The Rudolf Steiner Archive

For some time we have been occupied with gaining a more accurate knowledge of Man's relation to the universe, and today we would like to supplement our past studies. If we consider how Man lives in the present period of his evolution—taking this period so widely that it encompasses not only what is historical but also in part the pre-historical—we must conclude that speech is a preeminent characteristic at this moment of the cosmic evolution of mankind. It is speech that elevates Man above the other kingdoms of nature.

In the lectures last week, I mentioned that in the course of mankind's evolution, language, speech as a whole, has also undergone a development. I alluded to how, in very ancient times, speech was something that Man formed out of himself as his most primal ability; how, with the help of his organs of speech he was able to manifest the divine spiritual forces living within him. I also referred to how, in the transition from the Greek culture to the Roman-Latin culture, that is to say in the fourth Post-Atlantean period, the single sounds in language lose their names and, as in contemporary usage, merely have value as sounds. In Greek culture we still have a name for the first letter of the alphabet but in Latin it is just ‘A’. In passing from the Greek to the Latin culture something living in speech, something eminently concrete changes into abstraction. It might be said: as long as Man called the first letter of the alphabet ‘Alpha’, he experienced a certain amount of inspiration in it, but the moment he called it just ‘A’, the letters conformed to outer convention, to the prosaic aspects of life, replacing inspiration and inner experience. This constituted the actual transition from everything belonging to Greece to what is Roman-Latin—men of culture became estranged from the spiritual world of poetry and entered into the prose of life.

The people of Rome were a sober, prosaic race, a race of jurists, who brought prose and jurisprudence into the culture of later years. What lived in the people of Greece developed within mankind more or less like a cultural dream which men approach through their own revelations when they have inner experiences and wish to give expression to them. It might be said that all poetry has in it something which makes it appear to Europeans as a daughter of Greece, whereas all jurisprudence, all outer compartmentalization, all the prose of life, suggest descent from the Roman-Latin people.

I have previously called your attention to how a real understanding of the Alpha—Aleph in Hebrew—leads us to recognize in it the desire to express Man in a symbol. If one seeks the nearest modern words to convey the meaning of Alpha, these would be: ‘The one who experiences his own breathing’. In this name we have a direct reference to the Old Testament words: ‘And God formed Man ... and breathed into nostrils the breath of life’. What at that time was done with the breath, to make Man a Man of Earth, the being who had his Manhood imprinted on him by becoming the experiencer, the feeler of his own breathing, by receiving into himself consciousness of his breathing, is meant to be expressed in the first letter of the alphabet.

And the name ‘Beta’ considered with an open mind, turning here to the Hebrew equivalent, represents something of the nature of a wrapping, a covering, a house. Thus, if we were to put our experience on uttering ‘Alpha, Beta,’ into modern language we could say: ‘Man in his house’. And we could go through the whole alphabet in this way, giving expression to a concept, a meaning, a truth about Man simply by saying the names of the letters of the alphabet one after another. A comprehensive sentence would be uttered giving expression to the Mystery of Man. This sentence would begin by our being shown Man in his building, in his temple. The following parts of the sentence would go on to express how Man conducts himself in his temple and how he relates to the cosmos. In short, what would be expressed by speaking the names of the alphabet consecutively, would not be the abstraction we have today when we say A, B, C, without any accompanying thoughts, but it would be the expression of the Mystery of Man and of how his roots are in the universe.

When today, in various societies ‘the lost archetypal word’ is talked about, there is no recognition that it is actually contained in the sentence that comprises the names of the alphabet. Thus we can look back on a time in the evolution of humanity when Man, in repeating his alphabet, did not express what was related to external events, external needs, but what the divine spiritual mystery of his being brought to expression through his larynx and his speech organs.

It might be said that what belongs to the alphabet was applied later to external objects, and forgotten was all that can be revealed to Man through his speech about the mystery of his soul and spirit. Man's original word of truth, his word of wisdom, was lost. Speech was poured out over the matter-of-factness of life. In speaking today, Man is no longer conscious that the original primordial sentence has been forgotten; the sentence through which the divine revealed its own being to him. He is no longer aware that the single words, the single sentences uttered today, represent the mere shreds of that primordial sentence.

The poet, by avoiding the prose element in speech, and going back to the inner experience, the inner feeling, the inner formation of speech, attempts to return to its inspired archetypal element. One could perhaps say that every true poem, the humblest as well as the greatest, is an attempt to return to the word that has been lost, to retrace the steps from a life arranged in accordance with utility to times when cosmic being still revealed itself in the inner organism of speech.

Today we distinguish the consonant from the vowel element in speech. I have spoken of how it would appear to Man if he were to dive beneath the threshold of his consciousness. In ordinary consciousness memories are reflected upwards or, in other words, thoughts are reflections of what is experienced between birth and death. Normally we do not penetrate Man's actual being beyond this recollection, this thought left behind in memory. From another point of view I have indicated how, beneath the threshold of consciousness, there lives what may be called a universal tragedy of mankind. This can also be described in the following way: When Man wakes up in the morning and his ego and astral body dive down into his etheric body and his physical body, he does not perceive these bodies from within outwards, what he perceives is something quite different. We can get an idea of this by means of a diagram.

Let us say that here we have the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious, red representing the conscious, blue the unconscious. If a person sees something belonging to the outer world or to himself, for instance, if with his own eye he sees another Man's eye, then the visible rays which go out of his eye into the other Man are thrown back, and he experiences it in his consciousness. What he also bears of his own being beneath the threshold of consciousness he experiences in his astral body and his ego, but not in the ordinary waking state. It remains unconscious and essentially forms the actual content of the etheric and the physical bodies. The etheric body is never recognized at all by ordinary consciousness; it recognizes only the external aspect of the physical body. As I have mentioned in the past, we must plunge beneath memory to perceive the primal source of evil in human beings, but then something else can also be perceived, namely, an aspect of Man's connection with the cosmos.

We may, through appropriate meditation, succeed in penetrating the memory representations, as it were, to put aside what separates us inwardly from our etheric and physical bodies; if we then look down into the etheric body and the physical body so that we perceive what normally lies beneath the threshold of consciousness, we will hear something sounding within these bodies. And what sounds is the echo of the music of the spheres, which Man absorbed between death and new birth, during his descent out of the divine spiritual world into what is given to him through physical inheritance by parents and ancestors. In the etheric body and in the physical body there echoes the music of the spheres. In so far as it is of a vowel nature it echoes in the etheric body, and in the physical body in so far as it is of a consonant nature.

It is indeed true that Man, as he goes forward in the life between death and a new birth, raises himself to the world of the higher hierarchies. We have learned how Man in the world of the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai, joins in with their life and lives within the realm of the hierarchies, as here we live among the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. After this life between death and a new birth he descends once more to earthly life. And we have also learned how on his way down he first gathers to him the influences of the firmament of the fixed stars, represented in the signs of the Zodiac; then, as he descends further, he takes with him the influence of the moving planets.

Now just picture to yourselves the Zodiac, the representation of the fixed stars. Man is exposed to their influence on descending from the life of soul and spirit into earthly life. If their effects are to be designated in accordance with their actual being we must say that they are cosmic music, they are consonants. And the forming of consonants in the physical body is the echo of what resounds from the single formations of the Zodiac, whereas the formation of vowels within the music of the spheres occurs through the movements of the planets in the cosmos. This is imprinted into the etheric body. Thus, in our physical body we unconsciously bear a reflection of the cosmic consonants, whereas in our etheric body we bear a reflection of the cosmic vowels. This remains, one might say, in the silence of the subconscious. But as the child develops, forces press upwards within the body and strengthen the speech organs; these are forces that, as reflections of the formative forces of the cosmos, build up the speech organs. The more interior speech organs are so formed out of Man's essential being that they can produce vowels, and the organs nearer to the periphery, the palate, the tongue, the lips and everything that contributes to the form of the physical body, are built up in such a way that consonants can be produced. While the child is learning to speak, something takes place in the upper part of his being, as a result of the activity of his lower part, which is a consequence of the formative forces taken up into the physical body, and also into the etheric body. (This is naturally not a material process but has to do with formative activity.) Thus when we speak, we bring to Manifestation what we might call an echo of the experience Man goes through with the cosmos in the life between death and a new birth during his descent out of the divine spiritual world. All the single letters of the alphabet are actually formed as images of what lives in the cosmos.

We can get an approximate idea of the signs of the Zodiac if we relate them to modern speech by setting up B, C, D, F, and so forth, as constellations of the Zodiac. You can follow them by feeling the revolution of the planets in H (ed.: ‘H’ like in him, her)—H is not actually a letter like the others, H imitates the rotational movement, the circling around. And the single planets in their revolutions are always the individual vowels which are placed in various ways in front of the consonants. If you imagine the vowel A to be placed in here (see diagram) you have the A in harmony with B and C, but in each vowel there is the H. You can trace it in speaking—AH, IH, EH. H is in each vowel. What does it signify that H is in each vowel? It signifies that the vowel is revolving in the cosmos. The vowel is not at rest, it circles around in the cosmos. And the circling, the moving, is expressed in the H hidden in each of the vowels. Consider, therefore, a vowel harmony expressed somewhere in speech: let us say I, O, U, A. (ed.: IH, OH, UH, AH in German) What is expressed by this? Something is expressed that is the cosmic working of four planets. Let us add one of the consonants to something like this—IOSUA—let us add this S in the middle of it, and this would mean that not only the forming of vowels within the planetary spheres is expressed, but also the effect that the planets connected with I, O, U, A, experience in their movement through the connection with the star sign S. Thus if a Man in the days of ancient civilization uttered the name of a God in vowels, a planetary mystery was expressed. The deed of a divine being within the planetary world was expressed in the name. Were a divine name expressed with a consonant in it, the deed of the divine being concerned reached in thought to the representative of the fixed star firmament—the Zodiac.

When there was still an instinctive understanding of these things, in the time of atavistic clairvoyance, clairaudience, and so on, a connection with the cosmos was experienced in human speech. When speaking, Man felt himself within the cosmos. When the child learned to speak it was felt how what was experienced in the divine spiritual world before birth, or before conception, gradually evolved out of the being of the child.

It may be said that if a Man could look through himself inwardly he would have to admit: I am an etheric body, in other words, I am the echo of cosmic vowels; I am a physical body, in other words, the echo of cosmic consonants. Because I stand here on the earth, there sounds through my being an echo of all that is said by the signs of the Zodiac; and the life of this echo is my physical body. An echo is formed of all that is said by the planetary spheres and this echo is my etheric body.

1. Physical body = Echo of the Zodiac
2. Etheric body = Echo of the planetary movements
3. Astral body = Experience of the planetary movements
4. Ego = perception of the echo of the Zodiac

Nothing is said, my dear friends, by repeating that Man consists of physical body and etheric body. Those are no more than vague, indefinite words. If we want to speak in a real language, which can be learned from the mysteries of the cosmos, we would have to say: Man is constituted out of the echo of the heavens, of the fixed stars, of the echo of the planetary movements, of what is experienced of the echo of the planetary movements, and of what knowingly experiences the echo of the fixed star heavens. Then we would have expressed in real cosmic speech what is abstractly expressed by the words: Man is made up of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We remain entirely in the abstract by saying: Man is composed first of physical body, secondly of etheric body, thirdly of astral body, fourthly of ego. But we pass into concrete cosmic speech if we say: Man consists of the echo of the Zodiac, of the echo of the planetary movements, of the experience of the impression of the planetary movements in thinking, feeling and willing, and in the perception of the echo of the Zodiac. The first is abstraction, the second reality.

When you say ‘I’, what is that exactly? Now just imagine someone had planted trees in a beautifully artistic order. Each individual tree can be seen. However at a distance all the trees resolve into a single point. Take all the individual things—all that resounds from the Zodiac in the way of world consonants, then go far enough away: Everything that is formed as inward sound, in the most manifold way, is compressed within you to the single point ‘I’.

It is an actual fact that this name which Man gives himself is really only an expression for what we perceive in the measureless spaces of the universe. Everywhere it is necessary to go back to what, as reflection, as echo, appears here upon earth. Thus, when the matter is seen in its reality, before Man's higher and inward experience, everything out of which Man builds himself up as a phenomenon, as pure experience, melts away. If we look upon Man and gradually learn to know his true nature, then his physical body actually ceases to be in the way it normally confronts us and otherwise stands before us, our vision widens and Man grows into the heavens of the fixed stars. The etheric body, too, ceases to be before us. Vision is extended, experience is extended, and we arrive at a perception of planetary life, for this human etheric body is a mere reflection of planetary life.

Man standing before you is nothing but the phenomenon, the appearance, the image, of what goes on in the life of the planets. We think we have an individual human being in front of us, but this individual is a picture, on a certain spot, of the whole world. What then is the reason for the difference between an Asiatic and an American? The reason is that the starry heavens are portrayed at two different earthly points, just as we have various pictures of one and the same external fact. It is indeed true that when we observe Man the world begins to dawn upon us, and by such observation we are faced by the great mystery of the extent to which Man is an actual pictured microcosm of the reality of the macrocosm.

Now of what does modern life consist? When we look back from these modern times upon mankind's life in primeval times, we still find an experience of Man's connection with the spiritual world in the instinctive consciousness of those ancient days. In the alphabet we can have a concrete experience of this. When, in primeval words, Man had to express the rich store of the divine in all its fullness, he uttered the letters of the alphabet. When he expressed the mystery of his own nature, in the way he learned about it in the Mysteries, then he voiced how he had descended through Saturn or Jupiter in their stellar relation to the Lion or the Virgin, in other words, how he had descended through the A or the I in their relation to the M or the L. He gave utterance to what he had then experienced of the music of the spheres, and that was his cosmic name. And in those ancient days men were instinctively aware that they brought a name down with them from the cosmos to the Earth.

Since then Christian consciousness still preserves this primeval consciousness in an abstract way by consecrating individual days to the memory of saints, who, rightly understood, should give new life to the spiritual cosmos. By being born on a particular day of the year we should receive the name of the saint whose day it is on the calendar. What is meant to be expressed here in a more abstract way, was more concretely expressed in primeval times, when in the Mysteries the cosmic name of a person was found in accordance with what he experienced as he descended to earth, when with his being he created vowels with the planets and added them to the consonants of the Zodiac. The various groups of the human race had many names then, but these names were conceived in such a way that they harmonized with the universal all-embracing name.

Considered from this point of view, what was the alphabet? It was what the heavens revealed through their fixed stars and through the planets moving across them. When the alphabet was spoken out of the original, instinctive, human wisdom it was astronomy that was expressed. What was spoken through the alphabet and what was taught in astronomy in those olden days was one and the same thing. The wisdom in the astronomy of those times was not presented in the same way as the learning contained in any branch of knowledge today, which is built up from single perceptions and concepts. It was conceived as a revelation that made itself felt on the surface of human experience, either in the form of an axiomatic truth or as part of an axiomatic truth. Thus a concrete experience was represented with a part of the primal wisdom. And there was something of quite a dim consciousness connected with the fact that, in the Middle Ages, those who were highly educated still had to learn grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. In this ascent through the various spheres of learning lies a half conscious recognition of something, which in earlier days, existed in instinctive clarity. Today grammar has become very abstract. Going back into times of which history tells us nothing, but which, nevertheless, are still historical times, we find that grammar was not the abstract subject it is today but that men were led through grammar into the mystery of the individual letters. They learned that the secrets of the cosmos found expression in the letters. The single vowel was brought into connection with its planet, the single consonant with the single sign of the Zodiac; thus, through the letters of the alphabet, Man gained knowledge of the stars.

Passing from grammar to rhetoric entailed the application of what lived in Man as active astronomy. And by rising to dialectics one came in thought to comprehending and working on what lived in Man out of astronomy. Arithmetic was not taught as the abstraction of today, but as the entity expressed in the mystery of numbers. Number itself was looked upon differently from how it is done today. I will give you a trifling instance of this.

How does one picture 1, 2, 3 to oneself today? It is done by thinking of a pea, then of another pea, and this makes two; then another is added and there are three. It is a matter of adding one to another—piling them up. In olden days one did not count in this way. A start was made with a unit. And by splitting the unit into two parts one had 2. Thus 2 was not arrived at by adding one unit to another. It was not a putting together of units, but the two were contained in the one. Three was contained in the one in a different way—four again in a different way. The unit embraced all numbers and was the greatest. Today the unit is the smallest. Everything today is atomistically conceived. The unit is one member and the two is added to it, this is all imagined atomistically. The original idea was organic. There the unit is the greatest and the following numbers always appear as being smaller and are all contained in the unit. Here we come to quite different mysteries in the world of numbers.

These mysteries in the world of numbers give the merest intimation that here we are not concerned with what merely lives in the hollow of Man's head. (I say the hollow of his head because I have often shown it really to be hollow from the spiritual point of view.) In the relations of number we can come to perceive the relations of the objectivity of the world. If we always just add one to one naturally this is something that has nothing to do with the facts. I have a piece of chalk. If beside it I place a second piece of chalk this has nothing to do with the first. The one is not concerned with the other. If, however, I presuppose that everything is a unit and now pass to the numbers contained in this unit, I get a two in a way that is a matter of some consequence. I have to break up the piece. I then get right into reality.

Thus after being borne up in dialectics to grasping the thought of the astronomical, one reached still further into the cosmos with arithmetic and in a similar way with geometry. From geometry one got the feeling that the geometrical, thought concretely, was the music of the spheres. This is the difference between what holds good today and what once existed in the instinctive wisdom of primeval times. Take music today—the mathematical physicist reckons the pitch of a note, for example, reckons which pitch is at work in a melody. Then anyone who is musical is obliged to forget his music and enter the sphere of the abstract if, being a keen musician, he has not already run away from the mathematician. Man is led away from immediate experience into abstraction and this has very little to do with experience.

In itself it is really interesting—if one has a mathematical bent—to press on from the musical into the sphere of acoustics, but one does not gain much in the way of musical experience. That someone today learns geometry and as he proceeds begins to experience forms as musical notes, that is to say, if he rises from the 5th to the 6th grade, and makes geometry sound musically, all this, as far as I know, does not enter the curriculum. But that was once the meaning of rising to the sixth part of what was to be learned—from geometry to music. And only then did the archetypal, underlying reality become an experience. The astronomy in the subconscious then became something that one consciously mastered as astronomy, as the highest and 7th member of the so-called Trivium and Quadrivium.

The history of Man should be studied in accordance with the development of his consciousness for then we can gain a feeling that consciousness must return to these matters. That is just what is attempted in anthroposophical Spiritual Science. There is no need to marvel that those who are accustomed to accept the recognized science of the day find nothing right in what I have written, for example, in Occult Science. It is necessary, however, that Man should go back, in a fully conscious way, to the true reality which for a time had to recede into the background to enable Man to develop his freedom. Man would have been able ever more strongly to develop the consciousness of how necessary it is for him to stand within a divine cosmic world, had he not been cast out of this cosmos into the merely phenomenal, into pure appearance, so strongly indeed that the whole manifold splendor and majesty of the starry sky was condensed into the abstract ego.

This was a necessary step in the struggle for freedom. For Man could develop his freedom only by pressing together quite indistinguishably into the single point of the ego something that, filled out by the whole of cosmic space, streamed through all time. But he would lose his being, he would no longer know or possess himself, no longer be active and act on his own initiative, were he not to reconquer the whole world from this single point of his ego, were he not to rise again from the abstract to the concrete. It is indeed important to understand how, in passing from the Greek to the Latin culture, abstraction took hold of European culture and thus resulted in the loss of the primeval word. It must be remembered that the Latin language was for a long time the language of the cultural elite. What persisted however, was a kind of desperate holding on to what this Latin language had actually already discarded. And what had been spoken in the Greek world then remained behind only in thought. Of the logos there remained logic—abstract thought.

In the longing that a Man such as Goethe had for knowledge of the Greek culture, there lies something that may be expressed as follows: he longed for liberation from the abstraction of modern times, from the dry prose of Romanism. He wanted to reach the other daughter of the primeval wisdom of the world, what remained of all that stood for Greece.—We too must experience something of this kind if we wish to understand Goethe's intense yearning for the South. In modern school biographies we find nothing of all this. Only when in every individual thing there echoes a consciousness of Man being an expression of the whole cosmos, will the way be cleared for the forces needed for Man's progress, if civilization is not to decline into utter barbarism.

I have said on many occasions that at the time when medieval culture had reached its prime, two streams of spiritual life were flowing through the ripest souls in European civilisation—streams which I have described as knowledge through revelation and knowledge acquired by reason, as we find it in Scholasticism. Knowledge through revelation, in its more scholastic form, was by no means a body of mystical, abstract or indefinite thought. It expressed itself in sharply defined, clear-cut concepts. But these concepts were considered to be beyond the scope of man's ordinary powers of cognition and must in every case be accepted as traditions of the Church. The Church, by virtue of its continuity, claimed the right to be the guardian of this kind of knowledge.

The second kind of knowledge was held to be within the scope of research and investigation, albeit those who stood wholly within the stream of Scholasticism acknowledged that this knowledge acquired by reason could not in any sense be regarded as knowledge emanating from the super-sensible world.

Thus when medieval culture was at its prime, it was realised that knowledge no longer accessible to mankind in that age must be preserved as it were by tradition. But it was not always so, for if we go back through the Middle Ages to the first Christian centuries we shall find that the characteristics of this knowledge through revelation was less sharply emphasised than they were in medieval culture. If one had suggested to a Greek philosopher of the Athenian School, for instance, that a distinction could be made between knowledge acquired by reason and knowledge through revelation (in the sense in which the latter was understood in the Middle Ages), he would have been at a loss to know what was meant. It would have been unthinkable to him that if knowledge concerning super-sensible worlds had once been communicated to a man by cosmic powers, it could not be communicated afresh. True, the Greeks realised that higher spiritual knowledge was beyond the reach of man's ordinary cognition, but they knew too that by dint of spiritual training and through Initiation, a man could unfold higher faculties of knowledge and that by these means he would enter a world where super-sensible truth would be revealed to him.

Now a change took place in Western culture between all that lived in the centuries when Greek philosophy came to flower in Plato and Aristotle, and the kind of knowledge that made its appearance about the end of the fourth century A.D. I have often referred to one aspect of this change by saying that the Mystery of Golgotha occurred in an age when very much of the old Initiation-wisdom was still living in men. And indeed there were many who applied their Initiation-wisdom and were thus able, with super-sensible knowledge, to realise the significance of the Event on Golgotha. Those who had been initiated strained every nerve to understand how a Being like the Christ, Who before the Mystery of Golgotha had not been united with earthly evolution, had passed into an earthly body and linked Himself with the evolution of man. The nature of this Being, how He had worked before His descent to the earth—such were the questions which even at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha men were trying to answer by means of the highest faculties of Initiation-wisdom.

But then we find that from the fifth century A.D. onwards, this old Initiation-wisdom which had lived in Asia Minor, Northern Africa, in Greek culture, had spread over into Italy and still further into Europe, was less and less understood. People spoke contemptuously of certain individuals, saying that their teachings were to be avoided at all costs by true Christians. Moreover, efforts were made to obliterate all that had previously been known of these individuals.

It is strange that a man like Franz Brentano should have inherited from medieval tradition a hatred of all that lived in personalities like Plotinus, for example, of whom very little was known but who was regarded as one with whom true Christians could have no dealings. Brentano had allowed himself to be influenced by this hatred and vented it on Plotinus. He actually wrote a polemical thesis entitled Was für ein Philosoph manchmal Epoche macht, and the philosopher is Plotinus, who lived in the third century A.D. Plotinus lived within the streams of spiritual life which were wholly exhausted by the time of the fourth century A.D. and which in the later evolution of Christendom people tried to cast into oblivion.

The information contained in text-books on the history of philosophy in regard to the outstanding figures of the early Christian centuries is usually not only scanty in the extreme but quite incapable of giving any idea of their significance. Naturally it is difficult for us in modern times to have any true conception of the first three or four centuries of Christendom—for example, of the way in which the impulses living in Plato and Aristotle were working on and of thought which had in a certain respect become estranged from the deeper Mystery-wisdom, although this wisdom was still possessed by certain personalities in the first three or four centuries after the coming of Christ.

Very little real understanding of Plato is shown in modern text-books on the history of philosophy. Those of you who are interested should read the chapter on Plato in Paul Deussen's History of Greek Philosophy, and the passage where he speaks of the place assigned by Plato to the Idea of the Good in relation to the other Ideas. Deussen says something like this: Plato did not admit the existence of a personal God because, if he had done so, he could not have taught that the Ideas subsist in and through themselves. Plato could not acknowledge God as a Being because the Ideas are primary and subsistent. True—says Deussen—Plato places the Idea of the Good above the other Ideas, but he did not thereby imply that the Idea of the Good stands above the others.—For what is expressed in the Idea of the Good is, after all, only a kind of family-likeness which is present in all the Ideas.—Such is Deussen's argument.

But now let us scrutinise this logic more closely. The Ideas are there. They are subsistent and independent. The Idea of the Good cannot be said to rule or direct the other Ideas. All Ideas bear a family-likeness but this family-likeness is actually expressed through the Idea of the Good. Yes—but whence are family-likenesses derived? A family-likeness is derived from stock. The Idea of the Good points to family-likeness. What can we do except go back to the father of the stock!

This is what we find to-day in famous histories of philosophy and those who write them are regarded as authorities. People read such things and never notice that they are out-and-out nonsense. It is difficult to imagine that anyone capable of writing such absurdities in connection with Greek philosophy could have anything very valuable to say about Indian wisdom. Nevertheless, if we ask for something authoritative on the subject of Indian wisdom to-day we shall certainly be advised to read Paul Deussen. Things have come to a pretty pass!

My only object in saying this is to show that in the present age there is little real understanding of Platonic philosophy. Modern intellectualism is incapable of it. Nor is it possible to understand the tradition which exists in regard to Plotinus—the so-called Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus was a pupil of Ammonius Saccas who lived at the beginning of the third century A.D. It is said that Ammonius Saccas gave instruction to individual pupils but left nothing in writing. Now the reason why the eminent teachers of that age wrote nothing down was because they held that wisdom must be something living, that it could not be passed on by writing but only from man to man, in direct personal intercourse. Something else—again not understood—is said of Ammonius Saccas, namely that he tried to bring about agreement in the terrible quarrels between the adherents of Aristotle and of Plato, by showing that there was really no discrepancy between the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.

Let me try to tell you in brief words how Ammonius Saccas spoke of Plato and Aristotle. He said: Plato belonged to an epoch when many human souls were treading the path to the spiritual world in other words when there was still knowledge of the principles of true Initiation. But in more ancient times there was no such thing as abstract, logical thought. Even now (at the beginning of the third century A.D.) only the first, elementary traces of this kind of thinking are making their appearance. In Plato's time, thoughts evolved independently were unknown. Whereas the Initiates of earlier times gave their message in pictures and imaginations, Plato was one of the first to change these imaginations into abstract concepts and ideas. The great spiritual picture to which Plato tried to lift the eyes of men was brought down in more ancient times merely in the form of imaginations. In Plato, the imaginations were already concepts—but these concepts poured down as it were from the world of Divine Spirit. Plato said in effect: the Ideas are the lowest revelation of the Divine-Spiritual. Aristotle could no longer penetrate with the same intensity into this spiritual substance. Therefore the knowledge he possessed only amounted to the substance of the ideas, and this is at a lower level than the picture itself. Nevertheless, Aristotle could still receive the substance of the ideas in the form of revelation. There is no fundamental difference between Plato and Aristotle—so said Ammonius Saccas—except that Plato was able to gaze into higher levels of the spiritual world than Aristotle.—And thereby Ammonius Saccas thought to reconcile the disputes among the followers of Aristotle and Plato.

We learn, then, that by the time of Plato and Aristotle, wisdom was already beginning to assume a more intellectual form. Now in those ancient times it was still possible for individuals here and there to rise to very high levels of spiritual perception. The lives of men like Ammonius Saccas and his pupil Plotinus were rich in spiritual experiences and their conceptions of the spiritual world were filled with real substance.

Naturally one could not have spoken to such men of outer Nature in the sense in which we speak of Nature to-day. In their schools they spoke of a spiritual world, and Nature—generally regarded nowadays as complete and all-embracing—was merely the lowest expression of that spiritual world of which they were conscious.

We can form some idea of how such men were wont to speak, if we study Iamblichus, a man possessed of deep insight and one of the successors of Ammonius Saccas. How did the world appear to the soul of Iamblichus? He spoke to his pupils somewhat as follows:—If we would understand the universe let us not pay heed to space, for space contains merely the outward expression of the spiritual world. Nor let us pay heed to time, for only the illusory images of cosmic reality arise in time. Rather must we look up to those Powers in the spiritual world who are the Creators of time and of the connections between time and space. Gazing out into the expanses of the cosmos, we see how the cycle, repeated visibly in the Sun, repeats itself every year. But the Sun circles through the Zodiac, through the twelve constellations. It is not enough merely to observe this phenomenon, for three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers are working and weaving therein, sending forth the Sun-forces which flood the whole universe accessible to man. Every year the cycle is repeated. If these Powers alone held sway, there would be three hundred and sixty days in a year. But there are, in fact, five additional days, ruled by seventy-two sub-heavenly Powers, the planetary Spirits. I will draw (on the blackboard) this pentagonal figure, because one to five is the relation of seventy-two to three hundred and sixty. The five remaining days in the cosmic year which are abandoned, as it were, by the three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers, are ruled by the seventy-two sub-heavenly Powers. But over and above the three hundred and sixty-five days, there are still a few more hours in the year. And these hours are directed by forty-two earthly Powers.—Iamblichus also said to his pupils: The three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers are connected with the head-organisation of man, the seventy-two sub-heavenly Powers with the breast-system (breathing-process and heart) and the forty-two earthly Powers with the purely earthly system in man (e.g. digestion, metabolism).

In those times the human being was given his place in a spiritual universe, whereas nowadays we begin our physiological studies by learning of the quantities of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, lime-stone, etc., within the human organism. We relate the human being to a lifeless nature. But Iamblichus would have taught how the organism of man is related to the forty-two earthly Powers, the seventy-two sub-heavenly or planetary Powers, and the three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers. Just as to-day man is said to be composed of earthly substances, in the time of Iamblichus he was known to represent a confluence of forces streaming from the spiritual universe. Great and sublime was the wisdom presented in the schools of learning in those days, and one can readily understand that Plotinus—who had reached the age of twenty-eight before he listened to the teachings of Ammonius Saccas—felt himself living in an altogether different world. He was able to assimilate some of this wisdom because it was still cultivated in many places during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. With this wisdom men also tried to understand the descent of the Christ into Jesus of Nazareth and the place of Christ in the realms of the spiritual Hierarchies, in the great structure of the spiritual universe.

And now let me deal with another chapter of the wisdom taught by Iamblichus. He said: There are three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers, seventy-two planetary Powers, forty-two earthly Powers—in all, four hundred and seventy-four Divine Beings of different orders. Look to the far East—so said Iamblichus—and you will there find peoples who give names to their Gods. Turn to the Egyptians and to other peoples—they too name their Gods. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans—all will name their Gods. The four hundred and seventy-four Gods include all the Gods of all the different peoples: Zeus, Apollo, Baal—all the Gods. The reason why the peoples have different Gods is that one race has chosen twelve or maybe seventeen Gods from the four hundred and seventy-four, another race has taken twenty-five, another three, another four. The number of racial Gods is four hundred and seventy-four. And the highest of these Gods, the God who came down to earth at a definite point of time, is Christ.

This wisdom was well suited to bring about reconciliation between the different religions, not as the outcome of vague sentiment but of the knowledge that the different Gods of the peoples constitute, in their totality, one great system—the four hundred and seventy-four Gods. It was taught that all the choirs of Gods of the peoples of ancient times had reached their climax in Christianity and that the crown of wisdom was to understand how the Christ Being had entered through Jesus of Nazareth into His earthly activity.

And so, as we look back to an earlier Spiritual Science (which although it no longer exists in that form to-day, indeed cannot do so for it must be pursued now-a-days in a different way), the deepest respect grows up within us. Profound wisdom was taught in the early Christian centuries in regard to the super-sensible worlds. But knowledge of this spiritual universe was imparted only to those who were immediate pupils of the older Initiates. The wisdom might only be passed on to those whose faculties of knowledge had reached the stage where they were able to understand the essence and being of the different Gods.

This requisite of spiritual culture was recognised everywhere in Greece, in Egypt and in Asia Minor. It is, of course, true, that remnants of the ancient wisdom still existed in Roman civilisation. Plotinus himself taught for a long time in Italy. But a spirit of abstraction had crept into Roman culture, a spirit no longer capable of understanding the value and worth of personality, of being. The spirit of abstraction had crept in, not yet in the form it afterwards assumed, but adhered to all the more firmly because it was there in its earliest beginnings.

And then, on the soil of Italy at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. we find a School which began to oppose the ancient principle of Initiation, the preparation of the individual for Initiation. We see a School arising which gathers together and makes a careful record of everything originating from ancient Initiation-wisdom. The aim of this School—which lasted beyond the third on into the fourth century—was to perpetuate the essence of Roman culture, to establish historical tradition as against the strivings of individual human Beings. As Christianity began to find its way into Roman culture, the efforts of this school were directed to the elimination of all that could still have been discovered by means of the old Initiation-knowledge in regard to the presence of Christ in the personality of Jesus.

It was a fundamental tenet of this Roman School that the teaching given by Ammonius Saccas and Iamblichus must not be allowed to pass on to posterity. Just as in those times there was a widespread impulse to destroy the ancient temples and altars—in short to obliterate every remnant of ancient Heathendom—so, in the domain of spiritual life, efforts were made to wipe out the principles whereby knowledge of the higher world might be attained. To take one example: the dogma of the One Divine Nature or of the Two Divine Natures in the Person of Christ was substituted for the teaching of Ammonius Saccas and Iamblichus, namely, that the individual human being can develop to a point where he will understand how the Christ took up His abode in the body of Jesus. This dogma was to reign supreme and the possibility of individual insight smothered. The ancient path of wisdom was superseded by dogma in the culture of the Roman world. And because strenuous efforts were made to destroy any teaching that savoured of the ancient wisdom, little more than the names of men like Ammonius Saccas and Iamblichus have come down to us. Of many other teachers in the Southern regions of Europe not even the names have been preserved. Altars were destroyed, temples burnt to the ground and the ancient teachings exterminated, to such an extent indeed that we have no longer any inkling to-day of the wisdom that lived in the South of Europe during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Again and again it happened, however, that knowledge of this wisdom found its way to men who were interested in these matters and who realised that Roman culture was rapidly falling to pieces under the spread of Christianity. But after the extermination of what would have been so splendid a preparation for an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it was only possible to learn of the union of Christ with Jesus in the form of an abstract dogma laid down by the Councils and coloured by the Roman spirit. The living wisdom was wiped out, and abstraction, albeit working on in the guise of revelation, took its place.

History is well-nigh blank in regard to these things, but during the first centuries of Christendom there were a number of men who were able to say: “There are indeed Initiates—of whom Iamblichus was one. It is the Initiates who teach true Christianity. To them, Christ is Christ indeed, whereas the Romans speak merely of the ‘Galileans.’ ” This expression was used in the third and fourth centuries A.D. to gloss over a deep misunderstanding. The less men understood Christianity, the more they spoke of the Galileans; the less they knew of the Christ, the more emphasis they laid on the human personality of the ‘Galilean.’

Out of this milieu came Julian, the so-called Apostate, who had absorbed a very great deal from pupils of men like Iamblichus and who still knew something of the spiritual universe reaching down into every phenomenon of Nature. Julian the Apostate had heard from pupils of Iamblichus of the spiritual forces working down into every animal and plant from the three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers, the seventy-two planetary Powers and the forty-two earthly Powers. In those days there were still some who understood what was, for example, expressed in a most wonderful way in a deeply significant legend related of Plotinus. The legend ran: There were many who would no longer believe that a man could be inspired by the Divine Spirit and who said that anyone who claimed to have knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual world was possessed by a demon. Plotinus was therefore carried off to the temple of Isis in Egypt in order that the priests might determine the nature of the demon possessing him. And when the Egyptian priests—who still had knowledge of these things—came to the temple and tested Plotinus before the altar of Isis, performing all the ritual acts still possible at that time, Lo! instead of a demon there appeared the Godhead Himself!

This legend indicates that in those times men still acknowledged that at least it was possible to prove whether a good God or a demon was possessing a human being.

Julian the Apostate heard of these things. But on the other side there came insistently to his ears the words of a writing which passed into many hands in the Roman world during the first Christian centuries and was said to be a sermon of the Apostle Peter, whereas it was actually a forgery. In this document it was said: Behold the godless Hellenes! In very creatures of nature they see the Divine-Spiritual. This is sinful, impious. It is sacrilege to see the Divine-Spiritual in Nature, in animal and in plant. Let no man be so sinful as to believe that the Divine is present in the course of the Sun and Moon.—These were the things that dinned in the ears of Julian, now from one side, now from another. A deep love for Hellenism grew up within him and he became the tragic figure who would fain have spoken of Christianity in the light of the teachings of Iamblichus.

There is no telling what would have come to pass in Europe if the Christianity of Julian the Apostate had conquered instead of the doctrines of Rome, if his desire to restore the Initiation-training had been fulfilled the training whereby men could themselves have attained to knowledge of how the Christ had lived in Jesus and of His place among the other racial Gods. Julian the Apostate was not out to destroy the heathen temples. Indeed he would have been willing to restore the temple of the Jews at Jerusalem. His desire was to restore the heathen temples and he also had the interests of the Christians at heart. Truth and truth alone was his quest. And the great obstacle in his way was the School in ancient Rome of which I have spoken—the School which not only set out to exterminate the old principle of Initiation but did in fact succeed in exterminating it, wishing to put in its place recorded traditions of Initiation-wisdom.

When the moment had arrived, it was easy to arrange for the thrust of the Persian spear which caused Julian's death. It was then that the words were uttered which have never since been understood, not even by Ibsen, but which can be explained by a knowledge of the traditions of Julian's time: ‘The Galilean has conquered, not the Christ!’ For at this moment of death it was revealed to the prophetic vision of Julian the Apostate that henceforward the conception of Christ as a Divine Being would fade away and that the ‘Galilean,’ the man of Galilean stock would be worshipped as a God. In the thirtieth year of his life Julian the Apostate had a pre-vision of the whole of subsequent evolution, on into the nineteenth century, by which time theology had lost all knowledge of the Christ in Jesus.

Julian was ‘Apostate’ only in regard to what was to come after. The Apostate was indeed the Apostle in respect of spiritual realisation of the Mystery of Golgotha.—And it is this spiritual realisation that must be quickened again in the souls of men.

Newer geological strata always overlay those that are older and the newer must be pierced before we can reach those that lie below. It is sometimes difficult to believe beneath what thick layers the history of human evolution lies concealed. Thick indeed are the layers spread by Romanism over the first conceptions of the Mystery of Golgotha! Through spiritual knowledge it must again be possible to penetrate through these layers and so rediscover that old wisdom which was swept away from the domain of spiritual life just as the heathen altars were swept away from the physical world.

Egyptian priests declared that Plotinus bore a God within him, not a demon. But in the West the dictum went forth that Plotinus was assuredly possessed by a demon. Read what has been said on the subject, including the thesis by Brentano which I have mentioned, and you will find the same. According to the Egyptian priests, a God and not a demon was living in Plotinus, the philosopher of the third century A.D. But Brentano states the contrary. He declares: Plotinus was possessed by a demon, not by a God!

And then, in the nineteenth century, the Gods became demons, the demons Gods. Men were no longer capable of distinguishing between Gods and demons in the universe. And this has lived on in the chaos of our civilisation.

Truly these things are grave when we see them as they really are. I wished to-day to speak of one chapter of history and from an absolutely objective standpoint, for what comes to pass in history is after all inevitable. Necessary as it was that for a season men should remain without enlightenment about certain mysteries, enlightenment must ultimately be given, and—what is more—received.

When we try to ascertain man's position in the Universe as a whole, it is a question of turning our attention not only to Space but to Time. Anyone who follows the history of human evolution at all, will find that it is a peculiarity of the Oriental conception of the Universe to set Space in the foreground, not leaving Time wholly disregarded, but placing everything pertaining to Space in the foreground. The peculiarity of the Western conception of the Universe is to reckon to a very special degree with Time, and it is precisely this regard for the temporal in human evolution and the Universe which must have primary consideration in a right view of the Christ-Force. To recognise the full significance of the Christ-Force in human evolution on Earth, we must be able to place Man himself correctly in the whole Universe, in a temporal sense. The customary belief in the law of the conservation of force, and especially that of the conservation of substance, hinders this. The law of the conservation of force is one which would so place Man in the Universe that he stands there as a mere product of nature. Attempts have been made to discover the procedure of the transformation through combustion of what man takes in as nourishment, and to find out how the heat of combustion is set up and how other forces arise in man as transformed forces of the food. Such attempts have already been made in modern times by students. They are like thoughts which find expression somewhat in the following way. A man sees a building, he hears that it is a Bank, and endeavours by some method to calculate how much money is put into the Bank and how much taken out; and finding that the amounts are the same, draws the conclusion that the money has either transformed itself in there or has remained the same, but that there are no officials there in the Bank at all. This is approximately the logic of the thought that whatever a man has eaten may be found again in the transformed forces of his calefaction, his activity. Here too courage is lacking actually to put to the test the depth of thought underlying these modern principles. One might indeed arrive at many things by testing what we find in modern science; one has only to test its logic and more especially its reality.

Now the point is that on account of a mass of unreality and of illogical methods of thought, man is placed in the dilemma in which, as I have already pointed out, on the one hand stand ideals, as secondary effects, and on the other, natural occurrences; and we can find no means of building a bridge between them. At most an attempt is made today by chatterers in the sphere of philosophy to talk of natural occurrences in a way which flatters the primitive thought of man; this kind of talk has no desire to go into anything concrete, but prefers to acquiesce in such nonsense as that of Eucken or Bergson. What is of real consequence is, first of all, that one should ask oneself: What it is that man bears within him out of the whole compass of the Universe? What enables him as a member of the Universe so to work with his Ego, that one can see that what results from his activity is his own? Now of all things of the Universe, of all properties of being in the Universe, one such property is easier to study than others, if one only sets aside the prejudices of modern science, and that is the element of heat.

Certainly it must be said in the first place that even the animal world, and perhaps to some extent the plant world, have heat of their own; but the heat of the higher animal world and of man can be distinguished from other kinds of individual heat. And it is necessary to enquire now into what may be called the heat peculiar to man. For in this particular heat (leaving aside for the moment that of the animal, although what I am saying does not contradict the facts in the animal world; but it would lead us too far to include it in our present observations), in what man possesses as his own heat—in this he has his inmost corporeality, his inmost bodily field of activity. Our attention is not drawn to this, only because it escapes ordinary observation that the element of soul and spirit dwelling in man finds its immediate continuation in the effect it has on the heat within him. In speaking of man's bodily nature pure and simple, one should really speak of his heat-body. When we see a man before us, we are also confronted by an enclosed heat-space, which is at a higher temperature than its environment. In this increased temperature lives the soul and spirit element of man, and the soul and spirit in him is indirectly conveyed by means of the heat, to his other organs. In this way too, man's Will comes into existence.

The Will comes into being through the fact that in the first instance man's heat is acted upon, then his lung-organisation, thence his fluid-organisation, and thence only what is mineral or solid in his organism. Thus the human organisation must be represented as follows: The first part to be acted upon is the heat, then through heat the air is worked upon; thence an influence acts upon the water—the fluid-organism—and thence upon the solid organisation. (I have drawn attention to the fact that the solid part of man's organisation is the smallest, for he is more than 75% water-body.) This fact, that we really live and move in our heat element, is one of the physiological facts which we must keep carefully in mind, for we must not simply regard what forms an isolated heat-space as though it were just a space of pure uniform heat, having a higher temperature than the environment—no, we must regard it as having differentiated parts, warmer and colder. Just as our liver, lungs and so forth, differ from each other, so do the parts of our heat-organism; and this differentiation is continually changing inwardly. It is a constantly moving differentiation, and that which in the first instance unites with the activity of the soul and spirit has its being in this inner heat-organisation.

Philosophers today say that the effect of the soul and spirit upon the body cannot be perceived, because they imagine an arm as a sort of solid lever appliance; and of course they cannot see how the activity of the soul and spirit, which is conceived of as abstractly as possible, is to be transmitted to this solid lever-appliance. But one need only fix one's attention on the transition, and we find there that which has been organised for man out of the whole Universe. If we really study human thought, we find that the thought which asserts itself in our head has very much to do with this inner work that goes on within the heat-relationships. (This is not quite exactly spoken, but the inaccuracy can perhaps only be corrected in the course of time. We must try to get a complete picture, therefore I will begin with a more cursory description.) If we observe this inter-working of thoughts in the heat-space, in the isolated heat-space, it is evident that something like a co-operation of thought-activity and heat-activity takes place. In what does this consist? Here we come to something which demands very careful consideration.

Taking first the whole of the rest of man, and then his head, we can of course, trace a transmutation of matter (metabolism) from the former to the latter; and the fact that ultimately the head has to do with thought—that we perceive as a direct experience. Yet what really happens? We will lead up to this gradually by way of appropriate imagery. Let us suppose we have some fluid substance; we bring it to boiling point, then it evaporates, and changes into a more rarefied substance. This same process takes place far more intensely with human thought. All that plays its part as transmutation of substances in the human head, brings it about that all substance falls away like a sediment, it is precipitated, and nothing remains of it but the mere picture.

I will now use another example. Suppose you have a vessel containing a solution. This you cool down, which is again a heat-process. A sediment collects below, and above remains finer liquid. This is also the case with the human head; only here no substance whatever is collected above, nothing but pictures, all matter is expelled. This is the activity of the human head; it forms what are mere pictures, and expels the matter.

This process, as a matter of fact, takes place in everything that may be called the transition to pure thinking. All the material substance which has co-operated in the human inner life falls back into the organism, and pictures alone remain. It is a fact that when we rise to pure thought, we live in pictures. Our soul lives in pictures; and these pictures are the remains of all that has gone before. Not the substance, but the pictures remain.

What has just been presented can be followed into the thoughts themselves, for this process only takes place at the moment when thoughts change into mere pictures. At first thoughts live, as it were, embodied. They are permeated by substance; but as pictures they separate themselves out from this substance. If however, we go to work in a truly spiritually scientific way, we can quite easily distinguish pure thought, sense-free thought that has separated itself out from the material process, from all thoughts belonging to what I have called in these lectures the “instinctive wisdom of the ancients.”

This instinctive wisdom of the ancients, as we learn it today, bears in it, quite literally and exactly, the character of not being brought to such filtration of thought that all material substance fell away. Such falling away of all matter is a result of human development. Although not observed by external physiology, it is a fact that virtually—of course virtually and approximately—the thoughts of earthly humanity before the Mystery of Golgotha were always united with matter, and that at the time of the intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha in Earth-life, humanity had arrived at the point in evolution of being able to dissociate itself from matter in the inner process of thought; matter-free thought became possible.

This is not to be regarded as unimportant! It is indeed of the utmost importance that we should observe this development in earthly life—that man in his evolution has become free from the embodiment of thoughts; that they have changed to pure pictures. Thus we may say that up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, embodied pictures lived in man; but after the Mystery of Golgotha, matter-free pictures lived in man. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Universe worked upon man in such a way that he could not attain to pictures free of the body, free of matter. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Universe has, as it were, withdrawn. Man has been transposed to an existence which only takes place in pictures.

What man felt before the Mystery of Golgotha as his connection with the Universe, that he related also to the Universe. He related human life on Earth to Heaven. This we can observe quite exactly. The Hebrew of old was clearly and distinctly conscious that the twelve tribes of old Israel were projections on Earth of the constellations of the Zodiac. The twelve-foldness of the Universe comes to expression in the life of man; and we may say that in those days the life of man was pictured as a result of the twelve-foldness of the Heavens, of the Zodiac. Every man felt the starry Heaven streaming into him; and above all a group of men felt themselves as a group into which the starry Heaven rayed. In the evolution of Hebrew antiquity we must go back to the time when we are told of the twelve sons of Jacob as the projection on Earth of the twelve regions of Heaven. Just as there was this in-streaming of the heavenly forces upon Earth-man in gray antiquity, so also, since in the different parts of the Earth's surface evolution came about at different times, in Europe we find a similar thing at a later time. We must go back to the Middle Ages and study the legends of King Arthur and his Round Table, those significant Celtic legends. For Mid-Europe developed later to the stage reached by the old Hebrews thousands of years before. Mid-Europe was only so far on at the time to which the Legends of Arthur and his Round Table are assigned. There was however, a difference. Hebrew antiquity evolved to the point where the in-streaming from the Universe still yielded embodied pictures. Then came the point of time when the body was withdrawn from the pictures, when the pictures had to be given a new substance. There was indeed a danger that, as regards his soul-life, man would pass completely into a picture-existence. This danger man did not at once recognise. Even Descartes was still floundering, and instead of saying: ‘I think, therefore I am not’, he said the opposite of the truth: ‘I think, therefore I am’. For when we live in pictures, we really are not! When we live in mere thoughts, it is the surest sign that we are not. Thoughts must be filled with substance. In order that man might not continue to live in mere pictures, in order that inner substance might once more be in the human being, that Being intervened who entered through the Mystery of Golgotha. Hebrew antiquity was the first to meet with this intervention of the central force, which was now to give back reality to the human soul that had become

picture. This, however, was not at once understood. In the Middle Ages we have the last ramifications in the twelve around King Arthur's Table; but this was soon replaced by something else—the Parsifal Legend, which places One man over against the twelve, One man, who develops the twelve-foldness from out of his own inner centre. Thus, over against that picture which was essentially the Grail picture, must be the Parsifal picture, in which what man now possesses within him, rays out from the centre. The endeavour of those in the Middle Ages who wished to understand the Parsifal picture, who wished to make the Parsifal striving active in the human soul, was to bring into the picture-existence that could crystallise out in man after all the materiality had filtered away—to bring into it true substance, inwardness of being. Whereas the Grail legend shows still the in-streaming from without, the Parsifal figure is now set over against it, raying out from the pictures that which can restore reality to them.

Inasmuch as the Parsifal Legend appeared in this form, it represented the striving of humanity in the Middle Ages to find the way to the Christ within. It represents an instinctive striving to understand that which lives as the Christ in the evolution of humanity. If one studies inwardly what was experienced in the form of this figure of Parsifal, and compares it with what is to be found in the modern creeds, one receives a strong impulse towards that which must happen today. People are now satisfied with the mere husk of the word ‘Christ’ and believe that they thus possess Christ, whereas even the theologians themselves do not possess Him but hold to the outer interpretation of the word. In the Middle Ages there was still so much direct consciousness left, that by comprehending the representative of humanity, Parsifal, men were able to wrest their way upwards to the form of Christ. If we reflect on this we receive the impression of man's place in the whole Universe. Throughout the world of Nature, conversion of forces prevails. In man alone matter is thrown out by pure thought. That matter which is actually cast out of the human being by pure thought is also annihilated, it passes into nothingness.

If we reflect upon this, we must think of all Earth-existence as follows: Here is the Earth, and on the Earth, man; into man passes matter. Everywhere else it is transmuted. In man it is annihilated. The material Earth will pass away in proportion as matter is destroyed by man. When, some day, all the substance of the Earth will have passed through the human organism, being used there for thinking, the Earth will cease to be a cosmic body. And what man will have gained from this cosmic Earth will be pictures. These however, will have a new reality, they will have preserved an original reality. This reality is that which proceeds from the force which, as central force, makes itself felt through the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus, when we look to the end of the Earth, what do we see? The end of the Earth will come when all its substance is destroyed as described above. Man will then possess pictures of all that has taken place in earthly evolution. At the end of the earthly period the Earth will have sunk into the Universe, and there would remain merely pictures, without reality. What gives them reality however, is the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha having been there in humanity; that gives these pictures inner reality for the life to come. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, a new beginning is set for the future existence of the Earth.

From this we can see that what is contained in our stream of evolution is not to be regarded merely as a continuous stream, where one thing is always related to another as effect to cause, but we must so consider the Earth-evolution that we recognise in the first place a pre-Christian evolution, out of which came all that men were able to think at that time, for what they were able then to think was contained in the Father-God, was imparted to the Earth through Him. The nature and work of the Father-God however, was such that what He created as Earth-evolution was given over to that part of Earth-evolution that tends to pass away. A new beginning was made with the Mystery of Golgotha. Of all that went before only pictures were to remain, as it were descriptive paintings of the world. These pictures were, however, to receive new reality through that which entered as Being into the evolution of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. That is the cosmic significance of the Mystery of Golgotha; that is what I meant years ago, when I said: Christianity will not be understood until it has penetrated even into the physics of our Earth, until we understand how, even in physical things, the Christian substance works in the world-existence. We have not grasped Christianity until we can say to ourselves: Precisely in the domain of heat such a change is taking place in man that through it matter is being destroyed and a purely picture-existence comes forth out of the matter; but through the union of the human soul with the Christ-substance this picture-existence is made into a new reality.

If we compare this thought, showing us the interweaving of what man has transformed into soul and spirit with physical existence, if we compare this whole thought with the cheerless scientific thoughts of modern times which can lead only to a blind alley, we shall see its great and deep significance, and we shall see how we are to regard thoughts like those of Julius Robert Mayer, which are in reality that which falls away from cosmic existence, even as ice and snow melt before the Sun. Man however, retains these pictures, and they derive a reality for the future because a new substance has laid hold of them, the substance which has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And through this, the thought of freedom is established for man and is united with scientific thinking. This comes about because man says: Not ‘conservation of matter and of energy’; but, ‘matter and energy have a temporal life allotted to them.’ We take part not in the developing material Universe, but in its decay, and we have now to raise ourselves out of it to mere picture-existence and permeate ourselves with That to which we can only devote ourselves with our free-will, to the Christ-Being. For He so stands in human evolution that man's connection with Him can only be a free one. Anyone who seeks to be constrained to recognise Christ cannot find His Kingdom, he can rise only to the Universal Father-God, who however, in our world, has now only a share in a decaying world, and precisely on account of the decay of His own world, has sent the Son. Spiritual cosmogony must unite with natural cosmogony, but they must unite in man—and that by a free act. Hence we can only say of one who wishes to prove freedom that he is still at an ancient heathen standpoint. All proofs of freedom fail; our task is not to prove freedom, but to take hold of it. It is grasped when one understands the nature of sense-free thinking. Sense-free thinking however needs again the connection with the world, and this connection it does not find unless it unites with what has been introduced into the evolution of the world as new substance through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus the bridge between natural and moral cosmogony lies in a right understanding of Christianity. It might at first appear very strange that just those who uphold the modern creeds—as well as ancient creeds that extend their influence into modern life—do not desire a science leading towards Christianity, but desire a science as materialistic as possible, so that an unscientific faith may hold its own alongside of it.

In this connection we might say: Modern materialism and reactionary Christianity are very closely related, for the latter has driven mankind into the conception that things spiritual must not be penetrated by true knowledge. Knowledge must be kept free from the Spiritual, must be kept away from it, must extend only to the material. Thus on the one hand stands the advocate of one or other creed, who says: Science extends only to what is sense-perceptible; all else must be grasped by faith alone. On the other side stands the materialist, who says: science extends only to what is sense-perceptible; and faith I have given up.

Spiritual Science is not related to materialism. Modern creeds are indeed very closely related to it; that is to say, old creeds as introduced into modern life are indeed closely related to materialism.

I think I have now shown how the possibility of permeating the moral law with what we can know of nature, and conversely, of permeating nature-knowledge with moral law—is bound up with Spiritual Science. For the phantom which figures today in external science as Man, that delusive picture which shows Man as a configuration of mineral substance, simply does not exist. Man is just as much organised into the Fluid element as into the Solid; he is organised also into the element of Air, and above all, into that of Heat. When we come as far as Heat, we find the transition to the soul-and-spirit nature, for in Heat we have already the transition from Space to Time; and that which is of the soul flows in the temporal. Beyond Heat we pass more and more out of Space into Time, and it becomes possible, by the roundabout way here indicated, to seek the moral in the physical. Indeed it might be said that one who thinks short-sightedly will scarcely arrive at the connection of the moral with the physical in human nature—for one might certainly go to meet death as a miscreant without dislocating a limb, but remaining a well-formed man. The heat condition in the man is however not examined. The heat condition is changed far more subtly and delicately than is supposed, and works back upon what man carries through death. Today the method of study is such that we look up into abstraction, we have our thoughts up there; and we look down into the physical-material. We do not make the transition unless we pass over to the inwardly stirring heat lying between these, which has, at least for human instinct, still a physical as well as a soul aspect. We can develop warmth for our fellows morally—soul-warmth, which is the counterpart of physical warmth. This soul-warmth however, does not arise through a physical change in the sense of Julius Robert Mayer's theory; it arises—but how does it arise? I might say that here it gives palpable evidence of itself. Why do we speak of ‘warm’ feelings? Because we feel, we experience that the feeling we call ‘warm’ gives the picture of outer, physical warmth. The warmth percolates into the picture. What today is only soul-warmth will in a future cosmic existence play a physical part, for the Christ-Impulse will live therein. What today is simply picture-warmth in our world of Feeling—will live on, that it may become physical when the Earth-warmth has disappeared, for it is what the Christ-Substance, the Christ-Nature is. Let us try to find that delicate connection between external physical warmth and that which we instinctively call warmth of feeling; let us try to find it. Let us go to what Goethe said in his book called ‘The Material-Moral effects of Colours’, let us see how in his colour-perception he places the cooling colours on one side, and the warming colours on the other; how he unites the material-moral with the physical conditions which can to a certain extent be measured with a thermoscope, and shows how the element of soul interplays with the external and physical. Then we arrive at one aspect of how a moral cosmogony can be found in the study of Goethe.

The Jesuits of course hate this alliance. Therefore the best book on Goethe written out of the Jesuit thought is a poisonous book, a terrible book, though much more ingenious and effective than anything written about him elsewhere, because written with inner Jesuitical rhetoric. I refer to the three-volumed work on Goethe by Father Baumgartner. It is full of spite and malice, but it is both powerful and effective. We may be very sure that in that world, of which many people have no conception, a world which opposes us too, Goethe is better known than he is among more cultured circles. Those who appreciate Goethe and understand him from the positive standpoint, form but a small community. There is a large community of those who hate him; we do not conceive it half large enough. Some time ago I pointed out how little people are awake to what lives among us—I once said I would have liked counts to be taken at the door of all those who knew the German work, Weber's Thirteen Limetrees, a work that was truly Roman Catholic in the most positive sense. I should like to know how many it would be! The result would have been deplorable. Yet soon after publication this work ran through hundreds of editions. Have those who bring humanity forward any idea in their waking consciousness of how widespread these things are? That they have a widespread effect is certain; so too have those things from which the conflict with us proceeds. Whereas we have a small community which holds to Goethe, but is yet never able to point to anything of importance from Goethe's wisdom, the Jesuit book on Goethe is written with great cleverness and acumen—and that is precisely what we need, that we may be filled with spirit that is awake. Spiritual Science will surely succeed if a wakeful spiritual life really takes root in us.

From what has been said about the relation of sleeping to waking in man, and also about the membering of his organism, it can be seen that in sleep he experiences a profound cleavage in his earthly existence. We know that a distinction has to be made between the part of man which is materially perceptible to the senses, his physical body, and the part that can be seen only through Imagination, his etheric or formative forces body. This formative forces body embraces also the living forces which enable a man to grow, underlie his nutritive processes and generally build him up. As we have seen, the formative forces body includes also the whole system of a man's thoughts. Intermingled with his formative forces body and his physical body are two higher members, which we may call the astral body and the Ego-organisation.

In a man's life during the day these four members of his being are in active inner relationship with one another. But when he passes into the sleeping state, his physical and etheric bodies separate from the Ego and astral body. They remain—if one may put it thus—in bed, while the astral and Ego organisations enter a purely spiritual world. So that, from his falling asleep until he wakes, a man's being is split in two—on the one hand there are his physical organisation and the etheric that holds his world of thought; on the other, the Ego and the astral organisation.

I believe someone in the course of these days has voiced the misgiving: If in sleep a man's whole thought-world remains in the etheric organisation, then he must be unable to carry effectively into the sleeping state the thoughts which he can grasp only while he is awake. This shows a certain anxiety lest wishes for one's fellow-men, for example, or thoughts relating to an absent one, should lose all power because they cannot be taken over into the life of sleep. I should like to reply with a picture.

You are not very likely to have heard of anyone who, wanting to shoot at a target, thought he had to throw his gun at it. While still holding the gun he lets the charge do the work, and you cannot say that nothing reaches the target because the gun remains in the man's hands. It is just the same in the case we are considering. The effects of our thinking life when we are awake do not cease during sleep because the thoughts remain in the physical and etheric bodies. It is particularly important with these subtle matters that we should be precise in our thinking—precise to a degree unnecessary in the physical world, where the things themselves provide immediate corrections. From what has been said in these last few days, however, you will see that a much more intimate relation exists between the physical body and the etheric body than between the etheric body and the astral organisation. For throughout the whole of an earthly life the physical body and the etheric remain together, never separating even when, in sleep, the etheric body and the astral body have to part company.

There is a close connection, on the other hand, between the Ego and the astral organisation, for neither do they ever part from one another during life on Earth. But the connection between the astral and the etheric bodies is looser, and it is there that the split can occur. This has a quite definite effect on a man's earthly life, and also on his life beyond the Earth. In our waking state we give life to our senses through our Ego, and through the astral body to our nervous system; and what is brought about in this way we send down into the etheric and physical bodies, as we must do if we are to live in the physical world. Hence, because everything has to be imprinted into the physical body, in order to become manifest in life from birth or conception until death, a materialist supposes that the physical body can make up the whole of a man's being.

This work of incorporating the experiences of earthly existence into the etheric body and the physical body does not proceed, however, without meeting obstacles and hindrances. We are never able to send down straight away into the organs of these bodies our experiences and the thoughts embodied in our nervous system, for anything we absorb from the external physical world is at first in a form moulded by that world. If, for example, we perceive something angular, an experience of this angular quality forms itself in our Ego and our astral body. This cannot be taken up immediately into the etheric body, for the etheric body struggles against absorbing anything experienced in the external world of the senses. Imaginative knowledge alone is able to throw light on this situation. No ordinary sense-observation, no material experiment, no intellectual reflection, will help us to a view of this necessary re-forming, re-shaping, of what we perceive with the senses, so as to fit it for living in the etheric body and physical body in such a way that we can separate from it in sleep. It is only when we are able to observe the actual relation between waking and sleeping in earthly man that we come to realise the continuous conflict that goes on in life. Thus—in the case of the crude example already mentioned—if I have to take my experience of an angular object into my etheric and physical bodies, I must first round off its angles and give the object a form suited to those bodies. It has to be completely transformed.

This transforming of anything having as volatile a life as that of the Ego and astral body themselves, and giving it a plastic form capable of living in the etheric body and of continuing its existence as plastic movement in the physical body—this transformation creates an inner struggle not perceived by ordinary consciousness to-day, but anyone who has Imaginative knowledge can perceive it. Generally it lasts two or three days. We have to sleep on an experience for two or often three nights for it to unite with the other experiences already imprinted in the etheric and physical bodies. The dream-world is an actual expression, but only an outward expression, of this struggle. While a man is dreaming, his Ego and his astral body flow into his etheric and physical bodies and come to a sudden stop—as already explained. This check is an expression of the struggle I am now picturing; it goes on for two or three days. Until the experience has been slept upon more than once, it has not gone sufficiently far down into the etheric body, so that where the connection is loose, as it is between astral body and etheric body, a continuous interweaving is to be seen.

If we have here the etheric body and the astral is there asleep, then on the verge of waking or of going to sleep a continuous struggle takes place, a movement full of life, expressed outwardly in the dream, but signifying inwardly this weaving of experiences into the etheric and physical bodies. It is only when a man has slept on some experience two or three times—perhaps more often—that the experience is united with the memories already bound up with his etheric and physical bodies. The point is that the experience has to be transformed into memory, which is left lying in bed during sleep, for a memory is essentially the expression in thought of the physical and etheric bodies.

For Imaginative cognition, perceiving this is an extraordinarily interesting experience. The very form of its expression is significant. We give our ordinary earthly experiences definite outlines in conformity with natural laws. These laws, however, no longer hold good when the experiences merge with the etheric; everything firmly outlined becomes soft and plastic. Whatever was at rest begins to move; anything angular becomes rounded. Intellectual experience passes over into the experience of the artist.

That is the deeper reason why, in those ancient days when people still had instinctive vision, art was rooted in life in a quite different way from anything we have to-day. Even as late as the Renaissance, in the searching back to earlier art there was still in Raphael and other painters at least a tradition of that conversion of the intellectual into the artistic. For the intellectual loses its form, and takes on the nature of art, directly we rise to the super-sensible. The fact that in art to-day people are so strongly inclined to naturalism, wanting models for all their work, shows that they no longer realise its true nature. Humanity must find its way again into the true realm of art.

Human life as I have described it is thus made up in such a way that it is always possible to say: I am experiencing something which will take three days to flow into the etheric body. A day later, the experience of the previous day will flow in. Hence it takes a man two, three, or even four days to complete this uniting of an experience with the etheric body.

Now when a man passes through the gate of death, the etheric body detaches itself from the physical body—something that never happens during earthly life. And now, when the etheric body is free of the physical, all that has been interwoven into the etheric body is gradually dispersed, and this process lasts for about as long—two, three or four days—as the interweaving did. Imagination, which can judge rightly of these matters, shows how during life the physical body holds together, through its resistance, the experiences that have gradually penetrated into the etheric body. When the physical body is laid aside at death, it can be seen how in the first few days afterwards the memories woven into the etheric body pass out into the universal cosmic ether, and dissolve. And so, for two, three or four days after death, a person experiences this dissolving of his accumulated store of memories. This may be called the laying aside of the etheric body, but it involves an ever-increasing enhancement of the memories; they lose the third dimension and become two-dimensional, entirely picture-like. After the gate of death is passed, the person is faced with the whole tableau of his life, taking its course in vivid pictures for two, three or four days, the time varying with each individual.

But just as a student of botany recognises in a seed the plant that will develop from it, so anyone with Imaginative cognition does not see only at death this passing over of the etheric, of the whole memory system, to the cosmos; he has seen it already in picture form, for as a picture it is always present in human beings. Those who can grasp rightly the interweaving that goes on in the course of three days or more see already, in this incorporation of experiences in the etheric body, a picture of the inward experience that is lived through for three or four days after death. Whereas in earthly existence, before acquiring Imaginative cognition, a man experiences more or less unconsciously this blending of his experiences into the memories held together by the physical body, immediately after death he experiences the reverse process, the unwinding, as it were, of his memories and the passing away of them into the Cosmos. Our treasured thoughts, left behind whenever we fall asleep, unite directly after death with the whole Cosmos. This is what in dying we have to yield up to cosmic existence.

These things must not be grasped only intellectually, but also with heart and soul. For in face of them a man feels that his life is not to be taken egoistically, but that he is placed in the world as a thinking being. He will feel that his thoughts are not something he can preserve, for after his death they will flow out into the Cosmos and will go on working there as active forces. If we have had good thoughts, we surrender them to the Cosmos, and if we have had bad thoughts, we surrender them also. For a man does not exist on earth merely to develop himself as a free being. This he certainly should do, and he can do it precisely if he takes something else into consideration. He is here also as a being on whom the Gods themselves may work, in order to lead the Cosmos on from epoch to epoch. Moreover I would say this: What the Gods are to weave into the Cosmos as thoughts has to be prepared by them through all that can be thought and produced during individual human lives. Here is the nurturing-place where the Gods have to tend the thoughts they need for the continuing evolution of the world—thoughts they then incorporate into the Cosmos as active impulses.

During sleep, a man lives with his Ego and astral organisation outside his physical and etheric bodies. While in this state as a being of soul and spirit, as Ego and astral organisation, he is interwoven with the spiritual forces pervading the whole Cosmos. He is in the world that is, figuratively speaking, outside his skin—the world of which the only impressions he receives in waking life come through his senses. During sleep, therefore, he enters right into the things that in waking life show him only their outer side. But it is only what is experienced by the astral organisation, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, that can be brought back into the thoughts of the etheric body, not what is experienced out there by the Ego. Hence, during the whole of our existence on Earth, the experiences of the Ego in sleep remain subconscious for ordinary consciousness, and even for Imaginative consciousness. They are revealed only to Inspired consciousness, as already described.

So this may be said: In sleep a man gathers up sufficient strength to imprint on the etheric body those experiences that can be put into thoughts. But during his life on Earth he lacks the power to deal with the wishes and desires which during sleep are experienced by the Ego in connection with earthly affairs—for these also are gone over during sleep. In our epoch, therefore, only the part of sleep-life that can be transformed into thoughts, imprinted in thoughts, passes over into the conscious waking life of earthly men; while the sleep-experiences of the Ego lie hidden behind the veil of existence.

Imaginative and Inspired consciousness bring to light here things which can be perfectly well understood by any impartial person with a healthy mind, but in our present civilisation they encounter tremendous prejudice. Even the fact that when the three-dimensional in the physical world is imprinted in the etheric body, it changes from the plastic to a picture form, from three to two dimensions—even to grasp this calls for an unprejudiced approach. Directly we rise to Imagination, we no longer have to do with three dimensions, any more than with four, as a misguided science believes, but with two only. The difficulty of picturing what is then experienced comes from our being accustomed in earthly experience to reckon with three dimensions and to form our concepts accordingly. And so, when we should be finding our way over to two dimensions, we say: “Yes, but two dimensions are included in the three; the two dimensions of a plane can lie in such a way that there might still be a third.”

That, however, is not the point. As soon as we enter the Imaginative world, the third dimension no longer concerns us at all, and the position of a plane is immaterial. On our entering the etheric world of Imagination, the third dimension ceases to have any meaning. Hence—and I add this for mathematicians—all equations for the ether must be transformed so as to correspond with the two-dimensional world.

Now if we would pass on to the world accessible to Inspiration, in which we are as Ego between going to sleep and waking, we come to one dimension only; we then have to do with a one-dimensional world. This transition to a one-dimensional world, taken for granted by the faculty of Inspiration—the faculty, that is, of actually perceiving the spiritual in which we live between going to sleep and waking—this understanding of a world with only one dimension has always been part of Initiation-knowledge.

I have already described how the hidden forces of the Sun—not the forces of the external physical sunlight—are revealed to men of the Jacob Boehme type. These hidden Sun-forces do not spread out three-dimensionally, but are perceived in one dimension only. An older, more instinctive Initiation-knowledge could, and did, come to perceive this through Inspiration, but without a clearly conscious knowledge of what it was. Much that is still handed down in the ancient records of long past epochs of mankind is to be understood only when one knows: This refers to the spiritual world that is one-dimensional, the world we find through Inspiration; as regards our earthly life it refers to the hidden forces of the Sun and Stars. Between going to sleep and waking we do not live in Sun-forces that are outwardly displayed, but in those that are hidden.

These hidden forces of the Sun can, for example, pass through certain kinds of stone which are impenetrable to physically perceptible Sun-forces, and by passing through them become one-dimensional. If anyone has acquired Inspirational vision, then, although he may not perceive the physical light, he can see the hidden Sun-forces penetrating the otherwise opaque stone; thus the stone is permeable for the Sun's hidden forces and also for the forces of Inspiration.

In very ancient periods of human evolution on Earth, such expedients were not needed. But when the old instinctive clairvoyance, which in those days was the basis of Initiation-knowledge, was on the wane, these aids were adopted as a short cut—we might say—to the perception of things no longer perceptible through instinctive Inspiration. People had recourse to such measures in the following way, for example. Imagine a number of stones set up beside one another, with other stones laid across the tops of them. If this is so arranged that on certain occasions the penetrating rays of the Sun fall on the covering stone, then the physical rays of the Sun will be held up by the stone and the hidden rays will pass through.

When anyone trained to it places himself so that he can look into this structure from the side, he will see the spiritual, one-dimensional rays of the Sun shining through and vanishing into the earth. If, when all this was no longer perceived through instinctive clairvoyant powers, a short cut of that kind were taken, it enabled anyone looking from the side into the shadow-zone to perceive the world of spiritual Sun-rays which we experience every night during sleep. Hence in such contrivances, to be met with in this very district, we can see by what means, during a long transitional period, certain wise leaders of mankind tried to penetrate to the hidden forces of the Sun, which a man such as Jacob Boehme could do instinctively through simply beholding earthly things.

Although such collections of stones can be seen to-day in appropriate places, their real significance can be brought out only through what Spiritual Science reveals. Otherwise people are left with a superficial explanation which misses the real point.

Such stones can of course be distributed in the circle so as to show how the spiritual rays of the Sun differ according to particular constellations of the stars.

I have been trying to make clear to you the world in which our Ego lives during sleep. This world is not held together by the inherent forces of the physical and etheric bodies. These bodies, however, are alone responsible for the clear consciousness of earthly man; they are the source of the judgments we form, in accordance with our feelings and our will, on our own actions, our inward experiences and thoughts. Hence, when we are awake, we judge our external life according to the thoughts we have been able to imprint in our physical and etheric bodies. But it is not only a human being himself who has something to say about his experiences; his experiences and actions are the concern of the whole spiritual Cosmos. The Cosmos judges whether an action, a thought or feeling is to be declared good or bad. Between waking and sleeping we are left to form our own opinions about ourselves. As I have sufficiently shown during these lectures, the spiritual content of the Cosmos takes the moral as its natural law, and what the Cosmos has to say about our true nature and our actions is experienced by the Ego during sleep. Inspired cognition shows how the Ego, even during the shortest sleep, experiences over again everything the individual has gone through from his last moment of waking until his present sleep—however long or short this period may be. So a man, in the successive states of waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping, experiences again in sleep whatever he went through during his last waking time, especially where his own activities were concerned.

As far as this is the experience of the Ego, it remains outside ordinary consciousness, but Inspiration can call it up. Then the particular nature of the experience is disclosed, and we find it is gone through in reverse order to our experience by day. Whereas by day you go through your experiences—leaving short sleeps aside—from morning to evening, during the night, in sleep, you live through these experiences backwards—from evening to morning. This is in order that we may experience whatever the spiritual Cosmos has to say about the way we have lived through the day.

During earthly life, however, a man cannot normally call this experience up into consciousness. Yet he must become conscious of it, or his human existence would fall out of connection with cosmic existence. Inspired cognition shows that as soon as a man after death has watched his life-tableau, which, as I have said, lasts two, three, or four days, and as soon as his memories have dissolved into the Cosmos, spreading themselves out there—after this experience, often referred to as the freeing of the etheric body—a time comes when the man is able to look back on his earthly life again, but in a different way.

If we look at those few days after death, we come to a mighty panorama of our life, but at first it embraces daytime experiences alone. In reality, however, a man goes through not only his waking experiences but also those he has had during sleep. When in earthly life you look back on your ordinary memories, you always leave out your periods of sleep, as if your only experiences had been those lived through by day. And so it goes on right back to the time after birth when your memories cease.

In fact it is like this with the panorama that appears during those two or three days after death. Then, later, comes a period when soul and spirit have gained sufficient strength to experience in the spiritual world all that could manifest only unconsciously, in picture form, while we were asleep at night during our life on Earth. It now comes before us as experience. A man then passes through a period—lasting about one-third of his life on Earth, approximately the time normally spent in sleep—when he experiences his nights again, but in a backward direction. So he lives through his last night first, then the night before, and so on right back to the time of his birth and conception.

From other points of view I have described this going back through a quite different world after death in my book, Theosophy, when I was speaking of man, as a being of soul and spirit, passing through the soul-world.

Now when after death a man has gone thus through the soul-world, taking about seven years for it if he has lived twenty-one years, or, if he has lived to sixty, perhaps twenty years—always the length of time he has slept in earthly life—he has then to experience the total effect he has had upon Earth-existence—an existence created by the Gods in order to carry the world, with the help of the human race, a little further on its progress. Up to the end of this backward survey of his nights after death, a man has been gaining knowledge of what he has himself become, of his significance for the Cosmos. He now has to experience how the Earth itself has been affected by his life. This takes a long time—half the time, indeed, between earthly death and a new earthly life. Tomorrow we shall have to speak of this in greater detail.

After going backwards through our nights, we come to our birth; and having arrived there, after this backward journey through the soul-world, we have to find the way back to our previous earthly life. This enables a man to bring over with him that previous life for the shaping of his next life on Earth.

Here we enter the realm of the old Initiation-knowledge (which must be renewed to-day in a way suited to men's present faculties.) The old Initiation-knowledge led people over to religious experience. For Initiation-knowledge is always true knowledge, but of a kind that leads out from the world of the senses into the spiritual, so that the human will is stirred to take a religious form. At the stage of Initiation which leads to the Intuitive-knowledge already described, it has always been recognised as of the utmost importance that when a man goes back to his previous life on Earth, he should meet on the way a being who can become his guide after death.

In a certain region of the Earth a man would say to himself: In my earthly life I must absorb the teaching of the last Bodhisattva to appear on earth. The man may have lived three hundred years after the appearance of this Bodhisattva. But when after death he went back to his previous life on Earth, he arrived at the time when the last Bodhisattva was living on Earth. In the old Initiation-knowledge, this meeting with the last Bodhisattva to appear on the Earth was regarded as enabling the man to make a real contact with his own previous earthly life—which means finding the necessary strength for eternal life, for this can be found only when real contact with the previous earthly life is achieved.

Any possibility of this meeting with the Bodhisattvas, who descend to Earth from certain spiritual regions, ceased at a definite time in human evolution, in world-evolution. And to-day a man would have been unable, when after death he had gone back to his last birth and conception, to go further and make contact with his previous earthly lives. The way to this could be found by a man during the first millennia of earthly evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, when, in going back, he came to the time of the last Bodhisattva. Today, however, he will find the way only if he makes the journey under the leadership of that Being who united Himself with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha; if, in other words, he enters into such a relation with the Mystery of Golgotha that Christ can become his guide. For the Christ gathers into Himself all those powers of leadership for life between death and rebirth which used to belong to the Bodhisattvas who appeared on Earth.

Thus the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, with its particular bearing on our experience between death and rebirth, is one of the most important facts in the whole evolution of the Earth. If anyone wishes to learn about the spiritual evolution of the Earth and the place it takes in the spiritual evolution of the Cosmos, and if moreover he wishes to understand what a man goes through in connection with this spiritual evolution of Earth and Cosmos during his life between death and a new birth, then he must give the Mystery of Golgotha its right place in the whole evolution of the world. For people to-day, therefore, a way must be found that will lead attention over from the evolution of man to the evolution of the world, so that the Mystery of Golgotha is seen in all its fundamental significance for the course of events in the evolution of the Earth and in the evolution of man within the earthly.

With these matters, as far as modern Initiation-knowledge can reveal them—matters relating to the later experiences of human beings after death, when they have gone back in memory through their night-experiences—we will deal further tomorrow, in connection with the evolution of the world.

From what I gave out in my lecture yesterday it may perhaps be comprehensible to you that I should say of Aristotle, who really gathered together the whole knowledge, the sum total of the cognition of the ancients in the fourth pre-Christian century, that in spite of the fact that he only sent out a kind of system of logic into central Europe, yet he himself stood firmly based on the Greek Mysteries, and indeed on all the Mysteries of that time. Indeed we must even say that anyone who can follow such things as world-views and philosophies not merely with the intellect and the understanding, but is able to absorb them into his feeling, will be able to sense, even in the logical presentations of Aristotle, that a certain inner connection with the secrets of nature underlies the Aristotelian logic and philosophy. It was the fate of Aristotle then, if I might express it in this way, his own personal path of evolution to have to pour out this logical system into Europe. It may even be said, by way of illustrating the peculiar fact underlying these remarks, that it would be inconceivable to think of Plato as the teacher of Alexander, whereas, as we know, Aristotle was able to fulfil that task and to become the teacher of Alexander.

Plato only carried on in his own way the ancient Mysteries, though in a more ideal form. But just through the ideas that filled him he became that personality whose teaching led men away from the secrets of nature, whereas Aristotle continually drew them back to these; and this you can gather from the short representations I give in my book, The Riddles of Philosophy. We only learn to know the fun case when we can form an idea of the content of that seven years' instruction which Aristotle gave to his pupil Alexander the Great. I will try and compress into a short space the content of this instruction, drawn as it was from those ancient Mysteries.

Now when a man spoke in those ancient times in an authentic way about nature, people did not understand by the word “nature” that which our modern natural scientists understand; i.e., the merely earthly phenomena from which all the extra-earthly phenomena, the entire phenomena of the heavens, are excluded; but at that time they incorporated the human being himself into the world of nature in the very widest sense of the words. This could be done, because, at that time men sought the spirit in nature; it would not have occurred to them in those ancient times to regard man as being devoid of soul and spirit.

This Mystery-instruction taught men to regard nature in such a way as expanded far out into the Cosmos, in so far as the Cosmos was accessible to man through his relationship and affinity with it. All instructions, all teaching which was taken seriously in those ancient times was not an appeal to the human intellect or to the outer powers of observation of man. What we today regard as knowledge played no important role in those days, even in the time of Aristotle. If the historians of the different sciences today wish to write a history of their own scientific thinking they should really begin with Copernicus or Galileo, because when they go back beyond this in time what they have to say is not really adequate; and if they then approach Greek knowledge, what they have to give is purest phantasy. What they do is simply, in a sense, to prolong the present back into the earliest times; but it is no reality that they describe. Even at the time of Aristotle, even by Aristotle himself, such teachings as were taken earnestly were so given that they were connected with a complete transformation of human nature; with an appeal, not only to human thought and observation, but to the whole of human life. Man was to become a different being through knowledge, a being quite different from what he was without it. The essential point in these Mysteries was that man, through the knowledge he acquired therein, was to become a quite different being from what he was before. Actually, in the time of Aristotle the attempt was made to bring about this transformation of man's nature by causing to work upon his soul two polarically opposite feelings. The pupil who sought instruction and who was gradually to acquire this knowledge was exhorted to feel himself intensely as man in his relation to nature around him. The pupil was told: “See how thou breathest the air which in summer is warm and in winter is cold. Thou breathest the air in such a way that in winter thou canst perceive thine own breath in the form of vapour or mist; but in summer when thou breathest the warm air, it is invisible.”

Such a phenomenon was made the starting-point for instruction. The connection with nature was not made by saying: “Here is a body with this or that temperature. I heat it in a retort and then it undergoes transformation.” No, the starting-point was man himself, and he was made to realize his connection with the process of breathing. Gradually he was led, on the one hand, to realize and feel the warm air. He was told: “Picture to thyself what warm air is. Warm air seeks to rise, to ascend, and thou must feel, when this warm air approaches thee, that something really wants to bear thee out into the wide spaces of the Cosmos. Then, in contrast with this realize cold water in any form. Simply feel it; thou dost not feel at home in this. In the warm air thou canst feel at home in such a way, that this warm air seeks to bear thee up into the wide spaces of the Cosmos; but in the cold water thou feelest strange, not at all at home in it. Thou feelest, when thou withdrawest from cold water, leaving it to have its way outside, that is something which concerns it alone; it then transforms itself into the snow-crystals for example, the snow-flakes which fall on the earth, and thou feelest thyself to be in thy proper place observing them from without. Thou canst really only feel the warm air within thee and wouldst like to be carried upwards by this warm air into the wide spaces of the cosmos; but the cold water thou canst feel only outside thyself, and in order to have relationship with it thou wouldst like simply to observe it in its results, by means of thy senses.”

These were the two polar opposites with which the pupil was confronted. He was taught to feel that the words “outside” and “inside” are simply empty expressions, which really have no meaning; but such phrases as “warm airiness,” “cold wateriness” mean a great deal. These are contrasts through which man can feel himself fitted in to the world with the innermost part of his being. The word “outside” then signifies that which is cold and damp, “inside” that which is of the nature of warm air. Man felt this contrast qualitatively, and felt his relation to the world qualitatively. He spoke no longer of things, but of man himself, and it was said that the warm air leads one to the Gods, to the Divine Beings in the heights, and that the damp and cold leads down to the subterranean demons.

But this journey towards the subterranean demons is at the same time connected with a knowledge of nature; only the disciple had to take with him into these lower regions that which he had discovered and experienced through the warm air in the heights, so that what is below might not injure him.

When, with this inner feeling for the contrast between the warm air and the damp cold, when, armed with this feeling he approaches nature, he could, through the deeper experience of its objects and processes gain a deep insight into the being of the Cosmos. Today the chemist investigates hydrogen and ascribes to that element certain properties which he has discovered. Then he observes cosmic space and sees there something which reveals the same characteristics as hydrogen in the laboratory, so he concludes that hydrogen exists even in the cosmic spaces.

Such an argument would at the time of Aristotle have seemed foolishness, for then one approached things in a different way.

When the inner experience of the pupil had been deepened through that which has just been described he was led to the observation of that which really lives in the plants, as they unfold their blossoms outwardly and strive upwards towards the cosmos. Plant knowledge was that to which the pupil was led next. “Look into the opening corona of the plant, and observe how it radiates towards the wide spaces of the cosmos; realize the impression that this makes upon thee.”

When the pupil with these deepened feelings of which I have just spoken looked at the opening blossoms, there arose in him an inner knowledge, an inner illumination; flowers became to him the announcers of cosmic secrets in the wide spaces of the earth. Flowers spoke to him of the wide cosmic spaces and then, in a penetrating way, though only by means of indications the pupil was led by the teacher to discover within himself the secrets which streamed from the wide spaces of the cosmos into the being of the plant. Thus the pupil was gradually led to answer this question of the master: “What dost thou really perceive when thou gazest into the opening calyx of the flower, into the self-opening blossom, in which the stamens appear and radiate towards thee? What dost thou really perceive there?” And the pupil answered: “These plants tell me that they are compelled by the heavy cold earth to take up their abode upon it, but that, in reality they have not originated in the firm hard earth, they have only been imprisoned in it. In truth, they are beings born of water, and have their real true existence, as beings of water, in a previous condition of the earth.” (I am referring to that condition of the earth described in my Outline of Occult Science as the Old Moon-period.)

The pupil was led to say: “It is really the secrets of the moon which left the earth, and which still preserves something of the pre-earthly Moon condition, which are reflected to me out of the flowers.” For the plants did not say the same thing to the pupil every night. When the moon was in the constellation of Leo flowers said something quite different to what they did when the moon was in that of Virgo or Scorpio. That which the moon experienced as she went through her orbit round the Zodiac, these experiences were related by the flowers on the earth. The flowers on the earth told the secrets of the cosmos outside. In truth, through all this that was revealed to him the pupil said out of the innermost of his heart:

I look into the flowers;
They reveal their relationship with the moon-existence
They are subdued by the earth; for they are water-born.

The pupil could feel this because he had previously experienced the effect of chilling water. He had experienced this chilling, and through this experience he had acquired his knowledge of the plants.

When the pupil had been made sufficiently acquainted with the secrets of the moon, revealed to him by the plants growing out of the earth, he was led on further to the metals of the earth, to the principal metals, Lead, Tin, Iron, Gold, Copper, Quicksilver, Silver, as I explained to you in the last lecture in a different connection. When he had developed such an intensified life of feeling as I have indicated, he then made himself acquainted with the metals, and experienced what they so mysteriously relate; and through the metals he experienced the secrets of the entire planetary system. For lead told him about Saturn, tin about Jupiter, iron about Mars, gold about the Sun, copper about Venus, quicksilver about Mercury, and again silver about the Moon, in so far as she does not stand in close relationship with the earth, but belongs to the whole cosmos. Just as the blossoms revealed their secret to the pupil, so now he learned the metallic secret. First he learnt the secret of the plants, secondly that of the metals.

This secret of the metals which was given in the Eleusinian Mysteries, through that mighty planetary globe which, as I described in the last lecture surrounded the male statue, this secret of the metals still formed part of the instruction given, even at the time of Aristotle; and in this secret of the metals there was revealed the secret of the planets. Man's feelings were not then so coarse as they are today. When he approached the metal lead it did not merely appear in its lead-grey colour to the eye, but the lead-grey made a peculiar impression upon the inner eye. In a certain sense the leaden-grey colour of the fresh metal lead extinguished the other colours, and he felt that he participated in this lead-grey metallity. He came into another condition of consciousness and experienced something different from the present. He was filled with a feeling, a mood, as if the whole pre-earthly period of the earth rose before him. It was as if the present were toned down through the lead-grayness. Saturn nature revealed itself.

As regards gold, we know that according to external analogies the ancients saw in gold a representative of the sun. That was in truth not merely an external play of analogy that the sun was regarded as something precious in the heavens and gold as something valuable on earth. Really, nothing is too stupid for the man of today when he wishes to regard the ancients as stupid. When man regarded the metal gold, with its self-contained shining yellow colour, its modest mien and yet proud standing in the world, he actually felt how this is related to the entire blood-circulation of man. He felt in the quality of gold: “Thou art within that, thou feelest thyself as part of that.” Through this feeling he came gradually to comprehend the nature of the sun; he felt the relationship of the quality of gold with that which works from the sun in the blood of man.

Thus he gained a perception of the entire planetary system by means of the different metals, and the pupil, who did not think about these things as intellectually as we do today, conceived the following formula:

I think about the metals;
They reveal their relationship with the planets
They are subdued by the earth; for they are born of the air.

Actually the metals which are today in the earth came out of the cosmos in an airy form, and only gradually became fluidic during the ancient Moon-period. They came over in airy form when the earth was in the ancient Sun-condition; they attained a fluid form during the Moon-period, and then they became subdued by the earth and reduced to solid form during the earth evolution. That was the second secret which was revealed to the pupil.

The third secret was to rise before the pupil when he learnt to observe how, over the surface of the earth, man and the various peoples differ. One may turn towards Africa, with its peculiar hot climate, and there find human beings who differ externally, even to the colour of their skin, from the men of Greece. One can go over to Asia, and there again find human beings different. The Greeks had a fine feeling for these external differences of man.

One of the most interesting documents which has come down from Aristotle to posterity is his writing on physiognomy; by which however is not to be understood merely the physiognomy of the face, but the physiognomy of the whole man was studied with the intention that thereby one should learn to know the true nature of man; how he has either curly or smooth hair, according to the different climates in which he lives; how not only the colour of the skin but the whole expression of the human being changes according to whether he is born in one climate or another.

Thus, just as one learned to see the reflection of the moon secrets in flowers, and the reflection of the planets in metals, so now one learned to know the real secret of man on earth through this third instruction. The natural science of that time accomplished an extraordinary amount through study of the manifold nature of man and thereby obtained an answer to the question: What was the real intention of the Gods in regard to man's primeval form?

Through the different forms, through the varied physiognomy of man over the whole earth, in the living way it was brought before the disciple, the secret of the Zodiac dawned within him. The Zodiac works on the elements of the earth and its connection with the planetary system and with the moon brings the winds at the appropriate season in one direction or another, brings also warm air to one part of the earth and cold damp to another part, thereby cutting deeply into human life. The natural scientist of those times sought the causes for these things in the influences which came from the Zodiac, influences which, modified by the planets, by the sun and the moon, then streamed on to the earth.

It was of especial interest to the natural scientists of that time to say: Here is a man with black curly hair and with a red countenance, with his nose fashioned in this or that way. He is a, man who indicates the sign of Leo, how Leo pours down its forces, strengthened or weakened by the other planets according to the position they occupy. This is a man who inwardly according to his karma carries in his liver certain characteristics. Such a characteristic in the liver, which, for instance brings about a disposition to melancholy in the life of the soul is brought about because, at a certain point of time Venus is brought into a certain aspect to Juniper, which fact influences the rays of Leo. I look into the special construction of the liver, and in this I see a cosmic determination. I see how man is affected by this cosmic determination. I can extend this to the qualities of the different races upon the earth. I see in what man experiences by reason of his atmospheric environment the secret of the Zodiac.

While the pupil was thus guided, again there arose in his heart a knowledge which he clothed in somewhat the following form:

I experience the secrets of the Zodiac in the manifold nature on man;
The relationship between the manifold nature of man and the fixed stars presents itself to my soul;
For the life of human beings is on account of this manifold nature made subject to the earth;
They are beings born of the warmth.

(Human beings are born of the warmth ether under the influence of the signs of the Zodiac. They are warmth-born.)

So man felt himself in his physiognomy as one born of warmth, only transformed during the Moon-existence, and again transformed during the earth-existence; he acquired the original basis of warmth during the ancient Saturn-time. In the same way he felt the metallity of the earth as born of the sun and the air; flowers and everything of a plant nature as born of the moon and water. He could thus feel these things because of the preparation he had undergone, because he had to some extent grasped them through the feelings stimulated in him for the perception of the elements of warm air and of cold water.

The pupil observed man in such a way that the feeling arose that man works on the elements of warm air intermingled with the elements of coldness and water. He observed man in the time of Aristotle by studying his physiognomy in such a way that he could answer the question: “How much does a man give us of the elements of warmth and air, how much does he take from us of the elements of coldness and water?” In regard to what had been developed in the soul the pupil regarded the human beings around him, and gradually learnt to regard the whole of nature in this way. This was the preparation for what later on poured over from Africa into Spain, and spread into certain regions in Central Europe as the ancient alchemy, the true alchemy—to regard everything in nature, in the cosmos, every flower, every animal, even every cloud, every formation of vapour, sand and stones, sea and river, forest and meadow in the light of the impression they give of these elements of warmth and air or of coldness and damp.

The pupil thus developed in reference to the world of nature a fine power of feeling for four qualities; in experiencing the warm air the feeling for warmth was developed in him, and at the same time a feeling for the element of air and its relation to warmth. Out of the coldness there developed the feeling for the difference between moisture and dryness; and he developed a delicate power of sensing these differences, because through these capacities of feeling he stood with the whole of his being in what the world offered.

From this standpoint, in which the pupil of Aristotle, Alexander the Great was trained, it is quite possible to understand the whole environment in which these two men lived. As Alexander was permeated with what came through such a power of feeling, he perceived the whole Greek nature, as revealed in Macedonia, in the two qualities, the quality of dampness and the quality of air. They evoked his attitude of mind at a given period in his life. He really felt that through the special kind of initiation which he had received at the hands of Aristotle, he understood the basic character of the immediate world which he experienced, but he experienced it only as the half of a whole world. “That can only be half of the world,” he said to himself. “That can only be the half.” You remember that at that time everything pertaining to nature was brought before the disciple in such a way that he really experienced nature. The following instruction could now be added to the study of the purely natural.

Aristotle's pupil Alexander the Great had learnt of his own accord to feel what the climatic influences, what the winds carried from the north-west as the elements of cold and damp, and what the winds carried from the south-west as the elements of warmth and damp, but that, to him, was only one half of a world-feeling. This was amplified in his instruction, and there arose in his own inner being the idea that to this there belonged what drifted over from the north-east, the dry cold, and what drifted over from the south-east, the dry warmth. Thus from the four directions of the wind he had learnt to distinguish the feeling of dryness, of warm dryness, of damp warmth, and of damp cold; and as a true man of that epoch he sought to reconcile these opposites.

Here in Macedonia he experienced only cold dampness or warm dampness. That must be united with the cold dryness and with the fiery dryness; that which drifts over from the north, from Asia must be united with that which drifts over from the south from Asia. From this arose that irresistible urge towards the Asiatic expeditions. By this example you will see that at this epoch of time things were somewhat different from what they were later.

Think of our modern education, of what a prince is taught today. Just think of how a prince is educated and trained for journeys of conquest. Try and imagine what relation exists between the instruction in physics which his teacher gives him and what he experiences on his warlike expeditions. Try and think of the connection between the two. The reports do not as a rule produce anything pertaining to his actions on his journeys of conquest. From such examples you can see very clearly how far removed today is the knowledge which should be brought to man for the development of his inner being, from what man himself is in his external life. At the time to which we are now alluding the endeavour was made to establish a complete unity between the knowledge which inwardly forms and fashions a man and that which he does when he stands in the world and acts.

Ancient history is taught in the schoolroom (today) but at that time the schoolroom was related to the Mysteries, and the Mysteries signified the world. A knowledge of the world was the result of the forces which predominated in the Mysteries. That gave man the impulse to carry over to Asia what was then this natural science. Then in a weakened diluted form it later came across over Spain, through Europe. One can still trace it in what Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Gichtel, and various others wrote and taught, culminating in such spirits as Basilius Valentinus and others.

But at first, that which was clothed in mere thought-forms, in mere logic, had to transcend all else, and the rest had to wait.

The time has now come when this other has fulfilled its task of waiting, when it must again be found as the sum total of natural knowledge. Alexander had first to bury these secrets of nature in Asia, for only their corpses were brought over to Europe. But not these corpses have now to be galvanized to life; the primeval living secrets must themselves be found again today. The necessary enthusiasm for this can indeed only come about when a really warm feeling is developed for what once existed at this turning point of time.

One must really develop a living realization of the fact that these conquests, these expeditionary journeys undertaken by Alexander which appeared externally as mere journeys of conquest were undertaken in order to find the other side of the compass in addition to the side which was known; to add the other half to that half of the world which was known. It was absolutely the search of a personal experience, and this personal experience consisted in a certain inner dissatisfaction, a certain inner discomfort which was felt in this environment of cold dampness and warm dampness, and a realisation that other feelings had to complete these.

To what extent this is of great historical significance in the evolution of the entire west, I will explain in the lectures which will be given in the near future, at the meeting of the delegates, concerning the occult basis of the historical life of humanity on the earth.

I. The secrets of the Plants

I gaze at the flowers; they reveal their relationship with the Moon-existence; they are subdued by the earth, for they are water-born.

II. The secret of the Metals

I think about the Metals; they reveal their relationship with the Planets; they are subdued by the earth, for they are air-born.

III. The secret of Man

I experience the secrets of the Animal Circle (Zodiac) in the manifold nature of man; the relationship of this manifold nature of man with the fixed stars comes before my soul; for man lives in subjection to the earth in this manifold nature he is warmth-born.

In close connection with what I had to bring before you in the lectures given at our Christmas Foundation Meeting, I should like, in the lectures that are now to be given, to speak further of the movement that is leading us in modern times to research into the life of the spirit. I refer to the movement spoken of under the name of Rosicrucianism or some other occult designation, and I should like to take this opportunity of giving you a picture of it in its inner aspect and nature. It will be necessary first of all to say something, by way of introduction, about the whole manner of forming ideas which had become customary round about the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries A.D., and which only very gradually disappeared; for it is even to be found here and there among stragglers, as it were as late as the nineteenth century. I do not want today to deal with the matter from a historical point of view, but rather to place before your mind's eye conceptions and ideas that you are to think of as inwardly experienced by certain people belonging to these centuries. In point of fact it is not generally realised that we have only to go back a comparatively short time in history, to find that the men who were accounted to be scholars were possessed of a world of ideas altogether different from our own.

In these days we speak of chemical substances, we enumerate seventy or eighty chemical elements; but we have no idea how very little we are saying when we name one substance as oxygen, another as nitrogen, and so on. Oxygen, for instance, is something that is present only under certain well-defined conditions—conditions of warmth, e.g., and other circumstances of earthly life, and it is impossible for a reasonable person to unite a conception of reality with something that, when the temperature is raised by so and so many degrees, is no longer present in the same measure or manner as it is under the conditions that obtain for man's physical life on Earth. It was the realisation of facts like this that underlay research during the early and middle part of the Middle Ages; the life of research of those times set out to get beyond the relative in existence, to arrive at true existence.

I have marked a transition as between the ninth and tenth centuries A.D., because before this time man's perceptions were still altogether spiritual. It would never, for example, have occurred to a scholar of the ninth century to imagine Angels, Archangels, or Seraphim as falling short in respect of reality—purely in respect of reality—of the physical men he saw with his eyes. You will find that before the tenth century, scholars always speak of the spiritual Beings, the so-called Intelligences of the Cosmos, as of beings one actually meets in life. The people of that time were of course well aware that the day was long past when such vision had been common human experience, but they knew that in certain circumstances the meeting could still take place. We must not, for instance, overlook the fact that on into the ninth and tenth centuries countless priests of the Catholic Church were quite conscious of how, in the course of their celebration of the Mass, it happened that in this or that enactment they met spiritual Beings, the Intelligences of the Cosmos. With the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the direct and immediate connection with the Intelligences of the Universe began to disappear from men's consciousness; and there began to light up, in its place, the consciousness of the Elements of the Cosmos, the earthy, the fluid or watery, the airy, the warm or fiery. And so it came about that just as hitherto men had spoken of Cosmic Intelligences that rule the movements of the planets, that lead the planets across the constellations of the fixed stars, and so forth, now they spoke instead of the immediate environment of the Earth. They spoke of the elements of earth, water, air, fire. Of chemical substances, in the modern sense of the word, they did not as yet take account. That came much later. It would, however, be a great mistake to imagine that the scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—even in a sense, the scholars of the eighteenth century—had ideas of warmth, air, water, earth, that resembled the ideas men have today. Warmth is spoken of today merely as a condition in which bodies exist. No one speaks any longer of actual warmth-ether. Air, water—these have likewise become for the modern man completely abstract. It is time we studied these ideas and learned to enter into a true understanding of them. And so today I should like to give you a picture, showing you how a scholar of those times would speak to his pupils.

When I wrote my Outline of Occult Science I was obliged to make the account of the evolution of the Earth accord at any rate a little with the prevailing ideas of the present day. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would have been able to give the account quite differently. The following might then have been found in a certain chapter, e.g., of Outline of Occult Science. An idea would have been called up, to begin with, of the Beings who may be designated as the Beings of the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The Seraphim would have been characterised as Beings with whom there is no subject and object, with whom subject and object are one and the same, Beings who would not say: Outside me are things—but: The world is, and I am the World, and the World is I. Such Beings know only of themselves, and this knowledge of themselves is for them an inner experience of which man has a weak reflection when he has the experience of being filled, shall we say, with a glowing enthusiasm. It is, you know, quite difficult to make the man of today understand what is meant by “glowing enthusiasm.” Even in the beginning of the nineteenth century men knew better what it is than they do today. In those days it could still happen that some poem or other was being read aloud and the people were so filled with enthusiasm—forgive me, but it really was so—that present-day man would say they had all gone out of their minds. They were so moved, so warmed! Today people freeze up just when you expect them to be “enthused.” Now it was lifting this element of enthusiasm, this rapture of the soul that came naturally especially to the men of Middle and Eastern Europe—it was by lifting it into consciousness, by making it alone the complete content of consciousness, that men came to form an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim. Again as a bright, clear element in consciousness, full of light, so that thought turns directly into light, illuminating everything—such an idea did men form of the element of consciousness of the Cherubim. And the element of consciousness of the Thrones was conceived as sustaining, bearing the worlds in Grace.

There you have one such sketch. I could go on speaking of it for a long time. For the moment I only wanted to show you that in those days one would have tried to describe the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the true qualities of their being.

And then one would have gone on to say: the Choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones works together, in such wise that the Thrones found and establish a kernel; the Cherubim let their own light-filled being stream forth from this centre or kernel; and the Seraphim enwrap the whole in a mantle of warmth and enthusiasm that rays far out into cosmic space. [Footnote: Drawings were made on the blackboard, with coloured chalks.]

All the drawing I have made is Beings: in the midst the Thrones; in the circumference around them the Cherubim; and, outermost of all, the Seraphim. All is essential Being, Beings who move and weave into one another, do, think, will, feel in one another. All is of the very essence of Being. And now, if a being having the right sensitiveness were to take its path through the space where the Thrones have in this manner established a kernel and centre, where the Cherubim have made a kind of circling around it and the Seraphim have, as it were, enclosed the whole—if a being with the required sensitiveness were to come into this realm of the activity of the First Hierarchy, it would feel warmth in varying differentiations—here greater warmth, there less; but it would all be an experience of soul, and yet at the same time physical experience in the senses; that is to say, when the being felt itself warm in soul, the feeling would be actually the feeling you have when you are in a well-warmed room.

Such a united building-up by Beings of the First Hierarchy did verily once take place in the Universe; it formed what we call the Saturn existence. The warmth is merely the expression of the fact that the Beings are there. The warmth is nothing more than the expression of the fact that the Beings are there.

A picture will perhaps make clearer to you what I mean. Let us suppose you have an affection for a certain human being. You feel his presence gives you warmth. But now someone comes along who is frightfully abstract and says: “The person himself doesn't interest me, I will imagine him absent; the warmth he sheds around him, that alone is what interests me.” Or suppose he doesn't even say “The warmth he sheds around him is all that interests me.” Suppose he says: “The warmth is all that interests me.” He talks nonsense, of course, you will see that at once; for if the man is not there who sheds the warmth, then the warmth is not there either. The warmth is in any case only there when the man is there. In itself it is nothing. The man must be there, if the warmth is to be there. Even so must Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones be there; if the Beings are not there, neither is the warmth. The warmth is merely the revelation of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now in the time of which I speak, everything was exactly as I have described it. Men spoke of Elements. They spoke of the Element of Warmth, and by the Element of Warmth they understood Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones—and that is the Saturn existence.

The description went further. It was said: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—these alone have the power to bring forth something of the nature of Saturn, to place it into the Cosmos. The highest Hierarchy alone is capable of placing such an existence into the Cosmos. But when this highest Hierarchy had once placed it there and a new world-becoming had taken its start, then the evolution could go on further. The Sun, as it were, that is formed of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones could carry evolution further. And it came to pass in the following manner. Beings of the Second Hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Beings that had been generated by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, press into the space that has been formed through the working of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, that has been fashioned to Saturn warmth. Thither entered younger, cosmically younger Beings. And how did these cosmically younger Beings work? Whereas the Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones reveal themselves in the Element of Warmth, the Beings of the second Hierarchy form themselves in the Element of Light. Saturn is dark; it gives warmth. And now within the dark world of the Saturn existence arises that which can arise through the working of the Sons of the First Hierarchy, through Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

What is it that is able now to arise within the Saturn warmth? The penetration of the Second Hierarchy signifies an inner illumination. The Saturn Warmth is inwardly shone through with light and at the same time it becomes denser. Instead of only the Warmth Element there is now also Air. And in the revelation of Light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

You must clearly understand that it is in very deed and truth Beings who thus press their way into the Saturn existence. One who had the requisite power of perception would see the event as a penetration of Light; it is Light that reveals the path of the Beings. And wherever Light occurs, there occurs too, under certain conditions, shadow, darkness, dark shadow. Through the Penetration by the Second Hierarchy in the form of Light, shadow also comes to pass. What is shadow? It is Air. And indeed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men knew what Air is. Today men know only that air consists of oxygen, nitrogen and so forth. When that is said, it is very much as if someone were to say about a watch that it consisted of glass and silver. He would be saying nothing at all about the watch. And nothing at all is said about Air as a cosmic phenomenon when we say that it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. We say very much, on the other hand, if we know: Air comes forth from the Cosmos as the shadow of Light. In actual fact we have, with the entry of the second Hierarchy into the Saturn warmth, the entry of Light and we have too the shadow of Light, Air. And when we have this we have Sun. Such is the way one would have had to speak in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries.

And what follows after this? The further evolution comes about through the working of the Sons of the Second Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels. The Second Hierarchy have accomplished the entry of the Element of Light, Light that has drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air—not the indifferent, neutral darkness that belongs to Saturn, the darkness that is simply absence of Light, but the darkness that is wrought out as the antithesis of Light. And now to this Element of Light the Third Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels—add through their own nature and being a new Element, an Element that is like our human desire, like our impulse to strive after something, to long for something. Thereby the following comes to pass.

Let us suppose an Archai or Archangel Being enters, and comes upon an Element of Light, encounters, as it were, a place of Light. In this place of Light the Being receives, through its receptivity for the Light, the urge, the desire for darkness. The Angel Being bears Light into darkness—or an Angel Being bears darkness into Light. These Beings are mediators, messengers between Light and Darkness. It follows from this that what previously has only shone in Light and drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air, begins now to shine in colour, to glow in a play of colour. Light begins to appear in darkness, darkness in light. The Third Hierarchy create colour out of light and darkness.

Here we may find a connection with something that is historical, with something that is to be found in written document. For in the time of Aristotle men still knew, when they contemplated in the Mysteries, whence colours come; they knew that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy have to do with colour. Therefore Aristotle, in his colour harmony, showed that colour signifies a working together of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element in man's thought, whereby he knew that behind Warmth he has to see Beings of the First Hierarchy, behind Light and its shadow Darkness, Beings of the Second Hierarchy, and behind the iridescent play of Colour he has to see in a great cosmic harmony, Beings of the Third Hierarchy—this spiritual element in man's thought has been lost. And nothing is left for man today but the unhappy Newtonian Theory of Colour. The Initiates continued to smile at Newton's theory till the eighteenth century, but in that time it became an article of faith for professional physicists.

One must indeed have lost all knowledge of the spiritual world when one can speak in the sense of Newton's Theory of Colour. If one is still inwardly stimulated by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, then one resists it. One places before men the truth of the matter, as Goethe did, and attacks with might and main. For Goethe never censured so hardly as when he had to censure Newton, he went for him and his theory hammer and tongs! Such a thing is incomprehensible nowadays, for the simple reason that in our time anyone who does not recognise the Newtonian Theory of Colour is a fool in the eyes of the physicists. But things were different in Goethe's time. He did not stand alone. True, he stood alone as one who spoke openly on the matter; but there were others who really knew, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, whence colour comes, who knew with absolute certainty how colour wells up from within the Spiritual.

But now we must go further. We have seen that Air is the shadow of Light. And as, when Light arises, under certain conditions we find the dark shadow, so when colour is present and works as a reality—and it can do so, for when it penetrates into the Air-element, it flames up in this Air, works in it, in a word is something, is no mere reflection but a reality flashing and sparkling in the Air-element—when this is so, then under certain conditions we get pressure, counter-pressure, and out of the real Colour there comes into being the fluid, the Element of Water. As, for cosmic thinking, the shadow of Light is Air, so is Water the reflection, the creation of Colour in the Cosmos.

You will say: No, that I cannot understand! But try for once really to grasp Colour in its true meaning. Red—surely you do not think that red is, in its essence, the neutral surface it is generally regarded as being? Red is something that makes an attack upon you.—I have often spoken of this.—You want to run away from red; it thrusts you back. Blue-violet, on the other hand, you want to run after! It runs away from you all the time; it grows deeper and ever deeper. Everything is contained in the colours. The colours are a world, and the soul element in the world of colour simply cannot exist without movement; we ourselves, if we follow the colours with soul-experience, must follow with movement.

People gaze open-eyed at the rainbow. [Footnote: A sketch of a rainbow was made on the blackboard with chalks of the colours as seen in the sky: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.] But if you look at the rainbow with a little imagination, you may see there elemental Beings. These elemental Beings are full of activity and demonstrate it in a very remarkable manner. Here (at yellow) you see some of them streaming forth from the rainbow, continually coming away out of it. They move across and the moment they reach the lower end of the green they are drawn to it again. You see them disappear at this point (green). On the other side they come out again. To one who views it with imagination, the whole rainbow manifests a streaming out of spirit and a disappearing of it again within. It is like a spiritual dance, in very deed a spiritual waltz, wonderful to behold. And you may observe too how these spiritual Beings come forth from the rainbow with terrible fear, and how they go in with invincible courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see fear streaming out, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling: there all is courage and bravery of heart.

Now picture to yourselves: There before me is no mere rainbow! Beings are coming out of it and disappearing into it—here anxiety and fear, there courage ... And now, here the rainbow receives a certain thickness and you will be able to imagine how this gives rise to the element of Water. In this watery element spiritual Beings live, Beings that are actually a kind of copy of the Beings of the Third Hierarchy.

There is no doubt about it: if we want to get near the men of real knowledge in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we must understand these things. Indeed we cannot even understand the men of still later times, we cannot understand Albertus Magnus, if we read him with the knowledge we have today. We must read him with a manner of knowledge that takes account of the fact that spiritual things like these were still a reality for him: only then shall we understand how he expresses himself, how he uses his words.

Thus we have, as a reflection of the Hierarchies, first Air and then Water. The Hierarchies themselves dive in, as it were—the second Hierarchy in the form of Light, the third Hierarchy in the form of Colour. And with this latter event the Moon existence is attained.

And now we come to the Fourth Hierarchy. (I am telling it, you remember, as it was thought of in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) We today do not speak of the Fourth Hierarchy; but men still spoke in that way in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is Man. Man himself is the fourth Hierarchy. But by the Fourth Hierarchy was not meant the two-legged being that goes about the world today, ageing year by year! To the true man of knowledge of those times, present-day man would have appeared as something very strange. No, in those times they spoke of original Man, of Man before the Fall, who still bore a form that gave him power over the Earth, even as the Angels and Archangels and Archai had power over the Moon existence, the second Hierarchy over the Sun existence and the first Hierarchy over the Saturn existence. They spoke of Man in his original Earthly existence and then they were right to speak of him as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift it is true, of the higher Hierarchies, but the higher Hierarchies have held it only as a possession they did not themselves use but guarded and kept—with the Fourth Hierarchy came Life. Into the world of Colour, into the iridescent world of changing colour, of which I have only been able to give you the merest hints and suggestions, came Life.

You will say: Then did nothing live before this time? My dear friends, you can understand how it is from the human being himself. Your Ego and your astral body have not life, and yet they exist, they have being. That which is of the soul and the spirit does not need life. Life begins only with your etheric body. And the etheric body is something external, it is of the nature of a sheath. Thus only after the Moon existence and with the Earth existence does Life enter into the domain of that evolution to which our Earth belongs. The world of moving, glancing colour is quickened to life. And now not only do Angels and Archangels and Archai experience a longing desire to carry Darkness into Light, and Light into Darkness, thereby calling forth the play of colour in the planet; now a desire becomes manifest to experience this play of colour as something inward, to feel it all inwardly; when Darkness dominates Light, to feel weakness, laziness; when Light dominates Darkness, to feel activity. For what is happening really, when you run? When you run, Light predominates over Darkness in you; when you sit and are lazy and indolent, then Darkness predominates over Light. It is a play of Colour, an activity of Colour, not physical, but of the soul. Colour permeated with Life, in its iridescence streamed-through with Life—that is what appeared with the coming of the Fourth Hierarchy, Man. And in this moment of cosmic becoming, the forces that became active in the play of colour began to build contours, began to fashion forms. Life, as it rounded off and moulded the colours, called into being the hard, fast form of the crystal. And we have come into Earth existence.

Such things as I have been describing to you were fundamental truths for the mediaeval alchemists and occultists, Rosicrucians and others, who flourished—though history tells us little of them—from the ninth and tenth on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of whom stragglers are to be found as late as the eighteenth and even the beginning of the nineteenth century—always however in these later times regarded as strange and eccentric people. Only with the entry of the nineteenth century did this knowledge become entirely hidden. Only then did men come to acquire a conception of the world that led them to a point of view which I will indicate in the following way. Imagine, my dear friends, that here we have a man. Suppose I cease to have any interest in this man, but I take his clothes and hang them on a coat-hanger that has a knob here above like a head. From now on I take no further interest in the man and I tell myself: There is the man! What does it matter to me what can be put into these clothes? That, the coat-hanger with the clothes, is the man! This is really what happened with the Elements. It does not interest us any longer that behind Warmth or Fire is the First Hierarchy, behind Light and Air the Second Hierarchy, behind what we call Chemical Ether or Colour Ether and Water the Third Hierarchy, and behind the Life Element and Earth the Fourth Hierarchy, Man.—The peg, the hanger and on it the clothes.—That is all!

There you have the first Act of the drama. The second Act begins with Kant! One has there the hanger and the clothes hanging on it, and one begins to philosophise in true Kantian fashion as to what the “thing-in-itself” of these clothes may be. And one comes to a realisation that the “thing-in-itself” of the clothes cannot be known. Very clever, very clever indeed! Of course, if you first take away the man and have only the coat-hanger with the clothes, you can philosophise over the clothes, you can make most beautiful speculations! You can either philosophise in Kantian fashion and say: “The ‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known,” or in the fashion of Helmholtz and think to yourself: “But these clothes, they cannot of themselves have forms; there is nothing really there but tiny, whirling specks of dust, tiny atoms, which hit and strike each other and behold, the clothes are held in their form!”

Yes, my friends, that is the way thought has developed in recent times. It is all abstract, shadowy. And yet we live today in this way of thinking, in this way of speculating; it gives the stamp to our whole natural-scientific outlook. And when we do not admit that we think in this atomistic way, then we do it most of all! For we are very far from admitting that it is quite unnecessary to dream of a whirling dance of atoms, and that what we have rather to do is to put back the man into the clothes. This is however the very thing which the renewal of Spiritual Science must try to do.

I wanted to indicate to you today, in a number of pictures, the nature and manner of thinking in earlier centuries and what is really contained in the older writings, although it has become obscure. The very obscurity, however, has led to incidents that are not without interest. A Norwegian scientist of today has reprinted a passage from the writings of Basilius Valentinus and has interpreted it in terms of modern chemistry. He could not possibly say otherwise than that it is nonsense, because this is what it appears to be if, in the modern sense, one thinks of a chemist standing in a laboratory, making experiments with retorts and other up-to-date apparatus. What Basilius Valentinus really gives in this passage is a fragment of embryology, expressed in pictures. That is what he gives—a fragment of embryology. According to the modern mode of thought it seems to indicate a laboratory experiment, which then proves to be nonsense. For you will not expect to reproduce the real processes of embryology in a retort—unless you be like the mediaevally minded Wagner of Goethe's Faust.

It is time that these things were understood. And in connection with the great truths of which I was able to speak during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I shall have more to say concerning the spiritual life and its history during the last few centuries.

Easter is felt by large numbers of human beings as a festival connected on the one hand with the deepest and most intimate feelings of the human soul, and on the other hand with cosmic mysteries and cosmic riddles of existence. Indeed we cannot but observe the connection of Easter with the secrets and riddles of the Universe when we bear in mind the fact that Easter is a movable festival, the date of which has to be reckoned year by year from that constellation of the stars which we shall shortly consider more in detail. At the same time we must observe how many customs and sacred ceremonies have been associated with the Easter Festival for centuries—customs and ceremonies which lie very near to the heart of large numbers of humanity. These things will show us the immense values which mankind has gradually laid into the Easter Festival in the course of historic evolution.

In the first centuries of Christianity—not at its immediate foundation but in the course of the first centuries—Easter became a most important festival connected with the fundamental thought and impulse of Christianity, I mean, with that impulse which arises for the true Christian from the fact of the Resurrection of Christ.

Easter is the festival of the Resurrection. Yet at the same time it leads us back into pre-Christian times. It leads us to the festivals which were held about the time of the Spring Equinox (which still plays a part in our calculation, at least, of the date of Easter). It points to those old festivals which were connected with the reawakening of Nature—with the springing of life that grows forth once more from the Earth.

Here we already find ourselves within the very subject of these lectures; for here already we must touch upon the connection of Easter with the evolution of the Mysteries in the history of mankind.

Easter as a Christian festival is a festival of Resurrection. The corresponding Heathen festival, taking place about the same time of the year as our Easter, was a kind of Resurrection festival of Nature—the coming forth again of what was asleep in Nature throughout the winter time. But we must emphasise most strongly at this point that the Christian Easter is by no means coincident as to its inner essence and meaning with the Heathen festivals of the Spring Equinox. On the contrary, if we do want to relate it to the old Pagan times, we must connect the Christian Easter with certain festivals which, proceeding from the ancient Mysteries, were enacted at the Autumn season. This is a remarkable fact in the determination of the Easter Festival, which by its very content is obviously connected with certain of the ancient Mysteries. Easter above all can remind us of the deep and radical misunderstandings that have arisen, in the course of evolution, in the world-conceptions of mankind with regard to matters of the greatest significance. Nothing less has happened than that the Easter Festival has been confused with an altogether different one, and has thus been removed from Autumn and turned into a festival of Springtime.

We have here touched something of infinite significance in human evolution. Consider the content of this Easter Festival. What is it in its essence? It is this: Christ Jesus, the Being who stands at the centre of the Christian consciousness, passes through death. Good Friday is held in memory of this fact. Christ Jesus lies in the grave. It is a time that takes its course in three days, representing the union of Christ with Earth-existence. This time is celebrated in Christendom as a festival of mourning—the time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday is the day when the central Being of Christianity rises out of the grave; it is the day of remembrance of this. Such is the essential content of the Easter Festival: the Death, the lying in the Grave and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Now let us look at the corresponding ancient Heathen festival in any one of its forms. Only then shall we be able to penetrate into the connection between the Easter Festival and the Mysteries. In many places and among many people, we come across ancient Heathen festivals whose external structure—and the structure of the ceremonies which were enacted in them—is decidedly similar to the Easter-content of Christianity.

From the manifold festivals of ancient time, we may select for an example the Adonis festival. Through long, long periods of pre-Christian antiquity this festival was celebrated among certain peoples of Asia Minor. A sacred image was the central point of the festival. It was an image of Adonis—Adonis as the spiritual representative of all that is the springing and thriving force of youth in man, of all that appears as beauty in the human being.

True it is that in many respects the ancient peoples confused the substance of the image with what the image represented. The ancient religions often thus present the character of fetish worship. Many human beings saw in the image the actual and present God—the God of beauty, of the youthful strength of man, of the unfolding germinating forces which reveal in outward glory all the inner worth and inner greatness that man contains, or can contain, within him.

With songs and acts of ritual representing the deepest human grief and mourning, this image of the God was lowered into the waves of the sea, where it had to remain for three days. Or if the sea were not near it was lowered into a lake. Or again, an artificial pond was constructed near the sacred place of the Mysteries, so that the image of the God could be submerged and left for three days. During the three days the whole community associated with this cult remained in an atmosphere of deepest earnestness and stillness. After three days the image was withdrawn from the water. The songs of grief and mourning were transformed into songs of joy, hymns to the resurrected God, to the God who had come to life once more.

This was an outward ceremony which deeply stirred the hearts of large circles of mankind. And this ceremony indicated, in an outward act of ritual, what took place in the Holy of Holies of the Mysteries with every human being who was about to reach initiation. For within the Mysteries in those ancient times every human being who was to receive initiation was led into a special chamber. The walls were black, the whole space was dark and gloomy, empty save for a coffin, or something not unlike a coffin. Beside the coffin those who accompanied the candidate for Initiation broke forth into songs of mourning, songs of death. The candidate was treated like one who is about to die. He was given to understand that when he was now laid in the coffin, he would have to undergo what the human being undergoes in the first three days after death.

On the third day there appeared at a certain place, within sight of the one who lay in the coffin, a twig or a branch to represent springing, thriving life. And now the songs of mourning were transferred into hymns of joy and praise. With consciousness transformed, the man arose out of his grave. A new language, a new writing, was communicated to him; it was the language and writing of spiritual Beings. Henceforth he was allowed to see the world—for now indeed he could see it—from the standpoint of the Spirit.

What was thus enacted in the hidden depths of the Mysteries with the candidates for Initiation was comparable to the sacred cults or rituals enacted in the outer world. The content of the sacred ritual, pictorial as it was, was none the less similar in structure to what took place with chosen human beings in the Mysteries. Indeed the cult—and we may take the special cult of Adonis as representative—the cult was explained at the proper season to all those who partook in it. It was enacted in the Autumn, and those who took part in it were instructed somewhat as follows: “Behold, it is the Autumn season! The Earth is losing her adornment of plants and green foliage. All things are fading and falling. In place of the green and springing life that began to cover the Earth in Springtime, snow will soon come to envelop, or drought to lay waste, the Earth. Nature is dying, but while all things are dying around you, you are to experience that in the human being which is only half like the death you see around you in all Nature. Man also has to die. For him, too, there comes the Autumn season. And when man's life draws to a close, it is right for the hearts and minds of those who remain behind to be filled with sorrow and deep mourning. And that the full earnestness of the passage through death may come before your souls, that you may not experience it only when death approaches you yourselves, but may be mindful of it ever and again—it is enacted before you Autumn by Autumn how the divine Being who is the representative of the beauty, youth and greatness of man, dies and undertakes the same journey as all the things of Nature. Nevertheless, just when Nature is laid waste and bare, when all things in Nature are on the way to death, you also are to remember another thing. Remember how man passes through the gate of death! All that he experienced here in this earthly life was like the things that die in Autumn-time. For in this earthly realm he experiences only what is transient. But when he has passed from the Earth and lives on out into the far spaces of the Cosmic Ether, then will he behold himself growing ever greater and greater, till the whole Universe becomes his own. For three days he will live outward and outward into the wide spaces of the Universe. And then, while here on Earth the earthly eye is turned to the image of death—for the earthly eye is turned to all that dies, to all things transient—yonder in the Spirit after three days the immortal soul of man awakens. Yonder the soul arises, arises to be born again for Spirit-land, three days after passing through the gate of death.”

Deep and penetrating was the inner transformation when these things were enacted in the candidate's own person during the Initiation ceremony, in the hidden depths of the Mysteries. The profound impression, the immense and sudden jerk which the life of a man underwent in this ancient form of initiation, awakened inner forces of the soul within him. (As we shall presently see, in modern times it cannot be done in this way but must be done in quite another way.) The inner forces of the soul, the powers of seership were awakened in him. He knew that he stood henceforward no longer in the world of the senses but in the spiritual world.

I may perhaps sum up in the following words the instruction that was given, once more at the right and proper time, to the pupils in the ancient Mysteries. They were told: That which is enacted in the Mysteries is an image of what takes place in spiritual worlds, in the Cosmos. Sacred cult is itself an image of what is enacted in the sacred Mysteries. For everyone who was admitted to the Mysteries was fully clear that events which the Mysteries concealed within the earthly realm—events enacted there upon the human being—were true images of what man experiences in the wide spaces of the astral-spiritual Cosmos in other forms of existence than in this earthly life. And those who in ancient times were not admitted to the Mysteries—since according to their stage in life they could not yet be chosen to receive the vision of the spiritual world directly—were instructed in the corresponding truths through the sacred cult or ritual, that is to say, through a picture of what was enacted in the Mysteries.

Such, then, was the purport of the Mystery which we have learned to know in this example of the Adonis festival. Autumn, when earthly things were fading away, becoming waste and bare, Autumn, expressing so radically the transitory nature of all earthly things, the dying process and the fact of death—this Autumn time was to call forth in man the certainty, or at least the pictured vision, of how the death that overcomes all Nature in the Autumn, overcomes man too, nay even overcomes the representative of all beauty, youthfulness and greatness in the human soul, portrayed in the God Adonis. Even the God Adonis dies, and is dissolved in the earthly prototype of the cosmic Ether—in the Water. But even as he rises again out of the Water, even as he can be drawn forth from the Water, so is the soul of man drawn forth from the Waters of the world, that is to say, from the cosmic Ether, approximately three days after the human being here upon Earth passes through the gate of death.

It was the secret of death itself which those ancient Mysteries sought to represent in the corresponding Autumn festival. They made it visible in picture form, in that the first half of the sacred ritual coincided with the dying and the death in Nature, while on the other hand the very opposite was shown to be the essential truth for man himself. Such was the meaning and intention of the Mysteries: the human being shall turn his gaze to the death of Nature, in order to become aware how he himself dies in the outward semblance, while in his inner being he is resurrected—resurrected, to begin with, for the spiritual world. To unveil the truth about death was the meaning and purpose of this ancient Pagan festival which was connected so closely with the Mysteries.

Then in the further course of human evolution the great Event took place. What had been undergone at a certain level by the candidate for initiation in the Mysteries—the Death and Resurrection of the soul—took place even as to the body with Christ Jesus. For how does the Mystery of Golgotha appear to one who is acquainted with the Mysteries! He gazes back into the ancient Mysteries. He sees how the candidate for Initiation was led, in his soul, through death to the Resurrection of the soul; that is to say, to the awakening of a higher consciousness in the soul. The soul died, to rise again in a higher consciousness. We must above all hold fast to this, that the body did not die, but the soul died, in order to be awakened to a higher consciousness.

What the soul of every candidate for Initiation underwent, Christ Jesus underwent even in the body. That is to say, He underwent it on a different level. For Christ was no earthly man. He was a Sun-Being dwelling in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence what the candidate for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries had undergone in his soul, could be undergone in the entire human nature by Christ Jesus upon Golgotha.

Those who still had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries and of the above Initiation-rite—it was they who understood most deeply what had happened upon Golgotha. Indeed to this day, it is they who understood it most deeply. For they could say to themselves: For thousands and thousands of years, human beings have been led through the death and resurrection of their souls into the secrets of the spiritual world. The soul was kept separate from the body during the act of Initiation. The soul was led through death, to life eternal. What was thus experienced in the soul by a number of chosen human beings, was undergone even in the body by a Being who descended from the Sun at the Baptism by John in Jordan, and took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The act of Initiation that had been repeated again and again through long, long years, now became a historic fact.

The essential thing was that man should know: because it was a Sun-Being who took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore what was accomplished for the Initiates only with respect to the soul and the soul's experience, could be accomplished now even into the bodily existence by this Being. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolving of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal Earth, there could be a Resurrection of the Christ. For the Christ rises higher than the soul of the initiate could rise. The candidate for Initiation could not carry the body into those deep regions of the sub-sensible into which Christ Jesus carried it. Hence, too, the candidate for Initiation could not rise so high in resurrection as the Christ. Yet it remains true that but for this difference in respect of cosmic greatness, the ancient rite of Initiation appeared as a historic fact at the sacred place of Golgotha.

Yet even in the first centuries of Christianity there were only few who knew that a Being of the Sun, a cosmic Being, had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, that the Earth had really been fertilised by the descent from the Sun of a Being whom until then man upon Earth had only been able to behold within the Sun, by the methods cultivated at the places of Initiation. This was the essential point in Christianity, inasmuch as it was also accepted by those who had real knowledge of the ancient Mysteries. They could say: The Christ to whom we lifted ourselves up through our initiation, the Christ whom we could reach by our ascent to the Sun in the ancient Mysteries, has descended into a mortal body, into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come down to Earth.

It was indeed a festival mood, nay, a mood of sublime holiness which filled the hearts and souls of those who, living in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, had some understanding of this Mystery. Gradually, and by processes which we shall yet have to trace, what had thus been an immediate and living content of their consciousness became a memory, a festival in memory of the historic event on Golgotha. But while this “memory” was taking shape, the consciousness of who the Christ was as a Being of the Sun, became lost ever more and more. Those who had knowledge of the ancient Mysteries could not fail to know about the Being of the Christ. For they knew that the real Initiates, being made independent of the physical body and passing in their souls through death, rising into the Sun-sphere and there visiting the Christ, had received from Him—from Christ within the Sun—the impulse for the resurrection of their souls. They knew the nature of the Christ because they had raised themselves to Him. With their knowledge of this Initiation rite, the ancient Initiates knew from what took place on Golgotha that the same Being who formerly had to be sought for in the Sun, had now visited mankind on Earth. Why was it so? The sacred rite that had been enacted with the candidates for Initiation in the ancient Mysteries in order that they might reach up to the Christ within the Sun, could no longer be enacted in this way. For in the course of time, human nature had undergone a change. By the very evolution of the human being, the ancient ceremony of Initiation had become impossible. It would no longer have been possible through that ancient Initiation ceremony to visit the Christ in the Sun. It was then that He descended to enact on Earth a sacred deed to which human beings might henceforth turn their gaze.

What is contained within this secret is one of the very holiest things that can possibly be uttered on this Earth.

For how did it really appear to the human beings in the centuries following the Mystery of Golgotha?

From an ancient Initiation sanctuary man upon Earth looked upward to the Sun-existence and became aware, through his Initiation, of Christ within the Sun. Man looked out into Space in order to approach the Christ. And how did the evolution of mankind go forward in the succeeding periods? I must now represent Time itself: the Earth in one year, the Earth in a second year, in a third year, and so on in the course of Time. Spatially, the Earth is of course always present but here I have represented the course of Time. The Mystery of Golgotha has taken place. A human being living, let us say, in the eighth century A.D., instead of looking upward to the Sun from a sacred place of the Mysteries so as to reach the Christ, looks backward through the course of Time—back to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the turning-point of Time—at the beginning of the Christian era—he beholds the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus he can find the Christ within an earthly action, within an event on Earth. He finds the Christ within the Mystery of Golgotha.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha, what had formerly been a vision in Space, became henceforward a vision in Time. That was the significance of what had taken place.

We must however especially contemplate what took place during Initiation in the ancient Mysteries. It was a picture of the death of man and of his resurrection in the life beyond. Then we must consider the structure of the sacred cults, the festival of Adonis, for instance. For this in turn was a picture of what took place within the Mysteries. When we contemplate all this, these things—the three united into one—come before us in a sublime and transcendent aspect concentrated in the one historic action upon Golgotha.

Outwardly upon the scene of history there appears what was hitherto accomplished in the deep and inner Holy of Holies of the Mysteries. For all human beings there now exists what existed hitherto only for the Initiates. Men no longer need an image that is immersed and symbolically resurrected from the sea. Henceforth they shall have the thought—the memory—of what took place in all reality on Golgotha. The outward symbol, relating to a process that was experienced in Space, is now to be replaced by the inward thought and memory, without any picture to the senses—the memory of the historic event of Golgotha, experienced purely in the soul.

Strange is the course of human evolution as we perceive it in the succeeding centuries. Man's penetration into spiritual things becomes ever less and less. The spiritual content of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot find its way into the minds of men. Evolution tends now to develop the sense for material things. Men lose the inner understanding of the heart, which once told them that just where outer Nature reveals her transitoriness and appears as a dying existence, the life of the Spirit can be seen, and with it they lose their understanding for that outer festival which can most truly be felt when Autumn comes with its fading, dying process, inasmuch as the death of the Earthly and Natural corresponds to the Resurrection of the Spiritual.

Thus it becomes possible no longer for Autumn to be the time of the Resurrection Festival. Autumn loses its power to turn man's thought from the transitoriness of Nature to the eternity of the Spirit. Man now needs the support of material things, needs the support of what does not die in Nature, but springs forth again in Nature. He needs to connect his Resurrection Festival with that which is resurrected in outer Nature—the force of the seed which was laid into the Earth in Autumn-time. He takes the material as a symbol for the Spiritual because he is no longer able to receive inspiration for a true perception of the Spiritual itself. Autumn no longer has the power to make manifest through the inner power of the human soul the Eternity of the Spirit, over against what is transient in the world of Nature. Man needs the support of external Nature, of the external Resurrection in Nature. He needs to see how the plants spring out of the Earth, how the Sun increases in strength, how light and warmth increase in strength once more. He needs the Resurrection in Nature in order to celebrate the thought of the Resurrection.

At the same time he loses that immediate inner relationship which he had with the Adonis Festival, and which he can also have with the Mystery of Golgotha. The inner experience which could arise at the earthly death of man, loses its power. In that inner experience the human soul was aware how the man who in the earthly sense passes through the gate of death, undergoes in three days what can indeed fill the soul with solemnity and earnestness. Then, however, the soul must become inwardly joyful, inasmuch as out of this very death the human soul arises after three days to spiritual immortality.

The power that lay in the Adonis Festival was lost. To begin with, it was intended for humanity that this power should arise with still greater intensity. Man had gazed upon the death of the God, the death of all that is beautiful in mankind—of all that is great and filled with the strength of youth. This God was immersed in the ocean on the day of Mourning, on the day of Chara (Charfreitag is Good Friday; Chara means mourning). They fell into a solemn, earnest mood. This was the feeling they first wanted to unfold in view of the transitoriness of Nature. But then this very feeling of the transitoriness of Nature had to be transformed by the soul into a feeling of the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. When the God—or image of the God—was lifted out again, the true believer beheld the image of the human soul a few days after death. “What happens to the dead man in the Spirit, behold! it stands before thy soul in the image of the resurrected God of youthful strength and beauty!”

This truth, deeply united with the whole destiny of man, was really awakened in the human spirit year by year in the Autumn season. In that ancient time men could not have thought it possible to take their start from external Nature. That which was perceptible in the Spirit was represented in the symbolic action of the sacred cult. But the time came when this picture of ancient times had to be blotted out in order that the memory, unassisted by any image—the inward memory, experienced purely within the soul, the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha in which the same truth is contained—should take the place of the picture. To begin with, humanity had not the power for it to be so. For the Spirit descended into the very depths of the soul of man. To this day it has remained so; man needs the support of external Nature. But external Nature provides no symbol—no perfect symbol—of the destinies of man in death. Thus the thought of death itself was able to live on, but the thought of the Resurrection disappeared more and more. Though the Resurrection is still referred to as an article of faith, the fact of the Resurrection is not a really living experience in the humanity of modern times. It must become alive again through the anthroposophical conception reawakening the sense of man to the true Resurrection thought.

The Michael thought, as was said at the proper season, must lie near to the anthroposophical heart and mind as the thought of the Herald of Christ. The Christmas thought too, must be made ever deeper in the heart of the anthroposophist. And the Easter thought must become especially sacred and joyful. For Anthroposophy has to add to the thought of Death, the thought of the Resurrection. Anthroposophy itself must become like an inner festival of Resurrection for the human soul. It must bring an Easter mood into man's world-conception. This will indeed be possible if it is understood how the thought of the ancient Mysteries can live on in the true Easter thought. And this will still be possible if there arises a true conception of the body, soul and spirit of man, and of the destinies of body, soul and spirit, in the physical world, the soul-world and the spiritual world of Heaven.

Up to this point we have, at least to some extent, derived the eurhythmic gestures from the actual sounds of speech. Now we must realize that everything which may be expressed through the medium of these gestures—and which is therefore in a certain sense the revelation of man himself, just as the spoken word is also a revelation of man himself—we must realize that all this is based upon the possibilities of form and movement inherent in the human organism. For this reason we may choose yet another starting-point; we may, that is to say, take the nature of man himself and develop from this the various possibilities of form and movement. We may see what manner of movement can proceed out of the human organism; and then, carrying this further, we may eventually discover how the individual movement can take on the character of the visible sound.

Today, in the first place, we will take our start from the actual being of man, and we will endeavour to discover the forms and movements that may arise in this way. Then, proceeding somewhat further, we shall ask ourselves: Which sound is to be regarded as related to this or that particular movement?

For this purpose I shall need quite a number of eurhythmists, and I will therefore ask them to come on to the stage.

Will you place yourselves in a circle in such a way as to have equal distances between each point?

I. Raise both arms upwards, the palms of the hands turned outwards and all the fingers widely spread.

II. Hold the right arm closely to the body, the left hand being lightly supported against the side.

III. Both arms stretched forwards, the one laid over the other.

IV. The arms held to the sides, the left arm at some distance from the body.

V. One foot placed forwards, the left hand grasping the right elbow.

VI. Close the left hand into a fist and place it against the forehead; with the other hand, which is held
more in a forward direction make this gesture. (See diagram VI.)

VII. Both hands forwards, the left hand below, the right above.

VIII. Stand with the weight on the left foot, holding the right foot slightly raised, the right hand upwards in a vertical position, and the left arm bent somewhat sideways.

IX. Bend the head forwards and downwards, touching the chin with the right hand, and allowing the left hand to hang at the side.

X. Clasp the right arm over the head, covering the larynx with the left hand.

XI. Place the feet so that they are turned inwards and cross the arms.

XII. Left arm placed against the breast, the right arm against the back.

Here you see a series of gestures. These gestures in their totality represent the entire human being—the human being split up, as it were, into twelve separate elements, but still the entire human being.

You might also imagine these gestures being carried out by a single person, one after the other. If you picture them being made one after the other by the same person, you would see still more clearly how in this way, when one individual makes all the movements, the whole being of man is revealed and expressed with quite remarkable force and clarity.

Let us now pass through these several aspects of the human being. We will begin here: (gesture IV - Scorpio):

Try to imagine that we here have represented that element in the human being, which we call the intellect, the mind. We must realize that this gesture is the expression of the understanding, the intellect.

Now let us look at this: (gesture I -Leo):

From this gesture, there streams out with a sunny radiance that element which may be described as enthusiasm, which has its source in the breast. Thus we may say: gesture IV—the head: gesture I—the breast, enthusiasm.

Now let us pass to this point: (gesture X)

Here, the head is enfolded by the right arm, while the left hand covers the larynx. In this gesture we have represented that part of the human being that is the expression of the will. (The Word is silenced). We have man as the representative of the will, of all that can lead to action, to deed. Thus we may say: the limb system, will, deed.

Fundamentally speaking we now really have before us the threefold organism of human nature: understanding, feeling, will.

Then we still have that gesture which synthesizes all these elements in itself. You can see how here, in this gesture, there is the striving after balance: (gesture VII - Aquarius):

A state of balance is sought between these various aspects. One may imagine that the arms move in this way (with an upward and downward movement) and that by this means one is endeavouring to experience this state of balance. Here we feel the whole human being seeking to obtain equilibrium; it is the representation of the human being who finds the perfect balance between his three forces—thinking, feeling and willing. I will only write ‘the human being in a state of balance’ (see diagram). You must take these descriptions which I am writing here as matters of the greatest significance.

Now we will go one stage further; when you pass over from the thinking human being to the human being as he seeks for equilibrium you have, lying between these two aspects, that element which follows after thought, which is the consequence of thinking. Where does thinking lead us? To resolve. Thus gesture V is the resolve, the thought that wishes to transfer itself into reality: Resolve (gesture V - Sagittarius):

Now we reach this point (gesture VI) [Capricorn - L]

We see from the very nature of this gesture that something exceedingly significant lies here. This gesture (IV) represents thought. Thought may be very clever, but it does not necessarily enter into reality; it does not necessarily reach the point of resolve. Here we have thought; but thought may always miscarry when it comes to a question of external matters. At this point (gesture VI) thought struggles with the conditions of the outer world: the bringing of thought into connection with the external world (see diagram). This connection of thought with the outer world must actually become part of the complete human being; for the man who has reached a state of balance can, as he goes his way through the world, only bring his deeds to fulfilment when he has first entered into a relationship with the outer world.

And now, starting from the understanding, we will take the other direction. What really happens before one formulates a thought? Something must lead over to the state of understanding and now, starting from the understanding, we will take the other direction. What is really standing before a thought is actually formulated, we have the state of hypothesis; we have a weighing, as it were, of the pros and cons of the matter. Thus here, in this gesture (gesture III), you see the weighing process in its relation to thought (see diagram): [Libra - TS]

But how does this weighing, balancing process come about? In this connection we must make an accurate study of gesture II. What lies behind this gesture? You will remember that we take as our starting-point, feeling, enthusiasm (gesture I). This is a ‘burning enthusiasm’ (the enthusiasm which we lack so greatly in our Society, but which at least is represented here). Now, passing from gesture I to gesture III, before we reach that quiet feeling of weighing or balancing, a reasonable soberness must first make its appearance (see diagram). Gesture II—Soberness. [Virgo - B]

You will be able to feel this quite easily if you enter into the gesture correctly and without prejudice.

We have, then, that enthusiasm which has its seat in the, breast (gesture I). Now we come to this point: (gesture XII): [Cancer - F]

Here we have not yet reached enthusiasm, or rather, let us say, enthusiasm does not on this side pass over into a weighing, thoughtful process; it passes over into action, into the expression of will. On the path from enthusiasm to will, we find the first stage to be initiative, the going out of oneself, the impulse towards action. Enthusiasm burns with a fire that cannot endure. But when an action is to be accomplished there must be initiative, there must be the impulse towards action. Here then (gesture XII), we see the impulse towards action.

Now we must pass still further; let us observe the next stage. Here the whole human being is filled with the conviction that he will succeed in accomplishing the action: (gesture XI): [Gemini—H]

We can almost see Napoleon before us. Special attention, too, must here be paid to the use of the legs and feet; the eurhythmist must not stand as in the other positions, but with a firm hold on the ground. You will notice that admirals on board ship always stand in this way. (And let me here advise you, when you are on a ship, always to walk in this way; then you will not so easily feel the motion of the vessel, nor so easily become sea-sick.) This, then, is not merely initiative, but it is the capacity for action. Here (see diagram) we have already reached the capacity for action.

And now, with gesture X we have the action itself (see drawing R)

Then we go one stage further. When the action has been accomplished, what has been brought about by its means in the world outside man? We see the human being living in the world. He observes what has been brought about through his action. It is no longer a question of the action only. The human being has already passed beyond this; he can observe it; action has already become event—an event that has been brought about by his action, by his deed.

Thus in gesture IX we have the event (see diagram): [Aries V]

And now we pass on to gesture VIII: [Pisces - N]

In this gesture you can see that the event has made its impression upon the human being. He has caused something to happen and this happening has left its impression upon him; it has become destiny. Thus we may say (see diagram): Event has become destiny.

In this circle, then, we have the human being divided up into his component elements. We can picture this human being as containing within himself twelve elements and we can also discover the twelve corresponding gestures.

And now I need seven more eurhythmists. Let us start here in the centre: Stretch out the arms, the right arm forwards and the left arm backwards; and now you must move both arms simultaneously in a circular direction. (You need, however, only actually make this gesture when all the others have been told what to do.)

With this first gesture, which I have described, we have no longer merely the gesture which is held, but one which is in movement. And when we take this gesture, this movement, we find that it is the expression of the human being in his entirety.

Now the second: left arm backwards, right arm forwards; you must move the left arm in a circle, the right arm remaining quiescent.

Here we have shown you the second movement. It is the expression for all the loving, sacrificing qualities in the human being. Thus: the human being in his aspect of loving sacrifice (see diagram).

Now comes the third movement: right arm forwards, left arm backwards, the right arm moving in a circle. This is the extreme opposite of the preceding movement. It is the anti-thesis of the loving, sacrificing qualities. This is the aspect of egoism.

The fourth: stretch out the arms in front of you, with the lower arms crossed one above the other. This gesture is in the sphere of the spiritual; for this reason it may remain quiescent. Here we have everything in the human being that is creative; it is the capacity for creation.

Now we come to the fifth: you must hold the arms forwards with the fingers drawn inwards, and the movement is made by means of a rocking of the body, upwards and downwards. This represents the aggressive quality in the human being, thus the aggressive element.

The sixth: you must hold the left arm still (bent inwards) while the right makes a circular movement around it. In this way we show clearly that we are not now expressing the aggressive element but the activity arising out of wisdom.

And now we have the last movement: Here the hands are laced against the forehead, the one somewhat over the other; now allow them to move smoothly up and down—and again, up and down. Make this gesture, this movement. Here we have the expression of everything that is most profound, the contemplative, meditative element. The human being is here turned in upon himself; I will describe it as deep contemplation (Tiefsinn).

Thus we have formed a large circle and also a small circle. In the outer and larger circle we have the twelve outer gestures, which are static, which express form; here in the inner circle we have seven figures which express movement, with one exception, that is to say. This gesture expresses a different aspect, namely movement that is brought to quiescence.

Now you will soon see what a harmonious effect is produced when all these postures and gestures are combined: those in the inner circle carry out the movements belonging to them, while those in the outer circle take up their postures.

We must, however, go still further: those in the inner circle make their movements; the outer figures move slowly in a circle from left to right, always holding their postures. During the whole time the others also must make their movements. Here, you see, it is as though the human being were observing the world from all sides, and bringing all his faculties and capacities into movement.

Will you once again take up your postures and form the outer circle? I must just mention that in eurhythmy the direction from left to right is really reversed (that is to say it is taken from the point of view of the audience); this also applies to the direction from right to left. The outer circle moves at a moderate pace from left to right; those in the inner circle, still making their gestures, move round somewhat more rapidly. Thus the inner circle dances round at a rapid pace, the outer circle dances round more slowly. Now add all the movements and gestures. See what a harmonious effect is produced! This is one possibility. Here we have a first attempt at drawing forth from the organism its inherent possibilities of movement and gesture; and we can do this when at the same time we bear in mind the human being in his entirety. And we can indeed see how, in the future, further possibilities of form and movement will gradually be able to develop from out of this element.

In very truth the human being has not grown up simply from those forces known and recognized by present day science. He has grown up out of the whole cosmos and his nature may only be understood when the whole cosmos is taken into consideration.

When we have taken all that we have just seen and really observe it closely, then we may say that we have before us the human being divided up into all his different faculties, into the various qualities and forces of his being.

But, in the outer world, the human being is always divided up into the various members of his being. This is to be seen in the animals. The human being bears within him all the faculties of the principal animals. These are gathered together in him, synthesized and raised to a higher level.

Thus we have in the first place the four main animal types. Here we have enthusiasm, the breast element—Leo, the lion (see diagram). The lion has as its dominant characteristic what we have here in this, its corresponding gesture (I).

Further: Here (X) is that element which is manifested in the outer world in everything standing under the sign of external action, under the sign of the will: Taurus, the bull (see diagram).

Then here (VII), you have that which seeks to blend in the human being as a whole all the elements of experience, of action: you saw this in the way the movement was shown. Here we have that which welds together all the separated qualities, just as the etheric body welds together all the different members of the physical body. At one time the etheric man was also called the ‘Water Man’. Here (see diagram) one really ought to write: The Etheric Man. According to ancient designation however, this is also the ‘Water Man’—so here I may justifiably write: Aquarius, the Water Man. You now know that this signifies the etheric man.

Then we have the fascinating quality of cleverness, of brains, that which creates an impression (IV). And it is just here that tradition has brought about a gross error. In reality this has to do with all that is connected with the innermost organization of the head. So that I ought really to write: the eagle. This confusion between the eagle and the scorpion seems, however, only to have arisen in comparatively recent times. Here then, we must picture the eagle (see diagram). But everywhere today we shall find this sign designated as Scorpio. (I do not necessarily mean to imply that people have gradually learned to regard the understanding as something that stings them!)

Now we have here the four main characteristics of the human being. The others lie in the intervening spaces; enthusiasm does not immediately pass over into action; something lies between; At this point we have initiative. This impulse, which leads us over from enthusiasm to activity, which takes us out of ourselves, is incorporated in the feeling system, in that part of the human being that is enclosed by the ribs. In the ancient language of physiology this part of the organism was designated as ‘the crab’. Here also, then, I may call this point Cancer, the crab (see diagram). In the zoology of earlier times the word ‘crab’ did not merely signify that animal which we today call the crab; it signified all those animals possessing a specially strongly developed rib-organization. This is what was originally meant by the word ‘crab’. Everything, which had a special development of the ribs, was ‘a crab’.

Now when the human being wishes to pass over into the sphere of action he must be able to move properly; he must bring both sides of his organism into a properly balanced movement. Thus the element of left and right in the human being must be brought into action in a harmonious manner. Here we must observe that type of animal that is so organized that it has continually to bring the left and right sides of its organism into a synthetic and harmonious movement. Some animals, when walking or running, have to do this to a very marked degree: Gemini, the twins (XI) (see diagram).

As I said, from here we pass on to the action, and from the action to the event. When we examine this transition from the action to the event we find, in the animal kingdom, that it is best symbolized by those animals having curved horns. This brings us to the event: Aries, the ram (IX). Naturally, I should have to speak at considerable length if I wished fully to justify this statement.

Then we go further and reach the point where the human being is merged in the external world, where he gives himself up to the external world; we come to the point where his action becomes destiny. Here the human being lives in the moral element as the fish lives in water. As the fish is merged in the water in which it swims, almost becoming one with it, so does the human being live with his destiny in a moral outer world. Thus: Pisces, the fish (VIII).

Now I have already said that one must find a gradual transition from enthusiasm to quiet thought. We find this transition when the burning enthusiasm becomes sobered. The cooling element, that element which has not yet caught fire, when embodied in the animal kingdom, was called in ancient times: Virgo (II) (see diagram).

And after this soberness comes the quiet, weighing process, the balancing: Libra, the balances. Those animals that seem to consider everything were, in the dim past, designated as the balances (see diagram).

Now we pass from IV to VII, from Scorpio, or more properly the eagle, to Aquarius, to the etheric man. First we have the resolve, where thought determines to make itself felt in the outer world. It is easy to see why certain animals which dart from place to place from a certain nervousness of disposition - as for instance, certain woodland animals - it is easy to see why in ancient times such animals were named ‘Archers’. This is something different from what was later supposed; it is simply a characteristic of certain animals: Sagittarius, the archer (V) (see diagram). (Today, even, I believe that in certain dialects the expression ‘Schutze’ (archers) is used for those wretched little insects that dart about in the kitchen regions.)

And now we come to the bringing of thought into relationship with the world. At this stage, where one butts at everything - where one has not yet achieved the blending of all the human qualities nor reached as yet the sphere of destiny - at this stage we have the goat. Thus here I must write (VI): Capricorn, the goat. Man in his entirety is summed up in the circle of the Zodiac. But all this must be regarded as expressing human qualities and faculties, and these human qualities again make their appearance in the postures we have been studying.

Now in the inner circle we have had the expression of the human being as a whole: Sun. Next we passed over to the human being in his aspect of loving sacrifice: Venus; then to the more egotistical aspect: Mercury; to the creative, productive aspect: Moon; to the aggressive aspect: Mars; and then to the aspect of wisdom in the human being, that which radiates wisdom: Jupiter. And finally, we have that which passes over into a certain melancholy, into an inner contemplation, into a profound inwardness: Saturn (see diagram).

As we enter the sphere that reveals the human being to us in the way I have just described, we pass over from the postures that are held, to the gestures which are in movement. And if we now wish to synthesize all this, to gather it together into a single whole, we can do so in the way I have shown you, by bringing the circle into movement. By so doing we externalise all that which together makes up the complete human being, that is to say, the synthesis of all the animal qualities, the animal characteristics.

A certain experiment is given in the ‘Colour Teaching’ of Goethe: here one paints a disc in sections according to the seven colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, etc., then one brings the whole thing into movement, whirling it ever faster and faster until the whole impression is grey. The physicists assert: white—it is however, not white, but grey. The separate colours can no longer be distinguished; everything appears as grey.

Now if the eurhythmists had moved with such rapidity that the separate gestures were no more to be seen, but all were whirled together into a whole, then you would have seen some-thing of extraordinary interest: the picture of the human being expressed through his own movements.

Here (in the inner planetary circle) you have all those qualities in the human being which tend outwards, those possibilities of inner activity whereby the animal nature is gradually led over into the human. Thus, in the outer circle we have: all the animals as man; and here, in the inner circle, we have: a synthesis of the animal qualities transmuted into the human by means of the sevenfold planetary influence.

And now I must ask you (the details I shall give you next time) to bear in mind the sounds: a, e, i, o, u, ei, au—seven vowels. When we take the consonants really according to their innermost nature, grouping those letters together that are somewhat similar in sound, we get the twelve consonants. Thus we have twelve consonants and seven vowels. We arrive at the nineteen possibilities of sound when we see the consonantal element in the Zodiac, and the vowel element in the moving circle of the planets. This is the language of the heavens; whenever a planet stands between two signs of the Zodiac, in reality a vowel is standing between two consonants. The constellations arising through the motions of the planets are indeed a heavenly utterance that sounds forth with infinite variety. And that which is here uttered is the being of man. Small wonder, then, that in the possibilities of gesture and movement the cosmos itself is brought to expression.

Such thoughts as these enable us to realize that in eurhythmy we are really reviving the temple dancing of the ancient Mysteries, the reflection of the dance of the stars, the reflection of the utterances of the gods in heaven to human beings below upon the earth. It is only necessary, by means of spiritual perception, to find once again in our age the possibility of discovering the inner meaning of the gestures in question.

Today, then, we have discovered nineteen gestures; twelve static, and seven permeated with movement—of which latter one is quiescent only because rest is the antithesis of movement. (In the Moon we have movement annulled by its very velocity.)

Thus we have learned to know these gestures, and I have also been able to indicate how they lead over into the realm of sound.

Here we have taken the human being as our starting point and have travelled the opposite path. Previously we started from the sounds; now we take our start from the possibilities of movement and follow this path till it leads to man, to a visible language, to the sounds themselves.

Before education can be helpful, teachers and educators must gain the right perspective, one that allows them to fully understand the source and the formation of a child’s organism. For the sake of clarity in this area I would like to begin with a comparison.

Let’s take reading—the ordinary reading of adults. If we wanted to describe what we gain from our usual reading of a book, we would not say, “the letter B is shaped like this, the letter C like that” and so on. If I read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, it wouldn’t occur to me to describe the individual letters as a result of my reading, since the real substance assimilated is not on the paper at all, it’s not even contained within the covers of the book. Nevertheless, if I want to comprehend in any way the content of Wilhelm Meister, I would have had to have learned how to read the letters and their relationships—I must be able to recognize the forms of the letters.

The Ability to Read the Human Being

A teacher’s relationship with children is similar; it must constitute a reading of the human being. What a teacher gets from a strictly physical understanding of the physiology and anatomy of the organs and their functions amounts to no more than learning the letters. As teachers and educators, it is not enough to understand that the lungs or heart have this or that appearance and function in the physical realm; that kind of an understanding of the human being is similar an to illiterate person who can only describe the forms of letters but not the book’s meaning.

Now in the course of modern civilization, humankind has gradually lost the habit of reading nature and, most of all, human nature. Our natural science is not reading but mere spelling. As long as we fail to recognize this specifically, we can never develop a true art of education that arises from real knowledge of the human being. This requires knowledge that truly reads, not one that only spells. People are obviously unhappy at first when they hear such a statement, and it is left at that. They argue: Isn’t the human race supposed to be making continual progress? How can it be, then, that during our time of momentous progress in the natural sciences (which philosophical anthroposophists are the first to acknowledge) we are moving backward in terms of penetrating the world more deeply?

We must answer: Until the fourteenth or fifteenth century, human beings were unable to “spell out” nature. They saw natural phenomena and received instinctive, intuitive impressions, primarily from other human beings. They did not get as far as describing separate organs, but their culture was spiritual and sensible, and they had an instinctive impression of the human being as a totality. This kind of impression only arises when one is not completely free in one’s inner being, since it is an involuntary impression and not subject to inner control.

Thus, beginning with the fourteenth or fifteenth century, a time had to come in the historical evolution of humanity—an epoch of world history that is about to end—when human beings would forgot their earlier, instinctive knowledge, and become more concerned with learning the “alphabet” of human nature. Consequently, in the last third of the nineteenth century and, in effect, until the present period of the twentieth century, as human beings we were faced with a larger culture whose worldview is void of spirit. This is similar to the way we would face a spiritual void if we could not read, but only perceived the forms of the letters. In this age, human nature in general has been strengthened, just because the involuntary life and being of the spirit within it were absent, especially among the educated.

We must have the capacity to observe world history in depth, since otherwise we would be incapable of forming a correct assessment of our position as human beings in the sequence of eras. In many ways, modern people will be averse to this, because we are endowed, as I have already indicated, with a certain cultural pride, especially when we think we have learned something. We place an intrinsically higher value on a “letter” reading of nature than we do on what existed in earlier periods of earthly evolution. Of course, anatomists today think they know more about the heart and liver than those of earlier times. Nevertheless, people then had a picture of the heart and liver, and their perception included a spiritual element.

We must be able to empathize with the way the modern anatomist views the heart, for example. It is seen as something like a first-rate machine—a more highly developed pump that drives the blood through the body. If we say that an anatomist is looking at a corpse, the response would be denial, which from that viewpoint is appropriate, since an anatomist wouldn’t see the point of such a distinction. Ancient anatomists, however, saw a kind of spiritual entity in the heart, working in a spiritual and psychic sense. The sensory content of perception was permeated and simultaneous with a spiritual aspect. Such perception of the spiritual could not be fully clear and conscious, but was involuntary. If humankind had been forced to continue to experience a simultaneous revelation of spirit in sense perception, complete moral freedom could not have been attained. Nevertheless, at some point it had to enter historical evolution.

When we go back over the whole course of history since the fourteenth century, we find a universal struggle toward freedom, which was ultimately exprEssentialEd in the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century (particularly in the widespread fermentation in the more developed regions, beginning with the Bohemian-Magyar brotherhoods in Central Europe, where a definite pedagogic impulse was trying to make itself felt) and onward to Wycliffe, Huss, and the so-called Reformation. This struggle of humanity for the inner experience of freedom still continues.

None of this could have happened while the old perceptual mode persisted. Human beings had to be liberated for a while from the spirit working involuntarily within them so that they could freely assume that spirit itself. An unbiased observation of the activity of spiritual culture leads one to say: It is of primary importance that educators develop full awareness of the process of human evolution on Earth. Whereas there used to be an unconscious bond between teacher and student—which was true of ancient times—they must now develop a conscious bond. This is not possible if culture arises from mere spelling, which is the way of all science and human cognition today. Such a conscious relationship can arise only if we learn to progress consciously from spelling to reading. In other words, in the same way we grasp the letters in a book but get something very different from what the letters say (indeed, the letters themselves are innocent in terms of the meaning of Wilhelm Meister), so we must also get from human nature something that modern natural science cannot express by itself; it is acquired only when we understand the statements of natural science as though they were letters of an alphabet, and thus we learn to read the human being.

This explains why it is not correct to say that anthroposophic knowledge disregards natural science. This is not true. Anthroposophic knowledge gives a great deal of credit to natural science, but like someone who respects a book through the desire to read it, rather than one who merely wants to photograph the forms of the letters. When we try to truly describe the culture of our time, many interesting things can be said of it. If I give someone a copy of Wilhelm Meister, there is a difference between someone wanting to quickly get a camera to photograph every page, not bothering at all about the content of the book, and someone else who longs to know what the book is about. If I can be content with only natural science to help me understand the human being, I am like the first person—all I really want is photographs of the external forms, since the available concepts allow no more than a mere photograph of the forms.

We are forced to use radical expressions to describe the relationship that people today have with one another and with the world. This relationship is completely misunderstood. The belief is that human beings really have something higher today than was available before the fourteenth century; but this is not true. We must develop to the degree that we learn to manipulate consciously, freely, and deliberately what we have, just as in earlier times we gained our concepts of human nature through instinctive intuition. This development in modern culture should pass through teacher training education like a magic breath and become a habit of the soul in the teachers, since only it can place the teachers at the center of that horizon of worldview, which they should perceive and survey.

Thus, today it is not as necessary that people take up a scientific study of memory, will, and intelligence. It is more important that pedagogical and didactic training be directed toward evoking the attitude I described within the teachers’ souls. The primary focus of a teacher’s training should be the very heart of human nature itself. When this is the situation, every experience of a teacher’s development will be more than lifeless pedagogical rules; they will not need to ponder the application of one rule or another to a child standing in front of them, which would be fundamentally wrong.

An intense impression of the child as a whole being must arise within the whole human nature of the teacher, and what is perceived in the child must awaken joy and vitality. This same joyful and enlivening spirit in the teacher must be able to grow and develop until it becomes direct inspiration in answer to the question: What must I do with this child? We must progress from reading human nature in general to reading an individual human being. Everywhere education must learn to manipulate (pardon this rather materialistic expression) what is needed by the human being. When we read, what we have learned about the relationships between the letters is applied. A similar relationship must exist between teacher and pupils. Teachers will not place too much nor too little value on the material development of the bodily nature; they will adopt the appropriate attitude toward bodily nature and then learn to apply what physiology and experimental psychology have to say about children. Most of all, they will be able to rise from a perception of details to a complete understanding of the growing human being.

The Implications of the Change of Teeth

A deeper perception reveals that, at the elementary school age, children are fundamentally different after their change of teeth. Let’s look into the nature of the human being before the change of teeth. The teeth are the outer expression of something developing within the human organism as a whole (as I described yesterday). There is a “shooting up” into form—the human soul is working on the second bodily nature, like a sculptor working at shaping the material. An inner, unconscious shaping process is in fact happening. The only way this can be influenced externally is to allow children to imitate what we do. Anything I do—any movement I make with my own hand—passes into the children’s soul building processes when they perceive it, and my hand movement causes an unconscious shaping activity that “shoots up” into the form.

This process depends completely on the element of movement in the child. Children make movements, their will impulses change from chaotic irregularity into inner order, and they work on themselves sculpturally from without. This plastic activity largely moves toward the inner being. When we meet children at the elementary age, we should realize that in the development of their spirit, soul, and body, the process that initially lived only in the movements passes into a very different region. Until the change of teeth, blood formation in the child depends on the system in the head. Think of a human being during the embryonic period, how the head formation dominates, while the rest of the organic structuring depends on external processes; regardless of what takes place in the mother’s body, everything that proceeds from the baby itself begins with the formation of the head. This is still true, though less so, during the first period of life until the change of teeth. The head formation plays an essential role in all that happens within the human organism. The forces coming from the head, nerves, and sensory system all work into the motor system and the shaping activity. After the child passes through the change of teeth, the activities of the head move to the background. What works in the limbs now depends less on the head and more on the substances and forces passing into the human organism through nourishment from outside.

I would like you to consider this carefully. Suppose that, before the change of teeth, we eat some cabbage, for example. The cabbage contains certain forces intrinsic to cabbages, which play an important part in the way it grows in the field. Now, in the child those forces are driven out of the cabbage as quickly as possible by the process of digestion being carried on by forces that flow down from the child’s head. Those forces flow from the head of the child and immediately plunge into the forces contained in the vegetable. After the change of teeth, the vegetable retains its own forces for a much longer time on its way through the human organism; the first transformation does not occur in the digestive system at all, but only where the digestive system enters the circulatory system. The transformation takes place later, and consequently, a completely different inner life is evoked within the organism. During the first years before the change of teeth, everything really depends on the head formation and its forces; the important thing for the second life stage from the change of teeth until puberty is the breathing process and meeting between its rhythm and the blood circulation. The transformation of these forces at the boundary between the breathing process and the circulatory system is particularly important. The essential thing, therefore, during the elementary school age, is that there should always be a certain harmony—a harmony that must be furthered by the education—between the rhythm developed in the breathing system and the rhythm it encounters in the interior of the organism. This rhythm within the circulatory system springs from the nourishment taken in. This balance—the harmonization of the blood system and the breathing system—is brought about in the stage between the change of teeth and puberty.

In an adult, the pulse averages four times as many beats as breaths per minute. This normal relationship in the human organism between the breathing and the blood rhythms is established during the time between the change of teeth and puberty. All education at that time must be arranged so that the relationship between the breathing and blood rhythms may be established in a way appropriate to the majesty and development of the human organism.

This relationship between pulse and breath always differs somewhat among people. It depends in each individual on the person’s size, or whether one is thin or fat; it is influenced by the inner growth forces and by the shaping forces that still emanate from hereditary conditions during the early years of childhood. Everything depends on each human being having a relationship between the breathing and the blood rhythms suited to one’s size and proportions. When I see a child who is inclined to grow up thin, I recognize the presence of a breathing system that, in a certain sense, affects the blood system more feebly than in some fat little child before me. In the thin child, I must strengthen and quicken the imprint of the breathing rhythm to establish the proper relationship. All these things, however, must work naturally and unconsciously in the teacher, just as perception of individual letters is unconscious once we know how to read. We must acquire a feeling of what should be done with a fat child or with a thin child, and so on. It is, for example, extremely important to know whether a child’s head is large or small in proportion to the rest of the body. All this follows naturally, however, when we stand in the class with an inner joy toward education as a true educational individual, and when we can read the individual children committed to our care.

It is essential, therefore, that we take hold, as it were, of the continual shaping process—a kind of further development of what takes place until the change of teeth—and meet it with something that proceeds from the breathing rhythm. This can be done with various music and speech activities. The way we teach the child to speak and the way we introduce a child to the music—whether listening, singing, or playing music—all serve, in terms of teaching, to form the breathing rhythm. Thus, when it meets the rhythm of the pulse, it can increasingly harmonize with it.

It is wonderful when the teacher can observe the changing facial expressions of a child while learning to speak and sing—regardless of the delicacy and subtlety of those changes, which may not be so obvious. We should learn to observe, in children between the change of teeth and puberty, their efforts at learning to speak and sing, their gaze, physiognomy, finger movements, stance and gait; with reverence, we should observe, growing from the very center of very small children, unformed facial features that assume a beautiful form; we should observe how our actions around small children are translated into their developing expressions and body gestures. When we can see all this with inner reverence, as teachers we attain something that continually springs from uncharted depths, an answer in feeling to a feeling question.

The question that arises—which need not come into the conscious intellect—is this: What happens to all that I do while teaching a child to speak or sing? The child’s answer is: “I receive it,” or, “I reject it.” In body gestures, physiognomy, and facial expressions we see whether what we do enters and affects the child, or if it disappears into thin air, passing through the child as though nothing were assimilated. Much more important than knowing all the rules of teaching—that this or that must be done in a certain way—is acquiring this sensitivity toward the child’s reflexes, and an ability to observe the child’s reactions to what we do. It is, therefore, an essential intuitive quality that must develop in the teacher’s relationship with the children. Teachers must also learn to read the effects of their own activity. Once this is fully appreciated, people will recognize the tremendous importance of introducing music in the right way into education during the elementary years and truly understand what music is for the human being.

Understanding the Fourfold Human Being

Anthroposophy describes the human physical body, a coarse, material principle, and the more delicate body, which is still material but without gravity—in fact, its tendency is to fly against gravity into cosmic space. The human being has a heavy physical body, which can fall to the ground when not held upright. We also have a finer etheric body, which tends to escape gravity into cosmic space. Just as the physical body falls if it is unsupported, so the etheric body must be controlled by inner forces of the human organism to prevent it from flying away. Therefore, we speak of the physical body, the etheric body, and then the astral body, which is no longer material but spiritual; and we speak of the I-being, which alone is completely spirit. If we want to gain a real knowledge of these four members of the human being—a true understanding of the human being—we might say: The methods of modern anatomy and physiology allow for an understanding of the physical organism, but not the etheric human being and certainly not the astral human being.

How can we understand the etheric body? This requires a much better preparation than is usual for understanding the human being today. We understand the etheric body when we enter the shaping process, when we know how a curve or angle grows from inner forces. We cannot understand the etheric body in terms of ordinary natural laws, but through our experience of the hand—the spirit permeated hand. Thus, there should be no teacher training without activities in the areas of modeling or sculpture, an activity that arises from the inner human being. When this element is absent, it is much more harmful to education than not knowing the capital city of Romania or Turkey, or the name of some mountain; those things can always be researched in a dictionary. It is not at all necessary to know the masses of matter required for exams; what is the harm in referring to a dictionary? However, no dictionary can give us the flexibility, the capable knowledge, and knowing capacity necessary to understand the etheric body, because the etheric body does not arise according to natural laws; it permeates the human being in the activity of shaping.

And we shall never understand the astral body simply by knowing Gay-Lussac’s law or the laws of acoustics and optics. The astral body is not accessible to such abstract, empirical laws; what lives and weaves within it cannot be perceived by such methods. If we have an inner understanding, however, of the intervals of the third or the fifth, for example—an inner musical experience of the scale that depends on inner musical perception and not on acoustics—then we experience what lives in the astral human being.

The astral body is not natural history, natural science, or physics; it is music. This is true to the extent that, in the forming activity within the human organism, it is possible to trace how the astral body has a musical formative effect in the human being. This formative activity flows from the center between the shoulder blades, first into the tonic of the scale; as it flows on into the second, it builds the upper arm, and into the third, the lower arm. When we come to the third we arrive at the difference between major and minor; we find two bones in the lower arm—not just one—the radius and ulna, which represent minor and major. One who studies the outer human organization, insofar as it depends on the astral body, must approach physiology not as a physicist, but as a musician. We must recognize the inner, formative music within the human organism.

No matter how you trace the course of the nerves in the human organism, you will never understand what it means. But when you follow the course of the nerves musically—understanding the musical relationships (everything is audible here, though not physically)—and when you perceive with spiritual musical perception how these nerves run from the limbs toward the spine and then turn upward and continue toward the brain, you experience the most wonderful musical instrument, which is the human being, built by the astral body and played by the I-being.

As we ascend from there, we learn how the human being forms speech through understanding the inner configuration of speech—something that is no longer learned in our advanced civilization; it has discarded everything intuitive. Through the structure of speech, we recognize the I-being itself if we understand what happens when a person speaks the sound “ah” or “ee”—how in “ah” there is wonder, in “ee” there is a consolidation of the inner being; and if we learn how the speech element shoots, as it were, into the inner structure; and if we learn to perceive a word inwardly, not just saying, for example, that a rolling ball is “rolling,” but understand what moves inwardly like a rolling ball when one says “r o l l i n g.” We learn through inner perception—a perception really informed by the spirit of speech—to recognize what is active in speech.

These days, information about the human organism must come from physiologists and anatomists, and information about what lives in language comes from philologists. There is no relationship, however, between what they can say to each other. It is necessary to look for an inner spiritual connection; we must recognize that a genius of speech lives and works in language, a genius of speech that can be investigated. When we study the genius of speech, we recognize the human I-being.

We have now made eurythmy part of our Waldorf education. What are we doing with eurythmy? We divide it into tone eurythmy and speech eurythmy. In tone eurythmy, we evoke in the child movements that correspond to the form of the astral body; in speech eurythmy we evoke movements that correspond to the child’s I-being. We thus work consciously to develop the soul by bringing physical elements into play in tone eurythmy; and we work consciously to develop the spirit aspect by activating the corresponding physical elements in speech eurythmy.

Such activity, however, only arises from a complete understanding of the human organization. Those who think they can get close to the human being through external physiology and experimental psychology (which is really only another kind of physiology) would not recognize the difference between beating on a wooden tray and making music in trying to evoke a certain mood in someone. Similarly, knowledge must not remain stuck in abstract, logical rules, but rise to view human life as more than grasping lifeless nature—the living that has died—or thinking of the living in a lifeless way. When we rise from abstract principles to formative qualities and understand how every natural law molds itself sculpturally, we come to understand the human etheric body. When we begin to “hear” (in an inner, spiritual sense) the cosmic rhythm expressing itself in that most wonderful musical instrument that the astral body makes of the human being, we come to understand the astral nature of the human being.

What we must become aware of may be exprEssentialEd this way: First, we come to know the physical body in an abstract, logical sense. Then we turn to the sculptural formative activity with intuitive cognition and begin to understand the etheric body. Third, as a physiologist, one becomes a musician and views the human being the way one would look at a musical instrument—an organ or violin—where one sees music realized. Thus, we understand the astral human being. And when we come to know the genius of speech as it works creatively in words—not merely connecting it with words through the external memory—we gain knowledge of the human I-being.

These days, we would become a laughing stock if in the name of university reform—medical studies, for example—we said that such knowledge must arise from the study of sculpture, music, and speech. People would say: Sure, but how long would such training take? It certainly lasts long enough without these things. Nevertheless, the training would in fact be shorter, since its length today is due primarily to the fact that people don’t move beyond abstract, logical, empirical sense perception. It’s true that they begin by studying the physical body, but this cannot be understood by those methods. There is no end to it. One can study all kinds of things throughout life—there’s no end to it—whereas study has its own inner limits when it is organically built up as a study of the organism in body, soul and spirit.

The point is not to map out a new chapter with the help of anthroposophy, adding to what we already have. Indeed, we can be satisfied with what ordinary science offers; we are not opposed to that. We are grateful to science in the sense that we are grateful to the violin maker for providing a violin. What we need in our culture is to get hold of all of this modern culture and permeate it with soul and permeate it with spirit, just as human beings themselves are permeated with soul and spirit. The artistic must not be allowed to exist in civilization as a pleasant luxury next to serious life, a luxury we consider an indulgence, even though we may have a spiritual approach to life in other ways. The artistic element must be made to permeate the world and the human being as a divine spiritual harmony of law.

We must understand how, in facing the world, we first approach it with logical concepts and ideas. The being of the universe, however, gives human nature something that emanates from the cosmic formative activity working down from the spheres, just as earthly gravity works up from the central point of the Earth. And cosmic music, working from the periphery, is also a part of this. Just as the shaping activity works from above, and physical activity works from below through gravity, so cosmic music works in the movements of the starry constellations at the periphery.

The principle that really gives humanity to the human being was divined in ancient times when words were spoken—words such as “In the primal beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word.” That Cosmic Word, Cosmic Speech, is the principle that also permeates the human being, and that being becomes the I-being. In order to educate, we must acquire knowledge of the human being from knowledge of the cosmos, and learn to shape it artistically.

Dear friends,

Today I would like to insert into our studies a chapter of anthroposophy that we need for our examination of healthy responsibility and pathological irresponsibility as the physician and the priest must know them.

First of all it is important that we look into the question: What is really inherited by a human being? What is not inherited and must come to the human being in some other way? In evaluating healthy and sick individuals, a great deal depends upon whether one can differentiate between these two ingredients. Human beings come out of the spiritual, super-sensible worlds into the sense world: that means, they combine what is given them by heredity with what they bring from earlier earth lives and from life between death and the new birth. Then we see how they develop as a children, from day to day, from week to week. But if one does not perceive that they are four-membered beings, with physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization, one is not in a position to understand their development, for one does not see what part each member is playing in this development. They have different origins; they come from different worlds.

First, human beings have their physical organism. The most striking phenomenon in the physical organism is that in the first period of life they have what we call “first teeth,” which last until the time we call “change of teeth.” The teeth are only the most obvious thing that is changed at this time. For the fact is that human beings only keep the physical substance they received at birth until the change of teeth. They are constantly stripping that physical material from their form.

The process is, of course, more complicated than is implied in the brief statement that in the course of every seven or eight years a person pushes off all physical substance and replaces it. The truth is near to that, but one need only look at the change of teeth itself to realize that this picture must be modified somewhat. For if this abstract assertion were correct, we would have new teeth every seven years. We get new teeth only once. The teeth are changed once and do not undergo any other renewal. They belong in this category in the most extreme sense. As a matter of fact, the course of human life is such that the older one becomes, the more one retains of old physical substance. A replacement of by far the greatest part of the substance does indeed take place in seven- to eight-year periods; but we must distinguish what remains behind. At the seventh year it is only the adult teeth that remain. After each subsequent period there remain also certain parts of the substance that are not replaced, although the greater part is indeed replaced in the course of seven or eight years. Thus a basic statement can be made for the first seven years. Human beings strip away all the physical substance they had when they were born, keeping none of it, keeping only the forces that have lived and worked in it during those years. These forces have so appropriated the fresh new substance that was constantly being aquired that at seven the physical body has been completely renewed, even to the teeth. And from that statement the understanding must follow that the principle of heredity as our current natural science conceives of it really holds good only for the first seven years of life. Only for those first seven years is it true that a person's characteristics come from parents and grandparents. The physical body of those first seven years provides, in a certain sense, a kind of model from which the artist working in the human being (who consists now in these years of etheric body, astral body, and ego) fashions a new physical body. We see how what we bring down from spiritual worlds—our individuality, our own being—and what we receive from heredity work together in artistic reciprocal activity. If a human being is an inwardly strong individual and brings an intensely strong inner astrality and ego nature, which in turn makes the etheric body strong, then we will see a young person shooting up who from inner strength keeps very little to the model, only copies it for the general form. Naturally, the universal human model must be preserved, and therefore an affinity is already there for the inherited human form; features of it definitely remain beyond the change of teeth. Still, to thoughtful observation it will be apparent that in the case of inwardly strong individuals important changes come after the change of teeth because such individuals follow only slightly the model they inherited.

If we investigate such an individual as St. Teresa, we find that these particularly strong individualities resemble their parents very closely in the first seven years, but then in the ninth and tenth years they develop in surprising ways. Then the real individual is emerging. In the strongest sense of the word, heredity only holds good for the first life period. What seems to appear later as heredity is not really heredity but must be recognized as a copy of the inherited model. The copy may be more or less exact; even so, it is not heredity; it is a copy of the inherited characteristics. The ordinary natural scientist considers this to be simply the principle of heredity carried further. But someone who really studies the nature of humanity will perceive that there is a complete qualitative difference between the resemblance to parents before the change of teeth and the resemblance after the change of teeth. Before, the forces of heredity are active. After, the forces that copy the model are active. To be exact, one can no more say that a human being has inherited what is carried between change of teeth and puberty than one can say of an artist copying the Sistine Madonna in the Dresden Gallery that the painting has caught the qualities of the Madonna through heredity!

You can see the particular kind of work the etheric body has to do. For in the years up to the change of teeth, the astral body and ego organization participate very little. The etheric body forms a new physical human body in accordance with the model. Why? Because, like the child during the first seven years, it is not yet able to receive other than a very special kind of impression from the outer world. Here we come upon an important secret of human evolution, a secret that answers the question: What does a child really perceive? The answer lies far away from present-day ideas.

We live, shall we say, between death and a new birth (or conception) in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world we are surrounded by realities very different from those found here in the physical world. We come out of that world into the physical world and continue our life in a physical body that we receive. Now in this physical world the same forces work further, although they are hidden from human sense perception. If you look at a tree, the same spiritual forces are working in it as those you encounter between death and new birth, only they are covered over, veiled, by the physical material of the tree. Everywhere in the physical world in which we live between birth and death, spiritual forces are active behind the sense-perceptible physical entities. We can think of the activities of the spiritual world continuing into this world in which we live between birth and death.

Now in the first seven years of life the child's whole being cannot unite with anything except this spiritual reality in all the colors, all the forms, all warmth, all cold. The child is fully aware when entering this physical world of the continuing spiritual activity. This awareness gradually diminishes up to the change of teeth. A sense impression is quite different to a child than to an adult. This fact is never recognized. To a child the sense impression is something entirely spiritual. For this reason if a child's father has a fit of anger, the child is not conscious of the angry gestures but of the moral state behind the gestures. It is this that passes into the child's body. During this time, therefore, the child is working with the forces that build a physical body in accordance with the child's own model—the body that will now be the child's own—and during this time is turned entirely toward spiritual foundations and works out of spiritual forces.

What does that mean? What is really working when spiritual forces are working? Obviously colors, forms, warmth, cold, roughness, smoothness work upon the sense perceptions. But behind all that, what is the fundamental force that is working? In reality, whatever has to do with an ego nature. Only invisible spiritual beings make an impression on the child, beings who have something to do with an ego nature, above all, beings of the spiritual hierarchies higher than human beings, but also the animal group-souls, and the group-souls of the elemental beings. In reality, all this is working upon the child. And out of these spiritual forces, out of these mighty spiritual dynamics the child forms a second body from the original model. It grows and is finally present as a complete second body when the change of teeth takes place. This is the body that the human being has built for itself since birth, the first body that is it's very own, a physical body built out of the spiritual world.

Thus we have in this first life period very special laws working within all that activates the child, in all the awkwardness and uncertainty that are in the soul and with which it moves. They come from the fact that constant adjustment is having to be made to the physical world, since the child is still dreamily and half-consciously immersed in the other surrounding world: the spiritual world. Someday when medicine reaches a proper spiritual outlook, this interplay between the spiritual and physical worlds during the first seven years of life will be seen as the true cause of the so-called “children's diseases.” Then we will have the explanation for a problem that today is solved in the medical books by empty words and formal elucidations that do not lead to any reality.

The etheric body has a great deal to do in these first seven years of life. It works quietly and steadily to develop the faculties that it will possess in the second seven-year period: independent faculties of memory leading toward the intellect. Whoever has an eye for it can see the greatest transformation in the child's soul-life when the first life period goes over into the second. The etheric body is now relieved of the work it had to accomplish—in the full sense of the word—to build the second body. It is relieved, freed. How it is freed, one can only realize if one perceives that at fourteen years not only the teeth remain but still more that had to be renewed, like the teeth, in the first life period. This now remains in the physical-material substance. What remains frees the etheric body—itself becomes free in the etheric body. Quantitatively it is a small thing, but qualitatively it is something of tremendous importance. It is what now becomes tremendously active as soul attributes, soul characteristics. What the human being saves by not having to create a third set of teeth (and much else that is taken care of by evolution in the same way as the teeth) enables something of the etheric body to be “left over.” What flowed during the first seven years into the physical development and is now “left over” from the physical development works now purely in the realm of soul, its nature depending upon the individual. With the faculties upon which you call as a teacher in school, the faculties you train, the child accomplished the great change from milk teeth to second teeth, and much else. With the forces that are saved by not having to form a third set of teeth, the child begins to develop soul faculties. This takes place in the depths of human nature. During the first seven years these soul forces had been entirely embedded in the physical development. We have to comprehend physical development as a soul-spiritual activity just as much as a physical activity. We see a spiritual entity active in the body in the first seven years of the human being, in the fullest sense of the word.

How does this relate to general human evolution? Those forces with which the human soul works in the first seven years of life are in the cosmos; they are sun forces. It is not only physical-etheric rays that stream down from the sun: in those physical-etheric sun rays, forces are streaming down from the sun that are identical with the forces by which our etheric body renews our physical body in the first seven years of life. It is the Sun Being (Sonnenentität) that works there. Look at the child—how the child works at a second physical body, copying from the model! The child is absorbing pure forces from the sunshine. One must understand that—how humanity stands within the cosmos! And when the child has certain etheric forces released at the change of teeth, they then work back upon the astral organization and ego organization. Then in the second life period human beings have access to what could not reach them at all in the first period. They now have access to the moon forces.

The etheric forces in the first seven years of life are sun forces. At the change of teeth we have access to the moon forces; these are identical with the forces of our astral body. Thus at the change of teeth human beings move from the sun sphere—in which, however, we also still remain, for it remains active in us—into the moon sphere. And now between change of teeth and puberty we work on ourselves with the moon forces. With the moon forces we now build our second own body (the third earthly body), in which not so much is replaced as in the first life period, but even so a great deal. Again forces remain behind, but they are now of an astral nature, and they are now transforming the soul. They were freed from their work on the body when we reached puberty. We have now reached a period in which we manifest certain forces that are now free in the soul, forces that had to work in the physical body between the ages of seven and fourteen.

So we work entirely in the first life period with what comes to us from the sun. And with the school child between change of teeth and puberty, it is sun forces that have now become free for soul activity. That is the great powerful fact we find in human evolution, that if one is educating a child's soul between change of teeth and puberty, one has to do purely with sun forces. The child-soul is so intimately related to what lives in the sunshine! One's heart can rejoice in such knowledge. The knowledge really sheds light on the relation between humanity and cosmos.

Moon forces are active in this second life period in the bodily development; they are not yet freed for the soul-life. They become free at puberty, and then they join the work on the soul. The change that takes place in the soul-life at puberty is caused by the fact that moon forces are now impressing themselves into the soul-life. So what a young person does in all kinds of behavior after the onset of puberty is a working together of sun and moon forces.

Thus we see into the depths of human evolution. We will stay clear of speaking of heredity in the crude sense in which natural science speaks of it. We will look in the opposite direction, to see what lives in the human activity of the child. It is the sun that lives in all the human activity of the child, and in the child's human thinking.

It is the sun that streams to us from the stone—for a stone has no light of its own, it can only reflect the sun's light to us. The natural researcher grants you that fact—but that is the very smallest, the most abstract detail! The child also reflects the sun forces back to us, between the seventh and fourteenth years. Just as we can designate the light reflected from the stone as sunlight streamed back to us, so we can designate what the child does in the second life period as “sun.” Sun is not merely there where it seems to be concentrated. This physical notion, that the sun is only there is like the notion of someone who looks at the soup in a soup bowl and sees a blob of fat floating on the top of it and thinks that the blob of fat is the soup.

Yes, our physical ideas are often very childish, and if one uncovers them and shows them for what they are, then people laugh. One could wish there were the same reaction to much that is happening today in the name of science, because it is pretty laughable. When someone takes the blob of fat to be the soup itself, that's the same as when that gold ball up there above us is regarded as the entire sun. In reality the sun fills the whole world.

Now let us look into the connection between the moon forces and the forces of reproduction. The forces of reproduction now gradually form the child's own second body that is built up between the seventh and fourteenth years and is finished when puberty begins. The human being takes in the reproductive forces during this time; this is plainly moon activity. These forces relate entirely to moon activity. They are the result of moon activity.

And now we reach the life period in which we must form our own third body (the fourth when counted from an external view), the time from puberty to the beginning of the twenties. The division of time in the later years is no longer so exact as the time between change of teeth and puberty. Now there is always more physical substance remaining behind; it stays fixed in the human being, it becomes permanent structure. Gradually a great deal of permanent structure accumulates. The older a person becomes, the less material is stripped away from the bones and replaced. Also in the rest of the organism certain parts need a longer time to separate off. And one can see a simple fact in connection with the teeth: that once one has got one's second set of teeth, whether one still has them later depends upon how long they last—just as with a knife, one only has it as long as it lasts. The knife can't renew itself. Teeth can't renew themselves either, really.

Obviously everything is in flow: there is renewal in the first place, but then it goes over into the state of nonrenewal. The teeth maintain their life process at a much slower tempo than the rest of the organism, so far as intensity is concerned. But therefore in reverse, the tempo is faster so far as quality is concerned, for they actually become bad before the other parts of the organism—for the reason that the other parts can always renew themselves. If the teeth were subject to the same laws as many other parts of the human organism, there wouldn't have to be any dentists. On the other hand, if the other parts of the organism were subject to the same laws as the teeth, we would all die young in this modern civilization of ours.

But now to go on. We are active in our organism in the first seven years of life with the forces of the sun, in the second seven years with the forces of the moon. In this second period the sun forces remain and the moon forces combine with them. In the third seven-year period, from puberty into the twenties, much more delicate forces are taken in, coming from the other planets. These other planetary forces appear in the human growth process, and because they work much less strongly than the sun or moon, their influence is outwardly much less visible. They had been working in the body between the fourteenth and the twenty-first years. Now at twenty-one, although it is hardly noticeable, they begin to work in the area of soul and spirit. Whoever has insight can see this remarkable change. Up to that moment only sun and moon have spoken out of human deeds. Now planetary forces modify that sun and moon activity. Actually people's coarse methods of observation afford very little capacity for grasping this change. But it is there.

Knowledge of these connections is necessary for someone concerned with the human being in health and in illness. For what do we really know of a human being, shall we say in the eleventh or twelfth year, if we don't know that the moon forces are working there? After that period, even though there are continually fewer parts to be renewed, the person must still renew them. Up to the twenty-first or twenty-second year, the sun, moon, and planets are working in succession into human growth. Then from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year the constellations of the fixed stars work. To be sure, this escapes ordinary observation. Only mystery wisdom tells of the entire zodiac playing into the human being between the beginning and the end of the twenties. Then the world becomes severe. It no longer wants to work into a person; it becomes harsh. Of this strange new relation of the human being to the world in the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth year—that the world hardens toward us—of this, today's science hardly knows anything. Aristotle taught it to Alexander when he told him that we push against the crystal heaven and find it hard. Thus “the crystal heaven,” beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, acquires meaning for human comprehension. And one begins to realize that when we come to the end of our twenties, we find no more forces in the cosmos for our own renewal. Why do we not die, then, at twenty-eight years? Well, the surrounding world does in fact let us die at twenty-eight. It is true. Whoever sees humanity's relation to the world, whoever looks consciously out into the world, must say, “O world, in reality you sustain me only until my twenty-eighth year!” Only when one realizes this does one finally begin to understand the real nature of the human being.

For now what happens when the world withdraws its formative forces—forces that previously we had always been free to use to build ourself up? At this remarkable moment, when in the twenty-eighth year we begin to show clearly that the earlier forces of growth are now completely gone, some people begin to die off. Some hold on a little longer to the forces of growth that are flowing away. But even Goethe had grown smaller when he measured himself carefully. This was when he began to work again on the second part of Faust. Earlier he had already begun to fade. From the moment when the world deserts us, we have to manage our renewal ourselves, out of forces we have received up to that moment. Certainly when the parts of our organism that can be renewed are becoming fewer and fewer, we cannot work to give ourselves a new body in the same glorious measure that children use up to the change of teeth, when they are forming their first very own body from the model. But we have collected many, many forces from sun and moon and stars which we are carrying within us and which we need when at twenty-eight we have to begin to renew our physical-material body ourselves. This is the moment in earth-life when we find that we are now given complete responsibility for our human form. This moment of our life when we are put entirely on our own is the point of time toward which we have been striving, and from which we must go on. (Plate III, middle) We strive from childhood when we are receiving many cosmic forces, strive more and more toward a point lying at the end of our twenties, when we no longer build our growth out of cosmic forces. Whatever we do after that moment, we do from forces out of our own body. In the middle is the point at which we stop working with cosmic forces and begin to develop forces out of our own body.

We often find a premature activity happening in some child from forces out of the child's own body. We become aware of it from certain pathological symptoms the child shows from the bones, for instance, becoming brittle, and particularly from becoming fat. But the connection between these things is not easily seen. In every moment of life a person is either striving toward this twenty-eighth-year point or away from it. You must realize that it is a kind of zero point, a kind of hypomochlion, a zero moment in time when we stand between ourselves and the world. Always in our inner dynamics we are striving toward it or from it. Whatever is happening in us is a striving toward a zero or away from a zero, something we do toward or away from nothingness. We are striving toward the point where the world is no longer active and we are not yet active. Between the two conditions is a kind of zero. There is something in us that is oriented toward nothingness. It is this that makes us free beings; that is why we can hold responsibility. It is rooted in the human constitution that we are responsible free beings, because at the moment of transfer from the world to ourselves we go through a point of zero. Just as the beam of a pair of scales goes through a point of zero from right to left, from left to right, and that point does not follow the laws to which the rest of the scales is subject. You can think when you have a pair of scales, (Plate III, right) here the mechanical laws you have learned are in force; this gives the scales an exact form—either this above and that below or the opposite. That is the law of scales, the law of leverage. You can carry the scales around; their relation remains the same everywhere, subject always to those mechanical laws wherever you take them—except at this point. This point is free. You can carry the point around as if it were not connected to a pair of scales: the scales remain unchanged. And so it is, when you take hold of yourself in your soul experiences at that point toward which first you strive, from which afterward you strive away: first the world is active, afterward you yourself, and here nothing is active. With the tendency toward and the tendency from, here where a hypomochlion sits, here can live freely that human capacity which is determined neither by nature nor by the world. Here is the point of origin of human freedom. Here is where responsibility is born.

If, therefore, one wants to be able to judge the degree of responsibility in, for instance, a person thirty-five years old—and I mean professionally, not merely a layman's opinion, or that of a dilettante—then one must ask oneself, has too much, perhaps, worked over from this person's abnormal development up to the point at the end of the twenties? Is the point moved more toward youth or more toward age? A person is properly responsible if the point is normal, if judging the whole individual from external life one can decide that the point is normal. If it lies too far back toward youth—that is, if the world ceased too soon to give its forces to some person—one may perhaps find that the person suffers easily, even though to a small degree, from compulsive ideas. The soul is becoming rigid and cannot be held fully accountable for its deeds.

If the point comes late, the question will be whether that person is hindered by his or her inner nature from developing complete freedom of soul and is too rigid physically, and for that reason cannot be held fully responsible. The physician and the priest are the ones who are competent to form this judgment, in the finest sense of the word. They will know that they can judge pretty accurately from people's appearance what their development has been, whether they are in balance, whether their life-hypomochlion is at the right spot, that is, at the right point of time, or is too early or too late. We will discuss physical appearance later, for even an intensive study of physiognomy belongs to pastoral medicine.

These are things that in the old mystery wisdom were regarded as very important for judgments of human life. They are things that have been forgotten and that must be brought again into our knowledge of the human being if that knowledge is to have any beneficial influence, if it is to be active in the right sense in medical and pastoral activity.

More about this tomorrow.