The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We can say that the original purpose of festivals is to make human beings look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things. The Easter festival in particular can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries we in the civilized world have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has made us focus less and less upon our connection with cosmic forces and powers. We have gradually been reduced to contemplating only our relation to earthly forces and powers. Of course, given the means for acquiring knowledge recognized as legitimate today this could scarcely be otherwise. However, if in pre-Christian times or even in the early centuries of Christianity someone who was connected with a Mystery center could have experienced what we moderns call knowledge, and if he were to approach the matter with the state of mind characteristic of those earlier times, he would not at all understand how human beings can live without an awareness of their connection to extra-earthly, cosmic things.

I would now like to sketch various matters that you will find dealt with more thoroughly in this or that lecture cycle. As the present lectures are intended to acquaint us specifically with the Easter idea, I naturally cannot elaborate on every detail, but only touch upon the most important points.

If we go back to certain ancient monotheistic religious systems—for example, to the Hebrew-Judaic system, with which we are most familiar—we naturally find the veneration and worship of one deity. That deity is the one of whom we speak in our Christian conception as the First Person of the Godhead, as God the Father.

Now all the religions in which the concept of the Father-God played a part had a greater or lesser awareness of his connection to the cosmic moon forces, forces that stream down to the earth from the moon; the Mystery priests were particularly aware of this connection. In our time this consciousness of our relationship to the moon has all but disappeared. Perhaps the only place it lives on is in the inspiration of poetic imagination by the forces of the moon, or in medicine in the counting of human embryonic life in ten lunar months. But older world views were clearly aware that the human being, who exists in the spiritual world as a being of spirit and soul, is permeated and strengthened by forces emanating from the moon as he descends into earthly existence.

If we want to know what shapes our living form, to know what lives in us as nutritive and respiratory processes, as overall forces of growth, we must look not to earth forces but rather to cosmic forces. For a consideration of earth forces readily reveals their relation to us. If we did not hold our bodies together with extra-earthly forces, if our bodies did not receive their form from cosmic forces, how could the earth forces alone hold them together? The moment the human body is forsaken by cosmic forces and exposed to merely terrestrial forces, it falls apart, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. Earth forces can only make us into corpses; they cannot shape us. It is to the influence of the moon that we owe the uplifting forces within us, the forces that give us a cohesive, organized form, a form that during life does not succumb to forces that seize and destroy us at our death. It is due to this that throughout our earthly lives we can resist destruction, as indeed it must be resisted.

Although in this way we may say theoretically how the form of our body is dependent upon the forces of the moon, we must also see that these forces, which guide us, so to speak, through birth into a physical existence, were revered by ancient religions as the forces of the divine Father. The ancient Hebrew initiates knew that the moon radiates those forces that lead us into our earthly life and maintain us there. Our physical being is severed from these forces only when we pass through the gate of death.

To look up lovingly to these divine Father forces, to express devotion to them in ritual and prayer, this was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these religions were more consistent than you might think. For history completely misrepresents them, basing itself, as it must, merely upon external evidence, not upon what can be observed in spiritual vision.

Religions that focused on the moon and the spiritual beings living in it were really of relatively late origin. The truly primordial religions had in addition to this a clear perception of the sun forces and even, it must be added, of the forces of Saturn. However, with this we are entering into a period of history of which no physical documents survive, one that antedates the foundation of Christianity by many thousands of years. In my Outline of Occult Science I called this period the ancient Indian—partly to have a name for it, but also because it took place in the area we now call India. The civilization following this was the ancient Persian. During these civilizations human beings still developed very differently than they did later, and this is reflected in their religious beliefs.

During the last two thousand years or more, human beings have been developing in such a way that they no longer notice a certain discontinuity in their earthly development, and indeed, the break is really hardly noticeable. Something that takes place in human beings around the thirtieth year today remains largely in the subconscious or the unconscious. However, this was not the case among people who lived eight or nine thousand years before Christ. At that time a person's development was continuous up until about the thirtieth year, when a profound metamorphosis set in, which I shall be quite direct in describing. Although what I have to say might sound somewhat strange, it nevertheless fits the relevant facts.

In those ancient times the following could happen. Let us say that before turning thirty, a man had made the acquaintance of someone much younger, say three or four years younger, who would therefore experience the thirtieth-year metamorphosis much later than the former. Suppose now that the two men had not seen each other for some time and were then reunited. It could happen, and in today's words this sounds indeed strange, that if the younger person were to address the older one, the latter might not recognize him. The metamorphosis would have completely transformed his memory.

Because in these very ancient times people around the age of thirty tended to forget all they had experienced previously, it was the custom in the small communities of the time to record events in young peoples' lives in order to inform them of their earlier experiences after they had passed through the profound transformation. And then, when such people realized they had become different persons in their thirtieth year, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their earlier experiences—yes, it really happened this way—then at the same time they were also taught that before their thirtieth year only moon forces had acted upon them, whereas now sun forces were entering into their development.

The sun forces' influence on the human being is entirely different from that of the moon forces. Of course, people today know little of sun forces, for they know only their external, physical effects. They know, for example, that because of sun forces—pardon my bluntness—they sweat, feel hot; they are also no doubt aware of sunbathing and its therapeutic uses, but this is all superficial. The average person nowadays cannot even begin to conceive of the effect that the forces spiritually connected with the sun have upon him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagan Caesars, acquired some knowledge of the sun forces in the dwindling Mysteries, and was murdered on his expedition to Persia because he wanted to make it official again. [Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus), A.D. 331–363. Roman emperor 361–363. ] That is how strong the powers that wanted to exterminate such knowledge in the early Christian centuries were. It is therefore not surprising that no knowledge of such matters has survived.

While the moon forces determine the human being, permeate us with an inner necessity so that we must act according to our instincts, our temperament, our emotions, in a word, our whole physical and etheric nature, the spiritual sun forces free us from this. They dissolve, so to speak, the forces of compulsion, and it is really through their agency that we become free.

In ancient times the influence of the moon and that of the sun were sharply divided. Around the age of thirty people simply became sun people, that is, free, whereas up until then they had been moon people, or unfree. Nowadays these two overlap; even in childhood the sun forces act along with the moon forces, and the moon forces continue to work on us in later years. Thus in our time necessity and freedom intermingle.

As has been said, however, this was not always the case. In the prehistoric times of which we have been speaking, the effects of the moon and the sun upon human life were sharply separated, it was considered pathological when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the new beginning in his thirtieth year. By the same token, people spoke of having been born not once, but twice. As humanity began to develop in such a way that the second or solar birth (the first was called the lunar birth) became less noticeable, certain facts, including exercises and cult rituals, began to be applied to initiates in the Mysteries. In this way the initiates experienced something that the rest of mankind no longer did. They were now the twice-born.

The term twice-born that may be found in ancient oriental writings even today no longer carries its original meaning. It would be interesting to ask every orientalist and Sanskrit scholar—I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst, you can ask him how things stand according to his professional studies—whether they think modern scholarship can explain the meaning of this expression clearly and in no uncertain terms. [Professor Hermann Beckh, 1875–1937, orientalist. From 1922 on priest in the Christian Community. ] In fact, any number of formal analyses are available, but the essential meaning remains a mystery. Only those who know it derives from such a reality as I have just described can grasp its true meaning. About such things spiritual observation does, after all, have something to say; and once it has spoken, I would challenge any unprejudiced researcher in a conventional academic discipline to prove that existing documents do not at every step bear it out. Ordinary science will confirm spiritual research, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain things transcending ordinary science must be brought to light since the study of documents cannot lead to a true understanding of human life.

Thus we look back to an ancient time when people spoke of their lunar birth as of a creation by the Father. Regarding their solar birth people understood that in the sun's spiritual rays Christ's power, the power of the Son, is active, and that it sets human beings free. Consider what it does for us. Only through its action can we make something of ourselves in earthly life. Without the liberating forces and impulses of the sun, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable determinism, and not even the determinism of fate, but merely that of nature.

People in ancient times knew this. To them, the sun was a celestial eye from which the power of Christ streamed forth. They knew that this power released them from the bondage of iron necessity into which the moon forces had placed them at birth and which would otherwise govern their entire lives. The sun forces, the Christ forces looking down upon them through the cosmic eye of the sun, enabled them to make something of themselves in inner freedom, something they could not have become merely by virtue of the moon forces. Thus in the sun forces people saw the possibility of transforming or making something of themselves here on earth.

For completeness' sake I should briefly mention that ancient people also looked to the forces of Saturn, in which they saw all that sustains us when we pass through the portal of death, that is, when we experience the third earthly metamorphosis.

After death the human being is maintained by the Saturn forces that reign at what was in ancient times considered to be the outer limit of our planetary system. These forces support us and carry us out into the spiritual world; they maintain our being's integrity when the third metamorphosis occurs. This was unquestionably the world view of ancient times.

But humanity changes, and the time came when the sun forces' effects were known only in the Mysteries. This knowledge survived longest in the Mysteries' therapeutic sections, because the same forces that give us our freedom, our ability to make something of ourselves—namely, the sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and in other earthly beings and substances, which as a result possess healing properties.

For the most part, however, human beings lost this knowledge of the sun. Although knowledge of our dependence on the moon or Father forces remained with people for a long time, consciousness of our dependence on the sun forces, or we must really say, of our emancipation through those forces, disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of nature, which seem to be the sole topic in modern philosophy, are really nothing but a completely abstract version of the moon forces.

One person who still knew the sun forces and was able to let himself be guided by them was the Christ-bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them. For, whereas in the old Mysteries the sun forces could be reached only by looking up spiritually to the sun, it was the mission of Jesus of Nazareth to receive these forces in his own body as they streamed down to earth. This I explained yesterday. The essential point, however, is that in his thirtieth year a transformation occurred in Jesus of Nazareth's body. It was the same transformation everyone experienced in primeval times, except that in those times only the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual sun entered into people, whereas here the primordial sun being himself, the Christ, descended into human evolution and dwelled in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This event central to all earthly life is at the root of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You will be able to understand these things in their full significance if you consider the way Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, one might say, was as yet a human affair, for it was initiation.

Basic initiation consisted of three stages. The very first requirement for initiation was to develop, through exposure to what the Mysteries had to offer, a degree of inner humility we cannot fathom today. Although today people do indeed consider themselves enormously modest with respect to knowledge, anyone who can see through them knows they are truly possessed by arrogance.

Above all, at the outset of initiation the candidate had to believe that he was not yet really human, that this was a goal yet to be achieved. Today it would be asking too much of people at any stage of life that they should not consider themselves human beings. But for initiation this was the very first requirement. The candidate had to know that it was only before descending into an earthly body that he had been a human being, that in pre-earthly existence he had been a human being of soul and spirit, which then entered a physical body provided by a natural mother, by the natural parents. It did not “clothe itself” with the body—for that is an inaccurate expression—rather it permeated itself with a physical body.

Now just how, over a long period of time, the spirit and soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—is something most people are not aware of. What everyone is aware of, what everyone perceives through the senses, is the physical world around us. When spirit and soul have completed their permeation of our physical bodies at adulthood, we can only look to the outside with our eyes, listen with our ears to what is outside us, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness outside us through our skin; in other words, we perceive only what is outside not what is inside us. We cannot look into ourselves with our eyes: the most we can do is to dissect a human corpse and imagine we are looking into ourselves. But in reality we are not.

Suppose I have a house here before me. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I take some tools and, if I am strong enough, I can demolish the house. The individual bricks then lie before me in a heap; they are all that is left of the house. This is the way things are done today; people dissect the human being, cut him up, in order to get to know him. But in this way they do not get to know him; what they get to know this way is not at all a human being. To really know ourselves we must be able, just as today we look out of our eyes, to look in through them, to listen in with our ears, and so on.

All this taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the door to the human being. Initiation started from the candidate's realization that he knew nothing about the human being, and that, having no consciousness of himself as human, he could not really claim to be one. He would first have to learn to look in through his senses, in the same way he otherwise looks out.

That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment a person learned in this way to look inside himself, he experienced how he had been in pre-earthly existence, for then he knew himself to be a being of spirit and soul.

The initiate thus learned to look in (red) instead of out (yellow), and in so doing became aware of what had entered him as pre-earthly existence through his eyes, ears, skin, and so forth (green—see diagram). Aware now that he had had such an existence, he was told that now he could begin to acquaint himself with what today we would call natural science.

When we learn about natural science today, we are taught to observe the phenomena of nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is analogous to being told upon meeting someone we have known for a long time to forget everything we have ever had in common with that person. Fancy, if you will, a married couple being told upon seeing one another after a long separation to forget everything they had ever been through together. Well, yes, I can imagine that once in a while such a thing might actually be preferable, but life could not be carried on in that way.

Such, however, are exactly the circumstances imposed upon us by our modern system of civilization. We all become acquainted with the kingdoms of nature from their spiritual aspect before we descend to earth. And while today people are encouraged to forget all they learned then about minerals, plants, and animals, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, attempted to remember it. He was shown, for example, a quartz crystal, and then everything possible was done to remind him of what he had known about quartz—or about lilies, or roses—before he descended to earth. The knowledge of nature taught in the Mysteries was essentially recognition.

After a candidate had mastered the method of recollecting things viewed in pre-earthly existence, he was admitted to the second stage, which consisted of learning the music, architecture, geometry, surveying, etc., of the time. This was because the second stage comprised everything a person could learn not only by looking inside with his eyes and listening to what is inside him with his ears, but by actually entering into himself. Here the candidate for initiation was told he was entering the Temple Grotto of Man, which was the part of himself physically permeated by the soul-spiritual forces of which he had consisted before descending to life on earth. Into this he penetrated.

The Temple Grotto, he was told, consisted of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought. There he became acquainted with everything—well, yes, when looked at externally, it is the human head, which is small, but when entered into and viewed from within, it is as big as the world. The candidate came to know himself there as spirit. That was the first chamber. In the second he acquainted himself with feeling; and in the third with willing.

In this way initiates learned how the human being is organized with respect to the organs of thinking, feeling, and willing; they acquainted themselves, that is, with what matters on earth. Knowledge of nature, on the other hand, transcends such merely earthly matters. One acquires it before one even descends to earth. After that, it is simply a question of recalling it. By contrast, no houses are built in the spiritual world with earthly architecture. Similarly, the music that exists in the spiritual world is entirely spiritual; earthly music is merely its projection into the terrestrial air. Surveying is concerned with the dimensions of the earth; both it and geometry are earthly sciences.

It was important for the novice of the second stage to realize that all talk of gaining knowledge by purely earthly means, except as it applies to geometry, architecture, and surveying, is nonsense. He realized that a genuine science of nature must consist of recalling pre-earthly knowledge; however, geometry, architecture, music, and surveying are sciences that can be learned here on earth.

The candidate thus entered into himself and came to know the cosmic human being. This consisted of three chambers, unlike the single earthly organization we encounter by approaching the human being only from the outside.

In the third stage the candidate not only delved down into himself, coming to know himself spiritually, but as spirit he came to know the body as well. Initiates in all the old Mysteries called this level of knowledge “the Portal of Death.” Here one learned what it is like to lay aside the earthly body. There was, however, a difference between actual death and the death experienced in initiation. I will explain in the following lectures why this had to be so; at the moment I only want to point out the facts.

When we die, we discard our physical bodies and are no longer bound to them. We cease to respond to, and are henceforth free from, earth forces. But while we are still connected to our physical bodies, as was the case in the initiations of old, we must achieve by inner exertion something that in death happens of itself, namely, freedom from the body; we must hold ourselves outside the body for a time. Initiation required that one attain strong inner forces of soul, by virtue of which one could remain free from the physical body.

These same forces also provided higher knowledge of matters that could neither be perceived with the senses nor thought with the intellect. They brought human beings into relation with the spiritual world, just as our physical bodies bring us into relation with the physical world. At this point a candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a human being of spirit and soul, as an initiate, while still living on earth. From that time on he experienced the earth as outside himself and could live with the sun rather than with the earth, particularly in the older Mysteries. He knew what he had from the sun, how the sun forces were active in him.

After this third stage followed then the fourth. The fourth stage had an effect that may be explained as follows: When a human being on earth eats, he recognizes, for example, that he is eating cabbage or venison. He can drink various things, and know that first these things are outside, then inside him. He breathes the air; first it is outside, then inside, then outside again. In short, he carries within him earthly forces and substances that also exist outside him. What the Mysteries made clear to the student was that before initiation he had been an earth-bearer, a bearer of cabbage, venison, pork, and so on, but that upon completing the third stage of initiation and experiencing what it is possible to experience when one frees oneself from the body he would no longer be a bearer of cabbage, pork, and veal, but rather of what the sun forces gave him.

In all the Mysteries this spiritual gift of the sun forces was called Christos. Hence the candidate who had gone through the three stages and now felt himself to be a bearer of the sun forces, just as he had been a cabbage-bearer on earth, was called a christophor, a Christ-bearer. This was the term applied to a neophyte of the fourth stage in most of the ancient Mysteries.

In the third stage the candidate had to understand certain things thoroughly, most importantly that his craving for the physical body had to cease during moments of knowledge. He had to understand that the human being, as far as the physical body is concerned, belongs to the earth, but that the earth actually only destroys the physical body and does not build it up. It was at this point that the initiate came to know the upbuilding forces that originate in the cosmos.

He also learned something else. Precisely when he became a christophor, the initiate realized that spiritual forces are at work even in the substances of the earth, albeit in a way imperceptible to earthly senses. Had our modern way of speaking, which is the only one I can use, been comprehensible to people of ancient times, the sense of what the neophyte was told might be expressed as follows: “If you wish to know and understand substance, to see how the different elements combine and separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter from the cosmos. You can only do this, however, once you have been initiated into the fourth stage. For only when you are able to perceive by means of forces of the sun-existence will you be able to study chemistry.”

Now in our time it would be thought quite absurd, wouldn't it, to require of candidates for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry that they experience sun forces in the same way that they do earthly cabbage. In the old days, however, such demands were made. Furthermore, initiates realized that all the forces of ordinary cognition alive in the body can be used only to study geometry, surveying, music, and architecture. They are useless for the study of chemistry.

Chemistry as we know it today deals only with superficial realities, and has done so ever since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine knowledge must despair at having to learn the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon descriptions, not upon an inner penetration of the subject. If people were open-minded, they would realize that something more is necessary, that a different method of cognition is required, for a true study of chemistry. That this is not realized is simply the result of the cowardice so prevalent today.

When a candidate had passed the fourth stage, he was ready to become an adept in astronomy, which was an even higher stage of initiation. The merely external study of the stars, based on calculations and the like, ancient people considered thoroughly trivial. For the stars are inhabited by spiritual beings, and these beings can be known only after physical observation and even geometry have been left behind, when one can literally live in the universe and know the spiritual nature of the stars. At this stage the candidate became one of the resurrected and could observe the forces of the moon and sun at work, particularly in their effects upon earthly humanity.

Today I have described for you from two sides how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries, not in a particular season but at a certain stage of human development. Easter, we have seen, was the inner human being's resurrection out of the physical body into the spiritual universe. Those still cognizant of ancient Mystery wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha saw that Mystery in this light. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place?

In ancient times it had been possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for even earlier than that it had been a matter of course for people to experience a second birth around their thirtieth year. Memories of this had been preserved, as had the knowledge of the Mystery schools, and thus what had been experienced directly in earlier epochs was kept alive as tradition. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, this had all been lost or forgotten. Humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not the power to whom the initiates had raised themselves in becoming christophors descended into Jesus of Nazareth and remained on earth since then, enabling people to unite themselves with it through Christ Jesus.

Easter as we know it today is thus a link in the evolution of the Mysteries, and we can become aware of its true content only by reviving that evolution. In the lectures to come you will be able to get at least an idea of what the ancients experienced in initiation. A new initiate could say to himself: “Initiation has revealed to me how sun and moon, as celestial opposites, work within me. I know now that my physical form—the particular shape of my eyes, nose, indeed of my entire body, inside and out—as well as the fact that this form could grow, and continues to grow through nourishment, is a result of the moon forces. Upon them all necessity depends. But that I can come to life within my physical body as a free human being, that I can alter my character and master myself, this is due to the sun forces, to the Christ forces. These I must awaken within me if I am to achieve through my own efforts a conscious freedom over and above that given me by the sun forces through another kind of necessity.”

From all this one can understand why even today human beings calculate the date of Easter from a particular constellation of sun and moon. All that remains of the old consciousness is an interest in finding the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. That Easter is set on that Sunday indicates, as I shall elaborate tomorrow, that people see in Easter's nature and form something that must be determined from above, that is, from the cosmos.

More than this, however, is necessary. The very content of Easter must be grasped anew, and this can happen only if we examine the old Mysteries. These showed first of all what people could experience if they looked inside themselves, the portal of Man, then when they descended into themselves and came to know the remotest inner recesses of their being, the three-chambered, cosmic human being; when they liberated themselves from the body—the portal of Death; and when they moved freely in the spiritual world, they became christophors.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear at the time human freedom started to assert itself, but the time to rediscover them has arrived. The Mysteries must be found anew, and we should be fully conscious that preparations to that end must now be made.

It was with this in mind that the Christmas Conference was held. An earthly sanctuary for the re-founding of the Mysteries is urgently needed. The Anthroposophical Society, as it continues in its development, must lead the way to that re-founding. It will be partly your task, my dear friends, to help this along in the right spirit. But for that you will need to examine the three stages of human life: introspection, self-penetration, and a consciousness one has in outer reality only in death.

As a reminder of what has been said in this hour, I would like us now to carry away and meditate upon the following words:

You will have sensed, my dear friends, in what I was able to tell you at the close of yesterday's lecture, concerning the old conception of Michael's conflict with the Dragon, an indication that for our time a revitalization is called for of the elements of a Weltanschauung once contained for mankind in this gigantic picture—and not even so long ago. I repeatedly drew attention to the fact that in many 18^th Century souls this conception was still fully alive. But before I can tell you—as I shall in the next lectures—what a genuine, up-to-date spiritual viewpoint can and must do to revivify it, I must present to you—episodically, as it were—a more general anthroposophical train of thought. This will disclose the way in which the conception under discussion can be revitalized and once more become a force in mankind's thinking, feeling, and acting.

If we observe our present relation to nature and to the whole world, and if we compare this with sufficient open-mindedness with that of former times, we find that at bottom man has become a veritable hermit in his attitude toward the cosmic powers, a hermit in so far as he is introduced through his birth into physical existence and has lost the memory of his prenatal life—a memory that at one time was common to all mankind. During that period of our life in which nowadays we merely grow into the use of our forces of mind and memory, and to which we can remember back in this earth life, there occurred in former epochs of human evolution the lighting up of real memory, of an actual retrospect of prenatal experiences man had passed through as a psycho-spiritual being before his earth life.—That is one factor that makes present-day man a world-hermit: he is not conscious of the nature of the connection between his earthly existence and his spiritual existence.

The other factor is this: when now he gazes into the vast cosmos he observes the outer forms of the stars and constellations, but he no longer has any inner spiritual relation to what is spiritual in the cosmos. We can go further: the man of today observes the kingdoms of nature that surround him on earth—the manifold beauty of plants, the gigantic proportions of mountains, the fleeting clouds, and so on. Yet here again he is limited to sense impressions; and often he is even afraid, when he feels a deeper, more intimate contact with the great spaces of nature, lest he might lose his ingenuous attitude toward them. This phase of human evolution was indispensable for the development of what we experience in the consciousness of freedom, the feeling of freedom, in order to arrive at full self-consciousness, at the inner strength that permits the ego to rise to its full height; but necessary as was this hermit life of man in relation to the cosmos, it must be but a transition to another epoch in which the human being may find the way back to spirit, which after all underlies all things and beings. And precisely this finding the way back to spirit must be achieved by means of the strength that can come to him who is able to grasp the Michael idea in its right sense and in its true form, the form it must assume in our time.

Our mentality, the life of our Gemüt, and our life of action all need to be permeated with the Michael impulse. But when we hear it stated that a Michael Festival must be resuscitated among men and that the time is ripe for assigning it its place among the other annual festivals, it is naturally not enough that a few people should say, Well let us start—let us have a Michael Festival! My dear friends, if anthroposophy is to achieve its aim, the superficiality so prevalent today must obviously play no part in any anthroposophical undertakings; but rather, whatever may grow out of anthroposophy must do so with the most profound seriousness. And in order to familiarize ourselves with what this seriousness should be we must consider in what manner the festivals—once vital, today so anaemic—took their place in human evolution. Did the Christmas or Easter Festival come into being because a few people had the idea of instituting a festival at a certain time of the year and said, Let us make the necessary arrangements? Naturally that is not the case. For something like the Christmas Festival to find its way into the life of mankind, Christ Jesus had to be born; this event had to enter the world-historical evolution of the earth; a transcendent event had to occur. And the Easter Festival? It could never have had any meaning in the world had it not commemorated what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha, had not this event intervened incisively for the history of the earth in the evolution of humanity. If nowadays these festivals have faded, if the whole seriousness of the Christmas and Easter Festivals is no longer felt, this fact in itself should lead to a revived intensification of them through a more profound comprehension of the birth of Christ Jesus and the Mystery of Golgotha. Under no conditions, however, must it be imagined that one should add to these festivals simply by establishing a Michael Festival with equal superficiality at the beginning of autumn. Something must be present that can be incisive in human evolution in the same way—though possibly to a lesser degree—as were all events that led to the institution of festivals.

The possibility of celebrating a Michael Festival in all seriousness must inevitably be brought about, and it is the anthroposophical movement out of which an understanding for such a Michael Festival must be able to arise. But just as the Christmas and Easter Festivals were led up to by outer events, in evolutionary objectivity, so a radical transformation must take place in the inner being of mankind before such a step is taken. Anthroposophy must become a profound experience, an experience men can think of in a way similar to that which they feel when imbued with the whole power dwelling in the birth of Christ Jesus, in the Mystery of Golgotha. As was said, this may be so to a lesser degree in the case of the Michael Festival; but something of this soul-transmuting force must proceed from the anthroposophical movement. That is indeed what we long for: that anthroposophy might be imbued with this power to transmute souls: and this can only come about if the substance of its teaching—if I may call it that—becomes actual experience.

Let us now turn our attention to such experiences as can enter our inner being through anthroposophy. In our soul life we distinguish, as you know, thinking, feeling, and willing from one another; and especially in connection with feeling we speak of the human Gemüt. Our thinking appears to us cold, dry, colorless—as though spirituality emaciating us—when our thoughts take an abstract form, when we are unable to imbue them with the warmth and enthusiasm of feeling. We can call a man gemütvoll only when something of the inner warmth of his Gemüt streams forth to us when he utters his thoughts. And we can really make close contact with a man only if his behavior toward ourself and the world is not merely correct and in line with duty, but if his actions manifest enthusiasm, a warm heart, a love of nature, love for every being. This human Gemüt, then, dwells in the very center of the soul life, as it were.

But while thinking and willing have assumed a certain character by reason of man's having become cosmically a hermit, this is even more true of the human Gemüt. Thinking may contemplate the perfection of its cosmic calculations and perhaps gloat over their subtlety, but it simply fails to sense how basically remote it is from the warm heartbeat of life. And in correct actions, carried out by a mere sense of duty, many a man may find satisfaction, without really feeling that a life of such matter-of-fact behavior is but half a life. Neither the one nor the other touches the human soul very closely. But what lies between thinking and willing, all that is comprised in the human Gemüt, is indeed intimately linked with the whole being of man. And while it may sometimes seem—in view of the peculiar tendencies of many people at the present time—as though the factors that should warm and elevate the Gemüt and fill it with enthusiasm might become chilled as well, this is a delusion. For it can be said that a man's inner, conscious experiences might at a pinch occur lacking the element of Gemüt; but through such a lack his being will inevitably suffer in some way. And if such a man's soul can endure this—if perhaps through soullessness he forces himself to Gemütlessness—the process will gnaw at his whole being in some other form: it will eat right down into his physical organization, affecting his health. Much of what appears in our time as symptoms of decline is basically connected with the lack of Gemüt into which many people have settled.—The full import of these rather general statements will become clear when we delve deeper into them.

One who simply grows up into our modern civilization observes the things of the outer world: he perceives them, forms abstract thoughts about them, possibly derives real pleasure from a lovely blossom or a majestic plant; and if he is at all imaginative he may even achieve an inner picture of these. Yet he remains completely unaware of his deeper relation to that world of which the plant, for example, is a part. To talk incessantly about spirit, spirit, and again spirit is utterly inadequate for spiritual perception. Instead, what is needed is that we should become conscious of our true spiritual relations to the things around us. When we observe a plant in the usual way we do not in the least sense the presence of an elemental being dwelling in it, of something spiritual; we do not dream that every such plant harbors something which is not satisfied by having us look at it and form such abstract mental pictures as we commonly do of plants today. For in every plant there is concealed—under a spell, as it were—an elemental spiritual being; and really only he observes a plant in the right way who realizes that this loveliness is a sheath of a spiritual being enchanted in it—a relatively insignificant being, to be sure, in the great scale of cosmic interrelationship, but still a being intimately related to man.

The human being is really so closely linked to the world that he cannot take a step in the realm of nature without coming under the intense influence exercised upon him by his intimate relations to the world. And when we see the lily in the field, growing from the seed to the blossom, we must vividly imagine—though not personified—that this lily is awaiting something. (Again I must use men's words as I did before to express another picture: they cannot quite cover the meaning, but they do express the realities inherent in things.) While unfolding its leaves, but especially its blossom, this lily is really expecting something. It says to itself: Men will pass and look at me; and when a sufficient number of human eyes will have directed their gaze upon me—so speaks the spirit of the lily—I shall be disenchanted of my spell, and I shall be able to start on my way into spiritual worlds.—You will perhaps object that many lilies grow unseen by human eye: yes, but then the conditions are different, and such lilies find their release in a different way. For the decree that the spell of that particular lily shall be broken by human eyes comes about by the first human glance cast upon the lily. It is a relationship entered into between man and the lily when he first lets his gaze rest upon it.—All about us are these elemental spirits begging us, in effect, Do not look at the flowers so abstractly, nor form such abstract mental pictures of them: let rather your heart and your Gemüt enter into what lives, as soul and spirit, in the flowers, for it is imploring you to break the spell.—Human existence should really be a perpetual releasing of the elemental spirits lying enchanted in minerals, plants, and animals.

An idea such as this can readily be sensed in its abundant beauty; but precisely by grasping it in its right spiritual significance we can also feel it in the light of the full responsibility we thereby incur toward the whole cosmos. In the present epoch of civilization—that of the development of freedom—man's attitude toward the flowers is a mere sipping at what he should really be drinking. He sips by forming concepts and ideas, whereas he should drink by uniting, through his Gemüt, with the elemental spirits of the things and beings that surround him.

I said, we need not consider the lilies that are never seen by man but must think of those that are so seen, because they need the relationship of the Gemüt which the human being can enter into with them. Now, it is from the lily that an effect proceeds; and manifold, mighty and magnificent are indeed the spiritual effects, that continually approach man out of the things of nature when he walks in it. One who can see into these things constantly perceives the variety and grandeur of all that streams out to him from all sides through the elemental spirituality of nature. And it flows into him: it is something that constantly streams toward him as super-sensible spirituality poured out over outer nature, which is a mirror of the divine-spiritual.

In the next days, we shall have occasion to speak of these matters more in detail, in the true anthroposophical sense. At the moment we will go on to say that in the human being there dwells the force I have described as the force of the Dragon whom Michael encounters, against whom he does battle. I indicated that this Dragon has an animal-like form, yet is really a super-sensible being; that on account of his insubordination as a super-sensible being he was expelled into the sense world, where he now has his being; and I indicated further that he exists only in man, because outer nature cannot harbor him. Outer nature, image of divine spirituality, has in its innocence nothing whatever to do with the Dragon: he is established in the being of men, as I have set forth. But by reason of being such a creature—a super-sensible being in the sense of world—he instantly attracts the super-sensible elemental forces that stream toward man out of nature and unites with them, with the result that man, instead of releasing the plant elementals from their spell through his soul and Gemüt, unites them with the Dragon, allows them to perish with the Dragon in his lower nature. For everything in the world moves in an evolutionary stream, taking many different directions to this end; and the elemental beings dwelling in minerals, plants, and animals must rise to a higher existence than is offered by their present abodes. This they can only accomplish by passing through man. The establishment of an external civilization is surely not man's sole purpose on earth: he has a cosmic aim within the entire world evolution; and this cosmic aim is linked with such matters as I have just described—with the further development of those elemental beings that in earthly existence are at a low stage, but destined for a higher one. When man enters into a certain relationship with them, and when everything runs as it should, they can attain to this higher stage of evolution.

In the old days of instinctive human evolution, when in the Gemüt the forces of soul and spirit shone forth and when these were as much a matter of course to him as were the forces of nature, world evolution actually progressed in such a way that the stream of existence passed through man in a normal, orderly way, as it were. But precisely during the epoch that must now terminate, that must advance to a higher form of spirituality, untold elemental substance within man has been delivered over to the Dragon; for it is his very nature to hunger and thirst for these elemental beings: to creep about, frightening plants and minerals in order to gorge himself with the elemental beings of nature. For with them he wants to unite, and with them to permeate his own being. In extrahuman nature he cannot do this, but only in the inner nature of man, for only there is existence possible for him. And if this were to continue, the earth would be doomed, for the Dragon would inevitably be victorious in earthly existence.

He would be victorious for a very definite reason: by virtue of his saturating himself, as it were, with elemental beings in human nature, something happens physically, psychically, and spiritually. Spiritually: no human being would ever arrive at the silly belief in a purely material outer world, as assumed by nature research today; he would never come to accept dead atoms and the like; he would never assume the existence of such reactionary laws as that of the conservation of force and energy, or of the permanence of matter, were not the Dragon in him to absorb the elemental beings from without. When these come to be in man, in the body of the Dragon, human observation is distracted from what things contain of spirit; man no longer sees spirit in things, which in the meantime has entered into him; he sees nothing but dead matter.—Psychically: everything a man has ever expressed in the way of what I must call cowardice of soul results from the Dragon's having absorbed the elemental powers within him. Oh, how widespread is this cowardice of the soul! We know quite well that we should do this or that, that such and such is the right thing to do in a given situation; but we cannot bring our self to do it—a certain dead weight acts in our soul: the elemental beings in the Dragon's body are at work in us.—And physically: man would never be tormented by what are called disease germs had his body not been prepared—through the spiritual effects I have just described—as a soil for the germs. These things penetrate even into the physical organization; and we can say that if we perceive man rightly in his spirit, soul, and body as he is constituted today, we find him cut off from the spirit realm in three directions—for a good purpose, to be sure; the attainment of freedom. He no longer has in him the spiritual powers he might have; and thus you see that through this threefold debilitation of his life, through what the glutted Dragon has become in him, he is prevented from experiencing the potency of the spirit within himself.

There are two ways of experiencing anthroposophy—many variations lie between, but I am mentioning only the two extremes—and one of them is this: a man sits down in a chair, takes a book, reads it, and finds it quite interesting as well as comforting to learn that there is such a thing as spirit, as immortality. It just suits him to know that with regard to the soul as well, man is not dead when his body dies. He derives greater satisfaction from such a cosmogony than from a materialistic one. He takes it up as one might take up abstract reflections on geography, except that anthroposophy provides more of comfort. Yes, that is one way. The man gets up from his chair really no different from what he was when he sat down, except for having derived a certain satisfaction from what he read—or heard, if it was a lecture instead of a book.

But there is another way of receiving what anthroposophy has to give. It is to absorb something like the idea of Michael's Conflict with the Dragon in such a way as really to become inwardly transformed, to feel it as an important, incisive experience, and to rise from your chair fundamentally quite a different being after reading something of that sort.—And as has been said, there are all sorts of shades between these two.

The first type of reader cannot be counted upon at all when it is a question of reviving the Michaelmas Festival: only those can be depended upon whose determination it is, at least within their capacities, to take anthroposophy into themselves as something living. And that is exactly what should be experienced within the anthroposophical movement: the need to experience as life-forces those ideas that first present themselves to us merely as such, as ideas.—Now I will say something wholly paradoxical: sometimes it is much easier to understand the opponents of anthroposophy than its adherents. The opponents say, Oh, these anthroposophical ideas are fantastic—they conform with no reality; and they reject them, remain untouched by them. One can readily understand such an attitude and find a variety of reasons for it. As a rule it is caused by fear of these ideas—a real attitude, though unconscious. But frequently it happens that a man accepts the ideas; yet, though they diverge so radically from everything else in the world that can be accepted, they produce less feeling in him than would an electrifying apparatus applied to his knuckle. In the latter case he at least feels in his body a twitching produced by the spark; and the absence of a similar spark in the soul is what so often causes great anguish—this links up with the demand of our time that men be laid hold of and impressed by the spirit, not merely by what is physical. Men avoid being knocked and jerked about, but they do not avoid coming in contact with ideas dealing with other worlds, ideas presenting themselves as something very special in the present-day sense-world, and then maintaining the same indifference toward them as toward ideas of the senses.

This ability to rise to the point at which thoughts about spirit can grip us as powerfully as can anything in the physical world, this is Michael power. It is confidence in the ideas of spirit—given the capacity for receiving them at all—leading to the conviction: I have received a spiritual impulse, I give myself up to it, I become the instrument for its execution. First failure—never mind! Second failure—never mind! A hundred failures are of no consequence, for no failure is ever a decisive factor in judging the truth of a spiritual impulse whose effect has been inwardly understood and grasped. We have full confidence in a spiritual impulse, grasped at a certain point of time, only when we can say to our self, My hundred failures can at most prove that the conditions for realizing the impulse are not given me in this incarnation; but that this impulse is right I can know from its own nature. And if I must wait a hundred incarnations for the power to realize this impulse, nothing but its own nature can convince me of the efficacy or impotence of any spiritual impulse.

If you will imagine this thought developed in the human Gemüt as great confidence in spirit, if you will consider that man can cling firm as a rock to something he has seen to be spiritually victorious, something he refuses to relinquish in spite of all outer opposition, then you will have a conception of what the Michael power, the Michael being, really demands of us; for only then will you comprehend the nature of the great confidence in spirit. We may leave in abeyance some spiritual impulse or other, even for a whole incarnation; but once we have grasped it we must never waver in cherishing it within us, for only thus can we save it up for subsequent incarnations. And when confidence in spirit will in this way have established a frame of mind to which this spiritual substance appears as real as the ground under our feet—the ground without which we could not stand—then we shall have in our Gemüt a feeling of what Michael really expects of us.

Undoubtedly you will admit that in the course of the last centuries—even the last thousand years of human history—the vastly greater part of this active confidence in spirit has been disappearing, that life does not exact from the majority of men the development of such confidence. Yet that is what had to come, because what I am really expressing when I say this is that in the last instance man has burned the bridges that formerly had communication with the Michael power.

But in the meantime much has happened in the world. Man has in a sense apostatized from the Michael power. The stark, intense materialism of the 19^th Century is in effect an apostasy from the Michael power. But objectively, in the domain of outer spirit, the Michael power has been victorious, precisely in the last third of the 19^th Century. What the Dragon had hoped to achieve through human evolution will not come to pass, yet on the other hand we envision today the other great fact that out of free resolution man will have to take part in Michael's victory over the Dragon. And this involves finding the way to abandon the prevalent passivity in relation to spirit and to enter into an active one. The Michael forces cannot be acquired through any form of passivity, not even through passive prayer, but only through man's making himself the instrument of divine-spiritual forces by means of his loving will. For the Michael forces do not want to be implored: they want men to unite with them. This men can do if they will receive the lessons of the spiritual world with inner energy.

This will indicate what must appear in man if the Michael conception is to come alive again. He must really be able to experience spirit, and he must be able to gather this experience wholly out of thought—not in the first instance by means of some sort of clairvoyance. We would be in a bad way if everybody had to become clairvoyant in order to have this confidence in spirit. Everyone who is at all receptive to the teachings of spiritual science can have this confidence. If a man will saturate himself more and more with confidence in spirit, something will come over him like an inspiration; and this is something that really all the good spirits of the world are awaiting. He will experience the spring, sensing the beauty and loveliness of the plant world and finding deep delight in the sprouting, burgeoning life; but at the same time he will develop a feeling for the spell-bound elemental spirituality in all this budding life. He will acquire a feeling, a Gemüt content, telling him that every blossom bears testimony to the existence of an enchanted elemental being within it; and he will learn to feel the longing in this elemental being to be released by him, instead of being delivered up to the Dragon to whom it is related through its own invisibility. And when the flowers wither in the autumn he will know that he has succeeded in contributing a bit to the progress of spirit in the world, in enabling an elemental being to slip out of its plant when the blossoms wither and fall and become seed. But only as he permeated himself with the powerful strength of Michael will he be able to lead this elemental being up into the spirit for which it yearns.

And men will experience the cycle of the seasons. They will experience spring as the birth of elemental beings longing for the spirit, and autumn as their liberation from the dying plants and withering blossoms. They will no longer stand alone as cosmic hermits who have merely grown half a year older by fall than they were in the spring: together with evolving nature they will have pressed onward by one of life's milestones. They will not merely have inhaled the physical oxygen so and so many times, but will have participated in the evolution of nature, in the enchanting and disenchanting of spiritual beings in nature. Men will no longer only feel themselves growing older; they will sense the transformation of nature as part of their own destiny: they will coalesce with all that grows there, will expand in their being because their free individuality can pour itself out in sacrifice into the cosmos.—That is what man will be able to contribute to a favorable outcome of Michael's Conflict with the Dragon.

Thus, we see that what can lead to a Michaelmas Festival must be an event of the human Gemüt, a Gemüt event that can once more experience the cycle of the seasons as a living reality, in the manner described. But do not imagine that you are experiencing it by merely setting up this abstract concept in your mind! You will achieve this only after you have actually absorbed anthroposophy in such a way that it makes you regard every plant, every stone, in a new way; and also only after anthroposophy has taught you to contemplate all human life in a new way.

I have tried to give you a sort of picture of what must be prepared specifically in the human Gemüt, if the latter is to learn to feel surrounding nature as its very own being. The most that men have retained of this sort of thing is the ability to experience in their blood circulation a certain psychic element in addition to the material factor: unless they are rank materialists they have preserved that much. But to experience the pulse-beat of outer existence as we do our own innermost being, to take part once more in the cycle of the seasons as we experience the life inside our own skin—that is the preparation needed for the Michael Festival.

Inasmuch as these lectures are intended to present for your contemplation the relation between anthroposophy and the human Gemüt, it is my wish that they may really be grasped not merely by the head but especially by the Gemüt; for at bottom, all anthroposophy is largely futile in the world and among men if it is not absorbed by the Gemüt, if it carries no warmth into this human Gemüt. Recent centuries have heaped cleverness in abundance upon men: in the matter of thinking, men have come to the point where they no longer even know how clever they are. That is a fact. True, many people believe present-day men to be stupid; but granting that there are stupid people in the world, this is really only because their cleverness has reached such proportions that they debility of their Gemüt prevents them from knowing what to do with all their cleverness. Whenever someone is called stupid, I always maintain that it is merely a case of his not knowing what use to make of his cleverness. I have listened to many discussions in which some speaker or other was ridiculed because he was considered stupid, but occasionally just one of these would seem to me the cleverest.

Cleverness, then, has been furnished us in abundance by the last few centuries; but what we need today is warmth of Gemüt, and this anthroposophy can provide. When someone studying anthroposophy says it leaves him cold, he reminds me of one who keeps piling wood in the stove and then complains that the room doesn't get warm. Yet all he needs to do is to kindle the wood, then it will get warm. Anthroposophy can be presented, and it is the good wood of the soul; but it can be enkindled only by each within himself. What everyone must find in his Gemüt is the match wherewith to light anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is in truth warm and ardent: it is the very soul of the Gemüt; and he who finds this anthroposophy cold and intellectual and matter-of-fact just lacks the means of kindling it so it may pervade him with its fire. And just as only a little match is needed to light ordinary wood, so anthroposophy, too, needs only a little match. But this will enkindle the force of Michael in man.

My dear friends! At first, without just taking note of it, let us allow to wash over our human souls, hearts, and minds the following admonition, which clarifies for human beings the ageless holy word of insight.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My friends, we can look up upon the vast reaches of the stars, and allow our gaze to rest upon what shines and sparkles down on us from that world of vast reaches, in the resting stars, the stars that show us specific forms in their groupings. We will, if we place ourselves within this beholding, within what works on us from the world of vast distances, we will win inner forces that are ever stronger and stronger. We will then, especially due to needing such force to maintain the soul free of what pertains to the body, we will then be especially advised to regard this gazing on the starry world as a purely inward activity. By this is meant, to have held the stars in view time and again so that the view is retained in our minds, so that we will no longer depend on gazing out into the external starry heavens in order to activate in our consciousness the mighty image of the dome of the heavens, beset with stars shining down on us. When this image emerges from our own inner being, when the soul strengthens itself, so as to build this image within itself, then it will be just in the condition needed, through the strengthened soul forces, to become free of corporeality, free of all pertaining to the body.

And then we may gaze out distantly at all that radiates and streams through us from the wandering stars revolving about the earth. In their revolving, the wandering stars certainly entrain all that moves and exists in wind and weather. And once again, we can make ourselves an image of it all, retaining in mind and living inwardly in this revolving movement of enmeshed interwoven existence, as a second inner experience.

And then, if we become attentive to all that chains us to the earth, to what happens there, to our being a dense body among other dense bodies, and if this so lives in us as a perception of our earth-bound existence, then we can make it active in the soul. And there it will be a third.

And out of these three inner experiences we are enabled. Out of the one in which we unite with the resting stars, although now having won into it with resplendent moving living thoughts, we are enabled. Through the second, when in emerging from the course of our own path on earth into the world-all, emerging into the coursing of the movements of the wandering stars, which call meaningfully from space down to us, out of this, as in our perception of the resting stars within the resting human being, as we feel ourselves in this way coming into movement with the cosmos, we are enabled. And out of the third, arriving at the feeling of being bound to the earth, of somehow being affected by the force of earth, drawn by the earth to a spot on the earth, we are enabled. Out of this, gradually and properly, we are enabled, more and more, to commence our entry into the spiritual world. And this entry can be achieved today by each and every person.

Of course, the question may then be brought up, why is it that so few people achieve this? The answer to this must be, that the majority of people do not experience this as intimately as is needed in order to come into the spiritual. They are scornfully disinclined to experience it so intimately. They like to experience things tumultuously, so that the spiritual world comes up to them with all the qualities of the sensory world.

People today would easily be persuaded about the spiritual world, if for instance they were confronted with a table from the spiritual world. There is no table in the spiritual world, however, but rather only spiritual essences in the spiritual world. These must be perceived as such, just as that which in men and women itself is spiritual. And spiritual is what we can read in the resting stars, what we can feel in the movement of the wandering stars, and what we can sense of the force with which the earth holds us, maintaining us as people of the earth.

Therefore, each and every one who wishes to understand things about the spiritual world ever more and more correctly, must also understand inwardly. Of course, with healthy human understanding one can understand all of Anthroposophy, but understanding inwardly means to carry this ever more and more into one's inner life. Whoever wishes to have an appreciation of this inner transformation of inner life must be determined to devote himself to these three feelings, or experiences, call them what you will, to these three feelings, experiences.

And that is what flows from the spiritual world through this school to you, my dear brothers and sisters, that is what I would like to speak to you about today, how through intimacy in practice with one's own human nature, one may become more aware of human interconnectedness with the world, more aware than one is accustomed to in taking stock of external awareness.

The first thing concerning this is to really come into intimate relationship with one's own human nature, though later in life, just as we certainly were to a very high degree when we were children. As children we were mostly just sense organs, eyes, ears. A child takes in everything that is happening in his surroundings, so much so, that the child's entire body seems to be a sensory organ. Everything is imitated, for everything reverberates within the child, and then in the same manner as it vibrates within, it will re-emerge.

A child has his whole body as a sensory organ for only so long, but once we understand having had one's whole body as a body-organ of sensing, then later, as wakeful human beings, we can renew it; we can renew the body as an organ of sensing. A child really retains this inner sensory ability for a long time, and we all carry it along still, we still preserve it, for it has not yet been set aside by the forces of the earth. And it is certainly something wholly wonderful, in the evolution of human beings, that their sensory existence is preserved even during the effective penetration of the forces of earth, and that this sensory existence can be made fully and remarkably alive.

The moment a child stands erect, in order to begin to walk, so that his movement falls into line with the forces of earth, the child must then rely on his own inner equilibrium, and at this moment his intimate sensory existence ceases. A person cannot really remember back to this first step into humanity, much less remember feeling his whole person just as an organ of sense. But we must be filled with this again, if we wish to take on human life ever more and more, we must be filled with being a sense organ as such. As a whole human being we must be filled with this feeling of just experiencing. We must experience ourselves in this way, as a touching-tasting-organ, as a solitary great touching-tasting-organ that is our entire body.

Now let us imagine grasping something or other, my brothers and sisters, that presses in upon you. You take the impression as a reality. As a matter of course you take the superficial quality to be a reality whenever you touch or taste something. But in reality, you touch and taste always, for by means of your entire body, from top to bottom, positioned on the earth, with the soles of your feet you touch inwardly and taste the earth below. You are just so used to it, that you don't notice it. When you begin to take note of it, then you feel yourself to be a person first standing, just standing within the forces of the earth. And just so comes the admonition at the threshold to the spiritual world. [It was written on the board.]

O Man, touch inwardly ¹ in your body’s whole existence,
How earth forces for you in existence-awareness ² are pillars.

With this we have made the first step in allowing this inner experience to work effectively in us.

Then in turn we can feel ourselves as the person who senses, who touches. We can experience this tasting, this sensing, we can feel ourselves inwardly as the person in whom this touching is enmeshed and lives. When we ascend to this, allowing this sensing to fill our hearts and minds, then don't take in only the earth forces as a reality, but also begin to take in as a reality the vibratory-water-forces, the forces of fluidity, that beat as waves enmeshed within our body's blood and fluids. And in these forces, we may then feel, in all that is flowing within us, that is beating within and is enmeshed in fluidity, our close connection to the etheric in the world. [It was written on the board.]

O Man, live inwardly in your touching’s whole sphere,
How water ways for you in existence-awareness are sculptors.

If we had only earth-touching-forces in our human frame, we would be constituted in a way that would evermore tend down toward decay. The water forces in us, however, literally mold us out of the universal ether into well-formed human bodies. Fixed earth forces hold sway in all that is fixed in us, where the earth alone has influence. In all that is fluid in us, the whole wide world of the etheric has influence.

After this we may enter more deeply, as a third step, into what is moving and living in fluidity. We can feel it inwardly, for example, when we feel our breath. Then we will discover how we as human beings are continually nourished, sustained by the essence of breathing, by the essence emerging from the air. We would be helpless children in the world, were we not continually infused with the forces of air, nourishing us, making us out of helpless children into men and women. [It was written on the board.]

O Man, feel inwardly in your living’s whole weave,
How air powers for you in existence-awareness are nurturers. ³

And having in this manner ascended to the third step of inner experience, we may now come to the fourth, in which we feel inwardly warmed through and through, in which we become aware on our own of warmth enfolding us, warmth that lives in the breath, that lives in everything aeriform in us. For only through the aeriform moving and living in us, will warmth be generated in us, physically internalized within us.

But just what lives inwardly in us as warmth we can arrive at with thoughts. And here is a very significant secret of human nature.

My dear brothers and sisters, you cannot arrive with thoughts, but rather only by the feeling of inner-touch, how earth-forces affect you and are pillars for you. You cannot arrive with thoughts, but rather only by inwardly experiencing, how water-forces in you are plastic sculptors. You cannot arrive with thoughts, but rather only by feeling inwardly, how air powers in you are nurturers. You can be thankful for these nurturers, you can love these nurturers, but you cannot arrive at their immediacy with thoughts. But warmth, however, a person can arrive there by meditating, by sinking down with thoughts into the warmth of meditation, by really thoroughly living within as a being of warmth.

A doctor may come with his thermometer, but only measures external warmth. Just as individual places on the body can be distinguished, so the inner warmth of the individual organs can be distinguished. One's thoughts can be directed down into individual organs, and there one can find differentiated the whole inner warmth-organism. One arrives at oneself as an organism of warmth by wrapping oneself with thoughts.

When one has arrived there, however, one has a quite extraordinary feeling. Bring this feeling, my dear brothers and sisters, before your souls here and now. Just think, you arrive there by focusing your thoughts, in becoming absorbed into your organism, thereby arriving at differentiated warmth, the warmth of the lungs, the warmth of the liver, the warmth of the heart, of all in you in reality in your essential nature that is given by the breath of God. You arrive there with your thoughts. You know now what thought is. Before, you did not know what thought is. At this point, you have arrived, for you know that thought, as it is drawn down into warmth, makes the formerly bland warmth flame up, it makes it blaze up. For a thought, well, it appears to you in customary life in the untrustworthy manner of merely being abstract. When you sink it down into absorption into your own body, the thought then appears to you as if it is glowing, radiating, and permeating into the lungs, the heart, and the liver. As the light, going out from your brow, extends inwardly, the thought is thoroughly illuminated, differentiated within into the various nuances of color, into the individual organs.

One cannot simply say, I am thinking about the differentiation of my warmth. One must say, through thoughts I am illuminating myself about the differentiation of my warmth. [It was written on the board.]

O Man, think inwardly in your feeling’s whole stream,
How fire-mights ⁴ for you in existence-awareness are helpers.

And then all this can be combined together. All that lies in these eight lines can be combined together, so that in a certain way, what one has undergone is combined and once again allowed to work effectively on one's soul in the following words. [It was written on the board, the elements after the corresponding mantric lines.]

O Man, look within yourself into the elemental realm.
Look into the elements of

earth,

water,

air,

fire

In this way take measure of yourself, delving and streaming within, strengthening yourself in concentrating on the body. But please take note, this strengthening, this taking stock, passes beyond simple physical feeling. It passes into moral feeling. Here we have first the pillars for the person, the physical pillars. [In the first mantric sentence "pillars" was underlined.] Here we have the plastic building forces. [In the second mantric sentence "sculptors" was underlined.] It is still somewhat physical, although infused with the etheric. Here we have guardians, nurturers. [In the third mantric sentence "nurturers" was underlined.] It is already somewhat moralistic. For as one comes up and out of the water into the air, one finds that the beings present in the air are infused thoroughly with the etheric. And in fire we have not only guardians, but helpers ["helpers" was underlined in the fourth mantric sentence.], comrades, beings congenial with us.

However, even as one can feel into the body in this manner, one can also feel one's way into the soul itself. For this, however, one must not concentrate upon the elements, but upon what courses about the earth in the wandering stars, sweeping along with them the currents of air and sea. One’s physicality is felt, within one’s spirituality, when what stands apart is intermixed in the body. All pertaining to the soul, however, one simply experiences directly. We shall develop this in more detail in later lessons. Today we shall merely describe allowing, experiencing this feeling of penetration into the soul. [It was written on the board.]

O Man, just so let rule ⁵ in the depths of your soul
The wandering stars' world-guiding might.

Again, this can be brought together in the sentence:

O Man,
bring yourself into being, into motion, through world’s circling.

Moving on, connecting with, experiencing the spiritual within us, that will be attained when we raise our spirit to the resting stars that beam down upon us in their grouped formations, in their constellations, in what becomes for us the handwriting of the heavens. When we realize just what is inscribed in this way in the starry heavens, then we become aware of our own spiritual nature within, of spirituality which speaks not just from person to person, but rather which speaks from the entire universe. [It was written on the board.]

O Man, inwardly hold in the work of your spirit
The resting stars’ heaven-heralding words.

Brought together:

O Man, fashion yourself through heaven’s wisdom.

Not with common sentences, nor with common feelings, do we come to this, to coming out and beyond ever more and more with our soul, our heart, and to crossing over into the universe. Instead, we come to this solely in just this certain way, by grasping element upon element, the movement of the wandering stars, the significance of the resting stars. In so doing this, we bond to the world.

And we will notice, as we do this, engaged in such exercises, as we complete the first part, we feel life in us, the life of the world. [Along the front of the first eight mantric lines was written:]

life

As we complete the second part, we feel love in us for all the world. [Along the front of the tenth and eleventh lines was written:]

love

As we complete the third part, we feel piety within ourselves.

piety ⁶

And it is really an ascension of the human being from life through love to piety, to a truly religious experience of the world. This can be achieved by means of such mantric words.

But then, when this has in fact been undertaken to completion, when we finally arrive at reverence through such an exercise, then the world ceases being physical for us. Then we say with complete inner certainty, the physicality of the world is mere appearance, maya, for the world is everywhere through and through spirit. As men and women, we belong to this spirit. And when we feel ourselves to be spirit in the world of spirit, then we are on the other side of the threshold of the spiritual world.

Then, however, when we are on the other side of the threshold of the spiritual world, then we perceive just how here our body, through its external bodily force, how our body holds thinking, feeling, and willing together, but how, the moment we become body-free in our experiencing, then thinking, feeling, and willing are no longer a unity, but instead are a trinity. For it is so, it is so for us, insofar as we bond ourselves to the earthen authority of earth, water, air, and fire, if and when we lead ourselves there in will, and through our will would become one with the earth.

It is somewhat more, feeling love in our souls toward the movements of the wandering stars, in other words, toward the spirit beings who live therein. It is so, that we experience there the circling might of wide-open space as a feeling. And when we can say, that the Sun bestirs itself in the feeling of wide-open space, Mercury bestirs itself in the feeling of wide-open space, Mars bestirs itself in the feeling of wide-open space, then we have grasped feeling in its universal existence sundered from thinking and sundered from willing.

And when we can take hold of thinking, so that we bring freedom from physical reality to thoughts, then it is as if our thinking were to fly out, out to the resting stars and itself rest among the resting stars. And we may say to ourselves, when we have arrived at the other side of the threshold, that my thinking rests in the resting stars, my feeling bestirs itself in the wandering stars, my willing articulates with the forces of the earth. And thinking, feeling, and willing, in the universal world-all are split asunder.

And ever and again they must be reconnected. Here on earth, one does not need to actively bind thinking, feeling, and willing together, since they are already together, by means of the unity of the physical body, for in the physical human being they are bound together. Thinking, feeling, and willing would perpetually come apart, were they not being held together by a person's physical nature, without the person willing it or knowing anything about it. However now they are torn apart so thoroughly, thinking, feeling, and willing, that thinking rests overhead with the fixed stars, feeling circles with the planets, and willing is intermingled down with the forces of earth. And we must bring up our inner forces firmly, enthusiastically so that the three lying far apart are reconnected through our own forces into a unity.

This we must do, and through a sort of mantric formulation we can perceive a sort of unity in thinking, feeling, and willing. Thinking, which is off among the resting stars, can be put in touch to some extent with feeling and willing. Feeling, circling among the wandering stars, can be put in touch to some extent with willing and thinking. Willing, so bound to the earth, can be put in touch to some extent with thinking and feeling.

We must gaze out upon the resting stars, taking care to say, there rests your thinking. But I bring the entire starry heaven into motion, as is done otherwise by the planets with feelings. Slowly I bring the starry heavens out there into motion in spirit. As I feel myself immobilized by the starry heaven, then I would like to break out, I would like to become one with the starry heaven as an entire human being. So, I have incorporated feeling and willing into the thinking bound to the resting stars.

Then I gaze into the wandering stars, and feel that my own feelings wander in these wandering stars. But I will endeavor, the moment I gaze about, to hold them firmly as they shift and change with the wandering stars, to hold them as firmly as the fixed stars elsewhere stand. And with the whole center of my being, with all pertaining to the heart and lungs, I will become one with the entire planetary system. And so have I attached thinking and willing to feeling.

If I were to become aware through these mantric formulations of how bound I am to the earth as a human being, then I really ought to admix feeling and thinking into this union with the earth. I should set the earth into motion in myself in thought, so that I am to her as a wandering star gliding along, oblivious to her heaviness, my union with the earth being so, that I could carry the earth through the universe. So feeling is admixed with willing. Thinking I drag in when I travel with the earth in my thoughts, but then again, I can hold it still, making the earth itself into a resting star through my own meditative power of thought.

When I carry out such a meditation, and ever and again carry it out, then I come upon myself as a person in the universal world-all external to the body and little by little I approach it with intimacy, with feeling. To this end, my dear brothers and sisters, one allows a mantric formulation to work effectively, and as such it can work effectively, especially forcefully, on the soul. [It was written on the board.]

Drag⁷ into think-living ⁸

That as pure musing

That means as meditation, as musing.

In the soul brilliantly
gleams
Feeling and willing
And you are spirit
Among pure spirits.

As a duality:

Drag into feel-emoting ⁹
That as noble loving
Through the soul warmly
weaves
Thinking and willing
And you are soul
In the land of spirits.

As a trinity:

Drag into will-powering ¹⁰
That as spiritual striving
About the soul effectively
lives
Thinking and feeling
And you observe yourself
As body from spirit heights.

Put in this way the human body appears in its true constitution, its true gestalt.

This sounds forth just so from the spiritual world, the initiate experiences this within the spiritual world, made fast within words. In this sense they are mantric words, and the experiences, to which they point, are entered into in the spiritual world.

To this end it is guidance, really, into the spiritual world, when your souls just allow the words to work effectively.

Drag into think-living
That as pure musing
In the soul brilliantly
gleams
Feeling and willing
And you are spirit
Among pure spirits.

Drag into feel-emoting
That as noble loving
Through the soul warmly
weaves
Thinking and willing
And you are soul
In the land of spirits.

Drag into will-powering
That as spiritual striving
About the soul effectively
lives
Thinking and feeling
And you observe yourself
As body from spirit heights.

Then, when it becomes ever clearer and clearer to you, my dear brothers and sisters, just what lies within such mantric words, then you will, when you ever and ever again come to these lessons, you will come with greater understanding, which means that you will hearken here to these words with ever greater world experience.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?
Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

• 1. Lesson 9 contains quite a few verbs that may stand alone but are inflected here with the prefix er- (ertaste, erlebe, erfühle, erdenke, erschaue, erwese, erhalte, erschaffe). All are command forms and the er- prefix specifies some internal activity that is to be done. In English the action of the German prefix er- is accomplished with a phrasal verb, and so we have touch inwardly, live inwardly, feel inwardly, think inwardly, look inwardly, etc.
• 2. Dasein, used 4 times here, is not just existence, but rather, existence-awareness.
• 3. Pfleger is cognate with pledgers, those who are pledged to care for others, to guardian, to nurse, and more than just to nourish, but to nurture. Pfleger are care-givers or nurturers.
• 4. Feuermächte
• 5. Walten is an ancient Germanic word meaning the wild waiting army of the woods and is cognate with the English verb to wield, that is, to wield authority, and so it translates as “to wield” or “to rule.”
• 6. Frommsein, similarly to Dasein, is actually being pious. In English piety is used not only for the concept of piety, which in German is Frömigkeit, but for being pious, which is Frommsein, responsible devotion to one’s family, to other people in general, and to the angels and the gods. Socrates was sentenced to death for being impious, due to his lack of understanding that caring for the gods could benefit them. For Socrates the communication from his daimon to himself was a one-way street.
• 7. Trag’: This is the imperative tense of the verb tragen. As a person is ensconced in either thinking, feeling or willing, the other two cannot be carried in, but must be dragged in.
• 8. Denk-Erleben
• 9. Fühlenskräfte
• 10. Willensmächte

[ 1 ] We will continue our study of the Mystery of Golgotha. At the very outset it must be realised that happenings on the Earth are not determined by earthly conditions alone but by the whole Universe. It is difficult for the modern mind to grasp what this means, but without the knowledge that influences pour down unceasingly upon the Earth from cosmic space, no event of human life, however simple, can be understood. I have spoken about this on many occasions and I shall speak of it to-day in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 2 ] I told you that the Jews—I mentioned them as the fourth people in the evolutionary process ¹—experienced the reality of the fourth member of man's being, namely the “I,” the Ego. This fourth member, which the Jews conceived to be the divine, innermost core of the human being, they called Jahve. And they saw a connection between Jahve and the universe of stars.

[ 3 ] You know, of course, that Palestine was the birth place of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine, in a Jewish environment. The Jewish religion prevailed in Palestine and although the Romans were the political rulers, in those far-off lands they were not in a position to abolish the established religion. Jesus of Nazareth, therefore, grew up in the environment of the Jewish religion.

[ 4 ] It will be easier for you to understand the character of the Jewish religion if I say something about the peoples who were living in Mesopotamia, that is to say, further to the East, namely, the Babylonians, the Assyrians. These peoples were neighbours of the Jews and their religion was connected essentially with the stars—it was a Star Religion. One often ears it said that the Assyrians “worshipped” the stars. They did not worship the stars but the instinctive wisdom of those times enabled them to know much more about the stars than is known nowadays, despite the claims of modern scholarship.

[ 5 ] You may have read in the newspapers recently that this hitherto undisputed knowledge of the stars threatens to collapse as a result of the discovery that the Earth is not surrounded by empty, celestial space but that at a height of 400 kilometres there are solid crystals of nitrogen! It would seem, therefore, that science is finding confirmation of the “crystal heavens” spoken of in Greek antiquity. I mention this merely in parenthesis. Such things may bring home to scholars how little is really known about the world of stars.

[ 6 ] And now imagine a being inhabiting the planet Mars. If such a being were to look downwards without a powerful telescope, he would not see any human beings on the Earth: he would simply see the Earth radiating a greenish light into cosmic space. Yet the Earth swarms with human beings who are in turn connected with Spiritual Beings. And just as the physical forces of the stars have an influence upon the Earth, so too the spiritual forces of the stars have an influence upon the Earth, above all upon man. The ancient, instinctive wisdom of the East revealed the existence of Spiritual Beings in the stars and it was to these Spiritual Beings, not to the physical stars, that men looked with veneration. In this sense the religion in Western Asia in those early times was a Star Religion. It was accepted as a matter of course that Spiritual Beings belonging to Saturn, Jupiter and the other heavenly bodies have a certain influence upon men and upon their earthly life. [ 7 ] Now what the Jews had adopted from ancient religions was the teaching concerning the influence of the Moon; they paid little attention to the other heavenly bodies. Jahve or Jehovah was connected with the spirituality of the Moon. The Jewish religion in its earliest, original form taught that Jahve, or Jehovah, as a living reality within the human “I,” was connected with the spiritual forces of the Moon. [ 8 ] This is not a mere legend, neither is it an idea born of religious superstition; it relates to something of which there is scientific evidence. During the pregnancy of the mother—a period of great importance for earthly existence—when the human being is still an embryo, he is essentially dependent on the Moon. This dependency of the human embryo on the Moon has long been known and the period of pregnancy computed as ten lunar months. It is only comparatively recently that the ten lunar months have been changed to nine solar months. But these ten lunar months, which have rightly been connected with the period of pregnancy, are in themselves an indication that the embryonic human being in the body of the mother is dependent on the Moon. What does this mean? [ 9 ] In its earliest condition after fertilisation, the ovum really contains earthly substance that has been broken down, pulverised, and nothing whatever would arise from it if it were exposed to the influence of earthly forces alone! The development into a human embryo is only able to take place because influences from the Moon play down upon the Earth. It can truly be said that the forces of the Moon lead the human being into earthly life. And so in its veneration of Jahve as a Moon God, the Jewish religion was really pointing to this dependency of the human being upon the forces of the Moon when he is entering earthly existence.

[ 10 ] Now the peoples living further to the East, in Asia—the Babylonians, the Assyrians—recognised other planetary influences as well as those of the Moon. They said, for example: Whether a human being subsequently becomes wise or remains a dullard, depends to a certain extent upon the influence of Jupiter. But the Jews did not concern themselves with these other influences. They venerated the one God—a Moon God. The fact that the Jews turned from many Gods to one God is generally regarded as a great step forward in religious life.

[ 11 ] Jesus of Nazareth heard much of the one God, the God Jahve, for the Jewish religion was all around him and He was instructed in its teachings.

[ 12 ] You can understand why a people who venerated only the Moon God, the God whose influence upon the human being works above all during the period while he is in the mother's body, believed that a man brings the whole of his being with him when he comes to the Earth. And this found expression in the ancient Jahve religion. If an ancient Jew who had fallen sick were asked: Why has this befallen you?—he answered: It is the will of Jahve. If his house had been set on fire and he were asked: Why has your house been burnt?—again his answer would have been: It is the will of Jahve ... He attributed everything to the one God, Jahve, through whose power man is led into the earthly world, and he saw the will of Jahve in everything that happened. Hence there was a kind of frozen rigidity about the Jewish religion. Through the whole of his life a man felt that his existence was determined by what he had brought with him to the Earth.

[ 13 ] Other religious teachings, as well as those of the Jews, came to the knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth. These other religions taught that many heavenly bodies—not only the Moon—have an influence upon the human being. There is an indication in the Gospels of a connection between the Star Religions of the East and the country inhabited by the Jews where Jesus of Nazareth was born. For the Gospels tell of the Wise Men from the East who had seen a star and were led by this star to the birthplace of Jesus.

[ 14 ] The story as it stands in modern versions of the Gospels gives rise to misunderstanding. The truth of the matter is that with their knowledge of the heavenly constellations the Wise Men recognised from the position of the stars that a momentous event was about to take place. And so at the very birth of Jesus of Nazareth we have the indication of a link with the Star Wisdom of Asia, of the East. And this link remained.

[ 15 ] The aim of Jesus of Nazareth was to enable man—while he is actually living on the Earth—to become aware of an inner reality of being, an inner selfhood. The Jews said: Everything comes from Jahve.—But in reality it is only until birth that the influence of Jahve holds sway, and once the human being is born, his life on the Earth is not simply a continuation of the Jahve impulse. The great truth brought by Christ Jesus was that during earthly life man is not like a rolling ball, impelled only by the impetus given by Jahve before his birth, but that he possesses an inner power of will by means of which he can ennoble or debase his own nature, his own personality. This was a truly epoch-making teaching. For the Star Wisdom had been kept very secret; nothing was known of it in Palestine, let alone in Rome. The Star Wisdom had been kept strictly secret and it was therefore profoundly significant that Jesus of Nazareth should have taught: It is not only from the Moon that influences pour down upon man; influences also pour down upon him from the Sun.

[ 16 ] This was a momentous teaching. But such things must not be regarded merely as theories; they must be studied in the light of reality. What is it that the influence of the Moon really brings about while the human embryo still rests within the body of the mother? The being of soul, the being of soul-and-spirit comes from the Moon-sphere and passes into the physical body. Man descends as a soul from the heavens by way of the Moon. When the Jews said: Jahve has an influence upon the human being in the womb of the mother—what did this really indicate? It indicated the view: The soul-and-spirit of man comes from the Moon; there, in the Moon, is the Creator of the soul. The physical, material constitution of man comes from the Earth; but the soul-and-spirit comes from the great universe, entering into man by way of the Moon.—The Jews, therefore, maintained that the soul entered into man by way of the Moon and received its endowments and gifts from the Moon God.

[ 17 ] Jesus of Nazareth taught that in truth man has the soul within him but that the soul can change, can be transformed in the course of his life because he has freedom of will.

[ 18 ] What underlay this teaching of Jesus of Nazareth? This question is profoundly significant and in order to find the answer we must consider the following:

[ 19 ] The Jews are always distinguished in a certain way from other peoples of the Earth. The difference is due to the fact that throughout the centuries the Jews have been brought up in the Moon religion and have refused to recognise any other influence. Real understanding of these things requires a knowledge of certain characteristics of Judaism. There is abundant evidence that the Jews have a great talent for music; but on the other hand they have no outstanding gift for sculpture, painting and arts of this nature. The Jews have a flair for materialism but little aptitude for acknowledging the reality of the spiritual world. And this is because their veneration has always been paid to the Moon and the Moon only; the rest of the super-earthly universe has hardly entered their ken. The Jewish character and the Greek character are in complete contrast. The talent and inclination of the Greeks lay above all in the direction of sculpture, pictorial art, architecture—architecture which embodied the art of sculpture. The Jews have always been, and are by nature, a musical people, a sacerdotal people; they unfold more particularly the inner activity which has its source in the talents bestowed during embryonic life. [ 20 ] At the time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, this tendency was very strongly marked. The Jews one meets in Europe to-day have of course been living among other peoples for a long time, and they have assimilated many traits from them. But anyone of discernment can readily distinguish the fundamental character of the Jews from that of other peoples. As I said, the hearts and minds of the ancient Jews were directed entirely to the Moon God. Therefore they developed the traits which are connected with the Moon, not those which are connected with the Sun. The Sun was completely forgotten. If Jesus of Nazareth had remained a Jew, even He could only have taught a Moon Religion. But a different impulse, a spiritual influence proceeding directly from the Sun entered into him in the course of His life.

[ 21 ] As a result of this, He was “born a second time.” Eastern religions all knew what it meant to be born a second time, but to-day it is nothing more than a tradition and is no longer understood. At a certain moment in His life, Jesus of Nazareth knew that he had been born again, that the soul with which he had been endowed by the forces of the Moon while still within the mother's body had been quickened and filled with new life by the Sun ... And from that moment, He who had been Jesus of Nazareth was known among the initiated as Christ Jesus. It was said: Like all other Jews, Jesus of Nazareth became a man through the forces of the Moon; but because at a certain moment in his life the Sun influence poured into him, He has been born a second time—as CHRIST.

[ 22 ] Obviously, an average man of to-day who cannot take these things in their spiritual sense, will never be able to make anything of them. Having no idea that the human being is united with his soul in the mother's body before birth, he thinks that the soul must come in some way from the external world. And he certainly can make nothing of the teaching that a Sun Being, a second “personality” as it were, entered into Jesus of Nazareth. Just as the first personality enters into the mother's body, so did the Sun Being enter into Jesus of Nazareth as a second personality.

[ 23 ] The words used in the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church make no reference to what I have just told you. But at any celebration of High Mass you will see on the altar the Sanctissimum, the Monstrance containing the Sacred Host, and here (sketch on blackboard) rays are depicted. It is a representation of the Sun and the Moon. The very form of the Monstrance tells us that Christianity originates from a religious conception which, unlike that held by the Jews, recognises not only the influence of the Moon but also that of the Sun. Just as the influence working in the process of the birth of a human being is that of the Moon, so the influence working in Christ Jesus is that of the Sun.

[ 24 ] Having heard this, you may imagine that it is possible for every human being to be born a second time and to receive the influence from the Sun during the course of his life. But the truth is rather different. What happened in the case of Christ Jesus was that the influence streamed directly to the “I,” the Ego. Upon which member of man's being does the Moon influence work during embryonic life? As you know, man is composed of physical body, ether-body, astral body, and the “I.” The Moon influence works upon the astral body: the astral body, of which a man is not normally conscious, is influenced by the Moon. But in Christ, the Sun influence poured into the “I”—the free and independent “I”!

[ 25 ] If the Sun influence had ever worked upon man in exactly the same way as the Moon influence, what would have been the result? Think of the following:—As individuals we have no very decisive influence upon our own birth; our birth dispatches us as it were into the world. If the Sun influence were of exactly the same character as the Moon influence, we should simply receive the Sun influence at, say, the age of 30, and we should have no more say in this than we have in our birth. At the age of 30 we should suddenly become different persons, we should actually forget what we had been doing before that time. Just imagine what it would be like if you were to be going about until your 29th year and then, at 30, were to be born again! After this second “birth” you might come across someone not yet 30, who greeted you as an acquaintance. You would say: I know nothing about you ... I have only been here since to-day and I do not know you. That is what would happen if every human being at the age, say, of 30, were actually to receive the Sun influence. All this may seem very questionable but it is true nevertheless. It has simply been forgotten because history has been so greatly falsified. An exactly similar process was at work in very ancient times, although not in quite as drastic a form as I have described to you now ... In the very distant past, about seven or eight thousand years ago in India, men were like new beings when they reached the age of 30, and they knew nothing about their earlier life. Then the people around took charge of them and sent them to some “official” (I am using a modern term) who told them their names and who they were. This transformation was less and less marked as time went on, but in those olden times it did indeed take place. Even the ancient Egyptians who had reached, say, the age of 50, did not remember back to their childhood but only to their thirtieth year; they were told by the people around them about their earlier life, just as we are told to-day what we used to do when we were babies of one or two years old. History says nothing about this change that has come about in the life of man, but it is a fact.

The last human being destined to receive the direct influence of the Sun was Jesus of Nazareth; for others this was no longer possible. There is a hint about this Sun influence in the Gospels but it is always misinterpreted. The Gospels tell us that when Jesus of Nazareth went to the Jordan to be baptised by John, a Dove descended upon Him from heaven. The Dove is the symbol of the Sun influence, of the Sun Being who entered into Jesus. But He was the last, the very last. The bodily constitution of other men in His day was such that they were not able to receive the Sun influence. Jesus was the last.

[ 26 ] In the ancient East, men could say with truth: The Sun influence comes to everyone in the course of his life, and when this happens he becomes a new being. This could no longer be said in the epoch when Christ Jesus lived, and the priests knew of it merely through tradition, not through their own vision.

[ 27 ] In the ancient past, before the days of the Jews, veneration was paid to the Sun, because the Sun was known to be the source of this all-powerful influence during life. When no such influence was received, men ceased to venerate the Sun. By whom, then, was the Sun replaced? By Christ Jesus Himself! Before the founding of Christianity there had been a Sun Religion in which the Sun itself was the object of veneration. Christ Jesus was the last to receive this Sun influence, and thereafter men could do no other than point to Christ, saying: There, within Him, is the Sun Spirit!

[ 28 ] Herein lies the great and fundamental change. It denoted a sheer revolution in thought to be able to say: Christ Jesus brought down upon the Earth that which was formerly in the Sun. In the first Christian centuries, Christ was always called the Sun and in the Gospels we still find the words: “the Sun, the Christ.” Later on, the meaning was entirely forgotten. At every High Mass the truth is visibly portrayed in the Monstrance; but if anyone says in so many words that what is represented there is a fact, he is denounced as a heretic. For the Christian Church has always considered it dangerous to proclaim truths which have to do with the Stars, and therefore also with the Sun.

[ 29 ] Why is this so? Here again we must go back to the ancient Mysteries and compare them with Christianity. You know that the Mysteries were not open to everyone. I told you about the different stages. The Initiates were known as Ravens, Occultists, Defenders, Sphinxes, Spirits of the People, Sun Men, Fathers.³ These men knew that influences come from the stars and the initiated priests were careful to ensure that the knowledge was in the possession only of those who had actually been received into the Mysteries. For knowledge is a power! True, it is often suppressed ... but when the authority of the priesthood is strong, knowledge is certainly a power.

[ 30 ] The Star Wisdom had, however, been lost. And now came Christ Jesus who brought it to life again—but in a new form—teaching that the Sun God must now have his place upon the Earth. If Christ's teaching had gained the victory, knowledge of the Sun influence and indeed of the ancient Star Religion in its entirety would again have been present in the world. Moreover in the early Christian centuries this was in many ways the case. There was a certain revival of the ancient Mystery teachings. But Christ Jesus had brought about the great and fundamental change in that He placed as a reality before all the world what had previously been guarded as a close secret in the Mysteries. Thereafter it would have been within the reach of all human beings, but no effort succeeded in spreading the knowledge.

[ 31 ] A certain Roman Emperor, Julian, called the “Apostate” tried to introduce the ancient Star Religion once again but he was murdered while on a journey to Persia

[ 32 ] What happened in Rome was this. The Star Wisdom that had in truth been brought again to the world by Christ Jesus was denounced as superstition—and not only as superstition but as a creed of the devil. The very means, therefore, of leading men to a real knowledge of the Spiritual was denounced and practically exterminated. People were expected to believe only in the external, historical event of the presence of Christ Jesus in Palestine—in the form in which the Church proclaimed it.

Consequently the Church became the supreme authority for all believers in the matter of how and what they should think. It was not by way of Rome that real Christianity came to Europe; what Rome brought to Europe was a changed Christianity—a Christianity which accepted only the outer event in Palestine and ignored the whole cosmic setting of that event.

Why did it happen so? [ 33 ] As I told you, Rome originated from a band of brigands who had once gathered together,² and echoes of their mode of life persisted for a very long time. Rome has always striven for power in worldly affairs and in the religious life at the same time. And in the course of the Middle Ages, the Pope took the place ... well, not of the ancient High Priest, the “Pontifex Maximus,” for it was only the name that continued ... the Pope assumed the position that had once been held by the Roman Emperors.

At one period—it was at the beginning of the eleventh century—an attempt was made by a certain German Emperor to achieve something in the same direction as Julian who had been called the Apostate. It is a very interesting story. Henry II was a good and faithful advocate of Christianity and was looked upon as a kind of saint. He reigned as Emperor from 1002–24. In history, too, he is known as Henry “the Saint” and he still figures among the saints named in the breviary of Catholic priests. Henry II was one who wished to point to the ancient wisdom, to preserve for Christianity the conception that in Christ Jesus there had lived the Sun Spirit. He wanted to establish an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, that is to say, a Catholic Church that is not Roman. This attempt was made at the beginning of the eleventh century. Lutherism came considerably later. If Henry II's attempt to establish a “Catholic Church that is not Roman” had succeeded at that time, the whole cosmic setting of Christianity would have come to the knowledge of Europe and through the religious life men would have been led to a truly spiritual science. But Rome conquered—that is to say, semi-religious, semi-imperial Rome. No Ecclesia catholica non Romana came into being and the Ecclesia catholica Romana lived on. The aim of Emperor Henry II had been to separate the Catholic Church entirely from the sphere of worldly dominion.

[ 34 ] It would have been a momentous deed, for if it had succeeded, the subsequent, very widespread persecution of heretics and heresies would never have taken place. Such persecutions are simply the outcome of authority exercised over men's thoughts. But in reality, nobody can have permanent authority over thoughts. Authority over thoughts can only be exercised when a human being is subject to the sway of worldly power, when he is obliged to attend particular schools where certain doctrines are inculcated into him, when he is put into a certain class which influences his point of view, and the like. Thoughts, in reality, cannot be made to submit to authority. No Church could ever have worked harmfully without the help of the worldly dominion to which man is subject as a physical being. For the Church can only teach; the response must come from human beings themselves. That is the principle which Henry II tried to establish. But as I said, the victory was won by Rome—by the ancient, imperial power working in the person of the Pope. The power of worldly dominion was very great in the days of Henry II. And if the attempt to establish a “Catholic Church that is not Roman” had succeeded at that time, the teachings of the Church would have remained apart from the sphere of worldly dominion.

[ 35 ] Fundamentally, the Crusades were pursuing the same aim. It is commonly said that the Crusades were undertaken in the service of Rome, that because the wicked Turks had conquered Jerusalem the pilgrims there could no longer perform their devotions in safety. Then Rome intervened and sent Peter of Amiens out into Europe to preach. Numbers of men were urged to come together in a Crusade to the East, to Jerusalem, and a great band of Crusaders gathered as the result of this preaching under the leadership of Peter of Amiens and Walter the “Penniless.” (Perhaps you can guess why he was called the “Penniless.” He was like all of us here, for we could not raise enough money between us to pay the cost of a crusade to Asia!) But this whole band of Crusaders perished on the way and nothing was achieved.

[ 36 ] Then came others, under the leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon. These men were not in the service of Rome but their aim had certain points in common with that of Henry II. They wanted to do away with the element of worldly dominion. (Dr. Steiner makes a sketch on the blackboard.) Here is Italy, here Greece, here the Black Sea, here Asia, here Palestine, here Jerusalem. The aim of the first real Crusade was that Jerusalem, not Rome, should stand as the centre and citadel of the Christian religion. This was again an attempt to make the Ecclesia, the Church, independent of worldly dominion.

[ 37 ] None of these attempts succeeded. Roman princes and nobles again found their way into the later Crusades. The story can be read in any history book.

[ 38 ] And so this basic principle of Christianity, enshrining the great thought that in Christ Jesus the Sun Force itself was brought down to the Earth and that realisation of this makes every human being free ... “Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free ...”—this whole conception has remained in oblivion through the centuries and true Christianity must be discovered again to-day through Spiritual Science. It is not surprising that the representatives of Christianity in the form it has now assumed, oppose the Christianity which genuinely adheres to Christ Jesus and teaches the same realities as He Himself taught. This is what Anthroposophy does. Again it is not surprising that those who only know Christianity in its present form often have an aversion to it. This aversion, however, it not to be laid at the door of Christianity itself. Christianity has brought about tremendous progress in the social life. Slavery was gradually abolished, for one thing. And without Christianity there would have been no science as we know it to-day. Most of the really epoch-making discoveries were made by monks (the air-pump produced by the worthy Burgomaster Guericke von Magdeburg is one of the exceptions). Copernicus was a dignitary of the Catholic Church; and the schools and academies of learning were all dependent upon the monks.

[ 39 ] But something else must also be remembered.—The monasteries were not, at first, welcome in the Church, because the monks had preserved a good deal of the ancient knowledge. Among the monks (only they were not allowed to speak) there did indeed exist knowledge of the ancient Star Wisdom. Ample evidence of this can be found by anyone who looks for it. It was through monasticism, not through any external regime that knowledge of the kind of which I gave you an example in the last lecture, had been preserved and it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it was completely swept away. The Middle Ages were by no means as “dark” an epoch as people generally believe. It is only what comes within the range of ordinary observation that is “dark.” In secret there was a great deal of wisdom, only it is not understood to-day.

[ 40 ] We can truly say: The greatest thought enshrined in Christianity is that the Sun Force in all reality came down upon the Earth.

[ 41 ] Not until then did history, as we know it to-day, really come to birth. For whereas in olden times men in the East possessed a glorious Star Wisdom, they attached no value to “history.” Those who were knowers and sages in the East always declared: It is there, in the Heavens, that the act of Creation takes place. They did not concern themselves to any great extent with the life and doings of human beings on the Earth.—True, something in the nature of history appears when the Jews come upon the scene, but it is history that begins with Star Wisdom—for the story of the “seven days of Creation” is pure Star Wisdom. Later on, events become chaotic, a medley. True history—and true history divides the whole process of evolution on the Earth into the pre-Christian and the post-Christian—really begins when Christianity is born.

• 1. See the lectures in the first volume of this series: The Birth of Christianity, and Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
• 3. See Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
• 2. See Christianity and the Mysteries of Antiquity; also Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History.

Just think how few people today are able to awaken in their souls a clearly pertinent understanding of all the preparations now being made everywhere for Christmas. Clear ideas about this festival are scarce, and most of them correspond only in small degree with the intentions of those who in the past established the great festivals as symbols of the Infinite and Imperishable in the world. The preparations being made for Christmas that are published in our newspapers convince us of this. There is hardly anything more hopeless and alien to a true understanding of Christmas than the material being published today.

Now let us summarize in our souls the whole range of spiritual science that has been offered in various lectures this autumn. Let us not make it the pedantic summary of a schoolmaster, however, but one that will arise in our hearts when, from the standpoint of spiritual science, we connect it with a Christmas festival imbued with a spiritual-scientific concept of life that is not gray theory or an outer confession and philosophy, but life itself pulsing through us. Modern man, more than he thinks, confronts nature as a stranger—certainly more so now than in the time of Goethe. Who today can still experience the great depths of the words spoken by Goethe at the beginning of the Weimar period of his life? At that time he addressed a hymn or prayer to nature with its mysterious forces:

“Nature! By her we are encompassed and enfolded, unable to withdraw from her, nor yet to penetrate her deeper. Unbid and unforewarned, into the gyrations of her dance she lifts us, whirling and swirling us onward, until exhausted from her arms we fall.

“Unceasingly she generates new forms; what exists was never here before, what was does not return—all is new yet always the old.

“We live in the midst of her and are strangers to her. She speaks with us unceasingly and does not divulge her secret to us. We affect her constantly and yet have no power over her.

“She seems to aim in everything toward individuality, and does not trouble about individuals. Now she builds and now destroys, and her workshop is inaccessible.

“She lives in countless children, and the mother, where is she? She is the only artist: from the simplest substance to the greatest contrasts, without seeming exertion to the greatest perfection, the most exact acuteness, always clothed with gentleness. Each of her works has its own being, each of her phenomena the most isolated concept, and yet all is one. She acts a show: whether she sees it herself we do not know, and yet she plays for us who are standing in the corner.

“An eternal living, growing and moving is in her, and yet she does not advance. She is forever changing and in her, nothing for a moment still. She has not concept of rest and has attached her curse to stagnation. She is firm. Her tread is measured, rare her exceptions, her laws immutable ...”

We are all children of nature and when we believe we are not acting in the least according to its laws, we are acting perhaps all the more in accordance with the great law flowing through it and streaming into us. Who can feel deeply today these other significant words of Goethe in which he tries to express how man can penetrate with his feelings into the hidden forces common to himself and nature? Here Goethe addresses nature not as a lifeless being, as modern materialistic thought would have it, but as a living spirit:

Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me all, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Thou has not turned in vain
Thy countenance to me in fire and flame.
Thou gav'st me glorious nature as a royal realm,
The power to feel and to enjoy her.
Not Amazed, cold visits only thou allow'st;
Thou grantest me to look in her deep breast
Even as in the bosom of a friend.
Thou leadest past a series of the living
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In silent covert and in air and water.
And when the storm roars screeching through the forest,
When giant fir-tree plunges, sweeping down
And crushing neighboring branches, neighboring trunks,
And at its fall the hills, dull, hollow, thunder:
Then leadest thou me to the cavern safe,
Show'st me myself, and my own heart becomes
Aware of deep mysterious miracles.¹

Here is expressed the mood through which Goethe, out of his feeling for nature, endeavored to enliven what flowed out of feeling allied with knowledge. This is the mood of a time when wisdom was in league with nature and there were created those signs of feeling united with nature and the universe, which we in spiritual science recognize in the great festivals. Now they have become abstractions, and the soul and heart meet them almost with indifference. In many instances today, the word, which we can dispute or swear by, means more than what it originally represented. What has become an external, literal word was really intended to be the representative, the herald, the symbol of the great creative Word that lives in nature and the whole universe and that can again arise in us if we truly know ourselves. The intention, when the great festivals were established on the occasions provided throughout the course of nature, was to make men conscious of this Word. Let us use the knowledge acquired in the course of our spiritual-scientific lectures to understand what the ancient sages expressed in the Christmas festival.

The festival held at Christmas time is not only a Christian event. It has existed wherever religious feeling was expressed. If you direct your gaze back thousands of years before our era to ancient Egypt, Asia or other regions, you find a festival being celebrated at the same time of year that Christianity recognizes the birth of Christ.

What was the nature of this primeval festival that was celebrated all over the earth at this time of year? In answering this question, we shall restrict our considerations today to those marvelous fire festivals that were celebrated in ancient times in regions of Europe, Scandinavia, Scotland, and in England by the ancient Celtic priests, the Druids.

What was the nature of their celebration? They celebrated the end of the winter season and the approach of spring. Though, to be sure, winter deepens as we move toward Christmas, nevertheless, a victory proclaims itself in nature at this time that is the symbol of hope, confidence and trust for man. In this way the victory of the sun over the counter forces of nature was expressed in most languages. Today we have felt how the days have grown shorter, which is an expression of the withering and falling asleep of the forces of nature, and this will continue until the day we celebrate as Christmas, a day that was also celebrated by our ancestors. From this day on, the days begin to grow longer. The light of the sun celebrates its victory over darkness. Materialistic thought does not reflect much on this event, but for those endowed with vital feeling and knowledge, it was the living expression for a spiritual experience of the Godhead that guides our lives. As an important and decisive event is experienced in the individual personal life of a man, so the winter solstice was experienced as a decisive event in the life of a higher being—as the memorial of something uniquely sublime. We are thus led to the fundamental concept of the Christmas festival as a cosmic festival, a festival of the first order for humanity.

In those ages in which genuine esotericism was alive and active like the very life blood of people—a fact that is denied by the materialistic world view of today—one observed an event taking place in nature at Christmas time that was considered a monument, a memorial of a great event that once had taken place on earth. During those days the priests collected the faithful ones, the teachers of the people, around them at the midnight hour and endeavored to divulge a great secret. What they said to them was somewhat as follows. I am not relating something here that has been discovered and thought out by abstract science, but what has lived in the Mysteries, in the secret shrines, in those earlier times.

Today, so said the priests, we see the victory of the sun over darkness ushered in. This also once took place on earth in a larger sense when the sun celebrated its great victory over darkness. Up to that time, everything physical, all bodily life on earth had only reached the level of development of the animals. The highest kingdom on earth at that time, prepared itself for the reception of the immortal human soul. Then, in this primeval age, the great moment in the evolution of mankind arrived when the immortal soul descended from divine heights. The surging life had developed to the point where the human body was able to receive the imperishable soul. This human ancestor was at a higher stage than that imagined by materialistic naturalists, but even so the spiritual, immortal part did not live in him yet. The human soul descended to earth from a higher planet, and the earth was now to become its field of action, its dwelling place.

We call these human ancestors the Lemurians. They were followed by the Atlanteans, who preceded the present-day Aryans. The human bodies of the Lemurians were fructified by the higher human soul—a great moment in the evolution of man that spiritual science calls “the descent of the Divine Sons of the Spirit.” Ever since Lemurian times the human soul has worked in and formed the human body for its higher development. I can only give an indication of what I am now going to say, but I have spoken in detail about these things in other lectures. Those who are here for the first time should take this into consideration and not take what I say as mere fantasy.

At the time when the human body was first fructified by the imperishable soul, the situation was quite different from the way materialistic natural science conceives of it today. An event took place in the universe that belongs to the most important in the evolution of man. Gradually, the constellation of earth, moon and sun arose that made the descent of the souls possible. It was in that period that the sun gained its significance for the growth and prospering of man on earth, and also for his fellow creatures, the plants and animals. To grasp this connection of sun, moon and earth with earth-man in the right way, one must make spiritually clear to himself the whole development of man and earth. There was a time—so ancient wisdom taught—when the earth was united with the sun and moon, forming one body. At that time, the earth beings of today had different shapes and appearances that conformed with the consolidated cosmic body of sun, moon and earth. Every living thing on earth received its being through the fact that first the sun, and then the moon separated from the earth and formed an external relationship to it. The mystery of the union of the human spirit with the universal spirit is connected with this development. In spiritual science the universal spirit is called the Logos. It embraces the sun, moon and earth, and in it we live, weave and have our being.

Just as the earth was born from the body that also comprised the sun and moon, so is man born from a spirit or soul to which the sun, earth and moon belong. When man looks up to the sun or the moon, what he sees should not be limited only to these external physical bodies, but he should perceive them as the external bodies of spiritual beings. Modern materialism can no longer accomplish this. Yet, one who is unable to see the sun and moon as bodies of spirits, will be unable to recognize the human body as that of a spirit. As truly as the human body is the bearer of a spirit, so the celestial bodies are likewise bearers of spiritual beings. Man belongs to these spiritual beings. His body is separated from the forces that rule in sun and moon but his physical nature nevertheless harbors forces that are active in them. The same spirituality is active in his soul, however, that governs the sun and moon. By becoming an earth being, man became dependent upon the sun's activity as a separate body shining upon the earth.

Our ancestors felt themselves to be spiritual children of the whole universe and understood that we have become human beings through what the sun spirit had called forth as our spirit. For us, the victory of the sun over darkness signifies a memory of the victory for our soul when for the first time the sun shone down upon the earth as it does today. It was a sun victory when the immortal soul descended into the physical body and immersed itself in the darkness of instincts, desires and passions.

Let us visualize the life of the spirit. For early man, darkness, which followed upon a previous sun period, preceded the victory of the sun. But the human soul, which sprang from the Divinity, had to dip down into unconsciousness for a time in order to form there the lower nature of man. It was the human soul that gradually built up the lower nature of man so that later it could come to dwell in it. If you imagine an architect using the best forces in himself to build a dwelling into which he subsequently moves, you will have an adequate likeness of the entrance of the immortal human soul into the physical body. At that early time, however, the soul could work only unconsciously on its dwelling place, and it is this that is expressed in the picture of darkness. The lighting up of consciousness in the human soul is expressed, of course, in the picture of the sun victory.

For those who had a living feeling for the connection of man with the universe, the sun victory signified the moment in which they received what was of the greatest importance for their earth existence. It was this great moment that was commemorated in the festival celebrating this event at the winter solstice.

In all earlier times, man's course through his earth development was seen to resemble increasingly the regular rhythmical course of nature. When we look up from the soul of man to the course of the sun in the universe and all that is related to it, we experience the great rhythm and harmony existing there as contrasted with the chaos and disharmony of our own natures. How rhythmical is the path of the sun; how regular is the return of the phenomena of nature in the course of the year and day!

I have frequently mentioned the rhythmical nature of the development of the lower beings. Just imagine the sun leaving its orbit for a fraction of a second and the unbelievable, indescribable disorder that would result. Our universe is only made possible through the great, tremendous harmony of the sun's orbit. With this harmony are connected the rhythmical life processes of all the beings dependent upon the sun. Picture to yourself how the sun calls forth the beings of nature in spring. It is not possible to think the violet might bloom at a different time from the one we are accustomed to. Imagine seeds to be broadcast or harvests to be gathered at times different from the usual ones. Right up to animal life we see how everything is dependent upon the rhythmical course of the sun. Even in man everything is rhythmical, regular and harmonious insofar as it is not subject to human passions, instincts and the human intellect.

Observe the pulse or the processes of digestion and admire the great rhythm and infinite wisdom of nature flowing through them. Then compare them with the irregularity and chaos holding sway in human passions, instincts, desires and particularly in the human intellect. Visualize the regularity of the pulse and breath and contrast it with the irregularity of thinking, feeling and willing. They are will-o'-the-wisps in comparison. Imagine the wisdom with which the life forces are organized, or how the rhythmic system must struggle against rhythmless chaos. Just think how much human passion and the desire for enjoyment trespass against the rhythms of the body! I have often mentioned how marvelous it is for the person who, through an anatomical study of the heart, learns to know the beautiful construction of this organ. Such a person must then come to realize how miraculous it is that the heart still continues its harmoniously rhythmical pulsation in spite of the abuse that can be heaped upon it through the use of tea and coffee. But, like our ancestors, who were filled with admiration for nature with its soul, the sun, in rhythmical orbit, we, too, can acquire feelings for all of nature, permeated as it is by rhythm and wisdom.

In looking up to the sun, the sages and their followers said, “You are the image of what the soul born in me will become.” The divine world order revealed itself in its great glory to these wise men. This is also expressed in the Christian view when it says there shall be glory in divine heights. “Glory” means “revelation.” “Today God reveals Himself in the Heavens.” This is what “Glory to God in the Highest” means. It is the expression of the glory permeating the world. This world harmony was presented as the great ideal for those who, in earlier times, were to be leaders of mankind. In all times and wherever a consciousness of these things was alive, it was the Sun Hero who was spoken of.

There were seven degrees of initiation in the ancient Mystery Temples. I shall cite them for you with their Persian names. In the first degree, man went beyond everyday feeling and attained to a higher soul experience and cognition of the spirit. Such a man was designated a “Raven.” The Ravens were those who communicated to the initiates in the temples what happened in the outside world. This was the case in the medieval saga of the Emperor Barbarossa who, surrounded by the earth's treasures of wisdom, awaits inside the earth the great moment when mankind is to be rejuvenated by a newly deepened Christianity. Here also the Ravens are the messengers. Even the Old Testament speaks of the Ravens of Elijah.

Those initiated into the second degree were called the “Occult Ones,” those of the third, the “Warriors,” and those of the fourth, the “Lions.” The initiates of the fifth degree were called by the name of their people—Persian or Indian, for example—because only these initiates were true representatives of their peoples. The initiate of the sixth degree was called a “Sun Hero,” that of the seventh, bore the name “Father.”

Why was the initiate of the sixth degree called a Sun Hero? Such a one, who had climbed the ladder of spiritual knowledge to that stage, had so far developed his inner life that the pattern of its course followed the divine rhythm of the universe. His feeling and thinking no longer contained anything chaotic, unrhythmical or disharmonious, and his inner soul harmony was in accord with the external harmony of the sun. This level of development was demanded of the initiates of the sixth degree, and as a result, they were looked up to as holy men, as examples and ideals. Just as it would be a great disaster for the universe if the sun were to leave its path for only a quarter of a minute, similarly, it would have been just as great a disaster if it had been possible for a Sun Hero to stray only for a moment from his path of high morality, soul rhythm and spirit harmony. He who had found as sure a path in his spirit as the sun outside in the universe, was called a Sun Hero, and they were to be found among all peoples.

Our scientists know little about these things. To be sure, they see that sun myths are crystallized around the lives of all the great founders of religions. But they do not know that in the initiation ceremonies the leaders were raised to Sun Heroes, and it is not at all remarkable when materialistic research rediscovers these customs of the ancients. Sun myths connected with Buddha and even with Christ have been searched out and found. Here you have the reason why they could be found in these myths. They had been put into them in the first place because they represented a direct imprint of the sun rhythm and were the great examples that should be followed.

The soul of such a Sun Hero who had attained this inner harmony was no longer considered to be a single individual human soul, but one that had brought to birth in itself the universal soul streaming through the whole cosmos. This universal soul was called “Chrestos” in ancient Greece, and the sublime sages of the Orient knew it by the name, “Buddhi.” When one has ceased to feel himself to be only the bearer of his individual soul and comes to experience the universe within himself, then he has created an image in himself of what as Sun Soul was united with the human body at that time. Then he has achieved something of tremendous significance for the evolution of mankind.

When we consider such a human being with his soul ennobled in this way, we can visualize the future of the human race and the whole relationship of this future to the idea, the percept of humanity in general. Today, disputing and quarrelling, people decide things by majority vote. As long as such majority resolutions are deemed to be the ideal, one has not yet grasped real truth. Where does real truth live in us? Truth lives in us when we endeavor to think logically. It would be nonsense to decide by majority vote that two times two equals four, or that three times four equals twelve. Once man has recognized what is true, millions of others may dissent but he will remain certain within himself.

In scientific thinking we have advanced as far as the use of logic, that is, thinking untouched by passions, drives and instincts. Wherever these come into play, they bring about chaos and cause men to quarrel and fight in wild confusion. When, however, in the future, these passions, drives and instincts will have been purified and become what is called Buddhi or Chrestos, when they will have reached the level of development at which logical, passionless thinking stands today, then the ideal of mankind, which radiates from the wisdom of ancient religions, from Christianity, and from the anthroposophical science of the spirit, will have been reached. When our feelings will have become so purified that they sound harmoniously together with what others feel, when for our feelings and sensations the same stage will have been achieved on earth as that of our intellects, when Buddhi and the Chrestos will have been incorporated into the human race, then the ideal of the ancient teachers of wisdom, of Christianity and of anthroposophy will have been fulfilled. Then it will not be necessary to determine by vote what is good, noble and right any more than one needs to decide by vote what is logically correct or logically false. Everyone can place this ideal before his soul and in so doing he raises the ideal of the Sun Hero, of all initiates of the sixth degree.

This was felt by the German mystics of the Middle Ages when they spoke the important word for “becoming Godlike,” “becoming one with the Divine” (Vergottung). What does this word signify? It means that those beings, whom we consider today to be the spirits of the universe, also passed through the stage of chaos upon which mankind stands today. The leading spirits of the universe have struggled up to the divine stage where their living utterances resound harmoniously through the All. What appears to us in the harmonious annual orbit of the sun, in the growth of plants, the life of animals was, in past ages, chaotic and a struggle had to be made to arrive at its present sublime harmony. Man stands today at a stage of development at which these spirits once stood. But he will develop out of chaos into a future harmony patterned after the present sun and the presiding universal harmony.

To allow these ideas to sink into our souls, not as theory or doctrine but as living sensation, yields the anthroposophical Christmas mood. Let us feel vividly that the glory and the revelation of divine harmony appears in the heights of heaven. Let us realize that the revelation of this harmony will resound from our own souls in the future. Then we will feel the peace of those who are of good will that will come about in mankind through this harmony. When from this great perspective we look into the divine world order, into the revelation and its glory in heavenly heights, when we look out upon the future of mankind, we may have now, today, a presentiment of the harmony that will reign in human beings on earth in the future. The more we let the harmony in the outer world sink into us, the more will there be peace and unity on earth.

If, during the time of Christmas, we feel and experience the orbit of the sun in nature in the right way, the great ideal of peace will be presented to our souls as a feeling of nature of the highest order. If we feel during these days the victory of the sunlight over darkness, we will gain from it the great confidence that unites our own developing souls with this cosmic harmony, and it will not flow in vain into our beings. Then something will flow and live in us that will be harmonious, and the seed of peace upon earth will sink into our souls. Those men are of good will who feel this peace, a peace that will prevail when the higher stage of harmony, which today has been attained only by the intellect, is reached by the feelings and heart. Strife and disharmony will have been replaced by the all-pervading love of which Goethe speaks in the Hymn to Nature I have quoted, when he says that a few draughts from the chalice of love are compensation for a life of trouble.

In all religions this Christmas festival has been a festival of confidence, trust and hope because they have felt that during these days the light must be victorious. This seed, placed in the earth, will sprout forth and prosper in the light of the newly arising year. A seed of a plant, when buried in the earth, will burgeon forth into the light of the sun. In the same way, divine truth, the divine and truthful soul, is sunk in the depth of the life of passions and instincts. There, in darkness, the divine Sun Soul will ripen. A seed in the earth sprouts as a result of the victory of light over darkness, and likewise, through the continuous victory of light over the darkness of the soul, the soul will become filled with light. In darkness there can only be strife; in light, only peace. Through true comprehension, world harmony, world peace will prevail. This is the deep and true word also of Christianity during these Christmas days: Glory, revelation of the divine powers in the heights of heaven, and peace to men who are of good will!

Out of this great cosmic feeling, the Christian Church resolved in the fourth century to establish the festival of the birth of the World Savior at the same time of year that all great religions had celebrated the victory of light over darkness. Before the fourth century, the time of the Christian festival, the festival of the birth of Christ, varied. It was not until the fourth century that it was resolved that the Savior of the Christians be born on the day on which the victory of light over darkness had always been celebrated.

Today we cannot deal with the wisdom of the teaching of Christianity itself. This will be the subject of a lecture next year. But one thing shall and must be said today. Nothing could have happened with more justification than the establishment of the birthday of Christ at that time of year. For that Divine Individuality, the Christ, is the guarantor for the Christian that his divine soul will be victorious over all that is darkness. Thus, Christianity is in harmony with all great world religions, and when the Christmas bells ring, we can remind ourselves that this festival was celebrated during these days throughout the world in the past. It was celebrated wherever on earth there was comprehension of the true progress of the human soul, wherever a knowledge prevailed of the significance of spirit and spiritual life, wherever self-knowledge was practiced.

We have not spoken of an abstract feeling for nature today. We have, rather, spoken of a feeling for nature in all its living spirituality. When we have connected our considerations with the Goethean words, “Nature! We are encompassed and enfolded! ...” we may be clear about the fact that we do not interpret nature in the materialistic sense. We see in it the external expression and physiognomy of the divine cosmic spirit. Just as the body is born out of the corporeal, the soul and spirit out of the divine soul and divine spirit, and just as the body united itself with merely material forces, so the soul unites itself with the spirit.

The great festivals stand as symbols leading us to use our feeling and thinking in order to bring about an experience of the union with the universe, not in an indefinite way but in a most decided fashion. If this is felt again, the festivals become something different from what they are today. They will become implanted in soul and heart in a living way, and they will become what they are intended to be for us, that is, focal points in the year that join us to the spirit of the universe. If, as the year proceeds, we have fulfilled our duties and tasks for everyday life, we can look to these focal points to what unites us with the eternal. Although we have had a hard struggle in the course of the year, during these festival days the feeling arises in us that beyond all struggle and chaos, peace and harmony exist. Therefore, these festivals are celebrations of the great ideals. The Christmas festival is the festival of the greatest ideal of humanity, and humanity must make it its own if it wishes to reach its destination. The Christmas festival, rightly understood, is the festival of the birth of mankind's highest feelings and will impulses.

The anthroposophical science of the spirit intends to contribute to this understanding. We do not wish to send a dogma a mere doctrine or philosophy into the world, but life itself. It is our ideal to have all that we say and teach, all that is contained in our writings and science, pass over into life itself. This will happen if men practice spiritual science in everyday relationships, if from the pulpits spiritual-scientific life resounds in the words that are spoken to the listeners, without special emphasis being put on the term, spiritual science. If in all courts of justice the deeds are judged with spiritual-scientific sensitivity, if the medical doctor feels and heals with spiritual-scientific insight, if in the schools the teachers develop spiritual science concerning the growing child, if on all the streets spiritual-scientific thoughts, feelings and actions prevail to the point of making spiritual-scientific teaching superfluous, then our ideal will have been achieved. Then the science of the spirit will have become an everyday affair. Moreover, spiritual science will then also be alive in the focal points of the great festivals throughout the year, and man will join his everyday life to the spirit through anthroposophical thinking, feeling and willing. Then the eternal, imperishable Spirit Sun will shine into his soul at the great festivals of the year, reminding him that in him there lives truth, a higher self, a divine, sun-like, light-filled Being. This Being will ever and again be victorious over all darkness and chaos, and will achieve soul peace and balance in the face of all disharmony, struggle and war in the world.

• 1. From Goethe's Faust, translated and edited by George Madison Priest; copyright by, and reprinted here with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Today I shall discuss once more the law of human development in the post-Atlantean age, for the reason that I shall have to link various comments to this law in the next few days. An understanding of the significant demands of the present and the near future cannot take hold in the consciousness of people, which is so necessary in our time, if there is no keen understanding of the way in which people have arrived at the current point of view of the development of civilization. Since the time of the great Atlantean catastrophe, humanity has undergone a soul development that can only be understood from a spiritual-scientific point of view. When we consider this age of the great Atlantic catastrophe, we do not come back as far as the present scientific interpretation of human development would like to go back with humanity, but we come back to the times that are geologically referred to as the Ice Age, in which great upheavals are also assumed by external science for the areas that we today call the areas of civilized Europe. We are going back to about the 8th or 9th millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and indeed always referred to the ancient Indian cultural epoch as the first great cultural epoch that emerged in the post-Atlantic civilization after the Atlantic catastrophe. We need to focus our attention on the fact that the nature of the soul of people in those ancient times was essentially different from that of later times, especially from our own time. From the spiritual-scientific point of view, it is significant to look at the development of the soul of human beings. The development of the outer body and the development of material cultural contexts can only be understood if one really penetrates the development of the soul.

If we now consider the two millennia that, beginning in the 8th and 9th millennia, make up the ancient Indian age, we encounter a humanity that developed under completely different conditions from what is generally known as the development of humanity today. In particular, as I have often said, it must be borne in mind that today's human being undergoes a development in such a way that his physical-bodily development goes hand in hand with his soul-spiritual development, but that today the human being actually only undergoes this development in the first decades of life. In the first decade of life, there is the important physical transition that we describe as the change of teeth around the seventh year, which we can parallel with important mental and spiritual processes. Then, again, there is a profound intervention in the physical development of the present human being, which in turn affects the mental and spiritual development, with sexual maturity in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then, as is still clearly evident for today's human being, there is a certain connection between the spiritual-soul and the physical development well into the twenties. It is less abrupt, less distinct than in the periods around the seventh, around the fourteenth year, but still clearly perceptible to a precise observer.

In such parallelism between physical development and spiritual development, humanity was in the primeval Indian period up to the age of fifty-five, well into the sixth decade of life. One was so dependent on what was happening in the body, in terms of mind and soul, at the same time. Even in old age, people experienced the same kinds of changes as they do today when their teeth change, when they reach sexual maturity, and so on. So, a person's physical life extended into their sixties, the fifties. And I have pointed out what this actually means for a person's life. One became a person, let us say, at the age of thirty; as a person of thirty, one said to oneself: I will also reach the age of forty, fifty years; then, purely through my physical development, I will be mature in front of the world in a completely different way than I am now. One lived towards old age even in the higher decades of life, as one actually only lives towards old age as a child today. One grew and matured well into the highest decades of life. And one had the awareness that the older one became, the more things of the world became clear to one, the more one's soul life was filled, one might say, from the unknown depths of world existence. One still had such epochs in development even in old age, just as one now has the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

This changed, of course, in that this parallelism between physical and spiritual development increasingly receded. In the next cultural period, in ancient Persian, as I have called it in my “Occult Science in Outline”, this was only the case until the beginning of the 1950s or even until the end of the 1940s. And in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, this was only the case until the beginning of the forties; and in the period in which the Greek-Latin culture, which is still important for us today, spread, people were capable of development until the beginning of the thirties. Man felt young in Greece until the beginning of the thirties. And he said to himself that something would grow with him when he reached his thirties. Today, with the onset of our thirties, we are already dried-up mummies if we only look at our physical development. Today we stop making sense at a much earlier stage of physical development.

But all this is connected with other aspects of human development. The first period after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the primeval Indian period, had people who, to a high degree, participated in the entire life of the universe, who, in particular, participated in the life of the universe through their head experiences. We only know about the universe what is explored in observatories through telescopes and what is calculated by astronomers. In primeval India, man felt the course of the stars in his head. He not only experienced earthly nature in spring, summer, autumn and winter, but he also experienced cosmic events, he experienced the age of, say, a certain Sirius constellation, and so on. What was later calculated in an elaborate astrological way was experienced in the human being, just as today we experience satiety after a meal or hunger when we are expecting a meal. The course of the sun and the stars in one's own head was thus experienced.

The consequence of this was that man at that time did not feel at all as mere citizens of the earth, but as belonging to a supermundane world, which is merely transferred to earth. He felt as a wanderer during a short pilgrimage over the earth. He felt a certain kinship with what is extraterrestrial.

This already changed in the second post-Atlantean period. It became the case that people felt less the life of the universe, but more everything that, I would like to say, relates to the nature of illumination, to the light of the universe. The people of the ancient Persian period experienced day and night differently. They really felt themselves to be still present in the universe in the time between falling asleep and waking up. This time had a real content for them, whereas today it only means something like a hole in the conscious life of a person. After all, a kind of co-experience of the universe still existed. So that we can say: to the same extent that the physical-bodily ability to develop is shifted from the higher decades of life into the lower ones, to the same extent does the coexistence of the human being with the universe cease.

We can therefore say (see the overview): in the first post-Atlantean, primeval Indian period, we experience the physical and bodily up to the years from forty-eight or forty-nine to fifty-six, and even beyond. In the second, the primeval Persian period, from the forty-second to the forty-ninth year of life, we still have developmental moments in the physical development of the human being that can be compared to our second dentition or sexual maturity and the like. In the third period, which we are accustomed to call the Egyptian-Chaldean period, we have such bodily developmental moments from the age of thirty-five to forty-two. And in what we are accustomed to consider the Greek period, in the fourth post-Atlantean, Greek-Latin period, this development goes from the age of twenty-eight to the age of thirty-five.

If you take note of this, you will say to yourself: The developmental capacity of man is declining more and more. And with this decline of the developmental capacity of man, the gates to the co-experience of universal events are, as it were, closing for him. If you want to remember it, do not write it down, but remember it, we can say: the first period ranges from 8167 to 5567 BC; the second from 5567 to 2907 BC; the third from 2907 to 747 BC; the fourth the Greek period from 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha to 1413 AD after the Mystery of Golgotha; and then our fifth period begins, the time when we remain approximately capable of development only from the age of twenty-one to twenty-eight. That begins in 1413 and that is the period in which we live. And if we want to be precise, we have to say: the present human being remains capable of development until the twenty-seventh year. It is then that he begins, so to speak, to emancipate himself in his soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily. Emancipation from the physical-bodily is therefore something that occurs more and more. You can see from this that the time will come when human beings will only be capable of development up to the age of fourteen, when the age of sexual maturity will cease to have any significance in human development.

This is a period of time that will most certainly occur. No matter how long geologists calculate for the development of humanity on earth, for the development of the physical humanity of the earth, this physical humanity on earth will not develop longer than until the moment when this upper age limit is pushed down to the fourteenth, thirteenth year of age. Because from that point on, the physical humanity on earth will no longer be able to develop. Women will no longer bear children. Then the physical humanity on earth will have come to an end. I once said: The calculations that geologists commonly make are all based on a certain error. Today, one can calculate geological periods of time according to the way in which river mud is deposited or how much mud the Niagara River carries and similar things, and then “determine” what kind of flora and fauna existed on Earth so many years ago. These calculations are all made in much the same way as if one were to calculate today what changes, say, have taken place in the stomach over the last ten years and then calculate what the stomach looked like 150 years ago. And just as geologists today can calculate what the earth will look like millions of years from now, so we can calculate what the stomach looked like three hundred years ago. Only, the earth will no longer be there in millions of years, just as the physical man was no longer there three hundred years ago when his stomach supposedly looked a certain way. According to the physical laws on which these scientific works are based, it is of course possible to calculate quite correctly, but what one calculates is no more “correct” than one can calculate what a human stomach looked like three hundred years ago. These things that I am mentioning are rejected by exact science today. But that which really is, that which is factual, cannot be found by this exact science. Because you can calculate for a long time what the earth will look like after a hundred thousand years, what people will be like and the like: people will no longer exist on earth!

These are things that should already force us to build a bridge to spiritual scientific considerations. For only in this way can insights arise into the real development of man and insights into certain necessities that are to be included in this human consciousness. Now it may not be difficult for you to see that in older times man, so to speak, simply by being a physical human being, experienced certain revelations, revelations that one can only experience if one remains physically capable of development until a certain age. In ancient Persia and ancient India, the brain was soft and flexible and plastic well into one's fifties. It was so plastic that today it is only so in early youth. Simply through this plastic brain one received revelations that one cannot receive when one is still a child, but only when the body remains plastic well into old age. Our mummified brain, which has already dried up by the age of thirty, cannot achieve these revelations through the old natural path. This results in the necessity for the emancipated spiritual soul to acquire content in a different, purely spiritual way.

This means that it is eminently necessary for you to turn to spiritual life in our time. Because at the age of thirty-five, we have reached the half-way point of life, and from there it goes downhill. Anything that can only be achieved in the descending half will not be achieved by today's man by himself. If he does nothing to achieve it in any other way than through his physical development, it does not come to him at all. From such insights, one should understand how necessary it is for today's human being to turn to spiritual science.

Whatever external social structures people have created so far have arisen entirely under the influence of the old plastic body. But now the age has dawned in which these old structures are becoming decrepit and in which something new can only be created if it is created out of the spirit. This is already evident today, even if one only follows external events. But one only understands external events if one follows them in connection with the spirit. I would like to draw your attention to a topic that seems quite distant from the one we have just discussed. As I have often mentioned, disreputable generals and statesmen are now writing their memoirs. Among those who have written their memoirs, there is relatively one of the best, most interesting of frivolous and cynical people, who has guided Austrian history for a certain period of time, Czernin. He has also written his memoirs. I am not exaggerating when I say that he is one of the best memoirists, for I must also call him a frivolous and cynical superficialist. But his memoirs are still among the most interesting.

There is an interesting passage in which Czernin discusses what could have prevented or brought about this world war catastrophe. He discusses it as an Austrian and says: This Austria, it was destroyed by the world war. But it would have been destroyed even without the world war, because it was ripe to be destroyed. It could no longer exist. It was rotten inside. — He even expresses himself somewhat dramatically by saying: We had to go under anyway, we could only choose our method of death. We could not choose anything other than the method of death. We chose the worst one. Well, something better has not been understood. Perhaps another would have been slower, less painful. — That is how he expresses himself.

This is basically a very true apercu, because this Austria was a state structure, put together according to the intentions of the imagination, which still came from an old time. Even if they did not, I would like to say, grow any more in the brains, they were still there, luciferically. Today people see how these old structures are beginning to become decrepit and die off. People would only see clearly if they saw the inner reasons, the reasons of the times, for the dying off of these structures. But no one sees anything until the structure in question has catastrophically perished. What it would be about for a person who is truly at the cutting edge of his time would be not just coming up with all kinds of social ideas and taking the old state structures, as if these old state structures, these old state frameworks could be taken at all. They cannot. One must realize that the old concept of the state has ceased to have any meaning, that something else must take its place: the threefold social organism. This threefold social organism will create its own state boundaries; the old ones have lost their inner coherence.

But people today are simply asleep. They go along with what is happening catastrophically. But people do not want to look at the inner motivating forces of existence. They will only decide if they learn to really understand things from a spiritual-scientific point of view. Then, through a truly spiritual understanding of existence, a bridge will also be built between the understanding of the purely natural and the social. For in the last analysis both fields have laws that are connected with each other. Only if we look at the present time from this point of view will we gain the necessary insight into what is really going on today. We must decide to say: Today, if a person wants to do something for the ascending development of humanity, he must not be satisfied with what comes to him from outside, because only up to the age of twenty-seven does something come to him. After that, he mummifies; after that, the soul and spirit must draw its strength from the spiritual world.

A person who only develops out of what the outside world brings to him is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven. You can take the following idea as eminently correct: if today most people who advance to so-called higher positions still undergo all kinds of grammar school or similar education, then this twenty-seven-year limit is somewhat shifted because something comes into people from old traditions, which they absorb from them. But if someone grows out of our present life, truly as a self-made man, and then reaches the age of twenty-seven without having imbued this self-made man nature with a grammar school education in the usual sense and the then at twenty-seven he can be so far advanced that he is steeped in everything that applies only to the present of the earth today, that gives no possibility of development into the future, and that must find its conclusion in the present. For if anyone is to have something in his soul that gives a power of development towards the future, then he must have it from the spirit. So today, when someone turns twenty-seven, he is, so to speak, educated only through humanity, through what naturally comes to him through physical development. He will understand the present, and the present will understand him. But for what he understands, for what is understood of him, evolution could actually proceed in such a way that it perishes tomorrow through a gigantic cataclysm on earth, for his soul would contain no further ferment for further development. Just such a man, who would be a self-made man, who would have been exposed to what is received from the outside today, who would then have finished at the age of twenty-seven and become a member of parliament for my sake, then soon a minister and so on, would be the most characteristic expression of the present.

The man who is the most characteristic example of the present is Lloyd George. He is the most absolute expression of the present. If you study his biography, you will find that he is the person who embodies everything that a person can achieve through his physical and spiritual development up to the age of twenty-seven. But since he rejects everything that does not come of itself, that is won from the spiritual world, he can never become older than twenty-seven years. He is certainly much older today in terms of his counted years, but in reality he is twenty-seven years old. And so today there are many of us who stop at these twenty-seven years because they do not absorb anything from the spiritual world. The fact that one gets gray hair, that one shows other signs of age, does not matter. Today you can be twenty-seven years old even if you are a seventy-year-old man according to the years counted, and you can be the French Prime Minister and be called Clemenceau. That is the secret of the development of humanity: growing old is not connected with the number of years, but today, if someone really wants to grow old, they have to do so by developing spiritually. It is therefore no coincidence that it was Lloyd George who set the tone for the world, especially in the decisive events. For the keynote for the present age, which is so fundamentally maternal, had to be given by someone who reached the age of twenty-seven in the most characteristic, the most typical way and did not go beyond these twenty-seven years. He became a member of parliament at precisely this age and developed all these things with great genius. Today, one does not get to know the world by merely looking at it as the ideas that float on the surface of so-called civilization today suggest. One only gets to know the world by really looking at it from the inside out in the way just indicated.

We human beings are given two things for our development: I would like to say the shell and the content. The old people of the first, second, and third periods were given not only the physical development but also the spiritual. The members of the higher hierarchies still lived in the physical shells. We develop our bodies only in such a way that we have the forces of the spirits of form in our human forms, the spirit of the time in our etheric body, archangelic beings in our astral body, and angelic beings in our I. But it does not go any further, for we must consciously and voluntarily ascend to that which the human being of ancient times simply approached with the development of his body. And one does not get to know the moral development of humanity without really taking such things into consideration. People today write history exactly as the blind would write of color. They write only external phrases that have no content. From these empty, superficial phrases party programs and social programs are then constructed, and so-called ideals arise, ideals which are used as a basis for social action. Today one cannot achieve anything socially without taking into account the driving forces of human evolution. A sense of the times is necessary today. But it can only be gained from spiritual foundations.

How strangely such an understanding of the times is often perceived can be seen from outward things. When people want to rise above the everyday, they often do all kinds of things. For example, some time ago, when people no longer knew what kind of trivialities of civilization to start, all kinds of “Olympic Games” were to be held before the war catastrophe. Yes, the Olympic Games were for the Greeks. Our age has gone beyond the Greeks by so many centuries. We no longer have the state of soul and body that the Greeks had. We must find something that is appropriate for our state of soul and body. We only show the impotence of our spirit, the complete emptiness of soul content, when we want to regurgitate the old over and over again. The Olympic Games were only possible for those human beings who had retained their capacity for development until the age of thirty-three. To simply renew things that were once there for the benefit of humanity is no different than for someone who has turned thirty-five to suddenly decide that they want to behave like a fifteen-year-old boy. That is roughly how it was when the ideal of the Olympic Games emerged.

This inner search for understanding based on the spiritual foundations of development is what must be striven for unconditionally from our present time onwards. For the old connections from which people have worked until now have become rotten and brittle. A snail's shell will indeed hold together for a while even after the snail is dead. In the same way the old states, which had arisen out of quite different shells, out of quite different conceptions, have held their own. But it is imperative that today new social formations should really develop out of the renewed life of human thinking. The great dying out of the old social structures, which began in the East and has taken hold of Central Europe, will continue! But it would be good if it were understood and if people would think less about raising the old empires and more about facing the real conditions of the present and creating new social structures out of these real conditions of the present.

On the whole, it must be said that spiritual science requires people to develop a little less complacency with regard to the soul than people are inclined to have today. People today are already so unaware of the driving forces of evolution that they are immersed in. It was interesting for me to see how a member of our Society wrote about the style of The Core of the Social Question in the last issue of the Dreigliederungs-Zeitung. Many people have talked all sorts of nonsense about this style of the “Key Points of the Social Question”: difficult to understand, convoluted sentences, and the like. It is quite good that someone has finally said that this book is intended to be a call for the renewal of humanity, that it should not be a sleeping pill for those who want to have a pleasant read.

Today, people, by wanting to be consistent, unite the most disparate. You can go among the so-called people today, that will demand a popular presentation. Perhaps the most popular presentation will be demanded by those who feel most free-spirited. They will find a closed style boring, these people. Where does this striving for so-called popular presentation come from? If only people would consider it just once, they would more easily move away from such judgments as are often heard. For what many people hostile to the church today demand as popularity in style is nothing other than a result of the presentation that certain representatives of the faiths sought in order to keep people as stupid as possible. In their Sunday afternoon sermons they gave them, as far as possible, only what was as clear as daylight, and this was also clear as daylight for those who wanted to stay awake during the sermons. The furthest limit of hearing sermons is, of course, the old lady who always slept during the sermon and who was taken to task for it. She said: Well, what does a person have in this world if they no longer have that little bit of church sleep! The difference in level from this state of drowsiness to popular presentation is not very great. It has essentially arisen from the fact that people have not been allowed to develop a certain free and lively way of thinking. What people have become accustomed to when listening to sermons is what the anti-church Social Democrats demand today as a popular presentation. Such are the circumstances. People today find the style of the “Core Points” difficult, which would have them reject any sense of confession; but the fact that they find the style difficult stems from the fact that these people have been educated by the “watery clarity” of Sunday afternoon sermons. This is also something that people must learn through spiritual science: to look at events impartially. People would prefer to be mistaken about the laws of development.

Above all, energy in the life of the soul is what is needed most urgently for the future development of humanity. And in this respect, we are living in an extraordinarily difficult time today. Last Sunday, here, while “Egyptian darkness” prevailed in the hall, I pointed out the many efforts that are being made against our spiritual science in particular. But it is not at all uncommon for a decisive, firm thinking about it to be resented, one might say, in our ranks. This must be clearly stated for the reason that the kind of defamatory campaigns against author-oriented spiritual science and what it socially entails are only just beginning. Again and again, we are confronted with the pernicious demand that when someone is slandered, the old man or whoever it is, sometimes a young man, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young one, should be treated as gently as possible. They say: above all, anyone who slanders should be treated as gently as possible in our ranks; you should first befriend people who spread slander! – That is not what matters today! Anyone who understands the times should realize that. Today it is not a matter of dealing with people who spread slander throughout the world, but rather of characterizing these people to others, of having nothing to do with them, of treating them as people whom one does not want to let approach oneself, and of educating others in an appropriate way about what kind of individuals they are in the world. That is what matters today! — For today we are facing serious moments of development, and today looking through one's fingers is the very worst thing that can happen in the service of humanity. It is more convenient to look through one's fingers than to grasp sharply what is at stake here.

Above all, we must be clear about the fact that a real understanding of the social task of the present is only possible from the spirit. But in addition, of course, much else must first be brought about, I would say. On the one hand, there is our science, which needs a complete renewal. We can no longer do anything with the old science. We must have the opportunity to truly penetrate the spirit of nature. We must have the opportunity to really grasp science, medicine, biology in general in a spiritual way, then we can really develop fruitful thoughts for social thinking with the education that is undergone in this way. Otherwise we will continue to want to create something new with the old buzzwords. But that is precisely what is leading us so powerfully down into the abyss. Humanity must ascend, but it must do so out of a spiritual renewal. And anyone who will not resolve to look at the old in such a way that it is really seen by him as old will simply not be able to work with humanity for its progress.

I have, of course, developed this before you in the most diverse variations. Today I wanted to point out how humanity is actually becoming younger and younger in relation to its age, which I have discussed several times before. The ancient Indians lived well into their fifties, then the Persians lived into their forties, the Egyptians and Chaldeans lived into their thirties, and the Greeks lived into their thirties. We do not grow old in this way. We still drag ourselves along if we do not inwardly enliven ourselves spiritually, but we do not grow old. For in the old ages, to grow old meant at the same time to become wiser through that which the human being developed bodily-physically. Today's people, by growing old, merely become old, they do not become wiser; they become mummies. They only become wise when they fill the mummies inwardly with something. The Egyptians mummified their dead. Contemporary people have no need to become mummies at all, for they already walk around as mummies and are only not mummies when the spiritual is grasped in the living, immediate present; then the mummy is enlivened. But it is necessary for present-day humanity that the mummies be brought to life. Otherwise we will continue to have those world associations in which all kinds of sounds come from mummified human beings. These associations are called 'parties'. But what came from the mummified human beings gradually became purely Ahrimanic voices, and these brought about the catastrophe of the last few years. That is the other side of the coin, that is the very serious side of the matter. If, from the present time onwards, man does not begin to fill his mummy with spiritual content, it will be filled by the whisperings of Ahriman. Then the human mummies will walk around, but the Ahrimanic demons will speak out of them. They can only be prevented from populating the earth if people decide to seek their living connection with the spiritual world. Yes, the matter is very, very serious. To pursue spiritual science today is at the same time to expel the Ahrimanic spirit from humanity, to prevent humanity from being possessed by Ahrimanic spiritual forces.

Spiritual science must become an instrument of mutual understanding, whereby we learn to understand each other, as it were, across all of humanity and into the soul. And this learning to understand each other, even into the soul, must permeate us as an anthroposophical attitude, so to speak, and live in us, otherwise the occult truths that flow into humanity through spiritual science will not be easily understood by us either. In this respect, spiritual science can, because it is, so to speak, the key to understanding the innermost, bring about peace and harmony across the earth. How can it do that?

Let us illustrate this with a concrete example. Take, for example, the relationship between two people who have different religious beliefs across the earth, let us say Christianity and Buddhism. What we can say with reference to Christians and Buddhists, who provide us only with classical examples, we could of course also say for the world views of two people living side by side in Europe; for what applies on a large scale will also apply on a small scale through spiritual knowledge. If we take the Christian and the Buddhist as they are in the traditional orthodox creeds, how do they relate to each other? Well, in such a way that the Christian actually believes that the Buddhist can only be saved if he accepts Christianity in the form that he has. And so we see the missionary activities of Christians among Buddhists; they take their particular confession there. And the orthodox Buddhist behaves in a very similar way. Suppose both became anthroposophists. How would a Christian, as an anthroposophical Christian, relate to a Buddhist? Well, let us say that he hears what is one of the most important things in Buddhism and what, basically, is only properly understood by someone who lives within Buddhism itself. Today, there are two ways of learning about the content of the various religious beliefs: from people who study comparative religion and from those who learn about the content of the various religious beliefs in a spiritual-scientific way. If we consider those who practice comparative religion, we must say that they are extraordinarily hardworking and active people who endeavor to cultivate the scholarly comparison of different religious beliefs. But when they compare these religious beliefs, something very special comes to light; then what they are looking for, even if they do not admit it, is actually only the untruthfulness of the various religious beliefs. These people are looking for what is not true, what was accepted by the various religious beliefs in childlike times; that is, they are looking for untruth. The person who studies this as a spiritual scientist seeks the main core in the individual religious beliefs; he seeks what is contained in a single nuance, but still as a perceptional nuance, in this or that religious belief. He seeks, therefore, what is true in the individual religious beliefs, not what is false.

In this respect, things can go strangely. Isn't it true that no one who knows the facts will have anything but the greatest respect for Max Müller, perhaps the greatest scholar of comparative religion or the greatest authority on religious studies. He, too, did not give much more than what one might call: the untruth of the oriental creeds. But he believed that he was giving everything with it. And then H. P. Blavatsky appeared and spoke quite differently. She spoke in such a way that one saw in her: she knows the main core of the oriental creeds.

What did Max Müller say? His judgment is somewhat grotesque and shows that a scholar does not necessarily need to be well-versed in logic. He thought that people follow Blavatsky, who only gives them a completely false representation of oriental religions, while she does not take into account the true representation of them, which, for example, he, Max Müller, gives. And he used the following comparison: Yes, when people are walking down the street and see a real pig grunting, they are not particularly surprised, but when they see a person grunting like a pig, it causes a stir. He wanted to compare what is naturally given in the oriental religious systems, namely his kind of religious comparison, with the pig that grunts naturally – I am not making the comparison! - and wanted to compare what H. P. Blavatsky has given with a person who grunts like that. Well, I won't even talk about the tastelessness of the comparison; because it doesn't seem very logical to me: I would be a little surprised if I met a person who could grunt deceptively. But I would not, really not, use the other comparison of comparative religious studies with the said animal, and it is strange that Max Müller himself used it.

Spiritual science introduces us to the truth of different religions. Take a key point in Buddhism: the Buddhist knows, when he has understood the basic tenet of his faith, that there are bodhisattvas, and he knows that these bodhisattvas, once beginning as an individuality, undergo a more rapid development than the other human individualities and then ascend to the Buddha. Buddha is a general name for all those who, in a human, carnal incarnation, ascend from the bodhisattva to the Buddha. And one of those who are especially honored with the name Buddha is precisely the son of Shuddhodana: Gautama Buddha. And with regard to him, it must be recognized, as with every Buddha, that when he attained the dignity of Buddha at the age of twenty-nine, the incarnation in which this occurred was his last incarnation, and that he would not need to descend again to a carnal incarnation on earth. This is regarded as a truth by Buddhists. A comparative religion scholar would regard it as a childish notion. But the anthroposophist, who familiarizes himself with the secrets of religions in all fields, does not approach the Buddha in this way, but he knows that such a thing is a truth. And so, just like any devout Buddhist, the anthroposophist faces Buddhism and says: Yes, I know that there are such things as bodhisattvas who ascend to the Buddha, who do not need to reincarnate again. That is one of the sentences of your religious community that I recognize, just as you do, and by acknowledging it, I can look up to your Buddha with reverence, just as you do. That is to say, the anthroposophical Christian begins to fully understand what the Buddhist says, and he has the same feelings and perceptions with him, he shares them with him, and they understand each other from the one side at first.

Now let us take the opposite case, where the Buddhist has also become an anthroposophist and is learning to recognize what the Christian, who has raised himself above the narrow-mindedness of the confessional orthodox point of view, knows about Christianity. Let us assume that the Buddhist Buddhist hears what a Christian can say about the Christ Impulse itself. He hears that within Christianity, within Christian esotericism, it has been recognized that at one point in the course of evolution, a being called Lucifer approached man in his development; he then hears that as a result, this human being descended lower than would have been the case had there been no Luciferic influence. And he then hears that it is actually something that we look up to as if it were a matter for the gods when we consider the rebellion and revolt of Lucifer against the progressive powers of the gods. So we are looking into a matter for the gods. And then we hear from the Christian who really understands his Christianity that the settlement of this matter between the advancing gods and Lucifer had to become what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. And why?

Well, in its present form, death and everything associated with death has really come about through the influence of Lucifer. But death is something that can only be found in the physical world. There is no death in a supersensible world, insofar as supersensible worlds are accessible to man with his clairvoyant consciousness. Not even the group souls of animals die; they only transform. There is metamorphosis, but not what is called death. The disintegration, the falling apart of a part of a particular entity, death, only exists in the physical world. Now, as a compensation, it had to be chosen - this can only be hinted at - by supernatural beings to suffer death in order to have a common cause with men, something that could be a compensation for the Luciferian rebellion. To conquer Lucifer, the Divine had to go through death; to do so, it had to descend to earth.

So what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha is a divine matter through which a compensation was created for the Lucifer matter. It is the only divine matter that has taken place before the eyes of men. This unique impulse, which cannot be imagined as anything other than the passing through of the Divine through death on the physical plane and the emanation of the Christ impulse into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth from that point on. This is now regarded by anyone who knows Christianity as the primary essence of that Christianity. In this way, Christianity, understood in a deeper sense, differs from all other religions in that the other religions see the main thing about their origin in some religious founder, in a personality; but that Christianity does not see the essential in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but sees in this personal founder only the bearer of the Christ impulse, that Christianity sees the essential in a fact. This must be grasped with all possible intensity: in a fact that had to take place as such at some point in the evolution of the earth: in the passing through of the divine through death. That is the special truth of Christianity: that it is not an individuality but a fact, an event, an experience that is placed at the starting point. Of course, it does not matter if someone says to us, “Yes, look, Jesus of Nazareth still has all kinds of passions, all kinds of qualities that a, let us say, according to oriental views, somehow advanced man should no longer have.” That does not matter at all. That is not the point at all. Anyone who allows themselves to be misled by this has no understanding of Christianity, because Christianity is not about Jesus of Nazareth at all, but about the event of Golgotha, about that fact. Let other founders of religions have personal qualities that other peoples like better than those of Jesus of Nazareth! But those who become Buddhists or anthroposophists will realize that in Christianity it is the event of Golgotha that matters, and they will give the Christian back what he has given them. They will say: Just as you yourself admit that there are bodhisattvas who develop as individualities, ascend to the Buddha and then do not need to incarnate again, so we admit that once in the development of man such a passing through of the divine through death has occurred. You admit that there is a shade of truth in our religion, and we admit that there is a shade of truth in yours. — Thus both sides understand each other. They would not understand each other, for example, and discord would be created if Christians came who thought they had become Anthroposophists and said: I don't believe you that a Buddha can no longer appear in a physical body, but I assume that in a certain time the Buddha will appear again in a physical body. - That would be an impossibility for someone who recognizes the essence of Buddhism. It would be impossible to expect the Buddhist to believe that his Buddha could appear in the flesh again. The Buddhist would say: “You do not understand Buddhism.” And it is quite natural and should not be a matter for discussion that just as the person who claims that a Buddha will come again in the flesh does not know Buddhism, so the person who claims that a Christ can come flesh again, who therefore does not realize that it concerns here a unique life of a divine entity on Earth, precisely for the purpose of passing through death on the physical plane, and not something else. So it concerns mutual understanding across the whole Earth, to really grasp each other and thereby establish peace. Discord would be caused if one were to claim to a Buddhist that Buddha would reappear in the flesh; and discord would be caused if one were to claim that the Christ could come again in the flesh. Such things would have to take a deep revenge, for they are impossibilities in view of what really lives in the evolution of mankind. It would be grotesque if anyone were to claim that the Christ had to come again and that people should understand him better now than they did then and should prepare themselves better for him and not kill him: such a person would not know that the killing was crucial and that without it there would be no Christianity at all! The good will to understand really does lead to mutual understanding, and we see how spiritual science can be an instrument for seeking the main core in the individual religious denominations everywhere. If you really want to, you will find it. That is why it is the message of peace for the world. Spiritual science will have to create a cultural soul for the whole world, just as it has given rise to the material cultural body that now extends across the whole earth in industry and commerce. It is precisely by recognizing the diversity that has been given to humanity in the various religious beliefs, and then in turn relating to that which appears to us as the core of truth through spiritual science, that we achieve a kind of synthesis, a unification of the various world views in our time. This should be emphasized with regard to one point.

The aim of the anthroposophically oriented movement that we are pursuing here has never been to present the differences between religious denominations in such a way as to ascribe advantages to one religious denomination and disadvantages to the other. How often has it been said: The spiritual height that was there immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe in the culture of the ancient Indian Rishis has not been reached at all today. It has therefore not been reached by Christianity as it exists today either. We do not indicate advantages and disadvantages, but present the individual religions in their essence. So we also only present when we draw attention to other differences. If we follow the more oriental way of thinking, namely the one that has the most followers, the Buddhist one, you will see one thing: there the main interest of the people is taken up by what is called the passage through the various incarnations. They speak there of a bodhisattva; but a bodhisattva is not one who lives only from the year of birth to the year of death, but one who comes back again and again and then becomes a Buddha; and one speaks of bodhisattvas as if they appeared in various numbers within the development of humanity. One generalizes more, one grasps more the individualities that remain. But how has it been done so far in the Western view? The exact opposite was the case. When people spoke of Socrates, Plato, Raphael, Michelangelo, they were referring to personalities, and here the Western view presents the limited entities as the essential being. This had its good side, because thereby a special education was achieved to chisel out and work out the individual human personalities. This was essentially the case with those views that H. P. Blavatsky, for example, did not understand: the ancient Hebrew and the New Testament views.

One looked, for example, to Elijah. The occult researches about him have something surprising. I need only say that we notice the uniqueness of which makes him a forerunner of what should have happened through the Christ Impulse. He still understands the matter in such a way that the Divine Being is expressed in the National Ego; but he already points out that the most worthy means of recognition lies in the Ego itself. In this respect, Elijah can be seen as a kind of herald of Christianity, and none of the other prophets seems to me to be a herald in the same way as Elijah. There is still a hint of Jehovah in his words, but with him we find Jehovah as close to the human ego as possible. Then we turn our attention to another figure, again as an individual personality, to John the Baptist. We find how he precedes the Christ Impulse, how John the Baptist really presents himself as the one who characterizes the Christ Impulse in words. He says: Change your mind, no longer look to the times of ancient clairvoyance, but seek the Kingdoms of Heaven within your own humanity! — That which the Christ Impulse is in reality: John the Baptist characterizes it. He is a herald of Christianity in a most wonderful way. What lives in the heart of John the Baptist appears to us as a kind of further development, an inner spiritual further development, compared to what lived in Elijah.

We then turn to Raphael and look at him as seemingly a very different figure from John the Baptist; but by looking at Raphael - yes, we just need to immerse ourselves in him a little in a truly human way, and we find in him a herald of Christianity.

Take the following. We turn to a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the passage where it says: “And Paul came to Athens, and the Athenians gathered around him, and Paul stood before them and said: You women and men of Athens, you have so far worshiped your gods in all kinds of signs; but the Godhead does not live in external signs in reality. You also have an altar, however, on which it says: “To the unknown God!” But I say to you that the unknown God is the one who cannot be indicated by external signs in his true form, but who underlies all that is alive and all that exists. He is the one who lived on earth and was resurrected, the one who, through resurrection, will lead man himself to resurrection.” And further on, the Acts of the Apostles tell us – and we can almost see Paul standing before the Athenians – how some Athenians believed and others did not. Among the former was Dionysius, the Areopagite. Then we look at the painting that hangs in the Camera della Signatura in Rome and was painted by Raphael, and which is called “The School of Athens”. Now let us assume – as was quite natural at the time –

Raphael had before him the passage from the Acts of the Apostles that we have just been discussing. It came to life in him. And now we look at the various Athenians, to whom he gave the faces, and except for the hand movement, we see stepping forward – stepping forward among the Athenians – a figure whom we recognize if we just consider Paul in the Acts of the Apostles.

And so we could go through the most diverse things with Raphael. If we focus on his various Madonnas, we must ask ourselves, however: Isn't one thing strange about Raphael, he is great when he paints the scenes that show the becoming, the growing in the emergence of Christianity, the little Jesus as something that contains the whole of Christianity becoming in the germ. But we do not find Raphael's painting of Judas betraying Christ, nor does he actually paint Christ carrying the cross, because his Christ carrying the cross seems to us to be forced, not at all like Raphael's other works. Instead, we find the Annunciation, the Ascension, that is, the things that point precisely to the emergence of Christianity.

And how did these things speak to people? Yes, they spoke most peculiarly. You know that one of Raphael's most magnificent works is in Dresden: the Sistine Madonna. People who think superficially might think that this is a work of art that was paraded through Germany like a victor. It made no impression on Goethe at all because he had heard how people generally thought about this work. As a young man, Goethe was not yet as sure in his judgment as he was in his old age and was still receptive to what people said. What did the museum officials in Dresden tell him? Well, that the child was ugly in its entirety, that the Madonna had been painted over by an amateur, that the little putti below had been added by some kind of handyman. That was still the attitude towards the Sistine Madonna when Goethe came to Dresden as a young man. But let us see how it is now. Let us consider what Raphael actually has become for people! Raphael worked in Rome at a time when there was much dispute about religious dogmas. The way in which Raphael paints the Christian mysteries is interdenominational. If we take the later great Italian painters, we see the religious mysteries painted in such a way that we recognize: this is the Christianity of the Latin race. Raphael paints in such a way that we are dealing with universal renderings of Christian mysteries that transcend nations. That is why we see how, in a short time, the Sistine Madonna finds its way into the souls even in Protestant areas. And if anthroposophy is to work for the understanding of the Christian mysteries, it will find its way best into those souls in which the feelings live that are won by images like the Sistine Madonna, into those souls that are prepared in this way. And when we say today that Christianity is only at the beginning of its development, that it will only receive its true form through the spiritual key that anthroposophy is able to give, then we know that Raphael stands as a herald for this Christianity.

And again we turn our gaze to yet another figure, taking only what is Western in outlook: we turn to the figure of the German poet Novalis. If we turn to Novalis, we find traces of the purest anthroposophical teaching in every detail; one need only unravel them, so to speak. Thus we see how Novalis is imbued with an anthroposophical Christianity.

We have thus presented four figures as personalities. That was the Western view. Now comes the spiritual-scientific deepening. Through this, people will already experience why, for example, Raphael feels that magnetic attraction to be incarnated into the earth on a Good Friday, in order to outwardly suggest through the birth on Good Friday that he has something to do with the Easter mystery. These things can only be hinted at today; in a few decades people will understand the things that are being asserted in this way, just as they understand scientific facts today: that it is the same individuality that lived in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis. First they will recognize the personalities, then the individuality as it has passed through them. And now we understand the fourfold heraldry and the ascent in this fourfold heraldry. Now we stand by such a thing quite differently than we used to. Today we already know that the original form of the Stanze in Rome can no longer be seen; they have been spoiled, are no longer as they were painted by Raphael's hand, and only centuries need pass for these things to disappear. Even if the replicas will have a longer life, what created the individuality is dissolved into its atoms. But even if Raphael's physical works are pulverized by the passage of time, we know that the same individuality that created those works was present again in Novalis and brought about, in a different way, what was in him.

Thus we see how today, in addition to what the Western way of looking at things has achieved, the limited vision of personalities is added to individuality; how, in other words, the best that the Western world view has achieved is combined with the best that the Eastern way of looking at things has. This is how time progresses. As humanity progresses and realizes these things, the spiritual world will not remain silent, but will speak to humanity in even the most mundane of phenomena. And so, people will not only have to rise to the spiritual world through a kind of knowledge, but more and more this knowledge will be transformed into a kind of, one might say, experience. But for this to happen, a real spiritual movement is needed today. That such a movement is necessary is evident simply from the fact that people no longer judge even the simplest things in the right way.

Let us single out one detail today. A person who leads a healthy life goes through waking and sleeping in the course of twenty-four hours. We know that when he falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed and the astral and I go out. What then happens to what remains in bed? When the clairvoyant looks back from his astral body at what is happening in the etheric and physical bodies, he sees how a more vegetative life begins, a life that has actually been destroyed by daytime consciousness. Fatigue is compensated for; that is, the etheric body and the physical body now flourish and sprout, and the astral body and the I have been withdrawn. When they submerge again into the physical body and etheric body in the morning, they have to make them tired again; they graze, let wither what has sprouted during the night.

Everything that is in the microcosm is also present in the macrocosm. When we see in spring how the earth lets its greenery shoot out in the plants, how flowers and leaves sprout and how the plants prepare to bear fruit, what do we have there? The one who compares externally will say that the waking up in the morning can be compared to the waking up of nature in spring. But the opposite is true! We have to compare the blossoming in spring with falling asleep. We have to compare the emergence and growth of plants in spring with what happens in the etheric and physical body of a person when they fall asleep. Then, as summer approaches, it becomes more and more alive, as in the human physical and etheric bodies in the middle of the sleep period. And in autumn it becomes as if the human being descends into the physical and etheric body in the morning, in autumn, which causes withering of what has sprouted during spring and summer. One must correctly put together what happens outside and inside; one must not seek external allegories and compare spring with waking up and autumn with falling asleep, but the other way around.

So that we can say: That which is the spirit of the earth goes to sleep in spring and wakes up as earth spirits in autumn and winter. In winter, they are connected to the earth as earth spirits, in order to rise again in spring and summer to the heights of heaven, to the astral heights and to the other side of the earth. When spring comes again, they go back to sleep.

It does not contradict that the earth sleeps once on one half and the other time on the other half. Something similar is also the case with man in a certain respect. The person who follows the processes clairvoyantly sees that in spring it is the same as when a person falls asleep, where the individual spirit withdraws into the astral world; he sees that in spring what we call the earth spirits withdraw into the astral world, and vice versa. Yes, today's humanity – except for those sitting here, who would probably burst out laughing if one were to speak of the falling asleep and waking up of the earth spirits. One believes this humanity; it does everything to prove that it has no idea of the real processes of the world. But it was not always so, not at all, but it was different in the past! There was an old human clairvoyance, and that saw these facts correctly. It was seen that the earth spirits withdraw in spring to go up, so to speak, into cosmic heights. In autumn these spirits descend again. This was recognized in ancient times. It was natural to point out that in the middle of summer there is something like an absence of the actual earth spirit from the earth. Instead, there is an upsurge of the elemental nature spirits, as in a paroxysm, and a lagging behind of what is earthly-bodily on the earth, which thus emerges through the senses. If one wanted to make this clear, one could not do better than to move the Feast of St. John to this time, in order to point out how the sprouting nature spirits and the actual spirits of the earth, which are the I and the astral body of the earth, work.

But what about when winter approaches? Then the earth wakes up, and the astral body and the ego are connected with the earth. That is when we have to move the festivals that primarily relate to the spiritual part of the human being. That is where Christmas has been moved to. And then, when the spirit of the earth moves upwards, which is indicated by Easter, this movement away from the earth, this movement into the astral, was related to the relationship between the sun and the moon.

All these things that we are looking into connect us in a wonderful way with ancient clairvoyance, showing us how, in what has been handed down from ancient times, we have to see something that has to do with ancient human clairvoyance. It is quite natural for the materialistic world view to say that it has only the body to educate, that it says: It is inconvenient for us, especially with regard to cheque transactions and similar things, to have Easter early one year and late the next, and this must be remedied so that trade and industry can get away with it as comfortably as possible. Easter should always be celebrated on the first Sunday in April! — This is only appropriate for the materialistic age, which has no connection with the spiritual world. Just as it is appropriate for materialism to entertain such ideas, it is equally true that a spiritual movement must maintain the connection with humanity's ancient festivals. And we will not hold back in doing what is appropriate for a spiritual worldview, especially with regard to practical activity.

And this should be expressed in what is presented to you in our calendar, which of course appears ridiculous to the outside world, but we do not want to withhold it from them, even if they think we are fools because of it. It is expressed through this calendar that we must maintain the connection with ancient times. In the illustrations for the calendar, which were created by a dear and beloved member of our group, you have a renewal of that which has already become dry and barren: the imaginations that relate to the constellations of the sun and moon and the signs of the zodiac, renewed for the soul of today, given in such a way that you really benefit from it when you look at the sequence of weeks and days. If you ask how you can gain access to such things yourself, then take a look at the Soul Calendar: these meditations are the result of many years of occult research and experience. If you make them effective in the soul, you will see that what is forming in the soul is the connection between the effectiveness of spiritual

worlds in the succession of time. And what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, we have made outwardly, exoterically, so that it does not shock at first glance. We have drawn a circle around it, on which 1912/13 is written, but inwardly the calendar is calculated in such a way that the beginning is marked by the birth of human ego-consciousness, that is, with the Mystery of Golgotha. And besides, the years are counted from Easter to Easter, which is bound to prove rather inconvenient for commercial life, but is necessary for spiritual life.

Thus something is provided that has grown out of our way of thinking and that can be used by everyone, so that by using it they can take a step closer to the spiritual path than can be achieved by any other means.

It will become more and more apparent how the things we undertake within our anthroposophical movement are actually conceived from a unified basic principle and impulse, and how the individual does not owe his existence to a whim, but is placed in such a way that he really fits into our work as a whole as a single building block. For this, of course, it is necessary that more and more individual members also develop an understanding of this collaboration and that we move beyond special interests and special aspirations and focus more on what unites us. Of course, it is understandable that many individual members have special aspirations and special requests, that some would like to bring this or that into the anthroposophical movement. But especially here in this place, where truly selfless cooperation will be necessary if we really want to achieve what we have planned, it must be deeply, deeply rooted in our hearts that we will only have a beneficial effect if we do not assert our special aspirations, but rather what can be integrated into the whole, what is being striven for, as a building block. Otherwise it cannot become a whole. This is so extraordinarily important, and in this respect I believe that the realization of what should have happened there is the basis for studying how the anthroposophical movement should develop.

So today I have tried to present to you some of our anthroposophically oriented views, and we have thus created a kind of substitute for what should have been this time, but could not be because not all the official approvals have been obtained: namely, the laying of the foundation stone of our Johannesbau. But we hope that in the not too distant future we will be able to make up for this. For perhaps in doing so we will also lay the foundation stone for a revival of the anthroposophical movement as we understand it in the West. And if we succeed in doing the right thing in this field, then we will already have provided the proof that we, in all loyalty to the truth, without any inclination towards sensationalism, are making those occult efforts our own which present-day humanity needs for its further development.

Eight days ago, we discussed important connections between the human organization, the physical build and the astral world on the basis of the Germanic creation myth. We have seen the interesting connection between the twelve pairs of cranial nerves and the twelve currents that our ancestors saw through their kind of clairvoyance in the astral plane, and which are nothing other than the inflows of that which then forms the twelve pairs of cranial nerves in the human being. We have also seen how the softer parts of the human body, so to speak, what belongs to the larynx, what belongs to the heart and to the lower organic parts, how all this is connected with the roots of the world ash - which is of course an astral phenomenon - and how the formation of the human brain is connected with the treetop and branches of the world ash. Here we have looked deeply into the connection between what the myth tells us and what we can acquire through our knowledge. We have also seen that the signs and symbols that the myth offers us are not things that have been thought up or invented by the imagination, but that they correspond to real observations in the astral world. This must be emphasized again and again, that all the beating about the bush with regard to symbols and signs that comes from the intellect and from speculation is worthless. For the real symbols that play a role in occultism are renderings of experiences and encounters in the spiritual world.

Today we will take an even deeper look into this area. We will come to a chapter that can really only be discussed in a working group that has been dealing with these questions for some time. Now, younger members are still being added to such working groups. They have to get used to hearing things that may still be shocking to them. But we would not make any progress if we did not want to discuss what applies to the advanced. This does not mean advanced in terms of study and knowledge, but what is meant by “advanced” is that the members who have been here for a long time have acquired a certain feeling that one of other worlds in the same way as if they were things or people that one encounters in the physical world, and with whom one can, under certain circumstances, associate and converse as familiarly as with the beings one encounters when one steps outside into the street. In this sense, I mean “advanced” so that they are not shocked when the spiritual worlds and their inhabitants are spoken of in an unbiased way. And the younger members may at least for the time being have the good will to listen to such a thing and accept it as naturally as a story from the ordinary sensory world. The composition of the lecture today will also be somewhat colorful. But that does not matter. We will get an overview of an important chapter of the spiritual world on the one hand and on the other hand we will get the connection with our own human physicality.

You know that within our sensual world there is a second world that we call the astral world, which initially presents itself as a flowing sea of light, in which colors and forms flow. For the researcher in the astral world, these color formations arrange themselves into certain entities, which he recognizes as astral entities, which are just as real there as plants and animals are here in the physical world. Then there is the world of spiritual sound, the harmonies of the spheres, the world of Devachan, which can be recognized by clairaudience. We will discuss this another time. Today we will limit ourselves to the astral world from a few points of view.

Anyone who studies the astral world with the means that those who study these things in depth can gradually learn through their own development will find that this world is much, much more populated than our physical world. For the astral world has a property that the physical world does not have, and in occultism this property is called 'permeability'. Astral beings can pass through each other; physical beings cannot do that. From this you can already see that the astral world can be much more populated, can contain many more beings than the physical world. This is also the case.

Just think back to the time when a large number of people were still able, even without occult training, to see into the spiritual world through their natural abilities. You will get a slightly different idea of some of the old pictures that earlier painters have painted. I would just like to remind you of the 'Sistine Madonna', which is in Dresden. Even if some have not seen the Sistine Madonna themselves, they are at least familiar with the good engravings that exist of it. You will have seen that in the background the whole atmosphere is filled with the heads of angels or genii. Just as the observation of nature otherwise makes cloud formations grow out of the air, so here angelic or genii figures grow out of them. This is not mere fantasy, but something that is a complete reality for those who can see the astral world. The astral world, which surrounds us as a surging sea of light, is filled with beings that, as it were, spring from space at every point with infinite vitality. This is how the astral plane appears in every respect; it is a moving spiritual life. Now it is not to be said that the painters who lived at the time of Raphael had this full understanding. That would be too much to say; but there were great predecessors of these painters, whose works have long since been lost, who in some respects were real clairvoyants, who, from their clairvoyance, indicated the tradition in such a way that a painter like Raphael, even if he was not clairvoyant, knew from tradition: this is how it is, and was therefore able to reproduce it appropriately. Even more appropriate are older pictures from the 13th and 14th centuries. If you go back to a time that is best known through the painter Cimabue, you will see how the strange phenomenon of the gold background appears in the pictures, and how angelic or genie-like figures emerge from it. This, too, corresponds fully to the reality of the astral vision. Down to the golden background, this corresponds to reality. For indeed, when we enter the higher regions of the astral plane, the flowing sea of light, which shines and is illuminated in other color tones, transforms into such a flowing sea of light that appears to be glowing with gold. This is beautifully depicted in a painting by Raphael, in a fresco, the “Disputa”, opposite another painting called “The School of Athens”, a name that should actually be crossed out. In the “Disputa” you have at the very bottom the disputing people - who are believed to be church fathers, popes, doctors of the church - then the region of the apostles and prophets begins, and then the region that Raphael depicts in the heads of the genii is divided, which is the region that we can call the lower astral plane. Higher up on the same picture, you can see the region of the higher astral plane, glowing with gold. That is why the pictures of these old painters are so convincing, because those who know these things find the truth of the inner vision reflected in them. They are also convincing for those who do not know this, because they can feel in their subconscious the deep truth from which these things are created. I mention this to draw attention to the way in which people in earlier times were aware of these higher realities and also reproduced them in pictures.

Today we want to discuss something about this world, which we have now tried to characterize as the painters have reproduced it in pictures. Today we want to draw attention to very specific entities that the clairvoyant person encounters in the astral world, partly in the lower, partly in the higher astral world. There are such entities that are shaped like a very complicated bird body, but of tremendous beauty, endowed with mighty wing-like organs and with a head similar to the human head; that is how they appear formed and shaped. These are definitely realities of the astral plane. The great teachers of the religions, who were able to see into it, were well acquainted with this type of being. And when in the most ancient times one tried to depict these beings - the cherubim, or the somewhat less correct, but at least well-intentioned griffins - then one painted such strange figures, which are something between a genius and a mythical creature.

If we recall the old legends, we see in them an attempt by people to recreate these higher, genially beings. They are shaped in the most diverse ways, and those who worked in the secret schools and knew them have, as it were, characterized this choir of beings. These types of entities are grouped into six classes. There are six regents, six leaders of these hosts. They have been named in various ways, these six main geniuses of the higher astral plane, the golden region. The Persian Secret Doctrine calls them “Amshaspands”; it speaks of the six Amshaspands.

A second type of such astral entities, occurring in a somewhat lower region, looks different; it does not at all resemble forms that exist here on the physical plane. But one can at least make oneself understood by trying to express their forms through those of the physical plane. This is what the secret teachers did when they gave the mythologies to the nations and the art of which we have spoken, which emerged from the secret teachings. There are no figures that look exactly like these beings, so we can only characterize them by depicting them as having a kind of human body with all kinds of different animal heads. The Egyptians, who knew a great deal about this area of the astral plane and were quite familiar with the spiritual beings of this sphere, tried to recreate this category of astral plane spirits in the various forms, such as human forms with the head of a sparrowhawk or human forms with other animal heads. These are not arbitrarily invented fantasies either, but rather forms with which one can interact on the astral plane just as one can with humans and animals on the physical plane.

Then there is a third kind of entity. There are now innumerable such beings, and it is no longer really possible to characterize them by drawing comparisons from the animal or human world, but rather by trying to draw the plant kingdom or the lower animals for their physicality and the human head as their head, so that the whole is somewhat similar to a plant body from which a human head grows, or a fish body with a human head. All this roughly gives a picture of the beings that are present on the astral plane.

As I have told you, there are six types of such genies, which the Persians called “Amshaspands”. You now also know the second type, which is best characterized by human form with an animal head; they are formed in the most diverse ways. If you go through these figures, you get about twenty-eight to thirty-one groups, and each of these groups is headed by a regent, so that you have twenty-eight to thirty-one such entities as regents in the astral plane. The Persian secret teachers called these regents the twenty-eight or thirty-one “Izards”. Those beings that I have discussed as the third category, they called “Farohars”. These are innumerable, and one would not be finished if one wanted to divide them all into classes according to their number. Today we are only interested in the six Amshaspands with their hosts and the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards with theirs, because they have a very remarkable significance for all human life. Those who have insight into the spiritual world can answer the question that someone might ask: What do these beings of the astral plane actually occupy themselves with? What do they do all the time? It would be quite wrong to believe that these geniuses and spirits are only there to form groups. One could easily think, if one takes certain poetic descriptions, that they are only assigned to the different spheres to form groups. That would, of course, be a very boring existence for these spirits. The formation of living groups is not an issue in the spiritual world. All these beings have their mission in the world plan. These entities, which the Persians called Amshaspands and Izards, were also known to the ancient Germans, the ancient trotters and druid priests, they only list them differently. According to some traditions there are twenty-eight, according to some thirty or thirty-one. We will hear in a moment why the number is uncertain. Those entities that the Persians call Amshaspands are higher spiritual entities that preside over and guide the natural forces around us. The natural forces, that which causes plants to grow, animals to flourish, and humans to live, these forces that are around us, that we call light, heat, electricity, magnetism and so on, nervous energy, blood power, reproductive power – call it what you will – are not merely unspiritual forces. It is a superstition to think that they are unspiritual forces. These forces are the external expression of spiritual entities. The great forces of existence, light, air, warmth, electricity, and the great chemical forces that permeate the world, they are all the external expression of the working Amshaspands and their hosts. There they work within. If I may express myself trivially: they “boil” in the world. For the senses they are behind the scenes. But you can still get an idea of them if, for example, you think of them as in a puppet theater, an actor, a performer who is not visible himself, but can be recognized by the way he works through wires and strings. Just as in a puppet theater the actor works behind the figures, so the spiritual beings stand behind the forces of nature. It is bad for a materialistic superstition if it only sees the puppets and is unaware that spiritual entities are behind them. This is the business of the Amshaspands, the six great genii who, as the Persian doctrine of the gods says, stand by the good god Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd as executive genii.

They are assisted by the twenty-eight Izards. What is the significance of these? This is best revealed by direct clairvoyant observation, observing them day after day. You will understand me best if I talk quite bluntly about these twenty-eight Izards. If the six Amshaspands were to work with light, air, warmth and so on without the Izards, this world structure of ours would not come about as it is. There must be a lower level of assistance for this world to come about. There must be subordinate, executive spirits. These are the twenty-eight Izards. And there is a very curious hierarchy to be observed. If you observe the way they work, day after day, you will see that the six great group genii, the Amshaspands, work constantly, continually, evenly. They are tireless. But the subordinate twenty-eight Izards have a substantially shorter working time. They relieve each other, so that on one day you see one category of Izards as helpers, on the second day the second category, and on the third day the third, and so on. This is what makes it possible for the world to move forward at all. When a certain type of plant comes up in spring, the Amshaspands are at work. Although they are always working tirelessly, one of them takes the lead for a period of time; this one is the most active. The others are also active, but they are not in the lead. After some time, another one takes the lead. When a plant species emerges in spring, the Amshaspands work in the manner of the great natural forces, and the lower forces, the Izards, work in such a way that everything fits and is right on a specific day. For example, one category of Izards ensures that the climate is right, that the temperature is just right on that particular day. Plant growth would not be able to continue if another category of Izards did not arrive on the other day. After twenty-eight days, however, the first category arrives again, and so it continues. This is actually the mechanism in the spiritual order that underlies nature. There we look right into the workings, we see how the work is done on the astral plane.

Let us now recall what we said eight days ago. We said that the part of the Germanic myth that we discussed then ties in with the exodus of the chosen few near present-day Ireland, which was once part of Atlantis, whose population had advanced in development and then moved east. What is called the more advanced race of the Atlanteans founded the eastern cultures. The story of the World Ash expresses the becoming of the new man as it was seen in the astral world at that time. It was seen how the twelve currents, which we described last time, flow down from the north and have been flowing in for a long time. These twelve currents are really present on the astral plane, even today. If you follow the twelve pairs of nerve cords that pass through your head and extend the lines further out into the world, they all merge with the twelve basic currents that are present on the astral plane. They actually flow in through the six openings of the head, through two eyes, two ears and two nostrils. Inside, they become twelve currents again, two and two. And who sends them in there? After light and air, which work outside as natural forces, are directed by the six Amshaspands, at the highest level of human formation these twelve currents are sent into our head to form our head nerves. The secret teachers saw this in the six Amshaspands. They saw the six directing spirits sending the twelve currents into the head, so that man acquires the ability to perceive the world through his nervous system. So you see the human head as being connected to these six genii as in a kind of telephone or telegraphic connection. You have them to thank for the ability to perceive through your senses. Thus man stands as a microcosm, as a small world, in connection with the great world, the macrocosm.

And what do the subordinate spirits do, the twenty-eight Izards? You see, before man was ripe to receive the high powers of the Amshaspands within himself, he was already ripe to receive the powers of the Izards, which express themselves in his lower nerves. Just as the above-mentioned currents flow into the nerves of the head and build them up, so the currents of the twenty-eight izards flow into the human trunk, which was built earlier than the head. Before man was able to absorb the forces of the amshaspands and form the head from them, man's trunk was able to absorb the inflows of the twenty-eight izards. Does he also have the powers of the Izards within him now?

If we examine the human spinal cord, we find that it passes through the spine in a nerve cord that has a whitish matter on the outside and a gray matter on the inside, whereas in the brain the inside is white and the outside is gray, exactly the opposite. This has a special significance. It is interesting to note that nerve cords extend from the spinal cord along the entire length of the backbone, supplying the lower functions of the body. They extend downward from above and spread throughout the entire body. How many such nerve cords are there? If we want to understand how many there are, we must first answer the question: Where do they come from? — These are the cords that are formed by the influxes of the twenty-eight Izards; therefore, there are twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of such left and right nerve cords. You know that before man was formed on earth, he went through a moon formation. During the moon formation, only twenty-eight such nerve cords were initially formed as a disposition. Then, as the moon developed towards the earth, two to three new ones were added. Therefore, the number of the original twenty-eight Izards, which already served the higher genii on the moon, was increased by three. Because the higher education of man had to be prepared on earth, three more Izards had to be added. These latter three are Izards that only affect man; they have no function in nature outside of man. This is very interesting to survey.

Now it is even more interesting to follow all these processes in such a way that we observe them not only in man, but also outside in the great nature. For man has been formed little by little according to the constellations of the great nature outside. If our Earth were not in the vicinity of the Sun, around which it moves in one year, if the Moon were not in its vicinity, moving around it in one month and showing itself in four phases, then man would be different, because all these things are strictly connected. Light and air have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a certain point in the sky, and they have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a different point. Why is that so? Because the apparent progress of the sun is precisely connected with the fact that the Amshaspands take turns in governing. From month to month, through six months, the Amshaspands take turns in governing. This is connected with the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac. After every six months, it is the turn of another Amshaspand, so that we have one reign of the Amshaspands in the months of summer and the other in the months of winter. Each year, an Amshaspand has to rule for one month twice, and during this reign the Izards take turns, they take turns exactly with the change of the moon. Therefore, the moon needs twenty-eight days to return to its original form through its four phases. The orbit of the moon regulates the work of the Izards, and the orbit of the sun regulates the guidance of the Amshaspands.

And so the formation of the human brain with its twelve pairs of nerves is connected with the course of the sun over the year and with the twelve months. What the twelve months are outside in nature, that the twelve pairs of nerves in our head are inside, and what the twenty-eight lunar days are outside, that the twenty-eight nerves of the spinal cord are inside. And because it was necessary that a new order emerge from the old lunar form when our Earth was newly formed, three new izards were added, whereby the order was established in which the months with thirty or thirty-one days must necessarily vary. Today's astronomical division is not quite exact, because the three supernumerary izards have a special effect on humans and less on nature. If a month always had thirty-one days, then all thirty-one Izards would actually work on the human being. They regulate the functions of the organic body below the head, and so these functions of the organic body are actually connected with the different reigns of the Izards, even if they shift in the individual human being. Originally they are connected with the arrangement of the great nature.

Here you can see deeply into the connection between the inner human structure and the spiritual world of the astral plan. In the various popular theosophical works, one speaks of the “formers”. Here you can see them at work, how they work into you from the outside and build you up; here you can also see what a complicated being man is, what kind of beings are at work so that man, this complicated being, can be built up. Six categories of spirits must be present so that his cognitive head can be built; and twenty-eight to thirty-one lower spirits must be present so that his trunk and all the functions of his trunk can come about. That is a wonderful connection between man and the spiritual world. Now you will understand that it is not enough for the knowledge of the relation of man to the Infinite to just prattle about the fact that man is built out of the spiritual world, but that we must patiently study what it is like. Occultism knows the entities of every organ that is in man, which have built the organ together from the outside. This is an occult anatomy that leads you from the effects in the sensory world to the causes in the spiritual world. The effects can be seen by anyone who looks at the world with an open mind; but the only way to learn to recognize the causes is through occultism. From this you can see that we are not trying to provide abstract proof of the existence of a spiritual world with all kinds of logical conclusions. Because anything that can be proven can also be refuted. You can object to anything. That is not the point. But if you piece together the individual insights so that the things match the effects that are present in the sensory world, then you can come to recognize as true what is recognized by the occultist, how the human being is constructed from the spiritual world. It did not occur to the Persians to count the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord; they saw the twenty-eight Izards at work. You can find the whole human being in the mythologies and legends. That is what gives the real occult study of the world of legends its great appeal.

These phenomena that we have studied can be found everywhere in the secret schools from Persia to the Druids in Central Europe. Whether you call the supreme spirit presiding over the Amshaspands, Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd, or Huu - as he was called in the Druid schools - does not matter. The spiritual beings that were given to humans in the mythologies were known. The individual gods and spirit figures are not fantastic inventions of a popular imagination. Anyone who speaks of “popular imagination” has a certain right to do so, but the imagination does not lie with those who gave the figures to the peoples, but the imagination lies with our present-day scholars, who speak of a popular imagination that does not exist at all. And in many cases, scholarship is a much worse superstition than what scholarship designates as superstition. In myths and legends, a much, much deeper wisdom can often be found, because they go back to the origins of things that were in the invisible beyond the sensual. When one engages in such contemplation, it is as if one were to cease being confined to one's own skin and one's existence were to continue from the inside out. One becomes familiar with the beings that are in the spiritual world; they have put one together and one can come into relationship with these beings again. For it is a real coming into relationship with these entities, which we attain through the path of knowledge that leads to the higher worlds. We ascend from the effects visible to the senses to the supersensible, invisible causes. Through the path of knowledge, man becomes one with the universe again.

We could cite many, very many more examples along these lines, but today we will conclude this reflection - so as not to prolong it too long - with a fact from Germanic mythology that will show you how, on the one hand, things happen in the development of humanity, and how, on the other hand, these events are preserved in myth, how many things are preserved in simple popular belief.

What is physical today was entirely spiritual in the beginning. Before these twelve brain nerves took shape, there were only the astral currents that entered them. Before the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord were formed, the corresponding astral currents were there. How do these nerve deposits arise in the human being? In the following way: Imagine that originally there was a watery, muddy fluid. Think of the brain in this way. You can still see this today in the part of the brain that has remained fluid and watery; if it remains too strong, a so-called hydrocephalus develops. Our brain emerged from such a watery brain and then became gelatinous. At first astral currents coming from outside flowed through this watery mass in all directions, and along these astral currents the gelatinous mass became structured and hardened, and nerves developed. Where nerves run today, there were originally astral currents, then etheric currents, and finally they became physical nerves. Imagine man gradually hardening. The mass was hardly cartilaginous when the first rudiment of the backbone appeared. The bony covering was still soft. The astral currents flowed in on the right and left, which later became the spinal nerves. We are looking back to an ancient time when the twenty-eight Izards began to send their currents - first astral - into man.

The twenty-eight Izards also had a leader, a controller who had a dignity between the Izards and the Amshaspands in the middle; this leader of the Izards was a kind of foreman, a divine spiritual being. When we look back into the ancient times, we see him working in such a way that he commanded the twenty-eight Izards and directed them to channel the astral currents into human beings. The whole earth was surrounded by this astral sphere; and just as today the winds flow through the earthly atmosphere, so the astral currents flowed into the human bodies. The old clairvoyants really saw these currents flowing into the heads and spines of people in the Atlantic Age. That was a living astral image. When the physical nerves gradually formed, this image disappeared, and that meant: their origin was forgotten, it was forgotten how the currents had been directed into the body.

The leader of the twenty-eight Izards initially commanded the forces of nature as they worked day after day. In the great course of the year, all this worked rhythmically and harmoniously. In the course of the day, it worked somewhat irregularly. Terrible lightning, thunder, and storms flashed through that air in the earth's orbit, which still had the astral in it. Then the god, the leader of the Izards, who had been working out there, changed his scene and worked inside, in the twenty-eight nerve currents of the spinal cord. He went out of that spiritual earth orbit and finally unfolded his powers in man. Germanic myth calls this god Thor or Donar. He is the same according to the Germanic view, who is later called Jupiter according to the Roman view. He is correctly worshipped as the thunderstorm god who caused the storms. He is also seen as being married to Sif, the astral earth atmosphere; these two now have a daughter who is something very special. How does this daughter come about? Because Thor has withdrawn into the inner being of the person and works through the twenty-eight nerve cords. Through the twenty-eight nerve cords, people do not perceive the astral on the outside, but in certain states of emergency they do perceive it, for example in a dream-like state of sleep. Those who were particularly predisposed to perceive this then said according to popular belief: “I am being pressed by Thrud” – and this is none other than the daughter of Thor. There people still knew that Thrud was born where Thor lives with his wife. That is why they called it “Thrudheim”.

You see, that is how closely folk tales are related to the occult truths. In this way, little by little, we can gain a deep insight into that wonderful structure that has been built by so many beings, into the human being. How childish and small a materialistic science appears to us, which wants to understand this wonderful structure in such a trivial way. In older times, this was felt quite differently. They expressed what modern science knows through realization with feeling. And when the old poet looked around and sensed how man, as the wonderful final structure, stands among the beings he sees on the physical plane, as the work of so infinitely many entities, he was allowed to speak the beautiful grand word that emotionally expresses such a deep truth:

Many powerful things live,
but nothing is more powerful
(than what can be seen)
than man.

My dear friends, this evening I would like to tell you something about the journey, and then give another talk tomorrow — since the next week has to be spent in Stuttgart and I will be dealing with some things that are perhaps more closely related in content to the things that I will also have to deal with today, as part of the description of the journey.

The journey began with Ilkley, in the north of England, where an educational course was to be held, a course dealing with Waldorf school methodology and didactics in relation to contemporary civilization. Ilkley is a town in the north of England with a population of about 8,000. At present there is a tendency in England to hold so-called summer schools at such places during the summer months, and this course was initially also in the form of such a summer school.

The course was to be accompanied by what we have developed in the anthroposophical movement in the way of eurythmy, and it was also to be accompanied by what six of our Waldorf school teachers could offer based on what has just been said in the individual lectures.

Ilkley is a place that is probably considered a kind of summer resort, but it is located in the immediate vicinity of those cities that really put you so deeply into what industrial-commercial culture is in our time. Leeds and other places are very close by, for example Bradford, and Manchester is not far away either. These are cities that truly reflect the life that has arisen from the present. One really has a feeling there that says very clearly how much the present needs a spiritual impact; a spiritual impact that is not limited to giving individual people something for their immediate individual-personal soul needs. It is certainly as justified as possible to see the anthroposophical movement in this light, but I am now speaking of the impressions that are really imposed on one by today's outside world.

You see, my dear friends, it is indeed the case that one would consider it an extraordinary, I would even say cultural paradox, if someone were to recommend adding indigestible mineral products - let's say any minerals, stones and so on - to human food, in other words, to regard it as something possible to add sand or the like to human food. One is compelled, on the basis of one's ideas about the human organism, to regard this as impossible. But anyone who is able to look more deeply into the structure and interrelationships of the world — and this may be said out of genuine anthroposophical feeling and perception — will have a special sense of a collection of houses and factories in such a style, which, so to speak, gives nothing to the aesthetic needs of human beings — as for example, in Leeds, where incredible-looking black houses are lined up in an abstract manner, where everything actually looks as if it were a condensation of the blackest coal dust, which has formed into houses in which people now live. If we consider this in connection with the development of culture and civilization of all mankind, and really do so with the same attitude as I have just applied to the sand in the stomach, we feel that we must say: It is just as impossible for human civilization for such a thing to become established in the long run in the whole course of human development and for human civilization to somehow progress inwardly.

Now it is really not the case that one could ever be a reactionary on anthroposophical ground. Of course, one must not speak of these things in a negative sense. These things have simply arisen out of the life of the whole evolution of the earth. But they are only possible within the development of humanity if they are imbued, permeated with a real spiritual life, if the spiritual life actually penetrates into these things and is gradually able to elevate them to a kind of aesthetics, so that people do not completely stray from the inner human through these things being placed in the unfolding of culture.

And I would like to say: it is precisely from such an experience that the most absolute necessity of a penetration of spiritual impulses into contemporary civilization arises. These things cannot be grasped merely in the sense of general ideas that one forms, but they must be grasped in connection with what is in the world. But one must have a heart for what is in the world!

Ilkley itself is a place that, on the one hand, has the atmosphere of its proximity to these other, purely industrial cities, but on the other hand, there are traces everywhere in the surrounding remains of the dolmens, the old Druid altars, that are reminiscent of an ancient spirituality that has no direct successor there. It is, I would say touching, to perceive when on the one hand one has the impression that I have just described, and when on the other hand, in this region, which I would say is thoroughly permeated by the effluents of those impressions, one climbs a hill and then finds the remains of the old sacrificial altars with the corresponding signs in the extraordinarily characteristic places where they are always found - there is something extraordinarily touching about it. There is such a hill near Ilkley, with such a stone at the top. And on this stone, essentially – it is a little more complicated – but essentially what is known as a swastika, which was imprinted on the stones that were placed at certain sites at that time and what was imprinted on something very specific: it points to how at these sites the Druid priest was imbued with the same thoughts that, let's say, two to three millennia ago, were culturally creative in these areas. For when one enters such a place, stands before such a rock with the engraved signs, then one can still see from the whole situation today that one is standing in the same place where the Druid priest once stood and where he felt so strongly about the engraving of this sign that he expressed his consciousness, which he had from his dignity, in this sign.

For what does one read in this sign when standing before such a stone? One reads the words that were in the heart of the Druid priest: Lo, the eye of sensuality beholds the mountains, beholds the places of men; the eye of the spirit, the lotus flower, the turning lotus flower – for its sign is the swastika – beholds the hearts of men, beholds the interior of the soul. And it is through this seeing that I want to be connected with those who are entrusted to me as a community. Just as one would otherwise read a text from a book, one reads this, so to speak, by standing in front of such a stone.

This is roughly the setting in which the Ilkley Conference was held. It consisted of my always giving the lectures in the morning, which this time, above all, tried to extract the Waldorf school pedagogy and didactics from the whole historical development of the art of education. This time I started from the way in which the art of education in Greek culture grew out of general Greek life, from which one can see that actually no special methods or special practices should be invented for school, but that school should impart what is contained in general culture.

It is certainly not right, for example, to invent special practices in Froebelian kindergartens – and I am not criticizing Froebel at all! – for doing this or that with the children, practices that are not connected to and have not grown out of general cultural life. Rather, it is right for the person practising the art of education to be directly involved in general cultural life, to have a heart and mind for it, and then to incorporate into the educational methods from direct life that into which the person to be educated is to grow later.

And so I wanted to show how pedagogy and didactics must grow out of our life, but now permeated by the spirit. This gave us the opportunity to shed light on the Waldorf school method from a different point of view. What I just mentioned was only the starting point; the subject at hand was an examination of Waldorf school pedagogy, which you are familiar with.

After that, there was a eurythmy performance by the children of the Kings Langley School and eurythmy performances by those eurythmy artists who had come with us at the Ilkleyer Theatre there. It would probably have been better if the latter had taken place first, so that it could have been seen in the order itself how what is cultivated as eurythmy in the school also grows out of eurythmy as an art that is part of cultural life. Well, these things will settle down in the future, so that in terms of external arrangements, too, a picture will be given of what is actually intended.

The third aspect, so to speak, was the achievements of those who had been involved as teachers at the Waldorf School. And here it must truly be said that the greatest possible interest was shown in the matter. I must say, for example, that the way in which Dr. von Baravalle presented his ideas was extraordinarily moving for anyone who cares about the development of the Waldorf School. When one saw how Dr. von Baravalle simply explained his geometrical views in the way they apply to children, using the method that you should know well from his book on physical and mathematical methods, and how then, from an artistic-mathematical development of surface transformation and surface metamorphosis, one might say, suddenly with an inner drama, the Pythagorean theorem emerged. When they saw how, after the audience had been led step by step and did not really know where it was all going, a number of surfaces were shifted until, at the end, the Pythagorean theorem was visualized on the blackboard by shifting the surfaces. There was an inner amazement among the audience, which consisted of teachers, an inner dramatic unfolding of thoughts and feelings, and I would like to say such an honest, sincere enthusiasm for what is coming into the school as a method that it was really moving – just as what our teachers presented in general aroused the most extraordinary interest. We had brought examples of our students' work, which consists of sculptural pieces, making toys, paintings, and so on. The greatest interest was aroused when it was described how the children work on these projects and how they fit into the school's overall curriculum.

The way in which music lessons are taught, as interpreted by Miss Lämmert, attracted the greatest attention, as did the discussions by Dr. Schwebsch. The insistent, loving way of Dr. von Heydebrand, then the forceful way of our Dr. Karl Schubert; all these are things that really showed that it is possible to bring the essence of the Waldorf school system to the soul of a teaching staff in a vivid way. Miss Röhrle then gave a eurythmy lesson for different people, which was also a good addition, so that the whole thing was quite well summarized from an educational point of view. I can say that because I had no part in putting the program together. All of this was put together by our English friends in such a way that it really was a very nice summary of the educational subject.

During the whole conference, a committee was formed which set itself the task of founding an independent school in England based on the model of the Waldorf School. The prospects are actually very good for such a school to be established as a day school, alongside the Kings Langley School, which had already agreed last year, after my Oxford lectures, to adopt the Waldorf school methodology. As I said, it was the children of the Kings Langley School who had presented what they had learned in eurythmy at the theater in Ilkley. The interest and the way in which these things have been received, and also how sympathetically the eurythmy performances have been received, is something that can already be very satisfying. This was the first half of August, until August 18. Then we hiked over to Penmaenmawr.

Penmaenmawr is a place in North Wales, on the western English coast, where the island of Anglesey is located, and this Penmaenmawr is a place that could not have been better chosen for this anthroposophical undertaking this year. For this Penmaenmawr is filled with the directly tangible astral atmosphere, into which the young man shaped himself, who had emerged from the Druid service, traces of which can be found everywhere. It is right on the seashore, as I said, where the island of Anglesey is located; a bridge, which, by the way, is ingeniously built, leads over to it. On one side, hills and mountains rise everywhere near Penmaenmawr, and on these mountains you can find the remains of the old so-called sacrificial altars, cromlechs and so on scattered all over the place; there are traces of this ancient Druidic service everywhere.

These individual scattered cult devices, if I may call them that, are apparently arranged in the simplest way. If you look at them from the side, they are stones arranged in a square or rectangle, with a stone lying on top. If you look at them from above, these stones would stand like this [see drawing], and then a stone lies on top, enclosing the whole thing like a small chamber.

Of course, such things were also grave monuments. But I would like to say that in older times the function of a grave monument is always connected with the function of a much more extensive cult. And so I do not want to hold back here from expressing what such a cult site can teach us.

You see, these stones enclose a kind of chamber; a capstone lies on top of it. This chamber is dark in a certain way. So when the sun's rays fall on it, the outer physical light remains. But sunlight is filled with spiritual currents everywhere. This spiritual current continues into this dark space. And the Druid priest, as a result of his initiation, had the ability to see through the Druid stones and see the downward flow - not of physical sunlight, because that was blocked - but of what lives spiritually and soulfully in physical sunlight. And that inspired him with what then flowed into his wisdom about the spiritual cosmos, about the universe. They were therefore not only burial places, they were places of knowledge.

But even more. If at certain times of the day this was the case, what I have just described, then one can say: at other times of the day the opposite was the case, that currents went back from the earth [upwards], which could then be observed when the sun was not shining on them, and in which lived that which were the moral qualities of the community of the priest, so that the priest could see at certain times what the moral qualities of his community children were in the surrounding area. So the descending spiritual substance as well as the ascending spiritual substance showed him that which allowed him to stand in a truly spiritual way in his entire sphere of influence.

These things are, of course, not recorded in what today's science tells us about these places of worship. But it is indeed what can be seen here directly, because the power of the impulses – the impulses from the work of the Druid priests in the time when it was their good time – was so strong that even today these things are absolutely alive in the astral atmosphere there.

I was then able to visit another type of place of worship with Dr. Wachsmuth: from Penmaenmawr, you have to walk about an hour and a half up a mountain. At the top, there is something like a hollow. From this hollow, you have an unobstructed, wonderful view of the surrounding mountains and also of the hollow boundary of your own mountain. Up there in this hollow, one found what can be described as the actual sun cult site of the ancient Druids. It is arranged in such a way that the corresponding stones are arranged with their cover leaves; the traces are present everywhere.

Think of it this way: these places of worship have no inner space. Up here, in close proximity to each other, you have two such Druidic circles. When the sun makes its daily path, the shadows of these stones fall in a variety of ways, and you can now distinguish, let's say, when the sun passes through the constellation of Aries, the Aries shadow, then the Taurus shadow, the Gemini shadow and so on. Even today, when deciphering these things, one still gets a good impression of how the Druid priest was able to read the secrets of the universe from the various, qualitatively different sun shadows that this Druid circle revealed, from that which lives on in the sun shadow when the physical sunlight is held back, so that in fact it contains a world clock that speaks of the secrets of the world. But these were definitely signs that emerged from the shadows that were cast, signs that spoke of the secrets of the world and the cosmos.

The second circle was then a kind of control to check what the first circle had revealed. If you had gone up in an airplane and gone so far away that this distance in between might have disappeared, you would have had, looking down, the ground plan of what the ground plan of our Goetheanum was, directly from these two druid circles.

All this is located where the island of Anglesey is also close by, where much of what has been preserved in the accounts of King Arthur took place. The center of King Arthur was a little further south, but some of the events that took place there were also part of King Arthur's work. All this gives the astral atmosphere of Penmaenmawr something that makes this place in particular a special one, one of which one can say: when speaking about spiritual things, one is compelled to speak in imaginations. It is the case with imaginations that when they are formed in the course of the representations, these imaginations in the astral atmosphere within today's civilization very soon disappear. When one tries to depict the spiritual, one is constantly fighting against the disappearance of the imaginations. One has to create these imaginations, but they quickly fade away, so that one is constantly faced with the necessity of creating these imaginations in order to have them in front of oneself. The astral atmosphere that results from these things is such that it is a little more difficult to form the imaginations there in Penmaenmawr, but that this difficulty in turn leads to a great relief of the spiritual life on the other hand, that now these imaginations, after they are formed, simply look like they have been written into the astral atmosphere, so that they are inside. Every time one forms imaginations that express the spiritual world, one has the feeling that they remain in the astral atmosphere there. And it is precisely this circumstance that so vividly reminds us of how these Druid priests chose their special places, where they could, I would say, effectively engrave in the astral atmosphere what was incumbent upon them to shape in imaginations from the secrets of the world. Coming from Ilkley, which is very close to industrialism and shows only very slight traces of the ancient Druidic period, one feels a kind of real transcendence, almost like crossing a threshold, and now entering into something that is simply spiritual in the immediate present. Everything here is spiritual. You could say that this part of Wales is a very special place on Earth. Today, this Wales is the custodian of an incredibly strong spiritual life, which admittedly consists of memories, but real memories that stand there. So that it may actually be said: the opportunity to talk about Anthroposophy at this place – not in reference to the branches of Anthroposophy, but about Anthroposophy itself, about the inner core of Anthroposophy – I count that as one of the most significant stages in the development of our Anthroposophical life.

The credit for having made this institution, for having placed something like this in the development of anthroposophical life, goes to Mr. Dunlop, who is extraordinarily insightful and energetic in this direction. He explained the plan to me when I was in England last year and then stuck to it and has now brought it to fruition. From the outset, it was planned to bring something purely anthroposophical in connection with eurythmy to this place this August.

Mr. Dunlop then had a third impulse, but it was impossible to carry out, and it may be said that what has become possible has only become possible through the truly spiritually insightful way of choosing this place. I think it is of some importance to bear in mind that there are such outstanding places on the earth's surface where, in such a vivid memory, there is an immediate awareness of what was once a living sun cult in preparation for the later adoption of Christianity in Northern and Western Europe.

The lectures were in the morning; the afternoon was partly devoted to allowing the participants to see this astral atmosphere and its connection to the memories of decaying sacrificial sites, dolmens and so on, on the spot; the evening was filled with discussions on anthroposophical topics or with eurythmy performances. There were five of them in. Penmaenmawr, which were received with great sincerity on the one hand and with the greatest interest on the other. The audience consisted partly of anthroposophists, but also of a non-anthroposophical audience. It was certainly the case that — which is, of course, understandable for a mountainous area bordering the sea — from one hour to the next there was always a nice change from half-downpours to bright sunshine and so on. For example, one evening — the external furnishings were almost the same as in this carpentry workshop — we really did go from a downpour to a eurythmy performance; at the beginning, people were still sitting in the hall with their umbrellas, but they did not let themselves be deterred in their enthusiasm. So it was definitely something, as I said in Penmaenmawr itself, that can truly be recorded as a very significant chapter in the history of our anthroposophical movement.

One event was dedicated to discussing educational questions in Penmaenmawr as well. And on this occasion, I would also like to mention the following, which you have already been able to read in the brief presentation I gave of it in the “Goetheanum”. When I came to England, to Ilkley, I found a book called 'Education Through Imagination', which I was able to skim through at first and which immediately captivated me; a book that one of our friends in particular describes as one of the most important books in England. Its author is Miss MacMillan. The same person was then chairman on the first evening and the following evenings in Ilkley. Miss MacMillan gave the opening speech. It was uplifting to see the beautiful enthusiasm and the inner honest fire for the art of education in this woman. And at the same time, it was extraordinarily satisfying for us that this woman in particular is fully committed to what can be achieved in a truly serious art of education through the Waldorf school methodology.

During the following days, I read more of the book and summarized my impressions in the article in the last issue of the Goetheanum. Then, last Monday, Frau Doctor and I were also able to visit the place of work of this excellent woman in Deptford, near London and Greenwich. There we found the Miss MacMillan Care and Education Institute. She takes children from the lowest and poorest social classes into this care and education institute; she also aims to take children at an older age. Today she has 300 children at the school; she started with six children many years ago, today there are 300. These children are taken in at the age of two, coming from circles where they are very dirty, impoverished, sick, malnourished or very poorly nourished – if I may say so, rickety, typhoid, afflicted with worse. Today you can see a kind of school barracks in the immediate vicinity, like those of the Waldorf School – the barracks, not our current opulently built house, the provisional barracks – but there they are very beautiful, nicely furnished. The things are in a garden, but you only have to take a few steps from any of the Iore and then you can compare the population from which these children come, living on the streets in the most terrible squalor and filth, with what is being done with these children.

First of all, the bathing facilities are exemplary. That is the main thing. The children arrive at 8 o'clock, are released in the evening, and thus return to their home every evening. The care begins in the morning with a bath. Then a kind of teaching begins, all done with tremendous devotion, with a touching, poignant sense of sacrifice, all arranged in a touching, practical way. Miss MacMillan is also of the opinion that the education of the Waldorf School must penetrate everything, so one must say: one can see that from this point of view with complete satisfaction – while today one might want to do some things differently in terms of methodology; but that is not considered at all in the face of this sense of sacrifice. Things are always in a state of becoming. It is truly significant how well-mannered these children become, which is particularly evident during mealtimes, when they are led to the table and serve themselves, or when the food is passed by one of the children. What practical sense can achieve is shown, for example, by the fact that this, I would like to say extraordinarily homely, “feeding” of the children, during which one would like to eat along, costs 2 shillings 4 pence for the child during the week. Everything is extremely well organized. It was wonderful, for example, to see how the older children, who have been at the center for years, were called together and then presented us with a long scene from Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream,” the Midsummer Night's Dream, with real feeling and even a certain mastery of dramatic technique. There was something touchingly magnificent about the way these children performed it, expressively and impressively, with real inner control of the drama.

And this performance of Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream” was almost in the same place where Shakespeare himself once performed his plays for the court with his troupe. Because near Greenwich was the court of Queen Elizabeth. There, in the rooms where today's classrooms are located and other rooms, as I will explain in a moment, even the royal household of Queen Elizabeth lived, and Shakespeare, coming from London, had to perform his plays for the courtiers there. The children performed these Shakespeare plays for us at the same location.

And in the same area, connected to this educational mental hospital, is a children's clinic, again for the poorest of the poor. Every year, 6,000 children go through this clinic, not 6,000 at the same time, but every year. The head of this clinic is now also Miss MacMillan. So that in a very impoverished and polluted area, in a terrible area, a personality is working with full energy and actually great in the conception of what she is doing.

It was therefore a very deep satisfaction for me when Miss MacMillan expressed the intention, if at all possible, to visit our Waldorf School in Stuttgart with some of her colleagues at Christmas. This teaching staff is extraordinarily devoted. You can imagine that caring for such children, with the characteristics I have just described, is not exactly easy. It therefore filled me with great satisfaction that this particular person was the chairman for the Ilkley lectures, and then in Penmaenmawr – where she came again in the few days that she could bring herself to do so – she introduced a discussion on education in which Dr. von Baravalle and Dr. von Heydebrand spoke. So it was precisely what took place at Penmaenmawr and what was connected with it that was really quite satisfying.

The last part, so to speak, was the third part, which was the days in London. Dr. Wegman had come over for what was to be my first task in London. We were to present the method and essence of our anthroposophic medical efforts to a number of English doctors. Forty doctors were invited, and most of them appeared at Dr. Larkin's house. I was able to speak in two lectures, first about the special nature of our remedies in their connection with the symptoms and with the nature of the human being. And then in the second lecture I was able to give a physiological-pathological basis for the functions of the human being; then something about the mode of action of individual remedies, again in connection with this basis, the effects of the antimony remedy, the effects of mistletoe and so on – and I believe we can truly say that perhaps a fairly good understanding of the matter has been brought to bear, even in a wider circle, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. Wegman was consulted quite frequently. So this aspect of anthroposophical work has also come into its own.

The finale was a performance at the Royal Academy of Art, which was an extraordinary success. The room is not particularly large, but not only was it sold out, people also had to be turned away. The eurythmy was received with extraordinary enthusiasm. One could say of eurythmy that wherever it goes, it makes its way. If only it were not for the enormous obstacles that exist in the present time! On the one hand, when one sees all that is going on, for example, the tendency of the Ilkley enterprises to now have a kind of Waldorf School emerge in England, then one looks again with a great concern, which cannot leave one today, at what one, I would like to say, encounters as an indefinite, painful response when one asks oneself: What will become of the Waldorf school in the terribly endangered Germany, from which, for example, the school efforts have emerged? I say this not so much because of the pecuniary side of the matter, but because of the extremely endangered circumstances within Germany. There are some things that make you say: If things continue as they are now, it is hard to imagine where the efforts of the Waldorf School in particular will lead.

After all, if things continue as they are now, as they have arisen from what is currently happening, there will hardly be any possibility of bringing such things through the current turmoil without danger. Then one has a heavy heart when one sees how these things are happening after all, and how in fact today all things in the world happen out of shortsightedness and without any inkling that spiritual currents must play a part in the development of culture, and how in fact in the widest circles people have lost all direct interest, all hearty engagement with things. Basically, we are all asleep when it comes to things that go so terribly to the root of human and earthly becoming. Humanity is asleep. At most, one complains about the matter when it is of immediate concern. But things do not happen without the development of great ideas! And there is such a dullness in the world towards the impulses that are to strike: Either one does not want to hear about it, or one feels uncomfortable in the world when something like the endangered situation in Central Europe is pointed out. One feels uncomfortable, one does not like to talk about it, or one colors it in a certain way and speaks of insubstantial things, of guilt and the like. In this way one gets rid of these things. The way humanity relates to general world events today is something that can be terribly painful for the soul. This general cultural sleep, which is becoming more and more widespread, is basically something quite terribly lamentable. There is actually no awareness of how the earth today, in its civilization, forms a unity, even in the face of such elementary events – I do not want to talk about them here, but they have happened – such as the poignant Japanese tragedy brought about by nature. Yes, when one compares how people looked at these things relatively recently and how they look at them today, there is something that really does bring home to one again and again the necessity of pointing out how urgently humanity needs to wake up.

Of course, this is always in front of you, especially when you see what could become of it if people would take an interest, if people would come to take things as they are, if they would not take them in terms of national divisions, in terms of state divisions, but in a general human sense! When one sees on the one hand what could become of it, and when on the other hand one sees how it is almost impossible because of general lethargy, then this actually characterizes, I would say, our present age most of all. That is the way things are. One cannot speak of the one without the other also arising in the context.

I wanted to give you a kind of travelogue today, my dear friends. I will speak about questions of intellectual life, which are, of course, more distantly related and which are actually also anthroposophical in content, tomorrow, after this.

My lecture will take place tomorrow at 8 a.m.; on Tuesday at 8 a.m. there will be a eurythmy performance here.

The contemplation of the world of dreams, as we did yesterday, has drawn our attention to the fact that in the moment when we enter from the world that is spread out before our senses as the world of natural laws into another world, the natural laws actually cease. I would like to say that they cease gradually, they cease little by little. In dreams, one can still clearly see how they are still based, on the one hand, on what is natural and lawful, but how, on the other hand, moral and ethical connections play into the dream, how one thing is connected to another in such a way that something is expressed in the context, such as, let us say, the moral value of the dreamer or the like. The dream is just a gentle transition from the physical-sensual world into completely different worlds, into worlds that then have nothing at all to do with the merely natural-law contexts.

Now, however, through such ideas and feelings, as they can be aroused by directing one's soul towards such transitions as are given in dreams, a, I would say, human understanding of world connections must be brought about, which otherwise should simply stand before the human soul as unrevealed secrets. You will soon feel what I actually mean. What matters is not intellectual comprehension of these things. What matters is to gain a totally human understanding, to gain a human relationship to the things with which man is connected, connected in his whole life and through the fact that he belongs to humanity. And it is impossible to say or present something about certain things in life if you have not allowed your feelings to be touched by something like what was discussed yesterday about 'Iraum. The things that depend on this coloring that the feeling gets as a result. And so today, in response to what was said yesterday about dreams and the strange utterances of the experimental magician, I want to put forward something that is linked to phenomena of life that should actually be felt as much greater mysteries than is usually the case. In connection with yesterday's considerations, such people, who from a certain point of view, bear the collective name “somnambulists”, people who show all kinds of deviations in their lives, which, for my sake, even go so far as to get up from their beds at night, climb around on roofs without falling off, and so on, that is, those people who are somnambulistic.

And secondly, from a certain point of view, I would like to discuss an appearance today that we have already discussed several times from other points of view, an appearance like that of Jakob Böhme or, for that matter, Paracelsus. And thirdly, in connection with this, I would like to discuss the appearance of Swedenborg. It can be said that today's humanity has become indifferent to everything, because the kind of interest that I would call a feuilletonistic one has spread so tremendously. Basically, phenomena such as somnambulists, Jakob Böhme or Swedenborg should be eating at people's souls, for they are quite different human phenomena that are placed in human life than ordinary citizens are.

Let us now try to understand such phenomena. Take the ordinary somnambulists. You know that in a certain way what they represent is connected with the manifestations of the moon. We have just recently spoken about the significance of the moon in the universe, and therefore this belongs in this context. I have told you that those beings who once were on Earth and brought man the original wisdom, which gradually faded away but which we find when we go back in history, that these entities have withdrawn to the Moon, as it were, to a kind of world colony, and that they populate the Moon internally. It is really the case that only the last remnants of what is characteristic of these beings have remained on earth in a coarser form. People were quite different back then, when these present-day moon beings were still on earth as the great teachers or guides of earthly humanity.

What these entities have left behind on earth are physical phenomena, the facts of reproductive life. These facts of reproductive life in its present form were not present on earth at the time when these entities gave people the original wisdom. Just as when you have dissolved any substance in a liquid, the liquid can look quite pure and even, but when the substance turns out to be sediment, then the substance is coarse and the liquid is even finer than it used to be – that is roughly what I mean here. What lives on earth today as the reproductive life is coarse in relation to what it once was. And what these beings have taken with them into the sphere of the moon is infinitely refined, has become infinitely more spiritual. But both belong together, both have been differentiated from each other. And what the moon really exerts on the earth as a force, what still works on the earth today as lunar force, is, as I told you when I discussed the position of the moon in the cosmos, that the moon actually reflects everything that is in the cosmos, not just the light of the sun, but actually reflects everything. So that we have two things in the moon: the interior of the moon, which is not currently emerging to the outside, but has closed itself off and been given a different task in the world, and that which is reflected back.

Now, in relation to his physical body, man is subject to the most powerful earthly force, gravity, in the way he moves, and also, incidentally, in the way he sits. It is always gravity that he appeals to. If he did not succumb to gravity with his physical body, he would not have these different states of equilibrium when walking, sitting, standing, and so on.

But with his etheric body, man is not so exposed to the earth force, but to the moon force. He is exposed to this force radiated back from the universe, and it pulls him out. While the force of gravity on earth pulls him down, this lunar force pulls him out into the cosmos. And this lunar force is temporarily predominantly active in somnambulant personalities. For moments, the lunar force overcomes the earthly force, and these personalities behave as if they had only an etheric body with which they can freely follow the lunar force. They drag their physical body along with them, and, as I said, climb around in the most daring way possible, as only the etheric body can, as the physical body cannot at all, but it is dragged along in such moments. So it is essentially, I would say, a breaking in of special lunar effects that occur in these somnambulistic personalities.

But now we must ask further, because everything is part of the great cosmic context, which ultimately leads back to nothing but beings. For the phenomena outside of the beings are only apparent, only the beings in the universe are truly real. So the beings in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, are truly real, as are the human beings, the angels, the archangels and so on. These are the realities; individualized beings are the realities. The other is something that takes place between beings, the other is an appearance, it is not a reality. So when we speak of realities, we are dealing with beings.

Now, when such beings appear, individualized human beings, that is, sleepwalkers, how does the appearance of such sleepwalkers fit into the whole of the universe? How is it that there are sleepwalkers at all in the context of the universe?

Now you really must grasp what I am about to say not in a logical, intellectual context, but in an emotional one, for that is the right logic in this field. Try to penetrate your feeling with the idea that one must go, I would say, from the world of natural law, beyond the currents of the dream-like into quite different worlds where natural laws no longer apply but where other connections prevail. Try to really feel your way into it, then you will also feel that one can speak of it: what is it like for those people who, in some earth life, appear as somnambulists, with what is not of this earth life, let us say, in the pre-earthly existence or in the post-earthly existence?

Surely, we could point out all the shortcomings and dark sides of the somnambulist, and even include the mediumistic aspect, but you know all that already, or at least you can know it. They behave differently in life, they act differently, they are different. Now, if they are different in earthly life, then one would have to ask, if one were to reach the spiritual world with its feelings in this way, I would like to say, quite literally through dreams: Are they perhaps also different in the neighboring extraterrestrial life, in the pre-earthly existence? What are they like there?

You see, it is evident from such entities, which are somnambulists in earthly incarnation, that in their pre-earthly existence they were actually extremely hostile in the spiritual world towards all spiritual beings.

If we use the means that already exist and that I have often spoken to you about, to investigate a somnambulant to find out what it was like in the pre-earthly existence – since the French Course we have often spoken of this pre-earthly existence in its concrete details – if we now investigate: What were such somnambulants like before they descended to their earthly existence? As grotesque as it may seem, it must be said: they were quite out of place in their pre-earthly existence – but they were materialists in the spiritual world in their pre-earthly existence.

Of course, one is not so materialistic there as to develop theoretical views about materialism. One moves, after all, first in the world of sympathies and antipathies; not in the world of concepts and judgments, but in the world of sympathies and antipathies. These somnambulists lived in the spiritual world, but most of what they experienced in the spiritual world was unpleasant to them. Everywhere they encountered spiritual beings they felt a sense of hatred for them. And so, when they descended to earthly existence, they could not anchor their astral body in the right way within themselves. One must indeed consolidate the astral body when one descends into earthly life. This consolidation suffers from the fact that these beings have constantly taken up these forces of antipathy towards the spiritual. And then the karma, which I would call cosmically directed, arises, that these entities, in their earthly life, because they have a physical body, must be connected to this physical body in just the way that a not quite consolidated astral body must be connected to the physical body.

Now I have also shown you how one passes through the sphere of the moon when descending back to earth, how one absorbs the lunar forces. Such beings have too little independence in relation to the lunar forces. They are not sufficiently consolidated in themselves, so that a relationship with the lunar forces remains in them when they enter their physical body. The result of this is that such beings actually show less consideration for their physical body than the average person shows for his physical body. And it is this, that they remain subject to the lunar sphere, the means of education in the entire plan of the world, to cure these people of their hostile attitude towards the spiritual. So that one stands with the moon-sick before people who, in this earthly life, are to be educated to get rid of their hostility towards the spiritual by being moon-sick. Through this non-grasping of the physical body, they experience the spiritual on earth, while in the spiritual world itself they have not sufficiently experienced the spiritual.

The normal citizen, who is now firmly seated in his physical body, is much more firmly seated in it today than is desirable for the good of humanity; he is terribly stuck in it. But the somnambulists pay very little attention to this physical body. Therefore, under certain constellations, they may experience moments when they are more given to the forces of the moon than to the forces of the earth.

Let us now move on from these personalities to one who, I would say, stood there in a certain greatness in Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus. Of course, such personalities also appear in history in a less grandiose way, not now in the present time, but it is not so long ago that such personalities were around. I would say there have always been more or less little Jakob Böhmes. Until a few decades ago, you could still find such little Jakob Böhmes, these personalities who, when you look at them so outwardly in ordinary life, are distinguished by the fact that they look into nature in a different way than is the case with the average citizen.

Take a characteristic manifestation in the case of Jakob Böhme. What was in his whole human character was already manifested in his youth. Take the characteristic manifestation: he tends animals like others do, when suddenly he has the urge to leave the animals, the herd and the others who are there, and to go to a place up in the mountains. Driven by instinct, he looks at a particular place. There he finds a hole in the ground, the earth is open. He looks down and finds a treasure down there. It shines up at him. He is amazed by this apparition, but he goes away in prayer. It does not even occur to him to take any of it. He often went back to look again. The hole was no longer there, the treasure must have been covered, and so on. He should have thoroughly convinced himself that what he had seen did not exist in the physical world, but of course, given his whole spiritual makeup, he never came to believe that he had not seen something after all.

Thus, what later emerged as his special way of thinking was prepared in him: to see into the borderline processes of things, the essence of things, everywhere. Anyone who reads Jakob Böhme's writings with even a little understanding will notice that the man saw salt and sulfur differently than a normal chemist of the time, of course. He speaks out of completely different insights. He even speaks out of insights that are not quite so familiar to him, so that language everywhere meets what he sees, because language is really sometimes confused and chaotic, and you have to live in it if you want to understand what this Jakob Böhme actually saw.

Now, to help you visualize the whole phenomenon of Jakob Böhme, I remind you of what I told you about the Druids. They dimmed the physical sunlight with their cromlechs, looked into the shadows, and in the shadows they saw the spiritual that radiates from the sun. For other people, shadows are just shadows, they are not light, they are something negative. For the Druids, however, it was something very real. And the shadow was not only different in its direction, depending on whether it appeared in March or October, but also in its inner attitude, in its coloring, in its coloring, but also in particular in the spiritual that it contained. If you push back the physical rays of the sun, so to speak, then the spiritual that the sun radiates appears precisely in the shadow. But for Jakob Böhme, this was what followed from his entire human essence. I would say that when he gave himself an inward jolt in a certain direction – it's a rough way of speaking, but that's how it is – when he gave himself an inward jolt, he could extinguish the physical sunlight and actually see into the darkness.

And what happens when you look through something where you don't follow the light, so to speak, but where you have something like a boundary in front of you? Something like a mirror appears. But when you look, let's say, like this - I'm drawing the physical eye, but it's not so much the physical eye that matters - there is light everywhere. Well, then you just see the physical things. But when you can extinguish this physical sunlight through your own power, then looking into the darkness actually occurs in the back. You don't even need the shadow, looking into the darkness occurs. But when this looking into the darkness occurs, then it has the effect of a mirror. And because Jacob Böhme could see like this, he saw things as if they were reflected in the darkness, and they gave back to his soul's eye what they had inwardly spiritually. So he saw the most ordinary objects when he tuned into them, especially the characteristic objects he speaks of, salt, sulfur, mercury and so on, not as one sees them when looking at them under ordinary circumstances, but he saw their essence, that which underlies them spiritually, mirrored in the darkness.

This was the special way in which he saw: He saw what underlies things spiritually, mirrored in the darkness. He saw them in the glow of the sun's effects, but excluding the physical effects of light and heat. While the somnambulists bring their will into the lunar effects and are thus less subject to the gravity of the earth for moments, and are more exposed to the lunar effects, while the ordinary somnambulists follow the lunar effects with their organs of will, Böhme was able to follow the solar effects with his organ of knowledge, and was thus a solar man, so to speak, a solar addict in contrast to the lunar addicts. And in such people, as Jakob Böhme was in his particularly characteristic greatness, we again have human individualities that stand out from ordinary humanity through a special relationship to the spiritual: sun people.

Again, with these sun people, we must ask: What were they like in their pre-earthly existence? Yes, you see, the pre-earthly existence of such people is actually extremely interesting. I have often reminded you that in the early days of human development, people always looked back to their pre-earthly existence. Something occurred in their consciousness that allowed them to have a kind of memory of their pre-earthly existence. They knew: I descended from spiritual worlds into the earthly world.

Something like this, not like a personal looking back, but a looking back on the way one looked at the spiritual world before one's earthly existence, emerged atavistically in Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus. As a result, such people have more of a connection to the elemental spirits of nature than to what natural things outwardly represent on their surface. They see more the spiritual entities that are within nature. For example, what is called sulfur on earth is not seen in the pre-earthly existence, but, if I may express it this way, the elemental spirit that underlies sulfur is seen. This is seen in the pre-earthly existence.

The yellow sulfur or sulfur of a different color – this concept does not exist in the pre-earthly existence. For the pre-earthly existence, there is not even an idea of the “sulfur” that people on earth talk about. There is absolutely nothing of the physical sulfur, but there is an idea in the pre-earthly existence of the very different spiritual essence that underlies the sulfur. These are the qualities that people like Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus possess.

As a result, they have precisely the power to exclude physical sunlight and, in physical darkness – I cannot say to see the spiritual effects of the sun, just as one does not see light or color, and so not see the spiritual effects of the sun either – I would say that with the vision, one encounters this physical darkness, but in spiritual elevation, which then reflects the spiritual that is present in the nature beings and natural forces. |

And basically it is actually like this: if there were not occasionally people who provide such inspiration – the channels through which such inspiration enters humanity are usually not taken into account – people would not know much about nature at all, because these inspirations are also necessary for even the most abstract knowledge of nature. The others then put everything into intellectual terms. But this looking into the living nature of things comes from such sun people.

You see, it became more and more difficult to express such things in the world the closer we came to the 20th century. Most of you know the biography of Jakob Böhme. You know how he was persecuted. If he had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, or if someone like Jakob Böhme, with the particular way he spoke, had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, he would probably have been locked up in an asylum. He would have fared much worse than he did in his environment at the time, but it was difficult even then to appear. After all, Jakob Böhme had, in a sense, still been able to feel the benefit of that time, and this benefit consisted, for example, in the fact that he was not maltreated with what we already have to learn in schools today. School education, elementary school education, was not so advanced. Please do not think that I am speaking against elementary education, but it must be said that things must also be judged from a different point of view. Perhaps not many of you have lived in such places where some retired shoemaker was a teacher. In such places, children have not learned all that much wisdom in the time that people in the present day have been able to live through in their youth; they remained much more untouched. But what one is exposed to in today's normal school not only trains something, but also kills something. Jakob Böhme had the good fortune not to have been subjected to such a school education, and therefore what was in him as a sun-person could push its way to the surface.

Yes, it is already there in the person; but sometimes it has to come out in a completely different way. I could quote you some compositions from the last third of the 19th century in which I could show you how people, because they went through school education from the end of the 19th century, naturally could not speak like Jakob Böhme - but in some musical compositions it comes out anyway. There is also a keynote and a basic mood as in the writings of Jakob Böhme. It breaks through somewhere, especially in music, but not in what has particularly reached the heights. Don't think that I would have to talk to you about a Wagnerian composition, nor about “Hänsel and Gretel”, of course, when I tell you these things. I would have to mention completely different compositions. But there are such musical achievements where something like this breaks through. Now, as I said, it is precisely such impulses, which are then realized, that have a certain significance for earthly life.

Now we can consider the third type, which has emerged so characteristically in Swedenborg. Swedenborg looks quite peculiar when you look at the externals. Swedenborg had already ascended to the forties of his life on earth; he was a recognized great scholar of his time, encompassing the entire science of his time, as much as one could possibly encompass this science of his time. There are works of his that have been published. But there are an enormous number of manuscripts that were written entirely outside the science of the time, that were written so strongly outside the science of the time – they then remained manuscripts – that a Swedish society of the greatest Swedish scholars has now been formed to publish those works of Swedenborg's that he wrote in the sense of normal science until well into the 1740s.

But then something like this begins with Swedenborg, where people say: He has gone mad. He has just gone mad! — One publishes his works as those of one of the greatest men of his time and explains that not just anyone is good enough to publish them, but that today entire academies are needed to make Swedenborg accessible to the world up to the age of forty-four or something like that. The future is not taken into account! But it is important that Swedenborg lived to a certain age in the intellectual and scholarly environment of his time, which was already so intellectual and scholarly, and that a certain spiritual insight then dawned on him.

Such a spiritual view, as it specifically occurred in Swedenborg, has very special characteristics. It is like this: If you imagine a human being and what the human being has as a brain, then, in a certain way, for the normal person, the etheric body fills the brain. What I have indicated here in red would be the physical brain. The etheric body fills the physical brain and extends somewhat beyond it.

Now, in the normal way, in the right, I could also say bourgeois way, his etheric body was formed, his brain, his head constitution was formed so normally by Swedenborg until he was in his forties. Then a force overcame him that contracted this etheric body somewhat, not behind the skin, of course, but contracted somewhat, into itself, so that it became denser, thereby also becoming more independent of the brain, but still retaining all the cleverness. Because it is not true that he then became more foolish; he was just as clever as before.

When you walk around as a sleepwalker, your astral body is so strongly subject to the power of the moon. The organs of will then often adjust to the power of the moon. When you are like Jakob Böhme, your cognitive faculty is aligned with the powers of the sun, and it repels the physical effects of the sun. When one becomes like Swedenborg, when there is such a contraction of the etheric body, there is the power that causes it, the Saturn power, that power of Saturn – I described it to you cosmically a short time ago – in which there is actually something like a kind of inwardness of our entire planetary system, as one can also say, Saturn contains the powers of the memory of our planetary system. What had been passed on to Swedenborg was precisely this Saturn force, this inwardness of the entire planetary system. This is how he was able to see things in such visions as he just described them. He saw angels, archangels, processes between angels and archangels, as he just described them. But what was it actually? What did he enter through this contraction of the etheric body of his head? He did not succeed in seeing the real processes in the hierarchies. You have to imagine what he saw like this: if this is the Earth, then we are drawing the Earth's ether sphere. This now extends into the cosmic expanse, about which I told you yesterday that we would encounter the Orion Nebula and so on, that there is a lawfulness, not a natural lawfulness, but a lawfulness, as it is in a dream. Where space would end, we would only encounter the processes in the hierarchies. Swedenborg did not see into this with his ability to see, but all the processes that really take place outside the ether sphere are not merely reflected in the ether, but they call forth, I would say, real image processes in the ether. So that something is going on up there in the hierarchies that should be described quite differently, but which has an effect on the ether sphere of the earth, so that the ether forms act in the earth's ether. Figures are acting around us, these are not the real angels, these are the ether figures, the figures formed out of the ether, but which now also implement their deeds in such a way that they are understandable to man.

These – one cannot call them reflections, but perhaps real reflections – these real reflections of the higher hierarchies in the earth's ether were seen by Swedenborg. He did not see what angels were doing, but he saw what one can see when one is up there in the angelic deeds, not seeing them as such, but seeing what is going on down there in the earth's ether in the sphere of men. What the angels do up there cannot have a direct effect on people on earth; it is precisely these real reflections that then have an effect among people. The reflections in the ether have an effect among people, they walk among us. Swedenborg saw them, he became aware of them.

So if those people we call moonstruck cause us to look at their pre-earthly existence, if, when we look at people like Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus, we look at their present earthly existence, then we have every reason to look at the post-earthly existence of people like Swedenborg. Our earthly existence only makes sense when we look forward to the afterlife. For it is these people in particular who are still able, after death, to have an instructive effect on others who have passed through the gate of death, to tell them much of what must remain incomprehensible in the higher worlds if one has not already become acquainted with something of the higher worlds in the earthly world.

And one would like to say: It is so in the general spiritual plan of the world that human personalities of the kind of Swedenborg are introduced here on earth into the real shadows, real mirror images of the processes in the higher hierarchies, so that they are well prepared when they go up there, because they will need it precisely in the post-mortal existence. While the earth-lives of somnambulists, because of their condition, have something of the character of a reformatory in relation to the spiritual worlds, the lives of personalities such as Swedenborg have something preparatory for the achievements they have to accomplish after death. And so we can say that people are different in their individualities, and especially in those who are very different from the others, it can be shown how man can only be understood if we not only consider his relationship to the earthly environment, but if we know that he also has a relationship to the spiritual worlds in every moment of his life, even here in earthly existence has a relationship to the spiritual worlds. Everything that happens here in earthly existence, even in people in whom it manifests itself as strikingly as in Böhme and the others, has a connection to the pre-earthly existence, to the spirit that also lives in earthly existence, or to the post-earthly existence. Only in these special types, somnambulists, the Jakob Böhme type, the Swedenborg type, do we notice very strongly what is present to some extent in every human being: a being of earthly existence in relation to the pre-earthly existence or to the simultaneous earthly spiritual existence or to the post-earthly spiritual existence. In particular, those beings who, I might say, behave in the cosmos as I described to you at the time, that is, the moon beings, sun beings, Saturn beings, they need the forces that play in particular human beings to carry out their tasks.

And that is where a perspective can open up to us, which I will mention only at the end of these reflections. What this perspective opens up, I will talk about when I give the next lecture here. But a very specific perspective can open up for us. We really have to consider that the human interior, even the physical human interior, the ordinary physical human interior, which lies within the human skin, actually falls outside of what we usually call the cosmos.

We can, roughly speaking, say the following: if we have the earth here, then the mineral, plant, animal, physical-human effects and so on happen on it, and so what can be observed with the senses and combined with the mind happens on it. Then there are people on this earth on it. But there is also a world inside people, it is not the same world as outside. I could do it like this: I could draw many people schematically, always showing the inside of the people. What is going on inside the people could be the red, and the white around it could be the natural effects that can be seen with the senses and so on. Now you can make an abstraction. Do you think I will now erase everything that is there in the way of natural effects, I will only leave the red, I will erase everything so that only the inner being of people remains and everything else is gone. So imagine that I would first remove all the minerals from the earth, remove all the plants and remove all the animals, everything else that would be there in the way of natural effects – but if you remove the three natural kingdoms , everything is gone, and then there are the skins, so that you then have the physical skin gone, but not only the skins, but also all the physical matter that you have within you. I would take all that away, then something would remain of the whole globe: these are divine effects. We would still have the hierarchies in it, angels, archangels and so on. We would actually only then have taken away the earth and kept heaven.

And if you follow this sensation, then you come to adjust the human interior in the right way to the actual spiritual supersensible world and to imagine in a comprehensive way where that is that could be called heaven. It is actually in the person, in that which remains when all that is gone that I have described.

If you describe sleepwalkers, Jakob Böhme, Swedenborg as I have today, who are you actually talking about? Then you are not on earth, but in the cosmos. It is necessary in our time that we no longer talk about the human being as if he were a connection between the laws and effects of nature that are outside, as has been the case in the last few centuries. Instead, we must today become aware of what would be there if we were to remove everything – I do not want to repeat the horrible image again repeat the ghastly image — if one were to remove all that I have just said would be removed, and leave only the inner man, then one would not only come upon the spiritual world in a general, vague, abstract-pantheistic sense, but one would come upon the concrete spiritual world of supersensible entities. They have their dwellings in man. And humanity must gradually become aware of this again, that the human body is indeed the dwelling of the gods.

Only when this is taken up in our time consciousness is the right ingredient in this time consciousness, whereby culture, instead of going down, can go up. This is a truth that can be expressed from a variety of perspectives. Today I wanted to present it to you as a link to what I said yesterday about dreams and today about these so-called abnormal states of mind.