breathing and feeling actually points us to the great, all-encompassing world into which we ascend when we pass through the gate of death, the world to which we belong when we no longer use the tool of our bodily life. The tool of our bodily life, so to speak, fetters us to earthly existence. From various lectures given over many years and recorded in the cycles, you know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it is not tied to earthly life, but rises into the cosmos to live in the spiritual worlds of that cosmos, in that which can be called the spiritual world. Is it not to be expected that precisely the emotional life, which corresponds bodily to breathing, spiritually to the inspired world, the emotional life with the breathing life, is in a much, much more comprehensive relationship to the cosmos, to the great world, to the macrocosm than our narrowly limited perception and imagination? What do we perceive in the end? We perceive a very small part of the world; a small part of the world plays into our physical existence between birth and death through our eyes and ears. Even if we are people who enjoy looking around and perceiving everything through our senses and then processing it in our imaginations, it is still a small part of the world that plays into our existence.

But what happens when we turn from the life of the nerves, to which the life of thinking belongs, to the life of breathing, to which the life of feeling belongs? A concept that is capable of elevating our feelings can be given to us by what can approach our soul in the following way: You all know that the sun rises at a certain point in spring. At the beginning of spring, on March 21, the sun rises in the morning at a certain point. But this point is not the same at all times, you know that. In ancient times, the sun rose at the beginning of spring in the constellation of Taurus, then in the constellation of Aries; the vernal point thus moves on and has now entered the constellation of Pisces. If you turn to what I mean now, you are therefore looking at the progression of the vernal point through the zodiac. The vernal point itself moves on in the zodiac. When a point in a circle moves on, it must of course arrive at the same point again after a certain time. Now, ordinary astronomy is familiar with this progression of the vernal point and its return to the same point in the zodiac. That is to say, if in a particular year of the past the vernal point was in Aries, the next year it will be a little further along, and so on, and then it will have moved out into Pisces and so on, and after a certain time it will be back in Aries again. The time it takes the vernal point to move through the entire zodiac is approximately 25,900 years, about 26,000 years. This number of 26,000 years expresses a measure of the outer cosmos: the measure by which the vernal point progresses. In this number, we have, so to speak, the means by which the course of the sun is measured in the cosmos. We could say, approximately. If we hold on to this number, we can add another consideration, which we now want to make.

A person breathes in and out, taking a certain number of breaths in one minute. We do not take the same number of breaths at every age between birth and death, but there is a certain average number of breaths per minute that a man of average strength can take. That is eighteen breaths in one minute. Now let's calculate how many breaths a person takes in the course of a twenty-four-hour day. First, we have to multiply the number of breaths taken in one minute by sixty, which gives us one thousand and eighty. Then we multiply that by twenty-four, which gives us the number of breaths a person takes in one day, including night and day: 25,920 breaths. It is remarkable that if we count the breaths of a person over the course of a twenty-four hour day, we get the same number as when we calculate the number of years that result from the advance of the sun in the great cosmos. The number of years that the equinox advances in fits and starts corresponds to the number of times that a person breathes in one day. The same number! Just think how wonderfully true that biblical saying is: that the wisdom of the world has ordered everything according to measure and number. — A number that is inscribed in the cosmos is reflected in our twenty-four-hour breathing. We can therefore also take this number into consideration, and we will find that human breathing is related to the great world in the way that was revealed yesterday by spiritual science.

But now, in a sense, we are again looking at something that is also a breathing, because breathing is nothing more than a special case of the general world rhythm. The essential thing in what was meant by breathing yesterday is the rhythmic movement, the rhythm. Let us look at something that is quite similar to breathing, another rhythmic movement that we know from our spiritual scientific considerations. When we fall asleep, our ego and our astral body leave our physical body and ether body; when we wake up again, our ego and our astral body enter our physical body and ether body. I have often compared the peculiar behavior of the ego and the astral body, this going out and coming in into the physical and ether bodies, with breathing out and breathing in. Just as we breathe in and out the air in an eighteenth of a minute, so, in the course of twenty-four hours, we breathe in our ego and our astral body, as it were, by waking up, by falling asleep; by waking up again, we breathe them in again, and by falling asleep again, we breathe them out. It is only a more comprehensive breathing out and breathing in of our ego and astral body in the course of the twenty-four hours of an ordinary astronomical day. How very remarkable, something is breathing! Let us first disregard what is breathing. There is a definite rhythm, which represents a kind of slow breathing, with each breath lasting twenty-four hours. Now, you know that the Bible speaks of the patriarchal age, of seventy, seventy-one years. Of course, this does not mean that this is something different from the average age. Some people die very young, some live to be a hundred, even over a hundred years old, but the patriarchal age is meant to be something average. So that when we mean something average in terms of human age, we can speak of seventy to one hundred and one years. Let's work out how many days that is. If we calculate that, we would find out how many such great breaths we take in an earthly life, where we exhale and inhale the ego and the astral body over the course of twenty-four hours. Let's calculate that: we take about three hundred and sixty-five such breaths in a year, as many as there are days in a year. So in seventy years it is seventy times as much: that would be 25,550. But let us assume that we are calculating for seventy-one years, and then we come a little closer: that makes 25,915. So a person only needs to live a little over seventy-one years to reach 25,920 such breaths. This means that if a person lives to be a little over seventy-one years old, he has breathed his I and his astral body in and out 25,920 times; that is, as often as a person breathes in and out during the day. Think about it: the same number again!

So you see that we can regard human life as a day, and the individual day that we live through as a breath: then our seventy-one to seventy-two year life is given by the number that is also the number of the advance of the vernal point, which is the number of breaths in one day. Our life is one great day, and the great Being at whose center we can imagine the Earth breathes out and in the I and astral body as often as we go out and in with our single breath. So our single life on Earth would be one day, one day of something. What is it a day of? If you multiply seventy-one by three hundred and sixty-five, you naturally get the year for the day of seventy-one years. If you count seventy-one years as one day and ask: What is one year of this day, it is three hundred and sixty-five times as much. But that is 25,920 years. That means, if we count our single life on earth with its 25,920 breaths, which are waking and sleeping, as one day, count a human life as one day, and see what year corresponds to this one human life with its 25,920 breaths: it is the orbit of the vernal point, 25,920 years! We get a wonderful numerical rhythm.

That is why I said: we get an idea that must be uplifting for our feelings, because we can feel that we are placed in the macrocosm through measure and number. Numbers reveal to us that which is true for us in the realization that what belongs to breathing, and therefore to the emotional life, is the inspiring world, the great world to which we belong not only between birth and death, but also in the time between death and a new birth and in repeated earthly lives. We are, as it were, in the bosom of the rhythm of our entire solar system, breathing in our individual breathing movements the great macrocosmic rhythm of our entire solar system. This is a thought that places us with certainty in the midst of the great life of our solar universe. In the course of time, people will have to make many more similar observations, and then they will be convinced that in this way they will again come to spirit-filled perceptions about the relationship between man and the universe. We need spirit-filled perceptions for our age and for the following ages in the sense that they are stimuli for our inner life, as was explained here the day before yesterday. In ancient times, it was the case that man's enlightenment came, so to speak, from outside. Today, this has been lost through the nature of the declining ages of humanity. We are now in an age in which, if humanity is not to descend into decadence, a development of the human soul from within must begin in an energetic way. And only he understands what our time needs who, as a necessity of earthly development, understands that spiritual life must take hold of the innermost part of the human soul from the fifth post-Atlantic period in which we live, into the time to which we are to develop further. What spiritual science says about this is not said out of some arbitrary idea or out of an agitative sentiment, but it is said out of the realization of the necessity of human development.

Now today we are once again looking at this human development from a slightly different point of view. Let us go back to the first post-Atlantic age, that is, the age immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe. The day before yesterday, after having done so from a different point of view on several occasions, we emphasized how, in this first post-Atlantean age, man was still related to that series of beings that we call archai or spirits of personality in the hierarchies. Spiritual life was still revealed in these ancient times of humanity because the age of life in those days was such that we can compare it to the present age between the fifty-sixth and forty-eighth year, as I explained the day before yesterday. Man had, so to speak, instruction from spiritual beings. How did these spiritual beings come to man? In those days, man did not look at nature in the same way as he does today. For man today, nature is a kind of mechanical order. Man today regards abstract, almost mathematical laws of nature as his ideal, an abstract order. Take the images that are spread out around you when you go out into nature. Compare what is out there with what is written in botanical and zoological textbooks about plants and animals. Compare these distorted, abstract ideas with life, and you can say: What is written in these books of botany and zoology is what is revealed to the human spirit today. Such botany and zoology, of which today's humanity is so tremendously proud, did not exist in that age. If we compare what modern botany, zoology and biology have to say about nature with the knowledge of nature that arose from the ancient way of knowing, we arrive at a different view. There was no botany or zoology of that kind in those days, but there was something else, something that is still very difficult for modern humanity to understand. It came from nature itself, and I would like to call what came out of nature: the light-filled, formed word. Just as we see nature today through our senses and minds, they did not see it that way, but nature sent them figures of light, and these figures of light also sounded, said something, expressed themselves about what they are. And every person could experience this atavistic clairvoyance in certain states of consciousness, whereby the light-filled, formed word came to meet him from nature; one could also say words, because a wealth of such figures came, speaking out of nature. The human being knew: You too belong to this world from which these words full of light come forth. You too belong there. But now you are here in nature, surrounded by minerals, plants and animals. You are in nature because you have an outer physical body; through this you belong to this nature. But nature lets the light-filled word sprout forth: you belong to it in your soul's nature just as your physical body belongs to the outer mineral, plant, and animal world. You were in this world of the light-filled, light-shaped word before your birth or conception, and you will be in it after your death. You will live in it again.

In the first post-Atlantean period, one could still see and feel an echo of the world in which one lives between death and a new birth by observing nature in certain states of consciousness. In the second post-Atlantean period, things were already somewhat different. The word was lost for these atavistic states. The figures no longer spoke themselves, but they were still there, light-filled figures were still there, only they had become mute. That which lay outwardly before the senses was felt as the darkness in this light-filled formation within, and one's own body was felt as a piece of the darkness. So that one could say: light and darkness! One's own body is ruled by darkness. By coming out of the light and going into darkness, he enters into earthly life through birth or conception; by going through the gate of death, he passes through the dark world back into the light. In the world there is a struggle between light and darkness, between Ormuzd and Ahriman. Thus Zarathustra, who was the teacher of this second post-Atlantean cultural epoch, spoke to his disciples. One does not understand what Zarathustrism means with its Ormuzd and Ahriman teachings if one does not relate it to the way people viewed the world at that time.

The situation had changed again in the third post-Atlantic period. If you look at the outward appearance, the light-filled figures had gradually disappeared in the third post-Atlantic period. But people still had the power to put themselves into an intermediate state between sleeping and waking, just as we put ourselves to sleep today. They only had to make a little effort. When sleeping, one does not need to make an effort, but in this different state, one had to make some effort. But if one made an effort, one could conjure up such a world of light around oneself, which now came from within and was similar to that which used to come from nature, from outside. So what was the actual progression from the second post-Atlantean cultural period to the third, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian period? What was the transition like? Well, in the second, in the Persian cultural period, people still saw the figures of light when they looked outwards and could say to themselves: Before my soul went through conception, it belonged to this world of light figures. In the third cultural period, this world of light no longer shone from the outside in, but the human being could, as it were, squeeze it out of himself; then he had conjured up out of his soul and in front of his soul what was there in the spiritual world before his birth or conception and what will be there in the spiritual world after his death. So that we can say: the third post-Atlantean period had the world of light as a soul experience. People had the world of light as a soul experience, so to a certain extent man had been pushed back from the external world more to his inner being. It was no longer the natural way for man to look at the outer world and see the world of light, that is, to see the spiritual world around him. Therefore, it had become necessary during this time to initiate a small circle of people in the manner of the Mysteries, so that they would be able to see the outer world of light again and bear witness to the fact that what was brought up from the depths of the soul was truly the same as that which lived in the spiritual realm.

Now came the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin one. In this fourth period, no more light came up when man put himself in a special state, as in the third period. The light no longer came, nor did that come up from the depths of the human being that would have been an echo of the soul's life before conception and after death. But there was still a certainty that the human being's inner being is filled with soul. This certainty came up. One still sensed something of what one had seen earlier when one inwardly brought the soul to see. One no longer saw the light, but one still felt the warmth of the light. That was the case in the Greco-Latin period. There we must say: the world of light was no longer experienced inwardly as a soul experience, but the soul itself was experienced as a soul experience.

But naturally this had to become weaker and weaker in the course of time. And how is the whole relationship expressed at all? It was expressed in the following way. We will have to look particularly at the Greeks if we want to understand the matter: the Greeks had, like the average person today, the consciousness of their body. But through what I have described, they also had the consciousness: the soul pervades the body. They felt the soul as invigorating, the body as it lives through. This feeling, which the Greeks still had, has been lost. The fact that history says nothing about the fact that this feeling has been lost today is only because we live in the age of materialism. No one really understands Homer, no one understands Sophocles or Aeschylus, if they do not read them with the feeling that the Greeks had a different spiritual experience than that of today's people. If one were to read Aeschylus with this feeling, one would provide different translations than those that are provided today and sometimes admired, and which, especially in the most intimate things, truly do not resemble Aeschylus. But the fact that it was so had a very definite consequence for the Greeks, namely that they felt the invigorating soul element in their bodies during the time between birth and death, and thus came to another realization: that body and soul actually belong together very intimately. Never in the development of humanity has this realization been as strong as in the Greek era. For in earlier epochs, which preceded the time of the Greeks, people actually always had the feeling that the soul belongs to the world of light, the world of the word, the world of the Logos, in which the human being lives before birth and after death. Now, in the materialistic age, it is the case that the human being no longer feels the soul at all. In Greek times, and to a lesser extent in Roman times, there was a sense of the intimate connection between body and soul. The Greeks regarded the body as the external form for the soul. Growth and decay of the body appeared to the Greeks as an expression of the growth and decay of the soul. The Greek loved the body as much as he loved the soul. This feeling, as it existed in the Greek, was not present in the same way in the past – as I have just explained – and is not present again today. But the consequence of this was the feeling that is so deeply expressed in the words put into the mouth of Achilles: “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows.” The Greeks had to pay for the beautiful harmony they felt between body and soul with the fact that, if they were not members of the mysteries, any notion of how the soul fares in the spiritual world after death had completely disappeared. Now, the remarkable thing is that the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was a great thinker but not initiated into the mysteries, spoke in a grandiose way about the experience of the soul after death, as one could speak in those days if one was able to envision the intimate harmony between body and soul in the way of the Greek age.

And when in the Middle Ages, in the so-called scholastic philosophy, Aristotle was revived, the scholastics said: In philosophy, one must think about the soul as Aristotle thought. If one wants to know more about it, it can only come from faith. With mere human research, one cannot go further than Aristotle. — How far did Aristotle go, he who is so very much the philosophical expression of the Greek way of looking at body and soul? He really did arrive at what can be so beautifully expressed in the words of the recently deceased masterly Aristotle scholar Franz Brentano, who says: If a person has lost a limb, he can no longer make use of that limb; he is, as it were, no longer a whole person. If he has lost two limbs, he is even less of a whole person. If he has now lost his entire body – so says Aristotle and with him Franz Brentano – and is still a soul after death, which Aristotle does not deny, then he is in a state of incompleteness compared to the state in which he is between birth and death. He is not a complete human being. And that is indeed the true doctrine of immortality of Aristotle, the greatest thinker of the Greek world, that man is only here between birth and death a complete, a perfect human being. If he goes through the gate of death, he is only a piece of man; he is indeed immortal, but at the expense of no longer being a whole human being. This is indeed the price that Hellenism had to pay for its beauty and harmony, that it came to the age of man – you know, compared to the human age – where one could indeed sense the soul from within, but where one could not yet see the life of the soul in the spiritual world, where one had to say of the soul: it is no longer a complete human being after death. Only those who were initiated into the mysteries, that is, those who were endowed with powers of knowledge that went beyond the normal, were revealed what the soul experiences between death and a new birth. That is the great difference between Plato and Aristotle, that Plato was initiated into the mysteries and Aristotle was not. Therefore, Plato must be understood in a completely different sense than Aristotle, who came to the “Chimborasso of thought” but could not penetrate to the secrets of the spiritual world.

That is why those who had power in this age strove for something different from what one can achieve in normal human life. Who were the men who had the power, who were able to develop this power? Certainly, there was a great, significant world of initiation, spread by the mysteries here and there, filling the then cultural world; but these mysteries gave people that which Plato said lifted people above the mud of transience. Those who had power in this fourth post-Atlantean period were primarily searching for something in the soul that would enable them to participate in the spiritual world. According to the general karma of humanity, one normally had to wait until one was introduced to the mysteries in the sense of the initiation principle of that time. In Greece this was common practice. The Roman Caesars did not need that. The Roman Caesars, who gradually rose to dominate the world at that time, were able to use their power to be initiated into the mysteries.

And so we see that from the time of Augustus onwards, the Roman Caesars sought initiation simply through their power. They forced one priesthood or another to initiate them into the mysteries. So that in this fourth period a peculiar phenomenon can be observed: on the one hand we have the mystery principle, the mystery knowledge that was still there, but which gradually disappeared, gradually declined I have often described why this had to happen: because the Mystery of Golgotha took its place. On the other hand, the priests were forced to reveal their secrets to the Roman Caesars. Augustus was the first emperor to be initiated in the fourth post-Atlantic period; but his successors were also such initiates. They differed in their nature from the other initiates, who were initiated into the mysteries on the basis of moral qualities, namely, of moral development. The Roman Caesars were initiated on the basis of their power, in that they were able to force the priesthood to reveal their secrets to them. And so we see that even a successor of Augustus like Caligula was an initiate. But that is why a person like Caligula was familiar with the secrets of the spiritual universe. He was familiar with the fact that the impulses of this spiritual universe are revived in the soul, that the human ego is divine within the divine. That which was a sacred truth of humility for the initiated priests became a symbol of external world power for the Caesars. For what did a Caligula know? The others stared at the mythological figures of the gods that had come down to them from ancient times; they worshiped them. An initiate like Caligula knew what these gods meant. Above all, he knew that man belongs to the same world as his innermost being. From experience, Caligula knew that he belonged to the same world as those beings who have their images in these gods: Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, Apollo, Zeus. Caligula knew the secret of how he could commune with the gods of the lunar world in a sleep-like state. And it is not mere myth, but absolutely true, when it is said of Caligula that he was said to have associated in his sleep – but it is meant in another state of consciousness – with Luna, the moon goddess, and to have drawn from it nourishment for his sense of power. The world lives in me – he said to himself – for I am in it. By looking up at the gods, he saw himself as a god among gods. And the initiated Roman emperors meant it when they said that. The initiated priest knew how to enter the dwelling of the gods, and so the Roman Caesar forced himself into communion with the gods. “My brother Jupiter,” ‘My brother Zeus’: these were terms that Caligula in particular used again and again. And it was Caligula who once asked a tragedian which of them was greater, Jupiter or he, Caligula. And when the tragedian refused to answer that Caligula was greater than Jupiter, he had him flogged. These are not myths, these are historical facts. Hence the processions in which Caligula appeared before the people as Bacchus with 'thyrsus and ephhebe wreath', because he was aware that he could transform himself into those figures he knew as images of the gods. As Hercules he appeared with the club and lion skin, as Mercury with the Hermes wand, as Apollo with the corona and surrounded by choirs. Thus he appeared in order to instill in his people the awareness that he belonged to the gods and not to men. Such was the situation in those times, in which, one might say, the less favorable image of what was great in the Greek world was reflected in the Roman world. Of course, no one saw this better than a Caligula or other uninitiated emperors such as Commodus and others. Caligula once heard that a court case had taken place in which a judge sentenced a defendant to death. And when the matter was reported to him, since it was a special case, he said: “The judge could just as well have been sentenced to death, because he is worth just as much as the other.” This was how he viewed the moral state of his time. In Romanism, the opposite of Greek culture really appears. We no longer have any conception of the inner constitution of the Romans of the time of Caesar. But we must form a conception of it, for it is one of the roots from which our new, our fifth cultural epoch developed in the course of time.

Nero, too, was such an initiate, an initiated emperor. And precisely because of that, Nero was able to see something very special. Those who were initiated into the mysteries at that time knew that evolution had gone downhill to a certain point. It must go up again, but it must also become more spiritualized. That is really what is meant by the “Parousia,” by the new age, of which Christ Jesus also speaks.

If you compare what is alive in all these ancient cultural epochs up to the Greeks with later times, you will find that in these ancient cultural epochs, the soul-spiritual still reveals itself in a certain way through the physical. Then it ceases; it no longer reveals itself, and must now be sought through other means. If man wants to seek the spiritual and soul through what he can see with his eyes and hear with his ears, he can no longer find it. The Kingdoms of Heaven were once revealed through the bodies, but now they must arise in the spirit. The Kingdoms of Heaven must come near. This is the prophecy of John the Baptist. This is also what Christ Jesus meant by the Parousia. Only, in a certain sense, the theologians still stand to this day on the peculiar point of view that they believe that Christ meant by the Parousia that the earth must physically change. Blavatsky also criticizes the saying of Christ Jesus about the Parousia, the coming of the Kingdoms of Heaven, saying: “It was foretold that the Kingdoms of Heaven would come upon the Earth, but the grain has not improved; the grapes are no richer than before; no Heavens have come upon the Earth. All the people who speak in this way do not understand what is meant. What Christ Jesus meant, what John meant, had already come to pass: the Kingdom of Heaven had already descended upon the earth, in that the Christ had embodied Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. The event is to be understood as a spiritual one.

But an initiate like Nero, who knew this also from the mysteries, rebelled against it. He actually came to the delusion that he said to himself: Well, the world is in decline, so it shall perish! — And that is actually the psychological reason why Nero had Rome set on fire — which he really did — because he at least wanted to have the spectacle of the firebrand coming from there to burn the whole world. For he no longer thought much of this world. He did not want to admit the renewal that came through the mystery of Golgotha. He was a madman, but he was also a genius. Through his power, he had forced his initiation, so all his ideas were great, greater than those of others who did not have this prerequisite. In a sense, therefore, Nero was the first psychoanalyst, but a generous one, not a psychoanalyst like those who are called Freud or otherwise. For Nero idolized the physical, in that he, like the psychoanalyst, wanted to bring up what was spiritual and mental from the subconscious. Today's psychoanalyst says: What is down there in the soul? Disappointments, all kinds of wasted lives and so on, and then he says: the animalistic, basic sludge of the soul is down there, there is not much beauty down there. When you hear a psychoanalyst today, it is as if a person is describing a field that has just been fertilized and then cultivated with the seeds for the near future, but the person only sees the fertilizer, the manure. So the psychoanalyst sees only what is really dung in the soul, comparatively speaking, of course. He does not see the eternal in the soul, that which goes from life to life. This is why psychoanalysis is so dangerous: although it goes down to the subconscious, instead of the soul-spiritual essence of the soul, it sees the animalistic mud, as if one does not see the germinating seed but only the dung. Nero was a great psychoanalyst when he said: There is absolutely nothing in man but the animalistic primeval mud; everything else is mere appearance. It used to be different when people were still close to the divine, but now man consists only of this animalistic primeval mud; there is not even the slightest part that is chaste; everything in man is dissolute – so said Nero. One can see from this, one feels especially with those who had forced their way into initiation in this way, the materialization of the world. In these circles, the old, spiritual principle of initiation was generally translated into the material. When Commodus, who had made himself not only an initiate but also an initiator, wanted to give a symbolic blow to someone whom he himself had to initiate, he killed him on the spot. Instead of delivering him to spiritual death, that is to say, to raising him, he killed him! Thus Commodus, the initiator. This is an historical fact.

What occurred during this fourth period is the Mystery of Golgotha. And since the spiritual can no longer come from the external and material, the spiritual must be conquered again. The ascent within has received an impulse through the Mystery of Golgotha. But we live in the fifth period, where this conquest has not yet flourished, where precisely those forces that emerged so grotesquely in Roman times are still strong in people and fight against the impulse of ascent that was brought by the Mystery of Golgotha. And so it is understandable that in this fifth post-Atlantic period, the age of materialism in the way of thinking and feeling has mainly emerged.

The Mystery of Golgotha has already brought an impulse so that the great corruption of the Romans has somewhat diminished, but man has not yet brought it about that the spiritual-soul in his soul also naturally shines forth again. For this, further impulses are needed; for this, a more intensive, a more thorough becoming acquainted with the Christ Impulse is needed. This must become more and more familiar. And so, in the fifth cultural period, the normal human being no longer encounters the soul when they experience themselves. The sense of the soul, the inner experience of the soul, has disappeared for the normal human being. The human being experiences themselves in the experience of the body; they experience themselves as a body, as a natural body.

Self-awareness of the body! And that is why the soul has disappeared from science in particular, and is still disappearing more and more. This soul must be conquered again from within. The fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, which began around 1413-1415, is only just beginning. Humanity will have to develop further in it in such a way that the spiritual is truly conquered more and more within. But this is initially making itself felt in the realm of the soul through a peculiar phenomenon: the phenomenon that something in man himself is appearing materially that was not so material before: namely, thinking itself. Such thinking, as we have it in the fifth period, would have been impossible for the Greeks, and even more so for the Egyptians, Chaldeans or the ancient Persians. Behind the Greeks, imaginative ideas still existed to a certain extent, and even more so in older times; and anyone who can really read Aristotle will notice effective imaginations even in the dry Aristotle, because thinking was still more consciously taking place in the etheric body. Now thinking is completely drawn into the physical body, has become completely brain thinking, and then it takes on the abstract character of which our time is so proud. Thinking that becomes completely abstract is thinking that is really bound to matter, to the matter of the brain. And this thinking, it shows itself precisely in the most epoch-making impulses, which in turn must be deepened, otherwise thinking becomes more and more materialistic and materialistic. And as thinking becomes more and more materialistic, life must also become more and more materialistic. Fundamental ideas - that is the characteristic of our present fifth epoch, which should work as impulses, they only work as abstract ideas.

And there was a time when abstraction as a principle of life had reached its zenith. Everything is necessary – understand me correctly – I do not want to criticize, I am not speaking from the point of view of sympathy and antipathy, I am characterizing as one does scientifically. I do not want to criticize – nobody should think that – the fact that there was an epoch in which abstract world ideas celebrated their greatest triumph. That epoch was when three ideas were expressed in the most extreme abstraction: liberty, equality, fraternity. They were expressed in the most extreme abstraction. This is not said from a conservative or reactionary point of view, but to characterize the development of humanity. At the end of the 18th century, everything calls for freedom, equality, fraternity, not from the soul, but from the thinking brain. And this developed in the 19th century in such a way that we still feel it reverberating everywhere like a habit today. In the course of the nineteenth century, people became terribly accustomed to the abstraction of thinking and are content in the abstractness of thinking because it makes them feel so clever. They believe that in thinking they have truth and feel no need to immerse their thinking in reality. This must be learned again, to immerse oneself in reality; otherwise it remains with the declamation of abstract ideas that have no value for life.

This is the great disease of our time, the declaiming of abstract ideas that have no value for life. If someone says today that a time must come when the world offers the path to success to the hardworking, when the hardworking are given the right place, well, what could be better than this idea! Is it not a wonderful ideal: a free path for the brave! — Sometimes, in today's materialistic times, when one expresses such an ideal, one feels as if one were carrying the whole future in one's breast. But what use is such an abstract ideal if it means that one considers one's son-in-law or one's nephew to be the most capable? What matters is not that we recognize, express and proclaim an abstract ideal, but that we are able to immerse our souls in reality, to see through reality in its essence, to recognize, penetrate, experience and work with reality. Expressing beautiful ideas and enjoying expressing beautiful ideas will increasingly prove harmful. What must enter into our soul is love for reality, knowledge, and adaptation to reality. But this can only come about when people learn to recognize the whole of reality, for the reality of the senses is only the outer shell of reality. If someone who sees a horseshoe-shaped magnet says, “That's the best way to shoe a horse's hoof,” does he have the whole of reality? No, only when he recognizes that there is magnetism in the horseshoe does he have the whole reality. But just as the person who knows nothing else to do with a magnet but to shoe a horse acts, so too is the person who wants to found an external natural science or political science, under the assumption that everything is only the visible world and can be grasped with concepts borrowed from the visible world. This is precisely the extreme abstraction, the harmfulness of abstract ideals. And one does not recognize this harmfulness because the ideals are true, because they are also good, but they are ineffective. They only serve human epistemological egoism, which feels lust in living in such ideals. But no world is ruled by that. At best, it governs a world as it has become in the first half of the 20th century.

One must surrender oneself to such feelings if one wants to understand our time more deeply. The soul life must come alive in the human being, which has emerged so gradually, as I have described, from our environment, from our observed environment. The ideas must become concrete and alive again. Brotherhood is a beautiful idea, but as an abstraction it means nothing. If, firstly, we know that the human soul lives in the body, through the body, on the physical plane here, that is, in a bodily-spiritual, spiritual-bodily way, and secondly, if we know that the human being is not only spiritual-bodily, but is truly a soul, and thirdly, if we that the soul is filled with spirits, and so, if one knows the soul as threefold and the human being as threefold, one knows the human being in his composition of body, soul and spirit: then one has begun to give concrete form to the abstract three ideas of brotherhood, freedom and equality. To say of man in general, of this abstract man, that he should live in brotherhood, freedom and equality, is nothing but a torrent of words. What is necessary is to acquire a living realization of the fact that man, inasmuch as he lives in the body in the physical world, needs a social order that is based on the foundation of real brotherhood, but that brotherhood can only be understood if one regards man as a body. That is the beginning of the right idea of brotherhood. Brotherhood has only one meaning if one knows that man is a trinity and that brotherhood is applicable to the bodily. Freedom: To understand this, one must know that man has a soul, because bodies can never become free. There is no institution by which bodies can become free; the development of mankind can only be such that souls become free. Freedom, when expressed as a general human idea, is an abstraction. Free souls in relation to fraternally living bodies is a concrete idea. People are equal in spirit. An old folk saying was even aware of this: after death, everyone is equal. It was based on the spirit. By living as spirits, people are equal here on earth, but speaking of equality only makes sense when speaking of this third part of the human being, the spirit. It must come to life, my dear friends, so that one can say: that which walks around here on earth in any order lives in body, soul and spirit. Evolution must progress in such a way that bodies live in brotherhood, souls in freedom, and spirits in equality. There is not enough time today to develop this further, but you will already notice today the very significant difference between abstract ideas of equality, freedom and fraternity and the concrete ideas permeated by knowledge, which are then applied to the right thing.

But what is the reason for the fact that one has become so abstract? Well, what has been lost to humanity is that which, relatively late, was still a mystery truth: that the human being consists of body, soul and spirit. Among the Greeks, it was still common to regard the human being as body, soul and spirit. With the first Church Fathers it was still a matter of course. That which lay in the decline of human development, which in turn needs an ascent from the Christ principle, was dogmatically established by the Council of Constantinople in the year 869 by abolishing the spirit. Forgive me for expressing it so grotesquely. It is only on the surface that what emerged in human consciousness through the circumstances I have described has been established. Since that time, it was no longer permissible to teach in theology that man consists of body, soul and spirit, but rather that man consists only of body and soul, as philosophy professors still teach today. And if some good Wundt or other professor of philosophy in our own time has no inkling that man is a trinity, but always talks of body and soul, then he does not know that he is only following the decrees of the Council of Constantinople of the year 869. He is completely unaware that his teaching is only a reproduction of this council decision. Yes, this “presupposition-free” science, if one knows its developmental history more precisely, sometimes has very strange presuppositions. The presupposition-free science of our present age in philosophy is in fact inconceivable without the Council of Constantinople, only the gentlemen do not know it.

What has been obscured, namely that man consists of body, soul and spirit, must be regained through spiritual science. Therefore, the first thing I tried to do, with full awareness, was to apply it symptomatically to our Central European, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, namely, to the structure of the human being into body, soul and spirit, as described in the book “Theosophy”. The whole book is built upon this. This had to be presented to humanity radically again and again; humanity had to be made aware of the threefold nature of man through evolution.

You see how, when you are grounded in spiritual science, everything is justified down to the last detail, but also how spiritual science is suited to giving us such ideas, such impulses of feeling and will, that can make us true co-workers in the right progress of the newer development of humanity. And I always wish that I could evoke a feeling that spiritual science must not remain a theory, must not remain a doctrine, that it must not remain something that is cultivated as a science, but that it can become a truly living, inner soul life. This seems to me much more important than the mere enrichment with concepts, which is of course also necessary, because if something is to be enlivened, it must first be grasped. We must have the concepts within us, but the concepts must not remain dead, they must come to life. Then spiritual science works in such a way that when it is grasped in reality, it stimulates the whole person. But then it is also necessary that the whole person tries to understand it perceptively and willfully. But when the whole person understands this spiritual science perceptively and willfully, then he can live accordingly in it. But then he must never run short of love for true knowledge and for humanity as it continues to develop. In our time, this love is still a tender little plant. And it is understandable, even if it is infinitely sad, when in the field of the spiritual-scientific movement, as we understand it, personal interests, sometimes not of a noble kind, still disfigure the tender little plant of love for the knowledge demanded by the times, celebrates its orgies precisely among those who do not approach spiritual science out of a pure longing for knowledge, who approach it in such a way that, if their vanity is not satisfied, their apparent love immediately turns into hatred. For only real love can conquer hatred; apparent love is even a producer of hatred.

If we feel this correctly, then we will also be able to cope with the phenomena to which I have already referred twice, with those phenomena that are looming so sadly over our Anthroposophical Society, in which we see that the strong haters arise precisely from the circles of the Anthroposophical Society. We will not overcome these things as long as we apply a principle of our materialistic time, as we are so fond of doing today: “I want to be left in peace!” — when we close ourselves off to things or do not want to call things by their right name. If numerous defamatory writings are now appearing, nothing is achieved by taking these defamatory writings so seriously that one refutes the individual sentences. For gentlemen such as those who are now writing do not care whether they put this or that as a proposition. To such a gentleman, for example, who had to be rebuffed when he submitted a work that could not be published by us, who felt offended in his ambition as a result, who, while he then became an enemy, to whom one must say: What you write is simply nonsense, you know better yourself; you write all this because your writing has been rejected. That is the truth. If one understands how to serve spiritual science, it is not important to refute all these things in detail as inventions and fabrications, but rather to show in its true light the person who has belonged to the spiritual-scientific movement in appearance and then afterwards does such things as many are now beginning to do, and more will be done.

Or there is someone — as I told you a few days ago — who wanted to become a great painter, but tried it by begging to be allowed to learn; but when every effort was made to help him, he wanted to know everything better. He thought you didn't become a great painter by learning, but by declaring that you were a genius! If you then have the misfortune not to become one, and, despite being given teachers, you can't learn to paint, but only make a mess of things, and if others are not able to recognize the mess as great paintings, then you come and say that it is the fault of the exercises. You cure such a person in the right way by telling the truth. It must not appear as if spiritual science were endangered and things were not being corrected.

Things will fulfill themselves karmically. The right thing should also be done in many other details in our circles, as it has been done on important points of principle. Consider that since 1911 all ties with Mrs. Besant's Theosophical Society have been cut, and that England's war against Germany did not begin until 1914. This is something where it may be said: the Anthroposophical Society has acted prophetically. There is a lot of defamation in general – this is of course not directed against the English people, but against the defamers who today abuse the nationality principle in this way – but defamation against all better judgment, as Mrs. Besant defames our Anthroposophical Society and me, is a rarity. And after we first made the book “The Great Initiates” popular in Germany and staged Schure's plays, we now have to experience being attacked by Schure in the most impossible way. These are things that, to a certain extent, take place in the wide open spaces. But enemies are also gradually emerging in the narrow spaces.

The anthroposophist must acquire a little foresight and a little will to see what is happening and what will come. One acquires this foresight by taking seriously the motto of our Anthroposophical Society, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, even if it is correctly placed as a motto at the beginning. The one who is able to grasp this deeply enough, “Wisdom lies only in truth”, will take the right position.

With this, my dear friends, I must bid you farewell for this time. I hope that our meeting this time can be the starting point for good cooperation in the spirit, even if we cannot be together physically. Let us try to think, feel and will in the spirit of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then we will work together properly.

Man perceives in himself and in nature both what we call growth and what we call destruction, or perhaps dissolution. And he instinctively forms his ideas in such a way that he is permeated with a certain belief in reality when, whether in himself or in nature, he perceives building up—growth: He forms ideas about what in a sense goes outside reality, loses reality, by directing his glance to destruction, to dissolution; so that it seems quite natural to him to describe what thus goes outside reality, when he perceives it being dissolved, as gradually passing over into the so-called nothingness of the physical world.

I have often said that if we want really to arrive at ideas concerning the spiritual world, we must modify in many respects those ideas acquired in the physical world. We must have different ideas from those acquired in the physical world if we wish to enter at all with our thinking into the spiritual world. It is especially important that we should form a concept which is actually found everywhere in our study of spiritual science, but which we cannot too often bring before our souls—the concept of a connection during physical life between our consciousness and the corresponding processes in our physical organism, We shall never grasp the working of consciousness in the physical world unless we can connect it with the concept of destruction or dissolution. Were there only growth, only development in us as physical beings, we could never be conscious beings in the physical world. In this physical world what is represented in growth, in budding and sprouting, never leads to consciousness. Consciousness can begin only where the processes of growth are invaded by destruction, by processes of dissolution. On this basis we should make ourselves familiar with the ideas which initiation gives us concerning man's so-called evolution

We know that at first the child grows into the world as in a kind of dream. This dream-life of the child is, however, closely united with his growth, with all the sprouting and budding processes; and the younger the child whom we consider, the more do these budding and sprouting processes meet our eye. Only when the individuality in the human organism gains sufficient power to oppose the sprouting and budding, and can bring into them processes of dissolution, does fuller and more complete consciousness appear. We become conscious to the extent to which we are capable of pulling down in us what inner Nature builds up.

When anyone who has gone through initiation observes how consciousness arises in man, he finds that every conscious thought that is grasped, and every conscious feeling that asserts itself, are bound up with the fact that processes of destruction are contending with the building-up processes in the organism. When we look at conscious life we look at destruction; and we must accustom ourselves to have not merely a positive feeling for reality wherever we see a process of sprouting, budding, a process of growth, but we must rise to a feeling for the conscious life of the spirit by observing what part this conscious life of spirit plays in the physical world, by observing, that is, the processes of death and destruction. It is for this reason that we have to alternate the conscious processes with the unconscious processes of sleep, so that what we have destroyed during our waking life of thought may be built up again by the unconscious forces of nature in our organism. That is the swing of life's pendulum—that the soul force when it wakes to consciousness wears out and destroys what mere nature creates in the human organism; and that from the moment the soul, in sleep, forsakes the natural life of the body, from that moment the processes, activities, of sprouting and budding go forward. Hence it is not correct to believe that man's waking life is to be compared with life in summertime, when the earth is budding and sprouting. No! the earth itself as spiritual being wakes when towards autumn the dying processes begin, and it is during the winter that the earth is fully awake. During summer, during the budding and sprouting processes, we have the sleeping life of the earth. The Earth-Spirit sleeps during the summer and during the winter it wakes.

I have previously pointed out that it is due to spiritual initiation that the moment of time when man is destined to unite himself with what in earth-evolution should call up the fullest waking life—with the Christ Impulse—that this moment has been placed in the middle of winter, not in the summer, namely, the Christmas festival. On the other handy I have also called attention to how in more ancient times, when manes knowledge proceeded more from his participation in the sleeping condition of the earth, when his soul had to sink into the sleeping Earth-soul in order to have Imagination, the. dream-like Imagination of the old spiritual vision, then the corresponding festival, the John festival, had to be held during the heat of summer. This festival might be said to signify union in dream and ecstasy with the sleeping, dreaming spirit of the earth. The Christmas festival signifies a conscious union with the waking Earth-spirit. It is just through conceptions such as these, my dear friends, that we come to feel man's renewed connection with the cosmos We enter into this connection concretely, not by merely enthusing in a general way about man being a microcosm of the macrocosm, but by gaining accurate knowledge of how the mighty Earth-being sleeps and wakes, taking the whole year for this alternation, whereas man sleeps and wakes in the course of twenty-four hours.

And now we must turn our gaze with more precision to what we experience in the physical world as consciousness. Let us sketch diagrammatically the sprouting, budding life of our nervous system (see diagram). Clairvoyance actually sees the sprouting, budding life, for example, of the nervous system, especially of the brain, in this form of a fiery wave. Now the human life of soul is in truth outside this sprouting, budding life, Were I to draw the human soul-life as it is in the night, in sleep, I should have to draw it completely outside this figure; in waking life, however, we must picture the soul-life as permeating itself with this budding, sprouting, let us say, fiery life. Thus were the soul-life to permeate the physical organic life only, no consciousness would arise, flow does consciousness arise? For that, the soul must work upon the physical. In the physical to begin with are budding, sprouting processes of growth which are as it were distributed over the life of the nerves. It is these processes of growth that are now broken down and destroyed. A process arises similar to what takes place when the budding and sprouting plant gradually withers and decays; thus the soul life induces processes of destruction in this budding, sprouting life. The destructive processes I indicate here by holes in the shading.

When we are awake, therefore, our soul-life destroys the physical processes of growths breaks them down. Man as a rule knows nothing of this destruction. Clairvoyant vision alone perceives it and makes it possible to say: “Now that you have put yourself into relation with the spiritual world (I say expressly with the spiritual not the physical world) if you wish to have ideas you must destroy something in you.” What makes initiation such a shattering experience is that we perceive this destruction, that we know that If we bring ourselves into relation, let us say, with an Angel or an Archangel being of the spiritual world and want to gain some ideas concerning that being, that is, if we want to perceive the being truly, we must first destroy something in ourselves.

Not that anything is actually destroyed by initiation, but through initiation we become conscious of what is all the time being destroyed in the everyday process of perception. It is just the same when we put ourselves in relation with a flower or an animal, only in the usual course of life we are not aware of it. We begin to know of it only when these processes of destruction work back as reflection into the life of the soul. That is the change. Suppose, for examples you see a red flower. What you experience in the red flower causes you to call forth in yourself a process of destruction, You are, however, unaware of this. But what is destroyed is reflected into your soul and brings about that you have the red flower as an idea, as a perception. Thus you must first create in yourself a copy of the red flower by destroying the sprouting and budding processes, and while you destroy these you create what you then see. Conscious life consists in such processes of destruction, which again are followed by building-up processes It is an inner working at one's own organism and, strictly speaking, lies at the root of all works of human culture. When we instigate cultural work we also destroy something in nature. We cannot build a house if we do not go outside to get wood for it by a process of destruction, and what is thus the product of destruction, torn away from nature, we build up into our artistic creations. Strictly speaking, we do this in all works of art. We do just the same as the destroying, demolishing processes do to the budding, sprouting, which arrest processes of growth. What is embedded into the living organism as an inserted element of death forms the content of conscious being. Every time we display consciousness we are planting what is dead into what is alive, and the more conscious we become the more do we insert a dead man into our living man. Then sleep has the task of dissolving away these dead elements, all but certain remains which, persisting as processes throughout the whole of physical life, lie at the foundation of memory, Were everything to be dissolved by sleep, we should have no memory, no recollection. Thus you see if we want to acquire consciousness we have to recognise in our life a real winter. Consciousness means spreading the destroying, withering life of.nter over the budding, sprouting summer life, We have to make winter within us if we wish to become conscious. Thus we must in a sense learn to value the winter, because were it always summer in our life the spirit could not experience the physical consciously but would remain for ever unconscious.

Something more may arise out of these considerations, my dear friends. A materialistic observer of the world may easily say: It is not possible to look into the way in which consciousness works in the physical body. But when through spiritual science we learn that a parallel exists, in the way referred to, between the individual life of man and the life of the Earth-spirit, then we come to the following conclusion - that if we wish to have a concept of sleeping man and what he really is, all we need do is to imagine ourselves in the budding; sprouting life of summer where everything buds and blossoms. What goes on outside in the earth goes on in miniature and imperceptibly in manes physical nature. We should simply experience summer in man when we look at him asleep, and winter when we look at him awake. If we wish to know what happens to consciousness when it makes use of the physical body as instrument, we must observe how in autumn everything begins to dry up and wither, everything begins to die away, In the external picture we can make of winter we have a true idea of what the waking consciousness brings about in man's physical organism by using it as an instrument. That is why when the soul is outside the body and clairvoyant consciousness looks at the body out of which the soul has departed, it perceives the body as a budding, sprouting world. It is childish to believe that the clairvoyant, when outside the body with his soul, sees the body in the same way as in physical life we see another human being. We are wrong in thinking that the man lies there with his soul hovering above and that the soul looks back on the body and sees the man lying there beneath. That is not so. The moment the soul goes forth, the body becomes the world, a summer world; and if the soul remains clairvoyant on returning to the body, it experiences in itself the personal, individual winter.

We can thus discover an inner connection between the life of man and the life of the earth. When we consider the life of the earth and look first at summer time, outside us we see in this summer time what works and weaves in us in the same way but works and weaves during our sleeping condition. If we now seek to express in a few words the feeling of this working and weaving in sleep, we can do so as follows. All this is the world of coming to birth, of arising, And when we feel ourselves in this world, we can say, “OUT OF THE DIVINE WE ARE BORN”. For in so far as with our own forces we belong to this world, this budding and sprouting world, we must say: EX DEO NASCIMUR, Out of the Divine we are born. Man has been able to say EX DEO NASCIMUR at every stage of earth evolution and will be able to say it also in each future evolutionary stages

On the other hand it is essential for our own cycle of time, which follows the Mystery of Golgotha, that we should now understand that the forces of dying life work in us; melting forces, dissolving life, and that with this melting away, this dissolution of life, consciousness is connected. We find the consciousness of the earth, the waking earth-life, in the winter time. In order in winter to live with the earth in the physical world, we must dive down into what is dying, But since the Mystery of Golgotha, we do this by taking the Christ Impulse with us into what is dying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. We make this into a guiding motto through the other half of the year, when the earth is awake, awake in the dying life: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

Thus the earth's year is divided for us into two halves, into the half which has its culminating point at Midsummer, for which the saying holds good: EX DEO NASCIMUR, and the other half which has its culminating point at Christmas time, for which we have the saying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

We should not think that the correct conception of man as the microcosm of the macrocosm is merely an abstraction, Nor should we think that we can do very much if we hold to abstract ideas about it. Rather should we be clear that we shall meet this conception more and more on really coming to the true life of the Spirit of the Earth. You see, when we observe the earth in winter with its dying, freezing life, this dying, freezing life is the expression of the thinking, feeling and perception of the waking Earth-spirit. But we must think of the Earth-spirit in connection with what surrounds us as our immediate world. We should picture the world, as it were, as a great spiritual being having the earth as physical instrument. And we get this idea of what the earth is thinking, especially of what it is thinking during winter, when we consider the whole manner in which the surroundings of the earth work into the earth. Imagine yourself on a night in winter, with your gaze directed to the stars, with perhaps the moon among the stars, and you have to say that the whole constellation of this starry world is an outward expression, a picture, of what is thought consciously on the earth, and we live in it because the cosmos enters into relation with the earth. You then see how we are standing in a living way within the thinking of the earth, in all that weaves and waves around the earth as earthly thinking, just as in summer, livingly with our own soul, we are within the earth-sleep;

Nevertheless, in summer we should take our place consciously in the life of the earth. We should call on. our astral forces so as not to succumb to the earth-sleep, Many people very easily fall asleep in the heat of summer, because during the universal sleep of the earth their astral forces are not strong enough to keep them awake. If we ourselves sleep during the summer time our activity is only equal in value to that of the earths In winter we should develop in the subconscious the forces for sleep which withstand the universal earth-life, whereas for the waking life during winter we need the forces lying more in the direction of the waking life of the Earth-spirit. So we might say we swing with our own life, with the lesser oscillations of our own life, within the yearly oscillations of the Earth-being, of the conscious Earth-being. And this conscious Earth-being is completely dependent on the star constellations There you have a living impression of the way in which our own soul-life is interwoven indirectly with the life of the stars in the sleeping and waking of the earth This gives us a living picture of what astrology is really meant to be, if it is at all to be taken seriously. Therefore, as I have often said Astrology is either the purest dilettantism, or it can only be striven for as an essential part in the deep study and knowledge of spiritual science.

Recently I have often emphasised, my dear Friends, how necessary it is that those who are drawn to spiritual science should acquire conceptions that will lead them from what is merely the content of thought into living reality, Think what entirely new sides of life open to us when we know that consciousness is based on a breaking-up, destruction, and that there has to be destruction for consciousness to have its physical instruments. For in very truth just as we cannot work in the physical world without destroying nature, so we cannot become conscious without the destruction in us of our processes of growth. Clairvoyance has to look upon these continuous processes of destruction, it has without bias to see how our whole life through, a gradual death is taking place for consciousness to be able to exist. Initiation consists in our receiving as it were a concentrated picture of this process of destruction spread out over the whole time between birth and death. This process is concentrated in actual physical death; were not physical death to come about, in the spiritual world after death we should never be able to develop consciousness. Death, the destruction of the physical and etheric bodies, is the primary condition for the development of consciousness in the time between death and a new birth. As a plant cannot be there if the root is not, so the consciousness between death and a new birth cannot exist if it is not rooted in the process of death. As in the first years of physical existence we have to strive for the possibility of destroying from the standpoint of the soul the early processes of budding and growth, consciousness only awaking to the extent to which we can embed the processes of destruction into the processes of growth—as only when the force of the destructive process has reached a certain stage a consciousness develops—so we have to destroy and discard the whole body. And the act we thus perform, this shedding first of the physical and then of the etheric body, is the starting point for the consciousness between death and a new birth. We acquire the faculty of consciousness between death and a new birth by being able to kill ourselves—we may be allowed to say this, for it corresponds with the truth—by being able, that is, to undergo the processes that take place in death. As life here between birth and death has its starting point in the merely plant-like life of the child, so the life between death and a new birth has its starting point in the process of death. We are here looking at strictly destructive processes, and it is important that we should adapt ourselves to the possibility of sharing in the life of the whole course of nature and that of the entire spiritual cosmos.

If you examine the modern life of spirit, my dear friends, you will find that in reality—I have pointed to this before—the development of man is gradually withdrawing more and more from the inner process of existence, and only the external world is considered. There is a growing disinclination to look at the whole of nature, the tendency being more and more to consider only half of her—the growing, budding and sprouting forces. Where annihilation begins, there existence is thought to cease. The materialist cannot think otherwise, since he can never form ideas about spiritual life in the physical world, because these ideas about spiritual life in the physical world begin just where the processes of destruction begin. He wants to investigate only the growing processes for to him they are the sole reality. When anything begins to wither he sets out to investigate what grows up over it, or he seeks in the dying process the chemical remains, that iso the material, the physical. The important point is that man has no wish to direct his attention to the other half, to the dying. Yet it is only from what passes away that men can acquire an insight into the existence of the conscious soul-life. This is a vastly important truth—that the modern world-outlook, because it has developed in the way indicated because it always directs attention to what is budding and sprouting, has deprived itself of the power to see the spiritual, the spiritual only betraying its presence in things when they begin to disintegrate. As long as there is budding and sprouting, the spiritual works within the beings, not appearing as spirit but manifesting externally through material processes. If the spiritual is to appear in the beings, processes of destruction must take place. The spirits of the blossoms, the elementary spirits of the plants, may not remain when the blossoms open and the flowers are developed, when the sun with its sounding waves charms forth the budding, sprouting life. “If it strikes you, you are deaf.” Read these words at the beginning of Part II in Goethe's “Faust” with understanding, The spirits must dive down, They can emerge only when the budding and sprouting life withdraws.

You see, the poetic perception of Goethe was so living that he thoroughly realised how the budding and sprouting that comes forth with the rising of the sun makes it necessary for the elves to recede. But this will become clear to us, my dear friends, that at the sight of the physically dying world there arises first the misty realm of the spirit and then the whole true spirit realm. It is not without meaning when in folklore we hear that to become spiritual the trees must first decay, that only when they are decaying do they let us see the spirit. If we go out into the country and see a decaying, dried-up tree-trunk, it is really showing for the first time its spiritual appearance. There must everywhere first be destruction before the spiritual is to appear.

Modern spiritual life, it is true, consists just in this—that souls have withdrawn from such an intimate living together with nature that they are able to feel the decaying forces and in them all that is spiritually alive. Hence it is that today when we speak of the spiritual, people can form no conception of it at all, for they only consider the world in so far as it buds and sprouts. When it ceases to do this, when decay sets in, for them it leaves the field of reality. If you speak to them of the realm of true life, if you say that the spiritual rises out of the dying, if you tell them all this, you will find that they are listening to something that has absolutely no meaning for them. It may actually happen that if you are speaking today to a gathering of people who have had no previous preparation through spiritual science and you talk of the spiritual living in the world, they have no notion of what is in question. To such people world-conceptions are a matter of complete indifference, They take no interest in discovering; what may be found at the basis of things:. One can have the same kind of experience that we once had at a lecture. You know that we try as far as possible to keep away those who are generally the least cultured of those attending our lectures, those who write for the newspapers. As a rule they understand the minimum of what is spoken about, But sometimes it happens that these very clever people of the present day cannot be kept away. One cannot always act in such a drastic way as was done recently at a certain place in Austria when a reporter came to the lecture and our chairman said to him: “You will certainly not understand anything and had better stay away.” The man had actually bought a ticket. It can't always happen like that, It happened on another occasion that a reporter wrote: “What is this spiritual science meant to be? It is obvious that one person pictures the world in one way and another somehow else, Everyone has a right to his opinion.” Thus in our time you find all over the place complete lack of interest mixed with utter frivolity whenever a world-conception is in question. And this was once written about a lecture: “One person sees the world as a box of bricks, another makes a brew of toads gall with tiger's intestines, a third is a monist, a fourth stares at the confusion without thinking at all, a fifth looks through two pairs of spectacles at the forces of the soul and so (says the writer) we could go on indefinitely.” He is completely indifferent to all these points of view.

This lack of interest towards a spiritual comprehension of the world is not diminishing, it is increasing, and will go on doing so unless a deepening comes about in the world through spiritual science, Deepening through spiritual science will prove of the greatest value, my dear friends, because it does not merely call upon man's faculty for forming concepts and ideas, but seizes upon his whole soul and permeates it so that he actually feels himself as microcosm in the macrocosm, and really experiences individually what has first to build itself up on the processes of destruction. We can attain an actual living-together-with-the-dead only when we can see in the destructive process of death a process that makes a foundation upon which the spiritual being of man rises after death—a process continuing to work up to the time of a new birth.

Thus spiritual science must mean both familiarizing ourselves with the truth of things and letting the truth of things take hold of our very being. Modern spiritual life is a withdrawal from the truth, a becoming apathetic It is becoming a matter of indifference whether there is real clairvoyant vision or whether “toads' gall is brewed with tiger's intestines”. In its culture and ethics modern spiritual life is on the way to the most frivolous and cynical indifference towards all existence that has to do with the depths of being, On the other hand, spiritual science is developing and can develop in a natural way, since the human soul, simply by interesting itself in the results of spiritual investigation, is taken hold of by the cosmic process, carried into it, interwoven with it. It is not necessary to be clairvoyant, but only to enter honestly into the experiences resulting from clairvoyance, getting to know spiritual science; then one will be laid hold of and carried along by what is received through anthroposophical concepts into a living mutual experience and mutual feeling with the cosmos, For this it is certainly necessary that spiritual science should not be looked upon as something adding to the enjoyment of life, but again and again we must penetrate further with our thought into what spiritual science gives. We need not be clairvoyant at first but must accustom ourselves to consider the things of life from many aspects, in the sense of spiritual science. Hence among us things are described from the most varied aspects. Then the experiences take hold of one and carry the soul in feeling if not with knowledge right into the life of the spiritual world, into the spiritual manifesting in the material.

But now my dear friends, in what spiritual science wishes to bring about in knowledge, in art, in religious feeling, and in ethical will—spiritual science takes its place in our spiritual life as something of which we have to be conscious that it is a new element in modern culture. Any anthroposophist must become conscious of this new thing. Yesterday I pointed this out in another connection—namely, that it is necessary for us to give a new form to the Christ Impulse, that our figure of the Christ is essentially different in form from that of Michelangelo's . Our thinking and feeling have to be thoroughly transformed in face of the new standpoint. Then men will begin to have an inkling of what life is as a whole—intensive, living life, For this has ceased. Wherever we look in our environment there is no longer the feeling Goethe expressed when he said: “Art must be the expression, the true expression, of living cosmic laws.” Art has to be an interpretation of the mysterious laws of nature. Today there is no longer any understanding for that. Hence one sees that in all spheres there is a gradual falling away from the real inner life of truth, in what appears as knowledge on the one hand, and on the other as art. In art today we are fond of speaking of compositions, of juxtapositions of individual parts. What art was in olden times, what it must again become—a creating out of the truth of the things themselves—has vanished. In the fullest sense there is an ahrimanic conspiracy against truth, which is spread abroad in the world, and this appears today in the sphere of art as well as in that of science. In the sphere of science we see everywhere a clinging to what is merely perceived by the senses.

In art, too, we see what resembles this. We see, in man, the possibility of feeling and perceiving the inner truth of things gradually dying out. Thus works of art can be produced and admired throughout the civilised world like “Jean Christophe”, the novel by Romain Rolland.

Anyone who creates out of true art, who feels inner truth, inner ruling truth, will never jumble together such a “work of art” as “Jean Christophe”; he would know that the individuality of a Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Strauss, Gustav Mahler, has its inner truth for each one of them. If we jumble them all together, we produce a vexatious chaos of decadent art like this tiresome “Jean Christophe”, which, however, to the regret of all concerned with real art, is admired throughout the civilised world. It is admired, let me say, because today there is a secret conspiracy against the real, essential truth. Indeed, people are no longer aware that they are sinning against the real, essential truth in admiring this so-called literary work and in letting pass as valid not the living individualities built up from a unity that is alive, but a chaotic, foolish work that is all patched together.

We must, my dear friends, be alive to the various sources of perversion out of which the soul willingly creates at the present time; we must calmly and courageously acknowledge what is thus perverted so as to bring to consciousness the significance of the impulse of spiritual science and its intervention in man's living world of truth. Then we shall understand. that we live in an age in which we must be clear that what confronts us as summer-life, budding, sprouting life, is EX DEO NASCIMUR; diminishing life, the destroying of the soul-life, but spirit issuing forth from this destruction in our life since the Mystery of Golgotha—IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. But in the future men must not remain standing on this ground; when this budding, sprouting life of summer when comes, when the Earth-spirit sleeps, we must find the strength to develop and carry into the sleep of the Earth-spirit a higher force arising from the life of soul resulting from clairvoyant knowledge. Then we have to say: As the world in summer is EX DEO NASCIMUR, so the world in winter; and since the Mystery of Golgotha, is IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

But as we go to meet the sleep, the summer life, the sleep of the external organism of the earth, let us be conscious that we can carry into this time what we now experience out of this actual living together with the spiritual world, what the spirit carries into this time of the earth's sleep—the mood of Whitsuntide. If we have felt: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR aright, we shall bear the Whitsun mood into this sleep-condition of the earth by receiving the impulse spiritual science is able to give.

We are born out of the Divine; the summer life of budding, sprouting nature is witness to this We live with the Christ, and feel that we do, by living ourselves into the winter; when the earth wakes we take the Christ Impulse with us into the life of dying Nature: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR, But by going forward again to meet the summer with the Mystery of Golgotha, we carry the Whitsun mood into life so that it may awake in the darkness of summer, in the budding and sprouting and that amidst the sleeping Earth-spirits we ourselves awake in spirit: PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS.

The contents of today's lecture will be better understood if we begin by considering once again what it is that happens when man wakes from sleep, but we shall pay special attention now to what is working out of the spiritual world at the building up of his nature and constitution. When man wakes from sleep his whole being passes out of the Macrocosm into the Microcosm. It is quite understandable that in his normal consciousness he has very little knowledge of the interaction between Macrocosm and Microcosm. In the ordinary way he supposes that what he calls his Ego is within himself. But in view of the fact that while he is asleep he is outside his physical sheaths with his astral body and his Ego, it is obvious that during the hours of sleep the Ego must certainly not be sought within the boundaries of the skin but that it has poured into the worlds of which we have spoken: the Elementary World, the World of Spirit, the World of Reason, and also into the still higher world we are to consider today—the World of the spiritual Archetypes of all things. The Ego has poured into the cosmic expanse; hence the entry into the body on waking in the morning must not be imagined as though the Ego merely slipped back into the body. A kind of contraction of the Ego takes place on waking; it contracts more and more and then passes into the physical and etheric bodies in a certain consolidated form. But what is perceptible to clairvoyant consciousness is that the Ego is not by any means wholly within man during the hours of waking consciousness. To clairvoyant consciousness the Ego is always present in a certain way in man's environment and coincides only partially with what is perceived as the human physical body. Accordingly we may say that the Ego, in its substantiality, is also always present around us. What the clairvoyant sees as a kind of light-aura may be called the Ego-aura. Man is always surrounded by a spiritual cloud of this nature. The Ego is not to be looked for at any particular spot but it pervades man's whole Ego-aura. In the morning the Ego approaches from all sides, from all the Beings and Realities of the worlds we have called the World of Reason, the World of Spirit and the Elementary World.

Now let us consider more exactly how the Ego slips into the body, and ask ourselves: How is it that on waking we are suddenly surrounded with sense-perceptions, such as impressions of colour and light? For example, suppose the first sense-impression we have on waking is a blue surface, the colour blue. What is the explanation of this impression? Ordinary consciousness is completely at sea here. The reason is that when the Ego is passing out of the Macrocosm into the Microcosm, a kind of barrier is created against the in-streaming spiritual forces, against everything we call the Elementary World. Something is held back with the result that only a portion of the Elementary World flows in. If we see a blue surface in front of us, then, through this blue surface all these forces are flowing in, with the exception of a part of the Elementary World. The part of the Elementary World that is held back comes into our consciousness as a mirror-image, a reflection, and this reflection is the blue colour. The elements of fire, air, water and earth (spiritually conceived as belonging to the Elementary World) stream through the eye with the exception of what we actually see. Sense-perception arises through the fact that our eye holds back part of the light from the Elementary World, our ear holds back part of the sound, our other organs hold back part of the fire or warmth; what is not held back, streams into us.

We can now supplement what was said in the previous lectures, that the “eye is formed by the light for the light.”

That is to say, the eye is not formed by what is reflected, but by what comes to us with the light—and that is part of the Elementary World. Moreover something also streams in from the World of Spirit, indeed from all the worlds of which we have spoken. Accordingly we may say: At this particular point certain forces are held back by the eye, and also by the other senses; what does not stream into us, what is held back, is the sum-total of our sense-impressions. Thus it is what we do not let through that we see or hear; but what we do let through is what has formed the physical organism of the eye, for example. We hold back certain forces and allow certain others to pass through—these latter being forces of the Elementary World. If we look at the eyeball in a mirror, then too we see only what it does not let through. Thus in the Elementary World there are forces which have formed our sense of sight and also our other senses. As sense-beings we are formed out of the Elementary World; the world we see when we are able to look into the Elementary World is the world which builds up our senses.

At the inner “wall” of our organ of sight there is a kind of second mirror, for there, from a further world, other forces flow in—with the exception of those that are reflected. There the elemental forces themselves are held back and reflected; they cease to function and it is only the forces of the World of Spirit that stream through and are not reflected. These are the forces that form, for example, the optic nerve. Just as the eye has its optic nerve, so has the ear its aural nerves from the forces streaming in from the World of Spirit. From there stream the forces of Beings who are the builders of the whole nervous system. Our nerves are ordered according to the laws of the planetary world outside, for the planetary world is the outer expression of spiritual realities and spiritual worlds.

If it is the case that the World of Spirit works at the forming of our nervous system, it follows that underlying our nervous system there must be a certain law and order corresponding to that of the solar system. Our nervous system must be an inner solar system, for it is organised from the Heaven World.

We will now ask ourselves whether this nervous system really functions as if it were a mirror-image of the solar system out yonder in the Macrocosm. As you know, our measurement of time is governed by the relation of the planets to the Sun and again in the yearly cycle by the passage of the Sun through the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. That is an arrangement of time based upon the law contained in the number twelve as a number which expresses the movements taking place in the solar system. There are also twelve months in the year, and in the longest months there are thirty-one days. That again is based upon the mutual relations of the heavenly bodies and is connected with our time-system. There is a certain irregularity for which there is a good reason, but we cannot go into it now.

Let us try to picture this remarkable time-system in the universe and ask ourselves how these cosmic processes would be reflected in our nervous system. If the forces underlying the Macrocosm are also the forces which have formed our nervous system, we shall certainly find a reflection of them in ourselves; and in fact we have twelve cerebral nerves and thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves. The cosmic laws are actually reflected in these spinal and cerebral nerves. The existence of a certain irregularity is explained by the fact that man is destined to be a being who is independent of what is going on outside him. Just as the Sun's passage through the constellations of the Zodiac takes place in twelve months, and this is reflected in the twelve cerebral nerves, so the days of the month are regulated in accordance with the circuit of the Moon—twenty-eight days. How is the connection of the thirty-one days in the month with the human nervous system to be explained? We have three additional pairs of nerves, i.e. thirty-one in all, which makes us independent beings; otherwise here too we should be governed by the number twenty-eight. Here you can glimpse a deep mystery, a wonderful connection between our nervous system and what is expressed in the great symbols of space—symbols which in themselves are mirrorings of spiritual Beings and activities.

We come now to the third part of the reflection. Our nervous system is built up by the World of Spirit. At the point where the nerves pass either into the brain or into the spine, again a reflection takes place. At this point the stream from the World of Spirit is held back in the nervous system and what we have come to know in the World of Reason penetrates through. The forces of the Hierarchies work through at this point and the World of Reason builds up for us the brain and spinal cord that lie behind the nerves. In our brain itself and its elongation, the spinal cord, we have the product of all the activity originating ultimately in the World of Reason. Anyone who is able to survey the World of Spirit clairvoyantly can find exact images of the great cosmic prototypes even in the smallest reflections in the cerebral nervous system and the spinal nervous system. But the World of Archetypes, or Archetypal Images, streams right through us without our being able to hold it back.

In what way are we able in ordinary life to be conscious of anything? By being able to hold it back. We become aware of a part of the Elementary World by holding it back. We are a product of the Elementary World in our sense-organs and in becoming aware of the activity and functioning of our senses we become aware of the Elementary World. We are a product of the World of Spirit and become aware of that world—but only in reflection—when we become aware of the world connected with our nerves. What does man know of the Elementary World? As much as is mirrored for him by the senses: light, sounds, and so forth. What does man know of the World of Spirit? Just what his nerves reflect for him. The Laws of Nature as they are usually called are nothing else than a shadowy image, a faint reflection, of the World of Spirit. And what man takes to be his inner spiritual life, his reason, is a weak reflection of the outer World of Reason; what is usually called intellect, intelligence, is a faint, shadowy reflection of the World of Reason.

Of what should we have to be capable if we desired to see more than what has been described here? We should have to be able to hold back more. If we wanted to experience consciously the influence of the World of Archetypal Images we should have to be able to hold back this world in some way.

It is only possible for us to have physical sense-organs—eyes, for example—by admitting the Elementary World into ourselves and then holding it back. We can only have a nervous system by admitting the World of Spirit into ourselves and then holding it back; we can only have a brain and reasoning faculty by admitting into ourselves the World of Reason and then holding it back; thereby the brain is formed. If higher organs are to be formed, it must be possible for us to hold back a still higher world. We must be able to send something towards it, as in our brain we send that which holds back the World of Reason. Thus man must do something if he wishes to develop in the true way. He must derive forces from a higher world if in the true sense he wishes to develop to a higher stage. He must do something to hold back the forces of the World of Archetypal Images which would otherwise simply pass through him. He must himself create a reflecting apparatus for that purpose. The method of Spiritual Science, starting from Imaginative Knowledge, creates such an apparatus in the way in which the man of today can and should do this. What man normally perceives and knows is the external physical world. If he desires to attain higher knowledge he must do something to create for himself higher organs. He must bring a world that is higher than the World of Reason to a halt within himself, and this he does by developing a new kind of activity which can confront the World of Archetypal Images and, to begin with, hold it back. He engenders the new activity by learning to undergo inner experiences which do not occur in everyday life. A typical experience of this kind is described in the book, Occult Science—an Outline (Chapter V). It comes about by picturing the Rose-Cross. How should we proceed in order to have as a true experience within us this mental picture of the Rose-Cross?

A pupil who aspires to be led to higher stages of knowledge would be told by his teacher to contemplate, as a beginning, how a plant grows out of the soil, how it forms stem, leaves, flower and fruit. Through the whole structure flows the green sap. Now compare this plant with a human being. Blood flows through the human being and is the outer expression of impulses, appetites and passions; because man is endowed with an Ego he appears to us as a being higher than the plant. Only a fantastic mind-although there are many such—could believe that the plant has consciousness similar to that of man and could reflect impressions inwardly. Consciousness arises, not through the exercise of activity but because an impression is reflected inwardly, and this, man—but not the plant—is able to do. Thus in a certain respect man has reached a higher stage of development than the plant but at the cost of the possibility of erring. The plant is not liable to error, neither has it a higher and a lower nature. It has no impulses or appetites that degrade it. We may well be impressed by the chastity of the plant in contrast to the impulses, desires and passions of man. With his red blood man exists as a being who, in respect of his consciousness, has developed to a higher stage than the plant but at the cost of a certain deterioration.

All this would be made clear to an aspirant for higher knowledge. The teacher would tell him that he must now attain what, at a lower stage, the plant reveals to him; he must gain the mastery over his appetites, impulses and so forth. He will achieve this mastery when his higher nature has won the victory over the lower, when his red blood has become as chaste as the sap of the plant when it reddens in the rose. And so the red rose can be for us a symbol of what man's blood will become when he masters his lower nature. We see the rose as an emblem, a symbol of the purified blood.

And if we associate the wreath of roses with the dead, black, wooden cross, with what the plant leaves behind when it dies, then we have in the Rose-Cross a symbol of man's victory of the higher, purified nature over the lower. In man, unlike the plant, the lower nature must be overcome. The red rose can be for us a symbol of the purified red blood. But the rest of the plant cannot be an emblem in this sense for there we must picture that the sap and greenness of the plant have lignified. In the black wooden cross we have therefore the emblem of the vanquished lower nature, in the roses the emblem of the development of the higher nature. The Rose-Cross is an emblem of man's development as it proceeds in the world.—This is not an abstract concept but something that can be felt and experienced as actual development. The soul can glow with warmth at the picture of development presented in the symbol of the Rose-Cross.

This shows that man can have mental pictures which do not correspond to any external reality. Those who are desirous of having normal consciousness only, where the mental pictures always represent some external reality, will speak derisively of the Rose-Cross symbol and insist that mental pictures are false if they represent no external fact. Such people will ask: wherever is there any such thing as the Rose-Cross? Do red roses ever grow on dead wood?—But the whole point is that we shall acquire a faculty of soul that is not present in normal consciousness; that we shall become capable of elaborating mental images and conceptions which have a certain relation to the outer world but yet are not replicas of it. The Rose-Cross is related in a certain respect to the outer world, but it is we ourselves who have created the nature of this relationship. We have contemplated the plant and the ascendancy attained by man and we picture this to ourselves in the image of the Rose-Cross. Then we inscribe this symbol into our world of mental pictures and ideas. The same could be done with other symbols.

In order that we may understand one another fully, I will speak about another symbol. Let us think of the ordinary life of a man through the days of his existence. Day alternates with night, waking with sleeping. During the day we have a number of experiences; during the night, without our being conscious of it, forces are drawn from the spiritual world. Just as we have experiences in our conscious life, in the night we have experiences in the subconscious region of our being. If with the object of acquiring knowledge we take stock of our inner life from time to time, we certainly ask ourselves the question: What progress am I making? Has every experience during the day actually brought me a step forward?—There are grounds for a man to feel satisfied if he makes only a slight advance every day, having his daily experiences and deriving new strength at night. A great deal must, of course, be experienced every day if he is actually to become more mature. Ask yourselves what progress you have made in this respect in a single day. You will find that in spite of innumerable experiences the advance made by the Ego from one day to the next is a very slow process in many cases and a great many experiences are unnoticed. If, however, we look back to the most favourable period of our life, to childhood, we see how rapidly the child advances in comparison what is achieved in later life. There are good grounds for stating that a traveler who devotes his whole energies to journeys round the globe in order to make progress through the acquisition of knowledge does not advance as far as a child advances through what he has learned from his nurse.

The advance made by the Ego can be indicated by a serpentine spiral. Two serpent forms, one light and one dark, wind around a vertical staff. The light curves represent the experiences of the day, the dark curves the forces working during the night. The vertical line indicates the advances made. Here, then, we have a different symbol representing the life of man.

We can make both complicated and simple symbols. The following would be an example of a simple one.—If we concentrate on a plant growing until the seed is formed and then gradually withering until everything except the seed has vanished, we can visualise this as a quite simple symbol of growth and decay.

In the Rose-Cross we have a symbol of man's development from his present stage to his purification; in the Staff of Mercury we have a symbol of man's development through the experiences of day and night and the advance made by the Ego.—Symbol after symbol can be created in this way.

None of them mirrors any external reality; but by surrendering ourselves in inner contemplation to the meaning of these symbols, we accustom our soul to activities which it does not otherwise exercise. These activities finally engender an inner force which enables us to hold back the World of Archetypes or Archetypal Images in the same way as we have held back the other worlds.

The symbols need not only be pictorial; they may also consist of words into which profound cosmic truths are compressed. When cosmic truths are compressed into symbolical sentences we have there a force by means of which we can mould the substance of our soul. By working thus upon himself man consciously builds up that which the external world has otherwise accomplished in him without his aid, forming his brain out of the World of Reason, his nervous system out of the World of Spirit, his sense-organs out of the Elementary World. He himself builds organs higher than the brain, organs which are not outwardly visible to normal consciousness because they lie in a realm beyond the physical. Just as the eyes have been formed out of the Elementary World, the nerves out of the World of Spirit, the brain out of the World of Reason, go out of the World of Archetypal Images higher spiritual organs are formed and moulded, organs which gradually enable us to penetrate into the higher world and to look into it. These organs simply represent a development and continuation of the activity carried out at a lower stage. These higher organs of perception appear in the shape of spiritual flower-forms budding forth from man and are therefore called ‘lotus-flowers’, or also spiritual ‘wheels’ or ‘chakrams’.

In anyone who practises such exercises, new organs may actually become visible to clairvoyant consciousness. For example, one unfolds like a wheel or flower in the middle of the forehead. This is the two-petalled lotus-flower; it is a spiritual sense-organ. Just as a physical sense-organ exists in order to bring to our consciousness the world around us, so do the spiritual sense-organs exist in order to bring to our consciousness the world which cannot be seen with normal physical eyes. These so-called lotus-flowers are forces and systems of forces which bud from man's soul.

A second organ of this kind may be formed in the region of the larynx, another near the heart, and so on. These spiritual sense-organs—the word inevitably implies a contradiction but there is no better expression in modern language which is coined for the physical world—these spiritual sense-organs can be cultivated by the patient and vigorous practice of immersing oneself in symbolic mental pictures which are not pictures of anything in the external world and which in this respect differ from the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness in that they do not mirror anything external but work in the soul and produce forces which can hold back the World of Archetypal Images just as eyes, nerves and brain hold back the other worlds that are around us.

But to have arrived at this point is not enough. Anyone possessed of the faculty of clairvoyant vision can perceive these higher sense-organs in man. But these organs themselves must now be further developed. So far they have been formed out of a world higher than those worlds out of which our human constitution is otherwise built up. Now comes the second stage, the preparation for actual vision. The form taken by the process of preparation is that anyone who has attained Imaginative Knowledge through the development of the lotus-flowers and is conscious of having attained it, now passes on to something rather more difficult, to a higher stage of inner work and effort.

The first stage consists in elaborating numbers of symbolic mental pictures—which are given in every school for genuine spiritual training and vary according to a man's individuality, so that the higher sense-organs may be developed with patience and endurance. At the next stage, as soon as the man has acquired a certain skill in picturing such symbols, he must reach the point of being able to exclude the pictures from his consciousness and to concentrate only upon the force within him that has created them. In forming the picture of the Rose-Cross we took account of the plant and of man, and only afterwards built up the symbol. Now we eliminate from our consciousness this symbol as well as that of the Staff of Mercury, concentrating upon the activity we ourselves have exercised in building up the pictures. This means that we direct our attention to our own activity, ignoring the product of it. This is even more difficult. We say to ourselves after having created a symbol: How did you do this?—Most people will need to make many, many attempts in order to pass from the symbol itself to the activity which created it. The process will take a very long time. Again and again it will be necessary to create the symbols until we reach the point where we can dismiss them, in order then to experience something quite new, without seeing anything external, namely, the activity which created them.

If after practising this for a long time we feel a kind of seething and eddying within us, a certain progress has been made. We can then actually experience the moment when we do not merely possess higher organs or lotus-flowers but see flashing before us a new realm of which hitherto we had no inkling; we have reached the stage where we have a new field of vision and have our first insight into the World of Spirit.

The experience is as follows.—We have already left the ordinary outer world, we have lived in a world of symbols, and now we eliminate the symbols and pictures; then we have black darkness around us. Consciousness does not cease but seethes and eddies, stirred by our own activity. At an earlier stage we held back the World of Archetypal Images, now we hold back the World of Reason too, but not in the same way as before; we hold it back from the opposite side. We hold back what otherwise flows into us. Previously we saw only the shadow-pictures of the World of Reason in our own intellectual activity; now we see the World of Reason from the other side; we see the Beings known as the Hierarchies. Little by little everything now becomes filled with life.

This is the first step to be taken. But that is not all. A further step consists in acquiring the power also to suppress our own activity. First of all the pictures have been suppressed and now our own activity. If he really makes the attempt the pupil will again realise how difficult this is; it is a longer process for it will usually happen that he then falls asleep. Yet if any consciousness at all is left to him, he has advanced to the point where he holds back not only the World of Reason but the World of Spirit too. He now sees the World of Spirit from the other side and the spiritual Realities and Beings in that world. Whereas the previous stage of knowledge, when the activity creating the symbols is held back, is known as Inspiration (Knowledge through Inspiration), this further stage, when we also eliminate our own activity, is called Intuition. Through Intuition we glimpse the true configuration of the World of Spirit which otherwise we see only in its shadow-pictures, the laws of Nature. We now become conscious of the Beings and their activities which have their outward expression in the realities and laws of Nature.

We have now described a path of knowledge differing somewhat from the one that is followed when a man simply becomes conscious of entering into or passing out of the World of Spirit when he goes to sleep or wakes. This method first creates the organs in that the World of Archetypal Images is held back and its forces used for the creation of these organs that are needed by man, and then he is led through Imaginative and Inspired Knowledge into the World of Spirit into which he is now able to gaze. But when he has reached the stage of Intuitive Knowledge, he can also grow into the Elementary World in such a way as not to enter it unprepared but fully prepared, seeing it before him as a final experience. Certainly this path is a hard one for many people because it demands much renunciation. A man must first practise for a long time with symbols and wait until the requisite organs are formed. But to begin with he cannot see with these organs. It is very often the case today that people do not want to go along a sure path but above all to see something quickly, to have rapid success. Success will surely come but it must be achieved by practising a certain renunciation. First we must work upon ourselves for a long time in order little by little to find entrance into the higher worlds; and truly, what we first see of the World of Reason and of the World of Spirit is a very colourless vista. Only when we come back from these realms into the Elementary World, when we are far advanced in Intuitive Knowledge—only then does everything acquire colour and vividness, because then it is all permeated by the Elementary World and its effects. It is only from the vantage-point of Intuitive Knowledge that these things can be described.

Moreover only when we have joy in building up the symbols, when we work with patience and perseverance at the development of the organs, can we be aware of a certain progress; but although at the beginning we see only little of the higher worlds, it is a sure path and one that protects us from illusions. The reward comes only later, but it is a path that is a safeguard against idle phantasy. If we have worked our way to the stage of Imaginative Knowledge, we already stand in the world immediately above our own; and we feel that we have membered into ourselves something from a higher world. Then we gradually rise to higher and higher stages and finally achieve a real understanding of the higher worlds.

You will find an outline of this process of development in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in the later part of the book, Occult Science—an Outline. The accounts given there are intended for a rather wider public and are therefore somewhat condensed. I wanted today to speak of certain more intimate matters which will add something to what is contained in those books on the subject of the path to higher knowledge.

I have tried to make it clear that in the Microcosm, in the nervous system, in the brain, men are mirror-images of the activities and Beings of the Macrocosm. It has been shown that before we begin to work on ourselves in order to unfold higher qualities, other work has already been applied to our development as human beings. We have realised that we are actually only continuing the work that has already been applied to us. Just as our physical constitution has been built up out of the higher worlds, so do we ourselves build up our ‘spiritual man’. We transcend our ordinary selves by advancing in our development. Nobody who takes the concept of evolution seriously can doubt that such further development is possible. Those who believe that what is actually there has risen from earlier Stages of existence to the present one must also admit that development can go forward. But because man has become a conscious being, he must also take his development consciously in hand. And he can tread in full consciousness the path of development that has been described. If he needs a teacher, he no longer needs him—as was the case when the old methods were in use—as one who takes something away from him or allows something to stream to him; in such circumstances those who were guided by the teacher were not independent. Today we have been learning about a path entirely in keeping with the consciousness of modern humanity, for one who takes this path entrusts himself to another in no other sense than a pupil entrusts himself to a tutor in mathematics. If he did not assume that the tutor knows more than he knows himself, he certainly would not go to him. In the same sense we entrust ourselves to a leader or teacher who gives us nothing more than indications. At every step we remain our own master while scrupulously following the indications given. We follow the indications given by the teacher as we should do in the case of those given by a tutor in mathematics, only now our whole soul is engaged; it is not a matter of applying our intellect to the solution of a mathematical problem. It is the essence of the new method of Initiation that it takes account first and foremost of the independence of the human being; the Guru is no longer a Guru in the old sense but only in the sense that he gives advice as to how progress can be made.

The successive epochs change and man is constantly passing through new stages of existence. The methods for promoting development must therefore also change. Different methods were necessary in earlier times. The method called the Rosicrucian after its most important symbol is the one most appropriate and fitting for the soul of modern man.

So we see how, in addition to the older methods, there also exists the appropriate modern method which leads man in the way indicated into the higher worlds. A mere outline has been given today. To-morrow we shall describe how man, if he works upon himself, grows step by step into the higher worlds and how they are gradually revealed to him. We have described what man has to do in order to apply the new methods and tomorrow we shall speak of what he becomes and what is eventually revealed to him.

Today we would like to look at some things that will bring together for a wider circle of anthroposophists many of the truths already known to us. Perhaps you are already familiar with the description I have given in my book Theosophy³¹ I described there the worlds that the human being has to live through between death and a new birth. Today I will describe something of these worlds from a point of view somewhat different from the one given in that book.

For the most part in that book Imaginations are used for the soul and spiritual worlds through which a human being passes—after going through the gate of death—in order to develop and advance to a new life on earth. Today I will describe these things not so much from an Imaginative point of view, but rather from a point of view resulting more from Inspiration.

In order to acquire the possibility of understanding at all, we can begin with the experiences we have during earthly life. At any given point in time between birth and death we stand here in our physical body confronted with the outer world. What is contained within our skin, what is contained within our physical bodies, we call ourselves, our human being. We assume that this human being contains not only anatomical and physiological processes, but we also assume that somehow soul and spiritual processes are going on in there. We speak of “ourselves” and mean thereby what is contained within our skin. We look out into the world and see it around us; this we call our “outer world.” Now, we know that we make mental pictures of this outer world and then these mental pictures live within us. We have, then, the outer world around us and something like mirror images of the outer world within our soul life.

When we are in the life between death and a new birth we are in the very same world that is outside of us here on earth. All that you can see clearly, or only dimly sense, as an external world, becomes then your inner world. To all that you then say “my I.” Just as you now regard your lung as belonging to your I, so do you regard—in the life between death and a new birth—the sun and moon as your organs, as being in you. And the only outer world that you then have, is you yourself, as you are on the earth, that is, your earthly organs.

While on the earth we say: In us is a lung, in us is a heart; outside us is a sun, outside us is a moon, outside us is a zodiac. But during the life between death and a new birth we say: In us is a zodiac, in us is the sun, in us is the moon, outside us is a lung, outside us is a heart. Between death and a new birth everything we now carry within our skin becomes more and more our outer world, our universe, our cosmos. Our view of the relationship between world and man is exactly opposite when we are living between death and a new birth.

So it is that when we live through death, that is, when we go through the gate of death, we have, to begin with, a distinct picture of what was before, of how we were on earth. But it is only a picture. Yet you must think of this picture as having an effect on you like the outer world. At first you have this picture like a kind of appearance within you. In the first period after death, you still have a consciousness of what you were on earth as a human being—consciousness in the form of earthly memories and earthly pictures. These do not last long; in your view of the human being you advance more and more to the following: I is the world; the universe is the human being. This is more and more the case. But you must not imagine that the human lung, for instance, looks the same as it does now; that would not be a sight to compensate for the beauty of the sun and the moon. What the lung and heart will be then is something much greater, something much more wonderful than what the sun and moon are now to the human eye.

Only in this way do you really get an impression of what maya is. People speak of maya, that this present earthly world is a great illusion, but they do not really believe it. Deep down people still believe that everything is just as it appears to earthly eyes. But that is not the case. The human lung as we see it now is mere semblance; so is the heart. The truth is that our lung is only a magnificent part of our cosmos, our heart even more so. For in its true essence our heart is something much more majestic, something vastly greater than any sun.

We gradually begin to see a mighty cosmic world arising—a world in which we can say that below us are the heavens. What we actually mean is that below us is what is preparing the human head for the next incarnation. Above, we then say, is what was below. Everything is turned around. Above are all the forces that prepare man for his earthly life, so that in his next earth life he can stand and walk on two legs.

All this we can then sum up in these words: The closer we approach to a new life on earth, the more this universe that is the human being contracts for us. We become increasingly aware of how this majestic universe—it is most especially majestic in the middle period between death and a new birth—how this majestic universe, so to speak is shrinking and contracting, how, out of the weaving of the planets that we bear within us, something is created that then pulsates and surges through the human etheric body, how out of the fixed stars of the zodiac something is formed that builds our life of nerves and senses. This all shrinks together, it shapes itself to become first a spiritual and then an etheric body. And not until it has grown very, very small is it taken up into the mother's womb and clothed there with earthly matter.

Then comes the moment when we draw near to earthly life, when we feel the universe that was “ours” until recently vanishing from us. It shrinks together and becomes smaller. This experience begets in us the longing to come down again to earth and once more unite with a physical body. We long for the earth because this universe is withdrawing from our spiritual sight. We look to where we are becoming a human being.

However, we must reckon here with a very different scale of time. Life between death and rebirth lasts for many centuries. If a person is born in the twentieth century, his or her descent has been prepared for gradually, even as early as the sixteenth century. And the person himself has been working down into the earthly conditions and events.

A great, great ... grandfather of yours, way back in the sixteenth century, fell in love with a great, great ... grandmother. They felt the urge to come together, and there, in this urge, you were already working into the earthly world from spiritual worlds. And in the seventeenth century when a less distant great, great ... grandfather and great, great ... grandmother loved each other, you were, in a sense, once again the mediator. You summoned all these generations together so that finally those who could become your mother and father could emerge.

In the mysterious and indeterminate aspect of such earthly love relationships, forces are at work that proceed from human souls seeking future incarnations. Therefore full consciousness and complete freedom are never present in the external conditions that bring men and women together. These are things that still lie entirely outside the range of human understanding.

What we call history today is actually only something very external. Little is known to us in outer life today of the soul history of human beings. People today are completely unaware that the souls of human beings even in the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D. felt very differently than they do now. Not as distinctly as I have just described but in a more dreamlike way, the men and women in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries knew of these mysterious forces working down to earth from spiritual worlds, working down, in effect, from human souls. In the West little was said about repeated earthly lives, about reincarnation, but there were human beings everywhere who knew about it. Only the Churches always excluded or even anathematized all thoughts concerning repeated earth lives. But you should actually know that there were many people in Europe, even into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who were aware that a human being passes through repeated lives on earth.

Then came the time during which humanity in the Western world had to develop through the stage of intellectuality. Man must gradually achieve freedom. There was no freedom in ancient times when dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. Neither is there freedom—there is, at most, belief in freedom—in those affairs of human life, governed, shall we say, by earthly love such as I have just described. For here the interests of other souls on their way down to earth are always in play.

Yet within the course of earth evolution humankind must grow freer and freer. For only if mankind becomes freer and freer will the earth reach its evolutionary goal. For this to happen it was necessary that intellectuality reign in a certain age. The age in question is, of course, our own. For if you look back into earlier times and conditions upon earth when human beings still had a dreamlike clairvoyance, you will see that spiritual beings were always living in this dreamlike clairvoyance. A person at that time could never say, “I have my thoughts in my head.” That would have been quite false. In ancient times one had to say, “I have the life of angels in my head;” and then in later times one had to say “I have the life of the spirits of elemental beings in my head.” Then came the fifteenth century; and in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries we no longer have anything spiritual in our heads; only thoughts are in our heads—mere thoughts. By not having any higher spiritual life but only thoughts in our heads, we can make pictures of the outer world for ourselves. Through the fact that we no longer have any kind of higher spirituality within ourselves, but only thoughts, we are able to form pictures of the external world within ourselves.

Could human beings be free, so long as spirits were indwelling them? No, they could not. For spirits directed them in everything; everything was due to them. We could only become free when spiritual beings no longer directed us—when we had mere pictures, mere images, in our thoughts. Thought pictures cannot compel one to do anything. If you stand in front of a mirror the reflections of other people, no matter how angry they may be, will never be able to give you a box on the ears, never a real box on the ear because they have no reality; they are mere pictures. If I decide to do something, I can arrange for this to be reflected in a mirror but the reflection itself, the picture, cannot decide on anything.

In the age when intellectuality puts only thoughts into our heads, freedom can arise because thoughts have no power to compel. If we allow our moral impulses to be only pure thoughts—as described in my book, The Philosophy of Freedom—then we can achieve true freedom in our age.³² The intellectual age, therefore, had to arise.

Yet strange as it may sound, in essence the time is already past in which it was right for us to develop mere intellectuality, mere thinking in pictures. Along with the nineteenth century, that has become a thing of the past. If we now continue to develop mere thoughts as images then our thoughts will fall prey to Ahrimanic powers. The Ahrimanic powers will then find access to us and, having just reached our freedom, we will lose it—lose it to Ahrimanic powers. Humanity is confronted with this danger right now. Human beings today are faced with the choice: either to comprehend the spiritual life—to understand that the kinds of things I have described to you today are realities—or to deny this. But if we deny the spiritual today we will no longer be able to think freely. Rather Ahriman, Ahrimanic powers, will then begin to think in mankind. And then all humanity will undergo a downhill evolution.

Therefore, in the highest degree, it is necessary that an increasing number of human beings in our time understand the need to return to the spiritual life. This feeling that we must return to a spiritual life is what people today should seek to awaken within themselves. If they fail to seek this, humanity will fall prey to Ahriman. Seen from a higher standpoint, this is how serious the situation of humankind on earth is today. We should actually put this thought before all others. All other thoughts should be seen in the light of this one. This is what I wanted to present as the first part of today's lecture.

Descriptions such as these may help illustrate the fact that the life we go through in the spiritual world between death and new birth is entirely different from what we go through here between birth and death. Therefore, pictures taken from the earthly life, however brilliantly conceived, will always be inadequate to characterize the actual spiritual life of the human being. We can only slowly and gradually be led to an understanding of the kind of reality present in spiritual worlds. Let me give some examples.

Suppose a human being leaves his earthly body and, with his life of soul and spirit, enters the world of soul and spirit. And let us suppose that someone here on earth, who has achieved initiation knowledge in the deeper sense, is able to observe human souls in their continued life after death. Much preparation is necessary for this to happen; also necessary is a certain karma that connects the human being upon earth with the one on the other side. What is of importance is that we find some means of mutual understanding with the deceased. I am speaking to you here of spiritual experiences that are extraordinarily difficult to achieve. In general it is easier to describe the world spiritually than to approach a departed soul. People like to believe that it is not so difficult to approach a deceased person. But it is actually far more difficult to really come close to the dead than to achieve spiritual knowledge in general.

I would like now to relate some features characteristic of communication with the dead. To begin with, it is only possible to communicate with them by entertaining memories of the physical world that can still live within them. For example, the dead still have an echo of human speech, even of the particular language that they spoke most of the time while on earth. But their relationship to language undergoes a change. So, for example, when conversing with a soul who has died, we soon notice they have no understanding, not the least, for nouns. The living can address such words to a dead person; a dead person, if I may use the term, simply does not hear them. On the other hand the dead retain an understanding for all verbs, words expressing action, for a relatively long time after death.

As a general rule you will only be able to converse with a deceased person if you know the right way to put your questions to him. With these questions you must sometimes proceed as follows. One day you try to live with him in something concrete and real, for he has pictures in his soul rather than abstract thoughts. Therefore you must concentrate on some real, concrete experience which he very much enjoyed during earthly life; then you will gradually get near him.

As a rule you will not get an immediate answer. Often you will have to sleep on it, perhaps for several days, before you get the answer. But you will never get an answer from the dead if the question is posed in nouns. You must try to clothe all nouns in verbal form. Such preparation is absolutely necessary. What the deceased understands most readily are verbs made as pictorial and vivid as possible. The deceased will never understand for example, the word “table,” but if you manage to imagine vividly what is happening when a table is being made, which is a process of becoming rather than a finished thing, then you will gradually become intelligible to him. He will understand your question and you will get an answer. But the answers too will always be in verbal form, or often they will not even be in verbal form; they may only consist of what we on earth would call interjections, exclamations.

Above all, the dead speak in the actual sounds of the alphabet—sounds and combinations of sound. The longer a soul has lived in the spiritual world after death, the more he will come to speak in a kind of language we on the earth must first acquire. We do this when we develop the ability to understand and distinguish the sounds of earthly language, when we go beyond the abstract meaning of words and enter into the feeling content of the sounds. It is just as I was saying in the educational lectures held here. With the sound a (a as pronounced in father) we experience something like astonishment and wonder. In a certain sense we even take this sense of wonder into our soul when we not only say a but ach (ch here pronounced as in the German or Scottish Loch. Ach is the German equivalent of the exclamation ah!). Ach signifies: A—I feel wonder, and with the sound ch the sense of wonder goes right into me. And if I now put an m in front and say mach (German for make or do) the result is a kind of following of what awakened wonder in me as if it were approaching me step by step—mmm—until I am entirely within it. The answers of the dead often come in this kind of understanding, an understanding carried by the meaning in sounds. The dead do not speak in English, they do not speak in German, nor in Russian; they speak in such a way that only heart and soul can understand them—if heart and soul are connected with the ears that hear. I said just now that the human heart is greater and more majestic than the sun. Seen from the earthly point of view the heart is somewhere inside us, and if we cut it out anatomically it will not be a pretty sight. But in reality the heart is present in the entire human being, permeating all the other organs; it is also in the ear.

More and more we must get used to the language of the heart used by the dead, if I may so describe it. We get used to it as we gradually eliminate all nouns and noun-like forms and begin to live more in verbal forms. The dead understand words of activity and becoming for a relatively long time after death. At a later stage they understand a language that is no ordinary language. What we then receive from the dead must first be translated back into an earthly language.

Thus the human being grows out of his body and ever more into the spiritual world, as his entire life of soul becomes altogether different. And when the time approaches for him to come down to earth again he must once again change his entire life of soul. For then the moment draws ever nearer when he is confronted with a mighty task, when he himself must put together, first in the astral form and then in the etheric form, the whole future human being who will be standing here physically on earth. What we do here on the earth is external work. When our hands are at work then something happens in the external world. When we are between death and a new birth our soul is occupied with the work of putting our body together. It only seems as if we come into existence through hereditary forces. Actually we are only clothed in the outermost physical sheath through heredity. But even the forms of our organs we must develop for ourselves. I will give you an example of this, but I would like to borrow a glove for this purpose.

When a human being approaches a new earthly life, he still has the sun and moon within him. But gradually the sun and moon begin to contract together. It is as though you were to feel the lobes of your lungs shrinking together within you. In this way you feel your cosmic existence, your sun- and moon-organ shrinking together. Then something detaches itself from the sun and from the moon. Instead of having the sun and moon within you as before you have before you a kind of copy or image of the sun and moon. Glistening and luminous, you have before you two, at first, gigantic spheres, one of which is the spiritualized sun, the other the spiritualized moon. One sphere is a bright and shining light, the other sphere is glimmering in its own warmth, more fiery warm, holding the light more to itself in an egotistical way.

These two spheres that separate themselves from the cosmically transformed human being—that is, from this Adam Kadmon that still exists to this day—these two spheres draw closer and closer to one another. On our way down to earth we say: Sun and moon are becoming one. And this is what guides and leads us through the last few generations of ancestors until finally we reach the mother who will give us birth. As the sun and moon draw ever closer together they guide us.

Then we see another task before us. We see, far in the distance like a single point, the human embryo that is to be. We see, like a single entity, what has become of sun and moon drawing near our mother. But we see a task before us, which I can describe as follows. Think of this glove as the sun and moon united and going before us, leading us. We know that when our cosmic consciousness has completely vanished, when we go through a darkness (this happens after conception when we become submerged in the embryo), that we will then have to turn this inside out. What is on the inside then comes to the outside. What the sun and moon have been you must turn inside out and then a tiny opening appears; through this you must go with your I, your ego, and this becomes a copy or image of your human body upon earth. And, actually, this is the pupil of the human eye. For what was one, again becomes two, as though two mirror images were to arise. These are the two human eyes; at first they were united, as the united sun and moon, and then they turned inside out.

This is the task that then confronts you, and you fulfill it unconsciously. You must turn the whole thing around and push what is on the inside outward and go through the tiny opening. Then it separates into two. In the embryonic state two physical images are formed. The physical embryonic eyes are two pictures representing what has become of sun and moon.

In this way we work out the formation of the several parts of the human body. We gather together what we experience as the entire universe and give to every part its destined form. Only then does what has been formed in the spirit get clothed in, and permeated by, a plastic material—matter. The matter is only taken on; but the forces that form and shape us we ourselves had to develop from the entire universe.

Say, for example, that in the time between death and a new birth we pass through the sun while it is in the sign of Leo. (It need not be at birth; it can be farther back in time.) We do not then form the eyes that are made of the sun and moon—that occurs at a different time. But during this time we unite with the interior of the sun. If we could walk in the interior of the sun it would look very different from what contemporary physicists imagine. This physical imagination of theirs lacks even a suspicion of the truth. The interior of the sun is not a ball of gas; it is something even less than space—a realm where space itself has been taken away. If you begin by imagining space as something extended, with pressure everywhere present within it, then you must picture the interior of the sun as negative space, as space that is emptier than empty, a realm of suction. Few people have an adequate idea of what this means. Now, when you pass through there, you experience something that can be elaborated and worked upon, something that can be formed into the human heart. It is not the case that only the form of the eyes is made out of sun and moon; the heart form is also fashioned from the sun. But this is only possible when the sun also contains the forces that come from the constellation of Leo.

So the human being builds his entire body from the constellations of the stars and their movements in the universe. The human organism is indeed a kind of copy or image of the world of stars. A large part of the work we have to do between death and new birth consists in this—that we build our body from the universe. Standing on the earth the human being is indeed a universe, but a shrunken universe. Natural science is so naive as to suppose that the human form is produced from the physical embryo alone. This is as naive as it would be for someone who sees the needle of a magnet pointing to the north and south magnetic poles to imagine that the forces causing it to point are only within the needle itself, not realizing that the earth itself is a magnet. It is exactly the same when someone says that the human being comes from the embryo.

The human being does not come from the embryo at all but rather from the entire universe. Furthermore, his life of soul and spirit between death and a new birth consists in working with the spiritual beings on the super-sensible form of the human being. This form is created first in the astral and etheric realms and only then shrinks and contracts in order to be clothed in physical matter. The human being is really only the arena for what the universe—and he himself with his transformed powers—achieves with his physical body.

Thus the human being gradually develops himself. It begins with language, as he no longer uses nouns but finds his way into a special language, a more verbal form of speech. He then goes on to an inner beholding of the world of stars; then he lives within the world of stars. And from the world of stars he then begins to separate out what he himself is to become in his next incarnation. This is man's path: out of the physical through the transformation of language into the spiritual, and then back again through the transforming of the universe once again into the human being. Only if we can understand how the soul-spiritual part of the human being, which thus loses itself in language, becomes one with the world of stars and then draws itself back from the world of stars—only then do we understand the complete cycle of human life between death and a new birth.

These things were still clear to many people at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth. At that time people never thought of Christ Jesus as merely the being whom they saw developing on the earth. They thought that Christ Jesus was formerly in the same world to which they themselves belonged during the life between death and new birth. They thought about the question: How did he descend and enter into the life of earth? It was the Roman world that then exterminated the science of initiation. They wanted only the old dogmas to remain. In Italy in the fourth century of our era there was a special organization, a specific body of people who made every effort to insure that the old methods of initiation should not be transformed into new ones. Only the knowledge of the outer physical world should be left to human beings on earth. Only the old dogmas could have any say concerning the super-sensible. Gradually these old dogmas were received into the intellect as mere concepts that could no longer even be understood but only believed. So the knowledge that at one time had in fact existed was split in two: into a knowledge of the earthly world and faith in another world. This faith has even shrunk to the point where, for some, it only consists of a sum of dogmas no longer understood, while for others it is nothing more than a mere basis for believing anything at all. What then is the substance of modern man's belief, when he no longer holds to the dogmas of the Trinity? He believes something altogether nebulous. He believes in a generalized, vague kind of spirituality.

We now need to return to a genuine perception of the spiritual, one made possible by living into the spiritual itself. That is, we need a science of initiation once again, a science that can speak to us about things such as the human eye, which we should look at with wonder, for it is actually a little world in itself. This is no mere picture or figure of speech; it is a reality for the reasons I have explained. For in the life between death and new birth this eye of ours was single, and this unity which was then turned inside out was actually a flowing together of the images of sun and moon.

Furthermore, we have two eyes because if we were equipped with only one, like the Cyclops, we could never develop a sense of self, an 1, in an outward and visible world; we would develop it only in the inner world of feeling. Helen Keller for example has an inner world of feeling and ideas very different from that of other people; she is only able to make herself understood because language has been taught her. Without this we would never be able to develop the idea of our I, or self. We reach the idea of 1 because we can lay our right hand over our left, or, more generally speaking, because we can bring any two symmetrical members together. We develop a delicate sense of self or I because we cross the axis of vision of our two eyes when focusing upon the outer world. Just as we cross our hands, so do we cross our eyes' axes of vision whenever we look at anything.

Materially two, our eyes are one in spirit. This single spiritual eye is located behind the bridge of the nose. It is then reproduced in a twofold image—in the two outer eyes you see. By having a left and a right hand side, the human being is able to feel and be aware of himself. If he were only right or only left, if he were not a symmetrical being, all his thinking and ideation would flow out into the world; he would not become self-possessed in his own 1.

By uniting the twin images of sun and moon into one, we are preparing ourselves for the coming incarnation. It is as though we were saying to ourselves: You must not disintegrate into the widths of the whole world. You cannot become a sun man and have the lunar man there beside you. You must become a unified being. But then, so that you can also feel this oneness, this unified, single sun-moon eye of man comes into being, and metamorphoses into the eye as we know it. For our two eyes are copies, or images, of the single, archetypal sun-moon eye of man.

These are the things I wished to tell you today, my dear friends, about the entirely different kind of experience we have when we are in the spiritual world, so very different from our experiences in the physical. But the two experiences are related to one another. The relationship is such that we are turned completely inside out. Suppose that you could take the human being as you see him here and turn him inside out so that his inside—the heart, for instance—would become the outer surface. Then he would not remain alive as a physical human being—you can believe that. But if this could be done taking hold of him in the inmost heart and turning him inside out like a glove, then man would not remain man as we see him here; he would enlarge into a universe. For if we had the faculty to concentrate in a single point within our heart, and then to turn ourselves inside out in spirit, we could become this world that we otherwise experience between death and a new birth. That is the secret of the inner side of the human being. Only while he exists in the physical world the human being cannot be turned inside out. The heart of the human being is also a world turned inside out. That is how the physical, earthly world is really connected to the spiritual world. We must get used to this “turning inside out.” If we do not, we will never get the right idea concerning how the physical world that surrounds us here relates to the spiritual world.

• 31. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 32. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (The Philosophy of Freedom), (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

In order to carry further the matters with which I have dealt in the last few days, I would now like to refer to the astronomical aspect of Easter. In order to do this it is necessary to allude to some of the facts connected with the so-called Moon-Mysteries.

During all those ages in which men were aware of mystery-wisdom, the Moon-Mysteries were spoken of, and these were connected with the being of man in so far as he is a part of the whole cosmos. For we must clearly realize that man with his complete being is dependent on the whole cosmos, just as he is dependent on the earth as regards his physical body.

Now the years of materialism have brought in their train a complete loss of consciousness on the part of humanity, of the spirituality existing in the wide spaces of the cosmos, as revealed in the formation of the constellations, and in the movements of the stars, when these are planets. No trace of this consciousness has remained beyond the outward observance of the stars and the calculation of the movements of the planets.

When we observe how all this is studied according to the ideas of modern astronomy, it strikes us as being exactly the same as if one were to study the human physical organism, completely unconscious of the fact that it is permeated with soul and spirit, keeping before one only the conditions of measure, and the external relationships of movement of this organism, and forgetting entirely that in the relationship of measure and of movement the soul and spirit find expression.

In man, an undivided soul- and spirit-nature comes to expression, held together by the ego. But in the organism of the whole universe, spiritual perception finds the expression not of a single undivided soul- and spirit-nature but of a multiplicity—an immeasurable, boundless multiplicity of spiritual Beings, who reveal themselves in the grouping of the stars, in the movements of the planets, through the light streaming from the stars, and so on.

All this multiplicity of spirituality living in the stars is related inwardly to man in the same way as those things are related to him, which, from an earthly side, and throughout the whole realm of Nature, provide him with the means of sustenance. But the closest connection between man and the universe has to do with what is called the “Moon Mystery.”

When the moon is observed outwardly, it is seen in its relation to the earth to be in a state of metamorphosis or change. At one time it is seen as a full luminous orb; we look again and see that only a part of it is luminous—a half, then a quarter. We also have that state of the moon in which it is entirely withdrawn from external sight, the state which we call that of new moon. Then we have again the return of full moon.

All this is explained nowadays by merely saying that in the moon we have a body moving in space which is illumined by the sun from different directions, so that to us it seems to assume different forms. But with this we have not exhausted what the moon does for the earth, and more especially what it does for man on the earth. We must clearly understand when we look at anything so apparently physical on the surface, as the full moon is, that what it here presents to us in its physical aspect is something entirely different, in that physical aspect, from what the new moon presents to us (which because of the relative connection of worlds it cannot do directly and physically), and we must not think when the moon does not show itself that its powers and activities are not present.

When because of the relationship of the heavenly bodies we know: now it is New Moon ... the moon certainly is invisible, but because of this it is present in a more spiritual way than when we see its physical light at the time of Full Moon. So the moon is present at one time physically and at another time spiritually. We have therefore a constant rhythmic alteration between a physical manifestation and a spiritual manifestation of the moon.

If we wish really to understand what is brought about through this, we must turn back to those facts already known to you through statements made in my book, An Outline of Occult Science. We must recall what is said there: The moon was once within the earth; it belonged to the earth-body; it left the earth and became what might be called a neighbouring planet. It has therefore split off from the earth, and now circles round it. It showed influences exercised by it on men while it was still connected with the earth.

Man was, of course, an entirely different being when he lived and evolved on an earth that still had the moon within it. Since the withdrawal of the moon the earth has been impoverished in respect of moon-qualities; from that time man has been maintained in his lower parts by other forces, by purely earth-forces, not by earth- and moon-forces. On the other hand, those forces which (so long as the moon was within the earth) worked on man from within have now, since its withdrawal, worked on him from the moon—that is, from outside.

We can therefore say: The forces of the moon streamed at one time through man, they encountered first his feet and legs, then streamed through him upwards from below. Since the departure of the moon from the earth these have worked in a reverse direction, from the head of man downwards. Because of this the Moon-forces have had an entirely different task for humanity than they had before.

In what way did this task show itself? It became evident through man having a clearly defined experience on descending from pre-earthly to earthly existence. When a man has passed through the period between death and rebirth, and has been acquitted of everything regarding the things affecting his soul and spirit during that period, he turns his attention to the descent to earth, to the union of himself with what in a physical, corporal way is to come to him from his father and mother. But before—with the help of his ego and astral body—he can find the means for union with the physical body; he must be clothed with an etheric body which he attracts to himself out of his cosmic surroundings.

This occurrence has been fundamentally changed since the time of the moon's withdrawal from the earth. Before the moon's departure, when a man, having completed his life between death and a new birth, drew near to earth again, he had need of powers by which he could organise the ether which was dispersed through all the surrounding universe, around himself, his ego, and astral body into the form of an etheric body. These powers he acquired on his approach to earthly existence from the moon, which was then one with the earth. Since the moon's departure he has acquired the powers necessary to the formation of his etheric body from outside the earth, in fact from the departed moon; so that immediately before his entrance into earthly life man has to apply to that which is contained in the moon—to something cosmic—in order to construct his etheric body.

Now, this etheric body must be so constructed that it has, as it were, an outer and an inner side. Let us try to picture in a quite diagrammatic way how the etheric body is formed. It has an outer and an inner side, so that we realize man has to construct it both outwardly and inwardly. In forming the outer part of the etheric body he requires the forces of light, for besides other substances the etheric body is principally formed of waves of cosmic light. Sunlight is not fitted for this; sunlight cannot supply the power which enables man to form his etheric body. For this purpose light is needed that has shone from the sun on to the moon and has been reflected back from the moon again, and through this the light has become radically changed. All the light coming from the moon, and streaming from it out into the cosmos, contains powers which enable man when coming down to earth to construct the outer side of his etheric body.

On the other hand, that which streams spiritually from the moon, at the time of the new moon, sends into the cosmos the forces needed by man for the construction of the inner side of his etheric body.

Therefore, man's power to form the outer and inner sides of his etheric body depends on the rhythm between the periods of bright external moonshine and the dark of the moon.

What the Moon-forces are thus able to bring about in man depends also on this: that the moon is not the mere physical body that modern natural science imagines it to be, but that it is permeated through and through with spirit, that it is indeed composed of a plurality of Spiritual Beings.

I have explained on many occasions how it was that the moon separated at one time from the earth. It was not only physical substance that passed out into space, but I explained how those ancient Beings who lived at one time on the earth, not in any kind of physical body but in a spiritual form, how they were the original teachers of humanity and withdrew along with the moon into cosmic space, and that there they established a kind of moon-colony. So that we must distinguish on the moon between its physical-etheric and its psychic-spiritual nature, only this latter is not a unity but a multiplicity.

The whole spiritual life of the moon is dependent on the manner in which the Beings dwelling in the moon look from their moon-standpoint out on the surrounding universe—how they regard the world around them. And were I to express myself in a pictorial way I might say: the Spiritual Beings of the moon turn their attention first to what is of the greatest importance to them—to the planets belonging to our planetary system. Everything that takes place in the moon, by which man receives in the right way the forces necessary for the forming of his etheric body, depends on the results of observations (Beobachtungsresultaten) arrived at by those Beings living, as one might say, in the moon and observing from it the planets of our surrounding planetary system—Mercury, Sun, Moon, etc.

This was a knowledge that existed in certain of the Mysteries. An ancient knowledge preserved in certain of the Mystery Oracles held that the constellations and the mutual movements of our planetary system were observed from the moon, and that in accordance with these movements the deeds of the Moon-beings were determined.

Stress was laid on this by those who regarded the Moon as the point from which, in a certain way, world-connections (Weltenverhältnissen) having to do with the formation of the human etheric body were determined; and these Moon-forces came to be associated in the consciousness of men with the forces of the other planets.

We see this in the names of the days of the week, how

So men came to associate what was perceived from the moon with that which entered their consciousness regarding the relationship of the planets to different parts of time.

In the centres of the Ancient Mysteries something like the following was said: “Remember, O man! that before thy descent to earth thou hadst need of powers that were built up by the moon, through the fact that the Moon-beings gazed upon the other planets of the planetary system. Thou hast to thank the powers of the moon derived from Zeusday, Wodensday, Thorsday, Freiasday, etc., for the special configuration assumed by thine etheric body at its descent into thy physical body.”

Thus on one side we have the rhythmic progression of the moon in periods of light and darkness round the earth; on the other side we have the impression made on the consciousness of men by the whole sequence of the planets in their courses. The Mysteries added to that which had already been given out, this: Because certain Moon-beings could gaze on Mars, man was enabled to organize within his etheric body the capacity for speech. Because these Beings were able to gaze on Mercury, man acquired that which enabled him to construct within his etheric body the aptitude for movement.

If people desire to speak in accordance with these Moon-mysteries at the present time, it is possible to give expression to them in an entirely different form: this can be done by means of Eurythmy. Eurythmy develops out of speech. Having investigated the mysteries of language, by allowing the Moon-beings to instruct us in what they are able to observe when gazing on Mars, we make further investigations: we then notice how what we investigate changes, if after having directed our observation to Mars we direct it to Mercury. Thus when we turn from what the Moon-beings experience through Mars, to what they experience with regard to Mercury, we pass from the human aptitude for sound-production to the human aptitude for Eurythmy. This is to explain the matter in its cosmic aspect. What pours into man as the capacity for acquiring wisdom comes to him through experiences the Moon-beings have in respect of Jupiter.

All that permeates the souls of men, as love and beauty, they receive through the experiences that come to the Moon-beings from Venus.

The experiences that come to the Moon-being through their observation of Saturn impart to the etheric bodies of men their inner soul-warmth; and that from which man must be preserved, that which must be repulsed, as it were, by him so that the construction of his etheric body is not disturbed immediately before its descent to earth, is what comes to him from the sun. Thus those things come from the sun—or rather from this contemplation of the sun—against which man must be shielded by protecting powers so that he may become a being cut off and enclosed within his etheric body.

In this way man learns to know what takes place on the moon. In this way he also learns how the human etheric body is formed—how it is constructed when a man comes down from pre-earthly into earthly existence. The things just described are those connected with the Mysteries of the Moon (Mondengeheimnisse). It is possible to speak of such things to-day; in certain of the Ancient Mysteries they were not only described but experienced—truly experienced. They were experienced in such a way that what is written below was not only known but really inwardly felt—

Through initiation into the Mysteries, of which I spoke in the last lecture, people could rise above mere sight by the eyes, and hearing by the ears, as these are known in earthly conditions, they could free themselves from the body, they could withdraw (sich fernhalten) from the physical body and live only in the etheric body. But when living thus in the etheric body a man lived with all those things of which I have just been speaking. He then lived with speech, not as formed by the larynx, but with the speech that resounds in Mars as universal language (Weltensprache). He moved in accordance with the way Mercury controls movements in the cosmos; not with feet and limbs, but in the sense in which Mercury guides the movements of human beings. A man did not then attain to wisdom with such trouble as is customary in the years of a child's education to-day, and which in this materialistic age is in fact un-wisdom, but he lived directly in the wisdom of Jupiter, because he was able to unite himself with the Moon-beings who gaze on Jupiter. When men were initiated in this way they were actually and entirely within the rays of the moon's light; they were not beings living in flesh and blood on earth—they had left the earth and dwelt as beings in the moonlight, but in moonlight that was modified and transformed by what lived in the other planets of our planetary system During the periods of spiritual observation a man living in such Mysteries was a Light-being of the Moon. This must not be taken in a symbolic sense, or thought of as in any way abstract; but just as a man is aware of reality when he goes on a journey, say to Basle and back, such an one was conscious of the reality about him when through the ceremonies of initiation he had approached the Moon-beings.

Such a man knew that he had left his physical body for a time, and with his soul- and spirit-nature had entered the light-sphere of the Moon, that he had been clothed with a light-body, and, because united with the Moon-beings, he had gazed out into the wide spaces of the planetary worlds and had actually been able to perceive what it is possible to discover there. And what was it he saw? The principal thing he saw—he saw other things too—was that the forces coming from the Sun-beings have nothing to do with the formation of the human etheric body. In observing the sun he beheld something that for the etheric body was disruptive; and he knew that none of the forces proceeding from the etheric body could be acceptable to the sun, but that such forces must proceed from the higher members of human nature, from the ego and the astral body. Only on these could the Sun-forces work. Thus he knew that one did not look to the sun, but to the planets, for the human etheric body. One looked to the sun for the human astral body, and especially for the ego; but that for the whole inner power of the ego one must turn to the sun. This was the second fact that came to him through initiation into the recurring mysteries of the moon: the fact that in the etheric body he belonged to the planetary system, but that for the forces strengthening and permeating the ego and the astral body he must look to the sun.

The actual result of this initiation was that a man felt himself to be one with the moonlight, but that through the moonlight-existence (Mondenlichtdasein) of his own being he could gaze into the sun. He now said to himself: The sun sends its light to the moon because it must not impart it directly to man. He receives the moonlight united with the forces of the planets. From these he constructs his etheric body.

These secrets were known to anyone who had been initiated in this manner. By this he knew in how far he bore the power of the spiritual sun within him. He had seen it. He had reached a consciousness of the extent to which he bore the spiritual sun within him. This marked the degree of initiation he had gained, and by which a man became a Bearer of the Christ, which means a bearer of the Sun-being; not a receiver, but a bearer of the Sun-being. In the same way as the moon when it is full is a bearer of the sunlight, so such a man was a bearer of the Christ—a Christophoros. Initiation to this degree was therefore an entirely real experience.

And now picture to yourselves that other absolutely real experience by which a man escapes from the earth and, as an initiated human being, rises to the existence of a Light-being, and think of this earlier inward human Easter experience as changed to a cosmic experience—a cosmic festival. In later times men knew nothing of this; they did not know that such a thing was possible as that a man could really pass out of earthly existence into super-earthly existence, could unite with the Moon-nature (mit dem Mondenhaften) and from the moon gaze on the sun. But a remembrance of this had to be preserved; and this remembrance is preserved in the Festival of Easter.

The way in which all this can be experienced by man does not pass over into our later super-materialised consciousness. Instead, we are left with but an abstract conception of it. A man no longer looks into his own being so that he says: I can become one with the moonlight ... but he looks to the moon—to the full moon. In those days he looked up to the full moon and said: It is not I who evolve so as to attain that; but the earth which strives towards it. When does she strive towards it most? She strives towards it most in early spring, when the forces which were formerly with the seeds and the plants within the earth stream forth from the surface of the earth. On earth these forces become plants; but they go further, they stream forth into the wide spaces of the cosmos. In the Mysteries people made use of the following image; they said: At the time when the inner forces of the earth carry that which streams upwards through the stalks and leaves of plants out into the cosmos, man is able most easily to attain to the Sun-moon initiation and become a Christophoros; for he then floats, as it were, towards the moon on the forces that in spring stream from the earth to the moon. But he has to do this at the time of the full moon.

All this passed into the memory of the people, but it became abstract. They felt something must come to them with the full moonlight.... but it was an unconscious feeling, it was no longer a clear knowledge that these people experienced. Something, not the man himself, streamed up towards the full moon when this was the first full moon after the beginning of spring.

What can the full moon do now? It gazes on the sun—that is, it gazes on it on the first day dedicated to the sun, on the first Sunday following the coming of spring. As in former times the Christophoros looked up to the Sun-being from the standpoint of the moon, so the moon now gazes on the sun—that is, on what it symbolises—on the Sunsday.

Thus we have, say on the 21st of March, the beginning of spring; the forces of the earth then begin to reach forth into space. The right moment must be awaited when the observer—the full moon—is present. Full moon falls this year on the 21st of March. What does the moon gaze on? The sun. The following Sunday was then fixed as Easter Sunday.

It is therefore an abstract computation of time, and has endured as the relic of an entirely real event of the Mysteries which took place frequently in ancient times and happened to many people.

This is the truth concerning the Easter festival. Our present day spring festival represents a certain occurrence in the Mysteries that was celebrated everywhere in spring; but this occurrence in the Mysteries was different from the one I described in the first lecture.

The one I then described was that which led men to an understanding of death. I then explained that the thought of resurrection, which was made comprehensible by such means as the celebration of the Adonis festival in autumn, led them in about three days, through experiencing death, to a realization of resurrection in the spirit. This process of resurrection belongs really to autumn for the reason I then stated.

The event I am describing to-day is different; it was celebrated in other Mysteries and was carried out in connection with special initiations, those of the sun and moon. And this event was placed by man at a time before the beginning of life (vor den Lebensanfang). So that we must be able to look back to a time when in certain Mysteries there was knowledge concerning man's descent from pre-earthly to earthly existence, and in other Mysteries—those connected with autumn—there was knowledge concerning his ascent to that which was spiritual.

But in later ages, when there was no longer any understanding for the living connection between man and the spiritual nature of the cosmos, it happened that the autumnal festival of the Mystery of Resurrection became simply confused with the mystery of man's descent (Niederstiegsmysterium)—that of the spring.

In the confusion which thus arose we see how materialism gradually entered into human evolution, and how this not only gave rise to false views but actually produced absolute confusion in men's minds regarding things in which at one time a holy order reigned. For there was a holy order in the fact that, as autumn approached, a cosmic festival drew near which again called attention to an occurrence in the Mysteries. On these occasions it was said: Nature now becomes barren, withers and dies; this resembles the death of the physical side of man. But while man, when looking at Nature, sees only that which works destructively, something lives in him that is eternal, something that, disregarding what takes place in Nature, can be seen in spirit, something that rises after death to life in the spiritual world. In the mystery of the spring season it was made clear to men that Nature is conquered by the spirit; that spirit works down again out of the cosmos; that physical life will sprout and spring again from the earth because the spirit compels it to do so.

At this festival men were not to think of how they passed through death to a spiritual life but of how they had come down from what was spiritual. Therefore, when Nature first began to stir in spring, man had to think of his descent into physical life; and when Nature was in decline, then he had to think of rising to what was spiritual—to think of his resurrection. The life of the soul can be intensified in an extraordinary way when anyone thus experiences his connection with the cosmos. The carrying out of these mysteries varied in different regions. In ancient times there were some races that were really more Autumn-people and some who were more Spring-people. The people of the Adonis-mystery were among the Autumn-people; the Spring-people were connected with other Mysteries, more with those I have been describing to-day. And only those people who, seeking wisdom, journeyed like Pythagoras from Mystery to Mystery have passed through the totality of human experiences. Prom one Mystery “station” where the secrets concerning autumn—the true Sun-mysteries—were seen, they passed on to another where the secrets of the Spring—the Moon-mysteries—could be perceived. This is why we are always told concerning the ancient fully qualified Initiates that they travelled from one station of the Mysteries to another. It could be said of them that in a certain way these Initiates experienced the year inwardly through its festivals. An Initiate of olden times might have said: When I arrive at a place where the Festival of Adonis is celebrated, I behold within me the autumn of the universe and the rays of the spiritual sun when the night of winter begins. If he came to another place where the Spring-mysteries were celebrated he said: Here I behold the secret of the Moon-mysteries. Thus he learnt to know inwardly that which was connected with the real meaning of the whole year.

You can gather that our Easter Festival is really burdened with something that it should not be burdened with. Our Easter should really be a Festival of Burial, and this burial-festival had also to occur in spring, as was really the case in respect of the Festival of Human Spirituality; it was a festival for the purpose of stimulating men to work, and was necessary for primitive humanity as summer approached. Thus the Easter Festival was a Festival of Exhortation to work during summer. And the Autumn Festival, the Festival of Resurrection, was an exhortation to strive towards the spiritual world, and was celebrated at the time when work ceased in the outer world. But when man ceased from work it was intended that he should experience in his inner being that which was of greatest importance to his soul and spirit: consciousness of the eternal part of him, by looking to his resurrection in the spiritual world three days after death.

When we pass in this way from earthly mysteries (Geheimnissen) to cosmic knowledge we are able to recognise the inner structure of the order of the year in its festivals. But much of what was veiled in the festivals, much of what they really contained, has disappeared.

In the next lecture I shall endeavour as far as possible, and in close connection with certain Mystery-stations, to enter more deeply into the subject which to-day I desired to place before you more in accordance with the connections of the heavenly bodies themselves.

In the lecture yesterday I gave certain indications in connection with the understanding of human destiny, and I said that an inkling of the power of destiny may come to a man from experiences which have had a significant effect upon his life. Suppose that at a certain age a man meets another human being; after the meeting their destinies run a similar course but the lives they both led hitherto have completely changed. An event like this meeting would have no rhyme or reason if it were entirely unconnected with previous happenings in their lives. Nor is this the case. Unprejudiced observation of the past reveals that practically every step taken in life was leading in the direction of this event. We may look right back into our childhood and we shall invariably find that some deed far removed in time from this event, that indeed the whole course of our life, led up to it as surely as if we had consciously and deliberately taken the path to it.

Such matters direct attention again and again to what in Anthroposophy we must call ‘karmic relationships.’

I also said that acquaintanceships differ in character and as examples I quoted two extreme cases. We meet someone and form a bond with him, no matter what outward impression he makes upon our senses or aesthetic feelings. We do not think about his individual traits; our attraction to him is caused by something that wells up from within us. When we meet other human beings, we are not inwardly stirred in this way; we are more conscious of the appearance they present to our senses, our mental life, our aesthetic feelings. I said that this difference comes to expression even in the life of dream. We make acquaintanceships of the first kind and during the night, while we are living in the Ego and astral body outside the physical and etheric bodies, we immediately begin to be aware of the persons in question; we dream about them. The dreams are a sign that something within us has been set astir by the meeting. We meet others of whom we do not dream because they have not stirred us inwardly and nothing wells up from within. We may be quite near to them in life but we never dream about them because nothing that reaches into our astral body and Ego organisation has been set astir.

We heard that such happenings are related to the extra earthly forces with which man is connected and of which modern thought takes no account—the forces working in upon the Earth from the surrounding, super terrestrial Universe. We learned that the forces proceeding from the spiritual Moon Beings are connected with the whole of a man's past. For the past is in very truth working in us when immediately we meet a human being we are impelled towards him by something that wells up from within.

Speculation and dim feelings must, however, be replaced by Initiation science which can actually bring to light the inner connections of these things. The Initiate before whom the spiritual world lies open, has both kinds of experiences, but in far greater intensity than is possible to ordinary consciousness. In the one case, where something rises up from within into the ordinary consciousness, a definite picture or a whole series of pictures filled with living reality rise up from within the Initiate when he meets the other human being and are there before him like a script he is able to read. The experience is quite clear to him; he himself is there within the picture which rises up in this way—it is as if an artist were painting a picture but instead of standing in front of the canvas were weaving in the canvas itself, living in every colour, experiencing the very essence of the colour. The Initiate knows that the picture arising in this way has something to do with the human being he meets. And through an experience resembling that of meeting a person again after the lapse of many years, he recognises in the human being standing physically before him, the replica of the picture that has risen up in him. As he compares this inner picture with the man before him, he knows that it is the picture of experiences shared in common with him in earlier earthly lives. He looks back consciously into an earlier epoch when these experiences were shared between them. And as a result of what he has undergone in preparation for Initiation science, he experiences in a living picture—not in dim feeling as in ordinary consciousness—what he and the man he now meets passed through together in a previous earthly life or a number of previous lives. Initiation science enables us to see a picture of experiences shared with a man with whom we are karmically connected; it rises up with such intensity that it is as if he were to break away from his present identity and stand before us in his earlier form, coming to meet himself in the form he now bears. The impression is actually as vivid as that. And because the experience has such intense reality, we are able to relate it to its underlying forces and so to discover how and why this picture rose up from within us.

When man is descending to earthly life from the existence he spends in worlds of soul and spirit between death and a new birth, he passes through the different cosmic regions the last being the Moon-sphere. As he passes through the Moon-sphere he encounters those Beings of whom I spoke yesterday, saying that they were once the primeval Teachers of humanity. He meets these Beings out yonder in the Universe, before he comes down to the Earth, and it is they who inscribe everything that has happened in life between one human being and another, into that delicate substance which, as opposed to earthly substances, the oriental sages have called ‘Akasha.' It is really the case that whatever happens in life, whatever experiences come to men, everything is observed by those Beings who, as Spirit Beings not incarnate in the flesh, once peopled the Earth together with men. Everything is observed and inscribed into the Akasha substance as living reality, not in the form of an abstract script. These spiritual Moon Beings who were the great Teachers during the age of primeval cosmic wisdom, are the recorders of the experiences of mankind. And when in his life between death and a new birth a man is once again drawing near the Earth in order to unite with the seed provided by the parents, he passes through the region where the Moon Beings have recorded what he had experienced on the Earth in earlier incarnations. Whereas these Moon Beings, when they were living on the Earth, brought men a wisdom relating especially to the past of the Universe, in their present cosmic existence they preserve the past. And as man descends to earthly existence, everything they have preserved is engraved into his astral body. It is so easy to say that man consists of an Ego organisation, an astral body, an etheric body, and so forth. The Ego organisation is most akin to the Earth; it comprises what we learn and experience in earthly existence; the more deeply lying members of man's being are of a different character. Even the astral body is quite different; it is full of inscriptions, full of pictures. What is known simply as the ‘unconscious' discloses a wealth of content when it is illumined by real knowledge. And Initiation makes it possible to penetrate into the astral body and to bring within the range of vision all that the Moon Beings have inscribed into it as, for example, the experiences shared with other human beings. Initiation science enables us to fathom the secret of how the whole past rests within man and how ‘destiny' is shaped through the fact that in the Moon-existence there are Beings who preserve the past so that it lies within us when we again set foot upon the Earth.

And now another case. When the Initiate meets a man in connection with whom the ordinary consciousness simply receives an aesthetic or mental impression unaccompanied by dreams, no picture rises up in him, to begin with. In this case the gaze of the Initiate is directed to the Sun, not to the Moon. I have told you of the Beings who are connected with the Moon—in the same way, the Sun is not merely the gaseous body of which modern physicists speak. The physicists would be highly astonished if they were able to make an expedition to the region which they surmise to be full of incandescent gases and which they take to be the Sun; at the place where they have conjectured the presence of incandescent gases, they would find a condition that is not even space, that is less than a void a vacuum in cosmic space. What is space? Men do not really know—least of all the philosophers who give a great deal of thought to it. Just think: if there is a chair here and I walk towards it without noticing its presence, I hit against it—it is solid, impenetrable. If there is no chair I walk through space unhindered.

But there is a third possibility. I might go to the spot without being held up or knocked, but I might be sucked up and disappear: here there is no space, but the antithesis of space. And this antithesis of space is the condition in the Sun, The Sun is negative space.² And just because of this, the Sun is the abode, the habitual abode, of the Beings who rank immediately above man: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. In the case of which I am speaking, the gaze of the Initiate is directed towards these Beings in the Sun, the spiritual Beings of the Sun. In other words: a meeting of this kind that is not part of a karmic past, but is quite new, is for the Initiate a means of coming into connection with these Beings. And the presence is revealed of certain Beings with some of whom man has a close connection, whereas with others the connection is more remote. The way in which these Beings approach the Initiate reveals to him—not in detail but in broad outline—what kind of karma is about to take shape; in this case it is not old karma but karma that is coming to him for the first time. He perceives that these Beings who are connected with the Sun have to do with the future, just as the Moon Beings have to do with the past.

Even if a man is not an Initiate, his whole life of feeling will be deepened if he grasps what Initiation science is able to draw in this way from the depths of spirit-existence. For these things are in themselves a source of enlightenment. A comparison I have often used is that just as a picture can be understood by a man who is not himself a painter, so these truths can be understood by one who is not himself an Initiate. But if a man allows these truths to work upon him, his whole relationship to the Universe is immeasurably deepened. When man looks up to the Universe and its structure to-day, how abstract, how prosaic and barren are his conceptions! When he looks at the Earth he is still interested to a certain extent; he looks at the animals in the wood with a certain interest. If he is cultured, he takes pleasure in the slender gazelle, the nimble deer; if his tastes are less refined, these animals interest him as game; he can eat them. He is interested in the plants and vegetables, for all these things are directly related to his own life. But just as his feelings and emotions are stirred by his relationship with the earthly world, so his life of feeling can be stirred by the relationship he unfolds to the Cosmos beyond the Earth. And everything that comes over as destiny from the past—if it makes an impression upon us—impels us in heart and soul to look up to the Moon Beings, saying to ourselves: “Here on the Earth men have their habitations; on the Moon there are Beings who once were together with us on the Earth. They have chosen a different dwelling place but we are still connected with them. They record our past; their deeds are living reality within us when the past works over into our earthly existence.”

We look upwards with reverence and awe, knowing that the silvery moon is but the sign and token of these Beings who are so intimately connected with our own past. And through what we experience as men, we enter into relationship with these cosmic, super earthly Powers whose images are the stars, just as through our carnal existence we are related with everything that lives on the Earth. Looking with expectation towards the future and living on into that future with our hopes and strivings, we no longer feel isolated within our own life of soul but united with what is radiating to us from the Sun. We know that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai are Sun Beings who go with us from the present on into the future. When we look up into the Cosmos, perceiving how the radiance of the Moon is dependent upon the radiance of the Sun and how these heavenly bodies are interrelated, then out yonder in the Cosmos we behold a picture of what is living within our very selves. For just as Sun and Moon are related to one another in the world of stars, so is our past—which has to do with the Moon—related to our future—which has to do with the Sun. Destiny is that in man which flows out of the past, through the present, on into the future. Woven into the Cosmos, into the courses of the stars and the mutual interplay of the stars, we behold the picture—now infinitely magnified—of what lives within our own being.

Our vision is thereby widened and penetrates deeply into the cosmic spheres. When a man passes through death he is released, to begin with, from his physical body only. He is living in his Ego organisation, his astral body, his ether body. But after a few days his ether body has released itself from the astral body and from the ‘I.' That which he now experiences is something that emerges as it were from himself; to begin with it is not large, but then it expands and expands—it is his ether body. This ether body expands into cosmic space, out into the very world of the stars—thus it appears to him. But as it expands the ether body becomes so fine, is so rarefied, that after a few days it vanishes from him. But something else is connected with this. While our ether body is being given over to the Cosmos, while it is expanding and becoming finer and more rarefied, it is as though we were reaching out to the secrets of the stars, penetrating into the secrets of the stars.

As we pass upwards through the Moon-sphere after death, the Moon Beings read from our astral body what we experienced in earthly existence. After our departure from earthly existence we are received by those Moon Beings, and our astral body in which we are now living is for them like a book in which they read. And they make an unerring record of what they read, in order that it may be inscribed into the new astral body when the time comes for us to descend to the Earth again.

We pass from the Moon-sphere through the Mercury-sphere, the Venus-sphere and then into the Sun-sphere. In the Sun-sphere, everything we have lived through, everything we have brought about and achieved in earlier incarnations becomes living reality within us. We enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, participating in their deeds, and we are now right within the Cosmos. Just as during earthly existence we move about on the Earth, are confined as it were within earthly conditions, we are now living in the cosmic expanse. We live in the infinite expanse, whereas on the Earth we lived in a state of confinement. As we pass through our existence between death and a new birth, it seems to us as though on the Earth we had been imprisoned ... for everything has now widened into infinitudes. We experience the secrets of the Cosmos, but not as if they were in any way governed by laws of physical nature: these laws of nature seem to us then to be insignificant productions of the human mind. We experience what is happening in the stars as the deeds of the Divine Spiritual Beings and we unite ourselves with these deeds: as far as in us lies we act among and together with these Beings. And from the Cosmos itself we prepare for our next earthly existence.

What we must realise in all its profound significance is that during his life in the Cosmos between death and a new birth, man himself fashions and shapes what he bears within him. In external life man perceives little, very little, of his own make up and organisation. An organ can only really be understood when there is knowledge of its cosmic origin. Think of the noblest organ of all—the human heart. Scientists to-day dissect the embryo, observe how the heart gradually takes shape and give no further thought to the matter. But this outer, plastic structure, the human heart, is in truth the product of what each individual, in cooperation with the Gods, has elaborated between death and a new birth. In the life between death and a new birth man must work, to begin with, in the direction leading from the Earth towards the zodiacal constellation of Leo. This stream which flows from the Earth towards the constellation of Leo teems with forces and it is along this direction that the human being must work in order that when the time comes he may project the germinal beginnings of the heart—a vessel in which cosmic forces are contained. Then, having passed through this region in the far spaces of the Universe, man comes to regions nearer the Earth; he passes into the Sun-sphere. Here again forces are at work which bring the heart to a further stage of development. And then man enters the region where he is already in contact with what may be called the Earth warmth. Out yonder in cosmic space there is no Earth warmth, but something altogether different. In the region of the Earth warmth the preparation of the human heart reaches the third stage. The forces streaming in the direction of Leo out of which the human heart is fashioned are purely moral and religious forces; in its initial stages of development the heart contains only moral and religious forces. To anyone who realises this it seems outrageous that modern natural science should regard the stars merely as neutral, physical masses, ignoring the moral element altogether. When man is passing through the Sun region, these moral forces are taken hold of by the etheric forces. And it is not until man comes still nearer to the Earth, to the warmth, that the final stages of preparation are reached; it is then that the forces which shape the physical seed for the being of soul and spirit who is descending, begin to be active.

Each organ is produced and shaped by cosmic forces; it is a product of these cosmic forces. In very truth man bears the stars of heaven within him. He is connected with the forces of the whole Cosmos, not only with the plant world through the substances which he takes into his stomach and which are then absorbed into his organism. These things can, of course, only be understood by those who have the gift of true observation. A time will come when the macroscopic aspect of things will be considered as well as the microscopic—which has really become a cult nowadays. People try to discover the secrets of the animal organism, of the human organism, by deliberately shutting off the Cosmos. They peer down a tube and call this microscopic investigation; they dissect a minute fragment, put it on a glass plate and try to eliminate the world and life as much as ever they possibly can. A tiny fragment is separated and studied by means of an instrument that cuts off any vista of the world surrounding it. There is, of course, no reason to belittle this kind of investigation for it brings wonderful things to light. But no real knowledge of man can be obtained in this way.

When we look from the Earth out into the Cosmos beyond the Earth, then, for the first time, part of the world is revealed. For after all it is only a part that becomes visibly manifest. The stars are not what they present to the physical eye—what the eye beholds is merely the sense image—but to this extent they are, after all, visible. The whole world through which we pass between death and a new birth is invisible, super-sensible. There are regions which lie above and beyond the world that is revealed to the senses. Man belongs to these realms of super-sensible existence just as surely as he belongs to the world of sense. We can have no real knowledge of the being of man until we consider the life he has spent in the vast cosmic expanse. And then it dawns upon us that when, having passed through the gate of death into the Cosmos, we have returned to the Earth once again, the connections with this cosmic life are still alive within us. There is within us a being who once dwelt on the Earth, ascended into the Cosmos, passed through the cosmic realms and has again come down into a restricted existence on Earth. Gradually we learn to perceive what we were in an earlier existence on Earth; our gaze is carried away from the physical, transported into the spiritual. For when we look back into earlier earthly lives the power inherent in Initiation science takes from us all desire for materialistic pictures.

In this connection, too, many strange things have happened. At one period there were certain theosophists who knew from oriental teachings that man passes through many earthly lives, but they wanted a materialistic picture although they deceived themselves to the contrary. It was said at that time that the physical organism of man disintegrates at death but that an atom remains and passes over in some miraculous way to the next earthly life. It was called the ‘permanent atom.' This was simply a way of providing a materialistic picture. But all inclination for materialistic thinking of this kind vanishes when one realises that in very truth the human heart is woven and shaped by the Cosmos.

The liver, on the other hand, forms in the near neighbourhood of the Earth; the liver has only little direct connection with the cosmic expanse. The knowledge gradually acquired from Initiation science makes us realise that the heart could not exist at all if it had not been prepared and inwardly formed by the Cosmos. But an organ like the liver or the lung only begins to form in the neighbourhood of the Earth. Viewed from the Cosmos, man is akin to the Earth in respect of the lungs and liver; in respect of the heart he is a cosmic being. In man we begin to discern the whole Universe. According to spiritual anatomy, the lungs and certain other organs might be depicted by sketching the Earth; the forces contained in these organs operate in a realm near the Earth. But for the heart one would have to make a sketch of the whole Universe. The whole Universe is concentrated, compressed, in man. Man is in truth a microcosm, a stupendous mystery. But knowledge of the macrocosm into which man is transformed after death is free from every element of materiality. We now learn to recognise the true connections between the spiritual and the physical, between one quality of soul and another.

For example, there are people who have an innate understanding of their environment, of the human beings around them in the world. If we observe life we shall find individuals who come into contact with numbers and numbers of others, but they never really get to know them. What they say about these other people is invariably uninteresting and tells one nothing essential. Such individuals are incapable of really sinking into the being of others, they have no understanding of them. But there are other individuals who possess this gift of understanding. When they speak of another person their words are so graphic and explicit that one knows at once what the man is like without ever having met him; he is there before one. The description need not be detailed. A man who can sink himself in the being of another is able to convey a complete picture of him quite briefly. Nor need it necessarily be another individual; it may be something in nature. Many people try to describe a mountain, or a tree, but one despairs of getting any real picture; everything is empty and one feels parched. Other individuals again have the gift of immediate understanding; one could easily paint what they describe. Such a gift or defect—understanding of the world or obtuseness—has not come from the blue but is the result of an earlier earthly existence. If with Initiation science one observes a man who has a deep understanding of his human and non human environment, and then investigates his preceding earthly life—I shall have much to say on this subject—one discovers the particular qualities of his character in that earlier life and how they were transformed between death and a new birth into this understanding of the world around. And one finds that a man who understands the world around him was by nature capable of great joy, great happiness, in the preceding life. That is very interesting: men who in their previous life were incapable of feelings of joy are incapable, now, of understanding human beings or the world around them. A man who has such understanding was one who in an earlier life took delight in his environment. But this quality, too, was acquired in a still earlier life. How does a man come to have this joyousness, this gift of taking delight in his environment? He has it if in a still earlier earthly life he knew how to love. Love in one earthly life is transformed into joy, happiness; the joy of the next earthly life is transformed into warm understanding of the surrounding world in the third life.

In perceiving the sequence of earthly lives one also learns to understand what streams from the present into the future. Men who are capable of intense hatred carry over into the next earthly life as the result of this hatred the disposition to be hurt by everything that happens. If one studies a man who goes through life with a perpetual grudge because everything hurts him, makes him suffer, that is what one finds. Naturally one must have compassion for such a man but this trait in the character invariably leads back to a previous incarnation when he gave way to hatred. Please do not misunderstand me here. When hatred is mentioned it is natural for everyone to say: “I do not hate, I love everybody.” But let them try to discover how much hidden hatred lurks in the soul! This becomes only too evident when one hears human beings talking about each other. Just think about it and you will realise that the derogatory things that are said about an individual far outweigh what is ever said in his praise. And if one were to go into the true statistics it would be found that there is a hundred times—really a hundred times—more hatred than love among human beings. This is a fact although it is not generally acknowledged; people always believe that their hatred is justified and excusable. But hatred is transformed in the next earthly life into hypersensitiveness to suffering and in the third life into lack of understanding, obtuseness traits which make a man hard and indifferent, incapable of taking a real interest in anything.

Thus it is possible to survey three consecutive incarnations through which a law is operating: love is transformed into joy, joy is transformed in the third life into understanding of the environment. Hatred is transformed into hypersensitiveness to suffering and this again, in the third life, into obtuseness and lack of understanding of the world around. Such are the connections in the life of soul which lead over from one incarnation to another.

But now let us consider a different side of life. There are individuals—it is perhaps for this very reason that they are as they are—who have no interest at all in anything except themselves. Now whether a man takes real interest in something or takes no interest at all has great significance in life. In this respect, too, odd things come to light. I have known men who had been talking to a lady in the morning but in the afternoon had not the slightest idea of what kind of hat or brooch she was wearing, or the colour of her clothes! There are people who simply do not observe such things. It is often regarded as a very excusable trait but in reality it is anything but that. It is really lack of interest, often going to such lengths that a man simply does not know if the person he met was wearing a black or a light coat. There was no inner connection with what stood before his very eyes. This is a somewhat radical example. I do not suggest that a man falls into the clutches of Ahriman or Lucifer when he does not know whether the lady he was talking to had fair or dark hair, but I merely want to indicate that individuals either have or have not a certain amount of interest in their environment. This is of great importance for the soul. If a man is interested in what is around him, the soul is invariably stimulated by it, lives with the environment. But whatever is experienced with lively interest, with real sympathy, is carried through the gate of death into the whole cosmic expanse. And just as man must have eyes in order to see colours on the Earth, so in his earthly existence he must be stimulated by interest, in order that it may be possible for him between death and a new birth to behold spiritually all that is experienced in the Cosmos. If a man goes through life without interest, if nothing captivates his eyes or his attention, then between death and a new birth he has no real connection with the Cosmos, he is as it were blind in soul, he cannot work with the cosmic forces. But when this is the case, the organism and the bodily organs for the next life are not being rightly prepared. When such a man enters the sphere of forces streaming in the direction of Leo, the rudimentary preparations for the heart cannot be made; he comes into the Sun region and is unable to work at its further development; then, in the region of terrestrial warmth, the Earth warmth, he is again unable to complete the preparation; finally he comes down to the Earth with a tendency to heart trouble.

Thus does lack of interest—which is an attribute of the life of soul—work over into the present earthly life. The nature of illness can only become fully clear when one is able to perceive these connections, when one perceives how the physical disability from which an individual is now suffering arose from something appertaining to the life of soul in a previous incarnation and has been transformed in the present incarnation into a physical characteristic. Physical sufferings in one incarnation are connected with experiences of a previous incarnation. Generally speaking, human beings who are said to be ‘bursting with health,' who never get ill, who are always robust and healthy, lead one's gaze back from their present existence to earlier lives when they took the deepest interest in everything around them, observed everything with keen and lively attention.

Naturally, things appertaining to the spiritual life must never be pressed too far. A stream of karma may also begin. Lack of interest may begin in the present life; and then the future will point back to it. It is not a question only of going back from the present to the past. Hence when karma is at work one can only say, as a rule it is the case that certain illnesses are connected with a particular trait or quality of soul.

Speaking generally, then, it may be said that qualities of soul in one earthly life are transformed into bodily traits in another earthly life; bodily traits in one earthly life are transformed into qualities of soul in another life. Now it is the case that anyone who wants to perceive karmic connections must often pay attention to what seem to be insignificant details. It is very important that the gaze should not be riveted on things that in the ordinary way are considered to be of outstanding significance. In order to recognise how one earthly life leads back to an earlier life, the gaze will frequently have to be directed to traits that seem of secondary importance. For example, I have tried—in all seriousness of course, not in the way that such investigations are often made—to discover the karmic relationships of various figures in history and in the sphere of learning, and my attention fell upon a personality whose inner life expressed itself so radically and remarkably that he ended by coining unusual forms of words. He has written a number of books in which the strangest forms of words occur. He was a very severe critic of social conditions, of men and their dealings with one another. He also deplored the jealousy shown by many learned men in their behaviour to their colleagues. He quotes examples to illustrate the tricks and intrigues of certain scholars in an effort to down their fellows, and the chapter in question is headed: Schlichologisches in der wissenschaftlichen Welt (underhand ways in the scientific world). Now when a man coins an expression like Schlichologisches, one feels that it is characteristic. And an alert, inner perception of what lies behind such expressions leads to the discovery that in a previous incarnation this personality had to do with all kinds of warlike undertakings, often calling for a great deal of manoeuvring and camouflaged actions. This was transformed, karmically, into a flair for coining such expressions for intrigues, disputes, quarrels. In the word pictures used for facts now under his observation, his head was describing that which in an earlier life he had carried out with feet and hands. And so in connection with this particular person I was able to give illustrations of how the physical had in a certain way been transformed into traits of soul.

• 2. ‘Negative space.’ See Physical and Ethereal Spaces, by George Adams; also Plant, Sun, Earth, by George Adams and Olive Whicher.

Having considered in the lecture yesterday the nature of the animals of the heights, represented by the eagle, the animals of the middle region, represented by the lion, and the animals of the earth-depths, represented by the ox or cow, we can today turn our attention to man's connection with the universe from that particular aspect which reveals the inner structural relationship of the human being to these representatives of the animal world.

Let us first turn our gaze to the upper regions, about which we said yesterday that when the animal derives its particular forces from them, they do then in fact cause the whole animal to become head-organization. There we see how the bird owes its very being to the sun-irradiated atmosphere. This sun-irradiated atmosphere—everything, that is to say, which can be absorbed by the bird through the fact that it owes the most important part of its being to it—is a necessity to the bird. And I told you yesterday that it is upon this that the actual formation of the plumage depends. The bird has its actual being within. What is brought about in the bird by the outer world is embodied in its plumage. But when the influence of this sun-irradiated air is not impressed on the being from without, as in the case of the eagle, but is activated within, as in the case of the human nervous system, then thoughts arise—momentary thoughts, as I said, thoughts of the immediate present.

When we thus turn our gaze upwards to the heights, and are filled with all that results from such a contemplation, it is to the tranquil atmosphere and to the streaming sunlight that our attention is drawn. We must not, however, think of the sun in isolation. The sun maintains its power through the fact that it comes into connection with the different regions of the universe. Human knowledge has expressed this relationship by connecting the sun activities with the so-called animal circle or zodiac, so that when the sunlight falls to earth from Leo, from Libra or from Scorpio, its significance also signifies something different for the earth according to whether it is strengthened or weakened by the other planets of our planetary system. And here different relationships arise in regard to the different planets; the relationships in regard to the so-called outer planets, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, are different from those in regard to the so-called inner planets, Mercury, Venus and Moon.

If we now consider the organization of the eagle, it is most important first of all to observe how far the Sun-forces become modified, strengthened or weakened, by their interaction with Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. It is not for nothing that legend speaks of the eagle as the bird of Jupiter. In general Jupiter stands as the representative of the outer planets. And if we were to draw a diagram illustrating what is meant here, we would have to draw the sphere which Saturn has in world-space, in the cosmos, as also that of Jupiter and Mars.

Let us draw this, so that we may actually see it, in a diagram: (see next page) the Saturn sphere, the Jupiter sphere, the Mars sphere; then we find the transition to the Sun sphere, giving us in the outermost part of our planetary system the working together of Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

And when we see the eagle circling in the air we do in fact utter a reality when we say: These forces which stream through the air from the Sun in such a way that they are composed of the working together of Sun with Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—these forces are those which live in the whole structure, in the very being of the eagle. But at the same time they live in the formation of the human head. And when we place man into the universe in accordance with his true nature—on earth he is only, so to speak, a miniature picture of himself—as regards his head we must place him into the eagle-sphere.

We must, therefore, think of Man in regard to his head as belonging to the eagle-sphere; and therewith we have indicated that element in the human being which is connected with the upward tending forces.

The lion is the representative of those animals which are in the real sense Sun-animals, in which the sun unfolds its own special force. The lion prospers best when the constellations above the sun and the constellations below the sun are so ordered that they exert the least influence upon the sun itself. Then those special characteristics appear which I described to you yesterday, namely that the forces of the sun itself, permeating the air, produce in the lion a breathing system of just such a kind that in its rhythm it is in perfect balance with the rhythm of the blood-circulation, not as regards number but as regards its dynamic. In the lion this balances itself out in a wonderfully beautiful way. The lion regulates his blood-circulation through the breathing, and the blood-circulation continually stimulates the stream of the breath. I told you that this can be seen even in the form, in the very structure of the lion's mouth. In this form itself the wonderful relationship between the rhythm of the blood and the rhythm of the breath is actually expressed. One can see this, too, in the remarkable gaze of the lion, resting in itself, and yet turned boldly outwards.

But what lives in the lion's gaze lives also in the other elements of human nature, the metabolic system, the head system, and the breast or heart system, that is the rhythmic system of Man.

And if we picture the special Sun-activity we must so draw the diagram of the human being that we place his heart, and the lungs connected to it, into the region of this Sun-activity. It is here, in this sphere, that we have the lion-nature in man.

When we turn to the inner planets nearer the earth, we have first the Mercury sphere. This has to do in particular with the finer parts of the digestive organism of man, the region where the foodstuffs are transformed into lymphatic substance, which is then carried into the circulation of the blood.

Progressing further, we come into the region of Venus-activity. This is connected with the somewhat coarser parts of man's digestive system, to that part of the human organism which works primarily from the stomach upon the foodstuffs which have been taken in. We next come into the sphere of the Moon. (I am drawing this in the sequence customary today in astronomy; I could also draw it differently.) There we enter that region where those digestive processes which are connected with the Moon act and re-act upon the human being.

In this way we have placed man into the entire universe. By turning our minds to those cosmic activities which the Sun carries out in conjunction with Mercury, Venus, Moon, we come into the region containing the forces which are taken up by the order of the animals represented for us by the cow, in the sense which I spoke of yesterday. There we have what the Sun cannot do by itself alone, but what the Sun can only do when its own forces are conducted to the earth by means of the planets which are nearest to the earth. When these forces are all at work, when they do not only stream through the air, but penetrate through the earth's surface in various ways, then these forces work up again from the earth depths. And what thus works up from earth depths belongs to the sphere which we see embodied outwardly in the organism of the cow.

The cow is the animal of digestion. It is, moreover, the animal which accomplishes digestion in such a way that there lies in its digestive processes the earthly reflection of something actually super-earthly; its whole digestive process is permeated with an astrality which reflects the entire cosmos in a wonderful light-filled way. There is—as I said yesterday—a whole world in this astral organism of the cow, but everything is heavy, everything is so organized that the weight of the earth works there. You have only to consider that the cow is obliged to consume an eighth of her weight in foodstuffs each day. Man can be satisfied with a fortieth part and remain healthy. Thus the cow needs earth-gravity in order fully to meet the needs of her organism. Her organism is orientated towards this need for the weight of matter. Every day the cow must digest an eighth of her weight. This binds the cow with her material substance to the earth, whereas, through her astrality she is at the same time an image of the heights, of the cosmos.

This is why, as I said yesterday, the cow is an object of so much veneration for those who confess to the Hindu religion. The Hindu says to himself: The cow lives here on the earth; but through this fact she forms in solid physical substance an image of something super-earthly. It is indeed the case that man's nature is organized in a normal way when he can bring into harmony these three cosmic activities manifested in a one-sided way in eagle, lion and cow; when he himself is the confluence of the activities of eagle, lion and cow.

In accordance with the general course of world events, however, we are now living in an age when the evolution of the world is threatened by a certain danger; and this danger will—if I may so express myself—actually take effect in man also in a one-sided way. From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries up to our own day the facts of human earthly evolution are such that, to an ever increasing degree, the eagle activities wish to make one-sided claims upon the human head, the lion activities upon the human rhythmic system, and the cow activities upon the human metabolism and upon all man's activity on the earth.

This is the stamp of our age, that it is the aim of the cosmic powers to bring about a threefold division of man, and that, each form of these cosmic powers is always striving to suppress the others. The eagle strives to subjugate the lion and the cow and make them of no account, and in like manner with each of the other elements. Just in our present age something particularly alluring is working upon the subconscious in man; alluring because in a certain sense there is also something beautiful about it. In his conscious life man today is unaware of this but, for his sub-consciousness, three calls surge and sound through the world seeking to tempt him with their allurement. And I must say that it is the secret of our present time that, from the sphere of the eagle, there sounds down to man what actually gives the eagle his eagle nature, what gives him his plumage, what hovers around him as astrality. It is the eagle nature itself which becomes audible for the sub-consciousness of man. This is the alluring call:

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To create a universe
In thine own head.

Thus speaks the eagle. That is the call from above, which today wishes to impose one-sidedness upon man.

And there is a second alluring call. This is the call which comes to us from the middle region, where the forces of the cosmos form the lion-nature, where, through the mingling of sun and air, they bring about that equilibrium between the rhythms of breathing and blood-circulation which constitutes the nature of the lion. What thus vibrates through the air, from the nature of the lion, what wills to make man's own rhythmic system one-sided, this today speaks alluringly to man's sub-consciousness, saying:

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To embody the universe
In the radiance¹ of the encircling air.

Thus speaks the lion.

These voices, which speak to man's sub-consciousness, have more effect than is supposed. Yes, my dear friends, there are certain human natures on earth organized in such a way that they are particularly liable to absorb their influences. Thus, for instance, all those who populate the west are so organized that they are specially prone to be allured, to be led astray, by the voice of the eagle. Thus American civilization, on account of the special organization of its people, is particularly exposed to the temptation offered by what the eagle speaks. And Central Europe, which is imbued with much of the culture of classical antiquity, which contains so much of what caused Goethe, for instance, to make his journey to Italy, a journey which acted on his life like a liberation—central Europe is particularly exposed to what is uttered by the lion.

Oriental civilization is pre-eminently exposed to what is uttered by the cow. And just as both other animals give utterance in their cosmic representation, so there sounds upwards from earth-depths, like a rumbling, muffled roaring, the call of what lies in the heaviness of the cow. It is actually the case, as I described to you yesterday, that when one sees a herd of cattle replete with grazing, sees them as they lie there in their own peculiar way, their very form revealing that they are given over to earth-gravity, then all this is conditioned by the fact that this bodily form must assimilate daily an eighth of its own weight. And to this must be added that the earth-depths, which, under the influence of Sun, Mercury, Venus and Moon, bring all this about in the digestive system of the cow—that these earth-depths, as if with demonic rumbling power, resound through such a herd with the words:

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To wrest from the universe
Measure, number and weight.

Thus speaks the cow. And it is the orient which is specially exposed to the allurement of this call. What is meant here, however, is that, though it is the orient which is primarily exposed to this alluring call of the cow on account of the ancient veneration of the cow in Hinduism, yet, if this allurement were actually so to seize hold of mankind that what arises from this call would gain the mastery, then these influences emanating from the orient would produce a civilization, which, spreading over centre and west, would hinder progress and engender decadence. The demonic earth-forces would work in a one-sided way upon earth-civilization. What then would actually happen?

The following would happen. In the course of the last centuries, under the influence of a technology brought about by external science, an external technological life has come about on the earth. Certainly our technical achievement is wonderful in every sphere. But in technology nature forces work in their lifeless form. And the important factors in bringing these lifeless nature forces into play so absolutely and utterly that they would impose a stratum of civilization over the earth—these factors are number, measure and weight.

The scales, the measuring rod—to weigh, to count, to measure—these are the ideal of the modern scientist, of the modern technician, whose entire profession is actually dependent upon external science. We have brought things to such a pass that an important mathematician of our times, in response to the question: What is the guarantee of existence?, gives the following answer. (Philosophers of all ages have tried to answer the question: What is actually real?) This important physicist says: What can be measured is real; what cannot be measured is unreal. The ideal is to regard all being in such a way that it can be brought into the laboratory, and weighed, measured and counted; and from what is weighed, measured and counted, science, or what stands for it, is constructed. All this then streams out into technology. Number, measure and weight have become the standards of the whole of civilization.

Now as long as people only apply themselves with their ordinary understanding to measure, number and weight, things are not particularly bad. People are certainly very clever, but they are still a long way from being as clever as the universe. And this is why things cannot become particularly bad so long as, in comparison with the universe, they go about the measuring, weighing and counting in a dilettante way. But if present-day civilization were to be transformed into initiation, things would be bad indeed, if this attitude of mind remained. And this can happen if the civilization of the west, which stands entirely under the sign of measure, number and weight, were to be flooded by what might well come to pass in the east, namely, that through initiation-science people might fathom what actually lives spiritually in the organism of the cow. For if you penetrate into the organism of the cow, burdened with earthly heaviness, with this eighth of her weight in foodstuffs, with all that can be weighed, measured and counted, you learn what is being organized spiritually in the cow by this earth-heaviness, you learn to understand the whole organism of the cow as it lies in the meadow digesting, and in this process of digestion manifesting wonderful revelations from the astrality of the universe. Then you learn how to form what can be weighed, measured and counted into a system with which you could overcome all other forms of civilization and impose upon the whole earth-globe one civilization, which would do nothing but weigh, count and measure, making everything else disappear. For what would result from initiation into the organization of the cow? That is a question of utmost gravity, a question of immense significance. What would be the result?

Well, the whole way in which people construct machines varies greatly according to the nature of the machine in question; but everything tends towards the gradual development of these still imperfect, primitive machines into a kind of machine which depends upon vibrations, and where the aim is to make the machines effective by means of vibrations or oscillations, by means of movements which run a periodic course. Everything is hastening towards such machines. But if once these machines in their coordinated activity could be constructed in such a way as can be learned from the distribution of foodstuffs in the organization of the cow, then the vibrations which would be conjured up on the earth-globe through the machines, these small earth-vibrations, would so run their course that what is above the earth would sound together with, vibrate together with what is happening on the earth; so that our planetary system in its movements would be compelled to vibrate with our earth-system, just as a string tuned to a certain pitch vibrates in sympathy when another one is struck in the same room.

That is the terrible law of the sounding in unison of vibrations which would be fulfilled if the alluring call of the cow would so decoy the orient that it would then be able to penetrate in an absolutely convincing way into the unspiritual, purely mechanistic civilization of the west and centre; and thereby it would become possible to conjure up on the earth a mechanistic system fitting exactly into the mechanistic system of the universe. Through this everything connected with the working of air, with the forces of the circumference, and everything connected with the working of the stars, would be exterminated from human civilization. What man experiences, for instance, through the cycle of the year, what he experiences through living together with the sprouting, budding life of spring, with the fading, dying life of autumn—all this would lose its import for him. Human civilization would resound with the clattering and rattling of the vibrating machines and with the echo of this clattering and rattling which would stream down upon the earth from the cosmos as a reaction to this mechanisation of the earth.

If you observe a part of what is active at the present time, you will say to yourselves: A part of our present-day civilization is actually on the way to having this terrible element of degeneracy as its goal.

Now turn your thoughts to what would happen if the centre fell a prey to the allurements of what is spoken by the lion. Then, it is true, the danger I have just described would not be present. Then mechanism would gradually disappear from the face of the earth. Civilization would not become mechanistic, but, with a one-sided power, man would be given over to all that lives in wind and weather, in the cycle of the year. Man would be yoked to the year's course, and thereby compelled to live particularly in the interaction of his rhythms of breathing and blood-circulation. He would develop in himself what his involuntary life can give him. He would primarily develop his breast-nature. Through this, however, such human egoism would come over earth civilization that everyone would be intent upon living for himself alone, that no-one would bother about anything save his own immediate wellbeing. It is this temptation to which the civilization of the centre is exposed, such is the existence which could hang like a fate over the civilization of the earth.

And yet again, if the alluring call of the eagle were to seduce the west, so that it would succeed in spreading its way of thinking and attitude of mind over the whole earth, binding itself up in a one-sided way in this kind of thinking and mental attitude, then, in mankind as a whole there would arise the urge to enter into connection with the super-earthly world, as this once was, as it was in the beginning, at the outset of earth-evolution. People would feel the urge to extinguish what man has won for himself in freedom and independence. They would come to live only and entirely in that unconscious will which allows the gods to live in human muscles and nerves. They would revert to primitive conditions, to original, primitive clairvoyance. Man would seek to free himself from the earth by turning back to beginnings.

And I must say that, for exact clairvoyant vision, this is further emphasized through the fact that man is continually approached by what may be called the voice of the grazing cow, which says: “Do not look upwards; all power comes from the earth. Learn to know all that lies in earth-activity. Thou shalt become the lord of the earth. Thou shalt perpetuate the results of thy work on earth.” Yes, if man were to succumb to this alluring call, it would be impossible to avoid the danger of which I have spoken: the mechanizing of earth civilization. For the astrality of this animal of digestion wills to make the present enduring, to make the present eternal. From the lion-organization proceeds not what wills to make the present endure, but rather what would make the present as fleeting as possible, what would make everything a mere sport of the cycle of the year, always repeating itself, what would spend itself in wind and weather, in the play of the sunbeams, in the currents of the air. And civilization, too, would take on this character.

If, with real understanding, one contemplates the eagle as he soars through the air, it appears as though he were bearing upon his plumage the memory of what was there at the very inception of the earth. He has preserved in his plumage the forces which have still worked into the earth from above. It can be said that in every eagle we see the past millennia of the earth; with his physical nature he has not touched the earth, or at the most only for the purpose of seizing his prey, and in no way for the satisfaction of his own life. To fulfil his own life the eagle circles in the air, because he is indifferent to what has developed on the earth, because he has his joy and inspiration from the forces of the air, because he actually despises the life of earth and wishes to live in that same element in which the earth itself lived when it was not yet earth, but when, in the beginning of its evolution, it was still imbuing itself with heavenly forces. The eagle is the proud creature which would not partake in the evolution of the solid earth, which withdrew from the influence of this solidifying process, and wished to remain united only with those forces which were there at the inception of the earth.

Such are the teachings given to us by this threefold representation of the animal kingdom, if we can conceive it as an immense and mighty script, written into the universe for the elucidation of its riddles. For, in very truth, every single thing in the universe is a written character if we could but read it. And especially when we can read their connection do we understand the riddle of the universe.

How full of significance it is to have to realize: What we do when we measure with the compasses or measuring rod, when we weigh with the scales, when we count—this is in fact only a putting together of something which is fragmentary; it becomes a whole when we understand the organization of the cow in its inner spirituality. This means to read in the secrets of the universe. And this reading in the secrets of the universe leads into the understanding of the being of the world and of man. This is modern initiation wisdom. It is this which must be uttered at the present time from out of the depths of spiritual life.

It is difficult indeed today for man to be really man. For, if I may put it so, in face of the three animal types, man conducts himself like the antelope in the fable which I told you yesterday. What wills to be one-sided takes on a particular form. The lion remains lion, but he wishes to have his fellow beasts of prey as metamorphoses of the other animal representatives. Thus for what in truth is eagle he substitutes a fellow beast of prey, the hyena, whose nature it is to live upon what is dead, upon that element of death which is induced in our head, and which continually, at every moment, contributes atomistic particles towards our death. So this fable replaces the eagle with the hyena, the hyena which consumes decay; and in the place of the cow—in line with the degeneration—the lion puts his fellow beast of prey, the wolf. Thus we have in the fable the other threefold animal group, the lion, the hyena, the wolf. And as today the alluring calls stand over against each other, their cosmic symbolism is confronted with its opposite, in that, when the alluring calls resound, the eagle sinks to earth and becomes the hyena, and the cow no longer desires in her holy, humble way to be an image of the cosmos, but becomes the ravening wolf.

And now we can translate the legend with which I ended my lecture yesterday from the negro version into that of modern civilization. Yesterday I had to narrate this legend from what may be called the negro point of view: The lion, the wolf and the hyena went out hunting. They killed an antelope. First the hyena was asked to divide the prey; he apportioned it according to hyena-logic, and said: “A third for everyone: a third for the lion, a third for the wolf, and a third for me.” Whereupon the hyena was consumed. And now the lion said to the wolf, “You divide it.” So the wolf said, “You get the first third because you have killed the hyena, and therefore the hyena's share is also your due. The second third is yours because, according to the verdict of the hyena, you would have had a third in any case, for each of us was to have had a third; and you got the last third as well, because of all the beasts you are the wisest and bravest.” And the lion said to the wolf, “Who taught you to divide in so excellent a way?” The wolf said, “The hyena taught it me.”

The logic is the same in both cases, but in its application to reality something quite different results according to whether the hyena, or the wolf with the hyena's experience, applied the logic. It is in the application of logic to reality that the essential matter lies.

Now we can also translate this fable into what I may call the version of modern civilization and tell the story somewhat differently. But please notice that what I am telling is in terms of the whole development of the great course of culture. Thus, expressed in modern fashion, the story could perhaps run as follows: The antelope is killed. The hyena withdraws and delivers a silent verdict; he does not dare to arouse the growling of the lion. He draws back, delivers a silent verdict, and waits in the background. The lion and the wolf now begin to fight for the body of the antelope. They fight and fight, until they have so severely wounded each other that both die from their wounds. Now comes the hyena, and consumes antelope, wolf and lion, after they have entered into a state of decay. The hyena is the image of what lies in the human intellect, the element in human nature which kills. He is the reverse side, the caricature, of the eagle civilization.

If you feel what I wish to convey by the europeanizing of the old negro fable, you will understand that just at the present time these things should be rightly understood. But they will only be rightly understood when, in opposition to the threefold alluring call—the call of the eagle, and of the lion, and of the cow—man learns what he himself should utter, that utterance which today should be the good shibboleth of man's strength, and thinking, and activity:

I must learn
Thy power, O Cow,
From the language
Which the stars reveal in me.

To comprehend earth-gravity, not as mere weighing, measuring and counting; to understand not merely what lies in the physical organization of the cow, but what is embodied in her; humbly to turn our gaze away from her organization up to the heights—this alone will ensure the spiritualisation of what would otherwise become the mechanistic civilization of the earth.

And the second utterance of the human being must be:

I must learn
Thy power, O Lion,
From the language
Which, through year and day,
Encircling space makes active in me.

Notice the words “reveal”, “make active”.

And the third utterance which man must learn is:

I must learn
Thy power, O Eagle,
From the language
Which earth-born life creates in me.

Thus man must oppose his threefold utterance to the one-sided alluring calls, that threefold utterance whose meaning can bring what is one-sided into harmonious balance. He must learn to look towards the cow, but then, after entering with deep experience into her nature, turn his gaze upwards to what is revealed by the language of the stars. He must learn to direct his gaze upwards to the eagle, but then, after deeply experiencing within himself the eagle's nature, he must look down with the clear gaze that the eagle's nature has bestowed upon him, and behold what springs and sprouts forth from the earth, and what also works from below upwards in the organization of man. And he must learn so to behold the lion that the lion reveals to him what is wafted around him in the wind, what flashes towards him in the lightning, what rumbles around him in the thunder, what wind and weather, in the course of the seasons, bring about in the life of the earth into which man himself is yoked. Thus, when man shall direct his physical gaze upwards with his spiritual gaze downwards, when he shall direct his physical gaze downwards with his spiritual gaze upwards, when he shall direct his physical gaze outwards towards the east with his spiritual gaze in the opposite direction towards the west—thus when man shall allow above and below, forwards and backwards, spiritual gaze and physical gaze to interpenetrate each other, then he will be able to receive and understand the true calls, bringing him strength and not weakness—the calls of the eagle from the heights, of the lion from the circumference, of the cow from below within the earth.

This is what man should learn in regard to his connection with the universe, so that thereby he may become ever more fitted to work for earth-civilization, and to serve, not its decadence, but its upward progress.

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To create a universe
In thine own head.

Thus speaks the Eagle. (West).

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To embody the universe
In the radiance of the encircling air.

Thus speaks the Lion. (Centre).

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To wrest from the universe
Measure, number and weight.

Thus speaks the Cow. (Orient).

I must learn
Thy power, O Cow,
From the language
Which the stars reveal in me.

I must learn
Thy power, O Lion,
From the language
Which, through year and day,
Encircling space makes active in me.

I must learn
Thy power, O Eagle,
From the language
Which earth-born life creates in me.

• 1. German Schein for which there is no exact English equivalent.

The fire which destroyed the First Goetheanum was discovered one hour after this lecture had finished.

The day before yesterday I spoke of how the cycle of the year can also be found in man. I pointed out that the forces of Nature around us group themselves into a sort of time-organism which we call the cycle of a year, so that we can see, during the course of a year, the interaction and cooperation of occurrences which otherwise appear like isolated processes and facts in Nature.

Now the essential difference between this Nature-cycle and its image in man is that events which take place successively in a particular region of the Earth, take place concurrently in man. Man, it is true, taken as a whole, resembles the Earth-globe taken as a whole, inasmuch as when it is Winter in one hemisphere it is Summer in the other, and so forth. In the case of the Earth, however, if we take the Winter influences as they work in one region and the simultaneous Summer influences working in another region, the two flow away from one another and neither is disturbed or weakened in its operation by the other. But now consider how it is with man. When he is asleep, his physical and etheric bodies are in a kind of Summer condition—a budding and sprouting life. Spiritual sight shows us this budding and sprouting Summer condition of man's physical and etheric bodies during sleep, when the Ego and astral body are separated from them. We can say that while man is asleep, there is a kind of successive Spring and Summer condition in the physical and etheric organism which he has left behind. At the same time the Ego and astral body, which still co-operate in supporting the human organism as a whole, are in a sort of Winter condition. Thus here again there are simultaneous Summer and Winter conditions, but in man they are not turned away from one another; on the contrary, they work into one another. And it is the same in our waking life. As long as man is awake, his physical and etheric bodies are in a kind of Autumn and Winter condition. Their organic life is waning, so to speak. On the other hand, the Ego and the astral body, stirred by external impressions and by the thoughts to which these impressions give rise in man, are in full Summer or full Spring conditions. So that once more we find inner Spring, inner Summer and inner Winter working together in man, not turning away from one another, but irradiating each other.

This is what actually takes place, as disclosed by the researches of Spiritual Science. If we wished to compare the entire Earth with man in respect to Winter and Summer, we should have to turn the Summer in the one hemisphere right round and superimpose it on the Winter in the other hemisphere. Were this possible we should have actually what may be described as Summer conditions cancelling Winter conditions, and Winter conditions cancelling Summer conditions—producing a kind of equilibrium. Now this is an important fact, not yet realized by external science, which in consequence is bound to misunderstand the essential nature of man. For in man, Summer and Winter—if I may allow myself the expression, for it really corresponds to what actually takes place—cancel one another.

It is true that man bears surrounding Nature in himself, but its activities cancel one another and a condition sets in which actually brings the activities of Nature to a state of rest. Even as in a balance that has weights in either scale, the pointer will come to rest at a certain spot and will at that spot be affected neither by the weight to the right nor by the weight to the left, but there will be equilibrium in respect to the forces which otherwise affect the beam, so there is in man a counterpoise resulting from opposing natural forces.

Anyone who studies what I said very briefly in my book Riddles of the Soul, about man as a threefold being—studying it really carefully, as people are not yet accustomed to do—will find that what I am now going to say is true. Man is membered into an organism of nerves and senses, a rhythmic organism, and an organism of trunk, limbs and metabolism. These three organisms work together and into one another. We may say that the organism of nerves and senses has its principal activity in the head. But the whole of man is head, after a fashion, functionally. And the same may be said of the other systems. If we take the two outer organisms, that of the nerves and senses and that of the trunk, limbs and metabolic activities, we find an actual opposition between them which is very plainly visible to a spiritual-scientific anatomy and physiology. Say, for example, we are walking. There is motion in our limb-organism, movement in space. To this motion there corresponds in a certain portion of our nerves and senses organism, our head organism, a kind of rest, proportional to the amount of activity or movement in our limb organism. Please try to understand this correctly. I said: a proportional amount of rest. Rest is generally thought of as absolute. A person who is seated, is seated, and people do not notice the degree of intensity with which he sits! This is permissible in ordinary life, where there is no need to make such fine distinctions. But it is not permissible in dealing with the organism of nerves and senses. If we run fast, if our limb organism moves fast, then in our nerves and senses organism there is a stronger desire to be at rest than if we were sauntering along slowly. And everything that happens in our limb organism—or indeed in our metabolic organism, when, for example, the digestive fluids are being kept active by intestinal movements—produces a tendency to rest in our nerves and senses organism. The fact comes to expression externally, as we know.

The head, the principal seat of the nerves and senses organism, is a lazybones compared with the limb organism. It behaves much like a man who sits in a cab and lets himself be drawn along by the horse. The man is at rest; and so does our head sit quietly on the rest of our organism. The head is not even interested if, for instance, I wave my arms! When I wave my left arm, a tendency to rest is set up in the right half of my head. And to this tendency to rest is to be ascribed our ability to accompany our movements with thoughts and ideas. It is quite a mistaken notion of materialistic philosophy that ideas originate from movements in the nerves. On the contrary, if they are ideas about motion in space, they are caused by tendencies to rest in the nervous system. The nervous system quiets down; and because it becomes quiet and abates its vital activities, thoughts find their way into this state of rest and become real for us. Anyone who can look at man with the vision of Spiritual Science and see what happens when he thinks and when ideas occur to him, can never be a materialist, for he knows that in the very same measure that thoughts, in their nature as soul-and spirit substance, become active and busy—in the same measure do the nerves grow quiet, lose their vitality and energy and even become numb. The nervous system must cease its material activities before it can make room for the soul-and-spirit element of thought. This will help to show us why we have materialism at all. Materialism dates from the time when science no longer understood matter. For material science is characterized by a total inability to conceive the nature of material occurrences, which it therefore endows with a number of non-existent attributes!

So you see there are opposite conditions in man, tending towards equilibrium. Just as there are present at Midsummer natural forces and activities that are directly opposed to those of the depth of Winter, so do we find opposing forces in the human organism, which however hold each other in balance. Yet we shall not think quite correctly about these opposing forces which balance one another until we divide man once more by separating his middle system, the rhythmic system, into two halves, a rhythm of the breath and a rhythm of the blood-circulation—even this discrimination is not absolutely exact, but it is near enough for our purpose—and speak of an upper and lower rhythmic system. Between the upper and lower halves is that part of man which, because it is influenced and permeated from above and below by opposite natural forces, strives most energetically to maintain equilibrium. So that man is divided as it were into two halves, an upper and a lower. The upper half embraces the nerves and senses system which extends, of course, over the whole body. The state of things therefore which I have to picture, is on the one hand a nerves and senses system with a breathing system belonging to it, and on the other hand a trunk, limbs and metabolic system with a circulatory system of the blood belonging to it. These two main systems work in opposite directions and cancel one another.

The organ in man in which the adjustment takes place, in which there is a continual struggle upwards and downwards to maintain equilibrium, is the human heart—which is far from being a pump, as modern physiology would have it, for the purpose of pumping blood through the body! It is, on the contrary, the organ which keeps the upper and lower systems in equilibrium. Therefore even in man's outer physical organism we find an expression of the spiritual events taking place within him, when we observe how Summer and W inter conditions are incessantly offsetting one another within him.

On Earth, Winter can prevail in one region precisely because Summer does not occur at the same time. Otherwise the Summer would balance the Winter, that is to say, there would be neither Winter nor Summer but only equilibrium. This is the real state of things in man. Man is a part of Nature, but since the natural forces oppose each other in his organism they cancel one another and it is as though he were a part of Nature no longer. But for that very reason, man is a free being. Natural laws cannot be applied to him, for in him there is not one set of natural laws, but two, working against one another, and cancelling each other out. And in this realm where natural forces cancel one another are to be found the soul and spirit of man, unaffected by the working of Nature and only to be recognized in their obedience to the laws of soul and spirit.

From this you can see what a fundamental change of method is necessary when we come to the observation of man, and why a mere application of the external laws of Nature, which are orientated in one direction only, is of no use at all.

But now that we have set before us the true nature of man, let us see what results follow. We have seen that man cannot be understood unless he is regarded as bearing within him, as it were, a piece of Nature, in such a manner that the counteracting natural forces cancel one another; and if we examine this piece of Nature in man with the eyes of Spiritual Science, we find it to be penetrated as to the physical and etheric bodies during sleep by mineral and vegetable modes of activity, which are seen to be in the Summer condition. If we are now able to observe in the right way this budding, sprouting life, we may learn to understand its real significance.

When does this budding and sprouting take place? When the Ego and astral body are not present, when they are away during sleep. And whence comes this budding and sprouting process? That is precisely what spiritual vision shows us. Let us picture man asleep. His physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed. Spiritual vision sees them as soil, as mineral matter, out of which plant life is sprouting. It is a different form of plant life, of course, from the one we see around us, but recognizable as such by spiritual sight. Above gleam the Ego and astral body like a flame, unable to approach the physical and etheric. Sleeping man therefore is a sort of budding, sprouting plot of ground, with a gleaming Ego and astral body belonging to it, but detached.

And when man is awake? I must describe this state as follows. The mineral and vegetable portions are seen to be withering and collapsing, while the Ego and astral body gleam down into them, and as it were, burn them up. This is waking man, with the mineral matter crumbling within him. The mineral element of man crumbles during his waking hours. There is a sort of plant-like activity which, although quite different in appearance, gives a general and universal impression of autumn foliage, of drooping, withering leaves which are dying and vanishing; and all through this fading substance, big and little flames are gleaming and glowing. These big and little flames are the astral body and the Ego which are now living in the physical and etheric bodies. And then the question arises: What happens to these gleaming and glowing flames during sleep, when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies?

When this problem is attacked by the methods of occult science we find the solution to be a consequence you could yourselves draw from a comparison of various descriptions that I have given from time to time. The power which drives away the flame and gleam of the Ego and astral body, and which is then actively at work in the budding and sprouting vegetative life of the summer-like, sleeping physical body, and also in its mineral element, causing even that too to evolve a kind of life, so that in the course of its infinitesimal subdividing, it looks like a mass of melting atoms, a continuous mobile mass, everywhere active, fluid-mineral and yet airlike, at all points permeated by sprouting life—what is this inner power? It is the reverberating wave of our life before birth, whose pulsations beat upon our physical and etheric bodies during sleep. When we are awake during earthly life we still the pulsating vibrations. So long as the flame and gleam of the Ego and astral body are united with the physical and etheric bodies, we annul those impulses which spring from an existence preceding our earthly life and which we experience during sleep, we bring them to quiescence. And now we learn for the first time, from an inspection of ourselves, how to regard external Nature in the right way. For all natural laws and energies affecting external vegetable and mineral Nature resemble that which is mineral and vegetable in ourselves, permeated with sprouting life, during sleep. And so this means that as our sleeping physical and etheric bodies point to our own past, to a spiritual life in which we lived before birth, so does all external Nature that is vegetable or mineral point to a past. As a matter of fact, if we are to comprehend aright the natural laws and forces of our external environment, exclusive of the animal element and physical man, we must recognize that they point to the Earth's past, to the dying-away of the Earth. And the thoughts we entertain about external Nature are really directed to the dying element in Earth existence.

Now if this decaying Earth-nature is to be brought to life so that it can receive impulses for the future, this can come about in no other way than it does in man, that is to say, by the insertion of soul and spirit into mineral and vegetable. In the case of the animals, the soul element enters in, and then with man, spirit enters in.

Looked at in this way, the whole world may be said to be divided into two parts. When we look out upon external Nature, in so far as this is mineral and vegetable—and these constitute the principal part of it—we can compare it only with our sleeping physical and etheric organism. When we consider external physical activities, we must admit that all of them depend upon the physical activities in mineral and vegetable matter. Consider the process of nourishment. It begins with the taking in of mineral and vegetable matter. The animal takes it a step further in preparing it as food for man. But all external Nature depends, so far as its physical and etheric activities are concerned, on such an order of things as we find in our sleeping physical and etheric organism. Now in man the Ego and astral organism which we bear within us, and which, during our waking moments while our physical and etheric organism is in its Winter sleep, is in a condition of Summer, being stimulated by the outer senses and the thoughts that form themselves—this Ego and astral organism balances in waking hours the Winter condition of the physical and etheric bodies.

And when we come to apply the methods of Spiritual Science to the cycle of the year, we find in it too a spiritual Summer condition belonging to its Winter and a spiritual Winter condition belonging to its Summer. These conditions do not, however, balance one another as they do in man. On the contrary, they express themselves in opposite hemispheres, so that on the Earth, physical Winter is strengthened by the Winter of the soul and spirit, and physical Summer by spiritual Summer. Nevertheless these occurrences point to the fact that all surrounding Nature bears within it its past and its future, even as man does.

We have actually the present only in waking hours in our physical body in respect to its activities and laws. For during the sleep of our physical and etheric bodies we experience the inworking of a past, a past moreover that was spent in the spiritual world. We find the same thing in the vegetable and mineral worlds as we see them before us and experience their effects upon us. They too are a result of past existence. And they only become present through the Earth being permeated with soul and spirit even as man is. And in the present is contained the germ of the future. But if it is true—and the description I have given you is true—that our physical and etheric organism is an expression of the past precisely when it is independent of the activities of the soul and spirit, then in order to find that which works over into the future we must look to our Ego and astral body; and for the Earth too we must seek the future in that which is spiritual.

Man has evolved to a point when, by help of forces which of course are quite elemental, he has brought the Ego and astral body into companionship with his physical and etheric bodies. The mineral and vegetable world has not yet accomplished this. The Earth's ego and astral body surround the Earth with soul and spirit but do not permeate her mineral and vegetable activities. The mineral nature of the Earth, as observed by us, shows itself unable to let soul and spirit enter into it, and able only to let them surround it with light. The vegetable nature shows itself also unable to admit soul, but in a certain way the upper parts of the plant may be said to be touched with soul and spirit. Spiritual Science gives us the following picture of a plant. If I draw it with the root below, the stem in the middle and the blossom above, then I have to represent it as in contact with the astral world through its blossom. The astral world does not penetrate the plant; it merely touches it, and this touching is the origin of the blossom. The astral substance surrounding the Earth touches the uppermost portion of the plant, and the flower appears. I have often spoken of this in an analogy (which must of course be received with proper delicacy), saying that the flowering of the plant is the kiss exchanged between the Sun's light and the plant. It is an astral influence in which there is no more than a ‘touching.’

So that when we look into surrounding Nature, we do not see in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms exactly what we see in man. In ourselves as man we behold a mineral nature, a plant nature, an astral nature and an Ego nature, all belonging to one another. (We will leave the animals out for the time being and speak of them on some future occasion.) But we have to see in the mineral and vegetable world themselves that on which physical activity essentially depends. These worlds show themselves, in external Nature, altogether lacking in astral thought, as well as in self-conscious spiritual intelligence which is the product of the Ego. The latter are not to be found in the world outside, neither in the mineral nor in the plant. For mineral and plant are fundamentally results of the past.

If we observe the Earth's crust and its vegetation aright, we shall look upon all the life of the Earth and say: You crystals, you mountains, you budding and sprouting plants, I see in you monuments of a living, creative past which is now in process of dying. But in man himself, if we are able to have the right insight into this dying element that draws its energy from pre-earthly existence and exhausts itself and dies away in the physical and etheric bodies—in man we see this physical and etheric organism permeated by an astral body and Ego throwing light across into the future and able to unfold freely, on a plane of balanced natural energies, a life of thought and ideation. It may be said that we see in man past and future side by side. In Nature on the other hand, so far as she is mineral or vegetable, we see only the past. That element which already functions as future during man's present, is the element that confers freedom upon him; and this freedom is not to be found in external Nature. If external Nature were doomed to remain just what her mineral and vegetable kingdoms make her, she would be doomed to die, in the same way that the mere physical and etheric organism of man perishes. Man's physical and etheric organisms die, but man does not, because the nature of the astral and Ego within him carries within it, not death but an arising, a coming into being.

If therefore external Nature is not to perish, she must be given that which man has through his astral body and his Ego. This means that as man through his astral body and his Ego has self-conscious ideas, he must, in order to ensure a future to the Earth, insert into the Earth too, the supersensible and invisible that he has within himself. Even as man must derive his reincarnation in another earth-life from that in him which is supersensible and invisible, since his dying physical and etheric bodies are powerless to confer it, so can no future arise for the Earth from the mineral and vegetable globe that surrounds us. Only when we place into the Earth that which she has not herself, only then can an Earth of the Future arise. And what is not there of itself on the Earth is principally the active thoughts of man, as they live and weave in his own Nature-organism, which holds always a balance and is on this account self-dependent. If he brings these independent thoughts to a real existence, he confers a future on the Earth. But he must first have them. Thoughts that we make in our ordinary knowledge of Nature—thoughts about that which is dying away, are mere reflections—not realities. But thoughts we receive from spiritual research are quickened in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. If we accept them they become forms having independent existence in the life of the Earth.

Concerning these creative thoughts, I once said in my book entitled A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, that such thinking represents the spiritual form of communion among mankind. For as long as man gives himself up to his mirror-thoughts about external Nature, he does nothing but repeat the past. He lives in corpses of the Divine. When he himself brings life into his thoughts, then, giving and receiving communion through his own being, he allies himself with the element of Divine Spirit which permeates the world and assures its future.

Spiritual knowledge is thus a veritable communion, the beginning of a cosmic ritual that is right and fitting for the man of today, who is then able to grow because he begins to realize how he permeates his own physical and etheric organism with his astral body and Ego, and how, as he quickens the spirit in himself, he charms it also into the dead and dying matter that surrounds him. And a new experience is then his.

When he looks upon his own organism in its solid condition, he feels that it links him to the starry universe. In so far as the starry universe is a being at rest, maintaining, e.g. in the signs of the Zodiac a position at rest in relation to the Earth, man is connected in his physical organism with these constellations in space. But by allowing his powers of soul and spirit to pour into this ‘form picture’ in space, he himself changes the world.

Man is also traversed in like manner by streams of fluid. The etheric organism lives in the fluids and juices of the body. It is the etheric body that causes the blood to circulate and that brings into movement the other fluids and juices in man. Through this etheric organism he is brought into touch, if I may so express it, with the deeds of the stars, with the movements of the planets. Just as the resting pictures in the heaven of the fixed stars act upon, or stand in relation to, the solid structure of the human organism, so do the planetary movements of the system to which we belong stand in relation to the fluids in man.

But as the world presents itself to our immediate vision, it is a dead world. Man transforms it by means of his own spirit, when he shares his spirit with the world, by quickening his thoughts to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, thus fulfilling the spiritual Communion of mankind. It is important that man should become conscious of this. The more lively and alert this consciousness becomes, the more easily does man find the way to this spiritual Communion. I should like to give you today some words that may serve as a foundation for this consciousness, words which, when allowed to act rightly upon the soul—and this means, they must be made to live over and over again in the soul until the soul experiences to the full their moving, living meaning—will then bring something into existence in the human soul which transforms the dead environment with which man is connected into a living one, and quickens the past to life in order that from out of its death may arise the life of the future. This can only happen when man becomes aware of his connection with the Cosmos in the following way:

In Earth-activity—(I am imagining the earthly matter which I take into myself with that which fashions the solid structure of my organism.)

In Earth-activity draws near to me,
Given to me in substance-imaged form,
The Heavenly Being of the Stars.

For it is a fact that when we take something that serves us as food and look upon its form, then we find in it a copy of the constellations of the fixed stars. We take it into ourselves. With the substance of the Earth that is contained in Earth-activity, we take into us the being of the stars, the being of the heavens. But we must be conscious that we as human beings, by a deliberate, loving act of human will, transform that which has become matter, back again into spirit. In this manner we perform a real act of trans-substantiation. We become aware of our own part in the world and so the spiritual thought-life is quickened within us.

In Earth-activity draws near to me,
Given to me in substance-imaged form,
The Heavenly Being of the Stars.
In Willing I see them transformed with Love!

And when we think of that which we take into ourselves to permeate the fluid part of our organism, the circulation of the blood and juices, then that, in so far as it originates on Earth, is a copy not of the heavens or of the stars but of the deeds of the stars, that is to say, the movements of the planets. And I can become conscious how I spiritualize that, if I stand rightly in the world; and I can speak the following formula:

In Watery life stream into me,
Forming me through with power of substance-force,
The Heavenly Deeds of the Stars—

that is to say, the deeds of the planetary movements. And now:

In Feeling I see them transformed with Wisdom!

While I can see how in will the being of the stars changes lovingly into the spiritual content of the future, I can also see how in feeling a wise change takes place when I receive into me, in what permeates my fluid organism, a copy of heavenly deeds. Man can experience in this way in his will and in his feeling how he is placed into the world. Surrendering himself to the supreme direction of the universe that is all around him, he can carry out in living consciousness the act of trans-substantiation in the great temple of the Cosmos—standing within it as one who is celebrating a sacrifice in a purely spiritual way.

What would otherwise be mere abstract knowledge achieves a relationship of will and feeling to the world. The world becomes the Temple, the House of God. When man as knowing man summons up also powers of will and feeling, he becomes a sacrificing being. His fundamental relationship to the world rises from knowledge into cosmic ritual.

The first beginning of what must come to pass if Anthroposophy is to fulfil its mission in the world is that man's whole relationship to the world must be recognized to be one of cosmic ritual or cult.

I have wished to say this to you, as it were, as a beginning. Next Friday I will speak further about the nature of this ritual in its relation to a real knowledge of Nature. I appointed this lecture for this particular day with a special end in view. For today, when that being of Time which is given in the cycle of the year is brought before our souls, when this year, at any rate for outward perception and experience, comes to an end, we should realize the nature of our relationship to Time—how it rests with us out of the past to form and shape the future, to work actively for the future, in order to create in the spirit.

One of the poems recited this afternoon began with these words: “Every year finds new graves!” That is profoundly true. But equally true is it that every year finds new cradles. As this year touches the past, so does it also touch the future. And today it is man's first obligation to grasp this future, to reflect that the budding and sprouting life in the external world contains within it the seeds of death, and that we must seek for life with our own power of action. Every New Year is a symbol of this truth. If we see on the one hand the graves, let us behold on the other hand, self-renewing life waiting to receive the seed of the future into itself.

It is our great task this day to observe how in the world around us it is New Year's Eve—all is passing and disappearing and dying away; but how in the hearts of men who are conscious of their real manhood, of their divine humanity, there must be the mood of New Year, the mood of the beginning of a new era, of the uprising of new life. Let us not merely turn with a superficial festiveness from a symbolical New Year's Eve to a symbolical New Year's Day; but let us so turn our thoughts that they may indeed grow powerful and creative, as evolution requires them to be. Let us turn our thoughts away from the dying phenomena which confront us everywhere in modern civilization, like old graves, away from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day, to the day of the Cosmic New Year. But that day will never dawn till man himself decides to bring it to pass.

In Earth-activity draws near to me,
Given to me in substance-imaged form,
The Heavenly Being of the Stars—
In WILLING I see them transformed with love!

In Watery life stream into me,
Forming me through with power of substance-force,
The Heavenly Deeds of the Stars—
In FEELING I see them transformed with Wisdom.

Geistige Kommunion.

Es nahet mir im Erdenwirken,
In Stoffes Abbild mir gegeben,
Der Sterne Himmelswesen:
Ich seh' im Wollen sie sich liebend wandeln.

Es dringen in mich im Wasserleben,
In Stoffes Kraftgewalt mich bildend,
Der Sterne Himmelstaten:
Ich seh' im Fühlen sie sich weise wandeln.

Our subject for today will relate in a wider way to many of the spiritual truths which will be known to you as anthroposophists. You are no doubt familiar with the kind of description given, for example, in my book Theosophy, of the spiritual worlds through which man has to go between death and a new birth. Today I will tell of those spiritual worlds from a rather different point of view. For in Theosophy, Imaginations are mainly used to describe the world of soul and the world of Spirit through which man passes when he has gone through the gate of death to advance into a new life on Earth. In today's lecture I shall relate these things not so much from the standpoint of Imagination, but rather from the aspect which is revealed by Inspiration.

To gain some access to it for our understanding, we may take our start from the experiences which are ours during earthly life. At any given moment between birth and death, we are here in our physical body, face to face with the outer world. We should describe as ourselves, our human being, what is contained within our skin, within the confines of our physical body. No doubt we take this “human being” to include not only the anatomical and physiological data; we take it for granted that processes of soul and mind are also somehow going on in there. Yet, speaking of “ourselves,” we generally have in mind what is contained within our skin, and now from here we look out into the world. There all around us is the world we call our “outer world.” And as you know, we make mental images of this outer world. We have the outer world around us, and mirror-images thereof—or something like it—in our life of soul.

Now in the life between death and new birth the essence of the matter is that we are in this very world which, here on Earth, is external to us. All that is now your “outer world,” including what you see in full, clear focus and what you but distantly divine, is then your inner world,—to that you say “mine I.” Just as you now regard your lung as belonging to your I, so, between death and new birth, do you regard the Sun and Moon as your organs,—in other words, as being in you. The only outer world which you then have is you yourself, such as you are on Earth—your earthly organs.

Whereas on Earth we say; “In us—a lung; in us—a heart; outside of us a Sun, a Moon, a Zodiac,” during the life between death and new birth we shall say; “In us—a Zodiac, in us the Sun, in us the Moon; outside of us, lung and heart.” Between death and new birth all that we now carry inside our skin increasingly becomes our outer world, our Universe, our Cosmos. Our view of the relation between World and Man becomes completely opposite when we are living between death and a new birth.

When we live through death—when we go through the gate of death—we have a distinct picture, to begin with, of what went before, of how we were on Earth. True, it is only a picture, but it is like the outer world. This picture, then, shines forth in you to begin with. Thus in the first period after death you still have a consciousness of the man you were on Earth—consciousness in the form of earthly memories and earthly pictures. But these do not last long; ever increasingly you have this other outlook upon man: “‘I’ is the World; the Universe is Man.” This becomes ever more enhanced. Of course, you will not imagine that the human lung, for instance, looks the same as it does now; that would not be a sight to compensate for all the greatness and beauty of the Sun and Moon. Yet in reality, what lung and heart there become is vastly greater and more sublime even than Sun and Moon are, here and now, to human vision.

Only in this way do you gain an adequate idea of that which Maya is. People speak of Maya—the great illusion of this present earthly world—and yet they do not quite believe in what they say. Deep down, they cherish the belief that things are as they look to be to earthly eyes. But it is not so. The human lung as we now see it is a mere semblance; so is the heart. In truth, our lung is but a part—a mighty part—of our Cosmos; and even more so is our heart. The heart in its true essence is vastly greater and more majestic than any Sun.

Thus we begin to see an immense and sublime cosmic world arising—a world of which we speak in this way: Beneath us are the Heavens. In saying this, we mean: Beneath us is all that which is preparing the human head of the next incarnation. Above are, we then say, what was below. For it is all inverted. Above are all the forces which prepare man for his earthly walking—prepare him to stand firm on his two legs in the next earthly life.

All this can then be summed up in the saying: The nearer we approach a new earthly life, the more does this Universe which is Man contract for us. Majestic it is indeed, notably in the middle period between death and a new birth. But now we grow increasingly aware of how this Universe, with all its erstwhile majesty and greatness, is shrinking and contracting. The planets which we bear within us—planets in their weaving movement—become what then pulsates and surges through the human ether-body. The fixed stars of the Zodiac become what forms our life of nerves and senses. All this is shrinking, to become a body—spiritual to begin with, and then ethereal. And not until it has grown quite tiny, is it received into the mother's womb, there to be clothed with earthly matter.

Then comes the moment when we draw near to earthly life. Vanishing from us we now feel the Universe which until recently was ours. It shrinks and wanes, and this experience begets in us the longing to come down again to Earth,—once more to unite with a physical body on the Earth. For the great Universe we had before, withdraws, eludes our spiritual gaze; now therefore do we look to become Man again.

All this involves, however, quite another scale of time. Life between death and rebirth goes on for many centuries, and if a man is born, say, in the 20th century, his descent will have been prepared for gradually, even as early as the 15th century. All through this time moreover he himself has in a certain sense been working down into the earthly conditions and events.

A great-great ... grandfather of yours, way back in the 15th century, fell in love with a great-great ... grandmother. They felt the urge to come together, and in this urge you were already working in from spiritual worlds. And in the 17th century when a rather less distant great-great ... grandfather and great-great ... grandmother loved each other, you once again were in a sense the mediator. So did you summon all the generations to the end that at long last those should emerge who could become your mother and your father.

In that mysterious and intangible quality that pervades the relationships of earthly love, forces are indeed at work, proceeding from human souls who look for future incarnations. Therefore full consciousness and freedom are never there in the external conditions which bring men and women upon Earth together. These things still lie outside the range of human understanding,

What we call history nowadays is in the last resort far too external. Little is known to us in outer life today of the soul-history of human beings. Even as late as the 12th or 13th century A.D., souls of men felt very differently than they do now. Yet this is quite unknown. Not indeed as distinctly as I have just been telling, but in a more dream-like way, the men and women of the 10th, 11th, or 12th century were aware of these mysterious forces working down to Earth from spiritual worlds,—working down, in effect, from human souls. Little was said in Western countries of repeated earthly lives—reincarnation—but there were human beings everywhere, who knew. Only the Churches always eschewed, not to say anathematized all thoughts about repeated lives. Yet you should realize that even as late as the 12th and 13th centuries there were not a few in Europe who were aware that man undergoes repeated lives on Earth.

Then came the time when mankind in the Western world had to go through the stage of intellectuality. For man must by and by acquire spiritual freedom. When the dream-like clairvoyance of olden time prevailed, there was no spiritual freedom. Nor is there freedom—there is, at most, belief in freedom—in those affairs of human life, governed, shall we say, by earthly love, of which we have been speaking. For here the interests of other souls, on their way down to Earth, are always mingled.

Yet in the course of earthly evolution mankind must grow freer, yet ever freer. For only by man's growing freer, will the earth reach her goal in evolution. Now to this end, during a certain period intellectuality was necessary. The period in question is, of course, our own. Look back into earlier times and conditions upon Earth, when human beings still enjoyed dream-like clairvoyance. Living in this dreamlike clairvoyance there were always spiritual beings. Man at that time could never say, “I have my own thoughts in my head,”—that would have been quite untrue. In very olden times he rather had to say “I have the life of Angels in my head”; and then in later times: “I have the life of elemental beings in my head.” Then came the 15th century, and at long last the 19th and the 20th. Now man no longer has spiritual beings in his head, but only thoughts—mere thoughts. And by not having any higher spiritual life but only thoughts in his head, he can make for himself pictures of the outer world,

Could man be free, so long as Spirits were indwelling him? No, he could not, for they directed him; everything was due to them. Man could only become free when spiritual beings no longer directed him—when he had mere pictures, mere images, in his thoughts. Thought-pictures cannot compel you to do anything. Say you confront a looking-glass; the mirror-images of other men may be howsoever ill-disposed, they cannot hit you, for they are not real—they are mere pictures. And if I am resolving on some action, I may cause the mirror-image in my thought to picture the resolve, but the picture can of itself make no resolve.

Thus in the epoch when intellectuality puts only thoughts into our heads, freedom is born, inasmuch as thoughts have not the power to compel, In that we hold our moral impulses simply in the form of pure thoughts—as described in my “Philosophy of Freedom” [Philosophie der Freiheit, 1894. The later English editions have been entitled Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.]—we can achieve true freedom in the present age. The intellectual age, therefore, had to be.

Yet, strange as it may sound, in essence this age is already past. The age in which it was right for man to develop mere intellectuality, mere thinking-in-images, has run its course. With the 19th century it has become a thing of the past. And if men now continue to develop mere image-thoughts, their thoughts will fall a prey to Ahrimanic powers. The Ahrimanic powers will then gain access to man, and having reached his freedom, man will lose it—lose it to the Ahrimanic powers. Mankind is at the threshold of this danger now. Mankind today is faced with the alternative: either to comprehend the spiritual life—to comprehend the reality of such things as I have been telling you today—or to deny them. And if man now persists in denying what is spiritual, he will no longer be able to think freely. On the contrary, Ahriman—the Ahrimanic powers—will then be thinking in mankind, and all humanity will undergo a downhill evolution.

Therefore it is in the highest degree necessary for an ever-growing number of human beings in our time to appreciate the need for a return to spiritual life. A feeling for the need to get back to a spiritual form of life, is what the men of today should try to awaken in themselves. For if they fail to seek for this, mankind will fall a prey to Ahriman. Seen from a higher standpoint, the situation of mankind on Earth today is no less grave than that, and we should put this thought before all others, testing all other thoughts in the light of this one.

So much for the first part of the lecture. If Mr. Kaufmann will now be kind enough to translate, I will then go on.

Descriptions such as these may help illustrate the fact that the life we lead in the spiritual world between death and new birth is very different from that we undergo here between birth and death. Pictures, therefore, borrowed from the earthly life, however well conceived, will always be inadequate. Slowly and gradually we must be led to an understanding of the kind of reality that prevails in spiritual worlds. Let me give some examples.

Suppose a human being leaves his earthly body, and, with his life of soul and spirit, enters the world of soul and spirit. Suppose moreover that someone here on Earth, who has achieved Initiation-knowledge in the deeper sense, is able to observe human souls in their continued life after death. Much preparation is necessary to this end; also a certain Karma is essential, connecting the human being upon Earth with the one in yonder world. Now he must find some means of mutual understanding with the other soul. The spiritual experiences which I shall here be relating are not all easy to achieve. Generally speaking, it is far easier to describe the Universe in its spiritual aspect than to come near to a departed soul. People will with ease persuade themselves that it is not so difficult, yet in reality it is far more difficult to gain access to the dead than to achieve spiritual knowledge of other kinds.

I will now relate some characteristic features of the real intercourse with the dead. To begin with, we can only communicate with them by entering into such memories of the physical world as they are still able to evoke. For example, they still retain an echo of human speech, even of the particular language which was mainly theirs while on Earth. But their relation to language undergoes a change. For instance, in conversing with a soul who has died, one will soon observe that they have no understanding for substantives—for nouns. The living may address such words to the dead; the dead, if I may use this expression, simply do not hear them. Verbs on the other hand—words expressing action—these they will understand for a comparatively long time after death.

As a general rule you will only become able to converse with a soul who has gone through death if you know how to put your questions to him. You may have to proceed as follows. One day you concentrate on him as quietly as you are able. You try to live with him in something definite and real, for he has pictures in his soul rather than abstract notions. Therefore you concentrate on some real experience which he was glad to enter into during earthly life; thus you will gradually get near him.

You will not as a rule get an immediate answer to your question. You will very likely have to sleep on it—sleep on it, may be, several times, after some days you will get the answer. But you will never get an answer if you ask in nouns. You must take pains to clothe all nouns in verbal form. Such preparation is indispensable. He will most readily understand verbs, especially if you make them pictorial and vivid. The dead will never understand for instance the word “table,” but if you imagine vividly what is astir while a table is being made—a process of becoming, therefore, instead of a finished thing—then you will gradually become intelligible to him so that he apprehends your question and you get an answer. But the answers too will always be in verbal form, or may be not even that; they may only consist of what we on Earth should call interjections—exclamations.

Above all, the dead speak in the actual sounds of the alphabet—sounds and combinations of sound. The longer a soul has lived in the spiritual world after death, the more will he be speaking in a kind of language which you can only make your own by cultivating a true feeling of discrimination even in the realm of earthly speech, insisting no longer on the abstract meaning of the words but entering into their feeling-content. It is as I was saying in the educational lectures here. With the sound a [a, pronounced as in father.] we experience something like astonishment and wonder. Moreover we take the sense of wonder deep into our soul when we not only say a, but ach [German or Scottish pronunciation of ch as in Loch. Ach is the German equivalent of the exclamation Ah.]. Ach signifies: “A—I feel wonder. The sense of wonder goes right into me: ch.” And if I now put m before it and say mach [Mach: German for ‘make’ or ‘do.’], I follow what awakens wonder in me as though it were coming nearer to me step by step—mmm—till at long last I am entirely within it. It is with this kind of meaning—meaning that issues from the sounds themselves—that the answers of the dead will often come. The dead do not speak English, nor do they speak German, nor Russian; their speech is such that only heart and soul can understand them,—if heart and soul are in the ears that hear. I said just now; the human heart is greater and more majestic than the Sun. Seen from the earthly aspect it is true, the heart is somewhere inside us, and will be no pretty sight if we excise it anatomically. Yet the real heart is there throughout the human being, permeating all the organs; so too it is in the ear,

We must get used to the heart-language of the dead, if I may so describe it. We get used to it in learning gradually to jettison all nouns and noun-like forms and live in verbs. It is the words of action and becoming which the dead still understand for a comparatively long time after death. Then, at a later stage, they understand a language that is no longer language in the ordinary sense, and what we then receive from them has first to be re-translated into an earthly language.

Thus as man grows out of his body and ever more into the spiritual world, his life of soul becomes altogether different. Then, as the time approaches for him to come down again to Earth, once more he has to change his life of soul. For now the moment draws ever nearer, whereat he is confronted with a mighty task. He will himself now have to put together—first in an astral and then in an etheric form—the whole future human being who will one day be standing physically here on Earth. The tasks which we fulfil on Earth are external. For while our hands are at work, something external to us is always being made or altered. In the life between death and re-birth it is the inner being of our soul that is at work, putting the body together. Truth is, it only seems as if man came into existence by hereditary forces. In reality, only the outermost aspect of the physical body he then wears is due to heredity. He has to make for himself even the forms of his organs. I will give an example,—if one of you will kindly lend a glove.

On his way down towards a new earthly life, man, to begin with, still has the Sun and the Moon within him. But they begin to contract. It is as though you were to feel the lobes of your lungs shrinking within you. So do you feel your cosmic life and being, your Sun- and Moon-organ, shrinking. And thereupon, something detaches itself from the Sun and from the Moon. Hitherto, you had Sun and Moon within you, but now you have before you a kind of image of Sun and Moon. All glistening and luminous, you have before you two immense spheres—immense they are, to begin with. One of them is the Sun in spiritual form, the other is the Moon. The one is all alight and sparkling, the other glimmering in its own warmth, more fiery-warm, holding the light as though more egoistically to itself.

Now the two spheres which thus detach themselves from cosmically transmuted man—even from ‘Adam Kadmon’ who is a reality to this day—draw ever nearer to one another. We, on our way to Earth, say to ourselves: Sun and Moon are becoming one. Moreover it is this that guides us—far away back you must imagine it to be, even from our great-great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother and so on—guides us at last to the mother who will give us birth. Sun and Moon are our guides—Sun and Moon, drawing ever nearer to each other.

And thereupon we see another task before us. Far in the distance like a single point we see the human embryo that is to be. We see the single entity that has become of Sun and Moon, drawing near our mother. And now we see a task before us, which I can describe as follows. Take this (the glove) to represent what goes before us there—the Sun-and-Moon united. We are aware that when our cosmic consciousness will have vanished and we shall go through a phase of darkness (for so we do when we dive down into the embryo after conception), then we shall have to turn inside-out this entity that goes before us. And as we do so a tiny aperture will arise, through which, as Ego, we shall have to go.

This, in its image, will then be there in our human body upon Earth. It is none other, my dear Friends, than the pupil of the human eye. For the one entity becomes two again, as though two mirror-images were to arise. These are the two human eyes: for they were once united—they were the united Sun-and-Moon, and thereupon they turned inside-out.

Such is the task which then confronts you. You do it all unconsciously. You turn the whole thing round and inside-out, and go in through the tiny aperture that remains. And then it cleaves asunder; two physical images become of it in the growing embryo. For the physical embryonal eyes are but images, representing what has thus become of Sun and Moon.

In this way we elaborate the several parts of the human body. Experiencing the entire Universe, we gather it and give to every item its destined form. What is thus formed in the Spirit, only then gets clothed and permeated with plastic material. It clothes itself in matter; as to the forces however, which have formed it, we ourselves had to develop them from the entire Universe,

For example, there is a time between death and new birth when we go through the Sun while the Sun is in the sign of Leo. (It need not be at birth; it can be farther back in time). We do not fashion then the eye of Sun and Moon which I described just now—we do that at a different time,—but we unite with the interior of the Sun. What do you imagine the interior of the Sun to be? If you could enter there, you would find it altogether different from what our physicists naively and unwittingly suppose. The interior of the Sun is no mere ball of gas; it is in fact something less than space—a realm where space itself has been taken away. If you begin by imagining an extended space in which some pressure is prevailing, you must conceive the interior of the Sun rather as a realm of suction. It is a negative space—space that is emptier than empty. Few people have an adequate idea of what this means. Now when you go through there, again you have a definite spiritual experience which you are able to elaborate and work upon, and as you do so it becomes the form of the human heart. Not only is the form of the eye made of Sun and Moon; the heart form too is fashioned from the Sun. But this is only possible when the Sun contains forces which issue from it as from the constellation of Leo.

So does man build his entire body both from the movements of the stars and from the constellations of the stars in the great Universe. The human body is indeed an image of the world of stars. Much of the work we have to do between death and new birth consists in the building of our own body from the Universe. Man as he stands on Earth is indeed a shrunken Universe. Science is so naive as to suppose that the human form is produced from the physical germ-cell alone. Suppose a man is looking at a magnet-needle, one end of which always points to the North and the other to the South. Perhaps another man to whom this is explained does not believe it, but begins looking for the cause inside the magnet-needle only, failing to see that the whole Earth is acting as a magnet. It is no less naive when someone thinks that man originates from the physical human germ-cell, whereas in fact he springs from the entire Universe. Moreover his life of soul and spirit between death and re-birth consists in working with the spiritual Beings—working at the super-sensible form of man, which is created first in the ethereal and astral realm and only then shrinks and contracts till it is able to be clothed in physical material. Man in reality is but the scene of action of what the Universe, and he himself with his transmuted powers, do thus achieve when the physical body in its true nature is being formed.

Such then is the development man undergoes. It begins with language when he no longer uses nouns but finds his way into another and more verbal form of speech. Thence he goes on to an inner beholding of the world of stars, until at last he lives right in the starry world Then he begins to detach from the world of stars what he himself is to become in his next incarnation. Such is man's pathway: out of the physical, via the transmutation of language into the spiritual, and then on the returning journey transmuting the Universe once again into Man. Only if we can understand how the soul-and-Spirit, having thus lost itself in language, becomes one with the world of stars and then recovers itself from the world of stars,—only then do we apprehend the complete cycle of human life between death and a new birth.

These things, dear Friends, were still clear to many people at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on Earth. At that time the idea did not prevail that Christ Jesus was, first and foremost, the Being whom they saw developing on Earth. They thought of Him as One who until then had belonged to the self-same world to which man himself belongs during the life between death and new birth. Therefore they pondered on the question: How did He descend from thence and enter into the life of Earth? It was the Roman world which then exterminated Initiation-Science. Only the dogmas should remain—such was their intention. There was in Italy in the 4th century of our era an actual organization, a specific body of people who left no stone unturned in seeing to it that the old methods of Initiation should not be transmuted into new ones. There should be left to men on Earth only the knowledge of the outer physical world, while of the super-sensible there should be no more than dogmas—dogmas which men would by and by receive as mere concepts into their intellectual life, till at long last they would no longer even have the power to conceive and understand, but only to believe them. So was the knowledge, which had in fact existed at one time, rent asunder into a knowledge of the earthly world alone, and on the other hand a mere faith, a mere belief in another world, till even this is so attenuated that for one group of believers it is a set of dogmas they do not understand, while for another it is no more than a point d'appui; there must be something to start from, to have any faith at all. For in effect, what is the substance of a modern man's belief, when he no longer holds to the ancient dogmas about the Trinity? He believes in something vaguely spiritual; the content of his belief is altogether nebulous.

We now need to return to a genuine perception of the Spiritual, into which we can enter livingly and fully. We need once more a Science of Initiation, able to relate such things as you have heard today of the human eye,—that we should look at it with wonder, for it is verily a shrunken Universe, This is no mere figure of speech; it is real and true, and as I have been explaining. For in the life between death and new birth this eye of ours was single, and from the unity it was—merging the images of Sun and Moon—it was then turned inside-out.

Truth is, we have two eyes because if it were our nature to see with a single eye like the Cyclops we could not attain to Egohood in an outward and visible world; we should attain it only in the inner world of feeling. Helen Keller for example has quite a different world of feeling and ideation than other people; she is only able to make herself understood because language has been taught her. We could never reach the idea of ‘I’ without being able to lay our right hand over our left, or, more generally speaking, to bring any two symmetrical members into coincidence. Thus in a subtle way we reach the idea of ‘I’ inasmuch as we cross the axes of vision of our two eyes when focusing upon the outer world. Just as we cross our hands, so do we cross the two axes of vision of our eyes: whenever we look at anything we do so.

Materially two, our eyes are one in spirit. This single spiritual eye is located behind the bridge of the nose. It is then reproduced in a twofold image—in the two outer eyes you see. By being left-and-right-hand man, man is enabled to feel and be aware of himself. If he were only right or only left—if he were not symmetrically formed—all his thinking and ideation would merge into the world; he would not become self-possessed in his own ‘I’.

In that we weld the twin images of Sun and Moon into one, we get ready for our coming incarnation. It is as though we were saying to ourselves: You must not disintegrate into the wide world. It is no use to become a Sun-man and have the Lunar man there beside you. You must be one; but you must also be able to feel your own oneness, you must be aware of it. So then you form the single Sun-Moon eye of man, which in its metamorphosis becomes the eye as we now bear it. For our two eyes are the twin images of the single archetypal Sun-Moon eye of man.

These are the things I wished to say to you today, my dear friends, about the kind of experience we have when we are in the spiritual world,—so very different from our experiences in the physical. They are related to one another none the less, but the relationship is such that we are turned completely inside out. Suppose that you could take the human being as you see him here and turn him inside out so that the inside of him—the heart for instance—would become outer surface. Physical man, you will readily believe, could not stay alive under these conditions. But if one could do this, taking hold of him in the inmost heart and turning him inside out like a glove, then man would not remain man as we see him here; he would enlarge into a Universe. For if we have the faculty to concentrate in a single point within the heart and thence to turn ourselves inside out in spirit, we simply do become the Universe which in the normal course we experience between death and a new birth. Such is the secret of the inner man. It is only in the physical world that he cannot be turned inside out. The heart of man however is in effect a Universe turned inside out, and that is how the physical and earthly world is really joined to the spiritual. We must get used to the ‘turning inside out.’ If we do not, we gain no real idea of how the physical world which surrounds us here is related to the spiritual world. These are the things which I was wanting to impart today.

Devachan is the Sanscrit term for the long period of time lying between the death and rebirth of man. After death, in the astral world, the soul first learns to cast off the instincts that are connected with the body. After this, the soul passes into Devachan for the long period that lies between two incarnations.

The devachanic world is a state or condition of existence. It surrounds us even in earthly life, but we do not perceive it. In order, by way of analogy, to understand devachanic existence and its functions in earthly and cosmic life, it will be best to take our start from a consideration of the state of sleep.

For the vast majority of human beings, sleep is a condition full of enigmas. During sleep, man's etheric body remains with his physical body and continues its vegetative, restorative functions, but the astral body and individual Ego leave the sleeping body and live an independent existence.

The physical body is used up, consumed, as it were, by our conscious life. From morning till night man spends his forces; the astral body transmits sensations to the physical body which gradually exhaust it. At night, the astral body functions in quite a different way. It no longer transmits sensations which come from outside; it works upon them and brings order and harmony into what the waking life, with its chaotic perceptions, has thrown into disorder. By day, the function of the astral body is to receive and transmit; by night, during sleep, its function is to bring order, to build up and refresh the spent forces.

In man's present stage of evolution, it is not possible for the astral body to do this work of restoration by night and at the same time to observe what is happening in the surrounding astral world. How, then, can man arrive at the point of being able to relieve his astral body of its work, in order to set it free for conscious existence in the astral world?

The procedure adopted by the adept in order to release his astral body is, on the one hand, to train and develop such feelings and thoughts as possess, in themselves, a certain rhythm which can then be communicated to the physical body and, on the other, to avoid those which give rise to physical disorder. Joy or suffering that runs to extremes is avoided. The adept teaches the necessity for equanimity of soul.

Nature is governed by one sovereign law which is that rhythm must enter into all manifestation. When the twelve-petalled lotus-flower which constitutes man's organ of astral-spiritual perception has developed, he can begin to work upon his body and imbue it with a new rhythm whereby its fatigue is healed. Thanks to this rhythm and the restoration of harmony it is no longer necessary for the astral body to perform the restorative work on the sleeping physical body which alone prevents it from falling into ruin.

The whole of waking life is a process destructive of the physical body. Illnesses are caused by excessive activity of the astral body. Eating to excess affords a stimulus to the astral body which re-acts in a disturbing way on the physical body. That is why fasting is laid down in certain religions. The effect of fasting is that the astral body, having greater quiet and less to do, partially detaches itself from the physical body. Its vibrations are modulated and communicate a regular rhythm to the etheric body. Rhythm is thus set going in the etheric body by means of fasting. Harmony is brought into life (etheric body) and form (physical body). In other words, harmony reigns between the universe and man.

This gives us some idea of the function performed by the astral body during sleep. Where is the Self, the Ego of man? In the world of Devachan, but he has no consciousness of it. We must distinguish between sleep that is filled with dreams and the state of deep sleep. Sleep that is filled with dreams is an expression of astral consciousness. Deep, dreamless sleep—the sleep that follows the first dreams—corresponds to the devachanic state. Nothing of it is remembered because it is a condition of unconsciousness for the physical being of ordinary man. Only after the attainment of higher initiation is man aware of his experiences in deep sleep. In the Initiate there is continuity of consciousness through waking life, dream life and dreamless sleep.

Let us now consider the condition of man in Devachan, after death. At the end of a certain time, the etheric body disperses into the forces of the living ether.

What is the next task of the astral body and Ego? A new etheric body has to be built for the incarnation that is to follow. Devachanic existence is devoted, in part, to this work. The substance of the etheric body, like that of the physical body, is not conserved. The substance of which the physical body is composed, is constantly changing—to the point of being wholly renewed in the course of seven years. Similarly, etheric substance is renewed, although its principles of form and inner structure remain the same under the influence of the higher Self. At death, this substance is given completely over to the ether-world and nothing remains from one incarnation to another, any more than the substance of the physical body remains. In each successive incarnation, therefore, the etheric body of man is entirely renewed. That is why there is such a change in the physiognomy and bodily form of man from one incarnation to another. The physiognomy and bodily form do not depend upon the will of the individual but upon his karma, his desires, passions and his involuntary actions.

It is quite different in the case of an initiated disciple. He develops his etheric body in earthly existence in such a way that it is conserved and is fit to pass into Devachan after death. Here on Earth he is able to awaken, within his etheric forces, a ‘Life-Spirit’ which constitutes one of the imperishable principles of his being. The Sanscrit term for the etheric body which has developed into Life-Spirit is Budhi. When this principle of Life-Spirit has developed in the disciple, it is no longer necessary for him entirely to re-mould his etheric body between two incarnations. His period of devachanic existence is then much shorter and for this reason the same character, temperament and outstanding traits are carried forward from one incarnation to another. When the master in occultism has reached the point of conscious control not only of his etheric but of his physical body, another, higher spiritual principle comes into being—Spirit-Man (in Sanscrit, Atma). At this stage the Initiate preserves the characteristics of his physical body every time he incarnates on Earth. With unbroken consciousness, he passes from earthly to heavenly life, from one incarnation to another. Here we have the origin of the legend referring to Initiates who lived for a thousand or two thousand years. For them there is neither Kamaloca or Devachan but unbroken consciousness through deaths and births.

The following objection to the idea of re-incarnation is sometimes made: When a man has accomplished his task in the physical world, he knows the Earth. Why, then, should he return? This objection would be justifiable if man were to return under similar conditions. But as a general rule, he returns to find a new Earth, a new humanity, even a new Nature. For all have evolved and he can enter a new apprenticeship, fulfil a new mission.

These changing conditions of the Earth which determine the times of rebirth, are themselves determined by the passage of the Sun through the Zodiac. Eight centuries before Jesus the Christ, the vernal equinox fell with the Sun in the sign of the Ram. Reference is made to this in the legend of the Golden Fleece and in the name of the Lamb of God—the Christ. 2,160 years before that, the vernal equinox fell with the Sun in the sign of the Bull, a fact expressed in the cults of the Egyptian Apis or the Mithras Bull in Persia. 2,160 years before that again, the vernal equinox fell with the Sun in the sign of the Twins and we find this expressed in the cosmogony of the very ancient Persians, in the two opposing figures of Ormuzd and Ahriman. When the civilisation of Atlantis was destroyed and the age of the Vedas was beginning, the Sun at the vernal equinox was in the sign of Cancer, (inscribed as the sign of cancer) indicating the end of one period and the beginning of another.

There has always been some consciousness among the peoples of the Earth of their relation to the heavenly constellations. The great periods of human civilisation are subject to the heavenly cycles and the movement of the Earth in its relation to Sun and stars. This fact explains the different characteristics of the various epochs and gives new meaning to the incarnations occurring in them. 2,160 years is approximately the time needed for the accomplishment of a male and a female incarnation—that is to say, for the two aspects under which the human being gathers all the experiences of one epoch.

A new flora and a new fauna on Earth are brought forth on Earth by the Devas; they are an expression of the forms of Devachan.

Darwin tries to explain the process of earthly evolution by the struggle for existence—but that is no explanation. The occultist knows that the flora and fauna of Earth are shaped by forces issuing from Devachan. The more man has advanced in his evolution, the more he can participate in this process. His influence upon the moulding of Nature is measured by the extent to which his consciousness has developed.

The Initiate can work in the sphere where the germs of new plants come into being, for Devachan is the region where vegetation receives its form. In Kamaloca, man works at building up the animal kingdom. Kamaloca belongs to the Moon-sphere; Devachan to the Sun-sphere.

Thus man is bound up with all the kingdoms of Nature. Plato speaks of the symbol of the Cross, saying that the soul of the world is bound to the body of the world as it were upon a Cross. What is the meaning of this symbol? It is an image of the soul passing through the kingdoms of Nature. In contrast to the human being, the plant has its root beneath and its organs of generation above, turned towards the Sun. The animal is at the intermediary stage, its organism lying, generally speaking, in the horizontal direction. Man and the plants stand vertically upright and with the animal form a Cross—the Cross of the world.

In future ages there will be conscious participation on the part of man in the higher worlds after death in the work of building up the lower kingdoms of Nature. The consciousness of man will govern the circumstances whereby a new civilisation comes into being, concurrently with the appearance of a new flora. The divine mission of the Spirit is to forge the future. A time will come when there will be no question of ‘miracle’ or chance. Flora and fauna will be a conscious expression of the transfigured soul of man. Creative works on Earth are wrought by the Devas and by man. If we build a cathedral, we are working on the mineral kingdom. The mountains, the banks of the holy Nile are the work of the Devas the temples on the banks of the Nile are the work of man. And the aim is one and the same—the transfiguration of the Earth.

In future ages man will learn to mould all the kingdoms of Nature with the same consciousness with which today he can give shape to mineral substances. He will give form to living beings and take upon himself the labours of the Gods. Thus will he transform the Earth into Devachan.