The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have seen that we approach certain riddles of the universe I and of mankind when we begin to observe man himself, seeing in his two-fold form something of the solution of the world-riddle. In meditating over all these things one can gain great help by thinking more deeply of the formula: The world as totality is a riddle, and man himself, again as totality, is its solution. We must not expect, however, to solve the world-riddle in a moment; human life itself in its completeness, what we experience between birth and death and again between death and a new birth—that is actually the solution of the world-riddle. So this is a very serviceable formula: The world is a riddle and Man is its solution.

We have seen that when we regard man's external physical form, we can distinguish in it the head-part and the remaining part. We can consider the head-part in its spherical form as an image of the whole cosmos, not only as a comparison but as an actuality. We can truly say that the whole starry heaven is at work to bring about the form, the shaping, the inner forces of the human head. Of course, it is also true—speaking lightly—that everyone has his own head. Man certainly has that. For as you know, the configuration of the starry heaven always differs, according to the special spot on earth and the special time at which one observes the stars. So that by taking the starry heavens, not in general, but in their configuration at the place and at the time in which the person is born, this must result in each person's having his special head according to the position of the stars in the heavens. Let us keep in mind that it is not the star-heaven in general that builds up our head, but its special configuration. And from the various studies we have pursued we can realize that a considerable part of man's task between death and rebirth consists in his becoming familiar with the mysteries, the spiritual secrets of the stars. One can even say in a certain sense, that the head is not merely given us quite passively but that we make it ourselves. Between death and a new birth we come to know all the laws that prevail in wide cosmic spaces. In fact, when we think of it spiritually, the wide universe is our home between death and a new birth. And just as here on the earth we learn to know the laws by which houses and other things are constructed, so in the time between death and rebirth we become familiar with the laws of the cosmos. And we ourselves take part in working in the cosmos. And from the cosmos, together with the purely spiritual beings who dwell there, we work chiefly upon the head. So that when the human head appears here in the physical world, it is only apparently determined by mere heredity from one's ancestors. I have said repeatedly that everyone acknowledges that the magnetic needle does not turn by itself to the North and the other pole to the South, but that cosmic forces are at work, namely, that the earth is working there. In the case of the magnet, people own that the universe plays a part, it is only when one comes to the origin of a living being that they are not yet willing to see that the whole universe participates in it. In the case of man, it is with the formation of his head that the whole universe is concerned. The head has not merely come about through heredity, from father, mother, grandparents, etc. but forces from the whole universe are at work within it. It is principally from man's limbs and members that the configuration of cosmic forces acts upon what is in his head. On the other hand, we actually receive the rest of our organism, in so far as it is physical, through a kind of hereditary transmission from the generations of ancestors.

Modern natural science, my dear friends, is moreover very close to the discovery of this from its own standpoint. In fact the natural science of today only struggles against those parts of the truth that are suggestive of Spiritual Science. Natural science is very near at many points to a meeting with spiritual science. I said in other lectures and have indicated the same thing here, that natural science is very near to a discovery of something that has met with opposition even in spiritual science. People who read my Theosophy often find themselves repelled by the chapter where I speak of the human aura and how man's forces of soul and spirit are expressed for clairvoyance in a colour aura that sparkles round him. Now Professor Moritz Benedict, whom I have often mentioned in other connections, has recently made experiments in Vienna with persons who have a gift for using the divining-rod. Professor Benedict did not make clairvoyant experiments; as he is very unwilling to acknowledge clairvoyance, but he made experiments in a dark chamber with those gifted for using the divining-rod, which has played such a great role in this war. You probably know that it has played a very special role in this war. Since water was needed for the soldiers, persons able to use the divining-rod were posted to various army-groups in order to discover springs of water for the men. This went on very largely in the southern areas of the fighting. Driven by necessity, of course, one had to do such things. Now in the camera obscura and with the method of natural science Professor Benedict has examined people who can find water or metals under the earth by means of the divining-rod. In the case of a woman who was quite small, he discovered that she showed under treatment in the camera obscura, an immense aura, so that she looked like a giant. He could even describe the right side as bluish, the left side as yellowish-red. This can all be read today as scientific findings, since Professor Benedict has published the whole matter in his book on the divining-rod. What has been observed by Professor Benedict through these methods is the aura, as I have mentioned on earlier occasions. It is not the aura of which we speak; we mean much more spiritual elements in man than this lowest, almost physical aura which Professor Benedict is able to find by natural means in the camera obscura. Still there is a connection. Precisely that part of my book Theosophy which has met with the most opposition and abuse, has thus shown its point of contact with ordinary science. Things will move quickly, and it will be the same with regard to what I have just touched upon. At no distant time, and purely from researches of natural science it will be possible to establish that what a man bears within him as inherited from ancestors is not the form of the head nor its inner forces, and that the head in fact is produced by forces of the cosmos. We should never be nationalistic, my dear friends, if we were to follow our head alone. The head is not in the least adapted to be nationalistic, for it is derived from the heavens, and the heavens are not nationalistic. All the dividing of men into groups that finds a place in our thoughts does not come from the head; it comes from that element through which we are connected with the hereditary stream of humanity. This of course plays into the head when man is living here between birth and death, for the rest of the organism continuously exchanges its nerve-forces and blood-forces with the head.

When we speak of heredity, however, and that the part of man which excludes the head received its forces from ancestors, we must only refer to the physical, for as regards the spiritual part of the remaining organism, it is another matter. And therefore it is very important for us now to consider a fact which can only be brought to light through spiritual science. Thus natural science will discover, as it has discovered the aura, the fact that the head is only influenced through heredity by being added to the rest of the organism. That man is only related to his ancestors in respect of the rest of the organism—this will be discovered even by natural science. But we touch upon another field which natural science cannot of course enter forthwith. Inasmuch as we are born we bear in our head the forces of the universe; they shape our head. A little, to be sure, can be outwardly substantiated. One who observes children in their development will perhaps know that in the very early days it can often be asked—whom does the child really resemble? And the likeness often only comes out strongly in later childhood—some at least of you will have already noticed that. It rests on the fact that the head is mainly neutral as regards earthly conditions; the rest of the organism must first affect the head (it can do so of course even in the embryonic stage) and then the features and so on can show a likeness to the ancestors. If one has a feeling for such things, one can see for oneself externally the truth that lies in this domain.

But the matter goes deeper. Between the spiritual universe—for the universe is filled with spirit and spirit-beings—and the earth on which we dwell there is an intermediary which is never at rest. A fine substance, which cannot be produced in the chemical laboratory since it does not belong to the chemical elements, streams in continuously on to the earth out of the wide universe. If one wants to draw it schematically, one can say: if the earth is here in universal space (see diagram), from all sides universal matter continuously streams in upon the earth, a fine universal substance (arrows inwards), and this fine substance penetrates a little below the earth's surface. So that this continually takes place—substances from the whole of cosmic space sink down towards the earth. It is not physical substance, not a chemical element, but actually spiritual, auric substance that sinks down below the surface of the earth. When we come down to earth from the spiritual world, to find a place in a human body, we use the forces that lie in this substance.

Now it is significant that this substance which streams into the earth and again streams out, is made use of by man when he

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dies. He finds in the out-streaming substance, forces which take him into the spiritual world. This substance, which I have shown coming inwards towards the earth, enters the surface to a certain depth and then streams away again (arrows pointing outwards). So that one can continually perceive a sort of inbreathing of ether or auric substance into the earth, and again an out-breathing.

This is an observation which is not so very easy to make. But if it has once been made, if one has once realized that the earth actually inhales and exhales spiritual substance continuously, then one knows how to apply it to all circumstances and, above all, to human life in the way I have just described. Thus we come into our bodily nature with what I have indicated as inwardly directed arrows, and with those pointing outwards, we pass out again in death.

In this case I will relate how I came upon this fact years ago. The forces that play here, the in-streaming and out-streaming forces, are not solely concerned with human life, but with every possible kind of earthly condition. Now a special problem for me was how matters stood with the cockchafers—yes, cockchafers. Cockchafers are in fact extraordinarily interesting because, as you probably know, when there are a great many cockchafers in a year then in three to five years there are very many grubs—(their larvae). These grubs affect the potato crop very seriously, one gets very bad crops if there are many grubs. And a man who has anything to do with potato culture knows that there will be a bad crop three to five years after a year in which there are great numbers of cockchafers. Now I had looked on that as an interesting fact, and then I discovered that the life of the cockchafer is connected with the in-streaming substance and the life of the grubs with the out-streaming substance. I will only stress this as a matter by which you can see how one comes upon such things from quite a different side. One comes to such things with the most certainty when one does not observe them on the direct object but on a relatively indifferent object, to which one can most easily maintain a neutral attitude. You see, however, from this that the substances of which I have spoken, penetrate under the earth and remain there for a time. The substance that in a certain year streams in, only streams out again after several years. This is also connected with the fact that the out-streaming substance is on the whole heavier than the instreaming substance. This latter is more active, streams in quicker, the out-streaming substance is heavier and streams out more slowly.

When one makes intensive observation of human life one can see how man makes use of the forces in the instreaming substance when he comes out of the universe to birth. Then in later years he loses connection with them. You will realize from what has been said that it is the head which is chiefly concerned with this instreaming substance. But the human head is a hard globe. It is indeed a hard globe, and among all the organs it is the most ossified. And thus, relatively early—not in childhood, but relatively early—it loses connection with the instreaming forces. Hence its formation and development are finished early. Man continues in his childhood his union with these instreaming forces and then they cease to influence him, at least this is so in our time-cycle. It was not always so on earth—I will speak of this presently—but it is so in our time. Now while man lives here on earth, the rest of his organism, apart from the head, takes possession of the out-streaming substances and their forces. This remaining organism imbues itself with them, and it is these forces which can rejuvenate the organism from without, as I indicated yesterday. They are the rejuvenating forces which act upon the etheric body, and which, while we are growing old physically, make it more and more chubby-faced. Thus the human being, as etheric man becomes chubby. In this process undergone by the etheric body that is connected with the remaining organism there work the forces streaming out of the earth. And it is these too which we use when we go through the portal of death to return to the cosmos, to the spiritual world.

The earth, as you see, has a share in our life, is inwardly interested in it. And something is connected with what I have now said that can very easily be brought into a formula, into an essentially important formula. For a long time we live as souls between death and rebirth before we enter physical life through birth, and again we live as souls when we have passed through the gate of death, even up to our next incarnation. The dead live a spiritual life, and this life is connected with the stars as here on earth we are connected with physical matter. Since our head has been formed and shaped by the forces which we have lived through between death and a new birth, since we build up our head, as it were, out of cosmic forces, our own real being of soul and spirit fairly early finds its spiritual grave in our head. We possess the head-forces that we have here on earth because our head is actually the grave of our soul-life as we led it before birth, or before conception. Our head is the grave of our spiritual existence. But inasmuch as we have come down to the earth, the rest of our organism is adapted to make us resurrect, for it takes up the forces which stream from the earth into universal space, in order to form its spiritual element. And whilst our physical organism falls away from us, our spiritual part with our forces that stream out from the earth passes through cosmic space into spirit existence.

This is the wonderful polarity that prevails in the universe in regard to man. We become physical out of the spirit, burying our spirit nature in the head, in the head is the end of our spiritual existence before birth. Here upon earth it is reversed. We leave the physical behind; the physical goes to pieces gradually during our life and the spiritual arises. We can say therefore: Birth denotes the resurrection of the physical, the spiritual being changed into the physical; death denotes the birth of the spiritual, the physical being given over to the earth, just as the spiritual is given over to the universe through our birth. We give our spiritual element to the universe by reason of our being born, and by reason of our dying we give over to the universe our physical element. By giving our spiritual part to the universe through our birth, we are physical human beings. By giving our physical part to the earth through death we are spiritual human beings in the period between death and a new birth. That is the polarity.¹ And our life here consists in developing our spirit organism. But we can only develop it in the right way for our present earthly cycle when what I said yesterday is taken into consideration. That is to say, when one reaches the point where both members of human nature enter into a real correspondence, when head-life and heart-life enter into correspondence with one another, and the shorter head-life really lives itself into the whole man. Thus the whole man can then be rejuvenated during the lifetime to be lived through, when in fact the head has long since lost its mobility, its power of inner development.

It will be the special task of a future educational science to make anthroposophical spiritual science so fruitful that the human being comes to feel how he is built up out of the cosmos, how he actually ‘shells himself’ from the cosmos and how he gives back to the cosmos what he has won for himself upon earth. This education must be given through all sorts of narratives, all sorts of things which are adapted moreover to youth—but so adapted that one can keep one's interest in them through every age of life. I only beg of you, my dear friends—I will not say to think-through something, for that is not of much use—to feel-through, thoroughly to feel-through something. Here too, you see, is a point where modern natural science is already concerning itself with what can be investigated through spiritual science. I have mentioned how intelligent geologists have expressed their view that the earth is already in a dying-out condition. The earth has overstepped the point where as earth-being she was actually in the middle of her life. In the excellent book by Eduard Suess, The Countenance of the Earth, you can read how the purely materialistic geologist Suess states that when one walks over fields today and looks at the clods of earth, one has to do with something dying out that once was different. It is dying out. The earth is dying. We know this from Spiritual-Science, since we know that the Earth will be transformed into another planetary existence which we call the Jupiter existence. Thus the earth as such is dying away. But man, that is the human-race as sum of spiritual beings, does not die with the earth; humanity lives beyond the earth, as it lived before the earth was Earth, in the way I have described in my Occult Science. And so one can permeate oneself—not in thought as I said, but in feeling and experience—with the conception: ‘I stand here on this earthly soil, but this ground on which I stand, in which I shall find my grave, has but a transitory appearance in the cosmos.’ How then does a next earth, a new planet, arise out of this earth, on which the humanity of the future can dwell? Through what does it arise? It arises through the fact that we ourselves carry piece by piece what is to form this new planetary existence. We human beings—the animal kingdom is also to some extent involved—inasmuch as we always carry within us something belonging to the next life, are already here during our physical life preparing the next planet that will follow the earth's existence. In the forces that go back again lies what is to be the future of the earth. We do not live merely in the present, we live in the future of the earth, but we have to keep returning into incarnation since we have many things still to fulfil on earth as long as earth exists. But we are involved in the future life of the earth. We have said that the earth breathes spirit-substance in and out. In the in-breathed substance we carry the past and the laws of the past, the forces of the past. In what is breathed out, given back again by the earth we bear in us what belongs to the future. In the human race itself rests the future of the earth's existence.

Think of all this made really fruitful with feeling and warmth, instead of all the stupid things that are imparted to the young nowadays: think of this made alive in hundreds and hundreds of vivid narrations and parables and brought to youth! Then think what a feeling towards the universe would be aroused—what there is to do! What there is to be done if our civilization is to go forwards—what there is to do concretely! This is very important to consider. And it can be considered all the more since it is connected with what I have called the rejuvenation of man. That present-day humanity has come to such calamities is connected with the fact that it has lost the secret of changing head-life into heart-life. We have hardly any real heart-life. What people generally speak of is the life of instincts and desires, merely that, not the spiritual element of which we have spoken. Today men let what streams out into the universe just peacefully stream out, and they do not bother themselves about it. They pay no attention to it.

Some individuals instinctively take it into account. I have recently given an example of how individuals take it into account, in which case however they differ very much from others. I have related the difference between Zeller and Michelet, the two Berlin Professors. I have said that I spoke with Eduard von Hartmann about the two men, just when Zeller had obtained his pension, since at seventy-two he no longer felt able to hold his lectures at the University. But Michelet was ninety-three years old. And Hartmann related how Michelet had just been there and had said to him ‘I don't understand Zeller, who is only seventy-two years old saying he cannot go on lecturing. I am ready to lecture for another ten years!’ And with that he skipped about the room and rejoiced over what he would lecture upon next year and could not imagine how that lad Zeller, the seventy-two-year-old Zeller, put in a claim to be pensioned off—no more to address the students!

This keeping young is connected with a proper mutual action taking place between head and heart. This can of course happen in the case of single individuals, but on the whole it can only occur rightly even in single individuals, when it passes over into our civilization, when our whole cultural life becomes imbued with the principle that it should not have mere head-life but heart-life as well. But you see, to acquire heart-life needs more patience. In spite of the fact that it is more fruitful, more youth-giving to life, yet for heart-life more patience is required than for head-life. Head-life ... well, you see, one sits down and crams. When we are young we prefer to stick to our cramming in spite of all the talk of the pedagogues. For, my dear friends, certain customs have remained from earlier times, when things were still known atavistically, but people no longer attach a right meaning to such customs. I will remind you of one.

Everything that has been preserved from relatively not very early times, before materialism had become general, has a deeper meaning. In recent decades the habit has already been lost, but when I was young—it is some time since—there was an arrangement in the Grammar School—in the Lower School in the second Class—to have Ancient History, and then in the fifth Class one had Ancient History again. Those who planned such regulations at that time no longer knew why it was so, and the teachers who dealt with these matters did not act as if they were aware of the reason. For anyone who had been aware of it, would have said to himself. ‘When I give history to a boy in the second Class, he crams it, but what he takes in needs a few years for it to become at home in his organism. Therefore it is a good thing to give the same again in the fifth Class, for only then does the knowledge that entered this poor head three or four years ago, bear its good fruits.’ The whole structure of the old grammar school was really built up on these things. The monastic schools of the Middle Ages had still many traditions derived from ancient wisdom, a wisdom that is not ours, but one that—preserved atavistically from olden times—arranged such things logically.

In fact it needs the principle of patience if life of the head is to pass over into life of the heart. For the head-life quickly unites with us, the heart-life goes more slowly, it is less active—so that we must wait. And today people want to understand everything all at once. Just imagine if a modern man had the idea of learning something and then had to wait a few years in order fully to understand it. Such a principle is scarcely to be associated with the frame of mind of modern men. The feelings of modern men lie along very different lines.

One can find examples of this and it is well to point them out. Two plays have lately been produced in Zurich by people connected with The Anthroposophical Society, in fact it has been widely pointed out that the two people are connected with the building in Dornach, with Spiritual Science and so on. In this case, to be quite just, it must be owned that these two Zurich performances by Pulver and Reinhart have really been very well received in Switzerland. But one can find remarkable things in the correspondence that has gone out from Switzerland. The foreign correspondents have shown themselves, well, less interested, shall we say, than in this case the Swiss audience themselves. Thus I have had a newspaper given me in which these two Swiss first performances by Pulver and Reinhart were discussed, where the correspondent cannot forego pointing out that the two authors are connected with our Movement and have drawn a good deal from it. Today people are not only afraid of the wrong teaching of the Gnosis, as I related yesterday, but they are afraid of anything concerning the life of spirit. If something about world-conception creeps into anything—Oh, that is dreadful! And this actually rests on the fact that there is no feeling for this relation of head-life and heart-life. All life to be found in mankind today outside the head is purely life of instinct and desire; it is not spiritual. And so the life of instinct and desire is irritated with the mere head-life. Head-life is very spiritual, very intellectual today, but more and more will it become—can one say—‘un-purified’ by the instinct and desire life. Hence thoughts come forth in a very curious way. And this correspondent of whom I speak—you can perhaps best judge of the confusion of his head through his instincts if I read you a characteristic sentence showing his fear that questions concerning world-conception play into these plays of the two authors. Just think, the man goes as far as writing the following:

‘But Pulver's belief in Christ ought to grow out of depths of sorrow and doubt if from the stage he wished to win disciples. The star flower plucked by Reinhart's seeker after Paradise at his studio window in the very first scene ought to bloom only at the end and from a bleeding heart.’

And now comes the sentence which I mean:

‘Both poets had their world conception already complete in their head as they began to write; it would have been better for the dramas if they had had to wrestle for their religion as they wrote.’

Now just think of that: nowadays one manages to make it a serious fault for anyone with a world conception to write! One is supposed to sit down as a perfect fool in face of the world to scribble away, and then in the scribbling, at the end, a world-conception is supposed to spring forth. Then the thing is produced at the theatre, and this is supposed to please the audience! Just imagine such stupid nonsense being actually spread abroad in the world today; and many people do not notice that such rubbish is being circulated.

Such things simply depend on the fact that the life of the head is not worked on by the whole man. For of course the journalist who wrote that was a very ‘clever man’. That should not be disputed.

He is very clever. But it is of no possible use to be clever, if the cleverness is mere head-life. That is the important thing to keep in mind; that is extraordinarily important.

Here we touch upon something fundamental, very necessary to our present civilization. One can make such observations in fact at every turn. Logical slips are not made today because people have no logic, but because it is not enough to have logic. One can be wonderfully logical, pass examinations splendidly, be a brilliant University Professor of National Economy, or any other subject, and in spite of being so clever and having any amount of logic in one's head, one can nevertheless go off the rails again and again. One can accomplish nothing connected with real life, if one has not the patience to lead over into the whole man what is grasped by the head, when one has not patience to call on the rejuvenating forces in human nature. That is the point in question. Anyone having to do with true science, such as spiritual science, knows that he would be ashamed to give a lecture tomorrow on what he had found out or learnt today—because he knows that that would be absolutely valueless. It would only have value years afterwards. The conscientious spiritual investigator cannot lecture by giving out what he has only recently learnt; but he must keep the things continually present in his soul so that they may ripen. If he brings forward what he has only just acquired he must at least make special reference to the fact, so that his audience may make note of it. One will only be really able to see what the present time needs if one bears in mind these demands on human nature. For what is necessary for the present age does not lie where today it is mostly sought; it lies in finer structures that nevertheless are everywhere spread abroad. One really need not touch on politics in calling attention to the following:

There are numbers of people today—more than is good for the world at any rate—who are of opinion that this war must continue as long as possible so that, from it, general peace may arise. If one ends it too quickly, one does peace no service. In the last few days—in what I say now I am passing no judgment on the value or lack of value of the so-called peace negotiations between the Central Powers and Russia, but it has been interesting all the same in the last few days to see what a curious sort of logic it is possible to work out. I have been given an article that is really extraordinarily interesting in this sense. The gentleman in question (his name is of no consequence here) argues against a so-called separate peace because he considers that through it universal peace would not be furthered. A direct way of thinking—but one perhaps that has gone a little deeper—might rather say to itself ‘Well, we may make a certain amount of progress if at least in one spot on earth we leave off mowing each other down’. That would perhaps be a straightforward, direct mode of thinking. But a thinking that is not so direct might be thus expressed: ‘No, one really dare not leave off in one place, for in that way “universal peace” would not be promoted.’ And now the gentleman in question gives interesting explanations—that is, explanations interesting to himself—as to how people quarrel over words. It is his opinion that those people who say ‘One must be enthusiastic about any peace, even if it is only a separate peace’, are only hypnotized by words. But one must not be dependent on words; one must go to the core of the matter, and the matter is just this—that a separate peace is harmful to the general peace of the world. Among the various arguments that the gentleman adduces is one of the following sentence, an interesting sentence, a most characteristic one for the present day—where is one to begin, not to reduce matters too much to the personal?—Well—‘Whoever is honest must admit that this is the motive of many’ (not all!) ‘among us who so delight in a “separate peace” and in Lenin and Trotsky’, (he means that enthusiasm for the word ‘peace’ is the motive) ‘while at the same time they shout tirelessly against anti-militarists and show little appreciation for our Lenins and Trotskys’. (He is speaking of Switzerland.)

‘We, however, who are not dupes of any word, but want to get at the matter itself, we do not want simply German peace, but peace, we want general peace. For us the word “separate” is a contradiction to the word “peace”.’

(If one goes into it seriously, one must carefully distinguish between peace and peace! Moreover the article is headed ‘Peace and Peace’.)

... ‘We too who do not want German peace, but peace, we want general peace. For us the word “separate” stands in contradiction to the word “peace”.’

Thus the gentleman who inveighs throughout the whole article against the worship of a word, then writes the following:

‘... For us the word “separate” stands in contradiction to the word “peace”. Separation is the principle of strife, not the principle of peace. After this World-War we need a World-Peace in which all nations come at the same time to a great mutual agreement. What we see in Brest-Litowsk, this game of a select circle of diplomats, imbued with all the subtleties of diplomacy, with the naiveté, the idealism, (also the dogmatism) of the representatives of a new order, is a spectacle that can please no one who wishes the ideal to remain pure. It is to be feared that we may get a Devil's peace, which will only produce more frightful war, instead of God's peace which finally leads to an end to all war.’

Well, my dear friends, this is certainly logic, for the article is written with ingenuity; it is brilliantly ingenious. This article ‘Peace and Peace’ is even boldly and courageously written in face of the prejudice of countless people, but its logic is devoid of any connection with reality. For the connection with reality is only found through that of which we have spoken, through the maturing of knowledge; what the head can experience must be reflected upon in the rest of man and this must mature. It may be said that what the very clever men of today lack most of all is this becoming ripe. It is something that is connected with the deepest needs and deepest impulses of the present. You see, the present day has no inclination at all to go in for the study of these things. Naturally I do not mean that every single person can go in for such study, but men whose métier is study, ought to occupy themselves with such things, and then that would pass over into the common consciousness of mankind. For do we not find that journalists—with all respect be it spoken—write what they find accepted as general opinion.

If instead of Wilsonianism or some such thing, Mohammedanism were to be represented as the accepted common opinion, European journalists would write away about something Mohammedan. And if spiritual science had already grown into a habit in human souls, then the same journalists who today grumble at Spiritual Science would, of course, write very finely in the sense of Spiritual Science. But nowadays there is a disinclination to go into such things among the very people whose task it should be.

You see, as man stands here on the earth, he is really connected with the whole cosmos. And I have said before that what holds good today on earth has naturally not always held good. That we may be informed at least about the most important things, we shall speak now principally of the period of time since the great Atlantean deluge, the Flood. Geology calls it the Ice Age. We know that changes took place in mankind at that time, but there was a humanity upon earth even before this, although in a different form. (You can read in Occult Science how mankind lived then.) The Atlantean evolution preceded the present evolution. In that part of the earth, for instance, where the Atlantic Ocean is today—as we have often said—there was land. A great part of present-day Europe was then under the sea—conditions on earth were quite different during the age of this Atlantean humanity. The ancient Atlantean civilization went down. The Post-Atlantean has taken its place. But the Atlantean followed the so-called Lemurian civilization, which again had several epochs. Thus we can say that we are in the post-Atlantean civilization in the fifth epoch, following the first, second, third and fourth epochs. Before this was the Atlantean civilization with its seven epochs (see diagram), before this again was the Lemurian civilization with its seven epochs. Let us turn our attention to the seventh epoch of the Lemurian civilization. It lies approximately 25,900 years before our epoch. It was about 25,000-26,000 years ago that this seventh epoch of the Lemurian age came to an end on earth. However remarkable it may sound, there is a certain resemblance between this seventh Lemurian epoch and our own epoch. Similarities are as we know always to be found between successive periods, similarities of the most diverse kinds. We have found a close similarity between our age and the Egypto-Chaldean. We will now speak of one which is more distant; there is also externally, cosmically, a resemblance. You know that our epoch which begins in about the 15th century of the Christian era is connected with the cosmos through the fact that since that time the sun has its Vernal Point in Pisces, in the constellation of Pisces, the Fishes. The sun had previously been for 2,160 years in the constellation of Aries, the Ram, at the Vernal Equinox. Here in this seventh Lemurian epoch (left) there were similar conditions. Twelve epochs ago the sun was in the same position. So that towards the end of the Lemurian age there were conditions similar to ours.

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This similarity contains, however, an important difference. You see, what we acquire today of inner force of spirit and head-experience, as we have described it in these studies, was also experienced by the Lemurian human being of that time, though in a different manner. The Lemurian man was constituted in quite a different way from the man of today, as you may read in my Occult Science. What could enter into him out of the universe, really entered right in. So that the Lemurian man received practically the same wisdom as the man of today gains I through his head, but it streamed into him out of the universe, I and only in this sense was it different. His head was still open, his head was still susceptible to the conditions of the cosmos. Hence powers of clairvoyance existed in ancient times. Man did not explain things to himself logically, he did not learn them, but he beheld them, since they entered his head out of the cosmos, whereas today they can do so no longer. For what comes in ceases in relatively early youth. As I have said, the head no longer stands in such intimate relation to the cosmos. That is so in the present epoch, at that time it was not so; at that time the head of man still stood in much more inward relation to the universe; at that time the human being still received world-wisdom. This did not lack that logic which is nevertheless lacking in what man gains for himself today. That original wisdom was an actually inspired wisdom, one that came to man from without, arising from divine worlds. Present-day man is unwilling to consider this; for modern man believes (forgive me if again I express myself somewhat drastically) that ever since he has been on earth he has had a skull as hard as it is today. This, however, is not true. The human head has only closed in relatively recent times. In ancient times it was responsive to cosmic in-streamings. Only an atavistic remainder is still there. Everyone knows that when he observes a child's head (a really young child's head) there is still one place that is soft. This is the last relic of that openness to the cosmos, where in ancient times cosmic forces worked in a certain way into the head and gave man cosmic wisdom. Man at that time still had no need of that correspondence with the heart, for he had a small heart in the head that has become shriveled and rudimentary today. Thus does the human being change. But conditions alter over the earth and man must grasp this and change too—adapt himself to other conditions. We should have been perpetually tied to the apron-strings of the cosmos, if our head had not ossified. We are shut off in this way from the cosmos and can develop an independent ego within us. It is important that we bear this in mind. We can develop an independent ego by reason of having acquired physically this hard skull. And we may ask when mankind actually lost the last remnant of the memories, the living memories of the ancient archetypal wisdom? This remnant really only faded away in the epoch that preceded ours, the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, during the Greco-Roman civilization. Human beings had then, of course, long since possessed closed skulls, but in the Mysteries there still existed original wisdom preserved from quite ancient times, from the epoch that preceded the Lemurian Pisces-age, from the Lemurian Aries-age.

As much as man could have of his ego in the Lemurian times was also revealed to him from the cosmos; his inmost soul-force was manifested to him from the cosmos. This came to an end in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin time. The heavens closed their last door to man. But instead they sent down their greatest Messenger precisely at that time, so that man can find on earth what he formerly received from heaven—the CHRIST. The Mystery of Golgotha is indeed a cosmic fact, inasmuch as there would have ceased for man what had been revealed to him from the heavens, cosmically revealed, from Lemurian times. Then there appears the Impulse which can reveal it to him from the earth. Only man must gradually develop what has been revealed to him from the earth in the Christ Impulse, and develop it, precisely by that process of rejuvenation of which we have been speaking.

Now, it is a result of this human development that we bear something within us today that is—so to speak—quite wonderful. I have already mentioned in yesterday's lecture that the knowledge of our time is the most spiritual it is possible to have; man however does not remark it because he does not let it mature. What can be known today about nature is far more spiritual than what was formerly known. What man formerly knew brought down certain realities out of the cosmos. In the stars, as I mentioned yesterday, the Scholastics of the Middle Ages still saw angelic Intelligences. Modern Astronomy does not of course see any angelic Intelligences, but something that one can calculate by mathematics or mechanics. But what was formerly seen has been thoroughly passed through a sieve; it is there, but sifted to the last vestige of spirituality. It belonged to the quite lovable genius of Novalis to see rightly in this point. In the Aphorisms of Novalis you find the beautiful expression—I have often quoted it—‘Mathematics is in truth a great poem’. But in order to see how mathematics, by which one also calculates the worlds of the stars and their courses, is a great poem, one must be oneself a poet, not as the modern natural scientists are perhaps, but such a poet as Novalis. Then one stands in wonder before the poetry of mathematics. For mathematics is phantasy. Mathematics is nothing observed through the senses, it is phantasy. It is, however, the final product of phantasy that has still a connection with the immediate external reality. Mathematics in fact is Maya thoroughly passed through a sieve. And if one learns to know it, not merely in the schoolmaster sense that prevails in the world today, but learns to know mathematics in its substance, learns to know it in what it can reveal, then one learns indeed to know something in it that has as much reality as an image that we see of ourselves in a mirror, but which nevertheless tells us something, in certain circumstances tells us a good deal. But to be sure, if one considers the mirror image as a final reality, one is a fool. And if one even begins to want to hold conversation with the reflection because one confuses it with reality, one is not really looking for reality at the right spot. Just as little can reality be found in the mathematical calculations in Astronomy. But the reality is certainly there. As a mirror reflection is not there without the reality, so the whole spiritual existence, that is calculated purely mathematically, is there; it is only passed completely through a sieve, and must force its way back to reality.

Precisely because our age has become so abstract, has been formed so purely by the head, it has such an immense spiritual content. And there is actually nothing that is so purely spiritual as our present science; it is only that men do not know nor value this. At any rate it is almost ridiculous to be materialistic with modern science! For it is a funny way of going through life if one takes modern science materialistically, and yet almost all learned men do take it thus. If one asserts, with the ideas that modern science can develop, that there is only a material existence, it is actually comic; for if there were only a material existence, one could never assert that there was a material existence. Merely by making the statement ‘there is a material existence’—this action of the soul is in fact the finest spiritual element possible, it is a proof in itself that there is not solely a material existence. For no person could assert that there was a material existence if there were only a material existence. One can assert all sorts of other things, but one can never assert that there is a material existence, if one only accepts a material existence. By asserting that there is only a material existence one actually proves that one is talking nonsense. For if it were true what one asserts, if there were only a material existence, nothing could ever arise from this material existence which became somewhere or other in a person the asserting—which is a purely spiritual process—‘There is a material existence’.

You see from this that nowhere has such a logical proof been put forward that the world is of the spirit, as by the science of our time which does not believe in it—that is to say, does not believe in itself—and by our whole age, which does not believe in itself. Only because mankind has spiritualized itself increasingly from epoch to epoch and has arrived at having such sharply refined concepts as we have today, only because of this has mankind reached the point of now seeing solely the quite ‘sieved’ concepts and can of its own volition connect them with the heart forces. This is shown very plainly now in external life, it is shown too in the great catastrophic events.

For, my dear friends, if one really studies history, there is a great difference between what is now called the present world-war—which is really no war at all, but something else—and earlier wars. People today are not yet attentive to these things, but in all that is going on this distinction is shown. One could refer to many proofs of the fact that this is shown. But you see, there are many men who speak from the standpoint of a quite particular ingeniousness in such an unclear way as the man from whose article I read you a sentence. For this modern acuteness gets to the point of again and again defending the peculiar sentence ‘One must prolong this war as long as possible so that the best possible peace may be established’. No one would have spoken like that about earlier wars. In many other respects too they would not have spoken as is spoken today. People do not yet notice that, as I said, but nevertheless it is so. If you take all earlier wars you will always find that fundamentally in some way or other men could say why they were waging war. (I will bring forward two things to illustrate this, though hundreds might be brought forward.) They wanted something definite, clearly to be outlined, to be described. Can the men of today do this? Above all, do they do it? A great part of those who are heavily involved in the war, do not do it. No one knows what really lies behind things. And if someone says that he wants this or that, it is generally so formulated that the other has no real idea of what he wants.

That was certainly not the case in earlier wars. One can go through the whole of world history and not find it. You can take such grievous events in earlier times as, for instance, the invasions into Europe of the Tartars, the Mongols, and you will always find that they were quite definite things, that could be sharply defined, that could be understood, and from which one could understand what actually happened. Where is there today a really clear definition of what is actually going on, a really clear description?

That is one thing. But now, my dear friends, let me say something else—what was generally the actual result of wars in earlier times? Look wherever you will and you will find that it was certain territorial changes, which people then accepted. How do people face these things today? They all explain that there must be no territorial changes. Then one asks oneself again ‘What is the whole thing for?’ Compared with former things this is really how the matter lies: people cannot in any case fight for what they always fought before, because that simply cannot be done. The moment that is somehow supposed to happen there is an instant declaration ‘That simply cannot be done’. Thus according to the impulses that prevail there can really never be a peace; for if one were to leave everything as it was before, there was no need to begin. But since one has begun and nevertheless wants to leave everything as it was before, one can naturally not leave off, for otherwise there would have been no need to begin!

These things are abstract, paradoxical, but they correspond to profound realities; they really correspond to conditions that ought to be kept in mind at the present time. One must in fact say that what is discussed here as the lack of correspondence between head-man and heart-man is today world-historical fact. And, on the other hand, one can say: men stand today in a quite particular period of development; they cannot control their thoughts in a human way. That is the most significant characteristic of our time; men cannot humanly control their thoughts. All has become different, and people are not yet willing to notice that all has become different.

Thus, one is not merely concerned with something that has a significance in questions concerning world-conceptions, but with something that very deeply affects the most wide-spread event of our time, the most crushing event for humanity. Men no longer find from out their soul the connection with their own thoughts. And this can show us how not only the individual but humanity too in a certain way has forgotten how to call upon the rejuvenating forces. Humanity will not easily be able to extricate itself from this condition. It can only do so when there is a belief in the rejuvenating forces, when we get rid of much of what cannot be rejuvenated. Whether we look at individual persons or consider what is going on around us, we find the same thing everywhere. We find a sifted and sieved head-wisdom, head-experience, without the will to let things ripen through the heart-experience. This is, however, so deeply linked with the needs of the common evolution of mankind, that man should turn his closest attention to it for the present and the immediate future. We have indeed often spoken of it before from the most varied aspects. It is precisely this state of things that shows how necessary it is for spiritual science to enter the world today—even, one might say, as something abstract. But it is fruitful, it can remould the world because above all it can send its impulse into actual, concrete conditions of life. Man would face sad times if he should continue no longer to have faith in the becoming older, if he wanted to stop short at what the short-lived head can experience. For I have said already that the utmost extreme of what the short-lived head can acquire is abstract Socialism, which does not proceed from concrete conditions. Yet this is really solely and alone what people believe in. The philosopher constantly asserts today that there is only matter—on account of his refined spirituality. But he ought to give up this judgment at once, for it is nonsense. But the mainspring of the present so-called war is to be found in the general world-condition from which there is no way out—just as there is no way out from the sentence ‘There is only matter’. For the present time is in fact spiritual! And this that is spiritual needs condensing, needs strengthening, so that it may grasp reality; otherwise it remains mere mirror-image. In the way humanity works today it is as if one did not wish to work in a workshop with actual men, but as if one thought one could work in a workshop with mirror-pictures.

And so it is in the most extreme form of head-concept-socialism, which on this account is so plausible for great masses since it is logical head-experience, purely logical head-experience. But when this logical head-experience cannot meet the spirit element of the other man, with what then can it meet? That is what we have often spoken of, in fact, even today. It then unites with blind desires and instincts. Then there results an impure mixture between the head-experience, which is really quite spiritual, and the blindest instincts and desires. That is what they are now trying to join together in the East, in a world historical way! A socialistic theory, pure head-experience, has nothing whatever to do with the actual concrete conditions of the East;

what is devised by men like Lenin and Trotsky has nothing to do with what is developing as concrete necessities in the East. For if Lenin and Trotsky, through some peculiar chain of circumstance, had landed up in Australia instead of Russia, they would have thought they could introduce the same conditions that they wished to introduce into Russia. They fit Australia, South America, just as much, or just as little, as Russia; they would fit just as well on the Moon, since they fit no real concrete conditions at all. And why? Because they come from the head, and the head is not of the earth. Perhaps they would really fit better on the Moon, since they are purely from the head. The head is not of the earth. That they are intelligible, comes from the fact that they are closely related to the head. But here on earth such things must be established as are related to the earth; a spirituality must also be found which is connected with the earth's future, in the way we described yesterday.

That leads into quite deep and significant things. And when one considers them, one will see how little inclined the man of today really is, to go into these things. And they are as necessary as our daily bread. For otherwise, if the path to rejuvenation is not found, the evolution of mankind will either get into a pit or a blind alley.

• 1. See: ‘Prayers for mothers and children’—and ‘Earthly Death & Cosmic Life’.

The name ‘Rosicrucian’ has an indefinite, vague air for anyone who studies the theosophical literature, as if there were a secret behind it. Many consider it to be a term for people who involved themselves in possible and impossible magic in the 18th century. Reading the works of people who want to study the Rosicrucians scientifically and historically one feels the kindly shrug of the shoulders when they write such things as: ‘There was a kind of brotherhood once that had noble ideals and ideas of moral progress.’ They may also refer to their symbolic formulas. But it is emphatically stated again and again in learned works that the Rosicrucians are degenerate. If the Rosicrucians had ever been what those people say they are, Rosicrucianism would be something that is utterly wrong. In reality it is one of the greatest treasures humanity has. Their secrets have never appeared in books. If something did come out, it was due to betrayal or the like, and such things might then easily be taken for foolishness or superstition. Such a view has nothing to do with what Rosicrucianism actually was. Rosicrucianism may be found encompassed in a book published in 1616. The author was called Johann Valentin Andreae. The title of the book was The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶² It describes the progress of someone who was becoming a Rosicrucian. Later Andreae published a book where it was impossible to tell if it was meant to be serious, a joke or a retraction.¹⁶³

Today we shall discover the things that may be said in public about the true nature of Rosicrucianism. There has always been initiation. People are at different stages of development. Some are far advanced and initiated into the most profound secrets of the world, people who know something about the way worlds evolve, how the earth evolved, and how human beings gradually reach higher and higher levels of development. When it is said that an initiate ‘has the knowledge’, this is often taken too lightly. To know the real secret of man, to know the future of man, is the greatest thing anyone can learn. Yes, there is a knowledge that actually has a deadly effect on someone who is unprepared. If it were simply told today, humanity would be lost. It would be split, with the greatest part destroyed, whilst a smaller part would benefit from the knowledge. The secret can never be elicited from initiates by anyone who does not have the right to know; not even if you were to torture them and make them into martyrs. No initiate would ever reveal the ultimate secret of the world to anyone who does not have the right to know. The very thought of having to reveal the secret would drive him mad or kill him. Let me give you a picture that gives the whole development connected with this secret in perspective—it is of an avenue that gets narrower and narrower, seemingly, though one day the great secret will be revealed to all humanity.

Rosicrucianism is one way of gaining initiation. It was established by Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶⁴ There are different ways of initiation. One was taught by the ancient Rishis in India; it is the Oriental yoga way. Then there was the gnostic Christian way, and the Rosicrucian way is the third. All three ways take people to the summit of initiation. But it is not usually taken into account that the mental and physical constitution of Indians and Europeans is utterly different. It would in fact be impossible for a European body to take the Indian way. People also fail to realize the difference in external influences. It is possible to see that in India, for example, some diseases—cholera, smallpox—take a very different course; they are different in hot compared to cold countries. The environment is completely different and therefore has a different influence on all the enveloping bodies of man. It was peculiar to think, therefore, to say that Europeans could go through yoga training. It was an error. People did not know, however, that the Rosicrucians had followed a way of development from the 14th century.

The Rosicrucian way is certainly not un-Christian. For many people who are firm and ardent Christians the gnostic Christian way is the right one they will reach the highest peaks by this route. But the number of such people is getting less. Rosicrucianism holds the most profound secrets of Christianity but also makes it possible to remove all the doubts raised in human minds today by popular or also less popular views. No one is protected from the most dreadful doubts today, which are coming to people from every direction. Christian training would not enable them to meet these doubts in the right way, protect and defend themselves from them. Do not take this lightly. If someone were to say, for instance, that he does not read Haeckel but stays firmly in the confines of his Christian view of the world, this would not achieve anything. We live in a world where people are full of our civilization. We are using natural laws when we go by train or use the newly developed sources of light.¹⁶⁵ However much a person may shut himself off—the thoughts that live in the spiritual environment come to him from every railway engine, every artificial flame. If someone were to limit himself entirely to reading the Bible, his astral body, his soul body, would nevertheless be surrounded by all kinds of destructive inner feelings during the night. You would not know what was making you nervous. Someone who knows the thoughts that reach us at an unconscious level does know. It is not a matter of materialistic science as such, but the whole atmosphere of mind and spirit in which we live. In the 12th century people still felt religious ardour, with the Church the spiritual and external focus of their lives. Having laboured hard, people would seek refuge in the house of the spiritual powers and find peace there. This has now changed. Rosicrucian training takes account of these facts, of everything modern man has to face.

What does Rosicrucian training consist in? You will meet high ideals in it. Anyone wishing to take up this training must turn to someone who has the requisite knowledge. Even as he takes the first steps the pupil will realize what really matters. Rosicrucian training completely transforms the human being. It is only by gaining the faculties for the higher world that he can be a citizen of it.

Seven elements, activities, are part of Rosicrucian occult training: 1) proper study; 2) acquiring imagination; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) gaining knowledge of man himself, the small world or microcosm; 6) gaining knowledge of the macrocosm; 7) knowing godliness. The sequence may vary, with a teacher perhaps taking 5) as the fourth step, for instance, to suit the pupil's individual nature. You will ask if genuine Rosicrucianism still exists today. Yes, it does, and it will achieve its greatest significance in the future. The Rosicrucian brothers also have signs of identification. Not many of them are able to present themselves in public; some work entirely in secret. Anyone who seeks them will find them; and if someone does not find them he may assume that the time is not yet right for him. It [the meeting] will inevitably happen, however. It may often seem to be pure chance. It may happen, for instance, that you have to sit in a railway waiting room for 3 hours because snow is blocking the line. A stranger approaches you seemingly quite by chance. You have found your teacher. This is just one instance which I mention to you.

1) Proper study. What does this involve? You will be taken into worlds of which ordinary people have no idea. It will be necessary to gain your bearings in those worlds. It is not for people who are divorced from reality, lacking a firm basis to their thinking. Absolute certainty in one's thinking is a precondition. The individual has to look around, endeavouring to look about him with sound eyes, and must also be able to shut off his senses. This is something not everyone appreciates, not even the greatest philosophers. Eduard von Hartmann, for example, said over and over again: ‘Something coming from the senses is always present when we think; thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible.’¹⁶⁶ It is unbelievably arrogant to say that thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible. Methods of developing a way of thinking free from sensory elements are now presented in the spiritual scientific literature and in lectures.

People who are found to be suitable are guided towards deeper knowledge. The elementary part of this knowledge is in fact open to many people. The way of study presented today, leaving aside the sense-related aspects of the world, consists in training one's thoughts. These then have nothing to do with the world we perceive around us through the senses. Wanting to enter even more deeply, one must put one's mind to more powerful thought training. I have endeavoured to give directions for such a way of thinking in the two books The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity - A Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Knowledge. It is like this—when he begins to study these books at some depth, the reader will find that one thought follows another in a sequence that is determined by necessity. All people seeking to gain higher things are thus given the means for genuine growth in the spirit.

2) Developing powers of imagination. Here the way ideas are formed differs from ordinary thinking. Think of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’. When you see someone with a smiling or worried face you'll not say ‘a crease is developing in that face’, or ‘a tear runs down his cheek’. What you'll say is that this shows a cheerful and this a sorrowful soul. The outer reveals the inner aspect; it is a simile, a likeness of what lives in the soul. Anyone will accept this in the case of human beings. Everyone knows the difference between a human head and a picture of it. A geologist may describe the earth for you, concerning himself only with its purely physical structure. People do not know that the earth's body is the body of a living entity, and that particular plants reflect the happy and the sad earth spirit. Goethe knew to tell of this; he knew how to see the earth as a body and knew what lived in it. In his Faust, he made the earth spirit say:

In life like a flood, in deeds like a storm
I surge to and fro,
Up and down I flow!
Birth and the grave,
an eternal wave,
Turning, returning,
A life ever burning.
And thus I work at Time's whirring wheel,
God's living garment I weave and reveal.

Everything on earth is a likeness of what is happening in the inner earth. People walk about on the earth's body. From my body, the earth may say, grows the seed that gives human beings their bread. The words in John's gospel, ‘He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me’, speak of one of the most profound mysteries in the way we look at the world.

Imagination is gained by seeing everything as a likeness. It is, however, necessary to learn logical thinking first. But in Rosicrucian training no one will choose a different image. Each feels that everything is in the image of the eternal. Here I must use dialogue to speak of something that lies behind an image that was taught in medieval temples and then in the Rosicrucian schools. The teacher would say to the pupil: ‘Look at the plant putting its root down in the soil and turning its flower, the seat of its organs of fertilization, to the light of the sun. The calyx is given a chaste kiss by the sunbeam and a new entity comes into existence.’ Even Darwin said that the root of a plant may be compared with the head.¹⁶⁷ Man is an inverted plant. His organs of reproduction are turned towards the centre of the earth in shame. The animal is between man and plant. These three realms of nature are shown in the image of a cross (Fig. 5).¹⁶⁸

Plato said: ‘The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body.’/p>

The Rosicrucian teacher would then ask his pupil to compare matter as it exists in flesh with the chaste matter of a plant, telling him that a time would come when human beings would be cleansed of their passions and desires, maturing to a stage and shining out towards the sun of the spirit where they will be as chaste and without desire as the chaste plant. With this ideal they will cleanse their flesh, so that fertilization becomes chaste and pure. Medieval schooling represented this ideal in the holy grail. The chalice is a sacred symbol of what human sensuality must become if it is to be like the calyx of a plant. It will then receive the kiss of the white dove—the chalice is shown with the dove above it.

To make the world thus spiritual, seeing man's environment in such images, raises him to the point of vision in astral images. Imagination is developed out of heart and mind and out of feeling.

3) Learning the occult script. The occult script reflects the inner currents in nature. One such sign is the vortex. If you were able to see the whole of the Orion nebula you would have two sixes intertwined. You see a world that is dying and one that is becoming in the nebula. Things are like this everywhere. When a plant sheds a new fruit, nothing from the old plant passes on to the new one. Nothing but powers cause a new plant to develop. And once again you would only see the vortex swirling inwards and out. In the same way you might see an old civilization spiralling into itself and a new one snaking out. This spiritual process can help us understand such a sign that is part of the script (Fig. 6).

800 years before Christ was born the sun entered into the sign of the Ram or lamb. Every spring it moves on a distance. The spring equinox is now in the constellation of the Fishes. At that earlier time people thought the Ram brought all that was good, new strength and power in spring. They even connected the redeemer with this. In early Christian times, the cross and the lamb were their symbol for this. Before the sun was in the sign of the Ram in spring, it was in the sign of the Bull. The Egyptians venerated the sacred bull Apis at that time, the Persians the Mythras bull. After the Flood, the sun was in the sign of Cancer. Cancer was given this occult sign: (Fig. 6).

And so there are many such lines, and also colours. And so one learns the signs that take us into the forces and powers of nature. One learns to develop the will in the occult script.

4) Finding the philosopher's stone. This was felt to be a secret in the 18th century. Someone then also published something about it. It is something everyone knows. The philosopher's stone is at the same time the noblest thing man can attain to, can make of his organism in order to achieve higher development.

Let me give you a story from Vedanta philosophy for this.¹⁶⁹ People once wanted to see if man could also live without eyes. After a year the individual concerned said: ‘Yes, I have lived, but as a blind person? He then tried to live without ears and a year later reported: 'Yes I have lived without ears, but as a deaf person.’ The voice was taken away and he lived as a mute person. Then his breath was to be taken away as well and that proved impossible. He could not live without breathing. Our breathing gives us the air we need to live. ‘And god breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’¹⁷⁰ We take in oxygen with every breath and release carbon dioxide. In the plant, the cycle goes the other way round. The plant uses carbon to build its body. This is why we find fossilized plants in coal after thousands of years. Man has carbon in him; he breathes in oxygen, and the carbon dioxide which is produced is removed. Animals do the same. The Rosicrucian school teaches a special way of breathing, so that the person learns the process which the plant carries out in itself. One day man will be able to transform his carbon himself; he himself will transform the blue blood that is streaming back into red blood. Now he takes in plant nature; one day he himself will do what the plant does today. The Rosicrucian says: ‘Today your body is made of flesh; one day you will create it yourself through the breath. Plant nature will appear in you, but you'll not sleep the way plants do but will be clairvoyant with it.’

This is the ideal man is moving towards—to build his body of carbon. Ordinary coal is the philosopher's stone. When man's body has become star-like it will not be black coal but transparent carbon, clear as water. These are not just chemical processes but sublime ideals. The Rosicrucian goes through it in stages, and later the whole of humanity will ascend to this level.

5) Knowing the human being as microcosm. In all the rest of nature, the world is spread out; man is an extract of it. Everything is spread out in the world in letters, and man is the word. In the early 19th century Oken¹⁷¹ and Schelling¹⁷² presented the basic ideas of this, which were quite correct. They sought to gain understanding of the essence that lies in an organ. Oken got a bit grotesque when he said the tongue was a cuttlefish. Goethe said: ‘The eye is created by the light for the light.’¹⁷³ We only come to recognize the true nature of light when we find the principle in man that corresponds to light.

The teacher gives his pupil a leitmotiv, asking him to concentrate on a point, the organ that lies behind the root of the nose, and he comes to know the nature of dream consciousness in addition to his wide-awake conscious awareness. The human being gets to know the whole world when he deeply considers the spleen, liver and other things. When he has expanded his conscious awareness by thus entering into himself—it is dangerous to go broody—he will become one with the whole world.

6) Coming to know the macrocosm. Having perceived what I have just described, he will also perceive the creator behind all creation.

7) Getting to know godliness. At the 7th stage the individual reaches a point that calls forth universal feeling from the depths of the human soul and something he only has a right to know at this stage—the feeling of blessedness. It is only by gaining insight into macrocosm that he learns to enter into universal feeling. Entering into every individual thing in a clear and living way is godliness. There he discovers the soul that lies at rest behind nature. Someone once said to me: ‘I never thought a stone would feel anything if I split it.’ The spirit of the mineral world feels the greatest voluptuousness when a stone is split, a feeling of bliss. It may seem to us that the marble quarry is going through martyrdom; yet for the spirit of the stone is it the greatest bliss. Now you might ask why people are not told such details. Someone once said it would be most useful for people to know them. My reply was: 'People would want to gain things for themselves from this, and this secret must only be used in utterly selfless service to humanity.’

The Rosicrucians knew this secret, as do those who now walk this earth and serve human progress. They tell the things that will serve progress, they who know how the ‘chymical wedding’ may proceed.

• 162. Andreae, Johann Valentin (1586–1654), German protestant theologian. ‘The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, Anno 1459’, written in 1603. was published anonymously in Strassburg in 1616. See Steiner R. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, essay written in 1917 (in GA 35); P. M. Allen compiler and editor. Blauvelt: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1968.
• 163. Andreae's later works, including the allegorical Die Christburg (1626), were more pietistic.
• 164. See lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Neuchatel on 27 and 28 October 1911. In Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (in GA 130). Tr. P. Wehrle. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1984.
• 165. New York had the first electric street lighting in 1882.
• 166. von Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard (1842–1906). His Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869) was translated into English by Coupland , with a new edition in 1931. At the beginning of the second volume (1882) we read: ‘We think either in images, in which case we rake sensory impressions and transformations and combinations of them directly from memory, or we think in abstract terms. Abstract notions have, however, merely been abstracted from our sensory perceptions, and we may discard as much as we like in the process of abstraction, so long as something actually remains. This has thus been part of the whole before from which the abstraction was made. Abstract notions thus are merely residues of sensory impressions and therefore take sensory by nature.’
• 167. Darwin, Charles (1809–1882). ‘Surely it is no exaggeration to maintain that a root tip which has the capacity for achieving movements of adjacent parts performs a function similar to that of the brain of a lower animal.’ Darwin C., assisted by Darwin F. The Power of Movement of Plants. New York 1892.
• 168. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC) Greek philosopher. After living for a time at the Syracuse court, Plato founded the most influential school of the ancient world, the Academy, in Athens. The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body. Rudolf Steiner would frequently refer to these words from Timaeus (chapter 8), but always in the form given by the Viennese philosopher Vincenz Knauer, who was a personal acquaintance, in his Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwickelung und teilweisen Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Vienna 1892, S. 96 (the passage is underlined in the copy of the work in Rudolf Steiner's library): ‘We know from mythology, in Timaeus, that god placed this world soul in the universe in the form of a cross and stretched the world's body upon it.’ The passage in Timaeus says that god split the world's soul in two halves, ‘brought the two parts together in the form of the Greek letter chi (Χ) and made each into a circle, so that the two met with their ends opposite to the middle, and each also met itself. He gave both parts the uniform movement of the circular orbit that took place in that same space, but made one of these circles the inner one, and the other the outer one’ (quoted from German translation by Otto Apelt, Der philosophischen Bibliothek Band 179. Leipzig 1919). See also Rudolf Steiner's discussion of this in Christianity as Mystical Fact (GA 8) (1902).
• 169. It has not so far been possible to trace this.
• 170. Genesis 2: 7.
• 171. Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851), German naturalist and natural philosopher, professor of medicine at Jena, later at Munich and then Zurich. The quote: ‘The tongue is a cuttlefish’ was freely rendered by Rudolf Steiner, basing on Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. Jena 1831. Friedrich Frommann, 14. Buch: Zoologie, S. 424,466,496.
• 172. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854). German philosopher.
• 173. ‘The eye owes its existence to light. Light creates an organ for itself from indifferent accessory animal organs, an organ to be like unto itself Thus the eye is created in the light for the light, so that the inner light may come to meet the outer.’ From the introduction to Goethe's Theory of Colour, An Outline. See Rudolf Steiner's Goethe the Scientist (GA 1).

The fact that we have the possibility of progressing to more and more advanced studies in this group is solely due to the arrangements we have made concerning the courses running parallel with the group lectures. Therefore I would like to ask you to give these courses all your support. It is necessary to have somewhere where we can progress with the lectures. Otherwise we would have to start from the beginning every year.

We will concern ourselves today with something that will again appear to be far removed from the previous lectures but which will nevertheless fit into our present train of thought. We want to take as our starting-point an observation made in one of the last public lectures; the one on ‘Superstition from the Spiritual Scientific Point of View’. An observation was made there that cannot be carried further in a public lecture because, for a deeper understanding of it, certain preliminary concepts would have to be presupposed that are less related to an intellectual understanding than to an understanding that lies in our whole soul constitution, and that we can only acquire after years of group work. Patient work of this kind brings us ultimately to the point where things that would have seemed absurd appear possible and probable, and we can see that life bears them out. The observation we want to start from is that it is an ordinary fact and no superstition that in the case of certain illnesses like, for instance, pneumonia, there is a crisis on the seventh day when the patient can easily die, and the doctor has to do everything in his power to bring the patient through this crisis which occurs without fail on the seventh day. This is recognised today by every sensible doctor, though doctors cannot investigate the causes because they have no idea of the spiritual foundation of things. First of all I will simply present you with the fact that pneumonia shows something quite remarkable that is connected with the mysterious number seven.

We must look at the human being in a way that makes it possible to understand this fact and many others besides. You know from the innumerable times we have referred to it that man can only be understood when we know that he has a fourfold structure of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. These four members of man's being are connected with and dependent on one another in the most manifold ways. Each member influences the other, and therefore they are in constant connection one with another. But this cooperation is very complicated. It takes a very long time for man to get to know these connections as well as the relationship of these members to certain forces, processes and beings in the cosmos as a whole. For man has a connection with the cosmos through each of his members; a connection which is continuous—and this again is very important—but which is also variable. What we know as the physical body, etheric body and so on are connected with one another but also with the cosmos, the whole world about us. For what we have within us is also to a certain extent outside us, and so we could say that we can best get to know these inner and outer connections if we observe man both in a waking and sleeping state.

When a man lies asleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed and the astral body and the ego are to a certain extent outside these. But this is only roughly speaking. A rough idea is sufficient for a number of things, but we want to understand this situation a little more accurately today. The astral body and the ego are not active in the physical body now. But the physical body with its nerves and blood system and the etheric body cannot exist unless they are interpenetrated by an astral body and something resembling an ego. Nor could the etheric body exist without being interpenetrated by higher entities. When the human being's own astral body and ego depart, the activities of these two members have to be replaced. The human body cannot remain without there being an ego and an astral body active within it, so there also has to be an ego and an astral body active when the human being is asleep. To be exact, we would have to say that the ego and the astral body that are active in the human being's sleeping physical body are also within the human being during the day, but their activity is completely overpowered by the activity of the human being's own astral body and ego. If we want to imagine the ego as it is nowadays, in the waking state, we have to tell ourselves that this human ego is within the human body when man is awake, and because of its activity during this time it deprives a larger ego of its sphere of influence. What does our own limited ego actually do during sleep? We can in truth say fairly accurately that this ego that has freed itself in the daytime from the large cosmic ego and that has a free hand in the human body, descends into the cosmic ego during the night and foregoes its own activity. And because the day ego descends into the cosmic ego, the cosmic ego can work unhindered and get rid of all the exhaustion that has accumulated during the day. Because the day ego sinks down into the cosmic ego it is possible for the night ego to be active in an all-embracing way. If you want to imagine it pictorially, you can visualise the relationship of the day ego to the night ego as though the day ego described a circle, passing through the greater part of this circle outside the realm of the great ego and descending into the great ego at night. For sixteen hours on average it is outside the night ego and for eight hours it is within it.

You will only understand this correctly if you take what I have said quite literally, namely that your ego never stays the same for the whole sixteen hours—assuming that to be the normal time for being awake—and that the ego is changing all this while. It describes part of a circle and then sinks down, passing through more changes during the night, about which the ordinary human being knows nothing. These changes become more and more unconscious until a climax is reached, and then the ego becomes slowly more conscious again. We must say, then, that in the course of twenty-four hours the human being is continuously undergoing certain changes, the outer symbol of which we can imagine as a circle, as a hand of a clock describing a circle and disappearing from time to time into the large cosmic ego.

The human astral body goes through changes in a very similar way. This changes too in such a way that we can imagine it symbolically as describing a circle. With the astral body too the changes are such that we really have to speak of a kind of sinking down into a cosmic astral body. Only present-day man does not notice this descent into the cosmic astral body any more, whilst in earlier times man was very aware of it. Then man felt his own innate astral feelings that he had at one particular time alternating as it were with quite different feelings at another time. At one time he felt more alive in the world around him and at another time he was more aware of his own inner feelings. You could perceive quite different shades of feeling in the astral body because it underwent rhythmic changes in the course of seven days, that is seven times twenty-four hours, that can again be compared to a circle. The ego undergoes rhythmic changes over a period of twenty-four hours, still expressed today in the alternation between waking and sleeping, and the astral body in seven times twenty-four hours. In primeval man these rhythmic changes occurred very vividly. Thus in the astral body rhythmic changes run their course for seven days, and on the eighth day the rhythm begins again. The astral body actually does sink down into a universal cosmic astral body for part of the time that man undergoes this rhythm. For the remainder of the time it is more outside this cosmic astral body. This can give you a picture of how significant for man's life the universal astral body and ego are that are present in man when he is asleep. This I into which he plunges when he falls asleep and which keeps his blood flowing at night, is the same ego that works in his body during sleep. If he sleeps in the daytime he also goes into this universal ego, and this brings a certain irregularity into his rhythm which would have worked destructively in earlier times but which is not so destructive these days because in our times human life has changed considerably in this respect. During the course of the seven days, man's astral body actually goes into the same part of the universal cosmic astral body which interpenetrates the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. This brings about changes in man's inner feelings. This is hardly noticed today, though in earlier times it could not be ignored.

It is not only the ego and astral body that go through certain particular rhythmic changes but the etheric body does so too. These take place in such a way that in four times seven days the human etheric body, symbolically speaking, revolves on its own axis, and after four times seven days it comes back to the beginning again. A quite definite rhythm takes place in the course of the four times seven days. But now we are approaching a sphere about which we would have to speak in great detail if you are to understand it all. You will remember my saying that a man's etheric body is female and a woman's male. The two have a different rhythm, but we do not want to go into that today. We just want to emphasise that this rhythm occurs and, because of the difference in man and woman, we will just say it is approximately four times seven days.

This, however, does not bring us to the end of the matter. Quite definite processes are rhythmically repeated in the physical body too, however improbable this sounds to people today. Nowadays they have almost become obliterated, because man has had to become independent of certain processes, but they are still noticeable to occult observation. If the physical body were entirely left to itself this rhythm would take place over a period of ten times seven times four days in the woman and twelve times seven times four days in the man. That is how it would be if the human being were entirely left to the laws inherent in the rhythms. At one time it was really like this, but man has become more free of the cosmic influences around him. Thus we have a flow of rhythmic processes in the four members of man's being. If you like, you can imagine each of the four rhythms as a circling. The rhythms man would carry out in his physical body, for instance, if he were left entirely to himself, only approximate, of course, with the external physical, purely spatial processes that correspond to these rhythms. This is because man has been driven back upon himself in the cause of freedom, and his relationship to the cosmos has changed accordingly.

You will have noticed from the number ten times seven times four or twelve times seven times four that the rhythm of the physical body corresponds roughly to the course of the year. You can imagine an external symbol for these changes in the physical body if you think that in the course of a year the human being turns around as it were; at one time he is on one side of the sun and at another on the other. If we imagine that he always turns his face to the sun, then in the course of a year he has to revolve once on his own axis and once round the sun. Anyone who only looks at it superficially will think that it is of no consequence, but it happens to be very important. These rhythms occurring in the four bodies were implanted into man over long periods of time, and the hierarchies—entities we have often spoken about—have brought it about that the various bodies influence one another. We know that we are embedded in higher beings. It is due to the action of these spiritual beings, who fill both physical and spiritual space with their deeds, that these particular connections come about. If you consider what I have just said, however, you will find a new way of looking at a thought I often mentioned here last winter. The establishing of the rhythm of the physical body already began on ancient Saturn. The incorporating of the etheric body into the physical body, in such a way that the rhythm of the two bodies harmonise, is the work of other spirits, the spirits of the Sun. Through the working together of the various rhythms a relationship is brought about in the same way as the relationship of the two hands of a clock is determined by their rhythm. On ancient Moon another rhythm was incorporated, that of the astral body.

Now those spirits that regulated our whole cosmos—for everything of a physical nature is an expression of those beings—had to create the outer physical movement in accordance with their own inner relationships. That the sun is encircled by the earth in a year arises out of the rhythm that was implanted into the physical body long ages before the physical constellation existed. Thus the spatial relationships between these heavenly bodies were regulated from out of the spirit. The moon had to go round the earth because its rotation had to correspond to the rotation of the human etheric body in four times seven days because this rhythm was to find its expression in the movement of the moon. The changing illumination of the moon by the sun—the moon's four quarters—correspond to the different rhythms of the astral body, and the revolution of the earth in the course of a day corresponds to the ego rhythm. In connection with this ego rhythm in particular we can point out something that occultism has always taught, but which will appear to people nowadays as mere fantasy, although it is nevertheless true. In very ancient times the earth did not revolve around its axis; this axial rotation arose in the course of time. Whilst earth man was still in a different condition, this movement did not as yet exist. The first stimulus to movement did not occur in the earth but in man. The human ego was given this stimulus to turn by the spirits to whom it is subject, and the human ego actually took the earth with it and made it revolve round it. The revolution of the earth is the result of the ego rhythm. And this is true, however astonishing it sounds. The spiritual members of man that were developing their ego-hood had to receive the stimulus to turn first, and then they took the earth with them. Later on this was different. Man became free on the earth; conditions changed so that man was freed from the surrounding cosmic powers. But this is really what it was like originally. Thus you can see how everything that is physical around us is actually an outcome of the spiritual. Spirit is always there first. And it is the spirit that sets everything going.

And now think of the astral body that accomplishes its round in the course of seven days. Imagine how illnesses are connected with certain irregularities of the astral body because these irregularities are passed on through the etheric body to the physical body. Now we will suppose that the astral body has a certain defect. Through this defect it affects the etheric body and the defect is then passed on to the physical body. This also becomes defective. Then the organism starts revolting against the defect and applies protective measures. This revolt is usually in the form of a temperature, which summons man's forces of recovery. A temperature is not an illness; it is the human being calling together all the forces in his organism to put this defect right again. This revolt of the whole organism against the defect expresses itself as a rule in a feverish temperature. A temperature is the most beneficial, restorative part of an illness. The particular area that is defective cannot heal by itself, and it has to receive the forces from other places, and this is expressed in the temperature.

Now imagine this temperature occurring with pneumonia. The lungs have become defective through one or other cause. When it is the human lungs in particular that have suffered some damage, the astral body becomes defective first and then it passes through the etheric body to the physical body. With pneumonia the cause is always in the astral body; pneumonia can occur in no other way. Now think of the astral body's rhythm. The day pneumonia appears the astral body affects the physical body. Now the body begins to revolt with a temperature. Seven days later the astral and etheric bodies are in the same mutual relationship; parts of them meet again. But it is not the same part of the etheric body, because the etheric body has been going through its own rhythm. It meets the next part. This is also affected by the astral body, but this time in the opposite way. The fever is now suppressed. Through the fact that the particular part of the astral body that coincided with the previous quarter of the etheric body seven days earlier coincides with its next quarter, the opposite process from a week ago is produced, namely a reaction to the fever. The opposing rhythm of the body now suppresses the temperature. For the human body is meant to be healthy, and that is the purpose of the rhythm. Certain influences increase in the first seven days, and in the next seven days they have to decline. In a healthy person this increasing and decreasing alternates. When a person is ill, however, his life is endangered when the fever is suppressed. Whilst in a healthy person an ascending process is reversed on the seventh day, in an ill person the ascending process ought to continue. But a rapid ascent causes a rapid fall. This is the reason for the pneumonia crisis on the seventh day.

We can understand this if we consider that the lungs were developed at a time when the moon had already split off and was preparing to develop its own rhythm, and the rhythm of the days was also beginning to develop. This is why even today the lungs are still connected with the astral body and the rhythm of the etheric body.

You can see, then, that spiritual science helps us to form a judgment of just these abnormal conditions in human life, and that the whole nature of man can be understood only when we see these conditions. It will only become possible again for the sciences to achieve fruitful results when man is permeated with the great truths of spiritual science. In earlier times, up to about the middle of the earth evolution, all the rhythms in man were much more in harmony with the rhythms of outer nature. Since that time, that is, since the middle of Atlantean times, however, things have shifted. Man's inner life has emancipated itself from outer rhythm, but he has kept his inner rhythm. It is just because the rhythms do not harmonise that man has acquired his independence and freedom, otherwise the evolution of freedom in the history of mankind would not have been possible. Man's rhythm compared with the sun, or the earth's compared with the sun has shot ahead. A similar thing has happened with the other rhythms, for instance that of the astral body. In earlier times man experienced quite different shades of mood in the course of seven days. At one time everything outside him made a great impression on him, and at another time he lived more in his inner life. It is because the rhythms are no longer in harmony that the condition of inner experience remains, even when man has more joy from the outer world, and vice versa. They combine and balance one another and this makes the astral body even-tempered, as it were. By means of careful observation you can still notice these alternations of mood in people who live more in their astral body. The variations in the condition of the astral body can be established in the case of people who are psychologically or mentally ill.

The ego rhythm was the last to arise, but there too, things have already become displaced. Man can also sleep in the daytime, and stay awake at night. In earlier times this rhythm always coincided with the outer one. In Atlantis something very serious would have happened if man had wished to sleep in the daytime and stay awake at night. He would have brought his whole life into disorder. The rhythm is still there today to a certain extent, but it has become independent of outer circumstances. This is the same thing as setting a reliable clock exactly in time with the sun. You can then tell the exact solar time. But you could also turn the clock to midnight when it is seven o'clock in the evening. Then the rhythm of the clock will still remain correct but it would be displaced compared with that of the sun. This is what it is like with man. Man has kept the old rhythm that he used to share with the whole cosmos, but it has become displaced. If the clock were a living being it would be justified in dissociating its rhythm from the surrounding rhythms. In the far distant future man is to reach the point of projecting his rhythms out into the world again out of the strength of his own inner development. Just as there were once beings who, out of their own rhythms, made the sun, moon and earth move, man will at some future time transfer his rhythms to the world, when he has reached the stage of divinity. This is the meaning behind rhythm becoming independent. We can glimpse from this the deeper foundations of astrology. But we will not go into that just now. Today we only wanted to show that spiritual science is not a collection of abstract ideas for those egoistic people who take an interest in it, but something that can bring light into the most everyday things of life. One must have the will, however, to pass from external phenomena to the causes behind them. Rhythm has been implanted into matter by the spirit, and man, today, has these rhythms within him as a heritage of this spiritual origin. Nevertheless we can only understand what this rhythm signifies for man's being and also for the rest of natural creation if we go back to the original relationships. In the case of animals the various bodies—physical body, etheric body, astral body and group ego—have a quite different relationship to one another. There is a different rhythm for each animal species. It is roughly the same for the physical body, but the different animals have quite different rhythms in their etheric and astral bodies. In the same way as the animal world is classified nowadays according to external form, it can be classified in species according to the rhythms of the astral and etheric bodies.

Do not imagine that these rhythms have never been clearly recognised. We will be able to show that it is not so very long since people were at least dimly conscious of these rhythms. Whoever goes through the world with a consciousness for these things, will find in some calendars in use in country districts certain rules referring to definite relationships between the animals and the land. Farmers used to manage all their agriculture by observing the rules in such calendars. In the farmer's lore a consciousness of these rhythms lay hidden. These are things that can show us that since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an age of abstraction, of external science, has arisen, a science that is no longer in a position to go back to the causes. This is particularly the case in medicine. People only grope today, and the solid basis of pathology and of therapy goes back to ancient times. It was a torture for my intellect and my feelings when phenacetin was tested. This kind of testing, without any kind of guide, shows that at the same time as it lost the spirit science also lost its depth. Through spiritual knowledge this depth will be acquired again. It is absolutely necessary to distinguish between caricatures of science and real knowledge based on the spirit. If you take this to heart you will see how necessary it is to have spiritual scientific knowledge, and that it has to find its way into every realm of knowledge and life.

This lecture is the eighth of nineteen lectures in the volume Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. This lecture is also known as The Categories of Hegel.¹

The lecture today will be put into such a form, that through particular remarks connected with the elucidations you will be able to see where the bridge is to be made between Anthroposophy and Philosophy, and how certain philosophical concepts and knowledge can be of importance in the practice of spiritual science. Something is to be stated at the outset that will be useful to us in bringing the philosophical edifice altogether into a right relation to spiritual science. As a preparation, you have heard the logic lectures during the General Meeting (22 Oct. 1908, on the 4^th Dimension; 25 Oct. 1908, on Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). There we recognized thinking as the capacity, to place oneself over against the world in a technique of concepts. We characterized it in a certain way, when we wanted to obtain a concept from pure formal logic. We can only really speak of thinking, when it takes its course in concepts, and we strictly distinguished between perception, representation and concept. If such distinctions are said to be difficult, it must be borne in mind, that in spiritual science it is obligatory that one engage in strict soul exercises, which will increase to sharp and energetic conceptual contours.

We have learnt to know the concept itself as something, which is constructed wholly within our spirit, and this construction is a true one. All psychological disquisitions, which see in the concept only a shadow, arising through abstraction, of that which we have in the representation, remain stationary half way. The concept has not arisen thus, but in inward construction.

In order to get a picture of the place of the concept and the conceptual system, let us just represent to ourselves, what relation this world of concepts takes on the one side to sensible perception, and on the other side to the higher reality, which comes to us through super-sensible observation. The whole network of concepts that a man possess, beginning from the concept of number etc. to the concepts that Goethe constructed, but which in our western culture remain wholly in inception, you may represent as a tablet (Tafel), forming the boundary between the super-sensible and sensible worlds. Between these two spheres the world of concepts forms the boundary. If the observer of sense things were to direct only his eye or other perceptive organs to the outer world, he would merely experience representations. That was shown in the representation of the circle, which remains to us from the perception of the horizon on the ocean. If the human being on the other hand constructs the picture merely in the spirit, the pictures of all the points which are equal in distance from a point within, then in antithesis to the representation of the circle he possess the concept of the circle. Thus we could construct other concepts than mathematical ones, and could finally rise to real knowledge of the Goethean morphology, whose concepts have come into existence just as inwardly as the concept of the circle and so on. When we accordingly imagine the network of all the concepts which man can form, then one can approach the sensible reality with these concepts, and then one finds, that the sensible world agrees with one's concepts. What one has constructed as circles coincides with the circle that is given to him in the perception, through journeying out on the ocean. In this way in all true conceptual thinking we relate ourselves to the reality. The concept is decidedly not gained through observation—that is a conception which is very wide-spread today—the concept is plainly something wherein a man takes no account of the external reality. Now through this we established the place of the network of concepts in regard to the external sensible reality.

Now we must ask: how is it with the position of the network of concepts in regard to super-sensible reality? When he, who through the methods of clairvoyance discloses the super-sensible reality, now approaches this reality with his concepts, he will thus find the network of concepts coincides just as much with the super-sensible world. From the other side the super-sensible reality throws its rays as it were on the network of concepts, as on the one side does the sensible reality.

Now whence comes this network of concepts itself? Here that can only be asserted as fact, for the answer to this question can only result as the consequence of the logical path which we shall yet be able to take together. Today I will only give you a picture of this network of concepts, in order to show whence the network, which a man weaves within him, takes it origin. That is best made clear by a shadow picture. The shadow-picture of the hand would never arise if the hand were not there. The shadow-picture resembles its prototype, but it has one peculiarity! it is nothing! Through the fact that in the place of light the non-light comes, through the obliteration (obscuring??) of the light the shadow-picture comes into being.² The concepts arise in exactly the same way, through the fact that behind our thinking soul there stands the super-sensible reality.

The concepts also are really only an obliteration of the super-sensible reality, and because they resemble the spiritual world, as the shadow-pictures do the prototypes, for this reason the human being can form an inkling of the super-sensible worlds. When the perception of the super-sensible makes concept with the sensible, then these shadow-pictures arise. In the conceptual shadow-pictures you have the super-sensible reality just as little as in the shadow-picture of the hand you have the hand itself. Accordingly we have recognized here that the concepts are the boundary between the two realities, but originate from the super-sensible reality.

Now we ask ourselves: how can a man arrive at concepts, when he has no experience in super-sensible worlds? If he had only the sense-reality, he could only have representations. But it is not requisite to ascend into super-sensible reality in order to form concepts. The seer can perhaps arrive more easily at a complete conceptual world, because he has of course learnt to know the forces, which form the concepts. You will find the spiritual-scientific explanation of what is here said in my Theosophy. A man arrives at his concepts because he causes them to stream down upon him in that form (formlich). Now how is it possible for a man to arrive at a network of concepts filled with content? The majority of people have only arrived at pure concepts in mathematics. Most men, of course, believe that concepts arrive through abstractions. Naturally that is not at all the origin of concepts. Even thinking men are in general quite unclear as to this. When I tried to make clear the self-constructiveness of the concept in The Philosophy of Freedom I had the opportunity of experiencing something very curious. You find elucidated there, in adverse connection with Herbert Spencer, that to start from outer experience is a thoroughly unsatisfactory mode of forming the concept. (p. 55, 1932 ed.)

The concept cannot be gained from observation. That arises from the fact, that the growing human being only slowly and gradually forms the concepts conforming to the objects which surround him. The concepts are added to the observation.

A much read philosopher of the present day (Herbert Spencer) describes the spiritual process, which we carry out in connection with the observation as follows: when in walking through the fields on a September day, we hear a rustling a few steps in front of us, and at the side of the ditch from which it seems to come, we see the grass in movement, we shall probably go straight to the spot in order to learn what has produced the noise and the movement. At our approach a partridge flutters into the ditch, and therewith our curiosity is satisfied: we have what we call an explanation of the phenomenon. This explanation, be it remarked, amounts to the following: since in life we have so often experienced, that a disturbance of the quiet situation of small bodies accompanies the movement of other bodies situated between them, and as we have for this reason generalized the connections between such disturbances and such movements, we regard this special disturbance as explained as soon as we find that it is an example of this very connection! On closer inspection, the matter shows itself to be wholly different from the description given here. When I hear a noise, I first seek the concept for this observation. This concept only points one to something beyond the noise. One who does not reflect further, hears just the noise and is satisfied with that. But my reflection makes it clear to me, that I have to regard the noise as an effect. Thus it is only when I combine the concept of the effect with the perception of the noise, that I am led to go beyond the single observation and to seek for its cause. The concept of the effect calls up that of the cause, and then I seek for the object which causes it, and which I find in the form of the partridge. But these concepts, cause and effect, can never be gained through mere observation, however many cases it should embrace. The observation calls forth the thinking, and it is only this that shows me the way to link the single experience to another.

If one demands of a ‘strictly objective science’ that it should take its content from observation alone, one must demand at the same time that it should renounce all thinking. For thinking, according to its nature, transcends what is observed ...

If one would follow Spencer's line of thought, one would arrive at this, that concepts only arise through the crystallizing of the special observations out of the general.³ So long as I relate myself in regard to the noise, as Spencer describes it, I can never come to cognition at all.

Something is still requisite. A prominent philosopher of the present day, to whom I dedicated a copy of my book, wrote in the margin at the place just quoted: “the hare certainly does not do that”, and sent me the book back. But here we are of course not intending to write a philosophy of the hare. Our soul must be in a condition in which it is able to gain the network of the concepts when it is not in the position to get it from perception. The methods, even when they are the scientific methods, which one employs to form representations about the world through outer experience, all these methods cannot aid us to construct the real network of concepts in the human soul. But there must be a method, which is independent of external experience as well as clairvoyant experience, for the human soul ought in truth, as we presuppose, to be able to form concepts before it mounts up to the super-sensible. Accordingly a man has to proceed from one concept to another then he remains within the network of the concepts itself. That that takes place in the soul, makes it requisite that we presuppose a method having nothing to do with external observation or with clairvoyant experience. This movement in pure concepts one now calls, in the sense of the great philosopher Hegel, the “dialectic method”. That is the true dialectic method, where the human being lives only in concepts, and is as it were in a condition to cause one concept to germinate out of another. The man then lives in a sphere, where he takes no account of the sensible world and of that which stands behind it the super-sensible world.

We have pointed out what the soul does inasmuch as it continues mobile in the network of concepts. It begins to spin concept to concept in the sense of the dialectic method. It leads man from concept to concept. Granted that we have to begin somewhere, then we pass on from concept to concept. This must give as a result the sum of all concepts. They would constitute the sum of all concepts, which in the world-all are adapted below to the sense world and upwards to the super-sensible world as well. In the widest sense of the word one terms all these self-mobile concepts, adapted to the two worlds, “the Categories”. Whence it follows that at bottom of the whole human network of concepts is composed of the categories alone. With the same justice one might say: all concepts are categories, as one might say: all categories are concepts. One has, in truth, habitually called the weightiest, the radical concepts, the nodal points of the concepts, Categories. These more important concepts, following Aristotle, are called categories. But in the strict sense one can use the words ‘concept’ and ‘category’ interchangeably, so that we are justified in calling the sum of our self-mobile, self-producing concepts ‘theory of categories’. And Hegel's work—is really a system of categories.⁴ Hegel himself, of course, says this very thing: if one establishes the network of concepts in the whole ambit, one then has in it the ideas of the divine being before the creation of the world. Since we find the concepts in the world, they must have been originally established there. If we trace the concepts back, we discover the divine ideas, the categorical content of the world.

Today I cannot go into the historical development of the system of categories, but only show how in the main Hegel, the great master of categorical theory, has developed the system of concepts. Hegel is today perhaps the least understood philosopher. And when anything is ever said about him, it is worth but little. Wherefore people are still apt to say today, as they always said in his lifetime: he wants to develop the whole world in concepts. Even the Leipzig philosopher Krug understood him as though he wanted to construct the rose out of spiritual perceptions, as though one ought to develop it from concepts. Whereupon he received the answer, that it is not quite evident why the writing pen itself of the Leipzig philosopher should (not) be constructed of pure concepts.⁵

It is of extraordinary importance for Anthroposophists to make their way into these pure concepts. It is at the same time an important and strongly effective means of training the soul, and a means of overcoming a certain indolence and slovenliness of soul. These are effectively banished by Hegel's ‘Dialectic’. One has, you know, this unequivocal feeling of the slovenliness of the concepts in the perusal of modern books, when one has trained oneself in Hegel's system of concepts. True enough, one must have a starting point, one must begin with something; naturally, this must be the simplest concept, it must have the most diffused (geringsten) content, and the greatest ambit; that is the concept of “SEIN” (being: in existence, entity, mere subsistence). This is the concept that is applicable in the whole circumference of the world. Nothing is expressed about the kind of existence, when we speak of existence in the absolute sense. Hegel starts from the concept of SEIN. But how does one get out beyond this concept? However, in order not to remain at a standstill we must of course have a possibility of causing concept to germinate out of concept. This essential clue which we have not got we find in the very dialectical method itself, when it becomes clear that every concept contains in itself something still more than the concept itself, as, to be sure, the root contains the whole plant in itself which will yet grow out of it. It is so with the concept as well. If we look at the root with outer eyes we certainly do not see what impels the plant out of the root. In the same way there is something incorporated in the concept SEIN, which can cause the germination of a concept, and this, in truth, is the concept NICHT-SEIN (non-being, non-existence), the contrary of the first concept. The NICHTS is incorporated in the SEIN, so that here we have one concept germinate out of the other. If we would form a representation of the concept of NICHTS, that is quite as difficult as it is important. Many people, even philosophers, will say it is altogether impossible to form a concept of the NICHTS. But that is just the important thing for Anthroposophists. A time is coming when much will depend upon the fact that the concept of the NICHTS is grasped in the appropriate way. Spiritual science suffers from the fact that the concept of the NICHTS can not be grasped purely. From the Theosophy has become a theory of emanations.

Imagine yourself confronting the external reality and contemplating the world from a point of view which depends only on yourself. You contemplate, for example two men, one large and one small. You imagine something about them, a concept, which would never be conceived [about them] then unless you had met them both, the small and the large man. It is all one what you think about them, but the concept would never have been formed unless you had encountered them. You can find nothing in the primary causes, which could lead to the concept. It has emerged through the pure constellation, through the reference of things to each other. But now this concept, which has come out of the NICHTS, becomes a factor that continues active in you. The NICHTS becomes accordingly a positively real factor in the phenomena of the world, and you can never lay hold of this world phenomenon unless you have seized the NICHTS in this real significance. You would even understand the concept of Nirvana better if you had a clear concept of the NICHTS.

Now connect the two concepts “SEIN and “NICHTS” with one another; then you come to the WERDEN (becoming); a fuller concept, which prospectively contains the other two. WERDEN is a continuous transition from NICHT SEIN to SEIN. In the concept WERDEN you have [a] play [between] the two concepts SEIN & NICHTS. Starting then from the concept of WERDEN you arrive at the concept of DASEIN (existent there); it is that which next (das nachste) unites itself to the WERDEN; the stiffening of the WERDEN is the DASEIN (existential state), a condensed WERDEN. A WERDEN must precede DASEIN.

Now what [do] we get when we have developed four such concepts within us and gained them in this way? We get much from them. In the concept of WERDEN then, we are thinking of nothing else than of what we have learned as content of the concept. We must forthwith exclude everything that does not belong to the concepts. Only SEIN AND NICHTSEIN belong thereto. Wherefore a strictly trained thinker is so hard to understand. When a concept is spoken of, one ought really just as little to think in connection with [it] of something diverse from it as in the case of the concept ‘triangle’. Dialectic is a splendid schooling for thinking.

Already we have four sequent categories: SEIN, NICHTSEIN, WERDEN, DASEIN. We could then go on and cause every possible thing to germinate out of DASEIN, and we would obtain a rich DASEIN from this one line. But we can also go otherwise to work. SEIN can also be developed on the other side; this is very fruitful. The pure idea (Gedanke) of the SEIN (existence) is projected into reality in thinking.⁶ At the moment when we grasp the concept SEIN we must designate it as WESEN (Nature, essence, being, i.e. existent but not outwardly. Tr.)

The WESEN is SEIN retained within itself, the through and through self-penetrating SEIN. That will become evident upon reflection on the essential (wesentliche) and the inessential (unwesentliche) element in a thing. The WESEN is the SEIN at work within, the SEIN wholly devoting itself to the work, it is the WESEN-being. We speak of the WESEN of man when we associate his higher members with the lower and contemplate the concept of the WESEN as the concept attaching itself directly to the SEIN. From the concept of WESEN we gain the concept of ERSCHEINUNG (appearance or phenomenon), the self-manifestation outwardly, the contrary of WESEN, which has the WESEN within it; it is, namely, that which emerges. WESEN and ERSCHEINUNG are in a lie relation as SEIN to NICHTS. If we again connect WESEN and ERSCHEINUNG with each other, we get the ERSCHEINUNG that once more itself contains the WESEN. We distinguish between the outer appearance and the inner essence. But when inner WESEN overflows into ERSCHEINUNG, so that the appearance itself contains the WESEN, then we are speaking of WIRKLICHKEIT (Reality). No man trained in dialectics will express the concept REALITY otherwise than by thinking therein of APPEARANCE penetrated by WESEN. Reality is the fusion of the two concepts.

All speaking about the world must be permeated by those concepts which receive their contours through the inner texture (Gefuge), the organic edifice (Bau) of the whole world of concepts. We can still go on, ascend of even richer concepts. We could say: Wesen is the Sein which is in itself, which in itself has come to itself, which can manifest itself. If now this Sein not only manifests itself, but furthermore still extends its lines (Linien) to the environment, and is thus capable of expressing something yet different we arrive at the concept of BEGRIFF (concept) itself. We have our Wesen in us; it works (arbeitet) in us. But when we cause the concept to work in us then we have something in us that points outwards which embraces the outer world.⁷ Accordingly we can ascend from Wesen, Erscheinung, and Wirklichleit to BEGRIFF. We now have the concept in us, and we have seen in formal logic how the concept works in the conclusion. There the concept remains within itself. But now the concept can go out. Then we are speaking of a concept which gives back the nature (Natur) of the things. We there come to true OBJECTIVITY. In the contrast to the subjectively working concept, we come here to objectivity. As appearance (ERSCHEINUNG) relates itself to the WESEN, so objectivity to the concept. And one has only rightly apprehended the concept of objectivity when it has taken place in this way. If we now connect BEGRIFF—concept—and OBJECTIVITY, we come to the IDEE, the idea, which is at one and the same time objective appearance and contains the subjective within itself.

In this way the concepts grow on all sides out of the primary stem-concept, out of the SEIN. Thus there arises the transparent diamond-crystal world of concepts, with which only we should again approach the sense world. Then is exhibited how the sensible and super-sensible world coincide with the concept-dialectic, and the human being comes to that concordance of the concepts with the reality, in which really rightful cognition consists.

• 1. At the beginning the source document the following is written: “Aristotle's Categories or Classes or Conditions or States: 1. Substance,2. Quality,3. Quantity,4. Relation,5. Action,6. Passion,7. Time,8. Place,9. Situation,10. Habit”
• 2. In the source document ‘obscuring’ is placed above ‘obliteration’ as it indicate a correction, but the latter is not crossed out.
• 3. In the source document the sentence reads “…crystallising out of the special…”, ‘out’ appears to be crossed out, but this is not absolutely clear.
• 4. In the source document ‘theory’ is placed over ‘system’ so as to suggest ‘system of categories’ could also be ‘theory of categories’, also above “Hegel's work”, and under “sum of our self-mobile” is the sentence (hand-written): “the logic derived from Logos, which of course is also a concept”.
• 5. In the source document ‘not’ is inserted as a hand-written correction, but with a ‘?’ after it, so as to indicate that the corrector is not sure about this correction.
• 6. In the source document ‘projected’ (hard to read) is an alteration from ‘protracted’.
• 7. In the source document “… it works (arbeitet) in us. But when we cause the concept to work in us …” is inserted (hand-written) as a correction.

My dear friends!

It will be different for me too, and I will have to speak to you today from a different background than I have been able to do in these meetings in past years. For we are still under the impression of the passing of our beloved anthroposophical building, the Goetheanum. I do not need to emphasize again and again what that actually means. The words of the Chairman have brought this home to you today; and I am convinced that these words were spoken from the soul of each of you. It is indeed the case that an accident beyond a certain level can only be revealed in silent language, and that words are really not enough to express what has been lost for us with the Goetheanum.

In the lectures that I had to give at the General Assembly of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society and the General Assembly of the Goetheanum Association in the meantime between the two assemblies and following them, I had to talk about everything that I feel compelled to say at this time.

Much of what I have to say at this time is, of course, said precisely in view of the great stroke of fate that has affected us. It should also not be overlooked how this stroke of fate has shown that there is a great deal of shared feeling among the members of the Anthroposophical Society. But, my dear friends, what I would say came to expression in a way that was self-evident to us at the time, when we were under the immediate and momentary impression of the Goetheanum fire, was that we did not want to give up the continuity of the work of our spiritual life. That must always inspire us. And it is particularly important that we know how to act in the sense of what I said yesterday: to work from the center of our spiritual life and not to be deterred by the most painful or uplifting impressions from the outside world in this actual inner work and attitude that comes from the center. The real perspective of the anthroposophical movement depends on this. It does not depend on how many and what kind of blows of fate come from outside. These must be accepted with the attitude that arises from the anthroposophical view of life. But the question of whether the inner energy needed to work out the center of spiritual life slackens despite all strokes of fate, or despite all favorable strokes of fate, depends on what is to be achieved and can be achieved with the anthroposophical movement.

But we must always remind ourselves of what is necessary for such work, especially in these very difficult times.

I would just like to note that in a spiritual movement of the kind that anthroposophy is, if it is to find the right path, success and failure must be taken as meaningless, and that only that which arises from the inner strength and impulses of the cause itself means anything. But a great deal depends on the consciousness of those united in the Anthroposophical Society.

My dear friends, you only have to consider the following: attitudes and impulses of consciousness do not materialize overnight. We cannot say today what the successes of the impulses of consciousness and attitudes of the day before yesterday are. If you did that, you would end up in a completely different direction than anthroposophy can take. For example, if you were to take the matter in this external way, you would be able to say: We rely on our good luck. But then, if this luck is not there in the way you imagine it, you would also say: We lose our courage, our energy. I might have imagined that at the time when we were struck by the terrible misfortune, there might have been souls, even among anthroposophists, who would have said: Yes, why did the good spiritual powers not protect us in this case? Can one believe in the impact of a movement that is so abandoned by the good spirits?

Such a thought, my dear friends, is linked to appearances, not to that which comes unerringly from the inner center of the matter, through appearances alone. If we want to take it seriously that our attitudes, thoughts and, in particular, our impulses of consciousness are realities, then we must believe in them ourselves, in these impulses of consciousness, in these thoughts, in these feelings, not in the help that they can get from outside, but in their own power. Then one must be sure that what one draws from such impulses will, despite all outward appearances of failure, reach its true goal, the goal prescribed for it in the spiritual world; even if it were to be completely destroyed for the time being by external circumstances in the external world.

He who can ever entertain the belief that a spiritual idea, which is rightly willed, can be completely destroyed by anything in the external world, even if the destruction takes place in the external Maja, does not really believe in the power of spiritual impulses, in the power of spiritual energy. It must still be possible to say at the moment when everything external perishes: Success is certain for that which is willed from within. But then one may only speak of success in the sense of that which lies within the inner impulses, the thoughts, the intentions of consciousness themselves. The things that take place in the outer world usually happen in such a way that they often only become explainable after decades, or perhaps even longer. And to judge the government of the spiritual world by the current constellations, if I may say so, would be to be timid about this spiritual world. The spiritual world must give itself its strength and power. Now there is nothing within the earthly world except human minds in which this power can find a home, can be understood; not organizations, not institutions, however beautiful or ugly they may be, can in any way prove or disprove what is really willed by the spirit.

Those who seek to prove or disprove the truth or falsehood of the spiritual by outward appearances are on the wrong path, for they do not stand within the center of spiritual impulses but outside it. The innermost part of the human soul is the only thing that can be used to judge what is at issue here; external connections can never be decisive. On the other hand, however, this means that people who want to be the leaders of such a spiritual movement must strive more and more for this inner strength and develop an understanding of what it actually means to work from the inner center of a spiritual movement. It seems to me, my dear friends, that it is urgently necessary, especially at this moment, to become fully aware of how difficult this is and how it cannot be sufficiently fulfilled by what is often expressed by saying, “I have the anthroposophical attitude, I have the anthroposophical will.” It cannot be satisfied by that in any way.

And here I would like to mention a word that I have often spoken, often spoken since the Goetheanum fire, and which I would like to see really understood; I have often said it: The first Goetheanum, the form of the first Goetheanum, this home of anthroposophy, as a building, as it stood there, cannot be rebuilt.

You see, my dear friends, when such a word, which is meant in the spirit, is spoken, it must be felt as a reality, one must make the assumption that one can look at it from the most diverse sides, as one can look at realities from the most diverse sides, that one can often only gain the right perspective for such a word from a certain starting point. For such a word was spoken initially out of spiritual obligation. And at the moment when the word is spoken out of spiritual obligation, there is absolutely no need to carry around on one's physical hands all the reasons, the so-called reasons, for such a word.

Today, at this hour, it is less incumbent upon me to speak of the external circumstances, but I would like to speak today particularly about something that is connected with the inner impulse of this word: the first Goetheanum cannot be rebuilt. And please allow me to speak of it with all seriousness; because only this seriousness towards the task of reconstruction can give the friends the right attitude.

You see, we can report an external fact today. This external fact is that the legal investigations that followed the Goetheanum fire have now been concluded; one can say that they have been concluded so that the authorities have now been able to decide to pay us the sum insured of three million and some hundred thousand francs. The payment has been made. These three million are there; and this fact can be recorded for the time being today. So, since June 15, we have had these three million.

Now, my dear friends, it could turn out that souls would breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that we now have these three million for the construction and at most have to raise another three million through the willingness of our friends to make sacrifices. One could characterize the fact in this way. One could now record this June 15 as an extraordinarily joyful event in the development of the anthroposophical movement.

My dear friends, it is not. And if I am to shed light on the matter for you today from a perspective that is wholly in keeping with anthroposophical life, then I must speak differently. For me, for example, this fact, which may be described as extraordinarily joyful by some and extraordinarily sad by others, is extraordinarily painful. And one of the feelings of suffering that I have had since the Goetheanum fire is that I have had to say to myself: what has happened now must be brought about, must be brought about in the best and most energetic way, must happen of necessity; but something must be brought about that actually has nothing to do with the center of the anthroposophical movement, that lies completely outside the center work of this movement.

You see, my dear friends, the saying: The first Goetheanum cannot be rebuilt, has not only an aesthetic, not only an opportunistic, not only an external-historical background, but also an anthroposophical-moral one. And it is this anthroposophical-moral background that I would like to talk about today.

Let us look back to 1913, 1914, and ask ourselves: what were the reasons behind the decision to build the Goetheanum and to start this construction project? What was pursued at that time and in the period leading up to December 31, 1922, or January 1, 1923, was based on the fact that every single franc that was invested in the Goetheanum flowed from the willingness to make sacrifices of those who, in some way, professed their belief in the anthroposophical movement. The Goetheanum was built entirely out of inner understanding. Every franc flowed out of inner understanding for the cause.

My dear friends, the following is truth, is real truth, because reality coincides with the inner core of the matter: at the moment the last lecture was given at the Goetheanum, we had a home for anthroposophy that had been built with the sacrificial pennies and sacrificial cents of those who were wholeheartedly committed to the cause. From the hill in Dornach, the building shimmered, having incorporated anthroposophical will and anthroposophical willingness to sacrifice into every cubic centimeter of wood and stone. This moral substance was built into the first Goetheanum.

My dear friends, now we will begin to build with three million francs, many of which come from the pockets of those who not only have no inner interest in the Goetheanum, but have an interest in this Goetheanum not being there. And when the Goetheanum again shimmers down from the hill of Dornach, it will not only be built with anthroposophical willingness to make sacrifices, but also with what is common outside of anthroposophy in the structure of the present world.

Then, my dear friends, there will be a very different structure, seen from the inner spiritual point of view. There will most certainly be people who will not only not accompany with any deep sympathy, but perhaps even with a kind of curse, what, according to the social context that now exists, comes out of their pockets and is built into the Goetheanum.

I have often said that within a movement such as anthroposophy's, it is a matter of being awake, not sleeping. What I have told you now is not said in a sleeping state, but in a waking one. For us, words such as “blessing of a thing”, “connection of blessing with beautiful qualities of the human mind” must not be a mere phrase; for us they must be a fact. And so the first Goetheanum was built with the inner feeling that we were doing something that, from its right causes, takes the path forward in such a way that this path is the path of the causes themselves. Now we are building the Goetheanum in a tragic direction, my dear friends. A tragically built Goetheanum is different from the Goetheanum that we were able to tackle in 1913, 1914.

You see, my dear friends, anthroposophy is often criticized for being too intellectual. No, it leads through what lies in its real impulses to the deeper feelings of humanity. In 1913, one could begin building with a joyful heart; today, when one begins, it is almost inevitable that one begins in tears. I am giving you just such a description, which comes from the inner center of spiritual thinking; and such thinking differs quite essentially from thinking that takes its impulses from external facts. Thinking that is linked to external facts would probably not express the words I have just spoken; instead, it would be excitedly joyful that June 15 brought us the three million.

My dear friends, I have often spoken, perhaps unjustifiably in the eyes of many of you, about the fact that there is an inner opposition within the Anthroposophical Society to what I sometimes have to represent from the center of anthroposophy; today I do not want to characterize this opposition again; but I would just like to ask the question: Has the feeling that I have just expressed been present everywhere in the course of the last few months, since the Goetheanum fire? If another feeling has been present, it has been an example of inner opposition. It was a feeling that should no longer have been reckoned with, after the anthroposophical movement has gone through the three periods of its existence.

When we stood here on the hill in Dornach, bowed down with grief on the first day after the fire, while the flames were still licking outside, many anthroposophists gathered around the still burning building. One or another said something. In the end, it really did not matter to me what anyone said, because the content of the words is only a symptom for the actual spiritual background; but I would like to say that what was said on that first day after the outbreak of the terrible disaster differed in two respects. Anthroposophists spoke the word, for example: Now we no longer have the Goetheanum, now we want to build it in our hearts. It was an elementary feeling that already had something to do with the center of the movement. But there were other voices that spoke like this: The Goetheanum is insured; will it be possible to rebuild it with the insurance money?

My dear friends, I do not want to lead you into impracticality in any area of life. I have nothing against these things being considered as practically as possible. But it depends on the intentions. It depends on whether one recognizes the difference between what was there before and what will necessarily have to be built now. For no one should say, in the anthroposophical field, that it does not matter what the intentions are, as long as the Goetheanum is rebuilt. Attitudes and thought impulses, especially impulses of consciousness, do not work overnight, but move in the currents of the spiritual world and must not be judged by mere external facts, which are only symptoms for them, not an immediate reality.

Now, in everything that had to be done after the fire – please forgive me for mentioning this too – I tried, as far as it was possible under the influence of the necessary facts, to shape our actions from the center of the matter. Therefore, I calmed the friends who, in the first few days, saw it as the most necessary thing to use all possible means to protect our interests – for example, during the negotiations with the insurance company. I tried as far as possible to remove from our actions everything that did not come from the core of the anthroposophical movement itself.

My dear friends, must we not think that we have to learn to take our affairs into our own hands, that we have to learn not to proceed as we would on unanthroposophical ground? It was certainly not to impose more work on myself that I tried to conduct all negotiations in such a way that they were conducted by us on our own side.

I knew that I was taking on a responsibility towards our friends. Because if the outcome of June 15 had been worse, people would naturally have said: If you had taken the right lawyers at the time, things would have been different. But such responsibilities have to be taken on when it comes to the higher duties arising from the center of anthroposophical work. They have to be taken seriously. And they are no longer taken seriously if one does not, as far as possible, remain within the designated center in specific cases. One immediately describes one's powerlessness when one declares oneself unable to deal with matters that are one's own, from the center of anthroposophical impulses. Of course, we can never set out today to do what should actually be done, I would say, as the most radical thing: to use the three million for some charitable purpose, and to build the Goetheanum again only out of the sacrificial willingness of the friends.

My dear friends, as I said, do not regard me as a person who wants to tempt you not to be practical. But my concern now is not just to focus on the external deeds; my concern is to utter the words that should shape our thinking, to utter them quite openly. If we make them shape our thinking, then they will also, in the nobler sense, have the right results.

Those who say, “So we have to use the three million for charitable purposes and have to wait until the building can be rebuilt out of a willingness to make sacrifices,” would of course be wrong now. They would again be confusing what must be done with what suits their selfish, ambitious intentions. The energy and strength do not lie in choosing the easiest path, even if the easiest path can be described as extraordinarily moral in an egoistic sense; but the energy lies in the fact that, even if the path has to be a tragic one, one plunges, if I may say so, into the tragedy. But this must not be done unconsciously; one must plunge into the tragedy consciously and know that one is in a realm in which one cannot do what is purely anthroposophical; one must know that one must do what one has to do, despite the fact that it is not anthroposophical, but must balance it out with an all the stronger anthroposophical element. When you weigh something, you don't take away from the pan on the side where the weights are too heavy for the other side; you add to the other side.

We will need that. We will have to create the counterweights through an even stronger anthroposophical approach to counteract what we are tragically being led into, as something that, for the most part, perhaps for half of it, must happen un-anthroposophically. I can say that it would perhaps have been easiest for me to say: I will only lend a hand in building the Goetheanum if the three million insurance money is used for charitable purposes and the building fund is created entirely through donations. It would have been easier because it would have caused less pain. But we must not shy away from pain, my dear friends, if we want to work in the realm of reality. But neither should we want to ignore the pain. We should not just keep telling ourselves: we are doing what is most beautiful, what is best. We cannot do that in the earthly world, least of all in the present. Therefore, we should not let our heads sink and say: then I will lose heart altogether. When the gods sometimes seem to fade away, as if they were not there, as if humanity had been abandoned by them, the wisdom of the gods consists in people receiving impulses to seek them out even more in the places where they have hidden, but not to complain about their disappearance and inaction. Wanting the earth only as a soft resting place and only finding it divine when it presents itself in such a way that it always corresponds to what one would like, can never form the attitude of a spiritual movement, because that is not strength, that is powerlessness. And we will not perform the Goetheanum, which is colorfully tragic, out of powerlessness, but only with the development of strength, with the awareness that where the gods seem to have withdrawn, they must be sought all the more by us in their place, where they seem to be hidden.

My dear friends, I wanted to develop thoughts of encouragement. And since it is quite difficult to speak between the lines, today I have added some things to the lines themselves, I would say with a certain clarity. But what I have added to these lines is really necessary if we want to develop the right attitude in the near future for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum and also for other things. It would not help at all to lull ourselves into this or that illusion; but it helps solely and exclusively to face ourselves without a veil with the eyes of truth, in this case the inner truth that flows from the moral side of anthroposophy.

If that can happen, then what should actually happen would happen: that the Anthroposophical Society, in the midst of today's world events, would be a place where people do not indulge in the illusions in which everyone lives today. Because for much of what is happening in the present, you can expose the illusions. Since 1914, people have been living with a certain relish in illusions because they do not have the inner courage to admit the truths. If the Anthroposophical Society, the association of the Goetheanum, could develop awakening soul power in the midst of a world full of illusions, then, my dear friends, the tragic situation in which we now find ourselves, and about which we should not be under any illusion, would be counterbalanced as it is in every real tragedy.

Study the tragedians of all times. You will see that the tragedy consists in the fact that everything external seems to collapse and that only within oneself is the strength to lead beyond the catastrophe. When this occurs in art, some people like to look at it, although today there are not many, because tragedies are no longer very popular. But if it is to happen in reality, then things must happen as I have characterized them. Then something must happen that makes the Anthroposophical Society, the Goetheanum Association, stand out in its inner spiritual attitude like an island formation within a world based on illusions. Then what is a real power can radiate into the world based on illusions.

My dear friends, if we take the words in the right way that I had to speak to you, then there will be much intention, much endeavor, much striving for a different state than the one we are in, in our feeling. Then we will not be blinded by much satisfaction, especially not much self-satisfaction. We will banish from us the thoughts of satisfaction and self-satisfaction and awaken in us those thoughts that can arise from a purely spiritual view of things. Then we will have right thoughts of building up out of the spirit.

My dear friends, it was in all seriousness, but also, I believe, with complete objectivity, that I wanted to speak to you today. And I thank the board of the Goetheanum Association for giving me the opportunity to speak these words at this event about what is so closely linked to the fate of the Goetheanum, the past and the possibly coming Goetheanum.

To-day I would like first to remind you how events which take place behind the veil of appearance, outside the physical, sense-perceptible world, can be described in pictorial terms. One has to speak in this way of these events, but the pictures correspond throughout with reality.

With regard to sense-perceptible events, we are living in a time of hard tests for humanity, and these tests will become harder still. Many old forms of civilisation, to which people still mistakenly cling, will sink into the abyss, and there will be an insistent demand that man must find his way to something new. In speaking of the course that the external life of humanity will take in the early future, we cannot—as I have often said—arouse any kind of optimistic hopes. But a valid judgment as to the significance of external events cannot be formed unless we consider also the determining, directing cosmic events which occur behind the veil of the senses.

When a man looks out attentively with his physical eyes and his other senses at his surroundings, he perceives the physical environment of the earth, and the various kingdoms of nature within it. This is the milieu in which comes to pass all that manifests as wind and weather in the course of the year. When we direct our senses towards the external world, we have all this before us: these are the external facts. But behind the atmosphere, the sun-illumined atmosphere, there lies another world, perceptible by spiritual organs, as we may call them. Compared with the sense-world, this other world is a higher world, a world wherein a kind of light, a kind of spiritual light or astral light, spiritual existence and spiritual deeds shine out and run their course. And they are in truth no less significant for the whole development of the world and of man than the historical events in the external environment of the earth and on its surface.

If anyone to-day is able to penetrate into these astral realms, wandering through them as one may wander among woods and mountains and find signposts at cross roads, he may find “signposts” there in the astral light, inscribed in spiritual script. But these signposts have a quite special characteristic: they are not comprehensible without further explanation, even for someone who can “read” in the astral light. In the spiritual world and in its communications, things are not made as convenient as possible: anything one encounters there presents itself as a riddle to be solved. Only through inner investigation, through experiencing inwardly the riddle and much else, can one discover what the inscription on a spiritual signpost signifies.

And so at this time—indeed for some decades now, but particularly at this time of hard trials for mankind—one can read in the astral light, as one goes about spiritually in these realms, a remarkable saying. It sounds like a prosaic comparison, but in this case, because of its inner significance, the prosaic does not remain prosaic. Just as we find notices to help us find our way—and we find signposts even in poetical landscapes—so we encounter an important spiritual signpost in the astral light. Time and time again, exactly repeated, we find there to-day the following saying, inscribed in highly significant spiritual script:

O Man,
You mould it to your service,
You reveal it according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

Injunctions of this kind, pointing to facts significant for man, are inscribed, as I have said, in the astral light, presenting themselves first as a kind of riddle to be solved, so that men may bring their soul-forces into activity.

Now, during our days here, we will contribute something to the solving of this saying—really a simple saying, but important for mankind to-day.

Let us recall how in many of our studies here the course of the year has been brought before our souls. A man first observes it quite externally: when spring comes he sees nature sprouting and budding; he sees how the plants grow and come to flower, how life everywhere springs up out of the soil. All this is enhanced as summer draws on; in summer it rises to its highest level. And then, when autumn comes, it withers and fades away; and when winter comes it dies into the lap of the earth.

This cycle of the year—which in earlier times, when a more instinctive consciousness prevailed, was celebrated with festivals—has another side, also mentioned here. During winter the earth is united with the elemental spirits. They withdraw into the interior of the earth and live there among the plant-roots that are preparing for new growth, and among the other nature-beings who spend the winter there. Then, when spring comes, the earth breathes out, as it were, its elemental being. The elemental spirits rise up as though from a tomb and ascend into the atmosphere. During winter they accepted the inner order of the earth, but now, as spring advances and especially when summer comes on, they receive more and more into their being and activity the order which is imposed upon them by the stars and the movements of the stars. When high summer has come, then out there in the periphery of the earth there is a surging of life among the elemental beings who had spent the winter in quiet and silence under the earth's mantle of snow. In the swirling and whirling of their dance they are governed by the reciprocal laws of planetary movement, by the pattern of the fixed stars, and so on. When autumn comes, they turn towards the earth. As they approach the earth, they become subject more and more to the laws of earth, so that in winter they may be breathed in again by the earth, once more to rest there in quietude.

Anyone who can thus experience the cycle of the year feels that his whole human life is wonderfully enriched. To-day—and it has been so for some time past—a man normally experiences, and then but dimly, half-consciously, only the physical-etheric processes of the body which occur within his skin. He experiences his breathing, the circulation of his blood. Everything that takes its course outside, in wind and weather, during the year; all that lives in the sprouting of the seed-forces, the fruiting of the earth-forces—all this is no less significant and decisive for the whole life of man, even though he is not conscious of it, than the breathing and blood-circulation which go on inside his skin.

When the sun rises over any region of the earth, we share in the effects of its warmth and light. But when a man accepts Anthroposophy in the right sense, not reading it like a sensational novel but so that what it imparts becomes the content of his mind, then he gradually educates his heart and soul to experience all that goes on outside in the course of the year. Just as in the course of a day we experience early freshness, readiness for work in the morning, then the onset of hunger and of evening weariness, and just as we can trace the inner life and activity of the forces and substances within our skin, so, by taking to heart anthroposophical ideas—entirely different from the usual descriptions of sense-perceptible events—we can prepare our souls to become receptive to the activities that go on outside in the course of the year. We can deepen more and more this sympathetic participation in the cycle of the year, and we can enrich it so that we do not live sourly—one might say—within our skin, letting the outer world pass us by. On the contrary, we can enrich our experience so that we feel ourselves living in the blossoming of every flower, in the breaking open of the buds, in that wonderful secret of the morning, the glistening of dew-drops in the rays of the sun. In these ways we can get beyond that dull, conventional way of reacting to the outer world merely by putting on our overcoat in winter and lighter clothes in summer and taking an umbrella when it rains. When we go out from ourselves and experience the interweaving activities, the flow and ebb, of nature—only then do we really understand the cycle of the year.

Then, when spring passes over the earth and summer is drawing near, a man will be in the midst of it with his heart and soul; he will discern how the sprouting and budding life of nature unfolds, how the elemental spirits fly and whirl in a pattern laid down for them by planetary movements. And then, in the time of high summer, he will go out of himself to share in the life of the cosmos. Certainly this damps down his own inner life, but at the same time his summer experience leads him out—in a cosmic waking-sleep, one might say—to enter into the doings of the planets.

To-day, generally speaking, people feel they can enter into the life of nature only in the season of growth—of germination and budding, flowering and fruiting. Even if they cannot fully experience all this, they have more sympathy and perception for it than they have for the autumn season of fading and dying away. But in truth we earn the right to enter into the season of spring growth only if we can enter also into the time when summer wanes and autumn draws on; the season of sinking down and dying that comes with winter. And if during high summer we rise inwardly, in a cosmic waking-sleep, with the elemental beings to the region where planetary activity in the outer world can be inwardly experienced, then we ought equally to sink ourselves down under the frost and snow-mantle of winter, so that we enter into the secrets of the womb of the earth during mid-winter; and we ought to participate in the fading and dying-off of nature when autumn begins.

If, however, we are to participate in this waning of nature, just as we do in nature's growing time, we can do so only if in a certain sense we are able to experience the dying away of nature in our own inner being. For if a man becomes more sensitive to the secret workings of nature, and thus participates actively in nature's germinating and fruiting, it follows that he will livingly experience also the effects of autumn in the outer world. But it would be comfortless for man if he could experience this only in the form it takes in nature; if he were to come only to a nature-consciousness concerning the secrets of autumn and winter, as he readily does concerning the secrets of spring and summer. When the events of autumn and winter draw on, when Michaelmas comes, he certainly must enter sensitively into the processes of fading and dying; but he must not, as he does in summer, give himself over to a nature-consciousness. On the contrary, he must then devote himself to self-consciousness. In the time when external nature is dying, he must oppose nature-consciousness with the force of self-consciousness.

And then the form of Michael stands before us again. If, under the impulse of Anthroposophy, a man enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakes in himself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before him, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near. This will come about if man can experience not only an inward spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a forcible Imagination, summoning man to inner activity.

For a man who out of present-day spiritual knowledge wrestles his way through to an experience of this picture, it expresses something very powerful. For when, after St. John's tide, July, August and September draw on, he will come to realise how he has been living through a waking-sleep of inner planetary experience in company with the earth's elemental beings, and he will become aware of what this really signifies.

It signifies an inner process of combustion, but we must not picture it as being like external combustion. All the processes which take a definite form in the outer world go on also within the human organism, but in a different guise. And so it is a fact that these inner processes reflect the changing course of the year.

The inner process which occurs during high summer is a permeation of the organism by that which is represented crudely in the material world as sulphur. When a man lives with the summer sun and its effects, he experiences a sulphurising process in his physical-etheric being. The sulphur that he carries within him as a useful substance has a special importance for him in high summer, quite different from its importance at other seasons. It becomes a kind of combustion process. It is natural for man that the sulphur within him should thus rise at midsummer to a specially enhanced condition. Material substances in different beings have secrets not dreamt of by materialistic science.

Everything physical-etheric in man is thus glowed through at midsummer with inward sulphur-fire, to use Jacob Boehm's expression. It is a gentle, intimate process, not perceptible by ordinary consciousness, but—as is generally true of other such processes—it has a tremendous, decisive significance for events in the cosmos.

This sulphurising process in human bodies at midsummer, although it is so mild and gentle and imperceptible to man himself, has very great importance for the evolution of the cosmos. A great deal happens out there in the cosmos when in summer human beings shine inwardly with the sulphur-process. It is not only the physically visible glow-worms (Johannis Käferchen) which shine out around St. John's Day. Seen from other planets, the inner being of man then begins to shine, becoming visible as a being of light to the etheric eyes of other planetary beings. That is the sulphurising process. At the height of summer human beings begin to shine out into cosmic space as brightly for other planetary beings as glow-worms shine with their own light in the meadows at St. John's time.

From the standpoint of the cosmos this is a majestically beautiful sight, for it is in glorious astral light that human beings shine out into the cosmos during high summer, but at the same time it gives occasion for the Ahrimanic power to draw near to man. For this power is very closely related to the sulphurising process in the human organism. We can see how, on the one hand, man shines out into the cosmos in the St. John's light, and on the other how the dragon-like serpent-form of Ahriman winds its way among the human beings shining in the astral light and tries to ensnare and embrace them, to draw them down into the realm of half-conscious sleep and dreams. Then, caught in this web of illusion, they would become world-dreamers, and in this condition they would be a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. All this has significance for the cosmos also.

And when in high summer, from a particular constellation, meteors fall in great showers of cosmic iron, then this cosmic iron, which carries an enormously powerful healing force, is the weapon which the gods bring to bear against Ahriman, as dragon-like he tries to coil round the shining forms of men. The force which falls on the earth in the meteoric iron is indeed a cosmic force whereby the higher gods endeavour to gain a victory over the Ahrimanic powers, when autumn comes on. And this majestic display in cosmic space, when the August meteor showers stream down into the human shining in the astral light, has its counterpart—so gentle and apparently so small—in a change that occurs in the human blood. This human blood, which is in truth not such a material thing as present-day science imagines, but is permeated throughout by impulses from soul and spirit, is rayed through by the force which is carried as iron into the blood and wages war there on anxiety, fear and hate. The processes which are set going in every blood-corpuscle when the force of iron shoots into it are the same, on a minute human scale, as those which take place when meteors fall in a shining stream through the air. This permeation of human blood by the anxiety-dispelling force of iron is a meteoric activity. The effect of the raying in of the iron is to drive fear and anxiety out of the blood.

And so, as the gods with their meteors wage war on the spirit who would like to radiate fear over all the earth through his coiling serpent-form, and while they cause iron to stream radiantly into this fear-tainted atmosphere, which reaches its peak when autumn approaches or when summer wanes—so the same process occurs inwardly in man, when his blood is permeated with iron. We can understand these things only if we understand their inner spiritual significance on the one hand, and if on the other we recognise how the sulphur-process and the iron-process in man are connected with corresponding events in the cosmos.

A man who looks out into space and sees a shooting-star should say to himself, with reverence for the gods: “That occurrence in the great expanse of space has its minute counterpart continuously in myself. There are the shooting-stars, while in every one of my blood-corpuscles iron is taking form: my life is full of shooting-stars, miniature shooting-stars.” And this inner fall of shooting-stars, pointing to the life of the blood, is especially important when autumn approaches, when the sulphur-process is at its peak. For when men are shining like glow-worms in the way I have described, then the counter-force is present also, for millions of tiny meteors are scintillating inwardly in their blood.

This is the connection between the inner man and the universe. And then we can see how, especially when autumn is approaching, there is a great raying-out of sulphur from the nerve-system towards the brain. The whole man can then be seen as a sulphur-illuminated phantom, so to speak.

But raying into this bluish-yellow sulphur atmosphere come the meteor swarms from the blood. That is the other phantom. While the sulphur-phantom rises in clouds from the lower part of man towards his head, the iron-forming process rays out from his head and pours itself like a stream of meteors into the life of the blood.

Such is man, when Michaelmas draws near. And he must learn to make conscious use of the meteoric-force in his blood. He must learn to keep the Michael Festival by making it a festival for the conquest of anxiety and fear; a festival of inner strength and initiative; a festival for the commemoration of selfless self-consciousness.

Just as at Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Redeemer, and at Easter the death and resurrection of the Redeemer, and as at St. John's Tide we celebrate the outpouring of human souls into cosmic space, so at Michaelmas—if the Michael Festival is to be rightly understood—we must celebrate that which lives spiritually in the sulphurising and meteorising process in man, and should stand before human consciousness in its whole soul-spiritual significance especially at Michaelmas. Then a man can say to himself: “You will become lord of this process, which otherwise takes its natural course outside your consciousness, if—just as you bow thankfully before the birth of the Redeemer at Christmas and experience Easter with deep inner response—you learn to experience how at this autumn festival of Michael there should grow in you everything that goes against love of ease, against anxiety, and makes for the unfolding of inner initiative and free, strong, courageous will.” The Festival of strong will—that is how we should conceive of the Michael Festival. If that is done, if nature-knowledge is true, spiritual human self-consciousness, then the Michael Festival will shine out in its true colours.

But before mankind can think of celebrating the Michael Festival, there will have to be a renewal in human souls. It is the renewal of the whole soul-disposition of men that should be celebrated at the Michael Festival—not as an outward or conventional ceremony, but as a festival which renews the whole inner man.

Then, out of all I have described, the majestic image of Michael and the Dragon will arise once more. But this picture of Michael and the Dragon paints itself out of the cosmos. The Dragon paints himself for us, forming his body out of bluish-yellow sulphur streams. We see the Dragon shaping himself in shimmering clouds of radiance out of the sulphur-vapours; and over the Dragon rises the figure of Michael, Michael with his sword.

But we shall picture this rightly only if we see the space where Michael displays his power and his lordship over the dragon as filled not with indifferent clouds but with showers of meteoric iron. These showers take form from the power that streams out from Michael's heart; they are welded together into the sword of Michael, who overcomes the Dragon with his sword of meteoric iron.

If we understand what is going on in the universe and in man, then the cosmos itself will paint from out of its own forces. Then one does not lay on this or that colour according to human ideas, but one paints, in harmony with divine powers, the world which expresses their being, the whole being of Michael and the Dragon, as it can hover before one. A renewal of the old pictures comes about if one can paint out of direct contemplation of the cosmos. Then the pictures will show what is really there, and not what fanciful individuals may somehow portray in pictures of Michael and the Dragon.

Then men will come to understand these things, and to reflect on them with understanding, and they will bring mind and feeling and will to meet the autumn in the course of the year. Then at the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will stand there to act as a powerful summons, a powerful spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. And then we shall understand how this impulse points symbolically to something in which the whole destiny—perhaps indeed the tragedy—of our epoch is being played out.

During the last three or four centuries we have developed a magnificent natural science and a far-reaching technology, based on the most widely-distributed material to be found on earth. We have learnt to make out of iron nearly all the most essential and important things produced by mankind in a materialistic age. In our locomotives, our factories, on all sides we see how we have built up this whole material civilisation on iron, or on steel, which is only iron transformed. And all the uses to which iron is put are a symbolic indication of how we have built our whole life and outlook out of matter and want to go on doing so. But that is a downward-leading path. Man can rescue himself from its impending dangers only if he starts to spiritualise life in this very domain, if he penetrates through his environment to the spiritual; if he turns from the iron which is used for making engines and looks up again to the meteoric iron which showers down from the cosmos to the earth and is the outer material from which the power of Michael is forged. Men must come to see the great significance of the following words: “Here on earth, in this epoch of materialism, you have made use of iron, in accordance with the insight gained from your observation of matter. Now, just as you must transform your vision of matter through the development of natural science into Spiritual Science, so must you rise from your former idea of iron to a perception of meteoric iron, the iron of Michael's sword. Then healing will come from what you can make of it.” This is the content of the aphorism:

O Man,
You mould it (iron) to your service,
You reveal it (iron) according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

That is, the lofty power of Michael, with the sword he has welded together in cosmic space out of meteoric iron. Healing will come when our material civilisation proves capable of spiritualising the power of iron into the power of Michael-iron, which gives man self-consciousness in place of mere nature-consciousness.

You have seen that precisely the most important demand of our time, the Michael-demand, is implicit in this aphorism, this script that reveals itself in the astral light.

[Following the lecture Rudolf Steiner gave a Brief Report on the Vienna Conference. See GA 259]

Perhaps it would be good today to reflect on spiritual-scientific questions that could serve one or the other when it comes to defending spiritual science externally. For precisely when we meet for the first time in a place where, so to speak, a kind of beginning or starting point of the spiritual-scientific movement is to be considered, it is quite good to bring to mind some of the moral questions that often arise for us, , especially when we ourselves are already working in this or that branch and then stand before people who come to us without any knowledge of spiritual science and want to know something that could perhaps lead them to a conviction or at least to an attitude towards spiritual science.

In this case, spiritual science must refer to transcendental, spiritual experience. And just as the message of the spiritual scientific world view is brought to us today, it is a narrative, a narrative of what the spiritual researcher — by making his soul an instrument to research in the spiritual world — can reveal and which has the same certainty for him as the fact that roses or tables and chairs exist for our external perception, that is, an immediate certainty of perception.

But what does that matter to us, who do not have such direct certitude of vision? the others might ask. For us it can only lead to our believing what the spiritual researcher says. Now I have always emphasized that this is not the case. It is true that the things of the higher world can only be known by penetrating into them; but if they are then only logically presented, it is such that everyone can grasp them if he applies his reason in the right way, so that he can say to himself: 'Everything that is said here agrees more with the facts than anything that is said by another philosophy'. We can therefore calmly apply our reason and find that from the logic that underlies things, the matter can already be grasped. It is not so easy, but it does come about that even the non-seeing person can form a well-founded conviction.

Of course, what can be said to outsiders will not be enough for the actual proofs. But if we take certain things that anyone can know and compare them with what the spiritual researcher says, then we can basically get quite far. Let us take just one very elementary spiritual truth: the truth that a person consists of four parts: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and that which we call the I. Of these four members, the outer world only knows the physical body, and of course everyone is free to deny that there is such a thing as an ether body or an astral body or the I.

One can say: Everyone speaks of the ego; but it is still refuted. The ego is like a kind of flame that is consumed by the fuel of the physical body like a wick. — This is how they wanted to refute the philosopher Bergson, who refers to the persistence of the ego.

But we can see how the ego survives individual perceptions. Every day shows this, since every night the ego is extinguished and cannot be experienced as something that continues uninterruptedly.

One could accept that these supersensible elements can be denied; but there is one thing that a person cannot deny, namely, that he perceives three kinds of inner experiences within himself. One is that he experiences representations in his soul. For everyone knows that when he looks at an object and then turns around and still has the impression of it, he has experienced a representation. The second thing that a person experiences, and which he must distinguish from his perceptions, are the emotions: pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, sympathy and antipathy. And there is a third thing that a person cannot deny: that he has impulses of will.

Let us take the world of imagination: a person can form an idea by letting the world of perceptions take effect on him. He can also form ideas by reading a novel, because a person also has ideas when he reads something. You all know that a person sometimes has it hard and sometimes not so hard in terms of his ideas. The images that a person instinctively likes to indulge in have a different effect than those that they indulge in with distaste or that cause them difficulties. You all know that a difficult calculation has a different effect on the way you think than a novel does. We notice that we become tired from the life of images when it takes effort on our part. This can be all the less doubted since it is a means to fall asleep more easily. It is not necessarily images that particularly irritate us, nor those that worry us, but rather those that are difficult for us. In any case, every person can experience this in themselves: falling asleep relatively easily when they immerse themselves in a world of images before falling asleep, bound by a sense of duty.

Let us now take the emotions. Lust and sorrow, joy and pain, worry, grief and the like are something that can, under certain circumstances, cause us external difficulties at such moments. A person who is severely affected by his emotions will find it difficult to fall asleep. Even joyful experiences will prevent him from falling asleep peacefully.

If you pay attention to such things, you will soon notice that emotions are a greater hindrance than perceptions when going to sleep, and especially emotions that are related to the most intense interests of the ego. If a person is anticipating a particular event, they often won't sleep for weeks. Just try it: an event that is bound to occur with a certain degree of certainty, for example the appearance of a comet – if you are not an astronomer who has an ego interest in it – will keep you awake quite well. Not the astronomer, because he has calculated and is waiting anxiously to see if his calculation is correct.

Now we can look at these emotions from another perspective. We can, in a certain respect, associate sleep with the clairvoyant side of a person. The state of sleep is such that the person is unconscious. Clairvoyance is only: sleep permeated by spiritual light, conscious sleep, if we may define it in this way. It should therefore be favorable for clairvoyant states when one is free of all emotional upheaval, and unfavorable when one is filled with it. This can be confirmed by many things that can also be known externally, for example, in the case of Nostradamus, who in the 16th century was an important clairvoyant of the kind that he had prophetic clairvoyance, so that even pure historians cannot doubt that events that he brought into verse were fulfilled and that, when compared, show that he made quite wonderful statements. Even the historian Kemmerich has recognized this because it cannot be denied. Kemmerich himself says that he had set himself completely different tasks: he only wanted to provide evidence that health conditions for humans have improved since the 16th century. And then he came to deal with Nostradamus.

When we follow Nostradamus, it is interesting to consider his life circumstances. He was a person who possessed such clairvoyant powers that were based on disposition, so that they were found in the whole family. But in his case they came up in a special way because he was a devoted, wonderful doctor. He did great things, especially during a plague epidemic in Provence. But then it was said that he was a secret Calvinist. This harmed him so much that he had no choice but to give up his medical practice. You have to understand what that means! The powers are in the personality after all! Physicists find that when forces dissolve in nature somewhere, they are utilized elsewhere. - Only in spiritual areas, people do not want to know anything about it. If a person develops such powers in his profession, then such beneficially developed as this as a doctor, so must such forces, which are released, manifest themselves elsewhere. And they all turned into clairvoyant powers in Nostradamus, because he had a certain original clairvoyance, as did Paracelsus.

Now, look: Nostradamus describes quite nicely how he came to foresee future events. He had a laboratory. But it was not a laboratory like chemists have. It was a room, a room next to his apartment, with a glass roof. From there he observed the course of the stars, letting the transformation of the constellations affect his soul. And then the things came to him that he could say about the future. It arose as an intuition. It leaped out of his mind. But in order for such things to come to him, he had to be completely free of worry and care and agitation of mind. There we have an example of how, in clairvoyance, just as in healthy sleep, there must be an absence of agitation of mind.

Now let us go further and inquire about the connection between a person and their will impulses, insofar as these will impulses have a connection with the moral. Let us again consider the moment of falling asleep. This is an important moment for a person, because, as spiritual science tells us, this is when they pass over into the astral world.

Let us consider the moral impulses in this moment of falling asleep. In order to observe these, one must pay great attention to such processes. Those people who are so careful make the following experience: So the moment of falling asleep approaches. While before the eye had seen clearly, now the outlines of the objects become more and more indefinite. Something like fog covers them. It is as if the person feels cut off from their surroundings. There is also a change in the physical body in relation to a certain something: one can no longer move the limbs. They can no longer follow a force that they used to follow. Furthermore, the person notices that they feel as if certain things, which must be described as impulses of the will, are being brought to mind all by themselves. The things he has made appear before him as a unity, things he has made in such a way that he does not have to reproach himself. And he feels an immense bliss over everything he has done well. Through good spirits, people are protected from the bad things appearing before their soul. Of course, feeling bliss over the good that has been done cannot occur if no good has been done. But then, people are generally not so bad as to do nothing good.

The person who is paying attention senses how something arises like a thought that remains dark and yet distinct before the soul: Oh, if only this moment could be held on to, oh, if only it could always remain like this! Then a jolt occurs and consciousness is gone.

While good impulses evoke bliss and promote falling asleep, bad impulses hinder it even more than emotions. A person falls asleep with great difficulty over pangs of conscience. Under certain circumstances, will impulses are an even worse hindrance than emotions to enter the spiritual world into which we are to enter. The life of imagination makes it relatively easy, the emotions are already more difficult, and remorse about actions for which we can reproach ourselves is the least likely to let us enter the spiritual world.

Usually, the images, that is, our images, keep watch; as we let the images of the day pass before us, we usually fall asleep quite well. But when sensations are added, they are a less good guard; we fall asleep less well under arousal. But what most guards our sleep, so that we best enter devachan, are the volitions, the volitions that have led us to moral deeds. When in our retrospective view we come to a point that fills us with satisfaction, with moral satisfaction about a good deed in which our will impulse has been expressed, then the moment of bliss is there that carries us over into devachan.

If we pay attention to what spiritual science has to say, we will find that there is already agreement between these observations and what has been found through clairvoyance. For spiritual science tells us: Man belongs to the astral world with his etheric body. Because he belongs to the astral world with his etheric body, he lives in his perceptions as in something that is not inherent in the physical world. The physical world gives us perceptions. But we have to turn away from them, and then we are left with something else: ideas. These are already supersensuous. Man has these ideas because the forces of the astral world reach into his etheric body, so that man stands in a certain connection with the astral world through his ideas. Secondly, spiritual science tells us that emotions are something that is not only connected to the astral world, but also to a higher one; for human beings also have emotions in connection with the lower devachan. Thirdly, spiritual science and all occultism teaches that through the moral work of the will impulses, the human being is connected to the higher devachan world, the world of the so-called formless devachan.

Thus, in man, these three types of soul life indicate three ways of connecting with the higher worlds. Compare what is experienced in ordinary life with what spiritual science says. It is in agreement. Imaginations do not hinder falling asleep, because we have to enter the astral world through them. On the other hand, in order to enter the world of Devachan, we must have such emotions that allow us to enter a higher spiritual world. We cannot fall asleep through such emotions, which make us toss and turn on our bed. The world of moral will impulses signifies our connection with the higher world of Devachan. We will not be allowed to enter there if we do not have such volitional impulses that we do not have to reproach ourselves for. So we cannot really sleep if we have pangs of conscience. We are locked out there. And the bliss we feel when we do a good deed is an outward sign that we are allowed to enter the devachan world. No wonder that people experience this as a bliss in which they would always like to live. They feel so close to the higher devachan world that they would like to remain there. Unless a person is clairvoyant, he cannot imagine these highest states other than as the feeling of falling asleep, which occurs as bliss and moral sensation.

Thus we can show man: You have a soul life within you. What you imagine manifests itself in such a way that it brings you into connection with a higher world, and in such a way that it makes it easiest for you to enter the higher world; it is related to the astral. What the human being lives out in this way is like a shadow of the higher world. Emotions separate us more, because through them the human being is connected to the lower devachan world; will impulses, on the other hand, separate us even more, because they are connected to the higher devachan world.

The whole thing is, however, still connected with other facts: what is most effective after death in Kamaloka are the emotions and moral impulses. Ideas about the sensory world die off, only those of the supernatural can be taken along by the person. On the other hand, our emotions haunt us after death and remain. Because they are what keep us in Kamaloka for a certain amount of time. For example, a person who is very bad would not be able to enter Devachan at all through his remorse between death and a new birth, but would have to reincarnate without it. Without moral impulses he would not be able to ascend to the higher devachan world; he would have to return and make up for it in a short time. Since he had no good emotions, even the lower devachan is closed to him.

Thus we can compare and show that we can gain an insight into the facts of ordinary life, of the ordinary life of the soul, if we explain them in terms of spiritual science.

I would like to tie in with what has just been said another fact that will seem important to you if you turn your spiritual gaze to the fact of the doctrine of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives. If we incarnate repeatedly on earth, it must have a certain purpose. After all, evolution would serve no purpose if we did not experience something through it! What is the point of reincarnation? Through the facts of spiritual insight, we come to see how very different human life is in different ages. Let us think back to ancient times, when people spoke Greek or Latin and did what was customary at the time! What is required today: that children be sent to school, only came about late. While today we see an illiterate person as an uneducated person, this was not the case in the past. Otherwise, our statistics would have to call Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example, an uneducated person. Something else that is not considered education today was different in ancient Rome, for example: every Roman citizen – even those who plowed their fields – knew exactly the content of the Twelve Tables and much else that was related to the organization of the civil state. The Romans did not need to run to the lawyer for every little thing. – That is one example. If these great differences were known, people would no longer ask why we have to keep reincarnating as children; surely it is not necessary! No, it is not! Each time we return, civilization has changed so much that we have to learn something new. So, we were born in completely different circumstances, and it is absolutely necessary to keep coming back until the Earth has reached its goal.

Now we can best distinguish what a person can become in the successive cultures if we know that the various qualities that have been listed today as an inner soul life gradually develop in the outer culture. In our time, it is characteristic that of the impulses listed, the greatest value is placed on the imagination. We live in a culture of the imagination. The intellect is being developed. In Greek and Roman culture, people did not think so much, but they perceived more than people do today. Something funny, but at the same time something great, is contained in what Hebbel, the playwright, wrote in his notebook: Let us assume that Plato was reborn; then he would become a high school student and would have to read Plato in the Greek language, and the high school teacher is terribly dissatisfied because he does not understand Plato and beats him. - That is what Hebbel wanted to dramatize. Well, on the one hand it is quite comical, but on the other hand it is quite understandable. Because it is true that today the high school teacher represents much more than even the great philosopher Plato in his time. It is just that today, in a certain sense, one looks at the world shortsightedly. Today's farmer thinks more than the Greek philosopher thought. In contrast, in those days the perceptive faculty was much more developed. Man was connected with all of nature. Perception was then the same as what we now call imagination. Today, perception is no longer learned, only by those who undergo training. It is quite possible for someone to get far in what he learns in the laboratory, and yet be very inexperienced outside, unable to tell the difference between wheat and rye. So we can say that people today have a lot of imagination, but in those days they were trained in perception. Thus we can distinguish between two epochs: one of perception and one of imagination. Then a third will follow, through which the movements of the soul will be developed, which today only take place on the side. A person who begins to undergo a certain development must indeed already anticipate what general human culture is to become in later times. He must therefore foster the movements of the soul. It may easily happen that someone begins to develop their emotions towards higher worlds and then, in contact with other people, has the culture of ideas. Then he will observe that one time the right thing is felt, another time the wrong thing. A purely intellectual person will accept what is right and reject what is wrong on logical grounds. It will take a long time before a higher cultural level is reached in which one will feel a sense of pleasure in the face of what is right and a sense of displeasure in the face of what is wrong. This then gives one certainty about true and false being; for what is required is not just a conception of true and false being. We do not need long to prove a matter, for we grasp it in a moment. Today we must prove, develop. Then it will no longer be necessary to prove, but to please. Therefore, when we incarnate again, a soul culture will follow the culture of perception of the Greeks and the culture of imagination of our time. Then another culture will follow in relation to the impulses; then the will impulses will undergo a great education. Those people who will incarnate then will pursue, so to speak, a Socratic ideal. If that were not the case, a person, no matter how clever he is, could be an ideal scoundrel; it would be in vain that Hamlet wrote on his tablet that one can smile and smile and smile and yet be an out-and-out scoundrel.

The era of emotional upheaval is followed by an era of pronounced morality. As occult research shows, this will present itself in a very special way. Let us assume that people become ever wiser and wiser. One can become wise in the way of today's way of thinking. One can even use one's wisdom to stage evil deeds. But strangely enough, in the epoch after next, this will happen: the evil of the impulses of the will will have a paralyzing effect on intellectuality! This will be the peculiarity of the moralistic cultural epoch: immorality will have the power to kill intellectuality. A person in this epoch must therefore develop in such a way that he must follow his intellectuality with his morality. We can therefore say: We have the Greco-Roman culture as a time of the culture of perception, ours as a time of the intellectual. Then comes the time of the culture of feeling and after that the time of the actual morality.

Now it is interesting to observe how an important impulse affects people in these successive cultural epochs. Here we have to refer back to what was said before, that the faculty of perception connects us with the physical, the faculty of imagination with the astral, the emotions with the lower devachan and morality with the higher devachan.

Thus, if an impulse were to reach a person in Greek and Roman times, the person was schooled to perceive particularly what approached from outside. Therefore, the impulse of the Christ event enters the world as an external perception. Now we live in the culture of ideas. Therefore, our cultural epoch will achieve its goal by knowing Christ as something that is perceived from the astral world as an inner idea. He will manifest himself as an etheric form from the astral world. In the next epoch, in the time of the emotions, the human being will particularly express his emotions in order to see the Christ astral. And then in the morality epoch, the Christ will reveal Himself as the highest that man can experience: as an I that shines forth from the upper devachan world.

Thus, the perception of the Christ will also develop further. In his ideas, in his imaginations, man will now perceive the Christ in a natural way.

Thus we see from these representations that man can find a certain agreement between what spiritual science says and what happens in the world, provided that man brings something to it.

These are points that can be touched upon for a local association to answer some of the numerous questions through which man can approach the spiritual world.

I would like to bring forward again, in a rather different form, a few remarks made in the course of our studies. You know that the fact of the intimate relation between man and the Universe was much better known to methods of perception used by the ancients than to ours of the present day. If we were to go back to the period of the Egypto-Chaldean culture, we should find that man did not look upon himself as a separate being who perambulates the Earth, but as a being belonging to the whole Universe. He knew of course to begin with that in a certain sense he was dependent upon the Earth. That can easily be observed; even our own materialistic age admits that Man, as far as his physical metabolism is concerned, depends upon the Earth's products, which he assimilates. But in those ancient times, by means of course of atavistic perception, Man knew himself to be dependent also in his soul on the one hand on the elements of fire, water and air, and on the other hand on the movements of the planets. These he related to his soul-nature in the same way as he related the products of the Earth to his physical metabolism. And the part of the Universe that is outside or beyond the planetary system, all that is in the starry heavens—this he connected with his spirit.

Thus in those past ages, when materialism was out of the question, man knew himself to be living in the bosom of the Universe. You may now ask: Yes, but how is it that the man of those times made such big mistakes in connection with the movements of the heavenly bodies, while today, in this materialistic age, he has made such magnificent progress in relation to the real truth of these movements? Well, we have spoken of these things for a considerable time and we have pointed out that the movements man believes in today are asserted by science merely on the basis of certain prejudices. Upon this subject I shall have more to say tomorrow, but for the moment we may remind ourselves that present-day man has entirely lost consciousness of the fact that that which belongs to the whole man can no more be discovered in the physical world than in the visible stellar world. For it is absolutely impossible to gain a true perception even of the visible starry heavens, unless man combines with the outer physical life the super-physical in his considerations—that super-physical part of his life through which he passes between death and re-birth. Yesterday we drew attention to the metamorphosis that takes place in man in this change from earthly to super-earthly life and showed how the organs which we consider as belonging to the lower man (and of which we said yesterday that they open inwards), transform themselves—as regards their forces, though obviously not in their substance—during the period between death and a new birth, and become what is considered to be the more noble head-organism. This latter is in reality nothing more than the metamorphosis—as regards the structure of its forces—of the so-called ‘lower’ man of the last Earth-life.

If we really think this matter over, we can see—in spirit—how between death and re-birth, man has a certain content within him of his experiences, as he has also here between birth and death. But the content is essentially different in each case. We may make this difference clear by saying: between birth and death, man has, as the circumference for his experiences, the circumference in Space, and also that which takes place in Time. He has these—Space and Time—as a circumference for his experiences.

You know in how small a degree man really experiences the processes of his inner organism. He is not conscious of them. All the organisation within the skin is known to man only indirectly and incompletely. The knowledge gained through anatomy and physiology is not real knowledge, for we do not by means of this investigation look into the actual interior of man; it is an illusion to believe that we do. Spiritual Science alone gradually reveals all that is within man. But how do we find conditions in this respect during the interval between death and a new birth? We have to put it in this way. In a certain sense we look then from the periphery upon the centre. And we know just as little of the periphery as we do here of our centre or interior. But on the other hand we have during this period a direct perception of the secrets and mysteries of Man himself. That which is hidden within us—within our skin—that we observe between death and a new birth as our experiences.

Now you will perhaps say that this world which we view during the time between death and re-birth must be a very small one indeed. But spatial dimensions do not count at all. It is the fullness or poverty of the content that matters, not the size. If we combine all we observe in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and add thereto the starry heavens, it would not compare in richness with the mysteries within Man himself. The real process is approximately as follows. We lose the structural forces of the head when we pass over in death. They have completed their office. But then the spiritual world takes up the structural forces of the remaining (lower) organism, which from being inner experience belong now to the periphery, and transforms them in such a way that when the time is ripe, from out of the spiritual world the human head is determined in the womb of the mother.

We must be absolutely clear upon this point. The very first beginning of the corporeal man within the mother, is a result of the whole process we have been describing. Conception is merely the opportunity given for a certain cosmic activity to penetrate the human body, and that which is formed first in the process of man's formation is indeed an image of the whole Cosmos. He who wishes to study the human embryo from its first stage onwards, must consider it as an image of the Cosmos.

These matters are today almost entirely overlooked. For of what do we generally think when we speak of the origin of a human being in the physical sense? Of heredity! We observe how the child-organism is formed within the parent-organism, and we are ignorant of how the cosmic forces which surround us are active within the parent-organism; we are ignorant of the fact that the whole Macrocosm projects its force into the human being in order to make possible the genesis of a new human being.

Of course, the great fault of our present-day world-philosophy is that we never take the Macrocosm into consideration, and therefore never become conscious of where lie the forces whose effect we observe. I must once again remind you of the following. The modern physicist or chemist says that there are molecules which are composed of atoms, that the atoms possess forces by means of which they act upon each other. Now this is a conception which simply does not accord with reality. The truth is, that the minutest molecule is acted upon by the whole starry heavens. Suppose here is a planet, here another, here another, and so on. Then there are the fixed stars, which transmit their forces into the molecule. All these lines of force intersect each other in various ways. The Planets also transmit their forces in the same way, and we come to realise that the molecule is nothing but a focus of macrocosmic forces. It is the ardent desire of modern science to bring microscopy far enough to enable the atoms to be seen within the molecule. This way of looking at the subject must cease. Instead of wishing to examine the structure of the molecule microscopically, we must turn our gaze outwards to the starry heavens, we must look at the constellations and see copper in one, tin in another! Out there in the Macrocosm we have to behold the structure of the molecule that is only reflected in the molecule. Instead of passing into the infinitely little, we must turn our gaze outwards to the infinitely great, for it is there we have to look for the reality of what lives in the little.

In this way does the materialistic conception of things also affect other domains of thought. Someone who considers himself capable of giving an opinion on the progress of human knowledge may say: the nineteenth century materialism is now overcome! No! It is not overcome so long as men still think atomically, so long as they fail to search in the great for the form and configuration of the small. Neither is the materialism relative to humanity overcome, so long as we continue to ignore the connection of Man the Microcosm with the Macrocosm.

And at this point we are confronted with a new—I might say a monstrous—evidence of materialism, to which I have previously drawn attention. It is in so-called Theosophy that its traces are often to be found, where a tendency is present to look at things in the following way. Here we have matter; then ether, thinner than matter but otherwise similar to physical matter; then comes the astral—again thinner or finer than the etheric; and after that quite a number of other beautiful things, all thinner and thinner and thinner. Call it Kama-manas, or what you will, it is not spiritual, but remains materialistic! The truth is that in order to arrive at a real understanding of the world, we must conceive of heavy, ponderable matter as ceasing at the ether; for we must clearly understand that this ether is essentially a very different thing from that substance of which we speak as filling space. When speaking of this latter substance, we think of space as filled with matter. But this we cannot do when we speak of ether, for then we must conceive space as being empty of matter. When ordinary matter strikes some other object, the object is repelled or pushed away. When ether approaches an object, it attracts it and draws it within itself. The activity of ether is the exact opposite to that of matter. Ether acts as an absorbent. Were this otherwise, you would present the same appearance back and front, for even in this diversity of the physical appearance of man we have the result, on the one hand of the pressure of ponderable matter, and on the other of the absorbing action of ether. Your nose is forced outwards, as it were, from your organism through the pressure of matter, while the eye sockets are drawn inward through the action of ether. It is therefore simply a pressing and absorbing substance acting within you which differentiates the exterior appearance of your front and back. These are things which are not usually taken into consideration.

Further, when we come to speak of the astral, we must not think of three-dimensional physical matter extending in a three-fold way in space, nor must we think of the absorbent ether, but of a third factor, one that forms the adjustment or connection between the other two. And should we then go on and attempt to form some approximate idea of that part of our being termed the Ego—the ‘I am’—we would have to include a fourth factor, which acts as mediator between, on the one hand, the absorbent-repelling action of ether and physical matter, and on the other hand, the astral substance. These are the things that must be taken into consideration.

You cannot logically ask: If the ether has merely a sucking, absorbing action, how then is it possible for us to perceive it? The fact is, ether stands, figuratively speaking, in the same relation in respect to ponderable matter—I am speaking now in a picture—as the relation we find in another plane if we have a bottle of soda-water. We cannot see the water in the bottle, but the pearly bubbles we can see, although these are ‘thinner’ than the water. And so it is in the case of the ether, which is a ‘hollow’ in physical matter and therefore the essential antithesis of physical matter; it also can be perceived.

From the foregoing you will now see that it is necessary, when speaking of the life between death and re-birth, to realise that this life is actually lived beyond space—beyond the space of which we are cognisant on the Earth-plane; and we shall have to endeavour to gain a conception of this ‘beyond’ of space. You can best do so by trying first to imagine ‘filled’ space. Take for instance, a table; it fills or occupies space. Then you pass from ‘filled’ space to ‘empty’ space, and perhaps you would say that you cannot go beyond this. But as I have previously pointed out to you, this would be about as sensible as to say: ‘I have a full purse out of which I continue to take money till nothing is left; this “nothing” cannot be less than it is’. But it can be less if you get into debt, when you would have less than nothing in your purse! Similarly empty space can be less than empty by being filled with ether, when it becomes a negative entity.

And that which adjusts or connects the two, that which mediates also in you between pressure and suction, is the astral. No relation would exist between the front and back of a human body did not the astral activity within form the connection between the absorbent and the pressing elements. You will say: I do not observe this connecting element. But try to follow the digestive process, and you will find the connecting link very clearly manifested. The astral is active there, and its activity is based upon the contrast between the front and back nature of the human being, even as the connection between the higher (head) man and lower (limb) man by way of the astral is based upon the Ego. We must therefore consider man, as he stands before us, in a quite concrete manner and make clear to ourselves that while he has existence upon this plane between birth and death he imprints his astral part and his Ego in the absorbent and pressure-producing elements, but his being only manifests here on Earth as the mediator between the front and the back, and between the upper and the lower parts of the body.

Now, what is this mediator or connecting link? It is that which we experience within us when we feel our equilibrium. We do not jerk the head forward and backward; we stand and walk erect. We accommodate our posture to the demands of the laws of equilibrium. We cannot see this, but we experience it inwardly. When we pass through the gate of death we consciously adjust ourselves to this condition, of which here we take no heed. If we possessed eyes only, it would then be dark around us, and if we had ears only, stillness would envelop us. But we have also the sense of equilibrium, and the sense of motion, and so we become able after all to ‘experience’ there. We take part in that which on Earth is implied in the words ‘equilibrium’ and ‘movement’. We adapt ourselves to the movements of the external world, we find our way into them.

You see, here, in the life between birth and death, the only way we experience the activity of the Earth's revolution upon its axis is in our daily metabolic process. We must take our daily meals, and this together with the succeeding digestive processes takes place within the limits of 24 hours, uniform with one revolution of the Earth. These two things belong together, the one is proof of the other. When we die, the revolution of the Earth becomes something real, as real as are the visible objects here. Then we live with this terrestrial motion; we begin to experience this motion consciously.

There are also other motions connected with the starry heavens, all of which we experience after death. Correctly considered, the description of our experiences already includes this experience, for we do not expand into the Cosmos like a jelly-fish, but we take part in the life of the Cosmos—and as beings taking part in cosmic life we experience at the same time the inner being of man. Between birth and death we say: My heart is within my breast, and in it converge the streams or motions of the blood-circulation. At a certain stage of development between death and re-birth we say: In my inner being is the Sun—and by this expression we mean the actual Sun, which the physicist claims to be a ball of gas, but which is in reality something quite different. We experience the actual Sun in the same manner as we experience here the heart. Here the Sun is visible to the eye, whereas during the time between death and re-birth the evolution of the heart on its path to the pineal gland, as it undergoes on the way a wonderful metamorphosis, is the cause of sublime experiences. The complete system of our blood-circulation we experience consciously in its transformation; we have this system within existence between death and re-birth proceeds, these forces undergo transmutation, so that, when once again we arrive at the gates of a new Earth-life, they have become the forces of us—not, of course, the substance, but the forces. As our new nervous-system. Look at the plates and illustrations scattered through modern books on anatomy or physiology and examine the circulatory system of the blood in one incarnation. This in the next incarnation becomes the life of the nerves. (We must not depict in diagrammatic form the head, breast (rhythmic) and limb systems as existing side by side, for they interpenetrate each other.) Note the wonderful structure of the human eye; there we find blood-vessels, choroid and retina (omentum). The last two are transformations of each other. What today is retina, was in the last incarnation choroid, and what is choroid today will be retina in the next incarnation. Of course this must not be taken too literally, but such is the approximate course of events. So you will understand that we cannot gain an essential conception of man if we merely study him as he appears between birth and death or even along the lines by which he develops through the forces of physical heredity. For thereby we understand man at most as far as the circulatory system; that would be the last process we would understand. The nervous system of the present life is a result of a former life, and can never be understood if studied in connection with the present life alone.

Now my dear friends, I beg of you not to object to what I have explained, by saying that animals have also a nervous system although they have no earlier lives. Such an objection would indeed be very short-sighted; for though in man the forces of his nervous system are the transformation of the blood-circulation of the former life, that does not imply that the same is valid in the case of animals. It would be just as logical to go to a barber and ask him to sell you a razor for the dinner-table—a razor being a knife, and knives forming part of the dinner service! Razors however do not! Nothing carries within itself its immediate purpose, neither does a physical organ. The human organ is entirely different from the animal organ. It depends upon the use to be made of an organ. We should not compare the human nervous system with that of an animal, but rather observe the fact that human nerves have become similar—during the course of their evolution—to animal nerves, just as the razor has become similar to the table-knife. This again demonstrates that when man follows the ordinary materialistic line of investigation, he can arrive at no true conclusion. Yet that is just the path which is being followed today.

It is this kind of investigation that prevents us from arriving at a conception of man as a product of the spiritual world. Our religious creeds, as they have gradually developed, have pandered too much to human egoism. It may almost be said that their one and only aim is to convince their followers of a continuation of life after death, because the egoism of humanity demands it. Yet it is equally important to prove to men the continuation in this life of a pre-natal life, so that they may comprehend—‘Here upon this earth I have to be a continuation of what I was between death and my present birth. I have to continue a spiritual life here on this plane.’ This indeed is not likely to please egoism so much; but it is something that must of necessity again imbue our civilisation, so that humanity can be liberated from its anti-social instincts. Try to imagine what it will mean when we can look upon a human countenance and say: ‘That is not of this world. The spiritual world has been at work upon it between the last death and this birth.’ For a time will come when we shall see within the material the imprint of the spiritual work between death and re-birth. It will indeed be a very different kind of culture which will guide humanity then; and it will bring in its train very different convictions and tendencies of thought, which will not permit the contemplation of the Cosmos as a vast machine set in motion by the mutual attraction between the stars—apart from the fact that this abstraction has already reached its zenith. Abstraction is deeply rooted in our ordinary conception of the planetary system, and it produces today some very strange results. For example, a great deal of popular literature is permeated with glorification of an idea which originates from Einstein. This idea is said to have shaken the theory of gravitation. Imagine that, far away from all celestial bodies—so that an interference by a field of gravity may be obviated—there is a box. Inside it is a man who holds a stone in one hand, and some down in the other. He lets both out of the box and see—they begin to fall—and fall until they reach the ground. Yes, says Einstein, men will no doubt say that the stone and the down both fall to the ground. But it need not be so; for up above a rope may be fastened and by some means or other the box is drawn up. The stone and the down—owing to the absence of any celestial body—do not fall, but remain where they are. When the bottom of the box reaches them, it takes them up with it.

This kind of discussion concerning an extreme abstraction, can be found today in the modern theory of relativity which Albert Einstein has propounded. Just think how far humanity has deviated from actuality! We can talk of relativity—well and good, but just imagine what would happen were this picture taken in earnest! A box, some inconceivable distance away from any celestial body that might attract (by gravitation) the stone and the down; and inside this box a man (air is only found of course in the neighbourhood of heavenly bodies, but the man is quite happy and content; as for his stone and his down, they of course need no air!), and now the box is suspended from outside and is then lifted up!

All this is a further development of the theory of Newton who postulated that ‘push’ or impetus which is imparted to a globe in the direction of a tangent, so that it is able with centrifugal force to escape the centripetal force. Such things as these actually form the contents of scientific discussions today, and are considered great achievements, whereas they are nothing more than a testimony to the fact that we have arrived at the most extreme abstraction, and that materialism has produced a state of complete ignorance in humanity as to what matter really is, and caused man to live in a series of mental pictures far removed from all reality.

But, my dear friends, these things are not in the least observed today, and we find our newspapers proclaiming that a new discovery has been made: the theory of gravitation has been replaced by the theory of inertia. The stone and down are not attracted; they remain in their original place—perhaps only because we can manage to imagine such a thing—while the box is raised! One can in truth say that so much nonsense masquerades as genius today that it becomes difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Can we wonder that in these times when in many other departments of thought too as well as that just described, men's ideas have grown quite crooked—can we wonder that we have at last been brought to the conditions of the last five or six years! These are things of which we need again and again to be reminded.

I have had to recall them to you today, and tomorrow I will add something further concerning the structure of the Universe.

Our recent studies have led us to consider the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world, and this relationship has in its turn made it necessary for us to cast a glance at the development man goes through between death and a new birth. We will take this as our starting point today.

Yesterday we said that the human being carries through the portal of death what I called a mineral consciousness. It can be called this because essentially its content is the mineral world with its laws, and this consciousness therefore is tinged by, or rather steeped with man's moral feelings and experiences. Bearing with him what comes from these two directions, the human being makes his way in the world through which he journeys between death and a new birth. When we consider what the human being is after death, we find that the astral body and the I have wrested themselves free from what surrounded them as a kind of shell, that is, from the physical body and the etheric body.

Now, if we picture the cosmic evolution of humanity, together with the cosmic planetary bodies that have to do with it, we know, from the description given in my Occult Science, how in the past this cosmic evolution has gone through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, and how the human being then arrived at the Earth evolution, in which he is still involved. We also know that essentially in the Saturn evolution the first rudiments of the physical body were formed as a kind of universal sense organ that was developed further in the Sun, Moon, and Earth evolutions. We know that the first rudiments of the etheric body were added during the Sun evolution, those of the astral body during the Moon evolution, and that the Earth evolution is actually the time during which the I of man is evolved.

When we consider the human being as a whole, we find that he has his ego through the bond of the human being with the earth, for through those forces that exist on earth the I is formed, is molded. If we now say, therefore, that the human being passes through the portal of death, bearing his I through it, he really takes through the portal of death all that he has from his earthly evolution, all that he acquires within the earthly evolution. We bear through the portal of death just what belongs to the earthly evolution, and it is during the earthly evolution that the mineral world has been added to the other kingdoms. This, too, you may gather from my Occult Science. The outer, mineral world is, therefore, bound up with the evolution of the I. That the I goes through the portal of death with a mineral consciousness is essentially connected with what the human being actually has gained from the earth.

If we comprehend the earth only in a general way, however, as it first appears to us as world body, we understand it very imperfectly. The earth as world body, as it were, is a being that may be compared to a large drop in the infinite ocean of space; but this drop is constituted in such a way that it is differentiated in its substance—it contains substances of varying weight, varying density. We need only observe the metals in the earth to find that they are of varying density. What the human being incorporates into himself from the earth with the mineral consciousness originates from the whole earth, and it originates simply because the earth is a complete planet in the cosmos. What is differentiated into the various mineral substances then works in such a way that the human being takes with him through the portal of death not only what his I has become but also, for a time, what was his astral body. This has been described in my books, Occult Science and Theosophy, as the passage of the human being through the soul world.

We may therefore say that when the human being leaves the earth he develops the mineral consciousness. At first, however, this consciousness is permeated with all that the human being takes with him from the differentiated earth, from the earth insofar as it consists of various substances. This constitutes the period of his passage through the soul world. We can therefore say that the human being takes with him something that then goes on further and that to begin with is not only his I but is in a certain way an astral fruit of the earth (see drawing, page 119).

If we then follow the human being further, after he has laid aside this astral fruit of the earth, as described in my book, Theosophy—where it is shown how a short time after death man completes his passage through the soul world—we find that his I goes on further. At first, however, it is permeated by mineral consciousness. When we raise our spiritual gaze to where the human being is, we find the mineral consciousness of the deceased human being, that is, the thought world, which is related to what is mineral. It is actually the case that this thought world borne by man through death works on earth, and also in the cosmos, upon what is the mineral kingdom (see drawing at end of lecture).

This is an extraordinarily noteworthy and significant relationship. When we look at our minerals here on earth, when we observe the mineral kingdom that is also in the clouds—for there, too, there are mineral effects—and ask ourselves what spiritual essences are at work there, we must answer that in these mineral formations, which show us their outer side when as human beings on earth we observe them with our physical senses—in all these mineral effects live the thoughts to which human thought comes after death. If we look at the mineral kingdom intelligently, allowing our gaze to peruse this mineral kingdom, we can say that in all this mineral activity there is working inwardly that which constitutes the consciousness of the dead at the beginning of their career beyond the earth. We must therefore—and not merely for outer reasons—call the mineral kingdom a non-living, dead kingdom: but we must also call it a dead kingdom in the sense that at first the human thoughts, the actual human thoughts that man harbors immediately after death, work into this mineral kingdom.

When the human being then continues his journey, he comes ever nearer the Midnight Hour of Existence. Both before and after this time he develops, in the sense in which I spoke yesterday, a consciousness that is more plant-like in nature; it is not the mineral consciousness he possessed before but a consciousness that arises through the human entity being permeated with plant-creating forces. The human being receives from realms beyond the earth something different from what the earth as such can give him; in addition to what the earth can give him, he receives what is a kind of higher consciousness, and it can become apparent to us that he develops a plant-like consciousness. During this time he works on the plant realm both on earth and in the cosmos (see drawing at end of lecture).

It is one of the secrets of existence that when we study the plant covering of the earth, all the vegetable existence, we are shown only its outer side; it also has an inner side. Naturally we must seek this inner side, not under the roots but above the blossoms. When we picture to ourselves the blossoming plant, we see its inner aspect in what inclines astrally toward the plants, in what lives astrally, as it were, and has its-outer expression in the plant covering, in the processes of fructification, in all, therefore, that is unseen. It may be said that if one observes the plant itself purely from root to flower, the inner side would be that which is over the flower. If, therefore, we consider what can be perceived outwardly of the vegetation as an outer side, then the inner side consists of the sphere of those forces that in part have their point of origin in the consciousness of human beings in the middle period of their existence between death and a new birth—before and after the Midnight Hour of Existence. We therefore must look upon the vegetation of the earth as being connected in its cosmic existence with the whole of human evolution.

If we can say regarding the mineral kingdom that in this dead kingdom live the weaving thoughts of human beings in the first half of their life between death and a new birth, then we must say that in the vegetation of the earth is outwardly revealed what lives inwardly in the universe, so that it constitutes the world of human consciousness in the middle period between death and a new birth.

The intimate relationship between the human being and the world about which we spoke yesterday made it possible to close yesterday's study with the words, “Knowledge of the world is knowledge of man, and knowledge of man is knowledge of the world.” This relationship reveals itself here in a quite special way. It shows us that here on earth we actually behold something of what the human being is between death and a new birth. If we look at the minerals, they reveal to us in a kind of outer picture what human beings do in an inwardly conscious way in the period immediately following death. When we look at the plant world, we see revealed what man does inwardly in the middle period of his evolution between death and a new birth.

To an unprejudiced view such things can be observed in a certain outer way. Whenever we consider Goethe's very peculiar nature—which is only an outstanding example—each time we are surprised afresh. What constitutes the peculiarity of Goethe's nature? For one thing, Goethe attempted again and again to become a draughtsman or painter. He never accomplished this, but the drawings and paintings he left are striking in their sureness of touch. When one considers Goethe's poems, especially some that are unusually characteristic in this respect, one says to oneself that though Goethe could not become a painter his poems are expressed in a kind of displaced painting. In his poems Goethe does a good deal of painting. If this were to be expressed in the same way as some modern talented critics do, for example, one might say (though I do not think that it is such a good thing to do) that Goethe had the tendency to become a bad painter; he carried his painting tendency into his poetry and therefore became in that way merely a painterly poet.

One may say further that those people were somewhat justified who described many of Goethe's poems as being smooth and cold as marble, even “Iphigenia” and “Tasso,” in a certain sense, but still more so “The Natural Daughter.” Goethe offered dramatic poems in which a sculptor actually lives, and as dramatic poems they do not breathe forth the inner life that permeates the poems of Shakespeare. In a certain respect they are poems that have stopped short and are expressed in sculptural form.

Briefly, Goethe can appear as a special genius, perhaps for the very reason that he never actually came quite fully into the world. He came to the world as a painter, but never became one. He then turned to poetry but brought things to expression in a way half-painterly. He never fully mastered the art of dramatic poetry. For this he had poetic inclinations but never actually became a real dramatic poet; he stopped short of this, turned back again, and brought it to expression in a sculptural way. When one studies Goethe correctly, one becomes conscious of something that is most characteristic of him—Goethe is a human being who was never really born quite right. He produced a theory of color but was never in a true sense a physicist. He occupied himself with natural science but never completely entered into its technicalities. In short, there was actually nothing in the world into which he entered fully—he never came into the world properly.

One might go even further, considering his relationships to women. These also developed only to a certain stage, never to the point to which they develop in ordinary human beings born correctly into physical life. One could find confirmation of this everywhere, if one feels and senses these things, and if only this feeling and sensation is not limited by ordinary pedantic, commonplace ideas and obvious objections to which I need not refer here in detail. About this thesis that Goethe was not entirely born the objection naturally may be made that he was indeed born on such and such a day in Frankfurt, as may be seen in any of his biographies. Let me draw your attention, however, to a matter that calls for comment, that he arrived in the world half dead, his body absolutely black. He therefore did not enter the world robustly but in a way that was half dead.

Let us follow his life and see how he never fully arrives anywhere—how he has setbacks, even to the point of illness. Everything is like this, even the way he went about in Weimar, inapproachable in a certain respect; one could say that he never entered fully into the world. This has its origin in the fact that he brought with him an especially large portion of the plant-like consciousness that is developed in the Midnight Hour of Existence. Hence, the urge he had toward developing the metamorphosis of the plant, in which he accomplished his greatest work: this wonderful view of the plant world.

I can well imagine that it sounds unusual to speak seriously about Goethe not having come fully into the world. There are many people who prefer to speak of the outer world as a kind of maya, speaking in general, in the abstract. When we explore how the individual stages of maya are differentiated, however, it must be admitted that it is absolutely a maya if one takes Goethe completely outwardly as do Mr. Lewes or Professor Bielscbowski,⁸ for example. He is most definitely not like that, however; he is quite different. His nature is such that its essential origin is really discovered in the sphere that lies just in the middle of man's life between death and a new birth.

We now come to the third part of this development, when a new incarnation, a new earthly life, is drawing near. In this period, as you may easily imagine, the human being develops a more active consciousness (see drawing below, red). Outwardly he has a consciousness such as I described to you yesterday, but he works with what now lives in his consciousness—chiefly with all that develops here on earth as the animal world. At this point, however, we cannot say that when we look at the animal world outwardly this signifies only the outer side and that the inner side leads us to human thoughts or to the contents of human consciousness during the third part of his life between death and a new birth. We cannot really say this, but we can say that if we look at the animal world this animal world yields us a kind of inner aspect. The mineral and plant realms therefore show us their outer side, as it were—the plants to a lesser degree, but they may nevertheless be included. The inner side of the plant-like is presented to us, in addition to other things, by the state of consciousness of those who have passed through the portal of death and are on the way to a new earthly life. When we look at the animal realm, however, we must actually say that this gives us its inner side, its outer side being the group-souls of the animals, which ascend up to the creativity of hierarchies beyond the earthly. There in the animal realm we cannot find in the animals themselves what works out of the human being, out of human consciousness. Rather we can say that human thoughts live and weave in the animal group-souls, in what is developing in the whole world of the animal group-souls.

During this third period the human being actually lives through all the subtle and complicated configurations of the world of the animal group-souls. This is what now becomes the human world, this world of animal group-souls. Out of what he beholds there in the world of the animal group-souls, out of what passes there in and out of his consciousness, the human being builds up his own organs. He gradually draws together, as it were, what he sees there in the breadths of the world into the active beholding of his own being. Man forms his own organism—his inner organs—out of the sum total of the animal group-souls.

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We might say that the human being then builds up the principal forms of his brain—of course at first as forces, not as a lump of matter, as such, but as forces—his lungs, heart, blood vessels, and so on. The human being builds up his individual organs out of the whole relationship of the animal group-beings. Thus, whereas in the first part of his super-sensible life, man constructs the outer world, he now recedes more and more into himself, finally building up the individual organs of his inner organism out of the entire world of animal group-souls.

In the last stage of his becoming, the human being then enters, as I told you yesterday, the sphere of the planetary forces. This is a later stage, as it were, that the human being undergoes. After having gone through his activity in and out of the animal group-soul system, he becomes dependent on what lives in the outer world, of what lives in the movements of the planets and their constellations. Through this the etheric body of man is prepared. Man is drawn toward a new birth. His etheric body is developed. In this etheric body there now become visible the webs of thought of which I have spoken, which are to be found between the etheric body and the physical body. Man thus now weaves into his system of organs what he has worked upon more out of feeling—feeling, however, that has been thoroughly permeated by thought. Around this he then forms a web of thought. This web of thought is therefore a result of what the human being has experienced from the working of the planetary world on his being that is approaching a new birth. He thus becomes ready to enter the sheath provided for him by what is accomplished in successive generations.

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What, then, is the human being who descends? Immediately after death he poured out of himself into the outer mineral world the thought element, the mineral thought element, that he took with him. By virtue of having poured out these thoughts, will impulses and feeling content gradually press upward. All this then permeates him with the content of the plant-like consciousness. The human being now begins to work with the plant realm in the outer world; then he withdraws into himself again, works out of the animal consciousness of the group-soul activity of the animals, and builds up his organs, which he then surrounds in a certain way with the sheath woven out of the substance of thought. This is what then wants to descend into physical existence.

How does this incorporation into physical existence now take place? In earlier lectures, and also again yesterday, I have pointed out that in modern science it is expected by many that someday cells will be found to have the most complicated chemical structure for which the most complicated chemical formula will be discovered. That idea, however, is completely wrong. In the cell, even in the ordinary organic cell (see drawing below, bright), the chemical cohesiveness is not stronger than in an ordinarily complicated chemical compound; on the contrary, the chemical affinities become most chaotic in the fertilized germ-cell. The fertilized germ-cell is chaos in relation to what is material, chaos that disintegrates, chaos that really disintegrates. Into this disintegrating chaos pours what I have described to you as the human being, which was formed as I just described (lilac). What is actually physical is then formed, not through the germ itself but through the processes taking place in the mother's body between the embryo and the environment. What descends from the spiritual world is thus actually placed into the emptiness and is only then permeated with mineral substance. What we have described here is, as you may see, an absolutely transparent process.

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We cannot look upon the animal consciousness as working back but must rather say that it works up into the animal group-souls (see drawing, page 119, red arrows). Then, when the human being reaches the planetary realm, he fashions man himself and incorporates himself in this way into the place prepared for him, as I have just described.

If you bear in mind the beginning and the end of life between death and a new birth, you certainly must say that things appear that can be related to one another. In what we may call the passage of the human soul through the soul world after death there arises something that still has a relationship to the earth, something that points the human being back to what is earthly. We know that then, as I have often described for you, the human being proceeds backward through his earthly life in about one-third of the time his life lasted. What he experiences in the passage through the planetary system before birth is, as it were, the polar opposite to this. Something is imparted to the human being that he brings down with him from heaven to earth. Just as he bears out into the soul world something of what is in his astral body, by means of which he lives backward through his earthly life, so he brings with him out of the cosmos something that then permeates his etheric body—something that has to do with his etheric body in the same way as what I have called the astral fruit of the earth has to do with our astral body. What he brings from the cosmos bears the same relationship to his etheric body as what he carries as astral fruit of the earth bears to his astral body.

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I may therefore say that the human being brings with him from the cosmos the etheric cosmic fruit. This etheric cosmic fruit actually lives on in his etheric body. From the first moment of his birth, the human being has in his etheric body something like a cosmic force impelling him forward, which works through his entire life. Karmic tendencies remaining from the past unite with this cosmic impelling force and are active in it.

We thus are able to show how perceptibly karma is related to the real human being. While telling ourselves that the human being has a pre-existent life, that he comes down from spiritual heights into earthly physical life and incorporates his I and astral body into his physical body and etheric body, we may also say that the karma he brings with him from his former life on earth incorporates itself into the etheric impelling force that he brings along with him from the influence of the planetary system that preceded his earthly incorporation.

Now you can grasp quite vividly how all that inwardly urges and impels the human being can be quite practically calculated from the planetary relationships. In this way one can look intimately into what is working in the human being and follow it out of the physical, sense activity into the soul-spiritual world, whence man again carries it down into his physical, bodily existence on earth where it continues to work. These things can be given in all their particulars.

When a person becomes filled with ideas that come from this knowledge, he will say: I enter this earthly existence in the form of physical man and am apparently shut off from the rest of the world. This consciousness of being shut off is given me where my super-sensible aspect is laid into the place prepared for it by the earthly, physical existence. When I am incorporated into this sheath, however, I again grow more and more into the cosmos through my perceptions, through my experiences. I grow into it especially when I form such mental pictures of the human being's connection with the world.

Through anthroposophical spiritual science man thus learns to feel himself at one with the universe. He feels the world in himself and himself in the world. He feels the life of the macrocosm pulsing in his own inner being, and he feels how all that he inwardly experiences pulses forth again into the whole cosmos. His breathing becomes for him a symbol of all-embracing existence. The indrawn breath assumes the form of the human body and becomes inner life. The breath that leaves the organism spreads itself out again into the world. It is the same with the soul-spiritual: the whole cosmos is, as it were, breathed in soul-spiritually and becomes man. All that originates in the human being is breathed out again soul-spiritually and disperses itself in the cosmos until it reaches the very periphery of the cosmos. Then it returns once more to form the human being. In the human being we may see the image of the world, and in the world we may see the finely dissolved essence of the human being. We thus may come to an all-embracing knowledge of the world and of man in the words:

O Man, thou art the condensed image of the world!
O World, thou art the being of Man poured out into infinite space!

Man should acquire a consciousness that really unites his being with the cosmos, so that his future evolution may proceed in an upward, not a downward, direction.

• 8 . George Henry Lewes, 1817–1878, Life of Goethe, 1855. Albert Bielschowski, 1847-1902, Goethe, 1895-1904.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to share some of my thoughts about my visit to the school, specifically, about the walls. Now that everything here is so new, it is more apparent than before that it is not good for a school to merely have a somewhat lost and not particularly good picture hanging here and there. It is significant that our school does not make a particularly impressive artistic impression.

Of course, we cannot completely fulfill the ideal at this stage, but it seems to me that it would be good to at least have that ideal before us so that we could move toward it, at least in our thoughts, and that in the end we would do something in that direction. I would ask you not to understand what I have to say the way many things have been understood. For instance, when I said that this or that is a difference between eating meat or vegetables and people immediately began to promote vegetarianism as a result.

Accept it as an ideal. Out of our pedagogy itself, what should be the artistic form in our classrooms? We could perhaps extend this from what we find in the schoolrooms to what we find near the schoolrooms on the walls.

There is no doubt that we need some pictures to decorate the schoolrooms. I say this not because I think we need to do this tomorrow morning, but because our guiding principle needs to be what is needed by our pedagogy.

First, we have the lower grades. There, we need a more physical presentation of what we give the children pictorially. That can gradually move into the more artistic, on the one hand, and to more practical activities in life, on the other. Today, I only want to mention some of the main things that we can deepen in the course of time. It is important that where the subjects themselves play the main role in artistic decoration, we have no mechanically created or barren illustrations, but that things be artistically formed. These artistic creations should not be such that they emphasize special opinions or special styles, but more in the direction of what seems to genuinely human.

If we look at the first grade, the main thing would be to decorate the walls with pictures from fairy tales, and when possible, to have them in color. I need to emphasize that if it is not possible to do everything in color, we will need to use some black-and-white reproductions. It is better to have a technically good reproduction than to have some poorly done copy of something. In the first grade we need to have pictures of fairy tales, and in the second, of legends. That is something we need to strictly maintain.

You can imagine the continuous and proper effect that will have upon the children’s feelings. The only thing is that we cannot just take the pictures from picture books. They should be artistically done. It would be beneficial to set this as a task, not in some one-sided painting style, but such that everything has a general human feeling to it.

When we come to the third grade, we must take into account the state of the soul. What we hang on the walls should be what is normally called “still life” pictures of plants and of flowers. Of course, these should not be normal still lifes, but genuine representations of what is living, but not yet feeling. If we bring the children so far that they live into them with their souls, that will be good. We should save representations of the feeling of animals for the next grade because then the child’s soul begins to relate to a portrayal of feeling. Only from that time on do children have a sense that they have feeling in themselves, even though that feeling may be quite dull. Pictures of animals that the children saw earlier in children’s books have an effect such that the child cannot differentiate whether it is a picture of a real cow or a cow made of wood. Before about the age of nine or ten, children cannot differentiate in an inner living way between the picture of a real cow and a cow made of wood. However, at about that age, this capacity to differentiate begins.

In the fifth grade, when the children are ten or eleven years old, what is important is to choose pictures that show groups of people of differing ages, for instance, dancing groups, or, say, a street where people meet one another, so that you can say something to the children about it. You need groups of people so you can talk with the children about what occurs between those people.

We now come to the sixth grade. There, we should have individual human beings. You could have pictures of heads or of the whole person, for example, a person standing in nature, where nature comes to that person’s aid. You could then draw the children’s attention to what a sunny landscape is, or to one in the rain, but there should be a person in it such that the individual person is important. Perhaps a picture of a small lake where someone is rowing.

We have now come to the point where the material itself is less important and where the pictures should move more into the artistic. Here, we need to begin with the most artistic things. We must, of course, recall that if you cannot obtain good copies, then we should have black-and-white pictures. For the age of the children in the seventh grade, it would be good to have Raphael and Leonardo, things that can also remain in the eighth grade. You could divide these between the classes in both grades. What is important is that the children have these pictures in front of them. You should not believe that the proper thing to do is to choose the pictures so that they go in parallel to what is being taught. It is actually quite important that the children have the pictures before they are spoken of in art class. You should speak occasionally about the pictures, but, in general, the child’s eyes should simply be occupied with the artistic aspect of the pictures. Children should first receive only a pure sense impression and know that we consider these pictures particularly beautiful. They have already been properly prepared since they knew that previously the pictures hanging on the walls were primarily important because of their content.

In the following classes, what is important is that you tactfully connect what is artistic with the practicalities of life, so that the children have both perspectives continually in front of themselves. Thus, in the ninth grade, you might have pictures from Giotto or similar things, and in the same class, pictures of other things, more technical, for instance, a meadow or a willow tree, a pine forest, and so forth, but not done artistically, rather, technically. Purely as examples, in the way that you might draw a plan. You could put those on one wall and hang other things on the back wall, for instance, paintings by Giotto. You could also have a star chart in the ninth grade where the various constellations are connected with some figure, with stylized figures of the heavens, as used to be done in star charts.

In the tenth grade, where you are dealing with fifteen and sixteen year olds, you should have pictures by Holbein and Dürer on the artistic side, and on the technical-scientific side, you could have—other things would be possible—a drawing of everything in the sea, all the animals, and so forth. That would have to be drawn appropriately so that it was intellectually instructive, but also had an artistic effect upon the children.

Holbein and Dürer would remain for the eleventh grade, with perhaps the addition of Rembrandt. That would also continue in the following grades. You might also include some older paintings. At that age instruction can go in parallel. Thus, for the eleventh and twelfth grades, Holbein, Rembrandt, and Dürer.

On the technical side in the eleventh grade, you should hang something like a cross-section of the Earth or geological cross-sections or perhaps elevation charts and similar things. Only in the twelfth grade would you have physiological pictures, anatomic charts in addition to Holbein, Dürer, Rembrandt.

That is what we need as an ideal. Things look terrible now, but if you have an ideal before you, at least under some circumstances, you can work in that direction, even if it takes a century. It is better to have a good woodcut than much of what is hanging now. This is what I wanted to say to you about pedagogy. It is certainly necessary that we attend to an exceptionally good treatment of art in our pedagogy, since that definitely belongs to the total picture of the anthroposophical treatment of human progress.

We can say that until the sixteenth century, there was not a sharp contrast between an intellectual and an artistic comprehension of the world. You should remember something that is no longer considered; the Scholastics created their books with a certain architectural art, very consciously, apart from the illuminations. Until the tenth century, there was absolutely no real difference between art and knowledge. Now, children in even the earliest grades are poisoned with purely intellectual material. There is an effect here in our school of something we cannot yet do differently: when teachers use reference books, not only by giving them to the children, but also for their own preparation, the intellectual tendency of such references enters the teacher. The teacher thus becomes a distorted picture of intellectualism.

You could ask, then, how should teachers prepare themselves? When the teacher wants to teach something to the children, he or she learns the material from modern presentations. When I see where teachers get their material for preparation, I would like to put another book alongside the one the teacher is using, a book that is perhaps a century older than the teacher’s. It is not possible to use only books that are centuries old, but it would certainly help in many areas to use books that are a hundred years old along with more modern books on the same subject. Now, if people are teachers, they know what someone like Goethe or some other exemplary person wrote about one work of art or another, or about something in nature. The problem is that no one looks at what people two or three generations ago, at Goethe’s time, wrote about art, but these, along with more modern works, are certainly important. Even today, when we have so many outstanding things, you can gain something by using books that are a century or so old that treat subjects similar to the subjects of more modern works. That is very important. I have often mentioned that, for example, editions of Greek and Latin from the first half of the nineteenth century are like gold in contrast to the brass printed today. The grammar texts that are thirty or forty years old are much better than the modern presentations.

I think we need to take into account that our pedagogy must everywhere counter with a thoroughly artistic activity the rule of intellectualism present throughout modern thinking. We should avoid allowing modern systematic books to affect our teaching. The systematic presentation in modern books is narrow-minded and inartistic. People are ashamed to speak of anything artistic. Modern academics are ashamed to develop their own artistic style or to artistically divide things into chapters. We need to take these things into account in our own preparations.

I would like to take this opportunity, which has arisen from a number of circumstances, to ask you all the following question. During a meeting last night, I again had the feeling that you think preparing is very difficult. Someone said that Waldorf teachers normally sleep only from 5:30 until 7:30 in the morning. Everyone needs to recognize that is much too little. People need to understand that a really enormous amount of time is used to prepare for school. From that, it seems that preparation is difficult. I would like to ask in that regard if it is true that for one reason or another you can go to sleep only at 5:30. I would also like to know if the difficulty lies in the preparation, if it is really so difficult and requires so much time. Of course, that is subjective; nevertheless, I would like to pose this question now, at the beginning of our discussions, and ask you to tell me about it so we can talk about this today or at our next meeting.

Some teachers report about it.

Dr. Steiner: Are there any specific questions about preparation?

A teacher: I usually need a long time. I used Carus for teaching about the skeleton.

Dr. Steiner: The bones of the human being have not changed. You used a book that is a hundred years old, but it is important that you use the easiest sources. This is a case where much help could have been given. The teacher of one class could help the teacher of the following class.

An upper-grades teacher: I do not actually prepare for a specific class. Instead, I read a book about the whole subject I will be teaching. Then, I read an anthroposophical book connected with it, for example, The Riddles of Philosophy, for background on the development of consciousness within the period. I read something that brings me into a mood of that time. For the specific class period, I look for something, perhaps even a small detail, from which I can form the instruction.

Dr. Steiner: That is a very good method, to begin with something you are strongly interested in yourself that brings your soul into movement, so that you make some small discovery. In that way, you will get an idea during the class. You will notice that while you are with the children, things come to you more easily than when you sit and brood by yourself. That will not happen in history and geography until you have taught for a few years. It is particularly important when you are beginning a new period that you really try to form a comprehensive picture of what occurs during the entire period, possibly only in broad outlines, so that you know what is important in that period.

The same teacher later gave Dr. Steiner some additional information when he was visiting the teacher’s class. Dr. Steiner told the teacher that while using that method he actually thought of too many things. He needed to be careful not to overload the students with what he was interested in at the moment.

A teacher: In Latin grammar, I have the feeling it could be organized according to thinking, feeling, and willing, but it falls apart when I do it.

Dr. Steiner: To orient yourself, it would be a good idea, when you have three weeks free, to simply take one author, for instance, Livius, and select some sentences, then study the sentence structure empirically. Someone should do that.

I would like you to pay more attention to developing a certain feeling regarding the Socratic method. I would like you to try to develop a feeling so that you differentiate between what the children can simply repeat and what you should ask them. It is more exciting for the children when you tell them something than when you ask them something they cannot answer. You should not believe you can get the children to say something they cannot know. You should not overdo the Socratic method because you will tire the children too much. You need to develop a feeling for what you can ask, and what you need to say. You need to develop a certain tactfulness. I would now like to hear questions about what is currently going on.

A teacher asks about the school administration. Many things within the administration need to be done by everyone.

Dr. Steiner: This is an awkward problem, but I have given it a great deal of thought. This is so difficult and we can accomplish our intentions only when we carry it out with the general support of the entire faculty, or at least the vast majority of the faculty. On the other hand, the way it is accepted necessarily affects the way it is organized.

First of all, I would ask you to consider what should be included in this new area of organization. There are a large number of operations the person in the school house needs to do. We need to exclude these things since they are connected with the person in the house. Concerning everything in the administration that represents the school to the outside, I would recommend that a small group of three or four people from the faculty take up that work in the future. This group can only work in an alternating fashion, so that they work one after another as individuals, and they should meet with one another only in those cases where a common decision is valuable. In order not to violate our republican constitution, it should be a group. I would ask you to speak your thoughts about this freely and openly, even though you might think what you have to say may contradict this in the broadest sense. I would still ask you to say what you think.

A teacher: There are some things we all know only Y. can do, and other things for which other people are better suited.

Dr. Steiner: I thought that such a small group would always represent the faculty since members would alternate, particularly for limited tasks. This group could do what you just said from case to case, namely, designate one person as capable of one task or another. Nevertheless, there will still be differences of opinion.

A teacher: I think regulating the situation would be a help. It could be very useful for the school.

Dr. Steiner: We could think still further. We would form such a group and the entire faculty would declare itself in agreement when the group decides some member of the faculty should be designated for a particular task. That is what should happen. Preparation for faculty meetings and setting the agenda could also be part of the duties of the head of the administration, but that would make the job rather difficult. It is possible that preparation for the faculty meeting could be one of the tasks of the committee member who has the task of administering the school at the time. It is important to do this in complete harmony with the whole faculty.

A committee of seven teachers had formed concerned with questions of the Anthroposophical Society.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, I now need to ask what the faculty thinks of this committee that formed itself. It is important to find a way of reaching a final resolution of this problem. That committee seems very active, and we could make an assumption that through its efforts to reorganize the Anthroposophical Society, it wanted to prepare itself for administering the school. Of course, if that committee has the complete trust of the faculty, the question can be easily answered.

A teacher proposes expanding the committee.

Dr. Steiner: I only thought that if a group of people was already working with this question, it would be best if that group continued its work because it would save time.

A teacher makes a remark.

Dr. Steiner: You are mixing up two questions. I only wanted to ask who is in that group because I know such a group exists. Apparently that group has worked with these questions and—I must emphasize from the outset that we must do the whole thing harmoniously—the first question I wanted to ask is whether that group has the complete trust of the faculty, so that it can make proposals for a final form. It would be difficult for us to begin from zero today. It would be better, since I will probably be here again soon, if we could answer the question of whether that or an extended group has the full trust of the faculty, so that the group could prepare a proposal for a final resolution of the question for the next meeting. That is the question we need to answer today. I would like to hear what you have to say about this question of trust.

A teacher: This makes an impression that there are first- and second- class Waldorf teachers, but perhaps that feeling is based upon a false assumption.

Dr. Steiner: The fact that a group has formed is their business. Since, however, it has worked with these questions, we could, in the event there is trust in that group, think we could trust them with working out such a proposal. It is more complicated to consider this question in the faculty as a whole than it would be to have a group that has the trust of the faculty consider it. Some teachers agree.

A teacher: I have an awkward feeling about the formation of that group. The people who formed the group are the same ones who are so distracting for the administration.

A teacher: I have noticed that certain groups get together, and when you go by, you hear parts of important conversations. I became uncomfortable with that, and I went to a colleague and said that it was creating cliques. I was quite fearful that the faculty was dividing into those who were more or less active.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly a problem. The Waldorf School can prosper only if the faculty is in harmony. It is not possible for everyone to find everyone else sympathetic, but that is a personal question and does not belong in the faculty. To the extent that the faculty represents the entire Waldorf School, the prosperity of this school depends upon the inner harmony of the faculty. There is a major difference in whether someone says to someone outside, “You are getting on my nerves,” and when that is said here in the faculty meeting. Here in our meetings and in the administration of the Waldorf School there are only teachers from the Waldorf School, and the difficulties arise due solely to the more democratic constitution of the school. Of course, difficulties do arise. I am certainly against using the terms “first- and second-class” here in the faculty. That would certainly be the beginning of very bad things if something like a first- and second-class of faculty and faculty cliques played a role in our discussions. These are things we must strictly keep out.

Basically, when such a group forms, we need to accept the fact that the group exists and not use it as an occasion to say bad things about it. If there were reason to do that, it would be the start of difficult times in the faculty. As long as the group has formed and exists as such, I would like to again ask to what extent we need to take that group into account. It is perhaps not at all necessary to say anything about that. The question has been posed because it has received an official duty and that group should work on proposals. Barring some misdeed, I do not see that it should have any significance whether it is that group or a completely different small group. The only thing that is important is the usefulness of the group, since the proposal will be presented to the whole faculty and discussed. The only question is one of trust, that is, whether you consider that group capable of making the proposals. When such remarks are made, it is difficult to see that there is even the slightest movement toward forming a faculty. That is something that must not happen. Here we must have only harmony.

A teacher: I have complete trust in the group, but I did want to bring out that there may be colleagues who do not.

Dr. Steiner: When I use the expression, “getting on my nerves,” I mean that one person makes another person nervous. The subject of the group’s work would be how to organize the administration. Thus, you would make them nervous.

A teacher: I do not distrust the group.

Another teacher: I do not feel there is a faculty within the faculty. I think all of my colleagues could agree to this group.

Dr. Steiner: Some things have been said that were not taken back, so we can assume we cannot do this in the way it was originally intended. I could just as well think that according to the impulses out of which the school and the faculty arose, I could create such a group. I am not doing this because suspicions have arisen. I would like to wait until things have become clearer. Some antagonisms are apparent.

The committee that works upon these questions needs to study such things in order to make proposals for the administration. I think six people would be enough.

Dr. Steiner has the faculty vote by secret ballot for a preparatory committee of six members.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to have the committee propose people who can do things.

A teacher asks about an educational conference in England.

Dr. Steiner: There is a possibility of another conference in England. I need to try to put these two things together. Perhaps we could agree to it in principle.

A teacher: The English people want to know if you would agree to inviting Waldorf teachers who can speak English.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, they can do that.